Games Beaten 2025

[MrPopo]

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

1. Tomb Raider II Remastered - PC
2. Tomb Raider III Remastered - PC
3. Blade Chimera - Switch
4. Cyber Shadow - Switch
5. Signalis - Switch

Signalis is a survival horror game that harkens back to the PS1 days, deemphasizing combat, having a bunch of puzzles to solve, and have the horror come from the messed up stuff going on in the world, rather than specifically the enemies. And man, is it a good one, with fantastic visual design. It's also a bit inscrutable, but not in a bad way.

The game opens with Elster, a synthetic human, waking up on her crashed survey ship. Her human captain is missing, so she sets off to try and find her. After finding a mysterious hole she suddenly has a consciousness flash to another area, where again, she's searching for her companion. So begins an exploration through a facility falling apart and trying to figure out what is and isn't real. The game takes a lot of cues from the broadcast ending of Evangelion, so don't expect anything to be simple. That said, the worldbuilding is pretty straightforward, and it paints a very interesting picture of the society.

The game uses late PS1-inspired graphics with a top downish viewpoint. Similar to Resident Evil, it is room based, with enemies confined to rooms and sometimes enemies can get back up after a period of time (if not burned beforehand). Dodging enemies is recommended, especially in visit-once rooms. You have limited inventory space and can make use of storage boxes in the save rooms to manage your inventory. Attacking enemies requires you to ready the weapon before hitting trigger, and the game will indicate if you are actually on target or not. Unlike Resident Evil, the auto aim is not very generous; you pretty much have to be nearly on target to get it to lock, which makes combat much harder when things start going down and enemies get in your face. But, as said, you're best off avoiding combat outside of the handful of boss fights.

Progression is gated through various key items, but many of those key items require you to solve puzzles to acquire them. Some are the easy RE-style "combine these items to get the thing you need", while others require you to decipher codes from files and the environment. It all feels pretty good; nothing too moon logic like old adventure games, but you do need to think a bit. There's also one zone that has no map and has some non-Euclidean geometry, so I'd recommend making a map.

Overall, it's a very fun experience if you're a fan of classic survival horror. You probably won't be fully sure of the story, but the beats you do pick up aren't going to leave you feeling warm and fuzzy.

[Ack]

1. Growing My Grandpa! (Point-and-Click Adventure)(PC)
2. The Black Masses (Action RPG)(PC)
3. Dead Estate (Action)(PC)

The Black Masses

Here's a fantasy game set in an era of 1600s tech, with black powder rifles and bombs alongside swords, axes, and crossbows. Your the sole survivor of a shipwreck off the coast of an island, and when you wake up on its shore, you discover a god has marked you as its own. And the island is overrun with zombie-like people oozing black sludge from their faces, and they are pissed. There are remnants of terrible struggles for survival everywhere, with houses barricaded, wagons wrecked, blood pooling in the roads, and everywhere the so-called black masses shambling about. Now you are forced to take your mix of medieval weaponry and flintlocks, as well as your ability to vault and climb onto most structures, and do the bidding of said god on this forsaken place.

The Black Masses started life years ago on Steam, went into Early Access, and then languished there for years with no updates. After five years of nothing, suddenly the devs popped back up, expanded the main storyline, and rushed the game out the door. They've since done a couple of bug fixes, but there was a lot of belief that the game was entirely abandoned, and what has been finished is quite buggy. Quest lines sometimes bug out, items are often not placed correctly in the world, trees clip through buildings, random notes found in the game all claim to have additional nonexistent pages, systems aren't fully implemented...the game feels unfinished, and yes, while it is beatable, it's going to be an uphill battle for the developers to win back their audience. Hell, when loading the game, you aren't supposed to click your mouse while the loading screen is at 90%, or else Windows will think the game crashed.

But at the same time, the key thing is implemented, and that is hordes. And I mean HORDES. The titular black masses are sometimes found in small groups, but then they're also sometimes found in the hundreds, and when they frenzy, all of them start screaming and running and flailing at you unceasingly. They'll jump onto low structures too if you're not careful, and they will do their absolute best to reach you, so you have to pick your hiding spots carefully. And that's not to mention some of the additional enemies, which are armored up and have abilities that can knock you out of position or do massive hits to your health. For every glitch and bug, there's promise to the game, and it delivers on the idea of you fighting legions of zombies.

So I'm not giving up on The Black Masses, not yet. Sure, it's had a difficult birth, but hopefully the devs stick with it and keep working to improve it over time, because when it works, it works incredibly well. Also, it has some beautiful music, and often the game has little quests and rewards in out of the way places that require you wander and explore to discover, which gives it the same kind of vibe I had from the likes of Morrowind or the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I want The Black Masses to succeed, because it scratched an itch for a type of game I love, where the open world genuinely feels like a place I want to explore.


Dead Estate

This started as a Newgrounds game, which makes sense for its sense of humor. It's an isometric action game, where you pick a character and run them through levels of a haunted mansion. Each floor has a required key and a boss, but there are also numerous secrets to discover, new characters to unlock, new outfits for each character, a variety of hidden level types and content to find, the ability to reloop the game once you're at a crucial point to get more gear and more randomized items as well as find more secrets...there's a lot. And that's not including the Challenge mode or the survival horror side game, Assignment Anna, where you play an actress with a zombie mask who must sneak through the mansion to find a way out.

Yes, there is a roguelike quality to the game, where the only things that carry over are any characters, costumes, or alternate level access you unlock. There is a bank, but even that is a random chance to find, and you may find certain items that give specific sections a chance to generate on a later level and yet never actually generate. Sometimes these items can just as easily make or break your run, so be careful before grabbing anything willynilly, because they are just as likely to give you a bad day. There are also alternate weapons beyond whatever base armament a character comes with, and some are quite powerful, while others are lackluster, depending on the situation and how powerful your character may be or what items they currently have.

There's also a tongue-in-cheek quality to the whole thing. Yep, it's a comedy horror, and its rendered in some gorgeous 16-bit pixel art. It also controls beautifully once you get the hang of shooting and maneuvering in an isometric space, and while the game is entirely done with its development, the devs put in a ton of content even after it was officially released. Sure, I've beaten it with seven or eight characters at this point, but I'm not even done unlocking all of them, not to mention the numerous other alternate challenges still hidden throughout. Dead Estate offers a ton of content for the price, which is $14.99. Even at full price, I'd say its worth it for the value and well worth checking out.

[Flake]

January

- Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamer Edition (Xbox Series)
- Megaman: Power Battle (Evercade Alpha)
- Megaman (Switch)
- Megaman 2 (Switch)
- Samurai Shodown (1993) (Switch)

Megaman and Megaman 2 are replays, part of my annual run through the classic series.

Samurai Shodown, on the other hand, is me coming back to beat a game that I have a ton of childhood memories of. Every Mexican buffet, movie theater, and pizza parlor seemed to have a Big Red MVS with Samurai Shodown in it. I could never get past the third fight.

Fortunately, the Samurai Shodown Neo Geo collection supports AES style difficulty options, save states, and infinite continues. In a cheesy fashion, I had my revenge. Here's the thing: although the single player mode is unconscionably cheap, the original SamSho really is a great fighter. The risk and reward fighting style is a complete change from combo heavy SNK fighters. A single lucky slash can change the entire course of a battle.

In terms of production values, the sprite artwork, backgrounds, and music are also ahead of their time. Capcom would end up recycling Street Fighter 2's assets three or four more times after this game came out, a game that one year after SF2 was released was already blowing SF2's art and music out of the water.

[prfsnl_gmr]

1. Mega Man (DOS)
2. Mega Man III: The Robots Are Revolting (DOS)
3. Teslagrad 2 (Switch)
4. Metal Slug 5 (Neo Geo)
5. Ufouria: The Saga 2 (Switch)

Teslagrad 2 is the sequel to 2013’s Teslagrad, a side-scrolling, indie puzzle-platform game, and Teslagrad 2 looks and plays just like a side-scrolling, indie puzzle-platformer from the mid 2010s. Unfortunately, however, Teslagrad 2 came out last year, and indie game standards have gone way up since 2013. My tolerance for wonky, unpredictable physics has gone way down since then, as has my desire to collect well-hidden macguffins so the game came tell a ho-hum story wordlessly. I likewise more keenly detect when an apparently open world is gated behind linear progression points.

I probably shouldn’t rag on it too much. Teslagrad 2 was mostly fine. The graphics are well-animated, and the gameplay is fine (despite being challenging for, frequently, the wrong reasons). The physics-based puzzles are OK, and the whole game only lasts a few hours (which is, generally, a plus for me). I just didn’t feel compelled to explore the game world or seek out the “true” ending after rolling the credits. Rather, I just deleted the game and moved on. So, in conclusion, Teslagrad 2 is fine, just not very compelling. (One exception…the Nordic folk-metal soundtrack is AWESOME.)

My son and I enjoy playing the Metal Slug games together, and we recently credit-fed our way through Metal Slug 5. While it’s not as good as Metal Slug X or Metal Slug 3 - but really, what is? - Metal Slug 5 is more Metal Slug, which is fine with me. You run around shooting stuff. There’s some light platforming. You have a new slide move for some reason. The bosses are great, and the game retains its wacky humor. We had fun with it, and we’ll likely fire up Metal Slug 6 pretty soon.

Ufouria: The Saga 2 is the long overdue sequel to 1991’s Hebereke (a/k/a Ufouria: The Saga in Europe and North America). The original is a challenging, charming 8-bit proto-metroidvania and, arguably, one of the best Famicom/NES games. The sequel is more of the same…maybe? It’s still a hop ‘n bop platformer, but it’s not as much a metroidvania this time. Rather, each level is a bit randomized, and you collect cans and coins in these randomized levels to buy the items you need to progress from a vending machine. So…it much more linear than its predecessor. It’s also one of the easiest games I’ve ever played…so it’s not challenging either. It’s still really addictive, however, and it’s insanely charming. The characters are bursting with personality; the soundtrack is catchy; and the game uses all “craft” graphics like Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Wooly World. (The pop-bead, 8-bit sprite versions of the characters constantly popping up on screen are awesome.) If you look hard you’ll even catch cameos from the characters Sunsoft re-drew for the first game. In short, Ufouria: The Saga 2 is not a very good game that drastically overcompensates for its gameplay shortcomings with offbeat charm. It was a very relaxing, chill, and weird gameplay experience, and frankly, the perfect sequel to a Hebereke.

[PartridgeSenpai]

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

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)

After playing Beltlogger 9 and Kileak 1 over the past couple years, it was only a matter of finding it until I finally played through this, their middle sibling x3. Kileak 1 is such an early PS1 game that it’s in many ways more of a tech demo, and Beltlogger 9 is a quite respectable game, so I was super curious about just where the game made right in between them would fall on that spectrum. It took me about 5 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

The story of Epidemic (or as it’s known over here, “Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness”), is a sequel to Kileak, The Blood which came out earlier that same year. Taking place some 30 years in the future from that, you play as Masao, the son of the protagonist of the previous game. A mysterious virus has wiped out nearly all of humanity, and those who remain live in an underground complex controlled by an authoritarian corporation. It’s up to you and the rest of the tiny resistance movement aided by your mech walkers, to put a stop to their regime and free humanity from this literal doomed future of darkness!

The story is definitely a midpoint between Kileak 1 and Beltlogger 9 in terms of both presentation as well as actual content. It’s very much an evolution of the first Kileak that adds both characters for the lead to interact with as well as somewhat more complex themes around what it means to be human (Are humans more than their genes? Are we just a collection of mechanical chemical processes, or is humanity something more than that? That sort of thing). It’s nothing that would’ve been terribly novel in sci-fi spaces even back in ’95, but it’s presented in an entertaining and engaging way. It replicates the feeling of playing through a kinda B-grade sci-fi movie of the time very well, and even if it isn’t quite as thought provoking as Beltlogger 9’s story, it’s still a good time to go through.

Appropriately, the gameplay is also very fitting for a midpoint between those two games. While we don’t have the three-dimensional verticality of Beltlogger 9’s space station exploration, we’re mercifully free from Kileak 1’s extremely simplistic corridor mazes. You play through a small handful of stages that actually feel like locations in a world rather than just a constructed maze to Pac-Man your way through. The narrative benefits a lot from this, sure, but it also just makes the game far more fun to play in the first place. Level design can admittedly be a bit rough, as remembering where to go among collecting all of the keys (or even just trying to find what the button you pushed even did) can be an annoyingly cumbersome process, but the game is overall short enough that I never found these to be massive problems.

Enemy design is still quite simplistic, and we honestly haven’t evolved that far from where Kileak 1 was. You’ve got drones big and small that buzz around and fire stuff at you, you’ve got cameras and turrets in the ceilings, you’ve got larger bots that’ll putter around and just try to bump you to death, and you’ve got super annoying (but thankfully infrequent) floor-hugging bad guys who just race into you to explode. In quite a change from either of the other two entries in this loose trilogy, enemies will actually respawn infinitely in many areas. Getting spotted too long by a camera will summon a bunch of baddies, sure, but there are many areas where just existing there will summon enemies out from holes in the wall endlessly. It’s not the worst thing in the world, and it certainly makes this somewhat horror-setting more tense, sure, but honestly the combat just isn’t fun enough to make something like this a feature I appreciated all that much. The game has bosses too, but they’re basically just giant versions of the big enemies that fire lots of missiles and take lots of damage. Nothing bad, sure, but nothing to write home about either.

The last and most interesting part of the mechanics are the guns themselves. In both Kileak 1 and Beltlogger 9, you find guns across levels which have various kinds of ammo, and you’ll use those to fight with. In Kileak 1, you even have a variety of energy weapons that drain your constantly draining shield health bar for a bit of risk/reward mechanics. This game has neither of those. While you *can* find some optional upgrades in some levels, these amount to some unimpressive activatable abilities (a shield that I never found terribly useful) and health bar expansions. Instead, you have the same weapons all the time and you just find more or different ammo for them.

You have a constantly (slowly) recharging energy beam that’s quite weak, an assault rifle that’s quite powerful but drains ammo fast, and a missile launcher that can fire various types of missiles for much greater damage. It ultimately didn’t matter a ton for me, but managing your ammo types is a pretty important part of the gameplay loop, especially early on, that adds to the whole survival horror feeling that they’re going for. It’s not the best thing ever, but it all amounts to a very welcome step forward from Kileak 1 and a much more playable experience, even if it’s certainly quite rough by even the later standards of the PS1.

Aesthetically, this game is both very cool and VERY much a creation of when it came out (and, I’m sure I don’t need to say it again, a midpoint between those two games :b). Environments are still made of what’s effectively a big grid, but the texture work of them makes them far more distinct than the simple floor-by-floor design of Kileak 1. We also have some prerendered cutscenes of our human characters which are as neat as they are uncanny. I’m sure they would’ve been fairly impressive at the time, and the camerawork employed to obscure things like how rough they look when they move around rooms is quite cleverly done, but it’s unquestionably quite rough by today’s standards at any rate ^^;. The only real downgrade I’d say is the music. Kileak 1 has a really eclectic and weird soundtrack, and this is much more subdued and laid back for the most part. It fits the tone they’re going for just fine, I suppose, but it’s definitely nowhere near as memorable as the first game’s.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While Kileak 1 is a relic only really good for the very curious into early console FPS games, Kileak 2 is a much more solidly put together experience. It’ll still feel very aged and clunky to anyone more used to games that control with joysticks rather than with the D-pad and shoulder buttons, but it’s a well enough crafted experience both narratively and mechanically that I think it’s worth looking into if you’re in the mood for something a bit different~.

----

8. Paro Wars (PS1)

This is a game I’ve owned for so long that I actually imported it back in the States and took it with me when I moved out here to Japan (and even then it took me nearly 6 years to finally get around to playing it XD). I’m not a huge strategy RPG fan, but I *am* a big Parodius fan, so I had to grab this out of sheer principle more than anything. Back when I first looked into it, my Japanese ability was far too rough to actually attempt playing it, so I just shelved it for some time in the future. I’m not sure what it was, but when combing through my backlog around a week ago, something in me just finally hit me with a huge urge to play through this for real. It took me around 19.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on easy mode on real hardware.

Paro Wars is a strategy RPG using characters and the universe(?) of Parodius, just as the Famicom’s Cosmic Wars is an srpg using characters and the universe of Gradius. You pick from one of eight factions of Parodius-flavored parodies of real-world countries, and you play through an 8-stage campaign of them fighting for supremacy in the latest Paro World War (all thanks to a mysterious and mischievous cat). It’s a narrative really just out here to be silly (even if some of the references to real-life events/people are surprisingly deep cuts at times), and it does a fine and entertaining job of giving us a premise for our big ridiculous SRPG game.

As someone only quite loosely familiar with SRPGs, the actual mechanics of this game are a very interesting mix of Advance Wars and Super Robot Wars (two series I’ve played tons of and am very familiar with, even if they both would’ve been in their relative infancy when this game was originally released). Mission objectives are always the same: Capture the enemy’s HQ or destroy their big robot (and the former is always far easier than the latter, lemee tell ya). Much like a SRW game, you have a collection of 30-odd pilots rather than generic units, and these pilots will level up and gain stats as they get kills on enemy units. You’ve got land, sea, and air units, and you’ve even got capture-able cities and buildings much like the Advance Wars series has. The biggest difference from either of those other series, however, is that Paro Wars’s biggest focus is on fighting your enemy economically just as much as you are militarily.

Unlike something like SRW where each pilot has more or less a single bespoke unit or, at most, can pilot a bunch of robots from their own series, any pilot can pilot any unit in Paro Wars. Unlike something like Advance Wars, where there are only a handful of units and never any overlap between different ones (there’s only one light tank, one helicopter, one transport ship, etc.), Paro Wars has at least two if not many more for basically every unit type. It’s ultimately all quite simple, but just getting to grips with the best practices of the game took more than a few restarts at the beginning to watch and learn how the AI played so I could even start trying to fight back ^^;

The game will thankfully deploy your units for you at the start of a mission, but you also have the opportunity to deploy them manually if you want. There’s nothing stopping you from deploying your entire army at once if you’ve got the actual machines to deploy them, and if all you want is ground cover, you can even assign one pilot per machine rather than the usual limits of 4 or 8. That’s to say that, unlike a game like Advance Wars where you’ll *see* 4 or 10 little units in the battle animations but they’re just representations of health, all 8 jets you see in a Paro Wars unit are actual units, and you’ll need to make more, one at a time, in the production menu if you want to launch more units. There’s no danger to your pilots though, however. If a unit gets wiped out, you can deploy them again in whatever machines you want next turn from your big robot (or any building within 10 squares of your HQ). Heck, if a unit hits level 20, you can even have them pilot a second unit simultaneously if you like! (just don’t ask me exactly how that works logically XD).

Bizarrely, capturing more factories, ports, and airports just gives you more manufacturing capacity. It doesn’t let you actually spawn units from those locations (which was very weird coming from Advance Wars). What these act as are not just more money per turn, but they also raise your “science score”, which lets you build more units per turn (as each one has a science capacity limit as well as a cost in money). These buildings can also serve as resupply points if you’re playing on a setting that uses fuel and ammo. A very cool feature of Paro Wars is the remarkably customizable difficulty, which not only gives you the choice between easy and hard modes, but also lets you toggle whether that campaign will have ammo/fuel (or if units just have infinite of both), fog of war, and even zones of control. The game even has items that units can pick up and then use before they move/attack on their turn. Items range from kinda useless to hilariously broken, though the game very annoyingly lacks an inter-mission phase to sort around items and such, meaning you’ve gotta do it manually during the mission, which feels very needless for such an important aspect of the game.

It's a lot to get used to, but it’s ultimately all surprisingly simple once you get down to it, and that’s largely down to two factors: The AI, and the game’s balance. The game is balanced quite roughly. My guess is that this is affected more if you’re playing on a setting with fog of war and/or fuel & ammo (as I played with those as well as zones of control off), but I found planes to be extremely overpowered, and land & sea units were barely worth looking at once I had a sizeable enough air force and production capacity. What’s more is that you actually take everything with you (from your money to your units) between missions, so if you spend the last few turns of a previous mission just using your high production capacity to crank out a ton of big scary units, they’ll be fresh and ready for you to use as soon as you start the next map.

Perhaps this is something fixed if you’re playing against harder AI, but at least on easy, the AI aren’t terribly difficult or smart. To a point, I want to give the game the benefit of the doubt and guess that harder difficulties make them create larger armies that fight more aggressively, but the biggest thing that I have a hard time believing that harder difficulties would alter much are their strange priorities. They seem to fight only one set of AI that assumes they’re playing with fog of war and fuel/ammo limits all the time. They’d take conspicuously long amounts of time to react to my approaching forces (or those of approaching enemy AI forces) as if they couldn’t see them, and they’d also target my resupply-capable trucks extremely heavily despite them having no use in the game mode we were playing. They target units that can capture buildings quite heavily too (which makes sense, especially with how broken the capture helicopters are), but it’s still something that makes them too easy to manipulate and abuse.

Aesthetically, the game is really exactly what you’d want, if you’re the kind of person who really wanted an SRPG version of Parodius, anyhow XD. There are all sorts of bizarre units (flying butts, flying women's chests, flying random objects, tanks with legs, boats that are made of food, and loads of other stuff), and it’s all animated beautifully in the battle animations. Character voices and depictions in cutscenes and such are also really well done, and they really show off just how powerful the PS1’s 2D capabilities were. There are so many little details that really make the "Parodius meets real-world parody countries" bit sing as well. I was giggling so much reading all the silly parody troop names for each new army I encountered, and it's all the funnier when the character they belong to is some photo-realistic looking dog or a giant bullet wearing makeup X3. The only really small complaint I have is the music, which, while good, is a bit too samey, as you’re hearing your own faction’s music SO often that you don’t get much of a chance to hear any other tracks (even if the AI take FOREVER to take their turns because they think quite slowly for each unit).

Verdict: Recommended. While it's far from the most finely tuned SRPG in the world, I think Paro Wars excels very well at being a competent, fun game that delivers on its super silly premise in spades. If you're like me and a fan of both Parodius and simple SRPGs, then this is a no-brainier to try out, but if you're just an SRPG fan looking for something a bit silly and different on the PS1, then this can be a great time there too! Paro Wars may be relatively simple under the hood, but the sheer ability you have to customize the difficulty and technicality of the experience to your skill level is something I cannot praise enough, and it makes this super weird game stand out on its own merits and not simply the facts of how bizarre it is that it exists in the first place x3

[REPO Man]

Just beat Heart & Slash for PS4, a low-poly action-RPG roguelike. Control a little robot smacking down vicious machines.

I'm counting it as beat since I beat the final boss, even if I haven't unlocked everything or got the Platinum Trophy.

[MrPopo]

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

1. Tomb Raider II Remastered - PC
2. Tomb Raider III Remastered - PC
3. Blade Chimera - Switch
4. Cyber Shadow - Switch
5. Signalis - Switch
6. Ender Magnolia - Switch

Ender Magnolia is a Metroidvania and the sequel to Ender Lilies. It iterates upon the gameplay of the first as you expect a sequel to do, improving on pretty much every aspect. And while it is a sequel, from a story perspective it's fairly removed from the first game, so it's not necessary to play the first to enjoy this one.

The game begins with the main character, Lilac, waking up with no memory in some sort of ruins. Before long she discovers a homunculus that she discovers she has the ability to attune with and form a bond. This homunculus, Nola, also lacks a memory but has a vague sense that they should make their way to the upper end of the city. So begins the journey as you slowly figure out the backstory of the world and bind with more homunculi.

Like the first, the game involves you utilizing the various homunculi you find to act as your attacks. Nola is your primary attack, while others might be cooldown based, acting as long as you hold down a button, or even fully autonomous. Each homunculus has three different abilities; for example, Nola can be a sword, scythe, or axe. You will level these up by finding items in the world, so exploration is encouraged (this is also the only way to increase your max health). You can equip up to four homunculi at once, in any combination, though you can only use one ability from a homunculus at any time. There's a lot of freedom to find the right set of abilities that matches your play style. There's also your standard set of Metroidvania mobility abilities.

The game improves upon the first in a couple of notable ways. The first is that the map is much more descriptive; the first game's map was just abstract boxes with exits marked as lines, while this map uses a more modern actual view of the terrain. This makes navigation much easier, as there are many large rooms with lots of inner passages. The second is there is no longer an ammo system for some of your abilities. Ender Lilies had some abilities that didn't feel great to use because you weren't sure how your ammo would hold out, but that's not an issue here.

Overall, this is a strong Metroidvania that has the right level of difficulty. The game is generous with giving you access to various stat adjustment items so you can find the right thing that fits your ability set, and the map lets you know when an area still has secrets to be found. I highly recommend this for fans of the genre.

[MrPopo]

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

1. Tomb Raider II Remastered - PC
2. Tomb Raider III Remastered - PC
3. Blade Chimera - Switch
4. Cyber Shadow - Switch
5. Signalis - Switch
6. Ender Magnolia - Switch
7. SimCity 2000 Special Edition - PC

SimCity 2000 is the seminal follow up to the original SimCity that takes the simplicity of the original and adds a ton of new features. But importantly, it doesn't overwhelm the player with things to manage, and that's before you discover how many things are superfluous when it comes to how the city actually functions.

The first obvious change is in the graphics. Instead of the flat overhead view of the original, SimCity 2000 is an isometric game with varied terrain height. This will complicate how you build your city, though you can always throw money at reshaping the terrain. This also opens up waterfalls for building hydroelectric plants. The second major change is moving away from everything being a 3x3 block. Zones can now be as small as a single tile, while non-zone buildings are anywhere from 1x1 to 4x4 (though always a square). This allows for more aesthetic freedom when it comes to building your city. The third major change is the addition of the water system. While not required for buildings to be built, sufficient water supply affects the land value, which directly leads to higher tax revenue. The game also lets you zone areas for either high or low density, which affects what buildings will be built. For example, high density residential will generate apartment high rises, while low density residential will only be single family residences. Essentially, high density can have either high or low density buildings, while low density can only have low density buildings.

As it turns out, though, the underlying simulation is actually fairly simple. The game only cares that every zone is within three tiles of a transit tile, and every one of the residential, commercial, and industrial buildings have a transit route that touches the other two zones. Power is required for buildings, but water is not. Police keeps down crime, which improves land values, but is not necessary. And hospitals and education serve no actual purpose. The game tracks numbers for population health and education level, but neither actually affects anything. You'll get the same tax revenue whether your sims are dumb as rocks or supergeniuses. The net result is that if you're going for a big population push you're best off optimizing for the things the simulation cares about, rather than things that make sense. Going the latte route is additionally risky because the game tends to spiral either one way or the other. A well put together city generates ever increasing tax revenue so it can grow ever faster, while a poor city leaves you in the red constantly and it becomes extremely hard to catch up.

SimCity 2000 hits a sweet spot between the bare bones nature of the original and the feature creep of the sequels. There's just enough to pay attention to, but not so much that it becomes impossible to juggle. And it even has a vague "victory" condition when you start rolling hard by building a ton of Launch Arcologies and starting the exodus, where they all take off to colonize space.

[Note]

1. Streets of Rage 3 (GEN)*

(Since this is a replay, I'm not going to write a full review.)

My girlfriend and I decided to have a co-op gaming night last Friday and she was interested in checking out SOR3, as she hadn't tried that game in the series yet. For this playthrough, I played mostly as Axel and tried Roo for a few levels and my girlfriend played as Blaze.

SOR3 has some nice additional mechanics with the dash, roll, star specials, cutscenes after each level, hidden characters, and multiple endings. However, there were some changes made that impact the game negatively for me. Firstly, the music isn't quite as good as SOR2 -- the tunes here here have a darker, more industrial feel. Also, the difficulty is ramped up a bit too much in the US release. This is a bit nitpicky, but I also don't like the fact that the characters palettes were swapped.

With my girlfriend not being aware of the polarizing status of SOR3, it was interesting to experience the game with her and get her take on it. She liked it for the most part, with her main complaint being the difficulty and the slow down that occurs in the night club scenes. We plan to play through this one again at some point!

[Note]

1. Streets of Rage 3 (GEN)*



2. Iridion II (GBA)*

(Since this is a replay, I won't be writing a full review.)

While in the mood for a straight forward action game, I decided to pick up Iridion II again, which I originally finished in the summer of 2023 and really enjoyed more than I thought I would.

Iridion II has creeped up into being one of my favorite shmups. There's a few different elements at play here that really work for me. The graphics look great for a GBA game, the soundtrack is catchy, the sound effects are well done, and as a mediocre shmup player, I appreciate the fact that there's a life bar and checkpoints. The game also has passwords, so that you don't have to try to play through the fifteen levels in one sitting.

Overall, I highly recommend this one, even for players who normally wouldn't take to this genre. Check it out when you get a chance!