As I enter the Bourntyverse™, a wave of anticipation washes over me. I’m about to enter a digital world dedicated to coconut delights and dark, bitter adventures. I can't wait to immerse myself in an all-new chocolate experience.

The entrance is a virtual portal that resembles the iconic Bournty® bar wrapper, inviting me to unwrap and reveal the wonders within. As I step through, I find myself standing in the heart of the Bournty® landscape. Below, a coconut river flows gracefully, glistening in the digital sunlight. It's a rich, velvety sort of coconut that makes my digital mouth water. As I look to the horizon, I can see a Bournty® fans dressed as Master Chief paddling on dark-red boats and taking selfies on the dark chocolate shore. Bournty® trees stand tall around me, their branches offering a canopy of fluffy white coconut. The air is filled with the sweet scent of coconut, and I can't resist making my avatar reach out to lick a piece. I imagine that it's delightfully soft and chewy, just like the real thing!

I begin my journey with a visit to the Virtual Bournty® Chocolatiers. It's a place of real creativity and indulgence. I design my very own Bournty® bar, choosing the perfect blend of coconut and dark chocolate. I think about adding a sprinkle of digital sea salt for that extra flavour punch, but ultimately decide that I should keep my 600 Bournty® Bucks for other lifetime digital collectibles that I may want to purchase license agreements for later. Watching the digital chocolatiers craft my bar in real-time 14FPS is mesmerizing. I can almost taste it.

After creating my custom Bournty® bar, I head to the Bournty® Bar Cafe. The aroma of dark chocolate and coconut fills the air as I pretend to sip on a virtual Bournty® Bar milkshake. The walls are adorned with larger-than-life Bournty® bar wrappers, and there's a sense of nostalgia that makes me feel like a kid in a Bournty® store again. Things are just like I remember them, and I like that.

As I explore the Bourntyverse™, I encounter Bournty® games. The Bournty® Strike 2 course proves to be a thrilling challenge that sends my Apple Watch's heart-rate monitor straight into the light-orange zone. I navigate through dark chocolate tunnels and jump across coconut bridges, all the while racing against other Bournty® enthusiasts who are enjoying the Bourntyverse™ just as much as I am. It's a fun and competitive experience that leaves me craving more Bournty®.

In the Bournty® Bar History Museum, I immerse myself in the story of the beloved Bournty® chocolate bar by learning about its inception, the secret to a perfect piece, and the undeniable impact that Bournty® has had on the world. The digital displays and holographic presentations that I can afford to look at make brand history come alive in ways I never imagined were possible before the advent of the Bourntyverse™. In the Bournty® Bar History Museum Gift Shop, I purchase a digital collectible: a limited-edition Bournty® wrapper for my custom-made Bournty® chocolate bar. It's a virtual memento of my time in the sweet, sweet Bourntyverse™ that I now wish I could call home.

In the designated social space at the Bournty® Bar Bar, I strike up conversations with fellow Bournty® bar enthusiasts from around the world. We discuss our favorite Bournty® memories, exchange tips on customizing the perfect Bournty® bar, using the Bournty® Bar Bar Advertmotes we bought in the Bournty® Bar History Museum Gift Shop to express the way we feel to each other.

One of the highlights of my journey is visiting the virtual Bournty® NFT Consumption Spaces (formerly the Bournty® Art Galleries). The media products within provide fascinating twists on the Bournty® brand identity. I now understand the undeniable speculative commercial value that conditional ownership of an NFT grants me. The unique blockchain identifiers - that can in no way be replicated, subdivided or copied - allow my avatar to look at exotic dark-red landscapes and engage in simulated ogling of videos of women dressed in clothes that look like Bournty® bars. It is a non-fungibly beautiful reminder of the real and virtual love that we all share for Bournty®.

As my simulated day comes to an end, I make my way to the Bourntyverse™ exit. I can't help but admire my Bournty®-themed avatar - the coconut helmet and dark chocolate cape make me feel like a superhero in the Bourntyverse™'s Bournty® world. I make my avatar smile. It's been a truly immersive and positive-engagement-generating experience, a digital journey through a boardroom-imagined world of coconut wonders and dark chocolatey dreams. The Bourntyverse™ is a place I look forward to revisiting for many years to come.

I finished this game... I finished this game?

Honestly, I've no idea why I played all 35+ hours of it. I was, at best, having an alright time. I enjoyed Sabotage's previous game The Messenger, though soured on it when I realised it contained a big tribute to Jordan fucking Peterson.

Thankfully, the fev has clarified that they don't actually agree with Jordan Peterson which was genuinely quite a relief.


Anyway, right, look. Big big fan of a dev making their own universe and setting all their games within it. Love that shit. Areas, characters, and music from The Messenger appear in Sea Of Stars, which acts as a prequel of sorts. But also, if you didn't know that, you wouldn't ever learn it apart from me telling you, so there you go.

So yeah, maybe my bar of what I enjoy from a turn based RPG has been lifted too high by Persona 5, but I'm fine that I spent all my time playing this, but wouldn't necessarily tell you to rush out and play it now. A learning experience for all.

SPOILERS when the ninja woman takes her mask off and looks like that for the rest of the game it kept constantly giving me the creeps ok cheers

Cannot believe I'm "into" competitive Pokémon in 2023, good lord what a mess.

Also cannot believe the Pokémon Company haven't shut this shit the fuck down

I run a Toxapex and I call it "Smelly Tent"

God help me, I did it again.

What am I supposed to tell you? If you're curious about how the game is on the Switch, it's a fine version. It's a quick, cheap remaster, and unless you have a specific interest in playing this game on a Switch, you're no better off than you would be running it on Dolphin. It lacks the Wii version's pointer controls, though, again, there is some crude motion control support. Weirdly, the widescreen presentation is far better than the new version of 2, with all assets displaying correctly. I can respect where their priorities lay.

What was interesting about doing another playthrough so soon after the first was how the game remains interesting for repeat visitors. The developers were aware they were making a short game for a console with a very limited library, and there are rare occurrences that you'll only see under certain conditions. Ignoring a landing site for several days means that grubs will eat your bridges, and predators will return, and some of the weirder enemies are reserved for that. My approach changed, too. At times, I was more ruthlessly committed to acquiring as many ship parts as I could in a day. On other days, there weren't 24 hours worth of parts to chase after, and I could spend my time farming Pikmin and taking on the weird, optional enemies. The experience drew me towards riskier decisions, but I didn't like myself for it. My willingness to see dozens of Pikmin, sacrificed by a High Score hungry commander. This wasn't the canon playthrough. I'd earned this opulence.

Pikmin is a great fit for the Switch. Finding a spare 20 minutes in your day, and coming back from sleep mode to chip away at the campaign, is really appealing. I've been umming and erring about the idea of going back to Wii U Pikmin 3, while I'm still on this Pikmin kick, but I can't pretend it's going to be nearly as casual or convenient to go back to. Along with Super Metroid and Ocarina of Time, Pikmin 1 is one of those monolithic Nintendo titles that I'd suggest any big fan of the company ought to have played, and I'm really glad that from GameCube, to Wii, to Wii U, to Switch, they've ensured that first-time players have always had the chance to play it. If it's still on your list of games you've been meaning to get around to, it's a great opportunity to sort that out.

In life, we rarely get a chance to follow an art from its genesis to its conclusion. At the arse-end of history, we're often doomed to look at such things retrospectively - surrealism, rock & roll, postmodernism, the New York School of Poets, wild west movies, whatever - and wonder what it was like to evolve and ultimately ascend to atrophia in tandem with a creative movement.

Titanfall 2 is, therefore, a rare privilege. A game that has, with the retrospective power of its seven-year existence, definitively marked the end of an era that was carved out by Call of Duty thirteen years prior. Halo, Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Borderlands, Wolfenstein, the lot - I feel like it's fair to say that Titanfall 2 encompasses its own movement, the nature of its existence, and all the reasons it could not continue - where do you go beyond time? If you'll forgive the incredibly fucking pretentious analogy, Titanfall 2 is not unlike Let It Be, the final Beatles album that put the cap on a half-century of rock. (You could probably extrapolate this complete nonsense further and suggest that the corporate self-awareness of popstars popping up in Warzone and Fortnite mirrors the ironic MTV garage grunge of Kurt Cobain, but hey! - that would probably sustain an equally stupid Backloggd essay of its own.)

What makes Titanfall 2 rarer still is that it’s an ending to a now-lost artform that began with the same creator years prior. Infinity Ward may have respawned, but they were, at this conclusive point in time, the same unit of creation from 2003. Impressionism was started by guys like Claude Monet, but was drawn (painted?) to a close by Van Gogh, a conscious will that passed down a century, their art thankfully/tragically unaccelerated by lack of commercial interest. They say an artwork is never finished, but fortunately for us the future is far more financial than we originally projected - artistic movements can now be efficiently condensed into a decade of fiscal quarters. We can watch an artform rise and fall upon the plateau in the time it takes to finish a high school diploma, and that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing; just a thing that happens now. Let it be.

Sure, other militaristic first-person dual-weapon wall-running action shooters with automatic health recovery have come after Titanfall 2, but they're essentially invalid imitations, impressionist postcards that we pick up in the lobby of the Van Gogh Museum. They're the consequences of something that's gone for good. Never to return, for better and for worse.

If the Resi 4 remake was the sequel to the Resi 2 remake, here's your spiritual successor to 3.

I don't know anybody who wanted a remake of the deeply forgettable Separate Ways campaign. After the pleasant surprise of the 4 remake, I think most were just quietly awaiting more of that reasonably enjoyable content. It's maybe a little more faithful than we'd hoped. This is largely a story about Ada's journey from canon cutscene to canon cutscene. The appeal of this confident, elusive spy, run into the ground as we see her do all the same shit as Leon and respond to an on-screen hookshot prompt as she sees him choked by Mendez. She must think this guy is a right fuckup. Every time she bumps into him, he's shit outta luck.

Look - I like Ada. She's a fun idea, and a good wildcard to toss into the mix after the wholesomeness of the Resi 1 cast. She makes a rotten protagonist, though. Her whole appeal is tied to popping up out of the shadows to turn the tables at the most exciting moment. Watching her do all the standard civvie Resi shit is rubbish. She's supposed to be above mixing herbs. Giving her a canon campaign (Assignment: Ada does not count) was a tacky idea to make the PS2 port look cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Mikami put God Hand into production entirely out of spite for it.

- ̗̀ New ̖́- Separate Ways also attempts to address a problem with the main campaign; the annoying fans who pointed out a couple of memorable omissions from the original. They're back, sweaty, and waiting for your applause.

Ada's secret agent role encourages the team to lean harder into everyone's favourite new aspect of the remake; THE STEALTH! Yup. Get excited to enter more rooms with ganados facing the wrong way for ages. There's a whole bunch of them here. Ada also gets some Spy Vision shit, where she can make footprints glow blue to solve a couple puzzles. It's nothing. Don't pretend you've got an idea, Resi 4 remake DLC.

The campaign does pick up after a brutally dull opening. It isn't a complete slog throughout, and as pandering as they often felt, the old Resi 4 bits did make me smile a couple of times when they were brought in as a surprise. There's a wee coda at the end that leads into 5 a little more cohesively too. I'm not telling you not to play it, just that you totally don't need to. The best addition here is easily Ada and Wesker in Mercenaries, but you get that as a free patch anyway.

The Resi remakes have been Capcom's safest bet for chasing the Triple A crowd for the last decade. Monster Hunter and Street Fighter have a lot of fans, but they're not appearing in the "Similar customers also bought" tab when you put The Last of Us: Part I in your cart. I'm sure they want to keep going, but I don't know if they can confidently put as much money into a 4K Steve Burnside model. They might be stuck pandering to the hardcore fans, and I really can't get excited about a faithful remake of 0. I don't know. Is it worth speculating? This is me writing a lukewarm review because I was let down after the high standards set by the Resident Evil 4 remake. We're in unprecedented territory, here.

It feels like whoever came up with this wrote the full production plan when they were 8. Titanfall 2 is about running across walls, doing slides and being best friends with a giant robot. There are hallmarks of linear, cinematic American action games that I don't typically have much taste for, but the game is so robust that you're typically doing the wildest stuff entirely of your own volition. The creativity and vision behind each new setpiece really justifies the instances where the campaign needs to limit your freedom, too. It's a bit of a buzz to see a game so clever being so riotously dumb.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the single-player campaign is only really an extra. Titanfall's primary focus is on its online multiplayer. There wasn't even an offline mode in the original game, which audiences had a strong distaste for at the height of Xbox's yuckiness in the early 2010s. Its mechanics weren't established with a story mode in mind, but you'd never guess that from playing it. Respawn Entertainment was founded by ex-Infinity Ward staff, who had plenty of experience with elaborate, cutting-edge setpieces through the Modern Warfare games. Titanfall 2 is them challenging themselves to show what they can accomplish without the restraints of the Call of Duty franchise or Activision's investor-focused release schedule. They show they can make Valve-quality games. This is the kind of campaign I'm still dreaming Nintendo will make for Splatoon someday.

Titanfall 2's ideas are wild. One level takes place on an elaborate manufacturing line, constructing houses that you take cover in, as they're carried down the track, turning on their sides and upside-down as they have new walls and objects welded on by giant machines. Another has you explore a ruined facility, shifting between two different time states at will, using either the past or present version to open secured areas or erase wrecked debris in your path. It does these things so slickly, you can't begin to imagine what's going on under the hood, and the campaign never takes a break to do a sensible idea.

My main reason for replaying this was as a spectacle piece for my Steam Deck. I've had the thing for over a year now, and Titanfall 2's just been a thing I've come back to every now and then when I've felt like an FPS. It's very silly that handhelds have gone from the 3DS to something like this in such a short space of time. I can't imagine myself ever going back to a console version either. Not unless they patch-in gyro controls, anyway. How did I ever play this with analogue sticks alone? There's so much movement and distant enemies all around you, it's impossible to keep track of targets without intricate, instinctive control over your subtlest actions.

I haven't dabbled with the multiplayer since the PS4 version. I'm aware it's just as good as the single-player. I just don't feel it would be respectful to come into PC FPS servers on a handheld. Certainly not years after launch, where it's just the hardcore fans still trucking on. Like attending a funeral dressed in an inflatable duck costume.

Titanfall 2 is frequently very, very cheap, and even cheaper if you're not someone who thinks Star Fox Zero has pretty good controls, actually, and you're happy with a gyroless PS4 copy. Even if it really doesn't look like your thing, you probably ought to give it a try. You don't want to look like the guy who was too clever to have ever seen Terminator 2.

Very glad I took a chance on this. Really loved it. I don't get to replay games as much as I'd like, especially when they're big new AAAA releases - but I realised right near the end of this that since I'd replayed every mission before completing it (sometimes multiple times) I'd essentially played this twice already. Just goes to show, you should always make your repetitive tedium optional, folks!

So yeah, it got its hooks in me completely. I even got into the customizing. And I'm eager to see how the alternate story branches go. A great game! I played a whole new game on my Playstation 5 and I loved it! How often do you get to say THAT?

A fascinating little oddity that feels more like a fan's student project than something John Carmack himself created on his week off, but it's nonetheless a decent way to waste away a 3-hour conference call if you want to round out your Doom bibliography.

This is probably the closest thing we'll ever get to experiencing Carmack's legendary Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and it's amusing to hear what dialogue written by him sounds like - clearly the funniest things he can conceive of are unicode string formatting oddities and luddite computer-users failing to follow basic security protocol.

The game lacks the trademark early-iD attitude that came from guys like Romero and Tom Hall, but I don't think there'd be much room for dumb hijinks or Alice in Chains MIDIs in a turn-based RPG for Java flip-phones. I'm tempted to check out DOOM II RPG and Orcs & Elves now and find out if there's any other fun to be mined from the "Doomguy's Etrian Odyssey" format.

animal crossing finally concludes its slow and steady descent into a list of chores served alongside a heaping helping of bread and circuses. the experience of playing new horizons is closer to playing a dead mmo than it is to any sort of zen-like getaway game.

animal crossing has always had a nasty hook monster but it is no longer lurking around the small town, showing its face to you rarely and at a distance. now, it has picked up a beach-front property and firmly moved in. it is now the most important resident, and by god, if you do not play by its rules, you are not going to have a good time.

this is the greatest game of all time

never played it but its fucking named dave the diver
ur kidding urself if im not giving this at least 4.5 stars from the get go
im gonna name my kid after dave
the diver will be their middle name
even if it's a girl they'll be named dave idc
if they come out as trans i wouldn't care either, they're gonna be named after the greatest game of all time

that ive never played
god this is awesome