I really enjoy doing those little letterboxd reviews because I can sit with a movie for an hour and a half and have a complete experience to mull over and jot some thoughts down about. When a game takes me 20 hours over the course of 2 months that’s a tougher ask.
But when you’re Spyro 1 and my 120% playclock was 6 hours, anything is possible!! It was on sale on Steam Deck for $5!!
Breezy playthrough over a couple nights this week, feels like it should sit with Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie and I don’t hear many people talk about it in that context. Sure it’s a little more simple but it’s really fun. And it’s short!
Good turn your brain off collectathon, sometimes smarter than you’d expect. Last few levels have one thing you either have to look up or get really clever to solve. If you played this on ps1 and tried to do Tree Tops without the internet god bless you.
I was day and date with every Ratchet and Clank until the ps3, so it’s weird that I waited until 2020 to try Insomniac’s most popular thing.
Booted up the ps1 version and thought it looked incredible but the controls were so rough for me launched back into the trilogy within 5 minutes.
Wonderful controls there, simple but uses its two button combat in different ways through the very end. Every level having unique enemies and stuff is great and every major collectible dragon you collect being unique is so good!! Every jiggy in Banjo should have a different cool hat or something.
Worried that the sequels’ deemphasis on platforming is really gonna kill it for me. I was all for Spyro after finishing this first one last time and did not care for 2 asking me to do so many things that were not run forward and collect gems.
Not a game that asks a lot of you, but boy it made for a fun few sittings!
I will probably look into figuring out how to play this with ps1 graphics with better controls one day if I fizzle out on 2 and 3 again. The animations on every enemy ooze with personality even in the remake with a pretty generic but nice art direction. Can’t wait to see em from 20 years ago. I’m a sicko for that shit.
I love the no bullshit collect stuff in hub > find worlds > collect stuff there. Just grabbing all of the stages and jumping from level to level from the menu to hoover up 100% gems did stamp out any artifice that collectathons aren’t empty calories, but sometimes I really like mcdonalds, too. If every game was Disco Elysium I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
**** (Four out of Five Stars)
Somebody just make a (good) letterboxd for games lol.
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Played an hour of Spyro 2:
Fun when the level funnels you to the collectables like Spyro 1 always did, but it sucks that every level seems intent on not doing that as often as possible. Every level so far has had “the part that sucks”, whether it was slowly backtracking behind a little guy to aim rocks at enemies, or slowly moving between two spawn points to kill two dudes until I did it 10 times for no reason. Also after doing those instead of seeing a cool dragon with unique dialogue I got a green orb.
Have yet to leave a level at 100% but not for lack of trying. They made my purple dragon game a dang metroidvania. A big joy of spyro 1 is that you walk into a level once, finish it completely, and never look back. I’m very very early but that doesn’t seem to be how they want you to play this one. Maybe you fill your verbs out really quick and that stops being an issue though, and I agree it’s a cool idea to make the gems currency to unlock stuff. It’s just a bad idea to make the first big one the ability to do underwater levels.
Still has great character and enemy designs unique to each level and that owns. Little cutscene intros for stages also!!
I am going to continue.
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Also uhh, Game of the Year stuff since even thinking about making that post stresses me out. No rules just write, if I wait until the perfect post comes to me I’ll just tell you Elden ring was very good sometime in 2024.
1. Elden Ring – it’s a culmination of everything From has wanted to do for the last decade. When people ask about my favorite games now, I’ll probably mention Elden Ring before Dark Souls.
2. Neon White – Makes you feel so so cool, I want to run and swap weapons really fast and beat more of my friends times. Leaderboard games rule. Play SEUM if you want more like this. Ben Esposito is hilarious and his previous games make me laugh just remembering them, but I can’t not skip the dialogue in this game. For every good line there’s ten about anime teens being horny. Just let me run towards demons please.
3. Vampire Survivors – I put an hour into this when it came out and thought it was neat. Then I put like 15 hours into it a couple months ago and really got it. Three dollars or whatever for this is a steal, they made a whole genre last year, half the games on steam were clones of this. 20 Minutes Till Midnight was maybe my favorite of them.
I didn’t play a ton of new stuff last year, but those were some real good ones. Signalis seems great but I’m pretty early on in it. Neat spooky space station horror game. I hear I should really play Pentiment. I didn’t have time to play the 400 games or whatever that I used to, but I’m also not at the point where I’m ready to retire to the offline colonies quite yet. I enjoy posting too much. See ya soon.
hippochippies 
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