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It's pretty cute i guess.

As much as I'd love to not mention it, it's impossible not to compare this game to Lethal Company. I feel like any game going forward that wants to try and recapture that Lethal Company appeal is going to have a hard time beating what Lethal Company already offers.

I think this game is way more chill than lethal company. Not that I'm ever a "try hard" when I play lethal with my friends, but this game incentivizes the silliness that tends to come with your average game of lethal. Both the games are dumb fun, but this game encourages you to be dumb. You are playing as a group of "Spooktubers" after all.

The camera mechanic is pretty cool, and is where most of the "chill factor" comes from in the game. Rather than hunting for junk like in lethal company, you're on the hunt for views on a clip show you make with an in game camera. This is where the magic of this game comes in, as one player can record up to ~2 minutes of footage with the in game camera. This leads to everyone being dumb on purpose, after all your best friend dying means more views right? It's a ton of fun finishing a dive into the "old world" and coming back up and watching the stupidity unfold in a sporadic retelling of your adventure.

The other chill factor in this game is the monsters. Compared to lethal company, the monsters in content warning are much less, well, "lethal". This is done purposefully since as I mentioned earlier the game wants you to be stupid. Where a lot of the comedy of lethal company comes from the instant-ness of death the monsters in that game cause, the comedy in content warning is seeing the monsters brutalize your friends, only for them to stand back up and walk it off.

There's a lot less pressure in this game than in Lethal Company, and in a lot of ways it works well. There's one treasure (the camera) and you're a lot more likely to all survive due to the inherently less hostile game design.

However, the game just doesn't have the depth Lethal company does. All the rewards in this game are mostly cosmetic, Expensive emotes, Party poppers, Silly microphones, etc. It plays into the gameplay loop well enough, your videos get "higher production" the longer you go. But they don't really effect how you interact with the world, unlike Lethal Company. In lethal you can get new tools that let you explore outside of facilities, or teleporters that can create clutch saves, or instant chaos. In Content Warning each loop is the same, even the location you dive to is picked for you and stays the same for the 3 day loop for each view quota. As it is now, I feel like I've seen most of what Content Warning has to offer. And it was a good time! But I don't think I could play this more than maybe one or two more times.

I got the game on launch when it was free for the day, and as a free game it's a 100% recommend. At $8 It's still pretty cheap, but I would only get it if your friends already have it or want to play it. However, if the game gets some updates, then I might change my tune! I do think it has room to grow and be a more "chill" alternative to the game play loop Lethal Company currently dominates.

Well, this is it - this might be the peak of smartphone gaming. Monument Valley is an absolutely beautiful mobile game that focuses on challenging the player through mazes and optical illusions to learn more of their own story and purpose. The use of storytelling as well as the phone’s touch screen and general formatting results in Monument Valley being one of the best in the smartphone gaming library. The player works with the puzzles they’re given through taps and contorting the map to their advantage, all to get from point A to point B. The story is simple but still emotional enough to create a reaction.

It’s hard to critique the game, as the flaws it has don’t really rely on the game itself, rather the limitations that being on mobile hinders a game, even though this is the format they chose when designing it. The issues Monument Valley runs into are its short playtime and lack of replayability, with me finishing the game in about 1-2 hours. Since it is a phone game, I imagine you’re supposed to only play it in short bursts, but in my case, I played it in its entirety while on a long plane ride - so that’s more on me than the game itself, honestly.

Monument Valley is an absolute must-play for those looking for the “best of the best” in phone games, and is a gorgeous trip from start to finish. It feels a little odd rating it so high for being so short and putting it at the same score as some pretty large epics in gaming, but when rating I like to compare games to their peers which in this case falls into mobile gaming. The real question now is will I find a phone game worthy of being 5/5… or more so am I ready to admit that the original Plants vs Zombies might be exactly that lol. Well, we’ll see - in the mean time, why not entertain yourself with one of the prettiest games to ever grace the App Store.

4.5/5

Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.

Incredibly fun app - might be one I’ve had the best time with since the “Golden Years” of the Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, and Cut the Rope kinda phone-gaming era.

Part Time UFO was made and published by HAL Laboratory (of Kirby fame) wanting to focus on games made specifically for smartphones in mind. This is why I think the game works so well, and why its reminiscent of the games that I remember most fondly in smartphone gaming. Part Time UFO is made with the phone in mind, and tried its best to focus on making a game that worked with a smartphone’s features (touch screen, portability, etc) rather than fight against them. Phone gaming at this point has a bit of a bad name for itself, having mostly devolved into however cheaply a person can make a game that can quickly take a player’s money, infamously cover the gameplay in ads, and force the player away with pop-up after pop-up of MTX requests.

Paying around $4 in exchange for a fun game experience is extremely worth it in my opinion, with Part Time UFO costing around that. Early smartphone games usually only offered a demo for free, but a very kind $5 or less price for the full game. A cheap price for hours of uninterrupted fun, and for good games, too! Games made with the intention for the player to work with the smartphone’s touch and lack of buttons, rather than fight against it.

That is where I had to dock points from Part Time UFO though, as while the game clearly is well-intentionally made to be a phone game, and is leaps and bounds ahead of many other current smartphone games, it still has to rely on covering parts of the screen with a joystick and button. People often say that this game is a better experience on Switch, and I can believe it. Even though the game was originally made just for phones, the way they put a touch control joystick and button right in front of you immediately has the player start to fight against the phone’s capability, rather than work with it. It results in the player desperately wishing they had a physical joystick and button, which the Switch can happily provide them.

Even with that as a bit of a glaring knock-back, I do really love Part Time UFO, and find myself quickly losing my time when I open it up. It has quite a bit to offer, and has great replayability in allowing players to retry levels to get a perfect score, very in tune to how early smartphone games work in eating up your time. I really do recommend this game to anyone looking for a good find for their phone! It’s $4 and I think I’ve already spent 3 hours on it, and I’m not even done! The Switch version probably controls better, but it’s also double the price. I’m guessing they add more stuff or something to reason the price, but also maybe not! It is Nintendo after all lmao.

Oh well, check Part Time UFO out, you’ll have a blast. It’s cute, charming, and fun - and will absolutely eat all my battery away when I take the train.

3.5/5

The first thing to note is this game's composer, Masamichi Amano, was an actual orchestral, film and anime composer! This was his first stint in games. The music is generally excellent - a lot of times in games, classical-influenced music gets stuck in cliche (think of your typical mediocre town song from a JRPG). You can tell he's drawing on a wide range of experience and that makes it a fun listen

What's neat about Quest 64 is how it's sort of prototypically 'open world', its world an imaginative mix of MMORPG open-ness, 3D towns, dungeons translated from their 2D counterparts. Is it repetitive with its endless battles? Yes. Is it tense in uninteresting and interesting ways? Yes! There is sooo little relief going through long areas like boil hole or blue cave, where one fuck-up means redoing it...

I think the hiding level-ups around the world and towns is really neat still. Also, the game not being hampered by an equipment system helps bring the battles into focus, as does the limited inventory and items in the game creating a unique texture. There's the sense of being a young, underprepared magician.

Sure, you can also use skill points in the wrong element and get stuck with bad builds! That's kind of the fun... and everyone just does the earth avalanche + magic barrier build in the end, so...

The battle system isn't executed perfectly (lining up attacks is tough, dodging is sometimes counterintuitive), but it was experimental and pretty fun most of the time! Not to mention 'seamless'..that buzzword.

I actually think the game is quite beautiful at times, using the low-poly and texture limitations to its advantage. The beanstalk at the end of Cull Hazard, the blues of Nepty's HIdeout, the expansive caverns of Blue Caves. They have an imaginative painterly quality that would be replaced by realistic lighting half the time nowadays...

On top of it all, there's such a quietness to how you progress in this game - only getting a few lines of dialogue from bosses, kings of towns, and the game being quiet otherwise. There isn't much going on in the story, but the point of Quest 64 is the quiet, difficult adventure, and I think the bare story works well in that way.

Quest 64 is probably one of the most badass names for a video game you could come up with. It doesn't need a subtitle or anything to draw you in, because it's that raw. When I was given this cartridge as a kid, I genuinely thought it must have been one of the greatest games ever made with such a blunt title.

Quest 64 is a JRPG without party members, equipment, or a currency system. None of the towns or dungeons are particularly unique. The plot is about going to find 4 elemental orbs and a powerful book that keeps the universe held together. Despite being overall unremarkable and lacking compared to other games in the genre, to this day I feel like its simplicity is kind of charming.

Combat is unique, being turn-based, but with a limited area of free movement where you can actually dodge attacks in real time during enemy turns and position yourself for different spells. There's a lot of background story told through dialogues with NPCs. Environments, while generic, largely look pretty good and are often quite colorful.

I've seen a lot of people call this game lazy, but I think it's the opposite and the team unfortunately just wasn't able to achieve their true vision for the game. Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but not as bad as it's often made out to be.