Games I Dislike That Everybody Else Likes

Competent, not much else. Impressive for 1996 (especially the vast amount of racers they managed to cram onscreen without sacrificing a ton of performance, even surpassing a lot of the Mario Karts) but those deep-fried, chunky graphics haven't particularly aged that well (they honestly look sickly). The turbo system also kind of sucks but the magnetic grapple is pretty innovative and satisfying to use while snapping around corners. At first it's pretty neat to race on so many different terrains like this in one race, and there are a few really solid tracks but due to its horrid physics the difficulty is stupidly unforgiving to the point of being a chore. Just play Wipeout tbh.

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 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.

A damn fine racer. If Jet Moto 2 was a top-to-bottom improvement over the first entry, then this one takes those improvements and amplifies them by a degree of about 1,000. Gone is ramming into every wall within eyeshot every .05 nanoseconds, now you can - and are encouraged to - ride ON them (took them long enough to finally implement this feature into a hoverbike racing game). The graphics no longer look like hallway floor vomit, instead here they're bright and much cleaner. The difficulty is actually semi-fair, and the course design is at an all-time best for the series (Khumbu Ice Falls, Volcano Island, Urban Subway, Shipwreck Cove, Devil's Canyon - I particularly love that a futuristic themed game takes advantage of so many different locations that aren't just the same sci-fi-esque metal backgrounds [the Sequoia Forest level still kind of sucks though, unfortunately]). It even has primitive analog support. But most noticeably the sense of speed here is just jaw-dropping, in its best moments reminiscent - though never quite reaching the blistering heights - of Kinetica. It doesn't escape all the flaws the series has dealt with up to this point, but it's a shame it was canned right when it was starting to find its groove. Though to put it frankly, these dead-eyed FMV characters/videos are horrifying.

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.

"I came from Queens fuh dis??"

Seriously fun and stylized RTS that's just in-depth enough to be engaging but still accessible enough to not be an unlearnable, grindy mess. This honestly should have spawned a franchise imo, I can only imagine the insane fun of later-gen sequels. Played the NA version, so I didn't experience any of the reported racism - but this version at least gets major points for doing the "edgy kid's animation" trope without being completely obnoxious about it. It controls great - also the AI loves to get in your way but it's never a major issue, at least they aren't dumb as rocks like I was expecting. And that's not even mentioning that there's an actually good tutorial! Super underrated, but solo play difficulty fast becomes brutal.

Cute. As twee and inoffensive a new-gen tech demo as Knack, which this is (slightly) objectively better than as a game but worse as the aforementioned tech demo. Does little to sell me on the DualSense adaptive feedback stuff even while it's very fun to use; whereas at least Knack's incredible graphical showcase sold me on the PS4's power immediately. Make no mistake, this is fun and reasonably charming enough in bursts to get a pass but you can also effortlessly 100% it in a handful of hours while still taking time to explore everything. Didn't blow me away but regardless, I can confidently call this a nice time. Also gives me a bad taste in my mouth how 'lovingly' they reference games/series that Sony has either totally forgotten about, abandoned, and/or burned into the ground.

Staggering to think of the shift in quality from this versus its 2016 predecessor - if the latter felt like a deeply bland, shitty licensed movie game from the mid/late 2000s then this is beyond a breath of fresh air. Still doesn't quite match the cartoony playfulness of the originals due to suffering from the current-gen problem of straining too hard for prestige seriousness to the point of cutting down gameplay (if I have to play one more tiring tutorial section where you go on a loop of playing for like 2 seconds before getting bombarded with 16 cutscenes I'm going to lose it). But the fact that this even feels like a Ratchet & Clank game again is more than I could have ever hoped for - there's tons of visually smashing planets, fun gadgets, and a decent story. I love Rivet & Kit as additions, and the weapons are as reliably fun to smash through and level up as always. Really good.

Games I Dislike That Everybody Else Likes

An aesthetically dazzling 2D platformer ruinously plagued by common flaws of the genre (i.e. occasional bad platform hitboxes, trial and error bullshit, arbitrary difficulty spikes, leaps of faith, repetition, etc). The advanced (for the time) mechanics feel surprisingly good to pull off but some of these levels are the actual spawn of Satan - I'm all for a challenge but a lot of this feels like a 9-year-old's shitty Ultimate Chicken Horse level: random hazards thrown everywhere with no rhyme or reason at all to the point of feeling at least partially incompetent. It seems like you have to break the game speedrunner-style just to get past basic obstacles, and at a point it begins to blend in with the lot of these that were hot in the 90s despite starting out with such promise. Still, its vibrant personality is just too strong to reckon with even then. Pains me to report this but... not as good as Gex.

A definite improvement over the first game, the 2D prototype had some interesting ideas going on but from a personal standpoint the jump from 2D side-scroller to 3D platformer collectathon was the right move here. Breezy, fun, and full of charm. Even this early on these games were clearly developing their own identity. That being said, outside of the GBC port this is probably the weakest version of the game - so it doesn't really have anything on its other ports let alone something like Gex: Enter the Gecko which is tighter and more nuanced let alone a genre titan like Super Mario 64, both of which came out years prior. Not that it should be a one-or-the-other deal, this is still a good game - but it can't help feeling somewhat rudimentary in comparison.

An unbelievably charming platformer that I haven't stopped thinking about since I finished it. There's something to be said about the singular sense of personality these types of games have, simple yet fiendishly affective. Full of fun characters, authentic Australian texture, music that fuckin' rips for just being a series of short loops, and not a single dud in its murders' row of levels (Snow Worries, Bridge on the River Ty, Outback Safari, Lyre Lyre Pants on Fire, and Ship Rex are some of the best levels I've ever played in a 3D platformer collectathon). I also appreciate that - rather than rebuilding the original from the ground up and possibly losing out on a lot of its intrinsic charm (still hurt by the hackjob that was Battle for Bikini Bottom: Rehydrated) - it feels more like a souped-up re-release as opposed to a full-on remaster. Glad to see this series is seeing a resurgence, it absolutely deserves it. Only big complaint is (like most of these) that it's too short.

Way more fun than it gets credit for - with mechanics that are just fleshed-out enough to be neither overcomplicated nor too basic, and some cool levels to boot. But I'm well past fatigued by these post-Fortnite cartoony live service online multiplayer games loaded with microtransactions that we see like 4 or 5 come and go within a matter of weeks every year now - which have all started to blend into each other like a wet oil painting. I'm at the point now where I could go my whole life without seeing a battle pass ever again and it would bring me an immense amount of bliss.

An outstanding side-scroller with a beautiful art style, excellent level design, and an insanely entertaining trophy/achievement list. As a rule of thumb this tends to be one of my least favorite genres, but this one does more than enough to separate itself from the rest of the pack - thanks in part to the series' bright personality. If I have one noticeable complaint, it's that Rayman's sprite has seldom felt more lifeless than it is here - I assume to account for the good amount of other unlockable characters, which I guess is a relatively fair tradeoff in the end. But other than a couple minor quirks (wall running can be janky and the bubble hitboxes are kind of fucked) I fell in love with it immediately and never wanted to put it down. Rare to find one of these with a satisfying challenge level like this has, not too easy but not too difficult. And I just can't get enough of that funny babbletalk, I've been saying "Urray-hay!" for like three days straight.