This game is a 4 stars if you stop playing after rescuing Olimar and doing his section. It's a solid 3.5 if you stop playing after rescuing Louie. I suspect that it's a 2.5 if you really try to go for Platinums on everything, which I did not do. I did everything except for that.

Mechanically, this game stretches the Pikmin formula to the absolute breaking point, which explains why they're so generous with helpful tools. The game would be almost unplayable without Oatchi and the ability to quickly rewind at a certain point.

The biggest criticism I've had about Pikmin after the first one is that there's no pressure to complete the game quickly. Without that pressure, this essentially becomes a "cleaning your room" simulator. Except whenever you go to pick up that dirty pair of underwear, a small dog gently bites you on the wrist for no reason, which starts out kinda cute and ends up being extremely irritating after 40+ hours.

Later levels in this require a degree of precision that the game does not provide. The lock-on system is incredibly helpful for the first half (while unfortunately removing the tension of missed throws) but ends up being a hindrance for many of the tougher challenges. It feels really really bad when all I want to do is target one enemy, but my reticle is stuck on a different one and there's no quick way to switch. It's like gears grinding in my skull.

They must have known it was bad because one of the hardest challenges in the game is killing 99 enemies in 2 minutes, and its mostly difficult because of the targeting. With the old system of a free-range cursor, it would have been almost trivial.

The late game swings wildly from "untenably difficult" to "trivial and boring." This is why I think that the game has really stretched the limits of what Pikmin could possibly be — it's hitting every note, including really weird and irritating ones.

The best mechanical part of the game is the night challenges, which end up being much closer to the game's Real Time Strategy roots than the rest of it. The later challenges require tactically switching between two commanders at just the right time to either defend or proactively attack, and it's magnificent. They never rise to an incredible level of difficulty, but they certainly aren't easy either. I would play a whole game like this.

Atmosphere-wise, this game will not shut the fuck up for one second. There's no more than 3 minutes of down time between some dipshit telling me something I already know for the nineteenth time and it's incredible. It doesn't even feel like hand-holding; it feels like someone shouting into a bullhorn about how important having my hand held is without actually doing it. I never learned a single useful thing from the near constant interjections of my crewmates which happen in the middle of the god-damned screen all the fucking time.

This makes the game about as atmospheric as a Red Robin. Every time I feel like I would like to focus on the gorgeous atmosphere or bizarre enemies, some ding-dong interrupts to say "Getting the lay of the land is important. Use the survey drone to see where you need to go!", a thing I've been told at least fifteen times prior. Just constant interruptions by a crowd of people who I have absolutely no interest in.

Anyway, all this to say that the first Pikmin still remains the best one in my mind. Pikmin 4 certainly brought me more enjoyment than 2 (oh god that game is evil) and 3 lost my interest pretty quickly. It's not a terrible game by any means. But if Pikmin 1 is a garden (that wants to kill you), Pikmin 4 is a checklist (that wants to tell you about how to use pens to check things off of your list).

Baffling on every level, but compelling. Incredibly memorable. It feels like Yuji Naka wanted to make some sort of universal game language, something that could unite all cultures and religions, and decided "Banjo Kazooie designed by an alien" was the way to go.

This game is the opposite of Yooka Laylee. YL weaponized nostalgia to move copies of a mediocre game. Balan Wonderworld weaponizes nostalgia like a tactical nuke. Every design hallmark that has been established by over 30 years of platforming was completely ignored in the design of this game in favor of something opposing, or usually just orthogonal. Every instinct I've developed for these kind of games was wrong in a jarring and surreal way. It feels like a dream that's verging on nightmare but never quite getting there.

I respect it, I even like it, but it's too weird to actually recommend to anyone. But at the right price (about ten bucks) I think anyone curious should absolutely try it. There's nothing else like it.

When I played Map, I felt much like an ordinary person perceiving the rupture in our material world, until finally spending the rest of my life in a city of giants as a purposeless element. 

When I played Apt. Map, all that human materiality was no longer present, and I felt much like an entity with no sense of mortality, navigating an infinite sea of universes of ideas and conceptual black holes. 

When I played Room Map, all these feelings surfaced but in a different way. Despite moving much like a two-legged being, I was trapped in a room, with nothing but the terror of isolation. So, it is in this that you find your escape, imagining and connecting through the mental worlds of other trapped individuals, much like how we as players did in the previous maps. 

When one is a human being our materiality is well-defined. We control this enormous flesh robot through a thing called a brain, and we segment our world through these principles of life: touch, speech, smell, etc., etc. And when we possess a brain, we use it precisely to imagine things, "what if I could fly?" "what if I were invisible?" "what if I were immortal?" "what if I was that person?" We often get caught up in these thoughts, but we always return to the real world and these concepts. 

Why not rethink all these concepts within a video game? When I played Map, I felt more detached from my physical existence and closer to my soul. As I passed through walls and everything around me grew while I gradually shrank, accompanied by whispers and audiences, this disruption of concepts that the physics of our world presents to us and that we treat as the norm, I felt more "real" than any lifelike RPG simulator video game has ever made me feel.

Map isn't the first video game to evoke this kind of feeling, and it certainly won't be the last, but it's always rewarding to play a video game like this.

It is surreal how solid this is as a movement game. Effortlessly easy to control where at one point I just thought something and was able to articulate it with inputs with ease.

Although there’s not any in-game maps, the areas do have their own themes and different symbols around the area to let you know what a loading zone will lead to. The art direction is good for navigation if you’re looking for it.

Game feels authentically nested in time, with a gorgeous soundtrack and a look that feels like a true PSX era game.

Perfect sized game for the content that’s here, over and done with in four or five hours. I would love to see this move set in a larger game, but here it works like a charm.

It’s also important to note there are multiple developers on this project! It wasn’t all made by one person, go support the whole Pseudoregalia team!

Samus never really returned to my childhood gaming life since the day I first met them back on the NES, it was quite a hole there between that and 2002, aka The Year Metroid Beat Everyone's Ass. Metroid II for all intents and purposes was just the cover for the box of the Super Game Boy, that was everything I knew it as. Just the front of a piece of cardboard that I saw at some store or in a JC Penny catalog maybe. It existed, that's all I knew.

I have many bones to pick with the way Nintendo treats it's back catalog of classics and oddities, but if there's any silver lining to the dripfeed of past content it's finding a reason to finally give a serious go at Samus' mission to genocide a race of beings for the supposed sake of the galaxy. The final enemies that you were once scared of back on your original adventure are now the sole focus of your mission, and as it turns out those were just the little baby forms. The nightmarish vampire jellyfish can evolve into monstrosities that could no doubt devastate many a civilization.

This is a fight for survival on both ends, it's us or them. It's not pretty.

The sprites are huge and chunky, resulting in screen space being closed in on you. This isn't just the screen, this is the darkness that Samus must traverse as she delves deeper into SR388. There's no telling what's coming up, and you're allowed just the faintest sighting of a Metroid before it spots you and begins it's attack for you to contemplate a battle or to make a strategic retreat to restock. Missiles require more and more care as the Metroids grow stronger and more terrifying as fear begins settling more and more during your first venture into this journey, and the music joins in on making your life go from disturbing to downright hellish with one of my favorite scare chords in recent memory.

Metroid II is a milestone for gaming as a medium, it truly drives home the utter misery that is to carry out a mass killing of other living beings who wouldn't think a second thought to do the same thing to you and your loved ones. It is...dare I say, an early example of Survival Horror. I don't see this game brought up a lot, but it really leans into much of the same pillars of which that genre builds itself upon. You traverse unexplored maps, looking for either dangerous creatures that make your universal counter go down one by one, or energy and ammunition to keep yourself strong to carry out said objective with more confidence. Your little vacation at SR388 begins all fun and games, then only gets more and more visceral as it becomes apparent just how destructive the Metroids truly are with long pathways that bear little to zero life. Violence to end violence...and at the end of all the destruction, an innocent that you can't go through with the killing of....a shred of hope that peace could be theoretically achieved with these lifeforms still intact.

Peace Sells, I'm buying.

Over the course of the 2010s I used to hear a lot of hollering of this game requiring a remake. It got them, all two of them. Personally, I feel once you take the aesthetic of the Game Boy away from Metroid II it dampers the experience a smidgen and it's identity is lost. That fear isn't really there anymore and many AAA-isms get thrown in to make the experience more "epic", which puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when the original foundation was to be a legitimately Dreadful experience as opposed to Samus doing kickflips off an Omega Metroid and striking a pose for the camera as the cutscene does the actions for you. Maybe it's just my age showing, but considering I only got to play this seriously recently and formerly brushed it off myself, I think there's legitimacy behind it.

Give this one a go, wait for the sun to go down, close your curtains, and play this on your Switch while under your blanket in your room. Simulate that feeling of a child playing this haunting game alone with only the sounds of that experimental atmospheric soundtrack going off as you wander the caverns of SR388. Perhaps even get a worm light on a Game Boy Color to get the ultimate experience. I don't think you'll regret it. It's an experience I wish I grew up with.

Respect the originals, don't replace them. Admire them.

(text copied from something i wrote in a thread elsewhere)

i remember when F-Zero X came out it seemed like no one i knew really knew about or played the game. my friend who owned a gazillion n64 games did not own it. i got it heavily discounted like a year after it came out at Funcoland and even the dude at Funcoland was like “yeah this game didn’t sell well at all” and slagged off the game a little. perhaps the barren dreamscape quality of the game, due to them having to drastically scale back world detail in order to have a smoother experience, contributed to that. but i played a ton of it. it was like Extreme-G (another n64 game my friend owned that a lot of people don’t really remember) in terms of the speed but like wayyy better executed. i read about the 64DD expansion in a magazine and was real upset it was never released here cuz i desperately wanted a track editor. i’m not even sure how much i like the OST (prefer the original SNES OST guess) but that sort of cheesy guitar stuff hits a particular feeling of wistfulness from the gaudiness of a bygone era that things like the opening theme for the tv show Red Dwarf also inspires. you can imagine a warbly degraded version playing off of a VHS tape. it’s very of a particular time and era i guess.

anyway it took me forever but i eventually did beat all cups back in the day. that's when i had a lot more time to devote to the same handful of games and didn't have a massive unplayed library and a life to live. also i'm glad there's gradually been more tolerance and acceptance for the sort of low-poly low-detail dreamscape fog worlds of the N64 era as its own sort of look and feel in the last five years or so. i wouldn't say F-Zero X is this utterly timeless experience but it's still fun and fast (and hard) and worth playing regardless.