An Unqualified Game Reviewer

After sinking weeks into Stardew Valley , then sinking not as much time into Super Mario Odyssey , I ended sinking an intermediate amount of time into Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle . Mario & Rabbids is a cross-over game created in a collaboration between Ubisoft who developed the game and Nintendo who actually made it marketable by putting Italians into it. All I know about Rabbids is that they’re something to do with the Rayman series; a series of platformers (I think) that I’ve never played, nor needed to. That being said though, here’s what happened when I started a new game. I watched a cinematic of some guy sitting in his room talking to his sentient roomba whose name I don’t remember about his latest invention: a VR headset that can merge two objects together. Just then a washing machine materialises in his bedroom and out come a bunch of insane semi-anthropomorphic rabbits who promptly steal the headset device and start merging themselves with the inventor’s Mario ac...

Super Mario Odyssey is a game that holds two firsts for me. It is the first game I played on Switch, which is not much of a special accolade. But what it also came to be was the first 3D collect-athon platformer that I’ve not only completed, but actually enjoyed. I’ve written about my opinions regarding 3D collect-athon platformers before, I’m not sure whether I wrote about it on this blog and I can’t bothered to check, but in summary: I’ve played Spyro the Dragon on PS1 and Banjo-Kazooie on N64, barely getting past the first stage in either of them. The former I found boring and the latter I found catatonically boring. When it came to 3D Mario games, however, they kept my interest for a little longer but never for too long. I first got Mario 64 on the N64, if only to pad my N64 games library, and I gave it a good hour or so every day for about week. Why I eventually gave up I’ll get to in a moment, but the second 3D Mario game I played was Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii, becau...

I’ve been engrossed in a number of games lately... well, three games. The number is three. Anyway, seeing as they’ve been taking up all my free time lately, I haven’t written anything for a while, so I thought I might as well write about these three games in quick succession. The first game that crashed everything else I’ve been doing during my free time is Stardew Valley . Stardew Valley is one of the most absorbing games I’ve played since the first time I played Dark Souls ... which was actually earlier this year. Oh, and I also first played Resident Evil 4 around the same time and then quickly played it again two or three times, so I guess that was pretty absorbing as well. Okay, Stardew Valley is a very absorbing game that I played recently. I’ve never played a Harvest Moon game before, but seeing as Stardew Valley is apparently just Harvest Moon with a different name, but also not a cheap rip-off of Harvest Moon , I’m just going to assume that Stardew Valley is basicall...

Have you ever noticed that Half-Life 1 and Doom 3 are the same game? Come with me on this and tell me what game I am describing here: You take the role of a silent protagonist on his first day at a top-secret research facility in the middle of nowhere. Within this facility is a lab conducting secret (even to the rest of the facility) research into teleporter technology. You, the player, are assigned to some more mundane line of work within one of the lower security areas. On your way to your first assignment you notice that most of the other employees seem to be put on edge by recent occurrences and several areas of the facility are experiencing technical problems and malfunctions. Just as you are completing your first boring assignment the teleporter experiments go horribly wrong tearing open a rift between the facility and an unknown alien dimension. This sends a shockwave across the whole facility damaging most of the major systems, and what’s worse is that alien creatures are bei...

Spelunky has been one of the most bizarre gaming experiences I’ve had for a long time. More accurately, it’s given me one of the most bizarre reactions to a game I’ve had for a long time. Every time I sit down to play the game I inevitably get frustrated to the point of rage quitting. I have yet to quit the game thinking “that was a lot of fun, but I’ve had enough for today”. No, I always quit the game with thoughts of “this game is completely unfair”, or “procedural generation really makes this game feel pointless”, or more commonly “fuck this game”. Those are the feelings I get when actually playing Spelunky , but when I’m not playing it I can’t help but think back on the game with high regard as a well-designed, enjoyably hard, and ultimately fun game. What is wrong with my brain? It’s not the first game that I’ve said “fuck this game” when quitting, only to come back five minutes later and carry on, but I guess that’s the point. A game like Dark Souls I rage quit early on in my...

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, although seeing as nobody reads them it shouldn’t matter. But still, keeping up the practice of writing can’t be a bad thing, so I’m going to talk about several games that I’ve been playing recently. I’m talking about several games in one article or essay or review or I think “blog-post” is probably the most accurate names for these things because they are posts that I’m putting up on a blog. Anyway, the first game I’m going to talk about is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt . Having finally gotten around to playing this enormous game, I have to admit that I’m struggling to remain interested. Let me clarify that statement: the writing is fantastic, the story is engaging and not overly complex to point of confusion, and the world design is interesting. The gameplay is serviceable, but for something that’s apparently inspired by Dark Souls , it’s one of the bits that I think is slowly letting it down for me. Again, it’s not bad, but there are ...

In my recent review about the whole of the Oddworld series (which missed out two of the main games, but whatever) I went on a quite some length about why Munch’s Oddysee is the weakest of the main line-up, citing the easy gameplay and far goofier tone compared to the earlier games with its cartoonish graphics and voices, and the bouncy, jaunty soundtrack. I have another thing to add: for a game called Munch’s Oddysee , I found myself playing as Abe for about 80% of the gameplay time. in the vast majority of levels I have Munch just sitting at the respawn points waiting to revive Abe whenever I get him killed, which seeing as there is absolutely no penalty for death in this game happens a lot. I’ll occasionally have to use Munch for something in most levels, but more often than not it’s an aside to the main thrust of the levels action and/or puzzles. Story-wise the two characters have roughly equal attention. Abe needs to break into Vykker’s Labs so save his unborn brothers, while...