A fun disappointment. Let's get this out of the way; this game is much worse than Golden Sun 1 and 2. I know it and you know it. Yet I had a lot of fun with it.

A lot of the charm from previous entries is still here; music, artstyle, sound effects, the clever level design and specially the gameplay, which has been improved from the previous entries. The jump to 3d is a welcome change, all animations have been re-hauled to be flashier than ever. The flow or finding and re-equipping your party is still just as good, now improved with the weapon mastery feature, allowing you to stack multiple unleashes on one weapon.

I never really played with the class system in previous entries. While viable I never experimented outside of using mono-elemental classes. Boy was I missing out; The strongest classes in the game are available by fooling around with djinn swapping, which only improved the experience.

However, not every aspect shines. Golden Sun has never been a pillar of well written characters, but it's almost as if Camelot went out of its way to write the most bland and uninteresting characters imaginable (Sveta is cool tho). Seriously, your last party member comes in so late into the game that they barely have any dialogue whatsoever. The decision to adopt an 8-party member system, similar to The Lost Age (where your characters developed over the course of two games), feels unnecessary and hinders character development. It doesn't help also that having 8 party members is unnecessary, as this is the easiest Golden Sun so far.

Dark Dawn's weakest aspect is the plot. Many writing decisions caused detrimental effects in the gameplay. Most controversial of all was to add FOUR points of no return, all which don't truly have a good reason to be. This writing choice locks you out of summons and several much needed djinn.
Part of the setup in this game is that the Golden Sun event caused severe continental shifts throughout the world, attempting to fool the player into thinking several new towns and cultures have been around for centuries despite never being mentioned in the past. This leaves you yearning what happened to all the places and characters from past adventures, but worst of all I only met Isaac and Garet from the main old cast. I imagine they expected to explore this in future games as this one ends on a gargantuan cliff-hanger. To my infinite disappointment, it's been nearly 14 years without any news of a sequel as Camelot seems infatuated with making Mario sports games.

Despite these issues Dark Dawn is still an alright game, offering a fun entry for fans of the series

Did you know? It's well documented that first lady Hillary Clinton was an avid player of the Game Boy during her husband's presidency. However, what isn't as well documented is how she loved the handheld system so much that she bought two of them to give to George Bush and Dick Cheney before their inauguration as a symbol of goodwill among the two parties. Bush and Cheney reportedly loved Metroid II in particular so much that the game's plot about the Galactic Federation making up some bullshit about dangerous weapons and sending Samus to SR388 was what inspired the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A man. A plan. A spaceship. Some salvage.

Lethal Company is as thrilling as it is thin, leaning on the power of human socialization to do the heavy lifting in this Early Access title. The premise is simple: up to 4 people embark on a trek to one of several moons in order to visit a procedurally generated environment to collect various pieces of salvage. This salvage, of which you have strictly defined quotas and a time limit in which to fill said time limit, is then deposited to your employers. Anything left over is yours to use on items to help you in your salvage collection such as flash lights, teleports, weapons, etc.....

That's it. You do this in a loop over and over again until you lose.

What makes everything work in the game's audio production value; proximity voice chat is the only way you can communicate with your peers. Voice quality changes based on environment and distance. It makes cooperating in this salvage operation difficult; once the party separates the isolation almost immediately begins to set in. With the isolation comes danger, and with danger comes death. There's no indication to other players. Their lives continue on without you as they push towards more and more salvage. It builds a foreboding sense of horror unlike any other game I've ever played. It's far too much for me - I had to cut our session short due to genuine stress and anxiety that I experienced while exploring its empty halls. The the danger of the unknown was perhaps a bit too much for my stomach. It's very effective.

Lethal Company, with its simple premise and disinterest in explaining itself answers the question of whether a tree makes a sound as it falls if no one's around to hear it.

The answer is no.

Replayed this gem on the Switch this year and can't believe how well it holds up. It's the perfect adventure, the dream-like atmosphere creates a melancholic vibe that will never cease to make me emotional. The game also has one of the catchiest rendition of the Zelda overworld theme. The narrative is present just enough to make you feel engaged with the world, and bosses like to remind you that progressing in the adventure means slowly erasing the island from reality. Link's unavoidable awakening is a looming threat all throughout your journey in Cocolint. It is what you're working towards while dreading the moment it'll occur.

It's perfectly paced, silly and beautiful and uses its hardware limitation to the best of its capacities. The game's 8-bit soundtrack enchanted me back when I was a child and continues to do so to this day. Not the most impressive game but the dearest to my heart.

Warcraft 3 was a massive part of my childhood, hell, my life in general, and I am proud of that. Be it the memorable story campaigns, all the fucking around in melee, or at least a thousand hours spent in the editor, it's a game that has stuck with me ever since dad first showed it to me when I was barely even five. It's the whole damn reason I begged for my first PC. As a kid, it took me a while to actually find out about the World Editor, and once I did, it was fucking mind-blowing. A few years later, I found out about all the different maps, models, spells, campaigns by other people online, and I was even more awestruck. I made my own maps too, most of them sucked and were never finished, but I didn't care. I even remember once making a bot match with all the opponents named after my school bullies to vent my frustrations.
Yeah, I'm reminiscing about myself here, but I think a great game should provide either a strong and captivating world/narrative, a deep gameplay loop with hours upon hours worth of fun, or a solid amount of ways for player expression in ways the developers may not even predict. Warcraft 3 managed to excellently achieve all of the above, and has an active community even two decades after it's release. If that doesn't earn it its place as one of the greatest videogames of all time, I don't know what else can.

And with all that said, Reforged is sadly the biggest middlefinger such a game could ever receive. Almost any credit I can give to it is solely due to the fact it's on top of a fantastic game, but that too is gimped, because Reforged actually removed features that were there for ages. Extremely slow patching has somewhat fixed this, but that's no excuse.
Old Battle.net? Gone. All your ranks and levels from there? Promised to be ported over, has yet to actually happen.
Custom Campaigns? Gone, not brought back until three years later. These tend to be massive projects that can easily require up to hundreds of hours to make, and here Reforged makes them unplayable for three whole years.
Tournaments? Ranks? Ladder? Absolutely absent at launch, patched in years later.
Certain voice lines? Gone. That dryad line was too offensive, I guess. Or even better, because "Grom" is apparently a copyrighted word, how about some absolutely terrible splicing of original lines? (Thrall is voiced by fucking Chris Metzen, could they really not ask him for a few lines?)
Reign of Chaos balance? Gone. Everything is bound by TFT rules only, including the campaign.

If the biggest appeal of a remake is a visual upgrade, then this is a travesty in its own right. The lighting leaves much to be desired, the terrain is ugly, various effects look like a fart gas, and the original artstyle is almost completely replaced by this semi-realistic, mobile game looking mix that is generally lame and unpleasant to look at. The individual models may have some nice standouts, but this means litte in gameplay. This is an RTS, you're gonna spend most of it from a top-down perspective, and once combat starts, visual clarity and consistency is more important than ever. Reforged absolutely fails at this, it's extremely easy to get confused and lost while playing, everything easily ends up as a big blur, and not even a pretty one. Or a smooth one, because the performance is subpar too.
The original graphics are thankfully available, but there are plenty of things that have been irreversibly changed, like the menu. A menu that fucking lags all the time, because for some goddamn reason it runs on Chromium. It also often disconnects me from Battle.net even when I'm playing single-player, and I bet the seeming instability of the game is at least partly responsible.

All of this, however, isn't the biggest issue. If a shitty remake drops, people just keep with the original. Well, you (legally) cannot now. Reforged has been introduced as a patch, and due to this, all existing copies of the original are now forced to update to the Reforged edition, even if they don't actually own Reforged, so not only your original CD copy is now too downgraded by Reforged, but you are forced to download 25+ GB of graphics you cannot even use (then again, why would you...). This is the real reason Reforged deserves to be forever remembered as likely the worst remake of a video game in history. It's an insult to both preservation and fans of the original in the worst possible way.

And I'm not even mentioning all the new things Reforged promised to add, and then never did.

Reforged should be only remembered as a perfect embodiment of what is possibly the worst era in video game history so far. Not only is it an insult to the whole medium, but it's a disgusting embodiment of the treatment companies give to this industry. The fact the project was basically cut in half because some rich cunt didn't find it profitable, the fact it shits on the legacy of one of the most important games in video game history, the fact that it has lied to, mistreated and scammed not only it's current customers, but also the ones that had stuck with it for over twenty years. And somehow, even this utter pile of shit on a silver platter did little as a wake-up call to anyone. Pre-orders that lie to your face, disgusting mistreatment of developers, zero respect for video games as an art form, all is still at large with no real change in sight. And as long as the shareholders profit from it, they have no reason to stop, until even your favorite childhood game has been wrecked and milked dry of money.

Fuck you, Bobby Kotnick, the current state of Blizzard may not be entirely your fault, but you nevertheless are one of the people most responsible for it. I sincerely hope the ghost of that employee who killed herself will haunt you until the end of your miserable life.

Completed China, Japan, Wild West chapters.

Live a Live is a masterful remake that can't quite redeem a badly aged game. On one hand Live a Live has a lot of positive attributes that are still unique and refreshing. Storytelling through game mechanisms, scripted encounters, tactical combat, and of course the completely charming variety of "lives" to be lived. The problem is that for every well-executed element there is a cumbersome equivalent.

Battles are weirdly paced in terms of frequency and generally far too numerous and repetitive. Almost every chapter forces you to make decisions without knowing what the consequences will be. While chapters are certainly varied each unique twist comes with its own pitfall. And without a strong through-line connecting them, chapters feel more like demos than parts of a full-fledged game.

Live a Live is worth playing for its unique perspective but there's a lot holding it back from greatness. At least the remake aspect is flawless, making this the definitive way to play Live a Live.

I didn't feel like editing all my notes so this one's coming in hot

the menus, ui/ux, and maps are nothing short of awful and the emphasis on fast travel, witcher vision, and waypoint markers make starfield one of the least convincing game worlds in recent memory. an endless sequence of vacuum sealed content boxes strung together by constant menus, loading screens, and teleporting, and bolstered on all sides by hundreds of procgen wastelands full of crafting junk

it's frustrating that there's something here I think I could like, but it's completely obstructed by design decisions that only make sense if your first and last priority is scale. aside from some dungeons and sidequests it feels like your only options are to be led by the nose like a dog or left to wander nothing areas for the rest of your life. a critical bug had me chasing my tail for over an hour on one of the essential planets and I was bored out of my brain so I can't imagine how sterile the non-essential ones must be

can't weigh in much on the RPG side of things cos I barely saw it in 10+ hours. it's like a cryptid where people keep swearing it exists but I'm still not convinced. can say that the dialogue options I've seen aren't too far off from the YES / YES (SARCASTIC) / NO (YES) we know and love from FO4 tho. writing doesn't go full head trauma this time around as quickly but everyone's a Quip Bastard or a block of wood so it's kinda six of one half a dozen of the other. the most memorable moment was when heller went chris dorner on the new atlantis police department unprovoked, but somehow I don't think that was what bethesda intended

perks/skills are as lifeless as expected. 10% more damage with shotguns or 10% damage with pistols or 10% damage with energy weapons or 10% damage with rifles or carry 10 more pounds or have 10% more health or..... zzzz

less I say about space and ship combat the better. everyone knows it wouldn't be better handled through a menu, but what this review presupposes is... maybe it would?

all in all it's a mess. bethesda's signature open world fractured and dashed across the stars; a marriage of some of the worst aspects of both pre and post morrowind eras with a slew of new unforced errors added to the mix. modders will fix what's fixable, I'll keep drinking that garbage, and the world will keep on turning

can't wait for skyrim 2

Friends of mine on the playground used to talk about this game, but it was one of the few Pokemon games I never owned. Thanks to NSO, I finally had the chance to play it after over 20 years!

Pokemon TCG for Game Boy is the game based on the card game based on the videogame. It draws from the Base Set, Jungle and Fossil sets, giving just enough cards for a variety of decks while still keeping things simple. If you collected those as a kid, you should be very familiar with your options here. If you're not a Pokemon boomer like me, the cards' full text is recreated in-game.

Speaking of "familiar" though, this game kinda assumes you're already familiar with the rules of the Trading Card Game. There's a forced, railroaded tutorial with stacked decks to start things off, but it doesn't come close to teaching you everything, and even the game itself recommends you get hold of an irl rulebook. While I never played the TCG as a kid, I spent hours reading and absorbing the rulebooks from Theme Decks so I was able to pick this game up quickly, but if you're new, I'd highly recommend looking up the Base Set rules online.

And I do mean "Base Set rules", because the modern TCG has changed a lot, and the game uses the oldest rulings. This was before Supporters were a thing, so draw Trainers like Professor Oak, Bill and Gambler are insanely strong and you should run as many as you can. There's also the old Energy Removal and Super Energy Removal, which straight-up discard your opponent's Energy, which is so disgusting a later set introduced No Removal Gym. (Look it up, it's hilarious)

I still very much enjoy this broken Trainer meta for two reasons. One: it's an even playing field. Any cards you can use, your opponents also can. Two: it makes deck building simpler, as there's a lot of no-brainer cards no matter what deck you're running.

If you're expecting a story, look elsewhere, because this game has basically none. You just go to the 8 Gyms, sorry, CLUBS, play a childrens' card game, then challenge the Elite Fo-sorry, GRAND MASTERS and win. There's a rival, but he's encountered a lot less than Gen 1's, so I wasn't invested in him.

But the lack of an exp system means this is finally the "challenge Gyms in any order" Pokemon game you've always wanted. Winning games will give booster packs, which you can use to refine your deck or make new ones, creating a gradual difficulty curve regardless of where you start or finish. You can technically "grind" boosters by rematching opponents, but I challenged myself to beat the game without doing that.

Opponent AI is dumb as rocks, but many of them use interesting strategies, some resembling classic tournament combos like Blastoise Rain Dance, Haymaker, and Mr Mime Stall. (Ugh Mr Mime is a pain to fight)

Some may say there's a lot of RNG involved, but I find once you have enough Oak, Bill and Computer Search, you essentially make your own luck. It's always a shame when a "boss" level opponent bricks their deck and ends up an anticlimax, though.

Overall this was a really fun game to finally experience, and a great fit for an NSO title due to fitting portability and short-bursts play. And I hear its Japan-only sequel is even better!

A tower defense game where the enemy is a fluid simulation - a surprisingly genius concept. It's super satisfying slowly fighting back against an endless stream of death water,

The base game has a lot of content on its own but it also allows you to download and play custom user created levels. The amount on offer here is impressive for $7.50.

It's biggest flaw is it's age, as a flash game originally, it's limited graphically and the maps are small. It's a good game, but has since been superseded by its successors.