Just right off the bat, I think this is the best that Mario has ever looked or sounded. You could say that the graphics are simplistic compared to stuff that would come later in the 16-bit era, but it's unique to the series as it's the only Mario game that feels like it's influenced by cartoon animation specifically (I love non-mushroomed small Mario's little Ren & Stimpy character-lookin ass) and the color and vibrancy of this world is just unbelievable - so gorgeous. Playing this on hardware on a Trinitron with S-Video is like seeing the face of God. Also the music and sound effects are absolutely untouchable.

The debate has been raging since the '90s, and I know there are a lot of well-intentioned however confused people out there, but I'm sorry, this game is a lot better than SUPER MARIO BROS. 3. It has less 'stuff' in it, but trades the scattershot, throw-everything-in approach for a careful, deliberate structure and virtuoso level design. Not to mention it wisely doubles back to correct all of 3's odder missteps, and tightens the already industry-best mechanics even further, to the point where if you play this game for like, an hour, you can basically control Mario by thought and make pixel perfect jumps no problem.

It's so good, I forgive it for Ghost Houses.

After SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 was essentially nothing more than a nightmare-difficulty levelpack, they took it upon themselves to REALLY go big on this one, and damn. An H-bomb explosion of creativity and ideas blown across an absolutely epic adventure that feels like it has about twenty times the content of its predecessors. To this day, it is dazzling in its scope, but it also suffers from a bit of bloat and hit-or-miss stuff, as anything this big (for the time) must. Not all the new core design choices are good (short stages but a trillion of them, no mid-level checkpoints, weird continuing), but plenty are (world map, inventory, bonus games), and the mechanics from 1 and 2 have been tuned juuuust a little bit to the point where playing is now a breeze, but it still feels so recognizably Mario that you barely notice a change.

It's an eternally top-tier platformer and introduced about 90% of the stuff that we now think of as Mario mainstays, so it's legendary no matter what ... but it also invented the thing where the mushrooms run away from you when they come out of the block, so it's not seeing a perfect score from me, fuck that.

Well, I'm trying to get back into my long-dormant beat 'em up project (currently in the middle of '91, with 46 of 223 played) and boy oh boy, was this not a good one to start up again with. A painfully boring, totally personality-less FINAL FIGHT clone with nothing going for it besides the ability to do four players at once. The art is okay, but everything is zoomed out too far in order to accomodate the players and the waves and waves of totally anonymous enemies, and I guess the number of sprites is sporadically impressive, at least. There are a good number of different mooks, too, but most of them fight the same and none do anything intestering, so they all just blur together.

Was literally falling asleep playing this. Next on the list is, uh ... NINJA CLOWNS. So ... I'm guessing that will be marginally more interesting.

A perfectly nice vertical slice of Yakuza whose storytelling is split between really good, powerful character stuff for Kiryu and then some clumsy tablesetting for the upcoming mainline game LIKE A DRAGON: INFINITE WEALTH.

Gameplay-wise, there's not quite enough compelling content for it to feel full-featured, but you don't exactly feel like you're getting short shrift either. There's 40 good hours of classic Yakuza stuff if you're looking to plat, and none of it is as bad as the lows of the series' other side content. If you wanted to main path it you could quite quickly, though.

As for the story, it starts out VERY strongly with Kiryu in a depressing, captive limbo existence and with some actual honest-to-God character growth for once. Seeing him bitter and bitingly apathetic about his situation is great given how long he's been around now without changing a whole lot. The game also does quite a good job at putting him at a distance from the rest of the RGG universe in lots of subtle ways (even though the meat of the game is quite traditional) reinforcing his frustrations and hopelessness. It feels like some kind of Yakuza version of LOGAN (Mangold, 2017), with Kiryu living on uselessly in the aftermath of his world, but maybe finding some small bit of purpose anyway. This first section of the game ends with (spoilers) an excellent, extremely dark sequence in which it looks like he's going to be unceremoniously executed in a dank basement by people who are supposed to be his allies for basically no reason and without anyone he cares about ever even knowing he was still alive. Of course you know it's not gonna happen because, come on, but even the idea of it is powerful.

Unfortunately, after this awesome stuff, things take a bit of a turn and becomes a much more traditional RGG plot and much less grounded, eventually tying into Kiryu's surprise guest appearances in LIKE A DRAGON. It's not as good, but so it goes - this is the identity of the series, and it certainly feels appropriate in that way. Can't blame 'em too much.

Eventually, however, that hamhanded world-building gets out of the way and it switches back into shockingly good mode for an ending that hit me so hard I think it may or may not be the first video game I've ever played that made me actually drop a tear. If you're invested at all in this series, you're gonna feel it.

So, overall, it's pretty good! I'm interested to see where they go with Kiryu from here. And this made me cautiously optimistic about INFINITE WEALTH. Some of the beats in this little half-game went to places that the series never quite touched before, so if they've got this in 'em I think they've justified Kiryu's continued presence. We'll see!

It feels like a bit of a sin given all the nerd stuff I'm into as well as the attendant affinity for/beginner's knowledge of/interest in the country's culture, but I have never been all that big on historical Japan stuff in media. Can't pin down why, but it never really appeals to me, and I usually go out of my way to sidestep it where possible. So, while I was never gonna NOT play this game (or KENZAN, which I'll get to at some point), I was expecting more of a dutiful observance than anything.

But, not so! This game rules and I loved it. Maybe I'd just played too many of the new-school RGGs in a row but damn if this didn't feel like some old time YAKUZA goodness. Some Y3-5 stuff, just tons of dumb crap to do and minigames and almost triple digit sidequests and that viiiibe. It really hit the spot for me.

And I ended up loving the story, despite my prejudices. The mystery plot was fun and the standalone nature of the game made the stakes astronomically higher than a mainline game, with the characters dropping like flies. It's easy fanservice, but seeing all the old (and some quite unexpected) faces pop up in this world (and then get taken out) was awesome.

The combat is 100% broken and the game is beyond easy with the right loadout but I just don't care about that stuff - really just not at all why I play these games. I can see why people who do would be rankled. But not my problem! Dumping on dudes with the equivalent of the Robocop gun while my invisible Shinsengumi trooper squad fry them with chain lightning and instaheal me is fun, lol.

I'm sure the original is better - just kinda how these things go - and I'll probably try it at some point (I do have it!) now that I would know what's going on. But on its own, this was a real good time for me. Love my Y games.

Quite disappointing. Going in totally blind and as a big fan of the original, I was initially excited by the greatly expanded scope of the story, the NPCs, and the world. But that faded quickly as the story bored, the puzzles proved weirdly easy, and the massive areas revealed themselves to be hollow, immensely frustrating to navigate, and totally pointless to explore.

That last one made me the most crestfallen. The first game had relatively small, dense levels that were absolutely packed with Easter eggs and ingenious secrets, constantly challenging you to leave the beaten path and rewarding every stray thought of, "I wonder if ..." with the confirmation that, yep, the devs did think of that, and they put something there just for you. Sometimes a silly something; sometimes an important something! I love games like that. I feel like that used to be Croteam's thing. But TTPII almost feels like a deliberate and direct refutation of that design ethos, with every area very rigidly and lamely having the same types and amounts of collectibles and "secrets" (now obvious riddles that a ten-year-old could decipher) signposted and marked on your compass. It's possible that there are a ton of awesome other secrets and eggs out there somewhere, but with how stupidly large and overstuffed with meaningless decoration the areas are, digging around for any amount of time only to be consistently rewarded with jack shit doesn't exactly make you want to continue looking. Compounding this problem (and creating lots of others) is the navigation. You'll notice I said "marked on your compass" earlier, not "marked on your map" ... yeah. I'll happily admit that I am worse at directions/navigation/orienteering than lots of people, but running around these giant, empty-ass yet topographically complex areas is fucking maddening, and the fact that they didn't give you any kind of overhead map option (and even only added the compass when people bitched!!) is absolutely unthinkable. I understand that the idea of exploring the areas is important to the story and the thematic content therein, but you're playing as a group of fucking robot intellectuals. They would MAKE MAPS. I don't like calling devs lazy, but it's either that or stupid in this case, so, take your pick, I guess.

That stuff is just the most glaring problem, but as I said, there are other significant ones. The story is exceptionally long and long-winded. All of the optional puzzles in every area are weirdly gated behind doing EVERY "secret" thingy in the ENTIRE GAME first, which makes them all amount to a kind of almost-post-game sidequest that you unlock that you have to do all of right in a row before the finale, which is dumb. The massive alien structures dominating each area that you need to get into are totally meaningless from a gameplay perspective, essentially being large 3D sculptures that house a single room with a cutscene and a switch, so what's the fucking point of them. The same goes for the showstopping central pyramid that you keep returning to - just (long) hallways connecting (very easy) puzzles and nothing to explore and no mystique whatsoever. There is no difficulty curve to speak of and almost every puzzle in the game is easier than the stuff in the back half of its predecessor. And, oh yeah, the entire build is a mess with game-breaking glitches and softlocks absolutely everywhere.

So, yeah. It's a shame. Bigger isn't always better in games. Again. Still love the spirit of the original, which this one definitely lost.

An interesting paradox in that it has the most content of any of the Traveler's Tales LEGO games and yet feels exceptionally lazy in almost every aspect. Actually no, sorry, that's not interesting at all. To be honest, this is one of the least interesting games I've played in quite a while.

First of all, it does a really bad job at adapting the films, even by the standards of this series. There are now only five missions per movie (because having ten or whatever there were in previous games would make the story mode just unfeasibly long) and so just by default you're glossing over a whole hell of a lot. I know this doesn't mean much because who in the world would the following apply to at this point - but if you don't already know the Star Wars movies, you're not gonna be getting much out of the campaign here. Also the levels are much, much shorter and simpler than in previous entries. It's almost silly how quick you can blow through what should really be the meat of this thing.

Additionally, as I think has been the case with some of the other recent TT LEGO games (I haven't played all of them), the different abilities and character types have been VASTLY pared down, and the overall gameplay is now simple to an almost insulting degree. All 'character' in your characters has been drained away compared to something like LEGO DC SUPERVILLAINS or MARVEL SUPER HEROES which had in the neighborhood of 50 distinct abilities instead of, like, I don't know, ten here? It's really quite basic. And therefore boring!

And this ends up affecting the real content of the game, which is the absolutely absurd overworld shit. Because when all your characters are the same, running around open world maps for MORE THAN SEVENTY-FIVE FUCKING HOURS gets really, really boring. Now, I am repeatedly on record as being a collectathon guy. I'm PYSCHONAUTS-pilled. I'm a DONKEY KONG 64-cel. Have been for a long time. But this may have broken me of it. This is the limit. The amount of absolutely drudgerous, totally meaningless shit you have to do to clear the overworld maps and 100% this thing is beyond anything I've encountered before. Yes, this is an all-ages game, but there are basically no interesting or challenging puzzles or platforming - you may as well be literally going down a list of around 2000(!!!!!!!!) checkboxes and filling them all in with a button press. Except, of course, it takes way longer than that. I've played my share of these LEGO games, and there is a really clear lack of effort in this area compared to previous ones, and there is just so unfathomably fucking much of it. It almost feels like one of those service games like FORZA HORIZON or something where you're not really ever supposed to even consider 100%ing it, but no, there's the big percentage meters all over the place letting you know how you're doing! Each level, each world, each region! And the cherry on top is that this has by far the most insulting 100% "reward" I've ever seen - so galling I don't even know if I'm gonna do the last little bit of trophy mop-up because I can't bear to give this another minute of my time after seeing what it was.

The only real bright spots lie in the writing (always pretty solid) and a couple fun deep-cut callbacks to SW lore and old EU stuff. But under that K2-sized mountain of at best blahness and at worst shocking incompetence (menus that should be prosecutable, busted-ass challenges you can cheese about twenty different ways, a frankly embarrassing amount of bugs, etc, etc.) they don't mean much.

Not a great sendoff for the series that started this whole LEGO game thing! Really should have rethought the scope on this one!

I've returned to this game a bunch of times over the years since I got it in '99 or whatever, and I've always considered it oddly compelling despite its many, many problems. This time, though, I think I've finally been cured of that. It is and always has been utter trash.

If you're not familiar with this thing, it was meant to be a kind of prestige Jurassic Park version of HALF-LIFE - a totally immersive unbroken first-person journey through the abandoned ruins of that second island from The Lost World. But rather than employing traditional FPS mechanics to fulfill that assignment, the vision for the gameplay was complete interactivity with the environment using realistic real-time physics. Of course, that's something that we totally take for granted now, but it was more or less unheard of at the time of this game's development, and wouldn't really be a mainstream thing until HALF-LIFE 2 six years later. But before you get too excited, understand how they implemented it - to interact with the world of the game, you directly control your character's fully modeled right arm in its full range of motion. Like, you hold left mouse to extend the arm and then move the mouse to wave it around and do shit. You gotta aim your arm to pick things up or open doors. There's no way to explain how clumsy this is without you seeing or playing it yourself. Imagine controlling HALF-LIFE: ALYX with a mouse.

So, that's the gameplay, that's how it works. Hard to wrap your mind around, but could probably be interesting or even fun if the game was well made! Well, guess what. This thing is so busted and unfinished it legitimately should not have been released. The physics are comically bad and all mandatory puzzles involving them will have you going insane trying to do the simplest things. Stacking three boxes to jump up onto something will take you tens of minutes. Keycards you need will fall through the world as you bash your hand against against a door frame trying to walk through it. Objects weighing hundreds of pounds will slide around frictionlessly against each other and slip out from under you like a watermelon seed as you walk on them. Oh, and you do actually get firearms and have to shoot dinosaurs quite regularly, but the guns are ......... are you ready for this? ......... also fully modeled physics objects. You have to pick them up manually with your arm, aim your arm in the direction of the Raptor about to kill you, and try to line up the iron sights to take a shot. Meanwhile, the dinosaur has run headlong into the end of your gun and your stupid noodle arm has folded up like a crinkly straw and you automatically dropped the gun on the ground and have to fumble around to try to pick it back up. Sound fun?

But okay, okay. Maybe the main gameplay conceit is somewhat hare-brained in the first place. And maybe the underlying physics engine is absolutely disastrous. It could be worth toughing that stuff out for an interesting, well-constructed adventure, right? RIGHT????

Well, yeah. But unfortunately, everything else about the game sucks too. Gameplay is literally 75% walking, as slow as you can POSSIBLY IMAGINE, through miles and miles of basically featureless jungle. The levels feel almost randomly assembled, and even in more densely and purposefully built areas, like ones with a bunch of buildings, the amount of space between objectives that you have to run back and forth between is sadistic. The dinosaurs sport genuinely hilarous AI and behaviors, and will sometimes do wacky things like die standing up, get stuck half inside objects, or accidentally skate down slopes at a million miles per hour like they're playing TRIBES. They're never scary, you can usually just avoid them by getting them stuck on the geometry, and they're always outside, making all indoor sections tensionless - presumably because trying to put one in a building would break the physics to such a degree that your computer would China Syndrome itself.

No real design skill or interesting storytelling going on - you're just solving the most basic physics puzzles, or key hunting, or following some light environmental clues to know where to go. The sum total of the story is just this lady who crashed in a plane trying to get off the island while snippets from John Hammond's fictional autobiography narrate things occasionally. Really just not much going on.

In spite of everything, you might enjoy some eerie moments slowly poking around in abandoned buildings, piecing together some little bits of enviromental storytelling, etc. It's there if you're that kind of person. I am! I love exploring weird horror or horror-adjacent stuff in first person, and I think that's why I've been giving this thing a chance since my teens. But good lord almighty, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It is at best a plodding, impossibly janky FPS, and at worst a JP-themed tech demo that does not function and should not have been commercially released. If you can believe it, there's a ton of quite interesting history about this game's development and the pre-release hype touting how revolutionary it was going to be. (Some real Molyneux levels of BS, go check it out sometime.) And yeah, that's fine. That's valid. I do believe that ambition and vision count for something, and I do understand that a game this bad can be made with good intentions. But at the end of the day, that doesn't make it not suck!

Anyway, everyone should really play this stupid game, or at least skip through a longplay of it. Hopefully I have now ragequit for the last time, and writing this has exorcised the demons. But it's probably just as likely that I'll load my save again tomorrow. Sigh.