LogFAQs > #949506479

74. Bust-A-Move (Arcade, 1994)

As someone who has never been particularly skilled or interested in fighting games, I find it interesting that competitive puzzle games, of all things, are what really seems to get my competitive juices flowing the most of any H2H gaming experience. Some people like stacking Tetris blocks forever, but I personally always end up falling for the puzzle games with a really juicy competitive back-and-forth. I even got into Puyo Puyo (or Kirby's Avalanche to be specfic) for a bit with a couple friends who were also learning the game and getting better against each other, despite not being super fond of that game in general.
Anyway, Bust-A-Move (or Puzzle Bobble in some versions) is a really cool puzzle game that involves lining up chains of same-colored bubbles to clear them off your screen (and potentially create garbage for your opponent). I've mostly played it on various Neo-Geo multiple-game arcade cabinets that definitely had some version of Metal Slug on them. It's a really fun twist to involve shot-selection and shot-making with the usual puzzle game franticness. That little extra bit of manual dexterity required makes it stand out, and also makes for hilarious moments when you inevitably blow a very important shot. I've got a couple more pure puzzle games ahead on this road, and this game is pretty much the posterchild for why those games are where they are.

73. Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (DS, 2006)

By this point, we kind of knew what we were getting from the Castlevania series under IGA, both in terms of games of great quality but a lot of similar ideas. Portrait of Ruin is not particularly adventurous in any regard, in terms of story (basically some minor Belmont-adjacent characters) or gameplay (if you played Dawn or Aria of Sorrow, you know what kind of beats the game is going to hit). The two-character system is...fine, though not used in a ton of interesting ways, but gives you more character options to use and customize.
On the other hand, the minor adjustments are generally very good; the smaller areas within paintings help the game breath beyond just a huge castle, and give the game some new kinds of settings and enemy types. There's tons of extra content - an optional heavy-difficulty labyrinth, multiple alternate playable modes with max-level settings, and lots of secret areas/items/quests/other goodies.
It's tough to say what makes this one great other than iterating well on a tried-and-true formula and shifting gears just enough to separate itself, but I always have a good time replaying through this one; when I booted it up a year and a half ago I had like five or six separate completed save files already. Sometimes you just want a solid Metroidvania, and you could always do much much worse than Portrait of Ruin.

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it's an underwater adventure ride