I want to like this game so bad. The art is great, the name "Electroplankton" is real cool, and the idea of this abstract meditative music making game really appeals to me. But the game just feels like a tech demo. None of the mini games have any depth, and I would be surprised if anyone would be engaged enough to spend more than 10 minutes on any of them. Like Hanenbow looks super cool artistically, but it's just not fun and it's borderline impossible to purposely create any music with it. Super cool to see something so weird come out of Nintendo, but can't say I really enjoyed my time with Electroplankton.

Dredge is a neat Lovecraftian horror fishing game with a satisfying loop. The loop is basically you go out to fish, and then sell that fish to upgrade your ship/equipment so you can get more fish. It works well, though I wish the act of fishing was a little more fun. Where the game really shines is in its bazaar world filled with lovecraftian sea monsters. It really begs you to explore it and uncover it's secrets. Unfortunately though, the horror aspect is a little lacking. There is some tension at night, but the game rarely forces you to go out at night. So if you play carefully, you may never see all the weird things that can happen at night. In fact, near the end I barely saw anything at night since I got buffed to not have as much panic at night. Still though, it is a very novel experience that I don't regret playing at all.

This game isn't quite as bad as people are making it out to be. Like yeah, the dialogue is terrible and it's basically the same tired open-world design we've seen so many times, but the combat is pretty fun and the magical parkour is pretty legit. It's not really enough to save it, especially with how poorly it is paced with the game literally telling you to read books at one point, and it taking forever to unlock the second set of spells. So yeah, the combat is fun, but everything around the combat keeps from wanting to play more.

This game looks like RE2 remake, plays like RE2 remake, but is structurally very different. Where RE2 tries to raise the tension while you explore a police station similar to a metroidvania or a Zelda dungeon, RE3 remake has shorter levels that are way more focused on action and set pieces. In RE2 the big bad is unpredictable in the way he chases you, while in RE3 the big bad is dealt with almost exclusively through scripted sequences, which destroys any fear you may have had of the monster.

RE3 isn't bad by any means, afterall the gameplay is taken straight from RE2 which was fantastic. However, RE2 wasn't fantastic just due to the fact that shooting the zombies was fun, it was fantastic due to how well crafted Raccoon City's Police Department was and how well integrated its mechanics were. For example, the RE games let you examine items in your inventory. This usually done to solve puzzles, but in RE3 it is almost exclusively used to open up boxes. It was like the devs knew they needed the mechanic, but didn't have time to implement it properly so they just took the laziest option. That example says all you need to know about RE3; it looks and plays like an RE game, but the experience as a whole is pretty hollow.

This game wears it's inspiration on it's sleeve. Entropy center is a first-person game where you solve puzzles in a sciencey place with a sci-fi gun, as an AI with a lot of personality talks to you..... sound familiar? Its basically Portal with some things swapped around. The biggest change is that the gun you use rewinds time instead of shooting portals.

Now being a Portal ripoff isn't a bad thing, especially since there aren't many games like it. However, it does mean you will be compared to 2 of the best games ever made, and this game doesn't stand up Portal 1 and 2. The writing and story is pretty good, the time gun is pretty cool, and the game is very polished. However, the puzzles just aren't as fun. What you find out pretty early on, is that basically every puzzle has you moving a cube from the final position you want it to the first position you want it, so you can rewind it as you jump through the puzzle. You do need to figure out where the cubes need to go, but its rarely that difficult, and after that the puzzles kind of just solve themselves. Not to mention the fact that tracing the path you want the cubes to move in is a little tedious, and if you screw up, you need to redo everything from the start.

That said the game is still fun. I just wish there was a little more to the puzzle design.

Return to Dream Land is probably the most traditional Kirby game in recent times. Even more traditional than Star Allies. So while it doesn't break any new ground (even when originally released), it's also very solid since Kirby's Adventure is very solid, which is clearly what this is trying to be. So yeah, if you haven't played a Kirby game before, this is a great entry to start with. Much more so than Star Allies that's for sure.

For those who have played this before on the Wii, I would only recommend if you want to replay the game. The game looks magnificent, and the new content is great, but it is by and large the same game. The new content mostly comes in the form of two new modes. First is Merry Magoland, which is basically just your typical Kirby mini games, though there are a lot more this time. It's pretty fun, though also not much we haven't seen before. The second is an epilogue where you play as Magalor, which is actually pretty great. The gimmick is that you are powering Magalor up, and teaching him new moves so he can get bigger and bigger combos like this is DMC or something. It works really well, though definitely would get quite repetitive if stretched past it's 2 hour length.

So yeah, I quite enjoyed this return to Return to Dream Land. It was just a dandy time.

Shit like this is the reason why I decided to collect DS and 3DS games. There's just so many weird, but fun games I missed out on on these systems. I have heard so much praise for this game, and I gotta say, they weren't lying. This game is absurd and fun in all the best ways. It's a fantastic rhythm game with a killer soundtrack. Not only that, but while you are playing it, the craziest shit you've ever seen is happening on the top screen. If you have a DS, you gotta play it. Don't be a fool and wait 17 years to play it like I did.

Dungeon crawlers can do several things to hook a player. Maybe it is a satisfying or tactics-driven combat system. Maybe it's all about the progression, the grind if you will. Maybe it's just fun to exploring the dungeons. This game does NONE of these things. At it's core it is a boring, dreadfully slow game that will really make you feel your time being sucked from you. I beat the first boss, and just couldn't continue playing after, for I have at least a little respect for myself. It's a damn shame too, because I respect the developer Wayforward, and "Hey Ice King!.." was actually a solid title. But I guess you gotta have some duds.

Ya know, it's just weird to me that Sega decided to make handheld version for all of their 3D Sonic games starting with Sonic Colors. Like you would think they somehow managed to cram the console game onto the DS, cause I mean it's called the same thing and they came out the same day, but no. It's a completely different game made just to capitalize on the huge handheld market. So you would think this game would suck since it's obviously not where Sega's attention was, but it's actually pretty decent.

This game plays like your classic 2D Sonic game, crammed with loop-de loop all over the place, but with a little 3D sonic added in the homing attack, plus of course the wisp powers. Due to these additions, this game feels so gosh darn fast and fun to play for most of the first half of the game. You can really zoom through levels. That said there is a bunch BS added to the game like a shitty auto-scroll section where you ride a whale, and that janky void thing you are forced to use. But overall, it is a pretty decent 2D Sonic. Definitely recommend to any big Sonic fan, assuming they haven't tried the DS version of Colors yet.

On paper, I feel like I should dislike this game. It's another open-world game jam packed with meaningless things to do, like collecting little tokens, and solving puzzles that I have seen in so many other games. Plus, I just said "Why?" SO many times playing this game. Like why is the best way to level up Sonic to go frickin' fishing? Why does it take so long to level up Sonic's speed and ring capacity, yet it's instant to level up his attack/defense? Why does the open-world keep forcing me into annoying 2D sections? What the hell is going on in the story? Ok, that one wasn't a why... but still!

Despite all these weird decisions, and a bit of jank, its an incredibly enjoyable experience. I think it manages to capture the fun that can be had in an open-world, and avoids most of the terrible aspects. For example, it avoids the whole "follow the dotted line on the minimap" design by obscuring the map at first, and putting tons of grind rails everywhere which are such a blast to ride, but lord knows where they are going to take you. Genuinely though, when I saw the first gameplay trailer, I thought the rails in the sky looked goofy as heck, but they really encouraged me to not really worry about the destination and just have fun with the game.

It also helps that everything is so quick. It doesn't take too long to get to any part of the map since the maps are pretty small, and Sonic is so quick. Honestly, this game made me realize how much slowly walking across open-worlds sucks. It's going to be hard to go back to Assassin's Creed after this. Another thing that's quick are all the challenges the map is filled with. They aren't really all that interesting, but they don't ever last that long, so they end up being pretty satisfying to do.

So yeah, this Sonic game is pretty good surprisingly. Not perfect by any means, but I had a good time with it.

Hey Pikmin is very well-made, polished game which wears it's Pikmin charm on its sleeve, but unfortunately the game is dreadfully boring. It's very pretty, the little Pikmin interactions you get throughout the game are adorable, and it feels surprisingly good to throw Pikmin by tapping the 3DS screen, but still the game put me to sleep everytime I played. it. Its just incredibly slow paced, and for the most part what you get at the beginning of the game is the entire game. The game does add some stuff as you, but not much that really changes the game in any meaningful way. The game ends up feeling like nothing more than an easy-to-make game, made only to sell games to Pikmin fans, not a game made to actually have fun with.