Recent reviews by Marginal

Stampede: Racing Royale is an interesting take on the kart racer. 60 player battle royale somewhat reminsant of F Zero 99.

The tracks look great, and there's plenty or route variety. My main issue is with so many other racers, ot can be difficult to see the track at the start of a set of races. Runs around 450fps on my 4080, so it's not too heady on most hardware I'd imagine.

Lots of F2P things to earn etc, but you thankfully don't have to pay attention to them to have a good time.

Double Dragon Advance is the best Double Dragon game ever made. If ArcSys was smart, they'd iterate on this for any future sequels.

It's the pinnacle of sandbox brawlers. Freeform combo systems without a reliance on canned dial a combos (which never work well in games vs mobs) , environmental interaction/manipulation, and enemy behavior changing up so that no run is the same, and you can get them to take each other out means the game is fresh across countless replays.

Add in the survival mode, and there's tons of gameplay to be wrung out of this game.

In terms of the overall package, it's still a GBA game at the end of the day, but you can bump up the resolution to 1080p and add in scanline options to take the edge off some of those giant pixels. Minor quibble on these options for me is the game wasn't designed for a CRT, rather a dim LCD panel, so an overlay that better approximated the true design intent behind the game would be nice as well. Three aspect ratio options are offered with one of them being fill meaning there's only two useful options.

Audio options are weird. You can opt to crush the highs or the lows if you want. (Simulating covering the GBA speaker with the palm of your hand or something?) The enhance audio option is very welcome however since the base GBA audio is on the scratchy side.

In all, its a functional albeit spartan package supporting an excellent game that's well worth getting if you like beat 'em ups at all. Note: As of the time of this review, the game runs at an uncapped frame rate, so you will have to cap the frame rate to 60fps if your monitor has a refresh rate higher than 60hz. Annoying, but fixable with quick tweaks in your respective GPU's control panel.

More an interactive documentary on Atari's history than simply a collection of games, this makes for a fascinating read if you have an interest in gaming history.

The games cover a wide chunk of the company's lifespan for better or worse. There are a lot of big games, but some notables are missing like S.T.U.N. Runner, and Hard Drivin'. (Perhaps I'm mistaken and those ended up with Williams?) Jaguar missing licensed games like AVP isn't shocking, but titles like Super Burnout and Ultra Vortek would've been welcome in lieu of partial games like Club Drive.

Emulation seems fairly good to me. No noticeable lag across the various systems. Some kind of option to upscale the 3d games would've been welcome as would 4k support in general. (Maxes out at 1080) Save states are also supported.

In all a very nice package.

It seems like a charming remake. Offers some nice frame rate options, nice graphics and the music's good. Great playing this in English finally.

Solid evolution of the Streets of Rage formula. Good music and sound effects. The enemy AI is clever enough to keep you paying attention, and the stage variety is great. Graphics had me somewhat concerned in the prerelease, but the game really does look amazing in motion.

When you get into the combo system, it flows really nicely. Each character has a unique feel and you feel really in control when things are going right. I'll have to try muti-player at some point because I want to see how these differing styles compliment each other.

The only downside for me is it's too long. What a problem to have. Though I have a feeling upping my skills will help resolve that issue.

I dislike this game.

Why?

At its core, this game has one level that just repeats over and over. There's no variety. Bosses all do the exact same thing. Every time I reach the "this is where we roll stuff at you" part in every level my soul dies a bit more. Enemy variety is rather weak, and you have little incentive to interact with the stages or really, think at all.

Oh it mixes it up with weird driving and flying sequences. Rah.

Then it vomits up a boss gauntlet. Oh wow. Yes. Let's chug through the same fight multiple times in a row! And there's no checkpoints? AWESOME! Yay. I get to knock down a bigger enemy down, dodge its magic AOE counter to keep you from pressuring the boss if it gets knocked down, then I get to counter some annoying spinning attack that they'll invariably use to move towards you while you slowly clomp away. Whee!

The other option is to trigger your Rage Mode. Then you can easily curbstomp the bosses since you're basically invincible and don't have to care about the patterns at all! Neither option is especially satisfying. Bosses are either really annoying or cakewalks depending on your approach.

All that leaves is the story which is awful and the over long cut scenes that slowly up that 80's edgelord cheese. Makes it feel like Commando with none of the charm.

If you want a solid beat'em up, get Fight N Rage. If you want a beat 'em up that makes Fighting Force look exciting, buy this.

This game's amazing. The way it won't launch and gives me "Couldn't start CreateProcess returned 2e4." Best game ever.

Edit: I did manage to get it running. I had to disable DAP, turn off my anti virus, and move the game to my C drive, but it finally worked.

Until it... randomly stopped again. At that point it just started crashing at launch. I couldn't get to the splash screen. Steam would say "running" then nothing. It'd fizzle out.

I'm not sure what caused that, some graphics driver thing or what because the game randomly came back after two weeks of doing jack all. No way I'm buying DLC for a game I can only open sporadically.