It's probably easiest to start right off with the game that's already currently in my PS3, 3D DOT GAME HEROES.

This one in particular inspired me to make this list, mainly because I don't think it warrants a big huge review but I want to talk about it. Co-made by Silicon Studio/FROM Software, this strange top down RPG is a huge homage to tons of old adventure games. The kingdom of Dotnia used to be plagued by an evil being, but was quickly slain by a brave hero. The land went into a long period of peace, but eventually fell into an economic depression due to lack of anything happening. Thus the king decided to turn the land from 2D to 3D because "sprites are outdated". Yeah. The rest of the writing is just as strange as this too, with your magical ring having a "Abnormous Terror Field", being able to use frozen fish as weapons, and having the opportunity to get the mystical "poof-poof" from a cute girl at an inn for only 10 gold. (it only works when the lights are off)

While obviously the quirky humour and reference-laden writing is a huge draw to this game, I also think that the game itself has a special charm to it. While not objectively amazing or unique in it's own right, it has just enough things that are "off" about it that lend to a unique and interesting experience. The game plays like a standard top down zelda title where you run around and swing your sword at baddies, but the second you hit max health your weapon expands in size to fill nearly the whole screen! This leads to a strange tempo of game balance where the second your health is less than max, the game becomes harder- leading to more conservative gameplay than usual. You also get dash boots as soon as you start the game, and while they act like what you'd expect from Link To The Past, they also increase in speed every time you turn! Once you master these, you can navigate entire screens incredibly quickly without hitting a wall- all while killing everything in front of you instantly with your massively overpowered sword.

I actually recently beat this game, which is why it's still in my PS3. I'm one last playthrough away from getting the platinum trophy for it, but I need a break. While 3D DOT GAME HEROES is a unique experience that is loads of fun, it's also pretty basic and doesn't do much to break the trappings of games it's trying to reference. Dungeons are samey, the game is a bit grindy at times, and enemies are either useless or kill you in just a few hits. Also the frame rate is terrible, which can probably be attributed to the voxel engine the game runs in. All in all i'd list 3D DOT GAME HEROES as a "rough gem", something that I think lots of people should play (especially if you're a fan of FROM Software, tons of references in here for you) but also having enough problems that can't be ignored. Definitely one of the better PS3 exclusives out there.

For the longest time I've stated that Elebits is one of the top 3 games for the Wii. The use of motion controls is astounding and well implemented, the amount of bonus content is staggering, and most importantly- the game is just fun. Yet despite all this, I haven't played Elebits in maybe 7-8 years. It's a game that i've just never seen the need to come back to after initially 100%'ing it.

When I saw it in my pile of games, I wanted to figure out why. After only an hour and a half of playing, I found my answer... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

You play as Kai, a (terribly voice acted) young boy plagued by the menace of absentee parents. They study aliens called Elebits, which in this world, provide electricity. One day the electricity goes out, his parents leave, and you're left capturing elebits with a laser gun to bring power back to the town. That's pretty much the plot for the entire game, which has you moving from room to room in your house, eventually outside, then to an amusement park where you fight a giant mech... It gets pretty crazy, pretty quick. In fact, "absolute chaos" is a prevalent theme of this game- you use your "capture gun" to not only pick up elebits, but objects around you too. This leads to you chucking things around like a madman in a physics playground searching for every last one of those multicoloured bastards before moving on to the next area to defile and destroy.

On fridays, I don't really have much access to the main living room in my house due to my current living situation (mainly people wanting the TV). So for today I had one simple goal: find a game that I have zero memory of but wouldn't need to play long to get the full experience. The answer jumped out to me almost immediately: Motorstorm.

Judging by the fact that the box still has that disgusting spiderman 3 font on it for the PS3 logo, it's safe to assume that this is an extremely early title for the system. And you'd be correct- while not a launch title (came out about a year after the launch of "599 US DOLLARS") Motorstorm was one of the first games I ever had for the PS3, along with a Blu-ray disc of Spiderman 3 (which came with the console) and a game called "Cars: Mater-National". Yeah, the games back then were slim pickings. Keep in mind that around this time everyone hated the PS3, citing it had no games and was massively overpriced. Motorstorm was one of the first games to really shift this tide towards people growing to like the PS3, with revolutionary graphics and a meaty game behind it.

Well, that's at least how it was advertised and seen back then. Playing it again now is a bit jarring- I remember it being much more revolutionary than what it feels like in retrospect. The gimmick is simple: it's a racing game focused on different car types and car destruction. You can be something small like an ATV or motorbike, which has high mobility and turning... but if you travel in mud at all you lose traction and speed and any larger car will basically run you over in a heartbeat. Inversely, you can be a massive semi truck which will cleave through any smaller car and can navigate through dirt fields, but you're a lumbering hulk with bad turning and way too high momentum. I'm not a huge fan of racing games but it should be said that despite trying to be realistic Motorstorm has a strange "gritty cartoon" feel to it where everything is so over the top it leans more towards arcade action than a mud-trucker simulator.

The graphics are OK, still managing to hold up with interesting dirt simulation and good destruction graphics. The UI is pretty terrible, looking like it just came out of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" with no user options at all. Where it all falls apart is the gameplay. I played as a semi truck (because it seemed novel at the time) and was pretty amazed at how terrible the game controlled. Not intentionally either- your truck bounces around like it's on the moon, flips over randomly, and loses speed too fast on turns. This makes the true difficulty of the game not balancing your class of vehicle against the terrain but instead trying to make it not careen sideways into a rock as it bounces over a minor bump like it's going for points in "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater". I played one race, got first, and quit. It feels like a bad tech demo and hasn't aged well at all.

Maybe back in 2007 it was impressive, but maybe back in 2007 we were desperate for any game at all. My dad loved this game and brought friends over to showboat it, and I guess he wasn't alone since it was popular enough to spawn two sequels. Maybe they play and handle better, but I don't know if I like racing games enough to bother trying them. All in all, skip Motorstorm: there are other early PS3 games more worth your time.

With the advent of Everybody's Golf for PS4, I find it difficult to recommend any other golf game on the grounds that one nearing perfection already exists. But I never really grew up with Hot Shots Golf (the american title for the everybody's golf series) and instead played this game for way too many hours. To begin with, I have no idea how we managed to own a copy of this- I think this was during the period of time when my parents were still trying to justify the purchase of a PS3. They wanted it for the blu-ray player but the only one we owned was Spiderman 3, I hated the PS3 back then because nobody I knew cared about it, and it was kind of just collecting dust under our TV. My dad definitely bought this one, and he spent a lot of time playing it.

In "normal" golf games, the swing is controlled by a 3 tap system: first, you press the swing button to start it, then you press it as the power meter rises to select your power, and then as the meter comes back down you hit it a third time to time your accuracy. This has been tried and tested as pretty much the best way to control golf swings, as hitting the accuracy swing is a good simulation of if your character will do a slice or a hook without losing game feel. But Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 throws all of this out the window to instead institute a "realistic" swing system using... the analog stick. To start your swing, you tilt it down towards you. To follow through, you push it from down to up. The amount your ball hooks or slices is instead based on the amount your stick deviated from the center line of your stick tilting. If you've played a few golf games, you might immediately be repulsed by the idea. And I agree, from a game feel standpoint it's pretty terrible. There is barely any consistency with your swings due to human error, and due to it being pretty much impossible to set power (you instead can move the "shot prediction" circle forwards and back) the only difficulty is in how accurate you can swing your stick back and forth. On the other hand, the comparison to real life golf is genius and unparalleled: not only does the stick movement mirror real life golf swings, but also the stress and tension of the situation/how your round is going will affect your gameplay. If you rush things and try and do easier levels faster to grind for money or skill you'll end up botching plays, and if you are stressed against hard opponents you might come up against a mental block and miss shots. You can turn this off though and go back to the "three click" system, but I've never tried it and it uses the right analog stick button for some ungodly reason.

I'll keep the literal description of this one short, and instead focus on my own personal perspective. I feel like at this point everyone has either played New Vegas or never will. If you've somehow never heard of Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 3, maybe it's better to just give them a spin before reading this review. They're both ridiculously cheap, and pretty good games.

I have always been one of those people who thought Fallout 3 was much better than New Vegas, having played 3 first and liking the setting, tone, and story a whole lot better. Both games are nearly identical from a framework point of view, and really I feel like it's close to the point of coming down to preference. However, after playing New Vegas tonight and getting addicted to it (which is why this review is so late and sleep deprived), I feel like I like it a whole lot more than Fallout 3. I never got far in my first playthrough, barely making it out of the starting town before getting my ass handed to me in the nearby prison and quitting. I think I had enough of Fallout at the time, and really wasn't digging the almost comical tone of wild west Las Vegas after the depressing atmosphere of Fallout 3. Coming back with a fresh palette, I really love the southern/mafia/cowboy tone the game has going for it, think the characters are much more interesting and much less grating, and areas more interesting to explore. Waking up as just some dude who had a drug delivery go wrong is already a breath of fresh air, considering most Bethesda games have you trapped in some apocalyptic hellhole before being broken out to a ~*~mystical new world~*~. After that I was swiftly exploring a strange abandoned bunker with dust storms happening every night, trying to navigate a valley full of deathclaws, and climbing a mountain inhabited by super mutants to stop a radio transmission. It spared no time at all getting straight into the weird stuff, and the generic abandoned buildings are few and far between.

I don't really want to get into the generic bethesda jankiness: it's still here in full force with this game. You can jump up cliffs to skip parts of the game, you can pull stuff out of people's views to steal it even though they're right next to you... you know what to expect. But this foray back into bethesda games really made me notice two things that hadn't hit me before. Firstly, the dialogue in their games are complete ass. Like absolutely abysmal. While each character has their own personality and style, all they exist for is lore dumps and nothing else. They are basically walking encyclopedias put into robotic shells that glide around the landscape waiting for somebody to ask them questions. At one point I was being extremely racist to a super mutant (to be fair, they've ambushed me too many times in 3) and he got offended by it, rightfully so. But immediately after his dialogue was over, I could just freely ask him any question about the nearby town and it was like nothing happened. Maybe it's a bit unrealistic to expect this level of detail in an open world game with over 200 NPCs, but at that point why even bother adding the options to be an ass in? Another less nitpicky example: at one point, I approached an obvious hooligan, looting a nearby corpse or some other dastardly deed. I walked up to talk to him and he said "What do you want asshole, I'm in a hurry here". I proceeded to talk to him about politics and what political party he supported, and he freely told me everything about both parties, what their plans are, where they are located on the map, where he came from, where he was going, what group of bandits he belonged to, where their hideout was, and what cigarettes he liked to smoke. While his voice of being a brash looter was sprinkled throughout his dialogue, it never formed into full fledged personality and instead felt like he was reading me a book about who he was supposed to be instead of talking to me.

Initially when starting this project, I wanted to keep it "PG" in case somebody wanted to cite it or show it around. I felt like it would also keep an air of professionality to add mild levels of credibility to some of the more objective reviews, and overall increase the reading experience. I guess when you start playing games that say "cocksucker" and "fuckwad" every 5 minutes you kind of throw that out the window.

Bulletstorm is good. Very, very good. But it takes time to appreciate it. The game first starts with an hour long prologue where you play a drunken space pirate cursing up a storm, being a belligerent asshole, and generally making obviously stupid decisions. You hear amazing lines such as "Fuck, does anything you touch just turn into dogshit?" with your character's response being "Well your mom survived... barely". You have a standard, boring assault rifle, and the controls fall victim to "too many things mapped to one button". The game tries taking itself way too seriously and getting you invested/emotional over characters you don't even know for more than 30 minutes before killing them. Overall, the first time you play the game it will probably make you cringe, feel anger, and want to stop immediately.

But over time you begin to appreciate it for what it is. It takes a lot of writing skill to make lines like "Come any closer and i'll kill your dick" work and be geniunely funny, but what Bulletstorm succeeds best at is taking ordinarily terrible things and flipping them on their head. The writing is genuinely laugh out loud funny in how over the top it is, but always takes it's world seriously and never does an obnoxious fourth wall wink at the camera. It's totally self aware in tone, but takes that awareness seriously and tries to build a competently made universe around it. This is the kind of writing I wish games like Gears of War had: you have giant hulking muscle mountains running around shooting chainsaw-guns at aliens, but the story is treated like somebody is trying to win an oscar. Bulletstorm is closer to something like "Sausage Party"; knowing it's an over the top raunchy comedy but somehow putting an extreme amount of detail in the worldbuilding around it.

While the writing is definitely the cherry on top, the rest of the cake is the gameplay. Lord almighty, it's satisfying to play Bulletstorm. The gimmick of the game is the currency- while you earn "points" normally for just killing people, you get more than triple the amount if you kill them in a flashy way. This includes kicking them into spikes, shooting them in the balls then stomping their head in (yeah), killing them by shoving a hotdog cart into them, attaching a mine to somebody then kicking them into other people before detonating the mine... the list goes on and on. This is also a great way to make ordinarily generic guns into something exciting, as now every single tool in your arsenal is dedicated around pulling off stupid trick shots instead of just playing an average cover based shooter. They can all be upgraded too, to make them more unique: for example, the revolver gets a flare gun attachment that sets people on fire before exploding. What really brings this all home is the actual feel of the guns, they all manage to get that punchy sound and recoil to them even if they aren't that strong in reality. The shotgun feels like you're shooting something even more powerful than the famed Super Shotgun in Doom 2, and it cleaves people in half when you do a killing blow with it, but the damage is laughable. And if all that wasn't enough, there's a system in place where getting new trickshots gives you way more bonus points than just using the same ones over and over. Normally you'd just resort to finding the "easiest ones to grind", but instead you're constantly thinking of new things to exploit and new ways to decimate your enemies.

Bulletstorm is a must-play if you're into raunchy humour and can take a joke of something being too over-the-top. It's seven acts long, and mainly campaign focused, but keeps things fresh constantly and has a well balanced difficulty. I highly recommend playing either this or the remastered version on steam, but keep in mind if you get the remaster there's story DLC that you can't turn off.

This one is going to be real short as I want to do a massive, full review of it someday. I end up coming back to it every year or two but haven't played it in over 3 or 4 by now. I want to fully deconstruct the game and what I think about every phase, but because I'm keeping myself busy I don't have enough time to binge playing and writing it out to fit it in my timeframe goal. Nevertheless, this is the game I played today, so here we go!

Spore is the absolute definition of "A mixed bag". On one hand you have basically distilled creativity, a huge scope that has never really been matched, and tons of personality to love. On the other hand you have the game forcing you to endure it's personality to the point of it getting annoying, everything feeling half-assed, and generally a large feeling of emptiness and lack of polish. It's one of those games you could grow up on and have nostalgia cover the gaps, but when you take a step back and look at it from an objective point of view it's an extremely unrefined mess. I'm kind of in the middle of these two camps; it's hard not to be disappointed at how terrible the game is in comparison to what it could be, but it's also too much fun to screw around in every once in a while. Because you're raising a creature from a baby cell all the way to an intergalactic dominator, you really get invested in them even if you end up making them a godless abomination that shouldn't exist.

I've played this game many times before, but the main thing I hadn't noticed until now is how little the game respects your time. It's been a while since I've played it last, but I was shocked at how artificially lengthened the entire experience feels. Cell mode is short enough to sort of ignore, but even during the end of it I felt bored cruising around looking for plants to eat. They were too few and far between; suiciding into enemies until you spawned next to one ended up being faster. When I got to the titular Creature mode, the game really ground to a halt. I had made my brilliant race "Low 'n' Long" herbivores, but wanted them to be murderous hotdogs of death. Cruising through the deep vegetation, they could charge on their one foot and instantly take down any prey. Well, that was my theory, at least. In reality, the combat is really bland and simple. Enemies have way too much health, and you deal too little damage. I played on hard mode, and it didn't seem to increase the difficulty of the fights, just spawn more literally impossible ones near your camp. So instead of having nail biting encounters due to the increase in challenge, you end up just walking further to a camp that you can actually beat. There's also no strategy at all- the combat in "Minecraft" somehow ends up being more exciting. You have four attacks, they all have cooldowns, you spam each one when the cooldown goes off. Enemies take forever to kill, and it never feels like a positive towards the gameplay. You instantly know based on the DPS you deal VS the DPS the enemy deals who is going to win, so all larger health pools do is delay the inevitable. I went combat oriented this playthrough, but socializing also sucks. All you do is copy what the opposite party does and hope your stats are big enough to match your bars up with theirs. There's no skill, no challenge, and it takes way too long. Kind of a reoccuring theme in creature mode. You also have to socialize with people you want to add to your party. Why? It's an extra slap in the face with my own race of creatures, as all they can do is sing. So what ends up happening is a minute or so of spamming the sing hotkey on my keyboard every time I want to recruit a unit.

I wanted to get to the space stage to do a full review, as I remember that being the true meat and potatoes of Spore. I remember cell stage sucking (which isn't as bad as I remember, but whatever), creature stage being OK, tribal stage being terrible, civilization stage being mediocre (leaning towards terrible), and space stage being empty and lonely but a fun time. Unfortunately due to the time sucking features listed above I couldn't get very far before having to do other things, but hopefully one day I'll get around to it all and write a more detailed review.

I'm not a huge Platinum Games fan, mainly because it feels like they take the "shotgun" approach to game development. They churn out a bunch of games, some end up being good, others end up being mediocre and bland. Because they all basically run on similar engines and have same-ish mechanics, there isn't really a "bad" Platinum game... but in all honesty, that almost makes it worse for me. While their stories and premises are usually bizarro and unpredictable, the games feel incredibly safe and more of the same. The amount of games by Platinum that I think truly stand out as amazing I can count on one hand.

I made sure to put Oblivion down on my hitlist after playing New Vegas, just to compare and contrast the two. While it's quite obvious that Oblivion came out years before New Vegas, they both live in the same era of "Bethesda Jank". I've never played a Fallout game back to back with an Elder Scrolls game before, and it was really weird to finally have the opportunity. With large breaks inbetween the two series, you don't notice how different the games are; it's extremely easy to see the obvious things like "one is a fantasy game with magic and one has guns" but harder to compare things like pacing, game feel, etc.

One of the many things that I brought home with me was my actual PS3, as up until then I hadn't really gone back to play the console. That is maybe why so many of these entries are PS3 games... well, there's also the fact that I own a lot of them. Before I modded my PS3 I rooted around on it to see if there was any previous software, and among various piles of crap my family (including me) had downloaded on it was the "Pixeljunk" series. Pixeljunk is a series of games made by developers Q-Games, initially starting on the PS3 but eventually having a majority of the entries ported to PC/PSP. To this day I have no idea why they are called "Pixeljunk" when the developers could have just advertised their own name more- the games are extremely varied and bare no resemblence in theme or style. Additionally, while ports may give off the impression to just get them all on PC and not bother with the original PS3 releases, it should be noted that most of the entries play best on PS3.

"Pixeljunk Monsters" is the second entry in the series, and arguably the most popular. In my personal opinion, it's by far the most fun out of all the ones I've played; but it should be kept in mind that they differ so much that personal bias might be a factor. You play as Tikiman, a small leader of a tribe, who must ward off monsters invading his hut. It's typical Tower Defense fare- you place towers, they shoot monsters, you get money to place more, and you can't let monsters touch the exit. There are two major differences in this one though: you can only place towers by cutting down a tree, and you have to run around as Tikiman to place the towers. Tikiman can also dance in front of the towers by standing still, gradually giving them EXP to level them up. While playing as a movable character in a tower defense was a new and revolutionary idea in 2007, we now have games like Sanctum and Dungeon Defenders to fill the gap. What's really mind-blowing though is that none of them have done it this good since Monsters came out. Monsters is a blast to play, and a lot of it is attributed to run speed and tree location causing a constant battle against the clock.

For me, "Sonic and the Secret Rings" was a gift nobody wanted. I was over at a friends house once when this game came out, and we were looking through the future shop (RIP) newslet for game deals. On one of the pages was Sonic and the Secret Rings, to which we both looked at and went "dang that looks cool". I don't remember if we actually thought that or said it sarcastically or what, but either way we thought nothing more of it and went on with our day. A couple weeks later I went back over, and his mom came up to us while we were playing outside. "For getting such good grades this term, I got you a gift" she said, pulling out a copy of The Secret Rings. She must have heard us mention it or something, but either way we were unimpressed. We went upstairs to play it, and ended up being a mix of depressed and disgusted with the game before shutting it off. "Here, uh... you can have it" my friend sighed, and now I was a proud owner of Sonic and the Secret Rings.

Some things change, some things stay the same. Humour is one example of something that is always fluid; what we consider "funny" or "a good bit" seems to change month to month, and is usually reliant on context of the era. Take PAIN for example: a PSN Download title that was made over ten years ago, and is firmly stuck there.

PAIN was released on PSN in November 2007, and quickly became the most popular downloadable game on the marketplace. The concept is simple: you have a cannon, you aim it at things, you shoot your character out of it and see how much damage/points you can rack up. You gain points from dealing damage to your character's body, dealing damage to things around you, and doing various secret stylish things depending on the map. Every unique object involved adds to a multiplier, so the best strategy is to vary your movements around the map and get as much involved as possible. What's unfortunate for anyone wanting to play PAIN in 2019 is that the humour is so poorly and miserably dated that this might be one of the most PAINful games to play on the entire console. While I do agree that people have gotten over-sensitive in the past few years and can't take humour as easily as they used to, PAIN takes it to a whole new level with the amount of sophomoric bullshit reaching astronomical quantities. It's hard to believe this game is rated T with sight gags such as: a night club called "THE MAN HOLE", Hollywood being called "MORNINGWOOD" featuring a movie named "AREA 69" made at "Touchmounds Movie Studio", a donut shop having "The best glazed holes in town", getting an achievement for changing a hotel sign from "HOTEL CORAL ESSEX" to "HOT ORAL SEX", and the biggest of all: an asian/mayan fusion map (yes) sponsored by AXE body spray (yes) in which you go up to huge breasted girls in robes who flash you (yes) while a stereotypical asian voice says "YOU HAVE DISHONORED WOMAN!" (yes). It's literally everywhere you look, and completely unavoidable. PAIN did very well at the time and was even congratulated by many review sites for it's sense of humour, which only made newer levels have more of it. Additionally, this popularity caused many celebrity appearances, from fictional like Daxter, Fat Princess, Elvira, and Buzz, to real life celebrities such as David Hasselhoff, Katsuaki Kato, Flavour Flav, Andy Dick, and George Takei (I wonder what he would think of this game now).

It really sucks how poorly this game has translated out of 2007, because the actually gameplay is really solid. Not only are the ragdoll physics of your character on point, but they also introduce mechanics like being able to grab objects and "ooching" along the ground as long as you remain moving. This allows more player interaction when you've made your shot instead of just waiting for things to happen once you've pressed X. The level design is also superb, with tons of interactable objects perfectly aligned for multiple ways of making your rube goldberg machine of destruction. Sometimes if you angle your cannon just right, you can shoot yourself into a secret location like a subway tunnel or a sewer, and even those places have well positioned explosives and crates to bounce off of and throw around. While your high score is based off of one cannon launch and gets reset if you go back into it, you can choose to not reset the world after every launch which allows for a surprising amount of strategy. Sure things are set up for you to knock them all down at once, but maybe there's a bigger advantage to derailing a monorail before going for a high score? What if you shut off the ferris wheel before your high scoring run so you can get more points off of dismantling the cars? Stuff like this is what transforms PAIN from a generic destruction fest into something you can actually get into.

I've never gone from liking a game to never wanting to play it just because of the humour. Usually you can just skip cutscenes or ignore it, but with PAIN there's no getting around it. I would absolutely recommend this game if it didn't feel like my soul was cringing from the deadpool-tier humour around every corner, as the gameplay is pretty much the best of it's kind. If you can somehow get past that or it doesn't bother you at all, I recommend it- especially since there's been a physical release with a bunch of the DLC included. But if you're like me and feel embarrassed playing this game even while alone, there's no avoiding the humour or tone... so don't even bother.

My nightmare began late at night when I decided to run a game called "Modnation Racers". I had owned this game for a long time, but couldn't remember a single thing about it. I knew it was meant to be a LittleBigPlanet ripoff but with kart racing instead of platforming, I knew that it was eventually salvaged into "LittleBigPlanet Karting" years later, and I knew that it was way better when the online servers were still up. Other than that, I went in completely blind to Modnation Racers thinking, "hey, what's the worst that could happen?"

Normally, most games I pop in to play years later have some kind of update. Modnation Racers had one too, clocking in at about 2GB. This sucks, mainly because the PS3 has abysmally slow download and install speeds- but it also made sense considering this is a game centered around creation. Along the way they probably added more content packs for things like clothing and accessories, especially since there was plenty of paid DLC to go around. After installing the patch, I was then greeted with a "first time install" screen. At this point I was firmly cemented into the cushions of my couch and just resigned myself to browsing twitter. After about an hour of downloading the patch and then installing game data, I was finally greeted with... two loading screens. Which took almost a minute each. Then I was finally at the painfully bland title screen with three options: Race, ModCentral, and Create.

I decided to go straight into ModCentral before creating my new character, to see what "amazing" "creative" "designs" my teenage self made while last playing this game. Another loading screen. Loading screens in this game take up to a minute to complete, and if you're actually racing they can sometimes take 1-2 minutes. They happen everywhere, and pop up whenever you want to do anything that involves changing modes or maps. Tangent aside, I was greeted with some ugly alien baby with massive lips named "it", driving a car with a human heart for an engine. Clearly nine years ago I was just as creative as I am today! Wanting to purge this beast off of my television screen, I choppily drove on over to the "create" section at a smooth 15-20 frames per second, and started to make my new character. Everything in Modnation Racers looks like a naff vinyl figure, so I decided to go full hog and make a "Funko Pop" ripoff- you can see it in the first gallery image. Pretty beautiful, huh?

As you can maybe tell by the stickers that say "ROFLCOPTER", "LOLCATS", and "RICK ROLL RIMS", the humour in this game is amazing. If you managed to tell a robot in 2010 what humour and memes were, it would surely try and crowbar shit like this into it's programming before learning how to hold a gun to it's head. The personality of the entire game feels forced in at the last minute, which is fitting, because the rest of the game feels extremely sterile. You have your witty announcers who won't shut up saying "hilarious" quips whenever you win or lose, and your characters make minion farting and squeaking noises every time they drift or hit something (I do like it when they get mad though, they act legitimately pissed off and it's so cute).

The gameplay is serviceable, if it wasn't for the insanely bad lag. It's never unstable, but it hits it's peak at 25 frames per second. I'm not really somebody who cares about high fidelity in graphics or frame rate- I mean, I grew up on bad PS2 games through a coaxial cable input... but in a racing game it's just unacceptable. Other than the frame rate, everything is perfectly "fine"; and by "fine" I mean extremely bland and uninspired. The items work but feel like placeholders for more exciting things, the boost mechanics are just the same as every other game with boosts only with the added bonus that you can shield yourself too (which the AIs abuse with machine accuracy), and the maps are all created via the in game creation engine which leaves them with a same-y and stagnant feel. You can unlock more parts to mod your character by doing achievements and challenges in each stage, but it's hard to feel inspired to do any of that when the game is maybe the most boring kart racer I've ever played, which is already a pretty flatlined genre to begin with.

Modnation Racers hasn't aged well, but I don't even know if it was good to begin with. It was quickly scrapped into LittleBigPlanet Karting, which actually had it's online services shut down before Modnation Racers. United Front Games had two shots and they both missed, long story short. Now if you excuse me, I'm falling asleep writing this. The hour and a half of waiting for loading screens and game installs has managed to push my sleep schedule back once again.

I normally rag on the Wii a lot for having a ton of terrible games and also ruining potentially good ones with motion controls, but sometimes there are brilliant gems out there that make me reconsider my decision. Boom Blox happens to be one of those games. Set in a world where everything is a rectangle or a cube, your mission is to undertake a variety of arcade-like missions to either knock towers down, get points, or do similarly destructive things. You have a plethora of tools at your disposal- whether it be bowling balls, laser guns or your own hands. The game comes with a ton of both singleplayer and multiplayer levels, and every one has been made in the game's own create mode. This never feels like a sacrifice on the quality of gameplay, and instead is used as an inspiring force to start making your own creations.

Boom Blox is played primarily with motion controls, and it's one of the most responsive feeling games using them. You throw balls or pull blocks using the Wii remote, so the motion and speed of your swings dictate the strength of your shots. Fast shots can be done with quick flicks, but if you want something slower you can use your whole arm in a slow throwing motion. The game has a surprisingly powerful physics engine, and everything feels as realistic as floating blocks covered in sheep would be. This can lead to frustrating situations though; while playing the same level over and over you can have different outcomes despite doing the exact same thing. It never feels like the game is cheating against you or is completely random, but it's kind of annoying knowing that sometimes things that should have worked as intended act completely differently. Maybe it's got something to do with quantum physics.

The only complaint I have is that I wish there was a "quick restart" button for the single player levels. Restarting takes less than a second, but it really adds up with the amount you'll be doing it. While the levels where you throw balls or shoot guns are fairly straightforward and easy (except the physics issues as mentioned above), where the game really gets hellish in it's difficulty is the "grab" levels. You don't have any balls or objects, and instead pull things out with the remote directly; this starts off innocently enough with simple towers, then turns into a jenga fever dream where pulling any block risks causing a destructive chain reaction. I nearly completed every "explore" level, which are just introductions to mechanics along with harder levels- but at this point I was kind of getting RSI in my wrist from all the flicking. If you manage to buy this game, take frequent breaks!

I only played this singleplayer today, but from what I remember the multiplayer is just as good. You get fun stuff like playing virtual jenga with insane setups, shooting cannons at eachother's castles, and even playing weird shooting galleries. There's also a shuffle mode, so you always play something new every time. From what I've heard, the sequel "Boom Blox: Bash Party" is even better- but I've never played it. Whatever you pick up, Boom Blox is a must-own for the Wii... just make sure to give your arm a break every now and then.

"Marble Saga: Kororinpa" has been a nice shelf warmer since I first owned it. It's one of those games that immediately assaults you with bad feeling gameplay straight out of the gate and doesn't seem to let up. After owning it for nearly ten years, I had never gone past the first world (which is only about ten to twenty minutes long). Tonight I finally put my foot down and decided to play more than just 30 minutes of it before immediately turning it off. I'm glad I did, because this game kicks ass.

Every iteration of "Mike Tyson's Punch Out!" that exists is just a test of memorization, plain and simple. While the first few fights are easy enough to go purely off reaction speed and counterattacks, eventually you'll get to the point where the enemies are too fast and deal too much damage. You have to either learn how to dodge every attack and slowly chip away at their health, or figure out the secret opportunites for a single-hit KO. This hearkens back to the old days of NES games being brutally difficult, but short- and the answer being Nintendo Power. Unfortunately this style of game design has not aged well, as people usually want more substance and weight behind their games and not just a load of cheap deaths (not to mention the internet now exists). So how does that fare for the 2009 reboot of "Punch Out!!"? Luckily, it's the best one in the entire series.

Punch Out!! follows the other games' formulas almost exactly: you play as Little Mac, a small boxer who must defeat a wide variety of racial stereotypes to make his way to the top and claim the championship. Each boxer has a unique gimmick, and it's up to you to figure out how to take them down. The main addition in this particular entry is the star meter, which lets you pull off powerful punches if you manage to hit enemies at the exact right times. Despite this, instant KO's are still there- they've just been given tricker and more obtuse ways of being activated. Star points are usually gained when counterattacking enemies just before they pull off an attack, and go from "a nice bonus" to "pretty much necessary" the further in the game you get. The final major addition to this punch out is motion control mode, which kind of makes the game objectively harder for no reason but is otherwise totally serviceable. When I played the game for the very first time I had no idea you could turn motion controls off- they automatically get turned on when you have a nunchuk plugged in and I heard you needed one to play. This resulted in a long, sweaty grind of shaking the controllers for hours trying to beat Mr. Sandman when I could have made life a lot easier by just checking out the options menu!

There's a lot of things that make this pretty much the definitive punchout, but the main draws are the game length and the star system. As already explained, the star system makes a lot of fights quite faster if you know how to pull them off; while this sometimes adds more memorization to the later bouts, overall it speeds up the fights so much that it's a welcome addition. The amount of fights are also much higher, which is to be expected considering that this is a Wii game originally retailing for 60 dollars. The flow of the game is the same- if you know the fights and are good at your reaction times you can easily clear the entire run in an hour or so (especially since you don't start from the beginning when you die), but this time there's multiple playthroughs. Once you beat Mr Sandman and become the world champion, your new mission is to defend your title and go back to kick everyone's ass once again. I actually really like this idea because it expands upon previous gimmicks and fleshes them out further. For example, Glass Joe now wears a training helmet so you can no longer hit his head, and King Hippo wears a manhole cover on his belly that must be hit off. I've never beaten this second loop because it does get quite hard, but I finished the first one in an hour and a half. I haven't played the game in over five years, but Punch Out!! is kind of like a bicycle... once you get good at it, you never forget.

Overall, I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to check out a punch out game and can't decide which one. It has a lot of returning characters, a ton of cool hidden star opportunites, and more than one full playthrough so you can really get your money's worth. While I think that the series itself is a bit tired these days and I don't really care for the amount of memorization involved, in comparison to the other games Punch Out!! for Wii can't be beat.

Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers came out today (congrats to me for instantly dating this review), and on top of that it's a friday so the main TV room is in use all night. The combination of these two things made it so I really had no time and place at all to play any game this afternoon! But I did have something to make up for it if this ended up happening, I actually have two games that are no longer playable but I still own: "Warhawk" and "MAG". They're both online focused, and thus why they can't be played anymore (for the most part).

It's best to start off with Warhawk, as I only really have fond memories of this game. Warhawk was a third person military shooter, where you would take the role of a generic army soldier with a simple goal of defeating the enemy. You did this through a variety of different game modes, but Capture the Flag was far and away the best one. To achieve your victory, you had a variety of weapons you could pick up and find on the ground, as well as vehicles and "warhawks". The vehicles were generic things like tanks and machinegun mounted ATVs, while Warhawks were extremely agile planes with an entirely different weapon set. Warhawks were the main focus of the game, with aerial combat seeming heavily favoured and much more fleshed out. Each weapon and pros and cons to it in a "rock-paper-scissors" balancing style, and the dodge roll mechanics added an extremely hectic layer of depth to an already chaotic dogfight. Despite this, I was never good at controlling warhawks- I much preferred going on the ground and stealthing around to various turrets and tanks to take them out. You'd think that if the game was designed around the planes being the main focus that ground combat would suck, but I actually found it much more intense and fun to play. You can capture bases around the map to gain more vehicle and weapon spawns while also allowing teammates to spawn there; usually a good strategy would involve one or two ground troops sneaking around on some obscure corner of the map to take bases from behind. Warhawks are strong, but it's easy to spot and hear them- but running through a forest with a sniper rifle or ATV is much quieter. It's also fun as heck to carry the flag in a fast moving vehicle only to hear people trying to bomb you from above while you go over potholes in the road. My friend from highschool was godlike at this game and would easily destroy anyone in a warhawk, but even he was outmatched by some people who had managed to attain the highest rank online (which takes hundreds of hours, by the way). Needless to say, the skill ceiling was quite high.

Secondly, the game I like the least out of the two: MAG. MAG was a first person shooter with capabilities to go up to 256 players in a single match, something that was so revolutionary it was awarded a Guinness World Record for it's size. You'd join one of three factions, each having their home be North America, Europe, and Russia respectively. Each would have largely the same equipment and playstyle, but would vary slightly differently to reflect their real world military counterparts and fighting style. This, combined with a ton of various skill trees, allowed for an extremely high amount of replayability... in theory. Actually, "in theory" seems to be a reoccuring theme in MAG, as I think i've said it too many times to count trying to explain the game to friends. When it comes to the game's actual design, there is nothing at all wrong with MAG. The problem came to the playerbase, which almost feels like an interesting psychological study. The game was extremely hard to play due to realistic health (only a few bullets would make you drop dead) and odd mechanics like parachuting into battle. Most times, you'd drop in from a plane up above and immediately get sniped in the head while deploying your parachute. In addition to this, the longer you played with more experience behind your back, the higher "roles" you'd get: by getting enough kills in the game you'd eventually have chances to be promoted to squad and platoon leaders. Since 256 players is a lot to handle in terms of chaos, the game is divided into smaller battlefields full of squads and platoons. As a generic grunt, you don't have much say- just follow your leader and shoot to kill. But as you get promoted, you have the ability to direct your squad around, lead airstrikes, see an aerial view of the entire map, and other neat things normal people can't witness. This is extremely cool in concept, but what it runs down to is more experienced players doing the absolute biggest scumbag tactics like camping spawnpoints with snipers and corners with shotguns to make sure they maintain their EXP bonus to get these roles. The addition of a skill tree doesn't help this out either, and just makes you at a straight up disadvantage to people who have been playing for hundreds of hours. On top of all this, real world stereotypes somehow translated into the game, leading the factions being skewed to the point of no return. Young annoying teenagers who thought gold plated AK-47s were the coolest thing ever would join the Russia company, old southerners who love freedom as much as they love america would join the NA company, and quiet british people who were extremely nice but never used mic chat would join the european company. So while playing on the side of russia would be a straight up advantage due to the high popularity of the PS3 with annoying teenagers, you'd also constantly get matched up with the scum of the earth micspamming every game. I had fun on the european company, but we got steamrolled every single match and lost the overall war really hard.

I sincerely miss both games, even though I only really liked one of them. It's the classic adage of "you only miss what you had when it's gone", as I totally wish I could go back and play them with my experience and knowledge now. Warhawk and MAG were two strategically deep games with tons to master, but back in middle and highschool I really didn't care about any of that and just wanted to shoot people and do dumb things with my friends. Looking back, I wish I was one of those people who had the chance to really get into these games, as there's not much like them on the market right now. Online multiplayer games have become more easily digestable, less focused on having tons of depth and more focused on being able to be consumed by as many people as possible. I may have hated being spawncamped and steamrolled in MAG and Warhawk in 2009, but looking back with rose coloured glasses, there's something to be appreciated about that after we've lost it to time.

Today a friend's birthday party was held at my house, so I didn't get time to work much- but had a great opportunity to play a four player game. I wasn't the one who initiated playing "Wii Sports Resort", but after seeing a few rounds played I decided to join in. I first watched my friends play some ping pong and bowling, and while bowling looked pretty much the same as the original "Wii Sports", ping pong looked insanely responsive and pretty fun.

I hopped in on basketball, in which the game was to score the most three point shots in the alloted time. The first thing I want to immediately comment on is the Wii Motion Plus: I am not sure if this thing is placebo or not, but it really continued to amaze me. I remember the Wii motion controls being pretty accurate, but not to the level of what I experienced in Wii Sports Resort. Basketball is as simple as it gets, you just pick up the ball, and flick it up into the hoop. But the interesting thing is that it seemed to pick up every small deviance from my wrist and arm, making nearly every one of my initial throws miss the mark. Much like real basketball, you can "lock in" to a groove, and once you know the sweet spot of how exactly to hop and flick you can easily land multiple shots in a row. I really liked this one, but I'm glad we only played one round of it as there was pretty much no variety.

Next we played Archery. This was a bit harder as somebody picked "Expert" while we were all preoccupied with eating dinner. Quickly seperating from realism, this particular archery course was filled with moving targets, wood boards blocking part of the targets, and even shooting arrows in a volcano. This is where I figured out one of the major flaws of Wii Motionplus- the obsession with getting it to recalibrate. I'm sure this is only a huge problem in Wii Sports Resort, but nearly every single turn we had to place down the wii remote for thirty seconds to get it recalibrated. Other than that I found archery a bit fun, but more luck based. Wind also plays a factor, but it's random and can vary from "spring breeze" to "hurricane" pretty fast. I'm sure in the easier difficulties it's less of an issue, but I think the expert courses are fun, so it's kind of a give and take scenario.

Admittedly, these are the only two minigames we had time to play. I could have joined in earlier for the longer ones like bowling, but I wasn't too interested until I saw ping pong. I will say this though: despite the small sample size I find it relatively easy to give a review of the whole gaming experience.

While Wii Sports Resort is a really fun game, it only serves as filler once a year or so with party guests and not much more. From what I saw and played there is not much variety to any of the games, so if you were to play an extended session you'd have to switch up the games regularly or get pretty buzzed. Luckily the amount of games to select is huge, which is why I partially think reviewing it at this point feels a bit unfair. I also remember that some single player modes are insanely in depth, things like the swordfight minigame having tons of levels and the flight area having the entire island be explorable with tons of hidden secrets. I might review the game again later, but so far from what I've experienced I'd have to just give it a mediocre pass. It's usage is too niche to warrant buying, but it's fun enough to not say it's a bad or mediocre experience. All in all, Wii Sports Resort is kind of like a hot tub- when you finally own one, you never end up using it.

Is a game still fun if you're not given anything to care about? Can something fly by it's pure gameplay alone and nothing else? Enter "Borderlands 2", a loot based shooter that released for nearly every single platform in 2012. Previously, I have struggled on dealing with this question for similar loot based titles like Diablo and Torchlight 2. Usually the plot is pretty weak, the setting is generic, and there is no motivation behind playing more other than to gain more loot that you can use to more efficiently farm further loot with. Borderlands 2 stands among these as one of the most middle of the road, despite it's unique first person shooter ties- but I will say that I enjoy it a lot more than I used to.

At the time, I was hyped for Borderlands 2. I preordered it, had my mom pick it up from future shop (RIP) while I was at high school, and waited all day to play it. I came home and played it nearly all day with a party of three other friends. Why? To be honest, the original "Borderlands" was something of a magical experience. I think it hit me at the right time, mixing together the setting of an unhinged mad max film with the gameplay of a first person shooter and the jankiness of an indie game (but with the scale of a AAA title). It was a bizarre game, and ended up enrapturing me and my friends for months. We would boot it up and beat the entire campaign in a day, grind bosses to get more loot despite having nothing left to kill, use cars to glitch out of bounds, and just fuck around in general. When Borderlands 2 came out with the announcement it would be over twice as long, I was ecstatic. But as I continued to play the game over the following week, my will to continue playing slowly drained... until I was basically begging for it to be over.

Was it hype? Potentially, because I don't see it as that bad anymore. If anything, it's got hints of extreme annoyance- but nothing more malicious than that. Having thought about it more, I think the main issue is the scale of the game's development. Do you ever end up playing a game that is extremely rough around the edges, but love it anyways? What about when it gets popular enough to get a sequel? Even if the game is well made, it still doesn't have the charm the original has. Take DotA for instance- starting as a lowly mod for Warcraft 3, it was a gamemode where you'd choose between a bunch of items/heroes to mess around with and try to gain victory over the opposing team. There was skill involved, there was a community, but not too many people took it seriously as the engine it was running in was jank as hell with a lot of easily abused elements. DotA2 and League of Legends come out much later, and suddenly what used to be a quaint hangout tool developed by a bunch of university studens on their spare time has now become an "actual game". A product, something made to be consumed en masse. I can't explain the exact energy loss behind things like this, but I feel like Borderlands 2 had a lot of the same issues to it. Is Borderlands 2 objectively better than the first game? Absolutely. Do I enjoy playing it? Not really.

To start off, the gunplay is much better than it has any right to be. Each gun looks like it fell off the back of a super soaker truck, and has a high chance of being absolutely useless in every way. But the strength of the controller's rumble, the screenshake, and the sound the guns make really drives the feeling home. HP bars are visually big enough that you can see the chunks of damage your shots take off, and damage numbers flying everywhere is an easy way to make even a peashooter feel satisfying. Each level is also extremely well designed, with special care taken to the hub town, The Sanctuary. There are tons of little chests and secrets hidden everywhere, and mysteries like locked gates to keep you attempting to explore around more. In The Sanctuary, there is a slot machine that dispenses both loot, money, and rare skins and currency- and this might be the most addictive loot based reward system I've ever played with. I have no clue why rolling the slots is suddenly more exciting when you get randomized weapons from it, but seeing a blue or purple come out of there is one of the most exciting things in Borderlands 2. When we used to play multiplayer, we would all line up on the slots and take turns gambling away our hard earned cash instead of just straight up buying new weapons.

Unfortunately, that is where my compliments to Borderlands 2 ends. The dialogue is abysmal, somehow managing to be even worse than the infamy people have attempted to give it. The main issue is not that it's immature, it's that you can tell it's trying it's damndest to be memetic. Every character is written to be an extremely quirky stereotype who randomly goes on sanity breaks saying the most absolutely batshit stupid crap you've ever heard... and this happens at least once a conversation. This includes your main characters, who will constantly say things like "Powned, noob!" and "EPIC!!" when you open things, even if it doesn't match their personality at all. My personal "favourite" (read: most hated) moment is when you help a rich hunter stereotype rename the "bullymong" (which is already an stupidly offensive name for no reason) species to something more suitable. You basically kill them while he rambles on forever about it until he comes up with the name "bonerfarts", and now all of those monsters in the gameworld are named "bonerfarts" for the rest of your playthrough. I think the worst part about all of this is that it actually works on people; I vividly remember this quest years later, and there are some characters like Tiny Tina (she's a little girl who kills people... wacky!!!) are loved by the community because of her being intensely forced upon the player as cute and/or marketable. The only character who really works for me is Handsome Jack, because he acts like a real person. It's actually quite impressive, it's like a real life douchebag is talking to you! He's insanely annoying, stupid, and aggravating, but his flow of dialogue and writing is so on-point with people i've met in real life with similar personality traits that I can (almost) give it a pass. The plot is also nearly as bad as the characters, by the way- it takes itself way too seriously while all these stupid shenanigans are happening at the same time. It's self aware at how dumb it's characters are and how contrived the plot is, but it never does anything with this knowledge... it's just going "look! here they are!" without actually deconstructing any of it.

As a few side notes of less important things: the graphics are insanely ugly, the music is passable but decides to come on at completely random times, and there's so many numbers to cross compare with guns and characters that you stop giving a shit very quickly and just pick up anything that has more green arrows. Building a character is fun in concept, since each skill tree they have makes them play in a completely different playstyle to most other characters. In actuality though, you might not find a gun to fit that playstyle for hours, or have to get a skill point into something so far down the tree that you find yourself slogging through levels without caring for your build at all. Additionally, there's no way to preview or look up each character's skill tree in game, so you can't really test out different builds to see what suits you the best.

So with all those points I've nailed out above, I must really hate Borderlands 2, right? Well... not really. The key thing with Borderlands 2 is that you can ignore most of these things in favour of the more appealing bits. You can turn the sound down real low and not do any sidequest that sounds stupid or meme-heavy, you can look past the brown and green cel shaded graphics, you can not really care too much about what your character's build is like or what guns you're carrying. But what you're left with is a decidedly average shooter. What's made worse is that not a lot of the guns are static; you can never really talk about your experience with a crazy weapon besides a small few due to the random generation. Everything starts feeling the same after a while, and that's really what sums up Borderlands 2 for me. Is it still fun to shoot things and level up, co-op style? Sure, but there are better games to do it in. And in a sea of over-polished AAA games that involve shooting things and levelling up, I don't really see a point to Borderlands existing as a series anymore.

When you do 20 reviews back to back every single day, you start to feel like you're beginning to repeat yourself. In fact, most of my playtime of "Brink" today was spent trying to find different criticisms than what I've said in the past few days. It's hard to distinguish whether Brink is just one of the most generic games of all time, or if I'm just a bad writer. Maybe it's a bit of both.

Brink is a first person shooter revolving around two factions vying to take control of a sci-fi city named The Ark. In reality, none of that plot really matters as it's heavily cliched and it's plot devices contrived (the most interesting plot twist: Bethesda published this game). At it's time of release, Brink was extremely hyped... which eventually blew up in it's face when the game was out for a few days. Reviews came in backblasting it, and for a while it seemed like nobody had anything positive to say about Brink. I didn't really follow E3 or game previews when this game was being launched, but the backlash against it was so huge that I ended up hearing about that despite not even knowing what genre it was. I eventually bought it for 5 dollars during Boxing Day, so my expectations were pretty low.

Other than the limp story, the main problems with Brink are Bethesda's obsession with making a competitive team-based shooter despite not knowing how to make one at all. Brink is set over the course of two different campaigns, all which focus around team vs team gameplay and having to complete a series of objectives or defend them from the enemy. I suppose the objectives themselves are pretty well laid out as they all match up to the story, even if it sucks. Even before the gameplay actually started, I knew there would be issues simply from looking at the character create screen: all of the gun's stats are in bars instead of raw data, all of the upgrades are in extremely general terms, the buffing abilities don't tell you how much you get buffed by, there's no clear explanation of what "ranks" are and what the difference is between them and levels, you don't get a sense of what the level cap is so you don't know how much you can increase skill points, and so on. Everything is designed to look as pretty and clean as possible, but the consequence is the entire game being extremely vague with a huge lack of information given to the player. Sure, you can spin around your gun in 3d with all these fancy attachments and paintjobs, but you can't actually figure out how much damage it deals. How much bonus damage do I get by buffing myself with engineer? Does buffing my AI teammates do anything or are they just programmed to deal the exact same amount of damage no matter what? The entire game feels like a fight against information, which is kind of ironic considering the plot of getting in an intelligence-based arm race with the rebellion.

But how does the actual game feel? For starters, the gunplay is pretty good... mostly. All the guns deal pretty high damage, have high recoil, make loud sounds (almost too loud, it drains out everything else), and rattle around realistically when you fire them. While holding an LMG and spraying down a hallway you really feel like you have a ton of power and are just mowing down anyone who dares peek out of a doorway. However, they manage to even screw this up by trying to go "too realistic" with the gunplay and ending up making every single bullet be made out of grenades. If you get shot twice you fly backwards and die instantly, if you get hit by the butt of somebody's gun you go skating across the entire room and fall down, if a grenade explodes 20 feet away you fall down on your ass for way too long. I get that they might want to instill some form of realism, but it happens so often that it's almost cartoonish. The balancing makes it even more ridiculous, as putting on a kevlar vest that you can unlock suddenly makes you invincible towards most forms of damage. The gameplay isn't the only thing that suffers, however: the graphics and audio are also equally terrible. The visuals of Brink don't really fall victim to the "brown and grey" trope that most shooters released around 2011 face; they instead have an entirely different issue of looking like you're in the most foggy humid city imaginable. This doesn't seem like an intentional design decision, but instead like you accidentally managed to boot this game up on your PS1. The textures and models are also really low quality, but I'll rack those ones up as playing on PS3 and not on PC where I could crank it all to "Ultra". The audio, on the other hand, is unfixable no matter what platform you buy it on; it suffers from being obnoxious rather than badly programmed. As previously stated, the gun sounds are excellent- but the constant yelling of teammates saying things like "MUCHO BAD GUYS SPOTTED" and "OY MATE IM OUTTA AMMO" every 3 seconds isn't.

Whereas you can ignore the bad parts of "Borderlands 2" and focus on how good the guns feel, I can't say the same about Brink. I played on hard difficulty because I wanted a challenge (and increasing it doesn't artifically raise their health or damage since it was originally intended to be online), and ended up only getting annoyed by the inconveniences instead of enjoying the things I liked about it. Sure, AI makes completing the objectives ten times harder and more tedious, but that doesn't give excuses for the muddy graphics, lack of user feedback, bad objective placement, and confused design. Why is there a parkour system that is heavily focused on by the game's tutorial and box blurb when it's hardly ever used in game? Why do I need to capture command posts for bonus health when we can just all ignore them and blitz the actual objective? There's so many confusing and stupid things in Brink's design and production departments that I can't really recommend it to anyone, ever. Not back in 2011, not now, not in 15 years from now. The most impressive thing Bethesda has done with Brink is managing to sweep it under the rug and having people forget it exists.

Here's one out of left field: "MySims" for the Wii. MySims is one of those games that I assume nobody has ever heard of, but every time I bring it up somebody has something to contribute. Made by EA, it's an official Sims offshoot- even including the lovable green diamond that dictates how dead your sim is inside. This game is a lot more simple than what'd you'd find in normal sims games though, considering you don't even have stats to begin with! Instead of the typical "create a character and make sure they don't die" formula, you are instead tasked with rebuilding an entire town from scratch with no pressure of keeping your sim happy or healthy. To replace the depth of sim progression, MySims adds the "essences" and workbench systems, which allows you to do pretty much anything that interacts with the world to earn abstract concepts as resources and then use those resources to build furniture and buildings. The twist to this is that you actually go into a basic 3D modeller and make the object yourself using primitive objects, thus every single thing that's not pre-rendered is user customizable.

MySims is really basic, and that might turn people off. In fact, what i've said above is almost describing over 80% of the game. You interact with objects- sometimes playing a short (but neat) minigame, you collect essences related to that object, you use essences to build things in your workshop using the 3d modeller, and then you complete quests using those objects. Essences have more of a use than just grinding for the sake of grinding, as they all have attributes to them and even come with unique wallpapers and decorations. For example, somebody might be a goth or a nerd, and if you want to gift them stuff to increase your friendship or complete quests for them you'd have to appeal to their sensibilities by injecting essences into things. The only downside to this system is that there's no way to make the essences invisible, they'll either paint the object or place a weird 3D model of the essence in the build area... but on the other hand it kind of gives every type of object it's own distinct "style". As you complete quests for townsfolk, your "popularity meter" will slowly raise, causing new areas to unlock and unique sims to move in.

MySims is as nostalgic as it is depressing. I loved this game as a kid, and I remember when I randomly got it for christmas one year I ended up playing it for hours on end until I totally completed it. There's a real sense of mystery throughout the entire game: you start out in a small area, soon to find abandoned powerplants that are boarded up, a desert blocked by rocks, and a forest with japanese shrines around it. You can't go into these areas until you complete enough quests, but they're juuuuuuust interesting enough to want to check them out. Sims constantly move in and all have unique personalities and dialogue, leaving you wondering on who could possibly show up next. Finding essences is really fun, mainly because the actions you do dictate heavily what essences you get; being a massive dick to people around town will give you anger essences, while being nice will give you essences of the person's type. Stomping on flowers like a bully will give you thorns and scary essences to help you become the true punk goth, but sniffing and picking them give you cute and flower essences to make your room more pink. Since everything can be custom made including both interiors and exteriors, you can create stories with peoples houses by changing up all their furniture or meticulously spend time designing every single room to make something beautiful. This all comes at a cost though, as I feel more old and dead inside while playing MySims than I have in a long time. The main downside to everything about this game is that there really isn't a huge goal or reward; there's nothing stopping you from making the absolute bare basics required or just speedrunning every quest immediately to complete the game in an hour or two. The main focus on the game is building your very own unique town and gaining a feel for each resident, to really make sure you add your own personality and flair to everything. While as a kid I was so enthralled by the mystery of what was to come and who I could meet, now I just ask myself: what's the point? Nobody is going to see anything I have made since it's on the Wii and not online, There's no multiplayer similar to "Animal Crossing" where you can share a town with local friends, and all of the quests are so easily completed and abusable that it's almost begging you to just do the bare basics. By the time I completed my fifth piece of furniture, I just felt drained and wanting to do nothing more than immediately quit. Despite the essence and creation system being shockingly in depth and customizable (for Wii, at least), the thrill of creation as it's own reward was not enough for me. I needed some sort of external goal- other people interacting with my creations, having a challenge to go along with it, or having some sort of deeper metagame. Gone are the days of making "Age of Empires" custom maps by myself and roleplaying battles out in my head for hours. Gone is my childhood innocence.

MySims is a very shallow and light game, which is why reviews on it are so harsh. But if you get past that fact, I think you could easily enjoy it if you love "The Sims". It's a large enough of an offshoot that if you go in expecting a typical sims experience you'll find yourself dissapointed, but with the expectations lowered and creativity heightened I think you could have quite a fun time. If you have younger siblings or kids who are into being creative, I think this game would be an amazing fit for them. As for me, MySims is a game that I think is very good, but I don't enjoy playing. Despite some occasional frame rate and second long freezes, there's nothing wrong with the aesthetic or performance of the game, and it's well designed for a light experience. I just wish I had the playfully free soul I once did as a kid to enjoy making bullshit in a sandbox for hours without asking why I did it.

Before "Mega Man 9", I had never played a Mega Man game. In fact, I had no real interest to playing them. I had seen them on the internet and knew what the gameplay is like, but I always assumed that since it was an old game it was bound to suck. While my childish thinking of "new = better" might seem unbased, at that point the only NES games I had played were "Golden Sun" and the original "Castlevania", which I both thought were clunky and terrible. But lo and behold, "Nintendo Power" advertised Mega Man 9 heavily, stating that it would be like the classic old NES games but released in 2008. This was a huge deal at the time, because up until that point the series had gotten steadily worse with increasingly terrible "Mega Man X" games, tons of offshoot series that had nothing to do with the basic gameplay, and a lukewarm SNES game to end the main series. People were hyped for the Mega Man games to finally go back to their roots, but I was just excited to finally experience a "new and not crappy" NES game to see what the buzz was all about.

The dust has settled, and while having an old-school Mega Man game in modern times is no longer an impressive or interesting task, Mega Man 9 is still considered to be one of the best of the series. Unfortunately, it's also one of the hardest. I agree with both of these claims, with the added caveat that I really hate the Mega Man series as a whole. Did starting on one of the most difficult games cause this? Not necessarily- while Mega Man 9 is undoubtedly extremely hard, it's nothing out of the ordinary for the series: almost every time I died while playing it today felt like "Yup, that's Mega Man".

Mega Man is a game focused heavily on memorization and knowledge, despite being mostly platforming. Each level you can choose from is wildly easy, but has one or two absolutely impossible segments in it that will probably kill you over and over. On top of that, each "robot master" is weak to another's weapon, and since they all deal so much damage you basically need to have the counter if you want to survive. Therefore the game is a lot more linear than it appears on first glance, because despite having 8 levels to choose from the game is just a giant "rock paper scissors" tournament. This I don't have much of a problem with, because the levels are usually short enough to not get too annoyed if you end up not having the weakness to the particular boss. What I do take issue with is the difficulty of the levels themselves: it's extremely uneven and doesn't feel satisfying. You'll cruise through 90% of the level unchallenged, and then come up to a stupidly taxing "disappearing block" segment with a ton of beginner's traps or a room filled with one hit kill spikes. If you die three times on this room you get a game over, and back to the beginning level with you. What about one or two deaths? You're still down a few lives, and if the boss is particularly tough then you might as well just restart anyways. If the entire level was difficult that would be one thing, but it's just a small handful of rooms, which makes the rest of the level feel like a tedious punishment for failing more than something to actually be progressed through.

The reason I personally feel like Mega Man 9 is the best out of the series is that it's got a lot of modern improvements without compromising the original design of the old games. Yes, I don't like Mega Man level or progression design, but even with that personal preference I would rather see it continue to be what it was designed to be than cater to people like me who want something completely different. There's achievements which add a high level of replayability, there's a challenge mode that lets you take on certain stages with conditions, there's a shop that lets you buy great items like a weapon auto refiller, so you don't need to switch weapons to get refill pickups for them. On top of all this everything else is also insanely polished: the music is great, the graphics are very distinct and crisp, and the plot is pretty cheesy but sets out to do exactly what it wants to. I feel like the difficulty of this one isn't that out of the ordinary, as the series has always been tough as nails. The few games that are easier and more broken ("Mega Man 2" comes to mind) are usually the more popular ones, but I feel like people enjoy them for the things that Mega Man isn't designed to be. Just because you can shoot metal man's weapon in any direction and have infinite ammo and health because almost every enemy drops a pickup doesn't mean you like Mega Man as a series, it just means you like Mega Man 2.

Bottom line: I don't like Mega Man as a series, but Mega Man 9 is great. I think anyone who wants to try out Mega Man but doesn't know where to start should play 9, as it's well made and modern enough to be accessible despite it's punishing difficulty.

Does a game having cool ideas and an extremely weird world behind it forgive the fact that it's cripplingly boring? According to "Super Paper Mario", the answer is a resounding "no". It's hard to believe a Mario game where you go to hell, date a NEET lizard, and watch an entire world be erased from existence could be boring- but Intelligent Systems somehow managed it.

Getting straight down to brass tacks, the absolute main factor to Super Paper Mario being as dull of an experience as it is comes from the gameplay. In other Paper Mario games, you have an RPG battle system where you execute a myriad of quick time events in a turn based battle to both attack and dodge enemies. While turn based RPGs can easily become tedious and boring, the skill factor of having to execute these moves along with the variety of them keep the game constantly engaging. Super Paper Mario tries a completely different approach: instead of having a turn based battle system at all, the game is entirely a platformer with battle taking place through attacking enemies in the overworld. It's entirely possible that the series was in dire need of this change- to be fair, the first two Paper Mario games are almost the exact same game, just with different characters. However, the way it was implemented is only repetitive and mind-numbing. Boss difficulty is nearly non-existent, as the only things there are to do against them is to jump on them or use a "Pixl" (partners you acquire in this game) to perform an ability on them. While this allows bosses to be "speedrunned" if the player is skilled enough to chain jumps on them, missing these opportunities does not punish or add any difficulty to the game and instead just makes things take longer to finish. Regular enemies aren't much of a challenge either, as they're so sparse and non-threatening that you can easily avoid them or use one of your abilities to take them down without thought. There are challenging sections later on, including the famed "Pit of 100 Trials", but this kicks in so late that the game is already almost over by it's arrival.

On top of the flatlined combat, the exploration itself is draining in every sense of the word. You'd assume that a 2D platformer with defined stages wouldn't have much in the way of exploring, but very early into the game you're given the power to go into 3D. You flip sideways and see the entire world in 3D instead of 2D, and can interact with it differently. What's painful about this is that there's a timer; while it's necessary for a lot of puzzles the game has, it just results in you flipping from 2D to 3D every five seconds to see if there's any secret goodies in one dimension or the other. Since each transition is about one second, this makes every screen at least 1-5 minutes longer than it really needs to be. Think you'll be finding Badges and Equipment in these hidden nooks and crannies? Think again! The only thing to collect in Super Paper Mario is trading cards, which give you a flat damage boost to the enemies you collect them for. But as previously stated, enemies are so easy that it's really not worth your time to hunt these down. If you want my recommendation, quell your collection OCD and don't bother finding anything extra- most of it is simply not worth your time.

There is very little to be said about "Cars: Mater-National". In fact, a more interesting story lies in how I own the game. Mater-National was my very first PS3 game, along with a Blu-Ray copy of "Spider-Man 3". I have no idea why my mom decided to buy it as our first PS3 game... maybe because it was something the whole family could enjoy, maybe she loved the movie "Cars" despite never seeing it, maybe it was literally one of the only games out for the system at the time. The PS3's launch was pretty dire, and the fact that Mater-National is one of the best games released in the first yearly quarter speaks volumes for that.

I knew this would happen, sooner or later. I just wasn't expecting it to be with "Playstation All Stars Battle Royale". I've come up against a game I can't really "review".

Playstation All Stars was meant to be Sony's answer to "Super Smash Brothers", where you play as one of your "favourite" sony-owned characters in a massive brawl across several stages. Unlike traditional fighting games, movement around the stage is more relied on along with the execution of various "super moves". Unlike Smash, you cannot knock out an opponent without executing one of these moves (similar to final smashes in brawl) gained by filling up your super meter. Each character has various gimmicks and move sets to make them all distinct, and there's quite a few to choose from considering how many properties sony owns the rights to.

That's the basic gist of the game, or at least on paper. In practice, none of it matters as I cannot actually play this game. Thanks to the newest patch that came out after the game's online was killed off, the entire game freezes after nearly every battle. Whether you decide to do the tutorial, arcade mode, challenge mode, or anything that puts you into a stage: if you ever go back to the menu, you're restarting your PS3. I tried the disc version, I tried installing it digitally, I tried deleting and reinstalling the patch, but nothing would work. I almost thought it was because my PS3 is modded, but it appears to be a common problem after looking the issue up online.

I did manage to get a few matches in before my patience gave in, however. First off, it's not surprising at all that this happened, as the game's budget feels disasterously thin. The menus, audio, stability, framerate, and pretty much anything to do with this game at all feels more like a beta than a full build. Everything feels like it's either a placeholder asset or not funded enough to get something better. There is a ton of content in this game, but it all feels cheap and mass produced- there are an absolute truckload of challenges to do for each character, but they are just the same level copy and pasted with the enemies you're fighting shuffled around. There are lots of unlockable skins and assets for each character, but a lot of them are recolours or reused art from other projects and locked behind a tedious level up system. There are a lot of characters, but some begin to feel very similar to others after a short while of playing.

The game feels very rushed, but is the core control good? Not really. Yes, it's absolutely a Smash Brothers ripoff; however sony committed the cardinal sin of fighting games by making it floaty and miserable to control. Smash games have always felt "fine" to control, even with the old N64 controller... Playstation All Stars on the other hand feels slow, sluggish, and like you accidentally enabled a "low gravity" cheat. You can use the analog stick, but since it doesn't provide precise movement, you're forced to use the d-pad (which literally cuts into your hand after prolonged play). It's also sometimes hard to tell characters apart when things get hectic- maybe having most of your IPs have generic white males as protagonists isn't the best choice for making a fast paced brawler.

I wish I had more to say about this game. It really feels like I'm being lazy today, like i'm taking the easy way out instead of booting the game up over and over to get a better impression. But the entire experience being so cheap and poorly produced really kills all motivation I have to play more. The entire game is just a cynical trainwreck, attempting to cash in on the Smash Brothers hype by outsourcing a game studio on the cheap. Maybe this entire crashing issue is a conspiracy made by Sony to make sure people forget about the game and never touch it again; because making the game completely non-functional would probably give off a better impression than if you actually tried to play it. Whatever the case, Playstation All Stars Battle Royale is absolutely not worth your time and money in any capacity... and Sony probably feels the same way.

I've never been a fan of the "Donkey Kong Country" series, and I don't like "waggle" motion controls. Clearly, I'm the perfect person to review this game.

I have always regarded "Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure" as one of the top three Wii games, so I was honestly ready to be let down from expectations being too high. Last time I played it was when I rented it in 2008, and beat it in a day before returning it to Blockbuster. While it clearly left a lasting impression on me, I was ready to have my rose coloured glasses shattered and be disappointed upon revisiting. But thankfully, "Zack and Wiki" did not disappoint in the slightest.

Zack and Wiki revolves around you playing a small pirate boy (with a magical flying monkey) who wants nothing more to be rich and famous. His pirate crew is in debt, nobody cares about him, and his plans are always being foiled by the sexy rich older pirate, Captain Rose. Very early onto the game you discover Captain Barbaros, who is some sort of enchanted golden skeleton; he then tells you that he will give you his famous pirate ship if you re-assemble his body. Throughout the game you go around solving puzzles to gain access to treasure chests, accumulating pieces of Barbaros from around the world.

I gave a full plot synopsis just now mainly because I don't feel like anyone has heard of this game. It was reviewed extremely positively and has garnered huge cult status, while also being made by Capcom of all people. But it's sales reeled in less than 25,000 copies in the United States, and it shows- whenever you end up asking somebody about this game there's an extremely high chance they've never heard of it.

This is a huge shame, because not only does Zack and Wiki fulfill a strangely undertapped niche for the Wii of being a point-and-click adventure, but it also does it well. Throughout the game you control Zack, moving around the levels solving puzzles to eventually get the treasure that's tucked away behind various tricks and traps. You do this by pointing the wii remote at the screen and "clicking" around to move... but there are additional motion controls on top of this to really shake things up (no pun intended). These seem like they would be stale gimmicks at first: having to pull down a lever using the wii remote in a similar action, having to drop a jar down a pit by letting the remote fall into your lap, etc. But surprisingly, they actually feel really intuitive and necessary to the gameplay experience. While I don't agree with some examples where you have to be extremely precise with your movements (the fishing game is notorious for this), those times are few and far between. The more common issue I have is not knowing what to do with the object you're given; the worst offender of this was an umbrella I had to use to slide down a zipline. I knew I had to use it and could guess how I'd go about doing it, but I couldn't figure out that I had to flick it in an upwards motion to flip it around in my hand to use the end. What resulted was me pointing at a pillar with an umbrella for 5 minutes looking like a lunatic. These are honestly minor complaints though, and I'll take weird leaps of logic (which are to be expected anyways, it's a point-and-click game) and ultra-fine precision to keep this great use of motion controls.

The most important part of point-and-click games isn't the gameplay, but the actual level and character design. If the areas themselves aren't well designed and memorable with intelligent riddles, then the game becomes too easy and tedious. Likewise, if the characters and plot are thin and generic, there isn't really any motivation to keep playing. What really makes Zack and Wiki shine are not it's controls or literal gameplay, but the fact that it absolutely knocks these two elements out of the park. Every single level is extremely inventive and unique- it never feels like you're doing the same thing twice, even though actions are shared between levels. In one stage you're racing against the clock to sprint through snow so a janitor-robot doesn't sweep you up after following your footsteps, and in another level you're trying to dodge a pissed-off monkey who's scared of fire. To back this up, every single character is memorable and likeable; a main thing I forgot about Zack and Wiki before revisiting it today was how funny it was. Wiki is a straight up bastard who is always happy about everything, even when it means your immenent death. Zack is overconfident and clumsy, usually doing the most stupid and direct approach to everything and getting himself into trouble. This extends onto the player, as there are a shocking amount of ways to die... all which seem like dumb things Zack would do if he were to try this out without your assistance. The minor characters all have personality too, and even your ranking that goes up depending on your score accumulated gets better drawn the more of a following you have. Everything is well animated and bursting with life and the entire experience of this is enough to carry the game, even if it didn't have as good control or puzzle design.

Movie tie-ins are usually garbage budget titles, specifically made on the cheap to see how much they can claw out from desperate buyers. While they have improved somewhat since the era of games like "E.T." and "Batman and Robin", they are usually still better off avoided. But when I was a pre-teen, I got my hands on a copy of a rare exception- a movie game that is interesting enough to warrant owning. My parents (mostly my mom) didn't allow me to play "M" rated games even though pretty much everyone at school was enjoying them. To make up for it, they bought me "James Cameron's Avatar: The Game" as reconciliation: it allowed me to shoot things without seeing blood/gore and going online with scary dangerous people. So instead of playing Modern Warfare 2 with a bunch of child molesters and drug dealers (because that's the only type of people who play online games, clearly), I got to experience one of the weirdest movie tie-in games of all time.

"Avatar: The Game" is a slow burn. The second you boot it up and see the main menu, you know something is off, but can't quite place it. But the further you get into the story, the more you realize what the problem is: the game is insanely ambitious. From the crisp menu UI that looks themed around RDA computers, to the "Metroid Prime" scanning feature that allows you to accumulate amounts of lore so vast they could fill up books, and that the entire game feels like a single player MMORPG. It's an insane attack from all sides of half-finished but ambitious ideas, all coming from a movie game that sounded just as terrible as the rest. At one point you unlock an entire "Risk" minigame where you take over the entire planet via strategic turn based combat, working similarly to "Sonic Adventure"'s "Chao Garden" where EXP gained in the real game transfer over to money in the strategy game. What benefit does this have on the main game? Barely anything, only giving you a few minor damage buffs if you manage to take over enough countries. Moments and discoveries of game mechanics like this really make you realize that Avatar: The Game is something special, even if it's massively flawed.

The reception of Avatar: The Game was extremely mixed, leaning more towards negative. Why? As ambitious and creative the overall experience feels, it is equally matched with terrible design, balance, and programming. It feels like the development team was filled entirely of "ideas guys" and designers and nobody really had much game development experience to back it up. The frame rate is abysmal, likely due to the high amount of plants and shrubbery on screen. The game balance is laughable, as during the whole game I used exactly one gun, popping a damage buff whenever I needed to (which let me almost two-shot bosses). Controlling vehicles is a pain, as the buggies flip over and crash if they hit even the smallest pebble and the flying helis are sluggish and clunky. Moving is incredibly slow, but dodge rolling is pretty fast- the entire game consists of you helicopter kicking as an avatar or somersaulting as a human to get from point A to point B. As for the MMORPG aspect? There's an EXP system that allows unlocking armour and weapons, but you get no sidequests at all (not a single one) and grinding enemies/achievements gives pitiful EXP... so it's basically locked to story progress.

But despite all these negatives, I was pretty addicted to replaying Avatar: The Game tonight. I think it comes down to the fact that the core gameplay isn't that bad, even if it's a bit generic. Along with the absolutely breakneck speed the story progresses at, it really feels like you're "abusing" the game in just the right ways. The game starts off with you reaching Pandora as a "systems specialist", and pretty much immediately you're put into an avatar. You do a few missions as a human, do a few missions as an avatar, and after a while the game tells you to pick a side and shoot the fuck out of whoever isn't allied with them. I chose the humans, mainly because cheesy voice acting from hamfisted corporate army moguls was way more amusing than hearing pretentious art students wax poetic about the beauty of life... but also because I preferred the gameplay. As an Avatar you focus more on stealth-based gameplay with slow firing bows and powerful melee weapons, but as a human you're more concerned with overwhelming firepower and shouting "USA! USA!" whenever you burn down a native village. This complete seperation in plot and gameplay is complemented by the short play-time, as by the end of my two and a half hour stint tonight I got over halfway finished. While the story isn't good in any sense of the word, it always keeps you engaged and on your toes.Even the few times the plot felt like it was dragging, I was compelled to keep playing by expanding my territory via the strategy minigame. Sometimes I wish my character would stop being such a snarky ass or question how the military got to be so informal in the future, but it only added to the hilarious camp instead of making me annoyed or frustrated.

I wholeheartedly recommend checking out Avatar: The Game. Is it good? Ehhhhhh, I think if I managed to put my nostalgia aside and just focus on the product, I'd say not really. But the ambition and love involved really make it something special and interesting, and that's why I have to give it a thumbs up for anyone wanting to venture off the beaten path. Some of the frame rate issues could probably be fixed on the PC version, and it only takes 4-5 hours to beat a campaign path. In all honesty, there's really nothing to lose from trying Avatar: The Game in 2019, as it's probably insanely cheap by now and quite a weird experience. Just don't go in expecting game of the year material.

"Little King's Story" is possibly the most whimsical game about genocide, taxation, and subjugation ever made. While it might sound like I'm spicing things up or making a ridiculous game theorist-esque stretch to an otherwise cute Wii game, but the plot and humour of Little King's Story doesn't mess around. You take control of a young boy named Corobo who finds a crown that instantly cristens him as king. Shortly after, your "loyal knight" Howser tempts him with the promise of making the kingdom better by killing off all the nearby locals. Sure, they're demons, but they're cute, slow, and carry around toys or candy. None of these main characters are considered or portrayed as villains, and instead are applauded for their efforts despite using terms like "World Domination". This kind of adds a layer of very funny black humour to the whole game, which seems to continue to other normally serious aspects of the world such as god (the "Priest of Soup" saying "Ramen" instead of "Amen"), death (small funerals are held for each dead villager, but are considered unimportant and can be ignored), and marriage (the tutorial itself saying "What's the point of marriage? I don't know and don't care").

It might seem weird to review the game's humour first, of all things. But it's what immediately jumped out to me as soon as I started playing Little King's Story again. The entire game is impossibly charming, with cute little soldiers marching to their death against adorable little Oni and winged cows. The presentation in general is top notch, with the music sounding like it came right out of a young children's cartoon and graphics being punchy and cartoonish while also feeling dreamy and soft at the same time. The plot is simple yet effective, while your main (and pretty much only) objective is to achieve world domination, every single faction you go up against has their own personality which translates to their in-game units. None of this ever takes over the game experience; even though bosses have cutscenes beforehand and there's quite a bit of dialogue at times, it's always brief enough to not get tired of it along with the occasional laugh or smile it brings.

So the game looks and sounds great, but what about the gameplay? It's also pretty damn good. Somehow this game managed to launch on the Wii without having any motion controls at all, which is frankly a blessing. You use the Nunchuk along with the remote to control villagers you recruit, forgo-ing traditional combat yourself a la "Pikmin". Unlike Pikmin though, your villagers are not just statistics to be wasted, they are living breathing people who have entire lives. They grow to like one another, they increase in rank, they fall in love and get married. When one dies it's a huge deal- people grieve and you feel bad that you just lost a good soldier or builder. Speaking of builders, there are a ton of classes for your townsfolk to take on. They all start as useless layabouts (if you talk to them they say great lines like "Frankly I think working hard is for chumps") but can be sent inside buildings you purchase to choose classes. This starts off from basic farmers and footsoldiers to more exotic ones like merchants and lumberjacks. They all specialize in different things and there is not really any "one glove fits all" class; while it might be tempting to go out with a bunch of burly soldiers, you'll soon hit a (quite literal) wall. This is where managing your group on the fly comes in: by using the DPad on the Wii remote you can swap between classes to shoot out instantly. While the first battles are simple and straightforward, later ones can get quite hectic and overwhelm you quickly!

The game follows the basic gameplay loop of going out to collect treasure and coming back at night to spend it on your town. Even though there is pretty much no customization for your town at all, you really get attached to it- you can choose what buildings to construct first and what projects to prioritize, it really makes you feel in control and like a real king. There are lots of little things that are barely described or documented in game which allow for a lot of neat little discoveries: you can tax your villagers by sending in soldiers to raid their houses (it doesn't get much gold but takes barely any time and is good for starting out), you can give villagers equipment to either make them look pimp or increase their stats, you can unlock a ton of paintings by doing random crap and have them adorn your walls, and you can have married couples produce children so you can draft them into child labour by having them climb trees for you. There are a ton of things I haven't even discovered yet that feel off, like how the fog seems to change colour depending on where you go and the time of day, or how there's a weird pedestal in the middle of the forest with no apparent use. There's a ton of mystery in this game, and while some of it ends up leading nowhere or ends anticlimactically, there's enough that is of geniune interest that it's worth exploring.

But overtop all of this, the main downside of Little King's Story is the control. In no way is the control scheme bad, and to be honest there isn't really much more they could have done with the controller they were given. But it lacks depth and is a far cry from being as well done as the Pikmin games, which are a good direct comparison. You can't really command how your squad follows you, other than changing the order you send them out in. This is important when enemies start charging in lines or have area of effect attacks- it would really be useful to have a second joystick to send them scampering around like in Pikmin. Your main character's turning sensitivity is also a tad bit too high, which causes locking on to different enemies and focusing fire to be a struggle. Even when you've turned the lock-on system off, it still feels like Corobo is snapping to a grid when you turn around. Finding units to recruit is also a tiny bit tedious: while there is a podium you can use to call upon various groups of townsfolk, calling in a new group completely dismisses your previous one. Therefore the only way to make a mixed group of multiple types is to manually go around and scout them out yourself. These are all things that could potentially have upgrades to counteract them- I didn't get too far in my replay and I think I only conquered two kingdoms when I originally bought it. That being said, these are my initial impressions after playing for two hours and getting a little ways in.

Little King's Story is a delightful treat, and I think might rank on my top three games for the Wii. Similar to "Zack and Wiki", I saved this one until the end as I didn't want to taint my positive impression of it. However, it didn't disappoint in the slightest- it holds up just as well, maybe even being a bit better as I got older and appreciated the game's humour more. It's very rare that we get a game that is not only charming and hilarious but also a blast to play. I highly recommend this to any owner of a Wii, as long as you're fine with the concept of killing hundreds of cute demon natives for their land.