I am not particularly enamored with the Final Fantasy series despite playing most of the numbered entries. Final Fantasy IX, however, is easily one of my favorite games of all time. Admittedly, a significant amount of my reverence for it has to do with the time and place in which I first played the game, and the state of mind I was in. Without dumping a bunch of personal details out on the internet, I will say that I was having to reckon with the loss of a loved one and was in a particularly poor place. Final Fantasy IX deals heavily in themes of death, especially with how the main cast of characters deal with the concept of mortality and their embrace (or rejection) of it.

I wasn't really expecting that. Most of my memories of Final Fantasy IX prior to actually playing it were watching a few friends struggle with the final boss and thinking it just looked "cool." Which, it is. But I think most people have forgotten this game, or lack the sort of affection for it that is typically heaped upon FFVII and VIII. It's a bit of an odd one, the middle child of sorts, stuck in that transition from Final Fantasy's golden years into the next generation of gaming. And yet, I think it's not only the strongest in terms of the story it tells, but in how it plays as well.

Sure, I've complained in the recent past about Final Fantasy's core battle system not really evolving, and it's true that IX doesn't make any attempts to break the mold. But the characters are so well-defined in battle and have a practicality to them that helps add some excitement to combat. You are greatly limited in how you compose your party, as whoever is active in battle is typically dictated by whoever the story deems the most important at the time. But Square tailored encounters and dungeons around who you would have in your party, which goes a long way in ensuring combat stays engaging.

I also think I have an inherent appreciation for Final Fantasy games that primarily adopt a more medieval aesthetic, especially when they work in some anachronisms. IX really feels like it's playing up the "fantasy" in Final Fantasy, and it's refreshing given how strongly the series leaned into high tech futurism after the success of VII. At the time it came out I'm not sure that's what people really wanted, but I sure as hell appreciate it. In fact, FFIX holds up better graphically than VII or VIII, or indeed many other games of its era. This is thanks in part to releasing so close to the end of that console generation, at a point when Square had a proficiency with the hardware and a team large enough to take on something so large in scope; but a lot of it is thanks to excellent visual design. The character designs are really some of the best in the entire franchise.

I think about this game a lot, and I really ought to go back to it for another playthrough. I wouldn't say FFIX helped me understand death or carried me through a hard time or anything so dramatic, but it did resonate with me more strongly than it would have if I played it in a vacuum. So maybe I'm a little biased, maybe I like it more than I should, but I do think it holds up incredibly well and is worthy of a second look if you dismissed it back in the day. You can also buy it brand new, physically, from Square's online store. That's crazy.

Scissorman is scary as hell!!!!

Clock Tower's presentation is almost too good for the hardware it's running on. While on a technical level it's not THAT impressive, the way it builds tension and steeps you in the atmosphere of its (almost) derelict mansion feels ahead of its time by generations. It's more moody than horror staples like Resident Evil, and even its own PS1 era sequels; which are all still great games, they just lack that special something that the original Clock Tower has in spades.

This is a very slow game. I'm not just talking the overall pacing. Your character feels like she's wearing boots made of solid concrete. That's kind of the point, though. It makes you feel powerless, and ratchets up the stress of being pursued by the scissorman, who I must reiterate is very scary!(!!!) You think they just let anone have scissors that big? No! They're made for murder!

At multiple points in the game you'll be locked in a chase with scissorman, and your only recourse against him is to hide. You cannot fight him off, you will die. Unfortunately, some rooms are harder than others to find a good hiding spot, and not all hiding spots are made equal within the same room. If you pick a bad one, Scissorman will find you and kill you. To make matters worse, object selection is similar to an adventure game, and is every bit as slow as your movements. When you actually do find a place to hide, you have to commit to the arduous task of actually selecting the object and waiting for Jennifer's animation to finish.

This might sound miserable and... well, it kind of is. I think it works best in these encounters, but simply navigating the mansion while not being in the middle of a pursuit can at times get a little tedious, especially if you're unsure where to go or what to do (which for me was often.) This isn't bad on a first playthrough, really, but going back for the other endings is the point at which the plodding nature of the game started to wear on me.

Clock Tower is pretty short overall, despite this. It's the perfect game to pull out for Halloween, and can easily be beaten in a single run. With the lights out, I'd put this on the same level as Silent Hill for overall spooks.

The Gamecube remake of Resident Evil is (at least in my eyes) the definitive version to play. It's QoL improvements, graphics, sound design, and revamped mansion layout have aged like wine. But there is a certain charm to the original that just didn't translate over. That sort of vibe you get from a game made by a small time doing something new and exciting, at least at the time. It might be easiest to point to the FMVs and poor line delivery, but that cheesy and almost subversive tone runs through the entire experience from the moment you boot the game until the last credit rolls.

It certainly doesn't take itself as seriously as the Resident Evil franchise does today, which is saying a lot considering these games remain over-the-top. There's an eeriness to it too, the sort you could only find in horror games of this era, back when sensibilities were less defined and studios were still experimenting with how to scare players. Enemy designs aren't just quaint given the limitations of the hardware they're rendered on, but in spirit, and yet there's an earnestness to the whole thing that makes it endearing despite the passage of time.

Gameplay is where the original Resident Evil becomes a lot harder to recommend. Movement, combat, and puzzle solving clearly needed more work, and by RE2 and 3 the team largely improved upon things. This will also vary depending on what version you play, and honestly I have trouble keeping them all straight. Even if you ask me now which version I sat down with, I'm not sure I could tell you without booting my Raspberry Pi back up.

While I may not come back to the original Resident Evil annually like I do with REmake, it's definitely one I can see myself jumping back into from time to time. The b-movie charm does a lot for me, even if the gameplay doesn't feel as solid or rewarding even compared to its Playstation counterparts.

It took me a couple playthroughs to really appreciate Resident Evil 2. I owe this in part to playing it immediately after doing a run through the original Resident Evil, a game that by comparison is a lot more deliberately paced, slow even, with enemies thinly spread throughout the Spencer Mansion and its surrounding facilities. In comparison, Resident Evil 2 is absolutely swarming with zombies. While you may have been able to conserve ammo by using the generous size of the Mansion's hallways to juke around threats, Resident Evil 2 demands consideration to crowd control. Corridors are more narrow, with enemies placed in such a way that they can't simply be run past (at least for the most part), and some rooms are completely swarmed with the undead.

Ammo was never much of a concern for me in the original, but my first run in 2 had me stretched thin. I was trying to clear rooms out that I found to be too troublesome to jog through, but you can't really do that. Some should be thinned out, others require a better understanding of the police station's layout so that you can bypass them. This makes for a much more tense experience, one which I initially found to be frustrating but ultimately warmed up to.

The way the game handles its two scenarios is also pretty smart. Whichever you play through second introduces Mr.X, a hulking enemy that stalks you through the police department, dishes out a ton of damage, and acts as a bullet sponge to deplete your resources. It's a great way to make a second one subversive, forcing the player to abandon comfortable routes and think on their toes. Resident Evil 3 greatly expands on this mechanic, but it's very well executed here, and I think reserving it for your second run adds a lot to the replay value of the game.

This is a similar case to the original Resident Evil where I feel the remake is the definitive version to play, but unlike that game, I feel the Playstation release of RE2 has aged pretty well. Graphically it's a lot more impressive than the first, and the sound design is much improved. The remake retains just enough of the original to feel familiar while improving upon characters and atmosphere, but gameplay-wise it's a pretty different beast. If you're looking for a tanky survival horror game, then the original is the right fit for you. If you're more enamored with RE4 (and other over-the-shoulder Resident Evil games) then the remake is the easy pick. I think both offer enough to be well worth playing, even if I prefer the remake that much more.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis feels like a side story, an expansion, a "gaiden" if you wanna be a freak about it. Technically that's because it is, it was never meant to be a numbered entry in the series. I don't want to unpack all that, but needless to say, RE3 feels weird as a conclusion to the Playstation trilogy.

It's not that it's a bad game. In fact, I like it quite a bit. It's less puzzle heavy than the first two games, putting much of the focus on action. It doesn't lean as hard into as Dino Crisis 2 or anything, but you're definitely given weapons that feel more fun to use, and ammo crafting becomes a huge part of your inventory maintenance. There's of course the titular Nemesis too, who despite the action heavy focus of the game is still best avoided if at all possible. It's clear they wanted to expand upon Mr.X from the previous game, and Nemesis is used to great effect here. It's definitely a highlight, though unfortunately he shows up less and less as the game progresses.

The reuse of Racoon City may at first feel a bit cheap, but you're able to explore so much more of it than you were able to in RE2. That said, one complaint I do have is that some locations beyond the large opening area aren't quite as memorable as, say, the sewers in 2 or the facility in 1. There's also only one scenario, setting this further apart from the first two games, but the alternate scenarios in RE1 and 2 weren't drastically different, and I don't feel the loss of one is that much of a bad thing. They could have given Carlos his own campaign, but weaving his story in with Jill's feels a lot better, ultimately.

Like RE2, there's a modern remake of this game. This is probably the first time I feel a Resident Evil remake is inferior to the original, however. The remake diverges more heavily from the original than 2 did and ends up losing too much of that identity along the way. While you are given more interesting areas to explore, they become less of a playground for the Nemesis, and thus there's even less of him past the starting area. In fact, he only really stalks you at one point during the entire game, with the rest of your encounters being scripted. I just feel that loses too much of what made the original fun, to be honest. If you have your pick between the two versions, definitely give the Playstation one a go.

I hated this game as a kid because it's different. As an adult, I love it because it's different. Super Mario Bros. 2's impact on the franchise is indelible. It sets the baseline for Peach, Luigi, and Toad as player characters, and introduces a unique slew of enemies that still persist today. Shy Guys are great, Snifits are little weirdos, Phanto is terrifying, Birdo. Given the mark its left on the series, it's a little strange to reflect on the fact that it isn't really the Mario 2.

It's not a perfect experience by any means. Some levels feel just a bit too slow, especially the ones where you have to navigate through mazes by blowing up walls, and some of the digging segments can feel a bit repetitive. I personally don't care for how Toad controls, but the rest of the characters are pretty fun, yet I almost always default to Peach for the majority of the game. She's got the best jump, it can't be helped. Finding secrets is pretty fun, and a lot less mind-numbing than it was in the original Super Mario. You no longer have to push down on every pipe hoping you'll find something, and instead throw a potion on the ground which will open a door to a small bonus area. Sometimes there's good stuff there, sometimes there's not, but you'll always get coins which can be used on the slot machine minigame.

Gameplay is overall much more slow, and Mario attacks by picking up and throwing veggies, items, and enemies rather than jumping on heads. The controls feel a bit more floaty too. It takes a bit of getting used to but I really do like the way it plays. The boss fights are more inventive than what you'll see from the series until Mario World, too.

While not the first Zelda I ever played, it's easily the one I put the most time into as a kid. I was pretty much glued to this thing, and it was the first Zelda to suck me in so much that I felt compelled to learn more about the franchise. This was in the early days of the internet, so there was a lot of scouring for details on fan pages and printing out character bios and getting my dad's computer filled up with viruses. Good times...

I remember being awestruck by the amount of secrets and easter eggs in this thing, like being branded an all-caps THIEF, or turning Marin into a dang ghost. It was years later that I caught on to the more disturbing fan theories about the story, and while those are almost certainly false, I think they're fun to think about too. The game certainly has a mysterious air about it, and for a an early 90s Game Boy game, they managed to pack in a lot of atmosphere.

Naturally the smaller scope of the game means there's a lot less content to explore. This isn't as vast as some other Zelda titles, and even the Ages/Seasons games feel like they're more robust, but there's still a lot to do for an early 90's Game Boy game. The graphics are pretty sharp too and the controls are spot on, it feels like a perfectly condensed version of A Link to the Past, impressive given the power game between console and handheld hardware.

There is a remake for the Switch, and it's fine. It has a horribly tacked on create-a-dungeon feature and the framerate really likes to nosedive for some reason. But it's still pretty authentic to the original, and is a perfectly fine way to enjoy Link's Awakening today. But my fondness will always be for the original, and I think it holds up surprisingly well today.

The passage of time hasn't been kind to Streets of Rage, reducing much of the appeal to its atmosphere and excellent soundtrack. This is true of a lot of early Genesis games, which were altogether a lot more rough than what Nintendo launched with on the SNES, but they still have their own undeniable charm.

Streets combat is fairly bare bones. You'll see others compare it to Final Fight, usually despairingly, and they aren't exactly wrong. Gameplay is a lot more shallow and enemies are fairly repetitive. The difficulty ramps up in a pretty harsh way that doesn't feel great, too. And yet, I just keep coming back to this thing. The music is phenomenal and probably the single biggest stand out feature of the game. These tracks hold up, it's a soundtrack you can easily throw on and just listen to, and it perfectly captures the mood of the dirty neon lit streets you brawl your way through.

As with any brawler, I'd suggest playing with a friend. This is especially true if you want to enjoy the twist ending, which I won't spoil in the off chance that you aren't already aware.

Just shy of Disney's golden age of video games, but among the best of its era. Duck Tales excels in control and feedback, two things that were very hard to get right on the NES. Each pogo-stick bounce or tricky platforming jump feels perfect. Levels are challenging enough that you'll get something out of it whether you're old or young, and I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone struggling to see the ending. Secrets can be a bit devious and even a little too obtuse, but if you just want to jaunt through and see the ending, it's a relatively straight-forward game.

Obviously they had the advantage of Duck Tales' brand name. It was a huge show at the time and even today you won't have to look far to find an adult who is nostalgic for it. If the new show is anything to go by, it still resonates with kids today, too. But if you stripped out the IP and made this its own thing, you would still have an incredibly fun game. For every ounce of character there's an equal measure of mechanical quality.

Often (and rightfully) in contention for the best 2D Mario of all time. It happens to fall just shy of that for me, with Mario World's less inhibited gameplay and flow earning it the honor.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is more traditional in its design, eschewing many of the mechanics introduced in the USA version of Mario 2. This of course isn't surprising considering it wasn't the Mario 2 Japan got (even if it may seem like the defacto follow-up today) but it's probably for the best as Mario 3 feels like a proper evolution of the gameplay introduced in the original Super Mario Bros. Graphically it's a marked improvement. Mario himself is far more "readable," and enemies feel much more expressive and cartoony. This is where a lot of the series aesthetics started to solidify, and it's impressive how good the game is as communicating these designs on 8-bit hardware. Flipping between the manual and the game will show you just how faithfully rendered the characters are, whereas most other NES games demand a hefty amount of imagination to fill in the gaps.

The level-to-level structure of the original Mario is mostly gone, as players now move between levels in a (somewhat) non-linear fashion. Not only can you break the level order with the use of warp whistles (skipping large chunks of levels was really tradition by this point), but the world map provides some small amount of freedom to skip levels and forge your own path. These maps are also dotted with minigames, which make for perfectly fine diversions and allow you to bank power-ups, a useful new feature.

Levels are generally well designed, but very short in length. This is where the game falters a bit for me. A few level concepts don't get the time they need to breathe, and there's a few too many levels towards the later half of the game that just don't feel like they justify their inclusion. You could probably remove a whole world's worth of levels from this game and it would feel much better to play through. It's usually around world 6 that the lack of a save feature starts to wear on me. There's a lot of game here. Not so much that beating it in one sitting is unreasonable, but save backups were becoming more common and it certainly would have been appreciated.

Mario 3 makes for an excellent end to the series' run on the NES hardware. It's a brilliant showcase of what the NES is capable of, as well as the ingenuity and creativity of Miyamoto's team.

Addendum: Larry Davis is holding my family at gunpoint unless I up this by .5 stars. Says both this and World can be 5/5's, says I don't know what it means to hurt.

I was 9 when Pokemon was blowing up in America, the exact perfect age to be swept up in the marketing and become the bane of my parent's bank account. I begged my grandparents to get me both Red and Blue for Christmas, and bless their hearts, they caved to my demands. They probably didn't know both versions were the same game with very minor differences, otherwise they might've had the better sense not to waste their money. I ate, breathed, and dreamed Pokemon for several years; the 90s equivalent of a whale, ever unsatiated and unstoppable in my consumption.

Anyway, I think this game is pretty crappy now.

Blue and Red are essentially Baby's First RPG. Gameplay is as shallow as can be, the main loop is glacially paced, and completing the Pokedex is pure tedium. Some of this is because of hardware limitations, and some of it is by design. In any case, it's a very hard game to come back to now, appealing only in its quaintness. Even then, my nostalgia was barely enough to tolerate my last playthrough, and I think now I'm finally broken, rendered completely incapable of finding even a modicum of enjoyment from Gen 1.

At the risk of going into a screed about the franchise at large, the remakes of this game aren't even worth your time. They both play it a bit too safe, and as such fall into the same dull traps as the original. Let's Go Pikachu initially piqued my interest by eliminating wild Pokemon battles, which would mean wading through less of Pokemon's tired one-note combat, but somehow it made the entire game even more interminable. It's nice to know that the latest release (Arceus, at the time of this writing) actually does something to liven up the experience, but for too long Pokemon has been boxed in, being this one very specific thing. The older I get, the more exposure I've had. The more I play, the less I want to play more.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It can temper reexperiencing something that is in fact pretty awful, or make you fight for a product that is not worth the time or energy just because it's become so deeply tied to a specific moment and a specific time that's important to you. But nostalgia has a limit, and I think I found mine.

Box art still rules, though.

Your enjoyment of Goldeneye is going to depend heavily on how much leeway you can give it for being an early console FPS. PC FPS games were more established by this point thanks to Doom and Wolfenstein laying the groundwork, with mouse and keyboard controls making these games a breeze to play. Serious reconsideration had to be given to the mechanical feel of first person shooters when 3D gaming hit the mainstream, and nowhere were the growing pains more pronounced than on console. It doesn't help when the controller you have to work with looks like it was made in a clown factory, too.

And yet, Goldeneye still plays perfectly fine today... if you're willing to accept it for what it is. Yes, the addition of a right stick helps tremendously as evidenced by the leaked Project Bean, and those emulating the original have the option of a mouse and keyboard hack. It goes a long way to make Goldeneye more enjoyable, but also highlights the fact that the game was balanced around having a single analog stick. In some ways it trivializes the game, and in others it makes it far less agonizing (especially in the later levels or 00Agent mode.)

On its default difficulty, Goldeneye is a briskly paced shooter where you're more or less jogging to the end of each level. Higher difficulties add additional mission objectives, some of which are downright obtuse. Losing a life means starting the entire level over, and when you're dealing with aggressive enemies that deal a lot of damage on top of mission objectives that can easily be botched, you end up with a hell of a challenge. But I like it. When you start to figure out the rhythm of levels on 00 it just feels good. Dying is almost always a learning experience, and it's very rewarding when you start to develop a route you have confidence in.

On the more technical side of things, Goldeneye suffers from a lot of the same issues other N64 games do: the framerate is generally pretty terrible, everything looks muddy, the draw distance is abysmal, and the lighting is overly dark. It's sometimes hard to tell what the hell is even going on, and this can result in some cheap deaths. I don't want to be "that guy" that preaches the superiority of CRTs for retro gaming as there are some solid upscaling options on the market, but playing Goldeneye on modern displays is a bad time. My Retrotink did little to alleviate how crushed the blacks were, making levels like the statue graveyard almost impossible to play without heavily boosting the display's brightness. Alternatively, you can try Project Bean, and honestly that might be the best way to go if you want to enjoy Goldeneye today.

I have a lot of fondness for this game, but there's also a lot you need to look past, and if you want to play it today you're going to have to jump over a few hurdles. Or just emulate it.

The best co-op game I've never been able to convince anyone to play with me ever despite numerous years of trying. It's still perfectly playable solo, but even then you just know it's meant for two.

I've seen other compare this to Four Swords and I think that's pretty accurate. Puzzles are fairly simple but really fun to figure out, and the game never takes itself too seriously. Even when you're griefing player 2 it still feels like it's all in good fun. There's not much of a story to this (why would there be?) but what's here is just the right amount of silly, and the sprite work does a great job at capturing the style of the show. The soundtrack is terrific too. Given how good both this and Four Swords are, it's surprising to me that there's not a bunch of indie clones.

It can get a bit dull in singleplayer, there's obviously something missing from the experience when you're going at it alone, but it's still fun enough if you want to waste away a Saturday afternoon.

A fun retro throwback to Mega Man 2, which is the best Mega Man (or so everyone says...) Like Mega Man 2, you are restricted to running, jumping, and shooting. There's no charge shot and none of that slide nonsense. In some ways it feels like a regression, especially for the 9th in the series and a game that follows a pretty good PS1 installment, but then that's sort of the point.

Really it's surprising how MM9 doesn't feel like it's out of step with the earlier entries. Sure there's some bits here and there that spoil how modern it is, but it feels so genuine to the originals that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was based on some long lost beta. Boss designs and theming were really being stretched thin by Mega Man 8, but they feel fresh again here while retaining that aforementioned authenticity.

That's also where I come down a bit harshly on this game, though. It's faithful to a fault. There's some incredibly frustrating stretches of levels and a few spots where cheap deaths are plenty, and a bizarre affinity for spikes (which cause instant death.) Mega Man was one of those trial-and-error type games, designed in such a way as to make it longer than it ought to be, but as a cheaper digital release it doesn't need to justify its price tag through length.

Still a very fun game though, and an important one for proving the worth of retro revivals. Without this we might not have games like Sonic Mania or Bloodstained.

Kirby and the Forgotten Lands is a Kirby game through-and-through, effortlessly transitioning all the charm, innocence, and gameplay of this longstanding franchise to 3D. It's a little bit surprising how well it works.

Very little of the core Kirby formula has changed. You still run through brightly colored worlds sucking up enemies and absorbing their powers, floating from platform to platform and battling the usual assortment of foes. Despite the new perspective, it never feels out of step with what's come before. Many of the copy abilities are from previous games, and while the selection is modest, the ability to upgrade them feels substantive enough that I never really felt lacking in options. The new Mouthful Mode is a lot of fun too, with the vehicle segments being particular favorites of mine.

The art direction is top tier. Kirby is quickly dropped into a brightly colored post-apocalyptic wasteland that manages to feel authentic enough to the series core aesthetics while providing moments of pause to ruminate on what this world has lost. This is sometimes played to comedic effect, especially in a later level that frequently drops the music out entirely, pulls back to give you a sense of scope to the destruction, then immediately jumps back in to the usual Kirby bops. It is unfortunate, however, that the Switch's aged hardware is holding things back. Even at moderate distances enemies will move at slideshow speeds, there's a total lack of anti-aliasing, and the framerate can be rather inconsistent. Maybe it's more worthwhile to point out when a Switch game actually runs well, but it's still unfortunate to see games like this and realize they could be that much better if Nintendo invested in a better platform.

The relatively short length of the game is somewhat elongated by the sheer glut of side content. As you save Waddle Dees in the core levels, you help to build a hub world that progressively fills itself with more to do. Kirby can take up a side gig at a restaurant that is flagrantly misappropriating his image for profit, or he can run through a tournament in the colosseum. If you want to take it a bit more slow, you can collect capsule toys and decorate Kirby's home with them. Or just take a nap! Forgotten Land is a game that can easily be taken at your own pace, and there's something very comforting about it all.

I am, however, less crazy about the challenge missions that are dispersed between the main levels. They're necessary for collecting rare stones (a crafting material needed for upgrading copy abilities), but just aren't that fun to actually engage with. Likewise, the post-game content is a bit too excessive and is largely a "hard mode" retread which you need to run through in order to get the true ending. After you clear that, you unlock one more colosseum tournament, at the end of which you fight the true true TRUE final boss of the game... I've fought variants of the final boss so much now that it just feels ridiculous and completely boring.

I would still highly recommend Kirby and the Forgotten Land to anyone who has even a passing affection for the series. It may not be my favorite in the series (I think that still goes to Crystal Shards), but it's a damn good time and the rare Switch game I'm actually glad I picked up.