If you stick with this game long enough to get past the weak opening act (which, judging by the trophy percentages, turned off a LOT of people), there is a neat little water physics and AI plotting puzzle-strategy in here. Vessel really shines once you've unlocked multiple types of colorful goo and can start guiding different blobs with different behaviors to specific switches and machines like melted Lemmings.

Unfortunately, since this is a physics-based puzzle platformer in the PS3 era, this means that sometimes you'll be stuck on a puzzle for over an hour because the water refuses to behave in the same way twice and sometimes you'll die because some particles of lava decided to wiggle in a corner and then launch at your sunburnt Murdoc Niccals scientist at 500 mph.

While this isn't the worst game I've ever played on the PS Plus service, this certainly was the most miserable game to Platinum. I love any game that hands me a gun and tells me it's an ~advanced futuristic gun~ only for you enter combat and it takes ten bullets to kill the lowliest grunt. I also love completely linear games that somehow try to work in a bullshit collectible system so the game punishes you for triggering story events before you checked every single corner in every single room. Love it. Perfect.

Cool art direction though, even if it's in service to one of the most barebones cyberpunk settings I've ever seen. It almost made the second playthrough worth it. Almost. (also shout-out to the Brazillian guy who wrote the only 100% guide for this game on Steam, you're a real one)

The concept of this game - Metroidvania where you play as a magical genie that attacks with her hair and can transform into animals - is really solid. Too bad the actual game is a fairly slow, plodding pile of nothing with weak combat and weak level design that spins its wheels in the mud for 90% of the runtime until all of the cool plot twists happen in the last room in the map and then the game just ends.

I've been told that Pirate's Curse is The Good Shantae Game so I'm definitely giving that one a chance. I've also been told that this game had a very troubled dev cycle, to which I replied "Yeah, I can tell".

By all accounts, a game with less than a year of development time, with a lot of resources and manpower diverted to making an online mode in the PS2 era, even more resources and manpower diverted to working on a separate game engine, and all the fun horror stories of cut features arising from this game's development cycle should've made a complete trainwreck of a game but instead this is one of the best games in the franchise and ended up creating the franchise's most iconic villain so clearly some black magic was at play at the Insomniac studios in 2004. The cut side-games of this game - the races and the ship battles - don't hinder the game so much as trim the fat and as a result I think this game has a more streamlined experience than Going Commando and brought me the gameplay that I enjoy the most from this series.

But mostly, I must reiterate, this game brought us Dr. Nefarious, who feels like he was created mostly for Insomniac to flex on the competition and go "look at how cartoonishly animated this PS2 character is", and I'm glad he's survived well into the PS5 era where they can raytrace that doofus and make him lavishly animated on modern hardware. Am I speaking from a bias? Possibly. But I think this game's faults would've been way more noticeable if the villain wasn't good and if we didn't get that banger of a song from Courtney Gears midway through the game.

With the 32-bit sprite work, the PS1 era soundtrack, and the cheesy 90's era voice acting tickling your brain and Mega Man possessing the ability to have the Buster and a Special weapon selected at the same time, you might be fooled into thinking that this is going to be one of the crown jewels of the Classic Mega Man lineup for the first couple of minutes. Sadly, it doesn't take long for the Blue Bomber's physics to start to feel sluggish and floaty with all of his extra animation frames, because it's right around that time when the game starts to flood the screen with so many moving enemy and explosion sprites that the game dissolves into visual noise.

Still a fine Mega Man all the same. I'm just happy that the Internet only makes fun of Dr. Wahwee, Rwmega Man, and JUMP JUMP SLIDE SLIDE because that means that Aqua Man's handsome guy intro got to be a complete surprise for me.

Also shout-out to the Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 version of this game for removing the red cross on the "Heal Mega Man completely" Rush item and turning it into a mysterious white box, meaning I was trying to beat the last two bosses of this game on one health bar like a chump. Capcom changing this in a rerelease means that they're aware that the original version of Mega Man 8 violated the Geneva Convention!

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Best MM8 Robot Master - Aqua Man clears, but I also appreciate Astro Man for being programmed with anxiety.
Worst MM8 Robot Master - Saying "Clown Man" is too easy and also isn't true. The implications of Search Man's double-headed state of existence makes him the worst for me, but I'm saying this out of pity as opposed to hatred.

I should've known things were going to be dire when I noticed that this game has existed for 15 long glorious years without a single Youtube walkthrough or Gamefaqs guide.

In a world where most of the movie licensed tie-ins on the Nintendo DS are either really bad 2D platformers or really bad touch screen minigame collections, Igor: The Game DS dares to be different by being a really bad RPG/puzzle hybrid. And, by doing so, it made me wish that I was rapidly tapping circles on the bottom screen instead of what I was forced to do.

So after the main plot of the movie decides to just get up and leave, Igor and his ragtag bunch of witty cartoon sidekicks enter a monster tournament because that will...bring back his creation/girlfriend and stop Eddie Izzard Scientist. So you build a monster with your Starter head, body, arms, and legs and then wander around a map FF Tactics-style and find the tournament sites along the way until you get into a random encounter so that you can grind for materials and money by playing Literally Just Super Turbo Puzzle Fighter on the bottom screen as both your monster and the random woodland creature awkwardly stand there in crunchy low-poly 3D until you fill up enough energy bars for your monster to throw a punch.

Yes, the DS game based off of the 2008 film everyone just kinda forgot about is not a bad Mario clone or a bad Mario Party clone but rather a bad Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords clone of all things, with some Monster Rancher thrown in there for extra spice to make the shit sandwich more palpable.

I would give them props for not taking the safe route, but I feel like a kid playing this would've preferred if this was just a button-masher type of affair where B meant fist rather than "slowly match 30 blue blocks for fist,". I'm not going to mince words - this is one of the most boring games I have ever played in my life. The puzzle aspect of slowly exploding gems and the framerate constantly dipping just makes this entire game so slow and boring that you can feel your soul escape your body when the non-puzzle aspect - the "collect body parts to build a freak of nature to fight in tournaments" idea - actually sounds like fun.

Oh, and you can't coast through this game with the starter monster either. You see, there are six tournaments to complete before you can roll credits. You can maybe finish the first tournament with just the starter monster if you're lucky, but then the second tournament has 11 goddamn opponents, all with monsters with twice as many stats as your now-useless hunk of rotting flesh. So you HAVE to grind for better body parts by running around on the map back and forth until you have enough material to exchange for body parts that you HOPE translates to better skills that can help you win.

One body part costs 16 of a given material. Monsters only drop 4 material items. You are going to be playing a LOT of laggy Super Turbo Puzzle FIghter while listening to the same two songs as random encounters take around 10-15 minutes as you gradually whittle down HP.

Why would you make grinding essential to progress in Igor: The Game. Of all games.

Once I realized that there was a long, thankless road ahead of me, I told myself "you know, I deserve to play better games" and gave up. I was curious to see how this unrecorded game would progress before I realized that I have far better uses of my time than seeing the ending of Igor: The Game DS.

Farewell, Igor. At least your art style was kinda neat.

This game takes the Going Commando approach of throwing a bunch of things at the wall to see what sticks in hopes of giving the franchise a good revamp for the new PS3 hardware, only some of the things it throws at the wall use the Sixaxis motion controls and the lot of the stuff sticking to the wall is melodramatic "Ratchet is the last of his race and also most of his personality traits are racial traits now" storytelling that just feels awkwardly crammed in there and has the same aura as Archie Sonic's echidna race storylines. Gonna say it - I really dislike that Ratchet turned from "just a funny little rat guy that found a robot in the desert" to "the last of a special, smart, mysterious race literally called "Saviors of the Galaxy" at one point" in this game.

As for the actual gameplay, it rules. Gameplay's solid, taking advantage of the new hardware to great effect, and the new weapon upgrade system was a major improvement that the franchise still uses to this day. It's a shame that, in return, this game is kind of an actual mess from a pacing standpoint, the storyline is still grappling with the plot points that were introduced here, and Tachyon is so uninteresting of a villain that he gets upstaged by the robot pirates about halfway through the game.

In a way, Tachyon is a perfect representation of Tools of Destruction because, like the rest of the game, the writing is unsure what tone to go for him so instead Tachyon ends up an awkward mix of comedic and dramatic and he just fails at being either. But at least he's fun to fight and his boss battle is tuned to gameplay perfection. Come for the gameplay, ignore the story, but don't ignore the story too much because the sequels are going to pick up the slack and be better written than this.