controlling nathan drake feels like piloting a cruise liner through wet sand. like swimming upriver with your left arm brain signal firing to your right leg. like the last guardian’s trico if trico was a straight white guy who went “lol” everytime he splattered a dude’s brains all over the floor. like an indecisive roomba unsure of what is carpet and what is dog. like attempting to slam two crash cymbals together while congealed in a solid jello-blood compound. like trying to talk to the uncle at thanksgiving who unashamedly does this gesture when talking about women. like playing chess by taking turns asking siri for random numbers and only getting to take your turn when she says the number you’re thinking of. like playing checkers over a phone call with no board and no pieces. like an uphill reverse slip n slide filled with barbeque sauce and stationed at the grand canyon. like suplexing your dog for peeing on the carpet. like getting a $1 sticky hand toy stuck on a car window and trying to stick it in exactly the same place it left a mark. like this. like this. like this. and like this. like having to awkwardly take and eat a chips ahoy cookie you said you didn’t want because this is the fifth time it’s been offered to you so this probably means something to them. like looking at the clock and dividing one hour into two thirty minute chunks which are basically only two fifteen minute chunks which might as well be three five minute chunks, so there really isn’t that much left to endure. like the last of us’ joel but much worse. like riding a horse on a treadmill. like playing a trumpet underwater. like ordering pizza and receiving a tshirt. like building a snowman made of applesauce. like a beluga whale in a shopping cart.

like, really bad.

The combat and enemies and openworld are on the basic side, but Travis himself, and the game's immense charm and style, addicting gameplay loop, witty writing, damn solid music and unique and fun boss fights (except Speed Buster lmao) outweigh the previously mentioned negatives by tenfold.

So in short; It's Suda51, what can I say? That guy's an enigma on the level of Hideo Kojima or Yoko Taro, and all of his unique ideologies and worldviews certainly carry over here, and that makes the game and the experience of playing it unlike any other.

all the fucked up parts of this game are actually good if you assume the setting is a wasteland post apocalyptic america

wonderful, charming and very cute. this game does have huge tedium but nothing that can't be made more serviceable with modern emulation tools, guides and rom-hacks.

don't let the platform of origin deceive you, this game is incredibly ambitious for the hardware that carries it and the time. it wonderfully pushes the NES and created a beautiful narrative sparkled with classic mother series humour, at a time where plenty of games a lot less ambitious than this one were coming out.

heartfelt, charming and incredibly human in a way that seems hard to do on an NES, the way text scrolls on the NES in fact adding to this charm and making punchlines land stronger.

I would caution against assuming this to be a "worse attempt at earthbound" or "just dragon quest", this game does provide a lot of its own merit to stand on if you do desire to tread past it's tedium.

a game that in my mind is defined by it's ambitions, it's technological limitations, it's game design errors and by its legacy.

I'm not a nostalgic person when it comes to game preferences, or just in general. 2005 was the worst year of my life and most media from that time fills me with a visceral disgust. With that being said, We Love Katamari is one of my favorite games of all time despite a severe handicap. This game is going to give you a good time, or burn out your PS2's disc lens trying.

The soundtrack is self-evidently great, even better than the first game and the first game's soundtrack is a contender for some of the best video game music I've ever heard. It's not just that the main stage tracks are varied and fitting of the atmosphere. The little piano jingle at the beginning of the game, Overture II, goes harder than most game's OSTs and it absolutely doesn't have to. The sound effects are fitting of how weird this game is, and I don't think there's any improvements I'd want to be made.

Graphically, it's not a leap from the first game, but it didn't have to be. It's a chaotic mess, but you never have issues reading what's happening on screen, and the visual direction of some of the stages, especially the gimmick ones adds more variety than the first game. For a Playstation 2 game, it looks fantastic and it's telling that the art style was mostly kept in tact for the remake, not much to fix outside of scaling up the resolution.

The King of All Cosmo's story is relatively simple and melodramatic for the sake of humor, but also played just straight enough to give this comedic character a meaningful arc that I got invested in. The flashback "plot" tying your progress through the game together could have been more comedic cut scenes like the original, but everything in this game is executed with such competence that I cared about the arrogant drunk and his connection with his father.

The gameplay introduces a few quality of life improvements over the original game, like less annoying collision physics and a better camera. On paper, the little tweaks this game does to the original's formula don't seem like they'd make a big difference, but they eliminated almost all frustration that I had from the original game. The stages have more of a gimmick focus, but not in a way that I found distracted from the core focus of the gameplay, and more traditional stages still existed. The game's amount of cousins and presents gives the game a ton of replayability, and I could see other people getting burnt out by the collection aspect of the game, that just never happened to me. If I start a fresh playthrough of We Love Katamari, it's easy for me to devote the next couple of days getting everything/going for larger planets.

I just have such a nice time playing this game. I'm very picky when it comes to video game humor, and all the bits in this game land like a Season 7 Simpsons episode. It's a loud and chaotic game, without coming off as obnoxious. I find the game really relaxing despite it's concept. We Love Katamari puts me in a better mood in a way that even games I'd say I like better can't. I think this game's one of the most sublime releases of the 6th generation. It's one of those games you can recommend to people who haven't touched video games before, and the most jaded brain-poisoned fans on the medium. One of the highest Smiles Per Minute pieces of media I've ever had the joy to play through.

In an age before the internet became commonplace, I didn't have as much to entertain myself within the multiple childhood bedrooms I had. A small hand-me-down television of dubious quality eventually made it's way into my possession, albeit with no cable or antenna. Three things kept me company during those rainy lonesome weekends: toys, old video game consoles, and the trio of pencils, crayons, and discarded notebook paper.

I never liked having my room overtaken by the sound of silence, so I would often keep my fan on during even the cold winter nights. The constant noise of the fan wasn't really sufficient when I wasn't actively trying to sleep, so often I would rely on the only thing my television could produce besides static white noise, the music of my video games. This music was something that could either be easily conjured up by the sound test within the options menu, something that I could only hear in-gameplay, or if I'm lucky pausing wouldn't quiet the music. It's the reason a child would do such things like constantly replay a game to the point of being able to no-hit run it, play a racing game to drive on the same tracks over and over, or destroy countless soldiers on the battlefield for an entire evening. It was all due to the cool music.

Sonic 3 and all of it's versions didn't have a sound test, at least as far as I could see. It was quite a bother, because Sonic 2 had this. Why didn't 3 have it? I love the music so much. It wasn't until I came across the miracle of gaming magazines such as Tips and Tricks, Expert Gamer, and the like that suddenly my games would find a new lease on life, and Sonic 3 would perhaps get the most mileage out of it. Go to the vines in the first level, hit left x3, right x3, and up x3. Easy enough to remember. Sure, I get a stage select, but the sound test without any strings attached was what I truly wanted. I didn't need to constantly fight Mecha Sonic as Knuckles to hear the final boss music, even if I did find him super cool. I drew him so much...

Even when I eventually did get cable in my room, there were only like four channels I'd bother watching, and unfortunately I broke my sleep curfew a lot and stayed up like many a kid would, and advertisements would eventually start being shown instead of cartoons, pro wrestling, or stand up comedy. I'd spread my blanket across the floor of my room in front of my TV to either play something or just put music on from something I liked, then I'd draw, play my game boy, arrange my massive stash of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, etc. Was I a weird kid for sometimes enjoying the company of bleeps and bloops or some insane synth-rock music I heard in a fighting game about the anime I would catch after school every day? Maybe so, but music is music regardless of it's origin. For myself, that music represents memories of the journey I have taken through every console's library. Some are just more special than the rest...

I grow older, and I go through changes for better or worse. I live, I learn. Yet, here I am typing up this pointless nostalgia piece to the very music that inspired me to create decades prior, with the sound of the CRT speakers being replaced by some HyperX headphones, and my notebook paper replaced by a digital interface.

Some things never change.

While Nintendo was never afraid of experimenting with Mario's identity, providing numerous detours in aesthetic and thematic imagery just by jumping from SMB1 to SMB3, Super Mario Land definitely earns its distinction of being "the weird one".

It interprets the plumber's magical landscape as one filled with ancient history and sci-fi cultural artifacts from our own planet that somehow feel more alien than what the Mushroom World has accustomed us to. There is definitely something very otherwordly and dreamlike about starting a level with the implication that Mario arrived on a UFO and that the enemies you will be facing are Easter Island face fellas, and the changes made to accomodate the limitations of the hardware, such as the exploding turtles and the bouncing ball power up, further elevate Super Mario Land's odd quirky vibe.

What I love the most about it though is its brevity. Low of difficulty and brisk paced, Super Mario Land is beatable under 30 minutes with little chance for game overs and with enough variety sprinkled inbetween that makes picking it up for a high score attempt highly leasurable and absolve it of the settling monotony that plagues the repeating assets and levels from SMB1. Add to that the beautifuly simplistic monochrome sprite line work and eternal earworm tunes that will never leave your head for all of your life and I'm very tempted to call it a perfect game, despite its lackluster platforming physics. A priveledged Mario that preceeds its own brand, that's pretty neat.

Try not to feel joy while listening to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f1I1i_t94E&ab_channel=GilvaSunner%3AArchive

I am Generation 1’s strongest soldier.

- Small limited inventory makes you actually consider every item you pick up and I think that’s neat. Putting this one at the start to filter anyone who can’t stand the idea of someone defending gen 1 inventory management. But if you actually go through and check what items you need and what ones you don’t every so often you won’t often cap out on bag space and you’ll probably make a good bit of money from all the vitamins and TMs and other random stuff you don’t really need. It’s just another aspect of preparation, and it makes sense for prep to be important when setting out on an adventure.

- The region layout is fun, there’s just enough freedom to let you poke around in places where you don’t really belong. It’s probably a bit awkward to navigate for someone getting into it for the first time, but on the other hand the lack of explicit guidance or scripted events benefit the sense of freedom - both in the literal exploration of the region (though it is a little more railroaded than I remember early on), and thematically in allowing it to feel like your own journey (something I find important in a Pokemon game, where the core mechanic of catching and teambuilding leans heavily into individuality).

- The region thematically is probably the most compelling. It’s incredibly ‘raw’ - putting its warts fully on display and having 10 year old kids freely wander around in it all. Future games have your protagonist take on moustache-twirling supervillains whose plans are varying degrees of nonsense, whereas Team Rocket acts and operates very much how Yakuza organisations might do (limited knowledge of this admittedly), with parallels to real life such as the Game Corner acting as both a front for their operations as well as mirroring the legal loopholes real-life pachinko parlours use to evade gambling laws (social commentary, in *my* Pokemon game??). There’s so many cute, weird and uncomfortable little details there to pick up on that sell the workings of the region, no matter how weird, with a joyful yet disarming honesty. (One of the less serious, more entertaining things I picked up on was that the Fighting Dojo lost its gym status because they got the shit kicked out of them by the Psychic gym which, like, yeah of course they did! It’s funny, but it’s also an interesting look into how the world actually functions.)

- The game has the purest and most unfiltered vision of a 'complete' Pokemon experience. Filling the dex is heavily encouraged/mandatory (you wouldn’t use a map for Rock Tunnel, would you…….), though admittedly not handled with the most elegance, and in-game trades are much more frequent than later games, as well as being more desirable - there’s a good few Pokemon that are otherwise unobtainable, and in Yellow in particular you can just get a Machamp from an in-game trade! Though exploration and battling are clearly at the forefront, it puts much more emphasis on these other elements of Pokemon that would end up being eroded away over time. (Admittedly features like the GTS and Wonder Trade help keep trading alive, though those two definitely have their own issues)

- Barren movesets and HMs come together in a really strange way. Moveslots have the least value out of any Pokemon game in most cases because most of your options just aren’t that good, so you’ll be sticking to your few good ones. This makes HMs easier than ever to slot onto your team! You can have a slot taken by Flash or Cut or even Dig or Teleport for the whole game and you probably won’t feel it all that much! Not to mention that half the mandatory HMs - Surf and Strength - are actually just really good moves (more than half if you’re not using Flash, but you WOULDN’T use a map for Rock Tunnel, WOULD you???).

- When Pikachu faints it makes the most horrifying blood-curdling scream that a GB could ever produce and I think that’s awesome

Sure there are more than enough valid criticisms of these games and I still can’t blame anyone for not liking them. Someone in the 8th gym used tackle on me. Tackle! Like I don’t mind the limited movesets that much but I think that’s a bit excessive. But I think they tend to get weirdly overhated nowadays and for reasons that don’t really make much sense? Either complaining about very specific quirks and glitches (‘The AI is so bad!!’, I yell, as I intentionally send out a poison type to make Lorelei’s Dewgong spam Rest), or comparing them to later entries when they are not those later entries (limited movesets being a big one, I won’t fight tooth and nail to defend them but they really don’t feel as bad as you’d expect coming from, like, Gen 4 onwards). And I think there’s a lot of value in these silly little games that’s easy to overlook.

Cosmology of Kyoto is an odd artefact from an era in which the popularization of personal computers, and computer games, led to a wave of experimentation with the digital medium, which gave us a lot of very interesting pieces that don't always fit with what we currently think of when we think "computer game".

If we look at it with a contemporary lens Cosmology of Kyoto is a horror game, a point-and-click adventure, a walking simulator and an edutainment game. But I don't think that kind of labelling would do it any justice. What I would call it instead is an exercise in form. The odd, fragmented structure; the freeform almost museum-like quality of the play; the functional and mood-driving use of death, are all incredibly interesting takes on how a digital space could be structured. To an extent they feel like evolutionary dead ends, but that's not for any inherent failing of their own, but because adventure games moved from there in totally different (and more lucrative) directions.

But yeah, no, you should probably play this if you like video games.

And, like, content-wise it's super spooky while at the same time being quite interesting and informative. Perfect Halloween game tbh.

But also, I dunno, I look at Cosmology of Kyoto and its very purposeful design decisions, and I think about what could have video games been if that wave of computer games had been allowed to flourish. It feels like we lost quite a lot when the medium became this "ease of use modern fun design" monolith, and left this kind of structural experimentations, not necessarily rooted in videogame-isms, behind.