Got a chance to finally play this infamous game.
Ngl: I expected worse. Like: WAY worse.
It still doesn't mean it's a great game by any means lol, it's the kind of game that will test your gaming sensitivity at insane levels. And I mean stuff like Bubsy's unbalanced dumb walking/running speed and managing to beat the level but dying while succeeding it because of falling damage.

FALLING.
DAMAGE.
In a fucking platform.

Ah yes, on top of that: one hit and you're dead.

Here's a thing that will sound blasphemous still: this goddamn franchise...was the closest thing of having a Crash Bandicoot for SNES. I know it sounds crazy and dumb, but my point is very simple: Bubsy animations and expressivity reaches Crash's ones alright.
I know one is objectively a series with only crappy to mediocre platforms, something that can't allow this unlucky creature to the "videogame olympus" alongside Mario, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot himself etc.
So just for being the first game and attempt I'm willing to give the equivalent of a 5/10.

An experienced dev team's first foray into true 3D that, shockingly, gets it right all the way back in June 1996.

Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.

The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.

Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.

Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!

Definitely a lot to like especially compared to a lot of other CRPGs from the time but progression is so bizarrely obtuse at times and while still pretty forgiving the time limit is an unknown stressor that put me off the game for a good while. It took me four playthroughs to actually get a game going because frankly I didn't know what the game wanted from me and with how much time exploring takes I felt like I didn't have time to figure it out.

It feels very low budget at points despite an assumedly expensive (somewhat) star studded cast rounding out most of the voice acted characters. Important characters or objects often times don't have unique sprites and sometimes don't even have unique descriptions to signify to interact with them. Definitely a "click on everything" game, which gets pretty grating when most of what you get is repeated flavor text and empty containers. The rope on a random bookshelf (which has incorrect interaction collision in some places) in a random corner of shady sands being the difference between basic progression at the start of the game or a few days off your timer is just one example of how much you'll need a guide here.

There are a lot of compelling and fun characters but the story gets lost and sort of meanders by the time you get the water chip and go to LA. Theres a couple good town quests and dungeons to be found but it's very limiting, which works for the tone but combined with how little a lot of the fun and interesting characters have to say it all feels a bit rushed. There are multiple quests referenced or mentioned that are straight up not in the game or entirely unfinished, and finding the final boss ultimately comes down to a crapshoot bumming around a random location given to you by the worst follower in the game. Some endings are either entirely impossible or determined by seemingly random factors.

The soundscape is pretty dull, the droning ambience and whispers are good for some areas but get grating as they repeat. I don't mind the repetetive attack sounds but at some point I gave one of my followers a deagle or something that is so loud it manually lowered other sounds on my computer every time he fired???

Combat is infamously bullshit at some points but often times way way funnier than later entries. The brutal and well animated death animations combined with your followers accidentally doming you in the back of the head every 5 seconds paint this sort of bizarre portrait of chaotic gunfight that none of the games really capture afterwards. The animation in both the actual game and the cutscenes is generally very detailed and impressive for the time. Bosses have insanely brutal death animations and characters accurately display dismemberment based on what direction of a blast they were hit by, though there was one part where dogmeat turned into a man because he didnt have an animation for being killed by flames.

TLDR play with a guide if you want to have any fun, just watch some hack talk about the lore on youtube otherwise

A unique game and an instant classic, Dark Souls is a game oozing with atmosphere and challenges. What Dark Souls seems to stand out in is environmental storytelling, the environments you inhabit are well designed in terms of connectivity, ambience, and especially lore. The lore is told through implications with casual NPC dialogues and item descriptions which help the player connect the laws and relationships of a rich world. This boon however comes shorthand into the one main issue with Dark Souls which that there is no story. It is mostly a disconjointed series of events reliant on atmosphere but that atmosphere is so excellent it creates an entirely unique experience. An interesting mechanic of DS is death, upon which all of your unspent experience points are left at the area you died and you respawn at a save point which the opportunity to reclaim your points, however dying again nullifies your points entirely. This leads to a gameplay style that is ‘High-Risk, High-Reward’ which is compounded by unpredictable enemy behaviour, booby traps, difficulty spikes, and a clunky combat system. There is a thrill of exploring the unknown and also knowing that you could lose everything if you’re not careful. It is also one of the few games where dying becomes an incentive rather than a deterrent to continue playing, which is a fundamental difference which should not be understated.