There are so many things I can say about this game.

I can praise its story for how interesting the characters are and how strongly it displays some scenes, despite the graphics not being on par with other games on more powerful hardware. I can gush about the game's absurdly amazing mechanics that must've been a nightmare to pull off but damn was it worth it. I can praise the fun side missions and how great the rewards for them can be. I can go on and on about how cool the new additions to the map are and how interesting they are to explore.

There's so many ways to sell someone on this game that has easily become my Game of the Year. If I can sum all these thoughts that weigh my mind down into one sentence that clearly conveys how good this game is, it would be this:

Of all of the $70 games I have bought and played to completion, Tears of the Kingdom is the only one that truly justifies that cost, AND YOU CAN BUY IT FROM NINTENDO FOR EVEN LESS THAN THAT!

Why are you still reading this? Play the game already!

As someone who didn't experience the Uncharted series back in the PS3 days, this was an interesting journey.

I started playing this collection back in 2019 and only finished it now 4 years later. I beat the first game back then and I'll be honest with you, I don't remember much about that game at all besides there being lots of jungle areas and the weird stuff at the end. Typically, I'll remember more substantial things about games after this many years, but I really have nothing for this one. That may speak for the content of the game, sadly, since I do remember it getting kind of rough. Having beaten 2 and 3 more recently, however, I thankfully can't say the same in terms of memories. It feels like here they figured out how they wanted to do the series, since in these games are some noteworthy set pieces that will stick with you, like the well-known intro to 2.

Set pieces aside, you're doing one of three things at any given time in Uncharted. You're either exploring and climbing around walls and cliffs, solving puzzles, or shooting at bad guys. Climbing around is fine, but it can be easy sometimes to miss a jump here and there. Sometimes the game will not read your input, though, and you'll just run off a ledge and die. Never fun when that happens! Puzzles are hit-or-miss, but I did enjoy the ones in 3 the most. I felt like they had the most creativity of the trilogy.

When it comes to combat, this is where I start liking the game less. The gunplay is simple enough. You get one main gun, a side arm, and 4 grenades to use, constantly swapping them out with whatever enemies drop when you run low on ammo. Surviving combat encounters relies heavily on using cover to your advantage, ducking behind walls to keep safe from enemy fire. You have regenerating health, so if you get hit too much and the colors on the screen start to turn white, just hide somewhere until the screen goes back to normal and continue business as usual. Combat is a simple system that works reliably enough.

However, there is a gameplay balance issue with these games. Early on in each game they'll throw a comfortable amount of guys at you that use weapons that pack enough of a punch to teach you to be cautious. They'll be tough, but never unfair. Once you get past the halfway point of these games, however, the game starts trying to test you more in encounters. Soon you'll be facing off against more enemies at a time, with them using fast-firing weapons that quickly tear through your health, or explosive weapons that will kill you instantly on direct contact. You'll also begin to fight armored enemies that carry shotguns that will one-shot you if they get too close no matter what difficulty you're playing on. You'll also encounter enemies that use riot shields that carry fast-firing weapons. If you don't have a grenade for those guys, you better hope your aim is true when shooting at any exposed limbs or you're done.

I also feel that there are issues with how the games detect where your bullets are hitting someone. You're encouraged to go for headshots, which will usually kill an enemy in one hit. In later encounters on Normal, it began to feel like either my shots weren't registering as headshots, or the enemies were just tanking these shots, often leading to me needing to shoot them once more in the head to finally take them down. The armored guys with shotguns I mentioned earlier are also a nightmare because of this, as well as the fact that they wear armor on their head, requiring multiple headshots before their head can become exposed. There's also an enemy class in 3 that just straight-up does not react to headshots, requiring the player to use melee to take them down reliably. When fighting these guys specifically, it's usually in a situation where that isn't much of an issue, but it's still baffling that headshots can't kill an enemy that isn't wearing any head protection at all!

My last complaint regarding the combat revolves around how easy it is for enemies to sneak up on you. You'll be shooting at guys in front of you and all of a sudden there will be a guy shooting at your back! I experienced this the most when playing 3, and it happened in almost every enemy encounter. You really need to be swinging the camera around when fighting foes, because when this happens, it will quickly lead to some super-unfair deaths. I switched the difficulty from Normal to Easy during my playthrough of 3 and it was not enough to stop this from happening. I'll be shooting at dudes just to get instantly killed because one of the armored shotgun guys snuck up behind me and fired ONE SHOT! ON EASY!

If you want to use this collection to get into the Uncharted series and want to not spend most of your playthroughs pulling your hair out, I implore you to play the trilogy on Easy mode. While the issues I described above still apply to Easy, you'll at least be taking down enemies faster during it. I don't believe you'll lose much going for that difficulty. The games encourage replays with tons of treasures and unlockables to get so you're given plenty of reasons to play through the game multiple times on harder difficulties if you think you can handle it. For me, personally, I'll stick to easier modes with less headaches after seeing the way these games handle difficulty.

I had a small bit of fun with this one back in my late teens, booting it up on the 360 since Minecraft wasn't out on Xbox yet. The world you could explore wasn't all too big, but it did scratch the itch of exploring and crafting for a small while.

I did not play this game for very long. There is a reason for that.

When this game spawned onto the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace, in it was one enemy you could encounter. This was a spider, which is a familiar foe if you've played Minecraft. Unlike Minecraft's spiders, however, these were much, much scarier than they had any right to be.

Imagine if you were exploring a dark cave and then all of a sudden you saw two red dots in the distance. Then, as you stared back into these eyes in confusion, they silently rose high into the air and then landed a few yards away from you. Now, you can view the creature in its entirety. It is a giant black voxel spider with large red eyes.

It has no animations at all. It "hops" by quickly rising high into the air and falling down close to you. It doesn't blink. It turns in your direction without making a sound.

If you weren't scared of it now, you will be once it hops on top of you.

When a spider approaches you in Minecraft, you'll typically hear these sounds. They do a proper job of conveying what the spider is and its aggressiveness without being too scary, especially since spiders are typically easy to take down.

In Total Miner: Forge, when a spider hops on top of you, it lets out a blood curdling scream that is so loud that it feels like it's going to blow out your television's speakers!

I'm sure that with all of this information, you can easily determine why encountering one of these things in the dead of night in a dark cave made me never want to play this game ever again. Well, that and it wouldn't be long before Minecraft got its proper Xbox 360 port, ensuring the death of all Xbox Live Indie Game Minecraft clones.

If you didn't get to try this out when you could get it on Xbox, I can assure you that you missed out on nothing! Play Minecraft instead!

RPG Time: The Legend of Wright is less an RPG and more an exploration-focused action game. Your journey takes you into a hand-drawn world full of cute characters and mischievous enemies. You'll fight foes, solve puzzles, and get creative to complete your journey to save the world.

The first thing you'll notice about this game is its presentation. It comes in the form of a game made up by an elementary school kid who seems to put all of his free time to excellent use, not only creating the book the game takes place in and filling it with wonderful drawings to convey the world to the player, but also creating loads of crafts that enhance the story and become game mechanics. You have pencil sharpeners that are blacksmith tools to sharpen your pencil sword, there's a slot machine that creates a unique special attack, and loads of other wonderful things to surprise you. This game never runs out of steam in regards to creativity. You'll be engaged seeing just what new things the game will introduce to you, from wonderful drawings to clay figures to paper mache works of art. It's a feast for the eyes and it'll do everything in its power to use that fact to put a smile on your face, and it will succeed!

The gameplay is a mix of a number of things, but primarily you'll be exploring the world, solving puzzles, and fighting enemies. The challenges you face are very unique and fun, and the puzzles are always fair, making this an easy recommendation for casual players. The combat also isn't too hectic, which some may see as a negative but for the sake of the general feel of the game I feel that this is to its benefit. You'll fight foes by slashing your pencil sword across the screen, hunting weak points and using the environment to do strong attacks. The fights are their own types of puzzles in that sense, and the animations during them are cute and interesting to watch.

RPG Time: The Legend of Wright is a love letter to the concept of raw unfiltered childhood imagination and letting it flow freely. As you go through the story, the creator of the game is always with you, gushing about his favorite games and other things, even teaching players about things like chemistry and rigging cup games. You feel the childhood wonder in the character, sensing his passion for not only the game but for the things that make him happy, just as any child would enthusiastically go on about their favorite things. It helps to create a sense of comfort for the player, and it makes every line from the creator that much more welcome. You can almost feel yourself getting as excited as the creator is at some points, and I think that's wonderful. It's a reminder to all of us of just how powerful our imaginations can be, and when we let our ideas flow freely, whether it's on paper or through music or film or any other medium, we shouldn't be too strict in regards to staying in the lines. We should celebrate our ideas with our whole hearts, and put every ounce of love we can into what we do every day, even if things get a little messy on the road.

Since the first trailer was shown for RPG Time: The Legend of Wright, I was interested in seeing the final product. Now, after the past few years of waiting, I've finally gotten to play it, and I can certainly say it was worth the wait. I'll be keeping an eye on this team going forward, because based on this strong release, I believe they're going to do some great things. Definitely pick this one up when you get the chance, if you haven't gotten to already. I can assure you it's worth it.

A short, somewhat interesting experience, to say the least. You get some cool weapons, but some are so grossly overpowered (like the rocket launcher and flamethrower) that you have little reason to use anything else. Exploring the area is neat, but the game's short length will leave you wishing there was more to it. I honestly didn't find the story interesting and quickly stopped reading the logs scattered all over the place. If you want something short and simple to kill an hour or two, this is for you, I guess. You can do a lot better, though.

The Final Fantasy Legend, also known as the first SaGa game, is a unique RPG for the Game Boy. You start alone and visit a guild to recruit party members, whether they're humans, mutants or monsters!

One of the most noteworthy aspects of this game is that you don't increase your stats with level-ups. Instead, you buy stat-raising items for humans, and mutants increase their stats and learn new moves randomly after fights. Monsters are highly interesting, though. When you defeat an enemy, they can drop meat. When a monster eats the meat, they transform into a new monster, using all of that creature's attacks and gaining all of their stats. This approach to party-building makes The Final Fantasy Legend a unique experience, allowing for players to really experiment with what kind of party they want to build up throughout the game.

Of course, being that this is a Game Boy game, there's a lot of things that the game does not explain, like weapon and armor stats, and the effects of items you buy in shops. Some are self-explanatory, and you can easily assume that the more expensive the weapon/armor, the better it is. However, each weapon gains its power from one of three stats, those being Strength, Agility, and Mana. It is very possible to find yourself buying a Mana-based weapon, not realizing this is the case, and then equipping it to a human, who can't improve their Mana stat like mutants can. Things like this will have players referencing online guides often for proper loadouts. Thankfully, you'll get used to the rules of this game quick, and soon you'll be referring to guides less and less as you play. Certain weapon types tend to use specific stats, making decisions regarding equipment easier to make. For example, bows always use the agility stat, and most swords rely on strength.

Speaking of weapons, all weapons and items (except armor) have a limited amount of uses before they break. This keeps players on their toes regarding their equipment and encourages players to use a variety of weapons instead of relying on the same ones throughout the game. Once you reach the end game, this becomes a non-issue since by then you'll be very powerful and you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with. Until then, though, this system proves to be interesting and keeps you thinking about what you have on your characters.

The Final Fantasy Legend is a fun short romp that will keep you engaged from beginning to end, exciting you with powerful monsters to control as well as cool abilities and weapons to tear through foes with. With how customizable your party is, it feels like the game encourages you to try beating it multiple times with challenging parties or with self-imposed rulesets. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it is one that will stick with me for a while. Hopefully it'll stick with you, too, but I wouldn't blame you if He Don't it didn't.

Imagine if a group of people looked at Wario Land 4 and said "What if we made it even MORE insane?"

If you like fast-paced action platforming with unique gimmicks for each stage that constantly surprises and entertains you, then Pizza Tower is your dream come true! Peppino feels great to control, there's secrets galore, and speedrunning stages is both challenging and satisfying.

When you finish Pizza Tower, you're gonna immediately wanna go back for seconds!

I'll be honest I'm not getting much out of this one.

The boss fights feel a little too unforgiving on normal and the game as a whole is a boring cakewalk on easy. While it feels good to play, I feel like you need to care about Astro Boy as a series at least a little to get much out of this besides the fun gameplay since that's all there really is here. Also, everything I'm hearing about needing to beat it twice is turning me off from it.

It also does the thing where it's a beat-em-up with stat upgrades and mixing those two together is a major turn-off for me. How will I know which stats I should be caring about before I enter the next stage and get beat to a pulp because I upgraded my special attack stat instead of life? I feel like games like these work best when you can easily respec your character to experiment with different combinations of upgrades to see what works best for a stage. Given the short nature of the game (going based off HowLongToBeat's stats) I guess it would make sense that they wouldn't want to include that but having the option would be welcome.

I want to like this game! Everyone calls it a classic! I feel like I'm missing something here, but I just don't get the hype. I'll have to give it another shot sometime and hopefully I'll be nicer to it then. Maybe you'll get more out of it than I did, so give it a shot if you want to see if it's right for you.

Also, it's complete B.S. that you don't get a stat point if you skip the tutorial.

There's a lot you can say about this game.

The story is wonderful from beginning to end. It does a great job fleshing out the events before FFVII, and Zack is an endlessly charming character. It's impossible to hate him. You'll fall in love with him very quickly.

The gameplay is pretty unique, but also kind of weird. There's a slot machine mechanic that determines buffs you'll get in battles, as well as how Materia and Zack level up. There's no real consistent way to get level ups, so you kind of rely on luck for them throughout the game.

Materia matters a bit more than levels, though. With the right set of materia you can bend this game over your knee easily. One mastered MP++ and a mastered High Jump will easily carry you throughout the entire game. Because of this, it's hard to justify experimenting with weird materia combinations. Despite that, I'm sure there's plenty of interesting setups you can have to get through the game.

Along with the campaign are missions which you can access at any save point. They're often short but there's a ton of them to keep you busy. If it weren't for me getting lost in doing a bunch of these, I would've finished the game way sooner. Honestly if you ignore missions (not recommended for a casual playthrough) you'll finish the campaign in a relatively short amount of time, maybe like 12 or 14 hours?

I like this game a lot. A part of me wants to dive back in right after I finished. I want to do the rest of the missions and get a platinum trophy. Maybe I'll do it one day.

As for you, the reader, I highly recommend you give this a playthrough, especially if you beat FFVII and want to learn more about Zack and the world before Cloud became the star.

Embrace your dreams.

I will be avoiding story spoilers here, so no worries there. I go into gameplay stuff and talk about some mechanics, but I don't detail any specific items or enemies here.

There's a lot to unpack with this one.

Graphically, it looks great in the headset. Each mountainside you approach looks really nice up close, allowing for great immersion. However, there's some texture pop-in issues that you will notice quickly. It's nothing disorienting, but it is a little immersion-breaking.

Aside from a few rare dips in framerate, the game ran fine, overall. There are also plenty of accessibility options to help make the game more enjoyable if certain gameplay styles cause motion sickness.

The story is pretty weak. I didn't really get attached to the characters, and the plot is pretty straightforward. Don't go into this expecting a jaw-dropping narrative, or much of an interesting narrative at all, sadly.

Where this game shines and flickers, though, is its gameplay. Climbing mountains, ropes, and other things feels natural, for the most part. Moving too rapidly to quickly climb a mountain can cause some controller detection issues that can rarely lead to you missing an important grab and making you fall, but for the most part it works well.

Throughout the game you'll acquire different traversal tools to spice up climbing. Some of which you'll be using constantly throughout the game. However, there's one item you get that sadly doesn't get much use outside of the first area you get to play with it in. You'll reach the end of the game and forget it exists. The final traversal item gets plenty of use in the end, but you'll often need to be using it while looking directly up, which can make your neck pretty stiff after a while. If you have lights on in the room you're playing in and they're above you, this will also cause the VR headset's cameras to lose track of your environment, causing the game to stop for you to reorient yourself.

One half of this game is climbing and traversal. The other half is enemy encounters. Sadly, this is the weakest part of the game. Enemy encounters feel like they're designed for you to be facing one or two enemies at once at max. When 3 or more enemies appear, it quickly goes from exciting to stressful, requiring you to keep track of multiple enemies all doing different attacks while finding small pockets of time to allow you to shoot or eat a healing item.

As you progress, you'll acquire different types of ammo for your bow that cause status effects when you shoot enough of them at an enemy. Because enemies are constantly moving, for the most part, you'll either miss shots or spend too much time trying to aim. Along with needing to hit the enemy with enough of a status type, you also need to hit them rapidly. Wait too long and the status effect meter goes down, nullifying your hard work. It would be better if one or two arrows did the job regularly, instead of the multiple enemies and bosses require.

Speaking of bosses, there are some here. Visually, they're impressive. Fighting them, however, is kind of a nightmare. Bosses have multiple area-spanning attacks that will quickly tear through your health bar. You'll spend more time hunting for tables with apples on them during these matches than you will be actually fighting back. Enemies and bosses all have weak points that the game shows to you, allowing you to do good damage to them. It's great for common enemies, but when it comes to bosses, they can often be small or hard to hit, and with some bosses moving around rapidly, aiming for these points becomes an arduous task.

Enemy and boss arenas contain not only infinitely respawning healing items but also a limited number of special ammunition. Using special ammo is encouraged, if not required, for having a more fun experience fighting bosses as you expose weaknesses with them. However, the fun stops when you run out of special ammo. At this point all you can do is unload your basic infinite ammo into a boss until it falls over. Bosses take very little damage from regular ammo, turning fast-paced fights into boring slogs.

Perhaps the worst part about fighting bosses is that there is no checkpointing during them. If you're a few shots away from taking one down and you die, you restart from the beginning of the fight. This is highly frustrating, especially if a certain fight is dragged out due to previously mentioned special ammo problems.

Overall, I don't hate this game, but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon. It does some cool stuff and is a long playthrough, so you do feel like you get your money's worth here. It's also a great workout, since you're moving your arms a lot during gameplay sessions.

If this game ever goes on sale for like $20 or $25, give it a shot if you want. While this game is not without its flaws, it isn't something I dislike.

One thing's for sure, it made me realize just how big the robots are in this universe. Honestly the coolest part of the game is getting to see these things up close. You can just boot it up to look at them and you'll immediately get your money's worth, if ya ask me.