This game is honestly just something else. It's an old school fighting game that is very reminiscent of Street Fighter 2, and that influence doesn't just come from the feel for the game but also a lot of the characters special moves are pretty similar, though there are some really interesting characters here as well. At first glance, the roster doesn't seem like anything special outside of Clown probably but really the characters are all pretty fun to play. Not unlike Street Fighter again the characters are mostly representatives of their respective countries and often display some sort of cultural martial art. And of course this game has a shoto and other characters with pretty recognizable movesets and gameplay that made me feel like I had played this game before even though it was my first time.

While at first I was somewhat underwhelmed I really felt like I enjoyed this game a lot more as I kept playing. First, the game looks and sounds amazing. It has a distinct SNES visual style with great backgrounds, and dynamic music. Arcade mode takes you around to every stage, fighting every character to ultimately fight the final boss Karnov atop a giant eastern temple. Along the way you will see a lot of great backdrops with a lot of destructible environment pieces that make big hits feel more impactful. Additionally, the background changes every round. Each stage has 2 forms, sometimes it can be something like changing the weather or time of day, but sometimes it can be an entirely different background, which really adds a lot to this games presentation. The characters also all have really good sounding voices for when they use special moves and win rounds that are really charming.

In terms of gameplay, this game is really simple. Basically, its Street Fighter, except there is not even a super meter. The unique mechanic for this game is how it utilizes stun. Each character has a specific clothing item that when hit enough times will fall off and result in a stun. It's usually something like a headband or mask but can also be located on a fighters legs or torso instead, so each character has a different weakpoint. I noticed while playing Clown how easily some characters could be stunned by him, as his Spin Attack would hit them in their weakpoint every time. So while this is probably not at all balanced, I still thought it was pretty funny, and was pretty rewarding. Special move inputs in this game are usually pretty standard, but there are certainly some awkward ones depending on the character you choose, though overall id say the difficulty of execution in this game for casual play is relatively low.

The games story is really nothing to write home about, but the writing for the characters endings are actually pretty good. Clown's ending was really great, after winning the prize money from the tournament, he still goes around bugging people for change, which results in the other characters in the game being so frustrated that they lost to him, literally referring to him as a menace to society. It was probably the best ending I've ever seen in a fighting game like this. There is not a single character in this game that I think is intended to be taken seriously which I think is awesome.

Overall, this game doesn't do anything special that would draw people in to play it at the arcade, and thats probably why it's not really around in any capacity anymore. That being said, if you can find a way to emulate this game, it's really worth your time just to see what it was all about. While it will probably always live in the shadow of Street Fighter, Fighter's History is a pleasant game that deserves to be remembered.

This game is a Doom mod that completely converts everything to a retro Mega Man style. Stages, weapons and skins from the classic Mega Man titles are here in a fast paced FPS and the execution couldn't be better. There isn't much to say about this game other than if the idea interests you at all, you need to play this game. The base game features a classic arena shooter style, in which all players have the same stats and exploring the level to find classic copy weapons and usable items such as E-Tanks, Ammo and assistants like Rush and Eddie is essential. Just about every weapon from Mega Man 1 through 10 are in this game, including those exclusive to the Gameboy games.

Alternatively, I recommend trying out the Class Based Modification mod and the Competitive Gondola Patch for it, which converts the game to be a class-based shooter. Instead of searching for weapons, your selected class determines your weapons. You can play as just about any Robot Master from Mega Man's history including some from Mega Man 11. Each class has moves faithful to their original boss fights, and it couldn't be a more well made product.

If you give this game a shot, the single-player is composed of bot matches in order of Mega Man's history. After fighting in each stage, you fight in the Wily Stages and ultimately an iconic boss such as the Yellow Devil, now in first person. Multiplayer is also an option with servers often up on Doomseeker. I often play this game with friends and adding bots to liven up the lobbies. The bots play the game reasonably well, naturally with great aim, but they often get stuck on ledges over pits and need to be shot at to come back to life essentially, which honestly is my only complaint across the entire game.

Links below if you are interested in trying out this game and the various modifications I recommend.

https://cutstuff.net/mm8bdm/ - Game Download
discord.gg/395EPXP - Discord for Class Based Modification (Converts the game into a class-based shooter where the classes are the Robot Masters and characters from the series history.)
discord.gg/HbZppcfGxj - Discord for Gondola Patch (Rebalances the classes further and adds many additional characters from Mega Man 10 and 11)

TL;DR
If you are interested in revisiting Re-Volt or playing it for the first time, I highly recommend downloading RVGL.

https://re-volt.gitlab.io/rvgl-launcher/

RVGL is a significantly improved version of the game made by the community and still being updated to this day. It is free to download and can be played with or without original game files as they have included made from scratch resources. As someone who has played Re-Volt in many forms, I can easily say that this is not only the best way of playing the game, but it does not in any way compromise playing the game as it was originally presented as all user-made content or changes are optional.

Simply put, this is one of the best and most unique racing games out there, and is probably the premier RC car racing game available, having never been topped since 1999. It is somehow just so enjoyable to drive these RC cars around in this game, and the weapons all mess with your physics meaning every hit from a weapon or collision with another car or obstacle creates a dynamic situation to where no race is ever the same. It's a fantastic game and I recommend you play it however possible, but I wanted to make a review with some advice on how to do so.

Re-Volt was purchased after Acclaim went out of business by a company that has done little for the game outside of porting it to mobile and trying to sell it on GOG with a community made patch without any sort of communication with the patches developers. It is now available on Steam being sold by some other shady company that again has done nothing more than make the game available for purchase with no improvements to performance or compatibility. I strongly recommend you do not buy this game from these companies, and instead download and play the community made RVGL source port which allows you to not only play Re-Volt for free, but also allows you to access thousands of pieces of user-made content such as more cars and tracks, as well as play online with a regularly active community, something not possible at all in the original.


Heroes of the Storm was made seemingly to be Blizzard's attempt at competing with big MOBAs that were gaining a lot of traction in 2015 like DOTA and League of Legends. In 2022, while DOTA and League are having multi-million dollar tournaments regularly, HOTS announced it was effectively entering maintenance mode. The game obviously couldn't compete, but in all honesty, I almost feel like it was never meant to.

Heroes of the Storm is a much more casual take on the formula with shared XP between your team, no gold or last hitting, no item shop, and a talent system in place of leveling individual spells. The simplistic nature of the game is probably more of a deterrent for most players who go after a MOBA style game, as the complexity and skill ceiling leaves more room for expression and improvement. Now, I dont think HOTS is an easy game, there still are a lot of heroes and mechanics to learn, but overall its more reasonable to learn this game while playing only a few occasional games than a game like DOTA. That, along with the games being much quicker, make the game a lot different and more arcade-style with a focus on the moment to moment gameplay instead of mechanics like laning or mastering farming patterns. This is accentuated by the variety of maps which all have different key objectives that both teams play around to gain an upper hand.

On top of being a more straight forward game, its also a good crossover. Genre defining franchises in Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo as well as characters from Overwatch and original characters created for HOTS come together in locations like Hanamura Temple and Alterac Valley. The heroes also talk to each other with unique quips and exchanges so it doesn't feel like any characters inclusion is forced. It feels like a pretty genuine game world with a lot of cool characters. And the last thing I admire about this game is viable to enjoy this game in a PvE setting with a dedicated playerbase of people who enjoy playing cooperatively versus the AI opponents. It's nice to see a MOBA with actually pretty solid bots that are worth playing against, and get in-game rewards for doing so. It is underappreciated by a lot of people understandably, but its nice to not be overlooked as someone who enjoys this type of relaxing gaming environment.

I just wanted to write this review to lament the end of new content for this game. With all the recent disasters concerning Activision Blizzard its hard to be a fan of the universes they created over the years, but even against my better judgement I still hold some of them in somewhat high regard, and I find that I can continue to appreciate HOTS for what it did for creating a game in a hostile genre that is easier to enjoy and experience.

Its the last game in the F-Zero franchise to date, but it's certainly no slouch even when compared to X and GX. It's totally playable without any issues because of a fan translation. I played this game on mGBA at a higher resolution and graphical enhancements and I thought it looked great, the sprites are really high quality and the track backgrounds are pretty nice but are awesome when they are sharpened by the emulator. The game controls well and has every single racer from F-Zero X as well as several characters from the anime that were included in F-Zero GP Legend, the only characters missing are the newcomers from GX. So with a roster of 34 racers each with diverse and unique machines as well as 53 total courses spread across the different difficulty modes, there is a lot of content here on a pretty easy to digest high speed racing game. The track editor is also really great, it's very simple and its easy to make a track that's fun to race on. The game lets you save 30 tracks and exchange them via a link cable but even through emulation you can share tracks through the password system. You can have a password for your track generated and then anyone can enter that password to create that track instantly on their game cartridge to race on, which feels really ahead of the curve. I definitely recommend you seek out this game and it's translation patch if you can, it's a great F-Zero game and one of the best racers on the GBA that deserves more attention and recognition as its a great handheld counter part to the console titles that inspired so many racing games.

Go to an online lobby, get absolutely destroyed by people who look like they are doing a tool assisted speedrun and then spend all your currency on Gacha Bom and unlock Pyramid Head and 600 other weirdos. This is easily the best no-nonsense Bomberman experience I could ask for, and the fact that it's a fan game is something I often forgot while playing. It has great online with it's own servers, an incredible amount of map layouts and characters, and every power-up you remember from Bomberman's entire history including Louies to ride. It's a great experience.

After playing a lot of Guilty Gear Strive and out of excitement for Jack-O's reveal as a DLC character, I decided to give Xrd Rev 2 a full re-play to see what I thought of it now. And to my surprise, it is genuinely one of the best fighting games I have ever played.

I play a lot of fighting games, I go out of my way to play as many as I can to see what games do to stand out from one another. Guilty Gear has always excelled at being a unique and incredible splash of style. The games developers want to do something amazing, which is tell a genuinely entertaining story through its story mode and arcade mode cutscenes, which is something most fighting games throw by the wayside. At the time of Rev 2's release and popularity, I was playing Street Fighter 5, a game that at the time, was causing me more heartache than anything. But still, I didn't mesh with Xrd that well. I played it a bit but ultimately I didn't find a groove with it. I would play it on and off up until Strive's release. In this time as well, I went around and played as many Guilty Gear games as I could get my hands on, and promptly came to find that even though I was never very competent at the gameplay, I loved the series for what it did.

Now after playing fighting games more seriously since 2017, I can say I love Xrd for its story, its style and importantly its gameplay mechanics. The roster is great, with a lot of interesting characters. Some rely too heavily on gimmicks in my opinion, but overall there is enough variety here for it to not matter. The roman cancel system is a great tool to make the game feel very open to what you want to do next, and sometimes its fun to just see what happens next after you decide to do it without a real plan. Experiencing the character stories in arcade mode is a sight to behold, with multiple cutscenes and dialogue exchanges between this games eccentric cast of amazing characters unique to each characters arcade mode route. It's one of the few fighting games that makes arcade mode actually feel like a storytelling experience, and it all preludes this games really great anime-styled story mode. This games arcade mode blows Strive's out of the water, I was so disappointed to see Strive had hardly any unique cutscenes to develop each character through the arcade mode. I also think the game is graphically stunning. The 3D models and the environments as well as the soundtrack create a presentation that is far superior to what many modern fighting games set out to present. In areas where it felt KoF 14 and Street Fighter 5 barely made the cut, Guilty Gear Xrd excelled and created a lovingly crafted fighting game that feels like a world being built around you.

I'm grateful that Strive has finally allowed the Guilty Gear series to make waves, and hopefully after its run is over, I can look back on it with as much love as I do Xrd. And also, here's hoping one of my favorite fighting game characters of all time, Baiken, makes her way in as DLC. Let's Rock.

This is an incredibly weird game that came completely out of left field. It came out slightly after the period of gaming where Sonic was really crushing, along with a lot of other spinoffs like Sonic Labyrinth (awful) and Tails' Skypatrol (weird) and it surely couldn't have been what anyone was expecting. A 3D fighter that is most comparable to a watered down Virtua Fighter or Tekken game, it's design philosophy seems to be an accessible fighting game for anyone to enjoy. In that sense, I truly believe Sonic the Fighters delivers. In it's presentation, the game is very cartoonish and lively, with expressive characters and a lot of physical humor, such as a character repeatedly clapping their hands together smushing their opponents head flat, while rings fly everywhere. It's just so weird that in my opinion its hard to not enjoy it. I think the models and stages look great and the music sounds really fantastic as well, as they are short pieces that can play throughout a match without getting tedious. In terms of mechanics, the game is very simple, with one awkward exception. The games only buttons are Punch, Kick and Block, while you also have 2 buttons that allow you to move side-to-side to dodge attacks. Every character also has a dash and back step as well as a "Slip-Around" that allows you to perform a quick move to end directly behind your opponent. Blocking in this game uses barriers, with each player starting with a supply of 5 for the whole match. The barriers can actually break if hit enough or if you are targeted with a grab, and if you run out, you can no longer block. It makes the game rely quite a lot on dodging more than blocking, as some characters such as Bark can easily destroy multiple barriers with strong but slow moves. Some characters like Fang struggle to break barriers however in exchange for having weaker but more quick moves as well as projectiles. The confusing mechanic is the weird "Hyper Mode" this game has that allows you to consume some barriers in exchange for all around buffs and access to different moves. The mechanic seems straight up unnecessary and in my opinion genuinely adds nothing to the experience of the game. Strategic use of barriers is actually a more interesting aspect than you might think, but it's incredibly punishing, as being left without barriers is nearly a death sentence, as many moves in this game are hard to punish unless you successfully block them.

In terms of the games roster, the characters are really fantastic. Besides being extremely cool classic Sonic characters, the roster offers a good selection of diversity despite being relatively small, even being able to include a couple gimmick characters, Fang and Bean, that are very different from the rest of the cast due to their unique projectile gameplay. A criticism of the character design is some characters sharing simple moves, something that was relatively common in early 3D fighters. For example, just about every character can do the same kick combo by mashing the kick button. It can make some matches look a bit boring than other fighting games, but for the most part the characters have pretty different movesets. The games arcade mode is also pretty fun, despite it being linear in the sense that you fight opponents in the same order every time. It culminates in a pretty challenging battle with Metal Sonic and finally Eggman in a robot, which you get to just demolish while powered up with the Chaos Emeralds you collected. The movelist for this game is not easily accessible in-game at all which is pretty bad, depending on your platform you may not even have one. Playing this game on the Gems Collection lets you look at the manual and see the movelist, which is what I did. The movelists are relatively simple as most characters have combos for mashing one button, but all characters have some directional inputs for special moves, but nothing too overwhelming. If you play this with friends, its honestly perfectly fine with no experience just because of how goofy it is, you really don't even need to open a movelist to experience some pretty fun gameplay. Overall, I think this game gets a bit too much flack. I think that bundling in the Gems collection with some of Sonic's best games makes it seem like more of a joke, but I'm glad it was made really available with ports on the PS3 and Xbox 360 as well. I recommend you try it if you haven't, I had a lot of fun playing through the game as Knuckles in front of my friends on Discord, and I enjoy going back to it from time to time.

A fantastically weird and over the top fighting game released by SNK in the heyday of arcade fighting games. World Heroes Perfect is the last game in the series of 4 games, and features the largest roster and most clean mechanics, now up to speed with SNK's better games of the mid to late 90's. Previous entries in the franchise felt good, but were slower and the inputs were more confusing than the streamlined game we get here. The game is graphically appealing with nice cartoony characters that are brought to life very nicely with great particle effects, sounds and sprite work. As opposed to games like Fatal Fury or Street Fighter, this game is completely outlandish, taking fighters like Rasputin or the football player Johnny Maximum to fight it out on top of an actively erupting volcano, complete with screenshake and noises to show just how insane the situation is. The large roster of characters from seemingly all time periods and places around the world will have someone to appeal to just about anyone, and while the game is somewhat challenging to play it is easy enough to understand. I played this game on the World Heroes Anthology on PS2, which is a port of the Neo Geo home console version, and so like its other home console releases it features a difficulty selection. To be honest, even on Beginner, this game is unforgiving. The AI is relentless, using just about every move in their arsenal as soon as the first opponent. And of course with classic SNK arcade fighter fashion, the final boss is a broken mess designed to take your precious quarters away. Thankfully as a home release you can try as much as you can take, but it makes the game harder to ease into than it should. Overall though, I think this game is a lot of fun to play, and would work well with groups of friends even with no experience, because most characters have really fun to use and generally easy to input special moves that can make a battle interesting even if no one knows any combos. The games mechanics are absolutely basic, with one special meter and very simple hit chains. You have one ultimate move that can be used when your health bar is in the red and you have a full meter, but that's all there is to it. If you want to give this game a try, its easily accessible thanks to the PS2 collection as well as its release on the Nintendo Switch for about 7 dollars, and I recommend it. It's a lot of fun and is really something special, and is likely the end of a very unique series.

I played this game on MAME on my PC, after I heard about the announcement of the Breakers Collection announced for release sometime in 2020. Breakers Revenge and its prequel are somewhat forgotten Neo Geo arcade games that feature a pretty awesome but small roster of some cool characters. I did a few playthroughs as Rila and I really enjoyed her moveset. Shes a charge character like Blanka or Balrog from Street Fighter so it was a very comfortable experience. The games controls are very typical for games like this and I found them very responsive, I felt the experience overall was smoother than the Fatal Fury titles of its time. Graphically the game is standard, the maps are very easy on the eyes and the animations are a bit stiff, but the moves have really cool particle effects, making landing a special move feel really cool. The mechanics for this game are pretty par for the course as well, but it includes a feature called "breakering", which allows you to perform certain moves in the later frames of hitstun in certain combos. I wasn't really able to do this to my knowledge, perhaps by mistake, but its likely very important for high level play. Of course this game is a coin guzzler and is a very difficult game to finish, but thankfully with emulation I am only limited by my own patience. I think this game is really underrated, even though it was developed by Visco it feels very on par with Capcom/SNK fighters and it was really a good time. Im highly anticipating the coming collection, hopefully with some sort of difficulty toggle. Definitely give this game a shot if you find the means.

The story for this game was goofy, edgy, and way over the top, just like all of its character designs. Platinum Games really can't be beat when it comes to 3D beat-em-ups like this, and when they are left to their own devices to create an IP they make magic like this. It's a shame that it feels like this game just never had a chance. The competitive free-for-all styled multiplayer felt very reminiscent of Power Stone, a large 3D arena filled with characters throwing stuff around. The unique weapon mechanics per character made this pretty large cast seem very fleshed out and interesting. The soundtrack is also a bunch of hip-hop music from various artists, and its something I often listen to outside of the game. I often go back to this one, and its very sad to see this is likely all that this and Mad World are likely all we will get from this series. Big Bull will always be one of my favorite video game characters.

This game released about a year after the Playstation 2 released in North America, in November before the holidays. It was made on PS1 and had a more child-friendly demographic because the target market was children. The developers believed that the PS2 wouldn't be as common in households as the PS1 was, but that was obviously proven to not the case, therefore when this game finally came out it, it was a pretty big failure. This game was announced at an event right next to Twisted Metal Black, the series's first game on the PS2, just to salt the wound a bit.

For a game that came out a year after the PS1's lifespan, the graphics are not that great. The 3D looks good at a standstill, but in motion its very jagged, and the draw distance is quite poor. The controls also are nearly the same as the controls for Twisted Metal 2, which came out in 1996, with almost no improvements besides the increased framerate which leads to better responsiveness. These things coupled with the game's strange release timing made it arguably the most forgettable game in the series, but by no means the worst, considering the existence of Twisted Metal III and 4.

The level design and theme for this game are actually surprisingly very effective, and the designs for the RC cars are respectable and faithful. The gameplay as well is exactly what you'd expect from Twisted Metal. Overall the game just had some very strange marketing decisions made with it, and was likely somewhat of a backburner project alongside Twisted Metal Black, which is why it uses the old Twisted Metal 2 engine. It's sadly noticeable, but that doesn't stop it from being a unique and interesting entry.