Bio

Nothing here!

Personal Ratings
1★
5★

Badges


1 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 1 year

Best Friends

Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

Noticed

Gained 3+ followers

N00b

Played 100+ games

Favorite Games

Star Wars: The Old Republic
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
Donkey Kong 64
Donkey Kong 64
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
NCAA Football 14
NCAA Football 14

164

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

000

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Spawn: The Eternal
Spawn: The Eternal

May 08

Blair Witch
Blair Witch

Oct 26

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman: Arkham Asylum

Aug 17

Recently Reviewed See More

I don't play a lot of video games. I really only feel compelled to talk about the ones that really had an impact on me. Blair Witch (2019) had me thrilled. I've been a fanatic of this franchise ever since my uncle told me about it when I was 13. I was fascinated by the concept of the film and the details he told me, even watched it alone at night the next year, all the lights out and doors and windows kept wide open (I wasn't the smartest kid) It was the first Horror movie to give me nightmares and still does to this day, just an atmospheric and horrifying theme park ride of a film. Later seeing the film in Cinema Salem in 2019 was one of the greatest and most memorable experiences of my entire life.

I saw Book of Shadows shortly after the original. It's one of the worst films ever made and killed the license (and the production company Artisan Entertainment) until the great Adam Wingard resurrected the franchise with his 2016 film. It's nowhere near as good as the original, but it was still a treasured theater experience for me.

Between them, I consumed pretty much ever bit of Blair Witch media I could find. The documentaries associated with the original (and even its otherwise irredeemable sequel!), books and comics.

Finally, it's 2019 and we're getting a major studio game from an experienced publisher. I hadn't anticipated a game this much since Jurassic World: Evolution, I pre-order the second I'm aware of its existence.

This makes Book of Shadows look like it belongs in the Louvre. It's more disappointing than college and not an ounce as useful as anything other than an abomination for the industry to never repeat. It is the worst game I have played on a console where I have suffered through Agony, the Saints Row reboot and 3 Madden games.

The boring story fallows an unlikable violent asshole named Ellis, a police officer whose only way of expressing emotion is to be violent and belligerent even to people he claims to care about. The only reason anyone would even have to think of liking this guy is because he has a cute doggo named Bullet (and we'll get to him) It doesn't help that the voice acting in the game has no urgency or believability. The twist with Ellis' character near the end feels like something out of a Paul Dini comic book and is about as scary as an edgy teenagers sketchbook drawings.

The game gives a bullshit warning before starting about your choices mattering. There is genuinely only one choice in this game that means anything and it's choosing to save your dog or leave it to die. Any human being with a trace of empathy is going to save the dog, there is no reason to change this apart from justifying an ending that is just as unscary and anticlimactic as the one people with souls in their bodies will get.

This game has almost nothing stylistically in common with the original film. If you took out the stick figures, it wouldn't even be a Blair Witch game. It seems to take the 2016 film's misguided idea that a story about a witch take place in the Summer rather than October, but at least Wingard's Black Hills Woods felt endless and expansive. With its constant invisible walls and extremely linear design, how the hell is anyone supposed to get lost? This game is so scripted and doesn't have the slightest fucking clue why the fuck the original film is so iconic and scary.

Speaking of the 2016 film, its astonishing that a game that takes so much from a movie all about the witch's minions to have such boring enemies. Just flashes of light that jump around like fireflies or shadows. They didn't even try, so I can't even feel sorry for how much of a failure this is. Everyone involved should be fucking ashamed of tarnishing such a great legacy. And the saddest thing is that we're unlikely to see a new video game adapting the property for a while.

The early 2000s survival Horror shooter games weren't great, but they at least had some sense of style. They had scares, they had atmosphere and most of all, they were fun. Far from perfect, but at the very least entertaining. This thing is as entertaining as drowning in molasses without the scares.

If you see this game on sale, do not buy it. If a friend of yours owns the game, steal their copy and destroy it. There is no reason to buy this game, no reason to play it, especially as a fan of the franchise. This is trash. Never, ever play Blair Witch (2019).

Paul Dini is what annoying people on the internet incorrectly think George Lucas is; a shadow of his former self, a hack who puts spectacle over story.

Arkham Asylum is what people incorrectly think the prequels are, minus the claims of bad acting those films get, as the cast is...Mostly fine. The wickedly talented Arleen Sorkin is so off her game I didn't even recognize her and Mark Hamill's performance is nowhere near the quality of what he gave us in The Animated Series. Hell, he's scarier in DC Universe Online than he is here in an overdesigned Joker where I can't even tell what direction they were going for. It's almost as bad as what was done to the character on Gotham. That being said, Kevin Conroy, Tasia Valenza and Dino Andrade turn in great performances and I'm an enormous fan of all 3. But the character writing is absolutely atrocious. It's the kind of thing that would be laughed at if it were in a comic and compared to a Rob Liefeld story with art design that's the shitty imitation of a 90s Image comic. Just total grimdark nonsense where nobody is a character outside Dini just projecting his weird misogyny that was rampant in his work around this time (look at his Detective Comics run and it feels like it was written by an incel)

Boss fights are unimaginative and none of the characters feel like who they're supposed to be. Bane has no intelligence, Ivy is a strawman of an eco-feminist, Scarecrow is weak and totally ineffective, Joker is weirdly brute force focused in a way that feels like Dini was poorly attempting to write The Violator rather than the Clown Prince of Gotham.

Fuck this game. Arkham Knight is the only good game in this wretched trilogy even with all its flaws in gameplay. It has a story that's interesting and coherent and characters that felt mature and fleshed out as people and not just caricatures.

1997 was hyped up as "The Year of Spawn" by Image Entertainment. It marked his first animated series on HBO, his first live action movie from New Line Cinema and his first foray into 3D gaming on the PlayStation. While the HBO series was met with universal acclaim and awards and the movie has since found a growing cult following, Spawn: The Eternal remains the unloved black sheep of the trio. Is it as bad as its reputation has made it out to be?

Well, right off the bat, I can say that the graphics definitely get a bad wrap. By original PlayStation standards, I think they do a great job capturing the mix of Gothic Fantasy and Urban Horror that the comics were so grounded in, and if you're a big fan of the 90s Spawn comics like I am, you might find the visuals here really cool. Hell looks properly disgusting and I love how the gateway into Earth is through a subway track. I wonder if Little Nicky stole that concept from this game. As you progress through the game, there's also a solid variety of environments to engage in that Spawn comic fans should be familiar with. You have the inner cities that Spawn calls home, a Medieval kingdom, a Prehistoric wasteland and, finally, Hell itself.

The game is mostly a platformer, but will actually switch to a Tekken style fighter any time combat is engaged. While the combat is actually pretty satisfying, with great sound design, brutal finishers and a surprising amount of strategy involved to take down enemies, the platforming is where the game severely suffers. Spawn himself relies on tank controls to move, which I don't necessarily mind, since Spawn himself has always been more of a tanky character, but jumping never seems to go as far as you want too. Even when you carefully plan out your jumps, there are a lot of poorly designed pitfalls in the game that you'll only get through on dumb luck. While fun, the levels are very repetitive. You collect orbs, fight a couple henchmen, collect more orbs and move onto a boss.

There also isn't much of a story, beyond awkward and jarring cutscenes with painfully distorted audio (which is very odd, given how solid the sound design in the actual game is), which is a major disappointment. I suppose it's better to have minimal story than a bad one, as we got with Spawn: Armageddon, but with the repetitive design of the levels, there's little reason to push through unless you're really a hardcore Spawn fan, other than the decent variety of world designs and surprisingly satisfying variety of boss fights.

Contrary to what a lot of people may claim, Spawn: The Eternal isn't the worst PlayStation game. It's not even the worst Spawn game. And if you're a huge fan of the Spawn comics with a soft spot for early polyganal PlayStation games, like I am, you might find the game pretty cool. It's got a solid combat system, some eerie sound design and an authentic visual aesthetic taken straight from the comics and properly translated within the limitations of the PlayStation's graphics. I won't die on a hill defending this game like I will the movie, but I still have a lot of fun with it despite its flaws.