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The technical ambitions for this game were high - the developer tried to create smooth bitmap-based 3D dungeons, possibly inspired by arcade games like Space Harrier. However, the experiment failed spectacularly, the game is almost unplayable, and looks awful, albeit in a fascinating way.

Amnios is a unique game where you fly across grotesque living planets, shooting planetary organs and horrible creatures, culminating in fights against large boss creatures. The Giger-esque graphics is by far the most impressive feature of the game, created by the talented Pete Lyon. The game is unfortunately rendered almost unplayable by its extremely low frame rate. Music and sound by Tim and Lee Wright does not quite live up to their usual standards.

Smooth gameplay, lots of weapon variety, cool original artwork, great sound and music. The difficulty is just right, difficult but fair, and can be adjusted using the settings.
The game even has a solid two-player mode.

I was obsessed with this game, played it solo and in multiplayer, I completed it twice, played DLC, and got 100% achievements.

The blend of first person shooting and action RPG was insanely addictive.

Obnoxious Screaming and Too Many Guns

Like its predecessors, Borderlands 3 is still a fun game with a lot of crazy weapons and satisfying shooting.

Also like its predecessors, The story missions are mostly mindless processes of following the mission indicator and shooting everyone over and over again.

I remember the first Borderlands having a great atmosphere in the starting desert, a relatively quiet area with cool music. I felt like this never happened in this game - in fact, there were times where I was in disbelief at the constant obnoxious screaming of the unlikeable, unfunny characters. They would go on and on and on about pointless, drawn out failed attempts at humour, where the game felt like a parody of everything bad about this series. I ended up turning the volume all the way down on the voices, instead having a weirdly quiet world with bad ambiences (that would normally have been covered by the screaming voices).

The loot mechanics are similar to previous games - you get way too many guns and can spend half the game sorting through them and selling them. At the end, I discovered a nice way of handling this. I ignored all guns that weren't Epic or Legendary. That felt like a nice balance. I only wish you could disable all loot that was Rare and below, I think that would make for a more enjoyable game where loot actually matters. I don't know why they insist on having this much garbage loot in the game.

All in all, Borderlands 3 was a frustrating and somewhat boring experience due to the strange choices regarding voice acting, and the usual overabundance of loot. The combat is as good as it ever was in the series, and the guns feel great due to effective sound design. There is still a fun core game in here, you just have to deal with a lot of annoyances.

The ambition of this game is impressive, and it's incredibly well executed in terms of graphics, witty dialogue, and great music. However, as was the style for Lucasfilm adventure games at the time, the puzzles are nonsensical, making actually playing the game a somewhat frustrating sequence of confusing puzzles. It speaks to just how great the presentation and writing are that the game is still worthwhile.

Fantastic original multiplayer game with great graphics and sound, unfortunately plagued by fatal bugs.

Well-designed, well-implemented shooter with awesome weapon upgrades.

The graphics emulates the arcade games that inspired it very well, and Paul van der Valks awesome chiptune-style soundtrack makes everything more exciting.

The final two weapon upgrades can be exploited to make the game too easy, but it's still super fun to play through, and the difficulty can be increased as well for a greater challenge.

A Revolution in Animation and Storytelling

Prince of Persia revolutionized what could be expected for animation quality in games, and set a high bar for storytelling that's tightly integrated with the gameplay. The punishing counter-focused swordplay is cool, once you get the hang of it, and even the slightly weird tile-based movement feels good when you learn to decode it.

The game is fiendishly hard, and will make you start over several times in order to beat the cruel time limit. Starting over will gradually build knowledge of the 12 levels and improve your acrobatic and fencing skills. I wish the time limit wasn't there, but I'm also aware of the expectations of games of this era, short games with a reasonable difficulty got lower scores than unreasonably hard ones.

The sound effects are fantastic, perfectly mixed for the environment with baked-in reverb, and they communicate the game state very well. However, a weird limitation is that the game seems to only be able to play one sound effect at a time. I'm thinking this could be a lowest common denominator for all the platforms the game was released for, but it's a shame, when the Amiga has 4 perfectly good sample channels that could be used without any overhead.

Speaking of limitations, the game suffers from slowdown when there are many animated objects on screen. This seems like a purposeful limitation, but it does detract from the experience because the game feels sluggish at times.

Apart from the performance issue, this is a wonderful game, truly a classic.

Fun, charming, collection-focused 3D platformer with great music and beautiful graphics.

Like Archon (1984) before it, this game is a turn-based strategy game where unit combat is resolved in a real-time action duel. In The Unholy War, these clashes are resolved in fun little 3D fighting games where each unit has fun different abilities.

The game is great, both as a single-player duel with an AI opponent, and as a local multiplayer game.

This was the sequel to one of my favorite PlayStation games. Obviously, it had some big shoes to fill, which it almost did.

It added the ability to drag corpses, which allowed for a bit more strategy to the gameplay. I had issues with stealth kills sometimes not triggering, even though I seemed to be in range. Many times I had to draw my sword and just chop the enemies instead...

The boss fights were also not as interesting as the first game, they lacked a bit of diversity.

I prefer the original Tenchu for its unique style, music, and mystique, and varied boss fights. However, this is definitely a worthy sequel.

Combining the map exploration of Super Metroid and a fun action RPG was one of Konami's greatest ideas. The game has so much stuff in it, secrets, weapons, monsters, boss fights.

Intense, atmospheric horror game that expands the scope from RE7 and goes to some really crazy places. There so much here to enjoy, the guns are fun, the enemies are cool and unique, the environments are suprising, and the game has a lot of depth in terms of action modes, New Game Plus additions, not to mention the full game being playable in VR. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys action horror games.

This is a relaxing and satisfying resource gathering game with slow progression and a calm, solitary atmosphere. There isn't much variety, but the game ends before it gets boring.

To me, UFO 50 feels less like a game, over even a mini-game collection. It feels like I discovered a new 16-bit system full of high quality games to try out. It reminds me of the time I started playing PC-Engine games and what a fascinating experience that was. The minigames in UFO 50 all have the size and scope of a full 8-bit or 16-bit game, and their game design mostly feel modern and fun. Certain games such as Avianos or Party House really stuck with me. The value here is extreme: you have 50 games to discover, and play the meta-game of completing them or getting gifts for the pig. This is very highly recommended to anyone who enjoys playing retro games.

I had a lot of fun with Ace Combat 7. the dogfighting combat is fun and has mechanics that were fun to learn and make sense, except for the last mission. The game looks and sounds great, easily the best looking fighter jets in video games right now.

Great platformer with charming graphics, fun chaotic 4-player multiplayer, and challenging boss fights. The game executes absolutely perfectly on its concept.

Exciting and original take on the boxing game genre, with tight and satisfying gameplay that smoothly ramps up from very reasonable to extremely difficult. The game has wonderfully varied and expressive characters, making for an incredibly charming experience.

Simple, elegant JRPG with beautiful graphics, a varied world, and satisfying progression. However, the progression is too slow and dull, making the game a bit boring.

This game was a revelation in its time, and a very impressive simulation. The only drawback was an almost complete lack of audio, and glitchy graphics.

The smooth gameplay and nice animation is hampered a bit by very rough sound effects and a curiously unbalanced mix, where the music is all but completely inaudible during gameplay.

Overall, I think Death Stranding is a great game, and original to its core. The gameplay is intentionally slow and the actions you're performing are the opposite of action-packed. However, great care and attention has been given to how these tasks are performed to make them nuanced and satisfying. You explore maps that are lonely and desolate, yet very beautifully rendered.

Even with the caveats about the character drama, Death Stranding has a lot to enjoy. A game with this level of originality that still has high production values is rare. For this reason, Death Stranding will stand out in gaming history for years to come.

Great game, although the last few encounters were a bit messy and restarting the encounters after failing had that annoying Deja Vu feeling. The museum was great, and cool to have that extra emotional weight before the final battle with The Tinkerer.

Vib-Ribbon is an early rhythm game, with a unique art style and the option of playing levels generated from the music on any audio CD.

The gameplay idea of associating shapes with 4 controller buttons and combining them in pairs of 2 is neat and plays pretty well. A few times during the levels, shapes are moving in different overlapping speeds at once, but ending up in the right place to match the rhythm.

The shapes are rendered as a line, in the style of the 1970s animation 'La Linea'. The level graphics and your character shake when you're close to losing a health level, which is a great effect.

However, I don't think the levels are particularly well-designed, they don't teach you the shapes at a reasonable pace, and the difficulty seems to vary wildly within the levels. Also, I have to note that it was a incredibly strange choice of having all the included songs vary in speed for a rhythm game. It sounds weird and kind of bad, and makes the gameplay way more difficult.

Apart from these minor issues, Vib-Ribbon is a unique and awesome game.

Frustrating, Slow, and Annoying

This horror cyberpunk adventure is a frustrating experience.

The game mostly looks great, you're walking around detailed and interesting retrofuturistic environments, albeit with some annoying MPEG-1 looking effects representing the mental state of the main character. The music is minimal and ominous, and hints at a greater horror, although this horror was never backed up by the dialogue and writing.

Interacting with characters in the world was slow and awkward. Rutger Hauer is voice acting the main character, delivering a particularly flat and slurred performance.

However, at key moments in the game, the Rutger Hauer character enters the mind of a victim, represented by a The Cell-like hellscape. These sequences have been great, very weird and unsettling, and plays with the visuals in unique ways. These sequences are way more enjoyable than the rest of the game. For instance, we found a secret virtual reality pig room, which was fun, and then we somehow seem to have walked back into Layers of Fear.

The ending was also better written and more coherent than I had expected. The story involved transhumanism and werewolf body modification, which I'm all for. I especially enjoyed the AI-son character design at the very end, a floating human face that broke up into cubes whenever he spoke. Very weird looking.

These faint rays of light did not manage to counterbalance the frustrating gameplay. The game was painfully slow, with annoying controls, and was understimulating due to the lack of meaningful interactions. When the game ended, I was happy to not have to play it anymore. I would probably have enjoyed watching a playthrough more than playing it.

Ape Escape was the perfect game for my DualShock controller, and the game was just well-designed and cool in many ways. There is something extremely satisfying about capturing one of those little annoying monkeys in your net.

Wonderful Adventure Game with Performance Issues

Loom is an impressive adventure game, with a unique musical spell system and sleek, modern game design. The game has a short, yet grand story, with a tone that is unique among adventure games, serious and poetic.

However, the Amiga version is not great, on an Amiga 500 it runs at an appaulingly low frame rate, and the amount of disk swapping is downright crazy and ends up detracting from the experience. Preferably, it should be played on a newer Amiga with a HD or 3 disk drives.

If you find a way of playing this game using a hard drive, it's a great experience.

Apocalypse was generally pretty fun, but got a bit frustrating at certain points. The challenge was never completely unfair, and the basic gameplay is enjoyable, although I wish Neversoft had done something a bit more clever with cover and ducking. There is a top-down Gears of War somewhere in here, but they didn't quite find it.

Although the campaign mode of Dark Crusade has a lot of good ideas, I don't particularly enjoy playing it. Still, the RTS action of this series is excellent as always, and playing skirmishes is a lot of fun.