Bio
Terminally Online.

I only review games that I have recently finished and then give my thoughts with a score.

In the words of an old prophet...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRmkSf-YT8o
Personal Ratings
1★
5★

Badges


GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

1 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year

Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

Best Friends

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Gained 3+ followers

Favorite Games

Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
Perfect Dark
Perfect Dark
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Dynasty Warriors 4
Dynasty Warriors 4

023

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

000

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

CarnEvil
CarnEvil

Mar 09

Atomic Heart
Atomic Heart

Feb 23

.Hack//Infection
.Hack//Infection

Feb 19

Hi-Fi Rush
Hi-Fi Rush

Jan 28

Signalis
Signalis

Jan 12

Recently Reviewed See More

"Jesus my hand hurts. I feel like a goddamn melee player after finishing one Fox vs Falco match." - Man who has shot over 4000 rounds into one boss.

I promise I'll get to playing .hack again. Just needed to scratch that old arcade itch again until I remembered this game.

Let me set the stage really quick for you.

The year is 1998, and The House of the Dead just came out with it's sequel that same year and it's hogging players left and right with how tight the controls were and how fun it was despite quarters being eaten left and right.

But... in that same arcade was a little cabinet that happened to release on Halloween day of all days.Holy geez did it look different compared to the competition at the time.

Before actually reviewing this game, I think anyone interested in this game at all should take a look at the development of this title when they have the chance.
Just seeing this game even be released was a miracle with the way things were headed for Jack Haeger's team during the beginning of the end for Midway games at the time. Only a couple of years before their impending bankruptcy in 2006.

I mean, they had good reason to think that as well. Hell, this is the same small development team that made Narc (Yes, that helmet blowing up hobos with rockets Narc.) after all.

Sadly the reviews on this game back then were not so kind. Going as far as to call it a "Crappy House of the Dead clone."

But enough of the past. We're in 2023 and I want to do some light gun shooting before MAME gives me a fucking headache upon setup. How does it play?

Like a faster paced House of the Dead. You're zooming left and right, jumping hoops and going through different rides in every level with the head camera changing every moment. The different perspectives you get while shooting down clowns, bats and whatnot is so different from any lightgun shooter that I've played. The music and the art-style is fitting for its Tim Burton Nightmare Before Christmas influence and the blood and gore taken from the Mortal Kombat arcade games.

This game is fucking cool as hell, but it's also short as hell too. If you're really good, you could probably beat this game in just under an hour, and with something like MAME with mom giving you infinite quarters at your disposal, you can just smash on through each hit.

Funny that the last boss is called Tokkentaker, because you'll be dying so many times throughout fighting him and the entire game really.

If you have 30 or so minutes to burn, give this a go. If you're new to using MAME like I was, check out this guide for setting up controls.





"Thank god it's all over. I may be extremely pissed, but I can go back to my PCSX2 hideyhole in peace."

Wait, there were people excited to play this game? Was it because of the graphics?
Was the concept of "Bioshock but in russia" that
compelling? I'd really love to know what got those people excited about this title.

Or maybe we just haven't had enough of crispy critters just yet.

Let's talk about the good things about this trash heap before I get to the rest of the game.

The soundtrack was "Fine" with a hyper emphasis on fine. As @petapd has said in their review, it seems that many were believed that Mick Gordon was going to create the soundtrack for this game with all of the hubub floating around this title. Turns out that the tracks were handled by a person called Geoffplaysguitar, a youtuber who mostly does Mick Gordon style songs in the cover of his style, and it does seem like he's trying when the game needs it. Looking at the discography, it looks like Mick has only done two tracks and called it there.

And that's it. That's the only "good" thing the game has got it going for. And it doesn't even do it that well sometimes. Hell, even when there's no fighting, the most you'll hear is environmental noises around you when you're finally out in the open world.

Alright. It looks like I'm gonna start with the shit. And it begins with just the mechanics and the whole core loop of gameplay that you'll be slogging through while you're playing.

First, some notable mentions.

1. Why can't I zoom in and out of the map. It's an "Open world" game.

2. Why is the inventory menu for the game when using the vendor so fucking terrible. Any time I want to move an item the list on where I'm moving the item from and to keep resetting to the top of the screen, so I have to move my mouse down again and scroll where I want to place my next thing for EVERY ITEM.

3. If you're playing on the hardest difficulty like I did, more than often you'll get groups of enemies that will group up on you and stunlock you while you're in a getup animation, and you can't do JACK SHIT but accept that you're probably going to die just because you got knocked down once.

4. I don't think I've had an issue where a quest has just straight up broken. Whether that be from just a key item not spawning, or a marker not being there in the first place. This game does the cardinal sin of fucking up both of those things while in my playthrough. Take for example, there's a mission in the game called "Bug in the System" where you have to find a key disk to unlock a door. I couldn't find the thing, so I was looking around and checking around with my map to see if I could find it, and when I ran out of options, I went onto the internet and looked for a solution. Turns out this quest is bugged to not spawn the item even if you pick it up and it shows in your inventory. Worst of all is that map marker just decides to disappear at times when finishing an objective or moving to a next objective, and I've had to reload the game a couple of times to fix and see where I needed to go next. This last problem was just annoying, but it kept occurring during my playthrough, so it was worth mentioning.

*This last point could be moot later on, but this was happening during time of review, so same point as the marker.

Alright. Now that that's out of the way.

This game fucking blows. The game's mechanics blow, the gunplay blows, the powers blow, and even the protagonist with the really predictable story blows.

Whose really fucked up idea was it to make an enemy that won't take enough damage to kill with a gun, but also still take just as long to kill with a melee weapon?

Even more fucked up is why did they make the bosses the same way minus for one boss that happened to have some weak points to him? I don't think I saw a single way to speed up the bosses in this game minus the one I remember.

I'm very glad I ended up getting the blueprint for the launcher early, because it felt like the only weapon that was capable of doing more that fuck-all when it came to damage to those "beefier normal enemies" and bosses. Hell, even the last boss was a pushover with how many rockets I had and how much splash damage it did.

Another big fucking issue I had with this piece of crap was regarding saves. See, this game decided to be cutesy and add saves all over the world and everywhere you went. Ok, that's great! But, you couldn't save from the menu, so the only way you could save is by using those booths.

Alright, you might think oh, "Maybe it's like resident evil where I've got to time my saves wherever I go to make sure I don't lose a lot of progress!"

But then the game autosaves anyway when you enter certain areas.

Why not just give me the ability to save from the menu instead? There are certain level sections where there are no booths, and just no way of getting to one either because you're closed off from going back, so if you manage to fuck up a dodge, or if you didn't heal enough, you'll just get fucked and lose so much progress.

Ok, so the gameplay sucks? Maybe story could be a good deal?

Yay it's Bioshock!!!!

It's Infinite but with even more ridiculous writing.

It wants to be a borderlands with the writing, but it also wants you to take its world very seriously too. The amount of people you talk to and the connections you make don't matter. None of it matters at all, and even worse when you have a protagonist who is being SPOONFED BY THE CHUNKS with how bad his employers might seem, he just shuts his ears and continues on business as usual. If you really want to endulge yourself it some grade-A stupidity, the ending might be more than enough to satisfy that insanity that the writers were cooking up.

You have more than TWO DECADES worth of games to look towards for your narrative, and you choose this shit? This makes David Cage look like a damn messiah, because at least he can make me laugh with his ridiculous writing. This is just insulting horseshit. The only reason I decided to keep going with this game was to try to find that sliver of hope, maybe that oomph that this game might give me, but it just gave me the gift of nothing but two middle fingers in my face.

You know, we've done this song and dance before with sexy girls in video games. Haydee, 2B, even fucking Widowmaker.

You don't even get to see these two girls until halfway through the game, and then at the end of the game. Maybe that scene where she's taking out that gold tube will be enough to satisfy the other types of gamers who were looking forward to this title.

This sucked.Thank god for gamepass.

I'm tired. Gotta go finish .hack//Mutation now.





No tagline for this review.

There isn't much to say about this game despite me willingly putting almost 30 hours into what is essentially a giant prologue.

The combat is very archaic and very straightforward. Beat somebody up by hitting the x button various times until you guard break them or until they're dead. Rinse and repeate for the entirety of the game until you get to the last boss, where I thought I was very under-prepared with the way my team was set up, only for me to steamroll through because I managed to find some good endgame weapons along the way.

So if the gameplay is very boring, what about the story? Is it worth your time playing this game (And watching the OVA) just to see what you're missing?

Eh, that's all really up to you. The only reason why I got into .Hack or started playing these earlier games was because I did think at the time that this series was sort of a niche type of deal. It's like playing Digimon for the first time when all you've known is Pokemon and the few other battlers around that time.

As I stated before, this is just a prologue to the next couple of games. And with the way this game ended off, it gave me at least a bit of a second wind to keep going despite all of the tediousness about the combat which made a bulk of the decent story the player manages to read with either emails, or even the message board within the game.

I do love the tutorial this game provides though. It's like having a wiki for the game inside of your game without having to ever go online if you're looking for that rare item.

I'll check back again with mutation to see if I still have that spark to keep going.