Games Beaten 2025

[REPO Man]

Speaking of scary numbers, if cartoon characters aged in real time, the Rugrats would be in their mid-30s while Doug Funnie and his friends would be in his 40s.

[prfsnl_gmr]

1. Mega Man (DOS)
2. Mega Man III: The Robots Are Revolting (DOS)
3. Teslagrad 2 (Switch)
4. Metal Slug 5 (Neo Geo)
5. Ufouria: The Saga 2 (Switch)
6. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch)
7. The Bounty Huntress (Switch)
8. Wide Ocean Big Jacket (Switch)
9. Haunted Castle Revisited (Switch)
10. UnderDungeon (Switch)
11. BurgerTime (Arcade)
12. BurgerTime (2600)
13. BurgerTime Deluxe (GameBoy)
14. The Flintstones - BurgerTime in Bedrock (GBC)
15. Dojoran (Switch)
16. Super BurgerTime (Arcade)
17. The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show (iOS)
18. Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution (GBA)
19. Dark Souls Remastered (Xbox)

I wrote long, detailed reviews of each of these and thought I’d saved my work. I hadn’t, though, and don’t have the energy to rewrite them.

The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show Is another fun point-and-click, cube-escape adventure game from Rusty Lake. It’s completely free and released to celebrate the developer’s anniversary. Like all their games, it’s solid, and I recommend it.

Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution the “lost” Shantae GBA game. It bridges the gap, both mechanically and narratively, between Shantae (GBC) and Shantae & The Pirate’s Curse (NDS). It has all the personality and LoZ/WonderBoy gameplay you’d expect from games in the series, with a unique background/foreground hopping mechanic. The spritework is stupendous, and the game sounds great too. While I am sure ports to other platforms are in the works, it is currently only available as a physical GBA cart, and it’s easily one of the best GBA games. Highly recommended to anyone, but especially recommended to fans of the series.

Dark Souls is amazing, and I love it. Really peak game and world design that holds up incredibly well. Challenging, but fair, and incredibly mysterious with heaps of replay value. It’s just a really, really great game, and I can’t wait to march through the rest FromSoftware’s modern ARPGs (after I finally beat Shadow Tower Abyss, of course).

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat

1~50

1. Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
2. Return of the Obra Dinn (PC)
3. Battlefield: Hardline (PS3)
4. Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3)
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3)
6. Dead Nation (PS3)
7. Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness (PS1)
8. Paro Wars (PS1)
9. in Stars and Time (Steam)
10. Tetris Battle Gaiden (SFC)
11. Super Tetris 3 (SFC)
12. Battlefield 4 (PS3)
13. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3)
14. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
15. Call of Duty: Black Ops III (PS4)
16. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4)
17. Call of Duty: WWII (PS4)
18. Resistance 3 (PS3)
19. Tearaway: Unfolded (PS4)
20. Grow Home (PS4)
21. Grow Up (PS4)
22. Ratchet & Clank (2016) (PS4)
23. Dark Sector (Steam)
24. Nagano Winter Olympics '98 (N64)
25. Multi-Racing Championship (N64)
26. Super Smash Bros. (N64)
27. Puyo Puyo Sun 64 (N64)
28. Shin Nippon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Road - Brave Spirits (N64)
29. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 6 (N64)
30. Let's Smash (N64)
31. Mario Tennis 64 (N64)
32. Ucchannanchan no Honō no Challenger: Denryū Iraira Bō (N64)
33. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 4 (N64)
34. FIFA: Road to the World Cup 98 (N64)
35. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 2000 (N64)
36. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 5 (N64)
37. Time and Eternity (PS3)
38. Pokemon Red (GB)
39. Dr. Mario 64 (N64)
40. Shining Force Neo (PS2)
41. Chou Kuukan Nighter: King of Pro Baseball (N64)
42. Tales of Destiny 2 (PS2)
43. Star Wars: Episode I - Racer (N64)
44. ChoroQ 64 (N64)
45. F-Zero X (N64)
46. Homefront (PS3)
47. Ape Escape: Pumped & Primed (PS2)
48. F-Zero (SNES)
49. Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (PS2)
50. Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (PS2)

51. Wave Race 64 (N64)
52. Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)
53. Mother (Famicom)
54. Famista 64 (N64)
55. Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58. Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59. Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
60. Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)

61. SimCity 2000 (N64)

I’ve never really played a city builder before properly, but they’ve always seemed very interesting when I’ve watched streamers play newer ones like City Skylines. I knew there were a fair few console ports of the SimCity games, as it’s hardly like I’d never heard of them, but learning that there was a *Japan-exclusive* port of SimCity 2000 was incredibly intriguing. Even more intriguing was learning that it had an array of exclusive mini-games such as a monster raiser and a dating sim. With parody-level Japanese version content like that, I just HAD to have this (especially with how cheap it goes for over here).

There’s not exactly a “win” condition in traditional SC2K, but this game does have something approximating one. In the game’s one mode, there are three chapters, and reaching the end of chapter 2 gives you the option for a kind of new game+ reset if you wish. This seemed like as good a goal as any to strive for, so that’s what I call “beating” this game. Not counting the couple of hours I had to spend researching online for how to even go about playing this game in the first place, it took me around 21.5 hours (in the year 2265!) to reach the 1 million citizens necessary to complete chapter 2, and I played the game on original hardware starting on easy mode with the natural disasters turned off.

SimCity’s general premise is that you’re the (immortal?) mayor of a city seeing its building and expansion as you try and fulfill your citizen’s needs to make it the best place to live in the world (or whatever you want, really). Other versions of SC2K have various scenarios of pre-built cities with pre-designed crises to try and help them through, but this game only has one scenario, and it’s exclusive to the N64 versions of the game, so far as I can tell. In the year 2000, a strange new land appears on Earth. You are part of some of the first settlers of this land, and your goal is to make it a wonderful place to live! However, you soon learn that a meteor swarm is approaching Earth! Taking your entire city along with you, you take off in a starship colony to flee the Earth for the safety of the stars in search of a new home to call your own.

It's a very interesting and silly premise for a city builder game like this, and that goes double given that this is a scenario specifically built for a years-old existing game at this point. There is a LOT missing from the PC version of the game: no scenarios or options for pre-built cities of any kind, no newspapers of any sort, and no historical starts or events, just to list some of the more obvious exclusions. However, as much as some of that can be explained by the limitations of trying to fit a game this big on an N64 cartridge, a lot of that can also be chalked up to trying to make a de-America’d version of the game for an international/Japanese audience. For my money, this sci-fi setting fits right in with the other silliness of SimCity, and as long as you’re not crushed by the loss of the features listed above, then you’ll probably feel right at home with this version (as long as you can get used to the new control scheme, I suppose ^^; ).

Under the hood, it really is just SimCity 2000 with some extra tacked on features. I’m far from a master or veteran of this genre of games, so I can’t give much comparative perspective, but I can certainly give comment on what I experienced with my time with this game and how well I think it’s all executed. You’ve got three major types of districts to build: residential, commercial, and industrial. Your citizens will demand different kinds of district to fit different kinds of needs, and building to these needs is how you make your city grow. There’s quite a fair bit of nuance to the simulation here, however, and your citizens will need a lot more than just jobs and homes to be happy. You’ve got schools and universities for education, police stations and prisons for crime management, fire departments to help clean up after disasters, and let’s not forget things like power generation and water management for the basic necessities of life itself.

Learning the ropes of things like utility management and roads/transportation networks were definitely my biggest stumbling blocks in learning the game, but once you get the hang of it, it’s incredibly satisfying to see your city thrive and grow. As hard as this can all be to keep track of, you’ve thankfully not alone in your city-building efforts. While you do have more granular graphs, charts, and maps that you can check to see how things like crime rate or power generation are going, you’ve also got a handful of advisors who will give you tips on how the city is faring. You can check with them at any time, but they pop up automatically at the end of each year, so you’ve got at least an annual check-in to see just how well your tax rate is faring and how much you’re overspending on roads (which is usually a lot but it’s worth it!).

There’s a TON I could write in terms of the actual nuts and bolts of how city management and design functions, but there’s already a ton of that written online by people far more familiar with the game than I am. What I *can* speak to is that Maxis and Genki have done quite a good job at porting the experience of the PC game to the N64, at least in terms of the basic experience. I learned how to play the game via videos of the PC version, so it’s rather odd that some mechanics from that such as newspapers (and therefore mayoral approval as a hard stat) seem to just be completely absent from this, but it didn’t affect my experience much in the end.

To set the minds of any PC version veterans at ease, the newspapers may be gone, but you *do* still have an immediate tip tool in the upper right that will tell you about impending emergencies or grievances that your citizens are facing. Tips and warnings (like your citizens wanting an airport or running out of water) appear up there in grey, and red warnings indicate you have a mini-game available to play if you’d like. For actual news events, you’ve got a TV station that replaces the newspapers, and that’ll tell you about things like arcologies being developed or how you’re all about to die from horrible meteors. It’s hardly a perfect substitute for all of the funny news stories you’d get in the old PC version, but it’s a perfectly adequate replacement for what the game demands of you mechanically.

Actually controlling the game to build your city can be a bit of a chore to get used to, as it’s never going to be as fast and snappy as a mouse & keyboard would give you, but the way they use radial menus and customizable hotkeys made it a lot more painless than I thought it’d be. At the very least, given that you don’t need to deal with the awful loading times or gutted graphics/content that the other console versions will saddle you with, I’m pretty comfortable saying that the N64 versions are the best *console* versions of SimCity 2000 they ever released.

All that said, I don’t want to give the impression that everything is sunshine and rainbows. While the end-game of SC2K is a bit limiting as it just becomes one big contest to try and get as many arcologies as you can (which I don’t think are a terribly well executed mechanic), the game’s biggest problems are tragically those silly mini-games I mentioned at the start. Upon fleeing the Earth and entering space, a slew of mini-games will become available for you to play. Some are quick gimmicks that are harmless to ignore, like the horse race track that lets you gamble or the simple dating sim that lets you date and marry a girl. Others like the “New Bio” game are just little diversions to get you some money every now and again, and they can be painlessly ignored if you choose. However, the other two games, Space Attack and Monster Room, end up dominating the gameplay loop in a way that starts fun but gets very annoying by the end of the game.

Space Attack is a simple score-attack rail shooter where you defend your city from attacking aliens! You get more money the better you do, so there only being one level of this to do isn’t the worst thing in the world, as it just means more opportunities to practice your efficiency in defending the city. You can get 20 to 30 thousand bucks from this game, so it really does pay to get good at it to beef up your city’s coffers. It’s decent fun, but it can get annoying to deal with if you’re just trying to let time pass to let population build up and reach a population milestone or something. While you can ignore the citizens demanding a new vegetable with no penalty, you can’t ignore an alien attack and expect everything to be okay. Nothing bad happens if you have natural disasters off, but if you’ve got them on, then the huge boss alien robot will come down into your city and start destroying everything. Alien kaiju attacks are, needless to say, a very undesirable thing, so you’ll be dealing with this every few in-game years or so even once 20 or 30k is a pretty ignorable amount of money.

Space Attack at least has the decency to be engaging, however. Monster Room is a far more dire thing to have to deal with. After a certain point, beating the aliens will leave you with a monster egg. You then raise this monster in a VERY simple version of a Tamagotchi-like pet raising game. You better keep your monster happy, too. Raising a happy, healthy monster means you’ve got a big buddy to help guard your city from attacking kaiju aliens. Raising a bad, cranky monster, however, means you’ve just unleashed an angry kaiju to attack your own city (the pet you didn’t take care of). Making that little bugger happy can mean petting him and feeding him for 5 to even 15 straight minutes, and it’s SO boring that I was going crazy from it after a while.

This is also a thing you can thankfully ignore by just turning the natural disasters off, but it does really suck that there’s no option at all to just have the game’s natural disasters operate like the original PC game’s did. You’re either dealing with those mini-games constantly, playing with no natural disasters at all, or going into the options menu to flick the disasters on and off whenever you see a red alien attack alert in the upper right corner. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but the tedium from having to deal with these was definitely one of the least fun aspects of the game for me.

The aesthetics of the game are more or less what you’d expect, if perhaps a bit unideal. The graphics are a nice recreation of the original PC game, but they change to a space theme once you launch into space. This is a neat gimmick, sure, but the new graphics change how ALL the buildings look, so it can be annoying to have to refamiliarize yourself with your own city after going to space. On top of that, the new building designs are also nice on their own, but they make for a VERY visually loud city when they’re all in a group. Special buildings like police stations are also so tall that they make it pretty meaningfully hard to see roads around them too. The graphics are nice, but I really wish there were an option to just keep the old building styles for the whole game. The music is also okay, but not my favorite.

The main thing worth mentioning here is that the game doesn’t really run all that well on higher settings. On fast and very fast, you’ll likely need to press buttons several times to actually get things to trigger, because you’re having such bad framerate issues that it’s easy to press a button during a time when inputs can’t be read. It’s a completely surmountable problem if you’re paying attention, at least, but it’s still an unfortunate thing to have to deal with.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I honestly really enjoyed my time with this game, annoying mini-games and all. It’s a perfectly playable version of SC2K, and it’s a really unique item on the N64’s library to say the least. My biggest apprehensions in recommending it are largely due to how much of a hindrance the game’s unique features are. Those unique mini-games and such are presumably the main reason you’re playing this version rather than just playing the DOS version of the original. Sure, it’s nice that this has stuff like adjacent cities to connect to like the Network Edition of the PC original did, but that doesn’t change just how much we’re missing here. If you cannot play the PC version and want the best console version of SC2K instead, then this is a pretty darn fun option, but I have a hard time imagining that’s actually a realistic scenario for the large majority of people out there who are looking to play a retro city-builder game ^^;

----

62. Prototype (PS3)

Continuing to play through games that my lovely friend Robin got for me, this was next on the list. Neither this nor its sequel actually got releases out here in Japan, but I’ve always heard good to good-ish things about both of them. Thankfully, she was able to find a copy of each for super cheap out in the UK, so she could send them to me to play~. Other than the generally positive reputation, I really knew heck all about this game. I knew people compared it to Infamous (a game I have played and enjoyed a fair bit) a lot when I was younger, but with how mired up in console wars garbage that sort of thing always is, it was pretty hard to know how seriously to take those kinds of comparisons then and now. All I knew is that I was really in the mood for an open worldy sorta game, and this fit that bill very nicely. Doing only a little bit of side content, it ultimately took me around 13.5 hours to beat the English version of the game on normal difficulty.

Prototype is the story of Alex Mercer. Three weeks earlier, a huge biological weapon was unleashed at Penn Station in New York City. In the intervening weeks, it’s been a huge bloodbath of people, military, and monsters. Alex Mercer reflects to an unseen person on how he got here, and that’s how we follow his story. He woke up in a morgue about to be dissected by Blackwatch scientists. Blackwatch is a government agency that’s topper than top secret, and the ultimate front line of American military interests, so they certainly mean business. Upon escaping and getting outside, however, Alex finds that NYC has been ravaged by a mysterious virus that not only kills but mutates too. Horrible monsters called the infected have been fighting it out with Blackwatch for days, and it’s only going to get more and more violent now that Alex himself is in the mix too. He’s not too worried about that, though. The only thing on Alex’s mind is trying to find out what happened to him, who did it, and how best to brutalize them.

To call this game’s story shallow would be an understatement. Alex is our main character, but it’s hard to say he has much any character to him in the first place. He is laughably one-dimensional, as effectively his only character traits are “doesn’t care about hurting people” and “wants revenge”. The supporting cast aren’t much better, as basically the entire script is just a justification to give you an excuse to do your next smashy killy mission. It’s one of the most incredibly vapid stories I’ve seen in this generation, as most games at least *tried* to have some veneer of something larger going on, but Prototype can’t even manage that. Large aspects of it feel downright unfinished with how some plot beats or characters simply vanish from the story, and even the final boss is some nobody who appears out of thin air.

I didn’t expect a great or awesome story from this game, sure, but I also certainly didn’t expect anything *this* difficult to care about. The characters are all so flat that they go from “generic” to dang near transparent in how purely mechanical they function. A really unengaging and boring story isn’t necessarily a death knell for a game of any generation (even if it’s weird to be talking about a game from 2009 this way), but it didn’t do any favors for my ability to actually care to keep playing over the more than 10 hours of my life that this game took from me. This ends up being an even deeper problem when you get into how the gameplay is structured on top of all of this.

Prototype is an open world game much in the vein of the 3D GTA games, but it’s also got superpowers to play with. Something like Crackdown or Infamous is the most obvious point of comparison for what came before it, but I liken it more to an almost Saints Row-style game (especially given where that series would end up after a few more years). Alex has all of Manhattan to play around in, and it’s a pretty impressively big island for the time. You’ve got mission markers for your next story mission, and then you’ve also got various side activities you can do, but there’s no great reason to do those. They’re just time attack and score attack missions, and frankly I never even felt compelled to so much as try a single one of them. All you get from them is more EXP to buy upgrades with, but I already felt like I was overflowing with EXP just from story missions, and I also really didn’t care for how the game actually played enough to want to engage with it any more than I had to.

Much like Saints Row 4 would do years later, Alex has three main ways of navigating the city: running, jumping, and gliding. You can run and automatically parkour over everything in your path, and just how good Alex is at that is pretty impressive from a technical standpoint. You can also hold the jump button for super jumps to both leap into the air as well as fling yourself up the side of buildings faster, because you can run so fast that you’ll just begin to vertically scale a building when you sprint into the side of it. Gliding is what you do to get between far apart buildings, and you’ve even got some mid-air super-fast dodges to gain speed with too. It sounds cool on paper, but in practice I found it incredibly awkward. Running and air dashing are all done with R2, jumping and charging your jumps is done with X, and gliding is some arcane combination of the two that I never really found intuitive at all. The movement tech is fine for the basics, but it’s janky enough that it often made time-limit missions far more annoying than they had to be, and that wasn’t made any better with how the combat works.

This game is a 3D brawler for its combat, though it does have some light gunplay elements too. You can pick up cars and rubble to hurl at enemies, but the real depth lies in your transformation abilities. Through both story events and EXP purchases (but mostly the latter), you can get new transformations for Alex to use to rip his enemies apart. There’s a pretty impressive amount of them, admittedly, though frankly it was far too much for my liking. They’re powerful if you can bother to learn how they work, but the biggest problem I found was that I never really felt compelled to change what I was doing. Simple combos with the more straightforward powers they force you to get for the story were already working more than fine, and when I was having trouble with combat, it was down to poorly designed encounters rather than feeling underpowered on my end.

There are two main enemy types, and one has far better design than the other. First up, you have Blackwatch, your military opponents. You have SO many options for dealing with Blackwatch, and it’s easily when the game’s combat and missions are at its most fun. You can tear them apart with your claws, steal their guns and fight at a distance, hijack their vehicles for a technological edge, or even use the game’s very simple stealth system to take them out before they even realize you’re there. While the actual stealth combat is so failure proof that it winds up being boring (you literally cannot fail it unless you try), Alex can actually grab and then consume humans to take on their form.

This restores some health, sure, but it has a lot of use if you use it against military targets. It lets you infiltrate their bases, hijack vehicles for free, and you can even swap forms when they’re chasing after you to lose them in crowds. The game winds up feeling like a slightly gimmicky GTA when you’re doing the missions centered around the military opponents, but it’s also definitely where I was having the most fun, especially as you get more vehicles to play around with. Nothing in this game is as satisfying as being cornered by heavy weapons but then leaping up to a helicopter, hijacking it, and raining terror back down on your attackers for a miraculous escape! X3

The game’s second enemy type, the Infected, range from zombies to monsters that are like giant apes, and they are both frustrating and boring to fight nigh universally. Restoring health by grabbing and executing/consuming enemies is a remarkably time consuming and awkward thing to do, and it’s dangerous in any combat, but that goes double for fighting the larger Infected (whom you’ll be fighting nearly the entire game in some form or another). These guys will magnet strike towards you with nearly undodgeable attacks, and they barely ever stagger unless you’re fighting one-on-one. You’re very rarely fighting them one-on-one, and even the early onboarding missions have you fighting like 4 or 5 at once. Fleeing until you can snag enough military hardware to take them out with a cheap shot is your main and effectively only strategy against 2 or more big Infected, and they never feel anything but unfair and frustrating to fight.

All of the game’s bosses have this problem too, and this game genuinely has some of the worst boss fights I’ve seen in a game from this console generation. Your available store of possible attacks is vast, sure, but executing them is both too complicated, too particular, and often too dependent on having over-full health to execute them at all. Nowhere near enough emphasis is given in actually telegraphing *why* the player would ever want to use so many of these moves, and it makes the game’s large pile of available powers very unappealing to ever really try out when hijacking military vehicles works so well (and EXP upgrades can’t make you better at that). I found just saving my EXP until I REALLY needed it for upgrades for one particular fight (often to follow a strategy I found online to beat some awful boss) was a far safer strategy than just spending wildly, and I can’t see anyone else playing very differently unless you were that committed to trudging through all of the janky, repetitive combat to unlock all of the other forms and moves just for the sake of it.

The game’s poor level design doesn’t really do much for it either. Manhattan’s level design in real life isn’t much of a thing, but that hasn’t stopped other open world games either before or after this from having worlds that are fun to explore and move around in regardless. With how fast you run and how super jumping and gliding work, the details of NYC are super easy to ignore, and you have very little reason to familiarize yourself with any part of it. There’s no process of unlocking more parts of the city as you go on, and the only possible reason to explore would be to grab the EXP orbs you’ll find scattered around (but it’s not like you’ll ever be hurting enough for EXP for that to be something you’d seriously want to do). Traversing the city becomes a boring chore of an activity very quickly because there’s so little character to the environment. All you’re ever seeing the city as is a series of buildings to hop over or streets to barrel down with the game’s janky movement tech. It really does suck that the character of the environment is just as flat as the character of Alex himself.

There are some other interesting or funny aspects of the game, like how the civilian AI is so brainless that they’ll dive right into your tank treads en masse when they’re ostensibly trying to run away from you, but that just leads more into how empty the game feels. The game feels so little about its setting and its story that it’s hard to get engrossed yourself either. Alex doesn’t actually care about the welfare of the city or its people in any visible way for damn near the entire story, and it’s not like the actions you see the NPCs take affect that one way or the other either. Janky combat, janky movement mechanics, and a lifeless city make Prototype a remarkably boring game to play for what’s supposed to be a power fantasy, and I can’t really see anyone but folks who excel at making their own fun with open world games really find much appeal in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Graphically, it’s a game from 2009. It’s not particularly impressive for the time, but it’s also super grey, brown, and red in a way I found very uninteresting. Some of the creature design is kinda cool, I suppose, but none of it is anything to write home about. The music is completely ignorable, given that I can remember none of it, but I guess that it at least does its job for setting the mood? One prop I can give it is that it runs okay on the PS3, which is a sadly remarkable feat for a multiplatform game on this console to have.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I basically did nothing but rag on the game here, but I’d be lying if I said I never had any fun with this game. When it’s being very GTA-y, it’s honestly pretty darn good fun, but that’s kinda damning with faint praise. It only takes a couple of hours for the game’s baseline to reach “kinda boring,” and it never really recovers from that. With ALL of the open world games out there that are better than this, I’d have a really hard time recommending why you should spend much if any time on Prototype. There’s not *nothing* here, sure, and it’s an interesting time capsule of game design for the time, but you should probably just play the far better sequel or something like Infamous or Crackdown if you really want to play a good open world super powers game rather than something so surface level mediocre like this ^^;

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2025!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***
***4. Pokemon Snap (N64)***
***5. Dead Or Alive (PS1)***
6. Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
7. Pokemon Blue (GBC)
8. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
***9. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)***
***10. Sonic The Hedgehog (GEN)***
***11. The New Tetris (N64)***
12. Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (GBA)
13. Yoshi (NES)
***14. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)***
15. L.A. Noire - The Complete Edition (PS3)
16. Batman: The Video Game (GBC)
17. Splatoon 2 (NSW)
18. The Punisher (GEN)
***19. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time / Master Quest (GCN)***
***20. ChuChu Rocket! (SDC)***
21. Advance Wars (GBA)
22. Shadow of the Ninja (NES)
23. Tecmo Super Bowl (SNES)



I completed Tecmo Super Bowl on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System this evening!

If there are two games that defined my childhood, it would be the original Legend of Zelda and Tecmo Super Bowl. Most of the video games I had growing up were from my older brothers and they really only played sports titles. So, I basically had to play Sports titles and my favorite was Tecmo Super Bowl on the NES. We had a NES dedicated to that game alone so that we could never take it out and erase our season. They loved the NES version the best, but I loved the Genesis version I played when I was older. Out of 28 teams, I have won the Super Bowl with 25 of them. I knew there was a SNES version, but I always thought it was the same. One night, I was searching through the emulator up at my Arcade, I decided to give it a try and noticed some slight differences. Since the game is about $10, I picked it up and decided to give it a try.

It is nearly impossible for me to give an honest review of Tecmo Super Bowl because of how much I have played of the game. Instead, I will give some variation differences of the game and which version I preferred the most. The major difference would be the speed of the game. The SNES version has many voice clips that play while the clock runs, so the games just fly by. In the GEN version, you could quickly go from play to play with little interruptions. Besides the first few weeks, I didn't have as many blowouts because of the faster pace. Also, the AI is a lot harder in the SNES version. The playoffs can be quite unfair and almost impossible to score sometimes. Add to the fact your QB throws more interceptions and faster defensive backs makes it harder to throw long balls. Besides different animations, the game also has animations for in game achievements. For example, it will tell you when your Running Back has rushed for 100 yards, you've thrown for 300 yards or caught for 150 yards. It's a neat feature that is exclusive for the SNES version.

Overall, despite the jump in difficulty, I still loved playing through the SNES version of Tecmo Super Bowl. For that classic feel, the NES version is the best one. For my nostalgia and favorite, I obviously have to go with the Genesis version. I know every little trick in that game and every little detail. Still, I would recommend the SNES version or any version because Tecmo Super Bowl is the greatest sports game of all time. Absolutely perfect!

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

1. Tomb Raider II Remastered - PC
2. Tomb Raider III Remastered - PC
3. Blade Chimera - Switch
4. Cyber Shadow - Switch
5. Signalis - Switch
6. Ender Magnolia - Switch
7. SimCity 2000 Special Edition - PC
8. Ghost Song - Switch
9. Citizen Sleeper 2 - Switch
10. Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider - Switch
11. The Last Faith - Switch
12. Anger Foot - PC
13. Avowed - PC
14. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Classic Mode - Switch
15. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Classic II: Dominque's Curse - Switch
16. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II - PS5
17. Pacific Drive - PC
18. Mekkablood: Quarry Assault - PC
19. Tempest Rising - PC
20. Astalon: Tears of the Earth - Switch
21. Voidwrought - Switch
22. Death's Gambit: Afterlife - Switch
23. Mechwarrior 5: Ghost Bear: Flash Storm - PC
24. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - PS5
25. Doom: The Dark Ages - PC
26. Haiku the Robot - Switch
27. Alwa's Awakening - Switch
28. Warhammer 40000: Boltgun: Words of Vengeance - PC
29. Alwa's Legacy - Switch
30. Wizordum - PC
31. Project Warlock II - PC
32. Exophobia - PC

Exophobia is a first person Metroidvania with a retro aesthetic and a stark choice of color palette. It tries to sucker you in by thinking it's a retro FPS, but the gunplay is basic and the focus is on environmental puzzle solving.

The setup is a ship has crashed on an alien planet and gets into a kerfuffle with the natives. You need to help the survivors escape. To do so, you'll make use of your gun, various upgrades for it, and a slide. The ship is divided into four floors, each being a different type of biome. The first floor is the storage area, the second is the biology lab, the third is the reactor, and the fourth is the crew quarters. You'll bounce around the floors as you unlock the various abilities that will get you past the various barriers.

You start with a basic gun and the ability to slide. Sliding will make you invincible and will push enemies and objects (useful for puzzle solving). You'll pick up a charge shot which can break certain barriers, the ability to do a shockwave that stuns enemies, cancels projectiles, and can manipulate electricity. Things really pick up when you get the teleport; after firing a shot you can trigger a teleport point at the shot location, then at any time you can teleport to said point. Finally, you'll get the ability to detonate your fully charged shot in an explosion, which will get past the final superbarriers in your way.

The game makes use of various obstacles like pushing blocks on switches, timed doors, and other parts of the environment to serve as the primary challenge. Enemy fights are generally straightforward, the occasional arena being the prime way the game will kill you. But even those are mostly just circling around the edge and shooting everything. The bosses are a bit more interesting; you need to find the vulnerable point of their attack pattern to land some damage. They make use of all your abilities; teleport especially stands out as critical for avoiding damage on the later fights.

Overall, it's a pretty solid Metroidvania. The level design does a good job of funneling you to where you need to go, and any backtracking usually makes use of newly opened shortcuts. Also, enemies don't respawn (though certain triggers will create new sets of enemies in certain rooms), so in the later game you're free to focus on traversal.

[Markies]

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2025!
***Denotes Replay For Completion***

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***
***4. Pokemon Snap (N64)***
***5. Dead Or Alive (PS1)***
6. Rogue Galaxy (PS2)
7. Pokemon Blue (GBC)
8. Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
***9. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising (NSW)***
***10. Sonic The Hedgehog (GEN)***
***11. The New Tetris (N64)***
12. Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls (GBA)
13. Yoshi (NES)
***14. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)***
15. L.A. Noire - The Complete Edition (PS3)
16. Batman: The Video Game (GBC)
17. Splatoon 2 (NSW)
18. The Punisher (GEN)
***19. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time / Master Quest (GCN)***
***20. ChuChu Rocket! (SDC)***
21. Advance Wars (GBA)
22. Shadow of the Ninja (NES)
23. Tecmo Super Bowl (SNES)
24. Child of Eden (PS3)



I beat Child of Eden on the Sony Playstation 3 this afternoon!

Back in my early PS2 games, I picked up and played through Rez. At the time, it was an under the radar game that was very unique. It was this on rails shooter where the music changed while you were playing the game. It was this strange interactive experience that was very unique for its time. Well, when I was creating my massive PS3 Wishlist, I was amazed to see that a sort of sequel to Rez was created called Child of Eden. It used the Playstation Move, but you could also use a regular controller. Every January 1st, I use the Backloggery Roulette to pull a random game from my Wishlist and Child of Eden was the choice last year. I was looking for a smaller game before I begin my next epic RPG, so I figured this would be a perfect opportunity.

I have taken very little drugs or alcohol in my life and I don't feel like I need to anymore after playing Child of Eden. That was one of the most intense and trippy experiences I think I have ever had in my life. The PS2 limitations made it a bit difficult for Rez to get out of its blocky aesthetic. That is absolutely not the case for Child of Eden. You have actual videos playing in the background and HD quality graphics throughout the entire journey. The ingame graphics are so unique and out there that it feels like an acid trip or something out of Epcot Center. It's a sight to behold and the music plays a pivotal role in it as well. It is one of the most unique experiences I think I have ever had. The shooting part is a lot more tighter and the gameplay itself is much smoother, so the overall experience is much more enjoyable!

Obviously, something this intense can be a bit much. At times, my eyes were beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed. There is very much a seizure warning when starting the game. Also, with so much going on, it can be hard to figure out where the enemies are and what is exactly damaging you. Everything blends together that it is very easy to miss the important parts.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Child of Eden. It is not a particularly long game as I beat it in a few hours in an afternoon. With only like 5 stages taking up to 10 - 20 minutes, it can be finished rather quickly. However, the memories and experiences will probably last me a lifetime. If you looking for something you have never experienced before, I would recommend playing through Child of Eden. It is very much a trip!

[pierrot]

Love Child of Eden. It's fantastic with some bangin' tunes. I'll always prefer Rez to some extent, but everything of United Game Arts (UGA) and Q entertainment's is pretty much amazing.

[MrPopo]

Previous Years: 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024

1. Tomb Raider II Remastered - PC
2. Tomb Raider III Remastered - PC
3. Blade Chimera - Switch
4. Cyber Shadow - Switch
5. Signalis - Switch
6. Ender Magnolia - Switch
7. SimCity 2000 Special Edition - PC
8. Ghost Song - Switch
9. Citizen Sleeper 2 - Switch
10. Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider - Switch
11. The Last Faith - Switch
12. Anger Foot - PC
13. Avowed - PC
14. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Classic Mode - Switch
15. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Classic II: Dominque's Curse - Switch
16. The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II - PS5
17. Pacific Drive - PC
18. Mekkablood: Quarry Assault - PC
19. Tempest Rising - PC
20. Astalon: Tears of the Earth - Switch
21. Voidwrought - Switch
22. Death's Gambit: Afterlife - Switch
23. Mechwarrior 5: Ghost Bear: Flash Storm - PC
24. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - PS5
25. Doom: The Dark Ages - PC
26. Haiku the Robot - Switch
27. Alwa's Awakening - Switch
28. Warhammer 40000: Boltgun: Words of Vengeance - PC
29. Alwa's Legacy - Switch
30. Wizordum - PC
31. Project Warlock II - PC
32. Exophobia - PC
33. Haunted Castle Revisited - Switch

Haunted Castle Revisited is a redo of the original Haunted Castle; it takes the same basic layout and improves it on every metric. Besides the expected "make the graphics better than 1988, make the stage layouts a bit more interesting", it vastly improves the boss fights to be far more interesting and puts in some quality of life features like making pits not be instant death.

The game is essentially a retelling of Castlevania 1; you're Simon, Dracula steals your bride on your wedding day, get to whipping. You go through five stages plus a short Dracula traversal, each with a boss at the end. Fairly standard Classicvania stuff; the stage layouts are mostly CV1 style with the graphical power of CV4.

One thing you'll notice is there are a lot more incidental damage flying around. Bats are pretty constantly spawning, a la Medusa heads, but they don't have much up/down movement, so they're more manageable. But you'll still take hits from them. You can't destroy axe armor axes, so make sure you pay attention to the throw. And some skeletons will spawn a ghost that seeks you after death. The game is trying to make up for the extremely short runtime (appropriate for an arcade game) by making sure you're on the ball.

Whereas the boss fights in the original tended to have one basic attack they used over and over, here they tend to have multiples. Some bosses have a straight up fixed pattern, while others will randomly select their attacks. One annoying thing is the bosses seem to need to be in a resting state between attacks to be killed, which can cause a death if you're low on health and trying to take out that last bar of boss health.

All in all, it's a short experience, but it is nice to have a Classicvania again.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat

1~50

1. Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii)
2. Return of the Obra Dinn (PC)
3. Battlefield: Hardline (PS3)
4. Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3)
5. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3)
6. Dead Nation (PS3)
7. Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness (PS1)
8. Paro Wars (PS1)
9. in Stars and Time (Steam)
10. Tetris Battle Gaiden (SFC)
11. Super Tetris 3 (SFC)
12. Battlefield 4 (PS3)
13. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3)
14. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PS3)
15. Call of Duty: Black Ops III (PS4)
16. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4)
17. Call of Duty: WWII (PS4)
18. Resistance 3 (PS3)
19. Tearaway: Unfolded (PS4)
20. Grow Home (PS4)
21. Grow Up (PS4)
22. Ratchet & Clank (2016) (PS4)
23. Dark Sector (Steam)
24. Nagano Winter Olympics '98 (N64)
25. Multi-Racing Championship (N64)
26. Super Smash Bros. (N64)
27. Puyo Puyo Sun 64 (N64)
28. Shin Nippon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Road - Brave Spirits (N64)
29. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 6 (N64)
30. Let's Smash (N64)
31. Mario Tennis 64 (N64)
32. Ucchannanchan no Honō no Challenger: Denryū Iraira Bō (N64)
33. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 4 (N64)
34. FIFA: Road to the World Cup 98 (N64)
35. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 2000 (N64)
36. Jikkyou Pawafuru Puroyakyuu 5 (N64)
37. Time and Eternity (PS3)
38. Pokemon Red (GB)
39. Dr. Mario 64 (N64)
40. Shining Force Neo (PS2)
41. Chou Kuukan Nighter: King of Pro Baseball (N64)
42. Tales of Destiny 2 (PS2)
43. Star Wars: Episode I - Racer (N64)
44. ChoroQ 64 (N64)
45. F-Zero X (N64)
46. Homefront (PS3)
47. Ape Escape: Pumped & Primed (PS2)
48. F-Zero (SNES)
49. Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (PS2)
50. Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (PS2)

51. Wave Race 64 (N64)
52. Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)
53. Mother (Famicom)
54. Famista 64 (N64)
55. Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58. Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59. Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
60. Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)
61. SimCity 2000 (N64)
62. Prototype (PS3)

63. Prototype 2 (PS3)

After being thoroughly underwhelmed by the first Prototype, I went on to this game immediately if only because I’d heard it was so changed from the first. I understood this game to have an overall weaker reputation than the first, but frankly the first game was so flat and dull that I was convinced that the sequel could not *possibly* be any worse unless it were a completely unplayable buggy mess XD. It took me around 14 hours to beat the game while doing all of the side content (and a little achievement hunting) playing the English version on original hardware.

Prototype 2 follows James Heller. Around a year after the Mercer virus, named after the first game’s protagonist, Alex Mercer, ravaged New York City along with the government super special ops military outfit, Blackwatch, it’s sprung up once again. Heller is a US Marine on his way back home from deployment in Iraq when he gets the news that his beloved wife and daughter were killed in the chaos slowly re-consuming NYC. His heart full of revenge, he immediately requests a transfer to a division in the city, and he gets it. He wants nothing more than revenge on Alex Mercer for killing his family, but things go a bit awry once Alex finds him first. Infecting him with a form of the virus just like his own, he gives Heller great, virus-borne powers with little explanation as to why. Heller is hardly happy to be aided by the man he hates most, but after being captured and tortured by Blackwatch, he knows he hardly has many friends to turn to in the first place. It’s now up to Heller to find out just what’s going on here, and just what Blackwatch and Mercer are respectively scheming if he doesn’t want to become one of the city’s next victims.

Prototype 1 had a laughably light and incompetent story, and I was very badly hoping that this game would not suffer the same fate. With Heller being African American, I had heard vague rumblings about this game’s story that it was fairly problematic and played rather uncomfortably into “angry black man” stereotypes. Needless to say, while I was hardly expecting a grand work of art, I was hoping for something that at least *interesting* because that’s certainly not what the first game gave me XD. I can report that I was very thoroughly and happily surprised in the end!

They’ve very clearly gotten a new writing team since the last game, since they’re really flexing their stuff by giving us, well, an actual story. Heller is far more than just some angry black man, and it does this story a great disservice to characterize him as such. He’s a grieving father, and that’s what drives his actions through the story (and as someone who deals with kids a lot myself, it was hard not to sympathize with him a lot of the time). More than that, he’s actually a character. Heller actually gets to be funny! He quips at enemies to dunk on them when he’s bashing them up, he struggles with technology and gets frustrated, and he’s even able to sympathize with fellow parents even when the circumstances would suggest he should do otherwise.

Heller and the expanded cast he gets to interact with really help bring NYC to life, and I loved my time along with them. This is a game that made me laugh a lot and even nearly made me cry, and it’s a story I actually cared quite a bit about the conclusion of. Prototype 1 was hardly a high bar to clear, but Prototype 2 soars high, high above it. It’s still hardly the best story of that console generation or anything, but at least for a game in the “guy in open-world city” genre, this game definitely has a strong story that goes well beyond the call of duty into being something both enjoyable and memorable.

Another very welcome improvement is with the gameplay. Prototype 1 had a lot of flashy moves and a big city to roam around, but it really didn’t have much more than that. Mission variety was dreadfully thin, combat was clumsy and clunky, and the city itself felt like nothing more than an obstacle to crawl over between your current objective and the next one. I was really hoping that Prototype 2 would do at least *something* to improve this, and I’m once again happy to announce that they did that and a whole lot more.

First of all, the city itself has been improved massively. Two new islands join a smaller version of the island from the first game, and it gives the game a much better sense of mechanical pacing compared to the first. Locations old and new have far more character to them, and going around the city is far more interesting and fun as a result. A lot of that has to do with just how much better the gameplay is, because the movement tech has gotten a direly needed improvement. Super jumping, gliding, and sprinting have gotten an overhaul, and it makes traversing the city both more fun and far more intuitive. Additionally, your combat abilities have gotten a lot of big changes too, and they’re all for the better.

Rather than the first game’s approach to your powers, where you could buy new moves and such using EXP while scrolling down a big list, you now much more naturally unlock new powers and mutations as you go through the story. Mission design is significantly better as well, and they do a good job of encouraging you to actually try out your new powers and experiment with different ways of using them as they slowly introduce new enemy types and mission objectives. Side content now feels like genuine side missions rather than just being time-wasting score attacks, and completing specific ones gives you specific new sets of upgrades to choose from. Combat is way better, absolutely, but I cannot overstate just how much the game’s flow is improved now that you actually have a sensible, well-paced method of getting new powers as well as upgrades that are actually worth a damn for a change.

Combat felt so good and well tutorialized that I actually felt compelled to use various different power types fighting different sorts of enemies, and the impact with each feels so darn good! They’ve tightened up how the whole combat system flows and reacts so well, and it feels like all encounters have a large and satisfying array of options available to you, so you’re no longer just waiting for a military vehicle to show up so you can tank or helicopter everything to death like you did in the first game. Infected enemies are still dangerous and a very different challenge from fighting military targets, but the better designed powers and UI make fighting them way more fun and interesting than it used to be. They’ve even improved the stealth system! Instead of it being a dead-simple, failure-proof waiting game, now you actually have opportunities to fail and ways to use strategy to mess with your opponents even more! Prototype 1 was a game that was neither entertaining to play nor engaging to read the narrative of, and Prototype 2 has solved both of those issues masterfully.

Aesthetically, the game looks about how you’d expect a game from 2012 to look. It’s not like it looks like it just sprang out of the Unreal 5 Engine or anything, but I think it holds up very nicely for a game over a decade old. I love the red/white/black stylization of the characters in the cutscenes, and character design on the whole is really strong. Music isn’t exactly memorable, but that’s also fairly run of the mill for a game of this era. However, in one of the few compliments that I can level both this game and its predecessor, it’s a third-party game on the PS3 that actually runs really well on the hardware. It certainly doesn’t sound too impressive a feat, but with how many horridly ported multiplatform games I’ve played on this system, I’m always willing to give credit where credit is due for one actually optimized well XD

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Prototype 1 was a game I could barely stay interested in enough to finish, but Prototype 2 is a game I absolutely couldn’t put down. I’ve joked to friends that my review of this game is “imagine if Prototype 1 was actually good”, but that’s frankly a lot more honest an opinion than it sounds. The devs clearly took a long, hard look at what didn’t work with Prototype 1, and they really deftly fixed damn near every last little thing when putting this game together. Fun and engaging story, great smashy gameplay, and awesome movement tech make Prototype 2 a must-play if you’re a fan of this type of open-world game, and it’s a terrible shame that Radical Entertainment never got to make another one with just how well they’d polished up the formula for this game.

[TheSSNintendo]

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary (XBox One)