not even done yet but jesus christ this is so miserable, i am literally only able to do the droll sidequesting msq content by turning my brain off for an hour or two at a time and skipping every line of dialog because if i invest any more thought than that into this game i feel like i might never want to play another video game in my life. it is insane how dragon quest 10's first version bodies everything arr sets out to do effortlessly when it came out a year earlier and also wasn't a second draft like a realm reborn is. if ff14 ends up being something like xenoblade 2 where it doesn't even get nearly good enough to make up for how much time you waste to get to the "good" part i am so sincerely never playing a game on suggestion of my friends again.

my au ra is cute at least though

An alternative take on skating to contrast with the arcadey Tony Hawk series, Thrasher was a game I ended up enjoying for brief moments. There's one thing that really makes this game stand out compared to THPS - fleeing. I grew up in a city that didn't have skate-friendly architecture or parks at all. Skating wasn't really a subculture here, really. Bikes were the big hitter. Thrasher and THPS allowed me to pretend I was part of a world I'd see on television a lot which was nice enough, but unlike THPS, Thrasher showed the risk of it. The allure of being where you shouldn't be, doing what you shouldn't do? That was interesting, and it was even more interesting that there were consequences for it.

Unfortunately the rest of the game isn't quite as good. The feel of it is comparable to GTA3, oddly enough, but the actual gameplay is quite sluggish and hard to get a grip of.

I saw the most recent review by largebagofrocks, where they wrote "It gets closer to imitating the experience of IRL street skating by putting you into a similar frame of mind that figuring to how to skate a spot asks of you" and that got me thinking of a glorious cross between Mirror's Edge and Tony Hawk.

Somebody, make that a reality. I'd buy it.

Insufferably mediocre. Irritating characters, an ugly aesthetic, and gameplay so stripped back from its predecessors that you may as well be playing an entirely different series.

The plot is forgettable, with tired cliches and a sixth former's sense of political commentary awkwardly inserted between forced attempts at humour. Watch Dogs took itself too seriously. Watch Dogs 2 didn't often take itself seriously enough. This is a bizarre, Frankensteined bridge between the two and it never ever works in my opinion. I hate to refer to a game's dialogue as cringeworthy, but this really is some shite.

That said - the Legion idea is fascinating. Every NPC potentially being a playable character? The routine system? The permadeath mode? The actual city of London that's probably the most well-realised since The Getaway in 2002? Great ideas! Shame they're in Watch_Dogs: Legion. This might have killed the series, I reckon. I hope.

Seemed to pull a desperate nostalgia bait by bringing Aiden Pearce back for the DLC, but even he is a shadow of his former self. Funnily enough, I'm convinced that transplanting Aiden into London would have worked if the entire game were just like the original in terms of tone and gameplay.

Garry's Mod was actually my introduction to Half-Life, as I'm sure is the case for plenty of kids. It was the Bananaphone video and then classics like Full Life Consequences that made me interested in it. GMod, as a platform, is perfect. It deserves a five star rating for longevity and content alone.

This game is the definition of "sandbox". You can call Grand Theft Auto an open world game where you can do anything, but you can't. You're constrained by what Rockstar will let you do - here, the sky is literally the limit. Scripts, models, sounds, maps... if it has been made in the public eye, it's probably in GMod in some form. I have fond, fond memories of just wasting hours in this game.

But I don't think I could go back to it now. I lack the imagination now, the "but what if..." aspect of interactivity. Something in modern game design has made me this way exclusively for this medium - I can still pull off all sorts of wild ideas in my head for other subjects but games tend to stump me. It feels like experimentation in a lot of games is unrewarded at best and punished at worst; but with GMod there isn't any reward beyond self-satisfaction, which I'm very fond of.

In the grand scheme of things, 123 hours really doesn't seem that much compared to other people's runtimes. It was the first game I owned on my own computer - and then I discovered I needed OTHER games to make this one work, since I got the Steam release and not the original sourcemod version. But GMod opened up an entire wealth of gaming history to me. This daft, "only as wild as you are" exercise of a game helped shape my taste to this very day.

Paradise Killer is weird as hell, but it's absolutely my kind of weird. I'm a big sucker for worldbuilding and unusual settings, and Paradise Killer sure does deliver that in droves. The world seems to be entirely built around juxtaposition; high-energy disco and jazz music imposed against the ghoulishly empty streets, the fantastical sculptures and temples cast against the grimey tower blocks in the town below, and of course the bright and cheery facade of the island in general cast against its horrific purpose and history. And this isn't a case of 'seemingly nice world with a sinister undercurrent'; the world of Paradise Killer is cheery, idyllic, suave, mysterious, horrific and terrifying all at once, and this is all quite apparent from the get go. It's such an interesting way to present a Lovecraftian/cosmic horror-type setting like this; I've never seen anything quite like it, and I loved every second of it.

Of course you need a game to go with the setting, and it felt like Paradise Killer's gameplay revolved around two fairly disconnected cores. There is a kind of collectathon nature to the game, where you're encouraged to scour the island, complete puzzles and platforming challenges to find various things. Sometimes these things are important clues which tie into the other half of the game, but more often than you're just finding money or snippets of lore. And I'm not sure this really adds too much? The platforming is often very janky, and sometimes things are hidden out of the way at the ends of areas with nothing else to see, and so this aspect of the game can come across as a little time-wasting (especially as the island is fascinating enough that I found exploring it to be its own reward). I do think on the whole I was grateful for the collectathon elements as a change of pace in between more intense investigative parts of the game, but it's definitely not where PK shines brightest.

The investigation side of PK, on the other hand, absolutely gripped me; I legit lost a fair few hours of sleep trying to piece together pictures of what might have happened from the snippets of clues I had at the time. The characters you spend much of the game interviewing are all fantastic with excellently written dialogue, and it is absolutely fascinating trying to piece together their motives and backstories. By the end of the investigation I still feel there were one or two things that didn't really fit into place anywhere, which was a little frustrating, but aside from that I think this is probably one of the best-written video game mysteries out there.

The other part of this project that has clearly had tonnes of love and care poured into it is the presentation. Paradise Killer is incredibly stylized, especially in it's UI and in little flares like character's VA's constantly blurting out catchphrases mid-conversation. I mostly like these touches, they help to make the game feel even more standout and unique than it already is, but it does lead to the game being a very full-on and generally loud experience that isn't easy to play for too long at a time. And of course I have to mention the music, which is fantastic and somehow fits the setting absolutely perfectly (I wouldn't even be surprised if the music came first and the game was designed around it). But there are a couple of presentation choices that I didn't get along with. Most of the VA is... pretty bad, to be honest, but this almost feels like a deliberate choice? I quite liked the weird things all the characters would constantly yell mid-conversation, but it feels like most of the VAs weren't really given much direction and the performances come off pretty weak. I also kinda hate the way characters are presented in the world. Every NPC in Paradise Killer is a static jpeg that is either locked in place or slowly rotates to try and face you at all times. None of the characters have any presence or 'pop' at all, and it just looks kinda bad... nothing breaks immersion like walking past a taxi driver too fast and seeing her collapse into an infinitesimal one-dimensional being, or walking straight past a suspect because he was standing flush against a wall and your brain just assumed he was part of a wall texture. I get that 3D models are a whole other thing and would look out of place in this world, but I would have preferred PK to do something like Doom where the jpegs are locked to always face you exactly. In fact, as a proof of concept, Paradise Killer does exactly this with the various inanimate collectibles in the game, and they all stand out from the world just fine.

So yeah, little things like the character models, outdated-looking textures and some stiff platforming controls do give Paradise Killer an unmistakable air of jank (topped off with its lack of autosave, which seems a bizarre choice to make in 2020). But if some corners did have to be cut to make this then it was absolutely worth it, because that time that was saved was clearly redirected into making this game as special, well-written and memorable as possible. It's a great experience, with a great mystery to solve and a highly satisfying ending, and this is one I can thoroughly recommend.