janky as hell, with a particularly gruelling and demanding final few levels (this game REALLY doesn't know when it should end), but everything else here is golden. the control scheme does take some getting used to, but it's fun to use once you do. the charm is plentiful, the soundtrack is very good, and there's just a vibe resonating through this game that i really dig yet can't quite put my finger on exactly what makes it so special. lots of quirk and personality, too. plus we have some british voice actors for the PAL release which is very nice.

what can i say? this game's legendary status is more than earned. i cannot imagine playing this for the first time in 1998, it must have been absolutely mind-exploding. playing it for the first time in 2024, sure, there are some rough edges. some of the bosses aren't great and the gameplay leaves a little bit to be desired.

but, when you have a story as good as this, when the voice acting is as great as this, when you have the brilliant ability to balance comedy and drama and sometimes seamlessly combine the two, when the music is this great, when the codec conversations are probably the best out of any MGS game (thanks to yoji shinkawa's incredible character portraits), when you have the brilliant fourth-wall shattering, and when the overall atmosphere and colour palette is one of the most immersive of any game i've ever played in spite of the aged graphics, fucking hell man. i cannot help but adore this game. hideo kojima is a horny little genius.

zone of the enders 1 is an OK game. it has a hefty amount of problems, and doesn't amount to much more than a tech demo, but it's a fun enough tech demo. the combat system is fun enough to use and the story and voice acting have a kind of so-bad-they're-good quality to them. it's the exact kind of game a sequel is essential for, and in this case it would have been a doddle to make it good. give it a good narrative, make the voice acting work, and tighten up the mission design, and you would have something truly special. the high praise for this game left me excited to see what a truly good ZotE game would look like. those hopes did not last long.

there is far too much clunk. there is far too much jank. the experience of playing this game has aged like milk. the difficulty step up is monumental, for a start. certain sections of this game took far too long to complete. one after another, you are hit with missions that are just so poorly designed and repetitive. whoever conceived of the train level, there is a special place in hell for you.

the player has to constantly fight the awful camera system you get to work with. furthermore, you have to work around this hideous lock-on system. it works fine in a handful of battle scenarios (although often leads to these situations being so visually disorientating and chaotic you want to be sick) but something the game constantly likes to do is throw swarms of tiny enemies at you. this wouldn't be too bad on its own, but when there are other actually threatening robots in the mix, it's all over. when you are just trying to lock-on to the robot that is pummelling you, and the lock-on system is targeting individual enemies in these swarms, you feel a frustration i cannot put into words. just awful to play, and feels so bad.

the majority of your subweapons are useless in the majority of battle scenarios, too. this means that your best bet is to hack-and-slash through your opponents, and the game is not well-designed around this and doing it just feels so mindless and mind-numbing. the story starts out interesting, and there's a particularly cool cameo for players of the first ZotE game, which was nice. however it just doesn't lead to anything interesting happening and the cutscene writing feels like a combination of MGS and the more tech jargony stuff in a mecha anime like evangelion. that, and the voice acting is now just flat-out lifeless.

fuck, man. i was rooting for this game at the start. but, by its end, i had grown so sick and tired of it. ZotE 2 totally failed to live up to any expectations i had for it, and is proof that just because a sequel is bigger does not mean it's better. improving on the first game should have been so easy, and how hard they failed in that way just makes me sad.

yes this means i prefer the first ZotE game. i am not immune to abysmal takes, it seems.

i took my copy to a video game store and they cleaned the disc properly and it worked perfectly after that so lol

gitaroo man is so bizarre and weird but, like, in the absolute best way possible. the story is nonsense but so heartwarming and charming and surreal you kinda have to fall in love with it. mechanically it plays unlike any other rhythm game i've seen, while also using an easily understandable and unique system when it comes to playing in time with the music. and what incredible music it is.

so much of this game is about the art style and presentation, though, and it has one of my favourite overall aesthetics of any game. i don't know what it is about this game's look but it just scratches an itch i never knew i had. all the elements work in tandem with each other to form one of the tightest, most cohesive visions i have ever seen a game put out, and it concludes with one of the greatest endings to a rhythm game perhaps ever put to disc. i cannot wait to give master's play a full shot, and to listen to the soundtrack every day until i die.

i have almost definitely sullied my experience with this game by playing the PS2 version which is notorious for how ass it is compared to the OG xbox version. so many loading screens, which is a bummer and a hell of a step down when you're used to the immediacy of the original gamecube versions. the combination of levels from 1 and 2 makes for a hefty challenge when it comes to the arcade mode, one which is not great given how imprecise a PS2 analog stick is compared to a GC analog stick. furthermore, the new stages they've added into deluxe are just kinda... bad? like they're all massive and gimmicky and have a lot of unused space on them. i might come back to this on the original xbox one day, but for now i can only rate what i played. and i did not enjoy it that much. it is fundamentally still fun because of how strong its predecessors were, but fails to add much of anything interesting or new. minigames are fun tho.

oh how cruel are the hands that life can deal us. how much fun i was having making my way through the first 6 stages of gitaroo man. enjoying its totally bizarre style, incredible music, and central gameplay mechanic unlike anything else i had ever played with. alas, it was not meant to be. as my PS2 copy tried to load up stage 7, right as the midly nonsensical story was beginning to find some feet to land on, right as i was already ready to put gitaroo man on my all time favourites list, and right after a slow jam stage where U-1 seemed to win over the heart of a very cute girl, tragedy struck. stage 7 would not load. the 'now loading' message was stuck playing ad infinitum. and despite numerous resets, and despite doing the old toothpaste trick, nothing i tried worked. i merely had to sit and accept the loss i had been dealt. a copy of this game is far from the cheapest thing in the world, and prices for them are increasing in my native UK. for the time being, i might just have to accept this as goodbye. thank you for the tragically brief yet incredibly memorable time you gave me, gitaroo man.

there are certain aspects of this game which stand the test of time. the aesthetic, atmosphere, music and story are consistently top-of-the-line and its greatest features. it feels like playing a really fun sci-fi action movie, with quotable dialogue and funny moments aplenty. also has some gameplay sections that will just floor you and the less said about those the better. the levels themselves, however, aren't great. lots of jank, lots of swarms and swarms of enemies making things frustratingly hard at points, and the library itself warrants this being below an 8/10. i wound up a touch sick of it by its end, which is a shame because i otherwise enjoyed myself.