Apocalypse is one of my favorite Megami Tensei games - to me, this game offers some of the best combat and boss fights in the franchise, with a wide variety of quick, addicting side quests to keep you constantly engaged and seeing new opponents. The writing, while largely pretty corny, wraps around into being cool as shit near the end with one of the most outrageous power trip endings of all time. I refuse to believe the Anarchy ending wasn't intentionally written as the ultimate payoff for people who did not like this game's cast.

When I lived in Osaka briefly, I visited some of the bigger arcades in the area. On one such visit I saw a fairly old man playing an Initial D game with a giant wheel, racing chair and all that shit. The Eurobeat was insanely loud and he drifted flawlessly throughout the entire track.

The next day I went out in search of a console version and found this. Obviously not as extravagant as the arcade, but a great game, with one of the best soundtracks out there. Decent customization, a fair amount of courses, and the cutscenes are presented like manga panels. You do get to try and balance the cup of water on your dashboard. Really fun to pop in for 20 minutes and mess around

Quest 64 is probably one of the most badass names for a video game you could come up with. It doesn't need a subtitle or anything to draw you in, because it's that raw. When I was given this cartridge as a kid, I genuinely thought it must have been one of the greatest games ever made with such a blunt title.

Quest 64 is a JRPG without party members, equipment, or a currency system. None of the towns or dungeons are particularly unique. The plot is about going to find 4 elemental orbs and a powerful book that keeps the universe held together. Despite being overall unremarkable and lacking compared to other games in the genre, to this day I feel like its simplicity is kind of charming.

Combat is unique, being turn-based, but with a limited area of free movement where you can actually dodge attacks in real time during enemy turns and position yourself for different spells. There's a lot of background story told through dialogues with NPCs. Environments, while generic, largely look pretty good and are often quite colorful.

I've seen a lot of people call this game lazy, but I think it's the opposite and the team unfortunately just wasn't able to achieve their true vision for the game. Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but not as bad as it's often made out to be.

A broken mess of glitches, amalgamated ideas, unfinished mechanics but I love it.

Alpha Protocol is such a weird game. an attempt to make a spy role playing game funded by Sega and made by Obsidian. How this ever came to be I doubt I'll ever know but I love so many things it does.

The story isn't anything to particularly praise but a lot of the content on the way is still pretty unique to this day. The dialogue system doesn't give you exactly what the main character Jason Bourne, I mean Michael Thornton will say but instead gives the type of response like "confident", "aggressive", Suave" etc. he will give. These responses can be amazing, hilarious or disastrous but you'll never truly know until you select it and to add to that you have a limited time to select your response to keep the conversation flowing rather than staring at the person dead eyed for 5 minutes weighing the choices up like in other rpgs. It's a really unique system and it works surprisingly well, i'd love to see more versions of it in other games.

Some of the character's are genuinely great and depending on how you treat them it has a surprising amount of endings that gel together in various combinations pretty nicely. This is surprising considering how unfinished the game clearly is with one faction in particular having a part in the game clearly destined to be more that never show up again in the game later.

The combat is kind of the biggest aspect of broken I found in the game. First playthrough I had to start the game again as I got to an unbeatable boss. Is the boss hard? no. The reason being I'd put points into weapons other than the pistol. Best and only good weapon in the game. The level up system and skills are generally a broken mess a lot of people never got past and it's a shame because there are great moments, characters (Sie!) and systems here that are often overlooked due to the troubled development it had.

Overall I highly recommend trying it. It must be cheap to get hold of by now and it's great despite it's rough edges (Only level the pistol!)

+ Dialogue system is still pretty unique over 10 years later.
+ Surprisingly cohesive ending combinations.
+ Sie is great.

- Combat and leveling up is dreadful.
- Parts feel unfinished.

Look I know there are better Monster Hunter games out there but nothing, and I mean nothing, will top playing a fully HD MonHun using the 80+ hour battery life of that amazing Wii U Pro Controller and without a HUD cluttering the beautiful scenery because all of that information is relegated to the tablet which can be effectively propped up as a second screen and has touch control menu shortcuts so you don't have to make naruto no jutsu hand pretzels just to open the map

Hunting with that setup gave me a satisfaction that felt like running a NASA operation or smth