With the mixed reception, failure to meet financial expectations, and eventual abandonment of Anthem, BioWare became yet another victim of EA's money-driven decisions hollowing out the spirit of the company, and the disappointing release of Mass Effect: Andromeda just two years earlier made this blow hit just that much harder. Before all of this happened, though, their legacy as a studio responsible for continuously making innovative and gripping RPGs was virtually untainted, and since Mass Effect is probably their most popular original IP, I wanted to have the first game in the series serve as my intro to their games. Although I have been quite busy over the past month and had to devote most of my time to other things, my actual playthrough of Mass Effect only took roughly 12 hours, and while not every element of this game clicked with me, I still liked enough of its elements to say that I've enjoyed my time with it overall.

When it comes to these kinds of space opera games, I often find their core stories more interesting than their backstories and other bits of extra information, but I was surprised to find that this wasn't the case here. Don't get me wrong, the plot of Mass Effect had me invested right from the outset, but I found the game's lore to be genuinely fascinating, and I ended up having a lot more fun reading about the different races, wars, planets, politics, and technology that surrounded Commander Shepard's attempts at stopping the reawakening of the Reapers than I thought I would, and they also complimented the sleek art direction and awesome synth score. The varied cast of characters in Mass Effect also helped sell this game's world to me, because even with the stiff, robotic animations and use of real-time cutscenes where textures only render about half the time, the game's solid writing and especially great voice acting made each member of my crew feel three-dimensional. Despite the binary morality system at play here where you can only really choose to be either explicitly good or explicitly bad, the more major decisions you make throughout Mass Effect are able to transcend that entirely, as they heavily affect the outcome of the story while also having enough layers to them to make choosing the best option a much more complicated process than it initially seems.

In terms of its writing, presentation, and role-playing elements, Mass Effect was really strong, but what held it back for me was its actual gameplay. The game's combat is definitely playable, but it shows its age in almost every way, with the imbalanced weapons, clunky menus for using your abilities, and a barely functioning cover system made each shootout feel less like a game of tactical decision-making and more like randomly firing at whatever's in front of you and hoping that you don't get killed in the process. Speaking of which, the squad-based elements of Mass Effect didn't work at all for me, as the limited commands and genuinely awful AI from my squad mates just ended up making me use them as distractions or human shields more than anything. The worst element of Mass Effect would easily be the Mako, with its unreliable controls and the repetitive enemies and layouts for its sequences made using it feel like a chore during the campaign and a complete waste of time whenever it came to the already forgettable side content. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed my time with Mass Effect overall, and while I do plan on completing the trilogy at some point, I'm pretty sure that my next BioWare game will be Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Since I wasn't that crazy about the first game to begin with and thought that the second game was astoundingly terrible in ways where I could barely believe the franchise even kept going after its release, I was unsure if I even wanted to go ahead and play Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, and so I took a bit of a break from the series after playing the first two entries within two weeks of each other. As time went on, though, I heard quite a few people say that it was well worth it, and that made me decided to finally bite the bullet and play through the fan favorite of the franchise. Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening was one of those games that I really looked forward to jumping back into whenever I wasn't already playing it, because while it definitely isn't perfect in some outright frustrating ways, it was a massive improvement on Devil May Cry and especially Devil May Cry 2.

Before I even got the chance to control Dante, I had a feeling that I was going to like this game thanks to its cutscenes, because if there's one thing that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening has in spades, it's a strong personality. Instead of being vessels for dull exposition, the cutscenes in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening are loaded with hyperactive camerawork and editing, blood-pumping music, campy dialogue, and some immensely over-the-top action that made my jaw drop multiple times, and I looked forward to every single cutscene to the point where they were my favorite element of the entire game. The stylized cutscenes were complimented by Dante's much more lovable personality, fleshed out characters, and a genuinely compelling story (a first for the series!), and seeing how Dante's relationship with Vergil evolved alongside Lady's relationship with her father Arkham was compelling from start to finish. The gameplay here got a much-needed revamp from the first game's barebones combat and the second game being entirely dedicated to having you spam the square button forever, as the twitchy, fast-paced combat is bolstered by a combo system that rewards speed and a whole slew of weapons and styles to choose from, the former of which you can switch on the fly. Not only did the variety of options to choose from alone make for a lot of experimentation, but the weapons and styles themselves being genuinely really cool made me excited to unlock new items and moves, and I got to try pretty much everything at least once while still clinging onto my favorite playstyle. The bosses are also loads of fun to fight with how hectic and varied they are, and while I do wish that they were spaced out a bit more and I especially wasn't a fan of the unnecessary repeated fights (looking at you, Mission 18), their Gothic designs made every encounter memorable.

Pretty much everyone who has played Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening talks about how difficult it is, and while it is pretty challenging, I don't think it would be half as hard to play as it is if it wasn't for the atrocious in-game camera. I don't know what it is about this series, but I haven't been able to play a single Devil May Cry game with a genuinely good camera system, as it constantly jerks around to the point where you can't even see what you're trying to kill, let alone avoid their attacks. This also ended up impacting the still-clunky platforming, barely functional enemy targeting system, the gimmick enemies that break the flow of combat with how they can only be killed in one or two ways, and practically every boss fight in the game, as attacks constantly come at you from off-screen in ways where you don't even get the chance to react to them to the point where it makes certain fights flat-out annoying to play. Although I wouldn't really call Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening the masterpiece that so many people have crowned it as over the years, it's still a great game that proved to be hugely influential to the character action genre, and while I'm not that interested in playing Devil May Cry 4 or DmC: Devil May Cry, I definitely do want to eventually check out Devil May Cry 5 when I come across a copy of it.

Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata is a game that I've been aware of ever since it came out due to me watching Dunkey's video on it once or twice, but I didn't get the urge to actually go out of my way to play it until years later. Since I've mostly been focusing my attention on games from the 7th console generation and everything that came out before it, I put my search for a copy of NieR: Automata on hold for the time being, but when a friend of mine lent me her copy of the game back in December (shoutout to Catherine, by the way), I knew that it was the first thing I wanted to do when I got back to York in January. After spending a week beating the game's three main paths across a total of just under 23 hours, I can safely say that NieR: Automata blew me away on every level, and even with all of the praise that has been built up for it over the years, I really didn't expect to love it as much as I did.

Since God Hand is currently my fifth favorite game of all time, I was really interested to see what a studio originally comprised of people who worked on that game would be able to come up with on their own, and while I didn't actually realize that NieR: Automata was made by PlatinumGames until I actually booted it up for the first time, I don't think I could've asked for a better introduction to their body of work. In terms of its core gameplay, NieR: Automata works wonders as a hack-&-slash character action game that's equal parts hectic and buttery-smooth, as the amount of mechanics to manage and aggressive machines to keep track of made each enemy encounter feel just as exciting and tense as the last, and I found myself constantly countering moves and unleashing combos that were incredibly satisfying to pull off successfully. The game's implementation of RPG elements worked really well alongside this, with the unique plug-in chip upgrades feeling varied in their uses while also making my own approach to combat feel personalized. NieR: Automata was also very admirable in how willing it was to branch out and go beyond its respective genre, as its massive sense of scale was achieved brilliantly through its implementation of shoot 'em up and even text adventure sections throughout its more conventional character action missions. On top of just feeling great on their own, the slick, responsive controls made me appreciate the game's gorgeous artstyle and world design, and travelling around the game's open world made me feel just as excited to see all of the new, dilapidated vistas as it made me anticipate whatever new loot or sidequests came my way. Keiichi Okabe's phenomenal score is very easily one of the very best video game scores I've heard in a long time, as his music perfectly captures the melancholic, yet grandiose and profoundly emotional tone of the game itself.

NieR: Automata was one of those games where every element on display was terrific in its execution, but one element that especially impressed me would be its writing. Across its multiple pathways and shifts in perspective, NieR: Automata explores densely philosophical themes such as what it means to be human, the motivations that fuel violence and war, and the value of our own individual lives, and its navigation of these topics through the increasingly fractured psychology of its main cast was riveting. The story itself was already compelling in its twists, turns, and overwhelming sense of loss and tragedy, but the layers of existentialism that grew more prevalent as the game went on made for some outright heartbreaking moments, and it all made the game's stakes feel heavy and palpable. The game's structure involving multiple playthroughs worked really well for me, with the slight shifts and additions in gameplay being welcome changes that were a perfect fit for the recontextualization of certain events, motivations, and reveals. There's no doubt in my mind that NieR: Automata was one of the very best games I have ever played, and not only do I want to play what directly preceded it, NieR, but I also want to eventually play the game that NieR was a spinoff of, Drakengard.

What's annoying about not having any next-gen consoles is that, despite how many interesting new games came out last year, I didn't have the opportunity to give any of them a shot, and so the only game released in 2023 that I got to play and review was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. While that game was decent (albeit massively disappointing), I wanted to play at least one more game before the year ended, and while I missed that date by one day, I'm happy that I managed to snag a copy of Super Mario Bros. Wonder either way. Even with my excitement for this game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder managed to surpass my expectations with flying colors, and I'd honestly consider it to be the best 2D Mario game since Super Mario World.

After years of oversaturating the market with mediocre 2D platformers through the New Super Mario Bros. series and even making their fans make their own levels across two separate consoles (not that there's anything wrong with that, because I really like both of the Super Mario Maker games), Nintendo finally decided to make a 2D Mario game with some soul to it, and I'd say they succeeded. Instead of being gimmicky and forgettable, the levels here in Super Mario Bros. Wonder are tightly constructed and bursting with new ideas, as each stage features wacky enemies, memorable themes, and interesting mechanics that build off of each other as the game goes along. All of this is true even before you come across each level's Wonder Flower, and once you do find it, the level morphs into something else entirely, and it only amplified just how creative the levels were, how gorgeous the new and more expressive visual style was, and how fun all of it was to play. The Wonder Flower sequences were easily my favorite moments in the game, but they were taken to completely new heights once I started going for the Special World stages, as their more demanding and even wilder level design had me grinning from ear to ear. Aside from the more conventional platforming stages, Super Mario Bros. Wonder also features different kinds of levels such as Wiggler races, Badge challenges, enemy challenges, and search parties, and these provided some decent variety while also being charming in their own right.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is one of those games whose general excellence makes me feel bad to even consider saying anything negative about it, but there were some aspects of the game that could've been better. For starters, the new Badge system was a bit mixed for me, as I rarely felt the urge to use anything outside of the Parachute Cap Badge and certain levels pretty much requiring the use of certain badges (namely the Dolphin Kick Badge, which makes swimming actually fun to control) without saying so beforehand led to me begrudgingly restarting the level just to swap badges. Among other reasons, Super Mario Bros. Wonder marked a new era in the franchise through its (comparatively) extensive use of voice acting, and while Kevin Afghani was spot on as Charles Martinet's replacement for Mario and Luigi, I thought that the game didn't really need so many Talking Flowers, even if Mick Wingert's performance as them wasn't nearly as annoying as it could've been. 2D Mario games always got the short end of the stick when it came to boss fights, but even with the implementation of the Wonder Flower, the repeated fights against Bowser Jr. still left a lot to be desired, and they weren't distinct enough from each other to be all that interesting to me. All of those flaws pale in comparison to what Super Mario Bros. Wonder got right, though, as I'd easily consider it to be my favorite 2D Mario game to date, and I can't wait to go back and get as close to completing it 100% as I can.

Kentucky Route Zero was a game that I had first heard about right around the time I made my Backloggd account, and while I never really knew how long it would take for me to actually get around to playing it, I never could have expected me playing it all the way through using the iOS port, of all things. Despite how often I played them as a kid, I've generally dropped mobile games altogether (aside from the occasional redownload of something like Jetpack Joyride for a week-long nostalgia trip) and I've especially avoided the mobile ports of games I'm actually interested in playing due to how shoddy many of them end up being, but since the iOS version of Kentucky Route Zero was free if you signed in with your Netflix account and cost a whopping $24.99 on other platforms, I decided to give it a go on my phone and spent the next few months playing through it. Putting my lack of experience with the point-&-click adventure genre aside, I can't really say I've played anything like Kentucky Route Zero before, and while not all of its decisions worked for me, I still found it to be a beautiful work of art whose moods and themes stayed in my brain whenever I wasn't playing.

Throughout its five acts and interludes, Kentucky Route Zero ends up feeling more like an interactive novel than a traditional video game, and since that exact phrase has been used by many to describe my top two favorite games ever made, this choice ended up working wonders for me. There's this quiet, yet poignant sense of melancholy and loss that can be found in every one of the creative choices here, as the minimalistic artstyle and user interface, naturalistic and often echoey soundscapes, and the few uses of actual music gave all of the environments a ghostly sense of decay. Along with the characters in Kentucky Route Zero all have some layer of tragedy to them, the conversations that they have throughout the game primarily consist of opaque recollections of people, places, and objects that have either disappeared long ago due to company buyouts and bureaucratic hurdles or never even existed to begin with, and having so many of these personal stories mesh together made the game's themes of memories, nostalgia, and the death of Americana at the hands of unchecked capitalism both prevalent within the context of the game's world and relevant outside of it. The strength of the writing in Kentucky Route Zero was just as prevalent in the story's actual structure and beats as it was in the sorrowful dialogue, with the game blending elements of literature, film, and even theatre into its paranormal and often abstract brand of magical realism to create an experience that is as ambitious as it is ever-changing.

Maybe it's because my attention span has been ruined by the more high-octane games I've been playing recently, but despite how fascinating and enthralling I found the ideas of Kentucky Route Zero to be throughout my playthrough, I couldn't actually play it for more than, say, 20 or 30 minutes at a time. In small chunks, this game is great, but longer play sessions of Kentucky Route Zero often left me feeling restless, and since some of the scenes felt outright sluggish in their pace rather than deliberate like the rest of the game, I found myself cutting my sessions short just to allow myself to appreciate the game more when I came back later on. The intervals were also a bit of a mixed bag for me, because while some of them were very effective, others were either too short to have any real impact or went on for too long without saying anything new, and I do wish that they were a bit more consistent overall. Kentucky Route Zero also features a final act that essentially boils down to running around in a circle and hoping that an interactable person or object would actually spawn in, and since they only appeared about 50% of the time for me, I had to quit out and restart this section multiple times just to get it to work properly. Kentucky Route Zero is not a perfect game in my eyes, but it's still brilliant and evocative in everything that it does well, and I'm really interested in seeing what Cardboard Computer has up their sleeve in the future.

Long before I got to actually play any of these games, I remember seeing an image online of a bargain bin with an entire stack of used copies of Max Payne 3 being right in the middle of it, and because I was only vaguely familiar with the titular character's name at the time, it made me curious to see why that game in particular was apparently so controversial. As I became a bigger fan of the series by playing through and loving the first two games, my intrigue towards playing Max Payne 3 only grew due to how divisive it apparently was in the fanbase, but hearing about how the game was made by Rockstar this time around rather than Remedy gave me the feeling that the game was in good hands. While Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne improved on everything the previous game had established, Max Payne 3 ended up feeling like a total evolution of what made the series so special to me, as it struck a great balance between retaining the soul of the previous two games and revamping the gameplay and presentation in ways that ended up making this game my favorite in the trilogy.

One of the most noticeable and controversial additions to the gameplay in Max Payne 3 would be that of the cover system, and while I do kind of understand why people were coming from (especially with how the game industry was horrendously oversaturated with third-person cover shooters at the time), I felt that it ended up working alongside the John Woo-inspired bullet time and shootdodge mechanics that made the series iconic rather than against them. Thanks to the reduced amount of painkillers, weightier physics engine, and limited weapon slots that have a built-in risk-reward system, the gunfights in Max Payne 3 ended up being so much more dynamic, intense, and engaging than the ones in the previous two games, as you're given more freedom to approach each encounter while still being effectively punished for being too reckless or not having a plan. In both Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, I killed pretty much all of the enemies in my way by dodging to the side in slow motion and holding on R1 until they died, but here in Max Payne 3, I would pull off stunts like dive off of a railing, headshot as many enemies as possible before landing on the ground, staying on the ground to pick off anyone I missed, and then rolling into cover to blind fire at the new enemies arriving in the area, and having those strategies go well felt incredibly satisfying. Although you can find optional clues in each mission to help make sense of what's going on, a lot of the detective work and especially the platforming from the previous two games were toned down in favor of focusing on the shootouts and cutscenes, but since the moment-to-moment gameplay is so fun and rewarding to experiment with (especially thanks to how good these guns feel to handle and how cruel the violence ends up being), it doesn't end up feeling like a loss at all.

Even before I got the chance to actually play Max Payne 3, I was well aware of its visual style (so much so that I remember referencing it in at least one of my movie reviews), but I not only felt that it was a perfect fit for the story and its themes, but I also thought that it was even more appealing to my own tastes than the presentation of the rest of the series. If Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne took cues from the noir genre, then Max Payne 3 did the same with neo-noir, as the comic panel cutscenes and grimy New York apartments were replaced with a sun-baked, yet sleazy São Paulo setting, an incredible soundtrack by HEALTH, and a barrage of woozy, hyperactive flourishes that feel straight out of digital-era Tony Scott films like Man on Fire and Domino. Max was literally never able to catch a break in any of the three games, but what he goes through here in Max Payne 3 felt outright depressing, as his intense and debilitating addictions to alcohol and painkillers added another layer of tragedy to a story and plot that are significantly darker and bleaker than the first two games. The game starts with Payne hitting rock bottom before having him somehow ruin every worst case scenario he finds himself in, and as the twists and betrayals stack up on top of each other, the fog of failure and self-hatred that clouds his judgement thickens right alongside it. James McCaffrey's performances in Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne were already brilliant, but he absolutely nailed it here in Max Payne 3, as he conveys just how beaten-down, exhausted, and bitter Payne has become with every line. Max Payne 3 was a phenomenal conclusion to what is easily my favorite video game trilogy (although I'd still consider Metal Gear to be my favorite overall franchise in gaming), and since Rockstar's focus has shifted towards making open world games over the past decade, I can't imagine them making something like this ever again.

When it comes to the history of first-person shooters, I've seen people crown Doom as the grandfather of the genre while half-heartedly addressing Wolfenstein 3D with a general sense of "Oh, yeah, that game exists as well". Don't get me wrong, people do pay their respects towards this game and the standards it set for both id Software's demon-themed follow-up and the first-person shooter genre as a whole, but I have not seen nearly as many people talk about Wolfenstein 3D as they've talked about Doom, let alone praise it, and I wanted to see why. Much to my surprise, though, I had a pretty good time with Wolfenstein 3D from start to finish, and while it isn't perfect and has dated quite a bit more than Doom, it's still a fun game that I'd say is worth playing today.

Back when I reviewed Doom in September, I mentioned how a lot of that game's entertainment comes from how simple and direct its immensely gratifying and fast-paced gameplay was, but since Wolfenstein 3D featured an even more stripped-down setup than that, I was interested in seeing what that would feel like. Instead of running at the speed of a cheetah and obliterating hordes of demons with chainsaws, shotguns, and laser rifles, Wolfenstein 3D has you infiltrating Nazi castles and bunkers adorned with countless swastikas and portraits of Adolf Hitler while gunning down handfuls of German forces at a time, and this approach manages to feel tense and enthralling in its own right. It only makes sense that the previous two entries in this series were both top-down stealth games, as having any of the enemies be able to kill you in two or three shots led to me peeking around lots of corners, looking for secret rooms, occasionally avoiding confrontation entirely, and even luring enemies into my line of fire using the sound of my gunshots as I fire at nearby walls. Even with B.J. Blazkowicz's limited arsenal of a Walther P38, an MP40, a chain gun, and the single most ineffective and unsatisfying knife on earth, gunning down Nazis is still very satisfying, and since your movement in the game is very restrictive, the combat becomes less about dodging bullets and more about killing whatever soldier or soldiers are right in front of you before they kill you, and that adds a lot of intensity to the otherwise brief gunfights. This is the same aspect of Wolfenstein 3D that led to me enjoying the game's boss fights, with the iconic battle against Robo-Hitler being especially engaging thanks to the limited health and ammo drops.

Most, if not all of the actual gripes that I had with Wolfenstein 3D can be attributed to both how old this game is and how early of an entry in the first-person shooter genre this was, but despite this, they still ended up affecting my experience with the game somewhat negatively. While the actual layouts for the labyrinthine levels were quite different in terms of both design and escalating difficulty, the art direction made many of the stages look and feel identical to each other, as the entire game is spent looking at the same brick walls, blue doors, and green lamps from the first stage to the last. The sameness of the visuals didn't help the occasionally confusing exploration, as the maze-like hallways were much less easy to navigate or tell apart than the ones in Doom (although these occasional moments aren't nearly as bad as the constant, cryptic nonsense of Doom II). The music tracks in Wolfenstein 3D also felt quite repetitive, and while a few new tracks got added with each episode, most of it just ended up meshing together anyway. Even with all of these flaws, I still enjoyed Wolfenstein 3D a lot more than I thought I would, and not only am I interested in checking out the prequel episodes that weren't included in my version of the game, but I also want to eventually check out some of the reboots and sequels that came out later on, such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein: The New Order.

The Dead Rising franchise was one that I'd heard of quite early on through videos from YouTubers like PeanutButterGamer and SpaceHamster, and while I never got the chance to actually play any of the games, the way that people talked about them made me associate the name with goofy zombie hijinks in a shopping mall. Because Dead Rising 3 was an Xbox One exclusive and Dead Rising 4 was apparently the game that killed the franchise, the main game in the series that I was interested in checking out was Dead Rising 2, but when I came across a copy of the first game roughly two months ago, I decided to give it a try. Dead Rising was another one of those games where I could barely even tell whether or not I was actually enjoying what I was playing until it was over, because while a lot of its ideas seemed quite novel on paper, their execution left a lot to be desired.

Timers in video games tend to be hit-or-miss for me (which is partially why I still haven't beaten Pikmin months after starting it), and so I wasn't sure how I'd feel about a game that was entirely made up of them. In Dead Rising, every main and side mission is timed so that you could potentially miss out on them entirely if you spend too long messing around in the Willamette Parkview Mall, and while I found this to be a bit iffy at first, I grew to see the thinking behind this choice. Not only do the timed missions give a lot more value to the upgrades and abilities that you unlock whenever you level up, but they also dramatically amp up the stress of actually playing the game, as it has you wade your way through oceans of zombies just to get a chance to progress the main story, let alone rescue a survivor or fight one of the many unique psychopaths that are spread out across the mall. Unfortunately, Frank West's only way of actually accepting these sidequests is by answering calls on your transceiver, and not only do you never know when these calls will show up, but they also leave you totally vulnerable to attacks, and so this system of accepting missions makes it practically impossible for you to do everything in Dead Rising without reloading saves constantly.

Despite its simple premise of being trapped in a shopping mall with an army full of zombies and spending the next few days trying to figure out how all of this came to be, Dead Rising makes the player juggle a lot of different tasks at once at all times, ranging from the missions they have to complete to the ratio of weapons to healing items in their inventory, and while there were some bits of breathing room during my playthrough, there was always at least one thing that I had to devote my full attention to, which made the immersion feel immediate and natural. The core gameplay of killing zombies with whatever items you can find is fun on its own and opens up a lot of opportunities for wacky moments, but the mechanics that this loop revolves around end up feeling janky and unreliable. Thanks to the awkward aiming for your ranged weapons and a complete lack of enemy targeting for your melee attacks, you never really know if your attack will even go in the direction that you wanted it to, much less actually connect with what you're trying to hit, and since every weapon in the game has limited durability (along with the unlockable skills having finicky inputs and incredibly situational uses), I often ended up just spamming the jump button with the hopes that the zombies would miss their attacks.

Despite how much it had going for it, Dead Rising had two big, glaring flaws that kept me from enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, as they reared their heads very early on in my playthrough and remained irritating until the credits rolled. Although backtracking in a game like this makes sense, Dead Rising still got quite repetitive pretty quickly, as having to take the exact same routes to go to main areas like the security room over and over again made having to fight the same zombies using the same weapons that I picked up in the same spots felt immensely dull, and since trying out other weapons or paths led to me getting killed at worst or being left with less resources at best, I ended up sticking to those same routes and getting bored as a result. The AI for the survivors is also absolutely atrocious, and practically every survivor that I tried to rescue would get killed on the way to the security room because they would constantly run into a crowd of zombies and get overwhelmed with no chance of me being able to help them out. Fortunately, the unresponsive AI also appleid to the game's bosses, and so I was able to cheese quite a few of the more cheap fights in the game. Dead Rising had a lot of interesting concepts, but I wouldn't really say that I had very much fun playing it, and while I don't know how long it'll be before I eventually check out Dead Rising 2, I do know that playing this game made me really eager to finally watch George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

After playing through and having an absolute blast with the original Doom back in September, I became a lot more excited to catch up on playing more of the boomer shooters that came after it during the 1990s, with its direct sequel being first up for me. Even with the amount of time that it took for me to test out different official and unofficial ports of Doom before settling on the DOS version, I still beat the game within a week, but it took me over two months to beat Doom II, and that's because this game is way, way less fun than its predecessor. Although it looks and feels like that 1993 landmark title, Doom II makes enough wrong decisions for me to consider it a direct downgrade from the original game, as it felt like a chore to get through very early on and only got worse from there.

Putting the fantastic gameplay, charming 2.5D visuals, and blood-pumping music aside, one of the main elements of Doom that makes it such a consistent and engaging experience is its carefully constructed levels and enemy placements, and I'm of the opinion that the design philosophy of Doom II completely misunderstands this. Rather than putting just enough enemies to make encounters tense while also giving you enough space to maneuver around them and strategize your approach, Doom II instead opts for filling every single room with as many enemies as humanly possible and pretending that this counts as "challenge" (a design choice that you'd be very familiar with if you've played one of those awful Super Mario Maker levels that do the exact same thing), and this choice alone turns Doom II into a repetitive, annoying shadow of the game that preceded it. The levels either consist of confusing mazes, cryptic puzzles, unnecessary gimmicks, awful platforming in a game that doesn't even have a jump button, or a combination of the four, and while I pretty much never got lost in the original Doom due to how the different paths in each level were designed to loop back to a central room or overlap with each other, these levels literally have arrows pointing to where I should go, and that's rarely ever a good sign. A lot of the game's new enemies were straight-up unfun to fight, with their high damage, frequent spawns, and finicky ways of actually fighting them making me groan whenever I came across one, especially if it was an Arch-vile or a Pain Elemental. Even the music in Doom II was lamer this time around, as the metal and ambient tracks were swapped out for boring loops that I got sick of very quickly.

Visually, Doom II has the exact same look and feel of the first game, and while I still find the blend of 2D sprites and 3D environments endearing, it doesn't work as well here as it did before. Since the original Doom starts out in Mars before you rip and tear your way through Hell, it made sense for the environments to go from mechanical and futuristic to fleshy and pulsating, but because the theme for Doom II is that the armies of Hell have invaded Earth, the game just ended up looking like a mishmash of entirely reused assets with nothing all that visually distinct when compared to the first game. The only new addition to Doom II that I genuinely liked was that of the iconic super shotgun, as it was immensely satisfying to use with every shot and ended up being my weapon of choice for almost my entire playthrough. Despite this, Doom II was a very disappointing and tedious boomer shooter that fundamentally misses the mark on what made Doom fun in the first place, and while I am still looking forward to playing Doom 64, I'm going to be a bit more cautious after being burned by this game.

In the three-ish years between my friend from high school snapping my barely touched copy of Dark Souls III in half after I gave it to him and me giving Bloodborne a shot and falling head over heels for it, I had always been interested in at least giving the original Dark Souls a shot, and after beating Bloodborne twice and Elden Ring once, I decided that I was finally ready to give that game a go. After hearing people call the 2018 remaster a disappointment due to it not fixing any of the original game's issues, I decided that I might as well play the original version of the game anyway due to it being the cheaper option, and so I snagged a copy of the Prepare to Die version of the game alongside some other Xbox 360 titles and then spent just over a month playing through it. My roughly 25-30 hour playthrough of Dark Souls was one that was filled with a lot of anger, complaining, and me wishing outlandish things on Hidetaka Miyazaki, but it was also an immensely fun and rewarding experience, even if I wouldn't consider it to be perfect like so many others have.

Even when compared to the terrifying Gothic streets of Yharnam in Bloodborne or the vast and varied Lands Between of Elden Ring, there was something about playing Dark Souls that made its atmosphere feel so much more oppressive and bleak, and I feel like that can be at least partially linked back to the game's controls. In Dark Souls, you have to commit to absolutely every attack, dodge, and occasional jump that you make, as your Chosen Undead's limited range, delayed movements, and inability to adjust where their moves go in any way eventually makes fighting even one enemy require lots of attention and patience. The jump from the tough, but fair combat of Bloodborne and Elden Ring to the brutal and punishing combat of Dark Souls was an admittedly jarring one, but it greatly added to the satisfaction of actually overcoming whatever was in your way, as having the odds be stacked against your favor made finally getting to the next bonfire or beating that boss feel immensely euphoric after being beaten down so many times. The game's grim setting was a great backdrop for the unforgiving combat, as the artstyle's blend of grotesque dark fantasy and medieval romanticism made for levels that were both gorgeous to look at and suffocating in how constant the presence of death and ruin were. Usually, I really dislike having to backtrack in games, but my appreciation for the game's interconnectedness was at its highest whenever I had to trek through levels before I got the ability to warp to bonfires, as those trips made Dark Souls feel thick with existential dread, especially with the game's few friendly NPCs being hopelessly insane (except for Solaire of Astora, bless his heart). Despite how haunting and depressing this game can be, there were several moments in Dark Souls that were overwhelming in their beauty, with my first arrivals in both the Firelink Shrine and the fight against the Moonlight Butterfly genuinely making me tear up with how enchanting they were amidst Lordran's constant strife and decay.

What's frustrating about Dark Souls is that, despite how much this game manages to get right so effortlessly, it is also rife with bizarre and even outright bad design choices that made playing the game feel either annoying, dull, unfair, or some combination of the three, and these moments ended up holding the game back from being the flawless masterstroke that so many people have praised it as. For starters, both the combat and the general movement felt very janky to me, and a lot of my deaths just ended up coming from my character doing a move that was in the complete opposite direction of what I actually pressed on my controller or even just slipping off of the platform that I was on for no discernible reason. Aside from the Moonlight Butterfly, Ornstein and Smough, and Gwyn, I never really struggled with any of the game's bosses (Bed of Chaos somehow only took me three tries), but quite a few of the levels that led up to them were filled with cheap enemy placements and annoying gimmicks, with New Londo Ruins featuring ghosts being able to kill you through walls and the Duke's Archives being littered with Channeler snipers sticking out to me in particular. There were also entire levels that didn't feature a single bonfire in them, and while it did add to the tension of trying to avoid getting hit to either keep exploring or to find the next boss, they also meant that I had to run a marathon from a totally different area every single time I wanted to attempt the level again, and this got old almost immediately. Even with all of these flaws, though, Dark Souls was still a great game whose influence and painstaking craft can still be felt to this day, and since I've heard almost nothing but horror stories about Dark Souls II, I'll probably come back to it after playing through Dark Souls III first.

1993

Along with it being a genre-defining landmark of the first-person shooter genre, the birthplace of speedrunning, and a haven for a mod community that is thriving to this day, John Romero's Doom is also known for the slew of game consoles, calculators, thermostats, and pregnancy tests that it has been ported to both officially and unofficially, and while I did like how this gave me a ton of options to choose from when I decided to finally give the game a shot, it also made actually settling on one somewhat difficult due to how different some of these versions are. Initially, I played up to the 14th mission using the Doom 32X Resurrection hack of the Sega 32X port, but since that version wouldn't let me make any kinds of saves for some reason, I decide to cut out the middle man and play the original MS-DOS version after wrapping my head around how DOSBox worked (although not before accidentally downloading and playing through the shareware version). This was a very good decision on my part, as it meant that I got to play this awesome game the way that it was originally intended to be played, and I had an absolute blast while doing so.

Even with all of the innovations that have come to first-person shooters over the years, Doom is still as fun of a game as it's ever been in part due to its simplicity. Whether you're blasting the armies of Hell away with a shotgun, ripping them apart with a chainsaw, or decimating them with the iconic BFG 9000, the combat in Doom is consistently hectic, thrilling, and satisfying, and that applies to both the power fantasy moments of turning waves of demons into assortments of gory pastes and the more tense encounters where you're low on health and ammo and need to make every shot count. There were several times in my playthrough where I was so invested in the game's action that I was literally ducking and dodging my head in real life whenever an Imp's hell-fire or a Cacodemon's ball-lighting came my way, and I feel like that sums up just how fun this game is to play. Doomguy's blisteringly fast running speed not only made maneuvering around enemy attacks and even tricking them into fighting each other by luring them out feel responsive, but it also helped with the game's moments of exploration, as each level is filled to the brim with secrets that lead you to ammo dumps, powerups, and even hidden levels. Doom also features some immensely charming presentation, as the 2.5D blend of nightmarish 2D sprites and 3D environments ranging from futuristic military bases on the moons of Mars to the fleshy, rugged terrain of Hell were a great match for both Bobby Prince's blend of blood-pumping metal and ominous ambient music and the humorous text crawls that show up at the end of each chapter.

Before I got into Doom, one of my biggest worries about the game was that I would spend most of it just trying to look for where I was supposed to go next due to how often I've heard people make that exact criticism, but thankfully, that rarely ever happened. Because all of the halls and rooms in each level end up either looping back to a central hub or overlapping with each other, I pretty much never got lost (especially with how the corpses I'd leave in my wake ended up serving as markers for where I had already been), and I rarely even checked the in-game map because of how distinct every area felt. I will say that I wasn't that big of a fan of the more open levels that showed up later on, though, because while they were still good, the amount of empty space that they featured made them a lot less interesting to navigate than the rest of the game's levels. Despite this, Doom was still a fantastic first-person shooter that aged incredibly well, and not only am I excited to check out Doom II and Doom 64, but I also want to try out a few more of the earlier boomer shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Blood as well.

Over the years, Valve has mostly shifted their focus towards selling games through Steam and enabling gambling addictions through Counter-Strike: Global Offensive rather than making new titles, but even with their reduced output, they were still responsible for some of the most iconic franchises in all of PC gaming. As a console player, though, this means that I haven't actually been able to experience most of their games, and while I do have fond memories of sinking 30-50 hours into Team Fortress 2 back in the 5th Grade, the limited capabilities of my Mother's MacBook turned every match into a PowerPoint presentation with the occasional low-res explosion of blood and gore. Like Deus Ex, my best bet to experience Valve's debut title was by emulating its PS2 port, and while I would say that I liked Half-Life overall, I also had huge issues with it that prevented me from loving it as much as everyone else apparently did.

Whenever people would talk about Half-Life, the one phrase that I would see get used the most often would be "environmental storytelling", and for good reason. After a quiet intro sequence where you spend what seems to be just another work day with your fellow scientists explaining the day's tasks to you, the game swiftly takes all of that away and leaves you to find your way out of this mess all on your lonesome. Because of how oppressive the sense of isolation is in this game, the player is able to immediately put two and two together in terms of what they're supposed to do next, as seeing things like corpses piled up beside entrances, a web of connected trip mines, and a destroyed mechanism firing electricity at a pool of water below it not only work in terms of immersing the player in the crumbling Black Mesa Research Facility, but it's also able to communicate both the story and your current objective to you without needing to actually say anything. The combination of highly interactable environments, creepy enemy design, a mostly diegetic soundscape, and a heavy use of scripted events gave the game a sense of unpredictability, and it also made exploration feel dynamic in spite of the game's clear-cut linearity. Gordon Freeman's wide arsenal of weapons made for some fun shootouts while also placing some importance on managing your ammo, and while I pretty much never used weapons like the Hive-hand or the Snark, I still liked how they looked.

Growing up, I had heard nothing but good things about Half-Life, and so I was really shocked to find out just how quickly the game nosedives in quality once it reaches its second half. After a certain point, Half-Life essentially decides to litter each of its remaining levels with traps, enemies, and obstacles that either kill you instantly or overwhelm you until you die, and so you end up abusing the quicksave feature whenever you take more than three steps or kill even one enemy just to spare you from having to deal with any of it a second time. Normally, I don't really mind savescumming if it's in a game where you can come up with your own solutions, but when Half-Life throws a tank that takes loads of ammo to destroy and can one-shot you from a mile away, it feels less like the game is testing the skills that I've acquired throughout my playthrough and more like it's expecting me to repeatedly bash my head against the wall that they've set up until one of its bricks randomly decides to loosen. Fans of this game like to single-out levels like "Xen" as the game's weaker points due to their bad low-gravity platforming (and rightfully so), but I'd argue that "Surface Tension" and everything that comes after it is just one big pile of tedium, and while I wouldn't exactly call any of it hard and the game's other strengths are still present here, this portion of the game is definitely annoying and not at all fun to play through. Half-Life is a very flawed game that didn't exactly age the best, but I still enjoyed it for what it did well, and I hope that Half-Life 2 ends up being a more consistent game than this.

The first time that I had heard of the Deus Ex series was through the middling reviews of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that were being written around the time that game first came out, and while I had no interest in playing that game (or most of the games in the series, for that matter), the amount of praise that went towards the very first game in the series made me curious about eventually giving it a shot. As my tastes in games began to form with age and my love for Western RPGs began to blossom, Deus Ex ended up being one of those games that I wanted to play as soon as I possibly could, and because playing video games on a Mac is an absolute nightmare, it ended up being easier for me to emulate the PS2 port of this game than it was to actually play the original release due to the former option having significantly less hoops I'd need to go through just to get the game to work. Despite me playing it on a technically worse version of the game than around 99% of the population, Deus Ex was able to blow me away in every aspect, and I knew that this deserved its status as one of the best games ever made long before I was finished with it.

One problem that a lot of WRPGs face is that the gameplay ends up being a lot less interesting than the story or characters, but that thankfully isn't the case here at all. Deus Ex is an absolute blast to play thanks to how much freedom of choice the game gives you right from the very beginning, and your options only increase as the game goes on. The sheer amount of vents to crawl through, systems to hack into, and people to talk to in each of the game's 13 missions end up making Deus Ex feel like it's constantly rewarding your curiosity, and having all of the game's interactable elements work alongside each other (i.e. helping a character out so that they can give you useful information or avoiding confrontation by climbing through some vents that you reached by building a stack of boxes) makes exploration feel natural. The dystopian cyberpunk setting was another aspect of why each level was so engaging to traverse, as seeing the grimy, moody, and hellish depictions of New York, Hong Kong, and Paris (as well as the amazing and eclectic music that they were paired with) not only made me want to see what these areas had in store for me, but also what was going on behind the scenes. Deus Ex is a stealth game at its heart (and an immensely fun one at that), but it gives you the tools to really carve out your build and play any way you want, as the limited nano-augmentations, weapon modifications, and skill points always made me careful about choosing what to upgrade and how to take advantage of my new abilities with my current roster of weapons.

From a gameplay standpoint, Deus Ex was already an absolute knockout that was designed in such a way where no two people's playthroughs are the same, but this game also features some of the most enthralling, fascinating, and thought-provoking writing I have ever experienced in a video game. Before the game even starts laying its twists and turns on you, Deus Ex gives you a sense of how bad the world's gotten through the propagandistic newspapers and terminals that are scattered around the levels, and even with the answers that the characters and various organizations give you throughout your playthrough, the atmosphere of mystery and secrecy still manages to linger all the way to the end. The game strikes an excellent balance between riveting gameplay and philosophical food for thought, and it ends up posing a lot of interesting questions regarding morality, politics, capitalism, and human nature whose answers are still being debated by fans to this day. By the time the credits of Deus Ex rolled, I had a giant smile on my face, because while I was admittedly a bit let down that I wasn't able to play the original PC version of the game, I'm still glad that I got to experience what is easily one of the very best games of all time.

Although I have seen people talk about Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins just a bit more than its predecessor due to it being the last 2D Mario game until the release of New Super Mario Bros. in 2005, as well as it featuring the first appearance of Wario, I would still consider these two to be some of the most overlooked games in the entire franchise right alongside those Game Boy Color ports of Mario Tennis and Mario Golf that are actually sports-themed RPGs. On its own, Super Mario Land didn't age all that gracefully, but it was still a fun enough experience, but I was genuinely excited to play the sequel, even if it took me well over a year to actually get around to playing it. Even with that in mind, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins still managed to surprise me, and it worked as both a direct improvement on Super Mario Land and as a solid Mario game in its own right.

Super Mario Land had a number of features and mechanics that never made it to any other games in the series, and the same can be said for its sequel thanks to the amount of creative and interesting ideas that it brings to the table. Pretty much every level here in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins manages to stand out without feeling gimmicky with their different platforming challenges, and while none of the changes to the formula were as drastic as the bouncier fireballs, exploding koopa shells, and shoot-em-up levels of the previous game, their implementation still made the game as a whole feel unique. On top of having almost three times as many levels as the first game, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is also much more consistent in its level design, and while Mario still felt a little slippery with his movements, the zoomed in screen and larger platforms made jumps feel a lot more precise. My favorite element of this game would easily be its world themes, because whereas Super Mario Land had worlds based on real-life locations, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins had a world based around a giant tree, a level set inside of a whale, a set of levels taking place within a giant mechanical Mario statue, and even some space levels a whole 15 years before Super Mario Galaxy. The sheer amount of variety and imagination in this game's world and level themes could arguably rival that of the Mario games on home consoles, and the ability to approach the levels in any order was a nice touch as well.

The first Super Mario Land has some of the best music in the whole series, and while the sequel's soundtrack didn't reach those heights for me, I still quite liked the songs here in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, as they were all catchy and fit the laid-back atmosphere of the levels quite well. Mario games were never exactly known for being challenging, but even then, the easiness of this game's levels paired with the game's bite-sized length still caught me off guard, and if you compare the steadily increasing difficulty of something like Super Mario Bros. 3 to the bosses in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins dying in less than five seconds (and occasionally less than even one second), the difference is night and day. I also felt that it really wasn't necessary for the game's final castle to have absolutely zero checkpoints, because while that level wasn't all that hard, it was still annoying to have to do everything from the beginning whenever you died. Despite its flaws, I still really enjoyed my time with Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, and I might even give the first four Wario Land games a go at some point.

When it comes to my experience with the shoot-em-up genre, a lot of it consists of me playing one of these kinds of games when I came across them in an arcade or as a minigame in something much larger rather than going out of my way to play anything specific. Most of my familiarity with the genre involves classics from the late 1970s and 1980s like Space Invaders, Galaga, or Gradius, as well as a few 90s gems like Pop'n TwinBee or Space Harrier, and while I had my fun with them, they never had me playing for very long. The first one of these games that I actually wanted to play from the beginning to the end, though, would be Ikaruga, as its basic gimmick and supposed high difficulty were enough to pique my interest, and thanks to my familiarity with its developer Treasure through Gunstar Heroes and Sin and Punishment, I became even more excited to check it out. My time with the game was quite short, but it was able to leave a huge impression on me, and while I still consider Sin and Punishment to be Treasure's best game, Ikaruga is a very close second.

Ikaruga is easy to understand, difficult to do well in, and even harder to master, but because the game took full advantage of its core mechanics, it ends up being an entirely rewarding experience rather than something rage-inducing. In this game, your ship can switch its polarity to not only do more damage to enemies of the opposite color, but also to absorb the attacks of those with the same polarity as you in order to fill up your energy meter and fire homing shots, as well as to simply not get killed instantly. While the game does still feature the knee-jerk reactions and fast pace that the genre is known for, this one mechanic adds a puzzle-like layer to its gameplay, as having the screen get coated head-to-toe in bullets and enemies of different polarities makes it so that you're less concerned with killing everything on the screen and more about knowing when to shift colors, where to go in order to fill up your energy meter as quickly as possible, and when to shoot out your homing attacks. The deceptive simplicity of Ikaruga meshes perfectly with the tough-as-nails level design, because the chapters and setpieces not only get harder as you go, but they also get more demanding of you and your skills, and having everything click as you figure out what moves to make in order to survive through a combination of memorizing enemy firing patterns and muscle memory is one of the most satisfying feelings I've ever felt in a video game. Despite how hard it can be, Ikaruga never resorted to cheap deaths or unfair tactics and instead made every single death feel like it was my own fault rather than that of the game, and that sense of refinement in both the game's mechanics and its level design made actually getting past that one hurdle and moving on to see what other crazy obstacle the game had in store for me made me immediately want to try again as soon as I ran out of continues rather than getting angry with the game and quitting for the day.

In all three of the games from Treasure that I've played so far, there's been at least one moment where the game fully leans in on the spectacle of its action and allows you to do something really impressive, and what's great about Ikaruga is that practically every moment of its five chapters has the potential for you to achieve that, and pulling one of these moments off rewards you with both a higher score and an unmatched sense of accomplishment. Since the game's central gimmick puts a strong emphasis on its visuals, it would only make sense for Ikaruga to be as stunning to look at as it is fun to play, as the gorgeous artstyle and effective compositions made the bullet hell moments and enemy formations into visual marvels. This especially applies to the game's hectic and immensely creative boss fights, with the battle against Tageri being my favorite moment in the whole game thanks to both how cool it looked and how satisfying it was. Ikaruga also features some amazing music from the game's director, Hiroshi Iuchi, and I especially loved how it was directly tied into the pace of each level. Ikaruga was an absolutely masterful game that not only became one of my favorite efforts from Treasure, but also my favorite shoot-em-up by far, and I really hope that I can check out the game that this served as the spiritual successor to, Radiant Silvergun, at some point.