Soul Hackers 2 is like the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of Megaten. I don't think I've fully processed that it exists, even like a year and a half after finishing it. I think of this game often. It just confuses me - it's like the ultimate monkey's paw. They made a sequel to a 1997 Sega Saturn game that offers basically nothing to someone who loved the original, aside from some terminology carried over.

This game is fine - and I think that's what makes me so bitter towards it. They specifically selected one of the most unique, rough around the edges Megami Tensei games and sanded all of the interesting features down into something more digestable for general audiences. Things like demon loyalty and zoma fusions had so much more potential, but instead of exploring that they were just stripped and replaced with a combat system reminiscent of modern Persona. Dungeon design is repetitive, as is the music. They added in a pointless mascot character, there's nostalgia baiting content locked behind a paywall, and even the game's special Jack Frost variant was only obtainable by pre-ordering.

So many things about this game just reek of marketability and someone in a suit making the decisions, which is pretty funny considering it spends time critiquing capitalism and exploiting nostalgia.

Ringo is a very cool character. There are some standout tracks in the OST too. It's just not enough to justify the rest of the game for me. Some people see that this game is functional and has characters and argue its reception was unfair. I also knew people who saw Crystal Skull as their first Indiana Jones movie who said the same thing.

A day or two ago it was the 11th anniversary of Infinite's release, and boy does this game stink, folks! It's very bad!
"What if there was a christofascist society where the underclasses rose up to overthrow their oppressors but - what a twist - what if in doing so, they revealed that they were just as bad as their oppressors?" Shut the fuck up, Ken Levine!! Parents, show this game to your kids that want to grow up to be game devs! This is what smug, narcissistic lib-brain does to a talented game director!
Even Neil Druckmann managed to improve at least the gameplay from TLOU to TLOU2, but Ken figured out a way to completely ruin the combat that Bioshock 2 nearly perfected! It's almost impressive!

(Only reason this isn't a half star is because the first hour or so is very pretty and that acapella Beach Boys cover was pretty neat. Do yourself a favor and instead of playing this game, go listen to some pretty Brian Wilson tunes, your life will be richer for it!)

Two stars dedicated for Bioshock Infinite? No. it's a single star dedicated for Bioshock Infinite's world and another for the internet's biggest animation industry, SFM. This one star is for you, you horny bastards.

Jokes aside, Bioshock is afraid to say anything new to the issues that it attempts to tackle, failing miserably even.

Shallow and repetitive, Bioshock Infinite decides to call it quits on its identity of being an immersive sim. But damn, Columbia's quite pretty.

I'm glad in 2024 this game gets remembered for how it actually was because back in 2013 this game was getting glazed up and down despite being just really not that good.

All the Bioshock parts of the game felt very phoned in and I think just about everyone was disappointed with the sky rails. And I don't totally blame the devs either considering the dev hell it was in.

Game development's rough.

Sonic 06 is an unfortunate ambitious game that had a good amount of stuff going for it, the story is the biggest with the highest stakes in the franchise and it has the most playable characters. But there is some gigantic problems that happened during development, 1. Yuji Naka left Sega, 2. The team was split in half to work on Secret Rings, and 3. The game had to release in 2006 instead of being delayed in order to fix some of its glitches, problems, or even giving the story another draft. Leaving us with a game that is damn near franchise killing and deserving of its title as one of the worst games of all time.

Every character genuinely plays like shit, yes even Sonic and Blaze. Especially with the amigo characters being unplayable as fuck. This game honestly does feel like an evolved version of the Adventure formula with how the story is told through different perspectives. For P-06, I appreciated that since the characters were the best they ever controlled in 3D in my opinion, and they are well integrated into the stages. But in this game its undermined by so much shit and glitches to the point that its nearly unplayable. Don't even get me started on Shadow and Silver stories which while I preferred over Sonic in P-06, is the exact opposite here oh my god they actually fucking suck to play as. The story sucks and as I said NEEDED another draft, why did they put a romance in this game, it would have been better if it was just a normal friendship, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING. The soundtrack goes hard which is one of the only redeemable things about this game, right next to how funny the game can be due to several glitches and incompetent moments. And as Clement said in his review, the game using the name "Sonic the Hedgehog" is feels disgraceful considering the low quality of this game, this is basically just Sonic Adventure 3 (yeah that's right Sonic fans, we already have Adventure 3) (which is also kind of disgraceful the more I think about it) making it the Shrek the Third of the trilogy. I love how it basically recons itself out of existence at the end but that doesn't excuse the fact that this game is pure dog water. The most surprising thing about this game is that I like it more then Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic 4 Episode I, so that's interesting.

Just because I adore Project 06 doesn't mean I find this game good at all since like I said, even though they do share the same level design, P-06 feels like a different game compared to this. Can't wait for when The End of the World update comes out though, that should be fun.

I give Super Metroid a perfect 10 out of 10!

Super Metroid is just such a great milestone for gaming. It's timeless, and almost UNIVERSALLY agreed to be the best Metroid game. It has inspired so many games like it, booming the metroidvania genre. I love Super Metroid, and it's been 30 years without aging bad, I know it'll go another 30 the same way.

I don't know what new I can input to the conversation about this classic, but I know for a fact that it is a staple in not only the SNES era, but the history of gaming as a whole.