Recent reviews by CactusSD

The ocean is scaaaaaary

The penguin ball cometh

I told Kinito that I live at the White House and it changed my location on the built in weather app to say that I lived in Washington D.C.

I saw a creepy doll the size of a person in a red dress. We just stared at each other until they walked away first into a wall.

Any time I play an online competitive strategy game like this one, I get an overwhelming urge to go against whatever "meta" that's currently going on. I was the same way with the Pokemon VGC a long time ago, and now the same joys of running off-meta strategies have rekindled this long lost passion of mine. Of course this is partially because I've been playing with friends and using dumb strategies that have no right to work against each other, or even against people in ranked. Master Duel has allowed me and some of my friends to get back into the game from the sheer ease of access of everything for new players. A big turn off from the other online simulators was simply all of the overwhelming options for what you could put into a deck and not knowing what exactly goes well with each other. Simply having a means for new players to see some decks other users have made is a feature I can't live without anymore! It's allowed me to see and try out these other decks. Of course the caveat of this is that craft/obtaining some cards are quite pricey and getting material for free isn't easy either nor do you get a lot of them either. The only way you can get crafting material right now is from playing the game for the first time through unlocks and the battlepass. The battlepass isn't easy to level up, especially if you're a newer player. You can only level it up from playing online, and even then the only means of a noticeable level up is winning duels. If you're someone who doesn't like using the "freemium" currency, then you won't like knowing that you'll have to use it in order to mainly get more cards. At least the decks I've made have a bit of success online. Some of these decks that I've used are Windwitches, Jackpot 7, Cyberdark Dragons (with a focus on summoning Chimeratech Overdragon), Vampires, Hungry Burger, a draw until you get Exodia deck, and finally a 100% RNG oriented deck :]

There's plenty of things wrong with the current meta of Master Duel that Komoney is forming for the game (such as at least making Maxx "C" a limited use card for decks), but as long as I get to make meta using garbage people ragequit, I'm happy.

(Also if you want a good time, try using some older "legacy" cards in your deck and simply watch how many people instant forfeit . It's honestly a pure joy of mine).

I've been waiting since 2008 for Nintendo to release another entry for the Wario Land series, and I finally got what I've been asking for. Not from Nintendo of course, but that's to be expected from them at this point from their back catalog of series that haven't gotten a new game in quite some time. But hey, I'm already used to scouring for fan projects for the games I actually want to play.

Now Pizza Tower takes heavy inspiration of Wario Land 4's gameplay loop and general mechanics. Just explore the level and then zoom your way back to the entrance as fast as you can before the time runs out! The usual puzzle platforming you'd usually expect from the Wario Land series is instead put to the side and the dash mechanic introduced in 4 takes center stage, creating a weird hybrid between a 2D Sonic game while still playing a Wario Land game at its core, and although my favorite mechanic from the Wario Land series is absent, that being the shoulder bash, I can't help but feel a cozy dopamine hit when I'm barreling through a level and send enemies flying from the sheer force of my barely controllable speed.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

The soundtrack... Never have I ever wanted to beg a dev for the soundtrack, but Pizza Towe's soundtrack is so much of a banger that all I need now is the ability to add its soundtrack to my respective playlists. Please Pizza Tower Dev! I'm on my knees! Let me purchase your soundtrack!

Honestly I'm just happy after following the development of Pizza Tower over these past few years and finally seeing the full release has just made me genuinely happy. I don't know how else I can put it but as pure joy.

Fix the lighting bug so that it doesn't look like I get flashbanged 24/7

I love this game and the devs for making it. To top things off, the soundtrack goes way too hard for a game like this, and I appreciate the devs for doing it anyways, and of course I bought the soundtrack. Great game. Will crab again and force all of my friends to try it out (I already managed to get one to buy it).

Just one warning for those interested in the game, the controls are weird and are NOT meant for keyboard and mouse. If you want to know exactly what I mean, all I'll tell you is that you control the movement of your claws with both of your joysticks. But how do you move? Simply press the corresponding direction on your D-Pad once and you'll go in that direction continuously until you either press the same direction again to cancel it out or press a different direction. These controls aren't as bad as they seem, but they feel a lot more coherent to be because I played with an 8BitDo SN30pro+ controller, aka a playstation 4 like controller. So I recommend using one of those when playing the game, but if you can't or just don't want to, I won't blame you.

I just wish I could play this on my Steam Deck. That would just make me the happiest ever.

Edit: I finally figured out how to play not only Fight Crab, but other Unsupported games on the Steam Deck. To get Fight Crab (or any other unsupported tagged game to work), simply go onto Desktop Mode, install "ProtonUp-Qt" from the discover store, launch ProtonUp-Qt, simply select which version you'd like to add (I'd recommend simply the latest version). Once you got all the different Proton versions you want, you can switch back to Gaming mode, make sure to download said unsupported game you wish to play, go to the game's properties, and then go to "compatibility". Once there, select "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" and select the latest version of GE-Proton7. Please note that not ALL unsupported games will work with this method. I have no idea myself, but from what I heard rumored, anything with Easy Anti-Cheat doesn't work. I recommend looking up the game you wish to know about (in terms of working on the Steam Deck) by looking at the website protondb. It should give you a general idea if they work with these other versions of Proton.

From my testing on the latest version of Proton (at the time, it was GE-Proton7-27) and the main menu will have music playing, but the usual in-game footage showing gameplay is missing. All you'll see is the menu text and nothing but a black void in the background. I haven't tested online matches on the Steam Deck (nor have I even tried them on PC), but some reports say that muliplayer works while more dated reports say otherwise. Take that as you will.

TL;DR: No resolution options but you have borderless full screen. Works great on Steam Deck, but you'll want to swap 'A' and 'B' buttons in the controller configuration menu for the game before you boot. Maybe wait for a sale.

I saw a streamer play this game and wanted to play it for myself from how much fun I saw from the game. Before this remastered re-release happened, I was already looking at playing Monster Rancher 2 on original hardware, however from my experience collecting old video games, Playstation 1 games are one of the 3 main pillars of pain to collect for when you're on a budget as a vast amount of Playstation 1's library is incredibly expensive. Luckily this re-release package deal for not only Monster Rancher 2 exists, but it also includes the first Monster Rancher as well as their respective manuals, but on Koei Tecmo's website...

For the most part I played Monster Rancher 2, so a lot of my review will be based around it. First off, if you want to change your resolution, you must go through the launcher which allows you to select which Monster Rancher game you want to play, however the resolution options are the worst I've ever seen. You have a full screen option and only a 854x480 resolution choice (for context, the menu shows a drop down menu for changing the resolution but can't be selected to be changed). That's already egregious, but what's worse is that the startup settings window is stylized as a Windows 2000 application (whether that is good or bad is up to you) and simply shows bare minimum effort was put into this small portion of the game, and although there are no other resolution options, at least when you select for the game to be played in full scree, it is borderless full screen so that's good. These are my gripes with this version of the game and they end here at simply "start up settings menu sucks and is bare bones."

I went ahead and also played this version of Monster Rancher 2 on Steam Deck (while also comparing it to the PC version) and I believe MR 1&2 DX is completely Steam Deck compatible. No display issues, no sound quality issues, nothing of real note other than the control scheme for the buttons which they use on PC as well. I recommend swapping A and B around if you're using a Xbox controller or a Switch controller for this game because it seems those inputs are hard coded to be in those positions. Simply swapping them makes playing MR2 a lot more organic. Other than a minor control scheme change, everything plays great! MR 1&2 DX should get a Steam Deck Verified icon at some point in the future unless I've missed something catastrophic that prevents it from getting verified.

I want to note one this before finishing this review, and it's the weird icons that are to the left and right sides of the screens while playing either one of the MR games, and doing some bare minimum research, I found that there were mobile ports of the first two Monster Rancher games. I have no idea if the Monster Rancher games used in this re-release are those same mobile ports as those mobile ports are, to my knowledge, Japan exclusives and I cannot find any footage, discussions, or even any screenshots that are floating around the net. I'm not saying that the games used were from mobile builds of the same games, but I want to bring attention that these icons are far too familiar (and also functional) to many other mobile ported games that have on screen press-able buttons. However if anyone has more information about this, please let me know as I'd like to know more whether or not if my assumption is correct or not.

I love this game way too much to even describe other than it was my Game of the Year back in 2020. As soon as I saw the first teaser trailer for Bugsnax I knew whatever I had to do, I had to play this game when it came out, and I did just that very thing back when Bugsnax was a Playstation/Epic exclusive (as well as to completion). Now I get the joy of not only adding this game into my Steam library, but also be one of the few people out there to try out Bugsnax on the Steam Deck. I won't lie, transitioning between mouse and keyboard controls to controller setups is very wonky, but that's only because I feel Bugsnax controls the best with mouse and keyboard. I also can't say I've experienced any problems playing on the Steam Deck, not even performance dips or anything. Everything runs and loads fast on the Steam Deck.

Great game. Runs great on Steam Deck. Don't spoil yourself on the ending of Bugsnax.