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1. Terranigma (SFC)
2. Eastward (PC)
3. Pulse (PC)
4. Lost Ruins (PC)
5. Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (PC)
6. Dropsy (PC)
7. Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)
8. Pokemon Ruby (GBA) *
9. Secret of Mana (SFC)
10. Fire Watch (PC)
11. Bokura (PC)
12. Romancing SaGa (SFC)
13. Trials of Mana (SFC)
14. Castlevania Legends (GB)
15. SaGa 2 (GB)
16. SaGa 3 (GB)
17. Celeste (PC)
18. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (PC)
19. Celeste 64 (PC)
20. CB Chara Wars: Ushinawareta Gya~gu (SFC)
21. To The Moon (PC)
22. LOVE (PC)
23. Pikuniku (PC)
24. Night in the Woods (PC)
25. The Beginner's Guide (PC)
26. Suikoden (PS1)
27. Chocobo Dungeon 2 (PS1)
28. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Advance! Fire Adventure Team (Wii)
29. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Go! Storm Adventure Team (Wii)
30. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Aim! Light Adventure Team (Wii)
31. Line Attack Heroes (Wii)
32. The Quest for Camelot (GBC)
33. Tales of Destiny (PS1)
34. Metal Walker (GBC)
35. Frog Detective 1 (PC)
36. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team (GBA) *
37. Frog Detective 2 (PC)
38. Frog Detective 3 (PC)
39. Super Robot Wars Alpha for Dreamcast (DC)
40. Brain Lord (SFC)
41. Lagoon (SFC)
42. Dark Hunter: Jou Ijigen Gakuen (PS1)
43. Ys: Books I & II (PCE)
44. Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (SFC)
45. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun (SFC)
46. Dark Hunter: Ge Youma No Mori (PS1)
47. Ys V - Expert (SFC)
48. Jaseiken: Necromancer (PCE)
49. Paladin's Quest (SFC)
50. Adventures of Lolo (NES)

I played this game very briefly many years ago, but never gave it a proper shot. Now that I can finally play PS3 games again (thanks to what is *hopefully* a true long-term capture solution for it), I looked around local resale places for cheap, neat games I could finally play through, and this was one of the batch of games I picked up. I’m loosely familiar with the sequel, but the original The Darkness was a near total unknown for me, but I was excited to see just what was in store for me with a game so early in the console generation’s life cycle. The game doesn’t record time, but I reckon it took me around 10-ish hours to beat the English version of the game on normal mode while getting a little under 75% of the collectibles and doing a little more than half of the side quests.

The Darkness is the story of Jackie Estacado. A hitman for a New York crime family, it’s the day of his twenty first birthday when two important events befall him: The head of the family starts trying to have him killed, and he gains mysterious and powerful darkness abilities. Using the powers of the titular Darkness, Jackie begins his mission to both stop his power crazed Uncle Paulie from having him killed as well as keep himself from begin consumed by the will of the Darkness on the way.

I really had no idea what to expect from the writing in The Darkness, it being a first-person shooter based on an indie comic I am completely unfamiliar with, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the writing in this game. The large strokes of the story are a love story and a revenge story, but this isn’t just an FPS. It’s also an adventure game, and the extra characters in this game really help it come to life in a delightful way. Jackie uses the subways to get around, and that’s where you’ll find tons of both mandatory story NPCs as well as eventually optional NPCs with requests for Jackie. There isn’t a great mechanical reason to help them, mind you, as it’s not like this game has a money or equipment system to get rewards from. All you’ll get for doing quests are collectibles, but they’re their own reward in more ways than simple completionism.

The voice acting in this game and the delivery of its story are loads of fun. Helping out NPCs with their quests was always super fun just to see how Jackie (whose delivery is very reminiscent of a younger Keanu Reeves doing a light Italian mobster accent) would bounce off of all of the weird and interesting people you find to help. Additionally, the collectibles were always something I’d comb areas for, because they take the form of phone numbers. You cash in those collectibles (unlocking the concept art and such in the extras menu) by calling those numbers at the public payphones in the game, and the answering machines and weird people always made a new collectible acquisition a very exciting time. Heck, even the random NPCs (both friendly and hostile) will have long, rambling, bizarre conversations with one another that I always loved stumbling upon. As grim and violent as the story often is, it knows when it’s okay to be silly, and that mix of silliness and sincerity make for a delightfully campy time along the course of Jackie’s big tale of love, loss, and revenge.

The mechanics of The Darkness are a somewhat typical FPS, in a sense, but with an extra twist with the Darkness powers you’ve got. Jackie’s got a collection of guns to blast people away with, of course, and you’ve got Doom Guy pockets too, so a gun collected is a gun collected forever. Something the game doesn’t exactly signpost (and I’m glad my partner pointed out to me, as she’d played this before) is that Jackie truly DOES have super Doom Guy pockets for his guns. He doesn’t actually reload his guns. He just picks up more. Firing one shot from a pistol and then reloading literally throws that pistol away (you can see him do it!) and brings out the next one, so there’s actually quite the risk-reward system in terms of reloading early or not. Guns overall were things I generally favored the dual pistols you start the game with (as they have both great range and good stopping power), and you can even fire each one respectively by pressing the respective trigger button on the controller, but the guns overall feel good and add a little bit of spice to what could’ve been a safely generic gunplay system.

The Darkness powers take a bit of getting used to, but they ultimately give the game a fair bit of variety, especially in how they influence level design. You press L1 to activate the Darkness, and while it’s out Jackie has a shield from it. When it’s *not* out, he dies almost instantly to gunfire much like enemies do, so you really wanna have it up whenever you can for combat. However, the Darkness feeds on, well, darkness, and being in the light actively robs you of your Darkness energy that both powers that shield as well as fuels your Darkness attacks you acquire through the game. This gives a lot of interesting decision-making aspects to combat that a lot of other shooters don’t generally have. Do you go in guns blazing hoping for a quick victory, or do you lose the element of surprise and open up by shooting out some lights to give yourself a safe place to hide? Taking stock of where sources of light are in any area is a key element of surviving and succeeding in any combat encounter, and it adds a bit of a neat spin to the level and encounter design too.

This also goes for how you operate your Darklings, which are minions summonable from spawn points you can only see with your Darkness activated. You start out with just a normal melee-focused Darkling, but eventually you unlock a gunner, a bomber, and a light killer Darkling. Each spawn point can only maintain one Darkling, so deciding which one to summon and when is just one more decision to make during combat. Darklings can either be directed in combat (with an admittedly awkward waypoint system) or just left to their own devices, and they’re generally smart enough that I just summoned them when I could and let them do their thing. Additionally, Darklings are creatures of Darkness just like your powers are, so shooting out those lights isn’t just for you, it’s for them too. Darklings are trash talking little weirdos in addition to being helpful for drawing enemy fire, and having them ambling about while I fought stuff was always fun~.

That said, the mechanics can be a bit fiddly at times. Your Darkness powers take a while to get actually, well, powerful, and for a good while I just felt like I was playing the game wrong when, in fact, it was just that I didn’t have much at my disposal outside of just shooting things (from a practical perspective). As previously mentioned, directing Darklings is kind of a pain, and the gun variety never felt like it mattered a ton with just how good the default pistols were. In addition to all that, the pace of combat can be a bit too slow due to fundamental design choices. The most obvious one is the focus on shooting out lights that I already mentioned, but the other main factor is how you power up your Darkness powers, which is by eating hearts from downed enemies. While the animation for this is gory and neat, it does take a good few seconds to do, and even though you’re free to walk around and leave while the animation is playing, this does make consuming several hearts in quick succession take a pretty good while. The mechanics may be novel and interesting in their own ways, but they’re also clunky in a way that the game doesn’t particularly benefit from, and that poor signposting can really be a bummer in a game with checkpoints that are often far too far apart.

The presentation of the game is really remarkably good for a mid-2007 game. It’s got some fun music tracks that underset the action well, but the graphics in particular were what I really liked. This game is based on an indie comic, and NPCs (particularly some of the named characters like your friend Butcher Joyce) really do look like they stepped right out of a mid-2000’s graphic novel. As previously mentioned, the voice work is excellent and fits the game great. It sadly has no Japanese dub (leading to why I just played it in English so I could have English subtitles too), but the English voicework is great and brings the characters to life wonderfully.

There’s also an interesting approach to UI, and the game actually has almost none. There’s no meter on screen for Jackie’s health or Darkness energy. Instead, you just wait for the red on his vision to go away to indicate your health has regenerated. For the Darkness powers, you’ll hear the light burning you if you’re standing in the light (draining your energy), and you’ll see the darkness tendrils on the sides of your vision sucking in darkness when you’re stood outside the light. However, the only way you really know just how low your Darkness energy has gotten is your power suddenly not triggering, or the Darkness itself suddenly involuntarily recoiling into you (often quickly followed by your death shortly thereafter). While I certainly appreciate the design philosophy of trying to keep things diegetic, I think some kind of visual indicator for your remaining Darkness energy would’ve gone a long way towards keeping me alive longer.

The game mostly runs well, but there were a few bugs I found here and there. The number one thing I can say about performance is that skipping dialogue with NPCs is something you do at your own risk. Virtually all the glitches I encountered were a result of skipping some dialogue I’d heard before, as even though it cuts the voice line short, it doesn’t stop the animation. This means that, particularly when the person you’re talking to is going to do an action at the end of their voice line, you can bug out that action by being too trigger happy on the skip button. I even managed to permanently break a side quest because I skipped their dialogue, and they just got stuck trying to do the action after it ^^;. It wasn’t an important or particularly interesting side quest, but I’d imagine that this would be a true nightmare for any completionist playing this game. Perhaps the 360 version doesn’t suffer from this problem, but I can’t comment on that. The PS3 version runs *mostly* fine, but just be careful with the dialogue system.

Verdict: Recommended. This game isn’t perfect, for sure. It’s got some performance problems, the gameplay can be a bit too slow paced sometimes, and just how far apart checkpoints are can really be a burden when you keep getting sniped by an annoying enemy you just can’t spot in time. That said, it’s got a lot going for it! The writing is fun and campy, the mechanics are fairly novel and neat, and the aesthetics are good too. If you’re a fan of shooters or even just a fan of fun, quirky stories (and don’t mind a bit of gore), then this is a game super worth checking out. I wouldn’t even consider myself much of a shooter fan, and I still really enjoyed my time with this game, so I’ll let that part of the recommendation speak for itself in terms of how enjoyable it is~.

This is a very “meme bad game” I’ve heard about for years and years. Getting trashed both critically and popularly when it came out to the point that it tanked beloved developer Free Radical, Haze is a game that I’d imagine most gamers of a certain age have at least heard of, even if they aren’t super familiar with its contents. I was absolutely one of those people. I’ve never been much of a shooter fan, particularly for online-focused shooters, so Haze was a game that I’d heard about when I was younger as a legendarily bad game, but it wasn’t one I’d ever gone out of my way to learn more about beyond that. Why waste my time with it? However, with my recent interest in PS3 stuff again, this was a game that fell into my interest again (especially after picking up fellow legendarily meme bad PS3 game Lair). In fact, it was my mistaking Lair for Haze that led to my friend Robin buying this game for me in the first place XD. She unfortunately couldn’t watch me play it in the end, but play it indeed I did~. It took me about 5.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on normal mode in one sitting.

Haze follows Shane Carpenter, a soldier in the PMC group Martel. Powered by Martel’s signature performance-enhancing drug, Nectar, and deployed to an unspecified place in Central or South America in the late 2040’s, Sergeant Shane quickly finds things are not as he had expected them to be. His army buddies are very gung ho about destroying the rebels and taking captive their vile, human skin-wearing leader, but as his Nectar flow is repeatedly disrupted, the world and everything in it slowly shifts around him to show him how things really are. Thus begins Shane’s journey towards finding out what’s really going on with Martel, the rebels, and this mysterious wonder drug called Nectar.

I’d actually never really heard anything about Haze’s narrative all these years, but, given when it came out, my expectations were on the floor. This decade is packed with shallow military-glorifying schlock that was tacked on to a multiplayer game simply because multiplayer-only games weren’t an accepted part of video games yet, and I figured this would just be another forgettable pile of crap. Despite how unsubtle the opening is, I was honestly astonished at just how well considered Haze’s narrative is, and it was easily the highlight of the game for me. Very clearly inspired very heavily by Apocalypse Now, Haze is a story of military disillusionment.

It has some pretty severe pacing problems (with like half of the game’s runtime having nearly nothing to do with the narrative other than “go here, do this, rinse and repeat”), the start and end are strong enough that I think it succeeds regardless. Remarkably light on (although not completely free from) racism and such for a game of this type from this era, I think Haze does a really commendable job at commenting on the state of contemporary American foreign policy. It has those pacing issues and could also certainly do with a better lead in to the story (as it is basically immediately obvious that you are, indeed, the real baddies, when they have plenty of time to lead into that a little more subtly), but the bones of the story are strong enough that I ended up really enjoying it. As a friend of mine put it, “Haze crawled so Spec Ops: The Line could run”, and I think that’s quite deserved praise on Haze’s part.

While the Japanese version doesn’t have its own dub or anything, I do want to finish off my section on the narrative by giving credit where credit is due for the Japanese subtitles. As much as they certainly don’t fix it, they do a really admirable job of trying to give the lead in to the game some more subtlety that the English version really would’ve benefited from. In particular, they make the distinction between being on and off Nectar much starker for how you hear your companions talk. While their speech while you’re on Nectar is much more sanitized and reserved, when you’re off Nectar, you finally get to hear (or in this case, read), the hateful, brutal language they’re *actually* using around you, where the English audio just achieves this by bleeping their speech when you’re off Nectar in a way that comes off as incredibly clumsy. I really would’ve loved to hear a proper Japanese dub for this game, but I understand why it wasn’t a priority for a game like this, and I really do give the Japanese translator(s) credit for making the game just that little bit better put together in their version of the story.

While I’d basically heard nothing about the story when I was younger, what I did hear about Haze was the mechanics, and they more or less live up to their poor reputation. It isn’t the worst game ever by any means, but it’s thoroughly underwhelming particularly with the context of this being a Sony exclusive while Xbox players were already enjoying Halo 3 roughly a whole year earlier. The gun selection isn’t terribly big, and what’s there never really felt terribly worth experimenting with. The two sides of the conflict each have their own versions of many weapons with different drawbacks to each, but I just used the Martel rifle the whole time, since it had basically infinite range, plenty of stopping power, and tons of ammo. There’s actually a neat mechanic where you can cannibalize guns of different types to get ammo for the gun you’re using (with diminishing returns each time), but all it really does is discourage you that much more from trying out other (worse) guns, so it’s hard to praise that cool idea all that much, really.

The campaign design is put together to try and give you a taste of playing both with and without the Nectar mechanics, but it’s mostly playing without to the point that it makes me question why they even did it in the first place. The main Nectar mechanic is pretty neat, where you hold R2 long enough to fill the meter with Nectar, but not too much otherwise it’ll backfire on you. In exchange you get a longer duration of speed as well as all enemies turning into big glowy spheres, making them very easy to spot and shoot. I get why they didn’t make the whole game this way for narrative reasons, but that kinda just ties into a larger point of how making a multiplayer-focused shooter with this particular message is decidedly at cross purposes with itself (a criticism that was also leveraged against Spec Ops: The Line years later for including an online multiplayer component, and rightfully so there as well).

The game all around is just very mid and not put together super well, and that extends beyond the fairly linear and uninteresting level design. In addition to the lackluster guns and underutilized bespoke Nectar mechanic, you’ve got vehicles that control like crap and far too many sections that use them. I know the meme back in the day was players driving around “invisible jeeps” in multiplayer (because of loading issues on the server), but those vehicles also just sorta handle like crap and break far too easily. Additionally, the AI is absolutely terrible. I was only playing on normal mode, sure, but it’s not like I was playing on easy mode either. They’ll just charge out from behind cover while nonetheless brandishing a gun at you, they’ll just stand in open space with no cover and fire at you, and your own allies will run in your line of fire constantly as if you weren’t even there. Thankfully, your allies dying just means you’ve got a little less help in drawing enemy fire away from yourself, but it’s still annoying all the same. Bundle that all in with how the AI (both friendly or otherwise) is spouting the same voice clips CONSTANTLY (there is rarely a moment of no speaking), and you’ve got AI that are pretty dreadful to deal with.

Aesthetically, it’s all around okay if not a little poor for the time. Music is fine yet forgettable, but the voice performances are quite well done, I’ll say, at least where it counts. Your main army rival and your main ally in particular I felt were very well acted for getting the points across that they’re trying to make with each character. On a related point, face models generally look quite good too, at least on the main characters. They’re not the best thing we had at that point, but the facial animations are pretty darn good for ’08, and the subtler features like your army buddies looking healthier or sicker when you’ve got Necter’o’vision or not is also a very neat touch. Unimportant NPCs, however, often look a bit uncanny, and part of that is due to the textures/models for their faces seemingly taking too long to load compared to important NPCs.

Environments in general look a bit low-polygon and muddily textured, and it gives the game a remarkably cheap and cruddy feeling compared to games I’ve played from less well funded studios that were released years earlier (like The Darkness, which I’d just finished playing before I started this). It’s not like the most hideous game in the world, or anything, but I definitely see why it did not impress back when the game came out, as it is decidedly underwhelming to say the least. Performance was also fairly fine and stable, though I will say that the game did crash on me once near the end, which is certainly worth mentioning even if the game’s generous checkpoint system ultimately kept me from really losing any progress.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As mid and unimpressive as the gameplay is, the story had me walking away from this game with far more positive an impression than I expected it to. If you’re big into shooters and are likely to be pushed away by something derivative and uninspired, then this game will likely bore you to tears. That said, if you’re okay with unoriginal gameplay if it’s got a neat story (in a game you can beat in an evening or two), then this very well may be something you don’t regret checking out, just as it was for me. Even not really caring much for shooters, I enjoyed the story enough that I’m happy that I played this game, and if what I’ve described about it piques your interest, then it just might be worth your while to hunt down a copy of this and give it a go~.

This was part of the bundle of games that a close friend of mine in the UK sent me last year. It was all her GameBoy stuff from when she was a kid, and she wanted it to go to a good and loving home (which I was happy to provide~ ^w^). I already played through the Batman game in that bundle last year, and the other day I finally decided to sit down and play this one. The Animaniacs as a series are something that I am juuuuust old enough to have caught some of on TV as a kid, so it’s a series I quite like, but I’ve never had much exposure to the video games and really had no idea what to expect with this. Despite being developed by Factor 5 of all people, this is still a Konami game at the end of the day, so after beating it on easy mode, I had to beat it again on normal mode to actually see the final level and final boss. It took me around 1 hour to beat it on easy mode, and then it was about 1.5 hours between both attempts I gave to beating normal mode. I beat the English version of the game on real hardware via my Super GameBoy.

Animaniacs follows the titular characters, that being the Warner Bros and their sister Dot, on a quest to open a hip pop culture shop. To do it, they’ll need to go around the Warner movie lot tearing through studios to steal famous movie props from currently recording movies! However, they’re not just going to be able to walk in and take them. In addition to the hazards already present on the movie sets, the ever-vigilant security guard Ralph is constantly on the move trying to capture our “heroes”, and Pinky and the Brain are also about and causing mischief for the Warners as they try to take over the world.

It’s not got much of a story, ultimately, but it definitely had more cutscenes than I expected it to. Before each level, the Warners will have a little silly chat with one another about the movie they’re about to barge into, and they capture the comedy of the show very well with their banter. This is actually a port of a Genesis game made by Konami themselves, and there have been quite a few sacrifices in getting a 16-bit game to work on the GameBoy. While the Genesis version has a lot more of it, this game still has quite a few other Animaniacs characters (usually Mindy and Buttons) bouncing around certain levels that you get to interact with in silly and fun ways, which I appreciated.

The gameplay is a rather puzzle-focused platformer. You can press Select to swap between the three Warner siblings, and each of the three of them has a different attack/power they can use to interact with the environment. Yakko can push and pull boxes as well as attack enemies with his paddleball; Wakko can hit enemies, detonate bombs, and break blocks with his big mallet; and Dot can blow kisses to most living enemies to stun them into no longer moving. The Genesis version has a lot more in the realm of action along with the puzzles, but this game is more so an action-puzzler than it is an action-game.

Some of the puzzles are very unclear how to actually do them, with some bosses (particularly the Western level and final boss) having very unclear paths to victory, but that was nothing looking up how to solve them couldn’t fix XD. The game overall is pretty tough, but far from insurmountable. Granted, I’m quite experienced with platformers, so keep that in mind as I say this, but I didn’t find this game to be terribly difficult, and it usually only took one or two tries at an obstacle before I could overcome it basically every time.

The Genesis version is significantly more difficult and in a much more Konami way, and I may as well relate here the differences I noticed between the two (after watching a longplay of the Genesis version shortly after finishing this version). This is missing one whole level from that game, having only 4 stages instead of the 16-bit version’s 5, and many levels either have simplified certain sections or have cut bits of them entirely (with the final level being nearly half as long as well as quite a bit different). This game is also a fair bit slower than the Genesis version, and honestly it can be quite a pain in the butt to do (or at least reattempt) certain puzzles because you saunter around at such a leisurely pace. It isn’t the worst thing in the world, and the game is, at least, balanced around your move speed, but it can still make the game somewhat irritating to play now and again.

The presentation is quite nice, especially on the Super GameBoy. The animations on movements, especially on the player characters, are very fluid and nice looking for a GameBoy game, and I reckon that might be the cause of why the game otherwise runs so slowly XD. The music tracks are nice original tracks on top of fun renditions of songs from the show (namely the main theme as well as the Pinky and The Brain theme), and it’s especially nice on the Super GameBoy. This is actually one of the very small handful of Super GameBoy-enhanced GameBoy games where you get not just a fancy border and way more color on the Super GameBoy, but you also get all new sound and music! This game uses the SNES’s sound hardware to give it a whole new soundtrack on the Super GameBoy, and it made for a very cool and novel experience compared to playing most other games on the Super GameBoy.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a neat little GameBoy game, but it’s still really nothing special. It’s certainly far less vicious than its 16-bit counterpart, but it’s still weirdly signposted enough that I think it’d be quite difficult to actually figure out some sections without consulting a guide, and that’s really not the experience you want with an action platformer, even a puzzle-focused one. If you’re a big nerd for Super GameBoy stuff or a fan of the show, then this is one you might find some good value in checking out, but if you’re more selective with how you spend your puzzle-platforming energy, then you’ll likely find your time better spent elsewhere.