 Earlier this week, I had the horrible job of having to talk about a bunch of games that disappointed me recently. It was a video I felt like I had to make, but I had no fun making it, and I did not take any joy in uploading it and having you guys watch it. It was one of the rare occasions where it was a video I almost didn't want to make, but I felt like I had to. And I honestly didn't think many people were even going to watch it because it didn't have Nintendo Switch in the title, but it turns out that video did really well and a lot of people saw me trash on their favorite games. So even though I've loved hundreds of games I've reviewed and there's just a small handful I haven't liked, I still fully expect that when I go through this list of games that haven't disappointed me recently, that people will leave the inevitable comment of, oh he didn't like Kingdom Hearts 3, but he liked this game. Trust me, I got that a lot after I didn't enjoy Xenoblade 2. So hopefully you'll find a new game that you or your friends can play together in this video. Maybe you're just here to see what I like instead of Kingdom Hearts 3. Either way, so let's start with one that took us all by surprise about a week ago in that Nintendo Direct, Tetris 99. I can't remember the last time I saw a gaming craze take off as quickly as the Battle Royale craze. I mean when Minecraft blew up we saw building games pop up all over the place, but it almost wasn't like the literal war that Battle Royale is, where these games are constantly fighting to be the number one Battle Royale game. And amongst all of these terribly bad attempts at getting into the Battle Royale market and then the ones that actually are pretty fun, you have one that really came out of left field. And it seems like a meme, like someone somewhere at Nintendo headquarters jokingly said what about Tetris Battle Royale and then someone else took that idea way too seriously and ran with it. As soon as I downloaded it that night after the Direct I was instantly hooked. I'm almost ashamed to admit this, but I didn't end up playing Final Fantasy for like 2 or 3 nights after that because every night I would go to bed with my Tetris 99. If you haven't played it yet and you're confused as to how it works and why it's so addicting, let me explain it. The actual playing Tetris side of it is basic Tetris, I don't think I have to explain that. But the 98 other rectangles to your left and right on the screen, they are literally other players playing in real time competing against you. And as they clear lines of blocks on their screen, they will send junk from their game into other players games. Now for the most part, this is random where all the junk gets sent to. You will see yellow lines attached to your screen from their screens and that's who's currently attacking you. At the top of your screen here you can have it set to 1 of 4 things and you can change this as many times as you want while you play. You can have it set to attack random players or attack people that are attacking you and I do think there is some kind of strategy here as to who to attack and when, but for the life of me, I can't really figure it out, I just do my best to concentrate on what's happening in my game. Now for those young'uns in here that didn't grow up with Tetris, Tetris is actually a pretty addicting game on its own right. I don't know how many of you will remember these, but back before I had my Gameboy Advance, my first handheld system was essentially a Tetris machine. I think it said like 1 in 99 games on it, it had a weird little bump groove in the middle of it, you had your buttons on the bottom half, the screen on the top half, I think it played a bunch of other games, I don't know, I was just there for Tetris and I ran the batteries and that thing dry on a daily basis. I loved me some Tetris and even as a kid, it was very addicting. As soon as you start playing with 98 other people and you're competing for a top spot, it just takes a game that was already hard to put down and makes it borderline impossible to put down. And hey, assuming you have Nintendo Online, this one is free, so you may as well try it out. Speaking of Battle Royale games, I actually didn't want to talk about this one. Second, I wanted to get a little bit further into the video to build some respect and credibility from those that might be new around here, but since we're already on this train of thinking, I'm going to talk about Apex really quickly. You guys already know my hidden shame that I loved Fortnite. Like, it's not even a matter of I liked the game, I loved the game. A lot of you might sigh, roll your eyes, think you had more respect for me than that, maybe even turn the video off and move on with your lives, but consider this, the amount of hours I put into that game, the amount that I actually did enjoy that game, I only talked about it one time and I only streamed it one time. I didn't overplay that thing to death, I kept it to myself. And I'm going to do the same with Apex. I'm going to keep this really short and sweet and say that I love it. I actually think it's better than Fortnite. I feel like it takes a lot of elements from PUBG and Fortnite, but refines them in its own way. I really enjoyed the visuals and the atmosphere of the game. It kind of feels more like hunger games. Like when I think of Battle Royale, I kind of want to think about dropping myself into an area filled with people trying to kill me and I'm doing my best to survive. And as fun as Fortnite was, it never really felt like that. It was very cartoony and gimmicky and people building things and how big can you make your structure and that's really the key to victory, which again, I liked, but this feels more grounded, knowing who the champion is in every match and seeing that banner scattered all over the place and knowing that you're truly just fighting for your life with your two allies. And again, I didn't really even like squads in Fortnite. I preferred going solo, but I do like being in teams for this. That's what I'm going to say about it. It's another free game. So you may as well check it out. I'm enjoying it way more than I thought I would. By the way, those two games were really the ones that were like, I know the comment down below is going to be, he likes Apex, doesn't like Kingdom Hearts 3. Oh, and this might be the last chance I have to remind you guys in a timely fashion that I will be at SoKa Retro Gaming Expo this weekend. You're watching this in the future. It ain't going to be this weekend. Don't go looking for me. The con won't even be there. The dates are the 23rd and the 24th. If you want to get your tickets before you go, you can use my code beatemups to check out, get 10% off. It helps me to help you, it helps you to help me. I'll even have a panel on Saturday at 11 o'clock in the morning and I'll just answer questions. I don't prepare anything. I'm too lazy. With that being said, I really do hope I see you guys there. I'm super excited for it. Oh, and Kim will be there too. Well, of course, I've already said that a bunch, but she will be. Next, we have a game that you might not have heard about unless you were really paying attention during the game awards and that's Ashen. This isn't the kind of game that I usually play, so it's not something I was invested in. I had no idea what it was. I heard about it during the game award and it was randomly just released that night, but the only reason I downloaded it is because there's two player co-op and my friend from high school, who I always play co-op games with, wanted to try this one out and so I went ahead and tried it out and I actually fell in love with it. You guys know that I'm not huge in a dark soul style games, so I definitely wouldn't check this one out on my own. I was instantly hooked by the visuals. At first glance, they look very minimalistic. I mean, your character doesn't even have a face, but as you progress through the game and go through some of these worlds and levels, it's honestly one of the most gorgeous games I have seen. Some of the locations in the game were just jaw-dropping for me and some of the enemy and character designs, I just never seen anything like it before. The entire world was captivating and just pure joy to explore and run around and kill things in and it's pretty hard too. I wouldn't say that it's dark souls hard. I wouldn't say it's one of the hardest games I've played, but me and my buddy, we died a lot. We were constantly having to run back and try and get our souls back or whatever they were called in this game. The boss fights were always something to look forward to. They were really intense and always a good challenge. And overall, just a very enjoyable experience. Again, my friend and I were always looking for co-op games. I mean, ever since high school, when I go around his house on the weekends and we play games together, we've just always liked keeping that alive. Even with me living on the other side of the world, we're always trying out anything that has co-op. Doesn't always work out and sometimes it's okay and we have fun, but we don't end up finishing that one. We move on to the next one. In between gameplay sessions, we would constantly message each other saying we couldn't wait for our next hit of Ashen and it's on Game Pass. So technically it's the third free game on this list, assuming you have Game Pass. And if you have an Xbox, you really should because Game Pass is great. The next game is also on Game Pass. Strange Brigade. It's almost literally the same story as Ashen. The same friend and I looking for co-op games to play, going through Game Pass, I actually spotted Strange Brigade and it looked awful. The thumbnail of it looked awful. It was a weird mummy head with Strange Brigade, which is not the name of a game. I feel like I would enjoy judging a book by its cover. I didn't think this one was gonna stick for us. I thought it would be one that we download, try out, delete to make room on our hard drive for the next one. But to both of our surprise, we ended up loving this experience. Countless times throughout the first and second levels of playing through this game, we would just stop and be like, huh, you know, this game's actually really good and keeps getting better and better. This isn't a word I use all that often, but it truly is a hidden gem. It's a Game Pass hidden gem. A co-op game for up to four players and I would highly recommend playing it in co-op, even if it's just you and one other friend. You're part of the Strange Brigade. There's a whole whimsical story and cartoony voiceover that goes with it. It doesn't take itself seriously at all. The whole thing is presented like a 1960s movie and it essentially boils down to a bunch of your Indiana types, your Nathan Drake, your Lara Crofts going out and exploring tombs and completing puzzles and challenges and mowing down a bunch of enemies. In this case, mummies. But what really impressed us were the levels and the level designs. They were brilliant and it's not really like anything that I've seen before. Huge open areas or catacombs. There's always branching paths. Whenever you think a level might be coming to an end, it's really only getting started and you still have a ton more map to explore and each one of these levels is packed full of enemies, puzzles, secrets, Easter eggs, challenges, you name it. I mean, I'll start with the gameplay. It's classic arcadey fun. You'll have grenades, you'll have shotguns, you'll even have a special ability like the character I use can like bring an enemy towards it with like a force pull and then force push it away and have it explode. Every character has its own individual abilities and you can unlock more as you play. You can also unlock crazy power-ups for your guns like bullets that ricochet off the walls and the levels are filled with different kind of booby traps that you can trigger or like explosive barrels lying around just a bunch of different ways to dispose the mummies and with so many ways to kill these things, the gameplay never gets old and then when you're not running around blowing off mummy heads, again, each world is filled with puzzles. Usually in these kind of games, even your triple A titles, the puzzles are kind of just your run of the mill stuff. You feel like you're going through the motions, not really that challenging, not that fun to complete but in Strange Brigade, they actually put a ton of thought into these puzzles and sometimes you need extra people to solve them or at least it makes it a lot easier. There was one door we had to open by stepping on a bunch of tiles in the right order and we really had to work together to step on these things in the right order and it made me feel like Indiana Jones in that one scene. Or was that the Goonies? I think it might have been both and other than the boss fights, the other thing I really look forward to each level is there'll be parts where you'll get bombarded with a horde of enemies, just waves and waves of loads of enemies doing their best to destroy you and you always have to trigger these parts to move on. There'll be a giant crystal, you have to get your whole team around it to activate it so you'll all make sure you're prepared beforehand, you have your heals, you're stocked up with ammo and then once you've activated it, it's just a slug fest, trying to destroy every enemy before you run out of ammo and resources and I love it. Again, in each one of these areas, the level designs are always great. They give you vantage points, they give you tunnels to run through that maybe have booby traps in them so you can kite enemies through certain areas and then trigger the booby trap to wipe a ton out at once and conserve your ammo that way or just drop a ton of explosives onto their heads. If you're looking for a co-op game and again, free on game pass, try out Strange Brigade. It might not be something you'll enjoy solo. In fact, honestly, I don't think it is something you'll super enjoy solo but if you have even just one friend you wanna play a game with, yeah, I really enjoy it. So I plan to talk a little bit about Final Fantasy IX in this video because that's what I've been playing the most as of most recently but I talked about those other games so much and I still wanna get to Resident Evil 2 and have enough time to talk about that game. So I think I'm gonna pretty much say Final Fantasy IX for one of my eShop videos because you know it's gonna be my highlight of my next 10 eShop games worth buying video. Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Honestly, I haven't played it since I was a kid really and it's better than I remember it. It's holding up so well. The character models are so crisp. I wanna say the pre-rendered backgrounds hold up but honestly the word hold up isn't even doing it justice. I still think it looks gorgeous today. And then those stunning cinematic cutscenes. Yeah, some of the faces look a little creepy now but everything else just looks stunning. Now I'll talk about it more in the next eShop video. Let's talk about Resident Evil because oh boy. Resident Evil 2 blew away any expectations I may have had about the game going into it. Growing up, I loved the first Resident Evil. It scared the crap out of me because I was a little youngster and I really liked it. The second Resident Evil, I didn't love so much. Not because I thought it was worse but because it scared me a crap ton more. I don't know if it was the liquor, it was the liquor. It absolutely was the liquor. I hated that thing. And you know what, going into playing the remake, I was legitimately nervous. I'm gonna say it, scared because of the liquor because I had such horrible memories of it growing up as a kid. Fortunately, I'm able to separate myself from the video game a little bit better these days. I'm aware I'm playing a game. I was still on edge, still a very creepy game but I managed to power through it and finish it. I just loved the entire experience. Also, the liquor, while scary, when it chases you, it's not as scary to me now, especially with his butt cheeks. I'm able to laugh at it now, more than be scared at it. Visually and cinematically, wow, didn't they just do an incredible job with this game? This is how you do a remake. This is a shining example of how you do a remake. I don't think anyone could ever have done a remake of this game better than this. This is the gold standard of remakes. The gameplay's been refined. We don't have those tank controllers anymore that were absolutely insufferable and a very weird choice for a horror survival game. And now we have the more recently classic Over the Shoulder style that was introduced in Resident Evil 4 and been used since then and it just works brilliantly. I really don't have a complaint. Like maybe it's too short. I mean, I think I finished it in eight hours and that's even with me being a big baby, hiding a lot, but other than that, and it's not really even a complaint. I'd say this is perfect. Like for what this game set out to do, it's a 10 out of 10 game, like hands down. And I feel like that's all I really wanna say about that game, just why I'm not gonna bother. I'm just gonna tell you I enjoyed it. I really, really enjoyed it. So yeah, some games I've been enjoying recently. I know it's a really weird mixed bag of nuts, but for the most part, I've already talked about and reviewed all the other games I've been enjoying. This is just kind of the leftovers, I guess. Games I usually wouldn't have reviewed if not for this video. If you liked this video or you want a little something, make sure you have a lip all over that subscribe button. Click or tap on this video right here because I'd really appreciate it. And if you're gonna see me this weekend in California, it's SoCal Retro Gaming Expert. Let me know down below so I can keep an eye out for you. I probably won't know it's you because your name is probably like beat him up Slayer 99 or something. Probably not. Who would have that?