Do yourself a favor and avoid the PS1 version! The save system in that one is ATROCIOUS!

Like the previous Tomb Raider on the same console, you can save at any time and at any place in the level, but they made saving a limited currency by bringing back the floating crystals which now serves as pickups stored in your inventory. So, if you spend all of them, you better hope you reach the end of the level soon or find another crystal hidden somewhere, and they can get really scarce.

Combine that with how much harder the game is by design, and that made for many scenarios where I had to repeat the same loop over and over and over and over and over again, until I succeed at the part I'm having trouble with, either because I got no crystals left or want to desperately hold to what little I have for in case I get f***ed again.

That made it for one of the most frustrating gaming experiences I ever had and I feel bad for saying that but I think it's that one aspect that ruined it for me.

Maybe when I'll revisit it through the PC version or that new remaster, I'll better appreciate the good side of Tomb Raider III, but that won't be for a while.

UH-OH! BIG!
A massive improvement to the first two, and a massive difficulty spike to go along with it. Metal Slug X is a sort of remake of Metal Slug 2, with redone levels and improved performance (hence why I beat this game and not Metal Slug 2). However, I guess SNK was going through a tight spot, cause they apparently needed to get WAY MORE QUARTERS from people playing this game. This game is crazy difficult, stealing $11.25 from me in virtual quarters. However, the game does make it worth it. So much character, new weapons as well as STRONGER WEAPONS, new vehicles, and a strange narrative through out the levels involving an alien invasion. All and all, I loved Metal Slug X but I didn't need the kick to the balls it gave me. (also Fio is so cute omg)

Sorry world, I don't like this game.

My favourite part of it probably was the shrine puzzles but to be honest I did not even really like them that much. This game has the illusion of creative problem solving to deal with situations but in reality there is very much a set solution to each problem.

I find the world completely and utterly uncapitvating much like breath of the wild before it. There is something about the way nintendo approaches open worlds that makes them completely uninteresting for me to explore. I don't know if it's the liberal usage of empty space or the fact that getting from point A to B is still boring for me even with the building option.

Speaking of this game's central mechanic, it's build system. In theory you should be able to build all sorts of things to help you traverse and defeat the enemies. I don't know if this is a skill issue on my part but I found the system to obtuse and unituitive to do anything other than what was completely obviously set up. Most of the time I did not find it to be the best way of working through the dungeons even though in theory you can do anything you want with it.
It's held back by batteries as a resource which I think are farmed by those gatchapon machines you find around. Yeah I don't like that either. I pretty much hate anything gatchapon related and even something as trivial as randomly getting machine parts annoys me. There should be a store you can buy batteries at.

But I digress, this one ain't for me. It's for the fortnite and minecraft generation bless their hearts. I miss the dungeon designs of majora's mask and ocarina of time, I wish they would find some way to freshen up those ideas instead of this open world slop.

You really get the impression that Croteam is embarrassed about this one. There's never been an official HD remake, there are no Steam achievements, the bare minimum has been done for the game's Steam release, the game's considered non-canon, subsequent Serious Sams have gone out of their way to take place in alternate timelines or before the events of the first game, other experimental Serious Sam titles are clearly meant to be side-games... I suspect Croteam would just as soon pretend they never made this one, if only they hadn't made this a numbered sequel.

Which is a damn shame, because of what I've played, this is my favorite by a decent margin.

Yes, this is an idiotic, honestly kinda cringey farce of a game to look at. I have no idea what the hell's going on with all the squeaky, sing-song voices the player hears throughout the game. Some of the redesigns are really stupid, particularly the bomb guys being given singlets. Yyyyyyeah I don't like the that one planet that's populated by Chinese stereotypes and Yellow Peril-adjacent bad guys, not even gonna defend that one.

None of those matter to me (well, maybe the last one of those). What matters is this: because Serious Sam 2 is so bizarre, it actually ends up being a ton of fun with its level designs and challenges. There's an elevator level early on, which is a surprisingly great complement for Serious Sam's usual enemy-spamming. There are a lot of really fun level archetypes, including a "Honey I Shrunk The Kids"-esque giant patch of grass and an intergalactic game show. There's this one boss fight where you're bounding around in moon boots, firing ballistae at a dragon, and it's the distilled essence of this game's experience: really damn stupid, but a ton of fun all the same.

Perhaps a significant portion of my enjoyment for this game came from the fact that I ran through this in co-op. The game doesn't play cutscenes during co-op! This does make the experience of the game a lot more confusing, since there's no attempt to explain within the levels why you're going from world to world. At the same time, from what I've seen of the cutscenes, I think I would be way more irritated by this game if I did have to watch them. I'm perfectly content treating this game as a fantasia of weird set pieces, if that's what we're working with.

The game controversially features a lives system rather than infinite respawns, but if you're playing an online game, you can just set it so lives are infinite. Not something you have to worry about if you don't wanna.

WAIT TIL THEY GET A LOAD OF ME!
Virtual Boy Wario Land is quite the step up from the first Wario Land. The level design is of similar quailty (no train level though), however the controls and overall smoothness of Wario is massively improved. It makes sense, as the Virtual Boy is a more powerful machine than the Game Boy.(Yeah I just praised the Virtual Boy's hardware, what are you gonna do about it?) The bosses are pretty fun, my favorite being the third with you having to jump as head, however his main attack comes out of his head. All and all, it's actually a good game. Damn good. But, only one problem: it's on Virtual Boy.

Wow, it's the first game I ever worked on professionally! I'm marking this game as "mastered" considering I spent 2 years of my life working on it.

Look, there are other former Volition coworkers of mine that have guested on podcasts and talked about some of the issues this game's development went through. This game was supposed to be doing a lot more, originally. The ideas were too lofty to be pulled off by a team of Volition's size, poor management and meddling from the publisher damaged team morale, and a whole host of other things contributed to the poor final product.

The game was originally more of a loot-based, co-op action RPG with three open world cities that would update over time. The map updates were kind of like Fortnite's, but smaller and on a more frequent basis. New events would happen every so often that featured community goals, the kind you currently see happening in Helldivers 2. The ideas were neat, but it all felt very pie-in-the-sky.

The newly updated engine and tools Volition was using at the time were designed with this original game in mind... which means the tools needed to make a single player open world game with linear missions did not really exist. There were no cinematics tools and no tools for linear, checkpointed missions. So that's why the game launched with a shitload of bugs that would break mission progression.

Also here's a nitpick I have with the game that no one has ever pointed out. There are multiple areas in the game where way more scientist NPCs spawn than any other type and it's really jarring. Also all of the civilian NPCs look like they were built on a slightly different scale than the player characters. All of the civilians are kind of tiny looking, even when put next to the playable characters that are also on the small side.

Glad to finally have my hands on this childhood classic of mine and it has aged more brilliantly than I'd hoped for. A grounded, atmospheric, and even sometimes terrifying survival game. The default settings are HUD-less, not even a crosshair. You use every resource available to you, mostly bone spears, to navigate the hostile Skull Island. Fight dinosaurs, giant centipedes, primordial gators, you name it. All of these monsters eat each other as well. Kill one and use it as bait to make your escape. Stick a big bug on a spear and throw it into thorny bramble to lure them in then set the bramble on fire to burn them all to death. It's filled with these little emergent moments. Then suddenly you play as Kong in a big monster brawler, climbing vines and breaking V-Rex jaws. Easily the gold standard for movie tie-ins, a genuinely great survival game on its own. The best game Ubisoft have touched.

What we have here is an incredible action game with a high skill ceiling. Would be a shame if someone added worms to it...

First things first: Ninja Gaiden Black looks incredible running on a Series X. There is a level of clarity and sharpness here that you just won't see in most other backwards compatible Xbox games - not unless it's also developed by Team Ninja - and even some 360 games upscaled to 4k don't look nearly as good. You can see every pixel on Rachel, and I know because I've spent hours in the lab analyzing her model. I have access to high-end Digital Foundry tools, and you will not believe the frame graph I've generated for Ryu's crotch-- this technology was NOT intended for these purposes!

Now this is where I out myself as a hack, because I did not beat this game on Ultra Lord-God Ninja mode or whatever the hell Ninja Gaiden Black's most powerful warriors insist is the one true way to enjoy the game. I'm a Centrist Ninja, I think any way you enjoy a game is the best way to enjoy it, even if you're a dog. A ninja dog, as some might be.

Even though I lack the requisite amount of skill to play Black on its highest difficulty, I'm more than capable of seeing what the game is going for and respect how technical it is. Look up any boss tutorial and you'll get a sense for how layered and complex Ninja Gaiden's combat can be. It's worth noting that none of the strategies therein actually helped me overcome some of Black's nastiest bosses when applied directly, but they did give me insight into the game's underlying mechanics which allowed me to develop tactics that worked for me. Brute force is seldom the answer, and Black rewards experimentation and thoughtful play, which is appreciable on any level of difficulty.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can jump onboard with the sentiment that this is the best action game ever. The rote reuse of certain bosses on normal difficulties and below can get tiresome, and though you can mitigate this by playing at higher levels, the trade comes at the cost of adding more mobs to boss battles. The few tastes I had of this during my playthrough didn't leave a positive impression, as the increased number of enemies didn't pay nice with the camera. An egregious case of this comes early with the second boss fight, where you have to manage an enemy on horseback running between the two edges of the arena while contending with wizards sniping at you and vanishing.

As the game crept on and abandoned interesting traversal for intense combat challenges in its last two levels, I found my investment waning. In a way, this is true to Ninja Gaiden's NES lineage, because like those games I found myself nearing the end and thinking "yeah I've had enough, I'm good." I understand clawing your way through several small rooms of meaty and tenacious enemies and rolling right into a boss rush is meant to be a true test of your skills, but I personally didn't find the attrition nearly as enjoyable as others. This shouldn't be taken as a full-throated dismissal of the game's combat, which I do like overall, but I did find myself waxing between disengagement and frustration towards the end.

Maybe some of my issues stem from a real bad case of Resident Evil brain for which I'm entering the terminal stages, because I found the parts of Black where you're roaming around and solving puzzles to be the most enjoyable. Yeah, I know, I'm a freak for thinking the combat is secondary to platforming and picking up weird totems to trek back to locked doors a level-and-a-half away. I have to live with myself every day of my life.

It's easy to get lost in the minutia of Ninja Gaiden Black's combat and difficulties, and if you really want to trip headfirst down the rabbit hole, you should check out all the subtle and big differences in Ninja Gaiden's many releases. I actually own a copy of 2004's Ninja Gaiden, which I mistakenly bought thinking it was a totally different game. It was only when I was a breath away from grabbing Sigma under the same assumption that I realized what I'd done, so I just have a spare lying around if anyone wants it. Just post your full address in the comments (DO NOT DO THIS, I WILL DELETE YOUR COMMENT AND SEND YOU A COPY OF AMERICA'S AMY INSTEAD AND IT WILL BE ON YOU FOR TRUSTING ME.)

Some problems inherent to the game and more still that amount to personal taste keep Ninja Gaiden Black from leaving the same impression on me that it does others, but I certainly see why people feel so passionately about it. I eagerly await them telling me how I played the game wrong and am a bastard for it, which is always the best way to get people to enjoy things the same way you do.

I played this for a group of friends without any context for what I was getting into (heck, I couldn't even give you context for why I played it - I think I asked for suggestions for licensed games, and this is what I got?). I remember Hamtaro being a thing, but the most connection I have to the source material is my girlfriend being a fan of the show as a kid and my sister having a questionable Hamtaro fanfic in her traveling convention show's regular rotation (long story).

But I know the general thing well enough - little hamsters going on big adventures. And for that sort of thing, Ham-Ham Unite is a cute enough title. Simple little adventure game, goin' around lookin' for stuff to give to people. I'm always a fan of these types of mousehole adventures, so this sort of thing is a nice, cute little time.

...were the characters like this in the source material? I don't think any of the specific characters felt important, like, it's been a couple years and I cannot remember if the lady hamster was even in this game. And did Hamtaro really go around peeing on things in the show? Little man's kind of a stinker!