DiOtherOne
25 Reviews liked by DiOtherOne
I think it's pretty easy to take for granted how much official controller support can add to a game. I'll give you an example: Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 on the Steam Deck is an unmitigated nightmare that, at best, is barely playable unless you have a mouse and keyboard plugged in. But the version for the Nintendo Switch works surprisingly well. Further case and point: anyone who has ever tried rebinding the buttons on a controller so they could play any of the three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games developed and released between 2007-2009 probably came to the same realization that the developers of System Shock 2's canceled Dreamcast port did: there just aren't enough buttons on any controller for this shit, man. Unless you want to sacrifice your ability to lean around corners, turn on your flashlight, change the firing mode of your weapon, or have quick access to healing items, trying to play the PC versions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with a controller is inadvisable until further notice.
Like Rollercoaster Tycoon 3's Switch port, what drew me to the Legends of the Zone Trilogy bundle currently on sale for the Xbox and (surprisingly) PlayStation isn't that I had never touched these games before, but I was genuinely curious to see how a franchise that has never had official controller support before would handle the task of running on console hardware. And surprisingly, it works. It works about as well as you would expect it to, anyway. It is still a little finicky in some regards: sensitivity between aiming regularly and aiming down sights differs to a distracting degree, the weapon wheel doesn't pause or slow the game while you're using it, and navigating the inventory without a cursor slows things down, which isn't aided by the fact that using the inventory, too, does not slow or pause the game for you. Some of that clunkiness aside, though, these control fine and are perfectly adequate ways to experience the vanilla versions of these games if you've either never played them before or simply want a reason to play them again. They've added achievements to all three games, as well, which is always a nice touch. Multiplayer modes aren't present, but it should be common knowledge by now that multiplayer doesn't tend to carry over when an older game gets re-released unless it was a notable part of the package (and here, it was not).
This is sort of reminiscent of that time they ported Half-Life 2, FEAR, Far Cry, and Doom 3 to seventh-gen systems to accommodate for the fact that neither the PS2 nor original Xbox could manage stable/struggled to manage stable ports of either, except they've done it two console generations later. I don't really mind that though; I find this sort of re-release nostalgic. On the subject of this being released on last-gen hardware rather than current-gen systems, perhaps they didn't have the resources for that? That distinction does make this feel a bit lazier than it should to prying eyes, but on a PlayStation 5, it emulates just fine, looks great in 4K, and feels fine enough with a DualSense. I am a bit bummed that they didn't consider porting this to the Switch, but I can see where technical barriers and monetary incentives would have prevented such a port from happening. Oh well, maybe next time.
There are a couple of interesting differences I've noticed so far:
- The Energy Drinks you'll find in-game now have the branding/product placement that they apparently did in the original European releases.
- They've done their due diligence, and the Chernobyl in Shadow of Chernobyl is now spelled in Ukrainian fashion, with an O instead of an E. They've also gone ahead and done this for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, so it's not too surprising, but what is is that they've gone ahead and edited the original menu images to accommodate for this change.
- As has been common with these re-releases since Whoopi Goldberg introduced the Looney Tunes (probably), there's a disclaimer in here about these games being historical artifacts (no pun intended). While you could point to something like the use of the R slur in these games for that disclaimer, the most likely explanation for what they're referring to is that these games have never had a particularly positive outlook on the Ukranian military. Preeeeetty bad timing for that, I'd say.
ETA: Easily the roughest bit of transition from PC to Consoles is that I don't think any of these ports allow you to quicksave. Given that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has always been firmly in the camp of "quicksave every five minutes in case you die instantly", this means that your manual saves will fill up quickly. There's also the fact that these being straightforward ports means that there are no quickslots for any game that isn't Call of Pripyat. Prepare to be sorting through that inventory a lot just to use one energy drink! That being said, I stand by my assessment thus far: these are accessible ports that mostly work out of the box. If that's what you're looking for, it's forty bucks well spent.
ETA2: Lowering my score for this by a star. Everything I said is true, but the faithfulness of these ports also extends to their notable technical shortcomings, including crashes, bugs that have never officially been patched, and inconsistent spawning/despawning. These games are still playable and fine, evidenced by the fact that I just spent 22 hours in Shadow of Chernobyl with very few issues. But if you're coming in expecting these ports to have been polished for consoles beyond their controls and presentation, they're somewhat disappointing, although the likely explanation is that there might not have been much to work with.
Like Rollercoaster Tycoon 3's Switch port, what drew me to the Legends of the Zone Trilogy bundle currently on sale for the Xbox and (surprisingly) PlayStation isn't that I had never touched these games before, but I was genuinely curious to see how a franchise that has never had official controller support before would handle the task of running on console hardware. And surprisingly, it works. It works about as well as you would expect it to, anyway. It is still a little finicky in some regards: sensitivity between aiming regularly and aiming down sights differs to a distracting degree, the weapon wheel doesn't pause or slow the game while you're using it, and navigating the inventory without a cursor slows things down, which isn't aided by the fact that using the inventory, too, does not slow or pause the game for you. Some of that clunkiness aside, though, these control fine and are perfectly adequate ways to experience the vanilla versions of these games if you've either never played them before or simply want a reason to play them again. They've added achievements to all three games, as well, which is always a nice touch. Multiplayer modes aren't present, but it should be common knowledge by now that multiplayer doesn't tend to carry over when an older game gets re-released unless it was a notable part of the package (and here, it was not).
This is sort of reminiscent of that time they ported Half-Life 2, FEAR, Far Cry, and Doom 3 to seventh-gen systems to accommodate for the fact that neither the PS2 nor original Xbox could manage stable/struggled to manage stable ports of either, except they've done it two console generations later. I don't really mind that though; I find this sort of re-release nostalgic. On the subject of this being released on last-gen hardware rather than current-gen systems, perhaps they didn't have the resources for that? That distinction does make this feel a bit lazier than it should to prying eyes, but on a PlayStation 5, it emulates just fine, looks great in 4K, and feels fine enough with a DualSense. I am a bit bummed that they didn't consider porting this to the Switch, but I can see where technical barriers and monetary incentives would have prevented such a port from happening. Oh well, maybe next time.
There are a couple of interesting differences I've noticed so far:
- The Energy Drinks you'll find in-game now have the branding/product placement that they apparently did in the original European releases.
- They've done their due diligence, and the Chernobyl in Shadow of Chernobyl is now spelled in Ukrainian fashion, with an O instead of an E. They've also gone ahead and done this for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, so it's not too surprising, but what is is that they've gone ahead and edited the original menu images to accommodate for this change.
- As has been common with these re-releases since Whoopi Goldberg introduced the Looney Tunes (probably), there's a disclaimer in here about these games being historical artifacts (no pun intended). While you could point to something like the use of the R slur in these games for that disclaimer, the most likely explanation for what they're referring to is that these games have never had a particularly positive outlook on the Ukranian military. Preeeeetty bad timing for that, I'd say.
ETA: Easily the roughest bit of transition from PC to Consoles is that I don't think any of these ports allow you to quicksave. Given that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has always been firmly in the camp of "quicksave every five minutes in case you die instantly", this means that your manual saves will fill up quickly. There's also the fact that these being straightforward ports means that there are no quickslots for any game that isn't Call of Pripyat. Prepare to be sorting through that inventory a lot just to use one energy drink! That being said, I stand by my assessment thus far: these are accessible ports that mostly work out of the box. If that's what you're looking for, it's forty bucks well spent.
ETA2: Lowering my score for this by a star. Everything I said is true, but the faithfulness of these ports also extends to their notable technical shortcomings, including crashes, bugs that have never officially been patched, and inconsistent spawning/despawning. These games are still playable and fine, evidenced by the fact that I just spent 22 hours in Shadow of Chernobyl with very few issues. But if you're coming in expecting these ports to have been polished for consoles beyond their controls and presentation, they're somewhat disappointing, although the likely explanation is that there might not have been much to work with.
Este juego calienta el corazón y purifica el alma.
This review contains spoilers
They gave this frog a gay love story and it really doesn't get any better than that.
I wonder what percentage of dev time those dance animations occupied
Dodgeball Academia
2021
You will dodge the ball but you can't dodge the love for this game
Lo unico malo son los haters, muy buen juego y muy original.
Venba
2023
Este juego es PRECIOSO
Venba
2023
I'm not crying, it's just the onions (T⌓T)
Oh I'm saying it. In fact, I INSIST. This game fucks so hard. Don't listen to people saying otherwise. Is it beyond weird? Its Kojima not even a question. Is it perfect? No way. But, its fucking amazing and deserves a playthrough atleast once.
Final Fantasy XVI
2023
This review contains spoilers
I have so many mixed feelings about this so I'm just going to break it down into parts, to start I wanna preface with the fact I've played every final fantasy game to completion yes this includes the MMOs where I've done the overall majority of content in both, I only bring this up because I think being a long time fan made me enjoy this entry less instead of more and while I strongly disagree that this game "isn't final fantasy" it could be more final fantasy.
Visuals: What is there to say, the game is breathtaking most of the time, the only kind of drab thing is the art direction, 99% of the villages are ramshackle copypasted shacks but outside of that its a treat to look at, character design and models are nice.... except for most of the monsters whose mechanics and models are ripped straight from XIV, even the Moogle this is the first mainline FF in ages to not have a unique moogle design, its just copypasted from XIV, lots of NPCs share names with XIV npcs and it makes the game feel like it lacks identity.
Story: Both the strongest and weakest thing in this entry, the game starts incredibly strong, but suffers as it goes. Really grand, powerful plots are often interrupted by glorified fetch quests and the pacing of the sidequests is absolutely atrocious there are five hours of sidequests before the final boss, and while yes they are well written most of those sidequests should have been the main story. For example, there is a cutscene midway through the game that strongly hints something is up with Torgal, this is never brought up again in the main plot but is in two sidequests, Torgal is...your only real mainstay party member and all of his development is in a sidequest. Why is he special? Well thats kind of left up in the air too with just small lore tidbits instead of fleshing out a major character. Don't get me started on Jill I know XIV addicts and XVI fans will attack me for this but CBU3 has often struggled with female characters and Jill is no different, her development is stunted and all of her agency is at one point completely taken away and just given to Clive, she doesn't even get to participate in the final conflict or make any meaningful difference on the plot, and all of the other women are either hilariously cartoonishly evil (such as Annabella) or just kind of there to hand out sidequests (Mid). SOME of the sidequests have extremely powerful and good writing even occasionally making me tear up, other ones are boring slogs that have you running back and forth with little lore or reward to show for it. The main scenario has some high highs, some of the highest of modern final fantasy games but the lows are quite dreadful and almost embarassing. Yoshi-P only knows MMO pacing and it shows, but whereas XIV has years of character development to make even more drab parts palatable with lore this game just...has long stretches of nothing and characters I wanted to care for but got shafted by the end.
Gameplay: The actual strongest part of the package, fights feel epic and fun and learning the powers of the different Eikons was a real treat, my only real gameplay complaint are the sidequests that I've rambled about enough and the speed in which you explore the world, Clive takes ages to sprint, you cannot do this on command, and he won't do it at all in the barren, lifeless villages that plague this game making walking through towns tedious. Even the chocobo feels slow so there is something wrong there. That brings me to another problem with the gameplay: the exploration, as I said there are no cities to explore, villages are lifeless and drab with only a handful of charmless npcs each and there might as well be no cities, only showing up as back alley dungeons and in cutscenes. Yoshi-p's bizarre insistence on no minigames to keep the story "dark" (seriously one of his many interviews where he isn't being a weird racist he goes into this) had such a terrible impact on the world the entire world feels free of leisure, stiff and unalive, even the most serious games in the FF series had minigames, moments of leisure and places to explore and other things to do besides combat but here? That is all there is.
Speaking of upgrades are just vertical, the crafting is mostly useless and there is almost no gear variety or rpg mechanics to speak of.
Music: Some tracks, namely Titan's final phase, the final boss final phase, the prelude and the hunt boss music slap insanely hard. However, I feel like Soken was holding back, there aren't honestly that many memorable or experimental tracks and for an OST with over 200 songs you'll be hearing the same like 4 or 5 over and over and over in almost every cutscene and town. Soken has been known for his beautiful music and variety where did it go??
In summary I feel like this game has almost no identity of its own, while FF has always been self-referential (something I normally find quite charming) this game is just a testament to Yoshi-P's ego, as the player gets bombarded with and endless onslaught of XIV references, and a game whose frames drop on performance mode despite yoshida boasting that the game would not need patches. I'm left sincerely hoping CBU3 doesn't do another mainline game for quite some time as this is the third worst game in the series for me barely beating out XIV, and walking over the low, low bar that is II. It's a real shame I honestly truly wanted to love it, most games I love, hell most Final Fantasy games in general I find myself wishing they would never end even on endless replays, but towards the end I was just ready for this to be done, and left kinda mixed on an ending I didn't feel the game earned.
Visuals: What is there to say, the game is breathtaking most of the time, the only kind of drab thing is the art direction, 99% of the villages are ramshackle copypasted shacks but outside of that its a treat to look at, character design and models are nice.... except for most of the monsters whose mechanics and models are ripped straight from XIV, even the Moogle this is the first mainline FF in ages to not have a unique moogle design, its just copypasted from XIV, lots of NPCs share names with XIV npcs and it makes the game feel like it lacks identity.
Story: Both the strongest and weakest thing in this entry, the game starts incredibly strong, but suffers as it goes. Really grand, powerful plots are often interrupted by glorified fetch quests and the pacing of the sidequests is absolutely atrocious there are five hours of sidequests before the final boss, and while yes they are well written most of those sidequests should have been the main story. For example, there is a cutscene midway through the game that strongly hints something is up with Torgal, this is never brought up again in the main plot but is in two sidequests, Torgal is...your only real mainstay party member and all of his development is in a sidequest. Why is he special? Well thats kind of left up in the air too with just small lore tidbits instead of fleshing out a major character. Don't get me started on Jill I know XIV addicts and XVI fans will attack me for this but CBU3 has often struggled with female characters and Jill is no different, her development is stunted and all of her agency is at one point completely taken away and just given to Clive, she doesn't even get to participate in the final conflict or make any meaningful difference on the plot, and all of the other women are either hilariously cartoonishly evil (such as Annabella) or just kind of there to hand out sidequests (Mid). SOME of the sidequests have extremely powerful and good writing even occasionally making me tear up, other ones are boring slogs that have you running back and forth with little lore or reward to show for it. The main scenario has some high highs, some of the highest of modern final fantasy games but the lows are quite dreadful and almost embarassing. Yoshi-P only knows MMO pacing and it shows, but whereas XIV has years of character development to make even more drab parts palatable with lore this game just...has long stretches of nothing and characters I wanted to care for but got shafted by the end.
Gameplay: The actual strongest part of the package, fights feel epic and fun and learning the powers of the different Eikons was a real treat, my only real gameplay complaint are the sidequests that I've rambled about enough and the speed in which you explore the world, Clive takes ages to sprint, you cannot do this on command, and he won't do it at all in the barren, lifeless villages that plague this game making walking through towns tedious. Even the chocobo feels slow so there is something wrong there. That brings me to another problem with the gameplay: the exploration, as I said there are no cities to explore, villages are lifeless and drab with only a handful of charmless npcs each and there might as well be no cities, only showing up as back alley dungeons and in cutscenes. Yoshi-p's bizarre insistence on no minigames to keep the story "dark" (seriously one of his many interviews where he isn't being a weird racist he goes into this) had such a terrible impact on the world the entire world feels free of leisure, stiff and unalive, even the most serious games in the FF series had minigames, moments of leisure and places to explore and other things to do besides combat but here? That is all there is.
Speaking of upgrades are just vertical, the crafting is mostly useless and there is almost no gear variety or rpg mechanics to speak of.
Music: Some tracks, namely Titan's final phase, the final boss final phase, the prelude and the hunt boss music slap insanely hard. However, I feel like Soken was holding back, there aren't honestly that many memorable or experimental tracks and for an OST with over 200 songs you'll be hearing the same like 4 or 5 over and over and over in almost every cutscene and town. Soken has been known for his beautiful music and variety where did it go??
In summary I feel like this game has almost no identity of its own, while FF has always been self-referential (something I normally find quite charming) this game is just a testament to Yoshi-P's ego, as the player gets bombarded with and endless onslaught of XIV references, and a game whose frames drop on performance mode despite yoshida boasting that the game would not need patches. I'm left sincerely hoping CBU3 doesn't do another mainline game for quite some time as this is the third worst game in the series for me barely beating out XIV, and walking over the low, low bar that is II. It's a real shame I honestly truly wanted to love it, most games I love, hell most Final Fantasy games in general I find myself wishing they would never end even on endless replays, but towards the end I was just ready for this to be done, and left kinda mixed on an ending I didn't feel the game earned.
As many others have noted, this is basically Little Nightmares but Swedish. Also there are a bunch of boss fights for some reason. (Who asked for so many boss fights in a game like this??)
The strength of Bramble is definitely its pretty woodland aesthetic which approaches photorealism at times. The world of the game feels so organic and lush I wanted to lose myself in it. Unfortunately the game itself prevented me from doing that. The gameplay is functional but offers no surprises to anyone who has played a cinematic platformer before, and despite being fairly short, Bramble manages to wear out its welcome by reusing many of the same challenges.
The story is also pretty flimsy. I love fairy tales, especially dark and spooky ones, so I am pretty squarely in the target demographic for this game. But Bramble’s story is really just a clothesline for the developers to hang whatever folklore reference happened to pop into their heads that day on. The only unifying theme here is “creepy and Scandinavian,” and the creepiness often feels forced in a cringey grimdark sort of way. (The tone is not far from a Hollywood movie trailer; you can almost hear the voiceover guy: “These aren’t your grandma’s bedtime stories...”) Folktales are dark, yes, but they are dark because they are about real things in life that are scary. The horrors in Bramble never feel human; they feel like things the developers thought would be cool to put in a video game.
The main problem I suspect is that Olle, our sweet little blonde boy, is boring as hell. I honestly have no idea why we are playing as him. What would a boy his age be afraid of and why? What conflict might there be between him and his sister? What lesson is he supposed to learn? The developers don’t seem to care, so there’s no emotional thread pulling us along, just a vague aesthetic interest in what spectacle they’ll throw at us next. It was enough to pull me through to the end, I guess, barely. But my patience was wearing mighty thin by the end.
Oh and SPOILER WARNING I guess the lesson we are meant to have learned from our trek in the woods, after enduring five hours of nonstop mortal peril and trauma that would leave any child permanently scarred, is...not to be afraid of the woods? lmao
The strength of Bramble is definitely its pretty woodland aesthetic which approaches photorealism at times. The world of the game feels so organic and lush I wanted to lose myself in it. Unfortunately the game itself prevented me from doing that. The gameplay is functional but offers no surprises to anyone who has played a cinematic platformer before, and despite being fairly short, Bramble manages to wear out its welcome by reusing many of the same challenges.
The story is also pretty flimsy. I love fairy tales, especially dark and spooky ones, so I am pretty squarely in the target demographic for this game. But Bramble’s story is really just a clothesline for the developers to hang whatever folklore reference happened to pop into their heads that day on. The only unifying theme here is “creepy and Scandinavian,” and the creepiness often feels forced in a cringey grimdark sort of way. (The tone is not far from a Hollywood movie trailer; you can almost hear the voiceover guy: “These aren’t your grandma’s bedtime stories...”) Folktales are dark, yes, but they are dark because they are about real things in life that are scary. The horrors in Bramble never feel human; they feel like things the developers thought would be cool to put in a video game.
The main problem I suspect is that Olle, our sweet little blonde boy, is boring as hell. I honestly have no idea why we are playing as him. What would a boy his age be afraid of and why? What conflict might there be between him and his sister? What lesson is he supposed to learn? The developers don’t seem to care, so there’s no emotional thread pulling us along, just a vague aesthetic interest in what spectacle they’ll throw at us next. It was enough to pull me through to the end, I guess, barely. But my patience was wearing mighty thin by the end.
Oh and SPOILER WARNING I guess the lesson we are meant to have learned from our trek in the woods, after enduring five hours of nonstop mortal peril and trauma that would leave any child permanently scarred, is...not to be afraid of the woods? lmao
Pentiment
2022
This game makes you deal with the consequences of your actions in the best--but also in the most difficult--ways and it's one of my favorite things about it.
Being put in almost impossible situations and then looking back and wondering whether anything you said was the reason for how past events transpired or not made for an incredibly captivating experience.
The game kept my thoughts occupied even after I was done playing for the day, which was partly because of what I mentioned before and mainly because of its really endearing cast. I love when games can do that to me. Despite of being introduced to so many characters at once, almost every single one was memorable in one way or another.
After all that it feels redundant to mention how much I liked the story but I can't close this without mentioning it either.
Being put in almost impossible situations and then looking back and wondering whether anything you said was the reason for how past events transpired or not made for an incredibly captivating experience.
The game kept my thoughts occupied even after I was done playing for the day, which was partly because of what I mentioned before and mainly because of its really endearing cast. I love when games can do that to me. Despite of being introduced to so many characters at once, almost every single one was memorable in one way or another.
After all that it feels redundant to mention how much I liked the story but I can't close this without mentioning it either.
Pentiment
2022
Pentiment is an eloquent love letter to Bavarian Renaissance history, written in ornate purple calligraphy. The dedication to accuracy of the time period is immediately evident with one glance at the art style. The entire game looks ripped out of a medieval manuscript, and all text is displayed as if being written in by pen real-time. The game centers around a series of murders in a town and nearby abbey, and, with every clue, the main character gets tangled tighter into a web of lies and overwritten history. Pentiment pulls no punches; when someone gets murdered, someone else must be held responsible and have their life forfeit. Every dialogue choice can have a substantial impact on the town, and change it–for better or worse.
There is also an achievement titled “Among Us,” with the description “Discover the Imposter,” so it’s obviously an instant masterpiece.
There is also an achievement titled “Among Us,” with the description “Discover the Imposter,” so it’s obviously an instant masterpiece.
Hades
2018
I'm not gay but why is Zagreus so goddamn hot.
Hades
2018
binding of Isacc but i wanna have sex with the characters