level design is really frustrating in that it constantly punishes the player for what's supposed to be the core appeal of the game. i actually don't mind marble zone as much as a lot of people seem to, but every zone after feels real bad, especially spring yard and labyrinth. water physics don't even feel floaty so much as they just feel like the game is having slowdown issues lol. even the good levels here don't feel great to me, they just feel acceptable and fine.
i do think it's pretty important to note what sonic 1 does right; the platforming physics mostly feel good, and the ring system is actually really well utilized here. it makes the game pretty forgiving for beginners while keeping a lot of challenge for completionists. the bonus stages are also kind of a fun idea even if they don't feel too good in practice. future games obviously iterate on everything this game establishes much better and thank god they did

GTA 3 is one of the most influential games of all time, and the natural bridge between the experimental late 90s/early 2000s push for realistic, breathing worlds (as seen in shenmue, majora's mask, driver) and the current model of open-world video games. it's also really frustratingly designed and pretty shallow. the first thing veterans of the franchise will notice when playing GTA 3 is that this game is tough. like, really tough. but the odd thing about the difficulty is that it feels almost unintentional, or at least not fully thought through. very frequently this game will throw you in disadvantageous positions, which is fine, but they're disadvantageous because the lock-on sucks, or because traffic is fucking you over, or because pedestrians spawn in inopportune places. the biggest issue w this game's difficulty, by far, is how random it is. i played this on an emulator with save states at the start of missions, so i didn't have to rebuy all my weapons and trek back across the city, and playing that way makes the completely random traffic spawns very transparent. you can do the same mission 20 times and get fucked over in completely different places for completely different reasons every time, it's just not a great feeling. just for some examples of missions i felt were particularly bad about this; big'n'veiny is excruciating because the traffic will frequently get in the way of magazine drops, espresso 2 go is quite bad because pedestrians will frequently stand in front of the stalls you're meant to destroy and if you slow down for them you can no longer destroy the stalls, trial by fire is based entirely around random pedestrian spawns which means you're at the mercy of rng, so on and so forth. the later games have smarter traffic systems and don't design their missions with timeframes as tight as these, so clearly rockstar learned, but i can't really fathom why they did it this way other than to waste your time and draw out the playtime. it's very funny how the best weapon in this game, by far, is the sniper, not because it does the most damage, but just because it allows you to bypass the frustratingly unclear lock on system. when you're forced to use lock-on for encounters, the game doesn't really feel skill expressive at all, it sort of just feels like you're beating your head against the wall and holding down fire until you win or lose. the only exception i can think of to this would be in the final mission, where you have to strategize a bit about what order to take down gang members in and what pathing to take to do so, but it still doesn't really make the lock-on feel fun, it just makes everything around the shooting feel tighter and more engaging.
when it comes to delivering on a lifelike world with tons of freedom, GTA 3 is a step forward and a step back compared to other games from it's time. yes, you have the typical issues you'd expect to see in an open world game from this era (small map, repeated voice lines, etc), but the actual city itself still feels fairly plausible, even if it is less than 3 square miles in size. there's a lot of thought put into little details here, like the way newspapers fly around, or the fact that some of the stores actually close depending on the day and night cycle. driving also feels like a breeze, i love how the cars feel in this game, and the most fun i had was definitely just going fast and exploring the city. gta 3 doesn't really deliver on freedom in this environment, though. unfortunately in this game there's never a point where you have access to every island and are safe to roam around in them. almost as soon as you get to staunton island, most of portland becomes off-limits because the mafia aggros you and can wipe almost all cars in seconds. as soon as you get to the third island, you're still aggro'd there. i can understand what they were going for, making the underworld of liberty city gradually become more unfriendly as you're forced to cut ties with more of it, but i don't really think there's any good reason why it should be this way still after the campaign has ended. why have all this detail put into the world if i can't sit back and take it in?
also, writing isn't exactly a strong point of gta as a franchise in my experience, but this game has especially weak dialogue and story. the plot more or less doesn't exist until you're almost done with it, for most of the game you're just doing jobs aimlessly until the game sort of tries to throw in a revenge plot at the end. i wouldn't be too disappointed by this aspect if the characters were interesting or the writing was funny, but pretty much all of the characters are stereotypes or stock crime movie characters, and the writing is neither ridiculous enough to play well as satire nor serious enough to be engaging dramatically. the writing feels especially dumb when it can't even bother to be a little accurate about the ethnic groups it's portraying. like, i get that they're trying to be irreverent and satirical, not accurate, but some basic understanding about the difference between japanese and chinese people beyond "honor" would be nice. still cool how unnecessarily star-studded this cast is, though.
btw more gta games should have a classical station, it actually fits the tone really well

has basically no story and absolutely requires heavy use of fast forward but honestly this game is mostly mechanically sound and kinda holds up. it's very simple, but it does a good job of allowing you to use the mechanics to shape your own little story. it's also easy enough to where off-beat mechanical quirks don't really impact the player enough to be frustrating, which is pretty nice. all that being said i think the game kind of falls flat in it's last stretch; the last level in particular is pretty frustrating as it arbitrarily splits your party up and doesn't allow you to select who starts where. it didn't end up mattering because i just cheesed the unit selection to have marth start alongside wendell and warp to the final bosses, but it's pretty lame. inventory management is also something that gets very obnoxious very fast, in the back half of the game i think i spent more time in the inventory menus than i did actually playing. also, marth being incredibly strong feels very cool, but it's a little less cool when he's at level cap and enemies always want to try to kill him, because he 1 taps them and soaks xp too easily. all this stuff could easily be improved on and it's totally understandable why it would have been an afterthought considering this was basically an indie project, but it's still worth mentioning. honestly, in a lot of ways FE1 feels like playing something like sonic 1, where they have a lot of what's important figured out... but just enough wrong to where it's not really recognizably a classic franchise yet. still definitely an interesting game to play (and reasonably short!)

honestly i really don't get peoples' complaints with this one?? the time travel mechanic is pretty neat, the levels are overflowing with unique ideas, the special stages are actually pretty good and fair for once (!?!?!?!?) the game definitely has an issue with sensory overload and i can see how the exploration would annoy some people but 1. it's optional and 2. it's not even the only way to get the best ending
i think this game's progression does feel pretty random compared to the other 16 bit sonics, however, and the bosses are quite weak, especially the final boss which honestly feels like it could have been the boss of zone 1 lmao.

has more interesting ideas than the first 8-bit sonic but also has a terrible habit of letting you go fast only to troll you and completely stop your momentum, also really likes to spam spike pits everywhere for whatever reason. still a lot better than 8-bit sonic 1 because it actually feels like somewhat of a sonic game, the music is pretty good, and the zone art is all quite cute. whoever designed scrambled egg zone genuinely needs to be psychologically analyzed, i think this guy has a chip on his shoulder against humanity

much better overall than the first game but still has plenty of hiccups. i really hate how they've changed the special stage system, special stages being tied to checkpoints makes the player backtrack a lot which totally fucks the pace of these levels. the special stages themselves are also not very good and a lot harder than in 1. special stages being like this also means that collecting rings doesn't feel as rewarding, since they're going to disappear if you complete a special stage objective
if you ignore the existence of the chaos emeralds, though, this game is pretty fun! the level design is more freeform and forgiving than sonic 1. generally if you fall down or miss a jump in this game, you'll just be put on a different path rather than losing momentum entirely or dying, which is pretty cool! the final stretch is a lot weaker than the rest of the game, but when the whole game is about an hour and a half long, it's hard to get too upset.

the combat is unnuanced, the story kinda becomes swiss cheese in the last act, and the load times get a bit annoying, but this is still a short and sweet little game. i don't really understand a lot of the complaints with the combat, to me it mostly felt boring because you're rarely if ever required to switch up what you're doing. the game just never really got difficult. most of the things that i assume are well-liked about the yakuza series have a strong foundation here, from the lifelike atmosphere of kamurocho to the pretty heartfelt and virtuous portrayal of kiryu. when you remember that this game came out partially in response to games like GTA san andreas, it makes the willingness to tell this big operatic crime drama pretty impressive. i think the story does a good job of blurring the lines between kiryu's "family" (the tojo clan) and kiryu's family (haruka, yumi, etc). there's a lot of emphasis put here on familial bonds, both literal and figurative, and i think the game executes that stuff quite well. i do wish that yakuza did a better job when it came to the nishiki relationship, though; for how important the game tells you he is to kiryu, you don't really feel it. the final boss fight with him feels like a forced formality rather than a natural conclusion, imo. perhaps i'll feel differently once i (eventually) get to 0.