HowHammerYou

This was yet another franchise that had no business going open-world. The Sonic series' gameplay has always been about going in one direction very fast. They're basically racing games. Making an open-world Sonic game is like dropping a Lamborghini in the middle of a forest and removing the finish line. The Legend of Sonic: Breath of the Knuckles is just another cash grab driven by investors who can't comprehend that no matter how much money it made, you can't just turn anything into Fallout.

Back in 2015 I spent an absolutely stupid amount of time on a single game which I thoroughly regret. Back in the day I was a Kojima fanboy, and had convinced myself that Metal Gear Solid 5 was going to be the gaming event of the century. So, I used some of my vacation time and took an entire week off work on the week the game released. And so for a week I did nothing but play MGS5, with breaks for eating, sleeping, showering, etc. I'm certain there were multiple 16-hour sessions in there. I put so many hours in that I was able to finish the game the very next week, and this is a game that takes around 250 hours to finish. And my reward for my insane gaming streak was Kojima kicking me in the balls at the end of the game and acting like he did me a favor. And that's how I learned not to fanboy for game developers, and not to spend an entire week on a single video game.

Atari: Atari 2600 Nintendo: NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii Mini, Switch, GBC, GBA, GBA SP. SEGA: Genesis Mini, Saturn, Dreamcast, Game Gear. Sony: PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP, PS TV. Microsoft: XBox, XBox 360, XBox One X SNK: Neo Geo Mini (Nakoruru Red Edition) My first console was the 2600, which came secondhand with a few games from some people my parents knew. This was early 90s, so it was already a very old console. After maybe a year, my parents upgraded me to the SNES (I completely skipped Gen 3 growing up, which is why I don't have any nostalgia for it). I didn't seriously get into video games until the Gameboy Color and N64 (largely thanks to Pokemon). Gen 6 was the first time I had every single major console while they were current-gen. Gamecube was my first gen 6 console, PS2 was the first console I ever bought with my own money. During my early adult life I was dirt poor, so I didn't upgrade to gen 7 until around 2010. Gen 7 was where I really started to get into game collecting, with my PS3 collection consisting of over 40 games. Gen 8 was mostly a repeat of gen 7, with my main console being PS4.

1: Gameplay over everything else. The game needs to be fun to play with no unnecessary parasitic systems interfering with the core gameplay, and realism needs to take a backseat to convenience. I don't care if I parked my horse 20 miles from my current position, make it come when I whistle for it! 2: Offline Playability. The entire game needs to be playable without an internet connection 3: Polish. Kinda related to #2, but if you can't ship your game in a state where it's fully playable right out of the box, don't expect me to buy it. 4: Sound Direction. As long as the music isn't repetitive, characters don't make me want to punch them when I see their mouths open, and the sound of my character's footsteps doesn't annoy me, we're good. 5: Story. Just have a story that makes sense. It doesn't really even have to be that good. A lot of the most "playable" games I've ever played don't even have stories. 6: Graphics/Visuals. This is mostly an obsolete category for judging games today, as with the funding and talent available to today's developers, it's nearly impossible to make a truly bad-looking game unless you really try to.

I've never been a fan of them. They've always seemed useless and pointless to me, unless they're actually integrated into the game itself and provide tangible benefits (like in the RE2 and RE3 remakes, that was the right way to do trophies).

I'll keep retro gaming for as long as I'm able to. As for keeping up with new releases and consoles, I'll keep going until digital distribution and/or cloud gaming take over everything. I'm already restricting myself to buying one 9th-gen console and 10 games for it due to the state of the industry, but when the big companies tell me I don't own a game I just paid for, I'm getting out of the video game rat race for good.

The KH series is a perfect storm of "I didn't have a long-term plan for making this a series" colliding with "Hey this was successful, we want you guys making more of these games regularly". The sheer amount of fluff that was jammed into the storyline is never more obvious than when you consider that there was a gap of 14 years between the release of KH2 and its sequel KH3, but we were getting new KH games roughly every 2-3 years during that gap. Even though I love KH:BBS, I really do wish the handheld games had never existed due to the irreparable damage they did to the overall story. Anyhow I got what I wanted out of KH3 (Roxas and Xion finally being freed), so I'm done with the series unless they make another game where Roxas is the main character.

Favorite Videogame : Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate Edition Best Story: Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time Favorite Art Style: Guilty Gear series "I'll finish it someday": Assassin's Creed: Valhalla It Made you Cry: Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time Best Combat: Final Fantasy VII Remake Favorite Protagonist: Eivor (AC:V) You Like it but everyone hates it: Resident Evil 3 Remake You Hate it but everyone likes it: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Favorite Horror game: Until Dawn Favorite Fighting game: Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate Biggest Letdown: Last of Us part 2 "Back in the day Game": Metal Slug Indie recomendation: Rime

Final Fantasy IX Star Ocean: 'Til the End of Time Dragon Quest Builders 2 Kingdom Hearts 2 Golden Sun 1+2

4th Gen: Metal Slug 5th Gen: Final Fantasy IX 6th Gen: Final Fantasy XII 7th Gen: Spec Ops: The Line 8th Gen: Until Dawn

The only ones I'm interested in right now are the RE4 remake, the Persona 4 Arena Ultimax port, and Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2. I'm curious about Valkyrie Profile: Elysium, but given S-E's track record with classic Tri-Ace properties post-gen 6, I'm afraid they're going to butcher it.

Trailer looked good. I hope they get rid of the QTEs that plagued the original, and make Ashley useful. I don't want her to be some sort of badass or anything, just give her a small revolver so she can shoot Ganados in the knees so she isn't dead weight. Mostly I just want them to get this one out of the way so they can remake Code Veronica X.

All of my PS2 favorites have been ported to PS4 by now, with the sole exception of Code Veronica X (which will likely get a remake after they're done with RE4) and SoulCalibur 3. I'm still hoping for a remaster of SoulCalibur 3, the sheer amount of single-player modes that game had is staggering.

I save manually every time I end a session, and every time I feel like the game is going to try subverting my expectations.

I stopped paying attention to them around 2017-2018. The Bethesda/Ubisoft Mono-genre and corporate focus-grouping have destroyed most of the classic series I loved and turned the industry into a wasteland of shovelware. This year I am paying a bit more attention than usual because I'm hoping Nintendo will announce the Switch 2 in preparation for a 2023 launch.

I bought a used Xbox One X so that I would have a 4k blu-ray player for when I upgrade my TV next year. Got it from Amazon for an absolute steal at $270 (there's no demand for them now that the Series X is out). It looks like it's hardly been used. Even when I opened it up to swap the old HDD with a 1TB SSD, there was hardly any dust inside it, and I was the first person to open it. Aside from that, I do plan to order an Odin Pro in August, and get a replacement for my recently-deceased PS4 as soon as I can find one that isn't in the hands of scalpers. That'll be it until the Switch 2 comes out in 2023 or 2024, which will be my only 9th-gen console out of the big 3.

Though I do most of my retro gaming through emulation, I do have a very short list of old game consoles I'd buy or re-buy if something happened to them: N64 Pikachu Edition, Sega Saturn, PS4, Gamecube, and Neo Geo AES. The Neo Geo in particular is one I've never owned, but would love to.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Reason: That stupid electro-torture button mashing QTE. I have never been able to beat that without a turbo controller. Bad game design 101.

I consider Legends: Arceus to be the best Pokemon game I've ever played. It's not a true open world game as the world is segregated into 5 zones according to biome, but each zone is quite large and contains a good variety of pokemon. And because the whole point of the game is catching pokemon, the world never feels boring or empty. Then there's an abundance of secondary gameplay mechanics such as Spacetime Distortions (inside which are treasure and rare pokemon), Mass Outbreaks, and Massive Mass Outbreaks happening randomly which make the world feel like it's constantly changing and there's always something to do. The main story takes about 50 hours to complete, but there's also a lively postgame that can easily keep you occupied for another 50+. I'm well over 100 hours into it and still haven't done everything in the postgame.

Gardevoir. I'd like to post something cooler like Giratina or Mewtwo, but the fact remains that if it is at all possible to catch a Ralts in any pokemon game, I will obsessively grind until I get a female Ralts to raise into a Gardevoir. If Gardevoir's in the game, it will wind up in my team.

Favorite: Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Least Favorite: Pokemon Silver. Silver actually used to be my favorite, but after recently starting another playthrough, my adult self started noticing a whole lot of flaws that I hadn't noticed as a kid. Notably the absolutely glacial pacing of the main story until you get about halfway through the gyms (there is NOTHING going on until you get to Ecruteak), and how although there were some damn good new pokemon designs in gen 2, most of them were trash. I've come to realize that the reason I held it in such high regard for so long was the memories I had of playing it with my friends.

Usually an hour or 2 per day, if I even play at all. Back in my younger days (when I didn't have a ful-time job) I would game for 5-7 hours a day. But these days I can't stand playing video games for more than 3-4 hours straight, even when on vacation.

Eh, maybe just a superslim then. The slim came out in 2016, It just seems odd to me that they'd go a full 9 years without another hardware refresh.

Breath of the Wild: It just doesn't feel like a Zelda game, it feels like an Ubisoft mono-genre game with a Zelda skin pack applied. This is one of my biggest gripes with it. Final Fantasy XV: Threw away any pretense of being a classic JRPG to become an inferior version of Kingdom Hearts. Bomberman Zero: Threw away the cartoony aesthetic of the older games to look like a halo/doom clone with nothing but the name to link it to its predecessors.

I'm surprised they're waiting that long to kill it off. Hopefully this means they'll send it off with a third revision in the form of a smaller and more power-efficient PS4 Pro. My PS4 died recently, so I'd love to get something like that as a replacement.