"Maybe life is like a ride on a freeway
Dodging bullets while you're trying to find your way" -unnamed polymath

I know I'm not the only person caught unaware of how they made not only one, but TWO mainline sequels to the Crazy Taxi series. While they may not be fully souped-up reimaginings, Crazy Taxi 2 and 3 contain all of the content in the prior entry plus a little more, it's a little more apt to think of these as expansion packs. What this mercifully does is maintain the lean and mean purity of the breakout title and sprinkle in a handful more options and maps for just the right amount of variety and personalisation.

The most standout addition in these expansions for me is the jump button, it's wild how much this shakes up your approach to the West Coast you'd otherwise be nailed to the ground for. With the ability to scale buildings and a sense of mastery of the course, it's insanely satisfying to defy the will of the sat-nav and take batshit and overly-direct routes to a dropoff point. I particularly love pulling off a crazy boost and landing on top of a highrise in the middle of nowhere and finding that the developers had the foresight to put a hidden customer there as a little treat. This is kind of fucking amazing. Unfettered videogames. The moment I understand how the fuck you're supposed to pull off a Crazy Drift it's over for you all.

If ever you feel the meter calling, the PC version of the game is easily available in a simple google search. Be sure to use the CT3Tweaks fan patch that adds certain optimisations, greater framerate and resolution support. The soundtrack is kind of hilariously bad but it's all stored in the root folder as .ogg files and I'm sure it'll be no problem to customise yourself.

I'm of the mind that game controllers are rife with untapped potential to an almost comical degree; even our two-analogue + two-shoulder-triggers (etc.) standard exemplified across every major system for the past couple of decades has plenty of wriggle room to prove themselves as fructuous user interfaces, as platforms for expression and experimentation. How often are games elevated by you using an input and receiving a response you didn't quite expect, when a title is brave enough to break out of muscle-memory-worn tradition? Why are we always using the right analogue stick for the camera when God Hand demonstrated that it could be used as an omnidirectional dodge? Bumpers piss me off too, it always feels like the part games fall back on when they run out of face buttons.

Aperture Desk Job is a hardware showcase for the Steam Deck, placing the player behind a desk filled with buttons and knobs that represent an abstracted control pad, more specifically the Steam Deck button layout. but I'm honestly not sure what it's so proud of, what it's even flaunting. When all comes down to it, the game seems satisfied to give you another simulation where the left stick "moves" the player, you ready a reticle with the left trigger, and shoot with the right. It even demonstrates with a quippy section that deviations from this, let's face it, trite format are nothing more than "overengineered" amalgams begging for failure. I honestly am a little disappointed in Valve for this. While I definitely think the Steam Deck is one of the best pieces of handheld gaming hardware on the market, it doesn't do anything for interactivity the Switch doesn't do - the WiiU gamepad didn't do. Hell, the fucking Nvidia Shield.

Which, I wanna stress, is fine. I love the Steam Deck lol, it's a relatively uncomplicated means to play my Steam library "on the go" (bed), I love the freedom and the ergonomics of the pad itself are wildly comfortable. It serves its purpose just fine - it's just why I'm a little confused by... this? It does nothing, and despite reprising a fan-favourite role, it also says nothing. I wasn't even necessarily expecting Valve's take on Astro's Playroom, I simply had hoped that their generally forward-thinking design ethos would unravel a hidden truth or two, especially since they had the confidence to release this on regular PCs as well.
Oh well, it's nice to hear little motifs from the Portal 2 soundtrack again, gave me the tingles.

When Demon’s Souls released in 2009, I was going through a pretty hard crisis of faith regarding videogames. I had grown old enough to finally see their limits, the industry-imposed repetition and condescention in their design, the corners that have to be cut and padded. I blindly took the advice from a few raving cynics I aligned myself with and imported Demon’s Souls from America as a last shot before I defiantly moved on from the medium like the little drama queen I was. DeS was exactly the game I needed, I had never played anything else like it, I had my mind shattered by the way the bosses in the title weren’t so much battles as they were puzzle boxes - imposing small situations to solve, being asked to find the lone small thread that will make the beast unravel. It felt like a NeverEnding Story adventure or something, I loved it, I still do.

With every new Fromsoft game, Hidetaka Miyazaki takes the opportunity to twist the dial even further from Adventure Fantasy to Battle Fantasy, the focus becoming more oriented around a type of mechanisation I personally find diagnostic-feeling, much less fulfilling - stat optimising and gear building, rote memorisation of excruciatingly difficult boss movesets. Very disenchanting open world too; everything in every corner is there to make your character more powerful, a handful of “types” of dungeon/outpost, a truly memetic core routine that made me feel like I was just playing Genshin Impact. This is obviously just a preference thing, but you must forgive me for feeling a little left behind.

There is a lot beauty in Elden Ring’s world, if I had anyone to thank for giving me the desire to trudge through this game to the end, it’ll be the stellar art and design team. Some of the most stunning locales I’ve seen in a minute; I’m particularly fond of miquellas haligtree, crumbling farum azula, and even revisiting Radahn’s arena post-battle for a taste of what I’d personally hoped exploring Elden Ring’s open world would feel like. The monster designs are nuts too, some skirting the perfect balance between recognisable and grotesque to lend some genuine unease.

Elden Ring is a fantastic game, just not a game for me. It actually gives me a little tinge of sadness to play a Fromsoft title and be made to think “this reminds me of another game” so many times. I respect the player-hostility maximalism of the bosses and the dizzying open-endedness of character builds - and in all honestly, Elden Ring very clearly has some of the richest thematic storytelling across the Miyazaki platter right now - I would just rather watch people snap the game over their knee on Youtube than ever play this again.

2024 Addendum long after the point of writing: I'm not exactly comfortable with my "eh it's not really for me" take being among the top reviews for this game. I use this site as a personal journal more than a platform for formal academic reviews; ultimately I'm glad that I'm not alone in my perspective, but we all know how Souls fans act, and believe me I'm not pissing all over your holy object - I'm bemoaning the fact that I've felt this illustrious series slip through my fingers and take the form of something I can no longer care for.

Earnestly clumsy in its story beats, lovingly realised w/ some frankly stunning artistic direction and craft, horny, kind of thin on anything substantive. The Frenchgaming Experience.
I must have played a demo for this at a convention in... 2015? 2016? It's been in the oven for a very long time, but I can't say the finished product particularly reflects that. Young Souls is a threadbare RPG beat-em-up that lacks much pizazz, aside from a few mechanical variances in its short runtime. Despite its armory of different weapon and tool types to choose from, you're typically pushed to choose whichever item in your inventory has the highest stat increment. Much appreciated the attempt at a homely town hub with a recurring set of characters, the Splatoon influence in its shop and upgrade design is unsubtle lol.

Completed in a sitting via couch co-op, which is nice!
Vanillaware are refusing to click "File > Export to... > PC" for Dragon's Crown, so this is the kind of ration that mercifully slides under my cell door once in a blue moon, I'm too hungry to complain.

Surprisingly smart little game! Uses Link's Awakening's skeletal structure as a somewhat perfunctory platform to host Tunic's core puzzle-solving strengths, which come from the way it delicately divulges new information to the player for them to intuit and patch together. The in-game manual conceit really is an enlightened touch, what a wonderful way to avoid tutorialisation by lightly suggesting mechanics and prompts in a freeform way. A new star in my eye forms every time a game nudges me into realising a shortcut or mechanic has ALWAYS been there, I just wasn't aware yet. The combat serves as an occasional hurdle against progress in a way I just found detracting to the experience. For as rough as it is, it neither needs to be as present nor as bafflingly demanding lol.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot. The closest comparison I can think of on a whim would be Fez, another game filled with micro and macro puzzles that near-wordlessly demand intuition and perception on the part of the player. Lifeformed is on the 1s and 2s for this soundtrack btw! Mostly just ambiance without the Dustforce killer, but I missed that guy.

Quite liked the latest joy-athon from the videogame industry's House of Mouse. Probably the most important distinction that wasn't hugely apparent to me in the leadup to Kirby Automata's release is that this game wouldn't take quite as many leaves out of Mario Odyssey's book as it would Super Mario 3D World. Not a problem to me, I personally (much) prefer the latter, and even think the bespoke isolated rollercoaster level format suits Kirby much better.

Where Forgotten Land falls short for me is that it really just doesn't do enough to prove that the additional control axis does a whole lot in Kirby's favor. While movement is a joy, as well as laying waste to flora and fauna while spewing bottomless bombs and flames, it all feels like a typical scrimblo affair - uncannily like Crash Bandicoot 3 at times specifically lol.
This game has 12 copy abilities. Twelve. If Kirby's Adventure on the NES has you beat by over double, you know something's up. The low ability count in turn means that there just isn't a whole lot of enemy variety, exemplified thru the fact that the game boasts a similar number of boss battles of varying size it spreads thinly across its many repeating arena sections. This also means that the environmental puzzles are hilariously rudimentary this time around too. The most you could expect your brain to be teased would be trying to find a Waddle Dee hidden in some offscreen obtuse nook, rather than needing to intuit the environment & scavenge the key ability needed. The abilities themselves are also stripped down to bare essentials too. Gone are the surprisingly complex input movelists of Triple Deluxe and Robobot; mastery of Forgotten Land comes from going to the town hub to menu-somely upgrade your copy abilities to objectively better versions with rather dull statistical upgrades.

Should stress that this is Fine. I don't exactly need Kirby games to be roving epicks of skill and wit, but Forgotten Land is sorely missing the subtle sleight of hand tricks I'd call a series mainstay. Even the title's proud Mouthful Mode gimmick is fully explored in the first world. The variety isn't present where it would be in prior Kirby games and it leaves many checkpoints feeling tiresome and rote.

Still, rly pretty and rly cute with gr8 musique. Not enough games let you breath life back into a devastated town.

The true final boss is fucking sick though. Maliketh, The Black Blade wishes it could.

I adore so many of the things this game has going for it, but I just can't cope with the drudgery. Wedged in between all interactions with Baten Kaitos are pregnant pauses - forced to wait repeated five-second intervals for things like a character to slide onto their mark and grace you with their dishwater dialogue box, exploring the world map or going through the combat. It's just too slow & it breaks my heart because the meat n potatoes here is really cool.

At BK's core is a deckbuilding rpg ordeal with the devil in its details. I really enjoyed my time with the half of Disk 1 I could feasibly play before becoming comatose, because every few screens served some kind of insane revelation as to how the game actually works. Not only do you need to negotiate with a limited deck size to allot your battle abilities - weapons, spells, items etc., you're also limited in how many quest items you can carry. Quite literally everything in the game you can pick up becomes entrapped within a card you have to shuffle and thumb through, it's a fun obfuscation of the normal menu system! Where things get really devious is the point where you realise the milk quest item you stored at an earlier point has curdled into yogurt because you took too long travelling between locations - your ice blades have thawed and are now a useless basic dagger. There is a combo system in which certain cards used in specific orders trigger special effects, and this is extended to seemingly(??) mundane objects, like spending a turn mid battle to use a knife to trim a bonsai tree you found. It's all very satisfyingly scrappy, I desperately wish it wouldn't take days out of my life to simply experiment with the toys it has given me. I thought Monolith Soft were openly hostile to completionists with the deluge of sidequests in Xenoblade, but this game reads like a ransom note to anyone with OCD. I looked it up and Oh My God there are so many fucking evil missables and one-offs.

The presentation is particularly beguiling, the similarities to FF9 are hard for me to ignore. Gorgeous mist-laiden high fantasy setting with surprisingly good monster and character designs. The backgrounds are all pieces of pre-rendered or sketched artwork with noticeable variation in quality. Sometimes you'd be looking at painterly postcard chic and one screen transition over you're in Hyrule Town. It becomes a juggernaut of beauty whenever the environment calls for some kind of cloudy sheen, honestly some of the most sublime 2d effect work I've ever seen, my jaw repeatedly hit the floor at all things waterfall. I'd share a million screenshots, but they don't do justice to what looks unparalleled in motion.

Really want to say stuff about the story but it'd mostly just be speculation, I'll probably never finish this. We're heavily leaning on angel wings in our theming here and I can't help but gobble that stuff up.

Really enjoyed Breath of Fire 2; despite being a bit of a mixed bag, it is a significant step up from BoF1. Surprisingly well-defined characters for a ‘94 SNES title, most of this game’s best moments are when it manages to deftly utilise them through meaningful interactions and mechanical nods to their personalities (like Lin desperately wanting to learn magic, but not quite having the capacity to chant the spells she learns). Felt so good to like, want to play as every single character because their roles in the battles feel tuned and identified just right. It may feel thin by today’s standards, but I’m just so impressed by how much dialogue they’ve managed to squeeze into this game. Plenty of opportunities to shuffle your party around to see how the world reacts to who, even has a townbuilding component where you can touch base with everyone in your roster. It’s very character-focused and feels so much warmer because of it. Thru tears, cursing modern gaming for insisting upon only ever rigging a human skeleton for playable characters, I want more fucked up creatures like this, we were eating good.

I often struggle with some RPGs from this era because they tend to be a little one-note. I get uncharitably bored by the droning daisy chain of sauceless overworld dungeons with labyrinthine layouts to snake around as the random battles chip away at my sanity. BoF2 is def one of the JRPGs that manages to avoid this by adopting a variety show-like format for its dungeons. Every one is unquestionably unique, often themed around a character or subquest, and fleshed out with mechanics and funny gimmicks that won’t be used elsewhere. This is kind of the key to my heart. If you want me to feel like I’m on an adventure, write a new rulebook every hour and give every point of interest their own flair. Has a few particular showstopper-grade setpieces and story beats I never predicted, at times it really does feel like you’re playing one of the best JRPGs ever. Could honestly be my new #1 spot for “most deserving of a remake to maximise potential”.

The story is peaks and valleys, sections can be cute but wear out their welcome (frog castle), or feel poorly planned yet have some rather standout character work (Highfort). The game has a “shaman system”, a couple degrees removed from FF’s job system, essentially granting new forms and buffs to your party members and it’s all a very good idea, but it feels so out of the way. By the time you’re able to make the most of it, the game is already drawing to a close. The worst wedge in the experience by far is the random encounter rate that is just dumb high and only exists to crush momentum. You're going to want to map a fast-forward function to a trigger.

Played with this retranslation patch and this rebalancing/QoL patch. I can’t exactly speak to the content or quality of either, this being my first playthrough, but they came strongly recommended to me, and I do love hatchet quality of life solutions.

Want to quantum shift to the alternative reality where the Breath of Fire franchise is as huge as our Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. What are they up to? What are we missing out on?

My first Civ, be nice to me.
The game feels little lost and suffocated by its own tangled web of subsystems that don't feel naturalistically enveloped by what is almost fundamentally brilliant. It doesn't bear much surprise to learn that most of these rather clumsy or extraneous mechanics were added in post-release updates and expansions, but can mercifully be disabled. I'm particularly un-fond of world hazards, congress, loyalty, and governers to name a few. There is every possibility I'll see the light and turn these on when my aptitude for this game builds up though honestly.

As the ball gets rolling it really is shockingly fun, I'm a fan of the inclusion of different methods to win games beyond just pure warlord domination. Culture and diplomacy make me feel like a devious little worm shmoozing my way under people's noses, it's great, and I'm excited to figure out whatever the deal is with faith. Science was apparently hit by the ugly stick in VI specifically - its victory requirements are kind of insane, require a lot of planning from turn one, and seem like a dull grind as you hope your opponents are just doing nothing.

A personal standout surprise here is the character animation for all of the leaders. This shit's better than Pixar I swear to god, excellent attention to detail in the subtle face and finger movements. Nobody in a videogame more expressive than Kupe.

I was never really one for point-and-click adventure puzzlers - more due to lack of trying than anything else. Maybe I should get into them in a bigger way - there are certainly some banger entries that have flown under my radar, but the ones I've earnestly attempted have been clangers, and I don't want to dedicate too much of this review to throwing namedrops under a bus (besides Deponia, that one deserves being nailed to the autobahn). Even as much as The Neverhood was a stylistically formative pillar of my life in my developing years and one that I swear by even now, I can never entirely escape the little conceit in my head that I know the game itself banks off of that style hard enough to leave actual design and writing by the wayside.
It's great, but is it Monkey Island 2 good? God no.

MI2 is a wonderfully transformative twist on the first game that understandably leaves many people behind. I personally adored its shift into a creepier, sadder atmosphere - where the first game's player experience is akin to a child discovering a new favourite theme park ride, excitedly exploring the sets in doe-eyed awe at the light and magic of it all. 2 is like finally stepping out of the funhouse and catching glimpses into the employee backrooms, seeing mascot characters take their mask off and putting out a cigarette on an animatronic. Everything here seems to just work in the game's favour; the puzzles are somewhat more streamlined and give me the impression of ride designers running out of ideas and budget. The palette's increase from 16 to 256 on screen colours at a time afforded the illustrators more licence to breathe some character into the environments, which funnily enough is the exact opposite of what they did - Monkey Island 2 feels downright dead to look at at times, even the vibrant front-end stages the amusement park designers want you to see have a sickly dingy grotty energy to them. The writing is just as funny as the first game but comes across far less comedic because of the dryness to the character delivery. These employees are here to pay their rent and go home, dead-eyed hucksters here to exploit the dream factory. Love it so much it all just works, and creates a uniquely textured feel to so many of the interactions in the game that for all intents and purposes should be childhood idyll. Which is what makes the ending so good to me, one of the few times I've seen "it was all a dream" handled so well because it recontextualises not only everything that happened earlier in the game, but the first entry too where the signs become strikingly obvious when pointed out. Without explicitly giving away too much, it's clear that Guybrush is an unhappy child coming to learn that his fantasy happy place is giving diminishing returns. The problem with dreams is that you have to wake up eventually.

I am dreadfully excited to see how Return to Monkey Island pans out. MI2’s ending hook has been prosperous for me in how effectively it made me think back on and contextualise the games up to that point, but there is something to be said about a complete package. I think I can trust Ron Gilbert.

Surprised by how little I hate this. On paper, it's pure gunk of a game, all about being a little seratonin plant that stimulates the brain with the fun chemicals by employing the most base level of visual power escalation. It's not just number go up, it's projectile go so Up you can barely see the field anymore. It's all pretty basic stuff, but that's the appeal - a game stripped down to bare essentials, the character arc of a fully-fledged Metroidvania condensed to maybe 30-minute intervals. A thin Roguelite affair with all the trappings that smacks of a Flash golden-era desktop toy. I'm happy to call this game shite, but it's like yelling at a cheap stress ball and I am well aware of the desperate things we do when we have to listen to a podcast. The veneer of Vampire Survivors is pretty hilarious, uses Castlevania's aesthetic right down to stealing monster designs and items and stuff, alongside this unashamed casino spin where you're pulling gatchas from chests and rolling for good pickups. The music and sound effects sound like a pub fruit machine constantly screaming for attention all the while I'm mowing down the devil's legions in gothic castles.

I see the appeal, I really do, but I'm one of those freaks that watches a movie without tearing my eyes off the screen to blink. Stripping down a game to the point where it is nothing but mechanical gratification isn't my thing, I just need the narrative thrust or linear hand-crafted oven-cooked pomp and care or else a game just loses me and I forget it the moment it exits my peripheral. If I was a kid that had to pretend to do work in IT class in the year of our lord 2022 this would probably be my go-to, but I was definitely better off doing the same with Warning Forever.

I've been pushing for Cotton to be the mascot of Backloggd for the best part of a year now and the intro of this game featuring her bio that states "Age: Unknown. Mental age: 5" is validation for that. Accept her as the symbol for what you are - a hungry little scamp and rascal.

Anyway, this is great. Played the recently released fan translation and was blown away by how fun this shmup is from front to back. A core universal grabbing and throwing mechanic on top of a general focus on physics-based nonsense makes Cotton 2 so much more tactile and openly comedic than most other Shmups I've ever played. Particularly adore the cutscenes inbetween misisons using squash and stretch principles applied to comic book panels, it's all shockingly unique and easy to love.