2023
Guard over there! Look, a guard! Guard over there! Guard! Look, a Guard! Piece of shit drill! Guard over there! Guard! Guard over there! Guard over there! Gaurd! Look, a guard! It's a civ! Guard over there!
I have a tendency to buy new releases, whether at launch or after months of carefully monitoring prices for a good deal, but Payday 3 was the rare "eh, I'm gonna get a month of Game Pass" game. Not like you can do crimes with bots, this is online only, and when the servers inevitably shut down it's game over for everybody. Ah, the future of ownership.
Thankfully, I wasn't stuck partnering up with a bunch of random weirdos (for the most part.) The majority of my time in Payday 3 was spentpanic spraying a full clip into crowds of civilians doing heists with my good friend Larry Davis, and one session with Appreciations and TransWitchSammy. I think your mileage with these kinds of games is dependent in no small part to who you play it with, and I had good company throughout.
The game itself is fine but, as of this writing, also feels stuck in the same state a lot of online-only multiplayer games are near launch. It doesn't feel robust, having only eight missions which you can burn through pretty quickly. So quickly that you'll likely tire of Payday 3 well before working your way through the game's lengthy weapon and skill trees. Though there are multiple ways to approach each mission, they are not deep enough to keep the game engaging for any reasonable person to earn a bunch of high level unlocks. Personally, I made it to about level 25 before I fell off.
The cost of unlockables and the amount of money you earn playing missions also feels wildly unbalanced, though it's in the player's favor. Unless you're constantly shooting civilians and intentionally botching missions, you'll earn so much cash that you can freely buy every gun and mod the second they become available. It will be a matter of personal preference, but I do wish Payday 3 made me consider what I could afford and what was best for my build, but as it is, you have no reason to not buy everything. It's liberating, but also makes progression feel a bit thoughtless.
The missions themselves are fun, even if they aren't fun enough to play more than three or four times apiece. There's nothing as crazy as the meth lab from Payday 2 but they all feel distinct enough. Some common tasks like standing in circles to boost wireless signals do feel a bit arbitrary and incongruous with your primary objectives, but I still had a very good time overall. I just wish there was more.
As with any live service game, all of this could change. No doubt Starbreeze intends to add more missions, more guns, more operators... It's just a matter of when, how far they're willing to go, and what the life of the game will end up being.
In a way, I feel weird passing judgement on something so amorphous, especially at such an early stage, but Deep Silver is charging money for this right now. It's not free-to-play, the closest you'll get to that through any legitimate means is if you managed to stack a bunch of one-dollar subscriptions to Game Pass, and even then, it's not like you really own it. This is a long walk to say that while I love pointing directly at a guard's face with the homies while whispering "Guard! Look, it's a guard!" I'm not sure it's good enough to justify its current price tag, but also maybe it will be a year down the line. Who knows!
Piece of shit drill. Fuckaroonie.
I have a tendency to buy new releases, whether at launch or after months of carefully monitoring prices for a good deal, but Payday 3 was the rare "eh, I'm gonna get a month of Game Pass" game. Not like you can do crimes with bots, this is online only, and when the servers inevitably shut down it's game over for everybody. Ah, the future of ownership.
Thankfully, I wasn't stuck partnering up with a bunch of random weirdos (for the most part.) The majority of my time in Payday 3 was spent
The game itself is fine but, as of this writing, also feels stuck in the same state a lot of online-only multiplayer games are near launch. It doesn't feel robust, having only eight missions which you can burn through pretty quickly. So quickly that you'll likely tire of Payday 3 well before working your way through the game's lengthy weapon and skill trees. Though there are multiple ways to approach each mission, they are not deep enough to keep the game engaging for any reasonable person to earn a bunch of high level unlocks. Personally, I made it to about level 25 before I fell off.
The cost of unlockables and the amount of money you earn playing missions also feels wildly unbalanced, though it's in the player's favor. Unless you're constantly shooting civilians and intentionally botching missions, you'll earn so much cash that you can freely buy every gun and mod the second they become available. It will be a matter of personal preference, but I do wish Payday 3 made me consider what I could afford and what was best for my build, but as it is, you have no reason to not buy everything. It's liberating, but also makes progression feel a bit thoughtless.
The missions themselves are fun, even if they aren't fun enough to play more than three or four times apiece. There's nothing as crazy as the meth lab from Payday 2 but they all feel distinct enough. Some common tasks like standing in circles to boost wireless signals do feel a bit arbitrary and incongruous with your primary objectives, but I still had a very good time overall. I just wish there was more.
As with any live service game, all of this could change. No doubt Starbreeze intends to add more missions, more guns, more operators... It's just a matter of when, how far they're willing to go, and what the life of the game will end up being.
In a way, I feel weird passing judgement on something so amorphous, especially at such an early stage, but Deep Silver is charging money for this right now. It's not free-to-play, the closest you'll get to that through any legitimate means is if you managed to stack a bunch of one-dollar subscriptions to Game Pass, and even then, it's not like you really own it. This is a long walk to say that while I love pointing directly at a guard's face with the homies while whispering "Guard! Look, it's a guard!" I'm not sure it's good enough to justify its current price tag, but also maybe it will be a year down the line. Who knows!
Piece of shit drill. Fuckaroonie.
2001
Taking photos of my junk with the camera obscura because my shit be lookin' HAUNTED
Add Fatal Frame to the list of games I was acutely aware of at the time of its release but completely skipped over for reasons unknown. I had a PS2 and a Blockbuster card, I could've picked this up, it's not like it reviewed poorly or anything. Instead, I just kept renting the live action Cromartie High movie over and over again. Well Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore, and I've had the iso for Fatal Frame chilling on this hard drive for the better part of the year, so now seemed as good a time as any to take some gosh damn pictures of ghosts.
For the first three hours of snapping glamor shots of spooky specters, I was having a lot of fun. There's a lot more Resident Evil and Sweet Home here than I was expecting, and much like those games, I was having a blast exploring the Himuro Mansion and solving its many puzzles. Sure, there's a few too many locked doors that require the same solution, and the numerical codes you need to glean from scattered research notes and diary entries are always input in the same tiresome way, but the real meaty puzzles - like collecting and arranging masks or tying topes to Budda status - feel ripped straight from Resident Evil, and I ate that shit up. If I'm reflecting on the order in which I tackled a sequence of obstacles or the path I took to and from key locations and piecing together a more efficient route in my mind, that's a sign that your survival horror game is tickling the right parts of my brain.
Unfortunately, the deeper you progress into the Himuro Mansion, the more Fatal Frame urges you to use the Camera Obscura to take down hostile ghosts, and I think this is the weakest part of the entire experience. It is also Fatal Frame's core gimmick, and that's not great!
On paper, the Camera Obscura is novel. Line up your shot, keep the ghost center frame while building charge, then snap a picture when the reticule turns orange for higher damage. There's a good balance of risk and reward inherent to the way combat operates, and ghosts are capable of warping around and turning invisible which keeps the player on their toes. The penalty for screwing up your shot, however, is anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of your overall health, which is steep when you consider how rare healing items are.
You can upgrade your camera's stats and assign abilities that slow, reveal, or track ghosts (though these are also tied to finite items), but it doesn't really solve some of the issues with Fatal Frame's combat, which become especially problematic around chapter four when the game makes a hard shift towards being more combat oriented. A lot of mandatory battles take place in enclosed spaces which are so tight that ghosts tend to float completely out of bounds, requiring you to stand around and wait for them to come back. It's difficult to outmaneuver ghosts when they're about twice as fast as you and aren't encumbered by clumsy collision detection, and when the Camera Obscura fails to stun theme due to uneven attack priority resulting in half your healthbar getting eaten, it just starts to get frustrating. Doubling down on an unforgiving and clunky combat system during the last two chapters really soured me on Fatal Frame.
At least Fatal Frame's atmosphere is immaculate. The lighting, transparency, and warping effects are all really impressive for the time, and the deliberate use of whites, blacks, and reds give the game a very unique look. I feel like I'm going to fall through the damn stairs or get a hand full of splinters if I touch anything in the Himuro Mansion. Everything is creaking horribly, falling apart, and is covered in blood, mold, and moisture. Even without the ghosts, the estate is delipidated and dangerous in ways that are believable. Not that I've made a habit of it, but I've done a little night urban exploration into condemned properties before, and I feel Fatal Frame does a good job of capturing the anxiety that the floor might cave beneath you at any moment.
It's a bummer that Fatal Frame's combat works against its other qualities. Had a great time with this for the first few hours but it just became inconvenient and annoying towards the later third, and that really gets in the way of me ever wanting to pick it up again. If only I was taking pictures of Mechazawa instead....
Add Fatal Frame to the list of games I was acutely aware of at the time of its release but completely skipped over for reasons unknown. I had a PS2 and a Blockbuster card, I could've picked this up, it's not like it reviewed poorly or anything. Instead, I just kept renting the live action Cromartie High movie over and over again. Well Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore, and I've had the iso for Fatal Frame chilling on this hard drive for the better part of the year, so now seemed as good a time as any to take some gosh damn pictures of ghosts.
For the first three hours of snapping glamor shots of spooky specters, I was having a lot of fun. There's a lot more Resident Evil and Sweet Home here than I was expecting, and much like those games, I was having a blast exploring the Himuro Mansion and solving its many puzzles. Sure, there's a few too many locked doors that require the same solution, and the numerical codes you need to glean from scattered research notes and diary entries are always input in the same tiresome way, but the real meaty puzzles - like collecting and arranging masks or tying topes to Budda status - feel ripped straight from Resident Evil, and I ate that shit up. If I'm reflecting on the order in which I tackled a sequence of obstacles or the path I took to and from key locations and piecing together a more efficient route in my mind, that's a sign that your survival horror game is tickling the right parts of my brain.
Unfortunately, the deeper you progress into the Himuro Mansion, the more Fatal Frame urges you to use the Camera Obscura to take down hostile ghosts, and I think this is the weakest part of the entire experience. It is also Fatal Frame's core gimmick, and that's not great!
On paper, the Camera Obscura is novel. Line up your shot, keep the ghost center frame while building charge, then snap a picture when the reticule turns orange for higher damage. There's a good balance of risk and reward inherent to the way combat operates, and ghosts are capable of warping around and turning invisible which keeps the player on their toes. The penalty for screwing up your shot, however, is anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of your overall health, which is steep when you consider how rare healing items are.
You can upgrade your camera's stats and assign abilities that slow, reveal, or track ghosts (though these are also tied to finite items), but it doesn't really solve some of the issues with Fatal Frame's combat, which become especially problematic around chapter four when the game makes a hard shift towards being more combat oriented. A lot of mandatory battles take place in enclosed spaces which are so tight that ghosts tend to float completely out of bounds, requiring you to stand around and wait for them to come back. It's difficult to outmaneuver ghosts when they're about twice as fast as you and aren't encumbered by clumsy collision detection, and when the Camera Obscura fails to stun theme due to uneven attack priority resulting in half your healthbar getting eaten, it just starts to get frustrating. Doubling down on an unforgiving and clunky combat system during the last two chapters really soured me on Fatal Frame.
At least Fatal Frame's atmosphere is immaculate. The lighting, transparency, and warping effects are all really impressive for the time, and the deliberate use of whites, blacks, and reds give the game a very unique look. I feel like I'm going to fall through the damn stairs or get a hand full of splinters if I touch anything in the Himuro Mansion. Everything is creaking horribly, falling apart, and is covered in blood, mold, and moisture. Even without the ghosts, the estate is delipidated and dangerous in ways that are believable. Not that I've made a habit of it, but I've done a little night urban exploration into condemned properties before, and I feel Fatal Frame does a good job of capturing the anxiety that the floor might cave beneath you at any moment.
It's a bummer that Fatal Frame's combat works against its other qualities. Had a great time with this for the first few hours but it just became inconvenient and annoying towards the later third, and that really gets in the way of me ever wanting to pick it up again. If only I was taking pictures of Mechazawa instead....
1989
If you ever wanted to play a version of Ghouls 'n Ghosts that feels like a bootleg, then good news, it's on the Sega Genesis.
A lot of my hangups here are with the controls, which feel like total junk. This isn't a knock against Arthur's stiffness clashing with the unforgiving nature of the game's platforming or anything, in fact I really like Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and I'd say a lot of aspects of that game's design are present here, even if it lacks Super's satisfying double jump. No, it's that Ghouls 'n Ghosts consistently fails to recognize inputs, so most of the time it just feels like Arthur isn't doing what I tell him to.
The majority of my deaths were the result of inputs being eaten, which happened with such frequency that I thought something might be up with my Genesis controller. I traded out one OEM for another and was still having issues, then switched to a Retro-Bit pad (I have a lot of backup controllers, I know) and it still felt like a total crapshoot getting Arthur to behave in a predictable manner.
At that point I assumed something was up with the cart I bought and decided to try Ghouls 'n Ghosts in emulation, but no, it still plays pretty bad. It is moderately better with a firmer D-pad, so I think that's my preferred way to play the game and it's how I finished up the first run, but I have absolutely zero patience for a second, so I decided to put this down.
I've bought a lot of legit and repro carts for the Genesis and I think this is the first time I've genuinely felt swindled. The only thing stopping me from selling it is the hassle and the only thing preventing me from chucking it is that I'm a pack rat. Ghouls 'n Ghosts controls with such grace it made me think multiple Genesis controllers were broken, and beating it only provided a sense of accomplishment in spite of the game. At least Yuji Naka went on to do better things, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Balan Wonderworld.
A lot of my hangups here are with the controls, which feel like total junk. This isn't a knock against Arthur's stiffness clashing with the unforgiving nature of the game's platforming or anything, in fact I really like Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts and I'd say a lot of aspects of that game's design are present here, even if it lacks Super's satisfying double jump. No, it's that Ghouls 'n Ghosts consistently fails to recognize inputs, so most of the time it just feels like Arthur isn't doing what I tell him to.
The majority of my deaths were the result of inputs being eaten, which happened with such frequency that I thought something might be up with my Genesis controller. I traded out one OEM for another and was still having issues, then switched to a Retro-Bit pad (I have a lot of backup controllers, I know) and it still felt like a total crapshoot getting Arthur to behave in a predictable manner.
At that point I assumed something was up with the cart I bought and decided to try Ghouls 'n Ghosts in emulation, but no, it still plays pretty bad. It is moderately better with a firmer D-pad, so I think that's my preferred way to play the game and it's how I finished up the first run, but I have absolutely zero patience for a second, so I decided to put this down.
I've bought a lot of legit and repro carts for the Genesis and I think this is the first time I've genuinely felt swindled. The only thing stopping me from selling it is the hassle and the only thing preventing me from chucking it is that I'm a pack rat. Ghouls 'n Ghosts controls with such grace it made me think multiple Genesis controllers were broken, and beating it only provided a sense of accomplishment in spite of the game. At least Yuji Naka went on to do better things, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Balan Wonderworld.
Oh, right, I guess I wasn't done with the Game Gear games. Sometimes I forget Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine had a handheld version, as I suspect most people do. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would play this version of the game today unless they really want to wring all $40 of value out of their copy of Sonic Origins, or if they've made the commitment to play every Sonic game they possibly can, like a certain bean-loving fool.....
Anyway, I think it's fucked up I can beat this on normal difficulty, whereas anything higher than easy on the Genesis version kicks my ass. I wasn't even paying that much attention when I beat Dr. Robotnik, I accidentally got a 5-chain combo and he sorta just died.
That's one of the key differences between the Game Gear's Mean Bean Machine and its Genesis counterpart. The CPU is much more prone to making mistakes and it's pretty easy to bury them under a pile of junk pieces early, though abrupt changes to the drop speed ofpuyos beans late in the game and the poor responsiveness of the controls can make this more challenging as your well starts to fill up with fumbled beans. The CPU is far less inclined to cheat, but everything else is considerably more unwieldy.
I prefer the Genesis version for its higher fidelity and smoother controls, but I wouldn't say Mean Bean Machine on the Game Gear is bad. It's just that you have better options, and this should be pretty far from your first choice if you're in the mood for a little Puyo Pop.
Why'd you spill your beans, Robotnik.... Why'd you spill your beans...?
Anyway, I think it's fucked up I can beat this on normal difficulty, whereas anything higher than easy on the Genesis version kicks my ass. I wasn't even paying that much attention when I beat Dr. Robotnik, I accidentally got a 5-chain combo and he sorta just died.
That's one of the key differences between the Game Gear's Mean Bean Machine and its Genesis counterpart. The CPU is much more prone to making mistakes and it's pretty easy to bury them under a pile of junk pieces early, though abrupt changes to the drop speed of
I prefer the Genesis version for its higher fidelity and smoother controls, but I wouldn't say Mean Bean Machine on the Game Gear is bad. It's just that you have better options, and this should be pretty far from your first choice if you're in the mood for a little Puyo Pop.
Why'd you spill your beans, Robotnik.... Why'd you spill your beans...?
2019
Those demonic bastards are gonna pay for turning my girl into a texture.
I haven't been having a good October. My tulpa has been out there opening new lines of credit in my name, and the spooky games I picked out have all ranged from middling to bad. I swear the plan wasn't to theme the whole month around mediocre horror. I actually thought I'd like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and I didn't expect to fall off so hard with Fatal Frame's combat. At least I'm finishing the season strong with Blood, which was recommended to me several months ago, around when I was starting to post reviews for the classic Doom games.
I can definitely see why Blood was suggested to me, as it sticks pretty close to the boomer shooter script as laid out by Doom. You have a shotgun that acts as the centerpiece of your arsenal, levels are often maze-like and require the collection of keys to progress in, and you'll need to claw your way through hordes of demons in one perfect run to the exit button - unless you're a save scummer, like me. Some of the weapons aren't quite as good as what you'd find in Doom, but for my money, Blood has the best dynamite in any first person shooter I've played, and the inclusion of alt-fires for almost every weapon adds a lot of versatility. Your normal shotgun can fire off single bursts or you can empty both barrels at once, for example, and I'm not sure any other shooter at the time was playing around with ideas like this.
There's also a lot of Duke Nukem 3D in here, specifically with Blood's protagonist Caleb, who loves to mouth off and amuse himself with corny little one-liners. Caleb is great. He's such a weird little freak. Stephan Weyte's performance is on the same level for me as Jon St. John, and I love the way he holds on certain syllables when growling out his lines. The way he says "Llllocked!" or "I need a keyyy" is tattooed on my brain, and Caleb's "Ohhh myyy, what a WONderful smell I've discovered~" when entering an outhouse (and just before diving into the toilet) is going to stick with me. Caleb may be very Duke-like with his shamelessly sourced movie quotes ("DON'T play it again, Sam..."), but his sense of humor is more off-kilter and suited to his role as an amoral former cult member.
Holding Blood back from being as great as Doom, however, is the whole of Episode 3, "A Farewell to Arms," which drills into Sandy Petersen territory with how labyrinthine and confounding many of its levels are. I got stuck for an unreasonable amount of time in the level "Spare Parts" because a grey elevator door blended in with the rest of the scenery, looking indistinguishable from a non-interactive wall. "Raw Sewage" and "Monster Bait" are dull levels that overstay their welcome and contribute their fair share to Episode 3 being a drag, with the highest point probably being "The Sick Ward" which is mostly just fine.
Episode 4 brings things back around with shorter, more focused levels, and though the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage expansions included in Fresh Supply do have some levels that are a bit too meandering, they are mostly solid, so Fresh Supply does recover from that mid-game slump. It is a shame that the expansions lack the same janky CG 3D cutscenes as the core game, though. There were better looking real-time graphics in 1997, I love it and can't imagine Blood any other way. The real-time shadows and lighting in the game itself do look great, though, so at least Blood looks good where it counts.
I have no idea how to tie all these thoughts together and wrap up this review, so I'm gonna hit this exit switch, listen to a bunch of dudes go "ohhhh owwwww!" and just reflect on how Blood saved my October.
I haven't been having a good October. My tulpa has been out there opening new lines of credit in my name, and the spooky games I picked out have all ranged from middling to bad. I swear the plan wasn't to theme the whole month around mediocre horror. I actually thought I'd like Ghouls 'n Ghosts, and I didn't expect to fall off so hard with Fatal Frame's combat. At least I'm finishing the season strong with Blood, which was recommended to me several months ago, around when I was starting to post reviews for the classic Doom games.
I can definitely see why Blood was suggested to me, as it sticks pretty close to the boomer shooter script as laid out by Doom. You have a shotgun that acts as the centerpiece of your arsenal, levels are often maze-like and require the collection of keys to progress in, and you'll need to claw your way through hordes of demons in one perfect run to the exit button - unless you're a save scummer, like me. Some of the weapons aren't quite as good as what you'd find in Doom, but for my money, Blood has the best dynamite in any first person shooter I've played, and the inclusion of alt-fires for almost every weapon adds a lot of versatility. Your normal shotgun can fire off single bursts or you can empty both barrels at once, for example, and I'm not sure any other shooter at the time was playing around with ideas like this.
There's also a lot of Duke Nukem 3D in here, specifically with Blood's protagonist Caleb, who loves to mouth off and amuse himself with corny little one-liners. Caleb is great. He's such a weird little freak. Stephan Weyte's performance is on the same level for me as Jon St. John, and I love the way he holds on certain syllables when growling out his lines. The way he says "Llllocked!" or "I need a keyyy" is tattooed on my brain, and Caleb's "Ohhh myyy, what a WONderful smell I've discovered~" when entering an outhouse (and just before diving into the toilet) is going to stick with me. Caleb may be very Duke-like with his shamelessly sourced movie quotes ("DON'T play it again, Sam..."), but his sense of humor is more off-kilter and suited to his role as an amoral former cult member.
Holding Blood back from being as great as Doom, however, is the whole of Episode 3, "A Farewell to Arms," which drills into Sandy Petersen territory with how labyrinthine and confounding many of its levels are. I got stuck for an unreasonable amount of time in the level "Spare Parts" because a grey elevator door blended in with the rest of the scenery, looking indistinguishable from a non-interactive wall. "Raw Sewage" and "Monster Bait" are dull levels that overstay their welcome and contribute their fair share to Episode 3 being a drag, with the highest point probably being "The Sick Ward" which is mostly just fine.
Episode 4 brings things back around with shorter, more focused levels, and though the Plasma Pak and Cryptic Passage expansions included in Fresh Supply do have some levels that are a bit too meandering, they are mostly solid, so Fresh Supply does recover from that mid-game slump. It is a shame that the expansions lack the same janky CG 3D cutscenes as the core game, though. There were better looking real-time graphics in 1997, I love it and can't imagine Blood any other way. The real-time shadows and lighting in the game itself do look great, though, so at least Blood looks good where it counts.
I have no idea how to tie all these thoughts together and wrap up this review, so I'm gonna hit this exit switch, listen to a bunch of dudes go "ohhhh owwwww!" and just reflect on how Blood saved my October.
2019
Nope. I barely had enough patience for Shenmue and Shenmue II's meandering bullshit, I am tapping out here.
I played about three or four hours of this, maybe less. Might've just felt like I put that amount of time in, it's hard to tell when you're stuck in the Shenmue time-dilation chamber. Not that you need to play much to get a sense of what this game is going for. Shenmue III is incredibly faithful to the previous two entries, and so authentically captures the feeling of those games that you could tell me it's a cleaned-up build of an unreleased 2003 game and I might just buy it. Ryo still controls like a car, you still spend an inordinate amount of time running around asking people for information, and characters still talk in a way that feels like they're engaging in two disparate conversations at once.
"Hi there. Do you know where Shenhua is?"
"Ah, don't tell me that!"
"I am looking for Shenhua, have you seen her lately?"
"I go to bed at 7pm."
"Ok. Thank you."
That may not be line-for-line, but it should give you an idea of what I mean. Yu Suzuki's writing hasn't aged a day, and whoever the voice director is clearly still has The Touch, too. None of the actors sound like they were ever in the same room as one another, even Johnny Young Bosch is giving a performance that feels plucked from the original game. Toe to tip, this is a Shenmue!
That's not to say there haven't been any changes to the formula, however. The Virtua Fighter-style combat is much stiffer this time around, and there exists a sort of disassociation between input and action that really makes it feel crummy. Juggling a ton of enemies at once with Shenmue's lousy camera was never fun, and actually lining yourself up with a target was clumsy, but I actually felt like I embodied Ryo more than I do here.
Ryo also suffers from stamina drain now, and if he doesn't eat eight god damn pears every five minutes he'll whittle away to bone. This is the mechanic that threw me off Shenmue III, and I can't imagine anyone actually likes it. I haven't run across anyone posting apologia for it in the wild, and I'm not going to seek out stamina defenders if they even exist at all. Running around, fighting, and breathing chews away at Ryo's health at a pace I've never encountered in a video game before, the man is straight up hemorrhaging energy. I get it, Shenmue is a series that seeks to emulate the mundanity of life, so naturally Ryo needs to have himself a little snack every now and then, but if someone out there is pulling whole cloves of garlic from their pocket and eating them with half the same voracity as Ryo, I'm gonna assume they have a medical condition.
Early in the game, you have to beat up a carny to get intel, but the dude can chip off nearly a quarter of your health with every blow. Ryo practically destroyed the Kowloon Walled City with his bare hands in the last game, so this dude is just jacked, he's a genetic freak and he's not normal. Every time I lost to him, I had to restore my health before trying again, which meant going back to the store to buy more food that barely heals a pip of energy. Only now Ryo is so low on health I can't run, so I get to take an excruciating stroll up the hill, back and forth, hoping to God I don't run out of money and get forced into a shitty wood chopping minigame so I can earn a few bucks. I'm not Goku, I shouldn't be undergoing intense physical and spiritual training disguised as errands so I can defeat Shenmue's version of Cell, who is some fuckass running an illegal Lucky Hit booth.
A few hours of this and I realized I had to make a choice. I could stick with Shenmue III for another 20 hours or whatever, or accept that the likelihood of the game improving mechanically or actually going anywhere meaningful narratively is slim and that I could spend that time doing something else. Like playing Final Fantasy II. I've slogged my way through two Shenmue games, what do I have to prove at this point? I spent three dollars on this, the price of a delicious hot dog from Tom's, is it really so bad to be out that much money?
I can't imagine Yu Suzuki is ever going to make another one of these, I don't see there being a resolution to Shenmue in my lifetime, and while I do appreciate that he was so uncompromising on his vision that he didn't truncate the story, the fact that all roads out of Bailu Village lead to a dead end is a compelling reason to drop Shenmue III. Helps too that it's just a bad game.
I played about three or four hours of this, maybe less. Might've just felt like I put that amount of time in, it's hard to tell when you're stuck in the Shenmue time-dilation chamber. Not that you need to play much to get a sense of what this game is going for. Shenmue III is incredibly faithful to the previous two entries, and so authentically captures the feeling of those games that you could tell me it's a cleaned-up build of an unreleased 2003 game and I might just buy it. Ryo still controls like a car, you still spend an inordinate amount of time running around asking people for information, and characters still talk in a way that feels like they're engaging in two disparate conversations at once.
"Hi there. Do you know where Shenhua is?"
"Ah, don't tell me that!"
"I am looking for Shenhua, have you seen her lately?"
"I go to bed at 7pm."
"Ok. Thank you."
That may not be line-for-line, but it should give you an idea of what I mean. Yu Suzuki's writing hasn't aged a day, and whoever the voice director is clearly still has The Touch, too. None of the actors sound like they were ever in the same room as one another, even Johnny Young Bosch is giving a performance that feels plucked from the original game. Toe to tip, this is a Shenmue!
That's not to say there haven't been any changes to the formula, however. The Virtua Fighter-style combat is much stiffer this time around, and there exists a sort of disassociation between input and action that really makes it feel crummy. Juggling a ton of enemies at once with Shenmue's lousy camera was never fun, and actually lining yourself up with a target was clumsy, but I actually felt like I embodied Ryo more than I do here.
Ryo also suffers from stamina drain now, and if he doesn't eat eight god damn pears every five minutes he'll whittle away to bone. This is the mechanic that threw me off Shenmue III, and I can't imagine anyone actually likes it. I haven't run across anyone posting apologia for it in the wild, and I'm not going to seek out stamina defenders if they even exist at all. Running around, fighting, and breathing chews away at Ryo's health at a pace I've never encountered in a video game before, the man is straight up hemorrhaging energy. I get it, Shenmue is a series that seeks to emulate the mundanity of life, so naturally Ryo needs to have himself a little snack every now and then, but if someone out there is pulling whole cloves of garlic from their pocket and eating them with half the same voracity as Ryo, I'm gonna assume they have a medical condition.
Early in the game, you have to beat up a carny to get intel, but the dude can chip off nearly a quarter of your health with every blow. Ryo practically destroyed the Kowloon Walled City with his bare hands in the last game, so this dude is just jacked, he's a genetic freak and he's not normal. Every time I lost to him, I had to restore my health before trying again, which meant going back to the store to buy more food that barely heals a pip of energy. Only now Ryo is so low on health I can't run, so I get to take an excruciating stroll up the hill, back and forth, hoping to God I don't run out of money and get forced into a shitty wood chopping minigame so I can earn a few bucks. I'm not Goku, I shouldn't be undergoing intense physical and spiritual training disguised as errands so I can defeat Shenmue's version of Cell, who is some fuckass running an illegal Lucky Hit booth.
A few hours of this and I realized I had to make a choice. I could stick with Shenmue III for another 20 hours or whatever, or accept that the likelihood of the game improving mechanically or actually going anywhere meaningful narratively is slim and that I could spend that time doing something else. Like playing Final Fantasy II. I've slogged my way through two Shenmue games, what do I have to prove at this point? I spent three dollars on this, the price of a delicious hot dog from Tom's, is it really so bad to be out that much money?
I can't imagine Yu Suzuki is ever going to make another one of these, I don't see there being a resolution to Shenmue in my lifetime, and while I do appreciate that he was so uncompromising on his vision that he didn't truncate the story, the fact that all roads out of Bailu Village lead to a dead end is a compelling reason to drop Shenmue III. Helps too that it's just a bad game.
Although it's by no means a requirement for my big playthrough of the Sonic series, I've been sprinkling in fan games here and there that I've been wanting to check out for a while, like Sonic and the Fallen Star. I generally find what fans are doing with Sonic to be more interesting than anything Sega is cooking up these days, and some fan games are of such high quality that they can exist comfortably next to official releases. Well, now I'm doing straight up ROM hacks, so perhaps there's something else motivating me to take these little detours, like wanting to play around in the "classic era" a little longer and put off getting to crap like Sonic Heroes.
Oh no! Someone got Sonic Heroes in my classic Sonic! AhhhhSHIT, it's all over the place... God damnit. Vector the Crocodile is in Aquatic Ruin now, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Sonic Classic Heroes is exactly what it says on the cart. One of the most straight-forward ROM hacks I've ever sat down with, and hardly any more transformative than sticking Shadow the Hedgehog or Princess Sally in Sonic the Hedgehog, something that has been done to death. But sometimes all you need to justify playing a game you've already experienced nearly a hundred thousand times is being able to run up the walls in Marble Zone as Espio and skip the whole damn stage.
That level of focus really is to Classic Heroes' benefit. A lot of the fun comes from having these expanded options for traversal that you can freely swap between, allowing you to break open familiar levels in new ways. There are a sparse number of new alternate routes and an added Sonic 1 style special stage that's a total bastard to clear, but otherwise, it's Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 stitched together with some new characters and Heroes-esque hot-swapping. You could argue that these levels should be more substantially altered to suit a speed/power/flight dynamic like in Sonic Heroes, sure, but I'd argue that this hack is everything it needs to be.
Now, I could have just grabbed the ROM for this and thrown it on my Raspberry Pi (in fact, I might've already done that), but you know me, I'm a strange little Genesis game collecting imp, so I had my guy send me a reproduction copy on cart. The first thing I noticed was how substantial the cartridge feels. It's got heft to it, so much in fact that I had to open that sucker up and see what was going on with the board. These chips really make use of all the real estate available to them. I guess that's necessary when you're essentially smashing two full Genesis games together and adding four new characters, shields, and an extra special stage, but when I look at it bare like this, it doesn't even register to me as a game so much as a device. If any technically-minded reader can identify what the UV-strip looking cells in the center of the lower chip are for, I'd love to know.
Do NOT lie to me about it. I have watched every episode of Lie to Me, I am an expert in body language. I will detect your falsehoods and I will destroy you.
I bring this up because I feel it's important to point out that I played Classic Heroes on real Sega hardware, so these comments about performance and behavior might not be consistent with your experience assuming you played via emulation or even with a different version number. Overall, I found Classic Heroes played surprisingly well, though particularly busy screens did introduce slowdown not present in either of the original games, especially when going super. Both of the water levels - Labyrinth (incredible) and Aquatic Ruin (vomiting) - struggle the most and feature really wonky collision detection on corners and switches, which resulted in me drowning several times as my characters got stuck.
Team Chaotix also introduces a number of pallet issues, often darkening and color-swapping badniks and other elements, but that's pretty minor and will only bother you if you have bugs in your brain like I do. I also noticed a lot of stray flickering pixels, which hasn't helped my growing anxiety about failing capacitors, but which I am pretty sure is just the result of a ROM hack with an excessive amount of characters crammed into games never intended to contain them running off a board that has like, ten pounds of computer chips welded on. I'm over here with a bunch of after-market AC adapters juggling foreign voltages in a single power strip, it's a god damn miracle I haven't burned my entire house down as a consequence of my horrendously jerry-rigged system and library of straight up bootlegs.
"If you paid for this game, you have been SCAMMED!"
Buddy, trust me, Idon't know what I'm doing.
Oh no! Someone got Sonic Heroes in my classic Sonic! AhhhhSHIT, it's all over the place... God damnit. Vector the Crocodile is in Aquatic Ruin now, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Sonic Classic Heroes is exactly what it says on the cart. One of the most straight-forward ROM hacks I've ever sat down with, and hardly any more transformative than sticking Shadow the Hedgehog or Princess Sally in Sonic the Hedgehog, something that has been done to death. But sometimes all you need to justify playing a game you've already experienced nearly a hundred thousand times is being able to run up the walls in Marble Zone as Espio and skip the whole damn stage.
That level of focus really is to Classic Heroes' benefit. A lot of the fun comes from having these expanded options for traversal that you can freely swap between, allowing you to break open familiar levels in new ways. There are a sparse number of new alternate routes and an added Sonic 1 style special stage that's a total bastard to clear, but otherwise, it's Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 stitched together with some new characters and Heroes-esque hot-swapping. You could argue that these levels should be more substantially altered to suit a speed/power/flight dynamic like in Sonic Heroes, sure, but I'd argue that this hack is everything it needs to be.
Now, I could have just grabbed the ROM for this and thrown it on my Raspberry Pi (in fact, I might've already done that), but you know me, I'm a strange little Genesis game collecting imp, so I had my guy send me a reproduction copy on cart. The first thing I noticed was how substantial the cartridge feels. It's got heft to it, so much in fact that I had to open that sucker up and see what was going on with the board. These chips really make use of all the real estate available to them. I guess that's necessary when you're essentially smashing two full Genesis games together and adding four new characters, shields, and an extra special stage, but when I look at it bare like this, it doesn't even register to me as a game so much as a device. If any technically-minded reader can identify what the UV-strip looking cells in the center of the lower chip are for, I'd love to know.
Do NOT lie to me about it. I have watched every episode of Lie to Me, I am an expert in body language. I will detect your falsehoods and I will destroy you.
I bring this up because I feel it's important to point out that I played Classic Heroes on real Sega hardware, so these comments about performance and behavior might not be consistent with your experience assuming you played via emulation or even with a different version number. Overall, I found Classic Heroes played surprisingly well, though particularly busy screens did introduce slowdown not present in either of the original games, especially when going super. Both of the water levels - Labyrinth (incredible) and Aquatic Ruin (vomiting) - struggle the most and feature really wonky collision detection on corners and switches, which resulted in me drowning several times as my characters got stuck.
Team Chaotix also introduces a number of pallet issues, often darkening and color-swapping badniks and other elements, but that's pretty minor and will only bother you if you have bugs in your brain like I do. I also noticed a lot of stray flickering pixels, which hasn't helped my growing anxiety about failing capacitors, but which I am pretty sure is just the result of a ROM hack with an excessive amount of characters crammed into games never intended to contain them running off a board that has like, ten pounds of computer chips welded on. I'm over here with a bunch of after-market AC adapters juggling foreign voltages in a single power strip, it's a god damn miracle I haven't burned my entire house down as a consequence of my horrendously jerry-rigged system and library of straight up bootlegs.
"If you paid for this game, you have been SCAMMED!"
Buddy, trust me, I
Batman has always been my superhero of choice. I'm pretty sure my mom still has pictures of me absorbing the 1960's show six inches from the damn screen, my eyes like thin sheets separating the Batusi from my brain. This hyper-fixation on Adam West's rippling physique resulted in me developing a very narrow taste in superheroes. Burt Ward's dog food is the only brand I'll feed my pup, that show still has me all fucked up!
One of the few Marvel heroes to break through and leave some sort of impression on me is Spider-Man, which is great because nobody seems interested in making good Batman games anymore. Rocksteady has been engaging in self-sabotage for almost a decade, but at least I can count on Insomniac to put out a good game, even if it maybe trends a bit too close to the previous Spider-Man and it's (better) expansion, Miles Morales. I wasn't on Backloggd dot com when I played them, so I never had a chance to share my thoughts. In short: they're both very good, quite possibly the best Spider-Man games to have been released up to that point.
The first 60% of Spider-Man 2 plays it incredibly safe. It's more of the same, albeit with fewer gadgets and less superfluous challenges scattered throughout New York. Although you now have two Spider-Men you can freely swap between - assuming this doesn't crash the game, which happened to me frequently - Spider-Man 2 feels much more focused than the previous entry. I think Insomniac learned a lot of good lessons from Miles Morales, which similarly trimmed a lot of fat and was far better paced and more manageable for it. There's also a whole lot less time spent paling around with the cops. In fact, they're practically non-existent now, unless you count the ghost of Jefferson Davis haunting the halls of his son's mind.
Things really pick up in the later half, however. The Symbiote suit comes with several new powers for Peter which helps refresh his gameplay, and the story picks up and veers into some very goofy territory that results in some really fun set pieces and battles. My only complaint here is that Venom spends a little too much time as a slobbering rage monster and that Tony Todd is severely under-utilized. Also, you know, heavily basing everything off existing stories and then not crediting those authors is kind of a dirty move. Sorry Donny Cates, all your ideas have been syphoned out of your head and are no longer yours... Just like Riddler's Box from the hit movie Batman Forever! Ohh... Batman...
Traversal is also as good as it's ever been, and I think this was already a strong point of the first game. The inclusion of a wingsuit initially feels as though it might trivialize navigation, but once you understand how it can be used to build or maintain momentum, you can chain it into swings and start doing some really crazy acrobatics. It's also useful for bridging the river that separates the two islands or maneuvering over open spaces like the park and suburbs of Queens, which means no more awkwardly swinging through trees. Everything just feels a lot more fluid.
Side content is more of a mixed bag for me. The Emily-May Foundation quest is dull and is mostly used to support a core plot thread about Peter and Harry's startup. It's a little more believable when Peter is actually helping with the Foundation than simply paying lip to it, but tepid shooting sequences and clunky gene splicing minigames aren't my idea of fun. I am also generally not a fan of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man missions, most of which I found to be trite in their efforts to tug on your heart strings. The Internet absolutely lost it over Finding Grandpa, but I could not get past Gramps' put-on frail old man voice which sounded about as good as something I'd do as a joke. Perhaps I'm a heartless monster for not getting misty-eyed about it, I ate some of the Burt Ward dog food and it might've done something chemically to my brain.
That said, the mission with Howard's pigeons is a highlight and was actually emotionally moving, and none of the side quests are so abundant or tedious as to be annoying. I was able to platinum this game without it ever feeling inconvenient to do so which is a marked improvement over the first Spider-Man.
Much like the gameplay, the overarching plot of Spider-Man 2 struggles to get going and only really picks up in the second half of the game. Maybe it's because I don't recognize any of these people anymore, but I had a really hard time getting invested in the interpersonal drama of Peter, Harry, and Mary Jane, which the game sinks a considerable amount of time into slowly developing. Some of that is to do with Scott Porter's performance as Harry, which makes the character sound a bit too phoney. He's very chipper, really leans into this "yeah, we're going to save the world! Let's go, team!" attitude that doesn't feel genuine. My friend Larry Davis also pointed out that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson from Nirvana the Band the Show and I can't purge this from my mind, so I need to pass the curse onto all of you. A lot of what Harry's arc is building up to does pay off in the end, but it's hard to unpack all of that without getting into spoilers. Spoiler is a character from Batman, she later becomes Robin and then a corpse.
Mary Jane is at least given more to do, although her atrocious stealth sequences are back, and I don't know who the hell asked for more of them. She's got a stun gun now, but these missions are still so tedious. Just the shallowest take on stealth you could possibly imagine, but even sneaking around as the Spider-Men feels like it has regressed and is nowhere near as enjoyable as it was in the last two games. At least Miles can turn invisible, which speeds things up, and I don't think any of these sections have automatic fail states if you're caught, so nothing's stopping you from getting into a brawl.
Speaking of Miles, I think I prefer his side of the story and find him a far more interesting character than Peter. This has been the case for me since Miles Morales, and I really liked seeing how his character, relationships, and powers evolved in this game. His struggle for revenge against Martin Li threatens to pull him into places just as dark as where Peter goes when dressed in the Symbiote, and this pent-up aggression is explored in more compelling ways. I also think Insomniac has done a better job of embodying what it means to be a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in MIles, whereas Peter is a bit more absorbed in his own world. The story does play with the idea of Peter possibly passing the torch onto Miles, and if the third game embraces that more fully by making him the lead, that'd be alright by me.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 might be the best in the series, if only marginally so, but it has left me excited to see where Insomniac goes with the third and presumably final entry. Even if it ends up just being more of the same, that still means we'd be getting a great game. Or they could fuck it all up, give Spider-Man the Spider-Mobile and force you into a ton of shitty tank battles with it under Green Goblin's city-wide fart cloud.
One of the few Marvel heroes to break through and leave some sort of impression on me is Spider-Man, which is great because nobody seems interested in making good Batman games anymore. Rocksteady has been engaging in self-sabotage for almost a decade, but at least I can count on Insomniac to put out a good game, even if it maybe trends a bit too close to the previous Spider-Man and it's (better) expansion, Miles Morales. I wasn't on Backloggd dot com when I played them, so I never had a chance to share my thoughts. In short: they're both very good, quite possibly the best Spider-Man games to have been released up to that point.
The first 60% of Spider-Man 2 plays it incredibly safe. It's more of the same, albeit with fewer gadgets and less superfluous challenges scattered throughout New York. Although you now have two Spider-Men you can freely swap between - assuming this doesn't crash the game, which happened to me frequently - Spider-Man 2 feels much more focused than the previous entry. I think Insomniac learned a lot of good lessons from Miles Morales, which similarly trimmed a lot of fat and was far better paced and more manageable for it. There's also a whole lot less time spent paling around with the cops. In fact, they're practically non-existent now, unless you count the ghost of Jefferson Davis haunting the halls of his son's mind.
Things really pick up in the later half, however. The Symbiote suit comes with several new powers for Peter which helps refresh his gameplay, and the story picks up and veers into some very goofy territory that results in some really fun set pieces and battles. My only complaint here is that Venom spends a little too much time as a slobbering rage monster and that Tony Todd is severely under-utilized. Also, you know, heavily basing everything off existing stories and then not crediting those authors is kind of a dirty move. Sorry Donny Cates, all your ideas have been syphoned out of your head and are no longer yours... Just like Riddler's Box from the hit movie Batman Forever! Ohh... Batman...
Traversal is also as good as it's ever been, and I think this was already a strong point of the first game. The inclusion of a wingsuit initially feels as though it might trivialize navigation, but once you understand how it can be used to build or maintain momentum, you can chain it into swings and start doing some really crazy acrobatics. It's also useful for bridging the river that separates the two islands or maneuvering over open spaces like the park and suburbs of Queens, which means no more awkwardly swinging through trees. Everything just feels a lot more fluid.
Side content is more of a mixed bag for me. The Emily-May Foundation quest is dull and is mostly used to support a core plot thread about Peter and Harry's startup. It's a little more believable when Peter is actually helping with the Foundation than simply paying lip to it, but tepid shooting sequences and clunky gene splicing minigames aren't my idea of fun. I am also generally not a fan of the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man missions, most of which I found to be trite in their efforts to tug on your heart strings. The Internet absolutely lost it over Finding Grandpa, but I could not get past Gramps' put-on frail old man voice which sounded about as good as something I'd do as a joke. Perhaps I'm a heartless monster for not getting misty-eyed about it, I ate some of the Burt Ward dog food and it might've done something chemically to my brain.
That said, the mission with Howard's pigeons is a highlight and was actually emotionally moving, and none of the side quests are so abundant or tedious as to be annoying. I was able to platinum this game without it ever feeling inconvenient to do so which is a marked improvement over the first Spider-Man.
Much like the gameplay, the overarching plot of Spider-Man 2 struggles to get going and only really picks up in the second half of the game. Maybe it's because I don't recognize any of these people anymore, but I had a really hard time getting invested in the interpersonal drama of Peter, Harry, and Mary Jane, which the game sinks a considerable amount of time into slowly developing. Some of that is to do with Scott Porter's performance as Harry, which makes the character sound a bit too phoney. He's very chipper, really leans into this "yeah, we're going to save the world! Let's go, team!" attitude that doesn't feel genuine. My friend Larry Davis also pointed out that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson from Nirvana the Band the Show and I can't purge this from my mind, so I need to pass the curse onto all of you. A lot of what Harry's arc is building up to does pay off in the end, but it's hard to unpack all of that without getting into spoilers. Spoiler is a character from Batman, she later becomes Robin and then a corpse.
Mary Jane is at least given more to do, although her atrocious stealth sequences are back, and I don't know who the hell asked for more of them. She's got a stun gun now, but these missions are still so tedious. Just the shallowest take on stealth you could possibly imagine, but even sneaking around as the Spider-Men feels like it has regressed and is nowhere near as enjoyable as it was in the last two games. At least Miles can turn invisible, which speeds things up, and I don't think any of these sections have automatic fail states if you're caught, so nothing's stopping you from getting into a brawl.
Speaking of Miles, I think I prefer his side of the story and find him a far more interesting character than Peter. This has been the case for me since Miles Morales, and I really liked seeing how his character, relationships, and powers evolved in this game. His struggle for revenge against Martin Li threatens to pull him into places just as dark as where Peter goes when dressed in the Symbiote, and this pent-up aggression is explored in more compelling ways. I also think Insomniac has done a better job of embodying what it means to be a "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" in MIles, whereas Peter is a bit more absorbed in his own world. The story does play with the idea of Peter possibly passing the torch onto Miles, and if the third game embraces that more fully by making him the lead, that'd be alright by me.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 might be the best in the series, if only marginally so, but it has left me excited to see where Insomniac goes with the third and presumably final entry. Even if it ends up just being more of the same, that still means we'd be getting a great game. Or they could fuck it all up, give Spider-Man the Spider-Mobile and force you into a ton of shitty tank battles with it under Green Goblin's city-wide fart cloud.
Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.
Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.
Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...
1996
For the longest time, I've only been familiar with the Genesis version of Sonic 3D Blast, with the Saturn release being a more unknown factor. Sure, I could've changed this at any point by simply emulating it, but I can count the number of times I've thought "gee, I want to play Sonic 3D Blast" on one hand. An intrusive thought that I'd give about as much weight to as "you should start an electrical fire," it's best to disregard it entirely. Unfortunately, sanity doesn't always prevail and sometimes our hands are guided more by our inner darkness than our conscious mind.
Right out of the gate, the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast features a number of improvements, including a full CG intro cutscene that may not be as technically impressive as the one that opens the Genesis version, but which isn't so garbled that it can't be understood by human eyes. Levels also feature more complex surface textures and expanded color pallets, and I really love all the small background details, like monkeys climbing up trees in Green Grove Zone or tiles wobbling beneath Sonic's feet in Rusty Ruins. These touches add a lot of life and vibrancy, and not to knock the Genesis version for working within its limitations, but I think 3D Blast looks much better on the Saturn as a result.
It debatably sounds better, too. There's no question that Jun Senoue's score is filled to the brim with memorable tracks, but Richard Jacques has his own style and it's a damn good one. I'd actually compare this to Sonic CD in that they're radically different yet equally suited to the game, and I can see myself slipping into similar territory where my preference is constantly vacillating between the two. Rusty Ruins and the special stage themes have been stuck in my head all weekend.
Speaking of the special stages, the Saturn version of 3D Blast ditches the Genesis' piss-easy runways in favor of something more akin to Sonic 2, so if you can't stand dodging bombs and collecting rings along winding halfpipes (it's me, I hate it, I am referring to myself here) then I'm afraid I've got some bad news. Being fully 3D and running on more capable hardware does make these stages more manageable, but there's still plenty of instances where the track is made unreadable thanks to sharp turns and poor camera angles, so you can still expect to get blindsided by bombs pretty frequently. A lot of people seem to love these special stages, but I'm not one of them. I'm a Blue Spheres guy, not a Halfpipe guy.
The rest of the game is, regrettably, Sonic 3D Blast. I got a little more mileage out of the alternate soundtrack and improved graphics, but dealing with Sonic's unwieldy controls and awkward hitboxes makes collecting Flickies a chore no matter which console you play it on.
Right out of the gate, the Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast features a number of improvements, including a full CG intro cutscene that may not be as technically impressive as the one that opens the Genesis version, but which isn't so garbled that it can't be understood by human eyes. Levels also feature more complex surface textures and expanded color pallets, and I really love all the small background details, like monkeys climbing up trees in Green Grove Zone or tiles wobbling beneath Sonic's feet in Rusty Ruins. These touches add a lot of life and vibrancy, and not to knock the Genesis version for working within its limitations, but I think 3D Blast looks much better on the Saturn as a result.
It debatably sounds better, too. There's no question that Jun Senoue's score is filled to the brim with memorable tracks, but Richard Jacques has his own style and it's a damn good one. I'd actually compare this to Sonic CD in that they're radically different yet equally suited to the game, and I can see myself slipping into similar territory where my preference is constantly vacillating between the two. Rusty Ruins and the special stage themes have been stuck in my head all weekend.
Speaking of the special stages, the Saturn version of 3D Blast ditches the Genesis' piss-easy runways in favor of something more akin to Sonic 2, so if you can't stand dodging bombs and collecting rings along winding halfpipes (it's me, I hate it, I am referring to myself here) then I'm afraid I've got some bad news. Being fully 3D and running on more capable hardware does make these stages more manageable, but there's still plenty of instances where the track is made unreadable thanks to sharp turns and poor camera angles, so you can still expect to get blindsided by bombs pretty frequently. A lot of people seem to love these special stages, but I'm not one of them. I'm a Blue Spheres guy, not a Halfpipe guy.
The rest of the game is, regrettably, Sonic 3D Blast. I got a little more mileage out of the alternate soundtrack and improved graphics, but dealing with Sonic's unwieldy controls and awkward hitboxes makes collecting Flickies a chore no matter which console you play it on.
Let's go back to my place, we'll put on some Koji Kondo and drop Wonder Seeds.
I'm not sure which is a greater triumph: the fact that Nintendo put out a good 2D Mario game for the first time since World released in 1990, or that they've finally started to release worthwhile hardware in the Switch's twilight years. Pikmin 4 and Mario Wonder have both swooped in during the 11th hour to justify buying this thing back in 2017. Better late than never, I suppose.
I ran through Mario World not more than a month before picking up Wonder, and while I wouldn't say Wonder topples it as my favorite 2D entry in the series, it does come awfully close. Platforming feels incredibly tight, every character has the right amount of weight and momentum, and levels are thoughtfully designed around unique gimmicks to keep the game feeling fresh every step of the way. I was also not expecting the Wonder Seeds to come with as much variety as they do. Not only do they heavily alter a significant portion of each course, but Wonder is pretty good about making them unique to the courses they appear in, even in the rare instances where certain ideas and mechanics are reused. My personal favorite comes pretty early with the Piranha Plant Parade.
There are a number of smaller courses that lack Wonder sequences, like badge challenges and Wiggler Races, but they never feel lacking for it. I could do without the "search party" levels, though. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to design stages where you have to habitually jump around looking for hidden blocks like you're playing The Lost Levels, but I wound up pulling a guide open for these just to expedite the process. If Nintendo removed these and retooled a couple of the secret world stages (the one where you have to bounce on bubbles to navigate your way over a pit as a Goomba is heinous), then this might be a perfect 5/5 for me.
Wonder almost earns that half star back with its roster of playable characters. Of course, you've got Mario, Luigi, Peach, and (THREE!!) Toad(s), but they finally put Daisy in one of these games and I'm ecstatic about that. She's my favorite Mario character, which I know might be a weird thing to say considering most characters in these games have little personality past saying "wowie zowie" (big Zappa-heads, these guys) and their own name like a Pokemon. I just get this weird energy from Daisy. Peach will spend all afternoon baking you a cake, but Daisy will just drive to Kroger in her Ford Taurus that hasn't had an oil change in six months and buy you a sheet cake, start eating it in the car, then mash the two ends of the cake back together and crudely smooth over the icing to hide what she's done. I "fuck with that," or whatever the hell it is you kids say.
Unfortunately, the Yoshis (and Nabbit) are lackluster as they can't make use of power-ups. In the past, I've lamented the fact that I like Yoshi but he's never the star of good games, so it's disappointing that he and his multi-colored brethren have these arbitrarily imposed gameplay limitations in Wonder. Don't really care about Nabbit, far as I'm concerned there should be a wonder sequence where he's placed in a hydraulic press.
Mario Wonder is pretty much a must-have for the Switch and one of the best games released all year, and I think it's safe to say it breaks into my top five entries in the series. High praise from someone who ordinarily needs very little reason to dunk on Nintendo and drag them through the mud, but even I've got to admit they've put out something wonderful here.
I'm not sure which is a greater triumph: the fact that Nintendo put out a good 2D Mario game for the first time since World released in 1990, or that they've finally started to release worthwhile hardware in the Switch's twilight years. Pikmin 4 and Mario Wonder have both swooped in during the 11th hour to justify buying this thing back in 2017. Better late than never, I suppose.
I ran through Mario World not more than a month before picking up Wonder, and while I wouldn't say Wonder topples it as my favorite 2D entry in the series, it does come awfully close. Platforming feels incredibly tight, every character has the right amount of weight and momentum, and levels are thoughtfully designed around unique gimmicks to keep the game feeling fresh every step of the way. I was also not expecting the Wonder Seeds to come with as much variety as they do. Not only do they heavily alter a significant portion of each course, but Wonder is pretty good about making them unique to the courses they appear in, even in the rare instances where certain ideas and mechanics are reused. My personal favorite comes pretty early with the Piranha Plant Parade.
There are a number of smaller courses that lack Wonder sequences, like badge challenges and Wiggler Races, but they never feel lacking for it. I could do without the "search party" levels, though. I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to design stages where you have to habitually jump around looking for hidden blocks like you're playing The Lost Levels, but I wound up pulling a guide open for these just to expedite the process. If Nintendo removed these and retooled a couple of the secret world stages (the one where you have to bounce on bubbles to navigate your way over a pit as a Goomba is heinous), then this might be a perfect 5/5 for me.
Wonder almost earns that half star back with its roster of playable characters. Of course, you've got Mario, Luigi, Peach, and (THREE!!) Toad(s), but they finally put Daisy in one of these games and I'm ecstatic about that. She's my favorite Mario character, which I know might be a weird thing to say considering most characters in these games have little personality past saying "wowie zowie" (big Zappa-heads, these guys) and their own name like a Pokemon. I just get this weird energy from Daisy. Peach will spend all afternoon baking you a cake, but Daisy will just drive to Kroger in her Ford Taurus that hasn't had an oil change in six months and buy you a sheet cake, start eating it in the car, then mash the two ends of the cake back together and crudely smooth over the icing to hide what she's done. I "fuck with that," or whatever the hell it is you kids say.
Unfortunately, the Yoshis (and Nabbit) are lackluster as they can't make use of power-ups. In the past, I've lamented the fact that I like Yoshi but he's never the star of good games, so it's disappointing that he and his multi-colored brethren have these arbitrarily imposed gameplay limitations in Wonder. Don't really care about Nabbit, far as I'm concerned there should be a wonder sequence where he's placed in a hydraulic press.
Mario Wonder is pretty much a must-have for the Switch and one of the best games released all year, and I think it's safe to say it breaks into my top five entries in the series. High praise from someone who ordinarily needs very little reason to dunk on Nintendo and drag them through the mud, but even I've got to admit they've put out something wonderful here.
It's become something of a tradition in the Sonic community for industrious fans to pull apart Sega's games and make all sorts of little changes to improve the experience of playing them. Project 06 might as well be the poster child for this, but even games like Sonic Superstars are benefitting from alternate soundtrack mods that attempt to wash away the stain left by Jun Senoue's bootleg Genesis snare drums. While a lot of these efforts are driven by the passion of fans and amateur modders, Sonic 3D Blast: Director's Cut is a unique case where the game's original designer, Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales, has gone back to retool their work. Unfortunately, it's still Sonic 3D Blast. fart_noise.flacc
I was actually pretty excited to try this out, even grabbed a reproduction cart of it in lieu of a legitimate copy of Sonic 3D Blast (you can toggle the mods off and play the game like normal, which for me makes this the ideal copy to have), but all the quality-of-life improvements in the world can't cleanse this game of its stink. Director's Cut makes improvements to movement speed and momentum, tweaks how Flickies function so that they're easier to find and don't all drop at once, and even adds Super Sonic, but the core design of 3D Blast is still the same. Jump on enemies, collect bird, hop into ring. I don't find this loop to be very compelling and would prefer something closer to a traditional Sonic, but the isometric perspective really hinders navigation and stage readability even in the time trial levels, which do ditch Flicky collecting for something more straight-forward.
For every improvement Director's Cut makes, which there are many, it just highlights the parts of the game that don't work for me, and those parts are so fundamental that you'd enter Hedgehog of Theseus territory if you started to uproot and replace them. Jon Burton, to his credit, changed about as much as he could, and the Director's Cut is the most approachable version of 3D Blast for his efforts. Changes to hit detection and the way damage operates does smooth over some the base game's key problems even if I may still be hung up on the more immutable aspects. It is unreasonable to expect Burton to alter level layouts to be more conducive to traditional Sonic gameplay, but changing how far the camera pans when running does help me avoid jumping directly into pits of lava in Volcano Valley, so I guess this is my preferred way to play.
In true Traveller's Tales fashion, I'm left weighing how impressive the game is on a technical level against how much fun I actually had playing it, and while I do think Jon Burton smoothing over nearly 30-year-old rough edges if worthy of some praise, I still find Sonic 3D Blast a struggle to get into. Very excited to pull this off the shelf in another five or eight years and walk away with the exact same opinion, because unlike 3D Blast, I never change.
I was actually pretty excited to try this out, even grabbed a reproduction cart of it in lieu of a legitimate copy of Sonic 3D Blast (you can toggle the mods off and play the game like normal, which for me makes this the ideal copy to have), but all the quality-of-life improvements in the world can't cleanse this game of its stink. Director's Cut makes improvements to movement speed and momentum, tweaks how Flickies function so that they're easier to find and don't all drop at once, and even adds Super Sonic, but the core design of 3D Blast is still the same. Jump on enemies, collect bird, hop into ring. I don't find this loop to be very compelling and would prefer something closer to a traditional Sonic, but the isometric perspective really hinders navigation and stage readability even in the time trial levels, which do ditch Flicky collecting for something more straight-forward.
For every improvement Director's Cut makes, which there are many, it just highlights the parts of the game that don't work for me, and those parts are so fundamental that you'd enter Hedgehog of Theseus territory if you started to uproot and replace them. Jon Burton, to his credit, changed about as much as he could, and the Director's Cut is the most approachable version of 3D Blast for his efforts. Changes to hit detection and the way damage operates does smooth over some the base game's key problems even if I may still be hung up on the more immutable aspects. It is unreasonable to expect Burton to alter level layouts to be more conducive to traditional Sonic gameplay, but changing how far the camera pans when running does help me avoid jumping directly into pits of lava in Volcano Valley, so I guess this is my preferred way to play.
In true Traveller's Tales fashion, I'm left weighing how impressive the game is on a technical level against how much fun I actually had playing it, and while I do think Jon Burton smoothing over nearly 30-year-old rough edges if worthy of some praise, I still find Sonic 3D Blast a struggle to get into. Very excited to pull this off the shelf in another five or eight years and walk away with the exact same opinion, because unlike 3D Blast, I never change.
1994
Shaking and crying, begging Yu Suzuki to make a good game.
All he has to offer me is a dispassionate "no."
All he has to offer me is a dispassionate "no."
2001
I went into Final Fantasy II with trepidation. This is the Final Fantasy game everyone seems to hate. Lot of words out there on the Internet about having to whack your own party members in the back of their plush, malleable skulls until they learn to have better HP. Literal tomes about memorizing complex sequences of key words to further the story, like a child learning to navigate the English language. "Final Fantasy II sucks!" all my friends shout, "Play Alan Wake 2, god damnit!"
"No, no, it's not on disc! I have to play a 2001 remake of a 1988 NES JRPG!" I cry out, seeing no other option.
This game is nearly as old as I am, and like me, it has some good ideas, and a whole lot of poorly aged ones that repulse the youth. For example, every stat from strength and endurance to weapon and spell proficiency is increased based on use, which is where a lot of the advice about hitting your own party members comes from as it seems like an efficient way to simultaneously build your offense, defense, and curative abilities. This system and the criticisms of it have largely informed my perception of the game, but now that I have FFII's 20+ hour campaign under my belt, I can safely say it's all a little overblown.
I was able to get by just fine playing the game like normal, and never once did I feel like I needed to grind. It wouldn't surprise me if the WonderSwan remake - and by extension, the PlayStation port that I played - smooths over and expedites stat progression, but outside of faster gains to weapon proficiency, I couldn't find what exactly was changed and what remained the same.
It's not a flawless system, though. I did find that prioritizing weapons over magic was the best COA (course of action), as you're always building stats into your preferred weapon type whereas each individual spell needs to grow on its own. This makes late game spells like Flare and Holy remarkably weak starting out, incentivizing you to hold the X button and essentially auto-attack through every battle. Swords are also ridiculously good and have a far more varied pool to choose from, including those imbued with elements to bypass physically resistant enemies, and the health syphoning blood sword that initially appears to have meager stats, but which everything in the end game (including the final boss) is severely weak to. About halfway through the game you can safely ditch shields and start dual-wielding, and once you're flailing two blood swords around, there's really no going back. I'm surprised anyone has any trouble with this game's difficulty as I mostly found it to devolves into utter banality, and that's probably where I'd fault Final Fantasy II the most.
One other part of FFII's dated design that gave me trouble was the key word system. You have to "memorize" highlighted words in a conversation and then present them to other NPCs to gain new key words or open up events that progress the story, but god help you if you forgot one key word somewhere in the world. Imagine getting in your car and driving all the way to the grocery store to pick up a refreshing beverage only to find that you hadn't internalized the term "NOS Energy Drink" and are unable to proceed unless you turn around and go find the one random schmuck who can tell you what you want. This has happened to me a lot throughout my life, I think it's a memory problem (probably from drinking too much NOS!), and I don't like it when it's in my video games!
This key word system is at least interesting on paper. Final Fantasy II is far more narrative driven than the last game, so needing to bank highlighted words and present key items to NPCs makes you a more active participant in the story. I get why it's here, it just never materializes into anything valuable.
For all its faults, I don't think Final Fantasy II lives up to its negative reputation, or least this version doesn't. I had fun with it overall, even if I might prefer the original game a little bit more. Should you play it? No! I gave Lies of P a 2/5 and Castlevania: The Adventure a 4/5, I am disconnected from reality. I drench my brain in CMPLX6 and high quantities of disodium EDTA daily, you cannot hope to process video games the way I do.
"No, no, it's not on disc! I have to play a 2001 remake of a 1988 NES JRPG!" I cry out, seeing no other option.
This game is nearly as old as I am, and like me, it has some good ideas, and a whole lot of poorly aged ones that repulse the youth. For example, every stat from strength and endurance to weapon and spell proficiency is increased based on use, which is where a lot of the advice about hitting your own party members comes from as it seems like an efficient way to simultaneously build your offense, defense, and curative abilities. This system and the criticisms of it have largely informed my perception of the game, but now that I have FFII's 20+ hour campaign under my belt, I can safely say it's all a little overblown.
I was able to get by just fine playing the game like normal, and never once did I feel like I needed to grind. It wouldn't surprise me if the WonderSwan remake - and by extension, the PlayStation port that I played - smooths over and expedites stat progression, but outside of faster gains to weapon proficiency, I couldn't find what exactly was changed and what remained the same.
It's not a flawless system, though. I did find that prioritizing weapons over magic was the best COA (course of action), as you're always building stats into your preferred weapon type whereas each individual spell needs to grow on its own. This makes late game spells like Flare and Holy remarkably weak starting out, incentivizing you to hold the X button and essentially auto-attack through every battle. Swords are also ridiculously good and have a far more varied pool to choose from, including those imbued with elements to bypass physically resistant enemies, and the health syphoning blood sword that initially appears to have meager stats, but which everything in the end game (including the final boss) is severely weak to. About halfway through the game you can safely ditch shields and start dual-wielding, and once you're flailing two blood swords around, there's really no going back. I'm surprised anyone has any trouble with this game's difficulty as I mostly found it to devolves into utter banality, and that's probably where I'd fault Final Fantasy II the most.
One other part of FFII's dated design that gave me trouble was the key word system. You have to "memorize" highlighted words in a conversation and then present them to other NPCs to gain new key words or open up events that progress the story, but god help you if you forgot one key word somewhere in the world. Imagine getting in your car and driving all the way to the grocery store to pick up a refreshing beverage only to find that you hadn't internalized the term "NOS Energy Drink" and are unable to proceed unless you turn around and go find the one random schmuck who can tell you what you want. This has happened to me a lot throughout my life, I think it's a memory problem (probably from drinking too much NOS!), and I don't like it when it's in my video games!
This key word system is at least interesting on paper. Final Fantasy II is far more narrative driven than the last game, so needing to bank highlighted words and present key items to NPCs makes you a more active participant in the story. I get why it's here, it just never materializes into anything valuable.
For all its faults, I don't think Final Fantasy II lives up to its negative reputation, or least this version doesn't. I had fun with it overall, even if I might prefer the original game a little bit more. Should you play it? No! I gave Lies of P a 2/5 and Castlevania: The Adventure a 4/5, I am disconnected from reality. I drench my brain in CMPLX6 and high quantities of disodium EDTA daily, you cannot hope to process video games the way I do.
A few months after picking up a PlayStation 2 and telling myself "just put games on the hard drive, do NOT go down the rabbit hole of buying used games," I saw the cover of Final Fantasy Origins and was so spellbound by Yoshitaka Amano's gorgeous art that I broke my solemn vow. It's just that meme of the guy looking over his shoulder, my gaze pulled away from my 1TB Western Digital hard drive towards the alluring figure of Final Fantasy Origins... Yeah... Yeah this game's got a great ass...
Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!
I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, andthat's just what daddy wants its really graet. .
More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.
This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.
Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review
Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!
I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, and
More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.
This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.
Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review