Mega Man 7 is a bit of a black sheep in how it feels and plays out. With Mega Man X proving a much greater commercial and critical success than 6 in early 1994, I'd assume they wanted to stick some elements of X into the next installment of the original series. The end result is this very "in-between" installment that doesn't know which design philosophy to stick to.

The level layouts are now more reminiscent of X, but Mega Man is limited to his own control scheme rather than gain X's wall jumping and dashing abilities. There's hidden items now, but without wall jumping and the like you have to use "Rush Search" in certain spots in certain levels to get upgrades and other various shit to make your life easier. The locations of these are either not indicated very well or not indicated at all, and it doesn't help that Rush Search is very specific, very finicky, and not at all fun to use. You also have to replay a level all the way through if you go hunting for items you missed, unless you find The One That Allows You To Exit Levels. Shouldn't this be a normal fucking feature on levels you already cleared? Start and select! It's not that hard!

You can also buy these items in the shop but the useful ones typically cost many screws, which are a hassle to grind for due to item drops from enemies being RNG based. There's not really any winning with that. You shouldn't need to grind for currency in a Mega Man game, and you shouldn't need to search all over the goddamn floors for hidden items, and really you shouldn't be needing to revisit levels anyway. This can be done with optional items in previous installments as well, but they're generally more inconsequential. If you don't get the Super Adaptor in particular, and the upgrade for the Super Adaptor, the final stages will all be maddening.

Even with all the preparation and secret items, though, nothing can really mitigate the final boss. Wily is infamously ridiculous in this game, and for good reason. They just felt like making him really difficult according to interviews, no real reason to do so, no gradual buildup in terms of difficulty, nothing. He sucks, and his weakness almost sucks more. One last kick in the head before the game comes to a close.

There's a lot to complain about, since it doesn't quite feel like classic Mega Man, and doesn't quite feel like Mega Man X, but really it's totally serviceable on its own two legs. I would probably play any of the previous five and definitely the first X game over this, but this is an okay game on its own. I just don't find that it lives up to expectations set by its precursors, yknow?

My friends and I butt heads a little about this one, usually because I personally am not a fan. Kirby's Adventure has wowed me since I was just 12 years old, playing it all the way through on my old Wii in my very first dosage of Kirby gameplay. And with later years and more playthroughs, I've only come to appreciate it more. For a 1993 release, its art and presentation are fucking stunning, outshining plenty of games on the more powerful, more sought after consoles at the time. Minor issues are present, but not once has it particularly weighed down my experience with the game. It holds up perfectly even today.

Now, this game is a direct remake of Kirby's Adventure. Yay! But, it's for the GBA, a supervillain of sound design in gaming. There is no sound chip, and oftentimes it just sounds really fuzzy or half baked. A lot of games on it feature MIDI-sounding compositions, and this is one of them. Gone is the bounciness and fun of the original release's soundtrack, drowned under MIDI trumpets and steel drums and shitty sounding bass. Not every song is necessarily butchered or anything, but I find it very drained of character and energy.

This leads me to the facelift the game was given as a whole. I've never been a fan of the GBA/DS era of Kirby in terms of art, it has always felt rather bland to me especially compared to the much more cutesy earlier and later eras. This looks the weakest of those four imo, and it really comes to your attention when compared to the wonderful backgrounds and charm of the NES version. It's serviceable I guess on its own, but compared to the original it just feels so sterilized and even drab and a bit sad to me. Butter Building isn't even yellow, for example? And the interior is far more samey looking than before, as are pretty much the majority of levels. Grape Garden and Rainbow Resort are my personal favorites in the original, due to how much variety there is in the scenery. In the original, I can even tell each level of those two worlds apart, but here they all blend together. They feel much more like really long individual levels than the great big worlds they initially set up 9 years ago.

Not a lot is really changed at all gameplay wise, either. The slowdown is fixed, but aside from that it is pretty much the same. My memory used to be a bit cloudy of this one and I assumed a part of why people prefer this version was adopting Kirby Super Star style gameplay or something, but I was surprised to see it doesn't actually do that at all. So what gives? Is the slowdown really that much of a make or break thing? Maybe there's just something I don't understand.

Whatever the case, it's kind of just okay on its own. But when compared to the original and when I take in what makes that one stand out so much, it lessens my opinion of this one a little. I've always just thought it feels like a lot of the charm and soul is taken out, leaving behind just a hollow husk of the original game. I guess it has Meta Knightmare. Yay...? It,, doesn't really make up for things though in my opinion. I don't know man. I don't think there was really a reason for this remake to be made, and it could have at least done the job a little better. It seems to miss the point on a lot of things that made the original as extraordinary as it is.

Excerpt from "list of things that can kill silver surfer with minimal trouble"
-frogs
-ducks
-turtles
-various small fish
-eyeballs
-cartoon ghosts
-pumpkins
-small hands
-any wall in the known universe
-hats
-the green giant

It seems that much like The Terminator on SNES, Terminator 2 on SNES is also lumped in with a different game on IGDB. This review is for the Bits Studios game, whereas the SNES port of the arcade version was released as T2: The Arcade Game.

This is probably one of the worst to ever do it. One of those games so half-assed and obscenely unfun that it makes you wonder how it got released in the state it's in, but unfortunately as we've previously learned from Bits Studios' other titles such as Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and GunForce, this is kind of just a thing they had a knack for.

Gameplay alternates between sidescrolling kinda-sorta-run-and-gun levels and driving segments in between. The driving in particular is just hateful, even with a grasp of how it works (which I only gained about a minute before I was ready to ditch the game entirely) it is still dreadfully unresponsive and unintuitive. Sometimes the directions provided aren't even helpful, so I had to follow a video verbatim each time a driving segment began, constantly tabbing in and out of the game. Sidescrolling sections really don't fare much better, with the T-800's leisurely pace and near inability to jump combined with unending swarms of enemies and a couple of escort missions.

Up until the final level, there are merely two indistinguishable songs during the whole game. I can't even begin to understand this. Maybe you'd expect a gripe of the same sort with a basic puzzle game, but an action game with 8 stages? Did they run out of time? Were they too lazy to compose more songs?

Despite joking around about it in the previous review, I figured from the start that this would be a weaker effort than Gray Matter's Terminator game on the console. I did not figure it would be this much weaker. Very plausibly in the bottom 5 of all games I've completed, though I've never taken the time to rank them like that. Despite what my profile and rating curve on here might indicate, I do in fact prefer to ruminate more on things that are cool and things that are good.

One of the highlights of the NES library undoubtedly but it still has a fair share of major issues that bring it down. One is the lack of passwords and saves, which isn't too uncommon for the time at all but seeing as this is pretty long for an NES title it could really use some.

The other, much bigger issue is the fucking wall climbing mechanics introduced after Area 6. They are so fucking bad. A lot of people will tell you this but I can not stress how much more miserable the game becomes with them. You'll always cling to the sides of platforms when you just want to fall from one and even though there's only one new area after this is obtained I probably could count more than 50 times it tripped me up. It's such a shame too, because it's so late in the game and leading up to that point it controls and plays wonderfully. I wish you could just turn wall climbing on and off or something on the pause menu, only having it turned on when absolutely necessary. It's probably one of the most absurd endgame blunders I can think of, at least gameplay-wise. Crusader of Centy still has this beat if we count plot-related ones.

Despite the wall climbing being from hell, I would still recommend this. Maybe I wouldn't recommend beating it, but for that first half especially it's a lot of fun. I just wish it could've sustained that enjoyability longer than it does, and I'd definitely have it at an 8 or so if that was the case.

Another cinematic platformer in the vein of Flashback and Prince of Persia, this time starring a COOL DUDE and his COOL GUN!! For a while it's actually quite nice, but it's far too long in the tooth for what it is and doesn't have enough changes in scenery. Ultimately becomes a slog in the back half, though still pretty alright. The only thing I outright dislike is the gunplay mechanics, they're similar to the swordfighting in Prince of Persia in that they're both a huge pain in the ass and could benefit a ton from just being simpler. I think that's a good way to sum up Blackthorne, really - its full potential could've been realized if it was shorter and simpler. I really do like most of what's on display here, but it was starting to feel like it would go on forever.

Ronald Reagan's dogshit self and presidency paved the way for a lot of totally absurd anti-drug propaganda in the 80s, this being one of the most infamous examples as far as I know. In this game, you kill every drug user you see! Shoot them! Blow them up! Run them over!

Those are pretty goddamn skewed priorities, no? You pose a much greater threat to civilian life than any of these people combined, except maybe Mr. Big, the owner of the "K.R.A.K." drug trafficking organization, and he's only on the same level because he is also an evil giant moving head who shoots fire and...tongues. What are you accomplishing by not just killing him first, but instead painting the whole town red because you saw some junkies?

Who is this even aimed for? It's not aimed for children, what with the violence and gore, or perhaps the various porno stores and theaters in the background of stage 4. Were teenagers or young adults supposed to think this was cool? Maybe they were, honestly. It seems like back then it was really easy to win people over with anything that had blood in it. It seems like it worked, too, because most criticism on release appears to revolve around the violence rather than just, how completely questionable it is.

I ditched at the final boss. He absolutely tears through your health since you don't seem to have invincibility frames. Every time you use a credit at him, the battle starts from the beginning for some damn reason, which doesn't happen in earlier levels or any other fucking arcade game. I looked up the ending and it says "You have completed your narc training mission. Contact your local DEA recruiter." No sir, I don't think I will do that.

Saturn emulation is unfortunate in its current state. Through RetroArch I couldn't get this running with any of the available Saturn cores except for Yabause, which fucked up the sound horribly and had a lot of lag.

The game itself is excruciatingly difficult, has absurd mechanics for the genre that are tough to get used to, and the Saturn version was never translated so I struggled to wrap my head around what was going on in terms of plot, save for a very basic understanding. Everything about it for me was pretty much a struggle.

But you know what? It's still as good as people say. Style, substance and overall presentation can go a long fucking way.

Bart vs. The Space Mutants fucking sucks. It's really a shame because by all means it shouldn't.

The presentation starts off really strong, as a puzzle platformer with a particularly surprising amount of detail and references to the show somewhat unheard of in many licensed games of the time. It's a little tedious, but there's a certain level of charm to it at first.

On the other hand though, the game's worst issues reveal themselves simultaneously, almost immediately after starting the game actually: the controls and the difficulty. The controls are so bizarre to me - namely that run and jump mapped to the same button, making movement incredibly awkward and making both individual actions somewhat of a chore. Running jumps are completely impossible as a result, and you'll never really get one no matter how hard you try. Instead, you have to do higher jumps by...pressing A and B simultaneously. You have to work with this while narrowly dodging various (like two or three total) kinds of much smaller but much faster enemies. Also, two hits per life and no continues. Awful.

So in turn the game becomes almost immediately really hard to enjoy, but there's at least still a decent amount of creativity at first, or at least just..something to appreciate at all really. This goes away as early as level 2, where the game decides to drop most of the ideas it had previously set up and just turns into a shitty platformer where you occasionally collect items that require no thinking or problem solving at all. There's almost nothing to interact with from that point onwards, all there is left is to trudge through until you inevitably throw in the towel or reach the power plant. God help you if you reach the power plant. That last level took me over 30 minutes even with savestates.

You know what else? There's only really two songs during gameplay, a dinky rendition of the theme song and some other shit that ultimately just blends in with the former during actual gameplay. It starts to grate on you really fast and just gets worse and worse from there. Combined with the gameplay and the drab colors of the later stages? It's maddening. Demotivating. Depressing.

What's that? There's boss music too? Not really. Two of them are just snippets taken from the fucking theme song again. The third is just the death sound played on a loop. They might as well not be there, but I'm glad they are because they're so amusingly shitty that they were essentially the only form of entertainment I found in this for two thirds of the runtime. That and Bart's weird miserable bird creature looking ass head.

I tried this in June 2021 or so and couldn't power all the way through it, and after finally doing so I just feel hollow and wish I hadn't bothered. It's better than Bart's Nightmare, but the time in elementary school where I just threw up all over the fucking grass in front of other kids was also better than Bart's Nightmare. Maybe this game would be more captivating if it wasn't so obviously rushed out the door. Maybe it'd be tolerable if the difficulty was toned down. Hard to say with what's basically nothing more than hypotheticals.

God this game fucking pisses me off. I wish it was good. I really do.

This is okay, actually. Bullshit in places, but like, fine? Maybe I'm missing something. I do have a soft spot for this one for whatever reason, ever since I was a kid (I've also always been very fond of the OST, surprisingly memorable when you consider all Game Gear/Master System stuff sounds nearly the damn same). I'll tell you what does suck though, the Sky High Zone chaos emerald is a fucking meme. The hang glider is a bit notoriously absurd, and while it's far from impossible to use, making it go upwards is indeed. You have to maintain your speed somehow and rely on gusts of wind to make it high enough to reach the emerald, and it's really strange and specific. There's a lot of odd design like that, but most of it I find is more manageable than people make it out to be. Scrambled Egg Zone codifies that annoying tube nonsense that appears in all the later Game Gear games though, so fuck it for that. That one is shit. But all in all, I think this one gets a little more flack than it deserves.

You will eat shit if you play on Game Gear, though. If you have the option to play on a platform with a better screen I would simply do so