This review has been a long time coming. It's been coming since before the site you're reading this on was founded. It's been coming before some of you were even born.

To know about my relationship with Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, you have to know something about me. I first started this game some 20 years ago, at a time when I couldn't even tie my own shoelaces. In those intervening years, many attempts to beat this game followed. Just off the top of my head, I can remember attempts in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015 and even in 2017, a time period where I didn't play video games a lot. Yet I always came up short. After reaching the game's halfway point - which was hammered into me by rote - Tomb Raider 4 would always get the best of me. I would give up. I would quit.

In 2020, I decided that I was never going to finish this game, and I skimmed through its ending cutscenes so that I could claim that I had beaten it. But I hadn't beaten it. I was a hack, a fraud, a liar. I was practically a member of Congress.

When I started my marathon of the Tomb Raider series in January of this year, this was the game I was looking forward to most. This was my opportunity to make things right, to make the lie a truth, to beat TR4 for good - for once in my life, to get the best of this game, instead of the other way around. I proudly proclaimed to my friends that I was Captain Ahab and Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was my white whale. Of course, nobody has actually read Moby Dick, or they'd have pointed out to me that the story ends with the whale dragging Ahab beneath the waves.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was to be Lara Croft's 'final problem.' Like her detective compatriot Sherlock Holmes, the character was so popular that the creator had burned out, and decided to kill them off. This was to be her last adventure, and she was assigned an appropriately epic quest - saving the world from the scourge of Egyptian god and all-around villain Seth, whom she accidentally releases on a routine raid. Her final send-off was intended to be her biggest adventure yet: huge levels, new abilities and ever more impressive graphics were prepared to accompany her into the afterlife.

The first half of Tomb Raider 4 - up to the point I always gave up at - is the best and most definitive classic TR has ever been. With Lara's new abilities and the tightly focused levels, traversing tombs and temples has never been more fun. There's even a prologue episode with a younger Lara, setting up her rivalry with one-time mentor Werner Von Croy. There are breezy exploration segments, smartly designed puzzles, thrilling timed runs and even a few passable combat sections - something the series has always struggled with. Apart from the introduction, the whole game takes in Egypt, and as a young player, I learned a lot about its ancient mythology just from this game. The race between Lara and a Seth-possessed Von Croy over the world's fate promises a thrilling conclusion to our heroine's last huzzah.

Yet it breaks my heart to say this, but the cracks eventually do start to show. The first half's linearity allows its strong points to shine. Once you get to the point where the game has interconnected levels - almost a sort of open world, and start running into rooms that are dead ends, that's where you should swallow your pride and open a walkthrough, because now it's a lot less focused and you'll want to save your time. The second half's location of keys and gates, with nary a context clue as to what you should do next, almost turns it into a point-and-click adventure game. There are a couple of puzzles whose logic has not been figured out even today, 25 years later. There are even more platforming sections that are made just to fuck with the player. Brute force - or a guide - is the only way through. Somewhere during Tomb Raider 3's development, it seems, Core Design lost their mojo for designing skill-based platforming segments that would throw down the gauntlet and challenge players to make use of everything they'd learned - best illustrated in the endgame of Tomb Raider II. Instead, they opted just to create trial-and-error sections with an instant death on every error.

The most glaring flaw, however is that this game clearly ran out of resources in its second half. Despite the apocalyptic events taking place in the story, the environments hardly convey them. A few half-hearted attempts at showing the brewing storm are made, yet the story tells me the clouds have already burst. The final boss is anticlimactic and subdued, and the final cutscene is too rushed to carry any poignancy. It feels more like a cheap cliffhanger than the 21-gun-salute, fireworks-forming-a-union-jack, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house send-off Lara deserves. Of course we are aware that Eidos bosses found out that Core Design were planning to kill Lara off and screamed at them about it, but all oral histories say it was too late to alter the ending, so why wasn't it made better to begin with?

There isn't even a proper credits screen - after Lara is buried alive, her rival Von Croy (now suddenly back to his usual self) having failed to save her, we are kicked back to the title screen with a staff roll. No stats screen, no 'The End,' and not even a new music track to signal the end of an era - all we get is the same 'danger music' we heard throughout the game's boss encounters (except the final showdown, which lacks gravitas in part because of how awkwardly silent it is). This has to be the worst possible choice for what's supposed to be a downer ending.

This ludonarrative dissonance takes away from the latter half of the game, and I am utterly confident that if The Last Revelation was remade today with its second half done right, it could still be the best Tomb Raider game.

I've read many reviews of TR4 over the years saying that Core Design had gotten lazy with the series, and were pumping games out annually like the new Madden or Call of Duty. I completely disagree. While Tomb Raider 4's latter half does show the hallmarks of money running out during development, of an exhausted development team, and of time constraints, I can't say the developers were lazy with it. The gameplay is the best that classic Tomb Raider has ever been - just compare how many more fan mods were built in the TR4 engine than in any other classic TR. It also looks incredible for its time, and the FMVs are among the best of the era. It's just a pity that in the end, Core Design lacked the resources to make this the farewell it should have been. Not when they had Eidos breathing down their necks.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation will always be my favourite classic TR, the one I have the fondest childhood memories of, the one dearest to my heart, but objectively it's not the best one. That title still goes to the original. It was also the last 'good' Tomb Raider game for several years: the next entry, Chronicles, was a collection of B-sides that was hastily cobbled together like the yearly Madden, and Angel of Darkness is remembered as a promising yet half-finished mess. That was the end of Core Design's control over Tomb Raider, and the series was handed over to Crystal Dynamics.

But hey, that gave us the Legend-Anniversary-Underworld trilogy. Sometimes when God closes a door, he does open a window.

God bless Stella and her walkthrough site. Where would we be without that woman?

"They always feel new - constant, but constantly surprising. They become part of your private autobiography and every time you [play] them a new layer of memory is added to the bond between you. Each performance is a collection of the experiences you have had together. Not many friendships last so long - I suppose the unchanging nature of the music simplifies the dynamic between you - but what would be an unhealthily one-sided affair in your personal life provides a great deal of comfort throughout your professional one. It is even richer if you can always remember the initial naivety, wonder, and thrill that accompanied your first 'date'."

This is a quote from an orchestral conductor about his evolving relationship with great pieces of classical music, but I suspect it's pretty easy for many of us to substitute a couple of words and apply it directly to our experiences with our favorite games. And in the case of RE4 it was a first date to remember.

It was the late spring of 2005, my friend had just bought the game, eight of us crammed into his dorm room at midnight, turned the lights out and the volume up as we played through the first 3 chapters more or less blind. The idea was that we'd pass the controller around whenever the player died, but the first guy somehow stayed alive all the way until chapter 3-2! Us seven spectators had one of the most intense watch-sessions ever, alternating between "AHHHH!" and "EWWWW" and "LOLOL Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks".

Two years later, I bought the Wii version - now I could shoot a Ganado in the leg and then in the face a split second later! It was so damn addictive that I completed the game (for the first time) in one single 16-hour sitting. A friend picked me up to go to a party right after, and I spent the entire time in a hazy half-asleep stupor hovering between RE4 and reality. And while I don't remember this, he said (while laughing his ass off) that at one point I stood in front of a vase and swiped my right arm back and forth in the "break vase" Wiimote gesture for a few seconds.

I've returned to Resident Evil 4 at so many different seasons of my life - playing quick rounds of Mercenaries mode with a warm bottle of milk in my lap waiting for my infant daughter to start fussing, doing a handgun-only pro run when COVID lockdowns first started - that it has to be a five-star game for me. It's not just that I have plenty of memories of it; it's that the game was addictive and fantastic enough that I kept coming back to it to make those memories in the first place, and that's something that no amount of plot contrivances or anticlimactic final acts can take away from it.

Plenty of reviews have waxed lyrical on this game's virtues better than I can, but I wanted to point out how impressed I am with how the iconic village brawl really teaches the new player how to play the game. It establishes from the outset that unlike the zombies from previous games, these guys are capable of running, moving intelligently to flank you, and following you up stairs and through windows. And through a mix of its large enemy swarms, the presence of sloping terrain which means that you will eventually hit an enemy in the face even if you just spray and pray, and the fact that enemies sometimes stagger forwards when hit in the face, and you've created the conditions for even a complete newbie to discover the melee options by accident. And the melee options are part of the extraordinarily robust but viscerally simple gameplay loop that has sustained my interest in this game through countless playthroughs.

I know that this represents the start of the shift away from survival horror that culminated in the all-action RE6 (that's a review I'm kinda dreading to get to) - but taken as it is it's a blockbuster in all the right ways. It looks and sounds fantastic even today, is exceptionally refined in execution, is a bundle of scares on the first run and then unadulterated fun on subsequent playthroughs, and... it's just good, man. Play it!

Documenting this here on Backloggd™ as I'm sure this will cease to be a memory within a few hours:

I just awoke from a nightmare that took place an unspecified amount of time into the future in which the desolate remains of Earth are lorded over by a Nintendo helmed regime and all of the world's conflicts are resolved through massive scale real-life BALLOON FIGHTS. Every balloon pop may as well have been a cannon blast and they always tended to be accompanied by the fading visceral screams of once afloat humans spiraling into a bottomless void, a red mist spewing into the air shortly after their disappearance.

Found this to be a bit unbalanced. Your roll, which is your primary form of weaving cheeks between bullets, absorbs damage far too often. Most enemies just phase in/out of thee board which feels quite lazy. Your gun is automatic yet hiccups every other second. Every encounter (boss or grunt) lacks physical depth, respective to thee playing field. Everything is a bit too large on-screen - rarely does combat extend to shooting something a few inches in front of you. Despite all of this, I really quite loved thee sprite work, & the credit system is one of thee most unique of this batch. They're not measured in lives, but instead in health.

Your character is named Waffle.

Most people nowadays that pick up Xenogears go in knowing it's going to be a good game, a great one, even. Word of its quality has spread gradually over time, primarily due to the success of its descendants; Xenosaga and Xenoblade. What people don’t seem to know is how ambitious it was.
The game having a good story is practically a given thanks to the names behind it, but it's the rest of the game that really impresses. Not only does the game have a ‘normal’ form of combat, in which up to three of your party members use their three attack types to combo their opponents into hell, there’s also gear combat. Gears are the mechs in this game, and unlike the normal characters, gears need to build attack level to combo, rely on fuel, and can’t be healed normally. The game switches between these two combat forms depending on the situation, and each of them are remarkably fleshed out, making it much harder to tire of combat than it is in most jrpgs.
Besides the main combat forms, there are also side modes and mini games such as gear combat. Not the same gear combat as before, the battlin’ gear combat is a lot more comparable to an arena fighter (albeit much less fleshed out) giving the gameplay even more variety. There’s even a speed minigame, a goddamn fully built card game that looks pretty good even now.
Xenogears bleeds creativity and is fully deserving of its legacy. The game is far from perfect - there are some glitches and some party members feel a tad underdeveloped, for example - but it's a truly one-of-a-kind experience worth anyone’s time.

I played this for a project I'm working on with some friends and wooooow this is noooot for me lmao.

Analog Horror type beats have never particularly been my thing but I can vibe with a kinda "x but it's off and kinda creepy" type experience especially if it eases you into that experience after instilling a false sense of security with you.

The problem here is that it kinda just goes down the list of the most obvious creepypasta tropes that you could possibly go for from the word go, like you would think that maybe it would hold off on some of its more creepypasta ass shit for at least a little bit but nah, I feel like it's designed that way to keep a youtube/twitch audience engaged (and I mean it has a streamer mode so I definitely think that's what's up).

It especially feels bizarre when the 3rd act of the game actually feels like it does something far creepier and far more interesting with its concept and the kinda connection and trust we allow programs to have on our computers without fully really thinking much about it sometimes.

It just all feels squandered in the way its all wrapped up and presented. Like if this leaned far more into stuff like the complete access/building you something from that, I really think this could've been something way more interesting than it was but I feel the ARG/Youtuber/Streamer/Game Theorist bait it lays out constantly just had me rolling my eyes the entire time.

Defo for a certain audience and hey more power to them but like I need a little more from something like this. I will say, the visual design and audio design though is perfectly done and I do really think that this person has a lot of potential to make something really special.

Also Kinito asked me what my favorite game was, I said Koudelka and he pulled up Control so frankly he's a fraud.

Buckshot Roulette is a short and simple game of shotgun Russian Roulette between you and a… thing that calls itself “The Dealer”. The Dealer loads up the shotgun with a random number of shells and blanks, and you each take turns shooting the shotgun at either yourselves or your opponent. If you opt to shoot yourself, your opponent’s turn is skipped. You’re each hooked up to a defibrillator with a certain amount of charges that will bring you back to life if you get shot, but there is a limited number of times the defibrillator can be used. The game ends when either you or The Dealer run out of chances to use the defibrillator.

The game does spice things up a little bit by giving you items at the beginning of rounds that you can utilize to help yourself get an advantage. You can get a knife to saw off the end of the shotgun which causes it to do twice the amount of damage, a magnifying glass which lets you peek and see what round is currently loaded into the gun, handcuffs that prevent your opponent from taking a turn, a can of beer that lets you eject whatever round is currently loaded, and a pack of cigarettes that will restore a chance to use the defibrillator. However, The Dealer is also given these exact same items. This adds another layer of strategy to the game, where you’ll have to think about when you want to use the items you’re given, while also considering the items The Dealer has and when they will use them as well.

The game has a pretty cool, yet measured concept. Despite how intriguing The Dealer and the setting are, there isn’t really a narrative to speak of. If you win, you get a results screen and a case full of money. That’s all. The game itself can be figured out pretty easily and beaten in about 30 minutes. The core gameplay, while decent, doesn’t make for something that’s especially replayable in my opinion. I love its low-poly artstyle, and I really dig the techno track that plays in the background. Its presentation in general is really strong and immersive, especially given the game’s setup.

There’s just not a whole lot to this game, which is its only real issue. I had managed expectations going into Buckshot Roulette. I didn’t think that it’d be anything mindblowing considering it’s on sale for $3 on Steam (actually, I guess it technically is mindblowing now that I think about it…). I expected a short, but decent time and that’s exactly what I got. It’s a fun little flavor of the month type of indie game that I do think is worth the $3. Just know ahead of time that you’re really not going to get a whole lot of mileage with it.

I wanted to get this done before Sparking Zero, not that I think it has any chance of releasing soon but I'm also worried about my PS3 so I'm gonna try to clear my games that need it out of the way.

Every complaint I stated in my Review of Raging Blast 1 still stands but for anyone who doesn't wanna click, the tldr is that it is very similar to the first game with just some extra mechanics and balance changes that I am not well versed in the intricacies of this duology to understand it on a deep level. Outside of being able to be hit out of supers, new recovery mechanics, and a beam finisher for pursuits while in high tension mode. Otherwise it still feels floaty, supers lack impact, dash supers still have no range, the cameraman is being paid off by the enemy so its hard to see, the right stick for super attacks is still an awful control idea and its largest new mechanic called Raging Soul are not something I enjoyed either. I in fact hate the raging soul gimmick, and it sucks that I do because it causes the intro song to play and I am always of fan of that. Whoever decided to have its activation be the guard button should have been fired. So many times did I enter high tension but the enemy shot something at me so I intended to guard that it activated. So now I gotta only rely on rush combos for damage because it locks you out of supers and ultimate attacks without a specific customization item until you run out of ki. Sure I'm getting 20 hit combos, doing twice the work that any ai above normal can vanish out of at any time with a vanish for the same damage I could get for a 5 hit launcher into an ult. The game seems to have wanted to try to be a more competitive style.

The attention to detail from the first game is still here from the transformation scenes, Janemba's cubey movement and in battle dialogue. The customization is also more front facing than ever as it is the main component of the game's main mode, Galaxy. It stops Goku and Vegeta from taking up 50% of the slots and Orange Gi without the weighted clothes underneath still goes hard with SSJ3. There is no dragon fist still however so I'm gonna dock points for that. The roster is more to what I expect from a Db game, pulling from movies and adding in some baffling absences from the first game such as Ultimate Gohan. I will also give the game props for using some damn near unused characters to this day like Neizu, Dore, Tarble, Android 14 and 15. Also I got actually Future Gohan'd by the android's fusion attack, the disrespect on those damage numbers was off the charts. I was on my last health bar and it did 99999 damage. LSSJ Broly is still yellow hair despite SSJ Broly being blue, but at least SSJ3 Broly has the green he deserves. Again its a nitpick but if you're gonna have blue hair broly, then have green otherwise make SSJ yellow too.

As I said above Galaxy Mode is the main single player feature as it gives you the credits when you beat everyone's and its unfortunately a tedious gimmick fight slobberknocker. Its similar to Smash Ultimate's World of Light now that I think about it. While each mission has difficulty ranging from easy to ultimate and the AI does get more aggressive/actually uses the defensive abilities on the higher ones, the main difficulty comes from the debuffs you will get. Health constantly draining, start near death (one hit from it), beat the enemy before raging soul runs out etc. Sometimes the game throws you a bone and YOU get the buffs like constantly recharging ki but those are few and far between. There are seal items in the game that can counter those debuffs, but they come in levels 1-3,4 or 5 and it seems arbitrary on which strength you need. Sometimes the level 1 seal works on the ultimate difficulty and sometimes level 5 won't stop it at all. But when you get one of those seals to work, then the difficulty drops dramatically. Its honestly super lazy. You can either just try to get by with what you have like I did or leave that character's galaxy and go to another's to maybe find said seal. With the exception of the fights with "perfect action" criteria, I didn't see any indicator of "this battle has an item reward" and I got so tired of the "beat the enemy before raging soul runs out" fights that I just looked it up. Some character based rewards are out of order and by some I mean Future Gohan. I went through his, got to a perfect action mission only to find out I still didn't have his SSJ transformation and after doing all of his battles. Other times a move or ability you might need isn't unlocked until after beating the "perfect action" mission that required it to fulfill, so beat the mission then do it again and thats just a dumb design decision.

I get it, we've seen the Z story 18 million times before, so how about you make your own like what handheld games like Shin Budokai Another Road did? A selling point of this game is the "Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans" OVA and it has an easy way for this "dream match" with movie characters already explained in it. Instead its just "fight with these criteria for every single character in the game". Every character didn't need one, Saibaman didn't need one, Cell Jr didn't need one. You could tell they didn't really know what to do with some of these characters because they had maybe 4 battles to their name and fighting Saibamen, Guildo and Chiaotzu with draining hp every 3 characters probably means you should have cut down.

This also might not be the game's fault as the copy is used and a little dinged up, but the game crashed on me three times on a specific mention. One time my PS3 just full on restarted, I actually thought I lost power but didn't and the other times whenever Kid Trunks was tagged in and went SSJ the game would hard freeze the console. Taking the disc out and putting it back in seemed to fix the problem as I never had the issue again on that mission or any other.

One of the other solo modes was the World Tournament, you had access to both the World tournament and Cell games, complete with ring out option for the former (I didn't look for the latter). Did both on hard and it was nice to just have a fight without any sort of buff or debuff on either side. The other solo mode was Battle Zone and I was just so fed up with the game by that point that I only did the first one. It seemed like a standard arcade ladder affair with the fights having no real gimmicks to bog it down, again only for the first one cuz there is a handicap option that I assume comes into play in the later ones.

TLDR: Having gone through both now, I realize I didn't miss out on much skipping these back in the day as harsh as that sounds. Raging Blast 2 in my eyes did not fix any issue I had with the gameplay of the first. The increased roster in terms of inclusion was much better which didn't cut down on individual attention to detail in the characters and the customization in game is still strong. Its main single player mode however is a quantity over quality, annoying gimmick filled slog. The game was at its best when it was just a strong enemy with not bonuses on either side. Half of Galaxy Mode's content could have been culled with no loss of anything of value. I will never like right stick controls for supers and I pray that Sparking Zero takes more from BT3 with actual button combinations instead.