Game Reviews

Doom 2016 is how you do a reboot. Not a game that isn't what the game was originally like, (no, this is not a jab at Doom 3), not a game that makes the originals look better, even with their technological inferiority, but a game that is game locked, cocked and ready to rock. A game that takes what is good about the previous entries and builds upon those previous games as a base. You don't make a comeback with a series that was so beloved and make a game that is sub-par and makes everyone want to forget that they paid real money for it.

You don't do Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 unless you want to be remembered as a joke. You just don't.

Doom 2016 was originally going to be what looks to be the death of originality for Doom, like what happened to Quake 4. Now before I turn this into Quake 4 review, that game will have its day. Believe me. It will have its day on the chopping block. But Doom 4 was going to be very similar to Quake 4, just now with glory killing. It would have probably...

Doom 64 is a great Doom game. Doom 2016 is as well, but that isn't the topic of this review. Tune in next week...

In all seriousness, I got a hell of a kick out of Doom 64, no pun intended. Some say it's an enhanced port of Doom, some say it's an all new game, I side with the latter. 32 new levels as well as a bunch of new secret levels, it's quite a great game. The sound effects, while being samples at 22.05KHz because they're on a cartridge, are satisfying and meaty. The music got quite a downgrade from the PS1 version, cartridge and all. It was composed by Aubrey Hodges, and I think of it the same way as i think of Quake's ambient music. Not a huge fan. But that isn't a big problem if you ask me.

The gameplay of Doom 64 feels good, at least if you're playing a source port. The N64 controller is not enjoyable to use if you ask me, and the way the controls are mapped for the N64 controller is just not much fun as well. But that doesn't matter, as there's two ports to the PC that...

I had a hard time writing this review. Not because of how I wanted to word myself, but because I couldn't bring myself to play the game. I tried and I tried, but nothing. Nada. Zilch.

I did not want to play Doom 3, but I tried. I really did. I really just could not play it no matter how hard I tried. It's not becuase it was "too scary", it wasn't because there is no duct tape on mars (well, I'll get to that), it was because the game was full of bullshit. Not in the way where everything was a lie, but in a way where you are constantly being jumped by one enemy or another, and you don't have enough ammo because you can't fucking see it because it's so dark. You're always being hit for bullshit reasons. Don't tell me that this is a commonality among Action/Survival/Horror games, because it isn't. At least, not as much as this game.

Gameplay. Here we go.

One of my biggest problems with this game is the jumpscares. All sorts of demonic things happening without any buildup, just "HA...

February was a bit of a missed opportunity with my reviews, with me only posting two throughout the whole month and one of those was an archived review that at this point isn't really much to look at. It's there, but I only posted it because I did it and I wanted to fill a week. March will be a bit of a change of pace, with how Doom Eternal is set to releae this month and all. I'll be talking about Doom games, albeit not really in release order. This first one will be the most lengthy, as I'm going to be talking about all four megawads on the idTech engine as well as briefly gloss over the tons upon tons of source ports.

Doom, much like its successor Quake, pushed hardware back when it first came out. John Carmack was obviously looking to push hardware among saying tons of other things, such as how story in a game is like story in a porn movie to the lead story writer of Doom. Funny that, as Doom 3 was very story based and Carmack still worked on idTech 4, but that is neither here...

Pitfall. A well-remembered game by David Crane. The game series that seems to bob in and out of popularity. Whether it be from mediocre or infamously poor games cough Super Pitfall cough or just not being that interesting. However this game, Pitfall The Mayan Adventure, seems to have been the beginning of that surge and resurgance of Pitfall every so often.

Was it a good game to come back on after the mistake Super Pitfall was?

Yes. Definitively yes.


QTE stage.

Pitfall The Mayan Adventure is a really good game that of which is actually a decent challenge. It's not super incredibly hard (honestly, some parts are complete bullshit), but it will give you a run for your money. It's been ported to a slew of consoles, most of them 16 bit, and it has a pretty good legacy. People still argue about which port is better to this day, but probably not as vehemently as they might have in the 90s.

Gameplay wise, this...

Please note that this is another old review because I wasn't able to get the review I wanted to publish this week done. I may redo others in the future as well, like I want to do with this one. This is really just a filler review for the moment. Also of note is that this is my first review.

I don't know where to start other than "I have a lot to say".

Sega Ages 2500 for all that don't know, was a series of video games released in Japan as remakes of old Sega hits. There were a few that were released outside of Japan, you'd know them from the Sega Classics Collection on the PS2. This one is one of them. This is...

Less than good.

I have a lot to talk about, so I'm going to explain why I seem so bitter towards this game.

To be perfectly honest, I really enjoyed playing Columns on the Mega Drive. It was great with both 1 and 2 players, and it was an enjoyable experience altogether. I love playing Columns 3, and on the subject of Columns 2, I've played it once before, but don't...

Parallax Software. A company who only exists in name alone and was, essentially, a one-hit wonder. Was it a bad one-hit?

Short answer is definitely not.

Descent and Descent 2 (as well as some expansions, I will talk about those later) ended up reorganizing Parallax into two companies. Why? Well, after Descent 2, half of the team wanted to go work on other things, such as Freespace, and later on Red Faction and Saints Row, so they renamed Parallax to Volition, and Outrage left to work on Descent 3. Outrage Entertainment ended up working on Descent3 and its expansion, D3: Mercenary. They also did a game called Alter Echo which nobody's ever played but it got reviews harbored at around 68/100, then by disappearing.

That is, until they banded together with Volition (perhaps it was Volition's own doing) as the Parallax Software name still existed legally and Interplay took the money they were making from Descent, and ran with it instead of paying their royalties.

Now, with that all...

Please keep in mind that this is not a new review. This is an old review from the original OG that I'm posting because I want to keep a weekly schedule. If nothing else, it's an archive and a filler review, hence the lack of many screenshots.

I've been one to try different games. I'd never played 1 on 1 fighting games when I first got Soulcalibur II & III, and I enjoyed them. When it came time to give Tekken a try, I saw Tekken 5 for cheap. I knew reviews were good, and the price was right, so I picked it up. I thought that finally playing Tekken 5 would be a fun experience, since I'd seen it in action and it looked cool. I also noticed that it had 4 extra arcade games, and so I picked up Tekken 5 to kill five birds with one stone (joke intended). I got it home, and tried it with a friend and thought "This isn't very much fun..." after playing a few rounds and so I took it out and played another game. I come back to it a while later, thinking that I'd have more fun, and so I found...

The Sega Neptune.

A prototype Mega Drive/32x combo. A way for Sega to sell 32xes to people that wouldn't be able to buy a Saturn. Pretty brilliant, honestly. Never came to fruition for many reasons, one of them being tons upon tons of miscommunication. It was promising, as that kind of upgrade to the Genesis could do it some good. Unfortunately, the 32x had a bunch of mediocre ports, a few good games for one reason or another but usually not both, and a game library that is small enough that it could all fit in a potato sack.

Hold on, why am I talking about this? I don't usually talk about hardware.

Well, Japan decided to do as it usually does and turned the Sega Neptune into an anime girl.

This here is Neptune. She will be your main character for this game.


All jokes aside, Hyperdimension Neptunia was originally a PS3 game from 2010. It was loved inside of Japan. It then gained a...

"I ain't afraid of no Quake."
-Duke Nukem

Quake is something I managed to get attached to. The sort of game where once you start playing, by the time you stop, you look at the clock and each time it is many, many hours later. For some people though, that is Doom. I've played my fair share of Doom, granted. But there was something that got me interested in Quake instead. Whatever reason it was, once I got the CD, I tried it out on DOSBox. There was only one problem with that, and that was running it on DOSBox. That is something I will get to later, though.

Quake is a FPS from id Software back when they were their own company and so was Bethesda. Time has marched on, and now the Bethesda that made The Terminator on the Genesis, Home Alone on the NES, as well as other games that are infamously bad. Then they made TES and that magically cleaned up their track record. Quake was impressive at the time. Massively, MASSIVELY impressive, and is a possible reason why Cyrix...

I realize that manga is a change of pace. This is a game preservation site. A review of a chapter of graphic novels seems weird.

In all honesty, I wanted to do this because the story in these was such a vast departure from the games, and if you try to ask if it's the same as the anime, no. The anime was meant for more general TV audiences and the manga was geared towards older, more "hardcore" Pokémon fans.

I say that because of some of the subjects in the manga. The overall tone of the manga is very mature and serious one. I say that not because they use "naughty words" or hand gestures that mean the same, but because they are quite violent. The VIZ translations are a bit more toned-down, but the Singaporean English translations and original Japanese versions don't shy away from anything at all.

Without further ado, I will do my plot synopsis and give my opinion on it. Spoilers, duh.

[SPOILER="Click here for plot...

"Why the radio silence?" You might ask. "Where've you been and why haven't you posted a review in the last month?" You might also ask.

The short of it is I didn't know what I felt like reviewing. I haven't been on the big reviewing kick like I had earlier in the year. I had actually thought about another Evangelion game, but there wasn't a good enough translation. Neither online line-by-line text document, no patch, no nothing. Not saying which, as I may get to it at another time. I'll keep it a surprise.

Then I thought about Arkanoid. Returns was a good one, but I also thought of Doh It Again, the SNES game, as I had found a highly rare PC port of the game and then I just didn't really feel like that, either. Mostly just complaining about gold bricks, which is probably what the review will end up being like if I end up doing it. They went way too far with those gold bricks.


Honestly, they built in a function...

Anyone reading this remember Core Design?
You do, huh? Do you remember them for anything other than Tomb Raider? Yes?
Well it's good to know I'm in good company then.

Core Design made some pretty decent platformers back in their time for sure, and as a personal upside, they were huge supporters of the Mega CD. That console needed more games that weren't as i mentioned in my previous review, just fodder for mocking the add-on. That and lazy Mega Drive ports that were honestly just useful for putting out games that just cost less to put onto a physical medium.

Wolfchild isn't one of those games.

Wolfchild, a game initially started on the Amiga, was a 2D platformer with about 5 levels. One boss for each level. It's also not an amiga game that feels like it was put out for a quick buck like many arcade ports looks like. I haven't played them but they look like they play horribly. That however is in part due to the fact that the game was made for the Amiga market, that being Europe...

Since I did my Sonic CD review at least two years ago, I've had some things come up since I've done that one. One complaint I've been getting is a real pain in the ass because it's not really a legitimate complaint and moreso just "you're wrong", but I'll get to that when I get to it.

However, while my other reviews have been more objective, this one will be more subjective and abrasive because I keep hearing about how "bad" this game is.
Yeah. This game is "bad" with all of it's ways of making the game harder, like future signposts. The game is "bad" with it's special stages. The game is "bad" because it used to only be open to the masses for public consumption because it was on an add-on that was "so awful" because all that kept getting put on there were Digital Pictures' games. This game is "bad" because of it's special stages. This game is "bad" because of its level design. This game is "bad" because the music doesn't fit. This game is "bad" because it has "anti-piracy" that...

In my previous review, I mentioned a few things. One that Edie had only one waiting animation (during loading screens as well), which is incorrect as she does do a few things, at least more than (probably) take her hair out of her tank top. Something I didn’t mention is that the voice clips you hear in the game, two of them being when you input the Left, Right, Left, Right, A, B, C, B, which allows you to change your lives count and bombs count, as well as the same code, but replacing the last B with an A which unlocks classic Elevator Action without having to play through Returns, both of those voice clips are from Edie when she’s idle. The line “I’ll get you next time!” which is in the track “Blow Up”, track 25 which is also the first song for the final mission of the game (as each level has more than one song play and they’re all scattered throughout the disc, it’s a bit irritating, aside from Mission 6) is a line from Kart while he’s idle. Jad also has some lines while he’s...

Elevator Action Returns is arguably one of the best 2D arcade games made period.

A sequel to the ever popular Tortured Artist Effect game Elevator Action from 11 years earlier, Elevator Action Returns was released to arcades in 1994. It stands as one of Taito's best, and definitely outshines the original in every way, as a sequel should. Does that mean the original is bad? Not really.
The original is just hard due to your slow movements and how the game, at times, does feel a little clunky. If not, then with how everything feels a little slow, it feels a bit unresponsive at times. That, albeit is due to the hardware it was originally released on. In 1983, they didn't have the F3 to run the game on, to give a time frame, Phoenix was only released 3 years earlier. I'll let you think about that.

The sequel improves in every way, undoubtedly. It plays more fluidly, everything looks better, you can jump from one platform to another whether or not the elevator is above or below...

So, I'm guessing what you were wondering I was hinting at with my review on Ridge Racer V, talking about Sugar & Rockets. If you're not wondering, well, I'll still tell you.

I.Q.: Intelligent Qube, on the PS1, was a fun game. You went back and forth on the stage to "capture" cubes that were either gray or white. You avoided the black cubes while also trying to capture the cubes that you could get to keep them from falling off the stage. The only ones that are supposed to fall off are the black ones. The green cubes though can capture everything in a 9-block radius, but when on the left or right edge, there are only 6 captured.

This continues with I.Q Final. This one was not released in the USA, but IQ was crazy popular in Japan. Like, award-winning crazy. These games, for some reason were called Kurushi in PAL regions, mainly Europe. Why? Who knows.

We then have the launch of the PS2. One of the games at launch was Ridge Racer V, another being Sony's Fantavision, to which I...

This review is being done because the show got released on Netflix. Otherwise I'd be holding out until I found something that would be less plot description and more gameplay description.

Shin Seiki Evangelion Koutetsu No Girlfriend, Neon Genesis Evangelion Girlfrien Of Steel/Iron Maiden to the fans in the west, is an Evangelion Visual Novel. Released on the PS1, Saturn, Mac, Windows, PS2, PSP, this game was very popular when it release and gained quite the following as far as something Eva goes. The meat of this review will be the Plot Synopsis, so if you want to play this game for yourself and not have the plot spoiled, you're not going to get a very in-depth review.

The Windows, Mac, PS2 and PSP versions were the "Tokubetsu-hen" versions, or the Special Edition version for those unknowing. Many updates and more content in the form of at least one scene and an extra ending, as well as remastered art that isn't blocky and any nuance...

Burnout Revenge is the peak of Burnout. Undoubtedly.

Burnout Revenge, a 2005 game for Burnout, and technically being Burnout 4, is a definite improvement over Burnout 3 in most aspects. It's enjoyable, with many hours I've clocked into the game, it sounds great and it looks good, though there is a problem I have with the visuals in this game. It was released on the PS2, Xbox and Xbox 360, with the 360 version being the "definitive" version. I've never bothered to touch it, though I have touched the Xbox version. I don't know whether my Xbox was messing up or the disc was messed up, but the Xbox version was very, very glitchy. Many times, the camera would clip through objects, a couple times I clipped through the floor, and in the "Eliminator" races, once it went down to me and only me, it'd go for a second and then say "You Win!".

Graphically, this game is very good. Progressive Scan is an option, being X and Triangle at startup, like most NTSC-U/C games, even across the pacific...

Metal Slug 3 is an incredibly enjoyable run'n gun game. Run to the right, blow shit up. Simple as that. Not much more to explain than that. The series just kinda didn't get better than this one.

Gameplay wise, it's a lot of fun. You run around, free and save hostages, and shoot everything that isn't a background object or is being used by yourself. Throw hand grenades, shoot with the "ROCKET LAUNCHER" and pick up the many, many powerups that will shout at you, "HEAVY MACHINE GUN". Granted, the voice shouting at you is a bit cheesy, but it does honestly add to the charm of the game.

The game has 5 levels, but also multiple pathways, usually having to do with a sub of some sort. They do add to the replayability, as they can change how you play the game. Levels 1 and 3 have them undoubtedly, and would be in places you wouldn't really expect under most circumstances. Level 5 though is a long, drawn out pain in the ass. First, your character gets abducted by aliens, then you go up to...