roboSteven
BACKER
2023
Pikmin 4 is fine.
It isn’t often that I get actively excited for video game releases, considering that my “backlog” of games is at the time of my writing this sitting at well over two thousand games I could try out at any time. I’m in no rush to play the newest stuff that comes out when I haven’t even finished Bloodborne, Mother 3, or even started Disco Elysium yet. I was actually excited for Pikmin 4 though. I preordered it and everything. I don’t even buy games usually, but this one I wanted to dedicate time to right away. Pikmin is one of my favorite game series ever. It’s a little rough around the edges, but I consider Pikmin 2 to be one of my favorite video games of all time. Pikmin 4 is fun. Good, even. But for me, it doesn’t touch Pikmin 2.
Pikmin 4 actually makes me feel the way that I’ve seen some diehard Pikmin 1 fans talk about Pikmin 2, with its lack of any sense of real pressure and focus on free exploration. On one hand, I agree that it takes away from the uniquely isolating, anxious, and unfamiliar mood carefully crafted for the first entry. On the other hand, Pikmin 2 was my first Pikmin game and I greatly valued the lack of pressure that allowed me to learn the ins and outs of it when I was an overly-cautious child. I’m pretty sure it took me 60 days or something the first time I finished it, and now that I’m an adult I can fairly consistently clear it in a couple of in-game weeks. I originally raised an eyebrow when first reading the question of “why bother with the day-night cycle at all if there’s no limit of days” regarding 2, but now I feel myself asking the exact same question with 4.
The actual answer is to create a stronger atmosphere and sense of environment, which Pikmin 4 nails (for the most part). The fact that you need to plan out your day and get work done during daylight, lest you face the wrath of wild night creatures, does wonders for building this sense of mystery and fear about the world you’re exploring. But this connects directly to what I feel to be the single biggest issue with the game: a profound failure of tension building or real danger. What we have here is an incredibly beautiful and vast landscape full of wonder and beauty set in front of us, begging to be explored after ten years of waiting for a new Pikmin game, full of treasures, caves, and enemies recognizable from the first three games.
And this dopey yellow shithead and his crew cheapen the entire experience.
Also the night missions are stupid and dumb contextually because they break the Pikmin story rule about nighttime being too dangerous to explore and ruin immersion by being actually pretty reasonable to handle. The game mode itself is fun enough though, Pikmin Tower Defense is a nice idea. I have nothing else to say about that.
Back to the dog.
With the introduction of the rescue pup Oatchi, levels are now designed with his abilities in-mind, like jumping, traveling through tunnels, and being able to carry Pikmin on his back while traversing through water, an obstacle previously reserved to blue Pikmin exclusively. He also doubles as a second captain who can command and lead Pikmin, just like the player character. You’re given the option (repeatedly encouraged) to give your pup various upgrades to make him stronger, whether it be to deal more damage, carry heavier objects, swim faster, etc., which obviously makes the game easier. However, riding on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin entirely removes a key weakness of your ant-carrot army of the previous games:
Your hurtbox has now been concentrated to the back of a responsive and easily-maneuverable puppy dog.
I’m torn on this mechanically. On one hand, by the nature of all of your Pikmin being focused on a single spot, you now risk losing a greater number of Pikmin at once to single strikes. I know this because a boss creature stepped on me and Oatchi and I lost most of my troops. No, I don’t want to talk about it.
On the other hand, due to the way Oatchi’s tackle ability works, taking down most of the larger, higher-health enemies is now a linear experience. You hop on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin, you charge your tackle, you land the tackle, your Pikmin hop off of Oatchi and onto the enemy, the enemy’s health depletes almost instantly.
A game doesn’t have to conform to the rules of any particular genre, but taking an engaging element of strategy out of a “Real-Time Strategy” game rubs me the wrong way.
I don’t actually hate the Oatchi-specific puzzles that come up on occasion. I like the little fella’s design. I think he’s goofy, especially when he makes the little whwhwhwhwhwhw noise with his whistle. But my problems with him get emphasized specifically in the context of the Engulfed Castle.
The Engulfed Castle is, in short, an excellent reference to the Submerged Castle from Pikmin 2, what I feel to be the most memorable and interesting cave in that game. It’s the only cave with a distinct restriction on the type of Pikmin you’re allowed to bring with you, as it is completely surrounded by water. A rule of Pikmin 2 is that you’re only able to enter a cave with the Pikmin directly in your squad, which means you can only bring blue Pikmin into this cave. The Engulfed Castle of Pikmin 4 is surrounded by water as well, but Pikmin 4 does not have this restriction on caves, so Nintendo decided to circumvent this by simply not allowing you to bring any other Pikmin type into the cave when selecting which Pikmin to join you. This cave functions just like any other, with long dark passages for you to explore and collect treasure, except your squad doesn’t have resistance to hazardous elements like fire, poison, and electricity. This means that you need to tread carefully in navigating obstacles to defeat enemies and get to the treasure. However, after about 5 minutes have passed on a sublevel, this steamroller-lookin’-guy shows up and starts meandering around the place, squishing everything in its way. Your blue Pikmin cannot hurt it.
The danger of the Waterwraith comes from the task of needing to carefully bring treasure back to your base coupled with how large, slow, and vulnerable your army is when spread out.
Oatchi lets your squad avoid the Waterwraith completely by carrying you and your Pikmin on its back.
You can just walk right past it. What’s it going to do? Turn slightly to the right? I’m already at the exit with all the treasure collected, you Flubber-lookin’ freak.
In Oatchi’s defense, it’s not entirely his fault. Nintendo also made Pikmin faster, so there’s not really any risk of them being left behind if you call them with your whistle (which is also the best it’s ever been) and try to make a break for it.
I will give Nintendo credit though, because they replicated the layout of the original sublevel floors from Pikmin 2. That was a very cool thing to realize while I was comfortably walking away from the steamroller.
Additionally, Pikmin 4 is so extraordinarily liberal in the sheer number of resources it gives you that I actively stopped giving a shit about Pikmin deaths. This is coming from someone who would hit restart on my GameCube every time a Pikmin died on my first playthrough of Pikmin 2. I’m sitting here with unused bombs, electricity, mines, and 56 Ultra-Spicy Sprays that I don’t even remember getting, and the game has the audacity to remind me that I can always rewind the clock if I feel bad about losing a single Pikmin. Relax, game. I have 400 other ice Pikmin sitting in reserve. It’s gonna be fine.
Granted, Pikmin 3 offered this via day-selection, but it wasn’t in-your-face about it the way in which 4 does it.
I don’t think a game being easier is necessarily a bad thing, but it feels a little wack to me when it’s a Pikmin game specifically, especially the way it was done with this one. I don’t need a bunch of items to figure out how to clear a level. My amorphous controllable blob of little guys can handle this.
Now, I need to address the Rescue Corp. itself. I don’t mind a world of characters that talk and have personalities. Hell, EarthBound is my favorite video game ever because of exactly this. However, what I do mind is a world that doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.
These characters do not allow for any sense of mystery or wonder while it happens to you, the player, directly. “It sure is good we have the Pikmin with us!” No shit, we’re like three inches tall. You don’t need to have a message pop up that says “wow golly gosh gee you sure just lost 30 Pikmin to a rock-spider death explosion, it sure would be great to rewind time right about now” because you’re fucking experiencing it right there right in front of you. You’re having fun and making video game memories, and Collin or Shepherd has the audacity to say “this thing is happening and you need to do this right now immediately” like I didn’t learn to blow the whistle when my Pikmin were on fire FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.
Why is the game backseat-gaming? Give me the fucking wheel and let me experience the consequences of my actions. For fuck’s sake.
It can be helpful on extremely rare occasions to have some kind of popup notification about something happening off-screen, given the nature of an RTS game, especially for new players. But as someone who figured out fairly quickly to actively pay attention to and notice the only numbers on your screen available at all times worth monitoring (Pikmin population), being told that my squad I sent on a faraway mission is under attack actively spoils the surprise. With Nintendo offering no option to reduce the frequency or turn it off completely, they might as well just said “fuck you” to me personally instead.
The only surprise to be found here is in my own consistent expectations of Nintendo.
Speaking of lacking any sense of mystery and wonder, a mechanic I was surprisingly very excited for in this entry was actually a limitation; you are only allowed to have three types of Pikmin out on the field or in a cave at any given time. This had the potential to be cool in-concept, because it could have meant you’d need to pick and choose different Pikmin types for different needs throughout various obstacles you encounter throughout your time spent in different huge locations.
Nope. The game YET AGAIN removes any player responsibility for decision-making. Just press the X button. The game will give you recommended types. You’ll be fine. No thoughts required. Go grab yourself a snack.
Can’t quite hit that one creature? Lock-on button. Charge. With Oatchi. It’s probably dead now.
Great.
The lock-on feature is awful and I hate it. I’ll take the free-form movement of an entire army controlled by the right stick and the ability to aim freely over an auto-snapping lock-on and charge button any day.
Biggs_hoson comments in their review that Pikmin 4 feels like “just playing more Pikmin™”, and when it boils down to it, I think that’s ultimately my biggest problem with the game. It’s still “Pikmin™”, but in a lot of ways it’s been homogenized to taste a little more like your average video game and less like the Weirdo Shit™ I’d fallen in love with through the first two games; games I find myself gravitating more and more towards as I play more video games.
Nintendo took the formula from their previous games, created an interesting world to explore and appreciate, and then slapped all of the tools they possibly could together to make it conducive to blazing through said world as fast as you possibly can.
My body is a machine that turns unexplored natural habitats into Platinum-Medal Cleared Dandori Challenges™.
I’m conflicted, because the first two Pikmin games are pretty niche and I understand completely why Nintendo would make the choices they did with 4. Pikmin 1 was ambitious and weird, and I respect it tremendously, significantly more than I actually enjoy playing it, which could be argued is the entire point of it. Pikmin 2 is my perfect jank-sandwich full of bullshit and weird eccentricities, and one of the few games I’ve given genuine thought about speedrunning. Pikmin 3 simplified the controls and toned down the difficulty in order to make it more approachable, shifting focus to a Pikmin 1-esque gameplay style of “do things as efficiently and quickly as possible,” all at the expense of making it an overall more shallow experience, and Pikmin 4 went further by tuning up the “dandori” focus and then adding a thousand safety nets. There are challenges in the later part of the game to be sure, but the ones requiring actual honest-to-goodness creative thinking are few and far-between. I’ve been seeing a lot of people saying it “takes elements from all of the other ones to make it the best one” and I just don’t see it. It’s the most sterilized and homogenized in the series for sure.
It’s still a good game overall though. After how short Pikmin 3 felt back on the WiiU, I welcome the clever design tricks Nintendo used to pad out the Story Mode and make it longer, e.g. Pikmin 3’s Mission Mode now existing in the form of mini-caves where you rescue leaflings by completing a Dandori Challenge. I feel it to be way too hand-holdy for my tastes, but I want to stress more than anything that I still like this game and I feel it to be an overall strong entry in the series. The time I’ve been putting aside to play Pikmin 4 has been enjoyable, and I’m incredibly happy for the reception it’s getting, as Pikmin is a series that absolutely deserves it. The levels are great, the controls are great, the caves are great, and the overall design of the game itself is fun and works well. But it’s too sleepy for what I was hoping for.
You’re not gonna get unexpectedly carpet-bombed or jumpscared by a Bulbear just for carrying a rubber ducky out of a cave. In my eyes, for some reason, this is a negative.
In the end, I guess I just wish Nintendo would say “fuck you” to me through its level design instead of its endless tutorials.
Just give me a “silent Collin” mode and let me explore the wilderness in peace.
I bet I’d feel differently about all this if this was my first Pikmin game.
It’s not.
It isn’t often that I get actively excited for video game releases, considering that my “backlog” of games is at the time of my writing this sitting at well over two thousand games I could try out at any time. I’m in no rush to play the newest stuff that comes out when I haven’t even finished Bloodborne, Mother 3, or even started Disco Elysium yet. I was actually excited for Pikmin 4 though. I preordered it and everything. I don’t even buy games usually, but this one I wanted to dedicate time to right away. Pikmin is one of my favorite game series ever. It’s a little rough around the edges, but I consider Pikmin 2 to be one of my favorite video games of all time. Pikmin 4 is fun. Good, even. But for me, it doesn’t touch Pikmin 2.
Pikmin 4 actually makes me feel the way that I’ve seen some diehard Pikmin 1 fans talk about Pikmin 2, with its lack of any sense of real pressure and focus on free exploration. On one hand, I agree that it takes away from the uniquely isolating, anxious, and unfamiliar mood carefully crafted for the first entry. On the other hand, Pikmin 2 was my first Pikmin game and I greatly valued the lack of pressure that allowed me to learn the ins and outs of it when I was an overly-cautious child. I’m pretty sure it took me 60 days or something the first time I finished it, and now that I’m an adult I can fairly consistently clear it in a couple of in-game weeks. I originally raised an eyebrow when first reading the question of “why bother with the day-night cycle at all if there’s no limit of days” regarding 2, but now I feel myself asking the exact same question with 4.
The actual answer is to create a stronger atmosphere and sense of environment, which Pikmin 4 nails (for the most part). The fact that you need to plan out your day and get work done during daylight, lest you face the wrath of wild night creatures, does wonders for building this sense of mystery and fear about the world you’re exploring. But this connects directly to what I feel to be the single biggest issue with the game: a profound failure of tension building or real danger. What we have here is an incredibly beautiful and vast landscape full of wonder and beauty set in front of us, begging to be explored after ten years of waiting for a new Pikmin game, full of treasures, caves, and enemies recognizable from the first three games.
And this dopey yellow shithead and his crew cheapen the entire experience.
Also the night missions are stupid and dumb contextually because they break the Pikmin story rule about nighttime being too dangerous to explore and ruin immersion by being actually pretty reasonable to handle. The game mode itself is fun enough though, Pikmin Tower Defense is a nice idea. I have nothing else to say about that.
Back to the dog.
With the introduction of the rescue pup Oatchi, levels are now designed with his abilities in-mind, like jumping, traveling through tunnels, and being able to carry Pikmin on his back while traversing through water, an obstacle previously reserved to blue Pikmin exclusively. He also doubles as a second captain who can command and lead Pikmin, just like the player character. You’re given the option (repeatedly encouraged) to give your pup various upgrades to make him stronger, whether it be to deal more damage, carry heavier objects, swim faster, etc., which obviously makes the game easier. However, riding on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin entirely removes a key weakness of your ant-carrot army of the previous games:
Your hurtbox has now been concentrated to the back of a responsive and easily-maneuverable puppy dog.
I’m torn on this mechanically. On one hand, by the nature of all of your Pikmin being focused on a single spot, you now risk losing a greater number of Pikmin at once to single strikes. I know this because a boss creature stepped on me and Oatchi and I lost most of my troops. No, I don’t want to talk about it.
On the other hand, due to the way Oatchi’s tackle ability works, taking down most of the larger, higher-health enemies is now a linear experience. You hop on Oatchi’s back with your Pikmin, you charge your tackle, you land the tackle, your Pikmin hop off of Oatchi and onto the enemy, the enemy’s health depletes almost instantly.
A game doesn’t have to conform to the rules of any particular genre, but taking an engaging element of strategy out of a “Real-Time Strategy” game rubs me the wrong way.
I don’t actually hate the Oatchi-specific puzzles that come up on occasion. I like the little fella’s design. I think he’s goofy, especially when he makes the little whwhwhwhwhwhw noise with his whistle. But my problems with him get emphasized specifically in the context of the Engulfed Castle.
The Engulfed Castle is, in short, an excellent reference to the Submerged Castle from Pikmin 2, what I feel to be the most memorable and interesting cave in that game. It’s the only cave with a distinct restriction on the type of Pikmin you’re allowed to bring with you, as it is completely surrounded by water. A rule of Pikmin 2 is that you’re only able to enter a cave with the Pikmin directly in your squad, which means you can only bring blue Pikmin into this cave. The Engulfed Castle of Pikmin 4 is surrounded by water as well, but Pikmin 4 does not have this restriction on caves, so Nintendo decided to circumvent this by simply not allowing you to bring any other Pikmin type into the cave when selecting which Pikmin to join you. This cave functions just like any other, with long dark passages for you to explore and collect treasure, except your squad doesn’t have resistance to hazardous elements like fire, poison, and electricity. This means that you need to tread carefully in navigating obstacles to defeat enemies and get to the treasure. However, after about 5 minutes have passed on a sublevel, this steamroller-lookin’-guy shows up and starts meandering around the place, squishing everything in its way. Your blue Pikmin cannot hurt it.
The danger of the Waterwraith comes from the task of needing to carefully bring treasure back to your base coupled with how large, slow, and vulnerable your army is when spread out.
Oatchi lets your squad avoid the Waterwraith completely by carrying you and your Pikmin on its back.
You can just walk right past it. What’s it going to do? Turn slightly to the right? I’m already at the exit with all the treasure collected, you Flubber-lookin’ freak.
In Oatchi’s defense, it’s not entirely his fault. Nintendo also made Pikmin faster, so there’s not really any risk of them being left behind if you call them with your whistle (which is also the best it’s ever been) and try to make a break for it.
I will give Nintendo credit though, because they replicated the layout of the original sublevel floors from Pikmin 2. That was a very cool thing to realize while I was comfortably walking away from the steamroller.
Additionally, Pikmin 4 is so extraordinarily liberal in the sheer number of resources it gives you that I actively stopped giving a shit about Pikmin deaths. This is coming from someone who would hit restart on my GameCube every time a Pikmin died on my first playthrough of Pikmin 2. I’m sitting here with unused bombs, electricity, mines, and 56 Ultra-Spicy Sprays that I don’t even remember getting, and the game has the audacity to remind me that I can always rewind the clock if I feel bad about losing a single Pikmin. Relax, game. I have 400 other ice Pikmin sitting in reserve. It’s gonna be fine.
Granted, Pikmin 3 offered this via day-selection, but it wasn’t in-your-face about it the way in which 4 does it.
I don’t think a game being easier is necessarily a bad thing, but it feels a little wack to me when it’s a Pikmin game specifically, especially the way it was done with this one. I don’t need a bunch of items to figure out how to clear a level. My amorphous controllable blob of little guys can handle this.
Now, I need to address the Rescue Corp. itself. I don’t mind a world of characters that talk and have personalities. Hell, EarthBound is my favorite video game ever because of exactly this. However, what I do mind is a world that doesn’t know how to shut the fuck up.
These characters do not allow for any sense of mystery or wonder while it happens to you, the player, directly. “It sure is good we have the Pikmin with us!” No shit, we’re like three inches tall. You don’t need to have a message pop up that says “wow golly gosh gee you sure just lost 30 Pikmin to a rock-spider death explosion, it sure would be great to rewind time right about now” because you’re fucking experiencing it right there right in front of you. You’re having fun and making video game memories, and Collin or Shepherd has the audacity to say “this thing is happening and you need to do this right now immediately” like I didn’t learn to blow the whistle when my Pikmin were on fire FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.
Why is the game backseat-gaming? Give me the fucking wheel and let me experience the consequences of my actions. For fuck’s sake.
It can be helpful on extremely rare occasions to have some kind of popup notification about something happening off-screen, given the nature of an RTS game, especially for new players. But as someone who figured out fairly quickly to actively pay attention to and notice the only numbers on your screen available at all times worth monitoring (Pikmin population), being told that my squad I sent on a faraway mission is under attack actively spoils the surprise. With Nintendo offering no option to reduce the frequency or turn it off completely, they might as well just said “fuck you” to me personally instead.
The only surprise to be found here is in my own consistent expectations of Nintendo.
Speaking of lacking any sense of mystery and wonder, a mechanic I was surprisingly very excited for in this entry was actually a limitation; you are only allowed to have three types of Pikmin out on the field or in a cave at any given time. This had the potential to be cool in-concept, because it could have meant you’d need to pick and choose different Pikmin types for different needs throughout various obstacles you encounter throughout your time spent in different huge locations.
Nope. The game YET AGAIN removes any player responsibility for decision-making. Just press the X button. The game will give you recommended types. You’ll be fine. No thoughts required. Go grab yourself a snack.
Can’t quite hit that one creature? Lock-on button. Charge. With Oatchi. It’s probably dead now.
Great.
The lock-on feature is awful and I hate it. I’ll take the free-form movement of an entire army controlled by the right stick and the ability to aim freely over an auto-snapping lock-on and charge button any day.
Biggs_hoson comments in their review that Pikmin 4 feels like “just playing more Pikmin™”, and when it boils down to it, I think that’s ultimately my biggest problem with the game. It’s still “Pikmin™”, but in a lot of ways it’s been homogenized to taste a little more like your average video game and less like the Weirdo Shit™ I’d fallen in love with through the first two games; games I find myself gravitating more and more towards as I play more video games.
Nintendo took the formula from their previous games, created an interesting world to explore and appreciate, and then slapped all of the tools they possibly could together to make it conducive to blazing through said world as fast as you possibly can.
My body is a machine that turns unexplored natural habitats into Platinum-Medal Cleared Dandori Challenges™.
I’m conflicted, because the first two Pikmin games are pretty niche and I understand completely why Nintendo would make the choices they did with 4. Pikmin 1 was ambitious and weird, and I respect it tremendously, significantly more than I actually enjoy playing it, which could be argued is the entire point of it. Pikmin 2 is my perfect jank-sandwich full of bullshit and weird eccentricities, and one of the few games I’ve given genuine thought about speedrunning. Pikmin 3 simplified the controls and toned down the difficulty in order to make it more approachable, shifting focus to a Pikmin 1-esque gameplay style of “do things as efficiently and quickly as possible,” all at the expense of making it an overall more shallow experience, and Pikmin 4 went further by tuning up the “dandori” focus and then adding a thousand safety nets. There are challenges in the later part of the game to be sure, but the ones requiring actual honest-to-goodness creative thinking are few and far-between. I’ve been seeing a lot of people saying it “takes elements from all of the other ones to make it the best one” and I just don’t see it. It’s the most sterilized and homogenized in the series for sure.
It’s still a good game overall though. After how short Pikmin 3 felt back on the WiiU, I welcome the clever design tricks Nintendo used to pad out the Story Mode and make it longer, e.g. Pikmin 3’s Mission Mode now existing in the form of mini-caves where you rescue leaflings by completing a Dandori Challenge. I feel it to be way too hand-holdy for my tastes, but I want to stress more than anything that I still like this game and I feel it to be an overall strong entry in the series. The time I’ve been putting aside to play Pikmin 4 has been enjoyable, and I’m incredibly happy for the reception it’s getting, as Pikmin is a series that absolutely deserves it. The levels are great, the controls are great, the caves are great, and the overall design of the game itself is fun and works well. But it’s too sleepy for what I was hoping for.
You’re not gonna get unexpectedly carpet-bombed or jumpscared by a Bulbear just for carrying a rubber ducky out of a cave. In my eyes, for some reason, this is a negative.
In the end, I guess I just wish Nintendo would say “fuck you” to me through its level design instead of its endless tutorials.
Just give me a “silent Collin” mode and let me explore the wilderness in peace.
I bet I’d feel differently about all this if this was my first Pikmin game.
It’s not.
2001
I think we should all collectively agree that birds should not be allowed to operate heavy machinery.
2021
It says so much about gamers when the overwhelmingly consistent sentiment of Vampire Survivors is "This game wastes a tremendous amount of my time. Super addictive. Cannot put this down. I miss my wife. You can play as the doggo. 4-stars, exceedingly solid."
I hate playing this, but I respect what it's going for a lot.
I got filtered by the upward tunnel section with the lamps, but up until that point (it was only a couple of minutes) I found it to be a genuinely enjoyable experience. I looked up a playthrough and found one with Tim Rogers and Bennett Foddy himself, where Rogers describes it as, for the most part, a meditative experience. I get it.
Foddy's commentary is insightful and important, interspersed throughout slowly learning the physics of this physics-based game. I genuinely believe that if I were to get past this "casual-filter" tunnel part that I would like the rest of the game. That said, unlike the Shin Megami Tensei casual-filters I've dealt with, I'm not interested in this one. If I want to have a meditative experience, I'll meditate. Meditation rules.
More than anything, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy just reminds me of how little mouse space I have.
Almost knocked over my drink.
I got filtered by the upward tunnel section with the lamps, but up until that point (it was only a couple of minutes) I found it to be a genuinely enjoyable experience. I looked up a playthrough and found one with Tim Rogers and Bennett Foddy himself, where Rogers describes it as, for the most part, a meditative experience. I get it.
Foddy's commentary is insightful and important, interspersed throughout slowly learning the physics of this physics-based game. I genuinely believe that if I were to get past this "casual-filter" tunnel part that I would like the rest of the game. That said, unlike the Shin Megami Tensei casual-filters I've dealt with, I'm not interested in this one. If I want to have a meditative experience, I'll meditate. Meditation rules.
More than anything, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy just reminds me of how little mouse space I have.
Almost knocked over my drink.
1983
If I witnessed an actual human being eat anything the way Charley Chuck eats an ice cream cone I would call the authorities immediately.
Cute game though.
Cute game though.
2023
I'm not a game developer, so I don't have as strong of a perspective on the process behind game creation as a developer would. I learned very quickly that the development process is much more work than fun, and that the expectations on developers to "just make a good game" are grueling, not even scratching the surface of deadlines and crunch culture that have permeated video games today, so I decided somewhere in my teenage years to just play games as a hobby. That said, I will always appreciate any insight into the behind-the-scenes aspect of game creation.
Another Pokémon Game rules. God I love this.
It's an excellent presentation and reflection on the expectations of game creators, developers, and consumers, from the outside and inside, with a specific focus on common sentiment and criticism of Game Freak as a whole.
I've complained about Pokémon a bunch before, and I try to stay as level-headed as I can (and fail) regarding criticisms of the latest Pokémon games, having played almost all of them since Red and Blue were released in North America, but tackling Pokémon as a whole is always a daunting challenge. Despite my consistent disappointment with the newer releases, it's still a series close to my heart and I can't in good faith point my finger and just blanket-statement say "this sucks because of this reason." It's complicated, and game development is complicated, and a commercial success like Pokémon having the particular problems that we're becoming increasingly more aware of is messy.
Play this if you care about Pokémon.
I promise it isn't just Another Pokémon Game.
Another Pokémon Game rules. God I love this.
It's an excellent presentation and reflection on the expectations of game creators, developers, and consumers, from the outside and inside, with a specific focus on common sentiment and criticism of Game Freak as a whole.
I've complained about Pokémon a bunch before, and I try to stay as level-headed as I can (and fail) regarding criticisms of the latest Pokémon games, having played almost all of them since Red and Blue were released in North America, but tackling Pokémon as a whole is always a daunting challenge. Despite my consistent disappointment with the newer releases, it's still a series close to my heart and I can't in good faith point my finger and just blanket-statement say "this sucks because of this reason." It's complicated, and game development is complicated, and a commercial success like Pokémon having the particular problems that we're becoming increasingly more aware of is messy.
Play this if you care about Pokémon.
I promise it isn't just Another Pokémon Game.
2021
Every once in a while a game comes out that is so special that it makes you wish you were playing Animal Crossing for the GameCube again instead.
2023
Acknowledging Sonic Adventure 2-style chao within the first hour of the game automatically makes this a great game.
The writing and characterization in this is charming as all hell, and the game itself was an incredibly fun April Fools release, but I was obsessed with those droplet-headed fucks for a solid three years of my childhood so I'm legally not allowed to dislike this game sorry
Also this is the best advertisement for Super Monkey Ball that I've ever played.
The writing and characterization in this is charming as all hell, and the game itself was an incredibly fun April Fools release, but I was obsessed with those droplet-headed fucks for a solid three years of my childhood so I'm legally not allowed to dislike this game sorry
Also this is the best advertisement for Super Monkey Ball that I've ever played.
Here we see the majestic elephant in its natural habitat, doing what the elephant is best known for:
Jumping and exclaiming "wowie-zowie".
Jumping and exclaiming "wowie-zowie".
2003
None of this would have happened if Fuminori simply owned an air fryer.
2023
Me: "So the gnorps have to hit this rock over and over to collect shards from it, so they can hit the rock with stronger stuff to get more shards. It's a clicker game. It's cute though, I actually like this one!"
My partner: "...Steven, is your computer mining bitcoin right now?"
My partner: "...Steven, is your computer mining bitcoin right now?"
2023
I LOVE COINFLIPS
I WANT TO MAKE OVERLY CONFIDENT GUESSES IN 50/50 SCENARIOS RESULTING IN MY VICTORY BEFORE MY OPPONENT GETS TO UTILIZE THEIR PLETHORA OF OPTIONS wait this is just how I play fighting games. This is a fighting game.
I WANT TO MAKE OVERLY CONFIDENT GUESSES IN 50/50 SCENARIOS RESULTING IN MY VICTORY BEFORE MY OPPONENT GETS TO UTILIZE THEIR PLETHORA OF OPTIONS wait this is just how I play fighting games. This is a fighting game.
no I don't
1990
This is the most biased rating I've ever given.
When I was three my parents decided it would be a good idea to buy a GameBoy for me for Christmas in a bundle pack with two games, Tetris Attack and, my first video game ever, Super Mario Land. I'm pretty sure they got it in a bundle pack or something, but the only image of a silver GameBoy Pocket with either of those games I could find was this one, which only had Super Mario Land in it, so I'm pretty sure my parents bought Tetris Attack separately, knowing basically nothing about video games and noticing that it said "Nintendo" on it and that the box art was colorful. A few month later, they noticed that I wouldn't shut up about Catrap, a game I had been playing at my babysitter Judy's house, the same babysitter who introduced me to the GameBoy in the first place, albeit on the original big clunker brick GameBoy instead of the Pocket I would eventually get. I was really into the cartridge art of the 3D digital-looking environment with the anime-esque art of the characters being something I had not been exposed to yet, and the game itself being a puzzle game but also a side-scroller where you climb ladders and pushed blocks was all a three-year-old me needed to think it was cool. One day after coming home from Judy's I was gifted with, you guessed it, Catrap. Catrap is fine.
My point is that my parents made a gigantic mistake and I love them for it.
Balloon Kid fills me with the same kind of feeling that I get when thinking about why I love some other GameBoy games, despite the clear age on the games and hardware itself. It's a clunky experience with a poor framerate, consisting of auto-scroll levels where you have to dodge obstacles to eventually get to a boss at the end, containing a few catchy tunes that play on the Balloon Fight leitmotif a la pretty much every Mario game released after Super Mario World. The game itself isn't gonna blow anyone's mind or anything, but it's impossible for me not to love something that represents such a specific part of video games so close and dear to my heart.
As it turns out, all I need in a video game is simple enough gameplay with good music from the GameBoy sound chip.
Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. I love you.
When I was three my parents decided it would be a good idea to buy a GameBoy for me for Christmas in a bundle pack with two games, Tetris Attack and, my first video game ever, Super Mario Land. I'm pretty sure they got it in a bundle pack or something, but the only image of a silver GameBoy Pocket with either of those games I could find was this one, which only had Super Mario Land in it, so I'm pretty sure my parents bought Tetris Attack separately, knowing basically nothing about video games and noticing that it said "Nintendo" on it and that the box art was colorful. A few month later, they noticed that I wouldn't shut up about Catrap, a game I had been playing at my babysitter Judy's house, the same babysitter who introduced me to the GameBoy in the first place, albeit on the original big clunker brick GameBoy instead of the Pocket I would eventually get. I was really into the cartridge art of the 3D digital-looking environment with the anime-esque art of the characters being something I had not been exposed to yet, and the game itself being a puzzle game but also a side-scroller where you climb ladders and pushed blocks was all a three-year-old me needed to think it was cool. One day after coming home from Judy's I was gifted with, you guessed it, Catrap. Catrap is fine.
My point is that my parents made a gigantic mistake and I love them for it.
Balloon Kid fills me with the same kind of feeling that I get when thinking about why I love some other GameBoy games, despite the clear age on the games and hardware itself. It's a clunky experience with a poor framerate, consisting of auto-scroll levels where you have to dodge obstacles to eventually get to a boss at the end, containing a few catchy tunes that play on the Balloon Fight leitmotif a la pretty much every Mario game released after Super Mario World. The game itself isn't gonna blow anyone's mind or anything, but it's impossible for me not to love something that represents such a specific part of video games so close and dear to my heart.
As it turns out, all I need in a video game is simple enough gameplay with good music from the GameBoy sound chip.
Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. I love you.