first of all: this IS the superior version of the game. sonic r was made FOR the saturn and i adore it in all its graphical crust and cascading render distances. seriously, the way they handle the low render distance in this game is gorgeous and amplifies the look of tracks like radiant emerald. i'm getting aside of myself though

sonic r is a misunderstood gem. i was thinking about this a lot in my free time the other day- i've been on a sega saturn binge lately and i played sega rally championship back to back with this game. intentional or not, sonic r and src are definitely similar games, yet sonic r has a 2.8 and sega rally has a 3.7.

"well, sonic r has slippery handling and inconsistent physics!" yeah, so does sega rally. stop playing sonic r like a kart racer

"well, sonic r barely has any content!"
sega rally has 4 stages, yet nobody complains. i guess cuz its an arcadey racer and you're supposed to master high scores? i'd definitely argue that's what sonic r goes for as well.

"the music is bad!"
nobody says this about either game i made it up

so the biggest complaints about sonic r come down to misconceptions. i think this is also why people complain about the "difficulty spike" for 100%-ing the game! the game demands mastery of the few stages it has for the same reason any arcade racer would. it provides a solid testing grounds for your fastest pathways, and the shitpost-tier ai in the standard races makes it less of a pain in the ass to get back to the challenge again. i don't know what design decisions were legit decisions here, but it all flows together quite nicely. though, obviously, the greatest part about this game are the track layouts and the MUSIC. i cannot say anything about sonic r's soundtrack that hasn't already been said. just listen to "work it out". it is the most bright, bubbly energetic music that fails to ever get old when you're practicing routes through those stages. and those stages do have hella routes- they're essentially 3d sonic levels that loop. it's super fun to use each character's power to "exploit" things. the speedrunning scene for sonic r is probably insane. maybe that physics engine was good all along? the artstyle is damn perfect too, featuring signature sega sunny skies as well as sparkley space voids and shiny metallic sheens. exploring is fun and satiates my need for a 3d platformer on the sega saturn, cuz this is way more interesting as a genre hybrid.

yeah sonic r is basically perfect. best racing game i've ever played

Pain is mandatory

What is a Doom II on Ultra Violence? A misserable lttle pile of go fuck yourself. A huge amount of issues regarding the pacing of the whole experience sadly make this sequel fall short of surpassing the original game. Sure, the new enemies are pretty good for the most part (I will find whoever thought of adding the Pain Elemental, and I shall teach them) and the super shotgun is probably the most iconic weapon in gaming at this point, but the whole experience gets bogged down by downright mean level design. I began theorizing with a friend that they did it this way so you would just skip the single player campaign and go play deathmatch since that was all the rage at the time. The small pockets of pure fun are incredible, blasting through scores and scores of baddies and meanies with a finelly tuned arsenal of deathfuck, but the puzzle and fucking platforming sections just tank the experience to a whole new degree of unfun.

There was a whole lot of hurting in this one fellas, mostly from Petersen's level design. You heard about traps and hidden switches? Now get ready for THE AGONY CONTRAPTION. You could fill a small nation with the amount of cacodemons present in his levels (my personal theory is that he is such a TTRPG nerd he just adds them because it reminds him of DnD).

Shoutout to the music tho. I found myself stopping to just hear it after every carnage. Yeah we all know it's mostly just stolen heavily inspired by the metal they were listening at the office at the time, but the ambient tracks and original stuff knocks it off the park.

On to build engine games, starting with Duked Nuked DDD. I won't play them on the hardest difficulty since from my experience the level of fun just goes to the shitter with them, while in Doom it's a somewhat achievable punishment for trying to have fun.

This game was recommended to me by a few friends of mine (Thanks Marc, Kevin, Shaun, and Noah), but like most games I didn't know what I was getting into prior to playing. I start the game and I'm immediately introduced to Mortal Kombat Sidescroller...

Through out the time I played I was very confused on how to actually control my character and how to avoid the pillars at the beginning of the game...if anything I was more annoyed that there's a 1 hit death gimmick on the "first level". I don't know if that was on purpose or if I was supposed to know what to do as soon as I saw it...but I whole heartedly didn't appreciate it...I barely got far in the game, and I regret playing it...Mortal Kombat shouldn't be a sidescroller oh my lord..