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Review – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD
I’ve got a history with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. In my pre-adolescent days, I had the delusion that skateboarding was exactly as high-flying and exciting as it was depicted in those early Playstation titles. I still have the resulting friction burn scar on my elbow. My last encounter with the series was Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, which was where…
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Review – Portal Runner (PS2)
Portal Runner is a pretty infamous game in the Army Men series. You could almost say that this is where it jumped the shark, but that isn't quite true. There were worse games than Portal Runner released before and better games released after. This is more like the beginning of the end.
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Review – Army Men (PC)
This is where it all started: the OG Army Men for PC. It was a badly needed (modest) hit for 3DO as it transitioned to a software company. But did it start off with a bang? No, not really. It could have been much worse, though, and kind of got there eventually.
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Review – Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes (Dreamcast)
Don't get it twisted, there were some good games in the Army Men series. There was a single release on Dreamcast, and that was Sarge's Heroes. It's largely an upgraded version of the N64 version but, notably, it fixes a number of the flaws found in that title.
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Review – Army Men 3D
Army Men had yet to gain its questionable reputation in 1999. It's the year that some of the best titles in the series would hit shelves. Army Men 3D isn't one of those titles. It's not without its merits, but those generally begin and end with "Army Men but in 3D."
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Review – Superman (N64)
Recently, when I was making a purchase at a game store, the clerk told me that if I spent $15 more, I’d get a free t-shirt. After a brief search, I brought to her an N64 game that fit the price requirements. She looked at what I had placed on the counter, then back at me with concern in her…
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Review – Final Fantasy
I never expected to ever finish the original Final Fantasy. I first encountered it during the early days of my retro fixation, and within an hour or so realized that I did not have the patience to put up with a JRPG of such vintage. For a long time, I had a difficult relationship with JRPGs in general. I often…
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Review – Fallout 2
I admit it, I’m part of the unwashed filth that was first introduced to the Fallout series with Fallout 3, but since I first dug into that game, it had been my intention to visit the games that had initially spawned the franchise. Fallout 1 frustrated me by placing my character in borderline unwinnable scenarios. In Fallout 2, I couldn’t…
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Review – Demon’s Souls
As technology advances, many of today’s games have been pushing more and more towards simple interactive storytelling. The need to obtain the same level of respect as Hollywood blockbusters is a carrot that seems to eternally dangle in the faces of the industry’s biggest publishers. That’s fine. There’s certainly a lot of potential to tell some great stories using the…
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Review – Wonderboy: The Dragon’s Trap (Remake)
There are a lot of very good reasons why the Sega Master System isn’t as well known as the NES — its comparatively small library of games, its atrocious standards for cover-art, the belief that basically every game was as ugly as a fermenting banana and controlled like trash, the fact that its controllers were maddeningly uncomfortable and the pause…
