You guys ever read those choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps books? This is basically one of those but you have to start back at page 1 every time.

Uniquely spiritual

Notable for pinpointing the moment of Ace Combat's decline. When a franchise plays this similarly across installments, there is literally no reason to play the ones that aren't that good.

Looks great, plays great, sounds great, but when the politics and philosophy are this overtly shit it's hard not to think back to The Belkan War and Electrosphere. What could have been...

Skirts up against ideas and images but ultimately decides that trying to confuse the player and itself will give an impression of meaning. The itch.io template.

Goku and Luffy deserve better.

one of gaming's most realistic worlds

Streets of Rage for people who want to be punched

Genuine accomplishment in many aspects - one for the fans only, but you weren't gonna pick up a licensed PS2 game from 20 years ago otherwise, were you? If you do, you will need a strategy guide - but that is an intrinsic part of the 2000s action-adventure experience.

"This is a surprisingly faithful recreation of the cartoon for an early PSX title" I remark to myself moments before retrying a platforming section about collecting dinosaur eggs for the thirty-second time

Officially licensed MUGENcore.

I played so many of these tedious little things in 2022

JKS games always have healthy doses of cynicism and world-weariness, but this one never gilds its ideas in light. Revelry in misery doesn't suit.

See above, but this time it's Kurosawa's colour filmography.

Insubstantially does a lot less with its concept than I thought it was going to, and its insistence of planning on your behalf robs players of something nothing and no one in the medium has done before now. However, it does play like a total joy; the PVP elements, despite initially appearing as a tedious hindrance, turn out to be the game's biggest triumph.

anti-game

Fun to go back down memory lane and play the game that caused me to spend 2 years growing out my hair because a girl said the box art was "hot". Feels somewhat pedestrian in the light of the modern day, but no CAG has ever put together a better 1v1 scenario than Dante vs Vergil. Ironically, most of the other boss fights are bullshit.

These games about depression and anxiety are giving me depression and anxiety

Good to see Flash game designers squeezing some coins out of the Game Pass purse.

They made slaughtermaps for nuDOOM and I think that's cool.

Unsure why this thing decided to course-correct back towards lore when the first installment rightly understood DOOM as an expression of violence without words, but still has its bright spots. The final boss is an IQ test, and gamers failed without pride or dignity.

Streets of Rage for people who never been punched

If this was made by someone other than notch I'd probably write something like "there's a decent idea here - you just need to iterate on it a bit and cut back on arduous self-pity!" but nah man fuck notch

Wario Land 5

Could have stood up at the top of this list, but the tedium of the RPG encounters wore at my soul and soles after a while. Like Moon Remix RPG, I just find "critical commentary on RPGs that involves playing an RPG" to be a worst-of-all-worlds experience.

The best thing anyone has done with the Bitsy Engine.

I cracked a few smiles! Pretentiousness that circles all the way around.

Guys, you're not gonna believe this. Are you familiar with the concept of "the fourth wall"? An indie developer is releasing a game that looks and plays like an original PlayStation title... and it's on the Nintendo Switch! But get this - not everything is as it seems! There are many obtuse secrets that you won't be able to find without YouTube! And the noise of the footsteps is really annoying! I can't wait man, about time someone had this idea

They (the car people) found a way to make Gran Turismo even more mind-boringly soulless and then accused SEGA AM2 of being an accessory to the crime.

Interchangeable with like five other SEGA 3D fighters from the era. Just because one of the guys has a bit of a Jotaro thing going on doesn't mean we need to laud it as a classic or whatever.

Streets of Rage for people who have been punched in the head

Has an inherent degree of shame akin to doing a children's shape puzzle or reading a nursery rhyme book, but it's charming. Like one of those VTech laptops you had as a kid.

much the same

Starts as a joke but eventually reveals itself to have mechanical and meditative qualities

Lack of accessibility features makes this kinda painful to play for extended periods of time - given the game is only like 2 hours long, "an extended period of time" need only be 10 minutes. It's fun! Gamera is in it!

didn't quite live the hype - the oppressive difficulty makes it difficult to believe that this truly is a game about about finding your groove and confidence, but nonetheless charm overcomes (see also: earthbound)

Coming back to this after a few months of Strive is like stumbling into a Discrete Mathematics 302 seminar with half your fingers broken

"Playable anime"? You're damn right. I'm advancing a story with the square button.

hate 40-hour AAA games, hate paying £60 for them, love five-minute indie explorations of hard-boiled middle-english homosexuality, simple as

I like the first level a lot. Unfortunately, there are eight levels.

Despite being one of the most polygonal experiences of my life, this is one of the few games I can think of that respects nature more than man. I should play Rain World.

Like watching a 76 minute video of someone applying brown shoe polish to a turd that's slowly curling its way out of Mickey Mouse's arsehole

i will probably get banned from this website if i share my thoughts on this game

Je n'ai compris qu'environ la moitié de ce qui se disait, mais cela m'a tenu en haleine tout au long. Il n'y a pas de traduction en anglais ? !

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/m1NDdY5UhxU/maxresdefault.jpg

https://static.scientificamerican.com/blogs/cache/file/8DB54395-72F4-48AF-8E850896766C5751_source.jpg?w=590&h=800&56152E4C-1B93-4526-A456EFF8D1E85035

like with real psychedelics, you can play too many of these and build up a chemical intolerance

One of Nintendo's few "art games"

Proof positive that trying to make your video game sequel more like a video game and less like something else is a one-way ticket to making a bad video game.

Got 2/3rds of the way into the PS2 port but eventually had to give up due to the pressures of trying to play an adaptive difficulty TPS on a PS2 controller. Came back on PC and cheated my way back to where I was within minutes. The power-rush of playing with unlimited bullet time and assault rifle ammo was too salacious to ignore. An absolute romp that recalled my teenage Quake III years with such glee.

(PS2 port)
It wasn't until I played the PC version that I realised just how much of an injustice this version is. Like trying to read a comic book by sellotaping the panels together.

Did this one the honest way and really loved it. Surprisingly sexy and romantic and intensely messy, as a love story should be. Wish it had played more into the duelling/cooperating protagonists angle, but what we got was short and sweet - that often leaves a stronger impression than a 12-hour labour.

The way this is all terribly laid out in a labyrinth of locked doors and keys reminded me so much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE that it made me happy. Maybe one day I can make a better game.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/SimonDedalus/review/573057/

Nobody knows what it means! It's provocative! Gets the people going!

Back in the Freedom Unite and Tri days, I used to get in a lot of fights with people who called the Monster Hunter games slow/obtuse/boring/awkward/punishing. Maybe they were right all along.

Discovered this baby through Pac-Motos in Pac-Man Museum. Really pleasant because it reminded me of Chu Chu Rocket in some sort of weird way that only makes sense to me personally.

Denigrating of a classic thats feels a little like the Star Wars Original Trilogy's bluray release, unnecessary smoothing all over the place and the inclusion of a comically sexy CGI monstrosity that purports to be a lady

Kinda satisfying to build teams out of literally anyone in the One Piece roster (even Gaimon and Sarfunkel are here!) but I already sold my soul to Treasure Cruise yeards back and this is just COD Domination on flat plains dressed vaguely like locations from the manga.

A loving attention to detail, but there are only five things to detail.

I love Tetris. I love One Piece. I loved being on the internet at the turn of the millennium. This game has everything I love.

just pisses me off so much

fuck off man

It's Pac-Man with modern gamefeel.

Painfully slow.

Invisible walls and obtuse arthausery obscure a few key moments, but this is up there with Pathologic 2 in the "Playable Tarkovsky movie" sweepstakes.

Existed much more viscerally as a theoretical concept on the pages of Nintendo Official Magazine

Feels fake. But it isn't fake. It's real.

Another one of those games like Earthbound that includes a few too many teaspoons of one ingredient (the nightmare mimics (you thought i was gonna say zero g, didn't you? well guess what - i thought those parts rocked)) that it ends up overpowering the meal in ways you'd prefer not to remember. Doesn't quite live up to its initial premise, but definitely one of the only imsims I've played where I didn't treat every human and mechanical interaction like a practical joke to be played and replayed upon unsuspecting dimwit robot-CPU-people

Not so much a game as it is an opportunity to congratulate a web dev on being really smart, nobly burning his talent on a DickTreesque crusade of no real merit.

As with The Ancient Gods above, it's nice to see modern-day id Software acknowledge and even advance the causes of their fans - even if some of their fans are also employees of the company.

Museum piece

too hard for the common man and knows it; should be recognised for its empathy and understanding of mortals

(Completed in Left 4 Dead 2)

a surprisingly strong realisation of REmake in the Source engine; a great time with friends - RE co-op is traditionally run-and-gun, but this made me wonder if it's possible for mansion-crawlers to go four-player

These days, it's rare that I feel the sweat on my palms while holding a controller. It surprised me in many ways. Probably the closest thing you can get to experiencing Resident Evil 4 all over again.

Modern-day filmgoers and critics often lament the death of the mid-budget action movie - what they haven't yet realised is that most of these movies now screen on games consoles.

(replay)
nothing needs to be said

Goes from strength to weakness to strength in a way that is wholly admirable but not particularly memorable outside of the depowered fantasies and a few puzzles that have been exported wholesale from Saw.

Feels perverse to take the thing that RE7 was least suited for and build a demo around it.

one of the best lowbrow works about highbrow topics that the medium has created thus far

give it a few more years to stew in the nostalgic juices of the 2020s and this will be a stylistic rival to Type 4

I Am All of Me was my second-most played Spotify song this year.

Postmodern / neomodernist shmup that is a lot more fun when you stop counting lives and points and passing minutes. Hugely slept on, but don't play it right after the original - this behemoth cowers in the shadow of its 64-bit junior.

In much the same way as Shadow the Hedgehog, its enduring legacy has very little to do with the game itself.

You head into this thing expecting it to be some kind of joke or shitpost or something, and then have to grapple with the realisation that it was an entirely earnest production that James Gandolfini gave hours of his precious life to, and then you start to feel awkward about it and wish the pastrami sandwiches would collect themselves faster.

You know when you take some kind of amphetamine and it makes all the muscles in your mouth clench tight and you can taste the iron in your gums? Yeah. That is this kind of drug trip.

Spend 10 hours learning the systems at play here, carefully plotting diplomatic relations with a galaxy of xenomorons who eat through their penises or whatever, and then have your run end unceremoniously when you discover your allies have sold you out to be colonised by a race you hadn't even met yet. Too brutal for a softhearted individual like me.

Makes me think I may have been too unkind to Street Fighter V at launch.

One of my most shocking discoveries this year - a Dragon Ball fighting game that actually plays like a fighting game. I assume this one never took off with DBZ fans because its emphasis on tactical, intellectual play does not reflect the ethos of the series.

A unique crystalline 2000AD vibe that's comparable to Ridge Racer V. One of those games you can't properly explore without friends or rivals, but it's nice to imagine yourself in these multi-tiered spaces.

Deftly hews a line between Old World and New World Tetris, leaning heavily on the surrealist/laserdisc aesthetics of the era that had just passed. Perfectly pleasant play.

It's more Toree! Yipee!

The fun factor plateaus quickly when the CPU finds its hands, but few games this year gave me more ecstasy than the mechanical discoveries RE: juggling, bounds, etc. here.

no comment

Could have used the time spent working on this game to work on your game instead (the game, in this case, being the confidence of your personal attributes, characteristics, and overall personality to win the affection of the woman you like)

A historical artifact that verges on becoming a genuinely fun game to play.

Wish I could wipe out my memories of this game

me and my gf do it every morning when we wake up 😊

Obviously a victim of its own hype and influence. Pleasant enough, but there's only so many times in my life I can push a little sprite around a board and go "Woah, trippy" while attempting to ascribe metaphor and meaning to random flashes of light on my screen. It's exhausting, isn't it? We put ourselves through so much on here.