A quick aside;- Spent the past few weeks on a bit of an PS3 emulation kick, knocking out a few stragglers from the gen 8 library that always managed to elude me. One of the games I tried out was the 2012 SSX reboot nobody really likes - god knows why I chose to start my foray into this series with that entry, it was just kind of there I guess. It was alright! Hard to really fault what appears to be a rock solid racing foundation w/ incredible feedback & thrills. I managed to get surprisingly close to the end of the game before my motivation careened off a couloir with the insistence of an awful statistical equipment store, gimmick missions like the oxygen tank, glider, solar power & rear-view cameras. If only EA made no less than three games beforehand where this memetic & metric excess is absent!!

Anyway SSX 3 is fucking sick. Nothing short of a landmark achievement for this game to accomplish as much as it does way back in 2003, all the while fully maintaining this feeling of modernity that makes it absolutely breezy to pick up blindly in current year. Snowboarding controls iterated on to a mirror shine, mechanically dense & full of freedom of expression in how you can approach the shockingly sprawling slopes that spread their tendrils through a track like a spaghetti bowl. Repeated heats thru race courses would have patchnotes I swear, the more I familiarised myself with their layout the more they’d pull the rug out from under me to reveal new avenues and secret paths. I love the blisteringly fast risk reward & fuckup cascade that can happen when your antic hubris meets its match & your teeth meet the grind rail. I fully expected this to just control like a breezy Tony Hawk clone or something, but it's so bespoke to itself & intensely demanding in a way that I adored losing myself to the mastery of.

Perhaps unshocking, but it’s also striking to me how much better this game looks over the next-gen reboot lol. Feels as though the art designers had no say in the way SSX 2012 looked, rendering the majority of its slopes a very grey textureless mush that only came across as too scared to introduce visually interesting locales like the audience’s eyes would just burst like blueberries under the tropical sun or something. SSX 3’s mountain is lined up like a daisy chain of unique vignettes with key visual identities and senses of purpose in the macro. I adore how the lighting and skybox would change subtly as you progress down the mountain, so when you do the ultimate no loading screen downhill jam through every track you’ve familiarised yourself with it feels like such a perfect odyssey. Unlockable Adam Warren art is rly great, particularly adore the concept art of the courses themselves and how franco belgian they look lol. Eventually I’ll play Tricky and enter the heated internal angel & devil inside of me debate between which of these two entries I prefer. I DEEPLY want these games to be added to that Noclip.website so I can see how these tracks curl in on themselves.

I cannae believe so many folk are treating such an ok game as some big line in the culture war sand. If they took a few minutes away from signing petitions and replying to every Sony tweet with their hashtag, and actually bought the thing they'd see that no amount of skin can save this from being just very fine.

Flat shallow characters, messy predictable story, repetitive combat. This game has it all!

Fights are mostly just waiting for the enemy to do something so you can parry it and do a burst attack. There are combos, but you almost never get to do full ones because the enemy is starting its next swing and your only options are block, parry, or dodge. Good luck with that last one, because the dodge is dogshit. It's supposed to be for moving away from unblockable attacks, but the timing for it just feels off. This is made painfully worse when more than one enemy is targeting you, and your Souls instincts kick in looking for i-frames that aren't there.

Boss fights and music mostly rip though, so it has that going for it.

The characters however are like interacting with cardboard. Everyone is so basic. They're saying words that sound important, but there's so little there beneath it in both the acting or body language. Adam has to be the worst of these. The man feels like a placeholder model and voice through the whole game. It's wild that's he's one of the main cast. They're all desperately trying to get you to care about a story that feels vague, but by accident. Not some kind of "Oh the secrets are being kept from you" thing, but like they forgot to give us necessary info because they know it all since they're the ones making the game. I burst out laughing at the end when some daft stuff happens and a character just goes "What are you talking about?" as this person walks away without saying anything. It's exactly how I felt in the moment.

I'm convinced this whole thing could have worked better as more of a boss rush with bits of story or travel in-between à la Furi. I didn't feel like I was connecting wih the people or what was going on when I was trekking across empty desert doing fetch quests where every one ends with finding a corpse with an attached dying message. It's a poor man's Nier Automata, and that doesn't do it any favours in a world where I've come to resent a game I loved because it's done cross-overs with fucking everything and I'm sick of seeing 2B. THEY MADE ME SICK OF SEEING A NICE BIG ARSE!

Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.

Once I got used to how the controls work, I had a blast with this. Some of the puzzles were a bit frustrating, and the baddies hit bullshit levels of difficult by the end of the game, which was also somewhat annoying.

But even today, this game looks incredible. The rotoscoped characters and sprites dressed as polygons has a really futuristic feel to it, but maybe that's just 8 year old me talking.

The gameplay is compulsive. Just one more go. I really enjoyed thinking about how to navigate each screen and figure out the best way to deal with enemies and various other hazards etc.

Other than a clunky control system, this has really stood the test of time. A real gem. I played this via the Delphine Evercade Collection. It's the Megadrive version on there for some reason. Can't complain though, because its still great.

Kinda silly it's taken me this long to beat flashback, considering I actually have the Megadrive cart, and the version they released on Switch. Still, a great time.

As someone who's only experience with fighting games is the Smash Bros series, (and a little bit of Mortal Kombat (2011) back when that first came out), I've always felt like I've been missing a big gap in my gaming knowledge base. So I figured, what better game to start filling that gap with than Street Fighter II! Which is why I started with Street Fighter 1. And Street Fighter 1 is just... very bad.

But Street Fighter II is great! Playing through the arcade mode, I felt like I was getting a microcosm of fighting game experiences. I'd get super excited whenever my opponent would bust out some insane special move I'd never seen before, like Chun-Li's spinning kick. Fighting Guile made me face what it's like to fight someone who just sits in the corner and spams projectiles. Fighting E. Honda made me face the reality that sometimes *I* was the guy sitting in the corner spamming projectiles. When facing off against Ken, I felt the thrill of planning what my next move should be and then successfully executing on it all within a split second. And then going up against M. Bison I realized that sometimes pure button mashing might be the only chance at victory.

But what's a fighting game if you're only playing by yourself? I knew I had to try my skills against real life, honest-to-goodness gamers. So I got four of my friends and we had our own tiny tournament. Now only one of them had any real experience with the game prior to this, so I was expecting the whole thing to be a bit of a mess. But it turned out to be insane. At our skill level, this had no business being as exciting as it was. There were constant close calls, several upsets, nearly every match went into game three. A grand finals that, with a bracket reset, lasted for ten whole games. It was glorious. Shoutouts to @SewerGoblin for nearly knocking me out in round one, @BaddaBoomie for causing a serious upset, LavaViper for nearly going all the way, and @Donjitsu for winning the whole thing.

This game is a ton of fun, and I'm excited to keep exploring the genre!

"I want to show you the truth, so you'll know how beautiful I am, and I'm trying to show you in a subtler way."

--- 我要大---

To play as a tribe warrior and a mysterious weirdo, adventuring in the world of gremlins.
You can have amazing experience in a fresh style.
It uses only excellent graphics for a new generation who seeks for the best taste enjoyment.
Good quality and great satisfaction guaranteed.
A new type of modified Unity-based product!
Don't hesitate to buy.
It will bring you happiness of gaming.

ᴹᴬᴰᴱ ᴵᴺ ᵀᴬᴵᵂᴬᴺ

Understands that the true Dark World is adulthood and that Time will mold us all into adults, whether we want it to or not. Collect your spiritual trinkets if you want some illusion of choice, but those in charge are pulling up the strings of your playpen from the shadows. Seven years will pass and the apocalypse will arrive with droughts and flames and frozen wastes, the leaders and heroes of youth rendered useless against the unstoppable forces of evil, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Masterpiece. You had to be there. Each playthrough allows you to see your past gaming selves as Young Link; you now naively see yourself as the more capable and wise Adult Link who is too embarrassed to use the boomerang. A Nintendo game that forces you to grapple with mortality and innocence and the cycle of fathers and sons in ways that grim Atlus JRPGs about demons could only dream of. Godlike!!! Majora's Mask stans will talk about their little stories that they write down in their little bomberman notebook or whatever, but it was all in here too - you just didn't have a checklist or trinkets to reward you for engaging with the material. Gameplay is still rock solid (on Nintendo's first try!!), but you come to this thing for mood, atmosphere, text, subtext. OCARINA OF TIME BABY

Had next to no expectations about this one so forgive me but I'm very pleased lol. I was Not expecting Rockstar to have it in them, this has so much arcade racer DNA despite its open-world core. Blisteringly fast & cartoonishly responsive controls, making great use of the open world's hazards and emergent chaos to make every race feel rich w/ needle-threading improv. Most impressed by how hard this is clearly pushing the PS2 graphically, in service of a dreary industrial conkcreet hellscape. With enough tricks of the light 20FPS feels like 9999FPS. Would earnestly recommend playing this in software rendering mode on pcsx2 for it to hit just right. Techstep of all things on the OST and fugly neon car underglow it's good to be back in 2006 again babye. Career mode is kind of threadbare, all of the cutscenes are Xavier Renegade Angel-grade FMVs where the dialogue is just "yo is that a car🤔❓ hit the boost ese 🗣️🔥" and you essentially experience all the game has to offer in the first hour of playing.

Issue 13 of the Official UK PS2 Magazine, published November 2001, came with a demo disk containing a handful of levels from the then soon-to-be-released Klonoa 2. Playing this demo tens of times as a wean would be my only exposure to Klonoa 2 for nearly 23 years. Despite Klonoa 1 being a childhood favourite, and a formative cornerstone that had no doubt informed my tastes and passion for videogames; I only managed to get around to Klonoa 2 proper earlier today. I’d have gotten around to it sooner, were it not for the fact that Klonoa 2 was one of a few outlier cases of games that emulated horribly on PCSX2. Fugged to the nines until relatively recent revamps in compatibility were instated. Aptly enough, it was so surreal playing the levels from the demo once again - it all came flooding back like fleeting memories returning to me from a dream fighting to be recalled.

Soberingly, I don’t think I’m anywhere near as red hot on this game as I still am with Klonoa 1. Perhaps K2 had spent too long being gassed up, cooking and stirring in my head as an elusive cryptid. On many fundamental levels I think this is absolutely beautiful work. Demonstrating incredible emotional maturity in its final hours of the narrative representative of a slightly aged Klonoa, through heartfelt writing and vocal performances. A soundtrack brimming with disparate ideas and delivering them w/ confidence, grappling a wide array of influences and energies. For such an early PS2 game, these cutscenes are composited so brilliantly, giving characters illustrative frames to act in, staging the environments in striking ways… we still get things like this wrong!! I particularly love how the camera would move during boss fights, not only tracking the boss’ movements but also working to sell their scale and let them act on the stage! Incredible level design too, making great use of unique stage quirks to impose puzzle-like ordeals - the colour changing enemy was an enlightened addition. Klonoa 2 is the proud owner of an amazing final level, too - a true sum of all of it’s works with stellar level design, and thoughtful use of music and visuals.

I’m less keen on how weak a handful of the stages in the game are, both visually and in terms of level design. I’m even less keen on the repetition the game will impose on you, it’s not enough that they’ll re-use levels at certain points; you’d also need to run a few laps around some levels as you collect keys/activate elevators and such. It’s a bit more draining than it’s necessarily worth, in my humble, made worse due to the fact that levels in this game are wildly long and can be a bit plain. If I had to be brutally honest, I think Klonoa 1 does a better job at conceptualising its levels around its many disparate worlds, wrapping around and winding between the background geometry in a way that makes it all the more satisfying to explore. It would be nice if Klonoa himself had more of an active role in the story than an optimistic errand boy. It stands in stark contrast to the first Klonoa game where he’s incredibly emotionally invested in the proceedings, but I’m sure the plan here was to demonstrate that he’s an older and wiser character this time around, more clear on his Unico-like role in life and letting the world speak for itself. There’s tremendous merit to that and I can’t help but feel more of a relation to a Klonoa who isn’t thrashing out at the world when playtime is over, but I’m a theatre kid at heart I suppose oh god.

Admittedly I played Klonoa 2 in a bit of a goofy way, where I'd finish a level, and then skim a longplay of the same level from the 2022 remaster for comparison. I can only be honest here, but I think both of them have merit! The remaster fucks up the vibes in key locations with awful colour choices, blown out bloom and weird fullbright lighting. The level in sheer darkness, necessitating you to use a limited light resource to be able to see the geometry is ruined in the remaster because it’s already so well lit you don’t even need the light spirits! But I think the additions to the geometry and character models made in the remaster are really well considered, fleshing out the world enough for them to feel closer to realisation without diminishing their overt dream-like quality. My annoying brainwyrms are expertly trained to hate the aesthetic haemorrhaging that occurs from changes and concessions these remasters tend to make, but my ideal Klonoa 2 sits somewhere between the two versions..... (I want to know what the remaster changed the weird Full Metal Jacket cypher into)

Boggles the mind how people can play FromSoftware games and be like "Oh these games are amazing, they don't hold your hand or tell you where to go and they're incredibly hard to master but so rewarding when you do" then they play OG Tomb Raider and just instantly assume it's shit because the controls are hard to get used to.

Maybe it's because platforming in AAA games has been dumbed down to an insulting degree or maybe it's because modern Tomb Raider is more action focused, but these games have always been primarily exploration, puzzle and platforming games with a specific control set designed for that, not action games with shit controls.

If you're new to this trilogy then please, take your time to get to grips with it and you'll experience some absolute masterclasses in level design and atmosphere.

What an absolutely beautiful remaster so clearly made by people full of love for the source material. Tomb Raider fans spent well over a decade begging for this to happen and it's far better than I could have ever imagined. Fingers crossed for The Last Revelation, Chronicles and Angel of Darkness next, then even Legend, Anniversary and Underworld.

Lara Croft is back, baby!