fuck you, fuck off, get fucked

banish it from my sight

🙈

physically, mentally painful to behold and contemplate

We have serious problems.

WarioWare: Micro-Game$ for the Girli£$!

Don't have time for tribute bands

Contractual obligations.

Made me nostalgic for my mum's Spice Girls Fitness tapes

Museum piece

Yeah I get it, very funny

Answered a question about Yorkshire canal paths to win £500,000 - unique experience!

An impressive observation to be held at a safe distance

Nice One man, but I'd rather be playing Streets of Rage

I'm not built for this on any level

As with all the other GBA fighting games on this list, you can scarcely believe what you're seeing

They did it...?!

[REPLAY] A struggle.

[REPLAY...?]

Lobotomised Daytona USA

more like DONTPachi 😂 no just kidding, it's fun but lacks the appeal of DDP and BL

Nintendo Official Magazine said Super Circuit was better. It wasn't.

One step away from watching a sprite animation of the artist sucking their own dick, which would not be entirely unwelcome

Hamster 🙂

Largely unremarkable, though there is satisfaction to be found in the tension of the PvE element and how it intersects with PvP. I simply do not understand Fortnite's obsession with heists and bank robberies.

I am so proud that it exists, I am so glad it was allowed to live

We are running out of frontiers to explore, but it's nice to be here while it lasts

Playing a Live Service game three years after it's been discontinued feels like having a game of football in a graveyard

Just play Donkey Kong (1994). The additions here are superfluous timewasters that don't understand the fundamental appeal of the original. HOWEVER the new voice lines for Mario are funny as fuck

Perfects the original Game Boy formula, but I wouldn't have made it through without a triple-speed toggle. Takes the coming-of-millennium feelings out of Pewter City's museum and builds a thematic core around them; I forgot how exciting the year 2000 felt. Feraligatr carried hard.

If you can't tell already, I'm struggling to think of something to say about many of the games on this list. I got a Game Boy that can play ROMs and spent a lot of time on trains, which is why the list is padded to the gills with old games. I don't remember completing this at all but I do have the file to prove it. It's BurgerTime!

Too onerous to be truly enjoyable, and the extraneous material does more harm than good. Technically impressive to be sure, though. I just didn't enjoy playing it.

Last year I did a Q&A panel thing at a games festival and people asked me questions about THATCHER'S TECHBASE. A guy in the audience asked why the game had three or four different elevator rides that take over a minute each, leaving the player with long periods of standing around doing nothing. I smugly laughed and said that video games are a waste of time and that such actions are a reminder that video games arblah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah . Dujanah has made me realise I'm an absolute worthless cunt who needs to be dunked in a tank of molten piss

I have three times more hours in this than I do Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

You can't make me write something meaningful about Breakout.

You can't make me write something meaningful about Breakout.

You can't make me write something meaningful about Breakout.

I'm a fool to play your dirty work

Painful and awkward to play. Fortunately, that's the point.

If I die before I wake, at least in Heaven I can juggle https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/604390/

nerd shit

A gargantuan influence upon Another Pokemon Game. If you hated the jokes in my game, you'll absolutely loathe this experience.

Palpable depression.

What if Resident Evil had footsies?

Played as part of my research into the Tetris movie. It's pretty clear why Nintendo won.

Ideologically, aesthetically and gameprogrammatically aligned with THATCHER'S TECHBASE. In simple terms, that means are angry men running around barren British wastelands land-filled with Tory propaganda. Also they're both kinda boring ("BUT THAT'S THE POINT!!!" he screams)

Aesthetic is truly embarrassing, sorry. I already played Bangai-O a bunch, so I didn't get much satisfaction from this. Game of the year most likely to make me hit Win+D when my wife came into the room.

You need to be pretty chill to play this game. I am not pretty chill.

The honeymoon is over by now, but grinding on vines made me feel like i was in Disney's Tarzan and that is worth something to me

Morrowind for people who can sort-of draw the anarchy symbol

I've always wanted to play Extreme G for the Nintendo 64. This is what I imagine it plays like. Kazuma Kiryu played it in an arcade while being hunted by the CIA.

A novel concept that is, for me, ultimately let down by the need to do the Binding of Rogue Gungeon thing where you roll exponentially obnoxious weaponry with stupid little numbers attached. It would have played so much better as pure Zelda. Nobody's impressed when you roll a fire sword that turns your invisible and gives you 260 iframes! My friends loved it, though, and that's what really matters to me.

Gradius for sex offenders.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1147159/

[REPLAY] Took me a year to beat this game when I was a kid. This year I managed to beat it in two hours. I have become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Perfects the Game Boy Advance formula, but I wouldn't have made it through without a double-speed toggle. Ruby and Sapphire always felt like rough drafts that lacked the spiritual magic of RGBYGSC, and while Emerald can't outright salvage a soul, it does at least find a lot of things for players to play with.

[REPLAY] It's like F-Zero 99, but less fun.

It's like F-Zero, but more fun.

Sauceless on many levels but feels great and its utility as a foundational framework for more complex tracks and powerups and car types is obvious. Getting my practice in now in anticipation of it becoming a bonafide banger. I like putting decals on cars.

[REPLAY] Through some act of divine providence the memory card I bought from CeX had a complete save file on it, so my friends and I finally got to achieve our dragon wishes of playing as Janemba [Final Form] and Super Vegito. The beginning of the end for Dragon Ball Z as anything other than a self-aware parody of all that we know and love.

Philippians 4:8 (NIV):

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/728954/

Played through RE4Make on Hardcore the first time, which was something of an ordeal. It ultimately bore fruit in the form of me absolutely slaughtering this mode and unlocking everything really quick. Parrying throwing knives just feels good.

I did not enjoy myself.

In a 2009 interview with GamesRadar, Chris Kramer, the Director of Communications at Capcom US, explained that it would be impossible for Capcom to trademark the name 'Biohazard' due to two other brands claiming it first. The first was a DOS game registered under the same name, and the second was a heavy metal band that also went by the name Biohazard. After discovering this, a company-wide contest was held to see who could come up with a new name for the series' US debut. Eventually, Capcom chose the name Resident Evil, a pun on the fact that the first game took place inside a mansion, and the series has gone by two different names ever since.

Andre and his friend are going to make a game together :)

Perfect game to go play in the SF6 Battle Hub when you feel yourself tilting about Modern Gief or Luke 2MP or whatever. Final Fight 1 has always felt like Poundland Streets of Rage to me so I was pleasantly surprised by how tactile this is in comparison. Never realised the city street stage from SFV and its transition into a bank vault was an homage to this game! Capcom gaming history in my hands!

Becomes mechanically burdensome right around the time it starts bring the subtext into the text. I liked the first few worlds the best because they were simple and quiet. If I still cared about writing massive paragraphs of meaningless text on Backloggd, I could have had a field day with the fact the game's decline is precipitated by the introduction of guns and enemies to kill.

It's simple and clean.

It is a genuine triumph that ultimately proves that the Quake II weapon/enemy set cannot be redeemed. Arguably the closest we will get to an Arcane Dimensions for Q2.

[REPLAY] Like most post-SotN games in the series, it eventually loses momentum when it asks you to manage an entire castle(s) with a tin-shit map that's half the size of your palm. I don't care what you think of me - I like objective markers and the comfort they give me. Regardless, a banger.

Finally a fighting game for four year olds and forty year olds, God Bless

aint no way i'm ever getting good at this shit but i love it nonetheless

https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/644127/

probably the closest thing you can get to actually shooting a real gun at things

Even a broken slide rail can't stop me from enjoying this game very much! Best rhythm game I played this year.

It doesn't support ray-tracing, but it's the first Pokémon game with reflections. https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/668271/

LIE: Plainscrap Borement!!! 😂😂😂 https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1103002/

I beat it on Baby Mode and felt no regret or shame. I'm maturing.

[REPLAY] Nintendo's answer to the Small Boy Unit/Army of the Devil from MGS2. Mario Warfare. It's so much fun!

[REPLAY] https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1154451/

[REPLAY] Pure, uncut Mario is hard to come by on these streets

https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1075591/

[REPLAY] Best pick-up-and-play Tekken also has the freshest vibe; we should have stopped digging when we struck solid gold oil

https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1144411/

When you first get into Gundam, for whatever godforsaken reason, there’s a list they give you. It recommends that you watch the abridged movie trilogy of Mobile Suit Gundam, then watch the entire Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam television series, then watch the film Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack. More recent revisions of this list will throw in Mobile Suit Gundam: Unicorn, a six-hour show that tries to grasp then-30 years of mobile suit history in its hands. I don’t really know why these particular things were chosen for a list that attempts to turn 40 years of robot history into something with the breadth of a single season of a Netflix show, but hey! Watch these things, they say, and then you’ll be a real fan of Mobile Suit Gundam.
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It is, of course, an utterly ridiculous list. You can’t hope to condense Mobile Suit Gundam's recollection of humanity’s millennia-long struggle against itself into 30 hours. But it is the utterly ridiculous list that a guy on a Quake 3 modding forum gave me in 2005 when I asked where I could watch more stuff that was like Neon Genesis Evangelion, a similarly intense humanity-spanning anime that another guy on a Quake 3 modding forum had recommended to me earlier in that same year (2005) when I asked what anime was. And you have to follow the list that the fans have made for you if you yourself want to call yourself a fan.
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As an aspiring fan of things, I voraciously consumed that ridiculous list in order to proclaim myself an authority all things Mobile Suit Gundam. I did not take in a single thing that made that ridiculous list important. I was, after all, a teenage child; a teenage child who would read books and watch films just to say that he had read those books or watched those films (and this was before Letterboxd!). Ask 16 year old me what To Kill A Mockingbird was about, and my 16 year old self would be able to give you a blow-by-blow of To Kill A Mockingbird’s precise literal events in the form of a stuttered synopsis - without error! Everything that happened! I could recount all the details, all the points, but I didn’t really understand what the point was about all these things I was recounting. Was that important? But I did know all the details and events and things that happened, you know! You could turn what I knew about these books into very good Wikipedia articles.
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The literal details of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack are a mess. The plot points of Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack do not hold up to any logical, critical analysis. Nothing about Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack sustains any real rational understanding. As a result, it was my least favourite part of that list that that guy on a Quake 3 modding forum had recommended me in 2005. It made no sense. What were they thinking?! I preferred the relentlessly straightforward mobile suit action of Mobile Suit Gundam and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and authoritatively told people such.
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In 2005, I had not yet lived through two recessions; a global pandemic; ten years of right-wing government; the very immediate consequences of a globally-warmed planet. I hadn’t yet watched Koyaanisqatsi and Persona and Miracle Mile. I didn’t yet understand what it meant to hate and love everything about the rock we have made our home. The returning villain Char Aznable’s rationales made no sense back then. He wanted to destroy the planet (Earth), and Amuro Ray didn’t want to destroy the planet (Earth). It was pretty clear-cut who was right and who was wrong. Nobody would want to destroy the planet (Earth)!
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Nowadays, Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack is my favourite part of that list that the guy on the Quake 3 modding forum sent me. Why? I guess I just understand, without endorsement, why Char Aznable would want to do the things he did. What I didn’t understand in 2005, as a newly-minted authority on Mobile Suit Gundam, was that Amuro Ray and Char Aznable are perfect eternal rivals forever because they embody exactly the same things; I just couldn’t see that at the time because I was simply reading the text of the subtitles on the file that the guy on the Quake 3 modding forum had sent to me. I couldn’t see this other mysterious subterranean text because Amuro Ray and Char Aznable say their partner’s quiet part out loud in a way that I could not yet see in 2005.
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Char despises humanity and their excesses, but his Newtype nature senses and sees the goodness within (that he holds next to us) and challenges it in the extreme (with an asteroid) to overcome the psychic rot that has set deep within our species. Amuro champions the human race’s spiritual beauty and resilience (with his psychoframe, that isn’t just for show) in the face of self-created adversity (the Axis), but has similarly heard the darkest voices in his eternal war (that began in literal childhood) and has now been subjugated by violent fascist forces beyond his broadest understanding, a true psychic weapon. The mobile suit battles here work as gorgeous mechanised action, but at their most truthful represent divine titans struggling on behalf of humanity’s spiritual segments like Greek gods - Sazabi as a destructive force of creation vs. the Nu (stylised as a lambda)’s desire to preserve an existing world in the hopes it can improve from its own mistakes. An eternal struggle that you can’t hope to understand in a single two-hour pass. A film that requires far more than its fan-recommended place as a full stop on an anime fan’s watchlist. A warning shot from a beam rifle that falls on deaf ears, spiritually consuming.
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Armored Core 6 is a lot like Char's Counterattack.

Carried us through some hard times. Reminds you that concepts like "bullet drop" and "leading shots" are fake and gay and have no place in a shooting game. I just want to click on the bad guys until they disappear.

My favourite anime fighting game. Chapter 4 was on the whole somewhat turgid in comparison to Chapter 3 but hey it's a natural law of physics and psychics that you will always find the previous season/chapter of Fortnite inferior to its successors. Still the most fun multiplayer experience you can have with your friends bar none, which is kinda saying something considering I played a bunch of SF6 with them this year. The cyberkatana is nowhere near the hammer in terms of fun and feedback, though.

I'm on Adventure Level 326 now, NG++. The dialogue has stopped making sense because presumably the writers didn't expect player retention beyond the first year but it's still incredibly fun and makes my thighs and shoulders in particular feel like they've been reforged with valerian steel or some shit, how the hell is a Nintendo game doing this to me https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/721463/

Tragic that this never left Japan, because it's the perfect GBA game.

The day I got engaged to my wife we were in Venice and walked by a garage that had been semi-converted into an arcade. The guy had one of those MAME boxes with every ROM in existence on it and I chose TGM2 because I'd been playing it on the Switch before we went on holiday and I managed to clear Marathon mode (including the bit where the blocks go max speed) and the guy from the garage and my wife were both like "yaaaaay that's so cool" and I felt like I was standing in the house of God and that my life had complete meaning and purpose

Refinement of a perfect game.

[REPLAY] Barring a few technical stumbling blocks, it's basically a masterpiece. The themes of physical and mental decline coupled unapologetic depictions of drug/alcohol abuse hit a lot harder now than they did at launch when I was a 23 year old kid who just wanted another John Woo action game. It is aging so fine (unlike Max himself and me myself lol)

[REPLAY] https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1068099/

gmodesque this, physxlike that.... the most powerful magic in this game is called "Dive to Zelda (Hold [R])" - the catharsis and redemptive power of perseverance in the face of failure, poor old Link stuck repeating skydives throughout the game, reminding us and him that he missed his Zelda by mere inches; this all being compounded by the doom of her ultimate fate just makes the final payoff even sweeter. The Legend of Zelda is a fairytale for children where the hero always wins in the end. semper games - they are, as always wasted on gamers who saw this experience as a laundry list to be ticked off in time for their next consumption date to roll around. long live the legend

[REPLAY] A parallel image to Ocarina of Time; a 2D story told in 3D for the first time, grappling with themes of helplessness in the face of institutionalized evil, the passage of time, the loss of innocence, etc. etc. Also there a lots of cool gadgets and freaky foes and you escape from a burning fortress with your girlfriend. Replays turn both games into clockwork watches that you wind up and watch-play with satisfying, unconscious precision - very few feelings in gaming compare to a playthrough where everything is exactly where you knew it would be.

Dwarf-made horrors beyond my comprehension

been a failure been a success / they're like a diamond they shine under pressure / they learned all their lessons / realized they gotta kill all their blessings / they working hard every day to be a better game / practice makes perfect / they're already a veteran / suffer from defeat so success is their medicine / destined for greatness so you know that they're back again / back on their feet after they fell down / always ready for a fight never back down / at this point they're fighting for pride / they're fighting for Life, reputation on the line / so they're fighting for theirs / you ain't gotta really like them but you must respect them / Ayo they're tired of PLAYING ON THE SIDELINES

crazy that i'm friends with all the people who made the best video games that came out this year

https://www.backloggd.com/u/letshugbro/review/1092195/