A part of me was blown away from the expansive environments. The way the skyboxes just look otherworldly. How kinetic movement and combat feels. How engaging each exotic is and how they can drastically change your playstyle. The wonder of what the next game from the dudes that made Halo felt finally lived with this expansion. Bungie is at their best when they craft a semi-linear story experience. From the campaign, to watching the raid race, that led to this never before seen final event, like this was endgame or something was just cool as fuck.

Then another part of me remembers why I don't dedicate my entire life to this game like I thought I would when I was in 11th grade. The live service part of this. I always come back and play whatever the expansion is or at least check out every new season, but something about Destiny 2 doesn't slap as much as the first one. Even though abilities are way more impactful, and it truly feels like a RPG shooter that it was harped up to be back then. Especially with the new Prismatic class, which is what I've always wanted out of Destiny's power system since the start. I just can't truly dip all the way back in this game anymore.

There's a bigger story to tell that I decree on my soapbox for the eleventh time about MMOs and how that golden age of community will never exist again, but that's not what you're reading for. For the record, I genuinely tried to get back into Destiny 2 before Final Shape. I geared up, farmed some exotics, got some masterwork gear, got as much as I could from the thousands of legendary shards, stocked up bounties, did some raids, farmed dungeons for god rolls, joined LFGs and Sherpas on a nightly basis on anything anybody needed another body for.

I even did something taboo...put my headset on and talked with strangers on a regular basis. "You guys gotta mic?". Chilling I know...

But as I enjoyed my time playing the content and finally mastering the clusterfuck of a UI, I felt the looming elephant in the room. I just enjoyed playing with randoms, speculating on what the Final Shape raid is going to be, talking about what's going to happen with Destiny 3 or Marathon, reminiscing about doing Raids for the first time in Destiny 1 and the beta. Then I'd hear that one guy, "Bro what the hell is that roll on your Mousekatoole. Why are you even running that exotic bro what the hell that shit is D tier bro. Bro doesn't know the mechanics, oh my god"

I'm not one to usually have other people ruin my experience. This is coming from a guy that runs a War Rock deck in Yugioh. I'm just not a competitive player. Even when I do competitive things, I'll go off-meta or don't follow guides because I like discovering and theory crafting on my own. What's meta might not be my play style. I just do my own thing. So this is very off-putting for someone that's primary Destiny 1 group were the owns to sit down at the tower and talk about life, we would stop and smell the roses staring at Vex Architecture discussing what it all could mean. I was with the lore heads that loved to sit and talk about what's going on in the greater destiny mythos and how what we're doing correlated. I loved that because that's what I loved about Halo.

I was one of those kids that read the books. I sat with friends during sleepovers talking about what they'll adapt with the new Reach game while searching for out of bounds clips and secrets. Because I don't have a friend group that's down to jump into games like this, and the random match made player base won't be that way either, I'm just stuck in a limbo state. While I love collecting exotics and doing random missions, I don't like being rushed through it. Destiny 2 is a forever game, you're meant to be constantly doing something.

The treadmill is on like speed 7 with this game and as a filthy casual I can't keep up. I done broke my ankle falling off the ramp. Not to mention how obtuse the monetization has become, making it hard to get said friend group to even join to play with me through this experience, or else cough up like 90 bucks to start. I really did like Bungie ass Borderlands for what it did for real. I guess this is a more general review of Destiny as an entity, as this is the "finale" or whatever.

It sucks cause frfr if it really was just bungie ass borderlands, then this would be Destiny 3, and it would've hit like a bitch rn.

Skyrim is the very definition of pure unfiltered SOUL. What else needs to be said about Skyrim that no other person has dared to say before me? It is quite simply one of THE games of all time.

Skyrim takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion, Bethesda’s other classic gem, where the player is put into the shoes of their hand-crafted Dragonborn Chad or Chadette. A civil war has taken place between the Imperials and Stormcloaks, and your character begins their journey at the helm of their disarray. (I still remember, to this day, when Ralof said “Hey, you. You’re finally awake” to me on my first playthrough.)

After a dragon accidentally helps the player narrowly escape their own execution, you soon find out that not all Nirnroots sing a pretty tune. Turns out that dragons have been extinct for centuries and now they’re back. Once you meet Balgruuf, it’s over. He orders you to fight an incoming dragon before it wipes out the city of his people. Reluctantly, your character participates, only to find out that they are in fact what we would call a Dragonborn, also known as Dovahkiin. (For those who didn’t know.) These rare somebodies are people born with the blood of Dragons and therefore can wield the same powerful magic. Fucking banger. It is now up to you, the player, to play the game and stop the dragons in order to say that you have beaten the game.

With a healthy level of jank, you could say that the gameplay loop of this game has aged quite poorly. And I would agree. There is no shortage of unfun first person combat to be found here, in fact, there is literally so much of it. However, the jankiness of it all is what gives Skyrim that rough edge charm we all know and love, and therefore I would say that even though it’s a 2011 game, it’s actually held up quite nicely. It’s not often you see me praising an old game that is THAT old, so you just know that it has to be the peak of the RPG medium.

I really think this game gets a lot of heat nowadays for really no reason. Have you ever considered that maybe this game is supposed to be a fucking mess? Just download a truck load of mods and exploit the enchantment table in order to deal 1247083927028238 contact damage on the Bandit Outlaw preventing you from progressing through the cave. It honestly takes a lot of skill to beat this game without it crashing at least 764 times with all the mods you’ve downloaded, so maybe just get better at the game before giving up on it. You seriously have no idea what you’re missing and I actually threaten you to give it another chance. Jankiness is an element that can be bested with both time and practice and was in fact intentionally put into Skyrim in order to challenge the player’s ability to keep their cool. I admire Todd Howard for shaping me into a better man.

Did you know that the term, “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee” actually came from Skyrim? You can trigger this event when walking around town and speaking to any generic guard. Not even M’aiq the Liar knows that one.

Now let’s talk about some of the mid level designs. Ugh, if I have to complain about something it would be in this area here. Everytime I walked into a Dwemer ruin, I wanted to take all my anger out on Lydia again. The Falmer? The Automatas? The one big dungeon that’s almost as big as my Mom’s house? They make me want to drop this kino from a 10 to a 9 so bad, but I am a much stronger person than that. The nice thing is that you don’t have to go through them very often, but hoo-wee if I had ever seen bad design, it’s that. Not sure what the game devs were thinking with that one.

Disregarding that, some parts of this game really make you feel like you’re truly on crack cocaine. I mean, there’s really no way to fling yourself into the air without dying in real life so baiting a Giant to do it is like the next best thing. I took off all of my clothes, got 10,000 bounty in each town for killing the merchants and not even a single NPC gave a shit. It really made me feel like I was crafting the RPG adventure of my dreams. I once ignored all of the main quests and drank so much Skooma that I instantaneously died right in front of Delphine, and I’d do it again too. Anything to stick it to that bitch. There is no way she can convince me to do Spoiler, ever. Also, did you know that the dragon Paarthurnax is voiced by Charles Martinet, the original voice actor for Mario?

I really wish that I could play this game for the first time again so that I could become the ultimate Skyrim racist on my first playthrough. I was too nervous to go that route the first time, but I really think I missed out on something special there. Oh well, there’s 17 re-releases of this game that I can do that on!

Trophies: 76
Playtime: 20 minutes
Graphics: Potato
Music: Based

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdvClO0qYlcfWVA6WXd3oczS3hZSko-Zi&si=SFytVGI9TK3jm_Uk

Here are my scores for those who don’t know:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐- A complete and utter masterpiece. The best thing I have ever played. I will be thinking of this one for generations to come. I got a tattoo about it on my back and will be naming my children after the main characters.

⭐⭐⭐⭐- It’s dogshit. I’ve never been more insulted in my entire life. If I could refund it I would but Steam’s horrible refund policy prevents me from refunding games after 65 hours.

⭐⭐⭐ - Anyone who likes this game should be imprisoned on death row. You are genuinely the worst person who ever worsted.

⭐⭐ - I wouldn’t even accept this as a gift. What are you? Anti-Santa?

⭐- It’s woke.

Happy April 1st, everyone!

My all time favorite RPG. True, Fallout 1 is a tighter experience and has better story, but there is just so much to do in Fallout 2, not just in the sense of the amount of locations, but also in the many ways you can interact with the world. Quests are more interesting and developed and almost every interaction has multiple outcomes, and I couldn't resist but keep reloading to see what the other options offer.

The comedic tone of the game seems to bother a lot of people, but personally I really enjoyed it, the game never takes itself too seriously, but yet manages to make a consistent world of interconnected cities with their own problems and interests. And the game is really hilarious, the voiced NPCs are extremely memorable in a very unapologetic 90s way. Bethesda attempts at humor are look like made by corporate suits compared to it. Also most pop culture references that everyone complains about did fly over my head (they felt like enigmatic dead ends), only San Fran really bothered me with that Scientologist stuff and not necessarily because is random, but more because it is boring. But that is only one area and very late in the game, in a huge game, that can be made even bigger with the restoration patch (as a fan of 90s pre-rendered graphics, I personally really like the cut submarine area, the extremely old and rusty submarine looks amazing).

It may not be the most expansive or the most refined but I think Fallout 1 is probably overall the most consistent Fallout game. It's so damn good.

Fallout's world and storytelling is so well thought out and intriguing that it'd make you think that when Interplay made this game, they knew for certain that it would become a popular franchise. You can tell how much effort and detail was put into every facet of NPCs and locations within the game.

That and also the iconic and terrifying soundtrack by Mark Morgan doing all of the OST with the almost clay-like CGI, gritty aesthetic of the game really makes it so unique and truly an alive world.

Despite how gritty and desolate the world seems in this game, I truly appreciate that it isn't this freshly nuked desert with nothing but crazy raiders running around with random junk like Bethesda seems to love. All the major locations in this game have actual infrastructure with agriculture, larger town centers, homes and everything, not just a bunch of scrappy shantytowns. The first area in the game that you encounter after you leave Vault 13, being Shady Sands is the best example of this with a clear farm and an entirely crafted created adobe architecture of all the buildings despite being so remote from the rest of the major locations like The Hub and Junktown.

Despite the simplicity in the story, I love it so much. I love coming freshly out of the vault and you basically directly assume the position as a vault dweller seeing this new world, learning about all these different factions and a growing army of mutants who want to take over the wasteland. Again, it does such a good job at giving bread crumbs for the player to follow and get drip fed new information about the world.

My only issues with this game come to a few things. For example, the game has a few oversights and glitches that can make playthroughs where you wanna mess around with stuff a bit annoying. From what I know, the fallout 1 in 2 mod fixes a lot of these bugs and unintended gameplay issues.

Another example is the combat can feel a bit unforgiving and start to spike weirdly in different areas where it really shouldn't. It's happens more near the end of the game but it still can happen early on. An example of this would be in an area like The Hub where you can pretty much get every quest there done easily around the same level except for the one house with the guys holding the BoS initiate captive, they somehow absolutely destroy you unless you come all the way back there after getting power armor and better guns way later into the game.

This is more of a subjective complaint because some people may like this because it gives the game a better sense of flow, but I feel like in this specific case, it feels a bit confusing and jarring.

The final big thing is just an issue with a ton of older games that are a bit more esoteric compared to games we're used to now. The game doesn’t really do the good job explaining how to play it. This is an issue with a lot of older games that rely on manuals and strategy guides to teach the player how to play.

This game fuckin' rocks though, I really appreciate it and after completing it, it's given me even more appreciation for the Fallout series.

Note: I was a dev. God what to say about this mess. I'm still proud of the side quests, Legion content and Crusaders MQ, but the NCR MQ is just an utter trash fire. The world design is weird in large part because we as a team didn't communicate the best. The companions are generally pretty good. The whole thing is janky as frick. 80% of the lore is a patch job because nothing included was really planned before a few steps in front of us. More should have been cut, and different things (namely more vaults) should have been added. I'm still proud of it, but god it's a mess.