great pacing, great characters, great voice acting, great writing, everything is here! even the gameplay isn't terrible like i thought it'd be, at absolute worst its just forgettable

edit: looking at top reviews of this game is really confusing to me. obviously this is a critique of the military and military shooters as a whole, but it's not you who's making the decisions. you're not a silent military man, the game isn't in a first person perspective, the player is just guiding walker through what he would've done anyway.

Out of all of the PSX's first party classics, Jumping Flash! is one of the most undersung, despite being the definition of a trailblazer. Released a year before Super Mario 64 would revolutionize 3D cameras in games and help solidify the 3D platforming subgenre, Jumping Flash! is a 3D platformer/shooter played from a first person perspective. Many developers have tried over the years to integrate platforming into the FPS genre and nearly as many have failed to really make it work. This makes it all the more impressive that a game from 1995 not only managed to make first person platforming fun, but even incorporates the act of hopping into its combat in a fairly novel way.

Robbit, your mecha rabbit player character, can jump up to three times in the air. Whenever you perform a double or triple jump, the camera aims downward to let you see where you'll be landing. This has the double use of letting you fire you blasters down at anything below you. Because jumping on enemies does even more damage than simply firing at them with your default guns, you're encouraged to leap high into the sky and rain lasers onto your foes from above as you come crashing down on top of them. After making contact with the enemy, you'll bounce right back up into the air, letting you repeat the process. This all leads to the combat having a very tactile feel and keeps you moving. You'll start to treat the floor like lava as you bounce from one enemy to the next in succession. It's a very unique kind of shooting/platforming experience even to this day.

Sadly, the game's origins as an early PSX game do limit how fully realized this gameplay loop can be. You can only strafe in the air, and even then the controls for it are unintuitive. Enemies also come in relatively small numbers and have very basic attack patterns so you won't always be able to find a baddie to land on, breaking the flow. Some levels also take place in cramped corridors that do the aerial combat any favors. It's nothing too dire but these shortcomings stop the game from reaching its full potential and keep the game fairly tame and hard to perceive as anything other than a short, fun distraction instead of the game changer it almost was.

Some indie games in the past few years have experimented more and more with first person platforming, so perhaps a game will finally come along and show us the endgame that Jumping Flash! could have offered us if it were given more than a couple sequels.

https://youtu.be/LOwMWfud04U

I'm of the mind that game controllers are rife with untapped potential to an almost comical degree; even our two-analogue + two-shoulder-triggers (etc.) standard exemplified across every major system for the past couple of decades has plenty of wriggle room to prove themselves as fructuous user interfaces, as platforms for expression and experimentation. How often are games elevated by you using an input and receiving a response you didn't quite expect, when a title is brave enough to break out of muscle-memory-worn tradition? Why are we always using the right analogue stick for the camera when God Hand demonstrated that it could be used as an omnidirectional dodge? Bumpers piss me off too, it always feels like the part games fall back on when they run out of face buttons.

Aperture Desk Job is a hardware showcase for the Steam Deck, placing the player behind a desk filled with buttons and knobs that represent an abstracted control pad, more specifically the Steam Deck button layout. but I'm honestly not sure what it's so proud of, what it's even flaunting. When all comes down to it, the game seems satisfied to give you another simulation where the left stick "moves" the player, you ready a reticle with the left trigger, and shoot with the right. It even demonstrates with a quippy section that deviations from this, let's face it, trite format are nothing more than "overengineered" amalgams begging for failure. I honestly am a little disappointed in Valve for this. While I definitely think the Steam Deck is one of the best pieces of handheld gaming hardware on the market, it doesn't do anything for interactivity the Switch doesn't do - the WiiU gamepad didn't do. Hell, the fucking Nvidia Shield.

Which, I wanna stress, is fine. I love the Steam Deck lol, it's a relatively uncomplicated means to play my Steam library "on the go" (bed), I love the freedom and the ergonomics of the pad itself are wildly comfortable. It serves its purpose just fine - it's just why I'm a little confused by... this? It does nothing, and despite reprising a fan-favourite role, it also says nothing. I wasn't even necessarily expecting Valve's take on Astro's Playroom, I simply had hoped that their generally forward-thinking design ethos would unravel a hidden truth or two, especially since they had the confidence to release this on regular PCs as well.
Oh well, it's nice to hear little motifs from the Portal 2 soundtrack again, gave me the tingles.

Standing here, I realize you were
Just like me trying to make history.
But who's to judge the right from wrong.
When our guard is down I think we'll both agree.
That violence breeds violence.
But in the end it has to be this way.

i will do untold amounts of crime to get this game a translation patch, it looks SO GROSS and CREEPY i want to love it so bad

Update: SOON... shoutouts to Cargodin and EsperKnight for making me not have to learn japanese

Update: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/6451/ gooped off my gourd with happiness. it real :)

Probably my favorite of the "dle" games at the moment, even surpassing the original. The premise here is to guess the daily word not through spelling, but by guessing words close to its meaning. Each word you give gets a rating from 0 to 100, and you have to keep guessing until you land on the word. The game gives infinite guesses, and you'll need a lot of them. Some days you happen upon the word in around 30 guesses, other days you surpass 200 guesses. It's all about trying to find the correct chain of thought, making several leaps to find connections, and having a thesaurus in a separate tab. It's a fun thing to do throughout the day, and I feel way more accomplished getting the right answer here than in Wordle. Definitely give it a shot if your itching for something pretty different from the other "dle" games.

Really short and unique (especially at the time) game that doesnt overstay its welcome. Gameplay is very much like a less refined, snappy Hades, which still makes it really enjoyable, with the iconic constant narration by Logan Cunningham still being one of the best executions of the concept imo. Soundtrack is still off the freaking rails
Maybe the game that influenced me as a person the most, for multiple reasons... holds an absolutely special place in my heart and Ive been a Supergiant Games fan ever since

the combination of the aggressive sugary sweet vibes in this game and the inexplicable full english dub and subtitle options, which include some guy doing a cartman impression, honest to god made me feel like i was playing some fake game invented for the creepypasta im the victim in or something. not to be "childhood fucked up" reddit over a cute children's game w some p cool style on its own terms but i dont know how else to emphasize how bizarre it is that this came to be, and there is hardly any info on how it happened. just popped out of the aether to be actually scarily ahead of its time???

(This is mainly going to be about the story, so if you want quick gameplay thoughts: It’s kind of okay. Parkour system is interesting, but most of the levels don’t do anything interesting with it. There’s way too many gimmick levels. Play the 3DS version instead if you want to touch this, don’t listen to people saying it’s worse.)

A fascinating thing to be able to witness as a member of the Sonic community was seeing fans turn on Sonic Colors, a game which had received critical acclaim beforehand. I have a strong attachment to the game, which is something that can be discussed another time, but I can sort of understand where they were coming from writing-wise compared to something like the Adventure games. That being said, I can still say that I’d defend Sonic Colors’s story. Being an incredibly light narrative is a nice change of pace from other Sonic games of the same era, and the humor, even with having some real stinkers, still works with the kind of story Sonic is trying to tell. Of course, this isn’t a review of Sonic Colors so I won’t go much deeper, but I think it’s important to discuss this game since a lot of Sonic fans see Ken Pontac and Warren Graff, the writers of this game, as essentially the antichrist, which I think is sort of undeserved for Colors and Generations. …now Lost World on the other hand…

Sonic Lost World tries to go for a more serious and dramatic story while still maintaining the elements of Colors’s story that people liked, and I say “tries” with the biggest asterisk imaginable. Every attempt to be serious falls completely flat on its face thanks to several of those attempts being placed alongside “Baldy McNosehair” type humor. The most egregious example is in Frozen Factory, where Eggman gets an actually menacing scene where he he threatens Zavok and talks of strangling Zeti, but the weight of it is severely diminished by immediately following a joke from Sonic that’s corny even by Pontac and Graff standards. As much as I rag on Forces(and rightfully so, it’s also really bad), it does a much better job at being tonally consistent than this.

The most compelling idea present is forming a conflict between Sonic and Tails due to working with Eggman. Unfortunately, this fails because Pontac and Graff’s idea of internal conflict is making characters uncharacteristically whiney and unpleasant. Every scene that tries to build up the rift between them feels incredibly forced. Tails gets unnecessarily hostile towards Sonic out of nowhere during an early Frozen Factory scene, when Sonic is already dealing with some guilt for allowing the Deadly Six to cut loose. And in a later scene, where Tails’s attempt to give Cubot a body via a badnik goes wrong and Eggman saves him, SONIC gets unnecessarily hostile towards Tails over the mishap. It’s incredibly unpleasant to watch, especially when it feels like it’s something Sonic wouldn’t do. And then that plot thread gets cut off by Tails getting captured in the most baffling way imaginable, and everything’s fine the next time they meet up. Oh, and speaking of the previous scene I mentioned…

I absolutely can’t stand Sonic in this game. It’s like they backpedaled from complaints of Sonic not taking the conflict in Colors too seriously in the worst way possible. Aside from scenes of Colors humor, he’s incredibly whiny for the whole latter half of the game. I already mentioned the scene with Cubot, but it also extends to scenes in Sky Road where he goes on about how horrible what they’re doing to Tails is. It’s not only annoying, but it feels uncharacteristic of Sonic to act this way. This is made even worse thanks to Roger Craig Smith’s direction. Roger’s actually my favorite Sonic VA, but this is easily his worst performance as the character. It just feels like he’s squealing whenever he expresses any seriously negative emotion and it makes him so much worse to listen to.

My main defense of Sonic Colors and the writers’ admittedly worrying statements about their knowledge of Sonic was that it was a story that didn’t really need to be on the level of past titles. It was an incredibly simple story that had its own charm, it didn’t really need to have that deep of an understanding of the story and characters. Lost World, however, is acting like it's trying to be more, trying to tell a story that would involve a better understanding, while Pontac and Graff just don’t put the effort back into making it work. This leaned further into the worrying state of the series than either of the previous entries ever did.