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First 50:

51. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III - Switch
52. Star Control Origins: Earth Rising - PC
53. Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX - Switch
54. Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith - PC
55. Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls - PS3
56. Silicon Zeroes - PC
57. Warcraft - PC
58. Serious Sam 3: BFE - PC
59. Wasteland 3 - PC
60. Iron Harvest - PC
61. Serious Sam 3: Jewel of the Nile - PC
62, Homeworld Remastered - PC
63. Homeworld 2 Remastered - PC
64. Offworld Trading Company - PC
65. F-Zero - SNES
66. F-Zero X - N64
67. Gauntlet (2014) - PC
68. Gauntlet Legends - Arcade
69. Halo 3: ODST - PC
70. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - PS4
71. Star Wars Squadrons - PC
72. Serious Sam 4 - PC
73. The Bard's Tale - PC
74. The Bard's Tale II - PC
75. The Bard's Tale III - PC
76. The Bard's Tale IV - PC
77. Outbuddies - Switch
78. Ghostrunner - PC
79. Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict - GG
80. Zombies Ate My Neighbors - SNES
81. Spider-Man: Miles Morales - PS5
82. Demon's Souls - PS5
83. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War - PC
84. Wild Arms 5 - PS2
85. Halo 4 - PC

Halo 4 is the first of the games developed after Bungie parted with Microsoft and starts off a new storyline in the series. It starts to deep deeper into the backstory of the Halo universe, and not necessarily to its benefit in my opinion. Not much is changed gameplay-wise, outside the new enemy faction and its weapons. So the story is the main talking point.

So let's talk that new enemy faction. The Prometheans do serve up something different from the Covenant and the Flood in terms of how you deal with them; the grunts are the dog-like creatures which are aggressive and can climb walls, the elites are the big walking mech-like things which take a lot to put down and aren't nearly as mobile as the Covenant Elites, and then there's a couple of unique wrinkles. One is a long range heavy beam sniper which takes time to charge but is utterly deadly if you don't notice and take cover. The other is a flying enemy that is cowardly but can resurrect enemy elites. The weaponry of this new faction is basically reskinned human weapons, though they do have a Fuel Rod Cannon variant that has secondary explosions. The Covenant also had their weaponry brought a bit more in line with the human weaponry; instead of the plasma rifle they now have an assault-rifle equivalent. As a result things homogenize a bit more, though the Needle Gun still ends up being rather unique. It feels like they dropped the amount of reserve ammo, so you'll spend a lot more time swapping with dead enemies due to their tendency to stagger who carries what.

On the story end I think they ended up feeling like they needed to have another "you must save humanity!" plot and as a consequence overreach. Since Halo 3 ends with the Covenant War being finished they came up with a new galaxy spanning threat, and it comes by resurrecting the Forerunners from the backstory and having them return. Personally, this feels rather backwards looking; instead it would have been more interesting to see humanity take a new place and forge a path with the Covenant as they try to deal with the Flood (since that's still a thing). Instead we get a Covenant splinter (because they don't want to lose those enemy designs) and a guy who was in hibernation for ages and oh god Earth is about to be wiped out again. And the story of this game really requires you to have dived into the supplementary stuff, like getting all the story terminals in previous games and maybe doing some wiki browsing. It's honestly kind of ballsy for them to do so, given the target Halo audience.

Overall it's more Halo; there's nothing terribly new it does from a gameplay perspective. I will point out that it feels like the shortest game so far, though this does mean there is less of that "huh, a few too many rooms" padding that sometimes came up in previous games. They also are more judicious with the vehicle segments; just enough to give you some power fantasy or show off terrain but not so much that you get bored with it.

Partridge Senpai's 2020 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019
* indicates a repeat

1-50

51. Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando (PS2)
52. Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal (PS2)
53. Nier: Automata (PS4)
54. Ratchet: Deadlocked (PS2)
55. Itadaki Street Special (PS2)
56. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (PCE)
57. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
58. Crash Bandicoot (PS1)
59. Nazo Puyo: Aruru No Ruu~ (Game Gear)
60. Jumping Flash! (PS1)
61. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PS1)
62. Crash Team Racing (PS1)
63. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped (PS1)
64. Super Mario Galaxy (Switch)
65. Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time (PS3)
66. Battle Stadium D.O.N. (GC) *
67. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii) *
68. Dracula Densetsu II (GB)
69. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) *
70. Super Mario's Picross (SFC)
71. Castlevania (Famicom)
72. Castlevania (MSX)
73. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES)
74. Castlevania: The Adventure (GB)
75. Castlevania III (Famicom)
76. Super Castlevania IV (SFC) *
77. Castlevania: Bloodlines (MD)
78. Kid Dracula (Famicom)
79. Sonic Adventure (DC)
80. Drakengard (PS2)
81. Pole's Big Adventure (WiiWare)
82. Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PC)
83. Mario's Picross (GB)
84. Sonic Heroes (GC)
85. Drakengard 2 (PS2)
86. NeverDead (PS3)
87. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (PS3)
88. Gain Ground (Genesis)
89. Bonanza Bros. (Genesis)
90. Golden Axe Warrior (Master System)
91. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)
92. Shadow the Hedgehog (PS2)
93. Sonic 3D Blast (Genesis)
94. Mighty Switch Force (3DS)
95. Mighty Switch Force 2 (3DS)
96. Pushmo World (Wii U)
97. Affordable Space Adventures (Wii U)
98. Stretchmo (3DS)

99. Saru Getchu: Million Monkeys (PS2)

This is an Ape Escape game released in 2006 only in Japan, and it's one that I've been after for years. This year wasn't the first time I'd become obsessed with Ape Escape to the point where I tried hunting down as much about it as I could, and the numerous Japan-only PS2 games have always intrigued me. Last month I was FINALLY able to find a copy of Million Monkeys at the resale mall in town for the whopping price of 500 yen, and I snapped it up on the spot. The game doesn't keep playtime, so I reckon I played it for about 25 hours to beat both campaigns on normal mode as well as beat the colosseum mode.

Million Monkeys is what you get when you cross Ape Escape, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, and EDF. The game opens on Japan just as a swarm of interstellar battleships start attacking the planet. Kakeru (aka "Spike" in English, the protagonist of the first Ape Escape game) and his friends are visiting Tokyo to witness the unveiling of a new virtual world system when it occurs, and they see giant gorilla mechs and drop-pods full of machinegun-toting monkeys fall from the battleships overhead. News reports show a helicopter shot of Specter surrounded by some very strange other monkeys on a platform of the ship over Tokyo, revealing to everyone just who's behind this. It just so happens that "everyone" also includes Specter himself! Lounging on an island retreat, some of the monkeys he's brought along with him drag him a TV screen to show him the news bulletin, and he storms off to find out just what's up with this fake Specter who's stolen both his authority and his entire army. That's right. Ape Escape pulls a Sonic Adventure 2 and lets you play as both the good guys AND the (kinda) bad guys XD.

The actual story in the game past the intro is pretty light, but the stages are often prefaced with some sort of cutscene (especially in the second half) is all intermixed with a series of live action cutscenes in between some stages that show an English-language broadcast about the state of the war against the monkeys. It's genuinely like a news broadcast as well, with the newscaster speaking English while a Japanese voice dubs over her (but you can still understand her just fine). It occasionally cuts away to on-site reporting of the war in places from Russia to L.A. to Hamburg to right there in Tokyo, so those parts don't all have English, but just how odd and wacky these cutscenes are is surprisingly import-friendly to English speakers. The live-action stuff is easily one of my favorite things in the game, and as soon as I saw the front line report where the reporter has a banana bomb go off in her hand and cover her and the soldier next to her in bananas and banana peels, I knew this game was gold XD

The gameplay is much more like EDF meets Ape Escape. You don't have any of the "catch X-many monkeys!" levels like the main-line AE games do, and instead you have 31 missions with specific capture targets. Though there ARE technically two campaigns to go through, this is largely a matter of what characters you can use in each. For Kakeru's Episode (as the game calls it), you can pick between the four good guys (Kakeru, Natsumi, the Professor, and even Charu, the green haired girl who gave you mission objectives in AE1). For Specter's Episode, you can pick between Specter and a monkey team. The game does have more characters than that, and the characters even have persistant stats outside of the story mode, but that's really it for the story stuff. There are a handful of CGI cutscenes that are different between the two campaigns, but only one mission out of the 31 is actually different between them.

That said, the way each character plays and the weapons they get access to really does make each playthrough feel quite different. Everyone starts with the same-ish 5 weapons: a net, a melee item, dash boots, remote bombs, and a laser gun. If you're using one of your pre-built characters instead of one of the game-assigned ones, you will get parts at the end of each stage you beat. You can then combine these parts into new weapons, super moves, and cosmetic costumes and each character gets certain weapons in different orders or even weapons that only they can get (or weapons they never CAN get). Even their base equipment operates differently, with Specter's melee weapon being tonfa that hit way faster than Kakeru's bat, and Kakeru's laser gun having a faster rate of fire but less damage than Specter's. I was expecting the second playthrough I did to be a real slog, but it ended up being a really fun challenge to see how I could fare with these new (quite frankly often worse XP) weapons that Kakeru had.

The stages are broken up into a concrete mission objective, and you usually need to fight your way to get there. Sometimes it's as simple as "beat a boss", or even some special puzzle stages in the middle of the game or an escort mission here and there, but mostly it's taking down a target. Sometimes that target is a series of monkeys (usually one group at the halfway point, and then another group at the end), and sometimes it's other enemies or even static objectives. They generally revolve around the same action gameplay of beating up the monkeys to break their armor and then catch them, but these monkeys and their non-monkey enemy allies are TOUGH. This is not a very easy game, even on normal mode. One of the biggest reasons my Specter playthrough was so much easier than my Kakeru one is that he gets the (very good) shotgun much earlier than Kakeru does, and he also has way better special moves. Getting used to how best you should jump, dash, conserve ammo, and try to get in melee attacks when you can is integral to surviving the later half of the game.

The game also curiously doesn't record EVERY monkey you catch, with only a couple dozen specific ones being recorded. Each level has a score counter based on your monkey-catching combos (how many at once in a short period of time), mission completion time, bonus coins picked up in each stage, and health at the end of a mission. I never really felt compelled to go for high scores and you don't get anything for doing them, but it's neat that it's there. There's even a curious crossover with Sony's white cat Taro mascot, and he and his friends are hidden around many stages and you can pick them up on your radar. They're REALLY hard to find, but they're also recorded in the same place that the special monkeys you catch are (even though you only scan them, and not catch them).

The problems the game really has are as equally ignorable as they are omnipresent. The comparison to a game like EDF (or even a Musou game) is very apt, in that if you don't like a silly presentation with tons of enemies to kill, you very well might find even the campy cutscenes not enough of a carrot to warrant dealing with the stick of the only mildly complex combat. The camera can be a bit finicky at times (even though buttons can now activate your weapons, you can still use the right stick to use them, so the camera is entirely operated via the shoulder buttons), but it isn't a huge problem. Aside from that, the game has some pretty significant difficulty curve issues as well as bad character balancing. Some characters like Specter or Pipotron G are WAY more powerful than others due to way more default special moves and better/earlier selections of items. This isn't necessarily a problem, especially for a game where multiplayer isn't the focus, but it's certainly a kind of issue worth mentioning.

There isn't any level grinding in the game, and you really don't ever get much more powerful than you are. There are some side-grade chips you can make for items, but they rarely make you outright more powerful in a really significant way other than making your weapon recharge a bit faster/have more max ammo. This can make the difficulty curve issues way more of a bastard, as the hardest bosses in the game are at missions 15 and 16 (especially the Specter fight on mission 15), and the final boss is a pushover compared to them. The monkeys you have to fight get way harder as you go on, but even at the midpoint, feeling frustrated with how much better the game expects you to be can be an issue. This is also especially true if you're trying to get all the monkeys and not just rush through a stage, as these stages have no checkpoints and if you get a really unlucky combo you can lose a LOT of health really fast. It never gets nearly as bad as say, Drakengard 2, as you can rush through these stages if you were really so inclined, but it can still be a real pain in the butt to lose like 15-20 minutes of progress because the last gauntlet utterly destroyed you.

The game also has a weird system of unlocking characters, as it was done entirely through entering codes you got on their website (back during the time of launch). Despite being a neat marketing gimmick back then, now it just makes it kinda odd that you get nothing at all for completing both campaigns and the arena battle mode, which is just several rounds of you fighting 3 NPCs all with similar powers. It's fun, but ultimately pretty ignorable. The only thing really cool worth mentioning about the colosseum mode is that it reveals the game this game is actually a successor to rather than Ape Escape 3. It's a successor to Ape Escape: Pumped and Primed.

The game's presentation is a mixed bag. It has the aforementioned live action cutscenes, which are incredible and I love them, but the game also entirely lacks subtitles, as I guess Sony just hated deaf people during the first decade of the 2000's with how many of their first party-published games don't have them or have damn-near useless ones. The art style is a bit sharper and lower poly than the other AE PS2 games, and while it does look nice and clean, it was no doubt done to make the game run better (as even AE3 runs terrribly). While this game does get framerate dips, it's never anything horrible. The music is also pretty forgettable, and the game has a weirdly small selection of tracks. SO many missions have the exact same music it makes it feel like the game has like, a dozen total songs in it XD

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Despite all my criticisms, I think this game's pluses heavily outweigh its minuses as far as my taste is concerned. The weird Red Alert-style cutscenes on top of the already really weird story and really solid gameplay make for a whole more than the sum of its parts. It isn't the most import-friendly game in the world (especially in regards to weapon and upgrade management), but it's also not the most impossible import in the world to fumble your way through if you don't know any Japanese at all. Either way, this is probably one of the best Japan-exclusive games I've ever played, and I'm so so happy that I was finally able to track this one down and play through it~.

Where do you folks find the goddamn time?!?!

REPO Man wrote:Where do you folks find the goddamn time?!?!

Behind the couch cushions. You should look back there every once in a while.

I make my time by drinking Baja Blast.

REPO Man wrote:Where do you folks find the goddamn time?!?!

After work instead of watching bad movies. That's the secret to Ack suddenly beating a lot of games this year.

First 70

71. Limbo (Switch)
72. INSIDE (Switch)
73. Electronic Super Joy II (Switch)
74. Super Mario Odyssey (Switch)
75. Haunted Castle (Arcade)
76. Streets of Rage 3 (Genesis)
77. Affordable Space Adventures (Wii U)
78. Phantasy Star III (Genesis)
79. Kirby’s Blowout Blast (3DS)

Continuing my quest to beat every game I’ve started, but haven’t beaten, I knocked out Kirby’s Blowout Blast (a game I started while waiting for my wife to get ready for bed...you make the time where you can, REPO).

It’s a remarkably solid 3D platforming score-chaser. In it, you run around doing normal Kirby stuff and chaining together attacks to get a high score. At the end of each level, you get bonus points for beating the level quickly, not taking damage, etc., and you get a ranking based on your performance. Getting gold/platinum rankings on each level opens up more challenging bonus stages, and there’re remarkably good boss fights every few levels. You can beat the game very quickly (and likely in about an hour), but accessing all of the game’s content takes quite a bit of work (more like three hours). I suspect that getting a platinum ranking in each level would take a lot of practice, but while I liked the game, I didn’t like it THAT much. Accordingly, I was satisfied with gold trophies on all of the levels, and a solid run through the game’s final “secret” level (which culminates in an excellent boss fight). Finally, the game looks stupendous in 3D and makes excellent use of the 3DS’s unique features. Recommended.

Markies' Games Beat List Of 2020!
*Denotes Replay For Completion*

1. Pikmin 2 (GCN)
2. Banjo-Tooie (N64)
3. Contra: Hard Corps (GEN)
4. Super Baseball Simulator 1,000 (SNES)
5. Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers 2 (NES)
6. Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection (PS2)
***7. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (PS2)***
***8. Cruis'N USA (N64)***
9. Arc The Lad Collection (PS1)
10. Halo 2 (XBOX)
11. Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings And The Lost Ocean (GCN)
12. DuckTales 2 (NES)
13. Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm (PS2)
14. Rocket Knight Adventures (GEN)
***15. Skies of Arcadia (SDC)***
16. Dragon Quest V (SNES)
17. Marvel Vs. Capcom (PS1)
***18. Street Fighter II: Special Championship Edition (GEN)***
19. Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II - The Sith Lords (XBOX)
20. Disney's Aladdin (SNES)
21. Flatout 2 (PS2)
22. Mr. Driller (SDC)
23. Blast Corps (N64)
24. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (GCN)
25. Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse (PS2)
26. Super Castlevania IV (SNES)
27. Jet Set Radio Future (XBOX)
28. River City Ransom (NES)
***29. Wild Arms (PS1)***
30. Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love (PS2)
***31. Bad News Baseball (NES)***



Bad News Baseball is probably the best playing baseball game on the NES, which is saying a ton! It is not annoyingly difficult or stupidly easy, but the game is perfect right in the middle. The games are tight and you feel a sense of accomplishment when you beat the game. There is not much there besides a great playing baseball game, but that is great on its own. I do like the Bunny Umpires, being able to play as girls and the unique music for each team to add some variety.

January through November:

December

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Switch)

It's rare that I beat a game so soon after release but there's something about the combination of a license that I love and Warriors gameplay that moves a title to the top of the list for me.

I enjoyed Age of Calamity a lot. It is a dramatic departure from the original Hyrule Warriors, which surprised me given that Koei Tecmo probably could have cashed in on a straight Hyrule Warriors sequel with no issues and at much lower development cost. None of the characters or iterations from Hyrule Warriors (or the Legends and Deluxe expansions) appears in this game, nor does Hyrule Warriors' multiverse spanning plot feature. I'm going out of my way to stress this because even as a BotW tie-in, it wouldn't have been hard to still try to crib in previous completed work the way KT does with the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. As far as Age of Calamity is concerned, the original Hyrule Warriors game never existed.

That even goes for gameplay - gone are all the items from the previous game, the grid like maps with square spaces to fight for control of. There is no fairy system, magic system, marketplace system, adventure mode, legends mode, etc. All characters now use the 4 runes of the Sheikah slate, with the actual execution different for each. This makes the 'items' of the previous game now feel like native extensions of the character move set, like how in a fighting game the same input may produce a projectile from each character but the hit box, speed, range, and angle change for each of them. Because of this, some characters begin to feel like they are perfect for crowd control and others become your monster fighting duelists. The majority of battles allow for multiple characters so you'll begin to have preferred 'teams'.

Coming back to story, Age of Calamity is a great tie-in to Breath of the Wild but it doesn't allow the BotW story to tie it in too much. No spoilers here but the game does take a necessary departure from established lore in order to keep you motivated and engaged. There are equal parts 'a look at what went before' and 'what if?' elements at play. It's necessary and well executed and also not what I wanted while being what I think I needed in order to keep playing. Nintendo and KT seem to understand that many players have a strong connection to the settings, story, and characters presented in BotW and they clearly respect that. Sometimes, too much. For an audience ravenous for any word of BotW2, some expansion of the original game's canon would be welcome. In order to allow the player some agency, the game makes little commitment to that.

Last thing I want to say on my way out - there's been a lot of complaint about framerate but I think this is a YMMV issue, at least for single player. The game seemed to maintain a solid frame rate nearly all of the time that I played, with the exception being some of the larger set-piece battles such as fighting multiple huge, flashy enemies in front of a massive fort in the rain. The game does chug on occasion but it's not nearly as bad as people have made it out to be.

REPO Man wrote:Where do you folks find the goddamn time?!?!

Cocaine.