Way to turn the holy grace of catching and raising your precious and beloved Pocket Monsters into what is essentially just a clicker game. I'm sure you get really sentimental over the fiftieth shiny Zigzagoon. Skinner box incarnate, sweeping through the neighbourhood and grinding the block's population of iconic creatures into Exp with the heart of a feller buncher combine harvester uprooting swathes of lush green forest. Pokemon Go to the gallows and give me your oil money fortune. I'll stop exaggerating and say this shit sucks even though I played it for like 10 hours.

A beautiful miasma. Lies and death. There's no joy to be found here, only a deeply uncomfortable test of character. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
One thing I find so fascinating about Pathologic is how it manages to be a true "Role-Playing" game despite lacking the stats, perks and numbers commonly associated with such. It's not just that the writing is staggeringly good, it's that Pathologic understands that playing a video game is like acting out a script - that you're an actor on a theatre play. You're given a prefabricated role to play on the stage, but what differs is your portrayal of the character.
Does Artemy believe in the steppe tales? Does he want to take his place among the Kin, or is he more reluctant and skeptical? Does he still care about his old friends, even seeing what they've become? There are a great deal of dialogue options in the game that shape your understanding of your character's worldview and desires, through the ethically fraught choices and even the mundane ones.

Kinda okay Arcade Shooter where you Shoot the Arcade. Banks off of its own absurd premise a little too much, because it's just not all too engaging as a shmup aside from the striking bosses (the classic dancing girl .gif!!!). I'm all for goofball shmups, but you gotta be like Parodius and have the creative sugar rush act in synchronicity with gameplay that constantly attempts to reinvent the wheel. You're crushing your Parma Violets into a fine dust and not even snorting them.

Hard to fault Cruisin Mix as an overall package, it's so full of extras, options, goodies and artbooks. You're not getting fantastic games, but you're getting a lot of cool stuff to sift through. Gunbare Game Tengoku 2 being absent from this collection is the glaring omission that drags the whole thing down, that's the best game in the series.

Every now and then I play a fairly old game that retroactively makes decades-worth of titles that came later within the same classification a little less impressive - that they're just not being very ambitious by comparison.

Napple Tale does and accomplishes SO MUCH despite being built on top of a relatively clunky foundation of iffy platforming. Radiant and imaginative and emotionally charged and I just adored it. Thank you Yoko Kanno for the new favourite soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzOwy2nu70o

Very well designed in ways that aren't obvious. "Randomly generated endless runner" is one of the most incandescent red flags in existence, but the game itself generally leans far enough into its strengths.

Each level is a handful of prefab obstacles strewn in a line as conducted by the seed of your save file. It attempts to keep a sense of theming by isolating new mechanics to individual acts in the world map, lending a very clear and deliberate sense of progression and escalation of difficulty, but it just can't help but be dragged down by the completely random nature of its design - destroying the flow, potentially placing the easiest obstacles in the pack after some of the hardest. The game at its best is constantly reinventing itself with a plethora of absolutely ingenious design decisions and obstacles that make the always-moving endless-runner aspect feel less like a mobile game necessity and more a very cognizantly respected direction for the levels to follow.

My personal patience for trial and error has waned over the years. Any game that has me being able to die- respawn-die-respawn with the haste of, say, Hotline Miami, absolutely never leaves me feeling satisfied to have eventually overcome the trial. It's like growing callused after punching the brick wall of the level. I slowly chip away at the challenge, bit-by-bit progressing through trial and error, but the callus forms and I unfeelingly break through the goal. The reward of hard work, but an endpoint I'd assuredly have gotten to anyway by grinding away for the time anyway. I've never quite been able to put my finger on why this type of thing doesn't feel satisfying to me any more, but "callus" feels about right. Expect to die a lot in SMBF, and not often for reasons that were telegraphed to you very well. This is a game of running headfirst and blindly into obstacles you can't predict, the satisfaction comes (I guess) from memorisation. That Boshy shit.

Oh well, the game's good. The production values are kind of insane and if you have the patience, go for it.

When the game permits itself to show the player a fun, bombastic setpiece sequence, its latent charm and creativity finally takes centre stage. Really cool moments that make the fullest use of the environments and hardware to reinvent the way you have to tackle obstacles.
The overwhelming majority of the game, however, is hamstrung by the worst controls imaginable and sprawling sadistically vague world design. This cast and world is so great! But Brave Fencer Musashi throws itself into cryosleep for hours at a time between the moments that absolutely slap. I don't want to say this game peaks in the first thirty or so minutes, but you can kinda safely only play the prologue and come out more positively than if you otherwise finished it.

Without a shadow of a doubt the best game Crytek has made. An extremely well designed inversion of the Battle Royale formula that mixes PvP and PvE elements with some smart AI and excellent attention to detail in the sound design. The gunplay feels weighty and the enemies are sp00ky. My score is representative of the Solo experience as a chronic antisocial - boring as fuck in spite of things. Get a friend and play this and you'll have a good time. Otherwise you're being lulled into braindeath by rolling brown environments before getting one-tapped by a brain surgeon's shotgun.

Replayed for the first time since launch to see what the famous Updates were about. They must be good, people never stopped bringing them up every time Hello Games added a new type of fern.

All these years and the game is still an exercise in prefab asset tourism - once the novelty wears thin and the artifice sets in, you come to realise that all of the tension comes in the form of anticipating what colour the trees are going to be on the planet you're leisurely approaching. No Man's Sky does about as poor a job of conveying information to the player as Destiny 2. This thing is now a hulking behemoth of retrofitted mechanics that gracelessly clash together, and poorly explain themselves with a haphazard collage of tutorials and tooltips leaving the first thirty minutes of this game with the UI looking like fucking a ransom note. Way to make space travel feel like homework.

Left my ass cooked and crooked. Easy to let complaints of the rigidity of RPGmaker ATB combat and exploration fall to the wayside when the game's narrative doesn't miss a beat. OFF has a lot of unique ideas, and it tells them confidently with fantastic dialogue, surreal environments and an all around sense of style. For a game that paddles in the abstract so obscenely, the conclusion still manages to expertly close the book and leave the player with exactly what they need. Thanks for the stone in the gut.

Solves my biggest problem with Slay the Spire - rather than facing off with only two or three enemies at a time, you are hurriedly retaining ground control of the three floors of your train from a series of escalating enemy waves. It's less elegant, by oh my god it's not stopped being exciting.
Lacks Slay the Spire's years of content and quality of life updates, but the foundation of Monster Train is so strong I'm excited to see where the journey takes it. Wonderfully designed around scrounging whatever bizarre and broken-feeling combos you can find on the road, with a tough but fair difficulty curve that encourages you to do so.

Silent Bomber ran so Spec Ops: The Line could walk.
Incredible high-octane arcady action where your only method of attack is to plant and detonate bombs. One of those late-PS1 games that realises so much more than you'd expect the console to be capable of graphically - the levels and bosses are detailed, varied, and smartly designed around the controls. The game finishes before you know it at around two hours, making this one of the most cut and dry cases of Just Fucking Play This On That Emulator I Know You Have Right Now.