This game has that early-2000s movie tie-in jank that you either love or hate. As someone that was incredibly excited for the movie at the time and actually played this BEFORE the film's release, I have fond memories of it, even if I can't imagine myself ever going back to play it now. Game gets bonus points for Bruce Campbell voice overs and having Shocker as one of the villains. However, it also loses points for the absolute cowardice on Activision's part in removing the cheat code that lets you play as MJ in later revisions of the game, preventing you from getting that sweet ending of Mary Jane making out with herself on the bridge.

Never forget what they took from you.

There are sequels, and then there are sequels. Pokémon Gold & Silver are firmly in the latter camp. A massive clean-up of practically everything that was broken about the first generation Pokémon games; a whole host of new features that would add to the game's incredible depth and become standards for almost every version that would come after; and cramming in an entire second campaign that brings you back to Kanto to witness how the world has truly grown and changed in the preceding years. All on one tiny Game Boy Color cart.

Reading about this game in magazines back in the day felt like the stuff of legends. It went through a long development period so even after we finally got Red & Blue here in the west, you already knew the next big thing was on the way from the info that came trickling in. But we all felt there was little way it could live up to weight of expectations that inevitably came with being the sequel to these games that started a phenomenon. Not only did Gold & Silver meet those expectations head on, they absolutely smashed them.

Getting Pokémon Gold on launch day felt like living in the future. Realistically, these games weren't all that drastically different from the simple Game Boy titles that had just launched a couple years prior. But if you lived through the GS era as it happened? It truly seemed like the world had expanded beyond all imagination; a bright future shining with a golden sun and a silver moon.

A Link to the Past is a very difficult game to judge because it is undeniably a landmark of gaming, a well-crafted adventure for its time and a truly ambitious experience for a Super Nintendo title. But as a kid, I found it incredibly frustrating, so much so that it put me off of the Zelda series for over a decade, and has been the biggest driving force for my apathy of 2D Zelda. It was a franchise that never clicked for me until it made the move to 3D, and despite several attempts to go back to ALTTP over the years, that feeling of apathy remained. Now, finally, having dedicated myself to seeing it all the way through to the end...yeah I still feel the same.

For as much as I did enjoy finally seeing everything this game has to offer, my biggest complaints still ring true: combat is more of a chore than anything else, quickly becoming something I did not feel like engaging with unless absolutely necessary, and as a result, hinders the game's biggest strength, its sense of exploration. I stuck largely to the path I needed to take because trying to get anywhere else was mostly an annoyance. The game can also be incredibly obtuse or downright cryptic with its puzzle solving and progression, easily the most dated aspect of the time period from which it originates, and all of this conspires to leave me in the same place I felt all those years ago, just with less patience for it now.

This review is much harsher than something like A Link to the Past deserves, and I am glad I was finally able to slay those childhood demons by beating it. But I've never had the love for 2D Zelda others do, and if playing through the most revered of them all didn't do it for me, I guess I can safely say they just aren't for me.

Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Good: The Video Game

About halfway through Lost Judgment I simply decided to yank the difficulty down to easy and plow through it for the story because I just can't get into the more action-oriented combat of this series. I bounced off before and if it weren't for my love of Yakuza 7 I never would have pulled myself back in to give this game a try. I didn't regret my decision, as even though the game does spin its wheels in the story department for a good half of it, it's carried by a strong moral and philosophical clash between it's two primary characters over what constitutes justice and it easily carried the narrative to the end.

My biggest regret was not going through more of the high school side of the story, as I really enjoyed what I played of it, but I also knew it would drag me down forever if I went all the way in and I'd probably never get around to finishing the main narrative. So, I left that part of the game unfinished. Perhaps I'll get around to it someday.

When I was a kid my local mall had a small arcade in it. The guy who ran it had both the N64 and PlayStation available for people to play; you could pay a dollar and play any of the games there for 10 minutes. This was a big deal at the time because of how relatively new those systems were, and it was actually where I got to play both consoles for the first time.

At the time I was - and still am - a huge fan of Beast Wars. One day while at a Wal-Mart, a friend and I both noticed a Beast Wars game had been released recently on the PlayStation. He had no interest but I desperately wanted to play it. However, since I didn't own a PS1, he helped me concoct a scheme to get the owner of the arcade to purchase it instead, and then I could just go and play it there whenever I wanted. I knew this was going to be a tough sell, however, as game prices were exceptionally high here in Canada during that generation, and I wasn't sure if anyone other than myself was even going to bother playing it. I had to come up with something good.

We brought the idea to the owner of the arcade and he was naturally a little hesitant, not being familiar with the game or Beast Wars in general. So I gave him my best interpretation of what this game I had never played was like: "Yeah it plays like a cross between Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye 007. So it'll be really popular." Technically, this wasn't entirely inaccurate: it was a third-person game like Super Mario 64, and you did shoot people like in GoldenEye, so I wasn't entirely lying here, but let's be real: I was just bullshitting the guy by name dropping two of the most popular games at the time. And wouldn't you know it, it actually worked!

I returned to the arcade a couple of weeks later and much to my surprise, the owner had bought the game! He wasn't there that day, though, so I went up to the guy who was working there, paid my dollar, scurried over to the PlayStation, sat down, and finally got to play Beast Wars: Transformers. A video game adaptation of my favorite TV series! I couldn't be more excited to experience this.

It was a piece of shit. I don't now if I had ever been more disappointed in a game than I was playing this for the first time. The controls were ass, the environments were a mess and didn't resemble anything from the show, and it was super unclear what you actually needed to do to progress. In those ten minutes I wandered around aimlessly trying to find any sort of fun here, but after the time limit expired, I simply got up and left the arcade, wondering where it all went so wrong.

Some time later I found myself at the arcade again and ran into the owner. He told me that he had bought the game for me and asked when I was going to play it. I told him I already had, which was true, but embellished a little, claiming I had already been here multiple times to play it. I felt bad I made this guy spend all that money on this terrible game that only I was ever going to play. Or, worse, I cursed some other poor, curious soul to experience the same immense disappointment I did.

Beast Wars deserved better.

A frustrating puzzle game that goes out of its way to inconvenience the player and waste as much of your time as humanly possible. Maybe I'm just an ADHD-ridden bastard, but exploring the island to get to the puzzles can be such a chore due to the endless invisible walls that part of me wishes there wasn't even an island to explore at all. Don't even get me started on the boat that I assume is supposed to be your fast travel. It might actually be quicker to just sprint around the island if you find a map of it online.

The puzzles themselves are interesting at first, but Jon Blow is obsessed with taking these concepts and adding some obnoxious gimmick on top of it to make it as annoying to solve as possible. For example, one set of puzzles involves drawing a line either around or on shadows cast by tree branches. Eventually, the game straight up obscures the grids of these puzzles with objects making it incredibly difficult to see where the tree branch shadows lie. Another set involves you drawing a line that is mirrored on the opposite side of the grid. Eventually, the mirrored line becomes completely invisible so you have to visualize it yourself. None of these puzzles are fun. They're annoying. It's like they couldn't figure out how to add difficulty to the game and ran out of ideas, so they just did random things to cripple the player. It's like if Super Mario Bros. repeated 1-1 over and over again and got more difficult by making the screen go completely black for 3 seconds every couple of steps. Or if the enemies eventually became completely invisible.

Some puzzles simply require memorization more than any actual puzzle solving. Draw the line to match where the apple is on the tree. Go through a hedge maze and replicate the path you took on the grid. There isn’t any real brain teasing here. It’s more busywork than anything.

Some of the puzzles aren’t bad. The tetromino and starburst puzzles are mostly fine, though eventually they get extremely hard. Too hard for my pea brain apparently. The problem is that the game does a really bad job at introducing you to these and getting you to understand what you’re even supposed to do. The fact that there’s a Steam guide specifically for explaining the rules of each puzzle set should be a testament enough to that.

As someone who’s actually a pretty big fan of Jon Blow’s first game, Braid, this was a massive disappointment. Maybe when Blow is done smelling his own farts, he’ll finally make a game that’s actually fun like Braid was.

It's hard to really quantify a game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I had both a wonderful time playing it but also no lasting emotional attachment to the time I spent with it. It's a game with a lot of stuff in it, but also never really let me have exactly what I wanted from it. It's a game like no other that I spent a lot of the time wishing was more like other games.

To start with, I had never played an Animal Crossing game before, so whatever expectations and disappointments came with a new entry in the series, I was entirely free of. I played this game for two months straight, every single day, diligently building up my island as I really had nothing else to do given the nature of the world at the time. It's been said before but this really was the right game at the right time.

Then, after those two months, I just stopped playing. There wasn't really an impetus for it; I simply felt I had done everything I needed to do. Which isn't to say I did everything that was available at the time, but my island had gotten to the point where I was very happy with it and there wasn't much more I could do to craft it toward my liking. It certainly didn't help that I still had not amassed a lot of the cooler items available in New Horizons, largely because the game does not make them easily available to you. So, happy with what I had built, I turned the game off and left for other adventures. I did have some brief thoughts of going back later in the year, to decorate for the holidays, but the idea of grinding those daily missions to get all the items so I could have my island looking festive for a day before it was all over did not appeal to me.

Beyond a few minor gripes with how the game handles giving you items, the bizarre way it treats its online, or how inefficient the crafting system is, there wasn't really a lot for me to complain about. I respect what Nintendo continues to create with these games, and I'm happy I was finally able to give this series a chance, but I had my fill and I think I'm done. This game is good, but ultimately not the "play every single day" kind of good I think it wanted to be.

If you're looking for a quality and fully-functional mahjong client with slick presentation and a healthy dose of cute anime girls, there's none better. I cut my teeth learning to play mahjong in Clubhouse Games 51, but after struggling to maintain a good connection with friends to play online with, stumbled upon this instead, and have stuck with it ever since. MajSoul has some decent tutorials to teach you the game, but honestly the best way to go about it is to learn some basic hands and just jump in and play, ideally with friends.

The only major downside is that the gacha mechanics are absolutely terrible, so if you're looking to snag a particular waifu, you WILL have to shell out money here; there's no efficient way to grind for what you need. Even then, the odds are so bad that you're probably not going to get what you want despite spending the cash for it. It's rough, but considering the monetization of this game is entirely cosmetic and you otherwise have an incredible free mahjong client to enjoy, the trade-off had to come somewhere. I wish this aspect of the game were better, but I'm glad there's a place online I can just go play mahjong with friends and have a great time.

If you were to ask me what this game was about I could hardly tell you, other than those who made it really, really liked Evangelion. In terms of an actual game, it's a solid, flashy rail shooter that gets bonus points for being a game designed with the N64 in mind. I appreciate their desire to craft the game and its controls around Nintendo's unique controller, even if moving and shooting can sometimes feel like "rubbing your stomach and patting your head" syndrome. There were a few times in the game where it wasn't really clear where and what you needed to shoot to defeat certain enemies resulting in a little trial-and-error but overall I had fun with it. I've wanted to play this game for a long time but never got around to it until now. I came away being genuinely impressed with what they made.

Horizon Forbidden West is more of the same when held against its predecessor, Zero Dawn. It improves in some areas, inexplicably bungles others, and much like the first Horizon I was left feeling that this game was good - but it could have been great. I suppose in some sense this does make Forbidden West a disappointment, as I had much higher hopes that that sequel would take greater strides to improve over the original game and learn from other open world titles that have done so much to innovate in this space. Horizon, however, seems more than content enough to stand pat.

In terms of what's good here, there's a lot to enjoy. The core gameplay loop of Horizon is still largely a satisfying one. Hunting, scouting, and battling these huge machines and then salvaging their parts to improve your weapons and armor continues to provide a winning formula, especially one-on-one against larger enemies where battles can get really intense. Guerrilla Games has upped the ante here with over 20 new machines to discover and fight, almost all of which are real winners, from both a visual design and gameplay standpoint. With most of the machines from Zero Dawn also returning, there's a lot of variety to enemy encounters.

This does begin to break down a little when the game starts to overwhelm you with multiple machines at once, as GG has also decided to dramatically increase the aggression to which the machines attack you. Yes it encourages you to strongly prepare yourself before the battle, an aspect of the game I do like, but often times during story events fights are forced upon you before this can happen, leaving you on the backfoot. Enemies also seem to have a lot more abilities which interrupt or temporarily incapacitate Aloy, which when combined with few evasive or defensive options, an annoyingly long recovery time, and overall more spongy machine designs, make some encounters an absolute chore to deal with. Other elements of the game's combat can also bring the experience down a few notches, but I'll touch more on that later.

Another positive is the game's side quests, which feel like a massive improvement over the first's. These ones tend to be more involved, featuring multiple links in the story chain, while also showcasing how much better NPCs act and emote here. Characters move around and are more physically expressive during cut scenes, helping to engage you more with their plights than simply seeing the same static shots of Aloy conversing with them over and over. Character writing in general is also a huge leap forward over Zero Dawn, not just with quest NPCs but also the primary cast, as you are given much more time to spend with them and have their characters fleshed out. Assembling an actual party here helps the game lean stronger into its RPG elements, even if you're still mostly in a solo action-adventure game. There's actually an interesting variety of personalities here instead of the more cookie-cutter archetypes of the first game, though I still find myself wishing Forbidden West had done more with its villains.

The game in general is a visual treat, with some of the most lush and dense world design of anything I've ever played. Playing an open world game is all about wanting to immerse yourself in the universe they've created and the world of Horizon II does a tremendous job of that. Much like the first Horizon, this new entry also features a fantastic soundtrack, which tends to hit the right notes at the right time, combining an orchestral score with some techno-infused tunes that really helps to underscore the contrast between the two themes of Horizon's universe. The battle themes when fighting the large machines are real stand outs.

Also a big step up from the first game is melee combat. They clearly made this a priority as your skill tree can unlock multiple combo attacks that give some real depth to fighting enemies without your bow. It makes confronting individual human enemies a fun experience to look forward to, although infiltrating a rebel base and having to fight a horde of non-machine adversaries is still a slog and something I wish these games would move away from because it's clearly not what players are here for.

Unfortunately where combat begins to break down is when you get into the weapon system, which has seen a disappointing downgrade from Zero Dawn. Weapon variety feels almost non-existent, as some of the more unique weapons from the first game have been toned down significantly, and most of the newer tools feel clunky to wield. Instead, you'll find yourself filling your weapon wheel with a bunch of similar bows, as for whatever reason they've decided to tie specific ammo types to individual weapons. Why have one bow with all types of arrows when you can now have five to cover your spread of element types? The problem alleviates itself somewhat later in the game, when you start finding rarer weapons with three slots for arrow types, but it's still an unnecessary change that causes more confusion than anything else.

One of the big complaints that I had with Horizon Zero Dawn was with its climbing system. While it was simple and linear it also could be a struggle when you needed to find the ONE handhold on an entire mountain to let you begin your ascent. Forbidden West revamps things here, giving you larger and more fluid climbing surfaces to work with, but with far worse readability. It's impossible to tell what surfaces you can and cannot climb without constantly scanning with your focus because they all look exactly the same. Thankfully there's an accessibility option to highlight all handholds without scanning, which I would highly recommend everyone uses, as it's the one thing that saves this part of the game from being a complete disaster. In a post-Breath of the Wild world, there's no excuse for a game like this not to simply let you climb wherever you want. Instead, it's like someone looked at how BOTW did things, decided to only go halfway with it before giving up, and the end result is truly baffling.

Finally, we get to what is the game's biggest failing: the story. Zero Dawn had a fairly satisfying narrative of Aloy going from outcast to savior of the world, mixed in with some genuinely interesting world building in which you seek out the answers to what happened to the humans that came before and how they caused the end of the world. In Forbidden West there's almost no real growth for Aloy. She's largely the same person she was at the beginning of this journey to when she reaches the end. Worse is that the pieces are in place here for a more cohesive arc: one about how Aloy needs to grow from a stubborn loner to one who depends on others for help. You can tell this is what the writers were going for but they don't really make the effort to connect the dots. There isn't a through line for the character like the first game; it's more like a bunch of loosely-connected story elements that share a common goal but don't really mesh well with one another.

On top of that, the actual plot of the game unravels the moment you finish and begin to think at all about what transpired. The story does have some interesting hooks to it, most of which are answers to dangling questions left by the first game. However, without going too much into spoiler territory, many of the late-game reveals only serve to undermine the journey that was taken to get here, and put into question what the hell this conflict was really about. When you work backwards from what the game tells you at the end, it's really easy to deduce that absolutely nothing which happened here made a lick of sense, and the game was merely obfuscating important details to maintain the illusion of a mystery. It doesn't work and it's wholly unsatisfying. The last-minute addition of a sequel hook only serves to make you feel even more exhausted with where they might go with the future story.

Ultimately I did genuinely enjoy my time with Horizon Forbidden West. It's an extremely well-made game that has a lot of offer, and as someone that eats open-world games up like junk food, this definitely hits enough of the right spots to keep me mostly happy with the time I spent with it. But I can't help but shake my head at the fact that Guerrilla Games has had five years to make a sequel that should have done much, much more than what we inevitably got here. These games have always had such a cool premise that lends itself to becoming something truly great. They shouldn't have to settle for just being good.

Death Stranding is the best 6/10 game I've ever played. A genuinely unique title that everyone should experience for themselves, yet at the same time one that constantly gets in the way of itself any time it tries to become something truly great. I think it speaks volumes that the best time I had with this game was after I had beaten it; when finally given the freedom to explore and create infrastructure, as well as do deliveries unimpeded by awful story, overwrought characters and uninspired combat. That ability to build out the world for yourself and your fellow porters and enjoy the fruits of your creation is what really makes this game shine, but the amount of work it demands you do to achieve that is so absurd I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to put in the time.

If you ever wanted to know how it feels to go on a date with two women and become the ultimate third wheel, play HuniePop 2. You, the player, may as well not even be there, in what is the ultimate failing of the new double date system. The hell is the point of a game designed around self-inserting if the characters are more interested in fucking each other than the player?

I would say it's a little silly to feel disappointment over what is primarily a porn game, but that comes in large part due to how surprisingly GOOD the first HuniePop was. In its place here is just a far shallower attempt to recreate that magic, with less interesting characters and scenarios, along with the puzzle gameplay that, while still somewhat enjoyable, relies far more on levelling up stats to advance than actual strategy. Which, sadly, is about the only real grinding you'll feel like your character is participating in.

Really fun game that combines Mario Party board game shenanigans with a side of card collecting. I was roped into this game by friends having no idea what it was and came out having an absolute blast. If you're interested in giving 100% Orange Juice a try, just remember these three helpful tips:

1. Make sure to achieve Norma
2. Always put Saki's Cookie into your deck
3. The seagull's name is Shitbird