Last year, I got close enough to playing through 100 video games that I decided I wanted to try and actually hit that mark in 2023. I ended up doing 103, and this year just so happened to be another one of those years where the games were so good that I feel the need to write about them. Just so things don't end up like the last time that happened and I ended up not writing half the list*, let's Lightning Round this shit. No getting cute about dividing old or new games, this is just a fast and loose list of the games I played from worst to best, 103 to 1.

*If you're curious about what my top five for 2021 were, it's Riders Republic, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, Forza Horizon 5, and Metroid Dread as #1.

#103 - Savage Bees

Capcom shmup from the 80s played through on a lark because it's included in Street Fighter 6's arcade. Notable for its funny name in the US (it's called Exed Exes overseas) and being a coop game early in the history of the genre, but not much else. Imagine 1942 but less charming and about as repetitive.

#102 - Alex Kidd in Miracle World

Similar situation to Savage Bees, but replace Street Fighter 6's arcade with Like a Dragon Gaiden's Master System. It does a good job of looking and sounding like a well-made platformer, but that facade slips away pretty fast once you put hands on the thing and run into cheap gotchas and literal rock-paper-scissors boss fights.

#101 - Hyper Dyne Side Arms

The other Street Fighter 6 shmup included in this list. Horizontal instead of vertical; named after the unprecedented ability to shoot both left and right. Classic shoot-em-up fun in that you do alright for a few levels and then can't get a word in edgewise after your first death. It's got more going for it than Savage Bees, but not that much.

#100 - Adventure Island: The Beginning

Feels every bit like the budget WiiWare title that it is (there's even motion control minigames tacked on), but the game's persistent upgrade system makes it kind of fun to just run roughshod over most of the levels short of the endgame boss fights.

#99 - Dino Crisis

Come for the dinosaurs, stay because you've fooled yourself into thinking that a game that is commonly referred to as being "Resident Evil with dinosaurs" is actually going to do something to live up to that description. It's not like dinosaurs aren't a natural fit for survival horror—when I discovered that there was a bleeding status effect, I assumed in vain that I'd be hunted down by some raptors picking up the scent if I didn't take care of it—but Dino Crisis is way more interested in puzzles and keys ad nauseam than having any actual fun with its premise. Bring on the remake; it needs it.

#98 - Fallout 4

A Bethesda game like you've always seen before.

#97 - Signalis

This game's frustrating because it clearly knows what makes its inspirations special but fails to have any of that actually rub off on the game itself. Any tension is quickly decimated after you realize how easily you can juke all of the enemies, and then all you're left with is a pretty-looking game with obnoxious inventory management and a story that holds onto its cards for far too long for me to get invested. A recent patch fixed the inventory issues, but arrived too late for me to benefit from it.

#96 - Parasite Eve II

Parasite Eve's mix of biological horror with RPG mechanics and V.A.T.S.-esque, pseudo-realtime combat still feels like untapped potential to this day, so the sequel's shift to more traditional Resident Evil gameplay is pretty disappointing, but that's not really the issue. For the first half or so, it works out pretty well: enemy designs are fucked up in just the right way, and the Mojave ghost town setting is a smart contrast to the memorably cold and sterile New York City of the original, but the back end of the game devolves into a poor man's take on those endgame laboratory segments from the earlier Resident Evil games (which weren never highlights to begin with). Weak puzzles and combat, loads of backtracking, you know the routine.

#95 - Mafia

Novel in its cinematic and storytelling ambitions, mostly frustrating elsewhere. That Django Reinhardt song gets stuck in my head more than I care to admit.

#94 - Peter Frankl: Puzzle no Tō

The early/mid-90s multimedia frenzy gave us a lot of funny stuff to gawk at, and the 3DO was successful enough in Japan that it had its own share. This here's a collection of logic puzzles starring a Hungarian-born mathematician/juggler that's a minor celebrity in Japan. Do a brain teaser you've most likely seen before somewhere else (One of them's even in Signalis!), get a vital dose of the unhinged FMV footage you came here for, and do it all over again. The puzzles (and FMV clips) start to repeat sooner than I'd like, but hey, a sitting with this nonsense was more entertaining than a month with Fallout 4.

#93 - Urban Trial Freestyle

Store brand Trials that fits the bill pretty well until the inconsistent physics spoil the fun.

#92 - Homefront

I got this pretty close to its launch and had trouble running it on my PC at the time. Never really touched it afterwards since I figured I knew what it was—I was right: it's a gauche Call of Duty clone—but it's pretty entertaining as an early 2010s trend-chasing time capsule these days. The game's so of-its-time in its trashiness that one of the bigger setpieces takes place in a TigerDirect.com building you called a white phosphorus strike on.

#91 - Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (SNES)

This one came up in a game club I was a part of. It's the licensed beat-em-up you expect it to be: simple enough that I got through it without dying, but the music was alright. The biggest problem is the severe lack of Tommy.

#90 - Saints Row (2022)

What is all but guaranteed to be the last Saints Row game for a very long time almost feels like it's ashamed to be a crime game. Its characters bend over backwards to be relatable to no avail, there's embarrassingly transparent attempts to eschew the once series-defining wry amorality (your very first jack move is whitewashed by your friend saying in earnest that he once saw the victim kick a dog), and the story shoots for a woefully misguided "power of friendship" arc that goes to some pretty embarrassing places. That said, if you can look past its borderline-apologetic tonal mess, there is an almost-okay open world game waiting for you with a pretty damn good customization suite. And a lot of the bugs are fixed!

What a way to go out.

#89 - El Paso, Elsewhere

El Paso, Elsewhere likely has the best story out of any game on this list. It deals with its theme of dependency and abuse with a staggering grace, and I was always looking forward to the next cutscene while I was playing. Partially because everything else kind of sucks.

If you can shoot a head, you've already won the game. The gameplay is a Max Payne homage starring enemies that don't shoot back, and it goes about as well as that sounds. Slowing down time gives you extra damage and headshots restore a decent amount of bullet time, so I quickly fell into a loop of slow-shoot-unslow with the pistol and shotgun, and that combined with the tommy gun for long-range targets did me well enough that I beat all fifty (fifty!) levels without ever using the other weapons. I can't imagine the other weapons would make it less of a slog.

And don't even get me started on the music.

#88 - Resident Evil 0

Using REmake's near-timeless visual tech for an original game is a great idea, and I even like the dual-protagonist gimmick as an extension of the series' puzzle-solving gameplay, but Capcom fixing what isn't broke and removing item boxes really drags this one down. You spend way too much of this game transporting your stash of goods from one safe spot to the next, and the rest of it is mostly B-tier Resident Evil gameplay along the lines of Nemesis and Code Veronica, anyway. If nothing else, the train sequence is one of the best openings in the franchise.

Well, that and the part with the killer ape falling on Rebecca from on high is really funny.

#87 - Sonic Advance 3

Speaking of dual-protagonist gimmicks, Sonic Advance 3 has a fun tag-team feature but is otherwise that brand of mediocre you got from the franchise in its post-Genesis, pre-Shadow/06 era. It certainly looks the part, but the level design just isn't up to snuff.

#86 - Mafia III

Mafia II feels closer to the video game version of a cinematic mafioso epic than maybe any other game out there, and they accomplish that all without the typical open-world excess you get elsewhere in the genre. Mafia III, however, does less with more, spoiling its great voiceover performances, compelling setting, and novel documentary-style framing on a straightforward revenge story with obscenely repetitive busywork. Granted, some of its wanton murder and empire building is pretty fun, but not fun enough to excuse the game padding things out to what feels like triple its natural length.

#85 - Tomb Raider (2013)

A decent third-person action game, but for being Crystal Dynamics' second shot at rebooting the series, they've given a pretty bland and disappointing treatment to Lara Croft. I can understand the potential of portraying a more grounded and vulnerable Lara, but that doesn't mean you have to make her so generic.

#84 - Halo 4

The Master Chief at his wheel-spinningest. Its lows aren't as low as Halo CE's bland corridors and backtracking, but it's not like there's a lot of highs, either.

#83 - Sonic Superstars

I had a feeling the second they announced Arzest was behind it that Superstars wasn't going to be the Sonic Mania follow-up I was looking for. Not that it doesn't have its moments, but it's easily one of the most uneven games in a franchise known for that. Half the soundtrack sounds like it'd fit right into Sonic CD or Sonic 3, while the other half sounds like this. Some levels look great and have fun gimmicks, while others feel half-finished both visually and mechanically. It's a decent game, but the exhausting boss fights kept me from doing its unlockable second run through the game, and I doubt I'll be back soon.

#82 - Fighting Vipers 2

Along with Daytona USA 2, this got its first home release (at least in the States) through Like a Dragon Gaiden's in-game arcades. A solid (if iterative) sequel to the underrated original, but I struggled with the final boss so much that I had to abuse the game's insane Super KO mechanic to beat it, and didn't feel like playing it much afterwards.

#81 - Mega Man ZX

Others (magazines from the era, especially) rail against Mega Man for how rehash heavy and repetitive the franchise can be, but I really love the way each series tweaks the formula and gives it their own flavor. ZX's metroidvania twist is a natural evolution of the exploration the X series introduced, and while it's a little rough (my god, the map in this game), it has the refined action of the Zero series to pick it up. I can't believe that it took Capcom until 2006 to figure out that this series was a great fit for the format.

#80 - Serious Sam Classics: Revolution

A fan-made restoration of the original Serious Sam that includes a new campaign that's too sloppily balanced to be worth the effort, at least on Serious difficulty. That said, it includes options to multiply the enemy count along with your max health and firing speed to produce some absolutely insane encounters, and it's a lot of fun to dick around with.

#79 - Quake II (2023 N64 version port)

Quake II's new remaster is fantastic, and it ended up getting me playing a lot of Quake this year. This N64 port's a simplified, more linear take on the game. Less meandering and backtracking is a good thing as far as Quake II's concerned, but that also means dealing with simplified enemy encounters to go along with it.

#78 - Mega Man X DiVE Offline

Hard not to talk about this one without immediately throwing shitty "for a mobile game" caveats, but I had a better time with it than I expected. Being a gacha game (effectively un-gacha'd for this release), there's plenty of fan-service, including loads of fun character pulls from across Mega Man history and decent enough action-platformer gameplay to make putting up with a bad story and worse localization worth it. It's also cool that it serves as a sort of museum for the game, with all of its seasonal events and quests freely available to check out. More studios should be doing this kind of preservation for service-based games.

#77 - Prodeus

A real looker, but sticks way too close to the Doom playbook and never poses much of a challenge. It plays well enough, but you'll know what to expect out of the rest of the game after a level or two.

#76 - Wipeout XL

A bigger and better Wipeout as the name would suggest, but its less forgiving criteria for completion—instead of traditional tournament scoring, it employs that all-too-common "first place or eat shit" approach—makes it just a touch too frustrating, so I end up preferring the original game anyway.

#75 - Quake Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity

Compared to the Mission Pack that came before it, Dissolution of Eternity feels a bit more like a glorified Quake mod, with cheap looking new weapons and level design that isn't quite as sharp. Quake is Quake, but there's better campaigns to play.

#74 - Dishonored

A lot of great level design like you want out of an immersive sim, but I made the mistake of shooting for a no-kill run and discovered that your non-lethal combat options are pretty limited and make for a repetitive playthrough. Its DLC campaigns make quick work of fleshing things out, though.

#73 - Power Instinct (SNES port)

The Power Instinct series apparently gets real crazy as it progresses, but this first one is part of that wave of post-Street Fighter II fighting games and plays it pretty safe by comparison. Fine enough start for the series, though, I guess.

#72 - Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure

There's better portable Sonic games these days given that Mania is on the Switch (and the fan-made Triple Trouble remake has an Android port), but my time with this was a nice reminder of the lost art of cramming unique adaptations of big boy console games onto far more limited handheld hardware.

#71 - Mario's Tennis

One of the light bulbs that went off in my head when I got my Oculus Quest 2 was seeing if I could play Virtual Boy games on it, and it turns out you can. Like the N64 follow-up, Mario's Tennis is a little more cut-and-dried than the Mario sports titles we get now, but the stereoscopic 3D is effective, the music is catchy, and the happy little jaunt (or walk of shame) your character does based on how a rally went is a delight. And of course, it's also a fine game of tennis on top of that.

#70 - Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Despite its quality voice acting, the story of Dishonored didn't grab me much, so any closure this standalone expansion brings is really secondary to the gameplay, which in turn isn't quite up to Dishonored 2's standard. The level design isn't quite as memorable as what the first game and its DLCs had to offer, either, but the toolset still beats it out, so I give it the edge.

#69 - Ultra Street Fighter IV

I came to it too late to enjoy it in its heyday online, and I'm too weaned on the more forgiving timing of more recent games to really get dialed in offline, but still, this is obviously a top-notch fighting game. Art style's aged a little poorly, but the game certainly holds up better than the Tekken crossover that followed.

#68 - Star Wars Episode I Racer (2020 port)

I've never seen a Star War and don't particularly care to, but I can recognize how it can make for some pretty good video games. Episode I Racer's lack of difficulty left me on autopilot at times while I shot for full completion of it, but the sense of speed and smooth control really go a long way for it.

#67 - Hydro Thunder

Kind of the opposite problem for Hydro Thunder. Game's got great arcade flavor and creative, dynamic track designs, but arcade difficulty comes along for the ride, and trying to beat the AI after the first handful of races is just brutal, and I opted to leave the bonus tracks unwon by the time I was done with the game.

#66 - Fighting EX Layer: Another Dash

I love Street Fighter EX 2 as well as Arika's roster of fighting game weirdos, and this game's central mechanic of using super meter to execute a dash move that can be used to extend combos called out to me as a Ken main in Street Fighter V and 6, so I felt right at home playing this. Unfortunately, for as tight and satisfying as this game's mechanics are, it's light on content and doesn't have much of a population online.

#65 - Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

When I think of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, I think of one of the soundtrack's songs, "Precious Thing" by Olli. That's not just because its repetitive "ASS ASS ASS ASS" is memorable, but because the song really is the game in a nutshell; just like how Precious Thing is a blatant—albeit fun—Zapp pastiche, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk pretty much takes Jet Set Radio Future's whole thing and doesn't make too much of its own mark on it. Some aspects are better (the controls and movement), some are worse (the "combat" with police, its rudderless story), but even at its best, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a game that takes a torch passed (or stolen, depending on your outlook) from SEGA and mostly runs in place with it. Granted, it ultimately probably gets away with it since the amount of people that have actually played JSRF likely dwarfs that of the more widely available Jet Set Radio, and it's not like SEGA is looking to make any more JSR of their own.

Oh.

#64 - The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Not only is "The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog" a pretty funny name for a video game and a solid April Fool's joke, it's also entertaining in its own right. There's an isometic platforming minigame they go to one or two times too many, but this is one of the most consistent Sonic games since Mania.

#63 - Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

It was a long time coming—lest we forget duds like Dead Aim and Survivor—but the Umbrella Chronicles is a decent Resident Evil light gun shooter and a fun way to revisit the stories its retells. Outstays its welcome a little bit by the end, but I'll chalk that up as being faithful to the source material.

#62 - Motor Raid

Another one of the Like a Dragon/Judgment arcade cabinets you should pay attention to. Picture a faster, futuristic Road Rash made by SEGA and injected with the kind of gritty aesthetic you'd find in a late-90s arena shooter, and you're on the right track. An interesting experiment.

#61 - Hot Wheels Unleashed

Its Medium difficulty is a little too hard and its Easy's a little too (you guessed it) easy, but this is for the most part the Hot Wheels video game you picture in your mind's eye. The cross-promotional stuff (which otherwise feels exhausting in video games lately thanks to live service games) is not only warranted but a highlight, with the Looney Tunes themed expansion serving as some of the best content in the game.

#60 - Sly 2: Band of Thieves

I'm not a huge Sly Cooper guy, and Sly 2's switch from "Crash Bandicoot clone" to a more open, hub-based structure welcomes backtracking and makes the platforming take more of a backseat than I care for, but this is still a slick game that's held up pretty well both visually and mechanically.

#59 - Trackmania (2020)

At this point it feels like nothing's ever going to replace Trackmania 2 for me, but the Royal mode they added since I last played (think Fall Guys) at least made me happy I checked in on this.

#58 - The Misadventures of Trone Bonne

Mega Man Legends feels like it's missing that breakthrough game where the gameplay can keep up with the visuals and the charm of its world. This isn't it, and it's not even really a step in that direction compared to the first game, but it's hard to argue with the Bonne family and their dipshit Servbot workers.

#57 - Super Punch-Out!!

Nowhere near as iconic as the NES original, but I have a soft spot for how weird it is, even if I don't really have the patience for a complete flawless run to unlock the final set of opponents.

#56 - Sonic Frontiers

Kinda surprising Sonic Team didn't reach this conclusion sooner; 3D Sonic is a lot more fun to control in big ass fields with more room for error than the tighter, more linear stages earlier games had. Like with Superstars, I could do without its boss fights being so long, but it's certainly a solid recovery from Forces.

#55 - Wave Race 64

Now that I've actually gotten my hands on this game I can't shake the feeling that it's a little overrated, but given that it's a decent first-party N64 game, it never really had a chance not to be. Nothing tops when the announcer yells "BANZAI!"

#54 - Judgment

Really sharp writing and likeable characters, but the actual detective work you do feels like the kind of stuff you got sick of in AAA games from ten years prior.

#53 - 1080 Snowboarding

The trick controls really take some getting used to, but this game feels almost SEGA-like in its upbeat arcadey vibes. The Mario Kart 64 composer worked on this, and it shows.

#52 - Bust a Groove 2

I wasn't prepared for how psychotic Bust a Groove 2 is compared to its predecessor. I think I prefer the first game in the end because its soundtrack is better, but between the outlandish endings, bizarre hidden characters and an increased prescence of Super Milk Chan creator Hideyuki Tanaka's artwork, this game feels like more of a spectacle.

#51 - The Evil Within 2

TEW2 has a bit of a direct-to-video vibe since Shinji Mikami isn't as involved and the entire voice cast was replaced, but given that the original Evil Within is kind of ass, I guess it works out? It's a shame Jennifer Carpenter couldn't get another payday, though. Either way, the open-world environments feel better suited to the TEW gameplay loop, and it's a lot more playable as a result.

#50 - Puyo Puyo~n

I love Puyo Puyo so this should probably be a lot higher, but the game's main gimmick of using special abilities is downplayed in its Story Mode and the general pace of play is a lot slower than the games that came before it, so this didn't quite hit as hard as a Puyo Puyo Tsu or Puyo Puyo Tetris.

#49 - Ecstatica

A very memorable survival horror game from the days before there were Resident Evil games to emulate. Ironically, it reminds me of Village in how it mixes gothic horror with more over-the-top elements, but in this case it's outright trying to be comedic. It's like a more fucked-up Grimm fable.

#48 - Quantum Break

A small step forward in gameplay and a small step back in storytelling compared to Alan Wake still makes for an alright Remedy title altogether. No, I didn't play Alan Wake II yet.

#47 - Dead Space (2023)

Lots of remakes this year, huh? I have to admit that I was wowed by a lot of the smaller technical details—I lost my shit once I realized they recorded Isaac Clarke's lines twice over so when he's low on health, he'll actually sound like it—but otherwise, this is the Dead Space remake I expected, and frankly, I want my survival horror games to upend expectations. What good is horror if I know how it's going to fuck with me? There's no real surprises in what's been changed and what hasn't, so if you're familiar with the tricks they pull in the original game, you won't have too much trouble (or tension) here.

#46 - Mortal Kombat X

Is this Mortal Kombat for the rest of our lives? Reboot trilogies that start out pulling from the original arcade trilogy with a few additions, then sequels that get more ridiculous (and less interesting) until they circle back around?

#45 - Exoprimal

The start of the very first cutscene told me all I needed to know about Exoprimal. The game keeps up that Verhoven-esque attitude the whole time (throwing in some time travel hijinx for good measure), and it's probably the best thing about it. The exosuit-based classes are all unique and satisfying, and slaughtering hordes of dinosaurs like it was a Musou game with guns is a good time—I even begrudgingly came to enjoy the contentious PVP elements—but even after a couple of seasons of updates, there's a serious lack of content, and I ended up getting burned out on it shortly after the first new mode dropped and it ended up just being a hard mode. It's cool seeing Capcom experiment, but I wish they put more into it.

#44 - X-Men Legends

X-Men Diablo? Shit yeah.

#43 - Earth Defense Force 2017

Speaking of Paul Verhoven, EDF's "Starship Troopers without subtext" vibe is a perfect match for the game's scrappy low-budget sensibilities. It doesn't hurt that said budget doesn't really hurt the gameplay, either.

#42 - Ghostwire: Tokyo

It kind of broke my heart once I realized this game was just a pretty and stylish Far Cry, but the game's lucky I haven't played a Far Cry in a while, and the moment-to-moment gameplay is a bit more engaging than the Evil Within 2's take on a horror-themed open world.

#41 - Mega Man Legends

Kinda cheating putting this one on the list since I've already beaten it before, but it was via the PC port using only keyboard controls so I didn't exactly get the proper experience. It's really frustrating that this series was killed before it could get a game that played in a way that'd do its world and visuals justice. It's a good game, but there's so much unrealized potential. We know how to make third-person action games control now, man! You could do Mega Man Legends 3 now!

#40 - 1080 Avalanche

In some ways it shows that this was handed to Nintendo Software Technology, their B-list American studio responsible for franchise also-rans like Metroid Prime Hunters and Mario vs. Donkey Kong. It's decidedly Western compared to the original, with a grittier, more generic, and less arcadey style (as well as a hilariously dated soundtrack; I about lost my mind when I beat the final challenge and Seether kicked in), but more importantly it's also a smoother playing 1080, with more intuitive controls and double the framerate. It'd be nice to get a mix of both games, but I was still shocked by how much I liked this one.

#39 - X-Men vs. Street Fighter

One of the games I played in the leadup to Street Fighter 6's release. Looks and feels great, but I think tag fighters aren't really my thing, since the abundance of options ends up giving me a sort of choice paralysis.

#38 - Hydro Thunder Hurricane

The jump from SSX Tricky to SSX 3—one that loses an iconic, bombastic style but gains improvements across the board elsewhere—is one that crosses my mind a lot with sequels. Like SSX 3 (and ironically, 1080 Avalanche before it), Hurricane loses a lot of that arcadey feeling the Midway original had, but the quality-of-life is so much higher (boost starts and jumps feel more natural here, and the difficulty curve is gentler) that I can't help but enjoy it more.

#37 - Wipeout

Not quite as unforgiving as its later PS1 sequels, and plays like a dream on its Phantom Edition PC source port. If you're an old-school fan of the original game, you should absolutely check out Phantom Edition; it's a night and day difference.

#36 - Super Mega Baseball 4

Super Mega Baseball 3 might be my favorite baseball video game of all time at this point, and while I love 4's addition of real MLB legends (John Kruk just feels like he belongs in these games), the UI is messier, the new character models are off-putting, and you can't import your old teams into the new game like with prior releases, so I don't see this replacing it.

#35 - Forza Horizon

I was picking away at this for years. Better than 2 since I like its map more, but it doesn't quite reach the greatness of the series from 3 and beyond due to a lack of off-roading (except for the now-delisted Rally DLC).

#34 - Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon

It's not quite up there with Half-Life: Opposing Force or F.E.A.R.: Extraction Point, but this is still a well-made expansion pack. The final boss is a little lame, but that's a problem across the whole series.

#33 - Mortal Kombat (2011)

I played the hell out of this online when it first came out (I still remember having the thrill of seeing scrubby Smoke players panic once they realize I can just block their teleports), but never really engaged with the single-player content. Turns out all that stuff rules, too.

#32 - McPixel 3

The pacing of WarioWare, the gameplay of Panic!, the trappings of MacGruber: just an incredible combination. Sneakily impressive tech, too. Bonus points for beating Goat Simulator 3 to the sequel-skipping gag.

#31 - Darius Gaiden

I'm not good enough and don't care enough to get good at shmups to be one of those people who can actually evaluate these things based on the intricacies of their gameplay, but what I can tell you is that Zuntata's ethereal soundtrack and its colorful, surreal visuals are enough for me to trust people who say that Darius Gaiden is among the genre's best.

#30 - Sega Rally 2

A slightly deeper, slightly more frustrating Sega Rally. The big knock against the home version at the time was its poor performance, and sure enough, it doesn't quite run how you'd want one of their arcade racers to, even with a hidden "performance mode" style cheat. Luckily, more up-to-date Dreamcast emulators can take care of that by overclocking the emulated Dreamcast's processor, and it really lets the game shine.

#29 - Mega Man ZX Advent

Mega Man ZX, but with most of its problems fixed and instead of taking their weapons, the ability to Shang Tsung your ass into all of the bosses you beat. Great stuff.

#28 - RollerCoaster Tycoon 2

My time with the more business-oriented Theme Park scared me off of these games for years, and boy do I feel like an asshole now. Despite the thrill ride focus, this is more of a podcast zen game for me, since it's pretty relaxing to slowly build up a park and cater to your guests (at least until you decide to start building death machines).

#27 - Dino Crisis 2

It's sadly not the survival horror game the original Dino Crisis should've been, but it's a pretty damn fun action game regardless. There's a combo system that encourages efficiency and a bonus for getting through areas without taking damage, working together to make going Terminator on a bunch of poor dino bastards feel especially rewarding. And the currency is called Extinction Points!

#26 - Sonic Triple Trouble 16-bit

Does a wonderful job of capitalizing on what makes 2D Sonic great while revitalizing a lesser-known Game Gear entry. The thought that fans are currently better at doing classic Sonic games than the people that actually made them the first time around is a little sobering, but it's nice to know that even if we aren't getting that Mania sequel I wanted, there's other stuff out there to fill the void.

#25 - Mega Man Zero 4

Along with 3, and X4, Mega Man Zero 3 is one of the pinnacles of the franchise (and not to mention a solid ending for Zero's story), so the idea that they got one more game out of the series before moving on to ZX is a bit odd. That said, the gameplay is still razor sharp, even if it feels a little too streamlined—ironic, considering where the Zero games started.

#24 - Super Mario Galaxy 2

I was a handful of stars away from finishing this for ages until I wrapped it up testing a blatantly-mispriced Wii remote I found at a Goodwill ($5!). It's good, but to be honest, I always thought Galaxy's sorta-linear-but-not-quite structure makes the process of getting stars feel a little rote compared to other 3D Marios, and I couldn't get as attached as I did to stuff like 64 and Odyssey.

#23 - Mario Tennis

Another game I feel like I'm cheating with by including here. Always played this multiplayer, but ended up finally completing the tournaments this year. Good, pure fun, plain and simple.

#22 - Shadow Warrior 3: Definitive Edition

I think Doom 2016's design owes more to Flying Wild Hog's Hard Reset and Shadow Warrior than people give them credit for, so it's funny seeing the Shadow Warrior series circle back around from Borderlands-lite to Doom Eternal-lite. It's not quite as demanding in its action (save for a setpiece/boss fight or two), but it's a snappy 4-to-5 hours of entertaining, fast-paced gameplay. Just ignore the dialogue.

#21 - Bowser's Fury

Remember what I just said about the Galaxy games feeling a little rote? Bowser's Fury doesn't have that problem. You can knock this one out quick, and the looming threat of Bowser adds a fun dynamic touch to the moment-to-moment gameplay.

#20 - Super Mario RPG (2023)

I love looking at this game. They did such a great job of capturing the whimsical, yet almost off-brand vibe the original game had visually (although Mario could stand to look a little more, I dunno, weird), and while I think the new, overly-punishing postgame seems at odds with how much easier the rest of the game is, it doesn't quite spoil the Super Mario RPG's status as RPG comfort food.

#19 - Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Subtitle That's Way Too Long

If Yakuza: Like a Dragon was proof that the series can succeed without Kazuma Kiryu, this is proof that the series can succeed without longtime series director Toshiro Nagoshi and the team of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio developers he took with him to NetEase. Like a Dragon Gaiden is an economical 30 hours (if you're looking to 100%) full of the satisfying combat and engaging side activities people have come to love the series for, and it delivers one hell of an emotional gut punch at the end of its story. If the series truly is preparing to say goodbye to Kiryu, this is definitely an excellent primer for it.

#18 - Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem

You can tell this was made by Serious Sam fans in the best way. Part standalone expansion and part restoration of cut Serious Sam 4 content, this retains the huge battlefields the later games in the series are known for, but tightens up the pacing around them while sometimes returning to the playful, a-wink-and-a-stab ambushes that helped the classic entries stand out. It's a solid balance of what makes both eras of the series great, and I wouldn't mind if Timelock Studio were to do more with the series down the line.

#17 - Back 4 Blood

I really didn't expect to sink as much time into this game as I did this year. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of my favorites, but when Back 4 Blood launched, the high difficulty and deckbuilding mechanics felt like too many cooks, so I backed off after a few hours. Since then, they've tuned the balance and took a sledgehammer to the whole card system, turning it more into a big ass create-a-class mechanic where instead of pulling a couple of randomly-chosen cards in your deck after a level, all fifteen cards are in play from the start. It's now much easier (and far more fun) to mess around with the various perks the cards offer and see what builds are viable, and that goes a long way towards covering up for the inferior level design and pacing compared to L4D.

#16 - Halo Reach

I share the thought of a lot of fans that the loadout-based multiplayer kind of goes against what makes Halo gameplay so dynamic, but the campaign is great, Forge is great, Firefight is great. I think ODST beats it out for me by a hair since it achieves its space-noir vibes more convincingly than Reach's job of emphasizing its looming finality, but they're really neck-and-neck.

#15 - Halo 3: ODST

Like I said, neck-and-neck.

#14 - Hi-Fi Rush

The worst thing I can say about Hi-Fi Rush is that it's a little too in love with its own writing. It's executed fine for a generic "plucky dork overcomes stern corpo with the power of friendship" story, but far too often it takes control away from you to rattle off jokes you don't laugh at or build up relationships you don't really care about. Maybe if the game's exemplary brand of combat—which walks the tightrope of tying music and gameplay together better than just about any non-rhythm game before it—wasn't something you can't really get anywhere else, it wouldn't be a problem.

#13 - Superhot VR

The untouched checkpoint mechanics are a little rough to swallow (and even takes a physical toll) if you're stuck on the last sequence or two of a level, but this plays exactly how you picture (and want) a VR Superhot to, and I can't imagine a better endorsement than that.

#12 - Quake II (2023)

For as exhilarating as its multiplayer can be, Quake II isn't one of id Software's better single-player games. The campaign's maps are drab and sprawling in a way that doesn't really bring out the best in its brutally gratifying weaponry, and its inventory system feels a little too clumsy to use without throwing the pace of combat off.

Quake II's surprise remaster, NightDive's latest achievement in retro FPS rescue, addresses all of these issues. An inventory wheel joins the Doom 2016-style weapon wheel introduced in the first Quake remaster, and there's a new compass item that draws a path to your next objective just like how Dead Space does it. It's so useful that I want it in every FPS remaster going forward. Enemy AI has been adjusted to be a bit more aggressive (Berserkers are actually a threat now thanks to a restored jump attack that was left unfinished in the original game), and the flow of gameplay has generally been brought closer to the peaks of Quake I's adrenaline rush.

The work NightDive put into this remaster makes Quake II's single-player content as good as it could be, but that can only really take you so far. At the end of the day, those maps are still those maps, warts and all. What takes this remaster over the top is the new campaign by MachineGames, which is easily one of the best official Quake campaigns you can play. Levels are visually diverse, the combat is genuinely challenging, and it smartly integrates enemies and equipment from the two expansion packs. If you're going to play any Quake II campaign, forget about the others and pick this one up.

#11 - Um Jammer Lammy NOW!

Um Jammer Lammy is simply a better Parappa the Rapper, iconic as it may be. It casts a wider net musically, has a lot more content, and generally plays better, cutting down on the frustration you almost assuredly dealt with on Parappa levels such as "baking a cake" and "trying to take a shit." It's one of the more delightful rhythm games of its time, and I always wish it got its propers alongside Parappa. NOW! is an obscure arcade release that I originally thought was just a straightforward port with a unique controller and an extra Parappa stage, but it turns out that it has damn near a half-hour of extra FMV content, including fake interviews with Lammy and her bandmates and a heaping helping of Joe Chin being a gutless trash bag on top. If you like UJL as much as I do, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

#10 - Dishonored 2

Dishonored once more, with feeling. It really feels like the culmination of a foundation they built with the first game and its DLCs, featuring memorable, sometimes best-in-class level design, beautiful visuals, and the wealth of options (both lethal and non-lethal) that make for a good immersive sim—and then some. Having two different characters with separate abilities is a brilliant way of adding to the inherent replayability of these kinds of games.

#9 - Resident Evil 4 (2023)

It's hard to overstate what the original Resident Evil 4 did for video games. It was a landmark, redefining the Resident Evil series going forward while inspiring franchises like Dead Space and Gears of War. Hell, it feels like Shinji Mikami spent much of his career afterwards trying to recapture that same high.

So what of its new remake? Well, it's good. Very good, even. But I dunno, man, that's kinda it. It looks how you would expect, it plays how you would expect, it has a couple of new enemies, removed its more goofy elements and changed a couple of story beats like you would expect, and that's it. It's the Resident Evil 4 remake you figured they would make, right down to the sterile UI they've had in every one of these games since 7. Don't get me wrong, that still means it's a fantastic action game and one of the best of the year, but it's underachieving excellence to the point that I couldn't help but feel like Mr. Burns looking at Martin's power plant while the credits rolled.

The Mercenaries is fucking killer, at least.

#8 - Black Mesa

The elephant in the room with Half-Life has always been its endgame, so it's great to see Black Mesa finally iron Xen out into a visually awe-inspiring third act full of atmosphere and improved setpieces. It has its own issues (the oft-maligned Interloper chapter still isn't paced all that well), but it sticks the landing a hell of a lot better than the source material.

#7 - Rez Infinite

Rez has always been an immersive game all but intended for VR, so of course this is where the game would naturally end up. The real revelation in its VR port isn't the extra layer of synesthesia achieved by your headset, though, and it's not even the breathtaking new Area X. The breakthrough that Rez Infinite presents that lets it be the ideal version of itself is the controls. In its original forms, the analog aiming was never quite as fast as your reactions, which was frustrating (and at worst took you out of the experience), but with motion controls, everything just feels natural, and it brings you that much closer to the game. Maybe it makes the game a little on the easy side, but I never got the impression that Rez was ever meant to be Space Harrier.

#6 - Resident Evil 4 (VR)

What a cool fucking way to play this game. For as active and fast-paced as the remake can feel compared to the original RE4, it's got nothing on how VR puts your head on a swivel during setpieces like the dreaded water room or the Del Lago fight (which has you firing and manually reloading a spear gun instead of tossing spears repeatedly), and even when little touches like having to reload and eject rifle rounds by hand feel frivolous at first, they end up really heightening the tension once you're in the busier parts of the game. Rez is a no-brainer in terms of VR adaptations, but RE4 really surprised the hell out of me.

#5 - Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Speaking of surprises, that's the theme of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the first truly great 2D Mario since World. It doesn't have the sprawling structure that makes Nintendo's SNES masterpiece my favorite game, but what it does have is the Wonder Flower. Each one mutates the level you're playing in a different way, and even when I was deep into the game and thought I had its tricks figured out, the Wonder Flower would throw a curveball I wasn't expecting at all. Wonder's full of the creativity that the 3D entries have been known for (and that the 2D entries feel like they have been actively running from), and it isn't afraid to modernize the series in ways that feel decades overdue.

#4 - Halo 3

I don't think I've ever been happier to be wrong about something than with Halo. I blew this series off for years, but man, playing this game with friends, a higher framerate, and mouse controls is some of the most fun you can have with an FPS, and holy shit, that campaign. All killer, no filler, baby. Even the requisite Flood chapters are less of a slog this time around. I don't really care about the story of Halo, but Halo 3 is so god damn good that when Keith David kills the Prophet of Truth in the middle of the best level in the whole series and then lets out a little roar for himself, I felt like I had to resist the urge to pop off too.

Good for you, Arbiter.

#3 - Quake (2021)

Quake II's remaster and its new campaign almost make me resentful of how the first game's remaster didn't get as much love with its content, but then I remember that Quake really doesn't need a whole lot of work to begin with. The flow of its gameplay and its atmosphere are so ubiquitous and unmatched that it feels like we have an entire generation of indie games trying to capture it. When you have that, it's hard to complain that the MachineGames campaign isn't as good as Quake II's.

#2 - Street Fighter 6

I managed get into Street Fighter V at a pretty good time in its life, but I don't think most would disagree with the notion that it fell on its face when it came out. Street Fighter 6 seems to have been designed with a deathly fear of repeating its mistakes, and the result is likely my favorite fighting game ever. The single-player includes a meaty Yakuza-lite with loads of Final Fight fan-service, the intuitive Drive Gauge meter system and its incredibly satisfying abilities are deeply integrated into the core combat (unlike SFV's V-Gauge, which could be outright ignored at times depending on who you played) and the Battle Hub makes playing the game casually against randos a cinch.

It feels like Capcom is on top of the world right now with where their heavy-hitter franchises are. Here's hoping some of that rubs off on their other ones.

#1 - Resident Evil (2002)

If it felt like I was too harsh on RE4 and Dead Space's remakes, here's why. REmake is unbelievably astonishing; the benchmark by which every survival horror remake should be judged. It's one of those games where, along with Metal Gear Solid 2, I get whipped up just thinking about it. I mean, shit, I ended up playing through it two more times right after my first playthrough. The way it turns players' knowledge of the original game against them is something every survival horror developer should be studying, and I have to remind myself that the game is over 20 years old despite how it looks. I could gush about this thing forever, but this is already long enough as it is.

Good year, as far as games go! It's a shame about all that other shit.

The lines have blurred over the years. I got into it a little bit in my previous post, but video games aren't always products of their times anymore. It's not unlikely that you may boot up a game in 2022 only to discover that it isn't the game you played a few years or even a decade ago, and it's always a toss-up as to whether or not that's a good thing. Some games get a second chance after a rocky launch, and some are even reborn altogether. Hell, we've reached the point where it's a common AAA business practice to ship a game half-finished or even outright broken, taking your lumps at launch while banking on big post-release updates to bring in sales and acclaim. Other games are simply abandoned, left to succumb to cheaters or server closures, accumulating dust and negative Steam reviews in its wake.

These are fascinating times, and it's left the once-predictable tradition of Game of the Year lists in a weird place. There's probably plenty of rules you could make or ways to go about dealing with that, but for my "2021" list, I've included any game that felt like 2021 was a notable year for it, whether it's because of major updates, next-gen upgrades, coming out of Early Access, or anything like that. Most of the games you'll see here were first released last year, but it only feels fair to let some older games through the cracks. Anyway, here's the first half of the list; I'll be posting the top 5 along with some Honorable Mentions later on.

#10 - Watch Dogs: Legion

Watch Dogs: Legion is a pretty smart dumb game when it wants to be. For a while, it felt like it was doing a solid job at being the non-thinking man's Deus Ex, hitting all of those cyber-espionage notes in that overly-convenient AAA video game fashion, portraying a hacker revolution power fantasy by way of those scenes from network TV cop shows that reveal that nobody involved in the production knows how computers work. Hiding unconscious bodies (or dead ones, the game barely pretends like it matters) is as simple as walking up to them and hitting a button to cloak them, and hacking phones—or computers, or cars, or anything else with wires in it—is a similarly effortless button press away. If you don't stop to think about it for too long, it's a fun little time-waster. Even its big "recruit any NPC in the world and play as them yourself" feature makes a great first impression, killing two long-standing problems in the series with one stone.

Who's your favorite Ubisoft protagonist? Yeah, me neither. That's why taking the XCOM approach and having the playable characters be the procedurally-generated citizens of London is such a refreshing move. The on-the-fly profiling of pedestrians you did in previous games barely amounted to anything, despite how Ubisoft propped it up as one of its distinguishing qualities as a hack-the-planet open world game, but with Legion's recruitment mechanic, it's been given purpose as a scouting tool—a pedestrian could have an occupation or traits that come with benefits that prove useful in gameplay—and it doesn't take very long at all before you start making up narratives in your head around the members of your odd resistance movement and the random variables that make up their background and history, and it ends up being a lot more fun than most of their actual plot lines. One of my early recruits was a veteran bare-knuckle fighter, with hand-to-hand prowess that I used to win all of the underground fighting championships in the game. After I saw his profile mention that he had filed for bankruptcy in the past, I assumed he had traveled a pretty tough road and made him look a bit more haggard than his initial appearance, giving him a widow's peak and tattoos to fit the part a bit better. It wasn't until after I did all this that I noticed that he was only 18 years old, at which point I shrugged my shoulders and threw a Benjamin Button gimmick on top of it. There aren't exactly a lot of interesting stories to be found in Ubisoft's London—save for a particularly morbid subplot involving a tech magnate that's gone missing, which flexes its dystopian muscles better than anything else in the game—but the buildup of your movement, and the resulting attempts to make sense of their procedurally generated lives is surprisingly amusing, and enough to make up for it.

At least, for a while. The problem with Legion is that you're ultimately just doing the same old Ubisoft shit you've no doubt seen before if you've played practically any of their AAA games in the past decade. I like sneaking into outposts and methodically clearing them out, but I did that in Far Cry 3, and the gadgets unique to Watch Dogs, while fun, can only entertain for so long when it feels like your experience was pushed through the same Play-Doh mold as Assassin's Creed, a feeling exacerbated by a line of AC crossover side missions. It's a shame, because there's a lot of potential in what's there, and it feels like Ubisoft could make an outstanding game if they didn't feel the need to make it their usual padded-out open-world game. I enjoyed it enough to reach the credits—and even take a glance at the absolutely barren multiplayer component—but it feels like the series is still at square one when it comes to fully delivering on the promise of the franchise.

#9 - MLB 21 The Show

I'm more of an arcade sports kind of guy, but every once in a while, I'll dip my toes into the simulation pool and see how it goes. I got NBA 2K14 with my PS4 at launch and ended up having a pretty good time with it (which in retrospect seems like great timing, as the series appears to have become a microtransaction nightmare that's monetized like a free-to-play game in the time since), and I even messed around with that Rory McElroy golf game a bit when I had a free EA Play subscription, but as far as baseball is concerned, it's mostly been Super Mega Baseball or the same old Mario Superstar Baseball for me. The last time I touched Sony's MLB franchise was on the PS3, and I couldn't really get into it much, but with the series coming to Game Pass in a "what the fuck" business deal that already seems quaint by comparison to Microsoft's more recent ambitions, it felt like the timing was right to give it another shot. After all I had a brand-new Series X to put through the paces.

2021's iteration ends up mostly being the Show I wanted it to be, but it takes a bit of work to get there. Every aspect of the gameplay can be customized to a staggering degree, so if you want batting to rely mostly on simple timing, saving the more involved, simulation style style gameplay for playing defense or pitching, you can do that. Everything from control schemes to camera angles to AI competency can be tweaked to such a degree that if you enjoy the sport in the slightest, you can probably mold the game into something you'd enjoy. Even in its Road to the Show career mode, where I'd expect at least some form of limitation, you have the option of letting the game take control for you on a case-by-case basis, going far beyond the typical "simulate game" functions I'm used to. I don't think the fielding in baseball video games is particularly fun, so I told the game to let Jesus take the wheel for a majority of the time, letting me focus on turning my created player—Hideo Kojima, as seen above, center-left in the front row after having won the World Series—into the best Shohei Ohtani-esque two-way player he could be.

It's not as much of a pick-up-and-play game as it could stand to be—the amount of options are overwhelming at first, and frankly, the game does a terrible job of surfacing the wealth of variables at your disposal—but if you dive into it, you'll probably come out of the other side with a good time. Eventually.

#8 - Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth

A lot of people place Symphony of the Night atop the Castlevania food chain almost by default, and to a point, I get it. It's a classic, but in a series that has immensely enjoyable action games like Super Castlevania IV and Rondo of Blood, it's hard for me to put the nonlinear games over the original formula. Still, it's hard to deny SotN's audiovisual splendor, or the simple joy of its movement and punchy, blade-based attacks. For me, it works more as a casual experience, because thinking about it more than "this is nice" leads you down a dark road—or rather, a dark hallway, over-and-over again for a half-hour in the hopes of getting an item that has a 1 in 1024 chance of dropping from an enemy that can't be found anywhere else, and that's not really what I play games for.

Record of Lodoss War: Let's Just Call It Wonder Labyrinth inevitably drew a lot of comparisons to Konami's seminal (and easier-to-pronounce) title with its flashy 2D visuals and familiar gameplay. Sure enough, it's a dead ringer for Symphony, and the game occupies the same kind of space for me, working best as a similarly mindless experience you soak in fully within a sitting or two. It's not a carbon copy, though, and the differences end up making it feel a bit closer to the action games of Castlevania yesteryear.

Where Wonder Labyrinth diverges from Symphony, and where critics begin to take issue with the game, is in how relatively light the experience is, with world design that plays it conservatively in providing branching paths and secrets, and boss battles that, while intense, don't require any serious grinding to overcome within a reasonable amount of attempts. I can understand people not being into that, but a tight 6-hour playthrough is more up my alley, and that ends up feeling better suited for the core gameplay anyway.

It doesn't take very long before Wonder Labyrinth makes it clear that the relatively small development team is a big fan of Treasure. The combat's central gimmick is an Ikaruga-style polarity shifting mechanic that has you changing between using a fire spirit and a wind spirit on the fly, each with its own perks. You're able to absorb damage of the same element you have equipped, and this will help level that spirit up to three times—leading to potentially huge increases in your damage output and health regeneration at Level 3. Taking damage will lower your level, while dealing damage will level up the spirit you don't have equipped. It's more intuitive than it sounds, and it leads to some interesting scenarios depending on what spirit the situation calls for. Most of the time, this mechanic does what you expect: some enemies take more damage from one spirit and are maybe even invulnerable to the other, but it really shines during the frenetic boss fights, which do an excellent job highlighting both the art direction and the gameplay in what is easily the highlight of the game. It's not uncommon to see bullet-hell projectile patterns being fired off, requiring you to rapidly shift back and forth to avoid damage and preserve your spirit levels, all while trying to do traditional Castlevania boss shit and getting your hits in on whatever huge monster you're contending with. It's the kind of challenging, fast-paced action that's usually reserved for more linear 2D action, and it could stand to pop up in metroidvanias a lot more often.

At is best, Wonder Labyrinth feels like the Gunstar Heroes to Symphony of the Night's Contra: a lean and mean 2D showpiece that distinguishes itself from its obvious inspirations with a few key twists. If the traditional exploration kept the intensity of the standout boss showdowns that punctuate it, this would've been a hell of a lot higher, but it's still a damn fine playthrough as it is.

#7 - Serious Sam 4

Serious Sam is a franchise that isn't exactly known for its nuance, but if you really dig into it, you discover just how finely tuned its combat is. You may be unloading on dozens of monsters at a time, each looking like they came out of a completely different series of games, but the placement of these enemies, the timing of when they spawn in, and their methods of attack and how they interplay are all impeccably crafted in just the right way to make the player squirm, with control of the situation feeling like it's always one false move from being wrested away. Croteam knows it, too: the original games waste no time in springing traps on players foolish enough to let their guard down, usually with some sort of cruel, playful wink—one +1 health pickup might spawn a giant rocket-spewing monster behind the player, while the one right across from it will play the "enemy spawning" sound effect 20 different times, yet without actually spawning anything at all. It's a series that doesn't take itself too seriously—name notwithstanding—but if you take the time to git gud, maybe playing it on its Serious difficulty setting (where both enemy and ammo counts are bumped up considerably in the early games), you come out of it with a deeper appreciation of just how much thought was put into each encounter.

Serious Sam 4, however, takes a fine look at the tight balance of its predecessors and says "yeah, fuck all that."

People generally think of the game's biggest battles when they talk about Serious Sam, and while the size of the fights has always gone up over the course of the series, it feels like Croteam took the Saints Row the Third approach to this one and really blew it up, doubling down on the loudest aspects and creating a game that's a monument to excess. The game opens in medias res, showing you its final battlefield for a few fleeting moments to give you a taste of how fucking crazy it gets, and while it's mostly smoke and mirrors—most of the literal hundreds of enemies onscreen are actually hi-res prerendered sprites, and some of the gunfire is coded to not hurt you so that it's possible to survive for longer than two seconds—it's still a sight to behold. You work your way back to that moment throughout the rest of the game, dealing with ever-increasing hordes all the while.

Let's put things into perspective. Final Doom's notorious "Go 2 It," a map iconic to the Doom fan community for being one of the most challenging of its time and popularizing the "slaughter map," has a whopping 206 enemies on its hardest difficulties. By the time Serious Sam 4 was done easing me in with its second level, my kill count was already at 541. Even for a Serious Sam game, there's just an insane number of enemies, and by the time your reach the game's second act in the French countryside, the maps are exponentially bigger than they need to be, using like 5% of its space for actual gameplay, with the rest being there just for the hell of it. Seriously, they mapped out like all of real deal Pompeii and a ridiculous amount of France's countryside just as, like, a game development exercise and let you use vehicles to drive around outside of the critical path if you want, randomly spawning enemies to fight as you go.

The sense of scale the game has is unlike anything I've seen from other linear FPS games, so I was a little concerned that it'd end up being too overwhelming, and to a degree, it is. The levels are damn near feature-length once you make it to France, so a lot of my sessions with the game ended up covering just a single level. Beyond that, though? To be honest, Serious Sam 4 was probably one of the most frictionless playthroughs I've done in the series, owed almost entirely to the amount of tools at your disposal. Perhaps fearing that they threw in too many enemies, Croteam gives you far too much to work with, introducing a skill tree that'll let you mix and match weapons to dual-wield and also adding a variety of consumable gadgets that each feel like a flip of the game's chessboard. When you can dual-wield miniguns, go into bullet time, and activate a combined speed/damage/firerate boost all at once, it doesn't really matter how many goons you throw at me. It's not the gripping challenge I came to love the series for, but it's an undeniable spectacle, and the game is loaded with moments where I couldn't help but chuckle at just how much shit was going on at a given time. By the time you make it back to that battle they tease in the intro, you'll have killed over eleven-thousand enemies, firmly placing its bodycount as the highest in the series—and it's not like it's an especially long game, either.

Earlier Serious Sam games made you feel like a matador, facing death head-on and gracefully dancing with your enemy as you peppered them with gunfire, your success depending entirely on using the right weapons, making the right moves, and maybe even getting a little lucky. Playing Serious Sam 4 makes you feel more like an exterminator with a DDT firehose, bulldozing over any obstacle with your ludicrous arsenal. A little disappointing, maybe, but you know what? Bulldozers are pretty fun, too.

#6 - Street Fighter V: Champion Edition

Excessive DLC can be frustrating for any game, but it feels especially brutal with fighting games, a genre that's had an uphill battle to maintain an audience since the decline of arcades. Considering the time commitment required to really know what you're doing (or the often-toxic community, or the studios unwilling to adopt reliable online multiplayer netcode, or...), throwing in season pass after season pass into a single game when people already weren't thrilled with having to pay for one in the first place isn't doing it any favors. The Super Turbo Third Strike Arcade Edition iterative updates are one thing, but the à la carte selection of countless characters available for $4.99 a pop feels at odds with the genre's dependency on a level playing field. It's a lot harder to learn how to deal with an opponent's character if you don't own them yourself. Hell, Tekken 7 locks more advanced frame data for attacks in its training mode behind a $2.99 purchase, which makes any kind of push for legitimacy feel like a bit of a farce. When you're going to insult the genre's most passionate players with that kind of gaffling, how do you think a casual fan is going to feel when they reach the character select screen and are welcomed with dozens of padlocks over a majority of the icons?

In my case, they're going to feel like spending their time and money elsewhere. As I began my dive into the Street Fighter series in 2020, I had it in my mind that I would pretty much ignore Street Fighter V for this exact reason—besides, everything I'd heard about SFV made it sound like half a game from the start, anyway. However, it turned out that a lot had changed since the game first launched. For starters, it was actually finished*, and had a Champion Edition release that included everything**, so I ended up giving it a shot, and while it isn't my favorite Street Fighter, it's the one I ended up playing the most this past year.

I'm not gonna pretend like I can really get into the finer details of this one too much, but I can definitely say it feels great to play. You have a much more forgiving input window to pull things off compared to earlier games, putting more focus on the application of your cool special moves and combos and less on the execution, making it rewarding to not only get dialed in with your mains, but also experiment outside of your comfort zone. I've only really explored two of the characters to any real degree (flowchart Ken until the day that I die, and I'll switch it up to Dan if I want to annoy the shit out of my opponents before they beat my ass), but the roster is full of characters with interesting designs and mechanics that make them feel distinct, which is impressive when you consider how long in the tooth the series has become. It's not quite Street Fighter III's new generation of characters—where I love pretty much every newcomer besides Oro—but SFV's unfamiliar faces are a fun bunch for the most part, with my favorites being the lovably dorky Rashid and the poison-chucking weirdo, F.A.N.G, who looks like the Monarch from the Venture Bros. and is probably about as much of a threat. It's not without its low points—there are some major duds in the cast in the Akuma-adjacent villains Kage and Necalli, who are both as lame as they are unnecessary—but otherwise, the roster's a great mix of new and old.

Street Fighter V's come a long way since it launched with 16 characters and the bare minimum in features. I'm not going to act like they deserve a pat on the back for taking so long to get the game where it should've been on day one—if I had spent $60 on it back in 2016, I would've been pissed—but I feel pretty good about what I've gotten out of it for the twenty-some dollars I did spend. There's a lot of directions they can go with the next Street Fighter (which may very likely be revealed later in the year), and despite the underwhelming design of its apparent poster child, they have me interested in whatever they do with it. At least, interested enough that I'll probably check it out a handful of years after release.

*Champion Edition did well enough that they went ahead and started development on a fifth season of characters afterwards, because of course they did. Thankfully, by the time I was finished with all of the single-player content, I had enough Fight Money to unlock all of the new characters for free, so at least I didn't have to spend any more legal tender.

**Champion Edition doesn't include some cosmetics or stages associated with the Capcom Pro Tour, which is frustrating, but when you already have Cultural Appropriation Ryu, Christmas Pimp Ken, and that kick-ass stage from Alpha 2, you're not exactly worrying about the things you're missing.

The year is 2022, and I have successfully killed the zeitgeist. Despite AAA gaming's best efforts to make each game you play the only game you play, with their battle passes and seasonal events full of FOMO-worthy exclusive trinkets and dance animations, I find myself now more than ever playing stuff on a whim and getting to the newest games simply when I get to them, seasonal Stanky Leggs be damned. And why wouldn't I? Games drop in price faster than they ever have. Dozens are added to subscription services that seem to duplicate by the day. Epic is outright giving them away, the only price being using their terrible app. Hell, with how often they're completely busted in the weeks (Months? Years?) following release, what's the incentive in getting something at launch? Odds are, I can hold off just a few months and get a cheaper, more stable version of the game, likely with more content to boot. Plus, it's not like there was ever a shortage of games to play in the first place. Older games don't just stop existing because you haven't played them.

Maybe obtaining the hardware to do so has become a different story altogether, but it still feels like it's never been easier to play video games. If you have a capable PC and the know-how, you can play almost anything from the PlayStation 2 back, and it seems like every couple of days there's a new breakthrough that renders games once notoriously difficult to play—whether because of emulator compatibility, a language barrier, or even it never actually seeing release—now as easily accessible as MP3s became in the Napster days. It wasn't that long ago that I went and purchased a SEGA Saturn entirely because of how much of a headache emulating its games was, but now I can play nearly its entire library on the new Xbox without even modding the damn thing. That's not to say that modding is still the process it was in the days of mod chips and Pandora's Batteries, either; even tweaking your original hardware has become more viable by the day. During the Great PlayStation Store Scare of 2021, I did what any reasonable person would do in the face of countless PS3 games being lost to time and looked into modding my PS3, which was so painless (and hell, even kind of fun) that it had me looking into PS2 modding the same week, which itself has become as easy as burning a single DVD-R.

It feels like as the years go on, each wave of year-end lists has a growing number of blurbs that start off featuring some variant of "well boy, that year sure sucked shit," and yeah: fair. Contemporary life has done a pretty good job stripping most of us of our passion, but even with its own fair share of bullshit, it's still a joy to discover video games, and with the myriad options at our fingertips—whether big budget or indie, new or old—I'm inclined to believe that anyone who thinks that there aren't video games out there for them in 2022 just hasn't taken the time to find them.

That brings me to my top ten, or rather, top tens. As you may have assumed from what you just read, my year in video games was all over the god damn place, with no particular rhyme or reason to what I played beyond "well I got a Series X, I should play a bunch of Xbox games." With that in mind, I wanted to give credit to older and more recent games alike without one coming at the expense of the other, so I've put together two separate lists for both. This blog will deal with games I played that didn't come out within the past couple of years, with a more current list to follow. Anyway, enough setup: let's get to it.

#10: Vampire Savior

When everybody else got into woodworking or baking bread or whatever the hell it was for all of two weeks back when the pandemic first hit, I ended up getting into fighting games. Don't get me wrong, I'm not good at them, but I spent a lot of 2020 getting way better at explaining why I lost. That, and going through Tekken and Street Fighter in semi-chronological order (Tekken 3 and Street Fighter EX2 Plus are my favorites at the moment, but it seems pretty obvious that all the talk of Third Strike being the best fighting game ever is likely true from what I've played of vanilla SF3). This year, however, was where I finally started cajoling friends into online matches, and while I didn't exactly have to twist any arms, a bit of line-cutting had to occur to make that happen. As such, I can't really tell you what Vampire Savior (also known as Darkstalkers 3) has to offer over its predecessors as the third game in the Darkstalkers series. I can, however, tell you that it rules.

Vampire Savior's gameplay feels like a middle ground between traditional Street Fighter combat and the more frenzied, fast & loose action of the Marvel games. There's meters a-plenty, mid-air blocks, and each character feels like it has a repertoire of moves that'd be considered total bullshit in a traditional fighting game, but it isn't quite as broken wide open as it could be, considering the lack of Marvel's tag-team mechanic. It's nutty but manageable, and it isn't until you start to crank the turbo setting up that things really get out of control. It's a great balance of mechanics as someone who wants more hectic stuff but doesn't feel quite ready for the tag fighters, and it's simply fun as hell to play, especially when you're evenly matched with a human opponent. It also helps that the game is from when Capcom was simply at the top of their game and releasing some of the most visually stunning 2D games ever made. Their whole CPS-2 run is legendary, but Vampire Savior's dark fantasy theme really makes it stand out, with everything from the animations to the stage backgrounds having an extra polish to it. I haven't spent as much time with it as I've wanted to, but the handful of sessions I'd have are enough to earn it a spot here.

#9: Tekken 6

It's not all fighting games, guys, I promise.

My insistence on playing most series in chronological order almost bit me in the ass with Tekken. I had fond memories of playing 2 on a demo disc—the intro FMV was the hypest shit on Earth, and it kind of still is—but the first game really hasn't aged well, lacking the responsiveness the later Tekkens would have. Thankfully, by the time I got to 3, I was pretty into the series, and that game in particular introduced a recurring theme of Namco experimenting with their single-player component in the form of their bonus Tekken Force mode, which used the typical 3D fighting mechanics in the confines of a arcade beat-em-up. It's admittedly pretty janky, but there's a certain charm to seeing the entire Tekken roster's movelist transplanted to a neighboring genre. Being able to spam Kazuya's triple spin kick and lay waste to multiple people instead of a single person (that probably just blocked it) is a lot of fun, so I was pretty excited when I read up on Tekken 6 and saw that it finally blew up its weird beat-em-up experiment into a full-fledged campaign mode.

I'm not going to pretend like the oddly-titled Scenario Campaign mode is this brilliantly crafted experience. The story isn't particularly interesting (The Mishimas are assholes, surprise!), and its protagonist is one of the blander characters in the series. Like the Tekken Force and Devil Within modes before it, it's got a lot of the problems you'd expect a 3D beat-em-up with Tekken controls would have. It does its best to handle potential issues—you can use the analog stick for free 3D movement and the d-pad to control your character like traditional Tekken, and there's a lock-on feature to single targets out—but you never quite feel completely comfortable outside of one-on-one scenarios. Normally, this would be a disaster for a fighting game, but honestly, given the raw impact of Tekken's combat, the goofy setpieces and weapons you come across (Tekken was never big on projectiles, so adding miniguns and flamethrowers is a real treat), and the drop-based loot system that upgrades your abilities and makes your character look like a dipshit, it's a lot easier to forgive its shortcomings than you might think. It's even got online coop with a separate set of tweaked levels and excised cutscenes for a condensed, more arcade-like experience. It's especially insane with a partner, ramping up the goofier aspects poking at the edges in single-player and replacing cutscenes and any actual context for what you're doing with a greater number of violent kangaroos, aliens, sumo wrestlers, and Brazilian Carnival dancers. It's a trip.

By the time Namco released the fan-favorite Tekken 5, the series had about as good of a foundation as you could've asked for, so it makes sense that they used 6 as a chance to really spread their wings with their beat-em-up ambitions. Tekken 7 is solid in its own right, but it's the first game in 20 years to not have a Tekken Force equivalent, which makes the story mode it has in its place, which resembles Mortal Kombat's take on fighting game campaigns in what now feels like an industry standard, feel pretty underwhelming—and the less said about its Arcade Mode style endings, the better. Don't get me wrong, Tekken is defined by the richness of its combat and the sheer number of options you have in fights, but the series always went the extra mile when it came to getting weird with the extras included in their home console conversions, and Tekken 6 feels like the peak of that.

#8: Gargoyle's Quest

One of the first things I did this year was tackle the Ghosts 'n Goblins series. I honestly forget why, but the impending release of Resurrection probably had a lot to do with it. While I think the original game is legitimately bad, amounting to arcade gaming at its most cynical and transparently money-hungry, the series would find its footing immediately afterwards with the much improved Ghouls n' Ghosts, which features a level of challenge that is almost downright reasonable, especially in its US arcade release. They're all at least decent games after the first, but it's the Gargoyle's Quest spin-off series that really grabs me.

Untethered from its arcade roots and the usual GnG conventions, Gargoyle's Quest strikes a more palpable balance, slowing the pace down a bit while retaining much of its tense, exacting difficulty. Where Arthur's stiff movement and awkward attacks in Ghosts 'n Goblins proper were things you learned to deal with, Firebrand's hover and wall-jumping capabilities feel much more intuitive and satisfying. The amount of in-air control you have (which increases over the course of the game) introduces some much-needed leeway, while the level design's ample usage of ass-clenching jumps and spike walls keeps things in check, ensuring that the platforming remains as tight as it was in arcades. It isn't quite as hectic as the rapidly respawning enemies and gigantic bosses of its source material, but it curbs the frustration that can often push me away from the main series while holding onto the challenge that's so much of its appeal.

Being more of a home console style experience does lead to some shortcomings of its own, though. As the name might lead you to believe, there's a lot of RPG influence in the series, and while you don't gain experience and level up, you traverse an overworld, talk to NPCs in towns, upgrade your abilities with new equipment, and even run into random combat encounters. The upgrades lead to more interesting gameplay down the line, but the overworld stuff—particularly the backtracking it introduces and the random battles—don't really add much and feel like unneeded filler. The NES sequel nips a lot of that in the bud, but has issues of its own, thanks to a less refined sense of challenge. They're both great games, though, and I'm looking forward to getting to Demon's Crest, the acclaimed final game of the trilogy.

#7: Resident Evil 2 (1998)

I played a hell of a lot of Resident Evil this year, going through the PlayStation trilogy, Code: Veronica, 2's remake, and even the god-awful Resident Evil: Survivor. I always had a real soft spot for the original game's campiness and its memorable setting, but it was fresher in my memory than its sequel—a game I haven't really touched since I was a kid—so I ended up being a little blown away by how much more I enjoyed revisiting RE2 this time around.

Beyond the b-movie vibes and the atmosphere of the Spencer Mansion, what really drew me into the first game was the way your experience would change depending on the character you picked. Jill Valentine had the de-facto easy mode while Chris' campaign was more strenuous, but it goes deeper than that, with setpieces, story beats, and equipment varying between the two, meaning you had to do both if you wanted the complete experience—an element that ties in perfectly with its survival horror gameplay. The first two games see you working your way around these intimate locales, redoing content somewhat regularly because of the limited save system and difficulty, so by the time you reach a second playthrough, you're well familiar with the locations and how to get around in general, letting the focus of subsequent runs be on the differences therein. RE3 and Code Veronica do away with this mechanic while also having more sprawling level design in its place, opting for singular playthroughs that are even more difficult, and I found that it doesn't really work out quite as well.

RE2 has the increased polish and refinements you would expect from a sequel, but it stands out because it capitalizes on that multiple campaign aspect like no other game in the series. The divide between Claire and Leon's loadouts is even wider than Chris and Jill's, and the unique "zapping" system (your guess on that name is as good as mine) leads to decisions in your first time around directly impacting the second, which means your resource management can end up having second playthrough ramifications, something that still feels novel today. The game's 2019 re-imagining is great in its own right, but the zapping system is MIA and the decision to bring the tenacious Mr. X to the forefront ends up feeling like a double-edged sword, as his presence in both campaigns makes your second run (where he exclusively appears in the 1998 version) feel less special.

Resident Evil 2 is a high point in the series, and there's never been a better time to play it. The fan-made Seamless HD Project uses machine learning to upscale the visuals of the GameCube port, and while it isn't quite on the level of the original game's remake, the results still speak for themselves. If you've never played the game before—and you should—this is the way to do it.

#6: Rayman 2: The Great Escape

Playing Rayman 2 made me feel like a bit of a dipshit. I put it off for so long because I had assumed it was like numerous other platformers that had made the jump to 3D, ditching its linear, stage-based gameplay in favor of the more meandering non-linear stuff, and I wasn't about to deal with another Donkey Kong 64 collectathon. That, and quite frankly, I just didn't like the way it looks. The original game has some of the most beautiful and vivid pixel art of its time, and by comparison, 2's redesigned characters, kinda grungy world, and darker color palette always put me off of it.

So imagine my surprise when I finally played it this past year and discovered that it's almost exactly what you would want out of a sequel to the 1995 original. Sure, its 3D makeover still looks a little drab, and the characters are even kind of ugly, but the Great Escape realizes the potential of the original's gameplay, ironing out its punishing difficulty and cryptic collectibles while also spicing up the gameplay with some new ideas. Not all of it works out—the third-person shooting aspect of its combat wears a little thin after a while, and some late game levels get a little carried away in their gimmickry—but Rayman 2 is a great platformer that has held up considerably well. I really showed my ass passing on this for as long as I did.

#5: Descent

A few years back, a friend of mine was so adamant on me playing Descent that he zipped up his own install of it and sent it my way. Given my love of boomer shooters, having that classic Doom formula transplanted to spaceship combat was a promising idea, but I bounced off of it pretty quickly after I gave it a shot. Not because the game was bad, mind you, but a lot of its quirks just made me literally sick to play. Between grappling with the 6DoF controls and the field-of-view, motion sickness was a hurdle I just couldn't get over at the time, but I gave it another shot this year, and enough has changed since then that I was able to complete the entire game. Which I guess means I'm Rodney Dangerfield now? Is that how it works?

Despite its simple premise (take a space ship through mining sites throughout the solar system, rescue hostages, blow up robots, destroy the reactor, and get the hell out before the explosion takes you with it), there's a considerable learning curve to Descent, starting with figuring out a control setup that works best for you. Mouse and keyboard was the way to go for me, but it didn't go as smoothly as I had wanted in my first attempt. In Descent's original release, your ship's rotation speed was limited. It probably feels fine when using the flight sticks intended for the game, but with a mouse and keyboard setup, you would have to wait for your ship to "catch up" to your mouse's movements if you were moving it too quickly, which not only feels unnatural, but adds an overall swimmy feeling to the gameplay that makes motion sickness even worse. Thankfully, the source port I used—DXX-Rebirth, highly recommended—added uncapped ship rotation speeds since the last time I tried it, and it's a game changer, letting me really sink into the experience.

It's probably a little reductive to say, but Descent's gameplay really is classic Doom in a spaceship (right down to a lot of the enemy designs), but despite the comparisons, that extra dimension of movement really transforms the game into something unique. Gliding through mines, dancing around enemy fire, all while losing sense of which way is up (answer: it doesn't actually matter) is entrancing, and even before you consider the quality-of-life improvements introduced by source ports, it's quite effortless once you settle into the controls. For being a 1995 FPS at its core, Descent is surprisingly forward thinking: when you die, you respawn at the start of the map with only your starting equipment (similar to a Doom pistol start), but if you make it back to where you were shot down, you can recover all of your equipment—yes, kind of like souls in Dark Souls, settle down—encouraging you to be a little more reckless and play through should you die instead of just quicksaving around every corner like you might in countless other challenging shooters. There's limited lives, but an arcade scoring system lets you earn more, and point bonuses for playing on harder difficulties grant a liberating margin of error, no matter what your skill level is. At least, for the first five levels or so.

See that guy up there? That is the Class 1 Driller, and he almost ruins Descent.

When I started the game, I chose the second-hardest of five difficulties—as any self-respecting classic FPS tryhard does—and had a wonderful time for the first handful of levels. It felt surprisingly well-balanced for its age, and despite the sprawling layouts and lack of gravity, I never got lost thanks to its smart level design (keys are always collected in the same color order) and the intuitive in-game map, which is rendered in 3D similar to Doom 2016 or Metroid Prime, making it very easy to find your way. But then, the Class 1 Driller showed up and instantly cemented itself among the worst hitscan enemies in all of video games. There are other enemies that put up a hell of a fight, but they're manageable and even fun to deal with if your flying skills are up to it. The Driller, on the other hand, single-handedly throws the delicate balancing I mentioned into disarray. The second that nasty little son of a bitch sees you, you're taking damage, and if you're on a higher difficulty, half of your shields will likely be gone before it even finishes the obnoxious screech it makes when it detects you. The driller is an oppressive, exhausting presence that can be dealt with comfortably only if you know it's there ahead of time, which means that despite all of the thought that was clearly put into the challenge of the game, you're going to be quicksaving anyway to avoid cheap damage. By the time I reached the tenth of its 30 levels, I decided to switch to the second easiest difficulty for the rest of the game so I could keep playing the game the way I had before shithead showed up and spoiled my fun.

This is coming across real negative for how high up this is in my list, so I have to stress: the Driller is pretty much the only thing wrong with this game. Whenever you're not dealing with its bullshit, Descent's sensation of flight and intensity of combat is unparalleled, like the most delicious Ace Combat and Doom sandwich you can imagine. I haven't played too much of its 1996 sequel yet, but from what I've played, I'm hopeful that it'll be the improvement I want it to be. It has a "why would you do this to people" enemy of its own—a ridiculously fast robot that steals your weapons—but Rebirth has an option to remove it from the game entirely, so I'm looking forward to playing it without caveats. If it lives up to its potential, I can see it being my favorite game of 2022.

#4: Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Earth

I don't much care for 3D rail shooters when they involve moving a character or a ship around. The scripted nature stands out far more when you don't have the more hectic action of a 2D shmup or the immediacy of aiming and firing a light gun, and to me, that makes them feel like game-length versions of mediocre turret sections from a mid-2000s console shooter. Some games power through this feeling (Space Harrier and Rez come to mind), but it wasn't until I played Sin and Punishment that I really bought into the idea.

If you like retro action games, you probably like Treasure. Their games are among the most polished and exciting of their time, pushing console hardware and creativity to their limits, all while delivering action that hardly gives players time to breathe. Genre shifts, countless explosions, and intricate bosses are all common hallmarks of a Treasure game, and it's a brand of action that feels like it shouldn't even be possible on the Nintendo 64. Treasure made their name on the SEGA Genesis, something that had the processor speed to keep up with games like Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier, but with the following generation of hardware being the first major step into the third dimension, consoles just weren't ready for that kind of game in 3D, and this is likely why Treasure's games on that generation of hardware rely mostly on 2D assets.

Which makes it all the more impressive that Sin and Punishment is the exact kind of action game Treasure is known for, but entirely in 3D.

Yes, it only runs at 30 frames per second, but the fact that the framerate is the only compromise in achieving a 3D version of the kind of run-and-gun gameplay the studio was known for is simply astounding. Enemies are numerous (even often exploding upon death like you were playing a Contra game), bosses tower over skyscrapers, and the action only lets up once everything is dead. There's even a late-game level that shifts from on-rails action to traditional run-and-gun gameplay, as if to show that the choice of scripted movement through the levels wasn't because of system limitations.

Of course, it goes without saying that the game is a blast on top of being a technical marvel. The real difference maker here is the degree of control you have despite your movement through the levels being so scripted. Most rail shooters let you move, shoot, and maybe have a barrel roll to dodge or a smart bomb to give you a breather. In Sin and Punishment, movement feels fantastic: your double jump and dodge roll—with generous i-frames—makes weaving in and out of danger immensely satisfying, and your capabilities deliver on the offensive end as well, with parrying bullets and bombs back to enemies never growing old throughout the course of the game.

Sin and Punishment is some of the most enthralling arcade action you can get from video games, let alone the Nintendo 64. It's fairly forgiving for a Treasure game, and its pacing is practically on fast-forward, so you can knock it out in a sitting, barreling through the hilariously incomprehensible cutscenes (where English voice acting doesn't doesn't make it any less gibberish) and making it to the incredible final boss within a couple of hours. If you paid for that Switch Online Expansion Pack, play it ASAP. You'll almost feel like you weren't ripped off.

#3: WarioWare: Twisted!

One of my game-playing habits these days is using the reveal of a new game in an ongoing series as an excuse to get caught up, and that's how I got to WarioWare: Twisted last year. Of course, I didn't get to the actual new game that got released, but that might be in Get It Together's favor, since that game is going to have to pull off some real herculean shit to live up to Twisted's standard.

I've said plenty about WarioWare in the past—even on this very site—so I won't gush about the series too much here. It's been pretty consistent throughout its nearly two-decade run—with the only outright misfire being the incredibly underwhelming Game & Wario—but my favorite in the series has always been the original Mega Microgames. The others are fun, too, but some of them, like Touched and D.I.Y., feel a little too simplistic, while others (namely Smooth Moves) maybe have too much going on to aptly capture the manic action the series is known for while still feeling in control. Twisted turns out to be just right, throwing accurate motion controls into the formula without abandoning buttons entirely like the DS entries do. It hits all of those Mega Microgames notes—the quirky art direction, the breakneck pacing, the intuitive controls, the wealth of unlockable post-game content—but that extra dimension the gyroscope brings makes it all feel fresh again, allowing the experience to stand right alongside the original as one of the GBA's best.

The elephant in the room is that it's not exactly a game you can just load up in an emulator and play through, and that's really the biggest part of why it took me this long to play it. By the time Twisted was originally out, I was already playing Touched on the DS and had moved on from the GBA, so it just quietly fell off my radar despite its critical acclaim, and by the time I was interested in it again, it was off of store shelves. These days, your options are still limited, but they're out there. I originally wanted to try playing it on my phone through one of the motion-supported emulators on Android, but I don't think my phone's motion sensors wanted to play nice, so I instead moved onto using a Wii Remote, and it played pretty much perfectly. mGBA's quickly become one of the best Game Boy Advance emulators around, and its Wii release supports the gyroscope natively, making playing Twisted almost seamless. The stage themed around flipping gravity doesn't feel quite right, but it's still functional.

People often hail Twisted as the best game in the series, but I'm still a little too close to the game to make such a lofty judgement. I've been playing Mega Microgames for almost 20 years, so I'm going to need more time with the game to make that call. That being said, it's already an easy #2, being the closest Nintendo's come to capturing the magic of that first time with the original.

#2: Ape Escape

My first experience with Ape Escape was not a good one. I rented it from Blockbuster (kids, it's what your grandparents did before the existence of GameFly, which is what your parents did before the existence of Game Pass) along with a couple of other games, and quickly discovered that analog controls weren't just a recommendation. Nope, it's a full on twin-stick game—probably the only game in the entire PlayStation library that 100% needs a DualShock—so all I could do was look at the title screen before I moved onto Disney's Tarzan and Bomberman Fantasy Race. I didn't get back to it until earlier this year, when I had an epiphany: "man I should play Ape Escape." so I did. And it was good.

Ape Escape reminds me a lot of Super Mario 64. Where 64 was the big "we're using analog sticks now, motherfucker" game, Ape Escape was the first major AAA showcase for using two at a time. It was from a time before the right analog was universally relegated to being the designated camera stick (which, to be fair, is what it really should be in most cases), so Sony's Japan Studio—kids, they're who made Knack—devised a lot of novel ways to use it here. None of them represent the change in the way games are made quite like Mario's analog movement does, but they're a ton of fun regardless. Swing a net in 360 degrees to catch monkeys! Pilot an RC car! Use it in tandem with the left stick to control a rowboat (or skis)! The game is constantly introducing new gadgets and minigames that tweak the way you use the sticks, and it makes you eagerly anticipate each new level.

The Mario 64 comparisons don't end with the analog stick, either; the philosophy behind the level design reminds me a lot of of the game, too. Ape Escape's stages aren't these hulking behemoths like you could find at the time in Rare's N64 platformers. They feel more constrained than that, as if built with the console's limitations in mind, and it works out perfectly. One of the in-game gadgets is a radar you spin around to find the direction of nearby apes to catch, and I hardly, if ever, felt the need to use it, because the level design is so tightly designed. It's almost "linear-plus," following natural paths that splinter into additional nooks and crannies to explore, often looping back around if you go far enough. There is just enough to each level to make exploration fulfilling—especially after the credits roll, when new sets of apes are added to each stage to take advantage of your complete set of gadgets—without going too far and overwhelming you with directions to go. The perfectly-scaled playgrounds are a huge part of why I adore Super Mario 64, and I'd argue that Ape Escape may even do a better job with it, considering how gracefully it adds more collectathon-styled gameplay to the formula.

Ape Escape is one of the best games on the PlayStation. Its gameplay is engrossing, it's got a great sense of humor, and Soichi Tereda's drum-and-bass soundtrack (Get it? "Jungle?") is killer. I only wish that I had gotten to it sooner.

#1: Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Dōchū: Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Wake

Konami sure does like fucking us, don't they?

In their defense, I get why you would give up on Goemon in the West. It's almost impenetrably Japanese—especially for the localization teams of the 90s—and the games we did get (the first SNES game, one of the Game Boy releases, and two for N64) only saw modest success, but man, we didn't even get the good ones. Don't get me wrong, the Goemon games they brought over are fine for the most part, but the gulf in quality between those games and the Japan-exclusive Ganbare Goemon games feels impossible to overstate, with the fourth entry, Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Dōchū: Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Wake (or as it can be translated, "Go for it! Goemon 4: The Twinkling Journey - The Reason I Became a Dancer,") being one of the most enjoyable platformers of the 16-bit era.

Now, Harakiri Seppukumaru is an alien athlete from space (where most aliens tend to be from) who is determined to be the best at every sport in the galaxy, with his grand finale being mastering the most extreme sport of them all: seppuku, a Japanese form of ritual suicide. The important thing here is not Harakiri being oblivious to the fact that seppuku is not at all a sport (or even something you can really compete in), but the fact that Harakiri has a bomb in his stomach with the power to blow up an entire planet. This poses a significant threat to Planet Impact, the homeworld of Goemon Impact, which is Goemon's giant robot (who is revealed in the game's intro cutscene to actually be a sentient being), so it's up to Goemon and his friends to save the planet by defeating Harakiri and his minions, the Four Tsujikiri, which are aliens that look like samurai eggs, thus stopping him from destroying the planet with a seppuku-induced explosion.

So it goes without saying that the story of the game is pretty batshit, but the gameplay is thankfully a little more grounded. Goemon games flirt a lot with Zelda-style non-linearity and exploration, and while the third Goemon game on the Super Famicom went all-in on this concept, this one is focused on traditional platforming first and foremost, downplaying a lot of the back-and-forth of the other games. The basic movement and action all feels great, and the game's structure lends plenty of variety to the gameplay. Goemon and his friends agree to split up at the start of the game, which means you play as a different character in each world, giving each segment of the game a different complexion thanks to their differing abilities. Once you complete the first four worlds, they regroup and you can freely swap between the characters in any level you've played before, letting you reach new areas and find more upgrades that can prove useful in the final set of stages. It's a fun way to break up the game, and the level design makes it easy to want to collect everything the game has to offer.

My favorite thing about Kirakira Dōchū is its sheer commitment to its bizarre theme. Keeping with the antagonist's hyper-competitive nature, sports have invaded Planet Impact, injecting the typical platformer level themes with an overdose of athleticism, leading to countless memorable setpieces. Water levels see you dodging synchronized swimmers. Instead of boulders, you outrun oversized golf balls across quicksand bunkers. A particularly inspired setpiece sees you dodging a gigantic Doom pistol while tricking it into firing at field shooting targets that will unlock the way forward. Every world is just packed with inventive tie-ins to the sport theme of the game, and seeing what the game pulls next is always a delight. Even the boss fights manage to fit in with Harakiri's generous definition of "sport," with every single encounter with the Four Tsujikiri being a different minigame, be it a Puyo Puyo-esque puzzle fighter or the most absurd practicing of Shinken Shirahadori you will ever see. Kirakira Dōchū is just seeping creativity out of every orifice, and considering how out-there the preceding games in the series were, that's a hell of an achievement.

Kirakira Dōchū is one of the finest platformers of its time, and the best game I played in 2021 that didn't come out in 2021. It's got a distinct, goofy charm only the Goemon series can bring you, and features the kind of best-in-class visuals and sound you would expect from an SNES game released late in 1995—shit, its soundtrack sounds like red book audio at times. It's a stellar game from start to finish, and I'm grateful it (along with the rest of the SNES games) finally received a fan-translation patch. It's been long overdue considering the hype that's been built up around these games, and discovering that the games lived up to it was a highlight of my year.

I was always a SEGA guy. Sonic the Hedgehog's vibrant colors, fast and dynamic gameplay, and market-researched persona hooked me in as a dipshit toddler, but what kept me attached to them as I grew into a dipshit adult was how creative they could be. As cynical as Sonic's focus-tested b-boy stance and in-your-face attitude was, they could really go off the beaten path back in the day. While Nintendo was removing blood and religious iconography from games, SEGA was greenlighting roguelikes about rapping aliens, pushing the limits of arcade hardware, and paving the way for our current subscription service nightmare. Their risk-taking probably bit them in the ass more often than not, but they would just go for it in a way that few other companies would, especially during the Dreamcast era, where their first-party lineup achieved peak diversity. Amid games like Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, and Phantasy Star Online, there was Jet Set Radio, one of the most memorable games SEGA would ever make. It's got its problems, but it also has a swagger like none other, loaded with bombastic characters, quirky tunes, and a cel-shaded art style that's aged like wine. Even the hectic gameplay really shined once you came to terms with its handling and controls. Thankfully, it's not hard to get a hold of Jet Set Radio these days due to a bevy of modern ports, but its sequel hasn't fared as well.

What About the Future?

There's a bit of a tendency among people to overstate the quality of games that are harder to access. It's true that sometimes one of the rarest games in a series is in fact the best, but a lot of games end up with a reputation that's overblown simply because of the forbidden fruit aspect to playing it well after its release. In SEGA's case, the once seldom-ported Sonic CD was frequently hailed as the secret best game in the series, and while it's pretty great (if nothing else but for its aesthetic), the level design doesn't quite hold up compared to its Genesis brethren. But what about Jet Set Radio Future, the Xbox-exclusive sequel to the Dreamcast original? The Xbox was hardly the place for fans of Japanese games, and the Xbox 360's capabilities of emulating the game leave a lot to be desired, so it's gained this status alongside other SEGA exclusives like Panzer Dragoon Orta as one of the most sought-after Xbox games to never leave the console. While I have a soft spot for the original JSR and ultimately prefer it for its more arcadey single-level structure, JSRF damn sure earned its reputation: the improvements it makes are undeniable. Movement is far less rigid, stringing together combos is buttery smooth thanks to the reworked trick system and the doubled frame rate, and this all goes hand-in-hand with the much more ambitious level design. I might like the original more, but I can accept that I'm in the minority because Jet Set Radio Future remains an outstanding game and one of the best of all-time, which makes it that much more disappointing that it's been so hard to play properly.

This leads us to the big question: Why? Microsoft's pumped-up emulation muscle has been a highlight of the Xbox One's rocky lifespan, and SEGA's been making it a point as of late to make fans happy, so a rerelease or Xbox One backwards compatibility should be a lay-up for these guys. They're practically running out of fanbases to appease: Streets of Rage 4's on the way, ToeJam & Earl's experienced a solid revival, Sonic Mania finally nailed the classic Sonic formula over 20 years since its last truly great game, and they've even shut my mouth on Phantasy Star Online 2, the announced-in-2012 "yeah, but" that would inevitably come up whenever people mentioned anything positive regarding the company. Quite a few dormant franchises still linger in the minds of SEGA fans, but Jet Set Radio Future's been in high demand for way longer than I've been giving them shit for PSO2's disappearance from the West, and they're seemingly in a great position to deliver the goods. So what's the big holdup?

There's no way to know for sure, but odds are that the Beastie Boys messed everything up.

Dark Future

It's probably obvious to some people that music licensing would be the culprit, but JSRF's circumstances are a little unique. You'd think since the original game was able to overcome that hurdle—the 2012 ports, while missing three tracks, went as far as to include music that was exclusive in the US and/or PAL releases for the first time worldwide—that JSRF would be an easy job for SEGA, but the truth is that the game's future prospects were most likely doomed from the start. There aren't actually any Beastie Boys songs on the JSRF soundtrack, but the vast majority of Future's licensed soundtrack was courtesy of a partnership with Grand Royal, a record label founded by the group in the early 90s. They had success throughout the decade thanks to bands like Jimmy Eat World, Atari Teenage Riot, and At the Drive-In, but with mounting debts (in part caused by some of the aforementioned artists disbanding) and the work that went into maintaining the label and its magazine stretching the Beastie Boys thin, the label's closure was announced in the second half of 2001, with its final release being a promotional music sampler for none other than the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack. The timing couldn't have been worse for JSRF, as the game wasn't even released until early 2002 (a slightly morbid detail: SEGA's own press release celebrating the game's launch included a blurb about the label's closure). Any hope for a future release was shot before the original version even hit store shelves, as Grand Royal's assets—including music rights—were auctioned off after the label shuttered.

Truth be told, licensing much of the game's Grand Royal music in 2019 shouldn't be that difficult: the music ownership's been scattered all over, but many of the songs featured are now property of record labels that are still up and running. Scapegoat Wax's "Aisle 10 (Hello Allison)" is currently being sold digitally by Disney's Hollywood Records (they really do own everything), Bis' "Statement of Intent" is owned by Beggars Group, and Warner Music retains the rights to the grating charm of Cibo Matto's "Birthday Cake." Much of Grand Royal's back catalogue was also purchased by a group of fans who then founded GR2 Records, but the label appears to be dormant (or at the very least silently rebranded as GR Entertainment, as YouTube copyright claims on music they own are all associated with that name). Despite the label closure, many of the game's most iconic songs are covered, but the biggest question mark is the status of the music most closely tied to the Beastie Boys. Many of the game's songs were composed or remixed by the Latch Brothers, a short-lived production group consisting of Beastie Boys member Michael Diamond, Mary's Danish bassist Chris Wagner, and Grand Royal employee Kenny Salcido. Their association with the Beastie Boys (whose music rights were not a part of Grand Royal's auction and were property of GR's parent company, Capitol Records) combined with their relatively low profile—they're mostly known for their JSRF music and never released a record of their own, so you have to consider they may not have officially signed with any label—means the rights to their work remain elusive. This is terrible news for a rerelease, since without the Latch Brothers, the game would lose over a quarter of its soundtrack, with the trio working on eight of the game's thirty tracks. It's possible that Capitol Records owns the missing pieces of the puzzle, but it's likely that only a few know for sure.

It's always possible that SEGA could get in touch with the right people and figure things out, and maybe it's something else entirely keeping us from playing Jet Set Radio Future on a modern console. Hell, it's entirely possible that SEGA just doesn't think it's worth all that money licensing the music and paying people to port the game over, but one way or another, it seems like a new version of Jet Set Radio Future just isn't happening. It's not all bad news, though: the whole reason I decided to throw this blog together was because I recently took a look at the state of Xbox emulation after having played through Jet Set Radio, and the results were astounding. Things are finally, finally coming together, and you can play JSRF start-to-finish on Cxbx-Reloaded, even if your PC isn't the beefiest. It's a fantastic development, but it shouldn't be the only option beyond the original release or the 360's sub-par emulation. Hopefully we'll see the game in a new (official) form some day, but it really feels like that if it was possible, it would've happened by now.

Then again, I was also convinced PSO2 was never coming to the West.

Super Mario Maker 2 is a week and change away, and the wait has been excruciating. To kill the time before its release—and the consequent moment where the police break into my home and discover me, rendered little more than a clothed skeleton clutching a Pro Controller on some J-Nug shit—I've been playing whatever games I can get my hands on, and luckily for me, Phil Spencer can't run the Xbox division of Microsoft to save his god damn life.

No, really. For the past year or so I've been using Game Pass to play stuff like Forza Horizon 4 and Gears of War 4 without paying so much as a dime thanks to their Microsoft Rewards promotion (which has you spending like two minutes each day Binging shit for free money), and now they have this Game Pass Ultimate deal that bundles their new PC-oriented subscription with the Xbox equivalent and Xbox LIVE Gold, too. It's supposed to be 15 dollars a month, but right now they're running a sale where you can purchase a month for a dollar, and any of your other subscriptions are rolled into that, with up to three years of it applying. This means that I was able to use Microsoft Rewards points (those sweet, delicious Bing Bucks) to get two years of Gold and then purchase that month of Ultimate, giving me 25 months of games for a dollar. A dollar! How do you make money off this shit? Why, they're practically giving it away!!!

Anyway, with the beta launch of Game Pass for PC last week, I've been going to town on its offering of games, so I figured I'd give people an idea on what to check out or avoid with a rundown on what I've played so far, starting with Microsoft's first-party offerings that were already on the service before moving onto indies and more recent additions. I'll even give them a rating out of five for the impatient types out there.

First-Party

It's hard to think of many studios that have had a more fruitful generation than Insomniac Games. Whether it's the blockbuster success of Marvel's Spider-Man or the excellent Ratchet & Clank remake, it's safe to say that they've recovered from the soul-sucking focus tests that led to the disappointing Fuse with gusto. They've found the most commercial success with Sony, but their first Microsoft release, Sunset Overdrive [*****], is their crowning achievement and one of the best games of the generation. It's the culmination of everything Insomniac is known for in their games: engaging platforming and creative weaponry at its finest, wrapped in a colorful, offbeat style. The sense of humor can whiff pretty frequently, but the gameplay is buttery smooth, featuring wild free-running and grinding that handles beautifully, and the game's art style is fantastic. Not much else this generation can match the feeling of grinding circles around a bunch of pissant mutants while a punk cover of the Pepto-Bismol theme plays. I've been a huge fan of the game since release, but last year's PC port is even better, upping the framerate and resolution, and including both DLC expansions for free. The game's anti-aliasing solutions are a little lackluster—making distant objects appear more jagged than they should be, even at higher resolutions—but everything here is still better here than ever. Whether you have an Xbox or a PC, do not sleep on this game.

You can tell that a lot of racing games are made by people who are just obsessed with cars. The attention to detail in games like Gran Turismo and the outright fetishism on display during press conferences make me shudder to think what the developers' garages look like under a blacklight, but where Forza Motorspot feels like a love letter to cars and the act of racing, Forza Horizon 4 [*****] feels like a love letter to racing games. It's a fun-first game that lets you drive what you want, do what you want, and create what you want. The deep vehicle customization, craft, and polish of Forza Motorsport is on full display—this has to be one of the best looking games I've ever played—but the actual driving is focused more on the kind of things you could only get away with in a video game. Stone barriers and pylons are made for smashing through, and reckless driving is rewarded with skill points instead of penalties. The open world and live seasonal challenges make it an incredible podcast game, and I've spent much of the past year listening to podcasts as I send my 40s Jeep careening off mountains, blaring the Windows XP shutdown noise as my horn all the while. I also have to applaud whoever decided to include a series of challenges inspired by various other racing games, taking the reverent, historical approach the series often treats its automobiles with and giving it to classic racing and driving games, going as far as to call them out by name. This is a game that loves racing games so much, that it straight up tells you to stop playing it and check out Out Run if you've never played it before. You see not-so-clever homages and parodies in games all the time, but when was the last time you heard of a game shouting out separate games from other companies on such a literal level?

I feel bad for ReCore [****]. It's a surprisingly good action game in its own right, featuring great platforming, upgradeable robot companions with variable abilities and stats, and a large hub world to explore that's interspersed with dungeons, combat arenas, and excellent platforming challenges. It feels like a true heir to the kind of Japanese action-adventure games you'd see on the PS2 or GameCube (and draws many parallels to developer Keiji Inafune's previous work on the Mega Man franchise: combat dependent on managing enemy weaknesses, a protagonist with a robotic dog buddy and scientist father figure, those god damn disappearing platforms...), but it was blatantly rushed out the door, leaving it in a sorry state that left one of its vital mechanics on the cutting room floor. About half-way through the game, you reach the Shifting Sands, a huge desert that takes far too long to traverse. Without a faster means of travel, the game becomes a total slog filled with backtracking and grinding, but once you start playing the new content in the Definitive Edition—a free update that, in addition to cutting down on the amount of items you need to progress, adds new areas to explore—it becomes clear just how unfinished the game was. The very first thing you come across is a dungeon that, when completed, unlocks the T8-NK frame for your robot, and this completely changes the complexion of the game's second half. The T8-NK frame is, as the name implies, a wee little tank that you can ride on top of, cutting traversal time considerably. Its dash boost is one of the most versatile mechanics in the game, acting as a charge that damages enemies and as a makeshift triple jump. Hopping off of the tank doesn't count as one of your double jumps, so you can boost off of a ledge, jump off the tank in mid-air, and still have two air dashes and jumps at your disposal, which opens the doors for a ton of sequence breaking and platforming finesse. It's easily the most fun frame to use, and makes short work of the desert that was once ruinous. It's a damn shame that the game didn't ship this way, because it's become pretty great in the time since release. Don't let the reviews scare you off from trying this one.

Halo's had a hard time regaining its faded glory since the shift from Bungie to 343. Say what you will about the quality of Halo 4 and 5, but the series hasn't quite had the impact it did in the 2000s, so I was a little worried going into Gears of War 4 [****], which experienced a similar change in dev teams. I'm not gonna lie, it's definitely in the "just not the same" territory that I was worried about, but it's still pretty good. Horde Mode is as fun as it's ever been (despite some nonsense with card drop-based upgrades for player classes), and the competitive modes still have that tension I crave from the series, even if the game trends more towards modes with respawns instead of the elimination gameplay I prefer. My main problem with the game is the campaign, which features an utterly forgettable story set a generation after 3's finale. You join memorable characters like Marcus' Kid, Marcus' Kid's Friend, and Woman with Mysterious Past as they drop groan-worthy quips that a Marvel movie would be embarrassed to spout and deal with a barely-new race of monsters that look a little too much like the Locust from prior games. There's some decent setpieces along the way (including some welcome cameos by Horde Mode mechanics), but for the most part, it's stuff you've done plenty of in past games, and the cast, combined with the lack of four-player coop, draws unfavorable comparisons to the last game. Still, the multiplayer is great stuff, and it doesn't quite reach the depths of Gears of War 2's campaign.

Crackdown 3 [***] is alright. It's more Crackdown, which is cool because Crackdown is fantastic, but I really would've hoped they'd take things further than they have here. Like in the original game, you're targeting leaders of various factions (this time, divisions of an evil megacorp), and killing underbosses makes it easier to reach said leaders. In 3, however, there's a final boss you need to take out, and killing the bigger targets then removes hazards and lightens forces at the final boss' hideout, perched at the top of a tower in the center of the map. You can take on the boss whenever you want, meaning you can choose just how difficult you want the tower raid to be, and even take a maxed out agent into new game plus to beat the game in under five minutes. It's a good start on fleshing out the formula (something Crackdown 2 seemed afraid to do), but it's sadly the only interesting thing they do with it. Still, mindlessly tearing a city up and leveling your agent up is a fine enough way to kill a weekend if you're not paying money for it.

The Indies

You broke my heart, The Messenger [***]. I really wanted to like it, and while it started off kind of slow as a too-easy version of Ninja Gaiden, I kept with it. As you gain new abilities and the stages begin to push those abilities more and more, it really comes into its own, plateauing with a jump from its initial 8-bit style to a gorgeous 16-bit one (although it could also be mistaken for a PlayStation or Saturn game). From there, you get a good two levels of challenging action with some excellent music (which takes the less obvious route and opts for dope Genesis-style FM synth instead of the expected SNES instrumentation) before it takes a turn for the worse. After the second 16-bit level, you return to previous levels and shift between generations to search for collectibles that eventually lead to the final boss fight. Now, I must admit that I'm already biased as someone who prefers linearity in my platformers, but the game morphing into a metroidvania just doesn't work out. I'd be alright with it if the gameplay was anywhere near as entertaining as the first half's, but it just becomes a meandering haze of backtracking (through levels you've already explored once before, no less) and solving riddles to progress, which is far from the game's strong suit. At the very least, the game's exceptional first half is worth a look.

ClusterTruck [*****] kicks ass. You'd think a gimmick like "platforming across a gang of roving tractor trailers" would wear thin, but I wound up playing through the whole game in one sitting and felt a little sad that there wasn't more of it to play (there technically is, but more on that later). The game's full of diverse obstacle courses with dastardly traps and the movement feels great, but the purchasable skills and utilities really push it over the edge. If anything, they're almost too good, since you could very well purchase one of each and find yourself making it through the game just with those, only to discover that some of the other tools are even better once you check them out. Going back to earlier levels to see how you can outright break them with the air dash, bullet time, or the grappling hook (!) is sometimes more fun than playing the game "properly" in a lot of stages. It's exhilarating to watch and to play, but there's one caveat (if we don't include the near-draconian final stage). The version that comes with Game Pass for PC is a UWP release that's behind even the Xbox One port in features, being the only version of the game without Halloween and Christmas themed bonus levels. Even if you opt for the Xbox release, you'd be missing out on user-made levels, courtesy of the Steam Workshop.

Speaking of gimmick-driven games, SUPERHOT [****] made a very good first impression, but kind of tapered off by the end. It seems way more interested in its story than it should be, ripping you away from gameplay a little too frequently for how standard its "JACK INTO THE SYSTEM AND BECOME ONE WITH THE MACHINE" plot is, coming off more as padding than something the creators were particularly invested in. Like ClusterTruck, however, its central time-bending mechanic is pretty god damn cool, leading to absolutely ridiculous shootouts which are then played out for you in real time should you complete the level. You can knock this one out in a sitting or two, so it's well worth checking out.

It's been a while since I've experienced a gulf between how I feel about a game and other people's reactions to it quite to the degree that I have with Void Bastards [***]. It's influenced by System Shock 2 and developed by some key figures of the Bioshock development team, claiming to be a roguelike FPS with immersive sim elements. It sounds promising, but the execution is a little half-baked. Guided by a suffocatingly British AI (voiced by the Stanley Parable's narrator, underscoring just how derivative the whole motif is), you traipse about spaceships that barely have any verticality (combined with the 2D enemy sprites, it even reminded me a bit of Wolfenstein 3D at times), killing or avoiding stereotypically British enemies and collecting crafting materials to aid you in your ultimate goal of collecting other, more important crafting materials that will win you the game. There's plenty to consider before you go into each ship, such as your current ammo count, money, oxygen supply, as well as the enemy composition and materials present in each ship, but once you're onboard, the moment-to-moment gameplay doesn't live up to the strategy present beforehand. The guns are satisfying to use, but the depth seen in immersive sims like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex is largely absent in combat, save for the occasional environmental kill or turret override. It's a solid podcast game (and has an incredible comic book aesthetic), but given the pedigree behind it, it really should've been more than just a mindless time killer.

The Rest

I'm still working my way through it, but the unique gameplay mashup of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden has blown me away so far, so I can't help but recommend it. The mix of XCOM combat with stealth and wasteland scavenging in-between is brilliant, and the game has a pretty clever interpretation of the overdone wasteland setting, leading to some great dialogue delivered by endearing characters. I don't think I've played another post-apocalyptic game that feels quite as brutal as this: everything is truly finite (even health only fully regenerates on the easiest difficulty), meaning you can't run a loop through respawning enemies for supplies like a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Fallout game permits. Instead, you have to actually ration your items out, and rely on smart usage of each mutant's abilities to get you through combat. It feels like those harrowing early moments of an XCOM game, but without ever reaching that far-too-common threshold where you have plenty of strong units and powerful equipment, letting you run on autopilot. Barring it falling apart in the later moments, this is one of the best games on Game Pass.

Considering the dearth of recent ports of the original game, Hydro Thunder Hurricane is a welcome addition to the service, but it's just a little flat compared to its source material. On paper, it's totally Hydro Thunder and passes the gameplay test, but it's just missing that panache Midway was known for, feeling like a halfhearted cover of the original's all-caps arcade action. It's fine in a pinch, but I can't help but consider hooking my Dreamcast up as I play it.

Supermarket Shriek came out earlier this month, and it seems like a fun little thing from the half that I've played. It's like an isometric racing game in the vein of RC Pro-Am or Micro Machines, mixed with the hazards and the perfect-run-pursuit aspect of the Trials series. A hapless dope and a goat (you see, because they're good at yelling) take their shopping cart and scream their way across a bunch of different stores, taking part in obstacle course challenges, races against other vehicles, and of course, Supermarket Sweep style grocery runs. It's got a surprising amount of variety for how simple its two-button gameplay is. Not only are the various different objectives divvied out at a rate that keeps things fresh, but many of the levels have unique themes ranging from arcades and electronics stores to butcher shops and gyms. There's even a handful of secret levels that go the extra mile to pay tribute to others games. It's had some pretty bad saving issues at launch that have kept me from going too far with it—no doubt a victim of the "beta" aspect of Game Pass' current PC form—but it's seemingly been patched up, so I'm looking forward to seeing what's next from it.

Finally, here's a quick list of other stuff that's either worth a look or something I've been meaning to get to. Hell, I'll even throw in some Xbox recommendations while I'm at it:

Other PC Recommendations

• Hotline Miami [*****]
• Gears of War: Ultimate Edition [*****]
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus [***]
• ACA NEOGEO METAL SLUG X [****]

PC Games On My Radar, So They Might Be Good Too, Who Really Knows

• Prey
• Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition
• Metro Exodus (this one might show up in another blog eventually)
• Mudrunner
• ABZU
• Snake Pass
• Ruiner
• West of Loathing

Xbox Game Pass Recommendations

• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts [****]
• BattleBlock Theater [****]
• Dead Island Definitive Edition [***]
• Dead Rising 2 [****]
• DOOM [*****]
• Fallout 3 [***]
• Gears of War [*****]
• Gears of War 3 [*****]
• Hitman [*****]
• Human Fall Flat [***]
• Metro 2033 Redux [*****]
• Metro: Last Light Redux [****]
• N+ [****]
• Rare Replay [****]
• Saints Row: The Third [****]
• Shadow Warrior 2 [****]
• Spelunky [*****]
• Wolfenstein: The New Order [*****]

Hopefully this'll give some of you new Game Pass subscribers an idea of what to check out in the fleeting moments leading up to Super Mario Maker 2's release, after which you'll never have to play another video game ever again. Anyone reading this wondering if I'm still planning on more blogs in my current series can rest easy, because I'm working on another entry. It could take some time, though. Because, uh, you know.

Mario Maker.

[This is the third entry in a series of blogs. It's recommended you read the first and second before you read this one.]

I'm probably not alone in this, but for the past few generations, I've thought of the PlayStation as the Exclusives Machine. The PlayStation 3's Cell processor made sure that it was a bad place to play a lot of third-party games, and the current gulf between how games run on a standard PS4 compared to a decent PC makes it more of a platform for games I can't play anywhere else. The upside to this is that thanks to a combination of choice partnerships and the wealth of studios they've acquired over the years, Sony's been having a damn good run at exclusives lately. Days Gone may be a disappointment in the eyes of a lot of people (that is, if they didn't write it off at first glance like I'm sure many did), but it's a rare misstep in what's been a fairly long line of solid work, including games like God of War, Bloodborne, and Uncharted 4. It's an impressive repertoire, but it's not something they just lucked into. It had to be built over multiple decades, which led to plenty of ups and downs. The PS3 got its fair share of shit early on for "not having any games," but even the original PlayStation had a fairly tumultuous history when you put it under the microscope. Of course they released plenty of great stuff back then, but being so fresh to the scene, they still had to figure a lot of shit out, both internally and in building relationships with developers. They had a lot to learn, and sometimes that led to ugly situations that would have a big impact on the games they released.

989 Reasons Why: SingleTrac & Sony's First-Party Growing Pains

Sony's been in the video game business for longer than some people may expect, starting with publishing games in 1989 as CSG Imagesoft, Inc., an offshoot of Sony's music branch then known as the CBS/Sony Group. As Sony absorbed the CBS portion of this joint venture, the company would adopt a slightly more recognizable name: Sony Imagesoft. Largely focused on publishing movie tie-ins for Sony-owned motion pictures and localizing the occasional Japanese game (typically those that were published in Japan by one of Sony Music's other branches, namely Epic/Sony Records), Sony Imagesoft's output isn't quite the lineup you would expect from the company these days. They brought Super Dodge Ball to the States and released the underrated Smart Ball (developed by the young upstart team known as Game Freak), but you'll likely remember them from SEGA CD "classics" such as Sewer Shark and the Make My Video series. That being said, their most popular game was 1994's Mickey Mania, a decent (if unforgiving) 2D platformer with an excellent art style that is remarkably faithful to its source material. It was UK developer Traveller's Tales' big break, helping them turn into the LEGO game empire they are today, but it was also the first game Imagesoft tester David Jaffe worked on as a designer.

As the PlayStation loomed, Sony's video game business was a bit of a mess. You had Sony Imagesoft, their parent Sony Electronic Publishing, and Sony's Japanese branches doing stuff on the side. Things were far from organized, so there was a lot of housekeeping to be done before the launch of their first console. All of these companies were eventually consolidated into Sony Computer Entertainment umbrella, with Imagesoft folded into Sony Computer Entertainment America (which is known today as part of Sony Interactive Entertainment). With the PlayStation on the way, SCEA needed games, and following Mickey Mania's success, Jaffe's work earned him a lead designer job at the company. His first task was to assemble a team that'd help him create some of the console's first big games. After a visit to Evans & Sutherland, a Utah-based tech company that specialized in military simulations, Jaffe was left impressed by their 3D technology, so he and a group of E&S employees formed SingleTrac Entertainment Technologies. If you had to pick an MVP for the PlayStation's salad days, you'd be foolish to choose anybody but these guys. Naughty Dog was a huge deal thanks to Crash Bandicoot, sure, but in a time-frame spanning the console's US launch in September 1995 to late 1997, the studio developed a whopping five games: WarHawk, two Twisted Metal games, and two Jet Motos.

We were literally working for the survival of the company at SingleTrac. We had less than twelve months to create two games from scratch, with no pre-existing engine and a software development kit and target hardware that changed regularly. I remember looking around the room and seeing pretty much the entire company working hard at their desks, and then glancing at the clock and realizing it was nearly 1:00 in the morning. I don't remember management ever insisting that people put in those kinds of hours. It was just that everybody there was responsible and committed, understood there was nobody else to take up the slack, and we had to ship two great games in time for launch. We were under a lot of pressure, but highly motivated and really excited about what we were doing. And as far as making games was concerned, we were all total newbies. -SingleTrac programmer Jay Barnson, PC World interview

Twisted Metal is the obvious standout of SingleTrac's library, and for good reason. A genre unto itself, the series took inspiration from car chases seen in films like Speed and the French Connection to offer a one-of-a-kind experience that combines the mechanics of a driving game with the frenzied combat and map control of an arena FPS. The first game is pretty rough to go back to (and was even criticized at the time for its lackluster graphics and spartan single-player content), but Twisted Metal 2 is a genuine classic. It expands upon just about every aspect, making the original game feel like a prototype by comparison. Gameplay takes the biggest leap, with the introduction of hidden abilities (activated by fighting game style d-pad button combinations) fleshing out the combat, supported by a diverse array of large levels to fight in. The stages in Twisted Metal 2 are maybe its high point, using a "World Tour" theme to showcase loads of iconic landmarks while boasting a shocking degree of interactivity. You can destroy much of the environment, revealing easter eggs (including hidden cheat code button combinations tucked away in clever hiding spots) and even changing the layout of the map itself. Blowing up the Eiffel Tower is a memorable moment on its own, but having the tower's wreckage lead to an entire upper portion of the map elevates it past a simple novelty. TM2's presentation is also a huge upgrade from the prior game, doubling down on the over-the-top nature and replacing the original text scroll endings with FMV cutscenes rendered in a hand-drawn, quintessentially 90s style. The single-player tournament mode is fairly challenging to get through, but it's worth it just to see every character's ending (another aspect lifted almost directly from fighting games of the era). Everything is as pulpy and as edgy as you'd expect a David Jaffe Joint to be, and considering the game's ridiculous premise (comic book villain Calypso runs a vehicular deathmatch tournament, granting the winner a monkey's paw wish), the game earns it. I couldn't tell you the last time I played the game before this blog, but I remembered everything from map layouts to Calypso's can-only-be-pure-evil voice, and that's a testament to its design. The lack of analog controls makes handling your vehicle a bit more of a hassle than it should be, but it's still an great game and one of the best multiplayer experiences on the console. Unfortunately, after the success of Twisted Metal 2, things would take a drastic turn for the franchise—a turn that had way too much god damn oversteer.

After releasing multiple million-selling games and garnering plenty of critical acclaim in such a short time span, many at SingleTrac felt that they were entitled to more money than what Sony offered them in their contracts. Sony, on the other hand, was unsatisfied with Twisted Metal's performance outside of the US, so they were at an impasse. This dispute would result in SingleTrac breaking away from Sony—leaving Jaffe behind—and being purchased by publisher GT Interactive (a company that blew up thanks to securing the publishing rights to Doom, because everything in this blog series has to circle back to John Romero). Under GT, SingleTrac would tweak their winning formula with 1997's Twisted-Metal-but-underwater Critical Depth and the following year's Twisted-Metal-but-also-sort-of-Crazy-Taxi Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012, while Sony was left without so much as an engine to make a third Twisted Metal with. They would turn to their internal development team at 989 Studios (first known as Sony Interactive Studios America, a merger of Sony Imagesoft and SCEA's development team), a decision that would make a huge impact on the series.

Among the team on Twisted Metal III were William Todd, Ken George, James Doyle, Jim Buck, and a bunch of other people who did not have two first names. Buck in particular is a key figure here, as his experience working on Rally Cross and its physics system directly inform how the game plays. TMIII runs on a heavily modified version of the Rally Cross engine, sporting what Sony touted as the "TruPhysics" system, something supposed to offer more realistic vehicle dynamics for the series. Maybe it did that to a degree, but to truly understand the effect that this had on the game, I suggest taking a quick look at Rally Cross in action. Simply put, driving in Twisted Metal III feels terrible. You roll over all the time. Steering is either hopelessly lethargic with the slower cars (here's where that oversteer comes in, turns ending a good quarter-second after they should) or overly touchy with the speedier ones, with no happy medium in sight. When you're not fighting the handling of your own vehicle, combat can only be described as a step back from Twisted Metal 2. There's less opponents per round, and to compensate, each enemy takes way more of a beating, making weapons that could do some serious damage in prior games feel pathetically weak. New weapons like speed missiles are borderline useless, as you could freeze an enemy and rattle off a dozen right into them and maybe take off 10% of their health. The level design also takes a hit, with the game rehashing the worldwide motif of Twisted Metal 2 sans any of the creativity that made those arenas so memorable. Stages like Washington D.C. and Egypt feel barren, and there's a distinct lack of interactivity beyond blowing the occasional structure up. Worst of all may be the tonal shift from dark humor to pure cheese, which takes things from campy to just embarrassing. Twisted Metal was already a series you couldn't exactly take seriously, but there was a rough charm to the endings, acting as an incidental time capsule from the 90s. TMIII treats its endings as a total afterthought, leading to perfunctory FMVs with hideous CGI and twists that range from uninspired to groan-inducing. At the very least, the soundtrack is full of nu-metal that fits right in with the rest of the game's mostly-intentional schlock, thanks to tracks from Rob Zombie and Pitchshifter.

Of the games covered so far in this series, Twisted Metal III feels like the biggest victim of circumstance. Making a worthy follow-up to Twisted Metal 2 was a big undertaking to begin with, but the rift between Sony and SingleTrac was a death blow. The decision to transplant a vanilla racing game's staff and engine to the franchise was like a round peg in a square hole, turning Twisted Metal III into a huge disappointment that's widely regarded as the series' nadir. Twisted Metal 4 improves things a bit, but still pales in comparison to 2. Thankfully, the next entry would correct the course of the series. With a new console on the way and fan resentment towards 989 growing, Sony recruited Jaffe and Incognito Entertainment—a studio consisting of many SingleTrac veterans—to make the series' PlayStation 2 debut, Twisted Metal: Black. Hitting all the right marks and ignoring all of III and 4's contributions to the series, Black was the first Twisted Metal to feel like a proper sequel to TM2, and signaled a return to form that would continue until 2012's divisive PS3 entry, simply titled Twisted Metal. It's not a bad game, but it has its problems. I mean, how do you possibly balance a roster of vehicles that includes a helicopter?

Sony's own attempt at Twisted Metal ended poorly, but it's only part of the story. Despite crashing and burning with Twisted Metal III, their answer to SingleTrac's other series, Jet Moto, didn't fare so badly. For those unfamiliar with Jet Moto, just know one thing: it is fucking crazy. On paper, it's best described as Wave Race by way of F-Zero, taking hoverbikes across land and sea with the aid of grapple beams to swing around hairpin turns. It's stupid fast, and among the most challenging games on the PlayStation. Your bike moves insanely quickly, and the terrain is some of the most treacherous you'll come across in a racing game, and that's even before you get to the "suicide" courses, which feature 180-degree turns, whipping you directly into oncoming competitors. It's absolutely brutal, but exhilarating in a way far too few racing games are. Jet Moto 2 is especially wild, refining the turbo boost system and going beyond the natural landscapes of the original. JM2's courses are far more ambitious both in the layouts and their themes, featuring outlandish tracks that take place on city ruins, literal roller-coasters, and even Heaven and Hell (oh, and all of Jet Moto's courses are included, to boot). It's a savagely difficult game, but even losing efforts are absolutely thrilling.

Given what happened with Twisted Metal III, you'd be forgiven for assuming the worst of Jet Moto 3, 989 Studios' follow-up to Jet Moto 2. It certainly doesn't help that 3's development was outsourced to a studio by the name of Pacific Coast Power & Light, which—on top of sounding like a company more suited for repairing a transformer than making a video game—was responsible for undesireables like Road Rash 64, Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed, and WWE Crush Hour (which is, ironically, a Twisted Metal clone). Fortunately, despite these potential red flags, Jet Moto 3 is actually pretty good. One of the bigger issues of the SingleTrac games was that they were downright ugly in spots, and ran at a mere 20 frames-per-second, which is hardly ideal for a racing game (the Championship Edition release of Jet Moto 2, which has an interesting story of its own, cuts the amount of rival racers down to three to get a locked 30FPS, resulting in the best way to play the game). Jet Moto 3 addresses both of these qualms, looking considerably better than its predecessors despite bringing the framerate up to 30FPS. That 30 isn't always stable, and I'm usually adamant about having racing games run at 60FPS, but it helps the sense of speed immeasurably nonetheless. JM3 is also much more focused on stunts, which gives it an edge when compared to its SingleTrac brethren. There's no tricks in the traditional sense, but in-air control is much snappier, a jump button is added, and stunt racing—a bonus mode from 2 where mid-air flips and rotations add to your turbo reserves—is now enabled by default. There's also a new score-driven mode played on unique stunt-oriented tracks, where you spin around like a madman snatching as many collectibles as you can on the way. It's reminiscent of the stunt mode in San Francisco Rush 2049, which is definitely a good thing.

Jet Moto 3 is possibly the best-playing game in the series, but I don't know that it's better than 2. The track design isn't quite as memorable, despite being larger in scale. Courses can branch out in multiple paths and laps can take over a minute and a half to complete, but there aren't nearly as many tricky jumps or corkscrews to conquer, and the settings aren't quite as varied. It actually can feel like a bit of a slog at times, which was never really the case elsewhere in the series. Still, after how Twisted Metal turned out, it's nice to see that Jet Moto didn't end up a casualty of SingleTrac's exit. It's a shame, then, that Jet Moto 3 was the final game in the series. PCP&L was working on a sequel titled Jet Moto 2124 that intended to take the series to outer space and bring speeds up to that of the Wipeout series, but it was cancelled by Sony after 3's mediocre sales. A PS2 entry, Jet Moto: SOLAR, was also planned, but never saw the light of day. It really sucks that the series has been dormant for so long, since modern racing game conveniences like Forza's rewind feature would make the blistering pace and devious tracks of the series more palatable to a wider audience. Hell, I'm surprised that the Motorstorm team at Evolution Studios never took a shot at it before they were shuttered, because they probably could've made one hell of a game.

In retrospect, a lot of people treat Sony's 989 era with disdain, and with games like Twisted Metal III and 3Xtreme, it's understandable. I don't even have any fondness for their well-received games, but if nothing else, the SingleTrac ordeal highlights the true value of a good team of developers. SingleTrac knew their worth, and while the 989 Twisted Metals may have been bombs, their poor reception taught Sony that crucial lesson the hard way, as proven by their eventual reunion with the team at Incognito. After all, you wouldn't want them sacking Naughty Dog and handing The Last of Us Part II to Media Molecule. Wait, actually, that sounds cool as fuck, but still, you really need the right people for the right franchise.

SingleTrac isn't the only developer Sony pulled from one of their hit properties, so next time we'll look at a Sony breakup that actually split a series itself into two different entities.

[This is the second entry in a series of blogs. It's recommended you read the first before you read this one.]

Moving on from the unfortunate results of John Romero's id departure (closing thoughts: god damn it I should've worked in the title "id and Egos" somehow), I want to shift gears to something a little more positive, so let's talk about a pair of games that inspired me to write these blogs to begin with.

The Worst Mistake I Ever Made: From Earthworm Jim to the Neverhood & MDK

You wouldn't be blamed for comparing Shiny Entertainment's classic-ish Earthworm Jim series to Ren & Stimpy. It's true that they both have this deceptively crude charm to them, where the things you're being shown are offputting and kind of disgusting—and yet you can't look away because of how well animated it all is—but it goes deeper than that. When Ren & Stimpy debuted in 1991, it marked a paradigm shift in cartoons from blatant commercialism to something more creator-focused. Cartoons have always moved merch in one way or another, but the 80s were a time where toy manufacturers ran roughshod on the animation industry and entertainment was often just a means of getting some poor young sap to ask Mommy for a G.I. Joe or a Transformer. Everybody loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, but it wouldn't even exist if the creators weren't looking to sell action figures. While Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi's fourth wallless Mighty Mouse reboot would get the ball rolling towards a new standard, it would be Kricfalusi's later Ren & Stimpy that would break out huge, representing a new wave of cartoons that looked to the Golden Age of Animation for inspiration. Inspiration which animators would use to inform their own warped creations, unbeholden to pesky license owners or studio executives. Two years after Spümcø's cat and dog duo first hit TVs across the United States, a similar transition would play out for a handful of game developers in California.

If you played video games in the 90s, you're at the very least familiar with the work of David Perry (who I can't not call Dave, thanks to this bit from Earthworm Jim). Like John Romero, the Ireland native was fixated on computers from a young age, spending his youth programming small games for home computers and sending them to magazines for them to publish. By the time he was 17 years old, Perry was working in London on home computer ports for various companies, something that eventually landed him a job at Virgin Games. During his time at Probe Software, he would meet designer Nick Bruty, and the pair would be offered positions at Virgin's new US-based studio during their work on the Terminator. They accepted, and it's here that the backbone of Earthworm Jim would begin to form. At least, as much of a backbone as a worm could have.

Considering the gigantic overlap in staff, Virgin Games USA is for most intents and purposes the prototype for Shiny Entertainment. They're mostly known for a trilogy of Genesis licensed games that, in addition to being some of the most popular games on the system, would share an engine that serves as the foundation on which EWJ was built. Mick & Mack as the Global Gladiators was their first title as Virgin Games USA, an action-platformer with an environmentalist bent and loads of McDonald's advertising. It's pretty unremarkable, but is notable for being the first game of Perry's that Tommy Tallarico would compose music for (And would you just listen to those samples?). It also firmly establishes the team's knack for quality artwork, thanks to a then-huge team of eight artists and the solid animation skills of future Shiny employee Mike Dietz. Their next game, Cool Spot, is a beloved "hey, this actually isn't bad" advergame classic, and is the Virgin game most like Earthworm Jim. You can see a lot of the gameplay basics of Shiny's debut taking form here, most evident in the sprawling, sometimes confusing levels, eight-way shooting, and the less-than-ideal collision detection with level geometry. Finally, there's their smash hit adaptation of Disney's Aladdin, a game second only to Sonic in its success on the system. It doesn't have a lot in common with Jim from a gameplay perspective, but its lauded "DigiCel" process (where real animation cels are digitized for use in-game) would play a part in bringing the Earthworm's animations to life. Virgin Games USA was working on a fourth licensed game based on the Jungle Book, but by the time it was finished, Eurocom would be the studio attached to it. Most of the Virgin team left mid-development to join Perry in his new venture at Shiny Entertainment.

Shiny would use much of their Virgin Games experience to make Earthworm Jim—the first release under their 3-game deal with publisher Playmates Interactive, the video game branch of the toy company responsible for Teenager Mutant Ninja Turtles (go figure)—but it still very much feels like the product of a team that was absolutely thrilled to put those damn kids games behind them. The gameplay feels like an evolution of Cool Spot (but eschewing the collectathon aspect and focusing much more on combat, having you run and gun through huge levels) and the visuals evoke the quality of Aladdin, but the similarities end there. Instead of fast food mascots or Disney characters, Shiny tapped the imagination of Douglas TenNapel, an animator that joined them during the development of the Jungle Book after having worked at BlueSky Software on SEGA's adaptations of Jurassic Park and, of course, Ren & Stimpy. TenNapel was the creative mind behind Earthworm Jim, crafting most of the characters and providing Jim with his trademark voice.

The world that TenNapel created for the game feels like a direct subversion of the kind of bouncy mascot platformers both he and Shiny were making before the company formed. Instead of going with the faux-cool of a Sonic the Hedgehog or even Cool Spot's own Anti-Cola mascot, Jim is an anti-mascot that's ultimately kind of a dope: a bumbling figure—featuring a Jim Varney-esque southern twang—that totally lucks into the bionic suit that gives him any of his noteworthy abilities. Gone are the Green Hills and sunny beaches of your typical platformer, replaced with junkyards, intestinal labyrinths, and even the gates of Hel- Heck, rather. Characters like the villainous Queen Slug-For-A-Butt (short for Queen Pulsating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-filled, Malformed Slug-For-A-Butt), her sister Princess What's-Her-Name (a commentary on the prevalent yet often meaningless damsel in distress trope), and the mad Professor Monkey-For-A-Head round out a marketer's nightmare of a cast. These aren't just aesthetic choices, either: even the gameplay takes strange detours to host hamster rides and rounds of competitive bungee jumping.

Its mechanics haven't aged particularly gracefully (the pseudo-360 degree firing feels pretty clunky, the whip swinging is far more frustrating than it should be, bosses give little feedback on damaging them...), but I just have to respect the free-wheeling attitude with which the game was made:

Once we released Earthworm Jim we knew we had a hit on our hands, but while we were making it I don’t think we really knew how big it would be. We were trying to establish ourselves as artists and as a company, and we were really passionate about what we were doing. However day to day during production we were just trying to entertain each other, making the game we wanted to play, and I think that comes through in the final product. -Mike Dietz, iGame Responsibly interview

Even with its rough edges, EWJ is a game where you can tell the development team just went for it. The animation is still impressive today, backgrounds are gorgeous and full of detail, and the gameplay has a great balance of variety. Tallarico's soundtrack is a real standout, offering straight-faced action game bangers—something he flirted with during Cool Spot—interspersed with ragtime, bluegrass, and big band non-sequiturs. The gameplay may not hold up its end of the bargain, but at the end of the day, this is a game the development team really put themselves into, sometimes literally. Many of the series' elements are named after the developers themselves, such as stages Big Bruty, Andy Asteroids, and the sequel's Lorenzen's Soil (there's even a cheat code in the SNES version taunting programmer Nick Jones for entering in a cheat code whose inputs were changed mid-development). It isn't one of my favorite games to play, but it's something I can't help but admire regardless.

Like Playmates' TMNT before it, Earthworm Jim was a near-immediate sensation, leading to Playmates-brand action figures, a Special Edition port of the original game, an animated series starring Dan Castellaneta, and a sequel the following year. While the SEGA CD's Earthworm Jim: Special Edition is by far the best way to play the original game, the series wouldn't quite reach the same heights afterwards. Earthworm Jim 2 has a lot going for it, being one of the best looking 16-bit games of the era, but the first game's issues aren't really addressed and the gameplay ends up a little too varied. It's filled to the brim with different gameplay styles, but the amount of gimmick levels and 12 different rounds of the dreaded Puppy Love often proves overwhelming, leaving you trudging along in the hopes of making it to the next traditional stage. The game was a success, but it was also the end of Shiny as we knew it, as a surprise E3 announcement would reveal during its development.

Mistakes Were Made

Joining the recent rush of mergers and acquisitions among video game companies, Interplay announced that it has acquired Shiny Entertainment. The news startled attendees at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, where the announcement was made, because of Shiny's prestige in the industry. Run by David Perry, Shiny is the young Laguna Beach-based company that created the Earthworm Jim games for the SNES and Genesis. -Gamepro, August 1995 issue

Very recently, a prototype version of Earthworm Jim 2 was unearthed, painting a picture of the game as it was extremely early in development. It features plenty of levels and other content that wouldn't make it into the final version, but the most fascinating thing about it is that it features loads of unused prerendered 3D graphics. In addition to 3D characters missing from the final game's levels (a green monster previously only seen in previews, dragons in the Flyin' King stage, a roller-coaster cut from Inflated Head's carnival world...), there's a test level that's little more than a copy of the first game's New Junk City with the addition of a big 3D robot that idles in front of you. Betas and prototypes are always an interesting window into what could've been for a video game, but Earthworm Jim 2's prototype doubles as a hint towards Shiny's future, giving vital context to Interplay's acquisition of the company.

Perry could see the writing on the wall: the Shiny formula wasn't going to last forever. It was 1995, and everybody was enraptured by the 3D capabilities of the Sony PlayStation and the upcoming Nintendo Ultra 64. Earthworm Jim 2 was able to successfully integrate its 2D art with pre-rendered 3D despite its many cuts, but to Dave, Shiny was on borrowed time. After all, what good would a bunch of traditional 2D artists be in a world where Bernie Stolar wasn't even allowing 2D games on Sony's new machine? Fearing the worst for his studio, Perry decided to cut his losses and sell the company to Interplay Entertainment, a safety net he would later call the worst mistake he ever made.

As you might expect, a lot of the Shiny crew didn't take the Interplay sale very well. Perry had a great reputation among the team as a programmer that really cared about the input of artists (the credits in Global Gladiators' manual list Perry with the nickname "I need more artists!"), so it came as a shock to many that he would sell the company. After years of working for sometimes-literal Mickey Mouse operations, Shiny's autonomy was something a lot of its employees valued, so it wouldn't take very long at all for many to abandon the company. Some would see EWJ2 through to the end, but Doug TenNapel would leave in April—quite early in development, if the prototype's build date of the 24th of that same month is to be believed—and have an E3 announcement of his own two weeks later:

Not all the folks are Shiny Happy People on the good ship Earthworm Jim. Half of the original eight-man team at Shiny has left. They've jumped ship after Interplay purchased Shiny, and they have set out on their own to form their a new gaming company called Neverhood. -Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1995 issue

A Beautiful Day in the Neverhood

Residents of the Neverhood, Inc. included artists Ed Schofield and Mark Lorenzen, both of whom left Shiny to join Doug almost immediately. Lorenzen, an old college buddy that worked alongside Doug at BlueSky, joined Shiny during the development of Earthworm Jim 2 but left to join the Neverhood before completion, mirroring TenNapel's own experience on Virgin's Jungle Book. Fellow Shiny employees Mike Dietz and Eric Ciccone would join later, as they wanted to see through EWJ2's development. Setting out to acquire funding, Doug courted the months-old Dreamworks Interactive, who were looking for creative new games to publish alongside their internally-developed ones. During the week of E3 1995, the Neverhood made a pitch in the home of one of the company's founders: Stephen Spielberg. The idea was a break from both action-platformers and 2D animation, a PC adventure game inspired by LucasArts and Myst, done entirely in claymation. With the greenlight from Spielberg, the Neverhood signed its own 3-game publishing deal with Dreamworks and only a year (and three tons of clay) later, their first game, known as the Neverhood Chronicles, was released on Halloween 1996.

Now, I'm a gameplay first kind of guy, so my patience for 90s point-and-click adventure games isn't exactly the best. The backtracking and trial-and-error that often comes with the genre isn't something I'm really into, so I was blown away by how much I enjoyed the Neverhood Chronicles (often just called the Neverhood). It smartly avoids many of the pitfalls of its contemporaries, resulting in an experience that rarely frustrates. It's not flawless, but thankfully, many of its issues can be alleviated with modern conveniences.

The Neverhood is quick to let you know it isn't just another adventure game, opting to throw you into things as soon as the publisher/developer splash screens are over. Following a brief title card sequence, you wake up in a room and start solving puzzles, knowing zero about your character or the strange clay world around him. There's no menus, no introduction cutscene, nothing. Just a lanky clay dork waking up in a big clay room with a clay hammer hovering over its only door. The Neverhood was influenced by an art show that TenNapel did in the 80s called "A Beautiful Day in the Neverhood," which was a series of 17 paintings depicting a city made out of clay, but while while the Neverhood is a desolate, sparsely-populated world full of odd clay structures, similarities to the 1988 incarnation end there. This Neverhood is far more abstract, featuring bizarre landscapes and strange buildings, sometimes made out of sandwiches (fans of the Chip Butty will be right at home here). You meet a handful of oddball characters as you make your way through the world, but the game focuses more on exploration and puzzle-solving than character interaction, as you search for 20 video disks scattered throughout the Neverhood. Each disk contains a piece of the world's story, as told by the dim-witted yet affable Willie Trombone. It's here that you learn that your name is Klaymen and are eventually told the origins of the Neverhood and the reason why it's so empty. The game's straightforward start and its relative lack of NPCs may lead you to believe that the story is more of an afterthought, but the Neverhood actually has the most backstory and world-building of any of TenNapel's works.

The "yeah, but" caveat that comes with the Neverhood is widely regarded as the Hall of Records, a building that hosts the titular "Neverhood Chronicles." This is a codex containing almost all of the lore to be found in the series, drawing inspiration from the biblical story of creation. Going into the game, I treated this as a huge red flag considering TenNapel's frankly abhorrent beliefs that stem from his being a fundamentalist Christian, but it thankfully ends up as a fun read, filled with humorous stories that fill in the world's many blanks while also being entertaining in its own right. The catch with this is that all of it is implemented in-game as a literal wall of text that can take up to ten minutes to traverse through, and that's if you simply want to skip reading any of it and reach the video disk you need at the end of the hall. It's a now-notorious sequence of the game because of this, but it's become far less of an issue in the time since the game's release. Not only can you read the entirety of the Chronicles online, but ScummVM also allows you to skip all of the non-essential rooms, expediting the process greatly. God bless emulation.

Puzzle-solving in the Neverhood will feel familiar to adventure game veterans, but the variety and some forward thinking really makes them shine. There's tons of different flavors of puzzle in the game, from tile sliding and matching games to more intense logic puzzles, and they sometimes even change the visual style up to something more hand-drawn. There's no dead ends or game overs—save for one incredibly obvious one that's more of a joke than anything—and you use items automatically as you interact with objects, so instead of savescumming and pixel-hunting or dicking around with an inventory screen, most of the focus is where it should be: actually thinking about the puzzles. They start off easy, but by the end you encounter some pretty taxing puzzles, and while you'll probably have to hit Google up for at least one of the solutions, there's always a logic or clue to them that you can follow (Stuck on the mouse puzzle? Follow your nose.). The biggest drawback that the puzzles end up having is the amount of backtracking you have to do. Occasionally you'll come across symbols that are the cypher for a puzzle in another location, meaning you'll have to strut along to another location with the symbols in tow. It can be a bother, but there's a much-welcome fast travel system introduced partway through the game, and you can skip the first-person traversal FMVs and any other cutscenes on the way. Thanks to modern technology, you can even use the print screen feature of Windows to store any information in lieu of grabbing a pen and paper.

The Neverhood is one of the better adventure games I've come across in terms of gameplay, but the game's aesthetic really steals the show. The clay style is a perfect home for the Neverhood team's talents, and while the FMV scenes are unfortunately pretty compressed, the animation both there and in gameplay is full of life and always entertaining. For as much as I can praise the look of the game, though, what sticks with me is the music. TenNapel recruited Terry Scott Taylor, frontman of Christian rock band Daniel Amos, to compose music for the Neverhood, giving him a rough direction of the kind of genres they were going for. What they got in return was one of the wildest and most addictive soundtracks in any game. It's largely driven by acoustic guitars, but it takes Tommy Tallarico's penchant for abrupt genre shifts in the Earthworm Jim series to the next level, throwing in 70s funk, swing, and whatever the hell this is. There's plenty of vocals, but good luck deciphering much of the lyrics, as Taylor skats, mumbles, and coughs through most of it. More than a lot of other games, the music is a huge part of what makes the game special, as there's nothing quite like wandering around a clay structure trying to figure out what the hell you're supposed to do, all while some dude is in the background rambling about playing a little ping-pong. The game even dedicates an entire puzzle to a radio full of batshit musical interludes, including some skits and a reference to the Simpsons' Beatles reference.

Overall, the Neverhood is the team's creative peak. It was a game I treated with a lot of apprehension beforehand, but it won me over almost instantly. I can't decide if it's my favorite Neverhood game or not—the follow-up, Skullmonkeys, is a better-playing platformer than either of Shiny's Earthworm Jims—but it's one of the most memorable adventure games you'll ever play.

Murder Death Kill, or Mission: Deliver Kindness, or Max, Dr. Hawkins, & Kurt, or...

Meanwhile, in Laguna Beach, Shiny wasn't just sitting on their hands while the Neverhood hit the ground running. After all, they still had another game to make for Playmates. It'd be easy to think that with a contractual obligation and a lack of TenNapel and company, the crew would be forced to rest on their laurels and just churn out lousy Earthworm Jim sequels, but just the opposite happened. Don't get me wrong, suck ass Earthworm Jim sequels were churned out, but not by Shiny: to keep things fresh, the company enacted a no-sequels policy, meaning future Earthworm Jim games would be outsourced and largely stink. Looking to create something new, Nick Bruty would rise to prominence in the company, laying out the groundwork for Shiny's next big game.

Like the Neverhood for, well, the Neverhood (Naming your studio after the franchise you're making can be a real pain in the ass, huh?), Shiny's next title was a bit of a diversion from the kind of games they were used to—and tired of—making. Instead of going for a 2D action game with kid-friendly sensibilities, they wanted to make a 3D shooter with heavy sci-fi influence and (slightly) more mature content. Taking a decidedly edgier tone, the game would be called MDK, short for Murder Death Kill. At least, it was supposed to be: in a bit of irony, the acronym would eventually take on a fluid meaning, as Murder Death Kill wasn't exactly the most marketable title. Content restrictions like this were the kind of thing that console manufacturers like SEGA and Nintendo enforced, and looking to break free from that, MDK also ended up as Shiny's first PC game, a perfect opportunity for a studio looking to flex 3D muscle.

Just like Quake II the same year, MDK would be a polygon-pushing 3D hardware-accelerated visual showpiece focusing on alien worlds, but where id Software's off-world landscapes are woefully pedestrian, MDK offers far more interesting design. It isn't quite the benchmark for 3D hardware that Quake II was, and the dithered low-color 2D assets definitely show their age today, but the art direction remains outstanding. The levels combine abstract architecture with flat-shaded polygons and complex sky textures to create a world that feels legitimately alien. Every area looks unique, and the gameplay upholds that sense of diversity.

You play as space station janitor Kurt Hectic, who is recruited by scientist Fluke Hawkins to destroy alien forces who have landed on Earth in humongous Minecrawler vehicles to strip the planet of its resources. You descend from Dr. Hawkins' ship, the Jim Dandy, with the doctor's patented Coil Suit in tow to infiltrate these Minecrawlers and destroy them from within. On the way down, you play a minigame of sorts where you avoid SAM missiles and collect various power-ups before the stage begins in earnest. Once you're on the surface, things feel a lot like Doom: there's no vertical aiming, and combat is more about moving around enemies as you dodge projectiles than it is about precision. Unlike Doom, however, there's a sniper mode that lets you aim, zoom up to 100 times, and even get headshots in an industry first (well, almost: the 2.5 update for Quake's Team Fortress mod beat MDK to the punch by a matter of weeks), all accomplished from a slick first-person interface that lets you watch up to three bullets as they travel to their targets. You can enter sniper mode whenever you like, but you'll mostly use it in puzzle-like sequences where you'll have to reach enemies hiding behind barriers by using well-placed mortar shells. Typical combat is more about using your Coil Suit's chaingun and various collectible thrown weapons and power-ups to tear up opposition. It's relatively simple compared to the more intricate action of modern shooters, but the game's pacing does an excellent job of keeping things fresh.

Even if you were to compare it to something like Call of Duty, where the runtime is usually about four hours or so, MDK is slight. YouTube playthroughs clock it at around 2 hours and there's only six levels, but the game milks a hell of a lot out of them, packing tons of ideas into each moment. Each level was designed by a different person on the staff, and it shows. No room looks or plays quite like the last, and over the course of the game's short-but-sweet campaign, you'll participate in bombing runs, traverse alien shooting ranges (featuring cut-outs of live-action humans as targets), and even sneak into an enemy base disguised as a robot. The most common break from firing your weapons is platforming, which is done with the aid of the Coil Suit's parachute. This parachute lets you glide across gaps with ease, and along with the third-person view (plus a vault to climb up ledges with) makes the platforming a welcome addition, which is something you can't really say about a lot of its first-person competition. Main rooms are broken up by tight corridors, which serve as stealth loading screens. These sections pose the greatest threat to the game's breakneck pace, but even these areas wind up being canvasses for Shiny's designers. The second stage treats these corridors as amateur bobsled courses, eventually giving way to an entire snowboarding section in following levels, complete with knockoff James Bond music. MDK perfects Earthworm Jim 2's kitchen sink approach to gameplay, throwing surprises your way at every moment without straying too far from the action you're there for. It can feel a little disappointing that the game's so short, but it beats having too much of a good thing, something BioWare's MDK2 proves with its repetitive corridor shooting.

Overall, MDK feels like a game from a studio out to prove that they still had the fire that made them one of the premier game developers of the 90s. It was put together by a measly six-man team, yet everyone seemed to have been firing on all cylinders: the 3D technology was cutting-edge and damn near overshadowed by the impeccable 2D artwork, the gameplay is Shiny's trademark action at its most polished, and even Tallarico's soundtrack feels far more grandiose (even if it still has the goofy one-offs you've come to expect from his work with the company). Despite the practical skeleton crew, MDK is Shiny's best work by far.

Mistakes into Miracles

After MDK, Nick Bruty and fellow MDK designer Bob Stevenson would leave Shiny to form Planet Moon Studios, which would make acclaimed third-person shooters like Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Armed and Dangerous (as well as the PSP's Infected, which might just be the most 2005 game ever made). Following this, Shiny struggled to find the magic that made MDK the success that it was, developing multiple games in concurrence to mixed reception and middling sales. They'd eventually be sold to Infogrames, develop the divisive (yet profitable) Matrix games, and finally be merged with the Collective to form Double Helix Games, which itself would be purchased by Amazon in 2014 (just as the studio was coming into its own with the surprisingly solid revivals of Killer Instinct and Strider).

As for the Neverhood, their first game wouldn't quite have the reception that it probably deserved. While it sold modestly (and apparently had a lucrative OEM deal with Gateway), critics were tired of adventure games, so the team would take inspiration from their previous work at Shiny and make the Neverhood's sequel a platformer. Influenced by the obstacle-course design of Donkey Kong Country and set in a planet neighboring the Neverhood, Skullmonkeys is a delightful little game that continues the irreverent streak of the series (and features a soundtrack that may be even better than its predecessor). The company's final game for Dreamworks, BoomBots, unfortunately wouldn't live up to standard set by the previous two games, and the studio would shut down shortly after release. The Neverhood's residents would then scatter until 2013, when Mike Dietz and Ed Schofield's animation-focused studio Pencil Test would reunite with Doug TenNapel to create Armikrog. While the game was a Kickstarter success, most feel the game pales in comparison to the Neverhood Chronicles, which it was a clear successor to.

Shiny's demise and Armikrog's poor reception certainly puts a damper on things compared to where John Romero and id Software are today, but there's still a good message to be found here. While Romero's ousting from id led to Daikatana's troubled development and Quake II's creative bankruptcy, the exodus of talent from Shiny was a net positive. It proves that it's not always about one key talent when it comes to a development team: Shiny was a studio packed with skilled artists, programmers, and designers, and while TenNapel's departure left them shorthanded, it allowed the MDK team to step up and create their best game while the Neverhood was able to accomplish the same exact thing. The worst mistake David Perry ever made could've been a whole lot worse, all things considered.

The Shiny story doesn't quite come full circle like how Romero and id both found redemption in revisiting Doom, but- oh wait, hold on-

Jesus, really?

Okay, as I was wrapping this up, they announced that the original Earthworm Jim team is reuniting to make another game. For Tommy Tallarico's new console. Intellivision president Tommy Tallarico's new console. What a fucking crazy future we live in.

Well, with this newfound ability to summon revivals of long-dormant franchises via blog post in mind, be on the lookout for the next entry which will cover, uh, how they should totally make Skate 4. Stay tuned.

When you think of high-profile breakups in the entertainment world, your mind usually goes to music. It's happened to the best of them: the Beatles had Yoko Ono, Van Halen eventually became Van Hagar, and no shortage of N.W.A. members would go on to celebrate Fuck wit Dre Day. It's not like these kind of things don't happen in other forms of entertainment, but music sticks out because it's where turbulent relationships come through most clearly in the actual final product. You don't exactly see a lot of movies dedicating parts of their runtime to getting all "EAZY-E CAN EAT A BIG FAT DIIIICK" on you quite like some songs do, after all.

While music's at the forefront, video games are no slouch here, either. It's rarely brought up by the games themselves, but more of them are informed by developer and publisher breakups than you may expect (hell, some are damn near defined by them), and this blog series is going to highlight games that illustrate that point. First up is a pair of games that might be the best example of how staff departures can wreak havoc on a studio's output.

Design is Law: From Quake to John Romero's Daikatana & Quake II

With the larger-than-life egos, the Ferraris, and the questionable hairdos, the id Software story's not unlike a rock band's. It's missing the cocaine, sure, but there's no denying that the early 90s incarnation of the Texas studio is the closest thing we have to the prototypical rock stars of video game development, so it's fitting that they're no stranger to messy breakups. While the studio's still around to this day, the development of one game was so grueling that it caused a rift that would take id nearly two decades to recover from and spawned one of the most infamous studios in gaming.

Personally, I think Quake is probably the best and most important first-person shooter ever made. From a design standpoint, it's astounding (long story short: "we made everything about Doom better"), and the groundbreaking network and graphics technology that supports it has snowballed so much that its DNA can be found in Half-Life, Call of Duty, and god knows where else. This digital yin-yang of design and technology is what id is built on, personified by Satan-loving mullet-man John Romero and programming genius turned literal rocket scientist John Carmack, respectively. Romero was the de-facto "bad boy" of the studio, responsible for a lot of the, well, stuff you would expect a guy with that title would bring to the table, while also creating some of the best and most memorable maps to grace a shooter (if you like that shareware episode of Doom, a lot of that has to do with him). Carmack, on the other hand, was the architect behind many of the cutting-edge id Tech engines that power their games and plenty others. The Two Johns got along during the development of Doom and its sequel, but the missed deadlines and reboots of Quake's strenuous development cycle would prove to be too much, eventually resembling the Hell that they had created for their prior games.

The story of their dissolution is a long one (and covered in-depth in Masters of Doom for those interested), but it boils down to two things. Work ethic would become a point of contention for Carmack, who became enveloped in his programming of Quake, growing distant from the rest of the team and taking a cold, authoritarian approach to running the office while Romero was focusing his attention elsewhere (something that Carmack would eventually resent) and serving as the brash and outspoken figurehead of the studio. Romero's beef, on the other hand, was with the core design of the game: he had originally wanted Quake to be a melee-oriented first-person game with heavy RPG elements, but the slow development of the game eventually led to the team deciding—against Romero's wishes—to stick closer to Doom. When Quake finally shipped in mid-1996, Romero was out the door, and the union of design and technology was no more. Both parties would quickly begin work on their next games, but without each other, their works would fall apart in separate ways.

By November, Romero had formed a new company with id ex-pat Tom Hall. This new venture, Ion Storm, wouldn't be shackled by Carmack's focus on technology, and was guided by the mantra "Design is Law." Ion Storm is most known for releasing the classic Deus Ex, but its flagship title was intended to be an ambitious FPS/RPG mash-up headed up by an all-star team of modders and ex-id staff: Daikatana.

Normally, I try to think of video game auteurs as just one part of a bigger team (Hideo Kojima didn't do Metal Gear Solid entirely by himself, even if people talk about him like he did), but Daikatana—I'm sorry, John Romero's Daikatana—is an exception. Even ignoring his icon status, Romero drafted the game's design document himself, so the team that would put the game together takes more of a backseat than normal, something that's reflected in a way by Ion Storm's history of staff exodus (the first wave of developers would go on to form Third Law Interactive and develop KISS: Psycho Circus - The Nightmare Child, a rivaling shooter that's actually better than its source material leads on). Not to say nothing of the rest of Ion Storm, but this is very much John Romero's baby.

If there was ever a game spearheaded by an "ideas guy," it's Daikatana. Imagine it's 1997, and you're playing the FPS answer to Chrono Trigger, a mixture of genres that feels years ahead of everything else. You're traveling through time, encountering different lands in different times that each feature their own set of creative weaponry and vicious enemies. To keep up with the increasingly deadly forces, you're leveling up and earning skill points to invest in your abilities, letting you jump higher, run faster, and do more damage. You're even joined by a party of sorts: two squad-mates whom you command during combat. To cap it off, this incredible journey is crafted by the glorious mane of id Software's free thinker. A game like this has the potential to shift the course of the entire industry, but there's a problem with this vision: the game came out in May of 2000, about two and a half years after its first intended release date. It was originally built on the Quake engine, but Romero had licensed the Quake II engine from id after their sequel stole the show at E3 1997, a decision which would prove ruinous. Romero expected the engine to be similar to the Quake engine he was familiar with, but it ended up being so different from its predecessor that porting the game over would take an entire year to accomplish. Daikatana's visuals were dated upon release because of this, but that would be the least of its issues. Once you get past the subpar graphics, you quickly find that the real problem with the game is that it just isn't good.

Daikatana is one of the most high-profile failures in the games industry, but to leave it at that does it a bit of a disservice. It's honestly promising on paper, it's just that, in addition to being multiple years too late, the execution screws it up almost anywhere it can. The lengthy introduction gives you a glimpse of the project's ambition from the outset, as there's much more story and world-building than in any of Romero's previous work at id. Unfortunately, most of it is cheesy or outright embarrassing. You play as Japanese swordsman Hiro Miyamoto (Miyamoto as in Shigeru, and Hiro as in "protagonist" as in "Hiro Protagonist") as he travels through time to stop corporate magnate Kage Mishima, who has used the time-bending abilities of the titular Daikatana sword to rule the world. Like Quake before it, the game's story is ever-so-loosely inspired by a Dungeons and Dragons campaign Romero and Carmack played (the Daikatana being a fabled weapon appearing in it), and it definitely feels like something a kid playing D&D would create at times. There's a lot of self-serious mysticism and unintentionally-campy dialogue, and it doesn't help that every Japanese man besides Hiro is voiced by John Galt, who provides questionable portrayals of Asian characters to say the least. I've always thought that John Romero, for better and for worse, designs games like a 13 year old that never grew up, and while Doom and Quake reaped the rewards of that, in Daikatana it leads to stuff like samurai ghosts and black dudes named Superfly Johnson. If it wasn't obvious, someone needed to rein him in a bit.

If you take the John Carmack approach and treat the game's story like a porno film's, you'll still be let down by the gameplay. Daikatana makes the worst first impression I may have ever seen from a game. It's a far cry from Doom's famous E1M1 (which was one of the last levels designed for the game by Romero, in an effort to use all of the experience gained throughout development to begin the game with its best foot forward): the first two levels of the game—a swamp and a sewer system—are a nightmare of hideous green color schemes and shooting projectile weapons at small hopping frogs and swarming mosquitoes. It simply feels awful to play, and by the time the game's bestiary becomes more tolerable to engage, you're introduced to your AI partners, who are, quite simply, total dipshits. The biggest albatross around the entire game's neck is the duo of Mikiko Ebihara and Superfly Johnson, whose AI bring an already troubled game to a grinding halt. Any time your buddies are involved, the game becomes a babysitting session as you futilely command them around and try to keep them from getting killed. The fan-made 1.3 patch fixes the issue by buffing the teammates considerably, but Superfly and Mikiko still get stuck on ledges, corners, ladders, and even themselves. There's a laundry list of other issues (there's a misguided attempt at a Tomb Raider-style limited save mechanic, most weapons are just as good at hurting you as they do enemies, the level-up system is in need of fleshing out...), but the AI is the one the game just can't overcome.

It's fascinating looking at Daikatana in 2019, because for as bug-riddled and frustrating as it is, the ideas at its core have ended up central to modern shooters. While squad-based tactics aren't an everyday feature, there's plenty of games out there that see you lugging around AI partners (Binary Domain in particular has you literally saying orders to AI teammates, with a similar degree of success as Daikatana). The leveling system, on the other hand, is pretty much everywhere, with practically every AAA game these days having RPG elements in it whether they're shooters or not. Daikatana ended up being a case study in how not to make a game, but maybe there's some vindication to be found in how the future ended up somewhat resembling its vision, entirely despite itself. Of course, things had already started moving in that direction before the game was even out (1997's Hexen II has a more involved experience mechanic and even Ion Storm's own Deus Ex delivered an exponentially better melding of FPS and RPG the month following Daikatana's release), but even back during the development of Quake, Romero's ideas were still prescient. It's just a shame that those ideas seem to have taken far greater precedence over whether implementing them properly was actually possible.

By the time Daikatana was supposed to be released, Quake II not only had stolen the game's thunder at E3 1997, it was out, and everybody ate it up. 3Dfx support! Colored lighting! Just take a look at how the GameSpot review starts:

Whatever else may be said about Quake II, one thing is certain: It is the only first-person shooter to render the original Quake entirely obsolete. Within moments of starting the game, it is safe to say that all but the most irrationally loyal players will acknowledge that Quake II is better than the original in every respect, and that no one who can afford to upgrade will have any reason to ever load Quake again.

This is, of course, fucking crazy talk. Hindsight's 20/20, but even for 1997 those are some seriously bold claims. So what exactly is it that could whip up an audience into such a fervor? Well, to sum it up, Quake II is a pretty face and a damn good deathmatch. It was the Crysis of its day, the benchmark for hundreds of dollars worth of brand new 3D acceleration hardware, and the multiplayer held up the standard that Quake set while also canonizing the fan-made Capture the Flag mode as official. Needless to say, the game made quite a splash, all without John Romero.

It's nice that you can put your Voodoo2 to the test, but what about the rest of the game? id's prior games had outstanding campaigns, after all. Unfortunately, the single-player component is just kind of... dull. It doesn't take long to discover that the alien compound you're fighting your way through is occupied by an exceedingly generic race of cyborgs and has a muted color palette of brown, grey, and the occasional red. The game was originally conceived as a sci-fi shooter without the Quake name attached, and it shows. Quake wasn't exactly a colorful game, but that felt like a conscious decision made to help establish that game's haunting atmosphere. Here, it feels like a decision they defaulted to, as if to say "well, this is what a sci-fi shooter is supposed to look like," something that extends to the game's form-over-function level design.

I've tried to make it through the game's campaign about four or five times, and all but the final attempt ended before I could make it to the third of its ten units. It's not that the game is too challenging, it's simply that I've lost interest each and every time. The culprit is Unit 2, which is referred to as both the Bunker Unit and (more appropriately) the Warehouse Unit. It's an oppressively boring series of levels spanning 3 maps, all of which are so homogeneous that they could have shared the same name (how much variety can there possibly be between an Ammo Depot, a Supply Station, and a Warehouse?). The game introduces a touch of non-linearity, which only exacerbates this problem. You'll have to go back and forth between each unit's maps to progress, but the lack of memorable setpieces or even recognizable landmarks leads to everything just bleeding together, which makes backtracking more of a hassle than it already is. It's disappointing, because the idea of progressing through inter-connected levels wasn't something that was being done at the time. Games like Hexen had "hubs" with levels you moved between like in Q2, but the hubs themselves still felt disconnected from each other. Even if it doesn't work out, Quake II's level design at least feels like you're actually working your way through parts of a larger whole, a concept that would realize its potential a year later in the masterful Half-Life—a game that many at id had figured was doomed to failure.

Even the combat, for as exhilarating as it could be in the multiplayer, is a letdown. Now, don't get me wrong, it's still Quake, so the basic running and gunning feels great and new weapons like the railgun are game changers, but none of that translates to an engaging single-player experience. Levels are more constricted and populated with many more hitscan enemies compared to the first Quake, so the focus shifts from staying mobile to popping in and out of cover as you wait for enemies to finish their firing animations. There's some admittedly kickass weaponry (including a great Super Shotgun that's pretty damn satisfying to gib people with), but the gameplay's heights are usually a result of the inventory mechanic. The game adapts the inventory system seen in games like Duke Nukem 3D and the aforementioned Hexen, turning power trips like Quad Damage and Invincibility into consumables that you can pop off whenever you like instead of immediately when you pick them up. It's one of the campaign's rare decisions that actually pans out, introducing a slight strategic element that can lead to some great rampages if you use the right item at the right time.

Speaking of the game's arsenal, you can find the epitome of the problem at Quake II's core in its starting weapon: the Blaster. Instead of a hitscan weapon, you begin the game with futuristic handgun that fires an energy projectile that lights up the environment as it travels. This was a stunning effect at the time, but as a weapon, it's just pitiful. The projectile barely does any damage, moves too slow to reliably handle moving targets, and is rendered useless the moment you pick up a shotgun. Compare this to the original Quake, which upped the ante from Doom by making the starter weapon a shotgun that fired even faster than its 1993 counterpart. This is Quake II's philosophy personified in one weapon: more of a tech demo than something you're meant to have fun with. An overwhelming amount of the game's new features seem more concerned with showing off new tech than the goal of giving the player a good time. Enemies have elaborate death animations and even dodge projectiles, but this ends up as little more than a hollow novelty after you've seen all of them. The machine gun has recoil as it fires—nearly unheard of in games at the time—but this only serves to make the gun more cumbersome since the effect isn't realistic enough to be convincing. Hell, the inventory system even falls victim to this: one of the available items is a silencer that seems to only exist because id Software could program it in, even if it's useless and borderline antithetical to the entire id brand of action. It's easy to see how people could get swept up by it in 1997, but in 2019, Quake II is a game that is less than the sum of its box art bullet points. At least the multiplayer is fun.

After Quake II, id Software wouldn't even try to right the campaign's wrongs. Quake III Arena is a seminal multiplayer game with some of the greatest action and deathmatch maps in the series, but it excised the campaign entirely, opting for matches with bots instead of bespoke single-player offerings. Arena is an excellent iteration on Quake multiplayer, but no matter how much I love the Longest Yard, I can't deny that cutting out the campaign nearly makes it feel more creatively bankrupt than Quake II was. Unfortunately, this trend would continue for years to come, with id titles like Doom 3 and RAGE showing little spark for how cutting-edge their technology was. During this time, the most interesting games using id properties would come from other studios, such as Raven Software's Wolfenstein and Fountainhead Entertainment's Doom RPG games (which, to be fair, featured John Carmack as a programmer).

It would be almost twenty years after Quake II that we'd see an id Software game that would truly deliver both the technology and design that id had made their name on. 2016's Doom is practically the anti-Quake II, featuring a phenomenal campaign that modernizes the original game's action without losing its spirit, and even manages to make an endearing character out of its protagonist without him ever saying a word. The multiplayer is a bit of a disappointment, but you can always play Quake. Go figure.

Nobody really expected the new Doom to be as successful as it was, and part of that is because id really isn't what it used to be. As more and more of the people that had made Doom and Quake what they were had scattered across the world and left id Software behind, the further Doom sunk into development hell. It wouldn't be until 2013 that development of the game would get on track, bolstered by some choice hirings. The Two Johns are long gone (with Carmack having left in November 2013 to focus on VR at Oculus), but thankfully, in their places are some incredibly talented people. Heading up the tech side of things is Tiago Sousa, who cut his teeth at Crytek as one of the people responsible for the bleeding-edge visuals in games like Crysis and Ryse: Son of Rome. Playing the role of John Romero is Hugo Martin, who has a pretty good idea of what the series is all about. They may not work on rockets in their spare time, and Martin's hair isn't even that long, but they (along with id business guy turned game director Marty Stratton) represent a new generation of id Software that can preserve the balance that has proven so crucial to their games.

But what of John Romero? Well, after Ion Storm, John would go on to briefly work at Midway before getting into mobile and social game development. It wouldn't be until 2016 that he would return to FPS genre, and after the disastrous production of Daikatana, I understand the hesitation. The crazy thing, though, is that despite all of the time away from making shooters and all of the ridicule and bitch-making that happened leading up to 2000, Romero's new work has been welcomed with open arms and critical acclaim, and like for id Software that very same year, all it took was recapturing the magic of Doom. Romero's brand new maps "Tech Gone Bad" and "Phobos Mission Control" for the original Doom were originally designed as a warm-up exercise for work on a new game to be crowdfunded on Kickstarter, but they were so well-received that he began work at his Ireland-based studio on an entire fifth episode, named SIGIL, due out next month. Like id themselves, Romero seems to have found redemption in returning to the franchise he built with them, and hopefully SIGIL will see things come full circle.

Thanks for reading this first installment. Next time, we'll be taking a look at an example of when a studio exodus leads to the finest hours of both those who left and those left behind.

With the main rankings out of the way, there's still a few loose ends and things that didn't quite fit on the list proper that I want to touch on before closing the book on Ridge Racer.

R: Racing Evolution - Sony PlayStation 2/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo GameCube, 2003

A Missing Link

I wasn't planning on talking about R: Racing Evolution, but after spending some hands-on time with it, I realized that I'd be making a mistake in not covering it. It's a bit of a confounding game, made presumably as a result of Namco's success with the MotoGP license. Breaking from the Ridge Racer mold, R: Racing Evolution is a sim racer that features real-life tracks, GT cars and brands (no Dig Dug brand car parts here), looking to compete with the Gran Turismos of the world. Unfortunately, it flounders because of a problem found in nearly every aspect of the game: it has no idea what the hell it wants to be.

Gameplay reminds me a lot of DriveClub: trapped between the snappy response of arcade racers and the realism of a simulation. It tries to have it both ways: braking early is emphasized, but collisions only cause a negligible speed hit and won't damage your vehicle. Drifting is both encouraged through cash bonuses and discouraged through harsh speed penalties and spinouts. You have plenty of options to tweak your car with before a race (traction/stability control, brake bias, differential, etc.), but most cars handle far too similarly regardless of configuration, with turning that feels too stiff for wide turns yet too twitchy for tight ones. Worst of all of this is how you never get a great sense of speed even as you unlock cars that can approach the 200MPH mark, robbing the racing of most of its excitement. There's an interesting mechanic where you can put pressure on opponents by sticking close to them until their nerves eventually cause them to make a mistake (they'll even react to your presence with radio chatter, cursing your name as they spin out or veer off-course), but despite the iffy controls, most races are so easy that you can win them without having to ever do this. The circuit racing is supported by the occasional rally course or drag race (the latter likely being thrown in because of its popularity in street racing games of the era), but both of these are too undercooked and insubstantial to be worthy diversions. By taking a middle ground approach, Racing Evolution has neither the rush of Ridge Racer nor the feeling you get when you hit a turn's apex in Gran Turismo.

The main reason I wanted to touch on Racing Evolution is its story mode, which is the closest connection the game has to its Ridge Racer roots. Titled "Racing Life," the story follows ambulance driver Rena Hayami, who after quickly delivering a racer to the hospital following a crash, is recruited by race team manager Stephan Garnier (Seemingly voiced by Michael McConnohie, who can't not sound like the Agency leader from Crackdown in this game. Garnier's speech here about a race is delivered with the same cadence heard in Crackdown's intro, and it cracks me up). As Rena ascends the racing scene, she finds herself in a rivalry with fellow racer Gina Cavelli (who could stand to zip her jumpsuit up a bit) and soon learns that Garnier's team is tied to G.V.I., a secretive corporation that pulls the strings from behind the scenes. There's some serious potential here, and you catch the occasional glimpse of intrigue (like when Garnier instructs you to throw a race on the final lap), but they never pull any serious triggers, keeping stakes way too low. Now maybe I'm just more lax on high-stakes gambling (that isn't even confirmed as illegal in-game) than others, but the story left me wondering why the corporate cabal you race for is so evil in the first place. The most the game does to sell G.V.I. as evil is through some eye-roll inducing cutscenes that frame them like they're some sort of Dr. Claw-style supervillains. Without any action, the vague threat from their leader at the end of the game may as well be alluding to something as inert as a damn pay cut. It's the game's most heartbreaking quality because it's so clearly trying to pick up from where R4's Grand Prix left off (Garnier's backstory even mirrors that of R4's Enki Gilbert), but instead of having the borderline-campy charm or style of R4, Racing Life is just there, afraid to commit to anything interesting.

Just a blip on the radar, R: Racing Revolution came and went with mediocre reviews and sales. The most attention Namco's given the game since is through Ridge Racer 6 (where the game's admittedly decent soundtrack is available as DLC), and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed by that. It doesn't come together at all in the game, but there's just something in the story mode that a future Ridge Racer game could make shine if they really ran with it. Imagine how crazy it would be if they made a game that took the Metal Gear Solid approach to storytelling and did for racing games what their own Ace Combat did for flight sims.

Planetary Sounds

Back in the introduction for this series, I wrote off the Vita version of Ridge Racer pretty succinctly. I stand by not putting on the list (without the paid DLC it's practically as much of a game as the pack-in "First Hunt" demo of Metroid Prime: Hunters was), but I was a little hasty in saying it had nothing of note to offer. The game may have an embarrassing amount of races, all of which are recycled from prior games, but it does have a new soundtrack that's worth a quick look. I don't think much of the music is particularly great, but as the most recent original Ridge Racer soundtrack, it's interesting to hear a sound that's a little more informed by the music of the time, like in the dubstep-influenced Planet. It's also a bit more vocally-driven than previous soundtracks, often eschewing samples for the voice talents of Aimee Blackschleger (a voice heard frequently in Bemani games such as Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution). It's a relatively small soundtrack, but some new (and a ton of old) music made its way into the game as DLC, including the "USA Mix" of the original "Ridge Racer," which is graced by the singing of Daytona USA's crown jewel, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi.

Trivia and Miscellany

• The Vita Ridge Racer's problems aren't limited to a sparse selection of tracks and vehicles. It has an online focus that doesn't really amount to anything, where you choose a faction based on one of four PlayStation face buttons (or in the case of the Trianchor Alliance team, the Evil Council from Kung Pow: Enter the Fist) and compete against the others. While it's a decent enough idea on paper that could alleviate some of that dreaded repetitive feeling, the lack of structure, rewards, or any real purpose means it has zero impact on the game. The Vita game also ruins a lot of the customization seen in Ridge Racer 7: cosmetics have been reduced to a choice in paintjob, and the performance upgrades are largely tied to a skill tree that leads to a lot of grinding and forces you to waste money on hints to get to actual improvements for your ride. There's even a leveling system that just makes you outright faster, turning the notion of balance during online play into a farce. Then again, this isn't actually a problem considering that nobody's playing the damn thing online.

• Credit where credit's due: the Vita game actually has a pretty cool method of unlocking the Devil car. After you race against a player or Time Attack ghost that has the car, you will receive the "Devil's Gift." This might sound like some crazy bugchaser bullshit, but what it actually does is put a demonic spin on the main menu (including an evil Reiko Nagase with devil horns) that won't go away until you defeat the Crinale Devil car in a series of Duel Races, which also unlocks both the car itself and the ability to challenge the Angel car. It's probably the best thing to come out of the game's online focus and is a neat take on the "viral" achievements and unlocks you used to see so much in the last generation of consoles.

• Speaking of the Crinale, the Ridge Racer V version of the Devil car also appears in the PS2's Critical Velocity, a story based open-world driving game that's best described as a Japanese take on Driver. The best part about this game's Ridge Racer connection is how you can come across Seaside Route 765 integrated as a part of the game's open world. Unfortunately, the game doesn't appear to be very good and never left Japan.

• The first Ridge Racer's soundtrack has a unique quirk to it. In the arcade release and on official soundtracks, each of the songs' titles have remix names attached to them, like "Ridge Racer (Power Remix)" or "Rhythm Shift (12" Version)." None of these songs are actually remixes, this is just a tribute to the electronic music that influenced the soundtrack, where it's not uncommon to come across songs that have eight-hundred different dance mixes.

• One of my favorite parts of Ridge Racer's music is how a lot of the series' songs will build to a crescendo that is almost always the best part of their respective tracks. Some songs may culminate with tributes to other Namco games (the Rare Hero series of tracks pay homage to Rally-X and Pole Position, while the PSP's Synthetic Life pulls double duty and honors both Xevious and Galaga in one go) while others will let the song's intensity reach a thrilling climax (the buildup and release in Nitro Witch is so fucking good oh my fucking god), but my favorite examples come from Rave Racer. This soundtrack in particular (which, upon further reflection, is totally the best in the series) makes it a point to subvert this trend, seeing a few of its songs (EXH* Notes, Yororeri Hey, Teknopera) flip the dynamic and peak with entrancingly chill breakdowns.

• One of the most obscure artifacts of the series is the LaserDisc release, known as Ridge Racer LD. It isn't a bizarre FMV game like you might hope, but it's interesting nonetheless. One side of the LaserDisc features videos of Ridge Racer 1 and 2 being played, while the other is a soundtrack featuring remixes (which was later released as a separate, perfectly-named CD). The video component of the disc made its way to YouTube and is worth checking out just for the "Acrobatic Runnings" portion, which is a skill exhibition that plays out like a long-lost relative of those ridiculous MLG compilation videos everyone used to parody. I have no idea how they got the cars on two wheels like that.

• Ridge Racer 64 and DS have a "Renegade" set of 3 tracks that take place in an arid desert, as well as a "Ridge Racer Extreme" circuit that imagines what the outskirts of the original Ridge Racer course would look like. They're okay tracks, but I think Ridge Racer 3D's Redstone Thunder Road is a more interesting take on the southwestern environment.

• The Nintendo exclusives also have a great selection of unlockable cars, including re-imagined classics, vehicles influenced by both Namco and Nintendo hits (including cars named 00 Agent and Ultra 64), and best of all, a Pooka.

The Finish Line

With that, I think I'm just about finished with these blogs. If a new Ridge Racer comes around, maybe I'll throw a review of it up here or something like that, but I'm about ready to take a break from the series for the foreseeable future. I've thrown the words "Ridge Racer" around so many god damn times this past month or so that they've lost meaning, and if I keep at it at this rate they'll probably find me in a ditch somewhere because I flipped a Chevy trying to build up a nonexistent nitrous boost. If you've stuck around this long, hopefully this all has sparked an interest in some of the games you may have missed, turned you onto some dope music, or at least taught a few things about the series. Either way, thanks for sticking with it.

[This is the final entry in a countdown of the best Ridge Racer games. I recommend you read the introduction before reading this; it includes a brief history of the series and links for each entry.]

Ridge Racer 7 - Sony PlayStation 3, 2006

Drift King

Ridge Racer 7 is where everything in the series comes together. Featuring the arcade gameplay that's been around from the start, the depth that was added to the formula on the PSP, the customization introduced in Rage Racer, and even some of the endearing self-seriousness of R4, Ridge Racer 7 is the payoff to everything the series had been working towards for over a decade.

Ridge Racer 7 uses the same engine as Ridge Racer 6 (which itself was based heavily on the gameplay of the PSP games), but there's a huge difference right off the bat. The very first thing you notice the second you get in a race is "holy shit, this game runs at real deal 1080p and 60 frames per second." This is something we struggle to get in video games now, but Namco was somehow able to pull it off at launch on the PS3, a console that was damn near SEGA Saturn levels of being hard to develop for in 2006. It could stand to be a bit more colorful, and there's the occasional dip in framerate when a lot of nitro-boosting cars are on-screen at the same time, but for the most part, this is the sharpest Ridge Racer has ever looked. Picking it up today, it feels like you're playing a game that's somehow a remaster of itself.

Ridge Racer 7's single player downscales considerably from 6's Ridge Universe to merely a state, but don't let the name fool you: Ridge State is home to the best career mode in the series. Instead of carving your own path through hundreds of single races, the main goal is to complete the Ridge State Grand Prix, a series of 14 tournaments of varying lengths held by the UFRA (which stands for, and I'm completely serious, the Universal Federation of Ridge Racers Association). All of Ridge Racer 6's courses return here, with 6 new tracks and the original Ridge Racer circuit joining them for a total of 22, beating out Ridge Racer 2's 21 for the most tracks in a single Ridge Racer game. This isn't a case of quantity over quality, either; the track designs themselves are among RR's best.

The arcade brand of gameplay seen in 6 remains, but Ridge Racer 7 considerably expands things between races thanks to a huge focus on customization. You can apply new liveries and exterior parts to your car, but for the first time in the series, you're able to swap parts on the inside, outfitting vehicles with new engines or even giving a Dynamic car a more Mild style of handling. Chief among the customization options is your choice in nitrous. RR7 blows out the options seen in the PSP games and 6 (which gave players the ability to use two or three charges of nitrous at once for a faster, longer boost) and provides eight different types of nitrous. There's automatically-charging nitrous, nitrous that only charges while it's in use, nitrous that you can use whenever you want, nitrous soup, nitrous stew, nitrous salad... There's also a "plug-in" slot on each vehicle, which grants perk-like features such as improved slipstreaming speeds or the ability to start each race with one canister of nitrous already filled. With the robust selection of choices at play, vehicles can really feel like your own and you can plot your approach to each track layout even further, which becomes a necessity as the difficulty increases.

There's still a litany of single races outside of the RSGP to clear, but they serve a new purpose, earning you currency (returning for the first time since Rage Racer) which lets buy and upgrade cars as you progress. Before you can race in the GP at all, you have to curry favor with the various vehicle manufacturers by winning a trial race with their cars, after which they'll give you a free starter. From there, you build your relationship with each manufacturer (whether it's for cars, parts, or nitrous) as you complete races using their products, and by doing so you unlock new parts, some of which must be earned through another trial race. It's a better carrot-on-a-stick than the rewards seen in Ridge Racer 6's World Explorer, and it's an effective way to encourage you to play outside of your comfort zone (as opposed to Ridge Racer 2, where you'd probably find me in a Himmel E.O. most of the time).

Some of the best racing in the entire series can be found after the credits roll, when the Extreme Battle category of races is unlocked. Alongside more intense Quad Battle races against three other challengers, this is where the game's one-on-one Duel races against the series-staple boss vehicles can be found. Near-perfect execution on the track is a must, but your car's setup is an equally-large factor into your success here. Before long, you'll find yourself poring over a circuit's every corner, figuring out which vehicle and nitrous type would get you the speed you need to beat that damn Devil car. It's at this point that the arcade gameplay and customization system achieve full synesthesia, and the victories earned here are among the most thrilling of any racing game out there.

While the online component of Ridge Racer 6 is left vacant, there's still a group of diehards populating Ridge Racer 7's online modes, and they're just as good at the game as you would think people playing the game 13 years after the fact would be. In my half-dozen or so races with players online, I came dead last in every single one of them, but just watching the masters at work is a pleasure in itself. High-level Ridge Racer play is a damn near awe-inspiring spectacle, starring a group of racers who are constantly slipstreaming off of each other and drifting in perfect unison. If you've ever seen Tokyo Drift, it's basically like if the driving in that romance scene was done at twice the speed. It's really something to behold.

Besides getting your ass waxed by people who've played the game religiously, there's also a good bit of DLC to be found online (although it seems to require a overseas PSN burner account now because none of it can be had in the US store anymore). There's a bunch of paid DLC songs from previous games, but the main attraction is the batch of 25 UFRA Special Events, which are unique single races that can be even harder than the ones found in Extreme Battle. There's arduous time trials, Quad Battles comprised entirely of Devil cars, races against 13 blue cars with infinite nitrous (in an apparent Pac-Man reference), and more. It's excellent endgame content perfect for when you've unlocked everything and still want a challenge.

When you beat one of these Special Events or achieve a few other well-fought victories (finishing the Grand Prix, beating the Angel or Devil cars, etc.) you'll be "interviewed" by a reporter asking for your comments on the race. Whatever you say will then be recorded and show up in the Ridge State News ticker that scrolls along at the bottom of the main menu for all players of the game to see (reminiscent of the Wii U's criminally underrated Miiverse). It's not exactly a key feature, but this ticker is actually one of the most charming aspects of the game, helping Ridge State feel more "lived in" without standing in the way of any actual racing. In addition to seeing comments from real people bragging after finally beating a tough race or using their platform as a chance to beg for Ridge Racer 8, the news feed will show world record times on the various circuits, racing hints, and news updates from around Ridge State. R4's racing teams and managers may be missed by some, but there's still fun in reading about endangered animal sightings near racetracks, car companies from prior games being absorbed into new ones, and other assorted bits of "lore" from the world of Ridge Racer. You even find out the fate of R4's Robert Chrisman after his time with the Dig Racing Team.

Ridge Racer 7's soundtrack is the largest in the series, featuring 20 original tracks from various composers new and old, and 20 more from artists on the King Street Sounds record label. Unfortunately, the soundtrack is more quantity than quality, with a lot of songs feeling kind of generic and never really going anywhere interesting. It isn't all bad news, though, since there's still some great music to be found in the game. The licensed tracks hold up their end of the bargain pretty well for the most part. They're maybe a little too slow-paced for Ridge Racer's brand of action (and the dev team would agree with me; many of the tracks are sped up specifically for use in this game), but club bangers like Tomo Inoue's Cross Saw Funk and Hiroshi Watanabe's Bad House Music (Nite System Groove) work fine nonetheless. The soundtrack feels like a bit of an off day for series veterans as a whole, frankly: in addition to the King Street tracks, some of the game's best songs (Kaleidoscope, Supercruiser) come from another series newcomer in Park Jin-Bae (better known as ESTi), a Korean composer known for his work on various MMORPGs. That being said, the game's best track belongs to AYA of series mainstay SamplingMasters, whose Nitro Witch may just be her finest work. Described by the game itself as "a high-speed techno track to penetrate the darkness," Nitro Witch is an aural fucking beatdown that wouldn't feel out of place as boss music in a Streets of Rage game.

With Ridge Racer 7, this list ends as it began. As you complete tournaments, accrue money, and rework cars to suit your needs, you slowly realize that the journey that began with Rage Racer is complete: Ridge Racer has successfully transformed from a pick-up-and-play arcade racer into a more substantial, deeper console experience that's dripping with style, all without losing its arcade spirit. More recent games may have left my hopes for a new entry in the gutter, but even if we never see another full-on Ridge Racer game, at least the series went out on top.

[Key Tracks: Nitro Witch, Supercruiser, Combustion]

[Key Licensed Tracks: Don't Deny Love (Main Vocal Mix ; MG Edit), Cross Saw Funk, Bad House Music (Nite System Groove)]