Thundercblob
277 Reviews liked by Thundercblob
LittleBigPlanet
2008
I miss my carefree days spent being engrossed in this gem. I put hours upon hours into joining random co-op parties and playing random level creations and slapping other players at random. The sequel is probably the better game, but this was my introduction to the series, so it made a stronger impression.
A great little Zelda adventure that plays to its strengths very well. The dungeons have good puzzles, the world is colorful and fun to explore and the characters are fun to interact with, paticularly Ezlo. The game does a good job of not holding your hand while also not letting you get too lost. I was a bit annoyed by the kinstones at first but they grew on me as the game went on.
Metroid Fusion
2002
I've played through this a couple times now, and while Fusion is a good game, it has a plethora of odd design decisions that make it inferior to most of the other games for me.
The story/writing is dumb (although this just might be poor translation because apparently this game does have some pretty notable translation issues), and this is also where Samus's obnoxious monologues truly begin that infested Other M. At least here it's tolerable because it's not voice by the most bored sounding woman in history. Forcing you to go to navigation rooms and locking you from progressing until you talk to Adam creates this annoying stop-and-go pacing that really hurts the flow of the game.
The level design is bizarre because for the most part it's fine, but then you get to these moments where it's incredibly unclear where to go. There's a part in Super Metroid where there's a wall you have to walk through in order to progress. It's not only not obvious that you can walk through it, but it also isn't affected by the x ray, breaking the rules of the game for no reason. Fusion does this shit a lot more often. It feels like you have to shoot at/bomb walls and floors constantly to see if there's anything that's breakable. There's also one screen that might be the worst screen in any Metroid game where there's no way to tell that you can morph ball through a wall without just, well, attempting to morph ball through it. It's just needlessly obscure and really ironic considering this is also a very linear and handholdy Metroid game. Also there's a point of no return where you can't go back to previous areas if you want to go for 100%. Just really odd decisions all around.
Then there are the bosses which are mostly good, but then you get shit like Nightmare which is a very appropriately named boss. Once you figure out how he works, it's not that bad, but it's still just a terrible, frustrating boss fight that relies on you using the space jump, which isn't as finely tuned as it should be. Then there's the final boss which is just a lame retread of Super Metroid's final boss.
Regardless, the game is still mostly fun. It looks great, it sounds great, and other than some instances of really poor conveyance, the level design is top notch too. Turning Metroid into a survival horror-esque game was a novel idea too (although Dread did it a million times better). Ultimately, I can't help but feel like this is a mid tier Metroid game.
The best thing this game did was establish the ideas that would eventually be perfected by Dread.
The story/writing is dumb (although this just might be poor translation because apparently this game does have some pretty notable translation issues), and this is also where Samus's obnoxious monologues truly begin that infested Other M. At least here it's tolerable because it's not voice by the most bored sounding woman in history. Forcing you to go to navigation rooms and locking you from progressing until you talk to Adam creates this annoying stop-and-go pacing that really hurts the flow of the game.
The level design is bizarre because for the most part it's fine, but then you get to these moments where it's incredibly unclear where to go. There's a part in Super Metroid where there's a wall you have to walk through in order to progress. It's not only not obvious that you can walk through it, but it also isn't affected by the x ray, breaking the rules of the game for no reason. Fusion does this shit a lot more often. It feels like you have to shoot at/bomb walls and floors constantly to see if there's anything that's breakable. There's also one screen that might be the worst screen in any Metroid game where there's no way to tell that you can morph ball through a wall without just, well, attempting to morph ball through it. It's just needlessly obscure and really ironic considering this is also a very linear and handholdy Metroid game. Also there's a point of no return where you can't go back to previous areas if you want to go for 100%. Just really odd decisions all around.
Then there are the bosses which are mostly good, but then you get shit like Nightmare which is a very appropriately named boss. Once you figure out how he works, it's not that bad, but it's still just a terrible, frustrating boss fight that relies on you using the space jump, which isn't as finely tuned as it should be. Then there's the final boss which is just a lame retread of Super Metroid's final boss.
Regardless, the game is still mostly fun. It looks great, it sounds great, and other than some instances of really poor conveyance, the level design is top notch too. Turning Metroid into a survival horror-esque game was a novel idea too (although Dread did it a million times better). Ultimately, I can't help but feel like this is a mid tier Metroid game.
The best thing this game did was establish the ideas that would eventually be perfected by Dread.
Metroid Fusion
2002
It's a more linear Metroid experience and the cutscenes not being skippable makes this one a bit hard to replay, especially compared to other games in the series, but this game still delivers when it comes to gameplay, level design and exploration. Not the best, but a great one, for sure!
This might be unfair since I currently have a sore throat, a recently broken fever, an ominous rash on both of my hands, a pulled muscle in my foot, and a union of blisters on my feet, but playing this is making me like Hollow Knight even more than I thought I did.
This review contains spoilers
Metroid Prime is such a strange game to me, I expected to like it a fair bit more than I did, but sadly, a lot of the game didn't have a lot for me to enjoy. In many ways, Prime feels like it's trying very hard to be Metroid in 3D, but also straying off to have its own identity, and this is where the game seems to lose itself a bit in my experience.
World-
The world of Talon IV is all in all fairly middling to me. There are a handful of areas in Prime that each have their own varying enemies and little environmental hazards, but there's nothing that really allows the world to properly stick together, with a lot of the world left feeling a little too game-y for me. The research labs felt the most real to me, and I quite enjoyed exploring them and reading up on the lore, which there is a lot of, and it's pretty dang good. The environments I was traversing didn't really feel "real", something I feel 2D Metroid games can get away with given the lack of a 3rd dimension. All-in-all, the World of Tallon IV doesn't feel like a world, it feels like chunks of levels with no clear connection other than some of the random elevators. If it's going to be this disconnected, at least give me the ability to fast-travel from waypoints or something.
Gameplay-
This is where I felt Prime burn me the most. It felt like half of my 13 hours with this game at least was me wandering around without a clue of where I should be going next. The map of the world doesn't help, while it is nice for what it is, it isn't hardly enough to get the job done in a satisfactory manner. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Dread, or y'know, having the ability to just place waypoints/pins, but I think the map leaves a whole lot to be desired. This would make traversing not feel quite as bad as it would clear out a lot of the time spent wandering around, which is especially unfun considering that Samus' movement in this game is dreadfully dull. Once again, I think that a part of this is due to the nature of it going 3D, but I felt at least a little more could have been done to improve moment-to-moment movement. It's not fun to just move around, and when you miss one small thing because you forgot to look at something with one of the visors and so you leave and that leads to dozens of minutes wasted just wandering, hoping you can find any semblance of a way forward, or getting a hint from the game itself, the gameplay can feel like quite a drag. The visors were a cool thought, and that's about it. The scan visor is a genuinely awesome addition, and serves a lot of purpose for the game, especially in learning more about the lore. The X-ray and the Thermal visors are both simply gimmicks. They peaked when you got them. Exploring the control tower with the power out and using the thermal visor was reaaaallyyyy cool. They don't do anything that cool ever again with the visors. It quite literally becomes the "we will highlight the key for this door" button. This can become an issue when you constantly come across dead ends, go "Oh I can't do this now", and then you leave, only to find that one of those dead ends was in fact, not a dead end, and you just wasted 30 minutes trying to look for something you already found, you just didn't check its temperature, or maybe you only read the memo when you get the visor, which says you can look through things now, so naturally, I got stuck fairly often, not knowing that the X-Ray visor, the ones that lets you see through things, also lets you see INVISIBLE things. Why? Good question. I'd like to know the answer too, and I feel that was important enough for them to make note of when picking it up, but I digress. They could've done more with the visors, and I'm hoping that when I get to Prime 2, 3, and (when it comes out in 2039) Prime 4, they do more with the Visors, as forgetting to use them once can result in a ton of lost time. When you're not wasting time slowly meandering to the next point, you're fighting enemies. I'm struggling to think of anything to say about this game's combat because it ranges from frustrating to middling, rarely ever passing that. The combat is a means to an end, and they don't do anything with their means until the very end, where there is a genuine killer boss fight, the only good one, dare I say. (I guess Meta Ridley's cool too but idk, he was peepee easy and boring)
I wanted to also note this somewhere, but the controls felt super jank to me, and I had a hard time getting used to them. Despite this, I didn't have too much trouble actually playing the game itself, so that means... something, I'm sure.
Overall-
I can't tell if Metroid Prime is deeply flawed, or if it simply isn't for me. I love Metroid, and I love metroidvanias, but this one just didn't quite hit the mark for me. There are moments of this game that really stood out to me positively, but those moments were few and far between, and often left more to be desired. The combat and the exploration of Prime are both sadly super mid. Other than the final boss, I don't think that much of Prime will really stick out to me, at least in a positive manner. The lore is cool, and the lab was fun to look around in and explore, but that was about all of the enjoyment I was able to get from this game. I have a hard time calling it all bad though. What I don't have a hard time calling it though, is Midtroid Prime.
Thank you for reading :) -Kibbs.
World-
The world of Talon IV is all in all fairly middling to me. There are a handful of areas in Prime that each have their own varying enemies and little environmental hazards, but there's nothing that really allows the world to properly stick together, with a lot of the world left feeling a little too game-y for me. The research labs felt the most real to me, and I quite enjoyed exploring them and reading up on the lore, which there is a lot of, and it's pretty dang good. The environments I was traversing didn't really feel "real", something I feel 2D Metroid games can get away with given the lack of a 3rd dimension. All-in-all, the World of Tallon IV doesn't feel like a world, it feels like chunks of levels with no clear connection other than some of the random elevators. If it's going to be this disconnected, at least give me the ability to fast-travel from waypoints or something.
Gameplay-
This is where I felt Prime burn me the most. It felt like half of my 13 hours with this game at least was me wandering around without a clue of where I should be going next. The map of the world doesn't help, while it is nice for what it is, it isn't hardly enough to get the job done in a satisfactory manner. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Dread, or y'know, having the ability to just place waypoints/pins, but I think the map leaves a whole lot to be desired. This would make traversing not feel quite as bad as it would clear out a lot of the time spent wandering around, which is especially unfun considering that Samus' movement in this game is dreadfully dull. Once again, I think that a part of this is due to the nature of it going 3D, but I felt at least a little more could have been done to improve moment-to-moment movement. It's not fun to just move around, and when you miss one small thing because you forgot to look at something with one of the visors and so you leave and that leads to dozens of minutes wasted just wandering, hoping you can find any semblance of a way forward, or getting a hint from the game itself, the gameplay can feel like quite a drag. The visors were a cool thought, and that's about it. The scan visor is a genuinely awesome addition, and serves a lot of purpose for the game, especially in learning more about the lore. The X-ray and the Thermal visors are both simply gimmicks. They peaked when you got them. Exploring the control tower with the power out and using the thermal visor was reaaaallyyyy cool. They don't do anything that cool ever again with the visors. It quite literally becomes the "we will highlight the key for this door" button. This can become an issue when you constantly come across dead ends, go "Oh I can't do this now", and then you leave, only to find that one of those dead ends was in fact, not a dead end, and you just wasted 30 minutes trying to look for something you already found, you just didn't check its temperature, or maybe you only read the memo when you get the visor, which says you can look through things now, so naturally, I got stuck fairly often, not knowing that the X-Ray visor, the ones that lets you see through things, also lets you see INVISIBLE things. Why? Good question. I'd like to know the answer too, and I feel that was important enough for them to make note of when picking it up, but I digress. They could've done more with the visors, and I'm hoping that when I get to Prime 2, 3, and (when it comes out in 2039) Prime 4, they do more with the Visors, as forgetting to use them once can result in a ton of lost time. When you're not wasting time slowly meandering to the next point, you're fighting enemies. I'm struggling to think of anything to say about this game's combat because it ranges from frustrating to middling, rarely ever passing that. The combat is a means to an end, and they don't do anything with their means until the very end, where there is a genuine killer boss fight, the only good one, dare I say. (I guess Meta Ridley's cool too but idk, he was peepee easy and boring)
I wanted to also note this somewhere, but the controls felt super jank to me, and I had a hard time getting used to them. Despite this, I didn't have too much trouble actually playing the game itself, so that means... something, I'm sure.
Overall-
I can't tell if Metroid Prime is deeply flawed, or if it simply isn't for me. I love Metroid, and I love metroidvanias, but this one just didn't quite hit the mark for me. There are moments of this game that really stood out to me positively, but those moments were few and far between, and often left more to be desired. The combat and the exploration of Prime are both sadly super mid. Other than the final boss, I don't think that much of Prime will really stick out to me, at least in a positive manner. The lore is cool, and the lab was fun to look around in and explore, but that was about all of the enjoyment I was able to get from this game. I have a hard time calling it all bad though. What I don't have a hard time calling it though, is Midtroid Prime.
Thank you for reading :) -Kibbs.
This review contains spoilers
I never finished the original metroid prime, I got pretty close after giving up in the phazon mines saying "I'm just not having enough fun, and this game is too long". well, I've finished it now and honestly, my opinion of the game has gotten worse! I already thought that metroid prime was a mixed bag of a game, the opening bits full of a sense of fun that quickly gives way to drudgery around the moment you pick up the varia suit. while the game is pretty fun when you're making forward advancements, the game increasingly becomes backtracking slowly through rooms that may as well have been loading screens, and the final hours of the game being spent on a pointless quest to backtrack through areas you have already done hours of backtracking through to find items that do nothing but unlock the end of the game, only to be rewarded with two bad boss fights and one of the worst final zones in any video game. all that said, there are some tangible improvements over the original with the new control options and the remastered visuals are gorgeous
This remaster is what finally made me click with Prime. The dual stick, less mashy controls made it immensely more comfortable to play and I couldn't stop until I finished it. Now it's maybe the most immersive thing I've ever played. The HUD is used so creatively to simulate a real high tech space suit and there's countless realistic visual touches. The planet feels truly alive and its atmosphere can be peaceful, tense, downright sinister. This is the best Metroid OST I've come across since Super - I would put them on the same tier with how perfectly they create the mood (and how much they bang). With the redone graphics I felt like I'd been fully absorbed into its world. The usual progression system and platforming in 3D space is incredibly satisfying, the majority of areas are well crafted and the morph ball in particular is completely transformed as a mechanic. It's insane they got it this right on the first try. When it comes to exploration, puzzles and environmental storytelling this is as good as it gets.
Sadly I can't say the same about the gunplay, which I found to be mediocre at best and an absolute mess at worst. There are a few standout boss fights but 1 on 1 gunfights are just not good at all. As it was originally designed for the GC controller and combat isn't the main focus, I could ignore this for the first half. But in the later areas it's like they really wanted you to notice how weak it is. Phazon Mines forces you to fight an entire gauntlet of strong enemies with no save stations for a long period of time, and you basically just exploit the poor AI to get through or tank a lot of damage. Ghost enemies appear all over the world map at the end to bring more annoyance.
Prime was yet another victim of Nintendo's GameCube era crunching. Exactly like Wind Waker you have to do a big collectathon to get to the final boss (and pad out the play time with backtracking) and there's a tiny area that seems like it was cut down due to time constraints (Impact Crater). Thankfully these downsides weren't enough to ruin my experience but it could be very frustrating at times, and the perfect gameplay flow was spoiled. I so wish they had taken this opportunity to make some changes but I guess it is JUST a "remaster" at the end of the day...
In short don't think of this as some FPS classic - if you're here purely for shooting you won't be satisfied. It's adventure / Metroidvania first and foremost and it's one of the best in those genres.
Sadly I can't say the same about the gunplay, which I found to be mediocre at best and an absolute mess at worst. There are a few standout boss fights but 1 on 1 gunfights are just not good at all. As it was originally designed for the GC controller and combat isn't the main focus, I could ignore this for the first half. But in the later areas it's like they really wanted you to notice how weak it is. Phazon Mines forces you to fight an entire gauntlet of strong enemies with no save stations for a long period of time, and you basically just exploit the poor AI to get through or tank a lot of damage. Ghost enemies appear all over the world map at the end to bring more annoyance.
Prime was yet another victim of Nintendo's GameCube era crunching. Exactly like Wind Waker you have to do a big collectathon to get to the final boss (and pad out the play time with backtracking) and there's a tiny area that seems like it was cut down due to time constraints (Impact Crater). Thankfully these downsides weren't enough to ruin my experience but it could be very frustrating at times, and the perfect gameplay flow was spoiled. I so wish they had taken this opportunity to make some changes but I guess it is JUST a "remaster" at the end of the day...
In short don't think of this as some FPS classic - if you're here purely for shooting you won't be satisfied. It's adventure / Metroidvania first and foremost and it's one of the best in those genres.
I love it when Nintendo makes Super Mario weird. Send Mario into a world where it’s just a giant mechanical robot of himself. Send Mario on a Toy Story style adventure through someone’s house. Let Mario get eaten by a turtle and then fight an octopus inside of a giant whale. Super Mario Land 2 blends that perfect amount of weird with the perfect amount of quality Mario gaming and somehow crams it all in an OG Game Boy. Well I guess it isn’t a secret how it’s all crammed in a Game Boy; each area has like 3 to 4 levels and the whole game can be beat in an hour but it’s an hour that you won’t regret having spent.
The game does its best to replicate the style of Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo while adding so much more of its own charm to it. Nothing like seeing Mario stomp some Jason Vorhees masked Goombas with butcher knives sticking out of their heads. Not to mention this game has one of the best Mario soundtracks ever. The amount they pump out of the Game Boy’s hardware is no joke especially compared to the relatively less technical Super Mario Land 1.
Also this game introduces Wario, so I mean, you really can’t get any better than that. Without this game, there would be no WarioWario and thus no Rhythm Heaven. It’s all a cruel domino effect. Super Mario Land 2 is an absolute top ten Mario Game and deserves its accolades.
The game does its best to replicate the style of Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo while adding so much more of its own charm to it. Nothing like seeing Mario stomp some Jason Vorhees masked Goombas with butcher knives sticking out of their heads. Not to mention this game has one of the best Mario soundtracks ever. The amount they pump out of the Game Boy’s hardware is no joke especially compared to the relatively less technical Super Mario Land 1.
Also this game introduces Wario, so I mean, you really can’t get any better than that. Without this game, there would be no WarioWario and thus no Rhythm Heaven. It’s all a cruel domino effect. Super Mario Land 2 is an absolute top ten Mario Game and deserves its accolades.
The dev team must've been on some strong shit when they created the level where we play on Mario's balls
Persona 3 Portable
2023
please go play P3 FES instead. it's a much better experience. that being said, the remaster itself had a noticeable amount of bugs and it just looks really ugly in the overworld. I played as a male and it just made me want to return to FES to get the full scope of the world.
I had a minor operation on my back and got seven stitches, and afterward the doctor told me not to do anything too strenuous. I decided to just game the rest of the day thinking that would be preferable to like working out or biking, but while I was finishing this game up I apparently leaned back in my desk chair so hard it made a bunch of blood squeeze out of my stitches and ruined the special disappearing bandages the doctor put on before. There was a huge stain on the back of my chair and I thought the stitches had straight up popped. I found out they were thankfully still intact when I went to urgent care but they had to do the special dressing all over again. I give this game four out of five stars.
Super Mario World
1990
Somehow Nintendo released the greatest game of all time as a launch title on the Super Nintendo and now we need to live with this knowledge for the rest of time, I guess.
God of War Ragnarök
2022
While there are many aspects of this game that I think are better than the first, overall I would say that this is a worse game than 2018. Mainly, the combat gets much more repetitive because of the fact that we already played the first game and this game is quite a bit longer. I didn't love the combat of the first game, but the campaign was brief enough that it didn't bother me a ton. While this game does have much more enemy variety, the core loop of the gameplay is still a little too simple and repetitive for me. I also think the climax of the game was extremely underdeveloped compared to the rest of this. I still overall really enjoyed the game though because of the incredible character writing and engaging story.
God of War Ragnarök
2022
It took me a long time to finish Ragnarok, I kept switching to other games and having to force myself to complete it and that in itself is telling. I love the graphics, the combat and the characters but the game can be quite a slog at times, the pacing is all over the place.