Stuff I played
by AJ "Tyron" Martinez @ worldsbe.st
Living record of things I’ve been playing recently but don’t have A Lot To Say about. If you catch me playing something and it’s not here, shout politely at me.
| Cotton Reboot shoot-em-up Played 2026-05 | As far as I can tell, Cotton is principally about a) picking up gems and watching the best effect design I have ever seen, and b) getting killed by off-screen hazards. I aspire to understand it. |
| Like Dreamer shoot-em-up Played 2026-05 full writeup | Elaborate fucking prank for people who think they can recognize shitty eroge. Excellent french-vanilla bullet-hell with a busty bunnygirl lurking in the sidebar like a gargoyle. |
| Burnout Paradise Remastered open-world racing Played 2026-05 | I just don’t know how the fuck you’re supposed to see anything, dude. Am I old? Am I dumb? I’ve tried to play this game like seven times since it came out, and every time I spend 45 minutes squinting at the millimeter-tall strip of screen that may or not contain my next intersection. I don’t even know if I like the handling. |
| Armed Police Batrider shoot-em-up Played 2026-05 | Battle Garegga’s dynamic difficulty doesn’t reset between credits; if there’s a line in front of the arcade cabinet, the operators want that machine to take everyone’s money as fast as possible. Armed Police Batrider one-ups Garegga, presumably to prevent players from resetting the machine and cheating the system, by starting at maximum difficulty on boot. It’s pretty good. Play the Japanese version and always start credits from the Service menu. |
| Slay the Spire 2 roguelike deckbuilder Played 2026-05 | You don’t give a fuck about my opinions on this, it’s more Slay the Spire. If you grind these types of games, you will probably be delighted to grind this one. If not, still consider taking a second look, the multiplayer is a lovely change of pace and opens up the strategy space in some fun ways. |
| Parking Garage Rally Circuit arcade time-trialer Played 2026-05 full writeup | The European DLC is really stretching the definition of what a “parking garage” is. The new layouts are all lovely playgrounds designed to ruin your line and fuck up your car, and I appreciate that; I’ve had time to get better, punch me down! Kill me! Make me work it out! |
| Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Played 2026-05 | I have played this game for 300 hours and still don’t know if it’s strategically correct to be in front of other people. |
| Hades II action roguelike Played 2026-05 | Still conflicted about the Hades approach to difficulty, where you get frog-boiled in metaprogression until some invisible threshold is crossed, then never lose on the base difficulty again. But the audio is as masterful as ever, combat design took several HUGE leaps up, and I get to look at Icarus, so it’s probably fine. |
| Crimzon Clover World EXplosion shoot-em-up Played 2026-05 | Still shoots good the third time around. Arrange mode is softer on mewling autobomb infants like myself, offering a rechargable shield that protects against a single hit, but still preserves a bit of that “push your luck” bite; after a death, do you want to recharge that shield, or rapidly re-upgrade your ship Gradius style? Still treats multi-monitor setups like a strange overhunted beast. |
| Void Stranger puzzle Played 2026-04 full writeup | I expect basically everyone to have a rough time with this game at some point during their playthrough. When it happens, which will probably be different than when it happened for me, I’d like to encourage you to push through a little farther. I think it was worth it in the end. |
| Trackmania time trial Played 2026-04 | The pieces are simple—slopes, surface types, boost panels—and the controls are simpler, digital accel/brake and a single left/right turn axis. I have never seen a game do so much with so little; it’s rarely a thrill ride, but it’s always really interesting. Anyway, Ubisoft would like you to pay $20/yr for this. |
| Dissidia NT 3v3 arena fighter Played 2026-04 | The final boss of Discord fighters; you need six players, all with at least decent connections. I like it on the whole, the teamplay dynamics are fun and the rhythm of step-dash-swing produces cute choreographed dogfights, but it’s a slow game with limited and linear movelists; you are a cog in your team’s machine, and if that machine is functioning badly, games will feel very similar to one another. |
| Rabbit and Steel raiding roguelike Played 2026-04 | An all-time favorite that permanently raised my standards for class and encounter design in MMOs. Also, I want to fucking eat Mino’s art, everything is so goddamn appealing it makes me mad. You’ll need to meet this one more than halfway when it comes to fight visibility, but I promise it’s not as tough as it looks. |
| Pinball FX pinball sim Played 2026-04 | I hate that this is the best reasonable way to play Williams pinball. I could talk about all the things it gets wrong, but first-time players will have a great time as long as you don’t spoil their fun, and people who care deeply about these games don’t need me to tell them that the sound effect pitch on Taxi is still wrong—FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK |
| Scott Pilgrim EX beat-em-up Played 2026-04 | I don’t think the open world is doing Scott any favors; fights start to feel interchangeable because they are interchangeable, and the glee of rapid-canceling to hop buttons can only burn for so long. Fun enough ride, but I’m glad it was a gift. It did finally get me to read Scott Pilgrim, though. Why does this game have so many shop themes. |
| BallisticNG antigrav racing Played 2026-04 | Wipeout, but with a weird forgiving cornering quirk where you can clip the back of your ship into the track and ride it like a rail. This is a weird detail to pick for a concise paragraph, but it really does define an unbelievable amount of the cornering, especially in Survival mode, and I kind of fuck with it? There’s a forgiving quality to drifts here that lets the course design really bite you. |
| Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 versus puzzle Played 2026-04 | hey this is the same as the last one |
| Screamer arcade racing Played 2026-04 | Broken netplay, strange story, thinks it’s too good for 8GB of VRAM. I’m actually really interested in the handling, but I would need more time than Steam’s 2-hour refund window allows, it is a weird snap-strafe-ass game. |
| Fighting EX Layer fighting Played 2026-03 | Only Arika could come up with a simple-input system that is harder than motion inputs, and only Arika would turn that system on by default in 2018. This game is one dollar. |
| Dota 2 MOBA Played 2026-03 | YUO HAVE A P]OLRTAL AND AN ORB OF DESTURECTION |
| Unbeatable rhythm Played 2026-02 | Great core gameplay and refreshing song selection, but the story is basically a 60Hz strobe between “extremely cool idea” and “elaborately tripped over its own dick and broke its neck and died and went to hell”. I admire its spirit. I also wish I still had $30. |
| Dwarf Fortress dwarf fortress Played 2026-02 | I have never been so outside of target audience in my entire life. Several somebodies somewhere are really happy that this exists. |
| Megabonk survivors-like Played 2026-02 | I guess “Survivors-like with bunnyhopping” was probably going to get me at some point. I think most of my fun was of the Good and Clean kind rather than the Numbers Rat kind, but the first few times you outpace the difficulty scaling really do feel like you stuck your frontal lobe into the kitchen outlet. |
| CosmicBreak Universal "MMO battle action" Played 2026-02 | I have never gotten so comprehensively dicked out of my ass in a PvP game in my entire life, and I have no idea how I would get better without a minimum of 50 hours and a side of credit card fraud. Even so, I admire online games that have run way, way too long, propped up by a handful of Dell Optiplexes in a closet somewhere, temporarily profitable for just a little longer before the last of the freaks and sickos and locked-in whales move on. Also I like when a girl is a robot |
| HYPNOSYNC rhythm Played 2026-02 | Sort of disappointing on all cylinders, and not because this isn’t my fetish. |
| Dead or Alive 6 fighting Played 2026-02 | The moment one of these games gets rollback and, like, mildly respectable presentation, the entire bottom is going to fall out of the casual fighting game market and we’ll never see another Invincible VS ever again. The core systems and presentation of Dead or Alive have a completely unique appeal that does not exist anywhere, one that is instantly legible to anyone who can draw a triangle, and the only ones with decent netplay are the ones with an old fucked up legacy control scheme. FUCK |
| Dirtbag Mahjong riichi mahjong Played 2026-02 | An offline riichi game feels like a hard sell to me, but if I’m wrong for whatever reason, this is probably your best bet. The dirtbag abilities are sort of whatever, and the AI is definitely on the weaker end, but, like…it’s mahjong with a table full of Dumb Online Homos! (affectionate) (seriously if you are habitually annoyed by overeager queer writing it’s that but not annoying) |
| D1AL-ogue vn / puzzle Played 2026-02 | Toneless, joyless localization. Look at robots anywhere else. |
| Initial Drift Online arcade racing Played 2026-02 | Affably dogshit. This thing made it to Mostly Positive on Steam while visibly falling apart on every level, solely because nobody else has yet tried to put Initial D on Steam and somebody had to be the first. It drives alright? |
| Lumines Arise versus puzzle Played 2026-01 | Can you believe I wrote an entire article comparing Tetris Effect and Lumines without knowing that the Lumines guys made Tetris Effect? Lumines is my preferred puzzler among the two, it feels more like art on a fighter jet and less like a science, and Arise is the best one, even if it does make a few concessions to the cheesy Effect-style ballads of universal love. I’ll forgive it because the presentation is that good. |
| Blue Revolver shoot-em-up Played 2026-01 | This game wants me to bomb so fucking bad and I constantly feel like I’m disappointing it. Stellar soundtrack, lovely character art, pattern design that successfully wedged itself into my head and won’t get out. I will make you proud someday. |
| STARDOM RIICHI MAHJONG riichi mahjong Played 2026-01 | Silently matched me against fake players and rigged my starting hands to win. I actually find this more offensive than the fullscreen AI sex CG it played after I logged in the first time. |