Maybe I’m being too cynical with this, but I’ve never been more happy to see the credits in a game. They did a great job of fleshing the world out from Breath of the Wild. It truly felt like Hyrule was healing from what happened previously, but once you dug into it, you realized how boring everything was.

Combat was the same, sidequests are just fetch quests, and the story is one of the most forgettable in the series.

I want to love this game, but I also want a life, and I feel like I need to sink more than the 80+ hours to get everything out of it.

This is Counter-Strike, too.

Like the tongue in cheek name of the only achievement in the game implies, this is Counter-Strike. Don't ask for any more out of this game, because there isn't anything else. Plant bombs, rescue hostages, scream at your teammates.

A lot of content was removed that was previously in CSGO and has still not returned, but to me that does not detract from how much fun I still have with this game today. It says a lot about a game (or me) when you can change nothing and still keep me happy.

Sure, I would love to have seen more put out at launch, but this is Valve we're talking about. They have been drip feeding us content for 12 years and I don't think anything is going to change anytime soon.

I would love to see Reserve maps return to the rotation, if only in Casual. As bad as they are as competitive maps they still hold value when it comes to messing around with friends for a few hours.

It's still Counter-Strike though, and that's all I really want at the end of the day.

I had a lot of fun with this one, but I felt it could have been trimmed down.

The game starts out really strong with amazing presentation and fun new mechanics with the vacuum cleaner, but quickly the gameplay became stale. From the time you begin collecting elevator buttons to about the 11 floor the game just falls into a mundane routine of clearing each floor to get to the next one. The challenges are creative, but I just did not find them all that satisfying to complete.

On the later floors the game begins to ramp up the challenge and was the part that I enjoyed the most. If they cut out some of the middle floors this might have made for a more compact experience.

Boss battles are all fun, and only a few suffered from some awkward controls and mechanics that needed a little polishing to work with the physics. The final boss especially has some great payoff.

I should note that I was not able to try to co-op which would no doubt make this a more enjoyable experience.

It's not a short and sweet adventure like the first game, but there is still a lot to be enjoyed with this one.

This particular era of gaming is always intimidating to go back to. Just like how the NES pioneered how 2D games are played today, the late 90s was best known for the birth of 3D gaming. And was it ever ugly.

FPS games were particularly rough. Shooting never felt like it was totally figured out by anyone, and every developer seemed to have a different take of the same problem. For every Goldeneye and DOOM there was countless other titles trying to replicate the magic without success.

While I'm not saying that the gameplay in Half-Life isn't good, but I think Valve made the right decision to focus their efforts on creating a vibrant world that the player could interact and immerse themselves in first. The start of the game demonstrates this perfectly, with Gordon Freeman showing up to work. You can interact with other employees, and watch as people greet you and discuss their day to day. The facility feels lived in, like decades of employees have walked the halls. In many of Valves Source engine titles, you continue to see that immersion on display, so it's impressive to see that occur with their first big title.

This immersion continues to sink you in once the invasion begins. Monsters are running loose through the facility, and it makes for a tense walk back to the elevator when everything starts going down.

Half-Life is creepy, sometimes scary. The entire game is almost devoid of music, so all you really listen to is your footsteps and the horrific sounds of the monsters that endlessly attack you. It provides a stark contrast to what you walked through minutes ago as employees went about their regular tasks. Now you walk by the dead corpses of co-workers, some of them reanimated with head crabs stuck to their faces.

In terms of world building the game gets a 5/5, but unfortunately I don't think the gameplay has held up as well. Movement is too fast, and I had to repeatedly restart sections with precise jumps because I could not grasp where the end of a ledge was while walking. The steps Gordon takes are massive and this makes walking feel more like ice skating.

The sound mixing does not hold up well on modern machines either. Sound effects like footsteps or shooting is turned way to high, while voices from NPCs are barely audible. This seems to be an known issue for years now, which does have some fixes in place through the use of mods.

The shooting is serviceable, but bullets lack impact when hitting an enemy, feeling more like you are firing a laser, rather than a piece of lead. It is probably the one part of the gameplay that has held up the best over time. I never had to question if a shot connected, and the enemies provided enough variety that switching between weapons was enjoyable based on the circumstance. Some sections required save-scumming to get passed, but I will chalk that up to this being first playthrough.

The original Half-Life is something that I would only recommend if you are a diehard, wanting to further appreciate video game history. It shows enough age at this point that newcomers are likely to be turned off by it. But there is still enough here to appreciate what Valve created if you give it time and know the legacy of the company.

I'm likely to return to this at some point. There is enough mods, and Black Mesa, that I am sure I will find a way to truly enjoy this.

Just like that, CSGO is no more. There was no celebration of it's tenure, of the joy and tears that the game brought to millions of players. Instead it went quietly into the night. With servers being taken offline as players finished their matches for unknowingly the last time.

By the evening of September 27, 2023. Counter Strike Global Offensive ceased to exist. It's store page removed from Steam, replaced with Counter Strike 2. Every other Counter Strike game is playable and accessible through community servers, and while CS2 is really just a port of CSGO, it seems disrespectful to completely remove one of Valve's most successful games entirely from its store. We would not be taking about CS2 if CSGO did not succeed.

11 years ago, CSGO was released in a broken, nearly unplayable mess. But fans stuck to the game, waiting patiently with each update for the game to improve. I was there for it all. The infamous Deagle update, Aztec existing, the skin betting scandal, and watching Skadoodle raise that Major trophy. Watching CSGO grow from a niche FPS, to the juggernaut it is now known as was something special to watch and be a part of.

I've grown with this series. Starting in 2011 on Counter Strike: Source, and quickly making the jump to CSGO the following year. I've made some unforgettable friends who have all mostly moved on to other things in life, but those memories will always sit with me. By the time another Counter Strike is released I will likely be in my 40s, and this franchise will have been a part of nearly half my life. By this point, I don't know if there will be another piece of media that will devote as much of my time as CS has.

So to anyone that hopped online, and maybe we shared a game together. Thanks. It's been a great ride.

If you have only been exposed to the last generation of Nintendo and go back to this game, you would probably have a hard time understanding how Luigi's Mansion exists. This game is weird. Nintendo is too clean now to concoct the idea of Luigi searching for his brother in a haunted mansion. But here we are, the launch title of a generation that would become known for Star Fox getting the opportunity to fail twice.

This game oozes charm right off the bat. With E. Gadd as your pseudo guide for the adventure you must traverse a haunted mansion trapping ghosts and turning the lights back on, while hollering for Mario at the top of your lungs. The interactions with the different ghosts and characters throughout are a highlight, especially the Toads. You often stumble upon them in absurd places and after rescuing them they decide to stay put for the rest of the game, giving you the opportunity to save when necessary.
Tank controls are used to control Luigi and at first it feels awkward compared to modern controls, but you get a knack for it quick and are sucking up ghosts like a pro. Once I got the hang of the controls, draining the health of the larger ghosts was sooooo satisfying. The difficulty of capturing the ghosts does not really increase beyond the second area though. Most of the challenge is found in solving the puzzle that will stun the ghosts, and some of them can be a little cryptic. There was a few where I am still not totally sure what I did to get a stun.

You listen to the same song over and over and most times that would be a detractor. But not in Luigi's Mansion. The main theme is a straight up banger and I was whistling it for a week after I finished my playthrough.

Give me more weird Nintendo. Super Mario Wonder seems like it might be that, but there still that hint of Nintendo purity. I want the grungy, weird Nintendo.

At first Pikmin 2 started out like I was getting more of what I wanted from the first game. From the beginning it oozes with charm. You are sent to the Pikmin planet (which is maybe Earth??) and sent to collect treasure to pay off the company debt. Pretty quickly you realize that the majority of this "treasure" is just garbage, with some recognizable brand names popping up, and then you realize that Pikmin are running around cleaning up OUR garbage and selling it for cold hard cash. Not sure what commentary is being said here, but the whole premise is hilarious.

Stripping the time limit away felt like such a relief as I did not have the stress of trying to see everything while also completing my ship as quickly as possible in the first game. The problem now is that it feels like there is less to explore than before.

I wound up paying off the debt, but I retired my playthrough before I was able to rescue Louie, so perhaps there are more areas that I am unaware of. I just could not convince myself to explore another cave, and I ran out of things to do on the handful of overworlds that I could travel too.

At first, they feel like a rewarding addition to the game. Underground areas with some new Pikmin species to collect as well. The problem is that the puzzles are always restricted to what can be done in a small area, and usually it means managing Pikmin around deadly traps and enemies in a confined space.

The cave levels are setup so that you work through a series of obstacles that must be dismantled one at a time. Often it requires one Pikmin species due to their immunity to the obstacle, whether it is fire, electricity, water, or poison. So, you separate your Pikmin and grab that one group and tackle the obstacle/enemy. Once that is cleared, you bring the rest of the group forward and then repeat the whole process at the next obstacle. With the tight corridors of the caves and the clunkiness of the whistle, it makes trying to call only a single species of Pikmin a chore, and often I had to separate my group again due to a handful of other Pikmin that I did not want to include being called by accident. As you progress to the later caves in the game the saturation of enemies on each floor adds to the chaos, and ultimately my frustration as there is no quick way to manage your Pikmin.

Having Louie/The President as a second character to control helps, but it falls flat because you cannot assign Pikmin to certain characters so that they will not be recalled by the other character. Trying to use two groups of Pikmin on one obstacle or enemy often leads to both groups getting mixed up and defeats the whole purpose of using two characters in the first place. It's really only helpful on the overworld where there are tasks spread further apart and you do not run into the risk of recalling the wrong group by mistake.

The caves do work when spread out, and they do feel satisfying to clear at the end, but having four on each overworld is exhausting, and it's a little disappointing when at the end of the road you find yet another one. Adding a few extra areas and spreading the caves out across them would have gone a long way to help break up the gameplay.

I might come back to this at some point to find all the treasure and ultimately save Louie, (poor guy). For now, I am burned out with Pikmin management. My hope was to catch up on all the Pikmin games leading up to Pikmin 4, but that might take longer than expected.

I bought this on sale, completely fueled by thirst for nostalgia. Growing up this was always a game that was out of reach for me, only playing it for half an hour at a time when at a friend's house. Each time I picked it up it was exciting enough to pique my curiosity after all the years.

Growing up in the early 2000s, Episode 1 is in engrained in my brain. From the lego sets, to the random plates and cups, it was one of the first mass media events I remember as a child, and it has helped cement the movie as one of my favourites. To say it has flaws is being generous, but I still get that feeling of being a kid whenever I turn it on.

Unfortunately, this game does not seem to have the same nostalgia blinders that the film gets the courtesy of receiving. The tracks are too long, and you are either blazing past every opponent, or at the back of the pack with no hope of regaining your places. The difficulty starts off being painfully easy and combined with the length of each race it's a snore. Some tracks are nine minutes long. Paying attention is the greater challenge than actually completing the race.

After you complete the first set of tracks the difficulty does a 180 and any mistake made in a race is met with the punishment of needing to restart. You are able to upgrade your pod, but I found this barely makes a difference because the performance of your pod is not the problem, it's the unfair NPCs and rubber banding. Some courses have decent challenge on their own and the driving feels good, but between the length of some tracks and the NPCs it made the experience feel incredibly frustrating or boring.

The only problem now is that I have zero G racing itch. Maybe it's time to go back to F-Zero X or give Wipeout a try.

I think this game has sat on my Steam Wishlist since 2011. Despite the high praise I just could never pull the trigger on actually purchasing it. Anyways, that changed when I heard that it might be delisted from digital stores.. which did not seem to happen in the end.

So what do I think after all this time? Meh. When Mirror's Edge is good, it's really good. Getting into a platforming flow feels so satisfying, but more often than not my rhythm would get interrupted by an ill placed wall or running into an enemy. It is similar to the feeling you get when halted in Sonic the Hedgehog.

The move set given to the player only seems to work when you are outside in an open area. There is enough room for error during your jumps that what you are doing feels good, and if you make a mistake it will be from a miscalculation rather than poor level design.

The interior areas on the other hand are claustrophobic and slow. You either have to fend off enemies, or do platforming sections that break up the enemy waves. The combat does not feel fully fleshed out and you do this awkward dance of running around until you can find one enemy, mash the attack button and then grab his weapon and mow everyone down. The interior platforming is often on ledges so small that I constantly fell down by accident and had to restart the area. Because you are jumping across a maze of tubes and vents inside the objective is so vague that I had to use a guide a number of times. These sections are just a huge letdown, and often times they are how missions end so it makes wanting to start the next chapter a slog.

If the game was spent mostly in the outside sections it would have been a fun parkour playground, but the interior areas just drag it down. Thankful it's very short, so for $5 it is still worth checking out.

When I think of peak civilization, I think of my Animal Crossing town on the Gamecube. For 18 years that little community has been living inside my memory card. Whether I am there or not, Tom Nooks shop opens at 8 AM sharp every day, and closes at 10PM. My homeboy Teddy is still wearing a custom Yoshi shirt that my sister made twenty years ago, and other villagers come and go as they please. Sometimes they write me a farewell, sometimes they don't. It runs like clockwork, with festivals happening precisely on the day they are scheduled, never being cancelled for poor weather.

"Winnipeg", the very unoriginal name of my town, is a place that holds a special place in my heart. When I visit, approximately once a year, there are no tasks to complete. I simply walk around, greeting the neighbors, and maybe stopping at the river to do some fishing. It's nice and quiet, which is a nice break from a life with growing responsibilities.

The restrictions of the first game are what make it stick out amongst it's more robust sequels. There is no terraforming or constructions projects that eat away at your time. The primary task is to pay off your debts for all the upgrades that have been made to your house. Having completed that years ago, all I have left is to go fishing, collect bugs, and decorate my house with random furniture that I acquire.

In Animal Crossing, you are nobody. The village will keep functioning without you, and when you return there is no urgency to catch up on the going-ons. Loading up my file now feels like when I return to places that were key to my childhood. The lake I spent my summers at, my elementary school, or the family farm. It's places I don't visit enough, and continue to exist without me, but I get that child-like wonder when I return to them. It gives me a break from the busyness of a job or managing my expenses. When you are in Animal Crossing you are there to rest and giving up the reigns of responsibility to someone else.

Newer entries have never caught my attention because the concept has strayed away from what I enjoyed so much about the first game. Too much importance is placed on yourself and it's because of this that I never feel like I can chill out like I did with the first game. The charm of talking to your neighbours wears off really quickly too. It took a lot more effort to truly befriend someone in the first game so when you did get a villager sending you something in the mail, or just giving you a gift out of the blue it felt more genuine.

When a new entry in the series gets inevitable released, I probably won't bother with it. I know it's not going to replicate the child-like wonder of the past, and I would rather continue the story of my current town that has been growing strong for nearly two decades. It won't be often that I load up the game, but when I do, I am immediately transported back to the TV room in my parents' basement. Patiently waiting for Tom Nook's store to open so I could sell all the fruit I stole from my sister's trees.

I seemed to skip the big open world games of the Xbox 360 / Xbox One era. Part of that being I was late to the party on the 360 generation and stuck to Halo and Gears of War. The other reason being I was firmly rooted in spending all my free time in Counter Strike, with the slim chance of me ever getting any good.

Now that I am older and have disposable income, I thought I would give Assassin's Creed a try. I know the history of the franchise and the burnout that began to occur with each new entry, but I felt burnout on the first game that I played.

AC4 is a "good game" on paper, but it felt too bloated for my taste. The world is rich with collectibles, weapons upgrades, and missions, but I could never get immersed in the world. Everything that I was collecting or side quests that I was completing felt like it was simply there to distract me from the lack of depth of the game overall.

The locations are gorgeous and it takes me back to days playing Wind Waker, sailing across the open seas to the next sunny island. I wanted to enjoy this world, to bring back the days of running around Outset Island taking in the joy and charm. But this is a game about grungy pirates, so maybe that joy was never meant to be felt here.

The missions got repetitive over time, following the same waypoint until you get to an open area with enemies you have to quietly take out. Combat for the most part is fun and I enjoyed the stealth mechanics, but combat scenarios also got repetitive with each area consisting of bushes you dart in and out of to avoid detection while you quietly kill everyone off.

Ship combat, for as exciting it felt at first, began to drag just as much as the rest of the game. Positioning and navigating your vessel around the enemies is slow and cumbersome. Once you are locked on to an enemy it is a matter of watching your cool downs, and hoping he isn't stronger than you. Boarding another ship is fun, but getting to that point isn't worth it and I often would avoid encounters all together by the end of my play through.

I've played open world games since the peak of Assassin's Creed, and maybe that is to my detriment of trying to enjoy this game. This franchise along with the Far Cry's and GTA's of the late 2000s laid the ground work for everything I've enjoyed today.

What a difference using a preferred control scheme makes with this game. I started playing on Xbox Game Pass with a controller and just could not get into it. I was apprehensive going into most encounters because I did not feel like I had full control of movement with a controller. After a few missions I set it aside.

I only picked it up again after I made some upgrades to my PC, and what a difference it made. I was able to do what I wanted to do with the controls, and it made every encounter much more fun. The combat is a joy to master with enemy waves becoming overwhelming, only to have you carve your way out.

The story worked, if only to string you along each mission, and the little bits of lore dropped in made the character bios actually interesting to read for once.