The main character is a white guy with dreads which should get anyone turning around before they walk in the door. The level up system is completely idiotic requiring you to pull off a laundry list of sequential stunts more akin to an achievement list. (Spoiler) Your arm is your wife... or something. (/Spoiler) Swinging with your arm cable is an ability with a high difficulty curve which will have you laughing at how awful you are at it. But once you master it it's exhilarating. They really captured the physics. There's a joyous catharsis that never gets old in nailing the transition from freefall to swinging to slingshot you through the air. There's so much fun to be had in using the cable to fling one guy at another guy or fling a wrecked car at a group of guys. The post cataclysmic city could have easily been a boring grey pile of rubble like it is in so many games but they break it up enough with greenery, natural landscape, interesting architecture and even some interiors to make it appealing to the eyes.

This game is such a departure from the series' origins of clunky tank controls and grinding it out to conquer or avoid a mob of plodding enemies in a narrow corridor. The horror doesn't exactly take a back seat but its navigator is action set pieces on steroids. It's so incredibly self indulgent and in your face it's like a Michael Bay movie... but it's awesome. There are four different intersecting stories you can play through with classic and new Resident Evil characters. If you play through them all and then think back about all the stuff you did it feels like you just played ten games worth of action. I flew on a zombie airplane and crash landed it in the city. I explored a church basement full of Indiana Jones traps and a minecart ride boss fight. I fought a shapeshifting nightmare dinosaur on a speeding train and all the way up to the top of a skyscraper where I harnessed bolts of lightning from the sky to defeat it. I rode a snowmobile and almost got blown up by a tank while crawling across a crumbling bridge. I fought towering bioweapon mutants and rode through the fogged out infected streets of Bejing after the city took a direct biological missile hit. There are scripted yet dynamic looking environment hazards. I think in Leon's story there's a part where you're fighting through the thick of an overwhelming zombie outbreak near a gas station and a semi truck barrels through a blockade of wrecked cars and if you're in its' path you're screwed. This is the type of thing typically reserved for a harrowing cutscene but here it's just part of the stage. It has a Universal Studios Backlot Tour feel to it in the best way possible. Everything is such an intense spectacle. It's really interesting to see where everyone's stories connect at least tangentially especially when the chips are down and you get a lucky break when a friend pops up and intervenes to help you out. This game is nucking futs. I've never played a game that just never let you catch your breath like this one does.

The camera is about as janky as it gets. The platforming is super finicky. There were some questionably campy enemy designs. The Castlevania franchise probably should have just stayed in the security of 2D where it belongs. The other 3D Castlevania games and even some of the 2Ds like the original have too much dingy and monochromatic earth tones making the visual experience kind of dull. Castlevania 64 is colorful and visually appealing by comparison even with dated graphics. It has interesting environments and set pieces. I'm not going to say it was a great game or even a great Castlevania game but it was entertaining enough for me and I certainly don't hate it.

This is technically part of the Dark Fall horror adventure game franchise. It's a legacy of shoestring budgets and small staffs. The Lost Crown is the first title to be primarily in third person where you click where you want your character, Nigel to interact or walk EXCRUCIATINGLY SLOWLY. The game is in black and white with a few colorized things. This is not so much an artistic choice as it is putting Vaseline on the lens of sorts. The views are static and composed of actual photographs in tandem with digital models and artwork seemingly placed in them. The real trick here is blending the fake with the real and hiding all the cut corners which they actually accomplished pretty well. Anyway it's a spooky game where you hunt ghosts and solve mysteries in a rural English town that is basically cursed with ghosts and odd residents. The story was interesting and kept me engaged which most games don't do for me. The puzzles were right about at my comprehension level which is of great importance if a point and click adventure game wants to resonate with me. The voice work is endearingly awkward. Nigel's odd way of speaking and his commentary on everything you examine just sticks with you. I recommended this game to my wife years ago and now "Sea creatures?" and "Deep, dark, swamp-like water," are inside jokes in our house. Despite not being able to die in the game there are still many creepy and even some scary moments like when you go to the abandoned shack. The guy in the antiques shop also makes you feel legitimately uncomfortable. I think it's cool that you go out at night and stalk around the town and go the places you're not supposed to go while most people are in bed. There's an intriguing duality of a benign kind of cutesy centuries old town that becomes extraordinarily dark and abandoned when everyone shuts their doors for the night. There's an overall strange, novel feeling this game gives that I have yet to find anywhere else.

This is one where I can't articulate as well why I like it or why anyone else should like it. It feels more subjective. I like that it's basically Neon Genesis Evangelion meets 2001 A Space Odyssey. I like the characters. They're interesting people with interesting backstories. There's enough elements here to build a successful Star Trek cast with. Their uniqueness really shines through in their attacks which even the basic ones are fun to watch which is something the Xenosaga sequels really muffed. The android KOS-MOS can attack with an arm blade, a scythe a charged particle cannon and my favorite, the minigun I like the recurring antagonists. Albedo is just a psycho but I more so like the sword wielding Margulis who is a real tough SOB and a constant thorn in your side through the whole series. The first time you fight him, beating him is actually optional. The overall story gets kind of thick and they failed to figure out the mech combat in the first game but I don't understand the hate this game gets. People always want to compare it to its older valedictorian and Medal of Honor recipient sister, Xenogears but can't it just be what it wants to be and stand in its own light?

This is a BAD Star Fox game which makes sense since it wasn't supposed to be a Star Fox game. The flying segments are short, obviously tacked on and play like pointless garbage. Fox doesn't use a laser on foot but instead wields the staff of the support character, Krystal who has no real reason to be in the story at all after it was retooled to accommodate the SF franchise. The combat is stupid repetitive. But I love the world. I like the dinosaurs and the anthropomorphic reptiles intermingling in jungles and ancient temples the same way they do in Turok. I like playing fetch with my companion triceratops. I like how colorful and alive everything is. So yeah, I like the setting so much that it's basically enough to carry the whole game for me.

This game looks like shovelware for little kids but it's actually rated T and has a few parts that will scare or at least startle you. You have only one attack which is a homing energy orb that comes from your lantern. You can hold it down to charge it for a couple of variant attacks but that's it. The repetitive shooting combat can be weirdly described as a free roaming 3D third person shmup... but with even less attack options. Surprisingly this game sticks to its source material quite well lifting elements verbatim from the ride. You're exploring the haunted mansion solving puzzles and trying to collect souls to open locked doors and advance. Every room is themed and well detailed and most surprising of all contains a very unique puzzle suited to the environment. I would have expected the creators to get really lazy here but they didn't. It feels like they deliberately took time brainstorming a list of every videogame puzzle stereotype they could come up with and then made that list off limits for usable ideas. Some of them are excessive and frustrating but at least interesting.

If anything this game really sticks in your mind because of how disgusting and gory it is. The concept is really interesting both in plot and gameplay. You control a team of paranormally endowed soldiers via their dead captain who you can use to posess and assume control over any one of them. Each character has different weapon sets and different weird abilities like astral projection, pyromancy or "reality hacking." Yeah, you KNOW you want to know what that is. I think the sniper is my favorite. I WILL NEVER GET TIRED OF STEERABLE SLOW-MO BULLETS THAT YOU CAN DRIVE THROUGH FIVE ENEMY SKULLS IN A ROW. It still wasn't enough to get Singularity on my list though. Anyway this team has been sent into a timespace nexus to combat the classic ancient evil. This evil has tried before to penetrate into our reality several times in the past signified by historical periods of great upheavals of corruption and violence so there's Nazis, the Crusades, the hedonistic Roman Empire, etc. So you go through all these cool thematic areas in reverse chronological order until you reach the origin. I just made myself want to go play it again.

I think public scorn has softened a lot on SH4 after it became apparent how bad the Silent Hill franchise could crash and burn and never get up again. Looking back now it seems like as far as quality goes it should be grouped closer with the Team Silent titles than anything else that happened afterwards. But even back then when we only had four Silent Hill games I liked it a lot and viewed it as a worthy sequel. I thought that no radio or flashlight in the game was a mistake. If it never gets dark enough to need a flashlight you're kind of capping your horror capabilities. However I found the story more engaging than the previous games the way it doled out those mysterious letters to you. There was something really intriguing about how your apartment, despite you being a prisoner in it, is a safe area that even heals you but as the game progresses it starts becoming hostile and even dangerous. I found that slow erosion of comfort and safety a really effective psychological horror tool.

They REALLY screwed up the button mapping on this one which stems from Sony REALLY screwing up the Playstation launch controller but it doesn't matter so much because Echo Night is mostly a first person spooky puzzle game. The voice acting is bad... which I still get a kick out of. Most of the game is played on a haunted cruise ship with a few memories and puzzles taking place elsewhere entirely. Whether intentional or not a lot of these old 3D games convey an unsettling sense of being on an island in an endless void like you're trapped in some strange limbo. Low poly graphics can actually be more creepy than hyper realistic ones and I think that's one of the things this game had going for me. The stories of all these ghosts are interesting to discover as you try to help them pass on to the next life to advance a puzzle and once again we're right within my threshold of mental abilities for puzzles.