Gonna have to preface this by saying that if you haven't seen ReBoot or haven't seen the Woolie video on the series a lot of this will just read like ancient runes. I genuinely don't think I can imagine a world where a ReBoot game came out for the PSX, or any platform for that matter, and actually had good controls. Like I'm not even trying to slight the show by saying that or anything, but ReBoot just feels like the kind of show whose licensed game would maneuver like dogshit no matter what platform it came out on or what genre it's going for. This is a third-person shooter, a skate-boarding game, and a platforming game! A mummy cursed Mainframe sometime in the late 90's and it caused everyone at the studio to just make the wildest, weirdest decisions possible. This genre choice feels perfect. This is Peak Late ReBoot.

I'm actually unsure if the controls are like, slippery and cumbersome by design here. All the buttons are in reasonable places and do what you'd expect, but the way Bob moves around the environment is just insanely fickle. Every time you tap forward he skids a little bit and then slowly comes to a stop, and in order to jump you need to hold the button down for a little bit to make Bob enter his "crouch mode", which he can still shoot and move with complete freedom in. "Crouch mode" actually lets you bypass certain obstacles that I'm unsure if you're supposed to be able to avoid by just making yourself shorter so you can duck under them. Releasing the button will make Bob jump, but with a pretty noticeable delay. Closing "tears" is like, one of the three things you do in this game, and each one is on a time limit that'll return a game over if you can't mend it in time. When closing a tear Bob gets jerked around and pulled towards/away from the tear, and if he touches it he'll get blown back and take damage, and this is kind of why I think the controls being this loose and slippery may have actually been at least a little intentional- the primary challenge when doing the main objective of each mission comes from wrangling Bob around so he doesn't die or get blown off a cliff trying to close the tear. In a way it actually makes closing the tears a little engaging, but actually getting to them is an absolute nightmare because of how much platforming is always involved and how high the penalty is for falling away from wherever the tear was and having to maneuver your way back up. I will give the game this, however: the shooting actually feels fine. Your cursor highlights an enemy and you hold down the button until they're dead.

I think there's actually something to be said for the visuals of ReBoot PSX. Like yes it's dark and miserable and Bob looks like his face has been squished flat enough so that you could comfortably eat off of it but I do think it does kind of capture the vibe of some of the really early ReBoot episodes that like, took place primarily underground or indoors.

Also this is small but it's absolutely hilarious to me that the game expects you to fall out of bounds so often that every time this happens the screen goes black, Bob screams "GLITCH, GRAPPLE!" and you hear the sound of a grappling hook before being punted back wherever you were previously standing. This happened to me 3 times in like an hour of play and I wasn't trying to make it happen. Some walls and a few floors just don't have collision.

So the game plays horribly, but I can't give it less than two stars because it's horrible in a lot of weird, interesting ways that might be of interest if you're fascinated with the show like I am. I feel like a lot of its strangest elements really only become more surreal when you consider that it came out a couple of months after Season 3 ended- I'm not saying that it had to have taken place after that, but given a lot of the events that take place during ReBoot's big 'serious', continually narrative season, it feels like such a strange decision to set this before anything else in the series.

So like, what do I mean by that? To start with it's extremely weird that Bob, who had never really killed anyone in the first two seasons because of censorship given that this was, like, a show for 9 year olds- and who is later confirmed to just straight-up have a no-kill rule once the writers get enough freedom to include frequent on-screen death, elevating it to a show for 11 year olds- is flying around on his hoverboard gunning down citizens who have been turned viral with his trusty sub-machine gun. Every time he wipes a soul off this world by pumping them with 15 slugs a voice cheerfully announces "Enemy Destroyed!", their little cartoon bodies falling to the ground and staying inert until they're removed to make space for more assets to be loaded. I don't even think this is like "character assassination" or whatever it's just extremely funny. Like can you imagine if you're playing a game based on The Last Airbender and they just give Aang the ability to kill people with firebending. Plus like I said, this came out after Season 3!! Why not just make Matrix the player character his whole thing is being a blood psychopath who shoots people and if they had just done this I might have gotten the chance to see him blow Ray Tracer's brains onto the pavement for the crime of standing within the same census zone as his computer wife. On the plus side this does mean we got a line read from Michael David Donovan in his incredibly racist Phong voice where he screams "BOB! You must __not__ shoot the civilians!"

In addition to that, I think that the events of season 3, namely that there are major character deaths that people react to with dramatic displays of grief, makes the plot of this game just incredibly funny. Bob goes into the sewers to stop Megabyte's plans and when he comes out Phong rolls up and is like "you saved the city! But little Enzo was killed in the ensuing blast :(" and Dot just frowns in the most everyday, unaffected way possible. Like she is exactly as upset about her little brother dying violently as I would be if forgot my wallet at home and had to drive back to get it. Phong then suggests sending Bob back in time to save Enzo and Dot is like "no wait Bob don't do it! What if you die in the process? Saving Enzo isn't worth it! :(" which is maybe the most hilarious sentiment you could possibly have Dot express after "I couldn't cope if my little brother died" is like, kind of her whole thing in season 3. Just, very surreal!

I absolutely choose to believe that everything that happens in this game is ReBoot cannon. I want to believe that Phong can just send people back in time but like, forgot to all the times someone either dies or is incapacitated later on in the show. You'd think his power to do this would come up again! And like, once again, this was written and developed, I would assume, during the season where Phong having time travel powers would actually have been game-changing!

This basically amounts to me just pointing and going "this game for Canadian 10 year olds uhhhhh doesn't really mesh with the thematic elements of this show for 10 Canadian 10 year olds B)" but I don't care I played this game as like, a bit to see what it was like and when it crashed after the fourth level it just left me with Many Thoughts. I can now say that I've written more about ReBoot for the PSX than I have for like, Pathologic. Sorry Ice-pick Lodge this is apparently the game that I find more interesting to discuss!

my hobbies include:
-Being cruel and sadistic to everyone around me
-Leaning over and admiring my very sharp, deadly "Evilest Woman in Finance" award
-Going to my soundproofed room alone and ruminating on the incompetence of my employees
-Sipping the mysterious drinks that appear in my office
-Overlooking the patrons of my bank through the dangerously thin glass of my office window and monologuing about destroying the middle class for fun
-Keeping sensitive files out of the hands of Ruby Red, investigative reporter.

I understand if you don't appreciate what I enjoy doing with my time, but my self-care is my self-care.

It's not finished, and I'm not even finished with it, but I genuinely don't think any other game has gotten me this excited at the sheer scale of my options when creating a character. On various runs I've played a teleporting gunslinger, an inventor who could channel electricity into his weapons, and a swordswoman who could phase in and out of reality at the cost of being hunted by a parallel version of herself. The frustration of each death (on classic mode, at least) is tempered by the fact that now you have another opportunity to explore whatever mutations, implants, skills and systems you haven't touched or paired together yet. It is a game that challenges you to take the character-building options it's given you and create new, stupid sci-fi OCs, all of whom get to exist in a wonderfully creative and colorful take on a post-apocalypse. It's obtuse and there are some very real balance issues, but I'm incredibly excited to venture deeper into its world and see how it all comes together.

Addendum: After playing this for 130 hours and having died over, and over, and over again, having seen much of the game even if some stones still are unturned, I think I really just have to give it to Freehold Games for deciding to create a longform open-world RPG that's engrossing and interesting instead of one that's like, reasonable. This is a game where your level 30 character will die in the last dungeon because a psychic cloned himself and each of his clones used Sunder Mind on you at the same time, and you know what? Cool. Awesome. I unironically love this shit give me more please

IO Interactive do not know how to structure or pace a story across 3 games and I did not care about WoA's overarching narrative up until this point, but somehow the final missions of the trilogy actually managed to get me properly emotional over 47 and Diana's dynamic, and, by extension, the series's events as a whole. It's crazy how having these two extremely likable characters be the only real anchors throughout an otherwise pretty tame conspiracy thriller plot allows 3 to pull this trick and retroactively make me care about the story of Hitman (2016). The interactions between Diana and 47 were always my favorite bits of characterization in the previous games, and even in Blood Money I found their whole thing charming, but there's something about how tangible it feels here that got me. I think going through K-8 with a paraprofessional who was payed by the school district to make sure I didn't bite people just makes me predisposed to having their deal resonate with me- her helping a man who's Literally Neurodivergent distinguish between right and wrong and him being thankful enough for it to put his life at risk... such a fun concept and the execution of it in the last real mission put a smile on my face.
It's WoA so obviously the level design is fucking phenomenal and the core gameplay's still extremely engaging if you're into this kind of routing-based stealth. Camera's a weird addition and feels kind of clunky to use, and I wish the ICA facility in China had been... better? I liked the level itself but after all the goofy sci-fi shit I was dying for them to just let me infiltrate an underground supervillain facility; was very sad to find out it was one of the more underwhelming areas in the game. Anyway though- I love WoA! All games with this kind of budget should have the decency to be good

I genuinely thinks it says something about the degree of confidence you have in the texture and atmosphere of your own stages when one of the music options is "stage ambiance". The graveyard, the burning house, the war-torn bay... there's just something so dramatic but understated about all of these locales and I love it. Also any fighting game with a dedicated counter button is good in my book. Low-level play in this game looks like you and your friend countering at the same time and then continuing to do that four or five times before one of you gives up on the bit and attacks

I think if I played this when I was a kid I would have joined the military

edit: okay so I've replayed this a few times and even though I will admit that some of these missions are kind of rough around the edges (Battery is bad and there's specifically 1 room in bathhouse that can go to hell) I'm kind of blown away by how genuinely phenomenal this feels to play. Fisher controls like butter, and using the scroll wheel to control your walk speed works beautifully. You have such a tight control over your speed and movement, and every other interaction (taking out your gun, switching attachments, tapping phones, picking locks) feels as if it happens fast enough that the player can maintain a high tempo through each level, but takes just long enough that when the enemy is searching for you things become incredibly tense. This is complemented by the fucking phenomenal score. This is what makes the game to me- I'm pretty sure Penthouse is my favorite level entirely because of the song that plays in it. Chaos Theory's soundtrack conveys a ton of tension and momentum, and does an incredible job of encouraging you to do quick thinking to evade guards and de-escalate even as things get louder and more frantic. I get that stealth games as a whole tend to usually have some form of reactive music, but the composition and tone conveyed by Amon Tobin's work here is just so perfectly in tune with how the game looks, feels and plays. Wish there were more good crazy-budget stealth games

I made an account on IGDB and made fake cover art for this game just so I could deliver this message: Crazy Shooters 2, a free browser-based FPS with one or two maps maps almost directly copy-pasted from CS:Source (but with blocks covered in hieroglyphs everywhere added in), that has no proximity audio for gunshot noises or knife attacks (so someone attacking with melee on the other side of the map makes the exact same sound at the exact same volume as if you were to melee attack), and which will routinely bug out and make your character turn into a horrifying spider creature when you die and ragdoll, is upsettingly fun. Me and my cousin stumbled across this while searching a bunch of FreeUnblockedGames.com type sites looking for the lamest shit imaginable to play together and were shocked by how entertaining it is. It's clearly cobbled together from a ton of unrelated assets, it's ugly as sin, the sound design is atrocious, but at it's heart it's still a surprisingly solid and fast-paced arena shooter; it's got these whack-ass moon physics that can make it entirely possible to jump around the environment and gain good footing during gunfights, and pretty much every wall that isn't totally vertical can be jumped into repeatedly to accelerate up it- that's clearly a bug, but it also rules and lets you get to positions you otherwise wouldn't be able to. On servers with more than a few people free-for-all mode quickly turns into an engaging game of tracking other players and making sure you're constantly moving and switching between the 10 weapons it gives you to manage when you have to time your reload animations since the TTK is so low that getting seen while reloading basically means you're fucked. Idk. I realize that I'm heaping quite a bit of praise onto a game that looks like this, but this was a surprisingly good time for me. Like obviously if you want an outstanding multiplayer FPS with whacky mobility play like Titanfall 2 or something but if you wanna play something that's hilariously jank but that somehow manages to entertaining for an hour or two in spite of looking and sounding (and kind of playing) like a multiplayer FPS version of a game from a 1000-in-1 Gaming Pack CD you'd find at Staples, maybe give this one a go. Don't try this if you're currently playing an actual FPS you enjoy but it has charmed me.

I think I can understand why someone would point to this as an example of style over substance- if you have a rudimentary understanding of how markets work a few hours playing SWOTS will make it simple enough to speed through without much challenge save for the odd hyper-specific client demand. That said, this really doesn't bother me or change what I DO like about SWOTS, which is that I think it generally has a lovely aesthetic which it uses smartly.

Trading organs on the stock market is like the most in-your-face device for getting an anti-capitalist message across, but I think what makes SWOTS succeed so much at its concept is how well it puts the player in the seat of a "market speculator". The second you've pressed the button to start the trading day you're accosted by just enough beeps and dings and bright colors to keep you perpetually stimulated without leaving you confused, and the fact that the gameplay is dead simple (you'll spend most of your time buying cheap, shitty organs to flip to clients for a profit) means that every 2-and-a-half minute trading day is a frenzy of trying to meet 6 or 7 client demands in as little time as possible, all while the incredibly catchy soundtrack shifts with the menus to keep the aesthetic from being too monotone. Lights flash, organs pulsate rhythmically, a number representing your worth keeps dipping and going up- it's a very, very pretty slot machine. It succeeds wonderfully at putting you in the mindset of the kind of ridiculous, greed-driven, morally bankrupt gambling that governs an insane amount of global finance. It'll occasionally try to make you think a little about what you're doing- maybe a client's request is clearly written in desperation and you know you'll be screwing them over by selling them something shoddy- but with the exception of the shocking, out-of-nowhere endings there's always a number going up and a dozen fun noises and pictures pulling your attention back away from how fucked up this all is. It's simple, but really effective at making you empathize with the kind of disgusting dopamine junkie that will happily scam someone out of their life for profit. It's a very effective device. You can know almost nothing about markets outside of having watched that Dan Olson crypto video or playing Cruelty Squad and you'll get what it's trying to say

I don't think SWOTS is a game that anyone's going to stick with for too long- its multiple endings weren't that tantalizing to me after a couple playthroughs- and so the lack of difficulty or depth isn't really something that bothers me. It's a thrilling, simple little stocks game that has really fantastic audiovisual design that feels considered. In that regard, it pulls off what it's going for very well.