Being both a person who enjoys games, and is a fan of AEW, I got myself a copy of AEW Fight Forever back when it came out. My short review here: the game played extremely well when you were in the ring, but was very much lacking in terms of things like match types and customization. Overall, I enjoyed it, and wish that AEW would consider making another console game.

An idea that I have had for a new AEW game, and one that a number of people have also had, is for it to not be a wrestling game. AEW is meant to be an alternative, the thing that we all watch because we're sick of WWE's bullshit, having a game attempting to recreate the same yearly WWE 2k entries goes against that. The roster for AEW lends itself well to other genres; imagine an RPG about The Conglomeration, for example. Other wrestling promotions have done this in the past. Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling in Japan had a 1-on-1 fighting game for the Super Famicom, where some of the FMW roster fought against a cyborg that did Taekwondo and a sentient mushroom with boxing gloves. It's not nearly as good as it sounds.

WWE themselves have done this, making a game with their, big sigh, Superstars doing things that aren't wrestling, or Sports Entertaining. The first one that comes to mind is WWF Betrayal on the Game Boy Color, which is a side-scrolling brawler where you fight referees, security guards, and guys with guns shaped like briefcases, all to rescue a kidnapped Stephanie McMahon. Then there is the infamous WWE Crush Hour, a car combat game in the vein of Twisted Metal. Both of these games are fucking dogshit. They both commit the cardinal sin that no licensed game with a unique spin on its property should commit: being boring. Betrayal and Crush Hour are so dull. There's nothing good or bad about either of them. Thoroughly mediocre experiences that don't go far enough with their ideas. The most you can get is a quick chuckle at Triple H doing a shoot Pedigree on a cop armed with a billy club and a stun gun in Betrayal, or wondering if the developers of Crush Hour knew how fucking funny it was to release a game where Jeff Hardy drives a car.

Now we get to Wrestlemania XIX on the Gamecube. On the surface, it looks no different than the number of WWE games on the PS2, back when those games were still good. While it was developed by Yukes, the same company who did all those PS2, as well as AEW Fight Forever (and Hermie Hopperhead!), the game's DNA is more in line with the AKI-developed Nintendo 64 wrestling games, so it is a mechanically different experience here. It plays just fine, nothing really all that wrong with it. Any actual complains would be that the roster is pretty small, and that of everyone in WWE that could've been included, Al Snow is playable. Al Fucking Snow is a playable character in a 2003 video game, during a time when WWE had Shelton Benjamin and goddamn Ultimo Dragon on the payroll. Some crimes can never be forgiven.

Go beyond the surface of Wrestlemania XIX, and you find something unique and interesting. Rather than the usual Season or Story mode, where you get to digitally experience all of Paul Heyman's worst booking ideas in order to unlock a new shirt for Shawn Michaels to wear, there's something new: Revenge mode.

Revenge mode begins with your chosen WWE Superstar (or created character) getting fired by Vince McMahon, and being given your severance pay of getting your fucking ass kicked by his private security. You are then found by Stephanie McMahon who offers you a deal at the titular Revenge: sabotage the upcoming Wrestlemania pay-per-view, and you'll get paid a bunch of money. Unfortunately, you don't sabotage Wrestlemania Tommy Dreamer style, but what you do is good enough. Things like wrecking the construction site where the show will be held (very relevant given the recent Saudi Royal Rumble), destroying merchandise, and destroying the trucks or boats carrying the ring and the staging equipment. As someone who thinks WCW never should have died, how could I not take an opportunity to hurt Vince McMahon?

Revenge mode is something of a pseudo-brawler. You run around in malls and harbors and construction sites, beating up construction workers and rent-a-cops, working your way up to bodyguards and secret agents, all the way up to Vince's personal security, who look like someone's Grappler Baki OC. Of course, other WWE Superstars™️ will be in the mix, which can be funny when you see The Big Show standing side by side with a wild-haired martial artist in a Hannya mask. These characters can all become playable, by the way.

Yukes took a look at how they coded the Royal Rumble match, and came up with a mechanic that carries this entire mode: what if, instead of throwing a wrestling over the top rope, you instead threw off tall buildings to their death.

Throw people into chasms. Throw people into the river. Throw people into oncoming traffic. Throw people through real glass (go cry me a river). In order to defeat Vince McMahon, you have to have to have killed almost as many people as he has. It's such a basic thing, but it's compelling and interesting enough, and it's such a refreshing change of pace from the previously mentioned bad story modes that these games have. Granted, some of these levels have a difficulty curve that can best be described as completely unfair bullshit that requires luck and not spiking your Gamecube down the same deep pit you've sent so many others to die in to complete. Anything that involves climbing, or is set to a difficulty level of 4 or higher will drive you mad. I know this because it drove me mad. There is also a level where Goldberg is completely invincible. Fuck Goldberg, man.

I must also point out that the ending is pretty anticlimactic. You fuck over Wrestlemania, costing WWE millions of dollars. Stephanie McMahon swoops in, suddenly books her own Wrestlemania, where the main event is you versus Vince. You face Vince in a regular old wrestling match, and not a particularly difficult one. Not something cool where you throw him through or off of something. No situation where you kill Vince McMahon, something everyone that isn't a syncophant has wanted to do for decades. For his many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many faults as a disgraceful human being, Vince McMahon is also willing to do ridiculous risks and fuck his own body for the sake of a storyline. He's not so fragile as to say no to being killed in a storyline, especially given that this literally happened a few years later.

All that aside, this one mode is what I want out of wrestling games, and is why I ended up liking this one. Fuck giving me an accurate representation of what happens in the ring; Fire Pro exists for that. Both WWE and AEW have characters that lend themselves to outside ventures. More games that are only tangential to wrestling would be really cool, creative, and could really freshen up a stagnant scene. Come on Tony Khan, the producer of Scribblenauts is literally one of your referees, you're telling me you all can't think outside of the box?

I've said before that I don't think that games age. Or at least, I don't think they "age badly." Nor do I think that you necessarily had to be there at the time to fully understand the cultural context to most games; doesn't matter if it's 1985 or 2025, you can still enjoy Super Mario Brothers without having to understand what game development was like in the 80s. It's like watching a great film after everyone else, or listening to an album that influenced so many of your favorite bands: you'll understand things pretty quickly by absorbing the art, and maybe a few minutes of research at the most. Then you get a game like Gundam Battle Assault 2, which is such a perfect encapsulation of a very specific moment in time, that I feel like most of its appeal lies in having actually been around in that era, and in that particular sub-culture.

GBA2 is a 1-on-1 fighting game based on Mobile Suit Gundam, released in 2002 for the Playstation. The world was all-in on the sixth generation of consoles; not even Capcom were releasing games for it anymore, and here's this little fighting game quietly coming out on a system that rode off into the sunset a year before. This game was made for one specific reason: to capitalize on the western success of Mobile Fighter G Gundam, which had begun airing on Cartoon Network. So now it makes sense as to why it would be a Playstation release and not something put together for the PS2, as it would be quicker to reuse existing code and assets, with most of the development time spent working on adding G Gundam characters to the roster.

While GBA2 was made to promote G Gundam, the roster is a real who's who of all the Gundam series' you were watching on Toonami and Adult Swim. So you would get characters from the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam Wing, War in the Pocket (my favorite Gundam series for the zero of you asking), among others. I mostly bring this up because Anavel Gato is a playable character, which might be the only time Gundam 0083 has ever been remembered in any capacity other than someone bringing up how sweet its opening is.

I mention all of this because, on paper, this game sounds like a cynical cash-in hammered out by tired developers who just wanted to go home. However, this is actually a pretty solid little fighting game. I wouldn't call it a great fighting game, or even the best Gundam fighting game (that honor goes to Endless Duel on the Super Famicom), but it defies the circumstances that would otherwise condemn it to the pits of mediocrity. There are some things that bother me, like my brain not being able to grasp that the game with giant robots has somewhat sluggish movement, as if you're controlling a giant robot. GBA2 also lacks any blockstrings. You go in with a light jab that gets blocked, you cannot follow up with any other move; you simply get pushed back and reset to neutral. That's a weird thing for me, playing a fighting game with no blockstring. Otherwise it's a solid game with a nice roster that kind of makes up for a real lack of modes other than story, arcade, and versus. No training mode is a bummer.

Getting back to my opening paragraph. Gundam Battle Assault 2 is a good game. But what make it stick in my brain so much is how much of a time capsule it is for the late 90s-early 2000s anime boom. This was a game made for an audience during a time when Optimus Prime and a sick hip-hop beat let you know about new episodes of Card Captor Sakura. A time when anime was hitting the mainstream outside of Japan, without having to be rebranded and filed down until there was nothing Asian in it like so much animation in the decades prior. Anime was finally Anime. While there was still censorship for things like graphic violence and anything remotely homosexual, network restrictions eased up a little bit more, showing us a whole new world of animation that had a plot that was more than "buy more toys" (paranthetical aside to acknowledge that anime was also a vehicle to sell toys and model kits, but you would be a damn fool to compare Mobile Suit Gundam to the Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour bullshit we were dealing with before).

Gundam Battle Assault 2 is a game that asks: do you remember having your fucking mind blown every weekday afternoon by Gundam Wing and The Big O? Do you remember how your life would be enriched every Saturday night with a new episode of Cowboy Bebop? Remember all those anime theme songs you downloaded off of Kazaa and played on Winamp, wrapped in a barely comprehensible Ruroni Kenshin skin? Remember when you could still like Ruroni Kenshin? Remember posting on anime forums, reading anime fansites, and quietly taking part in anime roleplaying chat? Remember when you joined an anime club at the age of sixteen because the owner of an anime store just so happened to be standing next to you in line at a tech shop getting your computer fixed up, and he saw your desktop wallpaper was Vash The Stampede? Remember watching the latest fansubs of Haibane Renmei and Gundam Seed in that anime club? Remember when Char Aznable was a skilled Zaku pilot, and not an obnoxious Twitter Check Mark that constantly platforms alt-right hatemongers?

This is a game where you had to have experienced that early anime boom to fully appreciate it. You had to have been enough of a freak to buy a 2002 Playstation game, ignoring literally every other game released that year, and throw it into your PS2 after you and the boys just finished watching Domon and the Shining Gundam kick someone's ass. A niche game for a sub-culture that was very quickly becoming The Culture.

Every so often, a game comes out that ends up defining something. Defines the year it came out. Defines its entire hardware generation. Defines an entire console. Or in the case of Final Fantasy Tactics, defines a genre. A title that will forever be used as the measuring stick for which all subsequent games will be compared to. Any and all strategy RPGs in the years since must face the same trial: is it as good as Final Fantasy Tactics? A genuine, bonafide instant classic in its own time, whose legacy and renown have only grown in the decades since. Tactics, despite being a spin-off, is arguably the best game in the Final Fantasy series, which is saying something, as I believe a wise man once said that it's easier to lead a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to find a bad Final Fantasy game.

Tactics is a great game. It is also a very dangerous one. RPGs keep my attention through two things: their plot, and numbers going up. You watch those numbers go up enough, and there's a reward for it. Maybe you become stronger. Maybe you learn a new ability. Maybe you can use new weapons. Maybe your Pokemon will turn into another Pokemon. There is always something. FFT makes numbers addicting. FFT is the final evolution of the Job system that began in FFIII, and was thought to have been perfected in FFV. Pick a job, learn its skills, then switch to a different job while still being able to use the abilities of the previous one. More numbers means more skills. More numbers means jobs level up. Jobs leveling up means you get more jobs to select.

You can have fighters that cast healing magic, but they can also learn the ninjas' ability to dual-wield, leading to magic using tanks that can hit twice with powerful weapons. Or learn the knights' abilities of breaking enemy equipment, and give it to a chemist, a class that can equip a gun, and now you can leave enemies without the added defense their armor gives them as your frontline moves in to do attacks that will hit harder with all that protection gone, with the Dragoon's ability to ignore the height of level terrain to snipe from the tallest point of the map. Or an Oracle that can deal damage up close with a Bo Staff, with the added ability to use mathematical formulas in order to cast devastating magic with no cost, while being able to counter enemy attacks with other magic spells, even ones you haven't learned yet. The amount of combinations that can break the game and turn your ragtag group of mercenaries into killers is what will take up all of your time. If you're like me, you will double or even triple the length of the game because of all the fucking numbers. And this is just the original Playstation game, I haven't even gotten into the PSP port, with extra jobs to unlock and new characters to use them with.

You spend 30 or more hours of your life, watching your little units become weapons of mass destruction. You search every map for hidden items, stealing rare gear from high level enemies, becoming stronger and stronger.

And none of it fucking matters.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game about a young man named Ramza who very quickly learns what massive privilege he has, and the horrific cost his family charges others in order to keep it. Ramza will eventually draw swords against his own brothers if it means that the downtrodden will have a better life. His sense of justice will cost him his closest friends. He'll be branded a heretic by the church. He will become a fugitive and a pariah in order to expose the massive corruption at the top of society. This is a journey of Ramza doing what he believes is right, to doing what he knows is right. He does all he can, while the government and the church conspire and kill one another in their quest for power. Ramza will slay ancient demons collaborating with this leadership. He will risk life and limb and reputation, throwing away a comfortable life in the name of equality.

It will not matter.

While Ramza destroys the resurrected god behind all this bull shit, the game does not have the cliched ending where everything is fine. No, Ramza defeated an eldritch horror beyond comprehesion, but he could not slay the true evil: that which lies in the heart of man. The government is still corrupt, and they still need to keep a lid on everything that's happened. Ramza is still a wanted fugitive that has disgraced God. He and his sister Alma are forced to flee their home country and go into hiding, truly leaving behind everything they've ever known. The one man that plans to tell the truth about the events of this game is arrested and executed by the state, because Ramza's name and actions are an inconvenience; nobody can know that their country is riddled with corruption and prone to demonic influence. It will only be generations later that Ramza's story can be properly told.

All the work, the fighting, the suffering, the enduring, all for nothing. You don't matter anymore. You don't even exist. Your contributions to the world intentionally kept a secret. We've all heard about people that we were meant to never know. Rebels and activists moved to the fringes of history for a more sanitized history to be told. They might be people in your family tree. Might even be the bitter old person down the street. It sucks. So fucking frustrating to know that people in this world will not get the credit they deserve for a long time, if ever. You wanted to change the world for the better, and this is what you get: hated in your own time, and forgotten about afterwards.

I don't say that Final Fantasy Tactics is meaningless as an insult. I appreciate this ending. There's no big party afterwards where everyone is happy. A war took place, with thousands upon thousands of casualties, and the world needs something to blame, so it picked the man who survived. It's ugly, it makes no sense. Why does someone who did everything right still lose in the end? We, as a species, don't have an answer for this. Even in a realm of Sword and Sorcery, there is still no answer for this. That answer is for us to eventually figure out.

The Dreamcast, Sega's final plea for world peace, was home to the greatest arcade ports of all time: Marvel vs Capcom 2, Ikaruga, Cosmic Smash, Soul Calibur, and many other games that remind me we're in hell and games will never be this good again. But of course, there's the Big One, the game that everyone remembers, even people with only the slightest familiarity with the Dreamcast, even a Vice Presidential hopeful, that game being Crazy Taxi.

Crazy Taxi is a game that I enjoy tremendously. It is also a game that I should be annoyed by, and should not want in my collection. You're a taxi driver who needs to take passengers where they need to go. But because your taxi is Crazy, you get extra fare money for driving recklessly, weaving around oncoming traffic and doing sweet jumps. The whole time, there's a clock ticking down, and the ends when it hits zero. Now, you can add time to the clock by picking up passengers and getting to destinations quickly, but it's never enough, and your time will end. It's what makes Crazy Taxi so fun and addicting. This is a perfectly-paced arcade game designed to be played in short bursts, getting as many points as you can before time runs out, like a PC-Engine caravan shooter without the shooting. Crazy Taxi gives you that "One More Game" urge, because you have to have a better run than your last one before you go to bed, and bedtime was two hours ago. The Dreamcast port adds a new map to drive around in, and some extra mini-games where you do stunts, but it is still ultimately this exciting little experience you'll want to throw in when you're in the mood for a game, but don't feel like putting in the commitment for Shenmue.

The thing about Crazy Taxi, the thing that should make me hate it, is that it is loaded with two things: obnoxious product placement, and music that I do not care for, to put it mildly. Let me start with the music, because I need to talk about this game's soundtrack. It contains four songs from two bands, Bad Religion and The Offspring. I'm pretty ambivalent about Bad Religion. I don't feel strongly about them one way or another. But The Offspring? Oh my fucking god, there are two situations where I will ever willingly listen to The Offspring:

1. When I'm playing Crazy Taxi.
2. If I have a loaded gun pointed to my head.

I hate The Offspring. What a fucking terrible band! The year before Crazy Taxi came out, these motherfuckers committed an audio war crime with the release of their album Americana, inflicting us all with an all-timer contender for worst song ever made, "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)." For what felt like an eternity, you could not escape from that fucking song. It was everywhere: MTV, the radio, you name it. It was even used as a bumper for the ad breaks on Channel 1, the news network we had to watch when we were in school. And when enough time had passed, and you thought you were safe from uno dos tres quatro cinco cinco seis, here comes "Weird" Al Yankovich with his new parody album, which includes the song, "Pretty Fly (For A Rabbi)," and HERE WE GO AGAIN.

There's a little more to Crazy Taxi than flying around the streets to the sounds of an ill-fitting Offspring song about generational abuse that, much like how my cab veers in and out of busy traffic, veers in and out of victim-blaming single mothers. Crazy Taxi has a ton of flagrant, obnoxious product placement. You pick up a fare: "take me to Kentucky Fried Chicken!" "Take me to Tower Records!" "Take me to The Original Levi's®️ Store!" Real human beings went into a recording booth and were paid money to say, "Take me to The Original Levi's®️ Store!" The kind of eye-rolling cringe that's like an unironic  Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour. Unlike the Chocobots, I cannot put down this entertaining Sega product, despite my dislike of being advertised to. You can argue that this was done to make the city you drive around in more "real," except that there's nothing particularly real about Crazy Taxi; this isn't exactly a Yakuza game, which is set in a real city with real businesses.

Over the years, Crazy Taxi has been re-released. Versions without the advertisements and a new soundtrack. Fundamentally, it's the same game. Yet, it is always a lesser experience than the original. Why is it that I need to play the version of Crazy Taxi with the senseless ads and music that I hate? A part of me worries that I'm afflicted by a horrible condition that has plagued society for far too long: Irony. Sega games of this era were such genuine, well-meaning creations, and I would feel guilty if I could only enjoy one of these games because it was lame. I've been wracking my brain for longer than I'd like to admit, trying to figure out exactly why I only care about the version of Crazy Taxi with the ads and the music I hate.

But maybe it isn't irony? Crazy Taxi is an incredibly fun game, with a personality reminiscent of an awkward pre-adolescent. You know, listening to music on the radio, which means that it must be good because it's on the radio, even though it isn't actually any good. Focusing on brand names as a way of forging your own identity; maybe you'll become popular if you show up to school wearing a hot new pair of Original Levi's®️. You haven't quite found yourself yet. You're not quite the moody Mall Goth that listens to music your parents hate. You haven't replaced your closet with an all-black wardrobe. You're finding your place in the world. Crazy Taxi feels like the digital equivalent of that, and maybe that's why it has managed to stick with me and so many others in a way that goes beyond, "here is a fun game where you drive fast."

The year 2000. A pretty wild time for games, looking back. A year full of changes, with a new generation emerging, while the previous one was still going strong. The Playstation 2 had come out, while the original Playstation showed no signs of slowing down. Sega still believed in the Dreamcast. The Nintendo 64 would have an incredibly strong final year, before passing the torch to the Gamecube. The Game Boy had a new lease on life thanks to the runaway success of Pokemon, and the upcoming release of Gold and Silver would do real well for the Game Boy Color. Arcades hadn't died yet. The Wonderswan was doing alright, if you were an importer. The Neo Geo Pocket would grace us with its all too short lifespan. Hell, even the Saturn got one final official release that year (Final Fight Revenge)! Some of the absolute best games ever made, spread out across every console, handheld, and PC, all in one year.

With such a massive avalanche of quality, so, so many great games found themselves unfortunately lost in the shuffle. A lot of titles that didn't really get their due at the time, only being appreciated long after their release. I would like to talk about one of those games.

In this great year for games and little else, Polygon Magic released the one-on-one fighting game, Slap Happy Rhythm Busters. Polygon Magic might not be a name that you immediately recognize, but you've probably played/suffered through their work. They had previously released the comedy mini-game compilation Incredible Crisis, as well as...Galerians. I have many, many, many thoughts about Galerians, but that will have to wait for another, much more negative, time. They had also released two fighting games previously: Fighter's Impact, which was a creative, experimental fighter that was ultimately plagued by awkward inputs and incredibly cheap CPU. Then Polygon Magic would reskin Fighter's Impact for a western release under the name Vs. Vs also had a number of mechanical changes that took flawed yet unique Fighter's Impact and turned it into what might be the worst fucking fighting game I have ever played. A truly wreteched experience I had with Vs.

The first thing you probably noticed about Slap Happy Rhythm Busters is how cool it looks. The cel-shaded graphics look amazing, and fit real well with a cast of characters who all have unique, sometimes exaggerated porportions. Fighting in front of colorful cityscapes full of buildings covered in neon signage that curve and bend like a cartoon, or candy-colored corner stores that look like they would be the hangout of teenagers you would see in an issue of FRUiTS or Popeye magazine, all while listening to some hard hitting EDM. This is a game that does a great job of nailing that turn-of-the-millenium Shibuya style that other games like Space Channel 5, Mr. Driller, and the big one, Jet Set Radio were all great examples of, and unfortunately hasn't really been seen since outside of The World Ends With You. It's a shame, because it's a very cool look that blended the past and the hypothetical future that spreads a message of hope and equality. Then again, it's not 2000 anymore, and the world became a much different and stupider place since, so maybe that style can never come back. At least it can't come back the same way.

The other big thing about Slap Happy Rhythm Busters is that the game is really fucking good. The kind of good that I'm surprised doesn't have a side tournament at EVO. I was interested in playing the game solely due to how it looked, but seeing how technical it is made me stick around. SHRB liberally borrows from other fighters: its standard for combos comes from Darkstalkers' "Magic Series," or Guilty Gear's "Gatlings." One particular character, Euri, even replicates the air dashing made famous by Morrigan. There's wall bounces. There's juggles. There's dash cancels. There's short hops. There's fucking short hops! Short hops more or less only exist in SNK games! There are all these pre-existing mechanics that are used really well, and aren't haphazard like they probably would be in a different game.

But it's not all blatant lifting, as SHRB has two very unique things that separate it from other fighters. One, in lieu of a gauge for guard breaking or getting stunned, the meter under your health is for something new: once you fill up your opponents' meter, they'll begin to flash for a few seconds. During this flash, the next hit they receive will be completely unblockable, allowing for all sorts of fun combos. However, this is not a free hit, as they can still move and attack the whole time.

The other, much bigger mechanic added is that every character has a level 3 super that turns the game into a rhythm game. Just match button presses to the on-screen notes to do more damage, and if you do enough damage, you get a fun little cutscene at the end. The opponent can also mash buttons to add extra notes to throw you off your timing to try and mitigate damage, as well.

I love that this is a fighting game that has no problem wearing its influences on its sleeve, putting its own spin on all of them, and having a real heart and soul that makes the game timeless. A digital celebration of the fighting game genre, and also a celebration of youth culture. That perfect storm of style and substance that is doomed to obscurity due to a regional-only release at a time when seemingly every game company on Earth was firing on all cylinders. Luckily, the torch of "small, but inspired fighting games with a unique look" continues to be carried by games like Melty Blood and Ultra Fight Da! Kyanta 2.

Oh, and there's a pretty nasty infinite combo you can do with Frosty. They should probably ban that guy from tournament play.