There’s a part of this where you can only see the boss you’re fighting through a rearview mirror and have to damage him by judging which of the three trains you’re running along the top of to decouple behind you, which is immediately followed up by having to raise a series of platforms said boss’ baby is standing on to prevent him from dipping your co-protagonist into rising lava via crane, both while dodging hails of projectiles. These just about make the top fifteen or so wildest scenarios in the game, maybe.

If Successor of the Skies (PAL supremacy) sounds crazy, that’s because it is, though it’s crazy with a purpose. Its mechanics seem straightforward enough initially: either flying or grounded, the player’s tools are exclusively shooting, charging up a more powerful shot, melee attacks or a dodge, and these are never added to from start to finish beyond minor alterations during certain setpieces. Only when you’re thrust into a genuinely overwhelming slarry of obstacles littering the screen from every angle is it that you’re driven to discover these moves’ less obvious nuances. The level I’ve referenced in the first paragraph has a great example of this, with a sequence in which enemies who are resistant to gunfire but get OHKO’d by melee attacks charge at you in such a rhythm that doing the full melee combo’s liable to get you hit (thereby teaching you that doing just its first one or two hits is sometimes preferable), but this kind of thing’s present in other areas too. A favourite of mine is how it handles parrying bosses – instead of telegraphing which attacks can be countered with a lens flare or something, as you might expect from other action games, you’re trusted to put two and two together when a boss enters the foreground and the intrusive thought of “What if I try kicking this gigantic claw swipe out of the way?” takes hold. Be it these, gauging just how much charge a shot needs to stun a given enemy or reflecting explosive projectiles back via melee, every interaction’s connected by the philosophy of nudging the player in the right direction without explicitly telling them.

How consistently intuitive it manages to be’s pretty staggering when you consider not just this hands-off approach, but also the creativity bursting out of it at every turn. As impossible as it is not to involuntarily grin at sights like a gruff military general splitting into three giant dolphins made of ink or a supersized lion wrapping a vulture around itself to become a griffon, it runs deeper than just presentational or conceptual levels. When a nominal rail shooter switches dimensions to chuck you into scenarios like a swordfight against a flying samurai lady or a fistfight in which you’re tethered to a particular spot on the floor, it’s tempting to think of these as borderline genre switches until the initial wow factor wears off and you realise that the moveset you’re utilising hasn’t really changed throughout the whole ride. As aforementioned, it’s never added to, though it is occasionally diminished to spice things up; apart from those examples, the segment following my favourite line in the game is an especially strong instance of design by subtraction, forcing you to approach familiar enemies differently both via said alien donkey/bike’s inability to fly and restricting your ability to fire if you hit the railings at each side of the screen. What gets me isn't just the fact the few tools at your disposal are versatile enough to be twisted into situations like this while never once feeling disparate from standard gameplay, it’s also that this isn’t even the only time that the borders of your screen are weaponised against you.

When the fact that you can legitimately never guess what’s up next on a minute-per-minute basis combines with the sheer amount of nonsense you have to navigate through at any given time, it’d be reasonable to worry about visual clarity becoming an issue, but it remarkably never does. There are enough actors, other interactable assets and particle effects jumping around that I frequently find myself wondering how Treasure got it running so smoothly on the Wii, although the hardware’s probably due thanks in this regard. Character models and environments being only so detailed hits a sweet spot in the same way that the visuals of the previous console generation did, teasing at realism enough to be immediately understandable while still being abstract and stylised enough to stoke the player’s imagination as to what else is out there in this bizarre vision of the future. It’d be myopic to attribute it all to working around technical limitations, though; the relatively muted palettes of levels’ backgrounds are clearly an intentional decision given just how much they help all the vital information pop out, from the seas of mooks you can’t take your eyes off of to the brightly coloured timer/score multiplier lining your peripheral vision. It’s a wonderful translation of art to game, which I think this wallpaper I can’t find the source of exemplifies pretty well (you’re welcome).

Although I like to waffle on about how much I value a game feeling focused, I’m pretty used to reading the parts of games I enjoy the most and which I couldn’t imagine them without written off by others as “bloat” or something similar to a point that my brain sometimes autotranslates it to “the fun parts.” Successor of the Skies is different to many of my favourites in that I genuinely can’t think of anything extraneous in it. So much as the file select music you hear when booting up the game is pitch perfect in terms of how well it sets the tone for what you can expect over the course of the next few hours, with all its boisterousness and excitement and undercurrents of melancholy. Don’t let how over the top it is fool you – not many games understand themselves as well as this one.

2005 saw the release of one of the most beloved games in the NFS franchise, Most wanted. The game mixed street racing with an open world environment, police chases and street racing gangs. Unfortunately, it has been fairly downhill since then. The series has gone a bit off the rails with no real direction. While there has been some decent games, the street racing feeling has really gone missing. Most Wanted is EAs attempt to cash in on people's love for the original game, without really addressing what people loved about the original game and it's not massively successful. It does has some similarities with the original mixed with some parts of hot pursuit. Like most NFS games, the game handles well and the racing is pretty nice. It is the standard arcade style racing you would expect from the series and when you are actually in a normal race, it is pretty fun. The problem is that the game is bogged down by a lot of rubbish that you don't really want in the game. Now, I'm really not a fan of open world racing games. I think most of the time tracks are more suited for close contested racing battles. This one is no different, it looks great but doesn't really work in terms of racing. That's if you actually get into the racing. There is time wasted driving around the city, time spent avoiding the police and time spent on non-racing events. Another huge time waste is the long crash animations, every time you crash you get a shitty 5 second cut scene. It totally ruins the flow of the races. Overall, the game feels vapid. From its' lack of racing to its' horrible music, it's another case of NFS not really working out. The basic mechanics of the game work but all the silly extras just bring it down.

Baja Edge of Control is hard as nails. Now, I am a fan of simulation racing games and I totally understand why some of them can be so difficult. This one was too much for me though. It's an off-road racing game based on the Baja 100 race. You take part in off road events like racing and hill climbing, battling through a bunch of different tournaments and, if you are like me, failing miserably. You need to master the use of the clutch, break, e-break, when to use the accelerator, how much to cut corners and the racing lines. There's a lot going on here and I think there's too much for it to be enjoyable, at least for me. The main issue is, even if you do git gud, the AI is so OP and aggressive. I was constantly getting fucked up whenever I got near the other racers, which wasn't very often as they were normally much faster than me. It isn't by definition a bad game, but this is one for the racing simulation purist masochists only and not worth it if you are not interested in hours of grinding.

Development cycle hell game with horrible reviews on release, Aliens Colonial Marines is a mess. It's a real shame as it could have been really decent, especially seeing as how good Alien Isolation was. Instead of an interesting horror game, we have a fairly generic FPS which isn't quite as bad as most people say. With a fairly standard story of a fire-team being sent into a space ship with unknown problems, ACM takes you along a very short campaign with some standard multiplayer features that we don't need to think about in 2024. Perhaps it was my really low expectation, but I did find myself enjoying my time with the game. I didn't notice many glitches which are frequently complained about and did quite enjoy the atmosphere of the game which looks and feels like the movie. The dark abandoned space ship, the Xenomorphs which constantly hunt you and the motion tracker. Now this doesn't hide the poor enemy AI and bog-standard FPS combat, but it does go some way to make the game more enjoyable. Aliens Colonial Marines is kinda bad, but not as bad as everyone thinks. As a huge FPS and Aliens fan, I enjoyed my time with ACM. If you see it cheap, give it a try.

There is nothing better than the sense of accomplishment you get when completing a FromSoft game. At this point we all know FromSoft games for their unforgiving difficulty and Elden Ring is no exception. However, it never feels cheap or unfair. No death is a failure and is instead a lesson. Despite being stuck at certain points for a significant amount of time, each death motivated me to improve and come back stronger until I finally came out victorious. It's these personal experiences and the stories/memories I now have from overcoming these brutal challenges that makes Elden Ring and other games like it so special. It is a perfect example how video games have the ability to tell a story in a way that a book or film can't. There is nothing like the storytelling in these games and I thank Elden Ring for reminding me why I fell in love with video games in the first place.

One of the first Shrek movie's primary messages is to not judge people by superficial qualities like their appearance. In this sense, Swamp Kart Speedway fails tremendously as an adaptation, because for looking past the ugly exterior of its graphics and sound design, you are rewarded with far, far worse gameplay.

Playing this game feels like spending your retirement funds on a slot machine. Sometimes you'll pick up an item and have it disable your controls and send you careening down a pit. Sometimes you'll hit a wall you weren't actually all that close to and end up stuck in it for a good like 7 seconds until either the game decides to let you out or you decide you've lost enough time to reset the race. And sometimes; nay, ALL the goddamn time; you'll end up colliding with other racers and getting sent back a few feet while their momentum remains undeterred regardless of your velocity or positioning, as if you are nothing but a fly on their windshield.

And maybe there's some truth to that. Maybe we are all flies drawn to a dumpster fire. We see the familiar, inviting faces of Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, the three pigs I definitely didn't forget were in the movie, and we think, hey, maybe this game won't be that bad. Maybe this'll actually be an alright Super Circuit clone with a bit of Shrek flair. Only for we, the metaphorical flies closing in on the fire, to subsequently burn to death.

Shrek is love, Shrek is life; but in Swamp Kart Speedway, I see naught but hatred and death. Begone, false prophet.

ENG: I'm not going to elaborate too much because it's not a game that deserves it. Its standardization of gameplay mechanics more similar to those of a generic Call of Duty were justly vilified at the time as much as its rancid humor. On that I agree. What I disagree on, which was said at the time, is the belief that this was REALLY the saga, a thing of the past that as of today is outdated. But no, Duke Nukem is not at all what is shown in Forever. Playably it was innovative, powerful, ingenious, and Duke Nukem as a character was a genuinely funny stereotype of 80s Hollywood action movies. Forever never seems to understand either the mechanics or the Duke character as such. If you played this horrifying piece of garbage, and were left with only this, I recommend you give the original a look. Because this is not Duke Nukem, never was and never will be.

ESP: No me voy a explayar mucho porque no es un juego que lo merezca. Su estandarización de mecánicas jugables más similares a las de un Call of Duty genérico fueron justamente vilipendiadas en su momento tanto como su humor rancio. En eso estoy de acuerdo. En lo que no estoy de acuerdo, que en su momento se dijo, es la creencia de que esto era REALMENTE la saga, una cosa del pasado que a día de hoy está desfasada. Pero no, Duke Nukem para nada es lo que se muestra en Forever. Jugablemente era innovador, potente, ingenioso, y Duke Nukem como personaje era un estereotipo genuinamente gracioso de las películas de acción hollywoodenses de los 80s. Forever nunca parece entender ni a las mecánicas, ni al personaje de Duke como tal. Si jugaste a este bodrio horripilante, y te quedaste solo con esto, te recomiendo que le des un vistazo al original. Porque esto no es Duke Nukem, nunca lo fue ni lo será.