I think the most bewildered I've ever been about an average rating on this site is Mega Man 8 being .2 below Mega Man 7.

That might not seem like much but consider how vast the disparity is between these two games. One is this gorgeous, wonderful attempt at revitalizing classic Mega Man for a new generation without compromising on the key elements that made the series so beloved in the first place. The other is Mega Man 7, a game thrown together in three months that (while miraculously stable) was rendered dull and downright messy for it. At no point playing Mega Man 7 did I think Capcom was doing anything notable or worthwhile with the formula to justify it being an SNES game, not that rushing it to market would afford the team enough space to innovate anyway. Mega Man 8 has a soccer ball. You couldn't do that on old consoles!

Alright, I'm being somewhat facetious, but I'm not kidding when I say Mega Man 7 and Mega Man 8 represent the classic series at its wort and best, respectively. Not that I always felt that way. When I first played this game on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection way back in 2004, I hated it. I was filtered out by "jump jump, slide slide" and am adult enough now to admit it, but I was also one of those people who was very dismissive over the game due to its cutscenes. I was 16 and stuck in a sad state of mind where all the media I enjoyed - including Mega Man - had to be treated with enough self-seriousness as to not embarrass me by proxy. It's taken me almost 20 years, but I now find stuff like "doctah whywee" to be very silly and fun and part of the appeal of Mega Man 8, and to correct that with a more competent dub would be akin to stealing Mega Man's soul.

Even if you still hold some animosity towards the goofy cutscenes or the jump/slide levels (which I beat first try on four hours of sleep and energized by a single can of NOS, which means they can't be that bad), I still feel that the rest of the game is a brilliant refinement of what Mega Man was up to that point. Everything just feels better than it ever has here. You have more control over Mega Man, levels are intricate and their aesthetic design is vibrant and imaginative, and robot masters are at their peak both in terms of visual and mechanical design.

I think weapon powers in Mega Man games are at their best when they also provide distinct utility for navigation, and that basically describes every weapon in Mega Man 8. Flash Bombs can light up dark areas, Tornado Hold effectively replaces R. Coil, Thunder Claw can be used as a grappling hook, and Astro Crush serves as a powerful screen-clearer, to name a few. I paid some lip to it earlier, but I also love the soccer ball power-up. For the most part it's not terribly useful, which is kind of appropriate considering how soon you get it, but it's fun kicking that thing around and watching it ricochet all over a room and take out smaller enemies. In general, I think the weapon powers just feel really good to use against enemies, especially bosses. Tangling Clown Man up with his own limbs thanks to a well-timed Tornado Hold, or annihilating Dr.Wily's Dr. Whywee's ship with a cluster of Flash Bombs results in some pretty good feedback.

My only real complaint is with the item shop, and it's barely a complaint so much as it's a matter of personal preference. You can buy items between levels using bolts, which are few and far between and generally require some ingenuity to obtain, meaning you'll likely only be able to afford so much. Some of the ways you can augment your arm cannon are cool and upgrades to the amount of weapon energy and health you're able to recover are invaluable, but I find scouring levels for bolts to be less engaging than Mega Man X's system of locating armor parts. Not only do I feel Mega Man X is better about incentivizing exploration, but having the armor pieces reflect Mega Man's growth is more interesting visually than dropping a new icon on the second page of the inventory screen.

Honorable mention to the robot master contest submissions being shown during the end credits. It's really cute and something I wish was present in the other games, though hardware limitations understandably made that impossible or at least too difficult/compromised to be worth it. It's neat seeing them side-by-side with their final designs, which of course had to drop certain elements in order to achieve a more unified design, but they're still undeniably the same characters, and I can't imagine how cool it must've been for these kids to see their robot masters in the actual game. At the risk of treading old ground, I think it's such a shame you could never do a contest like this again.

My journey back through the classic Mega Man series is nearly over. I'm going to take a brief detour into the two fighting games included in the Anniversary collection and then wrap up with Mega Man 11, and I might give the Sega Saturn version of Mega Man 8 a shot at some point in the near future, too. I hear Tengu Man's stage is totally different and it adds two previous robot masters, and I just plain like MM8 enough to do a second playthrough just to experience those small changes.

Great game. Better than Mega Man 7. Shouldn't even be up for debate. I want to confiscate and immolate every copy of that game in existence and then subject everyone to the Mega Man 8 draft and force them to play this until they like it, and if they don't then it's straight to prison!

Going back to this game and realizing just how weak the drift boosting feels in comparison to later entries is its own form of whiplash. Well, there's that, and honestly one of the weakest Rainbow Road courses out there. It sure is a road, alright!

But I like Mario Kart 64 all the same. The combination of pre-rendered drivers and low poly 3D graphics has its own appeal, and there's more than a couple race tracks that have set a precedent for the rest of the series. You got your first major city stage in here, an Excitebike-like stadium full of bumpy roads... the desert level with the train is pretty fun to me, especially in those moments where you manage to just barely get past the train, while everyone else has to wait for it to pass by. Sherbet Land's probably my favorite stage, I dunno why. Could just be that the music is nostalgic, but I also just like winter-themed settings in general.

I don't revisit this game often, as it feels like you can quickly get all the mileage you need out of it within an hour or two. But it'd be nice to play it with a couple friends sometime, even if there's technically better options for a Mario Kart experience out there. I guess that's probably 64's biggest problem, isn't it? It's not a bad game by any means, it was just made obsolete the moment later Mario Kart entries started adding past courses into their selection. Now, you can experience them at 60fps, with remade graphics, and with better controls. That just leaves Mario Kart 64 to sit in a corner, saddened and forgotten. But at least I'm still here. It doesn't have to be THAT lonely. Anyway, see you in 5 years!

Has anyone who worked on this game ever actually walked on wooden floors before?? Every time these hulking masses of man meat entered a busted-up domestic structure, the foley of their boots stomping on hardwood completely dominated our entire living room as if it was a "bass boosted" YTP from days gone by. Floors don't sound like war drums, guys!

Anyhow uhhhhhhh pretty good co-op experience! The reload timing is cool, reviving is a nice alternative to respawning, campaign length is nice and tight, and I like way those deep voice enemies say "BOOM". Besides having Bongo Bongo from Ocarina of Time do the footstep sound design, my only real complaint is how frequently you reach a door, have a need to go through that door, and then have to wait for the door to be opened for you. I'm 500 pounds of surly beefcake and jagged metal, just let me through already!

Oh and I constantly forgot that Jack existed, it's like I had no object permanence for that weird little robot

The lowly console owner that I am, I spent two years waiting to be able to play the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time. After all that, there's no way it could actually live up to the lofty expectations I had set for it, right?

Right?

Yeah, Freedom Planet 2 is freaking incredible, it's wild how much it blows its predecessor out of the water in terms of polish and scope. If FP1 was in my Top 20 favorite games, then FP2 is a Top 10, maybe even a Top 5. It pretty much checks every single box in terms of what I want from a game. Complex and fluid movement, satisfying combat with a high skill ceiling, level design that's consistently fun and inventive, bombastic boss fights, loads of side content, adorable character designs, an engaging character-driven story (seriously it's way better this time), utterly gorgeous and cartoonishly colorful visuals, and an incredible soundtrack. It elevates Freedom Planet from a lovely homage to the Genesis era to an all-timer platformer series that can stand on its own alongside some of my favorites in the genre.

Oooooookay... Can I start by saying that this game is kinda horrifying?
Ralph doesn't just bounce up and down the screen like Mario or Sonic when losing a life, oh no. This poor kid gets impaled, crushed(both of these complete with blood splashes), vored and digested by slimes, burnt to a crisp, petrified and eaten by maggots with his SKULL flying out once they're done, jesus christ.

I guess 7 year old me playing this didn't really understand what was going on, because I definitely didn't remember this part of the game lmao

With that out of the way... It's alright. Very old school. 1-hit deaths unless you grab a shield around the stages, power-ups you lose after death, score fruits all over the place and uh... Also a fighting game?
Yeah, from Stage 4 or so onwards, bosses turn into traditional fighting game battles. That caught me by surprise, but throwing out not-Hadoukens and not-Shoryukens to beat their asses was oddly endearing.

What isn't oddly endearing is the difficulty spike akin to a glass-covered hamburger on the last stretch of 8-3, what the fuck was up with that. Precision platforming to the extreme; thank god you can use continues...

The soundtrack is very bouncy and catchy, but the instruments kinda suck. It sounds like someone having a lot of fun with a cheap Casio keyboard at times.

Fun game, but 8-3 can go die in a fire. And the death animations were somewhat offputting in a game like this, even if it did get a laugh out of me.

Also known as Kaisoku Tenshi (or as the English on the Japanese box art says, "High Tension Comical Action Game The Rapid Angel"), this is a game I learned about via a video that someone on the Slack chat shared with me about cool, rare games on Japanese PSN to look at before the service was (going to be) shut down. It looked neat, so I picked it up, and this month's TR theme of playing very expensive games made it the perfect thing to try out. I really didn't know what to expect from this game other than something a bit silly, but I was absolutely delighted with what I ended up finding. It took me a little under 2 hours to beat the game playing as Ayane on my PS3.

The game's story is ultimately pretty simple. You play as one of three girls working for the Rapid Angel delivery company. You aren't a very popular delivery company, but when you get a very important delivery, it's up to you to see it to its destination! It turns out this is a VERY important delivery, as you'll be fighting no shortage of bandits, evil animals, super powered assassins, and demons before the package reaches its safe(?) destination! The game has a SUPER 90's animation style, and it not only has a (weirdly very compressed) animated opening video, but also full VA of the characters speaking to give the story through stills and VN-style asides in between levels. Each playable character even has her own version of the story, giving it a good deal of replay value outside of going for higher scores and such. It's super charming and silly and I was really taken just how wacky it is. It won't be everyone's style of humor, but it was something I found very entertaining~.

The gameplay is a side-scrolling action platformer with a few branching paths thrown in. There are plenty of bosses, both mid-level and end-level, to fight, but the important thing here is your time limit! It's not the strictest time limit in the world, but it plays into the whole aspect of making your delivery on time. While the combat is fine, your range is short, so it's often the smarter choice to prioritize your health and your clock, because you have a delivery to make! The game does have infinite continues, and you do have a pretty big health bar, but you also only have one life. This gives the game a good level of challenge without feeling too unforgiving, and even though I felt satisfied beating it using a few continues, it's something I think I could beat in one continue if given a few more playthroughs.

The presentation is excellent. As previously mentioned, the very 90's style fits the tone of the game fantastically. Characters have tons of really silly and exaggerated facial expressions they'll pull to match how extra their VA work is, and it all fits together great. The soundtrack is also quite solid, though not super duper memorable compared to the graphical presentation.


Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a bit of a harder game to recommend if you can't understand Japanese, but I definitely got my 600 yen's worth with this one. It's even on international PSN as well as Japanese PSN, so you don't even need to make a foreign account to pick this one up the same way I did~. If you're into platformers and love a weird, silly style, this is absolutely a game you can't afford to miss out on.

The Aeon Flux adaptation that never was is a strange game: on one hand it is known (to those who even know it at all) as one of the worst games on the PS1, on the other you get the feeling it could have been so much more with just a little bit of extra polish.

The story is as 90s as it gets: in a future world where only women with big tits exist, the titular Pax Corpus, a VR machine created to ease the suffering of depressed people, is converted into a mind control weapon by a woman with big tits. Only a woman with big tits can save womanity from this terrible threat.

The moment to moment gameplay isn't even that bad: dodging incoming fire and blasting enemies is actually kind of fun, and the player movement is responsive enough. What really destroys the experience are the load times (close to a minute a pop, and frequent at that) and especially the horrendous jumping sections over death pits, which, combined with janky jumping controls, will send you back to a loading screen and the start of the level every single time you fail.

The bosses are all atrocious: without exception they are irritating puzzle encounters requiring stupid amounts of trial and error to bypass, with no fun involved whatsoever.

These issues are what makes Pax Corpus a disaster, and it's a shame. French developers of the time had a knack for producing games that were almost fun, but with one or two devastating problems that completely demolish the fun factor.

Worst game on the PS1? Not even close, but still really bad due to how punishing the jumping puzzles are. If you're curious to see what it's all about, play it with save states, or not at all.

Dumb, ugly, and clunky as hell, but it's likely one of the earliest 3D RPGs so it isn't terribly surprising. The early game in particular is extremely miserable no matter what way you look at it. Random encounters aren't like catered towards your level or anything, so you'll be fighting (well, watching your party automatically fight) the same enemies throughout without their strength ever really changing any. What that means is towards the start of the game your entire party will hardly survive just about any encounter, so you have to do a mix of just getting lucky and getting a grip on the game's clunky mechanics. It's not fun, even towards the end, but by then it feels at least a bit more manageable.

Drakkhen sucks. Lots of European games originally made for the Amiga similarly suck, for some reason. Usually though, other examples of those (such as James Pond or Jim Power) are more garish and more amusingly bad, whereas this game is just generally miserable and boring. Most of the music is pretty nice, though, I'll give it that.

This one took a bit of getting used to due to some fiddly buttons and confusing menus. The Enterprise is monitoring Romulan Activity in the Neutral Zone and ends up in an epic quest to be chosen to be given an extremely powerful weapon – one that the Romulans and a new race called the Chodak.

The game starts off with a view of the Enterprise D bridge. Here you look around at the various stations. Some (like the Computer and Sensors) give you additional information, the Briefing Room has Picard explain the current objective to the crew (a really nice touch) and the main one – the conn lets you set a course. There are a lot of places to choose from, although there’s not much reason to visit most, not to mention that the game bugs you if you’re not doing the current objective.

While at warp, you may randomly encounter enemy ships. The focus on ship combat is a top-down view and is very basic and quite annoying. You’re also supposed to keep an eye out for a little notification that the enemy ship is surrendering (although there’s no penalty for blowing them up). When you get damaged, your ship’s systems will go down and you’ll have to assign resources to each one. You can go to a starbase to completely repair (which also creates a password to save the game), but I found that as most of the game it was navigation or engines that were down, you just had to leave the game for a few minutes and let the admiral yell at you for not doing the current objective.

When you go on an away mission, you get to pick your away team (in most cases). You’ll want to take Data on every possible mission as he has the best stats and can see in the dark, which is the only ability that makes a difference (and only on one mission). Some crew completely lack phasers (like Dr. Crusher). I found myself using Data, La Forge, Worf and a random ensign on most missions.

These missions involve a lot of shooting, some puzzle solving and a lot of aimlessly walking around the maze-like levels. There’s some interesting ideas here, as you can swap between the away team and take them separate routes or command them to follow one person.

I feel like a sequel for this could have had the potential to fix the issues with this game. There’s some good ideas, but ultimately isn’t executed very well.