Skyward Sword on Wii was already one of my favorite games of all time. I now have no reason to ever touch it again.

Skyward Sword HD took a game that I loved despite its flaws and fixed everything I had an issue with. I've already done a lengthy review on the original game, so instead of repeating all of that, here are my impressions from the 39 hours I spent completing this remaster.

- Ghirahim is still my favorite Zelda villain. He's so deliciously camp.
- "Romance in the Air" might be the most beautiful bit of music in any Zelda game ever: https://youtu.be/T6x5bEr_UUU
- The resolution and buttery-smooth framerate take this game to a new level. I know Breath of the Wild 2 is gonna chug just like its predecessor, but it would be a TREAT to have all Zelda games in 60fps from now on.
- I still adore these motion controls. For whatever reason, they just click for me. Wish I could have 1:1 sword controls in every Zelda game, just like this one!
- The side characters are so good here. Meaningful, memorable interactions with NPCs make this such a fun world to be in.
- These are still some of my favorite Zelda dungeons, especially the ones in Lanayru.
- I really like returning to areas multiple times with different stuff going on. Seeing things change in an area is one of my favorite things in games, it makes the world feel more alive.
- I adore the Silent Realm challenges! A little bit of survival-horror in a Zelda game works really well. I recommend going for the difficult tears first just in case you get caught though, no need to ruin your whole run by saving the ones surrounded by floaty ghosts for last.
- Timeshift Stones are so rad.
- I liked the Demise fight much more this time than I did in 2011, but that might just be because I knew what to expect.
- I replayed BotW right before this, and that game really lacks an ending. In contrast, SS's ending is solid, probably right behind OoT.
- Fi is great, and it's much easier to appreciate her with the now toned-down number of interruptions.
- Bring back Scrapper!!
- My only real complaint is that I wish there were even more side quests, but if a game just makes me wish I could keep playing for longer, that's hardly a negative!

That was kind of word vomit, but I think that about covers everything. I love this game!

Tomodachi life is one of those games that often gets overlooked and neglected by Nintendo which is a shame because the game is pretty fun for a while, but that's all it really is... fun for a little while. Tomadachi life has little to no replay value once you've played it for a couple hours, the game is very shallow when you take a good look at it. The start of the game is fun when your making your friends, family, and favourite celebrities but it's once you get into the actual meat of tomodachi life that you start to realise there's not an awful lot to do. I will say I was surprised just how well the text to speech holds up, like it still says most words fairly well. Overall, Tomodachi life is just silly, wacky fun if your looking for something to play but just don't be expecting to be playing for too long.

Crusader Kings 2 was shat out into the world about 12 years ago. By the time its successor came out it'd developed a reputation as a game that was barebones without any DLC but was a gripping and indepth time-abyss if you had most/all of it.

Crusader Kings 3 decides to iterate on its predecessor by being a game that's barebones without any DLC, and still barebones even with all the extortionately overpriced DLC.

It is an inevitability in first-party Paradox titles that the player will eventually stumble into a period of empty space where all they're doing is advancing time at 5x speed until some events pop up and let you do something. Even Stellaris, the game that most often has you actively doing things, tends to fall into it at some point.

CK3 is sadly the worst for it, in part due to numerous under-the-hood changes that at first seem beneficial but in reality seem drab. Paradox's approach this time round involves dissuading players from attempting to colour the map as in past games and instead focus on a small corner of the world - whether it be a kingdom or an Empire, they don't want you playing with adult colouring books this time.

Instead the focus this time is on roleplay and/or kingdom management, with hefty penalties to expansion and harsh limits on how much you as an individual can control directly before needing to shove things onto your vassals. The game, including its tutorials, not-so-subtly nudge you into grabbing hold of a title and clinging to it. New and reworked mechanics like culture/religion/councils/language and more with DLCs all add to this; the focus of this game is in finding a place and staying there.

Unfortunately this focus results in a lot of waiting, as almost all of the mechanics up above boil down to clicking a button and waiting for a scheme to resolve. The much-praised Tours & Tournaments and Royal Court DLCs are much the same despite their praise, simply offering you more buttons before the wait begins rather than just one. It's all rather at odds with the intent to make you more actively partake in your realm's management, because in practice it's all very passive.
Further dulling matters is that many events often boil down to very static, very predictable stat checks. Oh, someone's trying to murder your son - who is 9th in line to the throne and has more defects than limbs? It's just a passive intrigue and scheme power check. Duelling? Martial and Prowess stats.
Much of these additional stats like Prowess were added to make the game less binary, but given how they scale it's relatively easy to stack the deck in your favour unless you gimp yourself...

But even then, this game's biggest problem is that it's easy. Metagaming is no longer required to stack ridiculous bonuses in your court, especially given the relative prominence of random lowborn courtiers with insane stat spreads. CK3 tries its damndest to have consequences for this, but what use is a hit to your legitimacy when you can pump out children that're functionally immune to rebellion, assassination, or the perils of inbreeding?
The DLCs just make this worse, as most of them are nearly consequence-free. Tours & Tournaments is a series of easy resource/stat boosts for relatively low risk, Royal Court is the same and both of them make socializing so much easier. Northern Lords supercharges a lot of the northern factions, and-

You know, CK2 had a bit of a problem with Eurocentrism, to the point where most non-European factions needed a paid DLC to be playable. Even then, it was almost always the titular Crusader King nations/cultures that got all of the updates and boosts.

CK3 seemingly averts this by having everyone on the map be playable, but it doesn't take a genius to notice that the non-European factions feel distinctly undercooked. Muslims can't even observe Ramadan. As expected from a CK title, Paradox sell the fixes back to you via Fate of Iberia and Legacy of Persia, but even these feel half-hearted and empty compared to equivalent CK2 packs. Go even further East and it's like wading into unfinished content.

I think what really broke this game for me is the lack of impact anything has. The first time a council member blackmails you with your own incest/kinslaying, it seems like a grand obstacle to be surmounted, but oftentimes it's a total non-issue. In my most recent game, everyone and their mum tried to expose me for pulling a Habsburg on my bloodline, but the end result was a few minor opinion penalties that were easily swept away by holding a Grand Wedding. It feels a lot like playing a mod for CK2 that's perpetually in beta; wowed by all the options available until they fire and you realize that you've functionally just skipped a stone across bathwater.

...Also I realized halfway into my conquest of Britannia as the Irish that the devs had forced a Legitimacy mechanic on me and that I couldn't meaningfully engage with it without forking out money for the recent Legends Of The Dead pack. Hurray!

The best way to experience this game is to read people's (probably made up) campaign stories on Reddit, for much of this game's remaining appeal is in doing stupid shit like banging the pope, and for once that's attainable without touching the game.

It's been four years and CK3 still feels as hollow and unfulfilling as it did when it came out.

I know that marking this as ‘Completed’ when I’ve only seen two ensign-difficulty medium-galaxy campaigns through to the end is a bit like saying I ‘completed’ Chess after playing a few rounds with my Uncle Jerry at Christmas, but I feel like I’ve seen enough to close the book.

The Dune novels were my impetus for finally checking out the grand strategy genre, and it’s funny that Stellaris kinda has the same problem Frank Herbert did when he wrote all those sequels - nothing can match the initial excitement of starting out in your world, watching statecraft through your awed junior eyes, becoming a man and starting a galactic crusade of your own with nothing but good intentions. Castro famously said that the true revolution begins when the enemy is overthrown and you have the seat of power; the story of Dune begins to lose itself when the grand idea of “Paul Muad'Dib“ has to sit on a throne and run a government.

The early game of Stellaris is fun because of - and in spite of - its truly insane insistence that you micromanage every element of the universe you dream of. When things began, I was clicking on menus and tabs and fleets of ships like I was playing fuckin Starcraft on semuta, dealing with ethical and moral dilemmas left-right-centre-to-infinity-and-beyond like I was fuckin Jean-Luc Picard on spice melange… It was awesome! But inevitably in the mid-game and late-game (I assume my definition of “lategame” here is like a tiny fraction of what a pro Stellaris player can simulate with political campaigning and trade deals and military management), things bottom out and the universe becomes a static blueprint of starlight that resembles a classic European trade map more than the endless expanse of new possibilities you wanted to explore - I didn’t expect that the Year 3500 would look so much like today. I understand from reading online that the expansions flesh things out more, but dude… that’s like £100! And this game already kinda feels like the spreadsheets I fill out at work!!

Towards the end of Dune: Messiah, Paul Atreides internally remarks that being God Emperor of the universe - an all-knowing superhuman across space-time - is the most boring thing imaginable to his perfect Mentat Bene Gesserit intellect. In that sense, Stellaris was able to fulfil its role as the Dune-like experience I was looking for.