Baja Edge of Control is hard as nails. Now, I am a fan of simulation racing games and I totally understand why some of them can be so difficult. This one was too much for me though. It's an off-road racing game based on the Baja 100 race. You take part in off road events like racing and hill climbing, battling through a bunch of different tournaments and, if you are like me, failing miserably. You need to master the use of the clutch, break, e-break, when to use the accelerator, how much to cut corners and the racing lines. There's a lot going on here and I think there's too much for it to be enjoyable, at least for me. The main issue is, even if you do git gud, the AI is so OP and aggressive. I was constantly getting fucked up whenever I got near the other racers, which wasn't very often as they were normally much faster than me. It isn't by definition a bad game, but this is one for the racing simulation purist masochists only and not worth it if you are not interested in hours of grinding.

As humans, we all have an innate bias, preferences which differentiate us from others. This holds true for games and Perfect Dark Zero ticks so many boxes of dumb shit in games that I enjoy. Horribly cheesy dialogue and voice acting. Futuristic space city setting. Dated FPS game design. It's all here in its 2005 glory. The rise of boomer shooters and the throw back to early and mid 90s FPS games has got me hoping there is a mid 00s shooter revival at some point and PDZ is an absolute classic of that genre - whatever we want to call it? A sequel to the N64 classic, PDZ was actually a launch title for the console and was pretty hyped up. Unfortunately, it didn't really live up to the lofty expectations set by how good the first Perfect Dark game was. Everyone enjoyed the multiplayer, which was a blast. The campaign itself wasn't as well recieved though. It's easy to see why. With it's cycle of development hell, by the time the game released it looked bad and felt dated. People were expected some incredible next gen FPS masterpiece, and what they got was a pretty decent short FPS campaign which felt like an original xbox game. Yet, playing this game in 2024 I had so much fun with it. The short campaign is a total blast. The first thing I really dig about this game is the replayability. Like the original game, each mission gives you different objectives depending on the level of difficulty. These add a lot of variety to the levels and make some of them quite challenging. I particularly remember a mission which involved stealing an enemy radio and convincing the enemy to turn off communications and open a door. Every time you make a mistake a flood of enemies attack you, which at higher difficulties is really rough. There's also coop throughout the campaign which works pretty well. The excellent selection of weapons is also back with loads of cool stuff like the laptop turret gun. Each gun has a secondary fire mode which normally does something pretty cool and means it's really exciting finding a new weapon. Yes, all the weapons sound totally shit and the enemies react in a comical Goldeneye style way. Yet,, but this adds to the charm more than anything. It's an ugly and extremely dumb game, but the 2005 vibe is very charming. If you like clunky dated FPS games (just me?), you will love this.

As a huge fan of the SNES classic Zombies Ate My Neighbours, I was pretty excited for this spiritual successor. Zombies was a top down coop zombie killer which had a lot of character. With it's cute graphic, funny enemies and vibrant well thought out levels. From a first glance, Monster Madness Battle for Suburbia appears to match the feel of the SNES classic. In some ways it does. You can really tell the developers have taken most of the ideas from that game and tried to modernise it. There's a nice selection of varied levels, from your house to the streets of the suburbs and even hell. There's a decent selection of silly weapons and a nice variety of enemies. Yet, something is off about it. First thing I noticed was the way the game looks. It's really ugly. The style attempts to match the cutesy and silly visuals of ZAMN, but it's a lot more brown, bland and in general less appealing. The generic high-school stereotype characters are annoying and offensive and the enemies are just weird. Then we have the camera and controls issue. The top down camera straight up doesn't work. With this game being more focused on 3rd person shooting than hand to hand combat, the camera angle means you can't really aim properly or even see where enemies are. IF you play alone, you can set a different camera angle (by pressing y - thank me later), which makes it slightly more playable but with the game itself being pretty boring to play alone, this isn't a great option. The difficulty is also problematic. There are 4 difficulty levels, but unless you pick easy, it's just way too hard. After playing a few hours of the game, I realised that no matter how much I wanted to like it, I wasn't having fun. Don't bother with this one.