been feeling really ok lately with reaching a point where i "get" what a game is doing and feeling finished without having to beat the entire thing. that's real fitting in the case of madworld, a beat-em-up where i get higher scores and crazier kills the less hard i try. it's a good example of a genre i like to call "games you boot up for half an hour after work to take out your frustration". also see: bullet witch and postal. it's nice. probably the definition of all-style-no-substance (which isn't an idea i tend to buy into as i adore games like gungrave) as it has a bunch of really cool ideas that it does next to nothing with, but the animations are entertaining and swinging the chainsaw with the wiimote is fun. an alright game in my book; i bet the multiplayer is killer.

i've been trying to write a review for sonic adventure for months and i keep coming up empty-handed. there's not a whole lot i want to say that hazel didn't say better in her AMAZING video. it's gonna keep bothering me, though, so i'm gonna steal a page out of the handbook of my good friend naomi and bullet point this bitch. let's go! ^0^

- sonic route > knuckles route > big route > e102 gamma route >>> tails route > amy route >>> super sonic route. i prefer tails' to amy's only by virtue of his cutscenes being absolutely adorable. the final boss/super sonic route is dogshit.
- e-102 gamma's route is a meathead shooter and if sonic team made a spin-off where you played as him i would give it 5 stars in a heartbeat
- i think sonic might be the least interesting character? which is a good thing, as it gives everybody else ample room to express themselves. i love knuckles, tails, and amy and i want to give them all hugs!
- i was ready to shit on big's route like most people do, until chandler explained why they love it and... it clicked. if you're willing to take your time and get the hang of the slight jank, you will find some of the most rewarding fishing in any video game. i don't know how i thought that the company responsible for sega bass fishing could botch it. plus JON ST JOHN WOOOO
- sonic's version of lost world is an easy contender for my favorite level in any video game. i live and breathe for the back-to-back setpieces of the speed tunnel into RIDING A GIANT MECHANICAL SERPENT IN THE MOAT OF AN ANCIENT TEMPLE. the ebbs and flows of the music work wonders too, though i wouldn't say it's a better track than the mystic ruins theme. there is no better track than the mystic ruins theme.
- egg viper is the funniest boss fight ever. GET A LOAD OF THIS
- if you somehow don't rock with the whip-stick action gameplay of nearly every route, i think you'd be hard pressed not to find something to enjoy in the visual artistry, silly cutscenes, iconic soundtrack, hub world, or surprisingly great story (the melancholia of e-102 gamma and knuckles are going to stick with me). by no means would i call it a perfect game or one of my mostest favoritests, but i think it's a solider-than-rock entry in this rocky series and a wildly ambitious work everyone should experience at least once. i'm excited to see where the series goes from here, good or bad.
- i want to shoehorn the fact that sa1 gets shit on nowadays despite being great into the fact that ray william johnson gets shit on nowadays despite having made =3 (which i'm watching in the background as i write). honestly i've got nothing. point is i'm cringe
- oh no

"i don't get no respect!" - bullet witch

when i first got my job - this stupid job where every employee i enjoy being around gets fired and where i spend half my time terrified of my bosses and the other half fighting for shifts - i used to come home after late nights and spend hours playing bullet witch. i think i did 6 back-to-back playthroughs before i moved on to something else. it's absolutely perfect. i don't understand how someone could dislike blowing up massive buildings and backflipping over demons whilst wielding a top 10 video game shotgun. like, are people stupid or just lame? personally, i have to stop myself from coming back to this game all the damn time.

the most egregious of bullet witch's purported offenses is having technical issues - all of which are ironed out in its fantastic pc port. what do y'all even have to complain about? if something as unfinished as vampire: the masquerade can be so beloved, i don't see why bullet witch can't. and before you hit me with "TEH AMBITION AND UNIQUE" - for a budget ps2 studio, making a next-gen ornate gothic shooter with giant, fully-destructible environments (all of which boasting awesome setpiece direction) is super ambitious. just cause 2 wouldn't hit these heights for another 4 years! though some would argue that perhaps that ambition is exactly what makes the game a failure, i say that's some myopic bs. if it weren't for so-called "trash" like bullet witch, we wouldn't have half the criticommerical successes that populate the backloggd charts. so put aside your hollow prejudices for once in your life and enjoy the game for what it is, rather than what it's not. cuz what it is is easily one of my favorite pieces of art i've interacted with. that's right. bullet witch is art, motherfucker.

that being said: play it with the japanese va. i'm not crazy enough to defend the awful english dub. the japanese voices are also awful, but in a very endearing "random dev team members" kind of way.

in which sega adapts the wachowski sisters' magnus opus, speed racer, into a minidvd that might get you high if you boof it. i couldn't un-stick my eyes from the screen if i wanted to. gamecube controller diehards are still mondo uncool, though i come dangerously close to becoming one every time i jam down the spring-loaded triggers to kick into a drift. good shit. i think the devs knew the dpad and c stick placement were trashy and that's why nothing is mapped to either by default. anyway, this is the perfect racer. trying to describe the blistering gamefeel of a prime sega arcade title 20 years after the fact is a fruitless endeavor, so i will instead forego that and just show you this. and a message to my friends: no, i'm not going to shut up about this game. get gx or get THE FUCK out.

edit: shit, i think this might have beat out sonic r as my favorite racer. ganbatte, f-zero.

society was wrong. society was wrong to clockwork-orange forcefeed us mario-flavored drivel and tell us that it was the best this genre had to offer. i come to you all tonight to tell you that i have seen the face of the god of kart racing and it was spiky and orange.

if i had to sum up what makes ctr so much better than the Big N's blue-shell-blaster-dick-smasher flagship racer (rip f-zero) in 2 words, i would say "skill ceiling". fact is, high-level mario kart gameplay is b o r i n g. in the most mechanically expressive entry (which i would argue is mario kart ds), you are still getting a party game. i don't go to parties. i don't even have a social life. and there's not enough diversity in mario kart, handling OR content-wise, to warrant single-player sessions past the 30 minute mark. enter this godsend of a racer and its immaculate drifting. kart racers live or die by their drift, and this is as good as it gets. i would describe the crashperience as a semi-orgasmic trance of rhythmically tapping the bumpers and rocking the d-pad. there's no "saving up" boost here, you will use it when the game gives it to you or you won't get it at all. this timing-heavy approach is such a refreshing change from mario kart's "hold button to boost" bullshit.

there's still ONE thing i prefer in the marioid, and that's the art. i've never been a fan of crash bandicoot's 90s irreverent boyhumor cartoon shit. it's what kept me from playing this game for so long, despite everything good i heard about it. fwiw, i think the secondary characters are very cute - big titty anime bandicoot girl is a certified banger design - and the exaggerated cartoon style makes for strong visual feedback. ultimately, any complaints i could have are PALTRY in the face of how gnarly you can get with the drift boosting. my fingers are cumming, dawg. if you haven't already, go right now and buy/download/boot up a copy of crash team racing and play it like your life depends on it. my words cannot begin to do justice to its awesomeness.

edit: i spent 3 hours tonight crunching adventure mode challenges and then forgot to save before i turned the game off. i hate my life

edit: if you think you'd like haunting ground, please do not dismiss it just because i don't like it. i hate how my negative reviews keep becoming the most-liked under games.

i have not a speck of interest in the deepest pits of my soul to see how this game, this so intrinsically male-gazey game, handles the subject of rape. i feel like i'm watching a lars von trier movie. to be clear, i'm no prude! i don't mind - many times, i even enjoy - skimpy character designs and general titillation. i'm not rejecting this on some moral basis, either, as i enjoy plenty of exploitation media. look at a game like lollipop chainsaw. themes of SA and weird pedo shit? yes. sexualization of its main character? also yes. but the creators knew what they were making and set the tone accordingly. haunting ground's approach is the equivalent of putting jiggle physics in rule of rose. it's screaming "i have zero self-awareness" at the top of its lungs.

my belief in total artistic freedom doesn't mean i have to put up with jack shit. i see no reason to continue playing when i could be enjoying any of the 600 other video games in my backlog. i'm gonna go play silent hill 4.

i had to buy a pair of li-ions to stop myself from blasting through so many AAs playing this on my ngpc. chibi-ifying the graphics and putting it in a mobile format was exactly the shit i needed for neo turf to click. i've gone from being sort of lukewarm on the game to trying to squeeze as many courses as i can out of every long car drive with my parents. the satisfaction of successfully estimating meter marks with my fingernail as i try to optimize my runs is simply unparalleled! this is one of the best on-the-go games i've yet played, rivaling even nintendo classics like donkey kong '95, wario land 4, or pokemon crystal. and whenever i finally beat metal slug: second mission, you can bet your ass i'll write a rave review for that one too.

for a console with such a small selection of games, the ngpc sure had a lot of awesome shit.

ah, this takes me back. not only to a time when an atari flashback was my only consistent source of video games, but also back to those suffocatingly quiet nighttime drives out to the pier with my father. my strange, probably-depressed father taking a stressful drive with a stressful kid after stressfully preparing for the trip out to where he could fish and just detense for once in his stressful busybody life. i don't think i understood then that trips like those were as important to him as they were to me, the kid eagerly running back and forth between where our poles were posted and the little snack shop a few hundred feet away. i can still feel the cold wind trying to fight its way into my windbreaker (pockets full of shoplifted oreos, of course). in-between the crunchy beeps and boops of night driver, i can hear the sounds of fishing lines endlessly reeling and casting, reeling and casting. maybe our drives involved a bit less violent car crashing and flashing lights? not sure. what i am sure of is that i will remember those drives and that pier and the nights we spent sleeping in the truck bed tent for the rest of my life. also, that i really like the vibes of atari 2600 games.

There's nothing more synonymous with the 16-bit era of consoles than no-name platformers. These things were EVERYWHERE back then. You couldn't walk outside without tripping over 50 fuckin' side-scroller cartridges. One of the worst ones I've ever laid eyes on was Milon's Secret Castle - or should I say, Milon's Shitty Asshole. Saying I was surprised when I found out that somebody at Hudson Soft got that trash a sequel is the understatement of the century. I'm not one to say a game is bad without playing it though, so let's pop this in the old SNES.

The game opens with this cutscene of Milon and this fairy, and an explosion and... yeah, I don't know what's happening. Luckily, there's dialogue after to tell us that the fairy was stolen by an evil wizard. Right off the bat, this game just looks way better than the first. Obviously, it's on better hardware, but the art direction is way more colorful and distinct too. And when you start that first level... ooo! That music is catchy as hell. The SNES soundchip wasn't the greatest, but you could pull off some crazy stuff if you knew what you were doing and this person definitely did. Shockingly, the controls in Doremi Fantasy don't feel like total dogshit. You have the same stupid bubbles from the last game, but they have a bit more animation and I didn't have any trouble aiming them accurately. This first world is kind of easy, it's whatever. At the end of each world you unlock a new instrument in one of the dialogue cutscenes with the cool UI and then play a bossfight. This first one is nothing. I'll talk about the rest of them in a bit, trust me.

In the second world, we run into this game's biggest problem. The levels are sorta non-linear and you have to explore them to find stars to unlock the powers of your instruments. The stars are usually guarded by a bit of platforming or enemies to kill. Simple enough. The problem arises in the block-breaking mechanic. You have to break blocks with your bubbles in this game to get anywhere. The game remembers which blocks you broke when you leave a screen, like how other platformers remember what enemies you killed. In this game where you'll have to walk back and forth through bits of levels, they opted to remember what blocks you broke INSTEAD of what enemies you killed. These fuckers respawn constantly and get in your way. Imagine if, say, Ninja Gaiden forced you to re-traverse through parts of levels you already played for some dumb fucking collectible. I'd rather take Ryu's sword up the ass while Milon shoves his bubble wand up my dick. Ugh. What were they thinking?

I guess eventually I did learn to be more careful. Being "more careful" won't help you with these bosses, though. Don't trust how cute they look; they are the biggest dickheads imaginable. A bunch of them throw out these multi-step moves as their basic attacks while you try and jump and blow bubbles into their faces. Maybe I wouldn't have to fight them for so long if Milon used anything except, oh, I don't know, fucking BUBBLES. And it's like the pain never ends! Because after you finally clear a bossfight, you're onto another world with stupider and stupider gimmicks. Whose idea was it to make an entire world out of ice physics? Don't even get me started on this snowboarding stage. Why the FUCK do the platforms keep flickering out of existence when I get too close to them? I feel like I'm having my spinal fluid sucked out through my anus.

This game is so deceptive. It really seems like you're in for an experience that would make up for the first game. And while it's not as bad, it's still an infuriating and unsatisfying pile of slop. I have no patience left for this bubble-blowing bitch. Hudson Soft? More like Hudson Sucks Massive Dick.


(in all seriousness, this game is... fine? the art and music super rock. the bossfights super don't, and that awesome music is both reused in too many levels and looped too many times therein. this is a 4-6 hour game with a 20 minute soundtrack to its name. the level design by world 5 sort of drove me insane, but i don't like any 2d platformers that aren't donkey kong country. take my complains with a grain of salt. i still recommend doremi fantasy to anyone who's better than me at 90s platformers, cuz i think the mechanics, music, graphics, and general creativity are at least as good as super mario world's.)