Lightningboalt
God DAMN that was one of the most abrupt and rushed endings I've ever seen in any media, it's practically on the level of the movie Blood Debts. Look, I know this is a game for kids, but you have the villain sitting there for 20 minutes typing away at a computer while you explain the entire plot of the game to the mayor... run up, kick him in the dick, and restrain him. Holy shit. Why are you letting the scrawny bastard scientist doing evil plans just sit there RIGHT NEXT TO YOU for eons while you explain how his plan is evil! He's actively doing his evil plan! You are right there! Stop him! Do something!
I actually really enjoyed the original, it's a simplistic game but I had fun with it and liked it for what it is. It cruised by on charm and decently clever Pokemon themed storytelling across various interesting setpieces, it was never anything IMPRESSIVE but it was solid comfort food. This genuinely starts out pretty solidly. The first case is a fun little caper and we were pretty sold on the game from that alone, exploring the city was fun and the interactions were pleasant and made the world feel like it had some life in it. We were excited to see what was in store! It then proceeds to fall into very poorly paced linear storytelling that clearly is intended to do nothing more than wrap up the first game and forcefully end this sub-series. God, the chapter focused on "hey, we're gonna tell you what's up with Dad and Pikachu" was so slow and painful to crawl through, the amount of times the game just screams to the characters "this is what happened" and Tim just sits there all "huh. That's weird." without piecing it together for like three hours, god damn it, that was absolutely miserable pacing. It's a shame because, again, this is nothing earth shattering but I found it fun and enjoyable the first go around, would've been easy to just churn a few of these out and I'd have been there for each one! And even here, there are plenty of isolated moments where I was having a good time! But no, let's just focus so much on a poor main plot, write worse, and pace it so painfully slowly that you have trouble holding your interest. What really kept me invested was the little sidequests. They're braindead easy, you just talk to a character, go find another character, and you either solve it there or return to the original character to solve it. There are no puzzles involved but it was fun to connect little story threads and soak in the atmosphere of the world. Look, it's the holiday season, some simplistic pleasant moments based purely on vibes are a good reprieve right now. But whenever the actual plot shows up? It just gets stupid, they'd consistently have potentially smart moments (Electrode is exploding? Get Wooper!) and every single time they'd undercut it by deciding that you aren't allowed to think or react, we're just gonna spell out the solution and have you do it. There are no fail-states. Just go back to the other room and talk to Wooper, you are literally not allowed to do anything else, that's it, why should you solve puzzles in the detective game about figuring out puzzles?
This is so clearly forcefully rushed out, and yet they've been working on it since around 2018. What happened here? This isn't a complicated or demanding game, nor is it long. It has Pokemon money behind it, did they give it nothing for funding? What happened! I'm really just sad about it, because I was genuinely looking forward to this since it was announced, and it severely underwhelmed. There will clearly never be another one because Detective Pikachu is no longer a character and the ending is so abrupt that it basically openly tells you that you will never see these characters again. Fuck you for caring - it's done, it's over, we're not revisiting this, we're the Pokemon company: we don't let projects complete themselves in a satisfying way.
I actually really enjoyed the original, it's a simplistic game but I had fun with it and liked it for what it is. It cruised by on charm and decently clever Pokemon themed storytelling across various interesting setpieces, it was never anything IMPRESSIVE but it was solid comfort food. This genuinely starts out pretty solidly. The first case is a fun little caper and we were pretty sold on the game from that alone, exploring the city was fun and the interactions were pleasant and made the world feel like it had some life in it. We were excited to see what was in store! It then proceeds to fall into very poorly paced linear storytelling that clearly is intended to do nothing more than wrap up the first game and forcefully end this sub-series. God, the chapter focused on "hey, we're gonna tell you what's up with Dad and Pikachu" was so slow and painful to crawl through, the amount of times the game just screams to the characters "this is what happened" and Tim just sits there all "huh. That's weird." without piecing it together for like three hours, god damn it, that was absolutely miserable pacing. It's a shame because, again, this is nothing earth shattering but I found it fun and enjoyable the first go around, would've been easy to just churn a few of these out and I'd have been there for each one! And even here, there are plenty of isolated moments where I was having a good time! But no, let's just focus so much on a poor main plot, write worse, and pace it so painfully slowly that you have trouble holding your interest. What really kept me invested was the little sidequests. They're braindead easy, you just talk to a character, go find another character, and you either solve it there or return to the original character to solve it. There are no puzzles involved but it was fun to connect little story threads and soak in the atmosphere of the world. Look, it's the holiday season, some simplistic pleasant moments based purely on vibes are a good reprieve right now. But whenever the actual plot shows up? It just gets stupid, they'd consistently have potentially smart moments (Electrode is exploding? Get Wooper!) and every single time they'd undercut it by deciding that you aren't allowed to think or react, we're just gonna spell out the solution and have you do it. There are no fail-states. Just go back to the other room and talk to Wooper, you are literally not allowed to do anything else, that's it, why should you solve puzzles in the detective game about figuring out puzzles?
This is so clearly forcefully rushed out, and yet they've been working on it since around 2018. What happened here? This isn't a complicated or demanding game, nor is it long. It has Pokemon money behind it, did they give it nothing for funding? What happened! I'm really just sad about it, because I was genuinely looking forward to this since it was announced, and it severely underwhelmed. There will clearly never be another one because Detective Pikachu is no longer a character and the ending is so abrupt that it basically openly tells you that you will never see these characters again. Fuck you for caring - it's done, it's over, we're not revisiting this, we're the Pokemon company: we don't let projects complete themselves in a satisfying way.
It's the anniversary of Coolfest '99 so I finally played this. Fun send up to the era of late 90s shooters, and has that exact style of humor that makes Hypnospace work so well. It's not quite as memorable or impactful as Hypnospace, but it's a charming little adventure that features a level called "Boise Potato Festival" so it's still a pretty enjoyable time.
After years of 2D Mario being great but bland, it's so goddamn nice to have it get back on par with 3D Mario. The only bad things in this game are the uninspired Bowser Jr fights and the Spring and Invisibility badges, everything else is absolutely phenomenal and bursting with creativity. Fungi Mines is just about the best world a 2D Mario game has ever had, and we've also got some great new creatures like Hoppo, Taily, Outmaway, and Maw Maw around... the Switch is where Mario finally got weird again and that's exactly what we've needed.
1997
It's a pleasant little game where you beat up Alucard to make a dialogue box with a cutesy anime avatar of him shout "ooww!". About as limited as you would expect a Castlevania game on the Gameboy to be, greatly enhanced by save states being a thing to avoid a game over when you lose all your lives. Enjoyable little Halloween distraction, not a Castlevania you'll especially remember but it's pretty solid in spite of its extreme simplicity.
2020
Man, why'd they have to do Jill and Nemesis so dirty. Look, I'll admit this game is fun - I had a good time with it, enough that I'll definitely replay it a few times. But as a huge fan of RE3, my favorite classic style RE by miles, it just leaves you wanting so much more... I mean, it's short enough that I see the achievement for doing a 2 hour speedrun and don't doubt that I could pull it off. This is hardly a unique observation but the amount of content they ignored from the original is absolutely absurd. My poor beloved RE3 gets shafted so hard compared to the remakes of 1, 2, and 4... even my boy Nemesis, the king of horror game stalker enemies, so intrinsic to the original game that his name was part of the title, has a stalker enemy mechanic for about a half hour before becoming only scripted sequences and boss fights. RE2 Remake Mr. X outclasses him by miles. Sure would be nice if they could use the art and assets to do a RE1 Remake style version of the original, or otherwise make the original easily accessible again. The bright side is at least we got the excellent designs for the cast here, Jill and Carlos look fantastic. I had a good time, I really did... but it just stings that when it came time to remake my favorite Capcom simply didn't care the way they did with every other remake.
2023
Louie: History's Greatest Monster?
It's not a unique story to say that I've been excitedly waiting for Pikmin 4 for years and years, ever since that weird Miyamoto story where he once again said "it's basically finished and ready to release" just the same way he did with Pikmin 3. That's the story of half of Pikmin's releases, Miyamoto says it's on the way and then you don't see it for ten years. I'm thrilled the series is still going and still getting high quality entries, and I did love Pikmin 4, but it's also easily my least favorite of the series so far. Before even getting into anything mechanical, I'm so bummed by the fact that it's a weird reboot. There's a lot of weirdness in the decisions of Pikmin 4 that make it feel like it isn't designed for longtime fans, and that story decision more than anything is the biggest sign to me. We've had a pretty progressive narrative build-up across the past three entries and left Pikmin 3 on an interesting cliffhanger with exciting world-building implications - which we even make hints towards here! - but ultimately none of the prior stuff is remotely compatible with this game's plot. Scrap it and move on, we're seeking a new audience. Maybe we'll see it someday, but if Pikmin 5 is anything like the previous two entries we'll hear about it within the next year and not see it for at least a full decade. That it's interested in expanding the audience is not a dealbreaker, nor is it even bad, but it's disappointing when that focus is also the source of quite a few decisions that I feel hurt the game.
There's a lot about Pikmin 4 that tries to focus on making the game easier, and ultimately I do feel it's overall the easiest in the series. Oatchi in particular is so insanely useful that he can often entirely trivialize huge parts of the game on his own. That said, it's worth mentioning that the cave you unlock for beating Olimar's story has some of the toughest challenges in the series, particularly the Purple Key level which has an extremely tight time constraint that manages to be even more threatening than the two rolling walls of death you encounter. There are a few other standouts, like the Sovereign Bulblax in Cavern for a King and the multiple required encounters with the surprisingly returning Smokey Progg, but outside of those few outliers the rest of the game is easy to breeze through. It doesn't help when areas get entirely emptied of things to do as you progress, leaving them as empty wastelands with no remaining dangers to navigate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the whole ethos of Dandori is more centered on the game being about how quickly and efficiently you can succeed and I think that shines well with how they've designed the levels here, but that's also not necessarily a new thing. It has always been Pikmin's ethos (we just have a catchy word for it now) and after a few days enemies would respawn to both incentivize getting things done efficiently in an area and to keep the world feeling alive. In a lot of regards their Leafling-like focus on Dandori is a success, and with some difficult challenges it shows they can still throw you for a loop when they want to. The problem I have is more that they tend to reuse the same ideas multiple times, where something like an Emperor Bulblax in the past was an imposing and unique final boss it's now... pretty common, showing up repeatedly and making the Sovereign Bulblax feel like "oh, you again" even with it being a harder version more akin to Pikmin 1's original Emperor. There really aren't very many unique or memorable one-off boss moments or surprises, and that's a shame because all the previous games in the series really shined with their unique one-offs that made you really think and try to utilize your skillset on the fly. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps make certain aspects feel undercooked and repetitive rather than engaging and exciting, just going through the motions.
Where the clear focus on largely making things easier hurts, I feel, is in some of the mechanical decisions that they made that have the opposite effect. The lock-on is awful and makes targeting things extremely difficult, with no ability to use free aiming. Just killed an enemy in a mob of enemies? Sorry dude, you don't want to target that other enemy, you want the raw materials it dropped - oh, you lost a bunch of Pikmin because you couldn't throw them where you actually wanted? Oops. Similarly, they make it so that you need to whistle twice for Pikmin to abandon a task, which isn't a terrible idea... but if it was a mistake they entirely lose all momentum, and if it was intentional they have a very noticeable delay before finally listening if you're lucky enough for them to actually decide to. I've never had so much trouble getting my Pikmin to listen to me, whether they keep trying to carry something away when I don't want them to or whether they simply won't get thrown or charge, there were tons of times where there is intentionally developed input delay that hurts the experience. In some ways having Pikmin stop being thrown with your inputs when you hit the required amount for an action can be nice, but in many situations I actually WANT to throw more for a more efficient carry or because I want to target something else but the auto-targeting refuses to move. Sometimes I'll throw my guys at an item and they won't even try to pick it up, sometimes they'll just abandon a task for no reason, other times they'll try repeatedly to do a task as I try to stop them and they just decide nah, that wall needs to break and I'm gonna do it, that bomb you threw be damned! God help you if 50 guys decide to attack an enemy without your command, you have to just hope that they'll actually listen and escape from a dangerous situation before disaster as you desperately mash the whistle. Between this and some clunky menuing with the pack, it feels like they've managed to make things feel less intuitive when by all means it should be the opposite. On that note: there is no New Game Plus, so why is it that you can get things like Infinite Rush, Extra Hand, and Olimar's c-stick trumpet feature from 1 and 2 but not until you've 100% completed the game and there is nothing to use them for? Infinite Rush and Extra Hand require saving Louie and doing his optional post-100% completion side quests, respectively... cool that you can get rewards, but you have absolutely nothing to do with them as every area is picked clean and devoid of enemies. What's the point, just easier high scores in Dandori challenges?
My biggest gripe is the regression of the co-op. Pikmin 3 Deluxe's co-op was incredibly good. It is one of the most fun co-op experiences I've ever had, it's wonderful and extremely well implemented. There's absolutely nothing about Pikmin 4 that should prevent it from having a similar implementation - Oatchi can function almost identically to a captain, and on top of that we're playing as a generic create a character so why not allow for a second? Instead, we have Mario Galaxy's co-star mode, which isn't particularly engaging and also kinda breaks the game. It turns co-op from a fun way to engage with the game into something that actively encourages you not to - why go fight that potentially difficult encounter fairly when you can lob rocks at it forever and stun it with electricity? It's not terrible as an extra mode to include someone who isn't familiar with games, but if you have two people who want to play the game together after loving 3 Deluxe together it's a letdown that hurts the game's design to engage with... I do imagine it will lead to some very entertaining speedrun cheats however.
Despite this myriad list of gripes, Pikmin 4 is still an extremely well made game that I'm glad exists. I will replay it multiple times, like I have with all the other Pikmin games. It excels at creating interesting maps to explore, it does an excellent job of making you think about how to plan out your approach to the world, and as with the other Pikmin games the writing is a joy to read. There's more flavor text than ever here, and we have 50+ character voices floating around to make the universe of Pikmin feel livelier than ever before. There's a ton of content here, and most of it is great! I want to point out Night Exploration in particular, which is an amazing addition that I hope to see revisited and iterated on further. There's a ton to build on here, Pikmin could have a very bright and fruitful future! Just next time, have a little bit more trust in your audience and please don't make us wait another decade like we did for both 3 and 4.
It's not a unique story to say that I've been excitedly waiting for Pikmin 4 for years and years, ever since that weird Miyamoto story where he once again said "it's basically finished and ready to release" just the same way he did with Pikmin 3. That's the story of half of Pikmin's releases, Miyamoto says it's on the way and then you don't see it for ten years. I'm thrilled the series is still going and still getting high quality entries, and I did love Pikmin 4, but it's also easily my least favorite of the series so far. Before even getting into anything mechanical, I'm so bummed by the fact that it's a weird reboot. There's a lot of weirdness in the decisions of Pikmin 4 that make it feel like it isn't designed for longtime fans, and that story decision more than anything is the biggest sign to me. We've had a pretty progressive narrative build-up across the past three entries and left Pikmin 3 on an interesting cliffhanger with exciting world-building implications - which we even make hints towards here! - but ultimately none of the prior stuff is remotely compatible with this game's plot. Scrap it and move on, we're seeking a new audience. Maybe we'll see it someday, but if Pikmin 5 is anything like the previous two entries we'll hear about it within the next year and not see it for at least a full decade. That it's interested in expanding the audience is not a dealbreaker, nor is it even bad, but it's disappointing when that focus is also the source of quite a few decisions that I feel hurt the game.
There's a lot about Pikmin 4 that tries to focus on making the game easier, and ultimately I do feel it's overall the easiest in the series. Oatchi in particular is so insanely useful that he can often entirely trivialize huge parts of the game on his own. That said, it's worth mentioning that the cave you unlock for beating Olimar's story has some of the toughest challenges in the series, particularly the Purple Key level which has an extremely tight time constraint that manages to be even more threatening than the two rolling walls of death you encounter. There are a few other standouts, like the Sovereign Bulblax in Cavern for a King and the multiple required encounters with the surprisingly returning Smokey Progg, but outside of those few outliers the rest of the game is easy to breeze through. It doesn't help when areas get entirely emptied of things to do as you progress, leaving them as empty wastelands with no remaining dangers to navigate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, the whole ethos of Dandori is more centered on the game being about how quickly and efficiently you can succeed and I think that shines well with how they've designed the levels here, but that's also not necessarily a new thing. It has always been Pikmin's ethos (we just have a catchy word for it now) and after a few days enemies would respawn to both incentivize getting things done efficiently in an area and to keep the world feeling alive. In a lot of regards their Leafling-like focus on Dandori is a success, and with some difficult challenges it shows they can still throw you for a loop when they want to. The problem I have is more that they tend to reuse the same ideas multiple times, where something like an Emperor Bulblax in the past was an imposing and unique final boss it's now... pretty common, showing up repeatedly and making the Sovereign Bulblax feel like "oh, you again" even with it being a harder version more akin to Pikmin 1's original Emperor. There really aren't very many unique or memorable one-off boss moments or surprises, and that's a shame because all the previous games in the series really shined with their unique one-offs that made you really think and try to utilize your skillset on the fly. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it helps make certain aspects feel undercooked and repetitive rather than engaging and exciting, just going through the motions.
Where the clear focus on largely making things easier hurts, I feel, is in some of the mechanical decisions that they made that have the opposite effect. The lock-on is awful and makes targeting things extremely difficult, with no ability to use free aiming. Just killed an enemy in a mob of enemies? Sorry dude, you don't want to target that other enemy, you want the raw materials it dropped - oh, you lost a bunch of Pikmin because you couldn't throw them where you actually wanted? Oops. Similarly, they make it so that you need to whistle twice for Pikmin to abandon a task, which isn't a terrible idea... but if it was a mistake they entirely lose all momentum, and if it was intentional they have a very noticeable delay before finally listening if you're lucky enough for them to actually decide to. I've never had so much trouble getting my Pikmin to listen to me, whether they keep trying to carry something away when I don't want them to or whether they simply won't get thrown or charge, there were tons of times where there is intentionally developed input delay that hurts the experience. In some ways having Pikmin stop being thrown with your inputs when you hit the required amount for an action can be nice, but in many situations I actually WANT to throw more for a more efficient carry or because I want to target something else but the auto-targeting refuses to move. Sometimes I'll throw my guys at an item and they won't even try to pick it up, sometimes they'll just abandon a task for no reason, other times they'll try repeatedly to do a task as I try to stop them and they just decide nah, that wall needs to break and I'm gonna do it, that bomb you threw be damned! God help you if 50 guys decide to attack an enemy without your command, you have to just hope that they'll actually listen and escape from a dangerous situation before disaster as you desperately mash the whistle. Between this and some clunky menuing with the pack, it feels like they've managed to make things feel less intuitive when by all means it should be the opposite. On that note: there is no New Game Plus, so why is it that you can get things like Infinite Rush, Extra Hand, and Olimar's c-stick trumpet feature from 1 and 2 but not until you've 100% completed the game and there is nothing to use them for? Infinite Rush and Extra Hand require saving Louie and doing his optional post-100% completion side quests, respectively... cool that you can get rewards, but you have absolutely nothing to do with them as every area is picked clean and devoid of enemies. What's the point, just easier high scores in Dandori challenges?
My biggest gripe is the regression of the co-op. Pikmin 3 Deluxe's co-op was incredibly good. It is one of the most fun co-op experiences I've ever had, it's wonderful and extremely well implemented. There's absolutely nothing about Pikmin 4 that should prevent it from having a similar implementation - Oatchi can function almost identically to a captain, and on top of that we're playing as a generic create a character so why not allow for a second? Instead, we have Mario Galaxy's co-star mode, which isn't particularly engaging and also kinda breaks the game. It turns co-op from a fun way to engage with the game into something that actively encourages you not to - why go fight that potentially difficult encounter fairly when you can lob rocks at it forever and stun it with electricity? It's not terrible as an extra mode to include someone who isn't familiar with games, but if you have two people who want to play the game together after loving 3 Deluxe together it's a letdown that hurts the game's design to engage with... I do imagine it will lead to some very entertaining speedrun cheats however.
Despite this myriad list of gripes, Pikmin 4 is still an extremely well made game that I'm glad exists. I will replay it multiple times, like I have with all the other Pikmin games. It excels at creating interesting maps to explore, it does an excellent job of making you think about how to plan out your approach to the world, and as with the other Pikmin games the writing is a joy to read. There's more flavor text than ever here, and we have 50+ character voices floating around to make the universe of Pikmin feel livelier than ever before. There's a ton of content here, and most of it is great! I want to point out Night Exploration in particular, which is an amazing addition that I hope to see revisited and iterated on further. There's a ton to build on here, Pikmin could have a very bright and fruitful future! Just next time, have a little bit more trust in your audience and please don't make us wait another decade like we did for both 3 and 4.
1994
Really impressive how Klap Trap did all the koding tbh
Decent expansion but boy did they stuff these levels full of hitscan enemies and tanky enemies. The levels also flowed a bit less naturally, so the compass was a godsend here. Solid, but really felt like it was missing something... loved the Ionripper though, that was a great feeling gun.
1997
Ran through Quake 2 64, pretty neat set of levels that makes for a solid campaign, glad they included that in this port. Felt way easier and shorter than the other Quake 2 main campaign, but I imagine a big part of that is having much better control options than the N64 controller. Liked the Doom 64 vibe it had with the soundtrack and atmosphere, but it also doesn't quite live up to Doom 64.
2023
Quake 1 has it beat with more interesting atmosphere and enemy design (eldritch stuff is definitely way more interesting than another sci-fi alien war), but this is still a fun and satisfying campaign to run through. Feels a bit on the easy side but I loved the level design, the optional compass tool is a nice feature, and the gunplay feels great.
Genuinely one of the very best expansions for Quake 1, tons of variety in its levels and they're all excellent. It's a little brief, but there's a ton of creativity here and I'd rather an all-killer no-filler experience than something bloated with poor decisions.
2019
Probably has the worst looking run cycle I've ever seen a character have, that's about the only impression this left on me. An interminable 3 hours of sitting through a poorly written predictable story, there's very little game here so all it has is its writing to fall back on. That'd be fine if it were any good, but it seems to think it's deep and poignant when it's so painfully rote and predictable. I'll give it this - it's better written than 12 Minutes, there's my ringing endorsement.
"Metroid Prime Remastered, available now" is the single biggest power move the gaming industry has had since Sony's video about used games on PS4.
The e-Reader levels really highlight how much of a shame it is that Nintendo didn't make an original 2D Mario game on the GBA, basically the last chance we really had for a new sprite based Mario platformer. They're great levels with lots of unique and original ideas, and collectively are about as long as SMB3 itself is... just without the proper pacing of a fully structured game and also accessible only via an expensive peripheral and impossible to obtain cards. At least the Switch Online version has all the levels unlocked, though it comes with the unfortunate loss of the vegetable and fireball switches to add some extra variety to main game SMB3.
2023
A truly Zappy game. Engage nails the Fire Emblem experience by putting me in scenarios that appear to be totally unwinnable until I stuff Yunaka in a bush to make her a god. Peak Fire Emblem is when my best plotted strategies completely fall apart due to bad luck and I'm forced to use obscure loopholes and idiotic bullshit to get myself out of a bind, and Engage gave me that in spades. While the writing is definitely more Saturday morning cartoon than Three Houses' enthralling shades of gray politics, it sold me early on that it knew exactly what it was doing by having the traditional Doomed Fire Emblem Parent ask Sigurd (the protagonist infamously killed in a fire before he can ever be a parent) for parenting advice. That said, my one gripe is that by being a self-referential celebration of the series, the world of Elyos is definitely far less fleshed out and nuanced feeling than most Fire Emblem worlds... but hey, it still manages to be more coherent than Fatesland, so I'll take it.