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.

Pretty run-of-the-mill stuff other than the gimmick of being able to smash enemies into the background and break it, which does not get old.

Not really a great shmup but the biggest love letter to super robot shows there ever was. This is a 2D horizontal shmup that comes on four discs because of the amount of video and music shoved in to make this as much a super robot anime as is possible. Nice!

Scott Pilgrimcore. Nope.

Another free PS+ game. Serviceable beatemup, it's way longer than it needs to be but the combat is decent and I had replayed Sifu a few days before so I was in the mood for more kung fu.

Fun as a tribute to the NES but it couldn't really hold my attention.

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.

Replay. Fucking hell, man. Just one of the most tedious games ever made.

I think the C64 might not be the best system for this genre.

Intensely ugly game.

A game you need a pencil and paper for. Or a pen. Just something that writes, really.

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.

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!

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?

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

Played the Mega Drive version as a kid so I went for the arcade version here. Similarly clunky and not really all that fun, but all the monster transformation stuff is still cool and the voice clips are always funny.

Bad. It's not worth it.

The bad kind of FMV game and also barely functional. The cheek of them to act like this is some unearthed classic of the genre.

The huge sprites and zooming and the cut-ins are all cool for the time but I don't remember it being very hot to play. Arabian Magic kind of wiped most of my memories of this away.

Very cool game! Combat isn't really anything all that special but all the stages are so fun and adventurous and, well, magical. Made me want to watch a Sinbad movie, a feeling I have never had before in my life.

Really cool just how many combinations of your team are possible. This kicked my ass and then I read the review on here about difficulty scaling with credits. Absolutely fiendish.

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.

Emphasis on the melee attack is cool, but otherwise I wasn't that into it.

This is probably one of Konami's better licensed efforts if you're a fan of the comics, but I don't really give a shit about Asterix, sorry.

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

First time playing the series. The gameplay is cool! There's some niggles - I don't think the crafting system stuff really adds anything - but the core of it is solid. Don't care at all about all the light novel-tier story guff, though, and the designs of female characters are suspect to say the least.

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

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.

Replay. Bad Dudes is not a good-ass game.

Replay. Decided to just go through a bunch of the Arkham games after Origins. Still solid! Had never played the DLC so I gave that a bash, it is definitely less good. Just remembered the reason I played these was because I was rewatching all of Batman TAS at the time. Still a great show, I recommend doing the same.

Replay. Thought this was pretty weak when it came out, opinion remains unchanged, but the Batgirl DLC was good.

Replay. Not really sure why I went back to this. I think it was because I had been saying "Deathstroke the Terminator" out loud a lot and thinking it was really funny.

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

Obviously very funny to look at but it plays like ass.

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.

Cool game. Iceman's post-mission dialogue is incredible.

Similar to Battle Garegga, so it's decent enough but not one of my favourites. The number of ships available is pretty good!

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.

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

Wanted to like this, but I just found it kind of obnoxious, and I don't think it's a particularly good beatemup. Disappointing.

Replay. Designed by Cenobites. You know how everyone talks about the Turbo Tunnel? Real testament to just how bad the Turbo Tunnel is that you never hear anyone talk about the level immediately after it which is even worse.

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

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

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.

This is how you do an FMV game! I wanna see those digitised folks walking around, picking up stuff and looking at it - maybe even reacting to it!
Really cool, all the hokey charm of FMV combined with a pretty cool story that involves some real-world history, which I like. Education!

Completely terrible. There ought to be a law against shit like 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.

Has that high-quality Irem look but I remember it feeling really slow.

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.

Wanted to replay the Blade Runner game after watching some Trancers and gave this a go. Decided it just looked a bit too weird at higher res/framerate and dropped it to go back to the original.

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

Meanwhile, a Castlevania 3 clone. Also fine. Good music!

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.

Replay. Never finished it originally so I restarted and went through it. It's fine since it really is just trying as hard as it can to be a SotN clone, but as is the case with every SotN clone, it's not as good as SotN.

I don't think I really got this one. Might need to replay.

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).

This, D.D. Crew and DJ Boy form an unholy triumvirate of terror.

Rival Turf 2 - still bad.

Did not feel good at all to control, so I dropped it pretty early on.

Think this is the one that's really zoomed out and a lot the environment is destructible? Cool concept but it didn't feel very good to play.

Another free on PS+ trap. Whilst I was playing this a friend sent me a message asking if I was OK and they were right to do so.

Replay. Loved Bucky O'Hare as a kid, played the arcade machine and had no idea what I was doing and kept walking into stage hazards. Didn't blow me away playing today but it's okay by Konami standards.

It's really fun that a game devoted to a mainstay Italian cinema duo exists, and it looks really good, but the gameplay could never be accused of being deep. Whole bunch of beatemups like this.

Replay. SNK tries a Final Fight rip but with added ripoff music. Okay, but again feels like they can't keep up with the curve.

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.

Saw a free shmup on PS+, got a bit into it and then got the pervert shit dropped on me when I got hit. That was a surprise! Found out afterwards you can turn that stuff off, so that's a mercy.

Weird that this exists but I think Capcom should do more daft things like it. I cannot forgive how they made Vega look in this, though.

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!

Replay. One of Capcom's many remakes of Final Fight But in [Setting]. This time it's the grim future of...uh...4 years from now. It's fine, mostly gets points for being a little weird. Mack the Knife rules.

Replay. Didn't like it on release, didn't like it now.

Replay. Now this is a Castlevania. Great game and the story - WW1 as an impetus for Draculaic resurrection - is a hoot.

Played this to test out an Apple TV I had to get for work. Thoroughly depressing.

A Castlevania that features almost no platforming. Also come on, you don't even fight Dracula!

It's cool that an SD Go Nagai World game exists but that's all I can really say.

Disappointing. I like the concept but the gameplay is just clunky and dull, and the story didn't really end up anywhere I liked either. I guess I'm glad hokey FMV guff is still getting made though.

Game was fine, but the thing that stuck with me the most was the music.

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.

Fun point-and-click that has a bunch of sections where you'll have to do some googling about real-world locations and history. I like when games do that kind of thing!

Didn't get anywhere near finishing it, but it did seem really cool. I need to play it more.

Okay NES platformer, only really playing it for the license.

Replay. I've been dipping in and out all year, only at this point that I decided to actually log it. This game is always going to hold a very special place in my heart, even if I've done pretty much all I want to do in it.

Jesus, these avalanche sections! Whose idea was this?

Another Guardian Heroes-alike. I don't think I'm into these, sorry!

Weird not-very-good game that feels like it's some in-joke I'm not getting between steamers or something.

Now this is how you do an arena brawler, Renegade! Silly and fun. Bouncing someone's head off the concrete as an OTG attack is extremely satisfying. "The Slash Skate Screamers" is an incredible name for a gang.

Replay. Man, it really does suck that hitting objects takes health, doesn't it? A very punishing game, but the presentation is just so cool. I was obsessed with it a kid, right up until I got the bad ending in it, at which point I was too disquieted to play it again.

Another NES platformer that wasn't very good. Think I was playing these because they had translations.

Very dope. I was halfway through it before I got "Hard Corps". I played as the wolf guy obviously, he has shades.

Another clunky SNES brawler. I remember being completely incensed that this has an obvious Metal Heroes ripoff name but does not share anything of the supreme Metal Heroes aesthetic.

Genuinely awful. Konami were really not good at this early on.

Played under the name Vendetta. Konami's first real pretty good effort. OTGing people is good and punching people's fingers so they lose grip and fall off the stage: great.

A weird one. A dungeon crawl-brawler, it seemed pretty interesting but I feel like I must have missed something with the combat. Surely can't be as basic as it seemed to me?

By this point I'd played a lot of shmups and I think this is the first one where I really wondered how anyone could 1CC it. Wild!

A very basic 3D beatemup, but you can smash enemies into tons of stuff or smash enemies with tons of stuff, so that's good. I like the main guy's brown leather jacket/red gloves combo!

Looks great, plays bad. Tale as old as time.

Not ringing many bells. I think it was another digitised one?

Obviously took a ton of work to get it looking and sounding like it does, but I don't think the gameplay is very exciting. It never feels like I'm doing anything to bosses, either - even with damage modifiers it seemed like they would enter their next phase at a predetermined point. Gimme a healthbar at least!

It's no Skull & Crossbones.

Never let something like a license stop you from making the Gundam game you want. This is pretty cool but it's also a shooter where you're bumped back to a checkpoint whenever you die, which is infuriating when you're as bad as me.

Controls can be quite awkward a lot of the time and there's some real bullshit sections, but it's a good take on a mech game still.