amphibious_ReViews

Blue's Big Musical marks the start of a review series I hope to continue for a long time. I'm calling it "Daddy-Daughter Game Night," and it will consist exclusively of games that I'm playing with my kiddos. While Blue's Clues will always hold a special place in my heart, I doubt I would have even found out this game existed if my eldest daughter didn't love the show too. I sought out any Blue's Clues games I could find to play with her, and this was the standout in terms of both accessibility and show-accuracy. Starting off my new review series strong, both my daughter and I had a ton of fun snuggling up and finding clues together. As it was designed with kids in mind, Blue's Big Musical is unsurprisingly pretty simple. You are granted control of Blue as she and Steve work together to set up a musical in their back yard. Other than the mini-games, most of what you are doing is moving Blue to the left and right and interacting with the characters a...

This is it folks. We've made it. The grand finale. Just over a year ago, spurred on by the release of NetPass, an online resurrection of the 3DS's native StreetPass feature, I decided to beat every game in the StreetPass Mii Plaza. That journey concludes here with Feed Mii. While it took me the most real-life days to beat out of the bunch, it was one of the shortest games in terms of how long I actually played per session. It's thanks to that and the clever premise behind the game that it was one of my favorites in the plaza. Long before I embarked on my Mii Plaza quest, I was playing Puzzle Swap and Find Mii . These two games came packed-in with the software, whereas all the rest were introduced later as paid DLC. Because it was free, I would be surprised if anyone with a 3DS hadn't also invested at least some of their time into Find Mii. That's where this game comes in. Running with the assumption that the heroes in Find Mii were not adventuring on an empty stoma...

Returning to my StreetPass Mii Plaza quest after a multi-month hiatus, I decided I had to adjust my play style for Monster Manor. This game, while initially one of the more engaging choices in the collection, was the primary reason I took a break from StreetPass at the start of the new year. I was consistently spending the most amount of time on Monster Manor with every pass through the plaza, but the gameplay never changed and the finish line always seemed so far out of reach. There is a fake ending about halfway through the base adventure, and if it was a real conclusion, I would have been okay. Instead, my frustration with Monster Manor peaked and my interest quickly started to fade. My restructured strategy felt a little sloppy, but it did speed the game up a bit, giving me the strength to see it through to the end. Monster Manor is an exploration-style game that finds you trapped in a haunted tower. Your challenge is to find the way to the top so you can defeat the master of the m...

I first played Pokémon Trozei on a friend's DS while at a sleepover while I was still in elementary school. I didn't have much time with it, but I loved Pokémon and I was into puzzles, so I just couldn't get this game out of my mind. The 3DS received a digital-only sequel that I bought pretty early on, but it never hit quite the same. Now, closing in on two decades later, I finally buckled down and played the whole campaign. I think my conclusion is that I moderately enjoyed Pokémon Trozei. It has a lot going for it, but it definitely wasn't the juggernaut my nine-year-old brain made it out to be. As a puzzle game, Pokémon Trozei had the opportunity to be mind-numbingly basic and it still would have sold on the Pokémon name alone. Instead, Genius Sonority developed a unique take on the falling-block genre that cleverly took advantage of the still-new Nintendo DS hardware. Using the touch screen, you'll be sliding Pokémon in the bottom five rows as you try to make ma...

After obsessively playing the Pokémon Trading Card Game on two different official clients for the longest time, I finally fell out of love with the competitive scene about a year ago. Since then, I've still enjoyed collecting the cards physically, but I don't have much disposable income to direct their way. The recently released Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket introduced an entirely independent TCG with a focus on collecting that scratches that itch without breaking my wallet. Impressively, it's simplified ruleset also allowed me to play competitively without navigating any of the issues I took with the official game. The elevator pitch for PTCGP is that you get to open two packs of Pokémon cards a day at no cost. While the digital cards aren't one-to-one with their physical counterparts, that's still analogous to a minimum $10 investment you're getting for free. While I appreciate that the other two live-service Pokémon TCG clients supported the full rules and...

I had heard that Balatro was addicting. I had heard that Balatro was a time-sink. Yet, for some reason, I took Balatro on vacation with me when I had intended to clear a pile of short games off of my backlog. As I held my daughter's head up on the plane so she could sleep, I needed to find something to play one-handed, so I booted up this unsuspecting game-of-the-year nominee on my Switch Lite. After that, it was all over. I didn't pick up another game for the rest of my vacation, nor for the two weeks that followed. I have been hooked by games before, but I was drowning in Balatro and I couldn't find the surface.   At first glance, it doesn't look like there's much more to Balatro than there is to something like Spider Solitaire. That's a game that had its claws in me way back when I was still using Windows XP, and I assumed this was going to be similarly addictive. There is so much more than a simple card game going on here, though. I'm only recently disco...

I haven't spent at much time with Trivial Pursuit Live as I typically would have with a game I'm reviewing, but that's for a reason. I attempted to enjoy this game as much as possible, which meant playing it sparingly. The first day I tried it out, I played multiple rounds with my family and realized that playing Trivial Pursuit Live any more than once or twice in a blue moon will shine a much-unwanted spotlight on its many blemishes. However, if you leave the recommended buffer between each session, what you get is a fairly competent game show styled spin-off of the most popular trivia board game in history.   Since I received the Hasbro Game Night bundle as a gift around seven years ago, I've probably played Trivial Pursuit Live an average of once per year. In that time, the game was unceremoniously delisted from every storefront but Xbox and replaced by a sequel that I haven't touched. I can think of a few reasons why Ubisoft might have thought a sequel would be ...