I want to be clear that I’ve already lied to you by the time you’ve read this, because this game isn’t worthy of four stars. However, it is one of the most interesting and unusual games I’ve played in a long time, so I wanted to get the word out. If janky, mediocre PS1 games which fly off the rails are your thing, then go play it. Otherwise, I’ll just talk about its weirdness, spoiling things as I go.

So, the plot starts off in a Ghost-in-the-Shell cyber future, with your three protagonists entering the stage via the obligatory cyber helicopter. The first one you control is Hana, a slick super-spy who fits the mold of her time, essentially being Lara Croft by way of Motoko Kusanagi. Then, you have Glas, whose five o’ clock shadow and bright blue hoodie signify that he’s a hard-boiled detective undercover as a fifth grader. Finally, you have Deke, a potentially fake Australian who says “bloody” and “sheila” while wearing an unflattering turtleneck. The mission of this little mercenary band is to sneak into a yakuza hideout, and get information from their inside-man about the leader’s missing daughter. Sneak in, get the info, go out and find the girl, turn her in for a massive reward, easy. But of course, the job goes bad, the informant dies, the boss discovers what the mercs are up to, and they’re on the run. Now they have to get the girl as a bargaining chip for their own lives, and the race is on.

Please change the disc.

This game’s backgrounds are all pre-rendered videos, and it’s extremely central to this game’s identity. I may complain about how you have to juggle four discs to play a five hour game and laugh at the low resolution, but I can’t help but love how this game looks. I mean, it looks rough, but it’s the sheer commitment I respect. They didn’t want a rectangle with a circle on top as their helicopter; they created a fully-detailed model to be used in a pre-rendered video alongside other real-time effects. They wanted vents fogging up a rooftop with steam, not flat concrete walls. MGS-style head wiggling for talking wasn't good enough, they wanted animated faces with expressions and mouth flaps. They wanted an interactive animated feature within the limitations of the PlayStation, and that ambition really impresses me. I’ve played a ton of games which call back to this era, but they never replicate that ambitious attitude. They never capture the feeling of pushing the system to its breaking point, or of solving technical challenges with creativity. I mean, analog flaws are cool and all, but it feels like throwback games often miss the point by celebrating limitations for their own sake rather than for the creativity they engendered.

Please close the lid. Loading.

The second mission has you catching up to the missing girl, who’s in a town overrun by what seem to be zombies. She’s a little vague on the details, but she tells you that she “didn’t know that blood was the catalyst”. It’s a bit of a jump from the straight cyberpunk we started with, but sci-fi mixes with any genre pretty well, so it’s all good. She agrees to return to her father, as long as she gets to see a woman known as Madame Chen first, since she can explain things. But of course, Chen’s working with the yakuza, and the girl’s captured as soon as Glas brings her in the door. This third mission has you switching between characters in Madame Chen’s restaurant-slash-brothel: escaping capture as Glas, sneaking in as Hana, and kicking in the door as Deke.

This is an abrupt stop, but I’m about to drop a significant spoiler for the exact moment that shit flies off the rails. If this has piqued your interest at all, stop at the end of this sentence and go play it. This is the big reveal.

Ok, now change the disc again.

Glas and Deke are ambushed. They die, and their souls go to hell. The madame turns out to be a demon queen, and Hana kills her. Her blood melts a hole into the underworld. Hana descends the melted blood hell pit to go kill Satan.

That’s not an exaggeration. Not a joke. That’s what happens. You've spent the majority of the game as these two characters, and now they're bloody scraps. As hard of a tonal pivot as it is though, this is the exact moment where I totally fell in love with this clunky old game. With such an unsafe move, it achieved something that Resident Evil was never able to: the establishment of vulnerability when players are at their strongest. It’s a Predator-esque pivot where a lone action hero has to come to the realization they’re actually in a horror movie. You used to worry about normal soldiers shooting at you, and suddenly you’re facing demons with scythe hands. Maybe the zombies in the second chapter should have struck me more than they did, but I was expecting them to be explained away. I thought it would be revealed that the yakuza girl was genetically engineered to work with next-generation nanomachines or something, and that the nanobots in her blood were lethal to anyone else. I mean, the zombies in the games which inspired Fear Effect were the result of an engineered virus, and I don’t expect Jill Valentine to go kick Satan’s ass until RE10 at the earliest.

One last disc change.

That’s as far as I’ll spoil the plot, since I think it’s enough to convey why I have four-star love for this mediocre game. It’s just so wholeheartedly bold. Even to this day we get lazy rearrangements of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but Fear Effect showed how to use the format while fearlessly establishing its own identity way back in 2000. It fought every technical limitation, ignored standard practices, and did its own thing. Being just as good as the other games out there wasn’t the goal at all, it had to blow people away. It probably shocked you at least once just in this summary, and I didn’t even include some of the cooler things it does towards the very end. So, I’m fine with it having a shit inventory system. I’m fine with a broken lock-on. I’m fine with all the flaws, because, as cheesy as it is to say, this game was never trying to be good, it was trying to be awesome.

For a game that I'd prematurely written off a bit for the comparative lack of charming presentation this had compared to what the games before and after it had achieved in the series, I'm pretty annoyed that it took me this long to get around to it and realise that it's actually amazing. While I still can't deny the fact that this is the worst looking of the 3 main Punch Out games and has the least compelling aesthetic (likely due to carrying elements over from the arcade game which hadn't quite nailed its distinctive identity yet), the way the mechanics of this one so elegantly play into each other took me by surprise and ultimately make me think that this would easily be my preferred pick over Mike Tyson's Punch Out if it had just nailed the visual direction. Rather than the more methodical, reaction based nature of MTPO, this one plays around with the concept of combat momentum a lot more and creates something that feels rather complex and nuanced without sacrificing the very straightforward core loop of "dodge them and then punch them".

The most clear way in which this stands out is the way it plays around with the concept of momentum in a battle, with the line between being able to completely destroy an opponent in seconds and have a long, drawn out fight that you probably lose being rather narrow. This is mainly thanks to how the super meter plays such a vital role in making a lot of these boxers go down quickly compared to the way they seemingly can take an insane amount of punches to the face otherwise, with the fights often feeling less like a fight based around who's health bar hits 0 first, and more about filling that meter up and maintaining it. The exact amount of health left often feels irrelevant as there are so many cases where it feels closer to "how many more super punches will it take to win?" with so many nuances being based around this rather than anything else. Most fights will only allow you to get in a tiny number of hits with each successful dodge due to being balanced around this as well, but it also contributes to the feeling of going up against intimidating, unbeatable walls that's so key to the whole identity this is going for without relying so heavily on requiring ridiculous reflexes to get anything in the latter half of the game done.

The assortment of gimmicks that the fighters have is also handled really well, never feeling as if an out of field idea entirely dominates a fight while still adding some nice variety that can also turn a lot of these encounters into almost puzzle encounters, especially if you're trying to optimise how fast you are. While a lot of the characters themselves feel less fun and colourful, this vast array of fighting styles on display still end up contributing strongly to characters feeling distinctive and entertaining. Overall this is just an insanely solid game that has a lot to love about it despite the inferior visual direction and I love the way that it so strongly encourages absolute mastery without making you feel as if you need it to win, as even at the end of the game, you're likely to feel that there's so much more you can do with just another round, and it's all executed immaculately. Only real thing I don't love is that it takes a bit to really throw the exceptionally interesting ideas towards you, but it's not something that bothers me a lot either since that portion of the game is both pretty short and has a lot of valuable teaching moments to prepare the player for said interesting encounters later on. Awesome stuff, the series is truly an absolute gem and I'm looking forward to eventually seeing what the Wii game has to offer.

Absolutely brilliant game, top shelf from the NES but of course it also can't escape at least one NES-ism, which is how a couple of the later enemies (cough cough Bald Bull) practically need a guide.

Huge shoutouts to /u/Nowhere, who booted it up after me, raced me, and embarrassed me by beating it the same day; relaying info to me about stuff like Bald Bull and Tyson.

And of course the bearded person and photographer in the crowd for letting me know when to OHKO Honda and Bull.

Mike Tyson is a terrible fight, that's all.

Beaten via Mesen core on RetroArch w/ 2 frames runahead and 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller (over 2.4G dongle). No save states except to skip Macho Man once I began perfecting him and fight Tyson.

Sorry folks but it actually kind of rules. Clearly has a lot of love for the series behind every aspect of its design (porting over elements like boost/health management and the spin attack from later entries is great, the character art in the menus is cool) and the skyway is a genuinely well thought out comeback mechanic. Of course it's not a GX remaster or big budget new entry, but so called F Zero fans really seem to hate... the original F-Zero with X's mechanics. There is an element of luck that's going to come with a 99 person race, absolutely, but I'd say that the skill based racing and really tense risk/reward are here just as much as in prior series entries too. Really addictive arcade like experience that is unfortunately being beaten on by people for imo pretty superficial reasons.

Nearly 20 years of being an F-Zero fan and feeding on scraps like Captain Falcon being in Smash Bros or Captain Falcon's Twister Race being in Nintendo Land but at last, after all that waiting, after all that suffering, Nintendo has brought F-Zero out of retirement with F-Zero 99, seemingly plotting the best path possible to properly revive the series in the future.

F-Zero 99 marries the two concepts of SNES F-Zero (where every lap you must finish above a certain number of people or you're eliminated) with the 99 series of games (where 99 real people online battle it out to be number 1 like in Tetris 99 or Pac-Man 99).
So F-Zero 99 at its core is built on the foundation of the SNES game where it looks like how you would remember the SNES game only now in HD with various track elements like ramps and mines now built in 3D. You have the same four vehicles of the SNES game along with the tracks all being from that game as well but a few elements have been taken from later entries in the series to help make it play a little closer to F-Zero X and GX. The boost mechanic works exactly like those games where your health is your boost. Boosting requires a portion of your health to be activated and this core mechanic is exactly why I love the F-Zero series so much. When you can lose health from crashing into walls or being attacked by other vehicles, this mechanic brings a huge level of risk vs reward to every race, particularly towards the end of a race when everybody is going gung ho and the slightest tap could eliminate a number of people. To further add to this mechanic, if you knock out another player, you not only refill you own health but also increase your health allowing you to boost even more giving you an advantage over other racers. This is what peak F-Zero is, a thrilling race between life or death where the more aggressive you play the more you are rewarded. Being over zealous comes with the risk of being eliminated early but playing your cards right can lead to the sweetest of victories.

To help with aggressive plays, the other mechanic brought in from X and GX is the spin attack. As the name suggests, this allows you to spin and attack other racers, damaging them while protecting yourself. To accommodate for having 99 players on the track, vehicles are now less slippery than they were in other F-Zero games meaning the spin attack doesn't quite knock people flying and pinballing around like it used to, instead it does a better job at repelling racers around you who are trying to nudge you off course. Unfortunately the side attack hasn't been brought back where double tapping the drift buttons would jerk your vehicle to the left or right to knock other racers flying, but there is a new mechanic introduced that is tied to the spin attack to help pull those further back in the race up the pack a little.

Now many F-Zero fans are probably thinking "a comeback mechanic? In a game all about rewarding skill and punishing mistakes? Why have they Mario Kart'd my F-Zero?" Well that's where you're wrong because this new mechanic has also been designed around F-Zero's incredible risk/reward pull. By spin attacking other vehicles, these little yellow orbs land on the course called sparks. Collecting these fill up a meter that allows you to use a Super Boost which takes you up to a new part of every course called the Skyway. The Skyway is full of boost pads and corner cutting allowing you to fly above the rest of the racers and catch up. This boost lasts longer the further back you are and will not drop you off on a corner or an area where there is no track underneath so more smart thinking players will use it in the most optimal of places but that also comes with the detriment with not being able to use your regular boost so you can end up missing out on the most optimal place to use that boost while waiting for the most optimal place to use the Skyway.

Even with the Skyway catch up mechanic, it still takes skill to actually finish first in a race. The further up in the pack you are the more likely you are to find cpu machines designed to hinder you. Grey vehicles that bump you much further than usual and red vehicles that explode upon contact taking a large chunk of your health away truly test if you deserve to be leading the race or not. There's also blue player controlled vehicles for people who crash out early to cause mayhem for around 30 seconds with spin attacks before blowing up and people further back in the race can find a golden vehicle that fill up a good portion of your super boost meter when collided with. There's a lot of reaction skill needed to navigate these obstacles and they help separate the best from the rest.

Further pushing this as a skill based game is how you start a race. Rather than hope for a good starting point in a traditional racing starting line up, instead all 99 players a lined up across a super wide piece of track that narrows down as you drive along before jumping across to the start line of the actual course itself, meaning if you want to start the race in a good position you have to earn it by forcing your way to the front of the pack yourself. Another cool thing about these portions of the course is that they're sometimes changed up a little bit. Sand Ocean usually starts with two separate courses that cross over each other before merging into one for the jump but sometimes you'll get one that is a bit simpler and ends with a massive strip of boost pads.

In terms of game modes your main mode is the 99 mode itself where 99 racers compete to earn first place. A few racers are ranked out every lap and the course is voted on before a race via the two options given, currently selected from Mute City 1, Big Blue, Sand Ocean and Death Wind. It works for the most part but unfortunately people do tend to gravitate towards Mute City or Big Blue meaning track variety can be an issue in this mode depending on your luck from the choices given. In the 99 mode you're given 4 rivals based on your current level and rank and if you manage to beat any of them you will increase your rank slightly. It's a great expansion of the rank system in X/GX and it manages to give you some satisfaction even if you're struggling to compete for a 1st place finish. Doing well in the 99 mode will earn you tickets which can be used in the prixs.
The other modes rotate in and out and these include a team battle mode where you're put into one of two teams and your team earns points based on position, damaging opponents with spin attacks, destroying opponents, etc and at the end you get a Splatoon style totting up of the points to see if your team's bar makes it across the halfway point for victory. It's a nice side mode to dip into every now and then. There's pro tracks which currently includes White Land and Port Town II from the Queen and King leagues for players to test themselves on in a 99 race. These courses are included as possible finales for the mini prix mode in which you race across 3 courses earning points based on where you finish in a somewhat more traditional style F-Zero grand prix. Ranking out or blowing up eliminates you from the competition entirely so there's a test of skill to see if you can even finish the prix as it cuts down its racers to 60 and then 40 for the end. The rivals system changes a little here where your rivals become the two racers above and below you in the rankings, increasing the tension even further as beating rivals will most likely mean you're moving up the rankings table. Mini prixs cost 1 ticket and are a ton of fun to compete in but the main attraction for me is the mode that is always in a countdown on the main menu…
The grand prix currently cycles in once every hour or on weekends every half hour and currently takes the 5 Knight League courses from the SNES game and has racers compete to earn first place. It works exactly like the mini prix mode but costs 3 tickets and with 2 more races, the number of racers is eventually cut down to 20 for the final race where you start more like a traditional race with each player placed on the starting grid in terms of their table ranking with 20th at the front and 1st at the back. The grand prix is a true test of your abilities as even just making it through all 5 races is a challenge in and of itself. Any extra health you've picked up from destroying vehicles carries over throughout the prix allowing you to boost more and adding an element of strategy. Do you want to spend the first race building up your resources by hanging back a bit and picking off weakened vehicles or do you want to try and race normally, hoping you defeat vehicles along the way. It's thrilling stuff and you can really feel the pressure on yourself after having a good start and sitting near the top of the table. Winning the grand prix is the ultimate test of skill and what I would call the crowning glory of the game.

On top of all this, by completing challenges with each vehicle in the game such as winning a race or making it through a race without bumping off a wall, you can earn cosmetics to change up the look of your vehicle and decorate your user card. It's nice having a few options to give each vehicle your own identity. It is a bit of a shame that there are only 4 vehicles currently. It's hard to say if they'll add any more or not but they do have plenty of options from other 2D F-Zero games like Maximum Velocity and GP Legend on the GBA. Course wise all the SNES courses will be added eventually, which will be great. Seeing how many people who actually make it to the end of Fire Field will be a lot of fun. I think it would be wise to add in GBA courses as well, especially if we're just keeping easier courses in the main 99 mode. It would add more options and avoid the current predicament of the same courses being picked over and over again.

F-Zero 99 expands upon what makes traditional F-Zero so great, essentially feeling like what an online mode of F-Zero would have felt like. In its current form it does lack depth in vehicle and course options but aside from those drawbacks, this is the most thrilling, competitive, addictive, and true to its core series from the 99 style games released so far. It has given me optimism for the future of F-Zero and finally satisfied the craving I've had for a new F-Zero for nearly 20 years.

Another game in love with the sound of its own voice, holding players hostage to the ramblings of a venomous psycho. It looks fast, but all your moves land like a pillow. Everything collides at the wrong time, with poor key frames and difficult-to-read animation. Gameplay boils down to tedious rounds of Simon – orange circle means melee, red telegraph means dodge, that annoying doppler sound effect means parry – why bother with illustrative graphics? To round it out, Furi's plot is a narcissistic trap ala Breaking Bad, tempting you to excuse your baser impulses because everyone else is worse

An upsetting start for Konami’s quantity-over-quality approach to their Silent Hill revival.

I won’t reiterate what’s already been said about the intrusive monetisation system, mind-numbing ‘puzzles’ and choppy animation. I will say the idea of a community based Telltale experience can work on other IP - The Walking Dead is kind-of all about group decisions leading to drastic consequences - but the true essence of Silent Hill is loneliness and isolation.

Granted, PT was, in some ways, community driven in its obtuse puzzles, but the experience was undoubtedly best played alone in the dark. Unlike PT, Ascension is simply not scary, at least in the way we want it to be! It is instead riddled with narrative cliches, dull characters and ineptly written dialogue. That said, even the best Silent Hill games overcome some of these aspects through animation alone. Take the limited expressions of James or Angela from SH2 for instance: so much of the emotion behind their scenes are conveyed through choice of character movement, camera angles and editing. Sure, Ascension has the daunting task of churning out 16 weeks (?!) worth of content and won’t have Kojima’s budget or tools for facial animation, but there are no excuses behind the consistently uninspired direction where most characters just stand and deliver clunky lines at a flat camera angle.

I could understand something like this going fine and maybe even unnoticed alongside the release of both the SH2 Remake and the movie, but starting the revival of a decade-dormant franchise with Silent Hill: Ascension casts a looming shadow of uncertainty over releases to come. We can only hope the worst is behind us.