My second experience with this Annet + Earnest trilogy.

I love El Viento, because I think it's genuinely an amazing, wonderful action-platformer that is a ton of fun. I love Earnest Evans, because it's hilarious and weird and awkward and clunky at every step of the way. The ragdoll sprites, the "QWOP before QWOP" vibe, and the way the silly gameplay contrasts with the badass music and tone, really makes for an amusingly surreal experience. I would not seriously recommend that anyone try to play through this... but at the very least, it's fun to mess around with. (and also doable to beat if you know what you're doing)

Hopefully someday an English patch can be released for this.

(edit - did a 1CC on 2023-08-24)

Really disappointing conclusion to the El Viento trilogy in a lot of ways. I do find the story interesting, and getting some kind of closure in that regard is nice - plus the soundtrack is pretty neat. The actual game itself clearly is a bad experience though. It straight-up feels like an unfinished beta that was rushed to market due to lack of time or budget. Combat is tedious and unexciting, and it astounds me how bad enemies are at walking back onscreen if they've been knocked offscreen. I sometimes would wait for literally multiple minutes at a time before an enemy finally found its way back onscreen to keep fighting me, lol. Definitely the worst beat-em-up I've played thus far.

Interesting interpretation of the arcade original – it follows a flip-screen structure, which was likely chosen due to scrolling being somewhat difficult to implement well on the hardware. Contra as a flip-screen game, makes for... a rather tedious experience, I would say? You generally need to take your time on each screen in order to wipe out every enemy turret, so that you can clear a safe path through. This is encouraged, due to how turrets and other enemies' fire tracks your movement in a particularly aggressive way.

Along with this approach to level & enemy design, Contra for the MSX2 has a greatly expanded scope over the original, featuring new stages, and more of them. The stage count is somewhat inflated, as some boss encounters are considered a separate “stage” here, but counting them all up, you have a total of 19 stages here. The quality dips a bit, particularly in the second half, which is unfortunate. The increased length of the game also risks wearing on the player overtime – the NES game is great at around 20 minutes or so, but the MSX2 game can take roughly 40 minutes to beat – about twice the time. So, that makes it a bit less enticing to pick up and play.

Overall, it's not bad. Not great. It has some interesting ideas (such as the “rear gun”, which fires both forward and backward, in any direction you're aiming in – that's something the series would never revisit. Spread gun doesn't actually seem to exist here... so the best gun by far is the machine gun), but this game makes for a somewhat middling experience. It's whatever.

An incoherent mess of wasted potential. Clunky controls (and no, that's not solely due to motion control implementation), poor visual design (aesthetically, having black & white art is neat - but it makes it difficult to navigate spaces in-game as a result), and absolutely awful "humor" (I muted the announcers the first chance I could), make an already mediocre action game even worse. It doesn't help that the game's scoring system seems purposefully designed to make you play the game in as un-fun a way as you can possibly manage.

There are several other Wii games way more enjoyable than this. If you want a gory violent action game to enjoy, play No More Heroes instead.

Very interesting take on brutally-difficult action-platforming, in the vein of games like Castlevania or Shinobi. There's a degree of randomness in its design however – primarily with the skull ghost enemies that love to hinder your progress in several different ways. Because their appearances and behavior are both randomized, it means that there's potential for them to either make the moment-to-moment gameplay more exciting, or potential for them to ruin your current attempt at a stage, due to no fault of your own. This is probably the weakest thing about the game, and it's a shame that parts of the game don't quite hold up as being satisfying to get the hang of as a result. It seems a bit antithetical to this type of deliberate action-platformer, but it's an interesting experiment, I suppose.

I do really like the musket – it functions as a ranged weapon which is very powerful, but can only be fired once, before you need to initiate a lengthy reload animation to use it again. You also can attack with a sword at any time, but that's limited to melee range. So, the decision you have to make at any given time, of which attack to use and when, as well as figuring out when you can safely reload, is pretty exciting. You also generally have a good sense of weight to your momentum as you jump and run around, so the platforming is pretty satisfying.

All in all – it's a neat effort, and I generally like it, but there's room for improvement.

Charming action-adventure, somewhat in the vein of Zelda. Very short, but that's fine; it doesn't overstay its welcome. There are some weird aspects to the game's presentation and tone (there's kind of an emphasis on puking in this series, I've noticed... yes, puking), but if you can overlook that, as well as some control quirks (a result of this game trying to fit as much as possible into a 2-button control scheme...), I think Silk Road 2 is fun.

I ended up having to play this with Google Lens on my phone, since there's no suitable English translation anywhere. That's far from ideal, and normally I would not do that for a game, but I had... reasons, to try and finish it ASAP, lol. I would like to revisit this one if it ever gets an English patch, so I can have a better sense of what's going on in the story.

While doing research on this, I looked into the first Silk Road as well, and was pretty surprised by what that turned out to be, in terms of both gameplay and content. In retrospect, Silk Road 2 is essentially a story prequel to the first Silk Road, from what I can tell? This definitely made for an unusual experience, at least.

This is about exactly what I expected it to be, for better or worse. It's definitely competent, and if you've never played a Tony Hawk game, this is a fine entry to play. But I do think it's kind of redundant, and a missed opportunity, considering these games, and the majority of their stages, have been revisited time and time again across a million platforms. Most notably, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2X for the original Xbox is a game that exists, and that already featured all of the stages from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 in it, plus some additional bonus stages. It had every music track from THPS2, and while it lacked the music from THPS, it did have the custom soundtrack feature, as afforded by original Xbox hardware, so you could just put your own music into the game if you so chose. Hard to go wrong there.

So... yeah. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 is not bad, and I guess it's nice to have an okay Tony Hawk release after several reportedly terrible entries from Robomodo, but this feels a bit underwhelming to me, as a series veteran.