Warcraft 3 was a massive part of my childhood, hell, my life in general, and I am proud of that. Be it the memorable story campaigns, all the fucking around in melee, or at least a thousand hours spent in the editor, it's a game that has stuck with me ever since dad first showed it to me when I was barely even five. It's the whole damn reason I begged for my first PC. As a kid, it took me a while to actually find out about the World Editor, and once I did, it was fucking mind-blowing. A few years later, I found out about all the different maps, models, spells, campaigns by other people online, and I was even more awestruck. I made my own maps too, most of them sucked and were never finished, but I didn't care. I even remember once making a bot match with all the opponents named after my school bullies to vent my frustrations.
Yeah, I'm reminiscing about myself here, but I think a great game should provide either a strong and captivating world/narrative, a deep gameplay loop with hours upon hours worth of fun, or a solid amount of ways for player expression in ways the developers may not even predict. Warcraft 3 managed to excellently achieve all of the above, and has an active community even two decades after it's release. If that doesn't earn it its place as one of the greatest videogames of all time, I don't know what else can.

And with all that said, Reforged is sadly the biggest middlefinger such a game could ever receive. Almost any credit I can give to it is solely due to the fact it's on top of a fantastic game, but that too is gimped, because Reforged actually removed features that were there for ages. Extremely slow patching has somewhat fixed this, but that's no excuse.
Old Battle.net? Gone. All your ranks and levels from there? Promised to be ported over, has yet to actually happen.
Custom Campaigns? Gone, not brought back until three years later. These tend to be massive projects that can easily require up to hundreds of hours to make, and here Reforged makes them unplayable for three whole years.
Tournaments? Ranks? Ladder? Absolutely absent at launch, patched in years later.
Certain voice lines? Gone. That dryad line was too offensive, I guess. Or even better, because "Grom" is apparently a copyrighted word, how about some absolutely terrible splicing of original lines? (Thrall is voiced by fucking Chris Metzen, could they really not ask him for a few lines?)
Reign of Chaos balance? Gone. Everything is bound by TFT rules only, including the campaign.

If the biggest appeal of a remake is a visual upgrade, then this is a travesty in its own right. The lighting leaves much to be desired, the terrain is ugly, various effects look like a fart gas, and the original artstyle is almost completely replaced by this semi-realistic, mobile game looking mix that is generally lame and unpleasant to look at. The individual models may have some nice standouts, but this means litte in gameplay. This is an RTS, you're gonna spend most of it from a top-down perspective, and once combat starts, visual clarity and consistency is more important than ever. Reforged absolutely fails at this, it's extremely easy to get confused and lost while playing, everything easily ends up as a big blur, and not even a pretty one. Or a smooth one, because the performance is subpar too.
The original graphics are thankfully available, but there are plenty of things that have been irreversibly changed, like the menu. A menu that fucking lags all the time, because for some goddamn reason it runs on Chromium. It also often disconnects me from Battle.net even when I'm playing single-player, and I bet the seeming instability of the game is at least partly responsible.

All of this, however, isn't the biggest issue. If a shitty remake drops, people just keep with the original. Well, you (legally) cannot now. Reforged has been introduced as a patch, and due to this, all existing copies of the original are now forced to update to the Reforged edition, even if they don't actually own Reforged, so not only your original CD copy is now too downgraded by Reforged, but you are forced to download 25+ GB of graphics you cannot even use (then again, why would you...). This is the real reason Reforged deserves to be forever remembered as likely the worst remake of a video game in history. It's an insult to both preservation and fans of the original in the worst possible way.

And I'm not even mentioning all the new things Reforged promised to add, and then never did.

Reforged should be only remembered as a perfect embodiment of what is possibly the worst era in video game history so far. Not only is it an insult to the whole medium, but it's a disgusting embodiment of the treatment companies give to this industry. The fact the project was basically cut in half because some rich cunt didn't find it profitable, the fact it shits on the legacy of one of the most important games in video game history, the fact that it has lied to, mistreated and scammed not only it's current customers, but also the ones that had stuck with it for over twenty years. And somehow, even this utter pile of shit on a silver platter did little as a wake-up call to anyone. Pre-orders that lie to your face, disgusting mistreatment of developers, zero respect for video games as an art form, all is still at large with no real change in sight. And as long as the shareholders profit from it, they have no reason to stop, until even your favorite childhood game has been wrecked and milked dry of money.

Fuck you, Bobby Kotnick, the current state of Blizzard may not be entirely your fault, but you nevertheless are one of the people most responsible for it. I sincerely hope the ghost of that employee who killed herself will haunt you until the end of your miserable life.

There are two constants to internet culture: Impact font memes, and the insatiable bloodlust to ascribe solid-but-unconventional sonic games to an abomination against humanity. No case is more clear than with Labyrinth, which gets constantly lauded as the absolute bottom of the franchise's barrel because gamers have zero literacy and can only judge games in hypothetical voids.

Sonic Labyrinth is good.

"But you go so slow" No you don't, the spindash is right there. "But it's so wild and uncontrollable" Uh, get good? Sorry, can you say 'skill issue'? Filtrado? Shit and poop and fart?? It goes in a straight line, you curve it slightly with the d-pad, or stop it with a button. Sonic skids to stop and you have to anticipate that in advance when on the move. That's not janky controls. That's not a lack of testing. That's game design. Learn it, sillies. The contrast between slow walking and risky spindashes DEFINES Labyrinth's design economy: It's an intentional juxtaposition. You can't think of it as platforming, it's more akin to golf: Spindashes are your putt, and walking is for modifying your lay on the green. You are playing a nonstop, high-speed game of mini-golf. Every level is designed intimately around this, with wide boxed areas divided by slopes, doors, springs, and other railed transportation devices. You can't divorce control methods from the environments they are contained in; they're tangential to each other, and Sonic's controls work for these levels, period.

The REAL problem is the last few levels, which are just genuinely terrible, giving 'Labyrinth' its name, expecting you to trudge through poorly-directed mazes of teleporters and gates. 4-3 is basically unbeatable without a map and is what people THINK this game is.

Bosses ain't too hot either, but at least they're easy, with the one exception being 2-4's crab (which SUSPICIOUSLY looks like a gadget twins enemy). The Eggman robot with a feathered helmet is fucking ridiculous-looking; Robotnik commited too hard to the castle bit.

One other critique is the length and visual variety; 4 zones is kinda slim, even as someone who prefers short games. And of those levels, there's only a small amount of level palettes that they distribute between them. There's a lack of distinction per zone that creates the same sense of world other Sonic games have.

Anyway, bottom line, it's good. I stand my ground that careening through its levels is really cathartic, at least until endgame. If you took Kirby's Dream Course and made it a real-time platform game, this is it: The textbook example and a great exercise for it. I think people should have more open-mindedness for the way Sonic games are designed instead of shutting themselves off because it's dissimilar to the traditional speeds and flows that define the classics. People are fully capable of understanding divergent or intentionally discomforting gameplay schisms for so many other franchises, and I will never understand why Sonic specifically is the one who cannot be blessed with that same respect.

You know those last two Harry Potter books where it's supposed to be all dark and edgy because they "grew up with the audience" so Harry Potter and his wizard friends are teenagers with romantic subplots fighting a war and there's death but in the end, you're just experiencing something that's worse than the previous adventures because the writing sucks now and the story is still about wizards named Hornswoddle Prissipants? This is the dragon version of that.

What a deeply embarrassing nightmare of a game with a deeply embarrassing story that hits every single tired beat. After being trapped in a magic time statis rock with his goth gf Cynder for several years so that they can sneakily change the art style, Spyro is A TEENAGER now which means this game has to have Spyro flirt with Cynder, who now has dragon boobs and a wasp thin waist since she also hit puberty, while the game takes an agonizingly long time to finally get to Malefor and get this thing over with. Spyro's ability to transform into "Dark Spyro" when he's feeling strong emotions makes a return in pivotal cutscenes and it's still a stupid idea. At one point Spyro weepily says that he can't fight Cynder because "he'll have nothing left to fight for" while they run Mark Hamil through about 50 different voice filters until he's undecipherable without the subtitles. There's also a level where Spyro and Cynder walk into a village full of cheetahs and literally every single cheetah is the same character model just with palette swaps. They do the Dumbledore funeral scene with Ignitus the Red Fire Dragon and all the dragon ghosts are also all just the same character model. All of the budget went towards Elijah Wood as Spyro, Mark Hamil as Malefor, and Gary Oldman as Ignitus and it shows.

The only reason you'd own this game is either because of childhood nostalgia or because you own an HD version of the game and therefore own a collector's item. There's free flying and it was impressive at the time, but since this game's art style is so weird, Spyro and Cynder's bones just break every time these poor bastards fly around in their environment with their paper thin wings until they hit an invisible wall. The combat is back, and it's just as bad as it was in the previous two games. The one saving grace is that they gave just enough of a shit that Cynder has a completely different move set with different breath abilities, but that's really it. I'm glad I get different color breath attacks depending on which dragon I choose. I'm glad Cynder has "Fear" as a breath.

So glad we only got three games of this nonsense before they rebooted Spyro a second time and, instead of having a cult classic where the games don't sell but at least the kids on Deviantart love it, they got a minor cultural phenomenon that would immediately sell millions of copies and toys. The Legend of Spyro walked (and fell face first) so that Skylanders could run and Toys For Bob would grow enough as a studio that we'd get Spyro Reignited. The Legend of Spyro is a weird time capsule and I'm glad the series has moved on.

Assassination. Government conspiracy. Terrorism. Human trafficking. The weaponization of the human body. The gratification of murder. The unceremonious silence of death. The expression of one's own humanity through the suffering of another.

Why must the world be this way? What is it all for?

Killer7 asks all these questions and provides answers to none. It is a vessel for reflection and wandering through the unimaginable horrors of the mind. It's not that it has nothing to say, but that it presents you with an unfinished puzzle, and lets you use the loudest pieces to fill in the rest of the picture.

Games as a medium have spent so many long years trying to understand what it means to 'tell a story' and to 'be art'. Decades of writers trying to give 'the right answer' to questions while fumbling over their own cynicism, egotistical tendencies and unchecked cultural biases. We are so concerned with the desire to be perceived as 'artful' that we lose sight of making anything with truly unique meaning or power.

I don't have a damn good answer to what needs to be done differently, - I'm the most out-of-touch, lost-in-their-own-head numbskull on the planet - but if I had 1 call, we definitely need to step back and remember the strength of letting players write their own endings. Games spent their first several decades owning the vagueness of their own format, right down to the dirty FM patches and choppy polygons. There's a lost art to the ability to 'allude' to things instead of just 'showing' them, and letting the process of trying to compute the missing links be part of the game too. Everything's a tasteless puppet to specificity, excessive details, and borderline machine-generated design philosophies.

Killer7 was a note that we have so much room to grow as not just an industry, but as designers. So much untapped potential. So many strengths we haven't even become aware of. And damn, a lot of room to mature in regards to how we treat real-world tragedy and sociopolitical issues.



I couldn't think of a smart way to integrate Dan Smith into this so here's a funny