You know, RE4 was a really impactful game for me growing up. It was the first action shooter I played, it was my introduction to the Resident Evil series, and it was probably one of the sources of why I became so goddamn snarky and sarcastic when talking with people.

RE4 was the turning point for Resident Evil going absolutely hog wild, changing genre's from Survival/Horror to Action/Horror, and I hope I don't have to explain the huge gap between those two types of games. The B/C-movie grade dialogue is still here, the tank controls are still here, and the resource management is still here. But if you've played RE1/2/3 (The Originals, Not The REmakes), you can definitely tell that there's a huge gap between what those games had and sold people on, and what this game provides. There's a psudo skill gap, where the game makes itself harder the better you are at it. There's QTEs, one of the first games to throw them into cutscenes forcing you to pay attention or face an instant kill. And there's the fact that the game lets you buy a rocket launcher at every single merchant. It's all that which makes the whole game feel...very very different from the last 3 Resident Evil games...but that doesn't mean it's bad.

And it isn't bad. I mean, if it's gotten me to buy 3 different versions of this game and beat all of them repeatedly, so it can't be bad.

It's a goddamn shame that Valve has decided to make Portal and it's science heavy setting into their defacto "Test Our Software" game series now. I mean it's been 13 years since the last new game that tries to capture what Portal is as a puzzle game. Instead, we've gotten The Lab, a tech demo with all sorts of stuff to show off vr, and this, a 30 minute experience to get you to be aware of what the Steam Deck can do.

The good news is that everything here is still remarkably Portal. The writing, the comedy, the look, the lore, it's all there and it's borderline necessary if you want to go out of your way to know every inch of officially released material like an encyclopedia.

Gameplay wise it's also shockingly in depth to go over all the stuff the Steam Deck can do while still being a fun game, vs The Lab which is mostly just a bunch of fun experiences that require you to be in vr for them. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, nothing incredible, but the jump from Valve making The Lab to making Half Life Alyx did a very good job of telling them to make video games to show off tech stuff over just tech demos that do the job in a familiar setting.

I swear, historical sim games are like a weirdly special thing to me, and CK is no different. It's one of those games that's always fun to boot up, fuck around, fail, go to load a save only to find out you never saved and it's all your fault, cry, and then either immediately start again or drop the game for 5 months.

It's a fuckin blast, and it feels like every time I play I get something different. Either I die in 5 minutes and have to run the empire as a 4 year old, or I keep the same monarch alive through to 80+ years old somehow by magic and a dog. Shit's crazy and I love it.

Let's just be honest, drawing games tend to be pretty one note. Physics games doubly so. Combining the two just leads to make it more interesting but not by much. And so we have Crayon Physics Deluxe, a game that is exactly what you expect it to be on the tin and nothing more.

Repetitive soundtrack, goals that are either way too easy or absolutely not, and graphics that do the job.

Genuinely the thing that saves it is that this game is peak "I'm sick and want to play a video game" fuel. Nothing much tops it.

In whatever year this Early Access game comes out in, it'll be a serious fucking GOTY contender. An open world sandbox where you can sit back and do whatever you damn well please in whatever means necessary in order to complete whatever you want? Sign me the fuck up.

Some cases are short, some are long, some aren't even about murder. It's about having a damn fun time and that's all that matters in the end. That and getting an apartment and then subsequently retiring.

Everyone having something to do is great, only issue is I wish there was a more distinct day/night cycle and that the randomly generated cases had a lot more variety in them. Graffiti is mostly the same, clues are usually the same when you get them, and if that person has a roommate they honestly probably did it and therefore will never return to that apartment and be lost amongst the city never to be found. I want to see this game become a fully fledged masterpiece and I'll be patient until a person tells me it's finished.

Alright here's the deal. I've played a shit ton of the original release. I love it to bits, I've got a whole thing about saying that people who give the game flak aren't giving the game the credit it deserves. I have a lot of adoration for the original game, and I can take my rose tinted glasses off of it and also say that man there are some parts that are aggressively rough around the edges. There are things that absolutely can be fixed and I fully concede that.

With that out of the way, if you think that getting this mod will fix every issue that the original had, you are dead wrong. After playing through all the levels, beating the final story, and beating expert mode, I walked away wondering who in the world this is for. And then it hit me. It's for people like me who want Shadow the Hedgehog to be a better game, and goes in and files down those sharp corners to something a bit more palatable...only to then feed you the shavings again after a little bit of time.

Some of the changes made here are absurd. Removing the key doors? Great! Those don't need to exist since most of them are useless anyways! But then you change the keys to red rings and put them in the most cryptic nonsensical locations possible, to the point where the only ones I found were either the ones that stuck out like a sore thumb, or the ones that were unchanged from the original.

Stage re-balancing fluctuates from "We removed a few enemies so now you only have to go through most of the level instead of all of it!" to "We didn't touch this stage sorry" to "Yeah we made this stage intentionally more difficult by changing it in a negatively balanced way that does nothing but make the stage worse to play!" and it's frustrating. Most of the additions play off as someone messing around with a stage editor and either saying this is great and keeping it all in or just not remembering to revert their changes before putting the stages out.

Expert mode in particular is absolutely a guilty offender of the latter of the above statement. A majority of the difficulty comes in either flooding enemies or removing jumping platforms and not providing replacements, requiring a spin dash jump. Something you'll run into and have to repeat for around 60% of the expert mode playthrough. It's evident that the people making this just wanted something that felt hard and not something that felt particularly rewarding to beat or was well designed while being difficult when you realize that they took the most annoying and difficult segments of the original expert layouts and adjust them to be even more annoying in a "Let me copy your homework, don't worry I'll change it a little" type beat way.

Now look, this adds in a lot of changes that I do like. Little tweaks here and there, and some stages play incredibly fluid and well for them. It's just a shame that if you're not a Shadow the Hedgehog super fan and think that this is your big chance to cross that black sheep off your list that this is somehow worse in some cases, and chooses to wear those poor adjustments on it's sleeve. Alas.

It's an arcade racer that's just really really solid. It's a fair amount of fun to pick up and do a few runs every now and again before putting it down and doing something else. If you're a huge fan of joystick fiddling when you've got nothing to do, this game is crack cocaine with the amount that you're required to do. I love the game, it's a lot of fun, it's really pretty, but there's a lot to leave desired. More tracks to listen to, different engine sounds, that sort of thing.

Just a good thing to pick up and have fun with should you want to. Pretty cheap too for what you're getting out of it, should that be a swaying reason to pick this one up.

Played the main story levels to completion front to back. Won't ever go back for the rest of the achievements here. Terrible gameplay, a level chunk generation system that isn't remotely homogenius with one another, and a very clear weight towards wanting to make a franchise for pure profit over making an actually fun video game. Which is ironic coming from Super Meat Boy, a series made by people who were focused on making a fun game first over making a money grubbing soulless corpse.

I cannot remotely describe how aggressively disappointing this game is. You wait 10 years for the shittiest autorunner imaginable with the design philosophy of taking an iconic indie game, placing an interesting idea or two into it, then shoving the most aggressively terrible design decisions into it until it chokes on them, then giving up and turning that into an auto runner. Follow that up with a delicious side of attempting to bury the entire design philosophy of the original's story with one that's categoricially worse with an additional backstory for a character that was used as a gag in the original, turning them into a recurring bit character who's only use is a shoehorned reason for the final level to exist instead of writing something interesting.

Finalize that with the chaser shot of the dev trying to serialize the series into bootlegs of other genres of games because he's done cannablizing the corpse of a ten year old gaming trend and is now just straight up ripping off other games entirely but with a poorly inserted gimmick rather than trying to make anything remotely related to the original that made the series what it's known to be because he's fully aware that he can't because he has zero perceived talent at making anything original on his own and would rather throw money at the game to make the cutscenes pretty rather than make a playable video game first.

Look. I love the original Metroid Prime. Adore it to bits. And I always thought it was downright beautiful even with it's gamecube polygon goodness. The textures were low quality but the vibes and aura is what made it.

But I'd be a damn hypocrite if I said this didn't make the original game look bad in comparison. The original game is fantastic. All the points still stand regarding the original game's tone and aura. But let me tell you that this game is beautiful.

Probably not $40 beautiful more like $20 or $30 without the other two games in the trilogy or Prime 4 nowhere to be seen for 6 years now but hey we're not talking about the stuff outside of the game that makes me irrationally depressed, ok bestie? Alright.

Even as someone who's known a lot of fear, the fear of being alone is crushing. Not knowing where to go, what to do, if the next area is hostile or beautiful or somewhere inbetween. And that's the beauty of Metroid Prime. It has this aura that the other games really don't have.

The trilogy follows a weird sequence. The second game focuses on the moments right before and after death. The third focuses on the moment of death and what you could do to stop it. The first however focuses mainly on a corpse after it dies, and the vultures that pick said corpse clean.

Prime has that weird aura. Where everything is dead, long dead, excluding the Space Pirate Vultures who try to pick a corpse of a planet of it's one evil yet alluring resource after it's fall. Where everything is dead, perished, except for the horrors that rose after. And where for a few moments. Where everything is quiet and away from the evil and the vultures and the dead. Where those moments of wonder and mystery give themselves up and show in the most beautiful way.

I've played this game so many times since my first playthrough all the way back when I was a kid. And I've played dozens of games since. I've got a collective steam library 1000+ games strong. And let me tell you there has never. EVER. Been a game that plays as fluid, as fun, and as varied as this one.

I'll probably never see a game like it again in my life. I know that for a fact. I've begged and pleaded for something like it for my entire life, from kid to adult. Haven't gotten it. Still haven't. Probably won't. But let me tell you when I say that I don't really need it as much as I beg and plead for it. Because I have it already. And that's all I really need from it.

Look, I'm going to be fully honest and inform you that this game gets a needlessly bad rap. Is it absurd? Absolutely. Is it needlessly edgy? Oh you bet. But that's what's so goddamn fun about it.

There's so much fun about this. There's so so much fun in this game but people can't seem to understand that past "Ooooh it's such a terrible game" when it really isn't. The absolute worst the game gets is 2 stages you can freely skip, the bosses, and the controls sometimes. You're kidding yourself out of a really fun time if you even try to give it a moment's breath. Just play into the dumb bullshit, I promise you a good time if you're willing.