I was suckered into this because of the drop-dead gorgeous art direction and style and then I got punched in the gut when my wonderful time with the current build ended only after like 2ish hours and now I'm in desperate need of more please god

Already absolutely adore this cast of characters and the ways they play off of each other, how they argue and bicker but still try to have a good time together even with all the years apart and their differing circumstances, and especially the protagonist himself with how conflicted and anxious his internal thoughts are. There's a level of mystery and intrigue in the history that's unspoken between everyone, and there's a feeling that you can't help but be roped into with how Riley yearns for the way things were and his obsession with a figure from his past that he never truly got over, and the mistakes he's made since because of them. There's simply something about the way Riley is written that got me roughed up with the way he realizes how fleeting these times together can be, a true understanding of how desperately you want a good thing to last and pleading for it to stay, catching the sight of someone or something you had feelings for from forever ago and hoping you can make things work somehow. There's something deeply personal within here that just clicked for me in a manner that I already know I'm going to continue thinking about for a long while if this game continues along the way it's going.

I'm not even sure I can fully convey into words how much I utterly adore the abstract sharp look of this game's artwork, like how do you come up with designing a flashback sequence around a rough sketched graphite pencil style, or conveying the sheer drunken state of everyone by roughening up their artwork and blasting out the colors of everything, good lord everything is so gorgeous to look at. Every character is wonderful to look at and incredibly distinct from each other with their use of color and the ways they express themselves from a moment-to-moment basis. The music itself only adds to this mixture of a cozy homely vibe alongside hints of melancholy reflection, with a rare burst of anxiety when the time calls right for it.

The current build is less a "build" per se and more like a straight up 2-3 hour demo which is mostly why I'm not really going to score this yet (most of the other unfinished VNs I've looked at have had enough content to give a somewhat safe feeling guess), but I'm absolutely keeping an eye on this and would more than happily recommend what's already available as brief as it may be. Praying that this whole project sees itself all the way to the end someday.

It's just fine I guess? I think playing this after the RE4make and not after RE2make kind of soured the more action-heavy combat focus of this game. I wasn't the biggest fan of RE2's more bullet-spongey enemies but it made sense for that game because enemies were obstacles to avoid and the level design/ammo economy accounted for it. RE3's a lot harder to get a read on its expectations for until you reach a point where you have way too much ammo and healing items even on Normal difficulty, and it really didn't help either that I couldn't figure out what exactly made the dodge mechanic work consistently until far too late into my playthrough. The game only really vaguely tells you that dodging is based on timing when that's not the full picture. You don't get invincibility frames and you also have to account for your hitbox the entire way through; dodging into enemies isn't allowed and you will just get grabbed instead. It doesn't help either that the brief sections where you play as Carlos changes the rules suddenly and instead of a dodge, you get a shove with its own unique timing that the game doesn't give very much of a safe space to actually figure out properly.

More than enough's been said about the content that was blatantly unfinished and cut out making this so incredibly unfaithful to the original entry that... it might as well just make the two games completely distinct? I honestly don't really have much of a horse in this race because I personally would argue similar for RE2 and how butchered the 2nd Run really is compared to the A/B Scenarios of the original game, but I've already said my spiel on that game and regardless, RE3's remake absolutely would've benefited from a team who had more time to actually nail down all of the missing set pieces and locations. As a whole it just kind of leads to a game that I don't have very much to say on other than that it's just fine. Buy it on a sale because I still think most will have a good time here, just absolutely do not pay full price for this.

Burrows is straight up stellar on a presentation and technical level, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that comes from Nikko's experience from his usual art and his comic work. But his comic work was the one thing I was familiar with before playing this, and was what made me worried going in because I just don't like his comics. I don't want to say "full of itself" necessarily but there's something about Nikko's writing that always feels overly haughty and tactless, and sadly that's just kind of all on full display here with Burrows.

There's a feeling that I can't really describe here as anything other than disingenuous. For what should be a focused character drama, Burrows has terrible pacing issues because it cannot slow down for a single moment. It doesn't allow for essentially any quiet time to let a scene settle or give these characters space to exist and meaningfully flesh themselves out, instead opting for a far grander sin of sheer gratuity that affects every aspect of the game. For a game that's so willing to startle and jump the reader with more effort on sudden scares than any other VN within this sub-genre/community that I've played, they're a symptom of a bigger problem where Burrows is weirdly more afraid of having something smaller and more effective stand on its own. Burrows can't just have a character who's questionable and problematic because of his anger issues and actions, instead you get the game also smearing your face in the mud also screaming at you "ooOOoo he was also in an incestuous relationship!!!!!!!" It's not enough to have a character being overly anxious and panicked after having his trust damaged and being alone in a place he's not familiar with, he needs to be thrown into literal Silent Hill within the span of 4 hours of total play time to really throw him for a loop.

I might be admittedly somewhat of a gorehound in some of my entertainment with a good sense of morbid curiosity, and while Burrows' gorgeous artwork certainly more than delivers on that front, it's simultaneously another knock against the game and yet another symptom of its sheer overdose on gratuity. I don't really think I needed to have a hallucination of someone's head being blown off in clear plain view when it doesn't add much to the story itself. I don't think I needed a scene that shows somebody getting flayed alive completely out of the blue during another nightmare sequence. The best kind of horror is psychological, and at its strongest it would be a kind of writing that sticks with you long after its over. Burrows, and at this point just straight up the creator Nikko himself, seemingly believes that shock value somehow creates this grander tension and horror when it just does not need it at all. It actively detracts from any interesting ideas or storytelling that could have been here. I have other issues like an icky feeling in the back of my mind that somebody had their hand in their pants for a major chunk of the game with how incessantly horny the game gets at the worst inopportune times or a fragments/timeline feature that the game completely glosses over and I don't get the point of whatsoever, but frankly the longer I think about Burrows the more thoroughly disappointed and frustrated I get with it, so I will just stop.

I guess if you're familiar with Nikko's other work and enjoy it, you'll probably like this? But the part of a visual novel that truly matters, the writing, simply doesn't hold up for me despite how absurd of a carry the presentation tries to give it. And I'm absolutely not enjoying this to an extent that I need to just put my foot down and stop because it's not worth the effort no matter how stubborn I usually am.

(Played up to Chapter 16 with build 0.16.1)
I know I had heard a lot about this within the "furry visual novel" space as well as some character designs but didn't really actually know a lot going in and I'm happy it went that way because I was greeted with a genuinely very good sci-fi story? Like, this is the kind of thing I could recommend to most of my actual friends even with having furry characters as a central point. It's one of the few in this niche sub-genre that has a human protagonist with a plot-central reason for being so! There's a lot of very lovely artwork and good music, but more importantly Remember the Flowers just has a good story about moving on past the bleakest of traumas and fighting for your beliefs and bonds with others which will never cease to remain the most based kind of plot if handled well.

While it's unfinished, I'm very excited to see where this goes. I have a few quibbles with pacing every now and then with some scenes moving a hair too quickly for my liking, my kinda analogy being like a rhythm game with a single note or beat that isn't accounted for when it should be. There's a few scenes where just having like an extra moment of inner dialogue, whether it's a few lines or even a single sentence, would've greatly improved the moment-to-moment pacing of several incredibly important moments to make them hit even harder, but this is really nitpicky at best frankly and honestly my only real complaint so far. Otherwise, would very much recommend!

Wonderful little DLC that is so drastically different from its original that it's honestly kind of silly to even compare the two. OG Separate Ways I've never fully finished mostly because it's just a repeat of the original campaign with minor additions and removals of segments, while this new Separate Ways smartly reuses segments of the remake campaign in bits and pieces in-between entire brand new segments and areas that weren't present in the remake campaign. Nothing here feels like unnecessarily repeating old ground to pad things out and makes for a wholly new experience that's incredibly fun to run through.

I do kind of think some of the damage outputs are a little absurdly high for Normal difficulty moreso in the first half of the DLC while becoming a bit of a breeze by the end, but it's such a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things. For $10 bucks, if you liked the RE4 Remake and want more of it, this is the piece to fully complete the package.

Sunshine's a game I have a lot of childhood nostalgia for, but I can also kind of see why I never actually beat it as a kid. It's just fun to be in Sunshine's world and environments, the unique summertime vibe that Nintendo's never really tried to recapture in the same way that Sunshine did (maybe besides something like Wii Sports Resort), and a lot of that charm is what really carries the game for me. But on the other hand, Sunshine starts to fizzle out too much by the last several hours as later stages begin to just repeat bosses or goals like collecting red coins or platforming challenges that just aren't satisfying or fun to do. A part of the problem is that movement feels great and snappy when Mario has FLUDD on him generally, but there's issues with the physics here especially on slopes that can be just baffling with how much Mario will be flung off in certain directions if the game doesn't agree with whatever you're doing. The stages that take away FLUDD, your last resort for either saving a bad jump or reaching that last little bit before a platform, really exemplify how too snappy Mario is here compared to how he controlled in 64.

I do vastly prefer this game over 64 because for the most part I still was having a good time and the style carries so much of Sunshine even at its worst, but it's also a game that can feel a little too bloated and overambitious and that's when it becomes harder to look past the more janky aspects of its controls and mechanics. I feel really bad for anyone going for completion on this one because of how much more tedious stuff like blue coins are here in comparison to how relatively simple 64 was.

There's a lot of merit to how much 64 got right on a first attempt for an entire industry of 3D gaming alongside a lot of charm, but I genuinely cannot fucking stand how this game controls compared to later 3D Mario games. I get why there's a speedrunning community for this and that you can eventually learn exactly how the movement works and how you finagle the camera into working the way you want, but I just cannot will myself to have enough patience to do so, not when I have to redo entire minute-long courses from the beginning several times because Mario cannot make up his mind on whether he will turn around in an instant or do a full slow walk around instead leading to falling down a bottomless pit.

There's also just too many stages that feel like they require either insane person guess work or a walkthrough open to figure out what you're even supposed to be doing; I refuse to believe anybody actually solved "Blast Away the Wall" on their own. I get why Super Mario 64 is held in high regard to this day and why a lot of people love it, but I just vastly prefer how much snappier and more forgiving later 3D Mario games are compared to this one. Maybe someday I might dare force myself to 100% complete it on another playthrough or something, but a part of me also worries it might just tip the scale even more towards me straight up hating it instead, so just finishing the game to say I've played Super Mario 64 after all these years is more than enough for me.

Unlike the HL2 VR Mod which is incredibly well polished for a community made port, this one for HL1 just doesn't even really reach a bar that I'm comfortable with recommending. I really don't get why a source port like Xash3D with full source code wasn't used for this like the Quest Lamba1VR app instead of trying to make janky modifications to the original GoldSource engine, especially the already fairly buggy version of it that's used for the Steam version of Half-Life. Performance and animations just don't play smoothly even on good hardware and there's something about the way that you move around in the world that just doesn't quite feel right especially when trying to do stuff like climb ladders or even just crouching; getting movement right in a VR game of any kind is a hard requirement for comfort and immersion, and this mod already just doesn't cross that bar even for a VR veteran like me who has spent thousands of hours on the platform.

There's also just a whole missing layer of polish in general that makes this more unwieldy of a port. Crowbar damage is somewhat tied to how fast you swing your arm, but something about that acceleration calculation seems ridiculously overtuned leading to bizarre stuff like instantly gibbing enemies on one swing. Guns don't have manual reloads like most VR shooters these days which I would excuse considering engine limitations, if it wasn't for a complete lack of any animation or even a sound for when you reload weapons regardless of whatever graphics mode you use.

Those graphic modes are also a questionable point of contention, as this VR mod forcibly makes some extra additions to the game that I know is going to make me sound like a shithead for criticizing to some people, so let it be known that it's not the additions themselves that I'm upset about, but rather their janky unfinished implementation and the lack of user choice behind them: women have been added to Black Mesa! The issue isn't their existence, it's that voice lines have either been re-recorded or pitch shifted in a way that's immersion breaking and unnatural when the original dialogue has been stuck in my head for years, alongside plenty of other important lines that weren't re-recorded despite the game randomly replacing NPCs with the new models wherever it feels. This includes the entire intro test chamber segment which was completely silent for me because every scientist in the room was replaced with custom models that didn't have re-recorded lines. Again, I don't take issue with the addition, I take issue with how poorly implemented and handled this is compared to something like the Black Mesa remake where the addition feels natural alongside everything else that was changed and added. This should have been an optional toggle at the barest minimum instead of having to be something that people have to mod out themselves to get either the original experience or even one that works the way it's supposed to.

If you have a Quest headset, go try Lambda1VR instead. I appreciate the effort made to try getting this working on PC and it's nuts that somebody even managed to get VR working on the original GoldSource engine, but I really question how worthwhile that was when there had to have been a better solution, alongside changes and additions that should have been made optional with their questionable quality.

Controversial opinion, I honestly liked this more than Opposing Force? It's absolutely mostly because Blue Shift doesn't overstay its welcome and is laughably short, but the smaller scale of where Barney actually makes his journey through Black Mesa is a lot more believable and interesting to follow; making a clear distinction with the second half of the campaign taking place in an older nearly abandoned facility within Black Mesa with a group of scientists who are familiar with the area and tech is intriguing and distinct in a way that no location in Opposing Force ever really nailed down.

It's definitely nowhere near as ambitious as Opposing Force, not even close, and you can absolutely tell that Blue Shift originally was meant as a bonus to the cancelled Dreamcast port that was kinda shoved back onto PC not just because of length but there's no new weapons or enemy types here. Barney doesn't even get access to the full arsenal of weapons that Gordon had, but in a weird way it kind of works in its favor because it means the weapons here are much more focused in selection and everything you carry has a definitive use. The biggest thing going against Blue Shift is mostly that Gearbox's placement of enemies can be outright dickish and excessive; not as bad as OpFor, but expecting 2 or 3 headcrabs around every corner gets old fast. Also the engine issues that remained from Opposing Force despite being fixed in HL1 still remain here like music getting cut off on every load, albeit that music here isn't particularly notable when it's mostly just reused from Opposing Force and feels more out of place here compared to that expansion.

It's simple and doesn't really aim for the skies. It's fine.

Using the Half-Life: Source Fixed mod is basically mandatory if you want to still play this port for whatever reason. If you're playing this vanilla unmodded? Then yeah, this deserves the reputation it has; it's a broken worse version of the original game that has some pretty water and lighting effects that's only become more buggy and unstable as the years have gone by with engine updates that don't account for this port.

With the Fixed mod? It's a decent way to play the first Half-Life, but I still just don't know why you wouldn't use the original release. There's some nice benefits and improvements the Fixed mod offers such as resized maps that significantly reduce how many times the game stops you briefly for a quick map load and it's nice being able to have a nearly seamless experience (a lot of the game's chapters straight up fit into single maps here). Some of the redone more colorful lighting also does look quite nice since it's not being limited by GoldSource's limitations with baked lighting. Yes, the floating scientist in the game's first chapter is fixed. That one spot in Residue Processing doesn't flicker and turn into a broken visual nightmare anymore. The only bug I spotted in the brief time I tried this was that the Gonarch still seems to spit out a missing texture whenever it releases baby headcrabs at you which is still annoying, but still overall it's a major leap turning a completely broken port into one that's basically fully playable and a lot closer in faithfulness to the original release.

The thing is that even with the Fixed mod, there's still this feeling that this port needlessly complicates itself porting over an entire game from one engine to another and changes the feel of things by doing so. Movement feels very fast and snappy but in a way that feels like Half-Life 2 with sprint always being on, rather than how the original Half-Life is supposed to feel. Enemy AI seems to be dumbed down, especially with the military grunts which seem to have no idea how to account for the player moving around when it was one of their biggest strengths in the original. I don't even think I saw one throw a grenade once in the several chapters I replayed to check this out? The kind of prettier visuals is a mixed bag in of itself because this weird blend of old visuals mixed in with pretty lighting is kind of jarring in that weird sort of "community source port" way, like with cranking up the effects in something like GZDoom: it doesn't really look the way it was originally made and intended.

tbh the real reason anyone is even considering buying and installing this is if you need the assets for Garry's Mod, if that's not what you're doing then do not bother

I've never really understood all the reverence this expansion gets and while I used to have at least a decent opinion of Opposing Force, I just really don't think I liked it on this replay? It's less any one major fault and more like a lot of little issues that pile up on top of each other that just makes for an experience that I don't care much for. There's a lot of ambition here and Gearbox does deserve credit for this being their first major release (!); Gearbox definitely seemed to have some level of understanding of what made the original Half-Life work as well as it did, but I think the issue here is that a lot of the new concepts they brought to the table sound cool on paper but just don't work in execution.

Climbable ropes don't really add much that a ladder or convenient stairway/ramp out of other objects wouldn't do better, especially with how ridiculously janky they are. Marine grunts that you can command to follow you around and having unique traits is a really cool idea that would expand further on what HL1 was already doing (and I wouldn't be surprised if Valve took notes from this considering how the squad system in Half-Life 2 functions), but in execution Opposing Force pushes the already barely functional friendly AI past their limit. It's a coin flip on how much they'll actually follow the player around and even if you can manage to get them to stay behind you, the level design itself just barely accounts for their existence. It made sense for Gordon to leave behind scientists and guards in the moment because their weaknesses and limited usage compared to the ridiculous stuff you do can be understood from the get-go, whereas being a military corporal commanding his troops just suddenly abandoning them makes far less believable sense. It doesn't help either that Opposing Force doesn't do anything actually new with the friendly grunts, not when their only real required use still amounts to opening doors that you otherwise can't unlock yourself.

The bigger issue here is that I just don't find Opposing Force very memorable, and the few things that do stick out in my mind are the times when the game becomes frustrating at its worst towards the end. There's a lack of major set piece moments or distinct locales like HL1 had as you spend most of your time running through samey dark rundown interiors as the destruction has already long passed by the time Shephard is there. The new weapons barely register in my mind when several of them are basically just equivalent replacements for weapons in the original game (the deagle is just the revolver with more ammo and a weird laser sight that you will never turn off, the sniper is the crossbow, etc), and the others are gimmicky and are annoyingly assigned to keys 6 and 7 which are hard to reach for in a heated fight. That sounds like a bizarre nitpick but it's even that small detail that HL1 understood and was careful about with how its weapons were assigned, never making them far from reach and inaccessible. The new enemies either make me feel nothing or annoyed with how bullet spongey they are and how fast they can wipe you from full health; the military grunts in HL1 already rode a fine line between engaging and annoying with their fast hitscanning damage, I have no clue who at Gearbox thought that making them faster and adding more of them with the black ops units were a good idea but good lord it wasn't.

And on top of all of that, it really doesn't help Opposing Force's case either that Valve themselves haven't done a particularly good job of preserving the experience as well as it should've. I have no idea how many of these things actually might have been better back in its original release because the Steam version noticeably breaks several things like music cutting off on any load screen including map transitions and loading your saves. Some of the music I got to hear I kind of liked! I wish I could actually hear them in full! Certain AI functions and responsiveness seem to be partially tied to the framerate too, and the FPS limit doesn't actually work properly out of the box; the console command fps_max seems to be locked at 72 by default but it's not actually enabled with fps_override. It's frustrating because these issues were fixed for the original Half-Life since 2019 (which is still a ridiculously egregious amount of time it took for Valve to finally fix these issues) but they were never carried over to the two expansions.

Altogether I just kind of don't care much for Opposing Force. A lot of it sounds cool on paper and I can absolutely see the ambition but in practice I just don't think it's very fun to play. It's not bad and every couple of years I will sit there and wonder "why haven't I played this more times", only to actually start replaying it and realize very quickly why it leaves my memory every time.

The first Half-Life is still just a nice game to kind of breeze through today and reflect on how much first person shooter design has both evolved since this game, as well as how much surprisingly hasn't changed since then (and maybe in some regards, regressed). I'm not the biggest fan of how much the mixture of cheap traps, awkward platforming, and engine jankiness and bugs lead to this constant habit of having to quicksave the game every 10-20 seconds and some chapters definitely drag out for too long. But even still, what still makes this game special to this day is how despite being released in an era of shooters where arcade-y fast action was the norm, Half-Life demands that you slow down and take in this scientific industrial nightmare of a location, unravel its mysteries, and work your way up in power starting from absolutely nothing to being respected and called upon as the only one who can finish things off. Even after 25 years, Half-Life still gives a sense of atmosphere and progression that not many shooters have pulled off quite as seamlessly as it does.

A part of me still probably holds the fan remake Black Mesa in a bit higher regard today as the more complete and refined version of this story, but that's not completely fair when Black Mesa was working off of the evolutions that the sequel brought to the table, and there's charm in the original's simplicity and tameness in comparison to the remake (which did have a tendency to make certain sections overly bombastic, as well as Xen in its entirety). This is still worth playing if you care about seeing the original direction and vision, seeing the roots of where Valve as a game developer started, and/or you want to play a classic shooter from the era.