"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Fantastic puzzler moment-to-moment that's phenomenal in its early stages before eventually becoming tiresome and janky well before its endpoint. Granted this does add new environmental hazards and powerups as the game goes deeper into its sizeable collection of levels (those invisible blocks suck hard, though) - and they do work towards the fun factor overall - but unlike superior puzzleball outings along the lines of Mojo! and Ballistic the way in which you acquire points just isn't open-ended enough to hold your attention as long, it's much more on the linear side by comparison. That being said - it's still got a pretty groovy, surreal vibe and is absolutely engaging when you're in the mood for it. Just didn't grab me as long as some others.

Tommy Tallarico jumpscare. An honestly terrific 2.5D powerhouse with tons of splatty sci-fi violence and nostalgic charm - which happens to have the same issue as a lot of other games from this era: you can fully complete it in like a handful of hours. Still, kind of refreshing to see a game like this just ditch any sort of story outright in favor of throwing lots of edgy style at the wall - and while the combat mechanics are satisfying and creative, they can also be finnicky and definitely get repetitive (taking four complete side-to-side hits to kill most enemies feels fun at first but is eventually sort of tiring). Tight, well paced, varied, and cool. Underrated.

A technological feat on the 3DS, on all other systems it's just okay. Honestly thought this was better than Resident Evil 4 until I deeply familiarized myself with Raid Mode, where it became apparent that a game fit with bullshit 100-0 capable instakills and a clunky, outdated movement system doesn't really work with an unconscionably grindy RNG-fest looter shooter that rips off fucking Borderlands, of all games. This story is also the worst of the series so far imo, as if they honest to God didn't even try. Still, the Queen Zenobia is equal parts cool and creepy to explore - and it's nice to see Jill and Chris back in action. I even kinda dig the diet ZOMBI scanner thingy! Not to mention the enemies in here really highlight the series' strength of pitting beauty up against the most grotesque, merciless warping of human/animal flesh you've ever seen - there are walking melted blobs, enemies with a fleshy crossbow rotted into their arm, decaying wolves, even a fat beast with one humanoid head and one massive lamprey-like mouth that pukes toothed bear traps and has a motherfucking chainsaw arm. Pretty sick! I just wish there weren't only... like three colors between all of them.

This would be perfectly serviceable PS2 fodder if not for one of the most vehemently ugly gaming art styles in recent memory and a 'campaign' with bland progression that becomes flat-out unplayable in the last couple sections. I mean seriously take one gameplay video of this and tell me what the hell I'm even looking at. Not sure why this needed to exist considering they gave up on quality of life support for it in like a nanosecond anyway. Also tons of stupid .png cutscenes. Can confidently call this distracting.

A technological feat on the 3DS, on all other systems it's just okay. Honestly thought this was better than Resident Evil 4 until I deeply familiarized myself with Raid Mode, where it became apparent that a game fit with bullshit 100-0 capable instakills and a clunky, outdated movement system doesn't really work with an unconscionably grindy RNG-fest looter shooter that rips off fucking Borderlands, of all games. This story is also the worst of the series so far imo, as if they honest to God didn't even try. Still, the Queen Zenobia is equal parts cool and creepy to explore - and it's nice to see Jill and Chris back in action. I even kinda dig the diet ZOMBI scanner thingy! Not to mention the enemies in here really highlight the series' strength of pitting beauty up against the most grotesque, merciless warping of human/animal flesh you've ever seen - there are walking melted blobs, enemies with a fleshy crossbow rotted into their arm, decaying wolves, even a fat beast with one humanoid head and one massive lamprey-like mouth that pukes toothed bear traps and has a motherfucking chainsaw arm. Pretty sick! I just wish there weren't only... like three colors between all of them.

Every bit the victor in the battle between this and Tony Hawk's Project 8 for best of the final two Neversoft entries, but also every bit as tepid and annoying an experience. At least the characters don't look entirely like battered Nickelodeon Gak in this one, but it's still washed of color and - similarly - in their (at the time) increasing transition into uncanny valley realism because of EA's Skate the levels are resoundingly meh. At this point they were just tacking on semi-okay features and a sea of pointless additional moves instead of enhancing what was already a successful formula they had since THAW and THUG2. No one thinks the aggro kick is fun. No one. And again, come on, no trophy patch? Nirvana on the soundtrack and Judy Nails as a secret skater were goated moves though.

Remember when these games used to have subtlety? I'll give this one thing and one thing only over Resident Evil 6, and it's that this honest to God really does feel like it's trying to adapt to the CoD-hooked seventh gaming generation while also trying to stay somewhat true to its original roots as a survival horror game. Does the combat suck? Oh God yes. Is the level design dumbed down? Absolutely. Do all the endings flop? Of course, hard. Do the (almost 100%) in-game-rendered cutscenes look like shit? You bet your ass they do. But there's still some sort of an eerie thrust in here - there are some solid scares and tons of pretty-yet-freakish art design that don't feel totally out of place. But resorting the Otherworld to busted, shitty chase sequences (with a truly incompetent MLG filter applied over all of them) was a ruinous move, and the thing barely fucking runs even after a supposed performance patch. On the plus side plenty of smaller details and sections like the Centennial Building feel productively morbid, and Silent Hill as an open world actually feels pretty good here as well - not too Ubisoft-ified but also not Borderlands-levels of cramped. But the story and every single enemy (except for the dolls) are uninspired. As with a lot of games from this time, I think it both succeeds and fails because of how weird and experimental this is.

One of the worst controlling things I have ever played in my ~20 years of gaming. For a game that calls for stupidly precise 'troll' movement a la those crummy flash games from the late 2000s like The Unfair Platformer - it's one thing to also build it around the Wii's motion controls and then expect any sort of reliability. But it's another thing entirely to have well over ten years to get the chance to transfer it over to strictly-controller-gameplay and STILL fuck it up. The jump maneuver - in theory - I'm not against at all, even as a die-hard Super Monkey Ball fan but here it only works when it wants to. It's also Dropped Input Heaven and features shit maneuvering that feels like trying to get a marble out of a glue trap. And what's with these minigames? Where's Monkey Race, Monkey Fight, or Monkey Golf? You could drop hours into those, man - these feel cheap and tire themselves out in one or two plays. Slingshot Ball and Space Monkey Attack are two of the worst things I've ever touched in a video game. It's a shame because the music is wonderful, and there is the occasional flash of SMB inspiration from time to time. Boss fights are not only an awful idea on their own in this but they're so broken and unfinished that they aren't even worth pondering any missed possibilities.

Far superior to the lazy Aquaman packs, but just as pared-down and rushed - you play as Beast Boy for, and I am not exaggerating - maybe six seconds (while locked in a QTE btw). As expected you can complete the whole thing in under five minutes, and if you paid full price for this you'd be spending around $1 per minute so take that as you will. Gets points over the Aquaman stuff for being slightly higher in incident and for having this really pretty cel shaded filter over the characters and environment which fits the material like a glove. But again, there is zero to chew on here so it isn't that much more worth it.