I enjoyed the first Streets of Rage, and pretty much the same is true for its sequel, Streets of Rage 2, which released on December 20, 1992 for the Sega Genesis and later for the Game Gear and Master System. Developed by Sega, Streets of Rage 2 is pretty much the same game with a few minor and one major change.

First, instead of 3, you now have access to 4 characters to choose from, each with their different stats. Second, instead of everyone having the same special attack, each now has an individual one. However, this time, using a special attack drains your health, adding a quite significant penalty to using it. Third, there is an Easy mode in this game that is ACTUALLY easy. I managed to beat the game on my first time through using one continue on the final stage, and that's mainly thanks to the fact that Sega cooled it with the ridiculous bosses that felt like they were designed to swallow coins on Arcade machines due to their unfair difficulty. In Streets of Rage 2, unfair enemies are still a thing - especially on harder difficulties - but it's not on the same ridiculous level to the point that you won't manage to beat the game within 10 hours.

The soundtrack here is another great one and the levels are varied and good looking. The game looks prettier than the original, with bigger and better looking sprites and more detailed backgrounds. This creates the right atmosphere for this game where, once again, the whole city turns into chaos due to an evil syndicate taking over. This time it is Mr. X, who you face in a pretty cool final stage.

In terms of its gameplay, it has a fun loop but becomes pretty repetitive after a while. There is no dodge button, no guard button or anything of the sort, which means there is little you can do in terms of defending yourself in gameplay. The trick to being successful in this game is to time the enemy attack patterns and strike at the right time, at least that's what I would assume. Since that is much easier said than done, a lot of the game for me was spent either breezing through all normal enemies or getting into a slug-fest with one of the tougher enemies, where I would usually lose one life and try to out-damage the enemy. There aren't a lot of combos you can do either, so overall, I can't say I enjoyed pressing the same button over and over again for the entirety of the couple hours I've spent with the game.

All in all, it's a solid beat 'em up game I can recommend if you're a fan of the genre, but I didn't have as good a time with it as I would have hoped.

(This is the 80th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the sequel to, surprise surprise, Sonic the Hedgehog, both of which released on the Sega Genesis. This sequel released just 1 1/2 years later and with only 9 months of development time, but it not only helped Sega claim a lot of market share held by Nintendo at the time, but it also solidified Sonic as the iconic video game mascot we know today and as Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was developed by Sega Technical Institute released on November 21, 1992 for the Sega Genesis and, at the time, was the first Japanese game ever to have a simultaneous worldwide launch and popularized this concept at the time. It also become the fastest-selling game at the time, breaking video game records. It's also interesting to note that Sega wasn't quite sold on Sonic like you might think, which is interesting because one thing I felt while playing this game was "this feels more like the big deal that I expected Sonic the Hedgehog 1 to be".

The game does what a sequel should do. It realizes (most) of what ailed the original and improves upon it without taking anything away from everything else that made the original what it is. Now, I can't say I loved the original game, which I played just a few months back for the first time ever, but it was enjoyable and the 'speed' gimmick for Sonic certainly made the game stand out.

With Sonic 2, I have more positive, but somewhat mixed feelings still. It absolutely is one of the standout games of 1992 and deservedly called a classic and one of the greatest games of all time. Its gameplay is timeless in the sense that it is still very easy to pick up and play the game today. My complaint mainly is that I still didn't get quite as comfortable with Sonic's gimmick as I might have had I been introduced to him in my childhood.

My biggest complaint with the original for example was that way too often, speeding through a level was disrupted by countless obstacles, and you'd need to constantly jog back to gain momentum to run up a steep slope. The developers apparently recognized this and added a skill that allows Sonic to gain momentum for a second with a dash-like bump to his speed, which definitely helped a lot. Still, to activate it, you need to step back a bit to not be on an inclining area of the platform, then you need to stand still for a second, then press 'down' and then press the appropriate button to charge up the dash.

My other issue is that the obstacles could have been made much less frustrating. When you run up a slope and fall on top of any enemy, you are the one that takes damages and lose all your rings. Why? Because flying up in the air and falling on top of an enemy (or a power-up) is not registered as a 'jump'. To actually be able to hit them, you need to actually press the 'jump' button, which seems to me like it's the same thing and would have helped make the game a smoother experience. On the other hand, the game was called 'easy' at the time in its current state as well, and it certainly isn't the most difficult game I've played, so allowing for hits to be recognized without pressing 'jump' might have made things too easy. Though, with that being the case, you can see what my issue is with these game's design. It's not necessarily an objective flaw, just a subjective opinion on how it feels to play the game.

That said, this was certainly still plenty of fun. The soundtrack is as good as the first game, the levels are even more varied (the Casino zone is especially memorable) and there are more challenges to spice up the gameplay, like the underwater levels, trap platforms that you can fall through and the "half-pipe courses" that were added as a bonus stage to collect the Chaos Emeralds which turn Sonic into Super Sonic.

I really liked the design of most zones, though some felt a bit too busy. Some also include certain tubes that suck you up and shoot you around the level for a while, which takes control out of your hands and makes you wait for a bit, which quickly gets repetitive after a few Game Overs. But each level introduces its own challenges and themes, and there are many branching paths you can take to mix up each playthrough, which shows the high production values in this game compared to almost all competitors in the genre.

This game is also the debut of Tails, who has a very cute design but, unless you change it in the hidden "Options" menu, for some reason runs around with you even in 1P mode and just seems out of place.

Overall, I think most people will have a fun couple hours with this game at least and it has aged pretty well. I think even today, you'll get more or less the same out of it as people from 30 years ago did, especially if you're a kid, which isn't something that can be said about many games of this time period. Personally, I can't say these initial Sonic games suit what makes a video game a lot of fun for me because I find that the factor of 'speed' runs opposite to the countless obstacles that make you stop and play it more slowly, but I still had fun with it.

(This is the 79th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The survival horror genre is one of my favorites, and the genre has Alone in the Dark to thank for where it got its beginnings, at least in its game design and 3D perspective. Due to its age, I never played it, nor any of the other, less popular, entries in the series, but I am glad to say I got to do so today. It released in 1992 for the MS-DOS, was developed by Infogrames and while it shows its age obviously, I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I initially thought I would. This game will receive a remake in just a few months after this review is posted.

In Alone in the Dark, you pick one of two characters. Edward Carnby, a private investigator, or Emily Hartwood, the niece of Jeremy Hartwood. Jeremy Hartwood is the reason both of them are looking to visit the 'Derceto' mansion, as Jeremy Hartwood used to live there and had died of suicide shortly before the start of this game. Edward Carnby is tasked to find a piano for an antique dealer, while Emily Hartwood wants to find out more about Jeremy's suicide, which supposedly is explained through a secret note hidden somewhere near the piano.

I thought that was a nice touch to give both characters different motives to visit the mansion instead of giving the player a simple choice of male or female. I decided to pick Edward Carnby, who, if I may, looks like an absolute chad. His chicken walk up the stairs in the game's introductory cinematic had me immediately enamored with this character.

What the cinematic also depicts is the character you have chosen driving to the mansion and, as they enter it, the door closing behind them. Next, they walk up the stairs to the attic, from where you start your mission to escape. From here, if you choose Edward Carnby, that's pretty much your only goal. You're thinking "Shit, why did I accept this job?" and try to get out. If you're Emily Hartwood, you actually have an additional reason to be there, which is "Why did my uncle kill himself and was he really just insane or was there something else going on?". Sure enough, there is something going on in Derceto manor.

The game has the characters you pick hold a monologue describing their motives for going into the mansion, but once you are there, have no more lines. Instead, the story is told through books, parchments and notes, which are voice acted by Jeremy Hartwood (for his own letters) and other voices. Some books are simply there to add to the atmosphere of the game, while others include useful information for puzzle solving that are 1) optional to read, as you can solve the puzzles without doing so and 2) also add to the lore and atmosphere. The voice actor for Jeremy Hartwood does a fantastic job of expressing the voice of a man who is losing his mind and added a lot to the storytelling.

Ultimately, unearthing the secret of Derceto mansion is not as much of a big deal as the journey to get there, and the entire process is not as fleshed out as we have become used to through the power of bigger memory storage, but it was enough to keep me intrigued and the form of storytelling is unique enough for its time that I personally enjoyed it more than you probably would if you play it after having played more modern survival horror games recently.

This is even more true when it comes to the gameplay, though I doubt anyone today would say that the game's gameplay is 'good' either way.

This is a survival horror game that introduced all the elements you'll be familiar with by now. You explore the mansion and look for items that you will need to solve puzzles, heal yourself or engage in combat. The game has an inventory management system that is weight-based, meaning you can only hold items up to a certain weight that is not noted anywhere. Items like first-aid kits remain in your inventory even after you use them up, so you have to manually throw them away to make space, which is an odd system but something I can appreciate for the fact that this is something unique to this game.

The game's controls are tanky and the action you can use by pressing the Action button "Space" is something you select in the inventory screen. Your options are FIGHT, which allows you to get into a hilarious fighting stance while pressing Space and punching/kicking is done by pressing arrow keys simultaneously. OPEN/SEARCH lets you search cupboards, wardrobes and cabinets while you stand next to them, CLOSE lets you close doors, PUSH lets you push stuff to reveal hidden areas and later on, you get a JUMP action that is used for late-game platforming segments that put the tank of the controls to World of Tanks-esque levels.

Alone in the Dark has a pretty great way to start you off in the attic. As you are still trying to grasp the controls, an enemy jumps into the room through the window and attacks you. You can kill it with your fists but will take some damage. Just as you think the danger is averted, another enemy comes up from a trap door and you engage him as well. For new players, these will both surprise you and you'll 100% of the time have a suboptimal approach. Because see, the game quite clearly is OK with you avoiding its combat system as much as possible. I'd like to think they had mercy with players even back then, as they knew how unspectacular the combat was and is.

What you can do here is push the wardrobe in front of the window and a chest on top of the trap door, which lets you avoid the combat here altogether. Later on in the game, you can close doors to do the same, avoid a ghost lady by simply ignoring her and skip fights by placing certain items next to the enemies to distract them, like a gramophone or a pot of soup. You do have to engage in combat multiple times, but you will quickly realize that the best way to get through the game is to avoid it as much as possible. The game also only has very few healing items that you can find, adding credence to this.

The game is quite short overall, it took me a bit over 4 hours to beat it, but it could easily be done quicker, if you figure out some puzzles faster than I did. A lot of the time I lost though was due to the controls, especially in the last third of the game that included platforming sections, where it was very easy to fall into the water.

Additionally, to beat the game you will need to make sure that you don't fall into that water because it will wet your matchbox, which means you can't light your oil lamp, which means you can't see in the dark. The last major area before the final boss is a dark maze, so I had to replay over half an hour after realizing that I could simply not beat the game anymore.

The atmosphere this game creates these days can be described as creepy in a funny way. I can imagine certain parts of the game to have been scary at the time, and fighting two enemies in the first area while you still try to understand the controls certainly does a great job of having you on edge from the get-go, but at this point in time I can't say I was ever truly scared. The chicken-walk your character does up and down the stairs is hilarious, the male character has the ugliest face in video-game history, the enemies look like cartoons rather than actually scary monsters and whenever you hit an enemy, the game plays a smack sound akin to what it would sound like when you bitch-slap somebody, which in addition to your character's fighting pose had me in tears during the intended-to-be tense opening fights. The best way the game genuinely scares you I think is through the random deaths that can occur at every step and with its random use of its spooky sound effects, which make you think that enemies are nearby, even if they aren't.

Overall, I can definitely recommend the game to survival horror fans, because it is enjoyable enough to warrant an afternoon of your time. It pioneered an entire genre, so I think it's definitely worth being played. Outside of fans of the genre, fans of video game history will surely find some enjoyment with this for a little while, but I wouldn't say it's a good game by today's standards, though it does a solid job as a graphic adventure through its simple yet clever puzzles.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 7/10

Two characters to choose with different motivations, though this doesn't impact the playthrough

Story (Voice acted) told through books, notes and letters, with plenty of optional texts to dive into

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

Enjoyable mix of exploration, puzzle solving and combat

A lot of enemies to fight or avoid, but which constantly keep you on your toes

Inventory management that has its charm because it is done in a unique way for its time, but wouldn't be a lot of fun once more games start doing it

Tank controls that you do get used to, but which aren't that good. Running animation in particular often just doesn't trigger

Too many cheap deaths means you'll need to save often or be ready to replay many parts of the game

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

All text voice acted, but there is no in-game dialogue

Voice actor for Jeremy Hartwood has the best performance by far

Hilarious smacking sound when punching that didn't fit in with the atmosphere but still had me in tears from laughing

Sound effects are otherwise the scariest part about this game

Good soundtrack that fits the vibe of the game, accentuating both the mystery of the Manor and the horror within

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

A rare 3D game for its time with charmingly ugly polygon graphics

Many areas in the mansion varying in appearance

Some scary, ominous looking characters like the ghost lady and the dancing ghosts in the dance hall

Odd choice for the design of many enemies

ATMOSPHERE | 8/10

Confident that it was rather scary for its time, though not quite as scary anymore (I don't get easily scared though, so your experience may differ)

The game does a good job of creating an uneasy atmosphere and has many moments that tell you to expect the unexpected, which keeps you on edge

The incredibly ugly design of the male character, the smacking sound when kicking/punching and the cartoonish look of some enemies make the game much more light-hearted in feel than probably intended

CONTENT | 7/10

Will take 2 to 5 hours to beat

Not many puzzles in retrospect, but plenty of interesting ones

Many items in the game simply useless however

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

Some parts of the game can be approached in multiple ways

Game does a great job laying out the dangers in the game and you can feel gradually improving as you go

Attic part of the game is just superb game design

The basement and maze levels in the final third of the game were not so good

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10

The start of a whole genre as we would know it for years to come

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Two main characters, though will little difference in playstyle

You can tackle some parts a bit differently, as you gain more tricks

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Worked well at all times

OVERALL | 74/100

(This is the 78th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The way I first got into the Megami Tensei series is actually not too dissimilar to how many did over the past decade I would imagine. First, I got into the Persona series, which is a lot more approachable due to its social sim aspects and its bigger focus on story and characters. Persona 3 became one of my favorite games of all time, and I wanted more like it. Persona 4 was only available for the Vita at the time, Persona 5 didn't release yet and so, all I had was this series called Shin Megami Tensei. Apparently, it had the same combat system and I should probably start with Nocturne, which also was the only SMT game I was able to play on platforms I had available. I ended up playing Nocturne for about 25 hours before giving up. On the one hand, I was initially put off by the fact that gameplay played a much bigger role than story (though I wasn't promised otherwise) because I sucked at the battle system and finding the right demons to get past those incredibly challenging early bosses (Matador still gives me nightmares). That didn't change throughout my playthrough, but I got better and as combat was becoming less of a worry, I started to take the atmosphere in more and to this day, I get an itch from time to time to dive into a game with a hopeless, oppressive atmosphere because the type that SMT games manage to create remain unique in video games. Though I'd be lying, if I said I wasn't drawn to the Persona series more, and have only played SMT 3, 4 and a tiny bit of 5 so far, even though I know the franchise has lots of spinoffs as well.

So know I am doing this challenge where I go through all types of games chronologically, and I am in this great position where I am looking forward to appreciate the Megami Tensei series from its (near) beginnings, playing almost all the games fully blindly, from Soul Hackers to Digital Devil Saga to Strange Journey and everything in between, and I am happy to say I took a big step in that regard by beating Shin Megami Tensei.

Shin Megami Tensei is the third game in the Megami Tensei series, the first to be released on the Super Famicom and a remake of the second Megami Tensei game to indicate a new beginning for the franchise. It released on October 30, 1992 and unfortunately, did not release in the West until it got an iOS release in 2014, which doesn't even work anymore unless you have a phone using IOS 10 or a previous version. Luckily, there is a fan translation for this game, so you can still play it in English using an emulator. The game apparently didn't release in the West due to its heavy use of religious themes, which led Nintendo to reject a western release. The game released on a lot of other platforms as well (PC Engine, Mega-CD, GBA, iOS/Android), including the PlayStation, which also didn't get a Western release due to a similar veto by Sony.

Shin Megami Tensei is an RPG with first-person dungeon-crawling gameplay and demon-fusing as its core forms of gameplay. You play the Hero that you give a name of your choosing. You are also to give names to a 'Law Hero' and a 'Chaos Hero', as well as a 'Heroine'. The game plays in Tokyo, another factor that makes this game stand out amongst the sea of medieval fantasy JRPGs of the time. It starts in the year 199X. A scientist opened a portal to another world that leads to demons invading Tokyo. You get an email by a guy called Steven, who gives you access to a "demon summoning program", which allows you to recruit and summon them.

You discover that there are multiple factions fighting for control over Tokyo, and that you and your companions have a big role to play in the fate of humanity. First, you have the US military led by ambassador "Thorman", who decide to bring their forces to Tokyo when they hear the news about the demon invasion. They are opposed by Gotou and the "Japan Seld-Defense Forces", who are more keen on using demons. Then there is the resistance led by the 'Heroine', who are there to to prevent conflict between the other two factions. Gotou starts looking for any woman in Tokyo with the same name as this otherwise, to him, unknown 'Heroine', which leads to all women with her name captured. These actions lead to Gotou's faction being "Chaos" aligned. Thorman and the US military look to purge Tokyo from demons, which makes them "Law" aligned, however they do not fear using any methods to accomplish this, as they have atomic bombs aimed at Tokyo as the conflict waits to be escalated.

I don't want to take away much more than this, but understand that you can decide to side with either faction or no faction at all, which is one of multiple decisions in this game that will put you on the "Law", "Chaos" or "Neutral" route. This decision manifests itself in multiple ways. If you are either Law or Chaos, you 1) have to defeat all bosses with the other alignment, but not the one's that have the same as you (Neutral fights both), 2) can only summon demons, if they align with your alignment, 3) have to pay extra to use healing services of the opposing alignment and 4) get a different ending. This is pretty nice and adds plenty of replayability.

There is plenty of story to uncover in this game and it is well told, with the level of maturity present pretty much throughout that is unheard of for games of its time. It is downright depressing to see what happens to the main character and humanity as a whole in this game, and I love it.

Throughout the game, you travel the overworld of Tokyo and go from dungeon to dungeon. There are some optional dungeons you can take on and some dungeons are open to visits before you are supposed to go there, which is neat, but usually there is no point in doing so, and it feels like the only reason for why you can go there is because the devs wanted you to get lost.

Dungeons mostly are designed the same. They differ in size, but almost all have simple wall tiles with plain colors and no textures that you traverse in first-person. The same-y look can lead you to getting lost quite a few times, which means opening up the map a whole lot, which can only be done by going to the menu, entering another menu and selecting map, looking at the map, exiting the map, exiting the sub-menu and exiting the main menu. There is a patch to make the map accessible through one button press, but I didn't know this until beating the game, so I was left frustrated by this from time to time.

In dungeons, there are a lot of optional areas you can go to and optional enemies you can fight, which often drop items that you could have skipped otherwise. Your human party members all have levels and stats (Strength, Magic, Vitality, Speed etc.) that can level up as you gain XP. You can also gain 'Incense' items that let you increase stats by one as well, which are often hidden in dungeons at random points. Likewise, other items are hidden as well, like Memory Boards, which you need to give to a character called Steven (who looks like the late Stephen Hawking) to be able to hold more demons in your computer, something that is easily missable.

Your main task though is to find specific characters / items / bosses in dungeons to progress the story. As you navigate the dungeons, you are thrown into random encounters every few steps and engage in battle. First, a quick rant on the encounters. Forget what you know about random encounters in other retro JRPGs. This game is the KING of them. It is ridiculous. Every couple steps you take, a random encounter pops up. Escape, and you are thrown back a couple steps, only to take those steps forward again and get into another random encounter. Some dungeons have a lot of encounters, and some dungeons have even more. It is the #1 thing that keeps me from giving this an otherwise easy "Recommended" seal, because it is that ridiculous.

It helps though that the battle system is relatively fun. You can use physical attacks (sword, gun) with your main character, magic attacks with the other Hero characters and demons that you summon and the assortment of elemental, buff, debuff and ailment attacks that are common in the Megami Tensei series. This game doesn't have the Press-Turn system yet (that gets introduced with SMT III), which is a shame, but it was enjoyable regardless. That said, the high encounter rate and the low XP you get relative to the length of normal fights made me escape a lot of them. Especially around the halfway mark, you get so much XP from frequent boss fights that it didn't make much sense to me to put myself through all of these. Boss fights didn't turn out to be so bad either.

Demon negotiations and fusing is present in this game as well. Obviously, it is much more basic here then in future iterations, but it is just as fun to fuse demons here. Negotiations weren't quite as fun, as most would fail. There are few answers you can give and they appeared to be random, as the same demon would react differently to the same answer at times. Failing didn't always have any negative consequences, but often enough it would allow the demon to get the first hit in.

Overall, the game's loop is fun enough to push you through the game, at least in my opinion, and what will make you want to stick around is its incredible atmosphere and unique story presentation for its time. The Shin Megami Tensei feel is very much present in this game.

Apart from the atmosphere, the other highlight of this game to me was the soundtrack. The soundtrack is the best on the Super Famicom I've heard so far (by far) and likely among the best to ever be released for the console. What Tsukasa Masuko achieved on the Super Famicom is incredible. Pretty much all tracks did a great job of capturing the mood, the battle theme is kick-ass, the Ginza track is an instant classic and the boss theme always had me alert that serious shit was going down.

If you like the Shin Megami Tensei series and are OK with the lack of QoL features present (or not present) in retro RPGs, and if you think you can live with the high encounter rate (emulating allows you to fast-forward, which helps move things along quicker), then this is definitely a game I can recommend to you. Otherwise, probably not, though I myself am very glad to have played this and am looking very much forward to the sequel that released in 1994.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10

Engaging apocalyptic story with multiple memorable moments

Three different route options which impact the ending and your allegiance with characters

Fittingly depressing scenario that adds to the overall atmosphere

GAMEPLAY | 14/20

Addicting gameplay loop of exploring, battling and demon negotiation & fusing

Lots of strategic choice in battle

Navigating dungeons can become confusing

Encounter rate is RIDICULOUSLY high. Think of high it could be for the entire game, double that number, and that's how many encounters a dungeon has

Demon negotiations can become frustrating, as you fail most of the time

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 10/10

No voice acting

Easily one of the best soundtracks on the Super Famicom, simply amazing

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

Dark and atmospheric visual style

Lots of unique demons with varied designs

You spend most of the game staring at texture-less wall tiles

Dungeons graphically only distinguish themselves through color of the tiles

Easy to get lost / be forced to open the map due to sometimes confusing, similarly designed areas

Few animations, majority of battles and cut scenes play out with quasi-still sprites on-screen

ATMOSPHERE | 9/10

Incredibly atmospheric in terms of visual style, soundtrack and overall theme

Staring at pretty much the same wall tiles for most of the game does take its toll on immersion

CONTENT | 7/10

30-40 hours to beat

Many mandatory and more than a couple optional dungeons and bosses

Plenty of demons to fuse and battle

Most dungeons have no texture and look very similar

Encounter rate should have been lowered, even if that would have shaved off 5-10 hours off the game's overall length

The game makes up for that with three routes you can take, which adds replayability

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Leveling up to get stronger, face bigger challenges and be able to fuse better demons is a fun loop

Around the half-way mark, most enemy encounters can be skipped, as the time spent for the XP gain is not worth it due to the high number of bosses that give you a lot of XP

Encounter rate didn't have to be so high as a result

Some dungeons are hard to navigate and some have an annoying "fog" gimmick that makes this even worse

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10

Atlus imprinted their DNA into this game so well that it sticks out all these years later

The first SMT game I'd deem approachable for non-hardcore RPG fans

Very unique in terms of theme (religious themes, use of Norse mythology etc.) and demon fusion system compared to pretty much every RPG out there at the time, especially on the Super Famicom

REPLAYABILITY | 4/5

A ton of replayability thanks to three routes you can take

Your alignment impacts gameplay in a lot of ways as well

High encounter rate is the one problem that makes replaying the game less appealing

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Worked well at all times

OVERALL | 78/100

(This is the 77th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Super Star Wars is a run and gun developed by Sculptured Software and Lucas Arts for the SNES and released n November 1, 1992. It is based on the first ever Star Wars movie 'Star Wars' or 'Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope' as it's called now. There are over a dozen stages that take you through many familiar locations from the movie and (partly altered) scenes from the movie are used for cutscenes and overall storytelling.

I had not watched the first Star Wars movie before playing this, ever, so it was nice to get some motivation to finally do so. My conclusion: It's very good. The movie, not the game. The game itself is OK, not bad but not as good as I had hoped it would be.

Let's get this out of the way first. This is definitely on the upper half of licensed games in terms of quality. Whether it is in 2D platforming sequences, the vehicle stages (which tbh weren't that fun) or the trench run finale, all sections of this game are of high production quality relative to the majority of video games of its time. Animation work is also pretty solid, my favorite part being Luke Skywalker's hair flying in the wind as you run forward. Sprite work is good here too, though almost all enemies you face in this game are not from the actual movie.

In general, the game takes liberties in how it uses the movie framework. C3PO runs to Luke and tells him that R2D2 has been kidnapped, so you step into your landspeeder and destroy dozens of enemies on your to finding him. When did that happen in the movie? Or the bar fight scene, which is pretty much just Obi Wan and Han Solo shooting one guy each, but has you run through the bar with either Chewbacca or Luke and shooting another few dozen enemies. Or the 10+ boss fights, out of which I believe only the final one is actually somewhat part of the movie. As you do your trench run, Darth Vader's TIE Advanced appears in front of you, though is disposed of within seconds. This is all not a big deal, but worth noting.

One pretty poor design choice in my opinion that was made here is that enemies infinitely respawn for some reason. This was odd from the get-go, as you start the first level on a desert setting and run through sand dunes to get to the finish line and are constantly bombarded with enemies from all sides. Kill an enemy that is about 5 feet in front of you, and by the time you get to his position, he will have been replaced by a clone already. You're also constantly subjected to attacks and projectiles from all angles, and here is the second weird part about the game's design. Almost all enemies you kill drop a heart, which regenerates a little bit of your health. You might think that's excessive. On Easy mode, it kind of is. But you're also constantly hit and lose health, so it's kind of necessary to get this many healing items. How about you don't have enemies constantly respawn and rebalance things that way?

It doesn't help that projectiles are almost impossible to dodge because your character takes way too long to jump once you press the button, so you almost always get hit in your legs unless you know an attack is about to be made.

Again, to counteract this, you constantly get health refills and have a lot of health in general. You also get "Health Laser" power-ups, which extend your health bar, but only for the stage that you are on. Other power ups include a Darth Vader mask which gives you "2x points", a thermal detonator, a timer that adds to your overall time, a boost to your blaster and extra lives.

Most boss fights are pretty similar in how you approach them. You simply button mash and try avoid as many hits as possible with the limitations the controls set on you, and what happens in the end is that you simply try to deal more damage than you take to outpace the boss. Most boss fights are trivial, if you simply could actually dodge whenever you would press the jump button. Instead, you watch as slow projectiles hit your even slower character.

Overall, this was enjoyable enough thanks to its visual and auditory presentation. The characters you know, the orchestral sounds you're familiar with and the locations you revisit make for an experience that Star Wars fans at the time will have undoubtedly enjoyed, and it plays differently to most games, which I appreciate, but I can't say it was a good is at it could have been.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 4/10

- Story is of the first Star Wars movie with liberties taken here and there
- Story told after each stage and using images from the movie
- Overall, story takes a backseat to the gameplay though

GAMEPLAY | 11/20

- Controls have their highs and lows
- Varied levels, though landspeeder parts not that fun
- Platforming and Run and gunning enjoyable enough
- Many boss fights

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

- Voice acting limited to Obi Wan saying "Use the force, Luke"
- Sound design is really good, utilizing all the sounds you'll recognize from the movie
- Soundtrack faithful to the movie, so if you like that, you will like their SNES versions too

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

- Locations you visit are from the movie, look great
- Animation and sprite work is on a good level
- Nice special effects
- If you like the Star Wart art design, you'll enjoy this from a visual standpoint

ATMOSPHERE | 8/10

- Sounds, looks and plays like a Star Wars movie, putting you in the role of your favorite characters, letting you drive a landspeeder, wield a light saber and fly an X-Wing
- All faithfully created

CONTENT | 6/10

- Over a dozen stages with bosses at the end of each
- Landspeeder levels not that fun, boss fights feel similar after a while
- Three difficulty modes, but plenty of unfair deaths on Easy due to slow jumps/dodges, don't want to know how Hard feels like

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10

- Varied levels
- Poor choice to have enemies keep respawning
- Sometimes you can't see where you are jumping and fall to your death

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 7/10

- Overall a successful recreation of the first movie
- Pretty fun to wield a lightsaber

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

- You can play some levels with different characters, but for the most part, they play the same
- You can play on three difficulty levels and try to beat your high score

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

- Worked well at all times

OVERALL | 67/100

(This is the 76th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

I have now played 5 Spider-Man games starting in 1990 as part of this challenge I'm doing. The previous 4 are among the worst rated games I've played in my life, 2 of which I'd consider worst and second worst as part of this challenge for sure. Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six is another absolutely horrendous crap taken on everyone's favorite wall-crawler, and I am now one game away from having my own Sinister Six of shit Spider-Man video games of the early 90s. Awesome!

This game is another one by Bits Studios, which is slowly but surely turning into my most disliked development studio (I didn't even consider disliking one before this day) and I'm not at all surprised that they went out of business in 2008. It doesn't help that the publishers behind this are Acclaim Entertainment, who were behind two of the other 4 Spider-Man games I've played. They literally got the licensing rights just to slap his name on a video game cartridge, make no effort whatsoever to have the games even feel like Spider-Man games, and just profit from all those kids who love Spidey from the comics and are blinded by his appearance on both cover and title. These games were literal cash-grabs, and while I give this no thought again until the next, likely terrible, Spider-Man game I'll play (because I'll play them all damnit!), I just want to use this opportunity to say that Acclaim Entertainment can RIP where the P does not stand for peace, as they went bankrupt in 2004.

Now with that rant out of the way, let's get into why Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, which released in October 1992, is another brutally bad Spider-Man game. First off, let's go over the same points of criticism I can give you for all Bits Studios / LJN / Acclaim Entertainment Spider-Man games. Spidey looks like he is suffering from a disc prolapse in all of these games due to his weird hunched forward posture. His movement is odd at best, he controls like crap and he controls like crap. Oh I mentioned that twice? How did that happen?

The game, at least on the NES (the Game Gear version looks very slightly better), looks terrible. Bright green and bright red dominate the first stage, blinding red was used for one later stage for no good reason, sprites look bad, environments look (1) bland at best and (2) unrealistically designed and half the time, you have no idea if you are jumping on top of a platform that you can actually stand on or if it is supposed to be part of the background.

The soundtrack, which has some OK tracks, is the highlight of this game and that's not supposed to be a compliment. The lowlight on the other hand is the aforementioned controls. You can jump up. You can jump up higher if you hold down the jump button. You can also move while in air, at least that's something, but only in the direction that you're facing. That's somewhat more realistic, but stupid for a video game. You can sommersault forward as well, you can climb up walls and chains and you can shoot webs, if you have enough web fluid. Most of the time, you don't, like in some of the other Spider-Man games, and I ask once again, why make a Spider-Man game where you barely ever have any web fluid?

Spider-Man can do web-swinging here as well, but the controls here are so bad. You have to press B to jump, hold it and then press A to release the web and try to connect it to something. All this does though is let you swing left to right. You won't get up to a higher platform this way, limiting its use significantly. Letting go also doesn't carry you forward thanks to momentum, but instead drops you straight down. There were multiple occasions where I fell to a lower platform, and I literally could not bring myself back up by jumping or using the web. I suspect there are literal game-breaking pits that you can not fall into, if you ever want to get back up, but I suspect I won't find my answer to that officially because I doubt anyone cares enough about this game to share that anywhere on the internet, and I'm not gonna spend more than the 5 minutes I did unsuccessfully trying to get out.

Then there is the combat. You press A and do a punch. You double tap A and the punch animation gets cancelled for a jump-kick. This catapults you forward as well, so when you are near an enemy and frantically press A twice, you do the jump-kick instead of punching, which not only carries you past the enemy, but also happens above most enemies head, so you can't even touch them. Punches don't connect half the time unless you press it from the exact correct angle, and if you do connect, enemies blow up into a thousand pieces. That's right, Spider-Man kills in this game, and he does so non-stop. Try to find another studio that gives as few fucks about Spider-Man as Bits Studios, I dare you.

The story is explained in two sentences. Dr. Octopus wants to rule the world, so he calls on the Sinister Six, Electro, Mysterio, Hobgoblin, the Sandman, Vulture and himself. No one can stand in their way apparently, only Spider-Man. Done. Unlike the Game Boy games, especially the first one that was not developed by Bits Studios but rather by Rare, this game has 0 charm in its presentation. There are no cutscenes, no witty dialogue between Spidey and the villains, nothing. You finish a level, a simple image is showing the next boss with a sentence like "Sandman appears with a fist of fury" and off you go to the next level. It's just bad and shows how little Bits Studios cared when making this.

Finally, I want to touch upon the boss fights. My god. I didn't beat the game because the controls were doing my head in, but the first boss fight itself should tell you all you need to know about how much thought went into them. You fight Electro, but you actually don't. What I mean by that is that you stand there while Electro is simply chilling at the bottom of the screen and out of reach. Sometimes he decides to pay you a visit and come up, at which point you need to fight both him and the controls to somehow successfully jump-kick him, and while I did eventually just beat him on my first attempt, I can't say I have experienced boss fights that were much worse before. I suppose what the devs wanted to accomplish was for Electro to be out of range and shoot his lightning bolts at you, but it ends up looking like the game is bugged and he is flying around somewhere where he shouldn't. It doesn't help that he is literally under the platforms in a 2D game, which just would make no sense, but it doesn't matter because this all just sucked from start to finish.

To conclude, if you like to torture yourself with terrible Spider-Man games that aren't even bad in a funny sense, give these 1990 to 1992 Spider-Man games a try, but something tells me 1993 won't deliver different quality here. Oh wait, there is another game in 1992 already, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge... Why am I doing this to myself again?

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10

- Story is explained briefly in the manual and opening in-game screen
- Stages start with the boss introducing himself in one short, uninspired sentence
- Spider-Man kills dozens of enemies in this game and has no dialogue, rendering him a soulless guy in a red suit

GAMEPLAY | 4/20

- Controls are horrendous
- You rarely find web fluid and its uses are very limited
- Boss fights are just sad
- Spider-Man just feels like a name given to a random protagonist

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 4/10

- No voice acting
- Sound design ranges from OK to terrible. The sound of rats is haunting, especially when you are stuck next to them trying to get a handle of these darn controls
- Soundtrack is OK, with at least some tracks that don't make me want to turn the sound off completely

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 2/10

- Graphics are straight up ugly
- Spider-Man looks like an old guy with back problems and all sprites look bad
- Why did they choose to go with super-bright green and red colors? And did their little children draw the backgrounds?

ATMOSPHERE | 2/10

- Locations just feel like random places that have no realistic properties
- The Spider-Man license is also noticeable thanks to the enemies names, the ugly portrayal of Spider-Man and his web-swinging ability

CONTENT | 1/10

- 6 bosses with their own levels with multiple stages
- The game's biggest offense is that it exists in the first place
- None of the content is fun to engage with

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 2/10

- I guess there is some visual variety at places, even if it is hideous
- There are walls placed that you can crawl, crates in mid-air that you can web-swing off of I suppose
- I can literally not come up with another quarter-compliment

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 1/10

- This is the worst kind of your typical NES platformer
- I imagine this is what gaming would look like if Nintendo didn't save the industry
- This game is so conceptually bad that they didn't even bother to make use of the Spider-Man licence

REPLAYABILITY | 1/5

- Zero replay value

PLAYABILITY | 3/5

- The controls make this nearly unplayable at times
- I literally could not get out of certain holes because I couldn't jump far enough and the web-swinging ability just did not allow me to reach a higher platform

OVERALL | 21/100

Congratulations to Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, which just became the worst-rated game of this challenge, beating out a Spider-Man game, which had previously beaten a different Spider-Man game. Man, the video game industry did a number on this guy. Actually, it mainly was LJN / Acclaim Entertainment published games that did the deed.

(This is the 75th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

I love the Super Mario games, but I am not a fan of almost all Game Boy titles I have played in the past year. That's to be expected considering the handheld's limitations and the fact it loses its charm when emulated on a monitor, but based on this, you can maybe imagine how my expectations were both high and low for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. Its the sequel to Super Mario Land 1, which itself was the start of the Game Boy Mario platforming series. After Super Mario Land 2, Nintendo did not release a new mainline Mario platformer for a handheld system until New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS in 2006 (!) and didn't follow up on that until 2011 (!) with Super Mario 3D Land. However, Super Mario Land itself did get continued without Mario, and the name of the third game ended up being Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, a character which was first introduced in Super Mario Land 2. Why did this game get another sequel? Simple.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins sold over 10 million copies over its lifetime and became the fifth best selling game for the Game Boy (Color), only to be beaten by the first Super Mario Land, Tetris and two sets of Pokémon games. It sold twice as much as the 6th placed game, Dr. Mario.

This game is a 2D platformer in the vein of the home system games. It improves significantly over the original, which released in 1989, while this game in particular released on October 21, 1992. The original had somewhat odd looking and very small sprites, bland environments and very little variety in gameplay. Super Mario Land 2 meanwhile feels like it was made for a different handheld due to how many more features it manages to pack into a Game Boy cartridge.

First up, sprites are a lot bigger. In general, you see a lot less of a level, but what you do see ends up being much more visibly pleasing as a result. Some games, like the Mega Man series on Game Boy, don't work this way because they are usually much more difficult and when you have a small screen like this, enemies showing up at the edge of the screen being right next to you can become a problem. In Mario, that didn't feel like an issue to me because the difficulty felt pleasant at all times. In Mega Man: Dr Wily's Revenge on the other hand, you are much more susceptible to unfair hits because you just can't react that quickly.

Second, environments look much more varied. Instead of same-y settings, the game is divided into six zones with their own themes. So you end up having multiple basic "tree" levels that you will remember from the opening levels of Super Mario World, but you also have water levels, the Mario zone with its moving floors and lego levels (here, what look like Lego bricks are actually N&B blocks from Nintendo which competed against Lego in the 60s and 70s) and there is even a Space Zone where you explore the moon and where Mario changes into a spacesuit. It's all done on a pretty basic level of course, since this is a Game Boy game whichever way you slice it, but presentation and variety does a lot to keep things fresh and interesting, and ends up putting this game into 'Recommended' territory for me.

To conclude, here is a summary of my thoughts on each area of the game.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS |3/10

- Story is explained in the manual. Wario took control of Mario's castle in Mario Land. That's it.
- Wario is a new character in the Super Mario franchise at the time of this game's release. This fact plus keeping things consistent with the enemies is where the game gets the points from me
- There is a commercial on YT for this game that introduces Wario. Very much worth checking out

GAMEPLAY | 15/20

- Great controls for the most part, but sometimes they can feel a bit slippery
- Next to your typical power-ups, there is a new one, the "Carrot", which is fun to use
- Well-balanced in terms of difficulty
- Plenty of variety, such as the water levels, the space levels and the Mario zone levels

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

- No voice acting
- You'll instantly be familiar with the sound effects. As per usual, they are fantastic
- Good soundtrack, but no memorable tracks and not as good as for other Mario platformers (my favorites: Athletic, Tree Top and Star Maze)

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

- Graphics on the poorer side with the industry now firmly in the 16-bit era
- Game makes up for the Game Boy's limitations through presentation
- Varied locations make for a pleasant experience for the eyes, unlike the original Super Mario Land

ATMOSPHERE | 8/10

- Great overworld with 6 unique zones
- Plays and feels like a typical Mario platformer

CONTENT | 8/10

- 6 zones with multiple stages on each
- A few extra optional stages
- Bonus levels for ringing bell at the end of each stage
- High quality and varied content

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10

- The game allows you to choose in which order you want to tackle the zones
- The zones have variety in style and challenge
- Difficulty is fair, stages never felt like they were made extra difficult just to pad playtime

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

- Conceptually not different from the home console Mario platformers
- Added a couple new features like the Carrot power-up and balloons that you can ride into the 'sky'
- New iconic character introduced
- Probably did as much as they could with the Game Boy's limitations

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

- Main replay value comes from beating your high scores
- You can find a few extra secrets

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

- Worked well at all times

OVERALL | 70/100

(This is the 74th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Back in 1992, many games led to controversy in the US regarding their violent and sexual content. Because see, "film like rating systems" did not exist in the games industry until that point, and societal pressure was not there to create something like that until this fateful year and the year after it, where we saw the release of games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and, yes, Night Trap.

Night Trap released on October 15, 1992, was developed by Digital Pictures and is an FMV (full-motion video) game. Teenagers are having a sleepover at a mansion that is infested with vampires, and you, the player, watch surveillance footage of eight rooms in the house and partake in a hundred QTEs to activate traps around the house whenever these bad guys trigger them. You can fail a few times, but fail too often or fail at critical moments and certain characters will die.

Production values here are really poor, and there is never any actual blood seen in the game, though a drill-like device pouring red liquid out of a victim through a tube is the most controversial moment you will find here. The victim doesn't die, it continues on screaming and struggling to get out while she is getting carried out of the room, but it was a moment like this that had Night Trap added to a congressional hearing in 1993 alongside Mortal Kombat and Doom.

The result of this hearing? The creation of the ESRB, a self-regulatory organization that assigns ratings to video games in North America to this day.

Night Trap received a 25th anniversary edition in 2017 and can be played on PS4, PS Vita, PC and the Switch these days. Its ESRB rating? T for Teens...

GAMEPLAY | 14/20

Usually with my reviews, I talk about the story first, but I think this game should be discussed the other way round for clarity. As explained, this game is mainly a QTE game. Robbers (vampires) sneak around one of the eight rooms, sometimes on their own, sometimes in pairs. As soon as they reach a platform with a trap, a bar will turn from green to red, which is your cue to click on the screen. This activates the trap and a short clip of them being dropped into the floor, engulfed by a bookshelf or thrown out of the window is played, among others. During all of this, the main characters walk around the house and play out the story, at first oblivious to the dozens of robbers walking around the house.

What makes this game difficult are three things. First, at times, robbers show up on two of the eight screens. The traps don't activate after a set amount of time that they are on the screen. One trap might take 10 seconds to trigger for one robber, the other might just take 3 seconds to trigger it, meaning you might find yourself waiting to activate a trap on the wrong screen, therefore missing the trigger on the other. The game keeps a counter running of "Possible captures" and how many you actually captured. Capture too few and the game is over, requiring you to restart from the beginning unless you reach a checkpoint halfway through.

Second, the story is cheesy as hell but you of course don't know that at first, and when big moments happen, you find yourself suspensefully watching and missing out on the robbers sneaking through other screens in the meantime. Not letting this happen is one part of the challenge.

Finally, you don't just have to wait for a red light for your cue. That would be too simple. There is an additional colored code that you need to have selected for the triggers to work. There is orange, red, green, blue, yellow and purple to choose from. I believe there are 4 or 5 times during the game where the color changes. The only way to know which color you need to be on next is by listening to the characters. At very specific times in the story, they will talk to each other and say things they "I will change the code to green". If you miss this, all you can do at this point is just guess, which usually means you will miss a few traps.

I've heard plenty of things about this game since the release of its anniversary edition in 2017. A lot of it was and is negative. Having played this game myself, unbothered by the controversy and humored by its cheesy story and low production values, I don't really understand the hate. Is it a great game? Objectively, no. Is it bereft of fun? Absolutely not. I played this solo, but I can only imagine how hilarious this would have been had I played it with friends, which I plan on doing some time in the near future for sure.

The gameplay is extremely simple, but challenging and quite simply fun. Perception, quickness and a good memory will be the only skills you need in this game, and I really enjoyed how that translated. My only critique here would be that having to constantly check for robbers means you will not catch a lot of the story. Though I will go over that in the next part of this review.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10

The story in this game is cheesy, cringeworthy, trashy and plain bad. Let's get that out of the way first. As someone who can enjoy low production values from time to time though, I had my fun with it. You are part of the SCAT (Sega Control Attack Team for the Sega CD version, Special Control Attack Team for the others), which was alerted to the disappearance of teenagers at the Martin winery estate. As the game starts, a new group of teenagers are invited over to this place.

The SCAT team gives you the overseer role and tasks you with using the traps around the house on any suspicious people roaming about, whilst the overall goal is to keep track of the three teenagers and their two parents as they have a party with a suspected group of victims.

The game takes place in one continouus loop of roughly 25 to 30 minutes on 8 screens, each depicting a different area of the house. As you take care of the robbers/burglars/vampires, you also can simply switch to the screens with the main characters and listen in on their conversations. The problem is that most of the time, robbers are walking around, which means you can rarely listen to them for more than a few seconds uninterrupted. This has one good and one pretty bad point to it.

First, the good. If you fail to trap enough robbers, the game is over and you restart. This happened to me a few times, and with each run, I caught different conversations and learned more about the game's story, which mainly included hints given at the true nature of the hosts.

The bad is that the game's design pretty much doesn't allow you to catch all of the story unless you do dozens of playthroughs. Being stubborn and saying "I'll just listen for this next playthrough" doesn't work, because if you don't spend the time catching robbers, you get the Game Over screen after just a couple minutes. Personally, this wasn't a big deal to me because you don't end up missing much, the story isn't good and the gameplay was the fun part to me here either way, but how you feel about all this will depend on how OK you are with admittedly trashy games like this, which I personally think have their own charm, especially if the gameplay itself is, to this day, pretty unique.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

This is an FMV game. An interactive movie. So while the acting wasn't great, voice acting WAS present here, which in itself is unique for this time. There isn't much of a soundtrack here. Most of what you will hear comes from a specific part of the game where the group of teenagers start singing. There are some horror themes that play whenever you are in a room with robbers though, which added something I'll call "funny tension" because they just walk in the weirdest way possible.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10

Hard to rate this part considering that this is an interactive movie. I'm giving it a 7 for the following reasons. First, I'm rating the setting of the game and the style of it all. It certainly has that 90s feel to it and is charmfully trashy. Second, the costume design and the walk/crawl mix that the robbers do is hilarious. Finally, the UI, which looks different depending on the version you play but succeeds in giving you a clear overview. Here I can only recommend going for the 25th anniversary edition at this point though, since that one actually has the screens at the bottom show what's going on in each room, while older versions only had a stock image displayed and made you memorize the exact timing and locations of when and where you would find the robbers.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 7/10

If the atmosphere this game was going for was of the "comedy horror" genre, this works. You are part of the SCAT team, and you have sent a teenage girl in to aid you, so sometimes you will find her talking into the cameras and addressing you that way, which is a nice touch.

As for the suspects, they have an ominous presence to them in the way they walk and talk, they drink suspicious red liquid and there are some teases of their true nature every couple minutes which was pretty neat.

The SCAT team pulling the plug on you when you would let too many robbers pass by was also a nice touch, instead of getting a simple GAME OVER screen.

CONTENT | 7/10

There are 100 captures to be done in this game. If you want to try and get all of them, you can play this game for hours. In terms of your first full playthrough, you can expect 1 to 2 hours of gameplay. It's not much, but it's definitely the perfect amount for a game like this. That said, there isn't anything else to it besides the mouse clicking during appropriate times, so this game is what it is.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10

You have eight rooms to observe and need to do so with constant focus. Sometimes, the game cleverly takes your focus from you without you noticing, and half a dozen robbers scroll by before you notice. I found this to be a well designed game on that front on most levels, apart from the fact that the story cannot really be properly observed due to the constant interruptions.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10

This game was partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB, it is one of the most well-known FMV games of all time and it has the type of gameplay that (almost?) no other game has ever done. I can't say that a series of games like this would work, but for a one-time thing, this was a great concept.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

Replay value comes from all those extra story bits you'll get to see that you probably missed in earlier runs and from trying to capture all robbers.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 67/100

If you are OK with the low production values, the cheesiness and the one-dimensional gameplay, there is a good chance that you will have a fun 1 or 2 hours with this game. Personally, I had a blast, and I didn't expect that based on all the negative things I had heard about it.

(This is the 73rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

When you think of a video game that is all presentation and no gameplay, Splatterhouse 2 is a good retro example to give. Its known for its gory, grotesque style as you walk the halls and punch, kick and smash enemies into pieces. Does doing that equate to fun though? Not really. Splatterhouse 2 was developed by Now Production and released in July 1992. It's similar in gameplay to the original Splatterhouse, and was followed up Splatterhouse 3 as well as a Splatterhouse remake in 2010.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

You contol a character called Rick. The game follows on the story of the first Splatterhouse game. I'm unfamiliar with that game, but the manual makes things relatively clear. The mask talks to you, and tells you that you can still save Jennifer, so you must go to some house to do so. An atmospheric introductory scroll through an onimous field alongside lines of dialogue by the mask talking to you set the tone. With that, the game starts.

Each stage is introduced with a still image showing the stage number you are now on and a short comment by the mask on the next location. That's pretty much it in terms of story presentation.

GAMEPLAY | 7/20

Where to start? I guess I should first mention that no, this game is not fun to play. First, there is the fact that you simply don't have much you can do here. You can punch, kick, jump and use melee weapons to smash.

Second, everything you do is very slow. Fittingly, you can not sprint, just walk or 'strudge' as I would call it. This applies to dodging as well. Enemies pretty quickly start jumping over you, and you simply don't have the agility to dodge these jumps unless you know you are coming and preemptively are positioning yourself appropriately. That sucks.

Rick's agility generally sucks out the enjoyment I could have had with this game. You need to get close enough to enemies to punch them, but this means you are putting yourself in harm's way with no reliable way to dodge, so a lot of times, you take an unfair hit. I wouldn't even call it a hit, it's a mere touch. Then there are all these smaller enemies, which can easily find a way to jump at you from angles that you cannot reliably attack, meaning with a standing punch or a jumping kick. Instead, they will find the inbetween position to attack from sometimes, like the piranhas jumping out of the water in one early stage.

Boss fights are OK and certainly the highlight of this game alongside its atmosphere, but they are a minor part of the game. The major part of the game is simply not fun.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

No voice acting. The soundtrack fits the theme of the game. I can't say I loved it or that it was memorable, but it was certainly fitting.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 7/10

Splatterhouse 2 looks pretty good, but mostly due to its graphical presentation. Few games on the SNES look quite like this. The animations bring it all home. For example, there is one thing the game does in its presentation that I love, which is that when you use a melee weapon against an enemy, you either strike them from above and squish them into the ground or you hit them from the side and leave them a gooey mess on a wall.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10

Definitely the best part about this game. The game does a great job with its atmosphere. It all starts with the introductory cutscene, continues with the design of each stage and culminates with the boss fights, which are all uniquely positively disgusting.

CONTENT | 3/10

The game takes less an hour to beat, once you know what you are doing. It takes multiple hours to beat if you're a new player, and most of it is spent frustrated by the game's controls. There is little variety in gameplay, so even with that short runtime, it overstood its welcome.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

Strudge through levels, maybe do a little bit of platforming by jumping over obstacles, and punch your way slowly through enemies. Get hit unfairly most of the time because of the enemy's attack patterns and reach, and there you go. You got pretty frustrating levels in your game. The saving grace here is the presentation of the boss fights at the end of each stage.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10

You can praise the game a bit for its atmosphere and grotesque presentation, an inspiration which is felt in well-presented boss fights as well. However, from a gameplay standpoint, it's a below average 2D beat 'em up.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

Apart from trying to beat your high score, there is no replay value here.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 51/100

Splatterhouse 2 is above average in presentation, below average in gameplay. Depending on what you favor, your experience may differ, but assuming that most gamers want fun gameplay, I'd make a guess and say you won't enjoy this game.

(This is the 72nd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis by LucasArts (Release Date: June 1, 1992) is among the most popular classic point and click adventures out there. Ask the majority of adventure game and Indiana Jones fans who have played this, and you will receive praise for the game and how true it stays to the Indiana Jones franchise. As someone who enjoys his fair share of adventure games but didn't grow up with the classic ones, and as someone who watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time a couple days ago in preparation of playing this game, I have mixed feelings.

While I invite you to read on to find out my thoughts, let me share some facts about the game that should entice you to play the game regardless, instead of reading my opinion as if it were the gospel. Indiana Jones received multiple "Best Adventure Game of the Year" awards in 1992. Granted, it wasn't the most packed year for the genre, but the game brought home some GOTY awards too. It sold over a million copies by 2009, which may not sound like a whole lot, but was one of the most successful graphic adventure games for LucasArts.

MobyGames has it at 8.2/10, reviews at the time had the game at roughly 9/10 on average so, needless to say, this was a critical success as well.

That said, here is my review on the game and on why I didn't gell with it quite like I would have liked.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 6/10

You play the eponymous Indiana Jones in 1939 and at the start of the game, look for some small statue in university archives for a visitor that goes by the name "Mr. Smith". When you deliver it to him, he steals the statue and the "bead" that was inside it. As he escapes through the window, you manage to pull out his jacket and inside find his ID. His real name is Klaus Kerner, a Nazi agent. Turns out, the Nazis are looking for the lost city of Atlantis and the power it bears.

A magazine article from the past that was also in the Nazi's jacket has a picture of Indiana Jones and also of a woman called Sophia Hapgood, who joined Jones on an expedition to Iceland, where she stole artifacts that Kerner is now after. This prompts Indy to find her, as he fears Kerner will go after her soon. When he arrives at her location, Kerner indeed already took off with some Atlantean artifacts she had in her office. The most important artifact, a necklace, is still on Sophia's person though, which has the spirit of the Atlantean king Nur-Ab-Sal within. The spirit then gives Sophia a message, telling her how to find the lost city of Atlantis.

So now you're off to find Atlantis, discover the hidden power and make sure the Nazis don't get their hands on it to use it for world domination.

Having watched Raiders of the Lost Ark only, this general plot idea seems immediately familiar. 1930's, long lost powerful treasure, Nazis, a woman by Indy's side with a medaillon to help find the way, a trip down the Mediterranean, it all follows that formula. If you want to please a fanbase, that's certainly the way to go.

Through your journey, there are some small homages to the movie franchise, but from what I can tell, it doesn't appear to include any characters from the movies. The characters that are introduced here pretty much exclusively are "nuts" as Indy so lovingly puts it, reminding you of LucasArts witty humor rather than Indiana Jones more, mostly, grounded one. These characters talk funny, have seemingly lost their marbles or make some dumb suggestions (one character gives you a mask for free, but will later trade you something for it). Apart from them though, the presentation is generally much more serious than all LucasArts games I've been subjected to over the years. Personally, I'm more at home with the humorous point and click adventures, and this game felt like it couldn't decide between that and between the Indiana Jones 'feel'. Having the main character and Sophia take themselves more seriously most of the time than, say, Guybrush Threepwood, Manny from Grim Fandango or those three brains from Day of the Tentacle, is something I didn't particularly enjoy in the "talkie" version I played, because the lines coupled with the deadpan voice acting just didn't work for me, especially on Indy's part.

The plot itself works because it is more or less what you would expect from an Indiana Jones plot, but it's predictable and slow-paced due to both the nature of this being a puzzle game and puzzles being so heavy on backtracking and, especially in the latter half, on mazes.

One thing I did really like though is that you have multiple approaches you can take in this game. For example, in one part, you can manage to get through it by doing a dialogue 'puzzle' or, if you don't want to or fail that puzzle, you can do an object puzzle instead, both of which get the job done equally.

There is also a point where you can decide to bring Sophia with you for the rest of the game or go through it on your own. There are multiple path names for this choice you make. Bringing her along is the Team path, which has different puzzles and solutions, optional and non-optional dialogue that can provide somewhat entertaining banter from time to time and a "hint system" that allows you to ask her what the next course of action should be. I found this to be useless though, since she only states the obvious. Going solo is called the "Wits" path and while I didn't take it, it comes with many differences, such as different puzzles and different characters to meet as a result. There is also a "Fists Path" according to the game's wiki, but I personally did not figure out how to choose that option. Apparently, this leads to fewer puzzles and more action / fighting scenes.

Finally, this game has multiple good and bad endings, which I think is very nice. Overall though, due to the pacing, the one-dimensional characters and the flat voice acting for Indiana Jones in particular, I can't say I really enjoyed my time with this games story for most of its duration.

GAMEPLAY | 9/20

LucasArts point and click games almost all have the same "Verb Interface" that you use to 'Pick Up, 'Use' or 'Open' items, among several other options. You explore your surroundings to pick up items, to use them on other interactable items and to talk to people. There are puzzles in this game that need to be solved by using the items you find or by picking the right options in dialogue.

Games like this are hit and miss in terms of the puzzles that you need to solve. They don't shy away from having solutions be contrived from time to time, or for input to be needlessly specific at times. For example, at one point, you need to point a surveyor's instrument on a right and left side "horn". That horn has several points you can line the instrument up to. You'd think that the solution would trigger whether you place the line on the left, the right, the middle, the middle-left or middle-right of this relatively wide object. But no, you need to place it at the corner of it to trigger "this is the right side horn" line and solution instead of the "this is dirt" line. It's things like this that I will always find annoying about classic graphic adventures, but it's something I can deal with overall.

What made me resort to a guide to lead me to the finish line though was the overuse of mazes throughout the game's second half. The cave you explore in Crete is a labyrinth and Atlantis has multiple literal and non-literal labyrinth-like parts as well. Each include a bunch of puzzles that had me go mad at one point because it's constantly walking slowly from one point to another, picking up tons of items and having tons of options as to where to put them, and having to constantly backtrack back and forth. It was not fun at all and had me yawn uncontrollably, especially in Atlantis, which was supposed to be this mystical place that the game was leading up to.

There are also a few sections where you need to control things, like a hot air balloon or a submarine. Imagine Mass Effect's Mako controls but 90.000 times worse, especially on the submarine. Instead of having these epic Indiana Jones-like set pieces, all I had was fights with controls, which often just killed the mood for me.

I can't say this was a fun graphic adventure to play from a gameplay perspective (the basic gameplay loop of puzzle-solving itself is generally fun though), which is something I can only say about this LucasArts adventure so far. I played Secret of Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle and Loom before this.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10

Voice acting exists in the talkie versions, which came out a year or so after the initial release. While the voice acting was not bad overall, I can't say I gelled with the voice acting done for Indiana Jones. For most side characters, voice acting certainly was a plus versus no voice acting at all.

The soundtrack consists of the main Indiana Jones theme of course, plus an assortment of tracks that fit the locations this game plays in or the events that occur rather well. I wouldn't say it's fantastic, just a good adventure game soundtrack.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

The game has an art style befitting Indiana Jones, but what I liked the most about this game in terms of its graphical presentation is the animations. Sophia letting her hair down, Kerner brushing through his, the struggle between Kerner and Indiana Jones at the start of the game, it looks pretty clean and adds a lot of charm.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10

This game could have used more disgusting caves, but overall, this certainly has Indiana Jones written all over it, from the graphics to the storyline. If you're a big Indiana Jones fan, you should definitely play this.

CONTENT | 5/10

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is 10 hours long, which is quite long for a LucasArts adventure game. Unfortunately, I found the second half dragged way too much, so I can't say I found all 10 hours to be a lot of fun.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10

I have a hard time deciding how to rate this. On the one hand, I enjoy the fact that there are three routes with their own, distinct puzzles. On the other, second half of the game, at least in the Team path, is just chock full of mazes that didn't accomplish anything but bring the yawns out of me. I didn't find it fun and actually quite bad to have the same style of levels multiple times in a row like that.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10

This is a graphic adventure in the same style as the others that LucasArts developed before it. The only innovation I've noticed here is 1) the control schemes for the hot air balloon and the submarine, which was terrible and 2) the addition of multiple paths and endings, which was a really nice addition.

REPLAYABILITY | 5/5

There are three routes to take and multiple endings, so this game has quite a bit of replayability for its time. These routes also come with their own unique puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty, which is very commendable, even if I personally didn't enjoy the game enough to care about replaying it.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times. The beginning of the game had a weird issue for me though. You are supposed to find a small statue. While checking out the controls, I clicked both the left and right mouse button at the same time, which led to the whole introduction to be skipped. Indy had found the statue on his own and the game jumped to the scene where he gives it to "Mr. Smith". Weird.

OVERALL | 65/100

While the review has been more negative than I would have thought before starting this, I have to praise the game for the amount of freedom it offers the player in choosing which paths to take, and the difference that makes. The general gameplay loop of brainteasing puzzles is also enjoyable on some level still, but personally I didn't enjoy the level design in the second half and the tone of the game quite as much as I did previous LucasArts graphic adventures.

(This is the 71st game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

(This is the 70th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

The FPS genre and id Software is like the Soulslike genre and From Software. It's like the roguelike genre and Rogue. Wolfenstein 3D would kickstart a whole genre of video games that would try to replicate its (and Doom's) success over years to come from this point forward using the exact same style that was pioneered right here, with Hovertank and Catacomb 3D acting as test subjects preceeding it.

With Wolfenstein 3D, id Software improved upon their 3D engine and built a full-scale video game with multiple episodes, a small yet complete story and fast-paced shooting action that ended up being revolutionary, though not perfect. In today's review I'm going to go over my thoughts, which are both positive and negative, but mainly it's a celebration of an achievement that is pretty much the reason for why I decided to do this challenge in the first place.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

You are BJ Blazkowicz, an American spy of Polish descent infiltrating the Nazi base looking for plans for the Operation "Eisenfaust" (blueprint for building a "perfect" army) and ultimately destroying the Nazi regime. You are captured and imprisoned at Castle Wolfenstein at the start of the game and have to shoot your way out and ultimately make your way to Hitler's bunker and take him out in what makes the first of two trilogies. After releasing the first trilogy, id Software took a few months to create another trilogy working as a prequel to the first one. From a story perspective, you will be satisfied after playing the first trilogy though.

The story is explained in the manual and at the end of each of the three episodes of a trilogy. There isn't much else to it. BJ can be seen holding a minigun on the cover for the game, screaming as he stands over a dead Nazi soldier. You can also see his face throughout the game, as his eyes glean left and right to give an impression that he is actively checking the corridors for enemies. Finally, you see him jump into the exit of an Episode and shout in jubilation whilst doing so. I love BJ Blazkowicz from my time playing Wolfenstein The New Order, but he is a killing machine exclusively in this game, with no heart nor desires other than mowing down Nazis.

Hitler is the final boss, as mentioned, and is in a robotic suit when you finally meet him. When you kill him, he says "Eva, auf Wiedersehen", which is one of many things bosses and all enemies shout in this game. I didn't understand some of it even though I'm German, for example I have no idea what the normal soldiers are saying when they spot you, but having these characters express certain things or simply speak German is a pretty big deal at the time and definitely adds to the shock value that this game provided during its release.

GAMEPLAY | 13/20

This game is a first-person shooter. It revolutionized the entire genre and is called the "grandfather of FPS games". Before this, you had Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D from id Software, which used prototypes of the eventual Wolfenstein 3D engine and were short tech demo-type games that id made as part of their contract with Softdisk, but Wolfenstein was going to be their first big attempt at making a full-scale video game of this type.

PC's were not equipped to play graphically 'demanding' games from a first-person perspective at this time, so developers didn't attempt something like this. John Carmack, the programmer of the engine ended up figuring out though how to make this game run well by both making wall tiles all identically large to reduce the complexity of what the PC would have to display and by only making the PC calculate visible surfaces at a time instead of a whole map.

It was John Romero who then came up with the idea to make this a "loud" and "cool" fast-paced action game, and there you have it.

The end result is what we call today the world's first boomer shooter with handguns. You strafe around maze-like levels to kill enemies like Nazi soldiers of different types, hounddogs, bats and zombies, you look for keys to unlock your way out of the floor you're on, and you make your way up continously through three total Nazi dungeons with 9 floors each to ultimately kill Hitler. The end result is indeed a fun Arcade-like shooter that ... is not as bloody and gruesome as parents from 1992 would make you believe. Open a door and a Nazi will stand there. Shoot him and a bit of blood will come out. Even if you shoot all of them on a given floor, barely a few percent of the entirety of that floor will be covered with them and their blood. The floors themselves don't look brutal, gruesome or scary either. I guess it's called being desensitized by what we have seen since? But it could also be that it's genuinely funny to look back and think that this was such a horrific thing to expose gamers to when movies would depict a billion times more horrific scenes annually. It would be useful to note here that games were not seen as art by not only many individual humans inofficially, but also officially by, for example, the German legislation.

Back to the gameplay. After a couple hours, does it get repetitive? Sure. There are only four weapons in this game that I ever found, and the mini- and handguns pretty much become useless once you find the submachine gun, because all weapons share ammunition, so the single-fire handgun is slower than the SMG and the mini-gun wastes too many bullets needlessly unless you have a group of 3+ enemies standing next to each other, which doesn't happen all that often.

The worst part about this game from a gameplay perspective for me was the secret-finding. This game has secret doors just like Catacomb 3D had, but in that game, you would just shoot magic projectiles and it would cover a few tiles and you would figure out quicker if random tile #879 had a secret behind it. In this game, secrets are also hidden behind random secret tiles. Unfortunately, since this could be any tile and you need to push SPACE into it instead of shooting, this means you are constantly projected to that horrific buzzing sound that plays when pressing SPACE. It's somewhat tolerable when you press it separately for each tile, but progress this way is slow. Best thing to do is hold SPACE and strafe along an entire wall, but here is where you get that terrible sound penetrating your ears constantly, and it is literally so bad that I had to stop at one point because of a headache I got from it. I enjoy secrets in games like this, but not when finding them means subjecting yourself to these horrors.

The worst part is that for the boss fights, you are pretty much forced to figure out where the secret doors are. This is OK once you initially find them, but until you do, you just keep pressing SPACE everywhere until something opens up. These doors have weapons, ammo and health packs in them, which you will need, because once you die to a boss once, you only spawn with a handgun and 8 rounds of ammo, which means that without these secret doors, you simply cannot beat a boss.

Overall, I had a fun few hours with this game minus the headache. I can tell how this game was seen as revolutionary, and with only half a year of development no less, so I'm looking forward to the improvements id Software will come up with for Doom, which released in 1993.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10

Voice acting exists, as already described. Enemies shout stuff at you when they spot you and when you kill them. Sound quality is of course not great, so even as a German I couldn't decipher all of what was said, but it's a nice way to add immersion and alert players of enemies being in the same room as you, so I overall found this to be a plus for the experience.

Sound design ranges from horrific for the sound of unsuccessfully trying to open doors or strafin around, to pretty good for the sound of guns and doors opening and closing.

The soundtrack I found to be kind of disappointing. It reminds me more of the subtle background music of Catacomb 3D rather than the metal, fast-paced sounds of 1993's Doom for example. At least placing the tone somewhere in between I would have enjoyed more. While I don't think the soundtrack suits the game very well, as its own thing I think there are some solid tracks here, but it's not a soundtrack I'd care to listen to again necessarily.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10

Graphics look better than for Catacomb 3D, that's for sure. Wall tiles have some actual textures to them instead of being solid single colors. Decoration was added, like posters, plants, tables and more. There is more enemy variety and the spritework is slightly improved. This was all possible thanks to a switch from 16 color EGA to 256 color VGA compared to Catacomb 3D.

That said, these are still rudimentary 3D graphics in a game that sacrifices graphical presentation by design to allow for the PC's of the time to actually handle the gameplay, so suffice it to say, this is not going to win awards for looks.

I did appreciate a few minor things though, like the way you could see enemies get hit by your shot and die way off in the distance as small sprites, or how the portrait of BJ would keep starting to the sides and how he would get bloodied up the lower your health would go.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10

You stroll around in Castle Wolfenstein filled with Nazis that shout things at you in German. On top of that, you are playing this in first-person. Does it get any more immersive than this in 1992? The portrait of BJ staring to the sides, the posters and Nazi emblems hung up on the walls and the animations of enemies getting hit and dying all are minor things that add to the atmosphere in this game as well.

CONTENT | 7/10

This game gives you access to four weapons, it has 7 types of enemies in the original trilogy, it has two trilogies (six episodes) with 9 floors on each, and four difficulty levels to test your prowess on. Pretty good. Though the fast pace doesn't match as well as you'd like with the rather low amount of enemies you will find on each floor (especially compared to Doom) and therefore repetitiveness can kick in after the first trilogy.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10

The maze-like design of every floor is a clever way of extending the time it takes for players to go through them, but I found some to be overly confusingly laid out at times. I also found that on many floors, there weren't as many enemies as I would have liked to see, so I thought that there were too many breaks inbetween the shooting. There is also one major thing I disliked, which is boss encounters. You encounter one and pretty much immediately die on your first attempt. On your second, you realize that you have no weapons and ammo to really work with anymore, since you lose everything at death, which means you are forced to run around the room to find secret areas to restock. I don't like the idea of restricting the player to a few lives either.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 10/10

This game managed to achieve something on a scale that no other game that tried to do something in first-person view ever could achieve: Make a fast-paced FPS game that was fun to play and actually ran well. It's revolutionized a genre, something only a couple dozen games over history could say, so it deserves the high praise it gets for innovation (especially since this game will kickstart a slew of FPS games that will find themselves on my challenge spreadsheet over the coming years).

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

You can try to beat your high score, try to up the difficulty and try to find more of the secrets and treasures in the game to go for 100% completion. You could go for 4 or 5 out of 5 here if you were to include all those fanmade levels you can play as well.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 66/100

This game is a big part of video game history for its innovation. Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake are played to this day, both old and new iterations, and id Software took arguably their biggest step right here. The game is still fun for a couple hours, but didn't age quite as well in parts and still leaves a lot of potential left to be explored in 1993's Doom, which I'm already looking forward to.

I'm not a Formula One guy, but I did recognize some of the names of the other drivers, so I can start of by saying that those seem authentic as a whole. If you wanted to race against those F1 names from the early 90s, then well, this is one of a dozen options for you, and probably not the best one. Is it a good game regardless? Eh, it's OK.

This is the first in a series of F1 games I'll be playing as part of this challenge I'm doing. This means I don't have much to compare it to. This is also a sim racer, not an arcade one, so it's hard to compare to other racers of 1992 and others for the SNES in general, like F-Zero for example. But it can easily be compared in terms of graphics and music/sound, and in both these cateogries, F1 Pole Position is not good.

Graphically, there is little detail to environments and backgrounds, and the sprites of the cars don't look good either. Additionally, the sense of scale on the enemy cars is seemingly random. When they show up, they'll start small, then look gigantic all of a sudden, then look appropriate, then tiny, then gigantic, then appropriate in size again. It's odd.

There isn't much music here, just a few tunes to have you entertained when scrolling the menus. The sound of the engines is what you will hear mainly, and it sounds pretty bad.

What does this game offer in terms of content? Quite a few things actually. There are 16 maps total and a Grand Prix mode to go through them. You can also battle as many drivers individually as you want in singular races, and do practice runs. There is also a whole lot of customization you can do to one of many cars you can select. Choose if gear should be shifted manually or automatically, whether you need slick or rain tires, what kind of gear you want (short gear ratios mean faster accel but lower max speed and vice versa) and you can adjust your brake level from soft all the way to hard, among multiple other options. Pretty nice.

During races, there is additional strategy involved, as you need to watch 5 indicators. WIN shows if a wing is damaged, which would reduce speed. TIR is about wear on your tires. SUS is about your car suspension, which can reduce traction. BRA goes down the more you use your brakes and reduces effectiveness. GER reduces your control of the car, if your gear box gets damaged. You can reset these meters through pit stops. So careful driving and well-timed use of pit stops is pretty important to do well.

The controls are fine, you will have seen worse and better. The fact that this is a sim racer means the devs try to make controls more grounded, with which they've done an OK job. My biggest gripe was you hitting other cars or getting hit from the back yourself, which puts you, and only you, in a spinning animation, sometimes even leading you off-track. That seemed pretty annoying considering controls are not tight enough to avoid these most of the time.

All in all, I don't think many people are looking for sim racers of the early 90s to play, so this is skippable, but a serviceable game for its time. F1 fans will have had fun with it, but will be better served with later racing games than this.

(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)

I was looking forward to this one for a while. My history with the Mario Kart series is pretty short actually, as I have only ever played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the Switch. I love that game though and couldn't wait to discover the origins of the series. Having done that, I'm happy to say that Super Mario Kart still offers a fun time and offers lots of content to go through both in single- and multiplayer.

It's not perfect. There isn't a lot to complain about here, but the main thing I've noticed somewhat negatively is the controls. The game controls reasonably well for its time, and certainly not worse than its contemporaries (I'd give the edge to F-Zero though) but it quite often felt like the Computer had an edge over the player in handling, especially when it comes to turning corners. The drift mechanic exists in this game. Press the shoulder buttons, and your character's kart will jump up and start to drift. Unfortunately, I never really got comfortable with this. It felt pretty random as to how successful the drift is and how quickly I could regather control of the kart, as a lot of the time, the kart would just drift way further than anticipated and take an extra second of sliding before it would drive forward again. I could say I'm spoiled from modern Mario Kart, but truthfully, I just found this mechanic to not be useful a lot of the time. I'm sure I would have figured it out by playing more, but it certainly is not something I would describe as intuitive.

That said, I don't really have any more major complaints, let alone of medium importance. This game was plenty of fun. You can choose one of 8 characters in the Mario franchise, from Mario himself to Donkey Kong Jr. Each character has their own stats for speed, acceleration and handling, but those stats are only shown in the manual I believe. Karts cannot be changed and don't add bonuses/penalties.

There are two singleplayer modes. The Grand Prix mode, where you can choose between 50cc and 100cc difficulties and take on three cups with 5 unique tracks each. If you win them all on 100cc, you unlock a fourth cup that includes the iconic Rainbow Road that is still in Mario Kart games to this day. If you conquer that as well, you unlock the 150cc difficulty mode. The other singleplayer mode is called Time Trial, where you simply choose a track and try to beat your best time.

For multiplayer (2P), two new modes are Match Race, where you go head-to-head with no CPU opponents, and Battle Mode, where you need to pop the there balloons on top of your opponent before your balloons are popped.

So as you can tell, there is quite a lot of content here. No customization, but 8 characters, 20 maps, 3 difficulty modes and 5 game modes.

The music is immediately recognizable if you played future Mario Kart games, so it's nice to see that the atmosphere they're going for hasn't changed since the original entry. Tracks are very varied and cleverly designed with many different types of obstacles and challenges. In general, the presentation is just charming.

The game is the 4th best selling game for the SNES. It's not hard to see why. Unlike action/adventure/platforming games, racing and fighting titles usually have a hard time to be recommendable for play in modern times since pretty much everything is improved upon in newer titles, whereas the story and certain gameplay elements of single-player games are much harder to replicate and therefore rate more favorably in that regard. I'd say the same applies for Super Mario Kart. It is still fun, it's an iconic and revolutionary game that popularized the kart racing genre, but I have a hard time arguing for why you would play this instead of the most recent Mario Kart games.

(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)

The Top Gear series, but especially this first title, was and is incredibly popular in South America. I found out about this pretty quickly when researching the game. What this game's unique selling propositions are would be three-fold.

First, Top Gear has a fast pace. Not F-Zero fast, but pretty fast. Especially if you're going up and down hills, it can get pretty hectic. Second, it comes with dozens of courses spanning the whole world, from Germany to Brazil, from LA to Tokyo. Is there enough variety to support these 32 total courses? Not quite. Most actually feel very similar, and are distinguished by pretty small additions (obstacles on the course) and length.

The third and final USP is pretty cool. The game adds strategy to races. There is your typical nitro system that is limited to 3 uses per race. There is the selection of one of four cars, which differ in speed, handling and fuel consumption. Finally, fuel consumption itself is a big deal, as you have limited fuel that will get depleted before you finish the race on certain courses that are up to 7 laps long I believe. This means you need to use pit stops and time your visits well, as you will lose ground while you're waiting for your fuel to charge.

Overall, I appreciated these elements. Adding this feature does mean however that some tracks can take up to 6 minutes though. That's something you might feel one way or the other about in arcade racers, but I enjoyed the shorter levels more, even without pit stops becoming a factor.

One negative I want to mention is that half of the screen is constantly blocked by a split-screen setup that shows a computer racing below you. This is no issue in 2-Player of course, but could have been removed for single player.

In terms of content, the game offers you the four aforementioned cars, the 32 maps and puts these two things together for one single mode, which is a campaign through all maps in the game. You start in the USA and have to finish in a certain spot on the ranking to qualify for the next set of maps. I finished 2nd once and still qualified, so up to half of the game, there was no need to finish 1st yet. Finishing 4th didn't do the job though.

Finally, the soundtrack is worth a mention. There are some great tracks here, but out of the 4 used for the 32 tracks, I felt indifferent about two, so I felt there wasn't enough variety here and it wasn't an F-Zero situation where I was bopping my head to pretty much all tracks and even listened to some of them outside of the game from time to time. In general, the soundtrack is seen as one of the highlights of this game, so your enjoyment of it may differ. I just found 4 tracks to be too few either way.

Overall, Top Gear is a fun racing game. It doesn't surpass F-Zero as my favorite racing game for the SNES (so far), but it is similarly addictive and I have no hard time figuring out why it's still popular at some parts of the Earth.

(I played this as part of my challenge to go through notable video games in chronological order starting in 1990.)

(This is the 69th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

We have reached Game #69. Nice. Even nicer that this milestone was achieved with a good game, Flashback, a 'cinematic' platformer by Delphine Software that released some time in 1992. There are a few ways in which you could describe this game. I don't think anything would be more than apt though than calling it "ahead of its time", for mostly good but also bad reasons.

This game uses rotoscoped animations and would be best compared to other platformers such as Prince of Persia and especially "Another World", otherwise known as "Out of this World". While Prince of Persia was made by Broderbund, Another World was also developed by Delphine Software, and having played Flashback, feels like what Catacombs 3D is to Wolfenstein 3D, meaning that it feels like a short tech demo to show what's possible. (Fun fact: Just like Flashback is a milestone game for this challenge, Another World was the 50th game I reviewed)

If that doesn't give you an understanding of rotoscoped animations, think of the original Mortal Kombat, which probably is the most popular game to use this technique. It's basically the technique describing animators tracing over motion picture footage to create an illusion of realistic and very fluid animations.

Flashback has a lot of good traits, but definitely stands out thanks to using this animation technique. It has sold over 2 million copies over time and was at the time of its release the best selling French game of all time. It released for more platforms than Skyrim did, and initially released for the Amiga, though funnily enough had been created for the Sega Genesis originally. There is a sequel that released in 1995 called Fade to Black and Flashback 2 is set to release in November 2023 at the time of posting this review.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 8/10

This game shines here in many ways, and primarily in presentation. What makes this game unique is that it has cinematic cutscenes in a cyberpunk style and using polygon graphics that you're not going to see anywhere else apart from Another World. You can tell the devs really took their time making these and they definitely add a lot to the overall experience thanks to their great presentation. For example, in an early cutscene, you wake up and accidentally drop a 'holocube' as you get up. Then, in another cutscene, when you find the holocube, you can see it displaying a message while the main character is holding it in his hands. Cutscenes also play every time you pick up an item or give one to another character. It's a small thing that enhances the meaning of finding a key item, and even though the cutscene has half a second loading screens before they play, I still appreciated them.

Now for the story. You play Conrad B. Hart, a graduate student and agent of the Galaxial Bureau of Investigation (GBI). He is also described as an "overall cool dude" in the manual. You run away from some sort of spaceship with your own, but crashland in an unfamiliar area. When you wake up and pick up the holocube I just mentioned, the message that appears is from your past self. Apparently, you willingly removed your memory and need to see your friend Ian in "New Washington" to get it back.

You play the first level and make your way over there. In the first level, you meet a wounded stranger who asks you to find his teleporter so he can teleport to safety from these woods that you are both trapped in. Later, you meet an elderly man on a chair next to a giant hole. He says he will give you an Anti Gravity Belt if you have enough credits for him, so you can jump down to the next level.

Once you make it to New Washington, you are met with the sort of setting that would have made me go crazy at the time. There is a subway system that lets you visit for key areas in New Washington that are called "America", "Asia", "Europe" and "Africa". In one of these locations, you will find a bar, in another, you will find a room with job notices that you can take on with a work permit, in another, there is an Admin office that gives you said work permit.

In practice, this ends up being a level where you continously backtrack to ultimately pay another NPC to move on to the next level, and it does get boring and frustrating at times, but to have a world that actually feels real like this in a video game from this time period is extremely rare and absolutely worth a positive mention.

The overall story is relatively interesting as well. The manual has a comic book style opening to the overall story, which you will be able to find with a quick Google search. It shows what happens before the story begins, so maybe you'll want to look at it after playing the game, since figuring out what happened before Conrad lost his memory is part of the appeal of the story. I'm not going to spoil anything, and it doesn't get the crown for most in-depth story for a non-RPG and non-graphic adventure (I'd still give that to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) and it also does not have any shocking twists, but it's entertaining enough and most importantly really well presented that the reward you get from learning more is ultimately pretty satisfying.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20

This is a platformer that uses rotoscoping for its animations. This means movement looks really fluid and life-like, similarly to Prince of Persia and Another World. These animations don't just look real, but often they also play out like they would in reality, meaning they are deliberately slow. This has its positives and negatives. On the one hand, this slow movement means a methodical and strategical approach is more important, because there are plenty of enemies that you need to fight here as well. On the other hand, slow is slow. When you have to go over the same section of the game for the 5th time or have failed to make a jump three times in a row, having to wait for animations to play out will get a bit boring after a while.

The game has a somewhat convoluted control scheme that takes getting used to. To reach a platform right above you, you need to stay at one specific point below it and grab up. This makes Conrad grab on, and if you keep pressing up, he will climb up. If you are a single step behind or in front of this spot, he will not hold on. For 7 hours, I constantly had to do one extra step to be in the right position. Not a terrible thing, but annoying at times. It gets worse when there is a platform that is above you but on the other side of the room. Here, you need to hold A, press RIGHT/LEFT to sprint (you needed to run straight) and then UP to jump up. Or was it RIGHT/LEFT again? Actually, it's both. I couldn't quite figure out which one the game wanted me to do for specific jumps, but some jumps required you to press RIGHT/LEFT twice, and others required you to press RIGHT/LEFT first and then UP later. But what timing do you need for the jump? Do you press the appropriate button multiple times hoping the game recognizes your input in time? Do you button mash? Or do you hold on to the button? I can tell you that all approaches worked at times and didn't work at others. Finally, another frustrating thing that would happen is from being able to roll forward when crouching. The game doesn't scroll but rather plays on independent screens. Whenever you enter a new screen, your action from the previous screen would be remembered however. So if you roll from one to the next, you keep rolling as the next screen loads up. In some screens, there would just be pits that you would fall right into, and if you fall too far down, you die. Happened more often than I'd care to admit.

Dying is another thing. There are SAVE points in this game, but sometimes they are pretty far apart. You have 5 lives that you can recharge at certain checkpoints. If you ever die, and you will plenty of times, you go all the way back to your last save point, which can set you back as far as 15-30 minutes easily and all the progress you made is lost. Fall damage takes all your health, and running into portal-like things that have green myst coming out of them instantly kill you too, so you can imagine how many cheap deaths await in this game that make you lose hours of progress over the course of your playthrough.

But enough of the negatives. Despite these points, which do make me reluctant to recommend this game to anyone but retro gamers who have grown somewhat immune to these pains, I had a fun time with this from a gameplay perspective overall.

You are equipped with a simple gun at the start. Taking on enemies with it is not as simple as going in run and gun style. You need to crouch at times to not get shot first yourself, you can throw stones to distract them first or alert turrets that shoot the enemies for you, and you get a force field later on that acts as a shield if you time it right. You can also use teleportation devices or explosive mechanical mice later on to spice things up further.

Apart from combat, you do a lot of platforming and puzzle-solving, which either involves figuring out where to go or, if something is blocking your way, figuring out how to bypass it. It's never too difficult but enough of a braintease as well, so I liked the difficulty here. You collect key items like, well, keys, quest items and credits that allow you to make progress. These are on the floor randomly and some are hard to see, so you basically have to walk over every inch of a level to not miss anything. You get a Pick-Up notice once you are on top of an item, so you will find all of them just by being thorough.

Overall, the game offers a strategic challenge in both platforming, puzzle-solving and combat that I appreciated. It was enough to have me entertained for the 7 hours I played. I feel like the atmosphere did a lot of the heavy lifting to make some of the more frustrating parts more bearable. I would call this game "ahead of its time" because it offers a lot of things that just feel futuristic at this point, but the technology at the time meant many things couldn't be done in a way that the devs probably wanted, which means we got some frustrating gameplay parts as a result. The sequel is a 3D adventure game, so I'm curious to see if the devs were able to make use of the three years of technological progress to make gameplay more enjoyable throughout.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10

No voice acting, at least in the Sega Genesis version I'm reviewing. Later, the game would release for the Sega CD for example, where CGI cutscenes and voice actors would be used. I've seen some footage and the voice acting sounds like it takes away more than it adds to the atmosphere, so you'll be fine with this version of the game.

Sound design ranges from meh to excellent, and I particularly love the sounds that are added in to the short cutscenes when you pick stuff up or give and take items.

The soundtrack can be described similarly. Very sci-fi, really adds to the atmosphere. Music plays at specific points of certain screens or during combat, and overall the use of music can be described as "sparingly", and I can't say I mind this. Lots of games with incredible atmosphere forego the use of music for most parts of their gameplay. A great example that comes to mind are the Soulsborne games. This would mean that the game should make me listen to the protagonists footsteps and to the environmental sounds to further set an atmosphere, but for some reason footsteps are only heard while running, not walking. Seems like a weird thing to not do. But back to the soundtrack. Great, when used. Overall the OST is only about 15 minutes long.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

Can't go through this section without going over the rotoscoping that is used here. The animations here are to this day some of the more realistic you will see. Very clean. There is no question what the main reason is for why this and Another World still have a cult following to this day.

Apart from this, graphically there are nice special effects and diverse locations to compliment. It's not a very colorful game despite its cyberpunk theme and most of the game plays in grayish-green outdoor areas.

The HUD consists of an icon on the top right showing the item you currently have equipped. The UI opens up by pressing START and is a simple inventory screen with 4 items shown per line. Move to the item, select START again, and done. There are some items that are always useful, like the force field, and many items that are only useful once or twice, so it would have been nice for these very useful items to be equipped and useable without having to switch to it mid-combat every time. Or for example, charging stations serve one purpose for 99% of the game - charge your shield/hitpoints. Just because it is used for something else once (!) you need to equip shield every time you want to charge it, which seems like something that could have been automated.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 9/10

There are a lot of ways through which this game manages to set a very good atmosphere. The animations of course add a lot of realism at a time where this was hard to achieve. The sound design and soundtrack set a great sci-fi vibe. Cutscenes add close-up looks at the events. New Washington, while backtrack-heavy, is an unusual setting for a level because it creates the illusion of a genuinely lived in oxymoronic tiny metropolis, something that was uncommon at the time. Cutscenes playing when picking up an item or giving something to a different character also add immersion on a deeper level, even if it is a tiny detail. Overall, I definitely felt like there was a world here that the developers actually thought about and they did a great job of making it seem grounded and realistic despite the sci-fi theme.

CONTENT | 6/10

The game takes roughly 6-8 hours, a pretty good length for a game of this type. It's not too short to appear more like a tech demo like Another World, and it's not too long to overstay its welcome. You can tell by the missions you are assigned that there is only so much variety the game has to offer, so I appreciated that it ended when it did. The game does a solid job of offering new challenges throughout, but as I mentioned over this review, there are too many parts where the gameplay does hold the fluidity of the game back, along with the pretty annoying save system, which was only manageable to me thanks to the emulator's own save state feature.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 7/10

The level design in this game has high and lowlights. Highlights are New Washington, where the pros of its uniqueness outweigh the cons of the backtracking that you need to do there. The balance of platforming, combat and puzzle-solving is also well struck. On the negative side, dying setting you back so far, death coming unfairly too often, and some gunfights being in awkward locations that are made even more awkward by the control scheme of the game are some of the more prominent points.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10

This isn't the first game to use rotoscopic animation nor cinematic cutscenes. Another World did both of these things. That game didn't do it on this scale though, and animations look a lot more fluid in Flashback. The game is not groundbreaking in what it does, but it certainly is daring and innovative, and I really like that. Games in this time period pre-CD and pre-3D often stick to the status-quo, similarly to what is being critiziced in modern times, though there was little complaining at the time. Magazines had no issues spreading around 8s and 9s for nearly every game for not doing anything special at all. So developers who try something different are always much appreciated, and while these innovations did come with some drawbacks in this game, I can say the good absolutely outweighs the bad overall.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5

No replayability here apart from trying to beat your high score and maybe using some tools that are optional, like the mechanical mice.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 72/100

70+ is usually "at least check it out" territory for me. With this game, I have the same recommendation to retro gamers for sure, but unlike, say, a Super Mario World, Zelda or Monkey Island, Flashback has A LOT of the noticeable growing pains that come with old-school video games. I'd understand if it's too much for some people to take. That said, the game does plenty right as well and its unique status is undeniable.