Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
* indicates a repeat
1. Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
2. We Were Here (Steam)
3. We Were Here Too (Steam)
4. Tales of Graces f (PS3) *
5. Retro Game Challenge (Switch) *
6. We Were Here Forever (Steam)
7. Tales of Hearts R (PSVita) *
8. Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered (PC)
9. Mega Man 11 (PC)
10. Gravity Circuit (PC)
11. Mario Party DS (DS)
12. Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)
13. Ghost of Tsushima: Iki Island (PS5)
14. Astro's Playroom (PS5)
15. Michael Jackson: The Experience (PSP)
16. Sackboy: A Big Adventure (PS5)
17. Control (PS4)
18. White Album (PS3)
19. Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (GBA)
20. Kirby's Epic Yarn (Wii)
21. Breath of Fire III (PSP)
22. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2) *
23. Sly 2: Band of Thieves (PS2)
24. Army of Two (Xbox 360)
25. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves (PS2)
26. Jak II (PS2)
27. Jak 3 (PS2)
28. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3)
29. Pokemon Sapphire (GBA)
30. Watch_Dogs (PS4)
31. Watch_Dogs: Bad Blood (PS4)
32. Legend of Hero Tonma (TG16)
33. Alan Wake: American Nightmare (PC)
34. Banjo-Tooie (N64) *
35. Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters (PSP)
36. Super Robot Spirits (N64)
37. Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii)
38. Tales of Arise (PS4)
39. Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex (PS2)
40. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PS5)
41. Battlefield 1 (PS4)
42. Quantum Break (Xbone)
43. Battlefield V (PS4)
After playing Battlefield 1 last week and being pretty thoroughly unimpressed with it, I learned that we had a copy of this game available locally for super cheap. Battlefield 1 had been surprisingly tasteless with some of its historical depictions, and hearing that this sequel didn’t just follow a similar formula but also had a whole mini-campaign where you played *as a Nazi* made me far too curious to let this game lie until some amorphous later date. I actually ended up coming away from this remarkably positively, which was a nice surprise after how underwhelming Battlefield 1 had been. It took me around 6 hours to play through all four mini-campaigns on normal difficulty playing the Japanese PS4 version of the game, in English, on my PS5.
Where Battlefield 1 took place in the barely explored in video games first World War, its sequel returns to the far more familiar second World War for its setting. However, just like Battlefield 1, rather than one long campaign to play through where we follow one character the whole time, we’re once again given a series of shorter, mini-campaigns following different soldiers in different areas of the war during different periods of the conflict. After a mandatory (even before the title screen) opening sequence where you have to play through a series of different soldiers (on different fronts at different times), you can play through any of the four campaigns you like in any order you want, and it’s a neat touch how they’ve decided to focus on far less commonly explored (at least in video games) areas of the conflict for their stories here: an SBS British soldier sabotaging North African Luftwaffe bases, a soldier in the Norwegian resistance taking out Nazi nuclear facilities, an African French colonial soldier participating in Operation Dragoon, and an increasingly conflicted Nazi tank commander at the very end of the war (facing a conflict he increasingly clearly cannot win).
While I found the intro sequence incredibly melodramatic and serious (it felt like being treated as if I’d never interacted with a piece of WW2 fiction before), the actual writing of each scenario after that was refreshingly far better. Battlefield 1’s mini-campaigns were almost all far too self-serious for what they were, and they were also largely very poor fits for the kind of story that you can tell effectively in just about an hour. Despite the rough first impression, Battlefield V manages to completely mend that problem, and I’d say all four of the campaigns have really solid writing and execution between them.
Putting the more humorous (and in English) mini-campaign first in the chronology (and therefore making it the first you’d likely play) makes for a really effective palette cleanser. It starts you off with a strong, funny, and well-tuned story about comradery and learning to understand one another that makes the following three more serious mini-campaigns’ relative seriousness hit far better than they likely otherwise would’ve. While I definitely didn’t think The Last Tiger, the Nazi tank commander one, was *that* special or well done, that isn’t so much due to its poor quality so much as the relatively strong writing of the whole game. It is still, nonetheless, true that I’ve seen narratives like The Last Tiger told more effectively elsewhere (even in video games), it’s still cool to see such a mass market product focusing on something like that (which is a similar sentiment I have to the rest of the stories told in this game). While I think the whole mini-campaign approach doesn’t have *particularly* long legs, it was very nice to see DICE pull it off *so* much better this time than they did in Battlefield 1. This is easily the strongest writing in one of DICE’s campaigns since Bad Company 1, and that is absolutely never something I expected to be able to say about a Battlefield campaign with how the previous decade’s campaigns had been ^^;
On a similarly positive note, Battlefield V’s campaign was also the most fun I’ve had *playing* a Battlefield campaign since Bad Company 1’s as well. The guns and driving all still feel as solid as they ever have (though there is pleasantly no extended plane-focused section, which I appreciated), but the biggest positive change from previous Battlefield games is the level design as well as the larger gameplay loop design. While there are linear sections as well, most of the campaigns interweave them with more open areas with objectives that you can tackle in whatever order you want (from whatever direction you want). This works particularly well when coupled with the new approach to stealth that this game takes.
You can still mark enemies and see objectives on your hud, but it’s a lot less plainly seen than Battlefield 1 had it. Not only does this open up your vision a lot more, but it’s also an important thing to factor in with just how easily your enemies can spot you. If you’re not fairly far away and/or your enemy gets nothing but the slightest glimpse of you, they’re going to at least go check out where you were. While I think they strike a good balance with player health of being tough enough to go loud if you’ve gotta but being squishy enough that a larger group encounter is still scary, the real fear with getting spotted is what the guys who *aren’t* fighting you are doing. If they can make it to an alarm, or, gods forbid, a radio, the reinforcements that arrive are almost certainly gonna REALLY mess you up (especially with how tough those flamethrower jerks are). All of this adds up to a really satisfying gameplay loop where you’re very effectively encouraged to scout out areas, look at patrol patterns, and time your strikes wisely if you don’t want to get mobbed to death when your enemy call in the cavalry.
Additionally, while I’ve maintained for a long time that the biggest weakness with the whole concept of a Battlefield single-player mode is that it inherently struggles very badly to show off the squad-based gameplay that the multiplayer modes are so compelling for, DICE comes as close as they’ve ever come to remedying that. The solution hasn’t come from how *you* and your squads work, though. It’s changes to how your *enemies* fight. You enemies fight in squads of medics, engineers, and more firepower-focused roles much like you’d see in a multiplayer map. Especially in big fire fights when you and/or your CPU allies have scouted the enemies’ roles, you’ll even get indicated which one is of which role so you can react accordingly. If you don’t want those jerks to get back on their feet, you better take out that medic. If you want that mortar fire to stop raining down on you, then popping that jerk with the bullets mark over his head is the main way to salvation. Combined with the better level design and good writing, it all makes for a really engaging and compelling experience that *also* manages to provide it all without just aping how Call of Duty designs its single-player modes. At least for DICE’s campaigns, this is the most fun I’ve had playing a Battlefield game in ages, and I frankly just wish there was more of it to play because it was put together so darn well X3
I gave Battlefield 1 a lot of flak for running and looking like crap on PS4 despite the year it came out, and Battlefield V has thankfully mostly fixed a lot of those problems. While there are still some texture pop-in and model pop-in issues, it’s nowhere near as comical as Battlefield 1’s campaign so often had it (even if I did once hit a bug that made a lot of my buttons just weirdly stop working fairly early on, a checkpoint reset thankfully fixed it XP). The music is fairly generic modern military shooter fare, but its still effective for what it is. My favorite part of the presentation was easily the voice acting, though. I’m not sure if this is the very first time we’ve had player characters in a Battlefield game who spoke (and spoke a lot) in their native non-English language, but this game has a TON of it and I found it really effective in constructing the respective atmospheres of the various mini-campaigns.
Verdict: Recommended. While this certainly isn’t climbing nearly to the modern FPS campaign highs of a CoD: Infinite Warfare, this is still easily the best single-player mode DICE had put together in the better part of a decade. It explores some very neat, underexplored areas of WW2, and it does it in a way that’s great fun to play as well. It’s a very effective blend of the satisfaction of the trial, error, and execution of a good stealth game with the smooth moment to moment gunplay of a modern FPS game. The game’s quite cheap these days, so if you’re a fan of modern FPS single-player modes, then this is a pretty damn fun one!
Where Battlefield 1 took place in the barely explored in video games first World War, its sequel returns to the far more familiar second World War for its setting. However, just like Battlefield 1, rather than one long campaign to play through where we follow one character the whole time, we’re once again given a series of shorter, mini-campaigns following different soldiers in different areas of the war during different periods of the conflict. After a mandatory (even before the title screen) opening sequence where you have to play through a series of different soldiers (on different fronts at different times), you can play through any of the four campaigns you like in any order you want, and it’s a neat touch how they’ve decided to focus on far less commonly explored (at least in video games) areas of the conflict for their stories here: an SBS British soldier sabotaging North African Luftwaffe bases, a soldier in the Norwegian resistance taking out Nazi nuclear facilities, an African French colonial soldier participating in Operation Dragoon, and an increasingly conflicted Nazi tank commander at the very end of the war (facing a conflict he increasingly clearly cannot win).
While I found the intro sequence incredibly melodramatic and serious (it felt like being treated as if I’d never interacted with a piece of WW2 fiction before), the actual writing of each scenario after that was refreshingly far better. Battlefield 1’s mini-campaigns were almost all far too self-serious for what they were, and they were also largely very poor fits for the kind of story that you can tell effectively in just about an hour. Despite the rough first impression, Battlefield V manages to completely mend that problem, and I’d say all four of the campaigns have really solid writing and execution between them.
Putting the more humorous (and in English) mini-campaign first in the chronology (and therefore making it the first you’d likely play) makes for a really effective palette cleanser. It starts you off with a strong, funny, and well-tuned story about comradery and learning to understand one another that makes the following three more serious mini-campaigns’ relative seriousness hit far better than they likely otherwise would’ve. While I definitely didn’t think The Last Tiger, the Nazi tank commander one, was *that* special or well done, that isn’t so much due to its poor quality so much as the relatively strong writing of the whole game. It is still, nonetheless, true that I’ve seen narratives like The Last Tiger told more effectively elsewhere (even in video games), it’s still cool to see such a mass market product focusing on something like that (which is a similar sentiment I have to the rest of the stories told in this game). While I think the whole mini-campaign approach doesn’t have *particularly* long legs, it was very nice to see DICE pull it off *so* much better this time than they did in Battlefield 1. This is easily the strongest writing in one of DICE’s campaigns since Bad Company 1, and that is absolutely never something I expected to be able to say about a Battlefield campaign with how the previous decade’s campaigns had been ^^;
On a similarly positive note, Battlefield V’s campaign was also the most fun I’ve had *playing* a Battlefield campaign since Bad Company 1’s as well. The guns and driving all still feel as solid as they ever have (though there is pleasantly no extended plane-focused section, which I appreciated), but the biggest positive change from previous Battlefield games is the level design as well as the larger gameplay loop design. While there are linear sections as well, most of the campaigns interweave them with more open areas with objectives that you can tackle in whatever order you want (from whatever direction you want). This works particularly well when coupled with the new approach to stealth that this game takes.
You can still mark enemies and see objectives on your hud, but it’s a lot less plainly seen than Battlefield 1 had it. Not only does this open up your vision a lot more, but it’s also an important thing to factor in with just how easily your enemies can spot you. If you’re not fairly far away and/or your enemy gets nothing but the slightest glimpse of you, they’re going to at least go check out where you were. While I think they strike a good balance with player health of being tough enough to go loud if you’ve gotta but being squishy enough that a larger group encounter is still scary, the real fear with getting spotted is what the guys who *aren’t* fighting you are doing. If they can make it to an alarm, or, gods forbid, a radio, the reinforcements that arrive are almost certainly gonna REALLY mess you up (especially with how tough those flamethrower jerks are). All of this adds up to a really satisfying gameplay loop where you’re very effectively encouraged to scout out areas, look at patrol patterns, and time your strikes wisely if you don’t want to get mobbed to death when your enemy call in the cavalry.
Additionally, while I’ve maintained for a long time that the biggest weakness with the whole concept of a Battlefield single-player mode is that it inherently struggles very badly to show off the squad-based gameplay that the multiplayer modes are so compelling for, DICE comes as close as they’ve ever come to remedying that. The solution hasn’t come from how *you* and your squads work, though. It’s changes to how your *enemies* fight. You enemies fight in squads of medics, engineers, and more firepower-focused roles much like you’d see in a multiplayer map. Especially in big fire fights when you and/or your CPU allies have scouted the enemies’ roles, you’ll even get indicated which one is of which role so you can react accordingly. If you don’t want those jerks to get back on their feet, you better take out that medic. If you want that mortar fire to stop raining down on you, then popping that jerk with the bullets mark over his head is the main way to salvation. Combined with the better level design and good writing, it all makes for a really engaging and compelling experience that *also* manages to provide it all without just aping how Call of Duty designs its single-player modes. At least for DICE’s campaigns, this is the most fun I’ve had playing a Battlefield game in ages, and I frankly just wish there was more of it to play because it was put together so darn well X3
I gave Battlefield 1 a lot of flak for running and looking like crap on PS4 despite the year it came out, and Battlefield V has thankfully mostly fixed a lot of those problems. While there are still some texture pop-in and model pop-in issues, it’s nowhere near as comical as Battlefield 1’s campaign so often had it (even if I did once hit a bug that made a lot of my buttons just weirdly stop working fairly early on, a checkpoint reset thankfully fixed it XP). The music is fairly generic modern military shooter fare, but its still effective for what it is. My favorite part of the presentation was easily the voice acting, though. I’m not sure if this is the very first time we’ve had player characters in a Battlefield game who spoke (and spoke a lot) in their native non-English language, but this game has a TON of it and I found it really effective in constructing the respective atmospheres of the various mini-campaigns.
Verdict: Recommended. While this certainly isn’t climbing nearly to the modern FPS campaign highs of a CoD: Infinite Warfare, this is still easily the best single-player mode DICE had put together in the better part of a decade. It explores some very neat, underexplored areas of WW2, and it does it in a way that’s great fun to play as well. It’s a very effective blend of the satisfaction of the trial, error, and execution of a good stealth game with the smooth moment to moment gunplay of a modern FPS game. The game’s quite cheap these days, so if you’re a fan of modern FPS single-player modes, then this is a pretty damn fun one!
This is a game I’ve known about (along with its GB original, Balloon Kid) for quite some time through an old YouTube review show I used to watch, but I never ended up grabbing it. This is such a neat color remake (only originally released through the old RAM cart download service Japan had for some old Nintendo systems) that I nearly bought it on the 3DS Virtual Console several times years back, but I never bit the bullet. I discovered that it came to the Switch Online service completely by accident, but that made for as great a reason to play it as ever. It ultimately took me a bit under an hour to finish the game without using save states or rewinds and only using two continues.
As with most old 8-bit action games, the premise here is pretty simple. A little girl, Alice, sees her little brother Jack swept away by the wind when he grabs a huge bunch of balloons. She grabs her own pair of balloons to take off with and flies after him. It’s a short and sweet premise for this silly action game, and it more than does the job that its asked. It’s also a very clever reimagining of Balloon Fight as a whole, as it’s not like the weird tournament setting of the original game would’ve lent itself super naturally to a stage-based single-player experience like this.
That stage-based experience is somewhat like the original Balloon Fight’s Balloon Trip mode (which this game also has, as it so happens), but with a lot more extra added in. Over the game’s 8 stages, you’ve got to make your way from the right side of the autoscrolling stage to the far left end, with every other stage having a boss. This is more than just plain ol’ Balloon Fight, though, and some rather clever additions to the formula make this game a meaningfully more complicated and difficult experience. For starters, losing your two balloons doesn’t kill you. Alice can not only walk along the ground, but if she loses her balloons, she’ll actually be fine as long as she lands on safe ground. Repeatedly pressing the down button will pump up another balloon, and as long as you aren’t hit before then, you can get right back to flying. You can even press B to ditch your balloons manually, and quite a few stages and secrets explicitly require this, as well. Heck, the bosses actually all require fighting balloon-less, so getting good at maneuvering without them is something you’ll have to get used to if you ever wanna see the end of this game.
Practice is definitely your friend here, because this game is pretty darn tough. The checkpoints are relatively common, and you’ve got infinite continues as well, but the old funky momentum and control of Balloon Fight has been reinvented all over again for the GameBoy, and there will be plenty of times where one flap of the arms too many will send you to your doom. The only real times you’ve got a chance to practice jumping around without your balloons are the harder parts where you’re forced to do it, so there are a fair few trials by fire (sometimes literally) you’ll have to bypass as soon as the first few stages. You’ve got all sorts of animals (including the ever sinister giant fish) out to get you as well as instant death lightning, fire, and falling spikes.
One of the few genuine mechanical additions to the original Balloon Kid that this version of the game offers is a world map screen and a save function. It’s a little bit overkill of a safety net, I think, but it at least makes it so you can go back and grind old stages for extra lives if you’re really having trouble, and you very well might need them with the last couple stages. The cave level in particular kicked my head in good with some of the treacherous turns they demand of you, and while the art style may be cutesy, this game will make sure you’ve darn near mastered the controls if you want to save Jack. Thankfully, you’ve got a little more than just the ability to grind for extra lives in your corner. There are balloons scattered through levels like coins in Mario, and collecting 20 in a row will make them all double. This seems like just something you’d do for points or extra lives, which is indeed the case, but collecting enough balloons without dying will spawn a special P balloon that’ll grant you quite a long lasting invincibility power up. It also makes the stage scroll a lot faster, but you’re SO invincible that it probably won’t put you in too much danger (and normal stages start scrolling that fast pretty early anyhow, so it likely won’t make much of a difference a lot of the time XD).
The graphics are pretty darn good. Balloon Kid was always a pretty nice looking game, and now it’s got loads of color and pretty backgrounds to make it look even nicer. The overall mechanics of the game haven’t particularly changed, though, and the early GameBoy-style jittery movement and few frames of animation are likely going to look rather strange against the nice new colorful backgrounds X3. The game still *plays* fine, of course, but the dissonance is pretty stark and rather immediate, so just don’t expect this game to play like a GBC game from 2000 just because that’s the platforming it was released on. The music is great, as one would expect from an early Nintendo title, and the GameBoy rendition of the original Balloon Fight themes is definitely an unoriginal but great highlight~.
Verdict: Recommended. As was so often the case, just because this is an early GB game (color or no), Balloon Kid, and by extension its color remake, still hold up really well. It’s short and sweet like so many early GB games are, but price is little worry given how easily its available on the Switch Online service these days. If you’re a fan of retro action games, this is a fun and novel one to check out if you’re like I was and haven’t gotten around to experiencing this classic yet~.
As with most old 8-bit action games, the premise here is pretty simple. A little girl, Alice, sees her little brother Jack swept away by the wind when he grabs a huge bunch of balloons. She grabs her own pair of balloons to take off with and flies after him. It’s a short and sweet premise for this silly action game, and it more than does the job that its asked. It’s also a very clever reimagining of Balloon Fight as a whole, as it’s not like the weird tournament setting of the original game would’ve lent itself super naturally to a stage-based single-player experience like this.
That stage-based experience is somewhat like the original Balloon Fight’s Balloon Trip mode (which this game also has, as it so happens), but with a lot more extra added in. Over the game’s 8 stages, you’ve got to make your way from the right side of the autoscrolling stage to the far left end, with every other stage having a boss. This is more than just plain ol’ Balloon Fight, though, and some rather clever additions to the formula make this game a meaningfully more complicated and difficult experience. For starters, losing your two balloons doesn’t kill you. Alice can not only walk along the ground, but if she loses her balloons, she’ll actually be fine as long as she lands on safe ground. Repeatedly pressing the down button will pump up another balloon, and as long as you aren’t hit before then, you can get right back to flying. You can even press B to ditch your balloons manually, and quite a few stages and secrets explicitly require this, as well. Heck, the bosses actually all require fighting balloon-less, so getting good at maneuvering without them is something you’ll have to get used to if you ever wanna see the end of this game.
Practice is definitely your friend here, because this game is pretty darn tough. The checkpoints are relatively common, and you’ve got infinite continues as well, but the old funky momentum and control of Balloon Fight has been reinvented all over again for the GameBoy, and there will be plenty of times where one flap of the arms too many will send you to your doom. The only real times you’ve got a chance to practice jumping around without your balloons are the harder parts where you’re forced to do it, so there are a fair few trials by fire (sometimes literally) you’ll have to bypass as soon as the first few stages. You’ve got all sorts of animals (including the ever sinister giant fish) out to get you as well as instant death lightning, fire, and falling spikes.
One of the few genuine mechanical additions to the original Balloon Kid that this version of the game offers is a world map screen and a save function. It’s a little bit overkill of a safety net, I think, but it at least makes it so you can go back and grind old stages for extra lives if you’re really having trouble, and you very well might need them with the last couple stages. The cave level in particular kicked my head in good with some of the treacherous turns they demand of you, and while the art style may be cutesy, this game will make sure you’ve darn near mastered the controls if you want to save Jack. Thankfully, you’ve got a little more than just the ability to grind for extra lives in your corner. There are balloons scattered through levels like coins in Mario, and collecting 20 in a row will make them all double. This seems like just something you’d do for points or extra lives, which is indeed the case, but collecting enough balloons without dying will spawn a special P balloon that’ll grant you quite a long lasting invincibility power up. It also makes the stage scroll a lot faster, but you’re SO invincible that it probably won’t put you in too much danger (and normal stages start scrolling that fast pretty early anyhow, so it likely won’t make much of a difference a lot of the time XD).
The graphics are pretty darn good. Balloon Kid was always a pretty nice looking game, and now it’s got loads of color and pretty backgrounds to make it look even nicer. The overall mechanics of the game haven’t particularly changed, though, and the early GameBoy-style jittery movement and few frames of animation are likely going to look rather strange against the nice new colorful backgrounds X3. The game still *plays* fine, of course, but the dissonance is pretty stark and rather immediate, so just don’t expect this game to play like a GBC game from 2000 just because that’s the platforming it was released on. The music is great, as one would expect from an early Nintendo title, and the GameBoy rendition of the original Balloon Fight themes is definitely an unoriginal but great highlight~.
Verdict: Recommended. As was so often the case, just because this is an early GB game (color or no), Balloon Kid, and by extension its color remake, still hold up really well. It’s short and sweet like so many early GB games are, but price is little worry given how easily its available on the Switch Online service these days. If you’re a fan of retro action games, this is a fun and novel one to check out if you’re like I was and haven’t gotten around to experiencing this classic yet~.
