This game is like some kind of Guilty Gear party game. Seems like they tried to take on Smash with a 4-player version of Guilty Gear, but man is it clunky. You have to change the direction of your character by pressing a button. I understand why they had to do that, but it shows why nobody else is trying to do a 4-player traditional fighting game. There's a beat-em up mode here too which is.... fine I guess? There's also a mode dedicated to Robo-Ky, because of course there is.

Objectively, this game is kind of bad. But I kind of love it? It's just so weird, and it really tries something new. Plus, as a big fan of Strive, I just love visiting their old games, and seeing the roots of Strive. Happy I decided to pick up this game at the local retro game store, even if I probably won't be playing a whole lot of it.

The only thing this game has got going for it is it's standout art-style, but that art-style is nowhere near good enough to save this game due to it's awful gameplay. The game feels a lot Myst, but in reality it's puzzles are essentially just finding the right switch to flip in it's maze-like levels in order to progress. It's essentially 90% walking. There is the occasional slide puzzle, but they don't really do much for the game. Much of the game is "puzzles", but you do eventually have to fight monsters. Fighting the monsters in this is dreadful. You have to awkwardly run around hoping the enemy misses it's vomit then get directly up in it's face and hope your weapon actually hits the thing. Then do that like 4 or 5 times.

The games creepy vibes and disgusting art-styles are good enough for me to recommend checking it out if you think it looks cool and you got game pass. Just know you are going to be either bored or irritated most of the time playing this game.

I was going to wait until I can actually play this game to review it, but fuck it. Activision-Blizzard sucks (obviously), and this launch sucks. They blame their problems on a DDOS attack, and yet the game is still broken.

I put over 1000 hrs into Overwatch, and I really hoped Overwatch 2 would breath some life back into the game for me, but it looks like that's not going to happen. There just isn't whole lot new here. Making it 5v5 is a radical change, but I feel like that just makes the game less interesting as a whole. There is only 3 new heroes (which I can't frickin' play because the game is broken), and a few redesigns which for the most part make characters more generic. Bastion and Orisa are no longer these extremely unique characters due to their reliance in being stationary. No... instead they just do damage slightly differently from the rest of the cast. They also removed almost all crowd control as well, because reddit complained hard enough I guess. Mei was my favorite character when I first started playing Overwatch, because she was so fun and unique. I loved freezing people and putting up walls. Well now a little of that uniqueness has been rubbed out as she can't freeze people anymore without her ultimate. Only nice things I can say is I do like the new characters (even they aren't terribly unique), and the new Push mode is pretty good.

Over the years, it's been clear that the Devs don't really know what to do with Overwatch. Honestly, I don't envy them either. Seems like a difficult job. Before the game came out they actually forced people to play in a group of six friends, and you could really tell. The game wasn't designed to be play with 6 rando's as it requires a lot of teamwork, and ya know.... someone to play tank and support. This lead to loads of toxicity and just plain unfun games where not single soul willing to play tank/support. So they went to the role queue system, but then queue times for DPS were WAY too long. To me this has been the main issue of Overwatch, and something that this game is in some ways trying work through. Were they successful? I think somewhat, but they solved it by removing some of the uniqueness and identity of Overwatch.

Anyways.... this game just makes me sad. I still like Overwatch, and this game is certainly still Overwatch, but it just ain't the same man. I didn't even talk the shitty monetization stuff they are doing in this game! But whatever.... Here's hoping the co-op PVE mode they are making is actually worth a damn.

This game kicks so much ass. Who would've thought that turning DOOM into a rhythm game would work so well. Only real complaint is that the shield guys suck. I don't really understand how the game expects me to get past their shield, I just kinda shoot and pray. It also kind of sucks to be getting into the music, and lose the vocals track because you can't find an enemy or you get hit by a stray fireball. It does feel good to be in the zone keeping the multiplier up, but I am conflicted on tying the full music track to the multiplier. The game certainly could be longer with more variety in weapons and levels, but as it is, it is an excellent game pass game.

I seriously respect this game for doing something incredibly unique. It is really cool going through these lost movie clips, and trying to figure out what happened to Marissa and why these movies didn't release. It also clearly has a lot to say about artist, and the making films n such, though honestly I am not smart enough to unpack all that.

However, this game does have a serious issue with pacing. Either they needed a better method for delivering these clips, or they needed to cut the fat. Like did they need a 5 minute scene of Marissa just dancing AND a subverted version of that scene? It's not particularly interesting, and I don't learn anything really. And of course it sucks that I have little control on the next scene I am brought to. It just leads to me clicking stuff repeatedly in hopes I get something new. Maybe they could make the object relations less broad? Like when I click on one of Minsky's paintings, I don't think I should be brought to a painting of Mother Mary.

This game also includes a bunch of secret footage, which at first is a bit eerie and exciting, but they all are more or less uncovered the same way and their contents are quite similar. The secret footage gets quite dull, quite fast. At least for me anyway.

With those complaints, the game starts feeling quite aimless after awhile. I started to question when the heck the game was going to end. Turns out it just kind of ends randomly? Like I don't know if it ended, because of the particular last scene I saw or if it was due the number of clips I uncovered? I have no idea. Honestly still don't really know why Ambrosio didn't release, but I still got the ending. I guess it was just too horny? Idk. Immortality is still incredibly unique and respectable, but the experience of playing it really wore on me.

This game is basically a ROM hack of SMB1, but made by Nintendo. I definitely understand why Nintendo of America decided not to release game stateside though. There is poison mushrooms which to take the place of normal mushrooms a lot of the time, lots of precise platforming, some devious enemy and hidden block placement, and frickin' wind. Heck, they let you jump over the flag in one of the World 3 levels, which leads you to a warp pipe that brings back to the first level. Very mean. But with the ability to time travel on the Switch, this game is actually quite decent. Not as good as the first game, but I like it.

It's wild this game ever made it past prototyping. You would have thought they would've made the prototype, realized how bad an idea the control scheme was, and immediately ditched the idea. But no. They had to make a game that "justified" the Gamepad's existence, and that game had to be a Star Fox game for some reason.

In this game, the tv screen will typically give you the normal view you remember from Star Fox 64, while on the Gamepad you have the cockpit view. The TV view is mostly for navigation, and the Gamepad view is for aiming. This means that no matter what screen you look at, you are unhappy, because either your view is awkwardly limited to the cockpit, or you just can't aim properly. You might think, "Why can't I just aim on the TV", and you can.... kind of. You see, they purposefully made the aiming reticle on the TV inaccurate so as to justify this control scheme. So you can use the TV for aiming (which I did unless I really needed precision), but it's going to feel bad. Making the aiming reticle inaccurate is one of the worse design decisions I have ever seen. Can't believe this game was made by Miyamoto.

I should also mention that sometimes the game makes the TV screen view practically unusable by locking it to a cinematic view, making it stupidly hard to navigate with it. This forces you to awkwardly move around with the cockpit view, which just sucks every time.

The game isn't all bad. It's great seeing a Star Fox game in HD, and the transforming Arwing is super cool. Also when the game isn't super hard, it can occasionally feel like Star Fox 64.... which made me just want to play Star Fox 64, so as to not put up this game's bs.

But honestly perhaps even worse than the controls.... they put a frickin' stealth mission in this game?!?! It's not even good stealth mission! You just VERY slowly fly a helicopter around and drop a small (also very slow) robot in order to hack computers. It is absurdly boring. It's wild that that level actually made it to the final game.

Tony Hawk is back babyyyyy! When I was a young whippersnapper, the Tony Hawk were all the rage. But then, Activision did what they do best, ran the franchise into the ground by producing far too many games in an effort to make bank on its popularity. The quality of the games dipped, and people lost interest. There have been a few attempts to bring the series back, but this is the first one that actually worked.

This game is just as fun as I remember them being. The skating feels so good, and it is just so much fun navigating the world using grinds and wall rides. Though I wish this game was more just a remake of the first two games. As a remake it is quite good, but the "3 minutes to complete a series of challenges" structure of the game just isn't terribly interesting to me. Much prefer Pro Skater 4 honestly. What I really want to see though is just an entirely new game. This game is great, but just feels like a prettied up nostalgia trip.

It's easy say that Splatoon 3 is basically just Splatoon 2 again, because in a lot of ways it is. When you get into a turf war match, Splatoon 3 feels almost identical to Splatoon 2, just with some new weapons, maps, and specials added. That isn't really a bad thing necessarily though as Splatoon 2's was an incredibly fun and unique take on the competitive shooter genre, and Splatoon 3 is just as fun, but perhaps not quite as fresh with the series being 7 years old now at this point. That said, what makes Splatoon 3 worth the $60 (for at least fans of the series) is all the quality of life updates and sheer amount of content here.

This game has a lot of quality of life improvements that make the game quite bit better than it's predecessor. One of the first you may notice is that the cutscene that plays when you boot the game up is now skippable, which is fantastic. The lobby system now has you able to walk around a sort of training ground while you queue for a match making the wait a lot more bearable. You now spawn into the maps by shooting into them, which is a whole lot more fun than the previous system. Salmon Run is available 24/7 now. You have only one rank now instead of one rank for each mode, plus the ranked mode is designed around sets of 7 matches where you need to win 5 games giving real nice quitting points in the game. The ranked doesn't just judge you on the number of wins you got though, but also on the awards you got which means you can rank up even if you lose, which helps get rid of the frustration of bad teammates. While not quality of life per se, they also added a squid roll for mobility and iframes, and squid surge which allows you to get some vertical height when jumping out of a wall. All these add up and make the game a lot more fun.

Want to note also that the net code is also pretty good, but connection errors happen way more often than they should. The connection errors aren't frequent enough to make me stop playing, but if you play for like an hour it is very likely you have at least one. Hopefully this is fixed as it is incredibly annoying.

Much of the new content in this game bring a little closer to what most modern day competitive shooters do. For example, you now have a name tag which you can customize with a banner, a customizable title, and badges. You can also unlock victory emotes and decorations for your locker, because yes, you have a locker you can customize in this game. The locker doesn't affect anything, but adds one more area of customizability that will hopefully increase the longevity of this game. All of these things (except badges which are unlocked through challenges) can be unlocked through the catalogue which is this games (free) battle pass system, and a gacha system which you can spend in-game money on. All this will help keep people coming back to the game, as it gives you a sense that you are working towards something. Specifically you are working towards that sick dab emote at level 98. Don't want to be missing that!

This game sees the return of Salmon Run as well. It is more or less the same as Splatoon 2's, just with some new events and boss salmonids to encounter. Though it is worth noting you can throw the eggs now which is nice. The big new thing is of course us the new final boss which can randomly occur called Cohozuna. Cohozuna is absurdly difficult, but a really fun fight. In this fight, you can throw eggs at him to deal a good chunk of damage, but also balance the fact that there are tons of other boss salmonids to worry about, plus an incredibly short timer. Only complaint is that beating Cohozuna doesn't seem to award that much, but still pretty fun nonetheless.

With another Splatoon comes another single-player campaign. This one might be the best of the series (except for perhaps octo-expansion). It is admittedly more of the same, but with some big hubs to explore and more diversity of missions (seemingly quite inspired by octo-expansion). A little disappointing they didn't spice it up this time around, but it's still a solid campaign.

This game is also a card game now? The card game is called Tableturf Battle where you placing what are basically tetris pieces in order to claim the most turf. It's honestly better than it has any right of being, though certainly no where near as good as Turf-wars and Salmon Run. Bafflingly though, you can't seem to play against other players. You can play against other players decks, but they are still AI controlled which is incredibly lame.

Splatoon 3 is easily the best of the series, no contest. There is so much polish here, and the sheer amount of content and stuff to do is fantastic. It does feel practically identical to Splatoon 2 in a lot of ways, but Splatoon fans certainly won't regret picking this up. However, if you weren't a big fan of Splatoon, I doubt this will get you into it. I'm looking forward to putting another hundred hours into a new Splatoon game though, and very excited to see the new content they add to this game over the next two years!

I played this game back when it first came out on Switch, and thought it was the best platformer I have ever played. Decided to replay it on PS4 to get all the trophies this time, and I still think that.

This game has some of the best difficulty balancing and level design of any game I've seen. Most people will find the main story of the game challenging to get through, but it's still very doable for those who aren't very good at platformers. If you struggle more than most though, and want to see the excellent story to it's ending, the game has assist mode which allows you to customize the game to make it easier. It's an extremely well done, and thoughtful way to make the game more widely accessible. Now if you are like me and like a challenging platformer, you can go for and collect all of the strawberries. The strawberries are either a hidden secret, an extra platforming challenge, or force you to do a platforming challenge in a more difficult way. This way the story gives challenge to those who want it. Of course the game also goes further with B-sides and C-sides, which are harder versions of story's levels. Easy to ignore for those who just want the story, but really fun and satisfying to complete for those after a challenge.

The platforming itself is also rock solid. The dash feels absurdly good to use, and it's really fun using some the techniques they teach you after the main game like the wavedash to really break some levels. I imagine this game would be absurdly fun to speed run because of that. What's cool about the platforming though is that it is not just a normal platformer like a Mario or Super Meat Boy, but there is often a bit of a puzzle element to it. You often have to ask yourself where you need to use your dash to past a screen. It's not necessarily completely unique to Celeste, but it did feel particularly prominent in this game.

I also seriously need to shout out the composer for this game Lena Raine. She writes some incredible music, and she really outdid herself with this game. Some of the best video game music I have ever heard. I love the way the song Farewell is used in the DLC level. As you make it through the level the song gets closer and closer to its climax, and it is just so satisfying and beautiful. I do wonder sometimes how much of my love for this game is due to the music alone. It's really that good.

I don't think have anything more say.... just play this game gosh darnit. Just about everyone can get something out of it whether it be the wonderful story about overcoming anxiety and depression, the incredible and fun platforming, and/or the beautiful music by Lena Raine. This game is just about perfection, and is easily one of my favorite games.

As a big Kirby fan, the Kirby spinoff are some of my favorites. Kirby's Dream Course is one of my favorite for the Super Nintendo; I spent an absurd amount of time in City Trial for Air Ride, and I adored unlocking all the cosmetics in Canvas Curse. However, Kirby spinoffs these days have either simply repurposed the platforming mechanics of the main games, or just expanded on the sub-games from Triple Deluxe/Planet Robobot. This is why Dream Buffet makes me so happy; it is first truly unique Kirby spinoff title since Mass Attack in 2011, and I am pleased to report that it is quite fun!

In this game's main mode you partake in a series of 4 games, where the goal is to collect the most strawberries. The first and third games are races which are separated by a short minigame. The last game is a free for all where you use copy abilities to knock strawberries out of each other.

The races feel very Mario Kart inspired. Copy abilities are dished out via item boxes, but the item boxes can just randomly give you strawberries like the coins in Mario Kart. There are also a myriad of catch up mechanics like Mario Kart, though they are quite a bit more prominent here. Every time I've been confidently in first place, another Kirby always seems to somehow catch up as if they just move faster than me. In this way, the game tends to feel a lot more like Mario Party. Even if you are in the lead, that can pretty quickly change, especially if you are unlucky with the item boxes. No where is this more clear than in the free for all's. If you aren't careful, you can very easily go from first place to fourth in this last game. This can be frustrating, but still kinda fun in the masochistic Mario Party way.

The game also has bonus strawberries at the end, similar to bonus stars. These can also decide the winner, but you can aim towards winning at least some of them. The first set of bonus strawberries always goes out to the Kirby who eats the most cherries, blueberries, or blackberries during races. So aiming to eat these can net those extra strawberries, giving the bonus strawberries a little bit more strategy than the Mario Party counterpart.

As you play the game you will unlock new colors and costumes for Kirby, as well as treats to decorate a cake with designs from previous games. These are all very adorable, and any big Kirby fan will have a fun nostalgic time collecting all of the cosmetics, of which there is quite a bit.

The game does have some issues. The most bazaar issue is that the game only supports 2 player locally on one system, and those 2 players can't even go online with random people. You'd think a party game would naturally support 4 player local multiplayer, but I guess that wasn't a priority. Another problem is that the net code isn't very good. It is delay based meaning you will significantly more input delay online than offline, which isn't great. Also, if one person has a lot of ping or really bad internet, the game will play like a slideshow. Fortunately, I only have had one game play like that, though lag spikes do commonly happen throughout a game which will cause the game to freeze for a half second. This sucks, but they aren't deal breakers for me since it is primarily a fun, casual party game.

The game can also get a bit repetitive since it is very simple, and what you can do is pretty limited. However, to me, it's the type of game you play for just a few rounds here and there. It's quick to boot up, and the games themselves last less than 10 minutes. So I plan on continuing to play this game in this fashion for the next few months. Or at least until I get the Marx costume.

Kirby's Dream Buffet is a really fun online party game. It is definitely worth the $15 price tag. Just don't buy it if you were wanting to play this locally with all your friends.

Really ambitious game for the Gameboy Color. Aesthetically it looks really nice. It's very colorful and the animations are quite good. There is also a frickin' day/night cycle which is wild. It honestly feels kind of like a SNES game that somehow got stuck on the GBC.

That said the game is kind of annoying to play. Combat very limiting and awkward. You occasionally need to take leaps of faith, because either you can't see the platform or don't even know it's a platform to begin with. Backtracking just sucks. Like the game has a pretty linear world, so it doesn't make sense to force me to backtrack through levels I have already done. It doesn't feel like I am exploring a world, it feels like I am being forced to play the same platforming levels again. Some of this is certainly limitations of the GBC , other issues feel like they could've been avoided.

I will admit I did not get too far, so maybe the game gets better, but there are too many games I want to play for me to continue playing this. I am interested in playing the sequels though as this game does show promise, and I have heard good things. It's clear the developers put a lot of work into this game, it just isn't very fun in the year 2022.