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What I played last week #13

Resident Evil 4 Remake [PC]

I had a really good time with this - someone was saying the other day how RE was always one of those series where they enjoyed the idea of them more than actually playing them. I think I am the same in a lot of ways in so far that I absolutely love them, have always really enjoyed the series and have loads of nostalgia for them, but I don't think I've ever bothered actually completing most of them...  I think I watched a mate complete RE2 round his house when I was younger, the first one I ever finished was 5 (which I weirdly became obsessed with speedrunning - never done that with any game before or since, but I was randomly the fastest solo time in the UK and top 100 in the world at one point!)

Beyond that, I finished Village and I finished one campaign of 2 Remake, but most of the time they've been games Ive sort of had fun with mucking around with but rarely seeing through to the end. 

That was the same for 4, which I must have started on various systems over the years about 100 times but never really bothered playing it through to the end for various reasons. I do think part of it is RE games have a habit of starting really strong and then fading a bit, but the series just occupies this weird spot where I have such a love and reverence for the series, and how it often effortlessly straddles the line between being genuinely creepy and atmospheric, all whilst being super serious about how utterly fucking stupid it is, which I think it lands because so many of the unlockables and easter eggs across the series involve the developers breaking their po-faced serious act and sneaking a nudge and a wink to show you they know exactly how daft they're being

I always uses Super Bunnyhop's line about RE2 Remake where he said something like 'the mastery of this remake is it that it remakes it not as it was, but how you remember it being', which I now think should be the benchmark for any good remake. I actually think 4 goes a step beyond this where it's taken great efforts to actually subvert what you're expecting and tried to keep things fresh, or streamline them or improve flow. They have a lot more room to do that in 4 compared to 2 as it's a significantly longer game, but it still masterfully keeps things familiar whilst still managing to surprise you.

It's a fantastic remake of a fantastic game - I do think it's maybe a touch too long and some sections feel like filler, but it's hard to get too far away from that when you're remaking something, and I actually think they do a good job of tidying things up where they can, and manage to completely change or even straight up remove some sections of the original without it feeling like it compromises the flow and feel of the original. Some of the moments are genuinely great - the Krauser fight being a standout for me. They've also done a good job with the characters too - they've subtly made Leon way cooler but without completely removing his goofy cornyness. Ashley is also significantly less annoying than she was in the original game too. The only weird spot for me was Ada Wong. Sphere Hunter's review pointed out that the voice actress sounded really bored, and I can't unhear it now - its like they accidentally uploaded readthrough lines or something, its bizarre. Also the Merchant's voice don't hit the same at all, which does unfortunately actually make the game 0/10 stranger!

It's hard to play something like this in 2023 and judge it as a 3rd person action shooter - the original influenced so many things and it's become such a pop-cultural mainstay in gaming that it's hard to avoid forgetting that it started it all - it's like the Godfather or Smells Like Teen Spirit, where it's easy for something to feel overplayed and over imitated... Yet every time you have a moment of 'been there done that' or something feeling dated or unoriginal, you have to remind yourself that all the games you've played that occasionally make it feel by the numbers likely wouldn't have existed at all without RE4.  

The fact it's remake still stands out as a notably fun and memorable experience means it's impact and quality really shouldn't be taken for granted I've completed the game another 4 times since I first drafted this, its RE5 all over again.

Katana Zero [PC]

After my 4th completion of RE4 Remake in a row, I decided I needed to break the spell and play a pallette cleanser. Decided to play Katana Zero on a whim, which I thought I had completed when it first came out, although I wasn't sure how because I didn't own it until the last steam sale, I think I thought I'd played it on Gamepass or something. I remembered thinking it was cool but not really liking it as much as everyone else seemed to. When I played through it, I was wondering if they'd added loads to the game since, because there was loads of story bits I couldn't remember at all. I checked when I finished it, and it turns out I'd actually owned it on steam and refunded it before my 2 hours were up, which actually really surprised me. I found an old post I'd made on a forum at the time which said "It's absolutely not a bad game at all, in fact I think some people will play it and have an excellent time with it, but you can also tell you've kinda seen almost everything within the first hour, and I just don't see me pouring hours into it trying to beat levels more fluidly and stuff. It's cool in a lot of ways, but it has ridiculously limited enemy variety, and I don't find the mechanics all that deep or satisfying in a twitch way."

I actually still agree with that in a lot of ways - the gameplay is fun, but it never really evolves and it starts to feel a little rote pretty quickly. I hate when games just shoehorn in pointless skilltrees and stuff, but I do think it's just a few new abilities or level mechanics or enemy types away from being something much more special. I'm surprised I completely jacket it in though, because I actually really loved the story and the setting of it. The Cyberpunkish/Noir setting is already very cool and well executed visually, but even with it's pixel style, it manages to be a genuinely really moody, atmopsheric, engaging story that I thought really engaging and managed to be really visually emotive - much more so than most games in this graphical style. It's a surprisingly engaging, oddly touching and often resonant story and I am surprised I just ducked out of it considering how much I enjoyed that part of it. It reminds me a lot of Hotline Miami in that regard - I mean it's got a lot of similarities with Hotline Miami in general, but I think the elements where it tries to lean into PTSD and tries to be a lot more serious are very similar, except I think Katana Zero manages to do them in a better and more compelling way. Yet some of this all felt so familiar that I am still sure I have completed this at some point in my past, I feel like im going senile

Either way, the story ends at what is very much the close of the middle arc, and it turns out that the story is supposed to be concluded via some free DLC coming at some point in the vague future. Im kinda glad I've only gotten into it now, because I think it would have been a bit of a bummer waiting like 2+ years just to get the conclusion of the story, but now it feels like something to look forward to.

Also made myself laugh because I somehow skipped over the mechanic where you could slow down time even though loads of the encounters are specifically designed around it, and completed most of the game instead just becoming absolutely ill at it blocking bullets in real time and that

Golden Tee Fore! 2006 [Arcade]

I played a bunch of this last week and have continued to play more, trying out a bunch of the different courses. Just an awesome game

Simpson's Bowling [Arcade]

I spent ages getting this running properly as it's quite a beloved game, but I was quite underwhelmed to be honest. It has a decent amount of personality (which you'd hope tbf), but as a game its somehow a mix of feeling way too simplistic, but also plodding and slow. It's really easy too, I bowled a 290 my first game, and I feel like I could confidently bowl a 300 within a couple of goes if I really concentrated. Too many other better bowling arcade games out there for this one to get a look really

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What I played last week #12

I've been fucking up keeping on top of this, so here we go. A frankly ludicrous amount of games this past week or so, so I think I'll split the 2 games I actually finished into a separate entry, cos it'll just be even more of a fucking mess Panzer Dragoon Orta [Xbox] Brilliant game that still looks absolutely beautiful even today - I actually kinda forgot how the original Xbox was quite a bit more powerful than the PS2 and just looked ludicrously nice on the right setup. This feels a little bit dated in some ways, but I still think the combat system itself is really fun and original, and I'm surprised it hasn't been used more. I think I'd love a boss rush version of this game, cos those are the best bits by miles

Breakdown [Xbox] Bought this on a whim having never heard of it before, and thought it looked really interesting. Although it has guns, its essentially an FPS melee game at it's core, and has some really unique and interesting movement mechanics, including a fairly complex array of moves you can combo into each other, on top of dodge and traversal movement. Also one of those games in that era that was experimenting with allowing you to intereact with everything around you, which gives it a certain charm. Game seems bonkers too, it's turn of the millenium Namco which should tell you all you need to know. Unfortunately is a bit too difficult and janky to be truly fun, but still a compelling time

Overwatch 2 [PC] Used to play OW1 loads and then just never played it for years and years. Have gotten back into playing it with a mate, forgot how much personality the different characters and moves have. Not really my sort of go-to game, but still a lot of fun when you get in a good lobby

The Last of Us Part 2 [Playstation 5] My wife said she wanted to watch me play through TLOU2 after watching the TV show, so we started playing it after RE4 Remake kept crashing for me - I finished TLOU2 at launch and absolutely loved the game at the time, and it somehow feels even more astonishing in it's level of quality and detail the second time around. We stuck it on and thought we'd maybe play a chapter or two and flew through 5 hours of it. The quality of environmental storytelling in that game is at a level that few games even attempt, let alone manage. Everywhere you go in that game feels like it tells some level of story, and every room feels so unique and distinct - I find myself just looking around the houses and checking the shelves and stuff like I would in no other game, just cos the level of unique detail is off the charts. My one regret playing the last game was that I didn't replay the original first, and having just watched the TV show, it definitely made everything feel more connected and the various story beats hit much more vividly, even though I obviously already know the story. Also, I found Dina pretty forgettable the first time around - I didn't dislike her or anything, but I just never felt that attached to her. Dunno why, but I think she's brilliant this time around, she just has so much to her and really compliments Ellie. Also I don't know if it's something they tweaked over time, but she seems way more competent than I remember any of the companions being in the game the first time round - to the point where you can really rely on her to do her part in a firefight. Maybe it's just always been like that and I noticed it more this time, but it definitely helps the immersion compared to games where your companions stand there and a firefight would go on foreever unless you finished everyone off.

Saying that, one thing I didn't remember at all is the control bindings for this game feel absolutely bonkers, maybe it's just coming off other games, but I feel like loads of things are mapped weirdly in that game. The PS5 performance boost is awesome too - tbh I never really felt like it played horribly at 30fps or anything, but I feel like the combat and stealth really sings with the improved framerate

Just a phenomenal game. I very rarely replay games, especially ones like this, but I've been really glad I've restarted it. Also, my wife plays a decent amount of games here and there, but I wouldn't say she's massively into them or anything - I find it always gives stuff a new layer when you're kinda vicariously watching something through someone else's fresh eyes, and it was cool seeing how impressed she was with the level of acting and how cinematic it was, like she couldn't believe the quality of storytelling and the pacing/dialogue, etc. To be fair it probably helps that she was watching me play the RE4 remake before that, which isn't exactly There Will Be Blood in terms of dramatic performances

My wife selfishly went back to Australia for 2 right after we started playing this, so sadly had to stop just as my joy for it got reignited

Fifa 23 [PC]

I only ever play this when people come over. I actually don't mind it, its a perfectly playable game that is always good for a couple of matches when a mate fancies a few

Golden Tee 2K [Arcade]

Played a lot of golf games this past couple of weeks. I couldn't give a shit about golf, but I always thought it makes for a pretty fun game when it lands, and Golden Tee is about as good as it gets for a party game. Was having the match of my life with my mate on this one, only for my trackball to inexplicably stop working on the last hole. Annoying

PGA Tour Golf 2K23 [PC]

Played a lot of 2K1 with a mate on boozy weekends, so gave the free trial of this a go. Really liked the new 3 click mechanic they've got and the putting is really fun, but the presentation of this game is abysmal and it just runs like shit. Shame, because there is a good game there

EA Tour Golf [PC] This was the opposite to the above, where the presentation is out of this world, but nothing about the game itself feels as intuitive or fun. To it's credit, I think it's because it's a much deeper, more complex game that demands a bit more knowledge of actual golf, but I prefer my experiences on the Arcadey side. Probably an objectively better game, but not as fun for me

Golden Tee Fore! 2006 Complete [Arcade] This one has been a long standing hassle to get working on my machine but with ytrackball settings that felt refined, and playable in both approach play and putting. It's still not perfect, but I've finally got it to a playable point now where it feels a lot of fun, and the increased number of courses along with their ramped up personalities is a lot of fun.

Money Puzzle Exchanger [Arcade]

One of the best arcade games, such a simple concept, but so fun. Hardly anybody I know seems to know this game, but one of those ones where if I can get someone to play it, they always get proper gripped by it. Great fun 2 player, probably my favourite puzzle game

Windjammers [Arcade] This has been on this list this year already and it'll be on there again. One of the best ever multiplayer Arcade games

Neck N Neck [Arcade] See above, a true Arcade hidden gem

Cyberpunk 2077 [PC] I desperately want to like this game, but I just don't. The atmosphere and game world are so cool, but everything else about it just makes my dick soft

Escape Simulator [PC] Play this with a mate occassionally when he comes over. It's a bit clumsy, but the puzzles are really fun. Always follow a consistent logic, and they toe that line between being easy enough to get and hard enough to make you feel smart

Ruiner [PC] Liked the visuals and feel of this, but something about it just didn't do it for me. Felt a bit mindless and I didn't really like how it controlled

Huntdown [PC] Cool game with a lot of visual personality and it really nails what it's going for, but it's pretty limited gameplay wise. Decent little arcade style shooter though

Gauntlet [PC] Actually played this ages ago and forgot to add it on here. Pretty fun game 4 player, although some classes felt way better than the others, and it felt like it took way too long to earn any of the upgrades that made it more playable

Rocket League [PC] Another one I forgot I played with people at work. Not something I'd usually play, but it was actually pretty fun. I guess you could say that about a lot of multiplayer party games really, but it was way more enjoyable than I was expecting, even if I was trash

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What I played last week #11

Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast [Playstation 2]

I realised when playing this that I actually used to fucking love Arcade racing games - I'm not into cars at all, so once racers started to pivot towards more of a simulation style and car porn, I completely lost interest - If I can't powerslide for a 1000m hairpin, instantly change directions on a penny and do the same again the other way all whilst losing zero speed, I really don't wanna know. I actually think this might be my favourite ever racing game - there's loads to do, the different stages have shitloads of personality and detail, and above all it's just a really fun game that perfectly straddles that line between being really accessible and easy to pick up, but still ridiculously satisfying when you're hitting some perfect corner.

I just want every racing game to be Outrun 2006 - I strictly need any racing game I play to allow 280mph powerslides in a Ferrari as love hearts are flying out of some broad in the passenger seat because she’s utterly delighted that you’re avoiding UFO traction beams as you power-slide around London and inexplicably end up in San Francisco If your game doesn't have that, then I am simply NOT interested

Super Mario Land [Game Boy]

I think this was actually the first game I can ever remember completing in my storied gaming career. Not much to say on this really, it almost feels like some ripoff Mario flash game or something, where it has this 'almost but not quite' quality to it - the movement, the enemies, the levels, it all feels like this slightly off-brand version of regular Mario... like some Mario game where they only got partial rights to it or something.

Obviously they were doing their best with what they had, and I actually think they succeed in a lot of ways, but it's just ultimately not that great a game when you strip a away all the nostalgia. One thing I do love is the music in this game - it has some great themes that you never hear again in the Mario pantheon, and I surprised myself how much I remembered the music and how much nostalgia I had for it  - all except this one, which I'd apparently completely blocked from my memory

even at the time I deep down knew it proper wasn't on

It's actually a proper short game, there are only 4 worlds and each world only has 3 levels. It does try and change things up but most of the challenge comes from how stiff the controls are, which is so at odds with almost every other Mario game. Final thing was how fun it was playing on the Steam Deck - mentioned in another thread, but some of the filters out there now are insanely convincing and completely change up the look  - with this filter it's probably as close as you can get to f eeling like you're playing on a real Game Bo

Great nostalgia hit for this lad playing the same game in this photo though :*)

I also went away with some mates for a weekend break where I snuck in a bit of gaming TMNT: Shredder's Revenge [Nintendo Switch]

I completed this last year and thought it was fantastic - a brilliant love letter to both the cartoons, the Arcade and console games of past and also just the 90s in general. The first time I played it through mostly solo, although this time it was a change to play it with 6 players. It was lot of fun, but the game often devolves into such on-screen lunacy that it becomes almost impossible to see what is going on sometimes. Also, for all the personality and individual touches in the game, it felt like the special attacks feel very samey and unimaginative next to everything else. Still, this was great fun and we were all having an awesome time until we ran into a reoccuring bug that meant we couldn't progress beyond a certain boss. A shame, because i think we might have sat there and finished the whole thing in one go otherwise

Super Smash Bros Ultimate [Nintendo Switch]

I've always really liked the idea of Smash Bros, but never really had much experience playing them. I remember when I lived in my beloved NJ, I'd visit my mates at Rutgers College where they were all absolute savants at Smash Bros 64 - that was my first experience of the game and they were all just SO good at it that it was just impossible to learn. I dabbled in a few of the other games here and there, but never really had a chance to experience it properly. We got some 4 player matches going here, but like with most fighting games, they tend to get boring quite quickly if there is a gulf in ability. I guess that's true for any game really, but it feels particularly true with fighting games

Anyway, it made me realise that for all it's simplicity with it's pick up and play controls, it's actually a fairly complicated game that doesn't really lend itself to new players just picking it up and giving it a go, as there is quite a lot to get to grips with - even the sheer number of characters is overwhelming, let alone trying to explain what is happening on screen. In retrospect I should have picked a stage you couldn't fall off-of and turned off items and let people just get to grips with things, but people quickly got bored of it anyway. One of those series I kinda admire from afar but feel like I've never really had the true 'Smash' experience

Celeste [Nintendo Switch]

A bunch of my mates went for a hike and I didn't fancy it so I ended up playing this for a bit. I completed it on PC when it first came out and absolutely loved it and had been meaning to replay it for ages. Was having a lot of fun with it before my mates returned, so will have to go back to this one at some point

Cruis'n Blast [Nintendo Switch]

This game is super dumb and super fun - a racing game where you basically can't crash and can race a muscle car against a Triceratops and an Attack Chopper gets infinite thumbs up in my book. It's a great game to pick up and play because it requires almost zero skill and every race is basically designed to come down to the last 1000 meters and who can time their final nitrous boost the best. Really fun but the performance gets kinda tanky on 4 player split screen and it's hard to see what the fuck is going on, so we only had a couple of games of this one

Switch Sports Bowling [Nintendo Switch]

Easily got the most play of the weekend. This is that perfect game where you feel like you all kinda want some sort of vague activity to do, but it requires very little attention so you can kinda just sit around and chat shit but still feel like you're playing something - almost exactly like real bowling in that regard. This is great fun, but there is something about it that feels like it isn't as fun as the original Wii Bowling, although I couldn't tell you what. Switch Sports in general feels so sterile compared to Wii Sports, but I guess the whole point is they're just trying to recreate it, so it's always gonna feel a little hollow. Still, it's great fun and easily got played more than basically every other game combined

Mario Golf: Super Rush [Nintendo Switch]

We gave this a go on a whim and it was actually pretty fun, although I probably shouldn't be surprised as golf games inexplicably often seem to make very fun videogames despite being a horrendously boring game in real life. This was fun, but it becomes quite time consuming when a bunch of you are playing. I wish I had more Joycons instead of relying on Gamecube controllers, because I would have loved to have tried out the mode where you all play at once, as I bet it's bonkers and potentially very fun. This was one of a few Switch experiences this weekend that made me think maybe I'll get some more Joycons for the occasional moments like these when you have a fairly large group

Trivial Pursuit [Nintendo Switch]

This is actually a massive guilty pleasure of mine and a few other mates - it scratches the same 'kinda want a vague activity to focus on, but nothing too intensive' itch Bowling does. Unfortunately proved to be a bit difficult to play with Gamecube controllers since it was hard to quickly figure out which answer you were selecting in some rounds. Another nudge towards getting new Joycons

Undisputed [Steam Deck]

I played a bunch of this again to see how it was getting on with patches and to see if it actually ran on Steam Deck. It ran like absolute shit and the recent patches seem to have sent the gameplay backwards, so not the most exciting experience

F-Zero GX [Nintendo Gamecube]

This game is honestly so amazing, it's one of those games where you go back and play it and can't believe it still looks and plays as good as it does. The level of detail in the individual tracks is absolutely astonishing, and the sense of speed is incredible. It's hardly some hot take, but I've never understood why Nintendo has never gone back to the F-Zero well, it's an amazing series

James Bond: 007 Nightfire [Nintendo Gamecube]

I have no idea why I played this - I don't give a shit about James Bond, I have no nostalgia for this game...I think I just put it on out of pure curiosity. I actually thought it was an alright game, but the controls were hard to get to grips with. Honestly couldn't tell you why I even started playing this

Christ, that was a shitload of games

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What I played last week #10

Splatterhouse [Turbografx-16]

I very recently became really interested in buying a PC-Engine/Turbografx-16 (Japanese/Western name) as not only does it have a lot of fantastic games, but it's also a system that has an element of mystique as it never really caught on in the west - I'd genuinely never even heard of it until long after it had came and gone, so it's always been a bit of a blindspot. It's curious because it sat somewhere between the 8-bit and 16bit systems (it was actually marketed as the first 16 bit console, but really it had an 8-bit CPU with a 16-bit GPU, which gives a lot of the games a very distinctive graphical look compared to it's peers. Anyway I almost bought one for an amazing deal (although still very expensive) and decided not to at the very last moment, because I realised it was probably pretty silly to spend more than 250 quid on a system who's games I wasn't even all that familiar with and I had zero nostalgia for. Once I accepted that this was probably a dumdum idea, I decided to actually play some games for the system to get a good feel for what it's about. 

I'd always understood the Turbografx-16 version of Splatterhouse to be the best home version of the arcade game, but I didn't actually realise that the very first game never actually came out on the Mega-Drive at all, and in terms of home versions, it only actually came out on PC, Turbografx-16 and FM Towns Marty. It's one of those weird games where it somehow feels so ubiquitous and familiar, but when I really think about it, I don't think I've really ever properly sat down and played any of them for more than a quick couple of goes before bouncing off and doing something else.

Having now played through it, I actually think it's a pretty good game, if not a little basic - I remember 2 and 3 being a little more complex in their game design but this just a simple left to right brawler, although some stages do have sections where you can fall down into different areas you need to get out of, etc. Most surprising about this game is I actually thought it was pretty well balanced - its still pretty difficult, but when you die you start back at the section you were on and it's pretty generous with health and lives, so you get a decent chance at properly learning each section, although you only get 5 continues which go pretty quick. It's one of those games where the first time you play you've burned through all of your continues by the 3rd level boss, but after a few goes, you're suddenly getting back to the same section having not lost a single life. It definitely has it's frustrating moments, but its just one of those games that requires a bit of patience and experimentation to figure out your way through each level. There were a few bosses where I couldn't even figure out how you can possibly hit them without taking damage, and then you'll suddenly figure out a spot to stand that'll bair a certain attack out of them, or where you're harder to hit, etc. It's quite satisfying because it really gives that feeling of getting better and more familiar if you put the time in. There are 7 stages and I think at first I was getting to level 3 or 4 and having to start again, and when I finished it, I think I'd only actually used one continue. I imagine the Arcade version tries a lot harder to take your money, but I actually think the home version is pretty feasible to 1 credit clear if you practiced enough and got familiar with the patterns etc

I'm definitely tempted to play the others now - the first game is pretty basic, but you can still see the hallmarks of what some people love so much about the series - the weapons are really satisfying to use, and the enemy and death animations are really well done and have a lot of detail and personality to them, I can definitely see why that era of Nintendo were too shook to have a game like this on the system. The Turbografx version actually has a fake parental warning

Pretty good

Bonk's Revenge [Turbografx-16]

My apparent odyssey into checking out the Turbografx-16 library continues - kinda amusingly ironic in a way that I didn't buy one because I didn't want to risk spending a lot of money on some tech I might not use, and my solution has been to emulate the TG-16 on the Steam Deck, which until this point was a very expensive piece of tech I had literally not used at all since the week I got it last year...

The Bonk series was one of those games that I'd always seen around but never actually played - it wasn't until playing this and reading about them that although some of the games appeared on PC/NES/etc, the Bonk Series was originally created specifically for the Turbografx-16 and was their attempt at having a mascot franchise akin to Mario or Sonic. Obviously the system as a whole never really caught on in the west like they'd hoped, but I actually think they were pretty successful in making a mascot platformer. I'm not sure why I started with 2 (there are 3 mainline games as far as I am aware), but by all accounts this seems to be the best one, so no regrets really.

This was a game I really came to appreciate the more I played it - the stages and enemies have a lot of personality (as does Bonk himself) and it's a really nice looking platformer. You can hurt most enemies by 'Bonking' them with your head, either by doing a jump from underneath, a standing headbut with a very short range, or a diving midair attack you can also use to propel yourself higher into the air. You can also do more situations things like a wall-jump, as well as find power-ups, although these are mostly neglisible - they're more akin to something like Sonic where it's a temporary power boost that gives you an advantage, rather than something like Mario where it might be something that changes up how you fundamentally approach the level.

When I first played through the game I found it became quite difficult quite quickly and burned through my continues, but on the second time around I realised the game actually wants you to explore and use all your platforming abilities to reach and find hidden areas where you will gain items to win more health, bonus levels (some of which are genuinely very fun), and extra lives, which make the pathway ahead much easier. It made me realise that blitzing along the first time through I'd overlooked a few layers of complexity to the mechanics and level design I'd missed, and I came to really appreciate the game for trying to keep things so varied. It's actually a pretty long game too - at the start you can choose Beginner, Intermediate or Expert which I think essentially just chooses how many stages you complete rather than inherently adding any difficulty, but the 'Expert' full game had 8 worlds witch each one having 4 or 5 stages it seemed. Id argue that if anything it maybe begins to outstay it's welcome a little bit, but when looking at the individual stages all of them are pretty strong and it does a fairly good job of trying to change up what you're doing from level to level, whether that's focusing on a particular platform mechanic, making it more enemy focused, etc. It's not too hard of a game, but it definitely demands that you get to grips with most of it's moveset by the end

One gripe I had was that about halfway through I seemed to encounter a lot of bosses where I just couldn't figure out how to hurt them without taking damage myself, and essentially winning through a war of attrition and burning a few lives - it was a shame because what felt like pretty tight, consistent and fair platforming suddenly felt a bit clumsy and janky. I am actually fairly sure this was maybe an issue with the emulation as it wasn't something I noticed once the first time I played the game, and watching videos of one of the bosses I was struggling with, nobody seemed to have this issue despite doing the exact same thing as me, so I suspect maybe there is some weird issue with an emulator gamespeed causing some collission fuckery or something. Willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt because it seemed so jarring compared to the other 95% of the time with the game. I'd say the music is pretty forgettable too, which is a shame because I think it had so much personality that a killer soundtrack would have really sent this one over the edge. 

This felt like a proper treat getting to discover a top tier platformer I'd literally never tried before, but I think genuinely holds its own against other stuff on the big platforms. It looks great, it's super colourful and fun, the bosses are really imaginative and it has decent difficulty curve with a lot of variance in the levels and lots of secrets to find and explore. Most of all it just has a lot of personality, with some fun animation and sprite-work. Bonk himself seems to have so many different sprites and animations - actually way more than something like Sonic or Mario have, which gives him loads of personalith and it really adds to the game a lot. I said earlier I thought they were really successful in making a Mascot Platfomer and the animation and personality he has is exactly why. I've no idea if 1 and 3 are on the same level as this (or even the same style of platformer), but I'll definitely check them out now.

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood [Turbografx-CD] I did also play some probably the most famous game on the Turbografx-CD. Again I thought it was really impressive but I really didn't play loads to form some huge opinion beyond I can totally see why it's so beloved - it straddles that line between the original Castlevainia games and what it became with Sympthony of the Night, and some of the graphical flourises it has look amazing, particularly the parrallax backgrounds.

I had a little go on a few more Turbografx-16 games also - namely both Alien Crush and Devil's Crush, which are some very beloved pinball games for the system, as well as Blazing Lazers, another Turbografx staple - although to be honest I didn't really play any of them for long enough to have much to say about them. I'd been really impressed with the TG-16 so far to be honest - annoyingly so, since I regret not pulling the trigger even more now. Ideally next time I jump onto the system the next lot of games are dogshit

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What I played last week #9

Taz-Mania [Sega Mega Drive]

I think this might be one of my all time most hated games. I remember when I was a kid, my dad had a bet come in and he said he'd buy me a game. We went to the Woolworths (RIP) on the way back to my mum's house and I remember excitedly picking up Aladdin, but when we got to the checkout they didn't actually have it in stock. I then audibled to Earthworm Jim instead before my Dad noticed this was 50% off and essentially picked it for me. What could have been From the very second I took it home I have hated this game. I think it actually developed into somewhat of an abusive relationship, because I was so determined to get some kind of value out of it that I would actually play it loads. What amazes me the most looking back is that I remember getting up to this mine-cart level in the game I could only occassionally pass which Id assumed was like 2-3 levels into the game. Playing it back however, I learned it was incredibly far into this dreadful piece of shit game, meaning that as a kid I actually battled a decent way through what is basically just a punishingly hard, obtusely difficult game.

I refuse to believe anybody could ever beat that minecart level by simply reacting to the hazards, its basically just a cheap level that demands you die over and over, further and further into the level enough so that you can hopefully memorise it, except the limited lives and continues mean you'd have to battle your way all the way back there to even try again.

The game just breaks pretty much every single cardinal sin of design. The controls are clumsy, enemies have awkward hitboxes, beginners traps are everywhere, hazard items are located in chokepoints that are hard to avoid, the game constantly asks you to make leaps of faith you can't actually see, the backgrounds are cluttered so it's difficult to know what you can and can't be hurt by/land on/etc, instant deaths on hard to learn jumping patterns, etc, etc etc. At one point the game even inexplicably adds fucking depth perception platforming into a fucking 2D game. Maybe worst of all, the game has SO many levels too. Usually you see tactics like this employed in games to drag them out, but this has something like 15 levels and some of them are so long and punishing that the length seems to be more cruel than it does value for money. A few do have checkpoints but a lot of them don't. I am not too proud to say I used save-states just for my own sanity to get through this. I don't normally like to use them beyond some QoL stuff like saving time putting in Passwords, or to practice a boss, but there are so many bullshit sections I felt like it was the only way I'd play more than 10 mins.

I did beat the mine-cart level pure though, I had to do it for young me.

I cannot fathom the patience I must have had as a kid. I think I initially decided to play it partly out of twisted nostalgia, but after a few levels I was essentially on some sort of revenge quest to vanquish the ghosts of that shit game

Dogshit

Pocahontas [Sega Mega Drive]

Am I gaming's top boy? Not really for me to say, but hard to deny it given the streak I'm on at the moment. I randomly decided to play this after seeing a 'Disney games on the Mega Drive/Genesis' video by the excellent SNES Drunk

Most people know that this era of Disney games actually yielded a pretty solid group of classic licensed games - even ones that had different versions on either console like Aladdin. One I hadn't actually ever tried on this list though was Pocohantas, and I actually thought it looked pretty interesting in the video. It has a rotoscoped animation style like Prince of Persia or Flashback, and it actually suits the game really well. There is zero combat in the game, and instead it's a puzzle platformer - for most of the levels you're able to switch between Pocohontas and her Raccoon mate Meeko, and most levels are about figuring out how to use their different abilities and limitations to help each other out to create pathways for each other. As the levels go on Pocohontas gets more and more abilities by rescuing various animals, so you start off pretty limited, but by the end she can swim underwater, sprint, etc. It's a smart way to gradually introduce new mechanics into the game whilst still staying on theme, and it suits the game really well

It's obviously aimed at kids, so it never gets too challenging - there are hardly any enemies in the game and the platforming puzzles tend to be more about figuring out what to do rather than pulling off some tricky skill gauntlet. It's actually a pretty good, well made game - it's not exactly some must-play hidden gem, but it wasn't some braindead baby game either.

If anything my criticisms are that it's a little short. It felt as though they rush through the film and pretty much skip most of the middle and the end really. You basically go out, meet John Smith and rescue him and the game is finished. Also for a game based on a Disney film they music is pretty bad - there is obviously lots of music to draw on, but other than a few sections, 95% of the game's entire sountrack is just some looping midi version of 'Colours of the Wind' which gets real fucking old real quickly, to the point I just had to turn the sound down on the game

Overall I'd say it was worth checking out as a curiosity, especially if you have an interest in those 90s Disney games. It's not exactly at the level of something like Castle of Illusion or Aladdin, but it's definitely leaning towards the upper end of those licensed movie games

I did actually play a little bit of both Castle of Illusion and World of Illusion but got bored and stopped halfway through both. It's funny because they're both better games than Taz-Mania and Pocohontas - significantly so in Taz-Mania's case, but they just didn't grab me in that moment. I've played them both to death in my childhood, so maybe familiarity outweighed nostalgia in this case. Still, they get a mention in the name of posterity

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What I played last week #8

Klona 2 [Playstation 2]

This was such an absolute treat to play. I had heard of the series before, but I'd genuinely never played any of them at all - in fact they'd just totally passed me by really. I think they got remade fairly recently and it suddenly felt like everyone but me had some proper beloved history with the series, so not sure how I totally missed it - especially as I love platformers. Managed to snipe an eBay auction for this for £12 which I was buzzing about considering it rarely goes for less than £30 and often sells in the £50-60 range. 

Playing this it feels like it's the insane centrepoint between SO many games that have come before and since, I'd love to learn more about it and any games that were actively influenced by it, because it felt like it could somehow have come out in any area of platformers and fit in perfectly. At different points it reminded me of Nights, Kirby 64, Crash Brandicoot, Rayman, Mario Galaxy and more, yet somehow always still felt like completely it's own thing too. It's a pretty simple game at it's core - it's a 2.5D platformer where you can jump and hover, but can also grab enemies if you're close enough, either throwing them across the screen as a weapon, or using them to jump off and essentially serve as a double jump. The game actually starts off pretty slowly and at first I thought it was going to be another Kirby - something with loads of personality and character, but ultimately so easy it undermines the whole thing. However, the games levels quickly become more and more complex and constantly alternate between platforming and puzzles sections - by the end it becomes difficult enough where you have to have mastered every technique in the arsenal to progress through the levels, some of which are surprisingly long and complex.

The most amazing thing is how good the game looks, it's just absolutely beautiful - I genuinely couldn't believe it was a PS2 game at times. The occasional blurry texture or jagged edge gave it away, but there is just so much vibrant colour, detail, movement and animation on every level, it just gave the game an insane amount of character and life to each stage, and all of them have such a strong, memorable visual identity. There is even an amazing sense of scale to some of the levels where you'll get shot high into the air and you'll see these massively complex stages just fully modelled out and it just shows how much imagination and craft have gone into each one. There is one level set in a theme park and it just looks incredible. It's seemingly impossible to find any good quality gifs of this that aren't from the remake or haven't been upscaled in PCSX2, but hopefully you get the picture from an art direction perspective

The game isn't without it's flaws - there are some difficulty spikes that come out of nowhere and very strict animation windows sometimes make you feel like you missed grabs or jumps that you made, but it's rare and the platforming usually feels great. It never becomes a real chore of a challenge, but the levels become difficult enough where you feel genuinely accomplished getting through them, especially the last few levels. The bosses are also great mechanically, although they start to feel a little similar by the end. 

Normally if you play a retro game without the nostalgia, there is always this element of wishing you could have played it at the time, simply because it's almost always aged in some way that diminishes the experience at least a tiny bit. Here this just feels like that rare experience where it could have come out yesterday and I think I'd still be banging on about how much I loved it - if I'd unknowlingly played the remakes without knowing they were remakes, I don't know if Id have been able to tell from a design point of view. Im glad I played the original though, honestly one of the best looking, most colourful and lively games I think Ive played on the PS2, all at a crisp 60fps. Looked absolutely phenomenal on the PVM, I wish I could somehow show off how great it looked.

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What I played last week #7

Wild Hearts [PC]

Monster Hunter was always one of those series where I liked the idea of them and always thought they looked great when I watched other people's gameplay, but playing them myself always just felt a bit clunky and overwhelming. I don't think there is anything wrong necessarily with games aiming themselves at people who are already fans of a series, but trying to play Monster Hunter always felt like some videogame version of gym impostor syndrome, where you convince yourself everybody there already seems to know exactly what to do and it just adds to the feeling of the game feeling a little impenetrable. It always contributed to feeling like I was never playing the games 'properly', and always held back the experience for me.

Enter Wild Hearts, which I'd never really heard anything about until the week it launched, which seems to be a go at making as close to a Monster Hunter game as possible without infringing any copyright - that said, I am sure to the layman they're wildly different games, but at its core you're hunting down huge oversized fantasy monsters and looting their bodies to feed into the loop of building better/different gear to fight better monsters. Something about this game just felt immediately more accessible to me - the game has a Feudal Japan/Samurai theme running alongside the monster one which feels a little incongruous, but I am such a sucker for giant katanas and I famously live by the Bushido code myself, so it immediately appealed to me. The combat is actually very cool and felt immediately more visually interesting and mechanically accessible to me, and whilst it still had a bunch of complex systems that probably aren't too dissimilar from Monster Hunter, it somehow just felt a lot easier to understand. However, any enjoyment I might have gotten from this was totally marred by horrible performance - despite having a powerful PC, the game suffered from all kinds of crashes, freezes and performance hitches which combined to really undermine the experience, so this one never got too far off the ground for me. It's a testament to the game's potential to be fun because I still battled through a bunch of restarts and performance issues despite it being an unfamiliar genre I had no attachment too, where as normally Id have just sacked it off completely - unfortunately, an imminent performance patch didn't really improve things, and I feel like by the time this one becomes more playable, I'll have already long moved on. Cool game with interesting combat, but too many flaws to take on and properly enjoy at the moment

Wanted: Dead [PC] This one is a real enigma - on paper it looked like one of those ultra niche games trying to recreate an ultra specific experience warts and all, and you were either going to like it or hate it. Specifically it was trying to evoke the style and feeling of that mental 00's era of PS2/Xbox bonkers action games like God Hand, Blood Will Tell and Samurai Western, which I was completely down for. Then I started to play it and at first it felt like they unfortunately hadn't even managed that - even going in and having the exact right expectations, it just wasn't landing for me...

Then I played on and I'm glad I did because I ended up having an absolutely amazing, dumb time with this. It really was EXACTLY what I expected

On the surface, the game wants to be a mixture of melee and shooting combat, but what threw me at first is that the shooting is absolutely dreadful, literally almost unplayably bad outside of specific sections, and other than your pistol (which is really to be used as a combo starter/parry rather than a real weapon), the shooting just feels mechanically horrible. However, once I just started to play the game as a melee game with situational shooting parts, the whole thing just starts to make way more sense, and there are a few key unlocks on the skill tree that really make the parry and dodge mechanics a lot more enjoyable and viable. I quickly got the sense that the shooting is really only there as a mechanic to make sure you don't stand still, and you actually get hit very little and take very little damage as long as you're constantly moving around. This is reinforced even more as the levels go on, as firearm based enemies tend to dwindle and a lot of the toughest enemies are actually all melee based, and progressing becomes all about timing counters and parries. The whole game and it's aesthetic is so odd and funny, they've just totally nailed that early '00s insane character design you'd see in games like Time Crisis, this is the final boss for example

Nonsense.

The thing that truly saves the game is the finishers mechanic - for such a janky game they've come up with this execution system with something stupid like 150 different situational finishers that so seamlessly blend together, they genuinely never stop being cool. Like the whole game is New Jank City and then out of nowhere they have these best in class finishing moves with unprecedented variation - I was still seeing new ones right up until the very end, and chaning them together ends up making the game feel like some sort of John Wick moments simulator.

Among it all it just undeniably evokes the feeling of playing a very specific type of game from a very specific time - good and bad. Its strange because the framework for a much much better game is there, but if they'd actually turned it into that, I think it would suddenly be something completely different and lose a lot of makes it so...itself, and as crazy as it sounds, I am not sure if a better version of this game would have hooked me quite as much.

Look, this is an almost objectively bad game that I really loved playing. Its a mechanically janky, artificially difficult experience that has huge camera issues and so many of your deaths in the punishing gauntlets it throws at you are down to shitty game design or jank getting in your way rather than you genuinely failng. There are obtuse difficulty spikes and constant moments of a punishing lack of checkpointing where it has you fighting waves enemies that can essentially one hit kill you if you mess up. It's shooting is terrible to the point of being worth actively avoiding as much as you can, and the upgrades and stuff for the guns are almost pointless. The bosses are weirdly the easiest bit of the whole game, and the game itself doesnt even really become all that playable or enjoyable until you unlock half of the melee skill tree midway through the game. It mostly looks like shit outside of it's excellent finishing animations, and it has some of the worst minigames ever.  I have had an absolutely fucking amazing time with it and have completed it 5 times in the past week or so. 12/10

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What I played last week #6

Metroid Prime [Nintendo Switch]

I have a lot of nostalgia for Prime, and outside of making FPS platforming actively satisfying, I think it's biggest achievement is that it does what Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time managed where it took a game firmly rooted in it's 2D identity and transitioned it into 3D whilst still making it feel the same at its core. However, I think as an actual metroidvania, its a bit lacking. The opening few hours are pretty great - it weaves that web all the best games in the genre do where it slowly reveals an intricately designed area that subtly guides you around where you need to go next without ever feeling linear. After a while though (around the Magmoor Caverns area), it starts to lose its way a bit - it starts to become really vague, and the map is so spawling and confusing that it starts to become harder to track where you are in a way that the 2D games don't feel as confusing. Once you get past that section, it then has a massive stretch where it's actually kinda linear and combat heavy, befor having a solid final section again.

When it clicks it really clicks, and it's incredible how good a job they did bringing the game into a 3D setting. There are little touches like seeing Samus' face reflecting back in the visor after an explosion, or like steam from the jungle fogging up the vents that seemed mind-blowingly immersive and atmospheric at the time and they're still really effective even now. They've just done such a good job of brining all of the visually iconic enemies and items into a 3D format, and hearing the rearranged music is such a powerful nostalgia burst, especially the stuff they've taken from Metroid/Super Metroid

The game isn't without it's flaws though, and I definitely think this is one of those games where it's become such a beloved fixture in gaming and was so revalatory at the time that people just seem to completely look past it's issues and it's just been cemented as some sort of perfect game. I think one of it's main troubles is that it doesn't do a good enough job of working in it's mechanics and teaching you to use them - you can easily get caught in a loop of backtracking around because you're forgetting to religiously scan a room so you'll miss a switch, or forget to use a certain vision because you've not had to for the last 4 hours, etc. The move to 3D just makes it a bit more visually muddled sometimes where it's just easy to miss things. Such a Nintendo thing as well where there doesn't seem to be any in-game brightness settings and some areas are so dark it's hard to properly see. Also a lot of it's required backtracking is the worst kind where it'll send you all the way back and forth from one end of the map to the other, etc.

Also to get to the very end of the game you have to collect these 12 artefacts hidden around the game world. Some you might find from naturally exploring, but some are actually extremely well hidden, and the game only gives you a relatively vague clue as to the location of each one. They're not impossible to find by any means, but some of them are tucked away behind puzzles or tricks usually reserved for a game's most tucked away side-secrets, and I can see plenty of people simply getting to the end, not having all of the Artefacts and just having no real idea what do to or where to go without looking up a guide. Obviously Metroidvanias are focused around exporation and backtracking, but I think Prime gets a pretty soft go of things for how obtuse it can be to be honest.

It also has a few moments people always seem to completely ignore in beloved games, where it's just objectively bad design that doesn't respect the players time. The very last boss is a good example, which is a potentially tricky, multi stage boss that is a long fight even if you speed through it - basically I can see a few people needing multiple attempts to beat it if they've never done it before. Yet to get to the boss from the save point, you have to do a relatively time consuming platforming section with some strong enemies that can knock a decent amount of your health off if you get unlucky - it's just a stupid thing to have before a final big fight imo. You see a lot of games really bin the pacing of the game with the final few encounters, but peple always seem to overlook it, and I don't think Metroid Prime is an exception, even if Meta Ridley is very cool 

As a remaster this game is incredible. It looks beautiful and runs really well, and the dual stick controls were really the main thing it needed to update it and bring it into the modern world. It's a testament to the original art design and Gamecube performance that I felt like the game looked barely any different to the original until I saw them side by side - it shows not only how good and memorable the original was, but also how much a good art style and world design can shine with a new lick of paint without losing any of it's identity or style.

I absolutely love it and I think it's a really influential and important game in a lot of ways, but as an actual Metroidvania I actually think it's pretty average, and that's from someone with a lot of affection for it and can remember a lot of roughly what to do/where to go. The game is incredible for something that came out almost 20 years ago, but there are plenty of bits of 20 year old game design I feel like a lot of people just don't want to accept isn't actually that great. Still well worth a play for anybody interested in the genre in my opinion

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What I played last week #5

Still getting behind on what I actually played for any sort of time, so here is my attempt to catch myself back up! Hi-Fi Rush [PC] This looked like a really cool game on the surface - a pleasant treat that was shadowdropped out of nowhere and not only seemed to be a fun game, but was a really competent PC port. The premise is great too, where it's a hack n' slash style action game akin to something like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, but the twist is that it's also a Rhythm game, with your attacks either only coming out on certain beats, or having more power for staying tightly on beat, similar to something like Cadence of Hyrule. Unfortunately for me, this didn't really grab me like it seems to have grabbed a lot of people. Im not even really sure why - the art design is really strong and the combat itself is actually really fun and well conceived, but something just felt a bit uninteresting to me. I find the tone and humour of the game pretty excruciating, and the music itself wasn't that compelling to me. I actually thought the first boss I encountered was great, but for whatever reason I just never picked it up again after that. One of those games where I totally get why people enjoyed it, but it just wasn't for me. It's on gamepass so maybe I'll end up picking this one back up at some point, but there are just too many other things I feel like I want to play ahead of it at the moment.

The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang [Super Nintendo]

I had a quick go of this one as I'd heard it was a true 'hidden gem', and on first look I could see it had promise. The sprite-work is beautiful and the game has a lot of personality and you have a lot of interesting moves. My one immediate issue with this game was that it's text is SO unbeliveably slow. For some reason the font on all the text boxes is absolutely huge so it can only show 3-4 words at a time. It means that any conversation you have with anybody just ends up feeling tortuous. It sounds silly but even though it seems like a great action RPG I'm not fammiliar with, it was enough to put me off pretty quicky - my game crashed about 30 mins in and I couldn't bare to go through the intro conversations again that set up the story, so I just binned it off

Undisputed [PC]

Not going to write up too much on this one here, as the game is in early access and I imagine I'll be writing about this a lot more in the future. To be honest I thought this game was never actually going to come out, so I was surprised to see it enter early access this month. Despite the fact that Fight Night Champion has aged incredibly well even now, I am crying out for a modern boxing game and this seems like the best chance we have of something good. It has a lot of promise, but it's still very much an early access game - even ignoring the bare bones features, the boxing itself just needs to be refined a lot - punch power, knockdowns, judges scoring, the inability to cut off the ring, the ability to spam certain punches, punch tracking, footwork, etc, etc all needs work. I know that sounds ridiculous because that is basically every single element of boxing, but the framework is there. The boxer's individual personalities and movement have been captured phenomenally well, and what is there is a good start. The most encouraging thing is that the developers have been really active with pushing out updates already, so I have ever-growing faith that they will actually refine and support this game in the way that it needs. Currently it's at a state where I am glad I own it and feel like I haven't wasted my money, but I also don't feel inclined to play it much until they've improved some of the fundemental elements of the game. I did manage this in my first ever online game though after my opponent spent the whole fight trying to showboat even though they'd picked the most overpowered fighter in the entire game.

Satifying

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What I played last week #4

I don't want to break the habit of updating this regularly (even now im already lagging almost 2 weeks behind!), so here is a bare-bones rundown of what I played. I'll probably split this up into 2 entries just because I played so much in a short time. To be honest I need to remember this is basically just a way of looking back for myself, rather than putting pressure on myself to write something entertaining or informative or whatever the fuck this isn't.... I just find it really hard to straddle what kind of tone to write in, which ends up becoming this weird thing where I am writing things to myself that I already know, like a games history or whatever. Practicing for ever having an audience I guess! I seem incapable of writing anything without any kind of context first, so here we are - my good friend FJ moved to Boston a couple of years back, but he'd briefly come back for the weekend for work. This meant we not only got a solid chance to catch up (along with my mate Baz), but perhaps more importantly got to play some arcade games on my home machine.

I find my home machine really gets most of it's playtime when other people are over, so it was a good excuse to jump back on it. I always had visions of us all gradually working through the library and discovering random hidden gems - and whilst that does happen occasionally, in pracitce I've found that despite having hundreds of games available, we always tend to pivot to the same few games over and over, which have basically all essentially just become Arcade drinking games - here's a brief look at what we played Neck-N-Neck [Arcade]

A brilliantly simplistic racing game. Up to 6 people can play and your horses all automatically run and you use a single button to jump randomly placed hazards and hedges. The more you're winning, the less chance you get to react to upcoming jumps, which keeps everything tense and keeps everyone in the race for almost the whole thing barring you having a consistent disaster. Each race only takes about a minute and they nail the pool of horses names and the commentary. Great little party game and also has a double function of letting the CPU race itself and guessing the winner as a drinking game Windjammers [Arcade]

One of the all time greatest 1v1 arcade experiences, and the ultimate 'easy to pick up, hard to master' game. It's brilliant because it's one of those games where someone won't have played it before and games are over in about 20 seconds, and within about 5 games you're both reeling off these insanely complex rallies using every tool at your disposal. I do wish you could extend the games a little bit as they tend to run a bit short even if you set them to the highest max score and time - something they actually fixed in Windjammers 2 which seemingly came out of nowhere last year and was a massively pleasant surprise, I was sad to see they took it off of gamepass Shuffleshot [Arcade]

Hard to imagine something that makes a better Arcade drinking game that a literal Arcade version of a game you'd play in a bar. This works pretty brilliantly since it uses a trackball, and the movement and weight of spinning my trackball feels roughly on par with the amount of force and motion you'd use for a puck on an actual shuffleboard (are they even called pucks?) which is quite cool and makes the game feel really intuitive to play. One of those great games that has a surprising amount of tactical depth as you'll quickly have to choose between scoring points for yourself or trying to fuck over your opponent. Also has the most hilariously over the top canadian voice acting ever, can't tell if its supposed to be taking the piss or not

World Class Bowling [Arcade]

This game looks basic as fuck, but its easily the most played game on my machine - it's just the ultimate pick up and play game, doesn't have any complex controls, up to 4 people can play and even my mates who aren't really into videogames enjoy it. The physics aren't remotely realistic, but it always feels consistent and fair, and it nails the whole 90's bowling vibe, along with the dumb CG animations you get on the screen depending on how you score. One thing I really love about this game is how it has different scoreboards for Hi-scores, 300s, 7-10 Splits, etc. Given how much this gets played on gaming nights, I love seeing the initials of my different mates up on the boards, it's like a little passport stamp of previous nights out or something, and it's fun having a bunch of my mates on there, rather than a lot of other games where the scoreboards are just me and nobody else. I remember when I first built this machine, I once bottled a 300 on the very last ball and bowled a 299, only to bowl a 300 the vest next game, just brilliant being surrounded by mates all jeering and cheering when either one happened. To be honest I mainly look back and wonder how on earth I did either one, as I have simply gotten nowhere near even 280 in about 1000 games of this since

Marvel vs Capcom 2 [Arcade]

Okay, this one isn't really as much of a dumb party game, but its just one of my favourite games ever. Like any of the best fighting games, it has an incredibly high ceiling of complexity, but I feel like move execution and timing is so forging in this, it lets anyone jump in and have fun and compete, even if they're not massively familiar with the game or know the difference between a Shoto or a Charge character. The animation in this game blows me away even now, its just bursting with amazing spritework with an insane amount of detail and personality, and manages to capture so much of each character's identity in each frame of animation for every single move. It gets a second gif it's that good. An actual masterpiece

Switch Sports [Nintendo Switch]

This game doesn't really have any of the charm or personality that Wii Sports have, despite ostensibly being a pretty much 1:1 copy of the original. As a party game though, it still has that pick up and play element that makes it pretty decent mindless fun - especially if it's towards the end of the night and you don't want to concentrate too hard. My mates and I have wasted many a drunken evening playing Wii Bowling and Wii Golf, and this is just about good enough to be a placeholder for those. The bowling seems way more difficult though, and slightly less consistent - not that Wii Bowling was a bastion of realistic physics, but the Switch version actually feels less realistic if anything, and I find games of this often feel a bit random compared to the original. I was really excited to play the Golf DLC they added as the Wii version was great fun, but this seemed overly complex which ruined it's appeal a bit - I actually think my Joycons were having issues which probably made trying to play more frustrating than it is in reality, so maybe one I'll come back to down the line

I played some other stuff too - namely Hi-Fi Rush and Undisputed, but I'll save that for another update, as I have a bit more to say about both. That said, I've said that about Ganbare Goemon and Dead Space Remake now, only to never return, so who knows??? not I

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What I played last week #3

Another quiet week last week in terms of properly sitting down and playing some games, but luckily I still had a chance to play a few things here and there

Wave Race 64 [N64]

Anecdotally, it seems like the N64 is a real jumping off point for a lot of people I know for when they really got into playing games, or at least where most of their gaming nostalgia lies. For me it's actually just a huge blind-spot. I was lucky to have a lot of consoles throughout the years as a kid, either through hand me downs from cousins or as presents, but the N64 was the one mainstream console I never had or even really played at the time. As a result, I find a lot of the N64 library is just a complete mystery to me. On top of that, I think the N64 has probabably aged much more poorly than other consoles from around the same era - of course early 3D games were typically a little rough all round looking back, but I think the N64 just seems to be that little bit rougher for the most part. I think part of that is it's unorthodox controller - I've found that without any existing muscle memory or nostalgia for N64 games, the control schemes tend to be a little more difficult to just pick up and play. The games just look a little worse too - most consoles of that area natively output an RGB signal which can look fantastic on an old CRT setup like I have, but the N64 simply isn't capable of this without modification - because of this, plus a blur filter that was used to hide some of the rough edges, N64 games just tend to look a little more washed out and less sharp than it's equivalents, giving them an almost smeary effect, and I always found that made it a bit of a tougher sell. Between the lack of nostalgia, the dated trappings of early 3D gaming and quirks of emulating/mapping to different control pads, I've just found I've very rarely gone back to the N64 and really picked at it's library too deeply despite now having owned a console for years.

Perhaps ironic then, that the single vivid memory of the N64 I really have as a kid is being at a mates house and his older brother was playing Wave Race and I clearly remember just being absolutely blown away by how incredible it looked. It might seem laughable now, but at the time the water and the way it moved was just seemed unbeliveable - in fact the excellent Modern Vintage Gamer channel has a fantastic video breaking down exactly how it was achieved

One of my favourite things learning about old games is seeing how often the limitations of technology at the time would lead to incredibly inventive and outside the box design. I never actually got to play Wave Race at the time (or since until now!), but I always had had that memory of being truly blown away by it in that moment, so this week I finally sat down and gave it a proper go. I have to say, even coming into this game in 2023 with zero nostalgia beyond that one snapshot memory, I still think the water and wave physics are incredibly impressive, even today. The stages offer up a nice spectrum of tracks that not only manage to look visually distinct and memorably atmospheric, but also feel really different to play, with some offering a calm and tranquill race, where as others feel like you're constantly fighting against crashing waves. It's really impressive and gives the game a really distinct feel, and it's done a overall phenomenal job of really giving the game a sense of speed, weight and momentum... which to be honest is something that even modern racing games can sometimes stuggle to achieve. I had a great time going through the 8 tracks (2 of which had to be unlocked, which gave the game a tiny bit of longevity), although being an arcade-style racer , the game inevitably only had so much appeal before I felt like I'd had my fill. I'm not sure how much of a reputation this one ever had as a multiplayer racer, but I'd like to try this one again with some mates. A genuinely impressive game that I thought stood as an outlier to my 'N64 games haven't aged gracefully' theory Kirby 64 [N64] Not a massive amount to say about this one, but I thought I'd continue my odyssey into going back and seeing whether the N64 could potentially change my mind, and decided to have a quick go on Kirby. I have to admit, I've never really 'got' Kirby - if people were just like 'Kirby games are cute kids games' I could totally accept it, but it always feels as though they're considered to be more than that in a way I've never really properly understood. The problem for me is that they're so easy that the difficulty just undermines the entire experience for me, and trivalises it to the point where it just quickly becomes boring.

Don't get me wrong, I don't need every single game to be somewhere between Cuphead and Dark Souls, but it just feels like there is a line Kirby crosses where the challenge is so trivial that it just completely undercuts everything else going on around it. Kirby and the Forgotten Land came out on the Switch last year, and people were talking about it like it was basically a Kirby themed sequel to Mario Odyssey, and I just didn't understand it at all - there is just this layer of optional complexity to Mario's level design and movement that just simply isn't there in Kirby games. Don't get me wrong, the games have loads to like about them - Kirby is cute, he and the levels have loads of personality, and the whole ability steal mechanic is awesome. The games always have loads of personality and visual identity of the games are fantastic... but the actual gameplay is so basic and rote that it feels like it undercuts all of those elements and always makes Kirby games feel like a proof of concept or a fan made game to me or something. I actually feel like in this regard, Kirby 64 might be the most Kirby game I've tried yet - I thought the art style was awesome, the 2.5D effect worked really well, and the levels had a lot of personality... but everything was just SO boring, and just like with Forgotten Land, I just don't feel like it actually leans enough into the cute fun stuff to just make it an entertaining and leisurely distraction that it wants you to just soak in and experience.

It's a shame because every so often the game will throw up a novel mechanic in a stage or an imaginative boss that actually requires a modicum of skill, and it makes you realise just how close the whole thing is to being something legitimately great. I accidentally lost progress by turning off the console without thinking and lost about 3 levels worth of progress and just couldnt be bothered to return to it, which just about says it all

Dead Space Remake [PC]

Don't really have loads to write about this yet, but the entire point of this blog is posterity so will mention it either way. Dead Space is one of those games where I rerally enjoyed the original without having any real particular reverence or nostalgia for it - in fact I can't even really remember much about it beyond enjoying it in the first place. I've only played about an hour of it so far, but early impressions are good - it seems to have found that line that all remakes should aim for, which the brilliant Super Bunnyhop perfectly put duing his Resident Evil 2 Remake review as 'remaking it not how it was, but how you remember it being

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What I played last week #2

I figured I'd better update this lest it be another near-decade long hiatus until the next time. I didn't actually get to play a whole lot of games last week as real life got in the way, but I still managed to tuck into a few games here and there, and actually managed to finish off a childhood favourite, so that's where I'll start. Soleil / Crusader of Centy [Mega Drive]

Over the past few years this game has become quite a bit more well known among retro circles, but I've always considered it as true of a hidden gem as you can get. Usually when people talk about 'hidden gems' they almost always seem to be these games that literally everybody remotely into the hobby knows, but maybe just weren't the banner releases for a system. This is a rare example of a game that for the longest time honestly felt like nobody ever knew of it when I talked about it. I'd only discovered it myself because one of my best mates growing up had it on the Mega Drive when we were kids (shout out Meadey) and I've literally never seen anybody else ever own it, or even spoken to someone else outside of him that's played it - even the cart I own today is actually his cart which he very kindly sold to me years back knowing it would go to a good home.

I'm surprised there wasn't more of a fuss made of this game - not just because it's very good, but also because there were just surprisingly hardly any action RPGs on the Mega Drive, and the console was always crying for something to compete with Zelda. The broad format of the game is the same - it's ostensibly a top-down action RPG where you're moving around on an overworld map into different areas and defeating various dungeons and solving puzzles along the way. The main hook of the game is that fairly early on you lose the ability to talk to humans but gain the ability to talk to animals, and as you go on in your adventure more and more animals join your cause - they essentially become abilities you equip, so the Cheetah helps you run faster, a Flying Squirrel allows your sword to bounce off walls, the Butterfly allows you to control your sword in the air etc - basically how animals make your sword react in real life is how they tend to act in the game. It's quite a neat idea and opens up the dungeons and bosses for some cool puzzle potential to think about who you have at your disposal, and you can equip 2 at a time to come up with different ability synergies and stuff.

The game can feel really uneven in parts and often doesn't lean enough into it's puzzle potential though - some of the puzzles or dungeon areas are excellent and make you use your head a little bit, and then others inexplicably just won't have any puzzles or combat at all, or the puzzles will be so basic they just border on pointless

like in the above pic, I wonder where those blocks have to go... It's almost like they were placeholder puzzles they never actually went back and added in properly. Still, even with a lack of difficulty, the game does an admirable job of constantly changing up what you're doing, making the areas feel visually and mechanically distinct, and it's pretty well paced where it never really feels like a slog. There was actually a point during my playthrough where my save corrupted, meaning I had to start way back from where I was. That'd usually be an automatic playthrough killer for me, but it's all so straightforward once you know where you're going, that it was fine just catching myself up. The biggest peril in terms if difficulty in the game was actually just trying to constantly remember there is no checkpointing or autosaves in games like this, and forgetting to save my game as I went. Can be brutal sometimes if you lose track

The game undoubtedly has some flaws - the combat is pretty bad - your sword swings in this slow arc with questionable hit detection, and enemies don't get knocked back, meaning you can sometimes get caught in a situation where enemies are just sitting on top of you draining your health (plus the noise when you take damage is unbeliveably annoying). The bosses also feel like a bit of a missed oppourtunity - they're both incredibly imaginative and varied mechanically, but almost all of them are trivially easy, making them feel redundant and robbing them of a chance to feel truly memorable. However, the game just feels like it's more than the sum of it's parts. The art style is colourful with crisp sprites, and it has some genuinely impressive parrallax and transparency effects that make areas of the game look beautiful. Each area has a tonne of visual variety that really helps give the different areas a lot of personality, bolstered by the fantastic music that really adds to each area and making it feel distinct and offering it real identity.

What cracks me up is the game has a potentially interesting premise, essentially humanising the monsters and questioning whether they are even bad. There is a point early on where you get turned into a monster and you discover that they are just a scared, misunderstood family, etc…but the game is all over the place with it tonally. You're constantly being shown themes of unity and understanding and empathy, but you ultimately continue to kill monsters the entire game, who will all attack you without hesitation. Even your companions you win over and join forced with along the way are all animals and not monsters, it makes almost zero sense. I remember being really confused by the message as a kid and assumed it was going over my head - as it turns out, it's just an incoherent mess. I did wonder if it's perhaps partly a translation issue from it's origins as 'Ragnacënty', but I suspect it's just genuinely not very good. A missed oppourtunity for sure, but ultimately forgiveable Weirdly for me, this game always occupied a spot in my memory as a beloved childhood game I would borrow constantly from Meadey and has completed numerous times in my childhood. Yet when playing it through last weel, I soon realised that what I'd remembered as being the last boss was only actually about halfway through the game and I had zero memory of anything afterwards, even though I could remember everything else really clearly. That section of the game does kinda function as the end of an initial story arc... so now I am wondering if all these years I was just cheerfully turning the console off all these years thinking Id finished it, not realising there was an entire other half of the game to see. Idiot Anyway, good game that not that many people know about

I also briefly played a handful of games this week - namely the SNES port of Prince of Persia (which I had no idea was essentially it's own distinct, extended version of the original game), and the first couple of stages of The Legend of the Mystical Ninja also on the SNES. Mentioning them here for posterities sake, but I think I'll play some more of Mystical Ninja before writing more about it - the series is a complete blind spot for me despite me loving the SNES, and the Mystical Ninja (or Ganbare Goemon) series being fairly beloved. Prince of Persia [Super Nintendo]

As I was writing that last paragraph I was also going to save Prince of Persia for next week too, but deep down I don't think I am going to finish it to be honest. As mentioned, I had no idea that this was essentially an extended, remixed version of the original game, with new graphics and new stages. It looks absolutely fantastic, and I am a sucker for those rotoscoped animations that the game made famous, and we also saw in things like Blackthorne, Another World and of course Flashback - which is one of my favourite games of all time

(just an excuse to post a Flashback gif tbh)

....Actually maybe I'll catch this up next week after all because tumblr just deleted half this post when I tried to insert a gif - for some reason ctrl+z seems to revert you to a much much earlier saved draft rather than just undoing the last thing you did, and I cannot be fucked to write everything all out again because it already happened twice on this post and I reflexively keep hitting ctrl+z and I am going to lose my fucking mind. The general gist was that the SNES version is a longer and expanded port of the original (which I didn't realise going in), and ultimately probably outstays it's welcome because of it. It looks very beautiful - it's visually a huge upgrade on the original and it's visual variety fosters surprisingly potent atmosphere for a 16-bit game, but that extended length means that the game just starts to drag after a while. Also, from a mechanical perspective, I think that the deliberate, almost rigid control and animation based movement worked well in something like Flashback because the game is never demanding too much of you mechanically at once for the most part.

In Prince of Persia however, is at odds with both itself and you - it's encouraging you to go fast, hurry, experiment and take risks, but also pretty much requires that you go slowly and play methodically and risk averse, lest you die over and over and need to restart. You do get used to the controls for the most part, but the sword fighting in particular becomes more and more prevalant and it's a clunky mess that feels too random to be fun, even though its probably not random at all. It starts off as a fun challenge, but quickly devolves into an (often frustrating) chore. Considering that the punishment for dying is to start the entire level again (with the over-arching game timer still ticking), it quickly begins to become more of a test in patience than skill, and that increased length turns challenge into a chore - especially when deaths often feel unfair or a result of the controls rather than the consequence of a genuine mistake or a poorly calculated risk Prince of Persia is one of those games that has undeniable cultural impact and far-reaching influence, but was also something I'd never really properly played beyond maybe messing around on the first couple of levels over the years. I actually really wish I had played the original now - the SNES version has 20 levels and I got to level 15 before I really started to feel the fatigue of the difficulty and design. The original was only 12 levels I believe - which I think would likely be a much more paletable and well paced game. Actually, most of all I just wish I'd stop reflexively hitting ctrl+z every time I made a mistake - it's actually very fitting thinking about it, you can consider this the more poorly conceived, less well refined version of the blog update, with the original paragraphs I'd written being the more tightly designed and more enjoyable versions. There you go, I've somehow thematically bought it back around, and closed my own loop, so I am quitting while I am ahead, behind, roughly where I was in the first place. No more gifs because god forbid I have to write this piece of shit blog again

(Pic of me having to rewrite half the bloody entry)

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What I've been playing this week

After my last post I decided to take a very well earned 9 year break before posting again, as I simply didn't want to bombard the reader with constant posts.

Now that enough time has passed for the reader's pallete to have gently refreshed, it's clearly the right time for my return. In all seriousness, I think I've often struggled with a mental back and forth with myself when it comes to writing that essentially just boils down to wanting to write about games but also a) having no idea what I'd actually want to write about them and ultimately b) being incredibly lazy

Over the last couple of years, I'd started tracking which games I'd completed over the course of that year - this initially started as part of a challenge I took part in on a gaming forum to try and finish 50 games in a year, but gradually over the next couple sort of just became a way to highlight what games I'd seen all the way through to the end. It also functioned as a sort of gaming journal and let me look back at the end of the year to see what I'd enjoyed the most.

At the end of this year however, it made me realise it also created a massive blind-spot for me where any game I didn't finish kinda just got forgotten about in the periphery of my mind... even though of course not every game I finish is good, and not every game I stop playing is bad. Additionally, I realised I don't always play games in a neat way where I finish one and move onto another - sometimes I'll drop one for a while and come back to it, sometimes I'll be playing multiple games alongside each other, sometimes I just wanna throw on a game and fuck around for a little bit and then get bored because I have zero attention span rather than actually make any real attempt to finish it.

So that's why I've decided to resurrect this blog from it's almost decade long hiatus. I've basically spent a decade umming and ahhring over whether I wanted to write reviews, or opinion pieces, or something a little more in-depth and insightul, and trying to second guess what people might want to read, and how they'd want me to write it.

I've finally realised now that the real anwer is much more simple than that - I really just want write dumb stream of consciousness hot takes about what I'm doing in the moment, but on a blog nobody reads so I don't actually have to give a shit and I can just endlessly ramble into the void for my own benefit. Essentially just the blog equivalent of just shouting my opinions directly into a freshly flushed toilet in terms of audience reach and required effort.

So here we go - in true style I'm gonna post what I played last week even though I've said 'this week', because I know if I wait another week it'll actually be another decade. The stakes have truly never been lower

WHAT I PLAYED THIS LAST WEEK

Superliminal [PC] First up with a game I actually finished. This is a first person puzzle game based around optical illusions, forced perspective puzzles, non-euclidean geometry and so forth, with extremely mixed results.

It actually has a lot of cool ideas, and the overall concept is very fun, but it ultimately doesn't lean enough into it's core to stick it's landing.

I think one of it's main issues is what it feels like it's trying to be the entire time, where it's very clearly trying it's level best to fall somewhere between Portal and The Stanley Parable - and whilst it did a good enough job to certainly constantly remind me of those games, it was unfortunately usually only to remind me how much better those games are in just about every facet.

From a more gameplay focused uh...perspective, it's main issues are just that it's core mechanics are just too finnicky, and inconsistent puzzle design and odd difficulty spikes just made it quite a frustrating experience - all too often in this game I would figure out a solution fairly early on, and then spend ages trying to get the game to do what I actually wanted - or worse still assumed I was wrong and spent ages trying something else... a cardinal sin in any puzzle game. It has moments where it feels very cool and it's hitting the beats of it's premise in a way that feels very unique and clever, but it's mostly hamstring by it's own jank and clumsiness, and comes away feeling like a fan-mad mod than it does it's own game. It's also really buggy which often meant restarting puzzles or reloading entire sections, which was a pretty tough ask in a game I felt like I was borderline about to quit almost the entire time I was playing it Another issue is that it wants to encourage you to come up with your own outside the box solutions to puzzles at times, but that just meant the puzzles can come off as feeling like they're not fully realised, and it's often not satisfying to actually solve them - either because you feel like you've just kinda skipped the puzzle entirely, or kinda just stumbled your way through it and you just come away thinking 'was that how they wanted me to solve it?'. Ironically, for a game that seemingly wants you to try and pick at it's seams and break it in your own way, the game was always at its best when it funneled you into more myopic solutions in it's more linear sections.

Finally, it tries to have some sort of meta-story that seems to be genuine attempt at emotional resonance, or some profound meaning behind it's lightheated tone, but it just falls incredibly flat - the script is terrible and the voice acting is not great. This functioned pretty well as a GamePass special - something that I'd probably have never played without it being on a subscription service, but just about interesting enough to be noteworthy. I don't think I'd recommend it overall though. I actually forced myself to finish this, I don't actually know why I persisted with it - I think I just hit a point where I found I wasn't too far from the end and figured I'd just power through because of sunk-cost fallacy.

I was surprised to see this game actually reviewed relatively well. I am usually a big beliver in the notion that there aren't really any 'bad' games, just interesting and unintersting ones - in this case I think this is an interesting game that is bad...

High on Life [PC]

Aw jeez, Rick, it's like a Rick & Morty game ya know? exept we didn't get the license to do it but thats okay, cos aw, jeez like Justin Roiland just does the Morty voice for everything anyway! haha, right? and...and that stammering stream of consciousness affectation...so really its just the same thing anyway, right? a..and meta humour, don't forget that! did you forget that? aw, jeez I actually quite like Rick & Morty in the times that I've watched it - I think it mostly suffers from that 'popular thing that is actually kinda good but it's fans are fucking exhausting so you instinctively think you hate it even though you don't' phenomenon (aka Anchorman Syndrome)

Honestly, I've just found almost everything about this game just so instantly tiresome. It's strange because I have played both Accounting (which I quite enjoyed and found genuinely very funny for the most part) and Trover Saves the Universe (which I enjoyed a lot less, but didn't really actively dislike), which were both extremely heavy on the whole 'Roiland doing his one trick act', but I feel like this game just started doing my head in almost instantly.

I think part of it is maybe Roiland's shtick is probably a little well worn by this point, but I think a lot of it is that the game tries SO incredibly hard and just does not shut the fuck up at any point ever. It eschews trying to patiently land a well formed gag with just bombarding you with constant commentary hoping that something lands, and it just means that even when it did (because some bits are still genuinely very funny), I was just so weary of the whole thing that it completely undercut any genuine humor that was there. Undercutting is basically the entire theme for this game from what I experienced - the humour can be funny but mostly spends an insane amount of effort trying to appear effortless, so it diminishes anything that does actually land. The game constantly makes you feel like it's provoking you to go off script a-la Stanley Parable, but often doesn't actually know what do to the second you don't play along with whatever it was trying to set-up. The combat and movement have promise but every encounter is essentially a hollow wave shooter, etc, etc, etc. I will say the music is actually great, but even that feels like it belongs in a completely different game, as cool as it is. It also does that irritating thing where it'll do some meta-gag about a certain gameplay trope or level design thing being boring, completely overlooking the fact that simply pointing out something being boring doesnt suddenly make it some subversive twist and stop it being boring. I remember the Deadpool videogame did that a lot and that game was absolute runny shit, so poor company to keep really.

It's a shame really, because there is a framework there that actually has promise - the world is relatively world conceived from a visual standpoint, there are some occasionally genuinely funny gags, and there are moments that show genuine craft and care - it's biggest issue is that it has zero restraint and cannot climb out of it's own way from wanting to constantly show you how clever it things it is. I don't think there is a clearer indication of that than how you cannot skip the dialogue in this game, god forbid you rob it of a chance to show you how cool it is. Actually the clearer indication is probably all the Justin Roiland text messages that have come out the past day or so, showing that he really is just an excruciating piece of shit, so in that regard, this game is a perfect reflection. Aw, Jeez!

TMNT: Shredder's Re-Revenge [Mega Drive]

This is a comprehensive romhack that someone has made where they have put TMNT cast and characters into the levels of Streets of Rage 2, and refined the animations, combat and AI where the gameplay and movement is sort of a mix between the two. There is actually a similar Romhack that came out a while back called TMNT of Rage, but this one focuses on trying to recreate the visual look and moveset of Shredders Revenge - and for the most part it succeeds. What struck me was just how well these games actually meld together - obviously shouldn't really be that much of a surprise considering SoR2 and Turtles in Time came out around the same time and were both brawlers, but it never really occured to me how well their visual styles, settings and music fit together - like the opening stage of Turtles in time is a still under contruction bridge just like the 2nd stage of SoR2, and there are a few other levels that have a decent amounf of visual overlap.  

What was a bit different about this hack is mostly with romhacks, even if they change up gameplay stuff or difficulty, they ultimately always just feel like reskins, so you always feel like you're playing the game it's based on. With this it genuinely felt like a meld between the two - the combat is close enough to the Turtles game to feel like you're playing with Shredders Revenge movement and combat, but it's still following SoR2's rule on their stages - for the most part it actually felt like a genuine standalone game, with the only real hacky feeling holdover being that you couldn't pick up weapons but presumably they couldn't find a way to remove them, meaning you'd just pick them up and instantly discard them. They also did a great job of matching up the enemies from turtles to be a solid equivalent to enemies in the game, both visually and how they attacked. With that said, there was probably less enemy variety overall which got a little tedious, but they did a really good job of feeling like they'd tried to recreate SoR2 using Turtles assets and AI, rather than just plonking it over the top. I think also I would have liked if they'd mixed in some Turtles music, as as far as I noticed it was all SoR2. - no argument as it's a goat videogame soundtrack (and again it actually fits the turtles really well anyway), but I think that would have been the extra step to make it feel like a true mesh. Only other thing was that the game felt way way easier than the original SoR2 did, I think maybe as a consequence of the deeper moveset and improved mobility, it was just much easier to avoid damage and juggle enemies, especially the bosses. Still, well worth checking out if you're a fan of either game really

Red Dead Redemption 2 [PC]

I punctuated various points throughout last week with further attempts in what appears to be a neverending quest in not accepting to myself that I don't think I actually like RDR 2 very much despite really wanting to. My wife started watching Yellowstone the other week, and watching a bunch of cowboy achetypes act like they were in a videogame at all times was enough to relight the fire, but like always it never actually takes long with that game to realise to myself I am not actually having that much fun. I think my main issue is the same with most Rockstar games in that the worlds are always just 1000 miles wide and 2 inches deep - for all the incredible detail the world contains, it just feels like you can never really interact or become a part of it in any real meaningful way. The trouble with RDR2 is that the setting just means it's so much more limited in creating fun moments, since even getting around is entirely more cumbersome. GTA always suffered with the same issues with depth for me, but the difference was in GTA it feels like the game is it's most fun in those moments between missions - here those are the absolute dullest moments of the game, and there are only so many beautful country vistas and random encounters you can have until it all just starts to feel a little rote.

Additionally, that game really does not get enough shit for how clumsy it is in general - the way it controls, its awful radial menus, it's UI... almost everything about it mechanically just feels like a game constantly trying to get out of it's own way. Maybe I am just the world's worst RDR2 player, but the ratio of me pressing a button and then Arthur valiantly doing something completely different to what I wanted or expected just seems to be astromically higher than just about any game I can think of. So time is a flat circle and here I am a few days later, already bored of it again but wishing things were different. Can't wait for another 9 months to pass, at which point something else will inspire me to play it again and like always I'll try and convince myself it'll be different this time. Just like updating this blog

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My Mega Man Mental Mire

As we all immediately move past the genuinely offensively shit alliterative title I've DARED to conjure up like some sort of literary atrophied bollock, the picture above shows that on the surface, I am a pretty huge fan of Mega Man... at least that's what you'd be forgiven for assuming. I own a lot of Mega Man games - in fact aside from Mega Man 6 (which never actually saw a UK release), I own all of the 'classic' Mega Man games on the 8-bit and 16-Bit Nintendo Consoles (Mega Man 4 not pictured due to it quite selfishly deciding not to turn up in the post in time for me to take this picture). In fact, other than Metal Gear, it's probably the series that I own the most games from...yet until this weekend, I wasn't actually convinced I actually liked Mega Man all that much at all.

Whenever someone would ask me what I thought some of the best games ever were, I'd always instantly say Mega Man 2. I never really thought about it much, the response was just automatic... just a passive subconscious reflex - like blushing when you're embarrassed, never wanting to go to Scotland, or gobbing into a pub urinal when you go to take a piss. The thing is though, deep down, I always thought it was probably the nostalgia talking - the perfectly quintessential 8-bit graphics coupled with Takashi Tateishi's iconic, near-perfect chip-tune soundtrack... it's tough to think of a more...NES experience than Mega Man 2. However, when I actually went to play the game, I never actually had all that fun with it.

I think part of what bothered me was that anecdotally, everybody seemed to get along just fine with the Mega Man games, some smug bellends even going as far as saying they found them a bit too easy. Sadly for me however, I was - and always have been horrifically shit at them. They're the sort of game that I came back to as an adult, silently laughing at how woefully inept I was as a child and fully expecting to saunter through the game at a valiant clip, only to discover I was still just as appallingly dogshit at the games 20 years on. So the game constantly managed to deliver a heady cocktail of being frustrating to play AND making me feel inferior. 

Incidentally, I remember once being at my Dad's house and actually managing to complete a single level. So uncommon, so unspeakably rare was this occurrence, that I foolishly didn't have anything to hand to take down the password and couldn't find a pen anywhere. In a panic, I ran to the cupboard under the stairs and grabbed a tester pot of paint, before crudely daubing out a grid with the password on the wooden shelf underneath the NES. The fact I didn't get sussed out until literally months later was a testament to how infrequently I ever had to update that password, rather than a sign of me being some sort of inexplicably thick, adolescent Banksy.

Anyway, that was pretty much my singular experience of Mega Man - the bullshit deaths, the respawning enemies, the seemingly random patterns, the beginners traps. As much as I thought they were cool in my head, the sum of their parts never actually added up to me having too much fun. That was until this past weekend...

This weekend I came at the games with an attitude I'd never really had previously. One of determination, one of patience, one of humility. Rather than stumblefucking my way through a handful of continues and sacking it off in a huff, I was going to sit down and actually spend a Sunday afternoon trying to get as far as I could with these games. I wasn't going to get mad, I wasn't going to bemoan design choices of games almost as old as I was...I was going to have fun playing this poxy game whether I enjoyed it or not. (Don't)

...and that's when I realised just how fucking good these games are. Once I started to chip away at the levels, I started to truly appreciate how incredible the design of them was. Yeah the games were still frustrating and difficult, but I finally realised one all important thing - they were fair.

Once I started actually thinking about what I was doing, I realised how much depth was contained within the games - the nuances to learning how to negotiate certain obstacles, memorizing patterns, learning which bosses were weak to which items, figuring out secondary ways to use certain items - all things that made the games more fun the more I grasped them. I genuinely cannot think of another game bar perhaps the likes of Guitar Hero/Rockband that give such clear, tangible satisfaction to becoming better as you become more experienced with the game.

Even though you don't level up per se, you still somehow get this strong sense of becoming more powerful as you slowly progress from spending 3 continues to even get to the end of level boss, to being able to nonchalantly moonwalk your way through an entire level, hardly taking any damage along the way... Boss fights go from being apparently insurmountable matchups, to 5 second long comedy acts as you cockslap your opponent into oblivion after eventually realising the best order to tackle the levels, unlocking their weaknesses along the way. I can't think of many more things in gaming as satisfying as slowly picking your way through that grid of robot masters one by one - especially when it took me over 20 years to finally get there.

The funniest thing is, I've still not managed to complete any of them... but that doesn't matter any more. What matters is that it turned out I was right all along. They ARE good games and I DO like them. Turns out Mega Man isn't shit, I was just shit at Mega Man

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Games wot were a bit shit really but I enjoyed them anyway Sunday - Baseball

Neither as prevalent or catchy as "Throwback Thursday", I've just decided to invent "GWWABSBIETAS", which if we're honest, still would be nowhere near the shittest hashtag bandied around the likes of Twitter.

Anyway, as the overly descriptive and infinitely facetious title suggests, the idea is to have a look at that special part of nostalgia that covers those games that you know deep down are actually unmitigated sediment, but you still enjoyed them anyway - usually as a result of being a complete and utter (literal) child.   One of these for me was the imaginatively named 'Baseball' on the NES, one of the 30 'Black Box' games released by Nintendo, a slew of games so called as they all shared the same iconic simplistic box art style.

A lot of these games would go on to be remembered as bona-fide classics or spawn long running series of their own - Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt and Excitebike to name just a few. Baseball however, was not one of these games.

Looking back, everything about this game was so laughably half arsed - Even the team names were just single letters. Apparently, these did actually loosely correspond to actual teams - Y for Yankees, D for Dodgers, etc,  but to a 10 year old boy from London, it just seemed as though the game designers had just sat there in a complete sulk when they didn't get the MLB license and then childishly just given the teams random nonsensical names.

This theme is prevalent across the entire game's design - pressing start on the menu screen is about as in depth as this game gets as the game is woefully shallow in every way. Whilst pitching has a fleeting, infinitesimal hint of nuance - at the very least you could throw a number of different pitches, batting was just reduced to timing a single button press. Fielding was even worse - the fielders were completely automated, meaning you just had to sit there silently fuming as your fielders ambled vaguely towards where the ball might or might not be heading, only giving you the control over which base the fielder would eventually throw to, which was inevitably irrelevant by this point.

Oddly enough, this is probably the exact reason I loved it so much as a kid - Not being from somewhere like America, I had no real idea about the intricacies of how the sport was played, and having to understand anything other than the very basics of Baseball would have probably been too high a barrier of entry. When I was younger, this was actually one of the very few multiplayer games that I owned, and so it got a ridiculous amount of use by default.  What I loved is me and my friend convinced ourselves that team Y was an overpowered cheat team (considering these were essentially the 90's Yankees, we'd unknowingly not been completely witless). Anyway, we formed a truce that nobody could ever pick team Y, unless they won 3 games in a row, at which point they would be awarded the hallowed privilege of being able to control the mighty 'Y' for a single, glorious game. This led to all sorts of glorious dramas - 3rd game collapses, weekend dynasties, and of course the Halley's Comet of occurrences - a brave giant-killing win over the omnipotent Y. Years later I actually found out that in a final hallmark of developer laziness, all of the teams were identical - they all had the exact same players and exact same statistics, meaning that Y were no more powerful than any of the other teams - we'd just created this mystique out of nothing more than a few coincidental wins and naivety. I never had the heart to tell my mate, why ruin something so beautiful?  So in many ways 10/10, would definitely play again (only if I can be Y though)

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Retro Gaming Throwback Thursday - Gremlins 2

It occured to me when writing about New Ghostbusters II last week that every game I'd covered so far was a licensed game. These days, the thought of any offically licensed game is often instantly dismissed with the expectation of being mediocre at best, with the confines that come with using a license being a hallmark of absolute dogshit. The saddest thing is, bar the odd joyous exception, this is usually a pretty accurate barometer of quality. However, it wasn't always like this...

As mentioned when discussing Darkwing Duck, Capcom were responsible for a catalogue of absolute rollercoasting bollockers, but they weren't the only ones... Gremlins 2: The New Batch was released by Sunsoft in 1990 as a companion piece to the classic Joe Dante horror comedy released the summer of the same year. Sunsoft were no stranger to doing right by licenses themselves, having released the dick-swellingly good Batman earlier in the year, a game regarded to be one of the finest releases on the NES, let alone among licensed games. The game is a top down action platformer - you play as plucky Mogwai Gizmo, making your way through 9 levels across 5 locations battling various enemies from giant killer tomatoes and spiders, as well as the eponymous Gremlins themselves, whilst also having to negotiate various spike and pit hazards along the way.

The game actually does a very good job of following the plot of the film without ever feeling bound by it, and has a lot of iconic touchpoints from the movie from battling an Electric Gremlin, to getting to use Gizmo's Matchstick Bow & Arrow. The graphics are fantastic and the music is arguably some of the most memorable of any game on the system. The game is difficult without ever feeling boringly unfair.

Admittedly my rose tinted glasses are probably on a little bit when I suggest that licensed games as a whole were better back then, as there was still plenty of shit knocking about - Sunsoft themselves released the infamously sediment Fester's Quest the year before. However, with a game like Gremlins 2, it's hard to pretend there wasn't plenty of quality to go around.

So go pick yourself up a copy and look after it a little better than my tattered cartridge. Just remember not to get it wet, don't expose it to sunlight, and don't err...feed it after midnight? Oh fuck off then

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Retro Gaming Throwback Thursday - NEW Ghostbusters II

When it comes to NEW Ghostbusters II, there are two things I think of that make it a little bit special...

The first is that alongside Ray, Peter, Egon (RIP) and Winston, you could also play as Louis, making NGBII your premier one stop shop for all Rick Moranis power fantasies.

The second is that it's actually pretty fucking good, making it a sole beacon of hope against a remarkable run of Ghostbusters games that were so valiantly shit, it almost felt like some passive-aggressive statement by the video game industry.

Released in 1990 by Hal Laboratories, more famous for the utter classics in the Kirby series, the game had you select any two Ghostbusters to saunter through six different stages, figuratively dickslapping your way through a veritable smorgasbord of ghosts along the way. It had a simple gameplay mechanic where you would hold the ghouls in place with your Proton Pack and your AI partner would throw out a trap to secure them. A second player could actually control the partner, making it a limited but ultimately fun co-op experience.

The game isn't perfect, but for any Ghostbusters fan, it's well worth checking out - Ghostsbusters is a franchise that has been treated pretty horrifically in the video game world, and NGBII stands alone as the one game that got it mostly right - from hitting touchstones like the iconic theme tune, to actually making you feel like you were catching ghosts, to bizarrely being 1 of 2 games in the entire Ghostbusters franchise that let you play as Winston. I guess the game doesn't get the love it deserves since nuances with the license meant this game was never released in the USA, so it probably flew under a lot of people's radar. Pull our your PKE Meter and track this one down when you get a chance.