Pretty fun megawad, with a really unique visual style for the 2nd and 3rd episodes. Makes very smart use of low monster counts most of the time, which leads to a different type of difficulty than most modern wads. Also enjoyed the unorthodox use of weapons, like allowing the basic shotgun some time to shine in the first episode, and heavy use of the rocket launcher. My main complaint is some of the later maps are easy to get lost, particularly the guest maps which I felt didn't do as good of a job with signposting keys/doors. The ending was also a bit anticlimactic. Favorite map was 16, Cidadela I.

This game by itself takes the bongos from a gimmick peripheral to something worth trying, which is very impressive. I remember trying it for about 5 minutes at a friend's house as a kid, thought it was hard to control, and passed it off as a gimmick. I bought some DK Bongos recently to play this, mostly thinking it would just be a funny bit and I could stream it for friends, but I was surprised to find that this is actually a really fun game.

It genuinely makes good use of the peripheral, and the controls are fine once you get used to them, maybe with the exception of claps being a little inconsistent (tapping the side of the bongos instead helped a lot). The levels mostly flow well, though the bird sections and swimming sections feel a bit worse. There's a good variety of environments, and the boss fights are shockingly fun and creative, for a while at least. My biggest complaint with the game is that they introduce all of these awesome and varied bosses early on, and then end up reusing variants of them too much throughout the game. Still really cool though and more than I expected out of this.

The scoring requirements are a little strict, though I do like that they show you videos of how to better keep up your combo after completing a level. I just got the normal ending for this playthrough but could definitely see myself going back for the post-game content in the future, as sadly there's not much else to play on the bongos. Very happy I got to try this, I'm a big fan of the Donkey Kong series and didn't even know what I was missing out on with this one.

Revisiting this after 10+ years was a pretty weird experience, but a fun one overall. For a lot of the runtime I was thinking it was just okay, movement was nothing to write home about and the combat is pretty basic aside from the 2.5D aiming mechanics, but it really gets fun towards the end with all of the powerups you get. Your superpowered state in the end game is one of the best in the genre, up there with Super Metroid. Then the game just kind of ends abruptly, with a lackluster boss fight (as most of the bosses in the game are). That kind of killed my motivation to get 100%, which I was on board for with how fun it had gotten over the last hour or so. I think the pacing of powerups here could have been a lot better if it was more gradual and they gave you some of these upgrades earlier, and the game could have been a bit longer than it is. It's a shame they never made a second one of these because it's a really solid foundation.

The Forgotten City is a pretty cool experience that's still a little rough around the edges. While a time loop game isn't 100% unique they're definitely few and far between, and really cool when done well. This one mostly succeeds, and does so while being very heavy on NPCs and dialogue which I think are difficult to get right. While those aspects aren't perfect I think it still did an admirable job with them. My problems with the game are mostly minor but sort of add up to it feeling like a less polished experience overall than it could have been.

While the dialogue is pretty well written for the most part, the dialogue choices feel forced the large majority of the time. You start out with the same handful of options when talking to pretty much any character, which is pretty uselessly repetitive when you could just have fully scripted conversations. Thankfully the player character doesn't actually speak so there's no dialogue choice mismatch nonsense, but still even past the initial options I mentioned it feels like your choices aren't very meaningful. You can play into the role the game wants for your character, or not, but if you don't you probably won't be making much progress. Overall I'm fine with that, I don't need this to be a roleplaying game, but the presentation of it is in conflict with that and feels like a leftover from its origins as a mod.

Speaking of leftovers, the combat sections are just awful and really unnecessary to the extent they're used. Don't get me wrong, it's not a ton, but I still didn't need to do it more than once. I also ran into an unfortunate number of performance issues and glitches that did affect gameplay, I did play this fairly close to launch so hopefully those will be fixed but it is worth mentioning.

Before I get into somewhat spoiler-y territory I'll say that I would recommend this overall and it's a very interesting game if you're into this type of thing.



==Minor spoilers for the ending below==

The endings for the game are kind of a mixed bag in my opinion. The first two are pretty much the same, and while they are unsatisfying I doubt anyone is going to stop there, I just wanted to see them out of curiosity. The third ending is actually my favorite, while it isn't the "true" ending I thought it was very strong on its own. Maybe this is because it's the first one I saw, and some of the others reuse content from it which I mostly skipped through, but it felt well thought out. The true ending I think was still worth getting, and the very end I have to say was touching, but the conversation with you-know-who was ultimately kind of boring and unneeded, and I didn't really like the design of that final area. It was fine though, I didn't hate it or anything. I also thought it was a bit awkward at the very end how most characters didn't really recognize you if you did the ending towards the beginning of a loop, it makes sense but probably would've been better if they plot-magic'd that away. Thankfully all of the endings are pretty quick to see if you have a save in the late game anyways.

Wanted to like this but it has a ton of issues. The visual clarity is really awful, like the art is nice but there's a ton of spots where it's bad for gameplay, with stuff like instant death spikes that are hard to see. All the platforming feels really bad for the jump height like they just didn't test it or something, lot of stuff just a few pixels out of reach which even if intentional feels bad. The save system is horrible, the save points and item system are obviously dark souls inspired but every single other game like this saves items you pick up or doors you open even if you die, but in this if you don't manually select save at the bonfires it erases all that. I got to a boss and opened a one-way door next to it that led back to the save, and I thought I was still fine but it closed that and took away all the items I got and made me go through the whole area again. Also there's a ton of instant-death spikes and stuff which feels like a terrible fit for this kind of game, especially with the bad platforming and huge knockback when you get hit.

Probably the best typing game I've played, even though it has its issues, and I played it at a pretty good time just having learned a new keyboard layout (Colemak) so it was actually challenging. Lot of nice small touches all around, and the art style is quite good. The story and narration really didn't do anything for me, I doubt it's why anyone is playing this but it would've been fine without probably? The game is a little unclear on where to go sometimes, and the unlockable area system felt overly convoluted when it's a pretty linear game overall. While the movement system keeps your hands closer to homerow and is interesting, I still think it might've been better to have movement on the typical WASD and switch your hand position for typing. Also some of the battles later on were more tedious than fun, but the game ended right around the point I was starting to get tired of it so that's probably pretty good pacing. Fun game overall, if you enjoy typing give it a shot.

Always sucks to revisit one of your favorites and find out it doesn't hold up quite as well as your memory. Mirror's Edge still has some really high highs, but I'd forgotten how annoying other parts of it can be. I still love a lot of it, the visuals hold up great, the world design is amazing, and when the gameplay really works it's a ton of fun. Unfortunately, there's far too few sections that allow the gameplay to shine. The majority of the game is made up of a mix of weird slow puzzly climbing sections that aren't very fun and have janky controls, terrible combat sections, and don't even get me started on the story. The areas where you're free to take multiple paths and go as fast as possible and aren't restricted are fantastic, and I guess I remembered those a lot more than the rest of it.

Finally got around to playing through this in full. It's a really weird game to even exist, there were a lot of basic ports of Doom to various consoles, but it's pretty wild how fully new this is. Despite using a lot of the same weapons and enemies, they're all remade from scratch and feel a bit different, alongside an updated engine and a completely new set of levels, this feels more like an alternate reality's version of Doom. I think the feel of the movement and weapons isn't quite as good as the original, but it's certainly not bad (at least playing on pc, can't imagine it's great on an N64 controller). The level design is mostly pretty good, there's a couple I disliked but overall I'd probably put it over Doom 2's levels but below 1's. The updated lighting and different enemies definitely gives it its own style, which I don't think I'd say I like more but it's a nice change of pace. Doesn't really hold a candle to modern WADs but it would definitely be unfair to expect it to, and it's definitely worth playing overall if you're a fan of the series.

I'm obviously a bit late to the party here. There's a lot that's been said about Shadow of the Colossus, and it deserves a lot of the recognition it gets. However, there's also a lot of things that don't hold up very well playing it for the first time now. You can see its influence all over modern games, but that doesn't mean that going back to the source of some of those inspirations is necessarily fun. The core idea here is great, a boss rush with a puzzle slant to the boss design, and a beautiful open world to explore. Unfortunately both of those aspects kind of fell apart for me by the end.

The bosses start out very easy, and you can run through them comically fast. Difficulty ramps up later on, but not in a way that's very fun or engaging. Whenever I got stuck, it was due to a puzzle solution being obtuse, and whether I eventually figured it out, or it was one of the handful of times I ended up looking up how to do something, it almost never felt satisfying to figure out or to actually execute. The last two were especially egregious, and both took way too long to climb back up if you did the wrong thing. The only kind of mechanical difficulty comes from the poor controls, or falling off of a colossus and having to repeat a section, either due to running out of stamina or getting tired of holding the grip trigger. They seemingly decided that you should really feel like you're hanging on for your life by giving you hand pain through the controls. Also while you're on the colossus, it trying to shake you off often seems random or glitchy, and leads to a lot of just holding a direction and hoping it gives you a second to climb, or mashing the button trying to figure out when the opening for your attack is supposed to be. It looks nice, but the gameplay doesn't really line up with that experience. Beyond having to hold down a trigger for 90% of the game, this does a lot of other things with the controls that game devs have mostly learned just not to do anymore, even on the supposedly improved "modern" controls in the remake. The colossi and their environments are suitably impressive visually, and the scale of them is communicated very well. That at least was good enough to keep me going.

The struggles with the controls continue in the open world, where you have far and away the worst controlling horse in any video game and a camera more concerned with cinematic angles than letting you see where you're going. I can understand the idea behind wanting more weighty, realistic, and less responsive horse controls, but they went way too far with it here. If Agro is within 50 feet of even a slight bump in the terrain, much less narrow walls, he'll often refuse to move or go at a glacial pace, and turning feels like you're playing with over a second of input delay. Doing things on horseback like using your sword's guiding light or the bow is also a pain with the way the controls are laid out. The light showing you your next objective is an interesting idea I suppose, but combined with the way the world is laid out and how long it takes to traverse it, it ended up just being an especially annoying objective marker with a lot of trial and error of going down long narrow passages between mountains to find out a full minute or two later that it wasn't the way to go. The world looks nice, but you'll quickly realize there's not much to do or see here. I love exploration in games and am totally fine with it being mostly self-motivated, I definitely wouldn't expect this to be littered with side quests and collectibles like many modern open world games, but it just never really motivated me to explore here. There are collectibles, but they just never really caught my interest and I have no idea what they do. The map feels like just empty padding for the already short runtime.

I'm conflicted on the story, I think the simple setup is cool and worked well, but being given nothing over the course of the game that adds to it starts to feel repetitive, and being taken back to the hub feels like a missed opportunity to add basically anything here. Then at the end there's the big story dump, and I don't know that I really liked where it went. Maybe I would have been more okay with it if there was any kind of natural build up there, or hinting at what was happening, but it's just a long cutscene after the game is over. The pacing felt really off, and I would have been much more okay with the game just ending before any of that and leaving it up to interpretation more.

This review is pretty negative, but I really had an alright time overall. The game kept my attention and I finished it pretty quickly, it just has a lot of issues that I haven't seen talked about much, while its praises don't really need repeating by me. Still worth a try, if for nothing else, at least to see how important it is to gaming history.