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1999
One of the funniest things I've ever done was attempt to animate a walk-cycle and kick in this game. They looked OK to my childhood eyes in the moment, but I did not understand exactly what they were asking me to do, so what I made was a man who moved three inches forward while his legs swam in the air, and could not move again until his legs stopped swimming. Then I hit the kick button, and my Liu Kang Flying Kick did not have any forward momentum at all, so I watched the character violently shake his hand in the air as if to go "I'M GONNA GET YOU" and then slowly lift both legs, right leg outwards, left leg pulling the heel into his own balls. I don't know that I would have learned to appreciate animators sooner than this incident, especially through the lens of "wow it is hysterical to be bad at this"
The first KOF I ever played! Goenitz can eat me!
1991
"Murder the entire poaching industry over a grenade in our bar" is the best premise for a beatemup I've about ever heard. I wish more beatemups were just primally simple. I don't need dialog, I don't need worldbuilding, I need one bad day culminating in the desire to fistfight thousands of human beings. This is one of the things Double Dragon gets right about beatemups, and Growl takes it to the most buckwild extreme possible.
1998
As foolish as this feels now, playing this game with two controllers back when it came out, with player 1 moving and player 2 shooting, felt like the honest to god future to a ten year old's mind. Like the future was going to be all sorts of crazy machines and wires jammed into all sorts of shit to play Jeff Minter-lookin ass action games. That part of my inner child is profoundly disappointed at both wireless technology and the general arc of game development.
Being good at quake and playing this game was hysterical, especially the capture the flag mode where the flag disabled your force powers. "I will attack this rube with the flag, for they cannot use the force" they said. Fun fact: the lightsaber reflection thing only worked on laser weapons. Not the Repeater. Just a joyous time in my life. I don't even like Star Wars like that!
The people I was going to play this game with cut ties with me about a month into its release. Even going back to this game a few times after the fact with different people, that's still all I really know about it.
If I'd known they were gonna kill my Hunting Horn next time out, I would've sank more time into this and actually played Icebreak when it came out. Alas.
1991
If you're going to make a wrestling game that you have to play, this is a pretty neat place to start. It shouldn't have been a surprise that the attempt to resurrect it flopped, because it's a misjudgment about what the modern wrestling fan can tolerate or enjoy. They like the salacious details, tribalism, and animated gifs, and if your game doesn't generate those sorts of feelings you're gonna have a bad time.
1987
You know how when you're into some subculture and there's some monocultural force within that subculture that you look at and think "how could you support this without some evil in their heart?" That's me and this whole franchise.
1995
Often as fun as being cajoled into trying a show that "really gets good in season 3."
The Real Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
often as fun as trying to recreate an in-joke a month later
2005
As someone who's only regret in life is seeing The Ring (because all other mistakes have taught me a valuable lesson), it's a good thing the encounter design in this game is a distant peak of FPS design, where as waves of shooters tries to replicate the successes of things like Doom and Call of Duty, no one has the nerve to look at this game long enough. I understand. I've heard records before that have intimidated me out of making my own music. I threw out a symphony over someone else's record before. Anyone making a boomer shooter would look at this and just go "yeah I cant fucking do that," and anyone making a modern shooter would just see no profitability in making a game that can kick your ass this hard.
2009
Time for the periodic reminder that in my personal review scale, a 3 means "I don't regret playing this" and not that anyone else should.
As someone who found the single pre-release interview where they admitted that it was going to be an RTS, I rented this solely because I wanted to see how poorly Quirky Herzog Zwei was going to map to modern development, and I wasn't disappointed. I don't regret being there for that, but I do regret the sunk cost fallacy that got me 90% through the game.
As someone who found the single pre-release interview where they admitted that it was going to be an RTS, I rented this solely because I wanted to see how poorly Quirky Herzog Zwei was going to map to modern development, and I wasn't disappointed. I don't regret being there for that, but I do regret the sunk cost fallacy that got me 90% through the game.
If someone were to ask me "what's the most 90s video game," I'd give deep consideration to this. It eerily predates the dark cultural turn of the late 90s and early 2000s, where shit got edgy cuz they had to grrr. Mutant League Football was gross cuz it wanted to be. In the face of EXTREEEME culture, it feels more celebratory and joyous than contemporaries.