Bleak Sword DX is carried by its art direction. The game itself is pretty good, but suffers from some weird difficulty pacing. Altogether a very solid experience though.

Very Dark Souls in its use of meter and parry requirements. Some hitboxes and invincibility windows make very little sense, but overall I had a really nice time playing this.

Once you beat the game, you can unlock a Randomizer Mode, which I appreciate given that the entire game is about learning how to properly dispose of enemies in a specific way. Makes for an interesting experience.

Also, it's incredibly silly how often the camera zooms in on the pixel-art guy for dramatic effect. Gave me a good chuckle, and I'm pretty sure they re-use this bit like twelve times or something.

One of the background images used for the levels in this game is just people socializing and I don't know what to make of it.

The game itself is pretty tedious.

Gorbachev wikipedia article.

Krautrock album.

Liverwurst.

The idea of a Wii Play Tanks-inspired game is very cool, but this is stinky.

More like Stinky Tanks.

It's mostly bad for the usual video gamey issues, though. Poor performance on the lowest setting, control issues (it refuses to aim where I'm pointing), and just kinda fuckin' way too easy. Maybe Sugar Tanks 2 is better, but I honestly doubt it.

The gimmick behind Quilts and Cats of Calico is that it's the video game adaptation of the board-game Calico but they added a feature where cats will walk all over the board and be cute and distracting while you're trying to focus.

Imagine my look of surprise when I kept getting distracted by cats walking over the board while trying to focus.

One of them even hissed at me when I tried to put a piece down.

Cats.

The NES version of Toobin' is cute and fun but, like most NES ports, it makes me want to try out the arcade version more than anything.

The funniest thing to me about this game is that tubing down a river is, as I understand it, supposed to be a fairly relaxing activity. I mean, you just sit in the tube. Even speedboat tubing looks exciting, and it is, but you're ultimately just sitting there. It's awesome. Meanwhile, our Toobin' protagonist is giving it all he's got just to get down the river. Awesome. I wish him the best.

Also, major shoutout to the digital guitarist doing the soundtrack to this game. Racing down the river, and this dude's absolutely just tearing ass on this guitar solo.

The first thing I did when I woke up this morning, after taking a shower and getting myself a bowl of cereal for breakfast, was turn on the computer. I have a Windows 10. If you have a Windows 10 or have ever used one ever, then you know about the lock screen thing it does. It shows some photo with credits and location information in the top-right, along with some text box in the middle of the screen, usually with information or a link related to the image.

Before logging into my computer this morning, I read the center message saying something to the effect of "Try out tons of free games!" Being a gamer and all, I figured "why not", assuming it would link me to Game Pass or something, even though I know damn well that Game Pass costs money (and is an incredibly good deal that I do not personally take advantage of because I don't play a big enough variety of games, my steam backlog is enormous, and getting games for free via alternative means is incredibly easy and based).

It opened up Edge (which I never use for obvious fucking reasons, please if you're reading this and haven't already done so, get Firefox at absolute minimum for privacy reasons, Chrome is literal spyware and Edge is strictly worse) and brought me to a browser version of this game. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize, before even clicking anything at all, that this is just Puzzle Bobble. And then it showed me an advertisement.

I get that Puzzle Bobble, or "Bust-A-Move" if you're a fuckin lame-o nerd, has been copied and renamed a thousand million billion times, but to start my morning with the feeling of "I fucking hate video games" so quickly feels both like a targeted attack from Microsoft, and a reminder to stop playing stupid shit video games. Just stop completely. If you ever get a feeling of "wow this game isn't very good and I'm not having that great of a time and would rather do something else," please just do something else instead. Or play Super Mario Galaxy.

Also, I would like to take this opportunity to personally invite Bill Gates to eat my dick and also balls, along with every other billionaire posturing that they "give back to the world through charitable actions" while hoarding and acquiring tremendous amounts of wealth via exploitation of the working class. He can have his turn first though.

I dunno man, maybe showing a sad and dramatic pet-and-owner separation as a motivation to clear the game and then resolving it on the second level is a great example of terrible pacing.

B.ARK is like a kiddie-shmup. Like, a shmup you'd find on the back of a cereal box. It works, but it's not doing much for me and I don't want to get better at it when games like Hazelnut Hex, Blue Revolver, or any classic shmup that you could play on Fightcade exist.

I feel like the selling point of this is the 4-player multi-player, but I'm not really interested in playing this with anyone.