Recent content by CryoGyro

A lot of modern semicasual game critique comes down to this: players want to dominate a game. They care (or at least think they do) about what they can do to a game, and not what the game can do to them. Climbing up nearly any wall in the game with a very forgiving set of inputs trivializes...

Cryo's Retro Games of the Month (Jan '26) Final Fantasy Origins (PS1) Week 1: [FF1] Defeat the dark elf Astos FF1 is one of few RPGs I jive with. Much like early Pokemon gens, it's mechanically fairly simple but with just enough interesting decision space to make the game your own. Forming a...

Cryo's Mega Man: Dual Override Robot Master Design Contest Review We're looking for designs of a Robot Master who has a right arm with immense suction powers! Twenty finalists are in, and as a classic Mega Man superfan with a small audience, I have thoughts to share on all of them in a place...

Prime 4 is a lot of bad things, but it isn't cheap. It's full of the most lavishly designed empty rooms you ever did see!

48 Games in 10 Months: My Achievement of the Week Journey This year, I played a game on RetroAchievements every week and month to get the Arbok badge in their Achievement of the Week event (year of the snake and all). The journey was worthwhile, but exhausting; some personal weeks were damn...

Most Pokemon bosses are not very good bosses, and that has little to do with how their teams match people's notion of 'good' Pokemon sets. A single player RPG and competitive PvP are as different as contexts can get. In an RPG meant to get people acquainted with the mechanics and possibilities...

I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo is taking a two-pronged approach over the next few years, more so than a usual launch year; the great tech race in video games is long over, people have their Switch 1s and are still happy with them, and 2 is deliberately premium, so they aren't as antsy to...

Tauros is still absolutely a beast, why wouldn't it be?. The big three all just have the small issue of requiring the premium coverage TMs.

Even calling Pachirisu 'defensive' might be a stretch going by its raw stats, but it's a deceptively solid Pokemon in the context of DPP. You've probably noticed when battling it that it's miles ahead of most Pokemon at Valley Windworks in bulk and Speed; the Eterna Forest Lass's Pachirisu kills...

Avoidable enemies is a pretty inevitable "issue" in games that give you any amount of freedom, but you could definitely argue Silksong doesn't reward you enough for fighting them; shards are a self-justifying system of use the weapon to fuel the weapon, and rosaries are for combat-irrelevant...

Jimothy Cool has some of the best educational Pokemon videos on YouTube, and fabricated replays (that make their fabrication no secret) are a large part of that, helping illustrate whatever concept is being described. In general, his stuff puts entry level Smogon resources to shame; I encourage...

clauncher is also a gun, and what is bug backwards? yea that's right

At that rate, be bolder like with DK and overhaul the eyes entirely. Looks like he got a toothpick or stick of plastic between em.

My run is still ongoing, but I've executed the strategy and want to share my results ASAP. Turns out you can only buy X items from Veilstone Dept Store, so I played Eevee as normal until that point. After training it up some while holding Soothe Bell to test against Rival 3, it entered Veilstone...

I'm done now, personally. Early on I was hoping the designers were taking a more deliberate approach to cards than the core game, but it's become clear they have just as much contempt for the restrictions the rules impose and any strategy that isn't slamming big ex attackers into each other. One...