I saw a few folk disappointed in how gamey this is, rather than something more about just being a cat. I understand that, but if it was just a cat sim then fuckin' nothing would happen. A robot asks for help and you just lick yer baws? I'm afraid I want more for my £25.

Luckily what I got was a lovely adventure game about being a small dude in a city of robots. A city that is both grimy and beautiful in equal measure. The devs have somehow made a shithole that you'd like to visit. The robot inhabitants themselves are often charming, sometimes tragic. They're clinging to a dreg of humanity in order to keep that light from going out completely.

Enter, the wee man. A ginger cat. He's lost down here, and with the help of drone housing an AI, and a backpack he really disnae want to wear, he's gonna save this piece of shit city.

They've done a cool thing with the movement system where you're not free jumping all over the place, but instead get prompts on surfaces you can jump to. Think late Assassin's Creed traversal. Just holding a button and aiming the stick gives you a satisfying series of hops that feel like considered movements the way a cat does in real life. No shitty moments of falling into a pit because you misjusdged distance, or boucing off invisible walls until a surface lets you onto it.

In regards to story, despite it being about cats and robots, there's not much new here. Much of its beats are predictable, but for me that didn't detract from it. A recognizable tale told well with a new kinda setting and protag worked for me. Something doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be good. Sometimes there's comfort to be found in the familiar.

His name is Terry, and we all love him.

As the Ultimate upgrade to Rise there's no real surprises here, but there's something to be said for such consistent franchise quality - Monster Hunter is the most rock-solid brand name in gaming at this point, and an expansion pack to one of the best entries in the series is more than welcome; I'd be more than happy if Capcom just kept using Rise as a bedrock for an MMO-lite every year or two until the Switch finally combusts under the heat their developers have been bringing to the platform. With its sheer depth of customisable content and player expression, this is basically FFXIV for people who don't pee into bottles under their computer desk.

Criticisms can be made of Sunbreak, but they're all short-term annoyances in an expansion that could comfortably push a hundred hours. Like the original, there's an overabundance of pop-ups explaining Lucent Cromp Wenbembo Gems and DX Bugwire Casking+ that you'll never remember (until you finally need them weeks later), but it's a just an awkward signifier of how much gameplay-focused content has been crammed in to an ever-evolving ecosystem that always feels perfect until the next great idea comes along and takes thing to snow-capped heights you never imagined yourself climbing. As a Scot it also kinda pains me to trade out Fake Japan for Fake England as a hunting hub, but Capcom have done a great job of steamlining the beautiful "living menu" system Monhun thrives on even further, making the TTK even shorter than it was already; the new environment and its characters are full of more life than ever, and the follower quests are a fantastic "about damn time" inclusion to the experience that helps form an NPC-bond that goes deeper than the usual "you have a cute idle animation" acknolwedgements.

As a Freedom Unite fan, the updated Jungle brought a pixellated 480x272 tear to my eye (bring back plessy too pls...), but the Citadel is the true star of this show. A masterclass in map design that maximises every advantage of the Rise toolset, it's gotta be one of my favourite Monhun maps of all time - an Akumajo Dracula-type beat that feels like the Magala's true resting place. While I love all the imports from MH4U, there's fewer new monsters than I'd have liked - but the Monster Mash trio are so incredibly well-crafted that it's hard to be annoyed that the roster has been padded out with Really Annoyed Nargacuga and Pissed-Off Pukei-Pukei - when the combat's this good, who doesn't love a bit of repetition anyways?

Like with the original game, it's hard to give a definitive opinion on something that outright acknowledges that it isn't finished - but I have loved every moment on the Rise train so far. I just like having fun with my friends, okay? 😊

Far and away the worst game Capcom have ever made, a uniquely fascinating and objectively awful experience from a company whose lesser games are typically let down by near-imperceptible balance flaws for hardcore gameplay enthusiasts; a “bad” Capcom game is normally undone by subpar netcode or an overpowered character, but here we must suffer through actors falling through floors, textures upside-down on walls and enemies who forget to wake up and fight you, perhaps protesting at the unsanitary working conditions they’ve been asked to perform in. Rotten to the core in ways big-developer games are never allowed to be any more, Spanish bootleg-ass Devil May Cry game, fuckin El Diablo Puede llorar: Dos on a cigarette-burned DVD you got at the market this morning, buried deep in a spindle with Animal Soccer World. Hooooly shit dude, it’s funny like a bad movie for the first hour or two, rinsing bosses in minutes without taking damage by just standing still and shooting your guns and cackling maniacally about how little brain you used, but the novelty of a mute Dante’s hexagonal eyes clipping through their pentagonal sockets soon gives way to a depressive despair when you’re begged by a nervous stutter to pull off a series of chaotic wall-runs in order to beat a battle that I’m pretty sure was compiled and saved moments before Hideaki Itsuno had to load copies of this shitpile onto the back of a busted dumptruck headed straight to the cemetery. I persevered past the attack chopper’s infamy in hope of more epic-fail frivolity but was only rewarded with more mechanical misery; being able to activate Devil Trigger amidst what appears to be a knockdown state and have it expire before you can even jank yourself to your feet is a fun five minute feat, but my remaining shreds of self-respect prevented me from subjecting myself to ten more hours of bosses you can beat by simply walking behind them. Huge admiration for Capcom putting this in the HD Collection, presumably as a cautionary tale for generations to come about what happens when you release a CAG without combos, care or competence. Drakengard, eat your dragonheart out.

Spyro 2 is my favourite game. Gateway to Glimmer was my favourite game. Ripto's Rage Reignited is also my favourite game.

I could try to pretend all I want that another, more prestigious game takes the top spot but I'd always know it in my heart to be a filthy lie. This game has been in my life longer than any other. I've replayed it more times than I can count. It simply makes me happy. I'm too far past the stage where I can even think about it critically anymore. I'll simply never tolerate a bad word against it.

(...the boss fights are shite.)

Comfy, cozy.

A very enjoyable game to chip away at before bed each night. The art style drew me in straight away but the highlight of the game for me was definitely the characters and their slowly developing relationships.

It's not an airtight story by any means. There's a lot of contrivances (boy howdy what are the odds that all of these strangers with extremely important connections to eachother would stay in this hotel on the same night?) but none of that really harms the overall tone and feel of the story imo. It's a character driven tale and everyone is just vibing.

Gameplay wise it's nothing amazing. The pacing is really thrown off by the amount of walking you have to do, the amount of doors you have to manually open and the sometimes inscrutable puzzles you have to solve. If you can tolerate these old-gamey mechanics though, I think you'll find a lot to like.

Happy New Year!

Not putting stars because folk on this site are fuckin' weirdos about specific games, but I'm baffled as to how this became a beloved classic.

Playing it feels like treading treacle. I shouldn't have tortured myself by continuing on hours and hours after I lost all interest. I would usually drop something like that these days, but I had to know. I had to see what the fuss was about. Everybody who ever told me this was great should give me ten quid. How dare you?!

The game is spitting bible shit at me, and it just hits nothing. Lots of terms you know, but they feel empty. I want to blame the dodgy translation, but god (wahey) knows how accurate any of it is, because a quick google brings up either how it was painstakingly done to be as faithful (another one) as possible, or chucked together by one dude in a month. Whatever the case is, it regularly has conversations that just don't make any sense, and not because of weird references you might not know, but pure incorrect grammar, syntax, or replies that have no relation to what was just said. It's maddening.

The combat is such good fun with brilliant spritework, then they throw in mechs and you think "Oh baby here we go", but they fuck it. Combat inside your gear is tedious as shit. Your deathblows learned in normal fights allow you to do more moves when in the mech, but just using any of these moves requires you to do a series of weak shit attacks to build the power to perform a deathblow. It sounds kinda cool at first, but quickly becomes a chore on top of managing fuel as well as your health. Every fight inside your gears was an ordeal. They ruined giant robots.

I realise I have interchangeably used gears/mechs above. The game likes to do this too with all its various factions and races, or even characters with 2 or 3 names. This gets done seemingly at random and I had to go googling every time to check which person/faction/race they were referring to. At this point I still do not know exactly what Kislev, Zeboim, and Aveh are. It disnae matter. I'm done.

Disc 2 lmao

At one point during a lengthy visual novel part, I went "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME KARATE CHOP A GUY" out loud.

Full disclosure of video-game-journalistic integrity: I have been in love with Mario Kart 8 for close to ten years. I think it is one of the best video games ever made, sheer perfection that would be impossible to surpass with a Mario Kart 9 - hence why I have been banging the drums of DLC for this masterpiece for a long time. My review of these eight courses is extremely prejudiced by the fact I am just happy to be booting up Mario Kart 8 and seeing something that I haven’t already seen 10,000 times. But is it possible to add to something perfect without making it not perfect?? Without further ado, let’s review each of these courses in unnecessarily exhaustive detail:

Paris Promenade: If you browsed the video game internet in the mid-2000s, you’re likely familiar with this advert. I think it is one of the greatest video game adverts of all time, and most people who posted on video game message boards in the mid-2000s thought so too. If you posted on the Nintendo Official Magazine UK Official Forums, as I did, at least four dudes in every thread would have an avatar or at least a signature that referenced this advert in some way. It was the shit. Just funny as hell, and it also perfectly captured the excitement of finally being able to play Nintendo games online. Don Draper wishes he could've made it. I’m not one of those Ricky Gervais Jordan Petersen Richard Dawkins “cant say that these day” whatever-the-fucks but it does feel like an advert you could not do today and I am sad about that because I am currently envisaging a 2020s version of the advert for Mario Kart 8 that includes more good-naturedly outrageous cultural stereotypes and it’s super funny, dude, just trust me, honestly, please, it’s not offensive at all. Bro. Please. Anyway, as I was about to say - this course really reminds me of that advert and I get a real kick out of that, a sort of personal-liminal cyberspace, a private joke between me and my own Nintendo history, riding my little Donkey Kong motorbike around the Champs-Élysées (which is in itself pretty fucking funny imagery) and laughing to myself, having a good time.

As far as technical analysis goes - there are, in my opinion, two types of Mario Kart course: player-competitive courses and course-competitive courses. Course-competitive courses are primarily battles between the players and the environment - taking tight bends round steep cliffs, avoiding stage hazards, anticipating the movements of Goombas and Monty Moles. Other players are still an ongoing concern, of course, but they’ll also likely be too preoccupied by giant lava Bowsers and rain-slicked roads to give you their full attention. These kinds of courses usually serve as the finale of a cup, such is their intense make-or-break nature; a Survival Mode of sorts that rewards players who commit the fewest unforced errors (A Smash Bros-style stock battle for Mario Kart where you try and Death Race 99 other racers round a tough track would be so fucking sick dude, like honestly, just think about it for a minute) Player-competitive courses are, naturally, an inversion of this paradigm. With simple wide raceways and few hazards, if any, players are focused a lot more on each other and how they’re doing - expect green shell snipery, a focus on clean driving lines and a lot more counting of passing seconds. The bread-and-butter of Mario Kart, the sort of courses your gaming-illiterate little brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers probably prefer; the type of course your average anime-avatared Twitter luddite will probably call “mid and basic” because their TikTok-addled synapses require constant multicoloured stimuli in order to feel anything resembling satisfaction.

As you might have already worked out, Paris Promenade is a player-competitive course. Don’t get it twisted, though - “player-competitive” isn’t just some dogmatic mind palace I’ve created to justify the paucity of a simplistic Mario Kart course. There are bad player-competitive courses out there - take the mindless Grand Old Duke “marched them up, marched them down” tedium of 8’s GBA Mario Circuit, for instance - but Paris Promenade isn’t like that at all. It has branching turns, cute little roundabouts and a brand-new hyper-literal interpretation of “player-competitive” - the ability to drive head-first into the oncoming traffic that was bringing up your rear only a few seconds ago: a tense series of who-dares-wins moments where the leaders can fuck up the losers and the losers can get a far more visceral shot at the top than the game usually affords.

One of Mario Kart 8’s few flaws is that it’s quite easy for the podium-position racers to distinctly disparate themselves from the pack - strong defensive play leaves 4th-thru-12th to fight amongst themselves for scraps of coin and redshell, but folding the racing line back in on itself and forcing the tops/bottoms to go brave-or-grave is an ingenious little noteless balance patch that’s contained to a single lap of a single track, a very Nintendo solution to a very Nintendo problem that I’d like to see spill out entirely across the next instalment of the franchise. Paris Promenade is a track of deceiving simplicity that we’d all do well not to dismiss as “an asset flip” (curse the YouTuber who taught 11 year olds this phrase), it could well be the blueprint for more Karts to come.

Toad Circuit: Mario Kart 7, the hardworking Josephian father who helped give birth to the Christ-child Mario Kart 8, will always have a special place in my heart. In 2011, it helped form the bedrock of at least twelve friendships I still maintain to this day, its surprisingly robust online multiplayer providing a great opportunity for one of life’s most underrated means of forming a human connection - being absolutely fucking awful to other people via the medium of video games, strangers hurling “FUCK YOU BLUE SHELL PRICK” messages at each other via group DM until the ironic venom hardens in the veins of their hearts and forms the bonds of friendship.

Toad Circuit was one of my favourite courses in Mario Kart 7 because it played a sort of upbeat funky version of the game’s main theme and my brain naturally built neural links between that music and being online with my online friends playing Mario Kart online and having fun online. Sometimes it’s enough just to drive three laps to some music you enjoy and think about your friends. Who cares that the grass texture isn’t well-defined enough for you? You don’t have any friends because you’re comparing screenshots of Mario Kart grass on Twitter.

Choco Mountain: Super Mario Kart defined almost every element of the Mario Kart iconography/featurology that we know and love today, but I think it’s fair to say that Mario Kart 64 was the progenitor of the “fucked up little weird place that doesn’t really have anything to do with Super Mario” trend that has followed Mario and his friends all the way to Twisted Mansion and Sweet Sweet Canyon. The original Choco Mountain leveraged the Nintendo 64’s smudged-signature fog effects to create a terrifying Silent Chocolate Hill, and it’s unfortunate that Nintendo have chosen to prioritise things like “visuals” and “performance” over “looking like shit in an endearingly eery way”, perhaps traumatised by anime-avatared Twitter luddites who called the Switch port of Ocarina of Time “mid and basic” because their favourite YouTuber told them that the fog effects were wrong, totally trust me bro, I know you hadn’t been born yet and your dad was still in middle school but it’s all wrong man, go reply to @NintendoAmerica RIGHT NOW when you’re done talking about Mother 3 and Geno in Smash, man. Anyway, removing the creepy lag fog from the peaks of Choco Mountain is a besmirchment of Mario Kart’s legacy as a horror game; they added a cave, but forgot to make it scary. It’s still fun, though!

Coconut Mall: The Wii era of Mario Kart more or less passed me by because Mario Kart Wii came out at a time when I thought getting called “a feckless little irish cunt” (I’m not Irish) in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s Xbox Live lobbies was a preferable multiplayer experience to this. I do remember the majesty of Coconut Mall course quite well, though, because I was old enough to do Serious Babysitting when Mario Kart Wii was huge, and I spent a lot of time observing my little cousins and their horrible little friends play it all the time, maintaining a safe distance that afforded me plausible deniability if ever seen in the vicinity of Baby Daisy instead of a virtual M4A1. Undoubtedly a missing link in Mario Kart 8’s chain that has now finally been restored, albeit as a weaker polygon-carbonfibre replica of the Wii’s solid steel original. (Though shouldn’t we have cause to return to the old games now and again?) This broken circle now only awaits Waluigi Pinball.

Tokyo Blur: An unfortunate salvo of ammunition for the people who rightly or wrongly accuse Nintendo of hiring Miyamoto’s work-shy grand-nephew to drag and drop mktour3.track into the Mario Kart 8 codebase and call it a £30 product. There isn’t all that much to remark on here, I think - the course transforming on each lap isn’t all that impressive when it’s done off-screen, and we already know the game’s track designers can do cool revolving-set shit that evokes Prey’s opening level. I’m sick of driving under thwomps! What do thwomps have to do with Tokyo, anyway?! I know Nintendo love to represent their home nation in their work, but wouldn’t it be cool if, idk, they reproduced Barcelona or Budapest or Bangkok or something other than the usual New York/Tokyo/London/Paris real-life fare?? I just wanna do a bike flip over the Dublin Dracula Museum or the Potsdam Hanging Rhino…

Shroom Ridge: Course-competitive courses that seek to emulate the feeling of player-competitive courses are nothing new (Toad’s Turnpike, Mushroom Bridge, Moonview Highway), but I feel like this one is special because it also uniquely emphasises some course-competitive elements, like sheer cliffs, and puts you and some cars next to them like you’re a henchman driving in the second-act chase scene of a James Bond movie where he’s trying to overthrow the Mushroom Kingdom’s leadership on behalf of MI:6. The traffic is enjoyably dense, forcing players to sometimes choose between weaving and bending knife-edges and cartoon fenders (try it in 200cc time trial!) and you can even try for a mushroom-jump off the back of a moving car and over a crevice, which is surprisingly daredevil for a game that is usually one step away from putting giant flashing neon signs labelled SHORTCUT over their shortcuts. I’m now hoping for a course with cars and trucks that can actively fight back instead of passively crushing you by merely existing.

Sky Garden: lol u just gotta love it. Has three of my favourite Mario Kart 8 tropes in one neat package: the random copy-pasted Koopa Troopas floating in unison at the starting line like busted Disneyland animatronics begging for mercy; Nintendo blatantly going “ehhhh the o.g. track sucked” and just ‘remaking’ it by doing a whole new tangential optioning of another course (in this case, Cloudtop Cruise); and of course, everyone’s favourite -  busted-ass giant-ass leaves and fruits that serve as quintessential Mariokartian devil’s shortcuts that give you like a 33% of getting thoroughly fucked in the abyss if even one tire isn’t aligned right, only a step removed from just watching Bowser Jr. spin a Russian Roulette revolver and press it to his scaly little temple before pulling the trigger. Apparently this one was in Mario Kart Tour too, but who played that game after launch week? Nintendo, there’s no need to tell on yourself by acknowledging that game in any way - we’ll forgive you, like we always do.

Ninja Hideaway: This fucking Wanokuni-ass shit right here!!! I have no idea why Nintendo thought it was a good idea to package this directly in a cup with the relatively-unremarkable Tokyo Blur - while Hideaway perhaps leans a little too heavily into every single “omg cool japan” design trope ever committed to cartridge, it is undoubtedly a far better advert for Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin-Nintendo culture than anything else I can remember them making - and Nintendo fuckin love doing Edo-Nihon-Nin-Nin stuff. How good was Bowser’s Castle in Super Mario Odyssey, folks? Yeah!! How much time do I have left to talk about the music that brings this all to life? Funny to think that most people who originally played this course were looking at it on their iPhones with their sound off while riding the subway. Is it any wonder Nintendo wanted to free these little masterworks from their skinner-boxes and let normal people play them?

Let’s take a deep breath now and turn the other blind eye for a moment, pretending once again that Mario Kart Tour didn’t happen, and this course is brand-spanking new (which it will be to 99% of players). Operating on the exciting assumption that this is the logical next gameplay step for Mario Kart 9 (it won’t be called that, I hope!!) will take in 2025 or 2026 or whatever unfathomably far-off date that Nintendo decide to make a new Mario Kart game, is this an example of the “u can go anywhere!” design principles that Nintendo have been toying with in Breath of the Odyssey: Arceus’s Fury, now applied to a driving game?? Could the next Mario Kart be an off-road jam, finding new, personal routes through sprawling open Horizons or maze-like spaces? C’mon man, that would be kind of cool, man!! Mario Kart 8 is the apex of the traditional kart game - so how do you improve on that? Maybe, just maybe(!!!), the next Mario Kart isn’t going to be on a traditional track…?! Are we going somewhere where we don't need roads?

Some might argue that Ninja Hideaway’s exceptionally tight turns and freeform movements are more a consequence of this trying a straight transplant of Tour’s invisi-barriered track design tenets to the high-octane world of Mario Kart 8,  but I see it more as a prototype, accidental or otherwise, that addresses another of Mario Kart’s few flaws: that even in 150cc, the game often doesn’t require you to think all that hard about how you’re driving. See bend, take bend. See ramp, do trick. You might, at most, have to apply a slight brakepadding on a wet Neo Bowser City hairpin, but even then, that’s usually just a wrist-slapping punishment for favouring the kinda-broken top-speed big-boy builds. 

200cc is an admirable quick-win solution to this problem, but you can’t play 200cc with your grandma. And if your grandma can’t play Mario Kart, you’re not playing a Mario Kart game, right? It’s almost impossible to broach the skill canyon that exists between your grandma and proverbial snakers who pick the optimal weight class, but what if this is what the Booster Pass is intended to explore? Are there ways to make Mario Kart equal for all again after creating an essentially perfect game? With the last pack not coming until the end of 2023, this is a two-year experiment in the future of a game that has sold 35 million copies. I’m excited to see where it goes.

One night while I'm in the shower, the door gets knocked and I hear my dad shout "WHAT WAS THAT SHOOTING GAME I SAW ON THE TELLY?". After some confusing and loud back and forth, I realise it's this and tell him. "THANK YOU" is all I hear. The next day the game arrives. He'd immediately went on Amazon and got it for himself.

"Can you set up the virtual reality?"

I oblige, and he commandeers my chair, TV, and console for three solid hours. I spent a wee part of this time lying on the bed browsing my phone, listening to the game and looking up whenever he was getting particularly heated. He was having an absolute blast, and eventually I was enjoying just watching him experience this thing. You might say he was truly "In a world".

He so quickly went from weird arm flailing to precision reloads and headshots with shite one-liners. I watched my almost 60 year old dad become a real SAS dude. Childlike wonder from him experiencing full immersion, accompanied by patter like "Through his fuckin' eye" and "Go to sleep forever". At one point he was hanging from a window ledge 100 feet up on a building site, he drops one hand to his pistol, shoots a dude through the opening, leans in and grabs the fella's vape, takes a puff, chucks it and keeps climbing.

I barely remember what the game was about, but the live show I got to enjoy over three nights was incredible.

Soul-restoring.

Can’t stress enough how much the human element adds to this; normally I’m content with the bare minimum needed to qualify in racing games (hard for me to get invested in what seems to be such a mechanical exercise), but put the pride of the team on the line, have some characters that are pulling for me? Then I’ll have to start finding the lines and gunning for first place. Particularly liked the bittersweet victories of the Dig Racing Team- finally winning the Grand Prix while parting ways with your manager and newfound friend seemed the most appropriate way to enter the new millennium.