looking back to the miserable state of the games industry in the seventh generation, i have to say that the feverish cries to find the citizen kane of gaming - basically paltry, philistine shorthand for the holy grail of the medium, a work that legitimizes the practice and is enshrined in the canon - were super funny, not only because of the obvious nod to that works strengths with relation to filmmaking (which cant be replicated in games wholesale), but also way more specifically because that movie is the direct result of several contextual, social, and political factors that basically 100% mean games will literally never, ever get their own citizen kane. the last of us, for a time, was that 'citizen kane', in the eyes of many. which is insane because this title introduces literally nothing new in the AAA environ through either storytelling, mechanics, or structure (even when it was released it was patchwork pastiche of everything that came before it) and on top of that it was heavily corporate funded focus-tested prestige slush which in effect fully betrays the idea of this game being a ‘citizen kane’ type. a citizen kane of the medium would have to do more than be soulless and perfunctory interactivity Big Video Games decide for you has artistic merit - i'd even go one step further to say that if anything, Big Video Games would probably frown on the citizen kane of video games, similarly to how orson welles legacy was attacked and dismantled by hollywoods vanguard again and again, and again and again and again. it amuses me this is happening yet again with god of war but what can i say i guess it's tough being a sore winner

Another comfort game. I love when a game is fully committed to making you engage in really mundane tasks. Walking down the hill from your home, passing all the other houses on your way into town, maybe trying your luck with the gacha along the way, making sure to grab some cat food on the way back home, slowly crossing things off your checklist. This shit is exciting to me. Shenmue nails all of that perfectly. Over the course of the game, I became intimately familiar with Yokosuka and its denizens. It almost felt like a second home. It’s one of my favourites. I love it.

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of a decade's worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid twitchcore autoplaying bullshit that should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou ever again lest they face legally enforced financial restitution. just play nex machina man. or watch NFL. been a fun season for that. fuck the review man let's talk sports in the comments

Like the swiss army knife of videogames. Pack it all in, excellently balanced survival gameplay, never forgetting to pepper it with sufficient action adventure shooting fun.
Ressource and inventory management, cheesy 80s one-liners, cool puzzles and a batsht crazy story, honoring all that Resident Evil stands for.
I was a bit unsure why people love this game so much but the last "water sports" moments hit it home for me.

Liked Village a tiny bit more tho, and now I gotta watch videos to explain all the twisted narrative connections to my dumb ass.

The real benefit of living in the future isn't the high-end 4K videogames we get. It's that legacy publishers are desperate enough that they'll let the world play all their killer Japan-only shit.

Hebereke is one of the best games on the Famicom/NES. Easily in my top 5, anyway. It's a full-blown Metroidvania with the sensibilities of Parodius. Stuff that used to get lumped together under the umbrella of "mad Jap games", that I now appreciate as "funny guys making good jokes". There's no backstory to any of its weird characters, or much of a plot. It's just daft stuff jumping around and crows that take explosive dogshits on you. I can enjoy serious, lore-heavy, socially relevant games as much as anybody, but shit like this is definitely my comfort zone. Hebereke's characters don't even seem like they've been designed with the game in mind. In the years following, they've appeared in puzzle games, stupid experimental titles and for much longer than you'd expect, yonkoma manga characters in the back of games magazines. They're just silly doodles, and we don't really care about who they are. In the game's intro, Hebe starts explaining the backstory and gives up halfway, resolving "Y'know what? I really can't be bothered. Read the backstory in the manual or something." Beautiful.

This release just as half-baked and crummy. It's the Famicom game running in an emulator. There are modern conveniences, like a rewind and save system, but it's all fairly rudimentary. There's also an Achievements system, that I was quick to disable in the settings. The most jarring thing is the Japanese text. You can switch between English and Japanese in the menus, but everything in-game has been left untouched. They have bothered to do a full translation of everything in it, but you access this by watching each scene play out in Japanese and then browse to a menu to view the new English dialogue boxes. I'd suspect that if the emulator can track player progress well enough to implement an achievement system, overlaying the dialogue boxes with English text wouldn't be outside the realm of possibilities, but I guess Sunsoft didn't really think of that, and we're stuck playing a barely-localised game.

There had been an English version of Hebereke before, but that was one of those awkward early-90s localisations. Released in limited numbers in limited territories, Ufouria: The Saga basically stripped out all the humour and mad shit from the game, replacing it with bland toyetic filler. Curiously, Ufouria doesn't appear in this version, even though screenshots, artwork and full scans of the German manual do. I'm not going to cry over not getting access to a version of the game I like less, but I do think it's a shame for those with a fondness or nostalgia for this specific wart on videogame history. I grew up in the PAL region too. I remember the hazards of navigating the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, with the Sonic Team, Fleetway, Archie, AoStH and SatAM continuities all fighting for dominance on toy packaging and pillowcases. I don't like sacrificing Lylat Wars for the technically superior Star Fox 64. We probably should be able to play Ufouria, even if I'm never ever going to turn it on.

Hebereke's design mainly benefits from its simplicity. There are none of those vertical shafts of endless platforms that you see in early Metroid. It's much more modest than that. If you know where you're going, you can access any spot on the map within a couple of minutes. Over the course of the game, you'll encounter other characters who will join your party, and each of them come with their own abilities. You'll have to switch between them on the Select menu, but this isn't too much, right? People like Mega Man. Sometimes, when you're switching characters to get past blocked-off areas, or exploit a mechanic to bypass an area quickly, it can feel liberating. There are instances where it feels a little over the top. Only one of your characters can walk on ice, but they have the crappest jump, so you sometimes have to take the run up as O-chan, switch to another character for the jump, and switch back for the landing. It might have been nice to shortcut this by dedicating each shoulder button to switching to each character or something, but again, this is a fairly untouched Famicom ROM. I don't mind this stuff, personally. I've completed Game Gear games on original hardware. I do worry about the appeal for those who have never used a floppy disk before, though.

It's a breezy, silly little game, and its eccentric charm carries a lot of it. One of your guys is a ghost who hits himself in the head with a hammer, and his eyes fly out and attack enemies. There's a tough boss in a suit of armour, and when you successfully break it, there's just a big dumb cat standing there, waiting for you to kill it. I really like Hebereke. I like coming back to rough, old games every now and then, to keep my values in check, and there's few that I have a better time with. If you're going through the heavy-hitter NES games, and you're stuck looking at stuff like Zelda 2 and Startropics, maybe give Hebereke a shot first.

I've had my eye on World of Horror for a long time now, patiently waiting for the game to come out of early access. It feels pointless to even discuss what pulled me into the game; it basically sells itself 'cause... just look at it! Look. at. it.

Every single screen of this game drips with one of the most incredible aesthetics I've ever seen in a game. The 2-bit art works so perfectly at making its gruesome imagery and overload of information put upon you at all times so evoking to look at. Even opening an item's submenu and seeing 20 different icons I can't click on and don't know what they do is interesting here. Combined with a really well-done soundtrack, it's hard not to be completely enraptured by what's in front of me at all times playing the game. I can imagine how the simple art allowed for the solo developer (who apparently made the game part time while being a dentist?!) to flesh out a lot of unique scenarios, which is of course vital for a rougelike.

Indeed, the game has an immense amount of things going on throughout the five different mysteries you tackle each run. So many different encounters with a breadth of different, often very precarious effects, a stupidly high number of unique enemies, and different permutations of survivors, old gods, and backstories to shape the entire way you have to play, there's a lot unique going on. I've beaten 3 runs of the game so far, with 2 more I fucked myself out of victory in the very final stretch out of greed and bad memory (and very precisely those two things!). Even as I slowly work through the game's systems, it's kept up the feeling of being arcane and dangerous.

Indeed, the world never lets you breathe for too long, constantly having to keep up the spinning plates of your two different health meters, injuries you can sustain, and an almost ever-increasing DOOM meter that does exactly what you'd expect it to if it ever reaches 100%. (Spoilers: You're doomed!) This is where most of the game's horror comes in, constantly under stress of being just a couple of bad decisions away from all of reality crumbling away. The game definitely has a couple of scares and plenty of unsettling things as you'd expect—a few of the DOOM-based game over texts have been lingering in my mind since I've first read them—but it's all very manageable and interspersed with a solid layer of shlockiness.

At first, I was really unsure about the game's structure, as the genre's fatal question lightly flickered in the back of my mind: "would I have liked this more if it wasn't a roguelike?". The way each case you take lays out is admittedly strange. Each case's story advances when you explore a certain area, but the encounter you get while exploring is not one tied to the case and you can go explore other areas at your... something vaguely approximating leisure. The case stories are fun little experiences, but of course with the roguelike nature, you'll be seeing these cases several times over (more often than the individual events for certain), so what's left?? Then I realized, even as the exact case events fade into the background on successive runs, so pops out the natural stories of a playthrough.

Getting a particularly bad skill check roll and catching the attention of a being known simply as [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL], a constant presence just out of sight throughout the run, slowly getting closer... When I tried to save and quit out of the game, all I was told is [YOU CANNOT RUN FROM SOMETHING TRULY EVIL]. When I tried to rest at my very own home, I was threatened with [SOMETHING TRULY EVIL KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE]. When the mysterious figure finally lurched upon me, the screen glitching nonstop, all I could do was [CRY FOR IT], [BLEED FOR IT], and finally [DIE FOR IT], and in my struggle against these options, I was forced upon the third one. I later found out that this series of events ruining my entire run were something I could have survived through, but it still left it an incredibly visceral, awesome experience.

Contrast that, on one of my last runs, I came out of a boss literally as close to death as possible, getting rid of all my items and spells in a play that I'm still surprised got me out of the fight alive. I spent the rest of the game getting by on the skin of my teeth and then, by the highest grace of god, that ended up a run I won. All of the stress and fear of what could destroy me around the corner in the face of glorious victory. It's the best rougelike feeling you could ask for.

So, the game works really well as a roguelike, one that keeps pulling me back in the more I think about it, like it's an elder god of its own. Sure, there's a couple of small issues I have with the game that I could elaborate more upon, namely the limited feeling combat system with defensive options that feel like they cost too much to be worth using. I'm sure as I play a bit more the repetition of the 24 cases will start to grate on me and I will start to really see the seams of repetition and eventually I will get bored of continuing it, just as I do with every game. However, even if I stopped right now, the time I put into the experience would be more than satisfying. It's all not a very big deal though in the face of everything else feeling viscerally unique and interesting. Definitely one of the best games released so far this year.

hazier, sillier, and more playful than dream land, adventure takes an expansive approach to the nascent formula and adds the finishing touches necessary to elevate it even higher, doubling down on its unique personality, design philosophy, and impeccable style

the key addition here's the power snatching, but what really makes it pop is how the levels and encounters are so often built with it in mind: big zones with lots of optional interactions, secrets, and possibilities you'd never encounter on your first go, and never ever ever if you weren't explicitly meeting the game half way and inhabiting its joyful spirit

the laid back difficulty makes stuff like turning into a fucked up wheel and zooming around all haphazard feel encouraged; its lack of imposition an invitation to take chances and experiment in ways a harsher game might discourage or outright prohibit. you're given no reason not to treat every situation like a canvas, to muck about and to proceed without consequence with the reward being "play" at its most earnest and wide eyed

"you're gonna be just fine", sakurai whispers in my ear as I send my dumb ass down the same chasm for the third time in a row in case it's different this time

feeling cute, might turn into a UFO later; might light a wick and shoot myself out of cannon; might make dedede feed me dozens of eggs as punishment for getting smoked at quick draw. as much as you've seen, it never loses its ability to skirt familiarity and catch you off guard

there's a lot of slowdown here, but if shoot em ups taught me anything it's that slowdown just means you're probably looking at something too fuckin sick. this is for your protection; you're experiencing mercy; the human brain isn't equipped for this kind of stimuli

it may feel like smoke's about to billow from the cartridge slot at any moment, but hal laboratory deserves to burn down your landlord's apartment — it's just common sense

anyway: I was wrong in thinking dedede should be put to the guillotine, and if you need me I'll be in the yogurt yard, eating lollipops and giving metaknight's goons german suplexes

tonight dream land will sleep well

You ever play an action game and notice yourself mashing your moves out even though you know they have cooldowns between them? It's kind of a gut reaction and a self-fulfilling mishap: You mash to psychologically get yourself out of a tough situation, and that chaotic movement only further hurts you. Quicksand.

But Shinobi's a game about overcoming mashing instincts - sometimes by force. The original and Shadow Dancer both give you a single lifepoint to make it through - you can't aggro your way through things. Try it and take a fussless curbstomp. They're like Elevator Action and Rolling Thunder's brand of 'gunning-but-not-running' action, where you have to plan your moves ahead and commit to risky endeavors - reflexes are natural parts of surviving them, but without anticipation and timing, you're deadmeat. Revenge of Shinobi carried these philosophies into a larger scope with increased toolkits and platforming, while making healthbars more forgiving to compensate. But the tradeoff was a half-step ahead and feels uncomfortably transitional. Speaking for myself, when I play RoS, I want to play reactively, but I get fucked over. It's things like the slow horizontal movement, the uncomfortable timing on the double-jump, Musashi's chunky attack options, etc. I have tools that make feel like I should be able to rush ahead, but I feel like the designers still intend you to sit back and plan ahead. It doesn't feel complementary or satisfying; I feel underwhelmed playing slow, and underpowered playing fast. And when my patience gets tested, I button-mash.

III is cool because it refines what RoS brings to the table while iterating further. It has a very rhythmic pace to movement. There's still odd control discrepancies, but here they feel like intentional paramaters for encouraging thoughtful play. Mastering the timing of the double-jump, the angle and rebound of the divekick, the dash attack and laser-sharp kunai throws - these become drum-like beats to the rhythm and lead of your playstyle. It works perfectly for III's difficulty curve: A surprisingly comfortable game until the last bits, but that gives you space to develop your movement language and flow - and on return playthroughs, you feel like you're swimming. Every move you make is a matter of instinct but ultimately-calculated - and when you catch yourself mashing, that's when you know you're getting ahead of yourself. Airtime is floaty but punctuated through sharp divekicks, and it's really addicting to bop from one enemy to another. My favorite stages were around the midsection of the game where you have to time your walljumps - and by surprise, I was pretty fond about stage 7-2. I think having an all-platforming section to capstone the game is kinda brilliant - like an exercise of self-discipline before a final confrontation.

The part before that though, 7-1? Fucking abominable. I hate having to navigate under the jet exhausts. And don't get me started on 6-2's maze shenanigans and the dumbass kabuki boss.

Shinobi III is also just really fucking badass. It doesn't have the movie parody bosses or the Yuzo Koshiro music, but it owns itself and does so many cool things with the stage setpieces, bosses and music. You fight mechas on a surfboard while this song plays. 'Need I say more' is an easy throwaway, but like, dude - literally. Seriously. Fergaliciously.

Ok actually, one thing that makes the art especially cool? The use of soft grey gradients and shadows. Shinobi's never been a 'vivid' game visually, there's much to parse taken as-is on HD displays, but on CRT? Absolutely killer. Maybe the biggest facelift any game has ever gotten from CRT filtering. Everything blends like paint and has so much depth to it. When that first stage hits you and you see the parallax trees with the sun casting rays against them? Unbeatable.

Best of the Shinobi works and a loud-and-proud Genesis killer app. It's that rare 16-bit magic where everything feels organic, simple, and aggressively satisfying, up there with SoR2 and Phantasy Star IV for doing everything right where it counts. Props to RoS for laying the groundwork, but uh, when people say that game's better than III? Total buffoonery. Moron-pilled and poop-shitted. Go to jail. Re-evaluate yourself. Do better.

Popular perception of sequels suggests they’re usually worse than the original. This arguably rings truer for films than other media, but I have frequently felt mystified when playing game sequels I’d often heard described as better than their predecessor, usually finding that other cornerstones of the experience are neglected or lost in pursuit of mechanical refinement. This is common enough for me that it’s part of why, despite loving the first, I deliberately avoided playing Lost Judgment for over a year. I’ve rarely been so glad to have my misgivings dispelled.

Judgment’s walljumping, leapfrogging and cancelling moves via EX Boost were exactly the sort of expressive tools that RGG Studio’s combat always needed, but Lost Judgment takes several further steps to result in what’s by far their most cohesive system. Buffing Yagami’s attack speed, damage or knockdown resistance through dodges, charged attacks and parries respectively makes styles far more functionally distinct than the first game’s conceptually sound but imbalanced attempt at separating them into fighting individuals and crowds. Get two or more of these active at once and you can do some pretty fun stuff, EX-actions feeling more congruous now that Yagami’s able to do cool things without them. There’s less to it than it looks, but juggling being easier and more consistent pull off than in Judgment allows for more creativity on the player’s part and encourages better knowledge of Yagami’s moves, while also retaining just enough of a barrier that it feels more proportional to its reward than at least two other Dragon Engine titles’ combat. What accentuates this is that enemies are similarly fleshed out, between heavy ones that can throw each other at you and new status effects to watch out for among those with weapons, while bosses are (generally) no longer Frankensteined out of old assets and feel all the more distinctive for it. There’s enough to chew on that I recall feeling like there was a party going on between my hands at this part early on in my first playthrough.

Most full-on action games are still better alternatives to Lost Judgment if combat specifically is what you’re after, but that’s fine, because it’s stuffed to the gills with other things to do. It deserves as much credit for how much more enjoyable it’s made traversing the hub cities this time around, especially Ijincho. With the simple addition of a skateboard, what was once a mire of either absent-mindedly holding forward for prolonged periods or taxi-induced cuts to black becomes a giant playground of endless obstacles to jump over and grind along. Climbing hasn’t much more going on than something like Uncharted’s, but the grip meter at least adds a degree of tension to it, enough so that there are timed challenges in the (very handy) Gauntlet menu. Side cases retain the thematic harmony with the main plot that they enjoyed in the first game, though I did very few on my first run since I was so gripped by wanting to see what happened next.

What the plot comparatively lacks in personal stakes for Yagami, it makes up for in being thought provoking. The issues at its core are treated with a healthy dose of nuance to the extent that even Yagami’s friends will occasionally comment on sharing Kuwana’s perspective; the Mole was, and is, great in his own way, but they made the right call not trying to one up him and instead opting for an antagonist who’s not so clear cut, handling the (usually tired) angle of grey morality with grace. There’s an apparent step up on various levels of its presentation too. Few bosses have had quite so mythical a backdrop as that of Tesso’s first encounter, with its neon-lit rain and eerie throat singing, while the modellers and artists have gotten noticeably better at making characters created from scratch look believable. I was genuinely surprised to learn that Akutsu isn’t facescanned, for instance, a marked contrast from the days of Yakuza protagonists looking uncanny when onscreen alongside obviously real people.

I’ve only just now mentioned Yakuza by name because, increasingly, I feel that Judgment shouldn’t be lumped in with it as though the two are synonymous. I mentioned part of why I avoided playing Lost Judgment for so long at the start; the other part was Yakuza, or more specifically its approach to sequels. They’d conditioned me to expect that Lost Judgment would either diminish or totally axe some of the original’s good ideas for seemingly no reason other than difference for difference’s sake, something likely brought on by a release schedule that occasionally feels akin to an assembly line. It not only does nothing of the kind, it’s marinated in a palpable albeit not completely successful effort at improvement from top to bottom. In any case, the first Judgment did better than most of its sister series in considerably less time despite technically being a new IP, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest one has an appeal which the other lacks.

For me, that appeal lies in the relative clarity of what this now-duology wants to be and do. As aforementioned, Lost Judgment isn’t an entirely rosy sequel; among other things, Hoshino’s dragged through the mud to such a cartoonish extent I can only assume one of the writers (understandably) wanted Saori for himself, detective segments are barebones as ever and perhaps the only part of Kaito’s DLC that isn’t underwhelming is its price tag. These are only slight blemishes, though, on what’s otherwise a game which has dug in its heels and demonstrated unwavering belief in its identity as an (arguably for the first time) unambiguously solid beat ‘em up with plenty to say and plenty else to do that all ties into it. I’m simultaneously interested in a potential third Judgment and so satisfied with the two we now have that I don’t think it’s really needed. It’s almost enough to make a man forget about Sawa-sensei for a split second.

It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.

If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.

There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.

Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.

I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.

However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.

There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.