It's outstanding to me how incredible the production and care of this is considering how small the team working on it is. I don't want to sound hyperbolic but I truly believe this will be considered a classic of the form in the future, and its staggering to be here on the ground floor. I wonder if this is how it felt to play Higurashi when it was originally coming out.

There's so much I could say about this game in particular, but all of this story is so worth experiencing first hand and not from some chucklehead's review on game logging website. All I'll say is that Sophie and team do such an incredible job juggling humour, sincerity, tragedy, humanity and horror that its ridiculous to me that not Everyone is talking about Spare Parts.

Long live SpaPa.

I'm not really one for the checklist side objective type Open World Experience, or the type of prestige Triple A narrative game experience that Sony mainly deals in these days, but damn, the webswinging and combat were good enough to have me 100% this game just so I could spend a little more time in it.

The narrative has some blemishes and elements that are more than a little unsavoury (Spider-Man's general Cop Proximity and him upholding a Surveillance State Network) but most of the big plot beats and the little character moments with MJ, Aunt May, Miles, Martin Li and Octavius hit in the right spots for a spider-dweeb like myself, so this game was overall a real good time. Don't make me do any more forced stealth segments though.

I couldn't exactly tell you what it is about Side Arms that I like so much. I had never heard of it before it appeared in the virtual arcade of Street Fighter 6's Battle Hub, but immediately upon playing it I clocked it as something of a pseudo sequel to Section Z, a more fondly remembered Capcom shooter from the era.

Side Arms starts incredibly strongly, taking the two button directional shooting from Section Z and combining it with a Gradius style weapon system and really excellent graphics and sound. Side Arms revels in spectacle, and this is exemplified no better than when you find the secret AlphaBeta power up which has both Player 1 and Player 2 to combine into a super robot with a devastating 8 way attack. There's an adorable little transforming animation where the two ships combine and you then gain an extra hit point.

I love the environment design, which manages to stay nice and varied for its entire runtime, but unfortunately the same can't be said to the bosses, which there are only two for the whole game.

Aesthetically a lot was clearly taken from popular robot anime of the time (stage 4 has little Zakus jumping around as enemies and its very cute.) but honestly there's a lot of charm here. The protagonist Mobichan would go on to appear as an easter egg in many other Capcom games, notably on the title screen of Street Fighter 2, and I just don't know, the whole thing is so endearing to me. It's not a perfect game and there are many better shooters out there, but I've got a lot of love in my heart for it.