The best racing games, for me, have a vibe. This isn't an arcade vs sim racer thing, it is a VIBE thing. For instance, Forza Motorsport has no vibe, while Gran Turismo has a big vibe. Criterion's Need For Speed: Most Wanted is a total vibe-killer but the original 3DO Need For Speed? A total vibe. Crash Team Racing? No vibe. Konami Wai Wai Racers? Vibes for days. Do you see what I mean?

If you know, you know.

OutRun 2 is one of the most vibe-y racing games ever made. Is it even a racing game? What are you even racing against? Time? Just jump in a Ferrari, stick on Risky Ride and just go. Drift every corner. Slipstream behind a school bus doing 200 MPH. Master the art of gear-sliding. OutRun 2's lesson is a clear one - always move forward, choose whichever path you want and don't let anything stop you reaching the goal. You'll impress a blonde lass in the process.

"How far are you gonna take me?"

A palate-cleanser after a week of driving a Testarossa and an F50 around the technically impressive but virtually soulless Forza Horizon 5. After Microsoft forced me against my will to play a mission called "#SQUADGOALS", I knew I needed to play a driving game with real romance in its heart.

I'm sure one of the best reviews on this whole site was of this game, and it said something to the effect of "OutRun 2 understands that making your girlfriend happy is the ultimate game", but I can't find it because it's super-hard to sift through Backloggd data. So let me re-iterate that statement and say that more video games should implement mechanics centred around satisfying the whims of a romantic companion. Funny that it's a driving game that best understands romance as a chain of dangerous manoeuvres through risk and reward to keep a ticking timer alive.

The Quick Play mode dropping you in as a white-sheet Ferrari that's hopelessly, perpetually chasing the ghosts of the iconic OutRun F50 feels like the developers saying that they could never hope to catch the original game, but god damn did they come close. A testament to how well-built this thing is under the hood that it feels endlessly replayable without even going into the submenus to find mission modes, time trials or unlocks. Just glad that my long-past self unlocked all the songs, because all I wanna do is handbrake and swing tail to this beat all night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypiaPp3xMPo

A genuine artistic crime that a video game masterpiece like this is trapped in a prison made of licensing - surely Sega and Ferrari can work things out? Sega are rich now! They make movies! Ferrari's big red cars come off better here than they do in Forza, but I guess it would pain a modern-day corporation to admit their products might be inhabited by living souls - the girlfriend in OutRun 2 has more personality in her little 2-polygon pinky than all 132GB of what Horizon 5 is offering us.

You've got a heart, right? Go on, try this game out - you can set up PPSSPP, download the .bin file and complete a race to the finish in the time it takes your PC to download the first gig of Forza! Men with guts play OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast!

NEXT STAGE: GIANT STATUES

This is one of those games that feels like it was made specifically for me. Pretty much everything it does is exactly the sort of thing I love in a game. The music is consistently great, from the area themes, boss themes (especially Elvis's theme), and the completely ridiculous credits theme. The visuals are well done too. Environments can be somewhat bland at times, but the absurd character designs and incredibly satisfying animation more than makes up for it. Level design is shockingly varied, with more wide open stages, to linear stages, to mini-boss focused levels or stages with more out-there gimmicks that keep things fresh. The combat is incredibly tight and satisfying. The customizability of it is very rewarding to experiment with, and led to a lot of fun finding ways to maximize my damage output and keep my options open. By the end I could pull of crazy combos while splicing in guard breakers and then end it off with a super long juggle combo. The combat is greatly enhanced by the loud and powerful sound design, which really drives the impact of combat home. The story is fairly enjoyable, especially since it just exists to keep up the dumb tone and make stupid jokes. Some jokes don't work too well, but the tone is always kept intact. The challenge is an interesting thing to note as well. I find that just progressing through the game is usually not THAT hard, excluding some annoying bosses here and there. However, mastering this game is a truly herculean feat I will likely never accomplish. I feel like I could keep getting better and better at this game over time, which makes the prospect of a future replay sound fun. In short, this is everything I want in a game.
Difficult? Check. Simple with hidden depth? Check. Room for Mastery and experimentation? Check. Fast Pace, Stupid Tone, Great music? Check. This game rocks.

Pretty much every other action video game ever made wants their characters to be as cool as possible and to fight as effortlessly as possible. The first thing God Hand does is make Gene grovel on the floor, and then drops you in the middle of it with a really average skillset. I think where a lot of people go wrong (or went wrong, I guess, it's so much less common now) is they try to play the game as if Gene is Dante from the get-go. The God Hand and Roulette moves give him a lil bit of Dante Juice but they're also limited enough that you have to put at least some thought into when you want to spend them, and they're dialed in enough that they usually won't save you from your bigger mistakes.

The really big fork in people's experiences, I think, is if they figure out Gene's latent specials. He has multiple launchers just naturally in his skillset (in a real old-school fashion, they're given a plain descriptive section in the manual but are mentioned nowhere else), which take a bit of getting used to but once utilised break the game wide open. When I watched Giant Bomb play this game there were moments when they'd accidentally do the axe kick or shoryuken and be all "how the hell did you do that?!" but never investigate it, and they beat the game mostly relying on poorly optimised Square combos and careful play. Nothing wrong with that of course, but there's so much more to God Hand once you start using them. Suddenly you go from these careful fights trying to split people up or focus on one guy to being an absolute launch goblin running around trying to pick fights with 4 people at once because you know you can use at least one of them as a living projectile. You can start digging real deep and looking at stuff like dodge-cancelling (which is essential on Hard mode) or same-hand attacks comboing into each other faster but it's the launchers that really set the stage for some ridiculous nonsense.

Also holy shit the right stick dodge mechanic's so good? Why have other games not copied this? Who cares about controlling the camera action games have never had good ones anyway just give me that sweet, sweet multidirectional dodge again

Well, we are at the end of my little Character Action Game marathon. At the same time this is also my 350th review on the site, so what better game to cap both of these off with than the underappreciated Capcom cult classic, God Hand.

I have known about this game for, I wanna say the past 2 to 3 years thanks to my buddy Simon who showed me of course, the SsethTzeentach Review of the game. What I saw looked like some of the most comical shit ever made in a video game, and made it all the more surprising to me that this was the last game created by its developer, Clover Studios.

My friends have all gassed this game up to me for years now, and so I finally decided that 2022 would be the year I would play God Hand.

So now allow me to make a huge disclaimer: I fucking suck at this game. I doubt that's a huge surprise, God Hand is known to be a very challenging game and it will kick your ass, as it brutally did mine.

So do not take my opinions here as fact, but just as my personal views for my first playthrough, as God Hand is meant to be played many many times.

Right from the offset, God Hand comes at you in full force with its vibes, showing the "Graphic Violence, Discretion is Advised" statement that had been put in both Devil May Cry and Resident Evil games at the time. The image of course showing a screen of our protagonist Gene kicking an enemy in the testicles until his face turns blue.

Then there's the menu theme.

I sat there for a solid 2 and a half minutes just, absorbing the absolute bop that is the menu theme. All of the music in this game is fucking excellent, from the theme of Fat Elvis, this absolute bop filled with Elvis Presley sounding noises and a sensual backing track, to the intense rocking theme of your rival Azel, quaintly named Devil May Sly. It's all fucking phenomenal and gets you in the mood.

Of course, what follows after the music is also one of the funniest games ever made. Usually I find weird voice acting to be laughable for the wrong reasons but here I'd honestly argue that the weirdness is 100% both intentional and what makes the game work. Elvis being the most stereotypical version of a Hispanic male, which I also am (Hispanic, not stereotypical lol), gave me a good amount of laughs as he cracks Spanish curse words calling Gene all sorts of things from "pendejo" to "puta" and all that in between.

There's just so many funny moments, like when you encounter these Super Sentai looking mofos and they have these weird Stich like voices, doing weird poses and then you kick them into the ground like a nail and proceed to stomp their heads into the dirt. Or the scene with Gene kicking the thugs out of the window, and the last thug agreeing to get kicked out midscene with a tiny head nod.

And that humor stays in the gameplay as well. You have various ridiculous moves that you can and will use on your opponents, like your Roulette Moves. These can vary from beam like attacks, a flurry of punches, getting a Home Run with a Baseball Bat you summon, or my personal favorite: Kicking people in the balls.

The attention to detail is great too, because that kicking in the balls move only applies to male characters, and will not effect female or robotic enemies, and a specific boss who lost their testicles in the war.

Going more into the combat, my friend referred to it as a "spiritual sequel to Resident Evil 4", which makes sense given that both are Shinji Mikami titles. Both games work with an adaptive difficulty that changes depending on the skill of the player. It's a lot more subtle in RE4, but in God Hand it is the game.

The better you perform at the game, the higher the Tension Gauge goes up. It grows from Level 1, to Level 2, Level 3 and finally Level Die. Full transparency, the highest I ever got was to Level 2 because even on the lowest levels this game absolutely dominated me with its Alexander the Great obsessed cast of characters.

Combat works as follows: You use the Square Button to use the combo chain, which you can customize, the Triangle Button is your combo cancel move, and the X button is your spacer move, with Circle being your Reaction Command button.

All of the moves, for all buttons except Circle can be customized to whatever you wish. You want your Square Combo Chain to be an assortment of kicks, or a near infinite juggle combo, you can do that. You want your combo cancel to be a Pimp Smack, you can do that. The level of customization is endless, and even outside of that you have direction based moves that can also help you.

Let's say you do a spot dodge, you can press Triangle during it to do a slide kick which can easily knock down crowds of opponents and works great as crowd control option. If you're particularly skilled, you can knock an enemy high up in the air and press Back and Triangle to do a Shoryuken, and chain it multiple times until you do a forward triangle to kick the enemy in front of you, using them as a projectile to knock down other opponents.

All of these can help to take down the hordes of enemies you face, alongside the power of the God Hand. When you raise your God Hand Meter high enough, you can press R2 to activate the awesome powers of a God, and absolutely decimate your foes. They cannot block the attacks, and you are invulnerable while using it. Truly, an awesome ability.

This does bring up though certain other aspects of your playthrough, resource management. In your first playthrough of God Hand, unless you are some supernaturally gifted God of Video Games, you are going to suck ass. You will often find yourself breaking open various containers be it boxes or jars to get health, Roulette Wheel meter, God Hand meter, and cash. These drops are entirely random, as the game doesn't want you to rely too much on them.

This creates a system I call the "Gamble". Where you have to base your current battle situation around the resources available to you. Do you get a fresh fruit that restores your health while you're topped off and let it sit for later on in the fight, or do you get a Roulette Wheel card. You gotta take the risks and see if you'll survive.

Gambling honestly is a central mechanic to this game even outside combat, your hub for God Hand's sake is a fucking Casino on a remote island. You can play Slots, Blackjack, Poker, or even bet on racing these Poisonous Chihuahuas. (Always bet on Lucky Clover, should be obvious enough). Gambling is a major way of winning money both in combat and out of it, so to say that this game is very much about gambling is correct.

Of course a skilled enough player can work well without luck, but that was not me and it will not be you either on your first go.

In another refreshing sense, God Hand also lets you avoid entire encounters if you have what you need. If you just feel like you want to proceed through a level and aren't locked behind keys or the like, you can easily avoid combat in general. I wouldn't recommend avoiding all combat obviously, but if you're in a risky situation it is a completely valid option for progression. You aren't given a grade at the end of the level, the only thing decided is the bonus money you receive, and when you die you keep any money you gained from before hand. It results in the game not actively demoralizing new players unlike in other CAGs, which I find gives it more of an appeal than most. It also helps that the individual levels are themselves, very short. With there being 9 stages, with various small levels within each. It makes you feel like you aren't losing much progress when you die.

It's shit like this that makes me question how this game flopped. Everything here is incredibly appealing to a casual player, and there's all sorts of tech that more advanced players can learn and master. So why is it that this game got a 3 out of 10 on fucking IGN. You want my guess? The reviewer got to the first boss, thought it was unfair, and dropped the fucking game.

God Hand is a game that instantly brought a smile to my face, and even when I would get frustrated due to the many challenges, there was always a funny moment or a goofy encounter that would soon follow.

You can kick men in the balls, suplex a man in a Gorilla suit, fight Elvis, spank dominatrix women, get your ass beat by actual clowns, and save the world. What here is not at least somewhat entertaining?

Also this game had a ending dance sequence before Bayonetta did, so Bayonetta is easily the inferior copy of God Hand.

I implore you to play God Hand, or else I'll dragon kick your ass into the milky way. I'm Alexander the Great, and this has been God Hand.

P.S.

COME ON, HOW WAS THIS CLOVER'S LAST GAME?!?!?!? YOU KICK MEN IN THE BALLS! YOU KICK MEN IN THE BALLS!!!!!!!!!!

ok so imagine capcom as a mother & all the franchises/IP's they own as her offspring's

they're all at a nice family reunion

resident evil is there
devil may cry is there
street fighter is there

and so on...games that made momma capcom proud just sitting at the dinner table

...and then there's god hand who instead of being at the table is simultaneously smoking crack & having a loud ass threesome with trigun & fist of the north star in the capcom home bathroom for the rest of the family to hear while they try to eat dinner & the threesome is so rough that one of them just fucking dies

thats god hand, im not elaborating any further

"If a stupid pothead with barely enough time spent enjoying this game like me can do it on Level-Die, I have no idea what is wrong with certain people whose job it is to inform the gaming public."

This quote was in the description of a video that was meant as a response to IGN's now infamous review of this game by a user named Saurian, 14 years ago. All there was to the video was a demonstration of the user's skill with the combat system. (You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyfbtSyX3mc)

Everyone knows of IGN's infamous 3/10 review. Before I knew of God Hand, I knew of that image that compared this game's 3.0 score to Imagine Party Babyz 7.5 score, which was meant to show the sheer incompetence of IGN. Now for me, I'm a little more laid back when I see mainstream game reviewers' scores since the majority of them are written by independent writers which may not reflect the whole staff's opinion, yet is put onto review aggregate websites as the companies score, rather than the independent writer. Chris Roper, the man who wrote the God Hand review, didn't even do the review for Imagine Party Babyz, but people look at both reviews as it was written by one entity, which I feel is a major problem with mainstream game reviewing outlets as a whole.

That being said though, Chris Roper's review is still awful, the whole thing is written with a clear level of frustration towards the game, to the point where it becomes condescending, but that doesn't mean there aren't valid points within the review. It's got weird tank controls that feel out of place for a 3rd person action beat 'em up. The level design revolves around basic geometry and shapes and textures look very low-res (The cage that's used for the Chihuahua race isn't even textured), the game uses random elements for spawning items and even spawning demons from dead enemies, and the game doesn't refill health upon entering new sections in a stage.

I think what caused such backlash from game critics for God Hand was its time of release. God Hand was a late 2006 PS2 release, and the PS2 gen saw what was considered the golden age of character action games. We got Devil May Cry 1 & 3, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, Resident Evil 4, God of War, among other games. Comparing to all of those games that released within that time frame, God Hand's tank controls and basic level design looked outdated and primitive. The budget for this game was most likely 5 dollars and was used so Shinji Mikami could get lunch for the single day it was developed.

Here's the thing though: None of that fucking matters.

Never before have I played a game that didn't give a single flying shit about looking pretty or adding in less samey enemy types or making the game easier to give it more appeal. God Hand sacrificed all of those things to make it the game it is: a game about constantly testing the player.

God Hand's most notorious mechanic is the dynamic difficulty system. Similar to Resident Evil 4, the game will make enemy AI more aggressive, do new moves, or even group up in pairs more depending on what level you are at (it goes from Lvl 1, 2, 3, Die) but unlike RE4, God Hand doesn't hide it in the background. It's constantly in your face at the bottom left-hand screen at all times, letting the player know what level they are at and when they'll get to the next one. When playing the game for the first few hours, you'll most likely stay around the level 1-2 area, but later on, when you get more accustomed to the game's mechanics, you might start staying around the level 3 and level Die area, even if the game starts throwing more challenging enemy types at you.

That's when I realized something special about God Hand. It subtlety fixes one of the biggest hurdles in the action game genre: Ranking systems. Most action games have a system where at the end of each level, it tallies how well you did on certain aspect like time, combos, and even collecting currency and gives the player an award adjusted to how well they did (be it a higher letter or a shinier trophy.). While these are meant to encourage repeat playthroughs, they can also be frustrating to newer players, as they are constantly being told they aren't doing good enough, despite action games being about learning mechanics and repeating those levels to get better at them. You aren't encouraged to know what to look out for on each level to even get a good rank for your first time either, which that in itself causes more confusion or frustration to newer players.

God Hand instead takes those ranking systems and discards them, and rather than tally you at the end of a level, you are being shown just exactly how good you are doing, and at the end of each stage you are rewarded with more money based on how many enemies you killed at the rank you were in, rather than giving you a trophy that's only meant for bragging rights. I believe this is what makes God Hand so inherently fun on the face of it. It's not only a great action game with tightly designed combat, enemies, and bosses, but also a game that actively encourages the player to get better at it. I first feared that moment I hit level 3, but as the game went on, I kept wanting to get on level Die. Weaving effortlessly through your enemies punches and counter-attacking crowds of enemies with your sweep kicks, or launching them in the air and hitting them with a Shoryuken to a kick in the face sending them flying. Your adrenaline starts pumping as you see that meter go higher and higher. You think you are getting good at God Hand, and it's starting to take its gloves off for you, the player. But you start to feel like a god yourself. You feel like you can punch a hole through concrete, the game's challenge is just so exciting... and then it kicks your ass! You feel like you've been brutalized. I've had this happen to me with each death, but never once I did I ever get tired of this game. I kept going at it, because every time I hit level Die and survived those encounters, I never felt a more satisfying feeling in a video game.

I think about the quote I introduced in the first paragraph a lot, because despite God Hand being one of the most challenging games I've ever played, it is also a game I think anyone can enjoy, and I'm very glad I got to play it myself. It's compromised in so many areas, but what it does right left me with one of the most satisfying and memorable action games I've ever played. So, from the bottom of my heart: Play God Hand... it's probably better than Imagine Party Babyz.

'Pendulum Hold Your Colour Full Album Free Download [MP3 HQ]' changed their name to 'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316'

'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316' says: WwwwWwwwwasdaasdsadwwasdwwwassd

'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316' triple-rebound beheaded player: 'HD Ricochet Motorola Wallpapers'

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'John Ricochet' wins! 1st place of 1 players. 0 total Points

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