You have probably heard a gazillion times that this game is my favorite game. For those that know me, you should know that my most favorite game of all time is this one, Terarria. Developed by Andrew "Redigit" Spinks with Re-Logic in May 16th in 2011, Terarria I done hell of a unique sandbox game for it's time period, featuring  a lot of elements of exploration, combat, and even building! Every feature that the game provides us useful in every way, and I believe that this review will be the ultimate guide for those that have asked me, why is Terarria the game of all time.

Well  for starters, I do want to also get into a point that a good amount of players are familiar with: Terraria is just 2d Minecraft. Before you start ge/gathering the pitch forks, I'm an here to say that there's reason for everything, even if its a saying like this one. The reason for this? Terarria came out 2 years after Minecraft's 1.0 release, if I'm getting my information correct. And during both of their early stages, they lacked features that made the games unique. Yeah there were still bosses, NPCs and such within Terraria, but that wasn't enough to change people's comparisons of the game as a whole. BUT as time goes, more features for the two games have been added, and at the time of 1.2.4.1 (last 1.2 update for Terraria) it would've made sense for at least the veterans to stop making the comparisons because there's clearly a difference. Probably much earlier when 1.1 was done, but 1. 2 I believe would be a good solid point.

Another problem that I notice within this game is how new players tackle this game. From my experience, a lot of them would tend too mess around with the game, figuring out the absolute basics on what you can do in pre-hardmode, and using the wiki to guide them whether it comes from the in game guide, or the wiki.gg guide that's lore helpful. Anyway that you look at it, there's nothing wrong with looking up something in this age to figure out what you're supposed to do. For my first consecutive playthroughs on 1.1 mobile, I've done the daunting task of figuring them out myself too even find a flaw in the games system to make me create duplicated of my characters to cheat and such, and was sticking to the same method for a while until I've learned to get over it. Whichever way you learn, the result will be you learning more about the game though it's many ways. Normally, I would've said that cheating would make the experience bad and morally speaking it still applies, but cheating does have it's perks: it makes you feel what the game is going to become in the future, having later game stuff in the progress that you've had, and when it comes to figuring out how you've normally get it, its rather easy to find it out becsuse it'll become one of your most favorite weapons to use against enemies and bosses. I've done this primarily with modded Terarria (Which I  over in this review) due to the different nature's of the other mods.

Coming from a  veteran, there's no bad way to play this game. Using the wiki.gg wiki is your best bet in terms of playing the game as normal as you cam. Or using the Guide works! Whichever way you play it, it'll help with connecting you into the world of the game had to offer, and that's where I talk about it's gameplay. When I usually review games, the gameplay is one of my most important details rhat I discover about, and for Terraria? The gameplay is magnificent in every way. EVEN if pre-hardmode is boring. Wanna know why it's boring at least in my opinion? Because it's the initial test to see if you've done enough of what tbe game has to offer before you move onto hardnode. No matter what difficulty you're playing on, you're going to always see pre-hardmode as the most boring part because barely anything is happening. You don't know what to do. You need help with what to do. Now the Wiki has you covered in terms of figuring out what to do next, along with the in game guide! But yet despite this, a lot of people would never end up past even Skeletron because the game can't seem to have it's essnece be captured by its viewers. It's all of a matter of time and dedication. Becsuse the game can't play by itself. A good way to circumvent this is by playing the game with the person that introduced you to it and purposefully take long within that stages of the game so they can get used to the task of having to deal with said obstacles. They won't like it and they will usually say to hurry up to the better stage of hardnode but you need to make them learn about the importance of pre-hardmode and hard mode once you finally get into that point.

I'm going to take this paragraph to talk about the goblin Invasion one of the many kinds of invasions are going to get into Terraria. pretty much what happened is that a bunch of goblins come from the west or the East at a random point in the game  to come take over your world. They're not that hard of a challenge because most of the enemies just have the usual fighter ai and can be a easily defeated the more they are. If you want to hear more about invasions, just stick to reading more of this thread (even if it's long) because pre hardnode in terms of invasions is honestly not interesting outside of the goblin tinkerer, an important character that is rigged helps you with modifications to your tools to give them upgrades to make them the worst or the best.

Speaking of Hardnode, why don't we get into that stage of the game? Hardnode is one of the well known parts of Terarria, and honestly makes things much more streamlined and linear to the path into defeating the god of this game, the moon lord. But, from just beating tbe Wall of Flesh to either beating your first mech or queen slime is going to be definitely rough. The game will introduce you to hardnode with keeping the gear hay you've have but the core elements of hardnode will make things difficult. Your job at this stage is to take a long gander at your evil biome, to break the altars that lie there in order to gain access to better ores with the molten pickaxe that you've crafted from hell stone. After that, it's a matter of going through another adventure throughout your world because hardnode doesn't being anything extremely new to the table in world generation outside of the hallow, a place that's supposed to be the purifier of both of the evils in the story. Idrk if I can really get more into the story in this review because I am a little fuzzy on what this game provides officially and the developers stating that some of the info are false and just a better way to mess up with some popular things fans theorize about the game. Back to what I was saying though.

While you have your ore collecting, enemies drop other items and materials to further expand the items you're able to craft and collect. Most of them are usually optimal into beating the hardnode bosses whole some of them can be shown as gimmicks just for fun, but it's always best to try them out against the bosses to make you know which item is for next. But primarily, the mech bosses are your main targets: Destroyer, Twins, and Skeletron Prime. If you're a master of the bosses they're based on (Eater of Worlds (no brain variant LOL), eye of however you're supposed to pronounce it, and Skeletron), most of these shouldn't really been an issue. Although It's still best to understand how the boss works by either playing the game or for more specifically finding out  using the wiki to find some tactics. It's much better fighting them and suffering the consequence yourself though be sure you're able to easily develop a strategy to fighting the bosses even if they appear officially in the wiki or as a strat other people say.

Now we are at post mech, and honestly, this part of the game is the mort confusing one of the bunch. This is before Plantera, and there's not much in stock. While you have the Pirate army (another invasion similar to the Goblin invasion talked about previously), you also have an upgraded goblin army, the frost legion, the solar eclipse, and the frost/pumpkin moon. All of these are great ways to becone stronger in Terraria, and it's up for you to figure that out because I'm probably reaching that hidden cap on this site. With that said, I should talk about post Plantera. There's a bunch of opportunities opportunities that you can do at this stage like fighting Golem,to then tackle the pillars and then eventually beating moon lord finishing the game. Or actually doing what this paragraph has originally talked about, fighting the invasions again! At post plantera, most would say that this is the most confusing part of the game because you're so strong that you're able to cheese through most of the bosses with the gear that you've have. With the difficulties it can make things a bit mroe challenging than just running into the bosses, but still if you know what you're doing, you're better off just finishing things off with Golem and the rest.

But after you finish the Moon Lord, what do you have else to do? All I know is that THAT IS NOT ENDING SHIT. you might believe that you have no reason to play this game anymore, but YOU'RE WRONG. you're always free to play this game by yourself again changing certain elements (the class system you can follow within those restrictions Melee, Ranged, Mage, and Summoner), you can play adventure maps (pre constructed maps made by fans that have their own little objectives and such), play the game with more people doing what I've already said, building, cleaning your entire world's evil, whatever you can possibly think of. If you ever wished to play with me, I am almost ALWAYS down to play it. Especially if you're new! But, this unfortunately concludes my ultimate Terarria Review. I will be editing this sometime to include a tldr and to remove this message because it'll be good for those that don't read through these long reviews and only learn information through small increments. I hope you had an AWESOME time reading this, and to reconsider your last playthrough if you didn't touch it much.

Make no mistake, Dead Island can be a fun game, but it is by no means a good game. I originally played this when it came out and I remember having a good time with it, but having played it again after playing Dead Island 2, it’s pretty safe to say that this game is literal poo poo doo doo. However, it is still kinda fun if you allow it to take you for a ride. With that I mean, play this in co-op only. Dead Island is a series that is hard carried by its multiplayer aspects. Without them, this game is a huge slog for a multitude of reasons. It’s got pretty terrible balancing issues, horrible skill trees, horrendous audio, bad traversal, boring quests, and a confusingly shallow plotline that gets made easier to handle with the more friends you play it with.

Every year for my birthday I get a little co-op session going with my friends and this year, Dead Island was the chosen one. With 4 main characters that appear in each cutscene, we needed to play it the way it was meant to be played, with each of us playing as each one. After some convincing, we managed to pull it off. Two of them were ready to rumble, not really knowing what they were getting themselves into, while the third was begging for a sniper to take him out the whole time. I allowed them to pick their characters before choosing my own since I was the one player who had already beaten the game. Somehow I still ended up playing as Xian, who is bananas busted in comparison to the other three characters. For some reason, they decided that each character would be an expert in different combat styles and nothing really else. So while Xian and Sam B. are really good at using sharp and blunt weapons respectively, Purna is better at shooting the guns and Logan is good at…. um.. throwing objects.

While you may think that shooting guns is a good skill to have, this game just does not allow you to obtain a single gun until like 50% of the way into the game. Even then, it’s still extremely hard to find ammo and the guns are unusable most of the time. Blunt and sharp weapons are littered all over the place, and with Xian and Sam’s skill trees favoring damage and critical chance success, they’re easily the two characters that are skewed in favor of having the most fun out of everyone. It’s this initial kneecapping right at the start of the game that would probably taint the perception you’d have playing this game in single-player. Without this knowledge, you might pick either Purna or Logan and then realize you’re in too deep once the going gets going. Logan is actually able to deal some heavy damage with his throws, but my friend ran into this bug constantly where his weapons would just disappear upon impact. He’d be left empty handed more often than not, even with the boomerang skill maxed out. The plus side to multiplayer is that a lot of this ends up not mattering in the slightest. What would be a slog to get through by yourself, immediately becomes a speedrun with friends. The game will throw a big boss at you and the four of you will just beat him to death like a group of cavemen swinging sticks on an animal.

The one thing that multiplayer can’t really save though is the annoying as shit fetch quests that plague every story beat of this game. It’s fine in the beginning when you’re in the resort area, still getting your bearings, but the same fetch quests that John Sinamoi gives you are the same fetch quests that every other character will give you moving forward. “Hey, you four morons, can you please go to the warehouse outside and kill the zombies and grab some gasoline canisters for me pretty please?” No bitch, do it yourself!!! Each act has literally the same mission progression: show up confused, travel across the map multiple times to get supplies for a group of survivors you meet, go on a rescue escort mission, come back to the survivors having been mauled to death while you were gone, leave the area, and rinse and repeat. Two times is okay, but three and four…? It gets pretty monotonous. Dead Island is at its best in the first act, where you’re exploring the resort area. There’s something kind of metal about the whole blood in the sand, sunny beach vibes ruined by zombies that kinda hits different for me. I think at the time of its release, it was the first piece of zombie media to go there as it’s setting and it’s still really cool now, just hitting home how outrageously horrific a zombie outbreak could be while it’s descending on unsuspecting beachgoers on vacation who were having the time of their lives like day ago. Unfortunately, you only spend like a good hour and a half during this portion of the game because the characters eventually leave to these less interesting and gross looking maps afterwards.

Once you hit Act II, the game drops off hard. It’s just these really drab looking sewers, prisons, ugly jungles, and endless hallways that you’re constantly walking back and forth through. Even in the Definitive Edition it all still looks really ugly. It makes the fetch quests stand out even worse as the maps grow larger, you’re having to traverse further for the same quest but with different supplies, forcing you to walk through the sewers more times than legally allowed. The outside traversal will most likely be done by some of the most difficult to drive vehicles as well. You can walk, but it’ll take forever so there’s no point but to give up and just have someone ride that whip into the sunset, over and over again, constantly crashing it into trees and random blockades. There are some horrible oversights that come with this though. The cars only have 4 seats to adapt to the amount of potential players, but the escort missions don’t account for that. You’ll need the NPC to have a seat, which meant that 1 poor schmuck was hauling ass on foot behind us instead. This would be mitigated sometimes by the game allowing the stragglers to fast travel to the other players, but only when a main quest was about to take place, otherwise they’d be left behind. We also ran into this really annoying issue where everyone would body block each other in small hallways, which is definitely bound to happen in the later acts. Someone would just sit in a doorway and AFK as a joke while everyone else was left screaming in the room they were stuck in. You’d open a door to find an explodey zombie and perish because your friends are standing in the way.

Luckily, death is kind of just a suggestion in these games. The great thing about Dead Island is that when you die, you respawn back into the action rather quickly, instead of being sent back to a save from hours ago or having to rewatch the cutscenes. You get a little countdown and then blip back into existence just a short distance away. It’s nice because it allows you the freedom to just full send yourself right into a group of enemies and try again. The only real downside to death is that you lose a percentage of the money you’ve found laying around. There’s unfortunately a currency system in this game and its economy is kind of wild. Money is not hard to find at all, but it is a pain in the ass to lose like $3,000 because you slipped off a cliff. You can use the money to buy new weapons or crafting materials, but you also need it to repair and upgrade them for some reason. The weapon durability varies and some items are expensive as shit to maintain, so to lose a huge chunk of your money is pretty annoying. The game does give you a crap ton of weapons to work with though and you’ll likely be swapping your inventory out every once in a while anyways. This is a system that is just done better in Dead Island 2 though. Modifying the weapons is cool, if only for a moment. Electrifying or combusting the enemies is useful as it keeps them stunned, but the damage can also be self-inflicting. You’ll be swinging on an enemy nutty style, then die because your friend shot it with an explosive fire bullet. It’s just awful how much your co-op partners can get in the way sometimes, and I’m sure playing this with randoms back then was probably a nightmare of endless trolling.

When the four of us finished the game and the sound of Sam B.’s famous “Who do you voodoo, BITCH?” overtook our headphones, I asked them what they thought, only to be met with 10 seconds of raw deafening silence. They didn’t even know what they just witnessed. The gameplay was okay and getting through this with friends was an experience I’m sure we’ll cherish together like a couple of friends sharing survivor’s guilt after an accident, the overall consensus was mass confusion and I don’t really blame them. This game’s “story” is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. The core 4 characters only get shit done because everyone else you run into is extremely stupid, just doing the most moronic things for seemingly zero reason at all. For every dumb thing that happens in this game, there were like 5 smarter alternative solutions you could come up with almost instantaneously, but that’s just how it is on this bitch of an Earth!!! The cutscenes teleport the characters around in ways only magic could pull off, with random moments of tension just ending abruptly. The characters are just unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant and it tries to be serious the whole time, with nothing injected to give it a bit more life or breathing room. They don’t emote in any way at all, so something will happen and they’ll just kind of look like a deer in the headlights. You know you’re supposed to be upset because the emotional piano music is playing, but Purna’s eyes are looking in two different directions, so the whole thing ends up being funny instead. Now compare all of this to the most clickbait trailer ever and you can see why a lot of people think this game is diarrhea. Dead Island 2 really leaned hard on the comedic aspects that I think worked fairly well for it, but here there is no joy. It’s all “We gotta get out of here!!” impatience at the cost of not giving a shit about anything else going on, which makes meeting all the other characters pointless. Xian is the only character with glimpses of compassion written into her, but there’s a point in the story where a side character gets sexually assaulted off screen and all 4 characters, including Xian, are verbally just like, “Well, if you weren’t such a bozo idiot then this wouldn’t have happened!!” Huh???

It’s a story that does a lot more telling than showing. You’ll appear at an area where everyone was killed by zombies and a lone survivor will just explain to you what happened. You don’t actually see any sort of conflict that is inflicted on anyone aside from the ones in the core 4’s vicinity, so there’s no reason to really care for what happens. Those events are just vessels to shuffle them off to the next area and never see those characters again. Oh, what about the origins of the virus? How’d this even happen? Oh, someone just quickly explains it to you while you escort them and have your dick pounded by an onslaught of zombies. You can’t just show anything, it all has to be explained in the worst way possible so that you don’t even retain anything being said to you anyways. Jin is the only character that follows the party for the majority of the game and is given some weird emotional pseudo-arc, but it all falls flat when she’s just rendered as the game’s sentient storage unit who adds nothing else. She doesn’t help the character’s in any way, shape, or form, and the characters don’t have anything nice to say about her either. It doesn’t help that while escorting her, she bugs out and freezes in place randomly, so you can despise her in that way too!

Speaking of, there are a lot of weird buggy issues with this game. I’m pretty positive that the Definitive Edition fixed a lot of those issues, but there are some that are still prevalent. I remember in the original it was really easy to dupe and glitch the hell out of the damage modifiers on the weapons, and I’m not sure if that’s fixed or not but it was crazy being able to do millions of damage back then. I already mentioned Logan and Jin’s issues, but there were also some problems where zombies would just kinda disappear and then come back, or they’d phase through walls. The most grating issue for me though was that the audio mixing was shitting itself the whole time. For some reason whenever someone shot a gun or landed a critical attack, it would sound like someone played the metal pipe sound effect everytime. I don’t even know how else to describe it, it just sounded like they were hitting metal on metal when it should have been more of a flesh sounding injury. It’s just odd. The game overall looks so much nicer in the definitive edition, but the stand out is still the resort area. That part looks amazing and the rest of the game is just hampered down by some really boring set pieces after that. The original used to have this vaseline filter over the top of it and it was thankfully removed here. It did however come at the cost of removing the paper quests that the NPCs would give you, which I thought added a little charm to this rather charmless game.

I do have to mention though that something about the FOV or general visual is so off in this game too. Specifically when your character is sprinting, the screen becomes filtered and shaky. I had to turn off motion blur and adjust all my other settings because it was making me motion sick, which has never happened to me in a game before. I had to nibble on some snacks while I played to prevent it from ending my life early, so watch out for that if you have a weak stomach for first-person POV games, or just avoid it entirely.

I don’t despise this game at all, in fact I still found a lot of fun with this playthrough. It is just simply not a good game, but I would qualify it as circulating back to the “good kind of bad” in some way. There’s a reason why it’s considered a bit of a cult classic. I can’t in good faith give it a higher rating just because having friends makes it a little less awful though. However, If you’re gonna eat some dog shit, you might as well eat dog shit with some company. And hey! It could have been a lot worse. We could have been playing Dead Island: Riptide instead. Now there’s an idea for next year 🤔.

I was actually set up and ready to play Super Mario Sunshine for the first time, but it came to my realization that my Mario 3D All-Stars collection was missing out of its case. It turns out that the likely reason why it’s gone is because my nephew swiped it while he was here last, meaning that my LIMITED RELEASE 3D All-Stars copy was stolen. Look, he’s just a kid and I’ll probably see him again later so I may have a chance to get it back. I’m really not mad or anything, it’s just that the next time I see him I’ll probably be whipping Kung Lao’s hat at him instead of Mario’s. Until then though, I needed to find something else to play…

With Mario still on the brain, I had Odyssey basically screaming for me to finally let it out. It’s supposedly nothing like Mario Sunshine but I wouldn’t know anyways. The only 3D Mario I’ve played is Mario Galaxy, so I wagered it would play similarly in that direction instead. What I do know is that when I said I would be playing Mario Sunshine, it was met with tomatoes and thunderous BOOOOOOs. After changing plans to this, the mood instantly shifted to cute rainbows, hugs, and smiles. hotpoppah will remember this. Not sure what caused the hate in their hearts, but I guess I’ll take this situation as fate dealt to me by God himself.

I could be wrong, but this has got to be the most unhinged game in the entire series. Bowser has hit an all-time rock bottom, destroying civilizations in order to force a wedding onto a non-consenting Princess Peach. Mario’s whole gimmick is possessing the bodies of enemies, demolishing their bones in order to platform through natural disasters and discarding them into the ocean. This game has huge TikTok energy. It starts at a 100 right at the gate, then tosses you into the first world where the mechanics are kinda just thrown in your face. The camera’s whipping around like a CCTV monitor. The game’s just giving Moons out like it’s Halloween candy. Holy shit, is that a realistic DINOSAUR? I have so many questions and not enough answers, but it doesn’t matter baby, we’re cruising like it’s NASCAR. I don’t know what the fuck all the rush is, but boy is it cool as shit flicking your way around Metropolis.

New Donk City? This game made me feel like I could Donk anything. It was very easy. Sorry kiddies, I’m the better Super Mario Odyssey player. It really says something when you’re 3,654,844th place in Jump-Rope and yet there are still thousands of children behind you on the leaderboard. Maybe try a little harder next time! But real talk though, why are some levels like 4 seconds long? We can discuss and argue battle mechanics or bosses all damn day, but just the slightest diverging path will net you so many extra Moons for nothing that you can just straight up leave the level as soon as the boss is defeated. Sure, you don’t have to leave as soon as possible, but once you’re 3 worlds deep trying to absorb the area for what it is, you kinda realize that a lot of Moons are just the same puzzle or mini-game in every World. It slightly makes up for it in the post-game where you can re-fight the bosses and run around in Mario 64’s version of Disney Land, depending on who you are. I bet this was awesome for long-time fans, but for me it was like I was invited to the retirement party of some guy I barely knew.

I finished the game with 180 Moons though, 220 with some Mushroom Kingdom exploration. If you think I’m collecting 500 total just to unlock what I assume will just be a cock and ball torture level, you’ve been Donked one too many times. I’m sure it’s easier than it sounds with how the game just gives you Moons for breathing, but it’s the easiness of the collection that made the whole process sound so mind-numbing to me. It’s fantastic and amazing when the set pieces and bosses are all coming together, but boring as shit when you’re just buying Stars in bundles or looking for spots to ground pound. I don’t want to do that shit!!!

On another note, the music in this game slaps but it’s weird that there’s so many long stretches of levels where there is no music at all. Mario is half naked, nipples out on the beach but all you can hear is the sound of seagulls and waves hitting the coast line. It was a very surreal experience that I don’t ever want to feel again. Other than that, fine. It was fun. I finally have another Mario game under my belt, and it was mostly just as good as everyone says it is.

I gotta go though, someone just popped my balloon. When I fucking get you, Splatoon profile picture.

Skyrim is the very definition of pure unfiltered SOUL. What else needs to be said about Skyrim that no other person has dared to say before me? It is quite simply one of THE games of all time.

Skyrim takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion, Bethesda’s other classic gem, where the player is put into the shoes of their hand-crafted Dragonborn Chad or Chadette. A civil war has taken place between the Imperials and Stormcloaks, and your character begins their journey at the helm of their disarray. (I still remember, to this day, when Ralof said “Hey, you. You’re finally awake” to me on my first playthrough.)

After a dragon accidentally helps the player narrowly escape their own execution, you soon find out that not all Nirnroots sing a pretty tune. Turns out that dragons have been extinct for centuries and now they’re back. Once you meet Balgruuf, it’s over. He orders you to fight an incoming dragon before it wipes out the city of his people. Reluctantly, your character participates, only to find out that they are in fact what we would call a Dragonborn, also known as Dovahkiin. (For those who didn’t know.) These rare somebodies are people born with the blood of Dragons and therefore can wield the same powerful magic. Fucking banger. It is now up to you, the player, to play the game and stop the dragons in order to say that you have beaten the game.

With a healthy level of jank, you could say that the gameplay loop of this game has aged quite poorly. And I would agree. There is no shortage of unfun first person combat to be found here, in fact, there is literally so much of it. However, the jankiness of it all is what gives Skyrim that rough edge charm we all know and love, and therefore I would say that even though it’s a 2011 game, it’s actually held up quite nicely. It’s not often you see me praising an old game that is THAT old, so you just know that it has to be the peak of the RPG medium.

I really think this game gets a lot of heat nowadays for really no reason. Have you ever considered that maybe this game is supposed to be a fucking mess? Just download a truck load of mods and exploit the enchantment table in order to deal 1247083927028238 contact damage on the Bandit Outlaw preventing you from progressing through the cave. It honestly takes a lot of skill to beat this game without it crashing at least 764 times with all the mods you’ve downloaded, so maybe just get better at the game before giving up on it. You seriously have no idea what you’re missing and I actually threaten you to give it another chance. Jankiness is an element that can be bested with both time and practice and was in fact intentionally put into Skyrim in order to challenge the player’s ability to keep their cool. I admire Todd Howard for shaping me into a better man.

Did you know that the term, “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee” actually came from Skyrim? You can trigger this event when walking around town and speaking to any generic guard. Not even M’aiq the Liar knows that one.

Now let’s talk about some of the mid level designs. Ugh, if I have to complain about something it would be in this area here. Everytime I walked into a Dwemer ruin, I wanted to take all my anger out on Lydia again. The Falmer? The Automatas? The one big dungeon that’s almost as big as my Mom’s house? They make me want to drop this kino from a 10 to a 9 so bad, but I am a much stronger person than that. The nice thing is that you don’t have to go through them very often, but hoo-wee if I had ever seen bad design, it’s that. Not sure what the game devs were thinking with that one.

Disregarding that, some parts of this game really make you feel like you’re truly on crack cocaine. I mean, there’s really no way to fling yourself into the air without dying in real life so baiting a Giant to do it is like the next best thing. I took off all of my clothes, got 10,000 bounty in each town for killing the merchants and not even a single NPC gave a shit. It really made me feel like I was crafting the RPG adventure of my dreams. I once ignored all of the main quests and drank so much Skooma that I instantaneously died right in front of Delphine, and I’d do it again too. Anything to stick it to that bitch. There is no way she can convince me to do Spoiler, ever. Also, did you know that the dragon Paarthurnax is voiced by Charles Martinet, the original voice actor for Mario?

I really wish that I could play this game for the first time again so that I could become the ultimate Skyrim racist on my first playthrough. I was too nervous to go that route the first time, but I really think I missed out on something special there. Oh well, there’s 17 re-releases of this game that I can do that on!

Trophies: 76
Playtime: 20 minutes
Graphics: Potato
Music: Based

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdvClO0qYlcfWVA6WXd3oczS3hZSko-Zi&si=SFytVGI9TK3jm_Uk

Here are my scores for those who don’t know:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐- A complete and utter masterpiece. The best thing I have ever played. I will be thinking of this one for generations to come. I got a tattoo about it on my back and will be naming my children after the main characters.

⭐⭐⭐⭐- It’s dogshit. I’ve never been more insulted in my entire life. If I could refund it I would but Steam’s horrible refund policy prevents me from refunding games after 65 hours.

⭐⭐⭐ - Anyone who likes this game should be imprisoned on death row. You are genuinely the worst person who ever worsted.

⭐⭐ - I wouldn’t even accept this as a gift. What are you? Anti-Santa?

⭐- It’s woke.

Happy April 1st, everyone!

Finally got around to playing this. For some reason I played Portal 2 when it came out and just never got around to Portal Sr. Having prior knowledge of how to do the puzzles because of this made Portal 1 quite the breeze to get through and that’s really the only issue that I think it has.

It relies a lot more on environmental storytelling rather than any actual plot progression. It exists more just to set up the small world and act as a bit of a demo slice for its fun portally puzzle physics. The turrets are very silly and GLaDOS carries a lot of the runtime with sarcastic humor that kind of distracts you from how ominous the circumstances surrounding your character actually are.

It’s the kind of puzzle mechanics that itch your brain like giving scritches to your pet cat. Made me feel like I was both overthinking and also not thinking hard enough at the same time in some areas. There was one where I couldn’t figure it out immediately so I tried to loop myself between portals infinitely for fun, just to find out that that was the solution all along. So even while the rooms feel like you’re locked between padded walls, it really gives you just enough to play around with until you’re able to solve the problems. If anything I wished it was a bit longer or that the advanced puzzles were different levels. They’re really just the same maps just with harder obstacles like poop floors and more turrets.

Portal is Portal and Portal is very fun. I would say that Portal 2 is the better game, but that’s mainly because it’s just larger in scale, has co-op, and extends the universe created here. You have to start somewhere though and Portal 1 is the perfect sprout to a beautiful gigantic beanstalk.

I know people cream their jeans about the first Psychonauts game but that wasn’t really my experience with it. Big uppies to the visual style and really unique level-design, but the controls and platforming were uhhhh… POOP?? It was still a really fun game, but I just didn’t find it to be the game that everyone held up so high at the time. There were things I found odd with it like how some powers were only useful for short sections of the game and then never again, and generally just how annoying it was to platform and move around. The story though? That shit rules, dog. Psychonauts uses everything in its crayola box bussy to personify ideas and mental concepts into living designs, be it through the enemies or the overall builds of the levels as they shapeshift around you. The levels were just as much characters as the characters were, and the exploration was rewarded with interesting character writing that was shown instead of told without force feeding you a novel of it at the same time. It’s a game that I wish I liked more and I think I’m only babbling about it because I reviewed it when I was new to this site and didn’t really understand how to barf up how I felt in words yet.

Anyways, this is a review for Psychonauts 2 and the short of it is that it was by and large a tremendous upgrade from its predecessor. My main gripes revolving around the game’s controls and camera angles flew right out the window pretty much immediately. Movement and platforming was so buttery smooth and that dodge roll they gave Raz might as well have renamed him Rizz instead. I was so happy that they gave most of the essential powers in the first few minutes, allowing you to play around with them from the get go. With the added addition of the new enemies, now just about every power has a place on the table, allowing you to dish out pain in any way that you see fit in the moment. While there are particular enemies that require certain powers to be exterminated, the Pyrokinesis and PSI Blast abilities still carried most of the weight. The Time Bubble power is pretty much a must have moving forward, and the upgrades to all of the abilities makes them so much more useful than some of the abilities from the first game. My only minor gripe with the combat was having to assign powers mid-battle through the power wheel. For whatever reason I just would not budge from removing Levitation from LT and anytime I had to remove it during a wave of Panic Attacks and Enablers, I did audibly groan but that only happened a few times in the late-game. I definitely appreciate the challenge even if it meant swapping hotkeys like I was playing a speedrunner’s version of ball in a cup. However, hitting the objects that dropped health would send them into the fucking stratosphere sometimes, which made them pointless in my time of dire need. I would say that my least favorite boss fight was the plant one just because it was probably the most restrictive, but that’s one boss out of several who generally made for some really fun segments.

Aside from this game basically Kingdom Heartsing me by being a direct sequel of a 2nd game that I don’t own the console to, it was still a groovy time from start to finish. While none of the levels hold their own version of “Milla’s Secret” nearly at the same intensity, it was still a rather warming story about a group of friends working through their regrets with the help of Raz. It’s a story that still “went there”, just in different aspects. I don’t personally need the most fucked up thing to happen that lands this game into another 4,000 Top 10 Darkest Moments in video games lists until the end of time for it to be compelling. People are still DYING, Kim. I found the deep dive into the other Psychonauts to be rather interesting as it helped build the world that exists outside of the levels to a higher detail, closer to the ones that represent the actual brains where all the showmanship is. Of course the actual brain levels are still the best part of the game too and a whole heaping of them really delivered. I found both the cooking and concert levels to be the stand outs, as they represented the chaotic unraveling, or re-raveling, of their mindscapes so well. Like honestly, is the character losing his damn mind through sensory overload or am I, because that was quite the adventure into horrible ASMR that I didn’t expect to fall into.

And that’s where this series really shines because who else is crafting level design in a way that really puts you in the shoes of it’s characters in the same way that Psychonauts does? Where it really asks you to maybe reflect on your own trauma by dousing you in colors and sometimes difficult climbing; where mental healing and overcoming your obstacles is truly the ultimate goal at the end of the day. As someone who has mental illness in my family, it’s such a tender way of showcasing forgiveness for not just someone else but also yourself. It’s exquisite art design that is packed in just about every crevice and corner with some sort of metaphorical punch to each character’s inner turmoil, whether they have an addiction, horrible regrets, or unimaginable shame. There was care in connecting the platforming mechanics to the overall visual storytelling that combines into this whirlwind of gameplay that tells its story, with narrative twists that really make ya go “ZOINKS”. Interactivity is so fucking cool, bro!!!!

With that too, the game still has its comedic beats of course. The comedy is still written in a way that isn’t competing with the more downer sides of the plot because it’s written in a way that understands when each tone has its place to shine and both lift the cutscenes up without overshadowing each other. That is an aspect of both games that still rings very true. Unrelated to this though, Raz is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz who also voices Billy from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which made his blood curdling screams that he makes upon falling off a ledge really funny to me for some reason. Dying really wasn’t an issue because I genuinely laughed every time he screamed, as horrible as that sounds.

Related to Raz’s voice though, my real complaint of this game, that is still rather minor, is that Raz honestly talks way too much. I know that I’m 3 years late to this game, but I’ve been noticing a trend lately with any game involving a puzzle that if you don’t solve it in 2 seconds, the characters feel the need to just blurt out the answer for you as if you can’t figure it out for yourself. I am all for accessibility features for kids and everyone else but I really wish you could turn off tips without having to mute the voice audio in the menu. Sometimes I just want to examine what I’m working with before jumping into it and I don’t need Raz backseating the shit out of me- “I need to focus more with my Clairvoyance to-” at every chance- “I hear some emotional baggage around”- he could get- “I think I need to connect blank with blank in order to progress the level” Raz, please, I beg of you.

But all in all, this was a really good time and I felt like it would be. I really wanted to like Psychonauts 1 a lot more than I actually did and when I heard this sequel turned out great, I was more than excited to play it. Overall, I found the levels to be a lot more memorable here as well. I’m sorry Milkman fans, but I have made a solemn oath to never lie in a Backloggd review unless it was about how good I am at the games I’m criticizing. While this game does have things that irk me, they’re really not something that dings it in any grimy way. I guess they’re just more of a personal preference. But, having played this and Portal immediately after beating Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it was a huge breath of fresh air. Give me more games like this pretty please, please, please please.

Also, stop posting this fucking meme every November, you goddamn selective assholes. Whoever made this image and then dropped it into the piss ocean that is Xitter needs to answer for their crimes.

I am on a bender right now, so I’ll slowly start to review (almost) every Sims 4 expansion. The ones that I own, at the very least. I have been partaking in a self-imposed 100 Baby Challenge, but added completionist elements to it in order to spice it up. (All Aspirations, Collectibles, and maxed Skills on one Sim.) Because of this, I am having to use pretty much all that every expansion has to offer in one single save file. This save file is years old now and is on the verge of black hole collapse, but it’s still standing even if it’s got wobbly knees. I will not be starring these reviews though. As much as I would love to have a 3-star middle finger looking graph on my profile, I really just don’t want to muck it up with a ton of DLC expansions.

Anyways, Get to Work? What are you, my mother-in-law?

Ah, the very first expansion in a long line of never-ending add-ons. The Sims 4 was known for having quite the rocky start with a pretty bare bones base-game that was lacking heaps of things that were eventually added in updates later. Get to Work seemed to be a call-back to The Sims 2 Open for Business and The Sims 3 Ambitions, which offered gameplay features for the sickos that get their thrills from working behind a cash register. Get to Work adds on to this by also introducing active career paths like playing as a Scientist, Doctor, or full-time Bastard.

I actually do really like this initially since most Sims careers are rabbit-holes. I can go to work with my Sim and watch them do home-wreck affairs in the office with the randomly generated neighbors that look like they fell out of a blender before coming to work. It’s got a shelf-life though. There’s only so many samples I can analyze, or patients to scan before I get bored. However, you get promoted a lot faster by gripping the bull by the horns and just doing it yourself. It’s just that after a long time you kind of realize it’s eating up the whole day… like real work. The Detective career expands on this a little bit by allowing you to go to crime scenes, but soon you kind of realize that the culprit is just always spawned into the crime scene before everyone else and you know it’s them every time. It’s funny though because you can release the prisoners for no real reason. I don’t know why you’re in the slammer bro but I want to get home early tonight so go on, GIT!!

I think the lack of an aspiration is what disappoints me in particular though. You would think there’d be a few that were attached to the careers they added, but nah for some reason. Without that there wasn’t really any need for me to pursue these career paths that deeply. I’m not gonna spit at added gameplay elements though. I play The Sims for the life simulation after all, so even if I don’t particularly have an interest in curing Sim cancer, I can at least appreciate that I have the ability to do so. I can see why people would enjoy the routineness of the tasks you’re given on the job. Plus, you can also just send them to work without going yourself and it’ll play as normally as it usually does.

This pack also introduced several unique collectibles though and also Aliens, which are what I would consider to be a staple to The Sims. The aliens have some diabolical social interactions, like erasing the entire memory and relationship panel of a targeted Sim. They disguise themselves as humans and the only real way to discover the truth is by seducing them and finding it out after the fact. They sometimes randomly abduct you in the middle of the night while you frantically try to cancel out the interaction. They will impregnate your husbands!! Absolute menaces to society, but I love them anyway.

Other things: Magnolia Promenade is one of the worst towns in the game, but not the worst. Only 4 empty lots meant for retail properties, so it just doesn’t breathe any sort of life from it. I find it so odd that there’s buildings drawn onto the map where other empty lots could have gone. I guess it’s nice that there’s a designated area to put your retail store instead of using a lot in one of the other neighborhoods though. I haven’t actually dabbled into the Photography skill yet, but it’s funny to fill your walls with horrid photographs and be reminded of them every time you enter Build Mode.

Also, baking! So long Hamburger Cake, we’re having Rainbow Gelatin tonight baybeeee.

It’s honestly not half bad for a first expansion, but in hindsight it’s also not that impressive either. They use a lot of these gameplay elements in future expansions with careers that are more varied with better rewards. There are a lot of expansions like this though, which I’ll get into when I get to them. You’ll experience parts of them once and then not really ever again. If you’re looking to expand your game through DLC, there are better packs that will give you better bang for your buck in my opinion.