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Finally posting a few reviews! I’ll keep them short and sweet.

…..

1. Chico and The Magic Orchard DX (Switch)
2. Dusk ‘82 (Switch)
3. Dusk (Switch)
4. Rock Boshers DX (Switch)
5. Metal Slug 4 (Neo Geo)
6. Bleed 2 (Switch)
7. Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS)
8. Mighty Gunvolt Burst (3DS)
9. Love 3 (Switch)
10. Mini Mario & Friends: Amiibo Challenge (3DS)
11. Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Switch)

Mighty Gunvolt Burst (3DS) is to Mega Man what Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is to Castlevania. That is, it’s a loving well-tuned tribute to a classic game series (which is also designed by Inti Creates). If it were a Mega Man game, it would easily be one of the best, and it features a really cool “design your own boss weapon” mechanic that I loved. If you like Mega Man games at all, you really owe it to yourself to give this game a shot.

Love 3 (Switch) is a breezy die-and-retry platformer. It has cute “one-bit” graphics and a groovy soundtrack. Like its predecessors, the game lets you set your own checkpoints; so, it’s never that hard. It’s pretty short, but it has a lot of optional challenges. It also comes bundled with Love and Love 2 (a/k/a kuso), making it effectively the “Love” collection. It’s a fun game and a great starting point for anyone intimidated by other games in the genre.

Mini Mario & Friends: Amiibo Challenge (3DS) is the last original game in the Mario vs. DK series. It is a Lemmings-style puzzle game, like many of the previous entries, where you manipulate the environment to move a toy Nintendo character to the exit. (Of its predecessors, it’s most like Tipping Stars.) The twist here is that you use Amiibos to unlock different characters, and each character has unique abilities (e.g., Princess Peach can float, Luigi can jump high, etc.). This opens up a lot of different ways to play through the game’s levels, and only certain characters can reach exits opening up some parts of the game. This results in about 12-20 levels that can be beaten with any Amiibo, and 4 levels unique to each Amiibo. (Put another way, there’s not a lot of content if you have one Amiibo, but if you have all compatible Amiibos, you get a good 14-20 hours out of this game.) Since the game was a free download, the only cost associated with it is the cost of the figures; so, it’s not a bad little bonus for Amiibo collectors! I really liked it.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Switch) is the most recent game in the Mario vs. DK series, but it’s a remake of Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the GBA. Here’s my review of that game from 2019:



Everything I wrote behind the spoiler is still true in the remake. The Switch remake also has improved graphics, tighter controls , and much less frustrating difficulty. Accordingly, and while I enjoyed the original’s challenge quite a bit, the Switch version is MUCH more accessible and definitely the better version. (BTW…I completed all of the extra content in both the GBA and Switch versions; so, I’ve now 100% completed every game in the Mario vs DK series. I was first introduced to the series through our Together Retro club in March 2019, and I can’t thank you all enough for introducing me to some of my favorite games!)

1. Sonic Lost World (WiiU)
2. Kirby and the Forgotten Land (NS)
3. Kinect Adventures (XB360)
4. Metal Slug (PC)
5. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES)

6 Modnation Racers (PSP)

A few nights back I finished the Career Mode in Modnation Racers on the PSP. I found it to be a fairly average kart racer, especially since I was playing it now, well past any of the community building that was likely it's strength.

It is a decent looking game for the time, but the racing has some rough edges. Inconsistent drifting, some strange behaviour after landing a jump, and brutal rubber banding all kept this from being great. When I was right on track and playing well it felt pretty solid, but collisions and track edges were unpredictable and frustrating.

I still enjoyed it enough to complete the career mode, but this would rate fairly low on my list of recommendations for kart racing games.

The only minor gripes I have with Mario vs DK is losing the retro look and also some minor censorship in the remake. They toned down a lot of Mario's death animations. This is becoming unfortunately common with remakes and remasters. They changed a LOT of stuff in that Spyro Trilogy remake that they considered inappropriate. I can't imagine what the Lollipop Chainsaw remake will be like. They've already lost rights to the music.

The Mario vs DK remake is still pretty awesome though.

PartridgeSenpai wrote:
Verdict: Recommended. Though it’s certainly not without its flaws, Suikoden 1 is a really quality RPG on the PS1. It’s a bit mechanically bare for those who love really mechanically complex games, and the writing is a bit on the weak side for folks who prefer a better written story, but it does both well enough that I think it’s still a very easy game to have a good time with as long as you’re not demanding perfection from everything you play. If you’re in the mood for a good PS1 RPG, you can certainly do better, but you can do a lot worse too, and I’ve no doubt in my mind that, at the very least, Suikoden 1 will serve as an excellent spring board for its far improved sequel.

Should I first play the first or get straight to Suikoden II? (which seems to be more revered)

RobertAugustdeMeijer wrote:

PartridgeSenpai wrote:
Verdict: Recommended. Though it’s certainly not without its flaws, Suikoden 1 is a really quality RPG on the PS1. It’s a bit mechanically bare for those who love really mechanically complex games, and the writing is a bit on the weak side for folks who prefer a better written story, but it does both well enough that I think it’s still a very easy game to have a good time with as long as you’re not demanding perfection from everything you play. If you’re in the mood for a good PS1 RPG, you can certainly do better, but you can do a lot worse too, and I’ve no doubt in my mind that, at the very least, Suikoden 1 will serve as an excellent spring board for its far improved sequel.

Should I first play the first or get straight to Suikoden II? (which seems to be more revered)

I'll have to get back to you once I play through Suikoden II! x3

My gut response would be that the first game is fun and worth playing through, but it's just not exactly a 10/10 game on the PS1. It's a fun time, but it might leave you feeling a bit underwhelmed at the end of it if you're anything like me <w>

Luigi's Mansion 3

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat
1. Terranigma (SFC)
2. Eastward (PC)
3. Pulse (PC)
4. Lost Ruins (PC)
5. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6. Dropsy (PC)
7. Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8. Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)
10. Fire Watch (PC)
11. Bokura (PC)
12. Romancing SaGa (SFC)
13. Trials of Mana (SFC)
14. Castlevania Legends (GB)
15. SaGa 2 (GB)
16. SaGa 3 (GB)
17. Celeste (PC)
18. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (PC)
19. Celeste 64 (PC)
20. CB Chara Wars: Ushinawareta Gya~gu (SFC)
21. To The Moon (PC)
22. LOVE (PC)
23. Pikuniku (PC)
24. Night in the Woods (PC)
25. The Beginner's Guide (PC)
26. Suikoden (PS1)

27. Chocobo Dungeon 2 (PS1)

I played the first Chocobo Dungeon nearly two years ago, and though I liked it, it didn’t really leave me hankering for more Mystery Dungeon stuff despite running out to pick this up in the midst of my playthrough of it x3. Now all this time later, the mood for more Mystery Dungeon has struck me at last, and I have finally seen this game through to the end. It took me a (surprisingly short) 12-ish hours to get through the Japanese version of the game playing on real hardware.

Chocobo Dungeon 2 picks up some time after the first game, and Mog and Chocobo have moved on from that village in search of new treasure. Coming across a strange dungeon, they venture inside only for Chocobo to get launched out while Mog is locked inside! Chocobo is found by a kind young white mage named Shiroma, who sees him go back into the dungeon, only to find Mog just as he’s causing the whole dungeon to blow up and sink into the ocean! This is just the beginning of the epic tale that will find Chocobo, Mog, and Shiroma in a grand quest to save the world! (or at least the local village).

It’s a simple story, sure, but it’s a really nicely done one! Compared to how simple the writing in the first Chocobo Dungeon was, this game’s characters and setting really come to life in a way the series had just never done before, and the game benefits a ton from it. Never did I think a silly Chocobo-themed Mystery Dungeon game would get me to tear up, but here we are X3. It’s a very sweet story about the value in supporting and trusting in others, and its cool to see that it’s the legacy of these games being quite well written goes back this far!

The gameplay is very much what you’d expect from a Mystery Dungeon game for anyone familiar with them. For those unfamiliar, in modern terms, we’d call them rogue-likes in the traditional sense, with you moving around a grid in a procedurally generated dungeon, and the enemies only move when you move. This game is a bit like the original Chocobo Dungeon, Chocobo Dungeon 2 is much less close to a “true” rogue-like than its predecessor was. CD2 is a HUGE step forward for the series away from the old style and towards the new in more than just its story. In earlier games, we had one big dungeon that would reset your level every time you left and came back (i.e. died), and you’d sometimes get to keep some armor and weapons, but just as often, you were back to square one when you died. Chocobo Dungeon 1 has a bit of permanent progression in how you can unlock little benefits via sidequests (which this game also has), but Chocobo Dungeon 2 moves that bar WAY forward in just how much bigger and more player-friendly the systems in this game are.

First of all, we no longer have one big dungeon! Though you do effectively go through several dungeons twice, there are quite a few dungeons you’ll need to go through with each having its own boss to fight in Chocobo Dungeon 2. You also no longer lose your levels upon leaving the dungeon! All levels you get in Chocobo Dungeon 2 are permanent, and I ended up finishing the game around level 43 myself. On top of that, you can find spell tomes in dungeons to cast elemental magic with, and the more you cast a particular type of magic, the higher your reading comprehension level (and therefore magic) level gets as well! That said, stats aren’t everything in this game, and losing your stash of items (from your piles of tomes you’ve been hoarding to your preciously upgraded armor and weapon) can REALLY suck.

However, while you do lose *everything* upon death in this game (where iirc Chocobo Dungeon 1 let you keep at least the armor and weapon you were wearing), you thankfully get to still keep a good chunk of your cash to restock once you get back to town. You can also easily use an easily bought item to teleport out of a dungeon in this game and, if you made it far enough, you can go through a tiny dungeon to get right back around where you left off. This makes supply runs a lot easier, even if these mini-dungeon shortcuts are things you have to do solo.

Needing to do them solo is something special in this game as well, as this is also the first game to give you an NPC buddy following you around in each dungeon! The NPC party member you get can’t use items and will vary depending on the dungeon but having that extra bit of muscle can really be a life saver, and learning to utilize your partner’s power well is as crucial as learning to use your own. As an extra fun bonus, you can even dip into the options menu and have a buddy control that NPC instead of the CPU controlling them! Their AI is pretty darn good and reliable, honestly, but it’s still a super cool 2-player mode that you can use basically whenever you want~.

All the new good stuff is nice and all, but this is still an early Mystery Dungeon game, and it does really show it. This game has some really mean bits and unpolished bits of design compared to later games like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games many folks reading this are likely a lot more familiar with. It cannot be stressed enough just how awful a death usually is. While nothing you’ve found can truly never be found again, needing to find that stuff again, particularly your weapons & armor, can be a TON of work if they were highly upgraded. Not only can your weapons and armor (not to mention all of your precious piles of spell tomes and throwable magic rocks) disappear upon death, your weapons and armor have durability and can BREAK mid-battle if they take enough punishment. Your NPC ally’s stats scale off of your own level, but those weapons and armor are often the difference between life and death, and the village store selling literally no armor or weapons ever also makes it a real pain to go and find a fresh weapon and armor in your next venture into a dungeon in the early game.

The lack of polish isn’t all bad, though. The reason I keep mentioning those precious spell tomes is because they’re a very valuable and, most importantly, very powerful way of dealing with enemies without putting your squishy birdy self in harm’s way. Going through the first few floors of a particularly tricky dungeon and hoarding all of the tomes you can is an excellent strategy for basically the entire game. While that on its own won’t take down every boss, of course, it’s a nice thing to have to get over particularly hard bits, even if it does feel a bit too overpowered at the end of the day.

The aesthetics of the game are very pretty. Once we finally got bona fide 3D on consoles, we really stopped seeing many games use pre-rendered 3D graphics. Chocobo Dungeon 1 had pre-rendered 3D for its graphics, and its sequel really ups the ante in just how good they look. Monsters both friendly and otherwise look very pretty and cool in their chibi-styled designs and animations, and dungeons have very different flairs to them that make even re-going through a familiar location feel like a brand-new experience. The music is also excellent, and this is another title from this decade that shows off, yet again, why SquareSoft’s music team was and is still so heavily lauded in the industry.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. The systems in this game aren’t perfect, but they’re a HUGE step forward from where they were even just one year earlier with the first game, and even if there are some still overly punishing things here and some weirdly overpowered things there, they all add up to a very fun experience that make even a game as old as this fun and approachable for players old and new alike. The graphics are great, the music is incredible, and if you’re a fan of rogue-likes (or even just if classic Final Fantasy creatures all cute & chibi sound like a good time), then this is absolutely one you don’t wanna pass up on.

1. Live A Live (RPG)(Switch)
2. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Action)(Switch)
3. Pathway (Strategy [Tactics])(PC)
4. Rewind or Die (Horror Adventure)(PC)
5. Tomb Raider (Action Adventure)(PC)
6. Remnant: From the Ashes (Action RPG)(PC)
7. House Flipper (Simulation)(PC)
8. Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor (RPG)(PC)
9. Wild West and Wizards (FPS/RPG)(PC)

Wild West and Wizards is a hybrid of first person shooter and role playing game set in a world based on the Western of American mythology, but filled with spellcasters, gunslingers, ghosts, elementals, and giant scorpions. It was developed by a small handful of people, and while it offers up some interesting ideas for quests, it also steadily gets stale as the gunplay and spells never really evolve beyond side strafing every encounter. That said, it offers large open areas to explore at your leisure, and when the soundtrack kicks in, it has a mournful note that fills me with longing whether I'm staring at pockmarked sand dunes, sweeping prairie, or forested hills. As simple as it felt, I still ended up liking the game.

The general idea is that you're brought back from the dead into a flatly cartoonish world to track down a sorcerer trying to revive a big bad. When that doesn't work, you have to kill said big bad. Along the way, you'll also take jobs to hunt down bounties, deliver letters, create potions, murder-for-hire jobs, exploring abandoned homesteads, and even resurrecting the dead and searching for Bible pamphlets for a preacher. In that regard, it offers an interesting mix of variety, with all told over a hundred quests in the game and over 200 locations to find across three major areas. Not all of these locations are all that interesting, but every now and again you do come across something truly interesting, like an abandoned town or a strange garden, and those are the moments where the game is at its best.

At its worst, well, combat is pitiful. There are four overarching types of guns, and depending on which you equip may dictate how you handle combat. Rifles are used from afar, revolvers and repeaters pump out bullets in the middle range, and the shotguns are good for spiking damage up close. There are also spells that will give you offense or defense, or they may enhance your next bullet fired. That's pretty much it. I got through the game as a wizard who focused on defensive spells to armor up and then sniping from afar with a rifle or using an ice spell to freeze enemies in place so I could run up and empty a double-barrel into them. Sniping proved the more powerful over time, and once I really learned to lead my target, that was pretty much it for the game. That's not to say the game won't surprise you occasionally with a bandit sneaking up on you, but it's not a lot to break what can be a monotonous experience at times.

Where things get more interesting is in choosing your loadout and upgrading it. As you play, you collect different types of orbs. These can then be used as blacksmiths or wizards' shops to upgrade gear, guns, and spells. Do you want more power for a healing spell, better armor and stat boosts from your boots, or more powerful from your sidearm? You have to pick, and while gear keeps up with you level-wise until the character max of 20, it then pushes on to 25 to really get you good and powerful. And max level is also when the Yonder opens up, a harder version of the world where the enemies outlevel you but give greater rewards, making it worth your time to swap over so you can get that rifle up to level 25 and really do some damage.

There are three classes in the game: wizard, witch doctor, and gunslinger. Each has a different focus, on gunplay spells, or poisons and lifestealing, and each has a limited skill tree to enable you to focus on a particular aspect of a character. As I said, I played through as a wizard and focused on my defensive spells, so at max level, enemies my own level would have their damage reduced by 2/3 or higher, depending on the type (poison was down by 95%). This enabled me to then focus on the shooting, so I made a better gunslinger than a gunslinger.

Hey, as I said, it's a small team, they put together a project that doesn't necessarily stand out but has some high points, and while I found a lot of the experience uninspired, there were also things I could play with and break as well as a world to explore. That, and the soundtrack was wonderful, really. While it didn't hit all cylinders for me, it did feel like it was something the devs loved, and I hope they continue making games that feel worthwhile to them. And I like Weird Westerns, so it still scratched an itch that games usually don't.

RobertAugustdeMeijer wrote:Should I first play the first or get straight to Suikoden II? (which seems to be more revered)

In a lot of ways, the first game feels like a prelude to Suikoden II. While I think you can jump right to the second game and enjoy it just fine, the original does lay some groundwork for events that play out over the course of the rest of the series, so you'll probably enjoy later games a bit more if you play the original first. It's less important to the overall plot, and more about seeing the stories of certain specific characters and families play out over multiple games. Plus, you get some cool stuff in the second game if you import a 100% complete save from the first game.

Just beat Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales for PS5.