I'm the resident Street Fighter V defender, I genuinely think the game is very good nowadays and while flawed, often gets overly shit on in ways I do not think it deserves at all. I think it has rock-solid gameplay, some interesting character designs, a great OST, and a cool watercolor aesthetic that while it doesn't always work pops off when it does. It's bizarre to me that people will yell to the rooftops about how Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky, games with similarly disastrous launches, are "actually really good now!" but people still pretend that SFV is the same broken mess that was released in 2016.

I cannot defend A Shadow Falls. It is such an unbelievable waste of Capcom's own time, money, and resources in an era where SFV desperately needed fixing and decidedly not a half-baked narrative campaign. The writing is genuinely atrocious; the plot is hard to get invested in because of the number of characters they try to involve in an overarching global conspiracy to the point where I can't connect not only to the characters but to the scenario at large. It feels like it's biting off way more than it can properly chew and as a result, it feels like a rare steak that's still screaming. A lot of the dialog feels like it was written by people who haven't touched a script before and it's often wince-inducing without any sort of ironic enjoyment. It's also not a very attractive DLC either. I'm a defender of SFV's art direction and think a lot of it looks rather good, but with A Shadow Falls, a lot of the game's visual weaknesses are highlighted. SFV's biggest visual strength is its exceptional animation work, and while that still applies to the fight choreography here, it certainly doesn't apply to the facial animation which looks stilted at the best of times and downright rudimentary at worst. It's evident that SFV's character models and textures, while perfectly serviceable at a normal fighting game distance, were clearly not made to be put to closer scrutiny in cinematics, and the poor texture quality and strange modeling choices (the hair can often be ugly) that are otherwise difficult to notice are now flat in your face and ever so evident. The cutscene cinematography can actually be rather impressively framed and blocked, so credit where it's due, I certainly appreciated that. I also found that the narrative flow didn't exactly work with the game's gameplay either. Part of what appeals to me about SFV is its pick-up and play charm and I always know I can just log in after a long day and play match after match after match, but that isn't the case with this DLC. You get maybe two rounds per character before you're shuffled off to another location with another character, and therefore an entirely different moveset and fighting style to sample. It feels terribly disjointed and if this was your introduction to the game, you'd learn absolutely nothing about how the characters play. It just doesn't work with how SFV is best enjoyed and the gameplay - the core appeal of a fighting game - often felt secondary in A Shadow Falls which I consider to be its biggest weakness among other things.

Ultimately, A Shadow Falls is an awful DLC released when SFV was perhaps in its worst state. It was not only a waste of time for Capcom, during a period when they should have been doing anything else, but a total waste of time for players by neither addressing the criticisms of a lack of a substantial arcade mode nor providing a unique or even fun experience in its own right. It struggles with awful, cringeworthy writing, a disjointed pace that doesn't work with SFV's gameplay loop, and visuals that aren't conscious of the game's visual strengths exposing its visual weaknesses in the process. Even nowadays, when SFV is a rock-solid fighter with a ton to offer, A Shadow Falls feels like a vestigial remnant of the worst of SFV and a waste of time for everyone involved.

I guess the writing better implements pre-existing characters in ways that make more narrative sense but otherwise, this isn't a whole lot better than the base game. In fact, with the amount of reused areas, it's sort of a lot of the same. Echo Six are less edgy than Wolfpack, which certainly makes them more tolerable, but they're not any more interesting and the game does lose some of its luster when you're not playing as the villains. If you liked ORC, this will probably be up your alley, but it has the exact same flaws as the base game.

A lot worse than I thought it was going to be. I'm not opposed to Operation Raccoon City on a conceptual level, both a Resident Evil cover shooter and a non-canon "what if" scenario where you play as the villains threaten to be exciting but fail in practice. ORC plays terribly in almost every sense of the word. Cover, something pretty important for a cover shooter, hardly even functions, and one has to wonder if Slant Six had ever played one. Often, cover is usually not enough to stop the player from taking damage, while simultaneously obstructing your weaponry from firing. It is not uncommon to find cover where the only bullets it can block are your own. The base shooting mechanics aren't terrible, but the balancing on veteran difficulty is insanely skewed, with your weapons feeling like peashooters and human enemies tearing through you within seconds. Although I would have liked to play with friends in co-op multiplayer, Games For Windows Live has long stopped functioning, so I had to deal with ORC's terribly programmed AI companions. They hardly help you, frequently getting stuck on walls and failing to avoid deadly environmental hazards such as a burning fire. They also frequently run straight into enemy fire and require constant reviving, but of course, if the player dies it's straight to game over. The game also loves to pile annoying, stunlocking enemies into tight corridors and constrained areas, with Crimson Heads and Hunters being the biggest offenders. Hunters in particular are the worst they've ever been in the entire franchise, taking loads of bullets to put down and having rubber banding so blatant they will redirect mid-air if you dodge. ORC has to be one of the worst playing games I've played in a while, and it's even more baffling coming off of the backs of RE4 and RE5.

Part of ORC's marketing campaign was focused on the non-canon nature of the game, allowing you to radically alter the Resident Evil timeline by killing off major characters. Unfortunately, this isn't utilized as it should, and most of the game's writing is dumb fanservice with little to no point. Characters like Nicholai and Ada show up simply to remind you that "Hey, this is Resident Evil!" but serve little purpose other than that. The only one who makes any real impact on the plot is Leon S. Kennedy, who can potentially be the final boss depending on your choices, but he shows up so late in the narrative for it to flow to any satisfaction. I hate pretty much all of the protagonists, who have hardly any character and whose backstories are overly edgy and dramatic. Vector in particular suffers from "original the character" syndrome, as him being trained by HUNK on Rockford Island comes off, again, as pointless fanservice. ORC makes you appreciate games like Left 4 Dead, where the writers put effort into giving characters interesting dynamics and entertaining quirks, as opposed to yet another stoic, masked Umbrella sociopath.

ORC is also quite ugly, even for the early 2010s. Even when cranked to the highest possible settings, texture and shadow quality are still pitifully low, often appearing extremely pixellated and jarring. The game genuinely looks absolutely awful in the majority of indoor levels, with sparse environmental detail and uninspired art direction, which isn't helped by the sub-par at best asset quality, some of which may have been passable in an Xbox 360 launch title but not so close to the end of the system's life. Character models are often highly detailed, but the moment a human face is placed on them, they look like skinwalkers made of potatoes and plastic. Crimson Heads of all things look oddly like sanitized plastic Happy Meal toys instead of corpses in advanced decomposition. Although I'm a defender of bloom in video games, ORC slathers it on so excessively that at points character faces are impossible to make out. It doesn't help that the PC port is fairly bad too, with limited graphics customization, controller button prompts even when playing with a keyboard and mouse, a locked FOV, 30 FPS cutscene animations regardless of the game's actual framerate, and poor optimization which causes significant frame drops on modern hardware. It doesn't help that there's no native anisotropic filtering support, which makes textures look terribly blurry at a distance, and while this is easy to solve with your GPU drivers, by 2012 it isn't a problem that should need solving.

If there's any bright spot in this otherwise mess of a game, it's the soundtrack composed by Resident Evil veteran Shusaku Uchiyama. While hardly his best work, it breathes life into the game's sequences in a way that compliments both the atmosphere and action and is ultimately more successful than even Revelations's soundtrack. Although I'd argue that Operation Raccoon City doesn't give the player many opportunities to become immersed in the atmosphere, it's at no fault of the music but rather the game's breakneck pace. I appreciated the leitmotifs and musical callbacks to RE2, such as the tyrants' theme and the iconic three piano notes in the RPD. I didn't gel with every musical choice; I thought the use of organs for Nemesis's theme was a bit strange, for example. Particular favorites were "Escape" which plays during a mad dash out of a burning hospital, with exotic-sounding bongos and vocals immediately reminding me of RE5, and "Atrocity" which has the appropriate scale and musical heft fitting of a final encounter. It's fairly effective stuff overall, and the lone bright spot in this game.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is an awful third-person shooter that suffers from borderline broken game design, suicidal friendly AI, writing that exists only for fanservice, and a visual presentation that looked dated and piss-poor even for the time. It's a shame because the premise of the game has a lot of potential. Perhaps it is more fun with friends, but I cannot imagine significantly so.

Cheaply and quickly made expansion pack that hardly "expands" on the base game in any meaningful way. The only new weapon that is worth anything is the assault rifle, which shreds through everything. The new enemies are either enlarged versions of base enemies or extremely annoying, like the difficult-to-hit predators who dash toward you at lightning speed and chew off your legs. Level design is super hit or miss, with some being fairly decent renditions of base Unreal levels and others having five mercenaries run through a corridor at you with zero room to maneuver. It simultaneously goes by extremely quickly while also feeling like it drags for too long, and ultimately it just isn't a rewarding experience that does very little new or original, and the new things it does include are either insubstantial or outright bad. At least the music is still really good.

Starts as one of the most phenomenal FPS experiences I've ever had but, as most 90s FPS games do, drops off in the third act. It's not as egregious as Half-Life or Doom 2, but enough to end on a somewhat disappointing note. Nevertheless, Unreal's huge open maps immerse you deeply in Na Pali, putting more effort into worldbuilding than most shooters of this era. I won't claim that Unreal's world setting is anything exceptional but the effort in filling it with diary logs of the local inhabitants and doomed prisoners as you explore the religious temples of the Nali and its detailed historical backdrop immerses you more than I thought. The game design is fun as all hell, too, with the opening levels feeling rather nonlinear despite actually being a rather straight line. The weapons are mostly projectile based which adds strategy in combination with the intelligent enemy AI's propensity to dodge, the stinger countering the Skarrj being the best example. Levels can be somewhat mazelike but I usually found myself stumbling into the correct pathways with little effort. The Flak Cannon has to be one of the best shotguns in gaming history, the way it ricochets and shreds everything to bits is unbelievably satisfying. Unreal is often called a tech demo and while I find that reductive, it is a great showcase for the strengths of Unreal Engine 1. Giant landscapes with beautiful colored lighting and lively fauna create a world that feels as natural as a 90s FPS game can get pre-Half-Life. While something like Half-Life might be undoubtedly more advanced on a technical level, Unreal has more opportunities to show off with its vast alien worlds of purple skies, flowing waterfalls, and floating islands. The soundtrack is also phenomenal, composed by the same duo who did Deus Ex three years later. Atmospheric, timeless, and ethereal, it fills into the environments and kicks into action with breakbeat style compositions dynamically when engaging in combat. It's frankly fantastic and I'd love a vinyl release someday.

Unreal might fall into some similar trappings of many other shooters of its era, being a weaker final act, but its fun gunplay, intelligent enemy design, beautiful landscapes, and phenomenal soundtrack make it worth trying. One of the better titles of 1998.

It's a bit odd to me that this was made with the intention of "returning the series to its horror roots" when it is nearly just as action-heavy as Resident Evil 5, featuring similar game design and similarly over-the-top setpieces. I guess the opening is a bit slower, but after a while, Capcom just can't help themselves and go all in on the action-horror madness. This is not strictly a complaint, mind you, I enjoy the action-horror direction to some extent, but just something I found a bit silly. Otherwise, the gameplay is largely the same as in RE5, with similar ways the player engages in combat and approaches enemies. It's still quite fun, even in a somewhat dialed-back context, and it works well enough within the game's more pick-up-and-play style of level design. However, this quicker pace means the game doesn't build much tension or horror, and I often found myself wishing the game was much scarier than it was. I suppose the fact that you could mow down most early-game enemies with little trouble and Revelations' overreliance on cheap jumpscares prevented it from being the "return to form" that I had hoped for. Credit where it’s due, however, the very first-time ooze Rachael appeared, and the subsequent chase to the cafeteria genuinely scared the everloving shit out of me and showed the potential for what Revelations could have been in more capable hands. There's still a baseline competence to it all, however. Combat is a decent bit of fun, and the dodge mechanic from Resident Evil 3 is back and vastly improved. While it's still fairly jank and doesn't always feel like it registered properly, this time around it felt like an actual skill I had to learn and it was satisfying to pull off. Enemies are generally fun to fight and even the more traditionally annoying enemies such as hunters generally have weaknesses that allow you to combat them without much trouble. Something that significantly hurts the game however is Revelations' awful pacing. After a few levels, the game will switch to another perspective in a different location which not only robs the game of its fantastic cruise ship setting but also is where the game wears its RE5 blood on its sleeve most apparently. These segments aren't strictly unfun but they feel entirely unsubstantial and I always wanted to return to the main scenario every time without fail. I also wasn’t a fan of the final level being primarily an underwater level. While I didn’t mind the ones that came before, they felt like filler, and ending the game on that note feels anticlimactic, though the awesome final boss partially makes up for that. Generally speaking, Revelations’ campaign feels like a weird mishmash between classic and at-the-time modern RE design conventions that definitely feature more of the latter than the former, but don’t entirely meld, but don’t necessarily fail either. It just comes off like a whole lot of “competent, but nothing special”.

Raid Mode is Revelations’ attempt at a mercenaries-style side mode, and unfortunately, it doesn’t hit the franchise’s high standards. While it’s quite good fun at first, after about five hours, Raid Mode’s flaws just become more and more evident. Instead of being an arena filled with enemies that the player can mow down to a time limit, it’s instead mission-based, with certain objectives for the player to fulfill to get to the end of the stage. Unfortunately, this means that Raid Mode is entirely at the whims of the mission designers, and the levels are not remotely consistent. Some of them can be beaten in three minutes on a first try, some stretch upwards of fifteen on repeat attempts. Some are well-designed and paced, and others are unfun slogs that you’ll never want to replay. The grinding and repetition of it all sets in too, as certain missions are recommended only if you have a certain amount of XP, meaning you’ll be replaying older missions quite a bit after a while to get the necessary amount to progress. I’m also not a huge fan of characters having little differences other than stat boosts, as opposed to mercs characters having entirely different load-outs and movesets, proving to be much less interesting and allowing less experimentation. I’m sure it’s much more fun with friends, but the servers are absolutely barren, forcing me to play it as a solo experience. I’m totally down for Capcom experimenting with the sidemode formula but unfortunately, Raid Mode feels too underbaked for me to fully recommend.

Revelations’ story, written by Dai Satō of Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell fame, unfortunately, is a disappointing mess. While Resident Evil 5’s story was underbaked if not often downright stupid, Revelations’ story is messy. First of all, the constant jumping between perspectives is not just a pacing killer for the gameplay but the story as well. Revelations’ story isn’t absurdly complicated when laid flat, but when the game is constantly leaping from character to character, location to location, tone to tone, it becomes legitimately difficult to keep up with. This is the very first time I had to consult Wikipedia to find out the extent of what happened, and perhaps I’m just a big dumb idiot but this is the first time I’ve ever had to do that for an RE game, and I don’t think for the right reasons. The game keeps trying to pull so many different twists on the player that it feels like an M. Night Shyamalan film. Chris isn’t in any danger, Jill and Parker were fed false information! Veltro isn’t back, it was a setup by O’Brian! Turns out the attack on Terragrigia wasn’t unprompted but was done in collaboration with the FBC! Turns out Jessica and Raymond were double agents for Tricell! I understand the game is called Revelations, but the number of times the game tries to pull the rug out from under the player is maddening and comes off as a cheap attempt at layered storytelling. I also find O’Brian’s plan to lure out Morgan’s guilt by tricking Jill and Parker into thinking Veltro had been revived to be…extremely ill-advised. It’s honestly a miracle that things went as well as they did, at multiple points, the plan just puts his employees in unnecessary danger and I’m surprised most of them weren’t mauled to death or seriously injured.

Jill Valentine is probably the dullest she’s ever been (circa 2012) with zero personality or character development in sight. While she wasn’t exactly interesting in RE5 either, she was a supporting character and not the protagonist, and games like the original RE3 proved she could be a rather strong lead at that. The supporting characters are a mixed bag as well. I found Parker rather charming despite not being all that original and enjoyed hearing how he reacted to situations. I also found his dynamic with Raymond to be more endearing than I would have thought, even if it’s not very fleshed out. Unfortunately, the rest all fall flat for me. Jessica’s whole personality is being the flirty double agent, Morgan is an antagonist who wants money and power because of course he does, Chris is dull as usual, Norman hams it up the whole time despite virtually zero screentime, and Keith and Quint take the cake for being perhaps the most annoying characters in the whole series with their constant pop culture references and creepy comments about female characters. O’Brian threatens to be interesting as a grizzled and jaded old soul with his heart in the right place, but his relationship with Morgan is never fully explored and feels underdeveloped. The constant references to The Divine Comedy also come off as slightly pretentious rather than thematically relevant. I also found the worldbuilding to be a bit subpar. I always found memos to be one of the most interesting ways Resident Evil often told its stories, but the ones here are generic and reminiscent of, if not carbon copies of ones found in earlier games.

When the HD ports of Revelations were released, many gaming journalists criticized the game for featuring outdated visuals. While the PC port does offer a fairly significant boost in visual fidelity and asset quality compared to the 3DS original, it is still a 3DS game at its core, and what an impressive 3DS game it is! While an obvious, and understandable downgrade from Resident Evil 5, it is genuinely impressive how it’s not that far behind in terms of visual fidelity. Environments are densely detailed and the main hallway and the kitchen where you encounter your first ooze are prime examples. They have a lived-in feel that, while not as potent as some of the classic Resident Evil games, is still present and noticeable. Character models look nice too, featuring sufficient detail and appropriate proportions and although lip sync isn’t exactly very good, I doubt that would be very noticeable on a 480p 3DS screen. I can’t say I particularly care for Jill’s facial redesign. It looks good in the promotional CGI renders, but in-game, she looks somewhat misshapen and swollen. Moving away from Julia Voth’s face isn’t an inherently awful idea but this in particular felt poorly executed. I found the game’s use of color to be fairly interesting as well. Steely blues were expected and appreciated for the game’s setting, but the use of burnished orange as a contrast was surprising and provided for some great tonal clash that reminded me of a James Cameron film, especially during the Teragrigia sequences. Texture quality, even at max settings, often leaves a bit to be desired, but I found it to be an acceptable if even appreciable upgrade from the 3DS version. Unfortunately, Capcom was slightly lazy when upgrading the visual presentation, as some assets are entirely untouched from the 3DS original. Tiptoing around the dead bodies of ooze creatures isn’t remotely creepy when you can tell their models haven’t been updated at all, and therefore almost certainly won’t get up. I’m usually critical of MT Framework’s FXAA implementation but I found the simpler presentation lends itself much better to it, and there was significantly less shimmering than say, in the Resident Evil HD Remaster. The game also runs like a dream as well, maintaining 120 FPS at max settings all of the time, with the only frame drops being in elevators, which function as invisible loading screens. However, the lack of any native anisotropic filtering severely hurts the presentation, and while this is easily fixed by forcing it in the GPU control panel, by 2013 this shouldn’t have been something that required fixing.

While they’re a bit polarizing, I do love the ooze as enemy types. Their sick, mottled, slimy skin combined with how they slide around as if boneless is genuinely unnerving. I especially like how there’s a little bit of variance among them, which does give off the impression that their appearance is slightly determined by the person infected. The rest of the monster designs are pretty cool too, and I genuinely found the sea creepers, farfarello, and scarmiglione to be very cool creature designs, though admittedly only the creepers unnerved me. I felt that the hunters, fenrir, and globsters could have stood to be more original, and I felt very little from my encounters with them on a visual level. The pre-rendered CGI cutscenes are a bit of a mixed bag. While having such a prevalence of them was undoubtedly necessary to retain a certain level of detail on the 3DS, the problem is that the assets used in these CGI cutscenes look no different from the in-game ones, which causes them to look very cheap in a game otherwise known for its home console-level presentation. The lack of quality lip sync becomes even more apparent in these cutscenes, and I cannot give Capcom the “3DS” excuse this time around. Oddly enough, a few cutscenes, without rhyme or reason, are rendered with much higher fidelity assets and smoother animations, and while they’re not perfect they do represent a monumental upgrade from most of them. Cutscene cinematography and editing are generally uninspired and I felt nothing from them from a filmmaking perspective. Despite a few setbacks, however, Revelations has a genuinely highly impressive visual presentation especially considering the base hardware.

The original soundtrack, unfortunately, leaves a decent bit to be desired. It’s not bad by any means, it’s very well produced and made with quality conventional composition standards. However, I find it to be unfitting of the kind of game Revelations is purported to be. It’s a big-budget action film score, and while that’s not necessarily bad - a lot of Revelations is like a big-budget action film - it flounders when it needs to be atmospheric and creepy. The game could seriously use fewer rising violins, not only is it a horror cliche but I found it antithetical to the game’s lonely, ghostship atmosphere. Even going back to the scores for the PS1 games, they used a lot of droning synths and deep orchestral sounds, discordant compositions, and other ways to sonically unnerve the player. Revelations doesn’t have much of that, and while it’s not absent, it is missed. Where it does succeed however is its use of motifs, and I found that each entirely character having their own leitmotif and the same “Revelations” theme recurring at many pivotal moments to be intelligent scoring. It also succeeds in the big bombastic action setpieces, reminiscent of both RE5’s soundtrack and the works of James Horner, with “Ride to Sea” being a particular favorite. While I found “Rest & Intensify”, the game’s equivalent of a save room theme, to be initially rather boring, it did grow on me over time as a relaxing haven even if it’s still far from my favorite. It’s a perfectly serviceable soundtrack. Outside of maybe one or two tracks, it isn’t very memorable, and at some points even works against the game’s intended atmosphere. However, when it does work, it works well, so credit where it is due.


It’s interesting to see how Revelations’ reception has shifted over time. When released on the 3DS, it was very positively received, but with each subsequent port, it seems people become progressively less forgiving of its weaknesses. Unfortunately, I found I agreed with most of the complaints that people have about the game. Revelations just isn’t much of a return to form. It’s yet again another action horror game that prioritizes bombastic setpieces over the atmosphere and scares. It’s not scary, it’s not particularly original, it’s possibly one of the worst-written games in the series, and it has a soundtrack that often works against it. Despite this, Revelations makes up for this by being genuinely fun a lot of the time. Gameplay feels good to pull off - even the dumb setpieces are fun to plow through - and the visual presentation is outstanding within context. Although the script is a mess, certain character dynamics are endearing and the ship’s lonely atmosphere can be genuinely effective when left to silence. Even in the face of all of its flaws, it’s still a competent Resident Evil game and is worth playing for die-hard fans. General fans of horror games will want to look elsewhere though, you aren’t going to wet your pants here.

Still somehow not the worst Silent Hill game (I genuinely had a more frustrating time with Homecoming) but I struggle to come up with redeeming qualities for this game beyond it being baseline functional. The gameplay is beyond basic, with the usual dungeon-crawler furnishings but without anything that makes it unique or exciting. You walk into a series of interconnected rooms, kill the enemies, and acquire keys and puzzle items to proceed to more rooms. It doesn't need to be nearly as long as it is and the new level gimmicks later dungeons provide don't do much to make things more interesting. The biggest problem has to be the unique tiles, which provide specific effects when you or enemies stand on them, such as healing you, slowing down time, or draining your health to name a few, but these tiles are invisible unless you're standing directly on top of them, meaning its incredibly easy to forget where they are and just get fucked over randomly with no real strategy to avoiding them or using them to your advantage. The respawn system is more complicated, as post-launch updates actually overhauled it significantly, and I forgot to update my game until halfway through, so I got to experience both. Originally, if you died in a level, you'd have to either restart all of your progress or restart from your last save point, which doesn't sound unreasonable but considering how labyrinthine the levels are and how much needs to be collected it makes the game feel extremely frustrating and repetitive. The update changed it to where you respawn immediately at the beginning or a save point without any progress lost, and you simply have to backtrack to your death point to collect your lost items which while still not ideal is significantly less frustrating. It almost felt like cheating, since it was clear the levels were not designed around this and the update was a hasty response to player feedback. The game also has a blood/light system, which determines which ending or abilities you acquire based on which enemies you kill. This isn't frustrating by any means but it's very underdeveloped and having to monitor which kind of enemy I'm about to bury an axe into kinda sucks what little fun there is out of the combat. A lot of enemies also just suck to engage with, such as the Insane Cancers which take up an absurd amount of damage and explode upon death, or the Bogeymen who are often surrounded by black fog which miraculously makes every attack miss and stalks you throughout the entire level. There are also puzzles, which are randomly generated and technically different every time you play. This RNG element doesn't matter though, as the puzzles are almost entirely the same every time. They all amount to "this item is sorted this way, in this direction" and the variation is astoundingly limited considering its random nature. At some point you don't even need to read the puzzle memos, you can just guess them via very quick trial and error. It makes you wonder why they even bothered to have them at all. It's not an outright painful gaming experience by any means and is largely functional in moment-to-moment gameplay, but it's boring, repetitive, and oftentimes frustrating.

The story isn't anything to write home about either, written by at the time series producer Tomm Hulett, who also has a story writing credit on Silent Hill Downpour. The story changes based on the player's actions, and whether you've absorbed more blood or light, negative consequences can occur for those whose memories you are attempting to change. Unfortunately, this element also feels underbaked. You never actually meet any of the characters whose memories you change, and although the game attempts to fill in the blanks via memos and TVs which broadcast past conversations, it's hard to feel connected to any of it because you never get to feel their reactions to the changed events, you are simply told them. Beyond that, these characters are very one-dimensional and essentially just serve as light context for why the player is exploring these levels. The game also pretty much tells you its themes at the end of the game, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't do it in any way that feels earned and rather a shoehorned way to catch the player up on whatever they may have missed. The game also seemingly tries to be a canonical Silent Hill story, which again isn't necessarily a bad thing, but considering how much it also tries to be a game filled with fanservice for all of the previous entries these two elements do not mix. It's difficult not to feel rubbed the wrong way when the game is trying to tell a serious and emotional story set within Silent Hill's world setting while also having Pyramid Head and other monsters manifested specifically for other characters appear willy-nilly like they're Umbrella BOWs.

Unfortunately, Book of Memories' presentation isn't up to par, and can't elevate an experience that is otherwise a bit hollow. The art direction seems to miss the appeal of Silent Hill entirely, and if it weren't for the copious amounts of blood, feels almost like a bowdlerized interpretation of the series made for younger players. The Otherworlds you run through aren't remotely creative, and not only do they feel demonstrably "not Silent Hill", but also wouldn't feel interesting on their own in an original title. The game may contain rivers of lava, stinging hot metal walls, lush forests, and musty temples, but I feel like I could grab any other dungeon crawler and find similar if not outright identical environments. The only one that stood out to me was the Water Otherworld, as its metal catwalks, pouring rain, and lived-in feel reminded me a lot of Downpour. While I may not consider that the "right Silent Hill" to take inspiration from, it certainly feels more at home than the game's otherwise substandard environments. Although the game lifts enemies from prior entries, a missed opportunity to design original creatures fitting the game's themes in my opinion, the game does present a few newly-created monsters. The biggest examples are the Guardians, the bosses at the end of each zone who symbolically represent the individuals whose memories the player is trying to rewrite, and their designs honestly confuse me. While not strictly bad designs, they feel like they come from a PS3-era God of War clone, and fail to stand out on their own or appropriately blend with the rest of the series. There are a few new mooks too, such as the Mothers and the Blood Babies, neither of which I care for. The former feels like yet another oversexualized Silent Hill monster without any real thematic reason to be so, and the latter feels like a Grey Child knockoff, which is even odder considering the children are added to the game in the DLC. Once again, they fail to stand out in any sense.

The game's tech isn't much of a looker either, and upon sharing screenshots with my friends, they remarked that it resembled an early 2010s iOS game in a negative sense. Textures are all absurdly low-resolution, which wouldn't normally be a huge problem considering the game's camera is set at a far distance, but ground textures often look stretched and resized poorly which removes any benefit this could have. Character models look outright uncanny, with most facial features conveyed through textures, making it resemble an early Dreamcast game. Environments all look samey with little variation, and what little detail exists usually doesn't add quite enough. The game tries to mask this by using at-the-time current gen graphical features such as specular mapping and normal maps, but it's simply putting a bow on an otherwise unsatisfying presentation. Performance is also quite bad, with the game seemingly targeting 30 FPS but rarely hitting it, and often chugs along like it's nobody's business. The patch seemed to iron out some of the performance issues, but later areas still struggled to maintain a consistent framerate in any sense of the word. I understand that Book of Memories probably didn't have a AAA budget, but considering there are much better-looking games on the Vita I find the poor performance to be inexcusable, and the game itself to look rather poorly put together.

The soundtrack was composed by Daniel Licht, who worked on Downpour the same year and is also known for working on the Dexter and Dishonored franchises respectively. While I wasn't necessarily a fan of Licht's work on Downpour, I'll admit that it was competent enough to suit most of what that game needed. Here, however, I struggle to describe the game's score. I'll simply call it "video game music" because it is that unmemorable. None of the tracks give the levels a defined atmosphere, instead, I naturally tune it out while playing, as they fail to immerse me in the game's world nor are they catchy enough to be memorable in their own right. The only one that stood out to me was Water World, as just like the level itself, it had an atmosphere that I thought was surprisingly competent in matching the atmosphere the area provided, which the other tracks do not do for me. I'll also say the game's credits theme, a rendition of Akira Yamaoka's Love Psalm, is genuinely fantastic, is one of my favorite Silent Hill vocal tracks, and is a perfect closer for the game.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories gets a lot of flack within the Silent Hill fanbase, but due to the Vita's low sales and the game's general lack of availability, I honestly doubt most of those people have played the game for themselves and are criticizing it on concept alone. I don't like doing that as I do want to give every game a fair shot, and unfortunately, I'm sad to report that I think Book of Memories, even when approached on its own terms, is a below-average and sometimes even bad dungeon crawler which fails to bring a fresh breath of air to the series or expand on the universe meaningfully. I don't think it's as awful as some claim, it's entirely functional for the most part, but it simply isn't fun. The mechanics feel half-baked and poorly thought out, the story is simplistic and difficult to get invested in, the game doesn't have much of its own identity, and the presentation is bland and uninspired. I don't have many positives to give the game, but I'll simply say that it wasn't painful enough to give anything less than a 4/10, there is a baseline competence here that I can't put aside. I can't recommend this game to anyone though, because I don't even think the game itself knows what audience it is targeting.

A highly important and influential game, but it's qualities do extend beyond that. The game's movement system is phenomenal and a ton of fun to master. Learning how Mario's momentum works genuinely requires a lot of skill and patience but once you finally get it down you'll be bobbing and weaving through each level easily. The run button is core to all of this as knowing when you carefully platform and when to speed right through is key to mastering the movement. The problem is that the game's checkpoint system is absolutely asinine. The game has checkpoints but only mid level and not between worlds. Therefore, if you get a game over on world 8 you go all the way back to world 1, which is beyond frustrating and makes an otherwise solid platformer a slog. I think a good compromise would have been checkpointing at the beginning of each world, as it wouldn't trivialize the game's difficulty while also feeling much more fair. While the game itself isn't too long, a lot of the levels feel borderline copy pasted from one another, and the game can become a bit repetitive as a result.

While the game's visuals are basic and undetailed even by NES standards, I do think it's important to remember that this was the first time video game consoles could be on par visually with the arcade games of the early 1980s, so SMB1's presentation feels more impressive with that in mind, despite not being much of a looker. The creature and powerup designs are iconic and memorable as well. The soundtrack may be simplistic and technically very repetitive but it's so catchy and well thought out that it's hard to care!

Overall Super Mario Bros is worth a shot not just for its historical importance but also because it's just good fun. Normally I don't encourage savestates (they are a form of cheating) but in this case I'd save at the first level of every world for a better experience. It may be basic, but it holds up well enough to be enjoyable.

As a huge fan of the original Harlan Ellison short story, I knew I had to play the point-n-click adventure adaptation released nearly 30 years later by The Dreamers Guild. Thankfully, I had somehow already owned it on GOG, so I immediately started playing it. 90s adventure games are always going to be a difficult genre to get into, due to their reputation as cruel, unfair titles with moon-logic puzzles and instant-death scenarios as punishment for daring to guess. While it is true that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream does partially fall into these trappings, I'm glad to report that it is a largely successful adaptation of the original story that meaningfully expands on the characters and concepts from said story. The original story was only around eleven pages and didn't allow much room for character development or even significantly fleshed-out backstories. The game changes this, with each character from the short receiving their own unique campaigns, reflecting their greatest fears and insecurities. These campaigns are generally consistent in quality, with my favorite of the bunch being Benny's, as I found it to be the most interesting one narratively and aesthetically. Although a subject of censorship in its time, the game does not shy away from serious and often upsetting subject matters and handles them with genuine grace and tact. Themes such as grief, rape, murder, and genocide aren't simply used for shock value, but rather for the development and exploration of its five protagonists. Gorrister, Ellen, Benny, Nimdok, and Ted are all surprisingly well-written, each possessing distinct personalities, and the game devotes a great amount of time to exploring their internal struggles. Nimdok, for example, is inherently sympathetic due to his elderly age and the torment that AM puts him through. However, when it is revealed that he was instrumental in the torture and murder of numerous Jewish prisoners during World War 2, the player's sympathy is called into question. After all, Nimdok has been put through unquestionable hell, but when he's done the same to others, does he or does he not deserve it? These character complexities are what make this game so compelling, especially in comparison to the source material. Although sometimes the situations the characters are put in can be a little cheesy, such as representing a nightmarish man from Ellen's past as a shadowy monster with red glowing eyes, their reactions to said situations make them convincing nonetheless. The game is often disturbing and the tone is fairly consistent throughout, however, I will note that it doesn't quite match the same level of utter bleakness that the original story did. This isn't strictly a bad thing, as the game is still largely faithful, but it carries the vibes of its genre and era. Of course, how can one even mention this game without Harlan Ellison's phenomenal performance as the antagonist, AM? While AM was portrayed as a silent tormenter in the short, he's nothing short of a large ham in the game. This absolutely isn't a bad thing, as Ellison's performance is extremely convincing, breathing deep-seated insanity and utter maleficence into the character. He has become the game's most iconic element for a reason, as not only is he incredibly intimidating, but also highly entertaining. The rest of the voice actors do a surprisingly good job for the era as well, especially considering that many of them were relatively inexperienced, though I'll admit that Frederick Reynolds could be slightly overbearing with Nimdok's German accent. Overall, though, it's a great adaptation of the short story and this alone immediately makes it worth playing for fans of Ellison's work.

How does the game play though? The game certainly has a reputation for being rather difficult, if not often unfair, though I found most of the times I got stuck to be due to me not thinking outside of the box enough rather than poor design. That's not to say there aren't puzzles that are poorly designed, however, and Ted's campaign is chock full of puzzles that require literal guesswork that would be highly difficult to solve without an unreasonable amount of trial and error or a strategy guide. Despite this, there are some genuinely clever puzzles here as well, and by and large the first four campaigns just generally require some out-of-the-box thinking that while I don't find unreasonable, may take some getting used to. Sometimes the game seemingly expects you to do certain puzzles in specific orders, which can occasionally feel obtuse, but the fact that you can save as much as you want softens this a bit. Another thing of note is that the game is kind of buggy, and while not game-breaking most of the time, it can result in items that were previously in one room having their sprites disappear, but still being interactable objects anyways. The only time this ever soft-locked me was in Ted's campaign, where walking outside of the castle would occasionally prevent me from walking back inside, forcing me to reload my save. Playing the game through ScummVM doesn't seem to fix any of these, which is unfortunate. Nevertheless, I'd say the gameplay is generally quite good, but it is held back by a few inconsistent puzzles and bugs.

Visuals are very important for an adventure game, as narrative aside it's your primary method of engaging with the game's world. Thankfully, I Have No Mouth delivers on portraying an insane, warped world of decay and psychodrama. Environments are creative, with varied and interesting locations such as a flying steampunk zeppelin, an abandoned roadside bar, an ancient Egyptian tomb, and a techno-hell native cave civilization being particular highlights. This does lend the game a rather artificial feeling, such as the vegetation in Benny's campaign being robotic, reminding the player that the lands they traverse are nothing more than products of the active imagination of an insane computer. Backgrounds can have almost a painted look to them at points, which distinguishes the game from the pixellated look that most mid-90s games possessed. I even like how the character sprites can scale in quality to make them appear larger or smaller, allowing for a grander scale to many of the game's environments. If there's anything that could use some work, however, it's the animations, which while generally serviceable occasionally come across as awkward. This can occasionally disrupt the game's tone, especially when characters are speaking, as they suddenly appear overly cartoonish rather than somewhat stylized as usual. Another positive aspect of the game's presentation is the score, composed by John Ottman. What makes this game's soundtrack unique compared to a lot of games at the time is its cinematic quality, being composed similarly to films rather than what was expected from gaming. This does make sense, as Ottman would later make a name for himself working on The Usual Suspects and the X-Men films. The game's score makes great use of recurring motifs for each track, with each of the characters' themes sounding completely different but carrying said motifs, giving the game a unified sound. Even within the constraints of old-school MIDI music, the use of strings and more unconventional instruments such as xylophones and harmonicas do lend this game a unique feeling that not only complements the atmosphere but also allows it to stand out. It's a great score and probably one of the most impressive uses of classic MIDI I've seen.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is often considered a classic of the adventure game genre. While I do think it's a flawed game, it deserves that title. Its storytelling is its strongest point, expanding upon the source material in meaningful ways, giving the characters more depth, and elaborating on many of the sci-fi concepts it originally posed. The characters are interesting, the antagonist is extremely memorable, and the tone is depressing and disturbing. Its presentation is unique for its time and still presents an immersive atmosphere so many years later, even if some relatively minor aspects could use some work. Sure, the gameplay may be difficult, perhaps excessively so at points, and Ted's campaign may be an uninteresting slog, but overall this is a very solid adventure title with many memorable aspects that make this a must-play for fans of the original short story, and easy to recommend to fans of adventure games.

Better than I thought it would be considering the person who gifted it to me said "average gameplay, phenomenal premise". While his statement may ring true, I do think Hellblade achieves its own goals rather nicely. It's a game that relies heavily on its presentation and not simply graphically. The protagonist, Senua, suffers from what appears to a modern player as some sort of psychosis. The interesting part lies in the fact that the game takes place in the eighth century, and as far as Senua is concerned, this is her reality, and everyone else shuns her as cursed. This lends the game a very unique perspective not often seen, and this is portrayed visually and aurally with artifacts and minor light hallucinations occasionally peppering the screen, and numerous voices which constantly fill the surround channels at varying distances. It's very artistically interesting to step into the shoes of a character like this and one that feels not only highly immersive but also highly respectful to those suffering from it in real life. While I wasn't fully on board with the game's writing at the beginning, and unsure how to feel throughout, by the time the game ended I felt that Ninja Theory had done a great job telling a story that felt very intimately personal yet grand in scale despite the relatively small scope. Senua comes out of her shell as the narrative progresses and it's satisfying to see her become more confident in her abilities and quest, before finally coming to terms with the fact that not all of her problems were her fault. Uncovering the game's story through creatively told flashbacks at key points in the game feels like unraveling the bandaged head tied to Senua's hip, and by the conclusion, it all felt satisfying. While I'm not sure how the lore tomes tie into the game's narrative or themes, it is fun to hear Druth tell his stories.

The main make-or-break here is going to be the game design for most people, though I found it to be competent enough to be unproblematic. The combat isn't anything special, in fact, it's probably been seen in tons of other games in the same generation alone. Even in hard mode, it's not particularly challenging after a couple of hours and you really can just spam the dodge to escape all enemy attacks. Despite this, there's enough enemy variety to keep things varied enough, and you can't use the same strategy with all of them. The game probably could have benefitted from more of that, but what's here is fine. There is a visceral feeling nature to the combat and I think the visual feedback as well as seeing your enemies visibly represent the damage they've taken through different animations does make it satisfying at the very least, even if it's relatively simple and not particularly creative. The puzzles are generally fine as well. They require you to locate patterns within the environment, forcing you to view the game world from a variety of unusual perspectives to progress. While nothing mindblowing, these puzzles can often be clever and do require you to think outside of the box. Sometimes I felt they overstayed their welcome and had wished for a return of combat, but Hellblade generally gives you enough new puzzle mechanics to not be boring. The only outright bad part of the gameplay I'd say is a fire maze near the end of the game, which requires you to locate these patterns while on the run from a burning wall of flame. It requires a lot of random running around and trial and error before you get it right, but not in a way that feels like you've overcome it, rather feeling as if you got lucky. Despite this, I think Hellblade's gameplay is largely serviceable, nothing too special but with memorable moments here and there. Not bad at all, but you'll be playing this for the story.

Hellblade was made with a team of around twenty people, which makes the game's visual presentation all the more impressive. It genuinely matches the quality you'd see in a lot of AAA games from the mid-2010s, featuring well-defined environments, decent texture quality, and phenomenal character models. Seriously, Senua's model looks damn near lifelike, with an impressive amount of fidelity and great facial animation enhancing the emotion of the story. With a lesser art team, the game's story wouldn't be as effective as you wouldn't connect to Senua's emotions on a sensory level. Ninja Theory also updated the game to take advantage of ray-traced shadows and reflections, both of which look fantastic and add heavily to the realism of the game world. Occasionally there'd be a low-resolution texture in plain view, but this wasn't a frequent issue. I also loved the incredibly creative blending of live-action footage with the in-engine graphics during cutscenes, which was not only neat from a visual standpoint but also pulled off well. If there's anything about the presentation I wasn't a huge fan of, it's that the monster designs aren't all that unique. They're largely fine, but they don't strike me as particularly creative, simply representing distorted people. Valravn was the exception, whose mangled raven-like design reminded me of something from a more creative version of Silent Hill Downpour. The game also runs pretty well at max settings with ray-tracing and balanced DLSS at 1440p, usually averaging around 80-100 FPS depending on the sequence. However, like a lot of Unreal Engine 4 games, Hellblade does occasionally suffer from annoying shader compilation stutter. While much less egregious than a lot of games, it's still distracting when it happens. While I suppose that's the consequence of having a loading-screen-less game world, it doesn't make it pleasant either. The game's soundtrack is also very good, featuring very Nordic-inspired composition and instrumentation. It feels appropriately epic when it needs to, with Hela and River of Knives being good examples. It can also be appropriately atmospheric when need be, though the ambient tracks I found less interesting when divorced from the context of the game.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice isn't going to be a game that appeals to everyone, but I feel that it's a good game that achieves the specific goals that Ninja Theory set out. With its respectful portrayal of psychosis, its rare and fascinating perspective, and strong visual and aural presentation, it does make for a unique game experience in terms of immersing yourself into the shoes of someone different from yourself. However, the gameplay isn't anything all that special, and if you require every game you play to be mechanically innovative, Hellblade will not appeal to you. Despite this, it still comes recommended from me.

I'm a sucker for light gun shooters and while I still found it to be a moderately enjoyable experience overall, it's clear The Umbrella Chronicles could have been much more. When it's at its best, it manages to be not only enjoyable on its own but also a fun romp through Resident Evil nostalgia. At its worst though, it's padded, tedious, and frankly frustrating. The game doesn't have a continuous narrative, but rather multiple sub-scenarios with contained plots. The best of these is easily the Resident Evil Remake scenario, which is probably the most consistently well-designed of the bunch. Revisiting my favorite RE game in full 3D but being able to gun down every enemy that gave me trouble prior was both fun and exciting. Resident Evil Zero's scenario was no slouch either. While Zero was never exactly the most creative or exciting RE game, it's represented well here with great recreations of its locations and solid design. Umbrella's End, the only scenario with an original story is pretty solid as well, featuring a cool Russian location, increased difficulty, and a story that ties into future RE games (though admittedly not too well). All of this sounds pretty solid, and you'd be right, the game's shooting can be good fun and the variety of locations and playable characters means you won't get too bored easily. However, the game is a bit slower than your average light gun shooter, and I think it could have benefitted from being sped up a bit. The main problem with The Umbrella Chronicles is that at some point, developer Cavia just seemingly got lazy. Resident Evil 3's scenario isn't even an adaptation of the game it's supposedly based on. You never visit any of the locations from RE3 nor fight any of the unique enemies from it. Every enemy is taken from the other scenarios, and every map is ripped straight out of Resident Evil Outbreak borderline unchanged, you can't make that up. Nemesis, an antagonist so iconic and imposing that he was in the title of the original game, doesn't even show up until the last of the RE3 levels and you never see him go one-winged angel as he did in the original. All of the smaller mini-scenarios, while they fill in additional lore details that had previously gone unexplained in the mainline games, just reuse areas from the main scenarios and aren't worth playing.

These mini-scenarios do have a narrative line that does somewhat continue through them, however, featuring a new antagonist, Sergei Vladimir, who rivals Albert Wesker for control of the Umbrella Corporation. Sergei is unfortunately a very boring villain, encapsulating almost every evil Russian general trope that every piece of media since the 1980s has repeated ad nauseam. His motivations are to revive the TALOS project, yet another Tyrant offshoot whom he refers to as "beautiful" as all RE villains tend to do, and of course, mutates into a giant grotesque monster at the end. He's as par for the course as they come for the series and his villainy is constantly upstaged by Wesker's cool swagger, only further proving how uninteresting he is. Nevertheless, although The Umbrella Chronicles' original story isn't very entertaining, I will give props to Cavia for attempting to solve previously unanswered questions about certain events in the mainline series, which it does relatively well. It's nothing exceptional, but I can always appreciate fleshing out a pre-existing world in a matter that is consistent with the original works. The framing of each scenario as Wesker writing a report on past events is also rather cool.

I've always said that one of the parts of light gun shooters that appealed to me is that they tended to be rather flashy fun despite their shallow nature, and visually The Umbrella Chronicles mostly looks the part. The environments from RE0 and RE1R are lovingly recreated in full 3D with great accuracy if my memory serves me well. There is sufficient detail in these environments and I love the degree of destruction that the player can cause with their grenades, which makes it feel like your rather simple actions do affect the world around you, and is also just rather satisfying. Enemy models also look the part well enough, however, I am pretty sure most of them are ripped directly from their respective games. However, this is where the positives mostly end, and the rest of the game looks rather cheap. Character models animate rather stiffly, and while this isn't the biggest deal in the world considering the game is primarily in first-person, it looks rather awkward any time the game attempts any sort of cinematic cutscene. As I stated prior, the RE3 scenario quite directly reuses maps from Outbreak on the PlayStation 2, and while I'd argue Outbreak was one of the best-looking games on the platform, it was primarily played from a rather distant third-person perspective. When these maps are viewed up close, their weaknesses, such as absurdly low-resolution textures are revealed and therefore cannot match the fidelity offered by the rest of the game. The pre-rendered CGI cutscenes aren't very good either. While they may look decent in still frames, they animate rather awkwardly and the lip sync is always at least a little bit off. On the flip side, however, the game's soundtrack is more promising. While it does fall into pretty conventional RE territory, it's a very well-produced score that for the most part effectively underlines the mood and tone the game needs to meet. However, there were some points where I felt the music was simply too calm for the action on screen, such as "Raccoon's Destruction" which sounded more like something from a James Bond porn parody rather than Resident Evil.

Although this review seems predominantly negative, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is still a decent time in the right hands. If you're a fan of the series, the game offers quite a lot for you, such as nostalgic recreations of past locations, additional bits of lore that prior games left blank, and a decent amount of replayability as the game has quite a lot of unlockable memos which help expand upon the universe. However, if you're not a fan of the series, you may be turned off by the slower-paced gameplay, the inconsistent scenario quality, and the amount of padding the game can have at points. There are certainly better light gun games on the Wii, but this certainly isn't a bad one by any stretch of the imagination.