Top 50 Favorites: #37

City > Golf > Factory > Castle > Tower > Lumber > Water > Mountain > Demolition > Dark > Ice > Mansion > Thermal > Carry > Train > Laboratory > Steam > Power Plant > Miniature > Red Rock > Aztec > Copper World > Forest

Clears. I mean would you just look at those noodley little guys go? Just fantastic. PS5 online is the spawn of Satan but otherwise you just can't knock years of free content without a single bad level for a game that isn't a live service - it's pretty much unrivaled in that department. I've said it a thousand times but I remain a steadfast defender of this era's meme games - where the sole reason for their existence is to have fun with a strange gimmick, undoubtedly made strictly for the "Let's Play" craze so people can go "haha funni ragdoll". And it's a testament to the reliability of that stratagem where now - approaching EIGHT YEARS later - this thing still holds the fuck up whereas other 'trendy' games from following years have long since fallen to the wayside. Pretty much a big clay playground where you can fuck around and do whatever you want - often encouraging you to see how much you and your buddies can break the game wide open - and that's every bit as glorious as that sounds. So damn funny.

Top 50 Favorites: #9 (Included with Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition)

Just as lush, expansive, and easy to fall in love with as the base game - honestly one of the best expansions ever made. You just can't reckon with five bucks (often less during frequent sales) for all this beautiful content. Still has some current-day AAA sensibilities that I'm not too big on (the piss-easy 'platforming' for one) but all my gripes get swallowed right away when I just take one fucking LOOK at this thing. Snow levels in video games are often some of my favorites, and this is one for the books. Breathtaking, unforgettable environments abound that compliment this game's bracing lighting system perfectly. Not to mention the very respectable uptick in difficulty that makes this feel like its own original experience in addition to flowing into the base pretty naturally. Amazing.

Competent but booooooooooorrrrrrrriiiiiinnnnggg. Those chintzy stock music loops will be branded into your memory banks should you ever be unwise enough to go for this grindy platinum. But even if you're playing this casually... it's just dull motorcycle loops, restrictive ones at that. There's also a glitch still accessible in this that lets you get a podium position in the career + championship races in like two seconds without ever having to actually start driving lmao. How the fuck are there (as of writing) SIX of these??

Top 50 Favorites: #9

Base game:
The first big-budgeted PS4-era open world adventure game I really got swept up in, one which I'm also terrified to replay due to this genre veering more and more towards empty, boring, overbloated filler passed off as content as time goes on - I fear that what registered for me all those years ago as new and revitalizing will instead ring as tedious and generic these days. Still, at the time anyway this really felt like a breath of fresh air: vibrant colors (the lighting!!), an interesting story (even the collectible-based narratives I found to be intricate and emotional), breathtaking animations, Lance Fucking Reddick, etc. The thing really felt like games had finally hit the point they'd been aiming for since the inception of the medium. Its melee combat isn't the best but the rest of the fighting here felt unique, engaging, and responsive too. I love it immensely, a beautiful gaming experience - cannot in good conscience agree with this coming back into the discourse of why its genre's luster is waning, especially when the much duller and more overstuffed Fallout 4 had already come out and dominated years before this.

The Frozen Wilds:
Just as lush, expansive, and easy to fall in love with as the base game - honestly one of the best expansions ever made. You just can't reckon with five bucks (often less during frequent sales) for all this beautiful content. Still has some current-day AAA sensibilities that I'm not too big on (the piss-easy 'platforming' for one) but all my gripes get swallowed right away when I just take one fucking LOOK at this thing. Snow levels in video games are often some of my favorites, and this is one for the books. Breathtaking, unforgettable environments abound that compliment this game's bracing lighting system perfectly. Not to mention the very respectable uptick in difficulty that makes this feel like its own original experience in addition to flowing into the base pretty naturally. Amazing.

Alice's beast leg kick remains undefeated. Very sturdy fighter that refines the previous game in every conceivable metric (sans a weaker opening menu) and comes tantalizingly close to the high caliber of the franchises of which it cloned. Now instead of being just distracting, it's become addicting - has serious "just one more match" energy. Story mode being the best new addition, yes they mostly consist of my old foe .png cutscenes but the plot(s) are so bombastic, asinine, and campy in the same vein as like an 80s cult movie that it's too hard not to let yourself follow along astutely and tear through as many campaigns as you can in one sitting (though it's kind of weird that this has the same basic plot as X-Men). Still nothing spectacular, and some of the fights - to be frank - are bullshit (Long's last two fights, I love being caught in an unavoidable combo attack that wipes your whole health bar in 3 seconds!) but it certainly deserves a visit.

Mercy killing. Not as good as Chains of Olympus, better than the first one, about on par with the second one. I still think these games are some of the most fun to 100%, but as an actual game by itself I gotta say I respect it more than I like it. I never thought the story in these early GoWs were that great or anything, but this has one of the relative best despite still being too frantically paced to fully settle into its fittingly epic scale - the stuff with Pandora and Kratos (the best parts imo) feel far too rushed-through to work as much as intended, and the Gods just sort of pop in at random rather than having the looming presence they really needed in this narrative. That having been said, I like the way this game portrays the interconnectedness of the best and worst aspects of human existence - hate has just as much of an effect on your life as hope does whether you deny it or not. Also, this has absolutely earned its reputation as a violent, blood-gushing, cold-hearted motherfucker all these years later. Like WOW. Even I'm in awe of some of the brutal shit they make you do in this, gotta love it. Graphical powerhouse for the PS3 which still has some stunning images even today (Kratos looks incredible) but I'm just not as smitten with the environments here as I was with past entries - lotta of-the-era greys taking up about 90% of the color palette (even before there's a plot reason for it!) which dulls the whole thing down imo. Also kind of stinks that we're fighting the same old enemies with so many repeated tit-for-tat animations. Stacked voice cast though (in particular the always reliable Rip Torn's gravely, emotionally broken turn as Hephaestus). Zeus boss fight is God-tier (no pun intended) and the fight with Cronos is an all-timer - but the ending twist or whatever that was is really, really stupid. Some of the best QTEs in all of gaming. Good shit, but something just isn't clicking here on a deeper level for me.

Games I Dislike That Everybody Else Likes

Run-of-the-mill fighter that's virtually indistinguishable from the massive bevy of other entries to the genre that were coming out in droves around this time. The beast system is its biggest nuance but it isn't interesting enough to warrant going to this one over even the first Virtua Fighter - which is still fun in all its blocky, zero-gravity simplicity all these years later. You can also just spam Alice's leg sweep and decimate most enemies without being touched - and it should be noted that I mostly just mashed every face button on the controller at random and beat the entire arcade mode in under 12 minutes without dying once. The options are crazy in-depth, though - and the autosave feature is a huge breath of fresh air given the era, way ahead of its time. Objectively solid but I was just not that into it, didn't grab me the same way a Mortal Kombat or Tekken would. And I'm sorry but some of these characters are - to put it bluntly - butt-ugly.

Just as endearingly clunky as it was when it initially released, but I'm kind of glad they kept the primitive mechanics intact rather than watering them down and/or replacing them with all-too-basic antiseptic controls like some current remakes/remasters tend to do. It's always a treat to go back and see what we used to expect out of triple-A games from the seventh gen, and both this along with the original still look rock-solid for the time. But mostly this thing just coasts off of charm - particularly the chemistry of Nathan and Sully; and there's always been something particularly special about mowing down foes with AK-47s and Desert Eagles in these games. Rough around the edges, but a very important piece of gaming history.

A couple (major) grievances I need to air about this season, before I get into why I think it's still their best since SS1 - firstly, this signifying the death of new themed seasons is a heavy effin' blow which can't help but feel like the beginning of the end. Sure not every past season was a mega-hit, but at least they all had their own distinct identity which lend themselves to greater variety mix during play. I mean I loved this digi-polygon theme at first but now it's feeling stale - even a lot of the creator rounds feel samey. Though taking that into account, general gameplay is better than it's felt in what seems like YEARS. The vaulting bullshit that plagued this game heavy since 2022 feels almost totally muted here; with a ton of underappreciated and sorely missed games being put back into the cycle on a nice schedule. No more getting Stompin' Ground or Speed Slider every single fucking match anymore (though boring Blastlantis still shows up too frequently for my tastes)! And while team games can be fun on occasion, I'm glad they've lessened their appearances which before would totally derail any progress you made that match seemingly at random. The creative mode itself here is honestly also a hoot for what it is, though it still feels like its missing key developments. Still can effortlessly boot this back up and have a good time.

It's no Wave Race 64, but it gets the job done. A vast improvement over its predecessor in effectively every way: the sense of speed is improved ten-fold; the graphics are better; they thankfully cut down the first game's impressive but far too superfluous bloat of racers on the track from twenty to four; plus it added fun-as-hell courses like Aftershock, Rollercide, and Nebulous while also featuring every single course from the first (Joyride is a classic). Unfortunately, it's still cluttered with issues specific to this series - including track design that's too cramped, random, and restrictive for controls this floaty. Get used to the "clunk" sound your bike makes when it hits a wall and the scream your racer cries when they fall off course because you're going to be hearing them both non-stop. Multiplayer is a necessity.

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

"Happy Wheels but 3D" really should have been bigger than this, like, a LOT bigger. But I think by this time people were outgrowing the "meme=game" era so for a myriad of reasons - both its own fault and not - it was promptly forgotten about. Regardless, it's still mostly a blast to play especially today. It'd be an easy 3.5 stars if not for some B.S. glitched trophies which have yet to be remedied five years later. Not enough levels, not enough characters, still a bit unfinished-feeling even for a project like this - but you can't tell me it isn't totally rad when your character gets instantaneously blown apart into mincemeat by a cannonball or flying landmine, or slicing apart like warm butter upon contact with a spinning buzzsaw. And few things give me a warm, fuzzy nostalgic feeling quite like hearing UberHaxorNova comically screaming.

Throwing everything at the wall. Truly bonkers piece of candy-coated pop mayhem. Like seriously we really need to be talking more about how batshit this game is. Packed to the brim with virtually every relic of the seventh-gen imaginable cranked up to 11 - including but not limited to a glitchy co-op mode, constant bullet hell, explosions, zombies, and bombastic protect/escort missions. I used to dislike games like this at the time, but looking back they're just so sinfully fun (I'm also a huge Resident Evil 6 apologist, for what that's worth). Has one of the most God-tier soundtracks in gaming history (It's My Life, Yonkers, Return of the Mack, 31 Seconds to Die, Power, Satisfaction, Machinehead, etc. etc.), attractive graphics, a wicked sense of humor (some sporadic cringe aside), missions that are a blast to play, an eclectic collection of freakish characters, and a fucking ripper array of weapons. AND with all the equally over-the-top DLCs? Come on dude, this is just awesome. In my opinion makes one very, VERY fatal flaw keeping it from elite greatness and that's killing off [REDACTED] in the second fucking mission. I have my reservations about this as a follow-up to Saints Row 2, but it also has a car with a giant mounted cannon that sucks in and shoots out pedestrians - so I'm more than happy with it. Wild.