EU Virtual Console release played on a Nintendo 3DS XL.

This is really not a fun game. The first few minutes are cool as you automatically go into the cave, get your sword and try exploring for a while, but you very quickly realise you have no clue as to what to actually do and the game provides no real help in that regard. The fact I had to follow a guide for the entirety of the game due to the obscure "hints" it threw at me was a tedious experience and did not endear me despite the good art and audio design. Maybe American kids back in the 80s had a better time with a manual that provided hints, but on its own this game just does not hold up.

Don't feel guilty about save scumming if you're not playing on original hardware.

PAL copy played on a region-modded Dreamcast.

This game came out in 1998.

1998.

You know what else came out that year? Resident Evil 2. Spyro the Dragon. Banjo Kazooie. Half Life. Ocarina of Time. Metal Gear Solid.

So while you can fault the story for its cheesiness (when really it was pretty on par with other kids media of the time) and critisize the gameplay (when you're probably just playing the shite, buggy ports with crap lighting and art changes that the Dreamcast Conversion mod for PC fixes entirely), you cannot deny that for nineteen-ninety-fucking-eight, this was a beautful looking game that provided you with an actual goddamn adventure with some fun music that'll worm itself into your brain.

Big's levels do suck though and was the reason I never finished this game as a child, I'll grant you that.

EU Virtual Console release played on a Nintendo 3DS XL.

Ghosts 'N Goblins for the NES is one of those classic titles for this generation of consoles that just utterly destroys you in every way. It's the type of game you wouldn't really get away with releasing today without a bunch of Dark Souls fans being the only ones defending it.

And even if you love Dark Souls, this is not a good port. Even if you're prepared for the end-game twist of you having journeyed through a weird hell dimension version of the real world, forcing you to play through it all again, the overall design of this game is just a test in frustration. Enemies won't follow a predictable pattern, making trying to kill or avoid them next to impossible at times and Arthur's jump always lands just short of where you wanted to be. There's no point in even trying to get through the game with any weapon except the knife and the fact the game forces you at times to change to the useless fire projectile was not fun.

I did beat this game in the end, and yes I did it with the 3DS VC version and yes I did save scum my way through it because no way in hell would I have the time to do it all "properly" and retain my sanity. If you've played Mega Man, then you've already played this game but in a more satisfying and entertaining way.

EU release played on a PlayStation 4 Pro.

I'll be perfectly honest, I hated Sundered when I first booted it up. The trailer presented itself as a story-driven metroidvania (at least that's the impression I got), so to be confronted with a rogue like with minimum plot alongside death being an expectancy rather than a fail state, I was extremely turned off. I'd tried roguelikes in the past and had never really seen the appeal, so was prepared to just turn this off and never play it again. But since Sony has no refund policy on PSN purchases, I percevered and forced myself to keep going, and hey this is actually pretty good.

The art style is the first attractor, impleneting a clean, flat shaded look which utilises a hand drawn animation stlye. It's really quite beautiful to see in morion and coming up across the giant bosses in the game is all the more intimidating because of their sense of weight and scale implemented through their motion.

The sound design also manages to capture you, filling you at the best of times with a sense of uneasy calm and at the worst, complete dread. Each time you encounter a horde, a resounding gong plays and hearing it sucks every time for all the right reasons.

I managed to even love the level design in the end, regardless of it implementing some randomisation. The main locations within each area stay where they are on the map, but the rooms and corridors you traverse to get there change each time, which keeps exploration and traversal rather fresh.

And the upgrade system is incredibly satisfying, giving you the classic option between good and evil powers with both sides providing a good variety in benefits that each player will have their own preferences towards. As with most Metroidvanias, traversal becomes a complete and total joy in the endgame and gaining a new weapon or ability always felt good.

All in all I highly recommend Sundered. Even if these types of games aren't your thing, it managed to really sway me over to its overall design with some good art direction and music.

EU release played via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

This isn't that bad of an FPS in all honesty - obviously if you've read any of the comics you're going to get a lot out of this and seeing an early 00s shooter set in this universe is a treat. You can tell the devs had a lot of fun and put great care and attention to the environments and writing. Gameplay itself can provide a decent challenge too and the level design is often a huge maze of corridors and open spaces to get lost in which was fairly satisfying. A couple of cheap bosses here and there that require some trial and error accompanies by a lot of game over screens but nothing that will take you too long. Even the voice acting is on point with its cheesy, over the top performances nailing the ridiculousness of the universe fairly well.

EU release played via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

When it comes to the classic Sonic games I'll admit my experience is rather limited. I played the hell out of Sonic 2 back in the day, always getting so incredibly close but never quite being able to beat the last boss rounds. Sonic 1 I played a bit of before getting reaching Labyrinth Zone and checking out and Sonic 3 and Knuckles admittedly remain somewhat of a mystery to me even to this day.

Sonic CD however is a wildly different beast altogether. I could maybe appreciate it's sprawling and complex level design if this were the first title or had a different graphical style about it, but it getting lumped in with other regular Sonic collections over the years and looking pretty much like a more jazzy Sonic 1 is incredibly deceptive for the amount of bashing your head against a brick wall you're in for.

I finished this game. It took me roughly 10 years but I got there in the end and I can't say I remember a damn thing about it outside the creepy easter eggs and the rad animated intro sequence. Maybe I'll come back to it again at some point and take my time to explore the game fully, but trying to plow through it from start to finish like the rest of the 2D games leaves you utterly bewildered and frustrated.

EU release played on a Xbox One X.

Update: it's now been 3 months with various updates and the game still runs poorly on Xbox One X. Maybe in a few years I'll give this game another shot on the Series lineup but for now I'm too bitter to touch it for a good while. Sable should never have been released on Xbox One/X.

Original review:
To say Sable is a Breath of the Wild clone is both a disservice and fairly apt - it's story is more one of personal self discovery and finding one's place in the world which I have been highly enjoying, but the clunky controls and poor frame pacing leave more to be desired.

When the controller isn't being touched, Sable is a wholly beautiful game, with its Moebius-inspired artstyle really being pulled off immaculately (despite the low fidelity on both character and environment models) with warm inviting colours during the day and blue hues for the night. The sound design soothes you in both its calming melodies and weird, alien noises and the soundtrack provided by Japanese Breakfast is simply enchanting. The story premise and characters in the introductory area are melancholic in a way befitting of a lost Ghibli movie or one of the many AA/indie games in the past decade such as Journey, The Last Guardian, or The Pathless.

On the surface level, Sable is simply a stunning-looking game.

Trying to control the character however is when things go wrong - the input latency here is real, with movement and jumping taking up to half a second to register, making the BotW-style running, jumping and climbing extremely awkward and clumsy. There were several instances where I ran to the edge of a cliff and simply fell off because the jump button didn't register in time, making simple platforming a frustrating task.

The movement and handling of the bike is also a harrowing experience - if you ever played Jak II for the PlayStation 2 it feels exactly like that game's hover-bike races: overly-tight steering with the bike never quite being able to balance on even stable ground properly, let alone on a patch of dirt with a few rocks. It's always juddering about the place, which wouldn't feel quite so bad if the maximuk speed felt too slow. I understand Shedworks were aiming for a calm game with low levels o of adrenaline, and I don't need to be blasting off across the environment at 200 miles per hour, but the first bike felt at most maybe twice the speed of the player character's and the personalised bike you get a bit later barely feels any faster. There's a great big expanse you can explore in this game but traversal just feels like it drags a little.

And then there's the framerate itself - to say it's unstable is simply an understatement. I assumed that the poor frame-pacing and complete and total slow down of the game's visuals and audio were simply my poor, weak Xbox One X simply not being strong enough to handle all the action(?) on screen, but even folks with a Series X are reporting stuttering game play with no clear reason for it. The one guaranteed instance of the slow down is whenever new quests are accepted, where the whole game siezes up for a couple of seconds before it manages to stabilise again. I can't tell of 30fps is meant to be the target here simply because it never raises above that, which makes the stylistic choice of the choppy character animation frustrating to see in motion.

All in all, Sable is disappointing. I've been relatively hyped for this game for a few years now, but the poor optimisation on display here is simply annoying to witness. I'd leave trying this out until a good few patches are released to help stabilise everything.

EU release played via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

What an utterly fantastic metroidvania. The music and atmosphere of the levels are the first things that capture you and with the wonderful creature and enemy designs, this is a hard game to put down. The jumping does take a bit of time to get used to and you will find yourself dying on multiple occasions at the same point. But Demon Peak lets you experiment, going back to previous levels to get more gold and abiities before moving forward again.

A couple technical hiccups, namely the odd screen-length line of black pixels appearing in one particular point at a level and another experience where I had closed the game but could still hear the music, forcing me to go to the Task Manager and finding it in the background processes. But other than those two minor issues I can't say there were any game-breaking bugs.

Overall, well worth the price of admission and definitely an instant favourite of the pixelated adventure genre.

EU release played via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

I remember enjoying the first Season a few years back at the height of my enjoyment of the comics - it was a fresh way to explore a pre-established IP through the lenses of different characters that you could still empathise with but didn't have the guarantee of surviving. I enjoyed the characters of Lee and Clementine and the ending of that game is still fairly memorable to me.

That being said, wow did this sequel miss the mark. It started off well with it's characters and representing a wide view with different situations they were put through. But by the end I just didn't care about anyone, even though I tried helping them and siding with people the main character just ended up getting dicked over by everybody, so much so that I ended up leaving the last characters to go out on my own in the end choice.

I get that The Walking Dead really likes to drive home the theme of "people are dicks and you can't trust them" a lot of the time, but when everyone who is left is just a piece of trash even when you've spent so much time trying to get them on your good side with the dialogue options, it just feels like a shitty way to reward the players' time.

Overall, play the first game. While the journey in this game was captivating pretty much the whole way, the ending was disappointing and there were gameplay elements such as the items you obtain that never get used that just don't make any sense.

EU release played on a PlayStation 4 Pro.

This is the perfect follow up to the Mega Drive/Genesis games. Not only does it capture those games' sense of gameplay and creativity, it also greatly expands on those features with the new drop dash move and a great number of level-specific gimmicks and features. It truly feels like a Sega Saturn title with the expanded colour pallete and performance boost in what's capable within a 2D Sonic game. It also managed to land at the perfect time in terms of the "meta era" of Sonic where we weren't completely burnt out on the self-referential humour just yet.

EU copy played on a PlayStation 3 Super Slim.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is not a very good game. It attempts to be a Devil May Cry-esque action game with combos and the unique gimmick of stealing enemies' weapons to use against them. The controls can be kinda floaty at times and take a while to get accustomed to. The story is bat-shit insane and kinda difficult to follow due to the lack of any real substantial exposition.

That being said I kinda love this game. The artstyle is the first to pop out at you - it does it's best to feel like what the forces of heaven and hell imagine the mortal plane of existance to look like and it does a damn good job at that with a mixture of harmonising, light colours and incredibly abstract environments and character designs. The design of the player character and the angel helping him feels jarring at first but when you realise they're agents of heaven just wearing some jeans and a shirt with some plate armour, the intent of all these design choices all kind of clicks in your head.

The flow of combat takes a while to get used to and honestly is probably the weaker parts of the game. Stealing enemy weapons and cleansing them feels satisfying but it can be easy in some of the later stages to get overwhelmed and some bosses will intentionally kick your ass with little to no explanation that it was supposed to happen.

The story itself can be very hit or miss depending on how literal and expository you like your plots to be - you play as Enoch, the biblical scribe before the flood, and your task is to hunt down seven fallen angels to stop the flood from destroying the world. On your first play through there is absolutely no way you're going to catch all of that and it feels like the game is being intentionally vague and hand wavy at the best of times. However, if old biblical lore through a modern Japanese lense is your kind of jam then I'd recommend you at least check this game out. If nothing else your eyes will enjoy what they're looking at.

EU copy played on a PlayStation 3 Super Slim.

Alice: Madness Returns very much assumes you have not played American McGee's Alice, and while that original game was usually bundled as a free download, this is very much a good thing. The original Alice is a clunky title on the 360 and PS3 and while it's third-person Unreal Engine action was fairly attractive back in the day it can be a slog to play, being heavily reliant on save scumming to make any progress.

Madness Returns however is a complete joy in comparison. Perfect? God no, it suffers a bit in that what was once a novel concept of "what if Alice in Wonderland but edgy?" has been tapped bone dry by other forms of media, with Madness Returns offering nothing new to say. But the gameplay? Leaps and bounds better by far. Platforming feels a lot more fluid and in line with modern design sensibilities and the array of weapons at your disposal feel incredibly satisfying to use. The variety of art styles within the different worlds can be incredibly gorgeous and creative too with Alice adopting a new dress to fit in with her surroundings.

American McGee obviously has a lot of love for this idea he's built for himself and you can see that in every part of this game. It's a shame Spicy Horse didn't really survive long after this and the rights for the property remain with EA, but after the lukewarm reaction to Alice: Otherlands it's a little difficult to see what the future of this franchise will be.