If you never played a fighting game before, if you're an expert, or if you are someone like me who is somewhere in between, there's a lot to love about Street Fighter 6. Two great control schemes that can be played alongside each other, a pretty cool World Tour mode that has tons of nods to the Street Fighter/Final Fight lore, and a bunch of characters both new and old with their own gimmicks. I barely played Street Fighter V when I rented it, and, while I heard it got better with updates, it was 6 that got me back into Street Fighter.

Continues from True Kiss Destination as an experimental DDR without the DDR name and a focus on a specific band. Everything that was good about True Kiss Destination is here, from the unique backgrounds for every song, the surprisingly difficult unlockable Super Maniac mode, to the good framerate. This one has even more speed mods, a ton of different arrow designs to choose from (including the original DDR arrows), the arrows now have different colors like 3rd Mix, and the music is a lot better because it's by the band that gave us the Sonic 1 and 2 soundtracks. It's still a pretty small songlist of only 13 songs, 17 if you have a specific Greatest Hits album, but I had more fun with this one than TKD.

With DDR being such a big hit in Japan, they decided to make a few spinoffs featuring music by specific bands and give them the "Dancing Stage" name. This is an experimental release, with some ideas showing up in later games (speed modifiers, a modifier menu, a difficulty beyond Maniac), and a few that didn't (different looking arrows on each difficulty which were kind of hard to read, difficulty ratings with decimals). I wasn't particularly a fan of the music outside of mild interest that there's a 90's J-Pop version of Toto's Africa, and it just led to some awkward charts. But hey, it gave us Sexy Planet and Celebrate Nite!

Everyone makes fun of how Capcom never made new sprites for Morrigan after this game, but that really is just a testament to how good this game looks. It plays really well too. Dashes, being able to block in midair, having three levels of speed, and all those over-the-top special moves and even normals everyone has. It's just fun experimenting to see what one can do with them.

They tried to experiment with the super meter, but I don't know if I really like it. Doing any regular special move when it's full makes it a super special move, but there's also actual supers as well, and often I would do a special move not knowing it was full and waste the meter. Also, it drains, so you can't save it for later. Also, the AI is quite tough in this game, though it's not as bad as US Super Turbo.

I would imagine the updates to this game only got better from here, but I have yet to play them outside of a little Vampire Savior way back in the day.

Multiplayer Bomberman is still fun and they didn't really screw it up, it has better netcode than R 1 by virtue of actually being playable (outside of a strange issue with my Ethernet adapter that only this game and R Online has; YMMV), and it has the great battle royale mode from R Online. However, it is sullied by its price point, a lack of multiplayer levels beyond the Castle mode, and a story mode that, while goes in better directions than the original R storyline-wise, is just kind of boring gameplay-wise. Still a great time with other people, just like any Bomberman game.

Castle is this game's take on asymmetric multiplayer games. One Bomberman has a castle, and he has to defend against 25 invaders. Having played this with actual people, this can be fun especially with a good castle design courtesy of this game's level editor. There are some major balancing issues (Bean Bomber is this game's win button), and it is weird that getting to a treasure as an invader just takes you out of the game entirely, but it's not bad.

They tried to do something different with the Story mode, but it is just a slog to go through. They tried to do a Sonic Frontiers kind of style with huge segmented levels instead of the series of self-contained smaller levels of the original, but it just ends up being lots of big empty rooms with not a lot in them. The action is interrupted with Castle battles which either last too long or too short. There's only four (real) bosses, with the variation from the original is that you collect little alien babies and put them into a cannon to damage the boss instead of just trying to bomb them constantly while they're down. I prefer the original R's story mode even with all of its issues, but I guess I can appreciate the guts of having THAT reason for universal destruction in a game that appears to be made for all ages.

The multiplayer is still where it is at. Standard battles are still fun, and you can still play them with 8 players locally (it does have the option for 16 players, though I have yet to find out if a 16 player online Standard match is possible). They did at least have Power Zone and Speed Zone, but there's not a lot of levels to choose from. There's not even any levels that use the Castle mode gimmicks, which is surprising considering how much focus this game gave that mode. Would have been cool to have custom normal levels (not for the graded modes, of course), but alas, that level editor is only for Castle mode.

Grand Prix, the team battle mode, sadly loses two of the modes from the original R. This is a pity as I would have loved to play them with this game's actually good netcode.

Battle 64, the battle royale mode, is as fun as ever, though now that it is locked to a $50 game instead of a F2P one means it's far less likely to meet other people instead of the aforementioned AI players that are far too easy to trap and never bother to use bomb punches, kicks, or even use any of the bombers with special abilities. They also forgot to put in the alternate Battle 64 level that actually gives each of the rooms its own theme, which was a highlight of the later life of R Online.