Twennytoo Five Hundo
In future year AD2022 I apparently logged 500 video games (mostly just played, not finished - can you even imagine). Am I proud of it? Of course not, brother, pride is a sin. Here they are in their entirety in order of play:
500 Games
Replay. The daddy. It definitely shows its age these days but it's still just so cool. Easy to see just how influential it was. What a game!
It's fine!
Finally decided to take the plunge and play this. It's guff. Not the absolute worst game ever made, but there's just no reason to ever play this instead of a Mega Man game. Gave up at the Call stealth section, who has the time.
Looks and sounds great and I love Pulseman's look and concept but it's not much cope otherwise.
Another PS+ game. I guess I don't mind Minecraft, but I haven't put much time into this because it keeps trying to get me to do story stuff that I don't care about.
Replay. There can be no justice in the world as long as this is stuck on the Wii of all things. No idea why it was exclusive in the first place.
Okay this one is worse.
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.
I have no idea what the original cabinet was like for this, but this is a bit of a chore to play on a regular controller. I like the general weirdness of it though, and the invincible Robojacko. However it is unbelievable that it has tons of licensed Jackson music and the zombie level does not have Thriller. What the fuck!
Another shmup I am never, ever going to 1CC.
Replay. Same as VSav and COTA. Maybe the most 90s game of all time.
Played the Japanese version. It's very good! They've refined the SoR formula to a fine art. And yet the best was still yet to come...man...
I was having fun with this, but my save messed up and I haven't gone back to it yet.
This is also awesome.
Not quite as punishing as Revenge, but also more simplistic in level design. That's my only complaint, though - this game rules otherwise. You can tell they're really pushing the Mega Drive as far as it'll go. Looks awesome, sounds awesome, bunch of new movement options, good game.
Better than Final Fight 2 for sure, but still pretty lackluster. There isn't even boss music! What the hell!
Replay. Have never liked this game - I guess you can say the RPG elements were worth trying at the time, but I think the implementation here just goes against what's actually fun about the genre. And obviously it directly led to the Scott Pilgrim game, which is even worse.
Cool little idea. I like games with boats.
Now we're getting it. Still very playable and has one of the best title themes of all time.
Fantastic animation ruined by physics and controls unchanged from the 80s. I've no idea why folk bother doing stuff like this.
Replay. Old reliable. I love how the big blue laser looks.
Only just getting round to playing this now with the full release. It's Warband but more, which is fine!
Also very hard! Such a cool game though.
Fun throwback shooter - I'd never heard of it but a friend said hey, you might like this and they were right. Nice!
It's definitely cool, but these tiny bullets are killing me, man. My eyesight is bad.
Replay. Absolutely the best Battletoads game, probably better than several Double Dragon games, still not really that great.
Replay. Linn Kurosawa is so cool, man. What a good game.
Absolutely not the first game I played this year but the earliest one logged for 2022. Haven't finished it yet; it seems nice enough but just takes a bit longer than I would like.
Notabe for laying a lot of the groundwork for the genre and as an early Technos effort, but this just isn't particularly fun.
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.
VERY COOL. This is one that I'm absolutely going to keep coming back to. Just relentless, I love how the proximity gimmick means that against bosses it feels like you're mashing up against each other and trying to force each other down. Great.
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. I'm still amazed a game like this got made and released on home console at the time!
Replay. Fun idea, good enough to play about with for 20 minutes. Mega Man charm counts for a lot!
Wanted to like this, but I just found it kind of obnoxious, and I don't think it's a particularly good beatemup. Disappointing.
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.
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.
Replay. Actually feels kind of satisfying to play but the enemies and environments are so bland.
A triumph. It was super hard and reading up on how the difficulty works made me do a big laugh with zero humour in it, but that's completely secondary to the music and the visuals here for me. A game I really, really wish I had played at the time because I would never have seen or heard anything like it. Maybe I'd be a completely different person now. That's the power I think Darius Gaiden might hold!
Better than Guardian Heroes, although I didn't finish it at the time. I remember thinking the combo system was actually pretty good. Will 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. 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.
Peak of the series here, I think. Copen is a great addition and is super fun to play.
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.
Replay. Isn't it kind of wild that this exists? It's hilarious how massive the Kingpin is in the final boss fight.
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. The final evolution of Capcom's Final Fight remakes. What a cool game! Really sucks that it's likely lost to the wilderness forever.
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.
Leans more towards Dragon Quest than it does towards musou for my liking. Takes forever as well.
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!
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.
Pretty much the same deal as RayCrisis for me. Decent, but if I was going to go back to a polygonal shmup it'd be Radiant Silvergun over any of these.
Tried this after enjoying the Gunvolt stuff but I wasn't into how it controlled at all.
Golden Axe II - it's like Golden Axe. I like Golden Axe. I like Golden Axe II!
Just a fun arcade game. Some parts of this are absolute nails.
You walk around in eight directions and you shoot stuff. Sometimes that's all you need!
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.
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.
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.
Super cool, Metal Squad goes extremely hard.
Replay. More Splatterhouse. I think this is my preferred one of the trilogy.
Still hard, still cool. Great music in this.
Played the Japanese release, where it's a game adaptation of the anime Area 88 (high melodrama, watch it). Why is this game so hard!
Replay. Golf It night with the boys. Get a solid custom map and it's a great laugh.
Another Guardian Heroes-alike. I don't think I'm into these, sorry!
A lot of bright, creative designs but the gameplay is very basic. Can't hate though, fun name to say.
A better beatemup than the original game is, but still not particularly great.
Didn't get anywhere near finishing it, but it did seem really cool. I need to play it more.
Super creative designs and a very fun core concept (what if Power Rangers were ninjas who did baseball), but I don't think the gameplay quite matches up to the heights of the presentation. This is one game where I actually would want to see a remake that punched things up a bit.
Same as Gunbird.
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.
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.
The first stop on my journey of playing every game listed in the beatemup history book Go Straight. Not great.
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!
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?
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.
Emphasis on the melee attack is cool, but otherwise I wasn't that into it.
Replay. King shit. Double Dragon II is a good-ass game.
Knocked me for six. What a cool game! Boss health is excessive but that's my only issue. This one really got me itching to go on a run of shmups.
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.
This is how you use a license, because it is 10x funnier to try and pass this off as a John McClane adventure. Mental game. There's a review on here that calls it the father of the Yakuza series and they're completely right.
I played the Japanese version, Gun-Dec. Ninja Gaiden-ish for the most part, there's also some driving stages that are essentially on-road shmup sections. Had never heard of it before this year, it's cool!
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.
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.
Splatterhouse but with a time limit mechanic. It's fine!
Presentation carries what is otherwise a pretty annoying game, honestly.
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.
Hyper-edgy game. Combat is pretty satisfying but not deep enough to justify the length and large number of samey enemies.
Replay. It's some more Tower of Doom. It's good!
Pretty decent game! An oddity in that it's very clearly trying to ape the SNK/KOF look - not really something I associate with the genre. It's pretty basic, but short and sweet, worth playing if you can grab it cheap. You may also notice that this is the fourth game of this genre on the list so far that has Genzoman cover art. There can be too much of a good thing.
This game can fuck right off. Honestly.
Pretty good from what I remember!
Just rewatch the movie, which is very good, instead of playing this game, which is very bad.
Even worse than regular River City Ransom, because it introduces a bunch of characters who would be cool in any other game but are stuck in this one.
Replay. I finished this as a kid and remember thinking it was cool. Adult me is less enamored with it.
Another great OST. Game is extremely hard, though.
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.
I feel that I have nothing but hate in my heart for Kunio-kun and his dumb little buddies.
It was good, but it's possible that Gaiden has ruined me for the rest of this series.
I don't think I really got this one. Might need to replay.
4 Comments
Damn this is impressive
Did you complete Ring Fit?!
@Vee this took me days lol
@Dalaamclouds that's not the word I'd use but thank you!
@letshugbro good lord no. new years resolution though!
@Dalaamclouds that's not the word I'd use but thank you!
@letshugbro good lord no. new years resolution though!
Vee
1 year ago
Bayou Billy is one of the most unfun NES games I ever played, goddamn what a slog-filled and mean-spirited game.