Might be cliche to have this at the top, but I enjoyed it almost entirely throughout. Mesmerisingly inspiring music, rock-solid action platforming, and a meticulously detailed castle that none of the other 'vanias I've played since have surpassed. Good shit. Will be replaying.

Honestly, as great as the game is by most of its merits, Loader does a lot of heavy lifting here. Almost everything about Loader's abilities and movement make her one of my favourite characters to play as in any videogame, and I'd kill for a single player game designed around such a toolset. Oh, and everything else is really neat too. I just wish it were better optimised, if anything.

Such an explosive improvement to the first game in every way. I was really blown away by it after finishing it, and after having nearly a year to think about it, I've only grown fonder (thanks to so many wonderful writeups on this site). Combat is smooth and responsive, and the story is way more impressive - despite stumbling in the finale as with the first game. Going to miss PS2 Kiryu, but looking forward to more.

I was a Souls hater for so long despite having never sat down and played it - and when I did, I was glad I had given it a try but decided it simply wasn't something I could ever beat, giving up as early as the Undead Parish.
It was only thanks to the inspiration from a dear friend that pushed me further in, and despite many stumbles, I came out the other end a changed man. It's an incredible journey, and despite the design in the second half, I hold this in high regard for how it affected my life on a personal level.

But FUCK Tomb of the Giants, never again, eat shit.

If a game, upon me beating it, draws me to then complete all 3 other story routes within 24 hours of me beating it, when i normally can't play any one game for more than an hour at a time...I'd wager that means I was probably enjoying it.
Just an absolute masterclass in making a sequel, it's as close as you can get to a playable action movie on PS1, and such a technological frontflip ahead of the first game.

Also Leon is so, so loveably stupid. Can't wait to see more of him.

I'm almost completely tied between this and Dark Souls, and decided my love of Resi 2 would be the tiebreaker. That said, while Demon's Souls didn't have the same resonance that Dark Souls' near-seamless world carried, it made up for it with what I found to be a far more enjoyable gameplay loop.
Actually beating the final boss on call with friends was a really good feeling and cemented my love for this series.

Now where the hell are the sales on Dark Souls 2 and 3? Where, Bandai?

I may be too stupid to understand any of the greater implications of the plot, the story, the themes, but maybe that's what makes a game truly special - when you can spend just as much time debating such things with other people as you can from playing it.
It does help that the act of playing Signalis itself was an enjoyable, unsettling experience that I'm not sure I'd want to do again, but oh-so glad that I did. A genuine triumph of an indie¹ game, and one I'm a little guilty that I played through the now-defunct Humble Games Collection rather than buying it outright.

¹well, as indie as a game published by Humble can be.

Despite how much better I thought Resident Evil 2 was in terms of tech, the atmosphere of the two couldn't be more different, and in some ways I find the original game a little more personally enjoyable in this aspect. The Spencer Mansion is as iconic as videogame locales get, it's like an Evil Peach's Castle. The cheesy FMV is the cherry on top of the clumsy voice acting, and mastering the mansion's layout feels more personal and rewarding than the rollercoaster ride of Resi 2's environments.

Tangential, but I did beat Jill's scenario in the RE1 Remake this year too - not marking it as finished til I beat Chris' scenario too, though.

The only Castlevania I've played since SotN to come close to the enjoyment I felt from playing that - and that makes it pretty damn good in my books. The map and controls are a vast improvement from Harmony, but what really surprised me was the story. A little predictable, but marked something genuinely interesting and unique within the series. No wonder it got a sequel on DS, and I very much look forward to seeing if it can live up.

Ah, the ever controversial Sonic the Hedgehog. A lot of my mutuals blasted this game for its repetitive gameplay loop, ugly environments, and unimaginative story. And the thing is...I can't say they're wrong. All of those hamper the game, and indeed I only gave it a 6/10. But it cracks my top 10 because god damn, I love being fast, man. And having a completely free, unrestricted (mostly) playground to blast around in and do little challenges and stuff in, was just so liberating. I was completely engrossed thanks entirely to the open world, and god I hope it sticks around, maybe next time they can actually build all the levels into the open world rather than those...rather not-so-good cyberspace levels. But yeah, very special game for me (and a very kind gift as well) so it holds firm.

I was pretty jaded and burnt out on Halo after getting through 3, and so I put off ODST for the longest time. I regret that a little bit, because god damn, this surprised me. ODST wasn't as different from the core games as I'd have liked, but the atmosphere is unparalleled by the other entries. Gunplay was as good as always, and it was really cool to see a non-linear approach. Story went over my head completely, but it didn't even matter. Playing this really gave me the Halo bug again, to the point I'm even considering watching the dreaded live-action series...

It's Metroid, it's Super, and it meant a lot for gaming history. That being said, I kinda didn't nearly like it as much as just about everyone else! I thought it was fine, but traversing the world honestly got really repetitive and confusing to me with how many unmarked one-way corridors there were. However, the game is well and truly good, even if not remotely my favourite Metroid.

This game pissed me off and, well, burned me out in the later stuff, but I can't help but marvel at how much content they put in here - and how awesome the crashes are. They really got a lot out of the PS2 for this one, and while I prefer 2 overall, 3 is arguably the better game in terms of pure quality.

People really buried this and Castlevania 64, and that makes me sad because beyond the fact that it isn't Mario 64, it's genuinely decent. I prefer a lot of the original release's atmosphere, but this is the better game by virtue of having more content. It was a bold and inventive way to bring Castlevania into 3D, and I wouldn't have minded them giving it one more proper go rather than handing the reigns entirely to IGA.

I gotta get through these games faster. The first Armored Core was a good ol' time, but this one I liked a little less. Having a more serialised campaign wasn't a bad change, but it simply wasn't very high-calibre. What really ground my gears were some of the arena mode AI, which were just cheap and seemingly unstoppable, but it's altogether a fun offshoot of the original game - really glad it wasn't considered a proper sequel.

The story is some of the most laughably awful stuff around, and that's half the charm. The combat wasn't bad either! I was expecting a lot less from this, but there's a genuinely cool style amidst the edge. Shame about the dreadful DLC.

343's foray into doing to Halo what Disney would do to Star Wars didn't start on too bad a note, honestly (much like Disney with Star Wars, in my opinion). There's a clear and immediate diversion in how 343 do things compared to Bungie, and I thought the main plot was a load of old bollocks, but the steps taken to humanise Master Chief legitimately made me care for him more - there's more life to the characters in this game, however shallow, than any of the Bungie games - sans maybe Reach? The gameplay wasn't bad, though I wasn't too fond of the new additions (Forerunner baddies and their respective lame guns).

Turns out that mashing a bunch of random old Sonic levels and music into a cute new artstyle and pretty faithful physics results in a fun, if uninspired game. It's like a small pill containing the very best of Classic Sonic, in one weird misshapen package - but well worth a look.

Honestly quite liked this, more than most of the 8-bit lineup. Levels were only bullshit on occasion, Fang is lovably pathetic, and the music is real neat. I only wish the levels were more memorable in terms of aesthetic.

Shoot me, I liked DmC more than DMC4, without a shadow of doubt. Didn't like how Nero played early on, and Dante didn't feel right for the enemy design in this game at all. Still, I actually liked the story in all its charismatic nonsense, and even Devil May Cry at its worst is still Devil May Cry...even 2. But this is much, much better than 2. Just not quite my tempo for most of its runtime - and the less said about those dreadful platforming sections, the better.

Resident Evil 3 took risks, which I respect. Wish some of them worked (that dumbass dodge) but a few definitely did (the Nemesis and those quick-time decisions). Great environments and encounters, but the heightened difficulty compared to 2 really took me out of it in places. Still, marked an excellent conclusion to the Raccoon City saga.

I'm glad Nemesis is the real Resi 3 and not this. I did genuinely like it overall, but man it feels undercooked. Zombies are crazy resilient here, but the game showers you in ammo to compensate - feels like both of these could've been nerfed. The new characters are generally a miss on the whole, but the encounters are as cinematic as I'd expect. I also appreciate how they actually used the real-time rendered environments to their advantage, having the camera actually pan in places, though the pre-rendered stuff looks better - as RE1R and RE0 would later prove. Still, not a bad game and one I'd like to see rewritten and improved with a remake.

Not everyday I "beat" a mobile game, but this was a really neat little puzzler. There's not a whole lot to it, and sometimes it feels like you get dealt a bad hand, but runs are short enough that loss never feels crushing.

I enjoyed the ambition and scope, but the technical problems and a really, really bad final level dampened the mood for me a fair bit. It was a really neat co-op adventure for the most part, in spite of a few annoying bugs, but how do you NOT have graphics options? And how does such a low-poly game burn a metaphorical hole in my CPU? I do hope a much-improved sequel is on the cards, though.

I had a fun time with the first game, but it had a few small issues holding it down. So imagine my disappointment when none of those were changed in the sequel. There's more content, but that only serves to further bring out all the imperfections with the controls and menus, and the theming felt like a step down. Still, the puzzles themselves remain engaging and pretty.

I've played this almost as long ago as the copy of Sonic Adventure DX it was unlockable in, but only this year managed to sit down and beat it. Yuzo Koshiro's score feels as good if not better than the Mega Drive soundtrack, and it handles pretty well - though the compromises for 8-bit are very much on display.

It's frustrating in places, but I was surprised how much I was enjoying Castlevania 64 in spite of those frustrations. Even the infamous bomb section wasn't as bad as I expected, simply very tense. Bosses were mostly fun, but Carrie's projectile sucked ass and made her playthrough far less fun than Reinhardt's. I think I enjoyed the music the most, a bit of atmosphere in a 'Vania for a change.

It feels like a rather poor fusion of Devil May Cry and Symphony of the Night's formats. What this basically amounts to is a decent combat system, with an endless mass of corridors that take forever to plod through and have nothing to do in them. It's drawn out for the hell of it and really suffers for it. But when there are actually enemies to fight, and particularly bosses, it really does shine for a few moments. The story is also pretty decent, and I adored the theatrical voice acting. It saddens me to see people dismiss this kind of voicework as "terrible" when it's simply a different context - not every piece of media has to be a carbon copy of Breaking Bad. Castlevania is a B-movie action-horror with dashes of anime, and the voice acting perfectly matches the tone set by the game.
Now, if only the game had less bloody corridors...

I really quite liked the original Bioshock. Excellent environmental storytelling, decent gameplay that matched the frantic nature of the narrative from the protagonists POV, and Rapture is a mesmerising location. Bioshock 2...had very little of its own strengths to live up to that, and I found it to be worse in most ways. The emphasis on action built on top of 1's shoddy gunplay really disappointed me, and felt like a mindless Doom clone for about half of its runtime. The story didn't do much for me either, but redeemed itself with its endings. I just couldn't get into it for the most part, though. Doesn't help that it has a truly abominable PC port.

Kao 3 really disappointed me, and a big part of that was how much of a step up Round 2 was. It took the titular kangaroo from being a 2-bit Crash clone, to a genuine 6/10 Rayman-like. The controls are generally fine, everything looks much nicer, and the levels are actually a little fun. That being said, it does nothing especially unique (the checkpoint system from 1 is gone, it's just normal now) and the addition of voice acting did it no favours. From my understanding, there's two English dubs - one recorded in the USA for consoles, and...the one on Steam, which I can only assume was recorded in Poland. And it shows. Still, not a bad time.

Oh my god, it looks and plays like something you unearth at an archaeological dig site. I have immense respect for the innovations this paved the way for, but the actual experience of playing TLoZ in the modern day is wrought with trials. Still, it actually is easy enough to get to grips with the awkward combat, and it definitely nails that feeling of being on a quest. Neat stuff, Nintendo.

It's funny, I hate fighting games and don't particularly care for Vtubers beyond isolated clips. But the price tag of "free" will lead me to bite almost anything, and I found a decent little fangame in this. Sure, the input-reading AI is bullshit, but having a fighting game be free and light on storage means that I could actually rope friends in - and it turns out, fighting games are only fun when you're playing against a human you know and can have a laugh with.

Not as bad as the internet would have you believe - the music and visuals are lovely, the Chaotix themselves have fun movesets and great designs/animations, and the tether can be used to pretty neat effect if you actually learn how to use it.
That all being said, 5 acts per zone, made mostly of copy/paste level design is a pretty sizable detractor. Had it not failed in something as critical as this, it could've been a genuine A-tier Sonic game, imo.

It's Sonic, but the game hates you and wants you dead. The added challenge is kind of fun, until it isn't. Didn't much like the no-rings bosses, and didn't think much of the levels, but it's a passable Sonic game that you must not play on Game Gear under any circumstances. Please, just play the Master System port.

Castlevania 1, but it's pretty, and a bit better...but maybe also a bit worse? The music is a bop and the spritework is exemplary, but the removal of knockback kinda messes up the flow of the stage design, while other areas feel a little too ramped up in terms of ferocity. It's hard to describe, but I think I slightly prefer the original.

I'm really not sure what to make of this. Yeah, it was free, it had cats, it made me look for them...and I found them! And they're really cute. But like...that's it. It wasn't the most fun I had by any means...buuuut it was completely harmless. Except maybe my eyes, because god damn that's a lot of white.

Pure mediocrity, from music to graphics, to gameplay. At least being an overpowered, unstoppable killing machine is a little fun, but not fun enough to carry things. Felt like an overcorrection from Circle of the Moon, and thus doesn't end up much better off.

I honestly wasn't expecting it to play the way it did - I thought it'd control like a more conventional racing game, but it's more like a third person shooter with ice physics. Remarkable atmosphere and fun maps, but the actual game design made things a little hard to bear towards the end.

This could've been so much further up had they simply hidden items and the cards in parts of the map like any other exploration-based platformer. Instead, it's just bullshit RNG hell for every single thing in the game. That alone killed most of my goodwill, and the map design doesn't do much to save it.

Genuinely not as bad as people make it out to be, but there's only so much bird collecting you can do before it gets kind of old. I can admire the technical achievement on display, but I'd much rather play a non-isometric platformer.

That was it? That was the worst JRPG known to mankind(according to redditor who has only played Final Fantasy 7 and Dragon Quest 11)? That was just a clunky levelling system and a derivative plot! The dungeon designs are pretty bad, but I respect the risks taken and how well integrated the story is compared to FF1, even if it is a note-for-note copy of Star Wars. Still, was really frustrating early on.

God damn, it has no right being this poor. While the graphics are technically high-caliber, they're wasted on depressingly unappealing art design. Everything Rondo did right is needlessly backpedalled. I'd really love to know who decided the game had to be this way?

What can I say? It's old, it's grindy, it's simple. I enjoyed the simplicity of it all, and I can't hate it for its shortcomings given its age, and how important it was for the genre. But I simply can't say that I was having immense amounts of fun in the journey to reach the end.

Shit! I was actually really digging this in the first half! Unfortunately, at that point the difficultly skyrockets and all the small problems with the earlygame become gigantic ones. I'd love to play another game in this vein with better balancing, but the later boss fights become unbelievably cruel. Probably the hardest Resi?

Flat is right, jeez. Half the problems feel like bugs, and the other half feel like the developers didn't actually want to make a fun game. An interesting detour from the big racers like NFS and Burnout, but it ultimately just made me yearn for them even more.

Never thought I'd beat this one. It was a neat distraction for being a phone game but that's all it amounts to. It's like a dopamine Ultraman; 3 minutes of joy, followed by a crash back down to boredom.

I never cared for this game as a kid, but now having finally beat it...it's mid at best. Respectable for how old it is, and as an arcade conversion, but the unforgiving hitboxes make the limited lives even more annoying.

...so like, how is Tails not dead after this anyway? Besides his sudden floor allergy, he surely consumed lethal amounts of sugar from all that mint candy.
Oh yeah, game's not great. It's just half an hour of shitty level design that the actual controls and gimmicks are trying their hardest to carry. It's almost good, actually, but not quite.

World's first kaizo hack, really setting the benchmark. It's an interesting piece of home console gaming history, but past a point it becomes utterly joyless.

I'm putting on the hater gloves; I think inFAMOUS really, really sucks. The combat is clunky, Cole is way too squishy, enemies appear in too great a number for them to all be perfect marksmen, and the missions are incredibly unfun more often than not. Also, I couldn't bring myself to like a single character. Maybe that's the point? I can't bring myself to care. I'm convinced the only inFAMOUS fans are people who played it when they were 12 years old and made it their entire personality without ever replaying as an adult.

I don't want to be too mean to the devs given their situation, but that doesn't mean I have to pretend to have enjoyed this. Also, that is a yellow bipedal RAT, no way is that a kangaroo.

This goddamn kangaroo. I was actually impressed by Kao 2, so to go from that to this direct downgrade was unbelievably disappointing.

Would've been lower if not for the voice acting. I don't think it could be any worse if they tried, and it's simply magical. The game? Dreadful, but there was spirit.

I actually had somewhat fond memories of this one. Turns out its because I got filtered by the third stage, and that was probably for the best. What a catastrophe.

Tedious more than anything. But the decision to make non-linear level design that consists mostly of dead-ends, while also imposing a time limit, is just an insult to the player.

They should've kept its ass in the arcades. I'm not sure a single good decision was made in regards to the design.