Been on this game for a while, and other than the major flaw of the yellow devil being infinitely harder than anything else before or after it, I'm really impressed. There's jank to be found all over the place, especially when it comes to the platforming: the speed of falls is comical, you fall through moving platforms half the time, etc. Regardless, combat is at the core of the experience here, and it is both intensely satisfying and surprisingly deep. Sometimes the bosses are a matter of use the right weapon->win, but when it comes to the regular levels, there's a lot of planning required that gets my brain moving more than I'd expect. With Mega Man's absolutely worthless maneuverability, getting a grip on the exact angle, size, speed, and distance of each weapon is necessary, along with strict positioning since enemy attacks cover so much ground and there's only narrow safe spots when there are any.

Don't let the reputation of difficulty keep you away. Aside from needing to glitch a single ridiculous boss, this is a fairly average when it comes to NES platformer difficulty. The stages and checkpoints are super forgiving and continues are infinite, thank god. It's not an easy play, but certainly doable enough without save states or rewind or anything like that if you're like me and feel weird when you use those.

Also, in the credits: "Sound Programmer: Yuukichan's Papa" I WANT TO CRY (●´□`)♡

Super Princess Peach is slow. It's so slow. Peach crawls across the screen and there's nothing you can do about it, short of using occasional slides and extra energy for the crying vibe power to make it a little more bearable. 2D Mario games can do a lot wrong, but they typically make up for it by at least being smooth and snappy enough that the simple act of moving through levels is fun, and they fuck that up here. I like this game and I'm nostalgic for it, but playing through it to the ending as an adult, I can't say it's nearly as good as it is in my memories.

The vibes feel incredibly under-utilized and like they figured cool levels would flow out of them in a way that just never happened. You never feel creative or like you've solved a puzzle, you just stop and press the button on the touch screen that lets you get past the obstacle. It's really a shame, because with this game's slower and more deliberate pace along with more fleshed-out moves...what else are those for, if not new and creative kinds of encounters that require a little more thought? I'm likely going to write another short review if I get around to do the harder levels that unlock in the post-game, but I've seen no real indication that they had any fleshed-out ideas for what to do with Peach's (very cool!) unique abilities. Often it's as if the levels contain doors of four different colors and the player has the incredibly difficult task of tapping on the corresponding color on the second screen.

The feminist objections to Super Princess Peach are maybe what the game is most remembered for nowadays, and though the vibes don't bother me much, the criticism is plenty valid. It's a tone-deaf choice that makes it occupy a strange place in history. It sucks that this whole special game dedicated to Peach is based around extreme emotions. What bothers me more than that, though, is the insulting ease and spoodfeeding that go far beyond Mario norms, even beyond NSMB norms. Every single obstacle has a tutorial block telling the player exactly what to do over and over. These are optional, thank god, but they allow NO room for ambiguous goals or really thought of any kind. This includes bosses, where every single one is preceded by a message describing in-detail how to defeat them. I'm not sure if Nintendo is deliberately talking down to and expecting nothing of the young girls this game was meant for or if their level design was so bad at signalling what to do that they had to stick signs everywhere pointing you around. Either way, it sucks.

Why didn't you tell me I needed to collect every toad? I sped through thinking they were just another collectible but you need every single one, so I ended up having to go back through half the levels in the game just to finish. Painfully easy levels are one thing, but going through them again really soured me on this right at the end. It doesn't help that the bowser fight fucking sucks and doesn't require even the little bits of problem-solving that did exist in the rest of the game.

Obviously I'm frustrated as hell with Super Princess Peach and it's not as good as I remembered, but there still is a lot to like! It looks so cheery and Peach's animations are gorgeous and fluid. Bowser's bi! Peach is a badass, woo! It's a lot of fun seeing her still be a very traditionally feminine princess-type and also whipping everyone's asses with an umbrella. The floating feels good! The little dream sequences between worlds are adorable! This one is still solid, but it's far from the best Mario platformer. But it's another nostalgic childhood game beaten, and that always feels great.

Being the first 3D Mario to de-emphasize tight and satisfying controls, a decision which violently breaks from the priorities of both previous and later entries, Galaxy occupies an awkward place in the series. It's one of the most acclaimed games of all time, but for me I mostly see the watering down of a formula I love. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time with Galaxy, but it's equal parts frustrating and beautiful.

I want to write a more complete review when I get around to 100%ing this one, but when it comes down to it a 3D platformer lives and dies by its controls, and with such an intense focus on the planet mechanics making for a loose, wonky, and even glitchy experience (though it's still incredible it works as well as it does) it's hard to really love this.

(Written in 2018 for Glitchwave)

RuneScape is a magical thing that we'll likely never see again, thank the lord it is still thriving.

90s WRPG design with the design sense of the world's largest point and click adventure all wrapped up into an MMO...how are we so blessed? In much of RuneScape the pen and paper roots of RPGs are still clearly visible. In fact, even avoiding mechanics, RuneScape goes out of its way to be your typical classic fantasy novel / pen n paper rpg setting. Plain green dragons, classic names and representations of tiers of metal for armor and weapons, all the fantasy races you'd ever expect, etc. But this was built for years. We have layer upon layer upon layer of typical fantasy shit that became so intertwined in this beautiful and comforting world that it managed to carve out its own space.

The point and click influence can't be ignored. RuneScape is funny as fuck, and it solves the question of "how do we have meaningful questing instead of KILL 20 BEARS" in the coolest way possible: make it like a mini section of a Lucasarts or Sierra game! The tongues of the developers are permanently stuck inside their cheeks, and you're doing yourself a massive disservice if you don't read through all the dialogue. I'm not kidding when I say even the game's most irrelevant quests have more thought put into their flow and dialogue than most games have for their main story. "Use all items on all things" gameplay is also carried over, and I understand that this can be frustrating for some (it often is for me), but there's no shame in using a guide as long as you still read the dialogue! Really, I can't express how alive this world feels compared to any other MMO world, almost any other RPG world in general. There are so many characters that will stick with you for years and years even though they only had 10 lines in a free to play quest you did the same number of years ago.

As for the MMO mechanics, I'm less interested. Not because they don't work, they do, but they're only an excuse for the rest. RuneScape is constructed in such a way that you will not get maxed unless you set that goal aside specifically. There is ALWAYS progression, and anything you do will bring progression. Most actions in the game give experience in some skill, and with the skills themselves as motivators, it's hard to feel like you're wasting time unless you fall for the "no xp waste" meme. Bossing is cool, but you can never do it and still enjoy yourself. PKing is cool, but you can never do it and still enjoy yourself. Hell, if all you want to do is chop trees, catch fish, and cook food, you're going to have a great fucking time.

And the game scales SO WELL. You can spend a lifetime doing quaint little fun things in a cute forest somewhere, or you can slay gods, or you can hunt other players. You can cooperate, you can fight, you can ignore others. RuneScape allows for so many different playstyles and there's so much you can do that all synergizes with each other to make a big beautiful whole.

There's so much to talk about. The soundtrack is such perfect fantasy nostalgia. It has long-term goals that actually feel worth working for. Its symbols of prestige are clear and genuinely awe-inspiring. Its towns, cultures, and people have so much detail, much being stated and much left to discover. The "examine" descriptions give every object in the world character. Meaningful rarity. Long, winding narratives that you'll be working through for much of your playtime. Butting heads with other players. Finding harmony with other players. Learning zones and routes on your own. Sourcing your own information for what to do. You can hang out and you can be intense. Exploration even with no hidden parts of the map. Meaningful transportation. There are ALWAYS unknowns and there is ALWAYS more to learn. The only MMO left that can be another life.

This is the best MMO. RS3 is good too. GW2 and ESO are pretty good. EVE is cool if you ignore the space ancaps. But RS2 / OSRS is by far the peak of the MMO genre, and it's the last bastion of a kind of game design that we simply don't see anymore.

There are people who haven't played through One Small Favour? I pity them all.

I was going to try and answer the question of if this game has aged poorly, but that's a silly question. Of course it has. Pitfall is a hard-as-shit Atari platformer more about routing than platforming if you're actually trying to beat it. What, do you think that would be good?

What's more interesting to me is more a question about the Atari in general: What differentiates the lovely pieces in the Atari library from the painful garbage best left in the past? I'm thinking there's a few categories of good Atari games: immortally simple sports games, the black voids of space with earfucking explosions, the eerily quiet and lonely directionless whatthefuckdoidos, and of course the arcade games that still exist in some form on practically every platform today.

Pitfall doesn't really meet any of the criteria that make those groups of games simply fun or at least charming. It's a historical piece and nothing more. It looks gross and muddy, is mechanically bland, and doesn't have any of the magic and sheer wonder at THINGS MOVING ON SCREEN that brings you back to Atari.

When this was revealed, I said "Cool, more DOOM 2016." That couldn't have been a more wrong first impression, and I'm losing my mind over how good this game is. Eternal is all about crowd control and being the fastest thing you've ever fucking played. 2016 is honestly quaint in comparison...I loved that game, but I can't imagine going back to the constant cycle of being locked in a room, fighting a few waves with your basically infinite ammo, and moving to the next room that does the same. I originally thought that game was frantic and fast-paced, but the sensory overload and forced flow state of Eternal blows that game out of the water in every way.

I should mention that FUCKING "mortally challenged" joke that is like attack helicopter-tier Gamer bro "anti-SJW" garbage and they repeat it over and over throughout the whole game. I wouldn't mind it so much if I didn't have to hear it CONSTANTLY. Someone was clearly proud of that and I hate them for it. I guess I shouldn't have expected much better...the joy of this game is in its unrelenting immaturity. DOOM 2016 tried to still be 'classy' and grounded in a way that this just has no interest in replicating.

That's the worst and the best of Eternal, if I think about it. It's a pain in the ass and almost sickeningly masculine. Doomguy ascends from action-hero-cool to horny-audio-logs-calling-him-a-god cool. It's pretty obnoxious at times, but moreso admirable in how boldly ridiculous the whole thing is. It's in no way self-conscious, instead being such a silly over-the-top power fantasy that you can't help but be charmed. There's none of the weak attempts at being taken seriously that plague AAA games, and that opens up DOOM Eternal to things its predecessor wouldn't have dreamed of. Environments are abstract and overwhelmingly "gamey," fitting in perfectly with the drastically expanded movement systems and coming together into a whole so satisfying that I actually LOVED first person platforming. Who knew it was possible?

The new combat loop is a brilliant innovation that is literally the biggest breakthrough in the fps genre in decades. I'm not sure how to really put into words the amount that this adds. I'll have to write about it on its own sometime. I love how this game makes you play it on its own terms. If you're playing on ultra-violence, at least, you can't get away with just being good at first person shooters like you could with 2016 and most of the rest of the genre. No, mastering The Loop is absolutely essential and forced me out of my comfort zone in such an exciting way. Nothing feels like this game. Nothing moves like this game. Nothing is like this game.

As much as I've loved calling Amid Evil my favorite first person shooter and love how it looks on my profile, DOOM Eternal clearly stands above every previous fps. Somehow id managed to reinvent the genre that they effectively launched with their original classics. Good fucking lord.

D2's older sister is strange to go back to as a fan of the sequel, as its goals are jarringly different. Diablo is mechanically barebones to the point where the player rarely has to care much about what to level or what equipment to use. Equipment upgrades require very little thinking about pros and cons, you can usually easily tell if a new piece of armor or weapon is better than what you have. The drop rate is so low and the varieties of equipment and enemies is so limited that someone familiar with diablolikes at large will find themselves unchallenged and never asked to think all that much. Similarly, there's none of the involved questing or sometimes-cryptic hints that define the second. It's dreadfully simple: clear a level, go down the stairs, and repeat until you're in hell.

That sounds simplistic and dry, but the huge void left by the mechanical side of things is filled by the gorgeous gothic environments and the soundtrack which are every bit as haunting and unique as D2's. As was always the case with this era of Blizzard, passion and polish ooze from every inch of this thing. Atmosphere makes this game, but that's not to say that it's "more atmospheric" than its successor. It's very possible to play Diablo 2 in a way that brings out these same feelings just as well, there's just so much other shit going on that many will never slow down and enjoy it all. In this one, though, there's no other choice, no distractions. It's all about tone, and when you step into hell and see the cold, genuinely disturbing gore that leaves just enough to the imagination to really cut deep, you GET Diablo.

I'm glad I went back and played this. I never really got into it as a kid and would quickly go back to the sequel, but there's certainly a lot to appreciate here and it deserves its place in history.

I love the horny demon game I love girls I am GAY and I want them to tear me to shreds.

The puzzles are tough and have NO leeway (you'll end up within one step of the goal over and over and over), but they're ultimately satisfying. I did skip the door room out of frustration, but I'd still suggest not skipping as much as you can. The final boss fight took me a bit, but there's safe spots and it really just comes down to pattern recognition.

The designs are hall-of-famers for sure.