zone of the enders 1 is an OK game. it has a hefty amount of problems, and doesn't amount to much more than a tech demo, but it's a fun enough tech demo. it doesn't so much reach for the stars, but the combat system is fun enough to use and the story and voice acting have a kind of so-bad-they're-good quality to them. it's the exact kind of game a sequel is essential for, and in this case it would have been a doddle to make it good. give it a good narrative, make the voice acting work, and tighten up the mission design, and you would have something truly special. the high praise for this game left me excited to see what a truly good ZotE game would look like. those hopes did not last long. there is far too much clunk. there is far too much jank. the experience of playing this game has aged like milk. the difficulty step up is monumental, for a start. certain sections of this game took far too long to complete. one after another, you are hit with missions that are just so poorly designed and repetitive. whoever conceived of the train level, there is a special place in hell for you. the player has to constantly fight the awful camera system you get to work with. furthermore, you have to work around this hideous lock-on system. it works fine in a handful of battle scenarios (although often leads to these situations being so visually disorientating and chaotic you want to be sick) but something the game constantly likes to do is throw swarms of tiny enemies at you. this wouldn't be too bad on its own, but when there are other actually threatening robots in the mix, it's all over. when you are just trying to lock-on to the robot that is pummelling you, and the lock-on system is targeting individual enemies in these swarms, you feel a frustration i cannot put into words. just awful to play, and feels so bad. the majority of your subweapons are useless in the majority of battle scenarios, too. this means that your best bet is to hack-and-slash through your opponents, and the game is not well-designed around this and doing it just feels so mindless and mind-numbing. the story starts out interesting, and there's a particularly cool cameo for players of the first ZotE game, which was nice. however it just doesn't lead to anything interesting happening and the cutscene writing feels like a combination of MGS and the more tech jargony stuff in a mecha anime like evangelion. that, and the voice acting is now just flat-out lifeless. fuck, man. i was rooting for this game at the start. but, by its end, i had grown so sick and tired of it. ZotE 2 totally failed to live up to any expectations i had for it, and is proof that just because a sequel is bigger does not mean it's better. improving on the first game should have been so easy, and how hard they failed in that way just makes me sad. yes this means i prefer the first ZotE game. i am not immune to abysmal takes, it seems.

plenty of fun to be had here, thanks to some tight-ass gameplay, great theming (the robot + western aesthetic is fantastic and pretty unique), a good soundtrack and the short but replayable nature of it. wild guns is wild funs.

i have almost definitely sullied my experience with this game by playing the PS2 version which is notorious for how ass it is compared to the OG xbox version. so many loading screens, which is a bummer and a hell of a step down when you're used to the immediacy of the original gamecube versions. the combination of levels from 1 and 2 makes for a hefty challenge when it comes to the arcade mode, one which is not great given how imprecise a PS2 analog stick is compared to a GC analog stick. furthermore, the new stages they've added into deluxe are just kinda... bad? like they're all massive and gimmicky and have a lot of unused space on them. i might come back to this on the original xbox one day, but for now i can only rate what i played. and i did not enjoy it that much. it is fundamentally still fun because of how strong its predecessors were, but fails to add much of anything interesting or new. minigames are fun tho.

gitaroo man is so bizarre and weird but, like, in the absolute best way possible. the story is nonsense but so heartwarming and charming and surreal you kinda have to fall in love with it. mechanically it plays unlike any other rhythm game i've seen, while also using an easily understandable and unique system when it comes to playing in time with the music. and what incredible music it is. so much of this game is about the art style and presentation, though, and it has one of my favourite overall aesthetics of any game. i don't know what it is about this game's look but it just scratches an itch i never knew i had. all the elements work in tandem with each other to form one of the tightest, most cohesive visions i have ever seen a game put out, and it concludes with one of the greatest endings to a rhythm game perhaps ever put to disc. i cannot wait to give master's play a full shot, and to listen to the soundtrack every day until i die.

a cute and fun little take on the metroidvania genre. it's not genre-changing or anything, and hell it barely qualifies under the metroidvania umbrella at all with how linear it is. but, with how cute it is, how surprisingly great the soundtrack and sound design is, and how simple but effective the story it tells is, doinksoft have cooked hard here.