I've always been a little bit weary of the Samba de Amigo games. Something about flailing plastic maracas around coupled with my total lack of coordination seems... dangerous. I have no sense of timing or rhythm, my body moves with the grace and flow of a marionette. I'm lucky I don't have kids because there won't be video footage of me accidentally beaning them in the face with a joycon, but the potential for self-harm is still there... "1... 2... 3... jump!" and my hands go directly through the lights of my ceiling fan. Spending the night getting glass picked out of my knuckles in the urgent care. Terrible. Why would I sign on for that?

Well, the allure of a good deal, for one. Big thank you to Sega for sending Samba de Amigo: Party Central out to die so I could grab it for a cool 14$. Also, I do like to party (alcoholic) and I love to get down (on the ground because I drank too much), so I spent some time clearing furniture to make a good open space and moved my collection of priceless Victorian era porcelain dolls out of the way and finally played me a little Samba de Amigo.

Party Central is remarkably easy and probably the best time I've ever had with a rhythm game in terms of sheer personal performance. I was pulling A and S ranks with ease because it's just so lenient, almost comically so, and while the low skill ceiling might be a problem for some, waving my arms around like Kermit and still being told "aw, good job, buddy!" made me feel pretty great! The StreamiGo mode, which adds additional objectives like getting less than three boo's or clearing with a set score, adds a little extra challenge and replay value, and I do think the whole conceit of Amigo trying to build clout as a streamer is pretty funny. He's gonna have to switch to hot tub streams eventually, that's... that's where the money is. Subscribe to Amigo's OnlyFans...............

I did encounter a lot of issues with misread inputs and latency but honestly, that might just be my Joycons. I've long been suffering from drift despite barely using these things, the Joycons are hands-down the worst controllers Nintendo has put out, which is quite an accomplishment all things considered. Bad form factor and cheap parts... it would not surprise me if I simply have poor form, but I'd be even less shocked if this was a hardware issue. Still, Party Central is so forgiving that it never became more than a minor annoyance.

If you're as rhythmically impaired as I am, you might actually get something out of Party Central and considering how cheap it is (Sega had like, zero confidence in this, huh?) it's a pretty easy pick up. Just make sure you have your Joycon straps on or you'll fling one of them directly into your porcelain doll collection and straight through the window and directly into the face of the neighbor's kid and spend your whole morning writing this review on hold with the insurance company

i'm in a lot of fuckin trouble, man

I got hit in the head very hard and woke up here...

I have a bad relationship with Mario Party and have already written several incendiary reviews on that series. I'll never apologize for those, because Mario Party has hurt me in ways both psychological and physical. The same can be said about Sonic the Hedgehog, so Sonic Shuffle is a real "worlds colliding" moment, smashing me between two points with such force that all my internal organs are emulsified on impact. Welcome to Maginary World, it fuckin' sucks here.

The Precious Stone, which governs the world of dreams, has been shattered by Void, a spirit who's only sin is being an avatar for the dark half of man that exists within us all and who the game repeatedly tells the player had the audacity to even exist. Not going to say this silly little story is offensive or anything but it is also really funny when your heroes are like "the world of dreams was once a beautiful place, and then Void had to be born..." Even Sonic gets in on this savagery, dogpiling the poor guy and going so far as to assault him before finally growing a conscious and realizing Void just wants to be embraced and made whole.

Look, there's something to be said here about stones and glass houses, because after slogging my way through Shuffle's story mode, I wanna jump the guy, too.

Sonic Shuffle forgoes dice rolls in favor of a card system, removing some of the random chance present in Mario Party for something more strategic. You can move a set amount of spaces based on what's available in your hand, or draw a card blindly from your opponent's hand, and on paper this actually sounds like a good system. Indeed, it might be if you're playing with friends, but every time I politely requested Fightcade to "ADD SONIC SHUFFLE OR I WILL DO SOMETHING WE BOTH REGRET" I was curiously met with silence. It's like they don't appreciate it or something. Very strange.

The AI is so brutal that the Sonic Wikia has a whole section dedicated specifically to combating it, something that is absolutely not the responsibility of an encyclopedia article to do. Even the Wikia admits the AI is skewed upwards, and from personal experience I can confirm the computer on "normal" is able to read everyone's hands and will routinely pick the cards that are the most advantageous, either for their personal benefit or by anticipating what you need and making the choice to kneecap you. Though it's noted as a characteristic of hard mode, on several occasions the computer veered away from a precious stone to camp out near where the next would spawn, and since Eggman will drop a fucking 16-ton anvil on the head of the player furthest from the last collected stone, this meant being actively punished for grabbing a stone only for another character to claim the next before I even had a chance to move.

At least playing in Redream bestowed me with the ability to cheat. Oh, the AI can see all my cards, can they? Well, if I just habitually load a save state, I too can know the placement of every card! I don't have to finish each level with six precious stone pieces, or the most rings and mini-game wins-- I don't need things, I want them. Now I am become Mario Party.... How the tables have turned.

Being allowed to tap into my own disgusting sadism aside, it is worth having this level of insurance to insulate you from the computer, as in true party game fashion, you might just lose to some bullshit and have to replay the entire board. The only difference here is that Sonic Shuffle drops any pretense of being random, it doesn't care to veil itself in the illusion of chance and is upfront with its cruelty. I gotta respect that.

It also just feels bad to play regardless of how conniving the AI is. Mini-games are uninspired and control poorly, and they fall into the Mario Party trap of not filtering previously played games out of the rotation. After beating the story mode, there were still thirteen mini-game I hadn't even seen. At least Sonic Shuffle has the decency to not end every turn with a mini-game, instead having them trigger by landing on an event space. Unfortunately, this also means you can roll a turn where you end up playing four mini-games, so fuck, I don't know! There are also "Accident!" games which trigger randomly and are unique to the board, but these lack any kind of preamble to convey the rules, instead placing them on the bottom of the screen while the game is underway. Not gonna complain about reading subtitles, but this is like trying to process information while a brick is being thrown at you just outside your periphery.

Mini-games aren't the only thing that feels insipid about Sonic Shuffle. Even the boards themselves are dull, with extremely trite gimmicks like not being able to step across alligators if their mouths are open. Fuck that. I'm gonna lay down, let the jaws of the beast take me. That's far more preferable to listening to lumina explain each board's unique spaces which, it turns out, just warp you to a random location. That's it, that's what all of them do. The final board is laid out like the Vortex World from Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne and it is absolutely confounding. Probably spent more time just looking at the map counting spaces to figure out the most efficient route to a precious stone piece only for the math to never work out with how many spaces away the game claims I am, and I have to think it's just miscounting and judging distance through some other metric. Or maybe it's not, I can't tell!

I remember my first experience with this game. I was at Wal-Mart probably a month or two after it released. Sonic Shuffle, a Sonic game I hadn't heard of?? How is that possible...? I begged my dad to buy it, went home, popped it in the Dreamcast, and had a truly miserable time. And yet, I played it to completion. You'll just have to trust me on this because the battery to my VMU has long since died, and though I still own the game, I can't really prove that I unlocked every character and every item in Sonic's room. But like a man possessed, I did. This time? I settled for beating the story mode.

"See you again..."

No, you won't.

I'm just like Captain Falcon, I'm getting exploded all the time.

Along with Pilotwings, F-Zero might be the most technically impressive entry in the Super Nintendo's launch lineup, though it is less a demo and more a proper video game. Sure, the Sega Genesis had been out for a while and had already simulated 3D spaces to great effect with games like Space Harrier, but F-Zero is so smooth and runs so fast that even with the leg up, it makes a strong case for investing in Nintendo's 16-bit hardware.

Setting aside its role as a Mode 7 showpiece, it's just a well-designed racing game, with incredibly engaging courses, cars that handle great, and a satisfying sense of speed that is rarely interrupted by performance hitches. F-Zero isn't bogged down by a bunch of track gimmicks, it lacks depth mechanically, it's about as straight-forward as you can get, but I think that's a strength.

That's not to say it's perfect, though. F-Zero might be one of the better racing games on the SNES but it also suffers from issues typical of this generation. There's rubberbanding, and god help you if you screw up and smack into a wall near the end of a race, because your position will be taken by at least a car or two. Whenever you're behind a racer, they have a tendency to weave back and forth to prevent you from overtaking them, and during late game courses where tracks become more narrow and turns more tight, it can feel like threading a needle where inaccuracy is punished harshly by bouncing you against walls like a pinball until you blow up.

That said, I'm a huge Super Mario Kart defender, so I can't judge F-Zero too harshly for its sins, and if it came down to it, I'd knock Mario Kart off the shelf if it meant having room for F-Zero. Great pickup for Super Famicom owners. CIB sets are still affordable, and not only is the game in English, the comic in the back of the manual is, too. Even numbers the speech bubbles to guide native Japanese speakers as it's presented left-to-right. I thought that was neat. F-Zero is neat.

I love Mobile Suit Gundam, and I love a game I can beat in a single sitting, so Journey to Jaburo ought to be tailor made to my sensibilities. Yet, clunky controls and dull, repetitive gameplay left me with little patience for its whopping two hour long campaign. "White Base is under attack!" Yes, I know that, Sayla. I'd love to help but I'm a little busy shooting this Zaku with twenty fucking bazooka rounds.

Journey to Jaburo covers (roughly) the first half of the original anime, starting with Amuro activating the RX-78-2 Gundam on Side-7 and concluding with the defense of Jaburo on Earth. Although the game is only 9 missions long and arcade-like in pace and structure, a decent amount of key battles are covered and animated cutscenes do a serviceable job of connecting them. Sure, you're missing stuff like the salt arc, jumping onto white base, Chad Aznable laughing, and some major moments are touched on so briefly that they might be difficult to parse for the uninitiated, but when you're trying to truncate a space opera to fit in the confines of a PS2 game, you gotta make some cuts.

You could make the argument that Journey to Jaburo should've been more comprehensive by covering the White Base crew's return to space, but given how awkward the controls are, I do not want to think about how the Gundam would handle in zero gravity.

The RX-78-2 feels like a tank, and on some level that's appropriate. The whole "real robot" genre is built on these mechs being actual pieces of military hardware, so moving around should feel laborious to some degree. That's fine, but it starts to come apart with how often inputs are misread and eaten, a result of all control styles mapping movement to the D-pad. If you don't ride the very edge of a directional button, you might turn when you don't want to, and sometimes double-tapping to dash in a direction just doesn't work and your mobile suit stands in place like a dumbass. It is somehow both too sensitive and not responsive enough.

Slight errors when orienting yourself mid-battle is punished hard. The Gundam can't take much of a beating, and is thoroughly outclassed defensively and offensively by Zeon's frontline grunts. It is certainly the case in canon that Zeon was putting out suits that were sturdier than the Gundam by the end of the One Year War, with Amuro's talents as a newtype compensating to such a degree that he eventually became bottlenecked by the machine itself. That said, a Zaku-I should not take 30 seconds of mashing the attack button over and over again to blow up.

You can't lead your shots either, which effectively renders the Gundam's beam rifle useless, especially against fighter jets. You can be perfectly locked on but whiff every shot because you're stuck shooting where they were, and in missions where you're tasked with defending the White Base, watching its health tick down because of a limitation in the way the game is designed is irritating. Maybe I'm more irked by this than I ought to be, because playing this off my PS2's hard drive resulted in numerous crashes, particularly when trying to reload a mission after a game over.

This came to a head with the final mission, which despite how brisk all the others are, feels like it drags. You have to clear out several basic mobile suits over two attack phases, then go toe-to-toe with Char who hits like a truck and is so squirrely you can scarcely keep a lock on him. When you do take him out, you're (literally) smacked with another boss fight against a mobile armor that can stunlock you to death with its main canon. Fun. There's a whole secondary gameplay mode that unlocks when you beat the story and despite the fact that the core campaign is so short, I don't want to play it. I've been told it's better and requires more strategic thinking, but like, it's going to control the same and I've had enough of what Jaburo is putting down.

I rented this when it came out and at the time could only stomach up to the second mission before I took it back. As an adult who has been micro-dosing bad games to build up a tolerance, I was able to beat it and find some appreciation for its arcade-like structure - I don't even mind its length and view it as a positive quality - but it's so rough and unrefined that I can't see myself picking it up ever again.

One of these days, I'm gonna end up decking Bright.

We all wear masks... metaphorically speaking, Mr. Kratos.

Don't know why I got it in my head that God of War (2018) was the first in a trilogy. Everything's a trilogy nowadays, and every Sony first party title is a narrative action game. I know everyone is sick of it, the people crave Ape Escape, I crave Ape Escape, but having now finished the God of War Duology, I really wouldn't mind another one of these.

I won't dive in too deep on the story, but Ragnarok provides satisfying payoff to basically every plot hook introduced in the previous game and brings everyone's character arcs full circle for a conclusion that feels very earned. I think. Look, I was screwed up on medication and wracked by insomnia before a invasive medical procedure when I played most of God of War, I don't remember much of it. Baldur was there, Mimir's head was smacking off the side of Kratos' ass, Freya was real mad about her failson trying to kill her... I got the broad strokes!

Thor and Odin (played by Richard Schiff, who is mashing every scene between his molars) are perfect contrasts to Kratos and Atreus, both in terms of personal growth and their station in the story. Atreus wants to learn more about himself and the giants but seeks to defy their prophecy to protect the ones he loves, whereas Odin is consumed by a self-centered desire for knowledge and has blinded himself to the cost. Kratos realizes he's been running from who he was, but confronts his past and grows, while Thor feels powerless in the face of his own nature and habitually succumbs to his own anger and self-loathing. The rest of the supporting cast is given plenty of reason to kick old man Odin's door down and beat his ass, too.

Surt's also here, he's gonna cast Agidyne or some shit.

Combat picks up more quickly than the last game, you don't have to wait until halfway through to get the Blades of Chaos, and you eventually get a new weapon that makes use of the draupnir ring in some creative ways. Gameplay is divided between Kratos and Atreus, and I tend to worry anytime one of these games puts me in control of a side character that their gameplay just won't feel as good. Initially, Atreus is tedium manifest, but he really grew on me, and by the end of the game I think I actually prefer his combat over Kratos'.

New weapons and abilities are metered out in a way that keeps the game feeling fresh, but chapters struggle a bit more with pacing and often overstay their welcome. Every chapter has at least one room too many of a particular gimmick, puzzle, or combat encounter, resulting in about 20-30 minutes of your playtime feeling padded out. This is more a problem in the first half of the game, but even some late game chapters still drag on a bit. There are also a lot of side missions, and I eventually had to accept that I wasn't going to do everything, because then I'd only tire of Ragnarok and end up liking it less. I wouldn't even say this is a quantity over quality issue as all of it is still good, there's also just too much of it, and some of your time across Ragnarok's realms could've been better divided.

I wonder if we'll ever get to see Atreus at that age where he's stealing beer out of the garage refrigerator and taking the Blades of Chaos behind Kratos' back and accidentally causing an obscene amount of property damage. Even if we don't, I'm fairly confident in saying Ragnarok is the best game in the series. I've never played any of the other games besides the 2018 one but like, c'mon. It's got Surt!

Addendum: I almost gave this a 4/5 because of its pacing issues, but then started thinking about how Heimdall is basically just Weyoun from Deep Space 9 and that's deserving of a half star at the very least. Now if you'll excuse me, Mimir and I are gonna head to the holosuite in Svartalfheim and pretend to be old WWII British fighter pilots.

Though the Saturn was a commercial failure, it had its share of strengths, particularly when it came to emulating arcade games in the home. 2D fighters were generally best on the Saturn, featuring much less missing content than their PlayStation counterparts, lightgun shooters like Virtua Cop and The House of the Dead are mainstays of the genre, and some of the best arcade racers (at the time) were on the Saturn. Sega Rally Championship is one of the preeminent racing games on the system, bumping shoulders with Daytona USA, though like Daytona USA - and by extension, other arcade conversions - it is a bit threadbare.

All the cars handle great, the courses feel really good, and the level of challenge is metered out perfectly. You're battling against other cars but also a timer that carries between tracks, and at times Rally Championship can expect quite a bit from you, but I found that every repeated attempt allowed me to make just a bit more progress. I'd learn how to better take and anticipate turns and gain back two or three seconds before hitting a checkpoint I previously fell short of. Much of the game's length comes from slowly mastering its tracks, but it's a satisfying loop.

That's about all you get here, and while it feels very good to play, it's not something you'll spend a huge amount of time with. It's the sort of game you pick up off the shelf and screw around in for 30 minutes once every so often, and that was just the nature of arcade conversions like this, so it's hard to fault Sega Rally Championship for having so little meat on its bones. I'd say it's maybe an issue if you're shelling out a bunch of money for a copy, but even then, Japanese discs are like, ten bucks. USA longboxes are a bit more pricey but, and I cannot stress this enough, the aftermarket for US Saturn games is completely and irreparably fucked.

That said, if you're still playing on actual hardware today, you're probably using a soft-modded action replay, and that being the case, Sega Rally Championship is a no-brainer whether you burn it or grab a Japanese disc.

Constant slowdown, sluggish yet slippery movement, garish visuals, a grating soundtrack, and a frustrating bounce mechanic all add up to make Pulseman one of the worst Game Freak games I've ever played, and I played Pokemon Stadium with rentals!

I remember seeing Pulseman years ago in best of lists for the Genesis, and I've always maintained a level of curiosity about it simply for being a non-Pokemon Game Freak game, but I think it was probably better left in the pages of EGM and now defunct websites. It starts out fine, you run around and you shoot electricity at enemies, bounce around after launching into a charged jump once you've built enough speed (and static), but your movement is also super weighty and Pulseman always slides a little bit when you come to a stop, so early on you can tell he's not really suited to precision platforming.

And, sure enough, the game eventually takes you to levels that expect just a bit more than Pulseman is willing to give. The actual ice stage punctuates how rancid Pulseman feels to control, water levels disable his electrical attacks and require you to get right up on enemies, stage gimmicks like gears don't quite work right and have wonky collision that sometimes just sends you clipping through them, and hell, that occasionally just happens with the floor, too. Enemy hitboxs are sometimes more narrow than they ought to be, and many of the mid-to-late game levels are rotten with bottomless pits and blind jumps into hazards and enemies. None of this ever really compounds to such a degree that Pulseman becomes too difficult, but it does get increasingly annoying when tepid stage design clashes so consistently with the game's unpleasant controls.

My breaking point was when the game required me to charge a jump and bounce vertically through a single-block wide hole which took a good fifteen minutes of trial and error before I gave up and watched the previously linked longplay to find the exact angle it expected of me. I then encountered another section like this which sends you through several chambers, only I accidentally disengaged the bounce and got softlocked. I tried the level select cheat and played a bit more beyond that, but it was clear Pulseman was never going to get better. I could be doing something else with my time.

Shoutouts to the horrid art direction. Just a ton of strobing neon colors and effects that badly want to be like something out of The Adventures of Batman and Robin yet which look more rudimentary and come at a high cost to performance. I am not kidding when I say the slowdown is constant. It is prevalent to a ridiculous degree and is actively detrimental to playing the game. The casino level is just a bunch of noise. I would've been better off hitting the slots and wasting the money I spent on this game. Or, better yet, sticking a fork in an electrical outlet and turning myself into a pulseman (see: corpse.)

I hate how this game looks, I hate how it plays, I hate how it sounds, I hate Pulseman, I never should've trusted the same publications that said Aero the Acro-Bat was the best new character of 1993 with a god damn Genesis recommendation.

Between Cybershell's rundown of Sonic Adventure DX's problems and "The Ultimate Guide to SADX Sins," I think the book has been written on why this is such a bad port. I'd tell you to just watch Cybershell's video, but he'd tell you to read the Dreamcastify article, and that means I'm already too far down the chain to add anything new when it comes to this game's busted lighting, plasticy characters, or its issues with sound scripting. Most reasonable people playing SADX in the Year of our Jericho 24 will address these issues with mods, like PkR's Dreamcast Conversion, which is pretty comprehensive and can be paired with other mods like SonicFreak94's Lantern Engine and ItsEasyActually's Character Restoration mod to bring DX closer to the Dreamcast release.

I am not a "reasonable person," though. In fact, I'm pretty god damn unreasonable, which is why I decided to play SADX off my Wii's hard drive. Call it tradition, or laziness, or whatever, but I needed my Sonic Adventure DX raw, just the way grandma made it back in 2003. Twenty years later, nothing has changed.

Obviously, I agree that all the issues with lighting, textures, and models are detrimental and make the game look substantially worse both from the perspective of fidelity and aesthetic charm. What I have a larger issue with is the amount of collision detection issues that I'm pretty sure are introduced in this version of the game. Perhaps it's just dumb luck, but I played the original Sonic Adventure not too long ago and did not have nearly as many issues with Sonic getting stuck on walls, clipping through barriers, or breaking out of scripted events and flying into the void.

What I'm pretty sure is less an issue with DX and more integral to the Sonic Adventure experience as a whole is the game's rancid camera, which much like Sonic has a tendency to hang on geometry and disobey your commands. The travel distance on the Gamecube's shoulder buttons is ridiculous, and the extremely slow pan of DX's camera really makes it feel like you're operating a heavy piece of machinery, like the lens has been loaded onto some huge industrial crane. It fights you every step of the way too, constantly trying to jerk back into position, and God help you if you took a shortcut or broke off the standard path, because the flag to change the camera's position probably won't trip and it'll just lock into position under the floor or something.

It's never so bad that it complicates beating levels normally but does become annoying in the mission mode and more broadly through sheer prevalence. The missions added to SADX really run the gamut from being braindead easy and dull to functionally broken and badly designed. Special shoutouts to collecting the flags during the boulder sequence in Sonic's Lost World, an act of rote memorization and praying Sonic's shoulder doesn't clip into the side of the wall and slow him down, and Tails' flag collection in Windy Valley which I had to look up a guide for because bad draw distancing never rendered in a single flag while the camera was trained on it.

Nothing is worse than Mission 53, which tasks you with hitting a line of rings near the end of the snowboarding sequence in Sonic's Ice Cap by landing a frame perfect input on the final three ramps. If your timing is off, you'll shoot under or over the row of rings you need to hit, requiring you to restart from the checkpoint and sit through 2-3 minutes of the most dogshit snowboarding I've ever experienced in a video game. I had a bunch of episodes of Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak playing in the background while attempting this and now the Beef Log song has been stuck in my head for several days. it broke me, it fucking broke me, i am broken

I did all of these because at some point, probably while Freddie Prinze Jr. was snorting like a pig, I got it in my head that SADX is the only way for me to play all of the Game Gear Sonic games on my CRT, since Sonic Gems has an incomplete set. This of course meant fucking around in the Chao Garden, and I just happened to roll a Chao with the worst luck imaginable - a hidden stat! - so he constantly tripped and fell asleep during every race despite having the running, power, and swimming stats of a god. Catch my ass at 1am shouting "STOP DANCING!" because this little idiot had to do a jig every time he ate a nut in the Emerald course. Suffering through this and getting hit with "TAILS' SKYPATROL UNLOCKED" felt like getting stabbed directly through the heart, and I have nobody to blame but myself.

The only nice thing I have to say about SADX is that it runs at 60fps, but I'm not sure the hefty amount of graphical compromises was worth the bump in performance, and I'm the kind of guy who typically will turn off superfluous graphical enhancements to buy a few extra frames. Apparently the Gamecube version is the better release, and some of DX's problems have only gotten worse with subsequent ports. The real unfortunate thing is that Sega, much like they do with the Game Gear games, seem to be treating the demonstrably worse version of a game as the document of record.

Anyway, sound off in the comments! Are you a beef log boy or a cheeselogger? Me? I like a good cheese log. It's my favorite saturated fat.

Adjusting your options, as you know, is an excellent way to customize your gameplay.

Music: On
Difficulty: Hard
Handed: Right
Bouncing Breast: On
Favorite Food: Hot Dogs

I have very little love for early 3D fighters. This is known about me. I look at Virtua Fighter and I start to seethe and write ill things in my Yu Sazuki rage journal so that my negative thoughts might cause him psychic harm. In private, I've expressed that the earliest 3D fighting game I can recall liking is Dead or Alive 2, which sparked some discussion with my friend Larry about whether it was with the original DOA or Soul Edge that the genre finally came into its own.

Well, it's not like copies of Dead or Alive are that expensive, and Soul Edge or Blade or whatever you want to call it are pretty reasonable, too. I could trust the reviews on this, run the numbers and put my faith in Backloggd's average ratings, but DOA currently has a 2.8 average to Virtua Fighter Remix's 3.3 and I know that can't be right, so I'm afraid I just have to buy both of these games and determine for myself when 3D fighters got good.

Starting with DOA, which I have a more personal connection to, was a good idea. Character movement feels fluid, controls are responsive, there's a surprisingly deep combo system, and attacks carry enough weight to feel impactful. More refined than its stiff and clunky contemporaries, robust in modes and unlockables, yet still low-fi, DOA feels like a proper half-step between 3D fighters of the Saturn era and the looming sixth gen. It is just a shame Ayane can only be unlocked after sinking a significant amount of time into the game, but hey, that's why you always keep an Action Replay cart in your Saturn. Well, that and to play burned discs and bypass regional locks.

The AI does have a tendency to fluctuate between being insanely punishing and outright braindead, sometimes from round-to-round, but I don't think it's any better or worse than other 3D fighters of this period. Which is to say, I have a hard time taking any of these seriously enough to dig into how the AI operates, they're all drenched in protoplasm and even DOA has a few drops coming off its frame. The more important element here to me, personally, is the overall feel of the game, and the fast-paced nature of combat and responsive controls definitely put DOA ahead of the pack.

That said, it's not my favorite game in the series (toss-up between 2, my first, and 3 which looks incredible on the Series X), and the jury's still out on whether or not Soul Blade is the better game, but I still had a great time with Dead or Alive. It's a very strong first outing and a solid step in the right direction given the slew of dire 3D fighters hitting the Saturn around this time.

Thin crust, pepperoni, banana peppers, crushed red peppers, a little bit of grated parm of sean cheese, anchovies. You gotta have anchovies.

I wouldn't say I've been resistant to playing Pizza Tower, but I've definitely been dragging my heels. A classic case of Weatherby preferring to wait until something releases on console, or until a friend (thank you, Appreciations) buys it for me. Many cases of this happening. I am contractually mandated to play and finish The Evil Within 2 now because Larry Davis knew the only way I'd pick it up is if the overbearing weight of obligation forced me to. I guess you could say I get in my own way sometimes, but this sort of forceful nudging usually results in me having a good time, and Pizza Tower is no exception.

Barreling through enemies, charging through barriers, executing split-second rolls and leaps, careening into and up walls, and letting your momentum carry you to new areas all feels very Wario-esque, but I was surprised to see how much Pizza Tower took from other fast paced platformers like Sonic (I swear the sirens at the start of Not Legally Actionable Noid's boss fight are from Stardust Speedway), and even Super Metroid with how often you need to make tall vertical leaps à la Samus' shinespark. If you told me Pizza Tower was assembled and baked specifically for people suffering from terminal speedrunner brain, I'd believe you.

However, Pizza Tower is still very approachable for those who don't. I definitely had my share of botched inputs and there were a few sections that took me a number of attempts before I had the execution down, but once you fall into the right rhythm and embody Mr. Pepperoni or whatever the fuck his name is, it feels really good. It's also one of those games where executing on what it expects of you makes you feel like a speedrunner, even if it's actually taking you 30 whole minutes to beat the golf level.

My only real complaint is that you're never really at risk of losing a life until the chase sequence at the end of every level, and if you botch that you get to do the whole thing over again, which given the length of some levels is a bit of a problem. Though the game is checkpoint adverse, this is a somewhat minor complaint as I only managed to die probably four or five times during the course of the game.

I surprisingly don't have too much to say about the aesthetics other than that they're very good. Very 90s Nicktoons, lot of hyper-exaggerated faces and animations that lean so hard into the squash and stretch that you'd think everyone is made out of some kind of goop. That sort of elastic, malleable quality goes a long way towards selling the player on how chaotic, violent, and fast the game is. The soundtrack is terrific, too, and I especially like the full final boss suite and escape themes.

I think Pizza Tower is a pretty good game that I'm sure everyone reading this played months before I got to it, and you probably don't need me propping it up even more. I probably should've gotten to it much earlier in the year, but hey, better late than never. Excited for them to announce a physical edition for consoles in like, the next month.

"You need to replay Max Payne 3" gotta be in my top ten intrusive thoughts I've acted on, right up there with "fill your whole entire fridge with cans of NOS."

Unlike my fridge full of NOS, the compulsion to revisit this game wasn't as sudden as waking in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat and driven by chemical dependency, though I suppose the fact we both nurse our problems rather than confront them does make Max somewhat relatable (well, that and the baldness.) Rather, Max Payne 3 has ended up in front of my face several times over the past few weeks by pure happenstance, with the untimely passing of James McCaffrey acting as the catalyst to sit down and start it up for the first time since 2012.

McCaffrey's performance is of course outstanding, effortlessly selling you on an older, even more broken version of Max from the second he sets foot in his clean new apartment. Monologuing about the need to move on and start fresh with a few cracks at the expense of his weight and the poor choices that have led him to Brazil. The scene devolves pretty quickly as Max sets aside unpacking and decorating for drinking, stumbling, and self-pity.

The strobing effects, neon after-images, and punctuation of key words and phrases cutting through the cacophony of visual noise places the player right into the middle of Max's delirium, and while I'm sure some people were upset that Rockstar pushed away from the film noir design of the previous games, I am 100% into this sort of Man on Fire "tape roll" editing style, and I think it's used to great effect, keeping the player spinning in Max's fucked up headspace.

Despite how fundamentally broken Max is as a person, there was some real risk in inadvertently casting him as the "white savior," but I think this trope is pretty effectively subverted. Max is notoriously bad at saving anybody, and in fact makes most situations substantially worse by simply being there, drunk on the job and armed to the teeth. He is unwilling or perhaps unable (again, due to his inebriation) to understand any language that's not New Jersey English, frequently resulting in misunderstandings and botched attempts at negotiations, resulting in the loss of human life. I don't see how Max hopes to save anyone when he intentionally blows up an organ farming operation without making sure anyone got out, or by shooting up an entire airport, later revealed to be avoidable had he simply taken a ride offered to him to go directly to the bad guy's private hanger. As he puts it, "I'm a dumb move kind of guy." Sure, he gets the bad guy in the end, but when the game is popping accolades for killing 1000 enemies, you have to wonder if the math shakes out.

The shootout in the favela, which occurs about halfway through the game, feels heavily borrowed from Elite Squad. There are a couple notable moments during this sequence that are lifted from the movie, but one thing Max Payne 3 lacks over Elite Squad is that element of humanization, particularly for those in the favela. There's plenty of lip paid to the class divide and the animosity the rich have for the poor, and vice versa, but the fast pace of the story and action doesn't really provide time to peel back those layers and examine them. That's not what Max Payne 3 is about, it's more action than drama, and to do so would also mean providing subtitles and having Max not go "huh, what?" and immediately shoot dodge into a wall, so Rockstar probably made the right call there, too.

On the more mechanical end of things, Max Payne 3 carries over enough systems from the previous two games to feel authentic to the Max Payne experience and is otherwise just a very refined third person cover-shooter. A bit punishing, but in a way that feels satisfying. The action never dries out, and there's some really great set pieces, especially during the climax in the airport, which includes one of my favorite needle drops in games. At this point it feels trite to say a game feels like playing a movie, but Max Payne 3's action is paced in this very specific way that makes it feel like possibly the best translation of an action movie into interactive media I've come across.

Remedy has announced remakes of the first two Max Payne games, and I've been told there's plenty of allusions to the character in Alan Wake 2, potentially setting up something more. I haven't played that game and my friends have been careful to avoid spoilers until I do, so I really only know the vague points, like Sam Lake's character being voiced by McCaffrey. I'm curious where they go from here, though at the same time I don't want to speculate, as it feels a bit too callous to do so in the wake of McCaffrey's passing. Perhaps the best answer is to not do anything at all. Max Payne 3 is an excellent final chapter to Max's story and maybe my favorite entry in the series.

I often confuse The Adventures of Batman & Robin for being a Traveller's Tales game, and not because Gamehut did an excellent video explaining how many of the it's graphical tricks work. Rather, like Traveller's Tales' games often are, Batman & Robin looks very impressive but is a total chore to play.

This is a run-and-gun, because Batman famously only does battle with his rogue's gallery by chucking a hundred and fifty thousand batarangs at their faces. This isn't really a bad thing, but levels drag on and on and on, often inundating you with ceaseless waves of spongy enemies. Your batarang can be upgraded by picking up power-ups similar to your typical shot upgrades in a shoot-em-up, and much like an average shoot-em-up, starting from a game over on a particularly hard stage with your piddly basic shot is abject misery, though far worse here give how resilient enemies become towards the middle to later half of the game.

There's also several levels that straight up are shoot-em-ups, with Batman gliding around in an overhead view taking on waves of attack helicopters and battleships, and these feel like total trash. Your sluggish movement coupled with how often enemies want to ram into you or fire bullet-hell barrages pointblank makes these incredibly irritating. Your best strategy to carry you through these levels is to pause the game and tap B, A, down, B, A down, left, up, C and just skip the god damn stage. Consider that code a Christmas gift from me to you.

Damn good looking game, though. There's some really impressive parallax scrolling to give the illusion of 3D, and the title cards before each chapter are incredibly detailed and faithful in style to those of the 90s cartoon. I feel that moreso than any other game in my Genesis collection, Batman & Robin is best experienced on a CRT. It's not too surprising to see a 1995 Genesis game swinging for the bleachers with its graphics, the tail-end of the system's library is full of titles that are more preoccupied with making an immediate impression with their visuals, often at the expense of good gameplay.

I decided to add this to my yuletide shortlist alongside holiday favorites like Clockwork Knight and Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, and I guess nothing says "Christmas" more than sitting hunched forward, glaring at the TV, controller in a death grip while constantly sighing and muttering "Jesus..." under my breath. Happy holidays!

I previously wrote an exhaustive and frankly unfocused review on the base version of Sonic Origins, a game I paid 45$ for because I just had to get at a disorganized collection of improperly labeled music and borders for the bastardized 4:3 mode. I won't bother to link that review and save you all the trouble of trying to parse my thoughts. The short version is this: I own these games across an obscene number of platforms, but to have them in 16:9 and playable on my TV sounded nice. It's just too bad Sega put a buggy product to market that was outshined by fan projects like Sonic A.I.R., which released years prior.

But that was way back in June of last year. Sonic Origins has now received its first and presumably only major content update and physical release in the form of Sonic Origins Plus, and as I've established numerous times throughout the last two years, I am bad with my finances. At least I waited for the physical edition to hit 20$ this time!

Plus is a mixed package. It proudly advertises new characters, plural, but only justifies this by adding Amy and making Knuckles playable in exactly one more game than he previously was, Sonic CD. Mechanically, Amy plays very similarly to Sonic, albeit with a wider insta-shield and a weaker drop dash. Though I wish her drop dash had more oomph and lasted longer, I can respect the fact that she doesn't play wildly different, as she needs to slot comfortably into the level design of four whole games. Amy's sprites are excellent, and she has a lot of cute animations, like her victory pose in Sonic 3. She is arguably the main draw to Plus and while she could've felt a bit better to play as, I had enough fun to justify another run through each game.

You also get all the Game Gear Sonics, and if you've been following me as I played through those this year, I think they're pretty bad. However, my problem isn't so much their inclusion (it's good they're on here at all), rather that Sega and Sonic Team still refuse to acknowledge the better Master System versions of some of these games. Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic Spinball are still absent despite being represented in the music gallery and in the main menus, and I know Sega has the ROMs and a good Genesis emulator. I guess they're saving those and Mean Bean for Sonic Origins Plus Deluxe.

I still think Origins is a disappointing collection, and I wouldn't recommend getting it or Plus at full price, but if you don't have multiple Sonic 3 carts laying around, can't be bothered to set up A.I.R., or an emulator for that matter, then... yeah I guess 20$ is ok.

This year's had a real drought of good character creators. Street Fighter 6 is almost entirely designed for generating monsters, and Silent Hill Ascension is... well, you know. So Wo Long made a very strong first impression simply by letting me create an attractive human being. I'm a man who loves some good hair options, and this game left me straight up indecisive. With my feudal warrior properly yassified, I bounced into the main game... literally. Whole lot of jiggling going on here.

Oh right, this is a Team Ninja game. I almost forgot.

I have a real love/hate relationship with Team Ninja, in that I love Dead or Alive and hate everything they release that doesn't have "dead" and "alive" in the title. I've been told Ninja Gaiden Black is good, but I got filtered out by the second boss. Metroid Other M is the worst old game I've played this year. Nioh never left much of an impression on me and I grew bored of it a few hours in. I'll hoot and holler at the top of my lungs for the DOA movie - my username is a direct reference to one of its characters - but trying to experience any other Team Ninja property feels like torture.

And as I was diving into Wo Long's early missions, struggling with combat that felt just as weightless and floaty as my character's chest, I worried that might be the case here as well. But after trading out swords for weightier pole arms and getting a better feel for the more unique systems, like the spirit gauge, I found that I was actually starting to have a good time.

It helps that, unlike other games I've played this year with combat that is heavily reliant on countering enemy attacks, Wo Long is pretty forgiving and plenty generous with its parry timing. I've complained at length that stagger meters are often used to prolong battles in these types of games, effectively severing as armor that must be depleted before you can do "real damage." While it is the case that draining your opponent's spirit gauge will leave them stunned and open them up to a finishing attack that deals a high amount of damage, your basic attacks and spells are all pretty effective on their own. Combat does not feel nearly as rigid as something like Lies of P, and not needing to be surgical with my timing and actually having versatility felt refreshing.

In fact, there were times where I felt the game might be a bit too easy. Thankfully, you can always even that back out by summoning AI partners. You'd think that would trivialize the game but considering Wo Long abides by Souls rules and buffs enemies and bosses when summons are present, and considering AI partners are effectively braindead, they become such a liability that it actually raises the difficulty.

Wo Long is also lacking in variety. By about halfway through the game, you'll have likely seen every weapon, every piece of armor, and every enemy that you'll ever encounter. There is so much loot to pick up, and yet it's always the same low-level swords and axes, clogging up your inventory with dozens upon dozens of duplicates. The shop rarely updates, so selling excess items feels a bit pointless, and breaking them down for upgrade material is about as trivial.

Though much of my enthusiasm for Wo Long is bottled up in its combat, there's thankfully enough offff iiiiiiit thaaHHHHT IIIII HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHHHH-DRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH

Uh oh. The review slowed down. Hold on, let me back out to the main page and start again. At least it autosaved before it crashed...

Wo Long updated a few days ago, and something about this particular patch broke the game. For me, personally. I can't find anyone else bringing up any of this crap.

I have no idea what happens narratively in the last quarter of the game, as every time a cutscene loaded it would suddenly freeze and audio would grind down to a demonic growl. These softlocks happened over and over again and required relaunching the app every single time. I've never seen a game do this before, and I suspect the uniqueness of it is due to the proprietary nature of the Katana engine.

I also began encountering persistent notifications that I had been disconnected from online play, despite remaining logged into my PSN account and experiencing no actual service interruptions with my internet. These notifications pop up using the PS5's UI, and I could go on a whole rant about how it should be standard for notifications like this to pause a game, especially when Wo Long does have a pause function built in, but unfortunately having to hit the O button to dismiss this mid-combat just became a natural part of the game for the last three or so hours I played.

I could've reinstalled the whole game, go offline and keep it at a more stable version, but that felt like too much of a hassle when I was so close to the end, so I just pushed my way through until I rolled credits.

So, yeah, Wo Long is pretty fun but marred by a lack of variety, an abundance of systems that the player is rarely incentivized to use, a stunning lack of variety, and (in my case) glitches that made the game borderline unplayable. I guess that's what I get for playing a Team Ninja game. Now if you'll excuse me, I left the stove on and I really need to touch the burners with my bare hands, again.

It's been a while since I last visited my Retro Games Bucket List. I swear I didn't push off the last entry to coincide with some sort of arbitrary milestone (my 500th review if Backloggd's metrics can be trusted), but it was either this or Sonic Origins Plus. No, I just find it very difficult to discuss Super Mario 64 and have struggled for a while with how I want to approach it.

My apprehension doesn't come from the fact that Mario 64 and its legacy have been so thoroughly discussed, at least not necessarily. That certainly does pose a challenge, after all it is one of the most influential and historically significant games in the medium, and it's been documented to death for good reason. All I can really add is my own personal experiences with it, but that's where the real difficulty comes in, because I've so deeply linked the game to my late grandfather, and framing a whole review for a Mario game around parsing his death just sounds a little bit silly.

I could instead talk about how my first exposure to Super Mario 64 didn't actually come from my grandpa despite how much I tie it to him. When the Nintendo 64 came out, the arcade I used to hang out in had one hooked up to a big TV and roped off with velvet. Ten bucks for ten minutes with Mario, a damn good racket. The save already had all 120 stars unlocked, and the very first thing I did was jump into the cannon outside Princess Peach's castle, which takes you to the castle's roof and face-to-face with Yoshi. The next day I kept insisting to all my friends that Yoshi was in Mario 64. I was called a liar and relentlessly mocked. I knew what I saw, damnit! There's a Yoshi up there! He's gave me 100 lives!!

Anyway, I really hate Yoshi games for some reason.........

It's snowing out, and there are elk roaming in my grandpa's backyard - his house is large and remote, the massive fenced off satellite dish he gets TV from is bordered by miles and miles of pure nature. I'm playing Dire Dire Docks, and by that, I mean I'm mostly drowning to death over and over again, but the music and atmosphere is serene. Grandpa laughs warmly when I die, then he offers some advice, but mostly he just watches and lets me figure it out, as he did whenever we played games together. I don't know it at the time, but I would never be there again.

Ah, yeah, that sounds kinda dumb. But the most insightful thing I have to share about Mario 64 isn't some hot nugget of development history, or a unique perspective on its mechanics, how Mario handles or the way its levels are designed. As much as I would love to tear into it as I would any other game, I can't. Every time I try to write about how important the game was for establishing analog controls or the way it shaped the next several years of 3D platformers, I just get lost in a nostalgic haze, thinking about how much fun I had on the title screen alone, molding Mario's face like that scene from The Hundred Days of the Dragon. Mom walking in, asking "what the hell are you playing," and grandpa answering very curtly, "Mary-oh." I'd correct him. He'd never get it right. To the grave, it was "Mary-oh."

Nowadays, the scene around Super Mario 64 is still lively, though its greatest contributions are so codified in the medium that you'll likely take them for granted. Instead, it lives on more fervently through trite analog horror and speedruns which may or may not be influenced by stray cosmic particles. It occupies such a weird space; one I would've been far more fascinated by as a child. "L is real" captivated me, if you told me back then that every cart was personalized, my eyes would be as wide as saucers. I'm pretty dumb, but I was straight stupid in the 90s.

Super Mario 64 felt like an impossibly huge game to me. Peach's castle was large and full of secrets, and though I eventually got a Nintendo 64 of my own, I could only explore Mario 64 when visiting my grandpa. It was a strange omission from my collection, yet that always left me excited to play more when I visited his house. How much further had he gotten? What cool new things could he show me? What new games did he have, did he get any more promo tapes? The last one had a couple of guys put Mario's head in a damn vice, that was pretty fucked up!

There's a reason Mario 64 was the last game I wanted to get to in my bucket list, as the whole impetus behind making one in the first place was a form of retreat. It felt somehow appropriate to close the whole thing out with it. I really appreciate everyone who stuck with me as I went through my list, reviewing classics like Contra Hard Corps and hot liquid shit like Aero the Acro-Bat. I promise I'll get back to reviews like that soon.

Super Mario 64 is a great game. Bad camera, and it's gotten trendy to write off other parts of it that are antiquated, even despite the fact that for what it doesn't get right, it was still one of the first to do it. But I can't go in on that, even if I see a lot of those rough edges, too. I'm just too emotionally invested in it.