Overlong and borderline tedious in places and still with a lot of scruffy errors (poor voice direction on some lines, spoken dialogue that doesn't match subtitles, wrong audio lines playing, broken sequences) and some puzzles that are just obtuse but still quite funny and with a nice art style. The blueprint system is a nice idea, but doesn't work in practice because it's too hard to work out what some of the elements even are (the different liquids in the cocktail) and it doesn't give you any useful feedback on what you've got wrong. Probably not as good as the previous game overall.

Rhapsody:
You can see the roots of Disgaea in here. The bare bones of the combat, the art style and the sharply scripted, funny (and occasionally bleak) story. Unfortunately, this is all married to a rather tedious JRPG.

There's only really three dungeons, made up of about six screens each repeated ad nauseam with minor palette changes. The main challenge to the game is just navigating these mazes, which is not fun.

Combat is technically fine, but tediously easy and repetitive, especially once you run into some Metal Jellies, which allow you to very quickly power level (without even really trying) to the point that even the final boss is trivial. You could maybe complicate things for yourself if you ever decide to change up your party but there's really no incentive to do so - all the elemental stuff is fairly irrelevant - especially as every new character you get is at level 1.

Also, for a game that calls itself a musical, it doesn't really have many songs (which is of course a limitation of this being a PS1 game with limited storage, but still, it feels light on songs).

This is a pretty fun game that manages to capture the feel of the N64 originals, for better and worse, translating the mini-sandboxes of the 3D games into 2d. And that mostly works, some issues with unclear relative height of platforms aside. The graphics are nice, the script is sharp, it manages to recreate loads more of Banjo and Kazooie's moves than I expected and it's all pretty fun.

The biggest problem though is that cluserfck of a final bos. First, it's locked behind a time trial platforming task, but one that requires consumables to activate. Then you're presented with a three stage boss fight, with no chance to save between them and the only opportunity to heal coming from defeating minions in the middle one (which requires those same consumables as before). These three fights are interspersed with quiz sections that can absolutely get fcked. Loads of audio questions, so sod you if you've been playing with the sound off (or are deaf) and reprises of the mini-games, some of which you can lose more health in, due to random chance. Just an absolute toilet of anti-player choices that ruin the ending of an otherwise solid game, and why I've got this as "abandoned" rather than "completed".

Is this a great game? No.

Is it a good game? Probably also no.

But it’s a better game than it really deserves to be; a movie tie-in on a platform that had been superceded. There are some solid elements here. The multi character system is fun, the crafting system, while basic, is an interesting wrinkle. There are some solid puzzles, while it manages to have an element of survival horror to its dinosaur fights (and the pause menu sting too). And the graphics are pretty nice.

But it has big flaws. The sections where you play as Kong are tedious. The mini flashes of stealth gameplay that can have Ann be recaptured if you fail, forcing you to trek back across the map to get her, are a pain. And navigation generally is not great. The game is bad at telling you where to go in both a micro sense (with hard to navigate levels) and a macro sense, (with its world map that is not particularly helpful). The creatures that infinitely spawn behind bits of scenery can do one too.

After how much I loved MechCommander, and my general love of turn based games, I was surprised by how disappointed I was with BattleTech.

It's a game with some shockingly bad flaws. It doesn't bother to tell you how to play the game until the second mission. I could only get to that after going off and watching a 30 minute YT tutorial on the game's systems and UI in order to beat the first mission. It's kind of ridiculous really.

There are some pretty poorly designed/programmed mission too. There are loads of instances where I've had enemy "reinforcements" show up at the same time, if not before, the main batch of enemies. Once, there was even an animation of a dropship delivering the reinforcement lance of Mechs that played after I'd already destroyed 3/4 of them. Absolutely mad.

The core systems and gameplay are fine but I found them rather tedious after a while, especially combined with the samey missions. The financial roleplaying elements are a bit of a drag more than anything, and I ended up modding the game to minimise them, especially the time taken to re-equip stored mechs.

I'm not sure how far into the campaign I got percentage-wise, but I hit an absolutely insane difficulty spike in the Liberate: Smithon mission, where your four mechs are dropped on the south edge of a turret heavy base and tasked with destroying 8 enemy mechs and also some supply trucks if you want/can. There are ammo dumps around the base which you can destroy, but you're incentivised not to. The trucks are almost impossible to take out before they escape, certainly without having a light, fast mech then stuck in the line of fire of multiple turrets and mechs. You can neutralise the turrets, but taking out the enemy mechs was an absolute slog and even blowing the ammo dumps didn't help. I once blew up an ammo dump and the mech standing with its back right next to the explosion was barely scratched. The entire mission was a slog that took me several attempts across an entire weekend to get through. I was ready to just bail on that, but succeeded on my last attempt. But since that mission, my interest has waned regardless. The charm has gone.

I've been trying to get this (on the SNES) for about ten years now, after playing through a chunk of it on a PC emulator running way too slow about 20 years ago. But the secondary market prices are mad (especially as I'd have to import from the US), so a Switch port was a godsend. Does it hold up to those expectations though?

Yes and no. The battle systems are fun, the script witty and the art nice, but the game is surprisingly short and almost trivially easy. I completed the main story in about 14 hours (and that was with taking my time) and the only game over I got was from attempting the secret boss too early. Beyond that I don't think I ever came close to defeat.

I played through this back in the day and remembered it being alright, better than its reputation.

But returning to it today, it's a mess. Even on the tutorial level, I frequently had no clue where to go. The guns all feel awful and arbitrarily useless. You can one shot kill people with headshots, yet using the same weapon anywhere else on their body takes about 8 shots to kill them. Reloading takes an age and a day (with no auto-reload). The weapon swap interface is a mess, leading to continually losing the weapons I wanted for random ones on the floor.

I spent three hours with the single player and they all feel wasted, frankly.

Infection mode on multiplayer still rocks though.

I don't mind that it's based on the Cyberverse cartoon rather than G1 or anything (even having not watched Cyberverse) as some people do. And there are some decent design choices here in terms of the range of character abilities and customisation. But it's all a bit moot given that the game is so utterly tedious.

The level design consists almost entirely of paired missions where you a) run to the opposite end of the map avoiding constantly spawning enemies and then b) kill all the enemies. But the Decepticons still constantly respawn in the latter type, even sometimes as you've killed the last enemy on the map, it just chucks in another. And in the "run away" missions, the game is constantly telling you "you can't kill them all, make your way to the goal" which is fine the first two times maybe, but by Act 3 it can maybe stop clogging up the screen with it and scolding me for actually trying to clear a damn path through the enemies.

It's just such a cheap way of making levels. There's no finesse or style or even really much in the way of true tactics. The only element of difficulty is just from how many new enemies it chucks at you and when that increases, it doesn't become more fun or rewarding, just more of a drag.