Pizza Tower is a perfect videogame. A crowning achievement in videogaming. One of the finest videogames the world has ever known. Everything about the videogame is perfect. Presentation is aces, from the psycho 90s cartoon aesthetic to the little things like the game needing a button prompt to turn the lights on in the file select menu (lest something FUNNY happen). The music is nothing but fantastic, catchy tunes that set the tone for the levels and bosses to follow.

Level are designed to put your mastery of the games incredible movement to the test as you bash, throw and piledrive your way through all sorts of crazy bullshit the game throws at you. Every level also has some different shit to throw at you, like taking taxis to optional areas in a city level only for you to be sent to jail because the taxi turned out to be a cop car. Or the animatronic jumpscare level. Or the damn Mort the Chicken for the Playstation One console level.

Going for 101% really gave me an appreciation for how the game and the levels are structured. The highest honor you can get in a Pizza Tower level is the P rank. P rank means you reached a certain score threshold while obtaining all collectibles in the level while never dropping your combo, which is added upon by defeating enemies and kept going by collecting points. In practice, going for P ranks is like Crash Bandicoot 4's perfect relics, except Pizza Tower is significantly less punishing and repetitive which makes the process of perfecting a level actually fun. Except for Gnome Forest, no one has fun in Gnome Forest.

Last thing I want to rant about is that while the story is largely basic the game's ending which is just excellently put together. The game foreshadows what's going to go down and you get it but you don't care because it's so sick it doesn't even matter. You get your chance to fight the bastard that's been tormenting you the whole game, there's a little surprise in there, and then the final stretch of the boss and the subsequent mad dash out is pure catharsis in a way games rarely do.

All in all, perfect videogame. Purchase it now, and then purchase it later when it's ported probably. After that, purchase it again when it gets a physical release. And then play it, I heard the game's pretty good.

A middling brain empty button masher where you equip things with big numbers to do missions that are lower than your number. These missions consist of empty hallways that don't force you to engage with them at all and four to five forced combat encounters. Most of the missions are just completely recycled level design wise outside of like 4 levels with such unique mechanics like... basic platforming.

The gameplay loop is very simple. Go to boring mission with number suitable to yours, mash on light and spectral attacks for 5 minutes, replace your shit with shit of a higher number, repeat. Because it's designed as a GaaS you don't get options to a lot of mission types and loot mechanics until late in the launch campaign, the most egregious of which is the ability to keep gear of a certain rarity up to your gear level, which unlocks with four missions left before the final boss. Not that it takes too long, with cutscenes skipped (because who can really care) it took me seven hours to complete the launch story, after which there are a couple of other stories and a bunch of random modes to get your gear level up. Ultimately, it's all the same shit and evidently it wasn't enough to have people stick around.

And so lies Baby Fall, another weird Platinum project to add to the list of other weird, failed Platinum projects. At least unlike the TMNT game and that Korra game people won't be able to play their grand failure for long. I'm happy Bayonetta 3 got a warm reception because if that shit died a death like this thing I'd struggle to see how they'd recover.

Papa's Freezeria provides the experience of a retail wage slave job from the comfort of you own home, minus the mental abuse you'd suffer from the customers and your coworkers alike. You'll spend the first hour or two learning the ropes, you'll get a few hours out of chasing stickers, and then you'll slowly realize the gameplay loop (7 customers a day! closers on a set loop! one amigo orders the special! [two with the board]) hasn't changed from maybe the third in game week so you largely go through the motions until you get full completion or quit. As someone who's currently unemployed, it was a fun enough time waster that scratched an itch and now I'm done with it probably forever.

A neat demake that addressed the two big issues I had with the 3DS game. Namely the map design, where most of the egregiously designed maps are changed to be less bad. It's not all roses on this front but some of the maps of the 3DS game were extraordinarily terrible and there's less of that here. Another big peeve I had with the original release was the glaring lack of supports for most characters, which is addressed in spades here. Characters like Kliff, Silque, Sonya and Leon now have more than one support option and the made up supports for the game are written pretty well.

On top of that, the general spritework is great. The character portraits are excellent and the small touches like the little animation flourishes when entering combat don't go unnoticed. Brushing up against the limitations are fun, there's no equipment slot so having shield and ring bonuses is pretty good. Sadly there's no combat arts so you can't Hunter's Volley with impunity but magic works the same. Requirements for getting warp are still easy so you can do plenty of horseshit with it. Dungeons are replaced with tower of valni esque maps where you promote by visiting Mila statues and gain stats by visiting wells on the map in combat. Definitely worth a play through if you like SoV and want to fuck around with GBA mechanics.

Obviously the big draw of this thing has been the level creator where you can fuck around and make 2D levels similar to Crash 4 flashback tape levels, but the game itself outside of that is also pretty good for a small project. Controls are an honest recreation of the second game's movement but they aren't quite there. The 3D levels themselves are neat and do some fun things; while the 2D Uka Uka time trial levels can get cheeky, especially the last one. Overall pretty good not bad pretty good pret-tay... prettay good.

Honky: stark railing mad is a standard turn based rpg gacha skinnerbox propped up by good presentation and graphics. The character upgrading is too easy to get lost in the weeds in (why must everything have the ability to level up? why do fucking relics even exist?!) and pulling for fuckin light cones in the gacha is somehow worse than pulling for 3* gobshite year one characters in Fire Emblem Heroes in current year. But yeah I'm bored and brain is broken so I just buy the shitty battle pass and daily free shit for a month pass as I autobattle through 90% of the content with little issue.

The days of the licensed movie tie in game are long dead, but the days of completely random, absolutely psychotic licensed games are here with Scrat as a shining example. A truly baffling platformer, Scrat just fuckin runs through random places without a care in the world in order to get nuts so he can nut. One of the greatest things about the game is that sometimes Scrat needs to pick up key nuts to progress through locked doors, and unlike every other platformer where picking shit up hinders your abilities and makes you slow as shit, Scrat runs at the same speed AND you have access to all your movement shit. So yeah if you want to shovel pure jank shit into your mouth it would not be a mistake to shovel Scrat's nuts into your mouth.

Just a neat little metroidvania focused on the use and abuse of certain movement techniques you'll earn as the game progresses. Doing long jumps into super side hops into wall runs and wall kicks flows and feels good and when mastered can lead to naturally finding alternative means of solving platforming bits. Besides that, the PS1 low-poly aesthetic has yet to be beaten to death so it's neat here and the combat doesn't really have any reason to exist outside of the movement enhancing ground pound and a C tier end boss. Overall, good use of eight dollars and eighty cents (Canadian currency).

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is largely what you'd expect from a Jet Set Radio spiritual successor in the year of our lord 2023. It looks the part, it sounds the part, and it plays the part pretty well.

The game really adheres to how Jet Set Radio plays, the movement and existing mechanics here are pretty much identical to the ol' Dreamcast game. The main thing that separates the two games is how BRC addresses the things people didn't like about Jet Set Radio. Jet Set has a pretty notorious difficulty curve with a lot of stuff that can prove annoying and this game sought to address most of those things. Movement on your locomotion of choice is basically 1:1 with Jet Set but with the ability to get off your wheels and walk, the air dash and the Tony Hawk manual mechanic it's a lot easier to come to grips with and start chaining tricks to start boosting around with impunity.

The big stuff though is with the graffiti and police mechanics. The original Jet Set tasked you with spraying graffiti and to do so you needed to do a lot of quarter and half circles while local authorities bum rushed your ass in real time ready to whack and shoot you. In BRC, graffiti has been greatly simplified while also stopping time for a rather generous period allowing you to spray your preferred graffiti design without worrying about the authorities.

The police, meanwhile, are now attached to a GTA style heat system that grows as you paint graffiti everywhere and escalates as you make your way through the game. Your ne'er-do-well painting can attract the police on the scale of normal mooks to sticks all the way to copters and mechs. The game has a combat system to help you out in defending yourself from the over-militarized police force and while the combat is rudimentary it's also very funny. Doing jump cancels that AoE launch a bunch of dudes into your graffiti finisher is very fun, and enemies and machines having whatever graffiti you sprayed plastered on to them is very endearing. I wouldn't say the combat is anything great but it gets the job done in a way that's positive for the game.

So yeah game's good. The soundtrack is aces, with the 2mello and Hideki tracks being obvious standouts when playing, you can hold your phone out the entire time playing the game (millenial/gen z simulator confirmed?!?) and you can unlock a shitload of characters with even more available in the post-game. They just have to populate the hideout with all of them and let you switch between them outside of dance floors in the game's other areas.

I don't know amigos I loaded an eight year old save state because my ass was five chapters away from ending the game and I farted through it. Due to this elongated time period between play sessions and my desire to skip cutscenes I can't tell you what happened in this shit outside of the lengthy cutscene that played as Anakin Skywalker and Kelik (killer spelled backwards) shared a tender moment with the final boss dork I triangle attack'd twice into sweet oblivion. That cutscene may have been unskippable but because of ye olde holding space on visualboyadvance I could see the endless dialogue scroll in hyperspeed while my eyes glazed over waiting to see how hard I fed Lirin. What a moment in time not just for the fire emblem romhack community, but for every Hulkamaniac (have fun with my family and friends).

Super Mario Wonder is not just a pretty great 2D platfomer, but for me it was a good source of personal validation. I've never gelled with many aspects of 2D Mario, gave NSMBU a shot on multiple occasions and just bounced off immediately, and also the specific 2D Mario mechanics made me indifferent at best to 3D World and made it actively dislike 3D Land. So when this game was announced I didn't pay it any mind really, thinking it'd be the same ol' shit they've been making for the better part of thirty years.

Well the game leaked a week early and I pirated it for a laugh, and wouldn't you know it? They drastically changed the Mario formula, and in doing so addressed the many things I've never liked. They've removed the incredibly dated timer and score mechanics (apologies to all mario score attackers out there)! Lives are still present but in Tropical Freeze fashion they can be purchased in the in game shops for little cost. The four power-ups in the game are specifically for offense and puzzle utility, while the more important movement abilities are handled through the badge system, which means even if you're tiny baby character on death's door, you can still preform your glide or whatever. A far cry from something like 3D Land where having and losing the tanuki suit is basically playing a different game. Most importantly, there's even a badge that let's your character swim! In a straight line! Mario Wonder on the bleeding edge of major innovations in 2d platforming here!

Besides that base control is what you'd expect out of Mario. Presentation is obviously aces and you'll play it baffled that they stuck to the New aesthetic for so long. Level design is good on the whole, the Wonder Flower stuff is kind of a less repetitive version of Triple Deluxe's super power gimmick, while being inventive and fun. Difficulty is on the lighter end which isn't surprising but the game can bear it's fangs when it wants to, and there's a specific part of one of the end game levels that's the shittiest designed thing I've ever played so the devs can eat my ass with the ever-jumpy fire stick shit. Sneaking in a complaint here, the Bowser Jr fights are nothing to the point where some worlds don't even bother ending with one, the final boss is solid at least. Ultimately, despite sailing the seven seas for this game I'll be buying it when I can to fuck with the online features and play with friends hopefully.