I am sure there are compliments you could offer Alleyway, like that it's a good time waster, or that it's a solid Breakout clone, or that the fact that you control Mario in a weird little ship is cute flavor, or that the bonus stages actually offer a bit of solid fun. None of that would distract from the fact that most Game & Watch titles require more player interaction and end up more engaging. The additions made to the Breakout formula only seem there to lengthen the game and test the technical capabilities of the Game Boy, with each stage having three variants - a static version, a version that screen wraps while scrolling, and a version that slowly encroaches on the player. You would think that the third of these would add some sort of time limit or pressure, but no, all blocks disappear within close enough proximity to the paddle, meaning that the levels sort of just double up on themselves to be slightly less than twice as long rather than any sort of "ramping up". Alleyway is a thoroughly mindless excursion that screams "Game Boy tech demo", carried by the fact that the bonus stages are cute and Breakout is inherently fun... to an extent. The amount of time Arkanoid-likes play themselves can get excruciating at times, and the different layouts of Alleyway love to present those possibilities. It is functional, I have gained nothing from it.

Having grown up with Mean Bean Machine, it's nice to see a version of the game that takes that basis and ups it just a little! Presentation is very solid, having two 'next' previews instead of one allows for more flexibility, counter chaining creates an actual back-and-forth... I would say this is the first time where I really "got" Puyo as a concept! AI is still rather rudimentary once you lock in and understand what the game's asking of you, and I found it defeating itself before I could do the really cool chain I was ready to unleash which made me sad, but it's a solid, fun romp that makes me want to check out the modern versions of the game! Which is good! I like that!

What sets Twinbee apart from other shooters of its time for me is its constant sense of interaction. The fact that it asks you to juggle three different tasks - shoot enemies, take down land-based turrets, and shoot bells an exact amount of times before collecting them to get power-ups - creates a juggling act that requires the player's focus to be on far more areas of the screen than just their ship. By having this level of multitasking, it also encourages two-player cooperation, which I was only able to experience in a limited burst, but is truly well balanced through this system. It's a well coordinated and considered experience in spite of just looking like "what if we made Xevious cute and quirky~?" And THEN it decides to load you up to ludicrous levels with power-ups, with the speed boost being one of the most generous of the era with how much you can stack it, sometimes to nearly out of control levels! For being an insanely simple game, Twinbee offers a lot of expression and flexibility in playstyle and prioritization!

Why is Stage 5 so long? It's like twice as long as any other stage with the most turrets and enemy patterns that often linger and bounce about the screen in ways that leave VERY small safe zones... that can then be filled by bullets. And it's here where Twinbee's weakness shows: its spawning system. Rather than having you restart the level when you blow up, Twinbee has you immediately spawn right where you are, getting right back into the action. While this sounds good, and in fact IS good in the case of multiplayer where your partner can pick up your slack while you try to power up, Twinbee is so weak in its starting form that you're likely to get hit again... and again. Where other shooters would force you to restart the level, which may seem like a harsher punishment, it also encourages learning the level better, trying to do something different, and putting your weakened ship in a consistent position to upgrade and improve. Twinbee decides to throw a baby in the middle of a battlefield with no briefing and go "welp, good luck!" In this case, dying in an area like Stage 5 once might as well be a Game Over unless you're right at the end, as the odds of losing ALL of your lives one after the other when depowered is an incredibly likely and emotionally debilitating experience.

I look forward to seeing what the rest of the series has to offer. The initial impression is incredibly promising, I like the mechanics in general, and I think it's a lot more well considered than a lot of titles of its era. But man was I humbled quite a few times at the end of runs!

Pokerogue's biggest success in how addictive it is. It's so simple to just be hooked on trying to plan out a team based on the couple of members that have dropped, scout out ones to catch, try to catch a few more in order to get ideal IV's to bolster your starters with, and just grind out floors until you get that run where everything comes together. It's good like that! It makes great use of music and motifs from throughout the Pokemon series, both rival designs are great, and it allows for an incredibly speedy feeling out process of all sorts of Pokemon species, leveling them up insanely quick to feel a sort of greatest hits version of their growth. That Pokerogue can so effectively tap upon the feeling of wanting to catch 'em all and play with all of them is its greatest strength.

Unfortunately, it doesn't even take a full run for Pokerogue to show its faults. AI is rudimentary to a fault, being able to be easily baited based on type match-ups, effectively randomizing learnsets to the point of inefficiency, and ultimately just can't match up with all of the flexibility a player always has at their fingertips. Though this is really only an issue in the early stages of Pokerogue, when the player is still developing their team. By the game's midway point, five or so of the player's final party has probably been solidified, with one 'weak link' to drop out if they happen to see something better. Moreover, due to the way the battles are spread out as an endurance gauntlet, the same types of Pokemon are gonna end up being far more valuable. Whilst you could imagine a player picking up and bonding with whatever weirdos they happen to stumble onto and making some kinda grand narrative, the game is really only suited for two kinds of Pokemon: fast attackers and walls with a lot of resistances. Pokemon like Excadrill leap out to being so ridiculously good in this kind of format, it's almost a punishment to NOT have one on your team, and that goes doubly for any fast set-up sweepers. As the enemy loves to load its opposing trainers with Lum Berries, and it costs less to not get hit at all than to tank hits well, stall or status strategies are incredibly unreliable, inherently removing the usefulness of a littany of Pokemon. Pokerogue, ultimately, is a game where your run is successful because of one Pokemon who hits things really hard, a couple of switch-ins to bait that Pokemon's bad match-ups, and then the rest of your team can be rounded out with whatever losers who'll warm the bench. And considering the sheer length of a full run, they're gonna be warming the bench for a while!

I played way too many browser games as a kid to call PokeRogue bad - if I had THIS in my school's computer lab I definitely would've never played anything else and sacrificed all social time at school to play it. There's an intoxicating, addictive element here that's testing your knowledge of every generation of Pokemon in a massive gauntlet. It's just disappointing that the solution is "load Gardevoir with a bunch of drugs and spoons and then she hits everything with the moon until it dies", or variants thereof. It's an unbalanced but fun little experiment that I hope its devs do more with, but the core conceit of how the project works makes it a bit of a solved equation for me that undercuts the whole feel of Pokemon for me.

What I can never fault Ring Racers for is its ambition. Its environments are lovely, well realized, and expand on familiar Sonic zones and trappings in a way that accentuates every single track. It's a mechanically rich game with a bunch of different systems to compensate for every idea it has. It loads you with objectives and a glut of content that is mind boggling to begin to tackle. In all senses, it is a love letter to the legacy of Sonic and the fan game community that has sprung up around him, and takes every opportunity to remind you of its fan game status that it absolutely relishes. As a celebration and collection, Ring Racers is absolutely sublime.

Getting there tends to be the trickier issue. Much has been said about the game's intro, and while I find the dialogue and overall presentation of the tutorial very charming, I do find it a very misguided intro to the game. The mechanics taught in the tutorial are often used very sparingly across the actual races, and even those used often like drifting are used in different, shorter-form contexts than the tutorial would imply. It practically posits Ring Racers as an entirely different game and experience compared to what it actually is, and it goes on doing that for quite a while!

The actual races themselves vary in quality drastically depending on the track layout. Ring Racers can be absolutely vicious with its track designs, with hazards feeling devastating as they can easily combo into other hazards or items that toss you around like a pinball. This can be DEVASTATING on slopes, which require Sonic's vaunted momentum to get up and are aided by the ring system, letting you increase your speed a little bit per ring used. This should present some level of risk/reward; do you use your rings on straightaways to burst ahead, or save them for slopes as a means of recovery to maintain position? Unfortunately, rings are plentiful to a fault, and computer opponents (ESPECIALLY your rival character) are want to use them whenever possible to ludicrous speed increases, so rings become less strategic unless you're specifically saving them for chaos emerald bonuses in Grand Prix standings and more "I hope this part of the track also has rings". And when it doesn't... well you have the spin dash to get you out of the worst of things, but it feels pretty rough.

Drifting is also highly committal compared to rings, meaning that all alternate forms of speed are just kinda secondary to the immediate allure of the rings, which do not have enough risk to them to make the immediate reward not always a pull. This is compounded by items, which use the same button as using rings and, thus, often get in the way of progress more often than they help, especially considering how avoidable most offensive items tend to be as they struggle to interact with the steep sloped terrain of Ring Racers! I feel that individual race courses struggle to decide if they want to play nice with Ring Racers' systems or want to struggle against them, and very few of them are properly in line with the expectations set by the tutorial. It makes for a very uneven experience where a single bad spill on the last lap is both really debilitating and could not be entirely your fault, with means of consistent recovery not entirely present as opponents can keep padding their lead with rings and the comeback items are either unweildy to use, especially in a bad headspace, or inaccurate.

There are moments where Ring Racers does put everything together. Zones like Emerald Coast, Withering Chateau, Opulence, Regal Ruin, and Joypolis show DRRR at its best, with a consistent sense of flow, opportunities to best use shortcuts, and a great feel for combining the drift and ring mechanics. But for every one of them, there's a Marble Garden just asking for the player to try and break it in two before it breaks them. It lacks the kindness of kart racers like Mario, fails to commit to its individual mechanics like F-Zero, and does not string its systems together in nearly as seamless away as Crash, Diddy Kong, or even other Sonic racing titles manage. Ring Racers is its own, unforgiving beast that I can't say I had a bad time with, but it feels a bit overtuned for all it wants to strive for; a love letter that needed an editor, but how do you say "turn down the passion?" I like and respect it, I'll come back to keep pecking away at its wide breadth of content. But man I STILL haven't unlocked Whisper and don't even have a clue on how to get her, and I sincerely hope she's in the character class I like otherwise I'm gonna be real sad.

As a follow-up to Pikmin 1, Pikmin 2 makes an incredibly strong statement. And that statement is "we know that we're spreading ourselves thin between score attack-style survivalist gameplay and slow-burn exploration and worldbuilding, so we've destroyed the worldbuilding and put it in a little book and now the game is all about not dying in caves". It's a change that honestly the Pikmin series probably needed to take in one direction or the other, and the game commits to its more arcade-style gameplay fairly well! Without having to worry about navigating a more complex terrain in favor of labyrinths, control of the Pikmin generally feels a lot more consistent, combat challenges can be placed in a player's way methodically and deliberately, and overall the spikes in difficulty and memorable moments are a lot more controlled than in Pikmin 1. Unfortunately, the very limited exploration offered from seeing Pikmin 1 environments change does end up feeling very rote and obligatory by comparison, which makes a lot of the game's opening stretch seem pretty performatory; Pikmin 2 can't be mean enough in its opening to really grit its teeth due to needing to reteach Pikmin 1's mechanics and introduce its new ones. Additionally, returning bosses like the Burrowing Snagret, Beady Long Legs and Emperor Bulblax are shadows of their former selves due to appearing at the end of dungeons where a player can't be assured to have a full squad like Pikmin 1, creating this really unfortunate deflating feeling after clearing the first game. I'd cleared the debt and was ready to write the game off as a technically superior, but ultimately short-sighted version of Pikmin 1.

Then the Water Wraith happened.

I cannot tell you how wonderful of a turning point the Water Wraith is. Every cave up to that point (discounting backtracking to the first area's harder dungeons) could be handled with just a simple measure of patience, with taking things slowly, step by step, and throwing the right colored Pikmin at the thing they're good at stopping. Water Wraith takes every bit of that away from you, demands you scramble, puts you in the position to make mistakes, has no weaknesses for a majority of its dungeon. This is Pikmin 2 at its best: throwing you into cruel situations where one lapse in attention or assuming that your little guys will be fine will end up with a squad crushed, exploded, or eaten by a jumpscare of a bomb rock or bulbear. Where the first game had you try to figure out how to solve each creature individually, Pikmin 2 is glad to mingle its enemies together, forcing you into incredibly uncomfortable situations to try and keep your most precious fellas alive, cursing the name of the Dirigibug or anything that happens to shoot lightning as they attempt to one-shot your lil' boy army. Bosses take a significant step up, with Man-At-Legs being an especially fantastic upgrade of needing to figure out spacial awareness, positioning, and just how fast your Pikmin can duck into cover to avoid machine gun fire. The midgame of Pikmin 2 is absolutely exhilerating in attempting to expect its cruelty and react.

... and unfortunately the endgame is where Pikmin 2's flaws become most apparent. The caves that you delve into are somewhat randomly generated, with layouts tending to be similar, but a lot of enemy placements and exit placements in those rooms being random. This leads to a lot of scenarios that aren't so much difficult, but unfun, especially if something REAL dangerous like a groink or bulbear spawns directly outside your starting area and leaves you little time to react. I do think the game is significantly more fun not resetting or leaving caves, just trying to do your best with the limited resources you have (I actually managed to beat Submerged Castle on the back of seven total Pikmin remaining, and it was an absolute blast maneuvering that!), but I'll admit it's not the optimal way to play the game compared to resetting. Sitting there watching your 'min get blown over and over again because the blowy man is behind a wall you need to break while a snitchbug takes swipes every so often is hardly a fun time, and these kinds of scenarios are abundant the further you get into Pikmin 2. Add in things like bomb hitboxes extending through walls with no real indication, cutscenes for items interrupting gameplay, and treasures sometimes glitching out if at a bad angle, and Pikmin 2 ends up an experience as unintentionally frustrating as it is intentionally.

Overall, Pikmin 2 is my favored Pikmin game of the Gamecube duology. It's a wildly inconsistent game, but its peaks are utterly fantastic, its writing some of the best on the system even though it's tucked away in its own little section, and the moments it creates as you barely make it through a tough challenge or scenario are legendary. I will never forget sending my army of Pikmin to gank the Empress Bulblax while the President of Hotocate Freight personally punched out an army of her spawn with his bare hands until they could all mob her face and guarantee a win, or slowly tricking Dweevils into getting a stack up disc out of the water because I lost all my Blue Pikmin. It is not the ideal sequel to its original game, and has to sacrifice a lot to make its own fun, but what it does uniquely it does superbly, and there's a stretch of about eight hours of game in here that's utterly incredible. The other surrounding eight hour chunks on either side are still pretty good, too, just with their very obvious drawbacks!

Olimar should not dump his wife for a cool marble, though. That's weird, Olimar.

I feel like there are two, sometimes not mutually exclusive experiences with this game: either this was your primary focus for the Pokemon TCG back in the day because the collection aspect dominated the competitive and the combination of the music and incredibly clever spritework to bring these illustrations to the Game Boy Color won your heart forever, or you recoil in agony every time you hear the coin flip sound effect in this game.

This game exists in an incredibly weird space where it wants to show you everything that the initial three sets of the TCG had to show off, but almost entirely ignores the meta to do so. Sure, there's one Rain Dance trainer and Ronald's mid-game deck vaguely resembles Haymaker, but there's a lot of very neat experimentation trying to show off the various playstyles and most of 'em aren't running four Oak four energy removals. Sure, lightning is a bit neutered as the TCG version of Electrode was too complicated to implement in the game, but the game's slow rollout of cards essentially forces you to play a version of the Pokemon TCG that never existed, the intentions of the card game made playable rather than what the meta eventually developed into. And if you avoid fiending for a Hitmonchan Turbo deck or whatever, that's pretty cool! I ended up going through this playthrough with a quick swap strategy themed around Butterfree, keeping a core of Scythers and Grimers to build up my little Caterpies, then having a zero-retreat monster who heals for 20 every turn and can whirlwind away bad match-ups while Muk camps on the bench, with some Tauros and Wigglytuff tossed in as catch-alls and Koffing to inflict status on walls. It was a fun little grab bag that swung between big damage and stall, would have crumbled immediately if the game threw more than a few Electabuzz at me, but was fun to let play out in a much slower-paced metagame!

The game does have the drawbacks of being on the Game Boy. It's rather slow, the enemy AI isn't sophisticated and can pretty easily be caught into patterns (they rarely think about the big picture of bench composition compared to finding the fastest way to kill whatever's in front of them now), and sometimes Chansey will succeed at Scrunch eight times in a row and kill five minutes. The onboarding process is... about as good as they could do for the time with a tutorial that explains the game well enough, but actual deck construction tips, like suggested energy/pokemon balance, come WAY after they should be useful. The game remains a fascinating relic of the TCG in a state where it never really existed, and is far more competent at celebrating its strengths than contemporaries like Yu-Gi-Oh Dark Duel Stories or even later GBA Yugiohs were doing for years. It's mostly a cute game that's just kinda fun at doin' what it wants. Nothin' wrong with that!

What a cute little title to drop! Sugoi Hebereke is a fascinating little game, a fully functional four-player multitap marvel for the SNES to allow arena-style combat that wouldn't be fully capitalized on even in later eras! Its top-down action stylings set it apart from other fighters of its era, being entirely positionally-based, relying on drops from power-ups from the sky and cute, imaginative arenas in order to turn the tide of battle. This is one of the most innovative little party brawlers made in its era (that I know of), and certainly deserves its flowers for that.

Anyway I beat it by walking up to every opponent and spamming grab, which deals a ton of damage, and then repeated that like 20 times. Hebereke does not stray far from the fighting game formula by including traditional health bars as the means of elimination, and it provides a ton of hitstun on most of its moves and usually pretty simplistic inputs for very linear strategies. It lacks the thrill of a ring-out kind of mechanic, the power-ups aren't quite as useful as just punching another dude repeatedly, and I managed to roll credits with merely the knowledge of how to do a penguin boy flash kick and mashing. I'm sure that there could be more depth to it, but ultimately, this is a game that I respect the gumption of significantly more than I enjoy playing it. I don't think it's bad at all, just uninspired mechanically past its initial innovation, which is clearly taking all of its horsepower!

Tomba 2 is a game that has game design. It is unknown exactly what it's trying to do, but damn, it is designing its heart out. There is so much game about nothing in here, an absolutely fascinating pile of spinning wheels, fighting with controls, and weird, cozy endearment. I do not think Tomba 2 is a good game, but it's an INSANELY interesting game that I would LOVE to see anyone's impression of.

Outwardly, Tomba 2 is as close to a 2.5D platformer as you can get. You're locked to a 2D plane, but can cross over to other intersecting 2D planes whenever you come across one, giving each area this very neat sense of depth and interconnectivity. Tomba 2 then decides to couple this innovation with some absolutely lousy jumping controls. Tomba HATES the ground for some unexplained reason, and will spend as long as he can floating in the air, his prayers that he never has to hit the ground again slowing him down in midair. This is coupled with incredibly responsive midair controls that keep Tomba's momentum slip sliding all over the place, making simply jumping on anything far harder than it needs to be. Any sense of actual platforming in Tomba is an utter struggle...

... or it WOULD be, but Tomba is strikingly devoid of platforming for a platformer in its first half! There ARE jumps you need to make, but most of the difficult platforming is optional and can just be walked around, there are precious few difficult jumps you actually have to make, and enemies are generally ineffectual and easy to ignore. Tomba instead uses its level design for the sense of exploration, as surprise, the game is actually all about fetch quests! Explore the world, bring this specific thing to this specific NPC, wonder how you get a spoon lodged in between two water-filled plants and then wait for several hours as it sits in your inventory being unused without a clue as to what it should do! While this level of busywork might be off-putting, Tomba's world is actually fairly well-realized, very neatly interconnected, and the main path through it compact enough that any form of backtracking is hardly an issue. It even does the neat thing of going back to previous areas with new abilities to get new stuff, and sets that up fairly neatly!

Unfortunately, for a game all about talking to people, Tomba 2 has a REALLY rough English translation. Sure, it works well enough to convey basic information, but all dialogue is presented stiltedly, with sometimes inaccurate or very vague information on where to go. This gets especially rough the later into the game you get; whilst the game is very good at pointing you in a straight line through its world, once you've completed a loop, exactly who you have to talk to in order to do whatever becomes a rather confused game of "well just talk to everyone until you stumble into the answer".

This is ESPECIALLY trying as the game's two big objectives - the Evil Pig Door and the Secret Towers - are explicitly hidden from the player, Tomba needing to go up to the former located invisibly SOMEWHERE in the world, and if he's holding a specific item when in proximity, he'll be able to access a boss fight. The Secret Towers are even worse, with the player needing to get two special songs from sidequests per tower and just... play them. If a room seems sus? Play it. Didn't work? Move somewhere else. This creates an agonizing amount of guess work for basic progression in the case of the pig doors and secret hunting in the case of the towers, and whilst there are hints for both, the Pig Door locations suffer the most from translation issues, and said location-revealer is hidden behind a lengthy sidequest involving blooming flowers that isn't revealed to be any more important than any optional sidequest, and the towers have no better hint than an NPC in each area going "I'm looking for an invisible tower, I think it's here, better go explore every nook and cranny I guess".

And that exploration, weirdly, gets better as the game goes on. Y'see, the developers KNEW that Tomba's jump sucked, and decided to design the entire game AROUND how floaty and awkward his jump was! Power ups like the Flying Squirrel Clothes allow Tomba to glide a ridiculous horizontal distance, and the grapple allows him to... well, grappling hook his way onto most surfaces, swinging off of them to carry his momentum, which can then combo into the squirrel suit to float around. It is an incredibly weird combination where Tomba is usually not platforming, but going AROUND the platforms, abusing physics to ignore any sort of challenge beneath them. Imagine a Super Mario World where the level design was horrible to jump through, but the cape still felt good to control. That is the feeling of playing Tomba 2 at its best.

Sadly, the game does not stay at its best for long. Boss fights are incredible exercises in "why does this work like this", with elaborate platforming-based arenas constructed for Tomba to completely ignore as he patiently waits for the boss to teleport next to him, jump on their head, and throw them in a bag three times. Every single boss can be dispatched in this manner, the unique elements of their arenas entirely ignored. Tomba 2 also has mini-games, which range from innoffensive to "oh god you took the worst elements of your platforming and made a timed challenge around it" to perhaps the most brutally difficult mine cart mini-game out there. The world record speedrun finishes the mine cart course with one second to spare compared to the MINIMUM requirement to beat it. It has to be entirely learned via muscle memory, and doing it unlocks the hints for how to find the bosses... but you're not TOLD that these will unlock hints, these are just weird items in a mini-game that might or might not affect the mini-game itself for all you know! It is a backbreaking challenge of perfection, and a solid 15% of my 13-hour playthrough was just learning this mine cart game. Also you have to do it twice, and the second time is faster so it messes with your muscle memory. It's awful... I kind of love that it exists. Y'know those challenges that you hate going through, but want to see other people suffer through them? It's one of those.

The final bit I want to touch on is that this game is fully voice acted. Every single line of dialogue has voice acting that ranges from "we got a guy in the office to record these lines with no emotion whatsoever" to "actually these voice actors are making some fun choices". It is cheesy, it is endearing... it is WEIRD going from some legitimate vocal performances to some of the goofiest voices you will ever hear. All of these have very little proper direction, with some lines being perfectly delivered for their scene and others sounded like they were recorded in a vacuum just GUESSING where the line will show up. There is also an outtake left in the game where the voice actor is re-clarifying his accent and taking the line a second time. It is very funny, it is VERY endearing.

Tomba 2 is a game that only plays like Tomba 2. It is a clunky, unrefined mess that does everything it can make its good ideas try to stop being fun. But damn it, it has a LOT of ideas, like, ALL the time. It is a fascinating game where something is happening, and usually it's pretty mediocre, but there's so many things happening with so much awkward delivery that it becomes charming. Plus the international soundtrack is incredibly catchy and well-suited to its environments. Tomba 2 is a game of vibes. I don't know what those vibes are, but I want you to try them, because I want to see how you react to them.

Popeye 2 is a game about fisting. You get cans of spinach and that causes your fist to grow as large as your entire body, which you can then use to punch. I used this with a technique called "fist boosting", wherein I would fist mid-air in order to gain momentum to make jumps. I later discovered that you just hold B to move faster. I was very disappointed. When you reach maximum fist, you can shoot spinach cans out of your fist. Enemies do not love spinach the way you do, and will die.

This is a game that has levels. It also has enemies. And design, sometimes. You go up, you go down, at one point you swim. It has music, and some of it is good, and some of it is actively painful, and you don't hear the Popeye theme until the credits and that's sad. It has hitboxes, and sometimes they work, and sometimes you just get hit twice by the boss' attack because your invincibility frames barely exist and get you combo'd easily, but it's ok because sometimes you can just jump on the fireball and it'll be ok. Sometimes the game has checkpoints at bosses, and sometimes it'll make you do the penultimate level again if you die to the final boss. But not the boss directly before the final boss that the level precedes, just the final boss immediately after the penultimate boss. As a treat. Popeye 2 fulfills the minimum requirements of being a video game, and it has Popeye with a giant fist. If you would like to speedrun a video game, this game functions, and competition will be low enough that maybe you could get the world record pretty easily. Otherwise, this is a game that does enough to function. I do not think it's a bad game - I like video games a lot, I think anything above a 1 is still better than not playing a video game - but it sure is something that exists and works sometimes.

Would you believe that this is probably still the best Popeye game? I love the guy dearly, but MAN, he just can't catch a break games-wise.

If Mario Kart is the Mario of kart racers, this is the Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze if kart racers, for all of the impressive good and odd quirks that might entail. Which is weird to say it's not the Sonic of kart racers, but we already have Riders for that, and Riders is off doing Riders things.

If there is something that All-Stars Racing Transformed is utterly unparalleled in, it's spectacle. The race courses that the game chooses to bring out don't just spread across Sega's history, but prove to be ever-evolving set pieces rather than simple circuits. Tracks very often crumble to pieces by their third lap, some invading force like the eruption of Death Adder's volcano, or the assault of the Death Egg crumbling away Sky Sanctuary, or a massive zombie dance party within the House of the Dead will cause the entire stage to morph, with first-place's reward being able to see exactly how everything changes and falls to pieces for leading the pack. It makes every single track exhilerating, as you wonder just how it's going to change, what laps will be the same and which ones will morph, what kind of set pieces will be thrown at you next. In terms of a first impression, All-Stars Racing Transformed is the top of its class; if you wanna play a racer for just two hours blind, this is absolutely brilliant.

But then ASRT decides to marry pretty fabulous track design with an engine that takes the greatest advantage of it. ASRT is patterned far closer to a game like OutRun than Mario Kart in terms of vehicle handling, and it makes every single turn feel silky smooth, figuring out just how much you wanna throttle or let off the gas and break respectively. The fact that it has essentially a revert for drifting to make s-turns a combo opportunity is absolute icing on the cake - driving is an absolute joy and is allowed to be endlessly more complex than the game's predecessor. This then leans into the game's main gimmick - your vehicle transforming mid-race into planes and boats - and these are handled pretty darn well too! The layouts of each course allow for a sort of freeform shortcut-making, where you need to decide how stringently you're gonna follow the suggested route that has turbo boosts and how much you're gonna try to cut corners to save time. The transitions between these sections are all absolutely seamless, and figuring out where to save items, what turns are the most dangerous, where your specific character can save the most time - THAT is when ASRT is at its absolute best.

Unfortunately, there are a few issues that hold it back. While ASRT's ambitions are incredibly lofty and the actual racing mechanics fairly solid, it doesn't quite adapt to the physics of these tracks particularly well. Any sort of diagonal surface is liable to cause a car to veer out of control, most notable in water sections where ramps can cause vehicles to launch real high into the air or stall out entirely. As the game is built on momentum, any time that it comes to a hault, it SCREECHES to a stop. But hey, that's no problem, this is a kart racer, crazy comebacks are a part of the whole shebang... except no, the item system is exceptionally poor. A vast majority of items are single-target, with the game essentially having two Green Shell variants (three if you count a forward-thrown blowfish), a red shell, a purely defensive item and two self-boosting items. As all of these only interact with either yourself or a single other racer (usually whoever's right in front of you), the middle of the pack is even more of a nightmare here than in other kart racers, where wild swings in position simply aren't possible and whoever's frontrunning is probably gonna have an easy time of things. There are two excpetions - the hornet swarm, which creates a skill check for the front of the pack to deal with in the form of walls of bees with a few gaps to race through, which can either turn things around or do absolutely nothing depending on player skill, and the all-star item, a Starman equivalent with some extra bonuses per character. The All-Star is basically the only comeback mechanic, usually only dropping once per player per race (if at all), so knowing exactly when to use it is paramount in a way similar to Mario Kart's Bullet Bill... but the lack of guarantee of its drop, dealing with everyone else's all-stars in the meantime, and need to still jockey into a good enough position to use it without the ability to use other items to hope for first makes it rather a struggle. Compounded with single-player AI that absolutely loves targeting you, specifically, and any issues with courses essentially leaving you in a position of "get All-Star or suffer", and it can make for real hopeless situations in instants, far more often than contemporaries like Crash, Mario, Diddy Kong, or even the game's own prequel might put you in.

Ultimately All-Stars Racing Transformed is a Sega love letter, through and through. It has incredible ambitions, and when it reaches those heights, it is an absolutely irreplaceable experience. Seriously, Burning Depths might just be the best kart racing course I have ever experienced, it is such an exhilarating rush with beautifully turns, and I'm uncultured and don't even know what a Burning Rangers is! But it does crumble under its own ambitions at times, with moments where the game stops working, odd gaps (why did you take Billy Hatcher out but still have a Billy Hatcher course that was a lot of new assets for the water section... which also is probably the glitchest part of the game?), and the crime of not having a race track for my beloved Space Channel 5. It is the best at what it does and sometimes pretty bad at what it's going for, and if it decided to stop being a kart racer and instead be purely focused on its racing elements, as the boost race sub-games imply, it might've just been the best mascot racer out there. As-is, it simply has to settle for being better than almost all Mario Karts and having some unforgettable moments more than worth showing off. What a terrible fate.

After having not beaten Pikmin as a child because Puffstool turned all of my darling boys into violent delinquents who beat me up and got eaten, and then I decided "that's enough" and never came back to it, going back to play it is a fascinating task. What I'm presented with is essentially a simplified RTS where you simply drag one of your three units to the proper location for them to be useful, fulfill their function, and then repeat across a map before a time limit runs out. But sometimes they get caught on geometry or drown for no reason, because they have no idea what a bridge is and choose to dive into lethal amounts of water instead of following safety regulations that they themselves established. And it's here where Pikmin is at its weakest - its environmental puzzles are fairly rudimentary, the Pikmin themselves are clumsy, your actual throw is clumsy because it's tied to your walk so sometimes you'll just toss boys directly into the mouth of a lil' dwarf bulborb, and the actual matter of traversal is solved as simply as "did you make all the bridges and bomb the walls that are in your way?" Or just by throwing boys at the problem, typically nothing - enemies or puzzles - knows what to do when you throw Pikmin on its backside.

But it's that element - the enemies - that brings Pikmin to life. Due to the combination of the constant time limit and the fact that you have such limited resources - and they're ALIVE and make sad noises when they die and it's your fault like 70% of the time - every encounter with a new enemy type is a nerve-racking experience. You need to properly discern their behavior before they end up killing the battalion of boys you brought with you, and often times, ANY form of aggression ends up being an incredibly scary prospect! Things can turn from bad to absolutely untennable in Pikmin with just a single move, and god help you if more than one enemy is coming at you! Bosses, likewise, become a wager on how quickly you can figure out their gimmick before they wipe your squad and make you completely ineffectual. And this level of anxiety, trying to prevent things from going from bad to worse and failing constantly, is the heart of what makes Pikmin such an engaging experience. When you finally learn an enemy's patterns and manage to take 'em down no problem, using them as fuel for the fire, THAT'S the best of the game.

Ultimately, Pikmin isn't quite sure what it wants to be at this stage. It's an ultimately survivalist narrative with fantastic characterization for Olimar as this bumbling salaryman who's easily scammed but earnestly fascinated by the world around him, but it's presented as a score attack game where you wanna get better to have awesome speedruns with minimal losses. It wants to pressure you with a constant time limit, but there's true beauty in its world to appreciate. It wants you to be able to multitask between squads for ideal set-ups, but the learning process of enemies is the most fun part about the game! Ultimately, I think that Pikmin needed to grow from this first title - and I know in the future it did grow out from what this game set out to do - but I appreciate the unique little adventure all the same. It's clunky, but oddly accessible; if it didn't end up as an entire series, it'd be this fascinatingly unique cult classic! As-is... it's kind of that within its own series, anyway! A fun time to learn, but I eagerly await what future games hold for this series!

I think this is a brilliant beginner's racing game. If you have heavy nostalgia for this title in specific, I absolutely get it. The drift system is Mario Kart's pumped up to eleven - drifting to get speed is EVERYTHING in this game. Your natural movement speed is so painfully slow and getting a drift boost is so easy and lasts for so long out of the initial drift that getting back up to high speed is an absolute priority. Additionally, the actual drift is smooth as butter, both letting you weave out and cut in depending on the strength of your control stick hold flawlessly. Maintaining speed all throughout a lap is both simple to get a hold of and feels good to do!

Additionally, dang for a first draft, they really nail character in this game. Sure, you can tell that the budget isn't exactly stellar, but there's some REALLY good pulls for Sega all-stars and vehicle designs! Big the Cat on a motorcycle far smaller than he is with Froggy colors is hilarious, Eggman on a big wheeler because he "wants to look down on everyone he passes" is great, the Chuchus IN a rocket is a fantastic little touch, and Opa-Opa alone is a celebration of silent characterization. Seriously the amount of animation flourishes on that little guy; zero attachment to him before and now I would protect him with my life!

Unfortunately, simplicity is Sonic & Sega All-Stars' greatest downfall. I call it a "beginner's" racing game because most of the track design is based around the drifts - long, shallow turns that let you get that boost sky high. It makes the actual navigation of tracks rather samey, the chokepoints where you would use items repetitive and basically identical as "where the hazards are" or "when the split paths converge". There IS a lot of personality in these environments, but the process of going through them doesn't change due to the simplicity of the track design and the game's base mechanics. And due to the lower budget of the game, it doesn't have the time to sell the spectacle of each track mechanically. Sure, the Samba de Amigo tracks are visual spectaculars, adore those, but you don't interact with those visuals in any meaningful way; they're just neatly there, off to the side as you do the same drifts you do anywhere else! It is a good-feeling game with a lot of love for its source material, but very rarely does it come close to meeting its potential. As-is, it kinda just peters out halfway through the mission mode.

Note that nothing I said about the tracks above applies to the Super Monkey Ball tracks. For no reason, ALL of the Monkey Ball tracks are rude, filled with 90 degree turns and obstacles, and handle gravity differently as your kart clings to it rather than jumping off of it most of the time. They are fantastic and singlehandedly show the potential of this original game being realized. Seriously, Monkey Target is an all-timer of a race course and I want that to be known.

Infinite Wealth takes all of the good that was established in Yakuza: Like A Dragon and decides "you know, all of the weird, rigid things to make it more like a classic RPG made it weird and rigid. Let's smooth all those out". And then boom, the job system is suddenly a lot more flexible, the gameplay system is significantly better made to take advantage of positional combat, the simple addition of being able to wipe out an encounter for slightly reduced EXP if you're multiple levels over them is a godsend to traversal. To make up for your time not being held up by random battles as often, Infinite Wealth is filled to its gills with content, and goes to the furthest reaches of the LAD series' goofiness for its scenarios, substories, and general tone. This is among one of the most consistently funny titles that uses its absurdity to constantly add more animations, more gameplay systems, more mini-games that could be their own games to add in to the general level of zaniness. And when you are ping-ponging between taking pictures of perverts in a rail shooter segment, having Sam Rigel tell you puns while you try to mine enough gold ore so that you can make the golden statue of Goro Majima you want to make for the sleazy district of your resort island, petting the weird man dressed as Captain Crunch that agreed to fight for you in the underground sicko fighting ring because you NEED a water-type Sujimon with high attack, helping investigate this woman claiming her chicken was abducted by aliens, and learning how your friends somehow all know what a Sega Dreamcast is still, the game is an utterly daunting amount of content that refuses to stop giving.

It then decides to hinge its plot on two VERY important facets: the fact that you (as the player) likely REALLY like Ichiban Kasuga as a character and that he's just an inherently likable guy to the world around him, and the fact that Kazuma Kiryu is really, really tired and deserves a rest, but refuses to take it. The game milks these aspects for all they're worth, giving Ichiban every opportunity to show off his larger-than-life personality and weaponize it to win others over, whilst utilizing Kiryu to properly reminisce about the Yakuza series that came before, the overwhelming totality of his legacy, and his place in it moving forward. The game manages to create a beautiful balance between its bittersweet moments and its riotous future to make for an absolutely intoxicating adventure that seems to just KEEP going and CONTINUE expanding until well into the 70, 80 hour mark where you can drag yourself back to the main plotline.

... and it's, unfortunately, here where Infinite Wealth falters for me. The previous two Like A Dragon games have two of the strongest endings I have ever encountered in a game, as they end with incredibly personal stories coming to fruition and either resolving or continuing in some of the most emotionally resonant scenes I've ever seen in a game. Infinite Wealth was unlikely to reach these, but it spreads itself so thin with the minutea of the game that the main plot takes a bit of a backseat, reaching for all of these grand ideas and statements and political plans. Some of the twists in the middle of it are QUITE strong, but it seems like a lot of pieces that were thrown into the mix had to be consolidated and resolved in a hurry. Ultimately, the note that Infinite Wealth leaves on is a satisfying one, but the individual steps to get there are not nearly as thrilling as one would hope. I do think that I prefer the first of Ichiban's games for the stronger emotional arc it takes me on - which is hard to say, going back to it after Infinite Wealth's improvements is difficult! - but I will say that Infinite Wealth is probably the MOST Yakuza any Yakuza game has been. And that's worth something!