What if Dark Souls was more aggressive, darker, and dripping in flesh. A napkin pitch spun into an Odyssey scale epic of body horror and gothic architecture.

Bloodborne, baby.

The idea is simple: the world is being overrun by nightmarish stuff, and hunters are let loose into the real world to keep the nightmares tamed. It’s up to you to leave the hunter’s realm and her into Yarnham to cut off every single piece of flesh in front of you.

Bloodborne emphasizes speed and brutality as it provides you with a fresh slate of weapons that all have multiple forms to dispatch enemies with, and a gun to keep your enemies at bay as you seek the best approach. There is no means to block attacks this time around; you must duck, dodge, flank, and charge at your enemies to take as much of their blood as possible. They’ll do the same, but in larger numbers with worse appearances to ensure that they do the same. In the course of attempting to clear out the nightmares, you’ll encounter many bosses of varying degrees of grotesque-ness, each with their own horrible arena to do business in. Pop items, collect blood vials, dial in insight and blood echoes (souls by any other name) and climb your way through the halls of Bloodborne’s urban design in order to find success.

I found Bloodborne to be tighter in execution, but thoroughly less pleasant to vault through with my hammer in toe than Dark Souls, my previous soulsborne game. I got stuck quite a bit less, and experienced way less friction progressing in this far more linear game. In that sense it feels like a lesser experience - there’s less puzzles to solve, and most of the game’s large areas serve as means to lead you to shortcuts that streamline the experience even further. It’s a phenomenal game on its foundation, but it feels like less of a mountain one climbs and more a hill you jog up.

It also runs poorly and gets real murky during daytime sessions! Oh well. Such is life.

An adventure awaits. A world in ruin requires your deft hand to bring it salvation.....or perhaps.....nothing. The choice is yours as you venture forth from your cell with nothing but a broken weapon and hope in your back pocket.

This is Dark Souls.

What is there to say about the most discussed game of the 2000s. Reaching much farther than its predecessor Demon Souls due to its multi platform release, Dark Souls IS the game of the 2010s. And it is also the game of the 2020s - see Elden Ring and the plethora of Dark Souls inspired games that have arisen in the years since.

Dark Souls is a perfect experience. It rewards exploration, patience, and strategy as you discover the next boss, and the next build you're going to put together to keep you in the game. It is dripping with inspiration from games such as Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger, and even From Soft's own King's Field as it springs forward from the darkness. Unlike the many games that proudly declare their influences as the thing to be proud of, Dark Souls shows us that you can be influenced without imitating. It's incredible.

I am not totally convinced that there will be another game crystallized as clearly and with as wide a reach as Dark Souls until there is one, and its been 13 years since players first lost their souls to the torment of the Taurus Demon.

My only real regret is that it took me 13 years to try and understand it, rather than argue with it for what it is. And I'm supremely glad that I did.

Praise the sun.

Lara Croft sets out on an quest to uncover the pieces of a lost artifact. In the process, she finds herself entangled in the plot of the nefarious Nalta Corporation. Only her wits, her upper body strength, and the trusty dual pistols she carries stands between her and the destruction of the known the world as she travels the world in a race to find The Lost City of Atlantis.

Fully remastered in 16:9 widescreen and playable with a fresh coat of paint in arbitrary framerates, Tomb Raider arrives as part of the Tomb Raider 1+2+3 Remastered collection largely unscathed by the sand of time. It stands as proudly as it did in 1996 as a pillar of accessible 3D platforming that emphasizes a slow pace and deliberate planning in order to traverse the game's 15 increasingly elaborate levels.

Each tomb is packed to the gills with levers to pull, platforming to pull off, enemies to shoot, and environmental obstacles to navigate around as you climb through each tomb to retrieve an artifact. These increasingly larger and more elaborate tombs are designed around the most archaic component of this game: Lara Croft was designed to be manipulated by a 1996 keyboard, a Playstation controller, and a Sega Saturn controller - Tomb Raider uses slow, heavily weighted tank controls. Much of your success depends on your willingness to negotiate with this control scheme straight outta 96 and these controls are SENSITIVE as heck. Even with a full grasp of Lara's car-like maneuverability, a mistap or an extra tap of your D-Pad WILL get you killed. And you will die a LOT in the process of raiding these tombs. Perseverance is key to completing this journey as these tank controls will test your will to live, and test it often. That isn't to say the controls are bad; they're perfectly suited to the level design of each tomb. Don't mess with the "modern control scheme." The original controls are the way to go. And they are, in their own way, perfect.

The levels themselves challenge you to check every corner, move every stone, as try your luck jumping to every possible ledge you can in order to find levers, keys, and other various items that will help you on your journey. Even in the remastered version of the game, the game playfully balances tricky visual design and intuitive placement of objects to consistently challenge you as you move onwards. As you become more familiar with the various patterns that run throughout, the game adds additional layers of complexity to puzzles and spreads challenges out over greater distances to keep things engaging.

Unfortunately, though its legacy is well deserved, there are elements of Tomb Raider that have grown old with time - the shooting combat is straight up busted. The only element of it you control is the direction Lara is pointed in; the rest of it is handled with an auto aim system that really only feels like a suggestion of what you might want Lara to do. It is the result of the limitation of the control scheme of the era, but having played it on DOS and the Sega Saturn previously, it still feels like something to grapple with, rather than something to use effectively. And the increasing scope and scale of the game's levels does make the pacing of the game slow down significantly as you get into the back third - I found myself completely exhausted as credits rolled.

These elements considered, Tomb Raider is a triumph in its newly remastered form. Even if you only make your way through a handful of levels, you owe yourself some time with this legendary game. You can see its influence permeate out through the rest of the 90s in tasteful ways, and its sense of discovery is second to none. It will never feel truly modern, but it will always be one of the great games of all time.

The evil empire has descended upon the Kingdom of Lucia and usurped power from the reigning king of the realm, King Regis. Forced to abandon his road trip to the land of Altissia to marry his betrothed, the oracle Lunafreya, the young Prince Noctis must gather the power of his ancestors in order to command the power of the gods to save his kingdom from ultimate peril. Joined by his closest four friends, Gladiolus, Prompto, Ignis, and their car, The Regalia, they must discover the will to act, lead, and support each other in the dramatic journey of a lifetime.

Final Fantasy XV is a nightmare to grasp. In order to fully comprehend the scale of the world and the entirety of its plot, one must watch a movie, an anime, read a novel, play the entire game, play all four pieces of dlc, watch a press conference, write an MLA cited paper, grill four ribeye steaks to a medium rare complexion, dance the hokey pokey, build a 4000 piece lego kit containing essential lore, and ride your bike uphill five miles to school both ways.

It is quite a mess.

It is also perhaps the only AAA game that has ever tried and succeeded at the feeling of what its like to maintain adult male friendships. Road trips are incredibly stressful, especially long ones. This is the longest, most intense road trip of all time; they snap at each other, they build each other in moments of triumph, and celebrate that they have each other during moments of peace. It is the only game I have ever played that has ever sold me on the authentic relationship that this group of boys have.

Unfortunately this feeling of truth simply cannot hold up against a game that feels largely like its unfinished. Events play out haphazardly, breaking continuity and building into confusion as the journey unfolds. Characters disappear, or get injured in major moments that simply aren't executed during Noctis's journey to save the realm. The idea that a game is so immense that a movie and an anime are developed to expand it isn't exactly the newest idea, but making them essential to understanding the stakes of the world you're inhabiting is impenetrably frustrating.

Beyond its failure as a narrative work, Final Fantasy XV is simply the most sloppily assembled action RPG I have played to date; pretty much every single battle can be solved in the exact same way: by locking onto an enemy using the right shoulder button and pressing the Y/Triangle button to warp to an enemy and attack them. Once you've done this, you run a short distance away and do it again. Occasionally you command your buddies to execute a bonus attack, but much of the game is solved easily with the same combo over and over and over again. There are items, but as long as you have a smattering of hi-potions none of the rest ever really seem to matter too much There's new equipment and skills to upgrade, but as long as you pick the ones that make your numbers the absolute biggest you will succeed. And this is on normal, not the game's alternate easy mode. It is a game that, even though I completed it, never once made me feel like I had to try anything new, and also never feel like I'm getting any better while fighting stronger enemies. It is equally as bizarre as its storytelling ambitions. Neither ever really feel like they work in a way beyond, "you sure can complete the game using its combat."

And yet, though it is such a gosh darn mess that doesn't really work, I truly treasured my time with Noctis and his Kingsguard. There are huge moments of sweeping emotion that work so well, but are immediately undercut by every part of the game that simply won't allow you to invest in its plot or world building. The combat feels like nothing. But its visual design, music, and characters feel like something worth fighting for. And sometimes, that's all a Final Fantasy needs to be something great.....or at least very interesting.

Played on Extreme difficulty.

A mysterious enemy has arisen from within the dwellings of a biotech company. A clone army, led by a man who's known only as Fennel to you and your squad, has been let loose and must be eliminated before they contaminate the abandoned hallways of every corporate office building in America. As a member of the First Encounter Assault Recon team, only YOU can stop the nefarious Fennel and uncover the secrets hidden within his plans.

FEAR, a first person shooter released in 2005 and developed by Monolith Productions, known for their legendary PC titles such as Blood and No One Lives Forever, is a game that's all about the journey. Plopped into the body of an unknown operative, its your job to move forward through the game's numerous corporate office environments towards the truth while mowing down as many nameless, faceless dudes as possible with an arsenal of some of the best feeling weapons in the business.

The secret to FEAR's persevering brilliance is not its horror infested storytelling or its brilliant slow-mo bullet time mechanic, but its level design. Using then state of the art artificial intelligence, Monolith demonstrates their prowess in architecture by sending you through blazing through mazes of offices, hallways, multi-tiered rooms with multiple options of approach, and large spaces that challenge you to maximize your loadout to reach peak effectiveness. Though visually they meld together through their mid-2000s office aesthetic, each of the game's levels use the office set pieces to craft continuously engaging and exciting encounters that often feel like the perfect middle ground between a Half Life and Halo firefight in terms of balance and enemy presence.

Where FEAR perhaps shows its age however is in its narrative design; much of FEAR's storytelling is done through distorted visions, audio logs, and through scanning computers that your partner then reads a summary of for you. It seldom feels connected to anything you're actually doing; as you mow down Fennel's finest, a complex narrative of corporate culture and scientific experimentation is built up around you, while you yourself have little impact on the events depicted, nor do they seem to impact the gameplay at all. FEAR for the most part feels like the perfect evolution of the DOOM formula in that it emphasizes speed, movement, and responsive action. The horror elements and storytelling sorta just feel taped on with scotch tape.

Ultimately, FEAR is a brilliant exemplar of the power of an incredibly good feeling shotgun, pistol, and assault rifle in an FPS title. It's level design is top notch, its atmosphere is occasionally creepy in an effective manner, and its storytelling is half rate. It remains mostly unscathed by time; what is good about it in 2024 has always been good about it, and what's bad about it is easily forgotten as you hit the CTRL key and listen to the sound of one more bad dude yell, "OH SHI-" as you blast him into a cloud of red pulp.

A man. A plan. A spaceship. Some salvage.

Lethal Company is as thrilling as it is thin, leaning on the power of human socialization to do the heavy lifting in this Early Access title. The premise is simple: up to 4 people embark on a trek to one of several moons in order to visit a procedurally generated environment to collect various pieces of salvage. This salvage, of which you have strictly defined quotas and a time limit in which to fill said time limit, is then deposited to your employers. Anything left over is yours to use on items to help you in your salvage collection such as flash lights, teleports, weapons, etc.....

That's it. You do this in a loop over and over again until you lose.

What makes everything work in the game's audio production value; proximity voice chat is the only way you can communicate with your peers. Voice quality changes based on environment and distance. It makes cooperating in this salvage operation difficult; once the party separates the isolation almost immediately begins to set in. With the isolation comes danger, and with danger comes death. There's no indication to other players. Their lives continue on without you as they push towards more and more salvage. It builds a foreboding sense of horror unlike any other game I've ever played. It's far too much for me - I had to cut our session short due to genuine stress and anxiety that I experienced while exploring its empty halls. The the danger of the unknown was perhaps a bit too much for my stomach. It's very effective.

Lethal Company, with its simple premise and disinterest in explaining itself answers the question of whether a tree makes a sound as it falls if no one's around to hear it.

The answer is no.

Sonic is back in glorious 2 dimensions! And he's brought all of his friends along for the ride! And some new ones you'll likely never care about!

Sonic Superstars, developed by Sonic Team and developed Arzest, previously best known for.....Balan Wonderworld, is the latest 2D platforming entry in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. It focuses on traditional Genesis-era platforming with the new added twist of abilities granted through the acquisition of Chaos Emeralds, as well as a new 4-player co-op mode that allows you to zoom through each level in a manner similar to that of the New Super Mario Bros. titles. It feels as progressive as it does a little bit....off?

The key to cracking a great Sonic experience is its level design; the best Sonic titles are well known for their memorable level maps - think Chemical Plant Zone in Sonic 2, Flying Battery Zone in Sonic and Knuckles, Studiopolis Zone in Sonic Mania, and any of the tight, tasty morsels of levels sprinkled throughout Sonic Frontiers. These levels are all intuitively designed maps that keep you moving fast as much as they do challenge you to seek out new pathways and explore each environment to its full potential. These levels also appear early, and set the tone for excellence - the first zones in Sonic the Hedgehog titles are often solid, but the 2nd level will tell you type of craftsmanship you're about to dip into.

Sonic Superstars doesn't really give you that shot of confidence until maybe 5 or 6 levels in, which makes for an awkward experience. It's opening levels have weird music, a camera that occasionally feels too close, and far too many obstacles sitting in just the right place to kill your momentum in a first time experience. It all adds up to a big ol, "hmmm," feeling that will struggle to grab some players.

Fortunately for those willing to persevere, the latter half of Sonic Superstars finds its footing; levels start to better reward you for speed and exploration, and boss fights stop feeling trapped in Sonic's past and begin to expand the horizon for 2D platformer Sonic titles. There were a few surprises in this portion of the game that really feel like an exciting evolution of what one can do with a Sonic the Hedgehog game when you're not terribly worried about it feeling like a Sega Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog game. The boss encounters in this game feel particularly rewarding for those willing to learn patterns and stick with the surprisingly challenging experiences the back half provides. It's unfortunate that its early levels feel reluctant to experiment in the same way.

The rest of Sonic Superstars presentation is fairly standard; players can revisit levels, hunt for hidden bonus stages and alternate paths, and can also earn medals through gameplay that allow them to purchase items from an in game shop. The new co-op mode is more functional than it was fun to me; Sonic games move fast. This makes it incredibly easy to leave behind the players that can't keep up with the lead player's momentum. This worked in previous titles, such as Sonic 2, because the momentum always followed Sonic in level scrolling and otherwise. It does not work for me in Superstars because it just....seems to follow whoever is at the farthest edge of the screen. Some might be able to manage it, but I felt it overwhelmingly chaotic.

Ultimately, Sonic Superstars feels like a promise for future potential rather than a new, exciting idea. Everything about it needs maybe another set of revision and tightening to make it something truly exceptional. As it is, its an acceptable experience. I'm glad I played it. Shame about it debuting against that new Mario though. lmao.

Kazuma Kiryu has.....retired. No longer a Yakuza, he decides to live his life out as the owner and operator of an orphanage in the scenic Japanese prefecture of Okinawa with his adopted daughter Haruka. Unfortunately for our retired Dragon a scramble for the deed of the land his orphanage is built on turns into another one of the classic Yakuza scrambles for power and respect; the stakes have never been higher and once again the fate of the Tojo clan and all of Japan is at stake.

Welcome to Yakuza 3.

Originally released for the Playstation 3 in 2009, Yakuza 3 is a fantastic example of a team of developers using the full power of a brand new platform to realize their vision of an interactive world. Compared to its predecessors, its bigger, fuller, and more densely packed. It's one step closer to the Kamurocho of the modern Yakuzas, and you can feel the foundations of games like 0 in every fiber of its bones. It's a more mature, grounded, alive feeling game - it deserves a rightful place on the shelf of major 2009 PS3 titles such as Uncharted 2, Final Fantasy XIII, and Killzone 2 that properly leveraged the capabilities of that particular console to scale up ambitions successfully for the HD era of gaming.

Of those significant titles however, it might be the one that's aged the worst in the 14 years since it blazed onto the market.

Yakuza 3 is one of the most beautifully melodramatic stories ever told in a video game; its silly, strange, and emotive in ways that fully grip you in its depiction of modern day Japan. Saddling Kiryu with the responsibilities of not only determining the fate of the Tojo Clan, but also raising and guiding the children of his orphanage is perhaps one of the most interesting and most successful evolutions a long running franchise has ever done to keep itself vitalized.

Playing Yakuza 3 is the exact opposite; combat is the driest its ever been with a reliance on the same stale combo over and over to reach success as enemies block your moves with insane resolve. Leveling Kiryu up to make his move set more interesting requires such an intense time investment compared to its peers that most players will likely finish the game with a meager set of moves which creates that overwhelming sense of tedium. The minigames are half designed, the new first person mode to discover moves is high stakes and easily fumbled. There's so, so much to do for the committed player who's ready to invest a hundred hours into combing over every inch of Yakuza 3's new realizations of Kamurocho and Okinawa. I am NOT that player. In scaling up Yakuza for the HD era, the development hit some hard walls that would take them many additional years of work to climb over. Such is life.

And yet, warts and all, I found myself absolutely swept up by Yakuza 3's large scale, high stakes storytelling. I didn't enjoy much of my experience pushing through Yakuza 3's design, but its wonderful character arcs, epic set pieces, and shift in tone and drama away from the insane structure of Yakuza 2 make for a singular, unforgettable experience. Though I am ranking it a 3 star meal in 2023, it is absolutely a 5 star meal for 2009; players simply wouldn't have known at that time how much better the Yakuza franchise would continue to get. As it stands, I put it right next to Yakuza 0 as a top tier Yakuza adventure. Adjust your expectations accordingly and you will not regret. Not even for a moment.

A horrible accident has left a man permanently disfigured and enslaved to the whims of an apathetic corporation. For most of us, this would leave us grappling with a crisis of a scale most of us are not prepared for. For Chai, this is just Tuesday.

Enter Tango Gameworks' surprise January 2023 release, Hi-Fi Rush.

Billed as a rhythm-action game hybrid, Hi-Fi Rush is equal parts Space Channel 5, Ratchet and Clank, and Devil May Cry; its a product of its influences and perhaps the best mainstream application of the "PS2, dude," mentality that people of a certain age sink into whenever anything remotely resembles the days long gone. Unfortunately, unlike these singular titles that loom large in the brains of console owners before 2006, Hi-Fi Rush never quite lives up to the potential it promises by.....resembling these classic titles.

Instead, we get a "King of everything, master of none," title that oozes personality, but doesn't have the game underneath to make it sing.

Hi-Fi Rush starts big with bombastic set pieces set to licensed music that set a particular expectation for the experience; your character is fused with an iPod-like MP3 player that forces everything he does to move to the beat of whatever music is playing from said device. Combos, dodges, parries; all of this must be carried out according to the tempo of the music at hand. It's novel, and kicking off with a pair of Black Keys and Nine Inch Nails tunes to set early stages and boss battles to makes for an absolutely thrilling first impression.

The thrills dry up early however, with much of the early, middle, and late game lacking the thrill of hearing recognizable music, instead leaning on a wonderful, but unmemorable score by a collection of excellent composers who unfortunately never craft a beat quite as memorable as the licensed early sequences; it makes timing your increasingly elaborate combos, special moves, and ally driven assist actions easy to time to a pumping, consistent beat, but it lacks the impact of say, fighting a boss battle to Nine Inch Nails' The Perfect Drug.

Beyond that, much of the game's standard levels feel under-designed. They most boil down to small stretches of simple platforming that carries you to the next wave of enemies. Your movement abilities feel excellent to manipulate, but many of the games construction zones and designed areas offer little benefit to taking advantage of them; there are glaringly obvious secret areas sprinkled throughout, but no means to access them until you've completed the game once, which does little to motivate me personally. You also just move really slowly through each level due to being tied to the beat of whatever music is playing, which negates the fun of having such responsive platforming controls!

Hi-Fi Rush has great fundamentals, but ultimately comes out of the oven with a gooey center that destabilizes the soufflé just enough to ruin my appetite. It leaves me hopeful for whatever Tango Gameworks does next; with a little more time in the oven, its clear that they can accomplish something great, and innovative. I don't necessarily mean a sequel either; just something creatively ambitious, colorful, and friendly. Here's to whatever's next!

A man. A woman. A bullet, lodged in each of their brains.

Max Payne 2 picks up 2 years after the end of Max Payne, with Max reassigned to the NYPD and tasked with picking up on a new case involving a series of killers known only as "The Cleaners." This brings him back into the fold with known killer for hire Mona Sax, who we last encountered in the finale of Max's wild ride. Together they fight the cleaners back to their source, leaving a trail of bodies behind them so thick that no number of mops could clean it up.

Writing up Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is easy - its like someone took a wrench and tightened up every loose screw Max Payne burst onto the scene with.

The guns have better weight. The level design is tighter and more arcade oriented. The bullet time and dodge mechanics are a little more useful and fun. The structure has more variety by introducing escort missions where you have to defend other characters and a new character to play as and interact with in Mona Sax.

It's all flavor, no filler. A perfectly acceptable improvement over its predecessor that doesn't blow the wheels completely off, but makes for a decent hang, especially for how short it is at around six hours.

Performance on the Xbox is further refined in this entry - the game runs at a solid 60fps in most sequences, only dropping in certain cases where large amounts of explosives are going off or enemy count increases beyond 3 or 4 at once. Aim assist doesn't feel nearly as magnetic in this entry, making controller feel much, much better than it did in Max Payne. All in all an excellent console port.

Sure do wish each line of dialogue wasn't trying to outsmart the last one though. Cool heckin game.

A man. A gun. A need to exact revenge.

These are the ingredients that fuel Remedy’s iconic 2001 third person shooter Max Payne. Before John Wick picked up his pistol and waged a one man war because his dog was murdered, Max Payne did the same thing after the murder of his family sent him into an undercover mission to destroy the mob.

Max Payne is a rip roaring tale of revenge, sending players on a quest to destroy every single mobster in NYC after a job goes wrong, finding him on the wrong end of the law. This quest, which is essentially a gun fight from the lowest point in NYC to the penthouse of the tallest building, is flavored with a set of excellent feeling rifles, pistols, and shotguns, as well as the iconic bullet time mechanic that’s set Remedy on the path of icon status that’s led them to Alan Wake 2 today.

Each level is punctuated by comic book style panels that present us with the twisted inner thoughts of Payne, which moves mountains to separate the game from cutscene driven narrative games of its era. Sam Lake’s first crack at storytelling is a bit blunt and hammy, but it does an excellent job defining who Max Payne is, and gives him strong and sympathetic motivations for going on such a wild romp. Characters are wafer thin, but it leans heavy on style to compensate for what it lacks.

Ultimately Max Payne’s greatest strength is its length - level design becomes mundane as it continues to wind down its path and encounters become tedious as the game goes down the route of quantity versus quality for encounters. Luckily it’s very short - any longer and it would become frustratingly boring. It’s a good hang for what it is, but it lays out its cards early, and plays them repeatedly through the credits roll.

Even worse, the Xbox port is poorly suited to the kind of precision aiming that Payne is designed around; the aim assist and analog stick controls are tuned to be tolerable, but doing anything other than hip firing is a fever dream. Aiming during a leap to the left or right? Good luck, friendo. Combine that with mild instability and you have a frustratingly mild experience for what should be a firecracker experience.

You're a kid. You snowboard down different courses doing sick tricks along the way.

Got it memorized?

Developed by Racdym, the studio known best today for its support work on bigger Japanese studio titles such as Ni No Kuni 2 and Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, Snowboard Kids is a colorful, arcade style competitive racing game in which you, as the title implies, snowboard. On paper it offers little new for the late 90s, and in execution its bright, big, bold colors, grating midi music, and cartoonish characters have allowed it to blend into the background of a 90s console race entirely.

But its execution is also incredibly brilliant. Unlike traditional racing games your analog stick does not control your character through extreme left and right movements, but by pulling into the bottom left and right corners to simulate the process of throwing your weight around to guide the snowboard. This is at first jarring, but as soon as it clicked I could feel my galaxy brain activating - this simple approach to roleplaying ends up feeling incredibly intuitive as you slide downwards, which requires you to hold no buttons. Aside from interesting turn mechanics, you also have the ability to jump off hills; mastering a clean jump with a spin trick is key to success in the back half of the game's nine races.

Controls aside, the races are incredibly well designed; the twists and turns of the 9 mountain courses are challenging, forcing you to master the distinctive turning controls and use the game's items - which are devastating no matter who's in control of them. You do get two items, one of action and one of support, at any given time as long as you have a hundred gold. There is a shop from which you can buy upgrades, but I didn't see a ton of value in its largely cosmetic slant.

Snowbow Kids Plus, the port to Playstation for the Japanese audience, would be nearly perfect with its intuitive controls and wonderfully competitive track design, except for its almost consistently poor performance; the more kids on screen, the slower and less responsive it becomes. The slowdown ebbs and flows as races continue, which can go as far as causing unnecessary frustration as you head towards the end of your slope during the third lap. Otherwise, it sits in a space where its got a nearly perfect amount of races, challenge, and innovation to make it worth your time.