Sonic Adventure 2 isn't just a game. It's hard for me to convey in words how important this game is both to me personally and to an amount of people I interact with. It's like a cultural cornerstone made into a video game. You didn't just play Sonic Adventure 2, you experienced it. lived it, I guess. There is nothing about this game that I would change. If this game didn't exist society as we know it would be totally different. From the incredible soundtrack, the anime as hell plot, the 3 different character playstyles, and the chao garden, everything in this game goes hard. You owe it to yourself to play this one, especially if you like other sonic the hedgehog games. Shadow the hedgehog is the coolest character to ever be designed by mankind. This isn't like a joke review, I'm deadass serious about all of this.

Have yall ever had a game where like you constantly hear gassed up by your peers and despite trying in your entire power to like the game and be a part of the cool game enjoyers club it just doesn't hit? yeah... I've seen both people I personally know as well as internet randos pour endless amounts of praise into this title, and I've always been curious to see what was up, but after playing through this game naw man it just ain't for me.

On a vibe level, this game is immaculate. Given the developmental lineage of this game being done by ex-Love de Lic members, that should be obvious. Characters have their own unique wacky designs with their own goofy chopped-up gibberish voice clips, the various other boss characters have a lot of personality thrown into them, and the story has a ton of thought put into it. The game isn't afraid to explore themes of colonialization and hierarchal government structures, and it does so in a way that's subtle enough to not feel overtly preachy about its themes, yet still heavy-handed enough to make its messages obvious. It's a game where you as the newfound ruler of this kingdom, must overtake all the neighboring kingdoms in a conquest to take over the world. How did you become king? It just happened. Why do you need to take over the world? Because the military minister said so. Are the other kingdoms actively hostile? Not really. Do your subjects and countrymen like you? Sometimes. Tonally it fits right in with pretty much any other Love-de-lic game, and if there's anything that you can absolutely count on from the people that used to work there, it's that the personality of the game shines brighter than pretty much most other games in general.

THAT BEING SAID, its the act of playing the game (and really more of finishing it) that is where the problems truly become apparent. For better or for worse, there aren't many other games like Little King's Story. Essentially the gameplay boils down to managing a crowd of people to help explore a large map, overcome the many obstacles held within, and use the treasures collected from combat and exploration to build your kingdom and upgrade your troops. I've heard the game be compared to Pikmin, but if there's anything that this game has done, it's given me an immensely deeper appreciation for how thought-out the gameplay in Pikmin really is. In this game, you can only send troops out one at a time, in a straight line from where you are facing. Troops don't continue doing their tasks and come back to you if you move a far enough distance away from them, and there's no way to call back particular members, with the B button serving to call everyone back at once, regardless of what they are doing. It makes multitasking in this game neigh impossible at times as the gameplay is designed in a way that emphasizes singular interactions one-at-a-time. Which makes pretty much any encounter with multiple things an absolute hassle! There is a large variety of different jobs for the troops, with each job having their own unique skills and weaknesses, some being designed to get past specific roadblocks like builders building bridges or lumberjacks to cut down particular trees, and others being more niche with their functionality like chefs that only exist to OHKO any chicken enemies that show up. Considering the fact that there are only so many people you can take with you, there's a layer of strategy and decisionmaking for whether or not to spread your crew thin but be able to handle anything that might show up, or to focus on mostly combat grunts in order to ensure any potential fights can be handled comfortably. For me though, I mostly spent my time running with the wrong crew composition unknowing of what lies ahead, getting my shit kicked in for not being prepared, then begrudgingly having to start over with a more optimized team given the foresight of knowing what's ahead. The fact that the only way to manually edit your squad is buried within 3 submenus that the game doesn't even really tell you exists is the icing on the cake too! Even things like how the large crowd of troops creating difficulty in movement as people constantly fall off ledges/get stuck on corners and how there's only one button to cycle through class types in your squad which makes getting a particular class sent out more work than necessary. The gameplay as a whole just felt like it needed a second pass to really iron out the kinks, and it does make me all the more impressed at how Pikmin was able to pull off a similar concept with so much more user-friendly execution 8 years prior on their very first go.

and the bosses. oh my god the bosses. I don't know how they did it but they managed to make 7 bespoke encounters that are just as memorable and unique as they are absolutely infuriating. Like being overwhelmed with enemies? How about playing pinball with incredibly dodgy physics? Do you remember what gibberish voices are used for each of your NPC job classes? How's your Geography? Are you a fan of boss i-frames? I'll certainly give them credit for making them unique but there were too many times where a boss fight throws something completely out of left field that I either wasn't prepared for or had little to no control over that it felt like I was wasting time trying to deal with the games nonsense. It's just all a bit too much trial-and-error for my blood personally.

All in all, yeah. Despite me not having a very good time actually playing the game, I can certainly still understand why it's so beloved. I can imagine that the games quirky charm and personality could easily leave a lasting impression on people, especially if they played it in their youth where they can take in the vibes and enjoy the game at their own leisure unbeholden to the desire to actually see the game through to its end. Maybe it's just me being fixated on finishing games that was why I couldn't enjoy this as much as I honestly should have. The game was certainly an interesting and memorable experience (for better or for worse), and I'm glad I was at the very least able to see what the game was all about, even if it did bring a lot of frustration. The game is fucking, but the vibes are amazing.

You know, I joke a lot to myself about the "guy that buys the yakuza games solely for the arcade games", but here I am, I am the guy now. And how could I not be? For the first time in the 25(!!!) years since this game first hit arcades, we finally have a playable version of this game on a home console, with no need for obtuse command-prompt emulator frontends getting in our way.

This game basically takes everything that the first Daytona did and continues to do it just as well. 3 courses to drive through with the first basically being a training stage for learning how to drift properly and the other 2 being more interesting race tracks. Drifting in this game is the same as the first; you can do so through either gear shifting or braking and regardless of which option there is quite a high skill ceiling. The visuals are incredible, really leaning into the theme-park attraction style vibes and thrills that come from these kinds of arcade racers, with setpieces that include cities, ice glaciers, haunted houses, canyons, an alien space ship, wide open fields, and a giant rocking pirate ship serving as eye candy to zoom through.

With attractive visuals to lure me in with the deep mechanics to keep me playing, this is yet another example of a banger arcade racing game. The version featured in the latest Yakuza game is a rebranded version of the "power edition" of this game, which adds some new content like a marathon endurance course combining all 3 tracks together and brings the original daytona car as an option. They also changed the beginner courses scenery from a lush biodome to a generic nascar track and scrubbed out the daytona branding due to licensing, which is lame but it is what it is. A hornet by any other name drives just as fast.


if sega adds scud race to a yakuza game i will personally fly to sega HQ and kiss the entire ryu ga gotuku studio staff

Well. Guess this dropped, huh? F-zero fans eating.... okay? decently? It's something?

(forewarning: im quite the f-zero fan that has pretty much done everything there is to do in the series. I've played all the games, seen the entirety of the shitty kids anime that gets kinda good near the end, etc etc etc)

The concept of taking F-zero and putting it into a battle royale isn't bad at all. The games have already had quite a death-race battle-royale style vibe to them since the beginning, seeing as there are tons of racers on a track and murder is a viable option to success, so bringing it online with dozens of other real humans sounds like a no-brainer, and the "grand new idea" that the series apparently needed to get a new game, supposedly.

Though when I heard the rumors that F-zero 99 was reportedly going to be a thing, and given nintendo's current track record with how they handled battle royale games, I definitely was thinking of the monkey's paw.

And well well well lookee what we got.

It's kinda obvious to see why certain series fans can be frustrated by this release, given both how predictable and sterile it is and how this is the culmination of a 20-something year old wait for something, anything new outside of various smash appearances, some blue falcon cameos, and a jank Nintendo Land minigame.

Putting those frustrations aside for a minute, what we ended up getting is honestly pretty alright. Of what I can tell all the content from the SNES game is here, presented in full HD widescreen goodness. The controls are a bit different this time around, as this marks the first time a mode-7 style F-zero game can be played with an analogue control stick, and as such the cornering feels noticeably different from the snappy stop-and-go twitch controls of the original SNES game. Add the boost-from-health mechanic and spin attack taken from the later games, and the game honestly feels more like the GBA F-zeros than a straight port of the SNES one.

The battle royale style of gameplay is great in concept but the execution is a bit hmm. Of the many rounds I played, I found that sitting in the upper-middle of the pack to collect the weird meter-building dots and using the super boost to snipe the last lap at the very end pretty much guaranteed a spot in the top 10 every time. With all the shit flying around everywhere, using boost never really seems very worth it, as even in first place the game throws enough bogus AI obstacles and dead players trying to bump into you where there's never really a moment where the whole track is clear to safely use boost. Once I figured out that sort of game plan, it really wasn't that hard to consistently get Ws.

One cool thing about the game is the grand prix system where things become more endurance-based as players are graded upon their performances in multiple races in a row. It's really cool to see the numbers whittle down over time as your opponents either get ranked out or just end up exploding throughout the races, and it provides a good sense of tension to clutch out wins in those events. Only problem is most events like that are not only time limited but also have some dumb mobile game-ass in-game currency that needs to be spent in order to actually participate. Considering the fact that both Tetris and Pac-man 99 had a bunch of microtransactions/DLC that needs to be bought I can imagine they will try to do the same here, and that's never really my kind of vibe.

I don't think this game was low-effort, as the various control differences, visual improvements, and gamemodes lead me to believe that this is made from the ground up rather than having the sort of romhacky feel that the mario and pac man battle royale games did. If they made this game look more visually distinct (whether that be actually having done 3D or even just going for a more modernized pixel look a-la the GBA games), brought in new tracks and a variety of racers from the series to use instead of only the four original machines (hell, the SATELLAVIEW GAMES even gave new characters to race as for pete's sake!) then I feel like the reception to this would have been a little more warm. With how they basically needed to make this game from scratch in the first place, it probably wouldn't have had to have been that much more effort to make it look and feel fresh. It's Nintendo's strange insistence that this game HAD to be a "throwback" title, limited to only the same content that was originally there with little to no additions, that holds this game back. And for some reason, Nintendo seems to treat most of their back catalogue the same way.

All in all, it's fine. I didn't really hate it as much as I thought I was going to, but things get stale pretty quickly. Considering the fact that with the previous Battle Royale games that Nintendo has put out I play them at launch day, win a few rounds, and then call it a day, I am more than sure that's what's also going to happen with this. And seeing as Pac-man 99 is going to get shut down soon, I wouldn't be surprised if this shares the same fate in about a year or so down the line. If you are a fan of battle royale games or racers, you might as well give it a shot. It is free, after all.

The long-running gag of F-zero fans being starved of new games ended today, and on a rather flat note. We have our new game, guys. See you in another 19 years, I guess.

hoo boy where do I even start here? This game stands proud as one of the vibest of vibe games, and with good reason, because the vibes here are truly on another level compared to most games today, let alone on the PS1.

It's a game where in the grand scheme of things not much happens as you spend a month over at your cousins house in summer. What you do with your 31 days at their countryside abode is entirely up to you. It is your summer vacation, after all, so there's no real correct or incorrect way to spend your time, and the game is entirely developed with that in mind.

The game very obviously isn't designed much like a traditional video game, as rewards for exploration are more scenes that try to evoke a particular emotion rather than being any sort of progress-making videogamey reward. I guess a good example is a random well that exists in a corner of the countryside. It's a dead end, there aren't many bugs to collect near the well, nothing inside the well, you can't go in the well to a new area, all that you can do is examine the well. Doing so plays a cutscene showing Boku looking down the well in intimidation before taking a few steps back in fear. That one particular area really has very little significance in the entire map as a side route, and it's really not like that area has any real threat to it. But like, I'm sure there has been a time in all of our youths where we ended up wandering somewhere we probably weren't supposed to be unsupervised and getting psyched out from something completely harmless. Bokunatsu is absolutely chock full of moments like that from start to finish. Regardless of whether or not you actually have experience of being a child living in rural 1970's Japan, this game covers so many aspects of being a kid in general that there's bound to be tons of things to relate to in spite of its setting.

Another impressive aspect to me was just the design of the whole world and it's characters. It's probably one of the most peaceful games to ever exist, with breathtaking hand-drawn 2D backgrounds of natural countryside landscapes and characters that feel like actual people just living another month in their lives. The wide age disparity between the different characters also provides insight in how summer is spent at different points of life. Kids like Boku and his little sister spend their time completely free and at their own discretion, being curious about the many things in the world, generally playing around every day with all their free time. There's Moe, the older cousin in her teens, where she struggles with growing up, spending most of her days studying inside or sitting outside at night thinking more philosophically about her future as she is about to enter high school. And then there's your Aunt and Uncle, where to their adult lives August is just another month of the grind doing work stuff and housekeeping. This game just excels at being a window into this precise household in this precise one month in time, allowing you as the player to observe the countryside and the family living in it just the same way as Boku does.

I could honestly keep going on about all the various moments in the game and the many different memories they made me feel, but I think yall get the point. Would definitely highly rec to anyone even remotely interested in these kinds of peaceful vibes, as this game definitely hits in a unique way to everyone who would play it. Much like actual summer vacation to a kid, this game is entirely what you make of it. or something like that.

Banger game. You'd think that with its rushed development and constant re-use of assets from OoT to the point where it might as well be an official romhack, that this game wouldn't be as fun or memorable as its predecessor, but they managed to miraculously make something that I enjoyed just as much as OoT. While this game doesn't have as sprawling of a world and the dungeons are kinda more misses than hits, the real appeal stems from the overall vibe of the game. Exploring a town during the three days before its imminent demise creates this really tense and dark atmosphere, and the lengths taken to essentially give every NPC their own schedule that they follow for the three days makes the world feel rather alive for an N64 game. The dark themes are kinda contrasted by the amount of actual color in the game itself, as I felt like the worlds and areas that ya explore here are way more colorful and vibrant than the muted color palette of OoT, and that was super cool. That being said though, the whole cycle system does mean that ya have to backtrack every time a quest-specific event goes wrong or if some specific item that resets isn't all collected in one time, and that could probably be annoying for some. There is also a bit of an inventory problem with masks taking up a slot on the 3-item wide inventory wheel so it makes frequent menu switching be prevalent throughout the whole game. It ain't perfect, but it doesn't really need to be. It's also a bit stingy when it comes to saving as you can only either save by resetting a whole cycle or by basically making a "suspend point" through owl statues. It never happened to me, but I'd feel like there's gotta be someone who had their play session ruined by something happening to their game before they could reset the cycle after being 2-3 hours in. Regardless, the fact that this game goes so far off the beaten path both in how the game is played and how the story is told makes it feel fresh and stand out in this series, and it's no surprise to me that this game has such a huge cult following.

Definitely has a more interesting backstory than game itself tbh. So Sega made those Astro City-style arcade cabinets in Japan that are designed to be a one-size JAMMA machine to throw whatever PCB into to play games on. Thing is, there's a law in Japan which mandates that all arcade machines come with at least one game, so this game was made essentially to comply to that law and be the default game that comes with every interchangeable arcade machine made by Sega.

Because of that, this game was designed to be as cheap and disposable as humanly possible. You get NO sound hardware, NO colors, 256x192 resolution, it's literally just a head-on clone using the most primative graphics imaginable. I will say that compared to head-on, there's at least some sauce in movement as you essentially have free movement in any direction (except backwards) and the AI isn't as hell-bent on smashing into you to make juking enemies out more possible. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI programming follows a seemingly random path with as little lines of code as possible though. There are also no continues, or even credits to begin with which is honestly a bit surprising, if you were a cheapass arcade owner that couldnt afford any actual games for your cab you wouldnt even be able to make any change back on just dottori-kun.

It's certainly fascinating to see a game designed with the purpose of being replaced. Sega told their team "don't try too hard with this one" and they followed through. It's mid by design, but i guess in that case then mission accomplished? It also kinda makes this game extremely rare out in the wild, since the only way you'd be able to find this would be if an arcade operator fucked up and didn't actually put an actual game in their machine, or if its intentionally left inside a cabinet as either a historical curio or gag or something. I do appreciate how it is included in the astro city mini cabinets, giving people at home the wonderful experience of playing something that you'd really rather be best off playing anything else over.

Seems like a pretty standard version of tetris at first, but it's actually quite interesting! Weird how it's exclusive to Japan tho, i guess it's probably a bit too 2D and flat for what the virtual boy was trying to go for in the west. There's your typical A and B modes that do the exact same things you'd expect with A mode being the endless basic mode and B mode being clear 25 lines with piling amounts of garbage blocks. There's a variety of backgrounds with fun 3D parallax effects to pick from, some music selections (that are mostly a bit too screechy for my tastes, the OST ain't really my jam here), and the block clears pop out towards you as a neat effect. Theres no hold button, a generous amount of lock delay, and the highest speed doesn't go too fast so it's a basic if not a bit easy form of tetris.

The most interesting part comes from the new C mode where there's basically a double-length tetris field that wraps around itself. In this mode, getting any line clear triggers any other fully completed line on the board to also get cleared, so clever manipulation of the rotating board can make it so you can build up a massive screen-clearing super-tetris. This mode basically flips the game on its head as getting those huge clears relies on intentionally finding ways to fill the whole board without actually clearing any lines on their own, leaving intentional holes to be used as potential anchor points to build off of. It's super fresh and satisfying, and it alone makes this version of tetris definitely worth checking out. Not sure why they didnt bring this mode to other tetris games as it's pretty fun and really doesnt even make that much use of the 3D depth, like even pokemon puzzle league on N64 did the whole cylindrical 3D playfield with a stronger sense of 3D depth than here.

It's tetris! In red! With a cool exclusive gamemode! No reason not to give it a go really, just maybe make sure the volume is a bit low beforehand.

Ah, another game from my childhood that i forgot ive done everything in! My family went on a lot of ski trips, and while I definitely liked the vibes of going down snowy mountain courses, I certainly wasn't a fan of the actual activity of skiing very much (especially when all my brother and dad wanted to do was go on the fucking-kill-you black diamond courses, those are NOT vibes)

Wii WE ski is a game that seeks to provide the vibe of going on a fun ski trip without any of the actual annoyances of actually skiing, and honestly, the vibe works. There's really no overarching objective outside of various little side missions and unlockables and whatnot, just explore the resort and go down the different ski runs. It's a good time for folks that have a lot of free time to just explore the resort freely and just vibe, and that's definitely the kind of game kid me was hella into. There are even fun little secrets, like the ultra-perilous secret course that can only be accessed by going off the beaten path into the unknown mountainy wilderness. (Which is a lot more fun than actual perilous ski runs since who cares it you die in the virtual world!) It's certainly a good time! Though I guess it's absolutely surpassed by its sequels at this point.

Oh and the ski resort plays music from various namco games like katamari and ridge racer diagetically through the resort speakers, real ski resorts take note

The golden age of video games began and ended with the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device.

So firstly, I obviously didn't play this on the original hardware given the fact that this was really a patented proof of concept that as far as I'm aware never made it to any sort of production model so I used an online simulator to experience the magnificence that is the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device. You can play it for yourself here

Anyways, what the hell do I actually say here? The core gameplay comes from positioning little planes on the screen and then essentially tuning the CRT beam to move over a plane and then blow it up by moving various dials. There is a bit of a dead-zone on the left and bottommost corners of the screen so it makes some areas impossible to hit (or I just don't know how to move these dials properly), so it's up to you to make sure the game is possible in the first place. Moreover, there's no in-game logic to check on whether or not you are playing correctly, so really the whole game is beholden to the honor system of the player. I guess it works given the fact that it's an "amusement device" and not necessarily a game.

I guess what's more interesting than the game itself is moreso the context behind it as being one of the first instances of using video display technology for recreational entertainment purposes. There has been a reasonable amount of debate on whether or not this counts as a computer video game given the fact that there is no in-game logic and it's moreso just tuning a CRT beam in a fun way. These days there has been a lot of discussion as to what defines a video game and giving examples of acclaimed modern games that challenge the medium, when my homeboy Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. did that shit all the way back in 1947. Truly a revolutionary.

At the end of the day it certainly is more of a historical curiosity than anything, this is like reviewing a museum artifact. You'd definitely have to be a very certain type of person to even know about this thing though, let alone play and review it on a site like this. I've always been a fan of playing old titles to see where things have gone, and you really can't go any farther back than here. It's nice to pay the extremely primitive origins of video games their dues.

More like Kirby and the Stupid-Ass 12-year Wait. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. This shit is personal. Buckle up.

Going through the mainline kirby games this was the one title that always eluded me due to the fact I really started playing these games on the DS instead of the GBA and never could really find a copy back when I was a kid. I would only look at it through stuff like the kirby wiki, the museum and history book in kirby's dream collection, and various internet comments reminicing on how the GBA kirby games were the peak of the series in terms of game feel. When they announced it was going to be on the 3DS through the ambassador program, I was extremely excited to play the one mainline sidescrolling kirby game that I never had before at that point.

As I played for the first time those 10+ years ago, I was confused. Where were the levels? Why I am I going in circles? What's up with all these other kirbys that just bumble around? Where do I go? I think I accidentally skipped the intro cutscene when I first played because I felt like I was thrown in with NO idea what was going on. Unbeknownst to me, this game has levels structured in this large open world where you need to explore and find all the bosses to get all the mirror pieces. It's structured entirely differently from any other mainline kirby game, for better or for worse, and the in-game map isn't really the most obvious. Espically for 11-12 year old me. Combine that with the several unmarked one-way doors, and I was just kind of running around in circles on my first go, eventually dropping the game MAYBE halfway through, if that.

Fast forward a few years. In trying to get every US kirby game as a collector goal (in the times where collecting games definitely wasn't cheap, but was still in the realm of affordability to be a hobby, but that's a whole other rant for a whole other day), this game was the last game I needed to complete the set. The first copy of the game I got literally didn't work because it had what I assume to be black sticky tar on the inside back of the cartridge. Perhaps it was an omen that this game is just cursed, but I eventually got a second copy that actually worked on the actual GBA. I give it a play, knowing a bit more about what I was going to get myself into. In still getting as completely lost as before, I realized that the core problem must be the fact that the large open world is designed to be explored jointly with up to 3 friends, creating a much more social kirby experience as everyone explores a giant open world together, calling out what they find, and working to uncover all the level secrets. I knew that if I were to truly experience this game, I would need to get 3 friends.

So I bought a GBA link cable and asked around. By this point in time, it was the mid-late 2010s. Nobody had GBAs. Nobody had copies of this game. The period of time where you could concievably get a consistent group of people to play this had LONG since gone. Eventually, more time passed, I graduated from high school, my friends and I went our distant ways, and getting a group of people to play through this game went on to be a sort of bucket-list thing. I would find a way to play this in its entirety with 3 other people. If only someone made a GBA emulator that supported netplay...

And then it happened. When they announced that switch online was getting GBA support, This was the one title on my mind. When I saw it on that sizzle reel of upcoming supported games, that was my nintendo direct hype moment™. So I waited the extra few months or so for them to actually drip feed this game out, and when it finally arrived, I knew it was kirby time. Surely the various qualms I had with the game could be mitigated when divided up between 4 players, right?

WRONG!

(so firstly I have to get this out of the way because its not inherently the games fault. I was playing with one person on wifi with satellite internet and one person in Japan whereas the rest of us are in the US, so the connection was awful. Inputs pretty much took an entire ass second to register, but we soldiered on despite the many, many, MANY, problems that the poor netcode caused. The game also had a lot of periods where there would be a tangible amount of slowdown, and since the audio itself wasn't also slowing down I'm not sure if that's actually something that happens on the actual GBA hardware, but honestly for the benefit of the doubt I'm going to assume that was also a connection quality thing.) ANYWAYS

In a 4-person game, there are a few benefits and there are a few downsides. On the positive, the cell phone is actually a really cool feature. Provided you have enough battery, you can call your friends and teleport them exactly to where you are. It's helpful in situations where you need a specific ability, so you can have a friend get what you need and call them over to where you might be stuck, or if you need to solve a puzzle that requires multiple people. It also is handy if you need backup in a fight against a boss or mini-boss. The only problem about the cell phone is the fact that its super easy to teleport around between your friends doing stuff that it makes it even easier to lose track of where you are supposed to go. There were several times where I was doing something then got completely sidetracked by another player needing an ability I was close to, or help on a miniboss I had already fought. The game keeps track of which doors have been went through already between all players, and since everyone is bumblefucking around on their own, its easy to accidentally be wandering around in an area where someone else already wandered in The in-game map is still nowhere near as helpful as it needs to be for a game of this kind of calibre, though the confusing aspect of it was the least of our concerns. Oh my god, the map. Despite the fact that every player has their own bespoke screen with their own bespoke game boys doing their own bespoke thing, if ANYONE presses the map button, EVERYONE gets disrupted to see it. And even when it is showing for everyone, all players have to be looking at the same part of the map, theres no way for one player to look at one area while another person looks at another. It's like if you were in class and if one person has to take a piss everyone has to go get up and head out until they were done. Because of how disruptive it is for everyone to be checking the map so goddamn much, we'd all eventually just stop trying to use it as not to piss anyone else off, but then that just meant we were all wandering around aimlessly in circles again!!!!!!! The ability design doesn't work at all for this kind of game either!!! Losing your ability after getting hit makes sense in a linear style of game like kirby's adventure, but here where abilities have a more utilitary purpose, it gets incredibly annoying having to try and avoid touching a single obstacle just so you can keep the burning ability that can break iron blocks, or the hammer that can pound pikes. People like to describe this game as a "metroidvania" due to its non-linear structure, but then it'd be like playing metroid but every time you get hit you lose your upgrades and have to scramble around to get them back before they disappear. Don't even think about trying to get your ability back with friends dude, if everyone is getting hit everyones gonna be accidentally taking other players abilities and passing that shit around like its fucking chicken pox. Again, the phone can mitigate the ability problems (they are a lot worse in single player where you can't rely on other players), but the problems are still there. If they made it so that you could take 2 or 3 hits before dropping your ability, things would have been signifcantly better. Being careful not to get hit is also a lot harder when playing through molasses connections... The game also has all these dead-end "goal" areas scattered throughout the levels that do nothing besides net a couple of extra lives and send you all the way back to the starting area, which feels like its deliberately punishing the player for exploring because they weren't exploring in the right direction. The whole game just feels contradictory and not really well thought out. It wants you and your friends to explore a world but doesn't give the correct tools to do so, makes looking at resources for directions annoying, and punishes going the wrong way despite there not being any direction to begin with. Like they thought to make a multiplayer kirby game with a big explorable world then just kinda shrugged off the execution and instead just made a linear kirby game but with all the doors linked to one another in a confusing fashion. The level design genuinely feels like it takes cues from more obtuse non-euclidean experimental famicom and game boy games. This shit is the Atlantis no Nazo of the kirby series. (though definitely not as egregious.) Oh, and the final boss has 6 phases with only one player getting the easy-to-lose master ability to actually do any meaningful semblance of damage. Try doing that shit with a wifi warrior. If me and my pals didn't discover you could cheese life grinding by using the phone constantly at the goal areas, I think some of the players I got for the journey wouldn't have stuck around to see the ending.

Overall, yeah. Not very fun by yourself, not very much better with friends. One star is certainly harsh and the game has the amount of polish and misplaced ambition to it that I'd normally give something like this a two, but fuck man. I waited over a decade to play this, thinking it was going to be this really cool multiplayer experience lost to time finally come back. In order to have a smooth multiplayer experience, you either need friends that live close-by that still have GBAs and copies of the game around or friends with switches and actually good internet. Both of which are equally impossible for me unfortunately. I do think it also brings up the importance of having good netcode when it comes to things like this, as while it makes these old games all the more accessible for multiplayer, it can compromise the actual play experience and misrepresent how the multiplayer for these titles actually was meant to be played. If they waited a bit and made this for the DS, where it was a bit easier to get multiplayer game sessions going and they could have used the bottom screen to do an actually competent map, then they could have had something really cool. Flagship coulda made squeak squad for GBA and this for DS. They did it backwards, dammit. Not the worst game I've ever played but the actual game is bleh made all the much worse by my personal expectations and bad connection. At least it's off that bucket list...

It's fuckin cotton baby! Definitely a SNES game, with everything that entails. The color range is vibrant, the soundtrack has that distinct SNES midi-y vibe to it, and the game can sometimes chug to a crawl despite not much going on onscreen. The slower gameplay and simplified magic system honestly make this game a pretty darn good beginner shmup imo as the only extremely intense section is the final boss which might be considered a pretty high difficulty spike tbh. Other than that, it's cotton! I love this doofy willow-obsessed witch girl and her empty-minded antics, and you should too.

I don't remember which state of play this game was first announced in, but I definitely remember seeing this game getting unveiled and being curiously interested for both good and bad reasons. On one hand, I thought that color-based territory and movement mechanics were too cool of a concept to be only used by one particular game series, and I was intrigued to see how this game plays and potentially evolves from other titles of its ilk, especially given how this game has Square Enix backing it up. On the other hand, the CGI announce trailer and character designs definitely gave me very "overwatch SFM" vibes. The art direction and derivative game concept definitely made it incredibly easy to make low-blow jokes online over, that's for certain. And as everyone online continued to make jokes (myself honestly included at that point), this game still remained in the back of my mind until then. That's certainly not a quality most games announced at a State of Play possess.

Some months later, and another State of Play happens announcing an open beta network test to try the game out early, so naturally I had to give it a try and see what the fuck they were actually cooking, and I actually quite enjoyed it! Eventually they announced the full games release date and the game remains mostly untouched from the beta with the exception of a few new game modes being introduced (and season pass microtransactions being shoehorned into the game, gee thanks). They even made it free on PS plus this month, so I could just drop right back into the action when the game launched!

The game itself is actually surprisingly not as derivative as I thought it was going to be. Yes, you shoot blobs of color that cover the arenas and can use them for movement purposes, but there's no gamemodes where it's a contest on who can cover the most ground in their color. Rather, the main gamemode is more like the Light Vs. Dark mode in Kid Icarus Uprising, where each team has a life pool that, once depleted, turns a team member into a powered up "star" player, where defeating the opponents star player wins the game. There is also a 2v2-style game mode as well as a payload pushing tower defending mode to add some variety. It makes for a much more aggro-oriented game experience, especially considering the fact that in order to chill (not kill, DO NOT CONFUSE THE TWO) someone, not only do you need to blast them until their health runs out, but also run into their foam-balled up downed form with your surfboard. Running into downed teammates with your surfboard resurrects them from their soapy demise, so the game emphasizes huddling together and cooperating to succeed. The foam can't be used to cover walls and climb them, but rather it clumps up which can be used in various ways like making a wall, building a high ground, ensuring a spot doesn't get covered by the enemy as easily, etc. It's certainly unique. That being said, the bullets being slow bubbles definitely gives the guns less impact and the clumpy nature of the foam can kinda turn the large choke points in the maps into big uneven bumpy wastelands that can be hard to parse, so it's not like it's a flawless gameplay experience. There is a single player mode but its really more just like tutorial stuff so like PS plus is basically required to have any semblance of content out of this game, it sure as hell aint worth 30 bucks for some offline tutorials.

The biggest impression this game left on me though was its environmental design and general aesthetic. The dark blacks and blues of the night sky being contrasted with the glimmering golds of the city and bright pastel neon colors of the foam just gives the game this luxuriant appearance. Some real sophistifuture shit, where the hubworld is a high-rise penthouse, the giant neon LCD billboards play stylish ads for fictional brands, the menus are overseen by a mascot rave DJ, and EVERYTHING is a party of the most expensive caliber. The vibe is certainly strong, and Bath Vegas is certainly a video game place I would want to live in IRL. The game world feels like it is made out of money in such a pompously luxuriant fashion, and the modern game PS5-ass graphical rendering makes every golden handrail and illuminated bubble glow all the brighter. The character designs grew on me and I find their personalities endearing, the 2D CGI art from the story missions have a lot of personality in them. I even like the weird goofy mocapped animations that everyone has in the lobbies, every time I can get a full team of randos to do the doofiest synchronized dances always fills me with raw energy. There was certainly a huge amount of genuine care that went into the creation of this world and its inhabitants, and I appreciate it a lot. Did I also mention that this games OST absolutely slams way harder than it ever had the right to? Like holy shit man I am WAITING for this shit to get an OST release, like seriously dude this shit BUMPS.

Let's not beat around the bush anymore though, nobody else really cares about all of that. Despite the beta being loudly announced in a large playstation announcement video I had a hard time finding ANYONE else who even knew about its existence, yet alone was actually PLAYING it. Whenever I would bring it up in various servers I was in, I would mostly get ridiculed for wanting to play "the shitty splatoon for straight people", and to "just play actual splatoon instead", dismissing me the same way they dismissed the game. It reminded me of trying to talk about Yo-Kai Watch back in the day with friends of mine only into Pokemon, they just don't care and only made the same low-effort jokes about something I genuinely liked just because it was similar in the most surface-level aspects. I did manage to convince some of my friends to give it a shot during the beta, and the gameplay left them unimpressed. They likely won't ever play the full game. While the game being free on PS plus certainly gives it solid publicity and a decent starting playerbase, I can't help but feel like a lot of the players trying the game out are going to bounce off of it after only a few hours of playing. In fact, I already have seen plenty of reviews here that are from people that have done exactly that. At least they gave it a try instead of just outright making fun of it without even playing it, i guess... Normally I don't really take very much into account what a games general reputation is, but in something that's trying to be a more multiplayer focused live-service type beat, having the game be such a huge punching bag is a huge problem that's entirely outside the developers control. I've seen more people online compare this game to fucking Morbius than actually talk about the game itself. Searching the game up on youtube brings more videos with shocked clickbait thumbnails titled "will it die?" or "is it ACTUALLY good?" than not. Mainstream gamers don't know the game even exists, and it's a laughingstock to the more core gaming crowd. I'm an optimist, but I'm also a realist; I can't see this game gaining a large enough playerbase to last more than a year because of its reputation.

And that really sucks!!! Because this game is actually really cool and it feels like a lot of work and passion went into this game! It really reminds me of stuff like Survival Quiz City, where much like how for that game the small team of Gyaar studio was able to make it under the funding and publishing of Bandai Namco, ToyLogic was able to make this game with the backing of Square Enix. It has that solid AA feeling that a lot of modern games these days don't have, ironically something clamored by most of the same core gaming audience that dismisses this game in the first place aaaaAAAAA!!! I've been having a lot of fun with it though, and will continue to do so. I put like 5-6 hours into the beta, and have pretty much spent all of my fleeting free time just playing the full game constantly since it dropped, which is saying something, considering the fact one of my favorite games of all time got remade quite recently and yet I play this instead. If you have PS plus to be able to play online, I highly recommend giving this game an earnest shot. It's certainly not perfect, but the game is fun! The vibes are cool! What use would a giant golden festive city be if nobody wants to party in it?

(this is a long personal one, borderline life-storycore. sorry for those that dislike walls of text but sonic 06 does this to people. Sonic the hedgehog 2006? more like sonic the hedgehog 2006 word review)

I feel like if you are on the gaming pulse enough to be looking at a website like this, you likely already have at least HEARD of Sonic 06. Pretty much everything that could be said about this game on the internet already has been, it's really quite the overused topic both in the spheres of the sonic fandom and the sphere of bad game critics. Just in the sphere of youtube alone I've seen showcases of the many, MANY bugs and glitches the game contains, reviews of the game that dwell on it for uncharacteristically large amounts of time, personal retrospectives from fans recalling the impact the game has had on the brand as a whole, posthumous optimistic looks at the game dissecting vibes the game manages to retain in spite of its rushed nature, and the more recent phenomena, endearingly nostalgic takes towards the game from those that played it in their formative years. You could say that this game has had just as much of an impact on Sonic's brand as the previous game titled "Sonic The Hedgehog" (of which it has been a longer time between the present day and this games launch than the time between the two "Sonic the Hedgehog" games). It's certainly hard to say anything, let alone anything NOTEWORTHY about this game when everyone already knows what it is and why it is. All I can really contribute to the decades-rotten dead horse conversation is my own personal experiences with the game.

I'm a life-long sonic fan and despite being the correct age to have done so, I didn't grow up with this game. I definitely remember the launch hype cycle for this game, 6-year-old me frequenting the old Sonic Central website and looking at the promotional material for the game. I remember thinking that with the realistic environments and people that the sonic brand must have been taking a more adult turn after Shadow the Hedgehog, and since my family was still rocking the Gamecube as the sole household console, I was fine with sticking to the recently-released (yet equally mature in an incomprehensible sense) Sonic Riders and worrying about the fancy new Sonic game later when I was older. Given that I went on to own a Wii instead of any HD systems and wasn't a part of the greater internet at the time (as I should have been for that age), the release and subsequent car crash that was this games reception entirely eluded me. It wasn't until like, idk 2008/9ish? when I mentioned to a cousin that not much on the PS3 interested me besides "this game called sonic the hedgehog but not like the original one", and got laughed at for it that I realized that there might have been something up with this game, but I never thought much of it. I did always have a fascination with it in a curious way though, and whenever Silver was playable in any spinoff on the Wii, I always only played as him back then because he's from that mysterious sonic game I couldn't play! Imagine a Sonic Adventure 3 where you could play as him and all the other cool sonic characters...

Eventually I would get old enough to be given free roam on the internet and through that I would learn to discover this game and its actual reputation through youtube videos much like the ones I referred to earlier. Watching the game crumble under its own weight and seeing EVERYONE just absolutely tear it to pieces gave me a sense of relief that by owning a Wii I unintentionally dodged the bullet that was this game. (though instead I did have to suffer through Secret Rings, so who really won in the end?) I recall a family friend bought an Xbox 360 alongside this game and in the many times trying it at their house yeah it was just as janky and bad as the internet said it was. We would get stuck in that awesome beginners trap of getting owned by the mach speed section in Wave Ocean from hitting the scripted loop-de-loops at a bad angle and getting launched off of them to a game over, then having to restart from the absolute opening of the game. I saw firsthand that wow, this is certainly an unpolished, buggy, unfinished work that should be ridiculed. I couldn't believe this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3...

Eventually I got a PS3, and even more eventually I ended up buying a copy knowing full well what it was, and then I played it up to finishing Sonic and Silvers chapters before tapping out with Shadow. I felt like I had seen enough by that point, and outside of bringing it out for some ironic laughs in multiplayer with friends or playing it at my dentists office while high as fuck getting cavities filled in (don't ask, but yeah), this game remained on my shelf, uncompleted, for the better part of like a decade. The game sucked, after all. Seeing stuff like Project P-06 try and "fix" the game garnered no interest from me. Why would I want to even play a "fixed" version of this? My relationship with this game remained solely in the ironic "this is the bad sonic game haha" mindset and I couldn't believe that there were people that actually thought the game was good. They had to have just been gaslighted by nostalgia, right?

It was only a few weeks ago where the great almighty wheel of games decided it was time for me to stream a playthrough of this online. I figured that being a sonic fan that completing a playthrough of this was inevitable and that at least if I streamed it, it would be entertaining. Despite already owning the game on PS3 I instead bought the (bizarrely relisted for only 5 dollars) xbox 360 version as not only did it serve the ironic bit of buying Sonic 06 digitally in the modern day but also it gave me a clean save and was the most stable version of the game (as little as that actually means anything). As I played through the game, something very peculiar happened. Something that hadn't happened in all the years I've spent all this time rambling about.

I was actually having a lot of fun. And we aren't talking laugh-at-it isn't-this-game-so-bad-amirite-guys fun. Genuine, unadulterated, serious fun.

Maybe my tastes have changed a lot in all this time, maybe I'm going insane, but there was just this earnest sincerity that I felt when playing through this game, that emblematic sincerity that Sonic games have where they sometimes do some really REALLY absurd shit yet play it off with the straight confidence that I can't help but enjoy. Seeing all the sonic characters have their semi-winded anime-ass first-translation-draft dialogues with one another and how they handled this heavy-handed plot riddled with time travel and eldritch-horror summoning was the coolest thing ever. The game may be fucking, but I could still feel the games intent through it all. The game isn't even that fucking, honestly. Most glitches that I had heard the game get lambasted for online were things that I usually had to go out of my way to look for and execute, or things that I likely wouldn't have tried to do otherwise had I not already had the pretense knowledge of "check this out, I'm gonna kick in place on top of this box and you're gonna see some serious shit". The game is certainly unpolished and rushed, but if anything it's actually an absolute miracle that the game is as functional as it is to begin with! There's also tons of different characters to play as, which after having like 15 years of main series 3D games that only have you play as sonic and sometimes a variation of sonic, felt like an absolute breath of fresh air to control characters like Silver, Blaze, Omega, and Rouge again. I couldn't believe that this was essentially Sonic Adventure 3!

As I was enjoying my time with Sonic 06, it really had me thinking about it all. Was this game really as infamously horrendous as everyone has been saying, or had it perhaps been a victim of changing times? It was the first Sonic game designed for HD hardware, so maybe they thought it was a good idea to split the main team in half for Secret Rings as they assumed HD 7th gen gaming would only need as much dev resources as the last generation did, and gravely miscalculated how much more is needed from the jump to HD. 2006 was still the first year of these HD consoles, and a lot of the early titles for 360 and PS3 were also coming to grasps with those same problems regarding either total content or overall polish. Hell, that isn't even a generationally exclusive problem, look at how many games today launch in equal or even worse states as this one. Add that half-bakedness to both the facts that the mid 2000s was peak edgy gamer years culturally as gamers demanded the most photorealistic polished experiences out of their fancy new flat-screen displays, developer work be damned, AND that the modern social-media internet seeds had already been planting and sprouting giving viral videos much more weight, and maybe this game really actually was given a bad hand. There have certainly been a lot of people that wanted to see the Sonic brand crash and burn since its inception, and this game releasing in the state it did at the time it did gave those people the exact ammunition and platform they needed to do exactly that. Maybe the younger players that sing praises of this game aren't gaslit by their own nostalgia, but rather people like me have been gaslit by the myriads of negativity that has been surrounding this game since its inception, then only playing the game afterwards to affirm that already-implanted opinion. I honestly don't know, it's never usually as simple as that and it could go either way. It certainly did do a lot of damage, as after the negativity from this games release bled into other titles released in the same time frame, the brand took a more staunchly conservative approach by delisting "bad" games and scrubbing out any remnants of the 2000s era games from more contemporary works as they focused on more lighthearted and 90's oriented vibes before going full ironic meme mode in the mid 2010s, likely still due to the negativity towards the brand that remained from this game. (luckily that doesn't seem to be as much of the case anymore as both the sonic brand and community have been going back to the core of sincerity and have accepted themselves for what they are as a whole.)

I normally rate things off of some mixture of general recommendability as well as my own personal enjoyment, and while those two attributes usually go hand-in-hand, with this game they are at odds. While I may be crazy enough to have gotten a lot of enjoyment from playing this, I'm not crazy enough to recommend it over most other sonic games and you probably should be aware of what you are getting yourself into should you choose to play it on your own. I really have no idea how to end something like this tbh but I feel like I've said all that I can. There are probably many similar Sonic 06 takes and opinions in the vast endless sea of the internet, but this one is mine. There really is something about this game that makes people write a whole ass manifesto. Can't think of many other games that have that same effect, for better or for worse.