I am not a survival horror fan at all, and this game didn’t exactly do all that much to sell me on survival horror gameplay. I just don’t think it’s for me. I found it more tedious than scary, and before too long I turned the difficulty down to easy so I wouldn’t have to worry so much about the combat and resource management aspects.

With all that in mind: it should speak volumes about how much I like the story that I still managed to push through as a survival horror disliker and beat the game… twice.

Yes, immediately after beating the game once, I went right into new game+ to see the few scattered bits of extra story it added, as well as the somewhat altered ending. I never do that!! This game is a huge departure from the first, and it doesn’t quite have the same campy charm a lot of the time, and Saga’s side of the story in the real world wasn’t quite as interesting to me, but when it hits, it REALLY hits. Especially in Alan’s side of the story. The way the story keeps finding new ways to wrap back in on itself, layer after layer after layer of metatext, surreal blendings of both in-engine and live action material, all making you question how much is real and how much is a fabrication of one of a story within a story within a story, and if that distinction even matters in a world where fiction alters reality. What a blast. While I think Control was the more fun game overall, this is definitely Remedy’s storytelling at its best. They put everything they’ve learned into this game. This one’s gonna stick with me for a long time. Can’t wait for the DLCs.

Is it worth the joke? Did I need to spend 45 minutes deciphering and maneuvering through this game's absolute nothingness of an experience just because I shared my username with it? To experience the E.T. video game?

Fuck it, yeah. Sometimes I pull myself into poor decisions, sometimes I irony my way into doing dumb shit for a bit, but in the end, it's an experience to have. There's a huge difference between taking someone's word on a game being bad and giving the word.

actually, sorry, no, i'm not going into detail on this game. it sucks, but not for very long, and it's very funny being able to say that i've finally played and beaten E.T., especially while having parents who played the game on official hardware back then and couldn't.

i promise i won't do it again.

Pac-Man is a truly nuanced commentary on capitalism. The objective of eating all the dots is a reference to the excessive consumption the system demands and the fact that the game never ends signifies how hollow this endless consumption really is. Not only that but the central conflict between Pac-Man and the ghosts represents the working class in-fighting that the bourgeoisie will orchestrate to distract us from our true enemy. Toru Iwatani could write Das Kapital but Karl Marx could never create the true anti-capitalist masterpiece that is Pac-Man.

After years of drift towards third-person action, survival horror finally returns to its roots: dunking your entire arm into every single trashcan you can find and showing disobedient vending machines and lockers the righteous fury of your boot heel.

Thank God the indie market is so robust these days, because the increasing homogenization of the modern big budget game and shrinking genre space therein means you wouldn't get proper survival horror otherwise. Crow Country and others like Signalis have been filling that void, but despite clearly playing to the charm of PlayStation era horror with its visuals - especially with its character models, which look as though they've been unearthed from an old Net Yaroze kit - Crow Country is no tired pastiche. It's safe rooms, puzzles, and resource management might harken to a design ethos that was at one point more commonplace, but these elements feel authentic and borne from a place of appreciation and understanding.

Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in the park's layout and the way in which the player navigates it. The amusement park theme allows for neatly defined areas with their own theming and unique attractions, with hidden passages, back rooms, cast tunnels, and a subterranean network serving as the connective tissue between each "land" in a way that feels appropriate for the setting while serving to make the park feel highly interconnected. Crow Country is great at providing a sense of space while conveying where the player should go and what to do next. I never felt lost or completely stumped by a puzzle and was consistently engaged and encouraged to revisit old locations to explore - the part of my brain that starts processing how I want to route my way through a game activated pretty early, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign that a survival horror game is living up to the promise of its genre.

The setting is also small. Crow Country is less Disneyland, more Santa's Village, so one way developer SFB Games succeeds in making repeated loops through the park threatening is by gradually introducing more enemies and traps to familiar locations. As the time of day progresses, rain and darkness further obscure the player's vision, and boobytrapped pick-ups begin to litter the map to prey on the sense of trust they've developed with their environment. I sprinted my way through the opening two hours, juked most enemies and picked up any crap I saw laying on the ground. By hour five, I was walking everywhere, stopping frequently, side-eyeing boxes of ammo, and finding that I actually had to conserve what I had due to the increased expectation that I shoot some damn "guests."

I also appreciate Crow Country for telling a complete and coherent story, something I think a lot of horror games have pushed away from. I think the Five Nights series has poisoned the genre and led a lot of other indie horror creators to believe a complex and intentionally vague narrative is the best way to ensure franchise longevity. Keep posing questions, provide no answers. I get it, sometimes it's best to let the audience fill in gaps, you don't want over-explain horror, but in the hands of a weak writer, the "unknown" can just be a euphemism for "nothing."

That's not to say Crow Country fails to raise any questions of its own, rather that in true PSX survival horror fashion, you're given all the clues you need to form the big picture through memos, context, and dialog. How well you do that is entirely dependent on how much you're paying attention, and whether you view Crow Country as being so cliched that its horror can be explained by way of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I was extremely satisfied by the ending, which leaves just enough unanswered that you'll still have something to think of without feeling like you'll need to consult a YouTube series or read like, seven fucking books and play a dozen more games. An indie horror game with a conclusion that is both cogent and earned, thank christ.

So make the most of your Memorial Day weekend and bring the whole family down to Crow Country. Come ride our newest attraction: The Seven Seas, and discover new types of bacteria. Remember, vets and children under 6 get in free!

Atmospherically and visually impactful yet narratively messy with inconsistent themes and nearly no connection to the original game. The story could've been told as a new IP, it being Senua adds nothing of value. The voices which added depth to her character in the original act only as narrative yellow paint to explain every inch of a story that could've had more subtext if it wasn't completely subtracted by the voices overexplaining and negating any depth.

The gameplay is somehow even more shallow than the original which was at least paced better and had a story worth experiencing to back it up. Here the fights last so long it's comical for a system as shallow as it is and the puzzles are not puzzles in any sense of the word.

no good.

you can really tell this is one of the last games ubisoft made with some artistic intent, for better and for worse. it takes a lot of aspects from prince of persia and beyond good & evil and invents a bold new type of game: Sly Cooper for grownups. for a majority of the game the parkour carries it but the combat is pretty terrible throughout (no doubt from that PoP DNA) and the story loses sight of itself way too quickly. Ezio is cool but literally every other character gets introduced with their character trait and then forgotten about in the name of some conspiracy nobody cares about. however, that conspiracy let me jump around like a monkey, so i’d say it was worth it

Out of every game that has ever taken inspiration from Mega Man, Shovel Knight might just be the best one ever made. Gorgeous pixel art! One of the best 8-bit OSTs ever! An actually engaging story! Multiple waves of DLC! There was no reason for them to try this hard but they did, and they dug up a fantastic 2D platformer as a result. Even if it ended up kicking my ass more than a few times. Fuck, Shovel Knight might just completely uproot EVERY Mega Man game in terms of sheer quality! Maybe I need to actually replay the classic Mega Man series...hmm...

Oh yeah also medieval fantasy is a setting that I'm not usually too particularly fond of so that's how you KNOW Shovel Knight hits different

Well this is a bit of a downer. Metal Slug 4 is the first entry not made by the original team at SNK, instead being helmed by MEGA and Noise Factory (who made the music of the last few Metal Slugs). And it shows. This game is a far cry from the fun as hell Metal Slug 3, which is impressive since it looks the exact same. The level and enemy design just ain't there. It's difficult without being that fun.

Remember the lil narrative bits from 1, 2/X, and 3? Well those have been toned down, this time telling of a reformed Rebel Army. The most we get is an opening cutscene and a twist during the final level. Each level also ends by Eri and Tarma from the last few games taking you to the next level. In their stead, you can play as Nadia and Trevor. While I do miss Eri and Tarma, I can't lie, Nadia and Trevor are really cool.

Now I've been a bit of downer in this review, but it's not all bad. The gameplay is still good, after all, it's still Metal Slug. Plus the final level is actually kinda good (and the music kicks ass).

On the one hand, this is maybe the worst RPG I've ever played, a game ostensibly made for kids that's also incredibly cruel to the player at every turn. Every resource from MP and items to XP and money is too scarce and too tightly controlled so that you can't lessen the difficulty curve by grinding - and even if you do manage to gain an extra level or two, the enemies will just scale up. The repetitive battles quickly become gruelingly long and can easily spiral out of control if you make any mistakes. Missed inputs on the insufferable Elite Beat Agents QTEs are punished way too severely. And attacks randomly miss all the fucking time, particularly early on, because for some incomprehensible reason the "attack" and "defense" stats in what was pitched as the Sonic equivalent of the beginner-friendly Mario RPGs are actually secretly tabletop-style hit and dodge stats. It's completely miserable to play. The hand drawn backgrounds are kinda nice, at least, but they also mean that the world has to be incredibly small with few areas to explore, making the adventure feel uneventful. And, of course, the literally unfinished soundtrack is just the icing on the cake.

On the other hand, my fursona is now immortalized in the IDW comics with the army of duplicate "unique" Chao I save scummed for on stream so that I didn't have to do the QTEs for the special moves anymore. So who's to say if it's good or bad

Watching in abject horror as the Professor - who is a college educated man - climbs several tetrominoes to wedge his greasy little body between an L piece and a descending ceiling of spikes. He's dead! The Professor is dead and I couldn't stop it!!

Those who know me outside of this site understand how much I love Tetris, because I've subjected all of them to an absolute throttling in Tetris Battle Gaiden at least once. We simply can't be friends until I've copied a well full of blown apart junk, faxed it to you, and established Total Tetris Domination. Recounting my ill-deeds may not be enough to convince anyone passing by this review of my qualifications, but those of you who've been placed under the heel of Ninja Kid will hopefully trust me when I say Tetris Plus is kind of a crummy game.

Tetris Plus' main attraction is its puzzle mode, which presents the player with partially filled well that must be cleared so the Professor can escape. The Professor is under constant threat of a collapsing ceiling that progressively restricts the play space, and seeing as he has a tendency to climb blocks in front of him, the player needs to be mindful of how high up they're building their tetromino to ensure he doesn't get crushed while factoring what pieces are needed to open a path to the bottom of the well.

Despite being billed as a puzzle mode, the random nature of tetromino drops makes it more of a scramble to do the best with what you have, which I could deal with if not for the fact that Tetris Plus leans towards the GameBoy end of the spectrum and frequently puts the player into block droughts. You can't hold pieces either, so you might find yourself stuck stacking tetrominoes straight up to burn pieces and hoping to hell the Professor doesn't shimmy up them towards oblivion. Basic tetromino movement and spinning also feels clunky, and feedback when connecting pieces and clearing lines is just a little too limp to be satisfying.

Sure, the basic Tetris mode is perfectly serviceable, but there's so many better Tetris games out there that I see little reason to pick up Tetris Plus unless you want to dive into its more unique features, which I feel are poorly executed. If someone tells you that you should play Tetris Plus, watch out, it's probably the Professor and he wants to die.

A couple months ago, I decided to breathe some new life into my old, beat up Sega Dreamcast, and transferred its internals into a new shell. While I was up in them guts, I figured I'd go the extra mile and put in a PicoPSU, Noctua fan, and (most importantly) a GDEMU clone. I own three Dreamcast games on disc, they're all Sonic and they're all scratched to hell, and considering the longevity of Dreamcast disc drives, it did not pain me to rip that sucker out of there. Besides, an SD card opens me up to games I'd never dream of affording...

Anyway, I 100%'d Sonic Adventure 2 again. God damnit, why do I keep ending up here?

I explicitly told myself I would not, but looking at my childhood save file, I was maybe eight to ten hours of actual work shy of running through Green Hill, which I've previously unlocked twice on two different versions of the game (the Dreamcast original via emulation, and Battle for the GameCube.) It's not like I had something to prove so much as I hated the idea of leaving something undone, even if it meant feeding a Chao the same skeleton dog over and over again for three hours while alone in a dark room. Oh well, my time could not be less valuable.

I bring all this up because I'm going to say some fairly disparaging things about Sonic Adventure 2 - which for a lot of people sits in this exalted "sacred cow" position - and I just need everyone to accept that I've done my time with this game and feel pretty strongly about it.

Sonic Adventure 2 condenses Sonic Adventure's six distinct gameplay styles into three, and makes each of them more robust, which on paper sounds great. Sounds like something you'd do with a sequel, cut all the filler and build out from what worked... Only, I think adding more to the mech and emerald hunting stages makes them a total drag to play. What was once arcadey and enjoyable is now bloated and boring, sometimes outright frustrating. Sonic and Shadow get the best levels of the bunch, but given how often these brief bursts of fun are interrupted, does it even really matter?

Even setting aside my grievances with the way these modes are designed, I feel like Sonic Adventure 2 is just... sloppy. It has the collision detection of a cheap D-tier licensed platformer, with characters constantly juttering and clipping when making slight contact with uneven surfaces. Even flat surfaces are temperamental given how often Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles will catch on some 1 pixel tall seam. The camera is uncooperative, characters move inconsistently, and every part of the geometry feels like it's held together by Elmer's glue and tongue depressors. So much as brush a corner wrong and the game will shut off whatever complex calculation it needs to run to determine momentum. Having done this three times now, I can confidently say the worst part of the 180 emblem experience is fighting with the parts of the game that are unpredictable, like, you know, landing on a solid stationary platform and just falling through it.

This is all coming from the guy who frequently writes Labyrinth Zone apologia on Backloggd Dot Com, so I can't stress enough that my opinion on this shouldn't be taken as some condemnation of those who enjoy Sonic Adventure 2, or a statement that I'm more right for having a dissenting opinion. There's thousands of you and uh... I don't think there's even a dozen people that like Labyrinth. And hey, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't without its charm. I've previously praised the excellent soundtrack, which I remember owning once on CD (which also got scratched to hell), and though I hated the tonal shift SA2 made at the time, I think it's probably the best part of the game now. The voice clips cutting off, Grandpa Robotnik being put in front of a firing squad... it's not good, but it's good.

Unfortunately, it's not enough to bring me around on the game as a whole package, and I feel like the amount of hours I've logged both qualifies my dislike while calling into question my sanity. Sometimes you go for 180 emblems in Sonic Adventure 2 while playing Mario Party 6 while playing In Sound Mind while playing Shining in the Darkness. Sometimes you're just that kind of depressed, where you're glad you don't live with someone who could walk by your room and see you running through Mad Space and think "oh god he's spiraling." But it doesn't matter now. I'm finished. I never have to do this ever again.

Oh hey, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is on sale on Xbox...!

What edition of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the most "definitive" is relative to how you want to play it. Certainly Sonic 3: Angel Island Revisited is the most robust version with its myriad of gameplay options, 16:9 support, and improved soundtrack, but if you want to play Sonic 3 on a CRT with many of the same bells and whistles, Sonic the Hedgehog 3: Complete remains your best option. And it's a damn good one!

Complete features a frankly dizzying amount of options to tweak the Sonic 3 experience, to the point that I'm not even sure what all of them do. What's casual mode? No idea! I'm a Sonic 3 vet, I've stormed the beaches of Angel Island Zone, and a Toxomister took my shins in Lava Reef, I'm not messing around with no "casual mode." What does it mean to alter music per-character or per-zone? Don't know! What I am sure of is that Complete gives you so much to play with that you'll never get sick of coming back to it, and not only are you able to craft your ideal Sonic 3 & Knuckles, you can also fine tune base Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles to your liking. It's even got the full Get Blue Spheres experience, it's like they custom made this game for sickos like me!

It would be exhausting running through a full list of changes, so I'd encourage anyone interested in learning more to check out Sonic Retro's detailed rundown of Complete's options and modes, but some of the more "back of the box" features include the ability to select between Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles or "recommended" level layouts, fixes to certain sprites (such as replacing Robotnik with Egg Robo for the boss fight in Flying Battery Act 2), and soundtrack options that allow you to toggle between original and Sonic 3 & Knuckles Collection versions of certain zone themes. I've lamented in the past how the Collection versions of Ice Cap, Carnival Night, and Launch Base do not at all sound consistent with the rest of Sonic 3's score, but ValleyBell did such an incredible job with these arrangements that they fit in perfectly. I might still prefer the original Sonic 3 soundtrack (down to leaving the superior Mid-Boss theme enabled at all times), but it's an impressive effort and worth having on for at least a playthrough. If only anyone at Sega knew their way around a god damn Yamaha YM612, but unfortunately all their remaining Genesis era composers have been hit in the head with coconuts.

You can also enable the original Sonic 1 and 2 jingles and main theme, the prototype Knuckles theme (my personal favorite), and alter the Super Sonic theme to be less grating by using a "new" dedicated track or simply increasing the tempo of the current level's music. There's a lot to mess around with. Every Sonic 3: Complete cart is personalized. Or something.

The games themselves play just as good as they ever did, if not better. I swear some of Dr. Robotnik's nefarious traps have been cleaned up, or else I got very lucky during my four runs through Complete. It's also just plain convenient to have everything on one cart, especially considering my personal copy of Sonic & Knuckles no longer operates properly with Sonic 3 inserted into the top slot, and Sonic 3 itself has a battery that will surely give out sooner rather than later. Also, buying a new clamshell case and manual for Sonic 3 is getting unreasonably expensive, which is probably both a consequence of the used game market being a total joke and Sega's being a clown show in of itself. Of course, getting Complete on an a real cart is two layers of morally dubious considering neither Sega (whatever) or Complete's team (oh no!) are likely to see compensation. At the very least, Complete is an easy recommend if you're looking for a version of these games to put on an Everdrive, but if you're playing on PC then AIR is still the way to go.

Sonic 3 Complete effectively replaces the original Sonic 3 & Knuckles as my second favorite game of all time, if only because it's still that game plus a whole bunch of added features and fixes. It is a shame and a little bit funny that even ten years ago Sonic fans were out-performing Sega. Some things never change, I guess.