It really did surprise me how much better Chiki's Chase gets once you fall into it's groove a bit more; the early game is slow and uneventful, which one would expect to be an instant turn off in an endless runner where you'll be restarting a lot, but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that it's very much by design. Once you get good enough at navigating the bite-sized platforming gauntlets to start seeing past the first four or five levels consistently, the game quickly ramps up in pace and complexity, and the power-ups you accumulate start interacting to make the game unbelievably hectic. Star Power feeds into this too- it doesn't just make you invincible, but also makes you run at like twice your normal speed, and the fact that you get extensions on it for killing enimies (and through collecting coins, with the right upgrades) makes it incentivize agressive, full-speed-ahead play in a game that's already literally pushing you ahead at all times. It's also just cute! All the playable characters have genuinely charming spritework and designs, and the color palette used throughout is just disgustingly adorable. I do deeply appreciate that it has an "ending" of sorts that can be reached in 6-10 minutes, and then everything after that is an increasingly insane victory lap; it means that individual runs feel like they have a win condition beyond just beating your high score. and it's free and has no microtransactions or ads! about 4 dollars to unlock the ability to earn cosmetics and more equipment slots, which I think is well worth it if you've played the game and know you'll enjoy it. anyway, tl;dr, it's a very, very good mobile game

I made an account on IGDB and made fake cover art for this game just so I could deliver this message: Crazy Shooters 2, a free browser-based FPS with one or two maps maps almost directly copy-pasted from CS:Source (but with blocks covered in hieroglyphs everywhere added in), that has no proximity audio for gunshot noises or knife attacks (so someone attacking with melee on the other side of the map makes the exact same sound at the exact same volume as if you were to melee attack), and which will routinely bug out and make your character turn into a horrifying spider creature when you die and ragdoll, is upsettingly fun. Me and my cousin stumbled across this while searching a bunch of FreeUnblockedGames.com type sites looking for the lamest shit imaginable to play together and were shocked by how entertaining it is. It's clearly cobbled together from a ton of unrelated assets, it's ugly as sin, the sound design is atrocious, but at it's heart it's still a surprisingly solid and fast-paced arena shooter; it's got these whack-ass moon physics that can make it entirely possible to jump around the environment and gain good footing during gunfights, and pretty much every wall that isn't totally vertical can be jumped into repeatedly to accelerate up it- that's clearly a bug, but it also rules and lets you get to positions you otherwise wouldn't be able to. On servers with more than a few people free-for-all mode quickly turns into an engaging game of tracking other players and making sure you're constantly moving and switching between the 10 weapons it gives you to manage when you have to time your reload animations since the TTK is so low that getting seen while reloading basically means you're fucked. Idk. I realize that I'm heaping quite a bit of praise onto a game that looks like this, but this was a surprisingly good time for me. Like obviously if you want an outstanding multiplayer FPS with whacky mobility play like Titanfall 2 or something but if you wanna play something that's hilariously jank but that somehow manages to entertaining for an hour or two in spite of looking and sounding (and kind of playing) like a multiplayer FPS version of a game from a 1000-in-1 Gaming Pack CD you'd find at Staples, maybe give this one a go. Don't try this if you're currently playing an actual FPS you enjoy but it has charmed me.

Gonna have to preface this by saying that if you haven't seen ReBoot or haven't seen the Woolie video on the series a lot of this will just read like ancient runes. I genuinely don't think I can imagine a world where a ReBoot game came out for the PSX, or any platform for that matter, and actually had good controls. Like I'm not even trying to slight the show by saying that or anything, but ReBoot just feels like the kind of show whose licensed game would maneuver like dogshit no matter what platform it came out on or what genre it's going for. This is a third-person shooter, a skate-boarding game, and a platforming game! A mummy cursed Mainframe sometime in the late 90's and it caused everyone at the studio to just make the wildest, weirdest decisions possible. This genre choice feels perfect. This is Peak Late ReBoot.

I'm actually unsure if the controls are like, slippery and cumbersome by design here. All the buttons are in reasonable places and do what you'd expect, but the way Bob moves around the environment is just insanely fickle. Every time you tap forward he skids a little bit and then slowly comes to a stop, and in order to jump you need to hold the button down for a little bit to make Bob enter his "crouch mode", which he can still shoot and move with complete freedom in. "Crouch mode" actually lets you bypass certain obstacles that I'm unsure if you're supposed to be able to avoid by just making yourself shorter so you can duck under them. Releasing the button will make Bob jump, but with a pretty noticeable delay. Closing "tears" is like, one of the three things you do in this game, and each one is on a time limit that'll return a game over if you can't mend it in time. When closing a tear Bob gets jerked around and pulled towards/away from the tear, and if he touches it he'll get blown back and take damage, and this is kind of why I think the controls being this loose and slippery may have actually been at least a little intentional- the primary challenge when doing the main objective of each mission comes from wrangling Bob around so he doesn't die or get blown off a cliff trying to close the tear. In a way it actually makes closing the tears a little engaging, but actually getting to them is an absolute nightmare because of how much platforming is always involved and how high the penalty is for falling away from wherever the tear was and having to maneuver your way back up. I will give the game this, however: the shooting actually feels fine. Your cursor highlights an enemy and you hold down the button until they're dead.

I think there's actually something to be said for the visuals of ReBoot PSX. Like yes it's dark and miserable and Bob looks like his face has been squished flat enough so that you could comfortably eat off of it but I do think it does kind of capture the vibe of some of the really early ReBoot episodes that like, took place primarily underground or indoors.

Also this is small but it's absolutely hilarious to me that the game expects you to fall out of bounds so often that every time this happens the screen goes black, Bob screams "GLITCH, GRAPPLE!" and you hear the sound of a grappling hook before being punted back wherever you were previously standing. This happened to me 3 times in like an hour of play and I wasn't trying to make it happen. Some walls and a few floors just don't have collision.

So the game plays horribly, but I can't give it less than two stars because it's horrible in a lot of weird, interesting ways that might be of interest if you're fascinated with the show like I am. I feel like a lot of its strangest elements really only become more surreal when you consider that it came out a couple of months after Season 3 ended- I'm not saying that it had to have taken place after that, but given a lot of the events that take place during ReBoot's big 'serious', continually narrative season, it feels like such a strange decision to set this before anything else in the series.

So like, what do I mean by that? To start with it's extremely weird that Bob, who had never really killed anyone in the first two seasons because of censorship given that this was, like, a show for 9 year olds- and who is later confirmed to just straight-up have a no-kill rule once the writers get enough freedom to include frequent on-screen death, elevating it to a show for 11 year olds- is flying around on his hoverboard gunning down citizens who have been turned viral with his trusty sub-machine gun. Every time he wipes a soul off this world by pumping them with 15 slugs a voice cheerfully announces "Enemy Destroyed!", their little cartoon bodies falling to the ground and staying inert until they're removed to make space for more assets to be loaded. I don't even think this is like "character assassination" or whatever it's just extremely funny. Like can you imagine if you're playing a game based on The Last Airbender and they just give Aang the ability to kill people with firebending. Plus like I said, this came out after Season 3!! Why not just make Matrix the player character his whole thing is being a blood psychopath who shoots people and if they had just done this I might have gotten the chance to see him blow Ray Tracer's brains onto the pavement for the crime of standing within the same census zone as his computer wife. On the plus side this does mean we got a line read from Michael David Donovan in his incredibly racist Phong voice where he screams "BOB! You must __not__ shoot the civilians!"

In addition to that, I think that the events of season 3, namely that there are major character deaths that people react to with dramatic displays of grief, makes the plot of this game just incredibly funny. Bob goes into the sewers to stop Megabyte's plans and when he comes out Phong rolls up and is like "you saved the city! But little Enzo was killed in the ensuing blast :(" and Dot just frowns in the most everyday, unaffected way possible. Like she is exactly as upset about her little brother dying violently as I would be if forgot my wallet at home and had to drive back to get it. Phong then suggests sending Bob back in time to save Enzo and Dot is like "no wait Bob don't do it! What if you die in the process? Saving Enzo isn't worth it! :(" which is maybe the most hilarious sentiment you could possibly have Dot express after "I couldn't cope if my little brother died" is like, kind of her whole thing in season 3. Just, very surreal!

I absolutely choose to believe that everything that happens in this game is ReBoot cannon. I want to believe that Phong can just send people back in time but like, forgot to all the times someone either dies or is incapacitated later on in the show. You'd think his power to do this would come up again! And like, once again, this was written and developed, I would assume, during the season where Phong having time travel powers would actually have been game-changing!

This basically amounts to me just pointing and going "this game for Canadian 10 year olds uhhhhh doesn't really mesh with the thematic elements of this show for 10 Canadian 10 year olds B)" but I don't care I played this game as like, a bit to see what it was like and when it crashed after the fourth level it just left me with Many Thoughts. I can now say that I've written more about ReBoot for the PSX than I have for like, Pathologic. Sorry Ice-pick Lodge this is apparently the game that I find more interesting to discuss!

I rented this from Blockbuster as a kid and my mom watched me boot it up in our Wii and immediately forbid me from playing it past the opening cutscene because Spider-Man was being too mean to the villains in the opening cutscene and calling them "nut-jobs", behavior she absolutely did not want me emulating. 8 years later me and a friend got drunk in her basement and thought it would be the funniest shit in the world to play this game because she had it lying around (the Xbox 360 version). We played it for 45 minutes and made a devestating discovery... even if it has Spider-Man... it is still extremely mid :( I'm so sorry Peter

me and a friend fucking sucked at Payday when we were playing it back in High School and we spent an entire Summer trying to beat this heist. We beat it on the last day of the break and I felt like genuinely unwell the next morning. I'm not saying this random EDM producer the heist was themed around put a curse on me but I am at the very least saying that this heist is painfully long and the music bores a hole straight through your skull and the color pallet of the map hurts my eyes and I am also not the only person to have contracted Havana Syndrome while playing this. It is a documented occurrence if my friend + a YouTube review I watched of the DLC is anything to go off of. Will never listen to Alesso willingly because I am Pavlov's dog now where hearing Swedish house music makes me feel like I'm going under anesthesia

Vividly imagining a sickly Tiny TIm-esque child in 1995 slowly withering away due to a terrible illness who goes to the arcade every month with his loving father to play this game. They're too poor to finish it by just feeding it quarters but this kid is absolutely obsessed with Aerosmith, and so every week the father and son team up to stop The New Order from re-educating the nation's youth by going through shitty gimmick level after shitty gimmick level, each time getting closer and closer to the end. The love of Aerosmith in the heart of this ill little tyke is pushing them on, he desperately wants to save them from the clutches of the evil leather conformity witch. Eventually the family gets bad news. It's not looking good. He's got a month left to live at most. His final wish is to beat Revolution X. One last trip to the arcade, the father sparing no expense. They've been training for this for over a year. They blast through all 5 action-packed levels, and during the final boss fight, down to their last continue, the father gets KO'd and it's up to this little boy to save the day. He pulls a huge clutch, firing every CD he has into the final boss until it finally screams out in pain and explodes. In that moment, the screen fades to black, and rainbow text pops up, announcing that they've won... but Aerosmith will NOT be performing for them, because they failed to collect the 4 Aerosmith Gems hidden throughout the game. The boy bursts into tears. They have no more quarters, and no more time.

anyway uhhh I did not care for it but it was cheesy and lots of fun to play through with a friend at a pay-by-the-hour arcade with infinite continues!

The absolute essence of a character action game. Playing through Devil May Cry 1 I was told that if I liked the Nelo Angelo fights then I would find a lot to love in 3, but I honestly think that kind of undersells just how fucking good this thing feels to play, even outside of the Vergil fights, which are absolutely the best bits. The style meter being a lot more lenient than in the first game, the way more enemies stagger and respond to your blows, the fucking "ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! BREAKDOWN!" when doing Million Stab, the genuinely compelling familial drama at the heart of its story.... it's a good video game! Might honestly end up getting bumped up to a perfect 5/5 when I revisit it on hard mode/as Vergil. I've been told that Swordmaster and Gunslinger make it even more interesting (my first character action game was Bayonetta and I feel lost in this genre without a dodge so like a pathetic little whelp I played Trickster my whole run) so I fully expect to just end up enjoying this more on return visits.

It's not finished, and I'm not even finished with it, but I genuinely don't think any other game has gotten me this excited at the sheer scale of my options when creating a character. On various runs I've played a teleporting gunslinger, an inventor who could channel electricity into his weapons, and a swordswoman who could phase in and out of reality at the cost of being hunted by a parallel version of herself. The frustration of each death (on classic mode, at least) is tempered by the fact that now you have another opportunity to explore whatever mutations, implants, skills and systems you haven't touched or paired together yet. It is a game that challenges you to take the character-building options it's given you and create new, stupid sci-fi OCs, all of whom get to exist in a wonderfully creative and colorful take on a post-apocalypse. It's obtuse and there are some very real balance issues, but I'm incredibly excited to venture deeper into its world and see how it all comes together.

Addendum: After playing this for 130 hours and having died over, and over, and over again, having seen much of the game even if some stones still are unturned, I think I really just have to give it to Freehold Games for deciding to create a longform open-world RPG that's engrossing and interesting instead of one that's like, reasonable. This is a game where your level 30 character will die in the last dungeon because a psychic cloned himself and each of his clones used Sunder Mind on you at the same time, and you know what? Cool. Awesome. I unironically love this shit give me more please

A good action game that I have some gripes with (the camera can be finicky and a few of the enemies don't react as viscerally to damage as I'd like), but honestly the Boo-Haunted-House design of the environment and enemies elevates this quite a bit. Massively appreciate that Dante is just going around acquiring these priceless, ancient artifacts that have been lost to time and then just uses them to open doors. In every mission you'll retrieve like "The Stone of Infinite Wisdom" and then put it in a hole to make a spooky statue slide out of the way and I think that's excellent.