As the Sega systems had their fair share of Mickey Mouse "Illusion" games, the SNES also had it's own counterpart developed by none other than the 8 and 16-bit gods of Disney games, Capcom. This is the first of four games in the "Magical Quest" series of Mickey Mouse Capcom titles for the SNES.

Capcom were masters of producing licensed Disney games back in the day, such as Aladdin, Ducktales, Good Troop etc. And the first Magical Quest game in the series of Mickey Mouse platformers for the SNES was no exception. This game has as much love and care as any title from Capcom back in the day.
The game is a very good platformer, with beautiful graphics and visuals - similar to Castle of Illusion - but with Capcom's unique 16-bit flair they always nailed.

The gameplay is excellent and is my favorite of the Mickey games I have played so far. It is similar to Castle of Illusion where you are jumping and bouncing off enemies to reach the end of the stage and fight a boss. The cool thing that Magical Quest does to differentiate itself from Castle of Illusion and other platformers is the costume system.
There are four different costumes Mickey can freely switch between, each having it's own unique playstyle, but also each being a tool to help you solve some platforming puzzles as you get through the game;

The standard default Mickey costume lets you bounce off enemies and grab/throw them, similar to something like Klonoa or Tomba.
The Magic Turban costume lets you shoot magic projectiles, and is basically a Mega Man type of gameplay.
The Firefigher costume lets you shoot a constant stream of water letting you push enemies away.
And finally the climber costume essentially turns the game into Bionic Commando.
You can freely switch between these four costumes at any time after you've unlocked them, and each costume is viable to play with through the entire game. You are mostly never forced to switch to another costume, so if you wanna just play the game as a Mega Man game, you can do that.

The backgrounds, locations and artstyle are all excellent looking for the SNES. But this is SNES Capcom we are talking about, so I didn't expect any less. Each level has 3-4 stages, each being based on a different theme such as a Beanstalk level, a Cave level, an Ice level etc. Nothing too unique, but everything looks great.

The game is tad on the harder side, especially the final boss which was not fun and soured my taste on an otherwise very good platformer. I hear less about this series than the Illuision series, so I was surprised that I found myself enjoying it this much. Definitely recommended for people who like 2D platformers.

Being the "least bad" Fallout 3 DLC is a bit like being the "most moral" person in a trial at the Hague, but given how bad everything Fallout 3 related is it needs all the accolades it can get.

Point Lookout isn't really more than a pocket-sized other Wasteland to explore, a brief main quest that doesn't have much to it beyond you killing ~tribals~ in droves, some decentish sidequests aaaand some loot. Yay.

The main quest isn't anything to write home about. A guy named Desmond conscripts you to kill and infiltrate some Tribals which are just... Uncritically placed into FO3's setting with all their uncomfortable tropes and occasionally you-no-take-candle style of speech in all its offensive. You get part of your brain removed (this doesn't mean anything) by a boatman and then you kill more tribals. Then you kill a lot of tribals. Then you kill a brain in a jar.
The only emotion this stirs in me besides apathy is mild annoyance, because on my main Fallout site circa 2009 I knew a guy who made Desmond his entire personality and was really annoying about it.
Desmond is an English pre-war ghoul who swears a lot and is a massive dick despite being good-aligned. I didn't really find him funny back then because the Bit is very one-note and nowadays I mashed through his dialogue after reading the subtitles because hoho wow this is some immature humor even for Fallout.

The main sidequests aren't going to make any Best Sidequests Ever lists but they're servicable compared to 3's.
One sees you taking up a Chinese spy's mission to destroy evidence of their espionage long after their death, and while it's not exactly rife with choice or even combat it's a nice little vignette with a decent tone to it - also it gives the Backwater Rifle, one of the game's better 10mm weapons.
The other is a thinly-veiled Lovecraft reference that's not very deep but it is relatively atmospheric and does utilize the scenery well. Apparently it was meant to be a lot deeper and better, but as is the norm with Bethesda games this was cut super late in development.

But I'll admit PL's setting does kind of irk because it's very superfluous. Like sugar candy. The parts near the pier honestly don't look much different from the Capital Wasteland and while the idea of setting a Fallout story in a swamp is neat, the terrain is incredibly repetitive and not very interesting.
Same goes for the Swampfolk, inbred cannibal killers, who were very obviously inspired by The Hills Have Eyes - such was admitted outright. They even used to be called Hillfolk, c'mon.
They're very much just there, making effigies and killing outsiders because that's what they do I suppose. The Lovecraft-lite quest gives the vague insinuation that they do it because this is supposed to reference Shadow over Innsmouth, I guess. Happy to see people from Cumbernauld show up in a game though!

Outside of the main quest and two big quests, though, Point Lookout just isn't very interesting. It's the first of the DLC maps to be nice and ~open~ but it's also so small that it only took me 3-4 hours to clear it of meaningful content.

Considering Mothership Zeta is next, let's just call this calm before the storm.

Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak is a milestone in videogames history.

When I played it as a child, it defined my views on the concept on love, what it means to love and what it means to be loved.

Hamtaro, our silent main character, is a rather charismatic fellow well recognized in his hamster community. During one nefarious day and due to a bit of goofiness on his part, he let the ham-dictionary fall into a bucket full of milk, spelling demise for the book.
You see, in this ham-filled world, the ham-dictionary is the absolute source of lexical knowledge for the hamsters: by ruining it, Hamtaro not only the hampered the progress of society in language evolution but also retroactively forgot all the ham-words, rendering him so utterly illitterate that even the most basic emotion became unexpressible.

"What am I to do? I just want to cry and be eternally still because I know nothing and therefore I am nothing"

I am sure that, if Hamtaro could have thought in hamster language during the first moments after the tragedy (which he could not because he forgot everything he knows), he would have thought something like this. Even the most resolute and brilliant hamster reacts with utter despair when faced with horrible situations: to do not is to be an idealistic ubermensch, a utopia detrimental to the common hamster.
...What defines a good hamster then? It is its ability to stand up, calm the mind and walk on. Go on, Hamtaro, leave this Clubhouse and explore the world with your newly acquired uneducated eyes.
And so, he did. The door opens.

What awaits him beyond that door is an apocalyptic scenery. The destruction does not hide in plain sight, it is not physical: the grass looks greener than ever and oh, how beautiful is the sea!
No, the destruction hides in the hearts of the ham-people: they lost the ability to love.

While Hamtaro was busy cancelling the philologic history of his species, Spat, a trickster devilish looking hamster, broke the hearts of the hamsters through his hate-filled pitchfork, making them disdain their sweet halves and transforming them into sad husks of their former selves.
Hamtaro could not talk but he was still him: his hands, his mind, his emotions were as lively as ever. He trusted that his hamster companions needed just a push in the right direction and he had to do something. But how?

Self-love is a rather admirable form of love. Hamtaro, being the dependable hamster that he is, probably healthily loves himself. However, how can one help an heart broken couple when alone? The powerful feeling of acknowledging the value of another being and being acknowledged in return is a beautiful thing that it just can't be done alone. It takes two to tango.

After having saved his own sweetheart, Bijou, from dying from starvation after remaining trapped into a field due to the collapse of a giant tree and having met Harmony, an angelic hamster provided with a love-filled wand, Hamtaro is now ready to help. His job is to reunite half-hearts into a single one: doing so is demonstrating the worthiness of his people, their ability to return to love after everything broke down, to change idea, to apologize, to ask forgiveness, to hug while crying.
And so they go, Hamtaro and Bijou, in an emotional odissey to defeat Spat, the love wrecking calamity.

Schopenhauer once said that love is just a means to reproduce, a pessimistic approach that related to the progressive lose of faith of people towards the future that would eventually reach his climax during the XX century.
Hamtaro ham-ham heartbreak defies Schopenhauer by proposing a romantic approach to the question of love: even if love is just a means for reproduction, the fact remains that the emotions in one's heart are still real, if not in an universal way, at least in the mind. The game aptly summarizes the fundamental need for all beings to love. Each and every hamster in the story wants to: anything and anyone can be loved as long as the feelings in one's heart are real, complete and trustful. Even Spat, the hideous hate-filled devil hamster, is no exception: even as a foe of romances, his hating shenanigans give value to emotions and show that even in hate there can be love.
Spat and Schopenhauer cannot be more diverse and yet they are enemies of the same enemy: romantic love.

To summarize Hamtaro Ham-Ham Heartbreak I would use the famous sentence of 'The unbearable lightness of being':

'Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost'

Man, what the hell happened here?

I know the full release of this game just started today, but I've played a decent amount of the beta, and I think after playing the new update I can confidently talk about this because I've got some stuff to whine about. Get ready for another Shem review that I write on an impulse where I just tear into something with no structure

I'm going to say now that I'm not interested in playing fighting games competitively by any means; I usually only play fighters just to screw around. Unlike a lot of other people, I thought Multiversus had the potential to be really good from the beta, so someone please explain to me why they took down the game for a full year only to re-release the exact same thing, but it feels way worse to play?

Every character’s movement and attacks have been slowed way the hell down, so every fight just goes at a snail’s pace now. Even characters who are supposed to be faster, like Finn and Shaggy, just don’t feel satisfying at all. I don’t understand why this change was even made, because one of the big criticisms of the beta nearly two years ago was that the game was too slow and floaty, so why double down on that? Fucking Brawl Ganondorf could DANCE on these characters! That’s not good! It got so slow for me that it almost single-handedly killed the experience.

The only other really big addition to the game is Rift mode, the PvE mode, which basically just boils down to playing a bunch of matches against bots with a few minigames thrown in there. Those minigames are lame as hell, by the way. You could find them in a bootleg Wii Sports-like shovelware game back in 2009. Who played the beta for this and thought, “You know what was missing? A minigame where you control a tank and shoot slow-moving drones to protect a magic crystal, and the character does not change direction at the same time as the tank when you move, so it looks jank AF”. At least they don't really last that long at all, but it all feels so stupid. How they got away with shutting the servers down to focus on "new modes" when this was all they did baffles me.

Outside of a few new characters and stages, everything else is basically the same. The same microtransactions, the same perk system, the same battle pass—the same stuff that I already don’t like about “Live Service” games. What I’m left with is a game that is somehow even more confused than it was in the beta. It just makes me wonder what the hell the point of shutting the game down even was, if they were just going to keep everything the same but make it less interesting to play.

It’s a shame, really. I don’t want to just shit all over Multiversus in another overly drawn out rant, because there are still things to appreciate about it. The actual movesets for each character are really creative and unique. They all behave exactly as I would expect those characters to play in a platform fighter, and I really enjoy the unique character dialogue that happens in certain matchups. They nail the fanservice aspect of this game. Most of what I complained about could still be fixed, but my main point here is that I just don’t care anymore after THIS long of a wait. You can tell these developers really do care about the characters and franchises they’re representing. But considering the time we live in, where crossovers are essentially just being done to shill for dying movie series, Multiversus is just more of that.

Why do I try so hard to finish games that I don't enjoy? How many times do I need to restart a game before I realize that I just don't want to play it? There's no fault of my own, the game just isn't fun, and I see zero reason to continue it.

Everything about Sword & Shield is painstakingly dull and empty, not to mention unnecessarily slow. My problems with Sun & Moon are now amplified by an indescribable amount, as its now even more prominent just how many times you are stopped dead in your tracks for quite honestly nothing. Combined with the once again slow moving dialogue boxes and animations, all this to say I give up.

I have tried multiple times to finish Pokemon Shield, not one of those attempts made it past the 4th gym. Maybe I didn't like my starter choice? Maybe I'm just not a fan of my team composition? Maybe it's everything, and nothing I do will get me to have fun playing through the Galar region. I just wish I could realize these things sooner.

wheatie's just gonna have to live with the fact that she's been able to finish every mainline Pokemon game besides gen 8. And that's what really hurts out of this whole ordeal.

Shootemups were a genre that earned a parody as scornful as bullet hell games. As the genre wore on, they became less games about shooting things and more games about collecting things, be they lives, powerups, medals, or whatever else. There was ambiguity about how to push the genre forward which left everything primed for Cave to come in and do what they did, making the shooting part of shootemups ancillary to tracing lines with a pen through prismatic fields of dots. And now, sitting at the opposite end of 20 years of that shit, we've come to a fork in the road. One side of the fork is Vampire Survivors and it's ilk: the full lobotomic removal of the agency of play, replaced by the stockpiling of slot machine assets to take you to deeper Nevada brigs. Devil Blade Reboot shines gloriously on the road less travelled.

I'm not going to claim Devil Blade is the best example of what directions are left to push shootemups. That is ZeroRanger. What Devil Blade is, is a punk rock volume reminder of The Point. It asks, "Do you know what's fun about flying a ship full of bullets and bombs on a progressive metal suicide mission?" And it answers before anyone can think of a joke or a denial: "EVERYTHING."

The fixation on The Point informs the whole task. The ship is called The Shining. No model number. No time for revisions. All that counts is that it kills, and there are kills to be done. The enemy talks back to you in terms of a God's punishment. You are to play the role of Resilience, the role you should've been playing this whole time. The ship is loaded with two guns, and describes them only by function: Narrow and Wide. You have bombs. You can also get shields. Bombs do what it sounds like: kill everything on screen. Shields do what they sound like: Protect you, once. Bombs also have the benefit of giving you a shield when you use them. All that matters is that everything dies, and Resilience demands they die first. If you kill absolutely everything in a stage, you get a bonus, because That Is The Point.

In wisdom, the developer understands that rewards stacked on top of rewards are amplified, and in desire of removing the baubles of old, the player increases the score simply by playing like a fucking lunatic. The closer The Shining is to its prey, the higher the multiplier, from 2x to 4x. And every #x adds up to a meter, shown as a raw digit. Once that digit crosses 100, a beast snarls and the word "BERSERK" lights up. Those 2x kills become 10x, the 3x become 15x, the 4x become 20x. A small white bar begins emptying, but once the bar empties, it doesnt end berserk mode: it simply takes 100 off the value. So, if you can push the value above 200, when the timer ticks over, surprise! It's still Berserk time. And the way you do that is to Kill, Recklessly, Constantly. That Is The Point.

Or, you can convert one of those bombs, rare and precious as they are, into a Boost by holding it. I like to believe I'm shoving the bomb into my fucking mouth and eating force. It shoves the meter to 500%, increases your damage, and puts a giant countdown clock around your ship that you couldn't ignore if you tried. You want to gamble? Here you go. Don't waste it. Waste THEM. THAT'S THE POINT.

A lot of interactive entertainment and digital toys are going to come out this year. Devil Blade Reboot is a Fucking Video Game. Maybe as those markets start crashlanding, love-fueled little ships like this will start launching their own suicide missions into hearts obsessed with the grotesque parodies of unloved gods. There is a point to being alive, and it's to Be Alive.

You know, it really doesn't need rocket battles like the sequels do for it to be worth playing. What it needs is a damn ass real fan translation. The WHOLE POINT of playing any DQ-adjacent game is you're going to be in for a lot of wonderful puns. Don't get me wrong, the guy who still doles out his machine-translated rom to strangers even in the year 2024 is a confirmed real one (nor does he in any way pretend it is a definitive translation). If I had to lay any blame, it is the Aeon Genesis guys who have apparently been working on this for fifteen years with radio silence. Guys, why'd you skip over the first installment of a beloved series, but went ahead and fully translated fuckin Neugier? Who asked for that? I'm not mad, just disappointed.

Buried under this mess is the potential for the best Arkham game -- and one of the best superhero games of all time.

For 90% of what was happening here, I was sold. Fresh off playthroughs of Asylum and City with tempered expectations, I felt the character and story work here was the best this series had to offer. I was laughing out loud regularly; I never do that! I would even go so far as to say the mix of humor, existential horror, and edge is more true to how a lot of good comics feel to read than pretty much any other super hero game I've played.

Going in after months of updates, a whole season of fresh live service content, and a $30 price tag, I was (and am to some extent) willing to give this game a lot of rope. It plays like a Borderlands in third person with cool traversal abilities. Fun! The repetitive story missions rarely feel like they're wasting time and the narrative moves quickly but not overly so. Good! And alongside the Destiny of it all were some really good story-based missions and moments. Some really clever stuff even by Rocksteady standards.

But after 8-10 hours of Justice League killing, a weird conclusion that neither satisfies the ongoing story nor adequately sets you up for the live service endgame, a credit roll that doesn't even make you press a button before offering to skip, and a post game with a mess of icons and VO dialogue assuming I completed missions I absolutely did not, a sinking feeling sit in. I was prepared to say "Um, Justice League is good actually" like I was writing some type of clickbait article. But no, the discourse caught up with me.

I still feel there's a lot of good story work here and don't regret for a moment the time I spent. But the transition from goofy superhero game to live service mess is so shoddy that it has damn near soured the whole thing.

You want to unlock the Joker without paying? You want a crumb more story? Spend another 5-7 hours minimum on Warframe missions to grind out the season's leveling, and that's if and only if you know what you're doing. And with like 200 active concurrent players at any given time, how confident are you that WB will even finish out the six seasons required to complete this story?

In summary, Suicide Squad has the bones of a 4-star game, possibly higher, but along the way it lost a lot of really generous goodwill I was willing to give it (and it earned!) through a million little, medium, and very large cuts. Worth a playthrough but, devastatingly, not much more.

Final thought (Mild, vague story spoilers): While certain character and story beats are excellent, other moments -- like the ones you come to a game called "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" for -- feel really flimsily done -- lacking the impact they deserve.