I've been a Sonic fan for a long time, Generations was the most recent game and Lost World was coming out around the time I was first becoming a Sonic fan. Out of all the games I've played, I've never been disappointed by one, until now. There are just so many issues I have with this game that I don't know where to start, so I'll pick the most significant. First of all, the physics are horrible. There are so many ways to fall of the map since everything feels so slippery. Not only that, but you need to deal with those physics in four different stories: Team Sonic, Team Dark, Team Rose, and Team Chaotix. Speaking of, the four teams don't add enough to have to play the game four different times to justify playing through with each. Sonic is the standard, Dark is harder, Rose is easier, Chaotix is mission based. It really isn't worth it in my opinion. The payoff to beating all of these stories is fighting a secret final boss in "Last Story" which also requires you to get the Chaos Emeralds. Speaking of the Chaos Emeralds, to get them, you need to get a key from a cage in every second act and bring it to the end of the level. To do so, you need to beat the level without dying or taking damage as you'll drop the key. It's easier with Team Rose since their levels are shorter, but it's not worth it considering what the final boss is. The special stages aren't much better, imagine Sonic 2's pipe stages but slippery and annoying. I watched a video of the final boss again and it's underwhelming now compared to when I saw it as a kid. Also, the game doesn't really utilize Sonic well. Each team has the Speed, Fly, and Power characters, and yet you don't really need your Speed character for anything. For example: Most combat is done with your Fly or Power characters. Speaking of combat, the bosses are terrible and once again don't require the Speed character at all. One of the bosses is an upgraded version of another, two "bosses" are just waves of enemies, and two other bosses are just fighting one of the other Teams, meaning that there are only two original bosses, the first and the last. It's honestly disappointing to me how many issues I have with this game, especially since I was looking forward to playing it for the longest time. The only good parts of the game I can mention are the soundtrack and the Ocean and Metropolis levels. Those four stages were fine and I quite enjoyed them. I didn't hate the Casino stages, but as I mentioned earlier with the physics, it's quite slippery especially with the pinball boards. The remaining stages are awful in their own ways and make the game feel terrible to return to. Overall, I would say this game is worth skipping unless you're patient, but I don't think I myself am patient enough, so I'll pass on finishing this sad game.

i ended up cheating and using duplication glitches in this game because the grind is this game is so fucking long. it's boring, it's hard to find certain enemies, and you're not even garunteed to get certain drops. mind numbingly boring grind.

the story continues to be incredibly bland with cookie cutter characters. there are a few nice cutscenes, like That One In Particular, but otherwise the characters are forgetable. the continuity between BotW and this is shockingly bad, it's genuinely shockiing just how badly written the bridge is here, and for no reason! there are no divine beasts, no one knows who link is, some of the characters are just gone, basically no one mentions the World Ending Event THe Calamity that is Quite Similar to the Upheavel??? just weird and strange! the voice acting in english is genuinely atrocious, i switched that shit to japanese so fast. im so happy for matt mercer that he got to voice a character that he loves, but his performance is terrible. zelda's performance is terrible.

i honestly believed they couldn't have made breath of the wild's combat worse in this game, but they did! weapon fuse in this game is basically pointless because all it does is make weapons more tedious. they present it like you have this vast customisation of what things to attach to your weapons, but most things are completely pointless to attach. be honest, all you ever did when fusing to your weapons was pick something with the highest number right? why wouldn't you do that? if that was the point then why not keep weapons as they were in BotW? at least that way the weapons dont have to be genuinely fuck ugly. also fighting silver monsters is so annoying because it just takes ages, and combat isnt dynamic enough to make enemies like that fun. lynels are still fun to fight because the act of fighting them is engaging, the act of fighting a silver bokoblin is NOT engaging. its also silly that silver bokoblins have more health than red hinox/boss bokoblins, and makes fighting big enemies feel weird, strange, and disconnected. weapon fuse sucks, weapon durability still sucks, (youre spending your weapons to get resources for weapons, theyre ugly now, and theres an extra tedious step involved)

ultrahand is really cool and this game's physics engine is impressive and amazing. to watch. i dont care about building elaborate torture devices or beyblade areans or actual cars becuase like, what is the point? i got by perfecting fine with my mini plane and my hot air balloon, never needed anything else. now that i've seen all that stuff on twitter i feel perfectly content to not experiment at all and thats fine. its mostly boring

i like that they added caves and wells to this game, they felt massively overdue and it was really cool to first few times you enter one. unfortunately this game has the skyrim problem of "quantity over quality" because like, yeah, you might find a cave, but there is never going to be anything interesting in there. it's more brightbloom seeds, more bomb flowers, another knight's claymore, and that's it. the cave under lookout landing was the most exciting because it just kept going on and it was clear that it was leading to hyrule castle, but it didn't feel worth it at the end anyway so what was the point? this game is FILLED with stuff to find, but none of it is worth it because it's all the same. i'd take a game 1/4 of the size of this one with more interesting and unique locations that are rewarding to explore on their own merits, not just because of the arbitrary reward of arrows i might also find. this applies to the sky islands and depths too, both of which are conceptually good and exciting at first, but like the rest of this game, end up being overwhelmingly boring in the end.

i did the gerudo area first so seeing the lightning temple as this claustrophobic, closed in place i was so excited to see the other dungeons. they're all quite bad and way too short still, but theyre better than the divine beasts, other than the zora dungeon. the water temple feels like it was cobbled together in 5 minutes and is genuinely just terrible. cool to see unique final boss monsters though, i liked that. gibdo queen and colgalula or whatever were very cool looking

please tell me this is the last zelda like this. its time to move ONNN come on. i get why people love these games, i do, and i believe it was youtuber fudj who said "This game isn't a response to the criticisms of Breath of the Wild, it's a response to the things people loved about Breath of the Wild" which is true. i think its just time for us to say "okay, we've done that, let's see what we can do next". i'm thinking about how different wind waker was to ocarina of time and i'm ready for that kind of jump. im fine for BOTW and TOTK to inspire and influence the future games, i think they should even! but they need to switch it up and experiment because after 125 hours of this shit i'm burnt out, i'm bored, and i'm fucking done.

NES Week: Day #7

So, we’ve finally made it. After enjoying some simple pinball, ‘climbing’ up some icey mountains, hitting a ball with a racket, finding gems as a red blob, being a motorcyclist, and fighting with some balloons, we have finally made it. We’ve made it to Super Mario bros.

I could’ve gone for duck hunt for the last game but I thought that wouldn’t be great enough and that the perfect game to play at last is Nintendo’s mascot himself! My history with this game is pretty short. I used to play quite a bit of it but never get past world 6. Turns out there was a way to getting to world 8 all the way from world 5 so…that was nice to know at last after I’d gone through quite a lot of pain but oh well.

In the game you play as Mario on his way to save princess toadstool from the evil king koopa (or peach and bowser). On the way you’ll come across goombas, koopa troopas and buzzy beetles. You’ll also find lakitus who just love to annoy you every chance you get. As a game, Super Mario bros. has aged pretty well. Not ridiculously well but definitely well enough for it to still be played today. And yes: it is pretty difficult near the end but not as difficult as some other Mario games on the NES (looking at you lost levels) but overall you’ll still be able to enjoy a timeless classic.

Classic, recognisable music, decent enemies, bullet bills come at the wrong time, your princess is in another castle!