Ever since Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 got the Taxman treatment in 2013, I've been aching for home console ports, just as was done with Sonic CD. For whatever reason, Sega opted to keep both titles strictly confined to mobile phones and Android devices. Nearly ten years later I'd all but written off the possibility of getting the original games in 16:9 on a home console or PC, and it would seem more resourceful fans felt the same way if projects like Sonic 2: Community Cut and Angel Island Revisited are any indication.

With the announcement of Sonic Origins it seemed Sega was finally prepared to fix all that, with a ground-up remaster of Sonic 3 & Knuckles to sweeten the package. But anyone with as much of an affinity for these titles as I have has probably lived long enough to build a well developed level of cynicism towards Sega, a company that is seemingly incapable of stepping out of its own way. Suffice it to say, Sonic Origins delivers on the bare minimum with so many compromises that you have to wonder if it's worth it at all.

The Taxman remasters are ostensibly here, reworked for this collection by the fine folks at Headcannon. For the most part Sonic 1, 2, and CD play fine and come out the least scathed, though there's some odd things about each. Sonic 1 and 2 feature the upgrades from the mobile game, like the inclusion of elemental shields, or the seventh emerald in Sonic 1, but these options are buried in each game's level select rather than baked into the main menu, which is a frustrating level of obfuscation. CD appears to be a straight port of the Taxman release rather than a rebuild as evidenced by the Taxman version's bespoke menus being present. A consequence of this is that switching between the American and Japanese soundtracks requires you to launch into the anniversary mode and toggle between regions in order for your choice to reflect in the Classic and Story Mode versions of the game. Also, you can't play as Knuckles in CD because he wasn't in the Taxman version, sorry!

The drop-dash has also been added to each game, but the implementation into 1, 2, and CD seems dodgy at best. There's a brief moment in the animation that gives the trick away: for a single frame the moment you touch the ground you can see Sonic curled up, mid-charge for a spindash. It's an interesting way to fake it, but it also causes the drop dash to feel distinctly off, and I found myself disregarding it outside of one specific use case in CD where you can simply drop dash back and forth to time travel more reliably.

The main attraction of course is Sonic 3 & Knuckles, which hasn't been rereleased for quite some time due to legal issues concerning Michael Jackson's contributions to the soundtrack. At this point you've probably heard the whole story and all its twists and turns, and I actually have to wonder if Sega would have remained blithely unaware of the problem if not for the story gaining more and more attention online. The solution was to remove these tracks and instead use those found in the beta version of Sonic 3, which themselves are used in the original 90's PC release of the game. Personally, I don't think these tracks ever fit in the first place. Their melodies sound inconsistent with the rest of the soundtrack's style, and outside of Carnival Night, they don't really match their levels either. Ice Cap is a poppy upbeat tune that betrays how isolated and cold the level is, which is something Brad Buxer's reuse of Hard Times captured perfectly. The audio quality is also piss poor, but really all of Sonic 3 sounds weirdly muffled here, with the exception of the new Super Sonic theme which pipes through crystal clear. This isn't too surprising as it's very obviously not using the Genesis sound font. I am perplexed by why it's even in the game, as the original Super Sonic theme is still present in this collection. Was it to alleviate how annoyingly short the original theme's loop was? If so, replacing it with something that sounds gratingly similar to the music from Sonic 4 doesn't seem like much of a solution at all. I am begging someone to keep Jun Senou away from synthesizers.

Music aside, Sonic 3 is buggy as hell. I had the game lock up multiple times on PS5, and Sonic has a nasty tendency to stop moving entirely when hanging from objects like vines or monkey bars. A couple times I had to restart the PS5 because the game became completely unresponsive. The rest of the games are much more stable by comparison, though Sonic 2 has an issue with Tails failing to rejoin the player after scrolling off-screen, resulting in constant jumping sounds, and an audio bug with the drop dash that causes a high pitched chirp out of the right channel that sounds like a smoke detector beeping.

There's some cosmetic changes to Sonic 3 as well, including an impressive amount of new sprites to fill in some of the gaps present in the original sprite sheet. Things like Sonic facing forward and looking up, and a few tweaks to cutscene animations. They look quite nice and only really stand out if you're intimately familiar with the original. More broadly, special stages are redone in each game, allowing for much smoother scrolling. This cuts down on the difficulty of collecting Chaos Emeralds tremendously and is a welcomed change.

There's a variety of other modes on offer, including a Classic mode that allows you to play each game in 4:3, mirror mode (which isn't a wholly original idea, but a fun novelty), and boss rush. Tying each of the games together is story mode, which allows you to play the Anniversary edition of each game in chronological order with newly animated cutscenes serving as connective tissue. These cutscenes are by the same people who did Sonic Mania Adventures, and they're really great. Humorous, but a bit more serious and true in tone to the games. And if you aren't completely burned out by this point, you can jump into the mission mode, which allows you to take on bite-sized challenges in remixed levels from each game. These aren't terribly difficult and I S-ranked most of them on my first attempt, so don't expect to get much more than an hour of out it.

Rounding out the collection is the museum, which features an audio library, illustration gallery, and movies which can be unlocked when certain conditions are met or via the use of coins earned from missions or Anniversary mode. Most of what there is to unlock you've probably seen by now, but there's a few gems in there. I wish they found more concept and game plan documents to throw in as opposed to style guides, but considering Sega has lost track of a lot of masters over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if their backlog of design docs is similarly limited. The audio gallery is a bit underwhelming, however. There's so many Sonic games with excellent soundtracks, but Origins restricts itself to only songs present or related to the games on offer, unless you pay more for DLC that adds Spinball, Knuckles Chaotix, and Sonic 3D Blast to the track list. You can also set up a playlist if you like, but you can't actually do anything with it.

The pricing and DLC plan for Origins is just as much a mess as the collection itself. The base game is 40$, which is asking a bit much already, with additional DLC setting you back 8$ total, unless you opt for the deluxe edition for 45$. Do not pay for the DLC, it does not add much to the overall package. The quantity of "extreme" difficulty missions is meager at best, the extra soundtracks can just be found on Youtube (and god knows you can do more with a youtube playlist than one that tethers you to your Playstation), and the extra character animations on the menu or borders for the 4:3 mode just aren't worth the price of admission. It is mildly infuriating that some of the menus are designed around Sonic Spinball and Sonic 3D Blast when neither game is included, too. I'm not expecting full remasters of these, the market just doesn't really exist for that, but would it have been so hard to toss in a few extra ROMs as unlockables?

To be fair, just because the presence of Sonic Spinball art and music tricked me into thinking it might be int he game doesn't mean I should've trusted that it would be. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... I'm gonna keep buying this garbage.

Being a Sonic fan is exhausting. A port of the 2013 and 2011 remasters along with a new port of Sonic 3 with widescreen support by Headcannon should have been a layup. But a lack of features, messy user interface, and glitchy compromised titles hold Origins back from being the definitive collection it could and should have been. No doubt this frustration is shared by Headcannon, as their founder Simon Thomley recently aired his grievances with Sega on Twitter. It's a shame Thomley has to jeopardize Headcannon's partnership with Sega, but his honestly and unwillingness for all the blame to be pinned on his staff is admirable. It should come as no surprise that Sega is still mired in self-sabotaging behavior, of course, and I can't imagine it being any different moving forward.

Sadly, the ROMs Sega was offering on digital storefronts for the original Sonic games were all delisted ahead of Origins release, and while this doesn't mean much from a preservation standpoint given how easily accessible they still are off certain sites, digital scarcity is never a good thing. Fans have long been using these ROMs coupled with fan projects to upscale these games legally, and those versions are still the best way to enjoy Sonic in 16:9. Your choices are to mod the games the way they ought to be or settle on a product that is buggy and compromised. When it comes down to it, that too is a celebration of what Sonic is: a series consistently outshined by the efforts of fans.

Correction (6/29): According to Digital Foundry, Sonic CD has some differences that make it clear that it is also a unique build for Origins, so I really have no idea why the 2011 menus are still present in it.

NieR is alright.

At the nagging insistence of my friends I finally picked this game up, not really knowing exactly what to expect from it other than the broad strokes: It's an action-RPG with shoot-em-up elements and an absurd number of endings; also girl got a big butt. It is, of course, more than this too. It's a game full of thoughtful well-written characters occupying a post-apocalyptic landscape I was actually able to invest myself in, and tells a story that has something to say and definitely "goes places." I definitely see why people latch on to this game so strongly, but having experienced the A, B, C, D and E routes for myself, I think NieR is a game whose flaws and strengths exist in near perfect balance.

The game's multiple routes are experienced by different characters. Route A puts you in control of 2B, whose playstyle is straight-forward and lays the foundation upon which the other two player characters build from. 9S, route B's protagonist, is able to hack enemy machines via a shoot-em-up minigame. This allows you to make short work of enemies, as most successful hacks will either lob off a huge chunk of health or outright kill the target. Lastly there's A2, the deuteragonist of Routes C, D, and E alongside 9S. She has a berserk mode which causes her to continually drain health in exchange for increased damage. With the right build, you can actually extend her berserk state for a ridiculous amount of time.

Routes A and B tell essentially the same story, and considering they're played back-to-back, it can be a bit of a slog even with 9S' hacking ability speeding things up. Combat is never so strong that I actively enjoyed getting into encounters, and a poor lock-on system makes it even more difficult to find something to anchor onto when things get really chaotic. As combat encounters get progressively more frenetic, I found that I had to claw my controller awkwardly to constantly mash the dodge button, hold onto the shoot button, and mash attack all at once, or else risk getting sucker-punched and juggled to death. It's just uncomfortable and far too mashy for my liking.

I'll admit that I didn't play the game "right" for much of Route A, having stuck mostly to story missions while disregarding all the side content. I didn't realize just how short each route was and got a bit too carried away, which the game allows you to do as the difficulty doesn't really spike until the end game. For route B, I made a concentrated effort to take on every side quest as they became available, and boy I don't like them! The vast majority of these quests just send you out to kill enemies and collect materials. Go here, fetch this. It's all very dull, which is a shame because the stories that each quest are built around are very charming. At times funny, at others surprisingly touching. They're worth playing just to eat up more lore (and because you'll need the experience), but it's a shame that they aren't more mechanically engaging.

I will say that NieR does do interesting things as a game, but these often come at the expense of the game's overall quality of life. Dying will drop your corpse both in your world and in others, which also causes you to drop all your equipped chips (which essentially act as stat modifiers). You can, and should, retrieve your corpse immediately, but you can also play the chip lotto by retrieving other player's corpses, or revive them to fight for you. I never found this to be useful as most players had garbage builds, and as an AI companion they die almost immediately, not even being particularly useful for drawing aggro. I just don't think this game needed a corpse run mechanic at all, and it sure isn't executed well in any case.

Upon reaching Route C, story events disrupt the usual reviving system, forcing players to rely upon hard saves as their only checkpoints. Pulling the rug out from under you is definitely impactful narratively, but in the long run it just becomes frustrating to deal with. I lost 30 minutes of progress once because a self-destructing enemy bumrushed me from off screen as I was trying to get in range of a save station, killing me in one hit. As I got closer and closer to the game's true ending I just accepted that my favorite parts of NieR are the ones where I'm not actively playing the game.

The story is fantastic, and I really love the look of the world and the characters that inhabit it. The plot is at times convoluted, but the characters and their motivations are always easy to understand. The pacifistic machine Pascal is one of the few shining sources of optimism in a world that is otherwise dead, ravaged by repeated wars waged on behalf of humans who don't even exist on the planet anymore. That character's arc is genuinely heartwarming and, ultimately, gutting. The relationship between 2B and 9S is especially well handled, each character working through the grief of losing the other in their own ways with only the vaguest of hopes that it might just work out for them in the end. A2 is a capital-B Butthole and I love her, but her tragic past gives context to her distrustful and stand-offish nature in a way that feels earned, which is rare for that type of character. The game's themes and the way it builds its conclusion is just so incredibly well handled that it kept me compelled even when the gameplay made me want to pop the disc back in its case.

There is, of course, a myriad of other smaller goofier endings that can be chanced upon, and it's always great when you hit one without trying. I accidentally moved out of the area of operations at the start of Route C and was branded a deserter, and while I also lost progress as a result, it at least got a pretty big laugh out of me, and that definitely took some of the sting off.

While some gameplay issues do keep me from loving NieR: Automata as much as others do, I'm still really glad I played it. The story is going to stick with me a lot longer than my frustrations with combat or the tedium of side quests.

I've heard a lot of great things about Guardian Heroes over the years, but I think this might just be my least favorite Treasure game.

One part beat-em-up, one part action-RPG, Guardian Heroes is definitely interesting in concept. You select from one of four characters with different stat builds and proficiencies before being set loose in a fantasy world on the brink of war by two feuding clans of spirits. How you progress through the game and what ending you ultimately get depends on several dialog prompts throughout the game, and in a way it's quite similar to Shadow the Hedgehog, giving it some replayability.

Treasure, as usual, knocks it out of the park with presentation. Animations are smooth, characters are suitably cartoonish, environments are colorful, and the soundtrack is full of bangers. There is a bit too much reuse of enemy sprites, with most being recolors of the same basic soldiers and orcs, but Guardian Heroes has so much of that Treasure charm that it's easy to give it a pass.

Less forgivable is the difficulty balancing, however. My initial playthrough got me about 80% through the game, and rather than sit there and slog through all of that a second time I decided to max out my character's stats, easy thanks to my Saturn's hacked Action Replay. But even with Han at his absolute zenith and the game set on easy, enemies are still spongy and more than capable of locking you in a juggle from which there's little hope of escape other than dumb luck. Two bosses in particular just fly around and spit magic everywhere, making them a nightmare to even approach let alone damage, and I'm just not sure how to beat them without cheating. By the end of the game, basic enemies will block through all of your attacks, and when you do manage to hit them they still have more than enough health to shoulder several combos. Magic appears to be a counterbalance to this, but it deals such pitiful damage that it only becomes useful when you can buy half a screen of space to spam it relentlessly.

As I finished the game a blue screen popped up, warning me about the dangers of pirating this game. It's not unlike the dozens of fake copyright warning videos people seem to love making for retro games. Guardian Heroes is intended for personal use, and it is a crime to sell, reproduce, or even rent the game. As I turned off my Sega Saturn and pulled out the CD-R I burned Guardian Heroes to, I thought "Perhaps... but not today."

While burning new Saturn games to play with my recently acquired Virtua Gun, I mistook Konami's Crypt Killer for Corpse Killer, which it is decidedly not. This is thankfully for the better as I have no illusions about how bad Corpse Killer is, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Crypt Killer is a solid, competent light gun shooter. I am also notoriously easy to please when it comes to these kinds of games, if me actively trying to download and burn Corpse Killer was any indication.

In a way this feels like the perfect follow-up to Powerslave with its heavy Egyptian aesthetics and a gigantic floating head acting as your guide. While Powerslave never took itself too seriously, Crypt Killer is definitely more jocular in tone. The game is divided into six levels, with each having branching paths. You only need to beat two levels to complete the game, but you're able to continue playing afterwards, with routes you've already taken being blocked off. This allows you to view all four of Crypt Killer's endings in a single session, assuming you're skilled enough to hang on to all your credits (or have an Action Replay like I do.)

The graphics are... not great. Everything is incredibly blocky even for a game of this era, and textures are so lacking in detail you might be left scratching your head trying to figure out what it is you're even looking at. The soundtrack is nothing spectacular, and Crypt Killer doesn't do anything particularly unique for the kind of game it is, but it still plays well enough and is a perfectly decent way to kill a couple hours.

So, yeah. Another 3/5 from me. I'm turning into Adam Sessler.

There was a period of time in the 90s where the only thing I lived for was the Power Rangers movie. I was so fixated on it that I frequently popped in a VHS tape of The Pagemaster because it had a trailer for it. I won a competition in my class at the time where the winner could bring in a movie (pre-approved of course) for the rest of the class to watch instead of doing work, and of course I brought in The Pagemaster because I thought, well, I would get to watch the Power Rangers trailer again...! I've always been a freak and so help me god I will die a freak, too.

Needless to say, I played Power Rangers: The Movie: The Game obsessively. It didn't matter that it's one of the most painfully dull beat-em-ups on the console, I could play as the White Ranger god damnit! I was prepared to sit down, proclaim this better than the SNES game, give it a 4 out of 5 and call it a day. But nostalgia is a powerful disease, and realizing this I decided to quickly do another run through the game in order to write my thoughts while it's still fresh in my mind.

Well, obviously it's not a 4 out of 5.

For a beat-em-up on the Genesis circa 1995, Power Rangers is wholly unacceptable. The Streets of Rage series, even TMNT: The Hyperstone Heist are multitudes better than this, far more dynamic and engaging as brawlers. Those games push you forward and give you characters with more versatile movesets, whereas in Power Rangers everyone plays exactly the same and most levels are drawn out slogs where enemies continually jump in to attack you for minutes at a time before you're allowed to scroll the screen. The controls are finicky too. If you're holding a directional button while attacking you'll likely initiate a throw, which doesn't do that much damage and only causes you to bleed out the timer as you wait for the enemy to slowly get up. Initiating combos requires you to stand perfectly still and wait for enemies to come to you which is... not fun.

The structure of this game is just bizarre, too. Ostensibly this is a game about the movie, but after the first level you're treated to a cutscene that summarizes the entire film on which the game is based. After which, you're dumped out into a level that takes place chronologically at the end of the film before cutting to an extended flashback explaining how the new Red, Yellow, and Black Rangers got their powers. This flashback accounts for most of the game, only to abruptly conclude and pit you against Ivan Ooze for the final boss fight. The only way I can explain this is that they didn't want to take the time to redraw every character in their ninja costumes or something.

And yet, despite tearing this game down and explaining why I don't think it's good actually, I still kinda like it? I mean, that's nostalgia for you. I can't be mad at the game for being so lackluster when I'm punching the Neck Sentinel in its stupid face, because I remember how much fun that was as a kid and it colors my experience as an adult. There's a whole hidden boss against Lord Zedd set to a VR grid backdrop and finding that for the first time as a child was a revelation, so how could I possibly hate it now that I'm old enough to have chronic joint pain?

For me a 2.5 out of 5 means a games negative and positive qualities are in equal alignment. It is one half a good game, one half bad. Whether that cancels it out and makes it mean nothing to me or leaves me disappointed in its wasted potential depends on the game. Power Rangers: The Movie: The Game is an exception where it honestly should be rated lower, but my disappointment and nostalgia exists in equal quantities. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pop in Power Rangers: The Movie and give it a watch. I'm sure it holds up just fine...

And now I'm going to do the most sacrilegious thing I can after my 2.5/5 review of Power Rangers: The Movie and give Final Fight, the game that all but defined the brawler genre as we know it, a whopping two stars. Stick around to the end of the review for my home address so you can come settle your grievances with me in person.

I mostly just find Final Fight to be boring, and this is perhaps a consequence of it being so foundational as a beat-em-up. You can see the framework Final Fight laid out in the DNA of every brawler that's come since, only the advantage those games have is that they've polished everything Final Fight did and made it a hell of a lot more playable. Everything moves so slow here, the enemy variety is lacking (you'll encounter pretty much every enemy type very early), and the bosses are downright cheap. At least through emulation I can mash a button to endlessly feed quarters, but in the context of an arcade, Final Fight is the definition of a quarter muncher.

Don't get me wrong, I respect what Final Fight did for the genre. However, I think my appreciation is somewhat dependent on the time and place this game occupied. In 1989 I would've been, like, two-years-old. There's no way I could have an appreciation for what it did that was contemporary with the arcade scene at the time. My first exposure to beat-em-ups was TMNT: The Arcade Game, which came out fairly close to Final Fight, only it had the benefit of being tied to a franchise I was obsessed with as a child. In the early 90s, you also only got to play arcade games if they were, you know, actually in an arcade near you. Final Fight, to my knowledge, never was.

This is all to say that having played it for the first time in 2019, Final Fight just doesn't really impress me, and I don't find it to be particularly fun because I've been spoiled on other games in the genre, whether those are tied to IPs I have a stronger affinity for or are just more refined and engaging.

If you have any complaints about this review you can find me at

Hold on, are you telling me they made a Final Fight 2? But the first was was supposed to be the FINAL fight!

Fans of the first game may be very pleased to know that virtually nothing has changed between the first and second outing. At least in no meaningful way that I can tell, because as soon as I turned this on it put my brain to sleep.

Okay, okay, I'm being a bit hyperbolic. The bosses are a lot less aggravating to fight, and I suppose that's nice, but it still doesn't stop the game from becoming incredibly samey very fast. Capcom's beat-em-ups on console never quite rose to the same heights as Konami, but to be fair the same is true of their arcade counterparts. By being an entirely at-home game by design, however, Final Fight 2 can't blame its bland gameplay on a poor, scaled back conversion. Yet again you'll face every enemy and their respective variants pretty early into the game, and yet again everything moves at such a sluggish pace that I found it incredibly difficult to stay invested, let alone awake.

I guess this is an alright game if you have a podcast to listen to and you need to do something with your hands that isn't sinful. Otherwise, I can't imagine coming back to this one. It doesn't nothing for me. I feel nothing. I desire only non-existence.

I don't have too much to say here that wasn't already covered in my reviews for the first two Final Fights. I still don't care much for any of these games, but Final Fight 3 is easily the best of the bunch and does make some key improvements over Final Fight 2

More characters allows for more variety and moveset versatility, which is somewhat wasted on enemies that are too dumb to live. Still, it feels like you can do more here than you could in the last two games, one major innovation being the inclusion of dash attacks that add some much needed pep to Final Fight's otherwise sluggish gameplay. You can also perform supers like you would in a fighting game with its own dedicated meter, which is fun but I am also just terrible at executing them. That is, at least, a skill issue.

There are multiple routes to take through the game's six levels, which results in different boss fights and endings. This gives the game some good replay value and encourages you to try out other characters on subsequent playthroughs. More linear beat-em-ups can sometimes be hard for me to come back to, as a character with a different moveset can be fun enough to mess around with, but progression remains mostly the same. So hey, nice job, Final Fight! You finally have something good going for you other than Mike Haggar!

All that said, the improvements Final Fight 3 makes to the formula never quite feel fully baked, not even by 1995 standards, but it is nice that Capcom decided that they should make some attempt to innovate on these games. It could have just done with a little more polish, but perhaps I'm also just being a bit too harsh consider how much the first two games sold me off of Final Fight.

After being pushed back twice and ultimately not shipping from Amazon dot com, I caved and picked up Pocky & Rocky: Reshrined from Gamestop. Like an absolute lunatic, I also purchased two gigantic boxes of batteries because my addled brain would rather slap an extra 25 dollars on an order and get something rather than cough up six bucks for shipping. The real question is, was all this trouble worth it?

I think so. Like Tengo Project's other releases, Reshrined does such a great job at replicating every element that made the original games work while innovating on them in a way that feels like a natural progression, you'd almost think it was released a generation apart from the originals rather than 20+ years. If anything, the most "modern" aspect about the game is how the difficulty has been scaled back. It's still certainly challenging, but unlimited continues and mid-level checkpointing after game overs makes it a lot less frustrating when you bite it. I found myself entering into a sort of Castlevania rhythm where failure only meant another chance to approach a level armed with foreknowledge of enemy patterns and item locations, and building a new route accordingly.

Pocky and Rocky still play like how you would expect them to, but you're quickly given a new technique that allows you to set crystal balls that ricochet your attacks, and a chargeable shield that reflects most incoming projectiles. These new skills can sometimes be tricky to set up, especially in later stages, but I suppose it needs to be balanced out somehow given the absolute havoc you can unleash with them. The roster is also expanded with three new characters, all of which offer more varied movesets over Pocky and Rocky. Ikazuchi is easily my favorite among the three with her homing electrical spell and snappy dodge making her feel both nimble and overpowered. I was less a fan of Ame-no-Uzume, who attacks using two Options positioned at her sides, giving her a broader base attack while leaving her open down the middle. To make up for this, she can float over bottomless pits and bodies of water, but in more narrow passageways having her spell power at 0 feels more punishing than any other character.

My one real complaint about Reshrined is that there's NOT. ENOUGH. ROCKY. Look at that little guy! You're telling me I can only play as him for three levels!? AND one of those is just a boss fight where the whole gimmick is the boss runs left and right? Get outta here... Docking a whole star for that. Yes I know I can play the whole game as him in free mode, but I've always had a hard time doing a second run of any arcade game right after finishing the first.

The game is of course great to look at. The sprite work is incredibly detailed and colorful, and you can tell a lot of care was put into the animations. There's some weird censorship in the US release where they covered up Ame-no-Uzume's chest in cutscenes, which feels a bit unnecessary but also kinda appropriate for a game that is so closely trying to emulate its 90's predecessors. Speaking of, the translation isn't great. Some lines of dialog just sound off, but maybe that's just me. The plot is fine for what it is (see: time travel shenanigans), but also bizarrely convoluted for a Pocky & Rocky game. The cutscenes can go on a bit long too, which I don't entirely mind because they are great to look at, but the pacing of free mode feels a whole lot better.

Like other Tengo helmed Natsume games, it comes at a pretty steep price for the amount of game you're getting. I prefer to look at it as supporting quality work. Reshrined takes maybe an hour or two before you're watching the credits, but the game just plays so good that I really don't mind dropping 30 bucks on it. No doubt it'll hit 10 dollars on PSN as routinely as Wild Guns Rearmed. In any case, I'm a big stupid freak for Pocky & Rocky and I just had to have it on disc along with, like, 50 AAA batteries. My cup runneth over...

Played on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for the Playstation 2.

Head and shoulders above its more janky counterpart on the NES, Metal Gear for the MSX is a solid, inventive (for the time) title that - unlike the rest of the series it spawned - is heavy on gameplay and bereft of story. It's pretty clear that Kojima never intended to do more with Solid Snake beyond this game, the narrative only ever amounting to "go here, shoot this guy" until the last act, where a single twist that defines so much of the later entries amounts to a couple lines of dialog. Big Boss is a bad man and he's here to kick your ass, that's about it.

There's an undeniable charm to its simplicity when compared to the overwrought drama of Metal Gear Solid or even its direct sequel Metal Gear 2, refreshing after being steeped in a multi-generational story of clones, fallen mentors, and nuclear armed superweapons for so long. That said, I don't know anyone who would count this among their favorite Metal Gears. It's the kind of game you throw on to burn a couple hours with, but is otherwise unlikely to really stick with you. And hey, that's fine.

The NEC PC-8801 release of Snatcher may mark the genesis of Hideo Kojima's unique style of storytelling and game design, which infuses so heavily his passion for Cinema that inspiration at times feels like wholesale robbery, but Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is a refinement of Kojima's voice. It's hard not to look at this game as a whole and consider how much it informed his directorial style, or his ethos as a game maker, and yet, compared to the places his stories would eventually go, there is something very grounded and approachable about Metal Gear 2.

After the fall of Outer Heaven and the death of his mentor, Big Boss, Solid Snake is again called into action to infiltrate the military nation of Zanzibarland and rescue kidnapped biologist Dr.Kio Marv. It's a pretty simple setup, but much like the later Metal Gear Solid what begins as a simple infiltration mission to disarm a nuclear equipped terrorist cell explodes into a deeper conspiracy, casting both hero and villain alike in a morally grey light. Friends become foes, tragic backstories are shared through dramatic monologs, characters opine on very real problems of deterrence and the role of soldiers in an ever changing world, and Snake must cope with the fact that he can't save everyone. There's some good stuff in here, a lot of which echoes into Metal Gear Solid, but it's also remarkable just how much Kojima committed to fleshing out this world given the first Metal Gear lacks a story almost entirely.

Of course Kojima also greatly expanded upon the gameplay as well. The tools Snake collects on his journey have an actual weight to them, each one pushing your adventure forward in some meaningful way, not unlike suit upgrades in Metroid. The layout of Zanzibarland and way you sneak your way through it feels much more thoughtful than Outer Heaven, as well. The screen-to-screen object layouts are married with patrol patterns that make you stop, think, and come up with a solution before moving forward. It's like moving from one small puzzle to the next, and though progression can be a bit obtuse at times, it's genuinely engaging and does a remarkably good job of building on what the first Metal Gear established.

Bosses are also fleshed out, no longer just being guys with guns who have more HP than the other guys with guns you've been shooting. While some are still battles of attrition, most act as proper end-of-area tests of skill. The solution to each of them can be a bit goofy, like placing mines for Running Man to continually run over because the only thing Running Man knows how to do is run, I mean, it's in his name, he is the Running Man, but it's still fun to figure that stuff out for yourself. I wouldn't want to spoil any other boss encounter, but suffice it to say most require you to think quick on your toes and have a good understanding of what's in your arsenal. This sort of boss design is something that the Solid games are more well known for, but it got its start here.

I played through the version of this game included on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistance, which means updates were made to character portraits so they wouldn't be explicitly redrawn images of celebrities, and to bring them more in line with how the characters were depicted at the time. The new sprite art here is excellent and doesn't feel out of place in the slightest. Metal Gear 2 looks great in general, but it sounds even better. I picked up the Mondo release of the soundtrack last year, one of the few game soundtracks I own on vinyl, and I often pop it on while drawing or working out. Easily my favorite score in the entire series.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is well worth checking out just to see all the little mechanical and thematic elements that continue to reverberate through the Metal Gear Solid series even today. It's also one of the better entries in the series, and definite among the more accessible titles both due to its relatively early placement in the overarching story of Metal Gear, and its fine balance between gameplay and story. Definitely give this one a shot if you have even a passing interest in Metal Gear.

When Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker first released I was pretty sure I'd never actually sit down and play it. I didn't have a PSP and had zero desire to change that. Instead, I watched all the cutscenes on youtube to at least absorb the story, after all I had to stay current on my Metal Gear lore. Years later I snagged the HD rerelease on sale, and having sat down and put some time into it, I can confidently say that I already enjoyed the best parts of this game before I ever picked it up.

Peace Walker on retrospect serves as a narrative and mechanical bridge between Metal Gear Solid 3 and The Phantom Pain. The controls, screen-to-screen progression, and specific flavor of camo-index driven stealth is all very Snake Eater, and still a far cry from the more fluid and versatile style of Phantom Pain, but the home base micromanagement sim that breaks up the mission based structure is nothing if not the blueprint The Phantom Pain built off of. There's a stronger emphasis on action and set pieces as well, and enemy routines and AI patterns become secondary to simply dispatching the bad guys and moving them off the battlefield to become stock for your burgeoning Mother Base. The stiff controls and mechanical carry overs from Snake Eater feel positively aged here, remnants of Metal Gear Solid that Peace Walker so badly wants to shed.

This means that Peace Walker is neither strong as a successor to Snake Eater nor a particularly good precursor to The Phantom Pain. It's in a kind of limbo where fun comes in strong bursts between stretches of gameplay that feel underwhelming, sluggish, if not downright confused. The Solid series up to this point has often pushed players to consider how they interact with the medium of games, but there's no such ideas, no real attempt at experimentation with the format to be found here. Being on a handheld, the Monster Hunter machine no less, Peace Walker eschews much of that Solid identity in favor of grinding, slowly plugging away while on your commute. Even the game's true ending is locked behind an excessive amount of grind that seems better suited for a mobile game than something you would sit down and attempt to play at home. Unfortunately, the HD release does nothing to adjust the game for the home gaming environment.

The biggest disappointment for me, however, was the boss fights. In my previous review for Metal Gear 2, I praised the approach the series has had to bosses, who even at their weakest at least have some interesting hook. Not so in Peace Walker. Every boss fight is the same, and nothing about them are particularly engaging. It is sad to see the series that gave us The End, Psycho Mantis, or even god damn Running Man devolve into a tired series of encounters that amount to nothing more than "point gun, shoot glowing weak point." The bosses are total sponges too, and if you want the true ending you'll need to grind them for parts to build Metal Gear Zeke. Any amount of fun you might have with these evaporates quickly when you're playing on console.

The game itself is also absurdly easy, which goes back to my prior statement about it not being adjusted for home consoles. The more simplified, scaled back approach to stealth means you can jog your way through most missions without getting caught, helped by the fact that you have a proper controller in your hands.

Peace Walker's story is serviceable, definitely not the worst but certainly not my favorite told in this universe. I think it would have been better served by exploring Big Boss evolving into a leader rather than a one man army, and building towards Outer Heaven. That's there to some degree, but there's a much stronger focus on his relationship to The Boss, which at times feels narratively regressive. It treads a lot of old ground concerning her motives and the nature of her relationship to Snake that was already communicated with more subtlety at the end of Snake Eater. There's some really incredible line art from Ashley Wood, at least, though it is muddy as hell in the HD release due to having not been properly remastered. I'm not sure if they just didn't have access to the original pieces anymore or simply didn't put in the effort, but it's disappointing to see how blown out and blurry it is.

Also, I know all of you love Heaven's Divide, and it's a great song, but I don't feel it's inclusion in the story was earned. It starts to play during your final run up to the control tower where Paz is being held, with one last garrison of soldiers and a hind between you and her. But, like, I've been shooting down hinds this entire game, nothing about this feels any more triumphant than the last dozen times I've done this.

This game has been a curiosity for me for a while and I am glad I finally got to sit down and play it, if only to better understand and appreciate what it is and what it meant for the direction of the series. It's also not the worst Metal Gear Solid by any means (That would be 4, which I know has its defenders but god damn it's 4), but I also just don't see myself coming back to it soon. I've shelved this one because I know I don't have the patience for the post-game content, especially not with the amount of other games I'd rather get to right now. I also considered giving this a 3.5 originally, but the more I think about this game, the more I consider how much the final stretch sucked me out of it, the negative qualities just weigh too heavily and really overshadow the bits I liked.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is both a pointless, unnecessary remake of one of the greatest games of all time that is unfairly maligned and hated to an almost comical degree. Silicon Knights deserve better than to get continually dragged for a remake that plays up game and mass media tropes of the time. Sure it missed the mark, losing something crucial to Metal Gear Solid's identity in this sixth gen translation, but is it such a crime that Gamecube owners got their own twist on what was then still a "modern day classic"?

Yes it was the first Metal Gear game I played, what of it?

Maybe I'm too forgiving of The Twin Snakes many, many sins. Solid Snake's ridiculous John Woo inspired acrobatics and the frequent use of bullet time no doubt influenced by the still raging Matrix craze are not necessarily antithetical to Metal Gear as a whole, after all this is a series that wears its cinematic influences on its sleeve; for Metal Gear Solid specifically, it betrays the somber tone of the original for something more in line with Son of Liberty's Michael Bay-level theatrics. Same story, different flavor, and I can see why some don't have a taste for it.

Another point of contention is the first person aiming, a carry over from Metal Gear Solid 2 and a key feature that defined Metal Gear in the sixth gen. It does trivialize a lot of the game, making it far easier to not only get your bearings but dispatch an entire room of enemy threats from a safe position. This could have been helped by further changing enemy patrol patterns or redesigning some rooms to have less viable vantage points. It does, however, make the turrets along the stairwell in the communication tower easier to deal with, which I appreciate.

My preference is always going to be with the original Metal Gear Solid, which I feel is a much more effective both in terms of game balance and overall tone, but I'll always have a soft spot for The Twin Snakes for introducing me to Metal Gear. I also just don't particularly find there to be much bad in having a different interpretation of a game or story so long as the original is well preserved and still made accessible (by this point, Twin Snakes is arguably harder to play today than the game its based on.) This one is nonetheless a tough recommendation as all the negative qualities people are so hung up on certainly stand out even to me, despite my willingness to look past them.

The Nintendo 3DS is one of the single worst designed systems, ergonomically speaking. The very flat, boxy shape is complete hell on my hands, and to be fair it's not like it was ever designed to be clutched for long sittings. I bought all the Shin Megami Tensei games off the eshop when I found out it would be going down, not wanting to miss a chance at these titles forever (I am not paying the after market price on these, it's insane and it's only going to get worse), so I felt compelled to really sink some serious time into each one. As soon as I finished SMTIV I went right to its direct sequel, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse and all it got me was a case of tendonitis.

This is no exaggeration. My right thumb began to catch and even minor amounts of use would result in a burning pain along the length of the thumb and my wrist. A month of wearing a compression glove and taking it easy and I came out the other end just fine, but that also meant a month of not playing SMTIV:A. Anyone who has quit an SMT game and come back to it later, especially during the late game like I did, can attest to how disorienting it is to jump back in. This is all a long walk to say my thoughts are a bit scattered, and the final act did not land with me as well as everything that preceded it, but I hardly fault Apocalypse for that. I fault the 3DS. Piece of junk- this handheld hurt me!!

Apocalypse is a divisive game, maligned among SMT purists for failing to capture the tone and gravitas of previous entries in the mainline series, seemingly trading on all its hallmarks for something far more in line with the tone of Persona. This is a fair criticism. It's definitely a more huggy-feely, "let's show them the super power of friendship!" kind of game, and while there's been moments of brevity in the mainline games, the writing in Apocalypse is purposefully humorous throughout. However, I like Persona. Gun to my head, the mainline games are my favorite, but I enjoy the Megami Tensei game franchise very broadly and am not so easily turned off by Apocalypse's stronger emphasis on personal bonds.

For the umpteenth time I'll mention that Nocturne is my favorite game of all time. Its somber, lonely atmosphere is unparalleled, masterfully executed. However, I am not so cold that I can't find something to enjoy about the way Apocalypse's main cast of characters grow and bond with one another. Even Navarre, who existed in IV as nothing more than a means to highlight the upper-class' disdain for the impoverished in the Kingdom of Mikado, is so fully realized as a character that I found myself smiling ear-to-ear when his character arc finally came full circle. If this game can actually get me to care about a character like that, I think it's got something going on.

Mechanically, Apocalypse makes vast improvements over IV. Difficulty balancing is a lot more sensible, though the game is plagued by a few too many boss battles that are designed to be lost (a trope I absolutely hate.) You're able to select who the guest party member is now, each with their own clearly defined utility. Their AI actually seems competent this time, far less likely to pelt a boss with an attack they're immune to, and after a certain number of turns a meter will build up that allows them and the rest of your party to unleash an all-out attack. This also buys you another turn, which set up a satisfying loop of buffing my party right before the all-out attack just to ensure I could take advantage of any "smirks" I've gained in the aftermath (a mechanic where your attacks will become critical so long as the effect is applied.) It adds another layer to a combat system that I felt was pretty well perfected already.

Navigation similarly feels better. Tokyo isn't as much of a nightmare to explore, and you actually have a functional map that isn't a total pain in the ass to use. Quests are automatically accepted, reducing the amount of times you have to jump into and out of the menu, and claiming rewards is similarly a breeze. Sidequests themselves are much more compelling, too. Whereas they were a major point of contention for me in the previous game, I actually completed most of them by the end of Apocalypse.

The visual design is much more consistent as well. IV was downright confused, with artwork for the various demons you encounter being cobbled together from multiple artists, with no attempt at unifying designs. This resulted in a lot of ugly, blurry art occupying the same screen as other demons that used high res illustrations, and several designs that pushed a bit too far away from the aesthetic design that links the Shin Megami Tensei games together. This would be like someone redesigning Pikachu to be a cockroach monster, but Charizard looks the same, it just doesn't really work. In Apocalypse, many demon designs from the previous game that failed to gel with that aesthetic were redrawn, and they look a hell of a lot better for it.

There are of course some rough patches. A few dungeons failed to land with me at all, the final dungeon in particular. Each screen looks so similar it's very difficult to get your barrings, and the maze-like structure doesn't seem entirely thought out. I was able to circumvent it several times, which actually resulted in me missing things required to advance much later. There's also just a lot of dead open space and very few enemies roaming around, with most encounters being forced by sudden ambushes, which kinda just sucks. At this point in the game I was already level 99 and had no need to continually blow through fodder.

The DLC is also just kinda so-so. The Diamond Realm DLC which brings back the main characters from Shin Megami Tensei's 1-3 definitely appeals to me from a fan service perspective, but holy hell my team composition was just not right for it at all. The DLC is meant to be tackled at such a high level, really you ought to already be at the cap, and even then it feels like you need to be carefully considering what team you're building towards well in advance, making careful use of your macca so as to not do what I did and be flat out broke with a horde of demons capable of clearing the main game, but functionally useless for the DLC you blew real money on. Whoops! I'm not sure if the DLC scales for NG+, maybe you're supposed to wait until a second run or something. I won't be doing that because I don't care to ever put my hands through that kind of agony again, and I still have two whole 3DS SMTs to beat...

Apocalypse is certainly not my favorite SMT game, probably not even in my short list of the best in the series, but it improves on IV in absolutely every way. Perhaps that's blasphemy to some SMT fans, but I don't care. This is my opinion and these are my hands and they hurt and I'm tired and I am going to BED!

It's hard to talk about Metal Gear Solid 2 without treading ground video essayists on YouTube haven't already worn to the bedrock. By now every point of discussion has been mined, you know what the game is about and you've already made up your mind whether you want to play it or not. For some it's the black sheep of the Solid series, for others it's a high point that was eerily predictive of the current Internet era.

I suppose I fall into the later camp. Gameplay just feels great, there's some really fun parts of the Big Shell to sneak through, and screen-to-screen stealth-puzzle driven progression of the game feels just as intelligently designed as the original Metal Gear Solid. Granted, I see a lot of validity to the complaint that the Big Shell's nearly identical struts wears a bit thin, and it is at times a little disorienting when everything looks the same and you're told to go to Strut A or C or F or whatever. It's a definite weakness over the more defined landmarks of Shadow Moses, and the excellent Tanker chapter that opens MGS2 only highlights the Big Shell's shortcomings even more.

The incredible amount of detail keeps me invested, though. Shooting buckets of ice cause cubes to fly out, which you can then individually knock around or just watch melt in real time. Getting out of the rain in the Tanker chapter causes condensation to build up on the screen and spending too long in it will give Snake a cold. Urine splatters on Raiden's head with physics that beautiful recreate life. Now days if a glass doesn't shatter when you shoot it in a game people will bitch to death on Twitter about how lazy and unfit for continued existence the developers are. Back in 2001 though, Metal Gear Solid 2 showed how truly drastic the leap was between fifth and sixth gen hardware. Slipping on bird shit? That's only possible with the power of Emotion Engine, baby!

But of course what dominates most of the discussion around Metal Gear Solid 2 is its story, which deals heavily in themes of information control, particularly in the digital age. For much of the game it simply comes across as if Kojima just read 1984. It's a shallow, unchallenging take on censorship and culture control, that is until the very end of the game when Kojima begins to lay out exactly how this will all manifest in the digital age, where junk data reigns supreme. It's some pretty interesting stuff and also allows Kojima to do even more interesting things with how you play MGS2's climactic act, but it also results in some horrible pacing issues. Structurally speaking, MGS2's final two hours are hampered by excessively long codec calls interspersed between what is otherwise the story's more tense moments. Like, Solidus is right here and he brought two samurai swords so we can stab each other to death on top of the federal reserve building or whatever but hold up, AI Campbell needs to yack at me for 20 minutes.

Still, it is important to note that in 2001 a little over 50% of American households had an internet connection. The Internet was a far cry from its current incarnation, where much of our lives are tangled up in the world wide web. There was no Twitter, no YouTube, no Facebook to revolutionize the way we keep in touch with one another, let alone the way information is disseminated to the masses. And yet with each passing year MGS2 becomes more prescient. Maybe it's a time and place thing. I was pretty young when this came out and much of what Kojima was laying out in the last act went over my stupid little head, but it stuck with me, and I got to see the Internet shape itself into that very monster in real time. I wonder if someone born after the Web 2.0 explosion would really get as much out of it as I did.

And yeah, sure, Raiden is a real wet fart of a character. I mean the guy doesn't even have any posters in his room, what kind of sick freak doesn't have at least one poster? And Rosemary? Yeah, she's a cardboard cutout of a character, the sort of person who is so boring they would fall in love with the first guy to tell her she's wrong about what building was in King Kong. There's plenty of valid criticisms about the story! But I like it. I like getting to see Snake through the perspective of a rookie. I like the weirdo conspiracy to essentially mold Raiden into Snake's double. I don't even mind Raiden's lack of agency given how that factors into the overall narrative and central themes.

Really, I think I just like Metal Gear Solid 2.