Somehow FromSoft increased the vibes and aesthetic threefold from the first Evergrace (although they also made it a decent bit different so you might not personally agree with that) and improved almost every aspect of the gameplay and were way more ambitious and innovated a dozen gameplay systems and made this game a double prequel and did all this shit while also having a far more cohesive and comprehendible plot and story than the first game, probably because it was written by Mie Takase, the person who also wrote the Evergrace prequel novel, which this game itself is a prequel to. She's a published author who also worked (or still works?) on the Kirby novels. Yes, that Kirby.

This doesn't count as a review I think but I dunno what to say because I'm dumb and stupid. Basically this game is good, fuck the haters, plus the ost bangs so fucking hard dude how does it bang so hard PLEASE

It's also a dumb game sometimes. Actually a lot of times. Your party having a shared health pool and some attacks doing more than half of your HP upon hitting one character leads to points in the game where you just die instantly, which isn't fun, but I'm a cheater and used a lot of save states, so I don't care. This game would probably be a lot more infuriating if you decided to play by its rules, but I didn't and feel no remorse for not doing so.

Good game/10. The soul levels are off the charts, even compared to the first Evergrace.

also play the game in japanese byeeee

I'm not that interested in Pokemon, I only had Mystery Dungeon when I was younger and Stadium 1. my friend and my partner are both huge Pokemon fans though, and after my friend taught me how to play, battle, and build teams, I thought this was one of the most fun multiplayer games i've played in years.

Assembling teams requires an honor system though, as whoever picks second can just counter pick you entirely, but I suppose that's unavoidable, but damn that creates the most legendary screen-peaking win of all time. I'm not sure if that's an intentional facet of Pokemon battles, because my experience is really nothing.

I will say though, I loved playing this! I loved the Pokemon in this generation and how tactical battles can be, it required more thought than I was expecting, and I had so much fun. After seeing the quiz game played by my more knowledgeable associates, I wanted to see if XD and Colosseum had this badass couch multiplayer and it turns out those games require Game Boy link cables to play multiplayer on a Gamecube game. What the hell is wrong with this franchise?

One of the greatest compliments I can pay Rollerdrome is that it feels like a game from twenty years ago. You know, when they made stuff like SSX Tricky and Quake III and Tony Hawk's 2. Infinitely replayable, unique games with no real skill ceiling. You can get really good at this, and every new hurdle you get over feels great.

It's a rollerskating arena shooter. This could have gone badly wrong, but everything's well considered. Your movement is largely based on momentum, while you aim in all directions around you. If you need to take a sharp turn, you can use the same dodge roll you use to evade rockets and sniper fire. All the enemy types are instantly readable, with their own attack patterns and weaknesses. You're constantly balancing distance, quick kills and major threats, looking after your health and combos. Get good enough and the THPS stuff becomes second-nature. It starts to feel like Geometry Wars. Just one where you can throw grenades at fuchikomas while backflipping.

The aesthetic's pretty cool too. Like a very specific branch of early 80s sci-fi. Not like those ironic American parody throwbacks. It feels part of the scene.

Rollerdrome is very difficult, and it plays entirely by its own rules. Familiarity with Tony Hawk's (or better yet, Aggressive Inline) will definitely help you out, but there's a lot to take on board and practice until it's second-nature. The game's structured so you have to get better than you think you can be before it lets you onto the next set of levels. You can kind of flub your way through a lot of the early stuff, but you feel each new level of competence you gain, and it's exhilarating.

Do not pass this one up.

A legendary kusoge featuring pretty much everything you could possibly hate out of a game from this era. Horrendously unfair hitboxes, one hit deaths, no continues(without a code), trial-and-error stage design, repetitive music, a horrible maze stage that demands a strategy guide that was made to gatekeep the final stage, etc.

You'll also find out instantly upon starting the game that it was made pre-Porygon episode with a horrendous flashing light show that will obliterate any vision you have left and murder every photosensitive child within a five mile radius of your monitor. Hope you didn't mind it, because it also appears every time you kill a boss.

No, I have no idea why I booted this up in Nestopia. Sometimes a guy just needs to laugh.

The Mario Mandate is basically a thing of modern game legend at this point: The story goes that around 2007, Miyamoto was unhappy with the more bizarre routes the Mario franchise had been taking around that time (Rosalina's storybook in Mario Galaxy, the edgier animations of Mario Strikers, everything about Super Paper Mario) and implimented a course correction towards genericizing the series. While I'm not here to speculate on whether or not this really happened (It probably did), it certainly lines up with the decline of Nintendo doing much interesting: The same cookie cutter platformers, bland sports games and uninteresting RPGs were all Mario's had for us since, with little exception. However, these Mandaters, as I will now call them, claim there was a last bastion of creative freedom in this franchise, the last sign of soul in a growing ocean of soulless: Dream Team. Dream Team was the last of the Mario RPGs anyone seemed to have much praise for, seemingly continuing the trend of the Mario and Luigi games being quirky adventures among a weird and unique cast of characters, and I am unfortunately here to say that by all accounts, this seems like bull.

It's almost shocking how immediately uninteresting of a world Dream Team makes. Basically every NPC you find in the early stretch of the game is either recycled from one of the previous games, a toad, or a bird. The enemies are mostly composed of geometric shapes with eyes. Outside of the Pi'illo people (Who are fine, I guess), there's absolutely nothing interesting. It's barely one step removed from what would become of the later RPGs, almost exclusively using recycled Mario designs with, like, maybe a hat on or something. Game's ugly, too. Very ugly.

The overabundance of tutorials is something basically everyone complains about with this game and it's for good reason. They literally never stop. Every thirty minutes or so you're given a new tutorial on some new mechanic they introduce, some skippable, some not. Why they spread the mechanics out so far is beyond me: It takes around three hours to get the hammer, and over ten before you get access to any of the combination field moves. Why not just dump them all at the beginning like the other games, and then leave a couple to be added throughout? It makes the game's flow way better.

Why is this game so long? It's basically twice as long as the prior games for no discernable reason. Despite playing it for almost as long as, say, Superstar Saga, significantly less happens in it! You go to maybe 5 different areas in the time it takes that game to near completion! They filled the game with endless long, unskippable cutscenes that add almost nothing to anything. The main villain barely has any kind of presence, he shows up once every 5 hours to faff about in a bad Dracula impression and then just leaves.

The gameplay's...fine? I think the battles are pretty fun but there's way too little enemy variety for how big a lot of these areas are. These games can already feel repetitive with how little you have to think outside of doing the same couple button presses over and over, but this game really shows how uninteresting a lot of the core gameplay is. The bosses are usually fun and have higher pressure to them but outside of that it's mostly a slog.

The dreamworld transformation stuff is slow and bad. I don't like it.

Anyway, the giant battles are what made me basically drop the game. Sure, they rarely happen, but they're some of the least fun I've ever had with a game in general. They're like puzzle battles that are both way too easy to solve and go on for way too long, the swiping often feels incredibly unsatisfying with little indication of if you're doing it quite right or not, and they make my arm hurt after swiping for too long. 17 hours I tried giving this game a fair chance but these really made me tap out.

I'll probably finish this game like a year for now after I get curious again but for now this is how I'm feeling. I'd give it like a 1.5/5 if I was rating it but because I got less than halfway through I'm just gonna leave it blank for now. Fuck you Mario, you ruined my childhood forever.

Altered Beast (or Juuouki) is one of those iconic games for the Mega Drive for the better or worst. It was the pack in game for the Genesis here before Sonic made his debut so most owners of the console early on played this game. Nowadays it seems to be disliked a lot but personally of the 4 games in 1988. This is my favorite one.

This is one of those early kind of beat em ups before stuff like Final Fight hit the scene. It's a bit archaic but it's got a nice feel to it when you get things right. Getting the ability to power up feels satisfying and the many animal forms are cool even if their special powers can be quite overpowered.

This is however a very short game and I mean like you can beat it in less than 20 minutes short. The bosses are also really easy outside of the 4th one. So yeah it's not amazing or anything or heck I wouldn't even say it's good but with a friend or even by myself like me because I'm a loser, you can have some fun. It's a shame they never tried making a true sequel to it.

Apart from dodgy boss fights, this absolutely fucks.

I'm streaming my way back through the series and decided to add this in there since I never got around to it, and suddenly everyone was coming out of the woodwork to tell me that it's great and I'll have a good time. They were right, and I cannae believe I'd never heard any chat about it all these years.

I'd just assumed it must have been shite since it never came up when I was discussing the series with anyone. A game I knew nothing about other than it was a rail shooter. But it feels great to play, some solid shooting, and adds loads to the overall lore (aye that's right, I said lore, it's good to like lore again and you can't do a damn thing about it).

I've fallen deep into Dead Space, more than I did all those years ago when it first released. They've got me doing the Leo point at a name in a text document. It feels good.

I liked these games.
1 was pretty good.
2 was a bit better imo.

My biggest gripe would be that despite how many rules the gameplay has and how often they'll just teach you new rules even as far as chapter 4.

Also the dialogue is a little too "hot topic-y" for my taste.

Back in the day I used to play this obscure card game called "Yu-Gi-Oh", there was this weird fish monster card that was called "Space Mambo". It charmed the shit out of me with it's mysteriousness and the fact it's apparently named after a type of dance.

"What is a Mambo?" I said to myself. Turns out it's another name for a Sunfish (or Mola if you will), which is what the main antagonist/final boss of this game resembles, and can be seen there on the cover artwork and in the background of the Space Mambo card, hence the dumb joke. It's probably my favorite monster in the series, and I know I'm definitely not alone on that, since the twitter account that tweets random cards is using it as their pfp atm.

All that said, yes it was the entire reason I wanted to try out Space Manbow. It's the first MSX game I've tried that was completely unrelated to Metal Gear, it kinda sucks I barely have a frame of reference of other MSX games, but I wanna say this one looks pretty damn nice for a computer game from 1989 despite some of the choppiness which is apparently a common thing for the system. The soundtrack absolutely whips though and is worth checking out by itself.

A damn fine game I wanna say, it's rather difficult as usual for a Konami shmup and it's also hard to get a hold of, so I wouldn't recommend it for beginners. I had to empty my savings account and sell my kidney to some crazy guy in Tahiti to get a working MSX2 and copy of Space Manbow, definitely don't recommend original hardware for this if you can avoid it. Use modern magic like my real self did.