Quite literally Cock & Ball Torture: The Game. I'm rating this slightly low just because it's very short and there are a couple of sequences that were just annoyingly tricky - in the late game, you're afflicted with a massive limp that leaves you with virtually no room for error in chases. Still, the handful of new villains were particularly memorable, and it's cool how this acts simultaneously as a prologue to Outlast's main story and, following a lengthy time skip, an epilogue, although it would have been nicer to spend a bit more time exploring both the chaos of the initial 'outbreak' and the grisly 'cleanup' afterwards.

An imperfect experience, but when Outlast works, it works very well. The tension of trying to sneak past ranting lunatics in near-total darkness is never less than nerve-shredding, and on the topic of ranting, the dialogue is often a highlight, with a lot of very funny dark humour aided by some fantastic voice acting. I see a lot of complaints about the 'puerile' shock value, but I think the sheer amount of gratuitous gore and polygonal penises on display is so over-the-top that it just adds to the charming schlock & silliness of the game. However, beyond the suspenseful enemy encounters, the missions & story structure are very samey - your time is mainly spent on 'find 3 fuses/valves/pumps' fetch quests, or tracking down the irritating religious nut 'Father' Martin because he said he had something important to show you before he buggered off to 10 rooms away. And the cluttered & labyrinthine environments are often the biggest barrier to progress, especially when you have to engage with some slightly clunky first-person parkouring. The writing outside of the inmate dialogue isn't up to much - the story has a few fun ideas but largely feels like a Resident Evil pastiche, and when he's not jotting down cringey quips in his journal, the protagonist is just a mute personality vacuum. And there's the same problem I had with Resident Evils 7 & 8, where the best baddies get the least screentime! The most memorable encounters are with the drily sarcastic Twins, and Rick Trager, an executive turned self-styled surgeon who retains the glib faux-friendliness and financial obsessions of his former self. But you only get about 10 minutes each with those guys, whereas you're almost constantly under attack by the imposing but otherwise dull lunk Chris Walker, and the pseudo-supernatural final boss doesn't really live up to the constant hype they're given. Nevertheless, the game doesn't outstay its welcome, and it packs more than enough thrills into its rather short duration to make it a pretty fun, if slightly shallow, ride.

Beat the first handful of levels, saw I had about a dozen left, and decided life's too short. I wanted to rate this higher for the fun concept & charmingly dumb comedy, but I can't ignore the sheer lack of entertainment value I got from it. The game pushes you to build up a Pikmin-esque zombie horde which you can use to distract & overwhelm enemies, but either there's a limit on how many zombies can follow you at a time or their AI won't listen because it's just plain shit, and given their janky pathfinding, I'm inclined to pick the second option. And when they do come to your aid, the cheeky bastards then go and eat the brains that you need to regain your health & power-ups - although with that said, the power-ups are quite limited in range, take ages to recharge, and are all frankly a bit crap. The game has a nice spoof retrofuturist setting - i.e. 1950s metropolis but with friendly robots & flying cars - but the actual levels seem to be split between overly vast and sparse exteriors or sprawling labyrinthine interiors, which isn't ideal when the game is rubbish at conveying which way you're meant to go. Each level holds a half-dozen clusters of angry NPCs scattered around aimlessly, waiting to demolish your health in mere seconds, and the combat feels TERRIBLE. You can instantly tear into the craniums of weak starting enemies, but beyond that you get legions of armed cops who must be tediously button-mashed to death before you can recruit them to your cadaverous cause, and so you just have to trudge through level after level of 'punch, punch, punch, zombify' repeated over & over. I did have a glimmer of hope at the first boss fight, in which you play a game of Simon to simulate a pitched dance battle against the chief of police, although the banging covers of mid-century pop classics were slightly let down by the quite badly timed button prompts. But in the end, I just couldn't carry on with the slog that this game was already turning into. R.I.P. Stubbs!

I forget who called this "a good game trying to be a bad one", but it fits as Dead Rising is often very fun and highly irritating in equal measure. The Romero-esque plot of being stuck in a zombie-filled mall is played with a charming B-movie camp, epitomised by its lovably corny hero Frank West, and the combat based around smacking zombies & psychopaths with whatever you can get your hands on is super-satisfying. But the actual narrative is a bit weak and poorly structured, and the game is beginning to show its age with its hilariously ugly models, sticky controls, & occasional technical jank. Furthermore, every great mechanic - the timer which forces you to carefully pick & choose your missions, or the choice between loading an old save or restarting the entire game with your current stats - is marred by an equally annoying element, such as the reliance on escort quests plagued by notoriously dumb AI, or the 'scoop' calls which leave you momentarily incapable of self-defence and, should you be injured in the meantime, scold you condescendingly and force you to listen to them all over again. The campaign's broken up (for no apparent reason) between a 72-hour period in the zombie-filled mall and an 'overtime' section with the mall largely taken over by the army, and the game frankly runs out of steam in that latter part, as all the fun side characters are ditched and we slog through a bunch of dull fetch quests before a boss fight with a generic military nut whom we've literally never interacted with before. There's also an 'infinite' mode in which you must survive as long as possible with your health gradually draining and all survivors turned hostile, but said survivors only appear at preset times and in between fights there's nothing really meaningful or entertaining to do. I should clarify I DID have fun with Dead Rising - it's hard not to when it's basically the plot of Dawn of the Dead via the splatterstick comedy of Braindead. But its blatant flaws meant I was definitely over it by the time I finished, and I can't say I'll be in any rush to go back for a while.

Easily the best Rampage I've played so far. As with the original, the health-annihilating enemies shows it's still designed to be an arcade money-muncher, but this entry is elevated mainly through sheer personality, with its charming animations & sound effects, and limited but earwormy soundtrack. And despite its still annoying difficulty, World Tour makes up for the other games' clash of good presentation and crappy gameplay, as not only do your range of attacks finally pack a satisfying wallop, but there's a really fun array of collectibles, power-ups, and interactions hidden in each level - eating nuns gets you struck down by God's lightning, world flags send you into an aerial minigame in which you fly around on a jumbo jet, consuming purple ooze turns you into a winged fire-spitting mutant, etc. Plus, there's this really hot scientist, which is very important and crucial to the game's story. I still can't say this is engaging enough that I made it through the 100-odd levels to the apparent final boss fight against a mutated blob-monster on the moon, but it's a lot of fun while it lasts.

A quite literal translation of the old arcade kaiju-'em-up Rampage into console 3D. Unfortunately, what that means is beyond the goofy humour, fun monster designs, and innate appeal of going Godzilla on famous cities of the world, all you get is a middling marathon of tedious button-mashing, further hindered by janky 3D controls - it's often a struggle to get your monster to actually grab onto and scale a building properly, or to focus on a target you want to attack. The campaign sends you to locales such as Las Vegas or San Francisco - which in practice are divided into stages of indistinguishable buildings, cars, and citizens - and within a time limit, you get free rein to wreck the stage as you please, with the stage ending once all buildings are levelled. But it often feels like you need to carefully fuss around smashing each individual window to actually topple a building, and between that & the finicky aiming, your blows often lack a satisfying impact. The level structure then repeats ad nauseam, and once you've smashed one street, you've smashed them all. There's moves & monsters to unlock on the way, but rather than being a reward for high scores, these come from you beating boring collectathon challenges or just using the right monster on the right stage, so it adds to the sense of turning your 'rampage' into a chore. The co-op's kinda fun in a 'beating up your younger sibling' way, and this comes with a couple of the old arcade Rampages which are decent time-killers, but not much else here to recommend.

Fine for the first few SHORT levels, but it's pathetically easy & painfully slow, with no fast-forward as far as I can tell, so once the game brings out levels that take an in-game year or longer to finish, you quickly realise how long each month is dragging on and how monumentally bored you are. It's also visually & aurally off-putting - you're constantly squinting at a hundred tiny pixelated blobs, it's hard to tell exactly where you're placing buildings or fences on the map, and the limited library of crusty sound effects quickly gets on your nerves. Man, the amount of times my kid self bought a DS version of a game, thinking it'd be a perfect 1:1 port... I was so fucking dumb :)

Repeating my We Love Katamari review here, because this likewise combines rewardingly tricky gameplay with charming presentation & stellar music. Again, a simple, cartoonish art style means the game still looks great 15 years later, and the characters & stages instantly jump out at you with loud, colourful personalities. There's a decent difficulty curve, and although a lot of the minigames are sequels, they often improve on earlier levels in fun & interesting ways. To nitpick, I had quibbles with extremely strict timing or my touch screen's struggle to tell one kind of tap from another - the game's still reasonable enough to get through, with the option to skip a level if you're struggling after a few goes, but it's annoying if, like me, you're going for 100% on the Superb & Perfect grades. Speaking of, I'd prefer the ability to get a Perfect anytime rather than having a limited window to do so, but that's a smaller bugbear given the added challenge that creates. In any case, between the amazingly catchy music & endearing aesthetic, this is still a 5-star game for me in terms of the pure uplifting joy it brings me.

Fave minigames: Glee Club; Blue Birds; Crop Stomp; Munchy Monk; Love Lab; Frog Hop; Space Soccer; Karate Man; Glass Tappers (and this is a trimmed down list, this game seriously has so many bangers)

One of the most satisfying gameplay loops ever, wrapped in understated but hilarious comedy, a timelessly beautiful art style, and a BACK-TO-BACK BANGER soundtrack. This game drips humour from every pore, be it the innate oddity of the gameplay, the chaos of a world in which you find King Kong & Ultraman coexisting with gnomes & thunder gods, or the meta satirisation of franchises. I can't go in depth on the soundtrack only because there's 17 tracks and I could rave about every single one. I also like the variety compared to the first Katamari, with a wider range of settings to explore (outer space, underwater, fairytale lands) and twists on the gameplay loop - a flaming Katamari which must be kept alight, a racecar Katamari which zooms around at high speed, a sumo Katamari who must be bulked up with ludicrous amounts of food. I'd perhaps rate the first Katamari higher as a 'pure' experience, but I definitely get more of a kick from this, with bigger laughs & out-there ideas that keep drawing me back. Can't say enough good things TBH.

Fave levels: Large as Possible 5, Flowers, Gingerbread House, Underwater, Animals, Fundraiser, Sumo Wrestler, The Sun, Save the Earth