Main ListPrevious Listbold games are games that have been beaten, previously beaten, or are unbeatable.
italicized games are in progress.
standard games are games I am not currently trying to beat.
strikethrough games are games that have been abandoned.
86.
Elden Ring (PC)
We got my wife a gaming PC built, so we bought her Elden Ring, but then she wanted me to play with her and help her and stuff, so she bought me Elden Ring too. I have a laptop that can play the game so it all worked out. Last time I built a mage character, this time I went full strength with this character... like to the point that I'm real squishy, but I can one shot most enemies, most bosses only take 2-3 hits too lmao. I finally started putting points into vigor so I'm getting less squishy. I've basically only played to level up, keep up with her, and upgrade my sword and mimic tear summon ash. It's been a lot of "Hey, I need help here", OK, give me a few minutes to get there, where I absolutely run through bosses with me and my summon ash. I even had the pleasure of completely skipping the Castle Sol dungeon by jumping off a cliff straight to the boss room. Enjoying my time with this game again on PC, even vanilla. I took it a step further with this character and duel wielded massive strength weapons to the point almost every enemy got one shot and most bosses were trivial. Had a lot of good fun playing with that new play style for me. Next up is a second randomized run (after I finish getting the achievements) with seamless co-op so my wife and I can play randomizer together.
Rating: Highest Recommendation
87.
SkateBIRD (X1)
Another game leaving game pass real soon. I started it up first I think, but I just wasn't feeling it. I don't know if I was tired, in a mood, or just didn't understand what was going on with the game, but I dropped it pretty quickly because I was like whatever, I don't get it. Then a day or two later I came back and decided to give it another go because I wanted to play something and thought it would be silly to play it in front of other people. Then I really got into it and beat the game in like 2 days. I've got one achievement left on the game, but it's the achievement for beating all missions, collecting all collectibles, etc. I've actually only got like 6 collectibles left to get and all of the missions from the post-game park, so I could play tonight for instance and probably get the last achievement today. Overall the game is fun and plays like OG Tony Hawk with simple button moves. The missions are pretty repetitive but simple, the story is there but I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to be honest. It's a good game that probably is better than I let it be because I couldn't be bothered to actually pay attention. I also wasn't quite sure I understood the ending, did the human get fired and get a severance check?
Rating: Soft pass
88.
The Artful Escape (XS)
Game was leaving game pass so I finally decided to get around to finishing the game. I had only gotten maybe 5 minutes into the game before I had abandoned it originally, but I stuck it through this time around. Honestly, the game sucks hard. There really isn't much to it, just walk right and infrequently play simon says. Story isn't even that interesting nor does it make much sense, just a kinda weird game.
Rating: Hard pass
89.
Lost Words (X1)
I saw this game on Game pass and it looked like a game my son would maybe be interested in watching me play so I started it up for him. First time he barely paid attention. Second time he paid enough attention for me to get through the 1st Chapter. Third time he paid better attention and I think I got to Chapter 4, but it was bedtime so I said no more and he's all "Chapter 5!". Haven't been able to get him to pay enough attention to keep playing, so who knows when I'll get to finishing this. It's a pretty basic platformer, with a children's story book plot mixed with a real world plot that might be a bit more interesting for adults, and then it's got a bit of choose your own adventure, but I'm thinking it makes no difference on the overall story, just changes the tone and flourish. Wound up finishing the game on my own as my kid wasn't even mildly interested in watching it anymore. He was into this game when he was learning to read, but once he learned to read, he moved onto math and was infatuated with that to the point that words bored him.
Rating: Hard pass
90.
Going Under (X1)
Another game leaving game pass, this seems to be a pattern where I'm either playing games I've already beaten or I'm doing game pass things. Anyway, just a rogue-ish dungeon crawler game. I played the game with tons of accessibility features turned on because I just didn't have the time to dump 20+ hours into the game with it leaving soon, so the game was quite easy for me, which isn't a complaint, just an observation. Just a weird corporate internship gone awry type of thing. The context is interesting, but the execution is a bit weird. Not my bad personally, but I could see a lot of folks enjoying this game and it's jokes. The jokes either fell flat or hit too hard
Rating: Soft pass
91.
Save Room (PC)
First game I beat on my Steam Deck, not really on purpose, just this game was short and I happened to play it after ending Elden Ring sessions. It's literally a puzzle game based around the inventory management system in Resident Evil. Really not much else to it.
Rating: Hard pass
92.
Bloodroots (XS)
Game was leaving game pass and it looked interesting enough. I played through about half the game like normal but started getting agitated with the concepts and mechanics so I leveraged accessibility features to get through the rest of the game quickly. It's got that same style of gameplay as like Hotline Miami where you kill everyone and you die in one hit, so quick repeated runs. Game gets a little too hard towards the end and the platforming in isometric perspective will have you waste runs because you couldn't gauge distance or depth.
Rating: Hard pass
93.
100 Frogs (PC)
Literally a black and white image with 100 frogs hidding in the image, click the 100 frogs. Honestly a pretty chill experience and I see there are a lot of similar games out on Steam, I don't know that I'd recommend the game, but it's chill to play.
Rating: Hard pass
94.
Forza Horizon (360)
I had beaten this game like a decade ago but I decided to go back to it and see if I missed anything. I also had in my head that I'd check out the 1000 club DLC stuff because I never checked it out. Well the DLC was free, but it's locked behind their servers which don't exist anymore so nothing to do there. I wound up driving around and earning a few of the remaining achievements that I could get without the servers. Game still stands on its own without the DLC or servers, but it's also only like a 10 hour experience.
Rating: Soft recommendation.
95.
Forza Horizon 2 (X1)
Don't get me wrong, all of the Forza Horizon games are great, but I have a thing with this one where I truly believe this is the one Horizon game that will stand the test of time. It was little to no server reliant features like 4 and 5, and it may only have so many races, but they stretch that out by recommending that you do all of the races under all of the various car types which stretches it out to hundreds of championships to earn. I haven't done a meaningful chunk and I've already dumped like 40 hours into the game. 3 is the only one I'm not sure about because it's been so long and I don't believe 3 had the same online features as 4 and 5, so 3 might stand the test just as well as 2.
Rating: Highly recommended
96.
Forza Horizon 3 (X1)
Apparently I bought all of the expansion DLC for this game and kind of just never played it, so I've actually got a lot of stuff to do in this game still, but I'm also finding so much to do in 2, 4, and 5 still. I have to say keep this review with a bag of salt because I could have so much more to write when I really get back into this one, which won't be this year.
Rating: Highly recommended
97.
Forza Horizon 5 (XS)
I've been trying to do more in the older games, but with the 10th anniversary content being rolled out I've decided to play this one a bit. For some reason I've been doing the seasons content for this series, not sure why, I think I had it in my head there was some fancy thing you'd get for doing the 10th anniversary series, but :shrug: I still really hope they at EoL enable it so folks can go back and do old series content offline, like at least the non online elements.
Rating: Highly recommended
98.
Project Wingman (X1)
This is the only game leaving game pass this time that I was mildly interested in. I went in expecting Ace Combat paint by numbers and what I basically got was Ace Combat paint by numbers. It was a fun experience, it had lots of warnings about no checkpoints, but I believe Ace Combat was the same way, either way, I knock it points for that, I hate having to replay huge sections and stuff... but I overcame it and beat the game. The end of the game, like the last 4 missions, is where the game got interesting and had me actually paying attention. That's really unfortunate to be honest because I skipped over so much because I just didn't care about the plot. I saw a meme about the game after beating it which had me actually look up stuff about the game, which the game itself wasn't interesting enough for me to do after the fact, so I have a slightly better idea of the plot thanks to a meme convincing me to look more into it. Honestly, it's a good game, but it just makes me want to play Ace Combat.
Rating: Soft pass
99.
Atelier Ryza 2 (NS)
It took me a really long time to get into this game and get around to this game. I really loved the first entry in this trilogy and bought the 2nd game day one, expecting to immediately play it, but I just put it off. Not because I didn't want to play or anything, I just kept putting it off. Then I finally started playing the game and kept getting distracted. Once the 3rd entry got announced I knew I couldn't put it off any longer, so I dove in. The game is great. More of the same from the first game with some minor improvements and some not so great things. Story is good, characters are great, gameplay loop is borderline addictive... however some faults: the limited storage at your Atelier, it took time to hit it, but once I did I was annoyed at having to essentially throw stuff away, either give me no limit, or allow me to reduce to gems/sell to town lady instead of just tossing stuff; Let me reduce to gems on the fly in the field, it would make the game much better not to have to just throw things away, give me a way to reduce to gems on the fly; Too many team members, the 3 person main team with a single support is pretty good, I very rarely actually leveraged the support person, but I wound up with my team of 3 and just never used anyone else... either give me incentive to use other characters or just don't give me the option? These are minor things but I feel like it kind of breaks up the purpose of stuff. Early game had a lot of emphasis on 'help the townsfolk' but that quickly just went away and I rarely saw any incentive to doing the quests as I rarely bought stuff from anyone and the rewards were honestly not important if you aren't buying from merchants. It would've been nice if some of the quests could've earned you things directly instead of money to go buy things. It's a dumb thing, but if you give me the money to buy a table, I'm not going to buy a table, but if you give me a quest that just gives me a table, I'm more willing to do the quest, not really sure why I work that way, but I do. I also would've liked ways in game to earn/create outfits instead of just oh sorry that's dlc, but I get it... I guess. Anyway, great game, first game is better, but this game is still fantastic.
Rating: Highly recommended
100.
Miss Kobayashi's Dragonmaid: Burst Forth (NS)
A little sad that this wound up being game 100, but I decided to play this because I figured it would be short, it would give me a chance to give the shmup genre another chance, and I like the anime. First off, this game isn't English dubbed, so this is my first experience with the Japanese dub's VAs. I've heard a lot of shit about the English dub for this series and I always shrugged it off saying meh, it's ok. First thing I'll note is that 90% of the cast the different character's have similar tones between English and Japanese and I think that's really cool that, imo, it matches... however, that last 10%... Lucoa, in Japan she's sultry and almost cougarous, but in English she's bubbly and an airhead... so if that's the complaint... I get it, it completely changes the tone and quite frankly the character. Anyway, as for the game itself, it's just a standard shmup it feels like, it's got accessibility options that makes the game easier for folks who suck or just can't care, but I feel like most shmup games probably have that. And I was not expecting the game to do the, I guess, perv thing of as you take damage you lose your clothes, that seems weird for this, but maybe I'm forgetting that that probably happened in the anime too, I guess.
Rating: Hard pass
101.
Next Space Rebels (X1)
Another leaving game pass games. This one is a rocket building game, you start with like little model rockets and work your way up to the point that you can launch out of the atmosphere and into space, with the end goal of launching a satellite into orbit. You get different endings based on certain decisions made throughout your playthrough. Honestly it's a pretty fun game to play and kind of addicting to sit there and mess with configurations to do different things... though I will say the robotics parts I didn't get so I fudged my way through those challenges and I wound up youtubing how to solve a few different challenges and I never really got the hang of the tagging system to progress, even using a cheatsheet with all of the tags, I still didn't really get the system, especially at the end I was actively trying to leverage the system to do stuff and it still wasn't quite doing what I expected it to do. And then with all of that, there is no good ending, all three endings are pretty bad and seem to just tell the tale that people are dumb and don't know what they are doing or something. As fun as this game is, I have to imagine something else does it better.
Rating: Soft pass
102.
Sonic Unleashed (360)
I got Sonic Frontiers on the cheap and have been hearing how good it is, so I decided to get back into my Sonic franchise run. Slightly surprised that this is my first attempt this year (November) at continuing this run. I honestly went into this game with higher expectations than I should have because I'd heard good things about this game, like retrospective stuff. Obviously I hated the janky Sonic sections because the physics and everything are always broken, but I had higher expectations for the Werehog sections. Side rant, "were" means human and "hog" would more be in reference to pigs... so he's a man-pig. It won't ever not bother me. Should be Hedgewolf or something. Whatever. Anyway, the "werehog" sections started out fine and I relatively enjoyed it... until I realized that it had Mario 64 style progression where you have to collect stupid medals to unlock levels. So I had to make sure to start paying attention to that, which was kind of annoying... by the end of the game I had to go and replay levels to get medals so I could unlock the last level. Then the game started its betrayal... so many levels felt like the enemies just wouldn't stop coming, I kept dying, but I kept trying and eventually they'd stop spawning, so it was okay... but then the final level/set of levels actually had multiple sections where the enemies really do infinitely spawn... I sat there through so many lives and so much time until I googled it and found out that they do spawn infinitely and you just need to find the hidden button and gtfo of there. Like honestly, it's still the best 3D Sonic I've played, but that's a real low bar.
Rating: Soft pass
103.
Sonic Rush (NDS)
I started this one I long while back, but being on DS it was hard to keep going for some stupid reason. Anyway, found my DS and picked this back up, beat it pretty quick. Not too long of a game, solid 2D sonic experience. I honestly don't have a ton to say about this one as it went by real fast, but by the numbers 2D Sonic from what I recall.
Rating: Soft pass
104.
Sonic Rush Adventure (NDS)
I started this one immediately after Rush, expecting more of the same, but it's like a cross between Rush and like an adventure game. The game obviously relies too much on DS mechanics like they are shoehorned in, but they do that shit for DS and Wii a lot. Gameplay is pretty good, but I didn't realize that the game is one of those games where you have to manually save, so when the game crashed towards the end I had to start over, so I said fuck it, went and found a save online, put it on my cart and continued where I left off at, but like the save file had obviously beaten the game, so I had to kind of figure out where to go and what to do on my own. Honestly it ruined the entire experience for me, had I not been able to find a save file as quickly as I did, I would've abandoned the game and just honestly I might have stopped the entire franchise run of this. I get a lot of shit for this opinion, because it's a common staple of RPGs, but like games should just fucking have autosave, don't tell me it's my fault for not saving often, I know that, it isn't helpful, and autosave isn't that complex of a feature when you already have a save system, you are just automatically initiating a manual save.
Rating: Hard pass
105.
Sonic Riders (PS2)
Hooked up my PS2 and started this one. Reminded me of Rivals at first because of how bad I was doing and how I didn't know what the fuck to do with this game. So I went and grabbed the instruction manual and read through. That helped a little, but gawd this game really requires you to get your shit together to get through it. Honestly, this game is tough as nails and doesn't give you much leeway to work with if you fuck up. Plus the rubber banding is real. That seems to be a thing in these competitive Sonic games, the rubber banding works for the bots but not for you. I worked pretty hard to get to the final set of races, and the final race was just fucking tough as nails that I had to do the race over and over and watch what the bots were doing and kind of piece everything together until I managed to get a perfect run together.
Rating: Hard pass
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