I've got whiplash! Hard to imagine a bigger swing within the Annapurna Interactive Ultimate PS4 Collection than the one between Kentucky Route Zero and Sayonara Wild Hearts. This is an absolute zipper of an auto-runner and rhythm game, all speed and flash and gorgeous synth pop and neon motorcycle rides. It takes less than an hour to beat but shines and dazzles for each and every second. The developers called it an interactive music video, and that's perfectly apt. May genuinely be the shortest video game I've ever played but it rips like a damn Carly Rae Jepsen album so who am I to complain?

Still unsure whether or not "walking sim" is a pejorative but this is as good an example of that genre as any, along with Firewatch. Plenty to like here. Each member of the Finch family has their story play out with its own specific flair and flourish - minigames from different genres, specific artsyles, and so on - but the whole thing ends very abruptly and left me wanting more. That's not the worst thing a game can do, and I'll happily move on from this and hope it made enough of an impact to register in my memory a year or five from now.

My PSP-less ass had been waiting ages to play another Valkyria Chronicles game and holy hell did this deliver. Honestly improves on the original game in every conceivable way. The gameplay is identical or perhaps moderately improved by the addition of a grenadier class; the art style is identical and as such the PS4's graphic capabilities make for a prettier picture than the PS3's; the characters - from mains to secondaries to villains to troops - were so much more memorable this time around; and the story was more moving. You gotta love it!

The story, concept, and execution are almost perfect but there's something about the whole thing that left me just slightly cold. Feels like it's caught halfway between a much longer and much bigger open world space sandbox and a much shorter and smaller and more fully polished space puzzle game - simultaneously overpadded and underbaked. How can this be? Probably just me, not them, and so on. Plus the soundtrack's a delight. I think I recognize everything about this that everyone else loves so much. I just wish it hit those same pleasure centers in my own tired, aging brain.

Was all kinds of geeked up for this remake - why did it fall so flat for me? Somewhere around the fifth or sixth hour of collecting S-K-A-T-E two minutes at a time and chaining reverts and manuals together, not only was the nostalgic sugar rush long gone, but I was beginning to wonder if single-player Tony Hawk had always been such a grind to progress through. (No pun intended!) I guess what I liked about these games at twelve were the moon physics and playing as Spider-Man or something. Obviously I'm growing older all the time, but sadly this did not make me feel younger in my mind!

Here's a long overdue update to one of the strangest and most memorable oddities of the N64 era. It's a rail shooter through and through with the crucial subtle tweak where instead of bullets you're shooting digital photos. I don't think this set-up works for any other franchise than Pokémon, and yet it works wonders with Pokémon. This is probably four or five times as big and long and full as the old game, but that also means it began to wear out its welcome just a little, little bit by the end of it all. Would love to revisit this over the years and keep fleshing out the Photodex, but we all know how rare a revisit is in this day and age. Hey, even if I never touch this again, I enjoyed this all the same.

Thrilled to finally have an opportunity to play the PSP prequel to maybe my all time favorite game. Bluntly though, much sooner would have been much better; this game has aged poorly to say the least, remastered skin and all. FF13 took a lot of shit for being more or less a continuous series of corridors, but that's really, really all this game felt like it was. I shouldn't complain too much, because years ago I was debating buying a used PSP just to play this and a handful of other JRPGs. Genuinely appreciate that this PS4 game exists at all! The story here is a mishmash of good and bad elements with a lot of eventual FF7 characters appearing naturally and a few more shoehorned in gratuitously. The new characters here were generally trash and the early game is an absolutely aimless mess, but once Cloud shows up and the Nibelheim Incident starts unfolding, oh baby that's the good stuff right there! Sadly that's Chapter 8 of 10. The whole thing ends surprisingly poignantly - you know Zack's fate if you've played FF7, and if you haven't played FF7 what on earth brought you to this niche title? - and I'm as curious as ever what the upcoming Rebirth game will do with this particular storyline in the wake of Remake's retconned ending, or maybe more accurately beginning.

It's cute, fun, and quick, but it's missing an absolutely crucial feature: online co-op! The gameplay consists of controlling a circular spaceship traversing its way through bright levels and blasting enemies to pieces. There's a pilot's chair, there are four gunner stations, and there are three other special stations that control shields, navigation, and special weapons. That's eight total stations, and you and up to three companions are meant to scramble around the ship handling everything. That sounds very fun, and some (okay fine all) of my friends were down to try beating this thing in one night the other weekend. Alas, no online co-op! To enjoy the game together we'd have all had to gather in person, Xbox controllers in hand, on a couch. Even before the pandemic that was never going to happen! So instead I played this alone - you get one animal companion who you can move from station to station - and it was just so much more cumbersome and less chaotic than it could have, should have, and would have been with online co-op play. You just hate to see a missed opportunity like that!

Pretty much as dark and depressing as the medium gets, and the overall tragedy of this story and these characters will stick with me for a while. (Cards on the table - the first game's ending rubbed the wrong way and the inciting incident in this one made all kinds of sense to me.) Just an almost overwhelming sadness stemming from moments both big and small, which, yeah - well done, Naughty Dog. Gameplay's a secondary concern here and was, I dunno, adequate? (Survival horror still isn't my bag; your mileage may vary.)

Perfect example of a game I'm just not gonna finish here in 2021. Spent an hour and change getting four missions deep into this and just didn't have it in me to go five or ten more, even on easy mode, so I watched a three-hour Let's Play instead and called it a day. There's a lot to love about this, even if the execution feels a bit rough twenty unfair years later. It's not terrible but the fixed camera and a couple platforming segments make this almost unplayable by modern standards. Still gotta respect the overall vibes of what's so clearly a hack-and-slash Resident Evil inspired by Vincent Valentine, and I appreciate what this was, but I mostly think what it was a precursor to much better partial copycats.

Another planned abandonment as I kinda play but mostly watch my way through the Devil May Cry series. This one's reputation as an all time disappointment precedes it, and I totally get it. There are two or three small things this does better than the first game but just so many big steps backward. The story's empty and nonsensible (even relative to the first one) and the characterization is nealy absent. Gone as well are all the castle backtracking vibes that gave the first game just a hint of Metroidvania flavor. Can't complain too much - I actually prefer the combat here relative to the original Devil May Cry - but it's definitely a big old bucket of "but why?"

I should have listened. Reviews for this game were more or less universally terrible with the same critique showing up over and over again - that the game is immediately convoluted and complicated and confusing. Well, add my voice to the chrous. What sucks is that this game really should have been playable and enjoyable! The goal here is "guide a troop of humanoid ape creatures through the process of human evolution over several generations" and you accomplish this by exploring and investigating, mating, fighting off animals and other threats, and growing skill trees meant to propagte down through your future lineage. It's a cool concept, the game was pretty, and the controls weren't terrible to use. A winning formula! Except that the game doesn't explain anything whatsoever. This is not an exaggeration. There's no tutorial at all, and you're thrown immediately into the game with no guidance and no clue how to progress or succeed. The makers did this intentionally, citing that human evolution itself only happened through a series of trial and error. Well, yes, but that's a terrible way to design a damn video game! This game would have been immensely better and more playable had it walked the player through even just one day of this explorer-evolver simulation - it's time to eat, maybe go have sex with that ape, hey what's that sharp stick do, etc. Instead it's just confusing and hard to understand. A shame, since all the other elements of an interesting game seem to be here!