I think it's so funny how before the Master Sword, the developers made sure to ease the player into 3D gaming as much as possible. Constant hints, hand-holding as much as possible...

And then halfway through they said MAN, FUCK THEM KIDS BRO and little 8 year old Timmy on the N64 has to suffer through actual nightmare fuel with NO direction.

I love it.

HOT TAKE OF THE CENTURY - METROID PRIME 2 IS JUST AS GOOD AS THE FIRST ONE.

Now granted - this is assuming some stuff about the way you're playing. There's three pretty massive issues that can stop plenty of people from enjoying this one.

1) AWFUL save placement in Agon Wastes - I just used save states during that part, but if you don't use them this is probably so much more painful.
2) Dark World draining your health - Don't wait until your health is all the way back up!! There's health pickups everywhere!! Don't be a coward!!
3) Both starting areas are pretty gray - If you can't have me at my Temple Grounds, you don't deserve me at my Sanctuary Fortress. 😙

But aside from the above? My GOD I loved this game. There's so many little improvements from the first.

Big open rooms that make the planet feel less claustrophobic, while still keeping things tight and tense when the devs want to mix things up. Dramatically more unique area theming, meaning you get way more than just the "ice area" or "lava area" of Prime 1. World design that uses ESPECIALLY creative vertical and interconnected maps compared to the "hallway" approach of the first game. Different beams that actually require some on-the-fly strategy to mess with. World progression that's convenient to navigate AND avoids having the solution be a room you forgot about on the opposite side of the planet (most of the time). Tons more focus on kinetic movement! Making Samus feel so much more powerful at the end compared to the start!! The Dark World genuinely making you feel powerless and spooked!! Actually fun bosses!!! (most of the time).

Even the ability to use mouse and keyboard on PrimeHack was such an improvement for my overall immersion...I wish I could use this control scheme for the first game's remaster. It's SO good.

I think there's some totally fair points against Echoes, like the Dark World's areas totally blending together, dimension hopping being fairly underbaked, the love-it-or-hate-it implementation of Zelda elements, and some pretty tanky enemies here and there. I also can't ignore the fact that emulation and some minor cheats - like automatically skipping the world transition cutscenes - definitely impacted my time with it, and in a more "vanilla" play-through I probably would be much more annoyed.

But even with those in mind...I still think Echoes deserves way more love. It's easily the most underrated entry in the Metroid series, and with some minor fixes, it's JUST as fun as the first Prime entry. IMAGINE what this game could look like with an official remaster!!

I'm eating SO good as a new-ish Metroid fan wowwww.

on this game's cover the batmobile is basically the same size as batman. very accurate job from the cover artists!! because that awful car not only eats up so much of your runtime but actively brings down everything else to make room for it too.

about 75% through the main story gotham changes dramatically and forces you to use the car for like an hour. and i had to uninstall it at that point because I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE MAN.

but nine years later it's a PERFECT game for game pass. it's so cool to look at and so fun to play! until it keeps on going and going and you miss the interior tight designs of arkham & city...and a properly paced story...and gameplay that wasn't TANK STEALTH OVER HERE OH MY GODDDDD.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S, SAMUS

I'm 100% convinced everyone who considers this one of the best games of all times forgot to play the Phazon Mines. THOSE WERE TERRIBLE. OH, and the bosses too.

But otherwise a very great game :). I honestly can't believe I waited from freshman year of high school to play this!...but 6 & 1/2 years later it still was a banger so oh well

I am NOT kidding in the slightest when I argue that this is the most creative game I've EVER played in my life. It starts out as a little Zelda Dark Souls thing, but you don't know how to play? It just drops you in? What? And you can't understand the language? huh?? And then slowly but surely, Tunic reveals its hand to you, leading you inch by inch deeper into its secrets.

Every level and dungeon is so intricately designed. THE GAME MANUAL that you slowly find page-by-page is SOOO MIND-BLOWINGLY COOL. The fact that the developers created an ENTIRE FICTIONAL LANGUAGE just to recreate the feeling of playing NES Zelda as a child and not knowing how to read is INSANE. Slowly learning about features or mechanics that have been available the entire time genuinely made me FLIP OUT AT THE SCREEN.

And that's not even mentioning the crazy difficult but immensely satisfying bosses, the mind-boggling meta endgame puzzles, the LUDICROUS puzzles and hints and secrets that the community took years to track down, the GORGEOUS soundtrack I'm going to constantly be playing on loop, the (i am being fully serious right now) disturbing and shocking story revelations, the WILD speedrunning skips, or how even things like the CAMERA PERSPECTIVE get turned into a puzzle. THE CAMERA. THE. CAMERA.

I adore Zelda, but this game single-handedly goes out of its way to push more creative boundaries than Zelda has done in its ENTIRE existence. The only thing holding it back for me are a few stupidly hard puzzles and basically everything in the "true ending" path being obtuse as hell...I felt so guilty using a guide for some of that. BUT DESPITE THAT! It's so endlessly imaginative and EXACTLY the kind of thing I want developers to make. I'm probably gonna be thinking about this title for the rest of my life! And I played this for free?? FOR FREE? ON GAME PASS???

PLEASE PLAY THIS GAME. IT'S SO GOOD. I AM NOT THE SAME PERSON I WAS BEFORE TUNIC.

It's REALLY cool to get some of the best courses from GBA, DS, and Wii back in the game! And the original courses are pretty sweet too! But that's around half of the package and you can't tell me you're gonna be picking shit like Tokyo Blur by choice 💀

I would be much more generous about these but ehhhhh the way cheaper visuals AND course downgrades at work here means it's always a "...but..." part you gotta be aware of. Really nice for variety alone, but when I'm intentionally skipping half of the DLC courses at all times can you really call it good?

Plus they didn't even include DS Airship Fortress or Wii Toad's Factory...wtf...

Uncharted's been in a weird place for a while. They're fun games and an easy showcase of the Playstation 3's power for Sony, but calling these titles "art" was always a little bit silly. They're fun adventure games with tons of spectacle and that's totally fine! But after Naughty Dog put out The Last of Us, a landmark title that's become one of the most respected games EVER MADE partially due to its dark, emotional core, how could Nathan Drake survive with the prestige the studio earned?

The answer, it seems, was to create EASILY the best plot in the series. Uncharted 4 won't win any Oscars but its grounded, emotional story about two brothers, obsession, and betrayal elevates it so much further than the bang bang shooty type stories of the previous games. The actors' performances, the animations, the writing....it's all SO GOOD. So many games have incredibly lifeless or inhuman or robotic characters but Naughty Dog hits it out of the ballpark EVERY TIME MAN.

And the graphics?? This game is SEVEN YEARS OLD but i'm still over here taking screenshots every five minutes!! It's so smooth and so pretty! (Granted I played the PS5 remaster so that might account for it but still). Say what you will about "photorealism bad blah blah blah" IDC THIS GAME LOOKS INSANEEEE!! And it feels so smooth to play too! The climbing, the action, the shooting. The shear amount of location and gameplay variety is out of this world, I don't even want to think about how many man-hours this took to build. And how much crunch, because, ew. Yay.

Really my only major critique is I wish a lot of the gameplay had more...substance? I was pretty tired of the gunplay by the end, and I wish its stealth and combat options were deeper. But even if Uncharted doesn't have the best combat, or the best climbing, or the best stealth, or the best puzzles, it's its ability to pace everything together into one full-steam-ahead blast of an adventure that helps it stick the landing.

Triple-A video games might be in a bad situation with variety, visual styles, development time, and actually being fun these days. But Uncharted 4 is proof that sometimes, the big expensive games can be worth keeping around too.