I truly feel for the zoomers who didn't experience the sheer level of hype surrounding Halo 3. It was an experience that I don't think can ever be replicated again. People lining up for the midnight release, high schoolers staying home from school to play all day, hell people bought a mediocre GTA clone just to play the multiplayer beta for the game. And the best part is that it was all warranted. Halo 3 was a goddamn masterpiece. The pinnacle of the franchise, and quite possibly one of the greatest endings to a series ever.

Sure the story isn't as interesting as Halo 2's, with it simplifying the Prophet of Truth and Gravemind to what amount to mustache twirling villains. Sure the campaign is extremely short, and the level Cortana is dreadful. Sure the multiplayer map design and weapons don't feel quite as good as they do in 2. But as an overall package, you really can't get any better than this in terms of FPS games.

343 wishes they could make a game half as good as this.

Halo 2's campaign is something I both love and hate. The story is significantly more interesting with the politics of the Covenant and the whole story of the Arbiter. The levels themselves are a mixed bag of fantastic ideas and awful ones (that start of Gravemind might be the worst part of any Halo game). The difficulty is all over the place, and the game loves to throw droves of enemies at you seemingly out of nowhere. Not to mention the sniper Jackals. However, despite my issues with it, it's still one of my favorite FPS games ever. Some pretty low lows are balanced by extremely high highs. Stuff like boarding the Scarab, cutting the cables on the gas mine, riding the gondolas on Delta Halo, and so on. There are a ton of iconic moments that make the single player great despite its issues.

Plus, it has quite possibly the best multiplayer of any FPS game. Amazing maps, amazing weapons, and to this day some of the best gunplay in any shooter. I think Halo 3 is the better game overall, but Halo 2's multiplayer will always dominate.

Blow Me Away is still an absolute banger. More games need ridiculous insert songs like that.

This review is based entirely on the campaign rather than the multiplayer. I never got around to playing the campaign due to my PC for whatever reason being able to play multiplayer fine, but not the single player. I will give a quick multiplayer review though: it’s trash. Maps are bad, weapon balancing is awful, it takes forever for games to start due to loading and having to sit through those dumb intro sequences showing the team and shit, playing on keyboard and mouse still sucks ass, I could go on. It’s just not fun. There’s a reason why the game hemorrhaged its playerbase so quickly.

As for the campaign, it might be the worst Halo campaign yet. Granted I haven’t played Halo 5, but I’m sure it’s still better than this. Infinite has absolutely no variety in its levels. The open world is all just grassy plains and mountains, while the main missions are just the same type of Forerunner structures we’ve gone through a million times before. There’s no level like Assault on the Control Room where you go from fighting Covenant across massive bridges to blowing up enemies with a tank in the valleys below. No moments like fighting two Scarabs in Halo 3 on a Hornet. No surprises like the Flood briefly becoming your ally to defeat a common foe. It’s all just samey rooms with samey encounters with bullet sponge boss fights. It’s so mindless and bland that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was created by an AI.

The plot is basically nonexistent. Chief gets rescued by Angry Joe, you then find not-Cortana, then spend almost the entire rest of the game listening to an obnoxious gorilla man gloat about how big his dick is. I guess there’s a plot point about Chief learning to trust not-Cortana, even though he has every right to not trust her considering the events of Halo 5 where real Cortana became space Hitler. Also nu-Cortana being an actual clone of the original Cortana was supposed to be a plot twist and everything? Even down to having a “would you kindly?” moment as if it was supposed to be a big revelation for something? Not sure what they were going for there, but it definitely didn’t work. The entire game from a story perspective felt like a bunch of nothing.

What’s frustrating about all this is that the core gameplay itself is actually pretty good. Shooting feels good, the different abilities like the grappling hook are cool, and I’ll fully admit I did enjoy going around invading and capturing FOBs. Problem is that that’s all the game has. Once you realize how unrealized the open world element is, it becomes easy to stop caring about it. Pretty crazy how I feel like even Sonic Frontiers did a better job with its open world than this.

Combat is okay, but I really hate how it feels like 343 intentionally turned most enemies into bullet sponges. Higher rank Elites and Brutes take forever to kill. Hunters are way too aggressive and fast, making the classic way of fighting them borderline impossible. You pretty much always have to fight them by chucking fusion coils at them. Bosses are a slog and almost always require cheese tactics. Genuinely some of the worst boss fights in any video game I’ve played. I’ll take Tartarus any day over this trash. Hell, I’ll even take Guilty Spark. At least that fight ended fast.

What also amazes me about Halo Infinite is that somehow the game is still a technical mess. Loading takes forever, and you have to go through two of them if you just want to play the campaign. The way the game saves is nonsensical too, and I lost hours of progress due to it. Apparently, “saving checkpoint” doesn’t actually hard save your game. Only “saving progress” does. I backed out to the main menu after beating multiple missions, saw that the game file was at the mission I was just at, and quit thinking I was all good. Nope! Turns out the game lied to me and I needed to leave the mission I was on and fast travel to a captured FOB if I wanted my progress to actually be saved. The last chunk of this game is pretty linear and gives you a lot of urgency to keep going and not bother with the open world stuff, so why the save system works like this is beyond my comprehension. Why in the hell wouldn’t completing a mission trigger the game to save my progress? Who thought it would be a good idea for checkpoints to not actually save your game? Are they stupid?

Halo Infinite sucks. It sucks as a multiplayer game, it sucks as a linear FPS game, and it sucks as an open world game. You know, Halo 4 wasn’t exactly great, but at least it feels like they tried. At least it feels like there was a point to it. At least it’s impressive looking for a 360 game. I can’t think of a single thing that’s impressive about Halo Infinite, other than how big of a waste of time it is.

Really tried to finish this one, but not gonna lie, I dropped it as soon as I realized I had to do this godawful stealth segment in chapter 4. This is the second time I've tried to complete this game, and once again I am baffled by the acclaim. The developers' hearts are in the right place, and it definitely has some semblance of an idea about what Paper Mario players want. The problem is that it has a severe lack of polish that makes it obvious that these guys are amateurs.

The turned-based combat has the right idea, but I feel like it's way too heavily focused on badges to a fault, and ends up pigeonholing you into specific builds for each party member. It's lacking the freedom that Paper Mario gives you in terms of customizability. Too many badges have a negative aspect to them as well, which inherently makes me not want to use them, and even the ones that don't aren't particularly interesting. I also find it really annoying how enemies seem way too beefy in terms of health, and have slightly more attack power than I feel like they should in comparison to how measly your HP and attack power is. It makes combat feel like a slog sometimes.

Outside of combat, the game is filled with janky puzzles that are never really fun to do. One type of puzzle that comes up frequently is using the bee character's boomerang, which is always a pain to aim properly. The other type of puzzle involves freezing dripping water to make a block of ice that one of the other characters can move to use as a platform to reach higher areas. Problem is getting the right angle you want the ice block to move in can be a major test of patience. Then you have to do one of these puzzles during the aforementioned stealth segment! I cannot fathom how anybody could play that part and not only think it was designed well, but think it was fun.

It's a shame. I can kind of see why people like this, but to put it on such a high pedestal doesn't make sense to me. Sure it's better than the Paper Mario games we've been getting since Sticker Star, but that's not exactly a high bar. I'd hesitate to call the game bad, but I'd rather just play through any classic Mario RPG again than stick with this.

I think I like the idea of Yume Nikki more than the actual act of playing it.

This really is just a walking simulator in which all you do is wander around strange environments and soak in the atmospheric background music. Sometimes it's creepy, sometimes it's calming, sometimes it's extremely unsettling. However, any emotion the game was trying to evoke from me eventually turned into boredom after slowly walking around the same area trying to find a door or an effect.

I get what it's going for, but after playing 2.5 hours and 9 out of 24 effects I'm throwing in the towel for now.

Might pick this back up again in the future (feel like I've been saying that a lot lately), but ultimately I couldn't get into this game.

Aesthetically, it's great looking. The atmosphere is fantastic. I did like what little I saw of the story. Ultimately though, the gameplay is just a drag. Due to the small inventory, much of my play time was spent running around trying to find a bunch of different keys to open doors. It didn't feel like I was really playing a horror game, it felt more like I was playing a bland Zelda game. Once I realized that you're better off just running away from enemies instead of fighting them, they became more annoying than scary. The game also throws health packs at you like crazy, so even if a monster manages to hit you while you're trying to juke them, it's still better than using ammo.

The puzzles were the only things that really interested me, and even then some of them felt more like trial and error. Still, it's better than running down the same hallway multiple times because you need to unlock three different doors with three different keys.

It's a shame because I heard so much acclaim for this, and yet I just found it boring. Cool concept and art design, but lacking in everywhere else.

After years of sterile, commercial, uninspired entries, it's nice to finally see a 2D Mario full of life and creativity. Not that the NSMB games were necessarily bad or anything. They were, generally speaking, well made platformers that were perfectly serviceable. However, serviceable doesn't and shouldn't cut it for Mario. Playing a Mario game shouldn't feel like you're playing a corporate product developed by people being kept on a leash so they don't "go too far" or something. Luckily, Nintendo seems to have freed them from those shackles, and clearly it paid off incredibly.

This game feels like a true follow-up to Mario World in that it's actually expanding upon 2D Mario with things like badges, new enemies, and tons of new level gimmicks. There's also a bunch of secrets to find too that are pretty easy to miss, so there's plenty of replayability. The badges alone add a lot of replayability too just to experiment with and see how much you can cheese levels with them.

Level design is overall pretty great and each world has very unique theming as well. You don't just have a grass world, ice world, water world, etc. Every world has a variety of different aesthetics to keep them from getting stale. The trippy Wonder Seed parts of certain levels are a highlight as well. It's fun to see a Mario game really lean more into the weird and wacky aspects of the series that inspired so many people to make the same insufferable drug jokes over the years.

The online functionality is actually pretty cool as well. I at first didn't think it would be all that notable, but having these ghost players play along with you and help you out with finding secrets (or revive you from death if you really want to go full baby mode) adds a lot to the experience. The levels where you have to search for hidden coins especially make use of this feature in a neat way.

Only negatives I can really think of is that I do wish the different characters weren't just skins and had their unique attributes they're known for. Playing as Peach often would confuse me because I'm so use to her having a hover ability. I guess also the bosses are a little uninspired, but honestly I don't think 2D Mario games ever truly had particularly great boss fights.

Mario Wonder is genuinely wonderful. I wouldn't put the game above Mario 3 or World, but I would say it's definitely in the same tier of quality.

2020 was a bizarre and potentially depressing year due to numerous happenings, so I can only assume that the gaming community decided to gaslight themselves into thinking that Origami King was a good game just so there was a little more positivity in their lives. Unfortunately, not only is the game not good, I’d say it’s almost as bad as the infamous Sticker Star. It’s not even like I went into the game expecting to hate it. Hell, I went into the game with a pretty positive mindset thinking I’d enjoy myself, but after spinning around that fucking circle for the 10,000th time I wanted to genocide every last Toad in the game as much as the main villain did.

Just like the previous games in the Sticker Star trilogy, this game completely lacks everything that you would expect from an RPG. There is no experience, no leveling up, no real stat growth or anything. All you get from battles are coins. The only real stat you have is your HP, which increases from getting health upgrades at random points in the game. Other than survivability, this also determines whether or not hitting an enemy outside of battle will just instantly kill them instead of initiating a battle much like in games like Earthbound. I guess this is a good thing, but when battles are already pretty pointless, not to mention incredibly boring, you may as well avoid enemies entirely.

All battles involve this ring mechanic that makes them a slog. Every turn you have to line up enemies to group them either in a row or a 2x2 square shape so that your jump or hammer attacks hit all of them. You also get a damage bonus from successfully aligning all the enemies. Having to do this every single turn, on a time limit as well, gets annoying fast. It overcomplicates fights with an obnoxious puzzle, while also simplifying them by basing your damage output almost entirely on whether or not you solved the puzzle. I say almost entirely because you do find equipment throughout the game, which are basically temporary upgrades to your boots and hammer that degrade with each use and eventually break. You may think this makes getting coins in battle more meaningful, since you can buy equipment in shops, but the overworld has a bunch of question mark blocks with equipment in them anyway. I started out buying things in shops, but eventually didn’t even bother because of how many items and equipment the game hands out to you. Most of my money was spent on the game’s useless collectibles.

You can also spend coins in battle to have the Toads in the audience help solve the ring puzzles for you. Coins also can be spent to add time to the timer while you’re trying to solve these ring puzzles. This ended up being the most useful thing coins are for, but again, coins are found pretty easily in the overworld and mandatory fights. If coins are all you get as a reward for battling, and the things you buy coins with are really only for battles, then what incentive do I have to engage in battles outside of the forced ones? You can effectively avoid as many battles as possible and get through the game just as easily as someone who fights every enemy they come across. This is a turn-based RPG with no progression system.

What’s also bad is that there’s no variety to action commands. It’s all just “press A at the right time.” The first two Paper Mario games had a ton of different action commands that made your attacks along with your partners’ attacks feel unique and prevented combat from getting boring. Jumping on four enemies in a row for the hundredth time, in the same exact way, with the same exact inputs, will inevitably get boring. If the developers aren’t going to bother making combat meaningful, the least they could do is make it fun.

Oh also, speaking of partners, this game kind of has them, but not really. You get party members throughout the game that do help in battle, but they’re mostly useless. You have no control over them, their attacks sometimes will randomly fail, and they don’t even appear in battle for the more difficult parts of the game like boss fights where they could potentially be useful. The closest the game ever got to feeling like a real Paper Mario game was the desert area, where a Toad archaeologist follows you throughout most of the chapter. He even has a useful ability outside of battle. Why wasn’t the entire game like this chapter?

Boss fights are also mostly a pain because they’re mostly super gimmicky. They have a different spin (heh) on the circle puzzle thing, where bosses are in the center and you have to make a path to the boss and end on one of three types of attack panels. However, once you figure out exactly what the game wants you to do as an attack, they become complete non-threats. Other than the basic attack panels, there are 1000 fold arms attacks and vellumental attacks, the former of which usually involves mashing the A button and the latter having your sidekick, Olivia, transform into a giant beast and deal a ton of damage herself. It reminds me of Sticker Star’s bosses in which the fights are tedious slogs unless you bring the “Thing” sticker that happens to be the boss’s weakness, typically taking out half of their health. It might actually be worse here because for most of the bosses, there’s really only one way to beat them and it’s always gimmicky. Hell, the final boss even ends up being like this. First phase is just more annoying versions of a few bosses you’ve already fought, second phase is a dumb action minigame, and the final phase is one last obnoxious circle puzzle ending in a very generous QTE sequence. Bosses are supposed to be a test of the player’s skill and knowledge of the game’s mechanics, and here they’re more a test of the player’s patience as they try to trial-and-error their way to the solution the game wants.

Okay, enough bitching about the battle system. What about the other aspects of the game? Well, they’re not much better. Much of the game’s content is finding generic Toads folded into origami. The more you find, the more you benefit from spending money on them in battle. I’ll admit that this part of the game, despite once again being finding generic Toads, isn’t that bad because I do for whatever reason find it fun trying to figure out where they’re hiding. It does get pretty monotonous quickly though, and it didn’t take me long to stop caring. There’s also an aspect of exploration where you cover up holes by throwing confetti on them, filling them up and allowing you in some instances to progress. This honestly just felt like busywork to me more than anything since there’s nothing to it. There’s also the 1000 fold arms gimmick where you stand over a magic circle and have to move around Mario’s now giant arms and find a thing to grab onto. Again, this just feels like more busywork that is essentially pixel hunting. I guess there are a few puzzles here and there that are somewhat interesting in the more dungeon-like areas, but for the most part I don’t recall the game’s exploration to be anything all that noteworthy.

I did like the game’s more action oriented battles more. In fact, these are not only the best parts of the game, but also the parts I wish they focused more on. I don’t get why Intelligent Systems doesn’t just make Paper Mario an action RPG series instead of doing turn-based stuff if they can’t figure out how to make the turn-based stuff fun. Super Paper Mario was more action focused, and while it was easy as hell, it was still fun and kept the spirit of Paper Mario in tact.

One of the biggest aspects of the game I’ve seen people comment positively on is the writing, and I honestly don’t get it. There are some funny jokes here and there, but I’m so done with everyone in this universe being self-aware of the fact that they’re made of paper. Paper Mario originally wasn’t supposed to be a universe where everyone is made of paper, it was just supposed to be an aesthetic. It was supposed to look like a pop-up book. Sure, TTYD played into the paper stuff more by having those transformations, but it was mainly just a gag and was treated as unnatural. It wasn’t until Sticker Star that they really went hard into the meta, self aware paper nonsense. On top of that, the game feels like it’s trying too hard to be funny or wacky at times. There were multiple occasions where the characters would just start dancing or singing, which is the most lazy way to attempt to add wackiness to something. The wacky moments of the past Mario RPGs were always more subtle and few and far between. If everything is wacky, not only does it start to wear off and get annoying, you also can’t take what are supposed to be serious moments seriously.

The actual story itself is a little better I suppose, but the game itself was so tedious and filled with padding that it hurt any attempts to make me care about the characters. Everyone talks about Bobby, and I didn’t really like him much at all. He sucks as a partner, he ends up being a liability more than anything, and his sacrifice had to completely abandon the established lore of how Bob-Ombs work in the Paper Mario universe to even make sense. On top of that, there’s a moment later on where you control Bowser’s airship and shoot literally dozens of Bob-Ombs at enemies, which I guess means Mario is willingly committing Bob-Omb genocide. Definitely doesn’t undermine the sad Bobby death scene at all. It’s not even like the developers forgot about this, Olivia literally refers to the other Bob-Ombs as Bobbys. People can cope and say “oh well it’s only manufactured Bob-Ombs that die when they explode. There are normal Bob-Ombs that can explode as much as they want,” which just sounds like a stupid retcon to me. I’m pretty sure that’s not even consistent with the past games anyway. The writers were trying too hard to have an emotional aspect of the game that ends up feeling more comical than anything due to how out of left field it is. The only part of this that kind of works is Olivia’s reaction to it, which is admittedly sad and sets up a cute moment shortly after. Regardless, it’s nowhere near the same level of quality of the emotional moments that happen in TTYD and Super Paper Mario.

The game does have really good production value. Graphically it looks fantastic, and the music is definitely good stuff. It also controls well I guess. Other than one weird instance where the music randomly stopped playing, it’s bug free, which is commendable in this day and age where games come out with all kinds of issues. With that said, I feel like that’s the bare minimum for these games at this point. All the Paper Mario games look great for the respective platform they’re on. All of them are, as far as I recall, stable and not glitchy. Doesn’t really matter if the game itself isn’t good.

Origami King feels like one step forward and three steps back. The developers seem to have no idea what to do with Paper Mario and seem to just be throwing random crap in a hat and seeing what sticks. The irony is that all people really want is a traditional, simple, turn-based RPG like the original two games in the series. Maybe both the Super Mario RPG and TTYD remakes will be successful and finally open Tanabe’s eyes to the fact that traditional RPGs are what people want instead of all this gimmicky garbage. Or maybe they can focus Paper Mario on being a pure action RPG and expand on that with an actual RPG progression system. Or maybe he’ll once again double down on the Sticker Star shit out of spite and make Sticker Star 4. At least those remakes are coming out and zoomers can finally play an actual good Mario RPG and stop pretending trash like Origami King is good.

This was my first ever foray into Pikmin, and while I definitely have a decent amount of problems with it, it was very good. There’s a lot more meat to this game than I thought there would be. On one hand I’m glad it has as much content as it has for big fans of the series, but on the other hand I do think the game overstays its welcome a bit.

The highlights of the game for me are definitely the caves and general overworld stuff. Each area feels big and it’s always satisfying finding random crap to power up your ship or just collect for the sake of collecting. When things start to click and you get a handle on how to properly do various tasks efficiently, exploring becomes really fun. Figuring out how to tackle each floor of the various caves throughout the game is especially where I think the game shines. Every cave feels distinct in a way that I never got bored of them. Overworld stuff did start to wear off on me after a while however, especially after I went way above the necessary requirements to finish the game. I think the last couple of areas are also just generally less fun to explore due to the hazards they introduce.

Night expeditions are a neat aspect of the game. I like the idea of a tower defense mode where you actually have to play really aggressively to get through without issue. I just wish there was more to them other than “there are more things you have to protect now.” They’re also really quick, and it made me wish I could do actual exploration at night with more powerful enemies or something.

Then there are Dandori Challenges and Dandori Battles. Challenges are actually pretty fun, and a neat way to test your efficiency and understanding of the various mechanics. Battles on the other hand were more annoying than anything. Having the screen split like you’re playing a multiplayer mode was really obnoxious. Plus having to pay attention to so many different things like bonuses, items, and sneak bombs almost felt like sensory overload at times. Technically they’re optional, since if you really suck at them, you can literally just have the game beat them for you to progress. Doing that is lame though, so I ended up toughing it out. Battles really aren’t that difficult, but do feel a bit tacked on compared to the rest of the game.

The game’s difficulty is a bit weird in that it’s mostly pretty easy, but then has these random spikes of difficulty here and there. The final cave is a pretty massive difficulty jump compared to anything else in the game, and I think maybe easing people into that would have made that finale a bit less of a slog. I guess it’s technically optional, but the base game ending really doesn’t feel like an ending at all. With that being said, other than a couple annoying encounters, it never got too frustrating. The game does give you a bunch of items to cheese bosses that annoy you anyway, so at least there’s that. I did like the final boss quite a bit too. Makes me wish more bosses were more like that.

I went into this game having no idea if I’d like it that much, and overall I came away liking the game enough to want to give the other games a shot. Again, I do think it’s a tad long in the tooth, and gets a little repetitive, but I really enjoyed my time with it. Hopefully the next entry doesn’t take an entire decade to release.

Despite the Gamecube being a pretty significant part of my life growing up, I never did play this or any Luigi's Mansion game for that matter. There's a lot of charm to the game so I get why people are nostalgic for it, but I think it's decent at best.

The game definitely nails the atmosphere. It looks extremely good with great lighting and animations. Genuinely feels like Nintendo was trying to make a kid-friendly survival horror game. The music is also fantastic, and I can never get enough of that really low, kind of farty bass sound they use a lot. The game's overall creepy but also goofy tone works extremely well.

Gameplay is mostly good, but it gets really repetitive despite the game's short length. The controls felt a bit on the clunky side at times, especially whenever you had to actually aim. There isn't much of a difference with how to handle the ghosts, and your reward is either keys or money, the latter of which is purely for score. The only ghosts that have a different strategy are the ones associated with a certain element. Fighting these guys sucked because if you didn't have the right element, you had to backtrack to where you can find an element to suck up to use against them. Luckily, you don't deal with them too often.

With that being said, hunting ghosts can still be fun. However, that final boss really was an unnecessary spike in difficulty. The game is pretty easy for the most part, then they suddenly throw a boss at you that hits really hard, is tricky to put in its vulnerability phase, and can still attack you when you're trying to suck him up. I just didn't feel like the game properly prepares you for the level of precision necessary to fight him.

Luigi's Mansion is okay, but it definitely feels like one of those types of launch title games that's really only there to hold people over until the really good stuff comes out. Great atmosphere and lots of charm, but lack of variety and repetitiveness makes it a bit of a chore about halfway through.

Completely outclassed by its sequel in pretty much every way, but this is still great. Still not a fan of those escape sequences, which can get frustrating due to both lack of clarity and throwing instant kill nonsense at you. Ironically, they just get shorter and easier as the game progresses. Not much to the combat either, but the game doesn't really focus on it much. It's almost entirely pure platforming, which is all good and well polished. Some of the best movement and animations in a metroidvania too. Just running around the world is fun.

Thank you Microsoft for publishing this and Will of the Wisps and then apparently deciding never to publish another good game ever again.