Tiny indie platformer that had been sitting in my Steam library for ages and could be finished in no time, so I threw it on. One of those you play once and never again, but neat idea.

Replay. Awesome game but it is so incredibly punishing. Whoever designed the bird enemy should face charges.

Kamen Rider Garren! Whoah! Oh this is a visual novel, not an FMV game. Well, maybe there'll be a lot of gameplay to make up for i- oh. Never mind.

Okay this one is worse.

Oh jeez, I'm sorry, no, Sigma 2 is fine. I couldn't finish this. No idea what they were thinking.
Mizuki McCloud is a really funny name though.

This is also awesome.

Replay. Actually feels kind of satisfying to play but the enemies and environments are so bland.

Had to give up on this one because I was playing on emulator and the button sensitivity stuff just didn't work. From what I played it felt like this game could probably be finished in about 15 minutes if you skipped every cutscene (which I will absolutely be doing if I ever play a proper copy).

Hilariously edgy and kind of janky but it has that same fun quality of a Hotline Miami where positioning, prioritisation and full use of all your tools pays off big. Also very satisfying in its scrambliness when you don't do any of those and are just using everything around you on the fly.

Replay. Golf It night with the boys. Get a solid custom map and it's a great laugh.

Also very hard! Such a cool game though.

Extremely dope. I was only able to finish it with save states, but I want to try without because it really is just that cool. Play it!

Not interested at all in Overwatch and its ilk but I gave this a go because it's Gundam. Looking down ironsights? In a Gundam game? You're having a laugh mate. Also if someone picks the suit I want I can't pick it? Seriously? Is this what these games are like? I thought we solved this shit in Champion Edition. Absurd.

Better than Final Fight 2 for sure, but still pretty lackluster. There isn't even boss music! What the hell!

I don't think it's as great as the first game, but it's still very good! Though it's driving me mental that the first uses "and" but this uses "&" on here.

Replay. Perfect game.

Got a couple of levels in before deciding I couldn't be holed at the minute. I'll get back to it at some point.

Doesn't really have any of the energy of the first game, sadly. Just kind of a slog. And it introduces Maki, who I think is chiefly liked by anime boys that you would not want to talk to. Not the fault of the game but it's hard to look past.

I was having fun with this, but my save messed up and I haven't gone back to it yet.

Replay. The final evolution of Capcom's Final Fight remakes. What a cool game! Really sucks that it's likely lost to the wilderness forever.

Free on PS+. I don't follow the UFC (a friend of mine refers to it as a putrid cretin spectacle and I may be forced to agree), and maybe that's just as well cause if I did I'd have ended up wasting my money on this. Series peaked with Undisputed 3, all downhill from there.

Tried this after enjoying the Gunvolt stuff but I wasn't into how it controlled at all.

What a great game! Wish I'd played this at the time as it probably would have blown me away. Hey, listen to this!

Not great. I'm not sure why they bothered to make a musou of Berserk in the first place given how few characters fit the style.

Replay. Had been reading The Oral History of Street Fighter II and they talk a fair bit about Darkstalkers in it, so I gave this a quick run. Still not really into how it all shakes together but it's not a bad game. I would play Bishamon.

Cool game, very hard. This and the first one make me laugh a lot because you've got all these folk who have been facecapped so you can go oh wow that's Naoto Takenaka! And then you've got William who has proper Koei Face.

Peak of the series here, I think. Copen is a great addition and is super fun to play.

Thought 2 was a bit of an easier ride and then 3 decided they'd given me enough leeway. I was happy to finally go through all of these but they were an ordeal and a half.

Only played the first mission and then put it to the side because I felt like it would deserve some proper time dedicated to it. One for next year.

It's Panzer Dragoon, it's fine, but it's always a little weird to me to play these remakes with modern graphics but unchanged gameplay. Always just feels slightly off.

Replay. Absolutely the best Battletoads game, probably better than several Double Dragon games, still not really that great.

Another unfinished. A PS4 game that is clearly in reality a PS3 game. A theme song can only carry a game so far. Combat just doesn't have the oomph you want from a mech game and I'll be honest, I don't know how people can play these kinds of dating sim-adjacent things without feeling horribly embarrassed at every moment.

Impressive effort for a NES game but playing it in amongst so many technically superior games did it no favours for me. Maybe one day.

The Golden Axers Once Again. It's still much the same, I still enjoy it, and I think the stage on the back of the giant eagle is badass. Good music here.

Replay. Fun idea, good enough to play about with for 20 minutes. Mega Man charm counts for a lot!

Replay. King shit. Double Dragon II is a good-ass game.

Not very good, is it? There's a kind of charm to it though. I think I will go back and finish this at some point.

Oh, so the bug princess does nothing but kill bugs? Typical royals. These Cave shmups with tiny hurtboxes are very fun!

Hyper-edgy game. Combat is pretty satisfying but not deep enough to justify the length and large number of samey enemies.

I guess this is okay, but I'd rather play SNES Turtles in Time if I've got to play Turtles in Time.

Replay. I don't know who it was that convinced the world that the licensed Konami beatemups are really good but they were doing the devil's work. I guess I can see how it would be fun if you had four players on the go and it does look and sound great, but the gameplay absolutely reeks. No impact to a single thing you do.

The two-lane gimmick mostly helps with making the game quicker because you can avoid stuff. I think it being a not-terrible Power Rangers game did a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

Replay. Linn Kurosawa is so cool, man. What a good game.

Replay. I'm still amazed a game like this got made and released on home console at the time!

Oh, this is just Beatmania. Well cool, I like Beatmania! Also I'm terrible at Beatmania!

A little overlong from what I remember, but otherwise pretty much on par with King of Dragons.

Relentless game. Cruel!

Genuinely pretty cool, slamming people into the background rules. I didn't really feel like finishing it at the time but want to go back to it. Boss fights are a bit crap though.

I'd played the first episode of this before but decided to go through the whole thing from the start before I play Return. Promptly put it to the side after getting distracted by other stuff.

Replay. This isn't a good release, but the core gameplay of VF5FS is great, so if you have no other access to FS you should get this. Can't say enough good things about Veef.

Replay. Old reliable. I love how the big blue laser looks.

Obviously a very cool game but I didn't know at all how to play it. Need to read the constructions (used to call instructions this as a kid haha) and go through it again.

Replay. Isn't it kind of wild that this exists? It's hilarious how massive the Kingpin is in the final boss fight.

Level design is more straightforward (blander) than the Gunvolt games but it's still really fun because Copen. Designs of the girls are still prison sentence bait.

Originally played the SNES version, so here I went for the arcade release, which like the '89 game is trash. Legendary soundtrack but that's it.

Is there any earlier example of Just Defend in a game? Capcom beating SNK to the punch by 8 years. It's fine enough I guess, but later efforts are much better.

Replay. Thought this game was cool as hell as a kid, and hey, I still like it! The first-person sections are still very fun. Did this have Menacer support?

Not amazing but a pretty charming little game. Parrying blaster bolts back will always be fun.

A good take on the formula laid down by the D&D games. Just went on a bit too long for me at the time, but I want to get back to it.

Replay. Snake Pit, Clinger Winger and Rat Race are all worse in this one than they are in the original game. Rare is made up of the most extreme sadists on Earth.

Replay. Same story as VSav. Weird game. Love Omega Red's theme.

At least, another actually good Double Dragon game! It can be frustrating at points (staring directly at the final boss) but I think the dodge stuff is really fun. Not huge into the 80s throwback stuff, it's always under about ten separate layers of irony, but it does have the single best rendition of the Double Dragon theme.

Another shmup I am never, ever going to 1CC.

Replay. I think this game is cool although it's often an absolute chore to play. If it was half as long it'd be great.

Looks and sounds great and I love Pulseman's look and concept but it's not much cope otherwise.

It's fine!

Replay. It's some more Tower of Doom. It's good!

Replay. Nowhere near as bad as TMNT or The Simpsons - when you punch something it actually feels like you punched it - but it still features Konami doing their credit-stealing best to take your money. Colossus roar rules though.

Genuinely astounding effort for one guy. Awesome combo system, this was walking the Streets of Rage 4 walk before that game existed. Only problems I have with it are the lighting is a bit much at times and the main girl leans way too hard into anime fanservice for my taste. Genuinely really good game.

Very easy Mega Man clone. I'd seen people say that Beck is hard mode, and I guess he is in relative terms, because I replayed this later in the year as Gunvolt and I could probably have done it with my eyes closed.

The first stop on my journey of playing every game listed in the beatemup history book Go Straight. Not great.

Replay. Loved this game as a kid and still enjoyed it here. It's very basic and enemy variety is nonexistent but it just feels good to hit stuff and it's colourful! Great music too. OK, GO!

Another good DoDonPachi. No really, I love that big laser!

This is in the same vein as something like The Dishwasher for me - i.e., games that I assume you're probably into if you like Jhonen Vasquez.

Was free on PS+ so I grabbed it. Looks great but plays exactly like the Master System version, i.e. horribly. Can see no point in it.

Replay. Still really impressive even now! I like how much of it feels like an actual investigation rather than you solving a series of video game puzzles. I did not get a good ending.

Still hard, still cool. Great music in this.

About as good as GT: Final Bout, i.e. not very.

Not much here. Platformer with some rules quirks that you can finish in one quick sitting. Again, one you play once and never go back to, but that's fine.

Replay. I'd started this aaaages ago and gave it another bash this year. It's very impressive, but there really is only so much you can do with Skyrim. It's a great effort but it's just not built on a good base.

Really tough in parts, but still a really cool game. Honorary Amemiyacore.

Replay. More Splatterhouse. I think this is my preferred one of the trilogy.

It's very funny that From made this. Hyperjank, I guess I'll finish it for lols at some point.

Kinda-sorta wearing a management game skin, but really this is a choose your own adventure book. I got the best ending though, so hooray!

A better beatemup than the original game is, but still not particularly great.

It's definitely cool, but these tiny bullets are killing me, man. My eyesight is bad.

Probably would have liked it a lot if I played it at the time of release, but this ended up being a big-time disappointment. Just felt sluggish and killing things took forever. Obviously looks awesome, though.

Replay. Hell yeah man. A super ambitious game that combines Cool Adventures with some absolutely primo Capcom art work. I went through it solo but I bet this'd be a total blast on Fightcade. Only complaint is that the controls can be a little fiddly.

Leans more towards Dragon Quest than it does towards musou for my liking. Takes forever as well.

Not quite as strong a game as some of Capcom's other heavy hitters on this list, but man, I wish they still made games that looked like this.

Not sure what's going on here. Gunvolt is a furry character now? And you don't actually play as him outside of a super mode? And Copen is gone? Hmm. Think I'll go back to 2.

Scott Pilgrim, but now composed exclusively of anime pervert characters. I wish for a world where its kind cannot exist.

Really disappointed with this one. It looks good, I love the parry system and the animations that come out of it, it's really satisfying to catch a strike and then kick the shit out of the guy, but it takes 100 years to kill anything at all. A slog in the purest sense. Really sad.

Replay, technically. I've started this a bunch of times, shelved it, forgotten all of it and restarted. Gonna try and not do it this time!

Just rewatch the movie, which is very good, instead of playing this game, which is very bad.

Super cool, Metal Squad goes extremely hard.

Oh jeez, I played this last week and it's completely left my head already.

Had this game in progress for literal years, finally made the effort to finish it this year. It's fine for a short choose your own adventure type thing, don't really have all that much to say about it.

A little too samey throughout but it's cool that they tried it. They managed to make the mechs feel really big and heavy, and of course Blodia is just a cool design. Glad they reused it.

Replay. This game is very, very boring, and at no point do you ever actually feel like Superman in it. Why am I not punching all these little Igors and weird goatmen into space? Why am I having to combo them?