I think the concept behind this game is sound and, in some ways, better than Pac Man 99.

That being said...I can't really recommend the game as it stands.

I played several hours in early access and some once the game was officially out on May 8, and almost every game was completely filled with bots. Let me tell you, these bots are even more brainless than your average Reddit moderator. They'll constantly run into ghosts and any kind of trap you set up for them, guaranteed. Normally I'd be okay with bots since the game is new and the cross play functionality may or may not take off, but they offer zero challenge. I'm almost certain even a five year old could put up more of a fight.

The game is fun when there's at least a few other human players involved, but it doesn't seem to be guaranteed at this time. This could have been alleviated if there was some sort of offline/bots only mode with a difficulty scaler, or (heaven forbid with a modern game) local co-op...but Bamco has omitted both.

The final nail in the coffin for most will undoubtedly be the price. 20 dollars is a lot to ask for what is essentially an online only game that may or may not develop the kind of player base Pac Man 99 had. If I wasn't a huge fan of the IP, I likely would've passed and honestly can't blame anyone else for doing so at the moment.

Far better than Final Fight in every department except the graphics. In many ways, this kinda feels like a Master System or NES game with a suped-up appearance thanks to the extra bits. It still has some hang ups from that era too, including super cheap bosses that will knock half or even three quarters of your life bar off and the only (reasonable) way to beat certain enemies is to exploit their AI and incessantly loop them into throws or stun locks. The sequels are all far better on all cylinders in regards to balancing, but this is still worth playing as a history lesson and to see where the franchise started.

It's honestly just okay in my opinion. It seems like people either love or absolutely hate this game, but I can't help but find myself gravitating somewhere in between. One hand, the concept of "SMB1, but harder" isn't necessarily a bad thing to me considering I've beaten the original too many times to count (including several times under the influence of our world's magic mushrooms...heh) and I can appreciate that concept. That being said...the hammer brothers spam, the dumb wind gimmick and springs that launch you at inconsistent heights and speeds are really god damned annoying and keep me from coming back to this game as much.

Although unofficial, I think there are a handful of hacks out there nowadays that do the whole "Mario...but for super players!" thing far better. SMB Special: 35th Anniversary comes to mind as far as the original game goes. Bandicoot's Super Mario World hacks (especially Crown Tale which I loved cringe story aside) also fit this bill nicely. None of those games get as hard as this one, but offer a comfortable step up in challenge IMO.

I come back to this game to complete it once or twice every year, and it's been that way for a while now. It's a solid improvement over the original Flintstones NES game in terms of balance and gemplay. Gone are the stupid ice physics and constant placement of enemies in situations where it's very easy to get knocked back and insta killed.

Instead, we are treated to more interesting levels tailored around swapping between Fred and Barney. Fred is able to pull himself up ledges like in the original game, whereas Barney is equipped with a slingshot and can climb along vines whereas Fred can't. It's a very interesting dynamic and although you could argue other NES games experimented with it (Mario 2 for instance), I still find it welcome here.

The difficulty curve is surprisingly modern. The only real difficulty spike pops up at the very end- you're chased by an insta-kill wheel and will have to swap between Fred and Barney quite often. It is ungodly fast and even when you know the level layout its still easy to get clipped by it. This section blew on my first playthrough, and I still don't care for it. That said... it's a small price to pay considering how fun the rest of the game is.

Play this one any way you can...unless you've been living under a rock (heh heh) you're probably already aware that you'd have to give your left nut to own an actual copy. Worth emulating, but not worth getting neutered for.

This is a short but sweet Build-engine inspired FPS that oozes 90's. As in...your melee weapon is literally that damned S everyone drew on their notebooks or sharpied in on school playground equipment. Your character hurls out one liners and insults like a certain Nukem, but they're all as hilariously juvenile as you can get. "Oh yeah, I got it on with your mom!", "You smell like turds. Well, would have...because you're dead!"

If you don't mind crude humor (or, in my case, still get a chuckle out of this kind of garbage at nearly 30 years old) and a handful of those classic "where the fuck do I go?" sections these games were notorious for, then this is a great time. Not sure if I'd put it above Cultic or Dusk, but I don't regret spending four hours clearing it with xbox game pass.

I'm the kind of person who stays as far away from roguelikes as possible, but this looked cute and I just so happened to get three months of game pass via the purchase of a ROG Ally so I went ahead and tried it.

The gameplay loop is surprisingly good and sees you clearing out waves of enemies while turning your cat mech into a ball and bouncing about to deal damage and do some light platforming here and there. It is a lot of fun just rolling off a ramp and repeatedly landing on an enemy to wittle away at their health. The gunplay is fine, but it wasn't long until I found my favorites and simply ignored everything else.

Roguelikes are known for their brutal difficulty, but I was able to finish this one for the first time after three or four runs. Whether or not I got lucky...I'm not sure. That's one of many things I can't stand about this sub genre.

I really hope the devs will make another game like this with non-randomized encounters and actual level design based around the core mechanics. Like flinthook, I can't help but feel this is a great concept held back by being rougelike.

This was the first ever non Tiger video game I ever remember playing. I was about two or three years old and my mom bought an old apple II along with a bunch of games. It arrived one stormy night and I recall her setting it up and having me play some games while sitting on her lap. Although she swears by centipede and Carmen Sandiego being my first proper video game experiences, this is what I have my fist memory of.

Swinging off those vines and her saying "now he's going to jump into the water!" After I eventually figured out how to navigate that first board- memories you can't really put a price or proper rating on.

One day I'll have the space and money for a proper retro PC setup to nostalgasm over that...but for now...I'm happy to at least remember that.

If my PFP didn't give it away, I definitely enjoy the Battlemania/Trouble Shooter series so I'll probably be a bit biased.

This first installment is about as campy as it gets. The art style (clearly anime inspired) isn't exactly as polished as other Sega Genesis classics and it is full of fourth wall breaking, which is something I've always enjoyed in any sort of media. I was expecting some sort of crude or sexual humor because this is a game from the 90's with a female lead (and distinctly Japanese to boot), but fortunately, the dialogue during the cutscenes manages to keep it classy.

The gameplay itself borrows heavily from Capcom's Forgotten Worlds, but drops the multi-directional aiming in favor of a support character (named Crystal) who can fire in front of or behind you with the tap of a button. I like this idea quite a bit, but the level design sparingly compliments it. You can take advantage of the fact that this character does not take any damage whatsoever and really lay the smack down on the second and fourth bosses by positioning Crystal correctly, but that's about it. Oh well, at least the core shm'up gameplay is fun enough if nothing groundbreaking.

I'd also like to point out that this is a very beginner friendly shm'up, and one of the first I played when having a fling with the genre while my dominant hand was in a cast and I was somewhat limited in the kinds of games I could play. You do not die in one hit as the game works off a hit point system. The scoring system is pretty generous with handing out extra hit points and although you can be insta-killed by being sandwiched by the screen (sort of like sonic), there's really only one part in the game where this might screw you over on a first playthrough.

Trouble Shooter Vintage (the sequel) is miles better, but this is still well worth playing if you want something breezy and cheesy to kill a few hours with.

There isn't a whole lot I can say about this game that hasn't already been said about a trillion times by now, so I'll just leave it at this:

This game is a lot of fun if you're just going through it at your own pace and playing it through any%. The first and second floors are very strong in the level design department, although Shifting Sand Land's 100 coin star is pretty tedious. The third floor has some doozies, but I remember feeling like a genius for figuring out an unintentional way of getting the star on the far-off mushroom in Tall Tall Mountain as six year old.

The game really drops off in quality by the last two courses, which are not only super linear (contradicting the design philosophy of being more open ended that the game has used up to this point) but exist over a huge ass bottomless pit.

The beauty of this game's collect-a-thon nature is that you can skip all of the badly designed courses. You'll still have to collect more than half of the game's power stars, but there is more than enough leeway to ignore Tick Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride (and then some). Go for all 120 stars, however, and it really puts things into perspective and suddenly all of those comments about the game aging poorly start to make sense. I have a feeling there's a reason that I never bothered to get all of them until a year or two ago.

I'll also highly recommend Super Mario 64 Plus for PC while I'm here. It's a highly customizable experience that lets you tweak the gameplay to be as close to (or as far removed) from the vanilla game as you'd like. Just want to play at 60 FPS with all of the growing pains in tact? Go for it. Want that buttery smooth 60 FPS with a side of no boot-outs and a much better camera? It's there too.

I usually don't like Super Mario 64 ROM hacks because they're designed for speedrunners or sadists, but this one is pretty good so far. I really like the concept of taking all the classic courses and redesigning them in a way that shows the passage of time. There are a few added gimmicks here from later 3D Mario games such as the shrinking tiles and flip-panels, and even the spring bumpers from Sonic Adventure make an appearance (and work surprisingly well for something custom). While the annoying boot-out mechanic from the vanilla game is still here, there is one massive QOL improvement- falling off the course is no longer an instant death/boot out. Instead, you'll lose half of your health and are usually kicked back close to where you dropped off. Considering how slippery and janky Mario 64 is by default, this is huge and I hope more Rom hacks will incorporate this concept.

Shifting Sand Land and Lethal Lava Land weren't very enjoyable to get all the stars in and I'd say they're actually worse than their vanilla counterparts, but beyond that, everything else has either been on par with or even improved. I'd say give it a go based off my experience, but keep in mind that it is a notch or two above the vanilla game in terms of difficulty.

This is a somewhat janky and bare bones platformer but I can't help but love it. It just has this inexplicable charm to it like Alex Kidd, although playing it as a kid in a relatively vulnerable time in my life my also contribute to that.

One stage has these fairly decent looking statues against backdrops that could have come out of an Atari 2600 game. If you jump three times on one of the platforms in stage 3, a fish appears and you literally get shot out of its asshole as a shortcut. Of course, they couldn't depict an asshole in a Nintendo product, so they decided to make the "anus" a warp pipe from Super Mario Bros. Then there's Mad Monk, the boss of the fifth stage, who might as well be yelling "PUSSEH!" and drops literal F bombs. It's stuff like this that makes this game special even if it is, at the end of the day, a B tier platformer.

<I am 100 percent aware that there's a page for Bare Knuckle III. However, I'm sharing the review here since I imagine "Streets of Rage 3" is what most people are going to put in the search bar and I wanted to encourage people to try out the JP version before dismissing the game>

Your experience with this game is going to hinge on whether or not you're playing the American or Japanese version. I think a lot of the hate stems from the fact that this game got outright butchered in North America.

They got rid of one mini-boss due to (probably) homophobia and decided to up the difficulty in ways that are far worse than what was seen in Dynamite Headdy and Contra Hard Corps. Not only is damage scaled higher (like Dynamite Headdy's localization), but the speed of the enemies is also shot way the fuck up- it reminded me of what happened when I tried playing a PAL ROM of Power Strike II on NTSC hardware. It just felt broken and I'd originally shelved the game years ago before even making it beyond the junkyard.

Then I booted up an English patched rom of the original version (Bare Knuckle III) on my everdrive and what a difference. Everything clicked and made sense. Pacing was on par with something modern like Fight 'n Rage (a game I love btw) and not once did it feel unfair.

If I had any real gripes outside of the usual monotony that the genre is prone to, it's that the star system is kinda silly. Essentially, you'll gain more moves if you break a certain points threshold without dying and these can be especially powerful. Die, however, and you lose a star. This would be a great risk/reward system if it weren't for the fact that the six button controller allows you to perform these at will. If you hold the X button down and perform a circular motion (at least with Blaze) you'll be able to do them, and even as a non 1v1 fighting game player, these were piss easy to pull off and always take a considerable chunk of life away from enemies. I'm guessing Sega may have done this as a way to peddle more six button pads back in the day.

Some also point to the music as being lackluster compared to SOR1 and 2, and I unfortunately have to agree. There are a few decent tracks here, but even the best don't nail the vibe of the first two entries.

Still, I think the improved pacing (as well as the ability to run and roll about) is what helps Bare Knuckle III stand out in a good way. The star system was a nice touch, but is ultimately trivialized just by going with a six button setup. If Sega hadn't fumbled in localizing it so badly, I think it'd have a better reputation these days.

Based off a first impression and an hour of gameplay

Tutorial is overly long (not to mention forced) and once you get past that...the racing itself just doesn't feel that great compared to the actual Sonic racing games. There are also a billion different mechanics and I just have to ask myself what the point even is. Arcade racers are meant to be simple- steering, drifts and the occasional wrinkle in the boosting systems are all the greats (Mario Kart, CTR, Diddy Kong Racing, the Sonic/Sega racers) needed to be engaging. Meanwhile, this throws in spin dashing/odd whip system/four stunts with four different attributes...it just felt kind of ridiculous.

Just play Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing Transformed or even Team Sonic Racing. I understand this is a fan game and (of course) can't be measured up to the same quality, but personally it just felt way too off and I doubt putting more time into it is going to alleviate that.