14. Gone Home - [7] - 1hr 30 mins

Better than EGTTR... but then again what isn’t with these walking games. Always put it off. Not what I was thinking it would be at all. Yeah it was fine, extra point for being so short.

Edit - special mention for the ambient sound effects. Very good on the surround sound.

Can’t honestly say I thought that much about whether it did or didn’t, but the two main story threads made sense though...

51. Final Fight (Arcade) - 1hr

One of the Grandaddies of the scrolling beat 'em up genre. Very basic in it's move set, but it's just so damn iconic it's hard not to love.

9/10

52. Final Fight 2 (SNES) - 1hr

Shows just how compromised the SNES port of the original was on a 8 Meg cart, the sequel does everything right and is exactly what the original should have been.

A good game but not quite as good as the arcade original.

8/10

53. Final Fight 3 (SNES) - 1hr

By 1996 the genre was on its arse and most people were playing Resident Evil from Capcom or Super Mario 64 on their Nintendo's, it was a relic on release.

Looking at it now though, it's arguably the pick of the bunch, the move set has been widely expanded with Street Fighter style Special and Super moves to boot.

Despite that, it's just lacks a certain something that made the original special.

8/10

My list

Woohoo!

Cheers mate.

112. Horace - Switch (11hrs 52 mins)

Retro home computer inspired platformer that does everything right bar the platforming.  Unfortunately, considering there's a hell of a lot of platforming it does quite a lot wrong.  The truly exquisite cut scenes attempt to pull the wool over your eyes throughout the overlong quest - and they're so good you'll want to let them - but the core mechanics remind me of something you'd find on a randomly selected Amiga demo disk, stretched out over a potentially 20hr campaign.  In terms of character weight, inertia, room design and actual platform hopping it feels like James Pond trying to be Meat Boy, which is a frankly disastrous mix - the controls are too loose for an insta restart screen o' death type, and pretty much all the rooms in this are full o' death.  I'm a huge fan of modern games that take a retro template and tweak/refine rather than completely overhaul (Megaman 11, Monster Boy) but the basics for Horace could barely sustain a focused 4hr quest, let alone the sprawling collect 'em up epic I've been brute forcing myself through for the past week.  The main hook to the movement is the ability to walk on walls, rotating the screen and flipping gravity accordingly.  It's fine for a while, but by 'a while' I mean two or three hours.  Unfortunately it doesn't offer a lot else, so that's what you'll be doing for most of the game.  Nothing seems designed with any sort of care (outside the meticulous story sections and top drawer lookalike characters) to the point where half the rooms felt like proc gen offcuts to me.   The first couple of bosses are okay, but there's only so much okay I can take in a game like this.  Plus, some of the late game guardians are an absolute joke.  Worst final boss ever?  Possibly, and I didn't even lose a life, it was just full capslock shite even without having to swallow sour grapes.  I'll leave it there with the negatives (and I haven't even mentioned the broken shield system) but there's more than a touch of WTAF from me when it comes to the relentless plaudits this game has received since launch.  There are a handful of sections in this that are worse than the cataclysmically bad section that nearly ruined Battletoads for me.  Just quickly then - what have the following got in common: Slime-San, Light Fall, 10 Second Ninja X, Escape Doodland.  Give up?  They're all deep dive flotsam indie platformers I've played that have superior core jumpmans gameplay to Horace.  Slime-San is actually miles better and I rather harshly gave that a [5](!)

On to the good stuff then.  The deft touch ultra specific era-snapshot British nostalgia thing is wonderful.  Insert face value YourReferencesAreOutOfControl.gif, and we're not just talking 'ahaha I member that!' - some of the cut scene gags and exchanges are truly superb.  I guess I didn't beat around the bush in my opening paragraph as I straight up hated the gameplay, but the fact that I'm still glad I played it is testament to how fine the story sections are.  I've never played a platformer for the story and I hope to never do so again, but this serves up a good one.  Pelt the Wrong'un is ultimate form Heimdall minigame and I applaud the hustle.  I enjoyed the dishwashing minigame and the sports arcade cab was legit.  Would happily buy the devs a stout or two and probably try to avoid talking too much about Horace.  Maybe we could have a chat about Button Moon, Bertha and Mr. Ben instead.    

So that's that then.  A terrible platform game punctuated by possibly the best non interactive segments the medium has ever offered. [5]

Nintendo Life 10 too.

Elf might actually like it as he loved Plok iirc and it's a sort of fancypants extra long version of that with a proper story. I think you'd be baffled with it tbh, especially as you described The Splasher as a bit fiddly. The moveset is more limited in Horace but it's fiddly as fuck in places as you'll find yourself sticking to surfaces you don't want to and running the wrong way once the screen flips.

It's not content with being a straight ahead platformer either, it goes a bit Metroidvania in places.

Interested to see what you think of it after a few hours. It's clearly a game plenty of players adore. DS & uncle are sensible chaps too (at least one of them said uncle before end though).

I can think of plenty of games I've found amusing but Horace is probably the only one that's made me belly laugh on multiple occasions. It's not just delightful*, it's very funny too.

*When you're just watching.

Played that with @Moot_Geeza in co-op not long after it came out.

We both enjoyed it, a 6 or 7 sounds about right from what I remember.

Nice!  Imagine it would be more fun in 2 player too.

Kentucky Route Zero (PC) 6/10

Assumed I'd enjoy this one a lot more than I did.  I think my lack of enjoyment comes down to my mindset.  It seems to have a clear vision that is executed perfectly.  There isn't really much to criticise.  Like, I found it too wordy, too meandering, too easily distracted.  WTF was I expecting!

It says a lot that even though I didn't like the words in this game with so many words (by the second act I didn't know what anyone was going on about), there was still a lot to appreciate.  It's such an original, beautifully presented game.  I don't think anything looks or sounds like it.  So much of it's style works.  I love how much care has gone into it.  It's never content to present a scene in a mundane way.  The characters might be simply drawn, but they and the camera are always doing something new and interesting.  For much of the game I was reminded of Mr Plinkett's Star Wars 3 review.  This was the complete opposite of that.  I think Mr Plinkett would like Kentucky Route Zero

[font=Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]"Plinkett : [/font][font=Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]When Anakin pours his heart out to Padme, they're sitting on a couch. When Obi-Wan tells Padme he's gotta go kill Anakin, they're sitting on a couch. When they talk about the assassination plot, they're sitting on a couch. Sitting on a couch, sitting on a couch, talking in a room, sitting at a booth in a diner, talking in "shot, reverse shot", sitting at a table, walking somewhere, walking in a room, walking and talking, standing and talking, standing and talking in a room, talking in an elevator. It's usually just two characters or sometimes three characters, and they're always talking... and sitting."[/font]

It just never runs out of ideas!  It famously was made over a very long stretch of time and it's easy to imagine the team polishing up a scene and thinking of new ways to present its story.

I can easily see this game sitting in my mind over the years as I remember all that good stuff, and hopefully I'll be in a better mind to replay it, take in its story and enjoy it a whole lot more than I did this time.

113. Bloodroots - Switch (4-5hrs)

Mostly enjoyable room/area clearance game that l'll describe as 'arcadelike' because I tend to cling on to outdated terminology. Kill everyone in your path using an assortment of weapons strewn around the area. One hit kills (almost) all, including yourself. It's a rambunctious Hotline Miami type with far looser controls and more scope for staying alive on your wits/reactions rather than well laid plans. You'll plot routes, sure, but it seems easier to tear up your blueprints and change tact completely than in some other games of this type. For the first half the breezy controls work very well, but once things started to get trickier I found myself pining for more precision. It's a balancing act that hasn't quite worked, but the good outweighs the bad; it's mostly fun even when it's threatening to be annoying, and the looseness is part of the charm.

Unfortunately there are numerous performance issues on Switch, certainly undocked, which result in sound drops, character invisibility, framerate craziness, full freezes and many other things that should've been patched by now. It's playable when it works, but overall it would have benefitted from a lot more polish. Much as I enjoyed it I'd recommend one of the big brother versions instead.

It's the right length and probably the correct level of annoying in hindsight, but I can't forgive the final boss, which is definitely my least favourite in living memory. Apart from Horace. Any attack that rains down from above is a misstep here - a certain enemy in the main stages will be everyone's least favourite I suspect - but the way the final guardian's arrows drop onto you during its second form is frankly ridiculous (especially as you're moving in for a third hit and they start peppering the screen faster than you can move). Plus the whole game locks up with a red screen of death if you die on that section too many times. [6] for the Switch version, [7] on consoles (I presume), but there was an [8] in here somewhere. Would play a sequel, cheers for the heads up @JonB.

114. Wheels of Aurelia - Switch (45 mins)

I didn't listen then, either to the reviews or feedback from one or two on here.  It's such a curious concept I've always fancied trying it despite the general consensus, and 89p seemed like a now or never price.  An interactive road trip with dialogue trees and minimal gameplay 'set in the boring Italian 70s'.  Wait, roaring - I misread it, ahaha.  If shocking dialogue (I'm not sure what it's comparable to....a game of consequences played by a group of year 9 drama students, perhaps), appalling caricatures and Weighty Moral Dilemmas are your thing I'd wager you still wouldn't like it.  I've seen two of sixteen endings and one was more than enough.  Amusing for the wrong reasons and only worth a look to see how deluded the developers were.  I'm a fan of a few of these narrative indie efforts but when they fail this spectacularly it's about as bad as gaming gets [2].  Forget Surly Women in a Car and play Burly Men at Sea instead.    

I think Crazy Zen Minigolf got the same score.