Games I finished in march 2024 :

21. Akumajou Special: Boku Dracula-Kun (1990/NES) - 7.5/10 *replay*
First time playing on the NES instead of emulating it. I would call it a zany Castlevania lite game by Konami. The first boss is a small KKK dude that when beaten is replaced by a bigger one, most likely its parent, that comes in with a big swastika on its forehead. You also fight a giant chicken and get to a quiz with those two bosses helmed by the Statue of Liberty. After each level you get a casino style mini game. To get tokens for those you have to charge your shot when killing enemies. After each level you also get a new charge shot. With those casino games, I ended up having enough lives to go through the game without getting a game over.

It’s a damn fun game, but sadly, there is a surprisingly high number of slow downs and flicker for that simple a game. Those slow downs really hamper the game by making some tight moving platforming really hard, with the speed changing every second. Some minor grips include the special weapons that always revert to the first one upon death, meaning you always have to remember to cycle through it or you’ll end up dead again in a tight spot and there are no checkpoints at boss fights. Overall, it’s a shame it was never released in the west because it’s a really good game.

22. Super Mario Wonder (2023/NS) - 9/10
I can’t believe it took Nintendo 40 years to branch out of the Mushroom Kingdom. The Flower Kingdom is a really nice change of scenery with their toad equivalents and everything. The added mechanics in the form of badges would bring some much-needed variety on the gameplay if it wasn’t for the fact that to get the pole towards 100%, I mostly stuck to the first badge the whole game. They made levels specifically for badges in Kirby’s Return to Dream Land fashion that make sure they’re all used once or twice. Some unlock so late in the game that I was too wired to use the first one to really experiment.

The new level design approach of the wonder seeds brings surprises at every turn and mixes the gameplay significantly. Every level is unique with its own new idea that is thrown out the minute the stage ends. This maximalist philosophy works wonders in this context. Some smaller levels explore other ideas in a more confined way that I feel could have been included in larger levels for the most part.

Animations are great, models have been updated since NSMB Wii U, the music fits perfectly, but Charles Martinet is dearly missed. The overworld is similar to Kirby and the Forbidden Kingdom since it’s in 3D, so you get to pick and chose, with some levels being on a linear path, making them mandatory. To me it doesn’t make much of a difference since I played them all to completion. There are some secrets and hidden levels in the overworld, making it more than just a level select screen. Speaking of Kirby, the Wonder Seeds are suspiciously similar to the Super Abilities found in Kirby’s Return to Dream Land, but done a lot better, with way more variety; both are visually dense and mechanically optional. Contrary to the New series, that never felt new, even when it was, this game feels fresh. It’s the best 2D Mario game since Super Mario World; I loved every minute of this game. It’s a damn shame that they still use the lives system, though; the Final-Final Test is a tough one that’s eight minutes long so having only five lives to go through it isn’t enough and farming for lives isn’t fun at all.

23. Ufouria: The Saga (1991/NES) - 8/10
I learned about this one when the sequel came out, and since I love the NES, I decided to give it a play. It’s a sort of cute Metroid lite game is which you are looking for your friends. You have to find the map and compass and you dispatch enemies by jumping on them while pressing down in the vein of Castle of Illusion. The scrolling is buggy on the right side of the screen; at first, it’s disrupting but I forgot about it after a while. Some design decisions become tedious at some point; like Metroid you restart at the beginning when dead with almost no life, but in Ufouria you can’t really farm life, so you’ll have to cross half the map a number of times after dying over and over again. The map is really helpful since it highlights important locations, and nothing is overly cryptic making it playable without any guide. The music isn’t bad, but it isn’t anything special and it gets repetitive. Another tedious thing is the bombs that need to be used tens of times and it takes forever. There are lots of small flaws, but it’s a fun and refreshing experience. The game can be played in almost any order after the first couple friends and that is pretty rad for a NES game. I can’t believe I never knew about this one before.

24. qomp2 (2024/NS) - 6.5/10
It does what a good sequel should do. It adds lots of ideas and mechanics to an already solid foundation. This means the game gets a lot harder and fast, but that can be a good thing. The problem is that the interaction between all those mechanics makes everything less predictable which in turn feels like the player is never entirely in control of what’s happening. With increasing complexity, you often lose in elegance. Some camera work isn’t working and some of the new mechanics slow down the pace. Some levels were just a drag whereas no level felt like a slug in the first one. I’m disappointed in this sequel. I didn’t have nearly as much fun as with the first game; it got frustrating because I often felt I wasn’t in control. It feels a bit like playing the original Super Mario Bros. 2 from 1986, when a sequel had to be tougher than the first to justify its existence. And it was not as good a game. It’s still good enough though, both are.
I was pleased when I got to the Warlords boss fight as it’s one of my favourite VCS games and those are rarely referenced, as if video games started with SMB in 1985.

25. Sonic Rivals 2 (2007/PSP) - 2/10
I played the first one during a power outage about a year ago when it was around -30 Celsius out. A car shelter had flown into the power lines which caused a massive outage and a mild explosion right in front of my place. Not only was it getting cold, I was also playing crap. At some point I just stared at the fire team from my couch instead of playing that awful game. I ended up finishing it in the following days since it was only a couple hours long.

The sequel is basically the same, with four two hours campaigns that are exactly the same except for some crappy dialogues. With electricity this time around, I decided to play it on the big screen, because the PSP is the OG Switch. But I ended up playing in portable mode because of input lag already present in the game made the game unplayable on the TV. Basically in this game you race one-on-one and as soon as you make a mistake and get passed, there is no way to win, you won’t even see the other racer again. The thing is, every level has a cheap trap that you have to know about or else you’ll lose time and you really don’t have any to spare, so you almost have to replay every level once. The only new thing here are tag levels in which each player has a timer that must not reach zero while tagging the other one; and It’s as bad as the rest. Everything is messy, from the boss fights to the races and the tag battles, it feels like it barely holds together. At some point they even stopped bothering putting adversaries in the races, you just have to get a few rings or beat a timer, but the levels still have weapons and two tracks, as if a racer was supposed to be there. Maybe racers are present in other campaigns, I wouldn’t know.

This game doesn’t iterate on the first one, it just does the same thing. The voice acting is hilarious though, I’m grateful for it. And at least the game works. Animations are rough, voices were recorded in one take, the assets were probably reused from the first, and the racing is used to pad the bare bones game by forcing players to replay levels. The added characters serve the same purpose.

26. Star Wars: Dark Forces Remastered (1995/NS) - 7/10
I played every game in this series except for this one, which is weird since I always play series in order. I remember soft locking myself years ago on the PlayStation version and I had trouble with the DOSBox version, so I abandoned it and went straight for the sequel, having already played Jedi Academy when it came out. So anyway, this rerelease was a great opportunity to finally give this one another chance. There is a nice array of options to choose from; I played using the original sprites and cutscenes instead of the newer ones, kept the warping, but I enjoyed the new rendering that upscales the resolution by a lot.

It hasn’t changed my mind on the level design though; it definitely feels archaic and overly labyrinthine; none of the spaces in the game feel like real places. Some levels end right after completing the objective inside the enemy base while others ask that you return to your starting point, not very consistent. Other than that, it’s a fairly enjoyable experience and a fine remaster. The speed combined with the head bobbing left me a bit dizzy after a couple levels though.

27. Yoshi’s Story (1997/N64) - 7/10
The sequel to the great Yoshi’s Island on the SNES, this N64 2D platformer is a real disappointment. It is a charming game with a great aesthetic, which introduced the crafted and woolly visuals that would eventually come back in the newer games. In the levels you get fruits and after 30 of them, the level ends. So, the levels aren’t that linear and don’t have proper endings, they loop. It sometimes can get tedious looking for the remaining fruits, but there are usually enough of them. When you die, the coloured Yoshi you played ends up a prisoner in Bowser’s castle. If you lose all your lives, you start again from one of the four the first stages.

The game structure is really confusing. It looks like there are four levels per world, but after beating one you get to the next world. So finishing the story only requires beating six fairly short levels. To see the whole game, you have to finish it four times, but some of the levels are hidden, making them harder to get to. It’s a really weird structure that doesn’t make any sense. There are not a lot of levels, and most of them are gated off; for me it’s not really worth it to replay levels over just for a chance to unlock others. The game should just have been 24 levels in a row. At first, I wasn’t sold, but to my surprise, it slowly grew on me. It’s nothing incredible, but I ended up liking it even if I’m very critical.

28. Mario vs. Donkey Kong (2024/NS) - 7/10
A remake of the original 2004 GBA game with a fresh coat of smooth plasticky Nintendo polygons and fully animated cutscenes. It always was a nice 2D puzzle platformer, and this version makes no exception. I liked the nods to the original 1981 Donkey Kong in the GBA version and it’s still there albeit with a more modern sensibility. While it is a nice game, it is a weird choice for a big 2024 Nintendo release. They removed the useless score and the not so useless completion times (to be unlocked post credits) but kept the lives that have no design purposes. Bonus lives at the end of levels and tutorial animations were also shelved. Other than that, it’s exactly the same game it was 20 years ago, with a couple new worlds added in for good measure. 136 levels total is quite a lot, but 72 of those are post credits for some reason. Those post credit levels change the two-screen format of earlier levels to a one screen offer that adds the mini Mario trope of pre-boss levels; this change of pace is a welcome one. That is while playing in the casual mode, because it can get really tedious and frustrating trying to “control” where the minis go and starting over and over on some stages isn’t very fun; to me the solving is more important than the execution. For that alone, I think this remake is a better game than the original for offering a frictionless “casual” mode. Ultimately, Mario vs. Dk is a highly polished, and very easy game, but a good time with awesome music. It doesn’t really evolve as the levels go by which makes it quite samey; by the 100th level, I was ready for it to end. The expert levels are all about execution, which isn’t a bad idea, but the controls don’t offer much flexibility to tackle these. The remake kept Charles Martinet as Mario’s voice, which was nice to ear after having missed him in Wonder.

29. Yoshi’s Topsy-Turvy/Universal Gravitation (2004/GBA) - 4.5/10
A tilt sensor game for the GBA that acts as a sort of sequel to Yoshi’s Story. It is way too easy at first and yet unresponsive so by the end it only gets frustrating. The animation of Yoshi doesn’t really match the orientation of the device and it all feels weird to play. The level design is very, very repetitive and doesn’t complement the mechanics all that much. The point of each level is to grab apples or money or whatnot. Unlike Story, this time you still have to get to the end of the levels. Even if it’s fairly short, I don’t know why I had to get to the end, it really wasn’t worth it.

30. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back N. Sane (2017/PS4) - 7/10
I’ve played the Crash trilogy a few times on the PS1, but it’s my first go at the remake. I played the first one maybe a couple years ago and I didn’t care much for it; I really like the original, but this version was a lot more frustrating to me, so I never played the other two. It’s never been a series I have played to completion, as much as I like it, because I felt I would never be good enough for it to be much fun. I usually get through the games in one or two sittings as it’s only 30 levels per games or so.

Now I got through the second one. First off, I never cared much for the theming outside maybe the forest levels. The updated visuals are really pleasing and the controls a lot less frustrating than they were in the first remake. Crash has never been an expressive 3D platformer, it’s closer to an evolution of the 2D platformer, playing more like Mega Man without guns, than Mario. The platforming is tight and unforgiving with some live sinks peppered in. Bosses are either wimps or beasts lasting long minutes in which you can make no mistake or it’s back at the start. To me Crash 2 has aged a lot more poorly than other games from that era. It might just be me, but updated visual over an archaic design makes the whole thing feel weird. It’s easier for me to excuse the old games for being of their time than to excuse these versions.

31. Crash Bandicoot: Warped N. Sane (2017/PS4) - 8/10
The third one has always been the best, in my opinion, introducing other playable characters, and multiple vehicular levels. The theming is also much more to my taste than the others, the historical settings are a lot more interesting than the generic forest, sci-fi and winter themes of the second one. I always liked the added mechanics after each boss. I’d say this one aged fine enough. The motorcycle races could have been tweaked though.
The first remake I would rate a 6/10 whilst I would give the originals 8, 8.5 and 9. I now think I have had enough of those games for probably ever. Well, I might still respin Warped one day. In its original version. Probably.

32. Open Roads (2024/NS) - 5/10
TLDR: not good as a game, but not terrible as a story.
I really like Gone Home. Its Immersive sim approach to the walking sim genre works really well. I didn’t quite like Tacoma though. The setting is nice, but it’s just another walking sim that doesn’t do much design-wise. So I wasn’t expecting much from this one, and even less when I saw the reviews for it, but I still played it (the short runtime got the best of me).

The lack of animations on the 2D characters surrounded by 3D environments was hard to get used to. It felt like those Harry Potter games that didn’t have mouth movements back in 2001, but a lot worst. I didn’t like that you are playing two characters at the same time, like you click on things and suddenly the other character just appears to chat, and then disappears until the next click then she appears again, like a party in an RPG. And movement is slooooowwww. Gameplay is mostly click on things, chat, click, chat, something scripted happens, chat, click. I don’t know why some people make games in which there are no games, no real exploration or anything just about anything that is core to the medium. Gone Home was a narrative game through and through, but you could sequence break, and explore, and solve things, here you just watch a badly animated film in which you have no agency over what makes the “game” progress. 80% of the game is dialogues with a few choices that never felt impactful. The story is okay, and the vocal performances are good, but hampered by the non-animation.

33. Ufouria: The Saga 2 (2024/NS) - 6/10
Another one that has a weird structure. The zones or levels are linear and partly randomized and must be replayed to get cans to unlock items to buy in the shop, to get to other zones. Like the original, it gets repetitive since items to find appear depending on the random levels. There is way too much talking too. It sounds and looks cute and a lot like a Kirby game, with beads everywhere. It’s a simpler game than the original and an easy one. Even if the design is different from the original, it feels about the same. A lot of the original’s design hasn’t aged particularly well and makes the whole thing a lot more convoluted than it could have been, and sadly this sequel feels convoluted as well. At some point you have to go through zones without being hit but restarting a zone is daunting and takes crossing the same levels again and again as if it wasn’t already repetitive enough. I’m a bit torn on this one though; it’s not bad, I enjoyed it, then it became a lot repetitive even if it’s very short. Ultimately it feels like an unnecessary sequel. Still, it does something different, which is commendable.