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52 Games Challenge 2025!!!

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bikingjahuty:
89. Super Mario Bros (NES)

I was a Sega kid back in the early and mid 90s, and that was despite getting an SNES towards the end of that console's life (I think I got it for my birthday in 1995...it was around then). One console I played quite a bit, but wouldn't own until well after Nintendo stopped supporting it was the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Many of my friends, neighbors, and relatives had NES consoles when I was younger and because of them, I got to experience a decent chunk of the NES' most iconic games as a kid. While all their NES collections were different, one staple of every single one was a Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge. Literally, they all had this game and because of that, I got to play a lot of Super Mario Bros as a youngster. However, one almost embarrassing reality I've lived with for nearly four decades of my life is I've never actually beat Super Mario Bros. I decided to change that this afternoon. I also want to mention I only used warp pipes to get to worlds I already beat all the way through; I wasn't skipping over 75% of the game just so I could scratch this one off quickly. I really wanted to experience the full game from start to finish and say I beat what is possibly the most iconic video game ever made.


I wasn't alive when Super Mario Bros first hit the scene, but I have to imagine how much it blew people's minds in the mid 80s. Going from Atari and Intellivision to the Super Mario Bros had to be similar to how I felt the first time playing Super Mario 64 in the mid-90s. And unlike those old late 70s and early 80s home consoles and their games, Super Mario Bros is still a game that's enjoyable and fun to go back and play. Visually, there was almost nothing that could beat it, even if it seems fairly plain by modern platformer standards. There are a fair amount of levels that look very similar to others, but again, in the mid 80s, this game was way ahead of practically everything else in terms of visuals, including those repetetive stages.


The music is also still excellent, with certain tracks from this game burned firmly in my brain since I was in elementary school.


Perhaps the only things that really can be faulted with this game is its gameplay, which while not perfect, is still pretty damn good. My main grip with Super Mario Bros' gameplay is how slippery it can feel, particularly when running. It's so easy to accidentally run into an enemy or off into a bottomless pit on accident. Another issue I have is with the more technical platforming sections which require you to do a bit of Dpad rocking to ensure you don't fall to your death. This is also true of jumping on enemies, which I found myself messing up more times than I'd like to admit. There are also some really annoying stages in the last two worlds that tested my patience more than the rest of the game combined. But they are definitely beatable and once you do, you feel like a champion.


Super Mario Bros is about as must play a video game as they come. While there are a decent amount of retro 2D platformers I enjoy more, including other Mario games, it's just such an iconic and still highly relevant game that I feel like I could recommend it to nearly anyone who calls themselves a gamer. This game is a classic if there ever was one, and I am so glad I finally beat it. (8/23/25) [37/50]

bikingjahuty:
90. Kizuna Encounter: Super Tag Battle (PS4)

I've made it no secret over the years that I adore SNK, particularly their work during the 1990s and the 2000s. Even up to today, they still regularly release gold (mostly), but the majority of my fondness for them revolves around games made during the aforementioned time period. I've played nearly all of SNK's biggest fighting game titles, mostly from their flagship franchises like King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, and Fatal Fury. But in recent years I've tried branching out more to play some of their lessor known and more obscure fighting games that never really took off. One that I've been meaning to try out of ages is Kizuna Encounter: Super Tag Battle.


My main association with Kizuna Encounter is it's AES releases absolutely bonkers price (think NWC prices and you're looking at similar amounts for an authentic CIB copy of this game). Luckily there are various other means of playing this game, including on the PS4 which is how I played this game. I have to say, there is a lot to like about this Kizuna Encounter, however at the same time I kind of understand how this game slipped so far into obscurity. As the full title of the game suggests, the core mechanic in this game is it's tag team mechanic which requires you to periodically swap in your partner character so the character you were just playing as can rest for a moment. The first player to have one of their fighters get KO'ed loses. Adding even more to this gameplay mechanic is you can only tag in and out when you're right next to your other fighter on screen, which creates a pretty dynamic risk/reward system for trying to control where you and your opponent are at all times. Other than that, the controls and fighting system in this game feel pretty similar to something like Samurai Showdown where you can temporarily disarm your enemy in combat. Unfortunately, Kizuna Encounter falls short of most Samurai Shodown titles, and just many other 2D fighting games from the mid 90s period.


The central tag mechanic should work flawlessly and be relatively easy to execute, however I found it to be a bit stiff and unresponsive at times. Even when I was right next to my teammate and the Tag icon was flashing to indicate I could tag the other character in, it sometimes refused to respond. Maybe I just needed to get the hang of it more, but through several play throughs I just couldn't get it right. Of course, this resulted in me losing more times than I would have liked. Pulling off special moves is fairly easy to get the hang of in Kizuna Encounter, however I could not for the life of me pull a Super off. In fact, I wondered this game even had them until my CPU opponent pulled one off against me about 15-minutes into me playing this game. I looked up how to execute as Super with various characters, but just couldn't do it. I'd like to believe I'd eventually be able to figure it out, but my main issue is with only a few exceptions across SNK's fighting game library, I typically am able to figure out Supers fairly easily and pull them off with little effort with a bit of practice. Not this game unfortunately. It makes me wonder if my difficulty with the tag mechanic and the supers may be related to control issues that are baked into this game, but regardless, the game is still highly playable and mostly satisfying for the most part.


One other grip I have, which straddles the line between the game's presentation and its gameplay, is the lack of selectable characters. There are 10 in total, which is pretty small even for 1996 when this game came out. On top of that, one of the characters is more or less a reskin with a slightly different move set, and the overall character design of 2/3 of the fighters isn't great either. When I see KOF 97's roster, or Fatal Fury 3, I see a ton of interesting, fun characters I want to try out. But this game mostly had me gravitating towards the same 3 or 4 character for every match. Even more limited than the playable characters are the very sparse amount of stages to fight in. WHile each stage does have different variations such as a night and day version, it's still the same stage. Luckily the art style in those stages is fairly good, albeit a bit more static looking than I would like. Compare them to levels in other SNK fighting games released in 1996 and you'll quickly see what I mean.


Kizuna Encounter's audio is pretty good for the most part. While there aren't any tracks that really caught my ear while playing, they all definitely sound right at home with SNK's other musical works from the mid 90s, which will always be a huge win in my book. There are also a lot of meaty sound effects when you hit your opponent or pull off a special move. And of course, each character is voice acted with limited lines as well. I don't have any real complaints about the audio other than it may be a bit too generic to really make any different in helping this game standout at all.


Overall, Kizuna Encounter: Super Tag Battle is a mostly fun, albeit fairly flawed and forgettable fighting game. Even just on the Neo Geo platform, it had so much competition in its genre that I wouldn't blame anyone, myself included, for choosing a game like King of Fighters 96 or Real Bout, Fatal Fury Special over this game. On top of that, there just isn't enough substance in this game beyond a fairly neat tag team mechanic to really draw player's in. Beyond a fun, off the beaten path distraction or curiosity, you're not necessarily missing much if you never get around to playing Kizuna Encounter. But if you can play it ever, maybe just check out out for a bit. (8/24/25) [30/50]

telly:
Game 19 - Silent Hill Origins (PS2) - 8 Hours

Up until this point I had always accepted the prevailing opinion on the Internet that any Silent Hill game after 4 is not worth playing. And because a lot of them have become expensive, I just haven’t bothered with them. Now that I have the ability to play all of them (outside of Book of Memories) my intention is to form my own opinion about these games rather than just repeat what has been told to me from others.

So we start this journey with Silent Hill Origins: a prequel to the first game. While this game certainly has flaws, it really isn't as bad as I was led to believe. Let's start with some of the things that I liked. I absolutely loved the return to heavy exploration of the town that was missing from Silent Hill 3 and 4. I also really enjoyed the stamina mechanic because it adds a layer of strategy when you're navigating the town, although as a mechanic it's not coded very well and it doesn't really matter so much when you’re indoors. I think the visuals and audio are still great; it feels like a similar in style to previous Silent Hill games, even though it came out on the PSP.

As far as gameplay things that I didn't like I was disappointed to see that the same control scheme and camera are similar if not identical to Silent Hill 4 because this game returns to a more cramped claustrophobic level design like in Silent Hill 1. The constantly changing camera angles really screw with your movement and it became very frustrating. This game is also incredibly dark. Not in the sense of themes or atmosphere. I mean literally so dark you can’t see anything even with the flashlight on. It made exploration and overall appreciation of the level and art design (which I think is good) much more difficult.

Another aspect where I felt mixed on was the breakable weapons. To me the issue isn't the fact that your character can carry 50 to 60 different large items on their person, because the fact is that all the protagonists have always carried unlimited quantities of weapons and items (with the exception Silent Hill 4). To me the breakable weapons added additional tedium because you're constantly swapping weapons in and out as they break, and the fragility of some of them felt a little immersion breaking (haha). Like it didn't make sense to me that a sledgehammer would disintegrate after five or six hits, but Travis can punch monsters in the face 50 times over and not even break a finger. The reality that you spend a lot of combat literally slapping monsters in the face felt kind of silly to me. And it ruins the balance between the melee weapons in previous games, which had unlimited use, but you had to get close to enemies, as compared to the firearms which you can use at range yet have limited ammo.

Silent Hill Origins marks the turning point in the series where changes and retcons were made to the lore, story, and nature of the town and nightmare, that a lot of fans were not happy with. In this game there are two clearly demarcated worlds: the normal town and the nightmare world which is now called the “Other World”. And Travis can move freely between these worlds using mirrors. While I don't hate this concept from a puzzle/exploration perspective, it's a major departure from how the nightmare world was presented in previous games, in which everything is all one world/reality rather than two distinct worlds/realities. In addition, the burning of Alessa in a ritualistic sacrifice (as first depicted in the movie) is also not the original intention and story of the first game. In fact this game borrows a lot of its enemy design, character design, and themes from the movie and from Silent Hill 2 in addition to SH 1.

The biggest disappointment for me was the use of the characters and storytelling. So much of the game is devoted to exploring Travis’s past (which again borrows heavily from SH2), and with so much buildup it was frustrating to see how little Travis actually reacts to anything regarding what he is experiencing. Painfully little is about the town and origins of the nightmare, which is what I feel like a prequel should be about. I started this game with very high hopes that these ideas would be explored. For example, what was the town like before the spiritual power became perverted? What were the lives of the characters from SH1 like before the nightmare and how are they actively grappling with the ongoing changes to their existence? Maybe there are some new characters that disappear BECAUSE of the nightmare that we don’t get to see at all in SH1. None of these themes are touched on, and any interaction Travis has with the characters from SH1 is so laughably vapid it honestly hurts. There’s a little bit about the Flauros (albeit contradictory to its nature as depicted in SH1), and some information about the soul splitting (which implies that 3 versions of Alessa exist instead of 2 and so doesn’t make sense either). The rest of the game’s cult-related information in the story is just repeated from SH1. So much wasted potential there.

I really think that from a storytelling aspect a prequel to the first game would really be an interesting way to add to the world of Silent Hill, and so I hope they revisit this concept some day. Origins just doesn’t deliver any new ideas, and is more interested in retreading Silent Hill 2 but in a less interesting and fulfilling way. However, I still enjoyed this game a lot more than I thought I would.

dhaabi:

--- Quote from: telly on August 25, 2025, 08:19:44 am ---I really think that from a storytelling aspect a prequel to the first game would really be an interesting way to add to the world of Silent Hill, and so I hope they revisit this concept some day.
--- End quote ---

I feel like some sort of explanation will be explored in Silent Hill f considering it takes place during the 1960s, but it won't be in the ways you'd probably prefer it to (unless I'm mistaken.) There are narrative choices previously established in Silent Hill: The Short Message that seem to be taking the franchise into a different direction which explains f's Japanese setting, for better or for worse. Regardless, maybe some day there will be a more direct prequel to Silent Hill, although I think I may prefer not having all the information.

Cartagia:
Got the Platinum on Spider-Man 2 last week.  Just an absolute blast of a game to play.  The story is a bit weaker than the previous PlayStation Spidey games, but more than made up for by general characterization and just how fun it is to swing around New York and beat up goons.

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