These are literally just 3D platformers disguised as a peak 00s sports game, and in that regard the most mechanically rich, complex and rewarding of any 3D platformer to grace the genre. I implore any bored 3D platformer fans to play the unconventional, especially these (3 or 4, or even THUG1/2)

Here's a mod that (mostly) fixes button prompts for the PC version, which is the version I'd recommend if you can tolerate the slightly awkward setup. If you want to play a physical copy/console version, Xbox version is best, and for overall convenience there's GameCube.

The good, the bad, and the... Starfield.

I was a believer, I really was. I didn't dislike Fallout 4 as much as most of my constituents and peers, and decided to waste none of my time on Fallout 76. Despite going on a somewhat downward trajectory since the release of Oblivion, I had faith that with the Microsoft purchase and subsequent fiscal investment that Todd "It Just Works" Howard was going to be able to Houdini an amazing game out of effectively thin air with Starfield. I, like many others waited with bated breath as the marketing wave for Bethesda's newest IP in decades pushed into the gamingsphere. WIth every announcement, every showcase, I became more and more invested in the world I would soon embark in. Science Fiction when done right is an exploration of limitless possibilities, of worlds and galaxies foreign to the audience waiting to be freshly explored. This is what my dream for Starfield was, and did I get it? The answer is simply: not really.

Fallout and the Elder Scrolls succeeded in the moments in between, starting with the trademark cold opens (as seen in Oblivion, Skyrim, and the Fallouts) and continuing on to your first moments of freedom. Remember in Skyrim as you escape the executioner's block in the first thirty minutes of runtime, how the entirety of the land the Nords call home is open to you? You have a loosely defined main quest to embark on, but there is an entire world and path to craft between you and your destination. Nothing is forced. Once you began to creep into the stories of each respective game, it felt like there was a limitless possibility of what you could find on your way from Point A to Point B. In Fallout, walking through a simple cliff face could see you crossing path with an entire colony of people with the name "Gary" all yelling their name as they attacked you without rhyme or reason. In Oblivion on your way walking through the countryside could find the player interacting with a formidable prince of an otherworldy deity.

Starfield however, it never had that... magical spunk that the aforementioned titles did. In Starfield you spend the majority of your time doing two things: chasing down quest markers and flying to said quest markers. In theory this isn't a terrible idea, effectively the other titles are all about the same thing, but the issue in translating that mantra to Bethesda's big 2023 title is that there is no in between. Now much against my chagrin this is my biggest gripe with the game, the inability to have a reason to explore and the lack of reward of doing so. As I mentioned previously, in the "good" Bethesda titles I found myself overjoyed at taking the long way because it meant that I was likely to find myself distracted and taken on a path to a babbling brook of curiosities. In Starfield, this doesn't exist as it takes the form of grav jumping from system to system (as your ship's capabilities allow) with complete lack of middle ground. You fly from your starting point to your destination, there is no random occurrence, there is no vista to pause at along the way, there is no mysterious force that will stop you in your tracks to explore. Not having anything to look forward to in my active journey in a Bethesda game just felt... wrong. They'd always been the antithesis of the open world epidemic as sprung by Ubisoft, which had towers to climb and random outposts to capture. Bethesda titles championed the random and gave you a reason, completely unprodded to explore. That wasn't present here. It's hard to stress how strange it felt getting an objective for a faction that was taking you to a world a plethora of lightyears away only for it to require the same sequence of system jumps that the twenty quests before it did, the only variance being the end destination. As I mentioned previously, this was my greatest and gravest letdown with Starfield and an unfortunate result of a scope that didn't quite meet expectations.

There's another avenue of complaint to my issues of exploration and scope, and it is in the worlds of Starfield at large. My next statement may gesture itself as hyperbole but I assure the reader that I mean it in sincerity: I found there was genuinely nothing interesting about the planets in Starfield. Outside of legitimately well constructed cities like Neon and New Atlantis, the planets you do land on for side and main stories alike felt completely lifeless. Recycled clear procedural generation made for planet after planet of monotony with no motivation to poke around in other than completing a flora & fauna scanning log and collection of materials for resource crafting that I also found rather unengaging. Starfield didn't position itself to be No Man's Sky in that aspect and the expectation of the general public for it to be so is completely unfounded and misguided. But in the times I did find myself off the beaten path on the seemingly endless worlds at large, it was simply a nothing burger out there. I'd look out at the vast expanse of the freshly landed-upon planet and continue straight on my way, as there was nothing for me to poke around and find.

This takes me to my next issue with Starfield, and I promise this review is not just a laundry list of problems I had with the game, as I am giving it a favorable score. I touched previously on the great job the (recent) Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles did, and that was give the player an organically engaging approach to side content in the ways of questing and base building. Starfield sort of just... dumps everything on you pretty much right away. Quickly jaunting through New Atlantis (the game's starting city and most important location,) dumps more quests on you than you can count, and they are almost all unprovoked. By walking through each district the activity log grows with people you need to speak to and places you need to find as a result of NPC's conversating about them to eachother. This in particular felt strange to me, you were no adventurer in need as you were in the Elder Scrolls helping the woman in her painted world, you were just an eavesdropper who heard a character complaining into the void. This didn't necessarily impact the quality of the sidequests, but beginning the game with four factions dropped on your and a laundry list of people I needed to seek out before even beginning the second main story quest was numbing.

My favorite part of this game was easily the factions and side content that it throws at you, despite the awkward nature that you first interact with it. I loved the way the factions worked and varied from one another. If you wanted to dabble in humorous corporate espionage, you had the Ryujin Industries questline. If you wanted to embark on a well thought out space pirate adventure (and who doesn't,) you had the Crimson Fleet storyline. Players looking for an excellent piece of science fiction with an incredible twist, there was the UC Vanguard. And lastly for cowboys, you had the uh, Freestar Collective. Each of these brought something new to the questing and enjoyment table that the other ones didn't, and I found the bulk of my seventy hour runtime was spent with these storylines and the missions throughout. I greatly enjoyed the variation of writing styles, mission structure, and combat that were involved and showed that Bethesda in all of its recent faults still had some incredible scenario writers on retainer.

I left out a faction, and that one would be "Constellation" AKA the main story questline. Because of the nature that Starfield drops its side content on you, I made sure to do as much as I could of it first before engaging with the main scenario. This meant for practically fifty hours I had gone without talking to the members of my crew patiently waiting for me in New Atlantis to set the events of the story in motion. By the time they had asked and instructed me to explore the galaxy, I had already done so. I had done things that led me to interesting storylines and met many interesting people. I'd been to the other two major cities in the galaxy, Neon and Akila City. I had already travelled from one end of the explorable system to the other and had weapons that could one or two shot most opponents. The point of the above is to effectively say that the main scenario felt diluted after doing the side content. I felt like I was saving the best for last, but in reality I had set aside the most mediocre and uninteresting narrative in the game which is... unfortunate to say the least for what is the main story. Maybe unfair because the tertiary questing in the Elder Scrolls/Fallout series was also probably more "fun" than the respective narratives of each game's set path, but the gap was just too large in Starfield. I didn't feel a connection to quite literally anyone in the faction that you fight tooth and nail with to protect. Sarah had a moral compass and ability to annoy you more than Fi did in the original Skyward Sword, Stroud was fun for the few missions you had with him but ultimately was a rich playboy, Sam was a boring version of Irvine from FFVIII, Vasco was a robot doing the recycled dry humor robot schtick, Barrett was supposed to be someone we cared about, and Andreja was just kinda... there. I couldn't empathize with a group like Constellation and their ongoing mission if I couldn't connect with any of the group. I felt a connection to the plight of Martin Septim and Jauffre in Oblivion, I felt a connection to the issues plaguing my father and the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3, I didn't get that in Starfield. Every time I walked into The Lodge (Constellation's hub area,) I did a side eye at those around me. I just felt... 100% detached from a group I was meant to empathize with. I know they're completely of different strokes, but its impossible not to think of a series like Mass Effect and how it quickly got you to care about each of your party members in its expansive sci-fi narrative. Bethesda's never been about that to the same degree but man, it just makes you think.

Honestly thinking about it too, you just straight up don't matter in this game other than an advancement to the plot. Once more, I don't really expect too much more from Todd and his expertise but there came a point towards the end of the game where I read some testimonials from my brother and others who were also playing and came to the question: Am I really present in the story? I don't have the opportunity to say anything very interesting, I'm quite literally just the vehicle for a questline that chooses you as important within an hour of the game. I'm not the dragonborn, I'm not the son of an important figure reshaping a wasteland, I'm not the father of a child whose importance is likely beyond my scope... I'm just a character who touched a rock. Not the end of the world, but it made me ponder my actual intentions and level of engagement with the world(s) at large.

Speaking of engaging... you know what's really hard to engage with even with an Nvidia 3090 GPU? Ding ding ding... it's Starfield! Performance in this game on a good rig is straight up inexcusable and is responsible for a large degree of my detriment to this game, even more so than the previously mentioned dissent on worlds, questing, and player agency. I have a good rig, I'm fortunate enough where I'm at a position to be playing with effectively top of the line hardware... I should not be able to see Steam's frame counter register sub thirty in combat towards the end of the game. This is not okay. First person shooters are not fun below a certain threshold and Starfield managed to reach it. One of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, Bloodborne, saw its personal rating fall by quite a bit from me because it was locked at thirty on the PS4 and that was a third person action game! Starfield is a first/third person shooter in which aiming is... important! Movement and tracking is... important! Running around Akila City and feeling like I was in slow motion because of how astonishingly low the framerate was felt like a slap in the face to me as the player. Even Cyberpunk ran better at launch... on worse hardware!!! Sometimes I would find reprieve in smaller zones inside cities or at space stations where I was able to hit a reasonable seventy to eighty frames per second, but these moments were remarkably few and far between. The majority of my seventy hours of Starfield were spent sub fifty and I can sacrifice framerate SOMETIMES for fidelity and beautiful vistas... but that was not present in Starfield. When it was running well the game looked good but not great, not worthy of the tradeoff that came in the form of gutter-level performance.

The framerate issue made combat tougher than it should have been. I didn't expect fighting in any way to be the best part of Starfield, as it decidedly isn't in any Bethesda game, but it was another element of this game that added my ultimate takeaway of "meh" as I saw the end credits roll. The guns didn't feel very interesting to me as they were all variations of familiar Fallout formulas but without the nuance and strategy of V.A.T.S. You use shotguns, snipers, pistols, melee, and lasers to cut your way through unimportant humanoid and arachnid enemies alike just as you did in Fallout. Aiming though was a nice callback to the pre-Oblivion days where it felt like a complete dice roll. I laughed at the amount of times I'd have my reticle on enemies only to whiff shot after shot after shot because the combat mechanics of Starfield deemed a miss necessary. I was never frustrated... just confused.

Combat leads into another point of contention I had with Starfield: space flight. Not only is the shipbuilder resoundingly obtuse and unfair in the way it gates creativity, but actually employing the ship you carefully crafted in a combat scenario is a most woefully uninteresting and grating endeavor that I could have easily gone without. Dogfighting is a tall task to make work, but EA and Pandemic studios were able to do it with Battlefront way back in 2005. It wasn't complicated, as it was a simple follow and target system, but it was fun. Starfield's space combat requires the player to face slam three attack buttons that control cannons, missiles, and lasers, until however many ships you are forced to defeat have been silenced. The tracking system was a dud, and I didn't want to chase the skill tree to make it any better as I knew that would take away my enjoyment of more tangible and useful things like the persuasion system or on-world combat. If you accidentally ported to a system that had space pirates or enemies target you upon entry and didn't have enough ship parts to heal right away, you were effectively S.O.L. Enemies have a tendency to fly right over you and evade your targeting, forcing the player to spend an awkward amount of time just so they can recalibrate. Weapons had an annoying level of recharge period that took the active interest and engagement levels of the fights completely away. For something I really wanted to love and have that simply living-out-my-Star-Wars-dream-jubilee with, I was rather against ever partaking in. All in all, I stopped having fun with a lot of the appeal of the title real quick.

Starfield was a game meant for a lot of people, it is Bethesda's first big IP in too many years to count and unfortunately, it missed my mark by a long shot. What I had hoped would be a game to rival FFXVI for my GOTY spot, is really nothing more than another candle in the wind. Starfield is a game somebody is going to enjoy, but not me. If I want to build outposts and get some sort of vindication in doing so, I could play Satisfactory. If I want to dogfight, I'll just jump on Ace Combat. If I wish for an engaging first person shooter, I can get back into DOOM. If I want peak Bethesda, I have my Oblivion GOTY edition sitting on the shelf next to me. I can't recommend Starfield and it breaks my heart. It's the first time I've played a Bethesda game and truly felt indifferent. I reached the credits and I didn't clap, I didn't smile, I did the worst thing imaginable... I asked my friends to play League of Legends.

I want everyone to actually sit down and find it in themselves to meet this game on its own terms, which should be pretty easy to do with its stellar soundtrack holding you aloft better than any balloon or weed gummy ever could (the latter might help tho)

Kaze no Notam is beautiful, even if the "game" part of it is nonsensical; in a way I'm glad it gives zero heed to the players needs or wants at any moment. More and more I find games having complete indifference towards the player to be more and more attractive, and I don't just mean that they're brutally unfair execution tests but rather that they just continue to operate. I think Rain World embodies this the best, but this is way up there too in that field alone. I feel that my rating is a bit high but I don't really care, most I may do retroactively is make it an 8/10.

It's with this game that I must finally admit, the og PlayStation was absolutely the star of the 5th gen consoles. I don't know how I can argue otherwise anymore even with the handful of party games the Nintendo 64 had under its belt. Where Nintendo raised an Ocarina of Time to combat the Final Fantasy, they bring nothing when the likes of Kaze no Notam and Moon show up.

Shoutouts to Detchibe for bringing up this game thrice in the Backloggd Discord's Game Of The Week events to finally get it in the spotlight.

In a word: Luxuriate.

Most of the game is a strong 8 to me but holy hell the final boss gauntlet is agonizing, not because they're particularly difficult but because they're just so SLOW. OH BOY I CAN'T WAIT TO WALLJUMP IN A CORNER FOR 5 MINUTES!!! Missed the final boss's weakness that would've proly trivialized it bcus even tho I tested everything I guess I hit em at the wrong angle so XD

I also just think not refilling weapons or subtanks based on at least their state at the last checkpoint is awful, to the degree that during the final boss gauntlet you're better off game overing intentionally to get all your weapon charges back if you don't want to just do 1 bar at max charge (but don't system reset because the password makes you replay the entire first level too LMAO)

I'd probably like it a lot more on replay but the prospect of replaying games like this isn't particularly attractive to me, there's so many games and so little time to play them all. I DO think it's one of the more compelling ones to revisit though, alongside something like classic Sonic.

One of the few games to start making me cramp up and give me sore thumbs. Zero is cute also.

I'm a tech enthusiast, an enjoyer of feats from all eras of computing, and while on paper Portal with RTX(why is it named like this? just be normal and name it Portal RTX please) is impressive, it's a dogshit showcase for an otherwise fantastic number of technologies. The fact that DLSS "ultra performance" is practically mandatory for a remotely playable experience on an RTX 3080 at 4k is a joke. It showing off new tech isn't an excuse either. Others have already dug into the asset swaps a lot already and I 100% agree, the new assets look out of place, mismatched and at odds with even the new lighting. This entire thing feels phoned in.

You'd think with a tech demo, you'd also bother to make it run well on your all of your GPUs; not just the one that costs $1,800+ USD.

jump to the bottom of this review for the optimal physics settings. game is ass without them. thank me later

frustratingly close to being the best sonic game ever. with proper momentum there would be little contest, but thankfully the freeflowing open world promotes speed and precision above all else. if you're playing the game as it's intended you won't really ever be standing still, and thanks to sonic's, well... speed - frontiers may be the only open world game in the past ten or more years to actually justify its own vastness

regardless, the lack of momentum is still a problem during the few sections that are strictly 2d. i have no idea why there are levels that depend on inertia in a game where your character literally grinds himself to a halt every time you're not holding forward. all of this could be fixed if sonic only stopped after gradually losing speed or when holding a braking button or something, but because nothing like that is in place there's a few especially jarring sequences here and there

momentum aside, my only other complaint is the deceptive progression and noticeable lack of budget. i was really eager to see all five islands and what kinds of biomes they'd cover or what other characters may pop up. unfortunately the last two are pretty disingenuously labeled. think of the actual zone count as 3.5 and you wont be too underwhelmed - the first three are pretty massive areas anyway. i just wanted more. it's been a while since i've played a 30+ hour game that i didn't want to end

i'm incredibly eager to see what comes next. i hope sonic team picks up on frontiers' slack and puts out the actual best game in the franchise next time

optimal settings:

starting speed: 60
initial boost speed: 90
turning speed: 100
boost turning speed: 20
top speed: 100
steering sensitivity: 100
acceleration: 50
bounce height: 100

the most important things here are the third, fourth, and sixth options. sonic steers like a fucking tank otherwise. i'd recommend dropping the camera distance to 40 and upping its speed to 70ish but that's up to preference

edit: with the update this all stays the same. you'll just want to also turn deceleration completely off and keep the deceleration rate somewhere around 90 to 100 depending on what you prefer. i'm not a fan of stopping completely on a dime, but anything below 90 gets real stupid real fast

Was pleasantly surprised for the most part throughout, the soundtrack, artstyle and character designs fuck, the voice acting ranges from serviceable to great imo (tho Carmelita starts to veer into that "maybe a little too human" territory you'd see in The Female Character Design of the 80s-90s, unironically improved mostly in a lot of furry fanart lol)

The controls felt very responsive albeit awkward at times due to the aim-assist equivalent of some platforming sections (this means you can typically play a little riskier though and get some time save going)

The platformer level design is mostly solid, and there's a sense of actual urgency to tread carefully because for the most part you'll be dying in one hit, sometimes two or rarely three (this is good imo, since the game is explicitly about being stealthy-ish and, well, Sly. ) The only levels I outright despised were the autoscroller turret sections and the finale, I see the inverse from most other people saying the racing games were the worst and the turrets were fine, but eh? If you beat the first one you probably beat the rest first try unless you just forgot how it worked; while the turret levels especially the last couple love to pull cheap shots on you with the last one spawning enemies that require multiple hits to kill.

I loved the bosses though (except the last one), especially Ruby even though her fight is far and away the most gimmicky (SPOILER: It's a fucking rhythm game lol)

Going for 100% would be easy, or so I thought, then I got my ass kicked by the Master Thief Runs and decided nah lol. Maybe some other time, Idk, it's not a game that lends itself well to casually beating time trials (the lines are usually very obvious, but the times are tight enough that you're fucked over for making a simple mistake or playing even slightly suboptimally; there's not a lot of satisfaction there for optimizing a run because it's figured out by your 2nd attempt and you probably already have optimized it by then, just don't mess up the slightly slippery portions lol xd!)

Running this at 4k with no interlacing and no motion blur patch/cheat codes is lovely, artstyle holds up immensely well upresd and no motion blur is a huge plus. The only caviat here is it may randomly softlock on the first level when running these, but after remaking a save I played through the entire game without a hitch (via PCSX2 obviously). I highly recommmend playing the original releases instead of the PS3 HD collection because of numerous audio issues in the latter and redone soundtrack, as well as the model outlines being scuffed and way too small, losing a lot of its b-grade charm that fits the rest of the game in favor of a weirdly bombastic, orchestral spin on it that also somehow manages to have less going on in some pieces? Also the model outlines thing was present on old builds of PCSX2 when upresing, suggesting the HD collection is maybe just emulating shit poorly anyways rather than a proper port lol.

I feel like of the 6th gen mascot platformers, Sly shares a top spot for having the most reason to go visit it, I'd only group it with like 3 other games from around that time; it knows it's corny and rides it to the finish line.

+.5 star because I want Sly's surprisingly soft-spoken, cool voice to whisper sweet nothings to me.

To describe Zelda II as "arduous" would be an understatement, or perhaps we should look to Zelda II as the arduous game.

I actually quite enjoyed the first hour or two, but it dropped the ball pretty hard when it got to the cave south of Ruto Town where it introduced the boomerang enemy; utterly merciless and TAS-like reflexes required to progress without facemashing into him and losing most of your health. The best part is, it's only the beginning, that marks at most the 1/5 point of the game. I forget if this is verbatim but I could've sworn one of the NPCs in Ruto said not to go into the caves before getting the candle, what they don't tell you is the candle is through a cave in the temple on the other side LOL.

Needless to say I spammed the shit out of rewind, even with that everything past the like 1/3 point was utterly grueling and obtuse as hell to progress. There's a couple key moments late in the game where there's "hidden walls", and your only clue they exist is one NPC that says "The palace has a false wall"; doesn't specify where, or how you'd find it, and the wall he's referring to is up 1 tile so you can't even walk into it; you have to be jumping.

Listing each enemy that just unfairly bombards the player later in the game would leave me writing an entire wiki entry so I'll refrain, but it does only get worse for combat design. The enemy designs themselves are kind of neat, but in practice they're usually frustrating and blatantly unfair. The last couple of temples are just giant mazes that deliberately reuse room patterns (not like, individual rooms, but sections of rooms to throw the player off and make them lose their bearing) ugh.

If the OST wasn't such a banger (albeit a little repetitive as this is a relatively long NES game and there's only so much they can do) I'd likely have dropped it. SPOILERS kinda: To Zelda II's credit it also introduces one of the most iconic Zelda moments (Dark Link) and the general interactivity with towns and their NPCs, complete with a couple or so sidequests.

Fortunately a lot of what I moan and groan about here is answered by the tasteful Zelda 2 Redux romhack, I strongly recommend playing that version instead (retranslated NPC dialogue, tweaked enemies etc.), though core problems still exist like the late game temples just being a chore; you may need to keep notes still but at least the game provides you the information to do so now lol.