My family traveled a lot for work. Flying from state to state, resting in a variety of hotel rooms. Back in the early 00s, some hotel rooms came with game systems. For $10 an hour, you could play from a short selection of N64 or Gamecube games. In the 2010s, these would be replaced with PS3s and you would have to rent from a nearby Redboxes. And by that point, my brother had his Xbox he'd lug across the country and I had my DS. But those 00s were a very specific era for us in hotel gaming. My brother often got frustrated with wasting any precious second because there was such a hard financial limit to how far we could play. I was well aware that my parents were never going to approve anything past the $20 mark. But I couldn't help but dither around in these worlds. The first two hours of Paper Mario 64 and TTYD are permanently etched into my mind. I remember every corner, every NPC conversation, every polygonal line and invisible wall. Its impossible for me to be objective when it comes to Paper Mario.

Which is partly why this game hit such a strange euphoria for me.

TTYD64 primarily involves adding TTYD mechanics into 64. That's already a great sales pitch. The gameplay flows smoother and there's more intent to unravel in how you approach the game. Accounting for partner health and additional badges adds such an important spice to the game's feel. I feel like I'm planning more than before and making considerations on top of that.

But elDexter and his modding team go above and beyond. To unlock the new badges or upgrades, they aren't content to simply give those skills to you. Instead, new areas are carefully crafted into this game's world. And suddenly, my perfect memory of this game runs up against entire new ideas. A hole in the ground that didn't exist before, a crack in the wall, a new path in the forest, a back alley in the shopping district. Filled with puzzles or characters or even recreated TTYD level screens, there's so much elaborate care in this game. Its not front-loaded or back-loaded, its carefully measured out across the game's entire length.

The game has other important features, things that ease the game's pace. Difficulty modes, cutscene skipping, randomizers, challenge modes, New Game +. All carefully built to provide more to a game people love. To a game I love. You can truly feel how deeply the team cared about this game and wanted to provide every bit of polish possible. Just like me, they could play this game a million times and still find joy in discovering something new.

I can't be objective about anything Paper Mario. Its carved into my soul. Seeing other people who feel the same way leaves a special mark in my heart. It doesn't matter if this mod rules or if it sucks (hint: it rules). That feeling of pure creative joy is gonna stick with me for a long time. Worth the price of admission for that.

I’ve started to realize that roguelikes scratch a major itch in my brain in a real dangerous way. The satisfaction of seeing yourself progress, feeling yourself improve run after run… The core gameplay loop hits a specific nerve in my body that makes me hyperfixate on the game for hours and hours on end. Meanwhile, Paper Mario holds a special place in my heart. It's my favorite franchise, bar none. The joy, the world, the humor, and the masterful rpg mechanics all bundle together into a package resting perfectly in my heart.

So this game broke me under its knee. I was under its thrall for an alarming number of hours. I only managed to force myself to step back when various due dates began piling up. This is a mod that was tailor made to wreck my brain into pieces so I’m obviously going to be biased going in. But with that in mind, the craft going into this fan game is truly incredible.

Giving Paper Mario 64 a Pit of 100 Trials is a solid gimmick on its own. The Pit in TTYD works mainly because the gameplay is so fun, you WANT to play through 100 levels of challenges. Yet Black Pit goes beyond just that central idea and crafts an entirely new game. It transforms into a well-crafted roguelike that constantly rewards your efforts. Classic Pit mode runs exactly as the original Pit. Every ten floors, you’ll find a badge and unlock a partner. Using coins, you can upgrade Mario and your squad to get more powerful. Go deeper, unlock more badges and partners, get stronger, etc.

But then there’s Roguelike Pit mode. This goes ever harder into the roguelike Paper Mario concept by stripping you down to your bare essentials each run. Partners and badges and upgrades are all randomly generated on the floors, letting you slowly build up your team and discover how far you can go before you run out of items and health. It's furiously addicting but also rewarding. Any coins you gain in the Rogue Pit will be sent to your bank, allowing you to buy upgrades for the main Classic Pit mode.

On top of THAT is the Maze. A randomly generated maze full of traps and poison air, slowly suffocating you as you try to navigate its twisting corridors to find star pieces. Star pieces unlock chests which contain your Health and Flower Power upgrades. It's the only way to upgrade those stats for your main Classic Pit run. It's my least favorite part of the mod, but it's different secrets and upgrade tree opens up another different gameplay style to work from.

And then on top of THAT, is the achievements. Doing different achievements fills up your star points/(exp in Paper Mario proper). In Black Pit, those Star Points can be used to unlock your special moves, which are allowed in both Classic and Rogue Pit. Those special moves make it easier to complete achievements like “Beat the Pit without items” or “Beat the Pit with minimum badges” and so on. Which then gives you more Star Points to get more special moves and so on and so forth.

And then after beating the Classic Pit, a whole NEW Pit opens up, leading up to the game’s final climactic battle. Beating the game then unlocks new Very Hard modes for the other pits. I haven't even touched that yet, but this is a game I'm gonna be spending a lot of time earning 100% completion on.

The whole game builds on itself, over and over, adding new swerves and gimmicks and modes to craft an entirely new, incredible game. I’ve been interested in finally trying out game hacks and mods for a while, but this was so instantly rewarding in so many ways. It completely changed how I think of a series I already adore and helped me find a new way to love it in ways I couldn’t foresee. It made me stop and think harder about how these games are designed and what it takes to build a satisfying system. How later games tried to reinvent the series and just couldn’t match the perfect crunch of the original Paper Mario system. A perfect labor of love, with surprising swerves and delights that only a dedicated fan could have crafted.

yakuza 3 is kind of sad to me, a good game held back by glaring issues. mine is still one of the strongest foils to kiryu and still has the coolest boss intro and battle theme in the series and most scenes with him are incredible, and i really like the story in terms of kiryu and the orphanage and all of that, but the combat is pretty weak and the actual conspiracy that drives the plot is by far the weakest in the series and it's hard to reconcile with that when the behind the scenes scheming and what not that drives the plot is too uninteresting to do that very well. equally integral to and great for kiryu's story and progression as it is uninteresting and not really worth revisiting in my opinion

The day is April 1st, 2024. April Fools' Day! What are some silly pranks I can play on people on such a momentous occasion as this?
I've got a good one! I'll finally play the sequel to that game I hate, and see if it's actually any good.

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I've made it clear enough how much I hate Breath of the Wild, how much it quite literally pains me to play it. Obviously, I wouldn't be looking forward to Tears of the Kingdom either. Especially with just how much they tried to hype it up, like good lord this shit ended at least four Nintendo Directs. Despite all that, I decided to make a fool of myself today and give it a try, thanks to my brother being a BOTW fan in my stead, and purchasing this game back when it released. Be surprised when you hear this: I still don't like it.

I went into TOTK with no intentions of ever finishing it, and certainly no intentions of putting too much time into it. I gave it two hours, finished two shrines, and fucked around with whatever new mechanics they gave me. Shockingly though, I can at the very least admit that I didn't hate the new ideas. I enjoyed fusing items together a decent amount. It's definitely more Zelda than I felt with its prequel.

Unfortunately, there's still the entire rest of the game. The large, open world that has me running in circles for lord knows how long because I can't figure out a way to reach that spot I pinpointed on my map. The open world that I will be begrudgingly slogging through because my stamina doesn't allow me to speed up for any longer than three seconds. The very same open world that ends up giving me a headache if I spend too long in it. I didn't like it then, and I still don't like it now, fun new gimmicks or otherwise.

But hey, that's more than I could say for Breath of the Wild. Given that I had even the slightest amount of fun ever, I can still call it better than the first. It even took a little longer to give me a headache this time around. Maybe next time we can get an actual Zelda game.

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why did i do this?

more like Queen Peach i tell you hwat

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As stated in my last review on Super Princess Peach, I was very excited for Showtime. Like, way more excited than I ever thought I would be. Just off of the first couple trailers, I was enamored by the charm and promise that was being presented, what would essentially be a full game's worth of watching Peach undergo magical girl transformations and exploring different set pieces with her new abilities. I was in it for the style, and nothing else. As time went on (and as Nintendo kept spoiling all of the fucking costumes on their Twitter...), in an unusual turn of events, my excitement only grew. The demo drops, I play it, and I'm locked in, pre-order and all. I got what I came for, and I enjoyed every second of it.

almost every second of it.

Obviously, the costumes are all fantastic. It is such a breath of fresh air seeing such a major character for the series in all these different outfits, especially since Peach doesn't usually get to do much in the first place. Of course she has all of her spin-off designs, but Showtime does so much more with everything, experimenting with all sorts of aesthetics and colors, not one of them failing to impress. That really was all I was expecting for this game, so to move on to the actual gameplay...

It's fine enough? Peach doesn't get much of a moveset, the game only ever utilizes a total of three buttons, and I think they did fairly well with such limited controls. Not every gimmick is a winner (lord knows I never want to play another patissiere level again), but I thoroughly enjoyed what they came up with, the big stars being the detective, mermaid, and ice skater plays. (sorry, ice world bias.)
I have to admit, though, and it never really makes itself known upon first playthrough, but holy hell is this game slow. Again, it's never a problem as long as you can finish up everything you need to in one go, collecting all the Sparkle Stones and Ribbons, but, say you miss one of those collectibles, either by simply not exploring enough or failing a certain task; in order to go back and try for it again, you have to do everything from start to finish a second time. Your newly made progress won't be saved after exiting the stage like in the previous Peach game, so instead you'll have to repeat the whole stage, and by then, you'll notice that most of your time in each level will be spent completely motionless as some dialogue fades in and out of view. You aren't given the option to skip any of it, either. Text is placed on screen by itself, accompanied by animations that you have to wait for the end of before you are allowed to start moving again. As I said, not a big deal on the first playthrough, but it gets excruciating having to see it any more times than once. god forbid you spend 30 damn minutes on the second patissiere level like i did

I see where everyone else is coming from. Yes, Princess Peach: Showtime! can feel incredibly easy, handhold-y, linear, whatever else you might have heard. It is not complex in the slightest, but that's not what I was looking forward to. I was looking forward to the cute costumes and the fun worlds to look at, with the added bonus of some new personality for the princess herself. With such little expectations, of course I was going to have at least a little fun. Not the "game of the year" I was maybe (somewhat ironically) psyching myself up for, but I'd say it's considerably better than everyone else is giving it credit for. Again, though, that could just be my low standards, made even lower after recently finishing a much worse Peach oriented game.

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peach's next smash moveset could be killer if you think about it now holy shit

March 22nd, 2024, marks the release day of Princess Peach Showtime, a game that I have been looking forward to since its reveal, and even more so after playing the demo recently and being absolutely enamored by its sense of creativity and whimsy. I figured, hey, if I'm looking forward to this Peach game so much, I should give the first one a try as well! I sincerely doubt they'll be at all related to each other, but its fun to get the full Princess Peach experience regardless. Except this one wasn't very fun, actually.

Super Princess Peach is, 90% of the time, a mindless walk through a quick level grabbing whatever collectibles you need or may come across. The other 10% is a frustrating mess of a labyrinth where you will be wandering the area multiple times over in hopes of finding the weird little happenstance you need to pull of to find a Toad, or having a good old trial & error fest in a room that is exclusively pipes that only exist to drag you back to the beginning of the room. One of them takes you to the end of the level, have fun guessing.

The game doesn't do much to make these levels feel special, either. Peach's entire gimmick is her four emotions (stellar concept really), or three, given that one of them does nothing but heal Peach, in a game where dying is not only extremely difficult, but goes practically unpunished on the off chance it does happen.
The three emotions that actually are utilized are never for any more than a couple purposes. Being happy makes her spin windmills or blow away large clouds, maybe float at a snail's pace if you don't feel like platforming; being sad makes her run faster and grow plants; being angry makes her burn bridges and light torches, up until the end of the game where they just do that for you anyway. Very rarely will a new opportunity arise for one of Peach's abilities, but chances are you won't be seeing it again after a couple more levels.
Making it to the end of each world will reward you with a boss fight that follows a quick and easy touch screen minigame. Every boss in the game has one weakness that you will be told about just before fighting them, and they will hardly change anything up the whole time. Pick their favorite feeling and hit them five times with it, win game. Hell, you don't actually need to use any of the emotions for the final boss of the game except for one very brief instance of Rage just before the final hit.

The story is nothing I'm crazy for, either. I didn't care for Perry, and I guess Nintendo didn't either. Bowser and the gang find a Vibe Scepter (good one) that makes everyone very emotional, giving them similar abilities to Peach herself. This doesn't matter, SPP is more focused on giving you quick glimpses into the talking parasol's past at the end of each world, something something evil magic something something old man. It's your job to help reunite them. Or don't. You won't.

I was content on giving this game maybe a low 6/10 if it weren't for that final world. Genuinely appalling decisions made there.
Oh well, I don't have to play it anymore. Still looking forward to my Game of the Year tomorrow. Stay tuned for that one.

The game begins by dropping your car at the top of an active volcano. I obviously tried to drive the car straight into the lava, but the game FADES TO BLACK BEFORE YOU REACH THE HOT MOLTEN GOODNESS. What is the point of all the realistic graphics if I can't even melt my car???

A little while later, while driving through a cloud of kicked up dust, the commentator shouted "WOOOO RIGHT INTO THE EYE OF THE STORM!!" Gamers, I furrowed my brow so hard at him. It was a dust cloud! There is no eye! The eye is the calm area in the middle of a tornado or something, a phenomenon in which the center of the destructive force is the safest place to be! That doesn't apply to the current situation at all!

I generally try not to be a Surly Nitpicky Gamer Boy™, but a lot of big budget AAA games really do bring it out of me. I get it, it's very pretty and the cars go fast. But I finally tried Ridge Racer Type 4 a few months ago, and the cars in that 26-year-old game not only felt better to drive, but it had an actual visual identity that was beyond cool. This is just boring!