I should note that as a proofreader credited in the game, my perspective is inevitably a bit biased. Still, I think Post-Disclosure, Devil's Night is full of colorful writing, good imagery, and a really good grasp on depicting emotion in every scene.

It's a short read, and I think it's cozy and with much to relate to one way or another for many of us whose friendships are forged online more often than off these days.

All in all: I'm glad this exists. If you're reading this, whoever you are, go create some art! I'll love to see it.

Spyro the Dragon's biggest strength appears to be a certain minimalism to its design and kit. It's in stark contrast to the other 1998 collectathon, Banjo-Kazooie: where that game clutters your moveset up with tons of abilities that mostly fail to impact the platforming, Spyro manages to use the glide, charge and flame in interesting ways that often directly impact the platforming experience.

The result is an extremely laser-focused 3D platformer that offers an experience on par with, but stands out against Mario's best moments, yet feels modern and innovative in ways that Crash Bandicoot was too traditional to be.

Where Super Mario 64 strived for sheer mobility and options for fluid, nuanced movement, Spyro goes for geometry, and using that as part of the player's kit as much as the controls themselves.

Picture a ledge that Spyro couldn't reach with his jump: Mario would find a way onto it no matter what, be it through a triple jump into a wall kick, a well-timed turbo nozzle jump, or a cap vault roll chained into a cap bounce.
Spyro would have to explore the rest of the level, examine its geometry and determine the best point to jump off of and glide onto in order to find a way onto this very trivial platform...

But that's what makes it work so well. What would be small distances in the other most acclaimed 3D platformers is so meaningful - Spyro the Dragon achieves more with less, making the most out of its sense of space in a way that feels inherited straight from Sonic the Hedgehog.

Maybe that's why I feel like this was the true contender for Mario's most formidable rival in the late 1990's.

Listen to the soundtrack here!

With the release of Feather Park, the first real game I'd composed for, I'd talked about my raison d'etre, why I do what I do. It would be a bit redundant to go with that same topic of "I've wanted to make music for video games all my life!", so I want to try and offer a different angle to the idea of "Why do I do what I do?" - why do I make the musical choices I do, and how am I brought towards them?

As much as music is my calling, the language of art I feel the most comfortable in, it's also one of the more abstract ones when it comes to representing ideas.
I'd written in my retrospective of Feather Park that I feel that "there aren't any real answers when it comes to sound design, I think - just personal opinions and justifications on how you think your opinions will impact others' experiences."
What I hadn't mentioned there was that music isn't all that different, honestly. Compared to how two people might draw a bee spy or a cozy barn full of friends, two composers may approach each of those ideas completely differently. Sure, there are musical tropes, cliches and associations that a lot of us may choose to draw upon, but that's just that - associations.

Hive Spy Remi brought to me two challenges in that regard: How do I musically represent that this is a game about a bee, and how do I represent that it's a game about stealth?
Regarding the former, I had a discussion with Naughty Monkey - the sound designer and audio implementation wizard on the game - about what to do. I started off by bringing forward some 90's stealth games like Metal Gear Solid, Goldeneye 64 and Tomb Raider (probably stealth? I've never actually played it), and agreeing that we should soften its tone up to fit the whimsy of the characters, I found additional sources like Rayman 2 and Looney Tunes' Sheep Raider.

Those last two probably ended up being most important, informing the choices I made with both the percussion and DnB loops used in the main themes, which ended up driving the music in a way! Metal Gear Solid informed additional rhythmic sensibilities (There's a part that just takes the rhythm from MGS2's Twilight Sniping wholesale) and additional context as to what the 90's consoles were capable of when playing sequenced - and not streamed - audio.

This is in pretty stark contrast to my approach for Feather Park, where my direction very naturally found itself without explicitly relying on any reference material. (I did listen to a lot of Animal Crossing, though. I wonder if it shows at all?)
I'd remarked to myself countless times during production that I felt in over my head. Since stealth is a genre I never really partook in - neither for study nor for personal enjoyment - its musical language and the way it conveyed tension was actually quite unfamiliar to me!

Drawing so heavily from existing material makes me feel a little insecure about myself, honestly. I wonder if it's how artists may feel about heavily basing a work off of something else (albeit not tracing it wholesale). Sure, Igor Stravinsky- the composer of The Rite of Spring - has been attributed to saying that "a good composer does not imitate; he she steals,” but it sure doesn't make me feel good, you know?

Representing the bee side of the game was equally challenging, in no small part because I couldn't find anything that I felt musically represented bees besides... Flight of the Bumblebees, which is clearly not something I was interested in drawing from. (Somehow, neither I nor anyone I'd spoken to brought up Buck Bumble, though I don't think that really hits the mark either?)

I'd initially started by thinking about the buzzing of bees, and trying to represent that with flutter-tongued muted trumpet, but it quickly proved that in a stealth setting, the sound was nowhere near subtle enough anywhere but far in the background, where I simulated it using a regular muted trumpet sound with a volume filter.

From that turned into "what if I had tremolo violins for a similar but less brash effect?", which I ended up using at the very end for the title sting. Eventually, I landed on the idea of the BACH motif - embedding a name or word within a melody through the letters of its notes - which B - E - E lent itself to very easily. That was actually what it took for me to finally start writing a melody, at which point the song started taking shape.

With all this in mind, I get the impression that composing music for video games ends up as a bit of a problem-solving exercise where you're brought to consider what you need to represent through music, and you have to consider all sorts of creative ideas that sometimes will fit, and sometimes you'll just have to look for a different idea instead, but one will find you as long as you're willing to consider a wide variety of ideas and learn on the job.

That last point - "you learn on the job" - is something I've been told countless times about any position, and that's fair enough, I suppose. We can't all be completely perfectly equipped to solve any problem that's thrown at you from the get-go; no one is, and that's why it's all the more valuable that we find it in ourselves to adapt to these situations. But I can't help but worry about whether it takes me too long to accomplish that, you know? Not even just in music, but in life, there's always a part deep inside me that ruminates over "what if you're taking too long to get started; you're taking too long to learn how to get started?"

I'll have to take solace in the fact that I've gotten started, and I've put out art worth enjoying. Finishing my work on the game was still a really satisfying moment - it was the happiest I'd felt in the two weeks since I'd started working on it - and... well, at the end of the day, it's just another example of how composing music is my drive, the battery that fuels me to move forward no matter what.

So... see you on the third game!

Between Super Mario Kart and Sonic R, I think I've been fairly lenient on janky, poorly aged mascot kart racers, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that I'd extend that generosity towards my feelings towards Pac-Man World Rally.
But it doesn't earn that generosity in any aspect. The two aforementioned games triumph in areas that Pac-Man World Rally could only ever dream about.

Think about how Super Mario Kart's locales are either set directly on Dinosaur Land, such as Donut Plains and Chocolate Island, or draw heavily from it, such as how Vanilla Lake evokes the Vanilla Dome and Soda Lake, and how the Ghost Valley draws from the many ghost houses and Sunken Ghost Ship.
Sonic R, while not directly drawing as heavily on any one existing Sonic game, still makes fantastic use of familiar environments and themes while being completely in line with the visual and level design philosophies of the official games before it, arguably enhancing them in some ways.

The key result of all this is that Super Mario Kart ends up feeling very solidly and confidently Super Mario, and Sonic R the same to Sonic the Hedgehog - their identities as games are strengthened by their faithfulness and authenticity to their source material, in a way that extends not just to aesthetics but even in moment-to-moment gameplay design as well.

It's this aspect that Pac-Man World Rally completely drops the ball on in every way except for its great musical score. What on earth are these Pac-Bombs that mimic Mario Kart's shell in every way - including their color scheme - and why are they?
Mario's shells actually connect back to their associations in his home series, with Green, Red and Blue shells translating decently accurately to their personalities in the platformers.
By mindlessly bringing them over without any context, Pac-Man World Rally declares its source material it draws from is in fact its greatest competitor, which begs the question as to why you wouldn't play Double Dash instead of it.

Which is... not entirely true, actually. An effort was made, if you'll believe me! The Snowman that freezes enemies? Would you believe me if I told you that was a power-up from the 1983 Pac & Pal that I'm pretty sure me and five other people ever played?
You could argue that's a coincidence, but it absolutely isn't - Pac-Man World Rally borrows sound effects from it and Super Pac-Man, and it's fairly evident that the game did some amount of research within the entire Pac-Man series that extended beyond the Pac-Man World's rather trivial, superficial handlings of Namco's legacy.

So out of all the things that they would choose to reference, why was the only real thing they brought over an obscure power-up from an obscure video game? It's outright baffling.
Battle Mode actually does try to go a little further by weaponizing the bonus fruit from the original Pac-Man, a concept that Super Smash Bros. would later perfect, but it comes across as either a little half-hearted, or at the very least, half-baked. Smash's idea of giving each fruit very deliberate functions for different roles and situations seems absent, and... I mean, what on earth are some of these fruit? I think Pac-Man's set of the cherry, strawberry, orange, apple, melon, Galaxian, bell and key are fairly iconic - so what on earth is a watermelon doing here? Was that a kiwi I just saw? Why lemons?

And why is that design mentality not in the main game? Let's go back to the Pac-Bombs for a second. Even if we decide that okay, there's literally no other way to handle Mario Kart's system of tiered projectiles than a bomb, hear my opinion out:
- The bombs that just go on a set trajectory should be either orange or cyan. I think orange is a better pick to reference Clyde's non-committal approach to targeting his enemy, but I think you could make a valid argument about Inky.
- The bombs that navigate around the track to target an enemy should be pink. What is Pinky if not tactical and strategic around navigating a space to target an enemy?
- The bombs that target first place specifically should be red to reference Blinky and his persistence towards chasing Pac-Man.

That's the very minimum I'd ask from the game. Really. That doesn't even start to cover things like the Steel Ball from Pac-Man World! Or the Super Pellet from Super Pac-Man! Or the magical boots from Pac-Land! Or the sheer amount of references they could draw from other legacy Namco repertoire--

When I started writing this review, I expected to have very little to say about Pac-Man World Rally, to say that "it's just boring, there's no merit to it". But no - the more I write, the more Pac-Man World Rally irks me. It's a game that's absolutely unengaging to play (what references there are to the source material are cute but inconsequential at best - fruit gates like the first Pac-Man World - or just straight up obnoxious - like the Pac-Dots), but frustrating to think about.

Adam Neely said - paraphrased from The Music You Hate - that what most inspires antipathy is that which would normally instill empathy, but has fallen short to the point of feeling insincere. Pac-Man World Rally is that for me. I don't hate a lot of games - I casually dislike a lot of games, but I don't actively despise a lot of them.

Had I not thought to write about Pac-Man World Rally, my relationship with it would have ended with a nonplussed "meh".

But I decided to write about it, and thanks to it, I now find myself saddled with unnecessary... feelings.

Oh, Pikmin... You're the one game I wish I could play again for the first time.

Growing attached to my small group of Pikmin, really feeling the loss of each individual Pikmin, only to grow into a horde where each death is merely a statistic, a necessary evil to optimize progress... it's a little chilling, and I think the team intended that, with Olimar even finding a certain peace in his position of power over the limited environment he finds himself in despite the deaths of the Pikmin, assuming you're actually good at the game.

But replaying the game is always an interesting experience, even if I won't get those exact same impacts again, or at least as strongly. When I started replaying this game for this playthrough, I'd actually played through half of the entire game in a single night, only realizing at that point that the sun was rising and this game had captivated me like few other games do.

It's eternally compelling, much like Super Mario 64. It's static and unchanging - but how you interact with it is a constantly evolving game that offers something new every single time.

Ignoring my Mario biases for a second, if I were to consider one Nintendo game as their magnum opus, this would be it. From beginning to end, in narrative to gameplay to themes, I think this is the most completely realized in a self-contained work.

It's such a shame the series is kept hostage by its sales. Pikmin deserves better.

I could waste a few paragraphs breaking down how this game fails to champion Pac-Man in any meaningful way, but what's the point? Past all the miserable, miserable flaws is a game whose fatal flaw is... just being plain boring. Count how many levels are just the original Pac-Man maze, maybe with a small gimmick; revel in how unconfident the developers themselves were about the Pac-Man gameplay that they constantly interrupt it with forced minigames. I think that alone says all I need to say about how much fun there is to derive out of this game.

I've learned an important lesson, though: bad games deserve to be played on Easy difficulty. It's for your own good.

It's like... have you ever ordered the usual at somewhere you've eaten out at all your life, and it looks really good, better than usual?

And then you take a bite, and then you realize they accidentally put in sweet potatoes instead of potatoes?

And like, it's still an okay dish, and I guess it looks even better? But the taste, the feel is subtly off, and it makes you not appreciate how it looks as much?

I'm not going to ask them to put sweet potatoes in the recipe instead of potatoes next time, that's for sure.

Mario's Super Picross was my first Picross game ever, and my first impressions were nothing short of magical. I got hooked immediately, and in a summer full of boring Zoom classes, mental health issues and a general sense of ennui and listlessness I sought an escape from, Mario's Super Picross was it. I grinded through so much of the game and loved every bit of it.

To quote my initial review:

"this is potentially one of the best games on the nintendo switch library

i cannot imagine my life before picross anymore."

... But that was one year ago. I've finished this game just five minutes ago (as of this writing), and my feelings have shifted quite considerably.

The first thing I have to say is that Mario's Super Picross is one of very few games I've played where I can confidently say there's far too much content. Time after time, I've cleared out levels and modes thinking "wow, that was hard! I think that's about all that this game can throw at me."
And I was wrong, time and time again. The game has 300 whole puzzles, and the later ones can easily take up anywhere from thirty minutes to an entire hour to solve.

My total clocked time was over ninety hours, and... I think that's far too much. I doubt I've played some games I unabashedly love, games I tell myself I could go back to time and time again, for as long.
And I don't unabashedly love this game. The difficulty spike peaks, being extremely generous, around puzzle 250, and I'd say anything past 200 is honestly excessive already.

I'll take a tangent real quick and note that for a game simultaneously titled Mario's Super Picross and Wario's Super Picross, there's a noted lack of Mario and Wario here. Finding Wario's EX puzzles was a breakthrough moment for me in terms of what I think Picross is capable of, and it's a shame that it was so underutilized.

Wario's EX puzzles are written from his point of view, describing Mario's M emblem as "Bad Guy Mark", and describing his W as a "Hero's Mark", among other things - the sheer implication that these puzzle titles are written from the characters' point of view could have made for really fascinating exploration of characters, potentially even telling a story through overarching themes across puzzle descriptions (if any of you reading this decide to make a Picross game based on this concept - hi, I'm a composer looking to write music for video games! ...wait, i should actually bring this up to a friend who actually considered making a picross game).

Mario's Super Picross ultimately explores so very little about this concept, and only at the very tail end of the game. It's extremely disappointing.

So what you have left is an addictive, bloated game that doesn't do anything special. Its biggest draw is being a game that lets you live out the satisfaction of almost infinitely seeing boxes get checked.

"'Video games are bad for you'? That's what they said about rock and roll," said Shigeru Miyamoto once. But Picross might be the one (series of) game I've played that I'd be tempted to describe as "bad for you".

At least, to a certain kind of individual in a certain time. Maybe Mario's Super Picross gave me a kind of reprieve from my listlessness, from the boredom from my online classes - but it never solved anything. It let me so thoroughly escape that it took me arguably too long to truly admit to myself that I was in a position in life that I absolutely did not want to be in, and to go about changing that for myself.

I think the game was added to Nintendo Switch Online at simultaneously the best and worst time possible. It was a time when many people had much less to do, and could use a timesink of a distraction... but also a time where I'd argue that that's likely probably the worst thing a lot of people could have been doing at the time.

It's really funny, actually. I find the concept of Picross a bit too questionable to think this game deserves a high score, but I love the concept of Picross and its potential far too much to give this game an actually low score.

It's a great paradox of a game. I'll never forget it.

I like games that feel fun to move around in, usually. There's a reason why Super Mario 64 and Odyssey are some of my favorite games of all time; why I have a small soft spot for racing games; and I can't often stand turn-based RPGs for too long.

Kirby's Dream Land 3 gets so many things right... but movement is not one of them.

It's a fun game to look at, but not so much to play. Kirby's air momentum when jumping is instantly halted when he puffs up, and his float speed is roughly as slow and aggravating as his walking speed is.

The camera often takes time to catch up when Kirby starts running, resulting in Kirby running to the right side of the screen and being more prone to getting blind-sided from enemies.
At least half of Kirby's animal buddies' default movement are not fun (Kine, Pitch, Chuchu), to add insult to injury.

It's a shame, because this is one of the Kirby games with the best, most unique art, Jun Ishikawa near his absolute compositional prime, and this almost melancholic undertone that really sells this game - and its entire trilogy - in terms of atmosphere, and makes its overarching antagonist easily one of the franchise's most interesting ones.

But it's just not as pure fun to play as Super Star or the Kumazaki-directed modern Kirby games. The missions within each stage are poorly explained, even if once you understand their general structure; the minigames get almost impossible without save states, and the boss rush is one of the series' worsts.

But it's really, really pretty. This game gives me mixed messages.

On one hand, Virtual Boy Wario Land is the 2D Mario game of my dreams.
On the other hand, Virtual Boy Wario Land is an undercooked, underdeveloped game that doesn't always stick the landing.

The game has some of the best pixel art I've seen in a 2D platformer and one of my favorite Kazumi Totaka soundtracks rendered on a very interesting sound chip.
On the other hand, by virtue of being a Virtual Boy game, the graphics are in monochrome, and the stereoscopic aspect of the game is hard to emulate today, making for some less-than-precise platforming every now and then.

This is probably as close to a Metroidvania as I can realistically see Mario going, and I'd love to see this idea expanded on further with more levels and expanded interconnectivity like found in the traditional 2D Mario games.
But as it is, Virtual Boy Wario Land's level progression is linear, which means that in order to backtrack to collect missed treasures, the player would have to play all the levels in reverse until they reach the level they want to go treasure hunting in... and then play through all the levels all over again.

Virtual Boy Wario Land's powerup tier system is interesting once you can understand it, and the ultimate tier powerup, once obtained, is extremely satisfying to use.
On the other hand, a single hit takes Wario from any form all the way back to his small form, just like in Super Mario Bros., and will force the player to build up his power again from scratch.
The fact that Wario always has a maximum of only two hits especially makes what bosses Virtual Boy Wario Land have extremely unsatisfying, especially the final boss whom I cheesed by taking advantage of the fact that it does an extremely predictable and counterable attack immediately after getting hit.

As it is, I'd still call it better than the other Wario Land games, and better than a decent handful of mainline 2D Mario games. The movement is good, the level designs are varied with lots of unique mechanics, the level themes are surprisingly unique, and I genuinely think this game offers some of the most interesting platforming and exploration of both the Mario and Wario series.

But it's like the Virtual Boy. A very interesting idea that could have had some potential was not given enough time and resources, and ended up being simultaneously too safe and too bleeding-edge.
And we know how everyone remembers the Virtual Boy.

It's fascinating seeing June Chikuma constantly reinvent her one Bomberman soundtrack over the course of ten years, as she demonstrates a thorough mastery of all sorts of sound chips... usually only on her second go with any given console. Bomberman '93 is generally known as her better soundtrack on the PC Engine as far as I know (it's quite similar to the SFC Super Bomberman 3 soundtrack, I think?), but I like this one a lot. The sound design choices really highlight how the PC Engine's sound chip was the next step forward in Namco's old wavetable-based sound chip - which probably also explains why they re-released so many of their games on this console.

Oh, uh, the game? It's Bomberman. It's basically identical to Bomberman II on NES as far as I can tell. It's not really much to write home about, especially if you're playing single player.