Even 25 years after its release, Shenmue still blew me away. Despite the massive influence it’s had on everything to come out since, I haven’t seen any game that quite captures the same spirit as Shenmue, even with its closest counterpart in the Yakuza series. The world of Yokosuka is the most finely detailed I’ve seen in any game to date. Sure, it’s not nearly as big as something like Grand Theft Auto, but the pure amount of things in the world to see, do, and experience more than make up for it. If I had an idea to try doing something, chances are the game allowed me to. It’s such a joy stumbling upon random things and being rewarded for your curiosity.

Shenmue’s story is also a massive landmark in the industry. There were story heavy games on the SNES and PS1, such as the Final Fantasy games, but nothing that is as cinematic as Shenmue. I don’t think that it’s an understatement to say it changed the way games tell their stories going forward. The plot is simple, but extremely effective. It keeps you guessing, and does a great job at stoking the player’s curiosity, further fueling the fun of exploration I mentioned earlier. I like that Shenmue doesn’t explain Ryo’s pre-existing relationships to the other inhabitants of Yokosuka to the player, and instead leaves it up to your imagination and allows you to infer. It makes the world feel even more believable to me.

The combat is the weakest part of the game, but it’s still pretty fun! It was difficult to learn (especially with the baffling decision to not have any in-game explanation for the controls), but once you get a feel for it it’s pretty fun. It’s slow paced and requires the player to give thought to each input, lest they be beaten to the ground. The second to last fight in the game made me really start to enjoy it. I only wish there were more opportunities to fight.

All in all, I think Shenmue is still a fantastic game. I avoided it for a while as common opinion made me imagine it’d be quite antiquated nowadays, but I’m so glad I decided to give it a shot despite that. Absolutely astonished me!

Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is a great, short visual novel. I just got this game on a whim because I saw OSTs of it popping up in my recommended and it was on sale, and I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

Honestly, I’m terrible at handling horror games and jump scares so thank god I only had to get through an unsettling hour of gameplay until those became essentially a non-factor. Conceptually, this game is so good. I love how each character gets a different talisman based on one of the seven mysteries of Honjo, each with a different activation to kill others. I loved trying to figure out how each curse-bearer activated their talisman, it was such a mystery. The prologue confuses me a bit, however, I loved the fact that it’s essentially a kill or be killed scenario, really reminds me of Danganronpa. The bulk of the main game is solid. I love the use of unconventional methods for gameplay like altering some game settings to deter death, really love how games like this get innovative with their gameplay elements. The story has a timeline, and you can lose yourself over worrying what happens when, especially in a mystery-esque game like this.

The game was great, until near the end where I kind of got a bit bored and wanted the game to finish. The final plot reveal was hella boring and probably is the main reason this game gets a four star rating. Also, I personally have a minor gripe with some of the sprites and their lips (I’m sooo picky but it’s just something that kept annoying me). That didn’t really detract anything for me, it was just extremely noticeable.

Overall, a great game, with a few blunders. Also, Erio is peak and must be protected at all costs.

In 2014, not knowing anything the Resident Evil series in general being primarily a European PC boy brought up on Counter Strike and World of Warcraft, I bought this game on a whim (probably on sale) and played it for an hour. Then proceeded to not touch RE for 8 years and was skeptical to touch it even when I started getting into singleplayer games. That's the kind of damage dropping this kind of insane garbage onto the market does. Still, I'm sure it doesn't compare to the pain someone who actually liked RE in the first place felt when opening this on release day, assuming they of course were still delusional about 5 not being "that bad" at the time.

Development dollar for dollar, hour for hour, possibly the worst game ever created. Almost definitely the worst game ever dropped by a major developer in a major series. Insanely bad. Look up every bad word you know in a thesaurus and peruse the synonyms - this game very likely fits all of them. Think of the worst game you know and I am almost certain that this is worse. Devil May Cry 2 at least has the decency to end in 5 hours. They HAVE to make this shit non-canon if they want to ever continue with the classic RE characters beyond remakes. They HAVE to delete this game's existence on our current timeline. You HAVE to not play this game.

It's so tragic that so many models, weapons, enemies, designs, unique animations and setpieces with the size and detail of entire games on their own are so utterly wasted on this co-op action drivel parading around with a name that honestly would have preferred being shot dead than taken hostage like this. This game is straight up offensive. I take offense at it.

Leon's campaign, to be fair, is just more RE5 but with an even more nonsensical story. At this point the game is bad. The game is bad the moment it starts - let me make that clear. But it's just bad. It didn't hurt me or my family.

Chris' campaign is basically a Call of Duty level. I do not know why they did this. Piers has no motives, no background, nothing that isn't related to the fact that Chris exists and he's awesome. Piers will survive. I'm sure he will be fine. This is the action movie bullshit that starts with 4 turned up to its logical endgame - more and more and more Gears of Honorfield Killzone whatever the fuck. Fuck it, it might as well be a Halo level. At this point I am pissed. I am mad. I am struggling to understand with my tiny peabrain why this game has turned out this way. I Google and Google and Google the same question over and over again. "Did Capcom really make this? That Capcom?". The answer remains the same. I am angry about it.

Jake's campaign is the funniest, because Jake and Sherry basically feel like self-insert OCs by an obsessed writer." uh yea.. he's like.. the lost son of the epic guy.. and he can move really fast and he's like.. special and awesome.. and the female falls in love with him instantly because he's sooo epic.... and he's actually really sarcastic and aloof and awesome.. *flips knife in mid air* I'm a mercenary..". At this point I'm laughing. That's despite it not being funny. I am miserable, and it's a trauma response. A whole chapter cannot be completed in co-op due to a gamebreaking door that has just remained in the game for over a decade, despite Capcom finding the time to go back last year and patch out the quicktime events from RE5, which I know I already commented on my RE5 review, but is such an insane factoid that I don't feel bad mentioning it again.

Agent's campaign is awesome and clearly the highlight. Name one single character in the REverse that has stronger feats than Agent. FTL travel, teleportation, intangibility, invisibility, Ant-man powers to crawl up Ada's ass. Who can defeat him? They should add this guy to Dead by Daylight.

Every one of these campaigns intersect. "Wow, that's pretty cool". Shut the hell up, that's not cool at all. It means once you get to your third campaign half the remaining game to you is replaying the same boss fights. By the time you get to the last campaign you can probably predict every single level. That's not even touching on the fact that the overarching story itself barely makes sense. It's an idiot plot. Both in the definitive dictionary sense and in the sense that whoever wrote it is in an idiot. "You have unlocked Ada for additional gamemodes". No one is playing that. No one will game that videogame.

The achievement for completing this game on Normal difficulty on Steam currently has a 12.8% acquisition rate. This game is not hard, to be clear - it is possibly the easiest RE to date. It's just really that bad. If you take the gameplay and polish it a little (first of all maybe don't make the sprint button the contextual action button), and put another name on it, and put it in like, another game, with a different story, you could quite possibly scrunge up enough gamejuice to reinvest into a solid 2.5. That's the absolute best case scenario. I wouldn't hold my breath. Actually I would, but it'd be an attempt to die.

Over-hyping something has proven, time and time again, to be an incredibly risky practice. Taking a product that is either coming out very soon, or having already come out, and praising it all the way to the high heavens along with everyone else would set up false expectations for those who have never experienced said product before, and when they eventually get to this product, they will find that it really was not as good as everyone else had claimed it to be. What many don’t consider though is that this exact same mentality can also be applied to the opposite side of this attitude. You could have something that people will say is GARBAGE, literal bottom of the barrel scum, something that nobody on the face of the Earth should ever even consider giving a proper chance, which has the exact same effect as does over-hyping something, to where whenever people take a shot in the dark for this over-hated product, they may end up liking it at the end of the day. This pretty much summarizes what happened with me and Sonic Labyrinth.

Before playing this game, I had heard horror stories about it, with many considering it to be one of the worst Sonic games of all time, even if it isn’t as discussed as frequently as some of the others, and even though I never played it until this point, I had always wondered about it. I mean, could it REALLY be THAT bad, as bad as Sonic ‘06, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, or Sonic and the Secret Rings? Well, I was never really gonna figure that out for myself until I sat down and gave it a shot, so I did just that, and based on what I have played…….. it’s fine? It definitely does not reach the same quality as many of the best titles in the series, or even as some of the other Master System/Game Gear Sonic titles, but on its own, it was a perfectly fine game that managed to be reasonable and short enough to where I couldn’t possibly get that angry at it.

The story is… pretty fucking stupid, where in one of Dr. Robotnik’s most “cunning” and “brilliant” plans to take out Sonic yet, he tricks him into wearing a special pair of shoes that completely eliminates his speed, while also trapping him inside of a Super Labyrinth, so it is up to Sonic to traverse through this labyrinth, get the Chaos Emeralds, and stop Dr. Robotnik once again, which is about as dumb as you could expect from this kind of game, but I will give Robotnik props for actually being smart for once with his plans……… and then never again. The graphics are ok, pretty much looking like every other Game Gear Sonic title, which doesn’t look all that bad, but it is definitely doesn’t compare to other games from around that era, the music is also ok, once again also sounding like every other Sonic Game Gear title ever made, not having any real noteworthy songs to listen to at all, and the gameplay/control is, for lack of a better term, pretty mid, giving you a style of gameplay that you wouldn’t want to play over any other Sonic game, but at the same time, it isn’t that annoying or bad to where you would wanna keel over and die by the end of it.

The game is an isometric maze game, where you take control of Sonic the Slowpoke, go through a set of four different zones, each with their own set of levels to take on, defeat many enemies while zooming around to get the upper hand and to increase your time limit, gather plenty of rings and keys to protect yourself and help you proceed through the level, and take on several bosses that can either be extremely easy to take down, or be a huge pain in the ass due to not the bosses themselves, but the arena that you are placed in. When you really get into it, you will realize quickly how simple this game is in its execution, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say that it is necessarily all that fun, it definitely was not as bad as I was thinking it was gonna be, as I never had any point throughout the game where I was actively angry.

From what I have heard, one of the biggest factors as to why many people don’t like this game would be with the control, or more specifically, Sonic’s speed. For the entire game, Sonic only has two default speeds, those being really fucking slow and really fucking fast, with you of course starting out really slow, but whenever you rev up into a ball, you will go flying across the screen, bouncing off of any wall you come across, and you won’t come to a stop unless you do so yourself, or you hit a specific obstacle. As a whole, this is a pretty terrible way to handle Sonic’s speed, giving you very little consistent and satisfying control over yourself, and making it so that you will have the most sluggish, while simultaneously uncontrollable experience with this game……. or at least, that’s what you’d think.

For me, as a whole, Sonic’s speed and control didn’t really bother me all that much. Yeah, it definitely is NOT how Sonic should control in any game ever, and it can be frustrating here or there, but really, the game was built with your set speed in mind, meaning that there aren’t too many instances where you will get fucked over by your lack of or too much speed, aside from one or two pits you could fall into here or there. I would say that the only real trouble I had when it came to controlling Sonic was when I was either entering a door or grabbing an item, where you definitely can’t approach it while blazing at Sonic speeds (normally, anyway), otherwise you will just bounce all over the place, and instead, you have to just slowly walk up and get the things. It can be a little frustrating to do this, especially when there is a really specific door you need to enter, but I never got too angry by this to the point of me wanting to rage.

As for the main gameplay itself though, it is also pretty basic, and when I say that, I mean it is VERY basic. You just run around these many labyrinths, grab these keys, and find the exits. That’s it. You don’t gotta worry about grabbing too many rings, beating any enemies, or that many real platforming challenges, it is just all about collecting these keys. The only other real thing you need to worry about is making sure you don’t run out of time, but really, if you are playing through the game normally, you will easily manage to get enough time to where you will easily be able to get all of the keys and find your way out of there, if you know what you’re doing (more on that later). This gameplay style isn’t changed up or further expanded upon the further you go in the game, meaning that it remains fairly simple to tackle throughout the whole game, making for a relatively easy experience. Hell, you don’t even need to get the Chaos Emeralds through special stages, with the exception of just one, and even then, you don’t even need to do anything in the special stage itself, as you automatically get the Chaos Emerald in there just by going into it.

In a lot of ways, this game kinda feels like an early prototype for what we would eventually get in Sonic 3D Blast, being a game where you have to maneuver around these isometric areas, gather these specific objects, and make it to the end without losing all of them. However, in my opinion, I think this game manages to execute this concept BETTER than Sonic 3D Blast ever could. I will go more into it whenever I eventually review the game, but 3D Blast manages to butcher this concept by having many instances of very precise platforming and bullshit hazards sprinkled all throughout, making for a very frustrating game to run through, whereas with Labyrinth, the hazards are kept to a minimum, with the game more focused on building these mazes for you to navigate rather then having you get through obstacles, which was definitely the right call, making the game much less frustrating than I thought it was going to be.

With all that being said though, just because I am giving this game a free pass does not mean I didn’t think it was flawless, because it certainly has its flaws, ones that managed to irk me more than anything else. First and foremost, since the game is called Sonic LABYRINTH, you will need to navigate through plenty of labyrinths in order to find the keys you need in order to get to the next stage, and that in itself is much easier said then done. While I wouldn’t say these labyrinths are impossible to traverse, you can definitely spend a lot of time trying to figure your way around or finding out where everything is, whether it be the keys or the exit to the level itself. It also doesn’t help that you are on a time limit the entire time, meaning that you could potentially encounter some unwarranted deaths primarily just because you ran out of time trying to figure out where you need to go.

To me though, that is more mildly annoying when compared to the actual REAL problem that I have with this game, with that being the bosses. Half of the bosses in this game are easy as hell, with you just being able to easily spin-dash through them and call it a day, but then you have the other two bosses, who have very annoying patterns and really precise openings that you need to take advantage of in order to beat them, and this is much easier said then done. Not to mention, the level design of the boss arenas that you are put in are definitely meant to inconvenience you, making it so that you aren’t able to get a proper shot at these guys without putting yourself directly into harm’s way, which will more often or not lead to your death, and the very little amount of rings you are given for the boss fights themselves don’t help that much either. So yeah, half the bosses are completely fine, while the other half are complete shit.

Overall, despite the rough controls, dickish bosses, and some mildly annoying levels here or there, Sonic Labyrinth managed to surprise me in how competent it really was, not being great or all that good in any sense of the word, but managing to hold up just well enough to where I wouldn’t even say for a second that this is as bad as many people paint it out to be. I would recommend it for those who are huge Sonic fans, as well as those who don’t mind a little change in their typical gameplay style for one of these games, but for everyone else, there isn’t much here that you would get out of trying it for yourself, despite how I managed to somewhat tolerate it by the end of the day. But hey, at least I can say now that I have beaten the game, and I can move on and never have to touch it ever again…………. which is more then I can say for some of the other titles in this series that I am not looking forward to. Looking at you, Tails Adventure.

Game #601

It's a fine ass mf indie game, what else is there to say? Well a lot, I learned how to yap from the best. These GNOG guys look like decaying faces whose skulls were reworked to do undeniable art with. I don't think GNOG actually means anything. The title, that is. Maybe the game too. But it's definitely stylish as hell, and properly responsive, which is a crux of puzzle design. You essentially work your magic fingers all over a box and tinker with it, I don't got to tell you how inherently humane the feeling is. After a few trial & error through clicking, sliding the cursor, whatever feels right (the game has no text, so no explanations or hints), you'll know it's over because booo! Humongous figure of a robotic head jumpscare.

All levels are very memorable. There's one about a robber going through every apartment, which the box represents. This mf about stupid as hell doe so you gotta mess things up in different floors to make the theft easier. That's the one part I had to look up, because I didn't know I could mess with the other floors from the basement like that. After scrounging up the shame and getting rid of it with a professionally trained "it is what it is", I paid more attention. In short, a buffet of great levels you go through at a remarkably appropriate pacing. They should have gotten that mf Steve Minecraft head as a box, who knows what'd he be thinkin about.

That bloodcurdling screaming chant these guys are letting out after a level got me positively tweaking. It's great. Then, when you think the final box won't do a musical for a whole minute after clearing out that last longer than usual puzzle that asks you to put all your wits into the mofo... it goes and does it! Expectations: Subverted. The colors, sounds and feedback can't carry a whole game, blud stfu watch this unfold. This shit so magnificent 😭😭 There's nothing to dog on. No dog eithers, though there are mice and birds. Mama bird snatched those worm ups, she did not in fact let that shit slide.

It's in VR too, that is pretty cool. They had to choose between VR support or making DLC and guess which they chose? VR! Because I just said that, that was an easy guess. This shit probably numbing your perceptions of wordly senses while playing it so I'll say it's pretty cool despite not having touched the thing. I'll wrap things up by talking about the uncontested coolest level: a puzzle where you have to mix a song in order to progress. Very charming idea! It's only uncontested by me btw. I'm the only one who can contest, as I am the one who contests.