It's a survival/crafting game! It has very nice visuals and you walk around in a giant mech which is cool but it's a survival/crafting game! And moreso than almost any genre out there I'm starting to feel like when you've played one, you've played 'em all. (I guess calling it a "survival" game is a bit of a misnomer bc there's no enemies or hostility in this game, you get what I mean lol)

I really do have to give Lightyear Frontier some credit for its visuals, it's super gorgeous, it has a far more artistically interesting world than most of these games. The glowing green lights in the night sky, the pink trees and neon flora. It's nice! I found myself quite interested in the relics and artefacts and stuff, as well as the giant skeleton in the Yellow Forest, it has some cool stuff going on in its world!

But, like most of these games, it's a bit of a slog. It's still in Early Access so I give it somewhat of a pass, but even with your Titanfall mech thing, movement didn't feel fun! It felt sluggish, and almost every day you're having to venture out to a different corner of the map for some resource that can only be found there, and it takes ages to get there and back with basically nothing going on in-between! And it's so easy to get overencumbered without inventory upgrades that certainly early on, you're gonna have to be making multiple trips! Multiple boring trips! I didn't feel like setting up multiple base camps all over the world, that would have drained my resources and made things take even longer! (Also, there's some glitches present, naturally. I fired about 6 red paint blobs at my Upgrade Depot and it simply did not change colour when everything else did, lmao)

But monotony aside, this is a solid foundation. It's got a gorgeous world, some beautiful stuff to make and some gorgeous ways to customise your camp. You could get a real pretty looking homestead if you invest enough time in this! It just needs to be a bit more, uh, fun to get there! Needs a little more life in it! It's still early days, so I'm confident they can bring that, and maybe fix that voice actor's attempt at what I think is supposed to be a Southern accent? Because SHEESH that shit is bad

I first started playing Hearthstone around the tail end of the Knights Of The Frozen Throne expansion about halfway through 2017, just before Kobolds and Catacombs was released. And man, let me tell ya - Kobolds and Catacombs, certainly balance-wise, was a mess! Warlock was broken as shit! I still have nightmares about Cubelock; Skull of the Man'ari, Bloodreaver Guldan, Voidlord etc. every few months. I picked Hearthstone up because while I'd never played World Of Warcraft (and didn't particularly care for what I'd seen) I liked card games and thought this one looked cool. It had a ton of charm and colour and personality, a sense of style and humour that WoW seemed to be lacking. To this day, this is still one of my favourite things about Hearthstone. It's not hugely self-serious like WoW, not constantly trying to force an unearned sense of grandeur or epicness. This game just has a ton of fun with itself. Recently they had a wild-western themed expansion where Paladin got a card called "Holy Cowboy" who discounts your holy spells. They referenced Leeroy Jenkins and gave him a card. He's one of the most broken cards in history! It's fun!

In 2017 I liked everything about Hearthstone except for playing Hearthstone. Decks stayed broken and oppressive to play against for a long time. Either the balance team were asleep at the wheel for years on end, or they didn't exist. Corridor Creeper, Shudderwock, Call To Arms, Ultimate Infestation, THE CAVERNS BELOW. I can list off so many notoriously diabolical Hearthstone cards that made the game unfun to play for months at a time off my head like that, it's so easy. Beyond this, the game's monetization model, whilst not the most evil thing I've ever seen, was still pretty manipulative, as all monetization models are. Hearthstone was very stingy with handing out rewards of any kind. Card packs were few and far between, and getting the arcane dust needed to make the cards and decks you want practically necessitated shelling out a bit of money for some packs and getting lucky, or waiting a week for your weekly quests. Y'know, all that mobile game shit.

But it's not 2017 anymore, it's 2024, and Hearthstone has just recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and man how things have changed. Maybe you could argue the improvements have come too late, that positive changes being enacted 10 games into a game's lifespan isn't particularly impressive, and I think that'd be fair! But the fact remains the same, Hearthstone has been improved massively, and after years of considering my relationship with this game "complicated", I've finally come to terms with the fact that I just like this game. A lot. In 2024, Hearthstone comes dangerously close to being what I'd call "generous" with its rewards. There's a rewards track that's honestly been a godsend for the game. You're meted out gold fairly frequently now for just playing with the game, you're given extra points towards levelling up on the reward track (which results in gold and free arena runs and other stuff) by completing achievements, which are usually fulfilling fun, silly stipulations based on certain card effects. I just got one for copying a certain amount of minions with Celestial Projectionist, for example. This gave me gold versions of the card for free, and allowed me to trade in my original, non-gold versions for other random rare cards! It's good stuff! It's honestly not that hard to make the decks or cards you want anymore, I haven't felt behoved to spend money on Hearthstone in ages and that's awesome.

Equally as importantly, the balance team are super on top of things nowadays. Things rarely stay broken or oppressive for long. Hotfixes and balance patches are far more regular, and they also buff cards now too instead of just nerfing stuff into the ground. Handbuff Paladin just recently was hideously broken. Now it's reasonable! Now Tempo Demon Hunter is totally ludicrous, the devs have already acknowledged it and hinted at a hotfix! The game is simply more fun to play when you can actually have faith that the balance will be ironed out within a reasonable time if/when ever it gets out of whack.

And with this in mind, I struggle to find much to dislike about Hearthstone nowadays. I think it doesn't get enough credit for its incredible art and theming. Hearthstone card art is so consistently incredible, so colourful and cartoony, yet so detailed and expressive, I could stare at it for days. Baku The Mooneater, Cat Trick, Kobold Librarian. Some of my favourite card art ever! And the soundtrack? Bro. I've probably used the Hearthstone soundtrack more in my videos than any other video game OST. Ballroom Slink from One Night In Karazhan is one of my favourite pieces of video game music ever - so silly and groovy and tonally perfect both for a zany card game, and - as it turns out, my YouTube videos! I love love love the very cosy, baroque feeling Hearthstone's music goes for, it really does capture the feeling of being in a tavern by the fireside, but also kinda...Immersing yourself in other settings, imagining being in the desert for Saviours Of Uldum, or atop a volcano in Blackrock Mountain. I don't think I've ever heard as many guitar slides in any game's music as much as I do in Hearthstone, the peeps on the woodwinds and acoustics in these songs are pros, bro. This is all without mentioning the incredible attention to detail. Every. Single Card. Gets a little bit of flavour text in the Collection Manager, generally, these are actually pretty funny and well-written jokes! And the fact that every playable minion, including ones that aren't cards themselves and are only tokens summoned or generated by them have voiced lines of dialogue for when they're summoned! That's super impressive! I don't think people talk about that enough! I don't think they give enough credit to how good this game feels to control! "How it feels to control? It's a card game lol" your hater-ass is thinking, throwing in a little passive-aggressive "lol" at the end just to piss me off. Fuck you. You can cue up actions in Hearthstone, there's like a buffer of actions that lets you perform about 30 different inputs without card animations or voice lines slowing you down. You can easily cancel a summon if you think twice about it by just pulling it back to your hand. It's super intuitive! It has great game feel!

I guess I still fundamentally disagree with the Hearthstone devs' philosophy on randomness. Hearthstone has been criticised for years for relying too much on randomness. On random card effects, random targets of damage, random cards that can be summoned or generated in any number of ways. Against classes who practically rely on generating random shit like Priest or Mage (both of whom I hardly ever play out of spite) this can just be really frustrating! It's basically impossible to keep track of what cards they have at any time! And you can end up losing to some random bullshit they have that you could never have possibly predicted! The devs maintain that the randomness spices up the game, it keeps it fun and fresh and stops people from falling into predictable play patterns. I get what they're saying, and I'd agree if this wasn't a game that leant so hard into competitive, if there was any more substantial single-player experience where this randomness could go, never to interfere in matches with actual stakes. Hearthstone has had great single-player experiences before like Dungeon Run, which I loved! And it also had Mercenaries, which is...Fine! But I don't think, and have never thought that Hearthstone's reliance on randomness is worth the supposed variety it brings. Okay, yeah it spices things up, but at what cost? Again, if the game didn't lean so heavily towards being for people wanting a high-level, competitive experience, I'd get it! But as it is, this weird championing of random generation and crazy shit just feels totally at odds with what the game is otherwise trying to be.

But y'know, if it weren't for that randomness, I think in 2024 I might consider giving this game 5 stars. It was maybe 3, 3 and a half back in 2017, but it really has come a long way. I was pretty surprised, and to be honest a bit saddened to see this game's average rating sat at 2.9/5 on here. Maybe these reviews were left back in the day? Maybe people were angry about the monetization, or the balance, maybe - like me, they felt kinda dirty about lavishing praise on any game associated with Activision Blizzard. But those first two things have been largely remedied, and closer inspection will show you that Hearthstone's dev team seem to be a diverse and inclusive group of people who were often appauled by the decisions of ActiBlizz. They've made a gorgeous, charming, artful card game that I've found myself going back to many times over the years, and it's a shame that their game is often caught in the crossfire of their overlords' controversies. If you played Hearthstone a long time ago and found yourself frustrated and disheartened by it, I implore you to go back and give it a second look. You might be surprised by what you find.

Yes, I played one of those oldfangled car games. Why did I play the car game, you may ask? Well, I saw some footage of Burnout 3: Takedown the other day and thought it looked fun and really wanted to play it! Plus, I'm coming up on my 100th review and wanted to diversify my portfolio, so to speak. (I do not have a real job.) Alas, Burnout 3: Takedown is practically impossible to play today without an emulator, and that'd require sitting at my desk - and I don't wanna play games at my desk for the sake of my back! Also, I suspect someone sprinkled 17 Testosterone pills down my mouth some weeks ago whilst I was sleeping, and thus cars have now become my sole personality trait. I like it when they go fast and the engine makes a noise. Now that I have successfully transitioned into a car guy, I decided to fill the Burnout 3: Takedown-shaped hole in my life by playing the nearest thing I could, which was Burnout Paradise: Remastered on Game Pass.

And it was pretty fun! The core conceit of Burnout being that it's not so much a game for people who love cars as it is for people who love crashing things and wrecking shit is awesome! It's why I sought Burnout 3 out and not fuckiiiin, Need For Speed or Garfield Kart or any of those other more stripped back driving sims. And Burnout Paradise definitely delivers on the promise of mayhem, there's a lot of smart design decisions here that make the action real arcade-y and simple and fun in a super uncomplicated way. I love how "wrecking" your car is such a temporary setback, you just see a sick slow-mo vid of how badly you crashed for a few seconds and then you're back on the road, ready to go! Driving feels super good, you go like fast in this game - "no shit" you're thinking, it's a fucking drivey racey game, but like no man, you can go fuckin fast, there's nary a better feeling in video games than going full speed in Burnout, pumping your whole-ass boost meter and driving down the highway w some 2000's hard rock playing. Except maybe taking out like, 5 other drivers in a row w some 2000's hard rock playing! That shit owns! Road Rage is far and away the best overworld event in this game,

This is one of the most late 2000's games ever made, not just because Jimmy Eat World and Seether are on the OST, but because it did the fashionable thing that every series was doing at the time and took a previously non-open world series, open world! And that's where the problems start. Because you're racing around an open world instead of designated race tracks, you often find yourself driving into oncoming traffic, which makes Race and Marked Man events in particular more annoying than they need to be. Annoying, not hard. They're still extremely easy, but if you ever wreck, it's because you were constantly having to divert your attention between the objective marker at the top of the screen, the minimap in the bottom left to see if you're coming up on any alternative routes and shortcuts, and the fuckin' road in front of you! It's really pace-breaking to wreck so constantly. Once or twice isn't so bad, but in my experience when I wrecked it almost never really felt like my fault, it was because I was looking at the minimap while driving (bc I felt like I had to), then looked up at the road to find I'm speeding directly into a fuckin' pickup truck with no time to react! It really sucks the wind out of fast-paced events that should otherwise be so much fun.

Also it's a testament to how poorly this open world meshes with a driving game when I'm advocating for fast travel, but this game needed fast travel. Overworld events are dotted all over the open world, but said events can only ever end in 1 of 8 specific places in that world. So if you wanna tackle any of the many things moreso in the middle of the map and away from these landmarks (and this is where most of the Road Rage events are) then you've gotta go really out of your way to seek them out. And there's no ping system! You can't mark anything on your map as far as I can tell! Am I missing something? If you wanna seek out a specific event, I'm pretty sure you've just gotta keep stop-starting and checking your map to see if you're going in the right direction! That's the best way I could find! Again, talk about a pacebreaker! This is compounded by the fact that you can't just retry events! If you fail an event - and again, all of them end in only 1 of 8 places, you've gotta drive 20% of the way back across the map just to get the starting point! Huh?

ALSO also this game does not tutorialise things very well at all. I did not know how to start Showtime mode (a fan favourite that I thought was just fine) until the fuckin' DJ announcer guy mentioned it, and I forgot how he explained to do a Barrel Roll and a Top Spin and couldn't find any in-game tutorial to brush up on it, so I just had to look it up!

Burnout Paradise is fundamentally really fun, it's like the Skate to Need For Speed or Forza's Tony Hawk. It's not concerned about realism, it's silly and arcade-y. It encourages you to wreck shit and get hurt and that's dope! But it should be more dope. It keeps getting in its own way with this open world structure, a total noose around its neck. Just let me drive and make people explode! Stop making me navigate and check my map and divert my attention between like 3 different fuckin' things! And also let me play Burnout 3: Takedown you freaks