Games Beaten 2023

[Raging Justice]

Sounds like Insomniac has released the second DLC to their original Spider-Man, with Miles Morales being the first DLC

I'm kind of ready to see them move on to something else, but Spider-Man is easy money so i guess i can't blame them

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

I really don't get how so many folks would spend 70 bucks and 20 hours for yet another fairly good Spider-Man movie. I know I sound reductive, but it looks like the gameplay is almost the same as the last two PlayStation games, and the only thing getting universal praise are the cut-scenes.
Honestly, I wish I could love these games as much as everyone else, so I would in earnest appreciate some explanation. Playing the game hasn't helped though : (

[prfsnl_gmr]

1. Kirby & The Forgotten Land (Switch)
2. Kirby’s Dreamland 3 (SNES)
3. Earthbound Beginnings (NES)
4. Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels (NES)
5. Tuff E Nuff (SNES)
6. Star Fox 2 (SNES)
7. Rival Turf (SNES)
8. Brawl Brothers (SNES)
9. The Peace Keepers (SNES)
10 Arm Champs II (Arcade)
11. All-Night Nippon Super Mario Bros. (FDS)
12. Super Mario Bros. Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 - World e (GBA)
13. Vs. Super Mario Bros. (Arcade)
14. Super Mario Bros. Special - 35th Anniversary Edition (NES)
15. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball (3DS)
16. Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (3DS)
17. Vampire Survivors (iOS)
18. Ninja Spirit (TG16)
19. Earthbound (SNES)
20. King’s Field II (PS1)
21. Commando (Arcade)
22. Commando (NES)
23. Commando (7800)
24. Commando (2600)
25. Bionic Commando (Gameboy)
26. MERCS (Arcade)
27. MERCS (SMS)
28. MERCS (Genesis)
29. Bionic Commando: Elite Forces (GBC)
30. Blazing Lazers (TG16)
31. The Legendary Axe (TG16)
32. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

I bought TOTK at launch, and I played it for 275 hours. I beat it yesterday. I have a few very minor complaints, but mostly, I loved this game. I am happy to discuss it with anyone, but so much has been written about it already, I’m not sure a detailed review would add much to the conversation!

[Raging Justice]

I really don't get how so many folks would spend 70 bucks and 20 hours for yet another fairly good Spider-Man movie. I know I sound reductive, but it looks like the gameplay is almost the same as the last two PlayStation games, and the only thing getting unconditional praise are the cut-scenes.
Honestly, I wish I could love these games as much as everyone else, so I would in earnest appreciate some explanation. Playing the game hasn't helped though : (

I think, objectively speaking, the Spider-Man games are quality games. However, they bring nothing of value to the table. I mean the original game was just insomniac taking ideas already done in other games and just slapping the Spider-Man IP on to them. In many ways, Spider-Man was just a poor man's Batman Arkham game.

It also doesn't help that there have already been awesome Spider-Man games before Insomniac threw their hat in the ring. Their Spider-Man didn't feel groundbreaking like Batman Arkham Asylum did when that game came out.

i am very biased though, as i just find the Ratchet and Clank games far more entertaining than ANYTHING that Insomniac does. I wish they'd stick to that, because it's what they do best. You could argue that the Ratchet & Clank series are just the same thing over and over gain, but nobody else makes games like that. So I find every new entry fresh even if it's just like all the other ones.

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

Yeah, Ratchet & Clank was indeed rather original, now that you mention it!
What you say about Spider-Man is how I feel about the PlayStation games. They do indeed look polished, but I mean, so are The Order 1886, Valhalla, Halo 5, etc. and they didn't get as much praise.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2023 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
* indicates a repeat

1. Super Hero Operations (PS1)
2. Lil' Gator Game (PC)
3. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (PC)
4. Dragon Quest VII (PS1)
5. Dragon Quest III (SFC)
6. Dragon Quest VIII (PS2)
7. Dragon Quest Monsters (GBC)
8. Mario Party 6 (GC)
9. Last Bible 3 (SFC)
10. Mario Party 4 (GC)
11. Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Switch)
12. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest (SFC)
13. Chrono Trigger (SFC) *
14. BoxBoy + BoxGirl! (Switch)
15. The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog (PC)
16. SaGa (GB)
17. Wario Land 3 (GBC) *
18. Sutte Hakkun (SFC)
19. Kane & Lynch 2 (PC)
20. Burger Time Deluxe (GB)
21. Super Mario Advance 4: World e+ (GBA)
22. Bomberman GB 2 (GB)
23. Mario Party 5 (GC)
24. Klonoa: door to phantomile (PS1)
25. Mario Party 7 (GC)
26. Mario Party (N64) *
27. Crash Bash (PS1)
28. Balan Wonderworld (PS4)
29. From TV Animation One Piece Tobidase Kaizokudan! (PS1)
30. One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 (Vita)
31. Atelier Iris: Grand Phantasm (PS2)
32. Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis (PS2)
33. Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy (PS2)
34. Crusader of Centy (Genesis)
35. Shadow Hearts (PS2)
36. White Album (PS3)
37. Shadow Hearts 2 (PS2)
38. Shadow Hearts: From the New World (PS2)
39. The Hunt for the Red October (GB)
40. Wild Arms (PS1)
41. Wild Arms 2 (PS1)
42. Custom Robo V2 (N64)
43. Mischief Makers (N64)
44. Quest 64 (N64)
45. Maximo Vs. Army of Zin (PS2)
46. Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil (PS2)
47. Moguuru Dabas (PocketStation)
48. Legend of Dragoon (PS1)
49. Gyakuten Saiban (GBA) *

50. Gyakuten Saiban 2 (GBA) *

Continuing replaying through the original releases of the original Ace Attorney trilogy, next up on the list was of course Gyakuten Saiban 2. Now while it has been like eight or so years since I last played these, there were still at least a few things about this game in particular that I remembered quite disliking. A few puzzles in particular I remembered the solutions to, even all these years later, just because they stumped and frustrated me so badly back in the day xD. I overall remembered not really liking the game nearly as much as the other ones I played back then, but overall I still remembered it being mostly fine. It took me a bit over 20 hours (probably, as this game doesn’t count your playtime at all) to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (that being my GameBoy Player).

Narratively this game is a straight up sequel to the last one. While the first game covers Phoenix Wright’s first year as a defense attorney, this game covers his second. Miles Edgeworth is replaced with the daughter of one of the first game’s antagonist, Franziska Von Karma, and Phoenix gets a new sidekick in the form of Maya Fei’s little cousin Pearl. However, despite this game having the exact same writer/director as the previous game, the writing is *so* aggressively inferior that for years I thought for sure it had to have been written by someone else. The issues are really so widespread and varied that it’s hard to pick just one place to start, but we may as well start by taking a look at our new cast.

Maya ends up actually spending a lot of this game occupied with other things (whether of her own will or otherwise), so Phoenix’s main partner is Pearl for roughly 2/3rds of the game. This isn’t a terrible problem, really, as Pearl is cute and funny, but she’s also just a weaker copy of Maya in most ways. She’s silly, she’s not very worldly, and she can summon Maya’s dead big sister Mia (which is super creepy, given that they still give her huge boobs with cleavage even though Pearl is an eight-year old), and she just doesn’t have the chemistry with Phoenix that Maya has. The one case that Maya is actually around for the entirety of really helps drive this point home as well.

However, as much as Pearl is a sorta wimpy replacement for Maya, the much worse addition to the cast is our new prosecutor, Franziska Von Karma. Over the course of the first game, Phoenix and Edgeworth have a relationship that covers the span of the entire story. Thanks to Phoenix, Edgeworth slowly realizes that his world view of “victory at any cost” is a harmful one, and that he can very much use his talents as a prosecutor for something other than just getting guilty verdicts. Edgeworth becoming a better person through his relationship with Phoenix is easily one of the biggest strengths of the first game’s narrative. Franziska, on the other hand, is a VERY underwhelming replacement for him. Morally, she is nearly exactly the same as Edgeworth in the first game (victory at any cost), yet even then she barely has any character arc to speak of, and that which she does have is very poorly done (giving her the whip back at the end is also one of the most astonishingly misguided bits of character writing I’ve seen in a while, hot damn). She is more or less narrative dead weight and just Edgeworth’s hype woman, warming his seat until he can make his triumphant return in the game’s finale. She feels very disposable as a result, and she’s mainly just a conduit for the game’s very poor sense of humor (that sense of humor being that being cruel and mean to people is always funny, which comes off far more often as mean spirited than funny).

This, in turn, is a factor of the game’s larger problem with how it writes its women. Women are never allowed to be as complicated, flawed, or even straight up evil as their male counterparts. This is, to a degree, a problem that the first Ace Attorney has as well, but it’s MUCH more of a problem here. Whenever a woman is evil or bad, it’s always underlined with this ultimate reveal of them actually being scared, weak, vulnerable, etc. While it’s not like men are never emotional, absurd, or foolish in Ace Attorney 1 and 2, the fact that they get to be more than that while women don’t is very difficult to ignore for me. Women seem to always be written with this underlying assumption that they are fundamentally caring and sensitive creatures, and it means that their writing is fundamentally hamstrung from the start.

AA2’s misogynistic approach to how its female characters are written isn’t the explicit cause of why I say the writing is bad (any more than the racist caricatures or the profoundly toxic attitude towards suicide are), but they’re part of the larger structure of why the game’s writing is so weak. The game largely being focused around female characters who are then written so poorly means that the story is very flimsy as a result. This game lacks any meaningful meta-narrative that covers all four cases (with little it does have being confused and contradictory nonsense), and Franziska being such a paper thin bench-warmer of a character is a very big reason for that, in my eyes. It would be one thing if AA2 was just a less well realized story than its predecessor. It might even be something I could look past. But with its combination of poorly written and very distasteful characters, it’s a mish-mash of bad taste and weak writing that makes for an experience that is as difficult to care about as it is just generally unpleasant to go through.

This is also not helped at all by the game’s relatively weak case design either. We still have the same formula of more linear investigation sections alternating with the court room trial sections, but this game spices up both in very meaningful ways. First of all, the investigation sections are spiced up with the psycho lock system, which is basically just adding cross-examination sections to the investigation sections to make them a bit more than just reading text. Then, you have the trial sections, which are varied up by the changing of the penalty system. In the first Gyakuten Saiban, it was five strikes and you’re out (and in the original GBA version, you had to start from the very beginning of the case if you struck out, not just from your last save point). From this game forward, we have more of a health bar system, with different errors taking away larger amounts of health (and that includes several penalties that are simply an instant death if you get them wrong).

Both of these new mechanics are mired terribly by the generally bad signposting and illogical design that are peppered through the entire game. From the first case through to the fourth one (which, from its writing to its puzzles, is one of the weakest cases in the entire series, at least for me), you have at least one puzzle per case that is very unclear on what it wants from the player. Whether it’s down to an unclearly worded question or down to a completely illogical deduction you’re forced to make (with cases 2 and 4 having the worst instances of illogical nonsense, with number 4 having one that I’m still not sure of the logic behind reading it in either English or Japanese). It makes a game with an already weak narrative that much more weak on top of all that, as it’s very hard to care about a mystery or its deductions when the solutions seem so arbitrary. It easily turns into a vicious cycle, where, because you just stop caring about the mystery or the story, it’s that much harder to solve the deductions that are actually doable because you just keep doubting yourself that this logic is actually logical along the game’s strange lines.

There are other meaningful problems too, of course. For example, this version of the game lacks any mid-section hard save points as well as a speed-up feature of any kind, so failure is punished by wasting a LOT of your time redoing stuff you’ve already done. You also can’t restore health any way other than succeeding in breaking a psycho lock, so if you’re having trouble in the middle of a court section, you might need to replay through a LOT of content very frequently if you’re on something you only have once chance left to succeed on. But these pale in comparison to the poor signposting for the game’s mystery stuff. It all adds up to a game that isn’t fun to play wrapped up in a story that’s very difficult to find much enjoyment in on top of that.

The game’s presentation is at least a fine followup to the first game. While I don’t love all of the new songs, they’re by and large very nice evolutions on the overall soundtrack of the first game while bringing back a bunch of old favorites like the Steel Samurai theme. The graphics are also very nice. While there are honestly a few too many returning characters for my liking (it makes things feel a little stale after a while, but that’s a much more personal issue than anything else), the new characters have fun and well animated designs, and it’s just as enjoyable as ever to watch them strut their stuff. It just makes me wish it was all in service of stronger writing and game design, I suppose ^^;

Verdict: Not Recommended. I went back and forth for a good while on the verdict I wanted to give this game, but a conversation with my partner (who is played through this alongside me and disliked her time with it even more than I did) really helped clear things up for me. She asked if I’d recommend someone just outright skip this game and go right on to Ace Attorney 3, and I honestly couldn’t think of a reason to not answer ‘no’. The story isn’t particularly important to later Ace Attorney games, and both mechanically and narratively it’s just a generally quite unpleasant time. There’s enough other far better Ace Attorney out there that your time is simply worth better. Even for someone like me, who has played AA games after this and know how much better they are, I struggled to find the motivation to continue on to the third game because my time with this game was just that bad. If that doesn’t speak to how difficult this game is to enjoy, then I don’t really know what can ^^;

-----

51. Yoshi's Cookie (GB)

As a little break after a case in Ace Attorney 3, I decided to play through this little GB puzzle game that I nabbed for 100 yen at Book Off a week or so ago. This was a game I had on SNES as a kid, but never played all that much of. This seemed like a good a time as any to fire up the ol’ Super GameBoy and finally see what this Nintendo Tetris-wannabe was all about~. It took me about 1.5 hours to play through the first hundred stages and reach the credits, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

As said previously, this is one of the many wannabe Tetris clones from the 90’s, and one of the several that Nintendo themselves put out (and on the very handheld that Tetris itself helped make famous, no less). Mario and Yoshi are running a cookie factory, and they need your help to guide them to help the cookies not overflow the factory. At the very least, that’s what I could gather, narrative-wise XD. It’s a simple points-based falling-block puzzler, so it’s hardly worth much caring about the story, but it makes for a cute aesthetic at least~.

In a bit of a change from usual puzzle games (though a fair bit like one of the games that Gunpei Yokoi would later make for his Wonderswan, Gunpey), you don’t have blocks just coming from the top of the screen, but from the right side as well. Lines of new blocks come simultaneously from above and from the right, and they pause while you’re clearing lines. The only way to clear lines is to shuffle pieces around so you have a complete, unbroken line of pieces (usually cookies) of the same type from one end of the cookie cluster quadrangle to the other. This is dependent on the end, as well, so if your quadrangle is currently 3 by 6, you can much more easily make a match on the 3-long side than the 6-long side. This comes with a catch, however, as should either side of the quadrangle extend beyond the edge of the screen, it’s game over for you.

It’s a quite good puzzle game, as it is! My main complaint would really be that it’s a bit too easy, at least on slower speeds (I played on low speed and didn’t game over a single time in my quest for the credits), but when it gets harder, it’s impossibly hard. The cookies themselves are fairly easy to tell apart on the GameBoy (even the Super GameBoy) monochrome color palette, but once you extend beyond the first 10 rounds (which are ten stages each, so that’s the first 100 levels, effectively) using the code they give you after the credits, the piece shapes can change. For me, I decided to see how hard round 99 would be, and it’s unsurprisingly absurdly difficult XD. A thing I didn’t mention before is that matching a given piece type five times will get you a wild card cookie that will match with anything. In those later rounds, you’re given a special sixth type of piece to deal with, but you’ll never get more of that type dropping from the edges. You MUST get rid of it by matching it with wild cards, and that is incredibly difficult to do. It also doesn’t help that the piece shapes change from cookies to sprites from the GB puzzle game Yoshi (or Mario & Yoshi, if you’re in PAL regions), which look far more similar to one another than the usual cookies do (making it far easier to make mistakes).

The presentation of the game is really just what you’d expect for an early-life GB puzzle game. Simple animations but relatively detailed sprites make the little cutscenes you get between rounds extra cute, and the normal cookie pieces, at least, are well distinguished and easy enough to tell apart, even in a rush. There aren’t many music tracks, but the ones that are there are good songs and fun to listen to while you puzzle away.

Verdict: Recommended. It’s not gonna set your world on fire, sure, but this is a perfectly fine puzzle game on the GameBoy. There are certainly other puzzle games I’d recommend before this one, if given the chance (from Tetris itself to even the aforementioned Yoshi), but that doesn’t take away from this game’s general competency. While it probably shouldn’t be your first choice of puzzle game, it’s a great little way to kill time and a perfectly fun enough puzzle game to include in your GB library~.

[Flake]

Another clumped update!

Believe it or not, this was the first time that I ever beat the Neo Geo Pocket Color versions of Megaman The Power Fighters and The Power Battles. They are incredibly accurate to the arcade games except with art that substitutes the Megaman 7 style sprites with Megaman NES/Gameboy sprites. A bizarre amount of work went into these obscure adaptations.

This was also the first time I beat Megaman X8. Back in the day, I was completely turned off by the amount of back tracking and grinding it takes to get your characters powered up. Thanks to the power of Xbox Achievements, I finally found the motivation to power through. It's still not a great Megaman X game but I see some of the charm now.

Super Mario Bros Wonder is fantastic. Go play it.

Nintendo Switch

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
Kirby's Dreamland
Super Mario Bros (All Stars)
Super Mario Bros 3
Wario Ware, Inc Mega Microgames
Mario Galaxy (3D All Stars)
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Hyrule Warriors Deluxe
Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee
Megaman Zero 2
Megaman Zero 3
Megaman Zero 4
Star Ocean First Departure R
Layer Section S Tribute
Tetris Effect Connected
Megaman: The Power Battles (Arcade Ver)
Megaman: The Power Fighters (Arcade Ver)
Megaman: The Power Battles (NGPC Ver)
Megaman: The Power Fighters (NGPC Ver)
Super Mario Bros Wonder

Xbox Series

MLB The Show 2023
Megaman Zero
Megaman X
Megaman X2
Megaman X3
Megaman X4
Megaman X5
Megaman X6
Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes
Megaman X8
Megaman: The Power Battles (Arcade Ver)
Megaman: The Power Fighters (Arcade Ver)
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

Playstation TV

Megaman: Maverick Hunter X

[Raging Justice]

Yeah, MM X 8 wasn't great but it was a step up from 6 and 7. One thing I will give the latter Mega Man X games credit for despite a lot of the criticism they get is an increased focus on team based gameplay. I think 7 and 8 were the first ones to make it feel like X and Zero...and I guess Axel too were actually working together. In early games, there always had to be an excuse for X or Zero to disappear and then Mega Man X 4 didn't even bother with that and just had them go on separate adventures.

One thing I'll say about the entire series, even the weaker entries, there was always some really good music. MM X8 had a great boss theme.

[prfsnl_gmr]

1. Kirby & The Forgotten Land (Switch)
2. Kirby’s Dreamland 3 (SNES)
3. Earthbound Beginnings (NES)
4. Super Mario Bros. - The Lost Levels (NES)
5. Tuff E Nuff (SNES)
6. Star Fox 2 (SNES)
7. Rival Turf (SNES)
8. Brawl Brothers (SNES)
9. The Peace Keepers (SNES)
10 Arm Champs II (Arcade)
11. All-Night Nippon Super Mario Bros. (FDS)
12. Super Mario Bros. Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 - World e (GBA)
13. Vs. Super Mario Bros. (Arcade)
14. Super Mario Bros. Special - 35th Anniversary Edition (NES)
15. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball (3DS)
16. Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (3DS)
17. Vampire Survivors (iOS)
18. Ninja Spirit (TG16)
19. Earthbound (SNES)
20. King’s Field II (PS1)
21. Commando (Arcade)
22. Commando (NES)
23. Commando (7800)
24. Commando (2600)
25. Bionic Commando (Gameboy)
26. MERCS (Arcade)
27. MERCS (SMS)
28. MERCS (Genesis)
29. Bionic Commando: Elite Forces (GBC)
30. Blazing Lazers (TG16)
31. The Legendary Axe (TG16)
32. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)
33. Mappy (Arcade)

Since I finally beat TOTK, it’s finally time to play through the rest of the games on my Summer Games Challenge list!

Mappy is a frantic arcade platformer released by Namco in 1983. In it, you play as the titular Mappy, a mouse policeman, charged with retrieving stolen property from a mansion filled with a gang of literal cat burglars (a/k/a the Mewkies and their wonderfully-named leader Nyamco). Each section of the mansion has six floors, which you navigate by jumping on trampolines. Except for when you fall on trampolines, you can’t jump, and the game’s goal is to recover all of the stolen property in each level without getting caught by the mewkies. As you progress, the levels get more intricate, and the mewkies get faster. Thankfully, the levels are littered with doors, and you can fight back a bit against the mewkies by opening those doors right in their faces. Regular doors stun them for a moment, while flashing doors remove them from the playfield entirely. (Conveniently, stunning mewkies adds to your score, with a multiplier for stunning more than one at a time, similar to Pac Man.). Moreover, and this is key, the mewkies can’t harm you when you jump on a trampoline. It took me a while to learn, but this is critical for survival, and you won’t last more than two seconds at any point after stage 6 without relying on this aspect of the game.

In short, Mappy’s mechanics are very complicated for an old arcade game, and it takes a while to grasp them. Once you do, though, you’re in for a treat because the game is just tremendous fun. Grabbing goods and narrowly escaping the mewkies is thrilling, and progressing through the game require a lot of quick, strategic thinking. I really enjoyed this game, and I heartily recommend it to anyone patient enough to learn its mechanics.

(Also, the game just loops, and it doesn’t have an ending. I considered it “beaten” when (1) I was skilled enough to beat the default high score; and (2) I had toured all of the levels in a loop. The difficulty really spikes at stage 6, and I was able to reach stage 8 on a credit. Stage 14, right before the end of the loop, is so tough it’s basically a kill screen!)

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2023!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

***1. Dragon Valor (PS1)***
2. Breath Of Fire (GBA)
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (NS)
4. World Of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse And Donald Duck (GEN)
5. XIII (GCN)
6. NES Remix Pack (WiiU)
7. Dr. Mario (GBC)
***8. Bully (PS2)***
9. Dragon's Crown (PS3)
10. Bangai-O (SDC)
11. Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)
12. Destruction Derby (PS1)
13. X-Men Legends II: Rise Of Apocalypse (XBOX)
14. Vice: Project Doom (NES)
***15. Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm (PS2)***
16. Terranigma (SNES)
***17. Super Street Fighter II (GEN)***
18. Guitar Hero II (PS2)
19. Kirby's Dream Land (GBC)
***20. Gunbird 2 (SDC)***
***21. Stella Deus: The Gate Of Eternity (PS2)***
22. I Am Setsuna (NS)
23. DuckTales: Remastered (WiiU)
***24. The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past (SNES)***
***25. Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers 2 (NES)***
26. Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (GBA)
27. Prince Of Persia: The Two Thrones (XBOX)
28. Baten Kaitos Origins (GCN)
29. Virtua Racing (GEN)
**30. Breath Of Fire III (PS1)***
31. Metroid II: Return Of Samus (GBC)
***32. Chameleon Twist (N64)***
33. Resident Evil 4 (Wii)
34. College Slam (SNES)



I completed College Slam on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System this evening!

Growing up, I loved playing NBA Jam on my Sega Genesis. It was one of my later childhood games and I spent many hours playing through the game. I loved the different modes and playing as my favorite players, but I really loved the Power Ups and crazy dunks. After going through both versions, I was looking for the next game in the series. I picked up NBA Hangtime for the N64 as that was the next Arcade game in the series. But, there was another that I rented that I picked up for incredibly cheap and that was College Slam. I had only played it a few times, but I knew it was a NBA Jam game, so I wanted to play it for myself. Looking for something a bit more lighthearted after Resident Evil 4, I decide to play through College Slam.

College Slam is exactly what you expect it to be and that is NBA Jam with College Teams. The roster is absolutely incredibly as it is have 40 teams, so it is cool to see so many different teams represented here. You can play through a 20 game season and not even see all the teams. The game does still have that NBA Jam feel to it. It's 2 on 2 basketball, but they introduce substitutions to have a large roster and you can dunk the rebound you get kind of like an alley-oop. It is great to be able to do a fantastic dunk as that was quite fun. The games are quite short and snappy, so it was pretty easy to go through a season rather quickly.

Each game felt like a challenge though because of the heavy rubber band effect. I don't think I ever had a lead above 20 because one you have a large lead, you start missing dunks, can never get the ball and the other team starts draining 3's. Also, even during the tense moments, it was nearly impossible to get rebounds. The roster of teams is huge, but you don't get a large tournament which is the best part of college basketball. You end the Season in small 16 team tournament, but with 40 teams, you could have a big 32 team tournament.

Overall, College Slam feels like a budget version of NBA Jam. The announcer is there and has some college related sayings, but he is not as excited and doesn't say as much. There are many teams, but they all kind of felt the same. Also, your ending is basically a Congratulations Screen, so its hard to want to play more. If you love college basketball and NBA Jam, its worth owning. But, this is also an easy pass for a sports game!