Main ListPrevious Listbold games are games that have been beaten, previously beaten, or are unbeatable.
italicized games are in progress.
standard games are games I am not currently trying to beat.
strikethrough games are games that have been abandoned.
126.
Mega Man: Dr Wily's Revenge (GB)
After finishing Tron Bonne, I decided I'd play through the handheld Mega Man games before jumping into Legends 2. I'd say as a nice break, but that's dumb because I love Legends and am not that big of a fan of the Mega Man proper games, but it's more of get the disappointing food out of the way before you get to the good part of your meal. Being the first entry, it's not very refined. You do the regular level thing and fight 4 robot masters from Mega Man 1, do a wily stage, then fight 4 robot masters from Mega Man 2 with no stages just straight fight, and then fight Wily. I like to think of the GB as equivalent to the NES, even though I'm sure it really isn't, so it's weird to me to see such a small game in comparison. The platforming and such work well enough, but it has its issues. Most of these issues are resolved in other entries via QoL and improvements in hitbox calculations. That all said, I appreciate the shortness. You get 8 bosses, 5 real stages, and no boss rush. But I believe this one is very Mega Man 1 with no rush or sliding. After the 4 MM2 bosses, but before Wily, you face an original character boss Enker who gives you the Mirror weapon. You have to use the mirror weapon to reflect Wily's shots to kill him. Honestly, pretty great setup, fun original boss and original weapon to defeat the final boss. Major points for making a down port feel original and worth playing, if only at the end. I don't think I'll wind up recommending any of these handheld games, but if I were to, I feel so far that this might be the one to recommend.
Rating: Soft pass.
127.
Mega Man II (GB)
So with this one, you start with the 4 MM2 bosses you didn't face in the first one and then fight 4 bosses from MM3. I assume by the end you will have fought all of the bosses from 2-4 and half the bosses from 1 and 5, because my understanding is V has all original bosses and none of this half and half stuff. Graphically the game is an improvement over the first, it reintroduces sliding and Rush mechanics. This is also the only one not made by the same dev, just a note. This one brings back stages for the second half bosses. I'm reading back on it and it sounds like Inafune felt the developer didn't understand MM and had never been acquainted with it and as such this game's design felt off from the series and was why they went back to the original Wily's Revenge dev. Interesting. This one did the same as the first and gave you an original character with an original weapon, and the weapon must be used to defeat the final boss. Though I think you could use other weapons, this was just "easier". It was an interesting take, but even that original weapon didn't work well because you'd take damage when you use it. I do find it interesting that while this is the bastard child game, they acknowledge its existence and even include Quint in MMIV.
Rating: Soft pass.
128.
Mega Man III (GB)
Graphics improvement again, where I'd say this is on par with the quality of the NES games (even though it is monochrome). I'd even say the levels themselves are starting to represent their NES counterparts. I imagine they're slightly different, but they have all the same stuff I remember from playing the originals. Again you face the rest of the MM3 bosses and then 4 bosses from MM4. I imagine MMIV will start off with the rest of the MM4 bosses and finish off with half the MM5 bosses. I appreciate that they aren't deciding to repeat bosses, because they easily could. As a retroactive statement, that applies to the whole handheld series, I expected the 2nd half bosses, at least one right, to be weak to a weapon from the 1st half of bosses, but they aren't. So you don't have the normal Rock Paper Scissors thing going on. By that I mean there 2 MM(1 old + 1 new) boss that isn't weak to any weapon in the game and 2 MM(1 old + 1 new) boss whose weapon isn't good against anyone. I was hoping it'd go full circle and they'd make some new MM boss weak to an old MM boss's weapon. Again they do the thing where you fight an original enemy and get an original weapon to be used against Wily. I'm actually not opposed to this concept and am curious why that wasn't something the mainline series took on.
Rating: Soft pass.
129.
Mega Man IV (GB)
This one introduces a currency and shop mechanic with P Chips. This is actually the game in the series that originated the currency and shop model seen in Mega Man 7 and future games. So at the least this is noteworthy for creating a mechanic that was deemed so good it should be pulled into the series proper. I decided to read up and see what else this title is good for and I see they brought back the boss rush towards the end of the game and I am full of disappoint, it's not a huge thing, but it's always been my biggest peeve with this series as I hate refighting bosses. Honestly, I can't decide. I want to say I shouldn't recommend any of these handheld Mega Man games. I'll maybe retroactively make my decision after V.
Rating: Soft pass
130.
Mega Man V (GB)
This is the first handheld one with fully original story and enemies. You face "Stardroids" which are robot masters named after planets. You've got the 8 planets, pluto, the moon, and the final boss Sunstar.
This one follows the 4 then 4 model of the handheld Mega Man games, but Mercury is weak to a weapon only obtained from the 2nd 4 bosses, creating the full rock-paper-scissors model of the mainline games, so this is the only handheld game that offers the full circle, which also means Mercury has no weakness in the 1st 4, because you can't even earn his weakness until end game. Kind of a shame that they did it this way instead of just letting you access all 8 up front. This one has the boss rush plus it has you fighting all of the original bosses from the 1st 4 games. Then you fight Wily and then you fight Sunstar, a little weird that Sunstar is over Wily and then turns out to not really be a bad guy or something, just feels backwards, should've just made it Sunstar then Wily. Honestly, since this one is fully original, acknowledges the original ideas from the previous 4 entries, and has the most QoL improvements, I'd say if I were to recommend a handheld Mega Man game, this would be the one.
Rating: Soft recommendation
131.
Mega Man Xtreme (GBC)
This game makes my head hurt. You get 3 MMX bosses and 1 MMX2 boss. So you face Chill Penguin, which gives you the weakness for Spark Mandrill. Cool, makes sense. Spark Mandrill gives you the weakness for... Storm Eagle? Well that ain't right. Storm Eagle really has no weakness in this game and you basically have to do the fight with the buster since you don't have Chameleon sting. Then you face Flame Stag the X2 boss, and he's weak to storm tornado? Okay, whatever. I don't remember his level from X2, but it feels very Armored Armadillo. Just feels dumb that they didn't just do Penguin, Mandrill, Armadillo, Octopus. Apparently you unlock Hard Mode after beating the game which gives you different robot masters and levels to do, but I'm just not doing that. This game really wasn't good. It should've been saved for the GBA. The wall jumping mechanic just doesn't work well, it's nearly impossible to do dash jumps. Basic controls doesn't assign dash to anything so you press down + jump like OG mega man, well you can't dash jump like that. You can assign dash to the start button, but can you imagine how terrible that would control on a Game Boy? At least on a Gameboy advance you could assign it to L. I'm just sad that this game is so bad, it could've been serviceable on the GBA I'd imagine.
Rating: Hard pass
132.
Mega Man Xtreme 2 (GBC)
Okay, first off, this game didn't even offer a way to map dash to anything... so I figured out, accidentally, that if you double tap forward, you dash. I don't think that worked in the first game, otherwise I would've noticed it, but maybe. At this point I'm pretty Mega Man'd out, luckily the last game I'll probably play is Legends 2 which is a completely different kind of thing. I was expecting this to be MMX3-X4 bosses but half the bosses were still from MMX, and I didn't look up the other two, but I'd guess X2. Weaknesses seemed to mostly work this time around, but this game is designed to be played multiple times and collecting all of the power ups across multiple playthroughs. Story was pretty garbage, gameplay was just as bad as the last. Really should've waited for the GBA to develop something so ambitious. One of the boss fights was near impossible, only Zero could hurt him or one specific weapon from X. Zero can't get close enough to hit without taking damage because melee and his health is weak and low because he wasn't the main character. X burns through the weapon too fast. I didn't realize there was a shop until after that fight, so had I went to the shop and got the 1/2 energy upgrade thing, maybe it would've been easier, but it was still no bueno.
Rating: Hard pass.
133.
Metroid Fusion (GBA)
I've been meaning to play this one and I saw that it was part of the 3DS ambassador program so I've been slowly chipping away at this game when my Vita is charging. It'll probably be a pretty slow play for this one. I'm disappointed that the 3DS VC GBA stuff doesn't offer save states or anything. Can't even natively do sleep mode in VC mode. That said, this game seems to have a sleep mode built into the game which is interesting. The plot for this game is confusing me so far, and I'm hoping it'll get cleared up. I do actually consider stop playing on 3DS and setup my GCN with hdmi and gameboy player and play on a TV and stream it, because I'm getting 0 advantages from playing on 3DS. I'm getting about far enough into the game that I need to make the decision soon otherwise I'm fully committed to 3DS. I haven't been streaming because I've been in so much pain because of my work related injury. At this point I've committed to the 3DS version. I'm act Sector 3, which is the 4th sector.
I started largely following a walkthrough at some point because you couldn't progress without going through hidden walls and such, which I don't recall being a normal thing in previous games. And since I was doing that I largely started collecting all the pickups as the guide suggested, but I still only wound up with like 50% item collection at the end of the game. My understanding is that this game sort of directly leads to Dread, so I knew I needed to play it soon. I might read up on the series before jumping into Dread when it comes out, but I probably won't play Zero Mission, 2/AM2R, or replay Super Metroid. I'm expecting once Nintendo does the GB/GBC thing on NSO, if it happens, that Metroid 2 will be there and if they happen to do a GBA thing it'll have Zero Mission and or Fusion. Here's hoping.
Rating: Solid recommendation
134.
The World Ends With You: Final Remix (NS)
Finally started this game. I had intended on starting it a while back, but I noticed it seemed like it's touchscreen game, so I was waiting for a time when I could focus on handheld stuff. With my injury, I'm playing a lot of handheld stuff so wherever I'm laying around resting, I can just play. I initially tried playing this just system only, but the game wants joycons at least on and connected otherwise you can't play, which is dumb for a game that seems very designed around touchscreen only game play. You can't do anything with the joy cons without using Wii style pointer controls. It's infuriatingly dumb. I don't really get this game, and I don't imagine it'll wind up high on my list. It doesn't help that this game has been overhyped to a point that it's essentially a meme. There's no way it'll live up to its meme status. It took almost the entire first section of the game for the game to really grab my interest, and even then, the gameplay was always a deterring factor. The story for this game is actually pretty interesting, but the gameplay holds it back so much. I'll admit it's commendable that they decided to come up with such an original gameplay mechanic, it's just not a very good gameplay mechanic. The English dub for the anime just started, so I intend on watching that, if it's good and it works as a replacement for playing this game, I might update my recommendation to watch the anime. It's a great story, but that's about where the compliments end, it feels like a poor adaptation of an anime, but it was a game first.
Rating: Hard pass
135.
Night in the Woods (X1)
I had been meaning to play this game for a long time, even started it earlier this year, but kind of abandoned it. It's leaving game pass soon, so I finally bucked up or hunkered down whatever you want to call it and finished the game. I'm personally not big on dialogue in games unless I care about the characters, story, lore, etc. So I have the trouble starting games like this and especially visual novels (not that this is). So after like 7 in game days, I started caring, this is only a problem in that I missed a lot of lore and stuff in the first 7 days. I won't be replaying this game, but it does make me want to replay it, and it probably wouldn't be so bad because there is so much content I missed I could manage to mostly not repeat a lot of stuff, or at least have enough differences in the second playthrough that it won't be so bad. That said, I didn't get a lot of background on Gregg and Angus because I chose to hang out with Bea almost the entire game, mostly because my wife said she hung out with Gregg, so I wanted a different experience and if she were watching, she could also get a different experience. That said, I really like Bea as a character, she's a very deep and well fleshed out character with a real strong backstory. I'm almost concerned I wouldn't like Gregg's stuff as much, but Bea's content really emphasizes how much of a garbage mammal Mae is. The entire game does a real great job of emphasizing how garbage Mae is as a person. And even by the end, I'm not convinced that Mae is gonna change, other than that Bea seems to want to help Mae get help from a real doctor and not their local wack doc. Game is like 80% just wandering and chatting and Mae being garbage, 15% detectiving, and 5% mysteriousness, rise to climax, and resolution. There's just a lot of nothing going on in this game until right at the end.
Rating: Soft pass.
136.
Night in the Woods: Longest Night (X1)
I wanted to not count this, but historically I count these things. It's basically a side game that just has you looking at constellations and hearing stories about them. Not much to it. It's free on itch.io and stuff, but it doesn't really add anything to the game. Honestly, should've just been part of the main game as a random evening event or something.
Rating: Hard pass
137.
Night in the Woods: Lost Constellation (X1)
Okay, this one is at least different. It plays different, has different mechanics, and is kind of enjoyable. More or less one giant puzzle type of thing. It only adds lore in that in the main game you talk about this person and their constellation. So it's only tangentially relevant, but it was supposed to be a demo of systems that could go in the game, but as far as I'm aware, none of these mechanics were introduced in the game at all, so it's actually novel in concept. That said, it still doesn't add much, and some of the puzzles were confusing and I think I had to look up what to do.
Rating: Hard pass
138.
Katana Zero (X1)
A bunch of games got added to the list of leaving soon for Game Pass and as always I try to play the games that interest me from the lot. I passed on the physical of this game, because I wasn't confident that it'd be a game I'd want to come back to. Pretty pleased that I didn't buy it because I really didn't enjoy this game that much. The game started on a bad note for me because I thought the referenced "rewind" feature would be an actual rewind feature, but instead it was really just a retry like every game does, they just called it rewind to make the plot make sense in dying. That's fine, but it was definitely a letdown. Other than that, gameplay was pretty fine, other than that given the unforgiving nature of the game, some later areas were fairly long which led to dying meaning that you'd have to redo a lot of stuff, which got frustrating. Story wise, the game was kind of garbage. A lot of stuff didn't make sense and the story had no real ending or resolution and left off on a giant cliffhanger, which means another game is coming, but I'm not hyped for that or down for how it left things off.
Rating: Soft pass
139.
Heave Ho (PC)
Another game pass game leaving. I think I didn't realize this was PC only for Game Pass, it was part of why I passed on the Switch release, but it's fine as I am willing to play on PC. Seemed like a Snipperclips type of game that should be played local co-op, but I played solo because I wanted to get through it and I wasn't confident that my wife would enjoy playing the game. Controls are actually pretty good, I was expecting closer to "simulator" games where the controls are frustrating on purpose, but it worked pretty well. The game relied a lot on physics of throwing yourself across the level, that got a little tough in spots, but it led to some interesting and cool stuff. I really liked that when you die, you explode into a splooge of ink, it left me laughing in a lot of situations. Game seems like it would be fun and/or frustrating in co-op, so it could definitely be an interesting party type game, but as a solo experience it loses its luster and value pretty quickly.
Rating: Soft pass
140.
Fallout: New Vegas (360)
Don't really know why other than I was hurting because of my injury and I really didn't feel like streaming, so I played something I've beaten before. So I sat and played this on my XSX for 10s of hours. I generally have the problem of replaying this game on console to be the lack of mods. I see the things I didn't care for the game about that mods fixed and I can't do anything about it on console, but just to deal, which is unfortunate. It makes me realize that the replay factor is definitely diminished for this game compared to the PC version or even Fallout 4 because of the lack of mods. That said, the world, the systems, the characters, the quests, this game is still amazing.
Rating: Highly recommended.
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