It’s far from the best, to be sure, but it’s competent and content-filled enough that you’ll at least feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.

It’s not going to make anyone forget about the existence of Pokémon Snap, but it certainly does enough to justify picking it up.

Overall I found Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed to be a lot of fun, and certainly one of the better asymmetrical multiplayer games out there. It’s clear that Illfonic has started to eke out a nice niche for themselves with this type of game, and if you’ve enjoyed their previous efforts, you’ll likely have a lot of fun with this too. My only real complaint comes from the cosmetics, in that I’d like to see an even greater variety of clothing unlocks, and more outlandish options to boot considering the Ghostbusters comedic roots. Maybe we’ll get there through DLC, but the variations on the Ghostbuster jumpsuits and accessories feel a little plain out of the gate. Still, it’s a fun take on what a Ghostbuster video game can be, and the little nods to prior films, including the most recent one, will certainly appeal to franchise fans.

I enjoyed Letterbox by POWGI in my brief time with it, and I imagine that any word nerd who can hold out until the game is on sale will have a fun hour or so with it, but unless that describes you perfectly, you can safely skip this game.

Even if it’s not very original, Trifox captures its influences so well that it carries with it a lot of residual charm. It’s not going to make you forget the games it’s borrowing from, but it’s a solid enough entry in the genre that if you miss those games, you could do a lot worse than trying it out.

Persona 5 Royal is definitely an amazing role-playing game experience. The story is engaging and most of the characters are fun with colorful personalities to match. The battle system can be deeply engaging and almost a puzzle to figure out how to navigate. Collecting the Personas can be quite addictive as is playing with merging the Personas. This game is a must buy for any JRPG fan.

There’s an argument to be made, I guess, that if you stop thinking about it as a Batman game and just judge it on its own merits, it’s not half-bad – but even if you do that, you’re still left with the reality that the game that doesn’t come anywhere near matching up to what the genre is capable of. This is a mediocre game through and through, and Batman branding or no, it’s not really worth your time.

Mages and Treasures may come from a developer with a decent track record, but this is proof that even developers who know what they’re doing have a misfire once in awhile.

As long as you don’t expect too much – or, I guess, as long as you just want more of what was in Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2 – then Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3 does just enough to be worth playing.

As solid as NHL 23 is, it’s hardly a must-play game if you have any previous entries in the series. Given that year(s)-old sports games tend to be pretty inexpensive, that makes it hard to justify buying this one new when you’ll get basically the same experience buying a game from last year or the year before. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll get a very well-made game if you do decide you need all the latest rosters and draft classes, but it’s up to you to decide how badly you need those things.

The DioField Chronicle is a game that I had little trouble sticking with throughout the review process, and could easily see myself going back to in order to finish up the few remaining trophies I have left. The fun gleaned from this strategy title is almost entirely due to the engaging battle system, which while a bit basic compared to other titles, is still a lot of fun to play. It’s not a game that I’d wholeheartedly suggest picking up at full price, but I’d certainly suggest giving it a go after a sale or two.

I mean, I’ve clearly fallen in love with it. How could I not, when it’s as fun as this? Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope doesn’t just prove that the first game was no fluke, it shows that it’s possible to take a crazy idea and turn it into one of the best games of the year.

Atari Mania is a fun and challenging microgame experience for just about anyone who likes games. The concept, games and the overall presentation is both equal parts classic and innovative. Even after a long play session, I was drawn back to it to get further into the vault and challenge more mini games! I do wish you could unlock the actual Atari games you collect the artwork for, but not having those isn’t a deal breaker by any means. This is a great game to represent Atari’s 50 years of innovation and rich history that is the foundation of what we have today. Check this one out if you want a great challenge while reliving gaming’s incredible past.

It’s not quite there yet thanks to the challenging controls, but if you can overlook that, there’s fun to be had here.

Rather than playing this game, you’d be much better off watching Vertigo, and Notorious, and Psycho, and Rear Window, and whatever other movies you could squeeze into the 10 or so hours it would take you to play Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo, and I guarantee you that it would be time better spent.

No More Heroes 3 is a welcomed good time for fans of the series and may be a little hard to get into for new fans. Its crude humor remains the same (taking a dump activates your save files), but there is something very punk rock about this game that Suda51 has given us here. If you can look past its clunky visuals and repetitive gameplay, you’re in for a treat. This an excellent send-off for Travis Touchdown and his friends.

I wouldn’t call Moonscars a must play game, but I can appreciate that it tries to do a couple of new things with a sub-genre of Souls-like games that has become increasingly popular over the past few years. I think there are better examples of 2D Souls games out there, but Moonscars doesn’t overstay its welcome and the combat/exploration is fun enough that I found myself willing to overlook most of the other issues. I wish the magic/special abilities were more useful, as it would be nice to switch up combat encounters a bit more, but it’s perfectly serviceable as is. So if you’re in the mood for another attempt at a 2D Souls-like, Moonscars might just be the game for you.

It’s an absurd tale featuring dinosaurs, monsters, and lost civilizations, and the voiceovers of the two characters are enough to make it enjoyable. In other words, Little Orpheus’ two strong points are the same as the strong points from The Chinese Room’s other two games. The thing is, here they’ve added a third element – platforming – that’s not nearly as compelling, and it’s enough to make the game a far cry from their previous standard.

There’s a massive gulf between finding a game’s concept charming and actually wanted to play that game, and Bear and Breakfast never comes anywhere close to crossing that gaping chasm.

Technical issues may mean that doesn’t like up to the standards of the games it’s trying to emulate, but even so, there’s a lot of good stuff going on here, and if you can look past those issues (or even wait for some patches), there’s definitely something here worth playing.

The main thing, though, is that Easy Come Easy Golf is a joy to play. Whether you’re a newcomer to the sport/the developer or a seasoned veteran, this game will have something for you. It shows that even if the name on the game may have changed, it’s still fully lives up to Clap Hanz’s very high standards.

Lack of story aside, it’s hard to argue that Research and Destroy doesn’t do a decent job of developing its own niche within this crowded turn-based strategy genre. It’s definitely better if you can play it with others – whether in-person or online – but it’s solid enough that even if you’re playing solo, you should get a few hours of fun out of it.

As much as I enjoyed Gigapocalypse, however, I wouldn’t say that I whole-heartedly recommend it. For one thing, it’s really hard to imagine playing it with anything other than a touchscreen (though a mouse might be a decent alternative). At the same time, though, the performance on the Switch isn’t the greatest, to put it mildly. So the window for enjoying it is awfully narrow. Still, if you’re okay with compromising here and there, it makes for a pretty fun time.

I’ve really enjoyed my time with Shovel Knight Dig, and it’s a fantastic follow-up to the first Shovel Knight adventure. Everything comes together so well here, and it feels so great to play, that you’ll have a tough time putting this one down. Ideally we’ll see the game support more platforms down the road, but for now if you’ve got access to a PC, Switch, or iOS platform, then I’d highly suggest checking it out.

If you stepped away from Aliens: Fireteam Elite after launch, I’m not sure that the Pathogen expansion brings enough to the table to bring you back, but I can’t really argue that the $14.99 price point seems pretty fair considering all the extra stuff that comes along with the new, albeit short, story content. The new class perks are fun to play around with, giving you unique modifiers for your main special skill, most of which really boosts up your power level when paired with the right modifications. I certainly had some fun revisiting the game, and if you’ve been playing the game a fair amount up to this point, I can’t really see a reason not to pick up the DLC. Just temper your expectations when it comes to the new story missions and boss fight, which won’t blow you away in comparison to the main campaign.

Whether you’re intimately familiar with Mobile Suit Gundam or a total newcomer, the basic gist of the game should be enough to suck you in and keep you riveted. That it’s not shows just how forgettable this gameplay is – and forgettable is never a word that should apply to robots trying to blow each other up.

Royal Frontier is enjoyable enough – and short enough – that it’s worth playing through. It’s fun to see a game adding new elements to a well-worn formula, and it makes this game an easy recommendation.

It’s not inconceivable that LEGO Brawls could turn into something fun one day. If it were beefed up with loads more content, along with more interesting and more dynamic fighters, it would definitely be a lot more interesting. But in this state, with so little content – and with the content that is there being of such poor quality – there’s no way to classify LEGO Brawls as anything other than a massive disappointment.

It’s meant to be pleasant and cozy, and everything about it – from the folksy characters, to the fiddle music, to the lovely voxel art – is designed to be as warm and upbeat and wholesome as possible. And more often than not, it succeeds at being a pleasant experience. You wouldn’t think a fishing game, of all things, as being cuddly and cozy and inviting – but Moonglow Bay proves that it’s not just possible, it’s also pretty fun.

Voyage is probably the first game I’ve ever played from Ratalaika where its visuals are so good that they make the game worth playing, even if the gameplay itself isn’t that challenging or exciting. It may not mean that you need to stop what you’re doing right now to play Voyage, but it does mean that if you decide to pick this game up, you may get a lot more out of it than you could’ve possibly expected going in.

Hell Pie clearly isn’t for everybody, but if you’re the sort of person who loves pushing boundaries – and your definition of boundaries haven’t changed much since you were in high school – then it might just be the game for you.

I really found myself engrossed with Metal: Hellsinger, and the solid FPS gunplay paired with a challenging rhythm mechanic keeps you pretty engaged throughout. It’s a neat concept that certainly hasn’t worn out its welcome so far, and I’d certainly like to see it expanded upon in the future, so hopefully a sequel or DLC won’t be out of the question. Definitely check it out Metal: Hellsinger if any of this sounds intriguing, you won’t be disappointed.

To be sure, there are worse ways to waste three hours than in the presence of very good voice actors doing their thing over gorgeous visuals. And, like I said, the game always tries to make you feel like you’re in the presence of something great. But the reality is, no matter how much South of the Circle aspires to greatness, with a story like this, it’s never more than merely okay.

If you’re fond of stealth horror and don’t mind a bit of shallowness, then Yuoni could be something you’ll enjoy, at least for a short time. But for anyone else, I don’t think it’ll be nearly as appealing.

It’s built around an engaging story that never outlasts its welcome – the story of a boy pining for his lost love has obviously been done countless times before, but the way it’s told here is nicely done. Further, it ties into an interesting mechanic – since the boy is collecting the soul fragments at the behest of a being called the Soul Collector, he has the ability to switch realities and see another world. This, in turn, makes the puzzles a lot more interesting, as you often have to switch back and forth to figure out what to do next.Obviously, none of this is enough to make Eternal Hope feel like it rises about its influences. But at the very least, it’s enough to help the game carve out its own tiny niche within the world of Limbo clones.

Much like Choose Your Own Adventure books could be reread over and over again as you tried to find all the different paths, Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! is the kind of game you can play over and over again as you try to uncover all the different twists and turns you missed the first few times around (and given the sheer number of possibly story combinations, you’ll need to play through the game several times and several ways to see everything). Much like inkle’s other, later games, Sorcery! is highly replayable and an essential experience for anyone who’s even kind of interested in adventure games.

It feels like a comfort food RPG for Shin Megami fans, one that you’ll likely enjoy while waiting for the next big thing, but not one that’s going to come close to dominating that #1 RPG spot on most lists for the year. It doesn’t take a lot of chances, and instead just tends to lean into the elements that people already enjoy from other Shin Megami games. As such, it’s not going to really bump the Devil Summoner subseries to new heights, and I suspect it’ll be a while before we see another entry in this particular series, but overall Soul Hackers 2 is a solid bit of fun, and easy to suggest to anyone that has any sort of affinity for these games.

It’s got an interesting story and it’s set in an interesting world, but you’ll be spending a lot of time sidetracking into minute, extraneous details that make those bigger picture things difficult to see.

I still don’t know if I’d call in the best Crossword Puzzle Word Game ever, but I’d still say it’s a pretty fun take on the genre if you’re a fan.

PAC-MAN WORLD Re-PAC may not be one of the greatest games of all time being brought back for a new generation to discover, but it’s still a decent enough 3D platformer that lots of people – myself included – are going to enjoy.

Overall there is not enough here to recommend to most players. Souls veterans will be left wanting more, and most likely frustrated by the limited options available to approaching combat encounters. Newcomers to the Souls-like games will most likely be put off by the initial difficulty, as well as the massive skill check that the first boss poses. A forgettable story, relatively bland world, and overly simplistic combat leave quite a lot to be desired after the initial hour or two with Thymesia.

It’s still not a complex game, obviously. And you’re still likely to eventually get bored by its relative simplicity. But it’s a mark of how enjoyable Bit Orchard is that you’ll almost inevitably find yourself getting sucked right back in.

Forget debating whether video games are art – here’s a game that asks whether art are video games, and then shows that the answer is a pretty clear yes.

In many cases, it’s hard to step back to a older game from a previous generation when you are spoiled with the latest release such as The Last of Us Part II. To be able to go back to the original The Last of Us with a very close visual retelling to the top notch sequel is nothing short of magnificent.

If you’ve played any first-person puzzlers in the past decade-plus, you’ll know exactly what to expect in Hourglass. But if you liked any of them, the good news is that you’ll at least find things to enjoy here, too. Hourglass may not be original, but it’s still a decent enough way to spend a few hours.

Even if Blossom Tales isn’t all that original, that doesn’t make it any less fun. The world is fun to explore, the puzzles are fun to solve, and the story is engaging and enjoyable. It may not make you forget its obvious influences, but at the very least, it does right by them, and tries its best to live up to their sterling reputations.

I really, really dug my time spent with Arcade Paradise, and thought the sheer variety of arcade games was pretty impressive, as was the actual amount of upgrades and story content available. It took a lot longer to complete than I anticipated, right around the 20-hour mark or so for me, which makes for a pretty hefty “arcade” experience to be sure. My only serious complaint is the sheer number of bugs I encountered while playing. Nothing that was necessarily game-breaking, but I did have a lot of recurring issues while playing through our review copy on the Switch, which has not been fixed yet. However, a PC patch was just made available this week that does seem to address the bugs I encountered, and my understanding based on the official Arcade Paradise Twitter account is that this patch should be going live for consoles next week. I would advise holding off on purchasing the game until that patch goes live, assuming you’re considering a console version of the game, but outside of that, I think Arcade Paradise is well worth your time.

Two Point Campus is basically a perfect management sim. It’s filled with content (with more likely on the way, if Two Point Hospital is any guide) and it’s absurdly accessible, and it’s worth picking up no matter your usual interest in the genre.

Regardless of me being an old man yelling at the sky about the licensed presentation (or lack thereof), Madden NFL 23 is a win for console and PC. Now like I mentioned earlier, my PC use case is extremely particular, but I assume many players are now in a similar situation. Sports games on handheld have never been a great experience and Madden 23 is the first to really wow me, which is more of an example of how great the Steam Deck is, but I can’t hold that against Madden. As far as the current gen console release, Fieldsense is truly a game changer and made me think more about ball placement than I ever have in a football game. Dropping an over the should pass from Russell Wilson to Jerry Jeudy just feels extra satisfying, especially when it’s over Chiefs defensive backs. PC or Console, either way you’re a winner.

The controls are so bad, in fact, that they outweigh whatever good or interesting or intriguing things Pendula Swing may be trying to do here. There’s a lot going on, and there are all kinds of ideas, but the only way to experience any of it is by dealing with constant frustration, and in the end it doesn’t seem worth it.

The First Cases is a good tribute to one of the classic characters of fiction, and anyone who likes to curl up with a good mystery should find this to be to their liking as well.

Severed Steel doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where Neon White (to say nothing of Max Payne and Superhot) not only also exist, but are much, much better options if you want this kind of gameplay. With competition like that, Severed Steel doesn’t quite match up.

Cursed to Golf is designed to challenge you, frustrate you, and punish you – and even if real golf does that, this game takes it to a whole other level. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t usually give sports games a second glance but loves difficulty ramped up to an insane degree, this should be the one sports game you make an exception for.

Digimon Survive is a talk-heavy game that expects you to spend a lot of time reading, and a little bit of time fighting. That may not be the most enjoyable thing if you just want a Pokémon substitute, but as visual novels go, it’s one of the better ones.

Basically, it’s an odd game about fishing that looks like a leftover from another generation, so if that’s what you’re after, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find here.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is a grade-A game through and through, and as long as this release hasn’t changed anything (it hasn’t), it will remain that way.

When you get down to it, it’s still a lot of basic hack and slash fights broken up by lots of endless cutscenes, with extra side quests there to pad out the length even further. I don’t foresee Sword and Fairy: Together Forever garnering the kind of following here in the west that it has in China, but if you just want to kill lots of monsters and watch lots of dialogue, it may be worth your time.

Summertime Madness doesn’t last long, and it can easily be finished in under two hours. But it’s also not the sort of game that needs to go on forever, either. It’s a challenging, engaging puzzle with enough plot to last through its runtime, and that’s enough to make it well worth a look.

There’s a lot of potential there, but unfortunately Hazel Sky never really gets into any of that. Instead, you get Shane and Erin talking about what they want to do in the future. While I’ve always had a soft spot for stories about characters on the peripheries of something bigger – only so many main characters can be The Chosen One, after all – in this case, it’s hard to care about any of it. Or maybe it’s just hard to care because the game is so poorly designed and so frustrating. Whether you’re falling through the world, or having a needed object vanish out of your hands (which happened to me with alarming regularity), or merely just fighting with the camera, Hazel Sky is chock full of terrible decisions.

Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel provides some pretty solid chills. It’s not the sort of game that will wow you unless you’re already a fan of survival horror, but if you are a fan, it serves as a pretty solid reminder of the good things the genre has to offer.

So while Avenging Spirit might not be my top 90’s arcade game by any stretch, I do think the low price point and attention to detail on this release make it worth picking up. Its unique possession hook makes it stand out amongst other classic action games, and it can certainly be fun to run through with another player a time or two in order to see everything Avenging Spirit has to offer. So check it out when you get a chance, it’s a neat addition to your classic arcade game library.

If all you want is lots of content, then Dual Brain Complete Edition will deliver. But if you want the content to be fun or engaging, then it feels a little lacking.

Ultimately, the Wonder Boy Collection is a mediocre release. While the titles included are all decent games, it seems lackluster in options and presentation. There is a very small “gallery” of art included which is made up of Master System covers and instruction book pages as well as a small amount of promotional art from magazines. Again, seeing Master System related screens in this collection while not offering the ability to actually play those versions demonstrates how phoned-in this collection really is. While the price isn’t terrible at $29.99, I feel it should offer more in the way of playable games, options and extras. If you are interested in picking this one up, I would say wait for a sale or price drop before diving in. Decent games in an overall disappointing package.

XEL isn’t a great game. It’s not even a mediocre game. It’s a half-finished mess that shouldn’t have been released in this state.

To be sure, if you want something original – or even a unique spin on Pokémon – Coromon isn’t it. But if you just want that kind of game done exceedingly well, you need to check it out.

On the whole, though, Blackberry Honey is pretty harmless and inoffensive. It doesn’t ask anything of players and it probably won’t stick with you for very long after you finish it, but if you’re in the mood for reading something long and unobjectionable, you could probably do worse.

Bright Memory: Infinite will also leave you wanting a lot more if you’re the kind of person who likes lengthy video games. I was able to finish it in just over two hours, and that was with me running into some challenges in the boss fights, which means a more competent player will be able to finish it in under two. Even as someone who liked the game, that’s a pretty tough value proposition. But if you’re just looking at it from the perspective of how much fun you’ll get out of those two hours, then Bright Memory: Infinite becomes a lot harder to beat. It crams everything it can think of into that short runtime and is dripping with style for every second of it. I can see why it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it certainly is mine.

Stray didn’t want to tell an epic tale spanning oceans, it didn’t need towering bosses with glowing weak points to create the greatest tension. What it did do was weave a tale that the smallest creature can make the biggest difference and that despite our seat as the apex species, that perch is ever precarious, there’s always something ready to take the spot and life will continue. It’s certainly something that we need to be reminded of periodically.

It’s clearly a game worth investigating if you’re fond of farming sims that ask you to keep lots of plates spinning at any given moment. But truthfully, it doesn’t do anything for me.

All in all, though, the two games are highly enjoyable. I don’t know if KLONOA Phantasy Reverie Series is going to be the game that finally gives Klonoa the audience it deserves. But if there’s any justice in the world, it will be.

It feels as if the developers wanted to make a different, more interesting game, but couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do with it, so instead they turned it into a sequel for a game that wasn’t particularly good or memorable in the first place. You’re left with the feeling that they didn’t really care about Freddy Spaghetti 2 – and really, neither should you.

The three games here are tried, tested, and proven, and if you want the best the Jackbox series has to offer, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything better.

Overall, I thought Escape Academy was a great game, and does what it wants to serve you very well. The puzzle design is excellent and the wide array of environments keeps things fresh. The only complaint I could give is saying I wish there we more, but the quality of what is here makes it hard to complain.

Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is great if you want tennis, and nothing but tennis. It’ll give you ample opportunity to play match after match, and it never bogs you down in the extraneous nonsense that seems to plague most sports games. But if you want to do literally anything more than that, you might find your attention wavers long before you come close to finishing your career.

Unless you really enjoy half-finished stories, Paratopic never really builds on its great aesthetic to be a game worth playing. It may aspire to bring you back to the late ‘90s, but given how disjointed it all feels, it never achieves its goal.

At the very least, if you’re into simulating menial blue collar jobs, you could certainly do a lot worse than this.

The real draw in Neon White is the action – the pure, unfiltered, adrenaline-pumping action that feels like it brings together the best thing about games like Devil May Cry or Ghostrunner or Mirror’s Edge or Sonic or whatever else you play when you want to go as fast as possible while slicing and shooting through every single enemy in your way. It’s a pretty exceptional game, and it’s unlike anything else out there.

I found myself fairly engrossed with Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, and would argue it’s the best of the Omega Force/Nintendo collaborations so far. It runs really well in both handheld and TV mode (certainly far better than Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity) and the combat is propelled to another, more interesting level when you start utilizing the ability to command your various units as objectives appear. So even if you’ve not played through a single musou game before, I think Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes would make a pretty great impression for brand new players, while also breathing some fresh air into the formula for returning fans.

Sixty Words is a decent choice if you’re a fan of word searches and you want something different. It won’t take you more than a few hours to finish every puzzle, but during that time, it’ll serve as a pleasant enough diversion.

Haven Park isn’t going to make you forget its influences – and you should definitely play those other games before playing this one, since they’re both much better – but it’s still enjoyable enough that if you’ve got a few hours to spare and want to play something charming and wholesome, it’ll do the trick.

Redout 2 is specifically designed for people who need to master every track – anyone who stops short of that probably won’t enjoy it too much. It’s meant for people who want racers to challenge them, so if that’s what you’re after, this is a game you need to play.

Overall, Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak is just more of what you already know and love from the game. It provides further functionality to existing weapons and some new monsters but makes sure not to change too much. For me, it took about 16 hours to complete the main questline of Sunbreak, but as usual, there are easily hundreds of hours to pump out of the content if you want to. Just don’t buy it until you’ve finished Rise’s main story.

It’s this awful technical performance that makes Autobahn Police Simulator 3 go from so bad it’s good – or, at least fun – to just plain bad. If the whole thing was just a collection of nonsense, then it would be easy to laugh at, assuming you bought it on sale. The fact that it can’t even do that reliably is what makes Autobahn Police Simulator 3 a game to avoid.

Playing Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, it becomes clear the series has continued to find new ways to be mediocre, even as they’ve evolved in some ways. It’s a so-so game from nearly ten years ago that now feels positively ancient, and you’re better off just ignoring its existence.

I couldn’t stop playing it, frustrating flaws notwithstanding. I don’t know whether that says more about me or about Guild of Dungeoneering’s design, but I can definitely say that it makes for a very addictive experience – albeit one you may hate and love in equal parts.

As I said up top, The Artful Escape may not sound like much on paper. Its individual pieces aren’t anything special. But mix them together, and you’ve got an amazing creation, and one of the best games of the year.

All of this adds up to a pretty good sequel – or, at least, it would if the game was in a finished state. Eventually, presumably, the developer will get around to fixing its game-breaking bug, and once that happens, then the game will deserve a much higher grade. For now, however, in its broken state, tht makes it impossible to recommend Star Wars – Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.

While the story is decent enough that it’s not hard to imagine it could’ve been much more memorable with better translation, in this state, it’s not really worth your time.

It’s a game that genuinely seems to want to help players understand what it’s like to be a gymnast. But just because the game has its heart in the right place, it doesn’t make it any more interesting. Great intentions are fine, but as Pro Gymnast Simulator shows, they don’t make for compelling gameplay.

Given the enduring popularity of Sonic over the years – even with a couple of missteps along the way – it seems like there are plenty of people who will value getting a chance to play these games with fresh eyes and from a different perspective. If you’re one of those people, then Sonic Origins absolutely makes it worthwhile to revisit these classics.

If you’re a Darkstalkers fan, you are definitely eating well if you purchase this compilation, hell as a puzzle fighter enthusiast I am ecstatic that I will be able to play the title on modern consoles and possibly on the go (via the Switch or the Steam Deck). It is also nice to have a legal way to own Cyberbots and marvel at the eccentricity that is Red Earth. While I have issues with the title curation, this is nonetheless a solid lineup. One can only hope that the licensing gods will grant us a Capcom Licensed Fighting Game Collection which will include their Marvel catalog, their JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 3: Stardust Crusaders fighting game, Tatsunoko vs Capcom and dare I say…Rival Schools. Their resume is deep enough to have a couple more of these, but what we have here is a good start.

Mario Strikers: Battle League thankfully leans closer to original Strikers than Charged. While the changes to the gameplay does not necessarily shut out casual players, there’s some meat for those who want to take a more tactical approach. The game leans towards extensive online play, leaving more isolationist players a steeper hill to climb to unlock all the game has to offer. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to some drills so these online skirmishes won’t result in too lopsided defeats.

Obviously, if you’re okay with WarioWare-style minigames, then that may be a bonus for you. And if I could ignore my dislike of them, then there’s plenty about Card Shark to make it worth recommending – and even with those minigames, I’d still say it’s better than average. But unless you’re really fond of wiggling your thumbsticks around every few minutes, you may find the whole experience to not be as good as it could have been.

G-Darius is classic Arcade shooting action at it’s very best. Combining great gameplay with fantastic visuals and audio, you will have a blast even if you are not that big on horizontal shooters. Fans of the series will be right at home with the gameplay, while new players will get the hang of things very quickly. No matter where you stand, you will find a fun and challenging game that will keep you coming back for more. Out of all of the games in the Darius series, G-Darius might very well be one of the greatest. Other 3D incarnations would come to home consoles over the years, but they don’t come close to the original. It may not be a complete Darius Collection, but it certainly belongs in your library.

It’s hard not to feel the rush of nostalgia as Sonic and friends race through the Green Hill Zone – and I mean that in a good way. If you can ignore everything that came after these games – some good, lots of bad – and just focus on what’s here, it’s not hard to understand how these games became so iconic, and why Sega has spent so many years chasing after these same highs. The four games in Sonic Origins are clearly some of the best platformers the early ‘90s have to offer, and there are just enough tweaks and additions that even if you’ve given up on the series ever reaching these highs again, there’s still ample reason to revisit them one more time.

Overall, Mechanic Battle is fine – it’s not great, but it’s also not horrible. It may not let you live out your dreams of being a mechanic, but if you just want top-down racing, it’ll do.

The Quarry is a fantastic time but personally it’s a tough sell at $70 retail. I don’t see many replaying more than a couple times, and that’s really if you have connected enough with the story to go through again. The game could use some quality-of-life improvements like a scene skip once you complete the game, and overall this is a game for fans of this genre and those looking to have a unique experience that isn’t gameplay driven.

For years beat’em up fans petitioned to get the previously delisted Scott Pilgrim Vs The World a re-release. If these gamers knew that an even better title would be coming down the pipeline, I would dare say the furor would not have been as warranted. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is the game we thought had back then, but it’s actually real now. Licensed games are often seen by gamers as quick cash grabs for studios and IP owners, but this one is definitely the exception. So I would recommend get on this ASAP and find 5 people (hit me up if you know me, I wanna co-op) and go on this joyous romp in New York City!