You make a good point. However, mushroom power-ups could be carried between levels if you could avoid getting hit, which wasn't true in SMB2. I'd actually forgotten that it wasn't possible to carry it between levels.

Thank you.

"This marks the first time that it is possible to miss beneficial upgrades in a Mario series title."

I'm not quite sure what you mean there. The mushrooms only upgrade your life meter until the end of the current stage. The coins let you get extra lives in the mini-game, but that's not unusual. Neither represents a significant diversion from what came before. In the first game, you could miss all sorts of power-ups if you didn't hit the right blocks. You also couldn't scroll the screen back to the left, so exploration was more linear and items were even more likely to get missed.

Do you have the balls to-- well, no. Just the one at a time.

Good tagline - I understood that reference.

Before berating you for still not having played Cat Lady after I've championed it for a decade, I'll talk about Downfall. I played the original game of this a little after my first run though Cat Lady and, honestly, I prefer that version to this one. It's a lot more raw and scratchy and isn't trying to retroactively fit itself into a trilogy it wasn't originally designed for. It also sidesteps the voice acting which is... often not great. I'd say go back and give it a go once this game has faded from memory a bit, but I can't even convince you to play the best indie game on the market, so what chance I?

It's a very good review. Thank you for writing it so I feel less bad about never doing so after covering the rest of the series.

It never even comes close to reaching Top Gear, but I don't think the chief reason it the bumper car effect. The challenge in the SNES precursors (only the first of those three was a game worth playing, however) is mollified and stultified, clearly from a view of the average player (or buyer!) like that of LLMs opening every answer they give with "Your question is a brilliant one" and "learning apps" showing a flashy writing on screen that "You are doing great. Very well!" after every not-too-wrong answer you give.

Except if the player commits not to end within the first 3, it is very hard not to end a race in the first three. I am so annoyed at this game being much worse than it could easily have been only due to deliberate design choices that I may write a full review over it.

The problem with all this releases and products is that they very seldom match, let alone out-do, their older models, except for people of this age who call every earnestness and respect of the player on the part of a game as a "QoL lack", "frustrating" and the like names.

I got *Horizon Chase* days ago, and it falls short of its source material, *Top Gear*/*Top Racer*, and mostly it does due to intentional design, such as the adopted imperative to make sure any player will rank in the first three in every race, except if they deliberate to park their car till a race's end, and other more infantilizing "incentives to play".

I haven't tried this specific *Castlevania*, nor I am going to, but all new instalments in old glory franchises over the at least last 10 years, together with remakes, and "upgrades", have simplified, toned down, and done that betraying the rich soul of the originals, or they have been plainly uninspired, and when you try 10 of them and encounter no exception to this rule, you may decide to stop giving them a chance (after all, who can claim to have played, for real, all the old ones? This leaves adoption of new-old releases as a fashion-following exercise, and nothing more than that, in my view. New is the best option for really new IP and games, and only those).

What was intended as a comment turned into a short blog post, left in the comments, lol.

Thanks; that will work even better for me because now, there's no chance it will be placed under Mafia III: Definitive Edition!

I just moved it over to the right game for you. No need to delete and repost.

Yeah, this sub-genre was better when it was used more sparingly. Now, it's like too many of them are samey. I've played a handful that were just fine, but not much more than that. Even some of the Souls-like ones are getting a bit samey. Still, I occasionally find ones that surprise me, and though I had a feeling I would dig this one, I was not prepared to like it as much as I did.

Thanks for reading!

Hey, yo! Last night, when I was on the site, I noticed I made a bit of a mistake. In that this review is for Mafia: Definitive Edition and I posted it under Mafia II: Definitive Edition. Since I posted it as a staff review, which are supposed to be permanent and not able to be removed on the writer's whim, I can't delete it. So if anyone with that ability can do so, I'd be grateful and I'll then submit it under the proper (hopefully) game next time.

Really good review. I get what you say about Metroidvanias and how it's cool that they are getting a lot tougher than SotN and several of its mobile Castlevania heirs. One things I really dug about this game was how powerful some bosses were and how tough it could be to get to them due to the opposition in your way. That's a big part of why I loved Blasphemy and Hollow Knight. They were great, both in being atmospheric and in being legit challenges that I had to work my ass off to get through.

One thing about this genre is that I have the toughest time truly knowing just what makes a game click for me or not. Where it winds up being more a vibe than a situation where I can say, "Nope, this isn't working." Like, a month or so ago, I picked up FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch because it was leaving PS Plus and it was one of the many games there I had on my list of stuff I wanted to try. For a week or two, I was playing it regularly, but it was this "it's fun, but..." vibe where some times, I'd be having a great time and sometimes, I'd feel I was going through the motions. And then I just didn't play it for four or five days and realized I probably no longer had enough time to beat it before it was pulled, so I just deleted it. I could not tell you why I stopped or why I had days where I wasn't feeling; that was just how it was. It was kind of the same with GRIME farther back, but at least with that game, it was full-on with Souls-like combat, but side-scrolling, and I at least know myself enough to know that some days, I want something easier, so trying a game like that and having a time limit is a recipe for failure.

But when one of these games works, it works. This wasn't my favorite and you liked it more than I did, but I thought it was really pretty and a great love letter to SotN by the guy who made that game.

Tetris, one of the most overrated games. (In the same genre: Meteos, the DS original that could be played with the Stylus, could be the most underrated in vg history.)

Title: Death Stranding 2: On The Beach
Platform: PS5

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps5/389485-death-stranding-2-on-the-beach/data

Added.

Thanks.

Title: Dungeons of Dreadrock
Platform: PC
Release date: Mar 15 2022
Square image: https://dungeons-of-dreadrock.com/favicon.ico
Developer / Publisher: Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier
Info URL: https://www.mobygames.com/game/184211/

(Also available on iOS, Android and Switch, with slightly earlier release dates.)

Added.

There's actually another Tetris game on the Saturn called Tetris Plus. It has a traditional mode, but another mode where you must guide a person, who looks suspiciously like Mario, to an exit by getting rid of blocks. There's a catch where you have to do this before a spiky ceiling crashes down on him. I have the Game Boy version, and it's actually kinda frustrating from what little I played of it. Would be interesting to tackle that one day if I ever pick up the Saturn version.

Thanks for catching the typo!

Decidedly average, eh? This is the fate of nearly every Tetris variant I've ever played. Thanks for the review. I certainly wouldn't be scrambling for Tetris on my Saturn if I had any other one...

By the way, caught a little typo in the first sentence of the first paragraph: "Noting really." This certainly wasn't a game of note, that's for sure...just a blip on the radar that goes away leaving people puzzled. (I fear no puns.)

Letting users add the games they're reviewing would be a good thing indeed. Not adding games on their own, that will open a can of worms with spam and all and would take a lot of effort to curate properly, but when you submit a review, have the option to write it for a game that's not yet in the database and add the game yourself along with the review. And since the review is checked anyway, the game entry will also be, so there won't be room for spam or incorrect entries.

And I was actually making a note of the great number of reviews recently. The site had gotten down to barely a few a month not long ago, and now new reviews are posted most days, and sometimes even a couple in one day. Maybe still just by a few users, maybe as part of a series, but it's quite an uptick in activity anyway.

As for new and popular vs. old and niche, you can find info about what's new and popular everywhere else just fine. People looking for that won't come here (or on any review site, for that matter, considering the AI bots).

The last review of a game right now is for a release a few months old, and we have seen reviews posted regularly in the preceding weeks and months, but I take your point.

You have correctly identified an issue: that the community is no longer so large that it automatically reviews all the hot new releases and buzzworthy games people are talking about. However, your two proposed solutions won't work to address that issue. Review posting slowed even during a period of a few years when I spent my time doing almost nothing besides adding listings for all the game releases I could as they happened. I'm talking about several thousand listings over the course of a year. Of those, four or five games got reviewed, if that.

It is clear the solution is not to post listings for every game that releases, or even just every popular game that releases. At some point, we will probably add listings for a lot of the recent big games of note, but will anyone review them? Perhaps not.

Similarly, throwing the whole site into a Wordpress template (to match what all the other sites are doing these days, from IGN down to the smaller network sites run by the likes of Valnet and Gamurs) is no sort of solution. One of the key things people like about HonestGamers is its individuality and its indie vibe. Certainly, I am capable of making all sorts of changes to the site's design. I've done it before.

The biggest issues are that people don't always feel seen, especially in the current era when Google provides AI overviews (so that people don't have to click through to visit the actual sites) and when AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Grok and others just summarize what they've seen on HonestGamers and elsewhere.

The solution is community. We have a built-in audience here that lurks and reads a lot of new reviews. And we do have an audience of strangers that comes through and checks out our reviews new and old.

Adding a bunch of listings or a bunch of bells and whistles won't change the current situation. We simply need more people to post reviews for the games we already have listed. And if people want to review newer games of note, such as the ones you listed, I'm happy to make sure they are listed in our database to facilitate those reviews. I have no problem doing that, and I still plan to contribute reviews for newer games to go along with some of the exciting retro initiatives critics have already undertaken on the site.

We remain one of the best places on the web to find retro content, and I'm super excited about that. But I'm not stuck in the past. I just want to make sure that as the site continues to lumber into the present, it does so with a sense of purpose without diluting what we are all about. I am also considering options to make it easier for contributors to add listings for the games they plan to actually review, especially if the need for that increases.

Anyone who likes what we are doing here is invited--as always--to pitch in with quality reviews, and to tell friends about what we're doing. Invite them to join in the process. Let them know there is an outlet they may have missed that values written reviews over video reviews, that curates content to ensure each new review posted meets certain quality standards. And make sure to provide feedback when reviews appear for old games you like, or new games you've been thinking about trying, to remind writers they're not posting a message to the void but are instead reaching actual gamers who share their interests.

HonestGamers is a community for celebrating games old and new. I no longer have any particular goal to cover every game ever released with a stub page that only search engine crawlers ever see. I want to see lively discussion about great games/niches writers are passionate about, and to let that passion spread throughout the site. Otherwise, what's the point?

Yeah, I suppose that honestgamer is fine by having the last introduction post in the forum and last review of a game being a few years old....

"perhaps a redesign could help attract younger generations"

Please don't. The entire Internet is designed like that. Leave one place old-school at least, damn it!

Same goes for chasing "the market" and "trends". Almost everyone else does that, but little niches also need their, well, little niches, not to be driven out even of those so few remaining places.