Just completed my 50-hour nostalgia trip after not playing a first-gen Pokémon in any capacity since the 90s. Some parts don’t hold up, but this remake smooths out a lot of rough edges while not losing the charm of the original. Will probably stick with this for a few more days to try to fill out as much of the Pokédex as I can.

Why did I play these games out of order like ten years ago? Now that I have replayed them the right way on the 3DS rerelease, Trials and Tribulations is an obvious masterpiece capped off with a glorious final trial that wraps up everything in the whole trilogy, in a way that clearly has been planned since the beginning (or at least part 2). The missteps of Justice for All have been corrected. Now how will the second trilogy hold up?

Bumping the score on this one up slightly- the story is better than I remembered it, and it lays a great foundation for the rest of the series to build on. The choose-your-own-adventure aspects work great. Dull combat, driving sections and planet exploration weigh Mass Effect down though, and the character animations certainly haven’t aged well. Still, I’m looking forward to replaying ME2 which I remember liking a lot more.

This review contains spoilers

Perhaps the slowest 2 hour game I have ever played. Dialog crawls along in no hurry. The cursor moves like it’s scrolling through molasses. “Puzzles” don’t seem to exist, gameplay consists mostly of shambling around and making pixel-perfect clicks on objects until the scene unceremoniously ends. There’s multiple endings available to piece together a mystery, but I feel no need to keep going. I like the idea of a horror/adventure game hybrid, but the execution here was terrible. Maybe Clock Tower 2 will be better?

I’ve heard the first two Persona games are not nearly as beloved as the next three, so I’m not ready to give up on this series yet. But playing Persona 2 on PSP might be my least favorite rpg experience I’ve ever had. Boring corridors filled with generic enemies, inscrutable gameplay, some kind of overwrought card system. I actually liked the characters and was interested to see where the story was going, at least compared to the first game, but it’s unlikely I ever come back to see how it turns out. An early dungeon where you’re wandering lost in the basement of a school features some of my least favorite game design of all time, and I didn’t make it much further before I had to call it quits.

Wish I liked this more, as I was a big fan of Super Mario Land 2 when I was a kid, but I never got around to playing the sequel. Wario Land is another 2D sidescroller where you collect coins, but the differences here, especially with controls, are stark. Where Mario is speedy and agile, Wario is a slow bruiser more focused on combat than platforming. Levels here just kind of end after a while, with little interesting build to the design. I personally don't find it nearly as fun, but I'm hoping this laid the foundation for better games to come in the Wario Land series.

An obvious step down from the first Phoenix Wright, with low points including the consensus worst case of the series as well as the extremely creepy portrayal of a new character during her channeling, which I honestly can’t believe was left in for all the remakes and rereleases. On the other hand, introducing psych-locks is a great way to make the investigation portions more interesting, by making them more like trials.

The first game I really really loved, played for the first time in ~30 years. It holds up! Shorter than I remember, and missing some of the bells and whistles of Mario’s home console games of the time, but a major step up over Super Mario Land and Mario controls just as well as ever.

Maybe I just needed less of a challenge, but man did this feel way better than the first GBA Fire Emblem.

Played this for a few hours to see what the big deal is, and yeah Forza Horizon 4 is pretty great. But car racing has just never been my thing, so I feel no need to finish this.

There's plenty of issues here- unmemorable characters in a non-existent story, a card system that never really clicked with me, some very unintuitive menus, long loading times- but I had plenty of fun playing through this with my friends over the course of a month anyway. Co-op zombie killing is back, baby!

What gives? I thought this was supposed to be one of the classics of the SNES-era RPGs. Honestly this played worse than its already-mediocre Game Boy predecessor. I abandoned this a year ago and only today realized I will never go back to it, there are too many good games for me to play.

I love the attempt to reinvigorate the point-and-click adventure game genre with a big budget and an interesting hook- you're trying to piece together a mystery involving your wife and a murderous home invader in a world that's constantly resetting itself every few minutes. Unfortunately even for such a short game there is just so much repetition and wasted time every time you want to try something new. Some effort to make this more user-friendly (more shortcuts? selectable branching paths? fast-forwarding?) really could have improved the experience, and the payoff is pretty disappointing too.

Had some fun with this earlier in the year but not enough to make to The Show. Some of us are just destined to stay in the minors.

A reimagining of the relatively bare-bones Metroid 2, all that this game seems to keep from that one is the game-length hunt for 40 Metroids to genocide, and the ability to journey deeper into levels via drained lava after eliminating all the available Metroids. Otherwise we’ve got a standard Metroid game with a few new twists- a melee counter-attack, a magic bar, and a greater emphasis on puzzles and combat versus the exploration the series is known for. It was enjoyable, but I wouldn’t stray much further from the formula than this- that’s when you enter Other M territory. Eager to see what we’ve got next in Dread, which appears to be much more stealth-focused.