1118 Reviews liked by SlapOnToast


I adore the visual appeal and vibes of Sonic Adventure 1, it's so goddamn cozy and charming, while feeling like an evolution to the original Genesis games in various ways. Yeah, the story isn't great, and some of the stages can feel a bit cumbersome, but this was such a wonderful, ambitious piece of 3D platforming fun, especially for 1998. Good shit, people that don't like this game are stupid.

I really hate this mindset that preferring the original Yakuza 1 and 2 over the Kiwami remakes is nothing but elitism.

I started playing this franchise when 0 came to PC in 2018. Even with that, I still prefer these versions of the games. These games have a unique grit to them that the Kiwami games do not capture well at all. For Kiwami 1 in particular, it feels more like 0 but worse and with less content more than a remake of this game. Worst part is that Sega is actively treating the Kiwami games as replacements instead of alternatives.

In terms of the game itself I think it mostly holds up well. Even without the ability to change the directions of combos it does not take long to get used to. Story is still entertaining with my only issue being Nishiki's sudden betrayal (the one thing Kiwami objectively did better).

If you can I do recommend starting with this game and the OG Yakuza 2 and go from release order from there, and playing 0 in between 5 and 6. You'll appreciate how the series naturally grows instead of starting with 0 (which is the best game in the series) then following up with the Kiwami games.

When they announced this in a Direct, I got really excited for what it could be, seeing the theater aesthetic combined with a little bit of mahou shoujo energy, and also being a brand-new Peach game, so it felt like it was made for me. Then it came out, and after playing all the 1F levels, I honestly already gave up.

Lots of people point out that this game is "too easy" or "just made for kids" (I could go on a rant about this one part for hours, but I just want to keep things short), but I think that none of these have to do with the main problem. The thing is, this game is just built in a way that you are never really engaging with it. Everything is already solved, and the game is just waiting for you to press a button to conclude the "puzzle." All the cool ideas it has last so shortly or are affected by the previously mentioned principle that plagues it. All the stages are decorated in a way that tries to please you from a visual point, but they are no different from an empty one when you walk around them. It just kinda makes all of it worse with the fact that I played Ape Escape 3 this year, and it's kinda just the exact opposite of all of this? They share some motifs when building levels (a ninja-themed one, a cowboy one, etc.), but everything there is more tactile and feels alive. The monkeys around the stage are all doing their own thing relevant to the theme chosen for the level, while also changing how they respond to the player, be it with their attacks or positioning. So, while there it feels like you're actually playing a role and being a part of the show, in Peach Showtime, it just all feels like I'm watching things unfold and that's it.

"Nintendo's Balan Wonderworld"

For a game so small and so simple, it feels odd having so much to say on it, but here we are. Nintendo has struggled to make Peach their own character for decades. There were a handful of games that came pretty close like the first 3 Paper Mario Games, Mario Odyssey, and, most related, Super Princess Peach. I have yet to play it, but the general consensus on that game is that it's "fine", but they were hoping Peach would get a game that would actually make use of her as her own character instead of making what can be somehow described as "2D Mario for Babies."

Well, here we are! This is that game! This is Peach's first solo game in 19 years and the first one that dares to make a unique gameplay style for her alone, similar to what they did with Luigi, Captain Toad, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and Wario. This has all of the makings of an incredibly successful game that would spawn its own dedicated spin-off series that would get a new game every once in a while. And yet... after playing this game, It's become apparent how little this game offers. But I'm getting ahead of myself as there is actually a fair amount of stuff to appreciate.

The game as a whole looks quite good. The cutscenes are incredibly well-polished, I love the new character and costume designs, I love the animations of Peach's moves in her costumes, and I love the stageplay theming and the little details done to make it pop like how the camera moves and how the stage props show up, it sells us on the bit here. There are a couple of technical issues with this game I'll get into later, but on a purely artistic level, this game is quite strong and manages to make a unique impression. I also really admire the ambition to, like I said at the top, give Peach their own type of game that fits her as a character. There truly is no game quite like this one in the Mario series.

But that seems to be where the good things kind of end for me, so let's start with some of the more minor issues and slowly build from there. To keep on topic, yes, the game from an art direction standpoint is incredibly strong... however, it's clear that this game is struggling on this ancient ass system because not only is the resolution, even in docked mode, weirdly low but there are a couple of moments where the game chugs down to comical levels. It's most noticeable in cutscenes, costume transformations, and some of the bosses near the end of the game. So that's not great, but to round out the aesthetic gripes I have with this game, I don't think I like the game's music all that much. None of it sounds as bad as say, Yoshi's Crafted World (keep this name in mind. It will be important later), but none of it really jumps out as all that good apart from a couple of songs in the Cowboy and Mighty Peach segments.

If you're wondering how the game is narratively for some reason, don't bother. The extent of the story is that you get trapped in a theater with some purple guys who make everyone depressed and you have to make everyone not depressed (See? Just like Balan! Like I said earlier!). There is one minor story beat that happens later that had me sit up for a second, but it's quickly reversed so that's great. Looove that. Now, don't get me wrong, I was not expecting this game to have a super deep story. But some people pre-launch were hoping at least for something small and comedic similar to the modern-day Paper Mario games, but it seems to be a bit closer to Mario Wonder in this regard. Nothing special, but it doesn't need to be. However, this flaw seems to compound when I talk about the other issues this game has.

Princess Peach Showtime, weirdly enough, doesn't feel all that fun to play. Which is weird coming from.. a Nintendo-published platformer? It's like.. usually the one thing they get right. Peach's controls are sluggish, janky, and imprecise at points. The controls somewhat improve with a couple of the costumes like swordfighter, but it never feels all that fun to use. The only costumes that I actually had a genuinely fun time playing with were the Dashing Thief and Mighty Peach. All of these different costumes control very simply and just feel like the watered-down abilities of characters from other games, it doesn't make me feel like I'm "powered up" it makes me feel like I'm caught up to where I should be. (See? Just like- wait.)

Also, if you were hoping for a single costume that would have its own dedicated section in the game that wasn't already shown in the game's numerous trailers, then I'm sorry to disappoint you, but apart from one you get at the very end, every single costume you get has been shown in the trailers. I guess this is the fault of the marketing, and I'd definitely take quality over quantity, and these are all distinct enough to where I couldn't think of too many more to add, but at least hide them!

This game is also PISS easy. Not like normal Nintendo Easy where the games are still engaging, like so easy it becomes boring easy, without any way of making the game any more difficult for yourself. Now, again, I didn't expect Peach to be a "hard" game, but I at least expected it to be on the level of something like Mario Wonder or Luigi's Mansion 3, which were also easy, but they were also fun and engaging. This game takes the easy scale so far in the other direction that it just isn't that rewarding. You get 5 hit points (or up to 8, if you want), combat arenas and puzzles are incredibly simple, and bosses never pose as a threat and can sometimes be defeated after a single round. The ones that drag are the ones that are less fun and the ones that start to be kind of fun and interesting end so incredibly quickly that I feel like I'm getting edged out of fun gameplay.

The result of all of this; the lack of any challenge throughout the game, the sluggishness of the controls, the mega-basic bosses, the fact that none of the costume mechanics have any depth, and the nature of this game having only a few levels per costume but them being weirdly long, makes this possibly the single most boring Nintendo Published switch game. There are a bunch of switch games I personally think are worse, and this game does have a couple of redeeming qualities, but when you are making a video game for entertainment, then it not being entertaining means it has failed its job. I was initially going to give it a middling 5/10, but the longer I thought about it, the more the game's sleep-inducing gameplay and lack of direction kinda made me sad.

Though, it's not all that surprising. Through data mines of the game's demo, we have found that the game was developed by Good-Feel, the creators of Kirby's Epic Yarn, Wario-Land Shake It, and the two most recent Yoshi games. I didn't really like Crafted World all that much either, but at least my expectations going into it were already on the floor and it was part of a series I lost any and all interest in. This is a brand-new game. And one, based on those data mines, we can tell has been in the works for a while. Its code name "PJ037" hints it started development in between Yoshi's Crafted World "PJ033" and Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn "PJ040". Seeing as how the latter was revealed in September of 2018 and the Switch dev kits released in 2016, I think I can safely assume that this game has been in development since 2017, which would have been a whole 7 years of development. When you play the game with this assumption in mind, you can easily see the cracks of a long and tumultuous game development cycle in nearly every corner of this game. It feels like a game that was born from the idea of "Hey! let's make a peach game!" and they didn't know exactly what they wanted that game to be so they just tried to sample a bunch of small and basic minigames to see what stuck. It lacks any kind of direction or any interesting elements aside from its stageplay theme and some creative designs. It feels like it was supposed to be so much more, or at least something different. Let's hope that whatever they plan to do with this series next, whether a sequel to this or a brand new thing, they come up with a more solid direction for the game to take.

Because, frankly, Peach deserves better than this.

Deeply embarrassing.

Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.

Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.

This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.

The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.

The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.

Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.

Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.

What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.

If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.

Reviews of other games: The deckbuilder combat is certainly enthralling, but I'm not sure if it synergizes with the roguelike structure or if it's just a cheap and trendy cash-in, similar to yesteryear's Soulslikes...

Reviews of P3R: When I was fourteen years old I would lay in bed with my eyes open and ask for God to kill me. My brother left behind a beat-up PS2 after he went off to college where he would later die of an OD

Alarming! Boom, boom, walla, walla, dance, dance, Charming!

The makings of a full super duper lovely and cute hamtaro season congealed into one very wonderful ~metroidvania-esque~ package. It's really sweet <3 Lot of smiles, lot of wonderfully relaxing and cozy vibes while simply taking care of all the hamsters as you help them find love!!!

in the words of pantera ... fucking hostile!!!! an antifun tour de force, disrespects every second of the player's time, mocks u, kills u out of nowhere repeatedly and without mercy... AND teaches you that Love is all that can lighten the misery of Work :-)

I have to admit, I really commend whoever decided Action 52 deserved separate pages for it's games and giving me a shitload of free one-star ratings to add to my profile with Meong being the only half-star one, because it irrationally pisses me off like the other shit on that side of my rating scale.

However, you know what? Mash Man deserves it's own page, because this shit does nothing but make me laugh my goddamn ass off. I really want to meet the person in the brainstorm session who went, "hey what if we get this bald dude in sunglasses with big fuckin' feet goin' around stomping shit"? You think it's creative bankruptcy, but it's in fact creative masterwork. I want to smash Neil Druckmann's face onto the blunt end of a toilet seat until he realizes the sheer brilliance of this thing that is indeed a video game.

I get to cackle like a toothless crone with the very idea that someone could realize I rated Mash Man higher than the MercurySteam Metroid II remake or Skyrim. This shit fuckin' rules.

this is like if there was a game with an insane space alternate dimension plotline to explain why kazooie is in banjo's backpack

I don't feel it's controversial to say this - we are living in the worst era of video games in the medium’s history. In this post-creative type age, AAA games are designed by corporate committees, the bleeding hearts and artists chained to their whim. Here's $10 billion dollars, make a game. Your livelihoods are threatened if it falls beneath our expectations, except not really because we're going to lay off 60% of your team anyway after launch. We want a remake of an old classic of yours now that we've bought the rights from your old publisher - we'll give you no more than five years to finish regurgitating the same game you made in a fifth of the time two decades ago but your game will still come out unpolished, unappreciated, your bloody hands and dried tear ducts for naught. We're your new publishers, we're looking for a change of pace from your streak of critically acclaimed titles - we feel a live service game will be more beneficial to us. We’ll be looking into layoffs and a potential merger if the Metacritic score doesn’t meet our expectations. It cannot be understated or made any clearer - the bubble is not about to burst; the bubble is bursting.

It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.

What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.

User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.

2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.

You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.

Trivia Time!

Contrary to what you may have heard, this is actually the best Donkey Kong game we've ever released. Why didn't you buy it? Koizumi-san was so SAD.

It should have been a hit! You all should have played it! We could have been 8 games deep in the Jungle Beat series by now! DK Bongos should have been littering tens of millions of basements across the globe just like sticky Wii Remotes and busted Joy-Con®! WE COULD HAVE ACHIEVED TRUE GREATNESS, BUT YOU LET KOIZUMI DOWN

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!

''if i had superpowers id be just like homelander or omniman''

me with superpowers:

Just the right amount of Kirby, Just the right amount of Epic, and just the right amount of Yarn. Thanks kirby