Pokémon Platinum is a title that resounds loudly when Pokémon discussion comes around, it is a game that has gotten through every stage of fanaticism, with it being the improved version of seemingly one of the worse received and sluggish titles from everyone having played this specific one in the their childhood years thus marking what a Pokémon game would be forever for them. It's truly a generational game that has inflicted in the life of many people to get into the franchise to stay or video games in general... Or so I've heard. People all around me always have considered Platinum to be between one of the best Pokémon, if not just Nintendo DS games of all time and of course that going into this I was a bit excited, maybe they were right all along and I've always adverted myself to the thought of it being that good ever since I first tried out at the ripe age of eight years old... And I simply couldn't feel more disappointed by the end result.

Pokémon Platinum Version is the next big step in the Pokémon series of games, we're talking generational leap from the Game Boy family of handheld consoles to the new and shining, 3D-capable double-screened for double action Nintendo DS, a marvelous invention when it came to the ergonomics of handheld gaming as a whole and a series of handhelds that Pokémon would pretty much see as a home for the next decade or so. With it came completely new graphics mixing 3D objects with the tile-based sprites we've seen before, dynamic day/night cycle due to the clock functionality built into the system and a whole new screen to menu your menus easier I guess, they really haven't found an actual good utility for this one yet so it plays more like just your average GBA game with better graphics and sound.

So, with the new capabilities of the hardware you would expect that they make good use of them and actually bring the experience to a new standard, maybe this new Sinnoh region is vast with never-seen before Pokémon coupled with classics from Generations I-III coming back, right??? The answer would be, kinda? Only one of those is really correct and none of it is really in a good way.

Platinum marks the first Pokémon game to be abnormally long compared to its predecessors, and very little of it is actually used in any sort of meaningful way that would excuse it being this long. The whole game took me 41 hours and with having done a lot of optional stuff, I didn't skip out on any battles nor did I spend time grinding, so I reckon it probably wasn't just me being slow but the amount of padding there is throughout the whole journey, with routes being extra long with trainers that have some killer (hard) teams with little to nearly no time to actually spend in the cities and towns you visit, in Emerald it felt like the location of certain places you needed to go to were in very remote areas but in Platinum it feels like everything is a remote area. It's long, drawn out and so boring because out of those hours spent going everywhere only like 10 of it are actual things of substance relating to the story with Team Galactic and Cyrus, and the story isn't that good to begin with, it has the bare minimum of actual nuance to it and by the end of it I just simply couldn't care no matter what they did, I much prefer how the story was lied down in Emerald with it being spread out through the entire game and the resolve of it tying into the ending and stuff like that.

It being so long could've been somewhat excused if the usage of Pokémon wasn't so badly spread throughout, there's barely any familiar Pokémon from past Generations that aren't just Geodude, Magikarp and Zubat and every single trainer uses the same pool of like 20 mons while Team Galactic goons use the same pool of like 4 (four) mons, by the end of the game I had to check my Pokédex to see if I was actually lacking gray matter in my brain to make me forget about it but in reality is that there isn't nearly as much interesting wild Pokémon, and most of the Pokémon that were interesting enough came from the Ace Trainers that you fight in said long routes. (One particularly interesting one was Tropius being used in one of the teams, Tropius is such an underrated and unknown Pokémon that I was legitimately surprised, but it was an NPC's team so it's not like I could do anything about it) And then when you look at the Pokémon that Generation IV added you notice how bad is the variety of types is and how some like fire type Pokémon are simply neglected if it isn't Chimchar, it's probably my least favorite Regional Dex so far as there's simply nothing to it.

By the end of it, with the help of hacked Rare Candies and abusing the hell out of a measly 1.5x fast forward button the geniuses over at MelonDS headquarters crafted for me, I challenged the Pokémon League with a team at around level 50-ish, I struggled, hard. I know I'm not the best at Pokémon battling in general and I think my methods are a bit meat-headed when it comes to strategy but I didn't think it was that bad, and as an amazing surprise, by the end of it... Turns out I was underleveled. So I had to spend the entire Elite Four battles playing like a little bitch reviving and healing and waiting for the numbers to give me their blessing and coincide perfectly so that my damn Whiscash would actually use Surf once and for all. The game not only is 35 hours long minimum but to add insult to injury is also grindy as hell if you actually wanna have a slight margin of error when it comes to beating it, it's no surprise that leveling up anything past level 35 via natural means in Pokémon sucks and it's a long process but damn, you need to be around 65 to actually comfortably get past all the Elite Four challenges and that's just so much adding onto the pile of miseries this game has held for me.

In general I don't think I've ever felt more bored playing a Pokémon game, or a RPG in my life. Nothing really shines through, the story and characters are nothing otherworldly as people like to think it is, it's slow and has no variety when it comes to its monsters in this monster catching video game, and it's sluggish and slow as all hell. But hey, bonus points for the music department because damn did they pop off for some tracks here and there.

100 Asian Cats is a pretty normal and common hidden object puzzle game, your objective is to find the 100 kittens hidden in a pretty but sorta generic lineart artwork of a Chinese temple, I'd say it looking rather generic adds to the point of having to find these cats in a bunch of normal-looking shapes, and it works fine at that so I don't really mind it. I just wish that in general the feeling of finding these cats was a bit more satisfactory than just rapid-fire unlocking Steam achievements, something like portions of the artwork getting colored as you complete those specific sectors would've done the job, but I mean, I don't think I was expecting more of 100 Asian Cats.

There's also a DLC that adds a whole new level, this time based on a more urban-looking area that more or less looks like a corner store/restaurant, I wish you didn't have to pay for that because I personally didn't, but it looks neat enough I guess.

Kingdom Hearts II is a game I've been really eager to try out, its phenomenal reception and just the constant chatter surrounding the game really sells it. It's kinda funny how you have to go through two games, one pretty average and the other bad to get to this point and to some it's quite literally impossible to go back to the first game, me included. And that's simply a testament on how much they improved the formula this time around, In reality, Kingdom Hearts II feels and plays like Kingdom Hearts on crack.

Everything in this game is like trifold what it was in the first one, so much more content, more combat and movement abilities, more worlds to go through and a generally more cohesive and better story overall, it's really just crazy playing this and then going back and realizing how much the scale of things have changed and how much of it was augmented literally in the same generation of consoles, and this all makes for a pretty timeless game that has aged stupidly well and that is a marvel to play nowadays, with it being really charming, polished and fun as hell.

The updated combat makes up for a large learning curve of combos and different builds you can make for pretty much any occasion, something neat is that even the most seemingly bad abilities have a use and a certain level of potential to it, making them all very important overall and crucial for practically reaping through the game with the newly added Forms system that inclines you to approach combat differently as activating them usually restricts you from using certain other abilities or having a focus on things like Magic or Limits, and if you use these more than enough you eventually get Growth abilities that'll carry the enhanced high-jump or dodges to Sora's usual gameplay, kind of pushing you to think about using them more often than not.

Being able to properly tweak the tactics of your team in a hierarchy of using certain attacks more often, every now and then and less often is neat too, makes the party members feel a whole lot more useful than they ever did in past entries, although overall I wish giving them AP was way more worth it, because I'm pretty sure everyone just stacked up like 100 AP for Sora and then left Goofy and Donald in the 30's, can't say I didn't, but it's pretty much due because of the range of abilities you can actually have with Sora meanwhile the other party members are always stuck with the same basic ones.

Moving onto the worlds themselves, this time around they have pretty much cherry picked the most interesting/fun worlds to play from KH1 and brought them back, like Halloween Town and Olympus Coliseum and added a plethora of new ones, with the addition of smaller bite-sized worlds that are usually more of a plot thing than compared to the rest of the worlds. That and the addition of some particularly weird ones like Port Royal (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Space Paranoids (Tron) being the first worlds based off of live-action Disney properties, but I'll take them any day over Deep Jungle, Monstro or Atlantica. Needless to say the preexisting worlds have gotten significant upgrades when it comes to actual value in cutscenes, characters or locations from these classics.

Now, it's about time I start complaining about certain things, these are in no way completely experience-tarnishing and didn't personally bother me when I played the game but are things that I recognize that could have been done better for an ultimately perfect experience. So, with Kingdom Hearts II I've always felt that this game rides off of being better than KH1 a little bit too much, almost to the point where they forgot to be better AND expand further.
Take for example the levels in this game, KH1 had a really bad case of most levels' design being really obtuse, having a lot of obstacle courses when the mobility wasn't the best and having every level be a block with adjacent blocks around it that would contain chests and other collectibles that you would have to go out of your way of getting... Kingdom Hearts II is the complete polar opposite of that.

In Kingdom Hearts II, every level/world is comprised of hallways. Every single level you can go to you can go from point A to point B without any disturbance, not even anything that would require any sort of the new mobility the game likes to show off so much, and that is honestly so disheartening, and really shifts the focus of the game from making you look around and explore the worlds to just getting to the end of the hallway to fight a boss and then nothing else, by then you've most likely already collected all chests in the area and there is little left to see, and it's truly a shame because exploring and going around in this would've been so much fun especially considering the Forms and the Growth abilities. Ironically enough, this is the first Kingdom Hearts game with a minimap that you don't really even need for exploring, as it is a menial task in this game.

Another thing that I kinda wish they'd done better was the story and the beats of it, in KH1 I understood why the original Kingdom Hearts story wasn't really the spotlight as it still was a risky move in case the game didn't sell all that well, but in here... You have a whole Chain of Memories behind you, that game was pretty much comprised of 70% original Kingdom Hearts story stuff, then you have the chance to expand upon the new characters and plot points that were already pretty much secluded to a pretty bad game, to just fall into the same formula for the second entry. I clocked in around 33 hours of playtime, and between the story taking its sweet little time drip feeding you actual original story content, having to play all of the worlds and then do it AGAIN after the first big lore dump (marking the halfway point of the game) is just insane, if the game wasn't as fun as it is this would be horrible. Then the last 5 hours is like the thing that they kept on talking about over and over during the whole game and it just doesn't feel as satisfactory as it being a constant through the game, kinda just feels like they kept everything until the end so that the final act would feel satisfactory, but to me it felt rather cheap.

Overall, Kingdom Hearts II is an amazing game with pretty good things going for it, but it's literally gracing perfection and it saddens me that this could be refined ever so slightly to make it that. But as it stands, it's a good game, and would definitely recommend. Just make sure you play on something more than Normal if you're a competent enough player, a few levels over and you're already launching nukes at the poor Heartless.

This is by far the weirdest GTA title I've ever touched. Ranging from the setting, to the missions and characters or even the promotional art, it was a weird leap from the first game but somehow a welcome one.
Grand Theft Auto 2 is the sequel to the top-down frenetic crime simulator from 1997, and this one doesn't really stray away from its roots, in paper, it's pretty much just more 2D Universe GTA, this time however it takes place in a bit more of a gritty setting as you roam the streets of the crime-ridden Anywhere City, a big metropolis consisting of various districts and different gangs per area, and gangs are the name of the game since this game revolves primarily around them.

Now, instead of just picking up whatever mission from a payphone, you're gonna have to choose one path and affiliate yourself with one gang or another to get their missions, the better the trust you have with the gangs' leader the better the prizes, and you need to rack up those points to move on to the next districts (in pure 2D GTA fashion). This makes for a fun game of testing out and getting a feel for all gangs and their missions to choose a favorite one to go with, or to have protection against police and stuff like that. Granted it's a pretty basic feature that is interesting at best, since the missions are still all very same-y and it gets boring after a while, but it's cool to see that they would later on expand on something similar with the turf wars in San Andreas.

I was able to play with both mouse and keyboard controls and with a radar mod akin to 3D Universe GTA, and that alone made it so much more bearable than the first game, albeit the arcade system of getting money to get out of the district sucks pretty bad, but it's somewhat more playable and manageable here now that there's also ways to save your progress and the fact that you don't lose the opportunity to take on jobs/missions as soon as you fail them, you can always just retry them or go ham and kill your own dudes to go and hang out with the other gang.

By the way, the dude you play as in this game is Claude Speed, not affiliated with Claude from future games (GTA3/GTA:SA), and the fact that everyone kinda fooled themselves into thinking Speed was his last name in GTA3 when they probably looked it up and it was referring to GTA2 Claude is something that I found kinda funny

Now this one's simply unnecessary. The second mission pack of Grand Theft Auto consists of a prequel of a prequel, literally just showing the protagonists of London 1969 as their younger selves and as they enter the Cartwright family of crime that they would later work for in the future, and well, that's pretty much the only real difference besides this and the previous expansion. The map's the same, cars and weapons haven't changed a bit and the only thing that's different would be the addition of a multiplayer component and new missions.

These new missions are unbearably hard. Even if only a level, most of them are time-based and really tight to get by with considering the awful tank controls and the unpredictability of the traffic and police forces.

This game is literally what it says in the tin. It's a mission pack for the first Grand Theft Auto and that means it's pretty much just more GTA, this time however, it's british.

For what it is, I think the parody of the brits is funnier than that of the 'muricans, and this being the one GTA game based on an actual place instead of a parody of said place it's funnier seeing how late 60's Britain is as gray, how the characters you play as all nearly look like offbrand The Beatles and everyone talks to you in a posh accent. I also like that the missions this time around don't revolve around racking up X amount of money/points and you just instead have to do them all to advance, the missions themselves are better and London is generally a nicer place to drive than the confusing maps of the original.

Don't give it too much credit though, this is still the first GTA after all. Fail a couple of missions and the run is over.

The very original Grand Theft Auto is somewhat of a frenetic mess that was somehow really damn impactful and controversial enough to make one of the highest-grossing video game franchises of all time, and it's funny considering how the game is as rough and outdated as it is and yet somehow retains the raunchy, comedic charm that would forge the series identity from here until forever.

Grand Theft Auto is a 1997 crime simulator with a sort of open world, and playing it nowadays feels prehistoric as it feels outdated in every regard, but mostly in the way that it is played being a top-down game with a nauseating camera panning everywhere, with missions being often times pretty hard to pull off first try, and the fact that you have to rack up points to move on with no mission retries, limited lives and practically no forgiveness as you lose yourself in the urban jungle that is Liberty City and later on San Andreas and Vice City, too. Don't get me wrong, it sucks, but it really feels like an experience to be had since every single landmark of the franchise is there somehow. The parody nature of the characters being super edgy and cursing you out for everything, the US states and cities that have been changed ever so slightly making up the Liberty City, San Andreas and Vice City we know now, and just the frantic nature of running over pedestrians and blowing up stuff is proper of the franchise, so even if the story is pretty much nonexistent and it was planned out to be like an arcade game over everything, it's crazy to see how much it would grow from this.

Also, pretty uncontested point but the soundtrack is so damn good for no reason at all, they really had an entire radio goin' on before actual good controls lmao

Eliza is a soon-to-be relevant and very interesting visual novel about artificial intelligence and machine learning that practically reads like what I would imagine a Black Mirror visual novel would be like, just much more realistic and down to earth taking in context of current technological advances. Based on a semi-dystopian Seattle, we are placed in the shoes of one yet unknown Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey as she works as a "proxy" for the Eliza counseling system, basically, she reads out ChatGPT prompts to clients of the service in a desperate attempt from the big corporation Skandha to push forward AI-powered mental health assistance with a liiiittle touch of human interaction in-between. And of course, Eliza sucks.
The counseling system barely does anything outside of listening into the conversation, asking a few redundant questions and then recommending medications and AR/VR experiences suited for the users' needs, and yeah, it's a pretty big testament against the usage of AI in conversational or counseling practices, the language model will have problems here and there and because there isn't any sort of empathy or logical thinking behind it, most sessions are to no avail because of this and there's always the feeling of wanting to say something from one's soul to another, but then Eliza providing the most cookie-cutter questions of all time.

It's a pretty interesting argument to make the center of a visual novel of this kind, with it being fully voiced and super well presented with amazing art for an individually developed one and with an actual message to deliver out there, it saddens me to say that it falls flat when it comes to telling its story, being kinda repetitive and boring and kinda overstaying its welcome. Characters range from being unlikeable to just plain and without much substance at all, including our protagonist which has had a conflicting past and is now suffering living with depression... A lot of it is very subdued and there's no real emotional impact as the novel would expect it to, infuriating knowing that there is real human soul behind it, and some of the struggles presented by the many sessions you do are pretty real.
And it pains me to realize that the novel never really works on getting a true instance on the advent of AI as an unethical, personal information harvesting and fed tool, it insists on being pretty open-ended and up to whoever's playing it and has pretty much no catch in a narrative sense, which would be fine if every ending wasn't literally what it says on the tin when you get to it, with no real resolve or way of knowing how our actions determined the future of Eliza, the world or how does Evelyn get to live with the burdens of her past that they like to tease so much throughout the runtime of the novel.

It's all pretty half-assed and kinda disappointing, I'm glad people can like it and get some perspective on how things are so royally fucked in real life, but for the rest of us that have been on this pond for so long, I think it's fair to complain about the lack of depth when touching these subjects that passed on to be so important in cyber life. Or just life in general.

Aperture Tag is the Portal spin-off I never knew I needed. Portal 2 brought to us a new and quite dynamic puzzle element, coming from old Aperture were the Repulsion and Propulsion gels, (the "blue" and "orange" ones respectively) these added a whole new layer to the mechanics of that game and the design in testing chambers, being able to fling yourself at high velocities and end it all in a high jump to get to a far off surface really added a new level of variety and passed to cement itself into the rest of the chambers going forward. This feature was heavily inspired by Tag: The Power of Paint which was a small game made as a project carried by a group of students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, in that game you also use the ability to paint surfaces to do practically the same you'll later do in Portal 2, and that's also where I guess this mod got the inspiration for its name.

Aperture Tag opens up as your usual Portal story, although with tidbits more of lore here and there (which I'd argue isn't its strongest fort), you meet another Personality Core, Nigel, which has way more of a meta personality as it a bit less miserable albeit less funny than the main game's Wheatley. And then, past all that, you head onto the premises to take on some good ol' puzzlin'. This time though, instead of a Portal Gun you encounter a Paint Gun.

So, by now it's obvious that paint is the name of the game, with your newly-adquired Paint Gun you're meant to solve puzzles akin to the main game with the powers of repulsion, propulsion and the Source Engine, as you use the attributes of the different gels to get through the levels, you're also dealing with the physics engine and seeing more optimal ways of doing the things you'll do because you have the frankly overpowered power of flinging yourself everywhere you could, I was almost able to cheese some of the more open tracks because of this and, while I haven't looked at the speedruns, I'm pretty sure someone else has exploited them further, but that just says how fun it is to be jumping around and doing all these tricks, it helps that the chambers oftentimes also require you to have to shoot cubes or other objects mid-flight to get them to move from a button. I'd say the puzzle design in this one is interestingly polished, not enough to Valve levels but it's still pretty good, it only suffers from some lack of intuitiveness in some chambers where they make you do some maneuvers that I simply could not imagine ever being used officially so I had to look 'em up.

Only downsides with this mod would be that it kinda gets drawn out for a bit when not a lot of new interesting mechanics get introduced (besides the red death barriers or the new grills that limit which type of gel you're able to use) and the fact that you actually have to pay to play it, which is a very big discussion around this game and while I think they should be allowed to put a price on it if Valve allows it, the quality and duration of the mod leaves to be desired based on price. The reception would've probably be a bit more lenient if they didn't have to pay for the experience.

We Love Katamari is a sequel to 2004's Katamari Damacy (and in this case, a remaster following Katamari Damacy Reroll released back in 2018), and what to say. It's a game made out of pure love result of the great reception of the first one, hence the title of We Love Katamari, and as a sequel it's not a game that tries too hard to be different or supersede the original as it was never intended to, it quite literally is just more Katamari Damacy for the enjoyment of those who were obsessed with the rolling puzzle-action gameplay, the bizarre and weird yet funny and compelling story, or that were hooked on the varied soundtrack mix of Shibuya-kei, Lounge or Jazz Pop music tracks.

We Love Katamari is, by all means, a love letter and an important message to the video game industry where the key is to not fix what isn't broken, just build on and improve on it. This game is longer, has more levels and a lot of them are way more interesting challenge levels than the first one, the soundtrack keeps the same vibe while adding a new twist with some Swing or Bossa Nova tracks here and there and the world you've gotta roll up in some levels is way more detailed and even more expansive when you're big enough to roll everything, features a bunch of landmarks in our world with some other funny things that really make you wonder how much time and effort did they put in placing each little thing that puts the whole world together, and that when you're big enough you're simply able to roll over.

It was, by far, a very charming and even challenging experience to have, with every single stage being different enough to be interesting and the surrounding world around you being substantially different and feeling way more alive than Damacy's, only caveat would be in collecting all Cousins as some of these appear in very long levels and it's not like you can't really roll them up and then opt out, but then for the rest, it's pretty much a straight upgrade.

Reroll + Royal Reverie besides just being a remaster that makes the game look greater, adding in new shading that fits great with the low-poly oftentimes pixelated graphics of the original, and finally being in 60 FPS constantly, besides it adds a new mode where you get to play memories of the King when he was as small as the Prince and used to roll up things too, these levels are fine for the most part, but feels like there was more to be explored with maybe some As Large As Possible level here and there where we could see another version of the same world we rolled up as the Prince? The whole mode was Monkeycraft's thing so I get why they didn't do it and just stuck to lesser, smaller levels but it still would've been fun as it's the one exclusive thing to this port and probably the most original content this series has gotten in a good while.

Here's a hopin' they fix up and remaster Me & My Katamari sometime soon! Would hate to have to wait so much for it though, in an ideal world Bandai Namco would care enough to pair it up with Beautiful Katamari as well since that game is pretty unaccesible on a console that sold terribly in Japan and has DLC stages that would be cool to have built-in, but one can dream... And that's what We Love Katamari is all about! Granting wishes! How ironic.

Playthrough was done in co-op mode in the story with my girlfriend, so how the game accomodates to two-player gameplay is practically how I experienced it this time. But did all the Free Play and Hogwarts stuff myself since she hated the experience that bad.

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 is a game that I was very wary about. I remember not liking it very much when I was little and playing it on my Xbox 360, and hell, I love LEGO games so to find one that was a complete turn off was and is still very worrying to think about, and after FOUR whole better-than-average-but-not-for-much fully featured wizard movies (my reaction to those in my Letterboxd page, by the way.) I was starting to feel real dread, these movies are repetitive to no end and have a minuscule amount of an actual World and a pretty small selection of notable characters to use in a series of games which prides itself of letting you play as whoever you want, anywhere you want, but fine. I am a whole ass adult by now, it can't be that bad to fathom now, can it?

So, in my previous LEGO game review about Indy 2 (which I might or might not have been way too harsh on), I was keen on how those levels were pretty small, had no real significance and a big chunk of the game feels like filler because Traveller's Tales was just that bored and sort of remade the first one, now apply that logic to fully-fledged levels spanning 4 boring ass movies, and now you have a game that makes LEGO Indiana Jones 2 look like a timeless masterpiece in comparison.
And it's truly a shame, really, this game could've had so much more potential as the next big stepping stone for LEGO games, but the fact that they opted for a series with a world so hollow and so fundamentally flawed is probably what brought this game so down and made it so tedious to go through at all, and if it wasn't good for someone who had gone and watched all the movies beforehand, I really couldn't imagine for someone that isn't even familiar with the Wizarding World in the first place.

There's so much repetitiveness attributed to the gameplay loop making you go to the same places inside Hogwarts, using the same characters, and casting the same spells you use over and over and over again, wand-based skills really make it so dull compared to everything else before.
Characters aren't unlocked as you play the game so after you're done with the story levels you have to painstakingly go out of your way to save up, collect and buy for characters that will be useful for the 100% completion marks, oftentimes out of order so you can prioritize getting at least one dark magic user before you do anything else, having to scourge Hogwarts for some red bricks/Extras that'll aid you into getting all the pieces of the House Crest or finding the more hidden Character Tokens, and this part of the game is what I'd even dare to say is kinda fun and carries a lot of the experience, this is the very first LEGO game to feature a fully-playable expansive hub world that isn't just a gateway to enter levels, and I gotta admit that after getting all your spells and some characters necessary to do certain things, going around Hogwarts and getting everything that has been a tease all throughout the playthrough is satisfying, until it's not, and you have to resort to checking out places one by one if you're missing a Student in Peril or a Golden Brick anywhere, some sort of minimap or any notice that you've done everything you could in a room would be fine but by that point you're pretty much done with the game, so I'll let it slide.

A whopping 167 characters, (most of which are filler because the saga never really moves to other characters besides Harry Potter and the sometimes secondary lead or antagonist idk) and I only really used Tom Riddle because a lot of the characters are either virtually the same or just worse, making Free Play kinda sucky for the best part since it was actually just replaying most of the level with only this one character, oftentimes also missing something so I would have to go back in and do it all again.

The splitscreen being kinda messy and controls suddenly glitching out and not working, the constant back and forth between having to check a minimap I found on the internet made for the castle and playing the game because that damn layout doesn't make a lick of sense, the constant disappointment in self for having to bear the fact that you are playing A Harry Potter Game, Harry Potter Himself made by one of the evilest of evil in the planet (I wanna clarify that I bought my copy of both 1-4 and 5-7 through Humble Bundle and chose to give my money to charity instead of Warner Bros.) and it all makes it a pretty miserable experience and probably my least favorite LEGO game to date, every other one that's also considered bad is somehow more fun than this pile of nothingness.

Blue Shift is yet another expansion of Half-Life. This time around, instead of playing as a HECU soldier you play as the common security seen in the Black Mesa facility, more specifically Barney Calhoun, a character we see around the 10 second mark trying to enter his designed sector in the original Half-Life and then never again. A funnily yet odd choice for a protagonist this time around, seen as how security guards in the game are pretty boring, only really standing in places and being lookouts then always being victim of the Marine invasion onto the facility and dying, and well, it's not like this game makes them any less boring.

This game truly feels like a Half-Life expansion in the way that it is simply more Half-Life. Opposing Force had a lot of things different than the original, new arsenal of weapons, some new mechanics and enemies to take on (and mind you this was two years before Blue Shift released, and one if you take into account this was supposed to be a Dreamcast expansion), yet Blue Shift features little to no different content than the original, making it kind of disappointing to play with the same weapons in a bite-sized version of Half-Life.

But, for what they didn't get to do when it came to new features they doubled in for level design. After three years of GoldSrc being out, I'm guessing the peeps over at Gearbox had a very clear idea of how to use the engine fairly efficiently, and in return we got a very polished and more updated look of the industrial insides of Black Mesa, there's clever puzzling here and there and they accommodate fairly well to the game having you moving NPCs from place to place.

So the game is just like Half-Life but updated and shorter and a bit more boring, what's not to like.

Playthrough was done using the Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition mod pack for the game.

Silent Hill 2 is a touchstone in the survival horror genre, period. A game that in its short time does everything across the board pretty much perfectly, and a master class on how psychological horror, subtle storytelling and symbolism can go so well together to make the most immersively rich experience possible. And is overall a massive jump over its PSX predecessor.

While 1999's Silent Hill has way more focus on classic themes of the occult to tell its horror story, being quite literally the story of how the town of Silent Hill came to be and is showing of the many paranormal qualities of the town, and in that game Silent Hill was pretty much like a random nightmare world taking into account it wasn't the main protagonists' personified guilt and distress... But then came Silent Hill 2, a game that is so much more character-focused, leaving behind the occult topics to shower us with a vision of the town literally adjusted to our main protagonist, James Sunderland, some man who we don't quite know anything about, making you figure out yourself the story of recurrent characters such as Angela, Eddie or the mythical Pyramid Head, and when you realize that the reason this version of the accursed town is so different than the one Harry Mason would experience, it's when you realize why this game is so good at telling you the story of its characters, and it was all made super ahead of its time.

Leaving aside the story, because this is one of those games where you really have to go in blind or else you'll be spoiling yourself of one of the most immersive and suspenseful experiences in all of gaming the game pretty much lives to the standard that is Making The Second Game In Your Franchise Play So Much Better Than The First One™️, Silent Hill 2 offers some new stuff here and there without straying too much from its roots, and it basically plays like a smoother version of the first game. Allowing you to do stuff like running while attacking with any sort of light melee weapons or, exclusive to this version of the game, being able to get rid of those abhorrent tank controls from the get-go.
Nothing too big in that department, but when you look around and see how nice the environments look for a 2001 PS2 game and how the immersive and gloomy soundtrack masterfully crafted by Akira Yamaoka sets the mood for any situation (and is so good even to listen outside of the game), you truly do notice how much they did to capture a timelessly grim aesthetic that will probably never phase out considering the current state of the franchise.

Silent Hill 2 is a game i regret not have played any sooner, and while I can't say every single one of my expectations about this so highly regarded legendary title were met, I can still appreciate a work of art made with so much meaning and spirit behind it, and how it managed to be one of the most famously influential horror video games of all time. It also nearly made me cry, and that's wild considering I could probably count the times in my life where a piece of media was so moving that I could nearly feel myself tearing up in its last moments, a must play for absolutely everyone, even now considering the advancements of the refined, fan-made (and free!) Enhanced Edition mod for the PC version of it.