I've seen several people complain that this is just a repackaging of the GBA game that's compromised in several ways. I don't really know about that because I haven't played a WarioWare game a day in my life, I'm as bare and pure as the day I was born, covered in fluids and screaming in the corner of the WarioWare elevator as the door keeps opening up to wacky minigames. I don't know how I got here and I'm scared.

The multiplayer component seems to be the big draw, but "come over and play WarioWare, Inc: Mega Party Games!" doesn't have the same magnetism today that it probably did in 2003, and for that reason I experienced the game solo. Which, again, is just the GBA game (or so I'm told), and since it's all new to me, I had a good time with it regardless.

I am currently playing through Mario Party 6 with Appreciations and TransWitchSammy, and while that's obviously a more complex game, I do think it's funny to compare how minigames are designed between the two. WarioWare fires its microgames at you rapidly, but they're so simple and intuitive that you're rarely left wondering what's expected of you, which allows the game to maintain its pacing. Mario Party requires a team of adults carefully study the instructions to each minigame, examining them like a technical manual several times over before jumping into a practice game to ensure everything is operating correctly. Saw a log, pick your nose, dodge falling debris... Easy. I do that every day of my life. Navigate the Gomba maze in Hotel Goomba by punching Goombas in the back of the skull to coral them into the correct positions? Yeah, hold up, gonna need to do a couple dry runs.

"But George, that's an unfair comparison. The connection between the two is predicated on the presence of minigames as a generalized concept and is tenuous at best!" Oh, well look at what we have here. A Mario Party defender! Well guess what, I called Dribble and Spitz and they said they're coming to your house tonight!

Rollerdrome is a game that would fit in perfectly with the PS2 library, meant as a good thing. It harkens to back to that generation where all you needed for a videogame was a cool idea and some good gameplay.

Taking a lot of inspiration from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Rollerdrome is best described as a Tony Hawk game with guns. The concept is very similar; you're given stages and in order to unlock new stages you need to complete some of the listed challenges e.g. Get a score of X, Do this trick on this grind rail etc etc.

As opposed to playing against the timer, you are rather playing against enemies. This is where the guns come in. In order to complete a level, you simply have to kill all the players on a stage using your 4 different weapons. You have controls that are very similar to THPS except not as complex. The question is why would you focus on doing tricks when this is mainly a shooter then? Well, in order to get back some ammo for your guns, you need to perform tricks. This is where the cool gameplay idea comes where you will constantly shooting and flipping, grabbing, grinding and spinning which results in very stylish gameplay once you master it.

The first 2 hours of the game is extremely fun, however the novelty quickly wears off once you realise you've seen all that the game can show you in those first 2 hours. The game itself is about 5-6 hours so it's not too long, but in those last 3 hours you will just be basically doing the same thing by facing the same enemy types you have been facing in the first 2 hours and the repetitiveness kicks in.

The idea of Rollerdrome is so good, the gameplay is great, it's just the content itself leaves so much to be desired. There are a couple of stages, but you are getting the same 3 biomes which quickly wear out. There is so much potential with Rollerdrome to reach high highs, which it does at the beginning, but everything quickly wears off hoping you'd see much more variety.

It's still a very good game and I would like to see a sequel with the same concept but with much more variety and ideas.

Skyrim is the very definition of pure unfiltered SOUL. What else needs to be said about Skyrim that no other person has dared to say before me? It is quite simply one of THE games of all time.

Skyrim takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion, Bethesda’s other classic gem, where the player is put into the shoes of their hand-crafted Dragonborn Chad or Chadette. A civil war has taken place between the Imperials and Stormcloaks, and your character begins their journey at the helm of their disarray. (I still remember, to this day, when Ralof said “Hey, you. You’re finally awake” to me on my first playthrough.)

After a dragon accidentally helps the player narrowly escape their own execution, you soon find out that not all Nirnroots sing a pretty tune. Turns out that dragons have been extinct for centuries and now they’re back. Once you meet Balgruuf, it’s over. He orders you to fight an incoming dragon before it wipes out the city of his people. Reluctantly, your character participates, only to find out that they are in fact what we would call a Dragonborn, also known as Dovahkiin. (For those who didn’t know.) These rare somebodies are people born with the blood of Dragons and therefore can wield the same powerful magic. Fucking banger. It is now up to you, the player, to play the game and stop the dragons in order to say that you have beaten the game.

With a healthy level of jank, you could say that the gameplay loop of this game has aged quite poorly. And I would agree. There is no shortage of unfun first person combat to be found here, in fact, there is literally so much of it. However, the jankiness of it all is what gives Skyrim that rough edge charm we all know and love, and therefore I would say that even though it’s a 2011 game, it’s actually held up quite nicely. It’s not often you see me praising an old game that is THAT old, so you just know that it has to be the peak of the RPG medium.

I really think this game gets a lot of heat nowadays for really no reason. Have you ever considered that maybe this game is supposed to be a fucking mess? Just download a truck load of mods and exploit the enchantment table in order to deal 1247083927028238 contact damage on the Bandit Outlaw preventing you from progressing through the cave. It honestly takes a lot of skill to beat this game without it crashing at least 764 times with all the mods you’ve downloaded, so maybe just get better at the game before giving up on it. You seriously have no idea what you’re missing and I actually threaten you to give it another chance. Jankiness is an element that can be bested with both time and practice and was in fact intentionally put into Skyrim in order to challenge the player’s ability to keep their cool. I admire Todd Howard for shaping me into a better man.

Did you know that the term, “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee” actually came from Skyrim? You can trigger this event when walking around town and speaking to any generic guard. Not even M’aiq the Liar knows that one.

Now let’s talk about some of the mid level designs. Ugh, if I have to complain about something it would be in this area here. Everytime I walked into a Dwemer ruin, I wanted to take all my anger out on Lydia again. The Falmer? The Automatas? The one big dungeon that’s almost as big as my Mom’s house? They make me want to drop this kino from a 10 to a 9 so bad, but I am a much stronger person than that. The nice thing is that you don’t have to go through them very often, but hoo-wee if I had ever seen bad design, it’s that. Not sure what the game devs were thinking with that one.

Disregarding that, some parts of this game really make you feel like you’re truly on crack cocaine. I mean, there’s really no way to fling yourself into the air without dying in real life so baiting a Giant to do it is like the next best thing. I took off all of my clothes, got 10,000 bounty in each town for killing the merchants and not even a single NPC gave a shit. It really made me feel like I was crafting the RPG adventure of my dreams. I once ignored all of the main quests and drank so much Skooma that I instantaneously died right in front of Delphine, and I’d do it again too. Anything to stick it to that bitch. There is no way she can convince me to do Spoiler, ever. Also, did you know that the dragon Paarthurnax is voiced by Charles Martinet, the original voice actor for Mario?

I really wish that I could play this game for the first time again so that I could become the ultimate Skyrim racist on my first playthrough. I was too nervous to go that route the first time, but I really think I missed out on something special there. Oh well, there’s 17 re-releases of this game that I can do that on!

Trophies: 76
Playtime: 20 minutes
Graphics: Potato
Music: Based

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdvClO0qYlcfWVA6WXd3oczS3hZSko-Zi&si=SFytVGI9TK3jm_Uk

Here are my scores for those who don’t know:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐- A complete and utter masterpiece. The best thing I have ever played. I will be thinking of this one for generations to come. I got a tattoo about it on my back and will be naming my children after the main characters.

⭐⭐⭐⭐- It’s dogshit. I’ve never been more insulted in my entire life. If I could refund it I would but Steam’s horrible refund policy prevents me from refunding games after 65 hours.

⭐⭐⭐ - Anyone who likes this game should be imprisoned on death row. You are genuinely the worst person who ever worsted.

⭐⭐ - I wouldn’t even accept this as a gift. What are you? Anti-Santa?

⭐- It’s woke.

Happy April 1st, everyone!

sick as hell, and you know i sat my zoomer ass down and listened when this 20 year old game insisted that it was the future. but the whole time i was thinking about how i spent my 2020 seeing this game's composer tweet about funky femboys, and this dj professor k rp account that was warning people not to get vaccinated, in character. i think hes still going. people were @ing him going JET SET RATIOOO.

this is to say that the actual future just confuses me. but the game itself makes it clear it's not about the future future anyway. just what we choose to do to shape it. im taking that as another reminder to be less online.

i spent all my teen years listening to cibo matto (still lives in my heart) thanks to jsrf, even though i wasnt able to actually play it back then. it simply looked like the coolest shit, and id enjoyed the first game too. having finally played it in 2023, as an adult, was a bit anticlimactic for no particular reason? - it's everything i expected. it's the sequel to jsr, it's bigger, badder, but still a fun little thing about skating around tagging shit to funky music. all those songs id heard thousands of times, finally sounding off with full context. neat mini dj mixes for each chapter. it really did end up being the coolest shit.

fuck exclusives lol. theres some irony in no one being able to play a game all about the undying rebellious spirit because they dont happen to own a 2 decade old slab of plastic with a particular brand stamped on it. my uncle had an xbox but he wasnt cool enough to carry this game. unfortunate. and this shit still carries itself more like the dreamcast than it does xbox anyway. wheres the french guy on twitter begging #BreakFreeJSRF.

it's cool that video games can affect us even when we've yet to play them. jsrf ended up being as important to me as a lot of games i actually played growing up. always the game i was going to play one day, always that game in the future. and when the future finally came, there was that satisfaction of seeing all these disparate things id absorbed by osmosis, allowed to move and flow together for the first time. theres that song i spent so many years listening to. those character designs id adored from afar. that refinement upon the first game everyone would go on about. i still lost my mind a bit in the sewer level, as you do, but it was all in good fun.

ultimately id have liked to vibe to it all as the 14 year old spacing off to Skate 2, and not the 24 year old with nothing going on. but this works too.

The first in Quintet's 'unofficial' Gaia series, Soul Blazer is an action-RPG whose gameplay reimagines LoZ as a chapter-based, pseudo-town builder propelled by clearing waves of enemies in dungeons. i.e. Battle encounters could spawn quest points found in their corresponding level's hub, which take the form of buildings, hint-giving NPCs and special loot. The most interesting of which is found in the latter - namely their accessories and armor, equipped items with a range of extra abilities (whether to circumvent hazards or enter areas) that have more in common with Zelda than with ARPGs. By pairing those tools with the fragmented, gradually-expanding design of its trials (unravelling in tandem with hub unlocks and vice-versa), they offer a mini version of classic overworld-to-dungeon progression, but in discrete segments rather than a rigid dichotomy. And - along the way, plenty of shortcuts facilitate the frequent backtracking expected of this action-to-adventure loop. In their hands, dungeon-crawling is not necessarily about finding the boss/exit.

Its only weak point is the combat, a fast-paced albeit repetitive and somewhat awkward system in which enemies don't respond to offense; no knockback & no stun, just a split second blink as they continue forward. Those user attacks - however, sport a wildly disjointed hitbox that can pierce through obstacles, effectively inspiring players to hide behind walls, corners or pillars (or a few steps from the spawner) and cast or hack away at approaching foes. Its potential is perhaps better demonstrated in later stages and during boss fights (with a few painful exceptions). Regardless, Quintet engineered a challenging and unique form of crawler that is recursive but not quite rogue-like, thus possibly laying the foundations for Dark Cloud.

I'm normally not a huge fan of late 90s 3D platformers. I like Super Mario 64 a lot, but I normally think things like the Banjo games or the Crash and Spyro trilogies are just alright. Then there's Ape Escape. I love Ape Escape. This isn't a nostalgia thing since my first exposure to the game was the PS4 release of Ape Escape 2, but I still absolutely adore what the game is trying to do. I'm someone who likes controller gimmicks, so using the right stick for something other than camera control is more fun than annoying to me, and the variety of tools here coupled with the occasional vehicles meant that I was always having to think about what my hands were doing. Directional flicks for the net. Pull back and release for the slingshot. Circles for the hoop or propeller. It adds an extra layer to the gameplay of what would otherwise be a pretty standard, but charming, collectathon. The music has a kind of weird synthetic feel to it, but that fits a game where you're traveling through time to catch super smart monkeys that sometimes have guns.

I also just really like monkeys