Sonic Superstars is so bad that it has me questioning the narrative of Balan Wonderworld.

Yuji Naka was famously booted off the Balan project by Arzest, an effort that supposedly involved former collaborator and creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, Naoto Oshima. Naka has since alleged that his ouster was the result of speaking out against the unauthorized use of fan music in one of Balan's trailers among other things, but a long history of abrasive behavior and eventual arrest for insider trading has cemented him as the villain in Balan's story. However, to see how poorly Sonic Superstars turned out has given me perspective on another of Naka's accusations: that Arzest was intent on putting out a buggy game and that he was trying to do his best to save it. I think the son of a bitch might've been telling the truth. Yuji Naka is being held as a political prisoner.

On paper, a classic Sonic game produced by series veterans Iizuka and Oshima sounds like a good idea. Even people with more functional neurons than me looked at Arzest's catalog and thought it might still turn out good. Great even. Sonic's pappy is back, it's a real meeting of the minds over there at Sega HQ. I'm sure they're both great guys, but I'm to the point where I think they're about as capable of leading a project as Keiji Inafune, they're so far from their lanes they're driving through a corn field. Nothing about Superstars captures the magic of the classic games or Mania for that matter, but instead parades around in its physics, no better at displaying reverence or understanding for the material it is inspired by than Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Any sense of spectacle provided by Sonic's speed is dulled by bad stage design and an overuse of set pieces, which are applied cookie-cutter between levels along with gimmicks and enemies, even those that might at first seem bespoke in the way a classic Sonic game ought to be. The creative bankruptcy is astonishing even when viewed in a vacuum, two whole zones reuse the same pinball trope and one of them even has an extra act. The last level's second act is just the first act in reverse, and watching the counter tick down from the seven minutes it took to complete act 1 made my stomach hurt.

Zones have an inconsistent number of acts, with some getting two, some three, and others one single monstrously sized act that can take as long to beat as a full zone. These single act zones play like a gamified lobotomy, with stage elements both unique and borrowed stagnating under their average clear time. Everyone who talks about Superstars likes to bring up how bosses can at times take as long to beat as a level, and this is both a true and fair criticism, but I think it's indicative of a larger problem the game has with its pacing.

You can speed these fights up somewhat by using one or two of your chaos emerald powers, and I do mean literally one or two. Most of these powers have such specific use cases that they're rendered all but useless outside of a small handful of instances, but the rush attack you get for collecting the first chaos emerald is good for getting two or three hits in the second a boss' invulnerability drops. That's my tip to you. Actually my tip to you is to not buy this game, and if you feel compelled to do so, smash all of your fingers with a brick so you cannot.

Superstars doesn't even get music right, man. Tee Lopes is credited among others, and you know how badly I'd love to say he's got another hit on his hands, but the dude just sounds like he's phoning it in on this one. I've never heard a single piece of music Tee has done feel quite so tired as some of what he's contributed to this game. Jun has also broke fucking containment AGAIN and is still pumping out dogwater 10 second loops that sound as close to real Genesis music as La Croix does to flavor.

There's a lack of cohesion across the entire soundtrack which also bothers me. You go from Tee's stuff to Jun's mess and then a bunch of other composers that are churning out crap that sounds like Mr. Blue Sky with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (this joke was submitted by Appreciations, age 9.) At least if you buy this game on PC - which, again, you should not - you can mod the soundtrack so it actually become listenable.

When Superstars was announced, I made a comment that the game looked like some tripe you'd download off the app store. I got pushback over this and changed my tune so I could fit in, a little lie I told because I didn't want to seem like an annoying pessimist. I should've held my ground because Superstar's art direction is pretty flat and its fidelity weak. Some zone have backgrounds that, without hyperbole, look like Nintendo 64 textures. I'm not even sure what I'm looking at here.(source.)

Iizuka recently made a statement that "pixel art isn't viable", and that does speak to an uncomfortable truth about how consumers view sprite-based games. Take a look at the Game Awards, which faced controversy after Nexon's Dave the Diver got nominated for Best Indie. A cynical assessment would be that it got the nom because it uses sprites and sprites = indie which means you can't reasonably charge full price. Counterargument: nothing about Sonic Superstars is worth 60$, it looks bad and plays bad too. I paid 35$ because, true to form, Sega put this out near Black Friday and their games drop in value faster than the coconut that hit me in the head and made me think it was still worth buying for nearly half price. I bought Sonic Mania four times, I'm willing to shell out for sprite games that I think are good, I am straight up mad I paid 35$ once for Superstars and I think I should be allowed to grab Oshima and shake him by his ankles until I get every cent back.

So, yes, you could say I went into this with some pretty negative biases. That's a fair criticism of me, the player. The fool, as it were, stepping in big mud pies for the amusement of everyone else. But somehow, Superstars managed to sink even further below my expectations. I thought I might walk out of this a little poorer, but that I may think the game is a 2.5. You know, mediocre. Didn't think I'd have a great time, but had no reason to believe I'd like it less than, say, Knuckles' Chaotix or fucking Sonic Frontiers. I didn't just step in another mud pie, I slipped on it and fell head first into a ravine. I got a neck brace on and I look all fucked up now.

You hurt me. We're not friends anymore.

The power of harassing Sega and Sonic Team about minor, mostly forgotten characters has made Sonic Mania: Encore manifest. Bullying does work!!

Sonic Mania's Encore DLC is novel enough to justify its (typically) low price tag, but it should be noted that I'm psychotic and bought the entire damn game again when it launched because Sega bundled it onto a physical release, which they previously swore up and down would not be a thing. That made it the third time I bought Sonic Mania, after getting the digital version on the Switch when my PC Collector's Edition was delayed. I've since bought it physically again for the PlayStation 4 so I could experience Sonic Mania on a proper video game console, and I've been eyeballing it on my newly acquired Series X, too. I guess I'm the Sonic Mania guy now, gonna turn out like that one lunatic sucking up all the copies of Sneak King. I will not stop until I've given Christian Whitehead power of attorney.

Despite my obligation to Sonic Mania, I mostly think Encore is just kinda alright. The main mode itself remixes every level in the game and presents them with altered color pallets, but a lot of the alterations mechanically and visually fall flat. Most of the new color pallets overuse earthy tones, resulting in levels appearing drab. There are a few cases where this does work nicely, I really like the look of Encore's Stardust Speedway and Hydrocity (one word, I will tear your esophagus out if you say Hydro City), but most of my run through Encore left me pining for Mania's more vibrant colors.

The new party mechanic is a smart way to address the antiquated lives system and is something I would love to see expanded on in future games, but this does mean that every level needs to be beatable with any combination of characters. This results in zones spreading character specific pathways pretty thinly, and I believe that's part of what contributes to remixed sections feeling so tucked away. At least the new pinball bonus stages feel far better paced than Blue Spheres and more in-line with the spirit of Sonic the Hedgehog 3's bonus stages - I'm a certifiable Blue Spheres freak so I hope you respect the authority that comes with this criticism.

Encore presents some good ideas and underdelivers in almost equal measure, but it's hard to pass up when it's so frequently on sale for 2.50$. A worthwhile admission fee to play as Ray and Mighty alone, even if Encore doesn't stick the landing with as much grace as the base game. I guess just keep in mind that I'm under no fiduciary obligation here, if I've convinced you to buy more Sonic Mania and you feel that this has hurt you financially, well, that's on you. Never listen to someone who owns four, maybe five copies of the same video game.

Anime is far more prolific and accessible now than it was when I was in high school. That's definitely a good thing, but there was a certain rush to being at the whim of whatever was available at the local Blockbuster that can't be replicated today. Being a 15-year-old and pulling stuff like Appleseed or Vampire Hunter D off the shelf made you feel like you were being exposed to something forbidden and strange. I still remember shoveling snow after watching The End of Evangelion - having not seen a single episode of the show - and just trying to process what the hell I watched. Sure, I could load up Crunchyroll or whatever and spin the Anime roulette, but Anime is of a more known quantity now, it's hard not to have a good idea of what you're getting into, and the charm of physically exploring the tiny Anime corner tucked in the back of the video store can't be so easily experienced today.

The 1990s adaptation of Berserk is one of those rentals that stuck with me, and its cliffhanger ending led to me seek out fan translations of the manga, which at the time was in the middle of the Millennium Empire arc. Unfortunately, enduring the lethargic pace of chapter releases in real time leaves you itching for more Berserk, which might lead you to play games like the non-canonical Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage. Nothing says "Berserk" more like sticking Guts (or Gatts, or Gattsu depending on how far down the alliteration hole you wanna go) in tight corridors where his movement is restricted and his steel girder of a sword constantly bounces off walls. What a great game that's totally not annoying to play at all.

Sword of the Berserk's sequel never came out here. Can't imagine why. But it's a shame, as (deep breath) Berserk Millennium Empire Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War - baller name - is not only directly based on the manga, but makes significant improvements over its predecessor. An English patch for the game was released several years ago, but reports that the patch caused issues with playing the game through emulation made me put it off until I was able to put the ISO on a hard drive and play it on hardware. The second Sign by Susumu Hirasawa started blaring through the tiny speakers of my CRT, I knew I was in for a proper Berserk experience.

Guts is perfectly embodied here. His weight, the heft of his movement, the lumbering swings of the Dragonslayer, the force of his arm cannon ripping into endless hordes of demons... it's spot on. Remarkably so given when it came out - not even the more recent Band of the Hawk captures Guts' physicality quite as well, despite the Musou genre being such a good fit for the kind of action present in Berserk.

The level-to-level gameplay typically sees Guts running between set objectives, zipping back and forth in large, labyrinthine stages littered with enemies that spawn endlessly. Tearing your way through monsters feels good for a while but grows tiresome as defeating them rarely comes with an actual win state, they're just an obstacle between you and your goal and you could, you know, just kinda run there and not deal with any of it. So much of the game is this, and it just drags, especially towards the end when the fog of war stars tricking you into running down dead ends, or when the game expects you to hop through portals that might just send you back to the start of a zone.

Conversely, the boss battles in this game are incredible. I mean just look at all the cool shit you can do! Games should let you do cool shit more often!! All these modern games with their precious stagger meters and tight parry windows that make you feel like a weak little frail baby boy, ohhhh please sir, can I do damage now-- a standard counterattack in Berserk Millennium Empire Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War lets you chop both of the boss' arms clean off and it rules.

Every major fight of the arc (before its perspective shifts away from Guts) is accounted for, along with some recurring fights against the former members of the Band of the Hawk, who are summoned by a game-only character named Charles that haunts Guts at various points throughout the story. I think this is a pretty smart way to integrate more of Berserk's backstory for less familiar audiences, and it provides necessary context for Guts' growth as a character. Unfortunately, the English patch seems to be a translation of a translation, which results in some goofy and grammatically incorrect dialog that took me out of the story. My brain is usually pretty good about auto-correcting stuff like this but the translation is rough and really only excels at making the game readable enough to be completed by someone who doesn't speak Japanese.

It really is too bad that so much of your time will get eaten up whaling on demonic trees so you can just move forward. Even then, I think it's an easy call that Berserk Millennium Empire Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War is the best Berserk game, edging out Band of the Hawk and blowing out Sword of the Berserk for the top spot. But, boy, pulling back and realizing that the best this series has gotten is a middle of the road PS2 game is really depressing.

Maybe Fromsoft will get to take a crack at the license someday, as seems to be the want of anyone who has connected the dots between Souls and Berserk, but for my money the right man for the job is Hideaki Itsuno. I just need more people to internalize this so it happens. Please. Please i need this

Me and some of the homies jumped Turgle in Pontoon's Saloon and nobody did shit about it. Skoova pulled me aside the next day, said it was the most violent beatdown he ever saw, shook my god damn hand. We all hate Turgle around here.

Jedi: Fallen Order was an eclectic mix of Metroid style exploration, Uncharted traversal (see: climbing and environmental puzzles), and a smattering of Sekiro/Souls elements that came together pretty well. A 3.5/5 game, some would say. Had a good time with it for like, five dollars. That's practically a steal when you consider how much Greez you get for the price point, and the game was pretty good, too!

Survivor is about what you'd expect from a sequel. Rough edges have been smoothed over, the world is larger in scale and scope, and you can now make Cal look like some dweeb that does karate behind his trailer in a dirty old gi, yellow belt flopping around as he administers Akido-style justice to a hanging tire. Look, I'm not going to complain, Fallen Order's cosmetic options were dire and mostly amounted to ponchos that looked like total garbage, I'll happily take the massive volume of terrible 70's hairstyles they introduced in Survivor if it means getting at some good jackets and pants. Even Greez is getting in on the action, looking like a greaseball disco sex fiend with his popped buttons and gold pendant. The point is, Survivor is bigger and better in the ways I hoped it would be!

A major way in which Survivor expands on the first game is by introducing large hub areas to two of its worlds, which gives the game a sort of Uncharted: Lost Legacy rhythm. You can poke around, solve puzzles, find secrets, and then move on to more linear stretches of gameplay that move the story forward. Koboh serves as your primary base of operations, and in true Souls fashion, you can recruit various characters in the open world and have them join you at Pontoon's Saloon, where they can offer services, quests, or be Turgle (absolutely useless and in fact detrimental!) I really enjoyed the character writing of the first game, so I found it nice spending time building a whole community of weird alien buddies to hang out with. Grab a few drinks, listen to some jizz... Oh I'm sorry, it's 'jatz' now because we can't have anything nice. I won't stand for this jizz erasure.......

It took a while for the open world sections to grow on me, though. You just lack too many Force powers in the early game, which causes exploration to devolve into this frustrating start-and-stop when Cal inevitably gets roadblocked by some big red glowing object that he cannot pass. Sometimes you're given side quests far earlier than you can complete them, which is really irritating, too. I pushed most of my exploration back to the last third of the game and had a much better time with it, but as a consequence, a lot of cosmetic options, quests, and characters did not reveal themselves until very late in the game, and I feel like all of this could've been better balanced.

At least the new Force powers are great and make traversal a lot of fun, and although the grind for skill points means you should probably just pick two stances early and build them (I went with the blaster and vanguard stances), even a Cal that is well under max level can do some pretty crazy stuff in combat. Survivor excels at making you feel like some incredibly powerful Jedi. I do think a few too many bosses veer into Dark Souls 2 "another guy with a sword" territory, though it is also very funny to me that the most powerful boss in the game is a gigantic frog with a one-hit kill move, and all you get for this is a dirty poncho and the judgmental stare of a smaller, presumably more powerful frog.

I once again need to preach the virtues of waiting to buy a AAA game until several months of patches smooth out bugs and performance problems. Nothing ever quite excelled to the same heights as what my friend Larry Davis experienced. I had no crashes, no soft locks, and only a small handful of freezes that resolved pretty quickly. I thankfully never encountered any memory leaks, or anything else that could be considered game breaking. This is of course the benefit of waiting over six months to enjoy a AAA EA release - half the cost and half the technical problems.

However, I still had a lot of performance issues that disrupted the experience both in quality and performance modes. Lighting effects strobing wildly, textures loading in too slowly, frame drops and micro-freezes when moving between certain rooms... Screen tearing was a common issue, and NPCs on the Mantis would t-pose anytime they weren't seated prior to me selecting the next world to travel to. Load times are bad in general, often taking a good 15-20 seconds which in the modern age of SSD's is an eternity but becomes especially burdensome if you want to follow the bounty hunter questline, which has you darting between worlds, which in itself is a whole process.

As Larry points out, the first game's issues were never fully addressed, and he had little expectation that Survivor's would be. Vindicated. It must be a burden being so consistently right. He told me to say that, said he'd toss me to the giant frog on Koboh if I didn't, but he's got a point. At least Survivor is not in such a volatile state now that you'll be as prone to losing progress as he was. I think. It's hard to say whether that's the case or if I just won the EA lottery.

While fun overall, Jedi: Survivor still has more Problems than you'd want to see in a 70$ product, and some elements of its open world exploration can make the early game tedious and frustrating. It's got Greez, though. Greez is the greeziest character we've ever had, if only we can get Jedi: Survivor working...

Sonic has never been a consistent series, but the sixteen years following the death of the Dreamcast and Sega's departure from the console hardware market represents it at its lowest point. Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) nearly killed the franchise where it stood, both episodes of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 failed to live up to its namesake, and Sega couldn't even get a port of the original Sonic the Hedgehog for the GameBoy Advance right. Brief flashes of triumph broke apart dire releases before swiftly returning to the status quo, and games like Colors and Generations seemed almost accidental when followed by the likes of Lost World. At a certain point it became hard not to feel like the series was held captive by a rudderless publisher and a dispassionate developer.

The "Sonic Cycle" became a popular meme during this era both within and outside of the fan community, and constant promises to "go back to what made Sonic special" felt hollow when every subsequent release was decidedly not that. By the time Sonic Boom released, there was genuine debate as to whether or not it was worse than Sonic 2006. It felt like it was time to just pull the damn plug.

Sonic's 25th anniversary party was appropriately disastrous. Audio drops, a delayed start, and constant mechanical whine piercing through the event did not engender much confidence that Sega's upcoming slate of Sonic titles would be anything to get excited over. But seven years removed, the thing I think of when reflecting on the event is the reveal of Sonic Mania. The crowd's reaction to the announcement trailer was infectious. Sure, they may have been diehard fans hopped up on room temperature Totino's Pizza Rolls™, but seeing a proper 2D Sonic game helmed by Christian Whitehead and Simon Thomley - well regarded for their contributions to the hacking scene and the excellent mobile remasters of the classic games - felt like this tremendous release of pessimism and anxiety. Finally, a Sonic game worth getting excited about rather than remaining cautiously interested in. oh yeah and Sonic Forces was there, who gives a fuck

A lot of preamble, but necessary context for why people went ape for Knuckles and Tails being playable characters. The oft-touted return to form seemed real now, powered by the Retro Engine, which had previously proved capable of creating a near-perfect simulacrum of Sonic's Genesis era physics and momentum-based speed. Whitehead, Thomley, and PagodaWest were so honed-in on what made the old games work that the Drop Dash, Sonic's new signature move, was indirectly and unknowingly copied from a scrapped mechanic in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic 3 are the main mechanical inspirations behind Mania, blending Sonic 2's speedy setpieces and knack for pushing the player forward at all times with Sonic 3's large levels, platforming, and rich exploration. This fusion results in the best balance of speed and platforming I've seen in any of the classically styled 2D games, and the way each zone's pathways intersect and split apart never feel like they box you into a single linear route or result in you getting lost. Knuckles once again has his own bespoke routes, some of which are pretty substantive, like a totally different Act 1 for Mirage Saloon and exclusive boss fight at the end of Lava Reef Zone.

My only real complaint is that there's just too much overuse of classic zones. All but four are taken from previous Sonic games, and those that are not directly lifted are referenced in some way, typically by transplanting a gimmick or enemy into another zone, like the spinners from Marble Garden which show up in Mania's Stardust Speedway, or Angel Island Zone's Catakilla Jr. floating around in Chemical Plant. Mania ends up being a remarkably comprehensive celebration of the Genesis games as a result, and while these remixed levels are still a joy to play, the real highlights are the four ground-up zones exclusive to Mania. At least everything looks incredible, the sprite art is brimming with personality and the new coat of paint each of the returning zones are given - especially in the more divergent second acts - makes them feel fresh. TeeLopes incredible soundtrack also features some of the best remixes I've ever heard for these returning levels, but much like the original zones, his new compositions are the real highlight.

According to an April 2017 Famitsu interview, the inclusion of remixed levels came at the behest of Iizuka, though I do not know who is responsible for tying Mania's story in with Sonic Forces. At face value, these creative choices seem like a hindrance, but regardless of any limitations the team faced, they walked away with a game that feels positively energetic and celebratory of a series that no doubt inspired some of them to pursue game development. And, presumably, any follow-up to Mania would feature entirely original zones, right...?

Rumors of bad blood between Mania's former development staff and Sega have been spurred on thanks to the controversy over Denuvo's inclusion in Mania's PC release, and Simon Thomley's negative experience with Sonic Origins. Whitehead has since stated that the Mania team (Evening Star) and Sega are on good terms and that some of their discussions about the direction of the classic series influenced Sonic Superstars. It's easy to take rumors to heart, and I know I certainly have in the past. After all, it's natural for heads to butt on any creative project, and Sega doesn't have the best track record. However, it's more likely Evening Star wanted to make Penny's Big Breakaway and things just didn't work out for sequel. A bummer, as what little of Superstars I've played is certainly lacking Whitehead and Thomley's touch.

Even if proper a Mania 2 never comes to be (like my cynical ass believes it won't) I am still immensely happy with Sonic Mania. It's the Sonic game I wanted for years, and inarguably a capstone entry in the series that is responsible for Sonic's popular resurgence. Well, that and the internet collectively patting themselves on the back for "fixing" what turned out to be a real middle-of-the-road video game adaption by forcing CGI artists back to the office shortly before the liquidation of their studio. In a way, that's perfect. Sonic is back! And he's back because of one fuck-ugly CG model and a single good video game. The duality of Hedgehog.

This is definitely the most any game has been like Super Mario RPG since 1996. Played about as straight as Metroid Prime Remastered, you get a few quality-of-life improvements, but the majority of the game remains unaltered from its original release.

This was probably the right move, I can see why Nintendo and ArtePiazza didn't want to take any risks given how beloved Mario RPG is, but I personally prefer remakes play around more with the source material and do something different. The Resident Evil Remake is a perfect example of what I mean, marrying aspects of the original that made it so highly regarded while modernizing mechanical and narrative elements. Everyone has different expectations for what makes a remake good, and I feel like it's been a contentious issue this year given the glut of remakes and remasters we've been getting. I wish Super Mario RPG were a bit more ambitious, you know? Don't lock me to 8-way movement, that'd be cool.

This strict adherence to the source material does mean Super Mario RPG never loses sight of the original's charm. Some names have changed, but the script hits about as close as I remember it, Mario's little mannerisms, the way he jumps to verify his authenticity (nobody is more authentic than Mario Mario), all of that is preserved in amber. New additions like the triple attack add a bit more flavor to combat but battles never elevate to anything challenging until the post-game. Even the superboss, Culex, is kind of a chump. Timed button presses are well and good, but the low-level cap and limited number of spells can make random encounters start to feel a little too samey.

Aesthetic upgrades are overall very good. I've seen people compare Super Mario RPG to Link's Awakening's tilt-shifted style, saying it too is going for a diorama look that either hits or doesn't. I see it, though I also think the plasticy nature of the world is far more muted than it was in Link's Awakening and given that the original game already felt like a series of dioramas, I think that style is more suitable here. The new soundtrack is also fantastic, and I never felt compelled to switch to the old OST, though its inclusion is appreciated, and the menus are all very sharp and colorful. I just wish the game didn't look so pixelated on my TV, I'm not sure if it's the software or something with the display, but Wonder looked great, whereas Mario RPG looks poorly upscaled.

This also feels like a much shorter game than the original, I'm just not sure how. Outside of battles taking less time to load into (which is remarkable), it doesn't feel any more or less easy, and I don't think anything was cut. Maybe it's all in my head, but Super Mario RPG feels much brisker in its pacing. I appreciate that, however. I was able to beat it over the Thanksgiving week while trapped in the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, where I was chased after insulting The Orb and its smug incandescence. My Switch may permanently smell like cigarette smoke and I'm pretty sure I got bed bugs, but I was able to roll credits on this, and that's something to be thankful for.

Though I may sound a bit critical overall, I did have a good time with Super Mario RPG. The original game was never as special to me as it was for all the dorks out there that played it in 2003 on Snes9x and started preaching about how it's One Of Tha Best. It's very much an introductory JRPG and by the time I got to it, I found some of what it was doing to be very charming and enjoyable and other parts to be a bit flat and difficult to fully pour myself into. It sure is Super Mario RPG... Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong 3. Adventures of Lolo 1 and 2, King's Knight, Dig Dug, Chu Man Fu. Harvest moooooon

I'm still over here wasting my money on Super Famicom carts, and I've now entered the "only buy CIBs" phase of my illness, which you might note is a breath away from being terminal. Unfortunately, I also suffer a debilitating comorbidity where I habitually buy Puyo Puyo games. My family has begun discussing hospice options.

I didn't have a great time with Puyo Puyo Sun for the Sega Saturn and found it to be somewhat dull given how flat its difficulty curve is. Its Summertime aesthetics keep it on the shelf, but if I want to actually play a Puyo Puyo game, I'm more likely to throw in Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, which I find to be more challenging. Brutal, even. In fact, there's a good chance my perception of Puyo Puyo has been warped by Mean Bean and it's rendered me incapable of valuing the series beyond its capability for dickishness.

Well, good news, Super Puyo Puyo Tsuu Remix is pretty dickish, and that means it's a good Puyo game! I'm not having fun if I'm not stuck on the final boss, watching junk pieces come down with precision timing to choke off combos I've been setting up. Oh, half the screen is full now - that's nice, this match has only been going on for ummm.... ten seconds.

That's just what I like to call peak Puyo. Because you're always playing at the peak of your well.

I'm not being entirely fair to Remix here, because I do think its difficulty pacing is overall better than Mean Bean Machine. I was able to beat the game on normal difficulty with some perseverance, whereas Mean Bean has been an unclimbable wall on any difficulty level other than easy. I think this actually puts Remix in the sweet spot for me. Just hard enough to be engaging but not so insane as to be unwinnable.

It's also just cute as hell. Arle is such a great character, I genuinely felt bad beating Cait Sith. It's a shame I can't read any of this dialog, but the animations and overall presentation of Remix is fun. Even the box itself looks good, the manual is packed full of great character art, and it came with a foil sticker to celebrate the first printing that I swear hasn't been touched. I managed to grab a pristine copy for about 27$, which is only a few bucks more than a complete copy of the base Puyo Puyo Tsuu will run you, which lacks the expert mode and practice course introduced in Remix. Not a bad price if you're looking to build your own CIB collection, and it's just a damn fun game, too.

I've been checking in on Sonic Robo Blast 2 since the early 2000s. It's one of those "computer lab games" that I always tried to stealthily play during class instead of actually learning anything, and the negative trajectory my life took thanks to Sonic the Hedgehog is due in part to fighting with Robo Blast 2's squirrely controls when I should've been preparing for the future. It's fine. If I get an F on this paper I'll speed thok my teacher directly in the nose.

I'm all growed up now, a fully formed man of 30-something years, and yet Sonic Robo Blast 2, which has been in development since 1998 and is recognized as the first 3D Sonic fan game, is still getting updates. The game isn't even complete yet, but it's practically an institution in itself within the fangame community. There are whole mods that build on top of Robo Blast 2 which could be considered games in their own right, like the more recent SRB2Kart. Somehow, after all these years, Sonic Robo Blast 2 is more accomplished than I am, and I'm a wholeass real human being. Incredible stuff.

Robo Blast 2 is constantly evolving and changing shape, and version 2.2 (which released back in 2019) is one of the most extensive overhauls the game has ever received. Whole zones have been rebuilt, new acts and enemies have been added, slopes have been introduced, and new menus give the game a sharper looker. This all results in a far more polished and cohesive experience than previous versions, though some zones feel a little too indulgent and as a result, they drag on a bit too long. Castle Eggman has a lot of interesting gimmicks, but both acts feel like running a marathon, and Egg Rock's challenging platform sequences start to wear thin given how much zone there is.

However, none of these zones are difficult to navigate, and jumps over bottomless pits are generally easy to negotiate thanks to Robo Blast 2's tight controls, which at times feel better than some of Sonic Team's own titles. Even the special stages, which are modeled after NiGHTS into Dreams, feel better to play than the games they're aping.

These motherfuckers must've taken all their online courses at Westwood College, because the controls aren't the only thing that have been tightened up between versions. Graphically, 2.2 is Robo Blast 2 at its peak. It reminds me somewhat of the ill-fated Sonic X-Treme with its clash of 2D sprites against 3D environments, and mechanically it very much feels like a sort of bridge between what would have been had Chris Senn not been driven to the brink of death and the Adventure games, which did not drive Yuji "three hots and a cot" Naka to the brink of death. Anyway, listen to Deep Sea Zone's theme, which is a real jam. Love a good water level track, and this one is up there! Game looks good, sounds good, feels good too.

Robo Blast 2 is surprisingly lengthy, with huge zones, tons of secrets, unlockable levels, and alternate routes that provide a hefty amount of replay value. That's not even getting into all the add-ons and mods that fans have been pumping out over the years. Despite its robustness, it is still an incomplete game, and I'm not in the habit of rating stuff that's in development. I have no idea what version 2.3 will look like, or version 2.5, 2.8, or 3.0. Robo Blast 2 has been kicking around for over twenty years, and in that time there's been a number of constants and an even greater number of variables. This current version is a must play for anyone who enjoys Sonic the Hedgehog and indulges in fan content, and even if you don't, then I think it's still worth checking out to appreciate the effort put in by an incredibly dedicated and hard-working community.

I tend to find Sonic ROM hacks to play via YouTube recommendations, which I have carefully pruned over time to ensure is the only Sonic the Hedgehog related content I see on the site. People love to complain about how bad the algorithm is, I say they just don't know how to game it, and I like to keep a clean homepage. This is how I found out about Metal Sonic Rebooted, the sequel to Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, a game I don't like very much. In fact, I was only made aware of Hyperdrive after watching footage of Rebooted, and I guess seeing Metal Sonic fight with the RX-78-2 Gundam is all the motivation I needed to play both.

Thankfully, six years of experience and building a game on top of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 results in a much better hack than Hyperdrive. It's still more suited to classic Sonic veterans who want something a bit more challenging, but it is nowhere near as unforgiving as the previous game, and Lone Devil has picked up a thing or two about enemy and hazard placements. It's upsetting that the spin attack feels so heavy and connects with this horrible unsatisfying crunch, but hey, I'm not constantly being smashed against the ceiling, so I see this as a top-to-bottom improvement.

Of course Rebooted is immediately identifiable as a ROM hack thanks to its liberal use of borrowed 16-bit assets, but you'd never tell based on the level design. Each zone is intricate yet always pushes you forward, and Lone Devil has a pretty firm understanding of what makes the intersecting paths of the classic Genesis Sonics work. This more reserved approach to designing zones is appreciated after the gauntlet Hyperdrive put me through, but they got the old Lone Devil to design the special stages, so some of that malicious spirit is still there.

The special stages are modeled after the half-pipes of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, so already I don't like them, but Lone Devil has edited these stages to be so precise in what they expect from the player that mistakes amount to immediate failure. The fourth and seventh emeralds are especially irritating as you need to pull a near perfect run in each, and I found I was frequently falling short by one or two rings, no hits. Just grazed by them, pixels weren't lined up, they got posters of me around town calling me a hack and a fraud.

The cost of retrying a special stage is thankfully low as you now have a rolling bank of power rings that carry between acts and zones. Metal's new air-dash and pseudo-super state both require rings to activate, though I found I had so many at any given point in time that I could be pretty frivolous with both. I appreciate the sort of risk vs reward concept sitting at the heart of Metal's abilities, even if the game isn't balanced in a way that makes you interact with them as intended.

It's rough around the edges as any ROM hack will be, and it doesn't open on a 16-bit cover of Smile Bomb, but Metal Sonic Rebooted is a vast improvement over Hyperdrive and I actually had a pretty good time playing it, vestigial stomp attack, dogshit special stages and all.

The wipeout animation in Power Drift is just brutal, and I suspect unintentionally so. Take a wide turn on a raceway suspended 30 feet in the air and you'll spin off the edge like a drill, flying directly into a grain silo. Accidentally bump the side of a tree at 20kmph and your kart will scale to fill 80% of the screen while flipping around erratically, clipping through geometry, just a kaleidoscope of 3D objects and sprites. Where will you end up? Who the hell knows! I once crossed the finish line in such a state and this caused my racer to abruptly correct into his winning animation and drive off into the sky.

Power Drift rules. I love arcade racers and I think they're a great way to spend a lazy morning, and as far as the Sega Saturn goes, this might be my favorite one yet. It's goofy as hell and easy to jump into, and I just dig its style a whole lot. This never came out here and used copies can be pretty expensive, so if you do check this out you might want to consider emulation, a repro, or just burning a disc. Not worth the cost but definitely worth the effort.

Craziest part about Power Drift? It was made by Yu Suzuki. He did it! He finally did it! Yu made a good game!!

Really disappointed with this 2011 Sonic the Hedgehog ROM hack starring Metal Sonic and uhhh, Somari. I guess buying ROM hacks on cart was bound to blow up in my face at some point -- or in the case of Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, send me flying straight towards the ceiling where I will surely get brained.

The opening two levels, Robotic Isle and Botanic Lake, are pretty solid. Platforming feels great, the sense of speed is satisfying, and these levels do a good job at providing multiple routes through with enough secrets strewn about to encourage exploration. I could do without the Master System/Game Gear Sonic the Hedgehog style emerald collecting, but once you have the route down to each emerald, they're not too hard to grab. So far so good.

However, about three levels in and it becomes apparent that developer Lone Devil could use a lot of work with enemy and hazard placement. They might know how to craft a set piece, but spike pits litter every zone and punish poor reflexes. Enemies are precisely placed to be as annoying as possible, and the amount of crushing traps is insane. You'll frequently need to use raising platforms to progress, but 90% of these are designed to crush you if you don't jump off a split second before they reach the top. For some reason, this stops being the case around the final level, but by this point I had gone through such intense Pavlovian conditioning that I was panic jumping off platforms and needing to backtrack to respawn them. Better safe than sorry, I guess.

I'm good at Sonic games, this is one of the few things I can confidently claim about myself, because instead of trying to form meaningful social bonds or invest time into finding a worthwhile career, I decided to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 fifteen-hundred million times, but I actually did manage to get a couple game overs in Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, albeit fairly late in the game (arguably more irritating.) Eventually, I decided to look up a level select code, except the folks over at Sonic Retro wanted to pull some real cutesy shit and give the hint that it's "the North American release date for Sonic CD." Wow great, one problem, the sound select doesn't go to 93. I tried all kinds of combinations but it turns out you need to break apart each number, so for anyone searching for the cheat code to access level select in Metal Sonic Hyperdrive, I've got your back: 01 01 01 09 01 09 09 03

There's also a "Master Quest" mode which can be activated from the options menu. This remixes the game in some pretty substantive ways, and I honestly found the levels to flow a bit better in this mode despite it obviously being for players who have completed the main game. I think this is perhaps an indication that Lone Devil got better at designing levels over time, but they're still full of cheap crap. It does at least make me more hopeful for Metal Sonic Rebooted, which does appear more polished at a glance. In any case, making a ROM hack, remixing it, and then providing both in the same ROM is commendable, so those who do click with Hyperdrive have plenty of game to chew on.

By the end of the day, you don't need to pay anything to play a ROM hack, unless you're some kind of weirdo actively collecting these things on cart to fill the physical space around him to the extent that he'll one day be found dead under a pile of bootlegs. It's easy to go "yeah this is unnecessarily difficult, doesn't flow well" and just shut it off, so it might be worth checking out to see if you gel with it more than I do. I, meanwhile, will put it back on my shelf, pour myself a nice cold NOS, and seriously ask myself what the hell I'm doing with my life.

Addendum: I am awarding .5 stars for using a 16-bit remix of Smile Bomb as the title theme. If you put Smile Bomb in your game I am obligated to give you at least .5 stars more than I ordinarily would.

After finishing Sonic Frontiers, I was ready to back up over it, peel out, and leave it in the rear-view. I was done, I was out, I had no obligation to play its insipid DLC much less touch the case, except to move it out of the way for RoboCop: Rogue City, a proper damn video game.

But The Final Horizon, Sonic Frontiers' free story DLC, is a strange thing. Complaints about its difficulty and lackluster implementation of Sonic's friends, who hasn't been playable since Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), are common despite its current 3.0 average. Video guides often depict gameplay set to easy mode, and the first walkthrough I pulled up for the Master Koco Trial - an apparently common point of frustration - leads by calling it "unfairly difficult". I know what you're thinking, Sonic Team fumbling the ball? How could that be!

All this has left me with a nagging curiosity, a growing itch on my back that can only be satisfied by reinstalling Sonic Frontiers and experiencing The Final Horizon first hand. I'm a weak man, a cowardly little creature, and so I found myself sitting in front of Sonic Frontiers' title screen, basking in its stupid weepy music yet again.

Before getting into The Final Horizon, let's briefly talk about the state of Sonic Frontiers a year out from release. Loading up the game hits you with a barrage of notifications about what's changed, including adjustable sliders for speed (as always, sliders go to the right), other little tweaks, and the inclusion of birthday bonuses. I'm not a fan of how obtrusive the birthday UI is, but I do like that you can run around and collect tracks from past Sonic games to put into a playlist. Being able to listen to Palmtree Panic instead of the forgettable noise that comprises Frontiers' soundtrack is a marked improvement, and it's nice that I can put on the theme to the Mystic Ruins considering this game still has the pop-in of a Dreamcast title.

Poor draw distancing was already a major problem in the base game, severely impacting the readability of the open zones and often requiring the player to slowly trace geometry as it draws in. The problem only becomes worse in The Final Horizon as Tails, Amy, and Knuckles are all built around verticality, resulting in objective markers being placed far higher or further outside the island's bounds. This clip of me staring at an objective hovering over the middle of the fucking ocean is a perfect distillation of the Frontiers experience, a riddle solved only by remembering what game you're playing.

I don't care much for Donkey Kong 64's roundabout level design and segmentation of collectables and have been told this might pre-dispose me against collectathons. Well maybe there's a nugget of truth there, because The Final Horizon veers into DK64 territory, segmenting its collectables between Sonic's friends, resulting in the player frequently running by color-coded Koco that cannot be interacted with unless you're playing as the corresponding character, who until the end game is likely locked for story reasons. If anything, I think The Final Horizon should've gone whole hog here, litter the environment with color-coded rings, I might respect it more. Not enough non-euclidian design here, if you ask me!

Sonic's friends just aren't fun to play as, either. Tails' flight, Knuckles' glide, and Amy's Tarot Card Goobercycle all have an initiation delay that makes them feel lousy to jump into, and I don't even know what Amy's cycle is meant to offer considering her faster spindash makes it redundant. Knuckles' climbing feels like maneuvering a tank as 'forward' inputs only seem to register in the direction the camera is facing, resulting in him feeling about as awkward to control as he was in Sonic 2006; his glide is incredibly stiff to the point of near uselessness, too. I am not kidding when I say all of these characters played better in Sonic Adventure, though you can make use of some of their abilities to bypass platforming sections to great effect. I'd usually claw my way up to a collectable and then find that I was high enough to simply fly, glide, or hover-jump over to one or two more without needing to actually platform my way through another obstacle course, and frankly I see that as a positive.

In fact, Final Horizon does address a pretty big complaint I had about the base game automating too many of its platforming sequences. The training wheels have been completely blown off the bike - along with my legs - and this is kind of a double-edged sword. You have to actually engage with the game now, and I think that's where a lot of the perceived difficulty is coming from, especially with the trial towers. Sonic fans being asked to actually play their game instead of drinking in the spectacle as it's played for them, you love to see it happen.

Not that my snide, cynical take should rob anyone of their criticisms about Final Horizon's difficulty, but I think the root of the problem is that Sonic just doesn't control well and is unsuited to platforming in an environment that isn't open or which requires precision. There's a reason Sonic Team chose to affix the player and guide them through platforming challenges, and I believe Final Horizon lays bare why.

I didn't have any trouble with the combat trials and in fact found them to be absurdly easy even on hard mode, but the Master Koco Trial is one of the worst boss rushes I've ever played. I didn't get into it much in my review of the base game, but I think Super Sonic fights are usually the weakest part of any Sonic title, and the fact that all of Frontiers' major bosses are modeled as such made me despise them. So needing to go through them back-to-back, platforming sequences, unskippable cutscenes and all, was just tiresome. You need to perfect parry each boss and trap them in a stunlock using your cyloop which kinda feels like not the way you're supposed to defeat them, but it's certainly the most efficient method. Shoutouts to Knight killing me during the final quick time event because a tiny part of my thumb barely touched the X button enough to register an input, and that's an auto-fail for the entire boss rush. Very cool!

It was about at this point I started to wish Sonic was a Konami franchise, because at least they would've demoted Iizuka to parking attendant years ago.

All of this culminates in a bare-knuckle battle against Sonic's longest, greatest, most deadly adversary: an uncooperative 3D camera. I love to spend the majority of a boss fight requiring perfect parries stuck behind Super Mario 64 trees. At least you get a new Super Sonic form, despite Iizuka refusing to so much as utter the words "Hyper Sonic" in fear that he'd somehow introduce "power creep" to the series, which you might note is literally an insane thing to believe. Mr. Egg Person does finally get a happy ending as he's reunited with his precious daughter, a note that is entirely too sentimental and undeserved for his character. This is a man whose previous years long diabolical plan was to build an amusement park. But, you know, like an evil amusement park, which is bad. I think if Ian Flynn writes hoaky tripe like this regularly then he's just as poor at what he does as Ken Penders, albeit less interestingly so.

I remember people saying that Sonic Frontiers may have issues but it laid out a promising groundwork for things to come. I also remember questioning the wisdom in that and guess what, they followed it up with this.

AA-games are back! RoboCop is back! Teyon did it, they got Robo loaded up full of baby food and Oreo cookies and put him in a good video game!

It's hard to imagine what RoboCop would've looked like without director Paul Verhoeven, who famously threw his copy of the script in the trash and only dug it out at the insistence of his wife. It is even harder still to imagine Johnathan Kaplan turning down Project X to stay on for RoboCop, or how the film would sound without Basil Poledouris' excellent score, or what shape its themes and humor would take were it not for Michael Miner's thirst for corporate blood. I cannot envision a version of RoboCop absent of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, or Kurtwood Smith bringing Edward Neumeier's characters and world to life. Making a sequel game intended to be accepted as part of the series canon is a tall task, and it's one Teyon managed to pull off about as well as Terminal Reality did with Ghostbusters: The Game. I don't know what's up with these movie franchises struggling to find their place in modern cinemas instead getting excellent games that actually understand the source material, but I'd buy that for [Sixty US Dollars.]

Obviously, RoboCop makes the most sense as a first-person shooter, and for the majority of Rogue City, that's exactly what you get. Stomping around in open environments, rarely taking cover as you blast junkies into hunks of meat with your Auto-9, because RoboCop can take it. Every firefight plays out like the factory shootout from the first film, homing in on scum while shots glance off your solid metal chassis, occasionally grabbing enemies to fling into concrete walls and through high-rise windows, or chucking cans of gas into crowds, or CRTs into skulls, you know, if you want to be a capital C Cop.

You can pick up a variety of other firearms, but outside of the opening few missions, there's very little practical reason to do so. The Auto-9 gets the job done, start to finish, and it can be upgraded with PCB boards that can increase penetration, damage, and add additional upgrades like bullet split. I ran through most of the game with a board that provided unlimited ammo, an auto-fed clip, and enhanced gore. The end result is, in a word, ridiculous. Teyon ought to be commended for making the Auto-9 feel every bit as good to use in the game as you'd expect it to from watching the movie.

These linear sets of shooting levels are interspersed with trips back to Rogue City's two hub areas: the police station and downtown Detroit. It's during these sections of the game that Rogue City more closely resembles an immersive sim, with dialog trees and skill checks influencing the outcomes of side stories. Blowing up chop shops and de-escalating stand-offs by promising the perp three hots and a cot (a veritable golden ticket out of the hellscape of Detroit) can be initiated at your leisure, usually between handing out tickets and dancing for children. I like to call that serving the public trust.

It's just a shame that skill checks and the number of available side quests dry up the further in you get. A lot of it feels front-loaded, though there's still a lot of joy in walking around downtown and seeing the residual effects of those early choices. Near the start of the game, I had the option to let a graffiti artist go or fine him an unreasonable amount of money. I decided to uphold the law and bankrupt his ass, giving me the prompt "RoboCop has made an enemy of the graffiti artist," and later causing a large anti-RoboCop mural to appear in retribution. Don't know how he afforded all that paint. Scumbag probably stole it.

The subversive humor of the movie is alive and well, though the writing is a little flat near the start of the game and some performances are a bit questionable, save for Peter Weller who reprises his role as Murphy/Robo and doesn't sound like he's skipped a day since RoboCop 2. Once things gets going, Rogue City keeps its momentum. Literal bratty children lecturing adults on not voting (who in turn threaten to punch them in the face), letters from prisoners upset that they're forced into a baking program that makes them look soft, and Robo reuniting an elderly woman with her lost cat before destroying all her personal property in a shootout and just leaving is so perfectly in tone with RoboCop. There's plenty of direct references to the movie as well, and they never feel out of place, like the Delta City model one of OCP's executives collapsed into being unceremoniously stored in a supply closet that you can explore, or Kaplan again calling for a police strike in every scene he's in (Cops don't strike!) In any other game these callbacks could feel pandering, but in Rogue City they provide a sense of continuity.

Unfortunately, Rogue City runs about as well as RoboCop does while trying to arrest Dick Jones. I frequently had visual effects stop working, including a screen that was meant to depict a key character during a climactic moment in the game which remained blank. Audio frequently desynced and became covered in a heavy whine that required me to reset the game more than once, and artifacting is noticeably present during camera cuts when characters are talking. Temporal anti-aliasing also rears its ugly head once again, caking Rogue City's visuals in a muddy filter.

If Rogue City were a bit more cleaned up and embraced the immersive sim model more fully, I'd say this is a 5/5, but even as-is, I had more fun with it than most AAA releases this year.

A few months after picking up a PlayStation 2 and telling myself "just put games on the hard drive, do NOT go down the rabbit hole of buying used games," I saw the cover of Final Fantasy Origins and was so spellbound by Yoshitaka Amano's gorgeous art that I broke my solemn vow. It's just that meme of the guy looking over his shoulder, my gaze pulled away from my 1TB Western Digital hard drive towards the alluring figure of Final Fantasy Origins... Yeah... Yeah this game's got a great ass...

Whoa. Ok, I guess Origins still has me captive. But who could blame me? It's a fine looking collection, and it happens to hold two Final Fantasy games I've never played before outside of dipping my toes into the first few minutes of Final Fantasy I. It's not like grabbing this would set me down a costly path of buying every Final Fantasy on the PSX. That'd just be crazy!

I've already reviewed both games in this collection, so I won't go over what I think about them individually. Instead, I want to touch on the improvements Origins makes over the original releases. The most apparent of which is its presentation. Gone are the flat 8-bit graphics in favor of something more akin to the Super Nintendo era of Final Fantasy games, with the score getting its own boost to match Origins' graphical fidelity. Though it is graphically the same as the WonderSwan release for which it is a port of, the PSX Origins collection also includes a sparing amount of FMVs which adds a little more of that Amano flavor, and that's just what daddy wants its really graet. .

More importantly, Origins introduces a ton of quality-of-life improvements to modernize the experience of playing both games, including a "memo" save feature that allows you to make a hot save to the system's RAM. This is invaluable given the length and brutality of some of Final Fantasy's dungeons and was all but mandatory to ease my slog through Final Fantasy II's Pandaemonium. You still need to commit to sitting down and finishing these dungeons in a single playthrough but is eases the burden of redoing them from scratch due to bad RNG, which I feel is a good compromise. It's also just nice that spells which did not function correctly (if at all) in the original games now work as intended.

This might all seem a bit too transformative, but I don't get the sense that any of these changes and fixes trivialize the experience so much as they simply make it more palatable. These still feel like NES era JRPGs, the way they're paced and the order of operations you must undertake to progress through them still feels obtuse in a way that's authentic, but I can also sit down and play them, you know? I think that's exactly what you'd want from a collection like this. Also, god damn that cover art. Fuck.

Final Fantasy I review
Final Fantasy II review