VVVVVV has faded into the background somewhat despite its positive critical reception upon launch, and that's a shame: I think more developers should take notes, as it succeeds at appealing to both casual and competitive audiences. From a casual viewpoint, VVVVVV takes a classic deconstructed concept ("what if we removed jumping in 2D platforming?") and expands upon this in meaningful ways with little downtime. I've often complained about the lack of tech-skill in 2D platformers, but VVVVVV remains a key exception because it's simple to pick up (just gravity flip and walking as controls) yet difficult to master due to its weightiness. Additionally, it never feels stale with its utilization of gravity flipping by innovating upon this with classic obstacle escalation, introducing flippers, screen wrapping, teleporters, and auto-scrolling in respective levels as just a few married mechanics. On the other hand, from a competitive viewpoint, VVVVVV presents itself as an almost perfect beginner's speedrunning game thanks to the general lack of RNG; all rooms begin from the same state once entered, following the same pattern every time. Upon exiting, the rooms will always reset to that exact same state playing the same pattern, meaning that timing cycles don't have to be accounted for on a broader scale and players can just focus on correctly routing the first time around. Due to the simplified routing and committal movement (since you can't flip mid-air and have very restrained control over aerial drift), players must both react quickly enough to meet single room cycles and carefully plan out input timings. It certainly helps that a solid speedrun takes less than an hour and individual sectors can be practiced as "challenges" added in a recent update.

Notice how I said "general lack of RNG" however, because this is where VVVVVV throws a wrench into the works. One of the game's twists is that upon rescuing three crewmates (i.e. clearing 3 of the 4 main sectors), the player is thrown into a 2nd intermission dubbed "The Gravitron," an arcade-like section that bounces the player between two flippers as they must dodge incoming projectiles without any vertical control. This particular intermission is the only case of RNG (in the form of randomized projectile waves) throughout the game, and unfortunately sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise completely consistent speedrunning experience. As an endless arcade sidemode that can be unlocked via collecting every trinket, I think it fulfills this role as a reward well, but when considering it from a deathless run perspective, it is an absolute killer in the middle of the run that cannot be easily planned for. Outside of this complaint though, I find very few things that I can fault VVVVVV for. The game's simple visuals are bright and catchy, it's got a great sense of humor with its room names and stylized pixel hazards, and the soundtrack goes harder than it has any right to: Pressure Cooker and Potential for Anything never fail to blow me away with their energetic melodies. This is an easy recommendation for anyone looking to get into speedrunning platformers despite the need to heavily practice for the Gravitron, and it's an even easier recommendation for general players looking to understand how indies can thoroughly yet succinctly explore creative yet familiar concepts in a cohesive package.

Well fuck. I'm not surprised that I liked Venba, but I am surprised I liked it this much.

It does feel a bit strange that it took this long for me to find a narrative-based cooking game; most of the cooking video games I've seen are either arcade-scoring style minigame collections (your Cooking Mamas), restaurant management titles like Cook, Serve, Delicious!, or sandboxes that felt so simple and structureless that they basically turned into meme simulators for me past the five minute mark. Conversely, Venba more closely resembles what I expect of my idealized cooking game: it emphasizes the puzzle-like qualities of cooking via mastering techniques at the right time (something that no other game I'm aware of has really capitalized upon) while also using cooking as a narrative vessel to impart past memories of learning/executing recipes and thoroughly exploring culture via the medium of the culinary arts. Granted, Venba's puzzles are easy enough to navigate but still aren't free, and that does wonders in aiding its lean towards storytelling: without spoiling too much, entire sections of recipes are often missing, and thus part of the fun is filling out the gaps as the player to "correct" the dishes. You won't get penalized unlike a restaurant sim though, and that's the fun of cooking! Sometimes, you just want to experiment a little and try out new techniques, and if you mess up, that's just kitchen learning in a nutshell.

What I wasn't expecting though, was just how deeply I resonated with the narrative. My immediate family and I are immigrants, and quite frankly, I've inquired a little here and there about what they've sacrificed to move to the US, but I clearly haven't asked enough. While I've never genuinely felt ashamed of my own culture, I've absolutely felt the pressure to "fit in" and in many cases, felt a bit of the old embarrassment rise up again from playing this game due to how disconnected I've often felt from my old home city versus having now lived in the states for a while. English isn't my first language, but it may as well have been now given my difficulties writing and sometimes speaking my old language, and losing my grasp of all these things that were once more familiar to me has always been a sore point in my life. This game is a reminder to me that even if I may have grown up in an entirely different world than my parents, they're still my family at the end of the day regardless of cultural differences and it's still my past; I might have had years slip by where I chose to remain intentionally apathetic to parts of my family's heritage, but that doesn't mean that I can't start catching up now to try and make up for lost ground.

The game is only about an hour long with just six recipes included (and a couple near the end are a bit too guided), but I'm willing to overlook its brevity because this experience is going to sit with me for a while: it almost feels like it was written for me at times. Definitely one of the best surprises to come out this year. Thank you for the meal, Venba. Think I'm gonna go call my parents now and tell them how much I've missed them.

As the WarioWare series evolved, installments usually became more complex through new implementations of controls: Nintendo went from a D-pad + the A button in the original Mega Microgames on the GBA, to a gyro sensor + A in Twisted, to a DS touch screen for Touched, and finally to emulated Wii motion controls for Smooth Moves. So, it’s interesting how the latest installment, Get it Together, goes in the complete opposite direction and reverts back to a more conventional and simple control scheme with a single joystick + A. Unfortunately, I found it to be a regression from even the original Mega Microgames, because the gameplay felt undercooked.

Instead of referencing WarioWare’s usual motley of arcade-style structure (where the controls were generally used to manage and solve each scenario presented in drastically different manners), Get it Together plants all the microgames on the same 2D plane akin to a 2D platformer. Objectives here are pretty straightforward, and can usually be summed up as “travel from point A to point B” or “attack object(s) until you win.” As such, the main culprit behind this microgame homogeneity is that every level needs to be theoretically solvable with every single cast member; the result is that every level in isolation is somewhat basic, with designs that bled into one another after some time. This is further exacerbated because some cast members are just better versions of other cast members (ex: Ashley might as well be an amalgamation of Dribble/Spitz/Mike/Red that can attack in multiple directions) and some feel especially stunted because they’re stuck to the ground and/or can’t move (18-Volt…), nor does the game provide much incentive to play with the worse cast members during the story missions. It certainly feels like a step down from WarioWare Gold, which while I did have some minor complaints for regarding lost potential by not integrating touch-screen/gyro/gamepad controls together, nevertheless at least had depth via a suite of different control schemes to frantically juggle players through varying objectives.

I genuinely wish I had nicer things to say about Get it Together, but I was sadly underwhelmed. As usual, the sound design and vibrant art are on point, though I have to admit that the wacky vignettes didn’t quite hit it for me this time around. The side content also failed to hold my attention; there’s an endless arena mode that’s interesting for a few minutes until you realize mashing Ashley’s attack will get you easy points, an endless side-scroller mode with fairly few collectibles and obstacles, and a ball juggling mode that’s pretty optimally cleared by mashing attack with Mike. You can also buy gifts for your crew with coins earned during missions/story mode, but the resulting level-ups don’t affect gameplay outside of giving you a slightly higher score multiplier for Wario Cup, the weekly score challenge mode with online leaderboards: at least the unlocked color customization + character concept art are appreciated. That’s about all I can comment upon regarding a solo playthrough: while I can’t see myself dedicating much more time to this, I might add on a few multiplayer notes if I can get a friend to try this out with me in the future. If you want a more expansive toolkit to mess around with, then it looks like Gold is still the go-to, but if you want the back-to-the-basics idealization that Get it Together seems to emulate on paper, then I’d just recommend playing through Mega Microgames or Twisted. Sometimes, less really is more, but that doesn’t mean you have to try and reinvent the wheel in the process.

If you try and play Shinobi like a traditional hack-and-slash combo-heavy character action game, you'll probably find yourself getting frustrated within minutes. You can't dash or jump cancel sword swing animations, nor can you rotate your character's swings during the animation, so button mashing is discouraged and every attack matters that much more. Instead, the goal is to wrap up enemy encounters as quickly as possible, diving and dashing between foes to chain them together in a manner akin to abusing Sonic's homing attack (albeit with tougher execution). This is encouraged two-fold: firstly, Hotsuma's cursed sword requires sacrifices in the form of enemy blood (and running out of souls will cause the sword to sap his health instead), so slaying foes is in succession the most effective way to farm souls and satiate the sword's hunger. Just as importantly however, successfully chaining enemies builds up Hotsuma's damage output, so it becomes integral to prioritize weaker and clustered enemies so later hits can deal massive damage to bulkier foes; it's a great way to both highlight Shinobi's arcade puzzle-like qualities of efficiently navigating a room as well as giving the player a viable and clean strategy to quickly dispose of spongier enemies. This also applies towards boss fights, and there's nothing more satisfying than biding your time, waiting for the boss's goons to stack up, and then tearing your way through to finally slice the boss in one fell swoop.

To be fair, while a lot of Shinobi's criticism comes in the form of not understanding the above Tate system, there are other factors at play. I can admit that Shinobi doesn't feel very beginner friendly despite the seeming simplicity of its core concepts; there's no tutorial or in-game explanation of the game's mechanics, and if you don't understand basics like wall-running or stealth dashing behind foes to get around enemy stances (since side and back attacks deal more damage and some foes can block frontal strikes), you'll find yourself getting walled and wombo comboed by foes rather quickly due to what appears to be a lack of both invincibility frames and the game's inclination towards stun-heavy enemy attacks. Moreover, the game is definitely quite punishing: health drops can feel a bit scarce at times, jumps feel quite committal since you can't alter your aerial drift mid-jump and must rely on expending your double jump or dash, and falling off the stage will result in instant death with no midway checkpoints attached to any stage. That said, the biggest challenge for me was the rudimentary camera. It's fairly static, and as a result, it becomes a bit of a chore having to constantly rotate the camera mid-combat to spot all appearing foes so you don't have to attack while they're off-screen. The lock-on system makes it easier to target singular enemies at a time (and is often essential because there's no way to dash upwards/downwards towards foes without it), but it does present the additional issue of constantly needing to tilt the camera up and down afterwards: if the camera is pointed downwards, aerial enemies and floating collectibles are tough to spot, but if the camera is pointed upwards, then blind platforming becomes a nightmare. The other prevalent critique that comes to mind are the level designs themselves: while I don't have complaints towards enemy placements, I find that the level design motifs tend to bleed into one another within individual stages (i.e. specific platform and wall placements are repeated verbatim within the span of a few minutes), which can make the stages feel like they drag on too long, especially when no midway checkpoints exist. I also wish that there weren't so many straight corridors/tunnels present throughout the game, and could have done with more open room environments with wall-running opportunities. Finally, the final boss was unfortunately a miserable experience due to wonky mob hurtboxes (my sword kept phasing through and missing the spawned small-fry), the multitude of stun-heavy attacks from foes, and the element of luck involved (since the final boss loved to turn temporarily invulnerable or teleport away many instances after I had successfully chained the weaker minions for damage).

Even despite my criticisms however, I don't think Shinobi is anywhere as hard as a lot of players have made it out to be, and it is exactly what I had envisioned a ninja game to be: swift and efficient bread & butter combat that emphasized quick thinking and efficient traversal just as much as steady reflexes. It really never gets old slashing and dashing between scores of foes, and then cutting straight away to a cinematic of Hotsuma dramatically turning his blade while his prey is simultaneously sliced to shreds behind him. In conjunction, I certainly enjoyed the campy narrative regarding themes of light vs dark and revenge and honor between a bunch of folks who studied the blade. Lastly, the varied and fantastic soundtrack alongside the sleek visuals was the cherry on top to elevate those vibes. If you're willing to meet this game halfway despite all the classic 2000s PS2 jank and the intimidating learning curve, then I think you'll find a truly exhilarating experience that was ahead of its time in many ways despite the lack of polish, and a title that I think modern developers could learn a lot from.

Compared to Cing's later works in Hotel Dusk and Last Window, Trace Memory feels more like a rough tech demo for the DS... but what a charming little tech demo it is! You play as Ashley Mizuki Robbins, the daughter of two scientists who were presumed dead years ago, only for Ashley's father to send her a letter years later asking her to come to Blood Edward Island to learn the truth. Accompanying her is a device named the Dual Trace System (DTS), which very much resembles the classic DS model and can read DS game cards data cards scattered around the island of her father's logs. She eventually bumps into the ghost of a boy named "D", who also doesn't remember a thing of his past, and together, Ashley and D must navigate the abandoned island's sprawling mansion to unravel the mysteries of their respective pasts.

Puzzles are a bit of a mixed bag admittingly. A few of them are a bit rough around the edges; during multiple parts of the game, I had trouble grabbing or contacting objects on the screen with my stylus due to really imprecise or tiny hitboxes. In addition, a good chunk of the puzzles are extremely simple: some are tap and drag puzzles like breaking a bottle or rotating a crank, and a few are just inventory puzzle chains (item A will get you item B which is used to obtain item C). Nevertheless, I do have to respect the ambition for certain sequences. The DTS also comes with an in-game camera to take pictures of scenery so you don't necessarily need a pencil and paper alongside you while playing, but there's also a nice overlay feature that lets you place images on top of another image made transparent to decode hidden passwords; it's a nice little gimmick that I wish was utilized a bit more. I also have to give Trace Memory credit for utilizing practically every feature of the DS, with a couple of microphone puzzles and another DS open-shut puzzle that I think is basically Cing's speciality considering I have yet to see any other developer tinker with that idea. Outside of these interactive puzzles however, I do wish that the inventory puzzles were a bit more facilitated: key items have to be obtained from tapping around observable scenes that appear to have a lot of distinct items of interest, but upon tapping in many of these areas, most end up as red herrings that only provide a single line of flavor text. I also admit that as short as the game is (five hours, about half the length of Hotel Dusk), it was a bit easy to get lost within the mansion since I wasn't provided with a map but often had to backtrack to previously explored locations in past chapters for key items that became obtainable once I passed the right checks in future chapters.

Trace Memory's doesn't quite achieve the same feeling of presence as what I'd come to expect for Cing, with its strange mouth animations upon still-figures (as opposed to Hotel Dusk's distinct inky animated character models) or its fairly contrived puzzles that seem to make little sense in the context of its narrative (as per most tech demos), but I do think its heart is in the right place. Despite how much flavor text I had to mash through just tapping everywhere, picking up on those little details to add to D's past or stumbling upon another data card kept me engrossed in the central mysteries for tighter world-building. While I do prefer the first-person 3D environments of Hotel Dusk as opposed to the top-down exploration of Trace Memory, I have to concur with MelMellon that the ability to highlight more specific areas of interest in 2D while displaying its more vast environments in 3D grants Trace Memory a combination of detail and immersion that few games manage to achieve. Finally, even if the central narrative isn't quite as intricate or intimate as Cing's future work, the game wrapped itself up quite nicely with no plot holes (and keeps you aware of the running plotline with its end-of-chapter summary quizzes, much like Hotel Dusk would later utilize), and the final reveal of D's fate as a reward for thoroughly exploring the mansion and unlocking all his memories made the whole experience worthwhile. I came in expecting a short cozy adventure game highlighting both the potential of the DS and Cing's early ambitions, and I got just that, so all in all, I'd say it was a pretty good day.

Despite my obsession with Time Crisis, the original game is something that I respect a lot more than I actually enjoy playing. Right away, the hallmarks that characterize the series are present front and center. The trademark cover system becomes key to careful resource management, in that you must time your dodges carefully against incoming attacks while keeping an eye on your remaining ammo and syncing your dodges with necessary reloads. Enemies are color-coded to quickly communicate their threat level (reds will almost immediately damage you, orange vests have trickier weapons with slower attacks but higher accuracy, and blues are your standard fare that tend to shoot like stormtroopers but will eventually find you), with closer enemies easier to spot and hit but generally posing a larger threat, especially enemies with clubs and claws that will never miss. Headshots aren’t required since any hit will immediately down a foe, but higher accuracy is nevertheless rewarded because enemies are often utilizing cover just like you, and nailing enemies when they’re appearing for the first time out of hidden traps and doors or hitting their exposed limbs sticking out of cover saves valuable seconds.

As such, the toughest enemy is not so much Time Crisis’ many goons or the bosses, but rather, the timer itself. It’s simultaneously the original Time Crisis’ biggest draw and biggest con: every action you take contributes to preservation of your remaining time, including optional bright orange enemies that provide little time bonuses upon hit, resulting in a very focused arcade experience. However, as a result, I found the game to be extremely difficult and punishing: you can’t afford to play it safe with the scant time gains you’ll get from clearing each scenario (since the timer is never reset, even after clearing acts or stages), especially because enemies appear in waves that progress only upon clearing all present enemies on screen, and can also waste tons of time if you miss and they duck behind cover. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem, except unlike the other main installments, standard enemies (blues and more competent browns) in the original Time Crisis deal damage based off of bullet thresholds; after a certain number of shots fired your way out of cover, they sometimes have a chance to fire a shot that can actually damage you. There’s no feasible way to distinguish between a shot from these foes that will miss versus actually hitting you, because the animation to duck below cover isn’t faster than the short delay between the red flash of damaging bullets and the actual hit, so it’s impossible to react to. Furthermore, actually getting hit wastes a few seconds because it puts you in a state where you cannot fire or duck below cover to reload, creating further complications especially in scenarios where multiple enemies are on screen firing at you. As a result, it often felt like I was required to memorize spawn locations and pick off enemies immediately to prevent most bullets from being fired altogether, since playing by quick reaction felt unviable when I had to play proactively in scenes where multiple enemies were firing, making it easy to lose track of how many bullets came close to hitting me. This pressure of needing to play almost perfectly was exacerbated by the fact that continues restart you at the beginning of acts instead of resuming where you lost all your lives, and that there is no way to regain lives outside of downing 40 enemies in a row without missing once. I respect what the original was trying to do with its simple toolkit and scoring system, but I can’t deny that the difficulty curve felt ridiculously steep and unwelcoming at times.

Still, I can’t be too much of a downer. It’s classic Time Crisis with a batshit crazy plot involving destructive weapons, kidnapping, and terrorists, alongside extremely cheesy dialogue and corny voice-acting with tons of flashy boss fights in a 3D low-polygonal trap-ridden castle. The exclusive Special Mode in the Playstation edition is a nice cherry on top, with branching paths that decide what environments you traverse resulting in different boss fights, all determined based upon your clear times: not quite as exciting as how they handle branching paths in House of the Dead (i.e. saving civilians, shooting switches, etc), but I respect its presence regardless. While I’ll generally deviate towards the other entries in the series, I’m glad I got to finally explore the ambitious beginnings of my favorite light-gun franchise that set the standard of spectacle for future installments. Now if only I could find those remaining Time Crisis II and 4 cabinets…

Dawn of Ys has to be my favorite classic Ys game, hands down. The story has its moments even if it’s not considered “canon” (since Memories of Celceta takes more inspiration from Mask of the Sun, the other Ys IV, instead of this one) and the voice-acting is a bit goofy and over-the-top (I won’t judge too harshly since I played with the English fan-dub), but the game is worth playing for the improved bump combat alone… certainly a sentence that I did not expect to say in my life. Take my opinion with a grain of salt here, since I’ve only played Ys I + II Chronicles, but I found the bump combat to be a bit inconsistent regarding its angle calculations in Ys I Chronicles + while Ys II Chronicles + significantly streamlined it, but made bump combat pretty free since I just needed to walk into enemies diagonally and corner them against walls. I find Dawn of Ys to hit a nice medium between these two extremes: walking diagonally into enemies will likely successfully damage opponents, but you can’t just walk and knock back enemies diagonally since they’ll get knocked horizontally/vertically instead. As a result, the optimal strategy is instead to carefully position yourself just off-center of the enemy’s character model center, and then walk into them horizontally/vertically, taking care not to run into walls because Dawn of Ys has no invincibility frames and squeezing enemies into walls will cause Adol to contact their center and take tons of damage. All the while, enemies are constantly repositioning themselves and trying to maneuver around you so they can strike you with their center, making Dawn of Ys’s bump combat a more intricate spacing game of you + enemies trying to correctly run at each other. It’s certainly a much more engaging way to pass the time while grinding for levels to scale up to bosses, since single levels make a huge difference for stat gains to increase your margin of error. Regardless, thanks to a few late game abilities/items such as the Timer Ring (to slow down enemies) and the Solomon Shoes (instakilling foes in exchange for slowing your movement) that make bump combat quicker (but not necessarily mindless due to better AI pathing and lack of cornering) alongside instant enemy respawns once their spawn position is off-screen, I found grinding to be a lot more enjoyable this time around.

I find myself with very few complaints this time around, mainly because Dawn of Ys strikes a nice balance in taking what I like from Ys I and what I like from Ys II, and often improving upon that to boot. There’s a good mix of magic focused bullet-hell shmup-esque fights resembling those of Ys II and more bump-combat heavy fights resembling those of Ys I, and none of them felt unfair: good positioning and quick hazard awareness go pretty far, and you can usually spot enemy attacks and patterns soon enough to successfully dodge practically every attack if you space correctly. Dungeon designs are again, a good balance between straight linear tunnels and sprawling labyrinths; the best dungeons are never pure straight-shots, but also don’t waste your time with excess empty & isolated rooms so you can quickly figure out the correct path and get back on track. The adventure game elements of figuring what to collect and where to use corresponding key items often made the first two Ys games a bit esoteric without a guide, but I find that to not be the case at all here: tells are pretty evident, with tons of context clues dictated by environmental features + nearby NPC dialogue, and the overworld unlocks pretty naturally with backtracking very heavily stressed when necessary (and is fairly quick thanks to warp magic). I’ve heard complaints that Dawn of Ys is a bit long too, but if you compare the total run-time to Ys I and Ys II combined (since they’re essentially two parts of a bigger product meant to be played back to back), then it’s not too bad (10-14 hours for Dawn of Ys compared to 14-17 hours for Ys I + II Chronicles according to howlongtobeat) as long as you don’t spend too much time bumbling about and minimizing downtime from healing + excess grinding with the right strategies.

My only prevalent gripe is that I found the game to be a bit on the easy side (an opinion which I think I’m in the minority for), particularly regarding the last couple of hours. A few of the endgame bosses can be somewhat cheesed with Power Ring + Shield Magic to chip away most/all of their health bar, the final dungeon is extremely short (just a line of singular tunnels that take less than five minutes to run through), and I personally found the final boss to be a letdown: the final phase is a joke once you figure out the obvious blind spots, and I ended up winning on my first try even though it’s always taken me multiple tries to clear the final boss in the other Ys games. In addition, you get a lot of leeway with the Herb + Elixir providing two possible full health restores for most fights, so it tends to be a pretty forgiving game. If I really had to nitpick further, I’d also say that money tends to feel superfluous considering how few items there were to purchase compared to how much money I gained from slaying monsters; Hudson probably could have done away with money in the game entirely and just focused on locking items behind necessary dungeon treasure chests and NPCs as part of progression.

Aside from that, I found Dawn of Ys to be a really pleasant experience. The spritework + animated cutscenes still hold up pretty well, the soundtrack continues to kick major ass because Falcom Sound Team JDK have phenomenal composition embedded in their blood, and the side characters and villains get really great screentime in comparison to Ys I + II (where the villains are mostly in the background doing mysterious shadowy things). I’m gonna miss Dogi when I get back around to running through Memories of Celceta, that’s for sure. All in all, I’m a little surprised by how much I ended up enjoying this considering my more qualified praise regarding the remakes of the originals, and I definitely think it’s worth going out of your way for if you’re a hardcore Ys fan and enjoy the quick bump combat of classic Ys.

How do you follow up the likes of that which has never been seen before? Could you even hope to surpass the video game equivalent of lightning in a bottle? Keita Takahashi didn’t think so, but Namco saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and wanted more. So, he compromised. He agreed to direct the sequel after learning that Namco was willing to forge ahead, with or without him, and in exchange, the sequel became a metaphor for his mixed feelings regarding sequelitis and his eventual alienation from videogames as a whole. The result is We Love Katamari, a successor that tackled the subject of pandering to those around you while attempting to maintain the spirit of the original. The original Katamari Damacy was interpreted by many as an object of childlike wonder, railing against any form of cynicism while explaining absolutely nothing to preserve that joy. We Love Katamari on the other hand, turns the irreverence up to 11… and honestly, I’m all for it. As the Prince and the King of the Cosmos attempt to fulfill every fan’s request while repopulating the sky, they’re confronted with increasingly absurd situations. There’s a baby that outright tells you that he’s glad he was born to see the Prince of the Cosmos fulfill his lifelong dreams. Animals send requests a few times too, with some white dog telling you to roll around a zoo so he can attend a concert with more friends. To top this all off, the astronaut from the first game begs you to save the Earth from impending doom by rolling up countries of the world to stop an asteroid. The requests are all over the place and just as wild, if not wilder, than Katamari Damacy, and it’s fascinating how simultaneously off-the-rails the plot and worldbuilding have become even as the game remains one of Takahashi’s most intimate works, conveying his complicated feelings in this microcosm of cathartic destruction.

In terms of gameplay, We Love Katamari takes many of the logical steps in terms of progressing its simple yet realized formula. While the original game was content setting up its structure and letting players romp about in an expanding playground, We Love Katamari actively tests its limits of experimentation, challenging perceptions of what could be achieved with its level design while making players sweat with more complex goals and stricter time limits. Now granted, I concede that not everything in the sequel impresses me. The firefly level has a solid concept (roll up fireflies in a camping ground so a student has more light to study with) but doesn’t achieve much in terms of sense of scale or underlying complexity besides “roll up things quickly to get bright,” I could have done without three different variations of the Saturn levels where you just have to decide when you’re of the proper size, and I personally am not a huge fan of the underwater level where you have to handle floatier physics while dodging fishing hooks that put you out of commission for a bit. That said, the expansions that I did enjoy, I ended up really enjoying. There’s another campgrounds level where you control a burning Katamari and must carefully consider pathing on the fly to make sure that you never run out of fuel while avoiding any water sources that would snuff you out. Conversely, there’s another zoo level that sets a limit not on time, but on the things you’re allowed to roll up; as a result, it becomes an interesting exercise of restraint and sight-recognition, figuring out exactly the biggest things you can roll up at any time while outright avoiding anything else. Other favorite levels here include a racetrack where you “race” against a flurry of karts on a looping island road while barreling through anything in your way, and a sumo wrestling level where instead of rolling a Katamari, you roll the awkwardly-shaped sumo wrestler himself, and must prioritize foods as part of training him up to eventually KO his awaiting opponent. While some of the sequel's levels are content just playing with the established formula of “roll up things to get bigger to roll up more things,” the best levels here emphasize Katamari’s arcade and puzzle-like qualities by enforcing familiarization with the intricate object placement while accentuating the need for careful routing to avoid larger obstacles only to consume them whole later.

I must admit that despite my appreciation for what the sequel brings to the table, there’s a part of me that still prefers the original. There’s a sort of cohesion present in the original from repeating the same three levels but in slightly different ways and exploring them with different sizes that I think is missing in the sequel; rather, the sequel feels a bit more disconnected, with all the different fan-requests pulling from all different sides and a lot of the environments showing up for just a couple of stages or so. As a result, despite having more fleshed out execution of its base formula, I still feel as if the sequel could have more thoroughly explored certain levels in order to realize their full potential. In addition, I do find the sequel slightly more grindy than the original: not necessarily just because it’s harder (though I can’t rule out the possibility that this might be a factor), but because one of the final levels can’t be unlocked until you collect all the cousins (more or less just a cosmetic in the original), and multiple cousins are often present in the same level even though you’re only allowed to roll up and unlock one cousin per run. Finally, I must agree with everyone else in that I don’t think the extra Reverie levels from the remaster add much to the core experience, or at the very least didn’t wow me in the same way that many of the more experimental base game levels did. Rolling up clutter in a room as fast as possible and creating a variation of the racetrack level (just with the goal of snagging tires instead of overall size) doesn’t quite hit the same I suppose. Nevertheless, don’t let my personal gripes distract you from the fact that I absolutely recommend this. It's everything that a sequel could hope to be and more, providing a satisfying evolution to the series that stresses its understated design principles while serving as both a love-letter to the franchise and a send-off to Keita Takahashi’s most famous contributions to the medium. At the end of the day, we love Katamari, and while it may not be enough for Takahashi, it’s enough to matter for me.

Take the core formula from the original Slime Mori-Mori and throw in the tanks, and you've got Rocket Slime. Off the bat, there are already a ton of quality-of-life improvements, especially regarding the dungeoneering. All the trains cars/cargo floats now have a max capacity of four items (including yourself if you want to make a quick getaway while holding three items), so no more waiting around or meandering about to offload your goods! There's also no time-limit present in the dungeons anymore, so feel free to explore as long as you want while keeping in mind the day-night cycle that can affect enemy spawns. While there are still some instances of needing to carry around Bomb Rocks to blow up barriers or collecting other assorted objects to imitate totems and unlock doors, there's definitely a lot less of the former and the latter is simplified since objects are now located within nearby rooms instead of having to travel across the whole map. I also appreciate that much of the slower-paced platforming from the original has been replaced with movement-oriented obstacles (such as using the Rollerdash to traverse steeper slopes, or using cannons to both destroy sand castles and shoot yourself across fast-moving water), and that unlike the original, all destroyed and interactable hazards stay destroyed for good upon return trips (looking at you, Plob Balloons). The boss fights are every bit as ridiculous as the original: my personal favorite here has to be Pot Belly, who you must defeat by catching the materials he throws out of his magic urn and then chucking them back at him as he romps about. Finally, the transition from the GBA to the DS has not been missed: the visuals have gotten a nice bump with the DS's higher resolution, and there's a satisfying "YEEEEEOWWWCH" cry every time you slam into an enemy with the Elasto Blast. Just considering the basics that made the original so memorable, I can conclude that the sequel absolutely does all that and more.

What really add much more meat to the game, however, are the tank battles. It cannot be understated how much depth this adds to the core loop: in the original, materials sent back to town could only be used to repair the town (for aesthetics and to unlock some mini-games) or were to be sold for money. This time around, materials harvested from dungeons can now be transmuted with the magic urn once you've gained the corresponding recipes to produce more valuable material that you can use as tank ammo. Additionally, kidnapping monsters becomes much more valuable: send back at least 30 of any species, and you'll create a Bronze statue of that species in the art museum, allowing you to recruit that monster as a crew member for your tank. It's much more worthwhile as a result to forage about the dungeons and send back everything you find, knowing that it'll contribute to improving your tank warfare in some fashion. The tank battles themselves are the perfect mix of controlled chaos: you must fire upon enemy tanks in real-time, managing both the upper and lower cannon while fighting off any invaders trying to infiltrate your own tank and stealing ammo/destroying your interior. While most fights aren't particularly difficult, there is an element of strategy from figuring out exactly what to fire and when (ex: should I use shields to block off an entire line of enemy fire, or should I use carefully placed Kaboomamite instead to create a temporary wall of explosions while firing with the top cannon instead?), and if all else fails, you can just infiltrate the enemy tank yourself and blow up all their machines for the kicks. It never gets old engaging in these over-the-top fights, and the materials gained both for the fights and as a result of winning the fights makes the game's centralization around the tank battles that much more rewarding.

I've played hours upon hours of this game, both in my childhood and recently, and the only pertinent complaint that comes to mind is that the game is a bit too easy. In particular, most tank fights can be cheesed by infiltrating the tank via destroying the door/immediately shooting yourself out of the cannon and landing in the opponent's cannon room, and then just guarding the enemy cannon room to prevent anyone from firing at your tank. It doesn't take much more than a pulse to do so, since enemies can take a while to react to your Elastoblast and killing enemies will put them out of commission for a solid minute or two. I think this could have been alleviated if there were more fights that didn't rely on an enemy crew to fire or if there were more solo fights involved (i.e. just you as the only crew member vs someone else). Regardless, Rocket Slime is an incredibly entertaining and cozy experience that is every bit as charming as the original with tons of upgrades, and while there isn't much post-game to be found outside of the Tank Masters Tournament (which does at least have some entertaining tank battle variations, in fairness), I can respect a game that draws itself to a natural close and never outstays its welcome. It's even better if you can find a friend to play against via local multiplayer Wi-Fi so you can really get a taste of how crazy and complex tank engagements can become. Though, maybe don't pull out the Chili Pepper + Vulcan Bullets strategy if you still want to be friends afterwards. I learned that the hard way.

I was talking with a friend a few months back about how there seemed to be this cheery and upbeat trend with Game Boy Advance titles. In essence, I think this is a classic case of developers adapting to the limitations of the system. The original GBA has no backlight, resulting in a lack of darker palettes and backgrounds often looking a bit washed out: try and compare Mine Cart Carnage from the original Donkey Kong Country to its GBA port counterpart and the difference becomes obvious. Additionally, the GBA has no soundchip: the CPU instead processes the sound, and as a result, the GBA generally sounds much more compressed, with lots of sharp noise over its muffled audio. Again, compare the original SNES version of Minecart Madness to its GBA translation for reference. As a result, the GBA is filled with happy-go-lucky titles that emphasized brighter colors and catchy and cheery chiptunes: Golden Sun, Wario Land 4, Gen 3 Pokemon, Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, Warioware, Drill Dozer, and so on so forth. They even play around with this disparity to their advantage with the Advance Wars titles, emphasizing this almost idyllic portrayal of cartoon warfare as a sort of disconnect with little cynicism. I’d like to highlight this observation not necessarily as a bad thing that much of the GBA’s library was marked with warm and uplifting tones, and rather as something that fascinates me, though it does make me wonder if there are any true horror games to be found on the GBA or if they were even considered viable in the first place.

For those very reasons, I unfortunately have to mark the Silent Hill: Play Novel as a straight mismatch. The comparison becomes extremely relevant here, because the original Silent Hill is also a classic example of limitation breeding innovation. Team Silent was able to disguise the original Playstation’s limitations through both its gameplay and its presentation. Frame rate drops didn’t matter as much when the combat was already so slow and deliberate and the anticipation leading up to confrontations mattered just as much as the tension of the moments themselves. The limited draw distance became a strength for Silent Hill, with the developers abusing fog and darkness to create this “fear of the unknown” practically unparalleled to its contemporaries while also distracting players from the not so smooth character models and textures. Sure, the original might ultimately still be a linear and straightforward playthrough, but the act of exploration through a simultaneously worldly and otherworldly setting and poring through layers of fog did wonders in regards to concealing its linearity. Akira Yamaoka’s dissonant industrial soundtrack further highlighted the cold and rusty feel of wandering through an abandoned Connecticut town. All of this, unfortunately, just isn't there on the GBA, and leads me to believe that this was a poor fit for the system.

Again, this is due to the GBA's limitations, but unlike its original PSX counterpart, Konami couldn’t hide it quite as well this time. As an example, let’s again compare the soundtracks between the two different versions. Listen to the Silent Hill Theme on the Play Novel (well, the first 15 seconds anyways, as that’s all that was included), and then listen to the included theme on the original Playstation; the difference is night and day. Similarly, the visuals have taken a hit, because the pixelated stills of the Play Novel on the smaller GBA screen can’t come close to capturing the emptiness of Silent Hill on the Playstation, with its enveloping darkness and fog swallowing the town’s surroundings upon sight. I’ll give them credit for trying, but it’s just not the same; after all, Silent Hill is not just about what you can see, but rather what you can’t see, and the GBA visuals just don’t leave enough to imagination.

But it’s not just the atmosphere that’s a drastic drop in quality: I think the gameplay itself is also a mismatch. Silent Hill is a master of subtlety, disguising player choices made here and there in-between all the action, as something of a test of faith. Credit goes to chump here for pointing this out, but essentially, Silent Hill makes the decision-making towards an interactive ending feel less like a selection of correctly answering multiple choice questions, and instead feel more like embodying a certain “playstyle” by stringing together a pattern of actions; if you believe it, you can probably achieve it. Unfortunately, the former is exactly what the Play Novel is. Sure, there are some choices along the way that are more or less there for flavor text and won’t actually impact the route taken/final ending, but at the end of the day, it’s all laid out in the flowchart. Its structure ultimately works against its own illusion: while it’s certainly convenient jumping back to the flowchart to select every option to see what happens next, this breaks its veil almost immediately. You’re left with the lingering and obvious fact that you are just choosing between A or B to get the best ending possible. It’s for this reason that while Silent Hill’s original narrative was strong enough, it was not so much the story that sold it so much as the act of its storytelling itself. Deciding whether to hide or seek from a binary choice in branching storylines will never compare to the feeling of presence created from swinging around your flashlight in the dark on an abandoned street.

I admit that perhaps I’m being a little uncharitable to the Play Novel based off of its concept and execution in comparison to the original, but it does have some novelty. Cybil Bennett’s separate scenario is the main draw here: you can play through her perspective, and to Konami’s credit, while the base story remains the same, the actual events that Cybil goes through tend to be quite different than those experienced by Harry in the main scenario. Having said that, it is drastically shorter than Harry’s scenario: there are only three endings compared to the main scenario’s five, and half as many potential choices that can be made. In addition, you can’t unlock Cybil’s scenario until completing Harry’s scenario at least once, which meant that my main interest was stuck behind at least an hour of mashing through text and often repeating the same puzzles since certain choices made early on would affect the final ending and couldn’t be bypassed with the flowchart alone (though I concede that my curiosity to see all the content played a part in this).

There’s a bit more that could be said, namely that the puzzles were pretty one-note and seemed more like distractions than anything (with one particular “click on the bug” puzzle being a particular pain in the ass due to the screen crunch and the unclear cursor hitbox), and that it absolutely annoyed me how I had to mash through the first minute of introductory dialogue every time I restarted a scenario because the game wouldn’t let me open up the flowchart right away, but the short and thick of it is that the Silent Hill Play Novel constantly reminded me that I could be playing the real thing instead. It’s possible that the original text was far richer in its prose, which would mean that the stiff language was instead a result of the English fan-translation, as it vaguely reminded me of creepypasta. Additionally, perhaps the Andy Scenarios that were only temporarily available for download via phone (and have since become lost media) could have added a bit more bulk to the experience. As it stands though, I think that this is most definitely not a substitute for playing through the original on the Playstation, but rather, a passing curiosity for die-hard Silent Hill fans. At least there’s a silver lining to all of this: Silent Hill is an experience that can’t be genuinely replicated in any other form due to the magic of the original remaining deeply embedded in its distinct and understated design principles, no matter how many more will try to do so in the future.

It may be easy to write off Pokemon Snap as yet another gimmicky spinoff of Nintendo's most lucrative franchise, but looking back, it’s honestly a very refreshing take on the arcade rail-shooter. HAL Laboratory managed to transform a gameplay vessel known for flashy, action-packed titles into one of the most relaxing and heartwarming diversions in the N64 library. Just consider how the mechanics were translated: the guns became your toolkit, in the form of your camera and your apples + Pester Balls to interact with the environment and local wildlife, and the “damage” became a photography scoring system as you carefully manipulate your surroundings and wait for the perfect moment to take your shot. The game has excellent replayability due to its depth of interactions packed within the span of a few hours, and becomes a fantastic exercise of discovery and optimization: it’s quite satisfying figuring out exactly how every Pokemon can be lured and baited into favorable positions to maximize your score while unlocking a few new courses along the way. Furthermore, experimentation never feels punishing because courses are already naturally short (within 5 min per run) and you’ll later unlock the Dash Engine to accelerate your cart if there are any particular sections you want to get to immediately. It’s a fantastic way to encourage finding as many unique interactions as possible while rewarding acute player awareness; my favorite examples include stringing together multiple far-away shots of Lapras across the beach stage to finally snag an up-close profile photograph at the end, or realizing that you can "feed" Grimer with enough Pester Balls to spawn Muk. Of course, this goes without saying that nothing quite hits the spot like taking pictures of happy, dancing creatures on a chill Pokemon safari.

What does hold Pokemon Snap back a bit is the scoring system. It unfortunately feels like a crapshoot trying to snag a perfect score, since Professor Oak’s requirements regarding size seem a bit nebulous besides the obvious guideline of “make the Pokemon as large as possible within the frame with the whole body included” and pose specifications feel even more arbitrary (given that the Pokemon is facing forward of course), with anything that’s not an aggressive or flashy Pokemon stance often meeting the fate of “it’s so-so,” whatever that means. Also, needing to be exactly pin-point accurate on the reticle in order to associate a score with a particular Pokemon species should work well in theory, but this concept doesn't quite hold up in scramble situations when multiple species are present in the frame and none of them are covered by the reticle. Case in point, Professor Oak was very sure that this was meant to be a picture of Haunter. Let’s just say that being at the forefront of Pokemon research with a PhD doesn’t necessarily make him the most qualified to judge photography. The flimsy scoring mechanics aren't a huge deal for most of the game, given that unlocking courses seems to be locked behind photographing a certain number of different species as opposed to sheer score accrual, but it does hurt the post-game appeal of trying to beat the challenge scores.

Regardless, Pokemon Snap remains a somewhat overlooked and innovative twist on a classic video game genre, popularizing photography games and spawning many spiritual indie successors that have begun sprouting in recent years. While a part of me does wonder what HAL Laboratory could have done with a bigger development budget, given that there are only six main courses and only 63 out of the original 151 Pokemon were included, I have to respect how so many different hidden secrets were packed into a game that can be easily completed in a single afternoon. It never fails to put a smile on my face, playing the Pokemon flute and watching Snorlax bob its chubby face to the rhythm, or luring a horde of Charmanders from over a hill with apples and snapping shots of them jumping joyously about. I’m very much looking forward to committing to a full run of the long-awaited sequel later this year to see how the franchise decided to expand from this snug and breezy little package.

To me, Katamari Damacy is the margherita pizza of video games. It's one of the simplest yet most innately fulfilling concepts in the medium: roll up things with your ball to become big to roll up more things. While this description is accurate however, it doesn't do justice towards the game's underlying complexity. Committal tank controls combined with the seemingly strewn about yet carefully placed objects of varying sizes means that Katamari forces players to consider both the micro and macro design which the game effortlessly excels at. The player must weave in and out of clusters of increasingly large objects, building up their sphere while also mapping out the optimal paths (snagging relevant objects while factoring in how their shapes, once collected, will alter the roll) and keeping in mind how larger objects must be avoided at first and later consumed in the growing mass as the world appears to shrinks around you. For this reason, I think it's not just a simple power fantasy, and instead more closely resembles pure obstacle escalation. Katamari Damacy really drills in the sense of player progression from how the world unfolds from sense of scale (which is why it gets away with only three distinct stages) and even seemingly inverts its own concepts with side stages that force you to avoid smaller themed objects just to get your katamari to the perfect size for the ultimate outcome: the reward is made that much more gratifying with just a bit of restraint.

This all works seamlessly because Katamari is the king of player feedback. It can certainly feel frustrating at first, getting tossed around like fireworks by these moving objects that dwarf you, but the game knows exactly how to communicate your inherent progress. As your ball exponentially swells, these moving objects go from sending you flying, to lacking any significant impact upon contact, to eventually spotting the player and running away from the growing catastrophe. There's nothing more viscerally satisfying than coming back to mobile obstacles that were pushing you around and flattening them, hearing their cry as they too become stuck in the jumbled mess of rolling flotsam while the King of the Cosmos quips in the background. Simply put, the concept never outstays its welcome.

Going back to the opening metaphor, it requires much finesse to make all these different concepts sing together with little friction in a video game, this fusion of audio-visual presentation and player input. That said, to successfully disguise its intricate design and depth beneath its far-reaching artistic vision and simple yet realized gameplay mechanics takes a master's touch. Katamari Damacy does not try to explain why it works or how it succeeds, because it simply is, and it just does. Perhaps I've moved onto greater and grander things since that have built off of this, but I have to admit that sometimes, you just can't beat the basics in life. It's always worth going back for a slice or two every now and then, just to remind yourself that this is why video games exist in the first place: because underneath all this talk of focus and cohesion, video games are just goddamn fun.

Also, it's fantastic hangover food for you and your buddies after a long night, when they come calling you for content and suddenly it's 3 AM in a packed Discord call where everyone is wailing "YOU'REEEEE LONNEEELLLY ROLLING STARRRR" as this growing, screaming ball of flailing limbs bounces helplessly about for yet another awry creation. Let the good times roll.

I must admit that despite its foibles, I am fascinated by Cubivore. I don’t really know what brought this on, considering that it’s a mostly forgotten about Gamecube exclusive (though interestingly, co-developed by Saru Brunei and Intelligent Systems, the latter responsible for Advance Wars and Paper Mario) that I only heard of when a guy I knew submitted a soundtrack sample from the game for a contest. It really stood out to me though, from the really quaint blocky environments and low-poly textures alongside its rather melancholic tunes and soothing ambience, to its core gameplay concept of devouring other panel monsters to evolve your protagonist and become the King of All Cubivores to restore Wilderness to the world. After finally finishing it, I’m honestly pretty impressed. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with a lot of the others here that the combat is extremely grueling, but I think that’s exactly what makes this game shine. It’s very barebones: the A button lets you both jump out of the way and pounce at enemies (depending on whether or not you’ve locked on to enemies by holding the left trigger, and letting this lock charge fully does more damage), and the B button lets you block but stops you in your tracks. Then, once you chip away all of the enemy’s health, you have to swing them around and tear off their limbs to eliminate them by furiously rotating the analog stick (which can take several tries because the timing is very tight). Combine this with the laborious task of dodging/fighting multiple enemies at once while carefully targeting the correct foes to snag the correct color upgrades from devouring foes, all while your enemies are trying to do the same to you, and you’ve got some absolutely brutal combat. It makes for these very tense moments, constantly rotating the camera due to the limited FOV and trying to read your opponent or get the jump on them while keeping an eye on your health, all so you also don’t get knocked down and devoured, and it absolutely sells its subtitle of “Survival of the Fittest.” At the same time, this further accentuates the game's contrast from any downtime spent wandering about these often peaceful and quiescent levels, really making you savor and appreciate your lingering moments of safety until you must once again, throw yourself into the breach.

That said, Cubivore does suffer from one fundamental flaw: it doesn’t do quite enough to prod the player into constantly experimenting and unlocking as many mutations as possible. You see, Cubivore’s final stage and bosses require the player to unlock at least 100 different mutations to proceed onwards after completing the third stage… but to my knowledge, it never fully tells the player that this is required, and is rather vaguely hinted at instead. The issue here is that Cubivore’s circumstances never really necessitate such a high number of mutations outside of gate-locking the final stage: there are a ton of different mechanics and traits that would take a ton of time to list, so I will simply say instead that it’s quite straightforward for players to figure out exactly what specific mutations and color-types mesh best with them, and focus on unlocking and using those forms with classic bread-and-butter combat skills to clear the levels. The alternative is gobbling up every single enemy to grab as many different color combinations as possible, but this could result in losing a valuable mutation on hand if you don’t already have it saved as an EZ-mutation (which must be unlocked from mating or from a specific number of the unlocked mutation, namely during mutations number 20, 50, 80, and 100). Personally, I was met with the pretty abrupt lock after only snagging 60 mutations myself during my first run, and was then sent back to the title screen, where I could select each of the first three stages (Piggy, Grizzly, and Chicky), and essentially had to replay them until I hit 100 mutations, which was definitely not as interesting and sapped some of my goodwill. If you don’t want to be forced to replay these stages, then you have to clear and fight enemies in a very specific manner because levels are quite linear: you can’t go back to previous segments of each stage once you move onto the next segment, enemies will never respawn until you go back to the title screen, and there are no quick checkpoints in-between the individual segments of each stage (so you won’t be able to “devolve” your character to a form with less limbs once you’re inevitably forced to mate to take down larger enemies that require nothing less than a difference of “one limb”), meaning that you can only restart stages at the very beginning. As such, this either requires previous knowledge of all the enemy traits present within a stage + meticulous planning to hit as many forms as possible, or closely following a walkthrough. The structure is definitely a bit of an impediment as a result, and I think this could have been greatly alleviated with more quality-of-life features that wouldn’t force me to constantly restart to respawn enemies for additional traits, as well as firmer messaging that would let players know outright to shoot for 100 mutations.

Regardless, I’m glad I finally got the chance to clear Cubivore. There was a really visceral satisfaction to be found from getting to the final stage and destroying all the final bosses with my now overpowered character, all from grinding out more powerful mutations and thoroughly upgrading all my stats via all the different training areas and collecting powerups along the way. Despite how unfortunately grindy it became from needing to replay levels, I do have a soft spot for these wacky yet interesting and lovable titles that were made during this era. It’s absolutely emblematic of a time when first- and third-party developers alike were readily willing to run with crazy concepts and push them to their limits. While I can’t quite say it’s worth the 400+ dollars asked for online, it’s definitely a nice little diversion that’ll get a few kicks out of you if you’re looking for something unpolished but definitely memorable.

Spotting an arcade cabinet of Time Crisis 5 was like spotting a unicorn in the wild for me, and as such, I immediately felt compelled to run through the whole thing. I imagine that the devs must have been just as excited as I was to try out their new toys (in the form of the Unreal Engine), because that would be the easiest way to explain the drop in depth from previous installments. The dual pedal system sounds great in theory (switch perspectives on the fly to target covered enemies from their weak points while dodging more threatening attacks), but it makes the game somewhat of a breeze, because you can switch pretty quickly with no limits and enemies take a few seconds to refocus their attacks towards you, not to mention that you can dodge every bullet your way by doing so. You're heavily conditioned to do so anyways, because the animation for ducking back under cover has been slowed in comparison to how quickly red-highlighted bullets can be spotted and then damage you, so it's much harder to dodge without outright switching with pedals. Besides that, there's a lot less incentive to mess around with your other weapons, because there aren't quite as many yellow grunts to attack to farm extra ammo: not that you'd really need to anyways, since the unlimited handgun deals enough quick damage to dispatch practically everything with ease. The game also feels a bit more gimmicky this time around due to all the other sections that detract from Time Crisis's signature cover shootouts. There are a few quick time events that require you to press the correct pedal to avoid damage, a single sniper section that has you headshotting foes to avoid detection (unlikely anyways since they die to two body shots and you'll usually fire fast enough), and some "break the targets" quick time events that become simple enough since you're provided with unlimited ammo during these moments.

I do have to admit that at the end of the day though, it's still Time Crisis despite the obvious lack of focus, and it's still got many of the hallmarks that got me so interested in the first place. The light gun aiming feels pretty responsive and satisfying due to the vibrations and fantastic visual/audio feedback, there are some pretty intense railgun sections that actually prompted me to really keep an eye on both perspectives with the pedals, and the story still makes absolutely no sense at all with some of the laziest voice-acting imaginable. I can't help but grin though, as the campyness of the franchise, with all its exaggerated boss fights and gratuitous explosions, has always been a big draw in its memorability. As it stands, it's definitely the weakest of the Time Crisis games I've dabbled with, but I'm glad to have finally found and conquered another installment. The search shall continue until I've beat them all...

There are some strange rare design choices that cause minor moments of frustration, like one song constantly switching on and off between off-beat hits and another song that can overwhelm you with a flurry of notes right after an in-song cutscene, but in general, this game absolutely rules. It does a great job translating the song's lyrics and major beats into a firmly telegraphed form with the overlapping circles + lines that have to be traced as held notes, and they're all placed carefully in order to keep the chart and the player in-tune with the beat, perfect for the compact DS touchscreen. Admittingly it's not ideal relying on sheer score accrual over individual stage rankings to unlock the bonus stages, but it at least provides another incentive to master more difficult stages and the hardest settings when the thresholds are set that high. Either way, the game's charm is absolutely infectious and it never gets old watching three guys in suits and sunglasses dance away everyone's problems, no matter how minor they may be. Without a doubt, I can see myself coming back to push through the highest difficulty after clearing this on normal, so it's an easy recommendation despite some low points. I saw this advertised all over the place as a kid and can't believe it took me this long to finally try it out: hands down one of the best titles on the DS, and it's a real shame we don't see anything from iNiS anymore.