(This is the 52nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

This is going to be a short review similarly to what I did for 1990's Wing Commander. The truth is, there are some genres and games that are not going to be my cup of tea. This means that my review for these games couldn't do them justice. The right person will absolutely love Wing Commander, and the right person will absolutely love Civilization I, despite its lack of QoL and overall features compared to newer entries. So in terms of this challenge, I don't think it would be fair for me to review these games with my review score.

That said, I can recognize an objectively well-made game when I see one, and Civilization definitely belongs in that category. I can't say I didn't have any fun with the game either, I definitely did in my 5 hours it. However, the game (and its manual) is so packed with features that take a while to get a grasp of in nature, and also get more difficult to figure out due to the old-school UI. Once you get somewhat of graps of the basics though, the game becomes kind of routine, where you use the cities you build to create settlers, militia, phalanx and more, where you use these characters to explore the world, where you meet other races and either go to war or make peace, and where you overall try to gain world domination before you lose.

The gameplay loop was definitely fun. If you're intro strategy games and you want to go into the Civilization series from the start, I'm sure you'll find a lot of enjoyment out of this. And even if I will likely not include most strategy games to my challenge playlist for the coming years, Civilization will likely become a mainstay.

(This is the 27th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

After giving up on the game some 5 years ago, I gave The Secret of Monkey Island another chance thanks to this challenge I'm currently doing, and I can take this away right now: I'm glad to have seen it through.

This game released all the way back in October 1990, 32 years ago now, and has released in multiple editions for multiple platforms. To play it today, the easy recommendation would be to purchase the Special Edition that came out on July 15, 2009 and is available for PC and PS3/Xbox 360.

The Special Edition added voice acting, improved the graphics, a remastered musical score and even added hints for those of you that are like me and either can't think outside the box enough to figure out a puzzle and/or don't have the patience to think about a single solution for hours.

I played the Special Edition myself, which goes against the idea of the challenge slightly, but not only does the game seamlessly allow you to switch between Classic and Special Edition mode, but this way I also got to experience the full experience, including the voice work, which adds so much to the whole thing.

In this game you play Guybrush Threepwood, who makes his way to Mêlée Island in hopes of becoming a pirate. A group of pirates make him take on the Three Trials and that's where the game, a point & click adventure in case you didn't know, begins. Immediately in the first location, you can find a guy who talks about LOOM, a different LucasArts game from the same year that I actually played a couple months ago when I started the challenge, so that was a fun little surprise and pretty meta.

And breaking the 4th wall is a frequent occurrence in this game. It's one that doesn't take itself too seriously and jokes are at the forefront of every conversation. Even the three trials all end up putting you in humorous situations. For example, you need to hunt for treasure. You need to seek out the map to find the treasure, but when you get it, it actually has dancing lessons on the piece of paper. What that means you need to figure out yourself. For another trial, you need to beat the Sword Master. But turns out, sword-fighting isn't just about sword-fighting, but it's much more important to be able to drop witty insults (or comebacks) during the short breathing breaks. [Have you stopped wearing diapers yet? // Why, did you want to borrow one?]

Stuff like this makes the game comical at worst, hilarious at its best. I can't say everything fully hit my sense of humor like it likely did with others, but I laughed out loud plenty of times, which is more than I can say for many other games that are meant to be funny. There are many jokes I don't want to mention so that you can hear it in game yourself, but here is one silly thing that I laughed more about than I should have. When a guy teaches you to insult during sword fights, he asks you what you would respond with, if someone told you: "Soon you'll be wearing my sword like a shish kebab". And one of the options you could respond with was "So's your mother!". Same with the next question. That line itself works with everything and will always make me laugh, but the voice work by Dominic Armato (voice actor for Guybrush) just was the cherry on top.

In general, the voice acting in this game is phenomenal and so varied. Characters are all caricatures and over the top, so it's really a job well done to have all of them have different personalities like that, though of course many at the end of the day have one combining trait: They're stupid.

The game is divided into four chapters, and the puzzles remained clever throughout, though that's not to say that I didn't find some areas a bit tedious. The third chapter in particular became really tiresome, because you had to go from A to B to C to D multiple times over and the track was slow each time. Being stuck on a puzzle during that part was like a vacation almost, because it meant you could just stay in one place and keep your brain active instead of clicking the mouse to your destination and look as Guybrush took 15 seconds to get there.

That and the fact that some of the puzzles were a bit silly or required you to do things in a certain order are probably my only two complaints here. For example, for one puzzle, I did one thing first, the other next and then wanted to do the third part but it never worked. Finally, I checked a guide and it turns out, I had to do the one thing second, and the other thing first, to successfully be able to do the third part. The thing is, either way should have worked.

That said, I think there are these adventures out there that can be way more tricky and way worse with its puzzles, so it's not that bad here. I think overall the game did a good job of incorporating its areas and puzzles into an overarching story that was actually fun to follow, even if it felt like there could have been a bit more, especially in the second half of the game.

OVERALL
Overall, The Secret of Monkey Island is a great point & click adventure and one any fan of the genre should play. If you're curious about the genre, I'd recommend this, Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango as starting points personally, and I'd not shy away from using a guide or a hint (if available), in case you're stuck. All of these games have a ton of charm and even if you do find yourself being stuck here and there, to me it's just really a comfortable and relaxing time to play through these games that all have this chill vibe to them.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Otter Matic for GamePro, Issue 43 (Feb 93): "The dialogue is funnier than a simian's uncle."
- Ed Dille, Issue 27 (Apr 91): "The control interface for Monkey Island is superb."

(This is the 54th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

We're a bit late into the 'Wonder Boy' series, as the Platformer / Action-Adventure 'Wonder Boy in Monster World', which released on October 25, 1991 for the Sega Genesis, is the fifth game in the Wonder Boy series already and only two more games release for this series from here on out in 1994 and, interestingly enough, 2018. The games preceding and succeeding this game I'm about to review also received remakes in the past decade, so the series has seen somewhat of a revival recently. 

For its time, Wonder Boy in Monster World received positive reviews and currently carries a 7.5 Moby Score. Multiple magazines are quoted saying something to the tune of "Who needs Sonic, when you can have Wonder Boy", which I found funny to read in retrospect, but it should tell you that this isn't just some random character, but rather a relatively popular one. Some magazines weren't all too kind, like Sega Power's review saying that this is "one aimed at younger players, but I think that even they will find this very boring or repetitive." Who was right according to my taste? Well I'll start with this: I didn't beat the game.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10

In this adventure of Wonder Boy, you play Wonder Boy, who needs to save Monster World, which is under attack by ... monsters? Where else did you think the monsters wanted to be at? The Wonder Boy by the way has a name, he is called Shion.

Shion gets the help of many residents of Monster World. He can use one girl's 'Ocarina', an instrument that unlocks door if the right melody is played. He can use Poseidon's trident to explore the underwater areas. He gets the assistant of a dwarven kid that unlocks the path to a cave filled with monsters.

There isn't a lot of dialogue here besides the generic few talks you will have with people who want you to help them, so that they agree to help you afterwards. You are thanked a lot for being a hero and on you go until you win the game. After you defeat the final boss, the end credits actually play immediately after, which is kind of anti-climactic, though there are post-credit scenes where the resolution of the story is quickly explained. Again, it's generic "the hero saved everyone, so that they can live on happily ever after, or until the sequel at least." talk.

As is usual for games that call themselves side-scrolling Action RPGs at this time, you discover towns and have a few people there that you can talk to (I wouldn't call this an RPG though). Though when I say a few, I do mean just a few, as there aren't many characters walking around.

This game is also another one of those that has you run around colorful worlds for most of it, only to have the final act be in some sort of futuristic looking area against a futuristic looking final boss. Why were so many end-game areas designed like this? The games often have no hint of sci-fi, but all of a sudden some rogue AI / robot from a distant planet wants to use his futuristic weaponry to destroy you, and you poor dude with just your sword are supposed to put an end to it. Well, you do in the end, but you know, it's getting hilarious at this point how this seems to be the resolution so often.

GAMEPLAY | 9/20

This is called a side-scrolling platformer / action adventure / RPG. The first genre is correct. The second as well. As far as RPG's go, this I wouldn't call one of them. There is no character progression in terms of stats or any decisions you can make, there is in general no choice you can make and the only stats that are there are for attack, defense and speed. Armor, weapons, shields and boots are what effect those stats. You get those by opening chests and going to stores, though you'll have to do a lot of grinding for gold to get many of those store items.

So yeah, it's not an RPG, you simply control Shion in this side-scrolling platformer. From the 3 hours I've played, there wasn't much exploration but rather convoluted level design that made you look around for where to go next. There isn't really any area or anything that opens up for optional exploration. There are some harder to reach chests in this game, some of which are tricky to find. I got to one by accident by pressing up randomly (you press up to enter rooms), and a room appearing in the middle of nowhere and leading me straight to a chest. That can hardly be called exploration though.

So you are equipped with a melee weapon and have to fight enemies, some of which can jump up, some of which can swoop down, some of which can throw stuff at you, rush you, guard with their own shields and all sorts. The problem is that the swinging animation of yours takes a few frames too long, so what happens way too often is that you try to time the swing right, but you are a split second too early and before you get a second swing off, you already get hit by an enemy rushing you. The tough part is that once you die, you are sent back to your last save, which will be at the previous inn. This can send you back many, many minutes, and there is often plenty of time between your last save and the boss fight for example.

Boss fights represent ridiculous difficulty spikes here. Until the first boss for example, apart from those swing animation issues, you won't have any problems. And then you reach the boss and it just jumps on top of you constantly whilst throwing up tiny minions that hurt you when they run into you. So you got 4-5 minions coming after you from both sides, the boss coming from the top and until you take a looong time to figure out how to beat this thing, you'll, well, lose a loooot of time, and it doesn't really fell satisfying either. This the case for a lot of boss fights where it feels like the enemy attack patterns are way too wild and random. The main thing this game does with boss fights is just throw a bunch of stuff at you at once, which makes it hard to dodge, but even harder to find an opening to strike. Not fun.

The worst issue comes a few hours in however, when you are supposed to use Poseidon's trident to go underwater and find Poseidon. Multiple times I found myself thinking "where the hell do you want me to go and why are you making it this so convoluted?" I looked up the solution for a while and you know it's not a good sign when you see the actual path and think to yourself that this is way too unnecessary.

In the end, the save system and repetitively annoying gameplay made me abandon this one a few hours before completion. It's not even like this is a game where it being so hard is the point. It's not necessarily even that hard in terms of combat, bosses excluded, but finding your path and having to go all the way back to inns due to the lack of save points just makes the game annoying to play.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

No voice acting. The soundtrack ranges from meh to really good. The intro track sets a good tone for a game this is both child-friendly and one that will kick your butt repeatedly, and while few tracks combine these themes, you'll have tracks do a pretty good job of using either one to give off a relaxing vibe or one that captures the tension well. However there are some true stinkers here as well, like Village Theme 1, not to be mistaken with Village Theme 2.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

This game has good looking graphics thanks to its use of a wide color palette and attention to detail in the scrolling backgrounds. One interesting thing the game does in its villages is a visual transition effect when you enter a house, which makes the inside of the house become visible.

The sprite work, enemy design and animation here is not great, but the devs created a cozy and inviting world here, at least graphically, though it kinda starts falling apart a bitonce you hit some rough patches when it comes to hard enemies/bosses or not knowing where to go.

ATMOSPHERE | 5/10

Welcome to monster world, a world called after monsters that is in turmoil as it gets invaded by monsters. The game uses all the tropes you'd expect from a platformer of the early 90s, so unless this was one of the few games you played over and over at the time, you will notice that it doesn't offer anything new and doesn't really pull you in like plenty of other games manage to do. The world that is created here in its basic form, thanks to its soundtrack and graphical presentation, is inviting overall though, however you'll be stuck at very hard bosses and puzzles multiple times, so more likely than not it's only inviting until a certain point, where you likely will find yourself stuck, especially if you were a kid in the 90s playing this.

CONTENT | 6/10

Enough content here for an Action Adventure like this. You got many boss fights, many different enemy types, different types of equipment, plenty of puzzles and hidden stuff too boot. Not all of this is good content, but you'll be busy for a good 10 hours if you decide to play it to the end.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10

Most of the time, where you need to go is straightforward. Then there are times where you will keep running around in circles, unless you figure out that you need to go to X first or press Y, which unlocks a new path. That sort of environmental puzzle is pretty enjoyable. But most of the time when things aren't straightforward, you're meant to go to some place that is only described very imprecisely, and it's a lot of time away and makes it very easy to get lost with no positive impact on fun factor or satisfaction from figuring out the way. Add to that that if you die on your way there, you're sent back all the way to the last inn you saved at, and you can see where you'd get easily frustrated.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10

Nothing new on offer here, it's a mix of features and a focus on themes and a theme for its world that you have seen in a lot of different games before. There isn't even a specific thing this game tries to focus on more than on other areas, the game is meh to alright in every area, which makes for a meh game overall. It's got average world building, basic gameplay, convoluted level design, a middle-of-the-pack soundtrack, frustrating boss fights, slow pace and a boring set of one-dimensional characters. I'm sure the series has done better than this, but this game isn't doing anything above-average unfortunately.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

You can look for some more of those hidden equipment or health items in a second playthrough, but there is no other motivation given to play through it twice.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 50/100

You know, I'll take a game that is below-average in most aspects of a video game, if it does a specific thing really well. But Wonder Boy in Monster World doesn't really rate better than "average" in anything, as it's a game that takes many features of better games, puts them together and ends up being a worse product. So it's a skip for me, there are plenty of better retro platformers / action adventures to play from this time period, though it's definitely not a 'terrible game'.

(This is the 91st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

As part of this challenge, I've been going through these Sonic games as fast as, well, Sonic, and just like that, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is the Sonic series' fourth attempt to make me a fan of the franchise. It's not like I think these are bad games, definitely not, but there are some pretty key things about Sonic games that do not align with my tastes, and that has been the case for Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic CD, though Sonic CD has been the game I enjoyed the most so far.

I'm going to explain my likes and dislikes about the Sonic series below and whether this game does something different in those regards, but going in, I didn't really expect anything different here than what Sonic fans got up to this point. And that's more than OK, considering that this is a beloved series of many gamers. Additionally, this is the 4th Sonic game for the Genesis / Sega CD in just 3 years, so I imagine that innovation will be kept to a minimum simply due to time constraints. Looking at this game's wiki, that seems to be the case, as Sonic the Hedgehog would not only not include certain features that would later be turned into Sonic 3D Blast, but there is also a large part of the game that was simply cut and later republished as Sonic & Knuckles. Sonic & Knuckles' cartridge has an adapter that lets you attach Sonic 3 to it, which turns both games into Sonic 3 & Knuckles, in case you are interested in that. I'm only reviewing Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

At the beginning of the game, Sonic has the Chaos Emeralds but gets them stolen from him by Knuckles the Echidna, a new character in the Sonic series at this point in time. Knuckles is the last of his kind living on the "Angel Island", on which the Death Egg of Dr Robotnik crash-lands prior to the start of this game. Knuckles guards the "Master Emerald", which gives Angel Island its levitational power, so Dr Robotnik uses this opportunity to pit Sonic and Knuckles against each other by telling Knuckles that Sonic is attempting to steal the Master Emerald.

For the game itself, that's pretty much it. Knuckles makes life harder on Sonic during the game but there is very little in terms of story here, not unlike other Sonic and platforming games in general at the time. As per usual, this is fine, as it is not expected, especially for a game in 1994, where story cutscenes would likely damage the experience more by interrupting it than enhancing it.

GAMEPLAY | 9/20

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is, to me, the worst Sonic game to date in terms of gameplay. On the one hand, it innovates very little from the formula of the other Sonic games. If you enjoyed those, you will enjoy this game too for the most part, so no need to read on. In the following however, I will explain what exactly irked me more than usual in this game, especially since it is coming off the heels of Sega CD and Sonic 2, both of which are games that I praised for innovating enough in terms of controls, gameplay and level design.

The core gameplay idea behind this Sonic game is the same as with the others. Enter a large level with multiple ways to traverse to the exit, explore to find secret areas, defeat a boss at the end of the zone and in between, learn the flow of the level to go through it without losing one of your limited lives. As per usual, Sonic has a lot of speed, and as per usual, you are supposed to use this speed during appropriate times.

Because, AS PER USUAL, this Sonic game has terrible enemy placement and enemies appearing a millisecond before you can process them as you speed through any area of any level. So, while controlling a fast character, you once again tip-toe around levels once you realize that no matter where you go, unfair threats look to take your rings from you. You then have to recover those rings, because carrying at least one ring means you won't die from your next hit. Unfortunately, in this game, rings are unrecoverable for a good 2-3 seconds after you get hit, so I found myself either recovering very few even if I had dozens on me, or recovering 0. For example, there is this one enemy that has spikes and shoots three balls diagonally upwards. Almost always, it hit me. Half the time, I couldn't recover any rings. This means I had to tip toe next to it to wait for it shoot the balls in order to jump on top of it. Sonic moves like he is gliding on ice however, so the controls are not nearly as tight as you would want them to. Plus, input detection is not as immediate as you would need it to be either. Ultimately, you need to get close enough to time the jump, you need to stay away far enough to not touch the enemy and you can't stay away too far, otherwise you won't time the jump within that short time frame between the three balls that are shot. This would lead me to die countless times to one of these things as I try to do a very simple thing of just jumping on top of this one goddamn enemy.

Enemy design in this game is horrible in general, but there is no enemy more infuriating than that fucking piranha that tries to bite you underwater. It won't let go, you can't do anything about it, so 100% of the time, this means you are just waiting 10 to 15 seconds until Sonic can't hold his breath anymore and dies. Fucking terrible. You fall downwards a lot and can't see these piranhas, so if you jump downwards unfavorably, you literally cannot do anything against them. One of my biggest gripes in any video game is having to jump down from somewhere without seeing enemies/obstacles, and this game's challenge is simply made out of this trope.

Two other things I dislike in Sonic 3 are 1) the special stages, which I think are the worst of all Sonic games so far (you collect blue balls and have to quickly change direction, where you fight the game's controls more than anything) and 2) Tails now being completely forced on you. In Sonic 2, you could go to the options menu and remove Tails, but here, you can't. Tails does almost nothing in 1-player mode but constantly die and distract you. Tails for example cannot breathe underwater, and has his own timer appear for whatever reason, which confuses you into thinking that you need air yourself. The worst fucking part is when I stood near the air bubbles with 2 seconds to go on my own timer, jumped up to grab one of the air bubbles and have FUCKING TAILS STEAL IT FROM ME. I died after those 2 seconds and quit the game right after.

Again, Sonic games are not objectively bad, despite the overwhelming negativity here, but at their best, the 2D platformers are tolerable to me, and at their worst, like here, they're downright terrible to play.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10

The saving grace for Sonic games comes from their soundtrack. As with all other Sonic games (minus the Sega CD boss fight theme), this game has a good soundtrack as well. From what I've listened to, the save select screen's theme is funnily enough my favorite. The worst track here by far is the one for the new special stage, which makes the special stage even less tolerable than it already was to me.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

I can only really say the same thing here that I was able to for the other Sonic games. They are some of the best-looking games on the Genesis, some of the better looking games of the 16-bit era and all that applies to Sonic 3 as well. At the same time, Sonic levels often have a cluttered quality to them and can be overdesigned visually, which is not as bad herre as in Sonic 2, but still present.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 7/10

Not much to say here for this game. It plays, sounds and feels like a Sonic game. The only thing I dislike here in that sense are the underwater levels, which are a lot more present here than in the other Sonic games unfortunately, and they usually are my least favorite part.

CONTENT | 5/10

The main content is similar to what you have come to expect from the other Sonic games, only worse in my opinion due to the issues I mentioned under 'Gameplay'. The special stage here is the worst out of the 4 16-bit Sonic games in my opinion and this game doesn't innovate in any way here, a far cry of the effort that was put into Sonic CD in '93.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Levels are long as per usual and you can go through them in multiple different ways once again. There are a lot of rings to collect, Chaos Emeralds to find through the special stages and bosses to battle, but the in between issues of enemy placement and the terrible way through which this game achieves its difficulty makes this game a step down from the other Sonic games, where I had complained about the enemy placement as well, but never at the level of Sonic 3.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 3/10

Play Sonic 1, 2 and Sonic CD instead of this. Sonic 3 innovates the least out of all these games and feels like a step back for the most part. Knuckles' debut is cool but that's really all you get here.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

Less replay value than for Sonic 2 and CD, but Sonic games always have plenty of secret areas to find and Chaos Emeralds to collect, so replay value is present at usual levels.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 55/100

Sonic games eminate high production values, and there certainly was a lot of money poured into making them once Sonic 2 took off as it did, but money can't buy creativity, and Sonic 3 to me is the proof of it. The core system for Sonic games is in place, and Sonic 3 feels like those were simply re-used with little thought given to how the levels work. Based on the very good reviews the game got at the time, I realize I'm in the minority with this thinking, but I truly did not have a good time with this game. Its above-average visually and through its soundtrack as per usual, and when the game actually flows well it's fun like the others can be, but the annoyances that enemy placement and pop-ups present are more discernible here than they ever were.

A unique game with lots of good and plenty of questionable/bad, that I still recommend everyone to check out. And "checking it out" is all I can really recommend, because whether or not you like it will simply depend on one thing, and that is the humor. I'll get to that, but first I want to say the following.

The game is so unique in its presentation. I am always a big fan of games that try to do things differently, not scared of whether it is reviewer friendly or not. Hideo Kojima for example created, in very shallow terms, a delivery man simulator and he did not give a damn whether that game is for everyone or not. And it isn't. But games like that stick with those people that absolutely are the target audience. Or take my most recent review of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Not my cup of tea, but I can see how it's the dream game of the right audience, and ONLY of the right audience.

Meanwhile, so many games, even in the indie scene these days, don't shy away from what many games before theirs have already done, since it is already known that those games are well received. In the AAA scene, this is of course a very known issue, none more well-known than the Ubisoft open world games.

Anyway, you all already know this stuff, but my point is, game devs should have more balls to be creative, especially those that have the financial ability to do so. Rick & Morty creator Justin Roiland and his team I assume do have just that, and even if they don't, they certainly have the balls.

High on Life is unapologetically Justin Roiland's work, for both good and bad. More good if you enjoy the humor, more bad if you don't. So let me give my thoughts on the humor here. Quite a few times in this game, I actually did laugh out loud. Most games make me exhale out of my nose if they attempt to be funny, but few get me to laugh. Not because it's not funny, but because that's how I just am. Anyway, in High on Life, there was the funny intro that had me laugh, there was some of the dialogue between my guns and random NPCs that made me laugh, a certain conversation between two guys arguing in traffic, and in particular, there was something near the end of the game that had me actually crying laughing, though I do not wish to spoil that here.

But in between, I didn't really laugh at the monologues of my guns or the conversations between NPC. I certainly was intrigued by Roiland's style of comedy (have only watched a couple episodes of Rick & Morty in my life, so unfamiliar overall) and how vulgar it is. However, I was also intrigued by how explanatory his jokes are. Let me explain. A lot of the times, his characters feel the urge of why the things they say or the way they act is supposed to be funny. Or how funny their situation is supposed to be because it apparently is so ironic. And to me, this wasn't that funny. Considering that this is what happens a lot here, the middle parts of this game from time to time turned into a slog, if too many jokes didn't land in a row.

And here is why you won't enjoy the game if you don't enjoy the humor. The combat - this game is a first-person shooter - is certainly simple, in a good way, and works well, but it's also very repetitive and simple, in a bad way. If the humor doesn't stick in between these gun fights, the flaws of the combat do become more apparent. I'd say it is certainly good enough to warrant an 8-hour playthrough (without side content) and leave you mostly satisfied, but that's the thing. You'll either be very satisfied, if the humor hits or not satisfied if it doesn't, because the gameplay is not the focal point, it's the humor. The devs didn't build a script around the gameplay, they've built a game around the script and on that alone. So it doesn't matter that much, whether the gameplay it's great. It's simply good enough to not be a negative distraction in between of all the humor.

One thing this game does really well, whether you like the humor or not, is the visuals and the worlds they have crafted, especially Blim City. Whether it's in the small area that can be traversed or the rest of the city that you can't go to, but admire from afar, Blim City looks colorful and vibrant. The other worlds that you visit for your objectives look good, though a couple didn't seem different enough for my taste. Considering that there aren't that many worlds and that some are reused for multiple bosses, I feel like there could've been more done here.

The soundtrack gives off relaxed, laidback, lofi vibes and is definitely a highlight for me here. The voice acting is pretty good as well and the characters just sound untraditional, if that makes sense. It feels like you're watching a TV show rather than playing a video game, which often can have characters sounding too bland and robotic, though here, similarly to the South Park video games, the voice actors have treated it just like another episode of Rick & Morty.

And also regarding the characters, this game actually accomplished something that many games don't. I actually cared about some of the characters in this game, because the game spent an adequate amount of time on them and to develop their personalities, which are almost all unique and quirky from the start.

So yeah, all in all, I would really suggest to give this a try. You won't have played a game quite like this a whole lot in your life, and trying it out won't cost you a lot thanks to the fact that the game is on Xbox Game Pass. I don't think it's worth the full asking price right now, unless you KNOW that you will enjoy the humor, in which case you can have fun for two dozen hours if you go completionist and do two playthroughs (which in your case I'd recommend due to a lot of choices this game gives you) and likely feel like you got your money's worth. For me, I'm glad I played it, though I wouldn't have paid full price, if I knew what my thoughts about the game would be after I played it.

All this said, I hope there is a sequel some day, because this was definitely a fun use of my time overall.

I don't remember much about my time with this game, as it was about 6 years ago that I played it, but I remember liking the puzzles and the style of this game. Over on a different gaming site at the time, I seem to have found it important to mention that I liked the killmoves in this one, so there you go.

Looking at other reviews, I have noticed that the game has been removed and no one is able to play them again, unless through piracy and such I'm assuming, which is pretty terrible and I'm surprised a move like that didn't receive more backlash. I'm surprised that even the owners of this game can't play it anymore. Damn shame regardless. Leaving my own review here to fill out my own collection, and I guess it provides no use for anyone thinking about playing this in the future. Sad.

(This is the 109th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

Full Throttle was LucasArts' 11th adventure game and originally released in May, 1995. In 2017, the Remastered version released. It's got updated visuals, sound and QoL improvements, and in typical LucasArts Remaster fashion, you can switch to original visuals with the click of a button whenever you want. It's got dev commentary as well, which makes this remaster a nice little package for a game that you'd be hard-pressed to run on modern computers otherwise. Having beaten the game for the first time, I can say that it's definitely a worthy purchase for adventure game fans. That said, I'd be shocked if adventure game fans haven't played it already anyway. For those curious about the genre and who got enticed by the biker gang theme of the game, is it equally worth it?

Well, apart from the theme and some of the game's distinct features, it's mainly a typical LucasArts adventure. It's shorter than some at a 4-5 hour run time if you watch all cutscenes but what you do in this game follows the formula pretty much. You engage in puzzles that become more and more difficult over time, talk to NPCs and try to progress forward by combining these two parts of the game. These games are notorious for having unintuitive / illogical solutions to puzzles at least once in each of them, and Full Throttle is no exception unfortunately, but it's certainly one of the least egregious examples in LucasArts' catalogue I think. Still, there is one part where you have to ride around in your bike and engage in bike combat, which is a unique feature for this game, and figure out how to defeat each biker by beating one first, getting their weapon and then using that to defeat another. One biker for example is only susceptible to fertilizer, and another to a 2x4, and each failed attempt means waiting for 15+ seconds until the next biker shows up. Another part has you figuring out how to get past a minefield. The solution involves bunnies and it's pretty odd. Finally there is also a part where you find yourself on fire. I won't add much more to it other than what you have to do there is oddly specific and you'll figure the solution out by accident rather than logical deduction.

Still, I thought most solutions were easy enough to figure out and progression overall was much smoother for me than in Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle or their Indiana Jones game. This alongside its runtime work in favor of the story, which feels much better paced and includes less filler than usual. This comes at the expense of fewer characters that you meet than in other adventures of theirs, and I didn't find them to be as memorable.

The plot itself is also pretty simple. You play as the main character Ben, who is the leader of a biker gang called "Polecats" and who plans to stop the evil plan of one Adrian Ripburger, who plans to take over a motorcycle manufacturer and make them manufacture mini-vans, which is obviously a disgusting suggesting as far as Ben is concerned. Ripburger's actions are much more evil than his means however, and he frames Ben for his terrible acts to boot, so Ben has no choice but to put an end to Ripburger's plot. It's rather cliché and simple, as I said, but if you're into bikes and biker gang culture or just appreciate a story about a alpha, badass, funny one-liner spouting character, Full Throttle should scratch an itch for a couple afternoons.

OVERALL | 69/100

There isn't really much else to say about a game like this. If you know LucasArts games, you know them all kind of, at least from this time period. They have different themes but follow a very similar formula and it worked at the time. In modern times, with so many more games to choose from than in the 90s, where your gaming library probably consisted of just a couple games, it might be hard for you to stick to a game that will undoubtedly have you stuck at times trying to find a weird solution. If you didn't like it in other LucasArts games, you won't like it here, but if you did, then Full Throttle is more of the same with a different theme put on. It's a theme that works, which makes this a enjoyable game to play in my opinion.

While playing through some longer RPGs, I longed for a short little 'snack' in between. A Mortician's Tale looked like the ideal candidate thanks to its short run time (30 minutes of my 2 hours with this game I have optionally spent with its rendition of Minesweeper) and its interesting theme.

In this game you play Charlie, who joins a family-owned funeral home as a Mortician. The game spans about a year and you 'spawn' once a month or two, go on your computer to read some optional e-mails from colleagues, friends and prior 'customers', and also to see the mandatory e-mail that tells you what your task for the day is. You either ready bodies for closed-casket (you just have to clean them) or open-casket funerals (much more tasks involved) or you cremate them, based on the families wishes.

These tasks are rather simple and each step is carefully explained every time, so the goal is not to do it right, it's just to do it.

I know nothing about funeral homes, so I appreciated the game for showing me how they operate, how different requests are handled, about the environmental effects of embalming versus green burials, and about corporations that exploit both employees and customers even in this business.

Apart from that however, the game doesn't really manage to be emotionally impactful regarding its main character, which has no dialogue lines during the game. Anything she feels and thinks about her job, about how she handles it and anything else that could bring the players closer to her, doesn't exist, which I thought was a shame.

So while I appreciated the game for its topic, it doesn't succeed in being more than a tutorial/showcase for the 'industry', and I'm not sure if there was any intent to do anything beyond that.

This is the type of game I would have spent hours of time and lots of money on in the arcades as a kid. A game similar to Code Name: Viper, called Rolling Thunder, was actually an arcade game, but Code Name: Viper itself was released for the NES.

This is a side scrolling action game where you control "Mr. Smith", a special forces operative who is tasked by "Commander Jones" to take down seven hideouts of a drug syndicate. There is a mystery here to uncover and it reveals itself bit by bit after each stage you complete.

There are two weapons in this game, a pistol and a machine gun. Enemies are mostly syndicate members who are differentiated by color of their outfits. A blue member needs two shots to be killed and can only hit you by running into you, while a pink member can be killed with just one shot, but has a pistol of his own. You only have two lives, at least in the first three levels I've played, so this game can become very tricky real fast.

Not only are just two lives a problem, but you can accidentally run into an enemy that just gets into frame, you can enter a wall (to free hostages) and run into enemies or a bullet right as you exit the wall etc. Expecting a smooth experience I did not, so I'm not surprised that there were some annoyances here.

However, the gameplay loop got me trapped for a few hours anyway and if it weren't for the fact that I will likely play dozens of games like this in the coming days, weeks and months, I wouldn't have minded trying a bit longer to finish. But the game only gets harder from here and looking at a Longplay of it on YT, I doubt I'll get close to the level necessary to play through this.

But definitely worth checking out and would have been a favorite of mine back in the day.

Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos came out in March/April 1990 for the Famicom and as an arcade game. As a sequel to the much beloved Ninja Gaiden, it had a lot to prove and based on the review scores of 35/40 (EGM), 8.5/10 (IGN) and 4/5 Stars (AllGame), it appears the reception was generally positive. It's also a game that was influential and progressive in multiple ways, a game that according to the Video Games & Computer Entertainment Magazine is "proof that video games are learning how to evoke players' emotions and entertain just like a movie or TV show can".

In this series you play a Ninja called Ryu Hayabusa. And as that snippet of the VG&CE review shows, this series did something few, if any, platformers did back in those days, which was putting more focus into the storytelling. The antagonist in this game is Ashtar, an evil lord who is looking to open the Gate of Darkness. Even at the time this was cliché but these games went beyond simply introducing a villain to give slight back story for why the character we are controlling goes against a barrage of dangerous enemies and hazards in each level.

There are other innovations present in this game but let's talk through the game one by one by looking at the 10 criteria by which I rate games.

STORYTELLING: Let's stick with the story for now. The first cutscene you see is Ashtar declaring his evil ambitions, followed by Ryu meeting a stranger who tells him that his love interest from the first game, Irene, was captured. Most of these scenes are presented in a pretty simple way. Most of the time, you see the still face of a character in front of mostly blank background. For Ryu, the background is often simply purple and the only movement you see is the character being pulled from left to right and vice versa. Sometimes you see a little more detail like a brick wall or the full body of a character, and in the rarest, yet prettiest of instances, the camera zooms out to show us how Ryu is observing an enemy fortress in shots that I'd call ahead of its time.

The story is advanced after finishing stages and there is quite a lot more to it than I would have thought, with a whole bunch of twists and turns throughout pertaining to characters first introduced in this sequel and one's from the original. However, twists and turns and surprises await us after seemingly every stage, so after Ryu's seventeenth "What the....?!" it starts to get stale.

Undoubtedly though, having a character humanized as much as Ryu Hayabusa surely added a lot to the experience back in the day, or at least it would have for me.

GAMEPLAY: I didn't play the first game, but I did watch a playthrough of it and also read some reviews to see what advancements had been made. In Ninja Gaiden, a side-scrolling platformer, you are equipped with a sword and slash your way through a horde enemies like those damn birds, soldiers who fire weapons, weird goblins that turn into a ball and roll into you, lizards that spit bullets and of course a bunch of bosses that appear at the end of a level.

You can jump, you can hold onto a wall and climb it (couldn't climb in the original), you can get a bunch of power ups like ninja stars, fire projectiles and duplicates of your self that stay a few feet behind your controlled character and repeat what you do (also new for this game). This feature in particular is worth pointing out. You can have up to two duplicates and you can position them in ways that can give you major advantages in battle. Since they don't take damage and disappear after a set amount of time (to my knowledge), you can, if you are skilled and persistent enough to figure it out, position the duplicates in a way that they face the enemy, while you face the other way and stand many feet away from danger. Even if you then slash in the wrong direction yourself, your duplicate attacks the enemy without any danger of repercussion. So it adds a new element that is actually very clever and can be incredibly useful.

Unfortunately, while the controls were lauded at the time, they haven't aged well. Slashing with your sword is unsatisfyingly inaccurate, especially when swinging at flying enemies or when jumping yourself. Since the main thing in this game is slashing, you can imagine how it impacts enjoyment. The inaccuracy can also probably be assigned to poor hitboxes. Often, the hit box of enemies is smaller than it should be, while for you, it's larger than it should be. This I have found has been an issue often back in the day and was of course more tolerable than then it is today.

Bosses are mostly actually pretty fun, but I noticed that at least one boss fight was entirely re-used from the first and the final boss battle was just so bananas that I said "fuck it" after reaching Phase 2.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that enemy placement is another annoying part to this game. At times, there is just so much going on that being hit is pretty much unavoidable, and I wish at times the game would flow better to make for a smoother experience, even if at the expense of making the game slightly less challenging.

ATMOSPHERE: This is above average for a game of its time for sure. As far as levels go, the dark area comes to mind that illuminates whenever lightning hits. Some distant shots in cut scenes, as described earlier, are actually beautiful and for the graphical limitations that were present at the time, atmospherically this definitely drew me in.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: No voice acting. Music is catchy and memorable and also adds a lot to the cinematics, while the sound of your sword slashing through enemies and power up items is satisfying.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: From what I've noticed, graphics are a step up from the original. The game is colorful, there is animation in wind, lightning and even beating hearts on the wall on one level, plus moving clouds during boss fights, that make the game stand out graphically. It still has a grainy look though, even for its time, more noticeably than in a different game I played in 1990 already, Code Name: Viper.

CONTENT: Playing it without save states like me and actually beating the final boss proper will take quite a while I imagine and it's fun enough if one wanted to push through. There are also more levels here than in the original from what I've read. So it's an average affair for arcade games in 1990 but what is also an average affair from that time is that the game is not bloated in any regard.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Levels are varied bring unique challenges. There is a level where wind blows left or right, making timing important to be able to progress. One level is dark and you will fall to your death if you don't wait for that lightning that illuminates the stage for a second to show you when to jump. Levels are interrupted with cutscenes, which are mostly short enough to not become tiresome and were also unique at the time. The "Game Over" screen sends you to the start of the stage you are in with 3 lives again, instead of to the first stage, which I appreciated. However, in some levels, enemy placement was wild and made for a hectic affair. Enemy spawning was odd at times as well. If an enemy spawned at the edge of the screen and you killed it without moving forward, the enemy would keep on spawning ad infinitum. So being driven backwards at any time would get annoying quickly because you would have to face the same enemies again. Overall though, level design is solid in this game.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION: As mentioned before, the duplicated Ryu's add a different element to combat and the cinematics were progressive, making this a notable game in terms of innovation.

REPLAYABILITY: You can mix it up slightly with power ups in subsequent playthroughs and of course try to beat your high score, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.

PLAYABILITY: The game worked fine throughout.

OVERALL: I enjoyed this game and it's definitely a solid candidate for the 1990 Top 5/10. I can see why it's beloved even today, but it's unlikely to attract many mega fans if someone tries these games for the first time in this day and age. In any case, it's a classic for sure.

Bonk's Adventure is a platformer released for the TurboGrafx-16 and developed by Red Company and Atlus. Actually it apparently got initially released in December 15, 1989 in Japan, and released in April 1990 in NA (so it's technically not a 1990 game, but I played it anyway). It later was ported to NES and Amiga.

In Bonk's Adventure, you play as Bonk, who fittingly is equipped with a strong head that he can bonk his enemies with. He is a young, bald, strong caveboy and to go through levels, you have to hit enemies with your head, avoid running into them and ... well, that about covers it.

STORYTELLING
If you're looking for a platformer with a story, you got a little bit of story here. If you're looking for a bit more than about a dozen or so lines, you should look elsewhere.

In this game, there are 5 levels, which all have multiple different stages. At the end of each level is a boss, who thank you after you beat them and it appears as if they're being mind controlled by something. They all look kinda unique and most like dinosaurs, with one wearing boxing gloves and another glasses. And there is also a princess to rescue, Princess Za, but that's not something I learned from playing the game, since that goal only becomes known if you reach the final boss or read the manual.

There is a small little epilogue that is something cute to reward the player with, and while the story and characters will add to making the experience a bit more memorable, there isn't much here overall, not that there needs to be, since platformers live and die by their gameplay, especially in these times.

GAMEPLAY
This is a 2D-platformer and sees you fight a bunch of different enemies, some that fit the "10000 BC" theme of this game, some that don't necessarily feel as tied to it. There are dinosaurs, mosquitos, eagles that throw axes, erupting volcanoes, cacti and more. Some actively attack you, some simply follow a specific route. All pretty typical stuff.

The attack button leads to Bonk smashing his big slab of a head to the ground in front of him, so most ground-based enemies can be easily taken care of this way. Some enemies attack from the air, so a well timed jump can lead to Bonk smashing his head to the enemy from below, which does the trick just as well.

There is also an invincibility mode that you can trigger by eating some meat, similar to Mario collecting a star. This lets you rush through enemies, which is pretty neat thanks to the meat.

The gameplay mostly is the same throughout, but there are some water levels added to the mix as well. Plus, as mentioned, each level ends with a boss fight. The dinosaur with gloves is called "Punchy Pedro", the one with glasses called "Gladdis" and a big one with a cap that you fight first is called "Huey". Mostly, you try to avoid the stuff they are throwing while "bonking" the top of their heads until they die and are broken free from the claws of the ulitmate boss, King Drool.

The final boss fight is a pretty big mess and even playthroughs by skilled players will just not look all too pretty because it was just designed that poorly. Overall however, enemy design is mostly charming, though it does lack in variety over time.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Average sound design for the time with sounds that you have heard in many other games. The sound quality is good overall.

As with many games from this time, Bonk's Adventure has a really solid soundtrack overall. It ranges from OK to really catchy, and while it's not a soundtrack I'd listen to outside of the game, it does enhance the experience in a positive way.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Very good. Levels are mostly in tune with the theme of the game, sprites are clean, the game has a very good use of the available color palette and most importantly, the animations in this game are great. From Bonk's angry demeanor when smashing his head to his outburst when he eats meat to turn invincible for a bit, to holding on to a ledge by using just his teeth, to holding his breath underwater and even foaming at the mouth when he dies - which did look a bit gross though - the animation here is really well done for the time.

ATMOSPHERE
From music to art design to sound, the devs created a pretty atmospheric game that is in tune with its theme.

CONTENT
There are 5 levels and a few bonus levels, plus all the boss fights. The levels are separated into multiple stages, so there is a good 5-10 hours of content here before you probably are good enough to beat the game. At times the sections do get repetitive and the game could have done with more power ups to mix things up, but there is good content here if you are looking for an old platformer to master or just beat.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
Especially early on, there is good variety in levels. There is your basic ground floor level, then there is the under water level and then there even is a level where you have the ability to swing from a liana. From there, levels start to feel a bit similar, probably due to the use of a few similar enemy types a lot. But there still are enough different levels here where I thought it was a plus overall.

The two big minuses come from the bad boss fight design at the end (which I didn't manage to get to myself but watched others play) and the cramming of enemies into tight spaces a lot. Even skilled players wouldn't be able to get out of those situations without taking damage, which is a sign of suboptimal level design to me usually. Sometimes you'd have two ground enemies coming at you with two monsters flying above and ready to fly down, so sometimes I would just have to be OK with eating the hit and use my invincibility seconds after that to get out fast. Due to that it didn't often flow well, which was annoying.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Different combat ability than other games based on looks and animation, but not too different in terms of mechanics. This was a fun little platformer but it didn't really bring anything new to the table.

REPLAYABILITY
Not much replayability here once you complete a playthrough, apart from trying to beat your high score of course.

PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.

OVERALL
I've played platformers mostly since starting this challenge and I'd say out of all of them, this is an above average one overall thanks to it's solid presentation in pretty much every category you can think of from its animation work to the soundtrack to the color use. As an overall package, you're looking at a platformer that works well, that should provide a fun challenge for the couple hours you would spend with it, but probably will have controls that don't feel tight enough and levels that don't feel fair enough to make you wish to see it through until the annoying boss fight at the end, which is followed by a nice epilogue to be fair. Bonk's Adventure is a solid platformer for its time but not a must-play at this point.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Clayton Walnum for VG&CE, Issue 15 (Apr 90): "Bonk's Adventure is a terrific game, the best I've seen on the TurboGrafx-16 yet." | The TG-16 released in NA 8 months prior to this game
- The Eliminator for GamePro, Issue 10 (May 90): "The graphics and animation are great."
- Noreen Lovoi for Game Players Issue 9 (March 90): "a clever and thoroughly addictive game with cartoonlike graphics"

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is a tactical RPG and the first game in the Fire Emblem series, developed by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems and released for the NES on April 20, 1990 in Japan only. The first official Western release happened on December 4, 2020 for the Nintendo Switch, however for whatever reason Nintendo made it a timed exclusive, meaning it is not available for purchase anymore since March 2021.

That baffling decision aside and disregarding the fact that the newest Fire Emblem game was just recently announced, this series was not an instant hit. The initial reception by some critics was poor due to "poor graphics" and the game being "difficult to understand". This resulted in poor initial sales, a situation that would improve over time through positive word-of-mouth (especially a positive Famitsu column on the game about half a year after release) and led Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light to sell well over 300.000 units up until 2002.

Since the Switch version is no longer for sale, I wasn't able to play with the official translation. The translation I got, as I noticed after playing for many hours, did not really fit with the official names for items, characters and locations. The main protagonist / the prince is called Marth, not Mars.

STORYTELLING
The translation differences on seemingly everything notwithstanding, it was still "easy" to follow since the different translation was used consistently. Unfortunately, the game throws around a bunch of names of people and kingdoms all the time so it takes a while to get a grasp on what is going on. At first, many names simply end up sounding the same, so I had to find my way out of that web of confusion.

There are 25 chapters/missions in this game, and before and after each, there is some text or dialogue progressing the story, plus a small monologue during missions when you would get near the more notable chapter bosses.

You play as the Prince of Altea, Marth, who was able to escape when Altea was under attack by the Dolhr Empire. Marth's sister Elice sacrificed herself so that Marth could escape. During this time, their dad had left an ally, Gra, to watch over his kingdom, but Gra betrayed them to the Dolhr Empire. Meanwhile their dad had left to fight the leader of the Dolhr Empire, the Shadow Dragon, but failed and died. He used a Falchion in battle, a divine weapon that had stopped the Shadow Dragon 100 years earlier and it was taken from Marth's dad when he lost the battle. It is needed to fight the Shadow Dragon.

At the start of this game you stop an invasion of the new home of Marth, Talys, and then move out with your allies to fight the Dolhr Empire. Before that, you visit and free many other kingdoms and find more allies to aid you in your quest. All characters that aid you are named and have their own little back story (once the game ends, there is a brief summary on what each character is doing after the story conclusion, provided they survive).

And this is where the game gets its uniqueness from. The dev team decided to build on their experience from war games such as Famicom Wars, and add "RPG elements" to them. I think this game pushes the definition of an RPG, but that's a different discussion.

Each character is assigned a class and can level up to increase their stats. While this has gameplay implications only at first glance, it goes way beyond that. Characters barely have any dialogue apart from when your first recruit them, so building a connection to them is only possible on a limited scale. However, it still happens as you find characters that increase in level over time and improve in their abilities. You're excited when they then get criticial hits at the right time to get you out of tricky situations or you love them for simply being consistent throughout. And ultimately, this means it can hurt for a short while when you lose them to the perma-death system. It's a feeling I only know from XCOM games, but in those characters don't even have that backstory like they do here.

It's a system that is very limited here but is effective in general, and I can only imagine how much later entries built on it.

The main plot itself is convoluted for a first time player because you get a lot of lore dropped with no way to read it again or look up any info on anything. In general, the game lacks a tutorial or codex.

Once you get to grips with it, it is a solid plot but basic storytelling due to the technical limitations of the time. In addition, it was pretty typical for the time. I have just played 9 games in 1990 through this challenge so far and more than a few included the concept of "divine weapon is the only way to kill final boss". It works for a game to give the player needed motivation, so I can see why this seems to have been a popular choice for the overall theme. You'll be content with the storytelling for a game this old and with this much content outside of it, it'll the do the job, but nothing beyond that.

GAMEPLAY
Lots to discuss here. The game is a tactical RPG. Back in 1990, you would have found a lot of strategy games and a lot of RPGs, but few, if any, that combined the two.

The tactical part looks like this: You control a battle unit out of a set number of characters based on the level. Often, you would have about 15 units on the battlefield at once. If you had more characters available than the maximum possible amount - through recruiting them - a level would start by making you select the specific units that you want to deploy.

Once you do that, battle commences on a grid-based map. Maps changed for each level and would add strategical challenges, but wouldn't really change anything graphically or of their tone. The game has a turn-based battle system. You select a unit, move it up a specific number of grids based on the unit's Movement stat, and then attack an enemy if it is in range.

There are 21 classes in this game that mostly are specialized in something. There are your typical Fighters and Mercenaries who wield swords and axes and have average Movement range. Then there are your Archers who can only use bows, Clerics who cannot fight but only use a staff to for example heal or warp units (send them to anywhere else on the map, very useful) and Mages who can use powerful Magic and have high resistances. There are also "Pegasus Knights" that are on horseback and can fly over obstacles on the ground like buildings or trees, which usually take an additional step to move past for ground units.

Weapons usually have multiple different qualities. The lowest is the "Iron quality" and the best quality that is usually accessible is the "Silver quality". As you make more progress in this game, you come across many enemies that can resist Iron quality weapons, making the upgrade necessary. Luckily, money is literally no issue in this game, so all you need to do is buy new items. Unluckily, there is no "safe hub" or anything like that to stock up. Instead, shops are somewhere on the map in levels and usually guarded by enemies. Often, there would only be one store as well, so you could only send one unit to buy something per round. So I would spend multiple rounds after a map was cleared to just get everyone new items. This is a typical QoL issue that is surely handled differently in newer entries. I haven't played any Fire Emblem game up to this point, so I don't know.

Another QoL issue is how slow progression in this game is. When you control 15 units, you have to move all 15 units at a time, of course, but that takes a lot of time. This is probably a thing in current Fire Emblem games as well, and not the worst thing to do, but it does take a while and gets kinda boring once you are 10+ chapters in. I prefer the XCOM games here, where you only have 6 characters to control.

But again, this isn't the worst thing in the world. What is much worse is the individual battles themselves. The animation for one attack takes seemingly ages and when you enter over a handful of fights in a single round, it will take minutes to go through them all. Luckily, my emulator had a fast forward function, so I could skip through these much quicker. I didn't finish this game (I made it to Chapter 22/25) but I think it's worth pointing out that I got there in just 17 hours compared to the 26-40 hours it takes on a normal playthrough according to HLTB.

Strategically, there are a lot of ways to play this game thanks to the different classes and their specialties. If you want to bring a Cleric, Thief and Archer for example, they will not be - or you don't want them to be in the Thief's case - in close combat. A big system in this game is the "counter", which means if an enemy character attacks you, your character can counter and vice versa. If the Archer is attacked in melee combat, he will not be able to counter, which can make a big difference. Clerics don't attack at all. Thieves barely have any strength and limited health, so they usually will only be part of your squad to unlock doors and/or open chests. Clerics heal and warp and Archers can be devastating in long range combat, so they all do provide arguments for why they should be included in the squad.

But bring a few more Mercenaries, Fighters and Paladins and you'll have a lot more strength in Melee Combat. So do you go for more of them, or for a more mixed approach? All strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and more than a few will work, so it's nice to see these options being available.

Bringing the right squad to do the job becomes more important however when different Chapters are filled more with specific enemies that can only be significantly damaged with specific weapons. Some need to be fought with Magic, some with Arrows and some with Melee weapons. Plus, maps have enough strategical differences that having Pirates or Pegasus Knights that can go over water or having Mages and Archers who can shoot over walls becomes more important.

On the flipside, you can quickly find yourself in a bad situation when the most useful units for a particular level are the most under leveled. The only way to level up units is by having them battle. Especially later on, bringing those low level characters with you can be pretty bad since you will need all the fire power you got when the game starts throwing infinite reinforcements in your face until you finally defeat the boss and send Prince Marth to the Castle, which is a location he must visit to finish the level.

There is a balance that must be struck here, but I would have liked to get more additional ways to train my units outside of battle (probably expecting too much in a 1990 game). Especially when my strong units started dying late into game and enemy units just started being filled with strong Dragons that would show up in the dozens, the game pretty much had me in an impossible situation. You can't now level your low-level guys, nor can you even get them weapons since you need to do that within levels. When never ending groups of enemies come at you, when are you supposed to find the opportunity?

Due to this, I didn't get to finish the game, but there is a lot to like here.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. There is nothing noteworthy to discuss regarding the sound design, it sounded average for the time.

The music was definitely one of the highlights for me. 3 or 4 tracks were playing for most of the game, so it didn't necessarily have variety, but some tracks just were bangers, especially the start of chapter track. Look for "Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light- Chapter Start" on YouTube.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Even back then the game wasn't considered graphically pretty. I'd say it has some strong colors and the varied character design is pretty good, but there isn't much else to it besides that. You see the same few assets on every level, maps are mostly green spots of grass and even battles take place in a black background with nothing else on it.

ATMOSPHERE
Once I got firmly into the gameplay loop, playing this game was rather comfortable thanks to the mix of a solid soundtrack, uninspiring but not-ugly graphics and simply being around a cast of characters that have a place in this world and start to grow into trusted allies. It is nothing special but to me the atmosphere was rather positive than negative.

CONTENT
25 chapters, each take about 30-60 minutes on average. Lots of repetition here but also a satisfying strategical challenge throughout.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There is a good mix in the design of the maps, especially considering what technical limitations the devs had to battle. Map design and enemy placement means that challenges that players have to fight through are varied, but sometimes the enemy placement and especially reinforcements get so ridiculous that you have no way of progressing through them with the units you have on hand. And this was clear hours ago, you just weren't aware. Infinite reinforcements also mean that the amount of opportunity is limited to level up underleveled units and to stock up on weapons and other items in the lead up to chapters 20+, which was frustrating.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
One of, if not THE first tactical RPG that started a whole genre. Due to that, this game already gets iconic status, and it's a mix of genres that works pretty well too (as evidenced by the series status even today).

REPLAYABILITY
This game can be played in different ways, but the hours and hours of watching animations and moving your units make this a hard sell for people looking for replayability. Apart from improved stats, there also is no incentive to play through the game and try to keep different units alive compared to previous runs.

PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.

OVERALL
Definitely worth checking out if you're a Fire Emblem fan and want to see its origins. There is also some fun to be had and mostly the game offers a fair strategic challenge. If you're a veteran of the series, you might also do much better than me in the first half of the game and go into the second half more prepared, which will make or break your chance of completing this game.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Japan-only release, nothing to find in Western magazines

Crystalis is an Action RPG / Action Adventure game that initially released on April 13, 1990 in Japan for the NES. It was re-released for the Game Boy Color 10 years later and it's celebrated by many for being an "underappreciated NES gem".

The NES version is the one I played, and there are major differences in both versions in case you want to try it yourself. The Game Boy Color version has an almost completely new soundtrack that is worse in my opinion (1), from what I've seen it plays less fluidly and has lower resolution (2), a story sequence was altered (3) but most importantly, the Game Boy Color version is actually way more helpful in guiding the player and actually explains to you what the story is about (4).

STORYTELLING
So what do I mean by that last sentence? Well the issue I had with the NES version was that apart from a very brief introduction to the world in the menu screen, there was just about no explanation as to who you are or why you are fighting all these monsters and doing what these people told you to do. Every hour or two you'd get a line or so of information on what this game is about, but nothing substantial up until the end of the game, where all info would be dropped at once.

In the GBC version, there is a much longer intro sequence explaining why you were summoned and what the lore behind all those items and people is that you find and meet. Every time you find a useful item, one of the characters also would show up to tell you what it can do. Plus, characters also tell you a bit more about what to do next and there are much more intermissions filled with monologues on this world and its lore. Due to the other differences I listed which I actually dislike compared to the NES version, I still am glad I stuck with the NES version I guess.

So what's the story about? You play a hero that you name and that has been frozen in time for 100 years after a war in 1997 nearly meant the end of civilization. The survivors decided to abandon the ways and technology that led to this war and created a floating Tower, where they would live, gain power to control the world (to make sure no harm was done anymore) and to study the ways of magic. You and a companion of yours, Mesia, are now awakened 100 years after the war because an evil magician called Dragonia used his abilities to grow in power and fill the land with Monsters, to ultimately enter the Tower and control everything that is left of the planet.

Four magicians that will become your helpful companions in this world used their abilities to create four Swords of different elements. They used these to attack Dragonia, but he was able to take the Swords from them and scatter them throughout the land. With no additional way of defending themselves through magic, a safety put into place 100 years ago for a worst case scenario triggers and awakens both you and your companion Mesia. What you have to do now is find all four swords, which form the ultimate sword called "Crystalis", and use it to kill Dragonia and end his reign of power.

Throughout your journey, you meet these magicians and can use a skill called "Telepathy" to request hints from them. There are other characters as well that aid you in your quest, like the fisher that lets you use his boat if you find an item of his. There is also a guy called Kensu, who does help you out a lot but loves to play hide and seek and must be found many times to finally give you what you need.

In the NES version, you speak the absolute minimum with all of these characters, but in the GBC version, there is a lot more dialogue and detail to the lore. Since I played the NES version and won't play through the GBC version, I'm going to rate the NES version, which has none to little storytelling for most of the game, and not finding out the true reason for what you are doing for a long time isn't that motivating. It kinda pays off in the end though. There aren't that many twists and turns in this game, there is little environmental storytelling and overall, the package present here is average.

GAMEPLAY
As per usual for the time, gameplay interruptions are rare, so the action is pretty much constant. You start the game by gaining the Sword of Stone and you play the game by attacking the many different monsters with a thrust attack. Most of the enemies don't attack back but rather either walk in a pre-determined direction or into you, which damages you. Unfortunately, the enemies usually have a pretty tight hit box, so you have to do some positioning beforehand before you attack. It's not rare for you to do a 360 spin to try and position yourself in a way that opens up an attack for you without exposing you for damage by the enemies. Your hitbox sadly is much larger than it should be, so even if your character isn't actually touched, you will still take damage. This can become frustrating over the first couple hours as you try to figure out where the game wants you to attack from, but once you figure it out, it works most of the time as you want it to.

There are four swords of different elements to find in the game, and as a result, monsters with resistances and weaknesses to specific elements. While this is a good thing as it brings variety to the fold, it happens often that a room has two enemies with different resistances. Since there are no hotkeys, I would find myself equpping the Sword of Fire, killing an enemy, equipping the Sword of Water, killing an enemy and so on. This would not only throw me out of the action but also quickly become tiresome.

In addition, some enemies cannot be harmed at all until you reach a certain level. Worse even, bosses have the same effect. How does level 11 make you able to attack a character when level 10 means they are invincible? I don't know. But imagine my frustration when I tried my luck at a boss for 20 minutes, only to fail with each element because of a level difference. "Kill it with fire", a guide online said, which I used lavishly, though not only due to combat questions. When fire didn't work as well, I looked it up further. Turns out, I really had to be level 11 to hurt the boss, but my save state was right at the boss fight, so I couldn't back out. Luckily, I had a back up state from 30 minutes before, because otherwise that would have probably been the end of my run.

Leveling becomes harder and harder because the XP requirements grow exponentially, whilst I found that the XP you get by later enemies wouldn't increase quite as fast. This meant I had to grind for 30-60 minutes at multiple points to progress further, which even the most skilled walkthroughs incorporate online. Grinding has seemingly become a core feature of JRPGs since, and it's no more fun here than it is in Final Fantasy games for example, though at least here you don't have to load in and out of battles.

Dying in this game is very easy and checkpoints do not exist, so you have to save often to be able to actually beat this game. By now I'm used to it having played a bunch of other games from 1990 with similar requirements, but it's worth pointing out.

The game has a lot of different environments to explore, but often it requires you to do the same thing, just with a different element. There is however a snow area for which you will need Rabbit Shoes to be able to jump up a hill and most notably, there is a poison swamp, for which you will need to find a Gas Mask to not take damage from the poison.

Unfortunately, when I say "explore", I mean that you usually try to find a way forward and battle enemies. You do have to find "lost items" here and there, bring it back to someone and get something in return that enables further progress, however it's not like these items are shown anywhere on the map. A pendant for example is in a random spot in a cave and you find it by accident when walking over that exact pixel. There are some non-essential items to find, like healing herbs or teleportation boots, and secret locations to find those in.

Overall, gameplay is repetitive and exploration opportunities are limited, but it's enjoyable enough due to enough enemy variety and the core combat being fine once you figure out how to not take unfair hits all the time.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
There is no voice acting. The sound design is good, but nothing special. You hear the same sounds in dozens of other RPGs or Action Adventures from that time.

The music is really good, but this compliment is only for the NES version. The overworld theme simply sounds fun, cheerful and catchy. My favorite track has got to be on the "sea" level. An above average soundtrack that can definitely be listened to outside of the game.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN:
The game has solid graphics for the time and makes good use of color, but doesn't stand out beyond that at a time filled with games that look similar. There is a good variety in locations and especially the poison swamp is worth pointing out here again, but the majority of the game does take places in same-looking dungeons that simply use a different color based on the pre-dominant element.

ATMOSPHERE
The game mostly has a cheerful atmosphere in line with a lot of upbeat music, but it sometimes contrasts with the events in the game, like when a group of people are kidnapped and you wander to their desolate town with the same cheerful music as per usual. Even during the moments leading to the game's final battle it still felt too cheerful and sort of out of place due to the stake's involved per the game's storytelling. That said if you're looking for something to play that may have raised stakes but a more lax soundtrack, you'll be happy with Crystalis.

CONTENT
The game does take 10+ hours if you use guides here and there and are a first time player, but a few of those hours are spent grinding and you do hold the "attack" button for most of it. If you enjoy that, you'll probably enjoy your time with this game, which even with that playing time is much shorter than the RPGs of its time and therefore may be worth a try at least.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game plays rather linearly even though you can visit multiple locations at once. If you do visit those locations, you usually can't hurt the enemies, so there is no point to deviate from the main road. That main road involves doing the same thing usually and often walking through the same-looking corridors that simple have a different coat of paint. There is variety in locations here and there and the sea level offers a unique battleground at least. The final few locations are also much more unique in design, but the way the final chapter is designed is not necessarily my cup of tea, as it's boss fight after boss fight after boss fight until you meet the final boss, but wait, it's not the final boss, here he is, the end.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Most of what this game does has been done before this game came out and not all it does ages well. It's a good game for mixing these elements together and making this an enjoyable adventure overall, but I wouldn't say it set a new benchmark or brought anything new to the table, though its graphics were praised at the time along with the "depth", as in how much there is to do. As mentioned previously, some of the depth is stuffed with repetitive filler and therefore not simply a positive, unless you really are enamored with all core concepts here and don't want the game to end.

REPLAYABILITY
After a first playthrough, there isn't much that you can really do differently.

PLAYABILITY
The game works perfectly fine at all times and plays pretty fluidly.

OVERALL
This is a solid Action RPG / Action Adventure with very catchy music, varied environments and mostly enjoyable, though flawed combat. It's definitely worth taking a look at if you've enjoyed similar games like Zelda games or Final Fantasy, but it lacks depth and logic to its storytelling even when it does get going late into the game, key items are placed in arbitrary locations making progress very difficult and tedious without a guide and there is a lot of mandatory grinding required.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Martin Alessi for Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 13 (Aug 90): "A post-apocalyptic storyline with cinema displays mixes with one of the best search, solve and save the world games in recent memory."
- Chris Bieniek for VG&CE, Issue 20 (Sep 90): "the main thing that sets this title apart from most other [RPGs] is its tremendous depth. I've never seen a game with so many places to explore"

(This is the 56th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The two "The Amazing Spider-Man" games from 1990 sucked. That's the only way to put it when I've ranked them worst and 5th worst out of the 55 games I played for this challenge. So when I heard that today's game, Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin, developed by Technopop and published by Sega for the Sega Genesis in 1991, not only was single-handedly responsible for convincing Marvel not to revoke the Marvel licensing deal with Sega, but also was sold to over 2/3 of Sega Genesis owners at the time, I figured that this game would fare much better.

It did fare better. It's like the elite version of the 1990 Spider-Man games. Unfortunately, those games were crap. And the elite version of crap is simply 'elite crap'. That said, here is my review for the Sega Genesis version from 1991.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10

In terms of its storytelling, this game resembles the 1990's Game Boy version in that you get some dialogue between Spider-Man and his enemies between stages, which is a good choice because Spider-Man's got a personality that can add some charm to the game when used. Unlike that game though, you don't have a conversation with an enemy before you fight them, but rather after you do.

You see, Wilson Fisk - The Kingpin - gets on TV and tells the citizens of New York City that Spider-Man planted a bomb that will explode within 24 hours. The Kingpin offers $10,000 to the person who captures him. $10,000? That's it. Oh wait, the manual calls it $500,000. That makes more sense.

The Kingpin receives the support of Dr. Octopus, the Lizard, Electro, the Sandman and more. Each of them he gives a key, all of which Spider-Man has to collect to disarm the bomb.

I am reviewing the Sega Genesis version as I said, but if you do want to play this game, play the Sega CD version if you can. It comes with fully voice acted cutscenes, which are surprisingly well-done considering its 1991 we're talking about. Peter Parker comes across as if he's in his mid-40's though, just as an fyi.

GAMEPLAY | 6/20

This is a side-scrolling platformer, the likes of which you've seen plenty of before. The difference here? You're Spider-Man! This comes with all the Spider-Man perks, such as using your webs to glide through the screen. Shooting webs. Crawling around like a Spider to fit in tight spaces, like a vent. Sticking to walls. And yeah, that's all.

I give credit to this game for actually giving you a proper web-slinging mechanic where you can actually properly glide through the screen in a somewhat fluid motion. I can't really say anything negative about this in particular.

But everything else about the controls is just a mess. Often, you need to climb up, and to do so, you latch onto walls by holding the jump button in mid-air. Then you walk up and let go of the jump button whilst pointing up in order to jump over whatever it is that you're holding, as you can't just crawl over, say, a crate. You can crawl to the top of the side of the crate and then need to jump over it. Meh, but whatever. But then the jump over the crate is just so unresponsive and often doesn't even end up in a jump that I've damn near lost my mind. The worst thing was when an enemy was on top of such a crate. The warehouse enemies of the first level for example just point forward and relentlessly shoot every second. Shot, shot, shot. Since you're roleplaying as incompetent Spider-Man, you can't hit them from below or diagonally upwards like in Super Castlevania IV, no, you have to jump up and get on their level to hit them. But in doing so, you are always exposed to those bullets and get hit by them seemingly every single time. I'd lose half of my health bar just trying to stand up on a goddamn platform. Even worse is when they shoot you and you fall dozens of feet downwards because the bullet makes you fly backwards a couple feet.

If you get near these same enemies, they'll whip out a knife and stab towards you. Even if you manage to get behind them during this swing, and even though the knife doesn't actually connect with your body, you still take damage. What?

Then there is this annoying feature that I don't like in any game that does it, which is that the game expects you to fall down without even seeing what's down there. So often enough, you fall on top of a rat or a dog without even being able to see it and taking damage. Then you need to kick the rats to kill them, but those kicks need to be perfectly timed or you miss it by a split-second and the rat runs through it to hit you.

I think that's the rant over with. It's just a terrible control scheme that still somehow is 100 times better than what the 1990 games produced. Doesn't make it good though, just less crap.

To finally give you a bit of a better idea on how this game works, you go through 5 or 6 stages overall and defeat a boss at the end. Those give you their keys and you need those to defeat the Kingpin at the end and disarm the bomb. The bosses aren't overly difficult, I've managed to beat two pretty easily before giving up because of how frustrating the rest of the level is.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 3/10

No voice acting. This was not a pleasant auditory experience. The sound design and even some of the tracks had that metallic harsh sound to it that I feel like was rather common with the Genesis based on the Genesis games I've played, and even if it wasn't present in the music, it still didn't sound any good. The most pleasant and cheery track is ironically the 5 second tune that plays when you die. The sound effects for pretty much every action just doesn't sound good. The wind-like sound that plays whenever you jump got especially annoying really quickly since you need to constantly jump in order to climb walls, but the sounds of shots, of your own attacks, of rats, the forklift and of damage, among other things, was just unpleasant through and through.

This is no indictment of the Sega CD version, which by all indications sounds really, really good, but again, is not reviewed here.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10

I had to look twice at times to figure out whether I was playing a game on a 16-bit console or not. The levels are designed rather simply. You are in a sewer, so here is a sewer that looks pretty much the same everywhere. You are in a warehouse, so here are some crates and barrels in the background. You are outside so here are some same looking bland gray buildings, and with some windows flashing in a golden color. Apart from some of the color use here and certain effects like Sandman's arm extending or him losing shape and then gaining it back again, the effort here just seems to be lazy.

This is also another Spider-Man game where I'm not too happy with the design of Spider-Man. Once again he is hunched forward when he is supposed to just stand tall. The enemies manage to have proper posture, so why is Spider-Man always hunching forward in these games? And why is there red coloring beyond the black outline of his body? It's like a child drawing over the lines.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 4/10

The use of actual dialogue and cut-scenes help add some charm and to actually give you the sense that you're playing a Spider-Man game. Some levels are very tight in that Spider-Man can't really do a lot other than crawl around and some levels are out in the open where web-slinging shouldn't even be possible, and overall mostof the levels don't really have a Spider-Man feel to it.

CONTENT | 4/10

As you can tell by now, I don't find the content to be of particularly high quality. What you get with this game is 5 or 6 different stages with boss fights at the end of each that all do have their own sets of different challenges and therefore feel distinctive. There is also a little mini-game where you need to take pictures of as many enemies as possible, which at the end of each level gets you paid by the Daily Bugle, which basically means that your web fluid replenishes based on how many dollars you made. Other than this, there isn't much here and the length of the game is mainly stretched by how awful this controls.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Pretty average stuff, you go through levels that don't offer unique environmental challenges and are rather bland to defeat a final boss at the end of each. It's not different from most of the other platformers / Action games of this time.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10

Bonus points for adding a somewhat fluid web-slinging mechanic to a Spider-Man game, but other than that this is just a below-average 2D action game.

REPLAYABILITY | 1/5

No reason to replay this, after beating it.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

The game worked well at all times.

OVERALL | 39/100

3/3 as far as terrible Spider-Man games are concerned for this challenge. This one ranks best out of all three, which you'd expect considering this released for the Sega Genesis and sold really well according to one of the developers, but the Sega Genesis version truly sucks. The worst offender would be the controls, though this is not a treat from the audio-visual end either. If you want to play this game, check out the Sega CD version, which at least adds some cut-scenes and has much, much, much better sound.

After my initial try at this back in 2016, today I have beaten STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Well, actually, I made it almost to the end, but was backed into a corner with no way to beat the game. The last save being a few hours from there, I didn't want to replay it all, so I watched the canon ending on YT.

I both liked and disliked this game. I both am very excited for the upcoming STALKER 2 release, and also unsure if that game will be for me.

After hearing so much praise about the STALKER series, I have to say, I ended up being quite disappointed in this one. In case you want to know if this is for you, tell me how this description of STALKER sounds to you, courtesy of me.

A sandbox, open world first-person shooter with mostly unscripted shootouts, in a postapocalyptic setting, with a ton of bugs and the constant need to F6 (quicksave), because otherwise you will lose your progress or die thousand deaths due to a variety of reasons, often BS ones.

Now there is a ton of good and bad in that description. If the good parts sound really awesome to you, check it out. If the bad parts make you apprehensive about all this, then probably stay away.

First, the game is from 2007. I personally thought graphically this game looked more than fine, but it IS a game from 2007, so you might feel more sensitive there. However, graphics are definitely not an issue here.

The game does not hold your hand in this one. After you emerge from the intro, you are given a mission and make your way to a building, where you have to fight 8 bad guys. Immediately, you will realize that the game requires you to approach gun fights tactically, and that running in guns blazing will more often than not end poorly for you. Especially in this first mission, your weapon is terrible, which just worsens all the negative factors of running into a fight without taking cover.

From there, you are given main missions and a ton of side missions as well, as well as being told of dozens of secret stashes across the map. You can learn of these by talking to people or simply by looting bodies. How looting bodies gives you this info, who knows, but it does. These optional side missions and stashes are always the same. You go to a spot and have to either shoot enemies, or simply look around and try to find a stash that is usually well-hidden somewhere in the area. Both of these are important to do at the start, because they supply you with cash and loot.

Unfortunately, the game has a 50 kg weight limit, which you will hit very fast. And if my experience is anything to go by, you will never go far below it anymore. Even though I only carried a pistol, shotgun, AK and one more weapon with me, I never could go below 45 kg, which meant that whenever I wanted to loot something, the likelihood was very high that I would have to leave something behind as well. Since traders in this game are very few and are often very far away from your location at any given time, this meant inventory management was a constant worry.

This is the first part of the game that really wasn't fun to me. Why can't I increase my inventory space? Why can I carry almost nothing? What's the point of finding stashes all the time if they either give me almost nothing of value or are items that I can only carry if I leave something else behind? What's the point in exploration, when all I can stumble upon are enemies that I have to fight myself, or random gun fights between two AI factions? While the latter is always fun to see in an open world game, I just never understood what my incentive was supposed to be.

In this game, you can collect "artifacts", which are stone-like things that are in this game world and offer you boosts to some stats whilst reducing some of your others. One stone for example gives you a 200% health boost, if equipped, but reduces your defenses. Some stones reduce the amount of radiation you take in, but make you more susceptible to bleeding. You can equip five at a time by putting them on your belt, but they disappear after a while, presumable because they ... ran out of their powers?

These artifacts, I found, almost all suck, and those that don't are very hard to find. So you will likely sell almost all of them. Even if you don't, as I said, they disappear after using them for a bit, so you will constantly be needing to find more. There is durability on your weapons and armor as well, and while I don't mind these elements in a video game, the game likes to put you in dead-end situations, if you don't manage your inventory right, especially before a main mission. That's actually how I failed to beat the final mission.

When the penultimate mission ends, you don't get to visit a trader like in many other games pre-final mission/boss. If you want to do that, you have to backtrack for 10-15 minutes in order to trade. I decided to carry on to the final mission with my 10 medkits, 15 antirad items and 25 bandages, thinking I'd be alright.

Instead, after a very lengthy mission with hundreds of enemies coming at you all told, I had to use all my items (and all the ones I found off corpses), and to make matters worse, my armor was slowly but surely breaking, which means the effectiveness of it is reduced. My radiation resistance wasn't 89% anymore, but rather 10%. In an environment that was filled with radioactivity, this meant that I was fucked. If you are exposed to too much radiation, your health starts dropping. You can use antirad items, which get rid of all the radiation you currently have, but the meter immediately starts going up again, which makes me question what the point of these items is. Why isn't there something like Rad-X like in Fallout?

Or, of course, I could just keep using a suit that has high radiation resistance, but as I said, my armor is almost completely broken. I can't carry backup armor because my fucking carry weight is almost maxed out at all times without it, and I can't swap it in the battlefield because there almost never is any armor available. You can't just strip the clothing from your fallen enemies and put it on, but have to hope that you find some armor just lying somewhere. It wasn't, anywhere, on the final mission, so I just found myself dying endlessly.

This is precisely the reason why I wouldn't recommend this game to you, if you are not a hardcore gamer. This is truly a miserable experience, and per design. I don't find this particularly fun. It's not what I'm looking for in a video game. Or let me say it differently. If what this game strives for is realism, then why am I, one man, being sent out alone to fight 100s of enemies? Why don't you give me a fucking backpack so I can carry more health items, ammo and a backup piece of armor?

Now granted, this is mainly an issue if you plan on following the main story. If you want to simply enjoy the open world, sandbox nature of this game, you can easily do that without ever running into these problems. But as someone who likes to play the main story of games, Stalker's main story was really poorly designed. And as a sandbox, this game just doesn't offer enough for me. As I said, variety is very low in this game.

There are humans, dogs, and about half a dozen varities of mutants in this game as enemies. There are "anomalies" in the environment, which are basically fields that release different kinds of elements if you get near them, all giving you significant damage, whether it's lightning, fire or some sort of whirlwind. And there is radiation.

As I mentioned before, side missions always look the same. Go some place, have a shootout with a bunch of enemies. Win, go to mission-giver, get a few thousand rubles and maybe an item, and repeat this. Once you have seen all the dangers in this world, that's it. There is nothing more.

Having ranted a bit though, there are a bunch of positives here as well of course. First, the game is obviously very unique, even if not in a positive way all the time, and it's very ambitious. Take what this game has, fix the bugs, increase variety of the tasks in this game, how you can approach them and increase the amount of dangers in the world as well, and I could see myself enjoying STALKER 2 quite a lot. But as it stands, I think the game is ambitious but not really successful, in my eyes.

What the game does really well though is create a scary and depressing atmosphere. You can really feel that the Zone is a place that can just destroy you from one second to the next. While the variety of dangers is not awfully large, dangers are omnipresent and there are few people in this world who don't want to kill you and get to your loot. Plus, there is one particular mission in a sort of bunker in this game that was just scary as hell. In that regard, the game does a great job. Plus, enemy AI is pretty smart and gunfights do have plenty of tactical elements to them, though I would have enjoyed the ability to bring teammates with me and to have my teammates have more than 1 braincell during those fights themselves. I can't tell you how many times main quest-givers died because they simply refused to take cover like the enemies did. Bizarre.

But that said, these things the game did do well. The rest, I can't say I enjoyed. The story for the most part is go find A, so he can tell you more about this Strelok person you are trying to find. You go to A, he either is dead or sends you to someone else, until you get to person G, who tells you to go to a place and find documents. You find documents, which lead to knowledge about a different location, where you need even more documents, and you do that until you pretty much get to the final mission and learn the truth. Can't say I particularly liked 'the truth' and the story about the Zone, about you and your target and all that. But I guess the main story wasn't the point of this game anyway. A game that, overall, I appreciated for its ideas and for what it can spawn in STALKER 2, but one I didn't necessarily enjoy itself.