I never thought that a GTA game would be in handheld format. We had the original two games on the GBA, but that was kind of expected. Chinatown Wars is a brand new hand-tailored experience for the DS and later shoehorned onto the PSP. There are touch-screen controls, a whole new interface, and mini-games galore. This game feels like what GTA 3 would have been if it hadn't gone full 3D. You get the over-the-top perspective, but everything is still in 3D. The game looks really good for a DS game and feels like a unique GTA experience.

The story is your typical GTA gangster revenge story. You play as Huang, whose father was murdered for an ancient sword that was passed down to mark the next mob boss leader. Huang flies to Liberty City to avenge his father's death, get to the bottom of the Triad and gang squabbling, and get that sword back to help his uncle move to the top. The story is full of deceit, betrayal, deception, and revenge and is mostly uninteresting. It doesn't have the charisma, flair, or flavor that the console versions have, mostly due to the lack of voice acting. The story is told through stills and text, which makes sense on the DS, but definitely doesn't give the characters any well-being. Many of the mob members are stereotypical drug and sex addicts, power-hungry, stupid, and Huang can't trust anyone. The story has around 50 missions, and they play out similar to the console version.

The main interface is custom for the DS. You get a PDA-style screen that you can touch. The map is displayed here as well as your radio stations, throwables, and weapon switching, and the menu in the PDA will show your trade info, emails, settings, stats, etc. It's very intuitive and just makes sense. New story missions are given via red emails. These will also give you a shortcut to place a waypoint on the map leading to that new story. There are a lot of quality-of-life things like this thrown in. The GPS map has shortcuts for everything you need, from odd jobs to your safehouses. You can also order ammo and weapons from Ammu-Nation on the PDA as well. They show up at your house, and you get an email telling you when it's ready.

Running around the world of Liberty City feels lively because of the limitations put in place. You can run and jack cars, drive off and kill everyone on the road, and gain your infamous wanted stars. Stars can be dropped by making police cars crash, which will help lower your wanted meter faster. I did feel there were way too many cops around in this game. It seemed every 5–10 cars was a cop car or a pig walking around. I was constantly caught carjacking or running over someone, and I was always running into cop cars. This felt way overdone in this game. Driving around Liberty City does feel great. The game never slows down, and the ambient sound effects of the original radio tunes (they're instrumental and not licensed due to space limitations on the DS carts) make it feel like a living and breathing GTA game on the go.

Missions are varied, but some elements of missions can get quite annoying, causing multiple deaths and restarts. The auto-lock-on feature for shooting isn't that great. You don't always lock on to the closest enemy or an enemy at all. This caused many deaths when I locked onto a car instead of a person shooting at me. You can roll around and dodge people, but many times I was stuck without a weapon and would have to order something from Ammu-Nation, go to my safehouse, wait, pick it up, and go back and restart the mission. Thankfully, you can trip skip if you get to a certain point in longer missions, which saves you time, and you can skip cutscenes. A lot of mini-games surround missions, such as tapping the screen to break locks, mini-games to use cranes, plant bombs, scratch cards, tattoing, and many others. These were a lot of fun, and I was always looking forward to the next one. However,  trying to jack a car and being stuck in a mini-game of hot starting it for the 100th time got old and would make me get busted as you can't back out of it. Most missions vary from shooting, following, and chasing, and some put you on turrets or throw bombs out of a car. Overall, the mission variety is awesome, and I never got bored.

The biggest setback in the game is the new feature of drug dealing. You can use your PDA to see the drug turf map for who buys and sells what. This is required to actually make money for weapons and sometimes even start missions. Some missions require a certain drug type or a large amount of cash. This means setting a GPS waypoint for a dealer who sells said drug and buying some from them. You need to make large profits, so it's best to wait for an email when a dealer is selling at a discount and then turn around and sell it. This takes a lot of time—driving around and waiting around, however. Buying and selling drugs at market value won't get you anywhere. Odd jobs can give you a few bucks, but they don't pay out enough. This really slows the game down and hampers an otherwise fast-paced game. 

When it comes to visuals, the game really shines on the DS. There are small, subtle things, like street lights turning off when you hit the poles. Weather patterns such as lightning strikes casting shadows on the ground, sparks, fire effects, and even being able to close the driver door if it's still open while driving (let go of the accelerator and Huang will close the door). These small changes help make this a high-quality DS experience and set it above the rest in terms of production values. Chinatown Wars may have a forgettable story and characters, some control issues when shooting, some frustrating missions, and a drug dealing mechanic that hinders more than helps, but overall the game is miles above what I thought a portable GTA game could be and in some ways feels better than the PSP GTA games.

Saints Row 1 is kind of annoying as shit to play. Grinding activities fucking sucks once you run out of the fun ones (Demolition Derby and Mayhem). All the other ones I do not enjoy. Driving and shooting in this game is a pain in the ass because there isn't cruise control yet AND I have to play on controller with no mouse aiming. The missions have NO checkpointing so if die to some random bullshit (can often happen), start the whole thing over again. I also didn't really understand how I'm supposed to accumulate enough ammo to play missions tbh. I started with the Rollerz and I was frequently asked to do car shooting. You are not getting more ammo from this, and i could only accumulate like 100 sub machine gun ammo at max around then, it just seemed impossible to play the game.

I was wondering why I didn't have any achievements on this game I know I played quite a bit, and its because I always had cheats on when I was younger. I also just started using cheats for infinite ammo so I could actually have some fun playing the game.

Story wise the game feels kind of lacking. There aren't any real good character stuff like in the later entries, its just like an introduction to this world. Not to say there aren't good character moments, but the side characters kind of felt super constricted to the mission formatting and not real. Like any moment Troy's secret is foreshadowed through his dialogue is really cool. Gat's young love of destruction and mayhem is cute. I really liked Dex and I wish he was in more and didn't just disappear. Then there's Benjmain King, he feels like such a powerhouse character that just steals the show.

Gang stories aren't too crazy. The Rollerz are really forgettable in my opinion and Lin doesn't really do much. The Los Carnales kind of have something going on, but not enough story stuff I think. The Vice Kings feel like the real meat because of Benjamin King, and just the inner turmoil between the characters.

At the end, I did appreciate this as a early point in the Saints history. Like, "wow look at baby Gat". I remembered all the stuff invovling these characters in two and I started feeling like this was some hazy memory world, a sort of odd normalcy before the outrageous rise of The Boss.

addendum: Why the fuck can't you test songs before you buy them? The song store also doesn't show who the artist is, just song titles. The mp3 player is an ingenious idea, letting you play music whenever, but it is wonky as all hell.

A victory for the business side of video games more than the creative -- its biggest achievement was getting itself out on a popular new console starved for a GTA-style game while development of the real deal, GRAND THEFT AUTO IV, took forever. The reward for their shrewd timing was popularity well beyond what they probably would have enjoyed under any other circumstances, because as a game, it's ... fine. And kind of just barely.

Everything about the structure and the gameplay is, of course, incredibly derivative, but there are a few sparks of personality. The story is super basic but probably a hair better-written that most of its contemporaries. It has a good voice cast of interesting names. The narrative throughline of gangs as dysfunctional families is at least consistent and legible. And there are a couple amusing peeks at the chaotic identity that the series would later be known for.

But other than that stuff, there's plenty here to dislike or just be bored by. The side missions are uniformly dire -- slapped together, frustrating, and worst of all, required to some degree just to unlock story missions. I'm a big completionist guy with a lot of shameful map-full-of-icons open-world 100%s on my resume (including all of this game's sequels, incidentally), and even I, having now played through this game twice, haven't ever even entertained the idea of going for it here because of how miserable it would be.

A lot of stuff in this game feels tossed off, fumbled, or poorly thought through. Occasionally it feels like the whole thing is barely hanging together. But it is playable. If you can power through the rough spots there's an engaging enough game in here, and it even has a couple effective story beats which, surprisingly, get a lot of payoff in the later games. And that, of course, is the game's real legacy -- its sequels. The direction this series would end up charting (once again, in a brilliant strategic response to what GTA was doing at the time) ultimately justifies this, and makes one thankful for the somewhat mercenary nature of its development and release.

Calling Resident Evil 5 complex is such a weasel worded way of describing the thing. The game is deeply racist to its core, one of the most tasteless stories I've seen in a long time. Yet, strictly as a mechanical entity, I cannot deny it was quite fun. I played the whole game co-op with a friend, probably a requirement for the game to be any fun, as its clearly the way the entire game is designed around. Some of the boss fights and more challenging bits seem like they would be truly awful with an AI to babysit. The game is a little dated (and not just because of the sub 1800s racism), the cutscene QTEs chief among them. But the set pieces feel suitably spectacular, the stop and pop gameplay makes every encounter feel the right amount of tense and the levels are paced suitably for the mechanics. It makes this game a weird one to chew on. IF you have a friend willing to play through the entire thing with you and IF you both are willing to reckon with how offensive the game is, then i can't say I didn't enjoy playing it. But i can't really recommend it unless you meet those criteria. Maybe just play 4? That one I've heard is pretty good.

This game is an absolute mess but an incredibly charming, glorious mess in all its self-indulgence, bombast, and wild over-ambition. I pretty much always love media that meets these criteria even if that makes it by definition a failure - favorites of mine for those curious are the films Mother and Under the Silverlake (dying to see the original 3 hour cut that got booed at Cannes).

This is a game with a lot of really great ideas and one of the most stylish and creative combat systems I’ve ever seen in a shooter but it’s also a game that’s incredibly frustrating and dull at times - especially as the game weakly stumbles across the finish line with Ada’s campaign. There are so many bullshit and incongruous design choices in this game that it almost seems like it’s trying annoy and confuse the player. The constant QTEs, the linear cover shooting arenas that are totally at odds with the games combat mechanics, the AI partners that can seemingly defeat bosses all by themselves, and that fucking hidden ladder in Leon’s story. All of it makes playing this game a frustrating slog about 50% of the time.

As for the story: RE6 has the most ambitious story in any Resident Evil game and goes full on Fast and Furious in terms of absolutely outrageous action set pieces, indestructible main characters, and unabashed sentimentality. I will fight anyone who compares this to Michael Bay due to the fact that his films are deeply misanthropic, which is the opposite of what this game is. RE6 is relentlessly life affirming and brazenly, at times embarrassingly sentimental. Resident Evil stories have always been dumb fun and I can’t think of a better, more heartening tone for the biggest and dumbest Resident Evil story to take. It’s one of the main reasons I find this game so charming despite being more often than not frustrated and bored while playing.

This is a legitimately mediocre, at times bad game but one where I find its problems so charming and lovable that I’m honestly glad it’s such a mess. Every time I got dragged into another tedious and pace breaking QTE where a character survives multiple unsurvivable injuries in quick succession I felt annoyed but I also had a big dumb smile on my face. I have a great deal of affection for this game but also definitely never want to play it again.

Dude, let me tell you about Resident Evil 1, the original game that made history. You know that tense atmosphere that gives you the chills? That's exactly what Resident Evil 1 delivers. From the graphics to the soundtrack, everything conspires to leave you on edge.

The gameplay is the kind that makes you think twice before opening a door. You're always on the edge, trying to save ammo, searching for essential items, and, of course, trying not to get scared by the surprises the game throws at you.

The story is kind of crazy, but that's what gives it charm. It's like a 90s horror movie, but interactive. There are moments when you just go, 'seriously?' with the plot twists, but in the end, it's all part of the fun.

Resident Evil 1 is one of those games that leaves a mark, you know? It's an absolute classic that will always have a special place in gaming history.