This is a perfectly serviceable shmup that's presented very well. It's done in 3D instead of with sprites, but it uses that to its advantage with some absolutely massive bosses that move around in surprisingly complex ways, impressive backgrounds that zoom by, and. You can't see any of that though since the game's rechargable bomb (it was charged either by killing enemies or by grazing bullets, I think grazing but I honestly couldn't tell) turns most enemy bullets into giant rotating 3D coins. The devs did have the sense to layer bullets on top of the coins so they never actually keep you from seeing attack patterns, but they definitely detract from the game's overall presentation and feel. Which is a real shame since the game looks really damn good for an arcade shmup. Still pretty fun though and I might check out the mobile game this is is based off of at some point.

I find it really strange how the game that pushes the concept of dandori so much is the one where dandori matters the least. It's also just really strange how enemies don't respawn on the overworlds, so they end up feeling empty if you're going back for one cave or treasure that you couldn't get earlier. Things like that or the fact that a lot of the game is just combat when Pikmin's strength has never been in straight combat (granted 4's bestiary is pretty impressive, and the final boss is pretty fun) so eschewing the time management of 1 and 3 or even 4's own dandori challenges in favor of just making the bulk of the gameplay throwing a bunch of pikmin at a big enemy seems like a strange decision to me. I could say that it's casualized to make Pikmin appeal to a wider audience, but the series is already an attempt at making the RTS genre more approachable so I don't think it's that. It's still Pikmin so it's a pretty fun time and the fourth area is probably the closest to a new Chibi-Robo we'll ever get, but it's just worse enough when compared to the other games in the series to make me a little disappointed in it.

Also seriously why isn't there an online dandori battle mode yeah bingo battle is better but online dandori would have made up for all the game's flaws.

For an arcade port of a Chinese fangame, this was actually pretty good. I liked how the sakura barrier system basically gave you a reusable screen clear that's separate from your spell cards. Other than that, it's really just another Touhou but without ZUN's brand of objectively shitty but super charming art, even if the character art used here was surprisingly good.

edit: Went back and played PCB again after not touching it for a few years and forgetting a lot about it, and this is basically a pseudo-remake of that game with some changes like different bosses(including an OC sheep boy named Hyp that's actually a pretty fun fight) and being able to play as Youmu. It's still cool playing an actual Touhou game in an arcade setting and I do actually really like the art, but it's nowhere near as original as I thought it was when I first played through it. The sakura system is nearly identical to PCB's cherry system (it might affect score a little differently but IDK) which was the one thing that really stood out to me as cool when I played through PSF, but it's still a cool system.

I love fighting games with absurdly large rosters, especially ones that play well. Almost every mobile suit has something unique about it and even if the game's emphasis on movement and ranged combat makes mobile suits suits like Cucuruz Doan's Zaku kind of bad when compared to something like the Nu or Zeta Gundams, the overwhelming majority of available mobile suits are at least good enough to be viable.
My only real complaint is with a few specific omissions from the roster, but that's basically just the G Gundam fan in me being mad that Gundams Bolt and Maxter didn't make the cut while the Rising and Dragon Gundams did. It's also kind of odd how both Barbatos and Barbatos Lupus are in the game but Barbatos Lupus Rex isn't, but I'd need to look at when that actually first showed up in Iron-Blooded Orphans to see if it even could have been included in the game or not.

Since this is something that I only got to play on a perpetually open arcade cabinet at Magfest 2024, I'm going to hold off on scoring this until the console release comes out in a few months and I can really dig into the mechanics, but from what I've played this is a really fun arcade platformer with a pretty high skill ceiling for high scores and speedrunning. The pixel art was bright and charming and the style was very reminiscent of GBA/DS era platformers like Starfy, although a friend of mine said that it was anti-aliased to hell and back so maybe it's not as good visually as I thought it was (apparently the game was originally a 2001 mobile game before it got an arcade port, so that kind of makes sense).I also can't really speak about the soundtrack since I could only hear a bit of it over the other cabinets. The levels themselves were fairly short, but that pick up and play nature makes it more suited for an arcade environment than having longer stages would. The game is split into several "worlds" of three or four stages and a boss, and there are a few branching paths placed throughout the world map so you can only play about 1/3 of the stages in the game on a single playthrough. The level design is just okay and has the same kind of abstract platform placement as an Umihara Kawase game, but where the game really shines is in the gameplay.

You control a girl named Nico who has a bright yellow umbrella. She can use this umbrella for everything from melee attacks (a basic 3-4 hit combo) and floating through the air to reflecting projectiles and flinging herself through the environment. The mechanic that makes the game particularly fun is her ability to stick her umbrella into any surface, either through a melee attack or the umbrella throw that goes about halfway across the screen. Once her umbrella is stuck into a surface, Nico can fling herself in either direction perpendicular to her umbrella. She'll fly in a straight line for a while before the player regains control. You can chain this together with other actions like the umbrella throw or the float to breeze through stages, or you can use it to get to out of the way places to gather collectibles and increase your score. There were multiple times throughout my three playthroughs that I thought about ways I could chain Nico's abilities together to get through a stage faster or how I could reasonably do something stupid like beat a whole stage without touching the ground by bouncing off of all the enemies and flinging myself around to fill in the gaps. I doubt that the game can be pushed as far as something like Umihara Kawase or other physics-based platformers, but I always felt like I was playing way below the skill ceiling, which was pretty great. I kept figuring out new techniques and ways to get through stages and still barely felt like I was scratching the surface of what I could actually do. Because of that, the rerelease went from something I didn't even know existed to one of my most anticipated 2024 releases in a matter of hours. I'm super excited to see just how far I can push the mechanics of the game and to actually give it the time it deserves instead of a few hours over the course of a weekend.

It took me six years, about 130 total hours of play time, and three different save files to finally finish Ultra Sun. The first two times I tried playing it, I ended up dropping the game around the end of Akala Island. I honestly can't even say why, since I like Alola and the new additions like the sticker hunt and mantine surfing are fun, even if I don't really care for the story changes and think that the Rainbow Rocket stuff was pretty underwhelming. Maybe it's because it just feels too similar to the original Sun and Moon and I put way too much time into Moon when it came out. Maybe it's because it was a 3DS game released in the fall of 2017, and by the time I got around to wanting to finish it my 2DS XL's battery was so bad that I could barely play for an hour before needing to charge it (I actually ended up replacing the battery because of this and it made the last third of the game way more enjoyable). I really can't say. Regardless, I had a pretty good time with Ultra Sun.

A lot of the levels are little 5-10 minute sections of a wider mission that are broken up by loading screens (probably so the game could run on Xbox) and it could really have used some more enemy and weapon variety, but it's pretty fun. As far as Star Wars games go, it's also neat to see something focus almost entirely on the science fiction side of things instead of the space fantasy aspects of the franchise. Giving your squad orders and figuring out the best way to approach a fight was always enjoyable.

Fuck taking the bridge with the two super battle droid dispensers, though. That part sucked.

Ragnarok was a meandering, bloated mess of a game. A very fun game, but it had way too much stuff in it while way too little actually happened. God of War 2018 wasn't perfect by any means, but it had a focus that Ragnarok lacked. That focus is back in Valhalla, both in its story and the gameplay. Valhalla itself is a series of randomized combat challenges that draw from Ragnarok's enemy roster, as well as some bosses from 2018 and a few enemies from the original series. There aren't any new weapons or anything and the perks don't really change how you fight, but the variety in encounters is just enough so it never gets boring. The story is also basically just Kratos coming to terms with his past and reconciling the fact that he's a completely different character in the Norse games than he was in the original ones, but the fact that you get a little bit of story in each run helps space things out while keeping things interesting. The longest I went without being in a fight was maybe 10 minutes, which includes buying upgrades and choosing what equipment I wanted to take with me for the next run. There aren't any painstakingly slow and quite frankly pointless sections like Atreus's visit to Ironwood here, so I never felt like I needed to rush through a poorly executed story section to get back to the fun stuff.

I also really like the Draupnir spear and I'm happy to get any excuse to use it again covering enemies in spikes and then making them explode on command is really fun.