I'm not sure why they made a game called Tales From Space: About A Blob about an alien blob that eats things to become a bigger blob and made the focus of the gameplay "frustrating physics-based precision platforming through spikes and lasers like the later levels of LittleBigPlanet" instead of "rolling around and eating things", but to be fair on the dev team, they immediately realized their mistake and course-corrected in the sequel. Just play Mutant Blobs Attack instead, you'll miss absolutely nothing by skipping this.

You have to beat the entire story mode in order to unlock the scoring system (aka one of the most important features of a rhythm game) BUT Stitch dabs at the end of each song so it kinda evens out.

Owlboy is a visually stunning, beautifully crafted pixel art showcase with a wonderful soundtrack and a cute cast of fun characters that lure you into a false sense of security until you try to actually play the damn thing and learn that your little mute owl friend has glass bones and paper skin and his main weapon is a peashooter that takes multiple hits to kill even the lowliest cave bat.

Owlboy is beautiful, yes, and I like the idea of an avian character having to carry people around to do their fighting for them, but it wasn't exactly...well, fun. This is a very tedious game. As you play it, you start think "Oh I'm sure the game's gonna get better..." as the stealth missions and various maze-like dungeons beat you down in an ever-increasing volley that wears on your patience. Soon, you'll ask yourself "Am I having fun?" when you know the answer is "No", and that's usually before you realize that this game wants you to treasure hunt for over 2000 finite coins across a playing field that has zero warp or map options available.

But at least the art is really nice. It's a shame about the whole "gameplay" part.

UPDATE - Okay this is the first game I've played on my PS5 that actually hardlocked my system. I had to manually shut down my PS5, have my USB drive repaired, and use a back up save because the Owlboy save file got corrupted in the process. Because I...walked through a doorway wrong? I guess?
Fuck you too, Owlboy.

Greatest hits compilations can be a hard sell since a fan of the series might say "big deal, I've played all these games before" but the beauty of Gold lies in the hardware it was released on. Getting a WarioWare on the 3DS, a system that can emulate both the gyro controls of Twisted and the touch screen of Touched, was a stroke of genius - even if it occurred late in the system's lifespan - and the way it accumulates into an absolutely frantic finale where you're switching between 3 different play styles on the fly was a real "This is why I love video games as a art medium" moment. If you're going to use console gimmicks for your video game, might as well go this hard with them, and if you can, please play this beautiful game on an actual 3DS system. This is where Gold shines. like gold

In a way, WarioWare Gold is an amazing send-off, both for the handheld WarioWare games and the 3DS itself. An absolutely exquisite curtain drop for the system before it succumbs to its fatal injuries via poorly selling remakes, and I'm saying this about a game where Wario gains godlike powers by wearing a communal toilet on his head and tries to murder a small child in front of a stadium full of people while doing so (in makes sense in context, I promise, and also it's unclear if the communal toilet itself has godlike powers or if Wario gave himself godlike powers via the placebo effect).

Oh, and to sweeten the deal, once you collect all the souvenirs, the game slaps you on the back and says "well done, now you get this mildly addicting collectible card game where you play rock-paper-scissors against those random freaks from the minigames". This game rules.

Really not a fan of the fact that 3 of the 4 latest Crash Bandicoot games are (or, in this case, were) battle pass grindfests that want you to turn the marsupial into a side-job as you work the long hours for your free-to-play cosmetics, all while a frog in boiling water scenario is playing out where the releases have been steadily becoming online-only after the success of CTRNF, a game with a "seven dollars gets you 700 Bandicoot Bux!" cosmetics store that at least was still a full game that could be played offline.

But hey, at least they brought back Mr. Crumb from the obscure Tiger electronics game and did a crossover with The Noid at one point, which means that Crash Bandicoot has canonically interacted with a Domino's pizza.

Similar to how the Animal Crossing villagers used to insult your weight and steal your stuff in the first installment, Cooking Mama used to be a weird bully who would glare at you and call you a bitch because you didn't peel three potatoes perfectly under an oppressive time limit. While this does give the original Cooking Mama more of a personality than the sequels, I also don't like being stressed out while making pixel art spaghetti. I definitely prefer the defanged Cooking Mama of the 3DS era to the original "if I see one lettuce leaf break then it's a bronze medal" Cooking Mama.

I thought this game was going to do what previous DQM games have done by having Psaro be transported into a wacky alternate dimension to have his little Pokemon adventure but no, Dragon Quest IV just starts happening during gameplay. Psaro will lay waste to a village as The Manslayer and then go "Excuse me, I gotta frolic in a candy and gumdrop wonderland with my girlfriend now" and I'm supposed to just accept it as canon now. Which I will, because I'm not a coward.

Richard Horvitz voicing Spike in the US/NTSC dub couldn't save this one, I'm afraid.

I've long heard tale from other people of the Ape Escape remake that sucked, and...yeah, they were right. I will be nice to this clunky adaptation and say that I actually prefer the button taps for Sky Flyer and Dash Hoop over twirling the second control stick, but I can't shake off my "look at how they massacred my boy" gut reaction for this remake. Valiant effort to make this portable! Wish it wasn't trash!

It's still a version of Ape Escape, so the skeleton of a banger game still exists, but hot damn they ruined most of the gadgets. It's bad enough that the Stun Club and the Time Net have their movement severely limited from "move second control stick freely and gracefully" to "tap button once to do the same pathetic swing over and over with zero variation", but they seriously expect me to control the RC Car with a D pad?! Why not ask me to rub my ass with sandpaper while I'm here?

This game also makes the interesting choice of making the graphic and sound design somehow worse than the PS1 original. The graphics are your traditional "upscale the PS1 polygons but somehow making the colors muddier in the process" fare of the 2000's era of remakes, and the music is mostly left intact with the occasional Interesting Choice (Crumbling Castle, this is about you), but the sound mixing is where things get really fucked. Great idea to give Spike the loudest footsteps in all of gaming and have his footsteps sound wet somehow. Even better idea to have the explosion noises go from "too quiet" to "WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD".

Great game to give to an Ape Escape fan if you absolutely despise them. You can even say "What's wrong? I thought you LIKED Ape Escape?" as the twinkle forever leaves their eye during a failed net swing that would've been completely doable on the PS1.

At least you can Platinum this game on PS Plus Premium at a mere 60% completion on your save file since there's absolutely no "catch all the monkeys" trophies. This is a blessing in disguise.

You're right, Strong Bad. More point-and-click adventures do need a dedicated "use lighter on flammable object" action.

Every single episode of SBCG4AP is a ray of sunshine in a cold, desolate world that puts a smile on my face. Homestar Runner is the balm to a wounded soul. That being said, if you asked me which of the five episodes was my least favorite, I would say this one with zero hesitation.

Don't get me wrong! It’s still super funny and I love all the callbacks! This game just also makes it abundantly clear that Homestar Runner works best when you have this rich cast of disturbed weirdos bouncing insults off of one another and unfortunately we lose some of that when some of the cast (Marzipan and King of Town, mainly) is rendered mute after being possessed by video game characters.

I will say, props to this game for having some really obscure video game references. I was not expecting a joke about LOAD“FILE”,8,1 or Hard Hat Mack.

With the 32-bit sprite work, the PS1 era soundtrack, and the cheesy 90's era voice acting tickling your brain and Mega Man possessing the ability to have the Buster and a Special weapon selected at the same time, you might be fooled into thinking that this is going to be one of the crown jewels of the Classic Mega Man lineup for the first couple of minutes. Sadly, it doesn't take long for the Blue Bomber's physics to start to feel sluggish and floaty with all of his extra animation frames, because it's right around that time when the game starts to flood the screen with so many moving enemy and explosion sprites that the game dissolves into visual noise.

Still a fine Mega Man all the same. I'm just happy that the Internet only makes fun of Dr. Wahwee, Rwmega Man, and JUMP JUMP SLIDE SLIDE because that means that Aqua Man's handsome guy intro got to be a complete surprise for me.

Also shout-out to the Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 version of this game for removing the red cross on the "Heal Mega Man completely" Rush item and turning it into a mysterious white box, meaning I was trying to beat the last two bosses of this game on one health bar like a chump. Capcom changing this in a rerelease means that they're aware that the original version of Mega Man 8 violated the Geneva Convention!

------------------------
Best MM8 Robot Master - Aqua Man clears, but I also appreciate Astro Man for being programmed with anxiety.
Worst MM8 Robot Master - Saying "Clown Man" is too easy and also isn't true. The implications of Search Man's double-headed state of existence makes him the worst for me, but I'm saying this out of pity as opposed to hatred.

While this isn't the worst game I've ever played on the PS Plus service, this certainly was the most miserable game to Platinum. I love any game that hands me a gun and tells me it's an ~advanced futuristic gun~ only for you enter combat and it takes ten bullets to kill the lowliest grunt. I also love completely linear games that somehow try to work in a bullshit collectible system so the game punishes you for triggering story events before you checked every single corner in every single room. Love it. Perfect.

Cool art direction though, even if it's in service to one of the most barebones cyberpunk settings I've ever seen. It almost made the second playthrough worth it. Almost. (also shout-out to the Brazillian guy who wrote the only 100% guide for this game on Steam, you're a real one)

If you stick with this game long enough to get past the weak opening act (which, judging by the trophy percentages, turned off a LOT of people), there is a neat little water physics and AI plotting puzzle-strategy in here. Vessel really shines once you've unlocked multiple types of colorful goo and can start guiding different blobs with different behaviors to specific switches and machines like melted Lemmings.

Unfortunately, since this is a physics-based puzzle platformer in the PS3 era, this means that sometimes you'll be stuck on a puzzle for over an hour because the water refuses to behave in the same way twice and sometimes you'll die because some particles of lava decided to wiggle in a corner and then launch at your sunburnt Murdoc Niccals scientist at 500 mph.

The way that this game lulls you into a false sense of security by playing a goofy live-action FMV at the beginning starring a schoolkid with attitude like it's the opening of a 1995 PS1 game before catapulting you into Just Skylanders But Worse once the actual gameplay kicks in was enough to give me whiplash. You had me fooled, Invizimals! I thought I stumbled on a hidden gem!

At least there's a buff ocelot furry voiced by Mike Pollock in this.

This review contains spoilers

"Hey Tibby! Yo mom's so fat she's the palace of Heaven World!"