I never know how to write shit about Mario Party cause like you generally know what the fuck you're getting into with these games. Like there's just not all that much to talk about with it. I do think this one has more than enough content to work towards that is more interesting in actual replayability, the star bank and being able to unlock a map, some more minigames and characters is nice, it's mainly why this was like my childhood MP.

I think the games are absolutely who ya play them with and the little moments ya share with them. So like before I played this with two of my besties (Appreciations and Weatherby) and had pretty great times.

Ya got shit like Bowser Jr hitting a like 3080 on the snowboarding minigame like the cheating little shit he is, us all clowning on Bowser Jr constantly, me losing at that one dogshit bumper car bump-o-rama battle minigame cause the controls are so so so ass, buying cheap wine and just laughing about stupid bullshit happening in game.

Mario Party ain't about Mario Party, it's about chilling with people and slamming back some cheap ass wine while the game itself fucks you over in the dumbest ways possible or clearly sets you up to just lose the entire game. Even if I never play this again I will always keep these memories pretty close to my heart as very special cherished times.

My continued vendetta against Bowser Jr grows stronger with each passing day. One day I'll get him back for stealing 5 of my stars that son of a bitch.

Played for a couple of hours and I feel like I've sort of gotten the big picture of what the game has to offer. The plot is absolutely ridiculous and fantastic; you're an adolescent alien that needs to go through a rite of passage by playing pranks upon dumb Earth men/women to get lotsa cash, by stealing and wearing their skins (let's not think too hard about the implications here) and then becoming a public menace. The main gameplay loop is fun enough, but it gets a bit repetitive since you will run out of tools for pranks and will need to capture more skins and head back to UFOs that move around every time you use them. Also, there is a CPU that is actively trying to defeat you and will attack you to break down your disguise; once that happens, you're stuck in hitstun for quite a while, and if your disguise fully breaks, you lose a lot of money (that you cannot regain) which does slow down story mode a bit. And that's more or less the gist of it; it's a great game for laughs and giggles but I agree with BastardJodie that this game is probably better experienced as a chaotic party game of sabotage and proto amogus (I think it would be a ton more interesting if both you and the CPU couldn't tell by the tags whom was whom under the skins) and having to constantly run around for more skins and skin renewal via UFOs does slow it down a bit. Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting hidden gem that folks looking for something off the beaten path should give a shot.

This game is a technical marvel and it plays really well too. Taking a horizontal shmup series and putting it into the gameplay of something like Space Harrier is no easy task. The game features lots of spectacle, challenge, and lots of opportunities to get a huge high score. The presentation and audio is still as good as usual for the Cotton series with the only unfortunate absence being the cutscenes for every level now being only for the opening and ending of the game. It’ll probably take you a few attempts to beat the game as it can be pretty hard and you only have one life and a few continues. Try to play well to achieve more life.

While the impressive presentation is an amazing achievement for the system, it comes with the unfortunate problem of the framerate being a bit low. It’s not the worst but it sucks that there will probably never be a good FPS version of the game. With that said however you should definitely try the game out as it’s one of the finest shmups on the system with a lot of replayability. It also has seen a modern rerelease though be warned that make sure you update it as it launched with inaccurate emulation. It also features a new translation but a fan one also exists. Sadly getting an original copy is expensive, especially brand new. Hope you enjoy this incredible game or at least get to enjoy the visuals and fast pace.

Killer on Debt

Suda51's Killer is Dead was one of the many titles produced during the "Dark Era" of Grasshopper Manufactured as a developer since they're not publishers themselves. The 7th gen on consoles and the craze of action games, no matter the type was an age to learn the in and outs of the market. Say; your Bayonnetas, Devil May Cries, your Metal Gear Revengeances and even No More Heroes, something more close to home. Each one adding their own flair and substance beyond just connecting combos; the story, characters, dialogue, style, music and the overall presentation helps a lot of these titles stand on their own in top of being Hack and Slash games.

What doesn't suit me much with Killer is Dead is the overall package itself. The consistency in a game is key, maintaining a structure that can last is hard. Specially when we're talking about videogames. Killer is Dead greatest sin is that it can't mantain it at all, and when it does is you start to notice that something is missing. This leads me to believe that: Development time was tight and not enough, it was too ambitious and due to a lack of funding a lot of stuff had to be cut or simple inexperience led to a subpart product.

Takes some light inspiration from No More Heroes combat, combined with a simple yet fun upgrade system and killer7 signature cell-shading style and even the word "killer" slapped on the title. The combat is really fun albeit braindead easy and can get really repetitive on longer sections that require you to fight endless hordes of faceless enemies. It emphazises a "counter and strike" playstyle towards the normal enemies and being agressive towards some bosses; either dodge or parry their attacks to squeeze more juice out of the combat. When it comes to style, Killer is Dead is one hell of a looker, we don't see many games if any with the style that originated in killer7 emphasizing the crude and raw colors over the scenery, specially the blacks disguised as overly thick shadows. Killer is Dead has some of that, but it failed to secure a peaceful cohesion with all of the visual flare it has to offer. It is very close but they might have gone overboard with the motion blur and glow in general? While killer7 remained mostly calm and gave you enough time to analyze the scenery in your head without any intrusive post-processing effect while on gameplay. It is distracting in Killer is Dead if we compare it directly to killer7, it unecessarily stains an already clean image and thus ruining some of the merit it might had towards the future at least for me.

This time we the take control of "Mondo Zappa" and no it's not Sumio Mondo's lost cousin or anything just because they share that word. "Mondo" means "World" in Italian and my guess is because both characters travel around the world very often due to their jobs. Zappa works under an agency sustained by taxes, which means they work for the goverment, and their main goal is to execute whoever the client at hand is asking. Each chapter is treated as missions or levels which can be selected on a world map alongside sitting with some side-content in top of it alá No More Heroes 2. "Giggolo" as they're called are basically side-missions were we need...to enchant women with gifts? The whole ordeal is unnecessary, used as an excuse to give us new gadgets to make combat/exploration easier. It might be one of the many corporate meddling decisions that Grasshopper wered force to include because it really feels out of place and not something even a teenager would like. Lame.

Back to the story itself. It is known by most people that Suda51 makes games for a specific type of audience, they're not for everybody and that is perfectly okay. The weird and outlandish style can both attract and discourage people to try these games. Most Suda51's work tend to be chaotic on the surface, but subtle on the inside; Killer is Dead is vague and tries to tell it's whole narrative in that style. You see, killer7 worked because it has a fundation to stand on and the details of the story while vague were presented correctly as it had a lot to tell and was complex even for it's time. Killer is Dead narrative is quite simple but burried under layers and layers of vague dialogue and shiny visuals that end up confusing more than answering the questions themselves. That is why Killer is Dead fails for the most part and it is why I feel indifferent towards it.

Killer is Dead is worse that the sum of it's part. On one side it is a good and stylish action game, on the other side the music and the story are quite underwhealing and doesn't do much to shine on it's own so I barely had any reason to go forward outside just wanting to finish it. Play it if you're in the mood but don't feel forced to do so, it's 2$ on Steam on most sales.

Let's get the comparisons out of the way. This game is inspired heavily by Guardian Legend for the NES. You're a robot girl who can transform into a ship, with stages divided into top down exploration and shmups segments. There are a lot of weapons you can use htat lead to lots of gameplay styles. Unlike Guardian Legend, this game is divided into stages rather than a large world with keys.

This game's difficulty options are pretty varied, I completed 2 out of the 4 main options, Normal (the lowest) and Formidable (the second highest). I don't know if I'm good enough at this to beat Heartless Rampage, which disables health drops, so I'll say I'm done for now. Formidable took me about twice as long to beat as normal, so I think it's reasonably hard. Aside from that, you get two control options, classic style where you can only shoot in the direction you're moving, and modern style, where once you shoot you can strafe to keep firing in one direction in exchange for increased enemy health. I only played on classic, I felt that the variety of weapons makes strafing unnecessary and you can work around it. (as a side note, I feel the "modern" control format for this type of top down shooter would be a twin stick style, but I guess sticking to the NES influence doesn't let you have twin sticks.) One last difficulty option you get is a choice between a sensor that can detect breakable walls or an extra point for buying upgrades. I went with the sensor for both runs, in hindsight I could've gone sensor once and just wrote down where all the upgrades are, they don't seem to change between difficulties.

You get a basic rapid fire shot and 6 alt shots that can be swapped at checkpoints at the start of the game, these use no ammo. Among the alt shots, there's a neat black hole gun that sucks enemies in and does damage. Unfortunately I found it wasn't that practical, particularly on Formidable where I mostly stuck with flamethrower for top down stages, charge shot for bosses, and shotgun/homing for shmup segments. Sorry bazooka you're not useful. There are special weapons too, one free choice out of 3 per stage and you can buy the others between levels, plus a special weapon at the start and second to last level. The variety here is really good, I feel it accounts for lots of different playstyles. My favorites wound up being the basic lance once I realized it could hit through walls, the laser that could be used as a strafe shot in normal mode, and the slow powerful fireball. I'm sure other players would have different preferences though. The upgrades you could get between stages aren't all so dramatic, but as a lance lover the free lance usage made me happy and the last chance hit gives a whole six seconds of invincibility so that's insane. You can't get all upgrades even when finding all upgrade points, I like that choice, really emphasizes different playstyles.

This game is pretty nice looking too, some of the levels like the beach and final level have nice color palettes. The soundtrack is pretty good too.

If you play this I'd recommend going normal mode to learn the weapons/upgrades before higher difficulties.

Excellent platformer for the NES! It's not really very different from the first one, but having a new set of levels makes it fun to play. The gameplay doesn't change radically, however, this game introduces some new ideas like new uses for the cane, which make interacting with some elements of the environment more entertaining. I really like how exploring is still the focal point of the adventure, and this is made more entertaining as there are more secrets in the levels, such as more treasures or upgrades for the cane. The first DuckTales was not a difficult game, but still losing all lives could cause a sudden Game Over, DuckTales 2 instead is much more accessible in its difficulty, making you can spend the money you earn in the levels in a store where you can buy items that recover vitality, lives or even continues.

I felt that this time the scenery and music were not as memorable as in the first installment, but it is compensated by a better level design in general. Perhaps my only complaint is that the game is too short. It's too short, and as soon as you think about it the game will be over suddenly, just like this review.

Conclusion

ㅤ

Played 2 hours and realized I just was not having any fun. I don't particularly like the weapon (his attack animations/feel). I have problems timing the parry and the dodge to the attack animations. I love big shields in Dark Souls, but that feeling is NOT the same as shielding in this game. I dont like that the first area is just a open area with some "ruins".

I got to the second area (a big safe zone city) and all my exploration drive went away. I do not want to hear any more talking, I don't want to explore anymore so I just quit.

Yeah I think the artstyle, setting, and music is a good change of pace for Souls-likes, but it I don;t like the combat so 👎

"Curiosity killed the uncool cat, ya dig?" - Chad Ghostal

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.

In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.

Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.

Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.

The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.

Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.

And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.

We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.

At the risk of using the game journalist's fallback comparison, I just want to say that Crash Bandicoot is really, really hard. This is a do-or-die 3D platformer if I've ever played one. Each individual jump expects commitment. It wants you to be ready to go to college, get married, and raise a family every time you hit that X button. Crash Bandicoot can sense hesitation, and will not hesitate to off himself if he thinks you're not giving it your all. Couple this with fairly repetitive level designs and concepts, and I think this game is just tailor-made to hate you.

I'd accept Crash Bandicoot as a hard game if not for the stupid save system. First you find three severed heads hidden in boxes throughout a stage, then you skim past a bonus stage (that you can fail), and THEN the game blesses you with the opportunity to save your game. Worse yet, the game doesn't remember how many lives you had when you reset it. Slapping a fistful of lives at the beginning of each level doesn't really excuse this fact. Crash is a game where you can lose lives just as fast as you can earn them. Actually, you're probably gonna lose 'em faster if you're like me, someone unfamiliar with Crash's game.

Honestly, I only played this game as a rite of passage for the PS1 kick that I'm currently on. Gotta respect your elders, and boy oh boy, that bandicoot sure has aged. Crushed my ballsicoots.

Before this review starts, I would like to preface that this is by no means an actual, in-depth critical review of Max Payne 3. I won’t be touching the story or gameplay AT ALL in this, so let that be warned. This is purely about how I feel about Max Payne 3’s portrayal of my region of Brazil and how it affected my enjoyment of it to the point where I just can’t really stand it and think it is one of the most racist video games ever made. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Resident Evil 5 is frequently cited as a super racist video game when Max Payne 3 is literally right there and does the exact same things that game does!

The average person who played Max Payne 3 will probably not bother to do an inch of research on the country of Brazil, probably thinks Rio is the capital, and believes that it is an absolute warzone hellhole where people get shot on the street constantly. This is the kind of audience Rockstar was trying to appeal to with this game. I do not believe, even for a second, that they made this game out of respect for Brazil. They simply wanted a 3rd world country to throw their white American hero into so he could shoot and kill without a care in the world, because the 3rd world is so lawless, right? They wanted to portray their weird, twisted view of Brazil so much that they even went so far as to scan a thousand residents of the favela of Paraisópolis into the game, acting as backdrop NPCs in the chapters that do take place in the favela. You can kill actual residents of São Paulo in Max Payne 3, which is crazy once you consider how the rest of the game handles this stuff. You can sit there in your little house just outside Little Rock, Arkansas, and get your greasy hands on the controller and shoot at people who were probably paid less than a penny for their faces to be plastered onto enemies. It's the most pure depiction of the average 40-something-year-old American going to a country that doesn't belong to you and killing brown people for fun!

There is so much arrogance in Rockstar's approach to developing Max Payne 3. A huge inspiration for the game was the 2007 Brazilian movie “Tropa de Elite," which is very funny once you learn what that movie is about. It's like Rockstar saw that movie as just an average cool awesome shooter romp through a favela and not as a critique of Brazil’s problems and struggle with violence. I think taking a movie that presents a very thoughtful critique of violence and using it for their little American power fantasy video game is insanely disrespectful. But it’s not like it really matters to the audience for this game. The audience doesn’t know what "Tropa de Elite" is; most of them couldn’t even tell what language Brazil speaks, and most of them probably don’t even know Portuguese is a language. It appeals to the naive, the Americans, who think going to Brazil to shoot at some mixed-race thugs is the coolest thing in the world because they can live out their little soldier hero fantasy.

The depiction of lawful Brazilian citizens, who all seem to hate gringos and be aggressive on sight despite Brazil frequently being cited as one of the most friendly countries to foreigners, is an objectively wrong, offensive depiction. Brazilians do not hate gringos; I, being one myself and being friends with a lot of gringos and foreigners, can personally attest to this. I have been around a lot of São Paulo because I live fairly close to it and there are always gringos around, and no one minds, and in fact, most Brazilians really enjoy helping out gringos or foreigners in any way they can!  Rockstar seems to have this weird, twisted idea that since it's a favela and not the clean, corporate building of the Brancos, the people are totally different. The people from the favelas are wonderful people, despite the bad hand most of them have been dealt in life: stuck in poverty, living in run-down buildings on top of other buildings, stacked up so high. They have a resilient spirit; they, to me, represent the Brazilian spirit more than any other group of people in this world, and I respect them deeply for it. I think choosing to depict these people as inherently hostile to Max, the American hero, is so disrespectful to them and their home and the culture they were raised around, and it paints a picture that is absolutely not true. I believe Rockstar chose to depict the favelas like that because it would sell. The depiction of the favelas as lawless wastelands with gangsters and thugs at every corner is the most pure evidence you could find of the ignorance of the average American writer. You can visit a country and study it, see how it is, then go home to your little flat in your little apartment and depict it in a way that would make sense to your audience, which is the American, the one you want to please because they at the end of the day give you money; the citizens of São Paulo don’t really matter in the end much at all, and their input was never needed.

Brazil already gets misrepresented by the world at large, and I am a firm believer that media can affect and alter reality and how people perceive things in significant ways. Rockstar seemed to be drawn in by the allure of Brazil that exists in the minds of only foreigners and not the actual experience of the average Brazilian. The funk, the favela, the scorching sun, the people, the beaches, the drinking, the soccer—everything that people stereotype Brazilians as is present in this game! I don’t feel proud saying this is THE game that takes place where I live, that this is THE game that is supposed to “represent” São Paulo. I personally struggled with my Brazilian identity for a long time because of certain notions and preconceptions people held and still hold against Brazilians, particularly online, which tends to get very very nasty and racist. And I cannot sit here and pretend like I am fine with the way these Americans wrote about my country and my people.

Even when you get to the real villains of the game, the Brazilian UFE and Victor Branco, the game never changes from its weird attitude towards Brazilians. Chapter 12 is literally named “The Great American Savior of the Poor,” and as ironic as Rockstar’s intent may have been while writing that, they characterize Max and Brazilians in such a way that that is actually the case! He stops the Comando Sombra, he stops the UFE, he stops political corruption, and he saves a bunch of favela citizens from getting their organs harvested. He, a white American man, really does become the savior of the poor through this game's absolutely naive and frankly stupidly racist writing. And the critique itself towards the Brazilian police and political world is absolutely shallow and warped. I mean, Victor Branco is kind of a silly caricature of a stereotypical corrupt Brazilian politician, but the game doesn’t really delve any deeper than that, and it frankly makes me quite sad. Just a few years after this game came out, Operation Car Wash started, and honestly, I wish this game had come out during that time frame so they could have developed that plot point further. But then I also worry they would’ve handled it in the worst way possible and made the most Brazilian right-wing propaganda piece video game of all time, and that thought alone sends shivers down my spine. Like Imagine in your head right now a game so right-wing Bolsonaro would probably use clips of it in his 2018 campaign. I already think the game is inherently right-leaning simply because of the way it handles a lot of the subject matter, and I honestly fear what a 2017 Max Payne 3 taking place in Brazil during the Temer era would look like...

If it seems like I have gotten emotional or angry while writing this, it is because I have! I do not live in the city of São Paulo proper; I live on the coast. But I have been to São Paulo quite often in my life due to a few of my relatives living there, and those relatives live in the parts that Max Payne 3 chose specifically to depict. It makes me sad that this is the product that was made; this is what Rockstar chose to depict of my family, my friends, and my country. To the people that live here, to the people that know and love people that live in the world Max Payne 3 chose to take place in, it is a very painful experience to go through again and again. São Paulo is really a beautiful state, and most will never ever get to experience it; only the people that have lived here would really understand how amazing and beautiful it truly can be. But to the average audience that loves Rockstar, all of this is alright and fine by them; they’re never going to feel offended, and they’re never going to have a problem with it. They’re never going to feel their blood pressure rise when the game says something so insanely racist you have to take a step back. They’re never going to wonder how their friends and family are viewed due to the negative connotations being from a favela already carried, made worse by a totally inept and ignorant development team. Because they don’t care. To the average American consumer, it is just another game set in a "shithole," a "warzone," where they get to escape their privileged realities and pretend they’re some sort of hero. Rockstar manages to reinforce every single negative stereotype about Brazil for these people. And they’re going to eat it up; they’ll believe it because they are inherently ignorant. It is a game made for Americans, not for the Brazilian people, and there is nothing more American than pretending to be a badass hero in some “shithole” where the only goal is to kill as many brown people as possible.

I have gone on a few tangents here and there, but I have stated my case. Max Payne 3 is a racist video game, plain and simple. It's not going to beat around the bush and pretend it's because Rockstar is doing it by accident because it honestly feels very deliberate. They had writers approve a lot of this stuff, and it baffles me that at no point a writer went and said how kind of messed up it all is. I will leave a single quote here that I feel perfectly illustrates what I mean by all of this:

“We’d half destroyed São Paulo’s most hallowed place of worship.” A stadium.

If I could jump that high...would I ever find the ground again?

Is it bad to jump that high into the sky of nostalgia? To let yourself slip away and put your head into the clouds? Will those clouds of nostalgia turn you against your peers who don't see the vision? The vision of a children's playground for you to jump around to your heart's content? Planting yourself on a little conveyor and riding on it like a first-person roller coaster? Pretending to pet the non-threatening round green birds that chirp "kiwi!" if you dare to shoot them?

I wish I could jump like Robbit, I wish I could shoot lasers like Robbit, and I wish I could make funny noises whenever I took a step forward like Robbit. Why is life such a bore? Why can't it be just playgrounds and rainbows? Why can I not be just like my hero Robbit? Fighting funny evil men with funny palm tree jellyfish henchmen.

Was it my mom's fault that she bought me this during a time where I got nothing for a majority of the year due to being a poor December baby? Is she to blame for this mess? My poisonous care for a simple video game that I had played too much? The rare time where I can attach my mom to a game instead of my gamer dad? My yearning for days that I didn't need to care about getting up for work in the morning? When I didn't have a constant worry for the struggles of others? Is it truly bad for me? To just make me forget, and make me care only about smiling and struggling to hold back my emotions? To just, feel once more?

Is it bad for me to feel like a kid again? For just one hour?

Why must life be so grounded...?

Let's go Robbit, let's jump and go...for old times' sake once more....

Ah, man. Really not as good as I remember. Still too hard for its own good, which I had already been well aware of, but it also just feels like a very blah experience past that. It spends 75% of its time on Tatooine, and while A New Hope certainly does more than enough to get by with only two or three main locations, it feels unvaried and kind of shit when padded out to 12 stages. Around the second half of the game you get the option to play as Han or Chewbacca, but there's never really any reason to play as Han since Luke retains his blaster after receiving his lightsaber anyways, and Chewbacca plays poorly and doesn't really feel suited to his surroundings. Also around this point, many levels seem to use the same song in a row and it gets really grating. One of my friends ended up just muting the stream until it was over, and honestly I can't blame him.

It's really only the graphics and presentation that shine here in retrospect, and everything else needs a bit of work. Having to pull teeth to complete the game even on Easy isn't really worth it when there's already not as much to appreciate. The sequels are a little more varied if my memory serves me well, but even harder. I don't even know if I can endure them again.