The video game of all time. Does a great job of acclimating you to its verbs and controls. Movement feels fantastic (played on KB). Guns feel great.

Level design really falls off after E1 (Romero's levels). E2 was still mostly a good time, but E3 really lost me. Have yet to play E4.

Played on a 60% KB, so couldn't properly circle strafe without rebinding some keys, but that's really only necessary for the Cyberdemon fight on E2M8.

All of the weapons are fun and feel good and have their place, and finding newer, bigger guns that you don't have was such enjoyable progression, BUT.

I truly believe that somewhere up in heaven there is a perfect version of this game where you only use the shotgun.

The racing itself is pretty good. The actually management is varied enough to be stressful in a fun way. Lots of moving pieces. The best part of this game is dealing with adversity and the stuff that comes out of left field.

I keep getting sucked back in because the meta story is so interesting. My team was so bad at fake F1 that we got bumped to a junior category, where I set my sights too high and the chairman fired me, so I found a job at a BETTER team, and now I'm competing against the team I created. Like that's just too damn interesting.

Played for the first time in the MegaMan Battle Network Legacy Collection.
A solid first draft for everything that follows. Hard not to judge based on what's missing, having played the rest of the series. Throws you into the world with little/no setup which I both do and don't like for different reasons. Writing leaves something to be desired, but gets there in the end by making characters likable. World-ending threat is sort of a nothing burger that gets no introduction, but we learn what we need to along the way. Battle system is mostly there. ElecMan stage is saved only by reading a walkthrough. Not being able to save after the penultimate fight and before the final boss sucks. Thank goodness for the Legacy Collection's Buster Max mode. Really smart addition.

All in all, really glad I finally got to play this first entry and experience this part of the story! There are good bits that I've been missing for 20 years! Solid game.

Despite having far fewer tracks than I remember, and resorting to mirroring tracks pretty early on, Lego Racers somehow remains exactly as fun as I remember it being.

The brick system for powering up your power ups is great, and it's still a blast to break things by using the full-power green brick warp power up over and over.

Later circuits also remain a challenge, probably because the CPU cheats to higher degree, and there's likely a ton of rubberbanding going on there, but it doesn't feel impossible.

After finally finishing the game and defeating all of its host racers 22 years after first playing it on my family's eMachines PC, I can confirm this game still rules.

I don't know what ancient gods had to be appeased to bring us a collaboration between Hironobu Skaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, but they can have my firstborn.
Loved the idea of having scripted battles rather than random encounters, and that they played out right on the playing field. Genius.
Shoutouts to Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu for a bangin' soundtrack. Square RPGs always know how to build you up with a heroic theme and make your heart soar when you inevitably obtain an airship.