(Review of the BK ROM hack by JacksonG13)

If I were a ROM hacker, I would abolish flat levels, mazes, and pitch black rooms.

The levels are like 9 Mumbo's Mountains in a row, very simple and bite-sized dioramas you can knock out in 10 minutes despite having the full set of notes and Jiggies.

It's OK, really.

A couple levels are too big for their own good, the Mumbo token margins are thin, and the Nether has a lot of low ground that can't be recovered from.

But I'm still a mark for BK's movement and gameplay loop, and this mod is pretty good at filling every corner with goodies when you're not trekking across large, flat, empty expanses.

I would like to personally thank my acute spatial awareness for helping me navigate the cramped labyrinthine tunnels.

I have a lot of respect for Super Mario 64, but when it comes to actually playing it, I'm kinda mixed.  And it was when I was trying The Lost Levels that it finally clicked what I don't really like about Mario's movement: the momentum.

In TLL and SM64, it takes a second or so for Mario to accelerate when you push the stick, and since his jump distance is tied to running speed, jumps from a standstill are often limp.  Coupled with a lack of affordances (double jump, hover, etc.) or steering ability while airborne, and I grit my teeth every time I leap across small platforms over a bottomless pits. 
This is among other annoyances like bonking, tight wall jump windows which causes bonking, and a blurry line between air kicks and dives when pressing B in the air.

Contrast this with Banjo-Kazooie, where Banjo instantly accelerates to top speed when you push the stick to max.  With a very generous hover that also pushes Banjo to top speed, you can make some decent vaults from any amount of buildup.  You can also roll from standing 'cos of this, unlike Mario's dive.

And where any slanted surface could become a ramp via ground pound or dive, in BK it's either a slope Banjo can walk on, a slope Kazooie can walk on, or a slope neither can walk on, and it's this determinism that I find so appealing in BK/DK and the lack of it so off-putting in SM64. 
All-in-all Mario feels more like a physics object than your typical mascot platformer (including himself in Odyssey).

Does this mean I prefer to do precision platforming in BK?  Not really.  Doing tight maneuvers isn't what I come to the genre for, and even after all the time and thought I've put into both games, I'd still consider myself somewhat casual.  And do I think SM64 is an outdated clunker of a game?  Nah, it's just not my flavour.

Even after 20 years, its style of movement is still pretty unique, and there's clearly an appeal to its high skill ceiling judging by the speedrun/ROM hacking scene.  I don't have the speedrunning gene though, so for now I'll just continue to admire it from afar.

I didn't hate the 200 hours I spent on Xenoblade, but I don't think there's anything it does competently either (not even the music).

-Just big open fields with limited checkpoints and no interesting movement options to justify it.
-Combat was OK, Tension wasn't explained well but I like clicking Berserk > Magnum Charge > Sword Drive for beeg damage. Sometimes I would have to strategize against unique monsters but usually you will be facerolling your arts against common fodder.
-Story was meh. Too anime for me to take seriously (and this is before they quadrupled down in XC2), and it ain't no Star Trek morality play. Somehow it's better written as a comedy than as a drama.

A monument to misplaced AAA maximalism.

(Played on G&W Gallery 2)
Classic: More of a tech demo than a fully-realized commercial product. All you do is swing your arms from side to side and the balls will never switch tracks. Not very interesting, even for a first outing.

Modern: This is more my speed. Well, not Easy Yoshi 'cos fewer balls means fewer points and lower BPM without the mechanical depth to keep it interesting. But the higher difficulties are actually pretty challenging, since the objects you're juggling are constantly changing arcs (Hint: in Wario's mode, the furball always lands on the middle track after going offscreen).

The score is an aggregate of Classic's sheer mundanity and my greenness with Modern's switch-ups (the inclusion of Yoshi {bad} and Wario {good} cancel each other out).

3.5/5? What was I thinking? This is more like a 3.5/10. I just can't stand Yoshi, he has never felt good to control in any game, and Woolly World does not buck that trend.

This dumb dinosaur moves through the air like a lethargic balloon, "HRRRGGG"ing and "HZZZNNN"ing all the while as I slowly scour the levels for all the hidden items. And y'know, missing something isn't a big deal 'cos I can always comeback later and there are badges to make the task easier. But do I really want to go back?

Other things that test my patience include insta-kill crush hazards (if your game has both a health system and OHKO crushers, I probably won't look at it too fondly) and managing my ball count (this is also not a huge deal but seeing a target with an empty tank and no nearby gas stations is kinda deflating).

Donkey Kong stays winning.

Bought this DLC for the music. Didn't know who Terry was and didn't want to know who Terry was. All the things I knew were 1) Banger central, 2) He's obnoxious to fight, as usual.

I will say I have a greater appreciation for KOF as a Killer Instinct player than I do as a Smash Bros. player. Like I understand why down tilt is a chain and catches dodges.
But what doesn't make sense is Smash's approach to motion inputs: they artificially incentivize using them by making the motion specials fucking idiotic with intangibilty and cracked knockback. In KI, special strengths tend to be lateral, like being slower on startup but more plus on block, for example. But here it's just do a little more work for a lot more reward.

At some point you gotta ask yourself "Why am I playing this weird, watered-down mish-mash when I could be playing a real fighting game?"
I understand why he's this way as a billboard for SNK, but from a gameplay perspective these philosophies are incongruous IMO.

Why?

Why do competitive Smashers continue? Continue in the face of bad netcode, in the face of obviously overtuned DLC characters, in the face of several cold corporations that will never reciprocate the passion of the fans?

Why continue to mold Smash into a serious sport (an idea that receives only meager consideration from the devs) when the best you can ask from Nintendo is to just sit on their hands and look the other way, and at worst they shut entire events down? Why not play a game that was built from the start to foster a competitive drive?

I was a competitive Smasher from 2015 to 2021, and before that I spent years goofing around in Brawl on my own. I never treated Smash like a brainless activity only dug out at get-togethers. Smash was like, a core part of my identity as a teen. My drive to improve in the games I like funneled me swiftly into the competitive lane. This was my folly.
I only played Pac-Man; no other characters clicked with me, and I couldn't make them click. But Pac-Man was just right for me. Too bad he was a completely feeble low-tier. That era was grueling. Then I was a K. Rool main in Ultimate. Again, an ineffective slow-tier with a ton of bad matchups. Why do I have such trash taste in mains? Shit, there's not even a hitbox viewer nor a frame data display in training mode.

I wanted to quit for so long, but I had nothing else to sate my need for competition. So I started shopping around for a proper fighting game that didn't try to be everything for everyone. Long story short, I found a replacement in Killer Instinct, and things have been so much smoother.

Now, Killer Instinct isn't perfect. Lobbies can be finicky. It's possible to get softlocked in the menus. There's no crossplay in Ranked. But when you're in a game, it works. KI pioneered the netcode that all fighting game fans want. And if something truly catastrophic happens that interrupt's the game playability? Microsoft sends in a team to fix that shit, even though KI's 9 years old.
Arc System Works are still porting up their old Guilty Gears and refurbishing the online functionality. Is this not what you want? The only time a Smash got ported up was 64 on Wii VC. For fuck's sake, they put Banjo-Kazooie and GoldenEye on NSO before Smash 64. Meanwhile, online Ultimate players have to rely on flimsy peer-to-peer comnections that they need to pay for the privilege to use.

You know what else is miserable? Smash speculation and hype. And I regret that I was bitten by the bug. I used to be a Banjo ride-or-dier. No excitement for anyone else. If it wasn't Banjo, I was 😐. If it was anime, I was 😴. This is no way to live, this "My way or no way" kind of deal. And like clockwork, every announcement was puncuated by an inundation of "HOES MAD" and "Let X fans be happy" memes that fed more into my stony-facedness at subsequent trailers.
Forunately, Bridget dropped in Strive, waking me from my stupor and showing me what it's like to be happy for a charcater 'cos other people are happy.

I don't even really enjoy riffing on Smash; I just wish it would go away. I'm bored of these jerry-rigged 1-on-1 rulesets, I'm bored of these incremental changes between installments, and I'm bored of Smash as a stretched-thin monument to misplaced AAA excess. Long gone are the days of Smash as the hobby project of a modestly-sized team; the only way forward is escalation, and there's no room for risk with so many companies having a stake in it. But hey, the formula ain't broke (so fix it anyway).