(This is the 34th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Zombie Nation, released initially on December 14th 1990 for the NES, is one of the weirdest shoot 'em ups you will play in your life time, because the character you play is the severed head of a samurai traveling to the USA to stop a meteor called "Darc Seed" from destroying the USA completely. The reason why he does that is because Darc Seed has the ability to control a powerful samurai sword.

So you control this severed head called Namakubi and vomit projectiles on jets, buildings, turrets, people, whatever gets in your way. Yes, really. It's such a weird premise but actually not a turn-off on its own.

What was actually the bigger turn-off for me here was that, all told, the gameplay is just not that fun and game doesn't impress in any area apart from its weirdness. The music is alright, the graphics meh and the level design essentially very average. You don't really get to find any fun new abilities or power ups, there are no secrets to uncover and the enemy variety is low. You pretty much do the same thing over and over again in each level with very limited options. To top it off, the later levels include so many projectiles on the screen at once that the game can't handle it and starts lagging.

OVERALL
Suffice to say, this game is not worthy of a suggestion if you're looking for a fun game. It might be worth checking out if you want to take a look at a very weird game at least. Despite my opinion, I think it's funny and worth a mention that the damn "St. Petersburg Times" (now Tampa Bay Times) ranked Zombie Nation tied for 10th among the best games ever list in 1992. That's some weird taste they got over there.

(This is the 35th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The final game I played for my 1990 play-list is Actraiser, the fourth SNES game to ever release, which released on December 16th and is unique for combining two genres that you don't see combined often: City building and platforming.

There are multiple towns that you have to liberate from monsters in order for humans to live in them. You then help them establish themselves there and help them out with all their needs. Basically, you play god. Each town has a few monster lairs that you need to close and then a final one that you need to venture into in platforming sections to kill the boss. Once a town has no monsters left, you can move on to the next one.

Each town tells its own little story, which adds a lot of motivation to playing this game to completion. The gameplay itself offers a fun loop for a few hours, but due to its age and limitations does get repetitive after a while, at least it did to me.

But the mix of these genres works pretty well here and this game was yet another standout for the SNES, which looks to provide a lot of fun as I move on to 1991, where the world was greeted by classics like Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Castlevania IV, among others.

OVERALL
Should be in your play-list if you're looking to find out what some of the better games of the early 90s were. It has a unique mix of city-building and platformer that is pretty simple in execution due to the time it released in, but overall pretty successful in offering the player a fun 10 hours or so of gameplay.

(This is the 36th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Hey, we made it to 1991. This is the first game in my challenge that released in 1991, as Street Fighter II: The World Warrior graced console players (SNES) on February 6th of that year.

This game needs little introduction, as it changed the fighting game landscape forever. How has it aged though? Well, my subjective opinions on that are down below. Spoiler Alert: Plenty of games from 1990 aged poorly, some however aged really well. I would put Street Fighter II somewhere in the middle, though closer to the "aged poorly" side of things.

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STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS
The game does actually have storytelling, but only a very brief cutscene when you win all battles with a character. Then you will be shown how the characters react to defeating M. Bison. The oddest one? Chun Li goes to her father's grave to tell him that she has avenged him by defeating M. Bison.... and that she can now go back to being a young single girl! WTF! So 90s.

So this does add some recognizability beyond their gear and special moves to these characters, but it's pretty limited of course and you only get the one cutscene per fighter. Despite this, some of the characters have "icon" status in video gaming, like Ryu or the aforementioned Chun Li. Hell, I've never played a Street Fighter game before this in my life (Tekken only back in the day) but even I recognized them immediately.

The manual includes a short bio on all of the 8 main characters and a list of their special moves and how to execute them.

There is good variety among these characters. Chun Li is speedy, Ryu is a martial arts expert who can also do a cool fireball attack (Hadouken!), Honda is a big sumo wrestler, Blanka has a low center of gravity, Dhalsim is a lanky piece of shit and Ken ... is another Ryu? Not sure why they made them so similar. If you listen to the experts, there are differences between the two, though I'm not sure how much that applies to Street Fighter II. I didn't play this game that much to be able to tell you whether there are slight differences in footwork and pace or whatever. But to conclude, there are a bunch of different characters here overall with different abilities.

There are also bosses, one of whom looks like Mike Tyson (which he didn't know about until recently funnily enough). Even more funny and interesting: Mike Tyson's character in the US is called Barlog. There is a different character called M. Bison who is wearing a red military uniform or something.

In Japan, M. Bison actually stands for Mike Bison and is the name given to the character that looks like Mike Tyson. They've changed names around when they localized the game out of fear that they'd be sued.

Less funny story: The M. Bison in the US version can fuck off kindly, man is he tough to beat.

GAMEPLAY
In this game, you can either play simple 1v1 fights or choose a character and then travel the world to fight all the other characters plus some bosses that are non playable characters, like Barlog, Vega and M. Bison.

Each character has a few special moves and their own stage. You fight until someone wins two rounds. By now this formula has been repeated a billion times, but of course by then this concept was never done as well as Street Fighter II did it.

And while I can see a young me putting a lot of time and effort into this to get better, the current me simply can't shake the fact that this game hasn't aged as well as some other titles have of this time, including F-Zero and Super Mario World, two other very early SNES titles.

Movement of characters is stiff and pulling off special moves was really tricky because a lot of the time I didn't feel like my inputs were recognized correctly. Or I was doing it wrong, I don't know. But even when I put the difficulty to damn 0, there were some enemies that just didn't let me breath for a second. Hit up, hit low, hit up up up, uppercut and while I learned to block attacks after a while, attacking windows felt so small sometimes and the opponent was able to block so many of my attacks that I had to resort to doing specific OP moves to get them off me. This is actually a gripe I had about fighting games back in the day and I guess will always carry with me, is that abusing the mechanics and quicker trigger fingers will often be decisive of outcome. Maybe this was done better in later entries, but once I got hit in a specific way, especially once I dialed the difficulty up a little bit, I often felt like I was hopelessly at the mercy of my opponent to ever get a chance to hit again. The game also has a feature where you get dizzy for a few seconds, which I think is really silly for a game like this and one I didn't like at all.

Animations and the different attack styles of all characters definitely do feel pretty advanced for a game of this time, so I gotta give credit for that. And now that I've played this, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how other fighting games that released in the coming years will compare.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
Voice acting is limited to damage noises and "Hadouken!", which is enough to have it be iconic. Sound design I thought was solid and the soundtrack is about 40 minutes long and includes music for each character. Some of my favorites include the tracks for Guile, Ryu, Blanka and M. Bison.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
I like the character design and the different styles of the backgrounds of the arenas that the characters fight in. I'd say the graphical quality is pretty good overall but nothing that will make you go "wow".

ATMOSPHERE
Seeing groups huddle around to watch you and your opponent fight is always awesome. But the stages themselves are otherwise very static, you can break a few barrels here and there but otherwise the environment you fight in doesn't change anything. The best thing the game does atmospherically during fights is have the tracks fit the "boss" of the arena. For example, Vega fights very fast and his track is also very fast.

CONTENT
You got 8 characters + 4 bosses. You can play any character in Battle Mode and face every other character. This will take you a good 20-30 minutes and you will be rewarded with a short cutscene that suits the character you fought with. When you win with Ryu for example, you get a cutscene where Ryu is supposed to be given an award for winning, but instead he is shown walking off into the horizon because ceremonies mean nothing to him and he is off to the next fight.

In addition, you can fight locally against a friend and adjust difficulty in the Options menu. Plenty of content here, as you get 8 different character "stories" to play through and will need to spend many more hours to properly learn how to fight with each character.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The structure of fights is pretty simple by today's standards. One v One fights, the first to two round wins, wins the fight. It's simple, but effective. You also can choose to play any character's story as I mentioned previously, and what I just said about the structure of fights applies here too.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Can't really do anything but give full grades for a game that has changed the shape of a genre like this. Few games accomplish for their genres what Street Fighter II did back in the day, even if it was the Arcade version and not the SNES version that I played that had done the deed.

REPLAYABILITY
Endlessly replayable to learn how to master this game, though that probably applies to back then more than it does to new players today.

PLAYABILITY
It works well from start to finish.

OVERALL
I can't say it aged as well as some other games from that time period but fighting games were not established at the time like platformers, so to have Street Fighter II take such a leap is to be respected, and it's not like you won't have your fun with it if you decide to play it today. The game delivers beyond expectations in the storytelling department thanks to endings for each character (and a hilarious/ridiculous one for Chun Li), has created characters that are still iconic to this day and has delivered multiple sequels since. And those sequels I'd probably recommend to you more than this game in particular, which I doubt will live on as a great game by today's standards rather than simply being an iconic old-school video game that propelled the medium forward in a big way.

(This is the 31st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

You'll see many people compare StarTropics to The Legend of Zelda, and while I never played the first two Zelda's released in 86/87, I too can see the resemblance slash inspiration. Another game I would compare this to is something like Crystalis, a JRPG from earlier in 1990 that too had some unique mechanics similar to this game that was half-fun, half-detrimental to the gameplay and we'll get over that later on in the review. A big similarity my ears noticed when playing this however was the soundtrack and late-game level design. I was wondering if the game's had the same composer but nope, doesn't look like it. Either way, listen to some of the late game songs of StarTropics and the early game overworld track of Crystalis and you probably will hear the similarities as well. In addition, in both games you find yourself in a futuristic dungeon late-game.

Of course, StarTropics has none of the RPG mechanics, as it's an Action Adventure game, and ... did you know that this is a rare Japanese developed game that only released in the West? Yes, seriously. In NA in December 1990, and in EU in August 1992.

I'm not sure what the idea behind that was, because apart from calling every town something-something-cola, giving characters generic American names, mentioning 1492 and 1776 as ID codes and referencing Indiana Jones (?), nothing really screams "lots of appeal in the West". The game has a tropical island theme, your character literally has no recognizability (Mike, brown hair, blue shirt, your average kiddo) and, while I actually appreciated how the storytelling was more geared towards children (NPCs ask you if they should repeat "complicated" story parts, so that you can read them over and over again to get the story), the gameplay on the other hand is so difficult that I'm not sure who their target audience was exactly.

Let's take a step back. What do you do in StarTropics? You play Mike, an average kid who arrives at C-Land (shaped like a C, you see. And each village name ends with cola) in a damn helicopter. Village people say that you're an "ace pitcher", a reference made at the start twice and never again, and you find out that your scientist uncle has gone missing. In 8 chapters, you gotta try to find him and figure out what happened. Each chapter has a dungeon and potentially some overworld puzzles in it. All told, you'll probably spent around 10 hours with this game if you don't use any save states. If you use save states like me to "adjust" the checkpoint system in this game, you'll probably beat it in the time I did, which was around 6 hours.

There are two parts in this game, the overworld and the dungeons. In the overworld, you walk around the bland island and enter villages to talk to NPCs. Sometimes villages are harder to get to and you have to find secret passages to get there. You get a submarine later on to travel on water and get a robot buddy as well.

In the dungeons, there is a unique mechanic in this game, which is that there are special green tiles that you have to step on to either activate buttons that open doors, or you have to jump on them in a specific order to avoid falling into water or other liquids that lead to your death. It's a neat puzzle mechanic when used right and not an issue in itself, but the controls in this game are annoying and require some getting used to. When more enemies appear at once later in the game, it also becomes clear that the controls/mechanics weren't properly balanced with the enemies, because it becomes near-impossible to avoid getting hit.

Basically, to turn somewhere, you first press the button to look that way. Only by pressing it once more or holding down the button for a second longer does your character start walking that way. With the green tiles, you can actually chain jumps better, but it gets really repetitive after a while to jump, jump, jump, unlock a button, jump, jump over to the button, jump on it to press it and jump all the way back to the now-open door. Plus you have to jump one by one, but many enemies can simply walk over them, so it often happens that they outpace you and touch you to deal damage. Finally, there are a few awful sections where these tiles disappear for a second and then reappear for a second. That itself is OK, having to time your jumps is a nice challenge. But in these instances, three back to back tiles disappear, and the only way to jump through all of them is by PERFECTLY timing your first jump and mashing the jump button as fast as you can. Chances are, you'll fail your first 10 attempts anyway because it's that unforgiving.

Combat itself, if enemies are not so aplenty that they get on your nerves, is actually fine. You start off with a yo-yo, but get access to guns, ninja stars, reflecting shields and so on later on. There are also roller-skaters that attack every enemy on screen at the same time and illuminating staffs that reveal hiding ghosts. Lots of cool stuff that loses some of its magic due to the game's odd desire to be more challenging than it should be.

The story has a satisfying conclusion but is very simple otherwise. Something a kid will definitely enjoy as it's more fleshed out than many similar games and less prone to filler-talk. The soundtrack is solid. Graphics are too repetitive and bland in the overworld especially, but don't look bad.

Between the 8 dungeons, there are multiple that look unique (like the ghost town and final dungeon) and there is a tiny bit of reward for exploration, which is nice, in the form of health potions and permanent health rewards.

OVERALL
If you're into this sort of game and the old school look doesn't bother you, StarTropics is definitely a 2D Action Adventure worth adding to your play-list. It not being an RPG is great because with the stories these games had back in the day, those complicated RPG-features often drag games down for these retro-playthroughs. StarTropics is much more efficient in its gameplay as a result, even if being repetitive and unnecessarily difficult (especially late game) are flaws that pop up here.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Couldn't find anything apart from a Walkthrough/Guide by Nintendo Power

(This is the 38th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Well, I regret keeping this on my list. I have The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout as the 2nd worst game I've played in 1990's batch, but it was sort of entertainingly mediocre, so I thought I'd double down and play another Bugs Bunny themed video game.

This time, that game is The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle II, a GameBoy game that initially released in April 26, 1991. Wikipedia lists it as an "Action" game, which I think makes it the least "action" Action game I've ever played. I'd rather call it a Puzzle game myself. I would also call it a bad game. Check out the "Overall" part to see my overall thoughts, check out any part you want if you want more detailed thoughts there.

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STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 1/10
Very simple. Bugs Bunny's girlfriend, Honey Bunny, is captured by "Witch Hazel" and must be rescued by finishing 28 levels. The game starts by showing an image of the Witch's castle and the picture of Honey Bunny on top of it. Then the game starts. You'll get a tiny scene at the end but that's pretty much it. So pretty typical stuff for a puzzle / platformer type affair.

GAMEPLAY | 5/20
You start a level and find yourself on a screen filled with enemies and doors. The goal is to enter these doors, find all keys, and then exit through the designated exit door. In between, you also have to pick up weapons or a hammer for example to kill enemies or break some obstacles in your path.

The idea is simple. The level is presented to you as a puzzle, and you have to figure out how to perform all necessary tasks in an order that allows you to beat it without getting hit. Because if you get hit even once, you die and have to restart the level.

From the get go, I gotta say that the game design here is not that good. First, instead of simply picking up keys on the screen, you have to enter doors, all of which simply have a key. So why not just leave the keys on the screen and forego the minutes and minutes of time you will lose on opening all these doors over the entire play time.

Second, the game seriously lacks in features. Opening doors and collecting keys is all you do. Apart from picking up those weapons, you can also use a rope to get to another platform and you can step on platforms that are marked as "Up" to jump up. The game picks up in difficulty the further you go of course, but this is generally it. There is a small sense of reward of finishing a level that you feel and the game as a package is much, much tighter than Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout, but it isn't really fun.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 4/10
No voice acting. I didn't like the sound design that much. The sound of picking up keys got a bit irritating after a while, and the OST is only 7 minutes long. It's not the good kind of retro OST either, as its sound quality often is just subpar.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 3/10
It's an early 90s GameBoy game, so it looks like you'd think it looks. There isn't much attention to detail here and the fact that jumping platforms are simply labeled "Up" shows how little passion went into this. There are 5 games of this type by the way.

ATMOSPHERE | 2/10
There is no atmosphere to feel here. You could put anyone as the main character and it wouldn't really feel any more out of place. If you are going to enjoy this, you'll enjoy it for the puzzle design, but I doubt it will offer you any value in any shape or form by the way it looks and feels.

CONTENT | 4/10
There are 28 levels here and a boss fight. It's not a terrible offering. If you enjoy the puzzle aspect of this game, there is plenty here to work your brain over, but I don't know why you would choose to play this if you could instead play any of the other 4 Crazy Castle iterations or, here is a thought, a good puzzle game, of which there are thousands.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
It works in that each level has a guaranteed way of being passable if you figure out the right way. Figuring that out on some levels can be somewhat of a challenge, so it does its job as a puzzle game, but it's too repetitive and not that fun to begin with.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10
There is nothing here that could be considered innovating. As a concept, it works, that's probably the best thing to say here.

REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
Levels have a specific way of being completed and you won't really do anything differently the second time out. All you could do is try to finish the levels faster but why would you?

PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Unlike the other Bugs Bunny game I've played, this didn't play at constant 15 FPS, so that's a big plus. It works from start to finish without issue.

OVERALL
This is a repetitive, boring puzzle game that feels like a reskin of a reskin of a reskin, even if it isn't so necessarily. There just isn't anything here to make it stand out, the way the game is designed is just not fun and I was shocked to find out that by the end of 90s, it had sold over 200.000 copies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

(This is the 39th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Vice: Project Doom is definitely one of the best named games I've played so far. Is it one of the best games games though? Well, not really. It does some things really, really well, it has a lot more storytelling than you would expect from NES titles, but it is a game that shares similarities with many, many other games out there and other games have done many things better than this one.

This game released on April 26, 1991 for NES in Japan and NA, and got a release on Nintendo Switch Online in August 2019.

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STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 6/10
You play Detective Hart, to is tasked with investigating the "BEDA corporation", a front run by alien beings living on Earth in secrecy. They've developed a substance that was supposed to be food for the Aliens, however has been misused by humans due to its addictive natures, despite the fact that it has very bad side-effects.

Usually I would mention how the story resolves because for the vast majority of games, the plot and the storytelling in particular are afterthoughts. Not here. Vice: Project of Doom stands out in its storytelling and the sheer volume of its cutscenes. If I had to give a comparison, I think the Ninja Gaiden series fits best. After every stage, a cutscene plays with shots of the characters and lines of dialogue below. The camera pans left to right during these and the characters remain still otherwise, but this is very much unusual for this time and the #1 factor in which this game stands out.

There are some twists and turns in the story as well. That said, the storytelling isn't that great, probably because devs back then were game devs first and storytellers like sixteenth, so they're excused but the effort is there.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20
There are 3 types of stages in this game. In the first kind, you drive a car through a narrow driving lane and have to move side to side to avoid the edges, to avoid obstacles in front of you that damage you, and destroy/avoid enemy vehicles. This is not that great and there are only two short levels of this kind.

The second type is a side scrolling rail shooter kind of stage that repeats twice as well. You shoot enemies, some close by, some far away, before they shoot you. You pick up items they drop by moving the cursor above the items. You have a few different weapons you can use, some of which have higher AoE damage. It's OK and a nice-to-have change of pace, but I wouldn't say these levels are good. They're tolerable at best.

The third type, finally, is the main kind, 2D platforming with enemies everywhere. You have three weapons at your disposal, two of which need ammo (dynamite, gun). You also have a sword that you can slash your way through levels with. I mostly stuck with the sword. The timing window with your sword is not that long, so I often would be just early or just too late and get hit. It doesn't help that at many points, there are a lot of enemies coming from both angles. Some drop into view out of nowhere sometimes and immediately start shooting, which makes avoiding their shots impossible unless you move forward a step at a time, which would kill the pace and therefore your enjoyment of the game. So just eat those hits and keep moving.

At the end of each level, a meat item drops which regenerates most of your health, so getting hit a bunch of times is not a big issue. So yes, this is not a "one-hit and you die" type of game, thankfully. But it's not a very original game either, at least in terms of its gameplay. In fact, it's very average.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
No voice acting. Sound design is typical for NES games, so it doesn't stand out. The soundtrack is definitely one of the better ones of all NES games I've played so far, and has some bangers, including the track they've used for many of the cutscenes. The track for Boss Battles 3-2 and 7-3 is also worth a listen.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
It's very average graphically. It's an NES game, so it's inferior to some of the other games that came out at the time due to the move to 16-bit across the board. Artistically, it still has the ability to stand out but it doesn't. The levels and their artistic design are unimpressive and the kind of enemies that the devs have thrown into each level appears kinda random. You gut red ninjas flying out of the ground, fish too whilst bats come down from above, it just does not feel very thought out in that regard.

ATMOSPHERE | 6/10
The game is described as biopunk and noir. That's a nice mix of themes that you don't see often, and even if the technical limitations hinder the game from delivering a truly intense/atmospheric experience, I appreciate the difference in tone, especially in terms of its story the farther you dive into it. Within the levels, there is plenty of green and black but levels often rather feel like "levels" than actual places. More detail would have helped there.

CONTENT | 7/10
You have 10 levels I believe, all (most?) with multiple stages. 2 of those have you driving, 2 have you on rails. There are boss fights at the end of each level and probably over 10 minutes of storytelling all told. It's a good amount of content.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
This is mostly a very typical affair. Even though there are some levels where many enemies appear at once, it rarely really leans into the ridiculous like many other games do, even a game such as Ninja Gaiden, because enemies rarely take more than one hit to be defeated and you are such a tank with your own health. There is just one early difficulty spike for one boss that is just so insane that I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of players back in the day didn't manage to beat it. Thanks to the magic of emulators and rewind, I was able to eventually get it down, but man was that ridiculously difficult, especially since almost everything else in this game is very beatable.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 5/10
Innovative in only one thing, and that is its focus on storytelling. The way it tells its story is completely copied from Ninja Gaiden, but let's rather call it 'inspired' and be happy that storytelling is actually happening, something I'm always a big fan of.

The game also features a good soundtrack, but is decidedly average in every other way.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Not really replayable apart from trying to beat your high score. But it's an important game because it leans away from the arcade into a more story-focused experience, which at this time, many games still didn't do. It even gave you a lot of health instead of one hit-point like many other games, so it wasn't too concerned with artificially increasing the play time of this thing either.

PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Playable for the most part. It just has that typical NES slowdown issue whenever 5+ sprites appear on the screen simultaneously. It happens often enough that I deducted a point.

OVERALL | 60 - Average/Slightly Above-Average
Are you looking for something like the early Ninja Gaiden games in terms of storytelling, whilst the game maintained a similar retro style? Well, you don't have the wall jumping here, but other than that, Vice: Project Doom is the best comparison I could find so far. Storytelling is exactly the same, there is some (not a lot) of variety in gameplay and a very good soundtrack here, so give it a try. But don't expect anything special here, as this is one of the most average NES games you'll ever play apart from its storytelling.

I was looking for a short game one night, and I found a pretty good one in Detention. The game plays in Taiwan in the 1960s under martial law (under military control instead of civil law by a government). Suffice it to say, these are sensitive times where any suspicious act can lead one to be blamed as sympathizing with Communist China.

You control two students in this game. The first one finds himself alone at school during a typhoon attack after awakening from a nap that he started during class. After exploring the school a bit, he finds another student who is sleeping on a chair. After waking her up, they try to leave the school, but notice that the bridge has collapsed, meaning they are stuck at school. Shortly after, you start taking control of the girl and start to figure out the secret meaning behind this weird night at school.

It turns into a gloomy story of guilt, depression, death and more, but it's best to not spoil anything about that here. All I can say is that it is told in a manner that asks the players to understand a lot themselves. I'll admit, a lot of the things that happened I didn't quite get after playing through it, so I had to look at some explanations online after. I want to say that the game could have made a few things a bit more clear, but it could also be that 1) I am dumb and 2) It was very late and I felt tired, which is why I wasn't quite able to piece things together, even though it was explained clear enough.

That said, there are lots of metaphors and a lot of symbolism used here to explain what is happening and how the characters are feeling. On top of that, a lot of these metaphors and references are from Taiwanese culture, from Taoism and Buddhism, so as someone who has no idea about these references, there might be another reason for why I didn't quite catch everything in one playthrough.

I might have decided to play it again to figure everything out, but to be honest, the one big issue I had with this game was that it turned into a full-on walking simulator in the second half. Walking simulators are a tough sell for me, unless the atmosphere and story are very gripping. So to have a story that is told very mysteriously and to have the horror parts be kind of put aside in the final act made it kind of hard for me to have a very fun time during these walking simulator parts.

The gameplay also consists of puzzles a lot, and the puzzles are all very easy and mostly very similarly designed (find easy item, finish puzzle to get other item, put it in spot X, move on to next building to do the same). So the game lives and dies by its atmosphere and story. The atmosphere is suitably depressing for the most part, so the game mostly does a great job here. I liked the story, but the references and metaphors didn't blow me away as someone who wasn't able to get them all.

So if you're wondering whether you should play this game, think about the topics it references, think about how much you enjoy walking simulators and you'll have your answer. Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was.

250 hours. 7 years. And I've finally, FINALLY, beaten Fallout 4's main story. I've played this many times and gotten far into it before, but never finished the story, so this was a big milestone for me.

I love the Fallout series, even if each 3D game entry has a lot of flaws, whether it's the seemingly endless bugs for all games or the meh combat of 3 and New Vegas. But what I loved in both games was the dialogue, the way I could just talk endlessly with people about tons of topics and the way I could pass skill checks based on how I built my character.

So when I got my hands on Fallout 4 to realize that this was not the case, I obviously was pretty disappointed. That hasn't changed. I still despise the dialogue system in Fallout 4 and the illusion of choice. I also still dislike a voiced main character, even if the male one in particular has actually done a great job.

However, the game has grown on me over the years for all the things it improves upon compared to the two prior titles, plus for all those things that Fallout 4 does just as well as 3 and NV.

First, the world building and exploration is still fantastic. There are so many locations to discover, so many interesting activities and side quests to do in those locations and so much environmental storytelling to observe.

Second, the combat improved a lot in this game, and I actually had plenty of fun with it. The amount of customization options to mod your weapons and armor is also something I enjoy, not to mention the ability to find Legendary weapons.

Settlement building is something that I never dabbled with on any playthrough for more than a couple hours, but I appreciate its existence and it's been fun whenever I did build something. To think people can just spend dozens of hours of building settlements is pretty cool.

Finally, companions in this game are pretty varied in character and I really like how they open up to you as you spend more time with them, which lets you learn more about them and/or do companion quests.

So Fallout 4 is actually, in my opinion, a great game, it's just not a great Fallout game. I guess a silver lining in that regard is that Fallout 4 had to do a lot of wrong in order for Bethesda to (hopefully) get it more right with Starfield. And in that regard, all I can say about Fallout 4 is that it got me even more excited about Starfield than I already am, as there still is nothing like a Bethesda RPG.

(This is the 41st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

I think this is the first time in this challenge that I'm playing an actual sequel, though Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom chronologically actually plays between Ninja Gaiden I and II. The game came out on June 21, 1991 for the NES. I've actually played this back in December, so my memory of the game isn't so fresh, which means this review will be a bit shorter.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10

This series is known for an unusually big focus on its story at the time, giving players cutscenes that could last for minutes at a time after each level. Add a recognizable main character in Ryu Hayabusa, and I can't really not give this series a solid grade here. What has it stay a couple levels behind other story-heavy games of this time like Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and graphical adventures, is that the story is missing that one ingredient which makes it memorable. Sure, there is the conspiracy with Irene, Ryu's love interest, being killed by a Ryu Hayabusa lookalike, and sure, there are a few twists present here, but it never really goes deeper than that. You don't gain deeper insight into the mind of Ryu, the antagonist simply has a "take over the world" motive that you see everywhere and the conclusion is pretty much what you would expect. That is not a bad story overall, it's just pretty basic with a few cool little moments and revelations. For video games at the time, again, it's great to see that a game spends so much time to tell a story, but it's not going to make you think about the game after playing it, or beyond the game whilst playing it like Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for example.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

The Ninja Gaiden series has hack & slash and platforming gameplay, and that's the same here. This is on the NES just like Ninja Gaiden II was, so there are no improvements here that an SNES release would have given. It did get released for the SNES as part of the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy years later however.

Ninja Gaiden to me felt a bit worse in terms of its gameplay than what I played of the second title. The enemy design felt worse for some, it felt like some features were missing like the ability for Ryu to clone himself, which added a different layer to everything in Ninja Gaiden 2, and so overall, this felt like a worse version of an older game, which is never great for a sequel.

In general though, the hack & slash gameplay in this series is not too bad, it just felt disappointing that this game was made for the NES again and didn't improve, which an SNES release surely would have accomplished.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10

There is no voice acting. The soundtrack is really good. I really like the fast pace to all the beats and it definitely supplemented the game well.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

The game looks good for an NES game. The graphical presentation, both overall and in cutscenes, is absolutely a plus here.

ATMOSPHERE | 8/10

Varied environments throughout. The urgency put forward by the story along with the great soundtrack make for an exciting affair throughout.

CONTENT | 6/10

The game is just about as long as the previous one I believe, and while the game has a high difficulty overall, what's on offer here is plentiful and challenging. The gameplay is pretty much the same throughout and there isn't much else to this game though, but that's not an issue here.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Platforming / Hack & slash sections followed by a cut scene. You do this throughout and then the game ends. Unlike many other platformers, there aren't any levels that try to mix things up a little bit, and the game's difficulty is too high in my opinion.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

I can write pretty much the same thing here as for the 2nd game in this trilogy. Its focus on storytelling makes this be a pretty original game, the core gameplay is fun, but this is a small step back overall in my opinion.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Apart from trying to beat your high score, there isn't any other motivation given to play this game again.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 67/100

Great soundtrack, big focus on storytelling, which is always a plus in my book for this time period, and pretty fun gameplay makes this a recommendation. However, I'd rather recommend the second game for newcomers to the series, which actually is an improvement over the first and probably the best game in this NES trilogy.

Count me among those who see Lies of P as their favorite non-FromSoft Soulslike. In pretty much every aspect, Neowiz pulled off an immensely well crafted game and put themselves on the map as developers to look out for henceforth. The setting that is inspired by Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, the beautiful visuals, the top tier boss presentations, the satisfying and varied combat and a satisfying resolution to the story made this such a joy to play through. If you're a fan of the genre, you definitely have to check this one out.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10

The setting is Krat, a city where puppets were invented thanks to a power source called Ergo. Puppets can be police offers, porters at railway stations and all kinds of servants for the people of Krat. In what is called the "Puppet Frenzy", puppets have started to act out and kill the same humans they once served. In the midst of this, you (Pinocchio) awaken on a train. A voice calls out to you, the voice of a mysterious woman called Sophia. She tells you to meet them at Hotel Krat.

Not too long after, you get there and get your next task. Find Geppetto, your father. With the help of Geppetto, Sophia and a few other characters you meet along your journey, you are tasked with figuring out the cause for the Puppet Frenzy and with ultimately putting an end to it.

At the same time, a sickness called the "Petrification Disease" is spreading as well, which is deemed incurable and slowly kills its victims. As with many occurences and persons in this game, it too has an aura of mystery regarding its existence.

The story starts slow. As you make progress in the game and as you meet more of the characters, you can engage in mostly optional conversations where you will hear a lot of the same words. Puppet Frenzy. Petrification Disease. The Grand Covenant. The Alchemists. Ergo. These are all presented in a mysterious way and slowly but surely you uncover the fog. It's all done in a typical way, but thankfully, when the game reaches its conclusion, a lot of the mysteries in this game reach a really satisfying and partly unexpected conclusion.

There are three total endings and the ending you get depends on the choices you make. For this, the game has a unique LIE system, at least that's what I think it's called. Since you play Pinocchio, a puppet, you shouldn't be able to lie, just like every other puppet - but you can. So a lot of times, you will be faced with questions and two choices. Either lie or tell the truth. Lying makes you feel more like a puppet, while telling the truth brings out more of your humanity. There are also a few other, somewhat hidden ways you can increase your humanity, which were all pretty satisfying to figure out in terms of exploring locations and being rewarded for it in unexpected ways. From what I've seen online, I got the true ending and I can only say that I was really satisfied with that. Looking at the other endings, what strikes me is that they all appear pretty meaningful and make a lot of sense. This adds plenty to replayability, if you want to do a NG+ or just another NG run.

The story is told similarly to From Software games. You'll notice while playing this that Lies of P is inspired by From Software games A LOT. Bloodborne chief among them. Similarly to that, you explore a city in which all residents that survived hide in their homes. Lies of P has a similarly dark, gothic style. There are even residents here who you can't see and talk to through windows. And these residents, alongside many other characters, are the main ways you figure out the setting and the lore of Krat. If you've played any Soulsborne game, you'll be instantly familiar. What struck me though is that I found the writing in Lies of P to be a bit weaker and more simplistic than Soulsborne games. Obviously this plays second and third fiddle to the game's focus on combat and its visual style, but dialogue and writing can add a lot to the atmosphere, and some character dialogue, your voiced companion Gemini (who ultimately seemed like a pointless addition to me) and the numerous logs/notes/articles sometimes features writing that subtracts from that.

Again, the game ultimately pulls off its story conclusion satisfyingly, but engaging in dialogue didn't always keep me as intrigued as the games Lies of P is inspired by. When I say the story was concluded well though, I don't just mean the main story, but also many of the characters own little side stories. Sophia, Eugenie, Polendina, Giangio, Alidoro, Antonia and many more characters get their own moments to shine and I loved that.

Overall, even with the small complaints, Lies of P exceeded my expectations (a theme for this game) in terms of its storytelling and cast of characters.

GAMEPLAY | 17/20

Do you like Soulslikes for their gameplay? Then go play Lies of P, I really think it's one of the few non FromSoft Soulslikes that are exceptional in terms of combat. And I mean EXCEPTIONAL. If I didn't know, I would think this game was developed by From Software, truly.

At the start, you get to pick one of three weapons (I picked the Saber). Alongside your Saber blade, you also get the Saber handle. These things aren't tied to each other however. No, you can grab any of the dozens of blades in this game and combine them with any of the dozens of handles. What does this do?

Well, the blade is relevant in terms of the damage output. Blades do a certain amount of damage, can be upgraded by finding upgrade stones, reduce different amounts of damage while guarding and their damage output also scales similarly to Soulsborne games, but instead of Strength or Dex scaling, here it's called "Motivity and Technique" scaling. The handle you equip with the blade can change how the scaling for it works, it can change the moveset and handles have different "Fable Arts" equipped to them, which are special attacks or passives during combat.

I stuck with the Saber blade and handle for the entire playthrough and upgraded it to its max. I got its Motivity scaling to B, got Motivity up to 36 at the final boss and a +4 Motivity amulet (you can equip amulets in this game) and this setup was more than good enough to have a good chance during the final few boss fights. I'm definitely going to do another playthrough and be more experimental then, but having seen some combat clips from others, I don't think I saw the same blade / handle combo once in them, which should tell you how much replayability the game has in terms of its weaponry as well.

You might have picked up on it, but yes, there are no shields in this game. To be successful in battle, you have to play a style similarly to Sekiro, where parrying perfectly can give you a major advantage. Parrying will increase the "Stagger meter" on opponents, fill up your Fable Arts bar and therefore let you do more damaging attacks later on. There is also a "Legion Arm", which is a robotic arm you can equip to mix up combat some more. There are 6 or 7 options I believe, like an arm that can shoot projectiles, that can shoot electricity/fire or even one that can act as a shield. Personally, I didn't find it to be too useful, but I'm sure there are people who use their Legion Arms to make fools out of bosses. Ultimately though, the game introduces a lot of these features to you and succeeding in Lies of P will really depend on how well you can adjust to these mechanics, especially parrying. I've read that some think the game is really difficult, but as a below average Soulslike gamer myself, I can tell you that using all these mechanics will make the game challenging, yes, but very doable. There were just three bosses that I had to attempt 10+ times, but none more than 20.

There were many boss fights that felt impossible at the start. It didn't take long however for me to figure out what approach would work best, and I always found myself rewarded for it. Oh and on top of that, the bosses were presented amazingly well, so well that each time a new boss would show up, I'd put my controller down and just enjoy the show before the fighting starts. All of this is what makes great bosses in my opinion, and Lies of P does a phenomenal job. You might not always think so while you find yourself struggling, like I did, but thinking back, there wasn't a single boss fight I would call bad and all of them felt really different and, most importantly, fun and challenging.

One reward you often get in this game is called "Quartz", which is an item used to upgrade your abilities. There are a lot of choices for how you want to build your character. You can add to your Pulse Cells (healing items), you can make your Pulse Cells heal more, add amulet slots, make strong attacks deal more damage, make you regain more health when you guard, make your Fable Arts charge faster, add more consumable slots etc.

While we are on Pulse Cells, the undoubtedly best unique feature in Lies of P is recharging Pulse Cells. Once you run out of Pulse Cells, you can get another one by hitting your enemy enough times. And then another. And another. This means you never are out of a fight. An amazing incentive to not just throw in the towel. This mechanic saved me multiple times during boss fights and helped me sneak in a win.

In terms of itemization, here is what I didn't like. The game has tremendous amount of customizability in terms of weaponry, so I do appreciate that the devs gave the players a bunch of different consumables to use as well, but in the end, I just think there are too many items here and too many that don't feel very useful. They also are quickly consumed, so constantly switching equipped items didn't feel like something that felt all that fun, which is why I only stuck to abrasives (items that add status effects to your blade) and Fable Catalysts (which add to your Fable Arts meter). This doesn't stop you however from finding tons of items while exploring and being disappointed when 80% of them are not really useful. To add insult to injury, you can only sell them for 10-50 Ergo as well (the "Souls" of this game).

The worst offender would be the repair items and the system that comes with it. In Lies of P, there is the "Weapon Degradation" mechanic. Luckily, this mechanic rarely becomes an issue, but that is all the more reason why I wonder about its inclusion. As you use your blade, it degrades, and to repair it, you use your grindstone. That's it. There is no limits to how often you want to use your grindstone, and for like 90% of the game, you don't even need to use your grindstone, because by the time your weapon is at low durability, you find the next Stargazer ("bonfire") and your durability is back to full. Where it does get relevant however is for enemies and bosses that give you the "Decay" status effect, which drastically reduces durability. During boss fights in particular this gets annoying. Does it make one in particular harder? Sure. But unlike the rest of the game, that particular part of the boss was just annoying rather than anything else, and overall, I think the game could have definitely done without the degradation mechanic.

Overall though, let me reiterate that if you enjoy gameplay of Soulsborne games, then this game is almost assuredly going to be to your liking. Combat is great and can be customized in a lot of ways, which means you can tackle all the bosses in a lot of ways, which means you might just blink and find yourself at NG+4.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10

It took a while for me to get warm with some of the voice acting in this game, but I liked it overall. Giangio is probably the one that left the biggest positive impact, and all the other ones were solid, but no other stood out. Gemini's voice actor does kind of feel out of place though, just tonaly, and that's worsened by the fact that the game doesn't really do anything with the character, which felt weird (maybe going to be done in DLC?).

Where the game truly, truuuly shines though is in its soundtrack. My god is it great. The tracks used during exploration are good. The theme of Hotel Krat is burnt inside my memory now. The boss fight soundtrack is filled with great songs that fit them really well. But the real MVP is the soundtrack used for the game's records. Vinyl records are collectibles in this game, and you can listen to them in the Hotel. "Feel" is already much beloved online, but I want to give a special shoutout to "Divine Service", which gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it. This whole collection seems to have had one rule for one entry though: "Be a banger". And my god are they.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 10/10

Fantastic, beautiful visuals. The number of times I just stood on a cliff or some place with a great view and just appreciated the visuals the game threw at my face would be too high to count. There is a lot of Bloodborne-esque world building here, but I also got Resident Evil 4 vibes for some reason. Apart from that though, the game also has tremendous presentation, whether it's whenever new bosses are introduced (their design is also phenomenal) or often when you enter new areas. There were lots of moments like that that made me go "Wow" audibly. During normal dialogue, lip movement doesn't really match what is being said and for budget reasons (probably), a lot of cutscenes are cut short and turn into in-game conversations, but man does this game go above and beyond in every other way.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10

As I said, there are a lot of inspirations from Bloodborne and other Soulsborne games here, but also a hint of Resident Evil 4. Despite this, the game manages to feel unique anyway. The Pinocchio setting is used really well, the locations you visit all feel distinct and visually interesting and the Human-Puppet-dilemma takes center stage in many moments and is a theme that is well explored. This all culminates perfectly in all endings in my opinion.

CONTENT | 9/10

There is plenty of content in this game. It took me 30 hours to beat, which includes doing the majority of side content and exploring almost everywhere I could. Apart from the main bosses, there are many smaller, optional bosses which give you rewards such as new weapons (there must be 30+), new costumes, new masks and lots of Quartz to improve your skills.

Exploring areas also leads to many hidden chests, items and even characters and side quests. Doing these side quests can reward you with the above or even with collectible records. Unfortunately, you can't collect them all during one playthrough, but I suppose that adds to the replayability of this game. Side quests usually involve making progress, stumbling upon the item they are looking for and bringing them back to them, like some wine for a woman who can't leave her home because she has the Petrification Disease.

Then there are phone booths in many areas, through which the King of Riddles gives you riddles. These are usually very easy and giving the right answer gives you Humanity points and a Trinity key, which can be used to open hidden Trinity Sanctums, which give you Quartz, costumes or weapons. Finally, there are Cryptic Vessels, which a character in the Hotel can decrypt for you. These are usually pictures of areas you've visited and treasure marked on that picture. Go back to the area and grab the treasure.

Overall, there are a lot of fun activities apart from just following the main quest, and not distracting in any way.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10

If there is one thing the game lacks compared to Soulsborne games, its clever level design. The levels look great, all of them have several branching paths which you can all explore to find optional areas, but they lack the interconnectivity and the overall complexity that Soulsborne games can and usually do possess. That's not a bad thing necessarily, especially for people who are fine with just going a laid out path to the next boss, but it's worth mentioning. The levels become more complex in the latter chapters (though the final one dragged a bit imo) and again, each of them does provide plenty of exploration.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

It's a Soulslike alright. It wears its inspiration on its forehead sometimes, for the whole world to see, but does so many things well and plenty of things differently that it doesn't really feel negative. At the end of the day, it IS a concept we've seen however. Lies of P does introduce many great things to the genre, such as interchangeable blades / handles and healing item recharges, and I'd love to see the latter concept being used more regularly in Soulslikes, and Lies of P's boss fight presentations are among the best in the genre, so there is a lot that Lies of P does that makes it stand out anyway.

REPLAYABILITY | 4/5

Amazing replayability. The main story stays the same for the most part, but you can do an entire playthrough lying or telling the truth, you can give multiple side quests unique resolutions, you HAVE to do two playthroughs to get all collectable records and you can use dozens of weapons and blade / handle combinations, as well as different builds by using Quartz, which will make a second playthrough feel plenty different. If there is one thing that holds the game back in this regard it's that the levels are pretty simple and you'll likely have found every corner during your first playthrough by just being thorough.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 87/100

An amazing experience in pretty much every way and has reminded me why I love Soulslikes so much. Combat is fantastic, the story turns out great, visuals and bosses are stunningly designed and replayability is really high. Can't wait for the DLC.

(This is the 47th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

It's always exciting to hit a milestone in video gaming with this challenge, and we certainly did that by arriving at the first 'Final Fantasy' game for the SNES, Final Fantasy IV. Called 'Final Fantasy II' in North America, because FF II and III didn't release in NA originally, Final Fantasy IV is a rather big step forward for the series in many ways. It originally released for the SNES on July 19, 1991 and was re-released for PlayStation in '97 before the decade was over. The game also got a 3-D release in 2007 for the Nintendo DS, which, if ever get there, will probably be the time where we revisit it. Is it worth revisiting? Absolutely it is, but I'll go through all of my thoughts one by one in this lengthy review, hope you enjoy the read.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10

Finally a game with more to write about than "this is character X, he is hunting after evil person Y to save person/object Z". In Final Fantasy IV, the main character is Cecil, who is hunting after Golbez to save Earth. Just kidding, there is of course a lot more to this.

Cecil is a Dark Knight and Captain of the Red Wings at the start of the game, an elite air force unit of the kingdom of Baron. They are tasked to steal the Water Crystal from Mysidia, which makes Cecil feel guilty and ask the king of his motives. Due to this, he is relieved from his duties as Captain. He, along with his friend Kain, is taked to go to the Village of Mist and deliver a package there, a package that, once they arrive, releases bombs and destroys the village.

In the aftermath, he meets Rydia, who is a young and gifted Caller who loses her mother during the bombings and summons a Titan out of anger, a Titan that causes an earthquake. The earthquake separates Cecil and Kain, and leaves Cecil next to an unconcious Rydia, whom he brings to a nearby town. There, Baronian soldiers try to kill Rydia at night, but Cecil fights them off and he and Rydia become allies as a result, and Rydia can help you in battle.

From here, Cecil goes on to meet many important characters that have story impact and/or become playable characters. There are a dozen playable characters in fact, which regularly rotate throughout the game. There are Cecil, Kain and Rydia, then there is Cid, an aircraft engineer, Edward, the Prince of Damcyan, Tellah, a sage, Palom and Porom, twin mages, Rosa, Cecil's love interest and many more. Each character has a set class, so the job system from Final Fantasy III doesn't make it over here.

Final Fantasy IV is lauded for taking a big step forward in dramatic storytelling. Is that fair? If you compare it to games from the last decade, FFIV obviously does very little in comparison. If you compare it to the 46 other games I've played through this challenge, Final Fantasy IV is probably only outmatched by Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and blows everything else out the water just thanks to its depth and its many, many, dramatic set pieces.

THE PART WITH THE SPOILERS: The problem? So, the dramatic scenes mainly include the death of some of the playable characters. Palom and Porom turn to stone to lean against walls that were closing in to crush the party. Tellah can't bring them back to life. "They have turned into stone by their own will." Yang, a monk from Fabul, sacrifices himself to do ... something in a control room to destroy artillery systems, I couldn't make sense of that one yet. Cid BLOWS HIMSELF up to allow Cecil and crew to leave an underground area. Tellah uses his life energy to use a powerful spell and scare off the antagonist, Golbez, for the time being at least. Some manage to feel more dramatic than others, but the issue is, that apart from Tellah, all of them return to life later on. What? It's like they couldn't do that to all the kids playing the game, so they reversed their decision a few hours later into the game. Are any of these returns explained? Nope. Palom and Porom's return is actually, but apparently it's because their elder unpetrified them, but I thought you couldn't do that because they turned into stone out of their own will? Oh well. As a result, all the dramatics that are being lauded end up being teases than anything else, which is a shame. The game also pulls one of my least favorite ploys of any story, in a game or any other medium, which is present you with a main antagonist for pretty much the entirety of the game, and then announcing an even bigger antagonist right before the end, an antagonist who you never meet until the final boss fight. All this said, some characters do stay dead, and the plot twist of Golbez being used by Zemus, being the brother of Cecil and killing all of these innocent characters does manage to stir one's emotions, especially as you are left feeling like all of this could have been avoided.

The main themes of the game are, of course, the interplay between the Dark and the Light, and the power of friendship / support of your loved ones. Especially the latter you will find to play a role in a ton of JRPGs near the end, but not only does it work, but FFIV is one of the earlier games to do it.

From a critical standpoint, obviously the story does not leave you impressed anymore. There are some plot holes, the dialogue being rather basic, characters being one-dimensional, characters being swapped in and out regularly (which doesn't allow for character development for most) and many of the tropes you've become used to.

But if you look at it from the perspective of your inner child, and, from the perspective of the early 90s, you can't help but feel impressed by what this game set out to do and what it accomplished. Knowing what I know about the reception of the Final Fantasy games that are to come, I'm pretty excited to dive further into the series, which this game accomplished a lot more than Final Fantasy III did.

GAMEPLAY | 13/20

Final Fantasy IV is at a glance of course the same as the previous one's from a gameplay perspective, and as the one's to come in the next years as well. You have your party on the right side, the enemy's appearing on the left side whenever you are randomly (or as part of boss fights) pulled into battle, and you order each member around on a turn-by-turn basis by telling them to attack, use special attacks, use healing magic or an item from your inventory.

But looking at it deeper, there are some additions, subtractions and changes compared to FFIII. First, the game introduces the 'Active Time Battle' (ATB) system, which means that you need to give orders in 'real-time'. So if you take too long, the enemy will not wait for you but instead start attacking again. Second, this is the first Final Fantasy where each character has a pre-determined job/class and unlike in FFIII, there is no job system, so it can't be changed. Third, this is the first and only Final Fantasy which allows your party size to be five. Finally, unlike the previous versions, this has a very simple character development system, in that spellcasters get to gain new spells as they reach pre-determined levels, so you can't purchase spells and give them to your characters anymore.

For the first half or so of this game, this was considerably easier than FFIII. Without having to grind at all, you could pretty much spam attack through the entirety of the boss fights in the first half and heal with your white mage. Done. Then, three things happened. 1) Bosses and regular enemy types start doing a ton of damage, 2) You pretty much have to find a bunch of hidden items in order to deal enough damage or have enough defense to withstand the stronger enemies and 3) The game introduces the single worst enemy attack ever to a bunch of enemies and to pretty much all late-game bosses, which is one-hit kills. Doesn't matter if you're at full health, if you are parrying or whatever, you will simply get one-shot.

This is the biggest game design flaw in my opinion, but there are a few more minor ones that become annoying. For example, if you want to heal someone and he dies before the healing animation plays, you pretty much wasted a heal. If, on the other hand, you anticipate a death and use LIFE on someone (to revive them), and the character does indeed die before the animation plays, you still do not revive them. If you want to punish me due to timing, I should be rewarded for anticipation as well. There are also a lot of late-game bosses that pretty much attack you after each turn of one of your characters, meaning that before you go through all five party members, you are attacked five times. If you don't grind a lot, look up a guide to find all those easily missable 'OP' items and go through OPTIONAL late game areas to grind/get items as well, those attacks all also do a ton of damage.

This all culminates for the final boss fight, where it is not difficult to arrive in a state where your entire party can get one-shotted. I think this is really poor game design where simply following along the main storyline is punished this way. Once you're there, grinding the area immediately prior to the boss fight for hours is pretty much the only thing you can do at that point, and as you can imagine, that's no fun.

Overall, the ATB system I'd say was more negative than positive to me, because you're essentially being punished for having to go through various menus to find the option that you're looking for, which gives your enemies ample time to skip the attack order and strike again. I'd have rather appreciated more time to choose and strategize.

But all the critique aside, if you want to look at it from a glass half-full perspective, the game rewards you for taking your time with the game and then some. It rewards you for not escaping out of fights more than a couple times, for going through optional dungeons, visiting optional areas and yeah, grinding a little bit, by allowing you to make your way through the game easier. At the same time, it makes completion impossible if you simply follow the main path, which is what irks me.

The gameplay itself, which does continue to involve from one Final Fantasy entry to another, is also still not varied enough to really make me feel like playing those extra 5 - 10 hours to do all those optional things or to pop open a guide to go through dungeons again and find those missable items hidden each and every way.

But ultimately, whether you enjoy this or not will pretty much depend on whether you enjoyed the combat system in the other turn-based Final Fantasy entries. This one will improve upon that in some ways, potentially worsen in others depending on your viewpoint (ATB system) but will stay the same more or less.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

No voice acting. This game takes it a step further with its sound design in that there are a bunch of different attacks with their own special sound effect. That's a small thing, but definitely noticeable. The soundtrack for the most part ranges from good to great. There were a few tracks that I remember hearing in the few hours that I had spent on FFVII before I started this challenge (Red Wings for example), and they were good tracks, so it bodes well for FFIV's soundtrack for those to be originating here. Of course, some tracks are relatively similar to earlier FF entries (battle themes) but the main beauty in the soundtrack of FFIV lies in its diversity and the way it hits the tone of the different dramatic scenarios. You have your romantic tracks (Theme of Love), your ominous tracks whenever you'd take a look at what the antagonists where doing (Ring of Bomb), bittersweet tracks that capture the feeling of powering through despite the loss of your loved ones very well (Rydia), the sad tracks for one of many sorrowful moments (Cry in Sorrow) and then your "shit's going down" track to top it off (Run!!!). Each city/town/village have their own themes as well, many of which differ in tone and theme. Overall, one of the great soundtracks of the early 90's.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

The jump to the SNES from the NES obviously comes with an improvement in graphics. From improved sprite quality and detail, to increase in detail in the overworld, in locations and in dungeons, to more impressive looking special effects and enemies, and to actually have a background in the battle screen that aligns with the overworld location / dungeon you find yourself in, all of these points are improvements over the previous main entry. Then you add the underworld, some futuristic looking locations and the damn moon to add some variation to the environments and this is overall the kind of step up you would like to see with the jump to the 4th gen of consoles.

ATMOSPHERE | 5/10

You have a mash of themes here with medieaval fantasy along with elements of science fiction, both in terms of location and enemy design. At the same time, apart from using magic, your party is limited to weapons and skills you'd only see in medieaval fantasy, whilst you're being beamed with lasers and such from the enemies. The soundtrack would also support a focus on medieval fantasy rather than the science fiction elements, so it can feel out of place.

CONTENT | 7/10

You have 12 party members overall, about a dozen or so main + optional dungeons, about as many towns/villages/cities, plenty of different versions of your equipment, plenty of dialogue compared to pretty much any other game out there at this point in time and overall a good 20-30 hours of content depending on how much of the optional stuff you end up doing. The optional dungeons are more of the same compared to the main dungeons, of which more than a couple do unfortunately lack in variety and are much too big in size. Apart from those dungeons, and a little bit of optional dialogue here and there, there isn't much else as far as side content goes, but overall there is plenty to do here if you're not opposed to repetitive gameplay.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

The formula works in a specific way throughout. You go into a dungeon and go in deeper and deeper until you defeat the boss, get back to the quest-giver and get story progression. This game doesn't deviate much from that formula, but it's a good formula, so it doesn't have to. It would be appreciated if it did in some sort of fashion though, because unless you are really into using the same few moves for dozens of battles per dungeon for a dozen dungeons, it will get repetitive after a while.

But a part I subjectively don't like about these old-school RPGs and that I appreciate about more modern ones is the fact that, whether you go through the main path or grind a lot more and do optional dungeons/side quests, the game is designed in a way to be beaten either way. So for the game to be unbeatable at the final boss for me, I definitely didn't like that personally and would call that poor game design personally.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

This game successfully evolved the Final Fantasy formula and made a rather big leap in storytelling, which is great to see. It didn't put everything in terms of storytelling together quite yet, but it's much improved, and the jump in graphical quality makes this a big step forward compared to FFIII for sure.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

If you didn't do any or much of the optional content and still managed to beat this game, you have a few optional dungeons to look forward to for replay value.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 68/100

You want sequels to be better than the previous game in some shape or form. Final Fantasy IV is better in many ways compared to Final Fantasy III. Graphics are much improved thanks to the jump to the SNES, there is a much bigger focus on storytelling and the new ATB system, even if not ground-breaking, can be something that makes battles more enjoyable to you. So yes, FF IV is better than FF III in my opinion. But ultimately it comes down to this. Did you enjoy earlier FF versions? If yes, you will enjoy this more. If not, you won't enjoy this either. Personally, I enjoyed it but see a lot of room for improvement, and am excited to see what Square came up with for Final Fantasy V.

(This is the 28th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Hey, finally a game I can remember playing as kid. Super Mario World is a game that some of you may have heard of. It is one of two games that originally released with the SNES on November 21st, 1990 (the other: F-Zero). It was kinda popular. It sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Yeah, so that means I've played the best-selling SNES game ever already.

I mean, I don't need to explain Super Mario games to you, so I won't. What made this one stand out of course is that it was the first Mario game for a 16 bit console and one that used a much larger color palette, so it looked really good when it came out.

Plus, this game has a big difference over Super Mario Bros. 3, and that's of course that you have an ally in Yoshi. But before I get into that, I just gotta start with my conclusion for this game.

Because yes, this game is amazing STILL and honestly, not just easily the best game I've played out of 1990, but one of the best games I've played period. The best part is, I played this on my Steam Deck and not only did it run well, but it was a super smooth experience from beginning to the "end" (didn't beat the game yet). The controls are super responsive, the game looks fantastic, the sound quality is crisp and I was constantly in awe with how well this game aged in pretty much all areas.

The game has a ton of uniquely designed levels. That's a compliment of both the quality and quantity of them. I knew the game was good in that regard, but having played a couple dozen platformers that released in the same year previously, I can't believe how big of a jump in quality Super Mario World makes over every other game. Not only can you enjoy a variety of different levels, not only can you enjoy the challenges for well over a dozen hours for one playthrough, but the game is also just crammed full with features and secrets that allows for your future playthroughs to play out very differently over your first.

It starts with the power ups. Granted, not each power up will be as useful as some others, but you got the power up to increase in size, you got the ability to shoot fire, you can fly, you can turn invincible for a few seconds and you can even combine these when you are with Yoshi.

It took me a little while, but then I discovered that you can sprint, I discovered that you can spin in the air which allows you to destroy blocks below you, I discovered that Yoshi can eat enemies and shoot some of them back out even, and I discovered a bunch of other secrets, like special paths that you can take to finish a level, which opens up hidden paths. These aren't just there for padding, but completing them then adds new colored platforms to all other levels and makes them easier. This adds tons of replayability for multiple reasons.

OVERALL
I could really go on and on here, but I think I made my thoughts clear by now. The game was not just revolutionary at the time, but is still a damn fine video game by today's standards. That's the biggest compliment we can really give to games of old and this game deserves it and more.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Steve Harris for EGM, Issue 25 (Aug 91): "While Super Mario World may not be the ideal cart to show off al the fancy things that the SNES can do..." | and the game goes on to be the best-selling game of the entire console. Not sure what was expected but expectations certainly were high
- ? for Nintendo Power, Issue 27 (Aug 91): "Mario's latest adventure is gigantic."

(This is the 49th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Ugh, an EA game, I bet it's filled with microtransactions. Oh, right, we're in 1991. This game is called Road Rash, and is a racing game with some fighting elements. There is a spiritual successor for it called Road Redemption, which released in 2017.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

There actually is a set-up for this fictitious world in the manual. There once were two bitter rivals in Fang and Polygon. After Fang lost their final official race because Polygon tempered with Fang's bike beforehand, Fang challenged Polygon to an unofficial race, which started the cult behind 'Road Rash Races'. "Punching, kicking and clubbing and 150 miles per hour are the norm for Rashers".

In-game, you are greeted with messages by friends and foes before and sometimes after a race. Sometimes it's trash talk, sometimes it's a friendly hint and sometimes it's a police officer who tells you to not drive too fast, so he can catch you. After each level you beat, there is also a very short cutscene that plays where your character and, I presume, his girlfriend take their helmets off and enjoy the fresh air after winning all tracks in the previous level.

It's a bit more than the bare minimum, and I liked seeing those messages before races.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

This got kind of addicting really quickly. Obviously I'm gonna move on as part of the challenge, but I'm sure I'll play this to chill out from time to time like I used to do for F-Zero.

You start with the standard bike and have 5 races available at the beginning. Your goal is to win each race against 15 or so competitors, which allows you to move up in levels and difficulty, until you reach the final race. After each race, you are compensated in $ based on your finish and can use it to upgrade to bikes that are faster and can be controlled better. Most of the time, progress is blocked because your bike simply won't be fast enough to win, so you'll need to farm money in races you know you'll lose to be able to afford a better bike. I can't say how much of a grind it is at later levels, but it was acceptable where I stopped, which was after I finished the second level.

The special feature of Road Rash is that during races, you can ram the bike of the other racers, punch/kick them and hit them with melee weapons. You have a meter for your bike and your character health. If your character health goes down to 0, you fall off your bike but it recovers over time. There are also cars on the road that drive in both directions, which you have to avoid. If you are hit, you usually fly far away from your bike and have to run all the way back to it to get back to driving, which takes a while. Cars can hit your bike after you already crashed and kick it even further away that way, which is a funny mechanic, but might get frustrating later down the line because after two crashes, you're pretty much not going to win. I didn't find any way to back out of a race other than a reset of the emulator. Finally, there is a police bike that drives around sometimes as well, and if you fall off your bike near the officer, he will bust you and fine you money.

I really like the idea of this, and it's recently gotten a spiritual successor in Road Redemption (2017), but at least for the first two levels, I never really saw much incentive to battle the bikers. You either don't catch up to the fastest bikes or you can blaze past them once you do, so there isn't a lot of time for when you could be in a confrontation with them. Plus, I never got a melee weapon up to this point and I'm not even sure how to attain one, so that was disappointing.

The racing was fun regardless. It's very simple, you have to try to stay on track in a vertically scrolling 2D track, avoid the cars and get past the other racers. Your bikes differ in speed and handling, though that is not indicated everywhere but in the description of the bikes as far as I could tell.

Road Rash got two sequels over the next years, which were both praised for the same fun factor that you got with the first, but also criticized for lack of innovation. For those reasons, I'm not going to try those, but Road Rash goes 3D in 1998, has a PlayStation release in 2000 and then one final release in 2009 on the EA Mobile site only (hello, modern EA) before it then started to sit dormant ever since.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

No voice acting. The sound design in this is actually not so good. There aren't many sound effects here to begin with, including when your opponents crash into cars or the sound of the engine of any car in general. The main sound you will hear is the tires screeching when you turn corners, and that sound doesn't even sound like how it sounds in reality or even close to it.

As far the OST, I think overall it's a plus. If you played this when you were younger and played these maps over and over again, it's a soundtrack that feels distinct enough to stick around with you for a while. The track I liked the most is probably the Pacific Coast one. All tracks have this element to them I can't really describe well, but if I had to make an attempt, I'd describe it as a low pitch bouncey sound, which definitely is a terrible description. But nevertheless, my point is that it didn't quite gell with me and it being the connecting theme in the OST, I can't say this would be among the great soundtracks of this year if I were to make a list. Unlike a game like F-Zero, the OST didn't have any really good tracks that I would gladly listen to outside of the game either.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

The game doesn't look bad, it doesn't look fantastic. You drive down a road that looks the same throughout for each map with forests and mountains visible in the horizon. You and your opponents look the same and are only distinguished by color. What I really like about the graphical presentation is the animations. The animations of the crash and how your bike and you fly into the air and down on your butt and how you rush back to your bike is pretty funnily presented here. In terms of graphical fidelity, your main issue here might be that you will have a hard time sometimes figuring out that you're approaching a car, as the low resolution from time to time makes them hard to see quickly enough.

ATMOSPHERE | 6/10

In terms of atmosphere, it hits best when you drive behind a group of bikers and see them drive into the trunk of the car in front of them and fly off their bikes as you leave them in the dust. Or when you are side-by-side with another biker and throw a punch or hit their bike with yours to drive them off course. That doesn't happen often enough though I thought.

CONTENT | 6/10

There are 5 levels with 5 races each and 8 total bikes you can unlock. It's a solid amount of content, nothing special here.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

Pretty basic but clean design here. You go through more and more difficult levels and continue to earn money to unlock faster and faster bikes. Effective, and I'd say you'll have a fun 10-15 hours or so trying to win all races.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

I like the concept of using illegal tactics during a race to gain an advantage. I just don't feel like it's fleshed out here and you rarely have a need to use these tactics. It would have also been more fun if we could have gone into a race having some sort of melee weapon pre selected, because I went through two levels without getting my hands on a single one.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

It's a racing game, so you'll have plenty of motivation to keep playing and trying to beat your previous high scores.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 60/100

It's an enjoyable racing game. If you're looking for a more modern experience though, I'd suggest checking out Road Redemption. Road Rash's main selling proposition, the fighting during the racing, is only a small part of the gameplay here and it quickly just turns into a normal racing game for the most part.

(This is the 50th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Game #50. That's a nice milestone hit. We get there with Another World, a short cinematic platformer / adventure title developed by Delphine Software, who are also known for the game 'Flashback' and 'Shaq Fu'. This game is a unique one, so a good choice for #50, as it mixes up actual cinematics with gameplay, something that wouldn't become the norm until much later down the line as we all know. The game was initially developed and released for the Amiga in November 1991 but later came out for the SNES and Sega Genesis as well, among many other platforms.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 6/10

You play Lester Knight Chaykin, a physicist who at the start of the game arrives in his laboratory, rides an elevator down to his main office and starts an experiment. I couldn't figure out what it was about, but wikipedia describes it as 'attempting to reconstruct what happened when the universe was born'. During his experiment, the facility and him are hit by a lightning strike, which teleports Lester to an alien planet. Here, he has to evade monsters for a while until he is taken hostage by the locals. He escapes and helps free an alien creature that was captured with him called "Buddy", who henceforth assists Lester in his escape from this planet.

The manual itself only has a short diary entry from around the mid-way point of the game, where the main character talks about the friend he has found in the alien planet and how the energy weapon works that an enemy has dropped earlier.

The cinematics are mixed in between gameplay sessions of a game that will take you roughly an hour or two, and only 20 minutes if you know exactly what to do, which isn't too hard on a second attempt.

The plot itself is basic, but the inclusion of a friendly, strange creature is the kind of story element that will be used many more times in the future of gaming and that will pull at the heartstrings of many gamers. I doubt this was the first platformer to use this, but 'Buddy' definitely played a noteable and pretty useful role here.

GAMEPLAY | 11/20

This is a platformer / adventure, and your goal is to do platforming, solve some light puzzles, shoot a few bad guys and do so without dying a lot, as the checkpoint system can get pretty frustrating. If there is a particular part you are stuck at, it's not going to be unusual for you to go for a couple minutes of the previous parts over and over again. The most popular comparison I could give here would be the bonfire system in Souls games. Die to a boss and you respawn minutes of running away. Die here to anything and the same thing is true pretty much.

Sometimes, it's not quite clear where you are to go next, so you kind of end up shooting at everything and see if it opens up a path forward for example.

But other than, it's OK. The 'Buddy' character actually is quite useful in that he opens up holes for you to climb in and in general assist you through various means, which was pretty cool to see friendly AI this 'advanced' in 1991.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

No voice acting. The sound design has no business being this crisp and atmospheric. The echo of your steps when you run around in caves, the sound of the wind howling when you're outside, the sound of the water while you're swimming in it, the sound that translates the power behind those shots you take with your energy weapon really well and so much more is so well done.

The soundtrack is incredibly tense and perfect for the type of atmosphere this game is going for. Most of the game is played in silence and only accompanied by the various ambient sounds, but when the soundtrack kicks in, it only adds to the action.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

Mostly a good looking game but partly a mixed bag, most notably in its design of the backgrounds in some areas, which look rather uninspired, and characters. On the other hand, you have great detail in particle effects, the cinematics and some of the backgrounds, especially when you first enter this alien planet. But overall, it's a good looking game compared to its 1991 peers.

ATMOSPHERE | 9/10

Very atmospheric, from start to finish. You start the game wondering what this odd looking dude is out to do late at night in his labratory. You continue wondering as Lester is teleported to an alien planet, with weirder and weirder looking creatures and natives. You build an unlikely relationship with this friendly stranger that you rescue, you try to make your escape through dark caves, squeeze your way through vents, use your energy weapon to shoot your path forward and do so while the soundtrack amplifies the tension in the right moments. It's really well done.

CONTENT | 4/10

The big focus on cinematics means there is less space left to make this a lengthy game, or at least so I'd assume. So you're left with good content here for the most part, but not a lot of it at all.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10

The design, apart from the inclusion of cinematics, is pretty basic. You got the old-school issues with an unfair checkpoint system rearing its ugly head from time to time, but other than that, there isn't anything notable to add here.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10

Very unique in the way it tells its own story using, for the time, sophisticated cinematics. If we're fair, it's questionable whether this type of game has a higher fun factor than many of the top-end platformers that would release in the early 90s, as the game has to balance the high quality cinematics with much less content overall, but the concept in itself is promising and brings the medium forward in its attempt to blend story and gameplay together.

REPLAYABILITY | 1/5

Once you've beaten it, there is no extra incentive given to replay it.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 67/100

Solid graphics, great atmosphere and sound, well done cinematics that were unusual for its time. Definitely worth a try.

(This is the 51st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Caveman Ninja, Joe & Mac, Caveman Ninja: Joe & Mac, whatever you want to call it, is a platformer that released some time in 1991 for the SNES, MS-DOS, and, in 1994, for the Sega Genesis. Developed and published by Data East (known for Windjammers), this platformer is the worst 'well-known' SNES game I've played to date, not only because it is a rather boring platformer, but because the Arcade version is just so much better for some reason. The Arcade version had better framerate, better sound, better graphical presentation, more diverse and interesting levels, more dynamic boss fights and just in general looks way more fun. As I don't review Arcade games for this challenge though, I was left with the uninspired and truly lazy SNES release that Data East dropped onto the gaming market.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

You play Joe, a caveman who has to fight Neanderthal 'nerds' who kidnapped the cavewomen. The prehistoric setting is described as 'days when "rock and roll" was just rock and "fast food" was dinner you couldn't catch.', which I thought was asuming. The main goal here is to go through each level, defeat the boss and rescue a cavewoman, who then run on-screen and give Joe a kiss on the cheek. Joe drops a peace sign and runs off to the next level. It's truly an unga-bunga game in all facets. At the end of the game, the credits roll as Joe & Mac just stand there motionless, smiling. I can only imagine Joe asking Mac where the hell he was while Joe himself was fighting for his life. In truth, this can be played with a buddy, who would control Mac.

GAMEPLAY | 7/20

This is an uninspired as platformers from the early 90s get without being a disaster on a technical level as well. You have access to five weapons, from throwing bones to boomerangs to fire to a stone wheel. They vary in speed that you can throw them and the power behind them. Most of the time, the weaker weapons are useless however. When you hit an enemy enough, they scream in pain and then become invincible for a few seconds and usually hit you with some sort of, let's call it 'super attack'. You wait, hit them again once they can be hit again and repeat this until the health bar depletes. Thing is, for some of the later bosses, if I throw the bones at them, the "screaming" animation plays but the boss doesn't actually lose one health point because the weapon is too weak. Alas, I still have to deal with the invincibility for a few seconds and defend their 'super attack'. But if I were to just use the stone wheel or fire, the bosses always lose one health point when they are hit. So there is no point in using the weaker weapons.

Before you meet the bosses, you do some platforming as you try to avoid those Neanderthal 'nerds', dinosaurs and rocks. It rarely takes you longer than a couple minutes to reach the boss area because all levels here are incredibly short. You could just run through levels without attacking a single enemy and overall they appear mostly pointless.

You have one ability in this game and that is to point upwards while jumping, which allows you to jump further.

In general, there appears to be a shocking lack of f*cks given for the SNES port. Apart from what I just mentioned, the devs just start re-using bosses in the second half of the game (they don't really become more difficult either). Apart from that one ability, if you can call that an ability, you can only run forward and throw your weapons. That's pretty boring. A level or two in and you've already seen it all.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

No voice acting. The OST is focused on two themes. Stone age and positive vibes. Most of the tracks will sound similar to many other games that try to go for the positive vibes theme, which isn't a bad thing but means the soundtrack for this game is pretty average with its use of the xylophone, flute and bongos that you'll instantly be familiar with. Out of all, I'd say the 'Stone Age Skirmish' boss music is the one that will sound most recognizable should I listen to the OST again in the future.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10

It's not that good looking compared to the other SNES games that were available at this time. There is a nice variety of colors here and there, the general design of the levels are somewhat varied, but where this game again fails is in attention to detail. The sprite work is meh, the design of the water for example is just a jagged lines and blue color and no animation to it and speaking of animations, I've seen plenty of NES games with much, much better animation quality and depth than in this game.

ATMOSPHERE | 6/10

This is a stone age themed video game alright.

CONTENT | 4/10

Apart from the very short levels and the lack of variety in most aspects of this game, there are a few secret levels you can unlock by figuring out a way to collect equally secret keys that unlock these secret levels. You catch my drift? So say, in the first level for example, where you need to crack open an egg which releases a flying dinosaur that flies around for a bit, and if you stand still, picks you up and flies you off to one of these secret levels. Those are nice, but not that easy to find and apart from them, there isn't anything else to get you hooked.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10

I mentioned that levels were short. But only until you play the game will you notice how short some levels are. There is one level in particular where you simply need to jump up a few times. In 10-15 seconds, you already reach the boss. What? There are some that also take a minute or less, and none take longer than 3-5 minutes, which would be an average level length for other platformers. It doesn't help that bosses are re-used in the second half, and multiple times as well.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 1/10

Literally nothing about this game is innovative in the slightest. This goes double for the SNES version. I'd even say it is worthy of a -1, because it sell the capabilities of the SNES well short. But in its form, all it does is use a bunch of elements from other platformers in a worse way and add its stone age theme to it.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Hard to say that this game is worth the initial full playthrough. But if you do enjoy it, your main motivation to play again will be to figure out how to unlock those secret levels and to beat your high score.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 41/100

A very skippable game. It doesn't take advantage of the SNES at all from a graphical and technical standpoint, it's a much worse version than the one for the Arcades, it's in general a rather basic platformer, very repetitive and lacks features. Not the worst game of the year, but a Top 5 contender.