You ever just like, have moments of nostalgia grief where your brain kind of latches on to whatever you were fascinated by in your childhood and never really let's go of? I go through bouts of this every now and then, maybe it's just a symptom of growing old or feeling general lack of comfort in present life. I have no idea, I'm not a philosopher, but what I do know is that Nintendogs was such a highlight of my childhood that when I ended up getting a REAL!! dog, I begged and pleaded to my mom and sisters to name him after the virtual Shiba Inu that I adopted in this game.

And no, Nintendogs does not prepare you for any actual responsibility. I was not aware of the fact that you actually needed to pick up after your dog when walking them outside. Pissing off my in-game neighbors without understanding why. In fact, I'm sure my virtual Nintendog is actually pretty starving by now since I lost the game at some point and haven't been able to check on him in years.

But, it's days like today where I really, really wish that I still had it, but it's gone. I would check in on my Shiba and toss some frisbees with him for a bit. I really wish I could watch him run through loops on the competition track while reading the funny announcer banter. Maybe abuse the hell out of the records like I used to for hours. See the light in the dog's face that'd appear whenever you shouted it's name, even though it only ever heard complete undiscernible gibberish from the DS microphone. I would emulate the game but I just don't think it would feel the same and therefore, it'll just be stowed away in the back of my brain.

Since today my childhood buddy, Scout, is no longer on this Earth, and just like Nintendogs I cannot give either anymore praise other than thanking them so much for being a light of joy during the most tumultuous time of my life. It was never the pinnacle of gameplay, or the next generation's graphics, but a capsule of time that I will forever be reminded of whenever I hear the Nintendogs walking theme, which is a bop and a half. All it ever needed to be was an escape from reality for a kid who lived through a house full of screams and anger. Now it is a nostalgic memory that I will mourn for the rest of my life.

this shit got known ape murderer clayton goin gunslinger with the dante jump, there's a guy fieri behemoth, everyone looks like they're in the middle of animorphing into bratz, and it's still one of the most holistically accomplished games square's ever made

and I don't wanna hear a bitch say they're too sophisticated for riku and the paopu fruit. I don't wanna hear you're too cool to tech the ice titan or fuck up james woods. when beast rolls up that's hype. when haley joel osment says "you're stupid" it channels the most authentic childhood frustration ever with the million dollar voice crack. I'm sorry I ever said anything about nomura's big dumb shoes. if that's what it takes to design something like this make em even bigger for all I care. make em fuckin huge. I'll visit the shoe world if I gotta

the entire postgame's an exercise in stretching and bending your toolkit into different shapes to respond to increasingly idiosyncratic scenarios. the list of strategies for sniperwilds and heated contention about which is optimal (I like firaga) would make your mind melt. it's got perfect pacing, striking presentation, a rock solid mechanical backbone, and the cutest halloween outfit. kingdom hearts kinda rules

you can hurl a big ass key at sephiroth, build your gummi ship all jacked up, slump cloud and squall simultaneously, and recant every bad thing you ever said about the combat after playing proud mode

if you set aside your terminal irony poisoning and/or castle wall cynicism for a sec you can even engage with its earnest exploration of (pre)teen emotionalism and use of familiar pop elements as archetypal shorthand to meet adolescence someplace known and understood and maybe come away with better grasp of its enduring resonance beyond the chimeric childhood vhs premise

who knows

It's Good. It takes the typical turn-based RPG language developed through the 80s and instead uses it as this vehicle to simple create juust enough dungeon-exploring friction to tell a surprisingly expansive story - a story of a party of 4 surprisingly brave people who are climbing a tower that connects multiple worlds. Multiple worlds of other peoples who don't really care about whatever truths this tower contains - they just want to live normal lives.

The heroes reach the pinnacle of 'truth' of their existence, and when faced with a doorway of what 'true existence' might be, they go 'Fuck this heavenly outer space bullshit,' and walk right back down to their town to live out their lives. Roll credits where we step through all these strange moments we just experienced - moments that were told in the fastest cutscenes imaginable, while aware that the audience likely is aware of these situations and tropes from other media and lets us fill in the blanks.

I really like how creative many screens are, and how they take advantage of the gameboy tiles so well, and convey so many space and ideas. The whole < 10 hour JRPG form seems really interesting, the way that time constraint leads to denser levels, denser everything all around.

My favorite story's thesis translated and told through the language of video games and game design. I love how it’s dedicated to creating this therapeutic experience and how it communicates that just through how it’s built. There’s so much value in immersing yourself in the unfamiliar, savoring all these little pockets of existence not just the grand or eventful. Your goal looms overhead and literally shapes the landscape you traverse, your destination is in constant reminder but choosing to engage with all these little interactions that’s where this games truly shines. Your willingness to be in the moment and enjoy these little activities despite your destination there's so much value in that and games are uniquely built for exploring player agency like this. The claire and mom phone call is cute and heartfelt and contextualizing your journey as this reluctant reprieve is something I really like. You really don’t know how valuable an experience is until you choose to take the plunge yourself and even if its not for you "its all a part of the experience" and that should be cherished.

This Dutch student project puts you in control of a little girl whose family has been summarily hanged in 18th centurty Edimburgh by witch hunters on accusations of devilry. Rescued by a kind stranger who disguised her as a boy and teaches her to survive as a street urchin, she will have to run errands for strangers, pickpocket and hide from the witch hunters hot on her tail.

Think of this short 60 minute game as a janky clone of A Plague Tale with much more basic gameplay and many of the same mechanics, like ringing bells with your slingshot to divert attention and hiding in tall grass to sneak past patrolling enemies. there are also alternate ways to complete your objectives: though nothing as creative as Deus Ex, they allow for some improvisation, rather than just doing the one thing the game expects from you.

On the presentation side, Child of Lothian can be visually impressive, despite the worst motion blur in the world, as the assets the students have produced to recreate old Scotland are very convincing, though the human models are less so.

What steals the show is the ending, which toys with your genre expectations and, while not particularly well storyboarded, comes off as genuinely unexpected and thus deserves a special mention of praise.

(Edit) - So I played a bit of this again. I would say purely historically I have to give it the 5/5 because of how much I played it in 2015, but in 2024 it doesn't really hold up. The exploration is still kind of neat but the combat / death loop is seriously slow, combat comes down to weird circle strafing around very weirdly defined hitboxes, OR, spending hours learning roll windows for attacks. It's just not at all interesting, and it's something that a Lucah-esque rewind function could alleviate (something to let you more easily practice). But that still wouldn't fix that fact that walking around in circles feels awful...

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thinking abt this from the 2014 goty event.. while i appreciate recent fromsoft to various extents, I think this is their last work to really capture my imagination, for all sorts of reasons. (Not to say that their post-DS2 games don't have great moments of their own, but that's a matter for another time). I think the main reason is DS2 feels like the the turning point for their focus more towards a very specific sort of action which interests me less overall.

Dark Souls 2 is honestly a little fucked up! But that's what makes it good. There's more levels than there should be, stuff is stitched together nonsensically..

The game keeps going on for like 10-20 hours more than you'd expect with the dragon islands world, the shrine of amana, etc... each area feels like this dense zone that the creators wanted to share, even if it didn't perfectly fit. It kind of has this texture of madness to it and theming that feel so video gamey but manage to work as a coherent and memorizable world. idk. It honestly has that energy of those sprawling wild adventure platformers (think ecco, kid chameleon, dragon slayer 4..), that feeling of 'why NOT add a sick dark green poison cave with gigantic impossible to see giants'). But it's all kept so densely knit, just wild little idea after idea.

The thing is though, when I do pick it up it feels really hard to get into. I have a lot less patience for the whole 'die and run back and slowly try again' thing since i've already done that a lot in the past. i should just make a cheese build or play with save states or something

Shoot someone and they die. But you have limited ammo. But you can pick up other people's arrows if they miss. But if you hit someone and they dodge through it, they get the arrow instead. But...
Singleplayer games are often judged on how well they're able to accomplish something like the above: taking a simple base concept and constantly twisting it to throw players off guard while still keeping the same mechanical core intact. Multiplayer games, though, are an entirely different beast- learning how to play one is almost always getting the rules explained to you, whether it be through a heavy handed tutorial or just from one of your friends. The reasoning for this is apparent, as intuitive teaching isn't really possible without some kind of linear progression, and when you can't predict the "difficulty" (skill level) of your "obstacles" (other players), there's really nothing you can do. That is, unless you're playing with a group of people who also have no prior experience with the game, which was exactly my situation with Towerfall, and it was a blast! Slowly picking up on all of the little quirks in the platforming mechanics and immediately experimenting with them in the next round, laughing or gloating during the instant replay after a crazy finish, and that one moment, at match point, where the last two survivors are using all of the tricks they've learned to to try and outwit each other. Fittingly, it's reminiscent of discovering what Jigglypuff's down-B did or that Luigi's taunt could deal damage back in the day, on a much more limited scale. There's not really any worthwhile singleplayer content, but that only speaks to how lean it is- each and every part of Towerfall is both intuitive and highly conducive towards the controlled chaos that makes for a great party game. Considering you can disable anything you might find to be BS, like the auto-handicap that happens when someone lags too far behind in score, there's a temptation to call this game perfect... but I'm able to resist it. My crusade against loading screen tips continues to grow, as too much stuff is revealed to you via popups in between rounds, and it does feel like it's missing a lot in terms of personality, which makes you realize how much heavy lifting Celeste's soundtrack would end up doing. All the stages' individual mechanics are well designed, and rotating between several layouts rather than sticking with a static one is particularly clever, but a lot of them don't really fit the theming of each individual level and so it's kind of hard to remember which one contains which gimmicks. But can you call them flaws if they don't dent your enjoyment? Loaded my Switch up with party games for a meetup with college friends and we had so much fun with this one that we didn't get to any of the others, which just about says it all. With the Smash Bros. series treading water and only feeling more and more bloated since Melee, this just might be the new go-to.

I played through the main campaign as the bad guy and the Price of Loyalty expansion. I kinda wanted to try and beat the rest of the campaigns because in some aspects this game is amazing, but at some point this goal became a torture. I have to take a LONG break from this game. I'll explain why, but first I'll try to break down what makes HoMM 2 different from the first entry in the series.

So, on the surface this seems like an improvement and expansion of everything, but with the added complexity, certain patterns emerge.

There are 2 spectra that interact with each other:
1) Army build up vs. Character progression
2) Character progression: Magician vs. Commander

These spectra are felt much stronger here than the first game because every aspect of the game was expanded with more elements. In the first game you were able to kinda do everything, whereas here until the late game you're constantly low on resources. This ends up being a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it forces you to choose a path and makes every playthrough slightly different. On the other hand, the resource scarcity simultaneously kinda chokes this system. Because it gives you many choices, but really the most effective one is still somewhere in the middle. So yeah, you can play many different ways, but you're constantly gonna be losing to your opponent unless you choose the path of balance on both spectra.

Another thing that kinda chokes this system is the ridiculous imbalance. Some units (black dragons) are just superior to everything else in the game, so it only makes sense to play as the faction with that unit. Some spells (teleportation) are too. Pretty much, if you build an army of black dragons and learn teleportation, you're unstoppable.

I want to briefly give the game its praise. The gameplay is insanely addictive because of just how good it is. You're in a constant strategic decision-making process, and the game is just complex enough not to overwhelm you. The visuals and audio are some of the most beautiful in any game ever. And by drawing from a diverse roster of fantasy creatures and environments, the world of the game ends up feeling huge in scope. In addition, with some maps taking forever to beat, each one feels like an epic adventure.

But don't try to beat this game in its entirety. It's gonna break you. It starts off normal, but becomes sadistically tough in the latter missions of each campaign. And the thing about this game is that it gives you a million chances to recuperate, rebuild an army and attempt to turn the tide. What this means in practice is that some maps will take days, if not weeks to beat. I've genuinely driven myself sick of this game. The main campaign was tolerable, which gave me a false sense of confidence. But Price of Loyalty is just fucking insane. I have no idea how one is supposed to beat it. In the last mission, the red player is running around with hundreds of bone dragons, vampires and liches per each hero and castle.

So I cheated. Summoned deathstacks of black dragons, and to my surprise still managed to lose a couple of battles. I could never get like 300 black dragons through fair means, but the enemy had 300 bone dragons per hero somehow. HOW?

Finally, the thing that drew me to give up was two bugs I encountered in that last mission. One was when I was fighting the last castle of the yellow player and he cast a duplicate spell on his mage. I killed the mage and the duplicate disappeared, but continued attacking me. It became like an invisible and invincible enemy with 0 units, I had to bail. The other bug was that the last castle of the red player was simple not attackable. I pointed the context-sensitive cursor at it and it didn't change. No matter where I clicked, my hero would simply run there and do nothing. So I just placed my hero in front of it, hoping the red player would eventually spawn a hero of his own and I'm gonna attack him (which makes it a castle attack if he's in the castle), but he never did. I will still count that as my victory, even if through cheating, but I would say the AI was cheating too.

HoMM 2 is a fantastic game with some major mechanical flaws and unfairly brutal campaigns. I'm not really removing points for the latter because I almost never play campaigns in strategy games, as they're just the same as skirmish/scenarios, with a tacked-on story and arbitrary tasks. But I think the campaigns here really helped bring out all of the game's mechanical flaws to the surface.