Apologies for the verbosity. Feel free to ignore everything I said here; I am mostly writing all this crap down because my memory is terrible.
Showing 1-10 of 22 items
[Best Anime] School festival episode? Check. Hot springs episode? Check. Tournament arc? Check. A very slow burn, but the plot and characters are so well-developed that I didn't regret spending 40 hours on it.
[Second Best Game Involving Space Mining] This is a neat little puzzle/incremental game. The art style is kind of... 90s kids gross-out toys (which is interesting, at least), but it's a very calm experience, with enough complexity to keep it fresh. The upcoming sequel looks promising, too. It has been very pleasant to play.
[Best Picross] It's a Konami picross game. The controls are fine. You can make Dracula.
[Best Fake MMO] I still need to go back and finish this. It's a love letter to the SNES-era action RPG, but manages to feel like its own game. Fun combat, fun puzzles, fun game. Plus, difficulty sliders. Neato.
[Best Gaidenlike] Moves great, sounds great, and looks great. If you can withstand or even enjoy the writing, it's a fantastic twenty or so hours. Do use the hint system when you get to the midpoint. The game is very fun to move through, but it can be a chore to explore if you aren't sure what you're looking for.
[Best Value] See also: Xbox Game Pass, Epic Games Store free games. If you told me in 2010 that I would feel bad about spending $35 on like twenty decent games because I have access to thousands of games, completely legally, for little to no cost, I would curse my future self for being so ungrateful. Anyway, this is why I want more six-hour games and less sixty-hour games.
[Game That Should Have Been My 2019 GOTY] I am not going to wax nostalgic about how "games these days hold your hand". I appreciate that modern games are more curated experiences that attempt to reduce frustration and streamline processes by guiding players. Unfortunately, I think getting used to that has caused a lot of people to bounce off a game as seemingly directionless as this one. If you can spare ten to fifteen hours, and you haven't given this game an earnest try, please go and do so. Outer Wilds is a sprawling, beautiful jigsaw puzzle, and it feels so cool to piece it together. There is very little in this medium of video games that is as satisfying as figuring out what is being asked of you in this game. There is nothing like the tension of actually playing that part. Seriously, give this one a shot. If this game lands for you, it will land like few others.
[Mention] They implemented a level squish and gamepad support, which means I'm two for two with my wild WoW predictions. I don't actually think these predictions were that wild, though; the process of getting to max level was getting too labyrinthine, and FFXIV has demonstrated for years that you can put an MMO on a gamepad. It's an important accessibility enabler, even if the engine is going to require a deeper rework to make the gamepad movement and UI natural enough to draw me back to the game. Anyway, my next wild prediction is that the Warcraft team will aim to make installing prior expansions optional, to the limited extent that that's possible. Obviously some things (armor sets) can't be made optional, but I bet a lot of it can. Anyway, hopefully this expansion is good and not bad.
[Most Baffling] I cannot believe I'm saying this as a Spelunky junkie but: I do not like Spelunky 2. I do not think it is fun to play. I do not think it is interesting to play. I do not particularly like how it looks or sounds. Like Spelunky 1, there's basically one way to play Spelunky 2. Get what items you can and be careful. The difference is that Spelunky 1 was sparing with its density of threats, while Spelunky 2 is not. Every level is crammed with shit that kills you. Runs take longer, because you need to be even more deliberate, and feel worse, because you got one-shot after 40 minutes, instead of 20. As far as I can tell, this was done entirely in service of creating more "crazy" moments where you get bonked by an enemy into an arrow which launches you into another enemy who ricochets you off of a bounce pad into spikes or lava or a bear trap. Yes, those have always been amusing to watch on stream. No, I do not know a single player who wanted to experience that more. This isn't a good jumping-on point. It pretty much assumes that you're decent at the first game. It's not a good remix, because it feels worse to play. But it does have "more secrets" and "more weird interactions", so it's a better game to watch someone else play on Twitch, I suppose. Thanks, I hate it.
[Worst Gacha] This game scares me. Up front, it asks little of your wallet and much of your time. The character designs are very pretty, the story is engaging, and the world is fun to explore. It gives a lot of people what they wanted, which is "more Breath of the Wild". I think it expounds upon BotW in ways that could be interesting if given more depth. That's a lovely worm dangling from a giant fucking hook. What's scary is that this is a gacha game that has mainstream appeal. Gacha is exploitative enough when confined to the people who understand what it is and how it works. When it's in a very playable, accessible package like this, it's even more dangerous. This game is designed to suck up your time and money, but unlike a WoW or an FFXIV, it doesn't have an effective upper limit on MTX and it doesn't have enough interesting alternate content (sidequests/PVP) to justify spending hours on. Keep it at arms' length if you can, play it if you must, survive if it lets you. Damn, I'm glad I got out of this when I did.