Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is largely what you'd expect from a Jet Set Radio spiritual successor in the year of our lord 2023. It looks the part, it sounds the part, and it plays the part pretty well.

The game really adheres to how Jet Set Radio plays, the movement and existing mechanics here are pretty much identical to the ol' Dreamcast game. The main thing that separates the two games is how BRC addresses the things people didn't like about Jet Set Radio. Jet Set has a pretty notorious difficulty curve with a lot of stuff that can prove annoying and this game sought to address most of those things. Movement on your locomotion of choice is basically 1:1 with Jet Set but with the ability to get off your wheels and walk, the air dash and the Tony Hawk manual mechanic it's a lot easier to come to grips with and start chaining tricks to start boosting around with impunity.

The big stuff though is with the graffiti and police mechanics. The original Jet Set tasked you with spraying graffiti and to do so you needed to do a lot of quarter and half circles while local authorities bum rushed your ass in real time ready to whack and shoot you. In BRC, graffiti has been greatly simplified while also stopping time for a rather generous period allowing you to spray your preferred graffiti design without worrying about the authorities.

The police, meanwhile, are now attached to a GTA style heat system that grows as you paint graffiti everywhere and escalates as you make your way through the game. Your ne'er-do-well painting can attract the police on the scale of normal mooks to sticks all the way to copters and mechs. The game has a combat system to help you out in defending yourself from the over-militarized police force and while the combat is rudimentary it's also very funny. Doing jump cancels that AoE launch a bunch of dudes into your graffiti finisher is very fun, and enemies and machines having whatever graffiti you sprayed plastered on to them is very endearing. I wouldn't say the combat is anything great but it gets the job done in a way that's positive for the game.

So yeah game's good. The soundtrack is aces, with the 2mello and Hideki tracks being obvious standouts when playing, you can hold your phone out the entire time playing the game (millenial/gen z simulator confirmed?!?) and you can unlock a shitload of characters with even more available in the post-game. They just have to populate the hideout with all of them and let you switch between them outside of dance floors in the game's other areas.

Just a neat little metroidvania focused on the use and abuse of certain movement techniques you'll earn as the game progresses. Doing long jumps into super side hops into wall runs and wall kicks flows and feels good and when mastered can lead to naturally finding alternative means of solving platforming bits. Besides that, the PS1 low-poly aesthetic has yet to be beaten to death so it's neat here and the combat doesn't really have any reason to exist outside of the movement enhancing ground pound and a C tier end boss. Overall, good use of eight dollars and eighty cents (Canadian currency).

The days of the licensed movie tie in games are long dead, but the days of completely random, absolutely psychotic licensed games are here with Scrat as a shining example. A truly baffling platformer, Scrat just fuckin runs through random places without a care in the world in order to get nuts so he can nut. One of the greatest things about the game is that sometimes Scrat needs to pick up key nuts to progress through locked doors, and unlike every other platformer where picking shit up hinders your abilities and makes you slow as shit, Scrat runs at the same speed AND you have access to all your movement shit. So yeah if you want to shovel pure jank shit into your mouth it would not be a mistake to shovel Scrat's nuts into your mouth.

Honky: stark railing mad is a standard turn based rpg gacha skinnerbox propped up by good presentation and graphics. The character upgrading is too easy to get lost in the weeds in (why must everything have the ability to level up? why do fucking relics even exist?!) and pulling for fuckin light cones in the gacha is somehow worse than pulling for 3* gobshite year one characters in Fire Emblem Heroes in current year. But yeah I'm bored and brain is broken so I just buy the shitty battle pass and daily free shit for a month pass as I autobattle through 90% of the content with little issue.

Obviously the big draw of this thing has been the level creator where you can fuck around and make 2D levels similar to Crash 4 flashback tape levels, but the game itself outside of that is also pretty good for a small project. Controls are an honest recreation of the second game's movement but they aren't quite there. The 3D levels themselves are neat and do some fun things; while the 2D Uka Uka time trial levels can get cheeky, especially the last one. Overall pretty good not bad pretty good pret-tay... prettay good.

A neat demake that addressed the two big issues I had with the 3DS game. Namely the map design, where most of the egregiously designed maps are changed to be less bad. It's not all roses on this front but some of the maps of the 3DS game were extraordinarily terrible and there's less of that here. Another big peeve I had with the original release was the glaring lack of supports for most characters, which is addressed in spades here. Characters like Kliff, Silque, Sonya and Leon now have more than one support option and the made up supports for the game are written pretty well.

On top of that, the general spritework is great. The character portraits are excellent and the small touches like the little animation flourishes when entering combat don't go unnoticed. Brushing up against the limitations are fun, there's no equipment slot so having shield and ring bonuses is pretty good. Sadly there's no combat arts so you can't Hunter's Volley with impunity but magic works the same. Requirements for getting warp are still easy so you can do plenty of horseshit with it. Dungeons are replaced with tower of valni esque maps where you promote by visiting Mila statues and gain stats by visiting wells on the map in combat. Definitely worth a play through if you like SoV and want to fuck around with GBA mechanics.

Papa's Freezeria provides the experience of a retail wage slave job from the comfort of you own home, minus the mental abuse you'd suffer from the customers and your coworkers alike. You'll spend the first hour or two learning the ropes, you'll get a few hours out of chasing stickers, and then you'll slowly realize the gameplay loop (7 customers a day! closers on a set loop! one amigo orders the special! [two with the board]) hasn't changed from maybe the third in game week so you largely go through the motions until you get full completion or quit. As someone who's currently unemployed, it was a fun enough time waster that scratched an itch and now I'm done with it probably forever.

A middling brain empty button masher where you equip things with big numbers to do missions that are lower than your number. These missions consist of empty hallways that don't force you to engage with them at all and four to five forced combat encounters. Most of the missions are just completely recycled level design wise outside of like 4 levels with such unique mechanics like... basic platforming.

The gameplay loop is very simple. Go to boring mission with number suitable to yours, mash on light and spectral attacks for 5 minutes, replace your shit with shit of a higher number, repeat. Because it's designed as a GaaS you don't get options to a lot of mission types and loot mechanics until late in the launch campaign, the most egregious of which is the ability to keep gear of a certain rarity up to your gear level, which unlocks with four missions left before the final boss. Not that it takes too long, with cutscenes skipped (because who can really care) it took me seven hours to complete the launch story, after which there are a couple of other stories and a bunch of random modes to get your gear level up. Ultimately, it's all the same shit and evidently it wasn't enough to have people stick around.

And so lies Baby Fall, another weird Platinum project to add to the list of other weird, failed Platinum projects. At least unlike the TMNT game and that Korra game people won't be able to play their grand failure for long. I'm happy Bayonetta 3 got a warm reception because if that shit died a death like this thing I'd struggle to see how they'd recover.

Pizza Tower is a perfect videogame. A crowning achievement in videogaming. One of the finest videogames the world has ever known. Everything about the videogame is perfect. Presentation is aces, from the psycho 90s cartoon aesthetic to the little things like the game needing a button prompt to turn the lights on in the file select menu (lest something FUNNY happen). The music is nothing but fantastic, catchy tunes that set the tone for the levels and bosses to follow.

Level are designed to put your mastery of the games incredible movement to the test as you bash, throw and piledrive your way through all sorts of crazy bullshit the game throws at you. Every level also has some different shit to throw at you, like taking taxis to optional areas in a city level only for you to be sent to jail because the taxi turned out to be a cop car. Or the animatronic jumpscare level. Or the damn Mort the Chicken for the Playstation One console level.

Going for 101% really gave me an appreciation for how the game and the levels are structured. The highest honor you can get in a Pizza Tower level is the P rank. P rank means you reached a certain score threshold while obtaining all collectibles in the level while never dropping your combo, which is added upon by defeating enemies and kept going by collecting points. In practice, going for P ranks is like Crash Bandicoot 4's perfect relics, except Pizza Tower is significantly less punishing and repetitive which makes the process of perfecting a level actually fun. Except for Gnome Forest, no one has fun in Gnome Forest.

Last thing I want to rant about is that while the story is largely basic the game's ending which is just excellently put together. The game foreshadows what's going to go down and you get it but you don't care because it's so sick it doesn't even matter. You get your chance to fight the bastard that's been tormenting you the whole game, there's a little surprise in there, and then the final stretch of the boss and the subsequent mad dash out is pure catharsis in a way games rarely do.

All in all, perfect videogame. Purchase it now, and then purchase it later when it's ported probably. After that, purchase it again when it gets a physical release. And then play it, I heard the game's pretty good.

Spenge game is largely what you'd expect from a sequel to a remaster of a game from 2003. Main design difference is that levels are now designed to tell their specific stories, with the incentive to explore for collectibles being something you do after completing the level, as the game rewards you with some new power after every level that you'll need to do certain things within the level.

Besides that it's pretty and colourful, levels are unique in design and have lots of detail, combat is improved and has been given a greater emphasis, music and sound is a mix of pretty good original stuff and stuff instantly recognizable from the show, and hey they got Clancy this time!

Main thing holding it back is a lack of polish. Shit like the divekick whiffing and the bubble not being thrown properly at its designated target unless its moving are just weird dumb things that happen all too often. Also the Switch version is prone to hanging and stuttering while not running as well as the other ports. Seriously, avoid this version if you can.

Skully is almost a decent game but there's enough that's off here that unfortunately sets the experience back a lot. Skully is a puzzle platformer where the platforming is marred by dumb design decisions and the puzzle stuff can be more annoying than it's worth.

The main gimmick of the game is that you are a small skull thing and you transform into one of three large creatures when submerging yourself in checkpoint ooze. Little skull boy controls well enough but when you're a big boy the cracks in the platforming begin to show. Just weird shit like momentum being halted when you land from a jump to a different altitude (not just jumping down to a platform, but jumping up too) and shitty air control just makes shit annoying, and not in an engaging way. My favourite thing early on were these water spouts that if you got hit by them in big form you just froze for a solid like 2 seconds. It's fucked up, I tell you!

The big boy forms also serve the puzzle aspect of the game. You'll use their various abilities to move platforms and throw skulls around and whatever. The problem here is when it should all be coming together in the third act using all of them for stuff, it just becomes painful because if you fuck up it usually means death which means going through the same summoning processes over and over again.

The worst puzzle in the game requires you to summon three dudes, you'll be switching between their bodies numerous times, you'll be moving a platform to a perfect position outside of your line of sight and you'll only know if you fucked up by the end of your attempt of this puzzle, and then you'll have to throw your skull body to the perfect position four times. if you fail to avoid the stalactites above or simply over/undershoot your target (which is easy as you aren't given any indication that your throw will or won't be blocked by something) you will instantly die and have to spend like five minutes setting up another chance at the thing. Also when you leave a body it spits you up, sometimes at a random angle that can kill you for no reason if you did it over death water. This puzzle maneuver drove me to madness and there's still like 4 chapters after this!

So yeah that's Skully. It's almost fine but there's too much pain and it makes me sad.