Profound video games are games that are felt so strongly that they resonate with ones soul on another level. The definition of profound is:

"Having, showing, or requiring great insight or understanding."

There are games that capture this feeling. An emotional feeling where you learnt more about what it means to be human. These could be in terms of phenomenaly written characters, or a extremely well made world. It might be a story along with its characters. Whatever it is the game made you feel a certain unexplainable way.

Nier automata is that game for me. After finishing ending E it felt like i've experienced what it means to be human. A pessimistic and nihilistic point of view to life which i can heavily relate to. Even though the game is ultimately about cute robots and aliens the game does a tremendous job at portraying its message to me. The game doesn't resonate as well with everyone though and it doesn't need to. But it is, to me, one of the most emotionally profound gaming experiences i've ever had.

What are some other games that made you feel similarly, or games you could describe as 'profound' and why?

The simplest way to tell whether somebody is going to enjoy Death Stranding, is to commit a cardinal sin of game reviews - compare it to Dark Souls.

Do you like Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring/Demon's Souls? Do you like it for its twitchy action gameplay, variety of character builds and big beefy bosses with insane attack strings, or for its weird but captivating fantasy world, with a ton of poorly explained systems and poison swamps?

Because Death Stranding is a game about overcoming one Miyazaki poison swamp after another, except that poison swamp has (sometimes literal) hands, and will throw you like a plastic doll, if you don't respect it. Its also one of very few non-RPG open world games, that makes use of its open world for something else, than boring checklist objectives.

Its also super polished, AAA game, with top tier Hollywood talent, and extremely niche gameplay, that is super easy to undersale as a "walking simulator", that Sony was somehow convinced into financing. This is the real Kojima miracle working.

I'm not going to talk about lore, plot or the fact that Norman Reedus plays the role of main character, or that the game is about package delivery in a post-apocalyptic world, everyone and their dog knows that. This was the main marketing pitch. Instead, I want to talk about what this game is for me. And I think, it is the biggest revolution in open world game design since at least GTA3.

This might be a bit controversial, but the biggest difficulty in making open world games, is the technology. How to use enough smoke and mirrors, to convince the player that their character is in the real city, real island, something like that. This is where the biggest innovations happen, with more computing power, comes the ability to put more "real" stuff on the screen, without resorting to tricks like the Silent Hill fog.

But the games remain roughly the same. "You go to an NPC, watch a cutscene, go to a marker on a map (either on foot or via a vehicle), do some third person shooting, watch some cutscenes and go back" - can be gameplay description of GTA3, Red Dead Redemption 2 and ton of other AAA open world games. "Oh there are also checklists you can accomplish" - this can be also said about ton of open world games.

To me, that means there is very little point to an open world design. The player is going to cover kilometers of terrain, during which very little happens. Yes, you can say "that's the point, you are meant to vibe and take in the atmosphere", and I get that, I have my share of time doing that on the streets of Liberty City or Night City.

The problem with that is... That I can do that in the real world as well, and its going to be 10 times more impactful. If you like driving around open world games to immerse yourself, I recommend going out for a 2 AM nightdriving trip. Put on some moody music, pick a destination in your city, and just cruise there. The Friday/Saturday night air tastes differently once you do that.

What's most interesting abut Death Stranding, is how it sets that setup on its head. There is very little action at the destinations you go to - usually watching a cutscene and flipping through some terminal screens. The most action-packed and nerve wrecking sequences, are going to happen during transit. The game will be constantly throwing obstacles your way - be it terrifying ghostly things, "bandits" or just a really deep river. There is constant stream of interesting decisions to make - should I try to cross the river on my bike, and risk losing it along with the cargo, or do a bonus trip to a distribution centre to get materials for the bridge? Maybe I should ditch the bike, and try to carry the cargo on my back? Should I try to get through a bandits territory, or walk around it (usually a longer trip involving mountains)? Can I take some extra cargo? What if there are slippery slopes ahead of me? What if... It goes on and on.

A lot of open world games falls into trap of introducing systems, and then failing to impose any consequence for ignoring them - this is also something Death Stranding solves, because literally everything matters. Your main task will be delivering cargo from point A to point B. But unlike many other titles, everything you carry is not some abstract thing in a magical inventory system, that might introduce some slightly annoying speed penalty if you cross some arbitrary boundary. Death Stranding will allow you carry more stuff than it is necessary, and will punish you heavily if you overestimate your abilities. You've fallen into the river? Good luck catching up with the cargo, that now going down the stream. You left your bike in the rain to deal with the BTs in peace? The cargo will get damaged eventually. You don't have the repair spray? Well, good luck delivering the cargo before its lost. You have not taken spare shoes with you to carry extra cargo? You know the drill.

But if there is one thing Death Stranding is not, its cruel. There is a social strand system. Somebody will put down a ladder in their game, and it will appear in yours, just when you need it. Its a brilliant system, and has works like a charm.

Death Stranding is a GOTY contender for me. Only thing I regret, is that I used to doubt in it. I should have played it earlier!

I am finally able to share my experience that mentions a game that recently went past the 1 year mark. Much of this is from my review on the Paper Mario subreddit, with a few additional points. I played the Switch version during Christmas of 2025 after I got done with that semester's finals.

I played Expedition 33 right before this. For years, I read about how unfathomably far in the sky TTYD is above all the other titles in the series. So, my expectations were very high, and with all that, I was totally blown away. The world building, the immaculate tie-ins ( initially I found Pennington calling Mario, Luigi, a little low on the entertainment scale, but when it tied back in to cause Bowser to lose his mind over Mario & Luigi stealing his thunder, that was cinema ), the artistic application of paper in all of the folding and cutting ways it was shown, the use of the crowd and background scenery during battles.

I personally prefer this to Expedition 33, as I don't enjoy photo-realistic graphics, but I imagine that's a hot take to most people. I want to review that game separately sometime, but maybe on a secondary play-through. The other thing is, for me, The Thousand Year Door had a much better curve on the build-up of the story. Expedition 33's story died for me after chapter 1, and I stopped caring completely after chapter 2. The Thousand Year Door BUILDS with every chapter and doesn't stop climbing even after the credits scene.

A special note about the music; I happened to let the menu go on for longer than 10 seconds when I was first getting ready to play the game, and, yeah that theme still goes hard. All of the music was very fitting, all of the sound effects were bubble-wrap-good.

I could go on about all of the greatness, but I wanted to especially underline how important it was to me that the ending, was not just The End. It was the conclusion of a story. The demon was defeated. Period. Now, I WANT to go back and find out what's going on. One of my favorite titles, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and its predecessor, both have an ending that has no effect on the world you play in. There are so many games like this as well, where you get stuck on the save screen right before the final boss.

Just some notes I wanted to drop by as to my personal decisions in regards to the gameplay: Once I got Powerlift, that pretty much made every single boss fight a breeze. Bobbery basically turned into 3 Art Attacks with it, besides a few specific enemies resistant to his attack. I beat Bonetail before I began Chapter 7, which made all the battles afterwords a breeze. I did feel like Vivian, Koop, and Goombella really fell off towards the late game, even Flurrie only had a few uses like flying Buzzy Beetles with spikes. I did not use any hints online, neither did I look up how to get through puzzles, so the ZL button hints were very useful in nudging me in the right direction or reminding me of my objective. Seriously well done as well.

It's a 10/10 game for me in every aspect: The art is beautiful, the music is fitting and well written, the story is meaningful, the combat is fun, and all the quality-of-life things are just right.

TLDR: If I had one sentence to summarize my experience with Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, it would be this: "This is the first text-based RPG with no voice acting that grabbed my attention and created a desire in me to actually read everything the characters said (besides Luigi)."

And, just in case: Expedition 33 had PHENOMENAL combat, music, and art. I just personally prefer Paper Mario.

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

The combat's great - it's satisfying, enemies are not annoying and don't respawn until you activate a checkpoint, weapons are satisfying and fit the challenges the game sets before you well (think the exact opposite of every castlevania inspired game).

The exploration's great - you can move through the rooms quickly if you don't want to fight every enemy, there's tons of stuff to find, there are secrets, traversal puzzles, places to remember for later, and fast travel points everywhere, especially in the latter parts of the game.

The presentation's obviously fantastic as well.

The game hooked me like no other has in a long time, genuinely setting me back in life affairs because I felt so compelled to get through it, but then I got to the second to last boss and it felt like a slap to the face.

First, before even attempting the fight, I decided to finish up some of the quests I had almost completed - huge mistake. It's extremely tedious because you have to actually find every single instance of these collectibles without any indicators of which parts of the map you've already cleared out, and that effort is absolutely not appropriately rewarded.

I normally avoid stuff like this if it feels like an extra thing for completionists, but I had already done almost all of it through normal exploration, so I believed it was something meant to be worth my attention as a regular player.

So after I decided to cheat (and it still took a good while to find what I was missing) I got back to the fight, and oh my.

The biggest problem with the boss is that he has a long first phase that's there purely to waste your time - the attacks are easy to dodge, but the character himself can't be harmed most of the time, so you're guaranteed to waste a bunch of time every time you attempt the fight. Annoying as hell.

Then you get past it, and suddenly you face an enemy that seemingly appeared from a different game entirely. It's the only time in the entire game's runtime up to that point where you have to learn tight dodge timings for long strings of hard to read attacks, but that's what he's all about. You can't use a different strategy, use a certain weapon to exploit a weakness, play conservatively and deal damage with spells. It's the antithesis of the game's combat up to that point, and it's made infinitely worse by the fact that it's right near the end of it. Oh, and he deals a ton of damage without really giving you space to heal, so each mistake is that much more likely to send you back to phase 1.

It's probably the biggest fumble I've seen a good game make in its final hours. Pretty sad how it will forever define how I remember an otherwise great game.

Loop Hero is a rogue-lite deck builder developed by Four Quarters. Released in 2021, Loop Hero is what happens when someone likes the joke about the kid having his foot nailed to the floor so much they made a game out of it.

We play as an unnamed hero on a quest to stop the universe from coming to an end.

Gameplay involves googling 'bingeworthy Netflix shows' so that you have something to do while your hero joyfully walks in an endless circle of murder collecting sticks, food and metal from the fallen.

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The Good

It reminded me a bit of Hand of Fate 2 where you build the world around yourself. I did enjoy the early game of figuring things out. One thing that took me awhile to figure out is just how quickly enemies scale. I felt like the game should have played the Sonic drowning music if you go beyond 10 loops to warn you about just how fucked you're about to be.

I love that the progression unlocks don't screw you like they often do in most rogue-lites. Anything you unlock you can immediately turn off or disable so you don't find yourself dealing with bloated options. You don't end up with garbage in the loot pool (COUGH BROTATO COUGH) just because you dared to play a lot.

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The Bad

The entire strategy is in choosing what tiles to bring into a run with you. Once you figure out which tiles work best that's really all there is to it. In actual play there isn't all that much going on. The order tiles come in is RNG but where you are going to put them is pretty much the same every time.

It's one of those gameplay experiences where I was never sure if I was enjoying myself. There isn't enough going on to be interesting. I had more fun being a line cook at Applebees because at least occasionally the waitress would screw up an order and I'd get a free steak out of the deal.

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The Questionable

While it doesn't bill itself as an idle game, it has a lot in common with the genre. Unfortunately it requires just enough fiddling that you can't just let it rip, so instead it's a sort of "You can play this, but you have to have something else that takes up most of your time going on as well."

The meta grind is painful given how simple each run is and that you're capped on how many resources you can win each run. If you actually want to beat the game you have to do enough grinding to do a complete rewatch of the Sopranos. So I say, leave the fuckin' cheese there.

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Final Thoughts

It's a neat concept and I had fun for the first few hours. If you can get it cheap it's worth it for that much at least. If you're a completionist though it's a hard sell because the back 80% once you hit the grind is really boring and it requires just enough attention that you can't just enjoy it as an idler game either.

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Bonus Thought

The Russian developers have criticized the war against Ukraine and thankfully as of yet have not fallen out of a window. They've been unable to make money off the game and they've said that folks who can't buy the game because of sanctions should seek 'alternate means of acquisition.'

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Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

Crosscode is a 2D action RPG, kinda like Kingdom Hearts or the Of Mana series, but with as much emphasis on puzzle solving as there is on combat. I bought it some years ago after seeing it on a list of lesser-known indie gems.

I found the combat very engaging. There are four basic actions: melee attacks, shooting, dashing, and blocking, All of these also have further “powered up” versions, with up to three levels of charge, which you can unlock on the skill tree as you level up. The game makes the most of all of these mechanics through its enemies. A lot of enemies take reduced damage to start with, but can have their guard broken by different means. Some have to be hit from behind, or by a charged range attack. Some have to hit with a certain element, and for some you have to make use of environmental objects or other enemies first. This gives it variety and prevents things from ever getting too mashy or mindless.

The puzzles are similarly great. There’s a huge number of mechanics which interact with the four different element types you unlock in this game and which you can freely switch between once unlocked. By the second dungeon they’re already as mindbending as almost any puzzle I remember from a Zelda game, and they remain very engaging all the way to the end. Oftentimes I would enter a room and feel overwhelmed by all the moving parts of the puzzle, but taking it one piece at a time let me understand it until the only obstacle left was my execution.

In the overworld, there’s also a good amount of parkour-based exploration puzzles. You’ll see a chest or some other goody on some elevated position and then to get to it you have to see what piece of terrain there is nearby that will let you jump to it, and if that terrain is also out of reach you’ll have to figure out how to get there first, and so on and so forth, with some of these locations having very convoluted routes. These exploration puzzles can be satisfying, but also frustrating on account of the poor depth perception. Since the game is top-down 2D, it’s sometimes hard to say whether a certain platform is at the same level as the one you’re standing on, higher, or lower. There is a way to tell reliably—if you shoot some projectiles at the other platform, those shots will hit its side if it’s higher than you, otherwise they’ll pass over it—but it’s still not great having to stop and test for this stuff.

Other than that, my only big complaint about the game parts of the game is that some of the overworld stuff drags. Each area of the overworld could have been cut down by a third or a quarter and it would have made the pacing much better, imo. Especially the part leading up to the third major story dungeon, which is the biggest area of the overworld and which you additionally have to do some backtracking in before you can access that third dungeon. Arguably the dungeons should also have been shortened, but the only one that felt like a drag to me was the first.

As far as the writing goes, on the one hand, I ended up liking pretty much all the major characters. Your party members’ banter and discussions while exploring the overworld are a nice addition to the game. It helps very nicely to flesh them all out and make them feel like real friend groups. On the other hand, the plot was just okay. I found it a bit too contrived; for instance, there’s this person in the game who helps you through your journey, but every so often your character will ask him, “Hey, why do I have to do/put up with X? Couldn’t you just do Y instead?” and he’ll answer with some handwavey technical stuff that basically amounts to “I can’t because the plot/gameplay demands we do X”. I still liked it, but it’s not a game I’d ever recommend for the story. The ending is a bit underwhelming too; the DLC improves that but not by a lot.

On the whole, a really good experience, and deserves to be more well know. Right after beating the base game I went and bought the DLC, and it's just as good. 4/5 Stars.

I played the original (for the first time) and the remake back to back. I went over the original in a separate post, but it left me highly disappointed. That game did NOT age well.

But this game?

I adore this game. It is, in my opinion, the perfect example of what a remake should be. It fixes the major errors. It recontextualizes the stuff that doesn't make sense, in a way that makes more sense-- in the original, when Barrett would go on a rant about eco-terrorism, due to bad translation I had no idea what to make of it. Is he supposed to be making a poignant impassioned plea? Is he hallucinating? Is he actually a villain? No idea. In the remake, Barrett goes on a rant and Tifa and Cloud give each other knowing eye-rolls, perfectly nailing the tone.

GRAPHICS Amazing. Of course they are, because it's Square, but it's more than that-- seeing the world of Midgar come to life was INCREDIBLE. I have to imagine it was even more impactful to fans of the original. It felt to me like seeing Cap, Iron Man and Thor on screen together in the first avengers-- this thing that I had an image of in my mind, only seen represented as a kind of cartoon implication, finally existing as I imagined it.

COMBAT I loved it. One of the game's shortcomings is that the materia system is clearly designed for an open world, because the original was one-- and this game isn't. So a lot of the upgrades felt underwhelming, like I never really got to experiment with a ton of different materia load-outs because there just wasn't enough reason/opportunity to.

PADDING This is the biggest complaint of the game and I get why. There is ABSOLUTELY a lot of out of place dragging down of sidequests and whatnot. But I will say that to me, it didn't feel like padding, it felt like an earnest and sincere attempt to expand the world, that just failed. This game wanted to be open-world but shoved onto an on-rails story, and instead just switched back and forth in a way that didn't work. But a lot of the other expansion, like the trip to Jessie's parents, worked really well for me.

THE STORY One of the most controversial parts, and the thing that has me singularly most excited, is the idea of the whispers and changing fate. I LOVE the idea that this isn't just a reboot into new continuity, but it's breathing more life by becoming a meta-sequel to the original. I am so excited to see where things go, and whether the heroes can break out of fate fully.

The worst parts of this game felt like sections where it felt like the devs were just trying to appease fans of the original-- like the final sequence has this really time consuming, not-fun motorcycle chase with bad mechanics that really hurts the pace, because you just escaped an exploding shinra building and you're hunting down sephiroth but I need to swing my sword at a giant road-mech for 20 minutes with mechanics that barely make sense. But if they had cut this, I get the feeling people would have just complained.

Overall, this game is an incredible remake, and a pretty great game on its own.

I want to add that these games get hard to talk about because the fanbase is absolutely rabid while simultaneously looking at the original exclusively through nostalgia goggles. I looked through some other opinions, and a highly-touted one is that the remake is bad because it has goofy moments, while the original was filled with a dark and serious tone and barely had any silliness whatsoever. What. Come on.

My post with the original is here

I played RE4 on Gamecube back when it originally came out. I still have fond memories of all the campy one-liners and the memes from the GameFAQs message boards, long before reddit was a thing.

I finally got around to playing the remake for PS5, and it's just as fun and janky as the original. The updated graphics are great, and there's plenty of good story changes while staying true to the original. My main complaint is that on console, the controls are somehow even jankier than they were 20 years ago. Walking is too slow, running is too fast, turning is imprecise, and I confused the run button with the knife button for the first 5 hours. Even aiming was a struggle, turning on "snap-on aiming" was a must and even then I had to keep fiddling with the setting multiple times. There's a dodge QTE button but god I wish there was some kind of roll button instead (I know: this ain't Dark Souls). This was all mildly frustrating, but it was also refreshing to feel like a noob again.

One-off thoughts below:

• There were two early puzzles about rotating an image that sucked big-time. Was like one of those fake 3D images where you can't see the hidden picture.
• They took out two of my favorite Leon lines: "Your small time, Saddler!" and "Your right hand comes off?". Unforgivable. If "Hey it's that dog" had been removed I don't think I could've played on. XD
• The merchant shows up too often, it slowed down the game for me as I couldn't help but micromanage my inventory every time. Similarly, crafting ammo and breaking 5 loot boxes per room slowed things down.
• Regenerators can go suck a dick. If you miss one sniper shot at a vital you might as well just reload the autosave because you're going to tank damage and a lot of ammo getting away from it. And when it worms around on the ground, wtf.
• Krauser can go suck a dick too, although after giving up and watching a youtube guide it was ok. Just spamming the parry button seemed to work better than trying to time it.
• THE KNIFE BREAKS???
• Game is loooong. Overall that's good, but as a boomer gamer it was a bit exhausting.

I loved it, I hated it, I'll probably do another run soon!

I've been pretty big into the Assassin's Creed series for some time. As you may imagine, the Ezio trilogy is toward the top of my list in terms of its quality. Recently, I replayed Brotherhood and, for the first time, am attempting 100% in an AC game. This game has a special place in my heart and I think it deserves a big hand for being a perfect evolution of the AC formula established in 2, which is a rarity in Ubisoft's catalogue for certain.

Let's start off with arguably the most important thing about city-focused Assassin's Creed games: the parkour. The way you scale architecture and Batman your way across rooftops is integral to the fantasy of being a lone assassin stalking your prey, and I think Brotherhood pretty much dominates in this department. Sure, the animations aren't fluid like Unity and there's no hookblade shenanigans like in Revelations. But I think it's a perfect balance between giving the player control and having a low skill floor. And unlike Revelations's Constantinople, a spread-out and somewhat automated city to traverse, Brotherhood's Rome is practically handcrafted to be a big jungle gym. Even on the countryside you'll find these dense suburban areas and ruins that test your skills in different ways. The Romulus lairs are also, in my opinion, better than their counterparts in 2 and Revelations. They feel miles more polished than 2's Assassin Tombs and light years less railroaded than any of Revelations's Masyaf key missions. There is jank, but it's minimal and doesn't take you out of the experience.

There's also the single largest change from 2 to Revelations: the combat. And wow, is this combat so much better. Assassin's Creed has never really had perfect combat systems, and I wouldn't even say any of them had good combat until here, three games in. This is where the games transitioned from counter-kill combat to the chain kill system that saw its peak in AC3. That's not to say Brotherhood's iteration is primitive, though, far from it. In fact, there's an argument to be made that this game did it better than 3 in its own unique ways. Where 3 streamlined it to be more reminiscent of Batman: Arkham's free flow combat, Brotherhood kept intact all of the good ideas in AC2; ideas that were unfortunately muddied by the fact that counter-kill spam was by far the most effective strategy and it was fucking boring. In Brotherhood you can still manually grab enemies, for example, and gun enemies present a legitimate threat that would be trivialized in the Kenway games via a roll button.

The controls also require more involvement and deliberate input than future games, as well as lots of switching between high/low profile both in traversal and in combat, often an overlooked but important aspect of AC gameplay. One reason I think parkour in the RPG games, Shadows included, catches so much hate is because utilizing the right trigger and A or B feels much more active and engaging than just holding one of the two. As silly as it sounds, games are an illusion, and in order to sell the illusion you need the tactile feeling of pressing buttons that tells your brain that you're doing something*,* so that your brain can combine that with the visual feedback of the screen and say, "Wow, I did that!". All this to say, yes Reddit, I do care that I'm only holding one button down the whole game instead of two, and I will complain about it.

Rome is also one of the most fun settings to explore in AC and among the best maps to clear in pretty much any open world game I've played. Not even getting to how the game's collectibles aren't obnoxious anymore, Borgia Towers are a genius extension of viewpoints, and It's heartbreaking that AC just never did more of that after Revelations. They kept viewpoints themselves intact and turned defogging the map via towers into a staple of open world design going forward, which makes me wonder why they never revisited the one iteration of these towers that provided engaging gameplay. Breath of the Wild understood very well how to attach challenges to tower climbing, and Brotherhood quite literally pioneered the very idea of it. Borgia Towers also offered an unbeatable sense of winning a war and taking over territory. And sure, Odyssey introduced the conquest system, and I think I'm among the 5 people that think Odyssey is a good game, but there's something amazing about watching Borgia occupation dissipate slowly that makes you really feel like you're on a long, arduous campaign to liberate real people from the clutches of tyranny. I would go so far as to argue this feeling is even better in Brotherhood than the Far Cry series, where liberation is the goal of most of the games.

The game also doesn't overstay its welcome, despite the fact that it feels absolutely massive. If you had to compare AC2 to Brotherhood, AC2 is both a longer and more ambitious game, but Brotherhood creatively dedicated all of its resources to creating one vast, dense city in one eventful part of Ezio's life, which allowed the game to feel just as large in scope. Despite this larger map size, the game is actually paced much faster than AC2 because of the shorter runtime and streamlined fast travel system. This means you're pretty much never allowed to get bored, even when you're doing side activities throughout the city.

The Brotherhood system, like the Borgia Towers, is another aspect of Brotherhood and Revelations that I just really wish Ubisoft went balls-deep with. Just like how Borgia Towers emphasize the feeling of winning a war, having an entire Assassin Brotherhood chapter at your beck-and-call that becomes stronger as you fight with them makes you feel like both a leader and a mentor, a feeling that would unfortunately be streamlined and simplified in future games into "here's someone you're going to recruit and immediately forget ever existed". I still harbor a bit of attachment towards the first couple Assassins I recruited even now, and I will be devastated if one of them dies when I use them. Gameplay wise they also add this amazing power fantasy to the combat. I love the catharsis of staring down a distant guard directly in the eyes as I whistle and watch my students take him down from angles I didn't even know existed in a three-dimensional space. I think this feeling of leadership is emphasized when Machiavelli himself tells Ezio that he's now the master of Italy's Assassin Brotherhood. I like to think that's the game's little way of telling the player "the game is fully opened up now, the world is your oyster." And I believe there's a huge difference in feeling between games that subtly tell the player that and games that don't.

The story of Brotherhood is also tied with that of AC2 for my favorite in the trilogy, just for Cesare alone. Cesare is cartoonish, sure, but he's my favorite AC villain by far. One really underrated way to write a good villain is to just make him buttfuckingly evil in a bunch of different and unique ways. Cesare approaches what should be a one-dimensional bad guy trope in a very multidimensional way, and the game doesn't shy away from showing you the fact that no matter what he's doing he's gonna be doing it in an evil way. Just to give an idea,>!he commits patricide and incest, and is horrible enough of a person that Ezio feels the need to ask Caterina Sforza if he raped her while she was being held captive.!<

One problem I do have with the game is full synching missions. I love the idea of side objectives like in Unity that would earn you bonus stuff, but the problem is that you don't get a unique reward (from what I've researched) for full synching every memory and the Cristina missions, while amazing, are all available after just 75% overall synch. This means there's pretty much no point to doing all those annoying 8 minute Romulus Lair runs other than to get that number up to 100% arbitrarily, which can feel like a MASSIVE chore. Thankfully, this isn't mandatory, so you can very easily ignore this if you don't have an ego the way I do.

Overall, AC Brotherhood really holds up. It's still my favorite game of the pre-RPG entries, and definitely in the conversation for one of my all time favorite games period. If you want to feel like you're Altair in the Assassin's Creed 1 trailer, honestly I'd argue that this is the game for that. It's got the peak of parkour, a great power fantasy focused combat system, and tools like the Brotherhood system and the crossbow that make the genuinely bad stealth of AC2 feel actually pretty good here. The only thing keeping me from recommending this to every human on the planet is that to fully appreciate its story is that you need to experience AC2, and as good as AC2 is ("holy shit, two cakes!" moment) it has a lot of jank to it that would only be polished in Brotherhood onward, and not everyone wants to go through 15-20 hours of that jank to get to Brotherhood. But if you're perfectly okay with playing another masterpiece before this one, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood will very likely leave you walking away grinning from ear to ear. It seriously does just bring me so much joy that such a game exists.

I just finished this game, and I am so incredibly frustrated, that I have to vent somewhere.

I was drawn in by strong reviews and a good rating on Steam, as well as the very nice artstyle, but damn do I feel betrayed, because this game, besides the artstyle and the music has NOTHING to offer.

Gameplay is dull, boring and repetitive. The puzzles are laughably easy, the combat is bland as hell (shoot or hit enemies with a pan) and the different weapons you get make barely any difference.

The characters are somewhat likeable, but they talk on and on AND ON. And do they say anything important? NO! NEVER!

And that brings me to the story. I was hooked in the beginning, because it is an intersting world and I wanted to understand what was going on, but by the end BARELY ANYTHING was explained. They drop plotpoints LEFT AND RIGHT but they don't bother to explain ANYTHING. Weird shit happens CONSTANTLY, but the main characters don't question ANYTHING. Mainly because John, one of the playable characters doesn't talk. Why? We don't know. And it makes most situations so goddamn silly.

I am so incredibly sick of games creating interesting worlds, baiting you and making you care, only to answer NOTHING. We have time loops, clones, time travel, everything, but why? We do not know.

By the end of a game, I should have a solid idea of the plot of a game. It's fine if you have some plotholes or spaces that I have to fill with speculation. But don't sell me your paperthin plot with more questions than answers as if it's anything other than complete bullshit.

How this game got the reviews it has is a mystery to me.

Sorry for ranting, but I finished the game hoping to get some answers by the end, but I was let down completely.

This game had been sitting in my backlog for a while now, advertised as a "narrative sci-fi" game, I picked it up on sale at a deep discount and never got around to it.

That is until **yesterday** when I picked it up on a whim and didn't put it down again until I had 100% completed the game. Staying up through the night, I was overwhelmed by how engaging the story and character writing was, and how gameplay and story melded together as you played.

In Citizen Sleeper, you play as a Sleeper, a biomechanical indentured servant that uses a copied version of your original human mind to give your original body a better life. After escaping to find a better life for yourself, original body be damned, you find yourself on The Eye, a ring shaped space station at the edge of the cultivated universe. There you hope to survive and escape your corporate "owners" as they send mercenaries to "return their property". All while slowly breaking down in your mechanical shell.

Gameplay revolves around skill checks, ala Disco Elysium, that you must spend resources to perform. Each day you roll up to 5 dice which then must assign to your tasks for the day, but here's the kicker, -as you break down- you *lose dice*, so if you can't do as much the next day. Go too long without finding someway to repair your body, and you die. It puts needed pressure on a long-form narrative game, keeping the energy up and forcing you to choose how best to spend your time. Maybe you have to take a worse storybeat to make sure you can spend a better die roll on fixing yourself up, or -maybe- you risk letting yourself breakdown a bit to ensure that the story goes well. It's a great way to make player choice feel important and risky.

On top of this, branching narratives that incorporate whether or not you've done side-quests or other stories first, alongside *really* stellar character writing and emotional pay-offs, make this a game to remember. It's not -quite- Disco Elysium, but it's definitely the next best thing, and I think you'll have an excellent time if ya try it.

Spoilers are marked as such

This is a long post. If you want a TLDR skip to the end. Just know that you might not understanding my reasoning.

This was difficult to write. I want to love this game — it is hard not to want to. In the moments when Red Dead Redemption 2 shines, it shines incredibly bright. Such a gorgeous setting, with such fleshed out and well written characters. Two seperate times during my playthrough I tried to abandon the game, and both times I was pulled back by the irresistible promise of a real and alive open world, and by a strong desire to see the story through to its conclusion.

It's a good story. But I don't think it's told as well as it could be. I have a lot of issues with this game, and those issues stack up to create an experience that was more often frustrating than it was enjoyable.

THE OPEN WORLD

When it comes to spectacle, RDR2 is king. It feels obvious to talk about the way this game looks, but it really is impressive. It is remarkably easy to get immersed into a world that looks this real. The way the sunlight shines through the trees, the fog that rolls in during the mornings, the impromptu thunderstorms — these are stunning sights. Even through the epilogue I found myself still marveling at the simple beauty of this game's environments. There is so much attention to detail. This game has an obsession with realism, and while I think that has pros and cons, the visuals are definitely one of the pros.

Upon first arriving in The Heartlands and getting access to the open world, I spent a good hour or two just riding around and taking in the scenery. I imagine this is a fairly common experience, and that initial interaction with the open world is magical. The open world holds up at least for the first few hours of exploration.

Personally though, even before the end of Chapter 2 I was starting to get weary of the open world. It’s not “empty”, per se. There is a lot of open space, but there are also side quests and interactions between NPCs and other stuff to find. You can hunt, fish, play minigames. There are things to keep you busy.

It’s just that I found most of these side quests and minor activities to be pretty boring and unimportant. Hunting involves following a line on the ground until you see your prey. Fishing involves waiting around for a fish to bite and then holding space bar to reel it in. Too many of the side quests feel at best like mildly entertaining diversions, rather than something actually worthwhile to be spending your time on. The side quests that felt like they were meaningfully adding to the story were far too rare.

At one point I found myself watching a 15 minute magic show inside of the game. And I remember thinking, on the one hand yeah it’s cool that this is here, but on the other hand I just spent 15 minutes of my life watching a digitized magic show with no real purpose or meaning, and those are 15 minutes I’m never getting back. And that, in my opinion, pretty well encapsulates this game’s open world. Full, but uninteresting to engage with beyond its sheer spectacle.

THE GAMEPLAY

If I had to sum up Red Dead Redemption 2's missions in a single word, that word would be: Tedious. The gameplay of this game is unrelentingly restrictive and repetitive. It is almost insulting, the level to which Rockstar refuses to allow the player any sort of agency or use of their brain.

Every mission is entirely scripted. You are given a set of instructions that you have to follow exactly: walk behind this person for a few minutes, hide behind this specific wall, kill this guard in this specific way, etc. If you so much as walk in front of the NPC you're supposed to be following behind, that NPC will sometimes stop and wait for you to walk back behind them before continuing — that is, if its ai doesn't break entirely, which happened to me several times. There is essentially no room for creativity or choice of any kind. (Some missions do let you choose stealth vs. no stealth, but that’s not an interesting decision because both options are trivially easy). I often found myself wishing I could just lean back in the chair and let the game play itself, since my engagement with it as a player felt entirely meaningless.

This is also where realism becomes a big issue. There seems to have been no thought put into which "realistic" activities are meaningful or enjoyable, and which ones should be skipped over in a cutscene. Wanna blow up a bridge? Have fun running back and forth to place each individual stick of dynamite. Wanna steal some sheep? Have fun riding all the way there, taking the sheep, then riding all the way back. A big chunk of this game's gameplay boils down to waiting for the game to tell you what button to press, and then pressing it. The game has you do so many menial, mind-numbing tasks, that at a certain point I really started to feel like my time was not being respected.

Every mission also ends in a shootout. And while some of these can be exciting, most of them are rendered completely boring by their predictability and simplicity. It's like Rockstar thinks they need to put a shootout at the end of every mission in order to hold your attention, which is funny because I found the shooting to be similarly tedious. Hold right click to aim, press left click to shoot, rinse and repeat. Run up to the next set of cover when one of the characters tells you to. The game’s one and only combat mechanic, "dead eye", lets you stop time to aim. So, you don't even have to aim! (also it seemed like I would sometimes arbitrarily get headshots even if my aim was off). There is so little opportunity to feel like you've actually accomplished anything as a player. This gameplay is insanely shallow and undemanding.

The worst part about this is it undercuts the rest of the experience in a few important ways. First, all the work that has gone into making the world feel hostile is rendered irrelevant the minute guns are drawn. This shooting is so friendly. It rarely feels like there is any real danger or stakes. For a game that is trying to be gritty, dangerous, and heartfelt, this gameplay is nothing but sterile and safe for the most part.

Second, realism, which this game is obsessed with to an unhealthy degree, gets thrown out the window at the end of every mission in order to have a shootout. A constant stream of enemies start appearing for you to shoot at, whether or not it makes in-game sense. This makes it hard to take the rest of the game's intense focus on realism all that seriously.

Finally, and most importantly, the narrative is not able to deal with the constant shootouts. You end up in these ridiculous situations, where Arthur Morgan is reluctant to kill someone during a cutscene, or is berating a camp-member for harming someone else, and then — bam, shootout time! — and you just mindlessly mow down 20 faceless dudes without a second thought. This issue is especially glaring in the last couple missions before the epilogue, where >!the entire story is revolving around Arthur's character development and his decision to value life and love above all else, and yet he still is just mindlessly killing hordes of enemies the second you leave cutscene-land and enter gameplay-land.!<

Overall, the missions in Red Dead 2 felt like something I pushed through in order to get to the cutscene at the end and see the story progress. And I can't help but wonder why this frustratingly simple and repetitive gameplay even needs to be here at all. Why can't I just watch this as a movie?

THE STORY

I've been very critical of this game so far, so I want to start this section off by giving praise where praise is due. This is a great story. The overarching plot is extremely compelling, and the quality of the writing and voice acting is mostly off the charts. This game definitely has moments of being moving. I'll list some of the moments that really stuck with me below (massive spoiler warning).

>!- I found Mary and Arthur's relationship very compelling. Their incompatability is emblematic of the central conflict between the gang and Society. Mary sending back her ring to Arthur broke my heart, and that same ring ends up finding its way to John and Abigail. It’s an elegant way to show how despite the tragedy of Arthur's story, he was able to help create an eventual happy ending for John.!<

>!- I think Dutch is a fascinating character, he is so loveable at first and the gradual reveal of his true personality was very well done. The moment (actually there are two) when he leaves Arthur to die feels like such a deep betrayal.!<

>!- The cutscene where the nun reveals Arthur's goodness to him. I don't have much to say other than that it hit hard.!<

>!- Arthur's death, facing the sunrise. What really struck me about this was that he dies alone. The tragedy is not just that he dies, but that he dies having lost the family that he held so dear.!<

--------------------

My biggest issue with this game's story is how difficult it is to get to these good parts. They are simply too few and far between. It also seems like a lot of the more interesting plotlines could have been developed more, rather than "Mission where you rob a stagecoach, for the 8th time".

I find most of the subplots and side quests to be pretty uninteresting, and even the ones that are interesting are plagued by tedious mission design. For example, >!the mission where you go to help Mary with her dad is one of the most important ones in the game in my opinion. And that mission involves... trailing behind Mary and then running after a carriage to steal a necklace!< WHY??? Why does the game insist on filling every space with meaningless filler? It is so frustrating to me.

Also, too many of the missions are too safe and predictable. Often you are told what you need to do, and then you go and do it, and nothing really goes wrong or is surprising in any way (I should clarify that enemies showing up for you to shoot at doesn't count as surprising since it happens every mission). One instance that was particularly disappointing to me was >!the subplot between Beau and Penelope. It was almost incredibly done. Except that they didn't have the balls to actually follow through with the story they had set up — you are able to simply escort the couple to safety and they presumably go on to live happily ever after. That's not how Romeo and Juliet works! Imagine how striking it would have been if they had actually followed through and had Beau get shot by his cousins, and then Penelope die out of despair or something. That would have been a real ass subplot. Instead, we get this weak ending to what was otherwise a very well told story.!<

Speaking of weak endings, I want to briefly talk about the end of the epilogue. >!What the fuck. John just spent the entire epilogue finally coming to understand that living a simple life with his family is the way to real happiness, and the entire game is about how robbery and revenge will never lead to good results. Except at the end it suddenly does, John just goes and gets revenge on Micah and steals his cash and lives happily ever after. I guess the entire story was meaningless after all. Roll credits. Edit: Ok this point is kind of irrelevant since this sequence sets up the events of the first game. Still kind of a flaw since those that don't know about the first game would assume what I initially assumed!<.

IN SUMMARY

I think Red Dead Redemption 2 is bloated, and that results in a game that forces you to put up with hours of monotonous filler in order to experience its story. This would make a great movie or tv show. It’s already half way there, with its long cinematic cutscenes being the highlight of the experience. As an 80-hour video game, though, it didn't feel like my time was respected.

The story, at its best, is epic and beautiful, but so much of this game’s run time is dedicated to tedious gameplay, unimportant missions, and shallow spectacle. So I suppose I don't recommend this game unless you are very patient and have a lot of spare time.

Sup everybody? I was thinking about this earlier and decided to post here since all my examples are older games. Apologies if this breaks a rule that I'm unaware of. I couldn't find a relevant flair. Anyway, I was wondering if other people have stories about games they intended to beat but were unable to because of an outside issue. I'll give a few examples.

I never finished the original God of War. I rented a copy maybe 2 or 3 years after it came out and was having a great time with it, full intended to play the entire thing in the 5 days I rented it for but the game would freeze when I got to this one particular cutscene probably halfway through. A year or so later, I bought a used copy and still had my memory card save so I was able to pick back up where I left off, but ran into another cutscene with the same problem.

The same thing happened with Rogue Galaxy for the PS2. I had bought a used copy and got very far into the game, was close to the end when I encountered a cutscene that would freeze the game. I was able to eventually beat it though when I played on an emulator a few years ago. Great game!

Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal was another. I was several hours in, I believe at some sort of arena stage when my PS2 just completely died. That was the last game I ever played on an actual PS2 and I've still never finished it. I plan to fix that soon.

More recently, I was playing through Metroid Dread and Luigi's Mansion 3 at the same time basically. I had made it to the top floor in Luigi's Mansion when I turned it off for the night. Played Metroid Dread the next day and literally made it to the final boss fight but kept getting killed so I decided to turn it off and try again tomorrow. Tomorrow came and my Switch decided that it didn't want to live anymore. I could not turn it on no matter what I tried. It was more expensive to repair it than it was to buy a new one secondhand but by the time I replaced it, I had been inactive for too long and Nintendo had deleted my cloud saves. I've still never finished either of those games. Maybe one day.

It's one of the most frustrating feelings. Those are all some of the best games I've ever played but my memories of these games is clouded by the fact that hardware fuckery prevented me from finishing them. Do y'all have any similar stories?

"Adventure" is simultaneously ubiquitous to gaming experiences and surprisingly rare. Almost all games involve the player navigating a story that could be called an adventure, but often times that gets pushed to the side. Gameplay systems nudge us towards side-objectives for quest rewards and new skills, or animated cutscenes take the act of choice-making out of the players hands.

None of this is bad, and different players have different thresholds for how much "gamey-ness" starts to obfuscate that sense of open-ended exploration.

But when you step into a game like The Ancient City (Kings Field 4 as it is also known) and you see almost every scrap of curated presentation and handholding stripped away, you're either going to drop it thinking the game is underbaked... or you'll be intrigued enough to stick with it.

Atmosphere and Environment

If you have heard any praise at all for FromSoft's older dungeon crawlers, it's almost certainly for their atmosphere. The titular Ancient City is a massive multi-floor mega-dungeon you descend deeper and deeper into. True to it's name the locations with-in the dungeon are districts. Living quarters, forges, treasuries, graveyards, most of which have now been corrupted or overrun by opportunistic monsters.

Weirder locales exist too, like seaside fortresses full of plesiosaurs and snake temples with minecart tracks. Peppered throughout are plenty of traps, puzzles, and loot.

All of these wrap around and lead back to a massive central-chamber. It might take you 2-3 hours before you even see it, but after that first time it becomes a welcome sight when you finally open a door that loops back to this relative safe haven.

Combat exists to support Loot, which supports Exploration

Combat is very simple in Kings Field. You swing a sword to hit an enemy, and you back off and wait for your attack bar to refill so you can swing again.

There is a little more nuance to it than that, but not much. You need to play footsie with your foes and bait out attacks before launching your own. It's high-stakes as enemies can kill in a few hits, but it's not deep.

In my opinion, combat primarily exists to incentivize searching for loot. New armor, new weapons, new spells, consumables, these are oftentimes hidden behind fake walls or in hard to reach places. You want to become more familiar with the areas you are exploring so you can get these items to stand a chance against the tougher foes you will go up against.

The act of finding this loot is oftentimes it's own little story you participated in. The Queen's Staff didn't drop from some random mob. Your tired adventurer saw it hiding in a chest behind 2 giant living golden statues and took the risk (and the scrapes) to get it.

Organic Awe

Because The Ancient City refuses to hold your hand, there's a lot of moments in the game where you get to feel like a real genius adventurer for figuring something out.

I already mentioned one of these when you first circle back around to the central chamber of the Ancient City.

I won't spoil any of the others, but one in particular involves the games fast-travel system. Veterans who have played the game probably already know what I am talking about. All I will say is that the game teaches you the fast travel systems rules and then leaves you with an open-ended question you might not realize you already have the answer to. The end result is an organic moment that just feels amazing to put together.

The Ancient City isn't super puzzle heavy, there are some overt puzzles but most of them are more environmental/traversal which aids in the sense of adventure.

Some Caveats

I have some warnings on the game for anyone interested in playing it:

1. The only mod I made to this game was to give it something closer to modern twin-stick first person controls. I would recommend doing this as the original controls for this and the other FS Dungeon Crawlers are really rough.
   • I did NOT increase the movement or turn-speed. Frankly I think concerns that the players movement speed is too slow are overstated, you can run in this game and you move briskly enough. Turn-speed is... it's rough, but increasing it would break the combat balance so I left it alone.
2. This is the kind of dungeon crawler that starts out a lot harder than it ends. Every piece of gear, every spell you unlock, every level you gain is making the game that much easier. It can be a lot at first, but if you stick with it it does start to click.
3. You are not under leveled for any area you can get to. At first I assumed that I was wandering into areas I wasn't meant to be in yet. This is not the case, if you can enter an area, you are meant to be there.
   • The only exception to this I am aware of involves the area at the very top of the city (you'll know because you can see a cloudy sky...and the enemies will destroy you).
4. Don't worry about your gear's durability for now. You are going to be waiting a LONG time for the blacksmith. Gear cannot break (it caps at 50% durability meaning it is much less effective, but cannot be lost permanently) and you should be finding enough of it that you can switch to other gear until you do find the blacksmith, but you probably don't want to sell much of the gear you find until him for that reason.

Stuff I didn't love:

1. This is a minor criticism but the game hands you a lot of really neat utility gear at the very end. There are a lot of secrets you can easily miss, and you have to get about 70% of the way through the game to unlock a tool that helps with this, and then beat about 90% of the game to get another tool that helps with this. This is of course assuming you find these as they are both hidden. That's fine, I just wish they were available a little sooner?
2. This is also around the time you start get a lot more magic spells, but almost all of the enemies are weak to the same element at this point and you probably won't have a need for the others.
3. On that note, both spells and weapons can be leveled up by repeated use. I like this, but the amount of uses required is absurd. You can unlock special attacks for the weapons if you get them to level 3, but that requires a total of 480 hits on an enemy PER WEAPON. I never got a single weapon to level 3, and only got a handful to level 2. Spells get new effects as they level too, and while I got more of these to level 3, you'd have to probably spend an average playthrough length amount of time to max all of them.

Howdy folks! Waffles here. It has, admittedly, been a while. First I had two major end of semester projects due, then I was playing the longest game I've played for this project so far (and the next three are also long, so expect another large gap). But I have not abandoned this, and I'm back with the first half of the F games!

As a reminder, since it's been a while: I'm playing these in alphabetical order (mostly, I am arranging series in proper chronological order), and I'm committing to at least a half hour of each game. I'll note games that got more time. Without further ado, let's begin!

F-1 Race: Having played other Game Boy racing games, I had relatively low expectations for this one. I was actually pleasantly surprised. It's not as simplistic as some of the other GB racing games, and was in fact kinda hard. Took me a good few tries to actually do well enough on the first race that I could move on. I'll admit that I didn't play much past that (racing games aren't my thing) and that I don't think the Game Boy is necessarily a good platform for racing games, but if you wanted to play on one Game Boy, this is probably the direction I'd point you in. 6/10

F-15 Strike Eagle: I'm mostly just impressed they tried to put a combat flight sim on Game Boy. It's not actually fun to play. I tried looking up the manual to see if that would help, but I could not actually find the manual online anywhere. What I could find was gameplay footage of the MS-DOS version, which actually looks cool. Don't play this version. 2/10

F1 Pole Position: Four of the games in today's batch are F1 games. They're all kinda same-y. I'd still recommend F-1 Race out of the four, but this one was fine? Just not as good. 5/10

Faceball 2000: A delightful first person shooter. Sure, it runs at like, ten frames per second, but it's surprisingly competent. It's a lot of fun, actually. I'll admit that I don't know that I can recommend this one, because it did make me feel ill, but perhaps if you're not prone to motion sickness and migraines, you might have a better time. This is also a port of a PC game, and that version is probably better if you really want to play this, but this one is worth checking out. 6/10

Fastest Lap: Another F1 game! This one's the worst. It's top down with pivot controls. Terrible. 3/10

Felix the Cat: I actually really liked this one. It's a fun little platformer. It does very much feel like "We have Kirby at home," but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you like fun little platformers (with terrible bosses) and want to kill forty-five minutes, you can do worse. This one was fun enough to get a recommendation. 6/10

Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge: Yet another F1 game! I'll admit that I don't know enough about F1 to know which, if any, of these is the best actual representation of it, but F-1 Race is still my recommendation. 5/10

The Fidgetts: God this was just awful. It's a platformer where you have to switch between the fat mouse and the skinny mouse, and I'll admit that I didn't get past the first level because the time limit is incredibly punishing. You have basically no room for error, which just kinda sucks. I think, without the time limit (or with a looser one) it'd be worth playing, but as it stands, it's just awful. 1/10

FIFA Internation Soccer, FIFA Soccer '96, and FIFA Soccer '97: These are basically the same game. They have slightly different menus, but they all play exactly the same (the third one actually plays slightly worse because it's slower). Confession time: I actually kinda like soccer. I played in school before my knee stopped working, and while I was never any good at it, it was a good time. I was looking forward to these, but...yeah. They're not good. I acknowledge that the answer here is "capitalism" and soccer's incredibly popular internationally, but I genuinely don't get why they kept trying to put sports games on the Game Boy, which just is not meant for it. If you want to play a soccer game, play on a real console. The Game Boy isn't where you should be looking for good sports games, tbh. 2/10, 2/10, and 1/10

Fighting Simulator: 2-in-1 Flying Warriors: Have you ever done so badly at a game that the game itself stops and tells you to read the manual and try again? Yeah, that happened here. So I did. I tracked down a PDF copy of the manual (which I could actually find for this game!), and...yeah, it didn't help. I think that part is necessary to point out: I did the extra work and it didn't help. The issue is the controls. The first part of adventure mode is a fun, if simple, side scrolling beat'em up. The first level was a bit short, but like, that's whatever. Then you get to the boss fight, and guess what? It's a completely different control scheme. This is a truly baffling choice, and to be honest, the manual doesn't help here at all. All around just an awful game. 1/10

Final Fantasy Adventure: As of right now (5/12/26), this is my favorite game that I've played for this project. Just, truly a fantastic game. I've played Sword of Mana before (and also a bit of Adventures of Mana, which I've had on my phone for years and is a more accurate remake of this game), but this is my first time playing this version. And you know what? I think I prefer this one. It's just so charming? It plays a lot like Link's Awakening (or rather, Link's Awakening plays like this, since this game predates that one by two years) rather than the other Mana games, but that's not really a downside. It's also very much a Final Fantasy game rather than a Mana game -- you fight the Four Fiends, there's a chocobo, and the FFI classes show up as NPCs and enemies -- but all the seeds of what would become Mana lore are here. The translation's a bit rough, but that's mostly due to the character limits and what can be fit on screen at any given point. The sprites are nice, the music's nice, and overall I had a lot of fun with this one. 10/10

So that's the first half of the Fs! That brings us to 150/501 games, or 29.94%, with an average rating of 3.89/10. Of those 150, I'd recommend 22 (the list will be posted below), which is a recommendation rate of 14.67% Like I said, the next batch of games includes some more long ones (all three Final Fantasy Legend/SaGa games), so that one will likely take me another few weeks at least to get to. I hope you had fun reading these, and I look forward to posting again in the future!

Recommended Games

• Alleyway
• Amazing Penguin
• Avenging Spirit
• Balloon Kid
• Battle Arena Toshinden
• Battle Unit Zeoth
• Bionic Commando
• Bomberman GB
• Castlevania: The Adventure
• Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge
• Castlevania Legends
• Catrap
• Contra: The Alien Wars
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Land
• Donkey Kong Land 2
• Donkey Kong Land III
• Dr. Mario
• Disney's DuckTales
• Disney's DuckTales 2
• Felix the Cat
• Final Fantasy Adventure

The NES is a console everyone knows about, and many people love, but only a handful of its games are actually played and talked about. I'm not here to change that. For the most part, the popular games are the ones that stood the test of time. Since that's the case, though, I might as well rank the best ones.

#20 - Kirby's Adventure

Let's start with a hot take: I don't think most Kirby games before Return to Dream Land are very good.

They're well-made, don't get me wrong, and that's why Kirby's Adventure is on this list. It's a technical marvel on the NES, with lots of content to dig into if you're looking for a chill platformer to relax with.

The Kirby formula lacks what its own creator calls "game essence", though. That's how Masahiro Sakurai describes risk-and-reward dynamics. 2D Mario games have a ton of this. It's fun to blast through stages quickly by running, but this requires fast reaction times to pull off. You risk taking damage for the reward of extra satisfying movement and speedy progress. Even without the run button, jumping on or around enemies has "game essence" because you have to take a risk (engaging the obstacles) to be rewarded (making progress). Kirby does not work this way. You can run, but only awkwardly, and Kirby puffing up to fly when you jump kills any momentum you're building. Much of the time, the most effective way to clear an area is to fly over all the enemies instead of engaging with them.

Kirby's Adventure as a platformer feels designed to subvert "game essence" in the name of approachability. The market of the 90s needed games like that amidst lots of tough-as-nails competition, but that doesn't make it fun to revisit. Modern Kirby games have more depth to the copy abilities, or, by being 3D, the simple act of moving through levels. If you want to get into the series, play the modern games helmed by Shinya Kumazaki – everything from Kirby Super Star Ultra onwards. By comparison, Kirby's Adventure is fine. It's very well-crafted for what it is, but I'd much rather replay the 19 games ahead of it.

#19 - River City Ransom

I'm not a 8-bit beat-em-up guy. I'm not a 8-bit RPG guy. Those genres got better later, but almost no 8-bit games from them are compelling in the year 2026. Except for River City Ransom.

This is a beat-em-up open-world RPG best played with two people. As a beat-em-up, it's easily the best one on the NES. You start with a decent array of punches and kicks, and learn more moves as you progress. The game feel is really good considering it's a beat-em-up on the NES controller. You can even grab your co-op partner and throw them around. The gameplay is just deep enough to avoid getting stale during River City Ransom's several-hour runtime. This might be the best 8-bit co-op experience you can possibly have.

As an RPG, that beat-em-up gameplay lets River City Ransom avoid a lot of the early genre's problems. In theory, you can finish it without ever taking damage, so grinding is never truly mandatory. Combat encounters take place during exploration instead of interrupting it to go to a battle screen, letting players actually settle into a flow state. Since defeating enemies is quick, the game is short and replayable. It doesn't hurt that kids getting into street fights is a more unique setting than the generic heroic-fantasy-like-Dragon-Quest one most old RPGs use. In terms of absolute game design quality, this is easily the best 8-bit game with RPG elements.

#18 - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

That said, Zelda II is my favorite. It's extremely flawed. It's a worse game than Kirby's Adventure and River City Ransom. I still really like it though.

Its platforming elements and sword combat ooze "game essence" in spades. Even leveling up is a risk-and-reward decision. The RPG elements make even the toughest obstacles feel surmountable (in the first 2/3 of the game. After that... good luck). The music is fantastic. The sword combat is the best on the NES. It's basically an 8-bit Soulslike. Oh, and it's an 8-bit RPG from 1987 where you can see encounters on the overworld map and try to avoid them if you choose. Why did it take 15 years for this to become standardized? You can even see how tough the encounter is likely to be because they have different enemy sprites. JRPGs. Come on. The first Final Fantasy wasn't even out yet.

Zelda II gets tougher, and worse, as it goes on. It throws more and more "bad 80s platformer" bullshit at you the more you play it. It's a childhood game I've finished exactly once, but I've revisited the early sections over and over. There's just something about that game feel that keeps me coming back. Again, it's basically an 8-bit Soulslike. The fact that this is #18 on the list and not #1 is an absolute crime.

#17 - Ninja Gaiden

Ninja Gaiden is a similar story to Zelda II. The level design? Complete garbage. There was no level designer. This is why truly well-designed 8-bit games were so few and far between, you were basically rolling the dice on whether the programmer had a good eye for it. No one actually beat this game without cheat codes. If someone says they beat it, they're lying. If you remember beating it, see a doctor. The last world comes from an alternate reality where Tecmo released a "Ninja Gaiden Maker" and some six-year old's enemy spam level got mixed in with our reality's version of the game. There's no way this level non-design would ever be published by a reputable studio in this day and age.

But the game feel? It's perfect. Perfect! Jumping around and slicing your foes in one hit without stopping really makes you feel like Ba... like a badass ninja. It's a game I come back to regularly, not to finish it, but just to play it at all. That's what playing all games used to feel like as a child. The point wasn't to "beat the game" and on some level complete a task. The point was the experience. Having such well-designed controls and such poorly-designed endgame levels forces me into that childlike mindset. Every now and then I just want to play Ninja Gaiden, not finish it. That the game innovated cinematic presentation with incredibly stylish cutscenes also doesn't hurt.

#16 - Castlevania

You know a brutally tough game that does have great level design, though? Castlevania! Meet this game on its own terms, and you'll put the lie to the myth that old games were only hard by being cheap and unfair. Simon Belmont's actions take commitment, but they feel good to pull off, and the levels are carefully crafted around his abilities. I wrote a whole post about this one. Suffice to say, it's great.

What holds Castlevania 1 back is its brevity and its difficulty spikes. You're only getting six levels, and to compensate, the bosses in the second half are insanely tough. They're essentially puzzles where you have to bring the right sub-weapon and apply it thoughtfully. Unfortunately, doing this takes reaction times that are just tight enough to be frustrating. Lose all your lives and you have to start the whole level over. It kills motivation to keep going, and this game is already short enough if you don't quit before the final stages. When it's good, it's really good. There's just not a whole lot there.

#15 - DuckTales

DuckTales is basically a Mega Man spinoff focused on finding treasure instead of new weapons, and jumping on enemies with a pogo stick instead of shooting them. It's got great level design, great music, and a lot of freedom afforded to the player. It can be as easy or hard as you want it to be, compared to other NES games, and I can't think of another level-based platformer on the console whose stages have this many secrets to find. It's not just great for a licensed game, it's a great game, period.

What holds DuckTales back is the slightly awkward button combination you need to hold to pogo jump (AKA one of the most basic actions the whole game is built around) and the lack of continues. I understand this game is super short, with only five levels, but I think a better solution would have been to only offer the game on hard difficulty and provide infinite continues. That's essentially what Mega Man does, and it fits the open-ended level structure DuckTales borrows from Mega Man. Still, that doesn't stop DuckTales from being one of the more low-key classics of the NES.

#14 - Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

Dodge. Attack. React. Few games are a purer expression of this gameplay than Punch-Out. In a way, it feels like the first Mario Sports game, despite Mario only being a referee. Instead of making an accurate boxing adaptation, Nintendo captured the essence of boxing through the language of video games and distilled it into a really fun experience.

Punch-Out!! is a boss rush. It does exactly one thing and does it really well. If you like one-on-one bouts where memorizing and mastering enemy patterns is the key to victory, Punch-Out!! is the game for you. Zelda II feels like a 2D Soulslike, as do the Castlevania games, but Punch-Out!! has the same appeal as Dark Souls III. If you like action or action-ish games for the boss fights, this is a game for you, whether you follow boxing or not.

#13 - Mega Man 5

Mega Man 5 is not the weakest Mega Man game. That's Mega Man 1, where Capcom tried their best but didn't really know how to design Mega Man levels yet. Mega Man 5 is more refined than that, but I've always found there to be something "off" about it.

The level concepts are phenomenal. Before Super Mario Galaxy, we had Gravity Man. Before Resident Evil 0 opened with a train level, we had Charge Man. Before Wave Race... was six months old, we had Wave Man. Capcom had no shortage of memorable ideas when developing this game. The problem is that the level designs, boss designs and weapon designs aren't very refined from a gameplay perspective. It doesn't come together the way Mega Man 2,3,4, and 6 do on the same console.

It feels like the developers needed an extra month to tweak and polish what they had, but Capcom laughed in their faces and said "Are you kidding? Akira Kitamura built Mega Man 2 in three months, in a cave, with a box of overtime slips!" then slapped Mega Man 5 on store shelves. It's a good game, but strong evidence that Mega Man games didn't actually need to release semi-annually. A crazy thought. I know. But tell that to Capcom in the 90s.

#12 - Contra

The Contra games are probably the best run-and-guns on the NES and SNES, and the first title is no slouch. Getting a Game Over in three hits is ridiculous, but that's what the Konami Code is for! It may have worked out for the best, because if you're making a game that kicks the player back to level 1 after taking nine hits, you'd better make sure the mechanics and level design are extremely tight. Konami knew this, and that's exactly what they did. Contra is one of those games that may not have a single standout part of it, but everything it does, it does extremely well.

Aside from a couple questionable mini-bosses, the levels are very tough, but very fair. The variety of sub-weapons keeps the moment-to-moment shooting engaging. The boss fights are some of the best on the NES. The player must always engage with both platforming and shooting, but there's an ebb and flow to which part matters more as the player moves through the excellently-paced levels. Having different gameplay in 2nd and 4th stages keeps the adventure from becoming monotonous. The art direction improves drastically on the arcade game by balancing cool action-hero "realism" with the bright, cartoony color palette of the NES. Oh, and the soundtrack kicks ass. Not that I needed to tell you that. Every soundtrack on this list kicks ass.

Contra is a game in a genre big companies don't make anymore, crafted by the industry-leading talent big companies have.

#11 - Mega Man 4

Mega Man 4 is often dismissed as "just more Mega Man", because it's the very moment the series became "just more Mega Man". Mega Man 4, 5, and 6 all play identically. However, if Mega Man 5 and 6 never existed, I think 4 would be remembered a lot more fondly. It's got great level design and theming. The special weapons are excellent. It introduced the charge shot, giving it a distinct identity compared to Mega Man 2 and 3. The Mega Man formula is great, and this game more than any other is "the Mega Man formula".

I could praise individual aspects of Mega Man 4 like I did for Contra, but most of that would also apply to every other Mega Man game. Mega Man has a better formula than Contra, but it's also more oversaturated than Contra. That makes it difficult to talk about individual games from Mega Man 4 onwards, but regardless, this game holds up. It's a little plain, but it's executed at the same high quality level you'd expect from a classic game in 1991. It's just that most of those games were on the SNES or Sega Genesis, and Mega Man 4 is on the NES.

This has been a long post, so that's it for Part 1. Coming soon: Part 2, the 10 best games on the NES.

I played Ghost of Tsushima years ago when it came out, and looking for something to scratch that open world itch I had after playing Cyberpunk, I saw the PS5 upgrade was on sale and here I am over 50 hours later just as much of a fan of the game as I was 6 years ago. Maybe even more so after having played the DLC this time around.

Ghost of Tsushima doesn't break the wheel, it doesn't re-invent the wheel, it just hands you a really nice wheel with a new coat of paint. It doesn't pretend to be anything it's not, it's every bit a Ubisoft collectathon but it's so good at it it's probably better than anything Ubisoft has put out since AC Black Flag. It's biggest strength is knowing where it's biggest strengths lie, it delivers polished gameplay in a beatiful world with solid story with some very well done moments that elevate to be more than the sum of its parts.

The combat is excellent, the standoff mechanic gives it a unique feel to any other game in the genre. There's really few games where swinging a sword feels quite as satisfying as it does in GoT. The 1 v 1 cinematic duels are always a treat, the tension of trying to parry/dodge every shot really does make you feel invested in every fight. The stealth is solid if not a tad too familiar 'hide in x place, press y to take down an enemy'.

If I had to critique the gameplay in anyway I would say as good as it can be it is not perfect, you'll be parrying and dodging your way through encounters with no damage and an enemy will pop out and hit you from off screen with an attack that you cannot parry or effectively dodge. Likewise during the standoff sequences you can be frustratingly caught out by an enemy who's weapon is concealed by a piece of the environment or even a floating body that has stayed their during the cinematic. The game probably hands just a few too many tools to the point I wouldn't even think to use half of them during combat, just stuff like all the extra throwables and Ghost weapons can make combat messier and more unorganised than it needs to be when your cycling through menus in the bottom of the screen because you forgot where you keep the flaming arrows.

Like I mentioned earlier, the story itself is solid and hits the emotional beats where it needs to but I think there's some really high highs that drags the story up into being more memorable than it actually is. People like Lord Shimura, Yuna and the villain Kotun Khan provide a strong cast for Jin to play off of. The dramatic moments between Jinn and Shimura really are a highlight. The story actually does have a little more nuance than I remember, before replaying I'd entirely forgotten that Lord Shimura did actually at times kind of have a point about Jin's tactics. And maybe had they come together to find a way to take the mongols together they'd have find a way that wasn't as foolish as Shimura's head on assault or gave them access to Jin's methods.

The open world itself is absolutely incredible, I don't quite think the game is as much of graphical powerhouse like games released around the same time like TLOU Part 2 or God of War 2018, but the world design is so beatiful I couldn't disagree if you said you thought it was the best looking game on the PS4. The world itself is littered with side content with varying degrees of quality. You've got your ubisoft collectathon check mark style maguffins to find like hot springs to improve your health and shrines to find additional power up charms. Some of the major side missions in the game have some really strong storytelling with characters like Lady Massako and Norio, and those are definitely worth your time. However the game is also choc full of fetch quests and follower missions and outposts which do pale in comparison to something like the contracts in the Witcher 3.

Overall Ghost of Tsushima is a very 8/10 video game, it takes everything that the Open World Genre was already doing and wraps it up in an immersive feudal Japanese presentation with some really slick gameplay. After 55 hours I still have the itch for more so if that score isn't enough of an endorsement I think this will be the first game I ever attempt a new game+ save on.