games

same thing goes as books and drawings. we share what we want :3

• fighting games
• rhythmn games
• ds menu

nier automata

action rpg made by platinum games ! awesome.

game about conflict between humans and aliens, and about emotions and what it means to live.

humans use androids like 2B to fight ! whereas aliens use Machine Lifeforms. very distinct.

we think the game is trying to say something about how meaningless the distinction is. what is different between androids and machines !

celeste

really empowering video game about a trans woman's struggle with mental unhealthy things and um it's pretty impactful so it can be really overwhelming but we promise it's positive in the end and happy.

the sorta self care and self love, the specific kind, reminds us a lot of a special system we know. it's amazing, and we think that playing and thinking about both the system and the game help us think healthily and in diverse and stimulating ways. it's really important and special, and in an almost indescribable way (actually indescribable for our current spoons!).

it's really hard and we think it is poorly paced which encourages self harm we think. levels are really long and don't have clear lengths and so it's really encouraging for us to do more than is healthy. we think better pacing would give a lot more oppurtinity for healthy breaks that would otherwise be inaccessible.

it's really cool and we appreciate it a lot.

we don't actually really care about it for it's platforming, especially in harder levels! the switch pro controller has a analog gate that is notchless and also has lots of stick travel, and the dpad is extremely bad. we would use keyboard or gamecube controller but keyboard we need to sit up close to screen and our gamecube controller has very worn out notches and a stick that is looser than we'd like. we don't really feel anything for precision platforming, as much as other kinds of platforming expression. we don't really like needing to do route planning and resource management the way celeste requires. we don't think celeste levels are bad!! and actually our feelings are currently changing a ton.

as of feburary 2023 we've played main game for fourty hours and probably played custom levels for around five hours. game is really really special and we can play it whenever we need to occupy our brain with something stimulating and supportive.

we have tried hacking the computer version to work on ARM chips so that we can play mods on the nintendo switch version and like it seems to work but the modpack we're trying to play seems like it keeps getting dependency errors like mono stuff??? a little upset we can't play modded on switch.

demon turf

3d platformer that has a pretty muted colour palette and feels relatively uninteresting. the movement is cool and stimulating. a lot of the level design sucks and we really do not like how unexpressive it is!!! we think of hat in time and celeste and how many things are in those games just cus its cool. demon turf feels empty and also we dont like the gameplay loop and wish we could skip levels and not have to fight enemies. we want more levels like mario odyssey and hat in time!!!

we don't actually think it's colour palette is a huge deal by the way it's just something that makes us struggle having desire to play it because we think of how boring it looks first. we recently played a neo city level we REALLY liked but then we speedran it in 2 minutes on our first attempt and it's not really long enough to be interesting like mario galaxy.

a lot of levels are abtrasct platforming challenges.

we really like some of the things it does and getting the ouroborus turf ability makes the game WAY more fun, especially when you get serpentine speed mod. we discovered we could use it to get WAY more height and distance off of long jumps, by bonking with it against walls. IT'S SICK!!!! ever since we got it the game has been much more fun.

the whole plot setup and the characters and the levels and ESPECIALLY the enemies are unappealing to us and we wish we could skip levels and also not have to fight enemies.

we really like the main character in some ways but maybe beebz vouice we dont like it. think in general demon turf would be happy to have more special details about the game world and characters added. we also hope there are more levels than what we expect and also that the previous levels are much better with turf abilities.

we've played it for around 5 or 6 hours on feb 2023.

hat in time

probably have played 80+ hours

this game is very amazing and we've also played it for around 40 hours for feb 2023. we want to start a new save file soon and play it all again! we remember not much.

this game has so many amazing things like the character design the level concepts HOLY SHIT the level concepts are amazing and the game feels extremely cohesive and good. it also seems to be customised for everyone on linux which is very funny on protondb.

some of the game makes us really uncomfortable though because it doesn't have a strong message as celeste but it also feels like it is aware of things around it. it's,, it makes us uncomfortable that the main character is extremely smug and that there isn't any tonal direction in the game. we don't know what tone this game wants to have and we can't tell if the people who made the game are really mean or not based on the game. it makes us anxious and feel empty.

i love all the hats there are its somewhat cool and we think its so awesome there is interesting character customisation and the levels are put together extremely well except alpine skylines that one made us disassociate extremely badly due to its music and visuals and pacing and now the level is triggering for us.

the second area, the like, bird studios one, is fucking amazing. its our favourite. it's so fucking good. we love it so much.

the levels and goals are well designed and all have a lot of care and details that make us engage with them and it's SO AWESOME.

super mario odyssesy

time played: probably around 200 hours

we didnt really understand platformers when we played this game but we knew we liked them. we've played it for 110 hours.

we think maybe if we played this game now it would be more special to us, but at the time we had some more social coonnection with other people who played it so maybe it was good. the game was also special for our brain when we got it! it's a really good mario game and we think we take that for granted now that we've become extremely familiar with it.

lots of mario games are very special for us!!!!!! mario used to be our special interest uwu.

we remember making a point about depth perception being hard in it.

we think some of the worlds feels a little isolated and disconnected. like metro kingdom is just an island. lost kingdom too. moon kingdom is just a plains with a cave at the end (the cave is cool). it feels a little isolating and we don't really love that okay now im gonna tell u about metroid

metroid prime

first playthrough had 15 hour in game time.

metroid is amazing cus it wants to make you feel something, like celeste. it doesn't do this on accident! metroid games, like celeste, very deliberately communicate a certain tone and mindset.

metroid games are perfectly designed to isolate the player, and that can be really immersive and make things feel scarier, more pressing, more impactful, and a bunch of shit. one of our friends calls metroid prime a horror game!! 🥰

we think metroid prime is most immersive metroid because its first person, has a ton of details, and basically everything that would be gameified is contextualised in really signifcant ways, even the controller inputs.

metroid prime's tone and mood and immersion is like, unmatched by any other video game we've ever played. it's so good

it also has really awesome movement tech like in celeste that allows you to explore the game in more ways than you would be able to normally. this makes the game possible to play how we want to exactly, and makes it refreshing. the progression system in the game is really flexible when you know how to do tech, it's really fun, especially for things like randomiser or lockout.

it also lets you scan shit!! everything. learn shit about everything in the world!!! fucking AWESOME. it also looks amazing and but also omg fuck having to walk places with no direction at some parts. there are a couple of points in the game where the level design breaks down and becomes unfun and makes us disassociative. mark brown's boss key's episode kinda echoes our feelings but they feel it a lot more than we do.

part of what makes immersion in this game so good is how it's literally all environemntal storytelling. you do get a story if you don't seek it out. you have to piece together data logs from others and learn about the environment through analysis. it's so good. extremely good environemnetal storytelling is so good in games like prime and umurangi.

metroid prime 2 (echoes)

this is like one of our favourite games ever. we think the level design is so much more distinct and it fixes some of prime 1's issues and also this game may have our favourite samus and gunship design ever and the logs are way cooler even if they are no longer as diagetic.

the levels in this game feel a lot more distinct and memorable to us in echoes than in prime. this may be because we speedrun echoes. sky sancturary, torvus bog, the first area that we can't remember what its called, the desert place with the space pirate lab where you first encouter dark sammy. it's all so distinct in our brain and thinking about these areas makes us so excited. we listen to jazz covers of torvus bog a lot. we listen to this when we're anxious or when we want to feel awesome

we should create playlists to support our brain more because we usually avoid listening to our music playlist since songs are either way too high energy or way darker than we like. elysia is neither of these a lot of the time and when we're high energy we really do not want to do self harm.

we love this game so much and we have an enromous amount of love for it. also the game case is shiny and we like taking pictures of it with our toys. echoes makes us so happy

why do gamecube game boxes have so much fucking plastic

metroid zero mission (1)

this is a remake of the first metroid game and is one of our favourite games in the series. we played this mostly on our wii u after moving, before we got our internet set up. it was AWESOME.

this game is extremely fun level design and feels like it is really linear but then the game forces you to do speed booster tech to get all the items and omg omg omg

since we didn't play this game on wii u (unlike fusion which we played on gameboy advance SP) we got to use a proper controller and we think it feels so much better to play than fusion partially because of this alone.

it makes us really happy that the 100% completion from this game was sorta recreated in metroid 5.

super metroid (3)

metroid 3 was really the game that outlined the metroidvania genre. the first castlevania and metroid games were pretty different, or had poor execution in this way.

metroid fusion (4)

this game is hard to play because the SAX is terrifying and also holy fucking SHIT GBA SP are extremely uncomfortable. we kinda really wish we had a regular gba that just was modded to have a backlight?? is that possible. the SP is really uncomfy, especailly with things attached to it.

metroid fusion so far is very cool and we strongly appreciate how it uses more deliberate level design compared to other metroids to tell a horror story. metroid fusion and metroid dread are the closest to horror games in the series.

metroid dread (5)

we played this game with our partner and she helped us lots with the emmi and helped encourage us and tell us it'll be safe and we can always try again if something goes wrong. we don't know if we could've beaten this game without their support. elysia really struggled beating the metroid prime games, mainly because of how much courage it took! to this day we've only beaten the first prime game.

this game is lit and we don't really know what to talk about. there are trams and there are level designs and there is purple samus and the X parasite and samus talks and the developers took all the feedback they got from metroid 2 remake and basically resolved everything. their portrayal of samus as a character is much better and the gameplay is a lot better paced and it feels a lot more soulful!!! we were writing an essay about our issues with metroid 2 remake before the game came out, and we think everything we wrote about was addressed!

there are TRAMS and LAVA and RAIN and it makes us happy. this game is fucking incredible. the powers are also supepr cool in a way we dont usually think about. metroid zero mission speed booster puzzles 💝

first rando we played the game made us do

twilight princess

when we were younger, this was one of our friend's favourite video games. he loved it so much that he gave us his copy, which we entirely completed.

we'd talk about this game with him, what we thought, about the things inside it. we never quite understood why they liked it so much, but it seemed to form a part of their youth in a way we think is magical.

we like the game, too, and it's something we really respect.

the game feels like it has a complete aptmosphere. every time we play this game, now on our own gamecube version that we got, the sound of the item switcher, menus, water running, and the ambient glow is really awesome. it makes us feel something, perhaps that we're in a comfy place, or somewhere isolated.

thinking about this, the aptmosphere and mood of the game is very weird for a zelda game. zelda games are typically very playful and meant to excite something. even the more serious games in the series dont have this same kind of lonely ambience

i think that the game does give you a good amount of positive things to make the game playable for us, and we like that. it isn't all negative ambience and passive lonelieness.

we really strongly appreciate the game's art style. it commits really heavily to it and we think executes it very well. everything works so well together, it's amazing. we actually think this is true for most zelda games, and i think it's really impressive, since almost all zelda games have very different art styles.

twilight princess' style has a major focus on the colour yellow, and colours close to it like green sorta wash into it in a lot of contexts. colours aren't very saturated for the most part, highlights clip early, and there isn't much contrast. the game's visual fidelity is really good point between modern graphics and old game graphics, i think. it uses a lot of the design stylings of newer games, and is designed around 640x480 resolution (blurry and not widescreen ), and gamecube's hardware. we really like how heavy the bloom is. the interface elements have this mystical forest fairy kinda vibe going on and its really good looking and wait a second holy shit i just realised maybe that's actualyl the vibe they were going for. like, we used that to sorta communicate how it looks to us, but, it could actually be what they meant exactly.

the item design also look incredibly cool combined with link character design. really love the bow and arrow design and clawshots and stuff. the animations are also so lived in and good feeling. also link turns yellow when they drink rare chu jelly.

we think it would be cool if there was more exploration in this game and player flexibility, uhm, more to discover and more ways to route.

i think its so funny and also a amazing commitment to the style that all these normal zelda enemies were re-invisioned as eldritch horror fuel. like, bubbles, skulltulas, poes, skull kid. we also love the 1 on 1 combat the game has. it's cool the game focuses on that, even if it's underdeveloped. we really like the aeralfols and darknuts!! and in general even though so much of the combat is relatively limited it still feels really awesome and thats so cool.

combat arts do a lot to m,ake you feel like you have more options than you actually do and they're cool.

midna jumps are a horribly designed game mechanic. they are context sensitive actions required for progression, and happen infrequently. there is very little cue to what prompts a midna jump, and you have to be in a certain form to even get the prompt. they are basically invisible, and how they are triggered is subtle and inconsistent enough that its hard to know what is and it is not. it seems to be some kind of "step" that usually triggers it, but its not universal and that is not a clear or distinct enough cue. in the first wolf section we remmeber getting stuck because we couldn't reach the door to exit onto the castle roof, and tried everything. apparently there was a midna jump spot on the very edge of the room, out of the way. everytime we play the game again, we also get confused how we're supposed to get the shield in ordon village, because of the midna jump.

breath of the wild

time played: 600 hours

okay i think paraglider is a fundamentally flawed mechanic in a game about puzzles and traversal.

well, breath of the wild isnt really a game about traversal puzzles and skills, but maybe it should be. in tears of the kingdom, we actively avoid getting the paragllider until we start getting border by the movement speed, because it forces us to consider our surroundings so much more and also forces us to actually plan how we're gonna approach something.

in both breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom, the sections where we've been unable to or restricted to use the paraglider have been some oof our favourite experiences, ever. in tears of the kingdom specifically, though, the open world isnt actually designed in a way to facilitate manual traversal, which is why we always end up getting the paraglider, since the game just stops being fun at some point. but the tutorial areas of both games, where the game knows you dont have a glider, are both so fucking well designed. there are lots of reasons for this but at least for us the active traversal was a big reason why.

the tutorial areas force you to really engage with the game mechanics and the game mechanics at play are extremely solid. the act of traversal was a puzzle in itself, and just getting to see a new area and what was it and the new perspective it offers was reward.

a big flaw with breath of the wild is that once you've explored the map fully, there really isnt much to do. the game struggles with not having enough unique stuff to do, and one of the only consistenltly unique things in the game as you explore is the overworld terrain itself. at least we think this is interesting. there isn't much depth in the side quests or ways you can alter the world or interact with it, there just isnt enough unique scenarioes in the game for it to be all that replayable. and the main items of interest, shrines, can be defeated really easily once you've figured out a broken strategy.

part of why the shrines are special is because you can do just about anything to complete them. the whole game is designed like this, but shrines are focused specifically on solving a puzzle any way you want. but 1. some mechanics are just clearly more effective than others and 2. there isnt much forcing you to actually explore the mechanics once you've figured out something that works in one shrine. like, once you learn metal weapons conduct electricity, youre just gonna ignore the shrine challenge and place your weapons into the most direct circuit. once you've seen the winning strategy once, you end up doing it for every time a challenge comes up.

the game's mechanics are incredibly unbalanced and we think the game might be too open ended. the game stops forcing creativity early on, and also stops rewarding creativity early on, which takes away one of the game's core strengths. the game prides itself open ended puzzles and solutions, but the puzzles in the game fall flat, and the solutoins stop being open ended when you just use the same strategies over and over again.

also, the gameplay loop in this game is very intrinsically motivated, with very little extrinsic justification for doing anything in the game. what this means is that there are no special rewards for doing stuff. when you climb the tallest peak you dont get a brand new item that will help you traverse the game world in a more interesting and fun way and interact with the physics system in new exciting ways, like a clawshot, you just get a spirit orb. or rupees. like, this game seriously lacks an incentive to properly engage with the physics system once you learn that the same strats work over and over in every situation, and often those strats are the easiest and most straightforward options (just mashing the attack button staggers enemeies repeatedly, stun locking them), and so if they aren't gonna put things in the game that adapt to your broken strategies and make you have to think about something new, then it should probably give you stuff that makes you want to engage with the more complex systems.

Like oh my god, a version of breath of the wild that constantly presents new and challenging scenarioes that require different open ended problem solving, and a version that properly rewards exploration with unique stuff, and a version that focuses on exploration and gives you permanenet progression upgrades that help you interact with the physics system and the world in more and exciting ways, soudns like a amazing game.

we just want this game to have interesting traveral mechanics and have cool, unqiue permanent unlockable, like a claw shot, and to have genuinely interesting problem solving.

the game's tutorial is really good at this, because its the really the main part of the game where you do actually keep unlocking new, entirely unique abilities, and its when youre at your weakest, and arent able to just spam the same strats over and over again, cuz you dont have the resources. and it also forces you to plan out your traversal and engage with the game world at a deeper level, as well as engage with the mechanics at a deeper level. breath of the wild's tutorial is a perfect game its just the entire game isnt the tutorial.

i think a exploraiton based game should have cool rewards for exploring, like quests and new enemies and gameplay and story scenarioes, and then give the player cool rewards like traversal abilities that can be used with the physics,.

we really loved when we first played this game and getting to explore the world and its mechanics. but, now that we know what breaks the game, it just,, isnt possible to be fun anymore. there arent any intersting challenges. like, there are some difficult encounters we cant beat, but they dont challenge us in a way that forces us to play with the game's mechanics they spent 7 years developing.

tears of the kingdom

time played: around 50 hours

holy shit this game is so cool there's so much in it

when we played this game we actively limited ourselves in a certain way. we didn't get the paraglider until we had to (we assumed it wasnt in the game until we played a shrine that was Literally Impossible without the glider. imagine someone who had this happened and didnt know about the paraglider)

we also limited ourselves with the armour we could wear, we didnt want to wear armour that protected ourselves too much because breaht of the wild is horribly scaled around armour buffs.

we also didnt know anything about the game before playing!!

it was so so exciting playing this game for the first time, even though we have played so much of breath of the wild. the game has so many small things and there are so many new things to discover and its gameplay loop is a lot more develpoed than breath of the wild. it feels like a much more fleshed out game that has more things to do within it, and less like a sandbox for the player in some ways (although its more of a sandbox in the things you can actually do, its less of one in that there are also more things crafted by the game)

at some point though, the same issues with breath of the wild start appearing. aside from the unfortunate loss of the glitch that lets you move around while using the camera rune, the game is just breath of the wild but More.

this game doesn't really address any of breath of the wild's issues directly, and instead just adds More on top of it. Same overworld, but now its bigger and there is a new underworld, for example.

when we first played this game the beginning was incredibly packed with unique stuff to do. we did water temple first, and assumed the sage was unique and if there were other sages they would be conceptually completely different. we thought the questline up to the temple was discreet as well, since it worked really well there, and we assumed the dungeon was designed the way it was because of how it was open air.

but then every temple thereafter is exactly the same. they all follow the exact same formula, and its grading. even breath of the wild's main dungeons had some kind of unique spatial problem solving elements in each of them, reminsicent of past zelda dungeons.

and,, everything in the game is like this. everything is repeated in a boring and forumlaic way. and it makes everything in the game start to feel artificial, mass produced, and makes things feel less special.

the shrines in this game are arguably even worse. certain mechanics, like the fuse, recall, and ultrahand, are just, completely overpowering, and allow you to completely ignore most challenges in the game. like, oh my god. a lot of the most broken stuff in breath of the wild still requires you to engage somewhat the surroudning context to make it work.

if you want to gain height in tears of the kingdom, fuse a rocket to your shield. if you need to gain height more than once in a shrine to jump over a wall or a pit, get an object you can ultrahand and then drop it from a height. get on top of the obkject, click recall, youre done.

and something that we noticed raelly badly in this game is that when you do engage with the shrines, a lot of them are mechanical tutorials, teaching you how the physics work. but, they don't escalate these challenges at ALL, and don't add difficulty, meaning that if you already know how the mechanic works, you can just autopilot through the shrine in a minute and be done with it. these was also the case in breath of the wild but we didn't pay notice it ourselves. tears of the kingdom could desperately use more challenges around its vehicle building and give you more scenarioes where you need to use it.

also the dungeons where you need to make a mechanism to do something are almost always incredibly simple if you already know how to make the thing and are also really disapointing feeling. like, it shows you this cool thing in the game... and then doesn't go anywhere with it mechanically.

we do think the fact this games adds so much more meat to the gameplay loop and just more stuff and fleshes out some stuff relally does make the game much better than breaht of the wild but we also think that isnt the most effective way they couldve made it better. we still want our open ended problem solving zelda game with in depth traversal and challenging and forces you to explore the deep mechanical depths the game has to offer.

minish cap

i dont remember where or when we got this game, or frankly when we got our gba. we think our first game was pokemon emerlald?? no, no thats not right we remember getting it and the wireless link cable at the same time, and that was at a later date. yeah, no, our first game was pokemon saphire i think. i think we got our gba while out on a roadtrip with a friend, and maybe he gave us his copy of pokemon sapphire so we could use our new gba (he had emerald).

i think we got minish cap soon after we got our gba?? maybe at the same time????

anyways. this game was like. kinda weird for us. it feels like an outlier of 2d zelda. like you got your console 2d zeldas, and then the sorta quirky handheld ones for the most part that follow weird shit or have weird shit in them, but minish cap (and link between worlds afterwards) dont feel that way (havent played the train/boat games, only the gb/gba and 3ds ones).

this game kinda feels like its a normal zelda game. although it also heavily expands on what a zelda game can be and it feels very self contained. also games hard.

we absolutely love the scale of this game. like its so. everything fits so well. nothing feels weird or uneccesary and it flows really well and it feels like everything that should be there is there. we love it. it feels like one big giant puzzle and world, instead of feeling like most zelda games, where theres the puzzles and cool shit, and then Everything Else that i dont care about after the first couple times.

the elements of zelda it puts together is so cool. its one of the only games with darknuts in it, and it even has multiple tiers of darknuts. it's so cool seeing all the things combined to make this game. also the art style is extremely awesome and we love seeing how things are drawn and animated in the style.

the core concept of the game, becoming tiny, works so fucking well i think. it allows the game to have level of detail otherwise not possible for the hardware and that makes the world way more exciting i think. like. oh my god its so cool. i think it could be heavily refined and expanded on and polished but its still such a good idea and its definitely not executed badly.

god. zelda art style and game design is like a special interest for us in its own right. we think we have a special edition art book for the whole series somewhere. dont know where. mightve sold it. was probably stolen like most of our historical coping and escapism and autism items. hope we still have it. that shit is so damn autism.

link between worlds

fucking love 3ds games. fucking. god. i wish i could reasonably afford to collect them. i fucking love this thing but because of money ive never been able to like form a collection. always had to sell to get new games and stuff. maybe one day. although a lot of the 3ds games we are itnerested in might be very hard to get in the future ://

notes from before we started playing (21 aug 2023)

we've beaten this game i think 100% or nearly in the past, but we have so little recollection of the game. every time we see something about the game a small set of memories come flooding back, though. this game is so cool. we've decided that instead of seeing other people play the game we're gonna do it on our own and explore it for maybe the first time again.

what we know going into it is the very cool item and exploration system the game has going on. also really good presentation. also remember a giant tower and that the game had surprisng emphasis on combat. and that it had relally good puzzles.

we remmeber getting help from someone else and that we didnt play entirely in the most enjoyable way for us when we did play. we remember getitng the game on our own pretty recently cuz it was at a price that was within spontaneous purchase range for us, which was surpirsing cuz its a video game. also realised we had a 3ds so we could play it. seemed a little weird since we already beat it but then we realised how much we forgot. and then never played it again for a couple years.

also know that this game's style, like animation, character design, what parts of the zelda series it has and which ones it doesn't, was like an enigma for us. we knew so little about the game other than the chu like green friends and like the look of the gameplay. it looked so smooth,.

this game definitely seems like the single most polished and refined zelda game ever. while also having very good strengths. we remmeber it not having a lot of the annoying "zelda-isms" and from what we rememeber the game was extremely well designed, and looking back we're kinda surpirsed it even exists.

would be cool if this game had builkd cusomtisaiton like hollow knight

hollow knight

horrible platformer great combat and exploration game and the mantis claw is a microcosm

every game with a badge system would probably be better with hollow knight inspirations

mario kart 8

i think this was our "depression game".

in the past, we played this game a lot with one or two friends but for the most part we played it alone, and we played it a lot.

i think we have relatively modest feelings for the game, which is a little strange because it has really siginficant place in our lives.

we think this game has extremely good presentation and is very streamlined and solid. like it looks SO fucking good and it's music and sound design and animation and really all of it is so complete and perfect. have you ever seen a video of n64 rainbow road from the original 64 game juxtaposed to the mario kart 8 version. it's fucking unreal. and the music is so much more important to the game and feel likes a conscious design decision as a part of the game instead of just being a something necessary.

actually a lot of things in previous mario kart games that feel like after thoughts feel like they were consiously designed in 8 in a way that makes it feels extremely complete and streamlined and thoughtful in comparison to the other games.

maybe what comes from that though is that the game is from a mini series of iterative mario kart games, and since its so complete and streamlined its become the "default" mario game, and i feel like that takes a lot from how we see the game. it isn't "mario kart 8" so much as "the mario kart".

i think it makes us look at the game significantly more critically. i think the game gets boring once you know the tracks and controls. or, at least for us, having played 600 hours of it on wii u, mostly entirely on our own. we've played a little bit online in deluxe and with friends and it's been a lot more fun than how we usually think of the game. because of the gameplay being so streamlined, it does feel boring when there is huge skill gaps. nothing engaging happens!

i think if this game is going to represent mario kart as a whole, it should have different modes with different driving mechanics, particularly ones that create more oppurinity for decisions. i think decision making and interaction is what we want; not more control depth or options or skill depth, although i feel that adding more decisions and interaction would likely also increase those. like, i wish there was more decisions to make! and more thought, to make the game more engagin!

we also think there should be more visual and track variety. if we're gonna be playing the same tracks all the time, i think that playing on them should be more varied and also exciting! maybe different times of day and different weather and also minor variations in obstacles and track route and shape.

we really like a lot of the kart designs and we love shy guy falls (THE VOACLS!!) and we like dolphin shoals and electrodrome and mario stadium

super smash bros ultimate

boring game kinda?

like uh its our favourite smash game probably but but god they really god rid of all the jank that made the other smash games fun to play competitively.

there's so little extremely weird bullshit and im fucking autistic and i love extremely weird bullshit. and so much is so streamlined that the things that do exist are so barebones and shallow. like, there's technically weird stat stuff with traction and aerial interrupt and port priority but they affect so little in so few scenarioes that are impossible in real matches.

in other smash games, it feels like something absurd happens in every items game and a lot of competitive games

also competitively i think other smash bros games have so much more creative potential. like watching smash wii u i can't help but get around the fact that the game's movement and physics are very conducive to both competing and watching competition. smash ultimate feels so much clumsier to play and

pikmin 3!!

time played: at least 30 hours

we played this game on wii u, fun fact! the demo version had touch screen controls build in, but not the base game version at launch!

this was first pikmin game. we remember getting stuck on the final area for at least a month until someone we knew talked about it with us and how they beat it.

this is kinda one of those game like Xenoblade X or fire emblem conquest where everytime we come back to it theres a chance that it gets us autistic about it all over again after not playing it for a very long time.

okay so when we first played pikmin 3 it was like holy shit this game is so pretty and we really like its setting. it is so pretty, and we kinda were interested in getting it partially just because we wanted to explore all the areas?? i think.

you are small in pikmin games in real world so you get real world objects and stuff and explore and everything is so small scale.

we really appreciated the sci fi but also kinda grounded in reality vibe of pikmin 3! it felt like alot of the games we played aroudn the time we played it were super fantasy and disconnected from reality, and it was cool to see acknowledgment of the real world in a game. Felt this for xenoblade X as well

played the game i think for a bit with the touchscreen but eventually switched to wii remote and nunchuk, probably because our gamepad drifted and cuz we heard wii remote and nunchuk were good. they are so good.

wii remote and nunchuk fits pikmin 3 perfectly, and it works so well. the menu is perfect for them, and most of the controls work so well on the wii remote and the nunchuk.

it was sometimes hard to guage where our cursor would go cuz it would travel over physical objects different from how we expected but it was still so good

we appreciate the difficulty in this game similar to fire emblem conquest. difficult feels really really well tuned to the game, and is very thoughtful.

we really love the multitasking and routing once you know the maps, and how fluid everything is. having a touchscreen map also works incredibly well for this game with "go here" function.

everything feels so solid and very thoughtfully designed to be played many times. it is so much fun to get a friend together and try and optimise the game and figure out straats without looking them up online!

also bingo battle!! never really knew anyone other than ryan to play this with but its also a ton of fun.

the game has like two modes on the main menu, singleplayer and multiplaer, and it is amazing how both of them are incredible on their own. we view the menu as like, equal, even though they are completely different with their own characteristics. each of them have so much depth.

so pretty and feels so good.

really like olimar's notes!! really like how they are a collectable and how they teach you about olimar and the world!! really awesome. not as cool as 2's though

wish this game had more areas and things to do in singeplayer, with a less direct route to the end game

pikmin 2

we have autism!! we like pikmin!!

pikmin 4

date first played: sepetmeber 7 2023

it's so much bigger than pikmin other ones!

this game is surpsignly similar and suprisngly different from other ones. it feels, more puzzle oriented?? and less exploration and routing and multitasking based. this could just be because of how much harder it is to separate the leader than 3 and 2, and how switching between them pauses the game and goes to black, and how "go here" function requires pausing the game and getting to grips with the map, which is harder to read and navigate than pikmin 3.

this game also doesn't support touch screen, and also doesn't support wii remote. look, im just saying they added a gamecube adapter for smash bros and just smash bros, what about sensor bar for wii remote. the wii remote can already connect to switch in bluetooth if the funcitonality to support it was there.

to use the pointer you need to use the right joycon separated from the other one, and you can only control the pointer while aiming. the options menu should absolutely have more settings to change; it is surprisingly barren, no basic control adjustments to even jsut make the game play more like the last ones, never mind other basic settings that should exist and accessbility for like, idk, colour blind people, given that this game is entirely structured around distinguishing large groups of tiny colour coded carrots.

You can also use pointer with pro controller while aiming but it is really bad and doesn't seem calibrated properly. feels like it is impossible to move and conflicts super heavily with the other sticks. don't like iit when a game forces us to use controllers that do not work properly.

despite this, the controls aren't bad, at least on a first playthrough, and we've noticed that they work surprisingly well. like, the bad controls isn't something we think about until we remember the other games with wii remote and touch screen.

we really dont like olimar's notes, also the end of day report screen is much easier to read in pikmin 3, and it also has more sci fi vibe whihc feels AREALLY good and it goes with pikmin's 3's mood really really well with the music and cutsceen and everything. pikmin 4 uses the same music without the emotion behind it and also um the screen is just really hard to read and not inspoired

hd rumble is used really thoughtfully here sc

taiko no tajistun (arcade)

this is one of the only rhythmn games we've actually been interested in cuz i like the lil friends in it and the costumes a lot!

we like it !! and its helfpul for learning new songs and giving us something to do with our time. we wish it had more smaller artist music in it though

at least the smaller artists we like

also, getting a game set up takes like, 4 minutes, for no reason. there is so much waiting you need to do and i just wish like if you had more plays on the machine it would let you continue with your existing save instwad of having to log on again.

i also wish unlocking outdfits was more clear what we had to do and that more songs had cute banners around them. like the vocaloid songs have like miku and rin backgruond its cool now imagine if megalovania had Sans Undertale from undertale jump scare you. Awesome.

3ds games

3ds games are special so they get a category

metroid prime federation force

fire emblem fates conquest

we love everything about this game except its story and we do not know where to begin :3 so coming soon