I’ve never really been a fan of the Genesis. I was always a Nintendo kid. I didn’t have a Genesis growing up so I’ve only finished a handful of games and they ranged from meh to bad. Obviously, I know there are good games to be played on the Gensis but I wasn’t sure where to start. So, I did the only logical thing and trusted everyone here. I went to backloggd put Gensis games in the filter and put highest average rating filter on. Thanks to this site, I finally have a Genesis game I can point to and say that is a reason to own a Genesis.

Gunstar Heroes is an excellent game that is very fun from the very beginning until the credit rolls. The run and gun gameplay is fast paced and fun to experiment with (even if I was too stupid to realize until half way though the game that if you had 2 weapons you can actually use a 3rd weapon combining the 2. I know I'm dumb.) Once I learned about weapon combining the game got even more fun experimenting with all of my options. I also found the difficulty to be very well balanced. It's not so easy that you are mindlessly running through stages but also not so hard that anything will take more than a couple of attempts. The game runs incredibly smooth for being a game made in 1993. There are so many bullets, enemies, and explosions on the screen at times and I had frame skips one time. The art is one thing that I think the Genesis gets right almost every time and this game is no exception with great visuals. The music was pretty good as well.

This is an easy recommendation that is decently accessible thanks to the switch. I'm going to try out some more Genesis games but like I said I know very little about the system. I believe the only games I've played is Sonic 1-3, Ecco the Dolphin, Vector man, and now this. I know many of the friends I've made here are big on the Genesis so If you have any suggestions, please comment them and I will do my best to get around to playing them.

My 2024 ranked:

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/

I don’t know how in the world Atlus came up with an idea for a game that was half visual novel half puzzle with a splash of social sim/questions that would shape the many endings the game offers and revolve all of that around mature themes like love, death, and sex. But they did and it is brilliant.

I don’t know what I was expecting coming into this game but it was way more wild than I ever could have imagined. The story is goofy yet also very interesting and awesome. I loved how many of the choices they give you in the social sim are not so black and white and answering them can change Vincent’s romantic life as well as spell life or death of minor characters. I also loved many of the characters in this game especially the three “Catherin”s and Vincent’s main core of friends.

The puzzles were at first very frustrating, maybe because I am dumb, but once I got the hang of them I really enjoyed them. I think it’s awesome that they give you an option to skip the puzzles in case you want to just see the story unfold as well. I didn’t use that feature but it’s nice they added it in especially if you want to replay several times to see the multiple endings.

I never played the original but I know that Rin wasn’t in the original. I didn’t choose her path so maybe I would feel differently if I would have but I feel the game was clearly about Catherine and Katherine and you could feel Rin was an add on. For instance, again I’m sure if I chose her path it would be different, but in my playthrough it was building up to something big with her but then she legit just left and never came back. It felt off to me and knowing she was an add on to this version it made sense to me but if I didn’t know that I would have been wondering wtf that was all about.

The story has some amazing twist and turns and kept my interest for the 12 hour playtime. I only finished one path but I am going to go back and see how many different endings I can unlock but using the puzzle skip I spoke on earlier. But I am very excited to jump back in and see the various outcomes. If I enjoy them enough I may come back and give this game an extra half star or so but I feel like I know enough to rate and review it.

Catherine is a very unique game and it’s one I feel like you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot even if visual novels aren’t your thing.

My 2024 ranked

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2024-ranked-1/

It made my top 100 (preliminary ranking. Will finalize after getting all endings)

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/my-favorite-100-video-game-of-all-time/

Kind of had me expecting “Dark Souls but a boomer shooter”, but what I got was way more. It’s a lot more like dark fantasy-inspired Quake/Unreal on steroids.

The fantasy setting didn’t temper the range of the locations at all, since there was a litany of cool locales. The game is also bizarrely colorful, but never to a point where it ever felt super obnoxious, only to what properly served the environments and settings. Especially around the arcane/wizardy levels, I never knew there were that many colors in existence. Each respective episode has its own interesting and suitable variety of enemies, which most of the time helps deepen the purposefully vague lore and backstory, along with some signs and texts here and there. There is a VAST amount of enemy types, and as far as I could tell, they’re all relegated to the episodes they appear in. The game at one point toys with bringing back bosses at regular enemies, and I find it feels really out of place. These levels certainly aren’t trying to hide the fact that they’re sort of microcosms of dark fantasy settings and tropes, but the gameplay loop and visuals are so much fun that it totally works. Forgotten temples and overgrown fauna flooded by the sun in the Ancient Path, venerated magic halls of enchantment education in the Arcane Expanse, and post-exalted atriums of knightly valor in the Astral Equinox. I was ALL over this game’s art direction, it was made for me and nobody else. There were times where I felt like I was gunning it through old Spyro levels, and I mean that in the best way possible. The only episode I really couldn’t care for was the Forges. While visually the levels were cool, they were filled with garbage hitscan robots and the most annoying types of progression you could think of, being capped off with one of the better bosses in the game, somehow. The fantasy atmosphere is tied together with the classic shooter vibes in a very tight bow by Andrew Hulshult, who proves the massive amount of range he has with both music and sound design. Sometimes I could’ve mistaken I was listening to Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos’s work on games like Unreal and Deus Ex.

Movement can kind of feel floaty sometimes, especially when the game requires you to do platforming and/or lowers the gravity, and this does dissuade you sometimes from seeking out secrets. On this note, I’ve always been a fan of when shooters in this style hide secrets that reward the player for trying platforming and to get out of bounds (as opposed to rubbing your gun on every single surface until a secret door reveals itself), and Amid Evil has this in spades. Super solid arsenal weapons as well with a lot of range in usage. The game’s rocket launcher being a staff that shoots exploding planets at enemies is so amazingly over the top and perfectly fits the game’s tone. The Star of Torment also brought it back to the F.E.A.R. days, totally feeling like a shotgun variant of the 10mm HV Penetrator. It also finds its BFG counterpart in the Aeturnum, which you’ll find yourself using more and more as the game progresses, even for smaller amounts of enemies. The soul mode allows a lot of cool and creative super-powered versions of the weapons to be employed as well. The amazing weapon wheel sadly trips up with the Voltride, which I usually found to be useless compared to the staff that uses the same ammo/”mana”. Playing the game on hard also didn’t possess a ton of challenge, and I didn’t really find out about Evil difficulty until I was already mostly done with the campaign. The bosses I also found to be very hit or miss, with some having cool mechanics but others either being annoying, having too small of a health pool, or both.