Four years later and I've taken the dive. Tried this out for an hour or two a few years back and it left me as cold as a Zelda game could. This frustrated and half-apologetic Albert Burneko review sums up how I felt exactly (https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/god-help-me-i-dont-like-the-new-legend-of-zelda-game-1793718635). I'll co-sign on everything he said without repeating much of it, but I'll add that it was neither the limited inventory nor the extremely breakable weapons that sapped my spirits as much as it was the combination of the two. At any rate, that was four years ago and just earlier tonight I dealt the final blow to Calamity Ganon somewhere around the 60-hour mark after logging some heavy hours on this game in the past month or two. I already break it down in memory into three distinct 20-hour sections, each with a different vibe and experience. First came the flustered and overwhelmed and underjoyed component that I've previously described and linked to above. Everything kills you, you can barely climb halfway up a tree, the entire map is black and empty - honestly it just kind of sucks! And then bit by bit you fill out the map and increase your heart count and stamina bar and fill in some map locations, and kind of suddenly you're in the middle chunk of the game, much more confident and capable and empowered to explore. You fill out the map, you're tracking eight side quests at once, you've got multiple story threads unfolding in parallel while you bang out shrine after shrine. And then there's the final third of the game, when the shrines have started drying up and every hour you spend tramping around the vast-but-shrinking Hyrule is yielding diminishing returns on both your power-ups and your enjoyment, so, sure, let's just wrap the whole thing up in short order now. There's a fourth section of the game, an overtime third of the game if you will (that I will not be playing) which would give you a chance to clean up loose ends and track down every shrine in the game. I got to 85 and opted to skip at least half a dozen more that I knew would take fifteen minutes apiece to unlock and finish. Look, at the end of the day I liked this. I almost liked it an awful lot, and it got better and more enjoyable as I went along, and even by fifteen or twenty hours in it was very easy to forget all the headaches and heartbreaks associated with the game early on. But I mean, consider what that means. It means that for fifteen or twenty hours this game is exhausting and tedious and frustrating, and that just kind of sucks. The shrines themselves, and the hunts to find them in some cases, were a true delight and easily the game's highlight. And I thought the divine beasts were fun too - mega shrines, kind of - even if I'd prefered full blown temples. I appreciated more of this game than I disliked, really! But I would much rather play a Twilight Princess or a Wind Waker, let alone an Ocarina of Time, than this big and empty open-world adventure marathon any day. Credit to Nintendo for trying something new here when they could have gone fully derivative. But fuck all that climb-preventing rain, that was dumb as hell!

I'll be vague but blunt. If you've played either of Sam Barlow's previous two games you know exactly what you're in for here - spend a few hours collecting a bunch of disjoint video clips so as to figure out "what happened." As in the previous two games, you can get as much or as little out of the characters and the clips as you want; you're entirely responsible for your own inertia and your own trajectory through the experience. There is one twist - one - which you will inevitably encounter after anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of gameplay. It's an absolute mindfuck and it recontextualizes everything about the story you've been putting together, sending you straight back to every clip you've already seen and changing the scope and vibe of the game from that point forward. I had the... misfortune, maybe?... of discovering this twist fairly early on. It sent chills straight down my spine, but finding it so quickly may have made my gameplay experience shorter and shallower. But that's the way Sam Barlow's games work. (I found the climactic clip of Telling Lies like ten minutes in and then spent five hours filling in a story I just couldn't stay interested in.) Ultimately, I love the unconventional gameplay and - again, staying vague - this is easily Barlow's most artistic game so far. I'm sure I'll be reading discussions and theories and breakdowns for years to come. Play it alone in the dark late at night by yourself and make up your own mind.

Gorgeous little Studio Ghibli-inspired JRPG that plays like a real time blend of Dragon Quest and Pokémon. I played this on the PS3 I still have hooked up and it looks astonishing ten years later. So what left me a little cold here? Standard JRPG complaints - fetch quest mechanics, repetetive battles. I just don't have all the gaming time in the world these days, and can't help but feel that forty or fifty gaming hours were better spent distributed across a variety of games. Your mileage (and free time) may vary!

In theory, I understand the appeal. There's something cathartic about organizing your clothes and your books and your liquor cabinet, and a game that consists solely of unpacking boxes and decorating rooms in increasingly large and fancy apartments and houses is probably meant to tap right into that joy-sparking feeling of tidying up. But this has to be just the dullest and most monotonous game I've played in years. I have two kids. All I do anymore is take things out of boxes and tidy up by throwing a bunch of shit in a semi-neat pile. There is no joy for me - none! - in doing a simulated version of that with an Xbox controller. You click a box. Out comes a pair of underwear. You move it to the open drawer in the closet. You put it there. You go back to the box. It's another pair of undies. Back to the drawer. Place.Back to the box. Pick up. Back to the drawer. Replace. And so on and so on. Twenty fucking pairs of panties. Six pairs of jeans. Thirty hangers. Thirty things that go on those hangers. One hundred books. Click, move, click, move. Now the kitchen. Now the bathroom! And now it's time to unpack all that same crap all over again in the next apartment. Good lord, the bore this was! But it was short and it looked pretty enough and there's the vaguest hint of a happy story subliminally told, so, not a total waste of my time!

Fairly quick but impressively immersive and complex time loop game with a couple interesting twists. I liked this better than Outer Wilds - just more my speed and style - but your mileage may vary. Knows exactly when it's run its course, too - five, six hours max? - and never feels thoroughly bogged down or repetitive, which is hard to pull off for a time loop game. Starts out small, gets much larger and deeper in scope like a good mystery ought to. Then sprinkles in just a dash of introductory morality and ethics. Just a lot to like here, really.

Really enjoyed this in a way I've never loved a roguelike before. The art, the characters, the setting, and the variety of gameplay styles and strategies kept this from growing old and stale as I kept on failing and starting over again and again and again. My big regret here is not enabling God mode sooner, an adaptive difficulty setting that increases your defensive stats by 2% each time you fail. Why did I stubbornly waste 50 escape attempts before turning this feature on? You can always turn it off later if you want the additional challenge! I could easily see myself returning to this well again and again, if only there were so many more hours in the day. Alas...

Part of my old gaming mindset I still struggle to shed is this self-inclifcted necessity to "finish" what I've started. Here's an excellent case in point - a Worms game I downloaded from Game Pass last summer because it checked the hyperspecific boxes I was looking for: local multiplayer with one controller. And as far as Worms games go, it was absolutely fine. It was everything I remember Worms to be, plus or minus a couple of weapons. And that's a very good reason why there's no need whatsoever for me to spend hours blowing my way through whatever semblance of a campaign mode it had. There's no story here, it's just... Worms. I scratched the itch already when I played a couple rounds with my sister last summer. That can be fine! That can be my entire experience with a downloadable video game. The more time I spend here the less I can explore other, better games on my backlog. Still coming to grips with this. Bear with me, fam!

Haven't played a new release sports game in fifteen years or so, and when this longtime Sony exclusive was made available on Xbox, on Game Pass, on day one, I knew I'd take the plunge. The gameplay is more or less what it's always been, and the things I loved and hated came down to the menus and game modes. Huge fan of the idea of a "diamond dynasty" in which you essentially build up a fantasy team of the best possible players from years past and present. Give this old-ass millennial Frank Thomas, Alfonso Soriano, and Pedro Martinez any day. The flagship "Road to the Show" feature felt like a total slog though, just tons of time spent simulating games and churning through mundane menu text. Huge bummer that you can only have three pitches with a create-a-pitcher, and if they've fixed that via patch by now, who cares? Too little, too late. Another huge issue: the servers constantly crashing. A minor annoyance when you want to start playing a game, but an enormous pain in the ass when you've just spent an hour on a crucial win of some sort and the network shits its pants and bails, erasing your hard-earned W. Need to tear myself away from this one because the dopamine hits associated with unlocking so many players and perks and cards are enough to addict a man, but the time spent here ultimately just isn't worth it with so many other games on the table.

One of my all time faves. Beat the hell out of this thing five, six, seven times way back when, and haven't touched it in close to twenty years. Finally played the War of the Lions version for the first time - not logging it separately, sorry - and it's thankfully just "more" all around. That's good, because if this game leaves you wanting anything, it's "more." You spend thirty or forty hours training an intricately assembled party but by the end of the game you're overpowered enough to fly right through the story's conclusion. The only reward for managing to find, poach, or steal the rarest and best items in the game is the items themselves. I've done a handful of self-imposed challenges and this time opted for a "no duplicate equipment" run. Gotta keep things fresh and interesting, you know? The difficulty is still way too unbalanced with three or four insanely hard battles and a shitload of creampuffs, and the learning curve is laughably steep in 2021 - mostly because of how opaque the game is about everything - but man do I love this game and its characters and engine and story. Always have, always will.

This was quick and mostly enjoyable. Would love to see more Nintendo IP spin-offs like this today except this is exactly the kind of video game they could never make today because if they did it'd be a $5.99 smartphone app. Decent little physics puzzle game, really, and thank God for save states because the original design punts your ass all the way back to the first tee if you bogie a couple times. That said, those same save states make the whole thing a 3-hour play at most and expose just how thin and small you used to be able to make a console game if you made it hard enough. C'est la vie!