2024 is when I decide to really get into the game I've bounced off the most in my entire life, after two Steam refunds and multiple sneers at genre labels on the back of the box specifically tailored to kill me.

The search for the "roguelite I can tolerate the most by being as close to deterministic as possible" ends by embracing the one that is more often flaunted to be a pure RNG-fest, an exercise in putting coins into a jukebox set on "shuffle" and watching the funny lights that happen to pop out that run. Reality is, a top-down cardinal directions shooter with no iframes crutch option (shoutout to EtG) is simply a pretty strong foundation to build your game on top of, and the enemy roster more than enough supplements it with the varied slew of contact, projectile, AoE, delayed, hitscan, chasing etc. monsters threatening space as well as any good action game would.
Concessions have still been made, a noteworthy absent here is enemies anticipating and shooting towards the direction you are currently moving to, the game is clearly welcoming towards the casual gamer's proclivity towards circlestrafing while shooting inwards as the default approach (shoutout to Doom '16). By its randomly generated room nature, it can never properly contend with the handpicked enemy compositions you'd find in a regular action game. What's there is still solid at hell, and the default 1x1 rooms are small enough that their boundaries alone make good arenas to test your skill in weaving between threats, target prioritization, and all other conventional real time skills. The end result is a blazing fast sequence of densely packed encounters that rly make u think & execute before screen scroll is even over, and allow me to reiterate it's so funny this went down in history as The Luck Based One while stuff like Dead Cells me has me repeating 10 minutes of trite every time I want to see something that doesn't bore me. AND you get to put a coin in the funny jukebox too!

The gallery of inscrutably named items enriching the loot pool that make up its main form of progression are what make TBOI infamous, potentially turning your pathetic pea shooter into the most bullshit ms paint rain of death conceivable. I personally don't mind, for now (more on that later), the power gap between the run ending powerups and the purely utilitarian ones, I genuinely would enjoy the overall game much less if it allowed you to consistently become a walking AoE nuke devoid of the minutiae in spacing and fundamentals I've been rewarding with lavish praise until now - what I do enjoy is seeing how every run makes me recalibrate my mental stack on the spectrum between "positioning Isaac well to hit my enemies" and "positioning Isaac well to dodge shit", feeling like I'm really getting my money worth from apparently lame synergies that still allow me to remove either end from the equation. Some of my most successful runs aren't omg ludovico + azazel ggs we take those, but low damage regular-ass shaped projectiles Isaac having spectral, piercing, and homing, allowing me to keep my eyes glued to him and nothing else thereby maximizing evasion. I consider all of this very healthy for the skill ceiling of the game, and it turned what I initially expected to be a "low effort game for when you are sleepy" into a LOCKED IN kinda of mental effort that leaves me wanting for a cigarette, and maybe lying on the bed for a bit, after an hour and a half like the best of 'em.

... That's where my review of the game would've ended a couple of weeks or so ago, being an expanded version of my initial thoughts when I was still early in run progression, halfway through current objective of killing Mom's Heart 10 times (the second "end of run" final boss, arguably the end of the tutorial). I maybe would've added that the game needed some kind of RNG mitigation like a minimum damage floor the lower you go in floors because I want to turn every game into KH2 as it's the stat that most damages a run through sheer bad luck (the game is not beyond this kind of rigging, ie Hush's light pillars are tailored against your current Speed stat so that they are always avoidable). However, the more I progress and unlock final bosses, the more the effects of a bad/unlucky run are felt.

The question that takes up increasingly bigger space in my head is, how does the game incentivize not giving up on those bad runs?

One of the most exciting things about the game is the Devil/Angel Room system. tldr, by doing no damage runs on specific floors you get rewarded with the potentially best shit in the game, starting from the second one. That's another thing I, initially, unequivocally loved, another piece of the puzzle that turns even the lamest, earliest rooms in something requiring proper finesse as bad plays quickly compound into a more miserable time than it needs to be.
If I get hit and miss out on them, my bad, right? Well yes, but no, because only RED HEART damage counts against a no damage floor, and you can find BLUE HEARTS which act like armor above your regular hearts, and, just like regular hearts, each of them takes two hits to deplete. The no hit run turned into a doable 2-hit run. Maybe you are really lucky and drop multiple blue hearts, it's now a 4/6-hit run and now you are coasting so hard it's not even funny. Maybe you get neither and gotta play it straight, and get hit at the very last second of floor 2, and oh, actually there's a pity system and the earlier you get one to spawn the faster you snowball by making others spawn next and you just missed out on all of that, and oh, the rest of the run is also going like shit, and oh, you find yourself flouride staring at the time counter wondering why you shouldn't just spam R(estart) every time you want to play the game hoping the first floor's RNG dumps a bunch of blues on your lap.
How am I incentivized to keep going instead?

From what I gather, you eventually have to gauge how well a run is going by yourself and pick a proper boss to end it. "If it's going great, try for Delirium or the Repentance content, if not, stop at Mega Satan or even the Lamb, if it really sucks cut your losses and end at Sheol/Cathedral". Or something like that. That sounds palatable NOW that I have unlocks to work towards to against any of them, but once I only the very top echelon left, what the fuck do I personally get out of ending a potential run halfway through at Cathedral? I'm the guy who least needs extrinsic rewards such as unlocks/achievements to enjoy the act of play, but 30 minutes to beat a final boss I've already done dozens of times is still 30 minutes.
What incentive do I have to stay on a run that's gonna end early and on a technicality?

I'm not gonna write a proper conclusion because this is a review I'm specifically keeping open for the inevitable reevaluation as my worries are either assuaged or confirmed by what's waiting for me ahead.




Uncharacteristically of me, I'm gonna put up a list of my pain points while I spitball solutions, which ultimately show you just can't take the fight out of the RNG hater.
1) As mentioned, put some kind of damage floor, or implement a pity system for DMG UP items, or have DMG UP on more items, or whatever needed so I don't have to look at 3.50 Damage on floor 8 (afaik the truly busted damage shit comes from specific multiplier items, not from the humble +0.4s)
2) Introduce some kind of mild pity system for bombs and keys for the first three floors (skipping out on MULTIPLE treasure rooms because you get zero (0) keys for ten minutes is just mind numbing)
3) Remove Hard Mode's changes to shops, namely that they can spawn at a lower quality level than what you currently have them upgraded at (they can't even spawn after the halfway point of a run at all, they require resources to enter, sometimes they are not a shop at all but it's a miniboss, they are not guaranteed to have stuff you want in them, is the additional dice roll really needed?)
4) Change how blue hearts interact with Devil/Anger Room chances or change how they spawn on the first floor. My most immediate idea is "just make one and only one always spawn, but hide it behind multiple layers of rocks so the player needs to choose whether it's worth consuming like three bombs when they can soldier on and try their skill instead", but people would just start Restart spamming for plentiful enough bomb drops instead. Plus characters that fly wouldn't care.

Recently I got myself a PS5 and was somewhat surprised by how meagre its Classics selection of PS1 and PS2 titles was in the store. Well aware that these are emulated games that require high precision and stability to be sold on the official storefront, I was still shocked to see Sony offer titles like Tekken 2 and literally all the Syphon Filter games over anything else that would come to your mind were you to think about PS Classics (and what Sony themselves put on that PSOne mini machine). The point is, despite owning the current gen Sony console I have no legit option of experiencing the beginning of some of the famous Sony franchises, which just feels... wrong. And this got me thinking about games preservation in general.

Usually the discussion of the topic is focused on old and rare physical-only titles or relatively recent games stuck in legal limbo and therefore unavailable to buy or run comfortably on modern systems. But here's an example of another side of the issue. Go ahead and visit the official Need for Speed franchise page on the EA website. You will see that the earliest title EA seems to acknowledge (and sell) is the Most Wanted remake from 2012. Sure, the sheer memetic power of the original Most Wanted and the Underground series is so strong that the general audience still knows that there were other big street racing titles prior to 2012, but what about something earlier than that? One would have to dig into the wiki pages to even learn that there were NFS titles prior to Underground, and in fact the series' whole aesthetic and identity were quite different from what is maintained to this day. The number of ratings on the games in the series on this very website is telling in how well known each entry is.

So Porsche Unleashed is a relatively obscure title. Looking up the game on YouTube I was hoping to see many "hidden gem" videos talking about it or retrospectives, but there's not that much and what little there is comes from hardcore racing games enthusiasts. Needless to say, obtaining the game these days and running it on Windows 11 is another issue. I had to download a .rar with the already installed and pre-patched game from a Russian forum, and I still could only play in windowed mode. One would have better luck obtaining a PS1 disc and playing that, but that's the thing--it's the PC version that is truly special.

This game was a regular EA yearly franchise installment release. Came out exactly one year after the previous game EA Canada worked on, in fact, that being Need for Speed: High Stakes. And that alone makes it all the more fascinating that Porsche Unleashed is not an iterative sequel one would expect but a major side step in the series. This here is a full fledged car simulation game, one of the first racing titles that got a proper model calculating the impact of car damage on performance. And it's an historic game, not only letting you race on Porsche cars from the 50s all the way to year 2000 but also providing detailed stats and preserving each car's character with how it handles in-game. Of course this is all looking somewhat quaint from today's perspective, but back then there wasn't much, if anything, like it. And it was a yearly release.

The handling takes some getting used to. It's very easy to spin out just from nervously adjusting your trajectory on the straight. More powerful cars from the 70s and 80s can barely turn a corner, and it's worse on wet tarmac and ice. But finally getting a fast and nimble 911 '00 at the end feels most rewarding as you zoom through the familiar tracks with surprising ease. The introduction of a car damage model means that careless driving will quickly lead to worse handling and acceleration and, crucially, higher repair costs before the next race. It also means that you can cause funny little fatal accidents for your opponents that can genuinely change the race's outcome as there's not much rubberbanding going on. The tracks are also notable, since most of them are not usual circuits but point to point races set in diverse locals around Western Europe. The courses are long and intricate with several distinct stages to them and a variety of route options (which are not always shortcuts). Some of the later tracks may actually seem like a puzzle at first due to how many options you're presented with. And the simulation aspect of the game informs your tuning decisions for the races: the Alps course has a terrifying icy mid-section that could benefit from the better grip provided by rain tires, but there are also a set of hairpins at the start and a fast slalom-like dirt section at the end. Different cars with different setups will provide a different driving experience just on this one track. Granted, the same simulation shtick can occasionally make racing quite frustrating, especially as you adapt to new cars, get into crashes and spend precious money on repairs. The progression system overall isn't great. You need to buy specific cars to enter new tournaments, you also need money for upgrading the car and paying the entry fee. And you can't exactly hit restart in case you made a mistake. Thankfully you can avoid grinding previous races just by buying, repairing and selling used cars for nice profit.

The presentation is also very 2000, for better or worse. If Underground and the following titles could easily be traced back to the Fast and Furious movies, I suppose here the companion film would be Gone In 60 Seconds? Except Nicolas Cage got spiky hair and a goatee. There's that weird vibe or prestige classy racing with all the expensive cars and lush locals, but it's all set to the dorkiest trance music.

This is probably way too much text dedicated to an outdated racing title from two decades back, but it's way too fascinating of a project for me to just ignore. A major deviation in an iterative yearly series, one that is now long forgotten even by the original publisher. A part of a still ongoing massive franchise that simply ignores most of its legacy. Triple A abandonware, if you will.

God, this game rules so much. Data Wing is the type of game you would never expect to see on mobile. This is a 100% free game with a complete story and everything. It has memorable characters, the music is a blast, and the gameplay...this game is so unbelievably fun. Data Wing is a racing game, but it throws in a bunch of gimmicks that make you approach levels in loads of different ways. The most important of this is the ability to grind against walls for a speed boost. This completely turns the game on its head - instead of hugging corners to go fast, you're forced to ride up against the edge of a turn to build up a massive speed boost out of it. Combine the perfect gameplay with the excellent presentation and you have a game where I easily found myself getting sucked in to going through the same 30-second track over and over to optimize my time, fully being absorbed into the groove.

The one thing that really sucks about Data Wing is its size. This game is criminally short, and you can beat it all in a couple of hours. I can't complain too much - the game's free with no strings attached which is probably why - but despite how fleshed out this game is, it feels like it barely scratches the surface and leaves me constantly wanting more.

I'm begging you Dan Vogt, please make a followup or a sequel or an expansion. Take my money. Please.

Black Mesa keeps shifting between different modes of gameplay–or so-called “pillars”. Black Mesa’s main pillars here would be: puzzling, platforming, shooting, and being a walking simulator, following Half-Life 1’s original tag-line of “Run. Think. Shoot. Live.”. In the narrative context of Black Mesa, this pillar approach does make sense. You are not playing as Mario or Master Chief; you’re a “highly trained professional” scientist caught in a FUBAR situation between aliens and the military. That would be a hard sell if the gameplay focused on either platforming or shooting or puzzling. But what nags me the most is that these pillars all tend to happen in completely separate realities; you’re not doing much platforming or puzzling while shooting, or much puzzling while platforming.

A knock-on effect of keeping these pillars all separate is that it limits what you can do with them individually, since a game can only be so long. A given pillar can never reach its full potential if the game has to distribute its total length between several pillars; time spent on one means there’s less time to spend on the others. We already see the unforeseen consequences of this in Black Mesa: many puzzle or platforming segments being rather toothless, potential enemy compositions never even being tried, and many puzzle types being one-and-done once you move to the next chapter. Sneaking past highly-lethal enemies is only a thing with the tentacles in Blast Pit. Active turrets, tripwire mines or Barnacles rarely appear in major Marine encounters. The more mobile Alien Grunt variants in Xen only appear for about three or four minor encounters. You never get to use the long-jump module in combat against the Marines. The shielded Controllers only appear around five or six times near the very end of the game. Gargantuas are only used for scripted sequences and never as an enemy in regular combat. Bullsquids and Houndeyes rarely appear with the rest of the Xenians. Marine Snipers never appear in regular combat as well. Portals are almost never used within combat encounters. Headcrab Zombies are only used in minor encounters but rarely ever in any major ones. Tanks, helicopters and APCs are rarely utilized as a serious enemy type. Long-jumping in combat is never really tested outside of one boss fight where you use it to circlestrafe faster. The Assassins only appear for a whopping TWO encounters in the whole game.

This gets worse when Black Mesa continues to introduce new elements within each of these pillars, up until the very end of the game. When introducing something new, you generally want to slow the game down a bit to show/tell what the new thing is and/or does. So a security guard tells you the Tentacles in Blast Pit locate you by sound, the Marines are shown in a scripted sequence to be hostile against scientists like you, and you get an antepiece to practice your Long Jump in . Else you risk the player having no clue what they’re supposed to do with the new thing and die several times in confusion, which is rather demotivating. To its credit, Black Mesa is incredibly thorough with making sure that the player knows what it is they’re supposed to do and how something new works. The only issue here is that Black Mesa keeps introducing too much new stuff. If you keep slowing down the game to teach the player something new, there won’t be much room left to test the player’s mastery over most pre-existing elements, which leaves the game feeling like wasted potential. Black Mesa already has the tools to craft interesting combat scenarios or platforming sections or puzzles or combination thereof, but it instead chooses to dazzle you with its quantity and variety rather than the quality of its individual challenges. (At the very least it’s not Half-Life 2 where its gameplay elements and modes of gameplay are so disparate that you couldn’t combine them even if you tried)

Had the core gameplay combined these pillars into one, it could get more mileage out of each one. If your platforming/movement skills would get implicitly tested during combat segments (f.e. because you got the Long Jump Module much earlier on and/or because the combat arenas already involve a lot of platforming), then the platforming-only sections can afford to be more complex and engaging because the player is more familiar with the game’s movement already. If your fourteen weapons also had uses for puzzling and platforming, then the game wouldn’t have to spend as much time slowing down to teach you something new. Then puzzles could be used to teach you new ways to use those weapons in combat, and vice versa. For example, the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2 isn’t only a puzzle tool, but a useful combat tool as well. The TMD in Singularity and time powers in TimeShift both worked in a way that enabled both interesting combat and puzzle scenarios. Admittedly, Black Mesa’s arsenal doesn’t lend itself that well to puzzles or platforming (perhaps it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that), but the presence of alien weapons and experimental lab weapons in the setting should’ve been a free ticket to do something more interesting in that regard, like Half Life: Opposing Force's Barnacle grappling hook weapon. And hey, it’s not like people were using the Hivehand much for anything else.

But even if Black Mesa had a less scatterbrained design philosophy, it wouldn’t be of much help if it kept the same horrible pacing issues. There are many many parts in Black Mesa well into the mid/late-game that consist of banal filler encounters where you’ll be shooting only one to three Headcrabs/Headcrab Zombies/Houndeyes, even though your arsenal is only getting more imposing over time. Sometimes you’re doing rather rudimentary ‘connect the wire’ puzzles. Other times there’s straight up nothing happening, where you’re walking down empty corridors or slowly crawling down a pipe or vent that serves no compelling narrative or atmospheric purpose (hello, Office Complex). Residue Processing at least has the big industrial vibes of getting caught in the massive underbelly of Black Mesa, even if its swimming and platforming puzzles are milquetoast. The ‘walking simulator’ parts in Anomalous Materials and Questionable Ethics at least serve a narrative purpose (which you can simply sprint past if you’re not interested, unlike some other games or moments in this game that like to lock you in a room until they’re done dumping the story), or if they happen right after a major setpiece where some downtime is well-deserved. The problem here is that Black Mesa completely overdoes this downtime. Xen is by far the worst offender here, combining copious downtime with non-threatening combat and simplistic throwaway puzzles/platforming.

Now, Black Mesa does manage to improve on some of the original setpieces, the Marine fights in particular. The launch pad climax at the end of On A Rail is no longer a small flat square, but a thoughtful arena with islands of cover and health/battery items placed in such a way to encourage aggressive maneuvering instead of camping a corner. The dam battle and Forget About Freeman’s topside fight cleverly use points of no return and liberal item placement to encourage the player to act proactively rather than passively. The lobby battle is also a wonderful addition both gameplay-wise and narrative-wise (with the scientists responding in awe and fear to you killing a whole squad of Marines by yourself, something the original game didn’t acknowledge as well). It’s the usage of item placement in BM’s encounters that’s a definite improvement over the original. HL1 was rather stingy with its supplies (on top of them yielding less depending on the difficulty setting), which meant that in the long-term it usually paid off to play boring and safe. BM is much more liberal with supplies within and outside combat encounters, which means you can afford to play more aggressively as long as you move towards wherever the items are.

Unfortunately, most Marine encounters (particularly those in We’ve Got Hostiles) are rather poor at pulling you into the fight. One reason for that is that you often don't get a good glimpse of a combat space and its layout before the fighting starts. This means that you won’t know what lies ahead or what your options are, which in turn means you’re more likely to play it safe than charge into the unknown. The other reason is that a lot of arenas only have a single entrance, whereupon entering you’re immediately fired at from every angle. When there’s too much suppressive fire ahead and you don’t know what exactly lies ahead, you’re of course going to retreat and take cover unless you want to take tons of damage. But when you end up camping the sole entrance, the enemy has no routes to encircle you and thus invalidate your camping position, nor can they flush you out with grenades (because at an arena entrance you usually have more than enough space to backpedal from incoming grenades). You could solve this by making arenas more circular and adding more entrances, and having enemies only move into an arena when you’re already deep inside. One-way entrances or cul-de-sacs with enemies coming from behind also help with preventing the player from approaching each fight with the same choke point and corner camping strategy. Some arenas do make use of these, but it's not applied as consistently as it should’ve been.

The way that the Marine Grunts are balanced also discourages playing proactively. The Marine Grunts’ hitscan fire is incredibly accurate, which turns most encounters into a damage race or a game of peekaboo. Marines also do not understand the concept of pain or flinching or self-preservation in response to being shot. It’s not uncommon for you and a grunt to dump mags into each other, waiting to see which one’s the first to die. It also used to be in HL1 that if you threw a grenade at grunts, that they wouldn’t even bother firing at you. They would instead run for their lives, letting you pick them off or reposition safely. In Black Mesa this behavior is nowhere as pronounced. They might call out the grenade, but all the AI does is try and shuffle away a bit while continuing to shoot at you. Without ways to mitigate hitscan damage, you shouldn't be surprised when the player decides to play it safe and boring.

As for the alien encounters, they only resemble something decent in Lambda Core. There the game actually leverages alien enemies being able to teleport in (when you’re already deep inside an arena!) at several positions and different vantage points. Then you gotta simultaneously take care of Alien Grunts on the ground, Vortigaunts sniping you from vantage points, Headcrabs/Houndeyes bothering you from below, and Barnacles acting as static obstacles. It’s promising stuff! It helps that compared to HL1 the alien enemies have been rebalanced for the best: the Alien Grunts’ ranged attack no longer has obscene homing, Bullsquids fire a spread of harder-to-dodge arced projectiles rather than a single linear projectile, and Vortigaunts/Houndeyes generally seem to not run around aimlessly after getting shot as they did in HL1. Unfortunately, most prior chapters only use alien enemies in the most basic ways possible, and Lambda Complex ends before it can meaningfully build on these interactions. It also doesn’t help that you get the Gluon Gun in Lambda Core, which is stupidly powerful and lets you trivialize a good part of most enemy encounters there.

In conclusion, Black Mesa could have gotten much more out of itself if it intertwined its pillars rather than keeping them separate. With some tweaking it already has a good foundation, it just needs to stop trying to change the gameplay every half hour. Admittedly it’s more fair to blame HL1 for that considering BM’s limited scope as a remake, but since the BM developers bloated Xen for no good reason other than what I assume is making their art portfolio look more impressive, it shouldn’t have been that impossible.

I also want to take a quick detour to talk about the final boss. The revamped Nihilanth fight comes as a part of a new wave of FPS bosses that I like to call “movement bosses”. Whereas before most FPS bosses had you either circlestrafing them to death (much like the Gonarch in HL1 or BM) or doing some inane puzzle that didn’t rely on testing what you’ve used so far (like Nihilanth in HL1, the Icon of Sin in Doom 2, and most Ugh-Zan fights in the Serious Sam franchise), nowadays developers seem to have somewhat realized that abstract puzzles or circlestrafing don’t make much of an interesting boss fight in an FPS. Now we get bosses with elaborate attack patterns reminiscent of 90’s console action games that you can’t just circlestrafe through (like the Cyberdemon in Doom (2016), General Brand in Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, and Nihilanth here). These fare much better because they're challenging you on something that you’ve been doing throughout the entire game (i.e. moving). But while this new wave of FPS bosses has made it more interesting to avoid damage from a boss, they all fail to do so for dealing damage to a boss.

As it is now, dealing damage to a boss is a simple matter of equipping the strongest gun (or the next-strongest gun if you run out of ammo), and then holding down LMB on the boss. In Siberian Mayhem that is your Rocket Launcher, in Doom 2016 it is weapon swapping between multiple guns (which amounts to the same thing since you’re swapping between them for the sake of DPS and not their other properties), and in BM it’s the Gluon Gun. Most of these bosses weakly try to address this by attacking you once in a blue moon with some form of homing projectiles that you can only avoid by shooting them down, but if you are already using a continuous hitscan beam weapon like the Gluon Gun, then these are only brief one-second diversions from lasering the big fetus. There isn’t much of a reason to use your grenades, your Snarks, your mines, your satchel charges, your revolver, your shotgun, your pistol, your crossbow, or your crowbar against Nihilanth, whereas in regular enemy encounters most of them can be of use depending on the situation. If your arsenal is designed around dealing with a large variety of ever-changing situations, then a boss fight should reflect that variety and unpredictability, such as by throwing multiple obstacles of different types at you at once. Designing an FPS boss fight that challenges both avoiding damage and dealing damage would need a shift in paradigm design, which I’ve written about in extensive detail elsewhere.

This is meant to be more of a review of the environment that this game created, as I have very little credibility when it comes to the critique of its mechanics. I don’t play Super Smash Brothers Ultimate competitively, and I have rarely looked into the deeper mechanics at play. I still get frustrated by Sephiroth’s neutral B catching me while not paying attention, and I frequently spam Banjo’s side B to my friends’ equal dismay. If you’re interested in reading the experiences of a high-level Ultimate player, this is not the place to do it. What this game accomplishes on the gameplay side of things is enough to facilitate having fun with my friends, and that is all it has to do. Smash Ultimate was more than just a game to me in the excess of three years it has continually been in the public eye for. While the character reveals for Smash 4 were monumentally hype, especially as it opened to door for characters like Cloud and Ryu, Smash Ultimate solidified the “character reveal event” with the Fighter Passes. Everyone would come together for each Nintendo event with bated breath, wondering if enough time finally passed for a new fighter to be revealed. These characters captured everyone’s imagination, and Joker’s reveal gave credence to anyone’s left field bozo pick. Dante? Definitely in the conversation. Doom Guy? Not too out there. Steve from Minecraft? He actually made it in, and it still feels like a fever dream. The funny thing is that, other than Sephiroth, I don’t particularly love any of the DLC characters included. Even Sephiroth, while a very left field pick, didn’t really wow me in the same way Cloud did for obvious reasons. The truly surprising door was already opened by the likes of Cloud and Joker, and every character that followed them was a little less surprising. The community aspect was still there for characters like Byleth and Min Min, but nobody’s dream was coming true. That kind of cynicism that felt so antithetical to Smash Brothers, the series that embodied everyone’s childhood fantasies, started to creep its way in. For the final DLC character, it felt like almost an inevitability that they would disappoint. Despite the overwhelming amount of soul that Masahiro Sakurai (one of my all-time favorite creators) has given Smash Brothers as a series, and the equally astounding care put into each character in their every facet, even I started to feel like Smash Ultimate would end on a down note. I was ready to post some unoriginal and unfunny joke when I believed the character would be from Dark Souls. I was anticipating my cynicism to be rewarded as it usually is in this world, and I would feel the momentary satisfaction of coming down on this labor of love that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t even the knowledge that Sora would be the final character that quelled this feeling. I had considered Sora to be a leading candidate despite the licensing nightmare that is his existence. It was the love that was put into his cinematic, and the silly but bittersweet knowledge that Sakurai’s wild ride was coming to an end.

I don’t even like Kingdom Hearts that much. I think 2 is a fine game, and Birth By Sleep and underrated gem, but the rest of the series I can take or leave. I grew up banging my head against the original Kingdom Hearts, having restarted it countless times. The game was difficult, and the narrative was like nothing I had seen in any other game. I never grew to like the game, but I certainly remember it like few other games. I would probably call Kingdom Hearts my least favorite series that I cannot get enough of. There are times where I truly hate it with a passion, but there are other moments that still get me teary eyed. I’m not sure why I expected to look upon a hypothetical Sora reveal with steely eyed stoicism. Any representative from a game that I had played tirelessly before the age of 10 would have had an effect on me. Sakurai could have thrown Crash Bandicoot in and my heart would have fluttered a little bit. Sora, in his great experience with doing so, unlocked something in my heart. The unashamed love that I could have for something, a feeling that I seldom experience in my 20s, came back to me for a while. I sat watching this silly sales pitch for downloadable content in a game I have spent over $100 on, knowing exactly what it was, but not being able to stop the tears in my eyes. The image of all these characters I’ve spent my life with emerging from their plastic state and having one last hurrah for their final visitor made me more emotional than I should be willing to admit. I don’t know if there’s going to be anything like this for the rest of my life, but I can’t imagine it will be as exciting. I’m not part of the “smash community” (and I don’t know if I want to be), but I am part of the internet community. It’s this larger group of people that made Smash Ultimate special. I couldn’t go two hours after the reveal of Sora before I heard the news being talked about among people outside of my circles in real life. Everyone, regardless of how they felt about this character or how much they play Smash Brothers, knew that there was magic in what Sakurai did. In retrospect, that magic was always present, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. It’s not until summer vacation is over that you regret taking it for granted.

I really want to like this game. It has the classic Ratchet gameplay that I've always loved since I was young, and Rift Apart's base combat is among the best in the series. The game is also a graphical showpiece for the PS5. Demon's Souls and Returnal look fantastic, but this game's graphics are on another level. The variety of locations really sells that graphical power, as you travel from bustling cities to bright mining facilities. Jumping between these locations with the new rifts is the first time I've been sold on this generation as a sizeable leap from the last. These aspects of the game do a good job of distracting you from several major flaws that are present throughout its entirety. Many of these issues aren't unique to this game, but a few of them are, and they really make me worried about the future of the series.
The biggest flaw is the enemy variety. This is at its worst with the bosses, but the regular enemies are guilty of this too. I couldn't tell you when I first realized I was fighting the same giant robot boss for the the fourth or fifth time because it happens so many times that I lost count. If you take out all the variants of bosses, there are only around 5 unique bosses in this game. The worst part is that none of these bosses are particularly fun to fight. It's so disappointing that a game so beautiful is stuck throwing the same robot and T Rex at you over and over again. In a game with such diverse worlds to explore, the bosses should reflect those worlds in some way. The regular enemies stoke similar feelings in me. I understand that this is a universe with an iron fisted emperor, but that isn't an excuse to make 3/4 of the enemies boring orange dome robots. This is one of the longer Ratchet games, and the lack of enemy variety really hurts when you're getting to the end of the second act. It all feels like they were playing it too safe with the enemies, and that feeling extends to every other issue I have with the game.
The more I think about the story in this game, the more it baffles me. It's a feeling similar to what I felt when I played the PS4 remake of the original game. It messes with a formula so simple that I was essentially rewriting events from the game in my head as they happened. It's so easy to see a world in which the story in this game could have been good, but not even the dimensionator could materialize it. Ratchet and Clank has always relied on the same basic themes of bonds the importance of friendship rather than the concept of "destiny". Rivet is introduced as an alternate universe version of Ratchet. She never met her universe's version of Clank, and there are so many interesting ways to take that plot point. You could explore how Rivet's life is a lot harder, but that she pushes through it anyway because of her unique ambitions. You could also go the opposite way, and show how empty her life is because of her solitary adventures. While Ratchet faces off against the buffoon that is Doctor Nefarious, Rivet lives in fear of the much more threatening Emperor Nefarious. I always think about the attic scene in Uncharted 4 when it comes to characterization in a video game. That scene shows a side of Nathan Drake that is almost entirely absent from the rest of the series. It's only when he's alone that these feelings get fleshed out. Rivet never gets a moment like this. You never get to see how Rivet lives, or what she believes, or what her deeper ambitions are. Her characterization reminds me too much of Ratchet's in the PS4 remake. She's just good because she's good and that's that. She doubts the honesty of Clank for like, one level, and then believes him instantly. Wouldn't someone like Rivet be a little more on edge when it comes to trusting anyone? This point is more of an issue with the overall plot. Ratchet and Rivet come in contact very early in the game, and this hurts their characterization and gameplay immensely. Once Ratchet and Rivet contact each other, all characterization is thrown out the window. The story becomes a checklist where characters are driven by the plot instead of the other way around. Before that happens, I was actually getting invested in Rivet and Clank's relationship. It reminded me a lot of the original Ratchet and Clank, and that made me love this series in a way I haven't since A Crack in Time. The story is at its worst when it comes to Kit, Clank's alternate dimension counterpart. First of all, I think this type of character shouldn't have been in the game at all. I think any way you slice it, Rivet would have been much more interesting without Kit. It feels like Kit herself doesn't even want to be in the story, as she continues to bring up this manufactured drama that ends in a pining to go back to her home planet. It reminds me of bad movie writing, and that makes sense when you look at the writers for this game. I love that two women were the lead writers, but it's incredibly evident from their portfolio and their work on this game that they tried to make their own bad comic book movie here. This is all ignoring the lack of character this universe has been plagued with since Deadlocked. A Crack in Time is my favorite game in the series, but even that game is missing the grime that the PS2 Ratchet games had. That was a world where everyone looked out for themselves, and people had motivations beyond "I'm good" and "I'm evil". I'm not saying Chairman Drek is a revelation when it comes to character writing, but he runs circles around Emperor Nefarious. As a final side not, I feel like Doctor Nefarious has stumbled his way into being the iconic Ratchet and Clank villain. To me, he's one of the weaker villains in the series, and he just happens to be in two of the strongest games. It truly annoys me how Insomniac insists on putting him in like every Ratchet game now.

I'd like to end this on a more positive note, and talk about Blizar Prime. Blizar Prime is one of the best levels in the entire series, and I would almost say sells the game by itself. A mining planet destroyed by machinery gone haywire, Rivet has to swap between the blasted off remains and an universe where it hasn't been destroyed. Seeing a planet enveloped by the void of space come back to life buzzing with energy is jaw dropping in a way few games are. There are levels like this in games like Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2, but this one is on another level when it comes to true childlike wonder. It's moments like these that make Rift Apart worth it even with its flaws. The pure joy of shooting a giant laser through a crowd of robots is enough to almost outweigh any negatives.

(Review of the demo)

This game being the largest meme aside, the demo was pretty sick. It pretty much boils down to the combat system, which the snippets from the trailer made look very just "blargh swing beeg sword around and glory kill", when it's surprisingly intricate and cool. I'm not the expert on these sorts of things by any means, but the action/jrpg gameplay fusion is really sweet, and for me scratches a similar sort of itch to something like kingdom hearts. Switching Jobs being something you do as an animation cancel, cool useage of parries and blocking, even a pretty neat little blue mage ability stealing system, it's all pretty damn cool and when it comes together in the demo's one boss fight, which is really good, its a great time.

There's clearly a lot of influence from Nioh here, with it's job switching taking the place of stance switching, the level design, demons souls shortcuts and the bosses. And it actually works.

Of course there's the whole CHAOS thing to address, which is here in spades and is delightfully stupid. Fortunately, when you get some other clothes on your main dude (which you will do in literally 5 minutes) and play for a little bit, it seems a bit less absurd and the style meshes together a bit better. It is still delightfully cheesy and at least somewhat aware about it though, particulary with the bombastic fnal moments of the game's boss fight, where an EDM version of FF1 music is playing over it and it turns a bit into metal gear rising.

Honestly, my main problems with the demo are that your supporting party members feel absolutely worthless and are more of a nuisance in battle (and frankly, dont have much to say in story), and the progression/loot being extremely fast and demanding menuing after basically every battle. That second one has probably been amplified to get more done in the demo, granted, but I dont think i'll be fond of it's loot system regardless, it feels a bit overdone for very minor benefits.
Also, as someone who, frankly, is pretty damn shite at action games, I'm willing to bet one of the mechanics here is utterly busted - such as the ability that prevents you taking hitstun, the animation canclling magic block that gives you MP, etc - that I just can't extract myself. Clearly i think people better than me at this sort of things need to give it a look before any conclusions are made on that though.

Overall, it's a good start, frankly. The trailer might be hilarious, and the game is a bit too, but frankly it doesn't do it justice. If you have a PS5 absolutely check it out. Yes, it's a meme, but there's definetly something cool here, and frankly, the bizzare direction for a retelling of FF1 that's been taken is kinda something worth seeing for yourself, like it or not.

Also, yes, the lines "Chaos." >"No, I am become Chaos, who are you">"We're here to kill chaos" basically happen in that exact order within 30 seconds. Its fantastic.

It's not as good as AC+R. I don't think it's particularly close, even. The lobbies barely work, the combat system is a bit too simplified, the wallbreak system is dumb, and frankly, there isnt that much do actually do in the game.

But it is very, very fun. When you actually get the game going, all the little niggles and issues strive has get washed out by the sheer wave of positive energy that comes when the battles get going, when the music's loud and the presentation is absolutely glorious.

I know its easy to enjoy anything with friends, but doing sets with Friends in strive, and for that matter, AC+R is just special. There's something about the sheer positivity and dedication to rule of cool about the series, along with the awesome characters and music, that just makes for an absolute whale of a time, ensuing with laughs, trying to avoid singing along with Chipp's theme in the discord call, and going "ooo" as your friend dunks you in the corner with an awesome Zato combo.

Particularly in these grim times, Guilty Gear has been special for me. Maybe the only thing i've played where even for a little bit, the worries of the world truly just give way to the sheer personality and fun of it all. And whilst Strive may not be truly as good as AC+R - it still has it's energy. And that's all that really matters to me.

To anyone who i've played Guilty Gear with in the past few months - Thank you.

I thought I'd check out the new switch version of this. I tend to like these complete versions of mobile rhythm games, without the hassle of paying microtransactions or trudging through an awful progression system - oh wait.

Arcaea Switch is a $40 game with the progresion system of a F2P one. That's basically what it boils down to. You start with 50 of the 150~ songs and to unlock any more, along with the support characters and so on, you need to progress through the world mode, which starts of slow for the first set of worlds, requiring about 5 song plays per getting a new song. Ok, could be worse, sure, and it'll get quicker as you level up support units for sure, right?

And then you get to the next set of worlds and unlocks take 3 times as long. And you still only have like 75 songs. And your character is probably maxed out. Oh, and the game still has the pointless decision to have like 5 different currencies you can earn in different modes that would have previously been stamina gated, but now just feels like it's wasting your time.

It's a shame because the gameplay itself is pretty good. The core gimmick, the Arcs, which are basically hold notes above the normal play field, im not huge on themselves, but when combined with notes that go under and around it, it can result in this contortionist finger play which is really fun.

Sadly, on a core gameplay level, it does also have some visibility issues. There's a colour blind mode, but it only effects arcs, and not the normal, light blue notes on white-ish background for half the tracks. I can get by, but having visibility issues at al in a rhythm game like this, which you cant adjust at all, is a huge no go.

Frankly though, it is the progression of the switch version that really kills it for me. The songs are good but you'll be replaying them like 8 times each if you want to unlock all the content, and that's assuming it doesnt get even slower later on.

There's just no need for it. I have played Mobile Rhythm games with progression systems less obnoxious, and it's a huge damper on the game as a whole. Doesnt help that there's basically a 20 second unskippable cutscene to actually show you your megre progress in getting to the stuff you spent $40 on.

Its a shame as the gameplay is good, there's some fun original songs, and the story seems fairly interesting, with a good aesthetic throughout.

But i've just come to the conclusion that it's just not worth it. There's enough good rhythm games that dont make jump through so many damn hoops to actually play the songs, which is at the end of the day, what really matters.

Hamster's new Arcade Archives port of this game advertises itself as being a "great, easy game to get into, even for players who don't often play shooting games!"

This is a lie. A complete lie. This game is completely evil. Beneath the lovely, incredibly cute aesthetic where an otter dangles his legs out of a biplane, lies a system where you will die at the drop of a hat, you move slow enough for some bullets to barely be reactable, and the scoring mechanics are absolutely stupid.

The most efficient way to score in this game is to literally rub up against the right side of the screen, which gives you about a thousand points a second. Yes, that's where most enemies spawn - yes, there's no warning that enemies are spawning. Yes, they kill you on impact. NMK are you ok?

Alternatively, you can pick up point items or merely walk on the floor to get points. But you also get points for avoiding point items, and only 3 of the 8 stages have floors! So ?????????????

It's very stupid. And very, very hard, rivalling the likes of Toaplan's evil STGs of the period, with later levels filled with loads of enemies that will fire lighting fast bullets at your massive hitbox, and it ultimately turns into a game of bomb resource management - well not bombs, "big" items that make your otter comically huge and fire sunfish at enemies which do increased damage. Because why not.

Aside from the shitposty nature of the game as a whole, it's pretty good. It suffers from a lack of variety as the same enemy types pop up again and again and again, and it's a bit too long, but the encounters themselves are pretty fun, and it is extremely, extremely cute throughout, and when it is throwing new bosses at you the encounters are surprisingly puzzle-y and interesting. The caravan modes included in the new port are also probably the best way to enjoy it, with two bite sized portions of madness instead of half an hour, with less frustration as a result.

But yeah, this is a hilarious shitshow that I kinda respect the gall of. In an arcade setting from 30 years ago, it's probably something I'd completely avoid and would get a horrid reputation, but as a modern curiosity, it's a nice little look back into one of the first cute em ups, and one of the more silly, evil examples of the genre.