My personal favorite Metal Gear game, and a game that deserves to be listed on backloggd’s top 20 highest average ratings four separate times. It was probably the point in my Metal Gear marathon where I really started to appreciate the Metal Gear franchise. The game's signature song Snake Eater is amazing and used very effectively throughout the game. The boss fights are all very fun and creative, maybe my favorite lineup of bosses in the franchise outside of Rising. The story is really nice too, it still manages to hit hard while being relatively self-contained and not as insane compared to the likes of MGS2 and especially MGS4. My favorite part of the playthrough was constantly sounding the alarm in the weapons lab for no reason other than to annoy the people watching me play the game in a voice call. There’s no real reason for Snake to ring the alarm, it’s meant for scientists to run over to in case they spot you, but you can do it yourself. It’s hilarious.

I mentioned in an older review that even more people would hail this as one of the best video games ever if it got a rerelease on modern platforms. And guess what? They recently announced not only a collection including the first three Metal Gear Solid titles, but also a full-on remake of Snake Eater is in development. No more excuses. Play this game.

If we pretend Mario Kart 8 never got a booster pass or Big Blue I’d honestly argue Mario Kart 7 has the best track lineup in the franchise. The retro lineup for this game is nuts. Coconut Mall, Koopa Cape, and Maple Treeway are by far Wii’s three most popular tracks, Waluigi Pinball and Airship Fortress are beloved by Mario Kart fans, Daisy Cruiser is a fan favorite from Double Dash, the remake of SNES Mario Circuit 2 is surprisingly solid, DK Pass is there. I don’t think there’s a single miss in this lineup. The lineup of retro tracks is so good that I’d go as far to say it stole all the good ones. Mario Kart 8 was able to snag some decent retros and had a killer Lightning cup, but still had to deal with a bunch of C-List tracks until it got DLC, and some of the best retros in its base game were from 7 itself. Mario Kart Wii also has a fine selection but a handful of stinkers managed to slip in. And those two look like masterpieces compared to the selection Mario Kart DS got, dragging down that game’s overall track quality from a 9/10 to like a 6. The new courses are also no slouch either, especially the Wuhu Island levels and the new Rainbow Road, being the first tracks in the series to be divided into three sections instead of laps. These courses aren’t too common in 7 & 8 but are always among the best in the series, 3DS Rainbow Road being a strong contender for my favorite Rainbow Road in the series. It's a generally strong lineup. Sadly, this game A: doesn't have a vs. mode for some reason and B: was rendered obsolete when Mario Kart 8 launched only three years later, so this great track lineup is unfortunately stuck in 7.

This game also gave us the Honey Queen, a minor NPC who appears in 2 missions in Mario Galaxy, as a playable character. 7’s roster is infamous for being very small and cutting a lot of series staples for more out there picks, most notoriously axing Waluigi despite the game bringing back his signature stage Waluigi Pinball. Honey Queen was generally the face of this backlash due to being the most random “who the fuck wanted this?” character they could throw in, every other weird pick was at least still a mainstay Mario enemy or recurring power up/Smash midboss Metal Mario. I’m gonna be honest though, I think a lot more people would be open to Honey Queen being a driver if they put her into a larger and more complete roster, like Mario Kart Wii’s or the current 8 Deluxe one. Mario fans adore the extended cast of the franchise and love it when they do this kind of shit with obscure irrelevant D-List characters. If Honey Queen never got in 7 but was randomly added to Mario Kart Tour as a newcomer, I would bet Mario Kart fans would be begging for her to be brought over to 8 Deluxe with the rest of the Tour exclusives. They recently added Poochy to Tour out of nowhere and so many people have started begging for him to come over to 8, imagine if they added him to 7 back in 2011 before he started becoming prominent.

Case in point, I can type in “Mario Kart Fan Roster” into Google Images, find 3 rosters with the Whittle from Mario Galaxy 2, a species equally as irrelevant as the bees in Galaxy, a roster with the monkey dude I don’t remember the name of also from Mario Galaxy 2, rosters with every Mario RPG OC that exists, why does this Nintendo Kart roster have 4 Sonic characters and 3 PAC-Man characters but only 1 Nintendo franchise has more than 2 racers? Why does this roster lack Dribble & Spitz & Orbulon but have Vanessa from WarioWare? I grew up with Touched too but like she doesn’t even have microgames?, is that the fucking Lion from Super Mario Land????? You may think the Lion from Super Mario Land making an epic comeback in Mario Kart 8’s BCP and finally giving Sarassaland the big revival no one with a full time job wants would be hilarious but imagine if he instead made his epic comeback in 7 and Waluigi still wasn’t there. He would have been just as hated! His legacy would have been “hey that’s the random lion boss they put in Mario Kart 7 over Waluigi,” which is exactly what will forever taint Honey Queen’s legacy and causing her to remain as a “Haha what if they added this to make people mad” outrage pick for speculation regarding the remaining 5 MK8D slots until the end of time.

Brick Planet is an online world where you can create and play multiplayer games with a large community. A more accurate description would be that Brick Planet is a Roblox clone that was created by a team wanting to cash in on Roblox’s popularity. I vaguely remember playing this in 2017 or 2018, whenever I was in my Roblox phase. It should be immediately obvious this is a Roblox knockoff. I made a bunch of accounts on this to namesnipe characters, but no actual games ever came out of it during my initial time playing it. There were some places where you could walk around. Maybe like one primitive obby I think. I don’t remember much of Brick Planet from back then but I do vaguely remember it closed down sometime that year. The review was initially supposed to end here, a short review of how I namesniped Pokemon on this Roblox clone only one other person on backloggd has played at the time of writing, a game so obscure it doesn’t even have a box art or a release date courtesy of IGDB, but I wasn’t quite sure if it actually shut down. I barely remembered anything about the game to begin with, so I looked it up to check, and as you can see, this review ended up becoming MUCH longer than I anticipated. Buckle up, this is a long one.

PART I - History of Brick Planet
I first stumbled upon the Brick Planet wiki, as even the most obscure pieces of media have a fandom wiki. It featured a timeline of this game’s history with entries as recent as 2022. Brick Planet started when the alpha was launched early by complete accident in 2016 as BLOX City. This name plus the first ever event being Egg Hunt 2016 make the comparisons to Roblox a little too unsubtle. BLOX City shut down in March of 2017, but a few months later it was revived under a new name, Brick Planet. Brick Planet’s history has funny and iconic moments including the fix of the “Block City Screen of Death” glitch, the site not working constantly, the forums having inappropriate posts “exposed” due to lack of moderation, the site getting hacked constantly, the swear filter breaking, and someone named Alex getting fired from the Brick Planet team which led me to find a rabbit hole of numerous admins who were also fired, including one that was embezzling large amounts of funds from the official PayPal account. The only admin listed on the list of admins page who hasn’t been fired/resigned is the CEO and founder of the website, Isaac. My two takeaways from this history timeline is that it’s actually just a bunch of patch notes for glitches and that Brick Planet was not a competently put together website. The rarest item and most popular page on the wiki is the “Overlord’s Crown” given out to very few people for reporting site threatening bugs and considering how many glitches are documented in its history, I’m surprised only 10 people have obtained this crown.

Brick Planet did indeed get shut down in August of 2018, but was later reopened that October. The official Discord server reopened for a day until it got spammed with pornography. Classic public Discord servers. Brick Planet would be shut down AGAIN about a month later, several hours before the time it was supposed to shut down. On February 6, 2019, someone named Tor reported Isaac had left the unofficial official server, deleted his twitter account, and cut ties with the rest of the staff. This meant that Brick Planet was ABSOLUTELY never going to come back. On February 8, 2019, Isaac posted a Tweet that Brick Planet was going to come back. It came back. And then it shut down again, and then it reopened again, and then it shut down again, and then it reopened. This site has had more EoS announcements than the amount of shut down mobile games with Joker Persona 5 in them. Brick Planet’s terms of service mentions how they reserve the right to shut down the game without prior notice, fitting with what seems to be their trademark.

Continuing on my not so little anymore Brick Planet rabbit hole, I found their official Twitter account. The earliest Tweet dates to December 2022, implying they had once again reopened recently. Brick Planet only follows one account, Twitter Blue, and they don’t even have a checkmark so someone probably forgot to cough up the 8 dollars. They seem aware Roblox has been accused of not paying their creators much and exploiting children aspiring to become game developers, claiming “did you know Roblox only pays ~30% of its revenue to game creators” while proudly announcing they’d give 70% revenue for sales made in Brick Planet. The first reply said “did you know Roblox doesn't shut down every 1 hour.” There were several replies in their Twitter mentioning shutdowns, implying this is still a recurring event and I wasn’t the only one who took notice. Many people were claiming Brick Planet of being a scam run by a scam artist, but one reply stood out to me, accusing Brick Planet of being a site made to support a drug black market. I needed to get to the bottom of this, a quick YouTube search of “Brick Planet Drugs” didn’t return much but the same thing going into Google led me right back to the Brick Planet wiki, specifically a blog post by cofounder of the site Brick.Master/Brennan about his experiences working with Isaac on Brick Planet, spreading as a pastebin throughout the website. Brick.Master’s wiki account claims accounts posting the pastebin were not associated with Brennan and the information hasn’t been proven true, but doesn’t refute Brennan writing the initial blog post and it’s interesting to talk about and I already wrote everything else below before reading Brennan’s wiki article so I gotta stick with it.

Brennan discusses how he and his partner (Isaac) wanted to create a 3D social website that could grow and compete alongside Roblox, how it was always meant to be a social experience for the masses to enjoy and the benefits of splitting the ownership to balance decisions made on the website. Brennan then makes insulting comments towards his partner's mental state and weight, claiming that Isaac didn’t like split ownership and wanted everything done his way. Isaac clearly didn’t have kind descriptions for Brennan either, allegedly referring to him as a “redneck” and a “Wal-Mart bag boy” behind the scenes. This was very obviously not a healthy working relationship, with the two constantly swearing at each other instead of having productive conversations on how to reverse engineer Roblox. On the one year anniversary of BLOX City, Brennan mentions the site had been doing pretty good despite his poor working relationship with Isaac. The admin team was going strong despite the absurd turnover rate, the community was doing well, and Isaac had made a ton of money off of this. Later, Isaac abruptly told Brennan that he didn’t want to continue the project, fired everyone, and promised partial refunds to users, with some remaining funds being used to dissolve the company and the rest going to a charity of Isaac’s choosing. However, Brennan claims the money went towards none of this. The charity Isaac chose was to buy himself all the pot he could’ve ever asked for. That’s right, Isaac pulled what everyone thinks the Friday Night Funkin’ devs are currently doing with their kickstarter money, he ran off with it and smoked weed. The true reason for BLOX City’s first reopening as Brick Planet was that Isaac had spent all of his BLOX City cash on weed and a house and a car, and had completely emptied his savings account. In late 2017, Brennan was offered the entire Brick Planet company so Isaac could pursue a Craigslist competitor called “Dash Trade.” Isaac later was advised by someone to not give the majority stock to him, but Brennan could still be CEO if he wanted, which isn’t how business works. Brennan later negotiated for 100% stock with 5% royalty, and all was well.

Unfortunately, Brick Planet would later receive a surge in popularity with famous Roblox YouTubers taking notice of the game, some of which had subscribers in the hundreds of thousands to even millions range. Whether they were trying out the game because it was Roblox adjacent or claiming this would be the “ROBLOX killer!”, this caused their loyal subscribers to check out this cool Roblox-like game and a massive influx of new users, and a massive influx of money. Isaac took notice of this and his eyes turned into dollar signs as he abruptly returned to Brick Planet, went back on forfeiting any of his stock but said Brennan could still be the CEO :). Isaac was still the boss of Brennan despite the latter’s fancy CEO title. Isaac also apparently committed over $100,000 dollars in credit card fraud on Roblox dot com, confirmed with admins of that site, and got the police sent to his house. Roblox staff member Lizzy claims Isaac owes loads and loads of debt to Roblox itself. Brennan then mentions staff members are paid with Amazon gift cards and collectively make $1300 USD monthly, despite Brick Planet averaging $10,000 USD monthly. Yes, this appears to be the combined income of the 12 staff members and server fees, not counting the two devs and two leads who apparently don’t get paid at all.

That’s basically a retelling of the contents of the PasteBin, and suddenly all the Twitter replies referring to the CEO as a scam artist make complete sense. Isaac’s official Brick Planet wiki page has a list of controversies longer than the rest of the page, one of which claims he confirmed his involvement in the Roblox April Fools 2012 Hack, a massive breach on Roblox’s admin panel that took the site offline. At least he accepts all friend requests he receives, what a great guy, I’d give him my credit card number and the three digits on the back.


Part II - Games on Brick Planet
Since this review ended up being far longer than I anticipated, I thought it would be worth a shot to give the game itself another chance. Most of this review has been centered around the history of the website and CEOs hilarious hijinks, but how does the actual game itself fare? I mean it is 4/20 and what better way to celebrate the birthday of the second best Persona character than by playing a game made by a weed addict. I had the website open for a few hours intending to play it later, and it took me until later to realize the most popular game, Escape the Disasters, did not actually have 1200 people playing it currently, it was actually the total number of visits the game has had, and this was the only game that had anyone playing it. Clearly this site hasn’t been making the profit it used to. Regardless, I signed up, and from here on out I’ll be doing a lightning round of Brick Planet game reviews, writing down thoughts as I hop between games on this platform.

I started with “Island Parkour Challenge”, since I did not want to have a social interaction with whoever was surviving the disasters. Despite being the second most popular game, it had a 1.2 star average, which equates to something like Garten of Banban, Devil May Cry 2, or Brick Planet itself on backloggd. It’s worth noting Google Chrome automatically blocked my download for Brick Planet’s launcher because the “small game studio” was unable to use its monthly $1300 USD and $8000+ of the pot fund to buy a code-signing certificate. I had to switch to Microsoft Edge to download it. Island Parkour Challenge had me jump over some obstacles, climb some things. You had to hold the right mouse button to rotate the camera, for some reason. I’m not sure if you were intended to jump on the wall to avoid the fire obstacle but whatever. I fell in the fire anyway and got stuck on the tree obstacle I bypassed earlier and decided to give up there. It sure was a platformer game.

“Realism Test” was a flex of someone importing realistic textures into Brick Planet. That’s about it. They weren’t even that good, looked like they came from the 5th gen N64/PS1 era, and took a hot minute to load.

“Car Testing Facility” had cars in it. It kinda reminded me of the really simple Roblox game I used to play where you had cars, you could race them, and they could break apart if you drove too recklessly or crashed. One day that game got hacked and sent to hell. Anyway, I got into my Brick Planet car and was met with the shittiest, slipperiest, turning that has ever been put into a video game. Your car accelerates at an absurd speed and controls like it’s on an ice level but the ice physics are 10x worse than any actual ice level I’ve played. Trying to stay on the road in this game makes all incarnations of Rainbow Road look like a cakewalk. I was eventually able to flip the car upside down successfully and nearly clipped onto the other side of the world. Twice. This game had a 4.6 star rating on Brick Planet, which equates to something like Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater on backloggd.

“where i may finally lay and rest” had a somewhat functional ferris wheel rollercoaster and mariachi music playing for some inexplicable reason. I don’t know if it was someone’s Brick Planet tombstone judging by the name. Weird.

“Unfair get the car to the end game (broken” left a strong first impression before even opening up the game, due to me already having a not so stellar experience with this game’s cars, the game title telling me it was broken, and this lovely thumbnail art. The game itself tells me if I get to the end I have to drive the car back because there isn’t a way to respawn them apparently. It also spells thakns wrong. The car I started in wouldn’t move, so I jumped in a new one and it took less than a second before I fell through the floor. I’m not sure if that massive car is supposed to be there and messing with everything, but I guess we’re going on foot. I got to the first set of obstacles, touched one colorful ball obstacle and the game froze. BrickPlanet.exe stopped working. Oh well.

“cardboard box on the side of the street on a rainy sunday night” sure did have a cardboard box. And a soccer field, for some reason.

“Da streets” had a nice town but I couldn’t interact with anything. The car wasn’t drivable, you couldn’t enter buildings, I couldn’t use the see-saw. Apparently most of the intended features were coming soon, but I couldn't find the minigun the comments said was in the game though.

“Speed Run X!” had a “VIP Room” that seemed to have nothing aside from the barrier asking for “ideas for the VIP Room.” Here’s an idea, put some worthwhile perks behind the paywall before you sell access to the VIP Room. Not like it would be easy to come up with worthwhile perks to spend money on Brick Planet aside from making sure Isaac is high enough today.

“Cube Simulator” has you click on the cylinders to get money. I didn’t get any money. I had a cube though. It followed me.

“Hole in the Wall” was fine. It’s the closest any Brick Planet game has gotten to being a game so far, but that’s an absurdly low bar to clear, and the only time I died in this game was when I walked off the map before the wall spawned.

“Neon Gent” is a green top hat. It is literally a green top hat. I can’t even jump on it or move anywhere other than the small platform with the green top hat on it. There is nothing here aside from this model the creator wanted to show off.

“Life of an Otaku - Showcase” is a game where you are stuck inside of your house because anime fans do not touch grass, I guess. The house is a bit more visually impressive than everything else on the website but you can easily just walk out and fall to your death. And what are you supposed to even do here? If I wanted to watch anime I don’t need to have Brick Planet running in the background. It is apparently a port of a game from Roblox, I’m not sure how much more engaging the Roblox version is but the Brick Planet port is far from impressive.

“Blow Things Up” lets you blow things up. There sure were structures you could blow up.

“Plotagon’s Fire Obby” was an obby you jumped over fire in.

“paint ball gunnin’” gave me a paintball gun that shot spheres of paint. I attempted to draw a penis and failed. The mariachi music abruptly made a comeback in this game.

“Grasslands Remake” is a remake of a 2020 Brick Planet game Grasslands. I assume this means Brick Planet wipes all the games when they shut down every 6 months, which probably explains the quality of things I see on the website. There was a sandcastle. There was grass. There was some water you could obby over to some water temple thing with a Minecraft esque lava block killing me instantly. I fell to my death for the fifth time. I think this review is getting a little toooooo long and everything I’m playing so far is just a place you can jump around in, maybe some obstacles if you’re lucky. I’m starting to get the gist of the entire website.

Last, but certainly not least, I decided it was finally time to wrap up and bother the one other person playing Brick Planet in “Escape the Disasters.” This was the most popular game on the site, the only one being played, and I loved Natural Disaster Survival in Roblox. Surely, this would be the good one. It wasn’t. The game warned me that due to Brick Planet bugs, the maps might not render. I was spawned into the game in an empty void and died instantly, to nothing. I also realized the sole other person was obviously AFK. I gave another round a go. A tsunami was coming, so I had to get to the high ground. There was no high ground, or ground, and my character died before the tsunami was anywhere close to us.

This is the most popular game currently on the website, and with that I’ve covered basically every game on the front page of Brick Planet, the most played games on the website, 17 whole games created for this site played by me, and none of them were fun or engaging in any way. Brick Planet was intended as a platform that could grow and compete with Roblox, but comes across as a soulless bootleg trying to cash in on children with mommy’s credit card who like to play Roblox, with funds that get used to smoke weed every day. Say what you will about Roblox in its current state but I have fond memories with several of its games. There are games on Roblox I would say were “not bad” or even “good” and “fun to come back to.” Brick Planet, which has existed on and off since 2016, has failed to produce one good game by the year 2023. I could’ve given each game its own star ranking in my mini reviews but there’s no point when none of these would cross above one star unless I ironically gave one 5 stars for some absurd meme reason. I try to find some redeeming quality in games, even games I dislike, so I rarely give out the lowest possible star score, but I cannot think of anything good about this game or its games other than the fact I was able to namesnipe Labrys from Persona. So there we go, half a star for Brick Planet as a collective website. Happy 4/20 everyone!

Pokemon Shuffle was active during the timeframe I was super big into Pokemon, so I played it regularly for nearly the game's entire lifespan, starting about a month after it came out and dropping it soon after the final update. Me and the buddies were talking about what our most played games were a while ago, and I included Shuffle in my list alongside games that were "potentially being close to 100 hours" because of how much I played it. We eventually all dusted off our 3DS systems to check the activity log for precise hours, and I was jumpscared by the revelation I had lowballed Shuffle's estimated time and my actual playtime was 766 HOURS AND EIGHT MINUTES. This was not only triple the amount of second place, but at the time I'm writing this review, makes it my second most played game of ALL TIME. Horrifying. I dropped this fun fact in another server and the only response I got was someone else casually dropping they had over 900 hours in Shuffle. Do not play Pokemon Shuffle. Not like you can, the 3DS eshop is on the verge of collapse and I have no idea if the mobile port is even available anymore, but still.