This game is insane. It's insane that an indie developer progressed so rapidly over the course of three games. It's insane that this feels just perfect to play. It's insane that it feels like a worthy Sonic Adventure 3.

But that's where we are. Just play this game. It's an extremely polished set of mechanics that totally nail the feel of the best of 3D Sonic movement and then set you ahead in a series of varied and large levels to zoom through. It's the best Sonic game in over a decade. I cannot wait to see how much they progress with 4.

Great fusion of Housemarque's experience in SHMUP design with the third-person shooter genre. Doesn't lose its step one bit and feels right at home along the likes of Super Stardust and Resogun. Movement is so responsive it never gets old dashing through enemy fire. I was worried that when the studio set aside the SHMUP genre they'd lose their identity, but instead they made a third-person shooter about abusing i-frames. It's a delight to play.

However, it suffers immensely from a feast or famine problem. The way health works—where your max health increases any time you pick up health items while at max health—means that players doing well keep doing well. If you're at max health, your max health merely continues to grow, setting you up for success by the time you hit the boss. Not doing so well? You'll constantly be scraping by, struggling to even regain what you've lost in each fight. It means a good run becomes an avalanche. And only good runs. Both of my victories—in the first and second halves of the game—came on runs where I didn't die once. Once the snowball starts rolling it's unbeatable. You get the artifact that leeches health on hit and the game becomes easy street.

It's always a hot or cold. You're either in the worst run and struggling to survive or the game feels like it's made for babies where it's impossible to die and aiming barely matters anymore. The game feels incredible, but it's a rebalance away from being truly perfect. Easily the quickest I've ever seen the end of a Roguelike.

Vanillaware's first game released in the US, coming out only a month before Odin Sphere, GrimGrimoire has a pretty interesting premise: an RTS, on a console, played from a sidescrolling perspective instead of the usual top-down.

Do these ideas work? Not really!

Using a controller for an RTS is already a pretty hairy prospect, but the perspective makes it even worse, as units often overlap with each other. This means the best strategy is often "select everyone, move them to enemy". This is exacerbated by the skill trees new to this version, where you get coins to power up certain unit types. It ends up creating a feedback loop where you just keep using the same types because they're what you've put points into.

There's supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors type dynamic between the schools of magic (Glamour [Nature] -> Necromancy [Ghosts] -> Sorcery [Demons] -> Alchemy [Golems]) but I cruised through the game by simply sticking to Glamour, which you start with. Depending on the level, either amassing huge amounts of leveled-up Fairies (sending them in groups of 10 or so to avoid getting wiped out by AOEs) or Morning Stars (bigger units with AOE blasts themselves) would win every time. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the difficulty was lowered in this version because I remember the original being balls-hard.

While the skill tree kinda sucks, a welcome new feature for this remaster is the fast-forward function. By default, the game is SLOW, probably to accommodate the awkward controls and micro-management, and the fast-forward makes the gameplay much more tolerable.

The story is kinda... Whatever. It's a time-loop scenario about a girl at a wizard school. Most characters are underdeveloped and the plot made very little sense to me. At the end I was left scratching my head wondering what the hell happened, as it gave me an Animal House-style "and here's what happened to the other characters~!" montage.

Of course, as is always the case with Vanillaware, the art is top-notch. Character and unit designs are excellent across the board. Some of them are very cool (the Golems and Chimera are incredible) and some of them are very funny (the demon turrets are succubi that wiggle their giant asses), but the art is probably the main reason to play this game.

Of course, if you want good art with a good game to go with it... Maybe just check out Odin Sphere.

not as tight as some of nintendo’s other platformers from this era but the sense of spontaneity and chaos is very much the point, the signature sakurai feeling, so that’s not really a knock against it. incredible game, the only nes title i’ve played to rival super mario bros 3’s unbridled imagination and gonzo spirit. also the most beautifully animated game i’ve played on the console; wonderful, gorgeous stuff from top to bottom. amazing what they were able to get out of this hardware toward the end of its life cycle

the tight, hyper polished platforming of mario in combination with the adventure game exploration and character progression of zelda — more or less everything i could ever want out of an nes game. for awhile i was convinced i was playing my favorite nintendo title from this era, and despite some late game hiccups it nearly ended up getting there. certainly top…6 or 7 anyway. it’s amazing how perfectly some of these 40 year old nes games hold up; this thing still feels absolutely wonderful to play. a limited set of simple, refined mechanics that it iterates on for all of its ~3-5 hours of playtime. feels quite massive, too, for its time. open and sprawling and yet incredibly dense with enemies and danger. the layout of the world and how you progress through it isn’t so different from, say, adventure (1990) or any number of the classic text games that inspired it in terms of wandering around shafts and tunnels finding keys and matching them to their proper lock, with enemies scattered everywhere to provide friction. only here the “keys” are mechanical in nature — weapons, abilities, and power ups that allow you to access previously unreachable sections of the map. tying character progression so directly to your ability to advance through the levels makes for an incredibly propulsive, balanced experience in which you’re getting stronger and more capable in perfect sync with the ramp up in difficulty. it’s all immensely satisfying, so much so that an entire genre sprung up around the design ideas that were cemented here! pretty cool! it’s an action intensive game for sure, throwing loads of enemies at you basically from the start, and yet it almost never feels like a high octane action game. it’s really kind of a lonely and desolate experience; oppressively sparse in spite of it pretty much always keeping some hazard right in your face. it’s an impressive bit of tonal maneuvering and i’m not quite sure how they pulled it off. i guess it’s just that dark, stripped down aesthetic in combination with the sprawling open world design — really feels like this black, windowless, alien expanse is bearing down on you at all times. and somehow this very non-actiony tone and mood doesn’t clash at all with the action itself, which is fantastic (almost) from start to finish. blasting, leaping, rolling, bombing your way through these passages feels sublime in every moment,,,right up until you hit tourian which is kind of terrible. i will say boss encounters are not this game’s strong suit. kraid and ridley are…fine, challenging enough (or kraid was anyway, actually didn’t take any damage from ridley) and effective as sort of roadblocks to test your progression and skill. but they aren’t particularly fun to fight, and the last encounter with mother brain is really poorly conceived. feels like the game ran out of ways to ramp up the difficulty and simply resorted to throwing a ridiculous amount of projectiles at you while draining all of your resources (i suppose so you’ll waste time collecting more; the designers clearly took some sort of sadistic pleasure in luring the player into time sucks to prevent them from getting the ‘good’ endings where you see samus with her suit off (i still got it tho 😎)), and it just isn’t very interesting or creative level design, especially compared to everything precedes it. hate that last tunnel so much goddamn. it isn’t even like it’s overly difficult to complete it’s just fucking annoying. a massive bummer since the game was a perfect 10/10 all-timer up until that point for me. ah well, what are you gonna do ig. this is still a near-masterpiece and one of the very best games on the nes. if the metroid games really do get better from here this will probably end up becoming my favorite nintendo franchise

The decade-later third game in the Zeno Clash series, Clash is a fairly significant departure. Rather than a linear first-person brawler, it's now a (mostly) third-person action-RPG. Hand-to-hand combat is still the core of the gameplay, but exploration is key.

You play as Pseudo, aka The Hermit, a guy living in the freaked-out world of Zenozoik who happens across The Boy, a little bird fella with special powers, orphaned when his grandfather dies. As is standard for this sort of Lone Wolf and Cub riff, the Empress wants the Boy's power for herself, and so pretty much everyone you encounter wants to fight you.

The story, though basic and somewhat derivative, is told well, and Pseudo and The Boy's performances are especially great. This game also gives you far more backstory on the world than either of the first two games did, and I could understand if fans of the series don't like it. In a way, it removes a bit of the mystery of Zenozoik, but it made me more interested to see what the future might have in store, especially considering the ending.

The vibes, by the way, are immaculate. This is the most Nier-ass game I've played since, uhhhh, Nier: Automata. Specifically, if you like Nier 1, I think you'll get a lot out of Clash.

Some have described this as a souls-like, and I don't think that's accurate. There are similarities, but if you go into it expecting that, you'll probably be disappointed. To get into the nitty-gritty of the gameplay, you pick from one of three combat stances at the beginning. You can unlock more through totems you find in the world, and you unlock special moves via the same method. You can have 3 special moves mapped at once.

You gain XP through fights, which levels you up and gives you skill points to put into your core attributes. You also collect figurines in the environment that are sorta like weapon upgrade materials, as they're used to power up your stances and specials. Because of their limited availability, you're best off picking a core loadout and sticking with it instead of spreading points around, as there is no respec function.

The game also has a day/night system. Not in realtime, but more like a LTTP-style Dark World phase, where Pseudo can go to sleep and "dreamwalk" in a strange Groot form. At night, the enemies change, you can access areas unavailable when awake, new items will be available, and the Night Avatar form can be customized with different body parts you find while asleep. If you die during normal gameplay, you also respawn in this form to do a corpse run, but if you die again, it's back to a checkpoint.

One interesting, though under-utilized, twist on the gameplay is the Ritual. The people of this world only abide by the One Law, which is that if you're challenged to a weird little dice game, you have to play. You can challenge any hostile, intelligent being you come across, and then whoever wins gets to impose a certain stipulation on the fight, chosen via one of the titular Artifacts. For example, being forced to drink a slow-acting poison, or being allowed to summon an ally, or, my favorite, getting one free hit at the beginning with a giant stick like Bart smashing Homer with a chair.

The issue with this is that there's not really much of an incentive to do it. The complications usually don't make a huge difference, and after a few hours I started just walking up to enemies and punching them.

Lastly, I'll say that the game is still a bit buggy as of this writing. Playing on Xbox Series X, the optimization isn't quite where it needs to be. It's mostly fine, but some areas in particular bog the framerate down to the mid-40s for no apparent reason and it feels pretty bad. A couple of other bugs I encountered:

- UI elements getting stuck (weapon info panels still on screen when moving between tabs at a trader, etc)
- random fade out/ins, almost like it's loading something. These are very quick, maybe a second, but it would occasionally happen during combat. No idea what's happening here

To their credit, the developers have been very good about fixing the game's bugs already. They're super responsive on the Steam forums and whatnot, and actively patching it. I would bet in a couple of months everything will be ironed out.

Even as it stands now, despite some minor annoyances, I loved this game. I'll check back later this year, and if the issues have been fixed, revise this to a 9.

UPDATE: As of December, most issues I had have been fixed, and the developers have also added NG+ and various other features. Performance can still be spotty in some areas on console, but regardless: Revising score to 9/10.

Remaking RE4 was always a pretty strange proposition. Unlike 2 and 3, 4 was already in the same general over-the-shoulder style of game as the 2 and 3 remakes. Sure, you couldn't move while aiming, and the aiming and movement were pretty clunky (I've been told this is "part of the charm") but it's still in the same wheelhouse.

So what, exactly, do you do with a remake? Other than the moving-while-shooting thing, that is. It turns out the answer is mostly "make it look better".

RE4R has, I'd estimate, about a 70/30 identical/new ratio. Nearly all of the Iconic rooms and setpieces are almost entirely untouched, but most of the connective tissue between them is new. That fucking water hallway? Still here. The hedge maze with the dogs? Oh, you know it's still here! It makes the few parts that were significantly changed really stand out, but I won't mention those here for spoiler reasons. I will say that, thank god, the Truck Drivin' Ashley segment is gone, replaced by something way funnier.

And if you're worried that the campy tone would be lost, have no fear: it's almost as stupid as the original. No, Leon doesn't say "your right hand comes off?" anymore, but he still mentions bingo and has a very funny repeated line whenever the Las Plagas pop out. Which happens a LOT, by the way. I feel like it was much more common than in the original, it seemed like half the enemies turned into Twisties.

Enemies are much more aggressive, as you'd expect. In the original, to compensate for your wonky movement and squirrelly aiming, they would spend about half the time pointing at you like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and slowly creeping forward. This time, they know you have controls that work, so they're coming for your ass. It makes the big fights feel so much more hectic and dynamic.

Apart from the game's general pacing issues, not really alleviated due to its fairly strict adherence to the original, most of its flaws are small annoyances. The crafting system sucks, for example, because the only things worth making are shotgun shells, magnum ammo, and flash nades. Those require more gunpowder, plus a "Resource™" (either Small or Large). This means you'll often be out of gunpowder but with lots of "Resources™" left in your inventory. And you can't put those into storage, you can only store weapons. Sure.

I'm not a huge fan of the original RE4, but I consider this pretty much a straight upgrade, just like the recent Dead Space remake. There's not much reason to go back to the original outside of curiosity or wanting to enjoy the more... "outré" camp factor.

I do wish the remake still had the stomping Little Lord Boy statue.

felt like playing re4 for the first time again which i suppose is the most important thing. 4 was much less in need of updating than 2 or 3, in that it’s still very widely available and holds up exceptionally well gameplay-wise (with a slight learning curve coming to it from modern shooters ofc), which makes the whole endeavor both easier and more difficult. sure just doing it again with modern visuals and controls gets you most of the way there, but if that’s all it was it wouldn’t stand on its own all that well, certainly not as well as the last two remakes which felt like fundamentally new experiences. and you don’t want to change too much, either, since it’s one of the most beloved games ever made and still relatively fresh in people’s minds for a title that was first released almost two decades ago. it’s a tricky needle to thread, and i think they pulled it off nicely for the most part. expanding and improving on certain areas - particularly the castle and island, which are infinitely better in this iteration imo - while keeping the core experience intact so that it’s instantly recognizable and familiar. the encounters are every bit as tense and unnerving as they were in the original in spite of the much more fluid and fast paced combat — the enemies are quicker and more vicious without sacrificing the inhuman eeriness than made them so impactful in the first place. capcom has really topped themselves where the action is concerned; the best feeling game in the entire series so far. improving on everything that worked in the last two remakes, and particularly 3, which i thought played quite nicely in their own right. taking out hordes of las plagas while flipping between weapons as you go, parrying melee attacks, popping headshots and busting out sweet roundhouse kicks…god there’s really nothing better. some of the cleanest third person shooting action i’ve experienced. i wish they had brought back the dodge mechanic from 3 but oh well, you can’t have it all and the parry is pretty neat too. it’s definitely an action game first and foremost, but i do think re4 has always taken a little bit too much shit (alongside the overwhelming praise ofc) for moving the series away from survival horror. that may have been its legacy, in terms of how the next couple entries followed it up, but 4 itself is still very much a horror experience imo especially when played on the higher difficulties and ammo is pretty scarce. a clear extension of the previous games in terms of how it filters american genre cinema through a gonzo anime sensibility, this is just switching up the genres it’s playing with — namely gothic/folk horror and 90s action films. it’s such a ubiquitous game that we kind of take for granted how deeply strange it is in terms of plot, mood, tone, aesthetics, characterization etc, and how wild its genre play is.. literally every element is something of a trope or cliche, ripped whole cloth from some other work, and yet they come together to form a piece that is totally singular. particularly in the village, when the game is at its most unique and horrific. and this is all in service of the most influential third person action gameplay of all time! what a masterpiece! this obviously doesn’t have that kind of game changing juice, and it’s easy to be cynical about this new era of remakes, which can feel a little cheap and cash grabby, but there is something beautiful about capcom taking all of the improvements third person shooters have made over the years and applying them back to the title that started it all. and it’s hard to be too mad at them when they’re doing these remakes alongside brand new resident evil games that are also very good (by all accounts, i actually haven’t gotten to village yet). had an absolute blast with this and i have no doubt i’ll end up returning to it many many times over. wish i was playing it again rn!

just about the best case scenario for a sequel; maintaining almost everything that made the first one great and building on it in subtle but interesting ways. the core gameplay loop remains fantastic; doesn’t matter how many corridors you trudge through or rooms you clear — every encounter is incredibly tense and exciting. i missed the sort of heavy clunkiness of the original a bit, but the slightly slicker, more fluid combat has its merits too and is well motivated character-wise: isaac would be a little more adept at dealing with these things by now. found all the new weapons and mechanics to be mostly fantastic; this time around i favored the seeker rifle, which in combination with liberal use of stasis absolutely shreds necromorphs. ridiculous name for them btw, necromorphs lol. the writing in these games is definitely…something. the narrative elements are more foregrounded here which isn’t exactly to its benefit as it’s very silly, rote stuff when approached on that level. but i did find isaac’s internal meltdown over the course of the game to be visceral (😏) and affecting; the visions of nicole are well realized and implemented. hard for me to buy into this as a story about a man overcoming his grief and guilt tho - partly why i found the final boss encounter (and really the only true boss encounter in the game) to be a little anticlimactic, especially compared to the last one - and i still think these games would be better with far less narrative context. let it be about a guy walking around fixing machines and fighting alien zombies and that’s it! this marker mythology shit is whatever to me!! but that’s okay. it doesn’t actually impede the experience in any significant way i just don’t think it’s the ideal package for this gameplay. don’t have much if any complaints beyond that; this series remains some of the very best sci-fi/horror action you can find in any medium

When it comes to games it can't be understated how easily a fun vibrant style can win me over. Hi-Fi Rush has this in spades as what initially pulled me was its gorgeous art style and excellent character designs. Almost everything this game brings to the table is presented with such confidence that it was hard not to appreciate what was in front of me.

What initially made me stick around was the extremely satisfying rhythm-based combat. Even a guy like me who often struggles with rhythm-based gameplay fell in love with how good it felt to get through an encounter without missing a beat. As soon as I heard the invisible crowd chanting my name as I got my first S rank I was hooked.

One of the features that surprised me the most was the game's emphasis on parrying. Being a hack-and-slash game I was not oblivious that there would be some form of parrying. This was something I initially dread as, even though I have played my fair share of these types of games, parrying was something I always found myself struggling with. Unlike these other games, Hi-Fi Rush sits you down and forces you to be somewhat competent with this mechanic. This irked me at first as I felt it was unfair for the game to roadblock me with a mechanic I was hopefully gonna try to use as little as possible. This lesson was what finally convinced me of how useful this mechanic is. Not only does the game become immensely easier once this mechanic is mastered, it is also the gateway to some of the most stylish combat I have ever seen.

Outside of the stellar gameplay, what I truly loved the most were the characters and their interactions with one another. Chai is such a loveable goofball that brings out the best in all the people around him. Watching his journey from a wannabe "rockstar" to a genuine rockstar was immensely enjoyable. The cast as a whole is one of the strongest I have seen in a while. The family love that slowly grows between them on all is genuinely one of the most wholesome dynamics I've seen in games.

A common fact about this game is how it just came out of nowhere. The success of Hi-Fi Rush should be a wake-up call for the industry that a game does not need all the marketing in the world to be one hell of an experience. Turns out that making your game with genuine love and creativity creates one of the most lauded games of the year. Hopefully, this marks a return to form in some ways where games start to incorporate aspects such as alternate costumes, challenge modes, and a boatload of other extra content without them being regulated to DLC.

Overall I feel this is one of the best games in its genre. Tango Gameworks has a record now of surprising releases with Evil Dead 2 and now Hi-Fi Rush. I am extremely excited to see what they make next.