A strong argument against this lingering notion that many gamers seem to have that a fan-made “fixed” remake, remaster or otherwise invasive revision of a game that actively changes core aspects of its identity should ever be taken in as a first impression of, or worse replacement for, an original work of art. And to be perfectly clear, I don’t believe that on any step of the development and production of Black Mesa that Crowbar Collective sought for this to be the intent nor the response to their work. Above all else, Crowbar are very obviously fans of Half-Life, and that passion shines through even from an outside observation of the time, effort, and communication the team put into creating this reimagining. I am also a big fan of Half-Life. That is, a big fan of Half-Life, the 1998 game. The other titles in the franchise haven’t ever quite worked for me the way the first one did, but I can of course acknowledge their very real and important place in both the history of Valve Software and of course the greater gaming industry and its progress at large. With that in mind, the permeating thought I simply couldn’t get out of my head with every later-entry-adjacent puzzle, every bombastic music cue, every chopped-in tie to the later Half-Life series, was that the developers and I were fans of the original game for flat out contradictory reasons.

I would say that I overall had a fairly good time with Black Mesa, but if I were to go down the list of pros and cons of the experience and then proceed to skin that list of the stuff provided by the original Half-Life, I think the list of positives is rather short. I’d like to address those first, because I want to come off at least somewhat positive about an experience I overall… liked. Some of the supplementary radio dialogue did well to add context without feeling invasive to the tone of Half-Life, especially late into the HECU breach as the Xen aliens begin to take over the rest of Black Mesa. I was happy to see the entire Half-Life tool-kit accounted for - Black Mesa was not so revisionist as to excise a weapon or two for the sake of streamlining the experience. Most play rather well but I do feel a greater imbalance was created leading players to favor the shotgun and SMG, which while fun to use shouldn’t and didn’t feel as overwhelmingly obvious selections in most scenarios in the 1998 title. I think the initial Tentacle encounter is probably a little better than the original game as far as detection of sound makers. For all the many, many issues I would have with this game’s take on Xen, I will admit that the abandoned base early on was really cool and felt in line with something the original game could’ve done tonally. And… that’s about where my Black Mesa-specific positives end, unfortunately.

I wish I didn't even need to acknowledge technical problems, but the loading times were worse than the original, my saves got corrupted like four or five times through a single playthrough, and sometimes flags just didn't work several times in a row. Much as I'd love to say these were my biggest issues with this project, sadly they're more of a negligible piece sitting in front of my actual, core problems with Black Mesa.

The overwhelmingly tone-deaf approach to reimagining Half-Life that plagues Black Mesa makes almost every change hard to swallow. I feel as if Half-Life was treated as a game to be ashamed of its own unique tonal identity in the execution of Black Mesa, given how many changes were contingent to keeping pace with the rest of the lesser entries of the series which would follow. And even then, I certainly can’t say that Half-Life 2, Opposing Force, or any of the other entries got nearly as bombastic and maximalist as this. Epic gamer metal tunes blast through previously alienating and uncomfortable hallways and gauntlets. Previously quiet and pensive strolls are stopped in their tracks for far less meaningful interactions than those they emulate from Half-Life 2. Tense, brief, but memorable boss encounters are stretched to the point of nearly a fucking hour at their very worst - frankly, the Gonarch encounter is embarrassingly bad. The entire heart and soul of some of Half-Life’s most curious locations is sucked out and spat out - is this supposed to be Xen, or application art to work on the next Avatar film? It’s frustrating how passionate this piece of art is, because there’s clearly a lack of mutual ground I share with why the game it’s trying to reimagine is so special.

Over twenty-five years after the original release of Half-Life, it remains my favorite first-person shooter ever made. It’s just as fresh, just as alien, just as unique as it was in 1998. Thanks to a massive rewrite of the sequel from its original 2001 concept and the subsequent influence it would have on both the remainder of Half-Life as a series and the greater market of first-person shooters, Half-Life remains one of a kind. There really is nothing quite like it. Black Mesa takes that ball, runs with it, and proceeds to make it feel more and more similar to everything else out there. The game is reimagined, but the heart is lost in the process. And no amount of polish can piece that together once it’s scrubbed out. That’s just my take on it, though. I really do send all the hardworking and passionate individuals at Crowbar my earnest congratulations. I respect the dedication, the execution, the grind. It clearly impressed Valve well enough, too. Keep making games, no matter what. Don’t let my equally passionate love for Half-Life put your flame out.

Trashy as all hell. A riot.

Mechanically much more interesting than Dark Escape. The choices between weapons offers more personalized variety in playstyles. You have one infinite weapon and then two limited weapons. Determining when to use these weapons is where half the fun and challenge comes in. There's not any real major plot divergences you can make, but that's not why I'm there. I'm there to see some goofy cutscenes and see if I can survive with more of myself intact. The power of choice feels more pronounced. Its silly, its dumb, its a charming little date night treat.

80s/early 90s anime is one of my favorite things, so a game trying to capture that look, combined with old-school shooter action, immediately caught my interest. Unfortunate, then, that it only half-commits to that aesthetic, while also being yet another Procedurally Generated Roguelike Slop-fest.

In Mullet Mad Jack, you run through floor after floor of the same rooms over and over, occasionally punctuated by a boss fight, while listening to some of the worst humor since High on Life. Do you like references? We've got Demolition Man, we've got Bane-posting, we've got RE4 Merchant lines that I forgot to screencap and I don't want to re-install the game!

The core concept is that you have 10 seconds to live, and killing enemies adds to your timer. This is because you're on a livestream and dopamine etc etc yadda yadda The Horrors of Capitalism because it's 2024 and everyone thinks they're fuckin Paul Verhoeven now by stomping this already well-trod ground into De Planet Corrrrre.

The time limit, however, means you have to always be moving forward. This also means the level "design", such as it is, can't be too complex. It's really just a series of hallways, some bigger than others, and they didn't even bother to make very many of them. You'll see the same very distinct rooms countless times, often several floors in a row. This, combined with how easy the game is on Normal (the Easy difficulty is named "I want a boomer shooter," as some weird dig at boomer shooters... But this game was easier than any boomer shooter I think I've ever played) mean you're just mindlessly blasting and holding Forward. Lasers are the most intimidating obstacle in the game, because they do a ton of damage, but you can also get an upgrade that halves that.

About the upgrades: You can pick from 3 every floor, and after 10 floors they reset except for your weapon (the weapons also appear in the upgrade screen). Just always make sure you get the shotgun, +max time, and increased chances for ricochets and enemies exploding. Those are really all you need, and you can cruise through. I never used any of the other weapons.

After yawning my way through 80 floors, I was surprised when the game just... Ended. I had assumed it would be 100, but I can't say I was sad that I wouldn't have to trudge through 20 more floors of rooms that I had already seen approximately 65 times so far. Then, to end things on a really great note, you have a final boss fight where your health is represented by a "badass-o-meter" and the last line is the same joke as the end of the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie.

2/10 - One grace point because sometimes there's stuff in here that looks pretty neat, even though other times it looks like art from a spinoff Meet N Fuck game.

PS: If you want something similar to this (as in, the game Mullet Mad Jack ripped off wholesale), I recommend checking out Post Void, which is 3 dollars at full price and also looks way cooler.

Alright Crash fans, you've officially lost me again. I'm not seeing what others do in this one. I guess the devs really wanted to add more variety, but instead of expanding on Crash's gameplay and levels, we get a bunch of nonsense. Underwater Crash levels? Boring. Jet ski stages? Why. Motorcycle races? Kinda annoying. A bi-plane dogfight??? I can't fuckin' stand it anymore!

There is one big addition to Crash's gameplay. Actually, it's more like five additions. Every time you beat a boss, you get a new powerup. They're a little superfluous, but I did notice that the level design going forward accounted for whatever new powerup you just earned. It's minor things, like occasional chasms that require the super tornado spin to glide across, but they're there. The game also introduces time trial relics for every stage, and I will come clean right now, I couldn't give a shit about these if I tried. The level design in this game feels weaker in general, and I have to wonder if Naughty Dog designed the stages with the expectation that you'd come back for the relic races. For me personally, gaining access to a couple more levels by earning relics isn't nearly as fun as seeking out cryptic hidden exits like in Crash 2.

Presentation's about as good as the last game. Being taunted by your enemies before stages begin is a really nice touch. Cortex sounds so dejected for most of this game, it's genuinely kind of hilarious, and a bit sad. They take full advantage of the time warp theming with the enemy and area designs too. Shoutouts to the water during the jet ski stages. I honestly have no idea how the geniuses at Naughty Dog got the water looking that good. MARIO WiiU would be proud.

Yeah I got nothing else. Cortex and his gang can keep their gems. I've had enough, personally.

"oh but the speed stages are too easy and badly designed and control poorly"

"oh but the shooting stages are slower than in sonic adventure 1"

"the treasure hunting stages are lackluster and underdeveloped in comparison to the other two kinds of missions at best, and overly convoluted and artificially difficult at worst"

you know, in my quest to 100% this game for the first time in my 22-year sonic adventure 2 career, i was worried i'd ruined the magic of the game for myself. mastering this game is grueling, man. it's one of the most tedious, difficult, and demanding collect-a-thons ever made, and after a certain point the cracks in the foundation of the basic game design begins to show as sonic adventure 2 begins to burst under the weight of its own ambition. there are only so many times you can handle playing the same set of missions over the same set of levels clearly not designed around them before you start to feel a little wearied, you feel me?

but i think my saving grace was the fact that i opted to gather all of the mission emblems before i actually completed the main story. after getting every A-rank from city escape all the way to final chase, i strapped right back in to the last story and let it enfold me. it's kind of funny how a lot of the things i cherished heavily at one point due to nostalgia vision and their impact on me lose their luster when i revisit them - sonic adventure 1 itself isn't immune to this, nor are other contemporary classics like half-life 2 or the original bioshock that were equally impactful on me - but nope, sonic adventure 2 still makes me feel like i'm standing on the fucking ceiling every time i strap in and let the main campaign take me. i mean, sure, the game is strongest as a 5-hour tour de force where it can showcase the strengths of its perfected gameplay loops without having to stretch them thin over a bevy of tasks not suited to them, and a few of the levels actively work against what the game's mission statement is... but what does any of that matter in the long run when sonic adventure 2 is simply the coolest game ever made?

by june 2001, the writing wasn't even on the wall anymore - the wall had actively been blown the fuck down by a monolithic black juggernaut sent by sony to wipe the floor with any and all competitors. the dreamcast had already been discontinued in march after a less-than-three-year lifespan, and with sega's transition into exclusively third-party software development the future of the company and its individual identity was cast into utmost obfuscation. it would be all too easy to just bow your head and duck out quietly here, but sonic team didn't seem content to just sit there and take it. if they were gonna sink, they must have planned on going down with the ship, because sonic adventure 2 is a masterclass in confidence - narratively and mechanically this is the best game that they ever made, and it knows it.

i think i could make an easy case for sonic adventure 2's complexity and depth if i compared it to devil may cry 3 (a game which has a lot of story and stylistic parallels to sonic adventure 2 as well... hmmmm): it's easy to waffle your way through each level and just keep going after you stumble, keeping a skill ceiling just low enough that you don't drown in the insane amount of shit going on... but part of the reason why sonic adventure 2 has such a reputation for its insane 100% status is because playing sonic adventure 2 well takes a lot of skill, practice, and willingness to learn. between the points system actively rewarding stylish gameplay and optimizing the living hell out of every second of your run, the fact that even one mess-up can potentially mean a restart, be it due to failing to maximize your point accumilation or (even worse) dying and starting with 0 points from whatever checkpoint you'd hit before that point. granted, many of the missions actively work against this design philosophy (especially since the same set of 5 missions is copy-and-pasted onto probably 95% of the stages, regardless of genre or level design), but when it hits? you get what you put into it. i've been eking away at sonic frontiers for the past sixth months or so, and it's perpetually perplexing to me that they apparently still don't know how to make sonic control well when they got it right twenty-three years ago. i'm starting to think we'll never get platforming levels like metal harbor or final chase ever again, or even the utterly deranged examples set by cosmic wall and mad space...

all right. sit the fuck down with your jututsu kaisens and your chainsaw mans and your my hero academias. bleach? one piece? dragon ball z? hell, fucking full metal alchemist (the indisputable GOAT in my opinion)? you all take notes too. this is the real shit, motherfuckers. REAL SHOUNEN. all killer, no filler. a series of picture-perfect Moments flawlessly interwoven together with just enough internal rhyme and reason to convince you to Go With It and not think about it too hard, all while having enough genuine substance and things to say for its children-and-teens audience to chew on. there's a reason that you hear people recite basically every cutscene in this game word for word during GDQ runs: everything from the iconic jungle clash between sonic and shadow to the mundane little moments like amy, knuckles and tails chilling on the side of the road just ooze style and personality, even when the story at hand is so boneheaded and numbskulled that you can't really get much out of it besides the raw adrenaline pumping through your veins. i even think the weird mo-cap on the anthro actors gives everything a lot of personality and charm, if only because this is the only time that sonic and co have felt like real people and genuine action heroes to me: it's little things like sonic assuming a cool guy fighting pose when he's about to square up with eggman, or the sheer cuntiness in rouge dangling above the eclipse cannon when introducing herself to eggman and shadow. sonic has always sort of had this reputation as being a silly scrimblo bimblo cartoon series, and it is that, but for one brilliant moment of clarity it commits to the bit and makes sonic actually as cool as he purports to be... and he's got enough swag that it actively rubs off on everyone and anything around him.

of course, this is maybe sonic the hedgehog's most controversial foray into genuine pathos... but i think everybody hams up the perceived "edginess" at the heart of the game without considering whether or not it's all in service of what the game ultimately has to say. sega knew that this would likely be their swan song, and the introspection and reflection littered throughout the script and reflection reflect that perfectly: sega was going out with a whimper after exploding onto the game scene with a bang, and the sort of questions the story poses reflects that perfectly. what happens when you're not who you thought you were, or when the people you define yourself by aren't who they thought you to be? the consistent anti-authoritarian throughline (sonic adventure 2 is an explicitly anti-police and anti-military game, and i'm not exaggerating even a little) reflects a willingness to distrust that which is portrayed as the unambiguous and untouchable good within our society. eggman's idolization of his grandfather is broken when he beholds dr. gerald's descent into wickedness, perhaps coming to understand his own lust for power and control as something less than the true tragic evil that now lives on through the blood in his veins. rouge's loyalty eventually yields not to her government benefactors or to her own selfish desires, but to her endearment to knuckles - an act which seems to even surprise herself by the end. hell, tails actually manages to make good on his "being independent from sonic" character arc from the previous game, considering that he breaks free from the mold of being a simple sidekick and is probably the single largest driving factor in the hero storyline from the moment sonic gets arrested for a second time.

last but most CERTAINLY not least, shadow the hedgehog's obfuscated memories and trauma-laden motivations all act to obscure and suppress the genuine kind heart and noble intentions he was born with and made for, perhaps being the embodiment of the game's study of and statements against the very concept of dualism. you would think that sonic's comparative lack of depth would make him stick out like a sore thumb here, but if anything i think this is the one and only example of that one-note characterization working to his favor: sonic simply is who he is, and his acceptance of his simple nature allows him to be who he is effortlessly without any kind of cognitive dissonance or baggage keeping him burdened to the past or anchored to laments about his present. he holds himself to no particular moral standard or self-image save for doing what he simply feels is appropriate at any given moment, his need for self-indulgence and going with his heart mercifully counter-balanced by the inherent purity of his character. shadow yields the title of "ultimate life form" to sonic not out of a recognition of his physical power or infalliability as a person, but because sonic's ideology is simply the way to be: unapologetically, violently, proudly yourself, unfettered to the artificial molds arbitrated your society, your past, or even your own everyday insecurities.

when i say sonic adventure 2 is one of the all-time top game narratives, i don't mean that it reaches the ideological potence of something like disco elysium or the inscrutable complexity of chrono cross, my personal favorite game narrative... i just mean that for the kind of thing it sets out to accomplish there's simply nothing better than it. crucially, to understand this the same logic applied to the main cast must be applied to sonic adventure 2 itself. yes, sonic the hedgehog is a silly series for silly children about silly cartoon animals... but if you look past that exterior and let go of all the pre-conceived notions you might have forged about what sonic apparently is, something special awaits you: the reality that sonic adventure 2, top to bottom, is one of the greatest games ever made.

When I started up Outcast: A New Beginning, I thought it was another remake of Outcast, the 1999 game beloved by those of us who still think of weird stucco-like peaks when we hear the word "voxels". I thought it was strange that they were doing another remake after Outcast: Second Contact (not to be confused with the remaster Outcast 1.1), but hey, we might be getting a second remake of Resident Evil 1 in the next few years. It turns out that A New Beginning is, in fact, a sequel, and it was originally titled Outcast 2 before being changed, presumably because they figured most people would not want to do homework by playing a 15-year old game.

I was under this impression until a few hours into the game, because early on, it sure seems like a remake. In short, Outcast is the closest thing to a Benjamin Sisko Simulator, wherein you play as a human guy on an alien planet, blessed by its extradimensional gods and designated as their divine savior. The general beats appeared the same, and I saw areas that looked like places in the first game. Eventually, it shows its hand and makes it very clear that this is some time after the first game, but your character, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE, FROM THE MEAN STREETS OF CINCINNATI, has had his memories erased.

This is an interesting way of onboarding new players, as NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE is just as clueless about what's going on as you are. And you will be, because the Talan, native inhabitants of Adelpha, LOVE to talk to you about anything on their mind. They constantly use words of their language and, though there is a glossary you can pop up by pulling a trigger during conversations, for quite a while you'll just be going with the flow. Sure, the dolo-tai guardians got reverted before they could activate the daoka and now their haagen-dasz is in sankra. Whatever, dude.

This barrage of nonsense, along with the game's very strange tone (veering wildly between sardonic humor, outright silliness, and sincere sci-fi), doesn't make a good first impression. I was pretty iffy on it for a while, but eventually you unlock the two things that make the game really fun: Traversal options and weapon modules. You have a jetpack that can be upgraded, both to let you zoom around at high speeds and great height, and a Just Cause-style wingsuit to cover greater distances over the air. Your guns, a pistol and rifle, can both be customized with various modules that either alter stats or completely change their method of operation. Think Gunstar Heroes for the best comparison. Turn your pistol into a shotgun that heals when it kills enemies, or turn your rifle into a sniper rifle that attaches mines to enemies it shoots. You also unlock various melee moves that I didn't use much, but make it clear that somebody involved in this game's development really liked Vanquish.

So playing the game is fun, but what do you actually DO in Outcast? Talk to aliens, mostly. Your main goal for the majority of the game is freeing the 7 villages on this big-ass map from human control, so you do missions for them that often intersect. This place needs booze from this other place, and the booze village needs bombs from the desert village, and so on. It becomes a pretty interesting interconnected ecosystem, and many parts of it can be done out of order or without being directed to do so. I was just putzing around temples collecting tablets for no real reason, and then when I got to the mission that required them, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE was just like "oh yeah I already have that." This sort of Emergent Questing can break sometimes, as I occasionally had a character talking about something that wasn't currently happening, but it's novel.

Outcast 2's biggest downfall is the shift in focus into an Open World Map Vomit game. I'm sure it's to make it more accessible to Gamers in general, but I don't think they're going to be getting a lot of new people in the door with this game's $70 price tag. The first game was a pretty unique action-adventure game, where you mostly focused on crippling the enemy's supply lines and weakening them, rather than powering yourself up, so 2 being dumbed-down is kind of a bummer. The quality of the activities in the game are variable: clearing bases and outposts are fine, because the combat is fun. Opening Essence Shrines to upgrade your max health is okay, as they have you follow a little ball around and the traversal is fun. Orym Trails, which are mostly the same thing, suck ass because there are 50 of them and they only give you a paltry amount of upgrade resource. Gork Eruptions are also fine, you just kill a few enemies near the Gork and then you collect the Gork to feed to The Gork. He's a weird guy in a cage, don't worry about it.

Outcast 2's SECOND biggest downfall is the performance. I would have rated this higher if not for the huge amount of glitches I saw during my playtime, as well as massive framerate problems. Within a few minutes, I switched to the 30fps mode because it was running anywhere between 30 and 60, with zero consistency, and it actually started to make me feel sick. The game also seems to have a memory leak or something, because during extended sessions it would start hitching more and more frequently, eventually hitching every time I jumped. Restarting the game fixed this, but yikes. Other glitches were all over the place, usually audio-related, but sometimes bouncy plants would be un-bounceable, making certain platforming challenges impossible. These were all fixed by just reloading a save, and you can save anywhere, so it wasn't a big deal. But this was on XSX, so I would say unless you have a really good PC that can brute force it into running well (because I doubt it's properly optimized on PC either) it's probably best to wait until the PS5 Pro comes out and play it there.

Your enjoyment of Outcast 2 will depend on how much you can tolerate this specific brand of jank. Personally, I don't mind it. It's not like Bethesda jank, where they're just too lazy to fix their shit that's been broken for decades. These are small, scrappy teams doing their best to realize their vision. Does this mean there are like 3 total models for the aliens, and some of them are voiced by the same people with comical "Witness Protection" pitch-shifting effects? Hell yes.

Get used to it, baby, this is all we're gonna have soon.

7/10

easily the best narrative i've experienced in a shooter to date; i acknowledge that's not exactly the highest bar, but if this were the benchmark we'd perceive the genre very differently

i'd say durandal marks two steps forward and one fairly meaty step back from its predecessor. story's the most obvious improvement thanks in no small part to the titular AI narcissist (who naturally happens to be about 100x more interesting than the marathon's leela ever could've hoped to be) as well as a plentiful amount of intriguing infodumps, which are now usually accompanied with some pretty cool 90s era pixel art to boot

gunplay sees significant improvements too, as every weapon (barring the alien blaster) looks nicer and feels way punchier. not to mention that the shotgun(s) here may be the best of any retro fps i've played; doom 2, eat your fuckin' heart out. it's nice having more aliens to shoot at too - almost every new enemy type is a welcome edition (fuck those giant missile-eating drones tho)

where things fall flatter for me, however, is level design. your mileage may vary, but as much as i love being showered with ammo (especially on total carnage, where it's a necessity to have 5835230952 grenades stockpiled) at all times, i can't say i'm half as enthused by running back and forth through such open and large mazes

it's not as if the original didn't have its share of backtracking, but there's just too much of it here. "begging for mercy makes me angry" is the most frustrating and obvious example; a long gauntlet stage that revolves around constantly returning to a central hub and covering obnoxious distances to revisit save points and health stations. where marathon exuded confidence in its placements of those things, often forcing players to abandon them and actively take risks, durandal just doesn't have the same sense of activeness or urgency in most cases. there's also far less in the way of puzzles - maybe a blessing to some, but a curse to me. oh well - at least there's plenty more terminals to make up for it

ultimately, the improvements and downgrades kinda cancel each other out. either way, you should absolutely play both games. expect strong storytelling and shooting here, but don't anticipate the same consistent quality in terms of level design

This game is very poorly designed. The progression and the mini games make this a very tedious collectathon experience. It almost feels like the developers were playing a practical joke with its game design. One of the mini games is broken to the point of being nearly impossible and it is repeated at least four times. To top it off there is a very easy to activate softlock that can gate 101% completion from you at the very end of the game. This all makes it hard to recommend to people. It's like a full time job of a video game.

To me this game design actually holds value. It makes for a game that's so over the top that it turns around and becomes compelling. You enter these giant collectathon sandboxes and it's so overwhelming, but slowly working out the ins and outs of the levels and achieving that 100% felt really satisfying in a way banjo never really got for me. A lot of people rightfully criticize the way it handles playable characters, but I think that limitation of having to find them was another step in this big puzzle of navigating the labrynthine collectathon loop the levels present. DK64 was always pushing me and testing me in all these ways that kept me engaged the entire time. I don't think there will ever be another game like it. Like what game has five variations of most of the collectibles in a level? It's just so insane to me and I find it endearing.

This is all held together by phenomenal presentation. I think this game values and understands the vibes of Donkey Kong Country more than people have you believe. Banjo is full of whimsy and a cozy feel to it. DK64 has a heavier emphasis on atmosphere, with the later levels going for moody foreboding stuff that you would see in the country games, it's great, and I think it compliments the daunting collectathon challenge it presents. I feel the same way about the music and I think it's easily Grant Kirkhopes best score. It's a surprisingly varied soundtrack and I often felt that it was going for the same kind of natural ambience David Wise goes for in the country games. I really don't understand the complaint that it just sounds like Banjo, they are definitely going for different things.

I wasn't sure I wanted to give this game as high of a rating as I did, but what cemented it for me was Hideout Helm and the final fight with K. Rool. It's an incredible finale and it's almost worth all the crap the game puts you through. Hideout Helm is a tight timed gauntlet that puts your knowledge of all the Kongs to the test with this incredible track that really puts the pressure on. And the K. Rool fight is this incredibly ambitious 5 round minimum boxing match where you have to use each kong's unique abilities to take him down. Legit one of my favorite bosses of all time, it's a masterwork in puzzle focused boss design.

I think one of the reasons I loved this game as much as I did was because it felt like a culmination of rareware at Nintendo. For better and worse it's this swan song collectathon where they just put all their eggs in a basket and went crazy with it. The fact you play Donkey Kong arcade and Rarewares Jetpac for mandatory progression only cements this idea. It's a celebratory experience that you have to really work at to get it's bombastic payoff. I don't think it's a game I'd casually play, but it was a challenge I set for myself that I found really fruitful at the end of the day.

I think the modern gamer has a tendency to outright dismiss a game's larger worth as a piece of art if it doesn't match a specific ideal of gameplay and presentation. Pikmin is not exactly what I'd consider a pretty game in all respects (there are certainly a few aspects that were technically impressive at the time though), and its gameplay experience seems purposefully tumultuous as much it attempts to simplify the RTS formula down in the typical Miyamoto fashion. But Pikmin is still a beautiful piece of art all the same, is it not?

I first played Pikmin in my teens, and I think it might've been the first game to teach me two things about games as a medium: that friction (and consequences) within a gameplay experience can be meaningful and compelling in its own right, and that a game can be more than the sum of its parts. It's actually kind of cool that the Pikmin AI will sometimes not listen or do something absolutely stupid; the things that modern gamers find annoying are part of what made Pikmin special.

Sure, Pikmin 2 is filled to the brim with content, and Pikmin 3 is a more realized and polished mechanical experience (I am not disparaging either of those games, I love them as well), but Pikmin has the most heart both in how its mechanics force you to think about your time and resources, and in how its narrative is more personal and dire. The bad, neutral, and good endings of Pikmin all stick with you.

Pikmin taught me that failure is okay, at least in the abstract gameplay sense. Olimar may have perished or even just returns home with no fanfare, but the player has another chance to do it better the next time. It's not a particularly hard game, but I do think it's an oft misunderstood game, so I just wanted to give this incredible little game the love it deserves.

you thought halo ce aged poorly?

...then how the hell was bungie utterly outshining that game's level design a whopping 7+ years before it was even conceived?! for a game of so many firsts in first person shooters, it's unnerving how little recognition marathon gets. not to mention how many of its pioneered ideas are often wrongfully attributed to the likes of half life; health stations, friendly npcs and narrative drive, to name a few

more than anything being falsely credited however, i'm upset that this melee combat hasn't been actively replicated by literally every succeeding fps. typically when playing a shooter - especially on harder difficulties - most people start pissing their pants as soon as they fire their last clip. doom with fists only? duke with his shoe? sure, it's been done for challenge's sake, but is it ever optimal?

it is in marathon because your fists don't deal static damage - rather their power increases with speed. on total carnage, the most standard enemy can eat 6 whole pistol rounds before he croaks; that's trivialized to 3 quick meetings between fist and face if you know what you're doing. simply put, punching dudes till they explode is insanely addictive. tell me this isn't the sickest shit and i'll rightfully call you a liar

a few of the levels here would make halo's library check the fuck out (colony ship for sale and pfhoraphobia most notably) but despite the sadism, i'd call most everything here pretty well designed and memorable thanks to some solid puzzles and smartly-placed save points. weapons are fairly basic, but the alternate firing modes (another bungie-birthed fps mechanic - go figure) help vary things up a good bit. shoutouts to the fusion pistol, flamethrower and whatever the fuck that alien gun is in particular - especially the alien gun because i adore it

narratively, there's definitely stuff of interest being brewed and i'm more invested here than i ever was in the original halo's plot, but i can tell things are just getting started. so onward i go - to durandal...

“Hey let’s just reuse the same locations and same puzzles and add some new half baked game mechanic”-every triple A dev team when making a DLC ‘story’ expansion since 2013

Maybe DLCs like this are fun only if you play them in the month window after they come out but they age awfully because you finish the main game load up the DLC to find out its story and you just have to play the same stuff again but more undercooked and just worse quality with one new annoying gameplay mechanic that doesn’t gel with the rest of the game.
And a character walking speed that makes the whole game feel so sluggish

Also if the base game was silent hill 1 inspired this is clearly silent hill 3 but without any of the pop punk y2k grit and style and nuance.