"Are you telling me I can play the Marble Blast demo and use Blades for 10$ new!?" - Me, four months ago.

Whatever brain disease I've got has progressed to the point where I'm nostalgic for a specific video game console GUI, and unfortunately there's just no coming back from that. They're going to put me down tomorrow. My caretakers are letting me eat chocolate because it's my last day on Earth.

Alright, alright, my reason for owning this is actually a bit more embarrassing. I wanted to buy that Sonic tennis game and saw there was a two-in-one. I like tennis games! So what! You got a problem with that? You wanna say something about how I spend my money? It was cheap and it was new, and I've arguably done worse things. I got drunk recently and bought a brand-new copy of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and that doesn't even come bundled with XBLA Uno.

This compilation disc is actually pretty neat, though. As mentioned, its interface is designed after Blades, the Xbox 360's launch GUI which was significantly more navigable Metro, and an incalculable degree better than the Xbox One's horrible Windows 8 launch interface. It also comes with the Xbox 360 launch video, which left me feeling quite nostalgic, and video previews for Viva Pinata and Shrek the Third. That's right, we got Shrek, he's on the disc, and there's even a demo for Surf's Up! We feastin'...

The main attraction is the five full Xbox Live Arcade games, which includes Boom Boom Rocket, Feeding Frenzy, Luxor 2, Pac-Man Championship Edition, and Uno. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but to briefly touch on each:

Boom Boom Rocket: A rhythm game where you time button presses to techno remixes of royalty free songs like Flight of the Bumblebee and Ode to Toy. The main gimmick here is that successful button presses cause fireworks to pop off. That's it. It's kind of dull and it seems like the timing is a bit off-beat, but I've mentioned before that I have no sense of rhythm, so this is maybe on me.

Feeding Frenzy: The best game I never played on Candystand dot com instead of doing classwork.

Luxor 2: I played this one the most. Weirdly addictive. I once lost a hundred dollars at the Luxor because I didn't know how to play blackjack. Ace is both a one AND an eleven!? The dealer looked at me the whole entire time like I was insane.

Pac-Man Championship Edition: I prefer DX, but this is pretty good! However, trying to navigate Pac-Man with an analog stick feels pretty bad and the Xbox 360's garbage D-pad is somehow worse.

Uno: This is a really good Uno game, but since I can no longer play it online, it's really missing something. I still had a great time playing against the AI, though.

There's also a few demos but most are nothing to write home about. There's one for Frogger, but it scales horribly, almost to the point of being unreadable, the aforementioned Surf's Up is ok, and I messed around in Viva Pinata for about a minute since I have the full game on my shelf. But Marble Blast... Man. Now that's a video game. It's too bad it's been delisted. Criminal, even. Preservation is incredibly important, and there's value in keeping games - and even old GUI's! - around, even if a scarce few want to access them. But the thing is, people actually want to play Marble Blast. We ARE the silent majority. Rise up, Marble-heads!

I love old demo discs and compilations. At the time, they were invaluable for filtering out which games you did and did not want to buy, and I find them worthwhile today as time capsules. You can also find this one for dirt cheap and I think it's worth the few bucks for the novelty alone. I feel weird rating this given what it is, so I'm not going to do that, but I did have a good time messing around with a lot of the content here and it was nice to relive the glory days of Blades.

Honestly I don't even care all that much that this game came out in a buggy, rushed mess and my game crashed I think twice while playing. It's a fine Pokemon experience and a decent enough first attempt at a fully open world Pokemon game. I just felt a lot of what I personally enjoy from Pokmeon got hurt in the process of going open world.

For example, I feel like I'm sort of alone in actually enjoying the story in most Pokemon games. They're not groundbreaking classic tales that I'll share with future generations, but they're enjoyable with a usually good cast of characters. Here, though, the story feels fractured and not much of it feels like it gets to be fleshed out cause they wanted all the focus to be on the open world. Nemona is pretty much the only character I enjoyed in the game and that's just cause she acts like a basic Shonen anime protagonist. However, her path (that is to say the Victory Road story route) doesn't really have you doing much with her. You just fight the gyms and occasionally she shows up for a battle. I love the concept of her story (someone who's been so strong that they bounce at the chance of finding someone who might be on equal footing to them, if not stronger), but so little is done with that until like the very end of her story path. I wanted to get to know more about her as a person or fight others with her, but you don't get to do that till near the end of the game after all 3 paths are finished.

Speaking of the other paths, they're not much better. Starfall Street has you going around and doing the very repetitive task of finding a Team Star base, fighting the guard (sometimes it's someone else), then fight 30 Pokemon using the "Let's Go" command, then fight the boss. Rinse and repeat 4 more times. Team Star themselves just exhibit an issue I'm starting to notice since Sword and Shield. See, my favorite mainline Pokemon game is Sun and Moon (I'll get into that if I ever replay any gen 7 game or if they ever get remade properly) and a big reason I love those games is Team Skull. They were the first "antagonist team" (that's the best phrase I got for it) that didn't feel truly evil (mainly cause of the plot twist tha revealed who the real evil team was) and I enjoyed that. They were a group of people society rejected and they just wanted a place they could call home while being surrounded by people they could call family. In Sword and Shield, Team Yell just feels like a lesser version of Skull cause you don't spend much time with members of Team Yell and nothing happens with them story wise until you get to Spikemuth. Team Star feels like an even lesser version of that, but at least you get some story stuff after beating each boss. However, their stories basically come down to "We were bullied, then we tried to bully the bullies, we won, then we went to do our own thing". It never really becomes more than that and when you finally meet their leader, they're not much of a character. You get a kind of sad moment before you're rushed off.

Then you get Path of Legends. This story path is at least somewhat interesting. While yes it is still repetitive (you hunt down the titan with some being kind of well hidden, then weaken it, it eats some food to get stronger, then you fight the stronger version), they felt different enough to not bug me (especially the dragon titan). After you beat a titan, Arven will expand on his relationship with his Pokemon Mabosstiff. This story can get pretty sad, although I'm still conflicted with how it ends cause like I'd want it to end a certain way, but I also know Pokemon wouldn't do it that way.

With all that explaining out of the way, the main thing I wanted to get across is the three paths are repetitive with not much going on in them. This super hurt the game for me cause usually the story and characters are what keep me going. The open world is fine for what it is, but given I'm not the exploration type and just want to focus on finishing the story it felt like a letdown.

As for some other random thoughts, I don't really care for the new mechanic "Terstallize". It's fine and can make for some fun mixups or help save a Pokemon that's weak to the opponent, but for a casual playthrough it just felt tacked on. I rarely used it cause you have to find a Pokemon center after using it. It's not just once per battle like Mega Evolution, Z-Moves, and Dynamaxing (granted that one could only be done in specific spots). Instead it's once and then a Pokemon Center has to recharge it. This just sounds like a pain. Raids also weren't as fun as I found them in Sword and Shield. They tended to glitch out frequently and they just didn't feel fully thought through with all Pokemon constantly attacking. Also the lack of level scaling feels like a weird choice. It makes it feel less like "Go anywhere and do anything in any order" and more like "Yeah you technically CAN go anywhere, but we have a preset path we'd like you to do".

I do like a lot of the new Pokemon designs though and that final story segment was pretty good (even if I didn't like how the final "fight" was done). Maybe at some point I'll do the post game, but for now I'm just glad to finally be able to put this game down.

these blobs can fucking sing!

We lost something culturally when a studio that put a swarm of blobs whose mouths match the vocals in the game music gets shutdown to fund games that poorly ape Hollywood. And hollywood isn't even good in the first place!

This isn't the most fun or innovative or wild game ever made yknow. But it's a game which seeps with joy, acknowledgment of the medium, and totally whips aesthetically.

seeing the moja: oh. not sure about that.

seeing the black locoroco: c'mon guys.

hearing the black locoroco: GUYS

Trouble In Paradise retains all the good qualities of the original Viva Pinata and builds on them and adds absolutely no bad stuff in the process. All it does is add more depth, intrigue and satisfaction to the loop. Now you can capture Pinatas from Desert and Arctic regions and bring them back to your garden to satisfy their demands and add them to your garden permanently! And with Desert and Arctic Pinatas comes terrain like sand and snow, which you'll have to be mindful with placing in your garden because you wanna have some of it to satisfy the Desert and Arctic Pinatas who like it (and to attract some new Pinatas who might like it), but you also don't wanna turn off your typical normie grass-loving Pinatas! Roll with the times, hippies! Pot is ruining our youth!

The nasty stuff in Trouble In Paradise is far more problematic than it was in the original. Weeds are far more plentiful, they spawn from downed Sour Pinatas and plant themselves automatically if you don't destroy them quickly, becoming a nuisance in a variety of ways. Professor Pester is a problem in this game compared to the first, this motherfucker shows up on your doorstep so often you half expect him to start preaching the word of Jehovah. Luckily you can exploit the game pretty easily by building a fence in front of him and blocking him off your garden and possibly making him glitched and incapable of entering your garden ever again! Nice! Gotta love a good old glitch that actually improves your quality of life.

Even then, I'd argue that the more sinister aspects of Viva Pinata popping up more frequently in TiP works to the game's benefit. It makes the game more exciting, it keeps you on your toes and it's more satisfying to keep your garden in tip-top shape when you're actively having to overcome such adversity to do so. It's not like there aren't ways around these things! It's simply adding more elegant flourishes to the game's core loop.

This game has some real nice QOL improvements over the original too. Selling items to Lottie actually works now, you don't have to wait over an item you've clicked to sell for 2 seconds so the icon of her head pops up above it and you can be sure, you just push the button and you're good to go. You can set corners when digging a pond to create perfectly evened-out bodies of water, you can go straight to a Seed Bag or Fertiliser Bag from the wheel instead of having to go the shop for these items every time.

All the while, you're still getting these cute, charming animals thrown at you left and right in these adorable cutscenes, and there's a ton more added in TiP. Like, a ton more. Way more than I remembered. There's also tons more Pinata evolutions which - while still needlessly cryptic (and this would be my one real criticism of the game, that and some glitches) are pretty fuckin cool. Give your Rashberry a Cheesecake and he turns into a Warthog! Give your Doe a Fir Seed and she turns into a Moose! It's awesome just how many Pinatas feel like they have a distinct purpose now aside from just being your favourites that you wanna keep in your final garden. (This is furthered by the unblocking mechanic, where some Pinatas won't be able to enter your garden until some kind of roadblock is removed for them, which often requires you to have a certain amount of specific Pinatas in your garden to do so.)

A near-perfect sequel, one that only misses out by still being too cryptic and a bit too clearly low-budget in some places. Considering this game came out barely 2 years after the original though, it's still a really impressive effort. I think people who try and assert this game doesn't iterate enough on the original would do well to remember that. (Also there's literally a Desert and Arctic biome with brand new exclusive Pinatas that you TRAP??? Which is an entirely brand new mechanic in and of itself??? Also the original slapped so why fix what ain't broke???)

Anyway my favourite new Pinata is FLAPYAK