Extremely short, but satisfying platformer that does the bare minimum of telling the story of the film, while adding some extra bits for the sake of having more stages and bosses. Aladdin feels a bit slippery at times, especially if you hold the run button down the entire time like me, but it feels just right where you can blast through the stages with your platforming skills, like I try to.

I wish there was a bit more variety, but it's still pretty good as it is, and the music is especially charming. It was a little golden period of Japanese devs working on Western IPs and making some dope ass games out of them.

Donkey Kong Country was a platformer with an interesting design, where the platforms and even playable characters' physics are kind of vague, they're kind of loosely designed. And on a console like the SNES, it worked very well as it made it easy for the player to flow and react in order to execute quick stage runs! Trying to cram that into a Gameboy does not really work.

The platforming tends to be frustrating, and even at times "too" loose. The entire game feels very haphazardly put together, thus the controls suffer a bit for it. I'm sure there's some miracle story that they got this game working the way it does, but I don't care. It's not fun. It doesn't really fit as even a remotely suitable experience to the SNES game.

A step-up to the original game in various ways, most especially raw gameplay and core combat. Batman: Arkham City runs, punches, and glides with so much more confidence than its predecessor, likely due to working on established grounds with the Batman franchise.

While the core combat is more intuitive, the exploration aspect is much more grand than the original, and even the story itself is considerably a step-up . . . I kinda like the way the original game presented itself more. From the comic book art profile pictures, the greasy stained menu, to the Metroid-like architecture and mapping!

I completely understand Arkham City going towards the open world aspect, and it's still really fun! I just have a weird bias towards the first game. But I can't deny, the boss fights in this game were brilliant. I also love how you start with all the gadgets from the original games, and continue earning new tools throughout on top of that. Great game design, and getting great scores in brawls is always a lot of fun.

Where Twisted Metal 3 and 4 shows the absolute worst case scenario of a Twisted Metal game without David Jaffe and his team, Twisted Metal Small Brawl shows what a PS1 sequel would've been WITH David Jaffe's team . . . but without David Jaffe.

The co-creator and lead director of Twisted Metal 1 and 2 initially came up with the idea of Small Brawl, but was not there for any of its development as he got caught up with pre-production for God of War. The rest of his team got to have fun providing a more delinquently themed--but less sinister--take of Twisted Metal, replacing the cars and venues with RC cars and suburban playgrounds.

It's a cute little idea! And it plays fine, but kinda wears out its theme and doesn't really do anything that interesting with it. Jaffe has expressed, if he were able to direct it, he would've done more with the environment and even include raunchier humor a-la "Porky's (1981)". But without David's edgier sense of humor, his team's natural direction is into something softer and more family friendly.

The epitome of not just the Rock Band series, but the mainstream appeal of rhythm games in the Western regions. Rock Band 3 felt like the final ounce of creative evolution of the concept that is plastic-rocking with your homies while buzzed at a party. With the inclusion of a keyboard peripheral as well as harmony vocals in a mainline game, this meant you can have up to 7 people in one performance handle different parts of the game! That's kind of amazing.

This was also the first game in the series to have a semblance of a story, and it was surprisingly heartfelt and endearing, especially for one that didn't have any speaking roles. You just get to see the characters you made build a road to stardom from ground level! It was really cute.

There's also the "Pro Guitar" mode to speak of that can actually teach you chords and such for actual songs, but the concept was a bit too soon and ambitious, as it would be something perfected by a different company shortly after with "Rocksmith." Even so, it shows how genuine Harmonix was about providing a gateway for fans to actually learn instruments along with its real MIDI keyboard peripheral, and add-on for drums to more closely emulate actual drumming.

Where Guitar Hero drowned itself with its obnoxious nature, Rock Band managed to bow itself out maturely and sticking to what it did best, going so far as separating itself from EA shortly after release while still maintaining support and DLC for multiple years. I love Rock Band.

This is literally just Dead Rising 3 rereleased on Windows PC with 'most' of the DLC and stripped of the Xbox phone app junk. The only reason this gets a slightly higher score than the original release is due to the value of modding. Even the most basic ones make a world of difference. I suggest the very easy .txt edit that removes the pesky 30 fps cap, making all the animation look buttery-smooth. I can also recommend the camera mod that replicates Dead Rising 1's camera angle.

These two alone make a huge difference in how much more appealing the game looks. Please, if you happen to own the game on Steam, do yourself a favor and slap these mods on.

More fun than a bus full of cheerleaders, Ratchet Deadlocked on PS2 felt like the developers recognizing that they've expunged their creative motivation to make new entries involving Ratchet and Clank exploring vast planets with a healthy mix of platforming and blasting (case and point: R&C 3), and decided to embrace the direction they've been leaning towards with every sequel, which is BLASTING, BLASTING, and MORE BLASTING!

Despite its initial lukewarm reception, Deadlocked is easily one of the best games the series has to offer. While it can be considerably one-note, it sings that note with absolute expertise using its dense enemy-count, banging tunes, amusing commentators, and explosive weaponry!

Where people saw absolute reduction in the environmental variety, weapon-count, and characters, I saw a tighter, more-focused direction in these aspects, making for very charming interactions throughout regarding the narrative and characterizations, and fun-filled action regarding the raw gameplay.

Speaking more on narrative, I adore the stronger, slightly sharper bite this story had regarding fame and corruption that tends to follow with that lust for admiration and profits. It's all still cartoonish and funny, but perfectly serves the slight edge this game has compared to its predecessors.

With that said--and looking back at this game more than 15 years later--this is the last real Ratchet & Clank game in my eyes. It felt like a perfect series finale to everything the stories before it represented. Helps that it's a fun game too.

4.3 ratio with a heap of 5-star reviews. I'm not sure what game these people played, because the one I played was mostly full of boring, boxy platforming weaved together by a completely forgettable story with a shithead protagonist as the cherry-on-top.

The combat in this game is great, some of the most fun and satisfying I've experienced in a while. It's too bad the devs weren't confident enough in it to have it be the main aspect like its brethren of the same subgenre. Huge potential for a sequel, because what they've come up with is genuinely great. They just need to . . . actually make it the main aspect.

An improvement to the original Parappa the Rapper in every possible way! The music, the characters, the gameplay, everything about Um Jammer Lammy is so clean and fantastic! I also think the nature of the presentation is a lot better, having Lammy basically play a Jazz game imitating the lyrics with her guitar. And the fact that there's an entire hidden "Parappa mode" for nearly the entire soundtrack just makes it all even better!

Seriously, if you love Parappa the Rapper but never got around to playing this, you're doing yourself a huge disservice. This heavily overshadowed installment deserves so much more recognition.

Hugely disappointing follow-up to the original game. Of course, maybe it shouldn't have been knowing Mikami was replaced as director, and the lead concept artist, Ikumi Nakamura, was completely absent from this project as well.

From the cornball story, to the horrible voice-acting, to the complete lack of a grimy atmosphere, to those canned animation dialogues that look ripped out of a Tony Hawk game, to the horrid enemy designs, depression hit me like a bucket of water fairly early into the game . . . and that bucket kept refilling.

The gameplay is overall fine, but the structure and design of the open world (if you want to call it that) is awful. I can tell they're trying to go for a really actiony Silent Hill 1 vibe, but it doesn't work for me at all. Exploring the town is very uninteresting, and the nonlinearity only harmed the pace.

Overall, I think the biggest misstep was trying to emphasize on the characterizations, which a lot of sequels fall into. The world never felt like a daunting mystery, but harassment from the villains that feel more appropriate for Goosebumps fodder.