Took the clunky, corny and overrated RE4 and made it into something to rival the best of Resident Evil. Leon and Ashley are REAL characters this time, with a bond that makes the adventure so much more emotionally and narratively appealing. The controls are flawless, making you feel like you stand a real chance as the badass Leon S Kennedy against hordes of shambling freaks. The environmental variety and atmospheric design constantly keep things fresh, and the new areas and changes to old ones make this bizarre hell-Spain feel so much more engrossing to exist in and explore.

Barely works as a video game, especially in the stamp mode. All of these card games that make up over half the game lineup not only feel and look the same, but are so reliant on luck that it becomes an exercise in patience and willpower to slog through minutes-long games that boil down to "flick the stylus once every 60 seconds while you wait for the CPUs to finish their turns, and hope that luck goes your way".

Atrocious game, genuinely one of my least favorite ever. At least the box art is cool.

This is... my favorite racing game ever. The sense of speed is on the level of F-Zero, as you blast through the surprisingly beautiful tracks using your liberally available boost, jettison off of a ledge and get 10 seconds of air time. The tracks become little more than a suggestion as you soar above them and perform tricks, with a sense of fluidity and momentum unmatched by other racing games. The variety offered by the in-race mini games constantly keeps things fresh, and is a bending of the genre like I've never seen. One moment you'll be gliding through the air collecting butterflies, rail grinding like Sonic, shooting darts, throwing pies, or scoring goals, all of which flow with the momentum of the race.

It runs and looks great, has a ton of content, brings fresh ideas to the genre and offers a sense of spectacle that few games have. A true blooded Wii classic here that goes IMPRESSIVELY overlooked, probably because it's successor, Excite Truck, is the worst launch game.

The controls work about 60% of the time, but that's okay because the game seems to not care if you don't succeed or not because it's constantly giving you items and power ups to excuse your failure. What this leads to is a game that plays like it should be frustrating and full of friction, but is actually just a garishly colorful hour-long romp with screechy voice acting. If the game wasn't so forgiving it would be worse, but I was able to breeze through it and see the last true rhythm game from the creators of PaRappa and Vib Ribbon in just about an hour.

It's interesting that it happened, but it barely works and there's really nothing to it.

I find Halo frustrating. I've played four games in the series up to this point, and only one of them (Infinite) has engaged me to any real level. It's hard for me to pinpoint things I enjoy about this game, since I find essentially every element to be underwhelming, disappointing, or poorly executed.

The worst part is I don't WANT to feel this way. These are some of the most acclaimed games of all time, and every time I visit one I try my best to get in to the flow and enjoy the games for what they are. It sucks to be the outsider on this one, but every time I try, I get more and more disillusioned to the series. This review contains my genuine, unfiltered thoughts on why the Halo series doesn't appeal to me, almost at all.

The gunplay is weightless as even on easy your weapons barely do any damage to anything bigger than a grunt. The only weapons I actually enjoyed using were the rare melee weapons such as the energy sword and gravity hammer, as they felt significantly more impactful than any of the other flimsy, weak pea shooters I was using for the vast majority of the game.

I also find the level design to be particularly weak, though this isn't anything new for Halo. The layouts are simultaneously frustratingly simple and too vague, as I was either walking down a hallway or spat out into a bland area with no clear direction to go, and I would end up wandering around for a handful of minutes after clearing all the enemies until mercifully an icon would lead me in the right direction. And within levels, Halo has the terrible urge to almost always make you backtrack through each area once you've gone through it the first time, making many levels feel like repetitive slogs.

The story is the only real element that put this above the first two for me, as its at least sort of fun to see characters like Johnson, Keyes, Cortana, Arbiter and Guilty Spark have to work together. Unfortunately though, in the end the one note, obnoxiously stereotypical characters placed into a painfully straightforward plot made the story nothing more than background context to be shuttled from bland area to bland area.

The game also contains incredibly underwhelming set pieces, as they boil down to running down a hallway, driving a warthog through impressively repetitive areas, or beating the easiest, lamest boss ever conceived, within a twist that almost makes no sense for what was supposed to be the end of a trilogy.

I just honestly and truly feel nothing but disinterest or frustration when I play Halo. I sit there, clear my mind and try my goddamndest to immerse myself. After about half of any of the missions though, my mind begins to wander. Flaws with nearly every element of its design begin to cloud my experience, and I start to sigh and groan at each new identical enemy encounter, straightforward set piece, cheesy one liner with no personality and area I either feel like, or literally have already been in.

Repetitive structure. Unrewarding, weightless gunplay. Simplistic, boring set pieces. Uninteresting level design. One note characters. A terrible final boss. The handful of highlights such as taking down the first Scarab (not as fun the third time), solid visuals and art direction and a very good original score can't save this from being one of the most underwhelming games I've played in a long, long time.