When I was a kid, I was never all that good at playing arcade fighters.

Today, thanks to 3rd Strike, I can confidently say I'm still no good at playing arcade fighters.

It's a great game, though.

I’ve held an interest in this game ever since I found out about it. There’s something about surreal artwork that’s always fascinated me and this is no different.

I love that artists like Osamu Sato, the creator of this game, have had the opportunity to realize their unique visions and at one time had the ability to release these niche products in a physical medium. I’d imagine it was as difficult for them to find financial backing for their projects as it was for auteurs like David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky in their burgeoning years.

I suppose I’ve mastered or performed a 100% run since I completed a full year of in-game days, but who's to say what a completist run looks like in this game? Around day 45, I happened to trigger every(?) cutscene in the game. I could have stopped there, but even as the days wore on, I kept finding new things–whether they be textures, models, or music.

Overall, though, I think the game is more interesting conceptually than it is to actually pick up and play. To finish a year feels like an endurance test after a while. Once I triggered those cutscenes, I didn’t know if it was even worth continuing at all. What does the game mean, anyway? I felt like I was able to make some vague, semiconscious connections to certain settings and models, but I didn’t know if I was right or not. Maybe that's the point.

We know that in our dreams, we experience the familiar with the unfamiliar. We also know that dreams have been open to interpretation since the time of the ancient Mesopotamians to the time of Freud. Scientists have worked hard to uncover the neuroscientific secrets of sleep and, while much has been accomplished in the field, very little can explain our dreams.

Maybe Sato wanted to animate those concepts through this game–allow his audience to play a game like one dreams, on an automatic subconscious level.

Either way, I can’t say it was a bad experience. It gave me time to think and that’s always a good thing.

It's Tetris. Tetris is a perfect game.

The developers of this game added some audio and visual bells and whistles to Tetris Effect to make it an interesting experience. While the EDM isn't exactly my thing, the musical effects are quite cool and add an interesting element to the gameplay. The visuals, while very good, can get in the way and distract from the game at hand. It's like they polished a fine marble statue until the glint off of it distracted from the artwork itself.

At the end of the day, it's a stylized version of a perfect game. I can't detract too much from it.

Now, I'm a big wrestling fan. I grew up in the 90s watching every WWF broadcast on cable and every ECW tape I could get my hands on. Today, I love everything from the smallest indie promotions to brands like DDT, GCPW, New Japan, WWE, and AEW. As a child of the Attitude Era, I also had my own standard-issue copy of No Mercy for the N64.

Surely, this game should be catnip for someone like me.

This just isn't the case.

Look, I appreciate that THQ produced this game and that you have the same storytelling system as No Mercy. But, when the first thing you see is a bad Unity render of Kenny Omega—one of the company's executive vice presidents, mind you—it acts as a harbinger of what's to come from the game. Everything just feels either a bit off or a bit empty in the game.

Any mode outside of a one-on-one competition is a nightmare in terms of gameplay mechanics. 2K Games has figured out the flow of televised American professional wrestling matches thanks to its annual obligation to the WWE. Fight Forever, on the other hand, thinks a fun tag team match means the unlimited ability to burn your tag (or the ability to interrupt a pinfall attempt once as the non-legal partner). Four-way matches also become a grind in this way but also because there isn't a ring-out stamina meter for fatigued opponents.

My main focus was the gameplay and I did have some fun playing the game, but there were little notions nagging at me while playing, such as:

- The Unity Engine has rendering and loading difficulties for no real apparent reason.
- The creation suite is paltry.
- The roster has changed so much from June that the CM Punk portion of the Road to Elite has become a slice of accidental comedy.
- Not including the trademarked themes for the wrestlers when the budget for the game has already ballooned to a reported $10 million.
- Match ratings based on something that is never made apparent. A match with three A's will receive a B overall and 2 stars. What does that even mean?

I don't know. I did have fun at first until everything became apparent. Instead of thinking of this as a reflection of AEW's failures, hopefully, it can be seen in the future as an indication of its growing pains.

I'm a big fan of this franchise, so I want to like this game. I really do.

The real problem with the game is the writing. The story has more twists than a pretzel factory. It becomes nearly incomprehensible by the end of the game.

Oh, and some of those new mechanics that they threw in. Like the mess of having to walk through secret passages or, god forbid, having to chase someone in a boat.

I heard the next game is better, anyway.