While I had a good run, It's kinda hard to recommend The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa.

The first couple of hours were fun but after that, I didn't really have anything to do. I can only smoke and listen to melancholic music for so long before getting bored. I wish some in-game events didn't have such specific requirements, maybe that would help to fill these gaps the game has. But hey, maybe that's the way it's supposed to be, considering how it all fits at the end.

I'm looking forward to checking out the upcoming game from yeo "Fading Afternoon", and see how he can improve this formula.

When I read Burning Rangers, I wasn't expecting a literal futuristic firefighting game. Which I somewhat appreciate you know? I haven't seen many firefighting games outside of a couple on the NES/SNES. The other ones I checked tend to be lame unity games or just shovelware. If you have any hidden suggestions, i'm down.

Now for a lil write-up about the game: I thought it was pretty fun, there's 4 missions and they all last around 20-30 minutes each, making the game a total of 2 hours long. You basically have to go to X destination and extinguish fires/save people along the way. Then at the end of each stage, you fight a boss, which are whatever, I killed most of them under 30 seconds except for the final boss which takes a bit longer.
The camera can be complete shit in some sections, specially underwater but thankfully you have a nice lady giving you indications at all times in case these things happen or you simply get lost.

Banger soundtrack which is kind of expected coming from Sonic Team and there's a randomizer mode after you finish the game if you end up wanting more.

I don't like this new genre of boomer shooters. Maybe i'm just looking for some new stuff and not bland looking levels with repetitive enemies.

Dusk is quite like that for it's first 5 hours which kind of tampered my enjoyment of the game. I got what I was looking for in Chapter 3, which has more of a bizarre level design and cool scenarios, ultimately ending the game on a good note for me. I can't remember a single song, maybe it's just me but these metal songs that are on every single one of these games are just indistinguishable from one another.

There really isn't anything to more to add, if you ever played quake or any other of these games, you know exactly what you're getting here.

"Distinctive" videogames are something I really appreciate, and it's weird to me that there aren't many games like this considering how much of a hit Initial D was, this one is clearly inspired by it.

A racing rpg can sound kind of grindy and it could be, with some races being absolutely grueling, it's best that you check a guide to keep your car up to pace, if you play on emu save stating is a blessing in this game.

The "random encounters" (which aren't really random since you can avoid them) are quite short, often being a very short lap which would make it shorter than any rpg battle. There's a shit ton of customization, you can steal your opponents parts after you beat them including their bodies, but cmon, if you set me with Toyota AE86ish car from the beginning, there's no way i'm changing it.

I wish it didn't go full bananas towards the end, square style, but i'm really glad I played it and I never really got tired of it, i guess that's saying something.

As a challenge for the rest of the year, i've decided to only coonsoom videogames that are supposedly really good. The first stop is 13 sentinels, a game I barely seen anything negative about and kids in the block wouldn't stop calling it "peak medium".

If you like sci-fi, you got a lot here. It pulls pretty much every trope that you could think of, and while it's cool to see a lot of these references, it gets kind of overwhelming and I wish it went for something a little more unique.

I didn't really care for the tower defense part of the game, it was alright and doesn't require a lot of strategy, funny how most maps completely shit on the framerate. I think the most fun I had with the game was trying to piece everything together chronologically and uncovering the plot, despite the destination, well.. not being really that satisfying, the journey to get there was really fun to discover and it made me finish the game in less than a week. I also really liked most of the cast, shoutout to Takatoshi and Miura.

I'll probably appreciate it more on retrospective, would I recommend it to someone? Sure, if they like visual novels, it's probably the prettiest one ive seen.

searching for the experience that I once felt after playing the first game, it's sad seeing swery stray further and further from it.

now i'm one to put up with jank, a lot of the stuff here i fuck with but there's one thing in specific that annoyed me:
for a game about wasting time, i hate how bad is it at it; the reason being that the only way time moves is just being outside doing nothing. being inside buildings or doing minigames just freezes time, which is stupid considering how slow the in-game clock is. so if you wanna pass time you'll either wait around or start smoking to skip time, which is what you'll likely end up doing sadly.

I'll give it some points on the schizo-meter when it comes to the 400 achievos/stamps, because the requirements for them are absolutely ridiculous. Like spending 1 year in-game, shooting your little partner patty in the face 300 times or killing thousands of animals. if there's something tedious you can think of, you'll have you do it 100 times. The worst part is that there's a dedicated community that did all of this, only to find out one stamp is bugged due to one of the fetch quests not triggering properly, swery you fucking asshole.

if i wasn't so attached to york and dp in general, i would've flushed it right away, this game is worse than the first one in every single aspect but hey, it did scratch some of that itch i had for DP.

Decent racing game if all you wanna do is drift a bit, since it's piss easy and broken, giving you an insane speed boost. However you can stay ahead of your opponent right away since somehow Takumi gets the lead at the start of almost every race lmao, i wish it had a bit of more strategy and catching up to your opponents like the series. also the order of the races are pretty random, they don't follow the manga or series at all.

The most dissapointing thing was the soundtrack, not that I was expecting some high quality production eurobeat on the ps1 or something, but it's just really dull and not catchy at all. Other than that, the driving is kinda satisfying but you don't have to put much thought into it since it doesn't have any physics and messing up mostly goes unpunished.

Interesting one for me. This game is often referred as one if not the best boxing game out there by a lot boxing purists. Mainly due to it's heavily detailed career mode so I had to give it a go.

I was pretty excited launching it up since I love games like Fight Night, Ring King, ect. So i boot up arcade mode and i get my ass whooped immediately, the movement felt terrible and so fast that it feels like you activated turbo on an emulator or something. Despite all that, due to my love for HNI, I kept going (and mapped the "sway" button that for some reason is not mapped, please do that) and started getting used to the crazy pace the game has. Despite feeling so arcadey, it's pretty detailed, sticking to your strengths is essential, so having knowledge about the characters style can be pretty useful.

If you want to try the career mode a guide is pretty much mandatory if you're looking to have any success (unless you know japanese and are a nutritionist lol). I used this guide myself and it led me to a WBA title :) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zN2xE2EADInboBMxLi-6TScuA9k2VyKYkpVs7b1STQg/edit