Every word that could possibly be written about Super Mario Bros. has surely been recorded dozens if not hundreds of times over. I cannot possibly expand upon what others have said about this game since its release in 1985, nor can I convince you whether or not you should play it. Odds are, if you have a pulse you have an opinion on Mario Bros.

While it may not be the first, it's nevertheless a foundational platformer that has spawned thousands of imitations, some great and others not. And for good reason. Super Mario Bros. just plays really damn good. The controls are about as simple and intuitive as it gets, and the levels teach the player in a manner that is both subtle yet appreciable when you're able to see it for what it is. Outside of some finicky springs, you never really feel like you lack control over Mario's movements, and gauging jumps feels about as naturally as walking.

Super Mario Bros. is not without its faults, however, though most of them I am able to look past. The aforementioned springs no doubt cost first time players a considerable amount of lives and solving the puzzle in 7-4 is about as fun as bashing your head against a brick. The latter at least gets imprinted on your brain, so subsequent playthroughs aren't nearly as miserable. Repetition will do that to you. Bottom, middle, top... top, middle, top... I remember it better than my own date of birth. Horrible.

Look, if you haven't played Super Mario Bros... Well that's very impressive, but, you should. Much of gaming as we know it today is owed to this one title, and if that's not enough for a curious playthrough then I'm not sure what else will convince you. It's arguable that there's better versions of this game, but the original is well worth checking out.

As much as I enjoy later entries in the series, it's a shame that I couldn't find much of anything to like about the original Legend of Zelda. Sure the music is good, it's very iconic visually, and it's novel to see the genesis of what ballooned into one of Nintendo's flagship series, but god do I hate every minute of actually playing it.

it's well known at this point that The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. were in development at the same time, with each team exchanging ideas they saw fit for the other. Unfortunately The Legend of Zelda got all the bad ideas. One of which was the cryptic design and poor telegraphing meant to encourage children to exchange hints and strategies at school. Sounds like fun, creating some mystery to the mechanics and progression of the game and driving those sorts of conversations between friends. My problem, I suppose, is that I didn't actually play this until I was a fully formed adult with access to the Internet, and perusing GameFAQs to figure out where the hell to go next just isn't the same.

There's certainly more obtuse games, and it's not like I was constantly lost, but there's enough about The Legend of Zelda that I just found to be completely unintuitive, as Mario's 7-4 puzzle were blown out more broadly and used as a template for an entire video game.

Mechanically it plays mostly fine. It's limited by the hardware and general game design philosophies of its time, but it's still certainly playable. Deaths never quite felt cheap, though the challenge of some rooms is "Nintendo hard" in that they simply throw a ton of enemies at you in lieu of intelligent design. It's just one of those things you can either look past or not. Apparently I am able to move beyond that but the progression is a bridge too far. Go figure.

Similar to Super Mario Bros., I do think The Legend of Zelda is worth playing. I am less sure that it's worth beating. It's a classic for sure, and one I think everyone should experience at least once, but I couldn't fault someone for running out of patience with it.

My first exposure to Duke Nukem came shortly after 3D was ported to the Nintendo 64. My dad picked it up as a weekend rental, though he never got past the first level, Hollywood Holocaust. Most of what I know about Duke comes through osmosis. His one-liners are still repeated often today, and there's no shortage of retrospectives and memes. But I didn't own my own computer until I was 16, long after the era of Boomer Shooters had ended, so when I finally sat down and decided to play it on my Sega Saturn (a weird choice of platform, I know) I went in with only the most superficial knowledge one could have.

At first Duke Nukem 3D took a bit of getting used to. I was never that good at Boomer Shooters, having been spoiled on more modern FPS games, but there's an undeniable charm to them that's ever-present in 3D. Guns all feel like they have their own utility, levels can at times be labyrinthine but a joy to navigate, and the mixture of 3D environments and sprite work creates a wonderful aesthetic. Controls are smooth, though Duke's weight and momentum can feel somewhat funky at first, and at times aiming on the x-axis feels a bit finicky. I'm unsure how much of this is my own poor aim and how much is the result of any idiosyncrasies with the SlaveDriver engine (I haven't played Powerslave or Quake on the Saturn to compare.) That said, I do think it's worth mentioning how easy it is to control on the Saturn. The shoulder buttons make strafing a breeze, and the six button configuration helps consolidate Duke's controls in a way that doesn't feel cumbersome.

Finding secret areas and easter eggs is a blast. I don't think I ever finished levels under par because I was having too much fun searching every nook and cranny. Levels are thoughtfully design and well landmarked, and even though progression largely boils down to "find the blue keycard to go through the locked door, then find the red keycard" it never becomes played out. This is a stark contrast to Alien Trilogy, another shooter on the Saturn which has a bit more variety to its mission structure while somehow feeling like it drags.

Maybe this goes back to the charm of Duke Nukem, which other shooters lack. He's not as much of a chatterbox as the Internet lead me to believe, but his one liners are excellent, and the world he inhabits is brimming with personality. Enemy designs are equal parts grotesque and funny, and levels are littered with interactive objects that at the time must have felt revolutionary. The sound design deserves some extra attention too. Explosions and gunfire are appropriately crunchy, and the music always lands in a way that got me pumped up.

I would say my biggest complaint is one that's true of many shooters of this era: retaining health between levels. This was more of a problem in Alien Trilogy, but a few levels in Duke Nukem 3D put you right in the shit as soon as you start. If you finished the previous level at low health, then it makes for an especially rough opening in the next. This can be mitigated by keeping two saves, though, so it's really not that much of a problem, and repeated attempts at levels often go more smoothly than the last.

Again, I never played the PC version of the game, though I do know the general consensus is that Duke Nukem 3D on the Saturn is a surprisingly good port that is none-the-less inferior to its PC counterpart. If you're like me and you've never given this game a shot, I would encourage you to do so, but perhaps seek it out on PC first. I just paid a lot of money for a Saturn and I needed something to play on it.

Zelda II is peculiar to say the least. Just one in a series of 8-bit sequels that opted for a radical departure from its predecessor. While some benefitted from this experimentation, others (like Zelda II) felt like a misstep. That isn't to say it's bad ideas all the way down, though...

While the original Legend of Zelda was a strictly top down affair, Zelda II breaks up the perspective to distinguish exploration from combat. The player is given a bird's eye view while in the overworld, which not only helps provide a sense of scope but also drives the player as they come upon new landmarks. The original Zelda segmented its map, exploiting the player's curiosity for what might be just beyond their current screen to encourage exploration. By contrast, Zelda II gives a more broad lay of the land and pushes the player ahead by showing them Hyrule's more varied landscape. This is fine, though less intimate, and relegates combat on the overworld to random encounters.

The bulk of Zelda II, however, is viewed from Link's side. The division between these two perspectives makes sense, though. Whereas exploration is all about the environment Link is in, combat and conversing with villagers is all about what Link is immediately interacting with. From a mechanical standpoint, this was done to make combat more dynamic. Instead of simply swiping at enemies, the player must now weigh their defenses and strike accordingly. Unfortunately, enemy types lack variety and you'll encounter most of them fairly early into the game, with most combat encounters devolving into a simple game of repeatedly bouncing on a bad guy's head around the half-way mark. The concept is sound, but the execution is a bit off.

Link's abilities are again augmented by the tools and weapons he finds on his journey, but he also gains access to a variety of spells. Which is... fine. Similar to combat, it feels as if the developers had an idea they couldn't quite make good on. To complicate matters, the player is allotted EXP and can level up their stats, but it never feels there's an appropriate risk/reward calculation driving the player's build, and ultimately you'll probably get enough EXP to max everything out anyway. Later Zelda games handle this better, allowing players to feel Link grow throughout his adventure without reducing it to a strict numbers game.

Dungeons are fairly bland and lacking in the sort of challenge found in the previous game, with much of the difficulty stemming from the janky combat system. Bosses are overly aggressive, can be a bit spongy, and generally aren't all that interesting. The last two in particular can be total nightmares unless you know how to exploit them, after which they just become pitiful. It never quite finds that balance, and if the rest of this review wasn't making it clear enough: that's this game's whole problem.

A lot has been said about the game's poor translation and how it makes obtuse puzzles even more difficult to decipher. Frankly, I don't find progression to be that much more difficult than in the original. If anything, a better translation would likely make this game a lot more easy to navigate than The Legend of Zelda, and it's nowhere near as bad as Castlevania 2. Baffling at times, sure, but I referred to a guide much less than I have for other NES RPGs. That guy says "I am Error" and it's funny, but the townsperson you need to interact with as part of that quest also refers to him as Error, so it's not like you wouldn't know who to talk to.

About the only area Zelda II sticks its landing is in presentation and audio design. The soundtrack is just plain solid, and contains a few of my favorite songs in the entire series (the dungeon theme is excellent), and I actually enjoy the sprite work quite a bit. It's just a shame the gameplay couldn't come together the same way the games aesthetic does.

Zelda II could have been a great game. It's equal parts hindered by the technology of the time and ideas that just needed a few more passes. Instead, the developers would have been better off refining the design of the original. Thankfully that's exactly what they did after this, but I can't help but wish there were more games like Zelda II. Ones which could benefit from hindsight and make good on the promise this game never quite lived up to. Maybe I'm just a bit too nostalgic for my own good, or maybe I saw that game over screen one too many times and it chemically altered my brain. I don't like Zelda II, but... I also like Zelda II. My relationship with this game is a weird one, but maybe that's the more appropriate thing of all, because it's definitely a weird game.

Parasite Eve left a mark on me back in the day. It was the first video game I played that felt genuinely disgusting. The first game I played that unnerved and maybe even frightened me. I remember going through the opera house and connecting sewer over and over again, returning to the start of the game and never daring to venture further into the body horror that waited just beyond the first boss. That little taste felt more special knowing I was putting off something much worse, but as I got older and started watching things like Tetsuo (and building an appreciation for body horror that grows to this day), my memories of Parasite Eve started to feel quaint...

Now that I've actually sat down and put the time in to see the game through I can say that no, Parasite Eve is still pretty gross! But it's gross in the best possible way.

The graphics absolutely hold up, both in-game and during FMVs. I feel this is usually the case for games using pre-rendered backgrounds, though Square certainly got a lot out of the FFVIII engine when it came to character models. Eve feels fairly grounded, but when transitioning to FMVs its art style really shines. It's exaggerated, yet it has some grit and grime to it. Watching a rat turn itself inside-out shouldn't hold up as well as it does here, this was done during the formative years of 3D game graphics after all. But it does!

Thankfully this extends to the gameplay as well. Parasite Eve is an odd mix of survival horror and JRPG, with battles playing out within a set radius from the initial encounter. Aya Brea is a cop and attacks primarily with guns, but a wide and varied bestiary continually challenges players to rethink their strategies. I found combat to be consistently engaging from start to finish, something I can't actually say about other Square games of this era. Although my enjoyment did end just short of digging into Parasite Eva's optional dungeon, which seems tailor made for sadists who enjoy a good grind. Thankfully dungeons push the player along at an enjoyable pace, with none of them overstaying their welcome or feeling too brief.

The story is terrific as well. I'd like to avoid spoiling it for anyone who isn't already familiar, but the gist is that "rogue mitochondria" are triggering horrible mutations in New York City whenever they're not causing people to outright combust. Aya and the titular Eve share a strange connection with these goings on that is not made immediately clear, leaving it up to the play and Aya to unravel the mystery. The game does a great job of evoking a police procedural vibe, noir, and horror when appropriate. Nothing feels out of place here, it hits every beat just right.

Parasite Eve is ridiculous. It's violent, disgusting, thoughtful and mysterious. It's a shame Square didn't take more chances like this, and an even greater shame that its two sequels didn't quite live up to the quality of the original. It may be a bit harder to come by a copy now, but anyone who enjoys RPGs of the Playstation variety really ought to give it a shot. In any case, I'm glad I finally came back to it after all these years.

After beating Duke Nukem 3D on the Sega Saturn I knew I had to go check out the other SlaveDriver Engine games, and given the recent release of PowerSlave Exhumed, the Sega Saturn original seemed like a great place to start.

In a lot of ways PowerSlave plays it pretty close to the Boomer Shooter formula: run around levels gibbing enemies with increasingly ludicrous weapons while collecting keys. If reduced solely to that, PowerSlave still plays damn good. In fact, the momentum feels better here than in Lobotomy Software's Duke port, and shots line up perfectly as long as your aim on the x-axis is true (which Duke 3D was a bit finicky with.) But PowerSlave doesn't adhere strictly to convention. Perhaps the way it departs the most from its contemporaries is by melding search-action elements to level progression.

As you make your way through PowerSlave you'll acquire different skills that modify the way you traverse a level, opening previously inaccessible routes that lead to new exits and thus to new levels. For example, you might find a long stretch of poisonous ground in one level that cannot be walked across for long before you die. Returning later with sandals that negate poison damage will allow you to navigate through towards a new exit which then branches out into several new levels. This never becomes too complicated and in fact I never found myself lost or unsure of which level I should head back to next.

The world map will also have a few levels that emit beeping sounds, signaling the presence of a transmitter piece. There's eight in all and collecting them is required for the good ending. Some of these are pretty easy to stumble across but others will require a bit of thinking and skilled platforming. Oh yeah, there's a lot of that in this game. If you're like me you probably hate the idea of platforming puzzles in a first person game, but PowerSlave generally feels good with only a few sections causing me any real amount of frustration.

The same can be said of the game's difficulty in general, which is ramped up at a good even pace. Weapons also feel terrific with each having a clear utility for the challenges you're about to face. By the end of the game you feel appropriately powerful, and to draw another comparison to Duke Nukem 3D, the final boss feels like a satisfying cakewalk as you go absolutely hog on him with the weapons you picked up along the way.

So I seem very positive on PowerSlave so far. Why the 3.5 out of 5?

There are a couple notable levels that I spent entirely too long on due to irritating design choices that feel incredibly out of place given the rest of the game's quality: Magma Fields and The Sunken Palace of Khnum. The former is a literal "the floor is fire" level, but you're saddled with so much to deal with that it's easy to get overwhelmed. The platforming is hard enough here but everything else that's thrown your way pushes things a little too far for my liking, coming across as overly difficult in contrast to the "tough but fair" nature of the end game.

The Sunken Palace, on the other hand, is far worse and teeters into "time to quit the game" territory. I'm not sure who designed this or what was going through their mind, but it's hands down one of the worst water levels I've come across in a long time. Much of the level is spent navigating underwater caverns littered with mines that have too generous of a blast radius. You're only able to use three weapons underwater to disarm them: you machete (which is obviously a terrible idea), grenades, or your magic staff. If you're just a hair too close the grenades can cause you to take blowback damage, and the staff's projectile weaves around, making it less than ideal in a few spots. It also can cause blowback damage, so I relied mostly on the grenades. You have to contend with piranhas during all of this, and if you get ganged up on by them they'll melt your health bar in seconds. Whacking them with your machete is an option, but feels clumsy and won't do you much good if you're dealing with a swarm.

Alternatively, you can pitch the camera down while you're floating above water and aim at mines and piranhas with your guns. This is a bit slow but honestly the safest way to go through the level, though this really only works in a few locations with the rest only accessible while submerged. Also the piranhas like to get underneath you and bop your character around which is incredibly annoying. At the end of all of this is one last key you must collect and immediately weave into a corridor before all the doors in the room close on you, trapping you inside and leaving you to drown. The game doesn't really telegraph this, so I fell for it my first time. This is perhaps the one part of the game where PowerSlave feels outright unfair, and placing the trap at the very end of an already frustrating level is garbage. You've been warned now, at least.

There's some other issues I have here and there. Lasers killing you in one hit makes navigating some very late game areas a pain. Like Duke Nukem 3D (can you tell what game I played right before this?) the lack of check-pointing can make later levels a bit of a slog when you keep biting it right at the end. Thankfully this is an area the Exhumed edition improves upon. A more stable framerate also helps, and a better draw distance and texture clarity makes it a whole lot easier to see what's going on and where you're heading. Again, if you have your choice of versions, Exhumed is the way to go.

There's a lot of good here, Lobotomy just got so much right with PowerSlave, but a few bizarre choices makes it stop just short of being better than their Duke 3D port. It's not that the bad outweighs the good so much as the good makes the bad even more apparent.

I played Kirby's Dream Land 3 for the first time about two years ago, and honestly I barely remember it. It exists as (ironically) some hazy dream. Maybe I've just played too much since then, but I think the problem with Dream Land 3 is just that it's a bit unremarkable.

For such a late SNES game, Dream Land 3 feels like something that could have very well launched in the early 90s. The design is simple, straight-forward almost to the fault, but nevertheless making for a relaxing afternoon game that you can easily complete in one sitting. Kirby's for the kids, but that doesn't mean a grown man like myself can't find some charm. The levels have wonderful pastel colors, the art style is evocative of a child's sketch book, and the music (while rife with series classics) always puts a smile on my face. It's just that despite all of this, Dream Land 3 feels like a pastiche of all that Kirby is, encapsulating the innocence and ease of play that the series is known for without doing anything in particular to really make it stand out. It's just... good.

Overall I think I like the look and gameplay of Super Star more, and Kirby 64 is easily my favorite in the series. Dream Land 3 never really hits those heights, but if I had nothing better to do but waste the afternoon away playing it, I wouldn't really complain.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the first honest-to-god great Zelda game. Whereas the previous two titles were held back both by hardware and the design ethos of the era, this 16-bit entry is far less encumbered and thus able to make good on the promise of the original.

After Zelda II's side-scrolling detour, A Link to the Past returns to the top-down formula that was at the core of the original. Once again you're traversing the overworld of Hyrule, discovering and completing dungeons, gaining new weapons, filling out your hearts, and preparing for a showdown with Ganon. But the amount of depth available here is almost staggering when coming off the heels of its predecessors. Dungeons are more complex and loop around on themselves in a way that feels much more intelligent, and puzzles are far less rote. The tools and items you find along your journey not only provide clear utility for the dungeon you're currently exploring, but open up new pathways in the overworld, encouraging the player to return to familiar locations and experiment. The overworld itself (and the discovery of dungeons within) is a lot less obtuse to navigate, and is brimming with NPCs and interesting locations, drawing you in and connecting you more to this rendition of Hyrule than the two that came before.

Augmenting this is the Dark World, a shadow version of Hyrule that players must explore to complete puzzles. This mechanic of layering two versions of the same location has been oft-repeated gaming since, and to varying degrees of success. More often than not I'm not a fan of it, so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but I feel it's a weak point here. There are times where it's utilized to great effect and others where it feels like padding. Ultimately, I think A Link Between Worlds (the direct sequel to this game) made better use of it overall by freeing up more of the world map, giving you more of a reason to explore the Dark World outside of addressing a few key progression puzzles.

I didn't get to play this game when it came out, though I did have my gross PB&J encrusted hands all over my grandpa's NES controller getting absolutely nowhere in the first two games. I'm sure if I played this at the time it would be utterly mind-blowing given the only two available points of comparison I had. I've played a lot of Zelda games since then. Almost all of them. A Link to the Past's DNA is ever-present in the franchise, and in a lot of ways I felt I've played this game without actually playing it. But damn if it doesn't hold up to the scrutiny of time. I was so sure that by now there was no way it'd live up to the hype, and to a certain extent it doesn't and never could, but A Link to the Past still exceeded any expectation I had for it. If you haven't played any of these earlier Zelda games, Zelda and Zelda II are fine for a novel glance, but you should really give A Link to the Past your attention.

I have a confession: I don't really care for JRPGs of the NES and SNES generations. Final Fantasy 4 and 5 did absolutely nothing for me, I found them to be slogs and nothing about them compelled me to persevere to the end game. Before going into Final Fantasy 6 I had to do a little prep to hype myself up, reminding myself that this was one of the best, topping many people's "best of" lists alongside Final Fantasy 7. I kept telling myself that I couldn't not like this one, it just wasn't allowed. I've already got too many bad opinions about 7 (I'll get to it...), could I physically survive having bad opinions about 6 too?

Well thankfully it turns out Final Fantasy 6 is a really good game and I don't need to worry about it. Ok, that's the review, byeee!

Ok, so my thoughts are a little more complicated than that, but only just a little. See, Final Fantasy 6 is in fact a very good game, and genuinely impressed me with its scope. There's nowhere this is more apparent than metric ton of playable characters the game drops on your lap. Everyone knows about this, it's like the one element of the game even the uninitiated have absorbed through osmosis (second only to suplexing a train.) You may even wonder as I did if such a bloated cast would make it all too easy to lose the thread on how characters fit into the larger narrative, or whether your team will be saddled with too many party members that lack any real utility. Well, you'd be wrong. Square does a surprisingly good job of keeping each and every party member relevant and engaging.

One of the ways they accomplish this is built right into the game's structure. You're never given a ton of characters and told to compose a team, at least not for quite some time. Instead, your party is mostly metered out to you as you progress through the story, with new and old characters swapping in and out as their own personal stories loop through the main plot. You get just enough time with everyone to know who they are, to invest in their story, and to build them into a useful member of your team. Each party member also plays substantially different from one another, drawing a clear line between classes (or "jobs" in Final Fantasy parlance), which is welcomed given the rudimentary nature of the game's core battle system.

Not much has changed there, unfortunately. It's still Final Fantasy, which means you have your basic elemental magics that can be safely ignored due to the under-reliance on affinities, and stat buffs/debuffs that might as well not even exist. Final Fantasy 6 is at its worst when it can be played like any other Final Fantasy game, which is to say mashing out the same attacks ad nauseam because the lack of depth means nothing matters. This is, however, a rarer occurrence here, and I found FF6's combat to be a lot more engaging than past and future entries.

The story is much more character-driven than other Final Fantasy games, which get too bogged down in contrivances to really resonate with me the way 6's does. Your party's bond is at the heart of the game, and everyone's little vignettes are compelling in their own ways. The opening is of course iconic in its own right, but the way the game closes out is just as indelible in my mind. I don't want to give a whole synopsis of it. By this point you're already familiar with the game and know, or you've managed to stay just as blind as I did and should go in unspoiled.

While it may not be my favorite Final Fantasy, it's still a damn good one and easily among the best. Despite my reservations and my bias, I can see what people appreciate about this game and find plenty to love myself. This is well worth checking out if it's somehow passed you by after all this time.

I didn't have a Playstation when I was a kid, but my neighbor did. Reflecting back on that time, it's easier now to admit that the only reason I maintained that friendship was because he had Crash Bandicoot 2, and my adolescent mind was utterly blown by that game. He also had a few demo discs, and on one in particular was a demo for Final Fantasy VII.

You know the one, I'm sure. It was the "bombing mission" that opens the game, the single most elegantly paced slice they could press on a disc to show off the first ever 3D Final Fantasy. Sure, it wasn't nearly as impressive to me visually as Cortex's giant disembodied head, but there was a certain tension to the events in the demo that was exhilarating all the same. By the time the guard scorpion was jumping down I was already sold. It wouldn't be until several years later that I got my own Playstation, and while my aforementioned friend had long since moved to parts unknown, I had a new friend who happened to have a copy of Final Fantasy VII he was willing to trade for my Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram.

This is the story of the worst deal I've ever made in my entire life.

This was a big deal back in 1997. The battle drums of the console wars changed in pitch and timbre when 3D gaming entered the home, and one oft repeated cry from the Playstation side was that Final Fantasy VII was too big for Nintendo's antiquated cartridges. They weren't wrong, but the grandeur of FFVII extends well beyond how many bytes it is. The game is cinematic in ways previous gen titles could not be with its lovingly rendered FMVs, stellar soundtrack, and its complex story that was so rich it needed three discs to tell. It's an important game, but it's a game from 1997 during the middle of a massive paradigm shift in the industry. There's rough edges.

Take the battle system, for example. It's still built upon the same foundation as previous games in the series but augmented through the introduction of Materia. This is something the Final Fantasy games do quite often. They don't stray too far from what makes Final Fantasy feel like "Final Fantasy," but try to give each game its own mechanical identity. The problem is that the foundation they're building upon is so dull that battles almost always break down the same way no matter what game you're playing. Pick your best attack and spam it until the credits roll. Status ailments, buffs/debuffs, elemental affinities? All meaningless. Hell, you don't even really need to summon unless you want to watch the little cutscenes that play, which are actually pretty great but also unskippable and incredibly long, so you probably won't even do that for very long.

Materia allows players to slot magic, skills, and passive abilities into their weapons and level them up over time. This allows you to build each character however you wish, no matter how much their designs might code them as being specific classes. But since this progress is tied to the Materia itself, it feels like characters end up lacking an identity in battle. My party composition usually broke down to whoever I liked the look of, because the free-form nature of Materia keeps everyone on about the same level playing field. This could be a positive for many people, but personally I like each character to have a more defined function that makes weighing team composition strategic. Outside of Limit Breaks (which are admittedly cool and I like them a whole bunch), everyone just kinda feels... samey.

So what about the story? I mean, those are pretty damn important to a JRPG too.

It's fine. It's well known by now that it suffers from a very poor translation that makes some scenes and plot points needlessly hard to follow, but it's also far from the most convoluted story in the franchise. The bare bones of what it is I think is pretty good, and I like the characters quite a bit, but I also think it's in dire need of a retranslation. The atmosphere and settings are great, though. I'm a big fan of pre-rendered backgrounds and FFVII's has some of the best. There's a style here that I really struggle to put into words... Everything feels like it's a set or a diorama, and I think the effect is unintended, a byproduct of trying to emulate the sort of overworld style of previous games while embracing 3D. This is why everyone has hooves for hands, something I'm a lot less crazy about. The music also does a fantastic job of evoking just the right mood from the player, it's easily some of the best in the series.

There's also loads of minigames, something else Final Fantasy is known for. I think most of them play pretty poorly in this with the snowboarding minigame being perhaps the biggest offender of the bunch, but they're also pretty straight-forward and don't break the pacing of the game too badly. Something Square will screw up on both fronts in their next game.

I still have a lot of fondness for Final Fantasy VII. It was the first real RPG I sank my teeth into, and I respect it for what it is and what it meant for the industry. I also just don't think it's very fun to play. You know what is fun to play? Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram. I was swindled.

Symphony of the Night might just be one of my favorite games of all time. It's so good, in fact, that it got me to totally re-evaluate my relationship with search-action games ("Metroidvanias" is you're a freak.) For the longest time I had convinced myself that it just wasn't my kind of game, and that impression wasn't unearned, but Symphony proved to me that I really just played a lot of crap.

For someone who is so married to the more linear, segmented stylings of previous Castlevanias, Symphony of the Night seems almost heretical in its design. My first playthrough as also admittedly rough as I committed to not using a guide at all. I got pretty lost, my build was all wrong, I had trouble with a bunch of the bosses in the late game, but I persevered... and came out the other end thinking this game was just "okay." But after jumping back in a few months later for a second run, my familiarity with the castle made for a much more enjoyable experience.

Part of my problem was that I tried to play it too close to a traditional Vania, sticking mostly to the familiar power-ups and not consciously trying comb for secrets. And sure, you can absolutely play Symphony that way, but you'd then be ignoring spells, familiars, and a wide variety of weapons. Not only is progression decidedly less linear than other titles in the series, but so is your relationship to the player character, Alucard. Each time I jump back in I try to build Alucard a bit different, focusing on different primary weapons and familiars, and playing around with equipment I may have disregarded in previous runs. It makes the game highly replayable.

My only real gripe is the inverted castle. The steps you take to get there are a little obtuse but admittedly fun to figure out, and the reveal itself is exciting. The castle and everything you thought you knew about it is now flipped on its head. On paper that sounds like a great way to ramp up the stakes and difficulty as the game enters its final stretch, but... it just drags. I've beaten Symphony a number of times and not once has the inverted castle ever felt like anything other than a slog.

That doesn't take away from the fact that Symphony of the Night is absolutely a game worth playing, and at this point you have some options for how to do that, but I would strongly encourage any that leaves the original translation intact. It's messy, but it's a big part of the appeal. It's not an incomprehensible disaster like some other botched translations of the era. If anything, it's just the right amount of corny. I love it and wouldn't take it any other way.

Tetris Battle Gaiden is a sloppy unbalanced mess of a game that has nearly brought me into physical confrontation with my friends. It is perfect.

True to its title, this is a multiplayer-centric Tetris game. Each player selects a character with their own unique set of magical skills. These spells exist on a tier, and by clearing lines containing orbs you're able to progress up to higher tiers of magic. Conventional wisdom would be to always build up to your highest tier of magic and then pop your "ultimate," but Battle Gaiden avoids this trap by smartly designing spells such that they have strong utility in certain situations. As an example, your opponent might be constantly sending garbage blocks your way, and your tier-1 magic will simply clear these lines out to make your well more manageable, whereas your tier-3 magic will reverse your opponents inputs. Inconveniencing them when their well is mostly clear doesn't do you much good when you're drowning in tetrominos.

You also can't play this like a traditional competitive Tetris. In fact, the way some spells work actually incentivize you to "play bad" in order to copy completely mangled rows over to your opponent. Likewise, since carefully managing which tier of magic you're building to is crucial to winning a game, you can't really boil things down to the same rote "build and clear tetrises" that forms a reliable baseline for other Tetris games. It's a thinkin' man's Tetris. Except it's also not!

Some characters are just built better than others, with clear counters that can make matches agonizing to win no matter how thoughtful you are while playing. There's definitely a lack of balance, and it can give those more familiar with the game a clear advantage and push away newcomers. The story mode might be a good way to acclimate new players, but the game's mechanical idiosyncrasies are better learned when you have another human being teaching you the ropes. As such, I have one friend who is way into Tetris Battle Gaiden who I can always rely on for a fair and challenging match, and another who just doesn't "get" the game and has perhaps said some things to me that should get him put onto a government watch list or two.

But, I love it. It's my favorite puzzle game, even if I might struggle to recommend it to others, especially in this current climate where getting a bunch of people in the same room to play games is easier said than done. It was also never released in America, so if you want to play it, you will likely need to restore to emulation. If, however, all of that sounds completely manageable to you, then I would highly encourage you to destroy a few friendships with Tetris Battle Gaiden.

Metal Gear Solid is often regarded less as a game and more as a vehicle for Kojima's own peculiar brand of storytelling. I think that assessment is a bit unfair, however. The gameplay (mostly) survives the test of time, rudimentary as it may seem when compared to its sequels. The player controls Solid Snake, and must sneak around the Shadow Moses nuclear storage facility, which has been taken over by Foxhound, Snake's old unit. While primarily a "stealth action" game, the player's progress is impeded several times through the game, requiring them to find new weapons and items to proceed. It has some search-action qualities to it, and similar to those types of games, I find Metal Gear more enjoyable on subsequent playthroughs when the route through Shadow Moses can be better optimized. It gives you a good sense of conquering the game, and each run is a bit more rewarding than the last.

The camera, however, is the biggest impediment to enjoying the game. Much of the action takes place from overhead, mimicking the perspective of the original two Metal Gear games. This can make it a bit too easy to careen right into a trap if you're not being careful. Thankfully, the "Soliton radar" alleviates some of this. Enemy's LOS (Line of Sight) is represented by cones projecting from small dots, which both give you positional information as well as an area to avoid being spotted. Enemies also patrol in set patterns, making each room its own sort of puzzle.

This sort of thoughtfulness extends to the story as well. Yeah it has its pants-wetting otakus and Cyborg Ninja, it asks you to read a frequency off the back of the box and it'll read your memory card. I think too often this is what the story is reduced down to, though. The actual meat of Metal Gear Solid's plot is a lot more layered, complex, and comes from a place of genuine concern. MGS concerns itself with legacy and what we pass on to the next generation, for better and for worse. Many of the main characters grapple with this theme in some way, such as Snake's familial connection to Big Boss and Liquid Snake, or Otacon reckoning with his family's ties to nuclear weapon development. This is all set against the snowy backdrop of Alaska, which is beautifully represented despite the graphical shortcomings of the Playstation hardware. I really love the look of Metal Gear Solid, in all its blockiness, with all its warbling textures.

Enhancing this experience is some of the best voice acting of the era. In particular, I really like David Hayter's more subdued portrayal of Snake. I think his voice becomes a bit of a caricature of itself in later games, and while his growl is still here, there's more of Hayter himself slipping through the performance. It makes Snake more believable as a human than later games, and perhaps that works in the overarching Metal Gear narrative. MGS deals the most with who Solid Snake is as a man and a soldier, and Hayter's acting goes a long way in helping connect the player to the character.

I think Kojima's strongest work can be found earlier in his career. Metal Gear 2 and Snatcher are both favorites of mine, but Metal Gear Solid might be the peak. This isn't to say anything less of fan favorites like Snake Eater (which is an amazing game), but there's something more grounded and heartfelt about the story in Metal Gear Solid, and something more meticulous and tight about its gameplay that has me coming back to it annually. It's easily among my favorite games of all time.

I was pleasantly surprised to find how dense Elden Ring is with things to do and places to explore. Each of the game's main locations (with the exception of the Mountaintop of Giants) is riddled with points of interest, mini-dungeons, and bosses. There's a lot of copy and pasted geometry and boss encounters that amount to regular enemies being given larger health bars but given the size of this game I think it's reasonable, and a far cry better than many other open world games that are utterly bereft of things to do.

The best point of comparison is, I think, Breath of the Wild, a game so uninspired and vapid in its design that it may as well be the equivalent of digitized Ambien. In BotW, mini-dungeons result in lackluster rewards, items feel as though they have no true weight or value, and there's vast swaths of the world that are utterly empty. Contrast this with Elden Ring, which also will let you fill your inventory with gold tinged excrement, but has the decency to make it a common drop rather than something you slowly build towards over 80 hours of gameplay. Seriously, every nook and cranny you explore in The Lands Between will at least lead you to something of value, even if you aren't spec'd for it.

Combat is a refinement of Dark Souls 3's, complete with Weapon Arts (now called Ashes of War.) I found these - and the addition of a jump button - to be invaluable in combat, especially in the late game where your standard R1's just aren't going to cut it. You can also craft items now, which is your primary way of getting things like fire bombs or poison darts, but the usefulness of consumables seriously drops off shortly into the game. I spent a lot of my time in the early game scavenging for materials only to find myself stuck with a surplus 20 hours in. Despite this, I kind of like it. I'm a sucker for good crafting systems, and the fact that you strongly rely on it in the early game only to ween off a few hours in helps communicate how powerful you're becoming inherently.

One of the strongest parts of the game are the side quests. You can no longer hack NPCs to bits in the hub area, and for good reason. Questlines are so heavily interconnected that slaying one NPC could invalidate numerous subquests. They're also a lot less obtuse than in previous games and generally they'll tell you where to go or what to do to unlock the next step in the questline. In fact, the overarching story is told in a much more coherent way as well, with key details spelled out in cutscenes rather than being relegated exclusively to item descriptions. You shouldn't expect a very cinematic game by any means, but it's a nice change of pace and grounds you more in Elden Ring's world without expecting you to pour into supplemental material.

The Mountaintop of the Giants was, for me, where the game finally started to feel its length. As much as I understand repeating bosses, traps, and geometry in a game like this, the lack of more unique and noteworthy things to do in the mountaintops makes the constant retread of content wear thin. Bosses also start to become progressively more difficult for those with strength builds, which is evident to me even though I was running with dex/int the entire game. This is, I feel, something that has become more and more true of Souls games and by this point I think you'd have to be some sort of sadist to run around with a greatsword. The Haligtree and Crumbling Farum Azula areas are both good, but by that point I had become so eager to see the credits that I had a hard time coming back around.

There are also (at least at the time of writing this, though let's be real, it's probably going to be a constant) loads of performance issues. It's a Fromsoft game, and at this point I think you should just expect jank the same way you would from a Bethesda release. Which also shouldn't excuse it, if anything the fact that they still can't make playing online not feel like a laggy trainwreck is pitiful. Add to the fact the Bluepoint's excellent Demon's Souls remake runs like butter and looks far better graphically, and it's even more disappointing that From can't get it together. I don't need this game to have crazy amounts of raytracing or whatever, but hitting a stable 60 shouldn't be an unreasonable expectation. Sadly, for Fromsoft it is.

Elden Ring is a really great game despite those few blemishes, and far exceeded the hopes I had for it. While it doesn't knock Demon's Souls off the top of my list for favorite Souls games (or even Dark Souls 2 for that matter), it sits higher than the rest.

Not my favorite of the Disney 16-bit platformers, but pretty solid nonetheless. Platforming feels good and the controls are responsive. Levels are fun to jump through and it never quite hits the same frustrating levels of difficulty as the Genesis version. Speaking of, I think I do prefer that version at least in terms of looks.

The music, on the other hand, is much better on the SNES. Not a lot of composures in that era really knew how to get the best out of the Genesis, and Aladdin's music definitely comes out the best through the SNES.

Between the two, this is definitely the better version to play, but I do think the Genesis version of Aladdin is worth checking out. They're both very different despite drawing from the same source material and I think it's neat to see how those teams interpreted key moments, music, and gameplay differently.

Edit: As soon as I finished writing this little review, I remembered the magic carpet/escape level and felt a surge of hate crash through me like a crack of lightning. Docking this .5 stars. To be fair, the Genesis version of this level is also atrocious.