So 2000's, like a PS2 game with 100x the polish and budget. Some people are amiss to the game's shift away from low-stakes comedy to something more 'therapy-core', but the cast felt very and endearing. Psychonauts' visual metaphors and plastercraft dioramas mean even the most perceivably corny moments were given great care and attention. You all see fuckers praise games for things like 'the designers really cared!' but no like, Double Fine packed way too much shit in here, a single level will have as many fully-fleshed ideas as an entire game. There's one world populated by pagesketch people, and they're all voiced by dozens of different actors and all have unique dialogue when you attack them. It's fucking insane. We need more insane AAA budget games like this.

This is also an offhand but, after Hogwarts Legacy and Sirona Ryan being the most embarrassing damage control in games this year (so far), I couldn't stop beaming with joy at Helmut Fullbear, the gay hippie rockstar voiced by motherfucking JACK BLACK. And it's like, excellent rep, 'cause (1) he's a prominent character who gets his own world and musical number, and (2) they spend equal amounts of time with his husband, Bob, another banger character (not my favorite world to play, but the one whose story and environmental imagery was most resonant to me). This hit my soul so warm man.

Weakest part for me was the larger Maligula plot, which went over my head or mostly bored me, plus some odd ethnic baggage thrown in. This chunk of the plot feels like it was a written immediately after 1, right on the heels of Middle Eastern xenophobia and terror rhetoric, and instead of starting from scratch, they tried their damnedest to chop into something more reflective of the times. You know exactly what direction it's gonna go, it not-so-subtly tiptoes around the larger moral implications, and it never feels much better than being 'hollow'. When Oleander is forgiven in 1 after kidnappings and building war machines, it just feels like the universe's silly rules and a big joke in a larger comedy. These 'forgiving hitler' riffs feel out of place and in the tender, repressed story they're trying to tell here. You can't play shit like this straight.

Another genre hybrid very early on in the SNES' lifespan, though a lot more subtle than ActRaiser. Each level consists of a beatemup section and a platforming section, the former also including some adventure game elements such as stores and townsfolk to interact with and sometimes minigames to play with them. It all comes together very nicely, with a lovely little soundtrack as the cherry on top that fits like a glove with the feudal Japan aesthetic going on here.

Very pleasant stuff all around. It does get pretty rough in the endgame as far as difficulty goes, and I had to use a guide somewhere in stage 8's overworld, but those aren't really enough to detract from the overall experience. There are of course bigger highlights in the decade-spanning SNES catalogue, but this one makes for a great playthrough if you're looking for something on the quainter side.

Star Fox is peak science fiction.

I'm not referring to the simple narrative, or the space setting, or the admittedly cool and original ship and boss designs; I'm referring to the game itself. This 1993 console cartridge - with a graphics chip so powerful that the dev team joked that the SNES was just a box to hold it - had absolutely no right to exist. But exist it did, and much like the clunky-looking tablets and touchscreens in classic Star Trek, Star Fox was visionary: a pretty-good facsimile of Star Fox 64.

It has plenty of merits: slick minimalistic designs, very cool boss fights with multiple phases and moving parts that must have been quite the spectacle at the time, and animation that isn't the smoothest but good enough to parse what's going on most of the time. The soundtrack is extremely strong and deserves unequivocal praise with zero "for its time" qualifiers.

It's also considerably less refined that Star Fox 64, in ways beyond the obvious technical things like animation and draw distance and game feel. The three fixed routes through the game feel rather rigid compared to its reboot's more dynamic pathing. Your wingmen are considerably less useful (which makes the permadeath mechanic hit less hard). And neither of the two camera angles feel great: the cockpit view makes it hard to get a good sense of where you are and what will/won't hit you, but the third-person view lacks an aiming reticle, further exacerbated by the fact that there is no charged homing shot in this game.

And obviously I can't negatively judge an older game for not being as refined as a reboot! But it does mean that as someone who didn't play this when I was younger I'm less inclined to be patient with it. If I were a kid in 1993 with a SNES, there was literally nothing out there like this! So I would likely keep playing the game in spite of its rough edges, eventually get good enough to beat the third route, and it would become one of my favorite games. Now, every time I struggle... I can just play Star Fox 64 instead. So I'm content to have completed the first two routes and leave the last one unfinished.

Star Fox suffers a little bit of "you had to be there" syndrome... and unfortunately as a Genesis kid, I wasn't there. But I do feel that it does enough things right to fly on its own merits, nostalgia goggles or no. I wouldn't class it as a 'must-play' for everyone, but it's a still-very-playable revolutionary piece of gaming history.

It's just worse Battletoads, and I find that really embarrassing. Only half as many levels with a very poor selection that eliminates the rhythmic pacing of beatemup/platforming/gimmick sections the original game had. And most returning levels are worse and harder than they originally were. This game's equivalent of Clinger Winger is probably the worst level in a videogame I've ever played.

Just bad, totally awful, I know Rare isn't a developer to be trusted, but c'mon, what kind of sequel is this?

Definitely an improvement over Ys III, but overall kind of mediocre nonetheless. The plot feels pretty run of the mill for the genre, but the game is short enough and the fan translation is written well enough for it to still be somewhat engaging. Music is weaker than it was in III, though I did play III on Genesis in which it sounds kind of insane. Definitely a bit of a high bar to clear.

The combat is the real weak link here. I've heard it's just implemented particularly poorly in this game, but the bump combat system it uses is miserable. At least grinding becomes much shorter than it is in a typical RPG, but since you have no invincibility frames (much like in III), you're dead meat if you slip up more than maybe once. This style of combat doesn't really work out in the game's boss battles either, they were mostly trivial but when they weren't (such as Gruda) they were needlessly tedious and aggravating. No in-between, no bosses that really piqued my interest.

Would I recommend Ys IV on SNES (not to be confused with Ys IV on TG-CD)? Probably not. I didn't hate my time with it, but it didn't really do anything for me that I didn't get more enjoyment of somewhere else. I'm glad to see an RPG that only takes a single digit number of hours, but what I got here could certainly be better. I do hear the Ys games I've chosen are kind of black sheeps, so maybe I should see some other entries if I ever find myself interested. Maybe I'll play Ys V or the other Ys IV one of these days, but the other games aren't really in the timeframe and console era I tend to gravitate towards.

"Another Truxton piece? Don't you have something else to do?" No.

This is the PC Engine version this time, anyway. It seems to be more faithful to the arcade version (which I've also yet to play), which means it's a lot more unforgiving early on. Depends on the person whether or not this is a good thing, but I do prefer to be eased into things a little better, so that's one point towards the Genesis version. It looks a little nicer here though, with the big ass Raiden-esque interface done away with.

The biggest upgrade here is the music. It kind of sounds like shit on Genesis due to programming errors, but on this version I actually thought to myself a couple times "hey, these are pretty nice background tracks". The rapid shooting kinda gets in the way of the drums, unfortunately. All important points towards presentation go to the PC Engine version.

Really, though, it only wins over slightly. I'd come back for either one next time I get the urge to replay it, honestly. Even despite the Genesis version's half hearted music I could just put on some album or playlist instead and it'd probably be better than if I was playing even with the PC Engine audio.

I retain a soft spot for Truxton compared to other Toaplan outings. A lot of them still don't really stand out to me but something in this one's simpler presentation does it some good work. It also has better weapon balancing, with all three being pretty useful even with how broken the lightning appears at a glance. Compare that to Fire Shark, for example, where you're constantly trying to hold on to the flamethrower while other powerups constantly bounce around the screen to try and throw you off. I would recommend either version of this I've played honestly. Maybe I should replay some more Toaplan stuff but for now this is the primary standout in my opinion.