One of those games that a lot of hipsters will tout as a "hidden" gem, and while it does have some great ideas (such as the dragon companions and light RPG elements) and a decent story for the time (you're basically out for revenge for the death of your father) it's very janky. I still enjoy running through the game on normal from time to time, but the lock-on shooting mechanic has never felt comfortable and level 6 has never not felt like a matter of damage racing because it is legitimately easier to just go fast and tank hits than lose all of your health trying to fight everything.

It's worth playing, but please don't go in expecting the level of quality that games such as Shinobi III have.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐂 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨 𝐄𝐧𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐏𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐂 𝐅𝐢𝐱 𝐌𝐨𝐝:

In my restless dreams, I see that town... My sweet Silent Hill, some could say I finally ended the big three of the franchise, and with a sad face I will tell you, the love for this game is huge and even if the next entries aren't as good as these three, this was THE entry to finally stop being afraid of the horror genre, also got into Resident Evil so a win-win!

Ok, without deviating too much, the story was weaker even if it connected dots to the happenings of 17 years ago, Silent Hill 1, but a solid story nonetheless.

This game is so freaking scary, you start the game and already encountering the huge sleeve monsters and the pendulums, I call them the beyblades (thought they were only the bosses of some part when I watched a trailer on YouTube.)

And while the game ended quickly, each session completed made the ending closer, can't say it was rushed, but there is less room to breath here you go from section to section and can't catch a break (less town exploration!), compared to the calm parts of SH1 / SH2 which made me more relaxed, this is without a doubt the scariest one I've played so far (just sweating thinking about SH4), the Otherworld parts followed by the soundtrack and monster noises really made me poop better the following days.

The perception of a game by the gaming community affects my ability to see it, this is why I tend to avoid seeing many reviews before submitting my thoughts here. Love Silent Hill 1, Silent Hill 2 (kudos for the team that made the Enhanced project for PC) and Silent Hill 3. I wish to have played this franchise so much sooner, and the nostalgia given for playing the PS3 HD Collection crappy version on the PS4's PS+ cloud streaming for some minutes gave a glimpse of what was awaiting. Hope this isn't the end, I want to keep enjoying the next Silent Hill entries. Silent Hill 4: The Room, don't fail me. Send me with the final love letter from the fantastic and creative, Team Silent.

Enjoyment - 7/10
Difficulty - 5/10

If you like Castlevania you will probably like this! Starts slow but gradually gets more exciting. Getting 100% was a bit tedious and the platinum trophy is a hard sell. When you lock into the game and you like the game's grind, fully completing it is pretty cool.
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Enjoyment - 10/10
Difficulty - 7/10

How stupid was I to think that Bloodborne was not a game for me. Past me was very silly. Coming from the perspective of a non-fan of the Souls games, Bloodborne had some initial growing pains. At first, I did not get it. The first couple of deaths were especially off putting. It was like catching a whiff of spoiled milk. However, as I inched closer to a new area around a different corner, not knowing what was ahead of me and getting excited for what challenges lurked beyond my reach, I finally got it.

The world of Bloodborne is truly wondrous. A feast in all senses. Bloodborne is a feeling you can't shake off. It is the linkage of video games, like a shadow for not yet realised imagined worlds.
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Ah, Crash Bandicoot. One of the earliest pioneers in 3D Platforming Action, coming out the same year as the revolutionary Super Mario 64.

Unlike Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot decides to opt for a more traditional approach when it comes to level design.
While Super Mario 64 was very open and sandbox-like in its level design, Crash Bandicoot is like the 2D Platformers of old, where you go from point A to B, while trying your best not to lose all your lives.
It may be simple, but Crash Bandicoot succeeds in providing fun level design... but it can get quite challenging, even early on in the game.

Some levels are long, others are challenging, and then there are some that are both. Crash Bandicoot will challenge you, and it will challenge you even more if you're trying to go for 100%!

Probably one of the most well known things about the Crash series is the fact that you can jump and spin boxes you find throughout the levels.
That's all well and good, especially because the act of breaking boxes, and hearing that ricochet sound while you're spinning them, is ultra satisfying, but you'll need to break all of them if you want to get that stage's gem, which all of them will be required to 100% the game, and get the best (?) ending.

The problem with this original game is that, it doesn't matter if you broke a checkpoint box or not, if you die once, you will not be able to get that stage's gem, which means you have to get every box without losing a life.
And with how hard these levels can get... yeah, fuck doing that.

I personally didn't 100% the game during my most recent run, simply because it just turns from something that can be fun but challenging, to something very frustrating. And that's not even accounting the colored gems that you'll get later on in the game, that you'll need to use in previous levels to get just those few missing boxes that you couldn't get to before.
I salute those who have 100% this game!

But when you're not going for 100%, even with its difficulty, I'd say Crash Bandicoot is a good game. Crash himself is a bit heavy on his jumps, but you'll get used to it, and overall, I just had a good time going through the levels and beating the bosses.

Speaking of the bosses... they're ok. They have their own obstacles to avoid, and most of them have a sort-of gimmick, like with Ripper Roo where you defeat him with Big TNT crates, or in Pinstripe Potoroo's fight where you hide behind some objects to avoid his gunfire.
They're fine, but nothing too special.

Outside of that, this game looks great for an early PlayStation game! Crash's model is not as detailed as future games, but I think it looks fine for a 1st game, and the environments that Crash goes through are really nice looking!
I remember when I was a kid, and when I saw this game for the 1st time, even though I already had much more modern games to play, I still liked looking at Crash 1, in spite of being older.
It was probably the sunsets.

The music is fine. I think they decided to go for an atmospheric sound for a lot of the stages, and it works in the moment, but not a whole lot of it I find catchy. But the main theme is classic!

In conclusion, while it gets hard quite early in the game, and going for 100% is not worth your time, Crash Bandicoot can be a pretty fun 3D Platformer!

deleted my review of this by complete accident. gist of it was that you shouldn't buy into the common sentiment that tf classic is just "tf2 but worse" - it still has an active, if small, fanbase nowadays for a reason. the goldsource engine movement makes the game more chaotic and the map designs are super cozy. it's probably better than tf2 cuz it wasn't updated into oblivion. plus medic is soooo much fun to play in this one.

edit: as of today i have decided that this will be replacing my team fortress intake. join me, my fellow conc jumpers, in the old school tfc discord.

A game about choices that doesn't understand their role in storytelling. A horror game that doesn't understand horror. A game that concludes a decent setup with an embarrassing ending.

The first half is bursting with jump scares, even the extremely silly ones where a deformed face screams at you directly, giving this high-budget game the feel of a free Unity horror game. We get some actual breathing room towards the end but at the same time the jump scares that still do occur destroy any leftover atmosphere. This is worsened by a dumbed-down narrative. The Storyteller is a childish addition, the archetype of a mysterious meta person who's above the narrative. His sole contributions are nebulous predictions and a patronizing pat on the back if you managed to save people - and maybe he reprimands you if someone died. I wouldn't know, I didn't bother to check any more endings.

And y'know, I got to my first ending and it sucked ass - a completely unexplained conflict suddenly emerged for that shitty 'ooooOOOoooo the evil thing is still out there' moment. I redid a dumb decision I made towards the end and saved everyone, but that ending is almost exactly the same and it still sucked ass. I even watched an ending compilation and they all sucked ass. If I let someone escape early and then save everyone else later on, why does that first someone come back to the spooky ghost ship alone and they don't even try to call each other before, while in the other endings he returns obviously not alone?

As often present in horror media, there's an ideology of nihilism where mostly bad things simply happen and you're forced to live with them. This cheap trick has little bearing because death can be thrown in at any time. Even worse, the game later tries and fails to rationalize the spooky happenings instead of staying with a purely supernatural explanation. As seen before in The Suicide of Rachel Foster, rationalization does not make horror more grounded, believable or impactful.

So what bearing do your choices have in the end? In a good narrative or even your local DnD campaign, the entire world changes with you. Here, there are binary choices: you survive or you don't. There is no moral, there is no larger point, character arcs begin and get thrown away. There's only a bunch of cutscenes with no emotional release. The gamification of the narrative can be seen by people commenting on how shocked they were when an early innocuous decision has grave consequences later on. One person even said that the storyteller is their favorite character. He's not a character, he's the writer's desperate attempt to give a nihilistic narrative an even more nihilistic twist.

Games like this are built on the belief that there's always a choice, but this one doesn't have an answer to any of them. As The Armed sang not so long ago:

Expectations, secret rattlesnakes
It’s never really how it happens
It’s never really how it happens

Enjoyment - 9/10
Difficulty - 7/10

Holy moly. Why haven't I played these games sooner?! Nights I could be vibing to this series... wasted. Instead, I was probably playing Fantastic 4 for PS2.
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Weird, self-righteous, self-indulgent bullshit. This game has the audacity to call itself an “essay” but doesn’t do anything except attempt to teach you some basic video game philosophies, which even then it does poorly.

On top of its holier-than-thou approach, the game making itself is done poorly. My game broke about 15 minutes into it; I couldn’t equip my gun anymore and I couldn’t pass a certain puzzle (which is a generous word to use) without it. Restarting the game or the checkpoint didn’t even fix it. I had to reset the entire thing and almost didn’t even want to waste the 15 minutes to do so.

Gameplay was boring and the design of it was trying too hard. I don’t like rating games this poorly but man this was a drag.

PaRappa the Rapper 2 is one of those sequels that takes everything that was good about the previous games, and just makes it better!

The presentation has seen a boost thanks to the PlayStation 2's power, with more detailed environments, and slight shading on the 2D characters, which is nice to see.
The songs are also really well made, and are probably my favourite in the series, just because I was groovin' to most of them.

And they fixed the biggest issue that I had previously, the timings are now not nearly as weird as before. I was also able to improvise more on the fly now, compared to before, and get away with it, which made the gameplay feel more interesting.
I know the improv. mechanic was in previous games as well, but this time, because of the looser timings, I was able to pull it off better.
There is even a bonus game that you play a few times during the game's story, just to add more variety, and I appreciate it.

The story also is a bit more "epic" than last time, as the gang has to fight off a noodle invasion, and there's an actual antagonist now, which is interesting.

Even Lammy shows up a bit here and there in the story, and it's cool seeing PaRappa and Lammy interact, even for how small those interactions are.

Overall, PaRappa the Rapper 2 is an improvement over what came previously, and it's just a really fun rhythm game! Go check it out if you're curious.

Back in 2022, I played Dr Robotniks Mean Bean Machine. I knew it was Puyo Puyo with Sonic characters, but I wanted to give it a try since I was playing a lot of Sonic games around that time. Turns out I sucked at it! Only got to like stage 6 before I gave up, and even then I'm surprised I got that far lol.

Kirby's Avalanche is Puyo Puyo again, only Kirby themed. This time around I only got to stage 3 before I quit(if were not counting the starter stages which I did complete). Idk man, my brain just melts sometimes whenever I'm playing. I'm way more of a Tetris guy than a Puyo Puyo guy, but those early stages were somewhat fun I'd say.

Besides me liking Kirby more than Sonic, something I definitely thought put this over Mean Bean Machije was the dialogue before each stage. Goddamn, Kirby is savage in this one. Maybe feels a little out of character, especially for how he is nowadays but it was very entertaining. Had to look up all the scenes cuz I knew I didn't want to miss them. If anything, its worth it to see them alone cuz they're hilarious.

Considering how short this game is too, the length of the OST is super short as well but the couple stage themes being remixes of Kirby's Adventure songs was nice.

Yeah, as you can see, I don't have much to say about this one. It's Puyo Puyo but Kirby themed like I said and I got filtered by Puyo Puyo yet again 😢. Guess that series just isn't for me haha. Kinda stinks this is another Kirby game I ended up not beating but it will probably be the last (unless one of the future spinoffs filter me as well). Either way, next Kirby game is Dreamland 2 so I'm happy to finally get to another mainline again.

You know what I haven’t done in a hot minute or so? Make fun of ADK, so let’s do that again! I mean, why not, it should be a fun thing to do, and besides, not doing so has been eating at my soul. I have been too nice to them recently, with me actually somehow liking World Heroes 2 Jet, so it only feels right to go to one of their older products, to examine how bland and uninspired it is, and then point out all of the other ridiculous elements present in said product along the way. But what other ground have they covered? They’ve done fighting games, they’ve done platformers, they’ve done run ‘n guns, so what else can they screw up at… looking at list... a beat-’em-up? Oh, that’s perfect! So now, for most of you at home, let’s go ahead and talk about a game that you all have never heard of in your life, Ninja Combat.

Like you, I had no clue that this game existed until I decided to look it up for myself, and based on what I did see about it, it looked extremely underwhelming. It was a launch title for the Neo Geo systems back in the day, so that is to be expected, but that doesn’t automatically spell out the quality of a game. I mean, Super Mario World was a launch title, and we still love that game, so who’s to say that this game wouldn’t be any better or worse? Well, unfortunately though, it isn’t quite on the same level as Super Mario World, and it wasn’t bad enough to where I could have fun ripping it to shreds, so the most I can say is that it is just… there. It does it’s job, and I bet you could have a good time with it with the right person to join you, but if you aren’t immediately on board with what the game gives you from the minute you press the start button, then you are gonna be in for a very mediocre time.

The story is just as generic as the game itself, where the evil Shadow Family starts to take over New York with the help of their Ninja Tower and all the baddies that dwell within it, so it is up to the brothers Joe and Hayabusa, along with a few other faces they run into along the way, to storm the tower and take the family down, which can only be an exciting plot if you have never played any other game in your life, which, let’s be honest, the chances of this being someone’s first game are VERY slim. The graphics are ok, looking on the same level as all of ADK’s other games I have played so far, meaning that it looks on par with other Neo Geo titles, but somehow feels cheap and artificial when you play it, the music is fine, having decent tracks for the levels and boss fights, but they are gonna leave your mind just as quickly as the game itself when you are done with it, and the gameplay/control is very generic and simple for the genre, but somehow it feels more soulless and generic then most of the other beat-’em-up games I have ever played… but it somehow isn’t as bad as Rushing Beat, so it gets a gold star!

The game is your typical hack and slash beat-’em-up, where you take control of Joe, Hayabusa, or any of the other characters you meet along the way, take on seven different stages through several different generic environments on your way to take on whatever lies in the Ninja Tower, slice down plenty of enemies using plenty of different attacks, including a special attack that you can pull off if you have enough health, gather plenty of weapons to help you out along the way, as well as scrolls that can grant you increased strength and speed, along with extra lives at points, and take on plenty of bosses that do look threatening enough, but is about as challenging as breathing air… or at least, if you have infinite credits like I do. You see it, you know it, you love it, you know what you are getting into with the game, but as I have mentioned several times already, aside from one or two admirable aspects of the game, there isn’t really anything here to make this anything more than a generic time waster for a half hour before you never touch it again.

I will say, despite how generic and soulless the game is as a whole, I did like some aspects about it, such as how it handles additional characters and power-ups. Like I mentioned before, there are those scrolls that upgrade your character as you keep going, which is pretty sweet to get and hang onto, and for the first couple of stages, whenever you beat them, you end up unlocking a new character that you can switch to in-between stages, and they can be fun to mess around with, especially Musashi, who became my go-to character for the remainder of the game. However, that’s really where all of my compliments end, as when you play the game for yourself, you can feel all the care and love that the developers DIDN’T put into this, especially when it comes to your main attack, which is so broken that you can pretty much just spam it and take care of whatever comes your way. Yeah, bosses require a bit more strategy, but most of the other enemies aren’t a threat whatsoever, and you can defeat them all with one hand while checking your phone, which I’m pretty sure I did at one point.

In addition to that, there are also the typical roadblocks that I ran into when it came to what I don’t enjoy in these kinds of games, such as arcade syndrome, where the game throws many enemies at you at once and expects you to deal with them all before they get the chance to take you down, and there are repeating bosses, which aren’t too bad most of the time, but there was at least one instance where a boss was repeated TWICE, because I guess the devs just loved fighting him so much, they wanted us to feel that same love as well. With all that said and done, again, I will say that the game as a whole isn’t really all that bad. It accomplishes what it sets out to do, and again, if you need some way to kill 30 minutes, it is a good way to do so, but with nothing here to not only stand out, but also make it seem like the devs had any kind of idea how to make an engaging product, why would you choose to play it over anything else?

Overall, despite the fun-at-times combat and some gameplay features that I did end up liking, this is one of the most “nothing” beat-’em-ups that I have ever played, doing the bare minimum and showing off what the Neo Geo is capable of, but not giving any reason for players to return to it, or even choose it over the many better games in the genre that came out before and since. I would recommend it for those who are obsessed with the genre, as well as those who want an idea of one of the earliest points in the Neo Geo’s lifespan, but aside from that, I would just stick to other titles if you want some great beat-’em-up action with your friends. But, I will say, there is one thing very appealing about this game that only this company and SNK can manage to pull off to make me want to check out every one of their games from this era: the voice acting. Like most of these games, it is so terrible, that if you don’t have any interest in playing this yourself, at least give a listen to the “cutscenes” in the game. You won’t regret it.

Game #557