Ghost Trick was one of the first games I put in my Amazon wish list back when I made an account in 2017. I remember a Youtuber I liked, Nintendocaprisun, streamed the game and the little I watched from the stream looked really cool. It sat in that wishlist for ages, eventually skyrocketing in price. It wasn't until last year, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy the game physically off eBay. It was expensive but it was a game I wanted to own for a while now, and I figured playing it on the DS would have been awesome. By this time, I was already a big Ace Attorney Fan, and knowing that this was another Shu Takumi game..I was pretty excited to play it. While I personally still prefer AA1 and AA3 over this, this was still a great time overall.

This game makes great use of the touch-screen. So, the basic premise of the game without going into story details, you the main character have died. You are a ghost and find out you have the ability to go back to the past, four minutes before someone has died, and have the potential to save them. You also have the ability to move to different objects and control them. You do this by going into ghost mode and moving your little wisp icon from object to object. The catch is, you can only move it a specific distance away. If something is too far away, you have to figure out how to get there by possibly interacting with the object you're on. This is called "tricking" and it can vary depending on the section of the story you're on. Some can be very simple while others you need to time specific actions in the real world. It might seem a bit confusing with how I explained however, it's very easy to understand in game. Either way, this gameplay loop is really fun and is perfect for a DS game. Near the end of the game, it also throws another character at you with some different mechanics. And it even combines the two at once and it can lead to some really fun puzzles. The game was never that hard, I never even had to look up a guide, however I never found them super easy.

Story-wise, like I said the premise is you die at the start. You play as Sissel, someone we know nothing about, and not even he knows who he is. His main goal from the start is to figure out who he is and how he dies, but along the way he meets a colorful cast of characters, and the game gets more complicated from there. Overall, I enjoyed the story and cast of characters for sure. Like Ace Attorney, they're all very distinct and can be very goofy. The main cast is very good tho I have to say I didn't connect to them as much as I do with the main cast of Ace Attorney. Probably because this game is shorter than your average AA game, and I was able to connect to that game's cast through the span of three games! Either way, while I didn't love any character here, Sissel..Lynne..Jowd..Cabanela..Missile..the entire cast is memorable and entertaining. The story is also full of twists and turns throughout. The ending may be a little convoluted imo but I think it was executed well and I did not see it coming at all. While not mind-blowing overall, I can at least commend the story and overall concept of the game for being unique. Always love seeing really out there stories like this.

This may be weird to here, but I don't think the absolute best aspect of this game is the story or the gameplay. It's the visuals. Honestly, some of the best sprite-work I've ever seen in a game. Every animation is so buttery smooth and really gives the game a lot of character. The look of each character sprite too, idk how they did it, but it has this very distinct look to it. Since the game is very goofy at times, the characters animations are goofy as well. The art style on the portraits is very distinct too tho those aren't animated. They're nice but it would have been cool if they had little animations as well, like Ace Attorney. Along with the sprites being full of personality, so is the dialogue. If you played Ace Attorney before this, you'd be right at home here. It feels just like Ace Attorney. Goofy and witty when it wants to be, serious when it wants to be, and full of heart throughout. In this regard, it may be better than Ace Attorney because I didn't notice any spelling errors lol.

The OST is probably my biggest disappointment compared to Ace Attorney tbh, especially since the AA1 composer did this game. The first Ace Attorney's ost is now in my top 10 OSTS of all time. I just love it so much, so I might've hyped myself up too much with this game. That's not to say this game has a bad soundtrack, I just don't find it comparable to the Ace Attorney games personally. Maybe I just haven't listened to the OST enough, as I know this is probably a hot take and others will disagree. Still, there were songs I did like. Four Minutes Before Death probably being my favorite since it reminded me of Ace Attorney the most haha.

I do wish I ended up liking this a bit more, especially since this game is praised so much and has a 4.5 average, however in this case I can totally see why it is as this game is really great. I guess maybe it just comes down to my personal preferences. Or maybe I'll like this even more on replay, who knows. Either way, while it seems I do prefer the Ace Attorney series more (sorry I keep comparing them, it's just hard not to with the type of game this is), this is still must-play DS game imo and worth all the praise it gets.

My first Donkey Kong Country game was Returns for the Wii. I got it for Christmas the year it came out (that or it was 2011 I forget) and I remember being so excited to play it. While nowadays, I'm not the biggest Returns fan personally, I can't deny it started my love for the DKC series. Once I got into Super Nintendo games with Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, I decided I wanted to play the very first Donkey Kong Country game since at that point I still only played Returns. I bought it at my local flea market I believe and really enjoyed it. I mentioned how Yoshi's Island always reminds me of the weekend, since I would play that a lot during that time, and the same applies here too. While I think the sequel does everything this game does but better, I still think the original is a really fun time.

The general gameplay of Donkey Kong Country is you run, jump and roll. Those are basics of course, as each level has other aspects that change gameplay up like barrel cannons you can shoot out of or ropes you can jump on but the general gameplay is pretty simple. The controls are basically perfect, rolling feels super good to perform, and if you know the layout of the levels it's very easy to just speedrun through levels since both Donkey and Diddy are relatively fast. Speaking about the characters, Diddy Kong's first appearance was in this game, and he honestly upstages Donkey Kong. If you get a DK barrel, you can get the other Kong along and they basically act as a 2nd hit. You can switch freely and this is helpful since they each have different attributes to them. Donkey Kong is slower but heavier so he can kill certain enemies that Diddy can't. Diddy just feels better to play as he's faster than Donkey and also has a smaller hitbox. Both are valuable, but Donkey is more situational and is mostly just used for one enemy type (and even then, Diddy can defeat them by rolling into them) so Diddy Kong is my much-preferred Kong to use.

As for collectables in the levels, you have bananas of course. The main plot involves King K Rool stealing DK's banana hoard and he must go after him and his baddies to obtain them back. I think the reasoning behind there being so many littered throughout the levels is he just dropped them or something but either way, they act as coins and getting 100 earns you a life. You can collect letters that spell out KONG and they also give you a life. You can also collect these animal buddy tokens, and getting three of a specific buddy lets you collect these stars, and every 100 you collect ALSO gives you a life. Besides all this, you can also find secret bonus rooms. These all contain all the aformentioned items, or just lives straight up, but these can be a pain to find. I wouldn't have an issue normally since these are optional bonus rooms so it makes sense they'd be really hidden, but getting every single one is how you get 101% in the game, so if you're a completionist you must find them all. The real issue then is, a good chunk of them are just kinda bullshit. You'll have some that are very easy to spot and are self-explanatory. But then you have ones that are completely hidden and sometimes even require blind jumps into pits. I know they wanted you to buy a guide or a Nintendo Power back then to find these locations, but I don't find random pit bonuses or random breakable wall bonuses fun ever. I used a guide for like 80% of these cuz I only ever 100%ed this game once before, so I forgot most of these. The sequel can be like this too, but it generally handled bonus room locations a lot better. Alongside all the collectables and bonus rooms, you also have animal buddies. These are fun as they change up the gameplay slightly. Rambi can kill usually unkillable (unless you have a barrel) enemies by running into them. Expresso can jump a bit higher and float over large gaps. Enguarde swims faster in water and has an attack you can perform. Winky...well Winky just jumps really high, tho he can also jump on usually harmful enemies too and he's honestly underrated. These guys appear enough where they don't just feel like one-off gimmicks or anything.

The levels themselves are generally well designed. They're simpler than the sequels, and I feel like there's generally more bullshit due to enemies suddenly appearing on screen randomly, but there's a nice flow to the levels. Visually, I think it just looks alright. The characters themselves looks good, I just think some of the backgrounds don't look great compared to others, and definitely compared to 2's backgrounds. I think it also doesn't help that the level themes aren't too interesting in this game. You have jungles and mines and factories and Mayan temples and some of these are more unique than others, but they don't exactly lead to very vibrant colors. When it hits, it hits. The one jungle level with the sunset is really nice and I like the ice caves. The factories are kind of cool near the end too, but overall, I think the level settings can be a bit bland here. Not like Returns tho, since that is very formulaic with its level themes but compared to 2, 1 is not as good in that regard.

The bosses in this game are kind of a joke. All of them, besides King K Rool, are incredibly easy and just feel like a slightly tougher regular enemy. They could've easily had no bosses and it would've been fine so I guess it's not like they detract from the game too much, however 2 did bosses way better.

This may be my hottest take though. I don't love the OST. A big reason for that is most of the OST was in Returns, and so I had always felt there was an identity crisis with this game which is not the game's fault and is more a me thing because I played Returns first. Even outside of that, some of the songs I just never really got into...but objectively the OST is quite solid. There are still bangers like Aquatic Ambience and Gang-Plank Galleon of course. Also a shoutout to Fear Factory, that one's nice too. Even though I don't love the OST, it's still good overall, I just much prefer 2's tbh.

I've kind of been complaining about things here or there despite praising the gameplay. Something else I'll praise about this game tho is its Rare charm. Animations are very charming between characters. Donkey and Diddy both get terrified when you're at the edge of a cliff. They do a charming celebration whenever you defeat a boss or complete a bonus room. Diddy Kong throws his hat down and stomps on it when he loses a bonus room. The dialogue between the other characters like Cranky or Funky or Candy are very charming too. There's a fake-out Kremlin credits that happens when you get halfway into King K Rool's fight, and the actual credits have humorous cutscenes between characters. Not only is this game charming as hell, but it also created all these well-known characters too. We wouldn't have Diddy Kong or Cranky Kong or Funky Kong if it wasn't for this game. We wouldn't have my man K Rool either, he's such a memorable villain. The Kremlins themselves are very memorable and cartoony. I think besides the actual gameplay, the best thing DKC1 does is the worldbuilding and charm. Before this, we just had DK and DK Jr. It's all thanks to Rare, that we have as many memorable characters as we do now.

I may have some issues with this game, and I think 2 fixes them all pretty much, but this is still a classic for a reason and is staple Super Nintendo game. I was honestly thinking about dropping this to a 7, even up until writing most of this review, but it wasn't until the paragraph before this did, I really ponder and think about how many staple characters this game created and just how charming this game is in general. It's very important to entire DK series as a whole and is a very fun platformer at that! However, as I've said several times in this review, 2 is better in every way and I'm going to be replaying that soon so stay tuned for that review!

We were young, and we were still learning. Coming into our own, yet still not quite there.

The second generation was much like some of us who had experienced the series from the beginning as bright eyed and optimistic children. Maturing, finding our footing in life, and trying to figure things out for what we really wanted out of our future. Do we continue onward with our current path and continue developing our skill? Are we seeking to make a career of said skill? Those drawings bearing a similar crudeness to generation one sprites that we etched on the back of our tests, those little characters that you made from your own two hands and the ocean of your imagination. They would need to be refined, perhaps to the point you would be sick of seeing them again through the months and months of practice. We struck gold on something we were good at, but were we ready to make this our life? How do we get ready for life? Would we even make it to that path we dreamed of?

For us, this was the sequel. A sequel to childhood, and the path to maturity.

If we were to get ready for life, we would need to learn how to maintain a schedule and utilize a form of communication to keep in touch with our contacts. Through our little battery-powered clock in our cartridges, we kept track of the time of day in order to search for different friends on different paths. We would remember what day it was, so we could participate in a bug catching contest and try to find that Scyther. If we couldn't get up in the morning early enough to catch a Ledyba, what good were we in participating in life? It was at this point we were starting to get into the thick of things, we weren't children anymore, but teenagers who aspired to be more like adults. We were excited of all that upcoming opportunity that would only be granted to us with age, and with that age in due time came responsibility and expectations to provide. Life would soon not be all about fun anymore.

It was soon time to grow up, and perhaps move away from home to master our craft elsewhere...

It's hard however to leave behind everything that you grew up with. We traveled to Johto to learn how to better ourselves, perhaps like the bike shop owner who got unlucky on their new shop placement in Goldenrod, but for us it wasn't truly home. We would long for our old pals, our old hangout spots, and our favorite order from our childhood fast food place. We desired a return trip home to Kanto, so we can say hello to everybody one last time before we begin our life's career. Home however, wasn't quite the same as we had remembered. Forests were chopped down, caves were cleared out, and Lavender Town's place of remembrance had been converted into a radio tower. Kanto has changed, or has it matured like us? Resources have been plundered for practical use over the thoughts of those who had lived there, and spirituality has been pushed to the side in the name of technological advancement. Have we lost our way, or is this what is to be expected of us in the future?

When I finally climb this mountain and end this visit home, what will await me at it's peak?

The last lingering strand of childhood I had left made manifest, the past me armed with the very first friends I had made on this adventure. If I must let go of the past, I must defeat the longing memories of what once was. Even if I were victorious, will the memories finally rest or will they continue pursuing me? With the destruction of the past, we make way for the future. This is the way. This is the way we grow up. We no longer have room for trifling matters such as our childhood friends, memories, or the places we once held dear. It's time to make way for adulthood and to only go forward without ever looking back. Home is no longer home, it's no longer even a memory for us, it was thrown back into the toybox where it belonged. With this we continue our adventure elsewhere, and we leave everything behind. It was a fad, and it's time to bury those McDonalds toys and trading cards in a box or sell them off in a yard sale.

It was never to be the same again, for we have both grown up. Us now simple mature adults, and them a fully-realized juggernaut of a franchise with no end in sight. We've defeated our childhood, there was no reason to keep going with this series obviously geared towards what we had grown out of. We could take a peek once in a while to check on them when they make the television, but we would do so with a look over our shoulder to try and maintain our mask of adulthood and maturity. It was time to only watch mature programming, and play mature games while doing other such mature things, like swearing while our parents weren't around. This is what is expected of us now, it's time to leave it behind to the next generation who will grow with the next set of games, whom may also leave once they have grown past it....with another generation to follow.....and the cycle repeats....

My time was over, much like Kanto and the Game Boy, but despite what life and middle school demanded of me, I would never be too far away.

I am home, I always have been.

Polyphony Digital at the time of of writing this review have made 17 games since their founding in 1994. 16 of these are racing games with Omega Boost, a 3D mech action game being the one outlier in their repertoire. With the lead programmer on Omega Boost being Yuji Yasuhara (Panzer Dragoon Zwei), the mech designs by Shoji Kawamori (Macross, Visions of Escaflowne, Transformers) it's kind of amazing this is somewhat of a hidden gem considering the pedigree behind it.

And the thing is, a gem it really is. This is the first time I've played it in the 25 years since it's original release and it's amazing how well it holds up. The most impressive thing about it is actually the control scheme. It's simple yet highly effective at allowing players to traverse 3D environments having dog fights with a variety of enemies. It essentially uses 5 buttons. Boost, fire, special, hover and lock on. That's it. Your mech, The Omega Boost will always move forward unless you hover which will lock you in place from auto moving. This with the lock on that will auto target you facing the nearest enemy allows for a surprising degree of control in aiming, moving and shooting all at once that still holds up better than some more recent games. Once used to them you can strafe around targets, stop to fire, boost away and reacquire all with ease.

It has a very arcade feel to it with only two main weapons of a rapid fire gun and homing lasers when held down called boost. You get a special with a bar that builds up that does great damage but can only use sparingly but there are no other options or upgrades so to speak. There are 9 levels in total and each one you get scored on for how quickly you can beat them and the amount of enemies killed which can unlock more boost lock on segments to hit more targets at once. The game probably takes an hour or so to beat if you play straight and know what you are doing but it took me longer due to the aforementioned roots above. You only get 5 continues and only recover a chunk of life at the end of each level rather than starting full. I can think of no reason to do this other than to create an artificial difficulty. Honestly, I found it really pointlessly annoying as I would have almost full health but not quite at the start of each level. Just why?

The levels themselves are pretty varied and have this great chunky mechanical industrial feel to them that PSX visuals did so well. Initially I thought this would be a purely space based shooter but very early on you end up fighting ships in planet atmospheres watching them explode onto the planet as you destroy them, artificial tunnels with giant robots, sand plains with floating embers like a giant fire in the darkness as you fight a variety of enemies with some really creative bosses. I really hated the final couple of levels though with a needless difficulty spike. One of them has an annoying timer to beat two bosses then a very tough mini boss rush to finish that feel a little thrown together with no level before them. Maybe on sequential play throughs that would be easier but with only 5 continues and having to start the whole level over if you die it's just needlessly brutal.

The story is kind of basic. Essentially you are trying to go back in time to prevent a catastrophe where humanity are losing a war with an AI. It's presented in cutscenes that use a mixture of live action actors and CGI. The opening video if left to play seems to have a surprisingly high budget of a command centre, getting into the Omega Boost and flying off all to a completely out of place rock song. The rest of the music except the end credits sound more like something from Nier which I feel fit the aesthetic far better. The music feels bizarrely inconsistent in places though I like the actual cutscenes themselves, extremely 90's and I mean that in the best way.

So even with it's minor flaws, Omega Boost is a pretty crazy intense game that looks amazing. To think Polphony Digital made this cool 3D mech game and then went on to make nothing but racing games forever more will never not feel like wasted potential to me.

The US TV advert for Omega Boost as an extra.

+ Controls are really fluid, they hold up amazingly well.
+ Varied levels and fantastic visuals.
+ Some great music....

-....Also some really out of place music. It's like someone's put their rock track over the opening and ending videos for no reason.
- Brutal continue system and life recovery between levels just take some of the fun away from actually playing the game.

It's not a meme review this time I swear!!!

I've been wanting to do a full-fledged Luigi's Mansion review for awhile because its a game that has a special place in my heart. Since this will total out to be my 190th review, I figure now would be the perfect time to do so.

One random day in my early childhood not too long after I began playing video games, I was at Target checking out the video games section. Upon doing so, I discovered one particular game that caught my eye, Luigi's Mansion for the Nintendo GameCube. Despite not owning a GameCube or having the cognitive abilty to realize not every single game was on the Ps1, I begged my parents to get me this game. Alas I never did until years later when I began collecting GameCube games. I probably got about halfway finished with the game until I dropped it along with 95% of the other games I owned. Since then I've beaten this game & its 3ds remake about 3 times in total. With every time I finish this game, I grow more fond of the game that was most likely underappreciated during its initial release.

Usually its Mario that gets the spotlight and saves the day, but not this time. Mario got scammed and turned into a painting by King Boo. To help save his brother, Luigi, with the help of a scientist named Professor E.Gadd, ventures into King Boo's mansion. To assist Luigi on his quest to rescue Mario, E.Gadd gives him the Poltergust 3000, a machine that will allow Luigi to do some Ghostbusting.

The game is split into 4 parts consisting of a variety of different portrait ghosts to collect. The first part of the game serves mostly as a tutorial for the remaining 3 parts of Luigi's adventure. During part 1, E.Gadd teaches you how to use the Poltergust and the first few rooms & portrait ghosts serve as a way to getting use to the game's controls & mechanics. Overall, the game feels incredibly well-paced and each part doesn't overstay its welcome.

Atmosphere aside, the gameplay is probably the best part of the game. You explore each room looking carefully for ghosts & money by sucking up everything around you. Once you find a ghost, you need to hit it with your flashlight. If the light connects, it will play a sound that prompts you to suck up the ghost. Sucking them up is pretty much like a game of tug-of-war as you will need to maintain a grip on your controller as the ghost will attempt to escape. It is not only something unique that hasn't really been done before previously, but it also makes the gameplay incredibly addicting. The money hunting isn't super important to the game and you can skip collecting coins if you so choose, but if you want to get a better ending then you will need to collect as much cash possible.

There are really only a couple of minor issues I have with the game overall. The main issue being how frustrating Boo collecting can be sometimes. Thankfully, there are no soft-locks in regards to it, but there will be plenty of times that a Boo will run into a room you can't access if you fail to immediately get it in your Poltergust. You can always go back and get it once you progress further, but it's one of those things that really bothers me during my playthroughs since I tend to struggle with getting them in one try. The only other thing I take issue with is the controls taking a little bit to get used to, but overall its not that big of a deal.

Luigi's Mansion is a game with fun, addicting gameplay, phenomenal atmosphere & aesthetics, and great pacing. It's a one-of-a-kind game that can't be replicated.

I don’t know what’s with Game Boy platformers having random shoot ‘em up sections but I’m all for it, nothing like seeing my favorite plumber commit aerial manslaughter against some octopuses and a literal cloud!

It’s pretty interesting how despite the Mario series being pretty off the wall setting wise when you really think about it, Super Mario Land sticks out by being even weirder somehow, and I mean that as the biggest compliment it can be. A result that could only come from the combination of the lack of the series prominent director and the Game Boy’s own particularities, this game kinda fascinates simply because of the fact it exists at it is, and that no game would really rival it in that regard ever since… maybe Mario Land 2 and Odyssey but I digress.

Sarasaland has the madness of the Mario world and mixes it with UFOs and aliens, the aforementioned shoot ‘em up sections in the sky and underwater, Koopas that explode and Zombies that cannot be killed, and worlds that, instead of being based around a theme like forest or ice, are just the Easter Island or Chinese bamboo forests. The insanity of the new concepts that it brings and the spin it puts into older ones and how fast the adventure goes by makes this what’s probably the most surreal game in the series; a game that makes of the incositencies its greatest strength, and makes for some memorable moments, and I’m pretty fond of it for that reason alone honestly…

…BUT aside from that, this isn’t that great, sadly…

It has some other amazing elements, like the music which is kinda fire, the Underground/Temple theme is probably one of my favorite songs in the series and the Overworld and Muda Kingdom ones aren’t that far behind, but aside from that and the whole creativeness of these four worlds… this is kind of whatever. It has some cool ideas like the upper final door in each level that leads to the bonus game and the fireball changing into the superball —which is a pretty funny name change in all seruiousness—, but both have things like that irk me, like how the former only plays into action on repeated playthrough and some can be a pain in the ass to reach, and the latter being a pretty obvious downgrade when you really consider it; I understand the change was probably made for performance reasons, but being able to shoot only one ball this imprecise in levels this maze-like… isn’t great or satisfying, to put it nicely.

And when it comes to the levels themselves…. They sure are levels! As I said, I like some moments and sections, but in general terms, this is pretty middling at best; some parts of levels repeat not in other levels of the same world, but within the same level, and while creating multiple possible paths to traverse is a great way to compensate to being unable to create genuinely interesting obstacles in paper, they never do anything cool with it aside of finding the fastest way to beat it.

The movement isn’t the best and can be frustrating at times, the bosses sure do exist… aside of the excellent ideas and originality at display, this isn’t anything more than a serviceable, kinda clunky portable Mario game… which hey, not bad for its first go!

It’s fine, it’s decent, I can see why some people love it, I can see why some others dislike it; it’s a pretty impressive feat and a showing of how different creative visions and hardware can loead to extremely interesting results, and has a ton of historic value, but aside from that, I had a decent time with it and that’s about it.

This being the first appearance of Daisy and Tatanga is pretty rad tho, sad that the little guy didn’t show up in more games than he did, he was pretty cool me thinks…

"The enemy of this place is not the Golden Rule, but human failings"

I first heard of this game when it got released as there was a positive word of mouth spreading around it but I was very surprised to find out it had in fact started out as a Skyrim mod before expanding into a game in it's own right. Even with the positive reviews around it I still hesitated due to my dislike of the Elder Scrolls games but fortunately due to a user here duhnunuh and his perpetual steam giveaway I was given the chance to try this out. Having finished it 100% in two days my reservations were extremely unfounded. It's fantastic. I found myself absolutely engrossed in the city and story around it's Groundhog day time loop premise.

The Forgotten City is a hard game to actually discuss though as much of the joy of playing it is making the discoveries as the narrative unfolds. A couple of parts really made me go "well dam!" as I played through it. The short spoiler free version is that you wake up next to a river in modern times before stumbling into an underground Roman ruin whilst searching for a man who had entered it prior to you. Once in there you realise it's a one way entrance and you are now stuck inside except for a portal that takes you back 2000 years before when the city was still a vibrant community. To get out you need to find out why it became the ruin it was in your time and prevent it from happening.

Though it does have plenty of options, branches and endings the game is actually more linear than it appears overall with talking to all the residents of this ancient Roman city to unlock more information, items and quests to constantly progress with loop shortcuts built in once enough progress is made. It's a clever little game but the cast of characters and usage of history and myths is what really makes it such a winner for me. I love historical settings and though Rome is often used in large scale war games and gladiator titles it rarely gets as intimate a background as this. Conversations of normal people of the period, gods and politics all mixed in but each conversation actually serving a purpose to push the story along towards it's conclusion. The characters all have their own lives and backgrounds and although some are more important to the overall narrative than others they all feel like people rather than background models in the world. The small setting allows for the characters to each have their own personality, worries, history and flaws.

Outside of the dialogue and conversations you will spend your time exploring the location. The game is called the Forgotten City but it's more a small village or town than a city. There is still plenty to explore and see however with temples, markets, forums, caves and secrets. There is some occasional basic combat in first person which is kind of weak though extremely limited with only one section really requiring it as the main point is the mystery. If I'm really nit-picking flaws, some of the animations for their faces and how characters stand can pull you out of the immersion a little as they stare at you cross eyed. The thing is I actually do think it's a fantastic looking and sounding title overall. It has great art design, vistas, music and voice acting to pull it all together cohesively, especially for a game made by a core group of only 3 people from scratch off the back of a mod idea.

Overall I think this is a game that will stay with me for a long time that occasionally I will just think about. Whilst I like a great many games in a variety of genres there are only a few for their story that really stand out to me for the overall experience. Games like Soma, Mass Effect, 13 Sentinels and now, The Forgotten City. "The many shall suffer for the sins of the one?" No, no, no. The many shall enjoy due to the work of a few.

Recommended.

+ Great historical references, narrative and characters.
+ Gorgeous art design.
+ Just an engrossing experience.

- Combat though limited isn't that fun.

Just meh. I can count the things I liked in this game on one hand - Water Palace, the return of a certain SA2 boss and Emerald Coast Act 1.

Generations 3DS is a strange game, the first three Act 1s all have the level design stolen 1:1 from their original counterparts, Classic Sonic has a homing attack and Modern Sonic isn't even 3D. That's right, no 3D levels on a 3DS. This leads to Classic Sonic just feeling like a worse Modern Sonic here, as the spindash is a worse boost and they both share the rest of their moveset anyways. It's genuinely such a baffling design choice to me, why even include two different characters if they play the same? The switching between Classic and Modern was a huge part of Generations' identity, and it's completely lost in this version.

If the level design atleast made up for it, it would have been fine, but it doesn't. Radical Highway and Tropical Resort are both some of the most unfun levels I've seen in a Sonic game (I've seriously considered dropping the game because of Tropical Resort), and those are already two out of eight levels total. The rest of the levels are fine, nothing particularly stood out to me except Water Palace, but I somewhat liked Act 1 of Emerald Coast too. The bosses are hit or miss, you have some interesting remade ones like Big Arms from Sonic 3 and a late boss from SA2, or boring 2D races against bosses like Silver, who is in Tropical Resort for some reason! There is nothing "special" about the Special Stages either, you run through the same glass pipe seven different times, similar to the ones in Sonic 2, would have been cool if they were atleast designed to fit the design of their respective levels.

In the end, there's not really a good reason to play the 3DS port of Sonic Generations, but I suppose it's a decent way to kill some time if you're looking to scratch that Sonic itch on a 3DS specifically.

Who knew that to make Super Mario 64 one of the greatest games of all time, all you needed to do was give Mario a shotgun.

Shotgun Mario 64 is exactly what you think it is. You play through Super Mario 64... with a shotgun!
The funny thing about it is, it adds to Mario's moveset so much, it gives you even more options as to how you approach levels!
With the shotgun, not only can Mario shoot enemies and various obstacles, but he can also shoot it while in the air for extra air time. With this, you can make some ridiculous jumps in the levels, and it makes the platforming even more fun!

The shotgun also eases up on collecting the 100-coin stars! Because with the shotgun, you can also shoot enemies that were otherwise undefeatable before, and they drop in more coins! Of course, stuff like the Blue Coin switches are still important to get, but the shotgun really helped make some stages a whole lot easier.
See a Thwomp? Shoot it.
See a Heave-Ho (the trampoline enemy)? Shoot it.
See a Chuck-ya? Shoot it.
See a door? Shoot it!
See a Toad? Well, if he has a star, shoot him, and that star will come to you!

The amount of attention to detail this game has is amazing, and I hope you guys try out the game and see what you find.
Just don't shoot Koopa the Quick... trust me on this one.

Of course, the shotgun trivializes a lot of the challenge that this game has, but I don't really care.

It's funny, the whole joke of "what if Mario had a gun?", I personally don't find that funny, but when you actually make it fun, and even make Mario give a tired expression during the final cutscene of the game, I'm laughing my ass off!

Shotgun Mario 64 was a really funny, but also really fun experience, and I see myself coming back to this game sometime in the future.

Donkey Kong Country 2 took everything that made its predacessor great and cranked it up to 11. I seriously mean everything. The visuals, the music, the gameplay, the levels, the story are all major upgrades from an already fantastic platformer.

While the story isn't great it is much better than the original. The original is legitamately Kaptain King K. Rool stole all of Donkey Kong's hoard of bananas. In DKC2 the stakes are raised from bananas to Donkey Kong’s life as he is kidnapped by King K. Rool. It's now up to Diddy Kong and newly introduced Dixie Kong to save the day. Dixie and Diddy are far and away my favorite two characters in the franchise so it was so much fun to have the entire game revolve around them. The gameplay is smooth and feels great even today. To be fair the original DKC also had smooth gameplay but I always found myself using the limber and quick Diddy over the lumbering DK. In DKC2 Diddy controls identically to the original DKC but now instead of a slower based powerful DK you get a second quick character in Dixie Kong. Plus Dixie comes with my favorite movement in the entire series with her hair spin which functions similarly to Peach's float mechanic in the Mario series. You will absolutely need that hairspin as this game is very difficult, especially the bonus stages. Every world out side of the first is sprinkled with a few very difficult levels which I appreciate.

The levels in DKC 2 put other platformers of this generation to shame. From a pirate ship, to a volcano, to a swamp, to a run down amusement park, to a giant castle this game takes you to many different locations that all feel fleshed out and keep the levels intersting and fresh. Not to mention they are gorgeous graphically. In my opinion it is some of the best graphics of the entire SNES library. The pirate, amusement park, and the bee hive levels absolutely pop with vibrant and beautiful color schemes. The swamp, castle, and volacono have a completely different tone with a much darker palette but equal in beauty just in a much different way. The animations on the enemies and the Kongs were top notch for the time. My favorite animation, which is also one of my favorites of all time, is when you complete a level and Diddy Kong breaks outs a boom box and starts rapping while Dixie pulls out a guitar and start slaying. It’s also very fitting that they celebrate their victory with music as this game with out a doubt has a top tier sound track of all time. As many great qualities that DKC boasts the star of the game is the abusrdly beautiful OST.

DKC2 is rightfully thought of as one of the greatest 2D platformers of all time and this is absolutely a game you should play.

My favorite 100 games of all time:
https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/my-favorite-100-video-game-of-all-time/

Finally we are getting into the meat and potatoes. A divine course of DLC that’ll make even the most serious dollar sign min-maxxers shudder in fear.

Ring ring, who’s calling? Oh, that guy you met once and never again. He wants to know if you’ll go to GeekCon with him and dress up as Star Wars characters. A random townie just crashed the rocket ship there and literally exploded (didn’t die), so you bought the festival related SWAG to commemorate this fine afternoon. They’ve concocted the perfect sample of stupidity to coax my Sims out of their house. Apparently it’s karaoke bars and dumb little stupid events that happen every other week. There is nothing like getting a bunch of Sims together and watching them interact on their own, whether it’s bettering their lives or destroying them. This is why I play the stupid, haha funny gibberish game.

The bulk of this pack is stored within a new city, which you can travel to at any time. Living there will require you to foreclose your house and gulp.. become a renter instead. Unfortunately, you cannot edit the foundation of the pre-made apartments, but most of them are rather lavishly gigantic. We’re talking sitcom levels of large, despite being the cost of a pair of shoes per month. Video game escapism, my beloved. It does however come with the added addition of shitty annoying neighbors. Video game escapism, denied. I like the busyness of the city, but I still prefer to just travel there instead. With it having 4 districts of different things to do and an assortment of foods to eat from different cultures, I’m still slowly working my way through the Collectibles that it added. There’s just a lot to do in the city, baybee. I barely go to the other towns in this game, San Myshuno is where it’s at.

I haven't really talked about the furniture in these packs and that’s mainly because it's.. well, just chairs and couches and whatnot. I do not claim to be or even exist on the same level as Bob from Bob’s Furniture. I’m much more the type of person that just kinda throws things I like together. Orange walls with green couch cushions, ya know? One look into my Sim’s house will make even the most sane individual break. But, guess what you sicko Animal Crossing enjoyers, this pack includes a gigantic superstore’s worth of furniture, not to mention the added abilities to perform street art to scribble all over your walls and lawns with. And don’t even get me started on Lot Traits man, give your house a literal personality so that it’s easier for your Sims to learn certain skills or encourage certain behaviors while they’re there. There are now more than a million different ways to make money that aren't just going into a rabbit hole and disappearing for 8 in-game hours. I would consider this to be a pretty big root for the tree that is this game as each pack created after this one just adds more oomph to it.

The only thing that genuinely annoys me is that they added a Singing Skill. It’s not the skill that annoys me really, but my Sim just loves to whip out her best Ariana Grande impression whenever there’s nothing to do. It’s like she’ll die if she doesn’t do it once every two hours. But other than that, this is a beefy hamburger of an expansion pack that adds a ton of content from aesthetics to actual gameplay. I don’t think I go a single session without using it, so I would think this one is pretty bang for your buckaroos.

Has it ever happened to you that you're working on a sequel to your 2D handheld platformer for a beloved and iconic IP, and everything is going great because you're fixing a bunch of problems the first game had and designing really cool movement tech and levels that are fun to play, but this guy you don't know keeps sneaking in at night and programming the most dogshit bosses imaginable and adding bottomless pits to ruin all of your levels? What do you mean you gotta collect seven rings in a zone to unlock the special stage AND it's the worst one in the whole entire series!? Somebody needs to stop this guy!!

This game was a cultural phenomenon of its time, so in true keeping with my tradition, I waited 16 years before actually finding out what all the hooplah was about. Don't get me wrong, I was interested - I can probably still recite some of the gushings about it I read in a magazine back then, waxing poetic about the game's living world, its vehicular combat, its in-game internet, how incredibly detailed it all was. But I didn't own a PS3 or Xbox 360; all I had was a Pentium III that was older than I was, so I figured there was no chance of me playing it. Little did I know back then that this game's PC port was so borked that even folks who owned high-end PCs in 2008 couldn't enjoy it.

I'm reviewing the Complete Edition incarnation of GTA IV, the one that's available on Steam. I purchased the game in one of my impulse purchases because Steam sales are more addictive than crack, and then I fucked around for 4 months before deciding it was finally time to play this game. And guess what? My laptop, which is no warhorse but still outstrips GTA IV's recommended requirements, still couldn't run it without stuttering like King George VI giving a speech. Clearly this game's requirements are only a suggestion. So I gave up, and tried the game on my dedicated gaming computer. That computer is a beast, and since I recently bought it and it's my precious baby, I almost didn't want to install the quasi-malware Rockstar launcher and Social Club bullshit on it that's required to play this game. But the refund period was long since gone, so I complied with their draconian demands.

And guess what? It still wouldn't let me play the fucking game. By this point I had 2 hours of Steam playtime on a game that hadn't even launched yet. First I had to solve 4 separate captchas to assure Rockstar that yes, I know what an upright cow looks like, and then I had to verify my email address again, and now finally I could play the game.

But what the fuck. Why does playing a game you bought have to be an experience on par with passing through an Israeli checkpoint? I gave up on video game piracy a while ago because of the perks Gaben's platform offers, but if the refund window had still been open, I would definitely have gone that route.

After all that, how's the game? Well, it's all right. GTA IV is amazingly detailed for its time - cars take realistic damage, the passengers inside them take realistic damage, you can shoot the driver to make them fall over onto the horn and go BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. The cars handle much more realistically than any game I've ever played; they have actual weight, and using the brakes is a necessity rather than a choice. While it takes some getting used to, the driving in this game - and believe me, there is a lot of it - is pretty fun.

The same cannot be said for riding motorcycles, however, and thankfully there are few missions that require you to. No matter how good you think you are at video games, you will always look like a monkey trying to fuck a football when you ride bikes in GTA IV. Out of the ~15 attempts I had to make on the final mission, one of the few that required repeat attempts (the difficulty in this game is usually very fair, which is surprising when you consider how bullshit most GTA games get later on), the list of failures go something like this:

- 11 were due to the required motorcycle section (the game suddenly loses all open-endedness to force a setpiece on you, and even if you shoot 15 rocket launchers at the final boss's boat, he won't die)
- 1 was due to me not stabilizing the helicopter fast enough, because the helicopter controls are almost as bad as the motorcycle ones
- 3 were due to a game-breaking, widely reported bug that Rockstar has had 16 years to fix, but they were too busy cutting content from the so called 'complete' edition to do so, leaving players to find workarounds.

Dear God, this final bug. It's not the only one in the game, but it's the most egregious, and really highlights how awful the PC port of this game is. Sure, it finally runs smoothly provided your computer is powerful enough to be able to run the game ten times over on its officially stated 'recommended' settings, but it's still not bug-free. NPCs getting stuck on geometry is extremely common, and the effect can range from you being forced to skip a cutscene and force the game to move on, to having to retry the whole mission because you can't bear to watch them bumping into walls like idiots any longer.

There are still stutters, and this was the first game to crash on my new PC - it can run brand new games at the highest settings with nary a glitch, but a 2008 game crashes. Sometimes Rockstar decides they're still not done bullying you, and their proprietary launcher closes without starting the game, so you have to click the Play button on Steam again and hope this time the two frontends this game mandates will both work. Not only that, the game doesn't seem to register manual saves, only autosaves after completing missions. Sometimes I lost progress because I had manually saved without completing a mission. I suspect this is because the Rockstar Launcher has its own cloud, which shuts down immediately when I quit the game after saving. Know an easy solution to this? DON'T HAVE TWO LAUNCHERS FOR ONE FUCKING GAME.

I realize I'm spending a lot of time talking about the abysmal performance of the PC version than the actual game, but when it's this egregious, it spoils the whole experience. I will try to talk about the game some more now.

Combat is much better than in previous GTA games, although it still is just on the level of a passable third-person shooter in 2008, one that lacks an open world. The cover system is finicky, and oftentimes it's better to make your own positional cover behind walls and boxes without snapping to surfaces. If you play with a controller, the triggers are used in all their analog glory - a half-press for manual aim, a full squeeze for auto-aim. There are a few missions that are extremely well-structured, such as the Heat-parody bank heist, even if a lot are simply the repetitive 'drive here, kill that' loop. The world is nice and detailed, though the NPCs are more cowardly than people in real-life - if you so much as sprint near someone, they will run away screaming. The in-game internet is rife with hilarious mockeries of the 2008 world wide web, some of which I sorely miss. There are also some fun side activites you can explore alone or on dates (romantic or otherwise), such as a strip club with at least 5 clones of Nicki Minaj walking around, a cabaret show that's honestly very entertaining to watch, darts, pool (played on a table made of ice, judging from the physics), and SEX. Pick up hookers and kill them after so you can get your money back. It's tradition.

Like all GTA games though, GTA IV suffers from most of the content being concentrated on the first island. There isn't even that much difference between the three islands - in the previous incarnations of Liberty City, you truly felt like you were moving to more affluent parts of the metropolis as you changed islands, whereas almost all of LC feels like a ghetto here. The third island hardly has anything to do at all. I've always felt that the reason memes about GTA are concentrated in the first third of the games is because most players don't progress past the first island. I guess Rockstar know that too, so they left the other two islands bare.

Despite all its flaws, GTA IV is extremely addictive. It's a decent game even in 2024, with an ahead-of-its-time attention to detail. With the issues it has though, I can't recommend buying the Steam version of the game. Rockstar don't care about fixing the bugs, and they don't care about your experience once they've got your money. They can't even be arsed to renew the licenses for the music, having removed 50+ songs so far, and it's only going to get worse. Every time I switched to the rock radio station, 'Wild Side' by Motley Crue would be playing, because there were about 4 fucking songs left on the thing. Do you want to have a cumbersome, watered-down, buggy time with this game? Nah. If you have the choice, I sincerely recommend finding an old PS3 disc and playing that instead. Don't give Rockstar your money for an incomplete 'complete' edition.

Indika is a very short (~4hrs) walking game filled with puzzles and thought-provoking dialogue. Oh, the brilliant voice acting in this game... I loved the emotions that the 'narrator' put into his work. The ending leaves you hanging with questions in your mind. There are many scenes where you can't get what's happening because it's confusing or because it happens too fast.
I also want to state that I dissected the game and they animated every scene; characters are moving even when you don't see them in cutscenes or in the game. And the demon is also a part of some cutscenes, but you can't see it. They put real effort into this game. It's sad that it was short.
The downsides were pretty much the optimization and some less-polished parts of the game.

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

“Bayonetta? More like Mayonetta, ‘cause this shit spread me apart!” This joke was brought to you by the legendary @QuentTheSlayer.

The Bayonetta series! One of the most acclaimed franchises I’ve seen in general that nobody ever played. Yeah, can you believe that Bayonetta 2 barely cracked 1 million copies on Switch as of 2021? That's not terrible by any means, but you’d think it’d be a lot higher, since it was practically the Wii U’s only pride and joy, and 3/4ths of the series were heavily funded and promoted by Nintendo, plus almost every DMC game has sold like hotcakes, but no. Oh, sorry to any NES Remix 2 fans out there! Apparently, it wasn't a killer app for the failing Wii U console. Shocker. But, when Bayonetta 2 launched in 2014, they also ported Bayonetta 1 to Wii U, and a few years later, Xbox One, PS4, and the PC. The PC version is the definitive way to play the game, in my opinion. It can run up to 4K resolution, and usually maintains a stable 60fps, unlike a majority of the console versions, which don’t. A shame that Bayonetta 1 has only seen a PC release, because 2 and 3 will probably always be locked to Nintendo Switch and Wii U, as those 2 were Nintendo-funded, and also receive FPS issues, more so Bayonetta 3. But hey, emulation is always free, I suppose. And for the record, in these playthroughs, I will be emulating 2 and 3, just for the best experience possible. An almost locked 60FPS is crucial for almost any modern character action game nowadays, so I just bit the bullet. And for you rare few, I have my lawyers on speed dial if you want to contest this.

Okay, jokes aside, what the hell is a “Bayonetta”? Aside from her name being a clear nod to the weapon, the Bayonet, Bayonetta herself has become an icon within the hack n’ slash genre, and also the fighting game scene. Bayonetta was birthed from the absolute legend, Hideki Kamiya, who also directed the first Devil May Cry title. Rather than a male lead, Bayonetta was designed from the ground up, as a female witch who wielded four guns at a time. Although some shade was initially thrown at the beehive hairstyle, mimicking traditional witch hats, and lacked glasses initially, eventually, they came to a witch, with a heavy focus on the attractiveness of the character. Bayonetta, from the ground up, was designed to be attractive as all get-out, if you couldn’t tell from the box art. This girl just leaves it hanging out there like it’s nobody’s business! Hell, this even floods into gameplay a little bit. The infamous torture attacks have Bayonetta seductively execute her foes, the innuendos, “Climax”, yeah. Hideki Kamiya and crew knew what they were doing, and it shows. However, in spite of the less-than-modest presentation of Bayonetta herself, I’d actually go out on a limb to say that it empowers Bayonetta as a character. In the cutscenes, we see Bayonetta doing all of this wacky shit. She’s having fun! Flirting with her enemies, dancing around them, as she aims to secure the kill. It really makes Bayonetta out as an unstoppable badass, deliberately belittling her foes as she defeats them all promptly. I'm not a woman, so I don't really want to comment on if Bayonetta is necessarily sexist or not, but personally, I never really felt that way. The opening cutscene demonstrates this, with Bayonetta, ambushed by angels while working as a nun, decimating every single Angel in her way with style and grace. And when things get dire, as the angels barely miss her, slicing her nun attire in the products, she fully awakens to her power. And then, the ICONIC song HAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, HAAAAA, AAAAAA, AAAAAAA, AAA, x6 FLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY ME TO THE MOON AND LET ME PLAYYYYYYYY AMONG THE STAAAAAAAAAAARS begins at full volume. I love this fucking track. Bayonetta has a good ass soundtrack and if you contest that fact, you're subhuman. But, back to the story and character design itself, giving Bayonetta this massive reach over her enemies demonstrates to the player how powerful Bayonetta is, and how powerful the player CAN be, with the game’s COMBAT.

GOD, Bayonetta's combat makes me SWOON. Never have I ever been so addicted to the controls of a game alone. Each time I listen to Fly Me to the Moon (Infinite Climax), I just want to start Bayonetta all over again. Bayonetta’s combat is EXCELLENT. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Hell, I might even say I enjoy the gameplay loop a little more than Devil May Cry’s gameplay loop, although I’m not entirely sure. Bayonetta herself has a few simple attacks; a punch, kick, shooting, and dodging. You’ll primarily be fighting your foes face on, but that’s not to say your guns don’t get some decent use either. You have 4 guns; two on your hands, and two on your feet. By holding an attack button, you can shoot the guns to give a little extra damage out, corresponding to which attack you throw out. So, punch to shoot the hand guns, or kick to shoot the heel guns. Or, alternatively, you can shoot your hand guns on your own, if you don’t feel like punching enemies in the face. But believe me folks, it doesn’t end there. The combo system of Bayonetta goes far deeper than you may think. Bayonetta retains the delay-based systems of Devil May Cry, but given the choice of hands and guns, the combos become much, MUCH deeper than before. Your average Devil May Cry combo goes like this. Slash, slash, wait, slash, slash. Whereas an average Bayonetta combo goes like this; Punch, punch, kick, kick, wait, kick. It adds complexity, but still remains simple enough to master. Bayonetta’s other main stick is her Witch Time, and upon dodging a majority of attacks at the last second, Bayonetta will slow down time for every enemy, and yeah, it’s as satisfying as it sounds. Outside of looking and feeling really good to do, the obvious benefit of slowing down time also adds a score multiplier to each attack done in Witch Time. So there’s no real reason to not be in Witch Time as much as possible, even if you can’t land a few attacks in. It feels great to pull off each time, just getting to wail on your enemies each time feels immaculate to watch and play. Even more immaculate is the Climaxes and Executions, which have you executing enemies in just the cutest way possible, usually killing them in a single shot. So, all of this versatility sounds pretty overpowered, right? How does Bayon- Wait, I’ve already used this segway in my Repentance review. Shit.

Straight and to the point, Bayonetta is one of the most deviously difficult games that I’ve ever played. Goddamn, I wasn’t expecting to die THIS much when going in. I knew that it wouldn’t be an easy game, but FUCK the Witch Hunts, seriously. But if it isn’t one of the most consistently fair games that I’ve played, too. Every attack is cued to perfection. To avoid frustration, most attacks have a bright shine and sound cue to it. The attacks themselves hit incredibly hard, but if you can dodge them, you’ll be a master of Bayonetta. Guess which camp I fell in? I was planning on doing a no items run of Bayonetta, but at Chapter 9, I caved. The game was just too hard for me. But, that’s okay, because before that, I was only getting Stone ranks, and each use of an item counts as half of a death, so there really wasn’t much difference in my overall score. What DID have an effect on my score were the Quick Time Events, though.

God, these just need to go. Bayonetta is an amazing game and all that jazz, but MAN, these got on my nerves really quickly. My main problem is that a grand majority of them lead to an instant death for no good reason at all, and they quite literally show up out of nowhere. At the very least, at least make the failure state cause minor damage or make it repeatable, because an outright kill from something you couldn’t see coming is not fun game design. Imagine that you’re on the way to a Pure Platinum in Chapter 2. You haven’t got hit a single time, and when you finally kill the boss without damage, you set down the controller satisfyingly, only to forget the instant kill at the VERY end of the chapter. Come on, dude! Talk about cheap and frustrating design. This especially hurt as someone who has really good hand-eye coordination, and played the Steam release with a Switch Pro Controller, as the direction of buttons doesn’t line up with the prompts on screen, as inputting the wrong buttons very frequently leads to Bayonetta’s demise. And don’t input them TOO early, because that kills you, too! For some reason. Speaking of bosses, they were... somewhat of a mixed bag. None of them are outright terrible, but there’s definitely a fair share of hot air between them. Sometimes, there’s not a whole lot to do other than firing your guns at them. They also have QTEs, although most are optional, thankfully. And failing usually doesn’t kill you, thank the fucking lord. Also on the plus side, all of the Jeanne fights were AWESOME. She serves as a skill check; Witch Time and guns won’t work for a majority of attacks, and she’s among the most threatening bosses in the entire game, packing speed and some hella’ Wicked weaves. Each encounter is almost perfectly crafted, requiring the utmost mastery of skills. And that music, man. Every 10/10 game NEEDS a 10/10 soundtrack, too. It’s simply inseparable. Jeanne is essentially the Vergil of Bayonetta, and those DMC comparisons don’t stop there.

Like DMC, you can buy abilities in the shop, all of which are of great variety and utility. In fact, I’d go as far to say that Bayonetta has a greater variety of skills than a majority of Devil May Cry games (obviously disregarding DMC 2). Good GOD, the moves you can pull off are so distinctive from one another. The Beast Within moves are among the best in the entire game, the Breakdance is a great AOE attack, also useful for revealing those hidden halos and other items, man. It’s all so good! Sure, the heel stomp attack could be a little more useful, but for the most part, all of these abilities are awesome! Uhhhh. I’m out of good segways. Shit.

Okay, time to talk about the final few chapters, and WOW, these aren’t all that great, unfortunately. Chapter 14 is mostly Space Harrier that just lasts far too long. At the end, there’s a Jeanne fight, though, which is my personal favorite of the Jeanne fights, because she has the best, most difficult attacks of them all. I kind of wonder why they didn’t just split the two chapters, though. Imagine fucking up the Platinum and then having to do Space Harrier all over again. Ugh. Chapter 15 is a... boss rush. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s just kind of... okay. Chapter 16, the final traditional misson, is just a boss fight, against Balder, and the fight would’ve been PERFECT, if it weren’t for the fucking camera. It’s like Jeanne; no Witch Time, no guns, just you and a fight to the death. The camera is just far too up close. But it's still a great send-off, into the EPILOUGE, of course. The FINAL final boss, Jubileus, is a solid little send off to the game, but I think it's just a bit too easy? First off though, Jubileus is fucking hot and you cannot say otherwise, but secondly, the boss herself hovers above you, slamming sword thingies down, and those shoot projectiles at you. Not too bad to dodge, you just Witch Time them, and bam. Beat their asses. She'll also end up changing the arena every now and then, one covered in lava, one in ice, and one in the middle of a tornado. You, once again, have to destroy the swords she plants down, and Witch Time is the key to success. Really, her fight is pretty straightforward. Most of her attacks are pretty slow and predictable, and the one that poses a threat is the Black Hole attack, which is a reset, but other than that… yeah. It's fun, but too easy in my opinion. But of course, this is capped off with the most awesome Climax. Bayonetta does an awesome 20 second long dance, summoning a massive hair demon with oddly feminine proportions (god this game is weird and I love it), and it beats the shit out Jubileus in one fell love tap, knocking Jubileus’s soul out of her body into the goddamn SUN. Yeah, talk about a fucking climax. Oh, you can control her soul as she falls? You know what? Fuck Jupiter, am I righ- I DIED??? …Okay, that makes sense. Anyways one dumb decision later, Jubileus’s body falls to the earth, brief lesbianism occurs, we destroy her body, Bayonetta dies, actually no, bisexualism occurs, Bayo winks, CREDIT ROLL!!!!

No hyperbole or anything, Bayonetta is one of my favorite games that I've played this year, and maybe one of my favorite games of all time. A must play for almost anybody. Sure, the game has it's low points (how the FUCK did i not mention Grace and Glory during this???), but overall, it's REALLY fucking fun, and serves as one of the best character action games ever made, andI'll for sure be returning for Hard Mode and afterwards, INFINITE CLIMAX (funny). Bayonetta is on Steam, PS4, and Xbox One for 10 bucks, and the game more than makes up for that price, I'd say. I'm not sure about Xbox 360 and PS3, but Bayonetta is also on Switch for $30, which is a bit of an eh deal, but hey, you get a $20 discount for Bayonetta 2 if you buy it. Speaking of Bayonetta 2, that's NOT up next, but rather Bayonetta: Bloody Fate. Yeah, for the first time in zeusdeegoose history, we have a cross-media review series (if you discount Isaac I guess). I'm still playing through Bayonetta 2, and it seems destined to be another banger, but hey, we'll see in the review. I don't know about Bayonetta 3 as I actually haven't even touched it, but from what I heard, there's some… opinions on it. But, once again we'll see. But, the moral of the story? Bayonetta is awesome and I like it. Go buy 15 copies of it right now, and I hope that you have an awesome day.

Fanservice Sensory Overload

In the light of Sonic x Shadow Generations' release later this year, there's a good chance the original Generations would get delisted from Steam, so I went ahead and grabbed it as long as I still could, but waited until finishing Origins, as I wanted to see as many references as possible - wise choice!

As I've already mentioned in the opener, Sonic Generations is fanservice incarnate. Every stage present here is a reimagining of an already existing one and you're going through them in release order. Each level has two acts, with the first one always being 2D and the second one being a mixture of 3D and 2.5D - although I think it would have been better if Modern Sonic's stages were just 3D, since the 2D sections take out the speed from the levels they were built around, but also because there are cases like Planet Wisp's Act 2, where the 2D segments end up being a lot longer than the 3D ones, despite the latter being the main draw of Modern Sonic's levels. However, Classic Sonic is not all sunshine and rainbows either, as his physics feel a bit off compared to the original games, but I can turn a blind eye to this, as Generations runs on an entirely different engine. It's also worth noting that the 2D level structure generally feels a bit strange and half-baked at times, City Escape Act 1 stands out especially in that regard to me. YMMV.

In terms of presentation, Generations still looks fantastic 13 years later and is the prettiest Sonic game I've played so far. It's the type of game to leave a smile on your face as you rush through those familiar levels with newly composed remixes and experience them from a different perspective - 2D zones in 3D and the other way around. Seeing Speed Highway for the first time on the hub world gave me joy, the same can also be said for the revamped Shadow chase (good lord, that fight was messy in SA2) and the second boss in Generations. But I've already said enough, some of those surprises are just better if you see them with your own eyes.

Despite being rather short compared to the Adventure duology, Sonic Generations doesn't overstay its welcome with the main story and still has enough side content for those who want to play it a bit more. As an anniversary game, it completed its task successfully - celebrating 20 years of Sonic with a really fun time.

much like life, being trans is awful. having to live your life as a compromised version of yourself, not quite belonging anywhere, even among the people who love you most, and constantly struggling with the feeling that you can't do what you want to do because people won’t let you or won't understand. there is a sense of loneliness, of isolation, a sense that you're not ever going to be understood and that you'll always be just a little off, a little too clockable, a little too different. there is an incredible sadness to the whole experience.

as for the positive aspect? i'm still working that out. i'm not lucky enough to have a family that supports me. i live in a state of constant fear and apathy, knowing that no matter what i do, i'll never be the girl i've always had in my head.

the problem is, i'm a pretty miserable person, and i take it out on everyone around me. i hate my life, and i can't be happy being a man and i don't know what to do about it. but i do know that i hate this situation i'm in, and the idea that i can't escape it. it's like i have an anchor dragging me down, and i can't get out of the water.

i know there's a lot of trans people who are really happy, and i'm happy for them. for me, it's not been a good experience, and i'm not at all sure it's going to get better. but it has given me some perspective on life.

my perspective on gender has led me to have unfortunate habits of psychoanalyzing everyone i see, recognizing patterns and trying to understand why they do what they do. it has given me a sense of being misunderstood and that it's everyone else's fault. because of this, i'm very judgmental. it's like i've dissociated from all of society, there's no human connection or emotions behind the faces and words. it's almost like i'm a vampire. it's not exactly easy being this way, and i wish i had been born different, but at least i know that, at the end of the day, no one is ever going to be able to understand me completely.

my feelings are a complicated mess, and trying to explain them to people who don't understand gender dysphoria is difficult, so it's easier to go without trying, especially if it was easier for everyone to assume i'm cis than have me talk about my feelings. it's just easier to keep people at arms length, let them make their own assumptions and let them feel comfortable in their own bubble. but if i tried to interact with people, i'd just be putting them in an awkward position, trying to understand what i'm saying. it's easier for everyone to just assume.

In an interview with IGN in 2020 Senior Producer Fleur Marty commented about Gotham Knights, Warner Brother's newest Batman game that it's, and I quote:

"is very much not designed as a game-as-service."

Now I don't blame him for this comment, it's part of his job when doing PR rounds to help sell the product. I can only imagine with the negative outlook the title was receiving that the Eye of Sauron at Warner Brothers was watching intently. The thing is the reason I don't believe him is to give credit to the talented people that work on WB Montreal as I refuse to believe they would design such an awful system if it wasn't a live service game initially that was repurposed. Now I like the premise of it, playing as the sidekick's when Batman is gone and the launch trailer is superb at really emphasizing that feeling. I like the idea of having the game co-op and having upgradeable RPG mechanics but the way it's implemented is just dreadful.

So it's an open world game similar to it's predecessors where Gotham City is the playground. When you are let loose to explore there are basic repetitive crimes on the map where you can scan to find them then interrogate criminals to find pre meditated crimes and it's utterly pointless. Simply finding them organically exploring would have been better and more interesting. When stopping crimes sometimes there are chests that have resources in them or blueprints for new gear you can make. The resources are just various shades of colours with huge numbers that are never explained. Playing with a friend to tell them I'd found "some green" which I already had 100,000 of just means nothing and is extremely unexciting. I had random unexplained resources coming out of my ears, blueprints for weapons and armour I'd never use equally spilling out of my bat belt pouch. To compound matters further creating one of these items you can do on the fly but you can't equip it until you return to the Belfry which the game makes you do constantly. It just seems to want to break it's own flow all the time with these "not designed as live service" mechanics.

The game generally is a bit of a rough state in various areas. The movement around the city will have you feel constantly stuck on objects like perches and lampposts that Batgirl seems to glue to with the worlds strongest adhesive like she'd made a lifelong commitment she refuses to break. Bless her. Additionally there are constant little things like the lack of a proper jump being only contextual leaving questions if it will actually work, running into other players or walls kills all momentum and you freeze for no reason, a choppy frame rate and playing online co-op auto stops my headset working in private chat forcing me to mute and unmute again in mid conversation for just no reason. All small things, nothing stopping the game being unplayable but they can get frustrating over time.

The thing is if you strip those mechanics out and look past the niggling technical issues there is actually the foundation of a good game here. When playing specific story missions and it's focused on the plot and unique locations it's really good. I like the characters and narrative, there are some touching scenes and funny moments. There is the framework of a great game here just held back by an obviously difficult development and initial design pivot regardless of what Fleur Marty may have been stating on his PR rounds. My friend and I did have fun playing it regardless and certainly don't regret it. Riding through Gotham on a bat-cycle launching into the air to land on an unsuspecting criminal and doing a finisher with a brutal kick to the jaw is really satisfying. I also loved playing as Batgirl and wanted more of that ever since the Arkham Knight - A Matter of Family DLC. Whilst it just doesn't reach that level of quality it was still fun, just extremely flawed.

Worth a try if you're curious as it's constantly on sale, hard one to recommend but it's not as bad as some people make out I feel.

+ Story premise is really good.
+ I like the characters and story beats.
+ I like the presentation though it's not as dense and gothic as it's predecessors.

- Upgrade and open world systems are just awful, clearly was designed as a live service game that pivoted in development but the damage is there.
- Combat and movement isn't smooth enough.
- Some minor bugs and frame rate issues.

Game's cool. You play as Meatwad. It’s filled with smartly designed puzzles, making engaging use of an oddball toolset that rewards out-of-the-box thinking… but only so much. Beyond manoeuvrability skill checks that are satisfying enough to clear, and a few cool mechanical revelations, there wasn't a lot of head scratching here for me. Animal Well is tremendously well-accomplished for a solo project, I had a great time with it! It's just lacking a certain star power for it to really raise the bar.

For complete transparency, I had this game sold to me as an ‘Outer Wilds-like’ - and upon seeing that it was a sidescrolling metroidvania, I was beside myself with hope that I’d get a few notes of La-Mulana in Animal Well, too. In practice however, I think the more apt comparisons for Animal Well would be games like Environmental Station Alpha, Super Junkoid, A Monster's Expedition, or Knytt. The distinction is important, to me at the very least, because I approached Animal Well with pure intentions but spent most of my runtime hoping for an experience that never actually came. This isn’t a game about losing yourself in the sprawling tendrils of a world’s unfolding internal logic - Animal Well is an array of screens containing pressure plate puzzles. The world feels utilitarian, and even with the animal themed ruins that politely aim to conjure a sense of dread and mystery, it’s all misaligned and mismatched in a way that lacks the cohesion of a place with a history worth learning. The latter end of my runtime was characterised by backtracking through areas to collect the final few tools, but it was made excruciating by way of the fact that practically all of the screens merely become desolate roadways once you’ve solved their focal puzzles. I don’t think I spent any more than five minutes on any given puzzle in the first ‘layer’’ of the game, and for as much as I like how left-field the player toolset is, their interplay with the puzzles themselves is usually shockingly obvious and leaves very little room for doubt.

There is, undeniably, an inclusion of outtadisworld ARG-like puzzles that at the time of writing are still being unfolded by dedicated Animal Well researchers, but I’d be lying if I said I value things like that remotely as much as game content I can be trusted to learn and master on my own. Will the community uncover a secret back half of the game that turns the whole joint on its head Frog Fractions-style? I kind of doubt it lol. I’m a sicko that completed La-Mulana 2 on launch week before any guides were even written, the distinction here is that that series takes great pains to contextualise its puzzles in multiple ways - through cryptic hints and also through things like inferred historicity and synergy. Animal Well doesn’t do this, it scatters codes and event flags around the map in obscure nooks in the hopes that a friend group is putting together a Google Doc.

I now have two big regrets when it comes to gaming. The first is that I have gone through life having never owned a PlayStation 2, and the second is that I didn’t support and play Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush before the studio was unfairly axed by Microsoft in 2024. The year prior was a crazy year in terms of the amount of quality game releases, and it was quite frankly, a tad overwhelming keeping up with them all. Despite all of the praise being given to Hi-Fi Rush, there were just so many other games that were coming out, or games that I wanted to get to, that I just threw it on the backlog thinking that I’d get to it eventually. Unfortunately, 2023 was also a year with a heartbreakingly large amount of game studio closures, and this is something that is continuing in 2024, with Tango Gameworks themselves being a recent victim at the time of writing this review, despite all of the success that Hi-Fi Rush had achieved the year prior. Coincidentally, the game also had gone on sale as part of a Humble Bundle around the same time the studio was shut down, and fellow Backloggd user duhnuhnuh had an extra key for the game that they were offering (huge shoutouts to him by the way, I’m extremely grateful). Given the timing of everything and an opportunity to play the game in a way that doesn’t directly support Microsoft, I leapt at the chance to give this game its due diligence, and I was absolutely floored at how much the game truly lived up to all of the praise people had given it.

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm-based action game that takes place in a city in the far future. It stars Chai, a sarcastic and oblivious slacker dude with a disabled arm who really wants to become a rockstar. He volunteers for a cybernetic limb replacement program being run by Vandelay Technologies on their very own campus. Shortly before the process begins, CEO of Vandelay Technologies: Kale Vandelay, a callous CEO stereotype, observes Chai’s records. Unimpressed, he harshly dubs him a loser before he carelessly tosses Chai’s music player away, causing it to fall into the testing site onto Chai’s chest. During the limb replacement process, the music player becomes embedded within Chai, giving him electromagnetic powers while also causing his environment to sync up with the music itself. However, this causes him to be labeled as a defect by Vandelay Technologies, whose security forces attempt to bring him in. As he flees, he meets up and makes a deal with Peppermint, a robotics prodigy with a grudge against the corporation, who helps him escape in exchange for helping her investigate them. Together, the two team up to uncover the shady secrets behind the scenes of Vandely Technologies so that they can expose them to the world and stop their plans from unfolding.

The gameplay is that of a character action game like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, but with rhythm game elements that supplement the combat and platforming. Before I played the game, I heard a lot of people comparing it to Devil May Cry, but I wrote those comparisons off as an over-exaggeration, since I feel like a lot of people will compare any action game with combat they really like to Devil May Cry. I was delightfully surprised to learn that no, the game really is essentially Devil May Cry, but with rhythm game elements. You can perform a variety of combos that are dependent on the timing of your button presses, you’ve got a stiff yet highly vertical jump, you’ve got short platforming segments to serve as variety in-between the combat, you’ve got a ton of different upgrades and additional combos you can purchase with the game’s currency, and you’re graded on your performance after every battle and level with a letter ranking system.

Everything in the game is tied to the beat of the song that’s currently playing, and I do mean everything. The attacks and movements of your enemies, platforming hazards, sound effects, and even animations in the background are all tied to the music, and the game tests you on your ability to not only perform well while in battle, but doing so while also staying on beat with the music. I did find it a bit difficult to get used to timing my attacks to the beat at first, but I got better and better at it as time went on. I can’t tell you how satisfying it feels when you’re able to successfully perform attacks in sync with the rhythm. Just like in Devil May Cry 5, the music will add additional layers of instrumentation the higher your letter score, and the game will also play the sound of an audience chanting Chai’s name as well. The better you do, the more ecstatic the game feels, and performing really well during a fight can feel genuinely euphoric.

The rhythm game elements don’t stop at syncing your attacks to the beat, however. There are a number of quicktime events where you need to press the correct buttons at the correct timing, such as during certain special attacks Chai can perform. Additionally, when close to death, more powerful enemies and certain bosses can force you into a one-on-one segment where you’ll need to successfully parry or dodge their attacks, which are telegraphed to a series of specific beats that you need to replicate with your button presses, and successfully doing so allows you to finish them off with one final strike. As someone who is a big fan of character action games, it’s extremely surprising how fresh and satisfying adding rhythm elements to this genre’s gameplay makes the game as a whole feel. This melding of the genres works fantastically. There is a great sense of cohesion between the two, and for the most part, elements of one genre don’t overshadow the other.

There’s only one element of combat that I have some small issues with. As the game progresses, you will meet additional characters who become allies that you can call upon during combat to aid you in battle. They’ll perform a special attack that has a cooldown once it’s executed. Your allies become a pretty key part of combat, as these special attacks are needed in order to make certain enemies or bosses vulnerable. The issue is how inconsistently your allies’ attacks function. You can’t manually target enemies, so when you call on your allies to use their attack, they can sometimes use it on the wrong enemy, or they’ll miss entirely. If this happens, then you’ve just wasted that summon and you now have to wait for the cooldown to finish before you can summon your ally to attack again. This was especially annoying with Macaron, who needs to use his ability twice in order to break the shields of certain enemies, and whose cooldown takes twice as long compared to your other allies. If he misses or targets the wrong enemy, then you’re basically a sitting duck until his ability recharges, which can be very frustrating. You can purchase some upgrades to make the cooldown slightly better, but they do cost a lot of currency, currency I’d rather spend on other things that can enhance the gameplay experience for myself, like additional combos I can perform, or items that increase my health or special attack gauge.

The game’s tone is very playful, upbeat, and fun, complimented by a gorgeously colorful artstyle that’s inspired by a combination of western and eastern comic books/manga. It tells a story that is a not at all discreet criticism regarding how the leaders of corporations frequently interfere with, mismanage, and ruin the lives of those who work under them. It also goes into demonstrating how much this hurts when the job is something that people have aspired to do for much of their lives, and are very passionate about. The story is extremely straightforward, but you can tell it’s one that comes from very real experiences that I’m sure the folks that have worked on the game have gone through, and considering what ended up happening with Tango Gameworks, it’s a story that resonates now more than ever.

The characters are decent, they serve the story well enough. I will say I’m not the biggest fan of Chai, but he did eventually grow on me. He’s a huge dork who’s very self-serving, unmotivated, and oblivious to those around him. He does get better as he starts to take the situation at hand more and more seriously and comes to care more about the people he meets and works with to take down Vandaley, though his ego remains pretty big still by the end of the game. He’s not at all a bad character or protagonist, he’s just a little too white bread for my tastes. The other characters don’t get much of a focus during the game’s main story, but talking to them in-between missions at the hideout allows you to learn more about them and how they feel about the unfolding events of the narrative. I think I might’ve developed a stronger attachment to them if they had a larger presence in the main plot, but this is still a fine and fun cast of characters.

While I personally would’ve preferred the tone be a bit less playful and to have had a little more edge to it, like the old school Guitar Hero games or Brutal Legend, I feel that would’ve made the game somewhat of a harder sell, not just to general audiences but to get approval to make the game in the first place. The exaggerated, Saturday morning cartoon-esque personalities of the game’s characters (the villains in particular), really manage to offset how personal, and in a way, sad the message that’s being communicated under the surface is. The villain Zanzo in particular is an excellent demonstration of this. His manically over-the-top demeanor and constant Jojo posing, to a certain degree, masks the very real, outrageous, and constant demands the person in charge of a team may have, and how their ego can get in the way of seeing the project to completion, making the efforts of the overworked people underneath them all for naught. The game’s current tone isn’t at all a bad one either. I can see some folks not jiving with the comedy, and I can also see certain people writing it off as “reddit humor”, but even if the game didn’t necessarily make me laugh out loud, I still found it to be endearing.

I’ve really enjoyed the rhythm games I’ve played, but I don’t play too many of them because the vast majority of them don’t appeal to my taste in music, so I’m really glad this game exists. I played the game with its original soundtrack instead of the licensed music (in case I decide to one day stop being a coward and start making YouTube videos), and I gotta say, it was pretty fantastic. I’m more of a metalhead than a rock guy, but this game’s music is still really good. The soundtrack has a lotta groovy riffs and decent solos that are never tiresome or boring to listen to.

Hi-Fi Rush was truly a surprise for me. I went into this without much in terms of expectations, but its fluid and immensely satisfying combat and complete banger of a soundtrack kept me hooked the entire time. I’m heavily debating doing a quick second playthrough of the game even though I’ve finished it because I was just that hooked and enamored by its gameplay. If the game had a different tone and a heavier soundtrack, I genuinely think it would’ve ended up being my dream video game, but even as it currently stands, it’s a brand new favorite of mine. The irony of a game condemning the actions of corporate dickheads becoming a massive success while the studio that made it gets shut down a year after it launches is honestly extremely tragic. It’s not like my $30 was the $30 that would’ve kept Tango Gameworks from shutting down, but I still feel really bad after finally playing this game that I didn’t purchase it and support Tango while they still existed. If you haven’t played Hi-Fi Rush, I implore you to, and I also implore you to learn from my mistake and actually support those games that don’t get AAA marketing, yet gain an outstanding reputation via word of mouth. Don’t just put them on your wishlist forever and wait. I can’t stress enough how much we need more games like Hi-Fi Rush, and if we don’t make our voices heard with our wallets, we hurt the chances of these games being made in the future.

Forever and always: Fuck You, Microsoft.

Any Nintendo fan, if you were to bring up the topic, would most likely talk your ear off about how great or bad Nintendo’s lineup of consoles has been from the NES all the way up to now, with the possibility that you may even get some people who will go out of their way to defend some of their more apparent blunders like the Wii U (it’s me, I’m one of those people). However, if there is one universal fact that most fans of Nintendo can agree on is that, out of all their consoles, the Virtual Boy was the absolute worst one of the bunch. For those that somehow don’t know, this was the placeholder console that was released in-between the SNES and the N64 around the mid-90s, and as you could probably tell by the name, this was meant to be a… ahem, REVOLUTIONARY system! It was gonna implement 3D and VR technology into console games, bringing capabilities that consoles like the SNES and Genesis could only DREAM of pulling off……………. or at least, it was, if it didn’t immediately crash and burn right out the starting gate.

Most of the games that were released for the thing barely took advantage of these capabilities whatsoever, which makes one question why you would even play these games in the first place, and given the fact that every single one of these games could only be played with this garbage red and black color scheme that would do a real number on your eyes, it becomes all too clear as to why this thing only lasted a year before being thrown away by Nintendo themselves. But hey, I will give the system credit, as not everything that it did was completely awful. For one thing, it gave everybody a clear idea on not how to make a video game system, and we did end up getting one or two decent games from the machine, such as with what I would consider the best game ever to be released on the platform, Virtual Boy Wario Land.

It only made sense that we were gonna be seeing more Wario Land games soon after the original game, considering how successful it was, but I never would’ve guessed that the next game in the series would be made exclusively for the Virtual Boy. Granted, that doesn’t make me wanna play it any less, but it definitely makes it hard to recommend to anyone given that fact alone, hence why I never played the game for the longest time until earlier this year when I decided to check it out. It wasn’t that hard for me to get into it, but HOO BOY, you think that staring at the red and black graphics were bad, then you should try what I did, and stare at a bunch of purple, blue, and red graphics that clash horribly with each other for hours at a time, so that was a lot of fun to go through. But anyway, obvious flaws aside, I actually ended up having a lot of fun with the game, and I would say it is really good. I wouldn’t say it is better then the original Wario Land, nor anywhere near as good as future games in the series, but it still manages to be a pretty solid platformer, and definitely the best game that was ever released on the Virtual Boy.

The story is pretty basic for a Mario spin-off like this, where while Wario is chilling inside of a cave in the Awazon region (yes, you read that correctly), he is disturbed by a gang of evil baddies who go on and take all of the treasure of the land for themselves, with Wario giving chase towards them, only to end up getting thrown down through the floor, so it is up to him to fight his way back up, get many treasures along the way, and maybe take down some bad guys as well. Again, pretty standard stuff going on here, but it is still charming and simple enough to where you can easily get invested in Wario’s plight, because not only can most of us relate to wanting to get millions of dollars through any means necessary, but you do wanna see him beat the fuck out of these creatures as well.

The graphics are… well, take a wild guess how they are, but even if we ignore the obvious elephant in the room, we got some really great sprite work going on here, with all the different levels, characters, enemies and so on looking pretty damn great, which makes the game that little more appealing to look at, the music is really good, having plenty of great tracks to hear in there such as this one, but I dunno, something about it doesn’t quite come close to what we had in the original game for me, and the gameplay/control is pretty standard for a Wario game, having everything that you would expect, with a few more bells and whistles attached as well, making for a pretty entertaining time all throughout.

The game is a 2D action platformer, where you take control of Wario once again, go through a set of fourteen different levels that’ll lead you all the way up through this tower, defeat plenty of enemies using your natural brute strength or whatever tools you have at your disposal, gather several different powerups, rare treasures, and LOTS of coins throughout your journey to get as rich as ever and for extra bonuses, and take on several bosses that can actually prove to be quite a challenge, not just because some of their gimmicks can take some time to getting used to, but you will also need to fight to see whatever is happening because of the goddamn screen. Once again, we have all heard this song and dance before, usually without any graphical nonsense holding it back, but it manages to make up for it in plenty of different ways, such as its overall tight design, its infectious energy, and having plenty of genuinely fun platforming challenges to see throughout.

If you had played the original Wario Land, then you pretty much know almost everything to expect out of this game: you run around, you bash these tiny fuckers around to take their money, you find MANY riches hiding around every corner, and you even find plenty of secret treasures along the way, which can change up the type of ending you get. That is pretty cool and all, with all of these elements blending together in beautiful, red-painted harmony, being very fun to play through, exploring around to get all of the treasures, solving the puzzles, finding these different hats that can help you out, even to the point of completely cheesing levels at some points, and even playing the minigames for the chance of getting more coins and extra lives. Most of it sticks pretty closely to the original game, but there is one thing that definitely does set it apart from that other game: the 3D aspect.

Given how this game was released on Virtual Boy, it definitely needed some sort of 3D or “VR” gimmick to make it stand out, and the way that this game does this is by introducing backgrounds, which you can jump to and from whenever you please using these arrow pads that you will find throughout many of the levels. It’s a very simple idea by today’s standards, but it is fun to explore both parts of each level to see what each might be hiding, encouraging even more exploration to see how you can go to and from that background, along with finding all of those hidden goodies. Not only that, but the game does also make sure to challenge you with this gimmick as well, with there being plenty of obstacles that can either sway to and from the background, or even send you to and from it as well whenever you aren’t quick on your feet. Hell, there are even plenty of enemies and bosses that take full advantage of this, leading you to pay close attention to who is gonna do what next, and what you should do from there, making for some somewhat tricky, yet still fun enemy encounters.

Unfortunately though, despite all of the good that is being done with this game, there are definitely some things that hold it back from being as good as the original Wario Land. For one thing, like I mentioned earlier, this game sticks WAY too closely to its roots, not introducing that many new gameplay mechanics, gimmicks, or enhancements on previous formulas whatsoever, with the only exception to this being with the 3D aspect, which can only really get you so far at the end of the day. Not to mention, the game is also pretty short, even shorter than the original game, where four of the 14 stages that I previously mentioned are just boss fights, and it doesn’t take too much time to clear out the other stages either, making the journey over much sooner then you would hope it would be.

And finally, the one last issue I have with it that probably triumphs over everything else…….. the fact that it was released on Virtual Boy. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the game is any worse for being exclusive to the VB even to this day, but for a system that primarily advertised itself on being a 3D VR headset in the 90s, having a 2D platformer on it with VERY SLIGHT 3D elements just seems very… out of place. You could’ve probably made this game for the SNES, changed up the 3D element in some way, and ended up with a much more successful and widely beloved product at the end of the day, and yet, here we are. Not to mention, again, given how the game is always constantly black, red, or whatever color your emulator decides to be, it makes me never want to go back to play this again, and instead just watch it on YouTube instead, which is a huge shame, especially considering how wonderful this game really is beyond all that.

Overall, despite a lack of major change, its short length, and the platform it was released on, VB Wario Land is definitely a hidden gem from Nintendo’s library, and a pretty good followup to the original Wario Land as a whole, having very tight and fun platforming challenges to take on, lots of money for you to find in many different places with the powerups, and fun fights all throughout that, when you beat them, makes you feel like you really conquered something……. even if the something in question is the VB’s graphics. I would definitely recommend it for those who are big fans of the Wario Land games, as well as those who are just THAT curious enough to see what kind of titles the Virtual Boy has to offer, because, in my own personal opinion, there is no better option you can choose from other then this one. Not really sure what kind of joke I could end on with this review, so rather then trying to make one, I’m just gonna show you all what the final boss is like here, because he is absolutely terrifying. I would say that he probably scared a lot of kids back in the day, but in order to do that, that would imply that people actually bought this game and a Virtual Boy back in the day, and uh, ha ha………….. that didn’t happen.

Game #588

I love you Tails, but you have disappointed me so. You might think silly of me to be let down by such a game. Even if a metroidvania with Tails using all his little gadgets and doohickeys is a really cool concept for a Sonic spinoff that gives my boy the spotlight he needs, this is still a Game Gear title after all, so naturally you’d expect something short of stellar.

But the thing is, this game starts off really good!! Apart from it taking me too long to figure out how to change abilities, the levels are fun to go through and Tails controls well. His movement physics aren’t bad and the flight option allows for some unique exploration challenges not typically seen in the genre to this day. I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I was having!

It’s once you get a few levels deep do the cracks start to show. Eventually you are required to do a fair amount of backtracking, using your abilities to open the routes that you’ve missed. Of course, this should be fine in theory but I found two main issues:

Firstly, Tails can only carry 4 abilities at once, if you want to swap them out you need to leave the level you are in (by walking either all the way to the end or back to the start), then return to Tails’ House and swap them out. Obviously this kinda BLOWS because your time is wasted if you don’t happen to bring the right thing with you. It may have been a hardware limitation, or maybe it was intentional to pad out the play time, but if Tails simply had access to all his abilities at once, he would be able to spend less time faffing about for no reason.

Secondly, Alternate paths are often very camouflaged. You will certainly walk past a mostly regular looking wall without knowing that it could have been blown up with the 3rd or 4th bomb ability that you unlocked. In general, bad level design is more common as you get further into the game, so I resorted to a walkthrough and much more common save states for the second half.

Other than those fundamental problems, the rest of the experience was just alright, the item selection is half creative and fun (abilities based on Sonic, Knuckles and Fang are here!), but half useless or samey (which you probably won’t even entertain trying out because again, your slots are valuable). The story is simple and cyuuuuuute but nothing to shout about. Level theming is VERY underwhelming for a Sonic game (even if we do get to swim in a submarine), and the few boss fights are mostly mediocre with one or two cooler ones.

It may be because I spent more time in the levels but I thought the music was good and for sure one of the better game gear soundtracks! Some nice compositions here! I was a little disappointed to not find many covers / rearranges on youtube, rare sonic fanbase L, but this one I did find was indeed very nice.

So here I am disappointed purely because my hopes surprisingly shot up at the beginning, but it's okayyyyyyy... Tails Adventure may be very flawed, but it was a cool time and as a certified Two-Tailed Fox stan I am quite glad I played through it since it does carry my enthusiasm for his character very well. Safe to say we probably ain’t gonna get anything like this from SEGA again.

Was this necessary?





























Bonus half a point because Sackboy is awesome.