It's kind of the "Free Bird" of video games. It's thematically thin, but just fatalitic enough to feel poetic. It's a cornerstone of modern American AAA games the way Free Bird is a cornerstone of 70s rock. Both a very much for Your Dad. And its legacy is ultimately tied to its vastness.

Just as Free Bird goes on and on and crescendos with a long guitar solo, so does Red Dead Redemption go on and on and then crescendos spectacularly... although crescendo is the wrong word. This isn't a game that leads to a big, violent set piece, but rather leads a series of quiet domestic chores as you reacclimate to life around the family farm. But in contrast to how loud much of the preceding game is, it feels a bit like a crescendo, like an inverted guitar solo.

I do wish this game wasn't so cartoonish. It feels like a game that could easily bare more of its soul. Red Dead Redemption 2 certainly comes closer to doing that. But here, just about every mission from after you leave Bonnie's ranch until you get back to Blackwater is filled with nonsense comic characters, with a few exceptions (Marshal, Landon, Luisa). Nothing wrong with having a sense of humour but in a game that's attempting to be as sombre and "authentic" as this is, the stereotypes just feel lazy and insecure.

Anyway. Good ending. I liked riding around the old west. And when I first played this I wasn't a very big gamer and it spurred 16 year old me on. I still have a poster of Bonnie on the wall of my old room. I don't know that I'll ever be able to NOT see through all of this game's warts.

The one thing I never expected an Obsidian game to be was terminally uninteresting but that's exactly what The Outer Worlds is. A collection of shallow systems, characters, and quests that sort of affect the illusion of a proper RPG with depth and consequence but in reality offers nothing of the sort.

The almost cartoonish lack of depth in the gameplay is mirrored in the story, which is a smarmy and infuriatingly smug monument to Enlightened Centrism that wraps itself in a veneer of anti-capitalist rhetoric so thin that it would struggle to appear meaningfully leftist even to someone who gets all their political opinions from Breadtube. Faux-empathetic South Park politics for the Rick and Morty generation, where picking an actual side is always fucking stupid and you should always strive for a meaningless compromise in order to preserve the status quo.

Genuinely astonishing that this came from the same studio that released Pillars 2 just prior, a game that, for all it's issues, actually had the guts to grab you by the neck and tell you to pick a fucking side, to get some god damn ideology, and actually let you meaningfully change the broken world it presented. That game was the real New Vegas 2 you've all been clamouring for, but no one bought it, so I guess we're stuck with this.

Nothing else to really say because there's basically nothing else in here. An utterly empty and vacuous game that doesn't even manage to surpass Fallout 4. A snake oil salesman promising you a miracle solution to bring back the Fallout you remember, but get past the fancy logo and uncork that bottle, and you'll find nothing in there but dust and echoes.

Pokemon Shield is not a good game. An unfortunate result of rushed development leading to a mind numbing story experience, poorly implemented new features with so much wasted potential (like the wild areas), and a lack of polish that sticks out like a sore thumb in the new generation.

With that being said, I can't deny the fun I had. I grew to really like Hop and Marnie as rivals, and Leon is one of the best champions in the series. Pokemon models and moves in general were pretty well animated and looked crisp (Never cared for the National Dex either). And above all else, the main hook of catching and training Pokemon is as engaging and rewarding as ever.

I hate this chain that Game Freak holds over me; despite them seemingly entering a new era of mediocre titles with little effort, it'll still garner some enjoyment purely based off of the namesake - and unfortunately I'm a product of this. I hope Legends ends up being the right step forward we're all hoping it is.

Purely an amazing Pokemon game. While Red and Green started the franchise and Gold and Silver sorta expanded it, Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald had evolved Pokemon to the point where it didn't just feel like some fad, it felt like a work of art. The gameplay is a lot more fun than Gen 1 and Gen 2 (with the addition of abilities, numerous new moves, and overall more challenge) and the graphics got a huge upgrade. There's also the much welcomed Battle Frontier (which includes the Battle Tower from Crystal, Ruby, and Sapphire,) which is a great way to introduce new content even after the main game's story has ended. Overall, one of my favorite Pokemon games.