Imagine being the birth of a new genre and then for 24 years never being topped. How embarrassing for every other single 3D platformer out there. You already know the deal. Mario 64 singlehandedly and simultaneously created and revolutionized the 3D collect-a-thon genre and drew the blueprints by which every subsequent 3D videogame would follow from then on.

Controlling Mario in 64 is one of the biggest joys you can have in a videogame, with so many movement options that allow you to chain numerous jumps, somersaults, and acrobatics in a split second, creating an unmatched free form decision making experience for the player.

There's a magic to this game that I simply can't describe. Maybe it's the hub area, a mysterious castle filled with secrets and paintings that lead to other fantastical worlds. Or maybe it's the actual levels that reveal themselves the more you play around in them, with many of their stars requiring curiosity and insight from the player.

Moments like finding a portal on a wall that leads to a desert world with a pyramid, discovering a hidden submersed town inside a cave, or realizing that you can change the size of a world depending on which painting you jump into, are some of the greatest memories you can have with a game. The levels are filled with paths, platforms and secrets that fully take advantage of Mario's controls, and each one manages to differentiate itself from the others with their own unique premises, be it a mountain with gusts of wind that push you around, a underwater level with a sunken ship and a giant scary eel, or the inside of a clock, that changes its platforms speed according to the time.

Even if subsequent sequels would improve on the foundation built by 64, with more complex and detailed level design, a better camera, and more unique gimmicks and obstacles, 64 still manages to surpass them in many aspects, like it's unrivaled kinesthetics and movement options, and it's no wonder it is still seen in such high regards to this day.

There's really nothing else to say, it's one of the best games ever made. You know it, and I know it.

worst way to play 1 the move remote doesnt work from my understanding too well
while the game does play with controller fine something about the flow and impact of the combat feels dull compared to the original along side the animations not to mention the framerate drops hard a long with some really bad screen tearing
worst part is the art style change this looks horrible
especially compared to the original
there is no real point to playing this over the original besides out of curiosity if you are a die hard fan like me
it plays worse than the original
looks and runs worse than the original despite it being on more powerful hardware
also takes stuff out of santa destroy
if you haven't played nmh1 yet and planning to for the first time stay away from this version
the wii, switch and steam versions are a much better way to play

Black Bird is an absurdly brief experience. Even by the standards of STGs, even getting down to the fastest things in the arcade and shitpost doujin shooters that scroll faster than the eye can see, Black Bird is extremely short. You get a whole 4 Levels of gameplay here, each of which probably not reasonably taking you more than 3-4 minutes. It's also a pretty easy game and whilst there is a "True Mode" which is harder and has secret endings and stuff, practically, if you've played an STG before, this is an experience that's over in 15 minutes. If you get this at full price and play it once, it's more than a dollar a minute!

So it's a good job Black Bird is a pretty wonderful experience. A Surreal Horror/Fantasy shooter which essentially lifts the template of Sega Classic fantasy zone to create a game where you, as the wrathful spirit of a dead girl reincarnated as an elrich black bird, wreak havoc through the world into it's far future.

And it really works. The levels are beautifully detailed and fun to tear apart, killing countless of Onion Games/Love de lic's cute little characters in the process. The visuals are fantastic, with great use of (what i think is) digitized sprites, heavy post processing and great animation - which combines with a fantastic, creepy ost to make for a very eerie experience.

Black bird is simultaneously cute, funny, and pretty creepy. It's a very open ended story that is more metaphor than anything concrete, as is illustrated in it's 8 endings, all of which basically consist of "different things this game could have meant".

It's particularly interesting to see a game come from some of the same staff as Moon to revel in death and destruction of a society that has wronged people, and almost make it comedic. I wouldn't call it outright misanthropic, more a cathartic fantasy n revenge and the power of grief. But idk maybe i'm talking out my ass.

Most weirdly of all, it's actually fairly good as a shmup, which is not something i expected. It's formula is basically fantasy zone - take out all the bases on a level and then a boss, but the fantastic level design, an interesting scoring system which the game encourages you to explore by locking the endings behind it. The game is still fairly easy even on true difficulty, and it's definetly not something that's intended to be mained as a shmup, but it is pretty engaging for those into scoring, and the way it uses music queues to spawn enemy locations wherever you are on the stage gives it a bit more in the way of interesting encounters than Fantasy Zone - fantasy zone itself being one of the finer STGs of the 80s, and i'd say this exceeds that at the very least.

So yeah, I think this is good. An amazing 15 minutes of surreal fantasy horror opera. Problem is, it's 15 minutes and when I, someone who will gladly import overpriced STGs from Japan all the time, think it's pushing it's pricepoint, it's definetly going to be too much for most people. As of time of writing it's on sale for £7.50, which for me is about right, but I know for many it is still pushing it.

Still, it's a 15 minutes worth experiencing, if you can.

So my first attempt at this game ended up in bouncing off it with a lot of frustration.

Having now gone through it in a more guided fashion I have to say that that exact frustrating obtuseness is its biggest strength. The idea of exploring the potential of a backdrop world by inhabiting it as a living place is sold so well by the knowledge that its not going to explain itself to you or really point you anywhere. If you want to understand this world and its people you do it in its schedule and by its rules, by happening upon things, by being patient and by listening to what it has to say to you.

Not a lot needs to be said about this that won't have already been said but I think that the path from frustration to wonder exemplified in the action limit system is such a good metaphor for what this game is and what it has to say. If you are willing to look past first impressions, accept and learn from frustrations then you gain the ability to see what's actually there beyond basic form and function.

Beat this while sipping coffee on a sunny Sunday morning and life couldn't be better. The platonic ideal of a Sega arcade title. Luscious spring and summer sound effects complementing an ear-grooving and slap-bassing OST that features narration from an earnest announcer-man who will helpfully guide you through a core gameplay hook that's simple enough to pick up in the first twenty seconds but will still challenge you enough that you'll wanna slip another virtual 50p into the slot to hear the coin jingle noise each time you miss out on TIME BONUS! (+5 sec).

The final boss is straight out of Dragon Quest and proves cheeky little Sega AM1 knew exactly what they were cooking up with this game. The credits are... surprisingly beautiful! Heading over to YouTube after the game to cop some more Bass Beats and finding out that there are young fisherman out there playing the soundtrack while they go out and catch real fish was the icing on the cake.

This game is a certified classic! And it's 89p on Steam right now! No excuse! That's basically the price you'd have paid for a single play of this in the arcades back in 1997!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_SUODbCgb8

Fished a dirty old cartridge with this game on it from the 50¥ bin when visiting the Osaka branch of Super Potato many years ago. The guy behind the counter, in typically super-helpful Japanese fashion, kept crossing his arms and shouting "NO!" to emphasise that the game would probably not work in a Game Boy - I didn't care, of course, as it was just cool and nice to have a 50p trinket with Kirby's face on it. When I got back from Japan, the trinket went into the back of my cupboard and was forgotten about.

... Until yesterday! I was digging through my storage to find my old GameCube copy of Killer7 (my Suda51 run continues apace!!) and ended up stumbling across this little rusty gem instead. And it works! I shouldn't have underestimated a games console that survived Operation Desert Storm.

It's really fun! Just super solid, simple pinball action that doesn't drown the player in a thousand gimmicks and storylines and all that shit that plagues more sophisticated pinball sims. Hit the ball and watch it bounce off stuff - that's what pinball's all about! Are the other Nintendo pinball games like this...?

Now I wanna go back to that shop and tell the guy that the cartridge worked... 😔

Rainbow Cotton is a 3D shmup with a forward perspective akin to Panzer Dragoon or Star Fox, but it is unfortunately very clumsy in design. Cotton's model takes up far too much of the screen, obscuring the enemies and crosshair, which loves to snap to the centre. On top of spongy enemies and a finicky EXP system to power up your beam, it's shockingly difficult to kill anyone in your path, let alone know you're even hitting them. The pathing is weird, too; you can just bounce and clip around the track haphazardly because the camera tracking is nigh impossible to predict. The experience is honestly so grating it's insane.
The saving grace is that this is imo the best looking Cotton game - charming anime FMV cutscenes, and low poly pastel coloured models and environments that are so kawaii in that Spyro PS1 way.

A curiosity is all this ever amounts to, if ever you want to experience a game that is bad enough to bury a franchise in the ground for twenty-one years - you can with the newly-released English fan translation!
( https://github.com/DerekPascarella/RainbowCotton-EnglishPatchDreamcast )

Yeah I did the first two chapters of the main story and I'm not coming back to this probably. Gotta love that music as always but once I booted it up and was greeted with the typical 100 currency gatcha nonsense my eyes glazed over. The actual game part is mind numbing too, it absolutely plays itself moreso than any other gatcha I've seen, and that's saying something. Gatcha really doesn't even work for the Nier series whatsoever, after doing some pulls with the starting gems and getting a bunch of literally who random nobodies with no personalities I was just left wondering who on earth would care enough to spend money trying to pull anyone who isn't one of the 7 or so main characters from Replicant/Automata.

Gotta say though the fact that the narrative of this seems to be about walking forever through an endless grind in an area literally called "The Cage" is pretty funny though. I choose to believe for my own sake Taro knew what he was doing there and didn't give much of a shit about this

Disappointing doesn't even cover it. The worst of gacha combined with the most phoned-in story Taro's put to paper, with a pace so ploddingly slow you'll fall asleep before you even unlock the main menu. Extending draken/nier's weapon stories to be a main mechanic backfires in a huge way.
Barely interactable, your avatar runs from one level gate to the next, the game begging you to put money into its loot roulette. There's no strategy, not even any real play: ultimately it's just a money vacuum.
Gacha is a poisoned well. Even the games that are entertaining (world flipper, love live, bandori) would be better without it, and Nier represents the very worst. A desolate, sinister creativity pit, it's sole purpose to empty lonely Japanese salarymen's wallets.

More like NieR: Auto[play]a.
Desolate in every sense! Combat is purely numerical and exists solely as power gates - simply upgrade your units, weapons and companions, then breeze through this battery vampire of a .apk for a few more missions before you need to upgrade again. OR u can Pay a humble fee for a chance to win epic units for you to also waste upgrade resources on :)
I just feel so wise and numb to the Twisted Mind of Yoko Taro. Grim "tragedy first" writing that passionlessly beelines towards an arc's desired sad outcome, a soundtrack that is essentially just spacy yoga music, vast post-post-magical-apoc environments that serve absolutely nothing. Sad to see Akihiko Yoshida designs wasted on this.