2001
A couple months ago, I decided to breathe some new life into my old, beat up Sega Dreamcast, and transferred its internals into a new shell. While I was up in them guts, I figured I'd go the extra mile and put in a PicoPSU, Noctua fan, and (most importantly) a GDEMU clone. I own three Dreamcast games on disc, they're all Sonic and they're all scratched to hell, and considering the longevity of Dreamcast disc drives, it did not pain me to rip that sucker out of there. Besides, an SD card opens me up to games I'd never dream of affording...
Anyway, I 100%'d Sonic Adventure 2 again. God damnit, why do I keep ending up here?
I explicitly told myself I would not, but looking at my childhood save file, I was maybe eight to ten hours of actual work shy of running through Green Hill, which I've previously unlocked twice on two different versions of the game (the Dreamcast original via emulation, and Battle for the GameCube.) It's not like I had something to prove so much as I hated the idea of leaving something undone, even if it meant feeding a Chao the same skeleton dog over and over again for three hours while alone in a dark room. Oh well, my time could not be less valuable.
I bring all this up because I'm going to say some fairly disparaging things about Sonic Adventure 2 - which for a lot of people sits in this exalted "sacred cow" position - and I just need everyone to accept that I've done my time with this game and feel pretty strongly about it.
Sonic Adventure 2 condenses Sonic Adventure's six distinct gameplay styles into three, and makes each of them more robust, which on paper sounds great. Sounds like something you'd do with a sequel, cut all the filler and build out from what worked... Only, I think adding more to the mech and emerald hunting stages makes them a total drag to play. What was once arcadey and enjoyable is now bloated and boring, sometimes outright frustrating. Sonic and Shadow get the best levels of the bunch, but given how often these brief bursts of fun are interrupted, does it even really matter?
Even setting aside my grievances with the way these modes are designed, I feel like Sonic Adventure 2 is just... sloppy. It has the collision detection of a cheap D-tier licensed platformer, with characters constantly juttering and clipping when making slight contact with uneven surfaces. Even flat surfaces are temperamental given how often Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles will catch on some 1 pixel tall seam. The camera is uncooperative, characters move inconsistently, and every part of the geometry feels like it's held together by Elmer's glue and tongue depressors. So much as brush a corner wrong and the game will shut off whatever complex calculation it needs to run to determine momentum. Having done this three times now, I can confidently say the worst part of the 180 emblem experience is fighting with the parts of the game that are unpredictable, like, you know, landing on a solid stationary platform and just falling through it.
This is all coming from the guy who frequently writes Labyrinth Zone apologia on Backloggd Dot Com, so I can't stress enough that my opinion on this shouldn't be taken as some condemnation of those who enjoy Sonic Adventure 2, or a statement that I'm more right for having a dissenting opinion. There's thousands of you and uh... I don't think there's even a dozen people that like Labyrinth. And hey, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't without its charm. I've previously praised the excellent soundtrack, which I remember owning once on CD (which also got scratched to hell), and though I hated the tonal shift SA2 made at the time, I think it's probably the best part of the game now. The voice clips cutting off, Grandpa Robotnik being put in front of a firing squad... it's not good, but it's good.
Unfortunately, it's not enough to bring me around on the game as a whole package, and I feel like the amount of hours I've logged both qualifies my dislike while calling into question my sanity. Sometimes you go for 180 emblems in Sonic Adventure 2 while playing Mario Party 6 while playing In Sound Mind while playing Shining in the Darkness. Sometimes you're just that kind of depressed, where you're glad you don't live with someone who could walk by your room and see you running through Mad Space and think "oh god he's spiraling." But it doesn't matter now. I'm finished. I never have to do this ever again.
Oh hey, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is on sale on Xbox...!
Anyway, I 100%'d Sonic Adventure 2 again. God damnit, why do I keep ending up here?
I explicitly told myself I would not, but looking at my childhood save file, I was maybe eight to ten hours of actual work shy of running through Green Hill, which I've previously unlocked twice on two different versions of the game (the Dreamcast original via emulation, and Battle for the GameCube.) It's not like I had something to prove so much as I hated the idea of leaving something undone, even if it meant feeding a Chao the same skeleton dog over and over again for three hours while alone in a dark room. Oh well, my time could not be less valuable.
I bring all this up because I'm going to say some fairly disparaging things about Sonic Adventure 2 - which for a lot of people sits in this exalted "sacred cow" position - and I just need everyone to accept that I've done my time with this game and feel pretty strongly about it.
Sonic Adventure 2 condenses Sonic Adventure's six distinct gameplay styles into three, and makes each of them more robust, which on paper sounds great. Sounds like something you'd do with a sequel, cut all the filler and build out from what worked... Only, I think adding more to the mech and emerald hunting stages makes them a total drag to play. What was once arcadey and enjoyable is now bloated and boring, sometimes outright frustrating. Sonic and Shadow get the best levels of the bunch, but given how often these brief bursts of fun are interrupted, does it even really matter?
Even setting aside my grievances with the way these modes are designed, I feel like Sonic Adventure 2 is just... sloppy. It has the collision detection of a cheap D-tier licensed platformer, with characters constantly juttering and clipping when making slight contact with uneven surfaces. Even flat surfaces are temperamental given how often Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles will catch on some 1 pixel tall seam. The camera is uncooperative, characters move inconsistently, and every part of the geometry feels like it's held together by Elmer's glue and tongue depressors. So much as brush a corner wrong and the game will shut off whatever complex calculation it needs to run to determine momentum. Having done this three times now, I can confidently say the worst part of the 180 emblem experience is fighting with the parts of the game that are unpredictable, like, you know, landing on a solid stationary platform and just falling through it.
This is all coming from the guy who frequently writes Labyrinth Zone apologia on Backloggd Dot Com, so I can't stress enough that my opinion on this shouldn't be taken as some condemnation of those who enjoy Sonic Adventure 2, or a statement that I'm more right for having a dissenting opinion. There's thousands of you and uh... I don't think there's even a dozen people that like Labyrinth. And hey, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't without its charm. I've previously praised the excellent soundtrack, which I remember owning once on CD (which also got scratched to hell), and though I hated the tonal shift SA2 made at the time, I think it's probably the best part of the game now. The voice clips cutting off, Grandpa Robotnik being put in front of a firing squad... it's not good, but it's good.
Unfortunately, it's not enough to bring me around on the game as a whole package, and I feel like the amount of hours I've logged both qualifies my dislike while calling into question my sanity. Sometimes you go for 180 emblems in Sonic Adventure 2 while playing Mario Party 6 while playing In Sound Mind while playing Shining in the Darkness. Sometimes you're just that kind of depressed, where you're glad you don't live with someone who could walk by your room and see you running through Mad Space and think "oh god he's spiraling." But it doesn't matter now. I'm finished. I never have to do this ever again.
Oh hey, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is on sale on Xbox...!
2021
"Curiosity killed the uncool cat, ya dig?" - Chad Ghostal
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.
In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.
Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.
Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.
The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.
Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.
And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.
We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.
In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.
Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.
Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.
The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.
Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.
And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.
We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.
"I don't think you'll like this." Jokes on you, I'm very boring.
2002
Has it ever happened to you that you're working on a sequel to your 2D handheld platformer for a beloved and iconic IP, and everything is going great because you're fixing a bunch of problems the first game had and designing really cool movement tech and levels that are fun to play, but this guy you don't know keeps sneaking in at night and programming the most dogshit bosses imaginable and adding bottomless pits to ruin all of your levels? What do you mean you gotta collect seven rings in a zone to unlock the special stage AND it's the worst one in the whole entire series!? Somebody needs to stop this guy!!
This review coming to you from inside the fucking wall of Blue Mountain Zone, which I clipped through several days ago. Please send help! There's something in here with me!!
If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.
While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.
I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.
Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.
For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.
Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)
I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.
Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.
I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.
Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.
If there's two things I love in this world, it's kart racers and complaining about Sonic the Hedgehog. You might view that as a problem, but I don't have a friend group that tells me things like "George, you're loved, you don't need to play Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers." Nope, it's just me and my brain, so with the help of my instructor, Jim Beam, I finally buckled down and spent an hour getting my class Robotnik operating license in Ring Racers' infamously long tutorial.
While the experience of jumping into Ring Racers has been streamlined after the game's first major patch, I would still encourage anyone who wants to pick it up to go through each lesson in the tutorial. Ring Racers is the most technical kart racer I've played in my life, and that might strike you as being a bit funny considering it's essentially Sonic Kart, but keep in mind this was made by Sonic fans, and those people are psychopaths. You'll want to know the ins and outs of your vehicle and what it's capable of before hitting up the Grand Prix, and though I've seen a number of people complain about it, I see the wisdom of blocking off the online mode until you clear the first cup. I can't imagine what it would look like if players skipped the tutorial and jumped headfirst into multiplayer, but I'm gonna guess it'd be a disaster for everyone involved.
I'm confident in that considering half of the single player experience could also be characterized as "a disaster." Managing ring consumption, learning where sneakers spawn to break shortcut barriers, understanding how to maximize your 3rd-tier drift burst, anticipating when you should "hold" your cart rather than drift, figuring out where and when to use your spindash... it's a lot to manage even without all the stage hazards and player-laid traps that are out to straight up kill you. Pico Park is my god damn storming of Normandy, I've seen people lose limbs on the straightaway, and good men stretched to the width of an atom after colliding directly with a Drop Target that bounced them back into the path of a Gardentop careening around the corner at maximum velocity.
Even the pre-race is a nightmare. You don't just line up all nice and neat like in Super Mario Kart, patiently waiting for the green light. You can roam freely so long as you don't cross the starting line, which means you can also bump into other players and force them over the line to penalize them. I said Pico Park was a nightmare, but I didn't even survive the first three seconds of Carnival Night Zone, because everyone kept bumping me into hazards in the pre-race, and when I was sucked into the magnetized tunnel that serves as the track's opening straight, I was flung directly into several hazards that caused my kart to explode. I died and I barely made a single input.
For the last week you could find me hunched over my laptop, drenched with sweat because it's 80 degrees here at night and my computer is overheating, gripping my controller and hissing "fuck you, FUCK YOU," and you might assume I'm not having a good time... but I am. Despite how chaotic and complex and downright vicious this game can be, I'm into it.
Maybe I'm just in the market for the kind of depth and sadism Ring Racers offers, or maybe I've played so many kart racers that the problem I'm having is that they don't have enough esoteric bullshit in them. Mastering Ring Racers' mechanics is satisfying, but understanding how they play off one another achieves an even greater high... I've graduated to a stronger drug. Naturally, courses are constructed around these systems in a way that's both mindful of low- and high-level play, and the loop of replaying tracks and developing better strategies to maximize your ring consumption and attain better clear times feels good, with few exceptions (Balloon Park and Blue Mountain can eat me.)
I really like the visual design of the game, too. The stylized menus, expressive character art, and detailed tracks all lend a high level of production to the game that's genuinely impressive for a fan game born out of a fan game born out of a fan game using the Doom engine. It can be difficult to parse the action sometimes, especially in levels with more unconventional color pallets, but I think the game has a look to it that really makes it stand out while feeling like an authentic progression from Sonic Robo Blast 2's aesthetic. I will add that this is one case where IGDB fucked up by allowing a cleaner thumbnail, though. I prefer the original, which looked like a magazine scan of a grainy off-screen photo taken at a CES. Much more fitting, if you ask me.
Of course, like everyone else, I still have issues with Ring Racers that I think really sour the experience. The pandemonium of the aforementioned pre-race wears out very quickly, with stage outs and starting line penalties becoming more annoying than humorous, especially given how long it can take to recover. There's also a lives system which feels wholly unnecessary when you consider that the capsule minigames that appear every two races could otherwise be used as checkpoints if you don't place high enough in a circuit to advance. The trick system is also interesting in concept but utilized so rarely that I often forgot it was a thing until I needed to exploit it, and I typically found myself fumbling it as a result.
I've said before that Sonic fan games are in something of a golden age, with hobbyist-led projects being of a caliber that genuinely blows me away. Credit where it's due, Sega appears quite comfortable with letting fans create games like this without interference, something I think has helped give the scene space to mature and which has helped to keep Sonic so relevant. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers' kinetic gameplay and strong art direction impressed me the moment I saw it, and I think there's a lot of potential in introducing a higher level of technicality to a kart racer, but it does need some adjusting in places and falls a bit short of its promise.
Addendum: Apparently the game also controlled worse pre-patch so I may be benefitting by having waited just a bit to really dive into it. Seems worth mentioning.
Woke up this morning and decided to play Darkstalkers really fuckin' hard. Cheap piece of crap, can't even quarter-circle!
I played through about 7 character's stories, though I couldn't tell you what actually happens in any of them since I'm playing off a burned Japanese copy. The ending cutscenes are all very cute, though. I'd let Q-bee move in anytime she wants, and she bring her whole carnivorous family with her. Some of the best character designs in the genre, if you ask me. I'm a BB Hood main only because I can't get enough of her beatboxing.
Like with most fighting games, I'm neither smart nor seasoned enough to really dig into the technical aspects. This plays good, the animations are great, and there's some really solid hit feedback, so I had a fantastic time with it. Just a shame someone decided to design the Sega Saturn D-pad such that it connects to a thin piece of brittle plastic fed through the mold of the face plate. I think BB Hood should beatbox over their graves (BB Hood is not real so this statement is not legally actionable, according to my lawyer, Larry Davis.)
I played through about 7 character's stories, though I couldn't tell you what actually happens in any of them since I'm playing off a burned Japanese copy. The ending cutscenes are all very cute, though. I'd let Q-bee move in anytime she wants, and she bring her whole carnivorous family with her. Some of the best character designs in the genre, if you ask me. I'm a BB Hood main only because I can't get enough of her beatboxing.
Like with most fighting games, I'm neither smart nor seasoned enough to really dig into the technical aspects. This plays good, the animations are great, and there's some really solid hit feedback, so I had a fantastic time with it. Just a shame someone decided to design the Sega Saturn D-pad such that it connects to a thin piece of brittle plastic fed through the mold of the face plate. I think BB Hood should beatbox over their graves (BB Hood is not real so this statement is not legally actionable, according to my lawyer, Larry Davis.)
Man, I'm in a real rough spot. Family members are getting older and sicker, I'm overworked, not getting enough sleep... I need a real pick-me-up, something that's easy to play and has a lot of charm. Help me, Hello Kitty!
Gets cracked in the nose by a disc travelling at 95MPH, completely caving in my facial bones.
hello kitty ,why. ..........?
Like Tetris Battle Gaiden and Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! is a game I was first exposed to through Giant Bomb, where it ended up in their rotation of competitive multiplayer games on more than one occasion. And I can see why. Even sticking to the single-player mode, Smash Ball's head-to-head Breakout-inspired gameplay is addictive, and in its later stages, weirdly demanding.
You have precisely two moves: hit disc and hit disc harder, and while the early game is such a breeze it can be played on autopilot, the later stages will see you smacking that disc around an inch from your opponent's faces - which the stage itself is designed to resemble, as if Keroppi's smug visage was there to mock you - all in a frantic bid to keep it from your side of the court, which has progressively been designed to put you at a disadvantage. This is still a kid's game at its core, so the difficulty never excels to the point of brutality, but there's a curve here that keeps Smash Ball surprisingly engaging.
I hope one day I can find someone willing to sit down and actually play Sanrio World Smash Ball! with me, I think that'd be cool, I wish I had friends like Hello Kit-
Gets hit in the mouth by a charged shot that ricochets off of and back into my teeth several times
uuugh i thinki n eed to go to the hompsital
Gets cracked in the nose by a disc travelling at 95MPH, completely caving in my facial bones.
hello kitty ,why. ..........?
Like Tetris Battle Gaiden and Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! is a game I was first exposed to through Giant Bomb, where it ended up in their rotation of competitive multiplayer games on more than one occasion. And I can see why. Even sticking to the single-player mode, Smash Ball's head-to-head Breakout-inspired gameplay is addictive, and in its later stages, weirdly demanding.
You have precisely two moves: hit disc and hit disc harder, and while the early game is such a breeze it can be played on autopilot, the later stages will see you smacking that disc around an inch from your opponent's faces - which the stage itself is designed to resemble, as if Keroppi's smug visage was there to mock you - all in a frantic bid to keep it from your side of the court, which has progressively been designed to put you at a disadvantage. This is still a kid's game at its core, so the difficulty never excels to the point of brutality, but there's a curve here that keeps Smash Ball surprisingly engaging.
I hope one day I can find someone willing to sit down and actually play Sanrio World Smash Ball! with me, I think that'd be cool, I wish I had friends like Hello Kit-
Gets hit in the mouth by a charged shot that ricochets off of and back into my teeth several times
uuugh i thinki n eed to go to the hompsital
2017
Well, mathematically speaking, it's just as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure.
I didn't give Prey a fair shot back when it released. 2017 feels much further away than it actually is, so I can't explain exactly what had me so distracted that I couldn't invest myself in "the best immersive sim of all time," but those opening few hours didn't hold me. I found myself meandering around and bounced off right around the point where you do your first spacewalk.
But here's the thing, if you're friends with Larry Davis, you can't just be like "oh I didn't enjoy Prey." That doesn't fly. You'll start getting texts while you're out that are just pictures taken from inside your apartment, some of which show you sleeping. He lives halfway across the country, how did he get in there? When was he there? The only way to stop the threats is to acquiesce to his demands. Play Prey or else. I always negotiate with terrorists, I'm a huge coward.
And I'm glad I did, because Larry's right, this is (probably) the best immersive sim ever made. I do, however, have to dock points for not having any Art Bell, something Human Head's Prey has over Arkane's. I'm aware that these games are not related at all outside of a very ill-advised, corporate decision to cash in on Prey's red hot brand name, but the least they could've done is throw in a few Midnight in the Deserts as audio logs. Not a problem, I just played a few in the background while making my way through the wreckage of Talos 1, bashing Typhons with a gnarly looking wrench while listening to Art's guest drone on about collecting and selling Big Foot scat.
Art: When I was in high school I ate erasers. No erasers on my pencils. I guess you could call that a strange addiction. When I went to erase something, I'd just scratch through the paper. Mmm... Erasers. That flavor has faded as an adult.
Ah, the true Prey experience.
That omission aside, Prey checks all the right boxes for me. Talos 1 is a great setting populated by interesting characters and engaging side quests that command your attention from the mission at hand not because they supply you with a list of things to do, but because Arkane has crafted a world so interesting and so fun to occupy that you want to delve into every nook and cranny. I see a locked door and I find myself compelled to know what's inside, even though the last three rooms I busted into had like, a corpse with a single discarded lemon peel in their pocket. Why did they have that? Every body tells a story...
Some of those side quests are going to stick with me for a while, which is both a sign of solid character writing and good mission structure. The fake chef booby-trapping fabrication machines and entry ways after you let him go adds a fun twist to revisiting old locations and makes your revenge that much sweeter when you finally catch up to him, and it's hard to imagine what shape the end game would take if you ejected Professor Igwe from his derelict storage container and skipped his multi-part quest. Which, you know, I initially did because I wasn't patient enough to hear him out. It's fine, I had an autosave, Igwe is totally okay!
That's just the way I play these games, with a dozen backup saves so I can test the boundaries of every moral crisis my character finds themselves in. I'm the kind of dude who will release a Typhon halfway into an inmate's cell just to see what kind of reaction I can get while turning over the long-term consequences of pushing the big red button. Not enough mirror neurons in my head, that's my problem.
Early in the game, you're presented with a personality test, an ink blot, and several variations of the Trolley Problem. An excellent way to establish what Prey hopes to accomplish with the player long-term, as so much of the game is affected by the choices you make both on a macro and micro level. The ending you get is clearly delineated between one of two set paths, but how those play out on a more precise level is affected by the small choices you made along the way. Take that chef, for example. You did get your revenge, but what of his other victims? Did you help them? Did you even try to find them? And what of your brother, Alex? So much of what happens aboard Talos 1 is his fault, but does your love for him win out in the end? Can you condemn him to his fate, or will you spend 30 minutes trying to wrangle his limp body in zero-gravity because the game won't trip one of the god damn objectives, which are clearly bugged-- oh wait, shit... I put him in a grav lift and it snapped his neck. Problem solved.
One area where I deviated from my typical immersive sim habits was combat. I often build my characters around stealth and avoid direct confrontation, but the Typhon abilities you're given work so well in concert with your weapons that turning Morgan into a violent powerhouse felt much more satisfying. There are also a few "survival" modifiers you can toggle at the start of the game, and I went with allowing injuries and suit damage, but not weapon degradation, because weapon degradation always sucks and is not as fun as getting concussed and needing to take "brained pills."
These modifiers add an extra layer of tension to resource management, something you'll be doing a lot of as you lug around literal garbage in the hopes that you might be able to squeeze a few extra shotgun shells out of whatever hard drives and bananas you have on your person. Fabricators are far between in the early parts of the game, often requiring you to loop back to your office for resupplies, which is a smart way of teaching the player the ins-and-outs of the game's resource economy while drilling in how Talos 1 is interconnected.
Is Prey the best immersive sim ever? Look, it takes a very boring man to admit when he's wrong, but it may very well be. Everything from the setting and story, to combat and the larger ways in which the game questions the player's morality is fantastic. My only complaint outside of some technical issues like the aforementioned problem with tripping objectives and a few crashes/freezes on the Xbox version is that there's no Art Bell. A whole .5 off the top of the score, I'm afraid. What's that? Art Bell was dead at the time? Nonsense. If Arkane only opened up a time-traveler's line, they could've booked him. Not an excuse.
I didn't give Prey a fair shot back when it released. 2017 feels much further away than it actually is, so I can't explain exactly what had me so distracted that I couldn't invest myself in "the best immersive sim of all time," but those opening few hours didn't hold me. I found myself meandering around and bounced off right around the point where you do your first spacewalk.
But here's the thing, if you're friends with Larry Davis, you can't just be like "oh I didn't enjoy Prey." That doesn't fly. You'll start getting texts while you're out that are just pictures taken from inside your apartment, some of which show you sleeping. He lives halfway across the country, how did he get in there? When was he there? The only way to stop the threats is to acquiesce to his demands. Play Prey or else. I always negotiate with terrorists, I'm a huge coward.
And I'm glad I did, because Larry's right, this is (probably) the best immersive sim ever made. I do, however, have to dock points for not having any Art Bell, something Human Head's Prey has over Arkane's. I'm aware that these games are not related at all outside of a very ill-advised, corporate decision to cash in on Prey's red hot brand name, but the least they could've done is throw in a few Midnight in the Deserts as audio logs. Not a problem, I just played a few in the background while making my way through the wreckage of Talos 1, bashing Typhons with a gnarly looking wrench while listening to Art's guest drone on about collecting and selling Big Foot scat.
Art: When I was in high school I ate erasers. No erasers on my pencils. I guess you could call that a strange addiction. When I went to erase something, I'd just scratch through the paper. Mmm... Erasers. That flavor has faded as an adult.
Ah, the true Prey experience.
That omission aside, Prey checks all the right boxes for me. Talos 1 is a great setting populated by interesting characters and engaging side quests that command your attention from the mission at hand not because they supply you with a list of things to do, but because Arkane has crafted a world so interesting and so fun to occupy that you want to delve into every nook and cranny. I see a locked door and I find myself compelled to know what's inside, even though the last three rooms I busted into had like, a corpse with a single discarded lemon peel in their pocket. Why did they have that? Every body tells a story...
Some of those side quests are going to stick with me for a while, which is both a sign of solid character writing and good mission structure. The fake chef booby-trapping fabrication machines and entry ways after you let him go adds a fun twist to revisiting old locations and makes your revenge that much sweeter when you finally catch up to him, and it's hard to imagine what shape the end game would take if you ejected Professor Igwe from his derelict storage container and skipped his multi-part quest. Which, you know, I initially did because I wasn't patient enough to hear him out. It's fine, I had an autosave, Igwe is totally okay!
That's just the way I play these games, with a dozen backup saves so I can test the boundaries of every moral crisis my character finds themselves in. I'm the kind of dude who will release a Typhon halfway into an inmate's cell just to see what kind of reaction I can get while turning over the long-term consequences of pushing the big red button. Not enough mirror neurons in my head, that's my problem.
Early in the game, you're presented with a personality test, an ink blot, and several variations of the Trolley Problem. An excellent way to establish what Prey hopes to accomplish with the player long-term, as so much of the game is affected by the choices you make both on a macro and micro level. The ending you get is clearly delineated between one of two set paths, but how those play out on a more precise level is affected by the small choices you made along the way. Take that chef, for example. You did get your revenge, but what of his other victims? Did you help them? Did you even try to find them? And what of your brother, Alex? So much of what happens aboard Talos 1 is his fault, but does your love for him win out in the end? Can you condemn him to his fate, or will you spend 30 minutes trying to wrangle his limp body in zero-gravity because the game won't trip one of the god damn objectives, which are clearly bugged-- oh wait, shit... I put him in a grav lift and it snapped his neck. Problem solved.
One area where I deviated from my typical immersive sim habits was combat. I often build my characters around stealth and avoid direct confrontation, but the Typhon abilities you're given work so well in concert with your weapons that turning Morgan into a violent powerhouse felt much more satisfying. There are also a few "survival" modifiers you can toggle at the start of the game, and I went with allowing injuries and suit damage, but not weapon degradation, because weapon degradation always sucks and is not as fun as getting concussed and needing to take "brained pills."
These modifiers add an extra layer of tension to resource management, something you'll be doing a lot of as you lug around literal garbage in the hopes that you might be able to squeeze a few extra shotgun shells out of whatever hard drives and bananas you have on your person. Fabricators are far between in the early parts of the game, often requiring you to loop back to your office for resupplies, which is a smart way of teaching the player the ins-and-outs of the game's resource economy while drilling in how Talos 1 is interconnected.
Is Prey the best immersive sim ever? Look, it takes a very boring man to admit when he's wrong, but it may very well be. Everything from the setting and story, to combat and the larger ways in which the game questions the player's morality is fantastic. My only complaint outside of some technical issues like the aforementioned problem with tripping objectives and a few crashes/freezes on the Xbox version is that there's no Art Bell. A whole .5 off the top of the score, I'm afraid. What's that? Art Bell was dead at the time? Nonsense. If Arkane only opened up a time-traveler's line, they could've booked him. Not an excuse.
Rapidly hit the point where the thought of booting up Marvel's Midnight Suns felt like punching in to work, and that's a damn shame considering how much of an X-Com mark I am. I signed up for tactical card-based RPG gameplay and base management, not a social sim with uncarbonated, room temp Joss Wheadon writing.
Every character here is reduced to one or two notable elements that are constantly harped on. Tony Stark, played by Josh Keaton under explicit instructions to do his best Robert Downey Jr. impression, is constantly making cracks about having to operate out of a scary magical castle. Dr. Strange's magical prowess is constantly under scrutiny, a dotard in a room of quippy millennials - "Dr. Spooky," they call him. Sister Grimm rearranged one of the clubs' acronyms so it spelled out "EMO KIDS" because she's so clever and quirky. Peter Parker LOVES pizza, can SOMEBODY please get Peter Parker a slice of pie!? No deep dish, it's gotta be New Yawk style, wooo, love da big apple!
Another way to put it would be if the beach scene in Persona 5 kicked off a running gag where characters had to constantly bring up Yusuke buying lobsters and equate some part of every conversation involving Yusuke to lobsters for the rest of the game. Just... close your eyes and imagine that. Lean back, get comfortable, absorb yourself in how "good" that would be. Congratulations, I just saved you $20.
I remembered Deadpool was in this game and that was the point I decided I needed to get out. It's not that it's overly snarky or self-depreciating in the same obnoxious, overbearing way the MCU is, Midnight Suns is to its credit more confident in its setting, but it's just so lame. Unfortunately, socializing with your team is a major component of the game - so much so that it's disproportionate to the actual tactical RPG elements - and unless you're willing to mash through all the tiresome character dialog to get to the conversation options that let you scream "do you ever shut up" and tank your friendship rating, you'll just have to put up with it.
Every day you have to run around this castle talking to heroes to raise their bonds, break down materials, craft new cards, fuse duplicates together, train with heroes to get daily stat buffs, send heroes you aren't using on away missions... Navigation around the castle grounds feels cumbersome, and you have so many tasks to do before you're ready to head out that combat starts to feel secondary against the lethargic pace of base management.
The tactical card-combat? It's fine. There's not really a whole lot I have to say about it. The early missions are decently challenging, and each character comes with their own attributes and pool of cards that helps give them defined utility in battle, like Sister Grimm, who is essentially your defacto buff/debuffer in the early game. Combat encounters still feel somewhat samey, but I was only about five hours in when I bailed, I'd have to imagine they get more diverse over time.
The most I got out of Midnight Sun was when I went on a nighttime walk with Blade and he mentioned not being able to see something, to which the protagonist quipped "that's because you wear your sunglasses at night."
"Hey, it's a fashion choice."
Blade was not wearing his sunglasses. I gifted him a skull I found on the ground. He seemed to like it.
Every character here is reduced to one or two notable elements that are constantly harped on. Tony Stark, played by Josh Keaton under explicit instructions to do his best Robert Downey Jr. impression, is constantly making cracks about having to operate out of a scary magical castle. Dr. Strange's magical prowess is constantly under scrutiny, a dotard in a room of quippy millennials - "Dr. Spooky," they call him. Sister Grimm rearranged one of the clubs' acronyms so it spelled out "EMO KIDS" because she's so clever and quirky. Peter Parker LOVES pizza, can SOMEBODY please get Peter Parker a slice of pie!? No deep dish, it's gotta be New Yawk style, wooo, love da big apple!
Another way to put it would be if the beach scene in Persona 5 kicked off a running gag where characters had to constantly bring up Yusuke buying lobsters and equate some part of every conversation involving Yusuke to lobsters for the rest of the game. Just... close your eyes and imagine that. Lean back, get comfortable, absorb yourself in how "good" that would be. Congratulations, I just saved you $20.
I remembered Deadpool was in this game and that was the point I decided I needed to get out. It's not that it's overly snarky or self-depreciating in the same obnoxious, overbearing way the MCU is, Midnight Suns is to its credit more confident in its setting, but it's just so lame. Unfortunately, socializing with your team is a major component of the game - so much so that it's disproportionate to the actual tactical RPG elements - and unless you're willing to mash through all the tiresome character dialog to get to the conversation options that let you scream "do you ever shut up" and tank your friendship rating, you'll just have to put up with it.
Every day you have to run around this castle talking to heroes to raise their bonds, break down materials, craft new cards, fuse duplicates together, train with heroes to get daily stat buffs, send heroes you aren't using on away missions... Navigation around the castle grounds feels cumbersome, and you have so many tasks to do before you're ready to head out that combat starts to feel secondary against the lethargic pace of base management.
The tactical card-combat? It's fine. There's not really a whole lot I have to say about it. The early missions are decently challenging, and each character comes with their own attributes and pool of cards that helps give them defined utility in battle, like Sister Grimm, who is essentially your defacto buff/debuffer in the early game. Combat encounters still feel somewhat samey, but I was only about five hours in when I bailed, I'd have to imagine they get more diverse over time.
The most I got out of Midnight Sun was when I went on a nighttime walk with Blade and he mentioned not being able to see something, to which the protagonist quipped "that's because you wear your sunglasses at night."
"Hey, it's a fashion choice."
Blade was not wearing his sunglasses. I gifted him a skull I found on the ground. He seemed to like it.
2024
After years of drift towards third-person action, survival horror finally returns to its roots: dunking your entire arm into every single trashcan you can find and showing disobedient vending machines and lockers the righteous fury of your boot heel.
Thank God the indie market is so robust these days, because the increasing homogenization of the modern big budget game and shrinking genre space therein means you wouldn't get proper survival horror otherwise. Crow Country and others like Signalis have been filling that void, but despite clearly playing to the charm of PlayStation era horror with its visuals - especially with its character models, which look as though they've been unearthed from an old Net Yaroze kit - Crow Country is no tired pastiche. It's safe rooms, puzzles, and resource management might harken to a design ethos that was at one point more commonplace, but these elements feel authentic and borne from a place of appreciation and understanding.
Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in the park's layout and the way in which the player navigates it. The amusement park theme allows for neatly defined areas with their own theming and unique attractions, with hidden passages, back rooms, cast tunnels, and a subterranean network serving as the connective tissue between each "land" in a way that feels appropriate for the setting while serving to make the park feel highly interconnected. Crow Country is great at providing a sense of space while conveying where the player should go and what to do next. I never felt lost or completely stumped by a puzzle and was consistently engaged and encouraged to revisit old locations to explore - the part of my brain that starts processing how I want to route my way through a game activated pretty early, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign that a survival horror game is living up to the promise of its genre.
The setting is also small. Crow Country is less Disneyland, more Santa's Village, so one way developer SFB Games succeeds in making repeated loops through the park threatening is by gradually introducing more enemies and traps to familiar locations. As the time of day progresses, rain and darkness further obscure the player's vision, and boobytrapped pick-ups begin to litter the map to prey on the sense of trust they've developed with their environment. I sprinted my way through the opening two hours, juked most enemies and picked up any crap I saw laying on the ground. By hour five, I was walking everywhere, stopping frequently, side-eyeing boxes of ammo, and finding that I actually had to conserve what I had due to the increased expectation that I shoot some damn "guests."
I also appreciate Crow Country for telling a complete and coherent story, something I think a lot of horror games have pushed away from. I think the Five Nights series has poisoned the genre and led a lot of other indie horror creators to believe a complex and intentionally vague narrative is the best way to ensure franchise longevity. Keep posing questions, provide no answers. I get it, sometimes it's best to let the audience fill in gaps, you don't want over-explain horror, but in the hands of a weak writer, the "unknown" can just be a euphemism for "nothing."
That's not to say Crow Country fails to raise any questions of its own, rather that in true PSX survival horror fashion, you're given all the clues you need to form the big picture through memos, context, and dialog. How well you do that is entirely dependent on how much you're paying attention, and whether you view Crow Country as being so cliched that its horror can be explained by way of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I was extremely satisfied by the ending, which leaves just enough unanswered that you'll still have something to think of without feeling like you'll need to consult a YouTube series or read like, seven fucking books and play a dozen more games. An indie horror game with a conclusion that is both cogent and earned, thank christ.
So make the most of your Memorial Day weekend and bring the whole family down to Crow Country. Come ride our newest attraction: The Seven Seas, and discover new types of bacteria. Remember, vets and children under 6 get in free!
Thank God the indie market is so robust these days, because the increasing homogenization of the modern big budget game and shrinking genre space therein means you wouldn't get proper survival horror otherwise. Crow Country and others like Signalis have been filling that void, but despite clearly playing to the charm of PlayStation era horror with its visuals - especially with its character models, which look as though they've been unearthed from an old Net Yaroze kit - Crow Country is no tired pastiche. It's safe rooms, puzzles, and resource management might harken to a design ethos that was at one point more commonplace, but these elements feel authentic and borne from a place of appreciation and understanding.
Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in the park's layout and the way in which the player navigates it. The amusement park theme allows for neatly defined areas with their own theming and unique attractions, with hidden passages, back rooms, cast tunnels, and a subterranean network serving as the connective tissue between each "land" in a way that feels appropriate for the setting while serving to make the park feel highly interconnected. Crow Country is great at providing a sense of space while conveying where the player should go and what to do next. I never felt lost or completely stumped by a puzzle and was consistently engaged and encouraged to revisit old locations to explore - the part of my brain that starts processing how I want to route my way through a game activated pretty early, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign that a survival horror game is living up to the promise of its genre.
The setting is also small. Crow Country is less Disneyland, more Santa's Village, so one way developer SFB Games succeeds in making repeated loops through the park threatening is by gradually introducing more enemies and traps to familiar locations. As the time of day progresses, rain and darkness further obscure the player's vision, and boobytrapped pick-ups begin to litter the map to prey on the sense of trust they've developed with their environment. I sprinted my way through the opening two hours, juked most enemies and picked up any crap I saw laying on the ground. By hour five, I was walking everywhere, stopping frequently, side-eyeing boxes of ammo, and finding that I actually had to conserve what I had due to the increased expectation that I shoot some damn "guests."
I also appreciate Crow Country for telling a complete and coherent story, something I think a lot of horror games have pushed away from. I think the Five Nights series has poisoned the genre and led a lot of other indie horror creators to believe a complex and intentionally vague narrative is the best way to ensure franchise longevity. Keep posing questions, provide no answers. I get it, sometimes it's best to let the audience fill in gaps, you don't want over-explain horror, but in the hands of a weak writer, the "unknown" can just be a euphemism for "nothing."
That's not to say Crow Country fails to raise any questions of its own, rather that in true PSX survival horror fashion, you're given all the clues you need to form the big picture through memos, context, and dialog. How well you do that is entirely dependent on how much you're paying attention, and whether you view Crow Country as being so cliched that its horror can be explained by way of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I was extremely satisfied by the ending, which leaves just enough unanswered that you'll still have something to think of without feeling like you'll need to consult a YouTube series or read like, seven fucking books and play a dozen more games. An indie horror game with a conclusion that is both cogent and earned, thank christ.
So make the most of your Memorial Day weekend and bring the whole family down to Crow Country. Come ride our newest attraction: The Seven Seas, and discover new types of bacteria. Remember, vets and children under 6 get in free!
Internet buffoon tries to start a high school band, accidentally causes the Third Impact.
I generally only collect Japanese copies of games that can easily be beaten without an understanding of the language, but the Evangelion games are something of a curiosity to me. How do you even turn Evangelion into a game anyway? This is a series so known for its emotionally heavy storytelling that audiences still debate its greater meaning over social media today. Is it about our capacity to love others and to be loved ourselves? Is it a pointed deconstruction of otaku culture? Wrong. Completely incorrect. It's about a big robot whose weapons are all assigned to a god damn roulette wheel whiffing every shot it takes.
The answer to "how do you make Evangelion into a game" is, evidently, by crafting a combat system wherein Angels are fought through a combination of tells and dumb luck, both too complex to be understood without a guide yet easy enough that you can kinda brute force your way through it. How do you call in support from the other Eva units? How do you choose when to change armaments? When should you block? Don't know, don't care, and never. I'm over here disassociating and going "blap blap blap" with my Glock, and it's been working out just fine. That's because I'm at a level of emotional trauma that makes me a perfect Evangelion pilot.
Of course, Evangelion is about more than the big robot fights, so breaking up these combat sequences - and arguably being the main thrust of the game - are FMVs that occasionally provide the player the ability to choose dialog and affect the outcome of the story. I was mostly navigating my way through these like my name was Max Payne, so 90% of the time I found myself staring at Shinji as he lays in bed with his headphones on whining to himself. It's impossible to interpret if this is good or bad.
Look, my read of 2nd Impression is limited by a language barrier and the presentation of its mechanics. The experience of playing (or perhaps more accurately, watching) 2nd Impression is like finding a VHS tape with a lost episode at some anime convention. It's strange, unseen material that you can't quite parse correctly, and fascinating as a piece of withheld Eva media. Moving beyond that novelty requires more of me than I'm capable of, unfortunately, and given the lack of coverage for 2nd Impression even on fan sites and wikis, I doubt there's enough interest for a translation to ever materialize, especially considering it's mostly spoken dialog, potentially requiring some Bulk Slash level effort. The most I was able to find was a lone YouTube video apparently stitching together someone's single run through one of the game's four divergent scenarios.
Perhaps the most interesting and readily appreciable part of 2nd Impression is its packaging and supplemental material. My copy came with all of its inserts, which mostly just advertise other games and products releasing around the same time, which I think is cool enough on its own, but the main draw is the set of collectable character cards (mine are sealed and I don't have it in me to open them) and the bonus soundtrack printed on a cute mini-disc that can be read by the Saturn. This contains two versions of two songs exclusive to the game: "You Are the Reason You Were Born" and "Get it on! ~To Kiss a Doppelgänger~".Having previously engaged in Tulpamancy, I would not recommend kissing a doppelgänger unless you want to end up on IV antibiotics Asuka says you've got to get it on, it doesn't matter if your partner isn't a real person, constructed beings are fair game. Mandate: Get. It. On.
If you want to listen to the soundtrack, thankfully it's been preserved and made available on YouTube. You won't be getting the true 2nd Impression experience of hearing these songs cranked out through the speakers of an old CRT while a Sega Saturn audibly whirrs in the background, which as any true audiophile will tell you adds important texture to the music.
Though I can follow a guide, read one of a few plot synopses, or watch a single translated playthrough, my own lack of ability prevents me from more directly participating with the game, so I'm not going to bother rating it. Just feels unfair to do so. What I can say is that 2nd Impression is pretty cheap on the aftermarket and that I think it's worth the ten-or-so dollars you'd pay to have it on your shelf, especially if you're an Evangelion fan to begin with.
Get in the robot, Shinji. Or Rei will have to play the Sega Saturn again.
I generally only collect Japanese copies of games that can easily be beaten without an understanding of the language, but the Evangelion games are something of a curiosity to me. How do you even turn Evangelion into a game anyway? This is a series so known for its emotionally heavy storytelling that audiences still debate its greater meaning over social media today. Is it about our capacity to love others and to be loved ourselves? Is it a pointed deconstruction of otaku culture? Wrong. Completely incorrect. It's about a big robot whose weapons are all assigned to a god damn roulette wheel whiffing every shot it takes.
The answer to "how do you make Evangelion into a game" is, evidently, by crafting a combat system wherein Angels are fought through a combination of tells and dumb luck, both too complex to be understood without a guide yet easy enough that you can kinda brute force your way through it. How do you call in support from the other Eva units? How do you choose when to change armaments? When should you block? Don't know, don't care, and never. I'm over here disassociating and going "blap blap blap" with my Glock, and it's been working out just fine. That's because I'm at a level of emotional trauma that makes me a perfect Evangelion pilot.
Of course, Evangelion is about more than the big robot fights, so breaking up these combat sequences - and arguably being the main thrust of the game - are FMVs that occasionally provide the player the ability to choose dialog and affect the outcome of the story. I was mostly navigating my way through these like my name was Max Payne, so 90% of the time I found myself staring at Shinji as he lays in bed with his headphones on whining to himself. It's impossible to interpret if this is good or bad.
Look, my read of 2nd Impression is limited by a language barrier and the presentation of its mechanics. The experience of playing (or perhaps more accurately, watching) 2nd Impression is like finding a VHS tape with a lost episode at some anime convention. It's strange, unseen material that you can't quite parse correctly, and fascinating as a piece of withheld Eva media. Moving beyond that novelty requires more of me than I'm capable of, unfortunately, and given the lack of coverage for 2nd Impression even on fan sites and wikis, I doubt there's enough interest for a translation to ever materialize, especially considering it's mostly spoken dialog, potentially requiring some Bulk Slash level effort. The most I was able to find was a lone YouTube video apparently stitching together someone's single run through one of the game's four divergent scenarios.
Perhaps the most interesting and readily appreciable part of 2nd Impression is its packaging and supplemental material. My copy came with all of its inserts, which mostly just advertise other games and products releasing around the same time, which I think is cool enough on its own, but the main draw is the set of collectable character cards (mine are sealed and I don't have it in me to open them) and the bonus soundtrack printed on a cute mini-disc that can be read by the Saturn. This contains two versions of two songs exclusive to the game: "You Are the Reason You Were Born" and "Get it on! ~To Kiss a Doppelgänger~".
If you want to listen to the soundtrack, thankfully it's been preserved and made available on YouTube. You won't be getting the true 2nd Impression experience of hearing these songs cranked out through the speakers of an old CRT while a Sega Saturn audibly whirrs in the background, which as any true audiophile will tell you adds important texture to the music.
Though I can follow a guide, read one of a few plot synopses, or watch a single translated playthrough, my own lack of ability prevents me from more directly participating with the game, so I'm not going to bother rating it. Just feels unfair to do so. What I can say is that 2nd Impression is pretty cheap on the aftermarket and that I think it's worth the ten-or-so dollars you'd pay to have it on your shelf, especially if you're an Evangelion fan to begin with.
Get in the robot, Shinji. Or Rei will have to play the Sega Saturn again.
2018
Within the first hour of Hades, I rolled a boon that gave me +2HP regeneration per hit at the expense of half my health, plus another which healed me by a certain amount if I dodged after being struck. I coasted to the third boss, where I finally ate shit while getting sandwiched between a minotaur and Theesus' hot, oily body (video games are all about wish-fulfillment, you see.) I figured there was no way I wouldn't knock this out in a single sitting if I was able to get 75% of the way through the game so early and with so little equipment and abilities unlocked, so I settled in and started thinking about what I'd play next.
It took me another 20ish hours to beat up my dad.
Chaos is down here, but I feel him everywhere. I sense him in the damn walls, because in true roguelike fashion, my ability to claw my way out of the underworld is largely determined by blind luck. Did I get the crystal turrets this run? No? Well shit, I guess this has become an exploratory mission, a grind to get as much crystals and keys as possible to buy stat upgrades and equipment to mitigate some of my misfortune. Oh good, I managed to get a boon to pom upgrades so everything is doubled now, surely I'll beat Hades this time and-- what do you mean he has two health bars, what is this Lies of P bull shit?
Each failed run sends me back to the main hall, where Zag can chat with his friends, colleagues and family, or pet his dog, maybe do a little interior decorating... it's a place to pause, to breath and collect oneself before the next run. Only problem is, I'm not built like that. I'm a sick little goblin freak and for the past eight hours I've been able to consistently make it to the fourth layer of the Underworld, where rats with a billion HP pick at my bones. No time to talk, Nyx. Go suck yourself, Hypnos. I don't have time for your sharply written dialog and I've run out of patience for picking out different colors of drapes, this is the run.
It's not the run. I can't be mad, though. The worst parts of Hades are tropes so quintessential to the genre that if you didn't expect them going in, then you aren't really being honest to yourself about what Hades is. The lack of predictability is a feature, one that comes with some great highs and abysmal lows, which at times made me feel like Hades is deserving of its praise while also making me want to put it down. Ask me how much I like Hades and I'm going to say "it depends."
And, in perfect fashion, I finally kicked my old man's ass not because I collected enough keys to unlock every weapon so that I could gain access to the upgrade system, or because I had maxed out several stat upgrades I felt might help keep Zag alive - as was my plan - but because I happened to roll a +900% damage perk against armor, perfect for making short work of those rats. With that, level 7 crystal turrets, and four full charges of Death Defiance, I could've taped my eyes shut during the fight against Hades. The cool thing about roguelikes is they can either favor you too early and trivialize the whole game or dick you over so much that you're just miserable. The truly fortunate land somewhere in the middle and get a more satisfying sense of balance amid all the dice rolls and chaos.
Despite the rogulike trappings of chance and repetition, I don't think Hades is a bad game, so much as it's a perfectly alright one. In fact, the bits that are more unique to Hades, like the writing, character designs, and even the way Zag feels in combat, are all great. If this genre is more your thing than it is mine, then this is probably a must play, maybe one of the best of all time. For me, it's a "shelved" that I'm giving a 3/5 because 20+ hours later, I can't imagine another run with modifiers actually turning the needle much at all. I'll probably get back to it someday, but for now, I need to put this down and play something else... Like Prey: Mooncrash!
It took me another 20ish hours to beat up my dad.
Chaos is down here, but I feel him everywhere. I sense him in the damn walls, because in true roguelike fashion, my ability to claw my way out of the underworld is largely determined by blind luck. Did I get the crystal turrets this run? No? Well shit, I guess this has become an exploratory mission, a grind to get as much crystals and keys as possible to buy stat upgrades and equipment to mitigate some of my misfortune. Oh good, I managed to get a boon to pom upgrades so everything is doubled now, surely I'll beat Hades this time and-- what do you mean he has two health bars, what is this Lies of P bull shit?
Each failed run sends me back to the main hall, where Zag can chat with his friends, colleagues and family, or pet his dog, maybe do a little interior decorating... it's a place to pause, to breath and collect oneself before the next run. Only problem is, I'm not built like that. I'm a sick little goblin freak and for the past eight hours I've been able to consistently make it to the fourth layer of the Underworld, where rats with a billion HP pick at my bones. No time to talk, Nyx. Go suck yourself, Hypnos. I don't have time for your sharply written dialog and I've run out of patience for picking out different colors of drapes, this is the run.
It's not the run. I can't be mad, though. The worst parts of Hades are tropes so quintessential to the genre that if you didn't expect them going in, then you aren't really being honest to yourself about what Hades is. The lack of predictability is a feature, one that comes with some great highs and abysmal lows, which at times made me feel like Hades is deserving of its praise while also making me want to put it down. Ask me how much I like Hades and I'm going to say "it depends."
And, in perfect fashion, I finally kicked my old man's ass not because I collected enough keys to unlock every weapon so that I could gain access to the upgrade system, or because I had maxed out several stat upgrades I felt might help keep Zag alive - as was my plan - but because I happened to roll a +900% damage perk against armor, perfect for making short work of those rats. With that, level 7 crystal turrets, and four full charges of Death Defiance, I could've taped my eyes shut during the fight against Hades. The cool thing about roguelikes is they can either favor you too early and trivialize the whole game or dick you over so much that you're just miserable. The truly fortunate land somewhere in the middle and get a more satisfying sense of balance amid all the dice rolls and chaos.
Despite the rogulike trappings of chance and repetition, I don't think Hades is a bad game, so much as it's a perfectly alright one. In fact, the bits that are more unique to Hades, like the writing, character designs, and even the way Zag feels in combat, are all great. If this genre is more your thing than it is mine, then this is probably a must play, maybe one of the best of all time. For me, it's a "shelved" that I'm giving a 3/5 because 20+ hours later, I can't imagine another run with modifiers actually turning the needle much at all. I'll probably get back to it someday, but for now, I need to put this down and play something else... Like Prey: Mooncrash!
If you open and exit this review 20 times, you'll unlock my review for Blue Spheres.
There was a long stretch where Sonic Mega Collection was my go-to way to play through the classic Genesis series, and I have a lot of fond memories of me loafing around my dorm room with my GameCube hooked up to my tiny CRT, just running through Sonic 3 & Knuckles for the millionth time. Loading it up again today for the first time in nearly 20 years, it's not surprising to me that every save slot for that game is filled up, played to 100% completion, with every combination of characters possible. I had a lot of time on my hands.
I still make enough time to go back and play these once or twice a year, and seeing as I've made the absolutely insane commitment to play every Sonic the Hedgehog game (that I am physically able to before the Sonic rot becomes terminal and fully cannibalizes my brain), I figured I should throw Mega Collection and the other compilations onto the pile and see how they stack up against each other.
Well, I've been busy breaking down each compilation with highly corrosive materials, mixing them in beakers and testing them with specially designed strips to indicate their purity, and the results are in: Sonic Mega Collection is (probably) the best one (maybe.) To date, I've tested Gems Collection, Sonic Jam, Origins Plus, and I've dabbled with the PlayStation 2 release of Mega Collection Plus, and all of them are in their own ways more compromised than vanilla Mega Collection. And yeah, I probably could've figured that out without a visit from the cops and the fine folks at the Department of Environmental Quality. Sure, just playing these games would've been "safer" and wouldn't have resulted in an "ecological disaster" or the production of "radiological material..." Whatever.
Mega Collection is a pretty straight-forward package, a real "has all his fingers and toes" release that gives you exactly what you want. The Genesis trilogy of games runs perfectly fine, I didn't encounter any more bugs than I would during a normal playthrough of these games on Genesis hardware, and while there is some audio cues here and there which don't sound quite right, it's nothing as egregious as Sonic Jam. Probably the biggest downside to actually playing these versions of Sonic 1-3 is using the GameCube controller, but if you're the sort of person who, in the year 2024, decides to play through the original Sonic games on GameCube hardware specifically, then an aftermarket controller with a proper d-pad won't set you back much and you're probably crazy enough to already have one.
Unlocking additional games - including Flicky and Ristar - however, is a total hassle. You have to boot up specific games a certain number of times before additional games will unlock, and I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but they should be frozen and preserved until future generations develop the level of technology necessary for truly understanding their brain. Practically, if you wanted to unlock everything fast you could just keep backing in and out, but a more sensible way to do this would be unlocking new games for completing old ones. Or just have them all unlocked from the start. Really no reason not to.
Full manuals are also included for each game but navigating them is a chore and the scan quality is just low enough that they become difficult to read on a CRT. The included gallery of Archie Sonic comic covers is also hard to look at, but I did have a decent time flicking through these and remembering all the good and bad that was Archie Sonic. Did you know there's an issue where an evil Sonic (who wears a leather jacket so you know he's bad) transports himself to Sonic's world and enacts a master plan to make Sonic have too many girlfriends by kissing all the pretty ladies he can find, and then in the next couple stories Sonic's whole problem is he doesn't know how to manage a polycule? Well now you do. I put that knowledge in your head.
There's definitely better ways to play these games. I'd easily recommend Sonic 3: AIR or Sonic 3: Complete, for example, but if you're wanting something official and physical, Mega Collection is a decent package that does right by the included games. Plus, you can look at comic covers and remember they interrupted the main story to do a two-part Guardians of the Galaxy parody and that Knuckles was green for some reason.
There was a long stretch where Sonic Mega Collection was my go-to way to play through the classic Genesis series, and I have a lot of fond memories of me loafing around my dorm room with my GameCube hooked up to my tiny CRT, just running through Sonic 3 & Knuckles for the millionth time. Loading it up again today for the first time in nearly 20 years, it's not surprising to me that every save slot for that game is filled up, played to 100% completion, with every combination of characters possible. I had a lot of time on my hands.
I still make enough time to go back and play these once or twice a year, and seeing as I've made the absolutely insane commitment to play every Sonic the Hedgehog game (that I am physically able to before the Sonic rot becomes terminal and fully cannibalizes my brain), I figured I should throw Mega Collection and the other compilations onto the pile and see how they stack up against each other.
Well, I've been busy breaking down each compilation with highly corrosive materials, mixing them in beakers and testing them with specially designed strips to indicate their purity, and the results are in: Sonic Mega Collection is (probably) the best one (maybe.) To date, I've tested Gems Collection, Sonic Jam, Origins Plus, and I've dabbled with the PlayStation 2 release of Mega Collection Plus, and all of them are in their own ways more compromised than vanilla Mega Collection. And yeah, I probably could've figured that out without a visit from the cops and the fine folks at the Department of Environmental Quality. Sure, just playing these games would've been "safer" and wouldn't have resulted in an "ecological disaster" or the production of "radiological material..." Whatever.
Mega Collection is a pretty straight-forward package, a real "has all his fingers and toes" release that gives you exactly what you want. The Genesis trilogy of games runs perfectly fine, I didn't encounter any more bugs than I would during a normal playthrough of these games on Genesis hardware, and while there is some audio cues here and there which don't sound quite right, it's nothing as egregious as Sonic Jam. Probably the biggest downside to actually playing these versions of Sonic 1-3 is using the GameCube controller, but if you're the sort of person who, in the year 2024, decides to play through the original Sonic games on GameCube hardware specifically, then an aftermarket controller with a proper d-pad won't set you back much and you're probably crazy enough to already have one.
Unlocking additional games - including Flicky and Ristar - however, is a total hassle. You have to boot up specific games a certain number of times before additional games will unlock, and I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but they should be frozen and preserved until future generations develop the level of technology necessary for truly understanding their brain. Practically, if you wanted to unlock everything fast you could just keep backing in and out, but a more sensible way to do this would be unlocking new games for completing old ones. Or just have them all unlocked from the start. Really no reason not to.
Full manuals are also included for each game but navigating them is a chore and the scan quality is just low enough that they become difficult to read on a CRT. The included gallery of Archie Sonic comic covers is also hard to look at, but I did have a decent time flicking through these and remembering all the good and bad that was Archie Sonic. Did you know there's an issue where an evil Sonic (who wears a leather jacket so you know he's bad) transports himself to Sonic's world and enacts a master plan to make Sonic have too many girlfriends by kissing all the pretty ladies he can find, and then in the next couple stories Sonic's whole problem is he doesn't know how to manage a polycule? Well now you do. I put that knowledge in your head.
There's definitely better ways to play these games. I'd easily recommend Sonic 3: AIR or Sonic 3: Complete, for example, but if you're wanting something official and physical, Mega Collection is a decent package that does right by the included games. Plus, you can look at comic covers and remember they interrupted the main story to do a two-part Guardians of the Galaxy parody and that Knuckles was green for some reason.
2004
Just like Fear Effect and Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball, Rumble Roses is a game I remember more for its marketing than any discussion around it. It's one of those games, where the jiggle physics is cranked all the way up, and any opportunity to sneak in a fanservice shot is seized upon with such ferocity you'd think some poor animator had on a collar rigged to blow if they don't fit in as much TNA as possible, like some pervert's version of Speed. Every print ad for games like this was carefully framed to tantalize the teenaged male demographic, with characters pressed together or caught in some compromising pose with "Mario Bros. doesn't have... BOOBS!" written in big blocky letters. Everyone who fell for one of those has a YouTube channel now.
Speaking of YouTubers, my friend and current Xenosaga hype machine, TransWitchSammy, is the only person I've met in my entire life that has actually played Rumble Roses as a proper video game. I still wasn't very interested until she put me in a mandible claw hold and forced my compliance. I had to look up names of wrestling holds for that joke, by the way. I don't know anything about the sport, I just remember seeing Dean Ambrose bring a Coney Island hot dog cart he stole to a match once, and besides that it's periodic updates from Appreciations about what Cum Punk is up to post-WWE.
I am likewise just as uninitiated with wrestling games, but as I understand it, most of them are total garbage. I can't say how Rumble Roses stacks up against its contemporaries or even modern wrestling games, but in isolation, it's got more going on than I initially thought while still not having enough to sustain me beyond clearing 40% of the roster in story mode.
Much like fighting games, which I often describe in how "responsive" they are and how good the impact of landing a hit feels, I'm so much of a philistine here that I can't articulate the more technical aspects of how this game works. I'm no expert on frame timing, I can't count let alone perceive input delay, I navigate these games the same way I would a real fight, all elbows and open-hand slaps (see: button mashing.) But the specials in this game are ridiculous and bombastic in the way real wrestling techniques are, and they look just as likely to cause real, severe, long-lasting damage when executed by a non-professional, so I'd say Rumble Roses ticks the right boxes.
The story is also appropriately bonkers, and I've made several attempts already to describe it as a mashup of wrestling storylines and fighting game narratives but scrapped all that after realizing they're basically the same thing. Dr. Cutter is doing a whole sexy nurse gimmick, but she's also like, brainwashing wrestlers and turning them into heels in an effort to harvest them for her cyborg, and that's something that feels as ripped from the WWE as it does Tekken.
It's just a shame then that Rumble Roses does so little with the heel/face alternate scenarios for each wrestler. Though this does double the size of the roster, each character's second scenario is truncated, with fewer fights and threadbare narratives that amount to an opening and closing cutscene to establish and bookend their gimmicks. Reiko - a certifiable babyface and the lead character - joins a biker gang, and she is completely unconvincing in the role, like a child wanting to be taken seriously. It's really endearing and silly, but you get so little of it. Likewise, there's a real drought of interesting costumes, with each character getting a normal outfit and swimsuit and a single pallet swap of each. Maybe I'm spoiled on Dead or Alive, but I feel like this misses some of the pageantry of wrestling. I just... I wanna dress up the pretty ladies......... .
There are also only three rings to fight in, one of which being a mud pit, and several wrestlers share moves with one another, which resulted in the game feeling a bit long in the tooth after only a few hours of play. The "glass half full" way of looking at this is that my biggest complaint about Rumble Roses is there isn't more of it. This is apparently something Rumble Roses XX addresses, but I've also heard more divisive things about that one... I'd love to say that since I'm buying Xbox 360 games up already that I'd just grab a copy and find out myself, but that thing is 70 damn dollars on average. I like Rumble Roses but not that much.
Anyway, 3/5. Would let Dr. Cutter perform unethical surgery on me.
Speaking of YouTubers, my friend and current Xenosaga hype machine, TransWitchSammy, is the only person I've met in my entire life that has actually played Rumble Roses as a proper video game. I still wasn't very interested until she put me in a mandible claw hold and forced my compliance. I had to look up names of wrestling holds for that joke, by the way. I don't know anything about the sport, I just remember seeing Dean Ambrose bring a Coney Island hot dog cart he stole to a match once, and besides that it's periodic updates from Appreciations about what Cum Punk is up to post-WWE.
I am likewise just as uninitiated with wrestling games, but as I understand it, most of them are total garbage. I can't say how Rumble Roses stacks up against its contemporaries or even modern wrestling games, but in isolation, it's got more going on than I initially thought while still not having enough to sustain me beyond clearing 40% of the roster in story mode.
Much like fighting games, which I often describe in how "responsive" they are and how good the impact of landing a hit feels, I'm so much of a philistine here that I can't articulate the more technical aspects of how this game works. I'm no expert on frame timing, I can't count let alone perceive input delay, I navigate these games the same way I would a real fight, all elbows and open-hand slaps (see: button mashing.) But the specials in this game are ridiculous and bombastic in the way real wrestling techniques are, and they look just as likely to cause real, severe, long-lasting damage when executed by a non-professional, so I'd say Rumble Roses ticks the right boxes.
The story is also appropriately bonkers, and I've made several attempts already to describe it as a mashup of wrestling storylines and fighting game narratives but scrapped all that after realizing they're basically the same thing. Dr. Cutter is doing a whole sexy nurse gimmick, but she's also like, brainwashing wrestlers and turning them into heels in an effort to harvest them for her cyborg, and that's something that feels as ripped from the WWE as it does Tekken.
It's just a shame then that Rumble Roses does so little with the heel/face alternate scenarios for each wrestler. Though this does double the size of the roster, each character's second scenario is truncated, with fewer fights and threadbare narratives that amount to an opening and closing cutscene to establish and bookend their gimmicks. Reiko - a certifiable babyface and the lead character - joins a biker gang, and she is completely unconvincing in the role, like a child wanting to be taken seriously. It's really endearing and silly, but you get so little of it. Likewise, there's a real drought of interesting costumes, with each character getting a normal outfit and swimsuit and a single pallet swap of each. Maybe I'm spoiled on Dead or Alive, but I feel like this misses some of the pageantry of wrestling. I just... I wanna dress up the pretty ladies......... .
There are also only three rings to fight in, one of which being a mud pit, and several wrestlers share moves with one another, which resulted in the game feeling a bit long in the tooth after only a few hours of play. The "glass half full" way of looking at this is that my biggest complaint about Rumble Roses is there isn't more of it. This is apparently something Rumble Roses XX addresses, but I've also heard more divisive things about that one... I'd love to say that since I'm buying Xbox 360 games up already that I'd just grab a copy and find out myself, but that thing is 70 damn dollars on average. I like Rumble Roses but not that much.
Anyway, 3/5. Would let Dr. Cutter perform unethical surgery on me.
2018
Claire, Riley, Joan, Andrius: Fuck everyone who works here!!
Vijay: nobody knows i'm drinking on the job again B-)
I think Prey: Mooncrash might have me feeling even worse about Hades. I spent most of that review moaning about roguelike genre staples and accusing that game of either being too agonizing or too trivial based on blind luck. I was actually apprehensive about moving directly from one roguelike to another, but I'm glad I stuck with the plan, because Mooncrash addresses a lot of the issues I have with the genre and finds ways to make the repetitive nature of playing these games work within the setting of an immersive sim.
Mooncrash accomplishes this by serving up a sort of Resident Evil or Metroid-like rhythm, where subsequent runs through the moon's facilities feel better and better as the player plans around objectives and develops their own route. While the layout of the facility remains static, item locations, key cards, enemies, and different hazards and conditions (like what doors are operational or where power is being routed) provide a necessary wrinkle to keep each run engaging, while a constantly ticking corruption meter threatens to repopulate previously cleared rooms with more powerful Typhon if you aren't quick enough. Granted, you can just buy a bunch of items that reset that meter, which kind of defeats the point, so my advice to you would be to avoid picking those up.
Unlocking every character and escape route on your way towards that perfect, immaculate final run requires you to complete each character's story missions (activated by touching a giant brain) and satisfying specific sequences, like using Joan and Claire to repair and hack into a portal device respectively to permit another character to escape through it. Changes made to the environment by one character during a run will persist into the next character's escape attempt, allowing you to tee up specific rooms in advance to ease the process and formulate the most efficient escape possible.
I'm a sicko and I eat that sort of thing up. If you design your game in a way that encourages me to repeatedly play through it and develop a more efficient method of reaching the end each time, I'll probably be on that shit annually. This isn't appealing to me in the way it might be to speedrunners where every little frame becomes a point of hyper-fixation (bad and evil), so much as it's about gaining mastery over a specific sequence of objectives while reducing points of failure along the way (good, pure and made of light.)
This would be an easy 5/5 for me if it weren't for a few shortcomings that hold the whole experience back, most of which make navigating the moon's surface - essentially the game's hub area, where its three main facilities connect - a hassle, and progressively dull. Each facility is locked by a Tyhpon gate, which requires you to clear out the nearby area of any Typhon infesting it. This gets repetitious in a way that doesn't really add anything, and flying enemies have a tendency to get stuck on roofs, which too often forces you to coerce them into the open. You also have to deal with the Moon Shark, a large enemy that burrows underground and seeks you out based on vibrations against the moon's surface. In other words: the floor is lava. This is a novel idea for maybe the first couple hours, but since the Moon Shark is one of a few persistent elements, you always have to deal with it, and the gimmick inevitably drags.
Mooncrash also runs bad. The framerate is poor and load times are weirdly long, although I never had the game crash like I did with base Prey so, that's nice at least. It's just a shame a game released in 2018 has not really been optimized for the Series X, a console that should be more than capable of running it smoothly. Sure, as with most immersive sims, this is probably best enjoyed on a PC, but guess what? I didn't buy it on PC! I'm over here rolling my thumb around on the Series X's d-pad, just enjoying how clicky it is while wearing a big fuckin dunce cap. I look like an idiot!
Anyway, I've cleared the two roguelikes off my backlog. I am done! I don't have to play anything in this genre ever again!
... Until Hades II gets out of early access.
Vijay: nobody knows i'm drinking on the job again B-)
I think Prey: Mooncrash might have me feeling even worse about Hades. I spent most of that review moaning about roguelike genre staples and accusing that game of either being too agonizing or too trivial based on blind luck. I was actually apprehensive about moving directly from one roguelike to another, but I'm glad I stuck with the plan, because Mooncrash addresses a lot of the issues I have with the genre and finds ways to make the repetitive nature of playing these games work within the setting of an immersive sim.
Mooncrash accomplishes this by serving up a sort of Resident Evil or Metroid-like rhythm, where subsequent runs through the moon's facilities feel better and better as the player plans around objectives and develops their own route. While the layout of the facility remains static, item locations, key cards, enemies, and different hazards and conditions (like what doors are operational or where power is being routed) provide a necessary wrinkle to keep each run engaging, while a constantly ticking corruption meter threatens to repopulate previously cleared rooms with more powerful Typhon if you aren't quick enough. Granted, you can just buy a bunch of items that reset that meter, which kind of defeats the point, so my advice to you would be to avoid picking those up.
Unlocking every character and escape route on your way towards that perfect, immaculate final run requires you to complete each character's story missions (activated by touching a giant brain) and satisfying specific sequences, like using Joan and Claire to repair and hack into a portal device respectively to permit another character to escape through it. Changes made to the environment by one character during a run will persist into the next character's escape attempt, allowing you to tee up specific rooms in advance to ease the process and formulate the most efficient escape possible.
I'm a sicko and I eat that sort of thing up. If you design your game in a way that encourages me to repeatedly play through it and develop a more efficient method of reaching the end each time, I'll probably be on that shit annually. This isn't appealing to me in the way it might be to speedrunners where every little frame becomes a point of hyper-fixation (bad and evil), so much as it's about gaining mastery over a specific sequence of objectives while reducing points of failure along the way (good, pure and made of light.)
This would be an easy 5/5 for me if it weren't for a few shortcomings that hold the whole experience back, most of which make navigating the moon's surface - essentially the game's hub area, where its three main facilities connect - a hassle, and progressively dull. Each facility is locked by a Tyhpon gate, which requires you to clear out the nearby area of any Typhon infesting it. This gets repetitious in a way that doesn't really add anything, and flying enemies have a tendency to get stuck on roofs, which too often forces you to coerce them into the open. You also have to deal with the Moon Shark, a large enemy that burrows underground and seeks you out based on vibrations against the moon's surface. In other words: the floor is lava. This is a novel idea for maybe the first couple hours, but since the Moon Shark is one of a few persistent elements, you always have to deal with it, and the gimmick inevitably drags.
Mooncrash also runs bad. The framerate is poor and load times are weirdly long, although I never had the game crash like I did with base Prey so, that's nice at least. It's just a shame a game released in 2018 has not really been optimized for the Series X, a console that should be more than capable of running it smoothly. Sure, as with most immersive sims, this is probably best enjoyed on a PC, but guess what? I didn't buy it on PC! I'm over here rolling my thumb around on the Series X's d-pad, just enjoying how clicky it is while wearing a big fuckin dunce cap. I look like an idiot!
Anyway, I've cleared the two roguelikes off my backlog. I am done! I don't have to play anything in this genre ever again!
... Until Hades II gets out of early access.