I just wanna shoutout Keizo Ota for a sec because the water in this game remains truly incredible, resoundingly kicking the shit out of any current games that aren't merely leaning on existing Unreal Engine tech. If you've seen any documentaries about the making of the Ultra 64, you probably know how rudimentary the Silicon Graphics sample projects were - imagine being handed an SDK that could barely render a sphere and then getting tasked with modeling the most amorphous natural body on our planet using a computer that's barely more powerful than your average modern calculator. Jesus Christ. I've been a programmer for 15 years I still sometimes break out in cold sweats when my boss asks me to make a floating dialog box with some text on it and this guy was out there in 1995 pulling off some Genesis 1:6-8 shit with the computational equivalent of a Casio watch. Keizo Ota is a man-machine genius-god and it does not surprise me that this is the mastermind who went on to design the masterpiece that is Nintendo Land for the Wii U.

Not just a graphics gimmick, the beauty of the gameplay here is entirely down to the water too - it creates this satisfying inversion of traditional racing game mechanics where your track is constantly moving out from under you, encouraging acceleration to make tighter, riskier turns and deceleration on straights to get control of the chop, a counterintuitive methodology that ultimately brings to life the idea that you're a driving demigod skimming across the firmament of creation to some of the best music Nintendo's ever done. Don't bother with Hard and Expert Mode if you want to preserve your Godhood, though - that shit is just stupid, vulcanized rubberbanding that makes Mario Kart 64 look merciful. Just turn up the wave conditions to "Wild" and revel in our Lord's wrath and fury.

The tracks on this one...

music-wise: never has an OST contributed so strongly to my opinion of a game—this'll be the first one to ever enter my regular listening rotation

racing-wise: exhilarating design—they display a masterful understanding of the intoxicating combo of elevation change with high-speed turns

It's not surprising to me that the Battle Royale concept has had such a big reach with mainstream audiences in all forms of media over the years, as putting a group of diverse characters in a situation where they are forced to kill each other until there is only one left is a sure way to inject thrilling drama and immediate excitement into any setting or cast of characters. So say what you will of Danganronpa, but turning such an exhilirating genre into a "whodunit?" mystery is such a concoction of genius that's it's not hard to see where its success lies.

It's not until you find yourself in the thick of the first Death Trial that the strengths of Danganronpa as a VN become apparent. You would think that the game railroading you into an unavoidable solution would hardly engage the player in the puzzle solving process, but once the accusations and reveals start rolling out interspersed with Danganronpa's stylish presentation and Masafumi Takada's bombastic soundtrack, suddenly the paper cut out characters' bickering and absurd over the top twists becomes more real and intense than what you would get out of a movie or tv show, and feeling like an active participant in the murder mystery is an interactive illusion that Danganronpa has over plain text or video.

But that strength is a double edged sword that Danganronpa reveals far more than it should. The VN limitations work wonders when you are figuring shit out alongside everyone else, but if you are instead guessing way ahead of the characters, it soon becomes a game of waiting for them to circle around the obvious solution and playing minigames where deducing evidence and confronting lies is replaced with figuring out what is the exact combination of phrases the game expects from you. This wouldn't be such a problem had Danganronpa been more willing to allow consequential choice and the threat of failure in its life or death world, instead of forcing the player to act dumb for the sake of it. Something as simple as letting the player pick what Truth Bullets to load would have done wonders.

Still, I don't think anything anytime soon will leave me as flabergasted looking at the screen like the Bad Ending of this game did:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2e/86/c8/2e86c801f658934323ace8427347d1a1.jpg

In the small-but-prolific pantheon of Zelda & Ys influenced action RPGs on Genesis, King Colossus is the one with the hardest contrast of artisan ego and overall payoff.

I saw it announced for the MD Mini 2, with a glowing recommendation from Ken Sugimori of all things, and went 'damn, it's translated, I should play this'. Boot it up and you get this chilling emblem on a black screen, with the designer's names fading in and out while a chilling wind hollers in the background. Makoto Ogino's credited too, the mangaka behind Kujaku-Ou. Sega produced games based on the series twice for him (localized here as Spellcaster and Mysic Defender, respectively). So in my head, I had every reason to be hyped right? Idk, I don't think it payed off, even if it was kinda interesting in abstract and a tolerable button masher.

King Colossus tosses you into the MC's home ala Link to The Past's iconic opening, where you find your older sister and elderly caretaker. The old man sends you on a fetch quest to retrieve a missing sword, which eventually devolves into a fetchquest journey amidst human sacrifices for the appeasement of a cruel god.

Colossus is as pure a dungeon crawler as it gets - there's no overworlds, no puzzles - just dens of enemies to venture through. Combat's somewhat similar to NES zelda where you move and place a hitbox in front of you to deal damage. Your range starts pitiful on-ground, but your early swords and axes let you attack out of a jump, giving you range to move and turn during swings. at first it seems like 'just always jump and swing' is the name of the game, but as you progress, the stronger and further-ranged weapons take away your air attack, so there's still incentive to swap back to a sword for enemies that require you to stay nimble. And... that's the entire combat system of King Colossus. Keeping it simple is perfectly fine in my book, but, the problem is it never gets meaningfully hard. Even without grinding, you kill most enemies in 2-3 hits, and their AI becomes seemingly DUMBER as you progress. I had more trouble with the early game snakes and spiders than I did with any of the late game demons by a longshot. And like, being an easy game is fine, but it's so rudimentary that it comes at the detriment of the ludonarrative weight - none of the world's stakes feel justified because these trials are just jump-slashing at randomly-moving bosses. This game's story posits itself too seriously to have battles this bland.

And hey speaking of story, it's kind of fucked up if you read even 1 layer into it? For being a 'kill god' plot, it has an oddly Judeo-Christian tone to its moral. From start to finish, your character is constantly being funneled around against his will by different 'masters' - first your caretaker sells into slavery as an arena gladiator, then you get thrown in prison, captured and enslaved again by the king's daughter, and eventually dragged into a transdimensional hell. For the record, I thought this direction was fascinating for the first 2/3rds of the runtime - combined with the game's monotonous combat, evoked this ludonarrative vibe of truly being dragged through a cycle of laborious captivity. I LIKED it and respected the vision. But in the game's climaxing moments, your former captors' sins are either unacknowledged by the greater cast or outright forgiven - that is to say, they 'apologize' for mistreating you, and since your MC is silent, there's no way to take it other than 'OK'. The grander theme seems to posit that all of the suffering and domestic abuse the player received from those above him was 'necessary' in order to reach his true strength and build character. I couldn't say one way or another if the fan translation fucked this up, but it's pretty believable - and a completely unacceptable
way to handle the subject matter. If the game's plot were any more involved than a 1992 game could be, who knows how much more lecherous it could've been thematically.

Ultimately though, the failing of King Colossus is that can't live up to the expectations it sets in the player. For something that makes so much effort to tell you 'HEY, we got this MANGAKA to work with us', the fruit of its efforts never come out bc of the limited scope - not just in the aformentioned combat, but even the design and art. It's a very mediocre-looking game that reserves its spectacle entirely for the bosses - which, again, are pushovers and don't really justify themselves. Characters don't have any dialogue portraits or up-close stills for cutscenes, so the best you're seeing are these plain-looking, miniature figurine sprites that romp around the overworld. At that rate why even advertise Ogino's involvement? The only place you're seeing his work shine through is in those manual illustrations. Dungeons often recycle the same boxy tilesets too - another point for thematic repetition, but that shtick only lasts so long man.

With the solid foundation of the gameplay and the lofty ego it carries itself with, King Colossus is passably decent but multiple steps away from the same epic caliber expected from PCE and SNES RPG's of the time. Even disregarding the shit with its messages, it fumbles because the weight of its themes and its over-simplistic gameplay are at a constant tonal clash. This was a missed opportunity to produce something with similar grit and staying power to a final fantasy or chrono trigger, and instead it feels like something for dragon quest fans to chew on between releases. Fine as-is, but it's the one time where the simplicity of a genesis rpg left me wanting something bigger instead of relishing in its braindeadness.

if this game and its predecessor were twins, it would be delivering a monologue to resident evil 2 about how it got all the dominant genes while it was saddled with the recessive genes. resident evil 2 would then punch it off of a giant tank and shoot it to death a machine gun.

where as resident evil 2 had further reignited a franchise already given a shot of adrenaline from Re7, this game feels like a foray into total pointlessness. The only thing that really separates this from any other AAA zombie game is having a tighter focus and saying "Resident Evil 3" on the box.

I don't feel comfortable giving it anything lower than 3 because, shit, it's still pretty good, it has just left such an alarmingly low impact that whenever I see it sitting in my steam library I think, "oh yeah, that came out. crazy."

banger game. a level design and mechanic layering tour de force. i didn't think the score chasing would keep me hooked for 25~30 hours but i couldn't stop. grabbed the ace medal on all 121 levels and swept up all the gifts and side-missions. will be back to shave off the milliseconds and dive into the level rushes for suuuure.

they are going for a vibe and i have to respect it - imagine not knowing what this was and picking it up for dreamcast in the early 2000. class.

look, yeah the writing is pretty weak but it can be easily ignored and honestly the story was a fine break from the action and enough to keep me curious to the end.

soundtrack was super great!! but one worlds song sounded like the main theme from fall guys and i couldn't stop laughing at the image of little jellybean guys fighting demons with magic guns.

if you're a pal, get me on steam and then @ me when you beat my times so i'm encouraged to go back. make me your rival!

Listen: There are a lot of weird Dreamcast games, but this is one of my favorites. Frantic mutiplayer puzzle action from the insane minds at Sonic Team. A simplistic premise: despite all your rage, you are only mice in a maze. Evade cats by placing directional panels and reach the rocket to win.

There's three game modes at play here, each with their own appeal. Puzzle mode gives you 100 puzzles to solve, each with a premade layout and specific panels to use. Leave it to ChuChu Rocket to make the presentation so frantic and mesmerizing, though. There's often a real satisfaction to placing down the panels in all the right spots, and watching your handiwork in motion. Stage Challenge mode pits you in 25 stages of reflexive, real-time challenges. These are interesting, but they begin to show the cracks in ChuChu Rocket's formula. The cursor you move around to place panels is barely fast enough to react to a lot of the shit this mode will throw at you. However, the true strength in ChuChu Rocket is its multiplayer.

In multiplayer, you and three other players set down panels in an attempt to get as many mice as possible in your designated rocket within three minutes, while preventing cats from getting to your rocket. It probably goes without saying, but once four players are all in the mix, the game goes from frantic to downright chaotic. There's so much on-the-fly thinking, opportunities to gain a huge lead, or sabotage your friends, either by abducting their mice or redirecting cats. If someone collects a roulette mouse, it'll cause one of several gamechanging events to shake everything up further. But what if I told you that ChuChu Rocket has one more trick up its sleeve?

A decently robust online mode helps this game soar to even greater heights. You can create lobbies to host games, simply chat with strangers (this was weirdly acceptable in the 2000s, okay), or share puzzles that you created in the game's level creator. Yeah, you read that correctly. Potentially infinite puzzles to play/create, and the ability to potentially share them with anyone else who owns the game. For the record, fan-maintained servers allow these features to persist even to this day, you can set them up on official hardware (or just download Flycast, it's preconfigured for online play).

ChuChu Rocket may be limited in scope and kind of a one-trick pony, but I stand by the fact that it completely nails what it wants to do. I'd be remiss to not mention the soundtrack that accompanies it too, which is this bizzare, almost cosmic series of compositions from Tomoya Ohtani. Twangy guitar sounds, synthesizers, and breakneck percussion. I am dead serious when I say to reach out to me on Twitter/Discord if you wanna play ChuChu Rocket. I will always be down for a few rounds of ChuChu Rocket. The japanese advertisement for ChuChu Rocket lives rent free in my head.