Recent content by CryoGyro

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found the person interested in guys like nosepass and cryogonal

Yes, the consensus is that it's poorly balanced, because the consensus is comprised of posters like the above: only able to spout trivia about powerful mechanics out of context. Gen 1 is powerful and 'broken', but that power is a rising tide that lifts all ships. While even I can grant that all...

I'm generally on ant's side here, and I think I can sum it up as this: in the name of "QOL" and sheer options and a superficial ideal of balance, Pokemon has gotten much worse at generating compelling, emergent stories via gameplay. There have always been issues; for every inexplicably terrible...

When you go into a game trying to prove people wrong, you are only robbing yourself of the opportunity to form your own experience and see where they might be coming from; the opportunity to grow. It's true that a lot of online fans are not thinking about this very deeply, with nostalgia being a...

Cryo's Retro Games of the Month (Feb '26) Previous posts: January Cyber Citizen Shockman Zero (SNES) Week 5: Defeat Galko (Or the 5 pillars). With such a tropey setup and cast of characters, I was shocked to learn this was the final entry in a wholly original series instead of some...

It doesn't have to be the best Castlevania game ever, but it has to recognize what made Vania special, and all I'm seeing is a game struggling to distinguish itself from the stagnant crowd. You have this bungee whip mechanic, which looks engineered to skip enemy and level design interactions in...

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.