tyketyke
BACKER
73 reviews liked by tyketyke
ok the one piece fans were right though it literally does get good 27 hours in
seriously a combination of patch 2.2 and improving my skill over the course of the last while has turned this from a game i was really mixed on to a game i can’t put down, it’s a crazy turnaround. i still can’t say my old review was wrong, though. it’s a real criticism that the experience as a beginner is so rough, and while i got stockholmed into sticking with it, i can completely understand why others would just give up after a few cups, ESPECIALLY on earlier versions. if you did, though… maybe try again? special stages are much easier to get into and much fairer, cpu rubber banding is nerfed, slopes don’t drag you down as much without rings, and the weirder challenges are finally starting to get well documented alongside the game itself making them easier to skip.
…balloon park still exists, though, so it’s not all good news. oh well.
seriously a combination of patch 2.2 and improving my skill over the course of the last while has turned this from a game i was really mixed on to a game i can’t put down, it’s a crazy turnaround. i still can’t say my old review was wrong, though. it’s a real criticism that the experience as a beginner is so rough, and while i got stockholmed into sticking with it, i can completely understand why others would just give up after a few cups, ESPECIALLY on earlier versions. if you did, though… maybe try again? special stages are much easier to get into and much fairer, cpu rubber banding is nerfed, slopes don’t drag you down as much without rings, and the weirder challenges are finally starting to get well documented alongside the game itself making them easier to skip.
…balloon park still exists, though, so it’s not all good news. oh well.
amazing but not having Hatsune Miku gotta be some ableist propaganda
Hi-Fi Rush
2023
My long journey to Hi-Fi Rush began when I was 7 years old, during the absolutely sweltering summer of 2003. It was one of those weekends where my family and I were "driving into town", because everything good was in Chattanooga and not where we were living. They took me to the local Circuit City (lol) and on the clearance rack they were "pennying out" (selling for a single penny to remove from the inventory system) a variety of cast-off video game and computer merchandise. One of these cast-offs was a little demo disc known as the Nintendo GameCube Preview Disc. It contained four demos, but my parents would have had a shared aneurysm if they saw me playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, so really, it only had three.
- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.
I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.
Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!
A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.
The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.
In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.
In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.
In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.
In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.
In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.
In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.
In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.
It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad
It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?
It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.
It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.
I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.
It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.
We somehow made it through
All of this.
Making things is hard,
Things never go as planned.
Too many features, not enough time.
We want the best
But can only do so much
With what we have.
So this is what we made.
We've never been more proud.
A game, a song, a million different pieces working together
Brought to you by all of us.
It may not be what you expected,
Everything
(Everything that you want)
But we did our best
And here it is:
A piece of our heart,
The hard work from all of us.
So please don't complain
And just enjoy.
Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.
One we spent thousands and thousands of hours
Arguing, building, and polishing.
But hey,
No sweat. 😅
- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.
I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.
Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!
A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.
The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.
In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.
In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.
In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.
In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.
In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.
In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.
In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.
It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad
It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?
It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.
It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.
I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.
It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.
We somehow made it through
All of this.
Making things is hard,
Things never go as planned.
Too many features, not enough time.
We want the best
But can only do so much
With what we have.
So this is what we made.
We've never been more proud.
A game, a song, a million different pieces working together
Brought to you by all of us.
It may not be what you expected,
Everything
(Everything that you want)
But we did our best
And here it is:
A piece of our heart,
The hard work from all of us.
So please don't complain
And just enjoy.
Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.
One we spent thousands and thousands of hours
Arguing, building, and polishing.
But hey,
No sweat. 😅
Hi-Fi Rush
2023
Apparently even when you develop one of the most unique and beloved games in years you’ll still get shut down. Fuck Xbox and all these western publishers who seem to be shutting down studios and laying off thousands just for the hell of it.
Final Fantasy IV
1997
After sinking more than a hundred hours into Rebirth, I know the last thing I should do is try to bite off more Final Fantasy. I've already had too much, I'm bloated on chocobos and moogles and nearly ready to burst, and yet I've been eyeballing Final Fantasy IV and thinking "I can handle it." Comparatively speaking, 23 hours of gameplay is light, downright brisk. Rebirth's after dinner mint... Why shouldn't I indulge?
Well, back-to-back negative reviews from mutuals - both of which abandoned the game - should be reason enough for me to pass, at least for the time being.
It's so over.
Or is it? I'm Weatherby, when have I ever listened to anyone about how bad a game might be? Especially for a game I already paid my money for. The cellophane on this unopened Final Fantasy Chronicles is coming off, baby!
We're so back!
It's probably worth pointing out up front that by going with the Chronicles version of the game, I am effectively playing the real Final Fantasy IV, which originally released stateside on the SNES as a port of Japan's easy mode. For babies. I'm not a baby, how hard can this version of the game be?
Turns out very, at least in fits and bursts. Final Fantasy IV is a very inconsistent game in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of this inconsistency is born from the unique space it occupies in the overarching trajectory of the franchise. The SNES allowed Square to do so much more than what they previously accomplished with the NES trilogy, especially in regard to story, but a lot of FFIV's mechanical features feel as though the game has one foot firmly rooted a generation behind. Things like a highly restrictive inventory is just unnecessary thanks to the SNES' expanded memory space, and the encounter rate is just as bonkers as it was on the NES, sometimes sending you from one daunting battle to the next with only a mere tile separating them.
Guest characters, something Final Fantasy II leaned on with its rotating fourth party slot, are commonplace in the early half of FFIV, and a some of them feel more like a hindrance, resulting in a lot of stretches where you need to nanny idiots like Edward, who has no useful abilities, low health, and straight up runs off screen when you try to heal him up. Likewise, you'll occasionally be gifted with guest characters that are too good, creating this pendulum swing of the game being "too annoying" and "too easy."
This combination of antiquated design elements and inconsistent party composition makes the early game a drag, and it's no wonder I ditched the GBA version around Mt. Ordeals back when I originally played it in 2005.
It's so over.
Final Fantasy IV's story also struggles in the early half of the game and spends a bit too long meandering around. It is interesting to play this right off the heels of Final Fantasy III as both games feature numerous character sacrifices, though the greater scope of FFIV means you'll get to spend more time with them rather than coming upon each character briefly before they like, chuck themselves into a furnace or whatever. Each death feels meaningful, which is why it's a bit upsetting that FFIV walks back most of them, sheepishly shrugging and going "I don't know, they lived I guess."
Thankfully, both the story and gameplay eventually find their focus, and once FFIV dials things in, I found that I was starting to have a really good time with the game. Turns out a stable party of well-rounded characters who share a clear and common goal is just what you need to get me invested, even if it may not address every single problem I had with the game up to that point.
By the time the party awakens the Lunar Whale and takes a trip up to the god damned moon, I was fully in it, and I loved the way the game handles the reveal of its true antagonist, Zeromus, who is less a singular consciousness driven by focused malice and more representative of the game's greater themes concerning good and evil, its presence in all men, and the cyclical nature of war and peace. I am a noted Necron defender, so the idea that the party has to do battle with something more representative of a thought or manifestation of man's own nature is my kind of thing.
Also, he's got a sick battle theme.
We're so back
Unfortunately, actually fighting Zeromus is another matter entirely. I thought the Cloud of Darkness was a motherfucker, but this might be the most I've struggled with a final boss in any Final Fantasy game. Apparently this guy can cast Meteo, Holy, Bio, AND Flare, but you'd never know it because he spends 90% of the fight spamming Big Bang over and over again. The solution here is to let Rydia stay dead as all of her spells will result in an immediate counterattack that operates separately from the fixed timer that dictates Big Bang. This also buys you better healing as Rosa only has to split Curaja between four characters instead of five. At the 11th hour, Final Fantasy IV deigned it necessary to saddle me with more dead weight, and the constant run back through several floors with high encounter rates and ~ten minutes of mashing through mandatory dialog is a steep price for failure, which unfortunately sucked a lot of the wind out from Final Fantasy IV's ending.
it's so over. literally, i am done playing this video game
Rating games in a series can be a little tricky, but I think I've more or less settled on a curve when it comes to Final Fantasy. I gave the original game a 3.5/5, which seems a bit high when you consider how approachable, engaging, and bombastic later titles are. All qualities I would assign to FFIV even if I think it spends a little too much time playing around in the protoplasmic puddle left behind by the previous three entries. That's why it's simultaneously the easiest of these four for me to sit down with, yet it's also a 3/5.
Maybe one day I'll check out the SNES version. I am genuinely curious if the easier difficulty curve results in a more evenly paced game, or if it simply makes combat dull and predictable.
Anyway, the next game has a protagonist name Butz. We're so back.
Well, back-to-back negative reviews from mutuals - both of which abandoned the game - should be reason enough for me to pass, at least for the time being.
It's so over.
Or is it? I'm Weatherby, when have I ever listened to anyone about how bad a game might be? Especially for a game I already paid my money for. The cellophane on this unopened Final Fantasy Chronicles is coming off, baby!
We're so back!
It's probably worth pointing out up front that by going with the Chronicles version of the game, I am effectively playing the real Final Fantasy IV, which originally released stateside on the SNES as a port of Japan's easy mode. For babies. I'm not a baby, how hard can this version of the game be?
Turns out very, at least in fits and bursts. Final Fantasy IV is a very inconsistent game in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of this inconsistency is born from the unique space it occupies in the overarching trajectory of the franchise. The SNES allowed Square to do so much more than what they previously accomplished with the NES trilogy, especially in regard to story, but a lot of FFIV's mechanical features feel as though the game has one foot firmly rooted a generation behind. Things like a highly restrictive inventory is just unnecessary thanks to the SNES' expanded memory space, and the encounter rate is just as bonkers as it was on the NES, sometimes sending you from one daunting battle to the next with only a mere tile separating them.
Guest characters, something Final Fantasy II leaned on with its rotating fourth party slot, are commonplace in the early half of FFIV, and a some of them feel more like a hindrance, resulting in a lot of stretches where you need to nanny idiots like Edward, who has no useful abilities, low health, and straight up runs off screen when you try to heal him up. Likewise, you'll occasionally be gifted with guest characters that are too good, creating this pendulum swing of the game being "too annoying" and "too easy."
This combination of antiquated design elements and inconsistent party composition makes the early game a drag, and it's no wonder I ditched the GBA version around Mt. Ordeals back when I originally played it in 2005.
It's so over.
Final Fantasy IV's story also struggles in the early half of the game and spends a bit too long meandering around. It is interesting to play this right off the heels of Final Fantasy III as both games feature numerous character sacrifices, though the greater scope of FFIV means you'll get to spend more time with them rather than coming upon each character briefly before they like, chuck themselves into a furnace or whatever. Each death feels meaningful, which is why it's a bit upsetting that FFIV walks back most of them, sheepishly shrugging and going "I don't know, they lived I guess."
Thankfully, both the story and gameplay eventually find their focus, and once FFIV dials things in, I found that I was starting to have a really good time with the game. Turns out a stable party of well-rounded characters who share a clear and common goal is just what you need to get me invested, even if it may not address every single problem I had with the game up to that point.
By the time the party awakens the Lunar Whale and takes a trip up to the god damned moon, I was fully in it, and I loved the way the game handles the reveal of its true antagonist, Zeromus, who is less a singular consciousness driven by focused malice and more representative of the game's greater themes concerning good and evil, its presence in all men, and the cyclical nature of war and peace. I am a noted Necron defender, so the idea that the party has to do battle with something more representative of a thought or manifestation of man's own nature is my kind of thing.
Also, he's got a sick battle theme.
We're so back
Unfortunately, actually fighting Zeromus is another matter entirely. I thought the Cloud of Darkness was a motherfucker, but this might be the most I've struggled with a final boss in any Final Fantasy game. Apparently this guy can cast Meteo, Holy, Bio, AND Flare, but you'd never know it because he spends 90% of the fight spamming Big Bang over and over again. The solution here is to let Rydia stay dead as all of her spells will result in an immediate counterattack that operates separately from the fixed timer that dictates Big Bang. This also buys you better healing as Rosa only has to split Curaja between four characters instead of five. At the 11th hour, Final Fantasy IV deigned it necessary to saddle me with more dead weight, and the constant run back through several floors with high encounter rates and ~ten minutes of mashing through mandatory dialog is a steep price for failure, which unfortunately sucked a lot of the wind out from Final Fantasy IV's ending.
it's so over. literally, i am done playing this video game
Rating games in a series can be a little tricky, but I think I've more or less settled on a curve when it comes to Final Fantasy. I gave the original game a 3.5/5, which seems a bit high when you consider how approachable, engaging, and bombastic later titles are. All qualities I would assign to FFIV even if I think it spends a little too much time playing around in the protoplasmic puddle left behind by the previous three entries. That's why it's simultaneously the easiest of these four for me to sit down with, yet it's also a 3/5.
Maybe one day I'll check out the SNES version. I am genuinely curious if the easier difficulty curve results in a more evenly paced game, or if it simply makes combat dull and predictable.
Anyway, the next game has a protagonist name Butz. We're so back.
I can sympathise with the casual crowd that was alienated by this, I understand SRB2 Kart was largely famous for being a game that people can quickly pick up and stream, and mod to have any character they like, so I understand that brutally difficult Kart racer was probably not something they had any interest in, but man, this pushes all the right buttons for me.
Is it flawed? Undeniably. I'm sure you've already read that the tutorial is dogshit, and the items and CPUs can definitely be a bit much to handle. But in my opinion, it's super compelling. Substantial and fun singleplayer content, countless secrets, incredibly engaging races (NONE of them feel like autopiloting which is what I find a lot of Kart racers fall into) all compliment an incredibly fun to control driving system that, while yes is poorly taught to you, clicks faster than you'd think.
If you are a casual who just wants this game to be Mario Kart but with any character then you've probably already made up your mind and that's fair, I get why that's a desirable experience. For anyone else who has perhaps grown a bit tired of modern kart racing offerings feeling samey I implore you to give this a shot. Try to do at least the first few cups. I honestly kind of wanted to put this down after the first cup but I absolutely got hooked after I tried another cup and things started to click. Also, don't be afraid of the easy mode, it's there for a reason!
Is it flawed? Undeniably. I'm sure you've already read that the tutorial is dogshit, and the items and CPUs can definitely be a bit much to handle. But in my opinion, it's super compelling. Substantial and fun singleplayer content, countless secrets, incredibly engaging races (NONE of them feel like autopiloting which is what I find a lot of Kart racers fall into) all compliment an incredibly fun to control driving system that, while yes is poorly taught to you, clicks faster than you'd think.
If you are a casual who just wants this game to be Mario Kart but with any character then you've probably already made up your mind and that's fair, I get why that's a desirable experience. For anyone else who has perhaps grown a bit tired of modern kart racing offerings feeling samey I implore you to give this a shot. Try to do at least the first few cups. I honestly kind of wanted to put this down after the first cup but I absolutely got hooked after I tried another cup and things started to click. Also, don't be afraid of the easy mode, it's there for a reason!
FightCade
2015
Zero support for Sonic Shuffle. Garbage. Parsec wins again.
Myst
1993
US Saturn Release #008 - Myst
Played on a real American Sega Saturn with the Fenrir ODE
Myst knows how to truly immerse you quickly and efficiently. Even if you have a hard time getting into the puzzles and the general game loop, I think you'll appreciate how it feels.
On those puzzles though, they really vary in fun factor. Some of them are really easy, some are tricky nut actually fun to do and make you feel smart for accomplishing, and others make you drag out the ol' notebook. That's not necessarily bad but I wasn't exactly expecting it so I wasn't too happy about it.
This is a game you really need to play with the shuttle mouse (or on emulator with your regular PC mouse). Playing with the controller is just kind of slow and annoying for the most part, really draggin stuff out making you not want to go through some puzzles the intended way just due to how much playing with controller tanks it.
So I guess overall, Myst is an ok game for the Saturn, though, I don't really know why you would play this on Saturn and not on PC.
6/10
Played on a real American Sega Saturn with the Fenrir ODE
Myst knows how to truly immerse you quickly and efficiently. Even if you have a hard time getting into the puzzles and the general game loop, I think you'll appreciate how it feels.
On those puzzles though, they really vary in fun factor. Some of them are really easy, some are tricky nut actually fun to do and make you feel smart for accomplishing, and others make you drag out the ol' notebook. That's not necessarily bad but I wasn't exactly expecting it so I wasn't too happy about it.
This is a game you really need to play with the shuttle mouse (or on emulator with your regular PC mouse). Playing with the controller is just kind of slow and annoying for the most part, really draggin stuff out making you not want to go through some puzzles the intended way just due to how much playing with controller tanks it.
So I guess overall, Myst is an ok game for the Saturn, though, I don't really know why you would play this on Saturn and not on PC.
6/10
Sonic Advance
2001
Check it out, it's 14-year-old me with a GameBoy Advance speaker pressed against his ear canal, mouth open while he pipes the most goopy-ass version of Scrap Brain Zone directly into his skull.
You can add Sonic Advance to the growing pile of reviews where I state, "I haven't played this since it came out." It's in good company, the Burger King Trilogy is in there. It's been so long that abandoning my previously held opinions on Sonic Advance and going in with no expectations was easy enough, though I did assume the consensus from my mutuals would be that Advance is among the best and most cherished of Sonic's handheld outings only to find it's pulled around a 3/5 average. A little surprising considering some of those mutuals think more highly of Sonic than I do, but now that I've closed the 20+ year gap... yeah, 3/5 seems about right!
Congratulations to Sonic Advance, because that practically makes it the best "traditional" handheld Sonic I've played.
Like the Game Gear games, Sonic Advance doesn't match the pace and feel of the Genesis titles, but the better hardware does allow for a much closer approximation, one that's pleasant enough in hand and which is only noticeably off to the kinds of people who are entirely too invested in this stuff. Like me. I just bought another copy of Sonic Mania, I'm up to five now, so I'd like to think I'm qualified enough to say that the way Sonic and his friend make contact with destructible objects and how they bounce off them doesn't quite pass the sniff test with me but it hardly ruins the game.
In fact, Sonic's physics feel perfectly in place with the way levels are designed, and that's really the most important thing. For the most part, stage design is pretty good. There's a nice mix of platforming and speed and plenty of routes that are made or less accessible depending on who you play as. The game does completely hit a wall and burn most of its good will by the time you get to Angel Island, though. The introduction of numerous bottomless pits, many of which the level directly funnels you into, is aggravating, and it's a problem that persists into the two single act zones that follow.
Also, not a fan of Amy. Dislike playing as her immensely. She felt bad in Adventure and she feels even worse here. These zones aren't improved by shafting you with a character that has a lower speed cap and movement abilities that purposefully feel bad. I'm sure there's some lunatic out there waiting in the wings who has dedicated a significant portion of their time to perfecting Amy's tech and will insist that it's not the game, it's the player. I don't care, I'm putting Amy in the contraption now.
Despite Sonic Advance's sloppy end game, I was pleasantly surprised with it overall, and that maybe says more about my insanely low expectations for a handheld Sonic than it does the game itself. Uh, end of review.
You can add Sonic Advance to the growing pile of reviews where I state, "I haven't played this since it came out." It's in good company, the Burger King Trilogy is in there. It's been so long that abandoning my previously held opinions on Sonic Advance and going in with no expectations was easy enough, though I did assume the consensus from my mutuals would be that Advance is among the best and most cherished of Sonic's handheld outings only to find it's pulled around a 3/5 average. A little surprising considering some of those mutuals think more highly of Sonic than I do, but now that I've closed the 20+ year gap... yeah, 3/5 seems about right!
Congratulations to Sonic Advance, because that practically makes it the best "traditional" handheld Sonic I've played.
Like the Game Gear games, Sonic Advance doesn't match the pace and feel of the Genesis titles, but the better hardware does allow for a much closer approximation, one that's pleasant enough in hand and which is only noticeably off to the kinds of people who are entirely too invested in this stuff. Like me. I just bought another copy of Sonic Mania, I'm up to five now, so I'd like to think I'm qualified enough to say that the way Sonic and his friend make contact with destructible objects and how they bounce off them doesn't quite pass the sniff test with me but it hardly ruins the game.
In fact, Sonic's physics feel perfectly in place with the way levels are designed, and that's really the most important thing. For the most part, stage design is pretty good. There's a nice mix of platforming and speed and plenty of routes that are made or less accessible depending on who you play as. The game does completely hit a wall and burn most of its good will by the time you get to Angel Island, though. The introduction of numerous bottomless pits, many of which the level directly funnels you into, is aggravating, and it's a problem that persists into the two single act zones that follow.
Also, not a fan of Amy. Dislike playing as her immensely. She felt bad in Adventure and she feels even worse here. These zones aren't improved by shafting you with a character that has a lower speed cap and movement abilities that purposefully feel bad. I'm sure there's some lunatic out there waiting in the wings who has dedicated a significant portion of their time to perfecting Amy's tech and will insist that it's not the game, it's the player. I don't care, I'm putting Amy in the contraption now.
Despite Sonic Advance's sloppy end game, I was pleasantly surprised with it overall, and that maybe says more about my insanely low expectations for a handheld Sonic than it does the game itself. Uh, end of review.
Sneak King
2006
Now that the dust has settled, what do we all think of Sneak King?
Before this last playthrough, I would've said Sneak King was the best of the trilogy with Big Bumpin' being the worst, but nearly twenty years removed, I'm afraid to say the BK hierarchy has changed.
It's tragic, because Sneak King's opening sets you up for something special. A still shot of a darkened driveway... The King appears from the shadows, stalking about like a predator, his visage a cruel mockery of the human form intended to disarm and draw in his prey. But this beast is no man, and his attempt mimicry is all wrong, glassy-eyed and without life. And then you boot up the game proper and find that it's just a crusty stealth title that asks you to do the same exact thing over and over and over again.
If Pocket Bike Racer's problem was too little content, then Sneak King's is that there's too much. Twenty missions spread out over four levels, but every mission tasks you with essentially the same objective: deliver delicious Burger King meals to hungry masses. The most variety you'll get in how you go about that is in what order you'll need to hit up the various NPCs sulking around the map or how often you're allowed to make a mistake. Sometimes you'll need to deliver [X] amount of meals without getting caught or by climbing into trash cans (coincidentally where I found my copy of this game, I think someone threw it out by mistake) or popping out of houses, but the amount of repetition here really sucks all the fun out. The King doesn't even need to take pentazemin to stop his hands from shaking when delivering Original Chicken Sandwiches™, this game's got no meat on its bones!
The controls are also horrible, which is something I actually wouldn't accuse the other two games of. Say what you will about Big Bumpin' and Pocket Bike Racer, but movement at least feels serviceable. Sneak King inverts the Y-axis and makes climbing into cover so laborious that your mark will likely move away or collapse from hunger before you're able to get into position. The King shrugging his shoulders and shaking his damn head because I botched the timing on his sandwich delivery while the camera was juttering behind a tree branch, what the fuck do you want from me, man? When we get to the sawmill I'm throwing your ass in a woodchipper [Warning: do not do this. The King cannot be killed by conventional means, he will come back and he will be stronger.]
Despite how bad it is, Sneak King is often the entry in the BK Trilogy that people talk about, because it is the most conceptually interesting of the bunch and the one to lean the hardest into the marketing that gave life to this iteration of The King. Tactical Burger Delivery Action is such a good-dumb idea that at least one man has dedicated his time and income to collecting any copy of the game he can find, and by a magnitude of cents it is the most consistently expensive title in the series on the aftermarket. Curiously, graded copies of the game are actually worth less than open CIBs. I understand the economics of this and why that's the case, but it's very funny to think Sneak King inherently has more value when played.
Ohhhh, wait a minute... Sneak King sounds like sneaking. Shit, I just got it.
Before this last playthrough, I would've said Sneak King was the best of the trilogy with Big Bumpin' being the worst, but nearly twenty years removed, I'm afraid to say the BK hierarchy has changed.
It's tragic, because Sneak King's opening sets you up for something special. A still shot of a darkened driveway... The King appears from the shadows, stalking about like a predator, his visage a cruel mockery of the human form intended to disarm and draw in his prey. But this beast is no man, and his attempt mimicry is all wrong, glassy-eyed and without life. And then you boot up the game proper and find that it's just a crusty stealth title that asks you to do the same exact thing over and over and over again.
If Pocket Bike Racer's problem was too little content, then Sneak King's is that there's too much. Twenty missions spread out over four levels, but every mission tasks you with essentially the same objective: deliver delicious Burger King meals to hungry masses. The most variety you'll get in how you go about that is in what order you'll need to hit up the various NPCs sulking around the map or how often you're allowed to make a mistake. Sometimes you'll need to deliver [X] amount of meals without getting caught or by climbing into trash cans (coincidentally where I found my copy of this game, I think someone threw it out by mistake) or popping out of houses, but the amount of repetition here really sucks all the fun out. The King doesn't even need to take pentazemin to stop his hands from shaking when delivering Original Chicken Sandwiches™, this game's got no meat on its bones!
The controls are also horrible, which is something I actually wouldn't accuse the other two games of. Say what you will about Big Bumpin' and Pocket Bike Racer, but movement at least feels serviceable. Sneak King inverts the Y-axis and makes climbing into cover so laborious that your mark will likely move away or collapse from hunger before you're able to get into position. The King shrugging his shoulders and shaking his damn head because I botched the timing on his sandwich delivery while the camera was juttering behind a tree branch, what the fuck do you want from me, man? When we get to the sawmill I'm throwing your ass in a woodchipper [Warning: do not do this. The King cannot be killed by conventional means, he will come back and he will be stronger.]
Despite how bad it is, Sneak King is often the entry in the BK Trilogy that people talk about, because it is the most conceptually interesting of the bunch and the one to lean the hardest into the marketing that gave life to this iteration of The King. Tactical Burger Delivery Action is such a good-dumb idea that at least one man has dedicated his time and income to collecting any copy of the game he can find, and by a magnitude of cents it is the most consistently expensive title in the series on the aftermarket. Curiously, graded copies of the game are actually worth less than open CIBs. I understand the economics of this and why that's the case, but it's very funny to think Sneak King inherently has more value when played.
Ohhhh, wait a minute... Sneak King sounds like sneaking. Shit, I just got it.
