Ok just kidding, apparently I'm still going through older stuff that's taken me years to get around to playing.
The Swapper is probably the current champion for ugliest game I've played so far this year. The puzzles seem decent enough (even if they're a bit awkward using a controller), and there's something potentially interesting going on in the world, but it's physically uncomfortable for me to look at it. Everything is so blown out and blurry and looks absolutely awful. It's weird because the designs of things, while not terribly interesting, seem totally fine, but it's the effects on top of that that make it unbearable for me. Like yeah there are plenty of other games from that time period that went overboard with depth of field and bloom and stuff too, but in addition to that the implementation of them in this seems particularly bad. Turning them off in the settings definitely helps, but it still doesn't look great.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 is...complicated. I never played it on my Wii because the disc drive started acting funny before the game was even out. I made a decent chunk of the way into the game in an emulator years later, but I stopped eventually because a 360 controller and a mouse is an awkward combination for certain sections. It works a lot better on the Steam Deck, where there are better options for the pointer like using the gyro or one of the trackpads, but I still don't think I'm finishing it. It's just so weird that even though their flagship series like Mario and Zelda desperately need good camera controls they made a controller that just has no reasonable way to control the camera (sorry, the d-pad doesn't really count). Between that and needing to point at stuff I'm just not having a good enough time to keep going even though the level design is good and it still looks great. I could pair an actual wiimote with my computer now that the drivers are better and I have bluetooth that's fully compatible with it, but I don't think I'll bother. There'll probably be a new 3D Mario by the end of the year anyway, and if they keep experimenting with stuff like they did in Odyssey and Bowser's Fury it'll probably be great.
