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.

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.

THIS is how you do a Smash Brothers fighter. How do we introduce our new DLC character? Have him slice the final boss of the game (previously established to have effortlessly murdered every other fighter bar Kirby) in half and then go "FUCK YOU IM THE VILLAIN NOW!" Give him a powerful feeling moveset, a gorgeous stage, and expand the infamous FF7 music collection, and you have a serious contender for one of Ultimate's best new challengers. Sure the costumes are bad and he only brings FF7 music because licensing is a bitch, but not every character can be perfect. I'm a huge fan of antagonist characters, seeing villains get added to Smash is always a treat, and Sephiroth absolutely delivered a DLC pack I didn't know I needed.

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.

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.

Sora is an absolutely incredible final character and a fantastic sendoff to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. For a franchise that has a pretty abysmal track record for finales, it's nice to see them hit an absolute home run with a pipe dream inclusion for so many that people said would never ever happen. Unfortunately I am people and I'm a little bitter it was the character I asserted had no chance at fighter 11 during the weeks leading up to the reveal and not Tabuu they had no reason to put trophies in the trailer after replacing them if they weren't gonna bring back the guy who turned characters into trophies.

Top 5 things you can do in this game while playing as Wario

#5. Smash mighty black bricks that block your way with Wario's super strength

#4. Experience Wario's awful movement, courtesy of being the token heavyweight character.

#3. Attempt to unlock Waluigi because it's 2005 and everything on the internet is credible in this era.

#2. Play as Wario in a mainline Mario game, which we will probably never be able to do again in this day and age.

#1. Run into the Luigi door to play as Luigi.

Kirby Super Star is widely viewed as being largely outclassed by its DS remake these days, but the original is still a nice time that holds up to this day. It stands out from other Kirby games by being broken up into 6 different mini-stories each with their own gameplay elements. Many series staples would end up being introduced in this entry, and the various games included all offer a unique take on the same refined gameplay formula; this being the first game in the series to expand upon Copy Ability movesets instead of locking them to one or two moves. If you want to delve into the Kirby franchise, this entry isn't a bad place to start.

This game has an insane amount of content. EVERY veteran returns alongside some hype newcomers ranging from long standing fan requests like Ridley and King K. Rool, to some out there picks like Sephiroth and Naoki Toudou who I really didn't know I needed in the game until they got included.

Is there still stuff they could have and should have included. Absolutely. This game has over eighty characters and I can still name over eighty characters who would rock in Smash, including uh throws dart Cloud Man from Mega Man 7. I could go on a rant about how Donkey Kong's music lineup SUCKS once you take out Gang-Plank Galleon (a stellar remix, by the way) There could easily have been like, maybe at least five more new stages in base game. There's endless nitpicks I could make, but the massive amount of things here, most of which being handled so well is the reason I and many others clamor for more characters like throws dart Nano Shinonome from Nichijou. The core Smash gameplay is as fun as ever, keeping me coming back all the time. It's really hard not to give it a perfect rating, and regard Ultimate as one of the greatest games ever made.