January:
February:
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December:
159)
Rise of the Tomb Raider - Lara's Nightmare (PS4) (DLC)
160)
Titanfall 2 (PS4)
161)
Soul Blade (PSX)
162)
Axiom Verge (PC)
163)
Owlboy (PC)
164)
Nitro Ball (ARC)
165)
Desert Breaker (ARC)
166)
Dead Connection (ARC)
167)
Crystal of Kings (ARC)
168)
Crime Fighters (ARC)
169)
Vendetta (ARC)
170)
Super Contra (ARC)
171)
Contra (ARC)
172)
Sunset Riders (ARC)
173)
Rastan Saga (ARC)
174)
Growl (ARC)
175)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (ARC)
176)
Red Clash (ARC)
177)
Dreaming Sarah (PC)
178)
Crimson Clover WORLD IGNITION (PC)
179)
Shantae: Half-Genie Hero (PS4)
180)
Adventures of Mana (AND)
181)
Double Dragon Advance (GBA)
182)
X-Men: Children of the Atom (ARC)
183)
Double Dragon (ARC)
184)
Double Dragon II: The Revenge (ARC)
185)
The Simpsons (ARC)
186)
Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone (ARC)
Too much talk about
Double Dragon on Talking Time after Aksys announced that they're working on a
Double Dragon 4. It... doesn't look very good. But
DD Advance is
very good. It's bits of the first two games, with an expanded moveset (no, really, even
more moves!), and zero slowdown. It's beautiful.
Stage 4 on the back of the moving truck can die in a fire, though. I seriously burned two continues right there, having only dropped one life in the prior stage to that point. Those blasted suited guys will absolutely destroy you if they get you trapped, plus you still have to contend with getting knocked off the edge.
Still, I recovered and had a continue to spare by the end. Good threat management is key, as always, and the non-disappearing weapons can help even up the cause. Many of the weapons are quite good. The whip is the first one worth holding on to, as is its cousin the morning star. The nunchaku are quite good, although it's got some serious delay in completing the combo, so you have to be careful how you trigger it. The tonfas are a little quicker to knock down, so they prove mighty effective.
Anyway, if you loved
Double Dragon in the arcade, you'll love this. Heck, you might love it even if you didn't. 9/10.
EDIT:
X-Men: Children of the Atom is the game that jump-started the
Vs. series. No, it doesn't have the
Vs. in the title, but it's very much the dashy, super-jumpy gameplay we know and love. My cousin had the quite good PC port of this, and I was pretty good at it then. Apparently, something has changed in the interim, because over the last few days, I've been getting smoked.
Well, two can play at that game. I can cheese with the best of 'em, computer AI. I pulled out Iceman, and chip-damaged a ton of folks to death. That worked great, until I hit Magneto. Magneto is much like M. Bison, full of cheapness with his overpowered super move. The rest you can handle a'ight, but if he lands his shockwave, you're looking at half of your life, gone in a flash.
I quite literally chipped him down enough and ran out the timer in both rounds of my winning run. I took it in the face more times than that, though. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any difficulty settings, either, so I'm assuming it's maxed out. The CPU blocks almost everything to a ridiculous degree, which might be why there's an auto-block option for the player as well... that I didn't use. Not my style.
Anyway, it's down and done. Now I'm going to go look up a video on YouTube and see Magneto mercilessly crushed.
EDIT: Moar
Double Dragon! I don't know if I've ever finished the second arcade game. It's... well, it's not as good, full of all sorts of cheapness that even the first game didn't have. Of course, I was on Hard and not Medium, I discovered, after finishing things up.
DD1 defaults to Medium, and is better for it. I'm not sure if Hard makes a massive difference, but there are enemies in
DD2 that will take off half of your life bar in a single barrage. It's very, very unfair. The NES version is far, far superior.
Also, both games have significant slowdown. I remember playing as a kid, but it didn't have that issue. That's apparently because I was playing a bootleg copy, which runs better than the original release. Go figure! Anyway, I remember beating the original game on two quarters back in the day... although the default lives were jacked up to four, and I don't know what difficulty it was on. Ah well, I still claim it.

EDIT:
The Simpsons arcade game is pretty much a reskinned
TMNT, which makes it pretty great. Been a while since I made a run through it. It may be the only
Simpsons-related thing I actually like.
