BeachEpisode
2021
Having this tacked on to my favourite Mario game is doing no disservice whatsoever, but I can't help but want to like it more. The central mechanic being Bowser's cyclic attacks on a seamless open world feels like such an incredible framework and lends the game a feeling unlike any other Mario game up to this point. Still, I found myself sinking into repetition as each zone tended to share challenges (blue coins, Dark Luigi, locked cage etc.) and fail to be particularly challenging explorations of them.
It was probably the first time I've ever attacked Bowser, and a fucking health bar appeared over his head???? Wild.
I feel this game would be better served as an expansion to Odyssey instead of 3D World if only because the limited move list seems to only work Okay for an open-world game. They were absolutely perfect for 3D World's level design, but the compromise for Bowser's Fury was to add the ability to hoard powerups and switch them on the fly, where something more momentum-based would have probably worked a lot better. It both eliminates a lot of challenge and makes the experience feel a little slapdash, that I'm mainly succeeding because of my gear rather than my own dexterity.
Still, this is quite fun! Cool as hell to see Nintendo pull a little bit of a Majora's Mask again by remixing old assets into a weird new direction n stuff.
It was probably the first time I've ever attacked Bowser, and a fucking health bar appeared over his head???? Wild.
I feel this game would be better served as an expansion to Odyssey instead of 3D World if only because the limited move list seems to only work Okay for an open-world game. They were absolutely perfect for 3D World's level design, but the compromise for Bowser's Fury was to add the ability to hoard powerups and switch them on the fly, where something more momentum-based would have probably worked a lot better. It both eliminates a lot of challenge and makes the experience feel a little slapdash, that I'm mainly succeeding because of my gear rather than my own dexterity.
Still, this is quite fun! Cool as hell to see Nintendo pull a little bit of a Majora's Mask again by remixing old assets into a weird new direction n stuff.
2015
Everything about this strikes me as the type of game that Mr Brainwash would make - unceremoniously smashing together a 3D collage of ready-made graphics with the sole intent of leaving a grotesque impact under the presumption there's a profoundness to it all. This game looks like a Second Life map, hideously warped prefab character models dancing with bought emotes and with bizarre decor strewn around in a way that only makes sense in the designer's stormcloud of a mind. Honest contender for most botched implementation of sun shafts I've ever seen. Off-Peak is probably supposed to be funny in a beguiling sort of way, but the languid dialogue and hacked together assets just hit me as dull and uncreative. The soundtrack is a bop though.
2006
The Elder Cowboys: Oblivion
Not a fantastic shooter by any stretch of the imagination, but it very clearly feels like a passion project of sorts. Inspired by the physics and interactivity of Half Life 2, and spinning them into an explorative series of levels introducing new mechanics with semi-regularity. One of those early 7th console generation games that feel eager to stress test the new hardware capabilities in as clumsy and charming a way as they could. Worth playing just to watch the player's cast shadow while swinging from tree branches with a whip.
Not a fantastic shooter by any stretch of the imagination, but it very clearly feels like a passion project of sorts. Inspired by the physics and interactivity of Half Life 2, and spinning them into an explorative series of levels introducing new mechanics with semi-regularity. One of those early 7th console generation games that feel eager to stress test the new hardware capabilities in as clumsy and charming a way as they could. Worth playing just to watch the player's cast shadow while swinging from tree branches with a whip.
2016
Hard to completely despise this despicable game because it's been polished to an absolute mirror shine through a lifetime of quality over quantity updates. Sadly, these updates were hyper-focused towards catering to the Elite Gamer demographic and far less towards the people who play games to have fun, and you're lying if you think there's no difference between the two. I went into this game at release hoping it would shape up to fit the hole in my heart left by Team Fortress 2, but Overwatch's walled garden content approach means the sheer user-created variety will never ever coalesce.
I'm not saying I'd love this game if it lets people make surf maps or play on servers with insane plugins - but I'd PROBABLY love it, if it even as much as let me set my spray to an animated gif of Konata Izumi.
My wildest hopes and dreams for Overwatch 2 begin and end at hoping they hired a writer this time. Overwatch trailers are seriously written like when you just press the middle suggested word on your phone keyboard. "We are heroes and we must protect this world because it is just the right thing to do and heroes must come together to do what is right and". I literally need to stop myself before I start talking about how good the TF2 comics were.
I'm not saying I'd love this game if it lets people make surf maps or play on servers with insane plugins - but I'd PROBABLY love it, if it even as much as let me set my spray to an animated gif of Konata Izumi.
My wildest hopes and dreams for Overwatch 2 begin and end at hoping they hired a writer this time. Overwatch trailers are seriously written like when you just press the middle suggested word on your phone keyboard. "We are heroes and we must protect this world because it is just the right thing to do and heroes must come together to do what is right and". I literally need to stop myself before I start talking about how good the TF2 comics were.
2017
elated to see this small ufo get the bag...
"Fall seven times,
get up eight times.
That's life."
get up eight times.
That's life."
1995
Wasn't expecting such an early foray into the 3D platformer genre to be this consistently engaging and easy to control. Bouncing around and blasting enemies into polygons felt visceral and I loved it.
Finding the Gods in the little things
Farming games have bored me to tears forever, and I could never put my finger on exactly why, until I played Sakuna. They never feel like I'm actually making anything for anyone, merely automating infinitely expanding factories that operate a hidden spreadsheet which assures me I'm efficiently pumping out a million different kinds of produce you never have the opportunity to see. A distant bird's eye view on an industrial empire devoid of anything besides numbers and percentages. At least it fills up a hunger bar, right?
Sakuna, on the other hand, has a laser-focused level of attention purely on rice farming, right down to the player needing to manually carry out quite literally every single step of the process by hand. Tracing the production cycle from sorting the seeds - tilling the land - planting the seedlings evenly - fertilising and maintaining a desired water level balance - reaping then drying the stalks on a rack - threshing and hulling for the type of rice desired - then preparing a meal to watch your beloved newfound family enjoy. It's tedious and arduous toil but completely thankful and full to the brim with charm, and I fucking love it more than anything. Quite literally made me more appreciative of a foodstuff I take for granted. Filled with sweet, reverent moments I found genuinely moving and will stick with me for a long time. Watching this humble rice paddy thrive was more uplifting than I have the words for.
You can miss me with the combat, which is my main sticking point because you spend so much time doing it. Labourious and dull even after the movelist opens up towards the end of the game. I'm thoroughly unconvinced the drudgery exists to further the game's themes of toil and spoil because it's just... so standard of a mid-tier Japanese game production.
Probably my biggest case of "a sequel could make this perfect", and the game's apparent success at least in Japan has me genuinely hopeful. A few minor deviations and we have a Strand game on our hands. Hear me out.,
Farming games have bored me to tears forever, and I could never put my finger on exactly why, until I played Sakuna. They never feel like I'm actually making anything for anyone, merely automating infinitely expanding factories that operate a hidden spreadsheet which assures me I'm efficiently pumping out a million different kinds of produce you never have the opportunity to see. A distant bird's eye view on an industrial empire devoid of anything besides numbers and percentages. At least it fills up a hunger bar, right?
Sakuna, on the other hand, has a laser-focused level of attention purely on rice farming, right down to the player needing to manually carry out quite literally every single step of the process by hand. Tracing the production cycle from sorting the seeds - tilling the land - planting the seedlings evenly - fertilising and maintaining a desired water level balance - reaping then drying the stalks on a rack - threshing and hulling for the type of rice desired - then preparing a meal to watch your beloved newfound family enjoy. It's tedious and arduous toil but completely thankful and full to the brim with charm, and I fucking love it more than anything. Quite literally made me more appreciative of a foodstuff I take for granted. Filled with sweet, reverent moments I found genuinely moving and will stick with me for a long time. Watching this humble rice paddy thrive was more uplifting than I have the words for.
You can miss me with the combat, which is my main sticking point because you spend so much time doing it. Labourious and dull even after the movelist opens up towards the end of the game. I'm thoroughly unconvinced the drudgery exists to further the game's themes of toil and spoil because it's just... so standard of a mid-tier Japanese game production.
Probably my biggest case of "a sequel could make this perfect", and the game's apparent success at least in Japan has me genuinely hopeful. A few minor deviations and we have a Strand game on our hands. Hear me out.,
2020
My experience with this game seems to have been very different from everyone else's, and I would definitely like to set up the disclaimer to disregard this write-up if you found yourself genuinely enjoying this game. My time with Alyx was coloured by the fact that VR makes me drastically motion sick after even a few moments of playing, I finally completed this game after about five months of short intermittent sessions. I ABSOLUTELY would not have even bothered if this didn't just so happen to be a mainline Half Life entry, a series I love.
Compliments to the chefs, the game is stunning looking. I'm sure they used every trick under the sun to get this game running smoothly while looking great on my ageing pc (which I'm sure plays a part in how VR affects me). The sheer level of mechanical detail, the variety in the pieces of graphic design illustrations throughout the city lending every area its own sense of lived-in plausability. Oo mama the posters and stuff around the zoo. Much of the stuff I love Half Life for is here and urbex is alive and well.
The problems for me really do arise around the fact that the act of playing the game was akin to strapping a microwave to my face and having my eyeballs burst like blueberries under the scorching tropical sun. I simply don't believe it's worth the strain, because the game itself is a fairly standard rail shooter affair. Once the fully-realised vr simulation euphoria disappeared I realised I was just walking from one gunfight to the next with alarmingly few tools to actually play with. I put up with this and even enjoyed it in Half Life 2, because my movement felt unrestricted. If Alyx is as good as VR games are at right now, I'm happy to just. Hibernate on the shit.
As a kid I always wanted to touch a Combine forcefield and this game let me carry out my dream, thamks valve
Compliments to the chefs, the game is stunning looking. I'm sure they used every trick under the sun to get this game running smoothly while looking great on my ageing pc (which I'm sure plays a part in how VR affects me). The sheer level of mechanical detail, the variety in the pieces of graphic design illustrations throughout the city lending every area its own sense of lived-in plausability. Oo mama the posters and stuff around the zoo. Much of the stuff I love Half Life for is here and urbex is alive and well.
The problems for me really do arise around the fact that the act of playing the game was akin to strapping a microwave to my face and having my eyeballs burst like blueberries under the scorching tropical sun. I simply don't believe it's worth the strain, because the game itself is a fairly standard rail shooter affair. Once the fully-realised vr simulation euphoria disappeared I realised I was just walking from one gunfight to the next with alarmingly few tools to actually play with. I put up with this and even enjoyed it in Half Life 2, because my movement felt unrestricted. If Alyx is as good as VR games are at right now, I'm happy to just. Hibernate on the shit.
As a kid I always wanted to touch a Combine forcefield and this game let me carry out my dream, thamks valve
2021
This review contains spoilers
I don't want to be too hard on a short inventive puzzle game that seems more focused on exploring a radio play of two San Fransisco doughballs' relationships than allowing the player to mess around with its central 'recursive world' mechanic - but I was certainly more excited for the latter. The way the gameplay blends into the narrative isn't lost on me; shrinking and growing different elements of yourself until you contort into fitting into a relationship is quite relateable... but If you prod at this game too hard, you'll poke a hole in it.
Maquette is a game about seeing the big picture; it encourages you to go outside the recursive boundaries and interact with the many worlds until you end up trapped or blocked because they didn’t think about their own concept enough. Surprisingly glitchy for an Annapurna title, I found myself in several fail states requiring me to restart the given chapter to wriggle out of. By the time the game finally unchains its Matryoshka doll premise for the player to make full use of, it's already over.
Maquette is a game about seeing the big picture; it encourages you to go outside the recursive boundaries and interact with the many worlds until you end up trapped or blocked because they didn’t think about their own concept enough. Surprisingly glitchy for an Annapurna title, I found myself in several fail states requiring me to restart the given chapter to wriggle out of. By the time the game finally unchains its Matryoshka doll premise for the player to make full use of, it's already over.
There's a point near the very beginning of the game where you climb on top of a high up vantage point to mark points of interest onto the map. Suffice to say that Immortals' colour palette is beige at worst and orange at best; those said points of interest are only made noticeable by their video gamey red glowing aura - wisely chosen to pierce through the duststorm and not be swallowed by the monotony of its visual design. You then spend the next few minutes cataloguing these red lights one-by-one as new UI waypoints are revealed. Every single one of them is made immediately apparent to be different flavours of collectable. The title card quite literally hasn't even dropped yet, and you're surveying the land with the same adventurous spirit of a warehouse worker doing a stock check. It's an Ubisoft game, by the way.
Just kind of a pathetic game, honestly. Breath of the Wild coattail rider with all of the charm and creativity you should really expect from the French videogame machine with a clot of coal where its heart should be. Between this and Genshin Impact, it's sad to grow so weary so quickly of the type of open-world Breath of the Wild vitalised. It may not have gatcha, but it boils the wonder of exploration into a skinner box of chests, collectables and distractions strewn scattershot around an environment in a way that feels completely dispassionate and built only to addict. This awful dialogue is such a waste of good greek accents.
Just kind of a pathetic game, honestly. Breath of the Wild coattail rider with all of the charm and creativity you should really expect from the French videogame machine with a clot of coal where its heart should be. Between this and Genshin Impact, it's sad to grow so weary so quickly of the type of open-world Breath of the Wild vitalised. It may not have gatcha, but it boils the wonder of exploration into a skinner box of chests, collectables and distractions strewn scattershot around an environment in a way that feels completely dispassionate and built only to addict. This awful dialogue is such a waste of good greek accents.
2020
I can't help but feel as though I owe a lot to the first PixelJunk Eden game. In 2008, it was the first arthouse title I'd ever bought; it played no small part in easing me into becoming more adventurous with the games I try - and what better game to do that than one where a goblin cultivates and expands their worldview to reach new heights.
This sequel doesn't do a lot to shake up the original formula, but features a greatly improved control scheme that allows the greenthumb audiovisual serenity to take centre stage, where it would originally fall victim to frustrations and lost progress. It has been pretty emotional skipping through these floating lantana fields while hearing familiar remixes to tunes I consider formative!
My sticking point would be my suspicion that this is essentially just a repackaging of the mobile game Eden Obscura, which brings to the forefront far too familiar to the mobile territory progression systems and clunky UIs. Where there was once a central hub that grew around you to connect to new garden zones is now a Level Select filled with gems and exp and skins and uuuuugh. It doesn't ruin anything of course, the encroaching shadow of The Phone consumes the best of us.
This sequel doesn't do a lot to shake up the original formula, but features a greatly improved control scheme that allows the greenthumb audiovisual serenity to take centre stage, where it would originally fall victim to frustrations and lost progress. It has been pretty emotional skipping through these floating lantana fields while hearing familiar remixes to tunes I consider formative!
My sticking point would be my suspicion that this is essentially just a repackaging of the mobile game Eden Obscura, which brings to the forefront far too familiar to the mobile territory progression systems and clunky UIs. Where there was once a central hub that grew around you to connect to new garden zones is now a Level Select filled with gems and exp and skins and uuuuugh. It doesn't ruin anything of course, the encroaching shadow of The Phone consumes the best of us.
First Sega CD game I've ever played! I'm hardly familiar with the hardware or the CD expansion, but I'm still absolutely blown away by the production quality of the cutscenes in this. Fully thoughtful employment of a limited colour palette that never feels restrictive. I have a soft spot for 90's fantasy OVAs and Popful Mail is essentially a playable one of those. Which is to say, it's not GREAT, but charming and short enough to never outstay their welcome. Respect the absolute fucking nerve to just not bother with invincibility frames if nothing else. Can't sing praises for what feels a little too bog-standard as sidescrolling action, but I'm always here for a goofy powerhouse of production talent making something that feels uncompromisingly corny.
If u like Popful mail check out these OVAs if you haven't already!!;
-Mahou Gakuen Lunar! Aoi Ryuu no Himitsu
-Ruin Explorers
-Armored Dragon Legend Villgust
-Record of Lodoss War
-Dragon Half
-Ozanari Dungeon
If u like Popful mail check out these OVAs if you haven't already!!;
-Mahou Gakuen Lunar! Aoi Ryuu no Himitsu
-Ruin Explorers
-Armored Dragon Legend Villgust
-Record of Lodoss War
-Dragon Half
-Ozanari Dungeon
2021
I believe the first Bravely Default game to be localised for the west was an updated and fine-tuned version filled with rebalances, extra features and manicuring - and oh my god, I can't play this any more until they bring out the toolbox and go to fucking town in a similar fashion. Genuinely smacks of a low-AA tier JRPG (I Am Setsuna, Lost Sphear) in early access. Embarrassing load times, missing features present in the previous entries, microscopic font, UI delays and an all-around undercooked presentation. How do you accidentally make a cast THIS BLAND I don't get it!!!! Even the unlockable classes you can switch between feel weirdly "empty", stripped of identity and utility because of how overly balanced BD2 feels.
2018
(Played whatever version is on Gamepass)
The game equivalent of being a child running through the aisles of Toys R Us and looking at all the products, being hypnotised into complete silence whenever an unskippable ad for some expansion pack starts playing on a kiosk. Completely barren of personality with thanks to how flawless and glossy the presentation is, but the appeal of Forza for most likely isn't going to be how it postures itself like a car dealership.
Honestly very fun for the first session or so! Gives you a huge lovingly rendered Edinburgh simulation and lets you carve whatever routes across it you want. It scratched that blessed Burnout Paradise itch for a while and I can see the appeal of an endless ball of yarn of procedurally/community generated racing content, but the monotony set in for me very quickly. No finely-tuned progression and reward systems in the world will ever be as satisfying to me as crashing a car and watching it wrap itself around the lamppost like a snap bracelet.
The game equivalent of being a child running through the aisles of Toys R Us and looking at all the products, being hypnotised into complete silence whenever an unskippable ad for some expansion pack starts playing on a kiosk. Completely barren of personality with thanks to how flawless and glossy the presentation is, but the appeal of Forza for most likely isn't going to be how it postures itself like a car dealership.
Honestly very fun for the first session or so! Gives you a huge lovingly rendered Edinburgh simulation and lets you carve whatever routes across it you want. It scratched that blessed Burnout Paradise itch for a while and I can see the appeal of an endless ball of yarn of procedurally/community generated racing content, but the monotony set in for me very quickly. No finely-tuned progression and reward systems in the world will ever be as satisfying to me as crashing a car and watching it wrap itself around the lamppost like a snap bracelet.