Of course after finishing Deep Fear I had to play the other horror-at-sea game with "Fear" in the title. It's surprisingly competent, if bland. Even my contrarian ass isn't going to tell you it's as good as Resident Evil 4, as the combat doesn't have nearly the amount of variables or flexibility. The aiming is really stiff, the not-quite-but-sort-of-almost tank controls aren't ideal, and the limited enemy variety doesn't help matters much, but most of the guns sound and feel great and blowing dudes' heads up with them is very satisfying. The level design is pretty decent too, a lot more in line with a traditional survival horror game, but since there's a fair amount of backtracking and no map, navigation can be a little confusing at times. Overall, I had a way better time with this than I would have ever expected, but I don't know if I'd really recommend it. If you haven't played any other horror or RE games, just play those. If you have and you're just curious, you could definitely do worse, but I highly doubt you'll be impressed.

Peak video game schlock. The gameplay does almost everything wrong compared to the Resident Evil games it rips off: it's slow, shows a complete disregard for resource management by giving you practically infinite ammo and healing items, and has puzzles no deeper than inputting codes you find in documents or are explicitly told by NPCs. The level design mostly consists of narrow corridors, and they're sometimes populated by really annoying enemies that are way faster than you and have a million hit points. Despite that, there's something I can't pinpoint outside of the hilarious story, characters, and voice acting that keeps it all from being totally insufferable. Maybe I'm just so amused by imagining Sega being so desperate for a hit Saturn release that they actually thought this interactive Z movie was going to be it. God bless the late '90s video game industry.

Very ahead of its time in a lot of respects, and is overall a great representation of Lovecraft's mythos, but is a little too scatterbrained to achieve excellence. It wants to be a stealth game but the stealth mechanics are painfully shallow. It wants to be a shooter but, while it has satisfying gunplay, you're constantly getting your weapons taken away from you for the sake of the plot. It wants to be an adventure/puzzle game but the puzzles are either so easy they can't even really be considered such, or they're completely esoteric (pun slightly intended), rarely ever in between. Add a dash of bugs and the occasional questionably designed setpiece and you're left with a game with its heart in the right place, but was maybe a little too big for its britches.

Between the lack of lipsync in the cutscenes, awful localization, slow and clunky combat, and spotty controls, it's not hard to see why this was deemed antiquated even in 2004. I hadn't been paying attention to the copyright date on the title screen, so I was shocked to find it wasn't one of FromSoftware's bajillion PS2 launch/launch window titles because it just exudes "generational transition" like Armored Core 2 and Eternal Ring did. I didn't exactly hate it since the level design was okay and the story and some of the mechanics were at least a little interesting, but it might have been up there with its contemporaries as a fantastic survival horror game if it were given the same polish.

I think it's common knowledge at this point that the story in Silent Hill: Origins is really stupid and contradictory to events depicted in the first Silent Hill, and it was that plus my natural aversion to the non-Team Silent games that made me avoid it. Then one day I was futzing with my PSP and decided to launch it, if for no other reason than to have a laugh.

I didn't laugh. I was horrified. Not by the game, it's not scary at all, but by the fun I found myself having with it.

The graphics were pretty solid for the system. The music, of course, was excellent. The level design was competent. The puzzles, while not exactly brainbusters, were well done and enjoyable to solve. Although the weapon system was silly, the combat was mostly functional save for some awkward context sensitive actions and the very little need to engage with it. The only thing I found myself really frustrated with was the omission of the tank control option, as the static camera angles change a lot and the 2D-type controls don't handle it very well at all. Despite that and the odd interpretation of Silent Hill 1's plotpoints, I found myself in the same strange position I was in when I played Shattered Memories: I wasn't hating a dirty, stinky, non-Team Silent SH game, and I was mortified.

I know it's been said millions of times, but if this game were stripped of its ties to Silent Hill, had the original story elements fleshed out more, and had a little more general polish, it would probably make for a decent handheld action/horror game. That said, I also know it's hard to look past the fact that it's supposed to be a prequel to some of the literal greatest games ever made, so I completely understand why it catches flak. I'm not defending or making excuses for it. I just liked it, goddammit.

It's Dead Rising 2 but you play as a caricature of Frank West instead of an actually interesting character. PS4 port is pretty ass: it crashed on me twice, the blood decals don't work properly, there were some really weird bugs with collision and items, and about halfway through the game all of Frank's audio cues were only coming out of the left speaker channel. I'm not sure if that's worse than the PC port that doesn't have proper controller support on Windows 10 for no reason, but it's worth noting.

Pretty superfluous, but could be worse. It's ugly and the music's kinda lame, but other than that and a few unnecessary changes it represents the first Mega Man X well enough. The Vile mode, though, is a complete waste of time. It takes away the mobility that set the X series apart from the classic series and, although the different weapons are pretty interesting, the bosses and most of the levels don't really call for them. As a whole, this doesn't match Dracula X Chronicles in terms of design and especially value, but at a time when it wasn't so easy to play Mega Man X on the go, it did its job.