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This and its sequel are both quit rare games here in Japan, so when I saw them both for super cheap a month or two ago, I snapped them up in a flash. These are some of the last Castlevania games I’ve never played, so I wasted no time in finding space in my gaming schedule for this. It took me around 7-ish hours to finish the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

Before Lords of Shadow retconned this out of canon, this was the original retcon for the start of the Castlevania lore timeline (itself replacing Legends). With his bride kidnapped by a foul vampire living in a forest of eternal night and the church being unwilling to permit action to save her, Leon Belmont casts off his titles and sets off on his own to save her. Along the way, he’s aided by a mysterious alchemist Rinaldo Gandolfi who gives him both a rundown of the situation in the castle as well as a special alchemical whip with the special power to harm creatures of darkness. With this setup, the stage is set for all the Castlevania to come (well, until Konami decided otherwise :b ).

The story in this game is, as with most of the IGA produced games, fairly light. We have a fairly small cast, and most of the characters in it only get one or two scenes where they ever get to talk at all. If you’re looking for some grand piece of narrative, you’re looking in the wrong place, but that’s not exactly unusual for a Castlevania game. The game’s relatively short runtime and fairly consistent cutscenes (long as they often are) give the story a pretty good sense of pacing despite how relatively far apart your periods of exposure to it are. I started things out quite lukewarm on this game’s story with just how long the opening cutscenes are, but I finished the game feeling very satisfied with how things had gone. While it may be nothing super special, the story ended up being very entertaining with how well directed the cutscenes and voice direction are. Igarashi may not be a fantastically deep storyteller or anything, but he and his team are nonetheless pretty darn good at putting on an entertaining show.

The gameplay for this is both very odd as well as very typical feeling for a PS2 action/adventure game. Much like the N64 Castlevania games had, you have a somewhat stage-based castle to explore. You’ve got your whip as your main weapon, and you can also find sub-weapons to hurl at enemies at the cost of hearts just like the 2D Castlevania games. You can also collect money to spend at Gandolfi’s store on better armor as well as healing items, and you’ll even get the uncommon loot drop from normal enemies you fight (but those are *very* uncommon in my experience). That said, as much as various aspects of this game were quite familiar to me, there were a lot more that were very interesting in their novelty.

At the start of the game, Gandolfi explains that our head non-Dracula vampire here has five main lackies that you’ll need to take out before the door to his part of the castle will open up. He wants to test the might of the hunters that come after him because this is all just a game to him (turns out eternal life is pretty darn boring). Each of these five bosses has a mostly linear stage leading up to it. However, unlike most games of this type from this era (or most others, frankly), you can actually choose whichever of these you want to play in any order. I was worried that this would end up giving the game a very uneven difficulty curve, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how well balanced the game felt as I just picked levels at random.

Much like the older Castlevania games, your power level at the start of the game really isn’t very meaningfully different than how it’ll be at the end of the game. That isn’t to say you don’t get any powerups at all, however. Every boss you defeat will give you a magic orb (just like the old games), and you can swap between these on the fly to change the type of attack that’ll come out of the sub-weapon you have equipped. While you do need to annoyingly re-find any sub-weapon you don’t have on you, just like the old games, their locations are helpfully automatically indicated on your map, and you can also revisit areas after completing them, so at least it’s not a memory test.

While they’re quite rare (I only ever found one other than the one they give you for free and the one in the shop), there are also relics which consume your MP. Defending against enemy attacks properly nets you MP, and then using your sub-weapon button while blocking activates your currently equipped weapon. I never found these terribly useful, but it’s something that seemed pretty key if you’re keen to play the game on harder difficulties and/or hunt for secret bosses. I never used any kind of guide for this game, so I only ended up finding one secret boss. He was both a pretty good fight as well as a benefactor of a new powerful whip upon killing him. The secrets in this game are often very well hidden behind pretty oblique puzzles, so either a hell of a lust for adventure (and patience) or a well-informed guide will be very valuable in hunting for them yourself.

Unlike earlier and later 2D Castlevania games of the era, this game doesn’t have any kind of experience point system or leveling up. At least, there isn’t a typical one. I have no idea what actually triggers it (unless it’s some invisible enemy counter or EXP gauge), but every so often killing an enemy would unlock a new attack skill for me. Sometimes these will be techniques like unlocking a dodge roll for you, but these are usually new combos for your whip. You have a light attack and heavy attack, and certain combinations of inputs will dish out very powerful special attacks. I’m really not one for technical action games, so this was quite intimidating at first, but I ended up having a lot of fun trying out the new skills and trying to incorporate them into my repertoire as felt advantageous. They were delt out at a very nice pace, and it helped keep combat fresh as well as provided welcome advantages against the stronger enemies you’ll have to face.

It's not all sunshine and roses with the game design, however. Before playing this, the main thing I’d read about this game was that, while the combat was quite fun and cool, the exploration was quite simplistic and boring (apparently because Igarashi’s team was given a handheld game’s budget for a console game, and they effectively had to choose to prioritize either combat or level design). That is more or less what I found to be the case. While they try and spice it up a bit with some interesting platforming sections here and there and just how deviously so many of the secrets are hidden, exploring the levels tends to be pretty dull.

Levels are generally just hallways connecting combat rooms, and sometimes you’ll have a platforming challenge instead of a combat room. The combat is pretty fun, so I didn’t mind it terribly much, but it still drags the pace of the game down quite badly, and it especially makes backtracking for secrets pretty horribly boring too. The game’s short length ends up keeping this from being an experience-destroyingly bad sin, but it’s still quite the weight around the game’s neck.

Then there’s the quite strange UI. The right stick actually doesn’t move the camera. This game uses a camera that focuses on the player and rotates depending on where you are in a room. It can be a little awkward to get used to, but it works remarkably well for what it is (likely due to the fairly simple level design). The soft lock-on system the combat uses works remarkably well too, in fact. What the right stick and D-pad actually do, however, is operate a quick menu for your items.

Without stopping the action at all, you can use this menu to do everything from swap orbs and relics to using your consumables. This is a neat system for a game this old, but you actually *can’t* use items or change equipment from the normal pause menu. You can check out what you have, sure, but if you want to actually do anything with them, it must be from the quick menu. These are things I ultimately got used to and didn’t mind, and I think they work quite well for how the game is put together, but your mileage will definitely vary for these depending on how you like your 3D action games.

The game’s presentation is a mixed bag. Visually, it’s a 2003 PS2 game and it really looks like it. This is usually fine, as the 3D models and enemy designs are well put together and animated for the time, and they still look quite nice as long as you don’t mind graphics that aren’t photo realistic. The pre-rendered models in cutscenes, however, can look a bit janky and weird sometimes. Human and humanoid models in particular, with some faces looking very strange as they animate. The music, however, is top heckin’ notch, and easily one of the game’s strongest aspects. The soundtrack combined with the good cutscene direction and (Japanese) voice work really sold the story to me in a big way, and I couldn’t imagine the game without them.

A final note about the voice and language stuff is that this is one of very few games I’m aware of (from before the blu-ray and digital distribution age, anyhow) that actually has the Japanese and English voice acting on the same disc for the original Japanese release. Not only that, but you can actually swap the language setting for the voice acting, in-game text, *and* subtitles independently from the game’s main menu. It’s not something that most people will care about or use, but it’s something that I appreciate a lot, and I wanted to give credit where credit is due for such a well-done touch to the game’s language accessibility.

Verdict: Recommended. While the review was pretty glowing, I’ll admit, this game isn’t *that* great. The slowness of that exploration is a constant and inescapable problem, and just how slow your character moves through these massive expanses is an aspect of the game that no one could possibly ignore. That said, I think the game’s high points are still very well done, and they ultimately manage to carry the game as well as they need to. The game’s short length also keeps the weak level design from outstaying its welcome too badly, even if I’ll admit I was getting a bit bored with it by the end. It’s far from the greatest game in this style on the PS2, but I think it does a good job of prioritizing design where it really counts, and it does a good job of being a fun, short game to spend a weekend on.

This is a game quite rare and expensive in Japan, and I had given up hope long ago of ever actually playing it. However, I happened upon a copy at an incredible price locally a few weeks back, and I snapped it up at lightning speed. I had lukewarm but ultimately positive feelings about Lament of Innocence, and I had heard from basically all my friends who’d played it that this game was at least a little better than that one, so I went in with good expectations if nothing else. It took me around 14 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

A sequel to Castlevania III, this game follows Hector. A former servant of Dracula, he cast away his title after a betrayal from his former comrade Isaac. Now a mere shadow of his former power, he’s chasing after Isaac on an initially unclear mission of revenge. However, Isaac has much larger plans (that may even go as far as involving the recently re-slain Dracula :O ), and it’s up to Hector the demonic forger to put a stop to this evil plotting hellbent on humanity’s destruction.

I found the writing in Lament of Innocence typically shallow for a Castlevania game but ultimately paced well enough that I enjoyed it. This game is about twice the length of that one (or much longer if you’re going for all the crazy hard post-game and optional stuff), and while it has about as much narrative as Lament of Innocence did, it’s paced much more poorly as a result. The cast here is actually smaller than LoI’s was, but this has a lot more characters who pop up repeatedly over the course of the story. As a result, I had a pretty hard time even keeping track of whom I was meant to be fighting because these characters are so shallow and hard to care about. It’s not an awful or gross story by any means, and it does have some cool twists and big events in the plot, but I ended up finding it hit a fair bit weaker than its predecessor. I never expected it to be some thematically deep masterwork of fiction, as none of these old Iga Castlevania games are, but where LoI at least managed to keep me entertained and engaged, this game soundly failed to do it nearly as well.

Mechanically, this is a very odd game to talk about in the context of its predecessor, because it feels like two steps forward just as much as it does two steps back. For every problem or wrinkle we’ve solved and ironed out, we’ve ended up making a new one in its place. In the broad strokes of things, the games are quite similar as an action/adventure game. You’ve got fairly linear stages with some light exploration elements but are mostly just combat or platforming rooms connected by corridors. This game doesn’t have the ability to choose the order you want to play the stages in like LoI did, however.

This has a larger, somewhat interconnected map with a warp system, which makes it something like a merging of the usual 2D Iga-vania design and LoI’s map design. I found that, while the level design is a little tighter than the last game’s, the much longer length of this game made that tighter design really not matter much by the game’s midway point. Exploration is still dreadfully slow and plodding, and backtracking is even worse. We have fundamentally still failed to actually mend the gap between 3D gameplay and the classic Iga-vania gameplay loop of recursive exploration, and the longer length of this game makes you feel that much harder by the end.

Another thing that drives home that tedium is the new crafting system. Rather than just a couple whips with two attack buttons like LoI had, this game only gives you one attack button. You’ve got a *sort of* second button for combat, but it’s only used to finish smaller combos, so the overall combat ends up being a lot more shallow than the previous game’s. However, what we’ve received in exchange is that you have the choice between several different weights/speeds of sword, axe, spear, and fist weapons with some special unique weapons thrown in to boot. The actual depth of the combat of each of these weapons is nowhere near the depth of your singular weapon you had in LoI, but at least you have a lot of options to pick from to tackle whatever enemy you happen to be facing at the moment.

However, I mentioned tedium, and this is where it is. While there are a scant few weapons that can be found or bought, the large majority of your weapons and armor are going to be crafted by you. Most side-paths and enemy drops are going to yield crafting ingredients, and as you find new ingredients new recipes will be automatically unlocked for you to try and do. There are over 100 possible recipes to make, so the sheer variety is pretty strong, but the fact of the matter is that grinding for these crafting ingredients is mind-numbing boredom.

This goes extra bad with how many rare crafting ingredients are hidden behind the game’s dreadful stealing mechanic. When you’re locked on to an enemy, sometimes the targeting reticule will go purple. This is your cue to press the O button and, if you’re close enough, steal that enemy’s bespoke stealable item (or money). Money is largely useless with how little you can actually buy, so those crafting ingredients are what you’re after, and they’re generally a massive chore to accumulate in any meaningful number, and there are a lot of crafting ingredients that you’ll want a lot of that can only be acquired this way. The lock-on system is also awkward and unhelpful, and despite how you actually have a fully controllable camera in this game (as opposed to the fixed camera angled of the last game), I found the camera far more frustrating to deal with in CoD than I ever did in LoI.

Ultimately, even as a non-fan of technical 3D action games or fighting games, I found the exchange of a deeper single-weapon combat for a large variety of very shallow weapons to be a trade of very poor value. Particularly combined with just how much longer this game is, it was a system I got bored with very quickly with how few new weapons I found actually worth using (the power gaps between what you have and what you find are pretty uncompelling pretty quickly, and I ended up using the sword that’s +20 power and +10 defense for nearly the entire game), which made the whole process of finding new loot one I could barely care about.

However, there’s another new facet to combat that’s a very mixed bag too: The I.D. system. Standing for “Innocent Demon”, this is what it means to be a demon forger. Over the course of the game, you find various IDs in special rooms (usually as your reward for beating a boss). You can have one of these guys out at a time, and they’ll both passively boost your stats as well as fight alongside you. This game ditches the sub-weapons from Lament of Innocence, and these new IDs are what consume hearts in this game, as hearts you find from enemies and such are both their health bar as well as their ammo for their special abilities. You can either set them to automatically use these special abilities or have them controlled manually, though I found it easiest to just control them manually.

IDs can also evolve as you fight alongside them. This is an RPG much like the other Iga-vanias, so unlike Lament of Innocence, you’ve got EXP and level ups. Your demons do too, but all their level impacts is how big their stats are as well as how much of a passive stat boost they give you. As you kill enemies, they’ll drop special crystals depending on the type of weapon you have equipped. Collecting enough of a particular type will make your ID evolve in one of two possible paths, and each of them has 4 or 5 possible ultimate evolutions you can attain for them. Each ID has 3 or 4 evolutionary stages, and each stage has another 2 possible special powers they can unlock. It all adds up for a lot of possibilities, and they’ll even lay eggs from time to time that you can use to start raising up a new one if you want a particular final evolution of that type of ID rather than the one you currently have.

Different specific powers can serve as traversal tools or powers to open up certain doors, and very specific powers held by certain final or near-final evolutions is what locks away many of the game’s most hidden secrets. However, I found this just one more excuse to grind. While the IDs are a neat type of addition to this genre of game, they’re wildly unbalanced and a pain to grind up and evolve. Many bosses are either quite to very difficult to fight normally, or they’re incredibly trivialized by utilizing a particular ID’s special power (and the final boss himself is no exception).

Grinding up new IDs to unlock secrets is a miserable chore in a game that’s already fairly tough and will likely see you having to do at least some grinding for harder bosses, but that’s on top of how their evolution system itself is in direct conflict with the way the weapon system works. They get specific kinds of crystals depending on the type of weapon you’re using. Even if you don’t care what final evolution they’ll have, it’ll take longer for them to evolve if you’re swapping weapons constantly and thinning out the amounts of one particular group of crystals they’re gaining. I felt very heavily discouraged from trying out or learning new types of weapons (regardless of how necessary the defense buff from my favorite sword was) because that would mean all of the sword crystals they’d earned so far would be meaningless.

The ID system is cool, but it’s far too unbalanced and does not add a meaningful amount of depth to make up for how shallow the combat otherwise is. Additionally, the way they evolve makes the already questionable value of the great amount of shallow weapons that much more dubious as it discourages weapon switching to prioritize your very strong ID buddies. I know a good few friends who’ve played this game and really enjoyed the ID system and all the new variety, but it just was not for me. Perhaps had they made another game with these systems they could’ve polished things up to the point that the whole system felt worth it, but as is, Curse of Darkness is a hodge podge of vaguely related systems whose relation to one another is far too poorly thought out to actually justify their respective inclusions.

Aesthetically, we have yet another weird and uneven comparison to the previous game. Visually speaking, this game is pretty easily the superior to its predecessor and very much talks the talk and walks the walk of how you’d expect this kind of PS2 game to look by 2005. Animations are great, and character models (particularly human ones) look far better than they did in the previous game. That said, while the voice acting is still very good, the real loser here is the music. It’s not a bad soundtrack, but it’s nowhere near the equal of LoI’s, and that was a real bummer after what a strong soundtrack that game had.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is far from bad, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who could play both this and Lament of Innocence and find this game the stronger of the two, but I’m just not one of those people. I found CoD’s combat system a flashier yet mechanically stark downgrade to the one in the previous game, and the game’s significantly longer length (not to mention numerous grinding-focused systems) only made that all the more boring to deal with. If you’re a Castlevania fan, it’s probably still worth your time to try out both of them, as I will admit that I’m in the minority in preferring LoI over this, but if your tastes are anything like mine, you’ll likely question why you’re even still playing this game far before you reach the ending.

1. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Cynically, in the modern chapters, this game even admits that it's a commercially pedestrian blockbuster. It depicts history wrongly all the time, so there's little value in that. Purely as a game, it's mostly the same as the previous games, which means gameplay is automatic and shallow, while you hoover up symbols on your map. The only thing going for it would be the ship battles, which while sluggish and imprecise, are still somewhat novel and explosive. In about forty hours of play time, I think I had about an hour of fun being a pirate.
4/10

2. Minecraft
I was extremely pleasantly surprised at how much respect the game had for the player's ingenuity. The tutorial is merely some pages you can find in the options menu. You have minutes to set up a safe haven, preferably with a bed and torches, with little to no instructions. Dying halves your experience points and leaves all your gear scattered about. Although randomly generated, there's always a feeling you might find something unique. The final boss is a treat, being open ended and seemingly insurmountable at first. There's a lot of random stuff that can set you back a couple of hours back, which keeps the challenge honest and respectful. However, it is still a game about crafting, meaning half the time you'll be doing busywork and clicking around in menus.
8/10

3. Street Fighter 6
Link combos now have a three frame buffer, while the super meter(s) allow many alterations to your moves. Competitively, this means you'll spend less time practicing the same combos over and over, and instead practicing reading different situations. With less neutral and much more creativity, this makes Street Fighter more like the other anime fighters. Which while a good thing, makes me wonder why this should be played at all. The answer is the masses: the single player mode is a poor man's Yakuza, but nevertheless will feed the tournament scene with plenty of folks confident enough they'll want to compete.
8/10

4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Is this a recruitment ad for the US Army? The production values are very impressive. Obviously, the game propels you forward, set piece to set piece, always giving you blockbuster flare. Occasionally, precision and strategy is required, and everything falls apart. Perhaps the lack of clarity and random nature of the enemies is realistic, but it does not make the challenge engaging. Luckily, it's over within a couple of hours. I hear the multiplayer was popular. Perhaps, but I doubt there's a reason to play this over Counter Strike or Quake.
3/10

5. Felvidek
A brisk 'Japanese' RPG instead located in Hungary, as its name implies. It delights in its historic background, where the church is at odds with cultists, and the monarchy at odds with the peasantry. The combat might just be barely strategic enough to keep the fights interesting, but this leaves more headspace for the eccentric narrative. Both silly and serious themes are explored, with intriguing writing and distinctive artistry. It's no Disco Elysium or Undertale, but if you want more in the same vein, a must play.
7/10

6. Blazing Lazers
Hectic and sharp, this is everything you could hope a 16-bit shmup can be. At times there might be too much going on, while you're bomb attack is too slow, but otherwise the difficulty is mostly fair. Space Megaforce has more interesting weapon choices, and MUSHA has more pizazz, but this one is still almost as good and definitely a step up from earlier Zanac/Aleste games.
7/10

7. Company of Heroes
On paper this sounds like any other RTS, but this one has a bombast to it that makes everything feel urgent, hence its popular appeal. The campaign benefits from high production values, enhancing the historic significance of the battles. There's an extra emphasis on controlling many different parts of the map for resources, and less on building structures, making skirmishes action packed. Still, I'd recommend only trying out single player, as CoH3 and SC2 have better competitive scenes.
8/10

8. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The amount of personality is commendable, but that's really all this 'game' has to offer. You can't help but feel like half the time you're just doing mundane tasks. And for what? Happy emotes and the occasional joke? Perhaps being able to show off your creativity with online friends. Fundamentally, this genre is flawed due to being in a medium that limits expression to moving things around and making extremely simple dialogue choices. Still, picked up at the right time in small bursts, there's no denying it's a charming experience. And for what it's worth, there is more to see and do than in the prequels.
6/10

9. Shatterhand
The risk/reward element of short ranged attacks works better in Zelda II and Ninja Gaiden due to them having defensive options. Shatterhand relies a lot on speed and brute strength, which is exciting, but also tense. The upgrades are awkward to yield and keeping them around is even harder. There's a lot of potential here: think Mega Man with fists and body extensions. And while the execution is polished on a surface level, the combat is too frustrating to make it a classic.
5/10

10. CyberPunk 2077
Amazingly ambitious, just seeing the effort put into this is a marvel. Goes beyond the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher III in almost every way, and thankfully, also in terms of gameplay and emergency. Unfortunately, the whole thing buckles under its own weight, as it's clear that the design process was hacked into parts for delegation. So don't expect level design as bold and organic as in Deus Ex, and systems working as well together. But there's still a lot to toy around with, and often enough make a choice with emotional weight.
8/10

11. Wario Land 4
Despite being the third iteration as a costume-based puzzle platformer, design is still rather tame and in stark contrast with the its exuberant personality. Some of the later levels dare the player to think twice, but never are you allowed to attempt things creatively. Still, it's a highly saccharine trip and you can't help but feel glee as Wario plows through ancient ruins with reckless abandon. Great bosses, too!
7/10

12. SUGAR (Jen Simpkins)
This interaction fiction is so short, it borders on being poetry. No matter, every second is gripping, as is every branch in the narrative. We already knew she was a talented writer as editor of Edge. I can only hope Jen's talents make it into other games. And you get to be a sex worker that eats the rich, indeed a very wholesome topic.
7/10

13. Earthbound
The best parts are when it subverts genre conventions, but rarely does it subvert gaming conventions. This tragically leaves the experience emotionally bound to 90's Japanese role playing games. Which in turn might ironically create its charm: it's yet another go at one of these, only this time everything's a bit different, making it both familiar and odd at the same time. The overworld portions are memorable, the combat isn't.
6/10

14. Venba
The cooking is surprisingly involving, as the meals have an existential weight to them. The cut-scenes between them are just barely long enough to get you interested in the next family conundrum. In the end, it's a bittersweet tale you can almost smell at times. And yes, you unlock a cook book at the end to add these recipes to your own memories.
7/10

15. Mario Kart 8
Now with more pizazz!! Luigi's Death Stare(tm) will never get old. And all the Nintendo characters having political alignments is hilarious. Toadette for life. /raisefist
7/10

16. Super Mario 64
Are you into speedrunning? Then this is the golden standard. There's boundless creativity in the movement options and oddball architecture. But as an adventure, this one quickly loses steam, as the horrendous camera does not gel well with the demanding platforming found in later stages. Most of the enjoyment comes from seeing how Nintendo got the most personality out of limited polygons. Often, the compromises create fantastic 90's SGI landscapes, which are a pleasure to trek through.
6/10

17. Resident Evil 2 Remake
There's something cozy about turning an unsafe area (in this case, the police station) into an orderly safe haven. The power fantasy is domestic: it's not that the place is empty, it's just under control. As the narrative delves deeper and astray into lacklustre areas and explanations, this one devolves into run-of-the-mill post-RE4 Resident Evil. The Claire run fares better thanks to the girl's side-missions.
5/10

18. Fantastic Dizzy
Stupid puzzles and annoying platforming are combined into something more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps the anticipation of seeing if your solution actually works is heightened by putting dexterous challenges in your way. And there's adorkable energy abound, as the Darling Brothers yet again shamelessly slap together a jury-rigged budget title according to a proven formula. While it is not recommended to be played, it should nevertheless never be forgotten.
5/10

19. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
A commercially injected by-the-numbers kitchen-sink metroidvania: doing everything as expected, and meticulously programmed. Of course, Ubisoft doesn't understand that it's mystery that ignites a sense of adventure (as done in Super Metroid and Hollow Knight), so its predictability makes everything feel redundant. And yet, you get a bunch of moves to play around with, while the developers went ham with exploiting tightly designed obstacles.
7/10

20. Chess 2: The Sequel
Easily the best Chess variant ever made. Some of these rules should at the very least be instituted in normal play (like winning by crossing the mid-line with your king). David Sirlin yet again amazes by adding five new armies to choose from. No need to memorize opening moves, and mid-game excitement is practically the whole game. Tragically so good, it exposes Chess's fundamental flaws. By turning the classic into a modern strategy game, one starts to realize that Chess was never really that interesting for competition. Its main attraction was that it's a rabbit-hole that has been studied for centuries.
7/10

21. Project Gotham Racing 4
PGR's last hurrah is more of the same, only this time flashier. Going down to 30 fps wasn't worth it though. There's fun to be had, climbing the ladder and fantasizing about the rivalries you make. One of the more demanding racing games, the repetition rewards the player with excellence. The kudo system, bikes, and alternative objectives keep the racing fresh. Unfortunately a bit too gimmicky for a sense of simulation, but too serious for pure fun.
6/10

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)

I’d played this game briefly on Switch Online a couple years back, but I never felt like I properly beat it. This is another pretty easily and cheaply found game around these parts, and with my recent kick on N64 racing games, it only made sense to track this one down and finally play it. I’ve only ever heard great things and that it’s a must-own classic on the console, so it was about time I got around to getting and playing it anyhow. It took me around 2 hours and 40 minutes to beat all three of the default difficulties of the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

As is the case with most racing games, there’s no real story to speak of here. There’s jet ski races to be done, and by gods, you’re here to do them! There are three difficulties of grand prix to try out with 6, 7, and 8 races to go through respectively. Those aren’t unique races for each one, mind you, as the hard and expert tracks just add one more track each to give the game a total of 8 tracks. 8 tracks is hardly the biggest number on the console, and it also makes for quite the brutal gauntlet for a grand prix format, but for such an early game and such a unique concept, it’s pretty easy to be happy with that amount of content.

This is especially true because I’ve also not been *entirely* honest with how many tracks there are. While it’s true that there are only 8 tracks to race on, they’re actually not identical between difficulties (even accounting for the mirror mode prix which is just expert difficulty tracks and AI but mirrored). While it’s true that the racers you’re pitted against are more skilled and ruthless opponents, the tracks themselves do change a bit from difficulty to difficulty. In some tracks, it’s a simple a change as a ramp being moved farther away to make a shortcut more difficult, and, in others, mines may be added where before there were none. However, the biggest change and one of the most unique aspects of how Wave Race 64 is designed is the buoy system.

Each race has a number of buoys scattered along the racetrack that dictate how you need to move through it. Yellow ones with big Ls on them need to be gone around on the left, and red ones with Rs naturally need to be gone around on the right. Your jet ski starts the race with a certain amount of power, and if you press A at the right moment, you’ll start with a higher amount. More power means more acceleration and top speed for your jet ski, so you always want all the power you can have. Taking the right way around a buoy increases your current power by 1 for a maximum of 5, but missing a single buoy drops you back down to minimum power.

Not only will you have a hard time keeping up when you’re slowed down that much, but missing 5 buoys over the course of a race will automatically disqualify you, so it pays to be careful beyond simple matters of speed. However, this means that you can also form strategies around which buoys are safe to potentially miss, and this is extra important for the harder versions of tracks. Buoy placement gets absolutely brutal on harder difficulties, and mastering how to turn properly to take them without falling off of your jet ski will be key to finding success against the tougher AI.

This game has an honestly amazing amount of depth and nuance for how early a 3D racing game it is on the hardware. They really go all out on making it feel like you’re racing on a jet ski, not in a car, and getting to grips with how this kind of racing works may take a while, but it’s super satisfying once you get it down. For starters, racing on a jet ski means you’re leaning on your craft to take sharp turns much like you would on a bike. Being delicate with how far to the side and how far back you tilt the joystick will be critical so you can take those hard turns without falling off of your craft. It’s not a game over if you fall, but it’s wasting precious seconds as you climb back on to get going again.

Then you have the titular waves of this race. While they’re not generated dynamically or randomized, just how jostled you can get by your opponents means that its difficult to know just how the waves will be at a particular time around a particular bit of track. This means that outright memorization of a track to race at it better is much trickier than it is in most other racing games, and learning to adapt on the fly to how the waves happen to be tossing you at any moment is the much safer strategy when you’re practicing to get better times on tracks.

Then you have the mere fact that you’re on a jet-powered watercraft and not a wheeled land vehicle. You don’t have any functional way to brake on a jet ski, so knowing when to let off the gas to slow down and turn more harshly (without falling off!) is what will save you on harsh turns rather than any brake button. Additionally, because they lack wheels or a rudder, jet skis turn by changing the direction of their propulsion. What that means for you is that letting off the gas to glide around a turn like you would in a car is impossible here, as turning is nearly impossible once you let off the gas. Add in more subtle mechanics like tapping B to ignore waves slightly more and pressing R to “glide” across water for sharp turns, and you’ve got a ton to master on these 8 tracks for the truly dedicated.

Things don’t stop there either. There are four different playable characters, and each of them has significantly different stats for how their bike handles. I chose Hayami, the all-rounder as my racer of choice, but that was largely because learning how to use any of the others was too difficult for me XP. This is very much a case where lacking the precision of the original N64 joystick (my controller has a hall effect replacement stick) was really hurting me, as it made tiny adjustments from neutral nearly impossible compared to how delicately I *needed* to be turning for characters with greater turning ability than what I was used to. You can also tweak the handling of each craft ever so slightly for each racer, but all these really amount to is micro adjustments to things like turning or drifting sacrificed for a tiny bit more top speed.

The game doesn’t have in-game credits anywhere, and I very nearly gave up trying to beat expert difficulty because it was just so difficult (and beating it on hard and normal was effectively beating it anyhow, at least for the purposes of a review like this). Part of this was down to just how tough the AI can be on harder difficulties. They don’t seem like they try to, but they can smash in to you mid-race and really ruin your time, so treating them with caution is important to good performance. That said, they can and will mess each other up too, and there was more than one important expert-mode race I only clinched victory in thanks to a last-second wipe out by the competition. It makes the AI feel far more like real racers rather than just perfect computers who exist simply to ruin your day, and it’s an aspect of the game’s challenge I really enjoyed.

Probably the hardest thing about the grand prix, however, is how they calculate your score. Scoring higher than the other racers doesn’t actually really matter. What allows you to progress to the next race is a game-enforced score quota, and if you don’t have enough points, you’ll be given a game over. It doesn’t matter how badly you’re thrashing the CPUs by in terms of points. If you haven’t hit that quota, you’ve gotta start over from the beginning, and that can just get so demoralizing and annoying. It makes the very well designed, fallible AI feel almost pointless when the actual structure of the game forces them to feel more like just obstacles here to ruin your day. No amount of competition against your fellow racers will help you to victory other than just placing higher in races, and that’s easily the aspect of this game’s design I care for the least with just how many races these grand prix have (especially with just how demoralizing it is to game over thanks to an unlucky wipeout out of nowhere caused by another racer on the 7th race of .

Aesthetically, the game is pretty incredible for the time. This is a very early N64 game, but the animations on the human models (from how they spin tricks in the trick modes to how they clamber up onto their jet skis when they fall) are really well done. The way the waves move and affect your craft is also very well communicated, and the art style holds up great as a result. The music accompanies it very well too. The same guy who did these tracks went on to do the Wii Sports music many years later, and it fits the action perfectly. All bundled together with the high energy announcer (a feature which I always love in a game like this), and you have a great soundtrack and sound design to go with your great graphics.

Verdict: Recommended. The main thing that keeps me from recommending this game any higher is just how awkward it can be to learn it. While “it’s like you’re really racing on a jet ski!” is one of the biggest one-word commendations I can give this game, it’s simultaneously its biggest fault. That combined with just how frustrating the scoring and win conditions on the grand prix can feel on harder difficulties can definitely sour the experience for someone hoping to just hop in and mess around without wanting to give a fair amount of time and effort to learning the game’s best practices (and the lack of a 4-player mode on such a 4-player-tastic console doesn’t exactly give this game any extra points either). That said, if you’re looking for a more novel and unconventional approach to a racing game, there’s a ton to dig into and enjoy here, and it’s no surprise to me that this game had and maintains the excellent reputation it does~.

I played Jinsei Game 64, the Takara-developed N64 adaptation of their Game of Life series, a couple years back thinking it was this game. I’d heard that there were two Game of Life games on the N64 and that the Taito-developed one was better, but I just assumed they were both Game of Life, so how different could it really be? That was until I actually saw footage of this game (and then later researched it). Despite the similar titles, the Bakushou Jinsei games actually have no connection whatsoever to Jinsei Game or The Game of Life (despite being in a similar genre). Furthermore, this game in particular shares virtually no mechanical connections with the other Bakushou Jinsei games outside of being board games.

This game, dear reader, is much closer to a very different and favorite board game video game of mine: Fortune Street. After learning that, I ordered this game immediately because I absolutely adore these kinds of economy board games X3. Playing on original hardware, I spent around 24 or so hours with this game between the few games I played for fun and the 18 or so hours I spent playing through the tournament mode to get the credits.

There really isn’t any story to speak of with this game, which is pretty typical for a board game (unless you’re Dokapon Kingdom, I suppose). The title of this game spells out the objective pretty clearly: Aim to be king of resorts! You’re one of four players in a tiny village going around a board buying property trying to do just that. There are 16 playable characters and 8 playable maps (with one only unlocked after you’ve beaten tournament mode). If you hit the wealth goal for that map and make it back to the bank, or if you’re the player with the highest net worth once the first player goes bankrupt, then you win! That’ll likely sound pretty familiar to anyone who’s played Monopoly or Fortune Street, but this game is a very interesting variation on both of those formulas, and it ends up offering a very compelling alternative.

If you’re familiar with the other two games I keep mentioning, then the central mechanic of landing on a property and buying it if it’s unowned will be very familiar to you, and the notion of trying to get the full set for a significant value bonus will be just as familiar. I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise that landing on an opponent’s space will make you pay them money, either. Fortune Street veterans will also find the mechanic of buying and selling stocks throughout the game to be nothing strange either. However, Bakushou Jinsei 64 takes these familiar concepts and takes them in very different directions to what you’re used to.

Take the whole mechanic of getting a “monopoly”, or getting all colors in a particular property set. In a game like Monopoly or Fortune Street, they’ll increase in value significantly and the opportunity to directly invest in them isn’t anything new to you. However, in those games, the properties still exist independently. You can directly invest in a particular property in Fortune Street to up its value or build houses or hotels on particular spaces in Monopoly, but that’s not how things work here. Upon getting all colors in a set in Bakushou Jinsei 64, the little bungalows on them are immediately bulldozed and they’re combined into a unified lot. This lot has its own value across all spaces it occupies, and it is completely impossible to separate this lot back into its component pieces. That’s because you’re here to be the king of resorts, and that means building lavish hotels for prospective guests!

In other games of the genre, you generally can invest in your own properties whenever it’s your turn. In this game, however, you can only do that when you land on one of your other properties, which heavily incentivizes owning more property than just the big hotel (or several) you’re going to try to build up to wreck the other unlucky players with. Upon choosing to build a hotel, you actually get to pick which one you want to build. Each map has a selection of different hotels you can build, and hotels with more expensive initial costs will reap much greater rewards when landed on. However, most hotels need to be upgraded at least once before they can get you anything meaningful, so factoring in that more expensive upgrade cost for a more expensive hotel is important too. Building the hotel on more expensive land in the first place will make the price it costs to stay there more expensive as well, so location is a very important factor too!

Factoring that in with how some lots are just 2 spaces wide while some later maps have lots that are 5 whole spaces, and you’ve got a lot of potential decisions to make when you’re trying to aim for your own lot. However, you absolutely don’t need to rely entirely on your own luck of rolling the dice to get a lot. Sure, you can trade for stuff with other players, but where’s the fun in that? Much like other games of this type, upon landing upon an opponent’s space, you have the option to forcibly buy them out for three times the bank value of that property. It doesn’t matter if it’s a single bungalow or a whole 5-space lot (or even a hotel, actually). If the person who lands upon it has the cash on hand to buy you out, there’s nothing stopping them from stealing your stuff, so expediency is everything if you don’t want to get your precious lot stolen out from under you!

However, losing your lot or having someone else get a lot before you is far from the end of the world thanks to the stock market. Fortune Street has a stock exchange system as well, but it’s very meaningfully different from this game’s. In Fortune Street, individual districts can be invested in, and buying stocks in them will make the stock price go up. A higher stock price also means the fees for landing on those districts’ spaces goes up too, creating an ecosystem of investment, stock price, and landing price. Bakushou Jinsei 64 goes about this *completely* differently.

Instead of districts having their own respective stock prices, the only stocks to be bought are in players. A player is their own company, and any player can buy stock in any of those 4 companies (including their own). Buying or selling stocks will affect the stock price, but so does buying shops or building hotels. Shops are expensive and dangerous as far as normal spaces go, and buying one will make your stock price shoot up a lot (you can even place franchises of one in open floors of hotels for a little change off the top if you want), but they’re small potatoes compared to hotels. If someone is likely to build a hotel soon, you want to invest BIG in their company immediately, because that will make their stock price explode. Once you’ve got all those nice healthy stocks, you can then sell them to make a fat profit that you can use to buyout enemy spaces and fund your own hotel creation.

This makes a completely different ecosystem than what Fortune Street makes with its stocks and spaces, as stock price has no effect of any kind on the value of the lands its connected to. The only thing that will make the penalty for landing on a space go up is direct investment in it by the owner. Stocks can only be bought at the exchange space, but they can be sold anywhere. There’s nothing stopping you from pumping money into a prospectively healthy stock any time you pass the stock exchange and then dumping it as soon as the money starts flowing in. Investing heavily in an opponent can very actively discourage them from building or upgrade hotels because they’re trying to deny their investors funds, but there’s only so long you can have your money not working for you and sitting fallow in your pockets.

A big reason for this is due to how the bank works in this game. Much like how passing the GO space in Monopoly works, passing the bank in this game gives you a big chunk of money. However, that money is far from consistent, as it’s actually a calculated payout based on how your assets are doing. There’s an initial bonus from the bank, and that’ll almost always be more than any fees you have, but you actually have to pay property taxes on any space you own, and you’ve got to pay maintenance fees on any hotels or shops you own too. This means that owning expensive, unupgraded shops and hotels is actually a very expensive position to be in, because your less well landed opponents will be raking in far more money every lap around the board while your big spaces just make your bonuses lighter and lighter. I really love this mechanic, as it’s a great risk reward between gaining money and the usual security of denying other players land that comes naturally from being a big landholder in these kinds of economy games.

Overall, I really love the systems that Taito put together here. While I do miss the more connected property and stock ecosystem of Fortune Street (and don’t at all miss its poorly balanced special stages), the new system here so much more actively encourages risk taking and aggressive play that it makes for a far more fun and chaotic board game (you even have things like weapon shops on later maps where you can place bombs and banana peels to knock other players off course or force them onto particular spaces!). While the AI can be a bit simple (it’s a bit too easy to goad them into spending way too much at property auctions, and they’re nowhere near apprehensive enough in handing lots over to other players if it means they’ll get one too regardless of risk), they’re as much of a blast to play against as friends are, and a nice, steady pace of 2~3 hours per game means you’ve got enough to sink your teeth into but not something that’ll consume an entire weekend.

The aesthetics of the game are quite solid too. All 16 characters are weird and charming in their own little ways, and it was honestly hard to pick which particular weirdo I wanted to play the most (the monkey was my character of choice). The different wacky events that occur in each board can be a frustrating element of RNG if you’re trying to get lucky enough to get second or first place in 7 consecutive games to win the tournament mode, but that doesn’t change how joyously bizarre they are when they do happen. It never failed to make me laugh when an earthquake would somehow take down a plane, or when King Bourgeois would visit the resort to throw his cash around X3. The music is overall pretty good, and the boards are all pretty and nicely visually distinct from one another. Not *every* board is great to play on, admittedly, but the 8 you have available make for a good variety of different experiences in both game difficulty as well as game length.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. I’ll admit, it’s a pretty narrow band of people I can recommend this to, but to those who love these kinds of virtual board games, I absolutely cannot recommend this game enough. It’s kinda crazy to me that Taito only ever made one game in this particular style, because it’s so well balanced and considered that I’d easily believe it’s part of a much longer running series. This is one of my favorite hidden retro gems I’ve ever found, and while an economy-focused board game is probably not the kind of experience your average retro enthusiast or game player is looking for, if that happens to be as much your jam as it is mine, then you’re going to absolutely love your time becoming king of resorts! X3