A solid collection of some great flash classics. The collection itself has a lot of nice sentimental notes and thoughts from the developer which I appreciate.

The games play as good as they did back in the day, for better or for worse. I did notably have some issues with Achievement Unlocked 3, with some achievements failing to unlock properly leading to me having to replay the whole game again (some pretty strong lag too, though the original release had that too). Run Elephant Run is also just, not that great (especially on higher difficulties), but it's really short so it's not too marring.

My experiences with all the other games were great, they were as fun as I remembered!

The true value of a game lies in what it leaves the player with after they've put it down. It follows thus, that the true job of any game developer, and by extension any artist, is to metaphorically fuck the viewer's mind and blow a hot sticky load of memetic material straight into their fertile cortical folds, ensuring the propagation of many healthy spiritual progeny. It was by this process of inspiration-impregnation that games like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk cum to be, and if Bomb Rush Cyberfunk went to my school I definitely would have bullied the ever-loving shit out of him for having such a stupid name. ButtFuck CyberTruck, CumSlut SiphonSpunk, Homestuck FuckingSucks, and possibly my favorite, ButtMush FiberFlush. I would be merciless, it would be so bad that he would go home early every day and his dad, Tony Hawk, would find him brooding in his room listening to old mixtapes on the Naganuma-compatible cd player his dead mother, Jet Set Radio, left behind. Tony didn't get why the boy held on to that stupid thing, and he could never figure out why that made him so goddamn mad. The way Jet Set Radio's eyes would wander when she did the pornstar grind, he knew she was putting on a show, but it wasn't for him. Now that I think about it, damn kid doesn't even look like me, doesn't trick like me... but the way he manuals, gliding effortlessly, perfectly balanced. I didn't teach him that. That's not skating, it's mockery, and I'm the one looking a fool, because he knows what I've always suspected but could never confirm, that I'm a real WashedUp SkaterCuck. You think you can hurt me? I've got news for you, kid: pain made the hawk a goddamn legend.

The belt lashes came hard and without warning, but Bomb Rush Cyberfunk's face remained a flat and inanimate mask. As the belt clattered to the floor, Tony hocked a loogie and spat on the poor skater.

"You're not even worth beating."

Bomb Rush starts the way you would expect every good gangbang to end, the team clearly poured a lot of love into that opening. It's a bold and bedroom-eyed promise for your forty bucks, but that's where the pretense drops and you're pop-n-locked in for 8 hours of mostly going through the motions. There's grinding, getting railed, turning tricks, and a dribbling climax, which admittedly feels kinda okay, but you gotta endure two awkward hours of post-nut clarity that leaves you wondering if "kinda okay" is the best you'll ever get, just like my fucking ex. Thanks, Lucy.

For a game about criminally defacing public property to unilaterally prescribe which sanitized street art jpegs you're allowed to raise the property value with... well, it sure as hell isn't vandalism, but it may as well be robbery for depriving the world of a better game. It's missing the point of graffiti so profoundly that I struggle to think of anything funnier to say other than to merely state as a fact that Jet Set Radio, the borrowed heart and soul of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, HAS a graffiti editor.

There is a version of this game where I could have taken a sniper bullet to the head and had my corpse stomped on by metal gear because I painted a mural of Mario spreading his gaping anus over New Amsterdam, and the world of gaming is poorer to have never gotten it.

But hey, modding would be hella boring if it the devs supported it.

Far too early to speak on this with any authority, but some early thoughts:

• As with Divinity: Original Sin 2 the potential for roleplay immediately crumbles if not playing as an origin character. Especially damning since they are all locked into a specific class and race except for the Dark Urge.

• Dialogue options being marked by skill checks and background tags deflates them. It would be more fitting for certain options to have the checks/tags but not convey this to the player until it is time to roll. If I see an option tied to my one-of-like-six background choices, I effectively have to pick it so I can get Inspiration. As for the checks, I can prep the face of the party with Guidance, Charm Person, Friends, what have you. Which itself leads into...

• Despite being a four-member party game, the other three characters might as well not exist for the purposes of dialogue. If you're lucky you'll see one of the origin characters milling about in the background of a conversation, but the person/people I'm playing with are forced to listen and suggest options. So just like with real 5E, it's best to have one person do all the talking since only one person can anyways, further displacing non-faces from the story they are meant to be involved in.

• Origin characters all talk like they're YouTubers, falling into a pillow at the end of a sentence, a permanent vocal sneer tainting each word (except for Gale). There is no space for subtlety in their characterisation either, their MacGuffins and driving purposes laid so bare like the Hello Neighbour devs trying to get MatPat's attention.

• Without a DM to actually intervene, to interpret the players' wishes, anything requiring interpretation is simply gone. Nearly every spell that isn't a very simple effect or damage dealer? Absent. This leaves players with options for what colour of damage they want to do, or what one specific action they might like to take. Creativity spawning from these bounds is incidental, not intentional.

• The worst part of 5E, its combat, is not improved in the slightest here, and if anything is actively worse. One of the great benefits of the tabletop setting is that the numbers are obfuscated. Statblocks need not be adhered to. Players typically don't know the raw numbers of a creature's health or saves unless they clue in through what rolls succeed for saves, or keep a mental tally of damage done before the DM says they are bloodied. The DM has the option of disclosing information, but here the player is forced to know everything. Every resistance. Every hit point. Every stat point. Every ability. Combat cannot be creative as a result because the whole of its confines are known the entire time. You even know the percentage chance you have to hit every spell and attack. It makes it all hideously boring.

• If spells are going to be one and done boring nothingburgers, the least Larian could have done was not have some of them, like Speak with the Dead, be tied to a cutscene that tells me a corpse has nothing to say. I get it, the random goblin body I found probably isn't a font of lore, but do you need to take me into a scripted sequence of my character making a concerned face with their fingers to their temple as I am told for the eighteenth time that it has nothing for me.

• When spells are being learned, there is no indication as to which are rituals and which are not, nor are there options to sort or filter choices. With so few choices maybe it doesn't matter.

• Despite a bevy of supplementary sourcebooks giving players countless options for their characters, you're stuck with primarily the base text. Perhaps it would be unrealistic to wish for every subclass, every spell, every feat, but not knowing this narrow scope beforehand meant my hopes for, for example, a College of Glamour Bard or a Hexblade Warlock were dashed. Without the spells that make those subclasses interesting, however, I suppose they might as well be absent.

• The 'creative solutions' of stacking boxes to climb a wall or shooting a rope holding a rock over someone's head are not creative, they are blatantly intended and serve only to make the player feel smart for being coerced by the devs into a course of action.

• The folks eager to praise Larian for not including DLC seem to have missed the Digital Deluxe upgrade that gives you cosmetics and tangible benefits in the form of the Adventurer's Pouch.

• As touched upon by others, the devs are clearly more invested in giving players the option to make chicks with dicks and dudes with pussies than they are in actual gender representation. This binarism only exacerbates how gendered the characters are. With no body options besides "Femme, Masc, Big Femme, Big Masc" and whether you're shaven and/or circumcised, the inclusion of a Non-Binary option becomes laughable if not insulting. Gender is expressed and experienced in countless ways, but here it comes down to your tits (or lack thereof) and your gonads. No androgynous voice options. No breast sizes. No binders. No gaffs. No packing. The only ways for me to convey to fellow players that my character is anything besides male or female are my outright expression of my gender, to strip myself bare, or hope the incongruity between my femme physique and masc voice impart some notion of gender queering. Maybe this is great for binary trans men and women, but as a non-binary person it comes across as a half-measure that seeks to highlight my exclusion from this world. More cynically, this, alongside Cyberpunk 2077 read as fetishistic, seeing the trans body as something for sexual gratification, rather than just that, a body.

I'll keep playing it, but damn if my eyes aren't drifting towards playing a real CRPG for the first time.

always feels like a great personal failing when i have to say "i don't get it" about a game. what's there to get, this is a game several thousands of children played and grew up with. yes, well, see, the thing is that there's not much here that appeals to me. you have a game where war is the central gameplay and none of the characters treat it with the seriousness that war requires. it's so jarring too, they all act like it's a friendly sparring match in a saturday morning cartoon as they send unnamed men to their deaths. and the characters themselves lack any sort of uniqueness or go through any growth. baby game, i know, but there's barely even a plot here.

sure, whatever, this isn't about the story. but the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired too. unit variety is very lacking and you'll quickly discover the good units and then never make any other ones. i think what really fucks me off is how drawn out every single level feels. the last 20% of any given skirmish is "YES YES YES YES I'M GOING TO MURDER YOU" but it's so painfully drawn out because of how this game functions. it's a game of inches, but the inches take too long (mixed metaphors rule). this game challenges me, sure, but when i solve a map, it feels like i have to sit through several turns before i actually get to the results screen.

still, i want to see if i'm just not getting it, so i'm gonna beat my head against the wall by trying to unlock all the COs and maybe even get the highest rank or whatever. i want to see why all the cool and smart kids seem to say that this is the thinking man's nintendo SRPG of choice. i don't get it, but i want to.

I once said on here that this game is too hard for me and I don’t like spending a long time like a half hour or up to an hour on a single mission just to lose and someone was like “this game isn’t HARD! All you have to do is put the RIGHT UNITS in the RIGHT SPACES, EVERY TIME!” Oh, that’s it, huh? That’s all it takes to win? I guess I just didn’t want it enough.

I played Superstar Saga this year and as a joke I wrote “the final boss isn’t hard, you’re just letting yourself get hit by its attacks” and my man actually said something like that for real. Let’s keep this going, I want to do more of these. I’ll go first:

Contra isn’t hard, you just have to not die with the three lives it gives you.

Ghosts’n Goblins isn’t hard. You should already know what to do on the mandatory second run because you just got done beating it the first time

Zangief is actually a very easy fighter to control. No, he can’t shoot fireballs or anything, you just have to turn the whole d-pad 360 degrees while holding another button so you don’t accidentally jump, then push the attack button, all while you’re close enough to your opponent to land the hit, if you ever want any special moves of any kind.

Anyway, I thought it was too hard to completely enjoy, and now I’m going to play three more of these games in the series

EDIT: I found the place where I read that thing and to be fair, it’s not on this site but a different message board but to be fair to me, it’s even stupider than I remember:

“I found Advance Wars 1 extremely easy. There is nothing challenging about the ai. Facing expert human players are much tougher challenge. Just follow the rule of thumb for every turn base strategy games. Always move your units to a certain spot and create the right units at a right time. It's almost 100% automatic victory if you follow this formula.”