Celeste (PC/PS4/XONE/Switch/Stadia): A Steep, Treacherous, and Beautiful Climb (Detailed Review)

And here we have yet another overdue review that I have been planning to get for quite some time. Specifically, this review was requested by former patron Winter. While they have since canceled their pledge due to financial difficulties, they were the first patron of mine to meet the current requirements for a review request, which require someone to be a patron for more than six months and contribute at least $120 total. Yes, this is a steep requirement, but it also ensures that those who are supporting me are doing so because they either really care about me or my content. Also I have tendency to take a long time getting to requested reviews, but I do plan to honor these commitments even when a patron in question is also an abusive ex (no, that’s not Winter, but that is the case with another patron).

As for what my excuse for taking so long this time is, it’s that I had initially tried to play the Steam version of Celeste several months ago (which Winter also gifted me because they are a total sweetheart), but I had some issues with the controls that made the game virtually unplayable to me. Specifically, I had this problem where, when using a PS3 controller, the game would just stop reading my button inputs for a second every other minute. While 1 second doesn’t sound like much, Celeste IS a platformer that requires split second timing and accuracy.

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (PS4/XONE/Switch/PC): A Highly N. Tertaining Trilogy (Detailed Review)

I can safely say that, prior to 2017, I assumed the Crash Bandicoot series was as good as dead. Despite not having been relevant since the PS1 era, it was able to stay barely afloat until 2010, with the last console based installment being Crash: Mind Over Mutant. Despite the fact that I haven’t talked about it much, I have played the crap out of the PS1 games (2 and 3 at least) when I was a child, but I hadn’t touched them in so long that the remakes were basically a new experience for me. Not to mention that I had never even played the original game.

Crash Bandicoot was one of the biggest names during the PS1 era, yet when it fell off, it didn’t even fall off in the same way as Sonic the Hedgehog where every installment still got a lot of hype and sold a lot even though the games were hit and miss. It’s more so along the lines of people just stopped paying attention to the series, so we wouldn’t even know if any of the post PS1 releases were any good. I mean, I did enjoy Crash Nitro Kart, and I heard Crash Twinsanity was pretty fun, but the other two post PS1 Crash games I played were Tag Team Racing and Crash of the Titans, both of which sucked. Crash of the Titans was especially moronic in that it turned a platformer series into a beat em up so boring that it makes Sonic Unleashed’s night time stages look like they ACTUALLY came from God of War.

Games&Girls (PC): An Embarrassing Train Wreck (Detailed Review)

CW: Mentions of Nazism, pedophilia, incest, antisemitism, and kidnapping

It seems as if the games I play are constantly trying to push the envelope for different ways to be absolutely fucking awful. I am at the point where if someone asked me the worst game I ever played, I’d ask what criteria they are basing them on. I could go with the game that was so disgusting and scarring that it made me suicidal, I could go with the no-budget “experimental” game that included real life gore in it, I could go with the RPG Maker game with no battles, levels, dialogue, or ending, or I could go with the game that required you to manually rename the game’s exe file to even play it.

Games&Girls is now among those games as “the visual novel that I almost didn’t review because I didn’t think I could review it without insulting the developer.” And even approaching this review is difficult because I’m not sure if I should do what I usually do and start describing the story, writing, presentation, or open with the fact that the 4th episode has you trying to seduce a fucking Nazi?

Quick Review: Echo Tokyo: An Intro (PC)

Echo Tokyo: An Intro is a visual novel that is meant to serve as the introduction to a larger series. Specifically, it is meant to be the origin story of two characters for an upcoming open world game known as Echo Tokyo, at the time of writing of course. While I can say that Echo Tokyo itself does seem like a fairly interesting game if it is done well, the mentality of Echo Tokyo: An Intro serving as on add on really shows. That is not to say that Echo Tokyo: An Intro is a bad game by any means, but at the same time, I’m only interested in Echo Tokyo as a whole because it is supposedly going to be different.

Quick Review: A Kiss for the Petals: Remembering How we Met (PC/IOS/Android)

A Kiss for the Petals: Remembering How we Met is the first game in the long running Sono Hanabira/A Kiss for the Petals series to receive an official English localization. Sono Hanabira is a series of yuri eroge that has had yearly releases from 2006 to 2016, and hasn’t had anything since then… probably because that tends to happen when you milk a series too quickly. A lot of them seem to be on the shorter side (or at least the ones I looked up on VNDB) so I guess I can at least see why they got them out so quickly. Also I’m not making any judgement on the quality of these games, it’s just… damn, over 20 installments in 10 years.

This particular installment, Remembering How we Met, is actually one of the more recent entries in the series, having come out in Japan on March 13th of 2015 and getting released in English in September of the same year. It’s also one of the few entries in the series that doesn’t have any erotic content, which is likely why it was the first to be localized. It should be noted that this game DID get a PC remake with added ero content in 2016, but that version hasn’t been localized.

Quick Review: Super Win the Game (PC)

God damn, I wrote my review of You Have to Win the Game six years ago. I was either 19 or 20 when I wrote that review. More time has passed since I wrote that review than has passed between the original release of You Have to Win the Game and its sequel, Super Win the Game. No, that’s not a jab saying that the game was made too quickly after the original, it’s a two year gap. It’s just… time goes by so slow yet so fast.

So I recently decided to check out Super Win the Game to see if it’s any better than its predecessor. Super Win the Game is, in fact, better than You Have to Win the Game. While neither game is a must play by any means, it is nice to see that a lot of the issues I had with the previous game were resolved in this one.

Standard Review: The Mysterious Murasame Castle (NES/GBA)

I’ve always had some level of curiosity towards retro Japanese games that were never localized, especially those by major developers before they got big. It’s hard to think of a more household name than Nintendo. After all, a lot of Nintendo’s major series have started back on the NES and are still going strong to this day. I mean, Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, no context needed.

But not every classic Nintendo title went on to get tons of sequels and get milked into oblivion. Kid Icarus got one Gameboy sequel and then a reboot decades laterbefore fading into obscurity again despite the reboot being very successful. Punch-Out got a SNES sequel that no one cared about, and then a Wii reboot decades later that flopped. StarTropics got one sequel then nothing. But at least these games were localized (except for StarTropics which was made in the US and not released in Japan).

Secret Little Haven (PC): A Deeply Personal Masterpiece (Detailed Review) #TransDayofRemembrance

CW: Transphobia, parental abuse, gaslighting, depression, violence, and suicide.

So here we are at another Trans Day of Rememberence, the day where cis people can bitch about trans social justice warriors and bathrooms while trans people mourn their friends and family who were murdered by cis people, or who killed themselves because cis people felt inconvenienced by their desire to, you know, live.

I’ve used Trans Day of Rememberence as a framing device for my work in the past. Two years ago, I used it for a highly emotional piece where I let my anger and disgust front and center. This time, I’m going to do something a bit different. It just so happened that the next game on my schedule for a review is also very much relevant to Trans Day of Rememberance. Not only is Secret Little Haven made by a trans developer, but it is also a trans centered title with a lot of highly relevant subject matter. It’s also an absolute masterpiece that comes strongly recommended even if you aren’t trans.

Quick Review: Home (PC/Ios/PS4/Vita/Switch)

Home is the first game developed by indie developer Benjamin Rivers, and was originally released in 2012. It is a short horror title made with the premise of letting players choose their own interpretations of the game’s events. I am unsure how to feel about this approach to storytelling. On one hand, a good work of fiction should always involve some form of subtlety and allowing for multiple interpretations gives a work more versatility. On the other hand, actively trying to invoke “multiple interpretations” oftentimes comes across as if the writer wants to have an excuse to not finish writing the plot and addressing every plot point.

MOTHER 3 (GBA): A Genuine Classic (Detailed Review)

I really should have played this game a lot sooner than I did. I’ve commonly listed EarthBound as one of, if not my favorite games of all time. It’s hard to believe that my review of EarthBound was only the 2nd review I ever wrote, and yet I did not get around to even playing the equally amazing sequel until 7 years later.

To be honest, I may have just played MOTHER 3 for the first time fairly recently, but I have seen a lets play of it before. Hell I was actually introduced to this series through the lets plays of Chuggaaconroy and NintendoCapriSun, which I just realized were posted over a decade ago. Hell now that I think about it, I think I first saw those LPs almost a decade ago.