Similar to the first Banjo game, I have very little reverence for Tooie. I never played it as a kid and I have an inherent dislike for collecathons, and generally find Rare's output to be very hit-or-miss. I guess you could say I was pre-disposed to hating this one, but I promise you I gave it the old college try (getting blackout drunk and playing the N64 at 3am.)

Unfortunately, I'm still coming up negative on this one. There's just too damn much to collect, Banjo still doesn't feel particularly good to control, and most of the minigames that have to be completed to earn Jiggies are just no fun at all. I got 100% completion in the last game, because despite it not being a worthwhile endeavor from the standpoint of having a good time, it was at least doable, and I do things that are doable because I'm stupid as hell. But Tooie is just so bloated with content it quickly becomes a chore just trying to satisfy the requirements for the game to be done, and I could not commit to it any more than that. It perhaps didn't help that I started getting way into The Computer Chronicles while playing this and watched episodes in the background. Listening to guys drone on about creating MIDI music on the Atari 520ST while trying to earn Jiggies must be what getting a lobotomy feels like, so I'll take some of the blame for my lack of enjoyment here.

The control scheme is a good reflection of the game itself. Every single button has to do something in concert with everything else, but the way it's laid out is just convoluted. Compare this with Super Mario 64. Controlling Mario is a breeze, yet the amount of movement options you have is varied. If you pull back and look at the amount of buttons you actually use, it's pretty simplistic. That's the genius of Mario 64; Miyamoto and his team knew their audience and understood that few people would have played a 3D platformer before, so they designed the game in a way that was easy to pick up and felt great in hand. There's a reason it set the standard. I'm 34-years-old and I've been playing 3D platformers since 1996, and every time I pick up Banjo-Tooie I think "what bastard designed this?"

At least the humor, music, and character designs are all great. I've always liked the look of these games. Gruntilda is a skeleton now, that's pretty good. None of this is enough to save Banjo-Tooie for me, and ultimately I think it would be the best case study of "bigger =/= better" if Donkey Kong 64 didn't already exist.

Shining Force CD was part of my Sega CD repro pickup along with PopFul Mail and Snatcher. I was mostly sold on the cover, because I sure as hell have no real affinity for this kind of game nor have I played a Shining Force title before this one. Maybe this wasn't the best place to start, I don't know, but I mostly found it to be kind of dull. The story was pretty forgettable and combat was generally uninteresting. Also not a fan of how you need to back out of a mission if you want to get a little grinding done, just doesn't seem like there's a good system in place when you hit a level wall.

I also didn't quite finish this, actually. Similar to Policenauts, I ran into a weird emulation issue, though in this case it prevented me from starting the second scenario entirely. As far as I know, Kega Fusion's support for the Sega CD is pretty good, so I don't think it's the emulator's problem so much as the disc. I'm not considering this a fault on the game itself in any case, though I was so thoroughly bored with it, walking away at what is ostensibly the mid-way point was a fairly easy thing to do.

Kind of reminds me of Phantasy Star in that they're both beloved roleplaying series for Sega consoles that I find myself completely unable to get into, despite being a huge mark for RPGs. Oh well.

For the longest time I was lead to believe Contra 3 was the best game in the series, which is demonstrably false. It's a perfectly fine game and a solid entry, sure, but the best?

I can sort of understand this position. If all you played were Nintendo consoles then I don't think I could blame you for being wowed by this one. It is probably the best Contra game in terms of sheer spectacle, at least if you're viewing the series from that very narrow viewpoint. I think over the years the conversation around this game has changed, though, and it seems to be a more popular opinion now that Hard Corps is the best entry.

Difficulty is way off balance in Alien Wars, with the first half of the game being absurdly easy and the second half suddenly spiking in difficulty. I still think there's harder Contra games, but there's something about Alien Wars that just feels cheap and artificial. It's totally possible to have a game be harder than this (again: Hard Corps) but have that difficulty feel earned, and I think that's the difference between having the gameplay loop be satisfying or a mess. The overhead Mode 7 levels are also a total drag to play, just incredibly dull in their execution.

It's not that I have a bad time playing this one, I think it's still more fun than miserable, but it's definitely rough around the edges. There's certain games of this era that were popular yet flawed enough to earn unofficial "enhanced editions," rom hacks that tweak the difficulty and tighten up stage design and other features. I've never looked into whether or not that's the case with Contra 3, but it radiates that vibe so powerfully I've fully accepted such a thing exists without any proof.

I recently jailbroke my Wii and loaded it up with illegally obtained iso files legitimate backups of games I've owned and always owned and paid for with my real money, and for some reason I decided the first thing I should play was Dragon Ball Z Budokai. Why would I do this? Why am I so stupid...?

Liked Budokai well enough when it first came out, but that probably had a lot to do with the fact that there had literally never been a single good Dragon Ball Z game until that point. I mean, what else was I gonna do, play Ultimate Battle 22?

Budokai is slow, awkward, and ugly to look at. Character models are off-kilter, lumpy and disproportionate. There's a model viewer in the game and it's hilarious, just load it up and take a look at Nappa and his ill-fitting Saiyan armor, mouth all open, eyes vacant. Nobody quite looks right, but they do recreate DBZ's iconic opening completed with "Rock the Dragon," and that's kinda neat. The menus, on the other hand, look terrific. The portrait art that's used on the character select screen is incredible, it all has a really distinct style to it. It's just a shame it's wasted on this game in particular.

Fighting is clunky. Special attacks are combo'd into rather than being stick-based executions. There's no quarter circle inputs here, which was good for me at the time as I had virtually no experience with a proper fighting game. There was a period in the 2000s where I got really good at Budokai, which is something I can't often say about any fighting game, but coming back to it... it's just so sluggish, and the Gamecube controller with it's long travel time on its shoulder triggers and super clicky face buttons just doesn't feel comfortable for this kind of game.

Gameplay itself is also pretty braindead. The story mode covers the Saiyan, Freeza, and Cell sagas (Majin Buu isn't here but that's fine. It's fine.), but for the most part the difficulty curve is a flat line. Enemies block through your combos more the deeper into the story mode you go, and that's about it. After finishing the story mode you can come back for a few What If scenarios, which are entertaining enough, but The Legend of Hercule provides the most fun out of Budokai's side content. You play as Hercule and beat up everyone in attendance at the Cell Games, trash talking them (and disparaging yourself in your inner-monologues) after each fight. It's fun seeing Hercule talk shit about Android 16 only to turn around and say "Oh man, I really tore my arms up punching that robot!"

Dragon Ball Z Budokai feels like a proof of concept for a much better 3D DBZ fighter, and in many ways it is. I've been playing a lot of crap lately, what's up with that? I spent all this time modding this Wii and I have so many great games sitting on here that I could be playing, but I keep coming back to stuff I know I won't enjoy. I think I'm going to treat myself to a real classic next, I've earned it. Yeah... yeah I'm gonna play Star Fox Adventures next!

I'm not done shitting on Bloodborne just yet! Who are the Old Hunters? i don't know, a bunch of assholes.

I don't have too much to say about this one. It's more Bloodborne, so, you know, most of my complaints still stand. The initial run through the chapel and surrounding areas didn't make a strong first impression, it was more Yharnam except it's during the day and there's rocks everywhere. The subsequent dungeons, though, do add some much needed variety. The fishing hamlet is probably my favorite location in the DLC, and given how closely such a location is tied to Lovecraft, it's almost a little wild that it wasn't part of the base game in some way.

The DLC also has the finest collection of bosses in the entire game. Ludwig is great, Lady Maria ranks up there with Father Gassy for hunter battles, and the final boss is a real motherfucker who is extremely satisfying to overcome.

The Old Hunters is a must have for fans of Bloodborne, which I am not, but it's still good enough to get a 3/5 for me and that's about the most praise this game is ever going to get.

I try not to let contrary opinions about media affect me. It's an awful trait, one that stems from tying part of your identity to a product. There's plenty of games I care deeply about, but if someone else doesn't like them, that's not a personal slight against me. Likewise, if someone enjoys something I passionately dislike, it doesn't make their opinion any less valid than my own. Of course I'm not perfect, I slip up sometimes. We all do. The important thing is having enough self-awareness to catch yourself doing it, pull back, and evaluate whether it's worth it. 99.99% of the time, it's not.

Bloodborne is the .01% exception.

I've beaten this game about four times now, and each completed run has only reaffirmed my belief that this is the worst entry in the Souls series. I'm sorry, I mean "Soulsborne", because apparently it's so good that it's now suffixed at the hip with the overarching franchise's namesake. Despicable. Feels about as good rolling off the tongue as "Metroidvania," and is about as unearned. I genuinely cannot enter into the same headspace as everyone else. Have we played the same game? This is one of - if not the best game From has ever put out?

Bloodborne feels like the byproduct of a rushed development. Locations and mechanics are so woefully underdeveloped that it simply feels incomplete. Take combat, which is designed to be more fast-paced compared to previous Souls titles. Trick weapons provide more utility and varied movesets, making each new weapon more impactful than the myriad swords you loot in Dark Souls, and gone are shields (ThEy EnGeNdEr PaSsIvItY har har har) in favor of sidearms, which can be used to initiate parries with a very generous window. A quick step was added in place of a roll, at least while locked on, making dodging and weaving between enemies more snappy. All of this contributes to a combat system that feels more aggressive than previous Souls titles, one that asks the player to unlearn the tired strategies they've relied upon for three games now.

The problem is that very little about the game is actually balanced around these drastic changes, and it's apparent that From is not nearly as willing to evolve their approach as they expect their players to be. The camera and targeting system become even bigger liabilities here than they have been. Lock on to any large aggressive boss and you'll see what I mean, it just spins around like a whirling dervish, all chest fur and particle effects. Apparently Dark Souls 2 is bad because of the way enemies track you, something Bloodborne doesn't do? Blood Starved Beast would like a word with you, and he'll pivot 180 degrees on a dime to tell you. To be fair, this is only really an issue with a few late game bosses, whereas most encounters seem to be reused or rejected concepts from previous Souls games. I was surprised to see people had trouble with Rom or The One Reborn when they're quite literally Phalanx and The Tower Knight from Demon's Souls, only now you can run around them like Sonic the Hedgehog.

The lock on system is more consistently problematic with mobs. Boy I sure do love targeting the guy to my right instead of the one immediately in front of me. Hey this guy is charging right at me, I should lock on and side-step him and oh no, I'm now locked on to something on the other side of the floor. A lot of Bloodborne's difficulty feels imbalanced, if not artificial, like the solution to the game not being hard enough was to just overwhelm the player with a bunch of bullshit ambushes in areas where the geometry and camera do not get along. The advice I often hear is "well then don't lock on," except the game clearly wants me to by including the quick-step as a targeting-only feature. Also, completely disengaging with a system that is bad isn't really the solution people seem to think it is for the system being bad.

I'm going to invoke Dark Souls 2 again, that rascal, that perennial black sheep. It's remarkable to me how the B-team had the wisdom to let the player warp to any location from a bonfire, and while removing the ability to level up at them as well was a step in the wrong direction, at least jumping between areas didn't feel sluggish. Bloodborne, on the other hand, makes you warp back to the Hunter's Dream for everything. You can't even rest at a lamp post to restore blood vials and quicksilver bullets. Want to replenish your inventory before a boss? Fuck you, back to the Hunter's Dream. The original Dark Souls may not have let you warp until halfway through the game, but that at least made sense with how its world was laid out, how it was meant to be explored. Bloodborne is just inconvenient for no reason.

One of the more interesting deviations from the norm, however, is its setting. Yharnam's makes a solid first impression. The opening "dungeon" is vast, and similar to the Painted World in Dark Souls in that it feels as if it was designed in tandem with Bloodborne's core mechanics. The city streets are laid out in a way that presents satisfying arenas to test out Bloodborne's snappy new combat, and its non-linear design allows you to just get lost, find some sub-quests, and take on one of two different bosses in any order you please. Unfortunately, the game immediately loses this sense of design, reverting back to very rote by-the-numbers dungeons that feel more at home in past entries. There's a distinct lack of location variety too, with some of the more interesting dungeons either being painfully brief or entirely optional. Most of your time will be spent in the streets of Yharnam, and god damn does it start to drag. If you need a break, you can always check out the Chalice Dungeons, which are randomly generated excursions featuring high value loot and challenging new encounters. Except that's a lie, most of them are not randomly generated and are designed to appear procedural, which is to say they're made to be shitty on purpose.

Well shiiit, what about multiplayer? Everyone loves multiplayer in Souls games. Well guess what, there isn't any. And no that's not because I'm replaying this in 2022, long after Bloodborne could reasonably be expected to be active. It was always like this. There's like, maybe two covenants and they they lack any interesting conceits. You can still invade or summon, but even at release it didn't seem like anybody was bothering. I'm not sure I've ever been invaded in this game, and I could probably count the amount of real living breathing co-op partners I've found on one hand. Of course it also suffers from some incredibly bad netcode, but hey, that's par for the course.

Look, I'm a Dark Souls 3 apologist. I was singing Dark Souls 2's praises before it became vogue to reevaluate it. I just don't "get" the appeal of Bloodborne, maybe, but I just wrapped up getting the platinum trophy and played this game to completion at least three times before that and I still find myself walking away thinking it's just a bad game. It feels like it needed another year in the oven or at least two dozen community mods before it approaches playability. And yet, everyone eats this game up. They can't get enough of it. So good it's not just Souls, it's Soulsborne. I feel like my head is a gigantic tumorous mass of eyeballs that permit me to see this game for what it is, though the truth has only driven me to madness, leaving me a derange piteous creature waiting to be euthanized.

I feel any contemporary review of this game has to come with at least half a dozen asterisks. Understand that at the time you could absolutely sell a Pokemon game on the premise of "but it's on a console, and they're in 3D...!" This was at the height of Pokemania, and for any kid growing up on the tail end of the 90s, it was undeniably cool to walk into a Blockbuster and see Pokemon Snap kiosks that let you print out little stamp sized pictures of your stupid virtual pets. But it's not 1999 anymore, there's a whole generation of kids playing these games that are already so acclimated to their favorite Pokemon being rendered in 3D that the 2D games seem like a novelty. Without that allure, that specific nostalgia, is Pokemon Stadium really worth anything?

No, not really!

Pokemon Stadium focuses its gameplay purely on the act of battling, something I don't find particularly fun to begin with. Combat in Pokemon is incredibly rudimentary, intentionally so considering the design philosophy behind the original Pokemon games was to make them "baby's first RPG." Blowing it up into 3D does nothing to change up the formula, and that was never the intent. Either you like the fundamentals of Pokemon or you dislike them, and considering I firmly dislike them, I guess I'm predisposed to having a bad time.

Packaged with Stadium is the Game Boy cart reader, which is unfortunately limited to only reading Pokemon carts. You can use this to play your Pokemon carts on the TV, or import the Pokemon you've been raising into Stadium to battle or just, you know, look at. Not only was Pokemon in 3D now, but you could see your Pokemon in 3D. Nintendo was banking on this being the main draw and Stadium was balanced accordingly, which is to say it's damn near unplayable without it. You can "rent" Pokemon to use in battle but they're saddled with such hysterically poor move sets that you need to pick very specific teams for specific scenarios or eat dirt. A better RPG would increase its difficulty by presenting the player with more thoughtful battles that require a keen understanding of its underlying systems to overcome. Not so with Pokemon Stadium, which would rather give your opponent precision accuracy with moves like Horn Drill while saddling you with Pokemon rescued from an animal testing lab. At a certain point the absurd imbalance feels like a warped selling point for buying and playing the Game Boy games. Sorry kid, you don't have enough Brand Loyalty to beat the Elite Four. Might I interest you in Pokemon Yellow™...?

You can always take a break from the battling to play some minigames, and you know what? These are actually pretty fun! It almost makes me wish they made a Pokemon party game for the N64 instead. I really liked the Lickatongue minigame the most, and the Clefairy game has an adorable track that always gets stuck in my head.

But minigames alone aren't enough to save Pokemon Stadium, and without an engaging or well balanced battle system to drive the core game, little else can besides the specific time and place in which it was originally released. In 1999, this game ruled. I had sheets of stickers with my Pokemon on them, I was able to port over my Charizard and my Mew to battle with in 3D. I was a kid, and the simple rock-paper-scissors strategy that acted as the bedrock of Pokemon's combat felt good. But it's 2022, all the novelty and charm of this one has worn off, and there's very little left to enjoy.

Working Designs is BACK and they're here to shoehorn in jokes about Bill Clinton into your JRPGs that will horribly date them immediately!

Or maybe that happens in Lunar: Eternal Blue... Look, I can barely keep these games straight when it comes to characters and humor since they seem to follow the general Working Designs outline for localization. Characters are reduced down to their most basic elements, which are then played up to the point of being a caricature. Toss in loads of (then) current pop culture references and sexism and you've got yourself a game.

They're also known for making alterations to how their games play, though yet again I could not tell you what they changed mechanically with this one. Lunar: The Silver Star is a very barebones RPG, in any case. It's the sort of game where you can rely upon one or two attacks per character and sweep most encounters, whether they're random battles or end game boss fights. There's not much to this one outside of its cutscenes, which are well rendered on the Sega CD. It's anime, 90s anime, the sort of shit everyone eats up now but totally would've gotten you shoved into a locker back in the day. Enduring repeated swirlies is the price you pay for enjoying Lunar: The Silver Star in 1992. In 2022 the price is about 129$ for a used copy. Misery all around.

Compared to its sequel, the story is pretty scaled back and fairly one-note. I do have to wonder if a lot of the nuance was stripped away in localization, but I'm still a sucker for Working Design's scorched Earth policy when it comes to doing right by these things. I'm sure very little of the identity of Lunar remains, but there's still some fun stuff here, and (from what I can remember) nobody says any slurs in this one, which is a marked improvement over PopFul Mail and Albert Odyssey. That said, Eternal Blue does tell a more emotionally engaging and complex narrative, and The Silver Star is a bit of a prerequisite given how much it expands upon the characters, story, and world that Silver Star establishes. To put it another way: I enjoyed The Silver Star while I was playing it, but after completing Eternal Blue I really don't care to ever go back.

There's better JRPGs that are more worth your time, even on the Sega CD, and Working Designs isn't for everyone. Personally, I found the gameplay to be a little boring and the story a little too simplistic, but it's not bereft of charm.

A few years ago I got into collecting Sega CD repros, despite not actually owning a Sega CD. This wasn't a big deal, of course, since you can just pop the disc into any CD drive and play the game through emulation. This is how I enjoyed Snatcher for the first time, and shortly after I picked up a very authentic looking copy of Policenauts with an English patch applied.

Policenauts is may not be as good as Snatcher but still works well as a spiritual successor, borrowing just as heavily from movies Hideo Kojima likes as that game. Instead of being a love letter to cyberpunk classics like Blade Runner, Policenauts is a pretty straight-forward police procedural/buddy cop homage, with the two leads clearly being analogs for Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon. In fact, if you want to be very reductive about it, Policenauts is essentially "Lethal Weapon in space."

The player controls Jonathan Ingram, sexual predator and founding member of the Policenauts, the first law enforcement entity in space. An accident during a space walk sends Jonathan adrift, though he's found many years later in stasis. Now estranged from his fellow officers, who have all grown older and found success higher up in the political food chain, Jonathan works as a hostage negotiator. However, he's soon called back into space where he reconnects with his former partner, Ed Brown, to unravel a conspiracy involving former members of the Policenauts and the mysterious Tokugawa corporation.

Like Snatcher, progress is earned by solving environmental puzzles, engaging in conversation with other characters, and (occasionally) whipping out a light gun and blasting some dudes. And, like Snatcher, the light gun segments are probably the weakest part of the game. They're very infrequent and they escalate in difficulty rather quickly, and since I played this via emulation I was stuck using a controller for all of them. One day I'll pop this into my Saturn and play it properly, but I suspect it will make playing these sections a lot more tolerable.

Puzzles are a lot more complex than they were in Snatcher, and a few of them can be pretty tense. One involves disarming a bomb under a tight time limit, and apparently this segment of the game does not play nice with emulators because the screen turns completely black during it. I could not fix this no matter how hard I tried and had to resort to using a youtube video as a guide and feel my way through it. Even without the added layer of anxiety, it's a pretty demanding puzzle, and I appreciate how much more Policenauts asks out of the player.

You also have to figure out where the bomb is even located before you can diffuse it, with one possible hiding place being a woman's chest. This does at least earn you a pretty funny game over, but... yeah. Policenauts is arguably Kojima's horniest game. In my Snatcher review I mentioned how Kojima's crass humor can sometimes cross a line, but at least Gillian wasn't capable of grabbing every female character he talks to.

It's also fun to spot all the things that show up later in Metal Gear Solid. Meryl is a prominent secondary character, Tokugawa Heavy Industry's logo is on the Cyborg Ninja's helmet, augments bleed white blood similar to Raiden in MGS4, hell Ed Brown was supposed to be a supporting cast member in Metal Gear Solid 2 before he was cut entirely. I always appreciated these little connective bits that loosely tie together Kojima's games, even if I don't think any of them can be considered part of one larger shared canon. It's just neat. I think it's fun.

Policenauts does lack some of Snatcher's personality and strangeness by rooting itself in a (comparatively) more grounded world, but that's not to say it's bereft of it. Every step of the way you can tell this is another project where Kojima was able to pour in a lot of references to media he loves while opining in his own unique way about real world theories on genetic engineering and space exploration. The sort of stuff you know is well researched, but still exists very firmly within the realm of fiction. There should be a term for that, really. Like... "Science fiction", or something. I don't know. Maybe not like that, sounds kinda dumb. I mean, it's alright too, you know, whatever.

Policenauts is not for everyone, and it is perhaps one of the harder games from Kojima's catalog to recommend to someone who is not already familiar with his work. It helps that this game is also pretty inaccessible. Emulation ain't great, and soft-modding a Sega Saturn and patching an ISO might be more work than it's worth for most people. However, if you find yourself drawn to Kojima's games then I do think you should try to check this one out. It's interesting to see how Kojima's storytelling grew (and regressed) from Snatcher, and as Metal Gear Solid's precursor, it makes for a good companion piece.

Umbrella would've gotten away with it if Himbo Cop Leon S. Kennedy didn't show up to work late in the middle of a zombie outbreak, and was too pure of heart and simple of mind for Ada to be able to kill without feeling immense guilt. It's been a while since I played the original Resident Evil 2, but I swear they actually made him dumber here, which is really just one of many excellent choices on Capcom's part that help REmake 2 excel over the original.

This game is great. On paper it's essentially a fusion of Resident Evil 4's more combat-focused control scheme and the original trilogy's puzzle-heavy progression. Obviously tank controls are out the window, but Capcom smartly redesigns the RPD building to be full of obstructed, narrow hallways that keep the tension high. Movement is sluggish both when attempting to evade or aim at zombies, which move around with an unnatural rhythm that further complicates shooting them in critical areas. You're given just the right amount of control that none of this feels annoying, while maintaining a sense of anxiety in every encounter.

Similar to REmake, many of Resident Evil 2's puzzles have some connection to the original, though how they progress and interconnect has been completely overhauled. This provides a similar sense of satisfaction when you route your way through the game that REmake does, and the manner in which locations slowly open up to you feels natural and well paced. It's just a very smooth experience all around. I also enjoy how much REmake 2 plays around with the player's expectations, introducing Mr.X far earlier than he would appear in the first game.

Likewise, jumping to your second run of the game immediately after the first (as intended) doesn't feel stale given how different the two campaigns are. While you'll solve many of the same puzzles, the route through the RPD and other locations are so radically altered that you can't rely upon the same sequence for an easier run. That said, the 2nd run can get kind of annoying as enemies seem to be placed in blind spots more frequently, which at times feels like a cheap substitute for difficulty.

There's some additional side modes if you want even more RE2, but I found most of them to be kinda just so-so. I think I prefer REmake's approach to focusing solely on the core game mode and introducing variables to augment future runs. I'm sure someone out there loves No Time to Mourn. Like, that's the one mode they've come to play, getting through the campaign is just a formality. Freak behavior. Personally, I'm fine playing through the two campaigns and calling it.

Things were real rough for the Resident Evil franchise for a while, but I'm glad Capcom is back in the business of making good games. It's impressive that they could release a remake of Resident Evil 2, a game that was critically acclaimed for the Playstation and remains one of the finer pieces of software in its library, and have it outshine the original at nearly every turn.

There's few games I revisit as much as REmake. It's become a tradition at this point to replay it every October, but since I have a big slate of games I want to get to next month, I decided to replay this one a little bit early.

Obviously it still holds up, I wouldn't come back to it annually if it didn't, but it's also hard to overstate how much it improves on the original Resident Evil. The entire mansion has been completely overhauled, with new puzzles, rooms, and enemies not only adding to the experience but improving it. The pacing is better, gameplay feels tighter, and the sequence in which puzzles progress feels far more fluid. Navigating menus (something you do a lot of in Resident Evil) is snappier, with the clicking and snapping sound effects that accompany navigation making them feel good to interact with. In general, the game benefits from some amazing sound design for a game released in 2002. Guns pop off with a satisfying punch, and the distant growls and groans of monsters provide both a sense of spatial awareness and foreboding.

My favorite addition is the Crimson Head zombies. In the original Resident Evil, which zombies you took out boiled down to whether or not you had enough ammo on hand to afford killing them. There was a certain layer of strategy there, forcing the player to decide if it was worth clearing out an oft-traveled hallway or continue to risk taking damage. REmake adds an extra level of anxiety to this by forcing the player to dispatch zombies either by exploding their heads or burning their corpse, or else they'll resurrect as more powerful 28 Days Later style zombies, transforming what was once a safe zone into a murder hall. REmake was the first survival horror game I played, and being so new to the genre and acclimating to the clumsy tank controls made Crimson Heads the most terrifying thing ever.

REmake is also one of the few games I can replay immediately after finishing a run. Finishing a casual playthrough and reacclimating to the mansion's layout is fun in itself, but the true meat of the game for me is taking everything I've learned and trying to plan the most efficient route for a second run. REmake also adds a slew of additional modes to augment subsequent runs, and trophies provide additional challenges like clearing the game with a knife only, or completing a run without saving. That fun of planning a second run then becomes planning a third run while considering invisible enemies and not healing, or routing around Real Survivor's non-magic boxes and going knife only. Despite coming back to this game over and over and over again, I'm always able to squeeze so much fun from it.

One area where the 2014 remaster doesn't quite hold up is in its presentation, which is a little ironic given the whole point of the project was to bring the game into HD. Some textures aren't scaled properly, leaving them blurry, and a few pre-rendered backgrounds just have a quality about them that feels off. Full 3D movement was also introduced in this version of the game, a godsend for people who hate tank controls. While this control scheme does make it easier to bait and juke zombies, it doesn't exactly play nice with the pre-set camera angles, making some screen transitions finicky. These are both minor complaints, however, but are observable weak points in the HD remaster over the Gamecube release.

The Resident Evil series is filled with so many great games, but none have ever topped REmake for me. And that's fine. I own this thing on like, three different platforms, plus I have it loaded onto my jailbroken Wii, and I have the ISO on two PCs and two external drives. The only way I will stop playing this game is if I die.

I have no idea what people have against this game, but every time the GBA Castlevania games are talked about, this one seems to stand out as the black sheep. Personally, I think it's a great, focused, and well executed bite-sized search-action game with some pretty fun movement and boss battles. I like the card system. I like collecting them, I like using them, I like experimenting with the cards I have. I'll admit they could have taken another pass at it, tweaked it in a few ways and made it feel better to use, but I still prefer it over the systems present in the following two games.

I'd go a step further and say Circle of the Moon is vastly underrated and the best Castlevania on the Game Boy Advance. I know this might be viewed as a very contrarian opinion, but I don't need to prove to anyone how much I enjoy this game or any other. There's dozens of us out there who like Circle of the Moon! You might even know a few of us without even realizing it. Maybe think about that the next time you decide to drag this game.

I've tied my entire personality to Circle of the Moon. Everything is going extremely well in my life

I played Final Fantasy X-2 immediately after my HD remaster run of Final Fantasy X, and there's a very real possibility that was just too much Final Fantasy. I've caught myself thinking I should give this game another pass, that I might not have played it under the best conditions... This is of course the same hideous thought process that leads me to revisit Final Fantasy X, a game I've never liked and never will like, and at some point I need to recognize the problem and stop my self destructive behavior.

But... you can dress the girls up in pretty clothes.

Final Fantasy X-2 is maybe the most wild mainline game in the series. It was the first to be a direct sequel to a numbered entry, allowing the player to explore a world directly affected by their actions in the first game. Sin is dead, Tidus is dead (I mean, he was always dead, but now he's dead), and Yuna is free to become her own person, no longer defined by her duties as a summoner. That sense of excitement and self discovery is also reflected in Spira's society, as people try to break away from old traditions and rebuilt Spira into something new. While Final Fantasy X has a heavy melancholy hanging over the entire game, X-2 adopts a more funky, vibrant tone.

You can also dress the girls up in pretty clothes.

That is why I find it a little annoying how much of the main thrust of the story is trying to revive Yuna's dead boyfriend. It does deal with themes of moving on, sure, but it feels like a bit of a betrayal in the end to just have Tidus magically wished back to life. It undermines his sacrifice and Yuna's growth. The story failed to really connect with me, and though I like the weird sort of "Charlies Angels, but anime" thing it has going on, sometimes I find it a bit much.

you can dress the GIRLS up in pretty clothes...

I appreciate what they're trying to go for with combat, too, but it similarly failed to land with me. Being able to hot-swap your class on the fly is interesting but despite enjoying the general concept, none of its parts ever really came together in a way I found particularly fun or engaging. I don't know. I think a lot of this game fell flat for me and I totally recognize I might have just been a little too burnt out for this. Maybe I'll come back to it one day.

After all, you can... you can dress the girls up in pretty clothes...

I've played Final Fantasy X about four times start to finish, with my most recent run being the HD remaster on PC. It's not unusual for me to come back to games I like periodically, if not annually, but Final Fantasy X isn't a game I like. Rather, it's a game I desperately want to like and keep returning to under the foolish notion that maybe, just maybe, I'll learn to love it THIS time. And for a while it seems like this might be the run, I start to actually have fun with the game and get lost in its systems... And then Tidus laughs and I realize I have 40 more hours of this shit.

I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to narratives in games. Get the tone right and tell a halfway interesting story and I'll find something to be happy about. I can't count the number of negative reviews where I say something to the effect of "I love every part of this except where I play the game." Final Fantasy X is an inversion of this, however.

Every Final Fantasy game likes to introduce its own wacky system that drives combat. Sometimes they land, sometimes they're the Junction system and I start to have violent intrusive thoughts. X mostly gets things right. The Sphere Grid, which is both a sphere and a grid, is a lot of fun to screw around with. It's somewhat similar to the Materia system from FFVII in that you have a lot of control over how you build your character, but still starts each party member on a part of the grid that represents their class. Whether or not you veer off from that is up to you. I also really enjoy being able to hot-swap characters in battle, which gives you the freedom to box yourself in to the characters you prefer or experiment with different party dynamics on the fly. In a lot of ways, the core systems driving *X don't feel like crazy reinventions of what Final Fantasy is so much as injecting QoL improvements into what's already there.

Sure, there's plenty of things X still gets wrong about its gameplay. Buffs, debuffs, and ailments still mean jack shit. Minigames like Blitz Balls are a total drag, the video game equivalent of eating your broccoli before you can have dessert. There's some really bland dungeons and patently dull puzzles that utterly destroy any momentum the game might have been building. Some of this is alleviated in the HD version of the game which allows you to fast forward or outright cheat your way around portions of the game, and at some point including these features feels like Square admitting that some of the stuff they threw at the wall didn't stick and is now rotting on the floor and filling the room with a noxious stench.

Speaking of stenches, the story stinks.

At its heart, it's trying to say something critical about organized religion, living in harmony with nature, and about breaking from the well worn path to forge something new. It's also about your dumbass dad getting turned into a giant water monster. Way to go, pops.

I think having a Final Fantasy game without a true villain is interesting in concept. You and your party are fighting against the nature of this world rather than any one being with a master plan. The closest the game gets to this is Seymour, who feels shoehorned in because the developers felt they couldn't totally get away without having a true antagonist. As such, he never quite fills the role and just exists somewhat awkwardly within its narrative. His hairstyle is impossible and he looks like a freak of nature, too. Never in my life has a character design been so bad that I actually get mad the longer I look at it. If you show me a picture of Seymour I will actually get pissed.

X's themes and more heady concepts are constantly undermined by poor writing, laughably bad voice acting, and the flattest cast of characters the series had to date. Again, I've played this four times to completion, and I constantly forget everyone's background or place in the narrative besides Tidus and Yuna. There's that one guy who likes Blitz Ball, he's voiced by Bender, and uhhh... the mage with big boobs. You know the one, she's got all those belts. What do they actually do in service of the story? What do their characters say about the nature of this world? I don't remember! One of the games "antagonists" can be effectively summed up as "trailer park dad."

I've seen some very thoughtful write ups about the story and what it means to people, and every time I read them or listen to someone talk about what they appreciate about this game I think "you know, maybe I didn't give FFX* a fair shake. I should play that again."

sideshow bob stepping on rakes