After 80 hours and nearly a month of playing, I'm happy to say Baldur's Gate 3 is one of my favorite games of all time.

This is easily one of the most immersive RPGs I've ever played, filled with so many fun and varied dialogue choices, battles, combat, honestly just everything. 5E is a pretty fun system for a game like this and especially near the end I felt like there was a lot of cool strategy to be had, and I loved gathering new equipment and making my party totally badass.

The companions are so well written, I love pretty much every single one and while not all of them are immediately likable from the start and some have opposing viewpoints, they're all so fun and well-acted and I enjoyed talking to all of them (My party at the end of the game was Karlach, Gale, and Shadowheart but I did most of the character quests).

The villians in this game are quite good as well and I really enjoy the way they all tie together and even into some of the companion storylines, with some incredibly memorable boss fights and mechanics even if some of them were a bit easy.

The only thing I don't really like about this game is how initially horny the companions are ,but I feel like once you tell them to screw off the game gets much less extreme. I feel like the way this game handles romance could be a lot tighter, but I personally don't do much with romance in RPGs so I just say "No thank you" and move on.

Act 3 also has some noticeably buggy stuff as well as some cut content, but I still think what we got was excellent and I felt very happy with the ending of the game, the final 3 or 4 hours is absolutely awesome.

I also loved how most of the returning characters from the original games were handled, I felt like other than one, they were pretty respectful to the older games and I loved having Minsc and Jaheira back in the fray.

I'm hoping we get to see some expanded content, with a bit of cut content restored as well as maybe some extra companions (lack of shorty companions makes me very sad!!! I would also appreciate one or two more evil companions.) But overall I'm extremely happy with Baldur's Gate 3 and I will be revisiting it over it's updates for many many more playthroughs!

10 Miniature Giant Space Hamsters/10

Finally 100%ed this game after all these years. I'm admittedly biased because this is one of my childhood Mario games but I do think this one of the best Mario games period.

While it's not at the level of creativity of Mario 3 and Mario World, I think it's right behind it with a lot of unique and interesting levels. Some of my favorites are the mountain level where you use trampolines and pipes to scale your way up the mountain, the level where you ride on the back of a giant wiggler in the sky, and honestly every level in World 8 but my favorite is the one where you're running away from lava outside of an active volcano.

Just a really great game with a lot of well designed bosses, 100%ing it was a blast but some of the coins are nightmares, my only issue is how annoying it is to get the games two new powerups. The mini mushroom and ESPECIALLY the blue shell.

This game has some of the best levels in the 2D Mario series but I won't lie i prefer the powerups of the later entries, even if they aren't as tightly designed as a result.

Still my personal favorite 2D Mario game and easily the best in the NSMB series, hoping Wonder can take the spot as my fav though!

Far from the best NES game but definitely overhated.

I finally took the time to push past the first level and it really gets going by that point when you get strength powerups and the bow upgrade.

Level design is pretty cool, especially the boss labyrinth levels, feels very inspired by the original Zelda which I imagine was being worked on at the same time.

Overall a good NES game and I think it deserves the frustrating first 30 minutes to get past the first stage or two!

One of the best roguelikes you can get on the Steam Deck. Super relaxing, feels good on controller, and has an excellent job system that really snowballs into something special as you play the game.

My completed run (Hardcore mode) took about 8 hours with a Soulkeeper/Floramancer (with a touch of budoka to increase my damage). Crazy summoner archer build that when played right let me have 5-6 summons on screen absolutely shredding shit. The final boss was tough, but I managed it blind just barely.

So many ideas for replayability and challenge runs (Solo, no class changing, etc) as well as Ronin mode makes this a game you could easily sink 100 hours into.. For only about 10 bucks on sale!

My only gripe with the game is I feel Heroic mode (The Roguelite mode) is a bit too focused on preparing for the next run vs enjoying your current. That's why I decided to play the game on Hardcore instead. I could also see the appeal of playing the game on Adventure and enjoying it more as a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon-esque adventure, there's plenty of content here to sink your teeth into even playing withoiut permadeath.

Highly recommend this one if you enjoy grid-based RPGs of any time, especially roguelikes and class-system enjoyers.

It's actually insane how a game like this exists on an 8 bit console without making the system spontaneously combust. That being said, it's ambition and insane amount of bullets results in a lot of gameplay flaws that makes the game kind of a fundamentally rough experience.

The biggest thing is with all shmups of the 80s, dying and losing your powerups is IMMENSELY unforgiving, but it might be some of the worst in this game. In order to fully power up your main weapon, you need to collect nearly FOURTY P-chips throughout the levels, and while these come in groups of 4, grabbing them while taking out this games swarms of hundreds of enemies is no easy task.

Next comes subweapons, which it's awesome how there's 8 of them, but I feel like most of them are pretty bad due to the fact that you will be dealing with an absolute swarm of bullets, so you want one that can protect you. From my experience, 2 and 8 were the only ones worth using, with 2 being my go-to.

2 covers you from the front which essentially makes the major threat being shot from the sides or behind, or an enemy ramming into you, which with how many enemies and bullets are on screen is absolutely possible.

Recovery just feels nearly impossible in this one once you do slip up and die, and the game feels like it was designed around weapons that protect you from the front, because otherwise you're playing a bullethell without the predictability of boss patterns.

I can't say the game is bad due to just how sheerly impressive this is for an 8 bit console game, but it's rough.

I reccomend playing the game on the M-2 Aleste Collection for Switch if you can, I played both the original Master System version and the Collection on Easy which basically just allows you to keep powerups on death, which made the game a pretty fun 1CC.

A pretty fun and snappy half-port of the original Harvest Moon, this game has a couple new features like the harvest sprites, crops in the fall and winter, mining (sort of), turning your cow's milk into artisan goods like cheese and butter. At the complete removal of the more involved town mechanics (being able to talk to npcs and get married, they're all just shops now. That being said, I didn't think this mechanic was that well implemented in the original.)

Unfortunately a lot of the cool content is locked until after your first year, and it's impossible to get Ranch Master in your first year, so you have to play through a pretty boring second year after a good first one to experience all the content.

Needless to say, due to the amount of content, I only played for the one year. Not a bad side-sequel to Harvest Moon, though!

This is probably the best shmup for beginners. I've been grinding at it for a couple days and have managed to pull off 1CC's on Normal and Hard. They feel difficult but you never really feel like it'll take hours to get good. The patterns are basic and easy to understand and there's a lot of fun weapons. It's good enough for me to try and 1CC on Expert so I can get all the games 13 achievements!

Some basic advice:

1) This is something I learned from some videos on Youtube as general shmup advice. Try not to stick to the very bottom except for certain boss fights! The best position for neutral play is around 1/3 up the screen, it gives you lots of space and time to react to patterns while increasing your damage output so you can kill enemies before they enter the screen! Adopting this into my play has helped me a lot with shmups, it's easy to get backed into a corner if you fall into the back of the screen.

2) Learn to love the homing shot! It's absolutely awesome being able to have it target boss weak points and shred them down alongside your main shot! Otherwise the wave shot is quite good

3) If the boss only has specific openings, laser is your best friend! It pierces through everything, and can cause some cool mass destruction, but it's not going to increase your screen control at all.

4) Fire gets rid of purple bullets, useful but I never used it toooooo much.

It really has no frustrating moments and I love the designs of the bosses despite their general blocky simplicity. Soundtrack bangs too, if you're wanting to get into the STG genre and feel like you need an easy gateway. This is really an excellent way to get into it if you're willing to part ways with a bit of money. (I got it on sale for 7.50$, which I thought was an excellent deal!!)

It also has co-op which I'd love to try with a friend sometime!!!

Great game that gets pretty boring in the last four months. By that point you most likely have a fully plowed field with grass, a lot of cows and chickens, and a kid. So there's not much else to do but feed your animals to keep them alive and grind out cash.

Once I hit the requirements for the best ending in early Spring Year 3, I called it quits, good game and what a great entrance for the genre!

If you wanna play like I did, Requirements for the best ending are

1) Get Married
2) Have 2 Kids
3) Have 12 cows and 12 chickens (some sources say 1 of each, but I'm pretty sure it's 12)
4) Plow your entire farm and fill it with grass
5) Hug your dog at least 100 times throughout the playthrough (Press A to pick him up, works once a day.)
6) Have at least 10,000 G on hand (free if you've done all the other stuff)

Have fun!!!!

My ranch score was 814/999, From what I looked up most of my points were lost from not all my cows being maxed affection and mostly ignoring NPCs that weren't my wife.

The classic horizontal shmup! (I think!)

This one is really fun despite it's age, I really like how the terrain effects your movement more, needing to fly around mountains and avoid hitting cielings and stuff. I've only really pretty vertical shmups to this point outside of Phalanx for the meme, so this was quite neat!

My only real issue with this game was how unforgiving dying is. Losing all your powerups can make winning basically impossible in later stages. I also played on PC-Engine where there are ZERO continues!! I did use save states between stages but watching the NES version I wanna try to 1CC that. Less bullets on screen looks a lot less stressful.

Great game and I can see why it's a classic, just a bit too hard for me atm!