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i've been thinking about my relationship with art, and my thoughts at the moment are that what i want in a piece is to feel something. it's not only about being entertaining, it's about catharsis. it's about feeling extremely happy or deeply miserable. it's about having the teeth grinding, the foot tapping, the head scratched. it's about going insane over the details. i want to feel alive. maybe it's a sick thought. maybe i should just live my own life, but i can guarantee, i've been living my own life a lot! much more than i would like to, sometimes.

all the games i've finished this year so far (very few) were a good time, some of them were amazing, really thought-provoking like anodyne 2, but none of them hit me like a truck. until GOD HAND.

GOD HAND makes you feel extremely happy, deeply miserable, with your teeth grinding, your foot tapping, your head scratching... pretty much at the same time! it's commonly known as a very difficult game and it's not an impossible one, but it does require you full commitment. starting with learning the controls: when action games were about swords and guns, with fast-paced movement, GOD HAND was about throwing punches while moving in tank controls. it's all about positioning, a 1v1 it's already a difficult task, but a 2v1? a 4v1? does not help when your crowd control movements are slow as hell! but don't be confused: GOD HAND is not a slow game! actually, if you can't keep up, you will pretty much ended up cooked lol, you have to adapt to the rhythm of the fight. it's all about learning and once you learn, it's about going wild.

and it's not a flashy game. you throw punches. real punches. punches that hit, than you can feel when it hits. GOD HAND it's a dudes rock game but every single dude is rocking on you (in a not-homosexual-way (unfortunately)), and you got rock on them instead. GOD HAND it's a videogame that loves action games. it's a videogame that recognizes the masculine archetypes about the action genre in overall media and at the same time it honors it and it also makes fun of it. GOD HAND is very "manly"! i mean, having blackjack and poker and dogs races as a way to make money makes me think that shinji mikami and the team are either the funniest guys ever or the most heteronormative of all time! and it's very funny either way.

what really matters is that GOD HAND is a videogame that made me feel everything, and in a year that is definitely NOT being my year, with a lot of work and study and personal problems as well, making me sometimes lost my interest in my favorite hobby, it reminds me how great videogames can be and how i can always just punch a son of a bitch when it needs to. you better watch out mf!!!

Some say that the best things are those that take its time in the oven before fully baking, and let me tell ya…

Tour de Pizza fucking COOKED.


It's almost heartwarming to see this realized: I still remember those first Pizza Tower demos on Twitter and Youtube and the Noise always being in the forefront, either as a boss of major part or them or an outright playable character. As we all know, in the final game he’s World 3’s final boss, not even the main antagonist of the game, tho that didn’t stop this psychotic gremlin from being charming as hell… but nah, I really wanted the fucker to be playable, and more than a year later, he’s here, to the dismay of all Italians.

I would have still felt satisfied if Noise felt less interesting or exciting to play as than Peppino, ‘cause I mean, it’s goddam Peppinno, but no, they just HAD to go all out and make a banger move set. I still don’t really know which of the two is my favorite, but that’s just a testIment of how fucking fun Noise is and how it accomplished what it’s going for: to make you feel that you aren’t playing as an overstressed cook, but as a goddam ANIMAL.

If Pepinno was the ‘’fight or flight’’ concept personified, then Noise is just the FIGHT, he cheats the game’s puzzles how many times necessary, he super jumps whenever he wants, he doesn’t need of Gustavo and Brick to save him, he’s got himself! Literally! Like there’s another one of him just becauseWHAT THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER. And I mean, they gave him the sausage gatling, so at this point I’m pretty confident saying the game is finally whole, this is it chief, happiness has been found.

It taps once again into that sheer adrenaline burst that the first playthrough perfect, but in a completely unhinged way. Once you learn how everything about this mad lad works, everything clicks, the levels break open and the amount of tricks you’ll be performing are second nature: skate wall jumps, tornado spins into dives into jumps into more tornado spins, pizza crushers that demolish everything without much of a sweat and using it is super easy, and that’s not even mentioning how ALL extra mechanics, like the ghost transformation or the rocket, are completely changed to fit this rat brain’s way of acting, and it’s exciting to learn and glorious to master. They somehow found a way to make WAR harder yet more fun. HOW.

One would think that, since it isn’t a boss anymore, part of Noise’s completely unhinched persona would be lost in translation to playability, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some levels even change lay-outs to fit him better and be more fun, but at this point I think it was the Noise himself that changed the before entering to make his life easier. His animations, how all title cards just have different drawings of his face on top of the characters, his ‘’no thoughts’’ face each time he fights a boss and how he can DEMOLISH them with the bombs (whoever thought of that should get a raise, they are so fun to use), some new songs that I'm 99% sure are just the sounds that play inside of Noise's head, it’s INSANE, as it should and then some.

It's Pizza Tower, it obviously was gonna be insane and good, but this is next level from what I was expecting, and I’m so happy it’s here. Noise Mouse is real bois, just that justifies completely another playthrough of this game, having bomb combos and level variations is the cherry on top…

Still, huge missed opportunity to not have Noisette or any other bosses playable in the Gustavo and Brick sections, like yeah, more Noise is fun, but I just think that- Oh dear, no I didn’t mean to- OH GOD THERE ARE 100 NOISES SURROUNDING MY HOME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

Stuck with this slack-jawed pawn with bug eyes. There's literal stink lines trailing off of him and he keeps rubbing blood from his diseased gums on the dungeon walls.

For some reason the game runs at 20fps when he's around, please advise.

Kinda garbage, but dang if I don't kinda love it. Feels like something a bunch of Japanese business men carefully concocted in a board room to maximally appeal to 13-year-olds.

Go into this expecting anything but cheap brutishness in the gameplay department, and you're gonna have a bad time. Just toss in a few virtual quarters and enjoy those first-rate cleaver-chop sound effects and the violent splatter of sewer monsters hitting the wall off your 2x4 for about 10 minutes, and then go enjoy something else.

So much to unpack, it's impossible to give this a proper breakdown. Especially with an emotionally complicated ending that's bound to stir discourse like Remake did, with the scale of this ambitious three-part project either failing or succeeding being the highest it's ever been, yet I don't think I could have it any other way. While I don't believe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth proves this trilogy succeeds as a self-contained narrative for newcomers to fully enjoy alongside the old, I think this does a remarkable job of pulling interest in a way I rarely see games do anymore for me.

Now, I don't care for remakes the same way I don't normally care for many adaptations. Because ultimately, no matter how well-made they are in their own right, they are unnecessary so long as the original exists in some capacity. I recognize remakes, remasters, and revivals have, especially in recent years, become an industry of themselves. So, it's all just a matter of personal preference here, and personally I prefer having new experiences than reliving old ones that's often repackaged at current MSRP. I've also seen a lot of the arguments in favor of remakes; that they're necessary to gauge consumer interest in reviving a dormant franchise, they're a compromise for the original's lack of availability, or that it's an opportunity to take a broken concept and do it proper justice -- I don't buy into much of these. I find it more worthwhile to spend creative talent and labor on a direct sequel (or spiritual one) than waste it on retreading old ground. One-to-one remakes don't interest me whatsoever because I see missed opportunities. I understand availability being an issue, but that lands more on companies making excuses for not porting the original to modern platforms. While I believe there are games that fall into the camp of "needs a remake because this just didn't work at all based on the circumstances it was developed within" (Epic Mickey is a golden example here, but I'll save that for another time), too often I find the ones pushed for one feel like whitewashing the past for little gain. Also, I emulate and pirate when necessary because have you seen the economy we live in nowadays so remakes mean nothing to me.

Final Fantasy VII Remake changed that. I still hold the opinion that it's flawed in design, not helped at all by what Rebirth massively improved in direct comparison, but I respect the ambition Squeenix aimed at pushing the boundaries of what a remake can accomplish. This wasn't made to correct or overwrite the original Final Fantasy VII and the statement it proudly made in 1997, one that stood the test of time like a monolith. No, it was made to re-examine the impact of its characters, setting, story and ideas left on the medium. To peel back decades of cultural osmosis, which ironically speaking, clouded everyone's memories and perception about what the game is. But this was simply the promise Remake's controversial ending made for the sequel to test. To see if this three-part project, as a completed whole, can not necessarily "surpass" the original, but stand beside it as though it's the missing other half we never knew we needed.

Rebirth doesn't even come close to outclassing the original, if we'rereally going there, but it eclipses Remake in how it complements yet alternates. While Remake was reimagining the opening 5 hours of a 60-hour-long game into a 10-hour-long game that for some reason got ballooned to at least 30 hours, it was very restrictive in its design and had to work within limitations. This lends to some opportunities in fleshing out Midgar to unreal (engine) possibilities, including the crux of the plot that'll get rolling, but you can see the cracks in how difficult this was to make into its own full-fledged game. The side quests are frankly terrible and don't even do an interesting job fleshing out Midgar. The attempt at a semi-open world Midgar really doesn't work when it's limited to just a few hub areas that's laid out linearly to progress. It's a good proof of concept for things like the core gameplay and combat, but it leaves so much needed room to breathe. I was surprised how much Rebirth took my major criticisms with Remake seriously and flipped it around. Due to it covering the middle stretch of the original, where the overworld opened up, and the plot takes the characters through so many locations, this is a very side content driven game. I have no problem with this! It's a remarkable achievement in how they took a PS1 overworld map and reimagined it in high graphical fidelity that feels like it geographically makes sense! The gang defeated the manifestation of destiny itself, and now they’re free on this unknown journey that’ll take them to who knows where, other than reliving trauma, burdens, unresolved memories, and minigames galore where they can goof off. It was a no-brainer, but still a clever choice to use a Xenoblade approach when reimagining FFVII’s overworld to follow an open-world format. Almost every major location has been expanded into its own open-world map, with 8th Gen towers and side content to fill it up. I’d have a problem sticking with… less than ideal open-world tropes, but Rebirth makes it mostly work exceedingly well. Some maps, I think, are strangely reimagined to become a large pool for exploration and content grinding, but this is mainly by comparison to other maps in the game that I think are handled perfectly. The combat is fantastically done, thanks to having a larger cast to experiment with, finally proving itself to be an excellent compromise between real-time action gameplay and the strategic ATB turn-based combat from the original.

What really brings everything together as my certified GOTY, and a personal favorite, is the focus on the characters. It’s not just main story stuff, though the ones who get spotlighted throughout are elevated and faithfully to the spirit of their characterization from the original, but even small stuff like exploring environments and having party banter, or taking surprising charge in a random side quest that develops Cloud’s relationship with everyone and why they’ll stick together to the end. Final Fantasy VII isn’t really my favorite entry in the franchise, it’s still close up there as a runner-up but not number one, but Rebirth spends so much time reminding me how at one point it really still could’ve. The thing it undeniably proved to me, however, was this is still hands down the most well-rounded Final Fantasy party. Anyone who I wasn’t super strong on before has now risen in the character rankings thanks to what Rebirth achieved. I can’t really speak more on the ending other than I know for sure it’s causing discourse, but minor spoiler territory gripes aside, it made me incredibly excited about how Part 3 is going to pay off everything Kitase, Nomura, Nojima, and Hamaguchi have been cooking. It’s going to either be a beautifully reflective counterpart to the original FFVII that makes its own powerful statement to shake the medium, or it’s going to completely collapse and fail in honoring its legacy. No video game has made me this conflicted on which way it’ll go, and I adore not knowing what unknown fate is ahead here.

My parents shipped me off to a vocational school when I was 16, at their wits end with my hooliganism. I suppose they thought learning how to weld would sort me out or something. This school was a "last stop" for a lot of kids whose parents ran out of rope to give, or who were otherwise court ordered to attend short of ending up in juvie. A considerable amount of the student body had a rougher background than mine and came from homes more fractured or communities that were deeply disenfranchised.

And everyone there loved Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 (also, Gauntlet Legends, but we're not talking about that today.)

Actually, it may be more accurate to say they just loved Dragon Ball. Budokai 3 was the newest game at the time and so it got the most play, but it was just as common to find kids huddled around a CRT watching Dragon Ball GT. The guy who had that GT set was also had a copy of Big Money Rustlas and I'm sorry to report that I've been conditioned through overexposure to adore both. Many flavors of Faygo touched my lips during this era.

The thing about Dragon Ball is that it had penetrated so many social barriers by 2004 that it had attained total cultural saturation. Playing these games, Budokai 3 in particular, and simply sharing a love for the series helped me expand my social bubble and connect with others during a particularly low point in my life. I also mained Kid Buu, so everyone knew I was a motherfucker. My Dragon Ball GT loving, Juggalo, furry friend taught me to never hide who you are, and who I am is a little pink goblin that can't be touched and will send his fist through the ground to punch you in the groin.

Though I'm typically bad at fighting games, there was a period where I was so practiced at Budokai 3 that nailing precision dodges and teleport chains was purely reflexive. Sure, this is partly due to being confined to a facility where the only other things to do was play billiards or hang out at a rundown single-screen theater that mostly ran crap like The Ladykillers, but you know, some of that was pure talent! Revisiting it now for the first time since leaving that school felt like slipping into a warm bath. Familiar, cozy, and-- whoa wait shit why is Cell spamming his ultimate like that HELP!!

Budokai 3 plays a lot better than the previous two games but is still compromised in several areas. Characters control largely the same as each other with little in the way of unique playstyles, but the capsule system feels more robust and better allows you to create a build unique to you, for example. Techniques look flashy and do well to capture key moments from the show and manga, but the rush attack and accompanying button guessing minigame wears thin and becomes a pace breaker fast. There's a lot of give and take here, but you can unlock Kid Goku so I'm afraid it's just the best Budokai game there is. I'm sorry. I don't make the rules.

The story mode is limited to 11 of the roster's 32 characters, and most of its replayability comes in the form of alternate routes, hidden fights, and secrets. There's a good amount to do, but the jog through DBZ's main four arcs is severely truncated and at times plays fast and loose with its canon (Goku survives the Raditz fight in Piccolo's story, for example, but the game doesn't explore this fully.) Dialog is rife with spelling errors, kerning issues, and there's a number of portraits that are off-model. Characters who existed mostly on the periphery like Tien or Yamcha or even those who were present in the story but largely inactive during long stretches are represented here, but much of their story modes involve bouncing between disperate points on a map to get maybe two or three lines of dialog... Many of the Dragon Ball games of this era just assume you're deeply familiar with the story and don't make much of an effort, so it's not surprising that Budokai 3 offloads a considerable amount of its narrative to your imagination.

And I'm fine with that. Budokai 3 isn't perfect by any means, but like the very boring man that I am, I'm perfectly capable of recognizing its faults and enjoying it regardless. That's only possible with the maturity laying bricks for two years builds... I think, I don't know.

I had planned on replaying this much further down the road (maybe around September), but as Akira Toriyama's untimely passing affected fans all over the world, it made me reflect on my time with Budokai 3 and appreciate something I understood back in 2004: Dragon Ball suffers no barriers.

If Peppino was a journey through an anxiety-induced fever dream from a man who's been driven to the very edge of his own helpless sanity, then the Noise is a journey through a man's own vanity, going through the same struggles as Peppino not because he wants to or needs to, but just because he can. Noise is much more akin to Wario than Peppino in this matter then, effortlessly blazing through the tribulations presented to them for the sake of their own greed and ego. With such a shift of character then, playing Pizza Tower as the Noise is not a lame excuse for replayability, however it is a whole new experience within the same game.

Just like Peppino, Noise can go really fast, if not more so. Unlike Peppino though, the Noise cant climb up the walls out of sheer desperation, instead opting for his skateboard to act as more of a wall jump that gets instantaneous speed when landing on the ground. The Noise can also do a tornado spin when using his skateboard that decimates enemies. To counteract this lack of verticality though, the Noise can super jump at any time and has access to an uppercut with much more force and range to it. Bosses are also different, with the Noise deciding to gleefully throw his own bombs around the arena, instead of grabbing the bosses out of abject rage. These new movement options and every transformation having new control methods create not only just a different game feel than Peppino, but one that beautifully balances on the line between a chaotic and smooth experience.

The movement isn't just the only thing that makes playing through Pizza Tower as the Noise feel so fresh, but rather the fact that the Noise is a god damn scumbag cheater. He often just ignores several mechanics in the game, such as changing the stroke limit in golf so that he always gets the primo ‘burg, or not delivering the pizzas in Gnome Forest and instead opts to destroy the customers' homes to get the toppins. Not even the bosses are safe from the Noise's wrath, as he just flat out shoots the Vigilante in the climactic duel and even scares off Fake Peppino in the final chase phase. He doesnt even have his own title cards for each level he just slaps stickers of himself over all the faces that were present in Peppino's adventure. And that's only tipping the iceberg when it comes to all of the delightfully cheesy flourishes that the Noise adds to make for a hilariously cheap playthrough.

The Noise reinforces the chaotic and insane energy of Pizza Tower that, in my opinion, makes it one of the best 2D platformers ever made, and is a more than welcome addition to this amazing game. The Noise even gets some great new music tracks that compliment an already fantastic soundtrack.

Now all we need is a playable Gerome update to make this game a complete masterpiece. Come on Tour de Pizza I know you can do it!!!!!!

played the demo back on PS3 and had my fill of this with it at the time but at some point i think i grabbed this through the BC program on Xbox for really cheap. kinda wish i just left it be lmao.

interesting but finicky jetpack mechanics are really all the game has going for it. the intro starts you off with being able to fly around at will while tackling some combat and it's passable enough for 15 minutes (as it was in the demo) but then the rest of the game happens. enemies are way too spongy and the mid-air combat takes a turn for the worst when the other flying ships and enemies put strain on the wonky flight controls.

also wasn't into the story but that was a given at this point. didn't realize this was going to be a time travel type thing or that it was going to have Nolan North showing up to do the most blatant/annoying case of Nolan Northing that i've ever seen so it had that going for it too.

will try the metroidvania side game someday.

very satisfying in terms of a narrative end cap, of course. not the complete slam dunk iterating on the first game was ideally going to lead to otherwise.

combat gameplay sees an improvement if only because the adaptive difficulty feels less overbearing (i'm pretty sure it's still here, though) which makes getting through the thing less of a headache. unfortunately level design takes a hit with everything feeling a bit less creative (especially the nightmare sequences) overall. the game ending on reusing shooting small parts of the environment to progress the final boss was a bummer. it was bad in Max Payne and it might have been even worse here due to the external pressure of enemy fire making the already finicky hitboxes worse.

looking forward to playing Max Payne 3 someday even though i expect the story to be a shit show. the gameplay looks to be like a powerhouse among third person shooters.

Was gonna start with some sort of intro or joke as always but now that I think about it I just wanna quickly say that I adore this game’s box art. The Castlevania series has always been synonymous with banger artwork but the composition and colors in this one are something else, and it’s probably the most menacing Dracula has ever looked in one of these so far… but that shield and sword that Simon is carrying are complete false advertising, that mf isn’t gonna use anything but the whip on this one!

The Adventure is quite a curious entry; as the last game of the series before Akumajou Densetsu, it would be easy to assume that this game was actually the true return of the series of its original roots — unless you count Haunted Castle and its Zelda CD-i looking ass… oh god I’m gonna end up playing that one aren’t I—, but actually, The Adventure feels more like an adaptation of that original adventure into a more simplified platformer, with even the losing power-up system akin to that of the Mario series on top of the usual health-bar and far more simplified and bare level design… oh and also if the original game was kind of a slog.

Christopher is a Belmont, and that means it should have the usual walk full of determination and commitment-based jumps… emphasis on should. The Adventure is s l o w, and when I say slow, I mean s l o w, and it not in a way that feels deliberated. I genuinely thought I was playing as the first protagonist in a game to have arthritis: Chirstopher’s movement doesn’t feel rewarding or like it has heaviness of it, instead it just feels like he’s sliding at a snail pace and like he’s being pushed backwards everytime he jumps, and you know, that’s already pretty bad, but I’m not even taken into consideration the slowdowns ON TOP of that!

I kinda associate this series with framerate problems, it’s always a price that the series has paid in service of its striking vistas and its spectacular boss fights and levels, and I’ve always refrained from mentioning it simply because it was never a problem that really got in the way of my enjoyment of past games and I every time it happened I just thought ‘’yeah, makes sense honestly’’. Here in Game Boy Land however, this old friend has decided to he’s gonna appear more than normal! From the moment the game starts it dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be a very pleasant adventure, and it never really got better, ‘cause even in those moments my jump wasn’t incredibly delayed, and enemies weren’t moving in power-point presentation mode, it didn’t matter because the base movement still sucked!

I believe that single HUMONGOUS problem caused a ripple effect in which other hiccups, some which were already present in previous and even future games of the series, were made even worse: ledge-jumping was a particularly annoying challenge in Simon’s Quest and it would return as the basis of many platforming challenges in IV, but at least in those two you felt in control of Simon, so imagine having to do the same on here but with a less responding character and the punishment being either to have to repeat an entire section or instant-death, at that point I’m sure it would be at least 10 times more fun having to clean Dracula’s own coffin for an hour straight.

The Adventure has interesting sections, mainly the eyeball bridge in Stage 2 and the entire first section of Stage 3, and other moments show snippets of a interesting and possibly fun game, but they are constantly interrupted by incredibly uninspired or frustrating challenges, inconveniences that feel like another level of tomfuckery — even for this series—, and the entirety of Stage 4, which I like to call ‘’The Gauntlet’’, and not in a loving way. If anything, this game has made me gain a much greater appreciation for Super Castlevania IV, ‘cause both games share that same problem, the difference of course being that in here they are much worse. And hey, some complain than in IV there aren’t any new secondary weapons or don’t feel as useful, but hey, in The Adventure there aren’t any to begin with and all your whip upgrades are gone if you are hit even once! JOY.

I’m not entirely sure how much this game being on the system it’s on got in the way of what the game wanted to do, and even if I can still commend the effort of translating a series into the handheld verse, I can’t justify its myriad of problems when nothing about the game itself gives a sense of unbridled creativeness or just general competency. Comparing this to even Simon’s Quest, my least preferred of the original NES trilogy, would be a disservice to the latter, because that game, even if in my opinion failed to bring to fruition most of its ideas, it tried, and in the process created a wonderful and original world and had many sections I do enjoy. In The Adventure, aside from two or three scattered parts in is three first levels, the only thing I got out of it is frustration and a profund sense of boredom.

All Castlevania games made me feel the former at times, but they always were much, much more than that. The Adventure has cool ideas, cool music, some cool visuals, and very little else. I’m sure there could be a good game in here, and maybe eventually there would be, but right now… I would prefer to not see the first boss in my entire life again, thank you very much…