Just my luck. I hop into a Call of Duty for the first time in years and it's one of the most disappointing titles I've played.

At launch, no new maps. And the maps they brought back just don't work with the new gunplay and movement.

The guns on the other hand have the opposite problem. They ported all the guns and attachments from the previous game into this one. Trying to put a silencer on a gun and you have to scroll through 50 different attachments that give incremental advantages to random stats. You need a PhD in order to understand what to put on your gun.

They have slowly improved it since launch but a botched game is hard to salvage through updates alone. The game is just not that fun sometimes, and no amount of new guns and maps will fix it.

Perhaps Call of Duty has simply evolved past what I'm looking for. Luckily I still enjoy battlefield for when I want to just relax and frag out.

The saying "it's the journey, not the destination" couldn't be more true. After over 70 hours, I was kind of surprised how abruptly everything wrapped up. 18 chapters about political intrigue and war, only for the final battle with Edlegard to kind of just happen without much fanfare. Then, the big baddies are finally revealed, only to immediately kill them lol. But wait there's more! A world ending threat appears?! That's shouldn't take more than exactly one chapter to deal with.

Aside from the ending (which I thought was quite sloppy) the writing throughout the rest of the game was a bit hit or miss. The political backdrop was actually quite interesting, and seeing characters switch sides depending on where their houses allegiance was some of the best writing I've seen in a Fire Emblem game (or dare I say, in gaming in general). Then there are certain parts and dialogues (particularly in support conversations) that vary from stiff to down right comical.

Gameplay follows the writing in the middle of the road aspect. There is so much to do and so many options given to you in the "monastery" portion of the game that allow you to get stat boosting items, improve support ranks, boost skills, gain useful items and gold... only to be paired with one of the easiest Fire Emblems I've played. Ultimately the added gameplay elements introduced feel more like fluff more than anything. They added 20 or so hours to my playthrough probably, only for it to feel like it wasn't at all necessary. I maxed the supports on most of my team by the 3/4 mark without even trying for most of the playthrough, but I still have hundreds of gifts, lost items, teas, and ingredients sitting in my inventory.

Overall, really great Fire Emblem for the cast of characters and interesting story introduced, but ultimately against the larger landscape of games it doesn't hold up so well. I would suggest fans of the series to start off on a higher difficulty to avoid steamrolling the entire game and not getting much out of all the extra mechanics added.

This is going to sound blasphemous for hardcore Tetris fans, but NES Tetris isn't the best retro Tetris game in my honest opinion.

That title goes to Gameboy Tetris. It's just the perfect game to take on the go and play in short bursts.

If you are a hardcore Tetris fan I can see how the improved visuals and control given by the NES release makes it far superior, but as someone who just likes to play for 10 or 15 minutes at a time I'd rather the ease of access the Gameboy provides.

Still the best "match" puzzler on the system though so, so it still has a spot in any collection.

About 20 hours into the game as of writing this review, and I can kinda tell where this one will fall for me in the pantheon of rougelike deckbuilders.

It's great, but the runs can feel WAY to dictated by rng (especially in the early stages of a run) because of the games design around poker mechanics. There are tools in the game to let you stack the odds in your favor, but I have had countless runs so far where I just died in the first few rounds due to bad rng when I didn't even get the chance to access any of those tools.

What elevates this game above others I have disliked for the same reasons is the variety and ease of getting into each run. There are so many different variations of jokers (cards that provide unique abilities), enhancements and powerups that each run can feel unique even when you are playing the same few poker hands. And when you do lose, it's so quick and easy to jump back in. I've found myself in the "just one more run" mindset basically every time I sit down when I have time to spare.

And once you are past the early stages of a run, choices start to matter more and you can mitigate rng with careful planning. Every round comes with a dozen or so different choices, all of which can impact your run in various ways. The strategy is quite deep in these moments, something I love in a deckbuilder.

The best NES game? Probably. There is only one other game I can think of that comes close, and I'll reserve judgement on that when I eventually get to my replay (at which point, I'll be sure to update this review with my definitive answer to this question).

There is basically a second NES hidden away inside the cart of this game, one of the benefits of being a late NES release. That extra power is used to expand the formula of the first Super Mario Bros in all the right ways. A world map, a selection of different powerups to discover, 8 unique worlds with different themes, and a fresh coat of paint which still holds up to this day. SMB3 is one of the few NES games that is still just as good to play today as it was to play when it released over 30 years ago. Easily in the top 10 platformers ever made.

Do I need to say more? Play this game if you haven't. It's "required playing" in the video game cannon.