So, does anyone else think a “Mario Party 9 was good, actually” resurgence is imminent?

I was discussing with some others a while ago about how Nintendo YouTubers have hyped up games including Banjo-Kazooie and Mario Kart 64 as the “greatest of all time” and there’s been more attention recently brought to the fact Internet users are prone to mindlessly parroting the opinions of big YouTubers until they become the standard “popular opinion” of their respective fanbase. Some of these include classic memes about Navi and Slippy Toad being the worst video game characters and the most annoying things ever, which many have now realized were overexaggerated early 2010s gaming humor. Some of which is currently ongoing nonsense about Kazuya Mishima being an obscure character and how we instead needed the “more iconic” character Geno in Smash Bros. instead, who probably owes a good chunk of his enduring popularity from people hearing their favorite YouTuber, who was actually old enough to play Mario RPG when it first came out, say Geno would be cool in Smash. And then there’s stuff I’m not sure what the consensus is at this point, pretty sure Twitter got into a fight over if the Water Temple was actually as hard as people made it out to be for decades and couldn’t come to an agreement. This even extends to things outside of the realm of gaming, such as a thread on Twitter I saw the other day about how season 4 of SpongeBob had plenty of gems and was unfairly lumped into the downfall of the series by YouTubers and critics.

The conversation eventually morphed into this question: Which Wii game is going to randomly get a renaissance of “it was good, actually?” I put my vote in for this one. The day before I saw someone whose profile bio was “the only Mario Party 9 enjoyer.” When I brought up Mario Party 9 as the game that would get a big flip in consensus, someone else in call SCREAMED at everyone about how he was saying “it was good, actually” since 2012. I brought up this conversation on another Discord server the next day, get a response saying “oh yeah I knew someone whose favorite game of ALL TIME was Mario Party 9.” I then saw it rank higher than 8 and one of the GCN Mario Parties on a tier list a few days later. Today I saw a tweet with a bunch of people proclaiming themselves as “Mario Party 9 enjoyers” which reminded me I had to publish this review.

Mario Party 9 is definitely a victim of “someone told me it was bad and not like the iconic N64 original games' so it's bad' and it gained this negative reception for a pretty notable reason, they overhauled the gameplay completely by shoving everyone into a car, and instead of everyone being able to move individually, you’re all moving together on a linear board aiming to (I do not remember what the win condition for this game even is, is it just most Mini-Stars wins?) which is widely considered a downgrade from previous entries that had codified a pretty solid gameplay loop for a little over a decade. 9 does have its positives though, the minigame selection is fairly solid, apparently held up as one of the series best. This game also adds in boss battles, each board having its own unique midboss and boss at the middle of the road and the very end respectively. You work together to defeat the boss while also trying to maximize your own individual score for a higher ministar payout. Bosses are an interesting idea and they’re fun fights (disregarding some of the really RNG ones, but it is Mario Party after all), they also have decent music, Bowser Jr.’s Mad seems to be the fan favorite but I’ve always had a soft spot for King Bob-omb’s themes.

It’s not hard to see why this game upset a lot of people and caused an endless wave of “N64/GCN Mario Party good car bad” and “when is Nintendo going to make a REAL Mario Party again?” It’s not my personal Mario Party choice, I grew up playing 8 a lot more and usually play the N64/GCN titles whenever friends want to play it. However, with the Mario Party franchise slowly slipping back into its original gameplay style, as well as the fact a lot of people who grew up with Mario Party 9, myself included, are getting older and louder on the Internet, I really think we’re going to be seeing a lot more “Hot Take: I think Mario Party 9 was good” posts on Twitter with a bunch of replies going “no yeah I agree with you I loved that game as a kid!”

I don’t know if we’ll ever see a renaissance for Mario Party 10, the other main entry using the car system, which seems to still have its reputation as “the bad one™,” is stuck on the Wii U, and widely regarded as much less balanced and much more boring. The people who grew up driving cars in Mario Party 10 are probably old enough to drive cars in real life now (I already see a handful of “Mario Party 10 was my childhood” scrolling through its backloggd reviews.) so it's probably not out of the question, you never know! Apologies if you grew any gray hairs when I said that.

I went into this one kinda expecting it to be a weird middle entry in between the acclaimed VI and IV, walked out pleasantly surprised and the game ended up being a personal favorite of mine. The characters and story aren’t the most fleshed out in the world but charming nonetheless. Gilgamesh is easily the highlight of this game, and would go on to be a recurring character in many Final Fantasy games. The main party is nice too, the smaller number of them compared to other RPG parties makes each of them memorable and they each have their little moments. Exdeath is also a cool villain, one of those antagonists from an iconic video game no one talks about but I’m weirdly fond of anyway and half of it is probably because of good theme music. The expansive job system of this game also makes your small party very customizable and the game pretty replayable, and is one of the main things everyone praises about the game. Overall, definitely don’t skip this Final Fantasy game, it’s a nice time.

Tee K.O. 2: Tee K.O. was one of the core Jackbox games for my friend group when we frequently played in 2020, so I was excited to see it revisited. We finally managed to play it after I successfully told everyone they did not need to set up their drawing tablets because you're not supposed to put effort into Jackbox drawing games. Partially inferior because the slogans randomly cut you off instead of letting you manually hit enter, so you end up with so many cut off words which is especially infuriating when you are well known within your friend group for pumping out slogans faster than they pump out Call of Duty games. Otherwise it's more of the same, a negligibly worse version of one of Jackbox's finest games.

Dodo Re Mi: Was fun when you pull up Megalovania Piano Tutorial in another tab, attempt to play that instead of the song, and fail miserably when you don’t know how to play piano.

TimeJinx: I enjoyed this one more than most other trivia games weirdly enough. Someone managed to get Cyborg Tom Brady's birth year right in the final round by saying "I don't know, I'm gonna put down Cyberpunk 2077 because it's cybernetics."

Hypnotorious: Will update when I have a funny to say about this one. I think we played it? Don't remember anything.

FixyText: Pro Tip, type out an overly long string of numbers (such as “7777777777777777777777”) until you run out of character space. The results are hilarious!

hmmm today I will bully one of my buddies into playing Danganronpa

1. he thinks the first game is fine, down to continue the rest of the franchise after a fishy QR code download for the entire series is the Twitter meme of the week
2. He insists on doing UDG, even though I tell him we could skip it if he wants
3. bring up a segment in chapter 3 is the reason this game didn't get a Switch port and don't elaborate. This causes the stream to get too many viewers, some of which know nothing about Danganronpa, out of morbid curiosity
4. The January 26, 2022 Danganronpa Ultra Despair Girls Incident.

Everyone always complains about this game's difficulty but I weirdly didn't have that much of a problem with it. Maybe it's because it's been nearly half a decade since I played the Mother games, but I have more negative memories in the Fourside Department Store and Peaceful Rest Valley from EarthBound than anything in this game. The only really bad area that stuck out to me was the path to Snowman, which isn't that long anyway. There's still a lot of charm to this game despite being an 80s NES game, and it's probably my favorite on the console.

I definitely think the original Banjo-Kazooie is a tighter video game than its sequel. Some of the level designs in Banjo-Tooie are not fun to play on. I constantly got lost trying to navigate Terrydactyland where every area of the level has the exact same textures, and I really didn't like whatever the hell was going on at Grunty Industries. By the time I hit the requirement to fight Gruntilda I felt incapable of doing any more Jiggies. Despite this, I can't bring myself to hate this game because the charm of Rare's classics is still here. The dialogue is as witty as ever and a proper boss lineup in this game is very much appreciated. Witchyworld might be my favorite Banjo world, though it might be a result of my favorite Kazooie level being a much closer race while Witchyworld is by far my favorite in Tooie.

Your eternal reminder Nuts & Bolts is Banjo-Threeie.

Rolled this game off of a backlog marble race. I liked it even though it’s fairly long. I ended up putting it aside a few times and it wasn’t even the first game in the backlog marbles I finished, rendering the whole thing fraudulent. It could’ve probably shaved off like 10 hours, specifically eyeing that part of the game where you have to do a long string of side quests in order to cross the Outer Sea, including being told the ship you spent a while working on fixing is worthless for crossing the Outer Sea and you actually need to jump on board the enemy ship to get over.

Game was still solid though. Garr is my guy and his theme, Fighting Man, is probably my personal favorite in the OST. They should put him in the next Capcom Versus game, or like literally anyone else from this franchise.

Despite going by Wario the Legend online I am not actually that big of a Wario fan. I get a lot of “You’re Wario the Legend but you post about Poochy joining Smash Bros. and tell everyone you want to ***** Gruntilda the Witch on Jackbox?” One time on some “I will guess your Smash main” Twitter post I replied for them to guess my main and the person guessed Wario despite the fact my actual main (King K. Rool) was literally in my Twitter bio at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Wario and he’s one of my favorite fictional characters, but the username’s a remnant of 2018 when I was an even bigger Wario fan and decided to name myself after him, and I’ve never had any better name ideas since. I did grow up on WarioWare, with Touched! actually being the first Nintendo game I owned, but I didn’t bother with the side of the franchise held in even higher regard, Wario Land. It’s consistently one of the most requested dead franchise revivals for Nintendo and has a vocal fanbase claiming they are some of the greatest Nintendo games. Wario Land has always been one of the weirder “I haven’t played this yet?” franchises on the backlog, especially considering I liked Wario enough to name my online presence after him. I played the first one about four years ago but genuinely remember nothing about it. It didn’t stick out at all compared to other games I played that year. I originally wanted to play more Wario Land besides the first one back then, but it never happened and the rest of the franchise eventually fell into “maybe someday” territory as I started to care about Wario less. With the advent of Wario Land inspired indie games and Wario Land 3 coming to Nintendo Switch Online, I decided it was a good time to finally catch up on my Wario Land backlog.

In Wario Land 3, Wario accidentally gets his ass sucked into a world contained inside of a music box. Wario meets a mysterious figure, the god of the music box world and is told that he must find the music boxes to restore the figure’s power which was sealed away by an evil being. Wario agrees to help out when promised he gets to keep all the treasure he finds during his adventure. The figure gives you helpful directions on where to go if you revisit the temple because this game is far more nonlinear than I expected it to be. Wario Land 3 is more of a Metroidvania than you’d think. Each stage in Wario Land 3 has four chests effectively acting as four separate goal points in each level, gray chests are available from the get go but you can revisit the level later on with new abilities in order to reach the remaining three. Items you get from these chests often influence the world map, unlocking new stages or opening up more paths in previous stages. These may also grant Wario power ups. His moveset starts off lacking, but it’s satisfying upgrading Wario’s powers and being able to access new parts of levels. Y’know, like a Metroidvania.

Wario does have one power in his possession from the very start though, immortality. It’s a funny idea, Wario will not die because he does not feel like dying. Specific enemies may “transform” Wario if they hit him. You get hit by the fire enemy, and Wario’s ass is on fire and he’s running around out of control, but you can use this to your advantage if there’s anything like torches that need to be lit or fire blocks that need to be broken. It’s like Kirby’s signature copy ability but done against your will. This does result in this game being challenging by being aggravating instead of actually challenging you. It’s easy to lose a lot of platforming progress by moments like getting turned into a sliding ice statue and falling off like 3 stories of a building, or the fact that most bosses in this game defeat you by ejecting you out of the arena, and you have to climb back in there to retry the fight, but it’s an interesting game mechanic regardless. There’s also a Golf minigame, responsible for the creation of the Golf level in Pizza Tower. You’re occasionally required to win at it in order to progress through stages. Later in the game, the coin total to play Golf increases, but I never found myself running low on coins while playing. It’s a bit annoying to get the hang of the minigame at first, but not impossible. I like to think I got pretty good with it.

Overall, it’s a nice game. I probably would’ve liked it even more if I played it years ago like I should have, but I still enjoyed it. I love Wario, he is a funny guy. The highlight of this game for me was when I would blast Battle on the Big Bridge from Final Fantasy whenever I had to visit the Big Bridge stage.

This is a mod for Shadow the Hedgehog, often considered one of the worst entries in the Sonic franchise, that attempts to turn it into a much better game. If you ever want to play Shadow the Hedgehog for yourself I highly recommend getting this mod for it. Reloaded features various quality of life changes that make for an overall better experience. This includes adjusting the game's physics to make it far more bearable to play, needing to beat the game only three times instead of 10, completely abolishing the secret door system and instead incorporating their contents as hidden paths within the levels, increasing the health of the Presidents blimp in Air Fleet, various music tracks being subbed in over others including apparent cut track Broken being re-implemented, and a whole lot more.

I ended up playing this mod since I still wanted to play Last Story for myself despite getting bored of the original game after four endings. At first I simply tried plugging in an "Unlock Last Story" cheat, but this didn't work. The Last Way was beatable but reaching the end would trigger a "LAST STORY Unlocked!" popup that would not go away no matter how much you mashed the button and heard the stock gunshot sound, preventing me from fighting the final boss. I couldn't figure out why it was triggering; there was a bug report on it but the fix didn't seem to work, I found out the popup would also trigger in other areas such as beating Westopolis and exiting the options menu, watching the final boss on YouTube wasn't going to be enough for me, and I sure wasn't going back to kill 50 enemies on Black Comet having a bad experience trying it on The Doom behind me and dozens of overdue games rotting in the backlog. I eventually stumbled upon this mod while looking for solutions, kinda wished I found out about it sooner but then noticed it slashed the amount of endings needed for Last Story from 10 all the way down to 3. I mentioned this game would’ve probably been more bearable if it only had 5 endings, but three was nothing, so I decided I could do a few more runs using this mod to get the true ending. It actually only took one ending for Last Story to unlock, since my save data transferred over and I didn’t even notice.

The game with this mod is probably still a 3.5 for me, but I'll bump it up to 4 stars because the mod makes tons of positive changes to improve the game and I want my score on its page to reflect that.

Didn’t end up outright hating this one despite its reputation. The promos and intro cutscene make it seem like a really violent shooter but the actual game still feels like Adventure 2 and Heroes, just with guns and rejected Devil May Cry enemies. Black Doom is funny and I liked his commentary during the levels, though I'm probably in the minority on this one. Liked how he would scold me for killing his soldiers even though they would still attack me and occasionally block springs and doors. Can he not just like tell them all not to attack Shadow and the Black Arms will ignore you if Doom's Eye is your mission character? This is a nitpick that would probably fuck with the game balance but it's something I thought about.

I had more fun with this game than Sonic Heroes, though after about the fourth route I decided I had basically seen about everything this game had to offer, didn’t want this to take up too much time when I could be playing other things on the backlog, and really didn’t want to do any “kill all enemies in the level” missions when those started popping up more frequently. I think this game probably would have benefited if they did away with each final stage having hero/dark missions, slashing the amount of times you need to beat the game from 10 to 5, because only 6 levels and a few bosses was pretty digestible and I could easily run through one story path in a 1-2 hour long session.

I ended up playing the Reloaded mod for this game as well because I still wanted to play Last Story for myself. The mod features loads of quality of life changes, so if you really want to play this game for whatever reason, I would recommend using it.