I predicted that every subsequent handheld adventure featuring the Blue Bomber would be better than the last, and that remains to be true. Mega Man IV Game Boy (Rockman World 4) is a major improvement over the first three games, sticking to what worked before and implementing elements from the NES games that weren't featured in the GB predecessors like the typical boss rush, while adding in new features that became staples in future mainline entries. We have new items such as the Weapon and Super Energy Tanks, the Energy Balancer which makes its debut here, and the most notable feature of all, the shop. Predating Mega Man 7 in about two years, this uses P Chips as currency that can be obtained in levels or by defeating enemies and can be spent on 1-Ups and the items I've alluded to earlier.

For the returning Robot Masters, we have Bright Man, Toad Man, Pharaoh Man, and Ring Man from Mega Man 4, and in the second half, we have Stone Man, Charge Man, Napalm Man, and Crystal Man from Mega Man 5 with the Mega Man Killer this time being Ballade. That's cool and all, and I do like Ballade's design, but I want to give a shout-out to its presentation. It's gorgeous and a huge step up from before, and I can visually see it in its opening cutscene and Wily Battleship. My favorite has got to be the cutscene before we fight Dr. Wily where we see Mega Man running in an isometric view before he stops dead in his tracks and looks up at Wily's giant mech in the background in another angle; very impressive for a 1993 Game Boy game. I do think the levels inside Wily Battleship drag on a bit, and the recoil after Mega Man releases his Charge Shot is a bit strange; nothing game-breaking, just found it to be weird that this is the only game so far where he has a bit of kickback.

Mega Man World 4 is a solid experience that is definitely worth your time if you're a fan of the series. It improves on its predecessors and at the same time provides new features that became mainstays for console entries to come, and that's something I can appreciate. I hope the fifth and final entry in the pentalogy will continue with the pattern by improving over what came before.

Releasing this game in the same week as plumbers filled with wonder and two Spider-Men is just a recipe for disaster. Sonic Superstars is the latest 2D entry from Sonic Team that is entirely original instead of rehashing old zones and or using uninspired titles under the guise of a "new" level (looking at you Sonic Forces and Sonic 4). I love Sonic Mania, but it's clear after the game's release, it was time for something different making Superstars a bit refreshing. Sonic Team wasn't alone in making this thing a reality as this was co-developed by Arzest whose previous works include Fantasian (co-developer) and... Balan Wonderworld (goddammit). However, I was still optimistic about this game after it was shown off at Summer Game Fest because one, it looked promising, and two, since Arzest is a Naoto Ohshima studio, naturally, he got to work on another Sonic game again. He is the true father of Sonic the Hedgehog and after all that shit with Yuji Naka, I'm glad that he was able to work on his child again. For the game itself however, I've never been this conflicted about a Sonic game in my life.

Before I get into gameplay, I want to touch upon the presentation briefly. The game goes in the direction of a 2.5D platformer, and while I prefer the pixel-based look, I don’t mind this style, in fact, I like how this game looks visually. The environments are colorful, and the character designs fit right in with the classic Sonic entries quite well; plus I think the 2.5D style makes the characters look adorable. Anyway, the gameplay. While plans fell through to get Evening Star (Christian Whitehead's team) back to create the game, the physics from Mania were translated over to Superstars, and as expected, they're great. They are completely identical and genuinely the best thing about Superstars, which is good because I can't imagine Sonic Team working on this after they failed physics twice in the Sonic 4 duology. All of the character's moves were kept intact and they're all fun to play, but I want to give the spotlight to Amy. I haven’t played Sonic Origins Plus, but from what I understand, all of her moves were directly taken from the game and improved upon; from my experience, she's one of my favorite characters to play as. She uses her trusty Piko-Piko Hammer to demolish anything in her path, has a large hitbox when jumping in the air, and has a double jump which is already a plus for any character regardless of the game. I'm glad that she's a part of the team now and I hope SEGA continues to make her playable in future entries, and the same can be said with the new character, Trip the Sungazer. She’s unlockable after completing the main story, and I dig her moveset. Like Amy, she has a double jump, but it’s her Ring Rolling ability that makes her distinct from the team. It’s sort of akin to Knuckles’ climbing ability, but fast, that can make going up and down walls such a breeze.

The Chaos Emerald Powers are what Superstars added to the table. Rather than the sole purpose of obtaining them all to unleash the eventual Super Form, each emerald has its own ability that every character can by holding a button and selecting it with the wheel for a limited amount of time. The Blue emerald emits clones to attack all at once, Red transforms the player into a bullet to shoot them in midair, Cyan helps you maneuver through water levels easily, Green grows a large vine assisting you to reach higher levels, Purple reveals hidden platforms and items, Yellow slows down time, and White allows an extra move depending on the character like Sonic’s homing attack and Trip fireball for instance. To be honest, I never utilized the system that much; even when the game prompts you to use powers like Purple’s Vision ability, they were never my first instinct as jumping and running were my main priorities to progress through levels. Out of the seven, I took advantage of two emerald powers, the Avatar and Bullet, but I only used them when the game started dicking with me, but I’ll get to that later. Overall, I found most of the powers to be sort of redundant as it didn’t really change how I experience Superstars, instead I found them to be a waste of time.

Now onto the levels themselves; they’re… okay I guess. Bridge Island, Speed Jungle, and Pinball Carnival are decent, Sky Temple, Sand Sanctuary, Lagoon City, and Cyber Station are okay, Golden Capital and Frozen Base exist, and Press Factory and Egg Fortress are easily the worst. Superstars has the same problem with Sonic Adventure 2 (and probably a few more 3D Sonic games) where the first half is solid, and the second half is kind of ass. The best levels that I’ve listed above are fun and give off the sense of speed that Sonic is known for while the second half consists of annoying gimmicks like the spheres in Press Factory Zone Act 2 that they somehow screwed up from Mania and added an insta-kill timer to annoy you, or slow side-scrolling anti-gravity sections in Egg Fortress Zone in a way that feels reminiscent to Sonic 1, my least favorite in the Genesis era. There are also character-exclusive acts, which are solo adventures for each of the four characters in the main story meaning more levels for a single-player experience, but not so much for cooperative play.

I think this is a good segue to talk about the multiplayer, SEGA’s main marketing push for the game. In past 2D Sonic games, the maximum amount of players you could have was two, serving as either local co-op or duking out in multiplayer modes. Superstars goes in the direction of the modern 2D Mario games by having up to four players at once for cooperative play, which seems cool in concept, but you have to remember that 2D Mario and 2D Sonic are vastly different. Mario games are designed with a pick-up-and-play approach so everyone can experience the fun no matter the skill level. Sonic all is about speed and momentum, so having more than two players running and jumping through each zone seems like a recipe for disaster, and from what I’ve seen online, the multiplayer is not great. One, playing with other people is restricted to local co-op (very Nintendo move), and two, even if you have real people to play with you, it’ll still be a disaster as everyone will have different speeds, meaning players are susceptible to being off-screen most of the time. Heading back to the aforementioned character-exclusive acts, I should mention that I played through the whole game by myself, so going through those levels was no problem at all. The real drawback is when more people are involved and they have to wait patiently for you to clear the level that can only be done with that particular character. It just makes me question why they even exist if only one has access to them. We also have Battle mode, and unlike co-op play, this one has online functionality as you play through a variety of events to see who will come out on top. The problem is, I don’t think anyone would give a damn about this mode as again, SEGA advertised the hell out of cooperative play, and you don’t even get to play any of the Sonic cast as you’re relegated to mecha characters that you can customize by spending medals that you’ve collected in the levels or bonus stages. If you don’t care about multiplayer, then the medals are kind of worthless.

Now let’s talk about the bosses. These are what soured my overall experience playing Sonic Superstars as every boss follows a cycle where you have to wait about 15-30 seconds dodging their attacks until they leave an opening for you to attack, making them balloon in length. They can drag on for like 3-5 minutes, and if you die, you have to restart the fight; it is so freaking annoying. The worst offenders are the final bosses as this feeling of exasperation kicks in. Starting with the Eggman fight in the main story, it’s the least offensive out of the three, but it’s still not great. The wait times are even longer ranging from 30 seconds to over a minute, and you need 12 hits to take him down, and if you die, you have to redo the whole fight, and this was where I started to use the Chaos Emerald powers near the end to assist me because this was ridiculous. After beating the main campaign, you unlock Trip’s Story, which is essentially replaying the same levels as Trip, but it’s a bit harder, and for the bosses, they take even more hits to kill. Exclusive to Trip’s Story is the encounter with Fang the Sniper in his giant mech, and this was where my frustration kicked in even further. Instead of waiting around for long for an opening, how about avoiding all attacks that will instantly kill you because that’s how I would encapsulate this entire fight. With some practice, the first phase isn’t too bad, it’s the second phase where I have issues. This is where Fang goes crazy with the insta-kill attacks and where most of my deaths took place. At that point, it wasn’t really difficult anymore as it was downright cheap, and I spent more than two hours beating this boss. TWO HOURS!! I already wanted to snap this weasel’s neck after the pain he put me through. I feel like they’ve done this because of, you guessed it, multiplayer. I get that a co-op experience would make the boss encounters easier, but they left it all in for the single-player people, and even if I did experience with a few people, I think they need some tweaking.

Spoiler Paragraph (If you even care): After beating both campaigns and collect all the Chaos Emeralds (which are really easy to obtain), you’ll unlock the Last Story where the true final boss appears, and he reveals himself to be… Dark Barney with wings. I could’ve made this a spoiler tag, but this boss came out of left field with no build-up whatsoever that there’s no real significance to leaving a spoiler tag. It’s one of those blink-and-you-miss moments if you didn’t see the purple egg in the hub world, and even if you did, this boss just happens out of nowhere because the game does a terrible job of explaining its purpose as the story is almost non-existent. For the fight itself, it’s not as excruciating as Fang’s was, but it’s still terrible as It’s entirely based on RNG and pure chance. His attacks don’t even harm you when you’re in Super Sonic form, but you’ll just be wasting time as you scour around looking for rings. This is the longest fight in the entire game and dying just once will send you right back to the beginning and wasted ten minutes. This is the most disappointing final boss in any Sonic game, and I was so glad that it’s over.

Now let’s talk about, in my opinion, the single most disappointing element of Sonic Superstars, and it’s the music. This might be the most disjointed soundtrack I’ve heard from Sonic, and there’s a good reason why. When rolling credits three times, you’ll notice that Superstars has a lot of composers. You have some good names like Tee Lopes, Rintaro Soma, and Hidenori Shoji, but then we have the elephant in the room which is Jun Senoue. I said this in my Sonic 4 Episode II review and I’ll say it here again; Jun Senoue is not good at making or even replicating Genesis music, and his works on the soundtrack are extremely noticeable due to the overabundance of those damn snare drums. It makes the soundtrack in some ways feel stuck in the past, and given that there was Sonic 4 placeholder music before the game was released, you can tell something was up. I want SEGA to let Jun focus on what he’s good at making with his electric guitar as I do not want to see him compose another classic Sonic game ever again; just leave it to the others who know what they’re doing. Outside of him, there are also some songs in a zone that don’t have any melodic connection, like Speed Jungle for instance. The first act, composed by Tee Lopes is an absolute jam that captures the overall speed and jungle aesthetic the level is known for. Act 2, composed by Hidenori Shoji is not a bad song at all; it captures the speed, but doesn’t have that jungle feel Act 1 provided. You can literally put this in any new Sonic night level and it’ll sound better there. I can go on, but I think you get the picture here.

Sonic Superstars is the definition of an identity crisis. It fails in what it wants to be, what it wants to do, and how it executes things, leaving a middling mess of a game that isn’t worth the $60 price tag. This is what frustrates me about the new Sonic entries; they have neat ideas, but they don’t go the extra mile to make it work properly like four-player multiplayer. If this has a bit more time in the oven, I’ll be singing a different tune, but I already got the platinum in this game in December, which translates to being a one-and-done for me. While I don’t think it’s a bad Sonic game, this isn’t something I want to return to in the foreseeable future, and it’s a damn shame that it had to be like this.

From middling to a decent package. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Booster Course Pass is Nintendo's five-year late response for DLC for the most successful Mario Kart. It started off underwhelming with the first wave with subpar tracks, or classic tracks that have been butchered like Coconut Mall. But as every wave released, the better the Booster Course Pass got with more fan-favorite tracks and new characters that satisfied fans. Wave 6 is the best in the package as they brought in the most meat compared to every other wave prior, and not only this was a great sendoff to the Booster Course Pass, but to almost ten years of Mario Kart 8. It's crazy to think that one of my favorite Wii U games will be turning ten in 2024, and I'm glad this game got a second chance on a more successful console. It's not amazing, but for $25, I think this is worth it.