If you want the game that really put its stamp on the Collectathon genre, look no further than Banjo-Kazooie. It's an immaculate and timeless game; it's honestly hard to find much I can say about it. The presentation is charming, funny and weird. The music is absolutely delightful. The platforming and exploration is tightly designed.

I feel like Banjo-Kazooie as a near-perfect game as it is, has lent itself to a sort of mystique that has only been challenged by sequels or spiritual successors, all of which just don't have the secret sauce that B-K has. A lot of the follow-ups to B-K in both direct and indirect terms suffer from serious bloat problems (ahem Tooie/DK64)

Banjo-Kazooie is like a gourmet cut of lean beef; it cuts out most of the fat bullshit, and you're left with a short but beautifully designed and elegant game that runs like clockwork.

Metal Arms is the definition of a great B-title on its respective consoles. It was a loony-ass game with robots killing each other, which meant loads of creative weapons, a variety of robots to murder (WITH LIMB DAMAGE), and a wildly comedic story with a lot of twists and turns and setpieces to go through. It was a 2000s-ass game down to the swearing robots.

The only real critiques I have of the game is the modicum of rust on the game being somewhat janky and running like garbage on anything that isn't an Xbox. It's also a game with inconsistent difficulty; some of it is genuinely challenging and will put your skills to the test, other cases you're rolling the dice with how jank or poorly-designed some set-pieces are.

Metal Arms: Glitch in the System has a sort of cult status at this point, for good reason. It's just a well-made game that's also infamous for its cliffhanger ending and loads of unexplored lore before Swingin' Ape studios went on to make their last game checks notes oh god Starcraft Ghost

Dragon Warrior 3 was one of the first major RPGs I played outside of Pokemon and Super Mario RPG. It's exactly what it says on the tin and is the quintessential "JRPG" to me, somebody who has played very little Final Fantasy games but enough to know what I'm talking about.

There's almost a purity to how basic Dragon Warrior 3 is. You build a party with different classes, get geared up, go exploring, killing things, and leveling up. There are no frills involved and it feels almost like you're telling your own story. It felt like a grand adventure that could fit into your pocket, with the overworld music fitting that to a T.

Honestly I think a reason I look back so fondly on DW3 is because it laid a lot of the groundwork for the Etrian Odyssey series, one of my favorite series of all time. Dragon Warrior 3 felt like an epic adventure in your pocket in 2000, and it still probably is.

While I played the original Kid Icarus on the NES, most of my tenure was spent playing it on the Wii virtual console. Often maligned as Metroid's deformed cousin, Kid Icarus is hard. Especially the first world, which was often a common breaking point that people failed to get past. God knows I stubbornly grinded my face against it for hours until I got to 1-4 and the game opened up. Figuratively and literally, the 4th levels of each world are dungeons where the Metroid comparisons come into play. Also the power curve of Pit through the game bears some similarities with Metroid.

Truth be told? I like Kid Icarus more than the original Metroid. It's linear, sure, but the tightness of the controls makes it feel good to play and unlike Metroid you won't spend the entire game getting lost. They really aren't comparable though. I think as far as platformers go on the NES, you can do a lot worse than Kid Icarus. I'd even call it "good".

Barring the original Castlevania games for psychos (ilu super castlevania iv), most people's exposure to modern Igavania/Metroidvania games was Symphony of the Night. I didn't own a PS1, so I had SotN at home, and that's Harmony of Dissonance.

It feels like SotN scaled down to work on a handheld, and frankly that's kind of amazing to me. Is it as good or memorable as that game? To most people, no. Hell, most people find this or Portrait of Ruin to be the least memorable Igavania game, but Portrait of Ruin has an ugly-ass art style that immediately makes me like HoD more.

The movement in this game feels slick as hell with a nice dash that really makes zooming around feel good. The sub-weapon system was rudimentary but focused. The exploration and dual-castle system is repeated again here but being on a handheld makes it pretty spiffy. And despite the music having that 8-bit compression crunch to it, the soundtrack still rips ass.

This is on the Castlevania collection on all your favorite game platforms. It's not the most memorable or interesting Castlevania game, but it's competent and feels nice to play. It has a special place in my heart.

Hisoutensoku and SWR have special places in my heart for being the first fighting game I got to play online with a bunch of friends. This was back during the days of using VPNs and static IPs and other wacky nonsense to get the online running in the first place. Getting the game to work was like pulling teeth.

As far as fighters go, Hisoutensoku is an incredibly fascinating game. The core gameplay is effectively what if every character was a zoner (except Hong Meiling, my beloved) where the emphasis is around spamming projectiles with varying priority and just trying to get in on people to fuck them up. The roster has a wide variety of characters to make your flavor of zoner varied enough to be interesting.

The other cool mechanic was the deck system, where you burn cards for your supers, for various stat boosts, or to even replace your specials entirely. So on top of fighting game mechanics you had the metagame of playing a card game simultaneously trying to get good pulls while you're trying to not die.

I think this game probably still holds up. It's somewhere on my computer and I might boot it up again. Also it goes without saying that the music fucking rips.

I remember getting this game right before Christmas around my birthday. I got it and Super Mario RPG at the same time, and I was dog-sitting. Somehow on Christmas morning, the dog managed to accidentally lock himself in the bathroom as my roommate got ready for work and I had to babysit him. He got a bunch of power tools ready to dismantle the door knob before I found a pin for the lock and got the dog out. The whiny baby was very upset to be locked in the bathroom for 20 whole minutes, so I tiredly escorted him to the couch at 6am where I started playing this.

But anyways, good game. Delightful personality and smartly designed. Yep.

Rondo of Blood remains one of my favorite Castlevania games, despite this remake lacking some of the charm of the original PC-Engine title. The music rocks, it's hard as hell, it has multiple characters and multiple paths to take for whatever playthrough flavor you're feeling. It's a dope-ass Castlevania game that I would still recommend to this day.

The big reason to get this version was because it contained Symphony of the Night as an unlockable, and that was my first real exposure to that game, lacking a PS1 growing up. Either way, great fucking games for a portable package.

When PSO died and PSU was dying, it only seemed natural that I would gravitate towards PSP2. This game is PSU but better, smarter, and more tightly designed. A lot of the obtuse garbage from PSU is gone here for a more streamlined experience, and it was a handheld MMO effectively; how cool was that? Sure the adventure mode is still kind of crap, but I'm here for that GRIND.

Much like my weird obsessive love for PSU, I desire to hunt down some private servers one day and give it another shot. It's truly staggering that this was all made possible on the Playstation Portable.

I haven't beaten this game. I don't know if I will. But it's lived rent-free in my head for years and I haven't decided if that's a good thing or not. I have almost nothing to say about Death Stranding, but simultaneously too much to think about.

This is QWOP mixed in with being a mailman. There's combat and enemy encounters, but it doesn't feel ancillary to the experience; if anything I would say it's the least fun to be had in this game with how clunky the controls can be. But playing Death Stranding, the definition of "fun" was challenged throughout my 10 or 15 hours of playing. Is awkwardly walking from place to place delivering packages and managing your carry load fun? To some people it probably is. Is building a complex network of highways, vehicles and communication fun? I think to a lot of people, that's going to be the major sticking point about Death Stranding; is any of this actually fun? I think it's compelling for sure, but listening to music while huffing and puffing through the mountainside delivering old records and food supplies sure is strange. It's like they turned those boring sidequests in a lot of games into a full-fledged experience, and some people enjoy that kind of busywork. I know I do.

The story is nonsensical and utterly fascinating. If you're familiar with any of Hideo Kojima's work, you know what to expect here theatrically but will have no clue where the story is going. Having bizarre names like Dank KushMan (parody) tell you the president's body needs to be incinerated or else it'll blow up the entire capital is something that actually happens, and no the context does not explain things better. Context is for cowards.

You know what isn't for cowards? Death Stranding. It's one of the most beautifully designed games for nobody, and the balls it took to make a AAA game on this scale of this absurdity is nothing short of commendable at the very least. It's worth playing, even if I'm confident a lot of people will hate what it's doing. I feel compelled to play more as of writing this. It's truly a remarkably weird experience so far that's already made such an impression on me so early.

As a longtime MOBA player, I have complex feelings about Pokemon Unite. I think distilled down to the core gameplay, there's a pretty great game here. There are loads of pokemon with varied methods of gameplay and it does a good job of enabling that power fantasy of fucking shit up as a Pokemon. I think that's the best thing I can say about it, and that's a really good thing. Playing as a team and coordinating big plays is a ton of fun with your favorite Pokemon. The ping system is fine and the community in general feels alright compared to most MOBAs especially since there's an absence of voice or team chat in-game. The biggest flaw with the actual gameplay is the comeback mechanics are really powerful, meaning you can roll the first eight minutes of a game only to coinflip it at the endgame objective and make 80% of the game feel pointless.

Once examined any deeper beyond the core gameplay in comparisons to its contemporaries, this is a deeply flawed and cynical product. Acquiring new pokemon either takes weeks of grinding (capped so you have to come back every week) or you can buy them for somewhat inoffensive amounts of real money. The Emblem system is a terrible rehash of the Lol Runes system that's based on lucky draws getting what you want. The item system in theory provides dynamic customization for your loadout but getting new items or leveling current ones is excruciating. Of course you can speed all this up by spending buyable currency or purchasing emblem rerolls through the energy system, creating a horribly unbalanced experience if you don't want to fork out the cash and spend hours grinding. You can get SOME skins by grinding out the battle pass or by paying ridiculous amounts (we're talking 20 to 40 bones) for them.

But most importantly, the HUD for the menus is some of the most offensive shit imaginable. It's cluttered, filled with events designed to bait you and play longer, filled with their own individual currencies that yes, you can pay to speed up if you want. As somebody with ADHD, my brain glazes over every time I log into this game.

As I said, there's a good game here, but it's buried underneath FOMO cashgrab grinding that's hard to separate from the experience, but since that system works for their wallets I doubt they'll really change any of it, which is the depressing part. You could have a legitimate LoL or DOTA contender here if it just wasn't such a cynical product designed to make money rather than a good gameplay experience.

A classic and technical showhorse for the Xbox 360 era of graphics fidelity, Gear of War still doesn't fail to impress decades later. The cover system remains a revolutionary mechanic, even if the campaign itself utilizes some pretty mindless AI for the stop-and-pop cover shooting. There are a few gimmicks like the pseudo-stealth sections and vehicle segments that haven't aged gracefully, but the distilled combat experience still fucking rocks. The campaign moves quickly, keeps things fresh, and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The multiplayer remains a landmark classic, but reminiscing on it, it had a lot of problems. The ability to BM and disrespect others in the game was varied and even in some cases ingenious, but didn't avoid feeding into what was a particularly healthy online ecosystem in the first place; people who played Gears of War online were assholes, your lovable reviewer included. And not only did the gameplay loop encourage this, but also unintentionally so with some maps being able to be glitched out of, allowing players to grief each other pretty extensively.

Ah, good times. Gooooood times. Still, the campaign is lean and still hits hard for a classic.

Yggdra Union is one of those tactics JRPGs that runs just on the fringe of being obtuse, but has one of the funnest, most complex battle systems I've played with in the genre. The story is pretty standard but decently written. The art direction is extra as hell but fun to watch. The music is pretty good.

The hook here is the Union system, which allows multiple members of your army to attack at once based on their formation, making unit placement key to maximize how hard you'll smash the enemy army while taking as few of casualties as possible. It also utilizes a card system that comes with offensive/defensive stats, mobility, and special abilities to use during combat, making combat tactics super important.

I never beat this game because my PSP battery eventually swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. But it got challenging as hell due to the depth and breadth of mechanics present in the game while not being generous with healing during or after combat missions. You literally had army fatigue and suffered through long battle of attrition.

It's on Steam now for 25 bucks, which I intend to pick it back up. It's a mess of a good time.

As a filthy antifa soldier who grew up in a conservative family, looking back on CoD4 is weird for me. Is it Bush-era bullshit propaganda? Yeah probably, and maybe I'll dissect this later in a substack post and a revisit to the game proper. But anyways, we don't need politics in a review about a game in a nameless MIddle-Eastern country and dealing with Russian civil wars and the nature of the US war machine.

CoD4 nonetheless remained a pretty big staple influence on me for what I wanted out of shooters; customizable loadouts, perks, fast arcade-y action and twitch shooter mechanics. You felt truly empowered to create a custom character capable of horrible war crimes, but they'd be your war crimes. There was some modicum of thought in CoD4's optics before MW2 set things off the rails with No Russian and dual-wielding saw-off shotguns and model 1887s akimbo style.

It was a fun adrenaline rush of a gameplay experience filled with racial slurs and sanitation of the American propaganda war machine. It has a special place in my heart despite now having a brain to parse how jingoistic and ridiculous everything around the game was. Oh, to be innocent and young though, am I right?