WAKE!

A great and absurdly overwritten, overdesigned & ploddingly paced game. Gratuitous exposition beating you down & down & down until Garth Marenghi (Wake) can escape the darkplace, a dim Mauve Zone/Silent Hill analog. Drawing from Twin Peaks: The Return, The Night House, True Detective & a little bit of Vanishing on 7th Street(?!!), Sam Lake is so buried under the weight of his influences that he rarely finds his own voice.

Contained in here is an efficient, stripped-down survival horror game, full of winding paths, plenty of fleshed-out re-visitation of areas that make Bright Falls a real sick Place to be by the end. Saga’s mindplace asks you to build your evidence to produce your own objectives (often to an insane degree of detail, where you find out you must speak to someone, as you are in that very moment standing in front of them). Rendering every objective and clue a physical, tactile object does align the player with the characters - who are (especially Lake) idiots.

Remedy have inverted the small puzzle-intermissions from Control into the entire structure of this game, all winding, looping, shifting architecture (a trope they indulge in here with glee). Enemies are relatively bland but encountered infrequently enough it was almost a non-issue (compared to the excessive waves of Control). Many of the kitsch FMV sequences were underwhelming, but it was where they were layered directly into the world that it worked for me, transparent membranes of Max Payne’s Lake/James McCaffrey in silhouette just hanging out and talking complete nonsense (I love him).

Honestly this is a case where the energy, humour and confidence of this overwhelming mess tips into endearing. Not to mention the absolutely beautiful soft, dimly-lit spaces in here that I'd be happy living in (especially the retirement home and Nu York apartment). Between this, Death Stranding & recent RE titles I begrudgingly accept that sometimes photorealism is valid & not just dull marketing for graphics cards. WAKE

Edit: RIP James McCaffrey! <3

Thief is methodically mapping space from the shadows. Thief is exploring an architecture of absurd, arcane labyrinths. Thief is rotoscoped & roughly layered 90s FMVs scored with industrial beats.

The Black Parade, a fan campaign mod for the now 25 year old Thief: The Dark Project, brings Thief into the present as an act of alternate-history building. Within the tight restrictions of the Dark Engine, this imagines what Thief could be given decades of further contemplation, or in this case, seven years of development led by famed modder Skacky.

The Black Parade echoes iconic levels: here is a mansion, or a sprawling, vertical city, a rain-swept church, a plague stricken derelict district. But everything is now denser, more honeycombed, more varied. At times you’ll be lost, but they’ve paid special attention to every room’s volume, materials, light and colour, so that your mental map is as rich as your potential targets.

Thief separates itself from other Im-Sims by refusing to be an everything-game (Deus-Ex). You are a thief. You can’t fight for shit. You can jump from carpet to carpet and knock someone out if you’re good, but you can’t do much about two guards on your tail. Thief is narrowly designed to do one thing. The Black Parade knows this and is as close to Thief 3 (5?) that we’ll ever get.

Trivia Time!

WarioWare is actually canon within the Zelda timeline! After using the Sheikah Slate to activate the Divine Beasts before the Great Calamity, Princess Zelda became increasingly enamored with the device. As you may know, King Rhoam eventually banned the Princess from continuing her research of ancient technologies, commanding her to focus instead on awakening her sealing power in preparation for the conflict with Calamity Ganon. But what you may not know is that the final straw for Rhoam was when Zelda came to him and showed him something she had been working on.

On the Sheikah Slate, Zelda had discovered how to program "microgames", and created cartoonish characters based on people she knew. Dr. Crygor was based on Robbie, Purah became Penny, and the King himself (due to his gruff demeanor) was reimagined as Dribble. While upset that his daughter had drawn him as an anthropomorphic dog, Rhoam was especially incensed by the idea that his daughter was becoming a "degenerate gamer", and, between dry heaves, he immediately forbade her from using ancient tech.

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!

I'm writing this review barely an hour after having Infinite Wealth. Normally I'd wait a bit and let it sit in my mind as I try to pick it apart, and I know I'll realise that the edges are rougher, I know that...but right now I want my memory of this to remain as untainted as possible. I know that sometime in the future I'll look at this review with tainted eyes, cringing at my self but I want to write this right now so I can look back and see that I genuinely loved this game deeply.

It took nine whole games to get here, and I'm at the end of it with my emotions being a complete mess. It takes so much hard work to sell a character, much less the same one around eight times over, and each time I've fallen in love deeply with Kiryu Kazuma all over again.

"They all treat you as if you're some hero. If we ended up just like you...the illusions of the yakuza life would be stronger than ever."

Piece by piece for eight whole games, we've been building up the legend of the Dragon of Dojima alongside him. Every admiration thrown towards Kiryu doesn't feel like just cheap talk, it feels earned because you yourself earned it.

Infinite Wealth isn't an erasure of every misstep this franchise has taken, it doesn't hide it but instead puts it on full display, it shows just how much you have impacted the world around you for so long to the point where at the end of Kiryu's life, the only question that remains was "Was it worth it? Was it a life worth living?"

It's hard having the courage to do something. It's even harder to be the one to give that courage to others but this common trait, this link that runs deeper than the dragons on their backs, is exactly why Infinite Wealth isn't just talk. You've seen that exact event take place time and time again, and now all that remains is the end of Yakuza as you know it. It asks you to be brave and head towards an unfamiliar future, and let the burdens of the past be a weight on your shoulders no more.

I wish I had something more meaningful to say, and in the future I probably will, but I want a record of my feelings as they are now. A public if not embarrassing declaration of my utmost love for this entry in the series, guess I'm taking a page out of Ichiban's book in doing this. Not that it matters, I think we can all benefit by being a bit more like Ichiban Kasuga.

I've been trying to think of bigger blunders humanity has made than letting the Sega Saturn die, shit like the Hindenburg Disaster and the invention of mayonnaise are peanuts compared to this catastrophe.

When I was in the mood to finally fill the massive gap in my Sega console lineup, I had to slap down a decent amount of didgeridoos for a working console and an ODE. It was a big down payment for only one console, but I essentially told myself that all it took was one copy of NA Saturn Bomberman for the entire thing to be paid off. It's insanely fucked up, more fucked up than someone inventing mayo while the Hindenburg was exploding, but these are the hurdles I'm willing to hop over to fix the hole in my heart that's the shape of my missing childhood Sega Saturn. I wanted to experience all the hypothetical final forms of two-dimensional art on my own coffee shit-stained clunker CRT TV, and emulation kinda smelled during that time. Worse than mayo.

I'd imagine there has to be some kind of heavenly timeline where the Saturn survived, and we weren't so quick to ditch 2D. I love my low poly original PlayStation, but if you had crafted a giant colorful sprite of a pizza in this game and made it scale up and down constantly while spinning all over the screen, it'd be second only to an actual pizza, and even then I'd be complaining about my pizza not getting more pixel-y as it approached my mouth, with similarly pixel-y cheese dripping from it ala a TMNT cartoon.

The Battle Mode is the literal life of the pizza party, and they even got a cast of Hudson all-stars to round out the playable characters. Bonk, the Adventure Island guy, that loser from Milon's Secret Castle, and even fuckin' Yuna goddamned Kagurazaka is here. I don't think Konami even remembers they own Galaxy Fräulein Yuna, and it makes me want to dive into the Turbo library a bit more again seeing all these peeps here, who are absolutely not getting let out of Konami's storage locker anytime soon. I mean, christ Bomberman himself didn't even get the common courtesy of an AV collection or any NSO releases. No respect, no respect at all I tells ya. Not even the common courtesy of a reach around. Konami don't give two shits about my man's history, cause he ain't their boy.

The only way you could make the battle mode more fun in this game would be to mod in all the voices from Atomic Bomberman, where all the Bombers were inexplicably voiced by Mr. and Mrs. Bighead and the Red M&M Guy. Maybe a lovely person could do that for me one day...

One day, one day maybe in 2050, Fightcade will have Saturn and 8P support....and the funny voice clips. There it is....the perfect bummer man.....you'd love to see it....

"time for a fuckin' dirtnap ya shitfuck" ~ Konami's last words to Bomberman after Super Bomberman R 2 bombed

Despite essentially codifying much of the genre, Thief stands head and shoulders over most of the stealth genre even today, in my opinion. Every single mechanic, from the light gem that shows your current visibility to the difficulties giving you more objectives and restrictions rather than arbitrarily cranking up some stats, is so well thought-out and meshes so well with the open, layered level design that it's honestly impressive this isn't a sequel to some much more poorly aged first game.

Some people might take issue with the less stealth-focused levels and while I agree that they're the worst half of the game, I still think there's a lot to love about them. Also, the worldbuilding and atmosphere are extremely good, as is Garrett's character.

That said the Thieves' Guild sucks on anything higher than Normal, honestly just use the level skip cheat code if you want, or play it on the lowest difficulty.