my small, vain hope is that the rerelease of beyond good & evil signals some change of fate for BG&E2. what we've repeatedly seen has been a gross homunculus of numerous corporate initiatives grafted together into something wholly unrecognizable from the original game. they so, so desperately need to scrap all that and pare back to something on the scale of prince of persia lost crown

that game shows there's still a beating creative heart inside of ubisoft, it's just being smothered by the ownership's endless obsession with contemporary fads like nft's and AI

Backloggd has this 2014 Replay event going on right now, it’s basically a retrospective GOTY awards thing for all the games now turning a decade old. Seemed like fun so I came up with my own picks, and I challenged myself to pick something different for every category.

Extended thoughts (and honorable mentions) below!

Life is bad right now, but luckily there are goofy arcade cabinets, like Rail Chase 2. One way to justify a rail shooter is to put it on literal tracks for the majority of the game. Your minecart bops around locales, periodically jumping over obstacles, while mowing down enemies alone or with a friend.

The cabinet comes with a "super magical bench seat," where both players can sit next to each other, while being shook around by the hydraulics underneath. As a weird quirk, gameplay isn't controlled with a lightgun, but with a joystick instead. Sure, a full game is only around 20 minutes or so, but what a fun ride it would be.