Super mario odyssey is such a perfect mario game. All the kingdoms are really fun and unique each with their own puzzles to solve. For a mario game, odyssey has a pretty great story, the idea of bowser marrying peach and them getting different wedding items from each kingdom is amazing. Not to mention how many new and funny opportunities happy brings to the table which might make this my favourite mario game gameplay wise. I can't believe it's been 7 years since I played this game last and I'll definitely have to replay it in the future, I can not wait for the next mainline 3d mario game which will probably come out on the switch 2. Easily one of the best switch games, if you haven't played it already, what are you doing?

The last time I had played Battle for Bikini Bottom (the original at least) was in 2019. According to my PS2 memory card, I had played this in 2010 prior to 2019. Back then, I never did 100% the game but I did beat it. 2019 though was the first time I 100%ed the game and I remember being so happy I finally did so since this was a game I liked a lot as a kid. I remember thinking it was great back then, but I wanted to see how I'd feel nowadays. While I don't think it's quite as good nowadays, it's still a really fun time overall.

I'd say the thing this game does best is replicating season 1-3 of SpongeBob. It doesn't always hit but when it does, this game is super funny and is basically just like those early seasons. There's a ton of callbacks to the show and references you'd only get if you've seen specific episodes. For a kid growing up on SpongeBob, this is basically like playing through a couple episodes of the show. Every voice actor from the show is here too, besides Mr. Krabs and Mermaid Man, and they don't half ass it. They bring their A game in every scene. However, going back to those two outliers, it's unfortunate they couldn't appear here. Mr. Krabs isn't too terrible, and the voice actor at least sounds like he's trying to replicate the character. Mermaid Man though is totally off and sounds pretty bad, I think. Even with those two being different tho, it's still super authentic to the show and a lot of fun seeing each scene be reminiscent of the show. The game also really replicates the world of SpongeBob well. The overworld of Bikini Bottom is done super well. You have all the main characters homes represented here. You have the Krusty Krab, the Chum Bucket. All the staple locations. The areas themselves also represent the show well. Rock Bottom, the Mermalair, Kelp Forest..even SpongeBob's Dream from that one season 1 episode appears. The characters, their dialogue and the world itself just perfectly represents the early seasons.

Getting into the gameplay itself, it's a collectathon and is basically mimicking a game like Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie. While I don't think it's as good as either of those, for reasons I'll explain shortly, that type of game still works well in the SpongeBob universe. Instead of Stars or Jiggies, your main collectable in this game are golden spatulas. Thematically super fitting to the show, though I gotta say I never found them as satisfying to get as the aforementioned stars or jiggies. There's no jingle that plays, only a crowd cheering for the player (and SpongeBob's laugh if you're playing as him). It's just sort of a bummer since it never gave me a rush whenever I collected them like Mario 64 or Banjo did. Anyways, you collect these golden spatulas in each level alongside collecting any other assortment of collectables along the way. You have shiny objects which you get from tikis or the robots. These are used to spend on shiny object gates or to get golden spatulas from Mr. Krabs. Socks are a collectable that you can trade in to also get golden spatulas from Patrick. These are mostly easy to get but can be annoying in their placement depending on the stage. Some, mostly the first couple stage ones, require backtracking with abilities you get later on. This like barely happens at all though so if you're a Banjo Tooie hater, you might like this game. In fact, this game is maybe too linear for my liking. It's obviously no Tooie, but it's not even a Mario 64 or Kazooie in terms of its exploration. Very rarely will you travel off the beaten path to do a little side challenge but that's about it. I prefer the more open games I mentioned before for that reason, as it feels like you're being guided along a straight path most of the time. Still, what's here is mostly fun. The levels in general, besides being faithful to the show, are either pretty fun or harmless. The only two I didn't care for much were Mermalair and Kelp Forest. Both had songs that kinda got on my nerves and Kelp Forest is too dark a lot of the time and also has the worst slide in the game. My two favorite levels though, were Flying Dutchman's Graveyard and SpongeBob's Dream. I found neither annoying and they were both endgame levels so they were pretty fleshed out.

You can also play as both Patrick and Sandy, if you find a bus station in each level. They each have different abilities but basically, Patrick is strong and can throw heavy things while Sandy has a lasso she can glide with and can also swing from these lasso Texas things. Both characters change the gameplay up enough for it feel different and fun. Their move sets are simpler than SpongeBob's. His move set consists of a double jump, a bubble wand attack, a bubble butt stomp, a bubble helmet that shoots upwards, the bubble bowl which is a bowling ball you can throw to hit things and the cruise bubble which is this missile attack you can use to hit enemies or buttons from a far. Those last two abilities are ones you unlock as progress and I generally like the move set SpongeBob has. Only thing I wish he had was a movement ability. There's no long jump or talon trot here so he doesn't feel quite as fun to play as because of the lack of something like that.

Between each set of three levels, and also in some of the levels themselves, are the game's bosses. The bosses in the actual levels aren't that great imo but are fun references to the show at least. The main game's bosses you must defeat to proceed tho are actually pretty fun. They're more fleshed out and have cutscenes between phases. You also switch between characters between phases too, which again, changes up the gameplay somewhat. The final boss was definitely the best, it's a fun nod to SpongeBob's love for Karate and also to the anchor arm episode. But I also gotta give props to robot Patrick's fight. The atmosphere of the industrial park combined with the eerie music, always freaked me out a bit as a kid. Still does even now lol.

Speaking of the music, while I don't think it's that amazing overall, there are still some tracks I quite like. Jellyfish Fields is an upbeat classic, Industrial Park again is quite eerie but really good and the best track in the game is probably Flying Dutchman's Graveyard. That one just perfectly fits the level and also rocks on top of it. Like I said, there are some tracks I straight up don't like whether it's cuz the level annoyed me as a kid or I just don't like them in general, however the OST is still solid overall.

I will say, I never noticed how unpolished this game could be at times. Whether it's me clipping through a tiki that doesn't have hit detection, or the slide portions being really janky depending on how I jump, it's not as polished as thought it was back then. Still, this is super helpful to the speedrun community as the game has some well-known glitches and exploits that are actually super cool to see someone perform. I remember getting into these speedrun videos shortly before Rehydrated came out and being amazed I'm just now finding out about all them. Speaking of rehydrated, I'll just say one thing. Play this version, don't play Rehydrated for the love of god. It's so bad, the fucking warp boxes don't even animate.

One more thing I wanna mention before I end the review off, is the golden spatula warp feature. If you go into the menu, to the golden spatulas you've collected or have to collect still, you can take the taxi from the menu and warp to that location. Holy shit, this may be the best feature in this game. It's super convenient and frankly should be in more 3D Platformers lol.

This is a game I played as a kid and while I think it's not quite as good as once thought, and is not as good as Mario 64 (and definitely not as good as Banjo), it's still a fun time. It's not too long either so it's a game you can easily replay. Maybe I'd think lower of this game if I wasn't a SpongeBob fan or grew up with this, as it's just kind of an average 3D platformer, but it's still one of the best licensed games I've played because it represents the world of SpongeBob so well. Glad it holds up even to this day.

Wow, it's the first game I ever worked on professionally! I'm marking this game as "mastered" considering I spent 2 years of my life working on it.

Look, there are other former Volition coworkers of mine that have guested on podcasts and talked about some of the issues this game's development went through. This game was supposed to be doing a lot more, originally. The ideas were too lofty to be pulled off by a team of Volition's size, poor management and meddling from the publisher damaged team morale, and a whole host of other things contributed to the poor final product.

The game was originally more of a loot-based, co-op action RPG with three open world cities that would update over time. The map updates were kind of like Fortnite's, but smaller and on a more frequent basis. New events would happen every so often that featured community goals, the kind you currently see happening in Helldivers 2. The ideas were neat, but it all felt very pie-in-the-sky.

The newly updated engine and tools Volition was using at the time were designed with this original game in mind... which means the tools needed to make a single player open world game with linear missions did not really exist. There were no cinematics tools and no tools for linear, checkpointed missions. So that's why the game launched with a shitload of bugs that would break mission progression.

Also here's a nitpick I have with the game that no one has ever pointed out. There are multiple areas in the game where way more scientist NPCs spawn than any other type and it's really jarring. Also all of the civilian NPCs look like they were built on a slightly different scale than the player characters. All of the civilians are kind of tiny looking, even when put next to the playable characters that are also on the small side.

Can’t believe Dunkey really tricked nine million gamers into thinking The Last Guardian was this broken dumpster fire devoid of any fun or joy. Shaking my head. The gaming community really let me down with this one, maybe some other content creator a decade later will realize it was actually good when it’ll be +120$ on retro game store shelves.

Okay, being more rational here, I’ve always found the mixed reception of The Last Guardian to be rather puzzling. You’d think the third game from industry legend Fumito Ueda, the man behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, arguably two of the most influential PS2 games ever, would come out with more enthusiasm behind it after its infamously long nine-year development time, spanning a whole console generation. But quite literally the opposite happened. The game was so divisive on its release by critics and audiences it’s no surprise nobody wanted to be the guinea pig that invested their time and money into it. Many of its detractors claimed this was because Trico, the big animal companion and the main mechanic of the game, was unresponsive and unreliable too frequently, giving the player more lack of control than necessary and making playing the game more frustrating than it needed to be. Which I’ve always found that odd because I feel lack of control has always been a major theme in Ueda’s games?

In ICO, you play as a little boy trying to escape a big castle with a girl named Yorda who doesn’t speak the same language and can’t make the same jumps or climbs as you, yet is relied upon to open certain doors to progress your escape. You cannot progress without Yorda, you have to work around her limitations to solve puzzles and protect her from the occasional fight with these shadowy figures. If you go too many rooms too far away from her, you risk her getting captured which kills you. So you have to escort her a lot of the time by hand or yell for her to get her to come to you, which her AI has never really been the best to be honest? It was to the point where Team Ico moved development of the game from the PS1 to the PS2 so they can have more processing power to get her to work and it can still be a bit bumbly and finicky at times. In Shadow of the Colossus, you were this warrior who wandered into a forbidden land to make a deal with a deity to resurrect a girl named Mono from the dead by riding to and killing 16 Colossi, these impossibly towering creatures made of stone and fur. You had to climb on these things and find their weak spots to stab as you wrestle with the overwhelming forces of gravity of these massive creatures trying to shake you off, which oftentimes means you have to hang on for dear life for what seems minutes on end before you can keep climbing as you watch your stamina bar get lower and lower, creating more dread of falling off and having to get back on again. It’s not as if oppression by removing control from the player has never been in Ueda’s previous work before, and these are often aspects I’ve seen praised in these two games, myself included. However, I think these are often overlooked when talking about The Last Guardian because there’s always a sense that you have more kinds of control over your own actions in those games at the end of the day. That you are the one who can hold Yorda’s hand and take her where she needs to be most of the time, that you are the one who made the decision to climb upwards on the Colossi at the most inopportune time. Ueda’s games have always had this near-perfect balance of making the grand scenario more and more learnable while still grounding the player in the reality they’re really in.

This is why I feel The Last Guardian was a harder sell for many people. While I argue the journey itself is more tonally lighthearted than his previous work, The Last Guardian is by far Ueda’s most oppressive feeling game. The boy is not The Wanderer, he’s not even Ico, he’s just about as small and frail as Yorda and can only make the smallest of jumps, hang on the tiniest of ledges, and can push only certain objects around in terrain that scales from tower to tower in a journey that asks you to go higher and higher up the clouds. You more than ever have to rely on your partner Trico, this massive impossible mix of a cat and a bird probably the size of a small house. Only she can make you reach heights you otherwise can’t and make those impossible jumps from tower to tower. Trico is probably the most convincing animal in a video game I’ve ever played, but to some, that’s a burden they can’t deal with. Trico will get hungry so you have to look for barrels sometimes to feed her, Trico will get flustered when she attacks these strange inanimate stone guards so you have to pet her to calm her down, Trico gets scared of these glass windows with eye-shaped designs on them so you have to find a way to destroy them even if you have to do some insane parkour to get to them, Trico will sometimes just flat out ignore your yelling commands by design taking longer to do what the player may see as the simplest of jumps. While Trico is the most relied-on partner character ever in an Ueda game, the boy still has to escort and command this man-eating beast from place to place to solve puzzles or to platform around large jumps. In other words, it’s ICO again, but this time the roles are reversed.

Of course the pitch of “you move an animal around that will act like an animal” was only going to appeal to the most committed to its premise, and it being Ueda’s longest game meant more people were going to fall off of it before they got a chance to see its conclusion. But I feel that aspect also overshadowed discussion of other issues the game has to be honest. You can practically feel its nine years of ambitious development time when the game starts to barely contain its targeted 30fps threshold. The environmental flourishes and details around Ueda’s legendarily creative architecture are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and as you get higher and higher up the clouds you see more and more of what you maneuvered around down below, but sometimes I feel this hyper fixation on its details mixed with its advanced lighting system can obfuscate puzzle information more often than it needed to, and I feel Team Ico knew this, which is why the game relies on its tip systems too much. There are not only button prompts that appear frequently on the top right of the screen to give clues on what you can interact with, but narration from the boy's perspective will appear similar to Shadow of the Colossus if the game detects the player being on a puzzle for too long. It’s kind of a shame that Ueda’s games still feature these immersion-breaking UI elements present and criticized in Shadow of the Colossus for years with no real way of turning them off, but I feel the game would’ve only been more frustrating on a first time playthrough if they weren’t there. Then there are the occasional physics engine issues that the game will stumble upon, while I found the physics complied with me more than most Havok engine games do to be honest, I did have a moment in my playthrough where when Trico jumped the boy was suddenly teleported upwards which made me fall towards my impending doom, so it’s by no means perfect even if I had a better time with it. The camera is by far my biggest issue with the game. It’s this fickle mistress that only focuses on what it wants to. Sometimes it’ll autofocus on Trico, or the ledge you need to jump on, and sometimes you have to adjust it yourself. Sometimes the camera will get stuck in tight environments with you and Trico which will reset itself with this awkward cut to black which can repeat over and over again rather than just clipping out of bounds to give the player a better view from behind similar to God Hand. The Last Guardian's technical ambitions from its AI to its environments can be seen from a distance as impressive, but its lack of gracefullness at times can also be seen as its downfall, and it’s no wonder why the game had the hardest time sticking with players the most.

It… might be my favorite Ueda game?

It might be too early to tell as I’m writing this, but it just feels right to say. This game just did it all for me. While ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are up there as some of my personal favorite games, I feel The Last Guardian is the most successful in what it sets out to do: to bond the player with its partner character. I never really particularly cared for Yorda or Mono or even Agro as much as I wish I could despite those characters being the central emotional core of the story. While I appreciate the former for its wordless communication between Yorda and Ico along their journey, I can understand the criticisms against the latter. It’s hard to place the corpse of a woman you’ve never interacted with in front of the player and expect them to care, which is why I feel players connected with Agro the horse a lot more since it’s someone you used to venture around the place even if all you did was ride on it and commanded where to go. Trico is that but taken a step further. Yes, Trico acts like a big dumb animal, but somehow managing to get her around these dark tight corridors with traps or these sky-bound vistas feels like accomplishing little miracles one at a time. The game features Ueda’s most creative puzzle design yet, asking the player to constantly think with Trico in mind, and it’s where the rooms where you are alone without Trico are the most pulse-pounding anxiety-inducing. Without that protection from Trico, you are more in danger from other threats like the stone guards or extreme heights you can’t fall on Trico as a failsafe. About halfway through I looked at Trico less like an obstacle and started to look at Trico as the guardian she really is. And you know what I think?

It’s rad as hell! And it’s fun! Seriously! Every time you get Trico to do her earth-shattering cat pounce from one stone pillar to the next it feels like this major accomplishment that the two of you managed to pull off. Every moment you have to climb around Trico when she sees an eye-shaped glass window hung by a stone tower and then get there by doing some mind-bending platforming as you look down at the stomach-churning distance between you and the ground (no seriously, jesus christ lol) and having to jump all the way down on her back is so immensely intense but pulling it off to progress just works. Every time Trico saves you from an army of mysterious stone guards is the ultimate “sick ‘em fido” of video games, yet the game always reminds you to comfort Trico after with a few pets, and maybe pull out a few spears thrown at her body. It’s this dedication the game has with these moment-to-moment connections between you and Trico as you two help each other out closer and closer to the end that makes the later moments where she starts to break design conventions all the more convincing and powerful. The Last Guardian to me is a game of little accomplishments up to the grand finale.

The Last Guardian is not a perfect game, and it’s hardly one I can see the casual player really sticking with very long. Even I had moments where I wished Trico would comply with me more and wished the game’s framerate didn’t give me a headache, but the last three hours of this game to me are borderline perfect, climaxing to Ueda’s strongest story beats yet, somehow managing to top himself with his best ending yet (a man already known for crafting the best endings ever). All the coincidental frustration I had with The Last Guardian seemed fleeting and diminutive. By the end of it, I was more frustrated at being reminded of its dismissive reputation that caused me to hold it off this long. The Last Guardian should be a testament to Team Ico’s mastery of storytelling through game design, rather than be left in the shadows of its predecessor's legacies, but even if it stays within those shadows of obscurity forever, I’m happy to have stuck with the journey through The Nest, atop Trico’s feathery back.

The Last Guardian is a game of accomplishments, and much like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, stands just as tall as those games do, as the achievement it undoubtedly is.

Hell Divers 2 blew up for reason. The game is action packed, hilarious, immensely fun, 3rd person shooter, PvE, and a game you absolutely owe it to yourself to play with some friends. As someone who finds the shooter genre just very ok I can not recommend this game enough.

It has been since Overwatch (before it sucked) originally came out that me and my friends had a game that we regularly get on every other night and just have a great time together with. For two months me, @Chordata3 and @TSampys25 have regularly got on and just joked, laughed, and had a great time killing robots, bugs, and spreading democracy.

The gameplay loop is great. There are many different missions, across 9 different difficulties, against (at the time of this review) two seperate factions. The first race you are at war with is the alien bug like creatures known as the Termanids. The bugs are aggressive and can overwhelm you with their numbers quickly. The second race is the robot cyborg Automatons. This race while less likely to swarm you and less chaotice are more tactical which makes them in my opinion a scarier threat. With an aresonal of tanks, rocket launchers, grenades, and a whole lot of guns your going to want to seek shelter and be more stealthy in you approach against them. Going from one race to the other almost feels like a separate game. Luckily the game gives you many different weapons you can unlock as some weapons are great against the Termanids but awful against the Automatons and vica versa.

This game can be played alone but I highly recommend playing with friends. Once you get to a high enough level to unlock all the weapons playing on the highest difficulty with some buddies is one of the most fun and rewarding times you can have playing video games.

I will always be thankful @TSampys25 on a whim asked if me and @chordata3 wanted to buy and play Hell Divers 2 together. We had no idea what it even was at the time and its been some of my favorite gaming memories I have with them now.

Now back to spreading liberty, freedom, and democracy.

Before moving on from Postal 2 for a bit to see what the later entries in the franchise have to offer, there was one last stone I had to turn over. This officially licensed Russian expansion from, get this, Akella and one of its own internal studios. Yeah, that’s right. The company responsible for the nigh universally hated Postal III. After playing this though, it's not hard to see why Running with Scissors might have thought they'd be up to the task of making the third main installment. It’s actually quite solid.

That's because this is more along the lines of a fan-made total conversion mod than anything. The new protagonist even uses the exact same character model as the Dude despite what the cover art shows for crying out loud. So, this is enjoyable simply because base P2 is enjoyable. That’s not to say there aren’t any distinguishing characteristics to make it worthwhile. You can tell most of the effort went into the entirely original map. I’ve never been to Russia, but this looks like nearly every picture I’ve seen of a typical Russian town and considering it was made by actual citizens from there I’d wager it’s a pretty accurate, if somewhat satirized given the property’s brand, depiction that’s a blast to explore. There are also a ton of cool new NPC models to check out, a few of which are surprisingly detailed and well done.

I think the biggest thing people will have a problem with here is the writing. So far this is the most immature piece of the Postal series I’ve experienced, and I highly doubt that will differ by the time I’m finished with my marathon through it. The plot which puts you in the role of an amnesiac ex-pornstar on a quest to recover his missing manhood after awaking to find himself the victim of an unwanted sex-change operation feels as if it was penned by a bunch of twelve-year-olds. The "comedy" frequently dips into homophobic and borderline transphobic “jokes” because that was the sort of thing that was funny back in the 2000s, especially in countries like that. Plus, there’s a shocking amount of smut as well. RWS was prone to throwing up images of those half-naked IRL models they used to promote the games with on walls here and there, but Corkscrew Rules regularly displays blatant pornography in the form of fully nude women on its posters and billboards!

So, should you check this out? Only if you can handle what is easily the most offensive content any Postal game has to offer. Not to mention, it can be kind of a pain to get a translated/dubbed version running if you too aren't very computer savvy since the one on Steam's Workshop is broken (although not being able to understand the dialogue would probably be a plus). For better and worse though, this is essentially Russian Postal 2 and it's pretty fascinating because of that.

7/10

Random notes you may find interesting:

- The campaign only goes from Monday to Thursday rather than the whole workweek

- Objectives are doled out in a linear manner, and even when you are given the option to visit more than a single place at a time you're supposed to do it in a specific order.

- In the original, unmodified version you can't pee and there are only three new weapons, but in the tweaked English-dubbed release they reskinned a couple guns to better fit the setting, added a drunk visual effect whenever you drink vodka, and gave you the ability to urinate, but only straight down (because you have a vagina instead of a penis).

- Believe it or not, there is a legitimately humorous bit where every secretary you talk to in a business just sends you to a different one on another floor before you can eventually reach "the boss" you were looking for in the first place. It stands as the sole clever moment in the entire package.