In the long time I’ve spent running this account, I’ve grown both as a reviewer and as a person. And it’s become increasingly apparent that I need to apologize for a long streak of immature behavior regarding this particular series.

I’m sorry for giving Megaman games half star ratings over something as petty as not including Dr. Light x Dr. Wily yaoi.

It’s childish, it’s messing with the average review score, and above all else, it’s a really superficial way to look at art. I still do not like most of the games in this series but I promise to offer more substantial critique in the future. As a show of good faith, below is my honest review of Megaman 11:

This game fucking sucks because it doesn’t have Dr. Light x Dr. Wily yuri. Keiji Inafune should take his stupid fucking NFTs and shove them up his ass.

Minstrel Song is an old skool rpg where you get into lots of fights with monsters to level up and learn techniques for your characters weapons as well as entirely new game mechanics, killing monsters is also the only way to advance the in game timer, the monsters will be replaced with stronger monsters at a rate faster than you will improve, on top that it will cause quests to time out, and new quests to become available, so actually you want to avoid combat as much as possible to keep the timer from moving forward and instead to focus on quests for character progression, only carefully incrementing it when you run out of things to do but monsters in the overworld spawn in huge numbers and are highly aggressive, so you can't totally avoid combat, but if you get into a fight you can just retreat to avoid advancing the timer, but retreating costs crucial resources so actually you need to run around like scooby doo with a trail of monsters chasing you while trying to progress quests, but the locations where you can find new quests are unmarked, and where you need to go to progress quests is unstated, so you need to run around the overworld getting chased by monsters like scooby doo so you can find quests to level up because there's no main quest, and you don't even know if you've done everything you can do before making the call to kill some monsters to advance the game clock, eventually you'll do this enough to get multiple quests that specifically tell you to go out and kill shitloads of monsters and they're really important so to do the most important quests you need to ignore everything you've learned about playing the game and potentially time out dozens of quests that you don't know how to do because they don't tell you where to go or what to do never mind the quests that you don't know about because they could be handed out by any of the dozens of NPCs who had nothing to say to you an hour ago, who are potentially in locations you haven't discovered because the only way to discover locations is either to talk to people or to recruit new party members, but you can only have a limited party size so to see if a new party member will give you a location (which they may not) you need to kick out an existing party member first if you are full, the removed party member will later reappear in potentially any one of the many pubs, one per city, scattered around the dozens of cities in the game, including ones you haven't discovered, after doing all that for a while the final boss shows up and you are probably not strong enough to kill him even with all that effort. This anti-lesson on game design could only be enjoyed by criminally deranged perverts.

It boils my blood that most of the world knows only of Bushnell's hackery. Ralph Baer conceived of, completed, AND released Table Tennis with the Magnavox Odyssey all before Nolan Bushnell ordered his lackey to spawn his inferior coin-op sensation, but if there's one thing that Bushnell always had, it was business sense.

Table Tennis required the astronomical buy-in price of the Magnavox Odyssey, and Pong did not. Pong also serves from the middle of the court in a way that is certain to cause repeated cheap goals, doesn't include the free movement and weird trick-shots of Table Tennis, and makes horrendous noises. I think I'll give the credit to the guy who invented the home video game console, thanks.

Alright, I'll be real with you. I'm only using Space Wars as an excuse to talk about Space War(!). My personal Game of the Year winners list starts with 1970, because I want to start it with a nice round decade-starter and because the 60's do not have enough games. I consider there to be exactly one victim of this decision, and that's Space War. Not only is it arguably the most important video game in history by default, it is, in all seriousness, a damned good first showing.

Space War was so good, right out of the gate, that it pretty much inspired an entire form of media, or at the very least, the action game mega-genre and the whole concept of a multiplayer video game. I don't just want to talk about Space War because it's historically important, I want to talk about Space War because it's ACTUALLY GOOD, and it deserves to be represented on this big, stupid list of mine, somewhere, somehow.

So, I'm hitching a ride on Space WarS, the fourth version of a game that was complete over a decade earlier. 1977 sucked. The leading competition for this spot by most standards is Zork, a game that I consider to be worse than Colossal Cave Adventure, its direct predecessor. The previous game I had in this spot was Heli-Shooter, one of Sega's crazy electro-mechanical contraptions which one could argue is "not a video game", is not something I have actually played, and isn't ACTUALLY that fun, just one example of a general genre of thing that was kind of impressive and already represented on the list elsewhere. The original version of Space War(!) is out of bounds, as explained. The next two are a prototype from 1971 that never "came out", and Nolan Bushnell's Computer Space. I already refused to give Bushnell any credit for stealing Pong, so I'm certainly not going to do that here, and I'm not about to let that other prototype beat out the original version of Oregon Trail for '71. After that comes OrbitWar, the networked PLATO computer replacement for the original which I can't imagine possibly ran well, in a year whose spot I'm also happy with.

So here we are, letting a very late, faithful remake of Space War(!) win 1977, a year where the competition sucks. Good job I guess, Space Wars!

EDIT: Oops! Turns out Oubliette (PLATO, 1977) is really, really cool, so now I have to actually talk about Space Wars as a separate entity from Space War! Space Wars takes Space War and cranks the speed up. This is both a blessing and somewhat of a curse. On the Vectrex version, with a much smaller play area and a completely ruthless AI opponent, the game is simply way, way too fast. All game modes tone down the central star so that it doesn't dominate every second of every battle in such a suffocating way, but on Game 9, The Only Correct Choice, it is still a threat and it has influence over the fight, making it an accommodator of trick shots and fancy flying. Space Wars also allows for each ship to take a few hits before the battle is lost, a change that allows for comebacks. Space Wars is, honestly, so frustratingly close to being incredible. If the arcade version had a single player option with decent AI and the star were just a little stronger and the ammo was unlimited and the shots were just a little bigger, we'd have a happy medium that I would boot up on a whim even today. Alas, we do not, and so Space War!'s potential continues unfulfilled.

And OOPS! Turns out Zork is a lot cooler than I was giving it credit for too.