On paper, this is a Castlevania rip-off where you simply maneuver a character as they auto-fire into waves of enemies and try to survive. And yet, it perfectly scratches my lizard brain itches, like a dopamine slot machine. Plus it's only $3 and under active development support. C'mon.

If this was on mobile, it'd be all over for me.

* Played well on Linux via Proton 7.0-2 and switching to the public beta branch

I love that this is more linear and lean, it makes the whole game an extremely tight and satisfying experience. The spritework and visuals are just gorgeous, and taking inspiration from The Thing makes this my favorite Metroid atmospherically. The SA-X is dope and I long for the day where this gets an RE2 style remake where it's just constantly stalking you. And narratively, this one's great!

The only thing holding this back from being 10/10 chef's kiss mama mia perfection is, what I call, "the bullshit": hidden passageways on the critical path with absolutely zero visual indication, diminishing returns on exploring for item pickups, frustrating bosses in microscopic arenas, and the perpetuation of those god awful space jump controls.

Man... I think this is gonna be the first mainline Pokemon game that I don't finish.

I love Diamond & Pearl. They are hugely nostalgic games for me (shout out to my original 300+ hour Diamond save file), but this ain't it. The graphics are actually quite nice (aside from the frequent extreme closeups on expressionless chibi faces), but the free 3D movement applied to grid-based level design is atrocious here just like it was in XY - I keep getting caught on invisible hitboxes, so the world is just unpleasant to navigate. The permanent EXP share takes all of the fun out of teambuilding - there are Pokemon on my team that I've never even used in battle because they are disgustingly overleveled, and that's even with skipping almost all trainer battles from Eterna Forest onwards. And with BDSP being based on the SwSh engine that's missing tons of moves, some Pokemon that were fun to use in the original DPPt are just kind of deadweight now due to their unbalanced movesets. The extremely confusing choice to revert TMs back into one-time use items while making HMs into both single use TMs and overworld field moves is genuinely baffling. There was also zero reason not to at least use the expanded Pokedex from Platinum as the base for BDSP - the original just unnecessarily locks out some of the most memorable Sinnoh Pokemon like Gliscor from being obtainable before the postgame. And while exploring the Underground has been made way more fun via the Pokemon dens (probably the only part of the game I legitimately praise as a unilateral improvement), they gutted the secret base decorating aspect! My cave is now full of lame, bland statues instead of being a cozy hideaway with a giant neon GTS globe as a centerpiece.

Idk man, this just...sucks. It's not fun for me. It's so faithful to a fault but clumsily so that I'd rather just play the original Diamond instead. Hopefully Legends Arceus is good.

Extremely charming! The sound design is so incredibly well done, especially the simulated hard drive noises. There's such a deep reverence here for like, Windows 98, that it's easy to overlook the fact that there's a really solid retro D&D inspired roguelike underneath all of the nostalgia.

Gets a bit repetitive over long stretches, but I'll definitely be returning to it over time to try and get all of the various endings.

* Played flawlessly on Linux via Proton 6.3-8

Totally serviceable follow-up to the originals. About half of this game is a loving send up to the series and the games that came before it, and the other half is "haha dark souls of platformers" that relies on exploiting the quirks of the sometimes janky physics while navigating imprecise or often unclear hitboxes. So, it's fun, except when it's not. Plus, there are so many collectibles that are just busywork-tier mobile game nonsense that I have less than zero desire to revisit this for any sort of completion goals. I even stopped attempting to get all of the boxes in each level by the last world.

Unrelated: I want to know what maniac on the dev team thought 450 boxes in a single level was a good idea. I just wanna talk, bro, just a quick little chat... Just got a couple questions, like where the two I missed were hidden.......

This game is a great improvement over the original (and in its own right), but that's not what I'm here to talk about today. This game's soundtrack is absolutely incredible. Each track is an effortless mashup of iconic Metal Gear music with classic Christmas tunes, all using an approximation of the MGS1 soundfont. It's amazing, and the OST album is permanently in my Christmas jams rotation because of it. It's truly not Christmas until you've sipped eggnog while listening to "Happy Sneaking (War is Covert)" and "Sleigh Drive".

If you're a Metal Gear fan, you'll wanna check this out.