Without a doubt the greatest game I’ve ever played. The grinch is one of the most classic movie characters and this makes him even more classic.
To be able to play as max is a genius move on the Devs part that is the greatest feature in video game history
Puzzles, you’ve got them
Grinch gun, you’ve got it
The dump, you’ve got it

The submarine is phenomenal and I am so glad it’s a part of the game

The voice of the grinch is true to life and a really great grinch voice

The rotten egg launcher is the best video game weapon and the mayor of whoville is the best video game character.

I love the chisel scene in The Grinch, it’s really funny and just like the grinch movie humour.

To be able to sabatoge all of the homes of whoville is to be able to experience the joys of Christmas and destroying property.

What is there not to love, oh yeah, the smell of his rotten eggs haha

nintendo salvaging the american gaming market with the release of the NES was the modern inflection point for our industry, in some ways that are less obvious than others. the console enshrined gaming as a medium with legitimacy beyond the original fad-like relevance of the atari VCS, but the centralization of this success around nintendo gave the company an uncomfortable amount of leverage. this immediately portended poorly with the simultaneous release of the console's killer app: super mario bros., which gestured to a sinister rejection of the console's original intent. look to the japanese launch line-up and you'll see arcade staples such as donkey kong and popeye; games that lauded precise, restricted play with definitive rules and short runtimes. super mario bros. was a refutation of this design philosophy in favor of the loosey-goosey variable jump heights, frequent health restoration items, and long hallways of copy-paste content replacing the tightly paced experiences that defined the era before. the NES still featured arguably the greatest console expressions of the rigorous arcade action experiences that defined the '80s - castlevania, ninja gaiden, and the early mega mans all come to mind - but the seeds super mario bros. planted would presage a shift into more and more experiences that coddled the player rather than testing their fortitude. in some ways, super mario bros. lit the match that would leave our gaming landscape in the smoldering ruins of the AAA design philosophy.

the '90s only deepened nintendo's exploration of trends that would further attempt to curb the arcade philosophy, which still floated on thanks to the valiant efforts of their competitors at sega, capcom, konami, and others. super mario world kicked off nintendo's 16-bit era with an explicitly non-linear world map that favored the illusion of charting unknown lands over the concrete reality of learning play fundamentals, and its pseudo-sequel yoshi's island would further de-emphasize actual platforming chops by giving the player a generous hover and grading them on their ability to pixel hunt for collectables rather than play well, but the most stunning example of nintendo's decadence in this era is undoubtedly donkey kong '94. the original donkey kong had four levels tightly wound around a fixed jump arc and limited ability for mario to deal with obstacles; its ostensible "remake" shat all over its legacy by infusing mario's toolkit with such ridiculous pablum such as exaggerated flip jumps, handstands, and other such acrobatics. by this point nintendo was engaging in blatant historical revisionism, turning this cornerstone of the genre into a bug-eyed circus romp, stuffed with dozens of new puzzle-centric levels that completely jettisoned any semblance of toolkit-oriented level design from the original game. and yet, this was the final fissure before the dam fully burst in 1996.

with the release of the nintendo 64 came the death knell of the industry: the analog stick. nintendo's most cunning engineers and depraved designers had cooked up a new way to hand unprecedented control to the player and tear down all obstacles standing in the way of the paternalistic head-pat of a "job well done" that came with finishing a game. with it also came this demonic interloper's physical vessel, super mario 64; the refined, sneering coalescence of all of nintendo's design tendencies up to this point. see here a game with enormous, previously unfathomable player expression, with virtually every objective solvable in myriad different ways to accommodate those who refuse to engage with the essential challenges the game offers. too lazy to even attempt some challenges at all? feel free to skip over a third of the game's "star" objectives on your way to the final boss; you can almost see the designers snickering as they copy-pasted objectives left and right, knowing that the majority of their player base would never even catch them in the act due to their zombie-like waddle to the atrociously easy finish line. even as arcade games stood proud at the apex of the early 3D era, super mario 64 pulled the ground out underneath them, leaving millions of gamers flocking to similar experiences bereft of the true game design fundamentals that had existed since the origination of the medium.

this context is long but hopefully sobering to you, the reader, likely a gamer so inoculated by the drip-feed of modern AAA slop that you likely have regarded super mario 64 as a milestone in 3D design up to now. yet, it also serves as a stark contrast to super mario 64 ds, a revelation and admission of guilt by nintendo a decade after their donkey kong remake plunged modern platformers into oblivion.

the d-pad alone is cool water against the brow of one in the throes of a desert of permissive design techniques. tightening up the input space from the shallow dazzle of an analog surface to the limitations of eight directions instantly reframes the way one looks at the open environments of the original super mario 64. sure, there's a touch screen option, but the awkward translation of a stick to the literal flat surface of the screen seems to be intentionally hobbled in order to encourage use of the d-pad. while moving in a straight line may still be simple, any sort of other action now begets a pause for reflection over the exact way one should proceed. is the sharp 45 or 90 degree turn to one side "good enough", or will I need to make a camera adjustment in-place? for this bridge, what combination of angles should I concoct in order to work through this section? the removal of analog control also forces the addition of an extra button to differentiate between running and walking, slapping the player on the wrist if they try to gently segue between the two states as in the original. the precision rewards those who aim to learn their way around the rapid shifts in speed while punishing those who hope they can squeak by with the same sloppy handling that the original game allowed.

on its own this change is crucial, but it still doesn't cure the ills of the original's permissive objective structure. however, the remake wisely adds a new character selection system that subtly injects routing fundamentals into the game's core. for starters: each of the characters has a separate moveset, and while some characters such as yoshi and luigi regrettably have the floaty hover and scuttle that I disdained in yoshi's island, it's at least balanced here by removing other key aspects of their kit such as wall jumps and punches. the addition of wario gives the game a proper "hard mode," with wario's lumbering speed and poor jump characteristics putting much-needed limiters on the game's handling. for objectives that now explicitly require wario to complete, the game is effectively barring you from abusing the superior movement of the original game by forcing you into a much more limited toolkit with rigid d-pad controls, the kind of limitations this game absolutely needed in order to shine.

that last point about objectives that specifically require a given character is key: the remake segments its objectives based on which characters are viable to use to complete them. however, while in some cases the game may telegraph which specific characters are required for a particular task, in many cases the "correct" solution is actually to bounce between the characters in real time. this is done by strategically placing hats for each of the characters throughout the map - some attached to enemies and some free-floating - which allow the player to switch on the fly. this adds new detours to the otherwise simple objectives that vastly increases their complexity: which toolkit is best suited for which part of each mission? how should my route be planned around the level to accommodate hats I need to pick up? will I be able to defeat an enemy that's guarding the hat if I had to? this decision-making fleshes out what was previously a mindless experience.

there's one additional element to this system that truly elevates it to something resembling the arcade experiences of yore. while you can enter a level as any character, entering as yoshi allows you to preemptively don the cap of any other character as you spawn in, preventing the player from having to back-track to switch characters. on the surface this seems like another ill-advised QoL feature, but some subtle features reveal something more fascinating. yoshi has no cap associated with him, so to play as him, one must enter the level with him. however, you often need to switch to another character in the middle of a level. how do you switch back? by taking damage. to solve the ridiculously overstuffed eight piece health bar of the original, this remake transforms it into a resource you expend in order to undergo transformation. sure, one could theoretically collect coins in order to replenish this resource, but this adds a new layer onto the routing that simply didn't exist in the original game, where there were so many ways to circumvent obstacles with the permissive controls that getting hit in the first place was often harder than completing the objective. by reframing the way that the player looks at their heath gauge, the game is calling to mind classic beat 'em ups, where the health gauge often doubled as a resource to expend for powerful AoE supers.

the game still suffers from much of the rotten design at the core of its forebear; these above changes are phenomenal additions, but they're grafted onto a framework that's crumbling as you delve into it. regardless, the effort is admirable. for a brief moment, nintendo offered an apology to all of those hurt by their curbstomping of the design philosophies that springboarded them into juggernaut status in the first place, and they revitalized classic design perspectives for many millions more who first entered the world of gaming after it had already been tainted by nintendo's misdeeds. the galaxy duology, released a few years after this game, attempted to rework the series from the ground up with a new appreciation for arcade design by limiting the bloated toolkit of previous games and linearizing levels, but the damage had already been done. the modern switch era has magnified nintendo's worst tendencies, putting proper execution and mechanical comprehension to the wayside as they accelerate the disturbing "the player is always right" principles that have infested their games since that original super mario bros. by looking at super mario 64 ds in this context, we at least get a glimpse of what a better world could have looked like had nintendo listened to their elders all along.

Reggie Fils-Aimé famously said “if it’s not fun, why bother” during Nintendo’s E3 2017 showcase. For some, these have become words to die by. An easy phrase to parrot when the individual faces a system they can't come to terms with. Some see it as a harmless way of saying they don't enjoy what they're playing, but I have never appreciated its implications.

If your definition of “fun” equates to anything you like, this quote probably resonates with you. But I've rarely seen the word used that way, and instead, this obsession with fun’s necessity in games seems more damaging than anything.

“Fun” is fast, approachable, and easy to control. An immediate stoking of the attention span, constant engagement, or a light enjoyment lessened in friction. Some see Dark Souls as unfun due to its slow, heavy movement and methodical combat. Dark Souls 3 is “fun” because it's quicker and lighter; you can roll faster, further, and more often. Nothing is wrong with either approach, yet one is sometimes dismissed.

Not everyone defines the term this way, but I’ve seen it used to debase games with an unconventional design. Traditionally “unfun” foundations have a harder time finding their place in communities who won’t acknowledge its worth unless it’s immediately satisfying. I remember this phrase being used during Death Stranding. It was picked apart, labeled as “unfun” because it’s a package delivery walking simulator. Who wants to be a delivery man, right? Even “walking sim” has become dismissive, used to label things as lesser.

Regardless of Reggie’s intention in the full quote, which specifically emphasizes that games are also a journey, even inviting the player to “open their mind,” that snippet has shifted into a rallying cry for people to do anything but. If something must be “fun” to be worthwhile, and that definition of “fun” is remotely limited, it denies ideas that don't fit under a narrow bracket. It is a quote accompanied by frustrating ignorance.

Not everything needs to be fun. Other artforms aren't seen this way, so why are games different? Is it because they're interactive? Is interactivity meaningless without fun? Art is feeling, and there’s no single feeling a work has to evoke to be successful.

Playing Resident Evil reminded me of my stance on this.

It isn't fun. It's claustrophobic, stressful, and frustrating. No encounter, room, boss, or weapon is traditionally “fun.” It's an unforgiving, labyrinthian puzzle; a constant check of resources where memorizing rooms and locations is vital. Even saving the game is limited to a resource, one I often found myself without and had to make huge stretches of progress knowing one mistake could send me back an hour.

Bosses are a cold, calculated check of your mindfulness towards collecting and preserving as much ammo as possible. You enter a boss room, move only a little, and fire everything you have. They die and you move on. You wasted ammo, and that made progressing more difficult. No part of this balance between figuring out the path forward while wasting as few resources as possible was fun, alongside trying to figure out at what point the player should save.

Yet Resident Evil is enormously good and I’m enamored. I've reversed my tune on the Ink Ribbon system after years of avoiding it in other titles in the franchise. The fear that arises from knowing one mistake can ripple; your decision to not save means you're risking everything, or being too frugal by going nearly an hour without a save, brings rise to an unmatched tension.

Games don’t have to be fun to be worthwhile, successful, or good. Art is too complex, and limiting any medium in this way sucks. It’s not something to be afraid of, either. Fun absolutely rules, but I’m tired of people treating it as a necessity. I’m tired of being seen as lesser when expressing love for old, unconventional, or mechanically complex experiences. I’m tired of new things being inherently better because they’re faster, more fluid, and easier to control. No feeling is worthless and games can accomplish anything. Just keep an open mind, experience it, and vibe. Fun isn’t everything.

If you support that quote and think “that's not what fun is, it's just whether or not you like something,” then that's fine. We can disagree. But I’ve seen people use the requirement of “fun” to shit on non-traditional systems before. People shouldn’t be afraid to say something isn’t fun yet still love it. There's so much more to feel :)

Beton Brtual is so fucking tedious that even the method of save scumming I used to make it a palatable experience was dull. When I first started playing it, its blend of precision platforming, tightly designed landscapes, and brutalist architecture-inspired art style wowed me. And then I hit a brick wall. And I kept hitting it. And suddenly, the game lost its zing. It became monotonous, a chore to sit through even at the peak of its vertigo-inducing, pants-shitting intensity. I felt I had an obligation to complete it, though; after all, I gave it four stars! In the immortal words of Kent Mansely himself, "This sort of thing is why it's so important to chew your food."

Fundamentally, my biggest issue with Beton Brutal is that it's convinced, no, insistent that forgiving the player for their mistakes is the wrong thing to do. In smaller spaces where the tension in each jump comes organically and doesn't feel contrived in the slightest, it's right. Those four stars I gave it came before I was faced with the wall spike section or the ice area. Even if its challenge remained organic throughout, though, I doubt it would have remained compelling. Without the inch that a proper saving system might give you, the emotional agony of taking a plunge no longer hits as powerful and just becomes dulling. The rewarding sense of discovery I mentioned in that old review only registers as long as the game manages to feel fresh rather than forcing you into the most rote, mechanical playstyle imaginable in the name of being "hardcore." I'm sorry, that's not "hardcore." I do, however, have a more apt phrase in my vocabulary for that: "self-indulgent and boring."

By the time I managed to complete Beton Brutal, it failed to convince me that games can be made without checkpoints. In fact, it persuaded me of the complete opposite. Checkpoints are not inherently a bad thing, and if you're looking to make your game feel intense and nerve-wracking, you can still integrate them into your game and give your players the same effect. Have them be a reward, or randomized, or hidden. What you do by removing any semblance of a saving system is, ironically, make all forms of progression feel stilted and unremarkable. Given that Beton Brutal has no narrative to rely on or any evident lore, that sense of mundanity feels as though it couldn't have been more than a side-effect. Embrace the gimmicky nature of it all, embrace save scumming! As Backloggd user Momoka eloquently puts in their review for the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, you can have a game that isn't traditionally fun and let the people playing your game save. If you force me to save my game every time I need to take a break, or every time I force the game closed in a particular way, that just feels like the pettiest form of punishment. With nothing to really justify it other than the developer insisting on it, I feel forced to reduce my evaluation of Beton Brutal to a scale that this developer is keenly aware of: spiteful minimalism.

I want to like Beton Brutal, but throughout the ten hours I put into it, it rarely let me. If uninviting games are your bread and butter, I suppose you'll chalk up all of the issues I have with it as me just being bad at the game. I can't say you're wrong. But I can't say you're right, either. You shouldn't need to be "good" at a game to enjoy it. If failing at games is part of their charm, then the least you can do with an interactive medium is make that failure engaging, insightful, or meditative. I seldom had that experience with Beton Brutal, so I can't, in good conscience, pretend that my lack of proficiency has much to do with it.

I love shinji mikami but I gotta say

damn bitch, you made this?

they called this shit "panic horror" and boy I'm panicking — panicking that there might be another god awful pipe puzzle from the twisted mind of shu takumi or that once I'm done collecting two of every keycard under the sun someone might ask me to build an ark

with little interest in horror or combat dino crisis bets it all on sludgy adventure game tedium and loses. it might've worked better if there was even a hint of resident evil's unhinged charisma — the weird doors, weird keys, bonkers architecture etc — but what's here is crushingly dull from top to bottom

if it wasn't for the narrative branching and crafting system I'd be hitting it with the chicxulub impactor grade extinction score it otherwise deserves, but I gotta acknowledge how cool that stuff was when RE3 made good on it later that year

reading more into the development I found that not only did shu takumi design all the puzzles, he served as the game's director before being fired after throwing the team into "uncalled for confusion" due to his lack of experience. kamiya and takumi corroborate this with the former referring to takumi as the game's director to this day and the latter alluding to mikami's role as being that of a fixer — someone brought in to get the project back on rails after much of the game had been already established

I love shu takumi but I gotta say

damn bitch, you made this?

it takes some cues from japanese adventure games but is really more of a big puzzle collection with very fancy menus. walk around, talk to some villagers, get new puzzles, and meander towards your destination. thankfully the characters are likable, especially the laid-back layton and his fiery yet precocious sidekick luke. with the limited cast and the small locale the world is snug and bereft of needless pixel hunting or confusing objectives. lovely animation from production IG even if the DS can't quite do the FMV justice. the main thing that holds back the macrogame here for me is the pacing. layton and luke encounter a mystery, get shooed off, and then stumble into another mystery over and over again until the endgame where layton magically solves the entire plot and then the credits roll. the shock of the endgame twist makes layton's exposition dump less jarring and more like a riddle within itself; it turns your brain inside-out and briefly rethink the rest of the game as you bounce between the final few puzzles. a simple twist but effective nonetheless.

as for the puzzles themselves, this was a bit of a proving ground for myself to make up for my terrible riddle sense as a child. as an adult this hits a brain-teaser sweet spot where I can comfortably make it through the main scenario while legitimately feeling challenged by the harder puzzles the game has to offer. refreshingly few puzzles relied on moon logic that made me grumble, and none of the touch-screen gimmicks felt tacked-on or perfunctory. the final two puzzles gave me pause... thankfully the game has a decent in-game hint system accessible by coins that are strewn throughout the environment. then for the final one I just looked at a guide since whatever, life is short. overall a nice way to ease players into the concept, and I'm sure the rest of the DS trilogy will flesh out the setting and intrigue.

I hate swirling around so many negative thoughts in my head regarding this game because the intentions are utterly pure. it is abstract, buoyant, and dedicated to showcasing an alien natural world that few other games can compare to. its graphics have a cheeky lo-fi bent to them, relying heavily on undulating curvature and bold primary colors. the songs its blob-like creatures constantly sing along touch upon many genres and play with language in fascinating ways. and yet, despite all of this, as an creative work locoroco reminds me most of the kind of project that would reduce your art school friend to tears after getting eviscerated in crit for being particularly lazy. the definition of a C- game, if you will. something entirely resting on its quirky graphical presentation with a game sort of tacked on underneath.

over an astounding 40(!?) levels you will help the titular locoroco roll across the landscape by tilting the world around them via the bumpers, and somehow doing little else in the process. locoroco is sprightly and highly maneuverable when tiny, but in their aggregated form they expand in size when eating red berries strewn across each level, and as their size expands their responsiveness takes a dive. that undulating property I mentioned prior isn't merely a neat graphical trick; it feeds into an exaggerated physics system that showcases the weighty locoroco sinking into the ground at various spots as if a water balloon were to traverse across molten rubber. in the process, locoroco frequently will get trapped even on sloped surfaces or will meander despite the world being at full tilt in a given direction. to compensate, obstacles tend to be more suggestions of adversity than true challenges, and I want to stress this is not a "the game isn't hard enough!" complaint. most levels will literally consist only of rolling in a given direction while occasionally jumping or using one of a rotating selection of simple interactables (spring, sticky ceiling, vaccuum monster that shoots you in a given direction). even with one of the few members of the moja troop on-screen to halt your progress, your solution to actually dealing with them will generally consist of rolling right past them. for what should be the core features of the game here, it's a bit shocking how undercooked it all is.

with such a simple mechanical realm to work in, locoroco may have succeeded as something without a discernable genre, or perhaps a puzzle game with a couple additions to the interactable set. unfortunately, the game opts to pursue a classico platforming structure instead. this is perhaps the great incongruity of the game: what could have been aesthetically novel or even boundary-pushing settles into the plodding rhythms of so many games that have come before. much of the incentive structure of the game is built around endless collectables such as the aforementioned berries, mui mui aliens, and locoroco house parts to decorate within the main menu. there are rare moments these are actually hidden behind challenges that escalate whatever the loose mechanical through-line of a given level is, but in the vast majority of cases exploring for these consists of merely finding a spot where the wall is intangible and moving into a secret area to collect your prize. there's absolutely no heft to this design whatsoever beyond giving these purely linear levels little stubs as branch-off points for observant players to be rewarded for finding - or in practicality, anyone who misses a jump and ends up falling through some indentation in a wall into a glob of items.

I actually thought there were six worlds (and thus, 48 levels) and felt a little shocked that right as the game was beginning to consider adding some basic platforming trials to the experience within the final few levels, it just ended. a few hours of watching my locoroco burst into bits and tumble down winding tunnels pachinko-style over and over again just to sit and watch the game attempt a half-hearted boss battle. feeling like I had missed something, I took a look at the minigames where I found only one unlocked... a crane game. tried it twice and then my friends came back with takeout, so I turned this shit off and we watched fulcrum/damianluck925 instead.

I've been ruminating on a previous review for this game. the miasma around it contains a lot of current ambient thought patterns of the affectionately-named "nintendrone" crowd, specifically around topics that have arose in the Switch Era. I think for many of us zoomers in the age range for backloggd (and the broader sphere of gaming culture online in general), the beginning of the switch's life cycle was a special moment. for me personally, the switch released a week before my 18th birthday, and after eventaully snagging one during its inital availability drought, it was my first real console that I owned. not just a shoddily-maintained handheld or a hand-me-down sixth/seventh gen console for me to fiddle around with, but something with brand-new games releasing for it that I could hook up to a TV! the bounty was particularly rich that year too; botw day 1, rereleases of several standout wii u titles, a brand-new collectathon mario game, a long-awaited "true" sequel to xenoblade, and splatoon 2, a multiplayer shooter tuned specifically for the zoomer crowd. the original splatoon presaged our modern neon-color, trend-focused, "what's cool with the kids?" mass-culture shooter wave that awoke from the decline of the tacticool brown-and-grey military shooters of the late 00s and early 10s. it's only natural that nintendo would ride the wave onto their big launch for the switch, and at just the right time as well, lest we forget that fortnite released in early access within the same month that splatoon 2 hit shelves.

five years later, it's inarguable that our perceptions would have shifted. the pangburn who had not started college yet grinding out turf wars on the couch is now halfway through grad school. I've now seen the many ups and downs of the switch as nintendo has consistently reprised their role as the clueless corporate granddaddy of gaming, prone to making jarring business and PR decisions more often than they can spit out decent games. I've witnessed the internet at the same time fall out of the honeymoon period many of us had with nintendo during 2017. putting so many great titles in the launch window left 2018 particularly dry other than the excellent smash ultimate late in the year, and when the release train revved up again in 2019 the quality was much more uneven. wrapped up in 2017 specifically was a revitalization of japanese gaming that brought attention back to the kind of games I'm primarily interested in -- the aforementioned nintendo titles, yakuza 0, nier automata, persona 5, resident evil 7 -- but those good times weren't going to last, right?

hence my interest in the aforementioned review. its main thrust is that nintendo is leveraging FOMO in order to sell everyone on a new copy of splatoon; which is true in the sense that this is how every new game is sold at retail price. it's also an accusation that nintendo has been rightfully accused of exploiting for their limited-time mario 3DAS and shadow dragon rereleases, or their underproduced amiibo lines and retro plug-and-play consoles. there's also a significant portion of this review extolling nintendo's countercultural original splatoon aesthetic that has been dampened in subsequent releases. personally I don't find any of these games particularly against the grain unless we're discussing it through the lens of the prior onslaught of modern warfare-era titles, which is a shaky ground to stand on considering in that case splatoon set the new standard and now suffers the proliferation of its copycats. punk? maybe pop punk... lord knows I had a steady diet of blink 182, alkaline trio, jeff rosenstock, pup, and screeching weasel back when I was playing splatoon 2 regularly. and isn't it more punk to deface clean hotels and malls in the name of artistic anarchy?

meeting those points at face-value means I'm getting lost in the smokescreen though, I need to dig deeper. because there are multiple valid mentions of this new entry lacking innovation, but they're nonsubstantial and swallowed by the rest of the remarks. this is understandable: it's hard to elaborate on features that don't exist. these are buoyed with remembrances of the earlier titles and how fresh they felt at release, contrasted with the stale aura of this new title. there's a general sense that something is wrong with this new game, right? it must be something new... but there's so little here that's actually new that it's hard to pinpoint. could it be the locker cosmetics and their associated "catalog" score, which scans as a battlepass in a post-fortnite world, or the new gachapon machine set up in the lobby? the former is entirely passive and totally free, so its only sin is just being cribbed from contemporaries, and the similar daily gacha is just an extension of that pernicious old ability chunk grind. what could possibly be that missing piece, that absent little bit of soul that the game lost between splatoon 2 and 3?

to me that answer is nothing. I think that line of inquiry is a dead end. my actual opinion? splatoon 3 feel bleh because splatoon 2 (and probably by extension splatoon 1) felt bleh. they're the same game!! I have returned to the well of squid kid bliss and instead am left wondering how eight years into this franchise I am still left without a way to alter my loadout, or play on more than two maps in a given mode at a time, or properly choose which ranked mode I want to play without having to wait for the choices to rotate every two hours! there are reasons these restrictions were originally set up, such as a limited initial set of stages for splatoon 1 or the need to make sure that ranked has a short matchmaking time, but there are other avenues to pursuing these aims that don't come at the expense of player choice and freedom of expression. I just want to use aerospray without getting trapped with these goddamn fizzy bombs, these fucking things that not only need to be cooked to make any impact but even then stil pale in comparison to virtually every other subweapon. could I please get a special that isn't reefslider as well? could I perhaps at least get to avoid playing on a stage that doesn't have walls that make reefslider glitch out near them? or at least could I not have to play on mahi mahi resort like five times in a row?

which is not to say there aren't minor QoL additions that perhaps alone make splatoon 3 marginally more playable than splatoon 2. the addition of a physical lobby where you can practice between rounds feels more engaging than the menus of the prior games, and thank god that I can finally make a room for my friends rather than messing with the awkward drop-in system. at the same time however, nintendo seems to be floundering a bit in terms of actually making substantial improvements to the game. in their stead, many changes have been made that seem to exist purely to justify the sequel status. sheldon, for instance, takes tickets now for weapons instead of money, which more closely ties his selection to your level progression I suppose? at the same time you still cannot truly skip his obnoxious spiel every time you set foot in his shop, so it might as well not have not been a change at all. the way that ranks for ranked mode are maintained now consist of a universal rank instead of individual ranks for each mode with the tradeoff of individual losses counting much less. perhaps there was a calculated reason for this change, but it ultimately makes me favor avoiding ranked modes which I'm particularly bad at such as tower control due to retaining my overall rank from my preferred modes such as splat zones. these are all side-steps to existing mechanics without being solutions to issues, and they hurt my impression of the game.

I must stress that I do like the overall design of splatoon, regardless of the nitpicks above. the way that refilling ink encourages traversal and the way that turf war flips typical PvP interactions on their head (running is often a viable option!) makes the flow of each match visceral as you continually move from area to area in a mad dash for territory. this is why I sunk so many hours into splatoon 2 back when this concept was still so novel for me. however, this style of play also creates very momentum-heavy matches where the outcome of a match can feel certain only halfway through. walking through endless puddles of your opponents' ink, especially the closer it is to your home base, makes me feel dejected even if I manage to get a kill I'm happy with or make a substantial endgame push towards the opponents' lines. this is amplified by the meager rewards from a match loss; seeing those progression bars get a few sparing drops towards a new level after trying your hardest in a match makes me feel like I almost wasted my time playing. when not playing competitively and thrown in with random team members into a game that seems to tacitly encourage communication, I feel pushed away from participating for more than a few matches at a time, just like I did towards the end of splatoon 2's life.

this is something that really felt noticable for me after I recently tried out modern warfare 2's online beta on the advice of a friend. having not played CoD since middle school, I was shocked at how different the atmosphere was. unlike splatoon, modern CoD is enraptured by the current trends in shooters with its season-based structure and mountains of progression bars, but at the other end of it there's something still very personal and intimately fun waiting in store. getting a double or triple kill at all could keep me going through multiple fruitless deaths afterwards just from the giddiness of succeeding in a split-second interaction. overall team scores just didn't matter, as my personal performance and growth felt rewarded by the systems of the game. who has time to worry about teammate behavior when you're succeeding on your own terms? splatoon 3 makes efforts to rectify this issue with its per-match rewards to each player highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, but these seem to confer little outside of maybe influencing the rewards in an anarchy series. perhaps nintendo is trying to highlight competition and community, but in a game where you have absolutely no way to engage with your teammates before and after matches, the effort seems wasted. splatoon could potentially learn some tricks towards crafting a more efficient timewaster from its contemporaries instead of half-heartedly incorporating their progression systems.

this bears mentioning though: just how much of my enjoyment with CoD came with not engaging with the game for over a decade? has my critical perception been inadvertedly weighted towards the novelty of it in a way that I've lost with splatoon? and again, how much of my degredation of splatoon 3 comes from releasing after a shoddy couple of years for nintendo's public-facing wing? splatoon 3 sits in the middle of a pretty good lineup of switch titles, but in the time since the original hype has died down it's much easier to feel and hear the nervous whispers of those wondering what the hell is going on with tears of the kingdom's rollout rather than the basking in the glory of breath of the wild still fresh in everyone's minds. of course, even breath of the wild cribbed much from its open-world contemporaries, and even though I loved it at the time I can see the criticisms from those who weren't too dazzled to see through the brand recognition on top of it. so perhaps then, splatoon has just been another multiplayer shooter all along, and the light is just harsh enough now for us to call it what it is.

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there is something behind that $60 price tag, and it's.... tableturf battle. this might have been the case if nintendo had bothered rolling out online multiplayer for it, but leave it to them to surprise in the oddest of ways. instead we get a brand new single-player mode that seems to derive more from octo expansion (note: I have not played it) than its direct predecessors for better or for worse. I played about sixty total levels including the three mid-game bosses but not including the crater or rocket levels.

splatoon 3 opts for more focused, puzzle-like level design over its predecessors, which were built around every potential loadout being used in every level. this entry opts for bespoke loadouts for each stage to maximize the amount of encounters it can build around those particular weapons. in a few cases this results in some really clever stage design (I'm thinking of the curling bomb stage towards the end of the game that focuses on tightly-aimed ricochets) but in most cases falls surprisingly flat. much of this is due to carrying over many enemies from the prior games with few updates. these octopi foes generally have extremely poor mobility options compared to the protagonist and generally wield highly-telegraphed projectiles that can be easily evaded, and this game in particular really struggles to emphasize its intended stage routes with how useless most of these enemies are. this is particularly noticable with how many basic cover configurations you'll fight enemies from that seem almost copy-pasted throughout the game. splatoon 2 has its own foibles (overly long, unfocused level design) but generally designed more interesting arenas with better escalation of conflict than 3 does. splatoon 3 has a tendency to lock down level progression into very pre-defined, "solvable" encounters that do not surprise the player when completed "correctly" and feel broken when subverted by obvious means. this could still be elevated if that escalation of conflict was engaging, but splatoon 3 tends to favor overloading each level with rote expressions of the player's toolkit before hinting at more thoughtful level designing past the final checkpoint. the curling bomb stage perfectly showcases what could have been the case for these levels, where initial simple ricochets build up into longer areas with movable walls, platformers, and adversarial inkers to navigate and plan around; it helps that for this level the solution space is purposefully wide and more daring solutions yield rewards.

the more explicit puzzle stages have a couple bangers as well (the pac-man level is particularly cool), but too many fall into common level design traps like long obstacle cycles to listlessly wait through or boring auto-scroller sections. I could understand trying to make these easily solvable to make sure everyone has access to the final areas, but in this mode virtually every level is optional, and I would've enjoyed seeing some more out-of-the-box puzzle ideas beyond just shooting targets with a particular weapon on an ink rail or simple rube goldberg contraptions. some of these are particularly frustrating; the one I have to highlight is the tennis level, where the angle of the player's camera behind the "net" sort of kills my depth perception in the void beyond where the targets are shot from, and the level ends with a block that taps the net and never makes it into your play area as some sort of sophomoric joke to force you to replay another minute of scripted tennis target shots. bleh. just less than what I would expect from nintendo in terms of design finesse.

bosses are fine, but the standout is definitely the area six one. probably the most explicit reference we've seen yet to another game that dealt with cleaning up someone else's ink...