It's convenient to matchmake into a very pretty-looking Counter-Strike experience with a consistent ruleset. It's also convenient that I can occasionally get a game on Steam for dirt cheap by taking advantage of enough people's gambling addictions. That is where my compliments end.

GO truly is just the Counter-Strike you play because it's structurally and socially convenient to do so, and occasionally rewarding. I dunno man, I'll take an inconvenient-to-set-up but consistently fun game over that any day.

I have complicated feelings about Counter Strike Global Offensive because on the one hand, I think it's mechanics are brilliant. It is an extremely well designed, strategic shooter. Matches can have a ton of strategy, prediction, and generally trying to out think and out flank your opponent. This partially comes down to how lethal this game is. Counter Strike kills you incredibly quickly, so it is usually the person who sees their opponent first that wins. As such, positioning and flanking are really important, as is thinking about how your opponent might approach a situation. It's incredibly satisfying, and is one of the most strategic shooters I have ever played. However, actually playing Counter Strike Global Offensive could be an incredibly mixed bag because of the online experience. If you mess up, opponents are likely to yell at you. I have been called an NPC and an AI for making mistakes, as all beginners to a game do. I've had people report my account after some bad plays. Playing Counter Strike can be so stressful because you feel a need to perform well so your team doesn't get mad. With friends this problem can be solved, but finding 4 other people of roughly the same skill level that want to play this is tricky.

Ultimately, I could give a deeper review if I had more time with the game, but unfortunately Counter Strike Global Offensive has been delisted because of the release of Counter Strike 2. This is an incredibly sad and worrying move on Valve's end, and I hope for legacy and preservation's sake it is returned to steam alongside its sequel. Ultimately, Counter Strike is a great game whose competitive community takes it so seriously that it harms my enjoyment.

I'm joining the war on narrative games, and I'm on the side of narrative. Before I ever really got serious about video games, I was serious about books and film, and like those mediums it's story that piques my interest.

Undeniably, Undertale is one of the most interesting narratively-driven games of the last decade. It's probably the most I've ever played a game I did not like, having done several playthroughs, neutral or pacifist or genocide, waiting for it all to "click". But it just won't. Why not?

I'll say that I thoroughly enjoy the gameplay and think it works perfectly as an example of narrative gameplay integration, and is used consistently and intelligently throughout. But paradoxically, in a game that encourages you to avoid combat, it's these moments where the characters get the most personality; their attack patterns and even their projectiles say more about them in a language unique to this game than their dialogue ever could.

It's appropriate that this game is so strongly associated with an auteur, because even moreso than the amount of times you'll see his name pop in the credits as composer or designer or writer or caterer, it becomes very obvious very fast that this game is only really meant to appeal to one kind of person. (Well, two kinds of people. Furries also exist.)

As someone else said in their review of this game, you should indeed not let one annoying fandom ruin your perception of a game, and I wish it was as simple as ignoring Tumblr's collective opinion. The problem is that this game was only ever meant to be FOR Tumblr, or more specifically the kind of person that Tumblr has cultivated; someone who thinks a character's likeability comes from them being 'adorkable' and not any kind of dramatic pathos or arc or actual character, someone who calls dogs 'doggos' and 'puppers', someone who spends six dollars on laptop stickers that say inane phrases like "why be moody when you can shake that booty".

A difference in humor is one thing -- though I'd argue it's still justifiably off-putting, considering how much of this game is reliant on its humor, to the point of stopping gameplay dead in its tracks to dedicate time to the kind of weak character skits you see in rejected SNL auditions -- but within this setting, it is crucial that you enjoy such humor and characterization if you hope to get any kind of mileage out of the game's narrative.
Which is a shame, because the game does have some true highs; the combat system allows for an exploration of morality with some genuine weight to your actions, there's clearly been a lot of thought put into the mechanics of this world and how consequences develop throughout the story. But it's ultimately at the service of very little; you will only root for Sans if you enjoy puns, you will only care about Napstablook if you unironically have Daria as your Twitter icon, you will only care for Alphys if you are the kind of unbearable nerd who sees themselves as an anime protagonist and not, you know, a fucking annoying prick.

Differences in humor tend to be the main reason people conflict about melo-dramedy stories like BoJack Horseman or Fleabag. Because humor and drama are interwoven in these stories and end up being celebrate to making each other work, which becomes hard to breach for an audience if they just don't enjoy your chosen method of comedy (pop culture references in BoJack or fourth wall breaking in Fleabag, for example). It works for these shows because, like the humor, the drama is very personal as well. Undertale on the other hand combines very personal humor with large sweeping statements about morality, postmodernism, ludonarrative dissonance, very large lofty themes that have to co-exist with pretty braindead humor like "what if the rock wouldn't stay put, LOL".

At its most egregious it suggests a kind of ego on behalf of the creators, that there never was a true conversation about these decisions concerning the narrative, or even that there was no one around to challenge these ideas. A lot of this feels adolescent and juvenile, especially compared to its successor Deltarune, which has demonstrated far stronger capabilities of self-awareness and actual character development.

In the end, Undertale falls in line with a game like Borderlands; decent to play, but god I wish it was written by anyone else.

With a few changes this game would be like twice as good. The lives system is archaic and shitty, especially with how long some levels can be. The game is split into 7 worlds with like 8 missions each. The first two are required to unlock the next world, and the rest are sort of optional. Or, they seem that way. Then you get to the 6th world and they tell you that you actually need to have beaten 25 missions to unlock the final world. So then you have to go back and do all those. The first two missions of each world are downright obnoxious. By the time I found out I had to basically double the amount of levels I'd finished, I was really annoyed with this game. Then I did a bunch of the "optional" levels and actually had a great time. Going into the final level, my opinion on this game had completely turned around. I was having a blast. Then I played the final level and had to deal with all the boredom therein. The final boss is tedious and slow.

This game's weakest part is the combat, but holy hell does this game want to put you in combat. The platforming is actually pretty fun once you get used to the movement, although it could very clearly do with some improvements. The music (mostly) rules, with few duds in the soundtrack. Final opinion on this game is that it took away 8 hours of my life that could've been lowered to 5 or 6 if it didn't suck so much. There's a lot of potential here, but being made by Sonic Team and in 2003 really makes it hard to love. It'd be cool to see a spiritual successor by someone who sees what this game could be if it were made Not Shit.

Sakurai is one of those gameplay auteurs who manages to showcase absolute mastery of how to challenge himself and then still bring out a great sense of depth and fun at every turn. This time it's, "hey what if we literally made a racing game around ONE button (and an analog stick i guess)"

That's the beauty of Kirby Air Ride, it's a rip roaring time with 3 solid game modes that utilize the most of the depth of its mechanics while also being a solid party game to play on the side. Whether you play on the well structured and designed race tracks in classic Air Ride with a multitude of different but very distinct karts, the minigame nature although probably weakest component known as Top Ride, or the total stat-grind rush and general party randomness structure of City Ride, you will have a shitton of fun to experience.

It manages to be more interesting than most racing games in general, especially with racing powerups that don't rely on luck factor as much as they do knowledge of the game (even the "random" obtaining powerups actually just come down to timing) and have more depth to show. It's also just incredibly accessible to jump in on, with a skill floor low enough that anyone can enter in.

It's a crazy good time that I'd recommend playing at any point you can, especially with friends through Parsec.