My completion log here comes with an asterisk as I felt like I ran out of new things to pull out of this game while I was on the path toward the true ending, so my best achievement was only a 5 bell regular completion.

Wildfrost is of course utterly adorable and the tactical depth that comes from its focus on positioning is lovely and I'd suggest any fan of deckbuilders give the game a shot, but I do think it's too reserved and focused for its own good. You'll quickly unlock every deck and by then you'll already have created a full mental tier list of each build type available at which point there's no longer really any new possibilities to explore and you're simply left to fiddle with the intricacies of the combat system with some rng on top. I'd love to see more added to this as I think most of Wildfrost's problems would be solved by more cards, encounter types, and more complicated effects to maintain the discovery and (at least seemingly) emergent behavior that roguelites thrive on.

Look, the moment-to-moment experience of playing Sonic Frontiers is pretty fucked. You'll be fighting a camera which is designed to inconvenience you and swing around wildly at all times, you'll get locked onto mini obstacle courses when they pop in a meter ahead of you and not being able to return back to moving about the open world until you hop through a bunch of boost rings that shoot you in the opposite direction you want to move, and you'll deal with ever-changing controls as the camera state and context collaborate to make sure whatever you intended to do becomes something else. It's a mess that is pretty much impossible for me to look past.

But I can't really bring myself to dislike it. Despite the fact that it's barely functional and any emotional moment has to be surrounded by smirks and 5 of the weakest quips you've ever heard lest it come off as too sincere, the glitchy somber Digimon-movie aesthetic, tons of Cute Little Guys all over the place, and next-level tunes (outside of the boss fights...) make for something I ultimately still enjoyed a reasonable amount and don't regret giving my time. Frontiers is bold and deeply weird, and I'm always down for that.

I had nice 45 minutes or so on this spent remembering good times playing the original, but I think the absurdity of that worked better in a time when there was still novelty to seeing "random" humor in a game...not to mention when I was much younger. Still good for a chuckle or two but the past decade of indie games created to be as ridiculous as possible to catch the attention of YouTubers and streamers have really desensitized me to this kind of thing.

I've no problem with this, really, but I also doubt I'll go through it all.

I picked this up as I had the urge for Battlefront and didn't want to burn myself out on the Pandemic ones in the leadup to the Classic Collection. I avoided the DICE Battlefronts since I always heard about their awful monetization, but strangely enough abandoning this game seemed to be the best thing EA ever did. You get just about everything the game has to offer in an edition that regularly sells for about nothing. If there's anything that doesn't come from regular reasonably spaced unlocks or the Celebration Edition, I haven't been able to find it.

While I still hang onto the 2005 game being superior overall, this functions as much less of a clusterfuck when it comes to the pure multiplayer experience. There's a clear flow to games that mostly falls apart in favor of wrist rocket madness in 2005, the gunplay is far more satisfying, and there's a much-needed sense of progression in weapon and modifier unlocks. Supremacy (what I usually play, aka the mode that plays like Battlefield) has the wonderful push and pull you always want from these games, plus it includes the brilliant addition of the winner automatically boarding the enemy team's ship and needing to push through and blow that up within a time limit to close out the game. If they can't, it returns to the standard Battlefield mode again. This can lead to monstrously long matches where each team wins and boards multiple times only to be pushed back, providing a natural drama to matches as well as compelling stakes.

I played this on PS5 backwards compat first and had to move to PC partially because I am ass at shooters with a controller and partially because the maps were so gorgeous I needed to see them maxed out. Look past the barely functional AA and messy reflections and you'll see the most lovingly recreated Star Wars locations you'll get in a video game. The sheer sense of scale and war-torn tragedy on a map like Geonosis is astonishing. Serious props to the artists, I've been pretty jaded when it comes to Star Wars after Episode 9 and the flood of TV shows and this still manages to make me feel like a little kid immersed in this world again.

I have no doubt this was once a terrible game, but if you haven't tried it in years and care about Star Wars and/or Battlefield-like games, you owe it to yourself to give this a shot. I'll do a separate review for the campaign when I get to that.

"Beneath a patch of grass, her
Bones the old Dutch master hid
While elsewhere Tobias
And the angel disguise
What the scholars surmise was a mother and kid

Interred with other daughters
In dirt in other potter's fields
Above them, parades
Mark the passing of days
Through parks where pale colonnades arch in marble and steel
Where all of the twenty-thousand attending your footfall
And the cause that they died for are lost in the idling bird calls
And the records they left are cryptic at best
Lost in obsolescence
The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal
With any fluorescence
Where the hand of the master begins and ends"

Perfectly presented and finely tuned to be intensely satisfying with meaningful and sometimes mind-straining choices to be made. If I have any complaint, it's only that the given jokers unlocked near the beginning don't allow quite as interesting of game breaks as I'd prefer. I'm not the kind of person to beat this with every different deck in a million different ways and likely won't put in that many hours unless greater and more dynamic challenges come along so if the later unlocks do this more I'll have no way of knowing, but in this kind of game I am most interested in banging different mechanics together and seeing how the game interprets the combinations and attempts to still look like a functioning video game while you break it in every way you can possibly think of. There are of course ways to break the game and there have been people putting up absurd point totals since the beta, but I rarely get that "holy shit, THAT works??" feeling I love to get in a game like Isaac. That's not really a failing of Balatro, though, it's probably mostly a limitation of a straightforward number crunching game where it's really hard to let things break in a way that's more interesting than a number going higher than you'd expect.

Seeing the minority of negative reviews here saying it's no better than actual gambling games or exploitative mobile apps has been really eye-opening for me. I thought we always agreed the tactics those use were terrible for ruining lives and emptying bank accounts, but it turns out for a significant portion of people (even those whose opinions I'm otherwise interested in), it was a simple aesthetic distaste for animations, sound effects, and gameplay loops intended to light up your brain at a base level rather than reaching for more Intellectual pleasures. It's a repeat of Vampire Survivors: no matter how safe of an environment the design principles are used within, no matter the richness of everything else that makes up the experience (and make no mistake, this is much deeper than VS ever was), they see some sort of threat or great evil in the simple pleasures of a digital toy that contains the ruffling sounds of card pack foil or a flashing light or two.

If you ask me, this attitude is elitist nonsense masquerading as concern for the vulnerable.

My previous experiences with madden were primarily on the PS2 and the last I owned was 09 on the PSP, so now I that I have an up to date non-Nintendo console for the first time in a good while, I thought I'd see what had changed with Madden. As you can probably guess, the answer is "not all that much." Well, not all that much except it now runs like dogshit. The damn main menu brings the PS5 to its knees and both performance and quality mode hitch like hell despite not even being all that impressive-looking compared to what this machine is capable of. It's clear that the yearly cycle of Madden has taken its toll, and I imagine something this rushed and barely functional is all the developers could manage while ensuring the next one releases on time.

It's sad, just about the only novel addition I've found is a mode reworking the Create-A-Team of old into a loot box-driven affair. I would've tried this out more to assess if it has any value at all but this is where the menus struggle and inappropriately overlap each other the most, a few jpegs with players' faces on them clearly being too much for the Playstation 5. I spent most of my time playing a custom career and planned to log this as completed once I got a ring in that, but I just lost interest after my goofy creation John Darksouls' third season. Didn't character creation back in the day involve a bunch of fun flavor like rolling your parents' professions and such? I miss that. Anyway, this mode is just too repetitive and requires far too much menuing and mindless practice between each game to be worth it. Still, this is where I had the most fun and when you're enthusiastic enough about football it's still a good time. That's the thing: football is fun by default. You'd have to really fuck up to ruin that, and modern Madden isn't yet that much of a disaster.

There are still various projects out there updating Madden 08 for current rosters and such. I'm not going to say that outclasses '24 in every respect, the passing mechanics are a fair bit richer now and for the novelty of being up to date this will probably be what I reach for to play head to head locally, but for the most part 08'll probably serve you about as well and at least the menus will fucking work.

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Side note: This is an example of one of the many reasons intellectual property is bullshit which steals from what should rightfully belong to us all. Football games would be so much better if we weren't stuck with a single company holding the license for the league which is practically synonymous with the sport itself.

A lot more imaginative with the environment breaking down and word-based interactions than the previous bonus episode, but the combat continues to wear thin and I'm still left wishing this embraced just being a 3D adventure. That wheel portion was brutal, too. It's been a while since I've had a game trigger my motion sickness so badly.

I really appreciate how much they're playing with how little we actually know about Alan, Barry, and Alice's relationships before the events of this story, making it difficult to take the horrible things we see in the dark place as entirely deceptive or just manifestations of self-hatred. It drags the story back into encouraging interpretation and active engagement instead of the rather straightforward final sections of the base game which wrapped things up a little too nicely for my liking.

I appreciate the increasingly unhinged brain constantly screaming aesthetic here but good god am I tired of just shooting at everything until it falls down. Light bringing words sitting around the environment into the false-reality of the dark place is sick as hell but I feel like it could've been an opportunity for puzzling that never really came.

I'm still gripped by the story and this did nothing to reverse that, but this episode was more an opportunity to let the emotions from the base game swirl around for a while rather than add that much.

I and the person I love most are nearly perfectly matched in this and it's brought some of the most raw, unfiltered joy I've experienced playing a video game. There's so much room for natural discovery and the actions are so dead-simple that you cut right through to the multilayered rock paper scissors and personal metagaming that make traditional fighting games so satisfying in their best moments. The levels pulsate and warp and sway in the most hypnotic ways and you're locked together running back and forth and back and forth in a dance that seems to never end and you are wholly consumed by the game and the person you're sharing it with and you approach that kind of momentary inner quiet you thought you'd never have again even as you're involuntarily shouting from impaling yourself again by diving in when your opponent was just standing still.

I'm 100% sure if I go out and look for it I'll find strategies, tech, and optimization which take away from that feeling of discovery and replace it with a tighter grasp on the mechanics bringing you and the opponent closer in a different way, but I'm not gonna let the optimization virus get this one unless I work my way there myself. There's something to be said for the maximum-information environment that is the default for any game nowadays, but there's also something beautiful about the high speed improv of a low information closed system of two players who don't have any idea how other people play it.

Ask yourself: in the past 15 or so years, how many times have you had the opportunity to feel like a multiplayer game is something between you and the people close to you, not really knowing or caring how others play it or what the "right" way to do it is?