The best version of Pac-Man available IMO. Every game ends with me going "okay, but one more run", it distills the best parts of Pac-Man and puts them together into the tightest package possible. So good I legit thought about buying an arcade stick to see if it would make me better at this game. My only complaint is one that someone already mentioned on this page, should have a scoreboard of all your best scores like Pac-Man, instead of just your best. It would make for a better incentive to finish runs that aren't going to beat your high score. It's too bad this version became so hard to come by.

Ya GIRL has a PROBLEM she is just hoovering up Ratchet games like she needs them to live, I’m not even very sick anymore, there was no real reason for me to spend thirteen hours of my Saturday playing through Up Your Arsenal in one sitting, and yet here I am, having done that, refreshed the following morning and ready to talk about this mess.

It’s not a secret that Insomniac Games worked under intense, nonstop crunch for basically the entirety of the PS2 and PS3 eras, with their steady stream of annual releases (sometimes multiple games per year) that didn’t stop even as they split into multiple simultaneous franchises, smaller mobile and PC games, and eventually steady VR development. While these conditions would undoubtedly continue to get worse over time, their effects on the games themselves are immediately noticeable, and I think Up Your Arsenal is the first time a game really obviously feels rushed and unfinished after its sub-year in development. It’s impossible to say why exactly this happened, of course. It would be easy to point at the new, very cool and full featured multiplayer mode as something that took away time and resources from the main game, but these are the kinds of things that can be planned for, and the significantly higher number of nearly-complete features cut late in development found in the bonus level and mentioned in developer quotes in interviews over the years suggests a project that was generally messy rather than a specific mistake in the planning stages.

Regardless of HOW it happened, though, you can certainly feel it in the bones of this game, which is sparser both in design and in aesthetic accoutrement. Essentially all the side activities of previous games are gone bar the arena from 2, which is now just its own singular level rather than two separate areas built into other environments, and the number and variability of challenges is stripped back accordingly. The crystal gathering scavenger hunt quest zone returns in the form of a sewer maze rather than two large open areas, and while I think that in actuality there is not much lost in terms of actual play when your movement is restricted like it is in these narrow pipes, highlighting how bland and thoughtless these areas are just makes the ones in Going Commando look worse, it doesn’t make the one here seem more fun. There are at least two levels in the main game that are straight up just multiplayer maps which is never a great sign, and both of them are examples of this other thing the game does that I’m not a fan of where several of the worlds in this game are kind of padded with these short missions where you’ll run through the same maps or chunks of maps with slightly different but very repetitive objectives with a cash reward at the end. These are framed as part of this game’s War Storyline but they can’t get away from feeling like desperate filler to make Up Your Arsenal match the first two games in length. Even GRIND RAILS are gone entirely, an element that in my mind are iconic to the series. Just not here. There IS the addition of a whole separate little five level side scrolling platformer and it’s FINE but it doesn’t feel like, SUPER good to control. I’m not exactly weeping over a lot of this stuff, I’m on the record as basically hating all the minigames from Going Commando, but I’ll get around to the streamlining of the actual level design in a bit, and when it’s all taken together I was definitely feeling the lack of Stuff here compared to previous entries.

It’s not just content, though, the game looks and feels a little off, too. The HUD is this hideous pissy yellow/gold shade that occasionally blends with environments to make it hard to read during gameplay and it is actively hard to parse in the menu when you’re trying to assign stuff to your quick select. The colors and themes in the areas have some creative highlights, like the criminally short robot discotheque moon or Dr. Nefarious’ underwater base system and the accompanying neon sewers, but the colors are looking pretty washed out for the most part here, and there are a lot of like, Grey City or Desert World maps. It really feels like stuff like a futuristic tv set should be a lot more interesting than “a series of grey rooms and one of them has an ugly pattern on the floor.” These visual downgrades are ESPECIALLY noticeable when you revisit Metropolis, one of the most iconic locations from the first game, reusing it’s incredible music track, and everything just fails to pop in the same way it did before. A lot of things that the games once paid a lot of attention to and in my opinion heavily characterized the series, like introductory cutscenes for planets and characters within levels are almost entirely absent now.

Where once most planets had unique enemies, or at least in the second game there were narrative justifications for why certain enemy types would recur regularly, here the roster of guys you’re fighting feels downright inadequate, and the weapons you’re fighting them with start to feel actively bad for the first time in the series. This isn’t because the weapons themselves aren’t fun or cool because they are, Insomniac is still batting pretty high on the designs themselves, but enemies just don’t respond to most weapons in the same ways they used to in a way that’s actively detrimental to the experience. I’m on the record as thinking the damage scaling phasing out earlier weapons is generally a good thing both because it incentivizes you to use other stuff and because the later weapons tend to be more creative and fun to use. But even when guns were less useful for damage in the second game, enemies still flinched when you shot them with a shotgun, they still reacted when they were hit by a missile. Here you can unload a dozen shots into a guy and he will just tank them like nothing has happened until his death animation. Perhaps this is an intentional choice to make things more challenging for you, tuned against Up Your Arsenal offering a fully mapped third person shooter style control scheme that makes shooting and maneuvering simultaneously a lot easier for the player, but it feels bad! Feels like shit!

Which is a shame because Ratchet really has never controlled better. His jumps are tighter and you have the most control over them, the quick wheel has been expanded so there’s less time managing the menus, gadgets have largely been pared down to contextual actions and button prompts that MOSTLY work intuitively when they should, but the few that are still active items feel necessary. It is cool that they keep finding ways to streamline the way Ratchet and Clank feels without paring down the things Ratchet can DO. It’s kind of a bummer then how little of that gets incorporated into the level design. It feels weird to me to be this person who is saying “bah humbug where did my platforming go” because I am generally in favor of experimentation and following your nose and clearly Insomniac’s nose is leading them down the path that these games should be bouncy third person shooters, and conceptually I am completely okay with that. I would embrace it. Where I think my issue starts to take is with how much tease there is of the really cool platforming experience we could have had. There are maybe three levels in this game that feel pretty solidly like an original Ratchet and Clank level and baby they sing they slap so fucking hard when you’re jumping and shooting and using your hookshot thing and running around and it’s frantic and asking a little bit of precision from you? It’s cool, it feels great. I wish we would either go harder on that stuff, make the experience more even, or settle more confidently into the game we’re really making here, which, to their credit, they do well when they do it, which isn’t as often as I’d like.

Aside from those old-style levels we’ve essentially fully ditched the classic Ratchet donut shaped levels where every zone as two or three paths to take from the starting point that all kind of spiral out to their reward and then back around to that initial hub. Most of the levels in the game are just a straight shot now, which is not truly so terrible a thing in the context of the shooter we want to be, but does make it harder to hide secrets and kind of highlights how much more engaging that old style of level is comparatively. My hope is that future games will refine this linear level design into something more engaging rather than something that just feels boring. Here it’s a middle ground – the levels themselves were rarely the biggest issue I had but I do notice the change in philosophy, and it was initially pretty jarring. There are a few times where they do plop you down for missions in small open world areas with a little list of objectives to complete, simple things like kill these four guys or shut down these four thingies, but the freedom of approach offered there works pretty well for Ratchet’s game design, the most fun I’ve ever had with a Far Cry Outpost lol. More importantly, even though one of those is a mission on one of the multiplayer maps, those two levels just show a more creative approach to objectives that prove there’s variety you can do in this space, and that kind of thing would be welcome as something to explore further in the future imo. I also want to shout out the Clank levels which are as sparsely placed as ever but I do think they’re the best they’ve ever been here, with the extraneous additional mechanics from the second game cut in favor of a much more puzzle friendly one and slightly more open design. They’re neat, wish there were more of them so they could be designed more complexly.

This was the first game Insomniac ever made where they had professional writers but I would not fucking be able to tell you that from playing it!!! The plot of this game is truly dire, an unpleasant, nonsensical mess that doesn’t hang together, is largely unfunny, and continues all of the worst trends of this series without offering anything else to balm the wound. I don’t really know what to say about it. Uh, so, Ratchet and Clank go back to their galaxy because it’s being invaded by the robot army of this guy named Dr Nefarious, who is also a robot, and wants to exterminate all organic life. Ratchet and Clank immediately get drafted by the galactic army, more because Clank is now a famous tv and film actor (???) than because anyone seems to remember that they are big time heroes, and it comes to light that disgraced hero and two time villain Captain Qwark was responsible for defeating Dr Nefarious in the past, so everyone decides to go get him because he might have some secret to do it again (???). So after a trip to a BIG TIME RACIST jungle planet populated by primitive monkey aliens who wear vague tribal masks where Qwark has been hiding, he’s put in charge of the fleet despite his obvious ineptitude, then kind of nothing happens for like eight hours, then robot Britney Spears is also anti-organic and you kill her, then you kill and evil clone of Clank that Dr Nefarious made because he thought Clank’s tv show was real and got mad when Clank didn’t hate organics (???) and then Dr Nefarious maybe kills Qwark but not really and Ratchet scolds him for being a coward and Nefarious turns everybody into robots and then you destroy his big robot with an inspired Qwark’s help and I guess everyone gets turned back from being robots because they’re fine in the ending, which is mostly a Clank James Bond joke and not actually about this game. Okay? Okay.

Can you see how from just like, typing out what happens things seem kinda fucky here? Like don’t get me wrong I think the plot of Going Commando is a hot turd but that game at least like, has a story and is about things? It’s just badly told. I DEFY you to tell me what Up Your Arsenal is about. What are the themes of Up Your Arsenal. The satirical element of the series is basically gone here. We’re not really commenting on consumerism, on capitalism, on arms dealership, on the corrupting influence of celebrity. We’re kind of sort of playing with that in the way that Clank’s star has risen and Ratchet’s has fallen based on their roles in this weird James Bond Parody that seems only to be here for some strangely out of place jokes, but that doesn’t really say anything about the characters or the world, and only loosely gets them an in with Evil Britney Spears Robot that could easily have happened any other way – these guys are already famous! So we’re kind of making james bond jokes, we’re kind of doing war movie pastiches which make up most of the gameplay (isn’t it funny when a robot says stay frosty? Guys?), we’re doing a lot of WEIRD early 2000s race humor like what the fuck is up with this robot plotline.

Dr Nefarious’ whole thing is that he hates organic life and wants to kill all of them. He never really says why; we know from flashbacks that he was bullied by Captain Qwark as a teen, but oh yeah lmao he’s a human guy in those flashbacks? He’s not a robot?? And him becoming a robot is never mentioned he just is one between two of the flashbacks there is not inciting reason for this. He claims to Clank that robots are like, secondary to organic life at one point but we’ve never seen evidence of this? In the previous games and in this one robots are victims of slapstick comedy and of the machine of capitalism but in basically equal measure with organic guys. This isn’t a Star Wars scenario where robots are just openly slaves they really do seem to just be guys, so if you want to make a racism metaphor you have to do at least a little bit of world building or demonstrating with characters on screen that this is a thing, right? But maybe not because then you’re running the risk of doing a Marvel style “the bad guy is right but too much” sort of thing and I can see why you wouldn’t want to have the villain of your funny kids’ game whose name is DOCTOR NEFARIOUS be the victim of actual hate crimes? I don’t know it’s a really fucking weird needle to thread, it’s a weird thread to tug at, and the game just kind of tugs it recklessly for NO payoff. The payoff is we get to make jokes like “you squishies can’t dance” and the president, after everyone is turned into robots, putting on a mask or something and being like “I’m half robot see you should vote for me!” like damn a Bill Clinton joke like six years too late very cool guys lmao. At one point Ratchet is like, oh man we gotta stop Nefarious from turning everybody into robots, and then he looks sheepishly at Clank and says “err not that there’s anything WRONG with that” like what the fuck are we DOING here man????

When your satire isn’t about anything and the jokes become this shotgun spread of unfocused spaghetti, some of it’s gonna stick to the wall for sure, and some of the goofs in this game ARE funny, but damn like a what cost?? There are so many weird little bits that just seem wrong to me. Why did we bring back so many characters from the first game? Was Skid McMarx a fan favorite? Was Al, the guy who gave Clank his helicopter mode or whatever, were people desperate for that random shopkeeper to show up again? Based on how unfunny they are here I sure fuckin’ wasn’t. Angela from the last game is gone and like yeah sure whatever, but Ratchet has a NEW girlfriend of the week, Sasha, who is like his handler, and there’s a part early on where the president’s city is being attacked by robots and a transmission cuts and she goes “DAD!” and that’s how Ratchet and Clank and you find out that she’s the president’s daughter, information that never comes up ever again and has no bearing on anyone’s characters and doesn’t even really add stakes to any of the multiple scenes where the president or Sasha are endangered in the game. It just doesn’t matter! Qwark’s return to the limelight, the thing he’s craved forever, is largely wasted because of how little the game has to say about it. There’s nothing about the way the world reacts to this or the characters around him, everyone except Ratchet is just happy to have him back and earnestly thinks he’s a big hero who’s going to save the day, despite ostensibly knowing of his now many crimes, which do come up here! It would be one thing if these things were used thematically, to comment on the way status and power let you get away with evil without consequence, which has been a running theme of the series UNTIL NOW but that’s clearly not what is happening here – rather now the tone is being pushed to outright farce, where every character is just openly stupid, and it’s jarring, and it feels inappropriate. Qwark himself is the only character who gets an sort of arc in the game, and it’s a pretty good one, as he’s finally given some internality and confronted with a genuine desire to earn the adulation he craves rather than contentedly cruise on past achievement or falsely crafted recent ones. But it’s mishmashed into the rest of this which is all just noise. It’s hard to write coherently about it because it’s not a coherent story. It’s barely a coherent set of jokes.

The funniest joke in the entire game is made entirely by accident, where in a Qwark segment the game has the straight man narrator say that robot ghost pirates are the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, and implies that’s a sign of creative bankruptcy and a cash grab, which is an INCREDIBLE self-own considering where this series is going to go very soon. A truly miserable low point for the series, and I hope it stays that way.

My time with this series so far has been defined by frictions. Design sensibility vs limits of controls, ambitions that exceed the scope of the projects, a constant feeling that I’m wrestling with games that are in some ways very close to ideal and in others falling well short of expectations that it feels like they themselves have set for me at various points. There has yet to be a truly great one of these in my eyes, but there have been three really mixed successes; it’s just that the things that are successful in each game vary. Up Your Arsenal does seem to be setting a worrying trend though, where the game is a LOT more fun in the moment than it is to think about out of my hands. I hope this feeling doesn’t continue, because I do think at this point that I’m in it for the long haul.

At the very beginning, i thought the sense of humour in this game would be similar to that of the Leisure Suit Larry games, something that could definitely appeal the inner boomer some millenial kids have. While it do be kinda like that humour, the truth is that the jokes are far from being funny (not because i consider them offensive, they're just dumb and not funny, period)

That kinda makes it hard to find a reason or reward in dealing with some really awful puzzle design (some of the laziest i've seen lately).

Maybe i'll give it another chance in the future. But for now, i would tell anybody not to lose their time with this game.

There's been a void in the gaming scene since the seventh generation of consoles that if I'm being honest only a select few of us are really dying to see get filled again. That being the collect-a-thon 3D platformer. Sure we get the occasional A Hat in Time, a remaster of an old SpongeBob game, or the umpteenth release in the Ratchet & Clank and Mario series, but that isn't the same as the constant array of imaginative weirdness the genre gave us back in the 90s and 2000s in the form of titles like Gex or Voodoo Vince. It's that kind of experience the team at Chameleon Games, partially made up of former Rare employees, is trying to deliver here and I think they succeeded at doing so rather marvelously.

Tamarin genuinely feels like something you could have gotten back on the N64. Given the veteran talent behind the scenes it shouldn't surprise you this has a lot in common with the legendary Banjo-Kazooie. You'll explore open stages for ways to amass enough items to unlock the next area and even purchase helpful tools from a little critter that likes to pop out of the ground every now and then. They went with a more natural wilderness theme for the setting in comparison however, in order to help hammer home an underlying environmental protection message. It leads to a lot of pleasant-looking scenery, but there's a noticeable lack of landmarks to help you get your bearings which can cause you to get turned around and lost quite a bit. While I can see that being irritating for some, it personally did very little to hinder my enjoyment of the experience. In fact, the only thing that kept me from going for 100% completion were some tediously drawn-out timed challenges near the end.

For all of its similarities to one of video games most endearing duos though, this was actually designed to be more of a spiritual successor to Jet Force Gemini, another Rare classic, than anything. You can see that in the shooting sections. Every so often the adorable primate you're playing as will take a break from gathering all the berries and fireflies he can get his paws on, pull out a gun, and start blasting away at some rather familiar insectoid foes. It's a bizarre change in tone to be sure, with stuff like the way enemies sometimes explode into gory masses of thoraces and mandibles giving the adventure the slightest hint of the same edginess that Conker had. The gunplay itself is a tad stiff when trying to precision aim while locked on and the opposing AI isn't the brightest, often not knowing how to react once you get within a certain distance of them. Nothing game-breaking enough to ruin the fun, but are signs that the action isn't as smooth as it could have been.

The issues are a direct result of the budget, which ends up being the package's biggest downfall as it rears its head in a few other detrimental ways as well. For one, the graphics on things such as your monkey's fur and the plethora of foliage are pretty blurry. It also isn't the longest offering on the market, taking me around six and a half hours to beat with maybe only one more or so left to get through if I'd wanted to mop up what was left. Although, that might not be a bad thing considering how many of its peers have felt like they've dragged on for just a bit too long. Now a problem I can't be so forgiving of is how they straight up didn't program the final boss. It's literally these two giant preying mantises who do nothing but simply stand there while you pepper them with rockets until they eventually run away. Those type of flaws will make it hard for many to justify dropping the cash on that $30 price tag.

Yet, for the gamers who miss the days of animal mascots and hunting down a varied assortment of collectibles through a whole lot of jumping it will prove to be money well spent. Tamarin is a delightful throwback to a bygone era, despite being a little rough around the edges. It allowed me to revisit a particularly odd period in the industry that I'm personally quite fond of, without having to contend with the jank and awkwardness of older hardware, providing some of the most enjoyable playtime I've had in a while and even rivaling its obvious inspirations in the soundtrack department. It's not often we see developers so willing to embrace and recapture the strange inventiveness of the concepts that were widely prevalent on the first 3D consoles like this. So if you too ever find yourself longing for the "Donkey Kong 64's" or "Dr. Muto's" of yesteryear, then this is the game for you.

9/10

Oh dear. This was one of my childhood games I was really looking forward to replaying, given that Spider-Man was and is one of my favorite superheroes. The game leaves a great first impression - the dialogue is quite well-done and in character, and Spidey's moveset is decent, with web-swinging being easy and intuitive. There are nice little touches, like being able to take pictures of the bosses to sell for money (which you need to replenish your web), and being able to return home to replenish your health at the cost of time (there's a bomb rigged to destroy the city).

The great first impression lasted all of five minutes - I realized I enjoyed it as a kid because I only played on easy mode. The normal mode is cheap and difficult, but in the worst possible way: it doesn't do a good job of communicating what you need to do to improve, and a lot of it seems more a result of shoddy programming than careful design. Enemies/hazards that your moveset doesn't have an answer to, simplistic boring boss AI that curbstomps you until you find the right exploit to win, and inconsistent hit detection make this feel more like a badly-done NES game with more advanced graphics. The final fight against Kingpin deserves specific mention for this: his AI is laughably limited and consists of walking in a straight line and punching, but his hitbox is so small that until I knew exactly what to do, I spent 10 minutes reloading state and didn't manage to hit him a single time. Oh, and I had to load state because if you take too long to beat him MJ gets lowered into acid and you get an instant game over, kicked straight back to the title screen.

I feel sorry for anyone who was trying to complete this game on the original hardware.

Not good! Better than Acclaim's try, but not as good as Web of Fire. Which is a bad game! Spider-Man is funie and brings me serotonin though so of course here I am again

First things first, this game's timer is meaningless. You can completely ignore that, it's not 24 hours in real time but it's more than lenient. Except when you actually reach the bomb, and you have to put the keys in the right order (which to my knowledge is never revealed, and was not the same as on a video guide I found).

What you need to worry about instead is piss and shit enemies and bosses, which encompasses most of them. Many guys will just fire bullets forever and there's like hardly any room to get closer and knock them down. Good luck if they're on a ledge, trying to get up there while they keep firing is a nightmare and you WILL have to on multiple occasions. Bosses are lousy, they're really simple but they'll kick your head in unless you find a way to stunlock them or just find a safe spot somehow.

Kingpin is the worst because his hitbox is like a fraction of his size and you have an actually strict time limit to deal with (unrelated to the bomb), and it sends your ass all the way back to the Sega screen if you don't do it in time. What the fuck is that all about? Not even a continue? Like the fucking rest of the game???

I don't know what was going on with Spider-Man games back then, even Maximum Carnage is no better than just alright. It's kind of becoming an in-joke with a couple of my friends at this rate. Maybe there's a good one buried somewhere, but I'm kind of beginning to doubt there were any before the Raimi movies came along.

Sega announced a Mega Drive 2 Mini and I thought why not play all the games as they're getting announced. Not sure how far I'll get with this but it doesn't hurt to try. I thought this would be the best one to start off with since I played the Ages version earlier this year.
I still really like this game despite being awful at it. It's no secret that I'm awful at schmups. This game is brutally hard at least for me. Even on easy it can still be pretty tough though I do find after this third playthrough I've gotten a little better. While there are a couple of other schmups I'd rather play on the console, this one is still worth trying. Shoutouts to the presentation as well, it's really great minus the questionable slowdown at times.
Also what's with the US name? Lightening Force is such a dumb name.

This is okay, actually. Bullshit in places, but like, fine? Maybe I'm missing something. I do have a soft spot for this one for whatever reason, ever since I was a kid (I've also always been very fond of the OST, surprisingly memorable when you consider all Game Gear/Master System stuff sounds nearly the damn same). I'll tell you what does suck though, the Sky High Zone chaos emerald is a fucking meme. The hang glider is a bit notoriously absurd, and while it's far from impossible to use, making it go upwards is indeed. You have to maintain your speed somehow and rely on gusts of wind to make it high enough to reach the emerald, and it's really strange and specific. There's a lot of odd design like that, but most of it I find is more manageable than people make it out to be. Scrambled Egg Zone codifies that annoying tube nonsense that appears in all the later Game Gear games though, so fuck it for that. That one is shit. But all in all, I think this one gets a little more flack than it deserves.

You will eat shit if you play on Game Gear, though. If you have the option to play on a platform with a better screen I would simply do so

Well it's... marginally better than a 1/5 I guess?

Trozei is the arcade puzzle spinoff of Pokemon, and it's the 2nd Pokemon game released on DS, after Pokemon Dash. The goal is to align 4 or more Pokemon in a row. then align 3 or more Pokemon in a row immediately after that to start Trozei Chance, where you can then combo clear Pokemon simply by touching two of the same species together and hopefully clear the screen for that juicy point bonus. This continues until you clear the stage by clearing more than the threshold listed above, and any caught Pokemon are added to the Dex. You're also told in advance of opportunities to catch rare Pokemon that will sometimes drop, but you'll need to gather Ditto by clearing 3 or more of the same species at a time during Trozei chance to catch those (and there's no real incentive or reward to finishing the Dex...).

It's fun enough to begin with (and it's pretty hard to mess up an arcade puzzler), but the game really starts feeling like an endurance test with some of the boss fights that will begin throwing rocks your way (which you must clear with Dittos, nothing else will do) and love to black out the screen so you have to make do with silhouettes to get clears and light the screen back up. These later levels have thresholds in the several hundreds, and you'll need to stay extremely vigilant and patient because having your screen fill up quickly will mean that you'll be sent back to the beginning and have to grind all over again.

Now like I said, it's pretty hard to fuck this up: the arcade puzzler works on creating a simple yet engaging gameplay loop, and the colorful Pokemon pixel art + the funky tunes are great! The story's pretty forgettable admittingly, but you won't mind too much. That said, there's one giant dumb design decision in all this; once you clear the final boss, you are immediately transported to hard mode and your map progress reset (wanted to play old levels for practice/rare mons? Too bad!), with no way to go back to normal mode unless you reset your save data. Goddamnit Pokemon Company, why is every Pokemon spinoff game released in the 2000s that I've played this year somehow crippled by dumb design choices that made it past Q & A?

Needless to say, I think Pokemon Trozei is at least serviceable; if you just like the core gameplay loop, I think endless mode will provide a fun enough experience, and there's some cool multiplayer interactivity in the form of "espionage" and other agent missions if you know of a sucker friend that's also willing to play this alongside you for some reason. I remain baffled that they couldn't even be bothered to have an option to switch between difficulties after beating the game, but I suppose that's just par for the course during this era. A shame that Trozei hasn't aged as well as when I first laid my eyes upon it at the Pokemon 15th anniversary mall events, but I'm sure I'll get used to this wave of disappointment of spoiling my Pokemon childhood ramblings. Eventually.

So after like literally 3 playthroughs beforehand where I disliked a significant portion of this game, I really didn't expect anything to change here. I thought I'd come out of this last chance I gave this game the same as the last. But something just... finally clicked here. This is to say, I can now appreciate this even with the pretty significant flaws I think it has.

If I had to compare this game to it's predecessor in one phrase it would be "One (huge) step forward, two (small) steps back." On every front this game takes SA1 up to 11 but is brought down by some strange and honestly frustrating decisions that were made in the Mech and Treasure Hunting stages. Mainly that; Tails and Eggman feel significantly worse to control for me than Gamma, and the radar in treasure hunting is only able to track one emerald at once. These are definitely still issues to me but I was able to finally slightly overlook them now? Even still I'm definitely going to be playing with mods that fix these from now on (in addition to a mod that tunes down the mech noises cause holy shit the aiming noise hurts my ears LOL)

Aside that this game's got the vibes of all time. From City Escape to Cannon's Core, the game has a sense of style that's really unparalleled by any other Sonic game. Fantastic soundtrack cranks it up even further.

So yeah, finally like this game. It's got its annoyances but it kinda makes up for that. Can't comment on the chao garden because (god forbid) it hasn't really interested me yet, maybe I'll come back to do it sometime. Even if I'm gonna just be replaying the speed stages mostly, rest of the game is still pretty alright and thankfully all my issues with those are easily fixed with mods. So glad I'm finally able to like Sonic Adventure 2!

Oh yeah, and happy 100th review, me!

I am trying to get the site achievement for five reviews in a day and can feel myself slipping into madness as I near the end. It really doesn't help that the last game I am reviewing today is Strider for the Sega Genesis. Not good, this game!

Hiryu's acrobatic leaps, twirls, and flourishing sword strikes might deceive you into thinking this is an elegant game to play, but Strider is one of the clunkiest pieces of junk I've played for the Genesis, and I beat Ecco god damnit! This is of course among other early Genesis titles, which I've lamented before on having a sort of cheap feeling to them. In Strider's case this is mostly relegated to game design as the sprite work is pretty good, easily the game's most stand out quality. There's still areas where the color pallet seems very washed out, almost pastel, which was a hallmark of this era of Genesis games, but the sprites are very richly detailed and nice to look at.

It is also very short, which is a blessing considering it ain't no fun to play. Your main impediment to a low clear time is how frustratingly difficult it can be at times, which is just as much a consequence of game design philosophy at the time as it is being poorly made.

You don't need to play Strider, and by all means you shouldn't, but if you do then perhaps give one of the other dozen ports a shot. I haven't messed around in any of them so I really couldn't tell you if Strider plays better on anything else, but at the very least I would suspect the arcade version would be preferential to the Genesis. You could also go outside and smash all your toes with a hammer. The cool thing is you're in control of your own destiny and can harm yourself however you wish. That's the most important thing Strider taught me, and now I pass that lesson on to you.