Cyberpunk is a bad game, and not because it's broken and unfinished... Cyberpunk is a bad game that also happens to be broken and unfinished. I managed to get through it purely due to entertainment value from its many, many glitches. The gameplay was nothing to write home about, just a mediocre FPS with some of the lamest RPG-lite progression I've ever seen. Oh boy, a 1% increase to bleeding, what fun and satisfying upgrades! The level design was never there, several maps are just corridor shooters or wide open areas, the enemies had almost zero AI, and the only difficulty would be when enemies are actually suddenly able to hit me (or cops, who inexplicably 2hko me every time despite my high value armor). Every boss fight basically involved me almost never being damaged: Sasquatch was the funniest in this regard, just walking forwards with a hammer presenting zero threat whatsoever as I shot him with a turret taking no damage. Oda also sticks out: he can be the final boss you face if you take certain endings, and while he has a lot of tools at his disposal, I just circle strafed him while whacking him with a baseball bat, and I won taking only two hits from him. You'd think a guy with swords, a machine gun, and active camo would be threatening but somehow he was a breeze that I won against with a literal joke strategy.

The story and characters are badly written: V is a bland protagonist who I could never care about, Johnny Silverhand is just an annoying jackass who never actually grows even though the game pretends he does (initially I liked Keanu's performance but he felt extremely monotone by the end of the game), the entire Arasaka plot is stupid... the two highlights to me were Jackie (not enough screentime) and Takemura (thankfully around quite a bit). Why on earth does the plot ultimately boil down to "go play counselor to a rich Japanese family"? The game literally advertises itself as "a heist to steal the key to immortality", but the game never actually talks about that stuff until the actual ending. The heist happens, but for the most part they never talk about it being "the key to immortality", and that's really not actually what it is. For someone who is publicly believed to be the murderer of the most powerful man in the world, V sure faces absolutely zero repercussions to that in the story! Yeah, you're dying, but that's not a consequence of stealing from Arasaka, that's a consequence of Johnny being in your head. Being considered public enemy #1 should be a game changing implication - when Ganondorf takes over Hyrule, things HAPPEN in the world and you have repercussions for your failure to stop his plot. Characters almost have no screentime whatsoever unless they're Johnny or Takemura, and I'm glad I liked Takemura because otherwise I'd have nothing here. Panam and Judy seemed okay but their actual missions are short and I didn't get invested in their sidequests.They exist for such a short time and in such inconsequential missions that while they were pleasant, there was little for me to latch onto. Characters are lucky to exist for more than three scenes, and this especially applies to THE MAIN ANTAGONISTS, Yorinobu and Adam Smasher. And as an aside: would it have killed the writers to just once NOT use shorthand for everything? Jesus christ V, say "I" ONCE! Just once! "I'M THINKING THAT" would've been a godsend to hear just once instead of the constant incessant sentence fragments starting with "thinkin that", "hearin talk that", "might have ta" etc. It's naturalistic writing to occasionally include that, the way they did it was like they were upholding some ridiculous style guide and in an attempt to make the characters sound real it made them sound like voiced text messages. A single fucking pronoun once in a while isn't gonna kill you, CDPR, I know you don't like them based your hilarious and original twitter jokes, but they are useful grammatical tools that would make your shitty writing sound better!

Add onto this the constant glitches and the boring, ugly open world that had almost no interactivity or reason to exist... if it wasn't for Cyberpunk being consistently the funniest game I've ever played (for all the wrong reasons) it is something I would've dropped immediately. My favorite glitch is probably the fact that every time there was a shootout on cars, the enemies would not spawn their guns. Every single time it happened. Jackie talked about needing to take me to a ripperdoc after the first one and I had taken zero damage because none of the enemies even HAD guns, they simply did not spawn in. They were pantomiming shooting me, but they had nothing in their arms. Motorcycle chase from the landfill? Same thing, the dudes just t-posed on their bikes and I took no damage while Takemura remarked about how a ripperdoc wouldn't be able to fix me up if I died before I got to them. Equally funny was my character's shitty hair and clothing desyncing with the character model and appearing in front of me. The hair was especially bad about this, it would somehow hover in front of my field of view, mostly obscuring it and forcing me to save and reload because this would not be fixed otherwise - I tested it, it literally lasted for two hours on one occasion. Sometimes my voice was just suddenly male V, or characters would not have their voice at all (T-Bug is the most forgettable character in the game to me because 95% of her dialogue never played - it's not her fault, this glitch just really screwed her over). I accidentally paid for a prostitute when I was on the phone progressing a mission because somehow the text popups for both conversations popped up and overlapped, and the sex scene was hilarious to witness: she kept turning into a PS1 model, her teeth and eyes would pop out, sometimes the camera was inexplicably inside V's mouth and I would see V's teeth as V opened her mouth, and then the prostitute t-posed and the world disappeared... all this and the whole time, the other phone call was still going on. Model glitches in general were very common too - Panam's arm broke and was permanently hanging diagonally backwards out from her neck for a whole mission, and V's own model broke so much it was hard to keep track. At one point V's head was broken such that it was facing down at our feet/legs, as if I were watching somebody follow me.

I'm sure they'll patch this game to make it playable eventually. But frankly I think simply patching it won't do much to improve it - to me, its issues are beyond that. You can patch a game to make it function better, but stability patches don't fix shitty story or gameplay.

The Strand Genre returns!

Really liked Cloudpunk, definitely the best Cyberpunk game I played in the past two months. Yeah, it's a bit thin on gameplay, but existing in the world, taking in the sights of the city, and going through the various stories was a satisfying time. Not every story was a winner, sometimes the voice acting wasn't great, but on the whole I enjoyed myself and thought it was a good package. My biggest gripe is that I only need to find one or two locations on the map to get the platinum trophy and I have no idea what I'm missing, so that's frustrating... gonna take a ton of aimless flying to get that and I don't care to do that right now.

I'll have to see how Hitman 3 compares when I'm done with it, but this is my favorite of the trilogy so far. A shame that Hawke's Bay is just a short prologue level rather than something a bit more elaborate when they already had the ICA facility built in for tutorial purposes... that said, every level in Hitman 2 is excellent. Even Hawke's Bay is very good for what it is, and the entire set of base game missions are all a ton of fun and the DLC expansion missions are extremely good too. Personally I don't think there's a single dud in this set of levels, and it's hard to pick a favorite. Maybe Miami or Colombia? I don't know if Mumbai is my favorite, but it does have my favorite mission story in the Kashmirian - there's something so special and satisfying about taking out your targets by making a rival hitman do all the dirty work. This game really just takes the foundation of its predecessor and runs with it, and it does that remarkably well.

Co-op is an absolute game changer for Pikmin 3, maybe the single best thing they could've added and frankly I'm surprised it wasn't in the original version. I do think it's the weakest of the three main Pikmin games, but I still love it quite a bit. The cast of characters is great and varied, I love their dynamic, but I do miss Olimar and it's a shame that he's primarily a macguffin rather than a character in this one. At least he's got plenty of data files and the new side missions. I think Pikmin 3 mainly suffers from being just a bit short... I was excited to see if the world would open up a bit more when we got blue Pikmin, but you get them so late that they're pretty much just the cleanup crew for a game that's rapidly approaching its conclusion. The final mission was also super tense and fun, so it's a shame that it's actually a normal timed scenario with a typical day-night cycle... really takes you out of the chase when nighttime hits and you just sorta abandon Olimar only to find that he's just miraculously fine the next day. Really should've put the Pikmin 2 cave mechanic in that last level to make it a one day event... maybe that was just too hard to manage for a solo player, requiring it to be done in one attempt.

On a side note, the side content is excellent. Bingo Battle, the mission mode, and the new Olimar storyline... it's amazing how much all of it adds to the overall package. Hell of a game, and to make it even better, the Piklopedia is back! The writing is always so charming and fun in Pikmin, so adding in more of it is absolutely what I wanted out of this port.

Might just have the strangest pacing I've ever seen in a video game. "Save the Elder! Defeat the Great Evil! ...go play minigames or mindlessly kill some random enemies, I dunno man. It's required content!" Imagine saving every sage in Ocarina of Time but then Zelda yells at you that you're not allowed to fight Ganondorf until you've played at least 6 combined hours of the shooting gallery and the chest minigame. Just absolutely bizarre, the only "compelling" content is the first two levels of every world and everything after is weird filler nonsense that would actually make sense to do if it happened before you already defeated the boss of the world, but it doesn't. Just a really weird game, at times I had fun but mostly it's just kinda badly designed and very clunky.

What a fun experiment this was. I like it more than I like vanilla 3D World, it just feels so focused and finely honed. A minor gripe I've always had with 3D World proper is that it's such a scattershot of ideas... all Mario games throw a lot of ideas together but 3D World didn't feel like it gelled for me. Just ah yeah, here's some fairies... they build stuff with carpentry tools... here's a bunch of cat themed stuff occasionally, and some circus/casino stuff. Oh look, Captain Toad minigame. None of this stuff is BAD, but it made the game feel thrown together (which in part disappointed me because it's basically just an iterative 3D Land sequel, and I already thought 3D Land was just okay), a lot of ideas but none fully explored beyond a cursory glance; hell, that's even why they made Captain Toad Treasure Tracker! Bowser's Fury manages to take many elements from 3D World that felt thrown together and remixes them in cohesive and thoughtfully considered ways. It's very simple to say "things are cat themed because you're in cat world", but it works, and they use the cat themed stuff to actually build memorable locations with fun challenges. I also love the unexpected Mario Sunshine sequel stuff (Jr and the paintbrush, evil ink ruining a beach vacation, shines and light), it worked really nicely and helped make the world feel full and interesting. Combine that with excellent imaginative level design, an extremely fun soundtrack, and a unique kaiju attack gimmick? Just a wonderful game all around that doesn't waste any of your time with menial filler content. Just about the picture perfect definition of all killer, no filler.

While there's definitely a valid debate to be had over Pikmin 1's static time limit and Pikmin 2's more relaxed approach, I personally prefer the time limit. It adds that extra weight and importance to your actions on a given day. Yeah, once you're familiar with the game you'll never really be at risk of running out of time ever again, but it's still an effective element and adds the fun layer of seeing how few days you need to escape. I'm still not entirely sure whether I prefer 1 or 2, but the added intensity to survival and the more focused design of each level are definitely points in favor for 1. Just an all around excellent and fun strategy game.