I don't tend to get into roguelikes, I find Binding of Isaac and Synthetik to be good time killers but require too much attention from me for something to idly play while listening to music or podcast or video essay, and the recent trend in the genre with games like Hades and Going Under to include a story deterred me even more. When I started up Balatro for the first time I did not intend to find myself in a daze 2 hours later exiting the game. It is a simple concept yet manages to have a lot of depth, definitely worth a try if the game sounds interesting to you

An improvement over the first game in pretty much every way, however much like the original by the end of the game the difficulty reached a level of more annoyance than challenge, throwing more enemies than you have ammo to deal with without grinding bolts to get more weapons, causing me to have to run back to the store in between checkpoints just to have enough ammo for the other half.

Also I don't know if it's because I took a significant break near the end or what but the story felt like it suddenly just ends, like it's building up, there's a final reveal and then you blink and it's the credits and final cutscenes

I'm not familiar with the original, but I really enjoyed this remake. The survival mechanics encourage the use of a variety of weapons, most of the time I never felt overwhelmed by the difficulty on normal. My only gripe is, even with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3080, I still had performance issues that would crop up after only about 10 minutes of play, in the final 2 chapters the frame rate was basically nonexistant. As someone not familiar with the original I enjoyed my time with it and would recommend it.

tldr; I enjoyed starting it, but by less than half way through I'd already realised why this game is so loathed.

I'd played it when I was younger, but much later I decided, for some demented reason, I wanted to finish it, since there hadn't really been anything like it since Skyrim nearly a decade prior to this point. At first the game seemed totally fine, the initial levels weren't offensive at least to someone like me who hadn't really played any other Ultima games, but as time went on not only did the bugs become more apparent, such as literally just an entire square of the terrain missing near the third town in the game, or the dungeon that would repeatedly play a loud as fuck lightning sound effect, but there was also just the gameplay issues as well, such as gaining the ability to sail a ship yourself only to find yourself with less than 5 feet of vision in front of the ship due to the render distance or one part where you have to get across poisonous water, only to find the platforms you're supposed to jump on being too far apart for you to jump between only to THEN find out you have to swim in the water anyway to get where you need to.

Ultimately I had to use a speedrun strat to beat it after like the second to last thing you need to do to beat the game involved beating a boss that would crash my game every time he talked, who was also in an underwater dungeon I had to use an invulnerability potion to get past the wall that would drain my oxygen. So I had to skip it and enter the final dungeon via an unintended oversight of being able to walk through the lava that's supposed to stop you and finishing the game.

This was my first fighting game after a friend convinced me to get it while it was on sale and I've had a blast with it and have definitely been bitten by the fighting game bug and already eyeing up some other fighting games to get into. Would recommend checking if anything to try out a fighting game. My only issue, being more a meta issue, is no one plays on the OCE servers, at least in the ranked mode, so there's only like 2 people at any one time and I've had to play on the jp servers instead.