Daikatana is an FPS developed by Ion Storm. Released in 2000, Daikatana reminds us that John Romera wanted to have sex with me. I think? The advertising was confusing.

We play as Hiro, failing entrepreneur and swordmaster, sent on a quest to save the Earth from the evils of capitalism.

Gameplay involves trying to figure out where you're supposed to go to next because yellow paint hadn't been invented yet. Occasionally you die from taking falling damage when you jump into water and wonder what kind of asshole would design it that way.

The Good

Despite being known as one of the largest gaming disasters of all time, patient gaming has been kind to it. The drama surrounding it is long gone. 1995 graphics in a 2000 game don't matter when it's 2026. The ridiculous 90s action story plot and severe levels of jank just add to the charm. It's like how that one Rebecca Black song is now ironically okay to listen to. Gotta have my cereal yo.

It honestly has a lot going on. It has a story. It has a leveling/skill system. You have voiced companions. I dig the idea of unique weapons for each level. You can play it co-op. All it's really missing is a moral choice system and you've got a modern RPG-FPS.

None of it's good but I can appreciate the ambition. If it didn't suck so bad it would have been amazing.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/r0yoZry.jpg

Video game marketing just hit different back then.

The Bad

There's a lot of bad, but most of it is standard grade ass. Shitty level design, bad enemy AI, the companions make the game harder.

But there's something uniquely ass about how bad the weapons are. I'm going to spoiler this because if you do intend on playing, finding this stuff out on your own is half the fun.

It starts with your very first gun. I discovered that: The bullets from it ricochet. You can take damage from the ricochet. Bullets ricochet off water. I learned this when I fired the gun underwater at a crocodile and my bullet infinitely ricocheted back into me, turning me into paste.

My next favorite is the giant orb you can throw that deals insta-kill levels of AoE damage. Great! Only you can't throw it further than its AoE range so it always kills you as well. The one time I thought I was clever and tossed it from on top of a cliff it bounced back up at me and killed me anyway.

There's the summoning staff and sentry weapon which will attack you when they run out of enemies to kill. Like, after the snake weapon fool me once, shame on me. But then they do it again with another weapon in the next chapter? Goddamnit.

There's more but these were my favorites. ~95% of my deaths came from my own weapons.

The Questionable

I played this with the 1.3 fan patch. I'm never certain how I should judge games that have such an overhaul. I'm not really playing Daikatana in the state it was left in. Instead I'm playing one nerds quest to show the world the true potential of Romero's vision.

On the other hand, I'm out here to have fun and the patch makes Daikatana almost enjoyable as a game instead of just a museum piece. One of the things it fixes is it makes your companions immortal. With how often they like to bathe in spike pits and lava, I don't think I'd have managed to beat the game without it.

So yeah, 1.3 it is.

Final Thoughts

Any other company makes this and it fades into nothingness like Rise of the Triad. It's bad but not worst game of all time bad. If you're like me and enjoy experiencing gaming history, this is the cornerstone of managing expectations and worth a visit even if only for a few minutes.

Bonus Thought

If I ever make a list of top ten worst enemies in any game, the mosquito things you meet on level 1 are easily top 3. Cliff Racers from Morrowind still take the #1 spot but these assholes are a close second. Obnoxious sounds, hard to hit, always come in groups, don't drop ammo but take tons to kill. In a game where every enemy sucks, managing to stand out as supreme ass deserves recognition.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

Tunic is an indie game with lovely visuals which can be summed up as a combination Fez, Zelda and Dark Souls. Its as difficult as it is beautiful, with some creative gameplay choices which work well but dont stop it from feeling overly long and repetitive.

The good

The art and music of the game is the immediate standout feature. From the first moment picking up the controller, you are immersed in this indie style world that just feels nice and makes you want to go and explore it.

The world itself is awesome to explore and really rewards you for it, with many hidden chests and paths to get extra stuff. The way it is designed/mapped is really genius, with enough variation and connected zones to avoid making you feel bored for most of the game.

The gameplay is also preety good, with a combat that draws from Hollow Knight and Dark Souls to make it feel good but challenging. It has some quirks but generally works well. The way it evolves is interesting too, with enough pace to keep you from being stuck in the same gameplay loop.

The great

The standout aspect of the game for me is the in-game manual. Let me explain…nothing in this game is spelled out for you, so the way you learn everything about the game is through finding the lost pages that eventually make up the manual.

Everything is in this manual…from the controller scheme, to explanations about your stats, to hints about how to progress in the world and the actual map for each zone. Its presented like an old school manual with pages and it works so well in this context - keeping you interested in exploration, trying to decipher the pages you have (vs the ones that are missing) and just makes the whole game a different experience.

I like this way of making the player work for information and I wish more games did this.

The bad

The last act. This section of the game is heavy on walking back to the areas you know and makes you go through some really frustrating challenges that do not feel in tune with what you do in the story before that.

Something happens in the game that forces you to lose all of your stats as you get to a “peak” which is absurd - I was fully motivated to use this character Iv been building up and this just deflated me right away.

I dont like walkbacks, and to do it with an artificially weak character…I can only guess the devs thought this was the way to up the difficulty for the endgame, but it fell flat to me.

I recently got a couple of months of PC Game Pass to clear a few titles off my wishlist. All the new and old Doom games were included except 2016. I'd never played the newer ones, so I wanted to start there, but Doom 2016 wasn't included and wasn't on sale. So I figured I'd go backwards through them while I waited for a sale.

(Also, no DLCs with Game Pass, didn't do those.)

Doom: The Dark Ages

The first of the modern Doom games I tried, and it took a long time to grow on me. But I had a great time in the end.

Pros

The peak of this game is its big open area battles. All the modern games have some take on this, and Dark Ages is excellent at it, with flat, wide spaces to battle in and just a few environmental elements to break things up. The battles are frantic but not as one-dimensional as a game like Serious Sam. It's somewhat tactical. You're not just trying to survive and shoot as much as possible, you also have to plan the order you take enemies out in, and which parts of the map to prioritise and which pick-ups to go for. Nothing groundbreaking, but at this pace and volume, it becomes a fun challenge.

Arguably the biggest change is the introduction of a parry system and a shield. Green attacks can be parried, which sends them back and stuns or damages the enemy, letting you wade in and attack. The idea of a shield in a Doom game sounds defensive, but the opposite is true. It lets you rush straight up to the biggest enemies in the game and attack them head on. By comparison, going on later to Eternal and 2016, constantly running away actually feels like the less aggressive option.

The game is pretty easy, but you have a bunch of sliders to adjust the difficulty to how you like it, which is a nice touch.

As with all the id Tech games, it looks fantastic and runs great.

Cons

The game introduces open areas alongside more traditional corridor sections, and the open areas are the weakest part for me. They're needed to set up the big open battles, but in every other respect they're pretty dull. Between fights you spend a lot of time backtracking to look for secrets, which gets tedious given how much ground you have to cover.

There are way too many weapons and half of them are kind of rubbish. As you up the difficulty, the weaker weapons become pointless to use. You have abundant ammo, so you may as well use the good ones.

The game also feels bloated in the second half. The big open areas are fun, but they don't really change tactically, so it's just one wide open area after another, with a minimally different set of demons. Sometimes you end up doing several of these back to back and it gets pretty samey. And the dragon and mech suit levels were just unnecessary.

The plot is tosh. I managed about a third of the game then skipped every cut scene after.

The bosses were generally pretty good, but the last boss (who you kind of fight twice) was an Elden Ring/Sekiro wannabe that felt very out of place.

Conclusion

This was great overall and well worth playing, but in a kind of "big dumb fun" kind of way.

8/10

Doom Eternal

What a banger. Dark Ages was ultimately a really good game, but this was another level. It had much better level variety, far higher peaks of intensity and it's as hard as nails.

Pros

Like Dark Ages, the pros were its big set-piece battles. Unlike Dark Ages' wide open spaces, these tend to take place on more compact, very vertical levels, with more small corridors or side routes, where you have to constantly keep moving, or even stay in the air, to survive. At their best, on an ultrawide monitor and heavy speakers, these levels are a straight-up assault on the senses. This meant that two back to back combat arenas could play out radically differently, taking you from open areas with long sightlines to narrow spaces where you could separate the enemies out. It added a big tactical layer to the game.

The combat mechanics were tightly balanced. I'd read that the game was akin to a puzzle in terms of what you can use against which enemies, but I thought this overstated it a little. On Ultra-Violence at least, you had a handful of weapons you'd use for key enemies, but there was also plenty of room to experiment the rest of the time. Still, weapon switching certainly mattered, and combined with the endless hunt for health, ammo, and armour via enemy kills, it pushed the limits of how much complexity you could pack into a fight before it became too complex for its own good.

Level variety is brilliant, ranging from tight corridor battles to set-piece ambushes to mazes.

Cons

The platforming outside of combat got tiring. The high points of combat are so intense that they needed something calmer in between, but this wasn't the solution. Jumping from platform to platform was never satisfying to me.

The worlds didn't really click with me thematically, and this is a criticism of Dark Ages too. I didn't like the way it tried to make Doom into a high fantasy epic, and many of the worlds seemed more suited to Quake 1 than Doom. They're not bad in terms of gameplay or visuals, they just didn't feel like Doom to me. A few were great though, like "Destroy the super gore nests", which was about my favourite level in all the games.

Conclusion

Fantastic game. Pushes right up against the limit of how much complexity you want in your combat system, but usually gets it right.

9/10

Doom (2016)

Man, this was nigh on perfect. If Dark Ages was an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, and Eternal was the crazed product of a Heston Blumenthal fever dream, this was just a rib-eye steak, served bloody. Nothing you don't need.

Pros

Overall, this is the most balanced of the games. Pretty much everything about it was just how I wanted it. The combat model didn't go as over the top as Eternal, but it was still intense and gave me a fair few moments where I had to put the game down and come back later.

Every weapon, and nearly every weapon mod, had its place. The same goes for the enemies: each one had a role in the combat encounters. You get just the right amount of movement, the health, ammo, and armour economy was just about perfect, and the glory kills were more of a fun accent rather than the relentless hunt for resources from Eternal. Doom Eternal went further in its combat arenas, but also occasionally too far, to its own detriment. This game knew exactly where the line was and stayed right on it.

The low fantasy/hard sci-fi vibe was great, far more grounded than the high fantasy look of the other games. It felt more metal and more appropriate for a Doom game.

The music. Amazing.

Cons

Very few. The trip to hell was a bit underwhelming. The side missions for runes were pointlessly easy. The Cyberdemon was fun, but the other bosses were both easy and forgettable. Maybe one or two of the weapon mods weren't that useful. I'm properly nit-picking here.

Conclusion

Wonderful game. A no nonsense pure shooter.

10/10

And with that done, on to the older game next...

Developer: Peachy Keen Games

Publisher: Whitethorn Games

Released: 2020

Playtime: 4.6 hours, beat but not complete

Calico is a slice-of-life style sim game where you create a character and run a café on a magical island. Most of the island is initially blocked off and you will have to complete tasks to unlock those areas.

The gameplay has a few different aspects. You can purchase and place different furniture in your café and change its colours. You can change and colour your clothing and appearance. The animals on the island are all tame so you can pet them, pick them up, put them on your head (if small enough), ride them (if big enough), use potions on them to change their shape and appearance, as them to follow you, and send them to your café.

At the café, you can do mini games to bake goods. These are things like playing pool but the pockets are tarts and the balls are fruit. Or pressing buttons at a specific time to mix ingredients. Or pressing buttons at a specific time to place ingredients. Or pressing buttons at a specific time to cut ingredients...

You can also walk around the island doing quests for villagers like bringing people donuts or placing specific furniture in your café. Those are whay comprise the main gameplay loop.

I have a hard time expressing my feelings for this game. It was not a good game. It was buggy, things moved weird, a cat wouldn't stop orbiting me for a while, I clipped a few places. It was also just very... empty except for the first area. Unlocking new places wasn't fun because it was like "yay even further to run to go talk to the 2 people who live here and see if they have any quests for me." The quests themselves were forgettable. The baking mini games were either dull or annoying. Bringing pets to the cafe and playing with them was not very fun because the pets would get stuck in the ground or barely move so you just have a pile of wild animals in mostly one spot and I just felt bad for them.

With that being said, it still had some charm to it. I liked the character designs and it had some fun moments and dialogue. It felt really sweet, wholesome, and cozy. Unfortunately it felt a bit frustrating because it had the bones of something really good and it didn't quite get there. I don't regret my time with it but I also didn't like it enough to do the few remaining tasks it took to complete it at a certain point.

Howdy, folks! Been a while, but I’m back with the next set of Game Boy games. It’s been a bit, and I apologize, but I had real life stuff happening and also this section actually had long games. But I have not abandoned this project, and we now have the second half of the Fs!

As a reminder of the “rules,” since it’s been a while: I’m playing the games in alphabetical order (mostly, as I am arranging series chronologically), and I’m trying to give each game at least a half an hour of play before I move on. I’ll note the ones that got more (or less) than that. So without further ado, let’s get to the games!

The Final Fantasy Legend: I said in the last post that Final Fantasy Adventure was my favorite game that I’d played for the project. It was immediately dethroned by The Final Fantasy Legend. Honestly, it’s become one of my favorite games of all time, not just for this project. This game is something else. It appears somewhat inscrutable at first, and honestly it kind of is, but taking the time to figure it out is well worth it. It’s an amazing game, and I’m impressed that this was not only on the Game Boy, but on the Game Boy the year it came out. I know “ahead of its time” is thrown around a lot, but The Final Fantasy Legend legitimately feels like a game that should’ve been on the SNES or the GBA. It’s genuinely amazing that this is an OG Game Boy game. Seriously, I cannot recommend this highly enough, and as soon as I finished this game I went and wishlisted every SaGa game on Steam. 10/10

Final Fantasy Legend II: Gonna start by saying that I’m deeply annoyed that they dropped the “The” from the title here. This bugs me almost as much as switching from Roman to Arabic numerals. That aside: this is another great game. Everything I said about TFFL could also apply to this one. Moreso, probably, because there’s even more going on here. About the only thing I’d say against this one is that it’s a bit more polished than TFFL in a way that undoubtedly makes it a better game, but makes for a somewhat lesser experience. It’s not the easiest thing to articulate, but something is lost in making the game play better. It’s still an amazing game, though, and well worth playing. 10/10

Final Fantasy Legend III: You’re probably expecting a glowing review for this one after the first two. Sadly, that’s not the case. Final Fantasy Legend III is a much more generic JRPG than the first two, to the point that it doesn’t feel like a part of the same series. You gain experience and level up normally. There’s MP. Weapons have infinite uses. It’s just generally a less interesting game than the first two. Despite that, I’d honestly still recommend it. It’s a fine game, it’s just not as good as the first two. 7/10

Fish Dude: If you’ve been reading along, it won’t surprise you that I don’t like this. It’s a Game Boy port of an arcade game, and it does nothing for me. It also doesn’t control super well, which is an annoyance. Still, if you enjoy arcade games, you could do worse than this. 5/10

Fist of the North Star: 10 Big Brawls for the King of the Universe: That sure is a title. Beyond that, it’s another fighting game on Game Boy. I think in general these are pretty bad (the system really isn’t meant for it), and this is no exception. 1/10

The Flash: The Game Boy is a generally poor choice for superhero games, and the Flash is probably like, top three worst choices for the system. Even when using the superspeed ability, you don’t move super fast, and the nature of the levels means it’s hard to go at superspeed anyway. Plus, frankly, it’s a fairly boring platformer. 2/10

The Flintstones: King Rock Treasure Island: This game’s two biggest flaws are that it’s a kind of generic action platformer on a system that had a lot of generic action platformers, and that the car levels are terrible in that they very much rely on knowing what obstacles are coming in order to dodge them. Otherwise, it’s a well made little game with great sprite work – Fred Flintstone scans super well as a sprite. Also apparently they need to have the ™ symbol every time he says “Yabba-dabba-doo!”, which is kind of hilarious. 6/10

The Flintstones: This one is based on the 1994 live action movie starring John Goodman. It’s similar to the above listed one based on the cartoon, just worse in every measurable way. Seriously, just play that one. 3/10

Flipull: An Exciting Cube Game: The title really oversells this one. It’s mostly boring. You’re a little robot. You shoot squares at other squares to remove them from the puzzle, and when there’s few enough left you move on to the next level. It’s fine, I guess, but there’s much better puzzles on the Game Boy. 3/10

Foreman for Real: It might shock you to know that not only is there a George Foreman boxing game on the Game Boy, there are two of them. I don’t know why. This one’s not very good. I could not, at any point, determine what any button I was pressing was doing. I could not find the manual anywhere online, so I couldn’t even figure out how to play. But as far as I could figure out, there was about a half second delay between pressing a button and anything actually happening, so…yeah. Not great, either way. 1/10

Fortified Zone: Much like The Flintstones: King Rock Treasure Island, this game’s problem is that it’s a top down shooter that doesn’t do much to stand out from the flood of other top down and/or side scrolling shooters on the Game Boy. It does, apparently, have a co-op mode, so maybe it’s better that way, but unfortunately I had no means of playing that. I think the character switching (you can play either as a guy who can carry heavy weapons or a woman who can jump) is interesting, but it’s fairly clunky in practice. I dunno. It feels almost mean to say I don’t recommend this one, but the reality is there’s other games on the Game Boy that do the general “shooter” idea better (Bionic Commando, Mega Man), and even if they’re side scrollers rather than top down, they’re still games I’d pick up again before I played this one. 5/10

Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball: It’s another Game Boy baseball game. They’re all basically the same thing. I don’t know what more there is to say about this that I haven’t already said. I could play another hundred of these and still have nothing new to say about any of them. They’re just kind of all the same mediocre experience. 4/10

Frogger: Do you like Frogger? Do you, for some reason, want to play Frogger on a game Boy family system in the Year of Our LORD 2026? If so, instead of playing this one (which, for the record, is Frogger for Game Boy, released in 1998). Instead, play Frogger for the Game Boy Color, also released in 1998! It’s literally the same game. In fact, it was even released on a black cartridge, meaning you could play that one on a Game Boy as well. So this version is entirely redundant. Still, it’s Frogger, and it is a fundamentally port. 6/10

And that’s it! That’s the Fs. This brings us to 163/501 games, or 32.53%, with an average score of 3.96 (kinda shocked that’s actually climbing!). I’ll post the recommended list below again, but we’re currently at 25/163 recommended, which is 15.34% – still beating Sturgeon’s Law! Hopefully, the next update won’t take me another two months, it’s mostly shorter games and I think the next really long ones aren’t until I reach Pokémon, which are still a long ways off. Thanks for reading, and I hope to update again soon!

Recommended Games

• Alleyway
• Amazing Penguin
• Balloon Kid
• Battle Arena Toshinden
• Battle Unit Zeoth
• Bionic Commando
• Bomberman GB
• Castlevania: The Adventure
• Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge
• Castlevania Legends
• Catrap
• Contra: The Alien Wars
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Land
• Donkey Kong Land 2
• Donkey Kong Land III
• Dr. Mario
• Disney’s Ducktales
• Disney’s Ducktales 2
• Felix the Cat
• Final Fantasy Adventure
• The Final Fantasy Legend
• Final Fantasy Legend II
• Final Fantasy Legend III

I would preface that I didn't outright hate this game; I just found myself slightly disliking it in most areas. It's disappointing because 999 is a contender for my favorite Spike Chunsoft game, which really made this sequel feel odd to play through. I was also a fan of the Danganronpa games as well as the AI games, so I know the gameplay loop that a lot of Spike Chunsoft games use works for me if done well, this just wasn't one of those instances.

Most of the ingredients for a good visual novel were there for me, but it felt like some things prevented the game from sticking the landing. Some of those things included:

• The weird jump to 3D graphics.
• The insane amount of repetition
• The overdone explanations
• The fuckass door and map animations
• The length of the game vs. the payoff in the end

I couldn't help but feel that the game was deliberately wasting my time for a good 50% of the playthrough. I think this is a problem the AI games have mostly solved, but in VLR, you have to sit through repeated events and dialogue constantly when you switch between paths. I know there's a skip button, but there's so much repetition that is forced on you if the situation changes even slightly. If one character explains an event to you in one path, you have to sit through that explanation again if it's explained to you by a different character in another path, despite the information being identical. Then rinse and repeat that like 8 times.

This game just lacked pacing, and it often seemed like the writers were putting things into the game just because they could, rather than it making the story or plot flesh out evenly. It's made worse by the plot not really having a head or a tense point near the end where it feels like your character is on the cusp of something great with high stakes, similar to the final puzzle in 999 or the final trials in Danganronpa. It makes the ending feel like a poor trade for your time. Again, the story isn't bad, it just feels like a rough payoff for the amount of time invested in it.

This game basically feels like a book with a good overall plot, but the author never ran it by an editor before publishing.

I picked up Super Puzzle Fighter II HD Turbo Remix (from here on, just SPF II) recently after it went on sale.

Full disclosure: I'm not a huge puzzle game fan. I have a few that I like, but I'm nowhere close to good. So this is just my layman's review.

While I'm not too tuned in on the series, it seems to be in the same universe as Capcom's Street Fighter series along with some of their other games. The relatively small selection of characters (Ryu and Chun Li among them) are all chibi versions of their Street Fighter counterparts.

Unlike Street Fighter, however, SPF II has nothing to do with throwing punches and kicks. As the name suggests, this is a puzzle game. If you've ever tried the PvP modes in Tetris Effect: Connected, then you have a good idea what's going on here. The objective in its simplest terms is to break tiles in sufficiently large amounts to fill your opponent's screen with tiles until they have no room left (thus scoring a KO).

Graphics/Style

The original SPF II came out as an arcade game in 1996, then was ported to the Dreamcast and later to the Xbox 360/PS3, before being released digitally for the current gen consoles- so a port of a port of a port of an arcade game. While this particular port has some refinements/ updates to look a little smoother, it still looks and sounds like an arcade game. It's a great look for a game like this and I'm glad Capcom didn't go overboard with the remastering here.

Gameplay Loop/ Game Modes

SPF II technically has four game modes: X, X', Y, and Z. X and X' are, for the average person, basically the same. X is the "classic" arcade mode while X' is supposed to be a rebalanced version of X mode for competitive players. I've played both and I can say I haven't noticed and appreciable difference. Y and Z mode are significantly different from what I would consider the "core" modes (X and X'), so won't be going into them.

In both of the X modes, the basic loop is identical. In every match, you have a 12X6 field; the fourth "column" of this field is where 1X1 tile pieces drop in. These can be one of four colors (red, yellow, blue, or green), a "crash tile" (breaks tiles of the same color), or a diamond (breaks all tiles of one color). Tiles of the same color can also fuse together to form "Power Gems", which are not only worth more points, but also are critical for the "fighting" aspect of the game.

To keep it short, every round consists of building up Power Gems/setting up combos, breaking tiles, and countering your opponent's efforts to do the same. Since there are no "move sets" to speak of, what separates your fighters are their "drop patterns". For every fighter, their "Counter Gems" (think of "trash pieces" in similar games) drop in different color patterns. Depending on your play style, each one can offer advantages and disadvantages.

If you're playing the single- player Arcade mode, this game is incredibly short. Depending on difficulty level, a single session can consist of anywhere from 3 to 12 matches, with most rounds lasting well under two minutes. There's no story/tournament/etc. mode, so you can quickly find yourself playing through multiple times. There are some things to unlock, but nothing earth- shattering.

My Thoughts

I enjoy SPF II a lot more than I was expecting to. The basic loop is fairly simple, but it's definitely easy to get hooked on and there's a lot to learn. The arcade/Street Fighter aesthetic looks and sounds great. Unfortunately, it's also one of the things I would criticize this game for.

While it's cool to have your characters "fighting" during a match, it's ultimately just window dressing. While your choice of character can make a difference depending on your play style, your opponent's character is almost irrelevant other than that you need to get familiar with their drop patterns. There is no interaction between the different characters, so unlike in fighting games, you don't really ever get any super tense or super uneven matchups. I have no idea how it could've been implemented, but it's a shame for a game to have such a large and well- established universe of fighting games to draw from, yet only borrow from them superficially.

To add to that, the cast of characters is tiny (both literally and figuratively). All told, there are eight characters right off the bat, plus three unlockable characters. That's it. I get it, this was a port of an arcade game, but it's a bit of a letdown that more characters weren't added when the game was brought to the more modern consoles.

My final point of contention with SPF II's current- gen port lies with one of its greatest strengths: It's a very faithful port of the original arcade game for better and for worse. As a result of this extremely faithful port from the original, a lot of features that would be considered normal quality- of- life features now simply aren't there. This is especially evident in single- player mode. Just to give a short list:

• No custom matches: You can choose a game mode and difficulty level, but that's it.
• Training mode is basically pointless: Sure, you can practice setting up combos and learning your drop pattern, but that's it.
• No restart option: Considering that the few unlockables hinge on you doing flawless speed runs, this is rather annoying, especially since you can see a loss coming pretty quickly.
• No option to skip the end credits: Considering how quickly an arcade mode session can go, it gets annoying to have to sit through the credits every single time you complete a run. The little animations that pop up during them are fun, though.

These are all nitpicks, but especially in a game as short as this, they're very noticeable.

Verdict

If you're a really big fan of the Street Fighter games or are looking for something to kill a little time with, you'll definitely get some fun out of SPF II. However, I'd recommend waiting for a sale because the game's issues and its short length are significant enough that I wouldn't have bought it at full price.

So this is patient gaming indeed, this is one of those games I remember from early childhood. I did play it a couple of times over the years, but never got very far. I've no idea what prompted this session, but something had clicked and I beat the entire game (with all the secret levels and all).

It's a pretty darn cool and unusual game, but also a fairly flawed one. It can be tough to get into, but in reality it's not a very complicated game. In each level you're explicitly given a bunch of tasks and when you complete them all - that's it, on to the next level.

The eponymous magic carpet you're flying controls like a very simplified flight sim (as opposed to something like Descent) and just the way it controls is really quite something. You'll never fall off or splat yourself against a wall or anything like that, you're 100% safe in terms of flying. You're also glued to the ground in a way and for the most part you have little control over the Z-direction, most of the time you're focused on the XY plane.

The only resource in the game is mana. One of the primary goals of the game is to posses mana. The more mana you posses - the higher your personal mana storage gets and you can throw more fireballs, etc. for longer before the storage dries up. When it does - it's time to retreat and regenerate.

The second use for mana is your castle. Your castle serves as a respawning point. If you die without a castle present - you restart the level from scratch. It also allows you to cast higher tier spells. But, in order to do that you have to fill your castle with possessed mana (that is, mana you've possessed on the level) that is collected by balloons the castle spawns. Castle has tiers - higher tiered castles can hold more mana. In order to upgrade your castle to a higher tier you need to possess more and more mana around the map.

So this is the basic gameplay loop: you go about the map possessing mana, this possessed mana is collected by balloons to your castle. The more mana you possess - the higher tier castle you can build and the larger your personal mana pool gets so you can cast more spells. The more mana you store in you castle - the higher the spell tier that you can cast.

As the game progresses you learn new spells and upgrade old spells, but in each level you always start from scratch in terms of what you can cast. You always start with a puny fireball spell, next to zero personal mana storage, and no castle. In later levels, when you've learned most of the spells and upgraded them, you'll eventually be able to cast huge meteors, lightning storms, spawn volcanoes, etc., but again, all of that is locked until you've possessed enough mana on the level, upgraded your castle enough and the castle balloons have collected enough mana.

Some levels are PvE, some levels are PvP, some are a mix.

Magic Carpet 2 is a game that oozes atmosphere. It has this eerie look to it and equally eerie sound design - both the music and the sound effects. The whole thing feels like a fever dream of some sort.

The game is insanely advanced and ahead of its time for 1995 (the original Magic Carpet came out a year earlier, in 1994, and it was quite similar). The environment itself is not only fully 3D, it is deformable. You can and you absolutely will cast spells that will carve out holes in cavern levels, you'll cast earthquake spell that will carve out a massive fault in the land, you'll spawn volcanoes - and the land will literally deform and, well, look like a volcano and it will spit out fire and stuff.

There are quite a few issues with this game, but in light how how insanely ambitious it is and how well it works in spite of its problems, none of them are at all deal breakers, at least not for me.

The AI is crazy dumb. Though if it was a bit smarter, it'll obliterate you (the game is like that), so I guess there's not much to complain there. Auto-aiming sucks and defending your castle especially can be very chaotic and weird. You'll just fly around hoping to hit something and you won't, even with massive area of effect spells at time. In later levels, there are situations where you will simply die and there's nothing you could've done. It doesn't happen too often to be truly frustrating, but it is a bit on an issue.

The game has 25 full levels plus 5 secret ones. It does become a tad repetitive around 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through, but I still found it compelling enough to finish.

The original DOS version is crashy at high resolutions (640x480 - yeah, that's a high resolution all right). My advice is to start playing at the standard 320x200. Just roll with it. I switched to it about 1/3 of the way through, it took a bit of an adjustment time, but it's fine. It's how the vast majority of people would've played it back in the day anyway.

There is a reverse engineering project called Magic Carpet 2 HD, it seems to boot up and work, but I'm not sure just how finished it is and how faithful to the original game it is.

All in all - a big recommendation for people who are into somewhat obscure or unusual games. Especially for fans of 90s PC games. If you've missed Magic Carpet - do try Magic Carpet 2. It really is something, there's really nothing else like it, not even remotely.

​

I've never seen anyone talk about Copy Kitty, a game I love very much.

It's a side-scrolling action platformer. You play as Boki, a preteen alien cat girl who wants to be a superhero, but thinks her power of power-copying is lame. Her alien ant uncle Savant sends her on a ~150(?) level gauntlet to show her that her powers are, in fact, not lame at all.

The main gameplay hook is, indeed, that you can copy the powers of enemies and combine them, with each combination yielding a completely unique output. With 10 powers that can be combined up to three at a time, there's a lot of possible combinations. There's also a substantial amount of flashy non-computable powers.

There's also a second playable character, who can only combine two power at a time, but the order in which you combine them matters. Also, his powers don't come out of him, but rather out of a turret whose behavior depends on the selected combination. I swear, this guy's gameplay is some of the most unique and fun I've ever seen.

Regarding the enemies, the variety is excellent, and there's quite a few boss battles (22? IIRC), all of them (minus one which is more of a "set piece") are REALLY fun.

The music is also very good, and has lot of nice vertical mixing. Although some of the stage themes can get a bit repetitive after playing for a long time.

Lastly, there's the story and, let's say, "flavour" of this game. While the main draw of this game is the gameplay (which is absolutely fantastic. Did I mention that already?), one thing that stuck with me even more is just how SOULFUL it is. In a world full of "irony" and "self awareness", this game stands out in as a most sincere love letter to childlike imagination. If I had to describe the general vibe, I'd say it's like a fantasy-action Saturday Morning cartoon from 16 years ago. The characters are all likable and/or really cool (Boki is my personal favorite) and have great colorful designs. The dialogue is good and funny and provides great characterization, and the world is interesting and hinted-at to be quite expansive (hunting for more content outside the game is a bit of a pain, as there doesn't seem to be a single unified place for it, but there's a non trivial amount inside the game already).

Oh, and each game mode (meaning both difficulties of the campaign for both characters, Endless mode for each biome, and, to a degree, Boss Rush) has its own story/dialogue, as well as some unique bosses that are only present in specific modes.

I remember buying Castlevania: Lords of Shadow when it came out and never beating it. I didn’t know much about Castlevania, but I liked God of War, so this was right in my alley. I think I stopped four hours into it, and I never understood why I didn’t like it. It didn’t hook me in the way the other spectacle fighters did.

I put the disc back into my PS3 for the first time in over a decade and replayed it. The first thing I noticed is that the game looks incredible for its time, but has a terrible framerate. It 70% of my playtime, the game slows to 20fps, which is inexcusable for a spectacle fighter.

The enemy unblockable attacks are very hard to distinguish because their animations look the similar as the normal attacks, and they take the same time. The only distinguishable difference is the small white light. However, the animation is so short that it does not telegraph well. Combine the enemy attack animations not being clear, with the camera pulled back too far, making all the characters way too small, multiple number of enemies, and the 5-20fps... In God of War and DMC, I could easily block the enemy attack because everything is so clear. In Lords of Shadow, it lacks the same polish, and the combat often turns into a mess, and I died without knowing what even hit me.

There are multiple annoyances like the grab move being a timing QTE that takes too much time, the enemies taking way too much hits to die, and having to press L3 and trigger the "animation" to absorb the orbs... It makes the overall flow of the combat unsatisfying.

With all that said, for the first hour, I was enjoying it and wondering why I gave it up. It is competent, and there are many moves you could buy and mix together. Then I played it for… 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours, then I shelved it again. This time I get the general gist as to why it was not grabbing me.

I view the spectacle fighters like classic God of War as the evolution of the classic Castlevania, as in they occupy a similar appeal. A linear hack-and-slash platformer, going from one thematic set-piece to the next set-piece. Take Devil May Cry’s spectacle fighter combat sandbox and apply it, and you get something special. Since Lords of Shadow is a God of War clone and does the same progression, in theory I should enjoy it.

I only realize now how much the classic Castlevania allivates itself through a certain style and vibe. Because there are a lot of older action platformers that do the same thing, but they don’t have the same magic as 2D Castlevania. It’s the mood, vibe, and, most importantly of all, direction. The weird, bizarre mixture of the Japanese sensibility with the Western sensibility, and the strong level design that varies up the challenge makes the series what it is.

Lords of Shadow is a Western-made game, and it doesn’t understand this appeal. It not only lacks the magical charm of Castlevania that makes it Castlevania, it also doesn’t even particularly stand out among the spectacle fighters. Everything is “has been done already and done better”. It doesn’t have a strong, unique style or personality. If you show a minute of God of War, it looks like God of War. If you show a minute of DMC, it looks like DMC. If you show a minute of this game, it sort of blends with something else. It has neither Castlevania nor its uniqueness; it kind of just flounders.

But again, that doesn’t make it bad. It makes it bland, but I played Conan on Xbox 360 and Dante’s Inferno, and they are the most blatant God of War clones out there. I enjoyed them enough to see them to completion. Lords of Shadow is technically more competent, so why did I abandon this one both times? It’s the pacing. Every level feels like it’s not directed at all? I don’t know how to describe it. It has no flair to it. It’s like someone made a level as a tech showcase and some other team added some monsters, and there is no careful consideration. Every level goes on way too long, stretched out to waste my time. Go through the Uncharted climbing (which this game had way too much), and repeat the same repetitive fight. Sprinkle in annoying gimmicks that slow you down like having to move through the swamp or walk on a tight bridge, and you constantly have to do a QTE to recover... Already the game starts to fade from my memory because nothing stands out.

Play games like Castlevania 4 and Rondo of Blood, and you will realize how every stage and level beat is very, very deliberate. Even the NES Castlevania games understood this despite the 8-bit limitation. Every moment-to-moment challenge is directed and different. It makes each combat beat and stage memorable. With Lords of Shadow, even though it is linear, it doesn’t take advantage of its linear design, which is variation and direction. It has the level design of a soulless openworld game, but dissected them into a corridor.

I played it for hours, and every time I look at the world map, I see I need to complete 14 chapters, and I only beat it 25% in total. It deflates my motivation to keep playing it. I know that complaining that the game is too long may come across as absurd for singleplayer games, but there is a reason why this genre tends to be short. It's about meat more than fat. If a linear hack-and-slash is twice as longer than Symphony of the Night, I begin to wonder why I even play this when I can play two Metroidvanias that are meatier and tighter in that length. This game has not much going for it for me to play for an RPG-level length. It doesn’t justify its long runtime. The story is just there, and it seems I have barely made any progress. It makes me think it’s wasting my time.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a 2024 jrpg drawing inspiration from the Suikoden series, to the point that they share a director.

Probably important disclaimer: I've never played a Suikoden game. I have played Eiyuden Chronicle Rising, however, so I didn't go in completely empty handed, although that game is completely different from Hundred Heroes. Just don't expect comparisons to the "source material" as it were.

Anywho, back to EC: while I haven't played Suikoden, I have played my fair share of classic jrpgs, and EC is absolutely harkening back to the days of yore. If the game wasn't so visually impressive, you could easily believe that it was released on the PS2, and that comes with all of the positives and negatives you might imagine. Took me about 50 hours to finish the game, but there is more meat on the bone if I wanted to go for 100%ing recruiting, side activities, etc.

What Works:

Visuals: EC uses a pixel art, semi 2D/ 3D artstyle that is a constant feast for the eyes. Environments are beautiful, towns have a solid sense of scale, and character models look amazing, especially in combat. I was never disappointed with the visuals.

The Setting: The setting of the world allows for a large range of environments, from your typical high fantasy castles to more industrial areas. The variety of species on show is pretty crazy too.. with a good mix of human and anthropomorphic races that keep things interesting. At one point my party was a wolf, a kangaroo, a samurai, a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl, a little tree guy, and a normal human.. and most impressively is that none of them really feel out of place. there are some characters that are kind of pushing it, but they don't rock the boat a ton.

The Sound: The music is phenomenal, even if it can get a little repetitive. The sound effects during battle are punchy and fit the action being done, and the voice acting is a mixed bag of quality overall, but at the end of the day, I was just happy most of the game was voiced.

The Combat: For the first 10 hours or so, I thought the combat was relatively dull, able to use the 'auto' option for 95% of combat encounters since no one really had any abilities to manage, and enemies didn't pose much of a threat. However, after the first chapter you're pool of available units expands, as does their ability pool (called rune-lens here), and you start to get more toys to play with. Enemies start to become more of a threat so picking your targets become more important. While overall, I don't think EC ever gets hard, there is a joy to be had in optimizing your party to deal the most damage. At the end of the day, the fun in combat came from trying new party combinations, and less from challenging battles.

Castle development: I love any system that allows you to build up a base of sorts, and EC has a really good system in place. Use resources that you find around the map and a currency unique to castle development lets you turn your busted up town into a thriving metropolis. It starts a little slow (which is common theme in the game in general) but once it gets rolling it is a treat.

What Works, with Caveats:

Recruitment: I played this game without a guide, and I felt like 70% of the recruitable units were easy enough to figure out. However, the other 30 were either tucked away in areas you'd have no reason to visit without the knowledge that they were there, or had some convoluted steps that were tough to follow, especially before you unlock fast travel (more on that later). So, overall not bad, but just slightly frustrating. On a positive note, I don't think any unit can be missed, so there's at least no pressure there. On another plus, the game has a really strong experience catch up system, so if you recruit a unit that 20-30 levels below your team, they'll close that gap in a handful of fights, making it easy to try new dudes.

Most of the Side Content: the Bakugan knock off and the card game are fine, but largely forgettable. Getting to actually play them is more complicated that it should be.. especially the process of earning new tops. They come as random drops from monsters, but I didn't get my first drop until almost 30 hours into the game. Offering a way to buy tops, and adding an indicator over which NPCs you could play against would go a long way.

The Story: Generally pretty good, albeit basic. Its your typical "small down guy with a heart of gold takes down the evil empire" plot, but it well told enough and most of the characters are sort of interesting. Overall though, its not going to be something you think about once you finish the game.

What doesn't work:

The pacing: Above all else, the pacing of the game makes it tough to recommend to someone without having to say the dreaded phrase "it gets better after the first few hours." Except in EC's case, things don't become consistently good until about 15 hours into the game. The first 15 hours are a sort of slog, with ample backtracking, limited enemy variety, limited characters available for your own party, a small pool of recruitable units, you name it. BUT once you hit a certain story beat at that 15 hour mark, the game opens wide. You get access to a fast travel that cuts down/ fully eliminates required backtracking, your party starts to become more deadly, the pool of recruits gets blasted wide open. It becomes so much better, but asking 15 hours of a player beforehand is a tough sell.

Inventory management: This never gets easy, its always a hassle to get your best gear on your active units. This does get easier once you can fast travel back to base, but its still annoying to make a change to the characters in your party, warp back home to move armor and rune lenses around, and warp back to where you want to be. Part of the problem is the limited inventory space you have while traveling, which makes it hard to keep useful equipment on hand. They could have solved this by just unequiping characters as they leave your party, or adding an outfitting option in the party management screen. Its also kind of lame that every characters weapon is just upgraded in a completely linear fashion.

The duels and the MASSIVE BATTLES: Visually cool and used as a way to add some gravitas to key story moments, they just kind waste your time. The duels just seems completely RNG and as far as I can tell, they don't even matter if you win or lose. The other side of the coin is the srpg style battles that play out at other key moments, while less RNG dependent are also just kinda there. I would have rather just had normal fights

In conclusion: Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes ended up being a rather enjoyable game. Once all of the systems get up and running, it has a very addicting loop of recruiting units, assembling those units into the most powerful combo you can, and using resources you find to build out your home base. It does ask the player to get through about 15 hours of less stellar fluff before everything gets fully operational, however, which can be daunting. I was luckily craving a classic style JRPG, so I didn't mind but ymmv.

Playing this has rocketed the Suikoden games up my must play list, however, so maybe that'll be on deck for the next time I'm in a classic mood.

Thanks for reading!

Card Shark was HARD.

It's essentially a minigame collection, based on real cheating tricks that were used in card games. It's set in France before the revolution and has a story you follow while cheating at cards and beating your opponents to progress the story.

At the same time, the difficulty is quite unforgiving, in the sense that each time you're introduced to increasingly complex tricks that you're expected to perform as fast as possible, otherwise other characters become suspicious and can call you out on the cheating. Sometimes, It's even better to throw a round in order to bring their suspicion down than just win all possible rounds and money. I found myself really racing against the clock trying to memorize the pattern of the tricks with my controller, as well as trying to do them well and fast.

Seriously, I think I struggled with this more than when I played the DS games, and that's still a compliment, since the minigames come with plenty of breaks in between.

It also has a fantastic art style, truly a sight to look at, paired with a decent sense of humor that makes up for a story that's very on rails and you feel like you have zero way to influence, making it much more like a minigame visual novel than anything else.

On sale, It's a fantastic deal, and I really think it made for a decent "brain puzzle" game for me, getting me ready for the old folks home in 60 years. Perhaps then I'll play it again to keep my memory and hand-eye coordination sharp.

**Preamble**

The release of E-Day is around the corner, which has grabbed my attention for a series I once used to have a lot of love for, but had strangely grown dismissive of it over the years. Despite my last experience with the series being in 2012 when I finished Gears of War 3, as my memories have gotten hazey over the years, I remembered it all as one big series of adult gory whack-a-mole. Whilst I had nostalgia for it, my glasses weren't rose tinted as I almost disliked the games more in my absence from it, remembering it as something far more basic, dated and archaic than it actually was or is.

Replaying Gears of War 1 through 3 recently, my love for the series has been reignited as I got the welcome reminder of how much more than just a simple shooting range the series was and why it was such a big franchise in its day. A dark, gritty, horror inspired action game that almost hates you using its famed cover mechanics with how often its fantastic enemy and encounter design almost constantly forces you to leave the comfort of your waist high wall to avoid an untimely demise by putting yourself into crossfire. Constantly reminded of action horror series like Aliens, Predator and the Thing throughout, it's so much more than a dude-bro testosterone fueled macho shooter.

A brilliant series I have been fully reminded of as to why I fell in love in the first place with all around brilliant gameplay, visuals that have aged spectacularly in some cases topped off with themes and narrative that when you look beyond the cover of big meaty shooty men are far more deep and mature than I think myself and many others gave it credit for at the time.

If anything, the original trilogy did the best thing any piece of entertainment media could do: it left me wanting more.

Remembering that I didn't like Judgement even at the time, I looked towards Gears of War 4, a game that never managed to gain my attention with everything I had seen of it looking like it missed what made Gears great in the first place whilst relying on the old "member berries". It felt very much like it had followed Halo in becoming a corporate husk of its former self once its original developers left the scene and I hust had no interest in that.

But...It's pretty good, actually.

**Story**

25 years has passed since V-Day, the day where humanity finally won the war against the Locust.

We join our new protagonist JD Fenix alongside Del and Kait. As they try to steal a fabricator from a CoG facility, fully automated cities inhabited by robot guards named Deebee's (our first new enemy type). After taking the fabricator back to their outpost, the outpost is attacked by mysterious creatures who kill everybody there and take Kait's mother.

Now we must set out on an adventure to find out what these new creatures are, where they came from, how to get rid of them and find Kait's mother.

In general, it's a competent enough narrative, especially for the fairly definitive ending Gears of War 3 had, eradicating the Locust altogether and pretty much closing the book on them returning in future continuity.

**New enemies**

First, the Deebee's.

The lore is fine. After V-Day, the CoG moved toward automation with robots taking the place of human infantry. It's very logical and follows something we try to do within the real world, so it's all plausible. It fits the narrative of where the series could go after Gears 3.

Mechanically, I don't have a problem with the Deebee's. They have various different types as is Gears tradition, each bringing their own unique firearms which tend to feel quite unique deapite clearly being something else. Their version of a shotgun, for example, **is** just shotgun...But it fires both when you press the trigger and when you let go, which does make you think that little bit more about letting go of the trigger.

In practice? Eh...They're our primary enemy for the first half of the game and killing robots just isn't all that satisfying. It doesn't have that grit or gore you want from Gears. They're just robots. And it feels kind of silly in cutscenes when characters angrily chainsaw robots to show them how angry and tough they are...Like, dude, it's just a robot, are you seriously trying to intimidate it?

The "monsters" are referred to as "The Swarm". After the events of Gears 3, the CoG buried the bodies of the Locust underground as their bodies began to crystalise, preventing them from being disposed of any other way. This crystalisation was akin to a cocoon, "Swarm" being the result of this.

The great part is that whilst it is just an excuse to bring back the Locust, they haven't **just** done that. The only Locust enemy that really still exists are Drones, the basic cannon fodder in the originals. Everything else and the whole lore surrounding it is new and feels fresh, despite being a way to attempt a retcon on the Locust being eradicated.

As I say, for as definitive as Gears 3s ending was, this is alright, actually.

My main complain would be the dialogue. Whilst the original had its funny lines, there's far too much of that MCU style "well, **THAT** happened" (wink wink) humour which plagued entertainment at the time.

The original knew when to have characters drop a funny line for a bit of morbid levity whilst keeping the rest of the game as grounded as the situation called for. We had a specific character in the form of Baird who was "the funny one", and even then, in a dark pessimistic fashion fitting of the world they live in. With Gears 4, **everybody** is the funny one.

**Visuals and Audio*

Stunning. What a damn good looking game this is. It honestly stands among some newer releases.

The slimy tendrils and pods of the Swarm look horrendous in the best way possible. The dark areas lit by torchlight are all perfectly unsettling and tense. The destruction and weather effects during the new "Windflare" events are spectacular. It all looks amazing and really was a showcase of what the Xbox One could do, being a standout title for the generation in this regard.

The enviroments are bright and colourful, popping with colour and vibrancy, something which was rarely seen in Gears...Which is a bit of a complaint, actually.

Colour was only really limited by hardware with Gears 1. Gears 2 and especially 3 had moments of bright vibrancy which really stood out, with it being used as a narrative and emotional choice. Gears was a very brown game, but a lot of the time, that was very intentional.

I feel it lost a bit of its identity. Yes, the game is absolutely stunning, but it doesn't quite look or feel like Gears of War.

This is a sentiment that carries over to a few other things...

Things don't feel as heavy, raw and bulky as they once did. Our characters move quite easily in their lighter, slimmer fitting armour (oddly explained in universe), the guns don't quite have that "chunky" feeling that every bullet could blow a hole in the side of a car, everything feeling rather lightweight and fast. You can run with heavy weapons now whereas before you were limited to a walking pace.

Think Pacific Rim with its huge masses of metal moving as slowly and purposefully as you would expect a 200' robot to move vs Pacidic Rim Uprising with its comparatively ninja-like anime robots.

Gears 4 loses a lot of what made Gears feel like Gears and its a shame, because these small aspects effect an overall great package, especially when it's largely things that are easy to change aspects of presentation.

**Gameplay**

I played on "Hardcore", for reference.

Mechanically, the gameplay is overall great with it feeling buttery smooth to do everything. It's Gears, but polished up a bit more. Mostly everything carries over from Gears 3, with a few new mechanics such as being able to pull an enemy out from behind cover and being able to vault over cover without first getting into cover (why did this take 5 games and a new studio to achieve?).

As stated earlier, the new enemies are mechanically sound for the most part...Except they can mostly be countered by staying behind cover, something the original trilogy did **really** well, having a decent variety of unique ways enemies either counter your cover or beg you to leave cover to most effectively deal with them.

The main thing here is they mostly just have guns and projectiles that can be dodged by simply getting into cover. Humanoids are most effectively dealt with by popping in and out of cover, anything bigger is often a case of just getting close, dodge rolling its one slow and well telegraphed attack and spamming the glowing weak point with the Gansher/shotgun.

Sure, Deebee's have little rolly things taking place of the tickers whilst the Swarm have Juvie's in place of the Wretches. Swarm also have drop shots, torpedo grenades that fly above cover before dropping down onto a target. Other than this, it's just enemies rushing you, with a handful having a fairly similar "spit" attack that **MAY** get you behind cover, but also probably won't.

And with enemies very much being "Deebee's first half of the game, Swarm second half" (other than one quick, small scale encounter at the end), it feels even more like there's less variety in terms of enemies wanting you out of cover.

And often, these enemies are very seperate. Rolly's and Juvie's will often be right at the start of an encounter so you can deal with them first and spend the rest of it in cover. "Pouncers", big dog-like creatures that shoot tail projectiles, are mostly fought on their own or alongside Juvies, so you'll probably not be in cover anyway since they're most effectively dealt with via a blindfire shotgun blast. Dropshots require you to at worst move sideways a bit whilst in cover or jump to an adjacent bit, so you're never out of it.

It's all so formulaic, feeling like the same few encounters for the whole game. It's something the original Gears did so well whilst this one is far more strictly a cover shooter as that's often the best place to be.

**Conclusion**

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Gears of War 4. It does some things **really** well, others as well as it probably could and sadly, not quite hitting the mark in other ways which held it back from feeling like a proper continuation of the series.

If I were to rate the original trilogy:

- Gears of War 1 : 8/10

- Gears of War 2 : 9/10

- Gears of War 3 : 9/10

I would have to say Gears 4 is...Hmm...Lets say, 7/10. Its no less than that and I can't really say I liked it as much as the original, even if it has polished many elements to a near sheen where the original honestly does lack.

It's otherwise a great game that I'm kicking myself for sleeping on. For a new studio taking over the mantle, it's honestly a decent starting point, even if it does stumble at times.

If anything, I'm looking forward to trying Gears 5, something I never thought I would.

We all know this feeling. You become an adult, you play video games, but they just... aren't fun. They start feeling like a chore. You start asking yourself "is it me or is it the games?". You buy all the expensive hardware, and then you never use it. You try to get back to classics, but something's missing. As sad as it seems, you consider that you're simply not a gamer anymore.

I was in this exact spot when I heard about Baldur's Gate 3. To be honest, I never really liked RPGs. Open-world, non-linear games with fifty spell slots always intimidated me. I mean sure, I played Witcher games years ago and I really enjoyed them, especially Witcher 3, but in these games you simply spam the sword attack while casting two spells and that's it, and the story makes the game quite linear. But I heard so much praise about Baldur's Gate 3 I just had to try it.

The first contact with the game was a little rough. The game wouldn't start and I spent a day debugging it. Oh boy, the joys of gaming on Linux - turns out, in its infinite wisdom, the game chose software renderer. Anyway, I fixed the problem, got to the character creation screen. Click-click, went through all the options and chose something that seemed cool. The game asked me to enter the character name. Wait what? I can name the protagonist in an AAA game? I tried a funny, offensive, immature name, and the game happily accepted it. Okay, now I am interested.

Learning the game's mechanics took a while, but once I got a grasp of it, it became very intuitive. Equipped with that knowledge, I got out to explore. Turns out, my fears of non-linearity and complexity were unfounded - the game allowed me to choose any path, but gently pushed towards the one that made the most sense. Yes, there are lots of items that do lots of stuff, but even on tactician (hard) difficulty level you can happily ignore most of that and just do whatever you like. What is absolutely bonkers to me in a positive way is that most quests have various ways of completing them - including "fuck the quest, I killed the questgiver and stole the reward". Characters really do react to most things you do - of course it's not possible to script all possible outcomes like when using Lae'zel I holocausted the entire creche but she kept poker face the entire time but by and large, the game is very, very interactive.

The game consists of 3 acts; I just finished act 2, which is roughly halfway through the story. Savefile recorded 80 hours of gameplay, which is easily more than 100 hours if we include all the time spent savescumming battles and other things. Those 100 hours were filled to the brim with content - interesting conversations, beautiful graphics, demanding battles, curious items, atmospheric music, all of it. I was glued to the screen "I can't wait to get back home and play the game". Today I woke up and I didn't eat breakfast, beating the boss was my priority. If the game ended here it would already be a fully-fledged, satisfying game, but I'm only halfway through. And even though I very rarely replay games, I'm already excited to play the game at least once more and make different choices.

The point I'm trying to make is that this game is super fun. Not in a "yeah I should be having fun, I see that" way, but in a "fuck sleep, I have a game" way. It's super long and replayable. Not in a "you can replay the game but now UI is purple, also please backtrack 3 hours" way, but "I really want to see what happens if I choose different things". I haven't felt this in a very long time, which points to the question - what exactly is wrong with most other games? I mean sure, there are good games, but what exactly happened to the gaming industry so that despite all the manpower invested in it, only once in a while we get a game that's truly... fucking fun?

Thank you Larian Studios.

Like Witcher 3, I feel anything I can say about Cyberpunk has already been said. But I’ll say it anyway.

I’ve been immersed in ways I never felt possible. Caught myself too many times walking around, eyeing NPCs, watching stupid ads or the in game news, admiring the architecture. For lack of a better word, I feel like I’m living in NC.

I’ve always kept an eye for whatever’s happening behind the scenes in any game, and this game does everything it can to feed that curiosity. Gives just enough about the lives of residents, politics, gang culture and anything else to let you connect the dots but never too much to blatantly tell you what to feel or what to think.

Like the real world, there’s a lot of bleak shit. Bleak implications. You’d have to look for it. Want to find it. Stick your nose in the dark corners of NC, and once you see it, you’ll never unsee it during the calmer moments

“braindances” stuck with me. They have effectively replaced movies. To keep it short, you “Scroll” through moments in someone else’s life, creating a more immersive experience. But artistic types don’t like how watered down corporate Braindances are. The various, family unfriendly, unrelated emotions one feels are human. The bootleg BD demand grows.

Some of these artistic types split off into the underworld, and create smut “Extreme brain dances”. Literal snuff films, then scroll the results. Most if not all the BDs you scroll in missions are fucked up snuff films.

The horizon, especially when the victim dies or is blinded, has an eerie red and black hue. Like staring into the depths of hell.

The worst of the worst are optional. Descriptions of XBDs on the “Pleasures of night city” website are even worse. Worse than you can even imagine. And you’ll only see it if you’re morbidly curious enough to look.

A particular quest involved a "Doll" with the ability to wipe her mind after a session. An ally suggested this gang of kidnappers and violators would not waste her on something as something 'Barbaric" as a snuff film. The implication was 100 times worse for me.

A gig involves children. You’re free to kill the men responsible.

I did that.

Past that, Ive always felt CD Projekt Red games were dated in design. Witcher 3 threw me off because my first impression was a 2004-2009 CRPG crappily ported and downscaled to a PS360. It felt incredibly dated, could not stomach it during COVID, and I only truly got into it last year to be hooked by its story and world building.

Now with 2077, I’m viewing this more positively. Initially turned off by the disastrous launch and recent COVID disgust for Witcher 3, I decided to bite.

A lot of old, archaic features I wish were done away with, but I like the charm. Icons in the inventory look like they could fit into a CRPG from the early 2000s/late 90s. The way dialogue is handled, reminiscent of older CRPGs like fallout. The way enemies and allies constantly shout the same catchphrases in combat. The optional action log in the corner. The view of whoever’s calling you. The way they handled incorporating Phantom Liberty. Ambient music even.

The decision to go first person, which irked me at first, allows the game to present this modern CRPG in a modernized fashion. Overhead like OG Fallout would distance the player from the emotional, grounded elements of the Cyberpunk brand. Third person could have its perks, but it wouldn’t differentiate the game from other AAA games.

In a way, CDPR’s fashion of game development keeps Cyberpunk connected to its roots. Both as a TTRPG (I can promise you would not know about if Mike Pondsmith didn’t make friends with CDPR’s founders) and a past era of games.

I’ve never touched a CRPG in my life. I’ll be honest. Wasn’t even alive then. I’ve seen plenty of videos, watched play throughs, especially OG fallout. I can definitely see Cyberpunk, as it is, made into a CRPG similar to Fallout 1-2. And I can see Fallout 1-2 expanded and glazed into a game like 2077.

All things considered, I think I’m finally comfortable enough to put Baldur’s Gate 3 on my wishlist.

Life has been difficult and unkind for a while now, so at the suggestion of a friend, I played the Outer Wilds. I had heard a lot of incredible things about the game over the years, and I thought that a space faring adventure would be just the thing to lift my spirits during this challenging season I have been facing. I fear that the message of this hopeful game was unfortunately lost on me.

The start of the game is daunting. Before you is an entire solar system where each celestial body houses a dense network of secrets and answers to the grander mystery of what is causing the universe to reset every 22 minutes. That confusion slowly blossoms into a feeling of wonder as your understanding of what’s going on starts to crystalize in your mind. My playthrough began to feature more and more milestone discoveries like conquering the depths of Ash Twin or making my way to the cosmic marvel that was the White Hole Station. One after another, I was lining up achievements and then that all slowed down and I felt more lost than I did at the start of the journey.

The longer things went on, the more the impossibility of the task laid in front of me began to mirror the problems I’d been facing in my own life. I went back retracing my steps hoping to find some overlooked clue the same way I aimlessly amble up and down winding back roads as if I’ll happen upon an opportunity to change my life somewhere on the side of the street. I clung to the safety and familiarity of my ship even when it was an active detriment to my progress the same way I find myself clinging to the warmth of my bed when any hope of tomorrow being different necessitates me going out into the world. Attempts at making some headway went from being measured in minutes to complete orbital periods. I’d click my tongue and defeatedly restart a cycle the way that I promise myself that this was ‘just a bad start to the day, I’ll sleep it off and respond to that text, or send in that job application tomorrow’.

A Short Stay in Hell is a novella I read this year about people trapped in Hell, with their only means of escape being them finding the book that contains the story of their lives in a library of infinite books. It is a sickeningly depressing story about how recursion and the unquantifiable senselessness of life will strip a person of all they are, and each 22 minutes with no progress made began to remind me of this. Cycle after cycle, I would watch every star that galactified the galaxy blink out of existence and watched the numbing blackness of entropy be scorched away by the death of my own sun. Each star was every minute that I had lived, all falling away and bringing me back to this same miserable moment in time where was waking up at home wondering what I could possibly do next

Eventually, with much coaching, I began to put the final pieces of the puzzle together and journeyed to the heart of Dark Bramble to bring the adventure to a close. I watched all the people I met along the way gather round the camp fire and play their little symphony as the end of all they’ve ever known started to dissolve around them. This is the thesis statement of the Outer Wilds, that in a cruel, uncaring, and meaningless universe, life is a miracle. That in the face of an inevitable end that will have made a mockery of everything we ever set out to achieve, we will still choose the ephemeral joys of finding connections and making music. It pains me to say, I found myself unmoved by this idea.

Throughout the entire game, aside from the creaking of your ramshackle spaceship and the ambient noise of alien worlds, the game is silent, save for the music played by the travellers across the solar system. The songs they play are beacons of comfort in a frightening world, and they don’t stop playing till the last star is gone from the sky. It’s a hopeful song, and Emily Dickinson had a poem about songs of hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul,

and sings the tune without the words,

and never stops at all.

What a lovely notion that is. No matter how harrowing life may seem, just remember that the song of hope keeps playing from within and from without. I wish this gave me greater comfort, but to shamelessly steal from John Green to conclude my thoughts.

“The song of hope is always playing, but you can’t always hear it.”

Edit: thank you for all the kind words and spirited discussion! I'd just like to apologize for an erroneous comment about the lack of music in the game. I was playing with friends so there was a lot of chatter and the volume was on low so I didn't notice the music much. Please feel free to share your favorite tracks in the comments!

Decided to play whole Syberia series, all 4 games. It's series about woman called Kate Walker who used to be an attorney but then heard call for adventure and couldn't resist it. Story takes place in alternative version of Earth, where everything is 95% the same, but they have super advanced clockwork automatons and some other minor differencies like new countries and animals. I only played second game at the time of release and don't remember anything about it so you can say played everything for the first time. I actually finished last game half a year ago and still think about it sometimes so wanted to share my thoughts on it.

Can't really say much about previous games, first two are fine classic adventure games, puzzles mostly made sense, not much moon logic there. Though in second game I started using guide often because sometimes there are just giant locations with like 5 active important points and I was afraid to spend hours searching for them. Third game had godawful controls on mouse and keyboard, like almost unplayable at some points, and weak story about... colonialism I guess. Russian military really doesn't like this small tribe because they migrate every 30 years or something. Whole thing felt like giant overreaction for a very minor issue. Third game ended with Kate being captured by military and at the start of fourth game we learn that she was enslaved and spent year in salt mines.

My opinion about the game is very nitpicky but thing is, this game is closer to telltale's interactive movies type, so story is supposed to be main attraction here. And story is built on mystery and mystery is extremely boring and obvious, so nitpicking the story was the only way for me to have fun with game. We find ~70 years old portrait of a woman who looks exactly the same as Kate. Who is this mysterious woman? She is Kate's grandmother named Dana, that's the mystery. It might be interesting fact about real life person, but I think it's harder to turn it into captivating fictional detective story. In game we jump between "modern" days and ~70 years back, playing from Kate and Dana's perspectives. At some point we learn that Dana gave birth to Kate's mother but then WW2 happened and because of that they got separated. They tried to add more mystery to this story and instead made it just more baffling. Dana's lover, father of the child, reportedly died in expedition (he didn't actually, as we learn later) and childbirth went badly, so Dana was left infertile. And then Dana parents decided that this is not traumatizing enough so they also took away the child, gave away to the friends of the family and told Dana that her daughter died during birth. Why they did this? Well meta-reason is that story is very boring like I said, so they needed to add mystery, but in-world reason? I don't know, my headcanon is that her parents are just sadistic assholes and did it for the lolz to see their daughter suffer. They even made fake grave in city graveyard for "dead child" and convinced doctors to change records. This thing is probably intentional reference to the first game where father faked his child death, but in that case father was super influential rich dude who basically owned town, so he easily could have done something like this, but here it's just two small shop owners, how they organized all this?

Going back to the beginning, right from the start it's hard to take story seriously. Kate is enslaved and works in salt mines. She is in a prison cell together with another slave, and as far as I can tell, they are the only two workers in the whole mine. It's probably much more expensive to actually feed them and pay guards, than they earn from two women manually mining salt with rusty pickaxes. Also this world has super advanced mining automatons who can just mine for hours with no fuel, you just need to wind-up them sometimes. Anyway, Kate receives letter from guard and learns that her mother died in US while she was out adventuring in Syberia and so now she really needs to get out. While mining they accidentally find cave with hidden old Nazi train from WW2. Oh, sorry, I said Nazi? I mean of course BROWN SHADOW. Another difference in this world is that WW2 happened exactly the same way but it wasn't Nazi Germany, it was Brown Shadow Germany. And also it wasn't Jews who are victims of holocaust, it was Vagarians. Every time characters in game were talking about Brown Shadow it felt like youtubers who say "unalive" instead of "kill", so infantile. My favorite moment is when at the end of the game Dana says something like "We can't forgive Brown Shadow for all the atrocities they commited...". What atrocities? I don't know any atrocities that BROWN SHADOW commited, game never told me.

So back to the BROWN SHADOW train we found in cave. Near the train there is also 70 year old motorcycle which thankfully still has 70 years old fuel in the tank, so we can just use it if we find the key, this BROWN SHADOW was really good at motorcycle manufacturing and fuel distillation. While we search for the key in the train we find this portrait with Dana, Kate's grandmother and that's the moment game completely lost me. I said that woman in portrait looks exactly the same as Kate, but thing is, we have two characters, Kate and her slavemate, they are both women with same short dark hair, faces are not detailed enough to immediately tell the difference, so everytime during cutscene only one woman appeared on the screen I thought "Wait, is that Kate or other character?". And now one clone shouts to other "KATE, LOOK AT THIS PAINTING! THIS WOMAN LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE YOU!", bitch, she looks exactly like you too! Also like probably millions of other dark haired women, because the whole painting size of A4 paper and woman only takes fraction of this space, so it's just impossible to make detailed enough portrait. There is also hilarious moment later in the game where we see flashback to Dana's lover drawing this portrait and developers didn't actually have different model for painting, so his fresh drawing is the same 70 years old torn painting we find in the present. And guy also doesn't know how to use easel, he just attached piece of paper directly to it without canvas so most of the paper just hanging in air and he somehow draws on it.

We finally found key for 70 years old motorcycle who still has full tank of 70 years old fuel, but then guard suddenly finds us when we are ready to escape. Fight breaks out, our friend gets shot, guard gets knocked out. Friend while dying says "Kate... promise you will find who is this woman who kinda sorta looks like you". Okay, character who was introduced 20 minutes ago for the sole reason of dying and giving me motivation, not sure why it's so important to you, but I guess I will do that instead going back to America to like mourn my mother and deal with inheritance and stuff. Obviously finding origin of this painting that was lying in cave for 70 years is much more urgent and important.

And then we spend whole game to learn that this woman who is probably Kate's grandmother is Kate's grandmother. And also there is race of sentient monkey people who live in hiding in the mountains and one monkey person joined resistance against Brown Shadow, the end.

I kinda played the whole game out of obligation, I already finished first three games so have to finish final, can't just drop it. Can't say game worth it, there were some funny bad moments in game, but mostly it's just dull. Probably first two games are only ones that still worth any attention. There were sequel bait in the end... or pentequel bait I guess, where we suppose to learn about the mystery of monkey people, but I doubt I gonna play it if it's ever gonna get released.

This was kind of a rant I posted in the Catherine subreddit, but it ended up being sort of a review so I wanted to share it here as well, since this sub made me discover so many games I love.

TLDR: If you haven't played Catherine, one of my favorite games, I strongly suggest playing the original over Catherine: Full Body, which SEGA and Atlus advertise as the definitive version. There might be mild spoilers but nothing major.

I think the addition of Rin goes against everything the original game is going for as an experience, while adding nothing of real value.

People that like it say it adds content, but to me that content is at all times working against Catherine the game and is actively disarming it and making it meaningless and boring.

First of all, Catherine was about the real struggles of this early 30s guy but still in his 20s in his mind. Which by the way is a very original representation in gaming, where most male characters are either teens or middle aged father types. He struggles with his love life, his future, his boring job and takes it all in his tiny studio apartment. Walls closing in. The gameplay is about constantly climbing to represent said struggle.

Inside his mundane life he is also constantly pushed towards things, towards decisions, he is constantly hedging and under pressure, and within all that he starts to go a little crazy. He feels like he's gonna die and maybe he is with these nightmares honestly... and he can't seem to get a grip. His choices are kind of bad a lot of the times and end up hurting someone.

You might think I'm rambling but I'm not because Catherine is a narrative game first, so this is all important, the story is important to feel engaged and connect with the game.

So with all that in mind:

When playing the game, you're never quite sure if Vincent is referring to Catherine or Katherine during A LOT of situations when he mentions her. He just says "catherine" (they sound the same) and the subtitles purposely don't write her name when he says it. This is intentional, for the game to feel personal to you and for the choices you're making (you know, the key mechanic outside the puzzle climbing) to mean a lot more, and also for you to question what's real and what's not. Rin throws that out the window because they're not Catherine. When he talks to Rin or about Rin, it's Rin. This is important.

She is also immediately alien, by that I mean by hour 3 you realize she's not quite human, the piano thing, all their aura really... you immeditaley buy that the crazy shit that is happening in the game s real or other dimensions or whatever, you realize it's fantasy, whereas the original played with the psychological aspect a lot more. You were questioning what was real plenty more, especially at first. Just another example of how Rin in general constantly goes against the proper game. Rin just comes in with the fantasy vibe out the gate.

Remember what I said about Vince disappointing people? Vincent is only capable of being a nice guy to Rin. He can do no wrong, ever. Rin is constantly amazed by him and he feels so good all the time with her. Zero tension. He is also suddenly so sure of himself, even when seeing her... you know... he's just perfect about it. Why? Why is he so mature and understanding with Rin when he was being so weird to Katherine 3 minutes ago? Meanwhile the C/Katherine tension is going on at the same time and these shoe-horned in Rin scenes make all of it feel fake. Why is he suddenly so hesitant? You're just out of his shoes at that point.

The duality of good and evil, of order and chaos? You know, the blue and red meter that constantly pops up? Like the one that defines the ending? Doesn't matter, the mechanic is there but you don't care because you know you have an out. Vince can have a third option really? What is this game about again? Seriously what does all of this even add? More scenes? More content? Who cares?

Catherine the OG is a fantastic simple yet twisted story about struggling to figure life out and the pressure to do things. With a very religious in nature undertone about good and evil, black and white, as a goal post, as the future, while the present is falling apart. Religion at its core is a morality system where shades of gray are discouraged, even though you see them all the time in your daily life. This game explores that, and Rin comes in to deflate all tension and tell you life is great and you're great. Puzzle gameplay has no connection to the experience, it's not engaging to help Vince climb because he's just fine whatever.

Oh also, you have the option to skip the gameplay in full body because it doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t want the player to actually get frustrated and feel like Vince does all of the time. Wouldn’t want the player to feel something… Vince has an out and so do you! Don’t worry dear it’s fine. Skip that puzzle section. Put down the controller and watch the anime. The original lets you skip it only on NG+, as it should.

Options, especially those that remove some friction, are not always better for an interactive experience like a game, especially for a narrative game with tension as a key theme. Gamers will feel tempted to skip them and they’re wrong, you can’t let them.

Skipping the puzzles is not quality of life, it’s why are we even here. There’s a lot of great visual novels out there. Nothing wrong with them. But Catherine is something different. Atlus was only making the game to test the persona 5 engine. It didn’t need the puzzle gameplay. They realized later it added value to tell its story properly.

Full Body is a B- tier anime. Catherine OG is a great narrative game.

Yesterday, I was checking my backloggd profile and realized that I've played a lot of games that barely anyone talks about, but genuinely deserve more recognition. Sharing them here in case anyone wants something different to play. Most of these are indie melee action games.

Midnight Fight Express: This one's a top-down beat-em-up that feels like you're playing through an action movie fight scenes. The combat is brutal and satisfying, with tons of weapon variety and combo potential. Also, the story has a good mystery.

Mr. Shifty: You teleport around punching people (fight like x-men's Nightcrawler), and it's as fun as it sounds. Fast, snappy, very short game. It's short but smashing enemies through glasses of the highrise building is so satisfying that I have finished this game three times already. The story is a bit basic "bring down evil corporation" type thing.

Dex: A cyberpunk side-scrolling RPG that wears its Deus Ex inspirations proudly. The thriller-mystery story with branching dialogue and the vibrant 2D cyberpunk 2077 style city are the best things of this game. Not perfect (action gameplay is a little clunky and some people hate the hacking minigames), but it nails the atmosphere better than games with ten times the budget.

Party Hard: A nice stealth murder simulator where you're stopping loud parties by murdering everyone at them. Sounds ridiculous, is ridiculous, but it's also tense as hell once you realize how badly you can screw up. Great soundtrack too.

Crossing Souls: This is Stranger Things by way of a Chrono Trigger-esque 16-bit adventure, and it absolutely nails that nostalgic '80s kid-gang vibe. The story gets surprisingly emotional by the end. The music alone makes it worth playing. It's not perfect, the difficulty feels a little imbalanced, but the atmosphere of this game is awesome.

The Last Door: A Lovecraftian point-and-click horror game that uses its minimalist pixel art to build genuine dread. It's less about jump scares and more about slow-burning unease, which makes it stick with you long after you've finished it. You may not believe me that a pixelated game where you can't even see faces is scary. But trust me, if it was created into a tv series, it would be a horror masterpiece. The soundtracks are so amazing that I still listen to the music of this game on YouTube sometimes.

Legend of Tianding: This one looks like a moving ink painting, and the combat hits just as hard as it looks. It's based on the legends of a real Taiwanese Robin Hood figure, so you get genuine folklore and history. The fights are fast, brutal, and stylish. They nailed 1900s Taipei City and I loved exploring the city.

The Silent Age: This is still the best simple point and click adventure game I have ever played. You play as an average Janitor and end up bouncing between a chill 1972 and a totally dead, empty 2012, using both time periods to figure out how to save the future. It's short and weirdly haunting in how empty the future looks with its stripped-back art style. The story is fantastic and I played this game three times already in the past 10 years.

Pink Panther: Pinkadelic Pursuit (PS1): I don't know how no one knows about one of my favorite 3D platformer games of my childhnood. It's the kind of game you stumble into not expecting much and walk away pleasantly surprised.

Anyone else played these? Would love to hear what other hidden gems you have not seen others talking about.

As a longtime Final Fantasy fan IX has always loomed in the background for me as a quiet must play. Not because it was the flashiest or most famous installment in the series - but to those in the know: the one with the truest heart.

Now that I’ve finally finished it: I understand. The game is pure magic.

Growing up a Nintendo family I never played any of the PS1 or PS2 installments until eventually visiting VII and XII many years later. But what always endeared me to Final Fantasy was its heart - and its ability to deliver on thoughtful themes THROUGH its heart and artistry. And FFIX is the best Final Fantasy of all time in that regard.

What makes it so special is how well it executes on its themes. It’s about life, love, identity, adulthood - but above all: death.

Final Fantasy IX is a game obsessed with death. And it is the most hopeful and life affirming game I think I’ve ever played. The Outer Wilds is the only thing that really comes close - for what that’s worth.

The story is sweet, sweeping, and deceptively tragic. The heroes, as they learn about the world, face one colossal loss after another - but find joy and hope in their deliberate CHOICE to persevere.

The way in which it explores mortality and how heroes like Vivi and villains like Kuja confront it - and through that confrontation come to know themselves and embrace their lives - limited though they may be - is simply inspiring.

All of this is wrapped up in a fairy tale story that is equally sharp, sweet, and expertly crafted. With morose lows and stellar highs. It’s remarkably tight for a Final Fantasy. At just 30 hours in length it knows exactly what it needs to accomplish and benefits from how direct and lean its plotting is. The themes hit harder and are never lost in the fuzz of grinding or long in the tooth side quests.

It isn’t a perfect game: the storybook art style is beautiful but doesn’t lend itself well to innovative or legible dungeon design. The combat is fun, but not nearly as deep as other installments. And the classes and character customization is honestly quite lacking.

But none of that matters.

Because Final Fantasy IX understands what it is. It understands what story it wants to tell. And most of all: it understands YOU.

It is pure magic. Go play it.

I was a diehard Arkham fan back when the games were first coming out. I thought Asylum was great and City was incredible, Origins was good but SUPER buggy, and ultimately I felt pretty conflicted about Knight for all the same reasons as everyone else - the Batmobile, and the twist.

A couple years ago I replayed them and my opinions changed a bit. I had a lot more appreciation for Asylum, and Knight surprised me with how much I loved my time with it, even the Batmobile. I ended up buying the season pass and playing absolutely everything available in the game.

Now I got the urge to play them again and my opinions have again changed. They are still excellent, carefully crafted Batman stories that understand and respect these characters. The combat is still a fun easy-to-use-hard-to-master power fantasy, where the real challenge comes from maxing out your combo meter. And the environments and world building are best-in-class across the core trilogy.

But ohhhh man I did not remember just how much these games stop you in your tracks every time you do ANYTHING to slather on exposition.

Arkham Asylum

This is still a gem, but it's absolutely showing its age a bit. Not just in terms of graphics, but the combat feels wonky compared to the 16+ years of games it's inspired. Batman will sometimes zip around the room between enemies, but sometimes he just.... won't, and he will end up just punching the air like an idiot. Enemy attacks also sometimes come out so quick you can't actually counter them since you're locked into an attack animation. The framework is there for a great combat system, but that's exactly what it is - the framework.

Where the game shines though is the vibes. The miserable, horrific buildings of the Asylum, the sounds of the maximum security doors, the announcement chime that plays while you wander the halls.... I don't think it's just nostalgia that makes it all click, it's still such a joy to explore the island and find riddles and see it change throughout the game as more and more chaos is unleashed.

But the game almost refuses to let go of your hand while playing through the main story. When there's some plot development, Batman either stands completely still or can only walk slowly and talk until the exposition is over. Need to talk to Oracle? Stand still to do it, even though at other times Batman can glide and run around while on the phone. Need to track someone down? Batman will just blankly stand in the room for a second, then carefully and slowly explain what needs to be done, and THEN you can enter detective mode to search for the alcohol or blood or whatever. Didn't do what the game asked you to do within 10 seconds? Batman will either repeat it out loud or instructions will appear on screen - or maybe both!

This is probably all to cater to a first playthrough and make it as accessible as possible but it was so constant that I was thinking of that AAA Mario meme.

It's still a great game, but definitely jarring to return to.

Arkham City

I always considered this to be the masterpiece of the trilogy but something about it felt kinda boring to me this time. I'll admit it's the game I've played the most in the series so maybe it's just that I've had enough Arkham City in my life, but I think the real "problem" is that after my last time playing Knight I was spoiled, and ended up just wishing I was playing that game instead this time.

Still it's a significant improvement on Asylum in basically every way. Graphically it looks great in comparison, the story feels appropriately expanded with a bunch of new villians, and the combat is much more polished and flexible. There's all these little tweaks they made to make it easier to keep freeflow going, but to balance it they add more enemy and attack variation such as thrown objects, armored enemies, shield enemies, and Riddler informants that you'll want to leave for last.

There's still lots of handholding and slow walking, but it's for sure toned down from Asylum. Mostly I got annoyed at little time wasting segments in the game, like flying out to three different jammers and individually punching out 3 screens each, when having one jammer with one screen would have probably been plenty.

But overall, it's a very good game and a great sequel.

Arkham Origins

It's unavailable on Xbox Series X! That sucks! I rarely have the urge to replay Origins, but any time I do it sucks to not have a way to actually play it. Maybe someday this 12 year old Batman spin off game will be backwards compatible....

Edit I was wrong! I can play it on disc!

Arkham Knight

It is the best of the best, and the worst of the worst. The gameplay is butter smooth, the combat has been polished to a mirror shine, and Gotham City is one of the best looking game worlds I have experienced.

Even the Batmobile is fun as hell - I think once I knew how much Batmobile shit was in the game, I was able to recalibrate my expectations and lean into it and appreciate what they built. The "tank combat" is pretty fun and you can tell they tried to emulate the freeflow combat a bit with different Batmobile gadgets and a Strike / Dodge system and combo builders that allow for instant "takedowns"

Sure the logic of this all is absolutely stupid - just strap a thug to the front of these drone tanks and Batman becomes powerless against them - but in a video game where you fly around dressed as a bat, in a city that was fully evacuated in a day, while fighting crocodilian monsters and jetpack-weilding freaks, the drones are just one more thing to add to the "ignore the logic" pile

But man the handholding is back in full force. Batman got a Zoom subscription and he is not letting it go to waste. Every main plot point and every side mission has Batman video calling his friends to slowly talk about what just happened and what to do next. I'm going to need a new B button on my controller after mashing it so goddamn much, WHY CAN'T BATMAN JUST CALL HIS FRIENDS WHILE GLIDING AROUND? HE EVEN PARKS THE BATMOBILE AND TAKES VIDEO CALLS ON HIS STEERING WHEEL SOMETIMES PLEASE JUST LET ME KEEP PLAYING

I might be overreacting and again I know that this is all geared towards a first-time playthrough, but I can't remember any other recent games that wrestled control away from the player so often, just to tell them shit that could have been relayed while continuing to play the game.

Have you ever had your mind blown by what you expected to be a mediocre game? I was well aware of Lair’s infamy. How it became a punching bag in the early PS3 days, and singlehandedly destroyed Factor 5. However, all I heard was that it had the worst control scheme ever with forced Six-Axis controls. This was later patched to add the traditional analog control, so I was curious if the game is any way playable. So the first thing I did was going into the options and turning on the analog controls, and I didn’t have much problem with the controls. The only Six-Axis input was swinging a controller for a somersault and the melee QTE sequence, which I will talk about later. This is how the game should have been controlled in the first place, not patched later.

Here is the thing: this is basically Rogue Squadron but with dragons. The moment I saw how the game handles the cutscene transitions, I instantly knew this runs on the same engine as Rogue Squadron 3. The save profile selection, the level structure, the short briefing, the objective-driven missions, picking a vehicle before the missions, the lives system, and the simulation of the air battle. It’s exactly like Rogue Squadron. It scratches that Rogue Squadron itch that hasn’t been scratched for many years.

I understand why Factor 5 was gravitated toward making a dragon game. Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike feels like a test run for this game. That game attempted ground combat, but not only was it shit, it felt very much segmented rather than being part of the sandbox. You play a flight level, then the scripted trigger point hits, and you are now playing at a ground level. Because the Star Wars vehicles are like planes, whereas dragons can be both planes and tanks in the gameplay sense. Dragons are living creatures, which are more flexible for the gameplay possibilities. I can see how they felt limited by Star Wars while developing Rogue Squadron 3, then saw the dragon scenes in Return of the King in the same year, and thought, we are doing that.

The best thing about Lair is that it removes that division between air and land segments. It makes the ground combat something you can do naturally as part of your moveset. The seamless ground and air combat is only possible with dragons, not vehicles. That was the first thing that blew my mind. I landed my dragon and engaged in the Dynasty Warrior-style ground battle with dozens of soldiers, and I was like, holy shit, I can do this? The second thing that blew my mind was when I saw The Lord of the Rings scale battle of hundreds of NPCs clashing in real-time, and it’s all dynamic. You have to engage in the battle to not let our army defeated, and you are targeting strategic points for our forces to win. It’s like Total War, and how is this even possible with PS3?

Well, only because the game runs at 5-10 fps. Lair looks good, with the visual design that hides the N64 level texture quality as best as possible, but the game runs like a slideshow. Whenever you are in a large scale city or enemy dragons are engaging you in battle, it runs at 5fps, and too bad, that’s most of the game. Some cutscenes look way too dark that I literally couldn’t see what the target the scene was highlighting. I do get astonished by the scale of everything, only if the game ran well. It is unfortunate considering Rogue Squadron 2 and 3 looked like Xbox 360 games and ran at 60 fps on GameCube. The game has numerous crashes. In one case, I just finished a long, difficult mission, and was watching the ending cutscene, and the game suddenly freezed there. I had to redo the whole mission all over again because the game locks any kind of savepoint.

The game desperately needed more polish. What made the Rogue Squadron games good is that the core gameplay is tight. Everything is clear and responsive. The combat is so snappy and intuitive enough to be put in the arcade. Lair, however, even with the analog controls, feels so loose and clunky. Obviously, the dragons should be weighty, but this one just feels more janky rather than intentionally awkward. The moment I moved the dragon, it felt slow and annoying. It never feels satisfying. There are too many animation interruptions and automations that it’s not clear what you are even doing. If you try to do more than one action at one time, the game shits the bed becuase it’s all tied to the long, interruptive animations. The combat relies too much on an artificial cinematic feel rather than any mechanical depth. The ally dragons and enemy dragons are indistinguishable because the game is too dark, so there were numerous inevitable friendly fires. The game lacks minimap, so it is difficult to identify what my target is. I often died or mission-failed, and I got confused because I was not sure exactly what I was doing right or wrong.

The camera control is inverted, so I changed it in the options menu, but it only applies to the flight camera control, not to the ground camera controls… so it gets even more confusing because it’s not consistent. There are also so many simple actions tied to the complex inputs. Why does the lock-on have you press L1 and R1 at the same time? Why does the brake have you press L2 and R2 at the same time? Why not have them do the one button? Why are L2 and R2 also mapped to the “landing” action? So when you try to slow your dragon in the low altitude, well, you cannot because you will accidentally land. Why not assign the “landing” to R2 and brake to L2? You try to lock on to the mission-critical target, and the game locks on something else.

When you get close to the enemy dragon, you can dash and engage in a melee, and it’s awesome in terms of the presentation. It’s exactly a playable dragon combat scene from House of the Dragon. In terms of the playability, it’s terrible. Once the novelty of dragon fight vanishes, the ground combat and dragon melee are jankfest. It is a glorified QTE rather than a natural extension of the combat sandbox. I thought Ace Combat: Assault Horizon’s dogfighting was bad enough, but this is on another level of trash. If you cut this out, the game would instantly be better.

There are certain boss fights that are basically QTE, and it’s extra frustrating because if you fail it, you are instantly dead, losing precious lives. Do I have to remind you that the game has no checkpoints? So if you fail the sudden QTE, there is a good chance that you have to replay the whole mission. For one example, there is a stealth mission where you have to evade the enemy searchlights and destroy the generator. I thought this was a medieval fantasy, and there is some kind of sci-fi searchlights? Evading the searchlights and getting to the generator is easy enough. So you find the generator; the game prompt tells me to lock on to it. My dragon dashes to the generator and grabs it. The problem? The game doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to do. By then, you are already spotted by the enemies, so the screen is literally bombarded with explosions with the flashing seizure-inducing SFXs, all the while I’m just screwing around and not seeing anything, wasting all my lives and having to restart the whole mission again. I had to look up the guide, and it turns out I had to shake my controller. HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THIS. Because I already tried shaking my controller and it didn’t work, so I thought I was suppposed to do smething else. No, you have to shake it really hard and for a long time. There are some truly infuriating shit like this throughout the game.

Regarding the presentation, the biggest gift of Rogue Squadron is that it is, well, Star Wars. It was meant to give you a cinematic vibe that you are playing a Star Wars game. It had an authenticity to it. Lair being the original IP means that it cannot rely on the existing IP, but only on the novelty of a dragon flight game, and while it does succeed, I cannot help but feel I would have enjoyed it more if it was just a flat-out licensed video game of an existing franchise. The lack of identity comes across as a cheap imitation or an off-brand copycat, so it feels like a fake video game of Eragon or The Lord of the Rings. It would be if Rogue Squadron was titled Space Battle, and you are fighting with the spaceships that look like X-wings and TIE-fighters, but not actually X-wings and Tie-fighters, so it ends up feeling like a waste.

Though, the story surprisingly has some meat to it. It is framed as a generic fantasy war story where you fight the bad evil faction, but it turns out to be “are we the baddies?”. Remember the white phosphorus scene from Spec Ops: The Line? If I tell you that this game did the near-identical scene 5 years earlier, would you believe it? You are ordered to destroy people fleeing to a building, assuming them to be soldiers. You burn the shit out of hundreds of them with dragonfire. You land, and it turns out they were all women and children. An argument ensues with the superior, and you learn that what you have been doing was genocide on the whole population, driven by religious fanaticism. This, I didn’t expect at all.

This, right here, a type of game that actually needs a remake or spiritual successor. Haze is forgettable, Killzone is forgettable, Heavenly Sword was forgettable, and Uncharted is forgettable. Lair isn’t. This had the potential to be the next big thing. The concept of the player being a dragon rider and blowing shit up in the wide battlefield is still unique enough that I have to recommend trying it out. I still haven’t played a game quite like this one… which is insane to me because this is the concept that should be a genre at this point.

What the hell are the game studios doing? How has a dragon war game in this vein been done with one game and never been tried again, while mediocre third-person shoulder-view shooters or Soulslikes fill the game shows? People love dragons. House of the Dragon exists. How to Train Your Dragon exists. Do the game devs not like fantasy? Whoever holds the IPs related to dragons, WB, Disney, or DreamWorks, please take a look at Lair. SEGA, reboot Panzer Dragoon like this. Make an Ace Combat game with dragons and seamless ground combat. Add in the raising simulation, roleplaying, and bonding elements like Monster Rancher and Dynasty Warriors, and you get a megafranchise like Pokémon. That’s all you have to do. The game industry is supposed to be individualistic and creative, but all the people are making the same tired shit.

I recently had the urge to replay the original Lego Star Wars video game, which just includes levels from the Prequel movies and nothing from the original trilogy (barring a single bonus level). I owned it as a child back on the OG Xbox, but I tended to have more nostalgia for Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga growing. I've replayed The Complete Saga a ton over the years, but haven't touched the original game in about 20 years.

After playing through the original Lego Star Wars as an adult and unlocking everything, I was surprised to find I enjoyed the original Lego Star Wars more than The Complete Saga, mainly due to two big changes.

I tend to yap a lot, so for the sake of brevity, I'll refer to the original Lego Star Wars as "LSW 1", and the Complete Saga as "TCS".

One of my least favorite parts of TCS is the vehicle levels, as they all tend to follow the same gameplay formula of controlling a ship on a 2D plane, while using torpedos and tow mines to break obstacles while dealing with enemy ships. These vehicle levels tend to blend together as they all play very similarly, outside of some small differences like using the tow cable to trip AT-AT's on Hoth. The worst part of these levels is the combat, as unless you're specifically required to kill enemies to proceed, the best strat is to just ignore enemies and spam the fire button while focusing on your main objective. Enemy ships are fast and spawn frequently, and so are their blaster bolts, making it difficult to intentionally fight them without taking unavoidable damage. The only levels that don't follow this design formula are the two vehicle levels they borrowed from LSW 1.

LSW 1 has only three vehicle levels, Mos Espa Pod Race, Gunship Calvary, and Battle over Coruscant, each of them playing a bit differently and I really enjoy them all. One of the biggest reasons they're so enjoyable is they're all checkpoint based levels, so dying means you respawn at a specific checkpoint rather than respawning in the same spot you died. This means death has an actual consequence besides just losing studs, which is something the Lego games tend to lack in general. Even if you're not a big fan of these levels, LSW 1's vehicle levels only have a Story Mode and no Free Play, as there aren't any unlockable vehicles like in TCS meaning you can collect all minikits in one go without needing to replay it.

The 2nd difference I really enjoyed, which may be a bit controversial, is that I really enjoy is how Blaster characters play in the original game. In LSW 1, blaster characters don't have a melee attack, have a less robust auto-aim feature, and can't auto-dodge incoming projectiles while spamming the fire button. While this does make your blaster characters weaker than TCS, personally it's a blessing in disguise you have way better control of your character in LSW 1, and makes blaster characters have some additional skill expression.

If you've played through TCS, you know the pain of blaster characters accidentally meleeing their nearby coop partner, or the auto-aim randomly locking onto a neutral NPC or breakable object behind you instead of the enemy in front of you. It's usually never detrimental, it just gets really annoying after it happens so many times. Luckily this is never an issue in LSW 1, as the auto-aim only functions in a cone shape in the direction you're facing, instead of being locking onto anything close to you regardless of direction. Having to actually strafe manually to dodge enemy projectiles alongside properly aiming your shots makes them a lot more engaging to play. Granted, it's still Lego Star Wars so the combat isn't that difficult, but in a game series that generally tends to lack difficulty and skill expression, I'll take anything I can get.

Those are the two main differences that really affected my enjoyment, but there are a couple smaller details I enjoyed which don't warrant a full paragraph:

• Certain blaster characters like Padme had unique blaster designs and sound effects in LSW 1, which were removed in TCS and they use the standard blaster design/SFX.

• They changed the lighting system in TCS, where the colors tend to be more bright and saturated, I prefer how the lighting looked in the original as it's a bit more. The Naboo levels are the best example of this imo, as LSW 1 looks like the sun is starting to set with an orange/yellow tint to everything, while TCS looks more like it's just set in the middle of the day.

• Yoda is such a unique character in this game. When his lightsaber is out his movement causes him to jump instead of walk normally, and when not using a lightsaber, you can have Yoda hop on his Coruscant chair to travel around instead of using the slow cane walk.

I've been glazing LSW 1 a lot so far, but it's definitely not a perfect game, some of my major complaints being:

• Studs and minikits are the only collectables in LSW 1, there aren't any red or gold bricks, and the only bonus content is a single level unlocked after getting True Jedi on all levels. You also don't need to complete True Jedi on both Story mode and Free Play like in TCS, getting True Jedi in either mode will count as "completing" the level.

• While you'll typically have enough studs to unlock all characters by the time you complete story mode + free play on all levels, I still needed to grind over 1,000,000 more studs to have enough for affording all extras, as there's no stud multiplier available to quicken the process.

• This game has glitchy collision with studs that appear when breaking lego objects, casuing them to sometimes clip through walls or floors. The first level of the game, Negotiations, is especially notable where none of the walls in the corridor past the starting room seem to block studs correctly.

Overall, I'm really happy I took the chance to give the original Lego Star Wars a replay, it was cool experiencing this game again and seeing the differences it has to The Complete Saga. I was also surprised how short this game is, it only took me just under 13 hours to complete every level and purchase everything in the shop, and that's including 60-90 minutes of stud grinding for the extras I was missing.

About a month ago, I decided to play a whole bunch of PlayStation 1 games that I’ve never touched before. That means buying the physical discs, hooking up my PS2 to an old Sony CRT TV that’s been sitting in my room for like 15 years, and diving in. I did not grow up playing PS1 (being an N64 kid) but I've previously played a few common titles such as all three Final Fantasy games (7,8, and 9), the Resident Evil games (2 and 3), and Parasite Eve (1 and 2).

First game on my journey is Syphon Filter, a third-person shooter with some stealth sections. I knew nothing about the game when I popped it into the disc drive, and the first level gave me pause, mostly because of the controls. Not because I dislike tank controls (I actually think they work great for many of the games on the PS1 given the control scheme), but because Gabe feels particularly slippery and walks like he’s got a hot shit in his pants.

I also didn’t realize you could auto-target at first, and was trying to shoot everyone in first person mode. You see, it’s mostly third person, but you can auto-target (think: Tomb Raider 1), and you can also “aim down sights” in first person mode, which allows headshots.

Once I got through the first few levels, the movement and gameplay started to click. More often than not, I’d auto-target in a jam, but take advantage of headshots in first-person mode to quickly clean up enemies.

The story is pretty standard 90s and early 2000s affair. A terrorist group has a plot to kill a bunch of people with a virus. The cutscenes and voice acting aren’t bad, but they aren’t good either. But damn, the music rips!

About the mid-point of the game, the difficulty ramps up, but I never found it too difficult. Checkpoints, similar to the original Halo, made some particularly grueling levels tolerable. Getting better at shooting first-person helped. My biggest achievement was probably finishing Rhoemer’s Base, a snowy level that encourages you to stealth kill the whole thing, without setting off any alarms.

My biggest complaint is the multiple levels with sub-objectives like “Treat 7 patients” or “disable 10 missiles”. More often than not, there’d be one target I just could not find, and I’d be running around the now empty level looking for what I needed. Once, a scientist I needed to kill was hidden in a side room I just completely missed. Those moments really killed momentum in what were otherwise fun levels.

Beat the game (with a final boss that was honestly more frustrating than fun) and rolled credits while the Syphon Filter music played. Bought the 2nd game and will likely play it later this year. Highly recommend if you enjoy PS1 and third-person shooters.

I love the PS1. Early 3D graphics are perfect for me: readable, a little pixelated, and with a lot of gritty personality. The PS1 has this dark, low-visibility range style born from its technical limitations that enhances these games. Even the texture wobble is charming in its own way.

Next, I’m playing Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. I’ll check in with another post once I’m done.