Move It iterates on the motion control gimmicks of Smooth Moves in so many outrageously fun and inventive ways it's delightful. You'll get handed the most absurd pose that you cannot consider any practical applications for, and somehow they designed a bunch of wildly different yet intuitive microgames around it. The pounce pose seemed like such a stupid gimmick when they first introduced it, but after seeing all the different implementations it might have ended up being my favorite one in the game.

I've always appreciated 2D Mario games, but aside from Super Mario World they've never really hit for me. Super Mario World was the revelatory moment for me as a young man where I realized you can in fact make a great video game purely on the merits of joyful movement and a world full of weird little guys. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the first time outside of World where I've truly felt the spark of creativity and joy in a 2D Mario game and it's incredible.

The core platforming mechanics are so tight and there is so much spice thrown into the mix in just the right places to not feel like it dilutes the experience. That spice takes the form of badges, wonder flowers, secrets, and a myriad of new weird little guys to keep things interesting the entire time, in what is a pretty beefy game. There's so much personality in all the art and music which is apparent just by looking at the game, but one thing that it took me some more time to appreciate is just how incredible the sound design is. All the sound effects have a musical quality to them that seamlessly meshes together with the soundtrack no matter what song is playing, and it leads to a cacophony of wacky Mario shit, it's so cute and playful and I just adore it.

Dead Space 2 pushes the franchise in a much more action focused direction, and I actually love that. It's plain to see that DS1 was overwhelmingly inspired by Resident Evil 4 from the shooting mechanics, to the structure, to the monster designs, and even the dismemberment mechanic. What DS1 did that set it apart from RE4 was having a strong sense of place, and a thick ass atmosphere. However, the meat of the game that made it so appealing to return to after the initial horror wore off was the chunky scifi dismemberment action.

The insistence of DS2 to focus so heavily on that action is extremely welcome as someone who played the first one to death. The levels are designed in such a way to just push you through combat room after combat room, draining your resources in order to hit the perfect balance of resource deprivation and power fantasy. I love the new enemy types here too, I think the babies that function as essentially mobile explosive barrels and the toddlers that swarm you in packs but can be taken down in one shot add some much needed pressure in tons of encounters. There's also many more weapons than what you're able to realistically use and upgrade on one playthrough, which is a huge incentive for doing NG+ on top of the fact the game can be blasted through in one or two sittings on a second go around.

I think Dead Space 2 does falter in a few areas though. For a sequel that is so much more action focused than its predecessor it's strange that there's less big boss fights, even the final boss is more of just an enemy gauntlet than an actual boss encounter. In keeping with the transition to an action game I also find the moments where the game flashes orange on the screen to indicate that they are jump scaring you really annoying. There is a few of these moments that actually serve to further Isaac's character development, but they aren't ever what I would consider scary, and the presentation of them seems so out of place it's almost as if they were added at spots where focus testers deemed the game needed a little more horror. There's also many more repeating environments here, which I think is a symptom of being a game with intense forward momentum and a lack of the backtracking from the first game, but it's so jarring that at several points you walk through a nearly identical room like 5 times in a row.

This was one of my favorite games as a teenager, I played through it countless times trying to get all the achievements (fuck that hardcore mode one), and I'm happy to see it mostly holds up. I may not be as head over heels for it as I once was, in no small part due to playing many other excellent survival horror games in its wake (including the DS1 remake), but it's still solid.

Armored Core VI is the moment where mech action games finally clicked for me and I fucking adore it.

I've tried about a half dozen games in the genre over the years, but I always felt overwhelmed by the abundance of options for outfitting your mech and ended up bouncing off because I never quite felt like I was building it optimally. I think part of the reason this wasn't as much of an issue for me here was because I've gotten extremely into building gunpla over the last year and now the idea of making a fucked up little robot is so extraordinarily appealing to me it superseded any other anxieties I was having. The speed at which you get new parts in AC6 also really helps alleviate that overwhelming sensation, there's never a feeling that there are too many options and it's very easy to switch stuff around and see what works best for you.

Okay all that aside once you actually build your AC the game feels like a fucking dream to play. It's fast, has a sublime balance of chunk and responsiveness in the controls, and the encounters are all designed with the exacting precision I've come to expect from modern Fromsoft. The fact that every encounter feels as good as it does despite the vast array of possible builds is astonishing. The second I finished my first playthrough I immediately booted into ng+, built a new little freak, and blasted through the game again. Love it to bits.

This is the only game that I have nostalgia goggles for that are so big they eclipse my whole god damn head. Replaying it now after not touching it for a few years there are so many weird little quirks that only make sense as an adult who understands the troubled development it went through. I think the fact it's so rough around the edges in so many ways while still feeling polished and pushing Pokemon so far forward as a franchise just hits on something magical to me that I don't really know how to explain.

A really solid addition to what I consider to be the best game in the franchise. Adding the grappling hook system to the already perfectly tuned combat of the base game felt like a sublime treat. Grappling into a group of enemies and doing a roundhouse kick that knocks them all on their asses is one of the most fun singular actions I've done in a game in a long time. The encounter design, particularly in the back half, is extremely solid and encourages you to use absolutely everything at your disposal to eek out victory with very little resources left, which I think is the core appeal of this style of RE.

My only real issue with Separate Ways is that the first few chapters have you walking backwards through the village and castle sections of the game which are already well-trodden if you went for 100% in the base game, and especially if you played it multiple times. Replaying content in RE is kind of part of the charm though, I mean I've replayed some of these games close to a dozen times. I think the real issue here is that there are certain rooms that feel specifically design to have you approach from one direction, and for a certain type of encounter to happen there, but there are instances where you approach from the opposite direction or a different type of encounter is retrofitted to the space and it just doesn't feel right. This could just be my familiarity with the base game fucking with my expectations, but there were a few instances where I felt genuinely annoyed by this sort of thing.

I appreciate the spin Melody of Memory tries to put on the Theatrhythm formula by having a 3rd person camera and making the presentation feel a bit more like an action game. I think this presentation style definitely comes at the cost of readability though, a lot of the time you have no idea what to expect past the note/enemy that's directly in front of you, which leads to some situations where I just get blindsided in a way that doesn't feel good. Also the way they handled the KH3 maps is just awful, I understand they were working around engine limitations, but the backgrounds of those stages are so insanely distracting I can't focus on the actual notes. The songs are good though and the story stuff sets up KH4 more so I can't really complain overall though.

I was pretty skeptical about the prospect of stapling a roguelite mode onto a game that is about exploring a setting that is fueled by its strong sense of place. How do you make a location that is as interesting to explore as Talos I but also have it shift and change across dozens of runs? In the end I think that Mooncrash pulls off this feat with aplomb. The sense of familiarity you develop with the moon base is constantly being fucked with by new hazards, enemy types, and full on room variations that are just different enough to keep you on your toes.

I think a problem inherent to a lot of roguelites is that the final run feels kind of anti-climactic due to you just have complete mastery over the mechanics and also have gained so much power that you can steam roll over nearly any problem. I think that's exacerbated a bit here by the delay loop time item that allows you to just completely avoid taking on higher level enemies or even allowing enemies to repopulate, so on a perfect run by the time you get to character 4 or 5 there's almost no major threats standing in your way, you're pretty much just making a beeline directly to your escape route. I think this offers a pretty neat reward for players that plan their route through a run smartly, but at the same time it does make the ending of your final run feel very anticlimactic. Luckily there is a final sequence as a part of the framing device of the narrative that makes things have a bit more satisfying of a conclusion.

I think the problems here are extraordinarily minor though. Overall this is one of my favorite roguelites or immersive sims that I've played, and just by virtue of tying the two together so well it should be applauded. I'm much more likely to dip my toes back into this than the base game which I think is one of the highest complements you can pay to any DLC.