Choro-Q High Grade 2 (a.k.a. Road Trip or Road Trip Adventure) for the PS2.

Just one more in a very long line of low-budget tie-in video games for a popular line of toy vehicles for children. Most western reviewers try to play it for the racing (which I admit is buggy and middling at best) and dismiss it as trash.

But it’s not about the racing. The racing is incidental; just a bit of action to break up the rest of the game and give you an overall goal to aim for. The real game is exploring a huge open world, meeting hundreds of NPCs, getting involved in their stories, solving mysteries, and digging up every last collectible in the game.

Enter the matrix was fun as hell, at least the first mission with all the bullet time, kung-fu and acrobatics. It wasn’t a good game, but it was everything I needed from a Matrix spinoff

Kane and Lynch!

I liked it way more than Gears of War, which was also a 2 player coop cover shooter released around the same time.

I just really liked the banter, the characters, the setting, the way that you could see how one of the characters was crazy because when you play coop as him he sees different things.

Loved every second of it when I played it, even in single player.

The Matrix Online. It was not a very good game mechanically, but the community and the monolith employees that would log on to role play major characters was the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games in my life.

Hmm, I guess I’ll go with Barbie Explorer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Petz Sports. Also arguably Ostrich Runner because it’s unfinished/unpolished in some places: particularly I don’t know how the final level is meant to be played because it ends on its own without the player really doing anything. I played those as a kid so I was less critical back then.
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Clive Barker’s Jericho

It’s janky af but it has great atmosphere.

Far Cry 2.

The game is fundamentally broken in a way that mods apparently can’t even fix. The enemy militia checkpoints instantly fully respawn as soon as you trip an invisible trigger. It makes combat with them pointless, which means getting stuck in a firefight with a checkpoint tedious.

The weapon degradation feature is way overtuned to cause some weapons to start visibly rusting from shot to shot.

These two aspects turn the game into a slog. Not even in a way that makes it immersive and survivalist, but immersion breakingly frustrating.

It’s a shame because the game was so ambitious. The game having a mechanic where a player at 0 health can get randomly saved if they befriended an NPC which will drag them to safety is really cool. The fire spreading everywhere was visually and tactically great. The malaria bouts were controversial, but I think they were a good way to increase the feeling of survival and desperation. There’s a lot good with a bleak, serious, and grounded Far Cry game but it just missed the mark in all the most impossible to ignore ways.

‘Far Cry 2 (2)’ would be amazing.

Bear with me…

Megaman legends 2

Silly kids game, lots of fun, early dungeon crawling, but they snuck in heavy philosophy.

There is a scene where the protagonist is recalling long forgotten memories. The last living human, in luxury, in extravagance, in exactly what techbros want today but actually achieved here, has a perfect system, a perfect world, serving his every whim. A world without poverty, disease, suffering.

And he is lonely.

He befriends a bot in this system charged with keeping order. Basically a cop in this world. But he gives him special privileges to be able to “think” in ways the others are restricted from. This one is special. He literally creates a friend.

Then he uses the incredible technological prowess to recreate suffering.

He creates a synthetic recreation of humans, designed to be vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to suffering. They are subject to pressures that simply delay their deaths. And through doing so they achieve meaning and happiness. They exist.

The master watches them, like fish in an aquarium, for generations. Eventually, he goes down to earth to fully experience them. Thousands of years of disease free living have basically robbed this last human of an immune system. He is vulnerable there. No force in the universe can take him out. Man has become god. And yet, he goes down there anyway.

To experience the smell of a dinner bearing prepared.

He dies. Before he does, he released the bot that brought him down to earth from the rules of the system that governed him and told him to burn it all down. Perfection was not a remedy, it was a curse. And then he dies as the bot holds him in his hands, watching him fade away.

This was a game for children. And I understood way too much of it.

Starbound is kind of like Terraria in space, but with a worse gameplay loop, worse characters, and worse bosses, but I did like gentrifying the cosmos.

I played all the 16 bit Phantasy star games when i was a kid. Phantasy star 3 is considered to be the black sheep of the series but it is the one that stuck with me the most, something about the music and atmosphere, and odd take on scifi fantasy it portrays.

The first Witcher game. I adored it. Janky controls, weird plot holes, subpar graphics. But oh man - the environments, the ambiance, and the dialogue absolutely slap.

Two Worlds and Two Worlds 2 The first one was advertised as the “Oblivion killer”. Which is hilarious, because of how janky bug ridden pile of code it is. Yet I love it. I could create such broken OP characters, which could one shot bosses.

The second one got a bit better production quality, but its still a broken mess. Love it.

Ultima 3 Exodus for the NES. Few games incentivize you to wait to level up as much as this one does, not to mention the drudgery.

Stretching the definition of “bad”, perhaps, I say Far Cry 4/5.

It’s the classic game with a map full of repetitive quests: go there and kill that guy, liberate the outpost, climb the tower, etc. It should have basically 0 replayability value, and yet sometimes I just need to switch off my brain and mindlessly do one quest after the other.

Earth Defense Force is a terrible looking game with an even worse premise and is fun as hell.