Pure art. An expressionist adventure that links the Mario and Yoshi franchises together by adding a phenomenal depth to their lore. The story is simple yet touching. The art style is some of the best I've seen by Nintendo; each frame looks like a Van Gogh painting. The levels have an excellent difficulty curve, starting off with simple levels and ending with platforming challenges of an unbeknownst complexity that will test the numerous skills you've acquired with Yoshi within the six worlds. The boss fights are likely the best I've seen in any 2D platformer. The experimental 2.5D sections work remarkably well and show the great capabilities of the SNES as a console. The greatest SNES game I've played thus far, the greatest prequel I've played thus far and possibly the greatest 2D platformer I've played thus far. Will be revisiting.

I'm a huge fan of platforming games, but I'm also a super artsy person. In this regard, Super Meat Boy only satisfied one of those factors: it's an incredible rage platformer with a difficulty that progresses well, but that unfortunately has an impenetrable atmosphere. The art style is very mundane and the music doesn't really always fit the mood, and that keeps me from really getting invested into sessions of the game. This being said, I only played through the main story so far, and I might keep playing this on the side to eventually get 100%, and maybe my opinion will change then.

If is certainly an accomplishment; at an era where developers were already deep into the SNES, leaving the original NES to slowly die, HAL Laboratory unleashed their ultimate flagship title on the now obsolete system. Indeed, having had well over half a decade to perfect their craft, the game studio understood the inner mechanisms of the NES better than pretty much anyone else. The result is a vibrant game with tons of content, and arguably the prettiest and most developed graphics in any NES game. Despite some repetitive and dull level design at times, the game is filled with fun gameplay surprises and challenges. It is, in many ways, the final essential NES achievement.

where does one even start a review about this game?

at the time of writing this review, i have over fifty hours of gameplay in this game, and i have just completed all the story missions. yet, according to the game, i'm only a little bit over halfway done with everything there is to do in this game. how the hell did they put so much content in a 2004 game?

GTA:SA is so many things at once
firstly, it's a driving simulator of 212 individual vehicles: various cars, bicycles, motorcycles, boats, aeroplanes, trucks with or without trailers, harvesters, tractors, tanks, helicopters, so on and so forth... each vehicle has its own personality and feel, and feels different to drive.

it's an excellent single-player FPS, which often feels very similar to games like Goldeneye 007. the firearms feel great and shoot out missions can be very challenging, requiring great strategy, practice and planning

it's an endless adventure game. the giant map has so much to see and discover that, even with dozens of hours in the game, you continuously find new stuff you've never seen before

it's an open-world game. you can do whatever the hell you want and you genuinely feel like you're even more than the main character.

it has phenomenal writing and some of the greatest cutscenes i've had the chance to watch in gaming. the game is written much like an extravagant hollywood action film, and with how self-aware it is, it succeeds at doing that much better than a vast majority of hollywood films. each character has an immense depth, sensibilities and the player gets attached. let me just say that the ending left me completely jawdropped.

it is such a perfect satire of everything that is wrong with american society, and while its absurdism gives it a certain step back from reality, now that i've visited some of the worst ghettos in the american south, and the more knowledgeable i get about american culture and politics, i feel like GTA:SA got a whole lot right about sociocultural issues in america.

it's truly a masterpiece. it's challenging, it makes you think, and it is phenomenally written. a must play. will definitely get through the rest of this game to 100% it.

once you get over the fact that this is clear DLC bait, and that you spend half your life savings on getting all those damn map DLCs, it's just about one of the best games I've ever played. drive through the day and through the night, from Cali to Texas and beyond, deliver eggs or other semi-trucks, roll your windows up and down, see the sequoias, the mountains and the deserts. go 90MPH on country roads carrying tens of thousands of dollars worth of explosive chemicals, or respect traffic laws perfectly. you're free. you're the king. the American dream.

In theory, this should be my favorite Mario game. I've poured in thousands upon thousands of hours over the course of a decade mastering this game, speedrunning it, and exploring its limits. I own six separate copies of this game in various languages and systems. Indeed, the reason why I've spent so much time on this game is that its level design is some of the greatest stuff Nintendo has ever made. Yoshi is such a versatile and broken asset to the game, the platforming is complex and vibrant, and all stars excite me. It really is a perfect add-on to SMG1, as it originally intended to be. The reason why I can't bring myself to give this game a perfect score is that instead of marketing this game as a sort of 'lost levels' or addon to Super Mario Galaxy, they slapped in a lazy story that feels lacking, unfinished and lacks vision. The whole story of this game is filler. Did they do it to boost sales? So they could more comfortably shelve it alongside other mainline Mario games? It feels slightly disingenuous. Either way, it's not a big complaint. This is a sublime game and I've had an outrageous amount of fun with it se a child, a teenager and a young adult. I truly hope they re-release this on the Switch, someday.

It is a truly exceptional and influential ROM hack, and it ages exceptionally well. It set the standard of quality for new, complete Mario games on the SM64 engine, and despite some annoying stars, it feels easily as accomplished as the vanilla game in terms of level design. There now exists many versions of this game, even one that is compatible with the N64 console of you own an Everdrive, and it feels as much like a fantastic add-on to SM64 as SMG2 feels like a fantastic add-on to SMG1. An excellent place to start if you have an interest for SM64 ROM hacking and don't know what to play first.

I agree with the general consensus that this is among the most complete and diverse city building simulators you can find on the market. The game is immensely complex and has a steep but rewarding learning curve, definitely leaving you with many freedoms in terms of design. Other than the fact that a lot of its marketing stems on DLC bait, and the fact that the core game forces you to build a city based on car travel (walk-only and transit oriented development is difficult to accomplish), and that zoning options are very limited, Cities: Skylines is a great simulator with lots to do, and even without mods, it rewards experimentation and gives lots of freedom to the player.

Likely the peak of 2D Mario excellence. Excellent and engaging level design, gorgeous and colorful sprites, lots of great content, especially in the post game, and an unforgettable soundtrack. Finding all 96 exits is an exciting and challenging endeavour. The switch to the new system adds saving and much more powerful cartridges, letting Nintendo masterfully execute all the ideas they had in mind while letting the player beat the game at their own pace. This game shows the potential of the SNES had as a gaming system, the amount of creativity the esceptional team had. Funny, gorgeous, grand and immensely fun. One of the great masterpieces of gaming and the ultimate bridge between the 80's and the 90's.

For a game that is so notoriously difficult, it's disappointing to see how much of its difficulty stems in pseudo-difficulty: pick-a-path, find this hidden block, guess what the right decision is before the screen scrolls too far... once you know the layout of these levels, it's really not too hard, and is just an awkward experimental version of SMB1.
I really liked World 9, so I'd love to play the four bonus worlds, but I seriously can't be bothered beating this thing eight times in a row. So it'll likely stay as is.

I'm glad we got Doki Doki Panic instead of this in the West.

Holds an outrageous amount of filler content (ground pound moons, buyable moons, chest moons...). Lots of boredom and aimless hidden moon searching to reach 100%, a very small percentage of the moons actually come with a worthwhile mission worth playing. This being said, the controls are exceptional, level design is great and storyline is modern and fresh. The missions that are worth playing are also some of the best in the series. It's, however, likely my least favorite 3D Mario game for a home console; I would have expected more substantial content for the game and less repetitive idling and searching.