It's very difficult to review this without looking at Undertale or Deltarune or LISA or any of the other countless games inspired by this - from a modern day point of view there's not a lot here I haven't seen before. In 1995 this must have been completely bizarre, and I start to get exactly why this is a cult-classic rather than a straight up classic.

Let's go right into the story - this story. It exponentially gets weirder and darker as it goes one, while the team follows a very simple task - go to 8 special locations. Whilst they calmly go about this task, we have zombie infested towns, KKK-esque cults, diamond dogs, a lost underworld filled with dinosaurs, A DUNGEON WHICH IS A MAN AND ALSO JOINS AS A PARTY MEMBER - it's so dense with strangely wonderful characters but they all make sense in the world's context. Everyone just goes about their business and it just works! The translation job does most of the heavy lifting with choice lines throughout, and the music is equally as odd as the game. Such a great scenario and a well written story.

The gameplay has aged, however - what may have been fine in 1995 isn't great now. The inventory system is dire (and I still hate it now when implemented in a Toby Fox game), the movement of this game just sucks - I hate the decision to just stop when you hit an angled wall rather than just...move up against it? It's also painfully slow to do anything in the overworld - travelling is slow, going in/out buildings is slow, battle transitions are slow, menuing is a chore. Combine this with the amount of enemy spawns (it really gets ridiculous at the end of the game) and dungeons start to take a while.

Which brings me to the battle system. I love this battle system. It injects the EarthBound weirdness in some great ways - I like that status' are just...things like crying or having a cold. Then there's the ticker system, which is just fantastic, and I can't think of another game that has it. Saving a doomed ally by healing as their HP ticker goes down - that is such a good feeling. Outside of Ness' massive level jump from Magicant, I never felt overpowered, and there's a great selection of PSI moves. I loved Jeff's weapon system, though it introduces it far too late in the game for my taste.

But the whole game is just a precursor to what is my favourite part of it; the final battle with Giygas. I wasn't sure if what I'd heard was hyperbole, but goddamn did it live up to expectations. The final hour of EarthBound is oppressively dark, with the music and the background and the Prayer system - it felt on another level to the rest of the game. And then the epilogue, where you have free rein of the world with no monsters, is the complete opposite in feeling. Suddenly there's no cares other than soaking up the atmosphere.

There's not much more to be said outside of everything else - it comes across as a near 30 year old game in some areas, but in others it feels like it's more recent. Yes it's painfully slow and could trim the fat in a few areas, but what RPG from near 30 years ago isn't like this? I finally checked this off my bucketlist and was not disappointed - I came in expecting a cult-classic and left with a classic added to the list.

It's been a long time since I've been as drawn into a Pokémon game as this, as this is a great jumping off board for something spectacular in Gen 9. The 'just one more thing oh no it's 2am' hits hard at times, and I found myself mopping everything up so that I could keep playing.

Let's start with the positives - wow is this fun! Taking plenty of cues from BotW, it fits perfectly with how Pokémon should be played going forward. Everything gameplay wise is so snappy - catching is quick and easy, sneaking around is surprisingly complex, crafting gear works really well and traversal is plenty of fun. The environments aren't too similar, even within the biomes, so there's a want to see the next area - and Pokémon - around the corner. I do wish we could actually go between biomes instead of having to use Jubilife as a go-between, but it's a good first step!

I came in blind to this so had no idea who was in the Pokédex, so there were some surprises. Not many, though - there's still the age-old problem of gen 1 bias, and some of the new Husuin forms are...rough (look how they murdered my boy Goodra!). It's still fun to see them roaming the environment, and having Alpha Pokémon is also a great new feature. The Pokédex having levels of research for each monster is great, though you'd be mad to think about getting them all, but it adds another interesting layer and almost forces you to switch your party about if you want a full Pokédex.

So now on to the not so good. This story - woof. Pokémon has a habit for people a slow starter and this one is no exception. It takes a good hour or so of walking and text to finally get into the meat of the game. After that, the story wanders a predictable path and then just sort of ends. I have to say though, some of the cutscenes were really well done, but it's a low bar to clear based on previous games.

The battling system has been absolutely gutted to the bare minimum - I found there's very little tactically left. They go so fast and levels don't make as much of a difference anymore, but there's no abilities, items and several moves have been altered to accommodate this new system. Trainer battles are almost non-existent and get to the point where you're just spamming your most powerful move - why wouldn't you, there's no time or reason to set up, debuff or apply weather or anything. There are also issues with the new turn order system - there were times where the order didn't match what was being shown to me, and this is without getting into the Agile/Strong attack system. I think something more in-between this and the older system would have worked well, because battling is easily the worst part of the game now. The new boss fight system, complete with dodge rolling - eeeehh, it would've been more fun if I could see what was happening. The Arceus/Dialga/Palkia fights and had so much going on and you're zoomed in so closely it starts to resemble a bad Dark Souls arena.

Let's not forget the elephant in the room - the graphics. They dip between acceptable to absolute dogshit - pop in is everywhere, I've had textures not even load at times and everything just has a very blocky quality. It's passable for now, but Game Freak aren't known for their technological prowess when it comes to games so I have no idea if this will improve. The Pokémon models themselves look great, but the grass and mud they're walking through is just flat and lifeless which is just sad.

Despite these faults, a few very small niggles that I had (the clothing variety, urgh), I walked away from this blown away by how good it was. I came in with low expectations after the DP remakes, but goddamn it's fun just to run around lobbing Pokéballs everywhere and walk around a living, breathing world. This is the Pokémon game we've needed the last 15 years.

Whilst it's easily the best modern day Tony Hawk, I come away from just wanting to go back and play THPS3 again. There's a lot here to like, and it should be commended for it, but there's a lot where it just falls short.

Let's start with biggest miss - the levels themselves, whilst faithfully created, are just far too busy at times. In the originals, due to the tech at the time the levels were basic, but they popped. Now, everything just blends together, and some of the busier levels (Venice Beach is just a brown nightmare) make it hard to navigate at times. This also affects collectables, as now you've got 2 minutes to search the grey wasteland for 5 grey things to collect. What I don't understand is that some collectables have a nice glow around them, making them standout (which is a necessity on some levels), whilst others are just...part of the environment. The skate sign task on one level is horrible, tasking you with finding 5 small signs in a darkened grey wasteland. Yikes.

On top of the busy levels, there's just busywork everywhere. Part of the fun of the originals was that it was just game. Just a good game you can easily drop in without worrying about what you needed to do. Now, there's hundreds of tasks you need to work towards. And some of these are literally busywork - the time to Platinum is rated at 90 hours, purely as you need to complete all these tasks. One involves getting to level 100, which is just tedious as it requires multiple playthroughs with multiple characters - it's such a blatant disrespect of a players time.

Thankfully, the actual act of skating is still fun, and stringing combos becomes second nature after a while. The lack of many clean cut lines in some levels is a downer, but landing a large combo is as good a feeling as ever.

In the end, it tugs on the nostalgia strings, but once that's over you realise this game just feels...hollow? Which is odd considering the sheer amount of crap they've thrown in, but there's such large plateaus of nothing between the spikes of fun that it's not replayable for me. If I were 20 years younger I'm not even sure I'd enjoy it, as there's such a dearth of quality games now that to stick with something like this for so long just seems a waste. I finished both 1+2 on here and even at the end of that I thought it had overstayed it's welcome.

What's bizarre is they had the format nailed down in Toadstool Tour - now, almost 20 years later, they release this mistake.

The Adventure Mode looks good on paper, but it's so bland and empty. You can skip everything outside of (the largely pointless) equipment, getting from point to point as fast as you can to progress in the...story? I found myself checked out of all this after the first course and had stopped by the third.

The golf itself is largely a step down from TT - I can no longer view the land where my ball will finish, instead I have a large overhead circle so I have to guess the ground elevation? The swing meter changes also don't work for me - hitting a powerful shot adds a factor of randomness for no reason I can see. Plus I don't seem to be able to strike the ball in an exact spot anymore, instead there's some awful curving system where your ball trajectory starts looking like a goddamn firework.

Which beings us to the main gimmick of Super Rush - you can now walk between shots. Look, I just want to play 18 holes against some Mario characters, but now I have to spend 60 seconds walking slowly between shots just to do that? And then there's eXtreme Golf, which adds in the awfulness of having to plan out your shots - on mountain courses this is an exercise in tedium as you work around cliff faces and whirlwinds. I just want to play shot to shot! Why is this being shoved in my face?

I think that's what annoys me most - the strange additions which takeaway from the standard golf. I know this is Mario and they have to add 'wacky' things, but they only detract here. Special shots seemed to be shoehorned in just... because, there's new modes which are forced on me, my ball can now be wacked by Bowser charging across the green. Even when I do play standard golf, there's no leaderboard. It's just me - but where's the fun in that? There's a real lack of content too, with only the free DLC giving us more courses than TT.

The whole game just feels incredibly soulless, like no real though was put into some of the new additions. This may just be a case of 'it's not for me' but it really feels like this is being forced on us because we're told it's fun, rather than it actually being fun. Rant over.

I think this is partly that I'm just not the right audience for this game, but the gameplay of this gets old extremely fast - it sounds petty but all you do is throw things and take photos and I just don't enjoy it.

The environments themselves look nice, as do the Pokémon (including several I had completely forgotten about), but the throwing fruit/orbs mechanic annoyed me with it's guess work for where they land, as did the Rube-Goldberg-Machine interactions to complete certain Photo Requests.

The Requests are the grindiest part of this, with several which seem almost impossible to get without a lot of trial-and-error, and for a game which moves so slowly this is a ridiculous time sink. If you guess what to do incorrectly, it's menu, restart, loading, then wait for the vehicle to move to the correct place again - we're talking 5 minutes for this in some places. Add in the randomness of nearby Pokémon messing shots up and... yeah, it doesn't respect your time.

Again, I'm probably not the correct audience for this, and I'm sure some people love it, but I'm struggling to see why.

There's a selection of good things here, stranger, though the game hasn't aged as well as I'd hoped - in particular the movement options compared to recent RE titles - but back in 2004 this was absolutely groundbreaking and I spent countless weeks churning out playthroughs. Yeah the story is paper-thin and Ashley is a one note damsel-in-distress, and the dialogue in terrible (though this does loop right around into comedy gold at points) - but goddamn the bread and butter gameplay of this game is just superb.

It starts to drag in the last chapter, but the Village & Castle sections are fantastic with great encounters and plenty of variety in enemies and setups. There's less scares than you'd expect from an RE title, but it really followed the direction of RE3 so can't put too much criticism here. This is a stone cold classic and an almost required play for anyone interested in the more modern TPS genre.

Takes the freedom of Odyssey's kingdoms and runs with it - it works so well that open world Mario has to be the concept for the next mainline game. It's basically a tech demo, but though it's only 3-4 hours to 100% it's so good to just work around the islands with your power ups or ride Plessie about.

The Fury Bowser idea works for the most part, though I found myself either waiting it out or ending it as soon as I could - if there was a version where this was completely omitted I'd be much happier, his frequent interruptions marring an otherwise fantastic game.

I wasn't expecting too much of an evolution with a sequel but this was generally the same thing as the first game - it's been a couple of years since I played it but nothing jumped out as "New!". The story felt like it hit the same beats so it was difficult to care about what was happening.

The graphics are as good as ever - but Christ does everything on screen just blend together. It's difficult to know what you can stand on and what you can't, and with the amount of particles on screen at once, some of the faster sequences (I cannot understand who thought those escape/chase runs were a good idea), it becomes a game of "What am I thinking?" between you and the level designer as to what to do next.

The world design is also very samey - the last desert world was a great change from the forest/cave/lake trifecta we've had for the last game and a half. It's fun to control Ori around these levels, but there's some puzzling layout choices which make fun fluid movement difficult to do.

Music is still top notch - and whilst they boiled down to mostly fetch quests, the addition of these was a nice break at times. I cannot say the same for those Spirit Trials - yikes, talk about inane.

I feel playing it on the Switch hampered it as I got a lot of bugs (random shutdowns, areas not loading, getting trapped in walls) - it's a commendable port but I feel playing it on the Series X would have given me a better time.

I still remember that initial trailer, and how hyped I was for a game to even approach what was shown. I was there day one for Infinite's release - and then I played and wow this was not what I (or many others) expected.

Gameplay is a lot faster than previous Bioshocks, akin to more conventional FPS's of the day. It makes it a lot more approachable but loses a lot of the world discovery which made the original so good. The vigors are the real star, though - they are all really fun to play with and combine in combat.

The story works well with the gameplay - it's diverse to begin with and up to about halfway (the first few hours are brilliant), with a nice mixture of shooting, stealth, and discovering the world. Then the wheels just come off, and the gameplay devolves into endless shooting galleries whilst the story just goes all over the place before vanishing up it's own ass. Urgh, I still hate that ending.

Somewhere in one of those alternate universes, a Bioshock Infinite exists with all the promise of that original trailer. Instead we have...this. And then 2K shut down Irrational so who knows what the next one will be like!

Whilst Bioshock was a nice tight package of a game, this is a bit bloated in places and has plenty of issues. Firstly, that story - yeeeesh, does it just go on and on. The last couple of levels I found myself rushing through to finish it off, with recordings playing I wasn't even registering and enemies just ignoring me. Speaking off the last levels, the environments in those and several other levels were very samey - not nearly as much variety as the original, and even the supposed colourfest of Dionysus Park was drowning in greys and browns.

Gameplay wise it hasn't done too much from the first - seemed to be a lot more shooting gallery segments than the first where enemies just appear out of thin air. Despite playing as big Daddy the guns and Plasmids are mostly the same as the first, though even the new weapons I found myself ignoring.

I can see why this is seen as the black sheep, because it really doesn't stack up well despite the number of studios working on it - every element of it was just underwhelming compared to the first Bioshock.

Having not played the original and seen it on multiple "best game since 2000" lists, I'm surprised how well it holds up. Gameplay is solid and visceral, plasmids are fun to use - but as you get further in, you start to vastly outpace the game in terms of what you can do. Even on Survivor, the last two levels I was danger-free whilst running and gunning thanks to the amount of money and ammo they throw at you.

The story has the whole "what a tweest" thing in the middle which everyone knows at this point, and outside of that it's pretty flat and just sort of there. It doesn't outstay it's welcome too long, but I was pretty much done with it at the end. I imagine 15 years ago this must have been a mind blowing experience as it came out the same time as * checks notes * Carnival Games for the Wii.

Crypt of the Necromancer is a goddamn masterpiece, but this... hoooo boy.

The move from a rogue-lite to a fully explorable world doesn't really fit right - due to the size and the lack of anything to do but kill things, a lot of the world becomes essentially needless, as why waste time & resources clearing a screen just to get a probably-useless item? The game only fell into place for me within the dungeons, which were essentially just standard levels from CotN. When you've got to work the space with enemies and projectiles in conjunction with your weapons - beautiful stuff.

Actually, the amount of weapons/items also seems bit much. A lot of them I just didn't use as other's seemed to do the same thing in fights (why use the Boomerang over the Longshot?).

Even the soundtrack is so-so compared to the godly OST from Crypt - yeah, some of them sound good but you'll be hearing them so often they quickly fade.

At it's core it's still a good game, but I just don't think it achieves everything it could with this mash-up.