The PlayStation can produce mind-boggling effects.

As much as it is a clunky, unpalatable piece of shit, I fucking love this game. King's Field IV is an old school dungeon crawler where you fight so very many skeletons (there's a lot of skeletons). It also has possibly the best vibes of any game I've played, rivaled only by Dark Souls perhaps.

King's Field is oppressive, its world dying, but you can bet your ass off some banger tune will be going off in the background at all times. Albeit quite slow (your turn speed is literally 5 rpm, unless of course you walk through a spiderweb, halving it), the exploration is also legitimately very satisfying. There are a myriad of fun, optional illusory walls and hidden items, and the levels are surprisingly well realized and interconnected. It's always incredibly relieving to stumble upon a save point after delving through a crypt for 30 minutes, and at -1 mph no less.

I particularly remember when I finally emerged in one of the game's central hubs after hours of tense spelunking. The area is a lush, colorful forest, one of King's Field's few above-ground locales, and completely unlike anywhere else in the game. It too, has fallen from its former glory, yet it is the first real reprieve in what has thus far been quite a grueling experience. It's beautiful— in all its crunchy, early PS2 game grace.

King's Field IV is certainly not for everyone, but it is unique and ethereal, truly a charming little game if you can stomach it.

So far in my adventures through the TMNT games of yesteryear, I haven’t really found much to get excited about. Sure, there were some good games to be found so far, but nothing that is gonna make me want to come back to one of these games over and over again in the future, especially with the original NES title. So I figured, since I did just recently play through a bad Spider-Man game and a bad Simpsons game, I want to play through a GOOD licensed game for a change. Yeah, I may be skipping a couple of other games when making this decision, but who cares, we can always come back to them later, and then we can properly give them the ripping that they deserve. For now though, I have decided to revisit what many consider to be one, if not THE best TMNT game of all time, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time.

If you have heard anyone singing any praise about any TMNT game, chances are that it is either this one or Shredder’s Revenge, which did take most of its inspiration and ideas from this game. I myself have played through the SNES version before back in the day, and yeah, I remember loving it back when I did, thinking it was one of the best beat-’em-up games I had ever played at that time. It has been a while since that original playthrough though, so I figured that I should give it another shot, and yes, I am sticking with the SNES version of the game, because that is the best version of the two despite not looking as good. So, after playing through it again, I would say it is still pretty great to this day. It may not be that unique from other TMNT games, or other beat-’em-ups, but it makes up for it with its fun and satisfying gameplay that I didn’t get sick of at any point.

The story is about as simple as a TMNT story can get, about them needing to get the Statue of Liberty back from Shredder, which is about as goofy and ridiculous as you would want one of these plots to be, the graphics are pretty great, definitely being the best looking TMNT game so far, and while it doesn’t look as good as the arcade version, the SNES version still looks pretty good for a port, the music is FANTASTIC, being without a doubt the best soundtrack in any TMNT game, having some incredible tracks throughout the entire game, and not a single dud I can think of, the control is simple yet satisfying, with there being a good impact present for whenever you beat up anybody, and there are no problems with the general setup to speak about, and the gameplay is familiar, yet still satisfying to run through, especially with a friend to join you along the way.

The game is your typical Ninja Turtles beat-’em-up, where you take control of one of the four Ninja Turtles, take on a set of stages from your home in New York City, or throughout multiple points in time, even including 2020 (looks a lot different then what we ended up getting), beat up every single Foot Clan member, robot, and Pizza Monster that get in your way throughout the game, gather plenty of pizzas and special invincibility boxes along the way to give you an advantage over your foes, and take on plenty of familiar foes to come from the TMNT from either the classic cartoon or the movies of the time. As is expected, it is pretty much what you would expect from your typical beat-’em-up of the early 90s, with not much else going on to make it stand out from the crowd, but there is one aspect of the game that I have to admire over everything else: it does everything it sets out to do, while also not fumbling the ball at any point.

This is, in my opinion, the quintessential TMNT game. Sure, the other games had some positive qualities about them, and there would be future games that would also reach the same level of quality as this, but when it comes to some good ol’ classic Ninja Turtle action from the 90s, you can’t get any better than Turtles in Time. Everything about the gameplay feels extremely fun and satisfying, from beating up your foes, to the different types of stages that you can play through, to the rockin’ tunes that go through your head whenever you do play it, and of course, fighting for the pizzas against your friend so you can be the ultimate jerk. There aren’t many other experiences like this. And not to mention, when it came to the SNES version of the game, it did add more to experience and enjoy, such as with new bosses, new types of stages that take advantage of the console’s Mode 7 capabilities, as well as the ability to throw enemies directly at the screen, which is the main gimmick for one of the bosses. Granted, it does take away some other elements, like the lack of four-player co-op, but aside from that, it is still the great game you experienced in the arcades.

With that being said, if you aren’t into TMNT or even into beat-’em-ups, then I can’t really say that you can find much to love about this game. Like I mentioned, there isn’t much else that this game does differently when it comes to others like it, so if you are looking for anything new and unique from a beat-’em-up, you won’t get that here. Not to mention, there are some elements that, while they don’t bother me personally, they may bother others. First off, when it comes to the SNES version, just like other Konami games, they lock the true ending behind the hardest difficulty, but thankfully, they don’t lock any content behind the difficulties, so it really only matters if you really care about some text boxes. In addition to this, those annoying-ass instant kill attacks from the original TMNT arcade game make a return in this game, and while they aren’t that big of an issue this time around, it does still suck whenever they are thrown at you. But then again, I could always just get better, so whatever.

Overall, despite a lack of originality and some bullshit moments here and there, this is, without a doubt, the best TMNT game so far, and one of the best beat-’em-ups of the 90s that I have ever played. I would definitely recommend it for fans of the Ninja Turtles, as well as fans of beat-’em-ups in general, because while it may not become one of your favorites of the genre, I can guarantee that it will be a good time with a good buddy to play it with. Anyway, now with all that out of the way, how do I end this review? Uh… maybe by making a snide comment towards the remake of this game, but I never played that one. So, uh… ooh, remake bad, ah, they ruined my childhood, ugh, Konami should throw themselves into a pachinko machine and never come back out.

Game #393

I don't know how much I can say about Chicory that others haven't already said, so I'll keep it short.

Chicory is a warm, beautiful meditation on art, acceptance, and imposter syndrome all with a backdrop of a stunning OST and an immaculate art direction.

It never shies away from the heavier parts of its message, and it never makes the player feel guilty for taking as much time as they want to explore and color in the world.

I also have to note that it has a great deal of extremely heartwarming. considerate queer representation that brought tears to my eye more than once.

Please play Chicory. It deserves all of its praise.

While the attempt was grandiose, the game was just ok, and in that discrepancy lies a strong sense of withdrawal.

I know, I know... When you're the studio behind the Dishonored and Prey, stakes are high and risks are often not worth taking. But Arkane had the balls to take it, and for that, they have my utter respect. The game has a very unusual and peculiar concept, with strong story-driven gameplay which plays with the concept of causality in the quasi-open world framework, making it the central driver. In combination with Tarantino-esque atom-punk aesthetics, the game is a very solid attempt to create a quite interesting framework. That being said, after being left with a post-completion aftertaste for some time, I must admit that the feeling of confusion and incompleteness is all I am left with.

Dead Island 2 is fine. In our state of gaming discourse, where anything below an eight or a nine out of ten is automatically bad, it was always going to be somewhat of a pariah. The extended development cycle featuring three separate developers certainly hasn't helped its perception, either; the expectations that come from a game in the oven for that long are on either side of an extreme, and reality rarely meets it.

The funny thing about that, though, is that if Dead Island 2 was released in 2015, I don't think it would have been as fascinating. Released a year after the overly ambitious sequel to its spiritual successor, it's almost refreshing to have a game this scaled-back. There isn't an Open World here; if you thought the original game kind of played like Borderlands, the immediacy with which you're asked to leave to the second area so soon after stepping foot in the first only cements that further. Unlike Borderlands, the appeal of this is pretty straightforward. With or without friends, you kill zombies in increasingly violent and silly ways. That's it. There's character building through a Skill Card system, but everything boils down to whacking the flesh off the undead while you drop-kick them in the head. The physics can use some fine-tuning, but the gore is a work of beauty. The question of, 'When was the last time you saw an action game try to sell itself on its gore?' is answered succinctly the first time you decide to keep hitting a zombie after you've downed it. But that question also has another answer attached to it: Dead Island 2 is decidedly low-stakes entertainment. It's aware of how silly its predecessor was, and it doesn't do anything to change that. It's just a better, more consistent thrill ride with genre enthusiasts who couldn't care less about having a prestige-worthy script attached to their games in mind. The worst that the nearly decade-long wait has done for this game is that it's fooled many into thinking that this either isn't enough or that there would be more to this. But I've been having a blast with this so far, so I really don't mind it.

Where your mileage will absolutely vary is in terms of this game's writing. I've heard many comparisons to last year's Saints Row, and while I can't personally make that connection, I can see where it comes from. From the offset, the team behind this was very open about the angle they were taking with this. You don't call Los Angeles 'Hell-A' if you're trying to tell an emotional, engaging story. It's pure camp, down to dated references and goofy caricatures you'll either find bittersweetly nostalgic or downright embarrassing to listen to. I'm finding the chatter to be less annoying than your average Borderlands character and I actually like the cast of characters in this so far. But if you were unable to play Borderlands 3 without muting the dialog, I wouldn't consider this an improvement.

If you want a throwback to what games were like a decade ago and you're going into this without expecting the world of it, this is a pretty enjoyable time. This is definitely not the bargain bin game some are making it out to be; at worst, I think it's worth waiting for it go on sale if you're curious but skeptical. If Dambusters keeps it at or above this level of quality, they might be developers to keep an eye on.

go to mansion
look at lawn
investigate lawn
look at grass
look at stairs
look at the lawn
reach down and touch the yard
investigate the thing on the lawn
look at the glimmer by the stairs
touch the sparkle
touch object by stairs
investigate sparkle
investigate object
get thing over there
get thing
tell Yasu to get thing
tell Yasu to get the thing on the lawn
tell Yasu to investigate lawn
reach down and touch the grass
please look at lawn
please look at the lawn
please look around
help
help me
help me please
slap Yasu

An unintentional period piece.

Fair warning, I'm gonna be talking about the grim shit that happened during the war on terror. I'm also gonna be talking about 50 Cent's career. These two are intertwined.

I doubt there are too many people using this website who are young enough to have completely missed the meteoric rise of 50 Cent, but I'd be remiss to not make sure that everyone gets a primer. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of gangsta rap was giving way to the bling era; what had become conventional in the late-80s to mid-90s was rapidly becoming less popular and less profitable than the revival of alternative hip hop. Of course, this didn't stop some artists from keeping their old sound in the face of new trends. Whether it was because they were stubborn, incapable of changing, or confident enough that they could keep selling exactly the way that they were, a genre shift will never be enough to completely unseat people from making what they want. 50 Cent had been making mixtapes for years, getting some notoriety from flipping the beats that other rappers had laid their voices on. He wasn't about to shift gears. 50 Cent kept his sound the same, and was rewarded handsomely: his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, went 9x Platinum. The Massacre came out two years later and went 6x Platinum.

That was 2005, and it was the last time 50 Cent was relevant.

Blood on the Sand released in February of 2009.

A significant part of 50 Cent's fall is that, frankly speaking, he’s kind of a shit rapper. His style was already out by the early 2000s, and it’s only thanks to a fortuitous pick-up by Shady Records that you’ve heard of him. He’s not talentless, nor was he ever; his mixtape work prior to his studio debut is still good at its worst, and GRoDT is a solid-enough record (as much as I’ll get called an RYM backpacker for not saying it's outstanding). But 50 doesn’t really have any pen game to speak of. It’s more like crayon game. The guy writes like a fifth grader. The first bar off the first track in his debut album rhymes “off my chest” with “off my chest”. There’s another not even three minutes later where he drops the line “I'm the boss on this boat, you can call me skipper. The way I turn the money over, you should call me Flipper”. Christ. 50 Cent has a lot of friends in some really high places, but there’s a reason that Curtis couldn’t get certified in the year that Graduation went 5x Platinum; people were tired of him after less than a decade after his mainstream breakthrough. All of the Slim Shady and Obie Trice and Snoop Dogg features in the world couldn’t stem the tide that people like Kanye and Lil’ Wayne were creating, and 50’s monotone flows, GarageBand default beats, and garbage lyricism were reliquary.

But 50 Cent’s relationships are what propelled him, and they helped him build a legacy that he’s still controlling to this day. He made it big by starting feuds with virtually every other rapper he could on How to Rob, only delving deeper into his many, many beefs as he got involved deeper with Shady Records, taking up their fights as an associate. He turned getting shot for running his mouth into his armor — you become feared and respected in equal measure if the guy that puts nine bullets in you winds up dead before you do. He created a multimedia empire of television shows, of vodka, of luxury underwear, of investments in South African palladium mines.

And of video games.

Blood on the Sand originally had nothing to do with 50 Cent, and you can tell. It was meant to be a tie-in with a Jason Bourne sequel series written after the death of author Robert Ludlum, but the television show that was also set to release at the same time got cancelled before it could leave production. This left developer Swordfish Studios holding the bag; this is basically what happened with Croteam when they made Serious Sam 3. Swordfish had sunk two years of dev time into making their Covert-One game, and now they had nothing they could do with the prototypes.

Enter Vivendi Games, who order a sequel to 50 Cent: Bulletproof.

It's obvious while playing Blood on the Sand that 50 Cent was just kind of dropped into a product that already existed before he got involved. You have all of these wide, open vistas, with sparkling bloom effects casting rays of light down onto the sand-bleached stones. Dilapidated malls and bombed-out highways serve as the backdrops for stop-and-pop cover shooter segments, tearing up the surroundings with heavy machine gun fire. So much of this game visually tries to tell a story of beautiful landscapes, contrasting against the war-torn buildings and roads of this unnamed Middle Eastern country. It’s ripe for some gruff-voiced American special ops player character to glibly comment on war being hell and how the American invasion of this land is the only way to save these wayward people, mowing them down all the while.

50 Cent doesn’t give a fuck about any of that. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull.

Blood on the Sand is honest. It's a puff piece for 50 Cent. It's a product that exists solely for the purpose of boosting his image and providing him with another brand tie-in he can point to as a marker of success. 50 Cent doesn't have any poetic musings about the nature of man or if he's the real monster for slaughtering all of these inexplicably Serbian and Slovenian goons. 50 Cent thinks this place is a shithole and he wants to go home as soon as he can get his $10 million jewel-encrusted skull back. The non-fictionalized 50 is on record saying that he loves the game because it shows him jumping out of helicopters and because his model has huge muscles.

The game attempts to answer the question of why 50 Cent is somewhere in the Middle East (the Covert-One books out at the time don't take place in the region, so there's basically zero clue which country this is meant to be) by saying that he's there to play a concert. We have to keep in mind that fiction, unlike reality, is designed from top to bottom to be experienced by an outside viewer. The in-universe justification is that he's there to make money. The real-world reasoning is because, in the year 2009, you're just kind of expected to set your game in the Middle East. They were easy "bad guys". Just because Obama was president doesn't mean shit. Just because the torture of political dissidents in Abu Ghraib was known for half a decade before this doesn't mean shit. Just because it cost untold trillions of dollars and a million lives doesn't mean shit. They — capital-T, bold-italics — did 9/11, so it's all fair game.

But this is all in service of making 50 look cool. Not of anything else. You're meant to watch him gun down five guys with a machine gun while the word MASSACRE takes up a third of the screen and and think "wow, this guy's a badass". You get Gangsta Fire slow-mo and 50 Cent bonus points to unlock music videos for killing quickly, because it makes him look cool. You have three separate helicopter boss fights because 50 Cent's son thought it would make him look cool. You listen to a rotation of background tracks that all sound the same and can only be differentiated in a firefight by whether 50 shouts "I run New York!" or "My gun go off!" at the end of the chorus. You have a dedicated taunt button that you can upgrade to make 50 shout progressively more profane things at his foes for bonus points. Because, you know, it makes him look cool. I think the target demographic for this game was 50 Cent.

Unsurprisingly, 50 Cent and the rest of the G-Unit do a fairly poor job of acting as themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, everyone save for Lance Reddick kind of sucks in this. The final boss cycles through a Texan accent, a South African accent, a British RP accent, and at one point what sounds like a Chinese accent all in the span of a single helicopter battle. Tony Yayo just...whines all the time? Like, he doesn't do much besides complain about how much he hates being in a Middle Eastern warzone, which, y'know, valid gripe. The other members of the G-Unit are no longer on speaking terms with 50 Cent. That's not relevant to the rest of this paragraph, but I did all of this research into 50 Cent, so I had to mention it somewhere.

The story is nonsense, but it couldn't ever be anything else. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull. Everything else is tertiary. The "love interest" crosses you, then double-crosses the villains with a story about how they're holding her family captive, and then triple-crosses 50 one final time by revealing that she has no family right at the finish line. 50 Cent quips that she's a "crazy bitch" and that's how he likes his women, and then blows her up with a rocket launcher. Your concert promoter/handler/blackmail victim inevitably turns on you — "trust no one," says the arms dealer, advice which 50 ignores three separate times before the credits roll — and just dies unceremoniously in a generic gunfight. You can blast him the moment you're out of the cutscene and get a 25,000 point bonus for doing it in under thirty seconds. This game is bordering on a work of deconstructive genius.

Blood on the Sand is funny, because Blood on the Sand is quaint. It revels in its own selfishness; the war on terror as an aesthetic to push a real guy as being tough, completely bereft of having anything to say other than "damn, 50 Cent is cool". It's almost refreshing to see something so concerned with itself that it's completely unbothered by its own implications. This is a better condemnation of the war on terror and the American culture that spawned around it than Spec Ops: The Line. Hit that big-ass ramp, Fiddy.

This is the good karma version of Rogue Warrior.

I do not know how to talk about 0_abyssalSomewhere.

I mean, in a way I do, but not in a manner it would do it total justice. It's incredibly obtuse, it doesn't make any part of it be clear, it's terrifying and tense despite death being non-existent. And yet, I loved it.

I don't usually remember my dreams very well, but when I do, they tend to be nightmares. Nightmares of me being lost in abandoned places, surrounded by cement walls, oppressive and claustrophobic, and the beings I encounter are hostile, human in form, but lacking something crucial, and that makes them terrifying. In that sense, it's uncanny how much this game replicates and evokes those exact feelings, playing this made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, but now it's stuck on my head.

I know that this review may be biased, but even excluding my own personal dumb experiences with dreams, those sounds coming for the abyss of stone and rusty copper and the cryptic and ethereal monsters made of light and night amounted to something I've never seen in another game.

I believe that its admittedly clunky controls (especially in the ''combat'', despite being so little of it) and its overly cryptic nature do stop it from achieving absolute greatness, but it's still nothing short of incredible. It's a half-hour experience that evokes feelings that other works would wish to.

I cannot wait for what's next in Tower of No One man, for the first time ever I WANT to be creeped out... oh god I'm gonna end up playing Silent Hill won't I?

Some of the most fun I’ve had with a game in years was learning how to kill lizards in Rain World. In my entire time with the game in my first playthroughs, I’m not sure I ever intentionally killed one of these beasts. I saw them as impossible foes. But in order to reach many of my goals in Downpour, I had to learn how to conquer them. The first kill feels like a fluke, like luck, and in a way it is. But each spear that pierces their hide feels more real, more earned. They never stop being terrifying. They never stop being a threat. But I had to learn how to take them down anyway, backflipping, juking, stabbing, feasting. I had to learn how to slay dragons.

I have a brand, and part of that brand is that I really like Rain World. In all my poetic waxings, I often am remiss to mention what makes playing Rain World itself actually so cool. So for once, I’ll try to offer an admittedly vague explanation. I’m sure you can find no shortage of mechanical rundowns, so I’ll keep this brief: Rain World is a unique game where you play as a little slugcat trying to survive and find shelter before the devastating rain comes. It’s quite a difficult game where challenges may often feel insurmountable. What makes Rain World such a unique game is its emphasis on emergent and procedural systems. The vast majority of these systems are not explained to the player at all, and as such have to be learned by experimentation and exploration. The behavior and animations of all the predators and creatures you encounter is unpredictable and dynamic. The game is a bountfiul garden of consistently surprising gameplay.

The result, for me, is something unlike anything else: a constantly exciting game. It’s always a thrill playing Rain World. Even dozens of hours in, I find myself yelping and gritting my teeth. I can get into specifics but I don’t want to dispel the magic of experiencing it yourself. I adore this. It can also end up making making the game agonizing. This is why initial critical response was negative, and why many players will find the game simply too hard or too cruel to even play let alone enjoy. But that agony is a part of the experience, or at least my experience, and it’s part of what makes the slugcat’s journey so beautiful.

So what about Downpour? This is an expansion that adds a litany of new features. If you just want a straight recommendation, I don’t advise going into anything related to the expansion before playing the base game. It’s not a required expansion and frankly is extremely geared towards die-hard fans. Most of my time was spent with the new slugcats, but they also added co-op, Expedition mode, challenges, and other stuff. A major addition to the game was Remix, a suite of new options that is available to owners of the base game. This alone makes recommending Rain World significantly easier, because it now comes with a big list of checkboxes that can help you tailor the game to your own needs. (If you want help figuring out what to use, check out my forum post here.)

Now, there is a criticism that Downpour in many ways actually distorts and weakens the unique core identity of Rain World. I’m torn on this. On one hand, I think it’s a bit paranoid. Even with an expansion (which is still optional!), Rain World remains a singular game like no other. Hunter and Monk were already additions and didn’t distort that vision. On the other hand, this game has a lot of things in it. There’s five new campaigns, a bunch of new game modes, and major additions to the map. There’s a chunk of community easter eggs, which frankly rubs me the wrong way, and the involvement of fandom in art can get ugly fast. The expansion also ends up adding a fair bit to the lore and narrative, and I don’t have simple feelings about some of the choices. (I won’t get into it for spoiler reasons, but there are some big swings that I don’t love.) It’s so much that I couldn’t possibly cover it all, and all the implications and complications in this review; even what I’ve written here is longer than I wanted. I wanted to just talk about the lizards, but this is too dense with content that I can’t just leave it at that. I would never go as far to say that Downpour ruins or fundamentally changes Rain World, but it does definitely add a lot to the mix.

There’s a reason for all this. Let’s talk a bit about the history here: years ago, some Rain World modders began developing the More Slugcats mod, which would add new playable slugcats to the game. Eventually, Videocult took these folks onto the team directly and made the expansion official. This, perhaps, explains why there is a sort of eagerness and lack of restraint to the expansion. The developers have announced intent to continue working on Rain Word, though I get the sense that this will mostly be the Downpour team and not the Videocult duo. I won’t lie that this concerns me; I don’t necessarily want to see this game endlessly expanded. I’m still waiting on the Signal project, and I want to see what else these teams are capable of putting together.

I think part of this comes from the fact that I don’t really engage with games in the way a lot of others seem to. For some people, Rain World is there forever game. I don’t want a forever game. I don’t generally seek to play a game for an indeterminately long amount of time. When I see credits on a roguelite, that’s generally when I stop playing. I am so puzzled when I see people gripe about growing tired of something after several hundred hours in a game. Even my favorite games of all time I generally do not return to ad nauseaum.

But that’s sort of why Downpour ends up making me happy. In spite of some of my concerns and gripes. A messier Rain World is still Rain World, and Rain World is good. And at the end of the day, Downpour gave me a reason to play one of my favorite games again. It gave me a reason to learn how to slay dragons. And that’s worth a hell of a lot.

PERHAPS THE MOST CONFLICTED I'VE FELT ABOUT A 5/10 IN A WHILE

This ain't your dad's 5/10 that's bland and inoffensive enough to not leave any impression whatsoever, this is one of those that has heaps of strong qualities paired with a lot of baffling ones. It goes without saying that the wide range of side content is welcome as usual and one of the strongest aspects of the franchise so I won't labour the point. There's some excellent music here too which isn't unusual for the series at all, with two of the boss themes being some of my favourite in the entire series.

Visually it's probably the best looking game in the franchise so far and the combat has a lot of great aspects to it on top of being a massive step up from the experience of fighting at 25 FPS on the PS4 in the original Judgment. The one-on-one boss encounters especially are probably the best they've ever been on the Dragon Engine games when it comes to gameplay. Ever since the shift to the Dragon Engine the combat has seen a shift to a more crowd control focused style which utilizes a frequent use of physics to emphasize the player's ability to bob and weave between attacks and exploit openings that sends crowds of enemies flying. While this is a shift I very much liked (and will die on this hill defending Yakuza 6's combat as a result), it didn't translate into boss fights as gracefully, making you often feel like you're just waving your AoE-tuned arms and legs at a brick wall. In Lost Judgment they finally nailed this and it made me enjoy its bosses a lot when I cared about what was going on narratively, giving much more of an impression of trading blows with a peer.

Sadly the main source of my frustrated feelings on the game come from the story. The way the story tackles bullying is for the most part pretty great and is paired with an excellent couple of opening chapters. But after that it lost me for a while in its pacing, with a lot of waffling going on for roughly the first half of the game. This isn't a first for the series but the game that comes to mind with a pace this tedious would be Yakuza 3 which I'd consider the worst in the series.

Without going into spoilers the biggest issue with the story is its handling of one specific character who has both a questionable amount of buildup and has their motive bungled just ever so slightly enough to make them come off as an incompetent jackass. This misstep is so severe to me that I can easily see why people generally give this a 8-10 if they didn't mind this. It's difficult to overstate how easy it is to see the appeal in why people love it, a lot of the quality excitement and emotion is all there but almost all of it falls flat due to this hangup. It's exacerbated to comedic proportions when Yagami continously offers sloppy reasoning and counterarguments to said character just so that they can come off as intellectual peers, which made Yagami a lot less likeable of a protagonist to me compared to the original game.

Seriously Yagami sounds like a drunk for most of the game and constantly repeats points that are established a chapter before at best and a minute before at worst.

Also the game's attempts at making the original Judgment's 'detective gameplay' feel less gimmicky and surface level ended up being even more intrusive and just as surface level so that's cool

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. Everyone knows this. Everyone says this. It oozes it from the first seconds of the game, pushing you through an idyllic world-building hallway in a floating city before everything turns to shit and the havoc begins. There’s even a fucking lighthouse. It’s so obvious it’s actually pathetic. The Bioshock series (itself deferred to System Shock 2) is sort of messy, wrapped up in gestures towards depth, both narratively and mechanically, that are ultimately flat. And this hit an apex with Bioshock Infinite, a game I truly despise, which was utterly vapid and utterly hateful. When it comes to depth, these are the equivalent of a Road Runner tunnel painted on a wall. So what of Atomic Heart? What happens when you imitate an imitation?

There’s that famous Putin quote, “Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.” I doubt I will ever really understand this sentiment; I’m not Russian and my ancestors left there long ago. But Atomic Heart is the most I’ve ever seen it manifest. The game is fascinated by Soviet aesthetics, the socialist realism, the hammers and sickles, but rejects the values that formed them. Marx statues and Lenin busts are easy to find, but they’re just set dressing. It loves the utopic visions of Soviet communism, but is disgusted by its own nostalgia. It is trapped pining for the aesthetics of past without its politics. It wants badly to be able to be superficial.

I struggle to explain the exact way this game is so facile. At first I say that Atomic Heart isn’t sophisticated enough to really have an ideology, but that’s not true. Everything has an ideology, and this game often makes it very clear where it’s coming from. So, maybe it’s not sophisticated enough to have a message. Okay, maybe, but it definitely seems to be trying to. So I just land on this: Atomic Heart is not very smart. It really, really thinks it is. But it’s just not.

Dumb games aren’t intrinsically bad, but I think Atomic Heart is. Like, look, aesthetics count for more than most of us want to admit. And, if nothing else, Atomic Heart has a stunning visual style. The robot designs are creative and eerie (and sometimes horny), and the environmental design is almost Seussian at times. That’s why this game’s trailers blew up: it looks sick. If this game was all looks and middling gameplay, I wouldn’t be writing this. Hell, I might be doing a cheeky review of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, instead. But it’s worse.

The problem is that this game never shuts the fuck up. It’s annoying bland protag never stops talking. The glove never stops talking. It does the time honored faux pas of complaining about mechanics it makes you perform. The motherfucker keeps saying “crispy critters” like he’s trying to make it a thing. I tried to play the game with Russian audio but the constant chattering made the game almost impossible even with subtitles. The game is very much interested in its plot and its plot fucking sucks. All of its twists are predictable and none of its ideas are new. Some twists are cribbed directly from Bioshock. I’m withholding some of the absurd spoilers, but there are a few moments that had me laughing to myself, saying, “I hate this game.” And god, it really is not that original. It’s the most run of the mill sci-fi plot you could have cooked up for this game. Its beats are so obvious and so rote. I think the glove literally quotes Animal Farm at you. It’s so fucking annoying. The messages, vapid as they are, are hammered repeatedly and obnoxiously, conveying its shitty politics piecemeal. And its politics really are shitty. There’s the undercurrent of nationalism and of anti-collectivism. This is not to mention the way female-coded robots are sexualized, and the apparent presence of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. I’ve even been told there’s a racist caricature hidden away somewhere in the cartoons that run on loop in this game. It is dripping in bad vibes.

And you know, I’d love to sit here and virtue signal about how I reviled the game and hated every moment, sneering “mid” and patting myself on the back. But I’d be pretending. Because there are fun moments to this trash heap. Like, yeah, it’s a 2010-ass game in a lot of ways (linear, parkour, quicktime events, minigames), but with a post-boomer revival combat sensibility (fast, hard, lots of enemies) and I don’t think it really quite works all said. I could get into it, but I won’t. Regardless, there’s glimmers. Even beyond art assets. In particular, there are some unique mechanical elements to the robot ecosystem. Granny Zina is cool (it would have been a better game if we could play as her). And I actually really liked most of the conversations with the corpses. There are brief moments, when they finally choose to shut the fuck up, where I had genuine fun. But those moments felt rare, where I was left to my devices to revel in silent aesthetics and mechanics, in a constant deluge of its overbearing sci-fi shenanigans and questionable choices, and by the end, all I could remember was the muck.

But doesn’t this all remind you of something? An alternate history sci-fi game, that had really impressive trailers to garner interest, with a very strong art direction admittedly steeped with nationalist visions of the past, that is an extremely watered down immersive sim, that is so enamored with its cliched plot about free will filled with garbage politics, where the game pontificates about agency while robbing you of it and espousing empty platitudes about power, with constant dumb twists and undercurrent of misogyny and centrism, resulting in a game that is inexplicably lauded despite all its glaring flaws and horrendous pretensions?

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. And the worst part is, it’s succeeding.

Dreams is not a LittleBigPlanet sequel. On its surface, the game-engine-within-a-game-engine-running-on-proprietary-consumer-hardware is reminiscent of LittleBigPlanet and its renowned sequel. But consider for a moment that describing LittleBigPlanet purely as a tool for creativity neglects the fact that, as a tool, it was kind of janky. Even its sequels, with their expanded scope and toolsets, could not compensate for the fact that trying to create anything with more than one person usually devolved into the random bouts of deathmatch usually saved for Halo's forge mode--albeit much stupider and silly than that game ever was. Fifteen years later, LittleBigPlanet stands out because it was a fun tool to play around in and also because the atmospheric, pop-music-flavored vibes are still as immaculate as ever.

You can create experiences like that in Dreams, no doubt. But if you try to play Dreams on the basis of vibes alone, what you'll find is an exceedingly vacant and wanting experience.

Dreams understands the counter-cultural angle of LittleBigPlanet's creation tools but, in execution, is more akin to a Net Yaroze spiritual successor. Net Yaroze, for those not in the know, was a brief attempt by Sony to turn their aging PlayStation 1 hardware into a hobbyist's wet dream. It may not have had all of the bells and whistles of that professional developers were afforded at the time, but given that anyone could still make a game with it, that hardly mattered. Net Yaroze's output can charitably be described as the demo scene on a smaller, more niche scale. Those invested in putting full-3D first-person shooters on the floppy disks that Doom would have shipped on weren't concerned with pushing the limits of hardware as restrictive as the PlayStation. But those who simply wanted to know what a PlayStation could do happily sent 700 dollars to Sony in the year of our lord 1997 (I'm citing Wikipedia, and there's nothing you can do about it). In much the same way, Dreams is chock-full of demonstrations. "What if I made Fallout 4?" is a sentiment you'll find throughout its community. If Dreams were as laser-focused on its target audience as Net Yaroze was, it would likely end there. But in the vein of it being a spiritual successor, those demos exist to the extent that they do in part because Dreams is more than just an accessible variant of the past. A fine line is walked between accessibility and depth. Custom music, for example, feels less like the gimmick it was in LittleBigPlanet 2, and more like a fully-fledged feature. It may not be the copy of MTV Music Maker that Jim Guthrie composed Morning Noon Night on, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone in Guthrie's elk found Dreams to be of great use. The end result is that, alongside a multitude of tech demos, Dreams is also filled to the brim with the kinds of microgames you used to see on platforms like GameJolt whenever a developer was bored or participated in a game jam. There isn't a sense that there's a broader market that these creators need to work towards; Dreams strips the bullshit away from prestige indie games and lets indies be fucking indies again.

And it's dying. It's behind a paywall, there's a fairly steep learning curve so no one's really made the great American Dreams creation yet, it never got ported to PC, and it is no longer a priority of Media Molecule's. It wouldn't surprise me if the community on this is only slightly more active than the five remaining people who play LittleBigPlanet 3. And that's a shame! Dreams deserved waaaay better. I don't know if I can recommend it in its current state, but for what it once represented, it was great.

ngl tho, the Puyo Puyo/Madou Monogatari cast have the drip, like they actually resemble their personalities. Of course Arle wears baggy pants, Schezo is the maracas himbo, Satan's our fishnet sexyman, and Rulue hangs out at Hot Topic. I'm sure someone at Compile just got hammered one night and asked "why don't we just dress the gang in American urban wear and have them dance like PaRappa?" That's one big problem with bosses taking you out to drink: you never know what random thing you'll say that later becomes a 1999 PaRappa the Rapper-like.

| The rise and fall of Puyo, Madou, Compile, and more |

There's both little to say and so much to cover with Puyo Puyo DA!, one of Compile's final releases. It's a hastily made, simplistic rhythm title bandwagoning on the hip-hop dog's success. There's a scant eight songs for eight minimally different characters, with only the most basic single-player and multi-player modes. And the actual rhythm game part of this package isn't much to speak for, either. I can sense that the devs generally matched distinct notes, rhythms, and other musical bits to the button charts they designed, but the laggy input processing means you're always tapping a bit behind the beat. Must I explain why that's frustrating and should have gotten at least a week to test-fix? Neither are the charts and songs varied enough to compete with its direct inspiration, let alone so many BEMANI series which trounced it in content and playability. The crust is real, folks—presentation and a great soundtrack save this from the trashcan, but how'd Compile go from one of Japan's most consistent self-publishers to…whatever greenlit this?

Prior to folding and its IPs scattering to the winds, the company had dug itself into a corner in every way. Masamitsu "Moo" Niitani and other leaders had drastically shifted Compile's direction away from their varied arcade-y shooters, puzzlers, xRPGs, etc. which brought them critical and commercial success. These still existed and even thrived on Disc Station subscription disks/CDs for various PCs, but on consoles and in arcades, Puyo Puyo and its parent series Madou Monogatari were the cash crops de jour. [1] Puyo Puyo did so damn well in game centers, rivaling many popular versus fighters in popularity, that Niitani centered most of the studio's resources around sequels and spinoffs. And all those largely similar Madou remakes for different machines proved fruitful, for a time. I mean, sure, they've effectively spurned their STG developers away by throwing all their resources at excuses to spread le smug Carbuncle face everywhere, which is why talent like Yuichi Toyama left sometime in 1992 to form Raizing (8ing). That's not a bad sign, right?

You bet it was. Things went far worse in other market sectors that Compile soon targeted. Though various Puyo-Madou merch sold well during the series' heyday, like the Puyoman manju candies, the cooling (though not dead) interest in these combat puzzlers left the corporation and its partners saddled with inventory and frustrated distributors. [2] Both an ill-advised new office in Fukuoka and a dead-on-arrival business software suite called Power Acty tightened their slim wallets even further. Worst of all, though, Compile just didn't have the mainstream console and PC presence they used to. Cash-cropping Puyo-Madou to such degrees hurt not only their blockbuster action games, but even the smaller faire reserved for Disc Station and handhelds. Difficulty courting new talent, insubstantial series entries sent to die on nearly dead consoles (all those late-stage Mega Drive carts!), an unwillingness to experiment with MMOs or get more involved with their surprising Disc Station hype in South Korea…I could go on. Compile found Incredible New Ways to Bleed Money seemingly every quarter from around 1996 to 1998, which eventually had them filing for bankruptcy and promising Puyo-Madou's rights to SEGA if unable to pay them back by 2002.

With some fresh cash from restructuring, Compile had precious few years left to use the Puyo-Madou IP intact before ceding them to the new owners. So, not learning any lessons from this outcome, they doubled down on the franchise even harder. Their lack of confidence in starting new big properties, let alone bringing any non-Puyo games to the PS1 while it was hot, led to quick, often copycat products on the SEGA systems they were overly familiar with. Wait, that's a great idea: have our Puyo-Madou guys make us some hit DC software! I'll admit that a Puyo spinoff's still got more immediate appeal to our Western eyes than something wholly new or remade from the Disc Station catalog. Except the latter's what happened anyway. Puyo Puyo DA! exists partly thanks to an earlier PC-98 minigame called Broadway Legend Elena. Now both games can be done dirty for the good of getting Compile off its bruised back! And I'd even be fine with that if this GD-ROM had sold well enough to save at least the development studio. No dice. Our beleaguered company limped along until 2003, with very few games releasing that late except on PC and handhelds. Zanac X Zanac and Guru Logic Champ deserved better than this, as did Wander Wonder, After Devil Force, Geo Conflict…argh. IGDB doesn't even many of these games listed yet, a telling sign of the studio's late-stage irrelevance.

We live in one of the timelines ever, and this one sadly saddles us with Compile Heart, SEGA arguably mishandling the Puyo-Madou war chest over time, and most other IPs receiving basic re-releases by the Project EGG people. Quite the downfall from the company's mid-'90s apex, back when you could find ads and broadcasts showcasing their swag and software on major networks. [3] You'd think that a Compile flush with cash would have tried bringing way more of their products out West during this time, a wise investment that would have made banks and investors plenty happy. Of course, why take that risk when you could just hire the army of staff needed to draft up a Puyo-Madou theme park, buy the land, and start construction? [4] Genius planning there, guys. It's almost like chasing trends which were clearly fads ended up kneecapping this corp in no time flat, a pattern as old as the consumer electronics industries in Japan, the U.S., etc. going back to the '60s. Localization efforts to broaden their market beyond this domestic audience wouldn't have seemed as glamorous, sure, yet they could have kept Compile going on its own terms for a long time.

| Grooving out like there's no tomorrow |

Oh, right, where does Puyo Puyo DA! factor into all of this? I doubt this game exists in place of some unknown better project (though I won't rule it out), yet it's still bittersweet to try out today. One could get quite a bit of fun from this if they're a fan of the genre, and/or love to watch these Puyo masters dabbing on each other for an hour. There's also Elena (or Ellena, IDK), no longer having a funny story mode like in her original game. She's not even one of the easy characters to play as, getting harder charts than Arle or Suke-T despite having subtitle spotlight on the game's cover. As I booted in, skipped the minimal options menu, and started a regular game using Ellena, this was beginning to look dicey. At least the window dressing's cute; chunky lower-poly modeling on this platform almost always looks nicer than it should. Each level is colorful, readable, and thematically appropriate. Everyone on stage has a hypnotic cadence, and

I keep bringing up Ellena's game because it did, in fact, predate PaRappa and other Simon Says-style rhythm classics from that hardware cycle, a legacy which the game loop in Puyo Puyo DA! neither advances nor matches in quality. Broadway Legend Ellena didn't have the combo chaining mechanic you can mildly synergize with here, yet that still felt like a dream compared to this. Set aside the aforementioned lack of music-input sync and we're stuck with a very limited set of commands to dance with. Face buttons and that blistering DC d-pad let you tap all four colors of Puyo while shoulder buttons handle the sun Puyo—where the fuck's the analog stick?! Every instance of tapping three or more 16th-note Puyos, wondering if input lag or my fingers would mess up first, has me wishing I could instead twist quarter-circles to accomplish the same. Better yet, having to use both Puyos and analog-based dancing motions would have added something meaningful to the pace and diversity of charts. All the characters feel too same-y without that extra layer, and the most engagement I found here came from executing some downright evil split-second segments.

Puyo combos are a minor mix-up to the formula, too, which I noticed mainly when the tide of duels went against me. Like in a classic Puyo match, nailing all your inputs in a row showers the opponent's "junk" bar with evil blobs. However, this presents a false sense of strategy; either player, real or AI, will lose the match if even one junk Puyo remains on their side. Compile could have added scaling thresholds of how much trash you can take on before toggling that lose state, but no, it's truly all or nothing, and the final rounds against Satan and Rulue on Hard become needlessly evil. Hell, the main series' concept of a filling, claustrophobic playfield is absent here, which makes death-by-grey-goo feel even weirder. It really grinds my gears to witness this much potential being squandered for reasons I have no way to verify. Did the team run out of time or money later in development? Was this always a cheapie, recycling nearly its whole soundtrack from Compile's own albums while tasking their few 3D modelers to do the real work? One day we'll uncover the truth; I've known the Puyo Puyo fandom long enough to vouch for their dedication and persistence.

| When all's lost, shout from your soul! |

All these grievances haven't overshadowed the main reason I can still play this, thankfully, which is that perverse delight of watching Compile's mascots gyrating to, as the kids call them these days, Absolute Bangers. The studio's sound team, like so many from Japanese developers in this period, had their own in-house vocalists and live band, performing and recording many catchy tunes throughout the '90s. Taken this way, Puyo Puyo DA! unironically succeeds as a sampler disc and playable jukebox in one, entertaining less for how it plays and more through its curated set of discotheque-grade jams. I bring up disco because, relative to the aggressive IDM booming around Y2K, what's offered here might seem tame, cheesy, or downright laughable at times. Maybe I'm a sucker for MIDI synth-brass, karaoke bravado, and canned drum loops, though. Pair this camp soundscape with suitably stiff but charming animation and we've got a winner! Even good 'ol Niitani sings on some of the tracks—good for him.

For all its shortcomings, plus misreading a market moving on to Dance Dance Revolution and other rhythm innovators, I kind of love Puyo Puyo DA! the way only a video game historian can. This absolutely was not the kind of game that could save Compile, and I wonder if it managed to break even considering the Dreamcast's abysmal performance in Japan. Still, it's a hoot for any self-styled Puyo-Madou heads, which I am one of. From those awkwardly easy opening moments to the trial-and-error irritations later on, I still bopped along to Katsumi Tanaka's cheery vocals, no less powerful than Takenobu Mitsuyoshi when you need him. And glancing at my avatar's comical reaction to missing a chain, or the very same from an opponent, kept me going well past the point of dropping this in disgust. Little details here and there tell me that someone at Compile had fun and passion while developing this, even if it started life as yet another hail-Mary from a dying soft house trying to avert disaster. At the very least, we'll have learned more from this event than Moo Niitani ever did—seriously, does he think he can capture lightning in a bottle twice, or are Puyo-style puzzlers the only thing he has left to pitch when starting a new doomed company? What a cursed franchise. Pardon me, it's closing time and I gotta pour one out for Kazunari Yonemitsu and the gang (don't worry, he and the rest at Sting are doing alright).

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Apr. 4 - 10, 2023

| Bibliography |

[1] discstation. “コンパイル@DiscStation Wiki.” コンパイル@discstation wiki. アットウィキ, November 19, 2022. https://w.atwiki.jp/discstation/.
[2] compile.co.jp, webmaster @, ed. “Puyoman Products -FOODS-.” Compile. Compile Corporation, November 1, 1996. http://web.archive.org/web/19961101080505/http://www.compile.co.jp/puyoman/goods/foods/index2.html.
[3] Iwaki, Toshiaki, and Yoshito Onishi. “Tokyo Game Show: Puyo Puyo.” Broadcast. Tonight 2 1996, no. August 28. Tokyo, Kanto: TV Asahi, August 28, 1996. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtZB1QNdsi0&t=879s.
[4] さん blitz753challenge, ed. “貴重 ゲーム ぷよぷよ 魔導ランド 直筆絵画 コン...” ヤフオク! Yahoo! Japan, August 17, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220818105430/https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d1060882018.