I started a lot of videogames but didn't see many of them through yet. Only played a bit each of Disco Elysium and Bean and Nothingness, but they're both excellent so far. As for games I played more than an hour of:
Pokemon Scarlet
Wow the glitches and the framerate issues really are that bad, huh? I thought for sure that Twitter was just cherry-picking bad clips the same way that Twitter does for every Pokemon game. No, the game really does slow to a crawl when you look at a hill wrong. (Played this before the game was patched - hopefully it's better now. It deserves to be better.)
I play these games in a very dumb way, going for raw power and type matchups. I think this is the first Pokemon I've played which seemed to expect more of me than that, especially in the last few hours of the game. Nemona in particular fucking cooked me in the last fight with her. (Hope that's not a spoiler. I think you know you're going to fight Nemona a lot as soon as you meet her.) I remember there was some discourse about Nemona being annoying, but she's no worse than any other main Pokemon rival, really. Her hell-bentedness on fighting everyone and everything is kind of charming after a while. She wants to be the Pokemon version of Goku.
The fight that caps off the Starfall Street plot thread is so good. So is the endgame sequence. The twist is very well foreshadowed, but also surprisingly dark for a Pokemon game!
Is the sandwich minigame the worst? It's just not fun, even when the ingredients aren't clipping through the bread. It's so annoying when you want a specific sandwich for a certain power-up but the collision buckaroos an ingredient off, so that your BLT becomes a "Tasty Original" with randomised power-ups just because it has two lettuce leaves instead of three. Speaking of which, are they using whole slabs of pork belly in those BLTs??
Metroid Prime
One of many games which I never played because I was content to watch my older brother play it. This remaster is my first time actually playing it for longer than halfway through the tutorial stage. It's my first time playing much of any Metroid game, actually. It's good. I gotta play more Metroid.
I played on Normal. I kinda wish I'd played on Easy. I preferred the puzzles and exploration much more than the combat. The combat isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination - colour-coding enemies to your weapons is cute - but fighting end-game enemies gets old fast, and changing your weapons is too clunky on the dual-stick setup to be much fun during battles (but then, I am very stupid and kept mixing up the X and Y buttons for the whole 16 hours I spent on Prime).
The design is very satisfying and thoughful. Every big room has multiple routes to let you play with new power-ups; every time you have to revisit an area, you have something new that lets you skip the platforming sequence you had to do the first time around. I liked the early exploration phase of the game a lot, and the final run-around where you're using late-game powerups to find Chozo Artefacts in early areas of the game is clever.
I think I hate the endgame. Meta-Ridley is a fun boss, and the first phase of the final boss is okay, but the second phase is a nightmare, and that big platforming room with the respawning Fission Metroids just plain sucks.
Last Call BBS
Eight games in one! How spoiled we are! I only played some of them very much.
Sad to say, I don't think I enjoy the Zachtronics schtick as much as I wish I did. There's a point where I usually get fed up of troubleshooting when and why my little machines are going out of sync, and it's usually before the halfway point. (I finished Opus Magnum, which is very good, and I'd like to take anothe rpop at Exapunks one of these days.)
So I didn't really dig into the tradional Zachlike games in this pack. I did the first level of 20th Century Food Court but it took me so long to understand how the components fit together and work that it burned me out on doing the second level. I took one look at the instructions for ChipWizard Professional and closed the game. X'BPGH is the one I'd probably keep going with if I had to beat one of these - I futzed through the first few levels and there's something very compelling about its cryptic body horror theming.
The two solitaire games are bangers. Sawayama Solitaire is just Microsoft Solitaire but less mean-spirited. Kabufawa Solitaire is odd but fun. I'm not sure what the best strategy is yet - I think it's best on the high difficulty levels to lock one or two stacks on the main playing area as soon as possible to unlock a few slots up top, but I'm not certain. Anyway it's good.
HACK*MATCH is okay. It never quite clicked with me, but I bet someone who's really into arcade puzzlers will love it.
STEED FORCE Hobby Studio is the one that everybody was wild about when Last Call BBS first released. It taught me that I should not take this up as a hobby. I really enjoyed building the models as a jigsaw, but as soon as it comes time to get the masking tape and paint, I get frustrated and lose interest. I'm just now realising as I write this that you're probably meant to paint the pieces before you put the model together. Again, I am very stupid.
I am absolutely wild about Dungeons and Diagrams, the Nikoli-like set of grid puzzles which work like Nurikabe crossed with cartography. The theming is great, and I love the campaign that's suggested by the level names. (My favourite is something like "Gronk's Fatal Mistake" on a level featuring a handful of orcs, a treasure chest, and a mimic.) I kept realising new tricks with the ruleset all the way through the level set. I would happily buy a pack of 60 more of these. My only gripe is that I kept confusing the numbers outside the grid as representing the number of spaces in that row/column when they actually represent the number of walls. Again, I am stupid, but I don't think this is entirely my fault. The numbers use the same orange colour as the pencil marks you use to mark a space, so the design suggests that the numberds and spaces are directly connected when they're not. Surprising how such a subtle little bit of visual design can really throw people! (Or just me.)
Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box / Pandora's Box / whatecer
Layton's back baby, videogames are good again. Been plugging away at the original trilogy to celebrate. I really adore these games. Curious Village is very janky in retrospect; Diabolical Box feels so much more polished and confident. Both are still a lot of fun.
People lovingly roast the Professor Layton series for having an explanation for why everyone is puzzle-obsessed in Curious Village1, and then ignoring it for all subsequent games. But Diabolical Box puts much more effort into integrating the puzzles into the plot. There are the train-switching puzzles which serve as transitions between different episodes, for example, or that prologue sequence where you have to search Schrader's office for a clue. I also think it's funny that some characters try to punish Layton with puzzles. You're stuck your nose somewhere where it doesn't belong, hatman: now solve this five-disc Towers of Hanoi. It's like trying to punish a dog by giving it a fillet steak.
The character designs of all the minor NPCs are really grotesque upon closer inspection, aren't they? Some of them look like they gave up and went home halfway through their hole at Amigara Fault.
GOT ANY SNACKS AROUND HERE
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Admittedly a wild and absurd one. But that's something I love about the Professor Layton games; the utterly absurd solutions to its central mysteries which raise a hundred times more questions than they answer. The Professor calmly explaining this total bullshit to Luke and the player as naturally as if he was explaining how a toaster works. God it's so good. Something new I noticed about Curious Village this time around: even Layton's explanation for who stole the crank is utter nonsense.