scramble was the first of this articles games i played, it's a super old and influential shmup that's basically the origin point of where the genre is now, it was the first one to kind-of have levels and it was also a very early example of a scrolling shooter, really differenciating itself from all the invaders clones that came before, sure it didn't have the influence and grip on games that something like xevius did but it's earned its place in history very well. the game itself maybe doesn't play as well? it's much too difficult for me, it has that xevius style multiple shooting types with the gun and the ground bomb and you do have a few lives but near the end it demands actual pixel perfect precision that would have taken me days to beat if i didnt use save states, with save states its maybe half an hour long and if you're good at it you can do a full run in 10 mins, but it's just too much for me, but i respect it a lot for what it is and what it did. the games been ported to a few different systems like the vectrex, which is the reccomended platform if you can do that just because its the vectrex but realistically you'll want to go for one of the more modern ports, the version in the arcade classics collection for switch works great with its save states so i'd reccomend that mostly, but it's also on the GBA konami arcade advanced set as an unlockable with the konami code as well as a weirdo port to the xbox 360s game room if you want the best-worst way to play it.

warlander is a free to play siege based hack and slash i randomly downloaded when i was board and waiting for other larger games to update, its basically a huge siege sim where you and up to 100 players kinda, rush each others bases and you got like classes with different skills and loadouts and it's all kind of basic, but pretty well made for what it is, the scale of the battles is really impressive and theres so many ways to do objectives between using ladders and stealth or just bashing down gates with like 10 other people that there's real strategy you can use, especially in the huge 100 player mode, but even the smaller 2 team mode has a lot of variety to it, but it's also kind of flawed, it feels very pay to win with how the gear and moveset systems work and it's so dead that its mostly just bots playing, which is fine but it's indicative of a game that won't last long and the combat outside of the variety in objectives is really basic with just some cooldowns and one combo for each class, i'd still recommend it though if the idea itself sounds appealing because it did make for a very fun night. it's available on pc and a few current gen systems like ps4, i played it on ps4.

lastly we have the big game i played this time, PT. i've never really liked PT, which is one of my more hot takes but its one i kind of still stand by, but playing it a second time has warmed me up to it a little more than it did the first time around but not to the point of me really liking it, i still have the game on my old PS4 so playing it is easy enough, if you don't have this your only real options were just being there at the time, playing a fan remake or just hacking your ps4 for it, which i do think is a shame because this is an influencial game, weather that influence was good for the industry is debatable, for me i'd say it was on the worst side as i just don't enjoy this style of game and it made for some of my least favourite horror games of its generation like the first person resis, but it also did give us some great games like village and the actual next silent hill game: the short message, which i see as basically just being a "better" PT that actually resonated with me much more than this game did. it's a lot like scramble like that, while i don't enjoy it much on its own, i think its a good tech demo yes but as a real experiance i've never liked it very much, it's just uninteresting and not very scary and i don't think the story it tells is interesting, it's pretty though, i also do think it's earned its place in history and i respect it for that now, i'm also glad this didn't end up being a new standard for the series like it may have had the game come out, oUtside of short message being a callback style it seems SH is third person again and i think thats for the best, i don't think i'd want a whole series like this and i'm still not convince i'd have been sold on it even if silent hills had came out, plus we got death stranding out of it, which i enjoyed much more.