Even as someone who was very excited for the game since the demo dropped, I didn't expect to be THIS in love with the final product. It's genuinely unbelievable that it's Shift Up's first console project. This is a technical marvel packed with eyecandy environments, models and effects that still runs at 60fps the whole time at a 30GB file size. In a lot of ways it feels like the first true 9th generation game I've experienced, and finally not a remake or sequel of anything else. So many moments where I was genuinely blown away by what I was seeing and experiencing, like arriving in the main city for the first time. Still shocking that SIE decided to back this so hard in publishing and promotion as it seems to go against everything the company is about in recent years but it's a move I'm thankful for.

Stellar Blade harks back to the PS2 era, unashamed of being a video game and prioritising gameplay above all else, with a ton of unlockable outfits and new game+ free on day one. Not to say that its design is primitive in any way as it incorporates all the best parts of modern gaming too. Areas are a mix of linear setpiece based levels and more open exploration. I liked how the side missions took you to new locations and had actually great rewards, and in general it's not a ridiculous time sink like a lot of modern games. Combat is an absolute blast, a fusion of other great actions like Sekiro, Bayonetta, even Resident Evil at times. Very reflex heavy swordplay wth a variety of different ranged firearms as well. With the amount of skills and specialized equipment you can collect you'd think it would get too easy after a point, but you will still get put in your place by the brutal boss fights at the end of the story. The grotesque monster designs and the elaborate animations for dismembering them are just on another level, every encounter sticks out in my memory. And I've seen criticism of it but I personally loved the parkour and Uncharted style climbing around the world. I felt like there was such a huge variety to what I was doing for my whole 40 hours played and it was mixing multiple genres I love perfectly. Finally if this game doesn't at least take nominations for best OST of the year it will be an absolute crime because it's constantly hitting your ears with objectively heavenly sounds, the most atmospheric emotional vocal songs seamlessly switching to more intense versions when fighting. Combined with the landscapes and art design you just gotta stop and take it all in sometimes.

This achievement has been overshadowed by some REALLY braindead controversies over the last few months and I've also seen a lot of hate from fans of the other series that clearly inspired it. It's a new IP so harsh critics are to be expected but I look forward to more people warming to it and realizing how it's actually a love letter to those things and an amazing game in its own right, and I hope EVE will be respected one day like Bayonetta, 2B etc have come to be. This singlehandedly made me feel less doomer about the game industry, if we can still get stuff like this every once in a while we may be alright. I will be eagerly awaiting whatever these devs make next on console

Even though this game’s story was mediocre and boring, and the dialouge was wattpad levels of cringe, the gameplay more than made up for it. Really that’s what you should play this game for.
I never thought a first person, run and gun, platforming shooter would play so smoothly and fast and fun but here we are. Neon White promotes speed running so well.
The leaderboards, for one, really made me competitive and constantly drove me to finish a level with a better time than before to beat my PS friends. As I rewatch clips of some of my best runs, I realize “Oh shit, I probably could have beaten the level fast had I done this” and then I go back to the lab.
I constantly felt the need to get better, and I’d like to think I did. I found my self skipping entire portions of levels completely on accident sometimes. Not just that, you’re able to reset levels with the simple press of a button rather than going to the menu and selecting an option, which added even more haste when it came to subsequent runs of levels All the abilities were consistent with the level design, and something that I noticed as I played more was that every time a gun was left unused it was always to access a shortcut.
The vibes this game gave were also great. The environments ranged from an area like the final world from kh3 to majestic ruins to a complete hellscape. The geometry of this game was super well done. and man don’t even get me started on the music. I know nothing of machine girl but she went CRAZY for this game’s soundtrack.
All in all, play this game solely for it’s fun and fast gameplay. I guess you can try and fw the story but it’s nothing too special.

Ocarina of Time is a timeless masterpiece, it really does nothing wrong and is influential to all of 3d gaming. Similar to Chrono Trigger, the way I view these games are both amazing because of their simplicity. Ocarina of Time's simplicity all around is what makes the game so good, it doesn't try to go above and beyond with its narrative and keeps a very solid and compelling story. The gameplay and level design is so well done everything to me this playthrough was very interesting a joy to go through even on my 4th run of the game. Did almost all the content in this game this run too just missing out on a few skulltulas but did collect everything else and the way the game connects itself through both timelines is really great.

Ocarina of Time is just a super compelling journey the whole way through. The way the game develops overtime is so so good with how as a kid your tasks aren't that big and you are just going alone with what a princess told you to do and leads into a epic journey crossing through time and fighting practically a god. The game knows how to raise the stakes and you feel it. The game gets so much praise and it really does deserve it in my opinion.

(Played using BetterSADX, Dreamcast Conversion and JP Retranslated mods)

"Aged poorly" is a meme phrase at this point but SA1 genuinely has. It must not be forgotten that these graphics and setpieces were mind blowing compared to the competition in 1998. It was well recieved in its day. The stage design and mechanics are a genuinely great adaptation of 2D Sonic to 3D no matter what Nintendo YouTubers said about "rocky transitions", it shows a dramatic emotional story from 6 different connected perspectives and has a killer soundtrack. At this point the Sonic series went full shonen. But playing it today you're really gonna feel the extreme jank, the emptiness of hub worlds, the pathetically easy boss fights, the awkward animations and timing in cutscenes, the lifeless English voice acting.

Most games that get remakes don't need them - I have never truly desired for something to be remade more than SA1. It has so much heart and should be able to wow people again. Today's Sonic Team are not the ones capable of doing it justice though

Easily the most well crafted Sonic game. SEGA hit a perfect balance between the speed of Sonic 2 and the exploration of Sonic CD with much better layouts than both. It was massive for its time and it still amazes me how much was packed into it.

3 playable characters experience the same zones in totally different ways with pathways only they can access, while also serving as different difficulties (Knuckles = Hard Mode). Everything is connected - each level is huge and branching with their own boss fights, transitioning smoothly into the next. Special stages are entered by finding hidden giant rings and are actually fun and worthwhile now, granting access to two super forms and an extra final fight as Sonic.

I particularly love how Sonic 3 tells two stories without any words, using only the character animations and changes in your surroundings. I also think the visual aesthetic and sound peaked here - wonderful parallax backgrounds and the more detailed threatening robot designs are so badass.

In all aspects the other classics just aren't in the same league. This is a masterpiece of 2D platforming and I credit it for really igniting my interest in video games as a child. It's depressing to think that since they perfected this formula 30 years ago, only one game used it again (Mania).

This is a pretty fun game. Played it with Mr. Troy and we both liked it pretty much the same amount I think. We did have different backgrounds though, as I'm pretty sure this was his first Resident Evil game. I've played quite a few though including 4 and it's remake. This works pretty well as a sequel to that game, but if you're expecting nearly the same quality of that game, you're pretty much just gonna have a bad time. It is significantly more shallow and quite a bit easier due to the insane over-abundance of ammo. I was pretty varied throughout the entire playthrough, trying to use different guns at all times, and by the time of the final boss I had accumulated around 25 Rifle ammo, 100 pistol ammo, 40 shotgun, and around 15 magnum ammo. Troy spent all his money like every sub-chapter on explosive rounds for the grenade launcher though. He pretty much only used that and the stun rod when they both became available and there was a LOT of friendly fire. The strategy was pretty effective though so I can't exactly complain. Next, this game does have some pretty crazy difficulty spikes towards the end. For example, the first Wesker fight took Troy and I an hour, and the final boss had this mashing sequence we had to potentially cheat to get out of and he still had tons and tons of health once we did it the other way. There was also this really slow and frustrating puzzle around halfway through the game that involved lasers and mirrors and if the laser touched you a single time you would die immediately. It got pretty annoying at times.

Overall even though it took us over (RESIDENT EVIL) 5 months to finish, it was a pretty fun time. There's some good moments in the level design, and Troy and I are certain that some of the late game stuff is directly inspired by Twin Snakes. I recommend this game if you like third person shooters and have a friend to play with, but I can't promise the game would be too fun solo.

Troy's Review: https://backloggd.com/u/madeinheathen/review/1513236/

They’ve got the sauce!

It’s not enough of the sauce, and it takes a little while before they actually start doling the sauce out, but by God, they’ve got the sauce! Undertale Yellow actually gets it, and what a triumph that is. It manages to avoid a lot of the pitfalls which plague fangames and have resulted in them getting such a broadly negative perception as being lesser forms of media, and it does so with an impressive amount of finesse. There are more than a couple of misfires here, and it can’t manage to be something that meets nor succeeds the original Undertale, but they’ve got the sauce. It’s a very big swing to take, and just about as big a hit.

What I appreciate most about Undertale Yellow is the sheer amount of restraint that the developers showcase. You only see Toriel for a grand total of about two minutes before she’s out of the game for good, and Mettaton, Alphys, and Asgore are mentioned a few times; apart from that, the only returning character who actually sticks around for most of the runtime is Flowey, and he acts differently enough that a large part of the narrative is trying to figure out what angle he’s playing at. There’s no Sans. He doesn’t even get namedropped! What? Can you imagine releasing an Undertale fangame and not bringing up Sans? When I got to the Snowdin Town bridge and released that Sans wasn’t going to show his face, I got pumped. It’s brave. A group far less confident in themselves would have just made this a second lap through the extant Underground, going on a little adventure to essentially experience Undertale all over again in a world where you could just play Undertale again if that was what you wanted to do.

The first impressions when the game starts branching off of Undertale aren’t especially strong. The first original NPC that you meet in the Ruins — Darv or Darm or Darl, whatever his name is — very much looks like someone’s Adventure Time self-insert that they drew to be Marceline the Vampire Queen’s boyfriend. Picture me retching as I type this. His character isn’t particularly good, mostly just muttering about some betrayal from long past and talking about how he wants to be left alone, and the game seems to agree with me in this respect; he drops off the face of the earth for the remainder of the runtime, only showing up again at the very end to make sure that the player hasn’t forgotten about him. The other new characters are significantly better: Martlet is a strong and obvious standout among the rest of the cast, North Star and his posse aren’t as consistent in their designs nor personalities but are still good, and Ceroba seems a lot like someone’s fursona but not in an especially bad way. I ended up liking more of the principle cast than I didn’t, so they’re definitely doing something right on the design and writing front.

The average enemy encounter is fine; there’s nothing especially interesting about most of them, though some do offer a couple of interesting gimmicks. Making the “floor slippery” so that the soul glides around or the music enemies blasting you with waveforms that you need to dodge are cute. Most of the boss fights don’t offer anything especially interesting, though. While Pacifist Ceroba does manage to get a few interesting gimmicks going in the form of giving the player the Big Shot, the overwhelming majority of the boss fights are just clicking Spare over and over and over again; your ACT commands often do nothing besides give the same line of flavor text every time you select them, which is a fairly boring way to handle these big encounters. I found the Guardener to be the best fight simply because it required you to hack away at vines blocking your options which then led into an ACT chain, giving you some freedom in the form of selecting which of your options you want to be available to you first. El Bailador is fine, turning the game into a rhythm section for a few minutes, but it doesn’t do much for me. So many of these fights are just about dodging bullets and slamming Mercy over and over again, and that’s never really been the draw of Undertale.

Similarly ranging from alright to forgettable are the music tracks. There’s nothing truly offensive here, and there are a couple that I like, but it's important for us to remember that Toby Fox was a composer long before he was a game designer. I can still hum the melodies to just about every track from Undertale, but I don’t think I could do the same for a single song from Undertale Yellow — at least, not from the ones that don’t lift one of Toby’s leitmotifs. While I do admire the developers’ willingness to get out from under the Undertale narrative trappings of returning characters walking in like sitcom guest stars for the audience to whoop and applaud to, I can’t extend the same praise to their composing. Ceroba’s fight plays a remix of Hopes and Dreams that the game absolutely hasn’t earned, and it took me right out of a battle that I was digging up until then. There are quite a few instances of obvious musical recycling in places where they don’t belong, and the songs that are wholly original don’t interest me much. They're far from anything terrible, but they feel a bit lazy in a game where there isn’t much else that does.

Undertale Yellow is ultimately a good fangame, and that is perhaps deserving of more celebration than anything else. It is very clearly made by a team of passionate and creative people, and I don’t think that their time spent on this would have been better spent on an original IP, instead. With that said, I would prefer for the next thing that this team releases to be something entirely of their own design; with all of the eyes that they’ve got on them now, I’m sure they’ve cultivated an audience that would be glad to see more.

And the sprites look too good. It’s all wrong. Part of the appeal of Undertale is that it looks like hot shit.

Like watching a car crash.

Open Roads had a very rocky development, and it's not hard to tell. Announced about four years ago at The Game Awards and three years after the studio's then-latest release of Tacoma, Open Roads ran into some trouble when it came out that Steve Gaynor was a microtyrant who was forcing employees out of his company. In a true success story for the industry, he'd only been abusing his power over his subordinates to humiliate and demean them (specifically focusing his ire on the women at his company), and not to sexually harass them — please, hold your applause for the man until the end. The news broke that this dipshit and his stupid haircut had been responsible for turning over nearly the entire workforce of Fullbright over the course of just two years, and Gaynor stepped down ahead of the story coming out. He said he was very very sorry for his behavior and that he wouldn't do it again, but also that he wasn’t sorry enough to surrender the company name. Open Roads is now credited to "The Open Roads Team", comprised of the couple of employees who were left in the wake of his reign and whoever else they could bring on to save the project from a shallow grave. The game released just a few days ago to a remarkably small audience and a middling reception, and it isn't difficult to see why.

Open Roads fucking sucks.

It's a game that's very obsessed with detail, yet is remarkably uninterested in its story. When the game let me open up a trash can and pick out every single piece of garbage individually to examine it in a 3D model viewer, I got the feeling that I wasn't going to enjoy this. The models themselves are all very intricate and detailed, each one of them complete with their own bespoke labels, and fine print, and they're all very lovingly put together, and I absolutely would not have noticed nor cared about any of this if a core component of the game wasn't picking up random objects and looking at them. There's a reason that movies don't feature characters picking up every loose object on the set and holding them up to camera, and that's because it's not particularly interesting to do that. I feel like I have to explain this from first principles. What do we gain by doing this? What do we gain from having the player pick up loose items and stare at them? What does that accomplish that just dressing the set with static objects wouldn't? It certainly makes the game last longer, because you need to pick up every piece of random bullshit in the hopes of finding the ones that advance you to the next section, but there's no appeal in doing that. It's busywork. So little worldbuilding actually happens by digging through these items; you'll be picking through erasers and pencils and plates, all such boring, domestic objects that don't have any character to them whatsoever. You can pick up some push pins and look at them. They're normal fucking push pins. You can pick up a fork and look at it. It's a normal fucking fork. You can pick up a comb and look at it. It's a normal fucking comb. What are we doing? Why? Is there something about allowing me to pick these objects up and look at them that does anything that leaving them in the scenery for me to look at wouldn't? Could we at least do something interesting with them? Express some personality through them? Give us a reason to investigate them? Anything, so long as it could give this a point.

Tonally, this is all over the place. Tess being kind of mood swing-y makes sense — she's fifteen, and nobody seems keen on telling her fucking anything on the grounds of it being "too complicated", despite one of the core conflicts of the game being completely resolved in a literal three minute talk at the end — but Opal falls into this pattern as well. Tess will go way, way too far in making an accusation or just trying to come up with something that would hurt her mom, and Opal will respond in kind, and then the pair of them will act like nothing ever happened. One sequence has them blow up on one another, refuse to say another word until the end of the car ride, and then resume quipping and bantering not even thirty seconds later. It takes more time for you to eat the fucking burger that Opal buys you at the motel than it does for the only two principle characters in this story to have a ground-shattering fight and then completely resolve it. The store description boasts that Tess and Opal’s relationship has “never been easy” when it so obviously is. If I had said so much as a fraction of the shit Tess says to my own mom, I would have demolished our relationship. Instead, it’s all glossed over, all just Buffyspeak for the pile. If wry quips were currency, Tess and Opal wouldn't have to sell the house.

The game can't ever decide whether it's time to floor it or slam the brakes, and instead has you constantly whipping back and forth between long segments of doing fucking nothing besides wandering around to rotate ashtrays and then blasting forward with story development that you barely even have time to register as happening before it's over. Your grandfather died, but he wasn't actually your grandfather, but he was a jewel thief, but he was your grandfather, but he might still be alive, but he tried to turn himself in, but who cares, but maybe your professional gambler father can enlighten you, but roll credits. Christ. We spend 90% of the runtime walking around and investigating literal fucking garbage and then cram way too much of this incredibly boring story into not enough time to tell it. This isn't even an Open Roads problem, but Open Roads is a symptom; so many games have fucking atrocious pacing. I've started celebrating anything that can get to credits without rushing or dragging. At least this has the decency to be over in an hour and a half, despite the fact that it does nothing with that time.

Would you believe me if I told you that this controlled badly? For a game this simple, just about every control scheme has something completely broken about it. If you're playing on a gamepad (the optimal way to play), menus are often incredibly sticky and require a few button presses before they actually register that you want to move your cursor up or down. Getting from New Game to Continue on the main menu took four down presses to move the selection box down once. Objects that you can interact with are what I can only describe as "sticky"; moving your reticle near them will drastically decrease your sensitivity and pull your view towards the item like a magnet, ensuring that you can easily pick up the item without having to fiddle with getting the reticle placement just right. This, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, the fact that so many fucking items in the game can be interacted with means that your view is constantly being dragged around, making it feel like you're fighting with the controls when you're trying to look up from a desk to the exit door. You can't move your camera freely unless you're staring off into empty space, because your reticle keeps getting caught on objects and making it incredibly difficult for you to look away from them. It should not be this frustrating simply trying to look around a room.

Doing this on a mouse is where the fun really begins, though. I don't know what happened with my copy of the game, because I can't imagine that this happened to anyone else and they didn't see fit to mention it; it's obviously a bug, but it's also really funny that it made to the final release. Mouselook, for some ungodly reason, is locked to eight directions. It also "snaps" when you move it around, jumping from one point to another rather than smoothly gliding between them. I thought it had something to do with the controller being plugged in, but it persisted through both unplugging the gamepad and restarting the PC. I can't really explain how bad this is through text, so I've graciously provided you with a video so that you won't have to experience it for yourself. Nobody should know these horrors, but I do. You should not be made to carry this burden.

I feel bad giving it this low of a score, because I usually prefer to reserve the half-stars for works that are actively harmful. The kind of thing that does damage. But there is absolutely nothing that I like here. I detest the writing, I detest playing it, I detest the way that it looks, I can't fucking stand it. This game radiates a horrid energy that enters me in waves and saps my will. The writers have almost never worked on anything else in their lives and one of the lead art directors made Dream Daddy. We're not dealing with heavy hitters of the industry, here. These are people who are uniquely underqualified coming in to try and salvage an extant work tainted by employee abuse because throwing out the name and starting over would be bad for brand recognition.

Despite the fact that this is intended as something of a follow-up to Gone Home, there's almost nobody left from that project who's still working on this one. This isn't a successor project so much as it is an imitation, all of the gaps smoothed over with drywall mud from Annapurna helping to pull in nearly three hundred fucking contractors to get this out. What compelled them to go ahead with releasing this? Open Roads is the ship of Theseus. Clearly everybody who knew what they were doing when they were still under the Fullbright banner is gone with no intention of coming back, and the ones with a clue who survived Gaynor's reign don't have enough of a voice under the fucking mountain of outside artists and developers being brought in to push this out the door.

Open Roads is a game that clearly has talented people on board, but is helmed by a team lead (or leads, plural) who have no clue what do to with them. There’s so much wasted potential here. It sucks to see all of these people wriggle out from under the thumb of an abusive manager just to immediately be put beneath the thumb of a new manager who’s incompetent, instead. I can’t write here what I hope happens to Steve Gaynor. I do hope that whoever’s left from Fullbright can leave Annapurna behind and make something better than their oldest work, because I know they’re capable of it. They just need a leader who isn’t a fucking moron.

Hey, mom!

Set the standard but can't keep the pace - an immense letdown of a revisit after being a series die-hard in my youth brought upon by dull + awkward charts, too many mid filler songs, and wonky hit detection. Also - and I'm sorry to say this - but it's damn ugly. I get it, it's supposed to look like a concert recording and all but holy hell does that lead to it looking super bland and samey - there is no sense of scale in any of these venues because of it either. Hammer-ons are so much harder to read here, but even if they weren't this doesn't feel nearly as fun and/or lively as - say - the godly Guitar Hero World Tour, which came out just a year later and was that series' first foray into full-band gameplay also. Saved from getting a 2.5 strictly for its vast DLC support (which, unlike GH you can still get to this day), but there are still some sick songs in the base setlist if you know where to look (Flirtin' with Disaster is essentially the perfect song for one of these games, I Think I'm Paranoid is one of my favorite songs ever, plus come on... SAY IT AIN'T SOOOooOOoOOO!!).

FF7 is just as good people hype it up to be. It starts off in the iconic Midgar with what is probably the most action packed opening of any JRPG, and after a few hours it's already opening up its world. It gets even better the more mysteries are unconvered, the more materia and limit breaks you acquire. The forced minigames are really the only complaint I have with it. It's not hard to understand why this was such a massive deal in the early 3D era with how cinematic and spectacular it is. Even to this day the seamless transitions between gameplay and FMVs with uninterrupted music are mindblowing, and the pre rendered backgrounds have an untouchable aesthetic.

No matter how hard Square Enix try with countless spinoffs and retellings in the same universe with all the advanced technology of today, they aren't able to replicate the magic that was achieved on a PS1 and only make its story retroactively worse. It's not nostalgia talking - this is coming from a person who first played it 23 years after release. There is a great subtlety to the original and its characters that the remakes miss completely. Sephiroth, one of the coolest villains of all time, is basically an entirely different character in every media released after this and his cryptic terrifying aura is lost for the sake of fanservice. I choose to think of this game as existing in a vacuum and will always recommend it over anything else as the most complete consistent work.

A victim of its own success.

I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.

What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.

The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.

I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.

I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.

There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.

Anyway, it's pretty good.

Sonic Rush was a childhood favorite of mine, one that I hadn't played since I was maybe 10 years old. In all honesty, it maybe should've stayed that way. For years, I had been hailing this as easily being the best Sonic game, with such a focus on pure speed, an engaging enough story, and the soundtrack people still bring up pretty regularly for how hard it bangs, it was the full package of what I thought a Sonic game should be.

With that, during my most recent winter break, I had finally gotten DS emulation running on my 3DS, and Sonic Rush was the first game I wanted to play, as I never did end up finishing it during my childhood (and I couldn't really think of any other DS games I wanted to play).

It was a smooth start, but as I played, some of the cracks (or holes, if you will) started to show, and I started to grow more and more frustrated with many of the design choices made throughout. Certain parts of this game had me feeling like I was playing some NES platformer due to how unfair things were. I felt like the AVGN as I was quite literally yelling out, "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??" in response to dying for the 10th time in a row to a bottomless pit that I had no chance of predicting or reacting to. It just really pissed me off. The dissonance of having "rush" in your game's title, then actively discouraging speeding through levels by placing so many instakills everywhere, I'm just left to wonder, why are the developers punishing you for following their own design philosophy?

And to follow that up, the frustrating thing is there are a handful of sections within the levels that have you running at Mach speeds for extended periods, combing endlessly through enemies with that super satisfying combo sound ringing in your ears, only to grind to a halt because they introduced a new stage-specific gimmick mechanic that kills you if you don't get it right instantly. Every time they'd pull this, it practically made me want to quit the game right then and there. It's again just a case of "What were they thinking?"

This isn't even mentioning the boss fights. Others have talked about it before and I don't really care enough to say what's already been said, so I won't. The exception is that final boss fight though. I seriously dropped the game for two months because of this shit man. I was honestly just tired of seeing Sonic Rush on my "currently playing" list so I decided to come back and downgrade the difficulty just so I could check it off the list. Didn't regret it in the slightest. I had no interest in trying to beat it legit, and it was either downgrade the difficulty or I drop the game entirely lmao. The true final boss wasn't any better, either. So glad I didn't have to deal with that thing on its normal difficulty. I'd honestly rather do ANYTHING else with my time.

All in all, I did come away from a childhood favorite with a bit of a sour taste, but I am in a way happy I came back and experienced it again with a more informed lens. I'm still glad the game exists and it still holds a special place in my heart for how much I loved it back then, but by god, I'm never playing it again.

Shameless plug, I also posted this review on my blog.