This game is very short, but it is very good! Quality over quantity as they say. I completed the mission in about 70 minutes, but the level was really well designed, having multiple ways to get through obstacles and generally being as creative as you would expect from a Metal Gear game. The story tackles subjects that are still very taboo in the video game world, and is pretty disturbing to follow through the different tapes you get in the game! It also adds some pieces to the gigantic puzzle that is the story of the Metal Gear franchise. It's too bad that this used to cost so much money, because this single level is on par with the levels in The Phantom Pain!

Probably the most bleak, depressing and soul-crushing game I've ever played. So many sections in this game leave you feeling completely empty inside, and even its attempt at humour is so dark that it just comes off as depressing. First of all we have the setting. The world has no females, which means that the men left are essentially just waiting for their doom. Just that is an incredibly bleak concept, but it gets worse, because it portrays all the different ways people act during this apocalypse. The world is riddled with corpses, hanging bodies, people who are broken or have simply lost the will to live, and much more. But the worst thing is the concept of Joy, a drug that makes you feel nothing. The main character, Brad, is addicted to this because of his traumatic past. This is interesting, because Joy is an actual item in the game, which makes Brad a lot more powerful and increases his health, but makes him eventually suffer from withdrawal, which reduces his damage. This makes you consider taking Joy to make the game (and by that, the pain) easier to handle. Another thing this game heavily features is a world where your party members can and will die. You can recruit up to thirty people, but when a central part of your team dies, it just feels painful. I definitely felt a lot of pain towards area 3, so much in fact that I had to shut off the game and do something else. I completed the game after returning to it, and BOY, the ending is surely something. Without spoiling anything, it is bleak as hell and will make you feel empty as all hell. Luckily, this game has some quite amazing gameplay to balance out all the bleakness, so it isn't like a Drakengard completely. It succeeds a lot better than that game did by somehow making the game both fun and painful to play at the same time. I cannot give this game any less than a 9. It was that impactful!

A damn amazing game that is as good, if not better, than Dark Souls. But one thing it definitely has over DS are the wonderful aesthetics. Fucking hell, this world is gorgeous. I mean, it's pretty ugly in most cases, but it is very intentionally ugly, and all the designs, enviroments and skies just look amazing and really capture that dark and gloomy setting. At first, I thought this game was harder than Dark Souls, but as I got into it, I found myself dying a whole lot less than I did in that game. Bloodborne has such a cool playstyle. In Dark Souls, I was using a shield for the first 3 hours because I thought that was the way to play. It was only when I removed my shield and started taking more risks that I found myself enjoying the game to the huge extent that I did. Bloodborne simply gives you no shield. There is one, but it is godawful, and should not really be used. Instead, you get a gun which you can use to parry enemy attacks. And you definitely should be doing that, because visceral attacks in this game are extremely satisfying to pull off, and you can even get runes that get you back health on successful visceral attacks. The bosses in this game are all great in my opinion, but my favourites were probably Micolash because of how different he is, Darkbeast Paarl because of my redemption arc (I found the boss pretty early in the game, got destroyed pretty hard and realized I had to go to another boss. After a while, I went back to him and defeated him first try), The One Reborn because of how truly intense that battle is, and Gehrman because of how difficult but fair that fight feels. I've always felt that the music in the Souls games wasn't really that noticeable, but in Bloodborne, it has a different vibe that I can't really describe, and therefore I liked it a lot more than the soundtrack to Dark Souls, especially the music when you are fighting Gehrman. This was an amazing game that I will probably play again, and again, and again!

An overall solid addition to the Metal Gear series. The gameplay, as you may have guessed, is based around stealth. The difference is that this game feels much easier than other MGS games I've played, probably as a result of it originally being on a handheld console. The first four chapters are pretty good and pretty easy, but the end of chapter four has a huge difficulty curve. After completing chapter four however, the game unfortunately makes a huge mistake in chapter 5. It does end in a satisfying way, but the road there is bad, filled with repetitive plot points, not that much story and generally feels really filler-esque. If it wasn't for that sequence, this game would easily be an 8, but this unfortunately downgrades it to a solid 7. Also, the soundtrack is really good as you would expect from this series of games.

A true classic. This was the first Zelda game I ever played, and I had some trouble at first, but after a year of being stuck at Forsaken Fortress, I got past it and started really enjoying myself. Now I replayed it with a friend in the HD version, and I must say that it is basically a straight upgrade in just about every way. Positives are everywhere. There is a sail that lets you change the direction of the wind AND go faster with your boat, which removes having to change the wind manually all the time and makes you travel the sea faster. The triforce hunt has been largely redesigned to still capture the feeling of exploring the sea that the original had, but also removing some of the charts required, making it a whole lot less tedious. There is actually just one thing that I would mention as both a positive and a negative: by jump attacking and then immediately inputting a spin attack, your damage doubles for the spin attack. This turns out to be incredibly overpowered, killing most enemies a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Otherwise the game is much the same, and here are some opinions on the game in general. I love the music in The Wind Waker! Not only is it highly nostalgic to me, but some more experimental tunes have sneaked their way in there, like the song playing in Hyrule Castle before getting the Master Sword, which sounds incredibly broken, distorted and has a very relaxed relationship to silence which I absolutely love. My absolute favourite of these experimental tunes has to be the Illusory Room in Ganon's Castle near the end. Everything about it is odd: odd rhythms, odd instrumentations, etc. I especially love how one part of the mix is delayed by an eighth note, making it sound different the more time passes. And because it is a modern Zelda game, every dungeon and boss music is incredible, with the highlights being Wind Temple, Forbidden Woods, Tower of the Gods and Forsaken Fortress for the dungeons, and Helmaroc King, Gohdan, all Ganon related boss tunes and Molgera. I also love how open the world is in this game. You are stuck for a bit in the beginning, but after the first two dungeons, you are free to go basically wherever you like. And there is just so much to explore, and it feels so natural to explore it because you are on the sea! I think that too is awesome, the fact that you are on the sea. And the final section rivals the final sections of my more appreciated Zelda games like Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time. I think the bosses toward the end are the best in the game, and that's exactly how it should be. This game would have been an 8 if it was the original version, but thanks to all the improvements I cannot justify giving this anything less than a 9!

This is a game that I have played many times, and for each time I just seem to like it more. I've heard many comments from people saying that the only reason people like this game so much is for the story and for nostalgic reasons. And while the story is certainly part of that, I feel like the gameplay is very underrated, and frankly, many of the problems that I thought the game had the first times playing it were absent from this playthrough. For instance, I disliked how long it took to change from 2D to 3D, which is a major feature in the game, and used in almost every puzzle. But during this playthrough, I found that problem to be non-existent. The whole gaming experience felt seamless. What I've always loved about the Paper Mario series is the world and the environment around you. And Super Paper Mario offers what is probably the best world(s) in the entire series. Because every world you travel to feels very distinct, has a very distinct atmosphere, and I just feel so immersed in the world because of this. Another thing that really adds to this are the different items the enemies drop. Because those items are usually very thematically correct. For instance, Crazee Dayzees and Amazee Dayzees drop Dayzee Tears, which you can use to make certain recipes. But many enemies drop these appropriate items, which really drew me into the game. I also think the main mechanic of flipping from 2D to 3D was a resounding success, probably in large part because of how incredibly detailed all the environments are. If you flip to 3D anywhere in the game, you get information about the world through things you just couldn't see in 2D, which makes it feel rewarding even when you don't find anything special there. And let's not forget about the music. This game has one of my favourite soundtracks ever, an incredibly consistent collection of weird, bumping, melancholic and bouncy tunes. Few games have better soundtracks honestly. The dialogue is also one of the strongest parts of the game. This game made me chuckle so many times throughout the game that I lost count. However, the main thing that makes me love this game beyond almost every other game I've played is the story. The story of Blumiere and Timpani is so beautiful, sad and sweet that I can't help but shed a tear or two every time I get to the ending. It may be standard in some regards, especially with its portrayal of love as the dispeller of evil, but I feel like it is actually true. Love is truly a wonderful force. All these things combine to form a game that I previously considered the strongest 9/10 that I had ever played. But now that I've played through it once again and enjoyed it so immensely, I have to give it too a 10. One of the best games I've ever played!

I love it when a game completely blows your expectations out of the water. I expected an inferior version to Dark Souls with clunky mechanics, bad bosses and bad levels. Instead I got a game that may actually be better than Dark Souls (can't really decide that before I replay it yet again) with great mechanics, extremely unique bosses and better levels than Dark Souls on average. It was a wild ride that I enjoyed basically every second of. It was a whole lot easier than Dark Souls tho, but it felt harder on some points due to the levels actually seeming harder in my opinion. But the environments were great, and they were also very immersive due to everything just making sense. Of course the enemies in Stonefang should be miners, as it is a mine, and of course that is the place where you find the most stone-like stones which you use to upgrade certain weapons. Once I arrived there, I decided to play through the entire game with the pickaxe, which was a very fun choice. So me and my pickaxe carved our way through the different areas and bosses. My favourite area overall was probably the fourth one. I loved how different each level in that area was, and the final archdemon of that area was damn epic! Another thing that greatly surprised me was the soundtrack. Overall, I am not a huge fan of the soundtrack of the Souls series, as they tend to fall more into the category of "uninspired orchestral music" to me. But Demon's Souls has a very unique soundtrack compared to Dark Souls, using a lot of more ambient textures, and many of the boss fights actually use less bombastic tunes, which just adds to the variation. I got the urge to download the soundtrack as soon as possible, which is something that I absolutely did not feel about Dark Souls' or even Bloodborne's soundtrack. In my opinion, Demon's Souls was a huge risk that basically payed off in every way, and I loved it very much.

I am usually not a fan of games that value aesthetics over everything else. I felt that a bit with RiME before it actually turned into a good game. But Journey has changed my positions a bit, because this game is SO beautiful. It is not a hard game at all, nor is it probably meant to be. It's simply you, the player, travelling through a desert to a mountain in the distance. And the journey there is actually a lot of fun. I played it with my girlfriend, and she was absolutely wowed by it, and it was hard not to be influenced by that. I liked the game because of how cool the sand gliding and flying mechanics were. I liked how you could stay in the air indefinitely if you just had enough skill (and luck) to be able to consistently fly into the carpet creatures that refill your fly meter. I liked how intensely focused the game was on delivering a fully immersive experience to the point that you can't even pause the game. The character just sits down, and no menu shows up. However, what made me love the game was the aesthetics and the soundtrack. The aesthetics are amazing! The game constantly shifts colour pallet throughout its runtime and plays around with different kinds of surfaces where you leave a trace. First it is sand, then it is snow. And the sand changes colour as well, at one point being blue and green when you are in a tunnel. But the soundtrack was definitely my favourite part! Because there is a pitfall that these aesthetic-valuing games sometimes fall in, and that is that the soundtrack focuses on beauty above everything else. Journey's soundtrack isn't like that at all! It has varied instrumentation based on where in the game you are, it is usually melodic but turns somewhat dissonant whenever something dangerous happens (I especially liked how it sounded when you were heading through a blizzard towards the mountain), and it even uses my absolute weakness, which is the key of B Minor. I just think it sounds melancholic and beautiful in a way that no other key manages for me. And the end section where you go to the mountain is triumphant and entirely in the key of B Minor with my favourite chords in that key playing throughout the section. The only parts where I felt that the game was somewhat lacking was some parts of the snow section, where it slowed down by blowing wind in your face. It didn't have to do that to convey the hopelessness in my opinion, that feeling was already there. Overall a great game though!

The NES is not a console that I used to consider had good games. I felt like most of them were absolutely held back by your inability to save, and while some of those like the Super Mario Bros. games tried to play around this by having very short games with warp zones to later worlds, I can't help but feel like this was playing around a system that was broken from the start. The Legend of Zelda is different. First of all, you can actually save in this game. Second of all, it is a wonderful open world game in an era long before open world games. This game drops you in a moderately sized world and asks you to do whatever you want. You can go in any direction you want, to any place you want as long as it isn't blocked off by an item you need. I have to praise the overworld a lot, because it is not too small, which makes it so that you don't get tired of it. At the same time, it isn't too big either. This is good because you have to start over from the beginning of the map if you die. And trust me, you will die a lot in this game, as it is brutally difficult at some points. I think I died more than 150 times throughout the 14 hours of gameplay. But if you die, you will restart in a map that easily allows you to get back to wherever you previously were. And if you die in a dungeon, you will simply restart from the start of that dungeon, a tradition that other Zelda games have also used. The gameplay is difficult, but fun. I like how you keep all the items you obtained even if you die, making this very Dark Souls-esque. In fact, I think the soulsborne series definitely was inspired by this game specifically. I also have to praise the final dungeon for how great it is design wise. It definitely feels like a true final gauntlet, and it is very satisfying to find your way through that lethal maze of a dungeon. However, not everything this game offers is perfect. The combat is pretty awkward sometimes, because Link stops every time he does something with an item or a sword. This definitely adds to the game's insane difficulty, and arguably in a way that isn't as fun. The soundtrack is also pretty one-note, only containing four songs in its entirety if I remember correctly. Still, this isn't a game that you should miss out on if you like challenging games. Definitely one of the best games for the NES!

Like I have mentioned some times before, I usually get quite turned off by games that lean too heavily on the 8-bit or 16-bit styled graphics, especially if they also use chiptune extensively in their soundtracks, because I think it negatively influences the image of video games, as people you know who do not play games themselves often think about 8 or 16-bit when they think video games. However, I try my best to put this bias aside when playing new games, and I am glad I did for this game, because I found Celeste to be incredibly enjoyable, and there are many reasons as to why. Let's start with the most obvious one: the gameplay! This game, like many other platformers, is based on different levels, but one big strength it has is that it never feels like you are playing individual levels. In Mario games, levels feel pretty arcadey, in that you go in, beat the entire level, and then you continue to the next level from a selected overworld. This system has many benefits, like for instance the fact that an overworld or hub world can give more clear breaks between different hard segments, and as long as a game is structured around this, it's absolutely fine to use. But I'm glad that some games work differently, like Celeste for instance. In this game, the entire world is one long segment, where you restart from the beginning of a room if you die. This is better for world building in my opinion, because it makes the world feel coherent, instead of every level being a sort of microcosm. The worlds are also very well designed in my opinion, especially some of the final worlds. They usually take the classic approach of giving you a certain gimmick, and then using that gimmick in as many ways as possible in an increasingly difficult row. It's great! My favourite worlds are probably the two final ones. These ones are great because they are also great from a story perspective, and feature some difficult, but fair platforming. This game always manages to be completely fair in its challenge, because there are no lives and you can just retry as many times as you want until you succeed with a challenge.
The story in this game is very interesting. You play as Madeleine, who has decided to climb this mountain called Celeste Mountain. But she is unaware that the mountain has the magical ability of making your inner demons into a physical entity, which is something that you fight throughout the game. This is a game about depression, unsurprisingly, and it goes about the theme in a good way in my opinion. It also manages to be very cute at the same time. I loved how all of the voices were synths that just sounded like voices. That was incredibly satisfying to listen to in my opinion, and it made me want to engage in all dialogues that you can engage in within the game. But the main thing I loved was the gameplay, not to mention how satisfying the musical progression felt. I especially liked the music of the final world and the hotel, with the hotel being the one that I still listen to a lot. Lovely, cute little game!

The GameBoy Advance version of this game was the bane of my childhood. I loved and hated it at the same time, loved it for how good it was and hated it for how difficult it was. I never played it on the NES though, and if childhood me had seen that you can't save on the NES, he would surely have flipped out. I was a little worried about the difficulty going in actually. But it turned out to be not only fine, but more than fine. First of all, this game is a lot easier than both Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2, which is positive in the NES era as you can't save on these cartridges. I felt like this game was the most well-designed out of the three though. It gives you a ton of 1-Ups, which really help to make the game manageable. So I managed to beat the entire game in one sitting, and it was a thrill ride that I absolutely loved. This is probably the best game I've played so far for the NES, and I can't wait to try out more games to see what they have in store!

This game feels pretty similar to New Super Mario Bros. 2 when it comes to the amount of handholding it does and because of how easy it is. I had 90 extra lives when I defeated the final boss, which is not a problem per se, but the game doesn't seem to be consistent with its own design philosophy surrounding extra lives because of the fact that it, like NSMB2, has an optional tool that helps you if you get stuck. But when you have 90 extra lives, it's gonna take a Super Meat Boy-tier level to actually get you to lose that many lives on a single level, and no such level existed. I'll admit that this game isn't really that bad, but it isn't good either. It's just mediocre to be honest. The extra dimension wasn't compensated by enough dimensions gameplay-wise.

This is essentially Half-Life 2, but even better in my opinion! The game is divided into different distinct sections, and all of them have a different game feel to them. While there are no vehicle sections, that is more than made up for by the flow that this game had. I completed this game in one single sitting without taking any breaks. A game that lets you do that is incredible in my books. The final battle against a Strider is also one of the best fights in the Half-Life series. Simply amazing!

I decided to dive into this series after a friend recommended it to me. And I decided to start from the beginning. Initially, I felt very lukewarm towards this game. I was not underwhelmed, because I didn't really have any high expectations to begin with, but it was not really that impressive up until the second to last dungeon, which was where I was beginning to have a LOT of fun with this game. The main reason for this is probably the combat. It works really well, and even though it does at most times feel like a glorified "spam x" simulator, it felt satisfying to get incredible combos on enemies, which really started happening once you got to that point in the game. But the thing that kept me going so that I could reach that point in the first place was definitely the music. The soundtrack has to be in my top 10 list, because every single song is just so solid. I loved all the world themes, all the battle themes and so on, my favourites probably being "Night of Fate", "Hollow Bastion" and "Forze del male". Yoko Shimomura has gotten a huge upswing in my personal rankings list after having played this game. The best part gameplay wise was the final two areas, with the exception of a particularily bullshit fight thrown in literally the room before the final boss. I think I died more in that room than to any actual boss in the whole game. I didn't bother to do a lot of the extra content, so I never got to fight Sephiroth or any of the other optional bosses. I don't think I would want to 100% this game, as it seems to require a lot of grinding, and grinding is very frustrating in this game. I definitely noticed that I was a bit underleveled for the final dungeon, but it was pretty fine with the exception of that one fight. The story felt coherent and satisfying to follow, and I really liked Maleficent as an evil force throughout most of the game. She had such a perfect voice in my opinion. The game does have its fair share of goofy moments (no pun intended) though, usually through the stupid stuff Sora does in certain cutscenes, but I thought those moments were funny, and certainly didn't made me dislike the game. I had a good time with Kingdom Hearts, and I am thankful that I played the Final Mix version, as I heard that the original didn't have the option to skip cutscenes, which would have been incredibly annoying against some of the harder bosses. Definitely give this game a shot if you like hack n slash games with RPG elements!