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

Dragon’s Dogma the type of narrow, niche fanbase that made me know I’d love it whenever I got around to playing it and even though I knew this would happen, I wasn’t ready for quite how much I’d love it.

Dragon’s Dogma is a weird game. It feels like someone played a game of telephone, describing the conventions and goals of the big western RPG genre to the designer of Devil May Cry, who then declared “I got it” and made a game. The reality isn’t quite as funny. Hideaki Itsuno had a lot of the...