I would like to say this game holds up brilliantly, because every time I replay it I love it more and more, but I think it's impossible for me to divorce context from this game: I played this shit when it came out. You gotta understand what a shot of adrenaline RE4 was. I re-watched the X-Play episode with it on repeat because the game looked unreal.

Finally getting it? Yeah the game was unbelievable. As soon as you see a head explosion and a parasite crawls out the game firmly etches into your brain. There is a reason there was a generation of confused hairdressers getting copies of this game handed to them by 14 year olds who wanted Leon's haircut. It is a badass fucking game.

So I am not really able to say whether I think the game would be good for someone who is now 14 years old, but I replay it every year because it never loses its sharpness or bite, and I personally love every bit of it, even the island section. Resident Evil 4 is just straight up fucking awesome, no caveat.

cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?

as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.

perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments

Diamond and Pearl have always been shit pokemon games. Terrible battle speed that is outpaced by drifting icebergs, HORRENDOUS regional dex with piss-poor pokemon selection, terrible fucking HMs that are used constantly to navigate the overworld, bland locations, jumping the shark outrageously early with legendaries that bend the fucking space-time continuum and a literal "god" pokemon that is just a goat stuck in a fence.

Does the remake fix any of this? Well, a bit. The speed is much nicer for sure, thank christ but everything else I bitched about prior still exists. Ponytas for days on the overworld because the devs literally fucking forgot to make fire pokemon for this gen. Oh boy there's a Houndour/Houndoom in the underground! But some idiot decided to laugh their ass off and still put fucking five hundred Ponyta in there for me to kill before stumbling upon a Houndoom or Camerupt that I couldn't even catch.

In addition, I know this is mostly a "me" problem. But the fact these assholes decided to keep Eevee to post-game after Platinum fixed it makes me want to slap the fucking tazzmission on every single one of those responsible for that decision. Fuck'em.

The overworld movement is ass, you can either stick to the classic grid-based movement that somehow feels clunkier than the old games or use the 3D movement assuming your stick isn't drifting, but now your bus-sized hitbox will get stuck on every obstacle known to mankind making certain narrow passages an annoyance to traverse.

The Poketch makes zero sense to include, because you get it then fumble around to get rid of it cause it takes up the top-right of the screen and then forget about it. Just shows how little thought was put into these games.

The chibi style graphics are fine....at least in the classic view, but for reasons only known to Buddha himself they decided to have the camera give the player whiplash by suddenly zooming into enemy trainers/NPCs and giving you a front-row seat to how low quality the models are. They should've just stuck to the original view, the camera angles are all terrible and their snappy movement makes them even more annoying. The in-game battles look good though thankfully.

Diamond and Pearl are bad, but a remake could've made it a lot more stomachable and BDSP only makes it slightly better while introducing other problems making it feel like a weird two steps forward with one step backwards. Unfortunately the streak of lack of effort continues in the modern age of mainline Pokemon entries.

Did you know that there are actual Pokemon games on the PC outside of the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online? And yes, this is somehow an official licensed Pokemon game, just not developed by The Pokemon Company/Gamefreak/Ambrella. This is what happens when I get really bored waiting for Digimon Survive to get patches and need a break from exercising my brain in Advance Wars 2, and then get morbidly curious after exploring the List of Pokemon video games on Wikipedia, having never heard of this gem before today.

So, this is a Pokemon racing game developed by Valusoft. It consists of 6 race courses with a selection of 20 something odd Pokemon from Gen 3 and before (I of course picked my favorite Pokemon Rayquayza), and your Pokemon automatically moves forward while you steer directly in front of it with the mouse. That's it. Sometimes they'll change the terrain to make it slightly harder to turn or add in collectibles on the race track to speed you up/slow you down, but otherwise, that is the core of the game. It's not particularly hard to beat most of these opponents, since the AI have trouble moving optimally (that is, moving exactly forward in a straight line) and are particularly bad at rounding corners and tight turns, so you can outright beat them without collectibles or powerups, though if you get too good you may have some difficulties avoiding walls and obstacles since the screen will not autoscroll to account for how close you are to the scroll boundaries.. Speaking of which, there are 5 minigames between the 6 races, and clearing the minigames will give you disposable attacks to slow down opponents or personal speed boosts. The minigames are, as I would describe them, "functional;" there's a crossword testing your Pokemon evolution knowledge, there's a domino puzzle game, a Pokemon name word finder, a very shitty Tetris like with stiff controls that requires you to match up certain combinations to progress, and a hit & blow puzzle with Pokemon such as Ash Ketchum and Brock. This is about as dry as Pokemon spinoff games get, and there is only one track playing on loop while the game, even in 2005, has about the same graphical quality as the early days of Newgrounds.

Today, I learned that the worst Pokemon game is not Pokemon Battle Revolution, or Pokemon Channel, or even Pokemon Dash. It's probably this, and this is honestly what I get for feeling the need to clear every Pokemon game I haven't beat before from the 2000s. And knowing how obstinate I am about these kinds of things, there's still more to cover...

After months of swearing off buying more PS1 games to catch up on shit and to avoid the current state of retro prices, you fuckers persuaded me with your praise and I came into this with little information. This shit better be worth the seventy didgeridoos I threw at an ebay seller.

an hour later

Y'all got lucky.

I really want to like Art of Fighting, I really do. I love the big dumb sprites and the attention to detail for 1992 in making the characters show damage during the fight, and the whole crime drama plot of finding the person who took your sister is cool as shit.

But John Crawley is broke-ass Guile down to both his character design and his obnoxious ability to throw three sonic booms faster than I can throw one of my great value hadokens. The AI being patented early SNK dogshit combined with the terrible feel to the fighting and the stiff control just makes for a crappy experience.

This game makes me hate Mr. Big, and that sucks because I love Mr. Big, at least his theme in this kicks ass.

While I feel that this game is a very mixed bag of quality, it has so much charm, creativity, and variety that the occasionally weaker points don't hinder it too much for me. This remake looks great, and adds so much atmosphere and detail that it feels like a true evolution from the source material. The music is excellent, both in terms of composition and the rearrangement. This remake also adds quite a bit more information to make some confusing points of the original feel much better. The only thing I like less than what I've seen from the original is that each era has the same textboxes, instead of different fonts and cursors for each. Feels a bit lackluster in comparison. Overall though, as a remake, it's very successful. Now, for each chapter, in the order that I played it.

Prehistory: Probably my least favorite. I really like the simplistic story told without words, and crafting was kinda fun. But the pace is all over the place, with long bouts of combat or really long story segments. The difficulty also feels weird, and the gimmick of smelling enemies is just not that fun.

Wild West: Easily one of my favorites. The premise is great, it's really fun in execution, it feels tense, the balance of combat to exploration is great, excellent all around.

Near Future: Fun, but had a few weak spots. It felt overall too easy, and it had a few points where the player would have to run back and forth through the same area over and over. The plot is fun and the ending is really cool.

Distant Future: I like the more story focused direction this one takes. The mystery and horror elements elevate it a lot, but it could have made the monster that chases you more threatening. Gets a bit repetitive since a lot of the chapter is running back and forth, but once danger is added it's much less of an issue.

Edo Japan: Another excellent one. The combat here feels challenging and rewarding, and the game gives the player a lot of leniency for how they want to play it. The atmosphere is great, the tricks and traps of the dungeon are fun, great all around.

Imperial China: This one has a great idea, but I wish it was less repetitive. The goal is to find 3 apprentices and train them, before switching control to the strongest of them. This results in just fighting the same apprentice over and over, and there's no reason to train all 3. Still neat, and the beginning and end are quite cool. The middle's the only bit that drags.

Present: I like this one a lot. The tournament setup keeps things quick and varied, and trying to get your opponent to hit you to steal their moves is really fun. Another one of my favorites.

Middle Ages: It's cool, but goes on a bit long. Most of it feels somewhat standard, but the back half is really great and is super interesting for the overall story.

Final: This chapter rocks. It's all about exploring to recruit all of the previous protagonists, and then preparing yourself by doing mini dungeons that are all pretty varied and cool. Some are kind of annoying, but most are fun and unique. It reminded me a lot of ff6's second half, which grants you a lot of freedom with the ability to confront the final boss at any time. Also the evil version of the final chapter is super cool.

IN CONCLUSION: Yeah this game's sick. I do wish the remake was a bit harder across the board, since I didn't have much difficulty save a few bosses and the last chapter. Maybe some sort of scaling that makes each chapter harder the later you take it on? Anyways, game's cool. Might be more fitting to be a 7, but I dunno.