"We know that millions of people all over the world just love the PAC-MAN arcade game. PAC-MAN has won the hearts of men, women and children everywhere. We also know that PAC-MAN has traditionally been an arcade game. Well, we at ATARI know all about arcade games. After all, we make some of the greatest arcade games In the world, and we know now to bring the same dynamite game play into your home. Our PAC-MAN has all of the excitement and challenge of the standard arcade game, and you get to play in the comfort and convenience of your own home. This is especially advantageous if you still plan to make an occasional appearance at the arcade to show off your great playing skills. (Little do they know that you've been practicing at home all along.)"
-Page 1 of the Pac-Man Atari Manual

at that point in 1982, you could probably argue that those words in the manual were the biggest lie ever told in gaming. When it comes to converting arcade games to the ol' 2600, obvious compromises need to be made in order to crunch out that game essence. Some games, like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Berzerk, etc, make the conversion relatively unscathed. But sometimes you just get some absolute nonsense like Pac-Man. While this game is in literally no means an accurate conversion of the arcade classic, it does show some interesting insight into Atari history both in a cultural and gamedev sense.

So like, the game pretty much shares gameplay similarities with the arcade version and that's kind of it. You eat dots and avoid ghosts that chase you, but compared to the arcade the ghost AI is different, scoring is different, the hitboxes are different, the maze is different, you get the idea. The maze isn't even like a bastardized facsimile of the original, it's just a bunch of circles in a grid. The hitboxes for actually eating the pellets video wafers seem to be a lot smaller and more precise than the hitbox for touching ghosts which makes things feel kind of inconsistent since you gotta be further forward towards pellets video wafers in order for them to actually count as eaten whereas the ghosts touch any pixel of you and pac man dies right then and there. At least on the control front things still feel responsive and snappy. There are only 8 different game variations here, and they just change how fast Pac-Man and the Ghosts can move to somewhat alter difficulty. I found that Game 6 is the fastest for both and even then it's still not that fast, so that's my rec if you want the most engaging Pac-Man gameplay. The slowest ghost speed is designed for younger children apparently, and at that speed the only way the ghosts will ever get you is if you actively try and get yourself killed which is awesome. Also this is probably just a me thing but using the stiff Atari joystick to try and quickly maneuver Pac-Man definitely hurts my hands after a little while. If there are any boomers on this site reading this please let me know of any proper Atari controller holding tech because I still haven't figured out how to use it in both a comfortable and consistently functioning way just yet.

If you look at this game solely through the lens of how accurate of a conversion this is, it's pretty dire. But ngl this game is pretty cool to look at retrospectively. Atari crunched the fuck out of one guy in 6 months to make something they KNEW would sell millions on brand alone (and sell it did, this is the best-selling game on the system), and so within those constraints the guy likely chose to go for preserving what he believed to be the essence of Pac-Man, rather than trying to make a straight conversion with no proper time or resources. Honestly, the essence still comes through pretty well even in this conversion, and there are probably a solid amount of the 8 million copies sold were probably satisfied casual customers just trying to get their fill of eating dots and chasing ghosts without much care towards the details. It's also just that by 1982 the Atari 2600 was already roughly 5 years old, and Pac-Man was already 2, and many other people had understood standards of what they should be expecting from a first-party conversion of an immensely popular arcade title, and this definitely wasn't up to those expectations. Gaming wasn't a fad anymore, the market of core gamermen had bloomed by this point, and if there's anything we know about those guys it's that they have quite high standards for their gamin. As a result, this game (and it's partner in crime that would release at the end of the year, E.T.) could be described as one of the first games known to the general public as a "bad game", and are frequently cited by historians and fans alike as a major cause of the great American video game crash of '83 as well as being touted as some of the worst games ever made in the later internet sphere of things.

Do I think this game really deserves that kind of reputation though? I mean, kind of? It's not nearly as ambitious as something like E.T. and is a pretty blatant result of Atari cutting corners to get as much easy profit on their grubby hands at the cost of making a quality product for their consumers, so it's not exactly like this game is great or misunderstood or anything imo. The Atari could absolutely have done a more direct conversion of Pac-Man, as both the Ms. Pac man port and plenty of 2600 homebrew can prove, so it's not like it was entirely the hardware at fault either. I just think that the end product is such a fascinating result of so many factors that it's hard not to be curious about it. It will obviously never happen, but I do wish Namco would reference this bizarro version of Pac-Man or include it in compilations as a historical curio or something. If they had a 2600 pac-man skin in a championship edition game or something I would absolutely pop the fuck off ngl. I definitely still wouldn't really recommend it to anyone outside of the curious gaming historians out there in this day and age, but an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel irredeemable worst-game-ever-made this game is certainly not.

Aight, so this is definitely a horny game, and obviously your enjoyment is going to vary depending on how much you can enjoy that kind of thing. If you are the type of person that thinks this kinda thing is degenerate/objectifying then yea nothing this game does is gonna change that opinion. But like, idk man playing this 20 years after the fact it's kinda a vibe? hear me out

In todays day and age, I feel like a lot of horny shit has fallen to the blatant and trashy side of things. Should you feel so inclined, you could use the very web browser you are reading this review on right now to delve into all sorts of dubiously degenerate shit from probably millions of sources. Hell, even strictly staying to the console game sphere there's all sorts of "Sakura Succubus 4"s and "Hentai Girls 8"s clogging up digital storefronts on stuff like the switch and Playstation, degen shit is out there. There's also comparatively higher budget shit like the Senran Kagura and Hyperdimension Neptunia series that hit that degen sphere, hell even the later sequels to this game crank up the trash dial with all the different ports and versions of DOAX3 out there. And that's not even considering all the actual eroge/nukige that are on PC. What I mean to say by all of this is that compared to how things are now, DOAX1 is really honestly quite tame, to the point where I feel like I could hardly even call it a trashy guilty pleasure game anymore.

Maybe it's the games self-awareness and goofiness in its plot, as it's just Zack inviting all the DOA girls over to play volleyball on a vacation island he happened to win before it explodes into a million pieces at the end. Maybe it's the aesthetic design being solid, with clear, crisp sunny beaches with sparkling water and bright blue skies accompanied by the most 2000s ass ska/reggae summery music you ever could find. The areas have the same high attention to detail and level of polish that the stages in the main DOA games contain. There are a lot of moments where the game basically gives you a free-cam to zoom in and look at whatever is on the screen, and while it's definitely designed to peep on some polygonal xbox goochie, I honestly found myself using it to look at the environments more than the girls.

The actual gameplay is kinda eh though. Half the time you are playing volleyball with the girls, the other half you are blowing away your life savings at the casino. There's also this lite-social sim aspect to it in that you can talk to other characters and give them presents in order for them to play volleyball with you, but it's all quite shallow. The point of the game really isn't so much in the gameplay, so honestly its whatever.

So like yeah. It's horny, but not aggressively so. I'm honestly rather impressed. They cared equally as much towards making a game that captures a summer vacation vibe as they did towards making an early coomercore console game. It may still basically be softcore porn at the end of the day, but damn is it some vibin softcore porn. I earnestly can't hate it. Sasuga itagaki.

really this games opening says more about it than I ever could, so just watch that.

This is my favorite game of all time (if you count compilation titles as bespoke games but that's a whole separate discussion). Hard to properly describe why, it just resonates with me. I love the strange lineup of obscure sonic games. I love the museum giving an insane amount of sonic art and sonic music to look at and listen to. I love the wonderfully stylish UI and menu design aesthetics both in visuals and music that feel so Y2K-y like a vibing digital futurescape. I've always loved this game, and I think I will continue to do so forever.

Hmm. Definitely feels more like PGR1 than PGR2 in terms of content and city count. We've stepped down from the eleven cities of 2 to less than half of that. We got Las Vegas, London, New York, Tokyo, and my favorite bustling cityscape, the Nurburgring. Seasoned PGRtaku will immediately notice that london, NYC, and tokyo were all already in the first game, so really the only fresh addition is the one city of Vegas. The soundtrack also bumps as per usual, with quite a decent amount of good ska and J-pop beats goin around.

The singleplayer basically is roughly the same as the first game, though a bit less balanced. Gone are the car classes as this game sticks to the rule of "every car has to hit 170 at minimum" so like every possible car choice is cracked right out the gate. I understand wanting to get straight to the good stuff out the door, but one of the core things I enjoy about PGR (and racing games in general, honestly) is the slow buildup from okayish cars to the good ones. I pretty much got one decent car pretty quickly on in and just stuck with it through the whole game and EASILY cruised past everything on the medium difficulty. I'd honestly suggest playing on hard or expert if you want this game to last any decent chunk of time or have any sustainable challenge.

The online support was a key part of what made PGR2 so cool, and this game appears to have tried to expand upon that by way of this broadcasting system showcasing what people are doing around the world. Key word being "appears" here though, cuz the servers are long dead so I can only really speculate what this game was like at its prime. There is the regular online multiplayer still up though, and I have heard that they added a bunch of cool new game modes like legitimizing the "cat & mouse" house ruleset into an actual playable game type. Can't say I've actually tried it as not only have I not found anyone that still has a 360 lying around for car gamer time and even if I did my xbox live gold game pass core membership has expired so i'm SOL on the online features, unfortunately.

Visually this is the game to take the series into the HD era, and it looks quite good! Only real gripe is that the dark areas of the game are really crunched out, and no amount of RGB range adjustments on either my TV nor my console could fix it so I guess that's just how it's supposed to look. I do think though that even if we specifically compare launch racing titles on the 360, ridge racer 6 has this game beat in terms of aesthetics both in menus and in the actual game rendering itself.

Overall it's certainly just existent, which is really surprising for me given how much I've enjoyed the first two games. It's really apparent from a lot of early 7th-gen titles that the jump in fidelity really cost a decent amount of game content from their late 6th-gen peers as devs require more time to make the most out of the new specs (sure hope that doesn't balloon over time!) Maybe my time would have been a lot more exciting had I been there in 2005 racing with the homies. Regardless, it's a game!

WE ARE SO FUCKING BACK.

After YEARS OF SLUMBER (five months), the weather has cooled enough for me to continue where I left off in playing some good ol' DDR, and coincidentally I just recently finished the banger that is tokimeki memorial 2, so this game being both a DDR game and a tokimemo spinoff that stars miyuki, bro the stars have aligned for me to play this.

Being a spinoff game focusing on the very small 2-week period that is summer break, this game is more of a VN rather than your simulator-y stat-growth time-management beats that are in the main game. The main bulk of gameplay is done through dialogue choices and the occasional round of DDR. The plot basically consists of Miyuki wanting to play some DDR with you at the arcade, where by playing she accidentally manages to do an all-perfect FC and get scouted to a local DDR tournament. In reality, she sucks at DDR and it's up to YOU to not only train her to not entirely embarass herself at the tournament, but also convince either Yae or Miho to be her partner. Hilarity ensues. Considering the fact this game is a much more straight-laced VN, there's not much else I can say in the gameplay department.

My only minor complaints with the game are that in the entirety of the main scenario there's only one song that you play over and over and over again on the basic difficulty, with the final song being the same song on Another difficulty. I get drilling one song over and over again to get better at it is part of the DDR gitting gud experience that this game seeks to portray, AND the one song is sung by Donna Burke of Metal Gear fame, but the repetition gets a bit old and the sudden difficulty jump at the end def caught me off guard a little bit. I also wish there was a way to actually play DDR with the characters themselves as player 2, as you can watch them play or play yourself, but never really both. If I could play DDR with tokimemo characters, my life would have been complete right then and there, but alas, some things are not meant to be. It is certainly amusing to play through an entire VN with a DDR pad, ngl.

What else do I really need to say? Tokimemo 2 is based, DDR is based, combine the two and I'm a happy man. It def is weird hearing the characters mention DDR by name though. Like I get that its all konami so there's really no issue, but it's still strange. Completing a run unlocks the full DDR TokimekiMix game to be played, which has 6 bonus songs to play through from previous tokimemo games. It honestly is a good way to slowly get me back and acclimated to the ol' mat again.

i miss when konami was good

more like the mid

I was planning to play this way later but the whole server shutdown turning every copy of this game into a coaster in 3 months forced me to play my hand and see what this game is all about.

Considering the fact that I've mostly been playing racing games from 5th/6th gen, getting whacked over the head with all the modern gaming tropes in this game was certainly jarring at first. There's a HUGE open world of fucked up america to drive around, and I really do mean HUGE. It takes about 45 minutes just to drive from one end of the map to the other, and while the copious amounts of space definitely allowed me to get into the zen headspace that long scenic car rides do, it also is just too overwhelmingly massive for me to really know what to do with. I'm the kind of guy that likes to slow down and appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into game worlds, and there's just not enough time in this universe for me to really be able to see all the sights that this game has, much less before the imminent server shutdown. So my options with world interaction slowly became a choice between slowly meandering through large empty spaces unrelated to anything else in the game, or just bumrushing straight from waypoint to waypoint to progress as much as possible. Neither of them really felt very satisfying, as both had this sense of "am I really playing this right?" lingering in the back of my head. Maybe I just need to get more comfortable with large-scale open world games, I don't really play that much in the genre.

The plot was a whole lot of whatever. Absolute junk food western shlock, yanno? Join car gang, rise the ranks in the car gang, it's edgy and gritty and written like a cheesy action movie and I can't tell how seriously it really wanted me to take it, but I eventually tuned most of the plot out and focused more on the road trips. The main character looks like what would happen if Gordon Freeman and Alex YIIK had a child, truly terrifying.

The actual racing is also solid enough. The cars control with a decent amount of weight to em, but also slide around a lot and sometimes the physics can freak out in comical ways so it's all decent enough fun. The events where you gotta take down other drivers kinda suck though, its like trying to ram a bar of soap into a drunk driver.

The game also has this huge focus on online multiplayer, with the always-on structure and how players are supposed to populate the game world in real time alongside the game being entirely playable in up to 4 player co-op meant that the biggest focus of the crew is in your literal crew of fellow players. Ironically though, in my entire playthrough of this game throughout this entire month of January I didn't bump into a SINGLE other player, despite what the large populated map every time I signed in would suggest. I left my game in "searching for crew members" mode the entire time, and not a single other soul answered the call. Surely, due to the fact the game is 10 years old and I am playing on Xbox (which is a platform that I do not really associate with active playerbases), there's not much surprise in the game being a ghost town. But that also begs the question of why this game needed to be always online in the first place when you absolutely can play the entire game solo and enjoy all the game has to offer that way. The closest thing I got to human interaction was spending like 5 minutes chasing a player location waypoint only for their car to vanish like a ghost once I actually got up close to them.

Overall, it surely is a Ubisoft title. Doesn't really do anything atrocious, but also doesn't do anything amazing. I will say that the licensed OST so far has been one of the most irritating setlists I have heard though, and the game constantly rerouting my GPS waypoint to fucking Ohio or whatever to try and get me to buy the delisted DLC was very annoying. But at least I got the chance to squeeze a playthrough in before the end of times. Maybe someone might make a fan server or offline mod or some shit to keep this game preserved and accessible down the line, but I won't hold my breath. Shame too, because while the game was certainly kinda existantcore to me, I definitely think enough effort was put into it that it's lowkey a waste to just get rid of it. Please look forward to my review of the Crew 2 in 2028 when the servers for that are about to bite the dust.

This is it. This is the peak of video games. It has all been downhill from here. It is essentially the sidescrolling action game perfected to a fine, glistening sheen. You have so many movement options, so many defensive and offensive options, and a whole HORDE of fun and interesting bosses to use those said options against all with their own unique and different fighting strategies. All while pushing the mega drives hardware to its absolute limit both visually and audibly. This game is Treasure's magnum opus, which is saying something since that company literally doesn't miss.

(preface: I joined backloggd roughly like in march this year when the course drip feed was in the middle and because of that I thought it would be funny to review the waves individually since there were only like 2 or 3 by then and now there are 6 of those mfers clogging up my played and I don't want to delete them but also want to write about the pass as a whole without just copy pasting all 6 reviews into here so uhhhhh oops)

This was like the most whelming DLC I have ever played for a video game. Not overwhelming or underwhelming, just whelming. What I got was precisely what I expected when I first heard "Mario Kart DLC that doubles the course count for less than half the price of the game, released in waves". Yeah, the visuals took quite a hit in terms of aesthetic consistency, but that's kinda what I expected given the release-wave live-service type structure they decided to crank these courses out through. Doubling the course count definitely gives a fresh breath of air to Mario Kart 8, a game that had grown quite stale to me after the dozens of hours through the past 8-9 years playing on both Wii U and Switch, but something just kinda feels lost in the sauce with this expansion.

One of my favorite things about Mario Kart is the track design and selection, how each course feels less like a racing circuit and more like a theme park ride. Dozens of themed rollercoasters to ride through each with their own gimmicks and setpieces to race through (while obviously avoiding the nonsense that the other drivers throw at you). I feel like the courses in Mario Kart can really shine because of how much polish and effort goes into making each course have its own unique bespoke thrills, and it's the reason why courses from games decades old can still remain fresh in my memory. With this pass taking courses from previous games yet done so in a hasty manner so as not to overvalue the 25 dollar price point as well as to fit in the likely-incredibly-tight wave release deadline schedule meant corners had to be cut, and the polish had to be sanded.

A lot of courses lost most of their core identities from the little things in them that weren't recreated, whether due to janky reinterpretations of features in previous mario kart games that weren't necessarily in 8 like the half pipe boosters, or from conscious track design alterations that make certain courses lose a lot of their edge. You can't fall back down to the earlier part of the track in Choco Mountain. You can't do the cool-ass crevice skipping shortcut in DK mountain anymore. The bob-omb cars in Moonview Highway barely harm you more than an ordinary shell when hit. I think a lot of the changes usually come from courses that were converted multiple times from their original games to something like Mario Kart 7 and then from there to Tour and then from Tour to 8, and it just makes the vibes off just as much on a gameplay level as on an aesthetic level. Which really wouldn't be much of a problem if there weren't already the highly polished original versions of each track that exist as not only a comparison, but really a reference point as how the courses should be.

Luckily it's not all complete vibe-killers, as the blander courses manage to make it out mostly unscathed or even improved, as is the case with various GBA and SNES courses that made the jump. They even managed to shake up a few existing courses like Peach Gardens and Kalamari Desert by changing up the course as the laps go on, leading to a fresh take on familiar ground. Some Mario Kart courses are just impossible to mess up, yanno?

There are also plenty of city-themed courses from Mario Kart Tour that were included, and they were mostly quite uninteresting compared to the rest of the track repertoire. They felt more like courses from the Mario Kart Arcade GP series, where the courses are flat and devoid of many hazards, with setpieces mostly being static background imagery rather than dynamically integrated into the course like a lot of the best Mario Kart tracks. Like, how come we just drive under the Eiffel Tower in the Paris track instead of driving up it in zero-gravity and doing a backflip off the top or something? By making the courses just tour you through a cities landmarks instead of committing to a singular one and theming around it, it makes the city courses just feel like basic tourism propaganda from their respective cities, rather than creatively thought-out Mario Kart tracks.

Lastly they threw in some original courses, and while the highest highs in the entire 48 course lineup can be found here through Ninja Hideaway, Yoshi's Island, and Squeaky Clean Circuit bringing fresh course designs and gimmicks with considerable levels of polish (Yoshi's Island in particular being a fantastic tribute to its source game), there are also some absolute dingers thrown in there. Merry Mountain and Sky High Sundae were some of the most uninspired courses I have ever seen, being mostly static boring ovals with not much to really make them remarkable, and Piranha Plant Cove being kinda just meh all around.

As a whole, despite the fact that now the course count in Mario Kart 8 has doubled from 48 to an impressive 96 tracks to race on, it's reached the point of diminishing returns for me. I guess stale bread is still stale no matter how much sauce you may try to cover it in, especially if that sauce is stuff I had before in the past made by someone who had more time to perfect it. I was originally kinda upset that courses like Airship Fortress and Mushroom City didn't make the cut, but honestly maybe it's for the better they get to keep their swag.

At this point, I want Mario Kart 9 to have a course count closer to older titles. Give me only 16 courses in four cups, but make them the most exciting, creative, goddamn FUN 16 courses they could ever possibly conceive. Quantity can only win out against quality for so long.

damn. Leaves good first impressions, especially for a gizmondo game, I'll give them that. It's basically like one of those ultra-linear platforming speed obstacle course type beats. Like those straight hallway endless runner flash games. The visuals and game feel are actually surprisingly solid and the game has a nice sense of speed and flow to it but the mfin level designs are so godawful that it just makes everything frustratingly annoying to play. Every level is on a timer and any remaining time carries over to the next level which encourages learning from your mistakes to clear the game, but doing 15 and 20 level long gauntlets of trial and error where each game over takes you ALLLLL the way back to the beginning where you gotta work your way back to where the game last gotcha-momented you just to get gotcha-momented again in the next level just aint fun. If the level design wasnt so focused on outright memorizing level layouts through trial and error this would probably be a "killer app" of the gizmondo (not like that really means much in the grand scheme of things i guess), but instead we just have a game thats fun to control but aggravating to play. Though considering this is a remake of some C64 game, maybe that's just how it sticks to its source material. To all you 0 gizmondoers out there, stick with sticky balls.

Gran Turismo 4. This is it. I don't think I can overstate how big this game is, both in terms of its content and its legacy within the racing game genre. This game basically takes everything from the previous GT games and cranks it up to inhuman levels. The GT series to this point has always been in the upper echelon of console racing games, but with this game, they basically created a golden standard for the genre. Like, when the developers for the first Forza game were talking about competing with the PS2, they weren't talking about the GT series as a whole. They, like many others, were trying to dethrone this game specifically. That's how big this game is. It's an absolutely monumental racing game that can absolutely last you a lifetime with how much content it has. With all that being said though, it still ain't my favorite racing game, or hell, even GT game.

Firstly, the good. They basically took GT3 and gave it a simulation mode that puts it more in-line with the insane sim mode in GT2. There's the same "do events, earn new cars that give you access to new events" loop that made GT2 so engaging, and there's things like used car dealerships to get rid of the credit-grind slog that was GT3's campaign. There are over 700 cars to collect across all sorts of events. Circuit tracks, city tracks, one-make manufacturer events, specific car type events, rally events, endurance events, you name it and it's here with an insane amount of polish. The driving in this game is the best that the series has been up to this point, with it having that nice realistic feel to it. I am no real life race car driver so I can't actually comment on how ACTUALLY real it is, but it certainly has a good feel to it. The UI and soundtrack are as fantastic as always (though I still found the licensed race music kinda eh but I think that's just how things are gonna be), and visually this is one of the best looking games on the PS2 with an insane amount of visual polish, and even support for progressive scan and a mode that uses some interlaced shenanigans to get a high-res mode of 576x960!!! Considering the power of the PS2 the fact that they can get something like that working at all is incredible, much less running as good as it does with the visuals that it has. In terms of technical mastery, gameplay polish, and stylish UI, this is the GT PS2 magnum opus.

But unfortunately, there are still quite a bit of qualms that I have had with this game in my entire playthrough. While I do have a decent enough PS2 wheel that I can use with this game, I really don't prefer to play with a racing wheel over a pad and I don't have a good place to even set up the wheel anyways so I was kinda screwed on the control front. The game uses the pressure-sensitive buttons on the PS2 controller and it's not able to ever be turned off, and I find the dualshock 2's pressure sensitivity to be a bit too mushy to be used as precisely as needed for a type of racing game like this. I played the first half of the game using a very cobbled-together wheel setup that shook when literally any FFB happened, before eventually giving up to use a controller with the steering bound to the left stick and accelerator bound to the right. Neither control scheme was really elegant for me. If this game supported the neGcon (which it very well could have), then this would all be a non-issue and it would absolutely elevate this game to an 11/10 status, but some things are just not meant to be. The high-resolution mode is also more of a gimmick than anything, as my upscaler didn't really like how it tried to display the image, my cables are too crummy to get the best out of it, and the menus and UI all run at 480i anyways so I honestly stuck to the default resolution the whole game as well. Lastly, my final issue with the game comes from its pacing. While the core racing structure of GT2 is back in this game, it doesn't feel nearly as well-paced when it comes to what agency the game gives through prize cars. A lot of events end up giving you a prize car that can't really be used anywhere else, leading to a lot of "dead end" moments, where I just kinda had to sell the car for credits to get the cars that I did need, or just ignored them altogether. Since earning certain things is locked to overall completion percentage, I found the best thing to do was just to do the rally events as they offered the highest payouts alongside cars that I could actually use in a multitude of events. Playing that way just meant I spent most of my time doing a bunch of really slippery rally events, when I'm honestly more of a fan of the street/circuit racing... And then the GT world championship at the very end is both such a huge difficulty spike and time sink, being 3-4 hours long for a single attempt with insane competition that I really got kinda sour by the end of the playthrough. Getting the REALLY good cars to breeze through the GT world championships involves winning the endurance races, and those can take up to 24 hours of real time to complete, and considering the fact I barely had time to attempt the 3-4 hour GT world championship, I REALLY didn't have time to get the best cars to smoke the competition. You could say that problem is def a skill issue from relying too much on better cars and parts over driver skill to win (and it certainly is, I suck at GT), but I think it's lame that the game lets you get away with that strat for everything BUT the one event I really didn't wanna get stuck in.

So yea. sorry for the long review, this is a game with a lot of things in it and as such I had a lot to say. It's honestly a masterpiece of the racing genre with so much care, attention to detail, and CONTENT put into it. I didn't even mention things like the B-spec mode where you can train an AI to race events for you, or the photo mode that allows you to render extremely high res (for the time) photos of your cars to a USB drive. It's one of those games that I'd absolutely consider for a "desert island" pick, for sure. But I still think that GT2s campaign pacing and flow was more engaging than this. Regardless, if you are even SLIGHTLY a fan of cars, racing games, the PS2, or just driving in general, you HAVE to give this game a go.

Definitely a peak DDR game. DDRMAX is pretty much a soft reboot of the series in a lot of ways. The setlist is almost entirely brand new, the announcer dude has been replaced, the rendered dancers have been replaced by FMV shots of various vibes, and the game has a brand new focused goal of getting players to challenge themselves and push towards new limits.

The setlist, while actually smaller than 5thmix, is way more dense with bangers to make pretty much a quintessential DDR setlist. They got funky grooves, sugary speedcore, eurobeat, J-pop, penis music, whatever the fuck you'd classify telephone operator as, the setlist is just fuckin LOADED dude. quality over quantity for sure. My personal favorite song in the setlist is www.blonde girl, that shit goes directly into my bloodstream dude fuck yeah

The biggest tonal change of DDRMAX just comes from its difficulty. This game is HARD, dude. I'm still not that great at DDR with my skill mostly capping out around the high 8-low 9 mark for heavy charts, and I found I wasn't able to clear a lot of the heavy charts in this game. I've noticed that compared to the earlier generation of DDR, this game is much more punishing with misses and it was extremely common for me to slip up and watch my entire health meter just plummet right into danger booing territory. Considering the fact that this is the 6th mix in the series and I'm sure that the people living in arcades at an eternal DDR grind needed something new to eat so konami had to deliver the goods, but it does come at the cost of feeling like quite a difficulty spike. The game doesn't even have foot ratings anymore, so you just kinda have to eyeball a weird 5 point graph to predict how difficult the song might be. Honestly I am fine with the lack of foot ratings because that lack of info definitely made me more willing to experiment and try things that I otherwise might have been scared off by a high foot rating to try.

Self-improvement is the name of the game here, and DDRMAX actually is genius in how it very subtly leads dedicated players to its true goal that they should strive to clear: take the MAX 300 challenge. The game slowly leads you on through notifications that there's something hidden in this game, and only by mastering the game can you find and clear it. By getting a final stage full combo on any heavy-difficulty song, your game will be greeted by the EXTRA STAGE, where MAX 300, the legendary 10-foot boss song, will be your only selection. It's an incredibly difficult song, moving at ludicrous speed and requiring fast reading and faster footwork to actually stand a chance against. Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't clear it myself, though I one day hope to be able to. I can read the notes just fine, I just have slow-ass gamer legs that can't keep up with the heat that song demands. I could clear it in training with the speed set to 2/5 though!!!

This game basically marks where DDR starts cranking up the heat, both metaphorically and literally. Despite the arcade versions remaining on system 573 hardware based off the PS1, the console versions are now on 6th gen hardware. I will admit, the slower PS2 saving times definitely give me some time to breathe after hard songs, so that's pretty cool. I've already been deeply sunk into the DDR realm at this point, and these games just keep staying as fun to play now as they were when I was starting.




(that all being said, pour one out for the redoctane ignition 2.0 pad I was using for all of my DDR sessions up to this point, the DDRMAX heat caused a tear in the fabric that my attempts to recover only ended up worsening. Shoutouts to Tom James, legendary game localizer and the tony hawk of dating sims, for supplying me with the dance pad that got me this far down the rabbithole, and I'm glad I was able to use it to play tokimemomix, but alas, she has reached the end of her times. Now I am using a DDRgame bootleg TX-2000 hard pad that I've coupled with an assload of penny mods and controller converters to work across all my consoles at a tolerable level. It was actually one of the lead directors at Epic Games of all people that helped me get this replacement pad, so I guess my DDR pads are always going to have some sort of game industry connections, for some reason.)

honestly one of the textbook examples of what video games can be. Aesthetically incredible, with both the artstyle and soundtrack being a sensory feast. The gameplay loop is addictive, and the controls make it easy to learn but hard to master. Conceptually it's incredibly easy to grasp, as your ball starts small, and you need to roll things up to be bigger. The runtime is a perfect length where it neither over nor understays its welcome, and there's enough challenge stages with hard goals to keep the more hardcore players invested. Both stylistically and functionally this game rocks and it is a MUST PLAY.

FUCK YEAH, KABOOM

im biased as fuck, this is easily my favorite game on the atari 2600. Using the paddle controller to catch bombs from the mad bomber is hella addicting, specifically due to just how unrelentingly difficult the game is. You gotta be mfin FAST to get anywhere past level 5, and scoring high is actually a reasonable challenge. Unlike Pitfall and Oink, the other two activision games I hit the manuals target challenge score for so far, getting 3000 points in this game to enter the Bucket Brigade takes a sizeable amount of practice and skill to pull off, where you get that one hot run going and it all just comes together, like shit man it's just satisfying as fuck to play this. It just gets me in that flowstate man where every game over has me immediately reaching for that reset button to play some more. God I love kaboom dude if you have an atari and a paddle controller for it this shit is an on-sight play