128 reviews liked by hlebushek


Played on the NSO cheater version and it was still too annoying even without the high difficulty. Bro this shit is so annoyingly cryptic. I got like halfway through and maybe I’ll come back to it at some point to beat it but I’m good for now.

Unlike other fantastic ports of puzzle games, this is different than the Saturn game in pretty big (and negative) ways. The reduction of the amount of rows you get, in addition to changes to the way pieces are cleared make this feel like an incomplete minigame compared to the original. It also doesn't help they used the same (awful) 3D graphics, but just digitized them with all the love of the Gameboy Mortal Kombat ports. This could have been Baku Baku's premier platform, and instead we lost a treasure of puzzle gaming to the ages.

Or at least, we could have had a decent thing to play on the Game Gear between Collumns

Toem

2021

nicely cute though doesn't fully scratch the itch I was hoping for. maybe the artstyle puts me off a smidge.
the larger problem I have is that things feel too one-dimensional. too many of the items you receive along the way are one-use. I would have loved to see more challenges that utilized different recurring mechanics rather than "here's this clothing that you'll use for one photo and forget about wearing until the next piece of clothing replaces it," ESPECIALLY the filters which I was expecting to have a lot of potential. I didn't 100% the game so perhaps there's more that mix-and-match than I encountered?
the music and world are nice, the act of photography feels snappy (haha), I merely wish those good aspects could have been allowed to flourish even more.

feels like i played this alongside my six year old self. we did it lil' buddy, we finally beat the one game we had no chance in hell of finishing without a gamecube memory card

as with sa1, there's really no point in arguing about this series since the detractors have long made up their shitty minds. sa2's an interesting beast though because it manages to excel just as much as its predecessor... in very different ways!

the speed stages are great, albeit nothing like sa1's. maybe you prefer these more linearly driven, setpiece-focused levels, but i might be partial to having a spindash that can blaze me across entire courses in a matter of seconds. i like going places i shouldn't and being rewarded for it. there's some of that here, but it's not nearly the same. that said, there's no city escape or final rush in sa1 so we'll call it a draw

treasure hunting is improved tenfold. i definitely prefer the newly limited radar system (it makes finding shards early super satisfying) and the overall increased difficulty. especially after knuckles' previous story was an absolute cakewalk. rouge is basically knuckles on hard mode and i generally prefer her side more for that. love her music too, though i wish it was more lyrically driven to better contrast knuckles

shooting's a more mixed bag. tails reps one of the best stages but also most of the worst. eggman on the other hand for the most part lives up to gamma's gameplay well enough - especially once he gets his booster. there's def a sense of flow to these that i feel a solid chunk of people don't give deserved credit because they just wanna go fast and grind rails

...which is a sentiment i don't completely identify with because i feel sa2 is more than the sum of its parts. the narrative is genuinely great and actively shifts moods and gameplay styles accordingly. you're always listening to a banger, you're never on the same sort of stage for more than a few minutes at a time - and you're always pushing closer to one of the greatest fuckin' finales you'll ever find in video games. the quality of direction really skyrocketed here. the last episode's preview alone completely solos every single scene in sa1

one strange oddity though: there's a surprising lack of shadow gameplay here. maybe the devs weren't so confident in him as a newcomer and didn't expect him to be such a hit?

if they knew what was good for them, sonic team would've just made a whole ass game where you play as shadow the hedgehog...

EDIT: after careful deliberation (replaying the shit out of everything) i've decided that i have 0 significant issues with this game. i'm not even standing by what i said about the speed stages before. they're all fuckin' fantastic and i think i might actually prefer these to sa1's (granted i need to spend some more time with that game too for confirmation)

on top of all of what i've said - i've still barely scratched the surface of the chao world content and that on its own is pretty impressive for being in an already tightly-packed game to begin with. how the fuck did this get made in two years?

i also learned last night via the extra video that city escape was inspired by sonic team constantly receiving parking tickets while living in san francisco. that's worthy of some merit on its own

and maybe this is cheating to mention since it's largely battle rerelease content, but i don't care: the multiplayer is some of the most fun i've ever had with a 2-player game

you know what - fuck it, 10/10

why do vanillaware titles always cause so much melties LMAOOOOOOO, notice how none of the review bombers have actually talked about the gameplay.

anyways, this shit is really good (so far - only 11hrs in), so if you're on the fence about picking up a cool srpg - i'd strongly say go for this.

also i carnally need berengaria so bad

MadWorld is a game I REALLY want to like but whenever I go back to it, I either get bored or stuck and give up until I pick it up again years later. This time I wanted to give it a proper go in time for the 15th anniversary, but my patience wore thin by the time I got to the castle area.

I was already feeling that the stages were becoming a bit monotonous with how much point pushing it felt like was needed each time just to get to the boss fight, but not only does the castle area ramp this up, but it also introduces annoying BS which feels like runtime padding considering on average this game takes 5-10 hours not really including all the times you need to reset 20 mins back to the start of the stage. In particular on the shitlist, this level has:
- Randomly spawning enemy that takes 1 life per hit. You have 3 lives per stage.
- Enemies that grab you, forcing you to perform a QTE to avoid the one hit death enemy.
- Enemies that can only be attacked in a certain way as they otherwise respawn in packs. Only method of attack that works uses up a pretty fast draining attack meter and has to be done in a certain direction subject to motion controls working.
- A bossfight on average 20 mins into the stage where you are ganged up on by around 10 creatures that respawn when you kill them.

After already struggling with other levels for an hour or so beforehand and debating throwing in the towel, dying right at the end of this ordeal was as good as reason as any to figure that it doesn't get much better than this (I've heard it does, but I don't want to sit through this stage multiple times to find out to be completely honest, a complete moodkiller when said mood was just already "meh").

Sick soundtrack, mostly good presentation (enemies blend too much into the background sometimes due to black and white) and an intriguing plot do a lot of heavy lifting, but monotony and stage design sink the ship. Also, why is this game stuck in 480i? It came out in 2009. Not only could it have looked way better, but it would've helped with the colour clashing issues this game can sometimes suffer from. Don't really see Platinum pulling this game out of their backcatalogue (even with heavy re-edits since some things are pretty dated) but something that would at least help it somewhat.

I get why people hated this game, but as a very classic and straightforward Pokémon experience on the Switch, it suited my needs perfectly. I don't hate the chibi presentation, but they could've gone for nicer models and better color grading à la Link's Awakening.

A very, very good game with few flaws, but still flaws nonetheless. The perviness of the plot given some of the subjects covered for the first half of the game just feels sleezy and held back my enjoyment of it somewhat, despite how well said plotpoints feel told even despite the stark contrast to just flaunting off the female characters whenever they feel like they need to grab the player's attention again.

My other issues mainly come down to a lack of clear communication for first timers on how to best interact with the game and specifically the progression of certain events later in the game, but given how well the rest of the game is explained and laid out, it's not too huge of an issue and something you either already know or will quickly learn.

Otherwise, I had a good enough time to put in 75 hours over 3 weeks, so when I say I really enjoyed it, I mean it. Looking forward to getting deeper into the rest of the series after a bit of a break with some smaller games.

The most basic gameplay and story so it didn’t hook me. It was kinda cool playing a snes jrpg again but it was very apparent that it was not final fantasy lol

The story was lost on me, I feel like there's some context I'm missing out on by just playing this game (not sure if there's any other games related to this or anime or?) but the gameplay was fun. Not something I see myself returning to soon but for how short it was it's a good experience.