Games Beaten 2025

[TheSSNintendo]

Ducktales (NES/Steam)

[REPO Man]

I know it's cheating, but I've beaten the 2018 SAGE demo of Petit Hedgehog twice, once as Sonic and again as Shadow.

As you may or may not know, I'm active in the Portmaster scene, having ported four games last year. Aside from two ports that are more than likely never going to work (Transylvanian Adventures of Simon Quest and Prison City) and my still WIP port of Ninja Senki DX (trying to figure out how to get the screen to not stretch out on non-16:9 devices like my RGB30 with its 1:1 display).

And recently, I put out a testing port of Petit Hedgehog. While only six levels exist (two two-act zones and two single-act zones), I thought it'd be a neat port to put out, especially if it leads to a renewed interest in the game.

After testing it on my RGB10 Max 3, I tested it on my RGB30 after someone said that there was some slowdown while playing it on the same device. I wanted to make sure whether or not it was an issue with the device or if it was to do with the custom firmware I and the tester we each were using.

And another person on the Portmaster Discord suggested I move the port to GMloader-Next. So I'll probably do another playthrough as Amy to see if it works.

EDIT: now I've beaten the Petit Hedgehog demo three times, the last playthrough as Amy.

[Markies]

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

1. Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
2. Mario Party 4 (GCN)
***3. The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)***
***4. Pokemon Snap (N64)***



I completed Pokemon Snap on the Nintendo 64 this evening!

Back in 2020, the only negative COVID really had on me was that my local Retro Gaming Convention was cancelled. Well, I decided to do some shopping instead and I visited my local retro game stores in 2020. Unfortunately, I only found Pokemon Snap, so the day didn't go over so well. In 2021, I wanted a quick and easy N64 game to beat and Pokemon Snap provided that perfectly for me. A few years later, I was once again looking for something short and easy after my longer Lord of the Rings Adventure. I knew that I needed to finish up Pokemon Snap, so I decided to do that. I only had a few Pokemon left to photograph. All I needed to do was find out where they were, how to make them appear and snap them to move onto the next one. It was a nice and breezy way to spend an evening.

In some ways, it is hard to call Pokemon Snap an actual game. It's more like an adventure or an experience. You get in this little Pod, you take pictures of Pokemon, after a few minutes, the adventure is over and you are then scored on your pictures. And that is it. Obviously, the game does have a few little tricks to help you get better shots, but that is all the game is. It is really neat to see the Pokemon interact with each other and just be themselves. They all have unique personalities, so I'm glad that they give them a chance to just be them. Also, it really is cool to see them in 3D, as that is still a rarity.

The biggest issue with the game is that forces you to play the same stages over and over again. There are only like 6 Courses, so you need to grind the different types of Pokemon and grind out your score as well. It's fun and enjoyable at the beginning of the game, but by the end, I just wanted it to be over with so that I could move on. I know the game is short regardless, but they stretched an incredibly short game to make it completely thin and almost transparent.

Overall, I still enjoyed my time with Pokemon Snap. I got the game for like $10 or $15 and I think that is the perfect price for the game. If you love Pokemon and can get it cheap, I would highly suggest the game. It wears out its welcome rather quickly, but the beginning of the game and the experience is unique and different. It won't blow anybody away, but for a neat little game where you can watch Pokemon run around, its a fun experiment.

[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)

This game has seemed both incredibly cool and extremely up my alley since it came out, but I’ve never had a good enough supply of funds to warrant picking it up. However, my partner, who also hadn’t played it until now, recently got it and suggested that we play it together as a date night idea. I snapped at the chance immediately, and we had a great time puzzling through it together. It took us roughly 7.5 hours to get through the PC version of the game while looking nothing up and getting every answer right (with her at the helm and me watching and assisting over stream).

Return of the Obra Dinn is the story of the titular ship. Taking place in the early 1800’s, the ship had been lost a short time earlier, and it went adrift until coming to rest at its current location. The entire crew has gone missing save for a few survivors, one of whom has asked you, an insurance adjuster sent to inspect the ship, to find the story of what really happened. To this end, you have been given a special book that records the fates of those you encounter as well as a magical pocket watch that lets you view the instant of someone’s death upon finding their body. It’s up to you to solve the mystery of just what could’ve possibly happened to destroy the lives of the 60 poor souls on this cursed vessel.

The story is very much there to facilitate the gameplay, but in a much more mechanical sense than an Ace Attorney game (for example). It’s a cool and fun mystery story, but a lot of the thrill of it comes from uncovering that mystery one person at a time. Often going in reverse sequence of events, it makes for a very novel and engaging way to do a mystery story. It lets the adventure come to life very well, and if you’re a fan of mysteries, there’s a lot to enjoy here along with the puzzles~.

Your magical pocket watch is what lets all those puzzles happen. You find a corpse, and then pocket watch rewind time back to their death. Very often you’ll find another corpse in that person’s death scene, which lets you go back to that person’s death scene as well, and it generally carries on like that in an almost dream-within-a-dream style. You’re then greeted with the last few things they heard before their death, and then you’re brought to a freeze frame of the moment in time that they died. An entry for them is created in your magic book, but it’s up to you to record not just how they died (if they did at all), but also who they even were. These are simply faces and bodies without names. You’ve got a crew manifest as well as a few illustrations of the entire crew, but other than that, you’ve got no idea who these people are.

Inspecting scenes for environmental clues (which can be anything from clothes they’re wearing, possessions they may (or may not) have, or even just someone saying their name to them) is vital to properly solving the mystery of the Obra Dinn. Going through and back through death scenes to identify who killed whom or what even led to someone dying in the first place is as exciting as it is mind bending. There are plenty of crew members with quite straightforward identifications and causes of death, but others take some really incredible deductive reasoning to spot. Thankfully, for every 3 fates you guess correctly, the book will confirm that you’ve done as such and lock their information in. This means that, worst comes to worst, you can use trial-and-error or simple process of elimination to guess fates, but the mere fact that everyone has *some* information available to determine their identity without those means is truly incredible, and it’s a testament to just how meticulously crafted a mystery puzzle game this is.

The aesthetics of Obra Dinn are probably one of the most famous and distinctive things about it. Not quite monochrome, Obra Dinn uses a graphical style composed entirely of blacks, whites, and greys to make a world that almost looks like the most incredible Apple ][ games you’d ever possibly conceive. The one downside to this, unfortunately, is that while the game’s visual puzzles all take into account the aesthetics and are purposefully designed for it, it can be a game that’s difficult to play for long stretches of time for some folks, as it can induce a degree of eye strain. We never had any problems with that, and there are alternative graphical options to swap the colors around a bit to help with eye strain (though the default option seems to be the best by far), it’s something I’ve seen others experience enough that it had to go mentioned here. The music is also very nice, and fits the early 19th century naval theme very well.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game that wonderfully lived up to its reputation. I’d heard it was an excellent and super novel puzzle game, and damn if that wasn’t true (and it also made for a lovely couple of date nights~). If you’re a fan of puzzle games or mystery stories, this is absolutely one worth picking up to play. It might be worth checking out the first 10 or 15 minutes on YouTube first though, just to make sure your eyes agree with the graphical style enough that you won’t be regretting your purchase ^^;.

3. Battlefield: Hardline (PS3)

I hadn’t originally planned to play through any more Battlefield games once I was done with my most recent adventures through PS3-era FPS games, but I found a few more for cheap enough that I just had to bite on this. I had already played through the extremely infamous Call of Duty: Ghosts, and it only felt right to give Battlefield the same treatment by playing through its most infamous game of this generation as well (even if it’s technically a cross-generational game but whatever :b). I won’t bury the lead here, through: I walked away frankly *shocked* at just how quality it ended up being, and this will likely go down as one of my biggest positive surprises of the year. It took me a bit over 12 hours to beat the English version of the game going for all of the warrants and side cases solved on normal mode on original hardware.

The story follows Nick Mendoza, a newly minted detective of the Miami Police Department’s vice division in the middle of a burgeoning drug war between the city’s rival gangs. His old partner Stoddard was a bit of an ass, but his new partner Dao seems to really have a good head on her shoulders, if a bit of a hot-headed streak. Not everything seems on the up and up here at the MPD though, and that’s confirmed given that the cold open to the game is a flash forward with Nick a prisoner as a “dirty cop” on a prison transfer bus. It’s a long way to get there and a long way after it to the story’s conclusion but believe me when I say that it’s worth it!

I’m a big stickler for games with trash-ass politics, and I was only really familiar with the reputation this game had as a tasteless “cops and robbers but the drug war” Battlefield game up until I played it. This game still has *some* issues, but it is a remarkably well done and very well acted story about systemic police corruption. We cover stuff like how good cops don’t exist (they’re pushed out of the system), corrupt cops get rich off of the drug war they’re supposedly here to stop and protect people from, and we even touch on the issue (and increasingly likely future) of privatized police forces rather than publicly operated ones. It’s not full-blown ACAB left-wing progressivism, mind you. There’s still tinges of “not *all* cops are bad” here and there, but even those sentiments are far more on the periphery of the narrative than I ever would’ve expected them to be. While it does ultimately pull its punches a little bit with how the narrative shifts from more of a political one to a personally-focused one for our main characters, I frankly really loved the narrative of Hardline, and it’s easily the best written game I’ve played in this genre from this generation by a country mile. (That said, I won’t go quite as far as to say the game got an entirely unfair reputation when it came out as, while this story *is* quite good about this stuff, the multiplayer is decidedly far more black and white in how it gamifies the drug war, which, needless to say, I am far less of a fan of).

The gameplay itself is remarkably not very Battlefield-y either. Visceral games (those mad lads behind Dead Space, which itself has a couple cute cameos in the story) took component pieces of Battlefield and made a shockingly fun stealth game out of it. While the story takes a lot of inspiration from cop dramas (and does a darn good job of it), the gameplay is a fun and at times very silly counterpart to it.

Areas tend to be more open than your typical Battlefield map, and the Battlefield classic super short time-to-kill ends up making a *lot* more sense when stealth is encouraged so hard. The Battlefield mini-map in the lower left displays enemy lines of sight very well, and you can do all sorts of stuff to mess with the AI and sneak past them or take them out. You can tag enemies with your scanner to make them easier to keep track of. You can toss shell casings to make sounds to lure them away from their buddies, knock them on the back of the head, but the sillies option is pressing L1 to shout “Freeze!” and flash your badge and have them put their hands up. Once you’ve done this, they will *always* (whether they’re a common street thug or a PMC hired specifically to kill you) follow your order and drop their weapon. You’ve gotta keep your weapon trained on them, which makes dealing with groups tricky, but if you get within melee range, you can do a special arresting takedown where you handcuff them on the ground.

Doing things nonlethally gets you “Expert Points”, and more expert levels unlocks more guns and tools you can use to fight with. Just killing guys actually gets you *no* expert points at all, but completing objectives does. This does lead to a scenario of the main stealth thing you’re doing to unlock guns not actually leading to being any better at doing the whole stealth thing, but there are enough parts where you *have* to have firefights that I never minded it, and better guns were always appreciated (with great gunplay as Battlefield generally does).

I’m also a big fan of stealth games, and I was just having a blast playing it as stealthily as I could. You *could* play the game just guns blazing nearly the entire time, but I think the game is far better enjoyed when played as the stealth game it was designed to be. I never in a million years expected this game to play like this, but I enjoyed the hell out of it, so I’m certainly not complaining! Leave it to the single-player game specialists at Visceral to make one of the best Battlefield campaigns anyone ever did, I suppose.

Graphically, I’ve gotta say I’m super impressed with this game. It’s got a fun soundtrack, and the cutscenes and voice acting (save for the Japanese VA which is much more average) do a really good job of feeling like you’re playing through a proper TV cop drama. That stuff is all super important. However, having played a few contemporary and, importantly, also cross-generational CoD games before, I was really surprised at just how good this looks on the last-gen hardware! It’s hardly the best looking thing you’ve ever seen, and I’m sure the next-gen versions look better, but hats off to Visceral for making a game that not just runs great on the older machines, but looks pretty damn good too.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a real hidden gem of this console generation that I absolutely never saw coming. I figured this would be as gross a piece of copaganda as its reputation implied, and I’d walk away from it laughing at how awful it was. Never in my life did I imagine that I’d walk away from playing Hardline singing its praises, but here we are! This was easily some of the best fun I’ve had with an FPS campaign from this era, and if you’re a fan of stealth game, then you should absolutely throw down the couple of bucks this goes for used these days and play this, because you will not be disappointed.

4. Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3)

Keeping the PS3-era FPS train chugging, I finally found a copy of this game that worked! Third time was the charm indeed! XD. It’s also very possible that Treyarch’s games are just extremely temperamental on PS3 hardware, as I had a ton of trouble getting my copies of Black Ops II to work as well (so let that be something of a warning for anyone looking at playing this on this hardware, I suppose). Still, I’d always heard nothing but praise for the early Blops games, so I could not let myself let them go unplayed if I was going through PS3-era popular FPS games. It took me around 6 hours to play through the English version (with Japanese subs) of the game on normal mode on original hardware.

Black Ops is the story of Alex Mason, a US special forces soldier in the Cold War. Stuck in some interrogation cell, we flash back through his (and others’) memory to recount the events that brought him up to this point at the request of his captors. Mason’s memories are fishy and twisted by the drugs they have him on, but his captors certainly seem to think that these mysterious numbers that keep flashing through his vision are the key to averting a global war on a horrible scale. (Speaking of which, this game has some CRAZY flashing lights warnings even for a CoD game. Player discretion be advised).

I had heard great things about the campaign for this game, but the story, at least, bored me to tears. The long and short of it is that neither Mason nor any of his compatriots are actual three-dimensional characters. Hell, most of them are barely even two-dimensional characters. This lack of any meaningful grounding or point of reference makes going through his scattered memories a neat idea in concept, but it becomes a pretty incredible slog in actual practice. I could not bring myself to care about any of these generic military men on their poorly defined secret missions to save the world. The story being interesting at all revolves around one big twist near the end, which would be fine for a 90 minute or 2 hour story, but it is atrociously dull for a 6+ hour story.

Beyond that, this is a story done in incredibly poor taste. Other CoD games I’ve played (from CoD 4 and forward, anyhow) have generally had the good sense to have your antagonists be some fictional country or group. They use aspects of real life to ground their setting, but they take care to avoid demonizing real groups or people too harshly usually. There’s usually some caveat of “oh these are a new splinter group” and/or “this segment of their military has gone rogue, and their actual govt/military are asking for our help!” It can come off as infantilizing towards those countries at times, and it’s certainly pro-US (or at least pro-Western hegemony) propaganda, but it’s been relatively ignorable for me.

Black Ops 1 goes *really* hard on picking the biggest hits of events you’d know from the Cold War, and boy do they do that *really* tactlessly. We demonize the hell out of the evil evil Cubans and the “doing war crimes casually right in front of you” Russians, but we even have the foolishness to give you segments in the Vietnam war fighting against never ending hordes of Vietnamese soldiers. Vietnam is a conflict with *so* much baggage that most developers and storytellers have enough sense not to touch it unless they have a *very* specific point to make doing it, but Treyarch apparently lack such wisdom. They handle these things with all of the subtlety of someone who watched Apocalypse Now and thought it was a trippy but still really cool and hype war movie, and it’s frankly embarrassing.

This is by far the most actively uncomfortable one of these modern military FPS games has made me with just how overt and gross the pro-America propaganda is, and it’s a huge pile of junk that they do absolutely nothing with beyond making a really long and boring action movie for you to play through. Much like with Killzone (another series that I have no shortage of narrative issues with), while you *could* read anti-US messages into the game, I find it very hard to read those messages as actually intentional. There is virtually nothing the story actually does to imply that any of this is done unironically or to make a point, and my personal read on it is that this is a story exactly as surface-level as it appears to be. Treyarch clearly love old action movies, but it might have done them some good to take a film or writing class or two to get at even *some* of the subtext in those old famous war films.

Gameplay-wise, it’s Call of Duty, sure, but it’s a lot rougher than you’d want it to be. The gunplay is very good, snappy, and arcadey like CoD always is. The game plays well at the very least. The mission and level design though leaves a lot to be desired, however. Compared to something like Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 1 several years earlier, the set pieces here are far less impressive, far more infrequent, and, when they are here, they’re some combination of “explained too poorly so you’ll fail a lot in trying to understand them” and “just very annoying and awful to get through.” For the most part, they come off as poor-man’s versions of those old MW1 set pieces. The actual playing of this campaign made me feel like I was playing Medal of Honor: Frontline again rather than a successor (of sorts) to Modern Warfare, and I in no way mean that as a compliment (particularly when it comes to the bafflingly useless AI of NPC soldiers both friend and foe alike). This is just not the quality I’d come to expect from a CoD campaign, and by the end of it I felt fairly foolish for having looked forward to trying out one of Treyarch’s entries in the series for as long as I have.

Aesthetically, the game is put together well enough at least. While I found the music pretty forgettable, it underscores the action well enough. It looks quite nice for a game of the era, and they do a very nice job of recreating the look and feel of the time periods they’re recreating. I do, however, wish CoD would be less in love with minimalist UI. There were so many times where I just wished I had a health bar, a stamina bar, a more specific objective marker. I’m also less and less in love with the whole savestate-like system of CoD checkpoints. It made me redo the entire first level because my dedicated door opener partner got permanently stuck in a wall, and he couldn’t be properly freed. It thankfully never happened again, but it was a pretty poor first impression, at the very least.

Verdict: Not Recommended. All of my issues with the narrative have been pretty exhaustively laid out here by this point, but even if you can deal with a 6 hour, shallow action movie and the pro-imperialist propaganda stuff doesn’t bother you, the gameplay is just so outclassed by other CoD campaigns that you’re really better off playing those instead. It was such a bummer getting to the super silly post-credits zombie mode stuff, because that stuff was so much more silly and fun in a far more problem free kind of way. Had that same “have JFK do JFK quotes as he kills zombies with Castro”-energy been put into the campaign’s design, I think we could’ve had something really great here, but that is simply not the case, and your time and money are just better spent elsewhere if you’re looking for a well put together FPS campaign.

5. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (PS3)

While I was quite thoroughly disappointed with the first Black Ops, I had heard the sequel was great too. I went in far from optimistic, certainly, but I was at least hopeful that the interesting things I’d heard about Blops II’s mechanical design would make for a less tedious gameplay experience, if nothing else. I was pleasantly (and mercifully) surprised, thank goodness, even if this is still far from my favorite CoD campaign. It took me around 8 or so hours to make it through the campaign on normal mode while getting what’s apparently the canon ending (though not for lack of trying for a better one <w>).

Black Ops II takes a much more diverse approach to its narrative than its predecessor. A super terrorist, Menendez, is hell bent on bringing destruction to America and the world’s superpowers, and David Mason (the son of the previous game’s protagonist) is consulting with his dad’s old war buddy Frank Woods (who actually didn’t die in the last game, go figure) to try and find some intel on how to stop it. A largely split narrative, we follow Alex Mason back in the 80’s while we follow his son David in the present (narrative) year of 2025 as the clock ticks down closer and closer to this Call of Duty-branded Joker’s planned day of reckoning.

There are some improvements and some less than improvements from Blops 1 in this game. On the more positive side, this is far more competently paced narrative than the last one. We have actual 3-dimensional characters who are concretely presented enough that I could actually remember any of their names, and the overall thing is far more engaging and fun than Blops 1 ever even came close to being. We also wisely stay out of Vietnam as a setting, as we seem to have accepted that some conflicts are indeed too hot a topic to harmlessly tell a silly war video game story about.

The “less than improvements”, however, are very difficult to ignore, however. While they’re not “let the player mow down Vietnamese soldiers”-levels of bad anymore, they’re still not super wise in what real people and conflicts they pull from in history, with hilariously ahistorical statements like the Mujahidin in ’86 calling America their “one true enemy” while in the middle of the Soviet occupation. The game’s politics are also incredibly neo-liberal, sometimes hilariously (like the 2025 president who is a VERY clear Hillary Clinton stand-in or the super aircraft carrier, the USS Barak Obama), sometimes pitifully (like just how back-patting it is for the “US and China military cooperation” stuff it does despite infantilizing the hell out of the Chinese armed forces), and sometimes just plain grossly and incompetently.

That’s where we get to the game’s main antagonist. While we do *attempt* to give Menendez some motivations and ideals, he is fundamentally devoid of any actual ideology. We run into the same problem that a fair few James Bond films do, where we construct a bad guy with an interesting personal motivation, and then we tack on a scary-seeming, anti-status quo ideology without actually understanding how that ideology works or even attempting to work it into his worldview. As such, Menendez is a pro-liberation, anti-superpower hegemony cult of personality who ironically has extremely few concrete ideals, because this is all ACTUALLY just a front for his true motive: revenge against a few specific spec-ops guys.

We even come SO close to Frank Woods realizing that he’s actually all at fault for this, as is the US military, but we neither reach that point nor do anything with those near realizations thematically. It’s just a twist to the parts of the narrative in the past and nothing more. It’s impossible to say whether this is all down to Treyarch’s personal politics or sheer inability to write a remotely meaningful political story, but neither is exactly a flattering description. While this was at least a bit less of an actively uncomfortable narrative for me to go through than Blops 1 was, this is ideologically nearly identical, and barely any less gross. This is a story that functions as a monument to neo-liberalism, and while it’s, to a point, an interesting cultural and intellectual artifact as a result, it’s still a pretty damn politically rancid and poorly executed story at the end of the day.

The gameplay, at the very least, is a BIG step up from Black Ops 1, and it’s far more what I’d come to expect these games to deliver after how good MW1 was to play. Guns and gunplay are some of best they’ve ever been, and levels have far better pacing than the massive hallways of enemies that made up Blops 1’s campaign. It’s still decidedly imperfect, granted. Treyarch are still nowhere near as good as Infinity Ward at coming up with set pieces that are both cool *and* fun, and we still have the frustrating problem of frequent set pieces that, while cool, are presented poorly enough that you’re very likely to die at least once pretty early on because they’re just not explained well enough. That said, it’s a game I had a lot more fun playing than the previous one regardless, and a good bit of that is due to all of the other experimenting that Treyarch are doing.

Blops II adds a lot more diversity to the kind of campaign you can have. That doesn’t mean nonlinearity, mind you. This is still just as linear as any other typical CoD game had been (which is something I don’t mind at all, for the record). Instead, you’ve got a few new elements that add a lot to the experience. One is that, before missions, you can set your loadout from a set of guns, attachments, and even multiplayer-style perks that you unlock by completing certain objectives in each mission. Second is that the story actually has a lot of potential endings and twists it can, or can’t take. This doesn’t really result in meaningfully different stages, granted, but the fact that you can succeed or *fail* missions without an actual game over fail state is super cool, and it makes for a much more dramatic and personalized-feeling experience. It really sucks that this also means that there’s simply no “restart from checkpoint” button mid-mission that isn’t just dying, but the multiple story paths along with the customizable loadouts gives a lot more longevity to the experience even if the story itself is still kind of a laughable pile of crap.

The last really cool new feature, an my personal favorite, are the strike force missions. Largely optional missions parallel to the main game’s story, they’re missions focused around operation titular strike forces of drones, air strikes, and marines in different settings. You can guide them around the map from a tactical RTS-style view, and you can also take direct control of drones and soldiers to help tilt the battle in your favor directly (and the AI are still pretty bad for both you and your enemies, so that’s a pretty big tilt in your favor, usually). Defense, attack, and capture missions make for a great deal of variety that are spaced apart just well enough and also don’t outstay their welcome, and I enjoyed them so much that I honestly wished that Treyarch had just made a whole game of just these XD

Aesthetically, this is very nice looking game, which is neat for the last non-cross-generational CoD games. They’re really pushing the hardware to the limits, and they’re doing it with barely any super noticeable texture pop-in and such. The music isn’t particularly stand-out, but it’s still a fine backdrop to the story content regardless. The voice acting is probably the weakest part of the game, though. It’s not nearly as bad as Killzone, granted, where the delivery feels really stilted and amateurish (because it generally is a bunch of amateurs), but it’s for a TON of the Spanish dialogue. I got one of my Spanish-speaking friends to confirm it, but basically all (even Menendez himself) have really weirdly accented and (at times) outright broken Spanish. It shows a shocking lack of care for a series that makes SO much money and is made in a place where you’d think it’d be incredibly trivial to find great, native speaker Spanish voice actors.

On that note, however, the Japanese subtitles were pretty darn cruddy too. They’re not totally useless, but they lose A LOT of the nuance and character to the line deliveries, and it’s frankly to the point where you’re coming close to losing important story info as a result. It was a very vindicating feeling upon looking online and seeing that Squenix’s localization job was commonly criticized out here, because I felt like I was losing my mind at just how bad these subtitles seemed XD.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There’s a lot of push as well as pull for this recommendation, and it’s a more “your mileage may vary” than a lot of ones I give. While the story is still pretty gross as Treyarch tends to do, the gameplay is both novel and fun enough that this one is at least worth checking out. While it’s certainly far from my favorite CoD campaign, it’s still one of the most interesting with how its myriad faults work together, so it was a memorable experience for me, if nothing else, and maybe it will be for you too XD

6. Dead Nation (PS3)

This is a game I’ve owned for well over 10 years because Sony gave it away for free ages and ages ago. I’d always heard it was pretty good, but I was just never in the mood for a game like this (or, it being digital, I just forgot I owned it <w>). However, in search of something to do with my last free afternoon before winter break ended, I took the opportunity while the PS3 was still hooked up to finally sit down and play through this. It took me around 5.5 hours to play through the English version of the game on normal difficulty.

The story to Dead Nation is very surface level, and it’s also very in keeping with a lot of other zombie fiction of the time. You can choose a male or (hilariously sexualized with her strapless bra in the zombie apocalypse, which yes you do get a VERY good shot of in the intro so you know that’s what she’s wearing XD) female protagonist, but other than looking different and having different voice actors, their stories and even their line-for-line dialogue seem to be completely identical. It makes a perfectly fine backdrop for the action though, as if there’s zombies that need killin’, you don’t usually need a terribly elaborate excuse in video games x3

That gameplay itself is a twin-stick shooter with adventure game elements. You go through stage 10 quite lengthy (about a half an hour each) linear stages killing zombies and looking for loot. Loot is, for the most part, money or score multipliers, but you can also find new armor pieces or ammo too. Money is spent at most checkpoints on gun upgrades consumables like grenades, and new guns, while different armors give faster movement, better defense, and/or stronger melee attacks depending on your loadout. It’s a really solidly put together game, and even if it’s a bit simple, it’s great fun to play, and I honestly wish I’d had a buddy to do the co-op with.

It’s got a few issues here and there though. You move with the left stick and aim with the right, and then your four shoulder buttons control firing, melee attacks, dodge charging, and item use respectively. That means you don’t exactly have any fingers free on a PS3 controller to handle things like switching between different weapons and items, which are bound to your D-pad. This means that you *must* effectively stop moving if you wanna swap weapons or items, which can often be a death sentence when you’re in the middle of a tense fight. I really wish you could sell weapons you weren’t using, as just having your most upgraded stuff to swap between quicker would’ve saved me a lot of unnecessary deaths in the harder sections.

Only your main rifle has unlimited ammo, so all of your other guns are relegated to emergency use, unless you’re willing to live dangerously (or just play more wisely, as you would after taking a death or upon a replay). I played mostly cautiously with the rifle as my weapon of choice as a result, which got very tiring as you need to mash the R1 button to fire that thing. Holding it down charges a charged shot, which, while cool, was rarely ever practical, and I really wish the game just had an option to hold down the button to keep firing ^^;.

The last minor issue is that while the game is normally quite well balanced, I found some sections very annoyingly difficult to go through as a single-player. The design of a handful of areas (with one really mean arena at the end of level 7 in particular) makes them *very* difficult to manage with only one person because you’re getting mobbed SO hard, and it very much felt like something designed first and foremost for two people to more ably handle. It’s hardly a game breaking experience or anything, but those tougher portions definitely turned me away from ever trying to replay the game on a harder difficulty, at least if I was still playing by myself anyhow.

The game’s presentation is quite nice for a download-only title. Zombies have a good amount of variety to them not just functionally, but visually too. Sure, you’ve got big super zombies in an almost Left 4 Dead style, but even normal zombies have all sorts of outfits, with many serving function as well as fashion (with firefighter zombies being immune to burning weapons and soldier zombies’ armor making them take more hits, for example). They all blow apart and fly around in explosions with the game’s fun physics system, and that combined with the pumping soundtrack make for a great gameplay experience. The story also is told with very prettily done 2D illustrated vignettes between levels, which look very nice even if the story’s not terribly original and the voice acting is fairly flat.

Verdict: Recommended. This is a ton of fun! It’s not the best thing in the world, and there’s honestly a lot of competition for similar kinds of games both then and especially now, but if you’re a PS3 or Vita owner and looking for a fun twin-stick adventure shooter, this is a damn fine choice, especially if you’ve got a buddy to join you for the ride~.

[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

Tomb Raider III iterates on what we got in Tomb Raider III; it seeks to correct some of the problems with II, adds several new moves and weapons, and lets you do the mid game in any order. However, it has some rough edges of its own, including a pretty crappy final boss that leaves little room for error.

The game begins with Lara in India, delving into a lost temple for an artifact. Upon finding it, she is met by a man who reveals that it's one of a set of four, and he wants the full set. Lara decides to go for it, and heads to the other three locations to grab those artifacts. Naturally, the guy turns out to be evil, takes the four artifacts, and you need to stop him from unleashing terrible power. The three artifacts can be acquired in any order; you're given a map and can hit up either Nevada, an island in the South Pacific, or London. Each of these zones has a different feel. London starts at the rooftops before you delve into a closed down tube station. The South Pacific is a more traditional lost temple style zone, complete with dinosaurs (as is tradition in the series). Nevada starts off in the desert, with a focus on traversal, before you get captured, go through the no-gear level, and then break into Area 51.

In terms of new moves, Lara is now able to crouch and crawl under narrow gaps, she can sprint (which is required to make some timed switches), and can grab onto monkey bar-like ceilings and traverse. The last one is the main one that opens up new design space; the other two just let them adjust some of the specific placements of things in a map (or use a half height hole instead of a full height one). The rest is stuff you've seen before; there's no new elements in the environment, just different layouts.

In terms of how it improves on Tomb Raider II, it doesn't have any particularly long levels, and it pulls back on the combat. On the flip side, you are much more ammo starved. It works out in the end, but you definitely will do more weapon swapping on some of the beefier enemies at the end game as you run out of ammo for any particular gun. I also found the layouts and puzzles more intuitive; doing a lap with a flare out was usually enough to figure out what I needed to trigger the next sequence. But in a frustrating turn, this has the nastiest water sections in any of the three games. Some of them are just very long with minimal air pockets, while one section is done through freezing water that rapidly saps your health and requires you to use medkits (the game even places them in the checkpoint spots outside the water along the way because they know you need it). And the no-gear level is much more punishing; while previous games let you keep all your ammo and health kits, here you lose it all and only get fixed equipment when you get to the recovery spot. On the remaster you do get a portion of what you came in with, which is a nice improvement, but it still behooves you to do Nevada first to get it out of the way and ensure you have solid resources for the rest of the game. Oh, and one final complaint which is totally a symptom of the technology of the time is that the monkey bar sections tend to be hard to see. Often you need to pan the camera up to see they exist, and depending on the lighting it might still not be obvious they are there. You get no indication like you do for switches or ziplines, so if you're ever stuck try jumping to the ceiling while holding action and see if you grab on.

Overall, Tomb Raider III was my favorite of the trilogy. The parts where it was better than the previous two games far outweigh any pain points. I've heard the series gets much more uneven after this, though maybe that's improved with the remasters that are coming soon. I'll see what people's impressions are before picking them up.

[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

Blade Chimera is a Metroidvania by the same devs who did Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth. It's set in future Japan after an event that caused hordes of demons to appear in the world. You are Shin, a demon hunter of the church who has no memory of his past. After defeating a large dragon demon you bond with a spirit that takes the form of a sword, even though it's technically a demon. You must continue to make the world safe and see if you can uncover your past.

Now, I call it a Metroidvania, but the game doesn't actually lock its progression behind mobility abilities. Instead, it's all keycards, though the level layouts and backtracking still scratch that Metroidvania itch. Your mobility abilities are on a skill tree, with the second half of the tree with double jump being unlocked midway through the game. You will eventually need all of those, but the game doesn't start enforcing it until the end of the game; prior to that there is pretty much always a path that doesn't require any of them. Skill points are gained by leveling up SotN style, and things are balanced such that you should hit the level that unlocks everything around the time you get to the final boss. One thing that is pretty unique to this game is one of the mobility abilities in the first skill tree is a map-based teleport that you can get pretty much as soon as the skill tree unlocks. Rather than having to find specific warp spots on the map, you can teleport pretty much anywhere at pretty much any time. There are a handful of map squares that can't be teleported to for story reasons, and one for a very specific puzzle reason. In addition to the sheer convenience, it's also required to get certain collectables that you can't get to normally (you will spawn in a closed off spot that leads to them) and to progress through certain barriers (again, spawning on the other side so you can unlock it).

The game lets you equip two weapons and one piece of passive stat gear (and later a second one). There are four weapon types, daggers, swords, greatswords, and whips. There's also guns available, coming in semi-automatic and automatic form, plus a handful of throwing weapons. The guns have an auto aim feature so they make very viable secondary weapons, though the melee weapons will be your bread and butter. Another signature feature is your demon sword companion. You can throw the sword out to deal damage, but the real benefit is what happens when it encounters surfaces. If you throw it into the ground you create a safe spot that blocks projectiles. If you throw it at a wall you now have a platform to jump off of. Additionally, there is a system where when the sword does damage it heals you, while your regular attacks restore MP (used by the sword attacks). It all comes together to ensure you are using all of your kit, rather than defaulting to just one effective attack.

The game has some nice pixel graphics, and the bestiary is made up of various Shinto demons and spirits, like oni, tengu, and nurikabe. It makes for a nice change of pace from the standard SotN-inspired set of monsters. For the most part they're all fun to fight; nothing is overly tanky and all their attacks have some straightforward mechanism for dodging or defending. That said, status effects are brutal, as they disable you for several seconds; with certain enemy setups pretty much ensuring a death from a follow up projectile spam.

Overall, it's a very fun Metroidvania whose only downside is it's a bit on the easy side. The ability to return to save points for a heal at will and instantly get back to where you are means that the main danger is bosses and overconfidence. It's got some good platforming puzzles and overall is just a really fun time. Highly recommended.

[TheSSNintendo]

Lost Odyssey

[RobertAugustdeMeijer]

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

[TheSSNintendo]

Sword of Mana (Gameboy Advance)

[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

Cyber Shadow is a throwback platformer that harkens back to the various ninja-themed platformers of the 8-bit era. It interestingly manages to both be extremely fast and extremely methodical, depending on how you approach things. Unfortunately, there's some design elements that end up being more frustrating than fun.

The setup is in a futuristic city, there's some kind of explosion and robots are going on a rampage. You are the last survivor of the guardian ninja clan, woken up from stasis to try and stop the bad guys. As you play through, you'll get Ninja Gaiden style cutscenes that will present the backstory for the game.

On the gameplay side, you have jump and slash, no duck. Every so often you'll hit a respawn point, which at bare minimum will full heal you. Some of them can have currency spent to have them refill your special meter or drop a specific special weapon. The game is reasonably generous with them; the time between points is fairly consistent as you go through levels. This is important, as enemies deal a shocking amount of damage, and you better have been picking up the various health increases in the easy-to-find secret areas. As mentioned, there are special weapons. These are various passives that last until you've taken three hits, which is quite frustrating, as you can often find yourself taking multiple hits in quick succession due to low duration on your mercy invincibility. These include a blade extension, auto refilling of your special meter, and a gun that auto fires on enemies.

As you go through the game you will get a series of abilities that improve your performance. The first three give you attack options; a shuriken, an air down stab, and a ground-based attack that shoots fireballs mostly vertically up. These all require special to activate, and in practice you end up with less activations available compared to the ninpo in Ninja Gaiden. The game can be quite stingy with special refill drops. Later on, you'll get a Mega Man X-style wall climb, a dash, doubled attack damage with extra range, a projectile parry that lets you optionally reflect them, and finally a boost to everything, where you get a double jump and the ability to charge your attack; while charges any of your abilities are more effective. The dash is the most notable in terms of how it can chase how the game plays, as if you attack while dashing you will do a forward dash that teleports through enemies and can be chained. It is hard to master multiple chains, but when you do you can zoom through levels; the speedrun is something else to see. But if you can't get the rhythm, you'll find yourself in pits and taking damage, requiring the more methodical approach due to the hazards of enemies.

Overall, I found that the game had too many aspects with some nasty enemy placements that often require you to know what's coming or you'll eat an instant death pit. You need to be able to use your full kit to make it through, but many of the moves just don't feel quite right. Enemy mobility and attack ranges are high compared to your ability to land damage on them due to your smallish attack hitbox. Contrast with Ninja Gaiden, which has enemies that don't move as fast outside of the airborne enemies, and even those have fairly straightforward trajectories. There's definitely good ideas in here, but it leans on the "hard for the wrong reasons" end of the spectrum.