WildFrontiers
2015
Bloodborne's dark and eerie world is visually stunning, and its combat mechanics are undoubtedly engaging. But the game was easy enough to cheese and did not give provide enough character development or comprehensible lore to encourage me to spend more time in it than was necessary.
1986
Obnoxious difficulty, tedious maze levels, mediocre art direction. Outside of some good music tunes, this game is not worth the effort it takes to complete it.
2021
Excellent game. Full review to come soon.
1981
Story 1/5
Challenge 1/5
Art Direction 1/5
Music 1/5
Total: 20/100
A comparison with Pac-Man or Tetris will show that the limitations of the era should not interfere with greatness. My test, now as ever, will remain: if this game were sold for $60 today, would I feel that I got my money's worth?
Playing Donkey Kong 40 years after its initial release, while not an unpleasant experience, is an inescapably shallow one. The story is nothing more than "Save the girl from the gorilla". The gameplay consists of simple avoidance of obstacles and jumping up platforms that is only difficult because of the poor responsiveness of the controls. The visual designs of Donkey Kong and Mario are memorable enough for the time period, though the sounds effects grate the ear more than please it. Overall, a rating of 1 star or 2/10 seems fair for an experience that adds nothing to one's experience of life, though at the very least it does not detract from it.
As a game referenced by Smash Bros, it features more most prominently in the hammer item and the 75 m stage.
Challenge 1/5
Art Direction 1/5
Music 1/5
Total: 20/100
A comparison with Pac-Man or Tetris will show that the limitations of the era should not interfere with greatness. My test, now as ever, will remain: if this game were sold for $60 today, would I feel that I got my money's worth?
Playing Donkey Kong 40 years after its initial release, while not an unpleasant experience, is an inescapably shallow one. The story is nothing more than "Save the girl from the gorilla". The gameplay consists of simple avoidance of obstacles and jumping up platforms that is only difficult because of the poor responsiveness of the controls. The visual designs of Donkey Kong and Mario are memorable enough for the time period, though the sounds effects grate the ear more than please it. Overall, a rating of 1 star or 2/10 seems fair for an experience that adds nothing to one's experience of life, though at the very least it does not detract from it.
As a game referenced by Smash Bros, it features more most prominently in the hammer item and the 75 m stage.
Characterization and Narrative Design: 3/10
Art Design: 7/10
Challenge: 4/10
Worldbuilding: 4/10
Overall 45/100
Art Design: 7/10
Challenge: 4/10
Worldbuilding: 4/10
Overall 45/100
Beautifully presented game with wonderful music and character design, only held back from being a true classic of the action-adventure genre by being a little short and repetitive.
1991
Finally got around to playing the first entry in the series after only having played Sonic 2 before and... let's just say it was disappointing. Sonic 2 improves upon the original in almost every conceivable way, including better music, adding the Spin Dash, adding Tails, and more interesting level design. Several of the stages in Sonic 1 slow your movement to a crawl, which is the very opposite kind of level design you would expect for a sonic game. The boss fights are also very basic and uninteresting compared with the sequel. There is almost no reason to play Sonic 1 when Sonic 2 exists, especially considering there is not even any interesting lore to be discovered in this game.
An excellent remake of the Midgar section of the 1997 classic game. My only issue with this remake is that some sections (mostly the slums and the npcs in them) look like they are from a PS3 era title. The PS5 version of the game thankfully fixes some of the more obvious pop-in issues, along with some of the low resolution textures (Cloud's N64 apartment door... never forget), but sadly it cannot fix how ugly the npc models look when speaking. Though there is accurate lip-syncing for the English voices during cutscenes, non-cutscene lip-syncing only works with the Japanese audio.