This has to be one of the ugliest looking fighters I've ever laid eyes on. Cheap looking pre-rendered sprites with some of the stiffest animation placed in front of what looks to be actual backgrounds from the 90s anime. It looks like complete shit, especially depressing since the SNES games looked fine.

The presentation isn't the only thing that makes me want to hurt myself either, some of the special moves have some of the longest windups and cooldowns I've ever seen. Wanna see Ami take five million instances of the ice age to finally throw a standard projectile? How about making breakfast in the time it takes Hotaru to throw up her Rugal reflector shield? It's embarrassing.

Going to this after playing the SNES games is like going from Third Strike to fucking Criticom.

I coincidentally happened to play this a few days after playing Sin & Punishment for the first time. These are the same fucking game. Yeah okay, one's a rail shooter and the other is a rhythm game, but let's look past the superficiality of "they look and play completely different". Released within a year of each other, amateurish 90s anime dub included, they're heartfelt, passionate spins on their genres in the most ridiculous ways possible. They're each like 1-2 hours long with a nice arcade tightness, and yet that 2 hours is jam-packed with setting after setting and fight after fight. Uncontainable fever dreams. Oh, and you'll be grooving hard to both.

Seriously, the soundtrack here is incredible. It's all just one band? And yet they genre-hop like nobody's business. Does Eurobeat even normally have guitars? The answer to that question of course being: Fuck you, this is a Gitaroo, they're not even remotely the same thing. The band here, COIL, (no, not the one that did "The Ape of Naples") completely understands that, and it's easy to believe that they've become one with the Gitaroo and are the coil pickups facilitating the fucking lightning beams shooting out of the thing. One of the songs here is literally just... Just. The Radiohead song. That song fucking owns.

Gitaroo Man's ONE flaw is that it has too much confidence in the Dualshock 2. That controller fucking sucks and tilting the stick even just a couple millimetres will ruin any inputs here. After like an hour of struggling on the final boss, I booted up PCSX2 (which has recently had some of its input lag fixed? cool) and beat it first try, no issues, on an actually good controller. I read online a bit and saw people having more success plugging in a Dualshock 1 too. Maybe they should've shipped a plastic Gitaroo.

I gave Sin & Punishment a 4.5 too but honestly it's tentative and shorthand for "I think it's fucking amazing but I don't know exactly how it'll hold up for me on replays". Just know that these are the best kind of game. I wish I had a dog that could turn into a boombox.

Edit: Also Master Mode is ridiculous LMAO it's fun though
Edit 2: Upon further reflection yeah this is one of the best games I've ever played. Also I may have unfairly trashed the Dualshock 2 a good amount, it may have just been my setup or me having to get used to using it for this game specifically

So, imagine if Scott Cawthon released the first 2 nights of the first fnaf game (let’s imagine that the concept of a “children’s horror franchise” already existed as it does today), and then promised to release the rest as standalone pieces, but before that: released merch, had insane amount of YouTube videos, started work on a movie and announced a line of whatever the 2014 equivalent of NFTs were. Poppy Playtime is less of a game and more of an experiment to see how much money a guy can make off an incredibly safe (and apparently stolen) “videogame”. This is everything that indie games shouldn’t be.

The more I practice speedrunning this game, the more confidently I can call it my favourite in the original Mega Man series.

The simple and humble nature of this entry makes for a fantastic purity that (while perhaps not always intentionally) feels quite free and allows for tremendous player expression. Due to the lack of E-tanks, not to mention I-frames not serving as a crutch mechanic against spikes, everything must be approached with skill and tactics alone. Take for example the Copy Robot fight. Should players slowly pelt it with bombs for a safe strategy, swap between the buster and Guts Man's weapon to render it helpless, or go all out with the fire to quickly kill it?

What of the pillars in Fire Man's stage? Should they be skipped with the Magnet Beam, frozen with ice, or patiently jumped past? Or the platforms in Guts Man's stage? Should the player learn how to leap across them, or fight Elec Man twice to destroy the guts blocks with his beam? The concept of revisiting stages for items would not be revisited until Mega Man 4, and boy did I have fond memories of experimenting with every weapon so heavily with this game.

In fact, I still have so much fun experimenting with different ways to tackle enemies. Maybe I'll freeze the Big Eyes and rapid blast them with the Buster, or maybe I'll use the magnet beam to lure them into the pits in Elec Man's stage. Every weapon in the game feels overpowered in the right circumstances. While later MM games feature more weapons, the limited amount of robot masters meant the limited amount of weapons here needed to have more than one purpose, thus the shield bundled with Fire Man's shot or the multi-directional nature of the Elec Beam. It's something I greatly prefer to only a couple weapons being worthwhile, such is the case with the metal blade mostly making the other weapons in MM2 redundant.

Of course, I can't forget the atmosphere either. The almost cheerful nature of Bomb Man's theme mixed with an underlying melancholy is permanently engraved in my mind, heavily mirroring my feelings of excitement to explore such a colourful futuristic world despite it being in the back of my mind I was unfortunately forced to face my own robot brothers. The battle against Yellow Devil also sounds like a descent into hell as I do my best over countless attempts to finally learn its pattern.

Sure, the game isn't perfect; I really wish Ice Man's level had water physics from later entries and the RNG platforms didn't suck, but something about reaching my destination always makes me feel complete. Seeing the hero I played as the entire time was a kid with his own family to return to, it truly awoke feelings of motivation in my silly child self.

FIGHT, MEGAMAN!
FOR EVERLASTING PEACE!

honest to god i think i enjoyed this a lot more than i thought i would. in an odd way, it made me feel like a kid again. like if i was playing a video game for the first time. everything was so cryptic and archaic that it felt almost alien. but the world and a decent amount of the level design kept me engaged to explore until the end. the real downsides to kings field are the terrible framerate, how some rooms are just one texture, the combat is obtuse and janky, and some paths to progress are hidden behind hidden walls which makes me wonder how some people can play without a guide. i was able to make it to floor 3 without a guide but towards the end of the third floor i just really needed an annotated map to show me where to find something I may need. overall janky and clunky but also atmospheric and oddly captivating to an extent.

Please, stay away from this awful 'demaster' collection based on unfinished builds of the games.

Considering most of the franchise has a lot of ports with missing assets/problems, here are the best places to play it:

Silent Hill 1 - Duckstation, PS1, PS2, or PS3.
Silent Hill 2 - PS2, PCSX2, or PC with Enhanced Patch.
Silent Hill 3 - PS2, PCSX2, or PC.
Silent Hill 4 - PS2, PCSX2, or PC.

If you are playing the PC Ports of 2, 3, and 4 check PCGamingWiki for patches and fixes because they have some issues. If you are using PCSX2, make sure to download the latest nightly build, you can check youtube and its wiki for config guides on each game.

It's a unique borderline perfect horror franchise, don't let the bad ports ruin your first-time experience.

1,963 DAYS AND COUNTING

COPE AND SEETHE, PIRATES, DENUVO IS FOREVER UNBEATABLE

FINALLY CRACKED

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/s/h5n5ecgk8J