i truly loathe this game. it introduces a lot of characters and concepts i want to love, but the direction of the game feels so wrong? it retcons a lot of cool things introduced in aa4, and completely wipes the character development of a lot of key returning characters. they completely massacred apollo!!! many of the cases are boring and it was a brave decision to focus the emotional weight of the story on your new character that you gave zero development & meaningful screen time to. i bought the dlc cases for this game before i played anything and i couldn't even bring myself to play those.

The people who like this game must have gaslighted themselves into doing so because I can't even fathom how anyone could unironically like this waste of time of a videogame. There is not a single redeeming factor in this game, the cases suck so bad and are easily the worst in the entire franchise, the characters are either incredibly boring or way too obnoxious, and the story feels like it had thought put into it for a total of 5 minutes before they started writing. I feel sorry for every person that had to work in bringing this game to light.

"Alan Wake 2 is a game that shows what videogames are capable of"

Well, I imagine that a large number of people, when reading this highlighted phrase, will imagine a game that demonstrates cutting-edge technology, photo-realistic visuals, or even surprising performance. But definitely not the case where I wanted to refer to that kind of thing.

Alan Wake 2 tries to push the limits of what is possible to present and (only) achieve through a game. Using different multimedia formats to convey a plot, whether through meta commentary, live action cinematic cutscenes, different forms of interaction in the environment and fourth wall breaks, may not be a new thing. But it is certainly the game that comes closest to what was idealized by Sam Lake throughout his career, by playing with these elements in a coherent way, and delivering an experience that is unlike ANY other game I have seen playing videogames for more than 20 years.

And speaking of which, I believe that the most important thing in a game is the experience it gives you, and without a doubt, Alan Wake 2 is a game that cannot be explained. I could say that it is one of the best survival horror titles of recent decades, going head to head with classics like Silent Hill 2 or the original Resident Evil, or I could even say that it has one of the best and most ingenious plots and ways of tell a story that you can find in any medium. But it doesn't make sense, nothing I can say could do him justice.

Alan Wake 2 is a game that needs to be experienced above all else, and I hope everyone can give it a chance someday.

You ever just play a game and go “Damn, this was MADE for me”? That’s me with Alan Wake. A survival horror game with an interesting story and world, characters I like (I don’t find Alan to be an asshole, like yeah he’s not the greatest but he’s not an awful piece of shit), and some of the funniest writing I’ve heard in a video game. Yes, the gameplay gets boring and repetitive but I don’t find it to be as bad as people say. Using the light as a weapon is really cool and fun, and the dodging feels good. I’m so excited to the play the rest of the remedy verse because MAN it started on a good note.

I honestly could say a whole lot of shit about Kingdom Hearts as a series but especially the first game. I've been playing KH1 very specifically pretty much since the original game released back in 2002. I have so many fond memories, so many hours spent wandering the levels, getting acquainted with the worlds and their gimmicks, platforming and ideas.

There's something tangibly there in KH1 that really doesn't particularly permeate the rest of the series. Like yeah, the combat mechanics absolutely improve, the series finds its identity in a lot of differing ways but there's something about the raw experimental edge and janky nature of this first entry that really isn't felt in the rest of the games.

The atmosphere here is almost uncannily eerie at points, especially in locations like Destiny Islands, Traverse Town, Hollow Bastion and End of the World. A kind of unsettling hint of darkness that unsettled me more as a kid (that Ansem in the cave scene genuinely scared the fuck out of me as a child I hated that shit lmao I always used to think that dude was like hiding in my closet about to call me a stupid bozo who didn't know anything) but some of the visuals, haunting gothic styled architecture and offness isn't felt to me in a number of later entries like it is here. Like some games do get closer to it again (0.2 is MAYBE the closest in years with 1 section in 3 getting a little closer too) but it's not really to the same level and degree that I feel this game really nails.

Like I adore the implications with stuff like the secret boss cutscene being really fuckin creepy and weird and off! The game is full of moments and ideas like that, the false Destiny Island in the end with the dead palm tree and no waterfall, the secret experiment room you uncover, all of Hollow Bastion and its gothic tones. It's so fuckin cool!

I like how this game integrates the Disney worlds with the actual overarching plot generally rather than just being flat out recaps most of the time (Atlantica having King Trident know what's up and shit talk the MC's is genuinely fantastic), I dig how this lays the groundwork for the rest of the series to build its world and concepts and ideas off of (even if they don't always work out the best in some of them DDD I'm looking at you).

I dig the gameplay systems and what they were going for with magic being more of a resource you have to build and manage, encouraging you to be more aggressive in order to build it back up. Though I do wish that being a purely magic focused build/character was a little more doable but whatever. Final Mix does add good additions like a camera that makes some goddamn sense and having Triangle be for opening chests and stuff like some of the moves you unlock like Sonic Blade and stuff to more reflect games like 2 and what they were going for more there. Though a Final Mix change I don't particularly enjoy is the color changes to the Heartless, I think the way its handled takes away from a l o t of the atmosphere and art direction of this game specifically and some just aren't good recolors like LOOK AT THIS

Potential hot take as well maybe possibly or maybe I have 2002 brain worms but honestly I really love the platforming in this game. I love how much they kinda messed around with it and while a bit slippery at points felt like something that could've been built upon or made a bit more interesting to do! Maybe made more interesting challenges or anything with it but I feel the series kinda just gives up on that aspect after this and that's kind of a shame. I really find it fascinating how much of that identity and idea permeates a loooot of this first game and how immediately 2 does away with pretty much the rest of that, with some lightly coming back in bits and pieces as apart of fights and some light exploration but otherwise nowhere near the same degree as explored in 1. I feel like that does make 1 stand out a little more in the kind of shit they were throwing at the wall to try out and everything too, same with the colored health bars idea that I honestly really fucked with!

Also something specific with this HD edition is I think some of the music is slightly just a little worse than the original. Like the original Night of Fate has a particular intensity to it that STILL to this day gives me fuckin goosebumps. The new version of Night of Fate does NOT hit in the same way at ALL. Something about it feels almost dulled? Like parts of it just aren't mixed how they originally were and I think it massively dulls the impact and effect of the track. Multiple songs in this version are like this and its kind of a bummer that there's still no kind of option like in the later releases of the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster that let you choose the OG OST if you prefer that. I know the remaster process for this was a bit of a mess due to supposedly all of the original assets being lost and having to essentially remake it all from scratch but I feel like the music out of all of it would've been the easiest to reimplement. But maybe they didn't have the original files of the tracks or something like that who the fuck knows. It's a bummer to me either way!

Overall though, this game will always stick with me, I will pretty much come back to this game forever for the rest of eternity. I could completely burn out of this series or hate some entry or whatever and still be all into playing KH1 all over again because it's so utterly special to me. I could go on and on about little strats for fights or what worlds can be completely skipped or how to get through world's quickly or fun facts about certain inclusions and ideas within the game itself. It's a personal heartfelt favorite that makes me feel a lot of things and I absolutely can talk about to absolute fuckin death man.

Kingdom Hearts opened my mind to the possibilities of what video games could be. More than just the Mortal Kombat 2's and Super Mario 3's of the world. It was the first game to really get me into its narrative, to really hook me and never really let me go. Even now I'm still invested in this series, its characters, its secrets, its fun goofy nature and its heartfelt messages and ideas. I love Kingdom Hearts for everything it is and while I wish certain elements of the series were carried forward in ways I am still happy overall with where things have gone since 2002.

"Only humans practice deception so intensely for reasons that are so... unnecessary."

In my previous review I made a rather kneejerk response to merely seeing Lies of P on the store page, I see the word "Soulslike" as an adjective and I instinctively want to frumple up and cringe like I just had a warhead candy. But hey, it's on GamePass, and Iron Pineapple gave a glowing review for it but with a caviat that though not as bluntly put, is very succinctly written by u/psychebomb in their review about two paragraphs down, which I quote, "If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game. If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game."; truer words have never been spoken on this site.

So, I decided to play it, it's practically free to me anyways and I'm just off the credits of the equal parts tranquil and exciting journey of The Last Guardian (review soon maybe) so I'm craving something a little more intense. Intense might be an understatement, right away I can tell I'm less equipped than most Souls games at the beginning, enemies are surprisingly tanky; what gives? Oh, it has the thing like Bloodborne where the enemy goes into a special state after receiving enough damage, then with the finishing blow of a charged heavy attack (or sometimes Fable Arts™, this game's "weapon arts" essentially) they get put into a position to deliver a Fatal Blow™. ...Alright I won't pretend the terminology in this game is a little goofy, but it's not difficult to understand either.
Anyways, the combat is already a lot more close and personal than Souls typically allows, likely due to the near complete rejection of ranged builds (there's only a limited use "gun", consumable throwables, and one weapon with a ranged Fable Art only); to offset this, the game has a parrying system similar to Sekiro where you block on reaction to Perfect Guard™, "but why would I need to do that when I can just circle strafe and block" says the DS1 fan, or "why bother playing the game when I can roll?" says the DS3 fan; the real spice here is this happy marriage of all of the similar mechanics wrapping around to something we saw in Sekrio: Unblockable, unrollable attacks; that can only be avoided by outright outspacing them or Perfect Guarding™ (or in special instances mostly only available to you in the late game). Immediately my Souls poisoned brain clenched, "NO ROLLING?", but the little bit of Sekiro I played clicked in instead, TWANG, I did it! TWANG, TWANG, TWANG, .... grabbed, SLAM SLAM SLAM CRUNCH!!! Oh, and not everything can be blocked either... lol... So I had to get these parts of my brain to agree on something: This isn't Block Souls 1 / 2, or Roll Souls 3, or Rhythmiro, or BloodBoR1ne, but will ask me to juggle all of these things in nearly equal amounts. That is to say, it all amounts to me using all of the knowledge I've accumulated from DeS, DS1, DS2, DS3, ER and Sekiro. To point to any one of these things as the thing it's aping is just plainly incorrect, because playing it like any of those (besides debatably Sekiro) will leave you in for a bad time.

That was a lot of words to basically say "some attacks ignore i-frames" but I cannot stress enough how much they use this to force you to be proficient in a variety of different combat situations. It's not just the bosses too, most enemies in general have an attack like this. You need to decide to space around it or go for the perfect guard. Now how about those enemies and bosses yeah? Overall pretty fantastic, I think the game has a notorious difficulty spike by the 3rd boss, because it immediately asks you to be able to perfect guard and identify when they're going to grab you (it's a subtle cue but you can definitely see it, I ate it like 10 times before finally never being hit by it on reaction). There's one explicit gimmick boss and of course it's probably the worst one in the game, though not nearly as bad as From's worst output (I'd list them but I want to keep those games spoiler free for those who haven't played them yet)
The enemy placement is often difficult in a variety of ways, either in group management, lack of space, or just a strong hitting "elite enemy" as I call em relative to the area you're in; they also love to hide them around corners and behind walls, crates etc. akin to all of the cheekiest moments from Souls and ER, which I absolutely love as it kept me on my toes, and despite that I fell for some obvious traps when I became impatient. The "lack of space" bit was very relevant at a lot of points where I'd switch weapons to a spear or something with a vertical arc to fight in hallways, reminding me of DeS in this regard (good), which leads me to the general level design: Significantly better than DS3, but that's a low bar; probably better than DS2 on average and a hair below DS1 (please stop pretending the game ends at Sen's Fortress, DS1 fans). The constant wrapping around to previous Stargazers (this game's checkpoints) and verticality is very impressive and shows the levels are a lot more deliberately thought out than the likes of DS3 just peppering its straight line with constant bonfires. The one thing the game is significantly weaker on is overall environmental diversity, well, at least compared to DS2 and Elden Ring; it's about on par with Demon's Souls, DS3 and a bit below DS1.

Gone is the habit of the classic Souls "you basically have 3 weapons because if you change you need to completely respec and grind materials", now you can usually buy the ones you need outright without seeking out some random mcguffin in someone's poop shack on the other side of the map to do so; and the weapons are in two parts: you only upgrade the blade, so if you have a good blade already but want to try a different moveset, you can just swap the blade to a new handle. The only downside with this is a lot of weapons are only proficient in either slash or pierce, a good number are fine at both though and if you want to spend the least resources I'd upgrade those. I ended up using probably 8-10 different weapons through my playthrough before settling on this heavy, oversized cleaver looking thing on a "dancer's blade" handle lol. I remember people saying "heavy builds are unviable in this" but I think the opposite, I think they're favored if anything at least for a casual playthrough; lightweight, fast weapons require a lot of Fable Art usage and timing to close the gap which while an extremely active and rewarding playstyle is incredibly demanding in a game that already demands a lot from the player execution-wise.
One thing that can be a little confusing, and again taking the wrong notes from Souls here, is that some upgrades and such can be kind of unclear about how good they are. All you gotta know is that in the skill tree, Dodge Link is a must.

Aesthetically I think the game has a really nice look for the most part, though I'm not as hot on the swamp and castle. People like to go "it's just BloodBorne" but it really isn't, there's been discussion about how both are rarely the architecture described (bcus people genuinely can't identify architecture 99% of the time and just repeat verbatim an architectural word they heard in front of an image they now associate with it with no further study) The weapons in particular are awesome and the ability to have a costume separate from defense items makes it a lot easier to create a look while optimizing stats and not looking like a clown. Tangentially related but the game runs like a dream for me on my 3700x and RTX 3080 at 4k "Best" settings (using DLSS Quality I maintain in the range of like 90-120FPS), all while stuttering less than DS3 ever did on the same system. Also, kind of unreal playing a game like this above 60FPS... It feels so good.
The music is serviceable, some boss themes are better, I just wish the game leaned into the clockpunk styling more and had a more industrial, mechanical, percussion-heavy soundtrack; seeing clockpunk boss with roaring choir orchestral music is serviceable but would've benefited atmospherically from this.

The character writing in this is okay, it's definitely weak at the beginning but a lot of them expand towards the back half as you get to know each other better. I think the story conceptually is pretty neat too, I've been a fan of the whole "what makes a human person?" philosophical conundrum for as long as I could read, and I think the way Lies of P handles it does a serviceable job in this regard, but I won't be reminiscing on it the same way I would DS2 (y'all sleep on that game's narrative too much). This isn't exactly glowing praise, but make no mistake that in this subgenre Lies of P has one of my favorite NPCs and a couple honorable mentions on top of that. One of them kept me engrossed in conversation for almost 10 minutes straight, which I can't say any other has really done. (personal favs are Stockpile Thomas, Ed, Andre, Seigmeyer, Saulden, Vendrick, Seigward, Hewg, Alexander, Rya, Blaidd, Ranni)
I'd decided on a score of 8 a third through or so, but it kind of only got better especially as the rather flexible weapon system kept things interesting for me.

I was quick to judge, and was happily wrong. Lies of P is the big surprise of 2023 imo that easily punches alongside FromSoft's greats, weaker in some areas but stronger in others. I'd place this firmly just above DS2 in my list of "Them wacky soulsemup things", all while having a team that gets completely dwarfed in comparison. Your enjoyment will highly depend on whether or not you're the kind of person who goes "Pac Land did it first" whenever people talk about 2D platformers.

In a word: Riddles.

The student becomes the master overnight.

Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.

Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?

Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:

If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.

If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.

Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.

Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.

If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.

There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.

People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.

None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)

For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.

It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.

I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.

Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.

I think what fans value about the GameCube is its cruelty. Not presenting a challenge with fair parameters and sending you off to give it your best shot, but tripping you up and hammering at your skull every step of the way. The warping, shifting eyesore levels in Super Monkey Ball, or seeing thirty Pikmin fall off a cliff and destroy your entire playthrough, or every aspect of F-Zero GX's design. It's a hostile format, and it's unlikely you'll accomplish much on there without becoming emotional. Double Dash is absolutely the GameCube's Mario Kart.

This bastard game.

There's malice in its code. Opponents can out-drift your red shells, while attempting to nullify an opponent's red shell by dropping an item almost never works. If an opponent bumps into you, your items are gone. There are traps and narrow, winding walkways that are tricky to drift over, and if there's a single surprise element like an opposing racer with a speed boost, or a rogue obstacle, you can guarantee that you're going in the drink and getting your items taken away from you. This is anecdotal, but I don't hear many people say they loved Double Dash as a kid. This was the game for college-aged competitors, with players going outside afterwards to swing punches.

The pain comes from the fact that Double Dash isn't actually hard to play. It's a fairly simple Mario Kart, lacking the coins and ramp tricks that fans of the newer games have developed instinctive responses to. If you're lucky, winning a race doesn't feel like a big deal. Not something you had to put a lot of effort into, and quite often it goes that way. It's when you're going for those Gold Trophies and 100% completion status where they'll throw in the last-second 8th place finishes.

The game's tone seems designed to irritate. The origin of Baby Park and "HI I'M DAISY!!". Garishly saturated colours, and constant noise from co-pilots switching positions. Hell as a theme park. The bitterness in your Spice Orange.

When you win, though, you are the bastard. The world's worst man. Death is coming, and has been earned. Enjoy these fleeting moments on your throne.

I dearly love Double Dash.

Pros:
-Got misty-eyed revising Wii Rainbow Road again after maybe 13 or 14 years. I blinked at the last turn, on the last lap, and saw myself 11 years old again. I blinked again, and I was back to my normal, current self, obviously haven flown off the track and regaining speed to cross the finish line. I still finished 1st. My muscle memory, as honed as it was, yet tucked away in my memories, was still sharp as ever, but that brief moment of glimmering nostalgia - a bullet to the heart, lodging itself deep into a place long forgotten, was enough to stun me.

-At 96 tracks, Mario Kart 8 finally ends its run at a gargantuan, unbeatable size; it makes me wonder what could possibly become of the franchise's future. What started off as a title I was initially unimpressed with back in its Wii U days became a kart-racer I've since learned to love profusely, enough to have me bawling tears when the Booster Course Pass was announced two years ago.

-The celebratory lap is over, and Mario Kart's richest and most engaging title ends doubly as much. I've no doubt that we'll see another Mario Kart in the future, as the sprinkled-in original courses (which are all great) seem to peek into a Mario Kart yet to come, but the question begs.. Or rather, many questions beg. Many. With so much of the series' history represented here, the possibilities of what yields ahead seem infinite. I do hope to see the Booster Course Pass format persist in future installments; not just to add longevity, as I'm sure many people still have their course picks unfulfilled, but also as an immortalized testament and celebration of those memories, of which I and thousands, millions of others have.

Cons:
-Rosalina's Ice World

Sonic Superstars writing notes, brainstorming, review outline:

-Discuss the arbitrary nature of rating scales and the nature of their subjectivity

-A "3 out of 5" is an ultimately good score in my eyes, but not everyone sees it that way; I tend to not when I see it, even when it likewise adheres as "good' to that rating giver/user

-Sonic Superstars is a 3 out of 5 game to me, because I think it is a good game. People also give Superstars a 3 out of 5, some as negative and some as positive, but I can only ever see it as negative

-This could be because the majority of 3 out of 5 reviews feel overly negative to me, often winded rants over perceived mediocrity (or in some strange cases, a maddening sense of distaste) with a sprinkled "but I still liked it" here and there, usually leaving me feeling lost, uninformed, ultimately confused on how I should feel

-Maybe it's because the classic IGN "7 out of 10" score is an industry staple-stamp of certified filth? It feels like any game, between a 1-6 or an 8-10 is a wild card, a Pandora's Box, but a 7 is unanimous for "bad." I think the "3 out of 5" is a similar case, just the same connotation on a different metric, even though the math doesn't even translate the same way

-Or maybe it's because people approach Sonic differently, we've been in an era where Sonic has been incapable of playing ball with the AAA giants like he used to (or was he ever?). Discussion on Sonic, as viewed through the increasing number of lengthy Twitter analysis threads these past few days, proves easily that there's an endless depth of nuance to how a Sonic game stacks up.

-Digress. I think Sonic Superstars is "Good", and that's it. It's a game with flaws that I enjoyed. I briefly considered it a 3.5 out of 5, which constitutes "Very Good," but I couldn't hold myself to that, as much as my enjoyment entails so

-Do I let myself adjust imaginary point values in my head to maintain a level of objectivity? I feel like that's utterly pointless. My rating curves on every adjacent site have the exact same distribution. The uniformity looks nice but I often wonder if I'm not rating with my heart because of it - my maybe obsession with order and numerical scales that dictate quality and value. I've been this way since a child; constantly cataloguing, journaling, organizing, rating. Maybe I watched too much Siskel & Ebert reruns with my dad as a kid. Maybe I shouldn't have wrote in Roger Ebert as my celebrity idol essay topic in third grade.

-I wonder if it's all just a response to witnessing a fandom, maybe my first and in my heart, only, a community I've been a part of since my earliest conscious gaming memories, continuously spiral into a black hole of discourse and toxicity, both positive and negative. All of it is hard, maybe pointless, to parse. Nobody should criticize Sonic because the series is supposedly taking steps to improve itself and we should be grateful. Sonic should always be subject to criticism because Sonic has never been able to stand toe-to-toe with Mario, or any big-name series since the 90s. Sonic himself is a product of marketibility. A mascot for profit. My favorite games are Sonic games. The Sonic series has some of the worst games I've ever played. I think Sonic Team might be one of the only prominent developer teams branching as far as they truly can, trying to cover every single avenue for where Sonic could evolve and experiment mechanically. Sonic Team makes unnecessary changes to the formula, so much of these changes and experiments suck. I love their willingness to try. These off-kilter takes also negatively impact the series. Lost World. Baldy McNosehair. Sonic '06. Elise kiss. Sonic's dumb friends. Sonic was never good.

-Long decided since jotting these unsorted thoughts down that I'm just going to upload these notes as my review. I don't have an answer to my confusion.

-Sonic Superstars is a "Good" game. I personally give Sonic Superstars 3 out of 5 stars.

-https://www.ign.com/games/sonic-superstars