Hydlide II isn’t the greatest of games even by the standards of its own series, and those coming to it with no nostalgia, nearly four decades later, are probably not going to have a very good time with it. The relatively low amount of text means the language barrier isn’t as big of an issue here as it is in some other EGGCONSOLE releases, so you probably could play through it if you have a mind to. But I doubt many but the most stubborn and dogged of gaming historians are going to try to do that.

I still recommend the base Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star game, but it is hard to recommend this expansion that doesn’t add enough to cost half the price of the full game. Had it been cheaper or offered more content and modes, it would’ve been easier to recommend. There also seemingly isn’t any discounted bundle for the game and DLC making it harder to recommend even to newcomers. If you do, however, play the base game regularly and enjoy it, this DLC offers more things to add to your fitness routine, but it should’ve been more.

Unfortunately, while it doesn't drop the ball in any meaningful way, Skyline Skaters is about as generic as they come.

When Maglam Lord is sticking to its visual novel elements, it’s rather enjoyable. You can choose your reactions and responses, building relationships and going on dates with the various other characters. The writing is decent, and the sense of humor is fun. Unfortunately, this is only half of the game. The other half is a somewhat dull action-RPG where you wander through uninteresting levels and engage in combat that turns out to be lacking in engagement. There’s an emphasis on grinding for materials to raise your strength, but nothing about the battles make this an enticing prospect. It’s not a very long game, but it feels absolutely interminable at times. Not without its charms, but hard to recommend on the whole.

Though the game grows more difficult over the course of its 16 levels, its formula never really grows. You may encounter a few tricky gates, or clever platformy sections, but what works in the first level will work in the 16th. Similarly, the music and aesthetic never much change or grow. What's terribly sweet for the first few levels grows cloying without variety.

The stop-and-start pacing and tremendous amounts of repetitive grinding required detract greatly from a game that could otherwise be pretty solid. There's a decent game here, and it's really only in the incidentals that it doesn't shake out to be more than that.

If you found yourself enjoying the gameplay and controls of Skeeball, NBA Hotshot will likely be a welcome addition to the arcade game collection on your iPhone.

The Tale of Clouds and Wind is a serviceable 16-bit beat-em-up, but not much more than that. Add in some emulation issues that result in control lag, and you’ve got something that can get the job done if needed but probably shouldn’t be relied on for such a task. Given the assortment of Capcom beat-em-ups available at a cheaper price on Switch, it’s hard to recommend this to any but those on the hunt for something less common to play from this era.

Affliction amounts to an impressive faux VR tech demo that, while impressive and fairly priced, probably won't hold your attention for long.

The fundamental problem with this release is that SVC Chaos isn’t a very good game. The Code Mystics have done their usual reliable job with bringing the game to Switch, and it’s certainly an interesting game to poke at if you haven’t played it before. But when the nuts and bolts of a fighting game are as busted, imbalanced, and frankly unfinished as they are here, there’s only so much fun you’re going to get out of actually playing it. If you’re okay with that, then by all means. It’s as good as it’s going to be.

The story is again the strongest point, but the cinnamon to oatmeal ratio here isn’t a great one. The battle system is certainly dressed up, but rarely goes anywhere exciting. In a quieter period I might have recommended this to RPG fans willing to forgive its healthy share of flaws, but we’ve been up to our ears in great RPGs of late and I don’t expect that flood to let up anytime soon.

I’ve been playing the game quite a bit, exploring all of the various options and features, and I get the impression I’m not anywhere near finding everything the game has to offer. Shoot-em-up fans without other platform options may still find the tech problems worth dealing with, but it’s too bad Switch owners are left with this kind of decision yet again.

It's possible to make mundane roles great fun, but Merchant to the Stars hasn't quite worked out how.

Reckless Hero is simple but it does a decent job of providing a five minute fix and it is so, so pretty.

Rider’s Spirits is one of those retro re-releases that feels like filler. It’s not very good, it’s not very bad, and there isn’t much of interest to it beyond the fact that we haven’t seen it localized before. If you’ve got a special hankering for a 16-bit racer that you haven’t played before, then you might enjoy this well enough to make it worth the pick-up. Most people will be better served running through Super Mario Kart one more time, however.

I actually really enjoyed playing through Xak here, but unless you’re able to understand Japanese I’d strongly caution against picking this release up. You can enjoy poking at it a bit using the included bookmarks, but actually playing the game requires understanding the text. Only the boldest of adventurers, equipped with Japanese dictionaries and/or translation software, need apply. I hope D4Enterprise can figure out a better solution for this kind of thing going forward, but I suspect this is just how it’s going to be.

There are 80 stages in total, and should you buy into the core conceit you’ll likely enjoy playing through them all. It’s not bad, but it takes more than a bit of graphical flourish to freshen up an idea that QUByte has revisited a bit too frequently.

Mars 2120 is definitely ambitious in many ways, but I wish that ambition extended to its design. For all the effort put into the production values, the game itself never quite shakes off the feeling of being the Dollar Store Metroid. A bit more polish for its fundamentals and maybe one or two interesting twists might have made this something special, but as it stands I think it utterly fails to make a case for itself against its many strong competitors in the Metroidvania genre.

After a few content updates, GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon has the potential to be an essential in the genre. Right now, it still feels like an early access game and one that has annoying technical issues on Nintendo Switch. Its biggest draw is the aesthetic and combat, but it needs to be polished and tweaked in its current state to be an easy recommendation when you have much better games in the genre on Nintendo Switch priced similarly.

After the Missile Command novelty wears off, there isn’t much to this game besides the survival fest and some eerie music.

Even for fans of the property, Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash feels like it emphasizes the wrong things at great expense. I think a great job has been done here in terms of serving the look, sound, and world of Umamusume, and the wide array of unlockables might be enough to keep those dedicated to the horse-girls interested for a while. But it fades far too fast, and if you’re lacking that attachment to start with, you’re probably going get tired of this well before the final furlong.

If you enjoy this sort of experience, you will probably lose occasional hours to the game. If not, you will probably lose interest after the first three games. It's all rather binary.

There is significantly more interactivity this time around, but at its core the game is still a Sega CD style FMV game, which means interactivity is limited to some puzzles and other touch-based mini-games. Unfortunately, these puzzles and mini-games really aren't much fun.

The one glaring issue with Dawn of Magic is with its translation. From the start, you'll find grammatical issues and a lot of strange sentence choices.

If it wasn't so convoluted and weighed down by the storefront, Rush N Krush would be a must-download for arcade racing fans. Right now though you'll have to brave the cavalcade of menus and micro-currencies to make sense of anything.

There are a lot of clever ideas in this game, but the game exhausts most of its tricks well before it ends. I think it’s still worth playing, provided you enjoy RPGs to begin with. It’s just unfortunate that a game that blasts out of the gates with such vigor ends up so flat in its closing hours. Add in some technical issues specific to this version, and you have a real hit-or-miss affair.

If you enjoy this style of social RPG, there's certainly no harm in giving it a try and seeing if you take to it more than I did, but for me, the whole thing just feels incredibly redundant.

I’d imagine there are some challenges in getting a game of this age running nicely on modern hardware, but as it is right now it just isn’t fun to play the game this way. Perhaps it can be patched into shape, but for now I’d recommend checking this series out on mobile instead. The puzzles are absolutely worth playing, and it’s neat to check out all the little details in each environment. But this Switch version sometimes feels like it’s fighting you with its laggy nature more than it is with its challenges, so it’s hard for me to recommend with much vigor at the moment.