I Am... All Of Me.

Shadow the Hedgehog has been my favorite Sonic character ever since Sonic Adventure 2, so naturally I was looking forward to trying out the one game, where he plays the main role - despite the overall divisive reception of Shadow 2005.

That being said, you know you're in for a ride when the very first level already leaves a sour taste in your mouth. Have you ever wondered how Shadow would control like if he was constantly ice-skating? Probably not, but Shadow 2005 takes that question off your mind by providing you with physics that feel floaty and entirely different from the previous 3D games. Even with those complaints in the beginnning, everything was still tolerable enough for me to keep my motivation to a certain point, but while playing through Iron Jungle, it dawned on me that this game was infamous for a reason. The cherry on top was the Egg Breaker boss afterwards though, who should have been named Camera Breaker, cause that's all he does while Shadow is running little laps around the base in the center of the arena ad infinitum. No offense to Lava Shelter though, it was the final level on the route I played and I actually enjoyed it a good amount after the mess that the previous stage was.

Enough talk about the gameplay, as the unique way of storytelling is also a key aspect of Shadow 2005. There are unironically 326 possible routes to play and they even have their own unique names - but it doesn't change the fact that the storytelling is nonsensical in many cases. So basically there's an alignment system in the levels, which you can advance through completing certain objectives towards your alignment. If you want to be evil, do Black Doom's requests. If you want to remain neutral, just run through the level and get the Chaos Emerald. This way of storytelling is actually an interesting concept for a game like Shadow the Hedgehog, as he is this morally ambiguous character, who can be easily interpreted as a player for both sides. Depending on which objectives you complete, the selection of levels across the stage flowchart changes accordingly and I'm sure the idea is that you don't have to play the same levels twice. Quite ironic, considering you have to play through Westopolis at least ten times in order to see the true ending, all while doing the same, repetitive tasks. Considering the amount of "kill [x] amount of enemy" challenges present, it would have been nice if you weren't required to kill every single enemy in the stage. You missed one? Good luck backtracking and finding them, cause the game surely won't tell you where to search. I couldn't really bring myself to do those challenges, so I went for a run that's mostly on the neutral side, but even that required me to play arduous levels like Iron Jungle to the end. Playing it several times would not be something on my priority list, so I only played a single route and called it quits for now.

Sorry for the amount of unorganized rambling in the second half. I still had my fair share of fun with Shadow the Hedgehog, even if some of it comes from a "so bad it's good again" perspective, cause there's something about it that sticks with me here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Either way, if I have to give the game some credit where it's due, it's for the soundtrack - the remix for Eggman's theme and the title theme "I Am... All Of Me" are both bangers.

Seeing Animal Well getting so many perfect scores kind of put me on the offensive with it, and that's not fair. I should be looking at it in a vacuum, removed of comparisons to other Metroidvanias, and the opening gambit of a comedy YouTuber who had the gall to start his own publishing house. It's a game that invites scrutiny, but not on those criteria.

The core of Animal Well is its sense of physicality. There's a very grounded and well-supported sense of logic behind each puzzle and obstacle. There doesn't appear to be any attention given to lore or narrative (and if there is, it's hidden behind additional challenges in the post-game). Your player character is essentially a walking sprite tile, with little other defining features. You get a sense of how high they jump and how fast they move, and that's all you learn about them. As far as I can tell, they don't even have a name. The design's focus is on utility above all else. You gain an inventory of toys, and find out how they can be used in a range of different scenarios. Unlike a lot of games in the genre, your items don't feel like elaborate keys, only introduced to solve specific sets of puzzles, but useful tools that you'll need to experiment with to discover their full value.

The game's ruthlessly abstract, rarely giving any explanation of its ideas. You have to figure it all out through experimentation. It wraps itself up in neon pixels and ambient soundscapes, and you just pick away at it, slowly uncovering more of the map and gaining a deeper understanding of how to traverse it. I spent hours doddering around with puzzles before I realised what I was focusing on was optional post-game content, and discovered what my immediate objective was supposed to be. I have to go really far back to find other games that took such a hands-off approach. Like, 8-bit microcomputer far back. And none of those games could dream of approaching this level of complexity. The closest modern comparison I can think of is VVVVVV, and that's, what, fourteen years old now? I think you only get these games when one guy makes the whole thing himself, and spends an entire console generation tinkering around with ideas, reworking the entire thing each time some new mechanic has an unintended knock-on effect. When someone never has to get a team on-board with their logic, and can just play around with the esoteric ruleset that lives in their own head.

Animals appear to be the game's one constant theme, and I think it's probably just because the developer liked them and they're fun to draw. It doesn't appear to be making any statement about real-world animals, and they all appear in different scales with clashing art styles. Some are cartoony, some are realistic, some have complex logic and a wide range of movement, some are very constrained and function as part of the fundamental level design. They're just a soft face on an otherwise abstract gamepiece. They're not the point. It almost seems coincidental that so many of the things that the game's made up of are animals. Play this game for the experimental approach to Metroidvania design, and the ever-expanding depth. Don't play it because it has Animal in the name.

It's a good game, but it feels a little cold to me. Like they didn't want to give us something to love. I'm not saying it should have Kirby in it (not that I'd complain, but the suggestion would undermine the point I'm making), but a big part of what I love about Metroid is how cool Samus is, and how exciting it is to see her doing cool stuff. Animal Well can feel a little like playing with a desktoy or something. It's so barebones in its expression of character and worldbuilding, and that's not going to be a problem for a lot of people, but it makes me feel a little too detached from it. Again, I can try to appreciate it on its own merits, but it's my main complaint. Maybe it's childish, but I like being the cool hero on the big adventure. Metroid Dread makes this look like Minesweeper.

Ah - This is embarrassing. I guess I hadn't played nearly as much of Half-Life 1 as I thought I had. I didn't know there was so much... Valvey stuff in it. I've always thought of it as a kind of more grown-up Quake II. It's actually much more akin to its sequel or the Portal games than I realised. The vehicle sections, giant production line conveyor belts and cliffside descent. It's full of wee sections with their own ideas. Ambitious and exciting. Well paced and varied. Much longer than I expected too.

I've had access to the PC version for about 20 years, but picking up the relatively dated Gearbox PS2 port on Saturday was what finally got me hooked. I had it in my mind that there was something uniquely interesting about the PS2 version. Given some light research, it seems its primary USP is some local co-op stuff that I can't imagine many would be willing to sit through now, given how much the thing can chug in one-player. The thing that I appreciated the most is that the controls have been somewhat idiotproofed for the console market, simplifying the crouchjump command (something I felt was never really explained to me very well on PC) and including an optional lock-on system. That lured me in, I guess. All of a sudden, this juggernaut of PC gaming started to feel like Ocarina of Time.

I find the kind of time capsule aspect of retro gaming is something that's easier to appreciate on consoles than PC. If I loaded up Half-Life on Steam now, it'd be a rose-tinted vision of 1998, boosted with high resolution options and decades of patches. On PS2, the awkward save system and pre-title screen CGI rendered logo really evoke the era of £25 DVDs in cardboard digipacks and Rex the Runt.

Half-Life 1 is Valvey, but it's the "this was made by 20 guys in a rented office" Valve. It's not terribly slick, and the ideas frequently take precedence over the player experience. Unlike Half-Life 2, moments where you feel pinned down or overpowered frequently seem accidental.

I've long understood that Xen was the result of a team all pointing towards some wild, massive conclusion, and having nothing of substance up their sleeves. Actually playing it, it's miserable. Not a misery that's unique to Half-Life - It's pretty standard 90s FPS drudgery, not unlike many sections of Perfect Dark or Turok - but a massive step down from what had been established. Gonarch is particularly awful, and I'm not confident that the PS2 port is even doing it right. I did an honest playthrough of the fight on Half-Life: Source just to test my suspicions and turned on the cheats to power through on PS2 afterwards.

A lot of Xen is only made palatable on PC due to the game's quicksaves, but you can only make one at a time on PS2. If you're not careful, you can completely fuck a playthrough by using a gun too frequently or assuming there's going to be some health pickups around the next corner. I kind of liked that though. There was a more meaningful weight to decision making, even if I did cop out and Google the Invincibility code for a shit boss.

I'm embarrassed for asking for Half-Life 3 before I'd even finished the original game. It's far more reflective of what I like about the series than I had given it credit for. Playing it in 1998 likely felt just as exciting as Half-Life 2 did for me in 2004. I'm very sorry for chucking it on the "I'm never going to actually play this" pile alongside Unreal.

You never really hear about PS3 homebrew, do you? After hacking my PS3, I found out why. It's a fucking pain in the arse.

If you know where to look, and join a private discord, you can find people modding old PS3 games. I almost found myself motivated to pursue this when I found out that fans have brought back MGS4's online mode, but that didn't feel like something I needed. Apparently, having the whole of Revolver and Magical Mystery Tour as Rock Band DLC was.

I guess it speaks to how earnestly I love The Beatles. They weren't just a bunch of guys who played good songs. When they emerged out of the early sixties, they were like a whole new kind of person. They broke the conventions of what an adult was supposed to be, and with their wit, intelligence and compassion, made all those guys look ridiculous. They made it okay not to live for the expectations of society or your family name, but your passions. Maybe you're not a fan of the band personally, and that's fine, but I think if you have any interest in pop media, fringe political thought or the embrace of foreign cultures, I think you owe some gratitude to The Beatles' influence. I can't imagine there would be a videogame industry without The Fabs. (This is beside the point, but did you know all those Atari 2600 cover artists were Yellow Submarine animators?)

Playing PS3 Rock Band in 2024 at all is a pain in the arse. If you didn't buy all the equipment 15 years ago, and held onto them for the following decade and a half, you have some very expensive eBay purchases ahead of you if you want to get in on this. I've still got a couple of the guitars, but thanks to multiple house moves, and weird, malicious flatmates who may not have appreciated my vocals on Debaser, those USB dongles were long gone. And it's not as if you can just buy any old dongle. With very few exceptions, they will only pair with their specific controller. And I have one of those fancy George Harrison Gretsch Duo Jets that you couldn't even buy in highstreet shops. I'm not willing to readily give up how much I spent on the dongle when it finally showed up for sale. Unless you're emulating (and seriously, if you're new to all this, please consider emulating), there's no new devices that are compatible with the PS3 games. Harmonix remedied this a little bit with the release of Rock Band 4, which supported full song exports for the previous games (which require DLC keys that are no longer purchasable) and are still playable on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles today, but one-off games like The Beatles Rock Band, which didn't allow you to transfer their highly-valued content to other titles, are still trapped on PS3, Wii and 360, with all their awkward "it made sense at the time" quirks.

So, hacking. I'm not confident I can recall the process well enough to provide even the most rudimentary of tutorials, but if you're going to hack your PS3, you'll need to be on a specific outdated firmware release, and it matters what kind of PS3 you have. You can utilise custom firmware on original PS3s and some slim models, but if, like me, you currently own a "superslim", you'll have more limited access to homebrew software. You can still do it though, with the Homebrew Enabler software ("PS3HEN"), but it's just a little more awkward. Each custom song needs to be transferred to the PS3 via FTP software (something that the installation guidelines only give a cursory mention of, and I hadn't used since college), you may need to make a direct Ethernet connection between your computer and PS3, and you'll need to keep every track in a special folder on your PC to use an executable to recompile the full tracklist each time you want to modify it. You also have to transfer over a special bit of software to make the game modifiable in the first place, and in the haze of everything I tried and retried, I really can't remember how I did this. This isn't a casual undertaking.

I'd argue Harmonix are one of the most under-valued development studios out there. Even in their smaller games, like Super Beat Sports, that nobody cares about, they're stuffed to the brim with extra modes and optional content. Rock Band was an insane logistical undertaking. Not only are thousands of songs accurately transcribed for multiple instruments and difficulty settings, but the on-stage bands are authentically animated, too. They made enormous bespoke electric drumkit controllers and sold them to American normies. By the peak of all their energy and ambition, on Rock Band 3, they were even including tracks for two backing vocalists, "Pro Guitar" mode (which would have you plug in either a midi-compatible electric guitar or a special, expensive plastic one with buttons on every string of every fret, to play the real guitar parts) and keytar, and barely anybody was playing the game like that. That doesn't even scratch the surface of how much of an undertaking it was to acquire the licences to an incredible range of pop and rock songs from a huge number of different publishing houses, and re-sell them. Of course, modders don't have to worry about the legal aspect, but it's just as ambitious for them to attempt reverse engineering the game to play home-made content and match the level of quality that Harmonix established.

There are amateurish custom Beatles Rock Band DLC tracks out there, but they're not the ones made by the core TBRB Customs devs. For the most part, you'd really struggle to tell them apart from the official Harmonix ones without prior knowledge. Sure, they have to lean on the handful of environments that were established for the original game, some of the surreal Pepperland visuals wear a little thin when applied to multiple songs, and in a post-Get Back world, Twickenham and Apple Studios seem like crucial Beatle locations, so it's a shame that they haven't been incorporated, but man, they managed to hack the Magical Mystery Tour bus into this. Would you have even the slightest idea how to make your PS3 games do that? They've been pretty clever, utilising the established assets to animate each new song, and the multiple costume changes during Glass Onion's callbacks are a particular treat.

TBRB Customs have set themselves the goal of creating custom DLC for every studio-recorded Beatles album, including the Past Masters singles collections and Giles Martin's remix album, Love. It's a lofty ambition, and the team have approached the to-do list with a completionist mindset. Frustratingly, this means that many of the most wanted tracks have been held off on for now, while we're stuck pissing around for the files for Sie Leibt Dich and Hold Me Tight. So far, there's been a huge number of tracks from With The Beatles and A Hard Day's Night, but no All I've Got To Do or You Can't Do That, and I personally find that extremely distressing. No Baby's In Black, no Hide Your Love Away, no Bad Boy, upsettingly few White Album songs - we're promised them in the future, but apparently, there were no new releases in the whole of 2023, and the team's recent focus has been on making previous tracks available for the Wii version of the game. I really want to believe they'll complete the tracklist, but I worry their energy may run dry when they see how many years they'll need to devote to the process.

There's also the fact that the modders seem to be young American Beatles fans. The kind who cried over 2023's Now & Then and think all of Paul McCartney's solo career is worth paying attention to. They don't have the same interest in the back catalogue as us slightly older fans who still think John was the big Beatle to like, despite the things he's alleged to have done after hearing of Nixon's reelection. They're insular and memey, and if you look into the more amateurish Anthology and Solo Career projects, you'll have to wade through some rake of Spongebob shit to get some comparatively rough content. It's very annoying that they've made a custom track for George's terrible White Album off-cut, Circles, while we're still waiting for Happiness is a Warm Gun, but I shouldn't upset the babies too much while they're working so diligently on my precious Rock Band DLC.

There's always a bit of a fear of custom Rock Band stuff. The most hardcore fans seem to be those who never got over Through the Fire and Flames, and not just guys who really like songs. While the focus in this DLC has been on matching Harmonix's precedent, there's still a wee bit of that Guitar Hero elite in here. We were never supposed to play the tape loop at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, and I think you know this. Please take your job more seriously, unpaid hobbyists.

Many have approached the custom content as a thing strictly for emulators, and sensibly, it's the only way I can recommend a fan to go through this rigmarole. That strips out so much of Rock Band's appeal for me, though. For me, accessibility was such a draw to these games. I've played them at house parties with exchange students who really struggled with conversational English, but were delighted to see those falling note icons and become part of the band. If fellow Big Bad Beatleborgs are over, I can show them my special game that has twice as many songs as anybody else's copy, and we can delight in playing the whole of the Long Tall Sally EP. Nobody should go through the embarrassment of having to navigate a docked Steam Deck in front of another person. Now I've got everything set up, Beatles Rock Band is just as inviting to casuals as it was in 2009. I can grumble about minor details or the trajectory of the project, but really, it's so cool that any of this is possible.

"Character action" has never done it for me. I feel the floaty combos and distant cameras really dampen the impact of combat. I'm so glad that we live in the timeline where instead of representing the future of the Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry became its own franchise. Resident Evil 4 was a game that Capcom attempted to make several times, before begging Mikami to come back to the director's seat, and even he scrapped a couple of false starts before he settled on the game he ought to be making. The change in camera was the big thing that players talked about, but it was the shift in focus and tone that really made Resi 4 so beloved by its biggest fans. Mikami had gained skill, establishing multiple complementary mechanics and tying that to a campaign, but he was also more confident in his own sense of humour and whimsy. Resi 4 was a game with a real sense of personality, but it was compromised by the pressures of the surrounding franchise, the publisher and the fanbase. For his next game, he'd disregard all these aspects and make it entirely for himself.

When I first played God Hand, it took about five seconds before I knew I loved it. It's very much built on the back of Resi 4, but makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It takes the weight and impact of Resident Evil 4's shotgun and puts that behind each punch. Resi 4 utilised the sensibilities of modern games just enough to adopt a mostly useless camera manipulation system to the right analogue stick, but God Hand foregoes those conventions entirely, tethering it to your critical dodge system. God Hand doesn't care about any other game. It's fully confident in what it's doing.

God Hand's vibe is a very divisive thing, and not something you can choose to opt out of, but a truly cultured mind will undoubtedly side with it. Its sense of humour comes from a very specific place. It's a deep affection for Fist of the North Star and low-budget 70s kung fu films, but there's so much fondness for late-80s and early-90s action games, too. It loves the ridiculous, digitised voice clips from Altered Beast and Final Fight. The greatest joy is when you encounter an absurd, one-off, late-game disco miniboss, and he hits you with the same audio clips as the standard grunts from Level 1. This is a game full of explosive barrels and giant fruit. Shinji Mikami started production on Resident Evil 4 trying to fulfil the obligation to make his scariest game ever, and by the end, he got so bored with that direction that he created a giant stone robot Salazar that chased you through brick walls. God Hand was the logical next step for him.

There's a focus to God Hand's ambitions that implies Clover really knew what they had with it. A few ridiculous bosses and minigames notwithstanding, the levels are typically fairly boxy and nondescript. All the attention is on the distribution of enemies and items. It's spectacularly un-fancy. Flat ground and big brick walls that disappear when the camera gets too close to them. It doesn't care. The fighting feels great, and we're having a great time with all these stupid baddies. Fuck everything else.

Your moveset is fully customisable. Between levels, you're given the opportunity to buy new moves, and apply them to your controls, either as specials tethered to a specific button combination, or even as part of the standard combo you get while mashing the square button. It offers players real versatility as they figure out their preferred playstyles, and what works for them, while trying something less intuitive can open you up to new approaches. There are quick kicks and punches that overwhelm opponents, heavy-damage moves that take longer to pull off, guard breaks, and long-range attacks that can help with crowd control. There are certain moves and dodges that are highly exploitable, and risk breaking the game's balance. Clover are aware of this though, and whenever they found a strategy that made the game boring, they made sure to penalise you for using it by boosting the difficulty massively whenever you try it.

That's the big feature. The difficulty. God Hand starts out really hard, and when the game registers that you've dodged too many attacks or landed too many successive hits, it gets harder. This was a secret system in Resi 4, but in God Hand, it's part of your on-screen HUD, always letting you know when you've raised or lowered a difficulty level. Enemies hit harder, health pick-ups drop less frequently, and attacks become harder to land. The game's constantly drawing you to the edge of your abilities, and if you die, you have to try the entire section again from the start. It never feels too dispiriting, though. You retain all cash you've picked up after you died, and you feel encouraged by a drop in difficulty. If you do well enough on your next attempt, it won't take long before the difficulty gets back to where it was. There's also some fun surprises for those who get good enough to maintain a Level 3 or Level Die streak for long enough, with some special enemy spawns and stuff. You feel rewarded for getting good, but never patronised or pandered to. Your reward is a game that felt as thrilling as it did when you first tried it.

It's the little eccentricities in God Hand's design that I really admire. Pick up a barrel and Gene will instantly shift his direction to the nearest enemy, eliminating any extraneous aiming bullshit, and pushing your attention towards the opportunity for some cheap long-distance damage. If an item spawns, it remains there until you pick it up, giving you the opportunity to save it for when you really need it, even if the backtracking route becomes a little ridiculous. Since the camera is so stubbornly committed to viewing Gene's back, they've implemented a radar system to keep track of surrounding enemies, and it makes little sense in the context of the scenario, but the game doesn't care about that stuff. It's another thing that makes the fights against gorillas and rock stars more fun, so run with it. Between each section of the game, you're given the opportunity to save, or warp to a kind of mid-game hub world, with a shop, training area and casino, which you can use to unlock better moves and upgrades when you need them most. You can gain money by taking the honest route and chipping away at its toughest challenges, or take the less honourable route with slot machines and gambling on poison chihuahua races. It's blunt, utilitarian, and it's entirely complementary to the way God Hand feels to play.

It's the consistency in tone and intention that completes the package. God Hand knows what it is, and how it feels, and it never betrays that. It doesn't obsess over lore or characters, but it really has fun in introducing new baddies and scenarios to put you in. And I really like its taste. I like that all the big bosses meet up at a secret hell table to exchange barbs between levels. I like the fight on an enormous Venetian gondola. I like the dumb, weird, repetitive soundtrack. The developers are world-class talents, and they just wanted to make a dumb, stupid, fun game.

I probably ought to give the soundtrack a little more credit. This is from Masafumi Takada, out on loan from Grasshopper Manufacture before he became a real gun for hire, working on Vanquish, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Danganronpa and Smash Bros Ultimate. He's great at elaborate, high-energy compositions, but his work on God Hand is some of his dumbest stuff. It's great. The constant Miami 5-0 surf rock, the warbling Elvis boss fight music, and the Flight of the Bumblebee guitar for the fight against a giant fly. He's having the time of his life on this one, fully liberated from the pressures to convey a consistent tone or atmosphere. It's stunning work, and he makes the correct call every time he has to write a new piece of BGM for God Hand.

Shinij Mikami is a bit of an enigma, and his work on Resident Evil has unfortunately typecast him as a horror director, but he's never expressed a real affinity for the genre. He was put into that position under an obligation to Ghouls 'n Ghosts' Tokuro Fujiwara, and the game he ended up making was full of corny heroes and giant snakes. The subject matter was a shock to audiences in the mid-nineties, but in reality, it wasn't that far removed from his work on SNES Aladdin. By my estimation, God Hand's the closest we've come to seeing the real Mikami through his work. He's made Resident Evil 4, and he wants to leave that behind him, but EA and ZeniMax kept dragging him back to his biggest hit.

God Hand feels like the only point in history God Hand could have happened, and it's pretty wild that it did in the first place. I mean, it makes sense that once you hand Capcom the Resi 4 Gold Master disc, they'll let you do whatever you want, but they were so rattled by the result that they fired all of their key talent and started making calls to Canada to produce Dead Rising 2. Confidence in Japanese development was at an all-time low after 2006, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in some of the most embarrassing entries in many legacy franchises. The PlayStation was born out of a SNES project, and that ethos was what drove the first decade of Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards, a new game proposal would not be greenlit without referencing the design of the latest Grand Theft Auto. The Konami, Namco, Square and Capcom that we have today don't reflect who they were in the nineties and early 2000s. To me, God Hand feels like the final page of that chapter. But, man, what a fucking statement to close out on.

The fifth best Final Fantasy XIV expansion, a modern Final Fantasy IV: Final Fantasy XVI is a game that I understand why people like it, but I cannot really conceive of how somebody would love this game. And don't let me stop you from loving it if you truly do, there's certainly moments of beauty within FFXVI that feel meant for somebody with much different sensibilities than I, it just remains a pretty thoroughly underwhelming affair to me personally -- both in what the game promises and in what it fails to deliver.

Mechanically adequate, systemically superfluous, and structurally mundane, but where Final Fantasy XVI really fucks up is with its thoughtlessly derivative narrative and dull characters. The way CBU3 have plucked concepts, backstories, and characterizations from popular shows like Game of Thrones isn't necessarily the worst thing they could do on the face of it, it's just how little those aspects end up mattering outside of being familiar tropes that the player can quickly identify. The same could be said for the game's attempt at a more serious tone with a focus on geopolitical affairs. The game starts off with two sequences that are almost identical to ASOIAF/GoT's Winterfell introduction, which is then followed by a Red Wedding-esque event to make sure you understand how fucked up this world really is. Except, that's kinda where everything stops being like that, they copied GRRM's homework, now it's time to be Final Fantasy!

Which like, if they wanted to copy Game of Thrones, you'd think they'd be a little more confident about it. Like, the way Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy IV, and Final Fantasy VI cop shit from Star Wars (and I guess a bit of Dune and LotR) feels like expert craftsmanship in comparison, because they also fairly accurately replicate the tone of space operas (just, you know, in the form of pseudo-sci-fi medieval fantasy). They sort of try to keep up with the underlying geopolitics aspect throughout the game, but it mostly falls apart by the end and Valisthea never really ends up feeling like a real place to me. So post-GoT-esque intro, the first third of the game's tone plays out like a more linear, bootleg Witcher 3, in a kind of unflattering way.

The remaining two-thirds of the game do feel pretty distinctly Final Fantasy (with a pretty weak undercurrent of half-baked Matsuno-isms) with structure identical to a Final Fantasy XIV expansion. The latter aspect was comforting at first since I kinda enjoy the simplicity of a fresh FF14 expansion, but it's easily the worst part about the moment-to-moment experience of Final Fantasy XVI, making the game much more prolonged -- and much of it being coated with the tasteless grey sludge of live service content creation habits -- than it really needed to be during its most important narrative escalations. The former aspect is what keeps the experience feeling adequate, but it really just doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from most of the series in terms of character dynamics, overarching themes, and fantasy elements. Really feel like most people who aren't allergic to turn-based combat are better off playing Final Fantasy IX or VI for most of the stuff XVI is trying to pull off. There's even this point where the characters decide to embark on this Final Fantasy V/Final Fantasy VII-esque quest to save the environment, and that also just kind of goes nowhere as the game buckles under concept bloat and is wordlessly replaced with a different thing later on.

The funniest part is the last third of the game is so clearly bogged down in its own bullshit that they had to add this NPC that feels like she was ripped out of Dragon Age Inquisition or something to explain the plot to the player because there isn't actually enough deliverable gameplay moments or constructive skits to bookend all the threads the game has set up by this point. I guess it's more disappointing than funny in the end, there were moments in FFXVI that made me wanna feel that it's all somehow worth it, but so much of it is just unearned or passively malicious in what it's conveying to the player.

The thing that almost makes the whole experience worth it -- a pretty common opinion -- is def the eikon fights, though I can understand if they're too spread apart and too mechanically fluffy for somebody who wants more substantial action gameplay to sink their teeth into. They're carried by their presentation and spectacle, as the gameplay interaction ends up feeling pretty junk food-y, but fuck they rule. Even the one towards the end that everybody I hates, I love that one too! Though maybe it's because I'm permanently a sucker for CBU3's boss encounter design, even if it's gotten a little stale in Final Fantasy XIV itself lately.

The combat design might be another story unfortunately, like, it's not bad, I actually kind like it because I have the issue with my brain where I enjoy performing class rotations in MMOs, but slapping that kinda shit onto DMC5-lite was not the move I think. There's just not enough going on here to be having a cooldown-based system integrated with kinda barebones action gameplay, and I don't think the individual eikon abilities themselves are interesting or cohesive enough to make up for the lack of both strategy and truly engaging action. Glad to see the stagger system here, but I kind of almost would've preferred if CBU3 had copied even more from the FF13/FF7R dev team's combat ideas.

The game is clearly designed around the fact that you can only play as Clive, and it only adds to that dynamism that's sorely lacking from most of the characters; if you're not going to show me enough of who these characters are in the cutscenes themselves, you could at least communicate it through gameplay, like other games in the series do. Clive's solipsistic streak feels pretty fucking forced compared to protags like Zidane or Cloud, Clive is just way too fucking reasonable of a dude most of the time I don't really buy it! And that's fine, I like having nice protagonists sometimes, but they spend the entire game trying to convince he's this brooding lone wolf! It doesn't help that in the game's pursuit of copying and pasting elements from other FFs, it also steals their mistakes: like Clive's main motivating factor being resolved like 5 hours into the game just like Cecil in FF4 and forgetting to make any of the women actually characters, also like Final Fantasy IV.

Like, I wanna say on average Jill is better written than FF4 Rosa, but at least you get to play as Rosa! Sure, both Jill and Rosa are treated as fragile baby birds who are forced to stay at home while the men go fight, but at least Rosa gets to defy that notion when it counts. It's just kinda pathetic what's happened here, like, CBU3 doesn't have an amazing track record with women characters, but at least they do get to do things and have individual motivations for participating in the story in Final Fantasy XIV. Even compared to the FF14 expansion that preceded the start of FF16's development, Heavensward, it feels notably regressive.

It'd be bad enough if it stopped there, but the two other women in the main cast are probably treated even worse. The first one's whole characterization is how she manipulates men with sex to gain power, with the writers using threat of SA as a motivating factor for her transformation into an eikon. Actually fucking vile! They even just straight up copy a panel from Berserk! And the other one's main character trait is she's an evil mom (basically just Cersei Lannister without any of the actual interesting parts). There's one secondary woman character towards the back half of the narrative who's probs the only woman with a personality, which is a shame! Jill especially had a lot of potential as at least Clive's best friend and confidant, and it's just wasted on a character who sits there and placidly stares while bloodlessly agreeing with everything Clive says and does. They can't even make her interesting as an extension of Clive, let alone as a person with actual interiority.

I don't really hate Final Fantasy XVI as much as this review would make you believe: I love adventures and I love action RPGs, and it does a pretty decent job of both. It's "comfy", but it could've been so much more with the kind of talent that Square and CBU3 have on hand, but consistently have failed to utilize to their fullest, outside of maybe Shadowbringers. Like the soundtrack is the best microcosm of all of this; Soken has an insane pedigree, and while his work here is mostly high quality, it feels like his strengths are being misutilized to adhere to a specific vision that maybe should've gotten a few more complete redraftings. Final Fantasy XVI half-heartedly commits to aesthetic ideals and tropes that were already outdated years before it released, in a way that feels almost Final Fantasy, but is ultimately never really elevated into its own cohesive identity.

Anyways, play Asura's Wrath instead. It's got the same misogyny per capita, but it's basically like if you cut out all the rest of the bad parts of Final Fantasy XVI and then also made it way cooler at the same time. 'Star Wars x Fist of the North Star x Buddhism and Hinduism' clears 'Spark Notes of A Song of Ice and Fire books 1 thru 3 x Buzzfeed Article History of Final Fantasy Series' any day.

A game made with much love in RPG-maker, I had a great time with Felvidek. The humor is top notch, and the graphics are absolutely gorgeous, especially during the cutscenes. I loved the environment and the fight style, and really loved having an RPG party with a 15th-century priest helping you fight. There was lots of humor involving the time period, including jokes at the past's expense, that I felt played pretty well. 15th-century Slovakia is interesting because well, there was no Slovakia! The area was probably under Hungarian rule at this point (...maybe German, who knows), with threat from the Ottoman's eventually taking over as well. It's a topic brought up often in the game, and I feel it makes Felvidek even cooler! Not only does it focus on an uncommon setting for a video game, but it focuses on a precise group within the time-period on top of it all.

The music is great, the art is gorgeous, and the gameplay is fun! Check Felvidek out if you can, it's a very strong game released into the 2024 pool that's worth checking out if you're interested in playing some indie goodies from this year.

3.5/5

This is my personal favorite Pokemon game of the ones I've played so far. Is it the best Pokemon game out there? No. Do I have blind raging nostalgia for the original Pokemon games? Yes. I still remember feeling excited to play a remastered version of the first Pokemon game I had ever played back when I was 7 years old. I loved the fact that it wasn't just a graphical upgrade but also received bonus content in the islands as well as an updated Pokedex to catch it up to the franchise to that point. Going through it is like coming back home and I can't stop smiling. Even today I will play this from time to time to try different Nuzlocke challanges.

I still have to play a few generations, which I plan on doing this year, before I can say I've caught them all and beat every game. But I firmly believe for most people your favorite game and favorite Pokemon come from your first experience with the franchise. Im not saying I'm hard headed and wont keep an open mind because I always do especially with this medium. What I am saying is I am fully aware of my biased blinding nostalgia that I will always have for this game.

Breath of the Wild is like ice cream, a sweet treat that a majority of people love, but loses its allure when consumed in excess. Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, is like one of those cookie ice cream sandwiches. Just like plain ice cream, they’re pretty damn good, but they’re easier to get tired of and are arguably more divisive.
Tears of the Kingdom takes Breath of the Wild, slams some layers on either side of it and throws in some new stuff and story changes in the middle. It's great but it can certainly be a bit much. For example, the new layers - the sky islands and the depths - are massive additions to the game, but fall a bit flat when fully scoured. There’s a lot of cool stuff in both spots, but when the player delves deeper, they realize that it's a lot of the same cool stuff, making the whole experience a little less magical. Finding an underground coliseum challenge is cool the first time, but the second time? The third time? It's just not the same, and the first time isn’t as powerful as a result.
There’s certainly an argument to be made that the sky islands and depths should have either been fleshed out or shrunk, but maybe the excess isn’t so bad. After all, a vast majority of players aren’t going to be in the game long enough to see this repetition in the first place. Of course, unique content is always better than repetitive material, but in a game like Tears where the player is constantly getting new materials and tools, each new instance of a previously encountered situation or problem is a chance to experiment with new solutions, something that can’t be said for other games with repetitive content. Ideally, the new areas would just have new, unique puzzles, but a game like Tears is a case where it works, or at least can work depending on how the player approaches it.
Speaking of the tools Tears provides, gone are the Sheikah tools from Breath of the Wild, in are the new Zonai tools Link gained from his cool new arm. Rewind allows Link to move an object back in time, primarily utilized to solve puzzles and to gain elevation using fallen rocks, but also has uses in combat. Ascend is pretty simple, it allows Link to swim up through ceilings and pop out on the other side, very useful when exiting the caves, another new addition to Tears. Fuse lets Link attach items to his weapons, shields, and arrows, a cool way to strengthen Link early on, but almost a necessity to ensure fights with stronger enemies don’t take forever. Ultrahand is the big one, it lets Link build machines using his new arm to move things like magnesis did to metal items in Botw. It also allows Link to glue items together. It's a little clunky and the creations push the switch to its limits, but it's the selling point to the game for a reason, and gives the player more options than anything in Breath of the wild. Autobuild is the last new tool, and allows for the recreation of previous machines even without all the materials (at the cost of other materials of course). The camera also makes a welcome return, and works just as it did in Botw. Tears also incorporates most of the Sheikah abilities from Botw in some way. Bomb flowers work kinda like the Sheikah bombs, ultrahand does everything magnesis does and then some, ice flowers and ice weapons can create ice slabs on water, and rewind can freeze items temporarily if turned on and off right away (that one is a bit of a stretch).
The story is in the same format as Breath of the Wild: Link needs to explore the world and collect some memories to put together the whole picture. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite as well in TotK. Because of how the memories are structured, seeing them out of order doesn’t work nearly as well as it did for the more disconnected ones in Botw. A shame, because the method of collecting dragon tears is far more interesting than simply looking at pictures and locating where they were taken. The order in which things are collected is actually a problem in other aspects of the game; the paraglider is missable now, as it is given after an interaction in lookout landing rather than when leaving the initial area. It's a baffling decision considering how important the paraglider is to exploration. Autobuild is also tied to a completely missable sidequest in the depths, another odd decision when building things is such a huge part of the game.
Tears unfortunately doesn’t fix some of Breath’s biggest issues, such as menuing which is even worse (especially the arrow fusing menu) and weapon durability is even more divisive considering how having good fusible items is almost as important as having weapons to fuse with in the first place.
However, this ice cream sandwich tastes kinda good actually.
For all the issues this game has, actually playing it makes them melt away, especially early on. Tears is not a game meant to be 100%, it's meant to be played as long as the player finds themself engaged. The sheer inventiveness on display here is staggering, Tears allows the player to do and try things that no other games do, and that's an accomplishment. Problems be damned, there’s plenty of fun to be had and memories to be made in Tears, and it deserves the recognition its garnered.

Forgive me for letting you down.

Phantom Liberty just can’t keep the 2077 heat up, which is all the more surprising when you consider that it’s an expansion to an already (allegedly) finished game, and not at all held back by being a wholly original work. Phantom Liberty’s linear gameplay is pushed forward by boring writing, and is then packed into a tiny slice of Night City that’s remarkably dense and remarkably shallow. Never has this world felt so artificial, barring back when the base game ran so poorly that Sony pulled it from their storefronts. Speaking of, this is the perfect place for your thirty dollars to go if you’ve missed those days of poor performance; even on a brand-new rig, Dogtown still chugs when trying to draw rays. Maybe this is like Crysis and they designed this tiny piece of Pacifica for a computer that’ll exist in the future.

Anyone who’s played tabletop games for long enough knows the dangers of letting a campaign go on for too long. Unless the DM has made some pretty solid plans — and assuming that the players haven’t gone too far off of the rails — properly handling escalation tends to be difficult. Ramp up the stakes too slowly, and your players will get bored; ramp them up too quickly, and you’ll have nowhere left to go. 2077 ends with an assault on Arasaka Tower, ensuring that V gets to be remembered as one of Night City’s legends. As Silverhand before them, as Blackhand before them, as Spider Murphy before them, as Rogue before them; V leads a charge against one of the deadliest corps in the setting to defeat Adam Smasher, destroy Mikoshi (unless you pick the obvious bad ending), and separate their mind from Johnny’s once and for all. It’s a strong ending, giving you an unequivocal victory in a world where you aren’t meant to get those. Phantom Liberty seems to assume (and reasonably for a $30 expansion) that you’ve seen this ending before. As such, it needs to escalate. It’s placed right in the middle of V’s story, but it needs to wow returning players who have seen everything that the original game built up to, and it does this by turning into a cartoon.

V gets contacted via their Relic by the world’s greatest netrunner, who’s currently working for the New United States of America. She informs you that she’s onboard the Space Force One alongside the president of the country, they’re going to crash, and they need your help. V swoops in, rescues the president of the NUSA, agrees to be a spy for the government, and then goes on little James Bond adventures with Idris Elba for the promise of a cure. The netrunner, Songbird, is also so fucking good at what she does that she’s managed to harness the power of the Blackwall. There’s a part at the end of her path where V jacks into her and gets to use the Blackwall powers for themselves, letting you click your fire button to UNLEASH BLACKWALL and glitch an entire army of secret service supersoldiers to death. Reed’s (Idris Elba’s) path features you directly taking on MAXTAC in order to pull Songbird out of their grasp. All of this happens immediately after V deals with the Voodoo Boys in Act 2. V goes from some snotnose merc who’s still on the come-up to an NUSA super spy, capable of harnessing the Blackwall like a magic spell and slaughtering a full squad of MAXTAC soldiers before they’ve even heard the name “Anders Hellman”. It’s far too much, far too quickly. V is the strongest fucking person who has ever lived and it isn't close. It’s silly.

Not helping matters is how synthetic this setting is, made all the worse by the story structure. Most of what you’ll be doing in Dogtown amounts to little more than going to a place and then going back. You might even get to kill someone if you’re really lucky, but it’s not something you should expect to be doing much of. It’s more like a little treat. A lot of these meetings could have been holocalls. You'll drive to Alex's bar, drive to Mr. Hands's hotel, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to an airdrop, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a Voodoo Boys hideout, drive back to Alex's bar, drive to a radio tower, drive back to Alex's bar. Dogtown itself is mercifully small, so these to-and-fro drives don't take especially long, but they serve only to illustrate how fake this world really is; the same NPCs will be shaken down by the same goons every time you pass by the same street corners, likely in pursuit of one of the same airdrops that's landed in the same spot to be picked up by the same set of guards. This was a problem in the base game, but nowhere near to this extent; Dogtown being so tiny and so dense reveals only that these characters are like actors in a play. They de-materialize the second they're no longer needed. Night City being fucking massive — despite having very little to do within it — at the very least provided some level of obfuscation for how surface level the NPC routines and placements were. Even then, there were some NPCs that would stand around in the same spots and actually have dialog that advanced as you progressed through the story. I remember there being a corrupt cop who always talked to the same two Tyger Claws on a street corner in Kabuki, and he would tell them about different schemes he had cooked up whenever you drove past. Not so in Dogtown. Everyone gets one line, one routine, one action, and they do it over and over again in the hopes that you won't be paying attention long enough to see them repeat themselves.

Regardless, it's the missions themselves that show just how far CDPR's level design chops have slipped. These are some of the most aggressively linear levels I've seen in any modern game, and they're easily on par with the worst Call of Duty campaigns. Most offensive of the lot is You Know My Name, where V is tasked with infiltrating a cocktail party. The game has a very clear idea of how it wants this to go — you enter through the sewers, silently take out the few guards they have posted, snipe everyone blocking Reed's path, schmooze your way through the party, find Songbird, download personality profiles of two hackers hired by Kurt Hansen, and then get out. The problem with this, to go back to the DM analogy, lies in how on-rails this entire mission is. There is so little room for player expression, and taking it on any other way feels like you're going off-script in a way that the game isn't equipped to handle. The building you're breaking into has some of the tightest security in all of Dogtown, patrolled by dozens upon dozens of BARGHEST guards, and V is reminded over and over again how key it is to remain stealthy. If you go guns blazing, and get caught at every single opportunity provided to you, the only thing that actually changes is whether or not Reed gets a black eye when you're escorted out of the building at the end. Something like thirty guards all get mowed down by you and your superspy friend who doesn't understand how cover works when you're guiding him around, and nobody bats an eye. You just walk about, do exactly what the game tells you to, and your actions are ignored if you try to do anything else. Even some of the most basic gigs in the base game offered more player expression than this. Being locked in place on a stationary sniper rifle and telling an NPC where to go for ten minutes is not what I play Cyberpunk 2077 for.

For as high as the stakes are, this is a remarkably boring narrative. Setting aside the bog-standard secret agent man schlock — which was already done and better in the base game — these might be some of the most same-y characters I've seen in a long time. Between Reed, Myers, Songbird, and Alex, every single one of them has the base, singular trait of "competent", and all later develop the secondary trait of "backstabber". Songbird backstabs Myers who backstabs V who backstabs Reed who backstabbed Alex who backstabs V and Songbird who backstabs V. They go through all of this with the excitement and fervor of Sam and Ralph clocking in. They're fucking bored by the entire narrative. Everyone seems like they'd rather just go home and be done with it. Johnny isn't even allowed to be wrong about anything anymore; he's been reduced to a voice in your head who mugs the camera and glibly recaps everything that happened every ten minutes to make sure that you're still paying attention. Base game Johnny had a lot of moments where he was an abject moron too blinded by his ego to see obvious answers, but none of that exists here. It doesn't even make sense in the timeline: he can give you that whole teary speech about how Songbird must have just wanted her freedom more than he did and that's why she got a happy ending instead of him, and then slip right back into his dipshit asshole persona the second you get back to base game. Again, CDPR is writing Johnny under the assumption that you've already seen him go through his character arc, but that doesn't work when you willingly set the events of your follow-up story before the point where his arc actually happens.

All of this just makes me wonder if CDPR ever actually had a clue what they were doing with Cyberpunk, or if it was just luck and a lot of outside consulting that got them where they are. V being able to take on MAXTAC in a 2v4 and coming out not just alive but victorious is so fucking stupid that it actually annoys me. I know I'm being a lore freak, but it's ridiculous. V may as well have recruited Bugs Bunny for the mission. There's no sense in pretending as though this is still a fairly normal story operating within the bounds of reality when you're so willing to break the hard rules of your own setting so easily. This goes double for the idea of harnessing the Blackwall and using it like a Bioshock plasmid. I'd call it pure fanfiction, but most fanfiction coming out these days has more restraint. Beating Adam Smasher was similarly pretty out there in the base game, but it at least had some narrative heft; two Night City legends taking down the last of the old guard, and it was one of the last things V ever did. You can canonically wipe a MAXTAC squad or shoot the Blackwall out of your fingers in this and the game just keeps on going as if V isn't a fucking god. Again, this is placed chronologically right after V deals with the Voodoo Boys, and there's still a lot of base game left after that. How the fuck are the Tyger Claws meant to be considered a serious threat after this? The Raffens? Kang Tao? Arasaka? You can't set your character to a level of strength and ability this fucking high and then bring the stakes back down afterwards. At least Reed's route has the good grace to offer ending your playthrough; finish the expansion by sending Songbird into space and you're dropped right back into Night City to go and get yourself a different ending.

Phantom Liberty is a massive disappointment. The opening section — while roughly about as linear as the game means to go on — at least manages to promise some interesting developments that ultimately never come. I think I'd like to stop offering so many chances to this studio, now. Thank goodness CDPR is taking a breaking from the Cyberpunk universe, and is instead shifting gears to beat some more life out of The Witcher horse. There is still supposed to be a sequel game coming out at some point in the future; if this is what we can expect moving forward, count me out.

They yassified Mr. Hands.

Featuring Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles!

I love Sonic 3K, and I can see why it's widely regarded as one of the best games in the series, it really feels like the full package of 2D Sonic (...and Knuckles).

While Sonic 2 rewarded speed in the level design, 3K emphasizes exploration again in a similar fashion to Sonic CD; the player needs to track down hidden large rings in a level to gain access to the special stages, where Sonic navigates across a maze-like board to activate blue orbs, while steering clear of red ones. Simple in theory, but certainly tricky at times. I would absolutely recommend going out of your way to do these special stages, because you'll unlock the ability to transform into Super Sonic after getting all seven Chaos Emeralds, and blazing through later levels in the Super Saiyan form is a joy. That's enough talk regarding the special stages though, as the actual main level design is the meat of the game.

With over a dozen different levels with multiple acts, Sonic 3K is the longest entry from the classic 2D games, and it's very nice to see how consistent the quality remains throughout its runtime. I'm not going to bring up every stage here (like in my Sonic 1 review), as I don't have extensive thoughts on all of them. There will also be a bunch of inevitable comparisons to other (Sonic) games, as I bear the curse of only recently becoming a fan in 2024 and those games just happen to be fresh in my memory.

Angel Island Zone is an amazing opening level, as it introduces the player right to the design philosophy of 3K and has many easily accessible special stages and multiple of the newly introduced elemental shields. For those who don't know, the elemental shields replace the shield power-up from the previous games and all are special in their own way. The lightning shield allows Sonic to double jump and attract rings, the bubble shield provides a move similar to Bounce Bracelet in Sonic Adventure 2 and allows him to breathe underwater (so the bubbles aren't required), while the fire shield gives immunity to fire (including lava) and a mid-air dash. In Angel Island Zone no shield is particularly better than another, so it's a good place to try their abilities before using them in later levels which make extensive use of their specific traits. One of those levels is Hydrocity Zone, which follows directly afterwards - here the use of the bubble shield is encouraged, as the bubble placements in the levels are only at certain spots and the ability to freely navigate underwater is very important if you actually want to explore there to find special stages without a rush. Marble Garden is arguably the longest and most confusing stage in the game, but it's still enjoyable in its own way. Carnival Night is plenty of fun to rush through too and has some nice underwater segments, while Ice Cap Zone is one of my favorites in the game with the snowboarding intro and overall satisfying level structure - this is particularly cool, because I was already very fond of Ice Cap in Sonic Adventure 1. Meanwhile, Flying Battery Zone is the result of "what if we made Wing Fortress Zone but actually good", taking the airship aesthetic of that level and making it more fun and sightreadable and Sandopolis is an innovative desert level, where the second half reminded me a lot of Pyramid Cave in Sonic Adventure 2. Afterwards follows Lava Reef Zone, which felt very reminiscent of Celeste's Core to me, but also stood out from the rest with its more vertical level design and great soundtrack, causing it to quickly become a favorite. Everything is rounded off with the Death Egg Zone, which gave me huge SA2 vibes again, as the atmosphere felt quite similar to the ARK levels in that game, same with the gravity switching mechanic. The final boss for 3K was also surprisingly fun compared to the other classic 2D entries, and Doomsday Zone is a great bonus for players who got all the Chaos Emeralds. Man, I love Super Sonic, no matter how basic the idea behind him is.

Sonic 3's soundtrack is an interesting one to discuss, as I completed the game through Sonic Origins, which uses the prototype versions of a few songs, as I believe the licensing for Michael Jackson's songs ran out (don't quote me on this). I don't think those prototype versions are as horrible as some make them out to be, and I actually prefer Carnival Night's prototype rendition to the original. Can't say the same for Ice Cap though, the original song is iconic for a good reason and I love how it ties in with the snowboard section at the beginning. The prototype version just sounds a bit too upbeat for my taste here, considering the original track conveys the gloomy feeling of an icy cave perfectly fine. Putting the differences of MJ and prototype songs aside, some other songs I thoroughly enjoy are Angel Island Zone, Hydrocity Zone (Act 1) and Lava Reef Zone (Act 1).

Even 30 years after its original release, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles managed to provide me with a surprisingly good time and I hope that many more people will continue to play it over the years. I really wish I would have grown up with the Sonic games in my childhood...

Much has been said about the historicity of Tetris and its many iterations, but I find the very original text-based graphics version from 1984 to be the most charming. If I was committed to grinding this as a pseudo-sport, to improve my logic center and simple problem-solving speed, I'd likely opt for one of the later titles, probably Tetris 2000 or something based off of that for what little I know; but I don't really care to, it's just an extremely fundamentally well-made puzzle game with a background that frequently births inspiration. Bored, and a few lines of code later... Tetris!

You can play a recreation of this 1984 original here,, as well as Tetris Holdings' tribute to the original. I prefer the presentation of the first here, but the second is good too.