Going to try and keep this one as a reasonable, to the point Game Journal(Spoilers, I failed), but I'm glad I could play both these games after finishing that tome of a Metroid Dread review. At the end of this I'll have my "Dread Review Debriefing", but before that, let me talk about some things I actually enjoyed.

Metroid II gets better with age, and better when you come to it as a willing participant

My palette cleanser after Dread was Metroid II. I ended up using so many Metroid II examples that it felt appropriate to give it a quick play through. This time I played with the EJRTQ Colorization, which I quite liked. I kinda wished I played with Azurelore Korrigan's color Patch(you should read this page and other things she wrote, even if you're not planning on using it) as she's maybe Metroid II's #1 defender, but the patch I had did the job fine. Metroid 2 doesn't need color, but I've played it monochrome enough to justify a little experimentation. I felt like it actually added to the game and it made it clear that the world wasn't actually just the same grey tiles, over and over again? I think a case could be made that being less confused is actually a downgrade, but I think I was confused enough!! 😭

...Aesthetically though there is something about the pure monochrome look. Probably the best way to do a first play through.

This will not be a Feel Good story about Metroid: Dread finally correcting course. I am here today to be a hater.

Not a hater out of spite, or to be a contrarian, or even to shame people for liking the popular thing. Metroid: Dread is many people's(Even John Cena's) favorite Metroid game. The game is a critical and commercial darling. I'm not here to try and make you feel stupid for liking a game I don't enjoy. My values are likely very different from yours and that's fine. A lot of folks I respect deeply enjoy this game. I've lived through enough forum arguments like "Is Metroid Fusion a good game?"(It isn't 😒) to care about winning the Video Game Opinion War.

I'm writing this because my feelings come from the heart. Because 2D Constructed Worlds get into my fucking soul. I can't help but to feel very strongly about them. If I just think a game is bad, I simply stop playing it(Bad is kinda a weasel word here. Bad for me usually means 'Boring' and I love some bad, awful TRASH games). I walk away. Hate happens when I care and I find Metroid is especially good at getting me to care a lot.

I don't want you to hate Metroid: Dread, I wan't you to understand why someone would.

Mario 64 has been one of my favorite Mario games for a long time. This isn't really an uncommon opinion, as this game hits a certain nostalgic window for some people. It's a game people often remember fondly before going back and remembering how janky it is, or how rough the controls can be... how scattershot it's design was. What appeals to me about Mario 64 isn't that I was young. It is that the genre was young and it is the type of weird game that can only exist within a short window. The type of game that gets made when everyone is talented, but no one quite knows what they're doing yet.

Back with Spec Ops: The Line I said I was going to try and make these more informal, but they always seem to spiral into something review-esque, which was never my intention. So this time we're going to go even further. I'm going to start to bust out the bullet point lists to try and get my thoughts out without having to worry about how one point leads into another. I'll have my paragraphs (reading this back, I have a lot of them), but I just need to dump thoughts sometimes. Also, whil...

I Wanna talk about World Tour Mode, but I gotta talk about the Actual Game First