140 hours in, I suppose I have to ask myself the question: is Fire Pro World better than No Mercy? In some ways yes, in some ways no. As a whole, if you are a die-hard wrestling fanatic like me, this is certainly the best overall package you can buy. Thanks to the astounding depth of user-created content - to illustrate, one guy made the entire cast of Def Jam Vendetta to a pretty high degree of accuracy just for the fun of it - you can pretty much set up any dream match you could possibly imagine, and the 2D nature of the game ensures that crafting your own bizarre creations is a lot more straightforward than the array of sliders offered by modern WWE games.

With all that said, however...Fire Pro is definitely an acquired taste on every level. I think every Fire Pro fan has a story about showing this game to their non-smark friends only to be greeted by a chorus of laughter and confusion, and I think that's an understandable response. Even by "retro game" standards, Fire Pro just looks and sounds unimpressive. Its controls also take a lot of time and effort to get used to - you'll likely mess up anything more complicated than a basic grapple or submission hold until you have a few hours into the game. Compared to the pick-up-and-play appeal of the AKI games, it's not exactly approachable. The grappling system actually works really well once you get the timing down, but your first few matches will make for a confusing slog, especially since the input for your finisher varies from wrestler to wrestler. However, Fire Pro has much better AI vs. AI matches than any other wrestling game I've ever played, even allowing you to customize your wrestler's AI logic, so if that's important to you, it's definitely a big plus.

Overall, I think you can determine for yourself if Fire Pro World is a game for you. If you've never followed a wrestling promotion on a week-by-week, PPV-by-PPV basis, the answer is probably no. I think it's analogous to a hobby-grade product like anime figurines, paintball guns, or matchbox cars - there's a big learning curve to get started, but once you get in the groove of it, it's a hyper-specific experience that delivers at a level that no other game can touch. However, it is very much for hopeless smarks only.

This is the WCW equivalent of WWF No Mercy, which is my pick for the greatest wrestling game of all time. While the base grappling is (almost) the same - the now-famous AKI engine, which is beloved in certain quarters - No Mercy has a huge leg-up on this game due to its Create-A-Wrestler mode, which ups the replay value for obsessive freaks like me. That said, if you're a WCW fan, this game has pretty much everything you could ever want from the last good days of the promotion, as well as AKI Man and a host of off-brand versions of notable Japanese wrestlers ripped from the VPW series. There's definitely some strange design choices - I've never quite understood why you get scored at the end of each match, and I don't know why Hogan's finisher is a Flair flop eye poke - but as a whole, this is definitely one of the best wrestling games of all time, and a must-play for fans of the Attitude Era. I once won the world title as Eric Bischoff, just to prove I could, so I think that says a lot about me as a person.

As bizarre as it may seem, this is probably the best open-world crime game ever made. In retrospect, Saints Row 2 came out at just the right time: late enough that its shooting, driving, and other mechanics are reasonably engaging (unlike the PS2 GTA games), but early enough that it didn't suffer from the massively bloated map and content padding of today's open-world games. Its tone manages to strike a good balance between childish shenanigans and crime drama, and I was pretty emotionally invested in several characters by the end of the game. Saints Row 2 is no masterpiece, but unlike the later GTA games, it's not trying to make some grand (and incredibly misguided) statement on the American experience, and as a result, it's actually a much better video game than its competitors. I was never a huge fan of the series, but if you're looking for a fun sandbox crime game to waste some hours on, you can't do much better than Saints Row 2.

I spent a lot of time playing Halo 2 against my will at LAN parties because it was the only game that my friends liked, and I still carry that grudge to its day. Halo 2's campaign is far worse than Halo 1's - it's the kind of experience where you sit down to replay it, and you realize that you only like two of the game's dozen levels - but its multiplayer is definitely an improvement over the constant pistol duels of Halo 1. As I said in my Halo: CE review, the series's formula actively made the FPS genre worse compared to my preferences, so I can't say I like the game that much. That said, you can still definitely have a good time with it with the right group of people.

While its influence is unmistakeable, Halo gets a bunch of things wrong off the bat that have sadly become very common problems in big first-person shooters. Two weapon slots is not enough to facilitate interesting combat design, and a lot of the weapons feel too situational to wield consistently. The plethora of vehicles here control poorly and are mostly useless outside of scripted sequences that require them. (However, a few of those sections are quite enjoyable, particularly the final Warthog run in The Maw.)

The Covenant are well-designed villains for the most part, with interesting interplay between the various factions. Unfortunately, the Flood are - simply put - not fun to fight, and the second half of the campaign is littered with encounters involving them. The Library in particular is one of the worst FPS levels of all time, and there are several other stages that are essentially just the same level from before, only backwards and more tedious. The story is sci-fi wish fulfillment nonsense that is better left unremarked upon, though the game's aesthetics and visuals are quite striking and unique for the era.

All-in-all, Halo is very much a "you had to be there" game. Much like Goldeneye 007, when you revisit it today, it's difficult to imagine that it had such a monolithic impact on the world of gaming, though that is in a sense a testament to its influence. Unlike Goldeneye, however, Halo actively made the FPS genre worse in several ways, and it just doesn't have the creativity that truly innovative games have. The multiplayer is still quite fun, but unbalanced. That said, it's still a pretty decent time by itself, and Halo 1 is probably the best entry in its series.

Sorry, Mario fans: this is probably my pick for the best platformer on SNES. It takes everything about the original DKC and elevates it by an order of magnitude, particularly thanks to the focus on hidden secrets and resources. Those additions gave the series an identity apart from "Mario clone," and would serve as the basis for the DKCR games years later. It doesn't get a lot wrong, so there's not much else to say. If you haven't played it, and you have an interest in classic platformers, please go rectify that. This is about as good as it gets.

If you spend enough time on Twitter, you'll find that some people really love to hate on this game, and I'm still not sure why. It's very much a proof-of-concept, but the controls and gamefeel are solid, and I love its aesthetics, especially Wise's soundtrack. Some levels are definitely more successful than others, and it comes across as simple compared to earlier SNES platformers like Super Mario World...but that's actually to the game's benefit, if you ask me. It also doesn't overstay its welcome. DKC is a very solid pure platformer that won't blow your mind, but it's quite successful in its own right.

Believe it or not, this is the first Rare game I ever completed, so booting it up leaves me awash with nostalgia. Unfortunately, after playing the other games in the SNES series, it's pretty clear that this is the least successful entry. As with other platformer trilogies, the designers seem rather bored with the game's basic mechanics by this point, so they throw a ton of ideas into the mix, and not all of them work that well. In this way, it feels more like an unpolished Mario game than DKC, and that's a shame. Still, DKC3 is much better than a lot of platformers that come out these days, so you could do a lot worse. Compared to DKC2, though, the gulf is obvious.