amphibious_ReViews

When I booted The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD up for the first time on my Switch 2, I had not expressly intended it to be a part of my Daddy-Daughter Game Night series. My eldest was playing more Tomodachi Life at the time, so I figured she was focused on that, yet I hadn't even cleared the introduction before she saw giant birds on my screen and was locked in. About a third of my time with the game from then on was spent with her as my cheerleader, pointing out interesting things on the screen and listening with rapt attention as I read the game's dialogue with storybook voices. I have heard many times over the years about how frustrated people were with both the controls and the structure of Skyward Sword. As a kid, I was able to play my brother's copy of the Wii original a few times, and I only ever loved it, so I thought I was just immune to such frustrations. Now, playing the HD version as an adult with a lot more experience (and, arguably, less patience) with vi...

Stardew Valley is the kind of game that you can play forever. No matter what you've accomplished in it, there's always something more to pursue. While that sounds pretty neat, it is also the primary reason that I was too intimidated to start playing, instead letting it rot in my Switch library for nearly a decade. I purchased the game back in 2017 when it first launched on the console, and then I let it lie untouched in my periphery until a friend from work insisted that I finally try it. Over 85 hours of gameplay later, I managed to extricate myself from what I now consider to be an all-timer. Stardew Valley is what happens when you let a fan of classic farming sims create a love letter to the genre. With only a passing fling with Friends of Mineral Town under my belt, I have precious little experience with this side of the cozy gaming spectrum, so I wasn't able to fully appreciate all of the decisions that made Stardew Valley. However, the way it kept my mind in a chokeho...

I was at a work cookout when this localization was announced via a Nintendo Direct. Being who I am, I had to have a single earbud in so I could listen to the live presentation as we sat at the picnic tables waiting for the food. I've been known to have some giddy reactions to Nintendo Direct announcements before ( Xenoblade Chronicles 3 comes to mind), but that was always in the privacy of my own home. If it weren't for this cookout, I would have been working remote and my response to this announcement would have likely gone unnoticed by anyone but my cats. Instead, I had to explain to my boss why the official translation of a thirteen year old Japanese-only DS game prompted an audible yelp amidst the picnic table banter. Now, a few years after that embarrassing moment, I've finally beaten the game that many consider one of the best in the Ace Attorney franchise. When the official localization to English was announced, I already had the fan translation of the D...

I'm not usually one for reviewing demos, since I don't think a pared-down experience properly exposes you to the game it represents. I've been known to review them anyway if they're a wholly separate experience, not just a vertical slice or content-limited introduction, but the new Tomodachi Life demo does not fit that bill, so what gives? When I downloaded this demo, I was driven by the nostalgia of receiving the "Move-In Version" for the 3DS game over a decade ago. When I first booted it up, I wanted to show my daughter how silly it was, but I intended to be the one who played it. However, she was immediately so interested that I switched over to her profile and handed her the reigns. What followed was a little girl enjoying a short demo so much that it seemed like a full game through her eyes. She got significantly more time out of it than I would have, and still wants to keep playing around with her Mii islanders. In light of that, I thought this absolute...

Spurred on largely by NintendoLife's Alex Olney, I have purchased most of Siactro's library on Switch. All of their games are detrimentally inexpensive, to the point that I would have thought they were shovelware if I hadn't been told otherwise. First on that list is Toree 3D, which includes the levels from its remix on PC, Toree 3D: Jumbled Jam. While I don't think this first game is at all groundbreaking, its controls are tight and the PS1-inspired graphics are pretty attractive. While I don't have much personal experience with Sonic games yet, I think the inspiration is obvious in the gameplay. There's an emphasis on speed and precision in all of the main stages, with a timer on the top of your screen constantly reminding you of how long you are taking. However, like the only Sonic game that I've beaten so far, the focus was split and the game's speed suffered as a result. Especially within the Jumbled Jam remix stages, there were many times where I h...

It's been a long time coming but I'm finally starting the last canonical Ace Attorney games I have yet to play. I knew a little bit about what to expect going into Ace Attorney Investigations, but nothing concrete. In fact, my only exposure to the games has been screenshots on digital storefronts and the announcement trailer for the collection. After having been focused on the 3D entries in the series for the past few years, it was fun to return to the 2D era again. Although, with the HD sprites enabled, this certainly doesn't feel like a DS game anymore. While not as poignant as the Great Ace Attorney games, not as loaded with twists as the Phoenix Wright stories, Miles Edgeworth has an excellent first entry into this spin-off duology. As the name implies, Ace Attorney Investigations fleshes out the investigation side of the mainline games, entirely forgoing the courtroom. While it makes sense, I was honestly baffled when I finished the first chapter and hadn't done an...

Well, I guess they can't all be winners. Enamored by the new(ish) Netflix revival of Teletubbies, my daughter insisted that we play the Teletubbies PSone game as our next Daddy-Daughter Game Night game. I was skeptical, but I gave it a shot for her. Now that we're on the other side of it, my daughter will still occasionally ask to play it again, but neither of us had much fun in the moment. I don't hold kids games to a very high standard, but this one just has too many faults for me to overlook. For a game claiming to be for children, Play with the Teletubbies is needlessly complicated. There's no way that I could see a kid playing this without constant intervention from a parent or older sibling. Something I appreciated about games like Dora the Explorer: Barnyard Buddies was the fact that my daughter could play independently if she wanted, relying on Dora's spoken word to know what to do. The same cannot be said for Teletubbies, unless my girl can figure out how ...

My daughter and I took a step back in complexity after  Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey to play another game from my childhood. Thanks to a couple of DVDs from the library, my daughter has recently taken an interest in the original Dora The Explorer show, so I introduced her to a game I had played many times over. The combination of a recognizable character and the farm animal theming in Dora The Explorer: Barnyard Buddies immediately hooked my little girl. Likely because she only needed to use one button for every action this time around, she was suddenly confident enough to handle the buttons all on her own, relying more on the instructions from Dora than from me. She even took a few turns with the joystick this time! While she knows in her head how the stick works, she is still having a little trouble translating that to actual thumb movements. She's getting close, though, and every new game seems to be another step forward! Dora The Explorer: Barnyard Buddies is structured ...

I was first turned on to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown when I heard it described as the spiritual successor to Metroid Dread . Knowing it would probably be ages before I got another mainline Metroid game, I was pretty excited by the prospect of having a similar game so soon. I felt a bit burnt-out on the Metroidvania genre for a while, so I let this one sit on my shelf while I allowed my interest to start simmering again. Picking it up now, I don't know why I ever walked away! The exploration and growth that defines search-action games is so addictive, and the team behind The Lost Crown must be experts. Shaking up the series in more ways than one, this Prince of Persia entry follows Sargon, a member of an elite fighting team known as The Immortals. Instead of being the titular prince himself, Sargon is tasked with rescuing the prince from a cursed mountain following his abduction from the palace. Mount Qaf itself, the setting for most of the game, also acts as the vehicle for ju...

It was a long road to get me excited about a game like Tunic. Because of my growing love for the Ace Attorney games, I was looking for something that would similarly require deductive skills. Because of the video game music compilations I was listening to at work, Outer Wilds was sitting patiently in the back of my mind, even though I knew almost nothing about it. When Outer Wilds came to Switch and I learned that it was all about making discoveries and using clues to solve mysteries, I had to try it. Soon after, it became a serious contender for my favorite game of all time, and I wanted more. In my obsessive consumption of Outer Wilds discussions on YouTube, I noticed that Tunic would often be mentioned in the same breath. Unfortunately, it didn't have an in-game log like Outer Wilds, so if I wanted to play Tunic the right way, I needed to use a real-life notebook. Up until this point, I have actively avoided games that require me to put pen to paper, but Tunic wouldn't disl...

I don't think I've ever been so blind-sided by a game announcement in my life. I've been surprised by the short time between Xenoblade releases on Switch; I've been hyped for Ace Attorney games finally getting an English localization; this, however, is the first time a formative game from my childhood got a surprise sequel nearly 16 years after the fact. Before I bought it two or three more times on other platforms, the original World of Goo  was gifted to me by my aunt via a CD-RW she put together herself. I was a bit too young and inexperienced to recognize the dubious origin of that Sharpie-labeled disc at the time, but I wasn't too young to pop it in our family PC and stack some goo. Thus, my lifelong appreciation of tiny sentient goo balls began, and I'm thrilled that I was finally able to bear witness to their triumphant return! World of Goo 2 was immediately familiar and nostalgic. From the 2D Boy splash screen to the goo world itself being used as a menu...