If I could jump that high...would I ever find the ground again?

Is it bad to jump that high into the sky of nostalgia? To let yourself slip away and put your head into the clouds? Will those clouds of nostalgia turn you against your peers who don't see the vision? The vision of a children's playground for you to jump around to your heart's content? Planting yourself on a little conveyor and riding on it like a first-person roller coaster? Pretending to pet the non-threatening round green birds that chirp "kiwi!" if you dare to shoot them?

I wish I could jump like Robbit, I wish I could shoot lasers like Robbit, and I wish I could make funny noises whenever I took a step forward like Robbit. Why is life such a bore? Why can't it be just playgrounds and rainbows? Why can I not be just like my hero Robbit? Fighting funny evil men with funny palm tree jellyfish henchmen.

Was it my mom's fault that she bought me this during a time where I got nothing for a majority of the year due to being a poor December baby? Is she to blame for this mess? My poisonous care for a simple video game that I had played too much? The rare time where I can attach my mom to a game instead of my gamer dad? My yearning for days that I didn't need to care about getting up for work in the morning? When I didn't have a constant worry for the struggles of others? Is it truly bad for me? To just make me forget, and make me care only about smiling and struggling to hold back my emotions? To just, feel once more?

Is it bad for me to feel like a kid again? For just one hour?

Why must life be so grounded...?

Let's go Robbit, let's jump and go...for old times' sake once more....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6qUB13LTTc

also vividly remember the kid at my elementary school who told me about the word "shit" loving the Shit out of this game back around 2003 and i was fascinated by his descriptions of what could take place in it. probably better than most Sony Computer Entertainment Incorporated Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC works from the past 6-7 or so years, which are just barely-evolved versions of what DMA design was cooking up here and a little bit earlier with space station silicon valley on the n64. i usually get pretty bored about halfway in every time i've played, and just end up driving around liberty city listening to some mad tunes from the legendary moving shadow records or some dubs mixed by the scientist over at king tubby's (rip) studio. that's pretty much the case with every subsequent game in this series, but with different music, actually.

This seems very overrated... I don't get it
I'm guessing it's one of those games people love due to the nostalgia of playing it when it came out. Not discrediting how ahead of its time it is for 2007, it is refreshing for a game to have this aesthetic when every shooter in the 2000s looked so ugly with the brown filter. The art direction is really good and probably the strongest aspect for me.
However, as good as the atmosphere is I can't get over how the story is told through hundreds of voice memos you find that are hard to pay attention to while you're shooting. It makes it really hard to connect and be invested in it. People praise bioshock's story so much and then... that's it?
The gameplay is clunky and for me it wasn't that much fun. Maybe I'm spoiled by today's standards but it just didn't click, even with all the different plasmids it's still very basic and it just got very repetitive.
And lastly, what made me quit is that technically it's a mess. I tried installing all the patches, tweaking the settings and everything but it's a mess. I managed to stop it crashing randomly mid gameplay but it still crashes constantly just by opening the map or saving the game. And you do have to save constantly cause you never know when it might crash again and make you lose progress. It just got too frustrating and I felt like I was making too much of an effort for an experience that wasn't that rewarding.

didn't really talk much about the combat in my last few classic RE reviews because so much of it boils down to pressing aim and shooting until the zombie goes down; the main appeal is the resource consumption, where every shot counts and evading enemies is often preferable. on its face re3's combat focus seems to violate this core appeal, as the increase in enemy counts across the board comes with a corresponding increase in heavy weaponry. shotgun shells weren't even sparse in re2, and in re3 you might as well just use your shotgun as your daily driver given how lush the ammo haul is. between this, chokepoints with explosive barrels, the contextual dodge, the wealth of gunpowders, and the grace pushdowns you get if you've previously been bitten in a room, it really feels like jill is nigh invincible in most regular encounters. with the more claustrophobic corridor design and increased enemy limit in rooms, there are certainly more times that the game pushes you into one of these options instead of going for straight evasion, but at the same time the core conceit is still the same: click aim, click shoot. a lot of mechanics to defray what is still relatively rudimentary gameplay.

however, the devs went out of their way to keep the routing intact. the addition of nemesis as a mr. X replacement so thoroughly trumps its predecessor that it feels a bit shocking they didn't get it this right the first time. mr. X was a effectively an ammo conversion spot; this lumbering beast you could pump full of cheaper ammo to get drops of the nicer stuff. nemesis completely flips this on its head by offering a real challenge between all of his different mutations, with attacks such as full-screen lunges, tentacle whips, and a rocket launcher. tackling him requires a much stronger focus on positioning and dodge acumen than mr. X (or even many other early RE bosses), and fittingly in return for choosing to fight you get parts for specialized weapons. granted, actually mastering the dodge in these fights plays up the issues with its seemingly random outcomes and directions, but at the same time tanking hits or controlling his speed with the freeze grenades gives much-needed leeway in what is probably the hardest boss up to this point in the series. unfortunately, killing him in optional encounters doesn't seem to influence rank at all, and I never got a sense that these optional kills help make his later obligatory fights easier, but his presence still gives the benefit of influencing your ammo route. killing nemesis isn't cheap, so if you're interested in his weapons, the regular fights that are so easily trivialized by the bounty of grenades you receive becomes moments for you to tighten your belt and conserve ammo.

small variations to the campaign are also more prevalent in this entry, from randomized enemy layouts and different item locations to subtle route-dependent event trigger alterations. the least interesting of these are timed binary choices that are occasionally given to you during cutscenes, which generally are nothing more than knowledge checks, especially when you can get a free nemesis kill out of it like in the restaurant or on the bell tower. occasionally these actually affect routing, as on the bridge prior to the dead factory, but more often than not the difference seemed either negligible or not a real tradeoff. the rest of these do affect routing in meaningful ways, from things as minor as changing a room from hunters to brain suckers to major changes such as the magnum and the grenade launcher getting swapped in the stars office. this plus the plentiful ammo fosters a nice "go with the flow" atmosphere where reloading a save and getting thrown into different circumstances is often a worse choice than just limping along through mistakes. on the flip-side, the actual effects of this feels like it would be most relevant between many separate runs, so I really haven't played around with really planning a route for this one as much as I would have liked. it already took me a year to play through this short game lol, hopefully next year once I'm done teaching I'll come back to this one.

with that in mind, the real thing that elevated this for me over re2 was the area design. re3 sticks with general design thrust of the first two -- bigger early areas, smaller later areas -- but it moves away from interconnected inner loops and major-key gating of the mansion or the police station in favor of something more akin to spokes coming out from a wheel, where each spoke has its own little setpiece and order of exploration feels more loose. the best example of this is easily downtown, which implements an item collection challenge similar to chess plugs or medals puzzles from previous games (get supplies to fix a cable car). each primary location in this section is a building, whether a sub station or a press office, all connected via alleys and streets with interactables strewn along the way. does a good job both corralling the player into fighting enemies in narrow spaces as well as providing many separated nodes with their own little sparks of action and intrigue. not really as genius as the mansion's taut, intertwined room layout, but it's cool to see them try something a little different. the later game devolves into mini-puzzle areas on par with the guardhouse (or even smaller in the case of the park or the hospital), but these are a significantly improvement over the undercooked sewer from re2. the puzzles themselves are pretty fun too; I like spatial puzzles more than riddles, and they lean into that more here with stuff like the water purification check near the end of the game.

a word of advice: if you love psychological horror, especially silent hill, YOU NEED TO READ CRIME & PUNISHMENT. i understand how a 600 page book released 150 years ago in a format that doesn't exist anymore can seem off-putting or intimidating; i promise you it hasn't aged a day. crime & punishment can suffocate you with tension and anxiety comparable to any horror movie or game using words alone. the characters are oceans of beauty and flaws that will stick with you forever. without dostoevsky, there would be no shining, there would be no subahibi, and there would be no silent hill. read it and thank me later.

On a random day in 2005, after binging a few Quentin Tarantino flicks and a couple of Fist of the North Star chapters, Shinji Mikami looked at his masterpiece that was Resident Evil 4 and said "What if RE4 but Kenshiro and Tarrantino fr" and God Hand was born (This is my headcannon).

God Hand was a game I was ready to drop in the first 2 - 3 hours of playing as I was struggling with some of the earlier bosses and didn't wanna give myself an aneurysm while barely making it out of every fight that I've died to multiple times. But then I looked at the huge following this game had and saw all the singing praises, and I wanted to be a part of that camp too. So I decided I wasn't gonna be a little bitch boy and try to properly figure out how this game works.

When the game clicks, it finally CLICKS and you feel like a boxing god (intentional with the title?), but at the same time no matter how good you get the game will just get harder thanks to it's dyanamic difficulty system, just one of the mechanics borrowed from RE4. Unless you spend a good chunk of your life playing this game, it will remain challening no matter what. This is honestly, quite one of the hardest games I have ever played. Keep in mind though the game is also one of the fairest games I have ever played. I don't think I've ever died once thinking it was the games fault. Everything done by the enemy is clearly telegraphed and you are given a window to deal with it in multiple ways. And when you die, the checkpoints are mostly frequent bar a few exceptions, and it's generous enough to give you all of your health back when you die.

In regards to fairness and difficulty, the way it's hanlded here makes you not wanna put the controller down because as opposed to other what is considered to be "hard" games like Souls games, while challenging, are pretty punishing usually sending you back a bit if you die at a bossfight, and at the risk of losing some of the experience you gained. God Hand is hard hard in the sense where you need good reflexes and awareness for every single fight, but also very fair because of it's generous checkpoints. In a souls game, there are plenty of ways to cheese things if you're at a wall, but here you cannot cheese at all. It's just you and your skill, and you aren't getting past a point until you get better. Best way to put it, this is a discipline simulator.

When this game was initially released, the game was mostly overlooked by critics due to the criticism of the combat not being robust. This is far from the truth about the combat and to put it, God Hand's combat was way ahead of this time. What we have now as modern God Of War over the shoulder combat, which has endless praise from critics, was clearly inspired by God Hand. Similar to Resident Evil 4, God Hand employs the same control scheme where it is an over the shoulder tank controlling game, with not much control over the camera. This was highly ambitious for an action game back in the day, where action games were mostly 3rd camera-pulled-away types of games. It works really well in God Hand as the right stick is now used as it's dodging system, which is implemented insanley well.

God Hand is not an offensive based game where it's about pulling the best combos you can. In fact, there really aren't much button combos here.. 90% of the time you will be just mashing the square button to the tune of your preset combo. God Hand's gameplay is mainly defense and crowd control focused. 1 on 1 fights are pretty straight forward and purley defense focused. In these fights you are dodging attacks and retaliating when there is a window of opportunity, wheras if you put more than one enemy in a fight, the strategy has suddenly changed and it's about positioning yourself in a way where you don't get blindsided or stockpiled. Crowd fights are more about putting yourself in a position where you can get into a 1 on 1 with a enemy for a moment, before going back to controlliing the crowd again. Once the game systems click, you will be dodging and taking out baddies one by one like a champ.

The game isn't perfect, there were moments that kinda sucked for me, like that one section with the big claw machine. Moments like these are few and far between, but when they come it kills the momentum you have.

Apart from the gameplay, the setting and style reminds you of a Quentin Tarantino movie which brings immesne charm to the whole package. There are so many goofy cheeky moments that bring a laugh out of you in between all the chaos, it makes getting through the hard moments so much more worth it just to see these goofy scenes.

By the end of the game I felt like I had just conquered a mountain. Despite at the beggining feeling like this is game I probably couldn't finish, I made it to the end and had so much fun while doing it. I am now apart of the God Hand cult and "I love it".

Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures is the reason my dad owns a PlayStation 5 and became obsessed with The Last of Us for a year. I'm not shitting you.

The year was circa 2009, or something like that, and my brother was obsessed with Ed, Edd n Eddy. Kind of. Back then, we had a small collection of licensed games. There was a copy of the Robots game that I thought the House Fairy (my mom's way of getting us to clean up after ourselves) gave us once, and a copy of a weird Animaniacs game that I don't remember at all. Those are the two that stick out to me the most. So my older brother's frothing at the mouth at the thought of playing a game based on one of his favorite cartoons, and lo and behold, one exists. So he goads my dad into going to the nearby GameStop we bought a copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk and a mic for our Wii at. No cheddar. But they have a copy of it for the PlayStation 2. At this point, we're using our Wii as a glorified Gamecube and boot up Goldeneye on our dad's old N64 to scream at each other. All hope is lost for my older brother until he remembers that, 'wait, doesn't the PlayStation 3 play PS2 games?' Neither of us Google that, and the thought of watching my older brother play it inspires me to add a PlayStation 3 to my wishlist come December out of the blue. Cue the gift card my dad gets from work that Holiday season being the perfect amount for a new console; cue our brand new PlayStation 3 getting unwrapped next to a copy of Mind Flex that will gather dust in the years to come and a copy of The Beatles Rock Band for Wii that probably went to a Goodwill somewhere. Cue the memories spawned from my neighbors: the kids who went to our house for the trampoline we had in our backyard and LittleBigPlanet; the kid who lived right next to us who was so obsessed with Call of Duty that his birthday cake was literally the cover art of World At War one time; the copy of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood sold to my older brother for five dollars and promptly ignored; and, anecdotally, the kid who had to get sent to the ER after a pop-it was thrown at his head. That last one isn't related, but it comes up every time I remember these things.

If this game didn't contribute to my childhood, I don't know what did.

Too bad it kinda blows.

Rollerdrome is a game that would fit in perfectly with the PS2 library, meant as a good thing. It harkens to back to that generation where all you needed for a videogame was a cool idea and some good gameplay.

Taking a lot of inspiration from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Rollerdrome is best described as a Tony Hawk game with guns. The concept is very similar; you're given stages and in order to unlock new stages you need to complete some of the listed challenges e.g. Get a score of X, Do this trick on this grind rail etc etc.

As opposed to playing against the timer, you are rather playing against enemies. This is where the guns come in. In order to complete a level, you simply have to kill all the players on a stage using your 4 different weapons. You have controls that are very similar to THPS except not as complex. The question is why would you focus on doing tricks when this is mainly a shooter then? Well, in order to get back some ammo for your guns, you need to perform tricks. This is where the cool gameplay idea comes where you will constantly shooting and flipping, grabbing, grinding and spinning which results in very stylish gameplay once you master it.

The first 2 hours of the game is extremely fun, however the novelty quickly wears off once you realise you've seen all that the game can show you in those first 2 hours. The game itself is about 5-6 hours so it's not too long, but in those last 3 hours you will just be basically doing the same thing by facing the same enemy types you have been facing in the first 2 hours and the repetitiveness kicks in.

The idea of Rollerdrome is so good, the gameplay is great, it's just the content itself leaves so much to be desired. There are a couple of stages, but you are getting the same 3 biomes which quickly wear out. There is so much potential with Rollerdrome to reach high highs, which it does at the beginning, but everything quickly wears off hoping you'd see much more variety.

It's still a very good game and I would like to see a sequel with the same concept but with much more variety and ideas.