Metal Gear Solid 4 is a unique game among the ones I’ve played. I don’t know if it was MGS4 not being too compatible with the apparently infamous art of PS3 emulation or an issue with the setup on my end but the game was BROKEN. After four crashes, a blue screen, and having to try a RPCS3 build tailor made for this game, the game was finally in a somewhat playable state. Somewhat. Various shaders and graphics failed to load resulting in characters regularly looking like this. The game’s framerate was also extremely poor, most notably the Eastern European city in Act 3 causing shit to perform even worse than “normal.” This culminated in a boss fight against Raging Raven that was borderline unplayable when the performance dipped to below 1 frame per second. It was really funny to watch some of the discourse surrounding the Master Collection having played MGS4 like this. While I'm not going to defend whatever the hell that compilation did to make people mad, everyone upset because that was locked to 30fps would implode after watching gameplay of my MGS4 build for 2 minutes. I enjoyed the game though at least! Despite the graphical and performance issues and my embarrassingly poor skill at Metal Gear games, it was actually beatable! The game itself was fairly solid, though it's probably one of the worst entry points for any media ever. If you like clicking spoiler tagged reviews for games you haven't played, do not even touch this game until you've played the first three. This whole game is built around your prior knowledge of the Metal Gear Saga.

A little while into the game’s famous 70 minute long ending cutscene, one of the backseat gamers begged me to stop using the emulator and watch the rest of the ending on YouTube. He didn’t want some serious moments in the ending to be ruined by the graphics. (Unintentionally good call on his part, we ran it back out of curiosity to see how it’d look and to get the playthrough stats but the game would not progress past the fake credits.) I pulled up the ending on YouTube, he managed to get everyone currently in the Discord call dead silent for the ending to the Metal Gear saga, and it was an emotional conclusion to the game series I had spent the past few months going through… until the EXACT second Big Boss passed away, someone else joins call, not knowing what we’re doing, and says “what’s up my N***as?” It is still probably the biggest mood killer I’ve ever seen in my life.

Final backloggd review of 2023, it is still 2023 here for a few more minutes don't listen to backloggd's timezone that's way ahead of me. Mario Wonder was alright, I wouldn't call it the greatest video game ever made because they bothered to spice up the artstyle but I still enjoyed it, and it is the most creative 2D Mario in a long time. I've been kind of falling off Mario this year and it was definitely a horrible time to do so considering just how much they dropped for the red plumber this year. Therefore I don't think I enjoyed this as much as I would have if it dropped a few years prior, but it's a nice game. There are a lot more playable characters this time around, not really jumping out of my seat any of the new additions but the mainstay Mario characters I care about (Bowser, Wario, DK) are either locked to final boss status or honestly better off with their own solo adventures instead of tagging along with Mario.

I really like how this game gradually builds up to the final confrontation, starting out with one of the earliest Wonder effects being the famous Piranha Plants on Parade, then gradually introducing more music themed Wonder effects until you arrive at the final level with Bowser's musical Wonder effect, go through a reprise of the previous songs from past levels before walking into a concert stage having figured out what's about to go down.