A mildly interesting, though, ultimately flaccid entry for the larger Metal Gear Saga envisioned by Kojima. It’s got quite a lot going for it on the conceptual level; despite being just Snake Eater But For Babies, it makes some solid compromises to be a serviceable Metal Gear game on a portable console. The leaning towards motion comic styled cutscenes never felt like an obvious limitation of the hardware but a natural step to dive into. After all, Yoji Shinkawa has taken artistic inspiration from western comic book artists like Frank Miller and Jim Lee, explaining how reminiscent Metal Gear is to a comic book in the art department. I did like the idea Kojima had for wanting this game to be centered on co-op, or “friendship”, through the way every mission op to the mother base management feeds into this mechanically. However, if you don’t really have access to most of those features to engage with properly (like me!) then you’re left with a game whose limitations are pushed all the way to the forefront. I said this plays like Snake Eater But For Babies yet it only barely feels like that. Strip mining just about every interesting stealth combat mechanic that MGS3 introduced into the series and left with essentially just a jankier MGS4 but scaled down. The level design is the most linear out of all the games, offering some branching pathways to head to your next destination, but never making them feel like environments rich with stealth combat problem solving beyond the bare basics. Evading past enemies, or confronting them, never felt like a tense challenge to overcome because of how easy it was to just tranq-headshot them and send their bodies flying Fulton Recovery style. I’ve only ever faced real difficulty when fighting the bosses who all took way too long to beat, even trying to work with the grind set of the content, giving you an increased arsenal of weapons.

What carries Peacewalker beyond these set of problems is undeniably its story, which even then my praises are mostly super faint. It serves as a small epilogue following the events of Snake Eater that meditates on the impact left by the ending, the repercussions which paved the way for the rest of the Metal Gear Saga to mold itself into. Though I still sorta question, even finishing my playthrough here, whether it was necessary because Snake Eater’s ending was powerful for visually speaking a thousand words in how things will change. I’m not sure that it needed to be set flat on a table and ironed out to make the subtext digestible as literal text. Like, oh -- did The Boss actually do what she did for the absolute sake of her country, or was it yet another government cover-up to make the truth sound easier to swallow? Does any of it really matter since either way it showed the true worth of ideals, loyalty, and identity in the face of the world wanting to take that away from you? Well, to people like Big Boss and Dr. Strangelove it certainly did. And I’ll admit, this is an interesting story thread to dissect, especially with how it reinforces the recurring themes of the other MGS games regarding the blurred lines between artificial reality and the emotions you always carry. Where this all stumbles lies in its characters. Besides Big Boss, whose arc is actually more impressive when I think back on it, the cast is just paper thin and doesn’t play enough into the theming beyond characters having names related to “peace”. This is meant to move the Metal Gear Saga into a different direction with Ground Zero and Phantom Pain attempting to develop further into what Kojima laid out here, but I hope this ambition is paid off good enough because I wasn’t hugely impressed by this. And by now, the bar I raise for Kojima is pretty high because of how I was being constantly impressed by what he and his team can cook up to shake the medium.

The fourth part of this game kinda fucking blows, but I REALLY love the characters enough to overlook some of the piss poor decisions in the story, Akiyama especially is a favourite, Saejima and Tanimura are great too, I specifically love Tanimura’s side stuff relating to Little Asia. Overall the substories are pretty strong, Akiyama and Tanimura having the best ones, I like this game even if it goes full fucking meathead ooogaa booga the times when it shouldn’t. Also Haruka should’ve been in it more

Fuck the Saejima Amon fight tho who thought it’d be a good idea for you to fight a guy with an EXPLODING SLEDGEHAMMER that does 1/5 your health AND the guy regens fuck off 3/10 video game

Gregory Horror Show is basically the best budget cartoon Resident Evil to ever exist. I say this out of admiration more than anything else: in a year where Capcom Production Studio 3 appeared to have mixed success with the ambitious but ultimately hollow Glass Rose and the infamous Mega Man X7, it was this overlooked horror-mystery title based on a Japanese CGI anime that thoroughly proved that they still had the sauce. Not only was it a solid return to their roots, it logically expanded off of Resident Evil’s base model in ways that are seldom realized even to this day.

The story goes like this: you’re a kid lost in a foggy forest, finally finding shelter at Gregory House, only to realize in a dream with Death that you’ve ended up in videogame purgatory along with a slew of other troubled inhabitants. Death proceeds to strike you a bargain; if you can bring him the twelve lost souls carried by the various inhabitants, he’ll show you the way out. To do so, you must discover every inhabitant’s weak point and expose them, taking their souls when vulnerable while staving off insanity during the endlessly looped day.

However, there’s a catch. Gregory Horror Show intentionally disempowers the player: there’s no combat to be found, and every guest is capable of running faster than you. They don’t particularly appreciate being spied on, and will immediately take notice if they’re alerted to your presence and skedaddle. As such, the player must rely upon sneakily gathering information by chatting up non-hostile helpers, and spying upon cagey guests by peeping through door keyholes, hiding around furniture/corners, and carefully creeping behind them as they roam around the hotel. This results in a surprisingly intimate experience despite Gregory Horror Show’s brevity: you really get to know the habits and quirks of each guest, carefully marking down your observations in a journal, before finally going in for the kill.

This is where the game really starts to come into its own: after robbing a guest of their soul, they immediately become hostile and if they catch you, will subject you to a “Horror Show” that significantly cuts into your health. It’s no simple task to evade capture once spotted by a hostile, because the player has to duck into other rooms unspotted and take cover in safe rooms or hide in closets/under tables to escape detection. Furthermore, as your cache of purloined souls builds up, more and more guests check into the hotel, further complicating traversal and observation. Thus, while most horror games become safer and easier to manage due to mastery of environments and clearing out enemies along the way, Gregory Horror Show instead organically escalates its difficulty by enforcing tighter timeframes and more meticulous planning to evade angered inhabitants while still gathering information upon new guests, resulting in an increasingly tense and unsettling experience. This is all while the player must also manage their constantly depleting mental health gauge from the simple act of staying awake and scour for items around the mansion in order to trade for necessary health and key items in Gregory’s Horror Shop. All these systems work together to hold the player accountable for plotting out constantly evolving routes throughout the hotel as more rooms/passages and guests are thrown into the mix, alongside the need to keep track of how these guest schedules interact, with their positions constantly shifting over the course of the 24-hour cycle. In particular, it becomes crucial to ensure that the player can safely make it to fortune-telling rooms (only two of which exist in the mansion) to save the game and sporadically return to the player’s guest room to swap/store items, check the player’s journal for recorded guest actions, and take naps to progress time, cure exhaustion, and secure the capture of lost souls. The latter presents a risk-vs-reward exercise in-itself: the player can temporarily keep captured souls on them in any given day to reduce the rate of mental health deterioration, but if the original owner should find them, they’ll lose the lost soul and will have to repeat the process anew.

The result of this intersection between stealth, observation, and horror is perhaps one of the most intricate exercises of sheer patience and planning in any video game I’ve ever played. Granted, Gregory Horror Show is not a masochistic game by any means, but it nevertheless forces players to consider the totality of their actions at any given time while paying dividends if they're willing to do their homework by nailing down the who, where, and when. In this sense, it’s one of the best evolutions of survival-horror, because despite how much it differs from its influences, it understands that time itself is the most important resource to conserve. Failing to perceive exactly how the different elements of the haunted mansion interact can feel quite punishing, not just due to drastic drops in stamina but also likely resulting in significant time losses that can cause the player to miss their striking window of opportunity. The player must then find alternative methods to effectively waste time through costly "Fruits of Time" (that damage your Mental Gauge)/occasionally sleeping and potentially encountering more hostiles until the events of the time loop roll around for another try.

I’ll concede that Gregory Horror Show isn’t an obvious contender for the greatest horror game of all time. There are a couple elements that could be construed as superfluous since they don’t add anything to the stealth-observation premise, such as a Mario Party-esque board game that the player must win for a lost soul, as well as a “boss-battle” amongst many other scripted events during the final night. That said, they’re mere blemishes in the overall scope of things, and are easily forgiven considering the game can be beat in about five to seven hours. Although Gregory Horror Show doesn’t quite rise to REmake's level of resource management mastery, it remains one of the most distinctly charming and succinct takes on the survival-horror genre that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do in its brief runtime, while daring to innovate upon an already revolutionary and tightly packaged standard. I’ve never seen or heard of its source-material prior to this game, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t one of the most effective ways to spark my curiosity. Perhaps that speaks for itself more than anything: even if you’re not a fan of the franchise, you owe it to yourself to check out what I’d say is outright one of the best titles on the PS2 in an already stacked era of exciting and wildly creative works.

It's more classic Mega Man alright, but with a twist. The Double Gear System; Speed and Power. Both are really nice additions to the series but I'd say the level design tends to use them as much as possible. Speed is most effective for levels and platforming and Power for bosses to deal more damage per second. Don't try to force your way to the end without this Gear System, it can range from being the easiest Mega Man ever to the hardest one, if you don't use it.

Boss Weapons are really useful tools not just to hit bosses weaknesses but throghout the levels. The enemies are mostly in spots that are hard to reach with the normal buster. Being able to instantly change weapons with a button is also great, that feature is carried from Mega Man 9 and 10 so playing with Boss Weapons on levels is as fun as it should've been on the NES titles.

It's a decent game overall. I also do like the amount of effort that went into the presentation in this one, looks really good. But ultimately I didn't feel anything by the end, specially knowing Capcom hasn't released anything Classic Mega Man related since this game hit the shelves in 2018. I could consider it a wasted effort on Capcom's part for not following the momentum Mega Man 11 gathered for the classic fans like myself, perphaps. It came and went like the wind.

I believe the classic formula hasn't evolved since the NES era, for the bad. It doesn't hit that charm past games had even with a modern coat of paint unless you truly want to be a tribute for the classic like Inti Creates did for Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10. But it's just that, a throwback to simpler times.

Mega Man needs to evolve, in general. And have a modern standard beyond what the classics offered.

God this game rules. Though for a re-release of such an old game (god this game rules) I'd expect a little more effort. The illustrations (god this game rules) that can be used as borders are really cute (god this game rules) but that's not worth the $15 price tag. The only other features it offers is save states and rewind, which are staples of any off-the-shelf emulator. There's also an online leader board, but the score has never really been the point of Gimmick to me (god this game rules). I love this game (god this game rules), but it's hard to justify its price when, for example, the M2 ports of classic SEGA games (god those games rule) are regularly about $2, or Hamster's Arcade Archives (god those games rule) top out at $8. Putting up a straight ROM onto a store front and asking for $15 with next-to-no justification for that price is a hard sell when comparing to anyone doing anything similar, but it is Gimmick (god this game rules) and Gimmick rules (god this game rules). God this game rules.

Guilty Gear Strive is a fighting game made by ArcSystem Works launched June 11th 2021. It is the most successful entry in the 25-year-old franchise and for a good reason. This game will certainly be a main stay in the FGC for years to come


Presentation
As I mentioned before in the Street Fighter 6 review, Guilty Gear Strive is a game that knows what it wants to be. I am not familiar with the franchise, so my opinions and thoughts would be just about this particular title, but I can say for sure that this game has style. Beautiful cell shaded graphics alongside an amazing original soundtrack and sound design. It has artistic merit all along the way. Not only that but the character design is top tier, and when compared with games like Tekken, KoF and MK it is clear that this game is far superior in that regard.


Features
There are four ways to fight people in this game: ranked mode, for fun, local and at player lobbies. The most interesting of these four is ranked mode's implementation. The ranked mode revolves around "floors" instead of an Elo. You start ranked against a CPU opponent that measures your power level and puts you on a floor. There are 11 floors in the game, 1 to 10 and then the celestial floor. The higher the floor number, the higher the skill of its players. Floor placement is way more fluid and dynamic than elo: you can go up or down in a matter of hours, so consistent play is way more important. One bad day and all your work can go to nothing. While a bit cruel, this system can give the sensation of a true "ascension" and journey, with highs and lows, so, because of that, I consider it a more interesting way of showing progression in the game.
Training, arcade and tutorials are very well made as well. You can even create and save your own combos, watch old matches and try to fight against an almost invincible final arcade boss. My only complaint is with the story mode: There is nothing to play, only a literal 4 hour movie. Since story mode is not a very important or strong part of most fighting games i can let it pass, but it is still a little disappointing.


Gameplay
Guilty Gear Strive has the gattling system:

- Punch (P) cancels into Punch or Command Normal

- Kick (K) cancels into Dust (D) or Command Normal

- Close Slash (S) cancels into Slash, Heavy Slash (HS), Dust or Command Normal

- Slash cancels into Heavy Slash



Besides that, there are the Roman Cancels and Bursts. Roman cancel is when you press 3 action buttons, besides Dust, and your character sends a shockwave that slows down the enemy for a few frames depending on the situation (which is indicated by the color of the Roman cancel: Blue, Yellow, Red and Purple), giving you tools to scape, trap or even extend combos. The burst is either a "get off me" tool to stop combos from enemies, or a more aggressive tool to gain meter faster when used at the right instant. All those mechanics are integrated in a fast-paced combat that gives room for smart play, quick thinking and originality. It is immensely satisfying to perform those mechanics and use them to your advantage, while maintaining your own fighting style.

It speaks volumes to a competitive game’s design when you don’t find yourself being frustrated with mechanics, cheap tactics, or dishonest characters. Every win feels earned and every loss feels like you could’ve done something better. Getting tilted in SF6 usually boils down to something along the lines of “I should’ve punished that!” Or “I keep dropping that combo!” Never once in all my sweaty ranked lobbies or bouts in the battle hub have I been dissatisfied with the game itself.

Street Fighter 6 is remarkably balanced. I haven’t seen such a tightly nit group of fighters in a tournament fighter in my lifetime. I main Lily, a consensus bottom 2-4 and I stand by everything I said in the paragraph above. It’s truly that even

This may be my favorite group of mechanics in a 2D fighter. SF6 is a metamorphosis of systems from the past three Street Fighters. Such a mismatch sounds like it could be disastrous or at the very least distracting or overwhelming. The drive system is genius and balanced well. The return of multiple supers is welcome and adds a new layer of depth. Drive impact can be abusable at low level, but it’s effectiveness becomes limited at intermediate levels. Drive rush is certainly powerful. Lots of players are complaining about it only costing one bar, but all I think it needs is punish counter state added throughout it’s entirety.

I didn’t expect Street Fighter 6 to be this good. After the disaster that was Street Fighter V (until it got really good towards season 3 onward), I was skeptical of SF6. I didn’t even pick the game up on launch day. I have to say that I’m so glad that I tried this game out. Easily my game of the year and could be the greatest fighting game ever made.

9/10