Video Game Reviews

The single-player campaign is surprisingly deep thanks to challenges, some open levels, and plenty of weapons, but the package is rounded out by a great multiplayer mode with AI bots, a rarity at the time.

4/5

The best-told narrative I’ve ever seen in a game. Gripping for all 30+ hours, and had me constantly thinking about how all its pieces fit together. Superb localization and art.

5/5

While surpassed by its sequels, it’s still a fantastically accessible tactical game offering a trifecta of a cute campaign, endlessly replayable multiplayer, and “war room” missions. War has never been this adorable.

4/5

Everything great about Advance Wars turned up. A better and more varied campaign, more COs, more maps, more terrain, and one new unit, the unnecessary Neotank. One of the GBA’s greatest.

5/5

It’s better balanced than prior games in the series, though the grittiness is just bland and the final mission is brutal and unfun. But the heart of Advance Wars remains, which is what matters most.

4/5

Even more stuff than Black Hole Rising! Sure, the new units are terribly balanced and situational and the new COs aren’t great, but everything from before is here. The hard mode campaign is completely broken, but the freedom to choose your COs and abilities means that you’re even more busted, allowing for some fun puzzle-y battles where prior strategizing is more important than usual.

5/5

The best retro 3D platformer in a while, sure to satisfy fans yearning for something in the Super Mario Sunshine vein. Lives up to its “cute as heck” billing.

4/5

I put a lot of time into Altitude, a 2D plane combat game, especially “ball” mode, which was essentially plane rugby/soccer. Pleasing movement and combat with a high skill ceiling and multiple loadouts for depth.

4/5

The main thing going for it is that it came out at a time when the Switch had almost no other games.

3/5

If it were free, people would still be playing this. Instead, it’s a dead game. Drafting was a delight, constructed was pay-to-win, much like Richard Garfield’s most famous card game. Made good use of the digital space with its mechanics, and I would have loved to have seen what they had for future card sets. Some very frustrating randomness.

4/5

A cozy amuse-bouche. It’s pleasant, but I would have liked more of an appetizer.

2/5

I do not enjoy sitting on benches in a very pretty rendition of the Middle East. Where are all the assassinations? What’s with the modern-day segments? (A question I’m told is still asked about the other 20ish games.)

3/5

The combat isn’t deep enough to hold interest. But even though it’s still the best part of the game, it’s surrounded by entirely too much padding and time-wasting, and the highest difficulty allowed on a first playthrough is boringly easy except for the final boss’ difficulty spike, ignorable with all the revive items you never used. Silent protagonist was a bad choice.

3/5

Ingenious. Breaks my brain. Got stuck at some point and have no desire to go back, though.

4/5

Long after its captivating first impression, Balatro maintains the edge-of-your-seat anticipation of what its next hand might contain. Unusual for me, I like this better than most other turn-based roguelikes despite the emphasis on strategy over tactics.

5/5

The best CRPG I’ve ever played, due in no small part to using a ruleset I already know (Dungeons & Dragons 5E). Knowing those mechanics makes it that much easier to get lost in the world. I’m impressed with how the game offers some genuinely difficult decisions, where there’s not an obvious best option, or you have imperfect information, or a companion issues an ultimatum. Those companions are a major highlight, with their motivations and desires evolving, helping to anchor a sprawling experience. Kudos to Larian for how rarely I felt obligated to check a wiki despite playing blind on hard mode, though there was certainly save scumming for some fights. And there is the usual CRPG jank, especially around pathfinding and the game not quite perfectly responding to the circumstances of my playthrough. Yet I’m itching to replay it with different builds and choices.

5/5

The best platformer on the N64, one which I still revisit on a quiet Saturday every few years to 100%. Rewarding movement, compact but dense levels, and a delightful score make it a treat every time.

5/5

The gameplay is fine, but basic. A narrative that isn’t all that interesting is held back by being told through voiceovers while you’re in the middle of trying not to die. Great soundtrack. A game that crawled so that Hades could run.

3/5

It’s a somewhat bizarre hybrid of RTS and shooter. The balance between the two gives a bit of a “rubbing your belly while patting your head” feel to help conceal the lack of depth of either, and especially the vehicles and aircraft are fun to control. Mission variety is also respectable.

4/5

A streamlined, or perhaps refined, multiplayer Battlefield experience.

4/5

I don’t care for beat-em-ups, but it’s fast, stylish, and different.

4/5

Same as the original, but with more variety in weapons and enemies.

4/5

Boy do I wish more games were written at a level that assumes a working knowledge of Objectivism. I’m here for the art design, the writing, and the rare ludonarrative concordance in a AAA game; the shooting mechanics are unremarkable by today’s standards.

5/5

Very obviously made without Ken Levine. And without an auteur, it’s just another mechanically competent bland shooter with nothing to say. I did like the Minerva’s Den DLC, whose story is interesting enough to carry its few hours.

3/5

A tour de force of worldbuilding, characterization, and story, with the latter especially leaving me processing it for days. One of my all-time favorites.

5/5

An amusing Skinner box.

4/5

While it satisfies the little part of the brain that gets excited over randomly generated loot, it trips over itself so many times in its desire to put its bad writing between you and the acceptable gunplay.

3/5

As an experiment in the Mario formula, it’s a failure: the Bowser interruptions are annoying, having objectives that can only be done during these infrequent, uncontrollable segments is unusually hostile to the player, and the open world doesn’t really add anything to what is, at its heart, a series of disconnected 64-style vignettes. And those levels and platforming are fun, but there’s nothing new there.

4/5

A light puzzle game perfect for a few evenings with a loved one.

4/5

A delightful bite-sized mashup of Crypt of the NecroDancer and The Legend of Zelda. Very accessible, to the point of being a little easy even as someone who’s terrible at NecroDancer, but doesn’t overstay its welcome.

4/5

How spoiled we were in 2007 to have had this and Halo 3 drop within a few weeks of each other. The campaign was unrelenting action, filled with set pieces and levels; “All Ghillied Up” has its own Wikipedia page, for crying out loud. The multiplayer took that relentlessness even further with its fast time-to-kill, and it was a masterclass in player engagement. Before the industry switched over to Skinner boxes and pay-to-win monetization, COD4 had a constant drip of weapons and challenges, with the hamster wheel prestige system. Everything was done to excite our monkey brains, especially that little crosshair that would come up when hitting an opponent. This was a game that felt good to play.

5/5

Shows how much Pokémon is held down by being Pokémon. Flexible builds, adjustable difficulty, and gameplay beyond using super effective moves. Simple story, but more interesting and tender than simply being the very best.

4/5

Casual beat ’em up simple enough for easy coop but with enough characters and gear to keep it interesting.

4/5

Once upon a time, licensed platformers were everywhere, and back in the late 80s and early 90s, many weren’t half-bad. Castle of Illusion stands out thanks to its all-over-the-place level themes and enjoyable bounce-based platforming, a core revisited later by games like Shovel Knight.

4/5

There’s the devious puzzle game half, with many a fist pump after a completed level. But this is Atlus, so there’s also a fascinating and messy dating simulator half. I love many of the mature themes of love and adulthood, the art design, and Shoji Meguro’s score filled with classical-inspired pieces. Certain aspects of the characters and their relationships are lacking, the LGBT themes are, at my most charitable, clumsily handled, and the final act(s) can go off the rails in terms of narrative and tone. Still, this is a crafted experience, and something I want to see more of in the medium.

4/5

The original indie labor of love that paved the way for so many others. The tight movement/combat is enough, but it’s a charming story and a truly outstanding score (I prefer the original compositions over the remixes, but the graphical updates are an improvement).

5/5

The absolute best 2D platforming has to offer. Tough as nails, but never frustrating thanks to quick respawns and per-screen checkpoints. Beautifully integrates a touching story with its gameplay.

5/5

At the time, a collection of perfectly cromulent games, especially on the cards front (Spit, Hearts, President, Texas Hold ’Em, Spades, and Bridge stand out) with online play was genuinely notable. Easy to pick up and play, and nice touches like the music and achievements.

4/5

A well polished collection of games that are not worth your time. (War, but no Hearts, Spades, or Bridge?)

2/5

While its sense of humor is appreciated and the “launch” telekinetic power (think Half-Life 2’s gravity gun, minus the gun) is a treat, Control’s story loses its luster once it becomes obvious that there isn’t actually anything grand going on, it’s just basically SCP Foundation vignettes. Overstays its welcome with the story expansions.

3/5

On the one hand, it’s basically a superhuman open world playground with powerful abilities, weapons, and vehicles. On the other, the actual missions suffer when the optimal approach changes from heist-like planning to jumping around, killing everyone, and hiding when your shields wear off. That playground is pretty great, though.

4/5

It’s a very simple throwback immersive sim. There’s also a presentation that is about as abrasive as an earnest game can be, and I can’t say that approach resonated with me. Gimme an Arkane game.

3/5

It’s a cute gimmick to have a musical/turn-based roguelike, but it requires more time to git gud than I have as an adult when losing is not fun.

3/5

The open map and powers are great for replay, and it still looks good enough to impress, especially the second level. I’m feeling old as I remember getting my first GPU that could run this: a GTX 260 216 core. And I played on a 1680x1050 monitor. On Windows Vista.

4/5

More Crysis fun.

4/5

Punishing, but amenable to a variety of different approaches. Frustrating, but the difficulty is overrated. Janky, but turning the jank back on your enemies feels good. Rough, but worthwhile.

4/5

It’s put together well, it has a good amount of content, it’s a satisfying combination of adrenaline and endorphins. But you die so quickly that I lost interest after beating the base difficulty.

3/5

Arkane took notes on why I was perennially let down by the Dishonored franchise. The timeloop setup, a lack of penalties for killing, bodies disintegrating upon death, and no quicksave option make for a playground that actually encourages the player to take full advantage of its systems and roll with it when it hits the fan. I have plenty of nits to pick, but I was fully hooked for its 20-hour runtime and enjoyed tinkering with my powers and loadout for each mission. Important notes: I played several months after launch, when the AI had been improved, disables online invasions, and turned off objective markers, only using them when stuck.

5/5

A worse version of Dark Souls, especially with the lack of the bonfire system. An egregious incident that stands out is backing away from a dangerous enemy to heal, only to exit lock-on range and have my character turn around and die instantly to a ranged attack I would have blocked with my shield just moments ago. “That’s Souls games for you!” someone on the Internet gleefully exclaims. But with a job and other games to play I find that I, much like Mr. Bond, have no time to die. I’ll note that the key difference between this and the other FromSoftware game I bounced off of, Sekiro, is that I made real progress in Demon’s Souls and could have beaten it if I wanted to spend the time, but the time lost due to unfair deaths wasn’t worth it, while in Sekiro I was incapable of getting any further when I decided very early on that it wasn’t for me.

3/5

Very, very familiar to anyone who has played Shadow Tactics. All of the ups, all of the downs.

4/5

Other than the forced boss fights, it’s an enjoyable crawling-through-vents simulator.

4/5

Watch numbers get bigger and letters hopefully get golder: the dopamine hit: the game.

3/5

The dice-based mechanics just aren’t that satisfying digitally. The chiptunes soundtrack bumps, but otherwise, I’d enjoy this more as a board game.

3/5

It’s a nuanced, human examination of society and the people within it. Makes BioShock’s takedown of Ayn Rand look like a Reddit comment in comparison. Powerful, clever, and funny in equal parts. Takes full advantage of the CRPG genre.

5/5

Same as Dishonored 2, but with worse level design and a painfully obvious plot twist.

3/5

I want to love it for the imaginative level design and powers, but the game doesn’t want me to love it. There are two main issues. First, most of the game’s powers are novel ways to kill, but the game’s morality system will tell you how awful you are if you avail yourself of them. Second, the mana system encourages the player to use their powers sparingly. (Incentives matter, people.) The result was crouching through the world, teleporting, waiting for the mana to recharge from that teleport, and repeating, quickloading whenever I was caught. This is a boring, slow way to play that the game encourages, rather than playing up its strengths.

3/5

This really should be worse than Dishonored 2, but the ability to kill without consequence and the recharging mana system make the minute-to-minute gameplay so much better than its immediate predecessor.

4/5

A stunning CRPG when it gets out of its own way. Act I especially is the best RPG experience I’ve had outside of PrinceCon. Occasionally inconsistent difficulty and a slow final act can’t take that away.

5/5

Impeccable level design. I don’t have as much patience for long segments with sparse checkpoints that I did when I was a kid, though.

4/5

The original, perfected. Fast, relentless, and demanding. It’s an adrenaline rush at Ultra-Violence, and I always felt appropriately challenged. Also one of the most well optimized games I’ve ever played.

5/5

Suffers very hard from a need to be bigger than its predecessor. Too many interconnecting systems and actions create an overwhelming game with exactly one way to play. I had a much better time dropping the difficulty from Ultra-Violence to Hurt Me Plenty and ignoring much of it. And why is there so much platforming in a game about murdering demons as ruthlessly as possible?

4/5

I prefer to play as a real-time with pause game, but the game is intended for you to iterate on a master plan, which isn’t as interesting to me, as it’s more trial and error.

4/5

Wow, and this wasn’t even BioWare’s main dev team. An accessible entry into CRPG real-time-with-pause games from BioWare’s golden age.

4/5

For the first few areas, this was my favorite open world experience since BOTW. Everything is appropriate for your level and there are all sorts of new discoveries and fun rewards to be found. Unfortunately, balance and fun go out the window in the mid-late game, and this is a very long game. Summons and enormously variable player levels towards the end mean that enemies are rarely of an appropriate difficulty, either getting steamrolled or killing you with a few quick hits. Quality of life problems like the interface, controls, inability to pause, and a 60 FPS cap are completely unacceptable at this point. Ultimately, the BOTW-meets-Dark Souls idea is better on paper than in practice, and I wish this were a much tighter package.

4/5

I am unsurprised that a handheld touch-based rhythm game with a nonsensical comic book story about secret agent cheerleaders helping everyday people score dates, defeat monsters, and save Christmas set to a licensed soundtrack of covers sold so poorly. But for those who enjoy the camp, it’s a fun rhythm novelty. The spinners destroyed my DS’ touch screen. Reminds me of the mini games in the original Mario Party that destroyed joysticks and palms. Nintendo should just never have rotation mechanics, I guess.

4/5

It’s…fine. Just not good enough where I’d want to play it over other games. Bullet hell, mildly interesting guns, enemies, and bosses, but not the dazzling amount of content like Isaac or the speed of Dead Cells.

3/5

Is this it? Cute for about 15 minutes.

2/5

The sense of speed was excellent, and it made zipping through trees without crashing a genuine thrill. But it’s still a one-trick poiny. Why didn’t more Wii games allow playing music off of an SD card?

3/5

Anything it wanted to do was done better by the originals or New Vegas.

3/5

Trades its RPG bona fides in for a horrifically janky FPS experience. The voiced (why!) protagonist is an idiot with no personality, and his inability to anticipate a major plot point blatantly laid possible in the first 15 minutes is frustrating. The story finishes stronger than it starts, but the only real choices are which factions you’re going to murder. As a failure of both shooters and CRPGS, who is this for?

3/5

Some RPGs boast of their player freedoms. New Vegas walks the walk. Pacifist? Go for it. Murder hobo? You can kill every adult human character and the game will actually acknowledge it (and I’m sure I’m not the only one to bring firearms into the Legion’s camp). Wish I were in the universe where the developers had enough time to fix bugs and add all the content they wanted. Peak Bethesda jankiness.

5/5

Suffers a bit from “Seinfeld is unfunny” in that most of its fresh ideas have been copied since. Puzzles rarely fall between obtuse and facile.

3/5

Gloriously imperfect. A captivating, epic JRPG that embodies the best and worst of the genre from this era. Some of Uematsu’s finest scoring, a lovable crew of a cast, and the story all make for one heck of a ride. I will happily overlook the translation and graphics.

5/5

The graphical leap over VII was impressive, and the soundtrack is almost as good. Shame the combat is worse and the plot goes completely off the rails in the middle of the game. This is all exacerbated by Squall being completely unlikable.

3/5

The highs are high, especially in the excellent closing sequence, but this makes it all the more frustrating that the game suffers from unnecessary padding and pacing issues. The presentation limits the effectiveness of its good dub with disconnects between the lines and animation, and characters often don’t feel like they’re talking to each other. Playable Advent Children is great and all, and the characters are so much more expressive with voices and more polygons than I can count on my fingers alone, but I look at Persona 5 Strikers and think of what could have been.

4/5

Yuffie is vibrant, FFVIIR’s combat isn’t fun enough to make this side story worthwhile, and this is one of the worst named games I have ever encountered.

3/5

At release, I was blinded by the graphical upgrade from the Tellius games (and the overworld sprites of the 3DS games remain the best in the series). But the difficulty is utterly broken and encourages low-manning a handful of super units and the story is a lowlight.

3/5

The series’ black sheep is surprisingly excellent in its 3DS reimagining, featuring strong characterization (when the game bothers) and some real tactical challenge. The turnwheel to rewind is a fantastic quality-of-life addition for a series that needs them.

4/5

The core gameplay is strong, and the highest difficulty is one of the more balanced ones in the series (but still begs to be cheesed in the last few chapters, as is tradition). Surrounded by a baffling amount of faffing about that should have been eliminated or replaced with menus. Story starts out as the worst in the series and finishes as merely terrible.

4/5

Conquest is the gem here, and a few of its chapters, notably 10 on Hard and then Lunatic, are among my favorite in the entire series. Massive cast and replayability across the games, but Birthright and Revelation can be played on autopilot even at the highest difficulty, while Conquest gets unfair on Lunatic at its end (and is merely punishing on Hard mode). The writing is seriously abysmal, and Corrin is the blandest insert imaginable.

2/5, 4/5, 2/5

My introduction to the series, and still my favorite. A genuinely engaging story that stands on its own while setting up its sequel. Varied level design as well. Unit balance is poor, with Laguz being useless and paladins being grossly overpowered, and enemy phases are much too slow. But it’s the writing that sets it apart. Characters all get time to exist as more than a set of stats with an equipped weapon, and the localization team actually made a character speak in iambic pentameter, which is a pretty bonkers amount of effort.

5/5

Characterization is almost nonexistent, and the story does get a little too epic, but it’s still engaging for its long runtime, and bringing in units from Path of Radiance is great. Difficulty is uneven, but it’s a plus entry.

4/5

What if we took a character-driven RPG and removed all of the characterization? (OK, the original didn’t have much there either, but all Fire Emblem games must be compared to Path of Radiance so that they might be criticized for how they are not Path of Radiance.) Make sure that the graphics are soulless and the soundtrack is grating, too.

2/5

Do not lock the modes with any semblance of difficulty behind completion of the easy ones. Maybe the hard modes are great, but I’m not going to replay everything to find out. Mediocre GBA Fire Emblem.

3/5

Other than the route split, it doesn’t do anything worth remembering.

3/5

The school setting allows the player time and reason to actually care about the characters, which makes the inevitable conflict that much more emotionally weighty, so credit there. Mostly too easy to be interesting, except when the difficulty spikes and it’s too frustrating to be fun. Would probably earn a star back if it weren’t for all routes sharing the same missions prior to the timeskip, and the general lack of respect the game has for the player’s time in its non-battle portions.

3/5

I laughed once and chuckled several times, but there is almost nothing here–it took about 30 minutes and no thought to get to the credits. Just watch an episode of a good sitcom, you’ll get more laughs and better pacing.

2/5

Charming, amusing, and inoffensive.

3/5

The zenith of the series.

3/5

A model for modern roguelikes with good reason. Many paths to victory, though within each archetype, things sometimes feel samey. Good variety of weapons, ships, and crew. Individual runs are a tad long, with too much of each run being navigating text boxes.

4/5

I don’t even like racing games and this one is still perfect. Not as hard as I remember it being as a kid, and I had a blast beating all the cups and missions as an adult. How did they get a Gamecube game to look this good at an unflappable 60 FPS? Don’t blink and drive.

5/5

A clone of the modern XCOM games. What it does better: encouraging a fast/aggressive playstyle and the overwatch system. What it does worse: repetitive side missions to pad its short length (this is a 10 hour game padded to more than 20, as of this writing I’m ambivalent as to whether it’s worth another mind-numbing dozen side missions to play the remaining seven story levels), nonexistent strategic layer, slow experience growth, constantly replacing non-hero units with new recruits who come at higher levels, and being too easy (I played at the second-highest difficulty). But it’s recognizably XCOM, and that’s a good core, even if I don’t bother coming back to it.

4/5

The beat ’em up mechanics are the best thing the original God of War has to offer, but they’re shallow and repetitive. Everything else here, like the actively un-fun platforming, tiring puzzles, an irritating love of quick time events, and mediocre story presented poorly, bring it down further. The cinematography, voice acting, and sexism are all offensive.

2/5

Very derivative of its SNES JRPG ancestors. Amazing graphics for the system, and Sakuraba did an excellent job on the soundtrack. Too easy.

3/5

Look how they massacred my boy.

2/5

It’s incredible that all this fit onto the GBA. Bigger and better in almost every way from its predecessor, especially in its puzzles. Does suffer a bit from its scope, especially for those who want to collect all the Djinn (it’s an old JRPG, just use a walkthrough and move on).

4/5

Finally, the spiritual successor to the GBC Mario Golf I’ve been waiting for. Constantly amusing, no more, no less.

4/5

I went in blind, and remember everything of the experience. I’m sure it would feel dated or supplanted if I were to go back, but it’s the kind of perspective and emotion more games need.

5/5

By embracing the limitations of the DS, Rockstar’s odd combination of touch mechanics and throwback top-down gameplay hits all the right notes. Driving especially is arcadey joy. In the series’ storied mistreatment of women, not enough attention is paid to Chinatown Wars creating a female character so they could put her on the cover, then killing her off immediately.

5/5

A stunning technical achievement of the seventh generation of consoles, but not a good game. Some of the missions, especially the heists, are fun, but there aren’t enough of them in between the time killers. Trevor is not nearly the social commentary that Rockstar thinks he is. The torture scene was one of the worst experiences I have had in all of gaming, with no artistic merit.

3/5

Best in the series, especially with the ability to import songs from other games. Great tracklist for all instruments. I miss the rhythm game era, but it completely oversaturated itself.

4/5

I’m a fan of the evening’s entertainment indie game (see: Gone Home), it’s interestingly written, it explores its mechanics thoroughly in its short runtime, I just don’t find its moment-to-moment gameplay particularly fun.

3/5

A personal favorite shmup due to its numerous weapon combinations and two characters offering plenty of different experiences.

4/5

Beautifully woven story/gameplay interaction. While a great game, it’s a roguelike for people who don’t like roguelikes. And as a fan of the genre, it lacks the staying power of something like The Binding of Isaac. Would love to see an expansion to add some replayability, and the difficulty progression really could have benefited from allowing rewards for increasing the level by more than 1 at a time. I’m nitpicking because I love it.

5/5

A masterpiece. With better lighting and lip syncing, this could come out today and still be well received. The story is simple but executed well, the writing is great, and the gameplay is outstanding. Weapons, from the shotgun to the gravity gun, are satisfying. The pacing is the real star, especially with how it shifts between long stretches of isolation and segments with allies.

5/5

The weakest link in the Half-Life 2 series is still a good game, but the focus on urban combat isn’t as interesting as what the others offer.

4/5

A literal rbeath of fresh air as the adventure leaves City 17 while retaining everything that made Half-Life 2 great.

5/5

Makes a strong case for best campaign in the series. Imaginative settings, engaging combat that’s slow enough to be tactical, and a multiplayer juggernaut.

5/5

The campaign flies high and peaks with The Covenant level, offering some of the most epic setpieces in the series done justice by composer Marty O’Donnell. And its multiplayer was world-changing on consoles with its Forge mode and custom games. I have fond memories of my early teens filled with Grifball.

5/5

While the concept of a Halo game in an urban setting playing as non-Spartans is sound, the gratuitous emphasis on a bad story and boring objectives aren’t.

3/5

Throws out the weapons and enemies that made Halo great. Apparently the story makes sense if you read a licensed companion novel, which I’m not doing for a Halo game.

2/5

Long levels filled with repetition and backtracking. Does not hold up. Entirely supplanted by (most of) its sequels.

2/5

While I’m definitely not here for the story, I was shocked to find out that Bungie still had more to do with the Halo series. Excellent twists and fun new toys breathed life into the series. Take notes, Halo 4.

4/5

A tantalizingly good idea somewhere in the FTL meets Hotline Miami mold that really would have benefitted from more structure and better onboarding.

3/5

If a rhythm-based spectacle fighter sounds appealing, then this will be a treat. Has some standout moments across its boss fights and licensed songs.

4/5

Recaptures the sandboxy fun of Blood Money. Plenty of imaginative assassinations with room for your own. Rewards replays and level knowledge, which may or may not be a plus.

4/5

More of the same Hitman. I appreciate the ability to import its predecessor’s levels into the engine to have everything under one roof.

4/5

Still yet more of the same. Wouldn’t have minded a few more missions. Credit where credit is due for continuing to import prior games’ levels yet shrinking the disk space required.

4/5

An unremarkable third-person action game masquerading as a Hitman game. There are actually a handful of decent missions similar to Blood Money, but not enough to save it.

3/5

Blood Money still has a lot to offer with its intricate, hand-designed levels that reward knowledge of the game’s systems and the individual missions. Find a sniper perch, get the target alone and strangle them, poison their food, set up a trap, the possibilities are endless, and pulling off a plan feels darn satisfying.

4/5

10 hours in and I was ready to award it 5/5 as a fantastically executed Metroidvania/Soulslike hybrid with superb controls and presentation. 8.5 hours later, having settled for the bad ending, I can’t. I have patience for certain difficult games, such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy, but those games almost universally feature instant retries without penalty. Hollow Knight is an absolute slog towards the end, not necessarily due to the difficulty of any of its mandatory bosses (I don’t think I died more than thrice on anything required), but because of the amount of downtime. Fast travel is limited, and this led to many situations of fast traveling, walking a minute to the bank, walking back, fast traveling somewhere else, buying something, walking to another vendor, finding out I needed more geo, going back to the bank… Or the situations where I die to a boss and have to redo trivial (but slow!) platforming challenges and basic baddies to get back to the boss only to die again. Or my personal favorite, the optional Super Meat Boy spinning saws platformer area where your health is supposed to be a scary limitation for the platforming gauntlet, but I had equipped the charm where your last pip of damage slowly recovers, and so every death meant 30 seconds of looking at my phone instead of playing the game. These are fundamental design problems, and they’re frustratingly solvable. Upon discovery that the good ending was locked behind a super boss that requires beating the normal final boss prior to every attempt, I completely lost interest. Which is a shame, because there’s a phenomenal game in here.

4/5

Starts off with a thoughtful premise and gameplay that teases a combination of Breath of the Wild and Monster Hunter before mostly settling into a generic modern open-world game with all of the pointless padding, jank, and ill-executed narrative that entails. Shooting robot dinosaurs with a bow is fun, and yet most of your time is spent doing tedious tasks like reading/listening to exposition (both for the impossibly uninteresting contemporary narrative and the more passable sci-fi backstory), holding forward on the developer-ordained correct path through ruins/wreckage/cliffs, fighting boring humans, and manging your inventory. Aloy’s characterization is terrible, and how is someone who spent her entire childhood talking to almost no one except for JB Blanc so sarcastic?

3/5

Some interesting ideas for combat and story, but not enough for 20+ hours.

3/5

A beautiful, poignant movie. As a game? Most of the puzzles are OK, but there’s no reason for the combat other than to pad length.

3/5

As a card game in the Slay the Spire mold, it’s enjoyable, but the actual card battling is very narrow tactically, with most of the fun coming from finding ways to create overpowered cards, which is deliberately encouraged by the game. As a fourth wall-breaking subversive indie horror game, nothing felt particularly novel, and I might well have enjoyed the game more if it just wanted to be another roguelike deckbuilder.

4/5

Almost pure tactics, with just enough management/strategy between to make it interesting, but not enough for greater replayability. Minor failures, like taking just one point of damage on an island and missing the bonus, don’t feel good, and feedback isn’t great for determining what you could have done better. Finally got its Advanced Edition update like FTL before it, but that doesn’t change the fundamentals.

4/5

A very competent 3D platformer adventure elevated enormously by endless imagination and tight integration of gameplay and narrative. A cooperative experience not to be missed.

5/5

A bigger and better Jak II.

4/5

It’s a great addition to the Super Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie-style collectathon, but it’s also a technical marvel for its lack of loading screens.

4/5

More of an action game (suddenly we have cursing and guns, but at least the guns integrate well into the combat) than its precursor, but a great one. Tough.

4/5

The best Bond game for understanding that first-person shooters are not the appropriate mechanism. Essentially a playable Brosnan film filled with toys and setpieces.

4/5

A seminal game in the genre of open world absurdist power fantasies solely thanks to the grappling hook.

4/5

Taught me more about physics than my entire formal education. I played in the Scott Manley era, before much of the structure later added, and while a bit spartan in presentation, I still remember landing on Minmus and the Mun.

4/5

As a technical experiment, a great success. As a game, not so much. The unnecessary driving and combat are obvious concessions to the GTA crowd, your interviewee’s tells are all too obvious, but mostly, I’m still annoyed at when the game withholds information from you in a case, lets you fail, and chews you out for it. Compare that with when I failed as a cop in Disco Elysium, which brought out real emotions and feelings of inadequacy, which the game was going for.

2/5

An amusing diversion for a few hours, but I absolutely do not care for endless arcade games.

3/5

Charming action/puzzler. Next Level Games clearly put a lot of effort into the animation, and it shows.

4/5

Surprisingly fun arcadey baseball, but there’s not much to keep you coming back.

3/5

The GBC version of Mario Golf was inexplicably an RPG, and boy, does it work. The surprisingly deep golf mechanics are sound, and the RPG quest makes great use of them with a host of varied challenges in addition to more vanilla golf.

4/5

A mundane entry in the series, but portable online Mario Kart is still an easy sell.

3/5

The standard “I dunno, what do you wanna play” when hosting and playing video games. A bit less fun solo or online, but still gorgeous and with a large variety of tracks.

4/5

It’s a fine entry in the series, but wireless local and online multiplayer were huge. This was the first time I ever played a game online outside of my home. I was at an airport and it blew my mind. Now we live in a world where I tether my Switch to my phone while on line at a restaurant to squeeze in some Splatoon and support Team Ketchup.

4/5

It would be easy to be unfairly harsh on the progenitor of the modern party game, whether for its randomness, graphics, or minigames that resulted in physical pain, but it caught on for a reason. That said, if I want a social experience with a moderately sized group of people, I’m reaching for a board game. Looking at each other instead of a screen.

3/5

This game has absolutely no business being a satisfying tactical battler. The liberal movement system is a blast, and it’s surprisingly tricky at times. Would be significantly better if you could take Mario out of your party.

4/5

A tactical card battler with the core gameplay loop of Persona (battles that set you up for rewards in the social half that enhance your battles…) is idiosyncratically appealing for me, and I went through 60 hours of this very quickly. That is enough time to get familiar with with the time-wasting/quality-of-life problems and embarrassing art and animations.

4/5

Web-swinging around Manhattan is excellent. Combat is simple, even on the highest difficulty, so the novelty of the gadgets and stealth wears off over the entirely reasonable 17ish hours I played. Could have really done without the shoehorned sections where you take the role of Spider-Man’s non-super friends and as they reenact the worst parts of the Tomb Raider reboot. Too much writing that tells rather than shows and desparately wants you not to think about it too much.

4/5

The black sheep of the series for its clunky combat, the original Mass Effect nevertheless has the best worldbuilding and story of them all.

4/5

Well written, deeply emotional, and featuring actually competent gunplay. BioWare’s finest outing.

5/5

The price of Mass Effect 2 spending its time on what amount to sidequests to develop its cast is that Mass Effect 3’s story has entirely too much ground to cover. The unsatisfying ending cannot take away from the dozens of hours preceding it in video gaming’s finest space epic.

4/5

Has anyone ever tried saying no to Kojima? Certainly not during the development of Snake Eater. A bizarre, worthwhile trip.

4/5

Dread? Not really. Annoyance? Yes. The good parts are better than those in Super Metroid, but the terrible semi-stealth (really, speedrunning) EMMI sections, the moments where it’s not clear what the game wants you to do, and the surprising linearity are all unforced errors.

4/5

Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 get all the credit for adapting their 2D predecessors for the new 3D-capable world, but Metroid Prime deserves to be discussed with them. A fantastic atmosphere and sense of loneliness as you explore the world. The synth-heavy ambient/industrial OST is fantastic and compeltely unexpected. Falls off slightly towards the end with a few non-obvious artifacts to find and the final two bosses being spongy slogs.

5/5

There’s a good game in here held back by frustrating difficulty and frequently opaque requirements to advance.

3/5

A mechanically competent but utterly forgettable modern open world (and I do not use those three words positively) adventure.

3/5

I’ve never gotten far into the structured single player mode they added, but it reminds me of my childhood dreams of setting out and making my own fort. Coop is a plus.

4/5

Falls short of its potential with its short length and weak combat, but it’s a great few hours of running through the city.

4/5

There are about three hours’ worth of good ideas and fun movement tech in this eight hour game. There’s also a bad story with bad voice acting and outrageously bad writing.

3/5

A fully actualized video game equivalent of potato chips. There is much to be admired, but there’s a ceiling on potato chips.

3/5

Lacks the impeccable balance of Slay the Spire, but that’s somewhat the point: you’re supposed to focus on breaking it. Satisfying for fans of roguelikes, but not incredibly heavy on tactics or puzzly feelings.

4/5

Would have rather played a good visual novel and a separate Picross game. Could really have used some more quality-of-life in the Picross half.

3/5

Hypothetically hits a lot of my favorite notes as a difficult 2D platformer with short levels and instant retries. It falls short in how it handles its difficulty. Many levels are trivial and only challenging if going for optional gold, but unlike the strawberries and bandages of Celeste and Super Meat Boy, there are often dozens of gold pieces on an individual level, making them a completionist annoyance instead of a one-off challenge. I also prefer the speed of those games over the heavy, momentum-based N++.

3/5

The speedrunning half is an adrenaline rush of tight platforming, and the high of getting an ace medal is fantastic. The visual novel half is more blah and will be a turn off for many, but it’s skippable. Machine Girl went off on the soundtrack.

4/5

Safe, but the formula works.

4/5

The main game is dull but good for local coop. The included Luigi DLC, however, is challenging and imaginative enough to be a worthwhile take on the New Super Mario Bros. series. Ultimately, I’d rather play something like Celeste or Super Meat Boy.

3/5

The game that made me realize how little patience I have for most JRPGs’ storytelling. Classic combat, banal plot. The true ending, which perhaps ties everything together, is hidden well and locked behind content I will never bother to slog through.

3/5

There’s a good Metroidvania in here that is completely let down by its awful checkpoint system that makes the frequent deaths massively more frustrating than they need to be. Coupled with the unclear visual design (I don’t mind retrying extended precision platforming segments, but repeatedly dying to not figuring out what the game wants from me is a terrible experience), difficulty spikes, and unexpected deaths, it’s hugely disappointing that these annoyances mar the core gameplay. It’s not that Ori is especially hard–I have every achievement in Celeste, I unlocked The Kid in Super Meat Boy–it’s that it infuriated me in a way that they and others do not.

3/5

Lovely sci-fi explorer/puzzler/mystery, with a few big reveals that hit hard. I appreciate needing to think, though it could be a little obtuse on occassion. Not infrequently annoying from running out of time right when finishing a puzzle or being killed by the actively harmful autopilot.

4/5

Not the first comedy RPG, but a laugh-out-loud romp. Very subversive considering this is Nintendo’s golden goose.

4/5

An outstanding art project, brimming with unstated but effective commentary about life under a totalitarian regime developed organically through the gameplay. But while a stressful, unpleasant, sometimes poorly explained paperwork simulator is an appropriate vehicle for its themes, I cannot say that I enjoyed my experience.

4/5

A Sokoban-like with a lot of tricks. This actually hurts it a bit–the narrow decision space and lack of emphasis on any one mechanic mean that it’s easy enough to stumble through levels that are intended to tutorialize some new recursion or paradox, leaving you ill prepared for the more complex ones.

3/5

As complete a work of literary fiction as has ever been created in gaming. Breathtaking. Powerful. Layered.

5/5

Persona 3’s songs and characters aren’t as good as 4’s, and this game eschews a story in favor of scattered vignettes.

2/5

It’s hard not to judge this one unfairly after playing 5 and 4, especially with the PSP version’s almost complete lack of 3D graphics or anime cutscenes stripping the game of so much atmosphere. But then again, the dungeon crawl is pointless padding of no interest or difficulty, the bosses are too easy save for a handful of level checks forcing grinding, the story seems to forget to do anything for entire in-game months at a time, and few of the songs can touch the OSTs from 4 or 5. I am shocked at how skippable this is.

3/5

I don’t like most fighting games. P4AU expects that and will even play out its story mode battles for you, although I found button mashing mostly adequate. Way too much redundancy in the story modes, especially in the original campaign. It’s basically an uniteractive visual novel, but it’s also more time with the Investigation Team and SEES.

3/5

Shockingly high-effort across all facets for what could have simply been a generic rhythm game set to Persona music.

4/5

A well done mystery with excellent, developed characters. Compared to Persona 5, the music, art, and JRPG parts aren’t as strong, but the narrative is better paced and perhaps better told.

5/5

The best JRPG I have ever played (though as of this writing, also the only Persona game I’ve played). Story, art, and music are all outstanding, but what sets it apart for me is the back-and-forth between the life simulator and dungeon crawling halves. Each enhances the other (I’ve strengthened a bond with this friend and now they have this ability; I’ve completed a palace and now can hang out with this friend and can now hang out with them) in a way that, coupled with the aforementioned plot and presentation, manages to hold up over its very long runtime.

5/5

Another powerful, emotionally resonant story supported by stellar art and music. Gameplay translates surprisingly well to the musou genre, though once it clicks, it’s not particularly challenging even on hard. A must-play for Persona 5 phans.

5/5

Mapping out dungeons is cute, but held back by the small size and low resolution of my launch-era 3DS: seeing small details on the top screen is a pain, and plotting them on the touchscreen is clunky. This is made worse by insipid random battles and uneven difficulty. More time with SEES and the Investigation Team isn’t as fun as it could be since everyone is Flanderized.

3/5

Played entirely in coop mode. Enjoyable light RTS/action/puzzler that unfortunately ends with a supremely unsatisfying difficulty spike.

3/5

It’s clear that Obsidian put extraordinary effort into building the world of Eora, but the entire game is an overwhelming exposition dump. This is not a recipe for a compelling story-and-character-heavy RPG, and the plodding combat is unforgivable.

2/5

A remarkable turnaround after the original. Better combat AI and lower difficulty make the game flow better, and the writing, voice acting, and presentation are all a big step up. As close as we’ll ever get to DnD Pirates: The Video Game.

4/5

Packed to the gills with challenges, from flying through rings to using missiles to fight a robotic kaiju. The USA-based level blew my mind as a kid.

4/5

A handheld game for the final handheld era. A little too simple, but not so much that it’s not still fun to try to score higher.

3/5

While I prefer my 2D platformers to have the elegant precision of Celeste or Super Meat Boy, there is no denying that this is a wonderfully messy refinement of the Wario Land philosophy.

4/5

Far better, more charming, and more interesting than a casual tower defense game has any right to be.

4/5

Black and White make the bold choice of only using the new region’s Pokémon for the main game, pretty shocking for a series that has given us more than a half-dozen Pikachu variants. I appreciate that it forces you into the unfamiliar, though it’s otherwise pretty mundane.

4/5

The Global Trade System is one of the two best features the series ever added along with post-game battling. Suddenly collecting them all was that much more feasible. Years later The sprites were also phenomenal, full of color and detail.

5/5

Stressed during my senior year of college, I decided that I’d try to complete the National Pokédex in Omega Ruby. Armed with Serebii.net and some elaborate spreadsheeting, I saw that between Omega Ruby, my ancient copy of Diamond and more recent X, all I needed was Black to get everything. This required driving out to a GameStop for a disappointingly expensive Black and borrowing another DS to facilitate transferring Pokémon from generation IV (some of whom had already come from III!) into VI. And it was fantastic in a compulsive, completionist sort of way. ORAS are bright and joyful, if somewhat pedestrian for the series, but generation VI was also an impressive culmination of catch ’em all ethos thanks to the many transfer and trade mechanisms.

4/5

I want to like it, collecting Pokémon is a great hook for pinball, but wow, this game is punishing.

2/5

I want to like it, collecting Pokémon is a great hook for pinball, but wow, this game is easy.

2/5

There’s nothing here besides Rowlet, their best starter in years. Slow and insulting.

3/5

Although it wasn’t actually the first 3D Pokémon RPG (that would be Gale of Darkness on the Gamecube), the series mostly stuck the landing, and Lumiose City scope in particular was a revelation after years of sprite-based cities. Sure, the pacing is too slow, the story is even more nonsensical than usual, and it’s easy, but it actually did something new for the series.

4/5

The surprise hit from The Orange Box. Clever and witty and writing and gameplay.

5/5

Valve’s painstakingly detailed playtesting pays off in that there are 0 rough edges anywhere in Portal 2. I could complain that the original had more charm, but really, it’s one of the funniest games of all time and the puzzles are fine.

5/5

Old-school immersive sim. A damn smart game. Beautifully open, with some actually interesting choices and story beats.

5/5

Drawing on Jungian psychology is a great premise for a game (just ask Persona), but the actual game is a technically unsound platformer whose core loop was outdated and outclassed even in 2005.

2/5

While it doesn’t reach the narrative vision of Persona or the platforming tightness of It Takes Two or the polish of Mario, the writing is strong enough to make this a memorable experience.

4/5

The game that made me realize I like Tetris. Puyo Puyo I can take or leave, but combining the two in local multiplayer with other novices is a real “pat your head and rub your belly” competition.

4/5

It’s the same thing as the original. I am deeply amused by the supremely unserious script and how much talent went into performing it.

4/5

A noble experiment in encouraging the player to accept losses, slightly confounded by the inconsistent difficulty (well, how often should I be losing?). Despite the care put into a genuinely well built world, the visual novel half can be too dry in the same manner as Pillars of Eternity.

4/5

A platformer for the platformer fan. Really impressed by the amount of content, with enough ideas to stay fresh throughout.

4/5

RDR2 is stunning. The scope is massive, making its obsessive details even more gratuitous. The sheer number of systems in the game make it feel almost like an immersive sim at times with a consistent internal logic, and I can point to any number of moments where they all came together for an experience few other open world games are capable of. The problem, then, is that there’s barely a game in there, which really hurts over the course of a 50+ hour story. This is a Rockstar game, and most missions boil down to riding your horse somewhere or shooting comically large numbers of people, with entirely too many actions reduced to button prompts on a frustratingly inconsistent control scheme. At times, this feels like the world’s most overproduced animated cowboy show. I won’t say it doesn’t respect the player’s time, but it has a vision that results in very large amounts of downtime for the player. Nevertheless, the core systems of RDR2 are incredible, and especially when it gets out of its own way enough for the player to hunt down a perfect animal or make a clean robbery, it’s one of the most fully realized digital worlds in gaming history. As an aside, Rockstar’s DRM is awful, and on multiple occasions I’ve gone through the multi-minute song and dance of launching the game only to be told falsely that my account is not allowed to play. That plus the plodding pace make for a very high fixed cost to a play session.

5/5

Delightfully campy. And the gameplay, despite the oft-maligned tank controls, is fun, if dated.

4/5

As a general sucker for games as art, auteurs, and feeling clever, yeah, of course I liked the indie murder mystery. I have a few minor quibbles about quality of life and a few of the fates, but from a game design perspective, Obra Dinn does an incredible job of balancing pure deduction and metagaming to prevent getting stuck, so hats off to Lukas Pope.

5/5

One of the more tolerable modern open-world action games. Combat, crafting, stealth, and the tombs are all adequate.

4/5

Multiplayer car soccer/rugby that’s dumb fun at all levels, with an impressively high skill ceiling.

4/5

It’s Chrono Trigger, which was a good game, and so is this. Some great moments and some nits to pick/genre staples that sour things a tad, especially the slow backtracking and one certain 60-part fetch quest.

4/5

They tell me that I need to get good and spend a few days mastering the dance of its combat. I don’t find that fun, and my video game time is limited enough that I don’t want to. Very disappointed. The experience would not have been ruined with difficulty options, but many more people would have been able to access it and enjoy zipping around a gorgeous world as a ninja. Isn’t that what we all want?

2/5

Emblematic of the best of the Xbox Live Arcade, any fan of Metroidvanias should play it.

4/5

Where ICO fails as a game, Shadow of the Colossus makes some concessions to its vision (look, a HUD!) to more than make up for it with this classic. Every colossus is an intricate puzzle, and the sense of scale, the physics as Wander gets tossed around, and the epic score all combine for an unforgettable experience. Of all the usual “games as art” suspects, Shadow of the Colossus is perhaps the strongest on the gameplay front.

5/5

The puzzling is great, it’s just surrounded by an eye-rollingly poor story and mediocre combat. The dissonance between Lara’s development as a stone-cold killer who must save the world and the tender-hearted young woman who takes the time to help a young boy get his dice back is immersion-breaking.

3/5

As someone with no experience with the Commandos games, I was pleasantly surprised at the extent to which Blades of the Shogun scratched my puzzly tactics itch much like Hitman or XCOM before it.

4/5

All four campaigns feel fresh and impeccably designed around each character’s abilities. A modern classic in every sense.

5/5

You know what, just look at the VI review.

4/5

You know what, just look at the VI review.

4/5

Having never gotten especially good at Civ, it’s still a shockingly addictive set of systems, but I find it overwhelming and prefer smaller, more tactical experiences.

4/5

Really nails the core loop of skating around San Vanelona, finding a spot, and hitting the perfect line.

4/5

Played on hardcore, it is equal parts frustrating and rewarding. Some of the missions and goals are boring or too hard, but it will always be cool to find a spot and nail the perfect line.

4/5

Enemy intentions are a fantastic mechanic, and it’s probably no coincidence that I also enjoy Spirit Island and Into the Breach. All four classes are great, and the base game’s modular difficulty ensures an appropriate experience. The true final boss isn’t worth doing other than for the achievements, though, as it limits the deckbuilding too much.

4/5

A favorite for couch coop. Adorable and requires all players to contribute.

4/5

Snowboarding is slow and unsatisfying, and skill feels pretty irrelevant, especially with the difficulty spike at the end.

2/5

Unredeemable. There was no part of this I enjoyed.

1/5

Serviceable 2D Sonic.

3/5

The platonic ideal Sonic game, with delightful throwback graphics and soundtrack with top-notch level design. Unfortunately, the Sonic formula is fundamentally flawed. The game wants you to fly through levels, but without replaying and memorizing levels, the gameplay is either effectively an autoscroller or failing to go fast by hitting obstacles or falling.

4/5

A bit less funny than its predecessor, but with a massively more interesting combat system. The difficulty slider is one of my favorite bits of social commentary the show has done.

4/5

As a playable South Park, very funny and worthwhile. More of a joke RPG than a real RPG though.

4/5

Overlook the painfully generic and slightly buggy cover shooter for the engaging narrative.

4/5

I’m generally not big on multiplayer shooters, but the lack of a deathmatch and the weapon variety, as well as the new PVE mode, kept me coming back. Underrated soundtrack reminiscient of The Go! Team.

4/5

When I had about 30 minutes before bed after struggling with problem sets all day in my first year of grad school, I would go to a simpler place, where life was a jam-packed gameplay loop of farming, fishing, foraging, and friendship. And the later addition of coop made for one of my favorite couple’s games.

4/5

As a genre novice, definitely my favorite rail shooter. Filled with details that reward replay like branching paths and secret segments, and of course, a simple, engaging scoring mechanism. I know every word of the script.

4/5

It’s very dated, coming from the olden days of BioWare, but it’s also one of the better Star Wars story in the entire Expanded Universe (before Disney killed it).

4/5

More of the same, but a bit weaker in the story department.

3/5

Flying through the explosions of ships you blew up at the last moment in HDR is a neat trick, and it’s sometimes reminiscent of Star Fox in a way I enjoy. It’s a straightforward, honest campaign experience, which I respect, but maybe I’d have been more engaged with the story if it had been told during missions rather than stilted base conversations that beg to be skipped. Dishonorable mention for bonus medals for attacking civilians with zero moral gravitas–this isn’t Spec Ops: The Line, it’s not trying to be, and it should have stuck to the popcorn.

3/5

There’s not a bad SteamWorld game out there, and this is an unremarkable (but fun!) platformer.

4/5

XCOM meets Worms does it for me.

4/5

Was looking for stupid fun. Got a lot of stupid, some fun.

3/5

Ostensibly a shooter, but the central conceit of a shooter where time only passes when you move ends up making it more of a puzzler. The story gets in the way a bit and is nowhere close to as clever as it thinks it is. Completely superseded by its VR version.

3/5

A roguelike SUPERHOT is a great concept, but the lack of content and amount of replaying levels necessary upon failure made me lose interest.

2/5

It’s The Matrix in a game, with the immediacy and intuitiveness afforded by VR. By far, the coolest I have ever felt while playing a video game. (“Felt” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I’ve seen video of me playing.)

5/5

The perspective-based puzzles are mostly adequate. The narrative around it apes Portal and The Stanley Parable in an unsatisfying manner.

3/5

As inoffensive and uninspired as the worst of the NSMB games.

3/5

Although the camera in particular shows its age, it remains a delightful adventure, and the levels are memorable and unique among the series.

5/5

The four character structure is gratuitous and the movement choice is a lesser-of-two-evils between a d-pad and bizarre touch screen joystick emulation, but it’s the same great game with a few extra stars.

4/5

One of my hottest takes is that by modern standards, the series was unplayable until Super Mario Bros. 3. Movement is just too clunky. “Modern” does a lot of work there though, I loved the Game Boy Color port as a kid.

2/5

We’re just going through the motions here. It’s good, but there’s not much here that Rayman hasn’t done.

4/5

It would be incredibly unfair to compare it unfavorably to its direct sequel, as this is still one of the best 3D platformers ever.

5/5

The best of the mainline games? Higher difficulty and no fluff make a convincing argument.

5/5

Let me put it this way, it holds up better than the original. Movement is everything in a Mario game, and Super Mario Land 2 feels good.

4/5

Fun (and stars) in every carefully crafted nook and cranny.

5/5

Still the same SNES game under the hood, which has long been surpassed by the Paper Mario series. It’s cute, but there’s not much to it, and some dumb 90s-era design elements have been left in.

3/5

Between F.L.U.D.D. and Mario not having any momentum, Sunshine has the best movement in the entire series. World design and many of the shines are also impeccable. Unfortunately, it’s clear they ran out of time with some of the repetitive content, especially the blue coins.

4/5

I’m fine with tough games with instant retries and short levels or checkpoints. Impeccable movement, and one of the best pure platformers the medium has seen.

5/5

I can recognize Super Metroid as a genre-defining game. Especially for a first playthrough, it would really benefit from some modern touches; there are way too many destructable blocks (and one glass tunnel…) with no indication of what they are. The controls are terrible and Samus’ movement is slow and clunky. What it gets right are a constant sense of progression and its atmosphere, especially the music. The one silver lining of a first playthrough in 2021 is that even the built-in Switch emulator supports save stats to make things less frustrating. Without that, I’d probably have to knock off another point.

4/5

Is it a party game or the monkey-rolling equivalent of a precision platformer? It’s both, and hits it out of the park. Features a surprisingly strong mini game collection as well, especially Monkey Target.

4/5

Why would you take a precision monkey-rolling game into a wonky motion-controlled exercise in frustration? With a jump button, no less.

2/5

It’s a mediocre action game. Very funny when it wants to be, and the story is downright OK, high praise for the plumber.

3/5

An impressive technical achievement, scaling the full SSB4 experience onto a handheld. Single-player not as compelling as Ultimate’s, and the level 9 AI in particular is notorious for reading inputs.

4/5

The story mode was oddly high budget, but the slower pace as a concession to the Wii’s poor online is too steep a price. Also, tripping? I get what Sakurai wanted to do, but randomly robbing the player of control in a fighting game is just bad design. More than a decade later, I remain upset at the time when my character tripped into the final level of All-Star Mode when I wanted to heal. I did not win.

4/5

Even as a casual player (I mean, I beat Event 51, but I also mained Roy for his neutral B, so yeah), the roster size and many modes made this an absolute staple of game nights for people of all abilities.

5/5

Downright rudimentary compared to what was yet to come, but the fundamentals are all here.

4/5

I’m not a fan of fighting games, but I make an exception for SSB. Lives up to its title in terms of content. An epic love letter to all of video gaming, and a fun, frantic fighter to boot.

5/5

Won’t make any new fans of the fighting genre, but the best since II.

3/5

Oof. As someone who likes-to-loves Fire Emblem, XCOM, and Triangle Strategy, I figured this was a shoo-in. It feels every bit its age, with some of the worst onboarding of any game I have played. As best I can tell, it’s not so much Tactics Ogre as Navigating Obtuse Systems in Menus between Battles Ogre, but maybe that’s just a localization thing. Story does not put its best foot forward, but you could spend more time in those menus reading summaries of it. An unexpectedly early bounce for me.

2/5

At some point, Valve described it as “the world’s #1 war-themed hat simulator,” but that’s a little on the nose. The sum of the new content detracts from the rock-paper-scissors of the base game, even though some of the class updates, like for the Medic and Pyro, made them more interesting and fun to play.

4/5

My favorite roguelike on the strength of its variety of content, in spite of its complete indifference towards fairness or balance and distasteful themes. The various expansions have only added to the sheer amount of stuff, but the many new paths and bosses bloat the game somewhat, and 60+ minute runs completely overstay their welcome.

4/5

An open-world timesink. There are better RPGs on tables and on screens and the world is soulless, with all your accomplishments feeling hollow as the game barely acknowledges them.

3/5

If I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself for any game, it would be this one. I have not felt this childlike sense of wonder in a game since I was a literal child.

5/5

The dungeons are tight, but it’s a short game and the stuff in between them (looking at you, animal trade quest) drags. Why on earth can this not always maintain 60 FPS?

3/5

A landmark in gaming and an epic adventure even today. The low framerate is awful, but the 3DS port solves that.

4/5

I could do without the repetitive parts, but it’s a full Zelda experience well adapted to the DS.

4/5

Much has been written about how the game treats the player like an idiot, and it does. I am firmly in the camp that the motion controls here are actively user hostile and was frustrated far more than I was impressed. A handful of good dungeons and bosses with doldrums between them.

3/5

Phantom Hourglass with less of the sucky parts. No one ever talks about the DS games, and it’s weird to remember that there’s a Zelda game about trains.

4/5

A direct improvement over Breath of the Wild in many ways, including enemy variety, dungeon design, and interlocking systems to encourage engagement with all of them. Too often, it mistakes more content with better game design, and more willingness to cut fluff would have been beneficial (dragging Koroks around, propping up signs, one-off gimmicks and minigames) that are uninteresting time wasters. This would put greater emphasis on the main quests and better side quests, which are all strong; we’ve explored this Hyrule before, so the best moments are reveals and discoveries rather than the pure wonder of exploration. Actually, exploration is often boring or slow, which is a problem because this world is huge. And while I approve of the game tending to avoid spelling out some information or puzzles, there are surprising rough edges of insufficient or actively misleading explanations and prompts. But these are nitpicks, and this is a worthy successor to one of the greatest games of all time, if not as groundbreaking.

5/5

Nintendo let Capcom take the wheel and was rewarded with one of the better 2D efforts in the series. Gorgeous art and sprites.

4/5

The ultimate realization of the Ocarina of Time-style Zelda game. A genuinely epic adventure with highlights in the art, dungeons, and for once in the series, story.

4/5

Fundamentally as sound as Shovel Knight. Pacing suffers a lot due to backtracking in the middle. Leans too heavily on self-awareness at times. Main game is a little too easy at the end, but the free DLC is a little too unforgiving and has an awful final boss.

4/5

Frog Detective with less charm.

2/5

An amusing meta-commentary art game/walking simulator. Has something to say and succeeds in conveying it.

5/5

What exactly is this game? A bizarre blend of The Sims, an RPG, and a few minigames?

2/5

Maybe I just don’t like pure puzzle games. Moments of realization were less “eureka!” and more “oh, come on.” The lack of direction, the reward for puzzles being more puzzles with no extrinsic motivation, and the tutorial puzzles not adequately explaining the concepts they were supposed to be teaching made me stop pretty quickly.

2/5

I was going to make a comment about the story hurting my head, but I suppose the combat does that just a little more, at least in the original DS version. Like most JRPGs, the lack of interplay between the gameplay and the story hurts it (why isn’t this just a comic?), but they’re both individually sound.

4/5

The card game is disappointing. Combos are overpowered and pretty obvious, and outside of one mandatory fight that is nigh unwinnable with certain types of decks, the game never forced me to change things up on the middle difficulty–I actually made choices that resulted in overpowered cards leaving to take away some of my options and force me to restructure a few areas. The rules explanation is also lacking, which made a few of the many, many puzzles unclear. The story and writing surpassed my admittedly low expectations.

3/5

An exemplary AAA linear shooter. Movement and boss battles are highlights, with the latter being unusual for a shooter. Weapons and narrative are both generic. Doesn’t quite reach the heights of the best of Halo, Call of Duty, or Doom (2016).

4/5

Harping on Tomb Raider for ludonarrative dissonance is like shooting fish in a barrel, but was there really no one in testing who found it jarring that immediately after innocent Lara kills a human for the first time in a cutscene, I’m getting bonus points for headshots? A fun cast of characters anchors the story until it decides to go all-in on the supernatural.

4/5

I owned this game before I had a memory card for my PS2, and with an hour limit on screen time per day, I got pretty good at getting through most or all of the campaign in that time. Conveniently, that plays to its strengths of fast, technical arcade skating designed to be replayed.

4/5

Not nearly as cool as it was when I was in middle school, but the levels, ability to walk, and that soundtrack (Cannibal Ox! DOOM! Queens of the Stone Age! Madlib! Deltron 3030! Juggaknots! Nas!) are all aces.

4/5

Wasn’t cool even when I was in middle school. THUG but worse.

3/5

Both the combat and story are inscrutable for a shockingly large portion of the experience given that this is only a six-hour game. They both mostly get there.

4/5

Surprisingly heavy visual novel with motion-controlled surgery simulations throughout. Superb soundtrack. Glad I replayed this one before covid.

4/5

Challenging and rewarding physics motorcycle game. Significantly replayable.

4/5

Although the story branches are filled with weighty, meaningful decisions, I rarely felt like I was making crunchy tactical choices; the key decisions on most maps are strategic: swarming the boss here, defending this area before advancing, etc. Gorgeous style, superb writing, an enjoyable story, a disappointing dub. The totality of the package reminds me of Path of Radiance.

4/5

The brilliance is in the in-game manual, with its mysteries and layers. At the start, it’s a loose guide, maintaining a sense of discovery and letting the game be cryptic without sending players to an external guide. And by the end, it’s your only friend in the face of an onslaught of riddles.

5/5

If art is anything that evokes an emotional response, then Undertale is a shining example of games as art. A personal favorite.

5/5

I would have much preferred they narrow the scope and create a more linear adventure with a tighter story and a more even, tactically interesting difficulty curve. And great googly moogly, Vanillaware, I would be embarrassed to play this in public, where someone might see your degenerate female elven fencer design. Be better.

4/5

Some quiet moments of storytelling and social commentary through mechanics. Note that I said mechanics, not gameplay, of which there is effectively none, though it manages to be annoying at times anyway. (Well, that’s where I would put the laundry basket.)

4/5

I want to love this for its unique take on the tactical genre, and there are some ideas in there that deserve it. But it is too often a janky, opaque mess that deprives players of vital information, encouraging save scumming and forcing reloads when the developers pull the rug out from under the player. Spends a lot of time answering the question “What if World War II, but anime,” resulting in a thematically unholy combination of concentration camps, comic relief winged pigs, clumsy nuclear metaphors, and the female lead wearing an anachronistic bikini.

3/5

Despite a better story and a few fun tweaks and additions over the original, it retains every single problem from it. I continue to be baffled by who the intended audience of the gameplay could be, pretending to be a hybrid of turn-based tactics and shooters yet usually playing more like a puzzle game with one right answer that’s frustrating to achieve given the clunkiness of the engine.

3/5

I have a thing for games that understand themselves and what they want to do. VVVVVV knows the limits of its mechanics and creates a tight platformer around them. Short, sweet, to-the-point.

4/5

Charming derivative of the beloved Advance Wars series. Turns out that’s not an amazing formula in a world where XCOM exists.

2/5

Detailed, varied, and challenging. High replayability to boot to find every last collectable.

4/5

Held back by its UX and inadequate tutorialization. Once an external guide or forum thread tells you how to build characters properly, even the Ranger difficulty becomes boringly easy. Nothing in the setting, characters, writing, or plot made me particularly invested.

3/5

There’s no reason to go back when Wii Sports Resort exists (unless you really like the baseball or boxing games), but this game rocked the world, exposing millions of people to video games. Everyone loved that bowling game. Everyone.

5/5

It’s a dated tech demo in a world with today’s VR systems, and yet it was an easy multiplayer hit with casuals. Nintendo didn’t have to put as much love into its world (there’s a whole island, and every event takes place somewhere on it in a cohesive world!) or Mii integration, but they did. Surprising depth to some of the games like golf and bowling.

5/5

The emphasis on positioning your allies each turn makes it heavily tactical. As with Monster Train, having some of your deck consist of allies played once per battle makes it more limited as a deckbuilder than something like Slay the Spire, which also hurts longevity. There’s a learning curve: the game is unforgiving.

4/5

A clunky, boring waste of time.

2/5

Honestly, its greatest sin is not being Worms World Party, the apex of the series.

3/5

For my money, the best in the series. The best kind of zany.

4/5

It takes Enemy Unknown, improves the good parts, and strips out as much of the boring strategic layer as it can. My favorite turn-based tactics game of all time. Huge replayability thanks to the randomized levels, soldiers, and enemies (the latter in the War of the Chosen expansion, which is vital). I live for those turns where the game becomes a challenge to somehow kill all the enemies, or even just survive, and it delivers in spades. Main weakness is the reverse difficulty curve.

5/5

While it loses the depth of XCOM 2, there’s some good tactical puzzle action to be had here and the changes to the formula are enough of a novelty for its runtime.

4/5

Completely outclassed by XCOM 2, but it was a revelation coming from Fire Emblem to get to play with destructable environments and line of sight. Improved by the Enemy Within expansion’s nudges to avoid turtling.

5/5

I played this during the first year of my PhD, perhaps the last time I’ll be willing to put up with an unnecessarily long JRPG. But the combat system is a treat, the score is one of my favorites, and then I was in the right mindstate for an inconsequential shonen story.

4/5

Somewhere in the Saints Row 2 or GTA mold, confidently and sloppily mixing a crime drama with the tonal potpourri of its side stories. None of the gameplay is especially deep or exciting, which really makes things drag. Long cutscenes, run to pink dot, fight people isn’t a great gameplay loop.

2/5

What if we took Banjo-Kazooie and removed the tight level design for vast, barren worlds? The version I played at launch was buggy and had a camera that was downright hostile to the player.

2/5