Fatherhood. It's the crux of the joke of this account, it's the glue holding together all the insanity and violence that the character of YourDadReviews portrayed through all of the reviews up until this point. While I'm sure there are many games that probably have better examples of fatherhood, I think Fallout New Vegas has ultimately become like the father I never had. Even to this point this game is always teaching me new ways to experience the journey, and on that journey we see a variety of fathers. Some are good, love their kids or are at the very least supportive of them, some aren't... I think the closest to YourDadReviews is Papa Khan, who is the patriarch of an entire clan of wastelanders. Much like Papa Khan, the character of YourDadReviews is haunted by his past. A past full of death, sexual gratification, drugs, and many other things. It was fun defining that past, making reviews and trying to tie it to the themes of YourDadReviews, but much like Papa Khan I wind up kind of stuck in a way.

I wanted to end YDR with a bang, something badass to wrap up the insane narrative I was weaving in my mind... but the more I think about it, the less I think such a character deserves such an ending. So, much like I do with Papa Khan in an NCR playthrough, I will silently kill YourDadReviews with this final review.

Thank you everyone for your love and support of YourDadReviews. Stay frosty.

P.S. The only April Fools joke here is that none of it is a joke.

while waiting for this game to fully release I have (in no particular order)
-hit puberty
-been to a psychiatric hospital
-lost my virginity
-had a nephew and a niece
-started developing games of my own
-joined a cult
-left a cult
-had about 11 boyfriends, girlfriends and other partners
-endured intense psychological trauma
-become a completely different person
-shaved my head
-grown dreadlocks
-shaved my head again
-grew my hair out
-read the entirety of Homestuck
-watched Evangelion
-watched lain
-played chaos;head
-played subahibi
-got really into denpa
-become a horror movie collector
-grown out of whatever phase i was in when i was into games like this
-learned french
-started learning japanese
-learned the banjo
-learned the ukulele
-learned the guitar
-learned the violin
-learned piano
-learned python
-learned HTML
-learned how to draw
-learned pixel art
-moved house 6/7/8ish times
-learned how to sew
-aged about 9 years
-played AA2 (which is basically yansim if it was good)
-played Daigaku Gurashi (which is basically AA2 with less boobs)
-seen several attempts at remaking yansim come and go
-been hospitalized
-drank alcohol for the first time
-smoked a cigarette for the first time
-been to a party for the first time
-been 2 years clean from SH
-seen the fnaf movie
-made a backloggd account
(and that's just off the top of my head)

Finally finished the game in fusion mode but only with 95% of the map cleared. I should really do Random Game Plus sometime considering the amount of times I've played this.

Even though this is a fan game, this game easily stands toe to toe with the best games in the series and I'd recommend it to every Metroid fa..

KNOCKKNOCKKNOCK NBI OPEN UP

OH FU...

Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

what a colossal fucking disappointment

star ocean has always been a fairly niche series built more on its mechanical depth and replayability than storytelling. however most games in the series at least manage to be entertaining, whether for plot or character driven reasons there's always something to care about besides just the gameplay

enter the divine force - where, uh, that's really not the case at all. i'm not sure i've ever played a game to feature a more boring cast of characters in my entire life, which is a huge problem because unlike in the 16 and 32 bit titles this game prides itself on homaging nobody here ever shuts the fuck up even when the only dialogue they have to contribute is a rephrase of the same thing they said 15 minutes prior and will say again multiple times over within the following hour

almost nobody grows or develops. there are attempts at emotional moments that all fall completely flat since the chemistry between cast members is roughly comparable to the relationship a cashier has with their customer. it's all so formal, lifeless, and downright unbelievable, but if your suspension of disbelief doesn't shatter in half there, the stiff cutscene animatronics a la ffxiv (2010) will sever any and all possible connection you could have ever had to this very inspired plot about a ragtag group fighting an evil space faction (which isn't properly introduced until over halfway through the game)

next i'd like to take a moment to discuss the soundtrack:

combat is the only point where the divine force ever shines, and even then it's still frequently mishandled. welcome to the worst targeting system in the series, (there is no fucking hard lock-on!) and possibly the most braindead ai ever seen in any arpg. on galaxy (normal mode) you might not even get to notice since it's so damn trivial that some bosses can die to a single buffed-up attack. but on universe (hard) and above most of the difficulty comes from not running out of revival items for your dumbass party members who keep sprinting into the same overtly telegraphed, mmo-style, circular kill-zones (and sometimes using their own abilities to warp you into said kill-zones for good measure)

party tactics are pretty much nonexistent. you can tell the ai to focus on separate enemies, the same targets as you, or to "do whatever you want lol". there's no "stay put" option, which means there's no efficient way to coordinate combos between characters. you can't even really buffer moves and then switch because the ai will typically just cancel whatever you were doing and run up to get slaughtered some more. it's a shame because with some basic commands (or even a really stripped down gambit system) this could all work perfectly. but instead everything is a giant clusterfuck and certain bosses on harder difficulties are either solo chipfests or cheesy washouts depending on the player's willingness to grind the crafting system for broken equipment

outside of combat there's pretty little to do. sidequests are about as bland as bland gets. wanna go to that place you just left and grab an item in exchange for some other item? or better yet - find some little girl's cat? then go for it i guess. otherwise between the action you're just going to be aimlessly gliding for exp crystals and battling it out with townsfolk in the most insultingly mindless minigame (es'owa) i've ever seen. triple triad this is not. still, you'll probably end up grinding your civilian opponents to dust anyway just because the rewards for doing so earn you some good accessories. oh boy!

by now you're probably thinking i hate this game, and, well, you may be correct! i went in with fairly high expectations, and while they were certainly tempered after playing the demo i still had hope that the characters would improve and the combat would have more to it than first impressions let on... and then after around 15-20 hours of the full release i ended up running so3 intermittently to remind myself that this series wasn't always a soulless husk of itself

sure it's fun to play at times, but there's so much wrong here that i can't in good faith recommend this game unless you're a diehard star ocean fan who intends to skip all the cutscenes or you're just craving mid and your diet is insatiable

I previously wrote an exhaustive and frankly unfocused review on the base version of Sonic Origins, a game I paid 45$ for because I just had to get at a disorganized collection of improperly labeled music and borders for the bastardized 4:3 mode. I won't bother to link that review and save you all the trouble of trying to parse my thoughts. The short version is this: I own these games across an obscene number of platforms, but to have them in 16:9 and playable on my TV sounded nice. It's just too bad Sega put a buggy product to market that was outshined by fan projects like Sonic A.I.R., which released years prior.

But that was way back in June of last year. Sonic Origins has now received its first and presumably only major content update and physical release in the form of Sonic Origins Plus, and as I've established numerous times throughout the last two years, I am bad with my finances. At least I waited for the physical edition to hit 20$ this time!

Plus is a mixed package. It proudly advertises new characters, plural, but only justifies this by adding Amy and making Knuckles playable in exactly one more game than he previously was, Sonic CD. Mechanically, Amy plays very similarly to Sonic, albeit with a wider insta-shield and a weaker drop dash. Though I wish her drop dash had more oomph and lasted longer, I can respect the fact that she doesn't play wildly different, as she needs to slot comfortably into the level design of four whole games. Amy's sprites are excellent, and she has a lot of cute animations, like her victory pose in Sonic 3. She is arguably the main draw to Plus and while she could've felt a bit better to play as, I had enough fun to justify another run through each game.

You also get all the Game Gear Sonics, and if you've been following me as I played through those this year, I think they're pretty bad. However, my problem isn't so much their inclusion (it's good they're on here at all), rather that Sega and Sonic Team still refuse to acknowledge the better Master System versions of some of these games. Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic Spinball are still absent despite being represented in the music gallery and in the main menus, and I know Sega has the ROMs and a good Genesis emulator. I guess they're saving those and Mean Bean for Sonic Origins Plus Deluxe.

I still think Origins is a disappointing collection, and I wouldn't recommend getting it or Plus at full price, but if you don't have multiple Sonic 3 carts laying around, can't be bothered to set up A.I.R., or an emulator for that matter, then... yeah I guess 20$ is ok.