It's always so nice to be pleasantly surprised by playing one of these undisputed classiques for the first time, and not have to grapple with the caveat of "you had to be there at the time, aged 9". Quake instantly became my favourite first person shooter from a pure kinetic standpoint, it just feels so good to skate around at mach speed - bouncing grenades around corners and rockets at the feet of goonies.

Amazed by how little I learned about this game through like, osmosis. Every enemy and sleight of hand trick of the levels was completely fresh new n excitin. Had to Google how to beat the final boss after beating my head against the wall for like ten minutes and it's a psychotic method I respect a lot.

Too stupid to get the soundtrack working, so all I had was pure ambient noise & sound effects. The spirit of Trent still manages to resonate within these rusty iron corridors, amazing sound effects that are as toothy and fulfilling as crunching in2 a protein bar.

A frankly mediocre game with an awful storyline, but a testament to how you can wrangle months of playtime out of me if you're a polished feature-complete title with a strong community-creation component. MapleStory 2 was as standard as MMOs get, I don't remember it being very well balanced, the action combat struggled to hold shape under the latency issues, it literally kills u irl when u die. Yadda yadda, I could say anything and you'd have no choice but to believe me, the game's servers have closed down permanently.

This was, however, my Massively Online Style Savvy: Trendsetters for PC. Games are terrified to let people make things for themselves, use their own images, provide customisation tools that could be exploited for devious ends - but they're pure and valuable expressions of da self! On one hand, I empathise with the walled-garden approach most games take, all content within the title being curated and poured over by the developers n publishers to assure maximum sponsor compatibility and compliance to ratings boards. MS2 was a rare and frankly exemplary occasion of a fairly major MMO publisher essentially not even caring about all of that. If you could think of it - you could make it. You could design your clothes and accessories and furniture meticulously, you could buy real estate within the world map and design every block of the house, you could buy billboard space and plaster any .png you want in story-critical questing zones. Was dumb as shit but so pure and good.

Also want to signal boost this
https://maplestory.nexon.net/ms2archive
An official site recognising the fact that the game has shut down and just made ALL of its art assets freely available for download. Wtf. Why is this so rare.

My contrarian ass is always on the lookout for another miscarriage of Gamer Justice, failed assessments of misunderstood secret gems of olde - it's my role as tastemaker ambassador in chief to purify the well and let the world drink full with a hidden mineral spring of mastapieces. Vexx looks like if Hugo the Troll listened to Lacuna Coil, why did I think this would be any good. The best compliment I can give this game is that it's "fascinatingly ugly", another misguided 00's attempt to cross Soul Reaver with Banjo Kazooie. Just dispassionately flopping onto the collectathon genre with a sauceless platter of 14 worlds and 100 orbs and 6 skulls and 81 hearts, it's kinda funny it's kinda sad.

Not a terrible VN hybrid, I honestly admire what it aspires to do with its different mechanics but they simply don't culminate in an interesting game.
The structure of Death Mark is composed of chapters with large areas to navigate and pick for key items, similar to Ace Attorney. This is where Death Mark particularly excels, being where it executes its style of horror quite well, with an excellent soundtrack and subtle corner-of-the-eye flourishes that unnerve better than any dough-brained jumpscare does. In between these sections are frankly terrible "puzzles" that typically amount to using key items on obvious spots, and bits where you have to choose the options in a dialogue tree that won't lead to instant death. The writing is basic and repetitious as fuck so the VN parts drag, characters literally never talk to one another, or even say anything particularly unique or interesting when taken on missions. Dotted throughout are these insane CGs of dying half-naked girls that look like they're from a completely different game entirely???

Death Mark wastes too much of your time. I'm not sure why it feels the need to completely deflate its atmosphere by forcing the player to meet very narrow item/character requirements that funnel you into asinine deaths and restarts, only for chapters to end in a hilarious turn-based combat puzzle thing. Curious enough to see if the sequel improves on these things, but I'm not hopeful!

Rainbow Cotton is a 3D shmup with a forward perspective akin to Panzer Dragoon or Star Fox, but it is unfortunately very clumsy in design. Cotton's model takes up far too much of the screen, obscuring the enemies and crosshair, which loves to snap to the centre. On top of spongy enemies and a finicky EXP system to power up your beam, it's shockingly difficult to kill anyone in your path, let alone know you're even hitting them. The pathing is weird, too; you can just bounce and clip around the track haphazardly because the camera tracking is nigh impossible to predict. The experience is honestly so grating it's insane.
The saving grace is that this is imo the best looking Cotton game - charming anime FMV cutscenes, and low poly pastel coloured models and environments that are so kawaii in that Spyro PS1 way.

A curiosity is all this ever amounts to, if ever you want to experience a game that is bad enough to bury a franchise in the ground for twenty-one years - you can with the newly-released English fan translation!
( https://github.com/DerekPascarella/RainbowCotton-EnglishPatchDreamcast )

More like NieR: Auto[play]a.
Desolate in every sense! Combat is purely numerical and exists solely as power gates - simply upgrade your units, weapons and companions, then breeze through this battery vampire of a .apk for a few more missions before you need to upgrade again. OR u can Pay a humble fee for a chance to win epic units for you to also waste upgrade resources on :)
I just feel so wise and numb to the Twisted Mind of Yoko Taro. Grim "tragedy first" writing that passionlessly beelines towards an arc's desired sad outcome, a soundtrack that is essentially just spacy yoga music, vast post-post-magical-apoc environments that serve absolutely nothing. Sad to see Akihiko Yoshida designs wasted on this.

When I accidentally glitched through a wall and found the narrator I knew this was special.

Incredible vibes, confident presentation. A dead-end town playing idly with its lighter as a sickness slowly engulfs it. The calm before the storm, before the death throes kick in. Systems of power play a big role in every story in Boreal Tenebrae, tangibly through threats of violence and death but also intangibly through poverty, desperation and exhaustion. The boss at the local factory spends his time crushing unions even as he plans to close down and move elsewhere. The mayor talks a big game about unity while packing his bags to leave in the middle of the night. All the while the broken cast characters fighting against the oncoming tide of malicious magical realism with whatever hasn't been stripped away from them.

Act 1 is astoundingly cheap on Steam and Itch right now, and it's also a part of the BLM Bundle if you've got that.

A premise that is leaps and bounds more fun than the game itself. Credits to the fan translation for seeming to excavate a little flavour out of this barren wasteland of fetch-quests, backtracking and Street Fighter 1 grade combat.

Speakin of fan translations though, I stumbled upon an ongoing project for the (much more interesting looking) Dreamcast remake that seems to be going along nicely. Keeping my eyes on this!!!! The Rent-A-Hero formula is inches away from winning me over.
https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?style=20&f=52&t=14032

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN
MARKED FOR DISPOSAL
OS 210/64
OS 504/6

A Hand With Many Fingers is a short and humble corkboard sleuthing game that posts the player into an archive of boxes, paper slips, and a whiff of conspiracy.
I don't have much I'd like to split hairs over about mechanical specifics; the game is relatively thin on substance, as well as in the scope of the overall investigation. The ending is also rather abrupt, which is a little disappointing! Also… shocked to learn that there was a kernel of truth to much of the names and events depicted?? Never knew!! Genuinely wish the game went further into exploring the atrocious under-the-table dealings of the CIA, and I’d def hold it against AHwMF for only giving us the top layer. O well, I've always desperately wanted a sleuthing game that granted me the power to Pepe Silvia across a few corkboards, linking articles and photos with a hieroglyphic cobweb of red twine - and this is the closest I’ve found yet!

I’d most like to compliment the game for its stellar employment of oppressive atmosphere, how well it builds a sense of paranoia without cheap tricks. As my corkboard grew more complex, my search for the truth turned almost frantic and conspiratorial. Milling over a filing cabinet I was sure to find the information I needed in, and turning up blank. “I know the man I’m looking for was here, in this year… right? Who was he with? Why was he here, anyway?”. The phone rings, and when I pick up, nobody answers. Did I just see someone looking at me from the building across from me? Has that car just opposite the office window always been there? The looping classical music sample on the radio becomes annoying, so I turn it off, only to realise that the sheer quiet of the archive is host to a palpable hostility. Come to the end, I was a jumpy mess, skipping heartbeats at subtle audio cues like bugs skittering and lights flickering. I kind of loved that, and frankly genius that it managed to wrangle these feelings out of me where the gameplay loop is essentially just admin work!! The untapped power of beige, babye.