…levels with mafia brutes, birds making movies, a murder mystery, a vigilante girl with a mustache, morbid nooses that comment about your neck, a horror stealth section that's actually a bit terrifying, and a good vs. bad twist at the end. It's not a hard game. Fun to platinum.

…collect and 40 macguffins to win for beating each level/stage (although you just need 25 to beat the game). What strikes me most about this game is how *weird* it is. You play as young "hat girl" alone on a spaceship, visiting planets to retrieve her scattered time pieces in…

Mini-Review: A Hat in Time (PS4 on PS5 Pro) My son (18) loved this game when he played it recently, and wouldn't let up until I fit a playthrough into my schedule, so here we are. It's a 3D platformer (think Yooka-Laylee, Mario Odyssey, Astro Bot, Psychonauts) with stuff to…

…perfect twist to it. The adventure as a whole is darned near perfect, with well-clued puzzles that are just challenging enough (and fun) without using hints. My only disappointment is with the ending, although it's also perfectly fitting, and watching YouTube explainers helped.

…two in 2023, but never the third game (Curse) or the TellTale series (Tales), which series creator Ron Gilbert wasn't involved in (nor with Escape, the 4th game). This starts out directly answering a question I've had since the ending of the 2nd (LeChuck's Revenge) and puts a…

Mini-Review: Return to Monkey Island (PS5 Pro) At last, I've played through what's probably the conclusion to the Monkey Island point-and-click adventure game saga. I've jumped around through this series, having played the 4th game on PS2 years ago, then remasters of the first…

VGGN Issue #44 collects all 22 of my James Bond 007 game mini-reviews. Also, a depressing Recent Events in light of horrible GTA6 and PlayStation disc news, and XBOX layoffs. Read it: vggpodcast.com/news/vggn-04... Archive: vggpodcast.com/news Get Notified: vggn.eo.page/sub

…crafted with immersive sim-like elements that do allow for "opportunities" (a la Hitman) but also provide multiple solutions to most objectives. There are big all-out gunfights, but also melee, stealth and misdirection. It's a great 007 origin story with twists. I loved it.

…trilogy, but I hoped this would feel more like a continuous story instead of a sequence of missions you pick from a menu, and that it would showcase Bond as a spy, doing spy things (which, to be fair, is also a bit of what Agent 47 does in Hitman). My worries were for nothing. It's…

Mini-Review: 007 - First Light (PS5 Pro) My 007 marathon ends with the recently-crowned king of Bond games, First Light. It's every bit as good as I'd heard. My biggest worry was that it would just be a re-skinned Hitman (both made by IO Interactive). I loved their Hitman WoA…

…all levels, because you can only proceed with a Bronze score, which seems impossible without speed-running levels. Enemies spawn from nowhere. The story is disjointed. Generic "Agent Under Fire" Bond gets swapped for pixelized Pierce Brosnan partway through. I didn't enjoy it.

…feat of engineering. Now, the bad. I had to force myself not to give up. This may be the only game in my 007 marathon I can say that about. Blown up on a TV, it hurt my eyes, but I wouldn't have finished without save-states. For that matter, I needed the cheat code to unlock…

Mini-Review: 007 - NightFire (GBA on Retron5) First, the good. It's a technical marvel that this game is as substantial as it is and runs as well as it does as a first-person shooter for the GameBoy Advance. On a tiny screen, it looks pretty good; kudos to the devs for a true…

…blonde hostages, plant a bomb, and then find the exit to escape before the countdown. It isn't a long game if you make heavy use of save states, but stiff platforming and cheap enemy shots would make it difficult otherwise. It's a fun look at 007's gaming past, but that's all.

…acquisition for my 007 marathon), but somehow never played through a single one of them until yesterday. This one features a pixelized, distorted Timothy Dalton in a four-stage (plus a final boss battle) side-scrolling platformer/shooter where the goal is to rescue several…

Mini-Review: James Bond 007 - The Duel (Sega Genesis on Retron5) I was an Atari/Nintendo kid growing up, so I never owned a Sega system (I had a GameGear for a while as an adult, but I digress). I added a few Genesis games to my collection over the years (this one is a recent…

…it, and back then I might have spent the weeks it would take myself, but that's not me anymore. It ends with the boss escaping. You're supposed to play through again, but sorry, no. I found it fun and very playable with that cheat code and save states, but otherwise, it's hard.

…limit really doesn't lend itself to exploring and slide-puzzle solving (in the first mission). You're probably supposed to fail, maybe make a map, practice, get lucky on the puzzles, and eventually beat the stage to get the password for the next one. I'm sure people have done…

Mini-Review: James Bond Jr (NES on Retron5) 181287 That's the cheat/password to start the game with 99 lives, infinite ammo, and no time limit. Without it, I would have given up in the first stage when I realized that even with save states to undo mistakes, the 45-minute time…

…follow a pattern (slow intro, then some stealth and spy stuff, then fight hordes of enemies, then a boss QTE fist-fight), and it ends unresolved because the entire final level (Skyfall) was DLC that's no longer available (except on Wii U). As my kids like to say, it was "mid".

…(many of the original movie actors' likenesses are here, but I guess they couldn't get Halle Berry for the Die Another Day chapter), but a lot must come from the rush to market (Eurocom was shut down mere weeks later) - a visual downgrade from their prior 007 game, levels that…

Mini-Review: 007 Legends (Xbox 360) This one has a reputation as rushed and unpolished, with an abysmal 45 Metacritic score, and I can see it. I liked it well enough to feel like my time with it wasn't wasted, but there's a lot wrong. It may not all be the developer's fault…

…a tough-as-nails adventure starring "young Bond" and various villains seemingly unique to the cartoon. I used save-states obsessively to finish it, so maybe it's not so tough with lots of patience and practice. It just doesn't strike me as a game that's worth all that effort.

…blocked it out of my mind. I was in college then, so maybe it makes sense that a cheesy Saturday morning cartoon take on the franchise wouldn't have been on my radar. Anyway, this one alternates between side-scrolling platform/action levels and shoot-'em-up vehicle levels for…

Mini-Review: James Bond Jr (SNES on Retron5) Until recently, I didn't know this game existed, or that there's a game based on the same cartoon for the NES too (which I'll play and mini-review soon). For that matter, I'd never heard of James Bond Jr at all unless I somehow just…

…Pierce Brosnan now); it's the entire cast, including Xenia, Natalya, Alec, Zukovsky and the rest (but sadly, my man Boris the Invincible was nowhere to be seen). There's a stupid difficulty spike in the last level, but otherwise a great adventure that holds up incredibly well.

…dropping in on a guard in the bathroom at the start of the second stage. Teaming up with 006 in the first mission seems like a smart change as well, allowing a little time to bond (no pun intended) before the (spoiler). It isn't just 007 who was recast (Daniel Craig, not…

Mini-Review: 007 - Goldeneye Reloaded (Xbox 360) I seem to remember this game being criticized a lot at the time, but I found very little about it to dislike. It doesn't seem to be a Goldeneye 64 remake; rather, a re-imagining of the original movie with a few nods to the game, like…

…James Bond adventure that brings back driving missions (linear car chase sequences), more mission variety than Treyarch's Quantum of Solace, and a phone-scan feature that aids in stealth and helps 007 play like a spy again. It's action-packed with big set pieces, and I loved it.

…that won't ever be resolved. I followed the story far better than in the trimmed-down DS version I played recently, although it's a significantly different game either way. Bizarre Creations (long-since shuttered by Activision, but known for their racing games) crafted a fun…