Sea of Thieves had, from what I can remember, a pretty rocky launch and subsequent couple years. However, Rare has really committed themselves to making one of the best pirate sim/roleplay games that you can find, period, and I think they've delivered on that promise pretty fantastically.

Sea of Thieves is not the type of game where you work towards some greater RPG style progression. In fact, it has almost no RPG style systems at all. The character you start out playing will be, strength and ability wise, the exact same character you'll be playing 40 hours in.

Where the game really shines is in giving you a space to roleplay a pirate, all the while gathering gold and reputation within the game's various factions. These factions give you access to cosmetics, which further allow you to roleplay and look like the character you have in mind. Cosmetic improvement is really the main thing that you're working towards in terms of progression in Sea of Thieves, but I wouldn't really say that's the game's main draw.

The real fun of the game though, is understanding it and building the skill required to truly make it on the high seas. Whether that means being able to read maps to find treasure, solve riddles and follow clues to secret crypts full of chests, maintain and pilot your ship while fighting skeleton ships (or even other players), and become the skillfully cutthroat pirate that only this game can make you feel like. While there is no real "progression" in terms of statistics or equipment, the true progression just comes from gathering the skill to fully realize this fantasy.

This fantasy is built up with a pretty awesome sailing simulation, in which you have to manually raise your ship's sails, aim them in the correct direction, steer according to a map and compass, load your own cannons, repair holes in the hull and remove water from the ship when you get damaged, things like that. I'm pretty hesitant to play "sim" type games usually, but Sea of Thieves makes all of it's mechanics pretty easy to understand and follow, while still making you do it all yourself. It never feels like a chore, because every aspect of it is so polished, easy to understand, and just plain fun that I have still not gotten tired of it.

There is a LOT of content in this game, with a solid mix between mostly single player "style" missions (all areas are still open to trespassers and PVP enabled, so watch out!), and random world events that are constantly rotating and keeping everything fresh. Even if you don't get into ANY of that content, it's just fun to sail around and interact with players. Of course, "interact" here means being ready to blow holes in the side of someone's ship and take all of their precious loot, if you so desire. And of course, defending your own haul from would-be attackers. And if you don't like to do ANY OF THAT, there are still tons of random things that can happen on any random island, so go exploring for the hell of it! You'll more than likely come across something worth looking into, or more likely, taking for your own.

All in all, Sea of Thieves is an absolutely wonderful game with a lot of really fun scripted content, a seemingly infinite skill ceiling where mastering the game's systems are key to becoming a pirate legend, and a myriad of things to do out on the open seas that are rotating in and out and always giving you a new challenge.

If you like multiplayer games with a blend of PVP and PVE, really enjoy games that freely encourage raiding and intense encounters with people, or just want to explore a wonderfully interesting world with a few friends, give this one a try! You can play it through Xbox Game Pass for PC, which makes it pretty inexpensive to try out.

Dress yourself up like a swashbuckler, grab your hurdy gurdy and a few cannonballs, and set sail!

I think it should say something that this is the only Monster Hunter that has grabbed my attention long enough for me to take it all the way to late game, high rank quests. I fucking love this game, and I think what it does differently than World or any of the other MH games before it is what sets it apart and makes it way more interesting and replayable. I've played a good bit of World, and a good bit of Generations Ultimate, but neither grabbed my interest for as long as this one has.

If you've never played a Monster Hunter before, start with this one. It's absolutely fantastic. Just stop reading and go buy it, find some friends to play hub quests with, and have a blast.

However, if you've never played a Monster Hunter and want more motivation, let me give you this.

At the risk of sounding like a total loser, I've often described Monster Hunter as if you were playing a game like Dark Souls. Both games have a very particular combat system that focuses on intent, knowing your moves ahead of time and understanding your weapon in order to get the most out of it's particular playstyle. And of course, in my opinion, the stars of any good From Software title are the bosses. Often huge, hulking things that dwarf you both in size, and in power. Things that will eat you for fucking breakfast if they get the chance. Now, imagine a Dark Souls boss that has it's own little mini open world to roam around in. It has habits. It likes to patrol certain places, and sleep in certain places, because it's a living, breathing creature that lives out in the forest.

And it's your job to hunt it down, learn it's moveset, understand everything that it can do, and use your very intent-based combat system playstyle to kill it, in it's natural habitat. Clawing for every inch it can get as you slowly chip away at it's stamina.

This isn't a boss encounter you stumbled into, or an enemy that the game sticks you in a room and wants you to learn before moving on.

This is a thing that you have to go find, and watch, and understand. And when you put all of your knowledge together, gather the right equipment (whether that means buying things from the shop, or crafting things in the middle of a fight with endemic life and materials you find in the world), and physically wrestle this thing into submission?

It's a feeling like no other.

It's hard for me to give Yume Nikki a review score higher than a 3. If we were to split the 5 star rating in half, then a 2.5 would be a perfectly neutral stance on a video game. Anything higher than that means I'm leaning positive, and anything lower than that means I'm leaning negative.

That's why I'm giving it a 3. I'm leaning positive towards this game, but it's hard for me to even really say that much about it, other than the fact that... Yume Nikki isn't really something you play. It's something that you experience, and that sort of thing just isn't for everyone. It's not really for me, honestly.

Regardless, Yume Nikki is an incredibly interesting game where you explore a series of levels that the main character, Madotsuki, is experiencing while she sleeps. There are objectives in the form of "effects" that the player will find, which give Madotsuki new abilities and sometimes change how she interacts with the dream world at large. Finding all of these effects, scattered across the various levels, is both the point of the game, and also not the point at all. It's much more a personal, explorative, and contemplative experience than it is something that's supposed to mean one specific thing or relate back to the main character in a specific way. There is a loose set of ideas that tie Yume Nikki together if you care to go looking for them, but for the most part, it is an exercise in giving the player a sense of being lost in an unfamiliar world that doesn't make sense.

This feeling is, sometimes, enjoyable and lighthearted. And sometimes, it's very scary and oppressive. Depending on what dream world you explore, you can have radically different experiences, but most of the levels are just seemingly designed to lead you around endlessly and trap you in it's particular ambiance.

Although I can recognize that these things are worthwhile, and something that I think a lot of people will enjoy experiencing, I just can't say that this game is for me. It just doesn't scratch my brain in the same way that other games do. But, again, that doesn't make it any less worth experiencing. You should just know what you're getting into ahead of time, which is a contemplative and explorative experience set in a world that seems like it's built on dream logic. And, that's because it is.

If that's your jam, give this game a try!

PaRappa 1 suffers from a lot of PS1 jank.

Sure, the music is FANTASTIC, but the hit registration is iffy at best, and I feel that getting this right is an extremely important aspect of any rhythm game worth it's salt. People will praise PaRappa 1 while totally overlooking the fact that most of the mapping is an absolute MESS. I am fully, wholly convinced that people who played the PS1 version of PaRappa and consider it better than this game have never kept a beat or experienced the flow of a good rhythm in their life.

BUT IT GETS BETTER, because PaRappa 2 isn't just good because it's better than PaRappa 1. It's just a fucking GOOD GAME.

Firstly, a rhythm game lives and dies by it's soundtrack, and PaRappa 2 is coming out swinging. FANTASTIC tracks like Romantic Love, Big, and Hair Scare kept me coming back and replaying the game over and over again.

And there's a lot of game to play! While the game may only feature a handful of songs (7 if I'm counting correctly), where this game really shines is in how it handles it's difficulty and mapping.

In PaRappa 2, you will be squaring off against a teacher of some sort, who will give you a phrase of notes that you will then have to repeat back to them. Very simple gameplay in this regard. HOWEVER, it's where PaRappa 2 does this differently that makes it shine.

PaRappa 2 has a freestyle system.

All of the teachers that you will be facing over the course of the game have a signature style. This influences the kind of lines they will give you, and what types of rhythms those lines will embody. You, as the player, can repeat these lines back like the game tells you to. And, that's a perfectly serviceable way to play the game. But if you want more, and you want to take the extra step to become a COOL GUY, you can make up beats on the fly.

You just DON'T FOLLOW THE MAP AT ALL. And, if the rhythms you produce make sense within the song and the teacher digs it according to their style, the game takes it as a win for that line! Most of the fun of playing PaRappa 2 is figuring out how much you can get away with freestyling in any particular song, turning what was a simple back and forth rhythm game into a brilliantly dynamic and ever changing system of augmenting and recreating the music that you're hearing, LIVE, where no two playthroughs will turn out the same way by nature of how you like to freestyle.

And the difficulty settings are to die for. PaRappa has 17 fucking different difficulty levels. After you go through a "cycle" (or, completing every song on a certain difficulty), you will be leveled up to the next difficulty. This changes the mapping of all the songs in the game from that point forward, which just unlocks new rhythm ideas for you to freestyle against, trying to get the most out of your line and still make it sound as funky and fresh as possible.

AND THEN THERE'S MULTIPLAYER. It's a two player gamemode where one person will receive a line that they will have to repeat. The goal is to freestyle over your opponent's line, and if the game likes it, that becomes the new line that the other player will then have to match, or augment, hoping to score more points and force the other person into a rhythm that they can't complete. It's INCREDIBLE fun, and will VERY QUICKLY expose who out of your friends have rhythm and who doesn't.

GO PLAY THIS GAME. If you like rhythm games and are interested in trying something different, you should give this a play. It is very much in the shadow of it's first entry, and the rerelease of that entry, but it is just as worth playing as that is, maybe even more so.

This game shits on everything that Bioshock accomplishes. In terms of it being a video game that's placed within the Bioshock series, it sits as a total mess and misinterpretation of everything that the original wanted to do. Nothing about this game's spirit or ideology meshes with what players should expect from a Bioshock game. It is a failure on all parts Bioshock, made worse by it's insistence on it's shitty "both sides are bad" ideology. What makes it worse is that the centrist ideology is largely associated with libertarianism, which is exactly what the first game in the series is intended to critique. It came out in a time where this mindset was both unappreciated and insulting, and that hasn't changed in 8 years.

From a gameplay perspective, it's... Fine. It is a game that I can sit down in front of, use Bucking Bronco on a group of enemies, shotgun them out of the air, go "nice, that was cool", and then move on. Some parts shine and are genuinely pretty fun, and if you play this game on it's own apart from it's place in the series, it's enjoyable in it's own right just for some decent gunplay. This reason alone is why I have played the game more than once.

The sci-fi weird plot twist story kind of sucks, but it's mildly enjoyable just to see it unravel.

All in all, it's a mediocre game that's sort of turned into a sinful one by taking a fat fucking dump on the legacy of Bioshock and other immersive sims as a whole.

Nintendo managed to make an open world game that's almost indefinitely fun to explore, gives constant rewards through bite sized vertical slices of great dungeon design with the Shrines, kept the incredible "puzzle box" style dungeons in the form of the Divine Beasts, and actually wrote a story that I gave a shit about that didn't feel like the typical Zelda story that I've been fed through every single entry.

I think the best part of this game, however, is just how it's been designed to give every person a unique gameplay experience. If you're a fan of open ended design concepts and emergent gameplay, this game is FULL of it, allowing the player to accomplish almost anything in an extremely personal, free form manner. If you were ever frustrated with linear dungeons full of one off solutions that challenged your ability to read a walkthrough more than it did your creativity and problem solving, you will enjoy what this game has to offer. Almost everything in the game has been made to interact with everything else, whether that be through an intuitive element system, or through physics objects, which most things in the game can be turned into.

This was everything I wanted from a Zelda title, and more. I genuinely think that this is the best Zelda game ever made.