Panzer Dragoon Orta is another one of those games I mostly remember hearing about in magazines. It received a lot of praise at the time, but being as it was an Xbox exclusive, it was forever out of reach like other well-regarded classics of that generation, like Jet Set Radio Future and Blinx the Time Sweeper. You have no idea how much I longed to play Azurik: Rise of Perathia, there was a whole universe of games just beyond my grasp!

Unlike JSRF and its own predecessors, Orta is actually fairly accessible today thanks to the Xbox marketplace, and used copies are still reasonably priced. I've been thinking of grabbing one as recent delistings has inverted my prior (psychotic) belief that I need digital backups of all my physical games. Gotta cover all my bases, I need to be able to play this grungy-ass port of the PC version of Panzer Dragoon whenever I'd like, that's important.

In any case, it's nice that I finally got to check this game off my list after 20+ years of thinking "I really should play Panzer Dragoon Orta," and I'm happy that it lived up to years of continued hype. Orta feels like a culmination of Panzer Dragoon's narrative and mechanical ideas, borrowing from all three previous games in one way or another to create what I think is the most fully realized entry in the series.

Obviously, Orta models itself after the on-rails entries rather than continuing down the turn-based RPG path laid out by Saga. That's not to say it jettisons all of that game's identity, of course. Orta is similarly narrative heavy and makes good on Saga's world building and storyline by focusing on Azel and (presumably) Edge's daughter. Look, it's a little hard to say, Azel just downloaded some DNA and I'm not about to check the file properties on that. Orta also borrows from Saga's positional combat in a way that feels very naturalistic, so much so that I had to question if it was present in Zwei.

Speaking of Zwei, the dragon yet again has the ability to grow over time, but no longer does so based on end-of-level scores. Rather, it changes shape in real-time when enough power-ups are collected in a given form to advance it to the next stage of its evolution. This feels like a natural progression from Zwei, and though the effect might seem quaint today, that level of skeletal deformation and changes to texture mapping is one of Orta's most impressive features. Being able to swap between different attack types also adds a layer of depth, and the deeper into the game you progress, the more rapidly you'll find yourself flicking between forms in order to manage different enemy types. Though I found this a bit overwhelming initially, once you find the right flow and develop an eye for what enemy types you need to counter, it feels pretty good.

Unfortunately, I live in an imperfect, shitty, fucked up world where a sequel to Saga and the overall health of the franchise was solely dependent on how well Orta performed. Since then, we've gotten a remake of the first game that released 18 years after Sega put the series on ice, and people tore it apart for reasons I still can't quite wrap my head around. I think it's safe to say the book is closed on Panzer Dragoon, and that's a shame, but I do think Orta is a good note to go out on. There's no cliffhanger ending here to weigh down on me, though Orta's story is left open, and the gameplay is so tight and refined that I'm not left with a sense that they needed one more game to get things right.

Sometimes you just gotta be grateful for the Panzer Dragoons you got.

Memento mori -- remember, you will not have enough time to complete all your Social Links if you focus on the old couple and their stupid persimmon tree the second you start the game. Do any of these kids even go to school!?

Apologies to FES devotees, but the "Persona 5-fication" of Persona 3 has, in my eyes, been nothing but a net gain. Sure, it's upsetting that the only other legally accessible version of Persona 3 is a ho-hum port of a compromised portable release, but I'm no stranger to the base game, and when stacking it up side-by-side with Reload, it's hard to not internalize the remake as being the superior way to play the game.

Pretty much every facet of the original is improved or otherwise preserved, and nothing has been downscaled or infringed upon in a manner I would view as harmful. That extends to giving the player direct control over their party, a choice that was originally made to suit Persona 3's themes of communication and bonding by treating each member of SEES as their own individual with their own will. You could largely avoid Mitsuru's habitual casting of Marin Karin by engaging with command presets, my issue is not with the AI. I just think having input over 25% of my team in battle makes the game a little too passive and boring. Well, not anymore. Now I have total control, me, and I'm using my newfound agency to... habitually cast Marin Karin-- wait what the hell

An expanded list of spells and abilities adds a lot more variety to combat, and having more input over how your Personas are built permits more strategic planning over the original's randomized inheritance. All quality-of-life changes that are more or less standard parts of the modern SMT experience, effectively bringing Persona 3 on par with Persona 5 and Shin Megami Tensei V. It is likewise as easy as those games, but being accessible to new audiences isn't necessarily a bad thing. I opted to play through Reload on hard and found the difficulty curve to be more enjoyable this way, though by the time you reach the end game you'll still likely be overpowered. Armageddon is basically the "bully The Reaper" button, and I feel a little bad about it, but that's free EXP so what're you gonna do?

Even the individual blocks of Tartarus, Persona 3's massive procedurally generated labyrinth, are fleshed out in a way that makes navigating less rote and tiresome... though it doesn't completely alleviate some of the tedium. This is perhaps one area where Reload is a bit too slavish to the original game. Enemy designs are turned over and recycled constantly, and the limited number of blocks ensures that even though the geometry is more varied, you'll still probably get sick of exploring before reaching a border floor.

Though I've seen people upset that Reload recasts everyone (except Tara Platt, who apparently had the one unassailable performance), I do think the new cast is excellent, and emotional beats that I found affecting when I played the original game were even more impactful despite anticipating them thanks in large part to better voice direction, more emotive character models, and more dynamic cinematography. I've seen mixed opinions on the soundtrack and changes to Persona 3's aesthetic, but I'm way into all of it. These are my favorite versions of familiar songs, I think the character portraits are a clear step up and I adore the hard lines segmenting areas of shading, I am 1,000% down with the water theming in the menus, and I think the new SEES uniforms are great and actually make the party feel like a well-backed force.

I also have nothing but praise for the new Not S. Links Reload adds, which provides the male members of SEES additional screentime for their individual stories to develop. I think this helps bond the player with each member of the core party even more than the original did, something that Persona 3's two sequels got right by giving each member their own dedicated Social Links. Strega and their ideology are also given a greater amount of time to develop, which helps build them as a credible threat and enhances their presence in the story. However, I must dock points for not being able to date Takaya, I can fix him

Reload might be me at my most defensive of remakes, and at my most insistent that changing material is not inherently bad. The few ways in which Reload does lack is still a noted step up from the original, and the content which is outright excluded is material I didn't care about anyway (I think The Answer is the closest any expanded content has come to essentially being an IGN "ending explained!" article, and unfathomably boring besides.) That said, I think it's possible to feel this way about Reload and still lament the fact that the original game is only accessible through piracy or by overpaying on the aftermarket, and that even more Persona 3 media is outright lost to time.

"It's like Smash before Smash" is a sentiment I've run across throughout the years in regard to Fighters Megamix, and I think the comparison is a bit discourteous. Megamix follows directly in the lineage of Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers, and while I don't care much for those games, they are closer to a proper fighting experience when stacked against Smash Bros.'s distinct party-brawler flavor.

The roster isn't even as broad, being less a celebration of Sega's many franchises and instead more focused on AM2 specifically. Even Sonic is represented by Bean and Bark, two characters from the AM2 developed Sonic the Fighters. I've been pretty vocal about not liking AM2's Saturn era fighting games, I believe I called them "shit from ass" and said something to the effect of "Yu Sazuki is spending three hours in the contraption," but I gotta admit... They have something here with Megamix. It is not bad, I might even go so far as to call it good.

The general feel and responsiveness of Megamix might not be on par with Dead or Alive (for me, at least), but it is a noted improvement over the developer's past games and conveys some sense that they've just learned how to put one of these together better. Characters move smoothly, strafing around opponents feels a lot better, and impacts are satisfying - especially when the game's physics freak out and cause your opponent to hit a wall at a weird angle and bounce off into space, which happened more than once. I also think designing each character around the more idiosyncratic qualities of the games they hail from was a smart move and adds a surprising amount of depth.

There's also multiple single player "routes," which send the player through seven fights against a themed set of combatants, like girls, dirty fighters, and "muscle" (see: himbos.) Completing each route unlocks a new character in Megamix's already sizeable roster and provides more of a reason to stick with the game. Having to log 84 hours to unlock the AM2 palm tree is completely unreasonable though. I've opted for leaving the console running, but it's taken on a reddish glow and appears to be pulsing while emanating a horribly loud hum... I don't think you're supposed to leave a Japanese Sega Saturn on that long!

I'm glad AM2 finally figured out this whole 3D figh[USER HAS DIED IN SEGA SATURN INDUCED EXPLOSION]

"The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?"

I began collecting physical copies of Xbox 360 games almost a year ago, anticipating seventh generation releases might suffer from the same degree of inflation that's plagued earlier console libraries in the aftermarket. This was perhaps a foolish concern as many seventh gen games are still widely available on digital storefronts, but occasionally there's an exception, a game that gets delisted and which sees a hike in value that makes it highly sought after and prohibitively expensive. I picked up Spec Ops: The Line last March, and I'd say the near five times increase in its market value is a damn good ROI. That's why they call me Mr. Money.

Being delisted and thus becoming more relevant also served as a great motivator to finally take the game off my Xbox shelf and fight the good fight, oorah! shoot a bunch of unarmed civilians. My curiosity for it had been mounting for some time anyway, in no small part to the march of retroactive playthroughs and ensuing Hot Takes that have ended up in front of me with increasing frequency. Some of the more disparaging opinions I've seen cast Spec Ops as boorish, weakly imitating the broad strokes of its inspirations, most notably Heart of Darkness. Hell, the main antagonist, John Konrad, shares a name suspiciously similar to author Joseph Conrad -- it doesn't get more on-the-nose than that.

Indeed, when you compare Spec Ops: The Line to the quality of meta-narrative games releasing today, it seems downright quaint, maybe even oafish in how it makes its case against the institution of war and the distressing consequences of "justifiable violence." With a setup that amounts to "respected military leader has gone off the grid and established a cult" that uses borrowed imagery from Jacob's Ladder, and story beats that are undercut by the repeated pop of achievemnts, I can get where people are coming from.

However, Spec Ops is very much a game of its era, and it's easy to take for granted what it's doing when you aren't being mindful of the climate of gaming circa the late-aughts and early 2010s. This released during the height of Call of Duty's popularity, in a time when military shooters played more like propaganda for America's actions in the Middle East. These games frequently cast the player as the hero, whose actions were unassailable or at least justifiable enough that the player was never made to see or consider the consequences of what they'd done. America's Army was allowed to hit the mass market roughly around this time, for chrissake.

Spec Ops is a military shooter about military shooters, and directly addresses the way gaming culture insulated players to the violence of war by glamorizing it. It accomplishes this in ways both subtle and heavy-handed, typically within the same set piece, like the infamous white phosphorus scene which is set up like a typical mortar firing mission that then forces you to slowly walk through the aftermath and survey the horrific results of what you've done. Kid Coolout angrily yelling at Nolan North for having yet another mental break might functionally serve as an awkward statement of intent by the writers, and other games before Spec Ops looked into the camera and stated in no unclear terms that "war bad," but the very specific and pointed way in which Spec Ops attacks its particular brand of shooter makes what it's doing both novel and necessary.

I especially enjoyed some of the ways Spec Ops preys on how players might approach a game of this type during this era, too. The opening sequence has one of your squad members attempting to reason with a group of insurgents by speaking their language, leaving you in the dark as to what is being discussed while another squad member gets in your ear about an interactive piece of the environment. "Hey, that bus is full of sand, if you shoot it you can take them out..." Yeah. Yeah, what's a little war crime in my shooter? This is a video game, I'm doing that all the time. I see a window flashing yellow and a prompt that says "shoot" and I squeeeeze the trigger...

Of course, a lot of these choices - and those that are larger and more narratively driven - are an illusion. "I didn't have a choice," is something Walker repeatedly states to make peace with his actions. It's a video game, you did what was expected of you, so why should you stop and feel bad about it? The more you progress and the more Walker deteriorates physically and mentally, the more you're hit with these excuses. Even the loading screens trade helpful gameplay hints to press you on what you've done or otherwise steep you in Walker's headspace.

"To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless."

None of this is particularly special when viewed strictly through a modern lens, but as a piece of work so heavily characterized by when it came out, I think it's pretty damn great. Less great, however, is its gameplay, which even by 2012 standards was about as dry as a cover-shooter could possibly get. This is partly the result of being hit with delays, one of which was to force a multiplayer mode into the final product, as was the trend at the time. I didn't bother to mess around in that, but having watched a few videos, it does appear very tacked on and lacks the core game's subversive spirit. If only that time were spent elsewhere, like incorporating more dynamic elements to the sand that's blanketed Dubai as was originally intended... oh well.

I think there's a lot of fair criticisms out there about Spec Ops: The Line, but I also think some of them are perhaps too colored by what is expected of a game today rather than appreciating the atmosphere of the time. There's enough of value here that I think it's worth playing even outside its notoriety as a delisted game, and as my pal Larry Davis pointed out to me in private, it's also crazy that this is where a series of 10$ PlayStation 1 games eventually ended up.

"You are still a good person."

(Sad "oorahs")

If you ever thought to yourself "I want to play Journey to Jaburo but good" then here's the game for you. The secret ingredient? Being able to actually land hits on the enemy reliably.

Journey to Jaburo covered the first half of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime, and Encounters in Space appropriately follows with the second half - and a fairly large assortment of side stories and alternate scenarios - which entirely takes place in space. No ground combat to be had here, your mobile suits move in a decidedly more fluid fashion, you're permitted to use the analog stick, and despite combat taking place in the void of space, it's surprisingly more easy to keep track of where everything is at than it was in the previous game.

Really, the only part of Encounters in Space I found disorienting is its targeting system, which has a tendency to lock on to the nearest enemy rather than what you're pointing the camera directly at. There were countless instances where I had a command ship in my sights but the game decided to spin me around because I had a Ball up my ass. You think I give a fuck about a Ball? Those things just like, explode on their own. They're colloquially referred to in-continuity as "spherical coffins," stop targeting them!

The main "White Base" campaign is enjoyable from start to finish, though it is very short, only taking one or two hours to complete. Gundam fans might get more out of all the side stories, which focus on different ace pilots, including deep cuts like Shin Matsunaga. It's fun being able to take different mobile suits and mobile armors for a spin, and having arcade-length runs through shows like Stardust Memories definitely adds a lot of replay value. However, these ace pilot substories also suffer from some pretty awful difficulty pacing, with the Thoroughbred episode placing its hardest mission directly at the start for some insane reason.

Still, for someone like me who has suffered immense brain damage from ingesting Tamiya Mr. Mark Setter (I like to take a hit for "inspiration") hearing Char's theme kick in when you summon him as a support unit during Gato's A Baoa Qu mission is all I need to have a good time. Gato even comments on the Zeong not having legs! Gato you dumbass, you're in space! You don't need legs in space............

uh, four of five

I'd like to say "this hasn't aged well" and be done with it, but that is NOT ALLOWED! If I said that, they'd put me in the stockades again, and I'm not going back there!!

I never got into the Ultimate Spider-Man comics back in the day. I don't like to dog on anyone's art, but Mark Bagley's interpretation of these characters was always a barrier, and it turns out they look pretty bad when rendered through a Nintendo Gamecube, too. However, if you asked me what my favorite pre-Marvel's Spider-Man game was at any point prior to this last weekend, I'd say Ultimate Spider-Man. Probably talk about how good the web-slinging was, or how neat the stylized comic book panel cutscenes were.

It's easy to assign a high level of quality to something you haven't touched for about twenty years.

Everything in this game feels weightless, Peter most of all as any punch to the nose will send him flying several miles away, rag-dolling at maximum velocity into the cold depths of the Hudson. Combat, traversal, even the level of mission variety just feels so flat, so bodyless that at several points I started to question if I accidentally downloaded a beta. I remember it being better than this, but apparently I just got way into a budget mid-2000s action game. I remember booting this up just to swing around for hours, not really doing anything. Real "playing with rocks" behavior.

Turns out me not actually doing anything when revisiting the game is partly a consequence of the game providing nothing to do. Side missions are divided between races and "tours" of combat that send you between points to beat up a few bad guys. Occasionally you'll be called upon to stop a crime in progress or swing someone with a tummy ache to the hospital (Spider-Man is a friend to those with IBD), but there's just not much going on in New York. Unfortunately, the game forces you to complete a pre-requisite amount of these missions before continuing with the story, and despite never being a tall task, it is incredibly mind numbing.

The main story missions are lacking in variety, too. Almost all of them follow the same pattern of chasing a villain from Spider-Man's rogues gallery and then doing battle with them. The chase sequences are lengthy and lacking in any sense of flow, and battles largely boil down to dodging attacks while waiting for the enemy to become vulnerable, then doing a hit-and-run for a small amount of damage. My favorite. There's like, five things to do in this game and they're all unengaging.

I don't even care for the story, which treads a bit too close to "it's all fate" for my liking. Peter and Eddie Brock's dads were both working on the Venom symbiote prior to their deaths, and apparently some of Richard Parker's DNA made it into the suit (he came a little), which creates a unique bond between it and Peter. I think part of what makes Spider-Man so appealing is that anybody could be him, Peter was just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Ultimate's story takes away from that and is worse for it.

Peter is also written to be an insufferable jerkass with no redeeming qualities, something Sean Marquette does an admirable job at capturing with his line delivery. Don't get me wrong, while half of Sean's acting credits in games are cited as "reused grunts," I'm sure he's a perfectly good actor who was turning in the performance expected of him. I pin the blame on bad writing and poor direction.

anyway, i'm giving this game an extra star because it never at any point made me play as Mary Jane

After watching TransWitchSammy play Illbleed at the behest of myself and Appreciations, I knew Blue Stinger was the next game she ought to play in order to fully appreciate Crazy Games and Shinya Nishigaki's mad genius. However, I'd previously committed to playing the game myself and had intended to do so in December, coinciding with when the game takes place, and it was quickly settled that I would play and stream it instead.

I'd like Sammy to know I took a bullet for her and I hope she never forgets the sacrifice I made.

DINOSAUR ISLAND TRAVEL LOG

Day 1:

For a Sega Dreamcast launch title and a first outing by Nishigaki's Climax Graphics (rebranded to Crazy Games two years later), Blue Stinger leads with its best foot forward.

Elliot Ballade is sailing around Dinosaur Island with his friend, who is so busy occupying himself with fitting a PVC figurine into a jar that he gets caught in a time dilation bubble. Elliot is saved a short time later by Dogs Bower, and now might be a good time to mention Masaki Segawa of Basilisk fame did all the character designs for Blue Stinger. Not to disparage his future work, but he's really never designed someone quite like Dogs since.

The story takes itself a little more seriously than Illbleed, with Nishigaki preferring to skew more towards a tone similar to that of Jurassic park, carefully balancing action and suspense while sprinkling in bits of his humor. People are mutating into horrible amalgamations of mammal and reptile, and though you have an arsenal of traditional and high-tech weapons, you can also like, put on a sumo shirt and come at them like the gassed up middle-aged, denim shorts wearing freak of nature Dogs is-- and all while thunderous music by composer Toshihiko Sahashi (who later worked on Gundam Seed) blares at a level that's just a bit too high in the mix to be able to hear your friends talk over Discord even with the game dropped to 20% volume.

In other words: this is a crazy game by Crazy Games. Or it is for now....

Day 2:

It doesn't take long to reach the Hello Market section of the game, which is littered with tons of great examples of video game signage, including so much marketing for Hassy Recovery Cola that you might be forgiven thinking it's a real product you can put your real lips to. However, Hello Market also exposes an especially frustrating aspect of Blue Stinger's design that plagues it through the duration of the game: it's "gero camera," the Japanese onomatopoeia for vomiting, which Nishigaki unaffectionately refers to it as in in an interview with Game Developer's John Andersen.

The camera tightly follows the player-character, and is at times so closely zoomed in that your visability when entering a room is limited to the back of your character's head. This was the result of an edict by Activision, which felt this sort of camera system would play better in Western markets as opposed to the more zoomed out position it takes in the Japanese version, because why on Earth would you want your game to be readable?

Unfortunately, I don't speak Japanese and I want to hear Deem Bristow go "GAH'CHA!" so I was forced to constantly eat shit when entering into rooms because Blue Stinger's enemy placement is practically the template Signalis followed, only with greater and more devious intent. It's fine, I spent all my money on large cans of Hassy. Dogs is leaving Dinosaur Island with his life and the price is only a few thousand dollars in soft drinks and completely calcified kidneys.

Day 3:

I'm starting to get a little frustrated.

Elliot is equipped with a shotgun and Dogs has a god damn gatling gun, and both these weapons do shit damage. What the hell, man? How do you make a video game gatling gun feel bad. How do you make a video game gatling gun wielded by reigning sumo champ Dogs Bower feel bad.

The whole weapon economy is fucked. Your arsenal is largely purchased from vending machines, necessitating a certain amount of grinding to afford new armaments. But when certain guns feel weak despite their cache in gaming culture, blowing 8,000 bucks on a laser sword or bazooka carries a risk that the weapon might be a total waste of money. Do you want to horde your cash and trade it in for ammo, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs? Or do you want to see what's in the mystery box?

By this point, the wildly variable audio mixing was actively causing problems with hearing my friends and being able to absorb needed context for where to go and what to do. Sammy became my Otacon, using a guide to keep me grounded and focused on the task at hand, only we discovered so deep into the walkthrough that the author was littering it with half-truths and totally glossing over important pieces of information, as if they too were a bit fed up with Blue Stinger. If IAmYoFatha was on the job, this wouldn't have happened, but he's either dead or in jail.

Day 4:

Elliot swallowed monsters.

Day 5:

Ok, man, let me tell you about burger-frames.

The final boss comes after a three minute and 45 second long defense mini-game with no save inbetween, meaning at minimum you're doing that over again if you die. Or worse, you'll have to do that plus a run back down and up a tower to restock on bazooka ammo if you didn't have the foresight to overstock your supply beforehand, because it's about the only thing that does a reliable amount of damage.

Despite having predictable patterns and attacks that can be led, the final boss feels like a bunch of random bullshit. His fire breath frequently hits outside of the effect and sometimes does not actually harm you when standing directly in the middle of it. I cannot stress enough how wildly incongruous the hitbox is with the animation itself. It also deals an insane amount of damage, killing Elliot in two hits if you didn't upgrade his health (something I didn't know was even possible until after I beat the game) and Dogs in three.

This is where cheeseburgers come in. Of all the consumable items in the game, cheeseburgers have the longest period of invulnerability from the time you eat them to the time your health is recovered, meaning you could bypass potential damage by eating a cheeseburger at the right frame of the boss's attack. At worst, you'll get a little cooked but still heal, rubbing your tummy while your head is engulfed in flames. This was the only way I was able to keep myself alive and beat the boss.

By this point, I was already at my wits end with Blue Stinger, frequently flipping the high-speed toggle in Redream and going "VROOOOM" while throwing sumo chops at a million miles an hour just to keep myself awake and invested in what was happening. Towards the end of the final night, I was making plans to buy a Japanese copy of the game and frame it.

"Oh, you must like this game a lot, huh?" some unsuspecting guest might say.

"Fucking no I do not!"

___________________________________________________

Blue Stinger is brimming with charm, humor, and that signature Nishigaki style. It's also obtuse, frustrating, and ill-conceived. It has Dogs Bower and Hassy, and it also has the worst gatling gun in video games and a "vomit camera." It's Crazy Games - or rather Climax Graphics - at its most nascent but not at its most pure.

Stand for the national anthem.

In the pantheon of seminal masterpieces that shaped the industry which Weatherby completely slept on (I was too busy playing Sonic Heroes, probably) The Sands of Time has been among the most interesting to finally loop back to. Nowadays, it might be easy to take what it's doing for granted. Clambering up crumbling ruins, dashing across walls, and swinging along busted piping is pretty bog-standard movement tech, but Sands of Time established this type of traversal so well that in terms of responsiveness and feedback, it doesn't feel like the industry has come that far since 2003.

The Prince's movement feels precise and deliberate, and progression is dependent entirely on how you position him and the timing of your inputs. Really, there might be an argument here that games have moved backwards, as titles like Uncharted come with far fewer fail states, and parkour mechanics in games like Assassin's Creed feels more automated. However, those games have more going on, whereas Sands of Time firmly roots itself in exploration and movement, making it a far better translation of the "cinematic platformer" to a 3D space than games like Tomb Raider. Which are bad. Evil, some would say.

Unfortunately, combat is the polar opposite, being a grotesquely clumsy affair. Geometry frequently obstructs the camera, and the Prince will too often fixate on enemies and fight back against your inputs as you try to point him towards a more immediate threat, resulting in this feeling of whiplash as you no longer feel in control. Combat is rarely challenging outside of these annoyances and remains rudimentary throughout the entire adventure, and in addition to just being boring, the game also likes to dump an obscene amount of enemies on you during every encounter. You run into combat encounters more and more as you near the end of the game, and at a certain point they feel less like a pace breaker and more an outright impediment, keeping you from the parts of the game that are actually fun. I'd prefer a more complex system with a greater enemy variety, but in lieu of that, I'd rather nothing at all than what Sands of Time actually provides.

It's such a shame, because the rest of the game is pretty damn good and would otherwise be one of the easiest 4.5/5's I've logged on the site. An endearing masterpiece that has weathered the test of time. But ah, whoops, I gotta jump off this guy's head and slash him in the back- oh wait there's another guy- oh wait there's another guy- oh wait there's- oh wait...

If I keep harping on it, I might sound as bitchy and ill-mannered as the Prince himself, who spends most of the game being a misogynistic pissant. Look, he grows by the end, it's about the journey. Yeah ok sure he forcefully kissed a woman who (at that point in time) did not know him, then rewound time to undo it, but that's because he knew it was wrong! Uhh... I'm not gonna think too hard on that one. I'm not saying you can't have your protagonist be unlikable and learn nothing - hell, I love Popful Mail! - but I did find it a little funny how many times I leaned back and thought "wow he really said that." Dudes need to be in therapy, but they too busy playing with their daggers of time.

I could definitely see myself revisiting The Sands of Time in the future, even despite how much I think combat steps all over the experience. It feels as good to play today as any of its imitators and there's no denying its significance in gaming history.

With the release of Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe I knew I had two options: drop about sixty dollars on the rerelease that adds big garish black outlines to the characters as if something about the original's presentation made the action inscrutable, or put the iso of the original on my Wii's hard drive and play a much better looking game... With the Wiimote sideways. Well shit, that was a pretty easy call all the way to the end.

Frankly, I've found a lot of Nintendo's rereleases on Switch to be pretty uncompelling and settled on discomfort. I should get a pro controller if I'm going to play more Wii games, holding the Wiimote sideways might be the single worst way to experience any Nintendo game. What a garbage setup, with its prank D-pad and hard edges digging into your palm... At least Return to Dream Land plays well and is so enjoyable that even despite this horrid controller setup, I often found myself thinking "damn, this might be as good as The Crystal Shards."

Return to Dream Land is about as straight-forward a Kirby game as it gets. At least in single player. I get the feeling one of the big draws to this one is playing with friends, but nobody is willing to come over and watch Kirby and Meta Knight smooch with me. Tragic, I know. On some level, Return feels antiquated, with only Super Abilities and a very minimal amount of Wiimote waggling offering anything new to the typical Kirby formula, but I think adhering to tradition makes Return comfortably nostalgic.

That adherence to expected gameplay and inclusion of co-op makes this a friendly entry point, too. Not that most people reading a Backloggd review will struggle with Kirby's notoriously easy brand of gameplay, but I grabbed a copy of Deluxe for my niece after learning about how much she adores Kirby, and she's had a great time playing it with her mom. I'm 36 and had just as good of a time playing this hunched in front of a CRT. That's uh, the power of Kirby.

I somehow failed to unlock Yuffie during my first playthrough of Final Fantasy VII, having made the fatal mistake of saving before speaking with her and getting my god damned gil stolen. About as successful as any Shin Megami Tensei recruitment attempt, frankly. At the time, I didn't even realize Yuffie and Vincent were optional characters; I was aware of them and just assumed you unlocked them as part of the story. Oh well, she stole my money, but I'm sure she'll be back around, and then we'll go on all kinds of crazy adventures together...

Naturally, I did a more complete playthrough of Final Fantasy VII sometime after my disastrous first run, and being as Yuffie is optional, I found she doesn't really have much agency over the story. Sure, there's plenty of interesting side content involving her and Vincent which helps build the world of FFVII and provide additional context for some of the game's larger narrative beats, but besides puking all over the Highwind and raining even more puke down onto unsuspecting citizens while skydiving into Midgar, she isn't given much to do.

So, at face value, Episode Intermission attempting to weave Yuffie into the core narrative of Remake is welcome, and I feel like there's far more character building and actual growth bottled up in its short 4-to-5 hour run than the entirety of the original game. There's still two more parts to the remake series, too! Yuffie fans are eating good (note: Yuffie fans are shattering their teeth on rock hard nuts, they are maniacs, and you should not trust them or accept any gifts from them)!

Intermission takes place roughly halfway through Remake, with Yuffie and her partner Sonon infiltrating Midgar to steal experimental materia from Shinra with the help of Avalanche. It's a little ironic that Avalanche's splinter cell is accused of working with Wutai operatives when the core branch of Avalanche was doing that all along, and throughout Yuffie's time in Midgar, she and Sonon both wonder if the more extreme sect ought to be who they partner up with. Also, there's a bunch of Compilation of Final Fantasy VII shit in here, and I can barely parse any of it from content exclusive to the Remake continuity. I will never play Dirge of Cerberus or read On the Way to a Smile, that is TOO MUCH FINAL FANTASY VII!

Yuffie's playstyle is a hybrid of close quarters and ranged combat and I like it quite a bit, though I never did get the hang of her parry timing or dodge ability. Not that they're necessary, but I feel like there's a skill ceiling there I never could reach. Being able to change the affinity of your basic attacks without the use of elemental materia is overly generous if it carries over into Rebirth but considering she's the only playable character in Intermission, it becomes an invaluable addition to her kit. Mug also compensates for a lackluster assortment of stealable items by applying a large amount of stagger at little cost.

It's a shame Sonon is not playable as I'm a sucker for any character that uses polearms, but hey, Cid is in Rebirth and I kinda get why they didn't want to overcomplicate the DLC. Dungeons, likewise, are pretty simplistic and don't have a whole lot going on, but good combat, great bosses, and an enjoyable story more than make up for how dry they are.

The true stand out feature of Intermission, however, is Fort Condor. Finally, the return of the persistent collectable mini-game to Final Fantasy. Much like the Fort Condor game in the original, it's a mini RTS/tower defense game, only it functions a whole hell of a lot better here and gives you a little something extra to work towards. Once you hit Shinra HQ, you're pretty much locked in until the credits roll, so most of my time with this was bottled up in the opening hour of the game, but I really hope it shows back up in Rebirth. I'm a huge slut for Tetra Master and I can see myself getting deep into this, too.

Now's a good time to jump into Intermission if you haven't already. It's worth the asking price and certainly seems like it will be required reading for Rebirth, and if you pick it up now you'll still have enough time to Google "what the hell is up with Nero?" before that game releases.

Though I thought very highly of Dead or Alive, my attempt to pinpoint when the 3D fighting game genre came into its own (or "got good" if you want me to be less polite) has now taken me a few months back to Soul Edge or Blade or whatever the hell you want to call it.

Soul Calibur and DOA are pretty much neck-and-neck for me, and whichever series I prefer changes with the weather. I was hoping that these initial releases would be different enough in terms of quality that I could easily point to one as being better, but it turns out this is not the case!

Sure, Soul Blade differentiates itself by focusing on weapons and even has a surprisingly robust story in the form of the very funnily named "Edge Master" mode, but I think I prefer the weight of Dead or Alive's characters and how that game paces combat. Soul Blade has a deeper combo system, but Dead or Alive is easier to pick up and play. Dead or Alive has jiggle physics, but Soul Blade has Voldo-- there's a lot to weigh here!

That said, Soul Blade released on consoles first, so for the purposes of my completely pointless experiment, it has DOA beat. I could take this back even further and try Tekken 2, but I've played the demo enough times already and I'm not especially impressed by how it feels. Look, it's a weak excuse, I know. I just need to free up some time so I can figure out how the hell you chain Taki's Critical Edge into an actual combo so Sophitia can stop beating the absolute piss out of me. Google is not being helpful, every old GameFaQs and Reddit thread I find basically just says "do it better." Do what better!? It's not in the manual! OH FUCK SOPHITIA IS RUNNING RIGHT AT M-

Early access streamer bait (derogatory) that I was initially apprehensive about but jumped in on after caving to peer pressure and ended up having more fun with than any other multiplayer game since freaking 1 vs 100.

You probably know how this game operates by now: you and a crew of three others (Apprecations, HaroKid, and TransWithSammy with a few guest appearances by friends of friends thanks to the More Company mod) plumb abandoned facilities, desolate planets, and "MILF mansions" - as they were colloquially referenced by my crew - for treasure... Or trash, as Lethal Company frames old soda cans, whoopie cushions and sheets of metal as items of value in much the same way Pikmin does. Complicating your excursions are violent bouts of inclement weather, natural and artificial hazards, and monsters. Lots of monsters. There are no MILFs in MILF Mansion, just a crackerjack-man with a shotgun looking to blow your head off.

Note: I am aware a nut-cracker is not a "crackerjack-man," I just called him that in a panic (I believe while running away screaming "CRACKERJACK-MAN!") and kinda kept going with it. I'm old and kept playing this game past my bed time. I once tried to explain how I thought Red Bull tastes like perfume, I should be in hospice.

Horror-comedy is pretty well defined even within the medium of video games, but I'm hard pressed to think of many examples that express this genre quite so effectively through their mechanics. Sure, there's some eerie monster designs, and you can buy some very silly items in the in-game store, but moments of genuine tension and comedy are more often borne from how you engage with the game rather than being experienced passively. Being lost in a pitch-dark maze far from your friends - who might be dead for all you know - is dreadful, especially when you start to laugh after a circling monster steps on the whoopie cushion you dropped, alerting it to your exact location. In other words, it's the perfect game to showcase Weatherby's many foibles.

Lethal Company's most interesting feature is how it plays with audio cues. Proximity voice chat places an emphasis on sticking together and coordinating, and becomes vital given the procedural nature of facilities, which are often labyrinthine and steeped in darkness. Monsters are identifiable by the sounds they make, and their distance and placement can be discerned from how their growling and stomping pans between audio channels. Much like every other facet of Lethal Company, proximity audio plays a large role in fostering anxiety and humor, whether it instills panic as the thunderous pounding of an Eyeless Dog's paws spell imminent disaster, or relief as you trek back to the ship from a harrowing expedition only to hear your crewmates blasting Canned Heat in the distance.
 
Mods add a lot to the game too, allowing players to replace the models of monsters with dumb shit like Son Goku, change the hazmat suits to NOS tracksuits, or expand the total number of allowable crewmates. In a lot of ways, I could see Lethal Company becoming as customizable and well supported by mods as Left 4 Dead 2, if only it would get Steam Workshop support so I don't have to deal with dumping weird dll's into file trees.

Being in early-access does come with a slew of problems. Instability, pieces of geometry loading in wrong, and general issues with mod compatibility are all standard and predictable consequences of being in-development, though Zeekerss does hope to have the game completed "within six months." Given how simplistic the game is, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable target, and it's explosive popularity does engender a lot of confidence that new features will be added over time. I'm not one to buy-in on early-access games, but Lethal Company is worth jumping into for its low asking price, especially given the level of official and community support.

Stating the obvious, you might not have as much fun with Lethal Company if you play it in a random group. Maybe that extra chaos factor of not having a rapport with any of your crewmates is it's own kind of fun, but I was never willing to wade into that part of the game. Call it social anxiety if you want, frankly I think the sound of my voice is as much a horrible burden on my friends as my inability to stay alive longer than two minutes. But with a familiar party, Lethal Company is so perfectly poised to exploit the usual antics of your friend group that it becomes a blast.

(I don't rate early-access games so, no current score for this one.)