Overall, I believe what defines this experience is your ability to play with the idea of choices - if you like picking options from a menu to see various permutations, the game is a pure service to that, with the reward being rather excellent variances in voice acting. It is a game made for a VERY specific kind of person, whose favorite part of every RPG is a dialogue wheel, and enjoys playing with just how much or how little freedom you get with having that dialogue wheel. If that, plus some fun, disturbed imagery is absolutely your jam, this is a game that perfectly serves your interests. If you're into a more constructed narrative where there's distinct meaning in the story itself rather than what you make of it, or simply enjoy the finality of an ending and actually having all of the information you need to have proper closure, the game intentionally avoids that. I fall somewhere closer to being fully engrossed during my playthrough, but have little impact walking away from it. Consider this review a sales pitch for the game; if it sounds interesting to you, and you hear a trailer and you're like "oh that Jonathan Sims sounds fun to listen to", then go for it!

I am a champion boxer I am the best at getting punched in this game.

There are some arcade machines that, if I see it in an arcade, I have to play it at least once. Dance Dance Revolution Extreme is one of them. This, recently, has become the other. The absolute thrill of this control scheme, sliding your fingers across the digitized keyboard, the piano track that goes in and out depending on your ability to actually hit the notes - this is the experience of a game like Guitar Hero, but with the full bodied involvement that simulates every cartoon pianist you've ever seen going to town, sliding up and down the machine to reach every note. And its focus on classical music, Japanese pop, and Beatmania soundtracks allows it to have a natural curve of altogether familiar songs into what would be expected out of a Konami rhythm game into testing the limits of the concept. For an arcade experience, I think this combines the absolute best in presentation, skillful execution, and growth from play to play that the rhythm genre has to offer. Strongly recommend looking out for it if a con has an arcade!

You can talk about the game's immaculate sprite work, brutal difficulty, how much replay value it realistically should have, how much of it is a scam to just get you to keep slamming quarters in a machine, how much a one-hour game can truly be "great" going off of just pure run 'n' gun gameplay.

Or we can sit here and talk about how the final level is the length of three levels combined, starts at an insane climax and only goes up from there in one of the most incredible marathons of a final sprint games have to offer. I will go with the latter, there is never a time where I bring someone through this game's final mission and their jaw is not on the floor.

There is less lag on this game than Tetris Attack, and also a bigger window to extend combos after clearing blocks (by a few frames). Therefore, it is very good.

This is the best puzzle game at being a fighting game. Agonizing wars of attrition, planning needing to be compensated by resource management - it does not compare to Tetris, because it does not want to be Tetris. It does not want to be infinite. It simply wants you to be better. You CAN be better. And when you're better the man will say "When you're hot you're hot" while playing a MIDI piano version of a power ballad from a 4Kids album from the early 2000's. And is that not the peak of human existence?

Some might say that this is a silly Mario Sports game. That it is a disposable title, made to be a good gift to get the kids in 2005 and then quickly be forgotten. It fulfills a quota of getting Mario out there to play all of the sports. No. This is what all baseball games aspire to be. When you're not just considering pure statistics, trajectories, timing. It's about managing resources. It's about counterpicking your opponent to take away their resources. It's about building a team to field all of your positions to best counteract everything your opponent can do. Mario Baseball starts at the character select screen, and continues on as a game of constant wagers between you and your opponent, calling bluffs to use your star powers to ensure runs, or faking your opponent out to make them whiff their opportunities. Of loading a lineup full of killers to force them to walk Bowser, only to immediately follow him up with Birdo who injects chaos into the ballfield. And then you actually hitting the ball and pitching and stuff feels pretty good, too. By far the deepest system of any of the Mario spin-offs, and it's got Pianta. I love that guy, he's stupid!

This game is utterly inexplicable. It's got an incredibly unfriendly front end where you kind of just bash your head against farming and church work until your daughter can do stuff consistently, is a bit gross and very "written in 1993" in places, has a certain stiffness to it, and you kind of lose steam at the end regardless of what route you take as you're just grinding out stats... but it's intoxicating being in the middle of it. Time melts away as every tiny, incremental bit of the game adds up, a massive list of options opening up more and more, finally unlocking themsleves as you puzzle together just how to get through the game. I'm not sure what I can say to the game's overall quality, but in spite of its age, the addictive nature of slow-burn building is just GOOD in this game. Its pace actively works to its advantage in making every small thing, every errant little discovery, that much more special. Not for everyone, but I think it's a game that should definitely be studied, at the very least!

What a fun, cute little game to learn. Very much in the vein of "get yourself out of unwinnable enemy patterns", with the added bonus of Sonson's movement being restricted to rather rigid platforming, a comfortable auto-scroll, and a rather short range of attack. Due to this, baiting enemy patterns is simultaneously more simplified as their patterns have less diagonals, and more harrowing as you have less of an ability to properly avoid them. It functions as it should, and that's neat! Very nice and replayable!

Imagine coming home after a long trip away. Everything is just as you left it as you approach your door, covered by an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. It feels right, it smells right, you're truly, finally home. But when you open the door, you notice immediately, something is off. The legs of your dining room table are all different sizes. The lights have an odd tint to them. Your wife repeats the same three lines of dialogue often. The floor seems to be covered in invisible tar. Your staircase causes your knee to give out whenever you use it, which isn't painful but it is kind of embarrassing and makes you not want to use the stairs. Everything is just very SLIGHTLY off. But it's still home, so you go through it, and then people tell you that the final boss of your home will be horrible and you remember him being horrible but he's not that bad if you nail the shortcut on two laps and honestly it's not that hard of a shortcut, Jungle Boogie's felt less consistent at least this one you have a vertical leap for.

That is the experience of playing Crash Nitro Kart. Everything about this game is so very close to being excellent - not even "as CTR was", just excellent on its own merits - but everything is very SLIGHTLY off. Ideas like frenzy and anti-gravity are super cool and exhilarating, but lose novelty and both distract from the act of racing with some odd stiffness. The lines you take have less of a natural curve, making the relic races simultaneously more slippery whilst requiring more precision. Track design is inspired at times, but the geometry of the levels causes you to bonk and lose speed more often than is necessary. There are some solid items, but computer racers NEVER hit traps, so you're just kinda left to avoid your own stuff and suffer as wumpa crate drops have been nerfed across the board. You have to beat the game twice, 100%, to actually finish it. And everything is just a biiiit too slow, causing races to drag on far longer than they should (something Nitro Fueled would later prove by letting you blaze through some of these tracks).

There is an INCREDIBLY fun game in here with a fantastically high skill ceiling, but every single step of the way there is a small problem or annoyance eating at this game's heels that keeps it from achieving everything it wants to, and they add up. It's a fascinating experience and I'm a Big Norm fan through and through (the fact that I can't play as him is tragic), the team clearly did their homework to see what made CTR work, but this needed either more budget or more time in the oven than what the publisher was willing to afford it. At least it has the fastest reset in the world; they knew some of those CNK Challenges would be miserable bits of trial and error.

Very enjoyable little title! Charming art style to present everything, very solid twitch reflex dodging feel, tons of customizable options insofar as attack patterns go. It does what a boss rush game absolutely should do, incremental improvement against things that initially seem really daunting to avoid and take on, but slowly become more and more doable until you finally manage to break through! And upon scraping by, you realize "oh there are challenge versions of this boss... that's gonna be really hard". Looking forward to this game's completion from early access; it's got a great sense of style to match some really excellent patterns!

Could've done without Clownpiece's damaged portrait, though. That was... much!

Psychonauts 2 is a transcendent game that every five minutes tries to remind you that nah, it's actually kind of janky and weird. There is the heart of a true Gen 6 platformer in here, complete with odd drifting off of geometry, interrupting dialogue, multiple gimmicks that are brought up only a few times and feel like an interruption every time you need to use them, and an oddly stiff feel to every jump where momentum is less of a scale and more several binary states. Combat ranges from nondescript to dreadful, needing to juggle more specializations than most controllers will allow for to constantly interrupt flow and most enemies choosing to not react to your attacks unless you hit at their specific weaknesses. Platforming segments can be good, but are at odds with creating a thorough collectathon experience, telling its story, and providing moments of actual momentum. Every time the game gets going, it decides that it wants to fumble around a bit too much to really successfully land platforming, combat, or storytelling, all three kind of drifting together in separate worlds from each other, at war with which one gets to steer the game forward right this second. This is combined with a narrative that feels like chunks are missing, ideas were created and just not stitched together, characters who get introduced and then don't really have much to do for hours on end just to show up again toward the end of the game to justify their inclusion past the introduction.

And for a majority of the time, it does not matter. Psychonauts 2 is a wickedly funny game, nearly effortlessly exploring high-level concepts in a way that is incredibly comfortable and approachable. It doesn't quite have the edge of its predecessor, but its art direction and the sheer scope of what is on display is absolutely monumental, and to say it's lacking in heart or thought is just as monumentally short-sighted. It forgoes the adventure game heart of the original Psychonauts in favor of a more streamlined experience, and it gave me something that the original couldn't quite match; it made me have fun with platforming. Not all at once, but reaching the Questionable Area, a whole series of mini-challenges that you just have to stumble upon and get to explore and watch the numbers go up as you mentally check off all the areas you go to, it felt like Psychonauts was truly exploring the lengths it could go to as a platformer. Moreover, the moments where Psychonauts 2 hits, it HITS, with the strength of character present in all of its levels shining through and making them a joy to traverse. It does not always get there, and stumbles constantly, but it's one of those experiences where the myraid flaws can almost be immaterial if you love what it's serving. And it makes me clap me hands and go "YES, LET ME PLATFORM AROUND THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY MORE, PLEASE!" And the joke about the pig needing to serve bacon was taken delightfully far. A fragmented, broken, downtrodden, uneven, unfinished, and unshakable love letter to the joys and perils of ideas.

After years away from this game, I thought "oh, I've gotten significantly better at matchy puzzle games. This will allow Dr Mario to innovate by making it a Vs Puzzler, my favorite version of the puzzle! And I actually understand the cute Wario Land 3 theming! It'll be great!"

It is incredible that the game manages to be inferior to the original in almost every way - and I don't even care for classic Dr. Mario all that much! Every addition that the title makes outside of the vitamin drop preview is to its detrement. The Story Mode proves to be a rather agonizing slog, especially on higher difficulties where it increases the virus count in addition to the CPU difficulty, which merely prolongs games and highlights the massive issue the game has. The "garbage" system of the game, rewarding you by hindering your opponent when you do a cool combo, is to rain two randomly-colored pill parts on two random columns. However, as Dr. Mario is a methodical game of adaptation, this does not create a situation that pressures your opponent - it either has a chance of nothing happening or, more than likely, causing them to just have to work around it for a little bit. The issue being that every single time it plays a slooooow animation as garbage sloooowly rains from the sky, but not in a way that better pressures your opponent. It is incredibly difficult to eliminate yourself via clogging the play area in Dr. Mario, meaning that the end goal for both players is to simply prolong the match and waste the other player's time as much as possible, which is... really decidedly unfun and goes against the point of a lot of Vs-style showdowns. When it expands to four players - a requirement for the penultimate fight of Story Mode - sprites are squashed to an eye-straining degree and garbage allocation is dependent on the color of the pills that caused the combo... which is often too slow a process to be targeted, turning the entire affair to be heavily reliant on random spawns if you get to play the game at a remotely decent pace. Dr. Mario is an inherently alright puzzle game, but this adds surprisingly little and the main attraction is flawed in a way that's difficult to repair.

Rudy has surprisingly good music, though.

It made me feel like I was discovering how good video games can be as a kid for the first time. Little moments like getting lost in a bunch of samey environments before figuring out the way, making me intimately familiar with the way the world interconnects, seeing some piece of geometry and thinking "y'know maybe I can get up that", and stringing together all of my abilities until somehow I do, thinking it's unintended, but then realizing "nah the game's just like that". The Sun Greaves' wall kick alone singlehandedly propels the game up tremendously, and there is nothing more exciting than the game going "yo good platforming. You want a fourth successive wall kick?" Moments so touted in games today, like scaling up a seemingly impossible wall in Mario Odyssey only to see the developers left coins as a reward going "we knew you could do this, good job", are what this game is built on. It's got the GOOD jumping.

There are moments of this game that can openly frustrate. The game lacks a map so it's easy to get lost if you're not taking in the environments via their platforming challenges. Combat is loose and very hit-and-run. Death isn't really a factor compared to environmental traversal, so difficulty might be something of a sliding scale. But if you hit the buttons and they feel GOOD to you - and they feel GREAT to me - this game is unparalleled.

It exists! There are a few cute ideas at play here with the core gimmick, but the game plays its hand with them very early, leaving a majority of the solutions to be rather standard and never really giving a strong payoff for its intentionally sluggish pace until the world's been properly plundered. It's entirely fine and cute and nicely stylized, it's not a game with FLAWS per say, but nothing that puts it at the level of similarly cute, gimmick top-down contemporaries like Turnip Boy. I won't remember it.

Super Mario Land 2 has some legitimately fun parts - the Hippo Zone leading directly into the Space Zone especially feeling good. It's a game just bursting with unique ideas and environments that would come to define the Wario Land series, individual enemies with funky designs shining before Mario disposes of them with a single jump. It's even got a pretty fun approximation of Mario's Super Mario World movement, abilities, and a last level that's oddly harder than the entire rest of the game! However, the game itself is rather woefully short when it comes to extra content and incentives to play it, neat little side areas usually only existing for a 1-up, which the game is both too easy to need and too plentiful to feel particularly earned. The game is restricted by its adherence to the Mario formula and trying its best to replicate it on a system that can't quite handle it (and I think was done a bit more fun in the previous approximation). I respect the ambition of this as a handheld Mario title, but the platforming is rather clumsy, with the largest bits of difficulty coming from trying to get Mario to awkwardly drift on top of a moving platform or enemy rather than much else. It's cute, but it's clear that Wario Land was the ultimate result this team wanted to achieve.

Played this long enough to the point where if it were on Steam, I couldn't refund it. Of all of the Mario-themed puzzle games where it starts really hectic because there are a lot of things to clear at the start and you just kind of wait for RNG to give you the solution as the endgame of a given stage slows to an agonizing crawl... wow it's weird that they made three of them in just as many years, huh? But between this, Yoshi's Cookie, and Dr. Mario, this is certainly the worst of them. Forcing the game into a match-two system, solely vertically, takes out any sort of thrill from potential chains or strong building of anything; it's a purely reactive puzzler with a few moments at the start of rounds where you're shuffling around columns. If you are a fan of Mario's Puzzle Party from Mario Party 3, that will give you far greater depth for a match-two puzzler than Yoshi can give. There are moments where it's engaging, but you will either get past that in the first 20 seconds of a round or lose.