Delved into this cliche-storm of a game after a friend's recommendation piqued my curiosity. Many games from this era have their share of frustrating gameplay elements, and this one is particularly egregious in a few ways: the limited color palette means that some enemies tend to blend in with the background, and combined with the screen crunch means you rarely get enough time to react to them. Worse still, nearly every enemy is a flyer that likes to attack you from above/below while you can only attack left or right. The feel of platforming is quite stiff too, and there are far too many extended climbing sequences with tiny platforms where one single miscalculation means falling to the bottom of the screen and losing a minute or two of progress.

What really saves this game is how forgiving it is - infinite continues, and you respawn right where you died. In a more linear game, I would chalk this off as an uncreative band-aid over a poorly-balanced and poorly-designed experience. However, the infinite continues do work with the spirit of exploration the game seems to be encouraging. The stages are large, nonlinear, and full of neat little secrets and items to discover, and taking away the penalty for death means that the game - despite its difficulty - becomes a relaxed little playground where you're likely to find something new every time you play it.

Of course it'd be nice if the game was more polished, but it's a decent enough experience as is. Said friend who recommended me this game was insane dedicated enough to be able to 1cc it, and while I don't share in his enthusiasm, I do think one could do a lot worse than Wizards and Warriors if you were looking for a fun distraction from the NES era.

Count Dracula acting through proxy vampires to initiate the First World War from the comfort of his English castle is such a darkly rich conceit that I’m surprised it was a video game that had the idea first. Despite being a Mega Drive game that has more in common with its straightforward NES and SNES sidescrolling siblings than any PlayStation descendants, Castlevania: Bloodlines does a pretty decent job of exploring war’s truths and horrors just through good sprites, background work and instruction manual blurbs.

I know it’s a Backloggd cliché at this point to read video games far more closely than they deserve, but the American John Morris arrives in 1917 Europe to clear out a German munitions factory full of dead men walking and then heads to the Palace of Versaille to soak in a fountain of blood with more skeletons bearing army helmets - I think this game is trying to say something!! It wasn’t until I was more or less done with the game that I even put together that I was playing as the dad from Portrait of Ruin (set 1944), too. I really like that Castlevania’s bloodlines and relationships feel like genuine legends that you have to explore via dusty old ancillary texts (i.e. crusty Fandom sites and 2004 forum posts) instead of being linearly spoon-fed through exposition that nobody really needs to hear before they go around whipping werewolves. (Netflix, if you’re looking for another Castlevania story to do after Rondo of Blood…)

Because I am obliged to talk about how the game actually plays, I will let you know right here that the gameplay of Castlevania: Bloodlines is, indeed, Castlevania. You stiffly jump, you whip, you beat up Frankenstein. It’s clear by this point that Konami had more or less exhausted the formula; this is solid-well made Castlevania, but it isn’t a ton of miles removed from 1986, and it’s plain to see why Symphony of the Night came a few years later, because this series would otherwise have been buried in a crypt. The not-mode-7 effects totally rule, though, and the music rips, too. Glad to finally trace the genealogy of Iron Blue Intention.

When discussions surrounding this come up, it's usually about one of two games: Sonic Colors, the game that pleased fans old and new alike and, after constant mixed to negative reception for years, truly saved the series, and Sonic Colors, the game that ushered in a lot of the series' worst traits of the modern era and supposedly doomed the series. If you couldn't already tell, Colors is a pretty controversial entry, and to some degree I can understand why. Despite how close it appears to Unleashed, it's wildly different to it, or really any other Sonic game, in terms of design. But I want to put that on the backburner at the moment, for now I want to talk about everyone's favorite aspect of this game: the story.

This might be a bit of a hot take, but I don't actually mind the downsized scale of Colors' story. I think that lower-scale more Saturday Morning Cartoon-y Sonic plots have their place in the series, and I find the more comedic take of this plot fairly charming. ...most of the time, sometimes the writers clearly think some jokes are much funnier than they are, most notably the Wisp translator gags. I only think Pontac and Graff's writing style only really became a problem with Lost World, where it tried to merge Colors' writing style with a semi-serious storyline. All that being said, I'd much rather that Sonic stories fall more in line with the Shonen-like plots that the 2000s games had than this, it's not my preferred writing style for Sonic in the slightest. Even so, I do think it gets more of a bad rap in this regard than it deserves as a one-off adventure.

Like I said earlier, Sonic Colors' design is very different from any other entry in the series, in some ways for the worse. However, I think that the way people judge it is purely on a first-playthrough basis. It likely won't really stand out all that much when you go through it for the first time. However, once you try mastering its levels on replays, arguably the most important part of the Sonic experience, that's where it really starts to shine.

A while back, I did a run of Colors where I attempted to S rank every stage, and that's where it really clicked for me. Colors puts a much stronger emphasis on smart usage of the Wisps in this context. You can't just blitz through a stage and get an S rank that easily. I had to strategize the way I used Wisps a lot of the time in my attempts at these runs and know when to hold onto them. The most notable example was the infamous Sweet Mountain act where you slowly rise up on a platform with red laser beams, but holding onto a tricky to obtain laser wisp from earlier let me just go right past that. Having all of the wisps accessible in every world is the most important part, like with how new routes open up in the later acts of Tropical Resort with the Spike Wisps. This is the hardest that replays have been encouraged in the series, and I'm all for it.

However, I'm not going to argue that the first playthrough shouldn't matter, cause it absolutely does leave the strongest impression. And despite how creative it can be with its design, I don't think the game presents it all too well with its 6 act structure. Presenting its challenges like this makes a good chunk of the acts feel like ways to bloat out the game, which is ironic since it's an incredibly short title even with them included. I think the approach they should've taken was having three main acts, whichever ones they are can vary depending on each world, and having the remaining three be bonus levels that aren't required to fight the boss. Kirby's Epic Yarn dealt out levels in a similar way, and that really worked in its favor really well. I think if Colors took a different approach with handling giving out content, then it wouldn't look like it needs the massive overhaul people claim it does.

On the topic of presentation, can I just say that it has one of my favorites of any Sonic Game? It's one of the best looking 3rd party games on the Wii, hell one of the best looking on the Wii period. It's matched really well with some of the most gorgeous locations that Sonic's ever been to. They perfectly fit with that "intergalactic theme park" motif while still all being very distinct from one another. Planet Wisp seems to be the crowd favorite, given its appearance in Generations, but I think Asteroid Coaster might be my favorite. It's the most "alien planet" feeling one of the whole lineup, I love it. The music is also phenomenal, probably in my top 3 Sonic OSTs of all time.

I previously had a brief review claiming that this was Sonic Team's Bayonetta. What I meant was that it has a lot of choices in design and writing that work well on their own, but the team ended up taking the wrong lessons from the success it had in later entires. I wish that this game wasn't constantly under fire from the fandom for what came after it, cause once it's looked at in isolation, the Colors feel so right.

Wow, 2003 Capcom sure was a crock of shit wasn't it? This game, Mega Man X7, Dino Crisis 3, etc. It's absolutely amazing the company didn't go under after such an awful display, but I guess that's thanks to Viewtiful Joe.

DMC2 isn't a video game, it isn't an experience for you to get yourself immersed in, or to be thrilled by.

DMC2 is a void that swallows up all enjoyment and entertainment value and puts you in a place where you cannot escape, where you cannot experience anything of value or providence.

I may not have understood how exactly combos worked in DMC1, but you know, at least the gameplay was inherently satisfying. I still felt like I had to avoid attacks, utilize the unique abilities for my Devil Trigger, etc. That game had a crunch to its sound effects too, and music that got you in the mood to kill the hordes of enemies ahead.

DMC2 has none of this. DMC2 plays the game for you. Hold down the X button and watch as you participate in the waiting game. This is how 95% of encounters in this game can be handled. Why bother with swordplay when shooting the enemy can stagger and juggle them in the air indefinitely. This even applies to boss fights.

I just knew, the moment I popped into this game for the second time since I own it on my PC that I was going to feel absolutely drained. By the second half of the game I had begun to abandon the guns to try and give any form of life to this fucking game, but it didn't work. There is no way to make this game any less soulless than it is.

I think for me, the premiere moment of the game's shittiness came to me during this one part where you ride in a train. There are enemies in the train and you are expected to beat them while the train moves to its destination. I managed to beat them very swiftly, but still had to wait a solid 30 seconds for the the train to reach the other side. And in that moment, that's when it came to me:

DMC2 wastes your time.

THERE IS A TAPE IN THE DINING ROOM

Like most of Anatomy, it is not a line that should be utterly terrifying. Consciously - thanks to it being the first moments of the game, and having absorbed enough of the game through osmosis to know the game is not heavy on jumpscares/whatever - I knew there was nothing truly to be scared of in that room that is going to rip my head off IRL. And yet the first two times I tried playing this game, the sheer intensity of just walking around the few innocuous rooms at the start of the game was enough to have me Alt-F4 before anything had even really happened.

And yeah, I will concede, when it comes to this sort of thing I am a bit of a wuss. Particularly when it comes to the interface screw-y glitchy horror you get in a lot of Itch games, which Anatomy does like to throw at you.

But whilst that stuff always freaks me out, the general presentation of Anatomy is what really hooks under my skin. Just moving around the house has this weird feeling of intensity to it. The sound design is impeccable, the lighting just right, with a narrow field of view that makes it feel like the whole time you're never really sure you're alone. And of course, the fact that the game's setting is so deliberately ordinary adds this extra, primal layer to it all. Like an old memory of being alone in the house I grew up in and the fear that came with it resurfacing.

The main conceit of the horror is also really cool and well done. The concept of a place or location being the source of the horror itself is nothing new, but the intimacy of Anatomy adds a nice layer to it, especially with the very erudite sounding sciencey person who reads most of the tapes to you - the game's horror thesis is still gnawing at me a little, and I do kinda buy the point the guy on the tapes is saying...

So for a 30 minute experience of dread, Anatomy is fucking great. Probably the best horror game i've played since PT, even, and frankly, is very comparable to that game in general but for having less of a focus on direct scares. I do think it has issues - the game desperately, desperately needs subtitles and an actual options menu. It wouldn't clash with the game's aesthetic even as it basically already uses VHS closed captions on occasion. Without them i literally had to go find a subtitled playthrough on youtube to parse the entirety of some of the last tapes you collect. I would also say the game's one big actual scare is a bit dissapointing - its ok, and a perfect rounding out of the game's big theme, but looks a little goofy compared to the rest of what is an immaculate aesthetic, and is nowhere near enough of a crescendo to match up to the sheer dread built up before it.

Also, and this is the smallest of nits to pick, but the UNITY PERSONAL EDITION logo popping up every time you boot, for game that you will have to do so 3 times in 30 minutes to finish, is a bit immersion breaking for something that is otherwise so utterly captivating.

But don't let that take away anything too much from Anatomy. The small issues I have with the game are also mostly in retrospect. When playing it I haven't been as scared by media since PT, and it's theme is one that feels like it's going to linger with me for a while just like it. When a game makes walking down a simple Hallway I KNOW has nothing at the other end scary, that's when you know you're dealing with a properly excellent Horror creator.