Now I know what you’re thinking, “DO, didn’t you beat this at release?” and the answer is yes, but Vita Nova basically restructured the game’s goals as well as new maps and mechanics.

Because of that, I counted it as a “rebeat” and it was enjoyable to revisit a really relaxing game.

I genuinely thought when I beat TTYD(remake) that I’d be able to go “Here’s a LOAD of thoughts” but honestly when I reflected, no, I don’t. “But DO, it’s a whole REMAKE surely you’ve got a lot to say?”, and sure, I do! But I don’t think it’d last more than two or three paragraphs.

Why is that? Because it’s faithful to the original, and not in a “Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl” faithful, but like this back when I originally beat it and put some thoughts down:

if you have the GCN TTYD, and an easy way to play it, you can skip the Switch remake. This isn’t because the remake is bad but more that, it’s *incredibly* faithful but not in a detracting way like Pokémon BDSP was.

The big change really is OST, some minor QoL changes and enhanced visuals along with two extra superbosses.

Other than that, it’s TTYD! Which is great ‘cus TTYD is great! But also, you might not wanna drop the full price on it, be it for reasons about Nintendo’s actions or just, again, it’s the same game.

And finally, the game gave us a retranslation of the original story and hell yeah Trans Vivian

Balatro ended up in this list because it’s simple, though fun. Kinda like Vampire Survivors. There’s not much I can say about it. It’s single player poker, but cheating and is just incredibly addictive to keep playing that once I beat the 5 base coloured decks I had to go “I NEED TO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE”… and then kept playing it.

Anyway here’s my flush five of a kind, a totally legal move in poker.

“You can beat this game? It’s endless right?” and here’s how I categorised this as a “beat”

Unlocked all challenges and earned the first reward in each, I consider that a beat.

It could be argued that this is an endless game, but the rewards (and achievements) kind of make this something that is a tangible end point.

I’ve no other comments other than “It’s a cute little puzzler where you put down tiles to score points and try to earn more tiles, so you can keep building”. Cute and chill! Lovely when you need something relaxing.

I have a lot of thoughts about Sonic Superstars but at the same time I don’t think it’d hold a full post…

…

Okay, breathe in.

Sonic Superstars is a 2D Sonic game which was left to another team who weren’t the Mania team. The game wants to pump too many new mechanics in instead of smoothly, gating them behind a special stage that I personally feel is the worst in the entire franchise and then eventually requiring them in stages.

Sorry I got angry there let me calm down for a moment.

…

Sonic Superstars does not know what it wants to be, it masquerades as a Classic Sonic 2D game but plays like a modern 2D Sonic game similar to the Sonic Advance games and especially similar to Sonic 4 Episodes 1 & 2, as such it seems to struggle with its own identity and not really grasp what made those classic games fun, learning no lessons from Sonic Mania’s success and taking so many of Sonic 4’s failings. The level design has an over-reliance on poorly telegraphed obstacles and bottomless pits, so so many bottomless pits that it’s an issue even in the first zone, Bridge Hill. Jun Senoue has been forced to use his Sonic 4-esque synths and compositions which is one of his weakest musical qualities but trankfully that is partly tempered by Tee Lopes, Hidenori Shoji, Rintaro Soma, Takahiro Kai and TORIENA (who did my favourite track from Team Sonic Racing that I listened to so many times in 2019 that it dominated my “most played” for years, Bingo Party). Jun’s musical ability has moved on from the Mega Drive era, he should be allowed to make music he wants and not clearly forced to attempt to create music from that era.

But the biggest “sin” from Sonic 4 it took in? Every boss wants to be cinematic, every boss. Classic Sonic battles, hell even the Advance games, knew not to give extreme i-frames to a boss, to allow the player to go ham on the boss at great risk to themselves, be it losing rings or even losing a life. It’s simple risk/reward, the reward being beating a boss quicker, or feeling gratified that you could, and then scoring a greater time bonus. Instead Sonic Superstars will make you sit through the boss going through a lengthy wind-up, before maybe even putting the player at risk, before allowing the player the grace of hitting the boss once, very rarely twice. Before then playing the next wind-up animation and so on.

This is worst in the final boss where it is completely out of the player’s range in the background, leaving you to have to wait for it to bump a missile back at it from behind, but only one before it goes to the next attack animation where you can’t hit it. It then has the audacity after being defeated having a second stage that isn’t checkpointed meaning if you died you have to redo that first stage all over again. Why am I calling them stages? When both stages have individual phases where the attacks change etc. in them. But this is semantics, the fact of the matter is that almost half the time in this the boss is completely invulnerable and you have a time limit to deal with.

This design for bosses is at best boring, at worst frustrating, and always boring. 3D Sonic games have a similar “cinematic wind-up” problem too, but generally you’re doing something in that to build up to knocking the boss’ health down, such as say Egg Walker in Sonic Adventure where you need to damage the legs after it attacks to allow you to attack Eggman directly, all the while giving you reasons to dodge his attacks in the process. See also Biolizard, or Egg Hawk, or Frigate Orcan, etc. You don’t feel like as a player you’re being arbitrarily forced to wait because the game wants to fully run its animations first, generally. There are some serious examples of similar “just gotta wait a while” bosses in 3D Sonic such as Chaos 4 in Sonic Adventure or WYVERN in Sonic Frontiers.

The biggest reason I think I’m frustrated by all this is… Superstars has decent potential in there to shake up the classic formula and play itself, but it’s held back by so many factors that the reception means that SEGA absolutely won’t try again. Except the special stages, there’s no potential there forget them entirely.

At least I got to be a dragon

…Okay maybe Sonic Superstars could’ve been it’s own post.

It starts out interesting, the premise is neat, before long it feels like you’re grinding for the sake of grinding while the game just scales itself tremendously faster than you as the player can. It just began to feel more like a job than a game, a pity.