Hotshot Racing confirmed to me exactly what "rubberbanding" is in racing games.

Which is also to say, Hotshot Racing is an excellent racing game to experience incredibly aggressive levels of "rubberbanding."

A+ aesthetics though. Drifting feels good and going fast feels good. Pretty sure I got this for free somehow. Don't buy this.

My Nana used to have a physical 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe board. Growing up, I used to think it was the coolest thing ever and would ask to set it up to play every chance I got. Sometimes my uncle would play with me. It was a little clunky, but I remember loving how the plastic boards were transparent and how the rods meant to keep the boards in-place kept falling over. Usually we'd play maybe one or two games and then I'd ask to play Chinese Checkers or Super Mario Land on my then-new GameBoy Pocket.

I have nothing to say about the Atari 2600 version of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, but it was nice visiting memory lane.

I should visit my Nana. I love her. :)

Proto-Metroid!

Kinda.

...Not really.

The "two-games-in-one" idea is very cool, especially for the time. Technically three games because you can play breakout for a couple seconds in the bottom right corner of the screen right before the flying section.

I bought Defunct for the Nintendo Switch shortly after purchasing the system. This is because for the first year or so of the Switch being out the Nintendo eShop sometimes had games go on-sale for 10 cents. Sometimes 1 cent. I didn't have a gaming computer yet, so I wasn't yet used to the overwhelming library of free games readily available to me via Steam, scouring the internet, or good ol' straight-up piracy emulation. Seeing a game sell for a penny blew my mind, and it was hard to pass up, so I snagged a good handful of penny-candy shovelware. Some of it is actually good.

I bring up Defunct specifically because it plays exactly like Zineth does, with its gravity-increasing speed-boosting terrain traversal across a wide, hilly space. As a playground, it feels good to move in, but there's not much going on in terms of making it interesting.

Meanwhile, Zineth is out here putting mini-games on the right side of the screen for you to play while you're riding walls and zooming around a desert.

It's bright, colorful, and feels excellent to play. The wall-riding part is a little jank, but it more than makes up for it with its sense of style.

Don't play Defunct, it sucks. Play Zineth instead. It's cool.

Frogs used to be my younger brother's favorite animal when he was little. I'm not sure if that's still true now that we're both adults, but it probably still is because frogs rule. They're just cute lil' pals.

My partner and I have a shared sentiment of being wary of any game that markets itself as "cozy" or "wholesome" featuring frogs as a main selling point, for similar reasons expressed in Backloggd-loathed student project Tender Frog House, to the point where they made a "frog-counter" while watching the 2023 Cozy Direct and increased the number by one every time a frog appeared on-screen. It reached at least 16.

Not to knock "wholesome" games completely, there are plenty of games in the aforementioned direct such as Beastie Ball that show incredible amounts of promise, and I added plenty to my personal wishlist. I guess my point is just to be wary of frogs as a marketing-tactic.

That said, I'm a hypocrite because I would go up to bat for the Frog Detective games in a heartbeat.

Also, Froggy's Battle is fun and good. It loses points because it uses words like "boi" and "froggo" but the core game is very much there and it's better than most games I've played recently.

$2 frog fun.

Ribbit ribbit. 🐸

This is a survivors-like/bullet-heaven game where you can play as little blob fellas named things like "Spinky Winky" and "Wiggle Woogle."

My main criticism of Vampire Survivors itself is how it utilizes design trickery and effects to suck the player into playing endlessly, on top of having some of the lamest art direction imaginable. There have been an aggressive amount of copycat games as a result of its success, many I've enjoyed. None of these games are making much ground in terms of "innovation," beyond simply having cohesive art direction. There are small changes here and there, and they (usually) tone down the obvious gambling bait presented, but for the most part the formula is exactly the same every time. Watch your character do little attacks to dispense little guys, collect exp from little guys, level up, choose an upgrade to some of your abilities, repeat but more this time. It inherently feels good to do, and it's very easy to get lost in the headspace of "one more run." It's fun, but it's also only about as gratifying as grinding a character in a turn-based RPG. For this reason I hesitate to actually "recommend" any of these kinds of games without the caveat of "it's not actually very good, but it definitely works at giving out that video game dopamine drip feed."

That said, I know who I am and what I'm about.

Listen, I like the art direction and one of the playable fellas is named "Bingus Bongus." I don't know what else to tell you, it's an automatic positive score from me.

Surprisingly very good, especially for what it is! Mario Tennis on the N64 is one of my favorite sports games, and they did a great job making this one feel very similar.

The RPG story mode is very cute, but it's always very jarring seeing Mario characters alongside "normal people."

Extra points because it's very funny that Waluigi is in the base roster and Wario isn't. I have no idea if Wario is unlockable. That's fine.