The worst one, apparently! Gaiden is undoubtedly a weird game and a black sheep, but I'd be very hard pressed to call it bad, or without merits. In fact, Gaiden is actually really cool, and many of its issues are grossly overblown. Just like with FE7, I feel that just because a bunch of fetubers have said it's bad, or pointed out its issues, it's become the general consensus, and in Gaiden's case I personally doubt many of its detractors have even played it because of its infamy. I don't blame them - a clunky, slow, Famicom SRPG with poor balancing and bad map design doesn't exactly sound fun, and it certainly seems like perfect punching bag material, but believe me when I say this; these are not egregious enough to make Gaiden unenjoyable, at least to me. If you want a tldr, I typed up my thoughts in a previous review, which was admittedly very passive aggressive and rude, which I apologise for. I just get heated trying to defend games I like, I suppose. But yeah, Gaiden is actually cool and you're all wrong. (Not really. All opinions are valid but I do heavily disagree with the negative sentiment this game has garnered.)

Gaiden is actually really impressive for a Famicom game of the time. Having a multi-faceted narrative with two ongoing, playable routes is probably the biggest part of Gaiden's identity, and I can't think of any other games from the time that dared to try this, at least within the realm of SRPGs and JRPGs. The world map is also surprisingly detailed, always fully visible, and fully traversible from top to bottom, albeit on a fixed path. I never saw any sprites flicker, and the battle animations are nothing short of eye-candy. I really like some of the attention to detail too, like having Alm and Celica's portraits change slightly on promotion, or the final boss' battle sprite completely changing when weakened. Not to mention the unique animation Alm gets for landing the finishing blow. That shield toss gives me chills and I don't think any other NES game has ever made me feel that.

Although I already knew the gist of Gaiden's narrative, having already played Echoes, I still think it's worth pointing out how good it is, especially by NES standards. What starts off as spearheading an uprising against a corrupt general spirals into the conquest of an entire nation, and wrestling control of the world from Gods back into the hands of humans. If you know me, that last bit is one of my favourite tropes in any form of media, and I think this might be one of the first ever examples of it - so good on Gaiden for starting the trend.

Here comes the hard part, though. Addressing Gaiden's biggest issues is difficult. The common complaints aren't totally unfounded, but they're definitely exaggerated. I guess I can try by getting the most notorious out of the way; the map design.

Gaiden map design is....weird. I don't think it's necessarily bad though. There're lots of open areas, and terrain bonuses are a bit excessive. Map layouts are reused, and some are questionably designed, but it never felt unfair, or unfun, which are probably two biggest contributors to what makes a map "badly designed", at least for me. Obviously this is entirely down to personal opinion. I won't deny some maps could've definitely pissed me off in another timeline, though, like some of Celica's lategame bog maps, or Nuibaba's mansion on Alm's side, but they just didn't annoy me too much, and maps like these are the exception, not the rule. And guys, please stop acting like Celica's route is all boat maps when it only makes up three of like, godknows how many total possible individual encounters there are on her route. Seriously though, Gaiden map design is fine.

"But Gaiden is grindy! The XP payouts suck and you're better off playing on easy mode."

In all of my time playing Gaiden, I only stopped once to grind, and it was right before the point of no return on Celica's route to give a few units that nudge they needed to get their promotions...which I didn't even end up using on the final map. So ultimately, no. Gaiden is very beatable without grinding. Consider that most actions reward your whole party experience, and that's a lot more exp that your units are getting than you realise, even if it initially seems like very little. And before you say grinding is slow in Gaiden, that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, it's faster than just about any contemporary RPG of the time. The game gives you very easy access to infinite mummy encounters on both routes (maybe to Celica's route's detriment because those graveyard tiles always initiate an encounter) that are guaranteed to give your characters boatloads of experience and in many cases a flat 100 xp.

Moving on to level ups and growth rates; growth rates being low is also a very deliberate design choice. They're there to add variety to playthroughs, and make some units end up potentially better or worse than others, as per traditional Fire Emblem's design philosophy, but only marginally in Gaiden, since promotions automatically bump stats up to class bases if they're lower, as opposed to providing a fixed increase to stats like other games in the series. This means that, actually unlike most FE games, Gaiden has a surprisingly balanced cast. I actually like this approach. It's definitely in line with Gaiden's whole idea of being an SRPG with traditional RPG elements baked in, given this incentivises just levelling your characters instead of relying on random variables, and, again, it makes for a mostly balanced cast. There's no doubt that dread fighters and falcoknights are by far the best promotions, but it does mean that everyone is viable if you invest in them. Regarding characters who don't promote until very late though, like Mae and Delthea, they don't even need the promotion. Being able to use Aura is more than enough. Seriously, everyone in Gaiden gets a chance to shine. Maybe some less than others, though, because of bases or stats that are unchanged by promotions. cough Clive.

"Witches being able to warp to your units is unfair!"

Ok, so, don't count me on this, but I heard that the witch enemy ai was intentionally made to be really stupid and to not be able gang up on your units. Not something I can actually verify, but I think anyone who has played gaiden can safely say that witches are stupid and very rarely actually do anything that could be anything considered remotely strategically beneficial. It didn't happen to me, but I dunno, if it does, Gaiden is one of the few FE games that gives you the luxury of reviving dead characters. Not once, mind you. Up to six times. Three per route, though characters who die on either route can be revived and brought over to the other. Silk seems to be the most common use of this, given warp utility is invaluable and I can't blame people for wanting to skip more than just the maps on Alm's side. Going back on map design though, I think the game gives you two extremely good, high move, terrain ignoring fliers on Celica's route for a reason. Three if you're willing to feed kills to Est for a bit. Her bases are actually pretty respectable.

(Protip, by the way, for people who've decided to read this far - you deserve it: Once you get to chapter 4, do all of Celica's route's stuff until you unlock Alm's promotion, transfer the angel ring over to Alm. Level up Alm a bunch in the ensuing maps thanks to his inflated exp gain and once you get to Nuibaba's mansion, just warp him in on a heal tile and pray he kills Nuibaba with a bow before they can land Medusa. Once they're gone you've practically beaten the chapter, and trivialised one of the most infamous FE maps in the franchise's history. You can reuse this same strategy for the final map, if you keep the angel ring on him long enough. Those boosted stat gains will likely remove any need for the regal sword. Just substitute using a bow for the Falchion, obviously, since it's required to beat the game not counting using nosferatu.)

"But Gaiden is too slow!"

I have genuinely nothing to say other than; "what did you expect when booting up a famicom SRPG"? Of course it's going to be slow, and clunkier than what you're accustomed to. The key factor, I feel, that will decide whether or not you like Gaiden, is your mindset. If you go in thinking it's going to suck, because of its slowness, or stiff controls, or anything else, your brain's just going to keep honing in on those thoughts, and you'll never be able to adapt. Gaiden's controls and speed are something I was able to get used to, and I'm not immune to losing my patience over old SRPGs, or JRPGs, or anything, either.
If it helps, turn off animations. I got through the whole game with animations turned off and only used fastforward maybe a handful of times.

So, is Gaiden better than Echoes? Of course not. The big question though, is "Is Gaiden worth playing?"

Yes. The answer is yes. Form your own opinions, please, I'm begging you. Stop believing word of mouth and try things for yourself before speaking of them as if they're gospel.

I gotta hand it to Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage. It bumped my opinion of Spyro 1 up half a star. That game stuck to its guns as a platformer with simple mechanics. Spyro 2 is constantly changing things up so often that I'm not sure what it wants to be.

Everyone in this game is very chatty, except for Spyro, strangely enough. He never talks back or makes quips, he just silently accepts whatever requests fall upon his shoulders (wings?). I think Tom Kenny voiced more lines for The Professor than the titular purple dragon on the cover of the box, and that's just weird to me. No one ever has anything remotely interesting to say, either. It's a lot of "please do the thing", followed by "thanks for doing the thing, here's the macguffin". I also have to wonder if Moneybags being the embodiment of capitalism was the catalyst for Ratchet & Clank (aside from, y'know, Spyro not being able to hold a gun).

I can at least admire the world design. Every level is made to feel like its own distinct area, with their own inhabitants and culture. Isekai-ing Spyro out of the World of Dragons was a good call in that regard. Instead, we get a variety of fantasy/storybook locales. I just don't think these worlds make for very engaging levels. Every area has its standard, linear platforming challenge. Completing that gets you a talisman, basically the consolation prize. Beyond that are the Dragon Orbs, which you usually earn by completing side-objectives in levels. Some of these are meagre challenges for Spyro's moveset, many of them are just minigame fodder.

I'll admit, there's bothing particularly wrong with this game. It's perfectly enjoyable on most fronts, but it really wasn't what I was hoping for, especially coming off the first game. Spyro's chosen a dark road to travel on: one that prioritizes variety over consistency. I hope he knows what he's getting himself into.

The adventure continues...?

THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON

The dreaded “Blockuza”. An entry fans will write off as being underwhelming, a game you need to get it over with in order to move onto Yakuza 4. Having beaten it, I can kinda understand why this got the reputation it did among the fan base. Getting this straight out of the way, yeah, Yakuza 3 doesn't beat the “Blockuza” allegations. This doesn’t apply to the standard street thugs you brawl, but with bosses who skill check you hard. While I didn’t find this to be as ‘bad’ as people made it out to be, it gets annoying with later bosses since quickstep is borked in the remaster’s PC port, and you’d need to hook up with Tiger Drop and some weapons to counter block effectively. Nothing about this is bad, except for quickstep being nerfed, and in fact I think this lends to Yakuza finally having combat that relies on the player doing more than just button mashing, but it feels arbitrary in order to learn to fight right. Like, maybe not vital information you should keep within the confines of side content, which considering my long trek into these games, I have to get picky about which mountains of minigames, substories, and training seems worth my time. Learning a technique or two which helps keep you up to the pace and flow of combat in this game seems too necessary to not at least drop in the beginning somewhere.

Now, there’s of course the other big thing with Yakuza 3 and that’s the story. Specifically, everything to do with Okinawa, by that, the orphanage, which I’ve picked up is something many fans weren’t too keen on. Look, I hear you; I understand you -- but you are wrong. Yakuza 3 is a game made aware of what the previous entries have done and attempts to really shake things up for a new direction Kiryu’s story will go through. Okinawa serves as an effective opener for many reasons; It’s not Kamurocho again, the conflict is divorced from Tojo Clan crime drama, the scale is more personal because of that, and it puts us into the serenity Kiryu has created for himself by just being a dad. I attribute this being some side effect of a lead writer for the first two entries, a crime novelist, having stopped contributing to the story after Yakuza 2, perhaps taking a bit of that realism or grit with him. Alongside… maybe a few other things, but we’ll get there in a sec. If I were to describe Yakuza 3, it’s the downtime we didn’t know we needed. It’s relaxing, pure vibes, you just want to see Kiryu impart his wisdom and compassion into the orphanage and chill with these little guys. But since this is a Yakuza game, that semblance of peace doesn’t last very long as Kiryu is dragged back in for Round 3 of How The Hell Is The Tojo Clan Still Standing. So… this is where I have to be mean to the story because I don’t want to really, but even I can’t deny that out of the four Yakuza games I have played now, in terms of construction, this is the weakest by far. The best way I can put this is that I absolutely adore the smaller scale Okinawa and the individual emotional character moments in relation to it, some moments here I see as being incredibly important for Kiryu’s journey from now on, but the actual main plot feels like a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen situation. Like, a very desperate attempt to further raise the stakes in the conspiracy thriller crime drama fashion Yakuza/LAD makes its identity by this point, only they feel so nonsensical and unnecessary. Andre Richardson is the character of all time, but if you strip away most of the subplots and focus it squarely on Mine and his whole deal that forces Kiryu out of Okinawa, then this would be a serious contender for the best story of the franchise. Even speaking for myself, who still really likes the story, oddities, quirks and all, and considers it to be my favorite one so far. Which is part of what makes this a difficult game to personally weigh some conclusive judgment on because there’s a lot to love, but much of it is back saddled by awkwardness that I’m only hoping RGG gets the ball running for something greater in the next entries. Sign of a flawed banger, alright.

Yeah... not counting remakes, this was the last Castlevania game with the classic gameplay, and I have to say that, although I understand that many people are fond of it because it was part of their childhood or because they believe that having a female protagonist saves it, on the other hand, this game sucks and I think nothing justifies it.

Without exaggeration, this game feels like a prototype of Castlevania II Belmont's Revenge (the second GB game, released in 1991), which for some reason 6 years later Konami decided to release to get some easy money. Everything is a big step backwards from Belmont's Revenge, the gameplay feels slower and clunky, the graphics are less detailed, the level design is bland and boring. There's no challenge in the game, sure, you'll die a couple of times, but when you do it will be in the most boring way possible, because the enemies are positioned in ways that are simply annoying, but not challenging. It's too easy, and yet it's extremely tedious to play.

The game has some interesting concepts and mechanics, like for example, to unlock the true ending, you have to get the classic sub-weapons of the series (which for some strange reason you will NEVER be able to use), which adds that exploration factor to the game. The bad thing is that exploring in this game is annoying because of two things. The first is that there are a lot of paths that lead you to dead ends and don't reward you in anything, feeling like a waste of time, and besides that, there are also traps that lead you to some sort of arena where you have to defeat waves of monsters as punishment, and that's not the worst thing, the worst thing is that many times the enemies are positioned on a very small platform where it's hard to attack them since when you defeat them they reappear in the only places from where you can attack them, making you always take damage. They are a real nuisance, as they don't add anything of value to the experience. Secondly, if for some reason you went down the wrong path and forgot one of these special items, you block the possibility of accessing the true ending with no other option but to start from the beginning.

The true sub-weapons in the game are weird, these are powers which are obtained every time you defeat the boss of a level. What I like about this is that you have at your disposal the ability to swap sub-weapons on the fly by simply accessing the menu, however, these powers are very broken, the first one you get freezes time, and there is another one that wipes out all enemies on the screen.

You can also enter a “hyper-powered” mode if you press A+B, in which you are invulnerable to all attacks and greatly increases your movement speed. With this you'll defeat the bosses in no time.

Somehow, I feel that the developers put all those “interesting” elements as a way to “correct” a flaw in the game's design. For example, the powerful sub-weapons serve to compensate for the game's mediocre and annoying enemy positioning. The alternate paths “compensate” for the blandness of the level design. The hyper-powered mode compensates for the slow character movement. But to me, these additions more than fix the game make it much worse, because it implies that the developers knew the game wasn't that good and still decided to keep going.

Yes... I would talk about the story, but it's not worth it, it's sappy, it's nonsense and it's not even canon.

Conclusion
If Castlevania The Adventure was an admirable attempt to adapt the series to the GB (failing in said attempt), 8 years later, Castlevania Legends arrived to give it competition, but this also being the most unnecessary game of the franchise. I wish it was funny, but it's just sad.

At least Castlevania The Adventure is somewhat justifiable because it came out when the franchise was just starting, but this game? it came out after Symphony of the Night, after the classic formula had peaked more than once. Nothing redeems this bad game.

I know this game's structure and pacing is not to everyone's taste, being a fairly divisive game as far as DQ games go, but I do think it is for me. It has an oddly melancholic feel to it permeating most of the stories surrounding the regions you explore, maybe I like it because the seeing the passing of time as something that affects people and places in such a direct way is a theme that always affects me, either way, I vibe with this game. I used to like it fine enough but this replay made me like it a lot more and yes, I do prefer the PS1 version mostly due to the graphical style.

One of those games where I can't see its greatest "flaw" in the moment as anything but a plus in hindsight. At points Portopia is vague and obscure enough to drive you mad. How is anyone supposed to know to search there? How is anyone meant to guess to do that or show that one item at this one place? But what this frustration does is transform what could have been a nice enough detective story into a hypnotic procedural of stasis; an unending loop of the same questions and the same faces, progress never seeming to go anywhere, everything winding back to dead end circles, beautifully reflected in the giant maze of white walls you get lost in during the climax.

It's a game that, whether through frustration or curiosity or glee, inevitably leads to you assaulting suspects for answers. And distressingly...it works.

Okay, asterisk on "you" because one of the many deeply clever things about Portopia is that you, the player character, are not the one who directly does anything. You just tell your subordinate what to do. It's a weird distinction but a VERY important one that raises all kinds of questions w/r/t your role in the story and as the player and what exactly inhabiting a character while playing a game implies narratively.

Anyway, the maze in the basement is without hesitation one of THE great moments in video games. Like, genuinely startling, unsettling stuff. You spend the whole game in menus and simple, colorful illustrations, and then suddenly as you descend below the surface color and life gives way to dead white walls twisting around themselves for an eternity, pathways opening and closing as if the place is alive. It's significant that here is the one time you take actual control. The simplest graphics in the world and yet some of the most effective atmosphere in the medium's history. Like being suddenly sucked into an Akio Jissoji directed nightmare.

One of the most important games of all time thanks to all that it inspired and not an inch of that inspirational power has gone anywhere. Meditative masterpiece. Horii my metaphysical king. Insane stuff

skeletal? orthodox? begging to differ from the game's own storefront terminology, this beast is unorthodox and exoskeletal; an articulate boneworld bursting with juicy meat. sexual subspace shoot 'em up grind-core. a cruel angel's cathexis. armored angelguts touhou for a hellbound heart. beautiful, depraved, forlorn, metal, a feast for demise within the realm of a dying sun.

give it a try if you like the aesthetic and even just consider yourself a dabbler in shooting games (bullet hell or not). it's a uniquely approachable game with an excellent tutorial and an original mode full of branching paths and weapons to collect and upgrade, angels to unlock, etc.

I have this annoying problem where, whenever I play a truly transcendental videogame that wows me from head to toe, I enter a state of post-masterwork malaise where even other good games just look worse.

And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.

But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.

Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.

Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.

It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.

Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.

All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.

Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.

But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.

Let’s talk about Oblivion.

Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.

But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.

Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.

In part, because it’s worse.

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.

After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.

Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.

Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.

It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!

Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.

Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.

I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.

To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:

A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.

Right, all that is out of the way.

Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.

The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.

Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.

To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.

New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).

All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.

This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.

Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.

This is where the problem really starts to take shape.

While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.

The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.

Final result?

Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.

99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.

Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.

There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:

They’re overkill.

Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.

Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.

In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.

Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.

Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.

The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.

And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!

Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.

Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.

It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.

But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.

FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.

As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.

“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.

Let me just quote myself, from earlier:

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.

As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.

Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.

I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.

When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.

What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.

Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.

I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.

But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.

Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-

There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.

RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.

It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.

And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?

In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.

But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.

All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.

With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.

Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.

When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.

This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.

Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.

I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.

There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.

With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".

As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?

It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.

But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.

In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.

I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.

You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?

No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.

On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.

Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.

I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.

Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.

Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.

In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.

It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.

But Fallout 3?

Fallout 3 never changes.

Funny little Arkanoid em up ARPG hybrid actually. The game is super easy until the very end but 5 credits was more than enough for me to conquer this in under 2 hours blind. Sometimes a game doesn't need to be ultra polished, it just needs to be really out there and wacky. I can safely say that in my quarter century of gaming, I have never encountered anything remotely like this game and thus it's worth playing for that aspect alone. The story is just run of the mill, the music is catchy enough, the visuals only get the job done, and really there's nothing that will make anyone fall in love with Firestriker. But it's the ultimate example of a game being more than the sum of its parts imo. I mean hell, the randomized boss rush at the end and the unique dialogue if the player continues against bosses will definitely be an aspect I remember in the future.

Also, the English version adds lines like "I pity the fool" so that's lived in my brain for a while now lol.

Protip if you play this: the grinding spot is hidden here. You can continuously revisit it for max HP and POW: https://youtu.be/LywWmlSGRGk?t=2714

silentchad2004:
using data mining, conventional mining, divination, and star charts I've uncovered shocking lore implications involving the 1999 teen choice awards, eddie's skull circumference, and the last herakleopolitan pharaohs that challenge everything you thought you knew about james. it all starts with the hex code for his jacket, which I'm sure many of you already noticed is #303828, a clear reference to the roland TB-303 commonly used in chicago acid house. to understand this better we'll first need to return to the topic of jean baptiste point du sable's whereabouts in 1780 and how they tie in directly with merikare of the 10th dynasty[...]

the fans:
obviously. it's soo obvious

masahiro ito:
😭😭😭

If you open and exit this review 20 times, you'll unlock my review for Blue Spheres.

There was a long stretch where Sonic Mega Collection was my go-to way to play through the classic Genesis series, and I have a lot of fond memories of me loafing around my dorm room with my GameCube hooked up to my tiny CRT, just running through Sonic 3 & Knuckles for the millionth time. Loading it up again today for the first time in nearly 20 years, it's not surprising to me that every save slot for that game is filled up, played to 100% completion, with every combination of characters possible. I had a lot of time on my hands.

I still make enough time to go back and play these once or twice a year, and seeing as I've made the absolutely insane commitment to play every Sonic the Hedgehog game (that I am physically able to before the Sonic rot becomes terminal and fully cannibalizes my brain), I figured I should throw Mega Collection and the other compilations onto the pile and see how they stack up against each other.

Well, I've been busy breaking down each compilation with highly corrosive materials, mixing them in beakers and testing them with specially designed strips to indicate their purity, and the results are in: Sonic Mega Collection is (probably) the best one (maybe.) To date, I've tested Gems Collection, Sonic Jam, Origins Plus, and I've dabbled with the PlayStation 2 release of Mega Collection Plus, and all of them are in their own ways more compromised than vanilla Mega Collection. And yeah, I probably could've figured that out without a visit from the cops and the fine folks at the Department of Environmental Quality. Sure, just playing these games would've been "safer" and wouldn't have resulted in an "ecological disaster" or the production of "radiological material..." Whatever.

Mega Collection is a pretty straight-forward package, a real "has all his fingers and toes" release that gives you exactly what you want. The Genesis trilogy of games runs perfectly fine, I didn't encounter any more bugs than I would during a normal playthrough of these games on Genesis hardware, and while there is some audio cues here and there which don't sound quite right, it's nothing as egregious as Sonic Jam. Probably the biggest downside to actually playing these versions of Sonic 1-3 is using the GameCube controller, but if you're the sort of person who, in the year 2024, decides to play through the original Sonic games on GameCube hardware specifically, then an aftermarket controller with a proper d-pad won't set you back much and you're probably crazy enough to already have one.

Unlocking additional games - including Flicky and Ristar - however, is a total hassle. You have to boot up specific games a certain number of times before additional games will unlock, and I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but they should be frozen and preserved until future generations develop the level of technology necessary for truly understanding their brain. Practically, if you wanted to unlock everything fast you could just keep backing in and out, but a more sensible way to do this would be unlocking new games for completing old ones. Or just have them all unlocked from the start. Really no reason not to.

Full manuals are also included for each game but navigating them is a chore and the scan quality is just low enough that they become difficult to read on a CRT. The included gallery of Archie Sonic comic covers is also hard to look at, but I did have a decent time flicking through these and remembering all the good and bad that was Archie Sonic. Did you know there's an issue where an evil Sonic (who wears a leather jacket so you know he's bad) transports himself to Sonic's world and enacts a master plan to make Sonic have too many girlfriends by kissing all the pretty ladies he can find, and then in the next couple stories Sonic's whole problem is he doesn't know how to manage a polycule? Well now you do. I put that knowledge in your head.

There's definitely better ways to play these games. I'd easily recommend Sonic 3: AIR or Sonic 3: Complete, for example, but if you're wanting something official and physical, Mega Collection is a decent package that does right by the included games. Plus, you can look at comic covers and remember they interrupted the main story to do a two-part Guardians of the Galaxy parody and that Knuckles was green for some reason.

The Cyberpunk of the Genesis homebrew scene. Paprium was a complete utter dumpster fire behind the scenes and is still burning with Fonzie being unable to ship the rest of the preordered copies out almost a year after the game finally launched. I was one of the few lucky ones to actually obtain a copy(along with a broken Grand Stick III, thanks Fonzie!) after this wild ride and unfortunately the game isn't in a state where it would've been worth the wait to obtain it.

Paprium is an incredibly perplexing game that's both aimed at a very specific niche audience yet also does everything it can to drive them away. As a Genesis/Mega Drive fan one of my favorite aspects of homebrew games and the big appeal is seeing what people can do with the console hardware after years of documentation and experience has been available. Paprium tries desperately to flex itself as the ULTIMATE Genesis game with 80 WHOPPING MEGS OF MEMORY except the cart itself is stock with so many custom chips it can't even really be classified as a Genesis game anymore beyond just using the console to power it up. What makes this all the more egregious is Fonzie in his infinite wisdom went out of his way to make this game borderline impossible to play on any clone consoles because again this is supposed to be THE Genesis game despite actually hardly using the console's hardware and hilariously enough his shitty attempt at this backfired hard as it turned out the game is unplayable on a lot of official Genesis consoles as well.

Now with all that out of the way you could still be telling yourself "Well maybe the game it really good in spite all of this to make it worthwhile!" at least that's what I was telling myself for years waiting for my copy to arrive. Sadly this isn't the case, for the first hour or so you'll be wowed by its flashy presentation but once the novelty runs out the cracks really start to show. Enemy AI is borderline unfinished with even incredibly basic attacks like the jump kick being extremely exploitable as they have no counter attack to it. There's a "bully" mechanic where when enemies will get put into a stunlike state that requires you to use a specific type of attack to do damage which ruins the flow of combat but to make it even worse there's also a glitch where if you use that attack too early it does no damage. There's also some visual issues as well which is pretty bad for something that wants to wow you with how great it looks such as bizarre perspectives when it comes to the breakable walls and televisions throughout the game. The throw attack rather than having an actual grab animation when you pick up an enemy has them magnetically fling to your hands. Glitches aside it also has a vary small variety of enemies and bosses which wouldn't be so bad if the game was fairly short but due to the insanely convoluted routing and secrets you're expecting to replay it numerous times for hours to fully unlock everything or get to the true ending.

Paprium is not a terrible game but it is held back with its blatantly unfinished state in a lot of areas leaving a very sour taste in the mouths of people who had been and still are waiting years to get their copy. Do yourself a favor and pick up Xeno Crisis or Demons of Asteborg if you want a technically impressive and great homebrew on your Genesis.