This review contains spoilers

Right after the chilling conclusion of Onikakushi - a visual novel which I loved going through - the complete reset of Watanagashi was utterly jarring. Resetting the time back to Keiichi's first forays into Hinamizawa completely baffled me at first. I started going through the more slice-of-life sections - club activities, walks home with Rena, the works. Everything seemed just as it was, until the introduction of the mysterious twin sister, Shion Sonozaki.

I love the way Shion is played for the first few chapters after her introduction. Both Keiichi and the player take her as some scheme made up by Mion to express herself as a woman to a greater extent. This is supplemented by past interactions with both Rena and Mion; even referring to herself as "[this] old man" on various occasions. Her femininity seems caged up if existent at all and even when Shion is revealed to be a seperate person from Mion later on, the seed of Mion's crisis have already been planted in your head and are not easily torn out for the remainder of the game.

This is perhaps the first thing that jumps out at me about Watanagashi, the cause-and-effect of the plot is felt far more strongly here than Onikakushi. Both are high-quality, slow-burning horror experiences that slowly inundate you in their world, but Watanagashi feels less like a sequence of events than the climax of hundreds of years of slowly boiling societal conflict, all concentrated onto the shoulders of one school-age girl. Even the most despicable villains in the game manage to make you feel for them - though Oyashiro's curse is definitely a plausible explanation which manages to fill in some narrative gaps, much more emphasis is placed in the scarier sections on how characters interact and intersect, whereas this was more largely relegated to the slice-of-life segments in Onikakushi. I like how the lines are drawn differently as well; in Onikakushi it's Keiichi against the world for the most part - as everyone who can leave him does until he is forced to act drastically as he is backed into a corner. Mion is the victim of this coalescing tragedy in Watanagashi - and as such Keiichi ends up with a lot more allies; this both results in the game not repeating ideas that Onikakushi expresses and results in the moments of character interaction feeling like more emotionally resonant interactions that contrast with the horror segments rather than another medium to express Keiichi's psychological breakdown.

On a wider thematic level, Watanagashi builds on Onikakushi excellently as well. The overarching plot theme; the mystery of whether Oyashiro's curse is a result of the supernatural or the man-made is explored deeper here to great effect. In the supernatural department, the mythology of Hinamizawa, its people, customs and families are built upon excellently and explain the town's relationship with its mythos excellently. And if you lean towards the man-made theory - believing the curse to merely be a symbol of familial/societal traumas as they build through generations - the same history gives you glimpses of the spite Hinamizawa's citizens have had to deal with; the way the prominent members of the community clawed their way to the top and how desperate its figureheads are to avoid the social image of the savage and sub-human Hinamizawa citizen of old.

In short, Onikakushi is an amazing horror visual novel - if it weren't, I wouldn't play the second part - but Watanagashi manages to keep the snowballing horror while introducing a depth of character the first game laid the foundation for but didn't quite deliver upon.

I mostly admire this game for the sheer excitement that emanated from this game's release. If you're reading this you almost definitely remember the hype behind it. I never saw it in reality as I live in a pretty small community, but seeing bigger cities bustling with people making friendships over the game was seriously exciting - alongside the concept of "Pokémon in real life" being both novel and completely obvious.

The game in of itself for the most part is just "neat", after the novelty of catching all the Pokémon common in your area wears off, it can at times become a chore but for the most part I enjoy launching this every once in a blue moon; mostly when I play it with my friends who are a lot more into it than I am. Kind of the perfect mobile game in that respect, nice to check into every now and again.

Definitely my pick for the worst Pokémon game. I remember being very displeased about the introduction of 3D graphics. Alongside that I just find it to be the slowest and least entertaining of the franchise.

Definitely my pick for the best game in the franchise. Feels the most ambitious, has the most quality artwork of any 2D Pokémon game. It doesn't quite have the theatricism of Black/White but that's not really what you play a Pokémon game for. Alongside this, it has the most expansive and difficult post-game content of any game in the franchise. The Pokéwalker was a cool concept too, and I'm a bit bummed out that there wouldn't be much like it before or after HG/SS. I played Generations III-VII as a kid, and I'd say without a doubt that this is both the most magical one through that childish glance, and the one that holds up the strongest today.

Definitely the worst game I've ever played. Controls like shit, doesn't feel good to play, the graphics are middling at best, the mechanics themselves are flawed... I could go on really. Sorry for anything I might have said about Brawlhalla.

Being the only avenue to rating Google Earth on Backloggd - and a valuable VR experience in of itself - Google Earth VR is the crown jewel of Google Earth itself and one of the mechanical, symbolic and aesthetic touchstones of internet culture, as well as human technological achievement.

The gameplay itself it simple, you merely explore a digital photomontage of the Earth. It sounds boring on a glance - and to some it might be boring - but to me it is the ultimate gameplay in a way. As someone who tends to value mechanical richness and discovery in games this is a great example of that. Though it takes most of its appeal from being the Earth, exploring the Earth is still gratifying. Everything you see is part of the divine tapestry of our world. Every field, every tree and every mesa every rock and every mountain has been formed by winds and shifting plates for billions of years and every city and town nests a rich cultural heritage entirely its own. You could look around for hours at every brick of every building, the people walking about - the minutae of their lives and the sweat they all pour into the cultural, economical, etc. heritages of their communities frozen in this one moment forever. Ironically, it's the kind of game that makes you want to stop playing it out of sheer reverence for the world. If you think about it too deeply it makes you want to run out of the house, kiss the grass in your yard, scream at the sky and the moon and the stars and feel the sheer cold wind on your face and hair. It makes you want to feel the joys and pain of everyday life, as Google Earth submerges you into them.

Around the time I began to enter this phase I began to become fascinated with pain, with viscera. I haven't gotten to BME Pain Olympics levels or anything like that, but I find a unique comfort and return to primal instincts when I come across pain in my life. Pain and Google Earth are the same in this way, both humbling experiences that may seem unpleasant on their surface but can rather serve to connect us with who we were, and who we all are.

I could probably drool about the mere concept of this game forever, but for your sake and mine I won't because the construction of this game is equally insane as well. Technically it may not marvel - accounting to not a whole lot more than a well-positioned photo montage, the fact that we have enough photos of the Earth to perform an undertaking like this is wild. So many places, so many angles that people may never even look at. Do you ever see anyone in New York City look up at the skyline from below?

Maybe I'm looking into this too much, but Google Earth feels unique to me. The appeal of Google Maps I can see, but Google Earth feels born of passion alone, from end to end. A quest to photograph the Earth and keep it in our digital archives. And there is something beautiful about that. Something beautiful about how we can all look at it from the comfort of our couches. It's a small world, I suppose.

Has no right to be good in any right, but G-Force is a surprisingly competent and entertaining fusion of action and stealth elements

The art style for some parts of the game are god-awful at points but overall the city management is a good subsitute for the passive upgrade systems in Bloons TD5 and the bite-sized maps mesh perfectly onto the game's general formula.

For the most part this is the unloved middle child of the series. The graphics are ugly a lot of the time, and in particular the decision to temporarily reverse back to one upgrade path is downright bizarre. It kind of exists in the same niche as the original where it's unremarkable on its own but its position as a historical piece is indisputable. The more "gritty" military-influenced aesthetic would be vital for the series moving forward and the game introduced a lot of new towers with unique and satisfying properties - in particular the enhanced Monkey Village (formerly Beacon Tower) and Banana Farm (and to a lesser extent the new microtransactional upgrades) introduce a sense of marginal cross-game upgrades that give the future entries in the series the ability to be as sprawling in content as they are.

As everyone has said on the reviews page and I will say as well, Bloons TD3 is the first entry in the series to really strike gold. The towers were expanded upon, the maps begin to take on far more unique appearances from each other, and the game begins to get more of a strategic edge to it.

In some ways a marginal improvement from the first, in other respects it lags behind. There are new mechanics - in particular non-tower objects you can place on the map would prove important for the future of the series. But, replaying this on the Ninja Kiwi Archive, it runs notably worse than BTD1, almost to the extent that I prefer 1 over 2; and is overall a slower experience than 1.

The negative rating is so obviously because the sequels (mostly) improve on every aspect of this game. It's a decent flash game, but it just feels like the bones without any meat that would be added on in the future.

Solid game. The puzzles are a bit obtuse at times but they're all within your grasp. The cheat codes add a surprising amount of replay value too, I've probably beat this game over 10 times with friends and alone and had a blast every time.