(this review will spoil which characters are in romantic relationships)

the writing is incredible. it made me cry several times. and the fact that all of our characters are women (most of them queer women at that) is just so joyous & refreshing.

and one of those women is a trans woman. a trans woman who is by her own admission "dumber than bricks." (gosh i wonder who i relate to in this story.) and who is well-written. heck, everyone in here is well-written. they're all imbued with so much personality. they're all very distinct, and very real-feeling. i love this big family of queer girls.

i think the thing about the writing that impresses me the most is how real all the emotions in this feel. it's really good at drawing you in, at making you feel what the characters feel, and feeling for them. it also tackles abuse in a way that made me feel incredibly seen.

it's not without flaws. the fact that maddie & abigail are afforded two sex scenes while tara & morgan are allowed none is a problem. a big, frustrating, unsurprising problem. the developers' excuse is that they're worried about people fetishizing tara or being transphobic, and just... hi. no. please get out of here with those excuses.

as if straight men haven't been fetishizing cis lesbians for basically as long as they've known there's such a thing. and i notice they don't let concerns about homophobia stop them from showing two cis women having sex.

ok, this is really what i want to know. why are you more interested in how cis people are going to react than how trans people are going to react? we play your games too. you're going to include a character that's "for" us but not afford her the same space to explore her romantic relationship as your other main characters? honestly, fuck off with that.

in spite of how angry i am about this, you'll notice i've still given the game five stars. i already talked about how incredible the writing (otherwise) is, and it made me cry like a bunch of times. and one of the reasons i'm so upset that tara didn't get her freak on is because the character means so much to me, and for me to hold that against the developers while not also giving them credit for creating a character that means so much to me feels patently unfair.

honestly, in spite of my one fairly substantial complaint, i hecking love this game. any game that makes me cry this much & is this gay is gonna catapult up near the top of my list of favorite games of all time, and this is no exception.

although i had an nes & have vague memories of playing mario & duck hunt for the first time, my parents bringing home a genesis & sonic the hedgehog is my first extremely clear video game memory. it was love at first sight for me. more than anything else, the sonic the hedgehog series is responsible for me being the gamer i am today.

and i didn't just stop at the games. i devoured the cartoons (tails gets tied up SO MUCH in adventures of sonic the hedgehog y'all, highkey formative for me tbh), the comic books, everything i could get my hands on.

i don't know how many times i beat this game, but i know plenty of those times were of the up/down/left/right /a+start variety, heh.

though this was surprassed pretty convincingly by its sequels, it still reminds me of when i fell in love with video games for the first time, and it still plays great. i love that dumb little blue speedster so much.

although i had this for saturn, this actually wasn't my first time playing the genesis version because i rented it once to see if it was different than the saturn version. i really liked it at the time because, well, i owned a saturn so you pretty much had to like this game since it was one of the like three games for saturn, heh. now... HECK is it ever rough. and it's not challenging because it's challenging, it's challenging because the controls & 3d perspective are kinda awful. there is still quite a bit of nostalgia factor here, and i do like the way the flickies follow you around when you free them, but that's kinda it.

i was pretty sure i had beaten this before but im no longer so sure of that? i know for sure i played multiplayer and didn't like it nearly as much as halo 2's. i think i played a bit of the singleplayer campaign but i don't think i must've gotten super far with it.

i mostly liked this one! i won't say it's the best halo i've played so far. i think that's still 2 even though the singleplayer maps were occasionally a bit more frustratingly repetitive than i remembered, but the multiplayer is just so sublime.

this is fun and a nice change of pace from either of its predecessors, though! the difficulty felt a bit higher. like, even with the somewhat quicker respawns we still wiped on split screen co-op more than we did with the previous games, and it was a nice challenge!

anyway, now we finished the fight! there for sure aren't a bunch more games for us to play still, right? right?

(cw: pretty straightforward references to bdsm relationships, nothing explicit)

this game is extremely me. it's very gay, it's very kinky, and it has one of the best explorations of the psychology of dom/sub relationships that i've ever seen in any medium. it hits me in a very tender spot considering how important dom/sub stuff is to me.

and one of my partners showed this to me when we were in the very early stages of figuring out our dom/sub relationship, and i have subsequently shared it with both of my other partners to talk about things i really like about the pyschology of submission.

i really love being in subspace. i really love how vulnerable it makes me. and i really like that this game treats that it like the Big Deal it is.

and uhhhh, beauty is just a hecking super hot domme and i would love for her to tie me up. there, i said it.