I have been surrounded by puzzles my entire life. I mean this literally. My father is a bonafide puzzler. Not jigsaw puzzles; I'm talking pen and paper puzzles. His peg is wordplay. Crosswords, cryptics, anagrams, cryptograms, all of it. He has taken my family to puzzle conventions often. He's a prolific constructor, too. He's been published in a certain major newspaper multiple times and even runs puzzle hunts regularly. It gets annoying, sometimes. I don't mind the test solves he asks of us. It's the other stuff. He'll turn a simple dinner conversation topic into a riddle, a game of guessing, hamfisting puns and clues. I think in my teenage years, that frustration with parents dripped down onto puzzles. I considered them geeky, dorky, not something I would ever like, no no no. Alas, my hat is thoroughly chewed; puzzles are fun. I'm nowhere near the kind of puzzler he is, not even close, but I've come around on it. I'll toy with a crossword, I’ll knock out a KenKen, I'll give a cryptic a shot (and fail), and I'll play Wordle.

Wordle is Mastermind but with letters. It's not a complex or new idea; this has been done before and will be done again. That's not a criticism. It's just a fact. It's a slick, well-made version of it created by Josh Wardle for his girlfriend. It works. It's fun. The key difference was the ease by which you could share your solutions online. Presumably, this was a huge influence on its popularity, which abruptly skyrocketed in the tail end of 2021. Seeing people post their scores is near ubiquitous, whether you were on Discord or Twitter. It’s a fun daily distraction to toil over. The limit of guesses encourages some strategizing. On Discord, we crafted theories and ran simulations. It became a delightful little problem of probabilistic reduction and linguistic statistics.

But I’m not here to talk about Wordle, but rather what’s happening to it. Puzzles seem to be on an abrupt uptick. I have no clue why. In the past year, I've seen people I'd never expect to talking about daily crosswords in the New York Times. Spelling Bee in the New York Times Magazine is also wildly popular and served as an inspiration for Wordle. If I had to guess why, it would have to be due to the global pandemic having a lot of people down-time they would typically spend doing something else. As well as, perhaps, the NYT's strategy of pushing their Games publication. Maybe you’re noticing something.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard. A bit later, Sony bought Bungie. Now, the New York Times has bought Wordle. Maybe this seems unrelated to you. But I can't help but see it as part of a pattern of rapid consolidation of gaming markets. Obviously, this is a widespread issue not limited to games, or media for that matter. Mergers and acquisitions seem to show up every few weeks. Anti-trust law isn't what it used to be in the US, and companies are constantly cannibalizing each other. By all means, Josh Wardle made the right choice. He was probably losing money by hosting Wordle, and he was smart to cash out. Good for him.

The NYT did not buy Wordle because it was a novel invention. The NYT bought it because it wants to be the only thing you think of when you think of the word "puzzles". Don't think of just any old newspaper, don't think of other websites or apps, don't think of GAMES Magazine or Nicoli or even those airport pulp bricks, think of the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine only. They could have easily made a Wordle version of their own. They wanted the name and the brand recognition. They want you to remember where the puzzles are. The only puzzles. Are they succeeding?

Wordle won’t die after this. It’s going to live forever. It’s been assimilated into the Borg. “Join us or die.” Even as folks burn out on it, or it’s fad-fame withers, there will still be countless players. It’s in the New York Times, after all. Will it stay popular? Probably. To some degree, certainly. And what of the countless Wordle-likes? The leagues of distractions, too numerous to list, ranging from copies to inventive reimaginings? Will they rise above it all? Well, I’m not optimistic. As much as I’d like to be able to say I think a wave of independent puzzles will come crashing down on the shore, spreading an anarchistic jubilee of puzzles on the sands, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s not going to happen in games, either. These moments result in flares of creativity and then a quiet march into obscurity. I’ve seen how hard it is to fight against cultural monopolies. Call it path-of-least-resistance, call it the Pareto principle, call it a process of preferential attachment, it’s gonna end up the same way: the slow oligopolization of cultural commodities with straggling indies. I’m not optimistic. I hope to be proven wrong. There’s a time for everything to come crumbling down. But until then, Wordle is fun. While it lasts.

what may just separate the veterans from the inexperienced in this game is the quality of their knifework. leon might pack an arsenal replete with the sexiest weapons of all time, but it's the tried-and-true double-edged stiletto he's packing that remains your eternal companion out there in the shit. utilizing it to its fullest requires confidence to an extent that resembles rashness - a full understanding of where to strike, when to kick, and how to deke. if you ask me, coming fresh off a run of professional, this is one of the most compelling elements of RE4 - the convergence between melee and gunplay is transformative, configuring leon into a living weapon. there is no element of his kit that goes unused or registers as unnecessary.

i once jokingly claimed that a remake of this title needed to simply superimpose re6's base of mechanics on to the game, but actually convey to players how best to parse these systems. there's actually probably a little nugget of gold buried in there - after all, i refuse emphatically the addition of a block button ala the ethan winters duology, or the presence of a parry which, when mishandled, tends to choke combat systems with its rote all-encompassing applicability. what they really need to do here is expand and tailor the level of knifework present. imagine if we got rid of the need for qtes because we got a game with hitboxes every bit as fair, but your knife mode had dozens of options attached to it resembling something like genes dodges from god hand, informally and unofficially linking mikamis action game tenure...errant slashes leading to blades clashing...im talking high risk high reward knife action in such a manner that it doesn't compromise on leons fragility. that, to me, would be a good rendition of re4. shouldn't bend the knee or make concessions to enemy design so as to make the holy grail 'knife only challenge run' more palatable to layfolk...people figured out how to do it with the original, they'll do it again

also id like to be able to throw my knife

This is a pretty harsh review, maybe one that is not reflective of how I felt about the game for a significant portion of its runtime, but I'm angry at how many things about this game legitimately infuriated me, and how only a few people are willing to talk about them.

There's definitely good stuff here. The cast is charismatic and likeable, the "Essence Of" animations are very funny, and the game has a lot of charm in how it interprets the conventions of classic JRPGs into the modern Yakuza universe. The soundtrack bangs harder than it has any right to, almost certainly the best of the Yakuza games I've played. Yakuza: Like a Dragon wears a shit-eating grin and an attitude you can't help be swept up by, but as the hours drag on and on, the charm wears thin, and the flaws stick out more and more, until I had grown to resent and even, to a certain extent, hate a game I once loved.

The plot is a complete mess that changes gears completely every three chapters or so, leaving me with a near-constant state of narrative and thematic whiplash, which would maybe be forgivable if this was a 30 hour game, but it's far closer to 60, 70, even up to 100 hours long. At least it's fun for that length, right? Well...

I'm a big fan of JRPGs. They're probably my favourite genre. And I love turn-based combat...when done well. When I heard that Like A Dragon would be a turn-based RPG, my excitement couldn't be contained. It felt like they were making a game I had dreamed about for years. So trust me when I say that the battle system of Like A Dragon is the worst I've experienced in a big JRPG in years. Progression is thoughtless and on-rails, with the only choice being which one of the game's jobs you want to be grinding at a specific moment. Moment to moment, the combat offers no interesting choices, almost every encounter playing out the exact same way: big AOE attacks if enemies are clustered together, or big single-target attacks if they aren't. Boss design is routinely awful, with the game almost always simply resorting to having the boss be a big tough guy with loads of health and resistances that does a fuck-ton of damage, without any other mechanics to make them feel distinct or memorable or fun. Artificial difficulty abounds in the final third, with both the Chapter 12 and Chapter 15 bosses literally having the game tell you to grind out about 10 levels before facing them, OHKO attacks that can hit your main character with little warning and give you an instant game over, wiping out all your progress through these overlong boss encounters, and dungeons as a whole containing almost no save points. Do you have a life you'd like to get back to anytime soon? Tough luck, buddy! Stick it out or do that shitty final dungeon where you run into the same room and fight the same enemies about a dozen times all over again.

And all of this would be bad enough, if not for the fact that the battle system is the vehicle by which the game delivers the truly unpleasant politics it has beneath it's surface-level charm and empathy. Through the cutscenes, the game affects a facade of being caring and empathetic towards sex workers (though that in and of itself is fairly lacking in nuance) but the former sex worker in your party, Saeko, is reduced to a caricature of feminine stereotypes when she's in battle, having a set of "female exclusive" jobs with abilities like "Sexy Pose" and weapons that are handbags. The game earnestly tries to convince you that it really cares about the plight of Japan's homeless, up until the point the game's "metal slime" equivalents are revealed: largely defenceless homeless men who you are encouraged to seek out and kill as fast as possible for an enormous EXP bonus. The initially charming and funny way battles are framed, as the overactive imagination of a central character raised on a diet of Dragon Quest, eventually left a bad taste in my mouth as Ichiban kept imagining deeply offensive caricatures of black men and trans people for him to beat up with his baseball bat.

As with the year's other big disappointment, Doom Eternal, the awful attitudes this game has beneath the surface have gone almost completely undiscussed by the wider gaming press, with only Dia Lacina's piece (which I initially thought was harsh but now reads as almost startlingly on-the-point) and a few people on discord and twitter acknowleging it. When the game asked me to grind out levels in a boring-as-fuck sewer dungeon right before the final boss, where it had me beat up trans caricatures that made me a bit sick to look at, I found myself getting really angry that I wasn't warned that this was waiting for me.

If you watched "YAKUZA: LIKE A DRAGON: FULL MOVIE 1080p 60fps" on youtube, or played the first four or five chapters exclusively, you might be forgiven for thinking that this game really is an empathetic portrayal of people on society's bottom rung rising up to reclaim their lives. But the actual game doesn't bear up to that scrutiny. It pretends to care about subaltern, and does a good job of pretending, but it doesn't. Not really. Not when it comes time to make shitty jokes at their expense.

When I loved Like A Dragon, I really loved it. There's truly moving scenes and moments, all the way up to the end. But when I hated it, I really hated it. And over time, the latter emotion won out over the former. In many ways, it is the true sequel to Persona 5. A game I was incredibly excited for, played obsessively through it's obscenely overlong length, and felt my enthusiasm sap out of me in real time over the course of it, until I watched it chicken out of landing it's themes home time and time again, until it's conservative attitudes bubbled to the surface, until my memories of the game, once positive and warm, turned cold and resentful in my hands.

The most I've been disappointed in a game in a long time.

I can't stand people who say that you should "just play Kiwami man!!!!" Yakuza Kiwami is the original but completely devoid of it's original style and character, entirely upending it with reused assets and a combat system that are lazily lifted from another game released a decade after. It's additions only serve to pad out an otherwise very well-paced game, and they sometimes just straight up take away from specific moments. The original's gritty look is replaced with the same generic look as Yakuza 0 without the late-80s aesthetic that contextualized that game and really held the visuals together. Yakuza Kiwami doesn't even recreate the original, it uses another game's systems and visuals in an attempt to replace it. It is straight up disrespectful to the integrity of the original and 0. People who support lousy games like this need to shut the fuck up. I hate them.

Sorry, not a review, I just needed a place to rant.

this one is completely disjointed and unhinged; at its core, past all the bloat, you can see what a sharper version of this title could have looked like, and that pervasive vision lingers in the foreground of all the games antics. but all the same you can feel the fervent passion of the development team in each minute of its runtime and their unrelenting, inelastic vow to push the bill and expand the scope of what is possible, sometimes unnecessarily. in all the ways that makes yakuza a titan it is fantastic, in all the ways it makes yakuza tiresome it is paramount. still some of the best side content in the series though, understands the core of what makes this franchise endearing with sniper precision

degenerate fighting game hiding behind illusory veil of 'honor' and 'fundamentals'; in other words, it's essentially perfect. love literally everything about this. haohmaru's heavy slash is the greatest fighting game button of all time. if samurai shodown 2019 had rollback netcode it'd probably be more of a 'forever' fighting game for me but it cant possibly match the lunacy of v special. go ahead, tell me what the D button does. you cant because its a fickle mistress that exists beyond the realm of logic

you hear the one about avid players of tetris? their minds basically get rewritten because of exposure to the damn thing. thing is, this is true of any earthly activity that brings together body, mind, and soul. its psychosomatic, kinaesthetic. any activity that informs consciousness will bleed into the subconscious. my dreams aren't really like the ones LSD presents, but my fear is that they will be.

a product of its time in all the ways that matter and bolstered as a result. psx architecture struggling under the weight of hell and failing to load in the density of its worlds in time leaves the mind incapable of guarding itself for whats going to happen next - legitimately unsettling, unpredictable, uncanny, uncaring. youre sieved through textures and atmospheres at a rapid clip. no barriers exist here, everything is simply a permeable membrane. every scene, vignette, happenstance, and interaction a stitched-together quilt one night and a tesseract the next. like any work of its kind it requires a certain level of maturity and commitment - particularly these days when the only thing you can reliably bet on about an audience is their urge to demystify - but you ought to take the leap. this is really affecting work here that i cant possibly be cynical about and a great alternative to melatonin

(recommended by clownswords on this list. i remembered!)
reigning champ and apotheosis of the ridge racer formula, type 4 finds namco on much more confident ground when compared to the shaky foundation rage racer built. a lot of rage racer's aesthetic musings - the idealization and veneration of wheelmen, the sleekness of these machines, the grunge and beauty of asphalt and cobblestone - have all essentially been given a facelift, no longer resembling a gloomy concrete jungle but instead coming across as suggestive, painterly, and sometimes ghostly. like many games of its kind, its romantic, but instead of invoking the arcade palette of saturated hues or gleaming vistas, this game is adorned with earthier tones that really strongly compliment its otherwise exuberant and kinetic approach to racing ('out of blue' is a particular fave of mine - cruising through a picturesque port town during a misty morning). personally i sensed a lot of overlap with ace combat 3 - obviously both works' existence as namco projects goes without saying but relating to their fidelity, they both have similarly moody approaches to lighting that really become apparent as you speed down highways at night that are pockmarked by pale green lights and transition into tunnels that explode with hazy amber. to say little of that incredible soundtrack shared between both titles! electrosphere with its comparatively cold electronic soundtrack has its antithesis in type 4, with polished evocative tracks that go down like smooth scotch (although 'motor species' is actually just a dead fucking ringer for some ace combat 3 tracks, which makes sense given that three composers are common to both games). it's not the furious rave techno of prior ridge racer entries, but it's mellow and heartthumping and just so goddamn arresting, my favourite soundtrack in a long while. drifting in sync has never felt better. so much of the reason this game is adored is largely for its aesthetic which is, to be sure, excellent, but this belies that it's every bit as strong mechanically as prior entries. rage racer's experimentalism is done away with for a more conservative experience, so hills are no longer sisyphean trials and drift/grip type vehicles see further segregation, but it's hard to complain when the end result is a game with some legitimately wicked track design that packs intelligent re-use of assets. the campaign, which has four levels of 'tuning' difficulties that all offer simplistic but reactive stories that depend on your performance as a racer, was a really nice touch - didn't need to be there but thoroughly enjoyed that element nonetheless. all their discussion about willpower and unattainable ideals is a fun way to motivate the player but also to underscore that these games are time trials in disguise, with your rival opponents being obstacles to surmount and benchmarks to ascendancy rather than acting as traditional opponents. about the only complaint i have in that regard is that it's strange that the peak of the game's difficulty is at the midway point; it's really disappointing that the final stage can be overcome without any of the predilection for appropriate technique that the game demonstrated prior to this (again, somewhat excusable, movin' in circles is one of the best tracks on the OST). even so, this is still a game that's firing on all cylinders - i had cynically expected some resistance to that idea heading in but it really is the peak of the franchise so far while carving out its own spot as a giant in arcade racing.

this is a game for the fellas who have It. if you dont know what that might be, you gotta do some soulsearching on these streets