1) The other account that posted a review pointed out how they played a match and the AI killed themselves. It should be noted this happened to me multiple times.

2) Imagine being Midway, releasing a deluge of just awful fighting games for the N64, and Dual Heroes shows up and takes the spot as "worst fighting game on the console". How demoralizing, it's like the end to the Blurnsball episode of Futurama, you couldn't even manage to be the worst! How pathetic. This might be the worst game on the console, full stop. I cannot believe this game passed any quality control, and it manages to be a failure on almost every level. This game does not know what a jay-payg is.

This game is so cool in concept and ambitious and just doesn't have enough gas in the tank to get where it needs to go. The maps are gigantic and nothing can touch it in that regard, and the game has this level of abstraction that assists with that sense of scale. It's hectic and has moments that could be really cool.

The problem is, many of the elements of the game that make it stand out are so unrefined that it makes this a very hard game to go back to. That sense of scale hurts the sense of pacing (levels can drag on forever), and use heavy fog to assist the draw distance. There's a lot of ways to fight aliens/get from point A to B (for the most part), but your overall objectives still feel like you're hitting the same plot flags to advance the level. That abstraction, both in terms of travel and what you actually interact with, combined with the weak visuals/audio make it really hard to get invested into the flow of the game. I'm never not aware that I'm playing an influential mess, and the game never manages to rise past that.

This game is really fun if you have friends to play it with, and drops down a full star point as a solo experience.

In terms of theme, it's below average early 2000's fantasy. The character designs are sexualized in a way that's more insulting than titillating, or they're just ugly bread-fed knife eared nerds. The plot exists and if it's engaging to you, then you're a happier person than I am. For the time that it was released, I think that they did a decent job in terms of bringing these characters into a 3d world. They just didn't have great direction. I also can't remember any of the music in the game.

This game felt incomplete or rushed in some places. The lack of sidequests in the second area was conspicuous, and a lot of the hacking and slashing takes place in long hallways without much to interact with outside of an occasional switch or trap.

What saves it is that as a co-op game, it rules. In many ways, it feels like it was built for co-op and single player felt like a mandatory inclusion. Weight restrictions feel awful in single player, but sharing an inventory between two people feels much better. Class design/balance isn't great on its own. For example, a solo playthrough with the archer class is awful because your character doesn't have enough speed, even with feats/upgrades to kite any enemy in the game. But, if you have someone else standing in front of you, you can sit there and turret down a mook without having to chug potions. Even just having someone to talk to during the huge, relatively empty hallways makes going through this 10 hour game feel its length, and not double.

This is an unnecessary addition to the Baldur's Gate "canon", but if you've played Gauntlet: Dark Legacy for the billionth time and are restricted to one of the many consoles this game was ported to, it's still a fun time.

The most average version of a very average puzzle game. Many of the QoL features from other Tetris clones like instant-drop are not here. Not much is here, if we're being honest. The main campaign is short, but also I wasn't really begging for more. It does get challenging later on, but the cutscenes that tie each of the levels together are engaging enough to keep going. The multiplayer component handles fine.

If there's anything that warrants playing this game over other versions of Dr Mario, it would be the presentation. It really was released in 2001, and it looks and sounds like a late N64 title in a very positive way. I like the redesigns of the Mario cast and the music (outside of the main theme) was pleasant. The tie-ins to Wario Land 3 are cute. It's not that there isn't personality to the game,

The main issue the game has is it's just Dr. Mario. There's no modifiers or powerups to the game, and as a puzzle game it isn't as fast as Tetris or allows for as flashy of combos as something like Puyo Pop. It's just kinda boring until it gets really hard, and even then you have to care about getting good enough at Dr. Mario 64 to see Mario plot. Without something to spice things up, the game comes off as a whimper of a way to end Nintendo's involvement with the N64.

It's so funny that the N64 has four RPGs, and one of them is a contender for the best of the genre. It'd be like if the DS's four RPGs were Black Sigil, Sonic Chronicles, an inexplicable port of Lunatic Dawn and TWEWY.

This game hasn't aged a day since it came out. This game is so polished, you could hold the cartridge up to the sun and its reflection could start ants on fire. The presentation of this game is immaculate considering the console it came out on. What a genius redesign of the Mushroom Kingdom. The music is first party Mario music, which is to say "nobody's going to go out of their way to listen to it but it's still some of the best of its generation".

Even moreso than SMRPG, this feels like a way to reduce the barrier of entry to JRPGs without having a barebones game. There's so much to do! The customization wouldn't be what we'd see in TTYD, but what customization and subsequent decision making I did get felt more meaningful than in a lot of JRPGs released even day. There isn't a world map like other JRPGs, but the way that all the individual areas connect into each other makes this world feel larger than something like early FF games. The size and density of the game never gets in the way of pacing either, this took about 25~ hours to get through and it felt like 10. There's never a need to grind, and there was one area in the game I kinda got lost in, and I'm willing to chalk that up to my own incompetence than any flaws on the designer's part. You never have to grind, as long as you're engaging with the game's content and mechanics, you'll have pushback but you'll never feel like a fight wasn't doable.

One of the best games on the console, and a very easy recommendation even as of the date of posting this. If there's any complaint I have, it would be that I wish this game came out 3 years earlier. Even if there were a handful of N64 games that tried to copy what made this game work, the console's library would be in a better place.

A western Musou that avoids that series' flaws by being really greasy.

Even back when this game came out, Dark Legacy had middling reviews and looked just awful, one of the ugliest games across any of the various skews. I'd argue it actually looks worse than Legends just because of what you had to compare the game against. The music's a slightly (?) less compressed version of the Arcade/Legends tracks. Nothing in here is going to stand out as all-time great video game music, but the tracks that are included are varied and add to the atmosphere of each level. Nacho cheese fantasy tracks, which is preferable to boring.

This game gets a four because, as a co-op multiplayer game it's a great time. The RPG elements add to a sense of progression, but this isn't Diablo, or even Dark Alliance, you're not selecting a build and variations between characters aren't super meaningful. You find a power up on the ground, and bludgeon waves and waves of braindead mooks with them, and it's works. The enemy variety is relatively small, considering most are just reskins of "a guy way that walks forward, tries to bonk you on the head and dies in 1-3 hits", but the level design and visual variety makes it so that you don't really care. The amount of enemies on screen at once also contributes, the game can chug but it doesn't dip to anything unplayable and for larger waves the slowdown starts to approach shmup slowdown in the sense that it's kinda helpful to pause the action.

There's a lot of content in this game too. The game rewards exploration and experimentation, although the game's piss poor visuals can obscure what you're looking at sometimes. With four players, the game can last about three 2ish hour play sessions. Level-ups happen frequently, the game showers you in a healthy collection of powerups and gold to buy more powerups or stat increases, there are unlockable secret characters, there's a collectathon's variety of shit to look out for to advance to new levels. It's design is very obnoxious and loud, but in a way that successfully covers up the games weaknesses.

If you don't have friends to play this game with, skip it, there's not much here for you. If you got 1-3 other people who are looking for a couch game to play through, this an easy recommendation.

Another venerated classic in Excellent Soft Design's collected works. The best part of the game were the anime girls in the background that both didn't fit the art style and didn't seem to be done by the same artist. The basic concept would be fine for a quick arcade game if the levels weren't recycled the entire game and it didn't control poorly. The variety of bosses were nice, but the lack of any invincibility frames upon coming back to life (with way to long of a delay) made them feel like quarter munchers more than a challenge you were actually expected to overcome.

This release is obviously compromised to such a degree that you'd never play this over any of the X/XX releases. However, even though they were pushing a boulder up a hill for this game, they tried really hard. The soundtrack sounds like they weren't familiar with the GBA's Soundchips (limited) strengths, but that didn't stop them from putting in a crunchy rendition of Liquor Bar & Drunkard). Venom has ball set. Faust has item toss. Characters have multiple supers.

It also showed a desire to let players "practice" these games on the go instead of solely trying to rework the games into mobile exclusive versions like Petite. We probably don't get the excellent BB/#Reload PSP ports without this game. You don't need to go back and play this, just look at the game, it's looks like a Famicom bootleg. But Famicom bootlegs have validity too, especially ones that try this hard.

This feels like a game out of time, and that time was "anytime during the 2nd George W Bush administration".

I'm actually surprised this released so late into the PSP's lifespan, because it feels like it should have been released smack dab in the middle of the same cultural current that gave us Spartan: Total Warrior or Shadow of Rome. Visually, it looks fantastic with the caveat that the scope of most arenas is so limited that you'd hope they'd be able to render armor falling off of models if that's one of the four things the console would need to display. The soundtrack has like, 7 tracks at most, but the gameplay loop doesn't require you use sound at all, very much a game to play with podcasts going in the background.

The gameplay is a winner format for the PSP. The fights don't last long for the 1:40 main battle theme to loop, the story doesn't matter to such an extent that I forgot it had one at points, and the combat has more depth than games with similar structures like Monster Hunter. You don't have dustloops or anything like that, but combos do exist and how you fight is dictated through your increasing supply of gear and your developing skill. For a game that you mostly play on the toilet and has multiplayer, it's outright good. There are difficulty spikes/gimmick fights that tend to drag down the experience though. Awful final fight.

If you really dig this game and want more content, there's a Gladiator Begins discord adding new content that seems to be somewhat active. There's enough going on with this game that people care enough to mod it.