TP is probably better than I remember it.  I liked it but can't pick out any particular wow moments.  I managed to get through WW on Gamecube but only after a year or so of putting off the dodgy triforce treasure hunt.

TP is super solid. Nothing new or amazing or different, just pure solid Zelda.

That's because SS is not good, and I say this as a lifelong Zelda fanboi

People seem to have forgotten the collect the orbs shite in TP.

It also had the ice and sky dungeons which are the pinnacle for me. The world felt alive, Hyrule field has loads of nooks and crannies. Characters are all top tier. Additional combat moves to find.

Amazing game.

Dark Soldier wrote:

It also had the ice and sky dungeons which are the pinnacle for me. The world felt alive, Hyrule field has loads of nooks and crannies. Characters are all top tier. Additional combat moves to find.

Amazing game.

The ice mansion dungeon is absolutely top tier but Sky Keep is FUCKING INCREDIBLE. Also the boss of the sand dungeon with the might be my favourite boss ever.

Also SS doesn't have the fucking twister spinner thing so that's a bonus.

76. Doorkickers: Action Squad - Switch (5-6hrs)

Odd side scrolling spin-off to the well regarded top down tactics game Doorkickers (which dropped down to £2.60 last month, so I now own that too).  I hated it initially - it just didn't feel fair with the default character class - but warmed to it while dipping in and out over the course of maybe three months.  It's a lot more tactical than it first appears and gear/load-outs really can make the difference in trickier missions.  Disclaimer: The character choice serves as the difficulty setting as the levels remain the same, and I mainly used the shotgun toting Breacher (who has the word 'LOL' written next to difficulty).  Assaulter is Easy, Shield guy is Medium and so on.  I didn't do particularly well with saving hostages, accidentally cutting them down more often than not so three star ratings were pretty scarce for the back half.  To me it's a high body count pew pew arcade rooted tactical shooter, but to some it'd be a police brutality murder sim with additional dog killing.  No judgments here - draw the line where you like but I was fine with it.     

Too few people have played the truly excellent Not a Hero, but that's not my problem so I'll go with it as a reference point.  It's like a SWAT version of that, minus the cover system but geared towards co-op play.  Having only played it solo there's some guesswork involved when I say that the whole thing feels designed for two playable characters, but I'm convinced this would be an outstanding tactical arcade shooter with a buddy in tow.  It has online and local play, and depending on how far the view zooms out to allow players some freedom to part (or indeed whether you can split up completely and roam the map independently) this has the potential to be a co-op worldie.  A harsh [6] for the single player game as it's a bit too ruthless on standard difficulty for my tastes (without the Breacher I expect I'd still be floundering), but the sky's the limit with two players - the basics are in place for sure, I'll have to try it out at some point.

77. Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove - Switch (3hrs 54mins)

I'd only played the main campaign through once previously, not sure why.  Possibly because I held in in such high regard I didn't want to take the risk of it dropping down in my estimation.  Turns out I needn't have worried as replaying it has cemented it as an all-timer for me, perhaps second only to Trials Evolution as my favourite videogame ever ever.  Everything from the controls and character weight to the characters themselves to the script to the music to the checkpoint placement to the bosses to the the secrets.....[fade out, 8-bit MIDI interlude music, fade in].....to the graphics to the thrill of a shovel bounce to the pitch perfect difficulty is interactive crack for me, and that's without factoring in the mostly great dlc additions.  Treasure Trove is the most perfect subheading in videogamedom; there's 30+hrs of joyous new retro gameplay here and most of it has been added post launch.  And I gave it a [10] at launch.  Even the Showdown mode is legit.  Just about the only fault I can think of to level at it is the slightly fiddly item menu for magic swaps.    

This was and is a dream come true.  It even has a goddamn co-op mode now.  It's a Magazord hodepodge of numerous games I loved as a kid and the whole thing is ultimate form happyplace gaming for me.  As perfect as it gets. [10]

The og is high, high tier for me, can't disagree with owt you've posted. I bounced (poggo'd?) off plague Knight tho. Must revisit.

Doesn't strike me as a coop game tbh

78. What the Golf? Sport Sports Adventure & It's Snowtime! DLC - Switch (90mins)

Free update the gives you two mini 'campaigns' for free.  Aside from a glitch that borked my save completely this was great fun.  In fairness the glitch promised to be fun until it wasn't.  I thought it was a deliberate oh noes it's broken! thing at first as my ball was placed outside the main building (which I couldn't get in) meaning I could whack it down past the WHAT THE GOLF? logo and off towards the uncharted boundaries of the map, expecting to find some hilarity in keeping with the whole WarioWare Golf vibe.  What actually happened was I walloped the ball so far - with the gradual colour changes reinforcing my belief that it must be a lol - I eventually realised that I'd been doing it for 4-5 minutes and the ah wait no it's just fucked penny dropped, followed by another 4-5 minutes of tedium getting back to where I started.  Which was pointless anyway as I still couldn't get in the building.  Reloading the save didn't help as when I did my ball was still entrenched in no man's land, but switching save slots to start afresh put me inside the building, as intended. 

Anyway, it's all more of the same - zany madcap lightweight minigames with deliciously groansome puns when you hit the flag - which is a good thing in my book.  It's a game pretty much anyone can enjoy and I still think it's got one of the best two player modes in recent years.  [7] for the DLC, considering it's free. 

I couldn't get on with GoW4, too many robots and not enough fleshy things to shoot. Heard mixed things about 5 so skipped to the Hivebusters dlc and that was great - plenty of pew pew and not much hoo-aahhhh I'm having a dead wife flashback! from the torso tankers. Aside from the final boss Gears Tactics is absolutely superb.

Glorious tat. I've got a collection of micro sized Sega consoles with teeny tiny carts and pads but I think that might trump it. Absolutely perfect for fit the game, top marks.

Stand back. Review dump incoming. 

32. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (MAME)
I think the only game I've ever completed in an arcade. Me and a mate went there with god knows how many weeks of pocket money. I must have been better at it then than I am now. It plays...alright. Very limited moves though. No runs, no specials. Legions of foot soldiers. Some armed with fuck off pikes that reach half the length of the screen. No really satisfying way of clearing house, just chipping away at endless versions of the same guy. 

The 16-bit ones are a better bet. But they can't beat this one’s range of animations, speech, cartoon special effects, environments and everything else. Really something special for 1989. Light years beyond Golden Axe of the same year, but I suspect the gameplay is superior in the latter.

Inflation-adjusted, estimated cost of completion: - one full price 1989 console game

33. UN Squadron (MAME)
For when you love UN squadron but can't do the SNES one. Handles really well. Out of my depth here but not absolutely drowning like with an R-Type. Just kept pumping the imaginary 20ps in the emulator and powered through. I love UN Squadron. The energy bar and the slower speed of the incoming projectiles keep it within the realms of games playable by humans. 10 levels here. On my absolute best day I've probably only got half way through the SNES one (which is a better game with the alternate paths and the upgradeable ships). A lot of mega tank boss things and flying fortresses where you have to fly around shooting different bits of them. It all starts blurring into one. Good ride though.

Inflation-adjusted, estimated cost of completion - One Gameboy

34. Captain America and the Avengers (MAME)
Data East didn't get the memo and made a completable arcade game. I really like it. Projectiles and ability to pick up objects enemies means decent crowd control. Outstandingly cheesy and badly translated speech. Loads of bosses. they’re mostly quite straightforward and easy to punch in the face. The horizontal shooter sections aren't winning any awards but they keep it varied. Big fan of this. Expected it to be one of the weaker ones. Graphically it is. 

Cost - 1 week of early 90s pocket money.

35. The Simpsons (MAME)
I can't work out whether I like this or not. Veering towards not. Same engine as the Turtles from two years previously apparently. But they've done something weird to the hitboxes. It feels very different. Like they liked the turtles but felt that they should make it shitter to steal more quarters. Mainly fighting the same two same characters over and over that I’ve never seen in the show. The weakest mame game here. Very strange relationship with the IP. Properly batshit interpretation of Springfield. Wouldn’t be surprised if the devs had never watched an episode. Burns in a super-suit as the final boss was pretty funny.

Cost - One copy of Radioactive Man Number 1.

36. Bucky O'Hare (MAME)
Really good. Another one tending towards the doable. More of a slow-paced run and gun em up than a beat em up. Nearly all shooting but in the 2.5D beat em up format. There is a melee move where the shoot button turns into a punch when you're close. But you take damage from enemy contact and it doesn't help with crowds so it's best avoided. 

The jump is good, turning into a float down if you press it meaning you can stay airborne for a decent chunk of time. Although you're mostly fighting toad soldiers they mix it up a lot and they are quite fun to shoot and show up in little basic patterns to match up against. A ton of bosses. Although things can get quite busy with enemy projectiles, they all shuffle across the screen at a generous pace across letting you weave through them. Really pretty visually and really nice, erm, audioly. 

Cost - 2 weeks of pocket money

37. Space Ace (PC) & Dragon’s Lair 2 (PC - incomplete)
I'm not sure why I did it after the rotten time I had with Dragon's Lair. But I wanted to give it one last try before deleting the DL trilogy from my PC. And Space Ace wasn't anything like as bad.
The response windows for the QTEs were mostly a lot more forgiving, allowing you to watch the movie with the prompts on the periphery of your vision rather than the other way around. 

There's an alternate path thing where the Ace in question is either a weedy nasal dweeb or does a Bananaman-style transformation into a square-jawed, muscle bound buck rogers type. And different animations play out depending on whether you get the prompt on time. But I couldn't activate those properly despite pressing all the right buttons. So I ended up playing most of the game as the prat version of Rimmer Space Ace. The whining and screaming of the hero got a bit annoying. It's a garbage QTE game attached to very well-animated cutscenes but not infuriating like DL1. Fair bit shorter too. 
37%

After getting on ok with that I went into Dragon’s Lair 2 which is back to atrocious. The worst of the bunch. Not even sure what was going on with it. A load of random chaos as you flip from one unrelated scene to another. 
The timing windows are all over the shop again and the scenes are waaay too long so any missed presses often means a minute or two of repeated animation and 'gameplay'. But again, it's so brutal on the timing, you can't take your eyes off the prompts. So, pretty tedious, keeping me right on the edge of packing it in throughout.

Then about half way through it told me I missed some ‘treasures’. No idea what that was about, I was pressing whatever it told me to. Presumably some sort of missed button presses it didn't tell me about as it expected me to watch the screen. Anyway, it dumped me back to the start. Fuck that, thank you. 

Wretched trilogy of games. At least they're short. Should be said that they've tried to do quite a bit with the prompts in later versions of this on other platforms. eg the Switch version has Dirk's sword glow when it wants you to attack instead of expecting you to keep your eyes glued to an icon at the bottom of the screen. Wouldn't be enough to save them. Dreadful. 28%.

38. A Short Hike (Switch)
Was absolutely desperate for a game that lets the kid wander around and explore without some overlay of tedious tasks or huge sections of dialogue. Something she could be left alone with. Can't say I'd have loved it very much if I'd played it solo. But the kid properly loved it. Almost made for her. Just could have done with it being a medium to long hike. Really good at what it does.
87% 

39. Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope (3DS)
Duck Tales grafted into Megaman with a Mario 3 world map and some Dark Souls loot recovery. Just brilliant. So well-made. Great sense of humour. Terrific graphics that bridge 8-bit with modern tech and frame rates and animation. Probably some of the best music I've ever heard in a video game. The perfect balance between risk and reward with the treasure-hunting detours. Tricky but only a couple of times getting into oh fuck off territory. The story is there but absolutely only as there as it needs to be. Most of the checkpointing is spot on. Christ, the amount of times I died on the penultimate screen just before the checkpoint. It knows exactly how difficult you’re finding it and asks just that tiny bit more. There’s just enough punishment to make it feel important not to die, usually not enough to cause irritation. 

I can't even really think of any quibbles. I'd like to be able to duck in and out of levels I've completed, along the checkpoints. I don't want to redo the whole thing just to find the thing I missed the first time. But then, with one exception, all the things are completely findable anyway. The bosses are a bit on the easy side. Most of them can be beaten in a war of attrition by just getting in the pogo hits when they're stationary and dodging as best as you can, rather than learning any pattern. 4 or 5 of them I did at the first time of asking. But that's not even much of a problem as they're all fun enough. And given that they're easy, they even made a boss rush that doesn't suck. It's actually good. A fun boss rush. Insane. 
94% 

40. Pokemon Snap (Switch)
Well, it's something. Straddling the two horses of lazy and inspired. Quite obscure progression paths. The success criteria are not explained well. Loads of the challenges didn't seem to count as completed even though we got the Pokemon doing the exact thing requested. If the AI isn't good enough to recognise what’s going on in a photo, don't do the game. Lot of trying a few different combinations of interactions through the same level to get the result the game wants.  Take this game off rails and it solves a lot of problems. But that’s obviously more work for them. 

The kid liked it. Clocked up 40 odd hours and it was simple enough for her to be left alone to get on with it. Classic clunky interface. Overly aggressive swear filter and unnecessarily stingy character limits on the captions that you can give photos. It's really banking on the player loving pokemon and thinking that it's amazing to find new Pokemon. Luckily my daughter did. I didn't care for it.
 69%

41. Miitopia (Switch)
More kids shit. A limited, final fantasy-esque RPG that gives you options to streamline nearly all of that into something that can basically play itself. It gets decent marks for putting that sort of team-building, exploration and battle system into something easily undertandable by a 7 year old. Everything else stinks. Graphics are all MIi-level eyesores. Story bad. Music bad. Levelling system bad. Pulls the switcheroo around the 7 hour mark where you think it’s ending but oh no you’re only halfway through. Mercifully ended when the kid came across some baddies that were ‘too cute to kill’ that were guarding an essential path. So packed that one in. [6]

42. Alba (Switch)
Yes. Just fantastic. Nails everything it’s trying to do. A kid having adventures on holiday. Total freedom to just muck about. Loads to see and do. The environment is the king here. It’s a living, breathing, Spanish island pueblo. Not much to it admittedly and I wouldn’t have liked it much on my own, but with the kid, great times. 92%

43. Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games: Tokyo 2020 (Switch)
Muh. Are any compilation sports games properly good? This isn’t great. There’s always a couple that are decent but then none of them have much depth once you’ve run through it a few times. Surfing is fun. The karate and football are solid. They’ve got some snowboarding thing on here for some reason that is easily the best event (I suppose that’s the reason). Some need to be avoided. Fuck table tennis. 

Rammed full of promoting the city and gettings the kids interested in some of the history behind the Olympics and Tokyo. Mildly effective on that front. Real pity that the Covid Olympics are so far from the open, packed, happy Olympics depicted here. There’s a bad story mode involving doing all the main sports and, due to a convoluted plot mechanic, stripped-down, 8-bit versions of other sports that I’m presuming was a product of budget rather than creative impulse. It’s somewhere in the [70s] depending on how tight you want to be. It’s a fun sports game for kids with a short shelf life.   

44. Streets of Rage 4 (PS4)
Having this one again as I've played through it twice more, once in co-op. It was a firm 9 before and I like it even more now I've tried to get into some of the combos and tactics. I am bad at it in a way I never felt like I was bad with the old ones. But getting better. Still playing it and replaying levels for better scores and stuff. Properly hooked in. [9.4]

31. Last Stop [7]
Mildly interactive TV-style boxset of three stories set in London, which combine quirky family dramas with a common thread of supernatural elements. It works because of the difference in tone between stories and the need to play an episode of each before moving on. Plus they're generally quite well written. And as long as you accept you aren't really directing anything with dialogue choices, just sort of nudging the form of response, it gathers towards an odd but entertaining conclusion.

32. Eldest Souls [8]
2D, pixel-art, Soulslike boss-rush. It all comes down to the boss design, and that's pretty great. Most bosses take some learning and a bit more effort from there to actually beat, with a good flow to battles as each mistake feels costly, but you can gain back lost health by charging up an attack to enter a timed 'bloodthirst' mode. There are other bits like NPC side quests and skill trees to vary your build, but mostly it comes back to that finely balanced cat and mouse struggle, with you the mouse most of the time. There isn't actually that much of it - only 9 bosses to reach the end - but they're a good challenge and it's probably best it finished before it gets stale.

33. The Ascent [6]
Looks stunning and the basics of shooting things are solid enough. But the mission design is dull, often sending you jogging through long stretches gunning down repeating gangs, the RPG aspects are meagre, and a host of annoying interface issues ensure it wears thin over time.

34. Cris Tales [6]
Visually very striking JRPG (although Colombian, not Japanese) that's full of promise with its time bending mechanics - you can see the past, present and future of towns and their inhabitants all at once, and in battle age and de-age monsters to change them. It just doesn't take that early promise and develop it into anything remotely deep, leaving the appealing characters and locations with far too much work to do.