Another year, Another Update, Another excuse to replay Dusk. Dusk is David Szymanskis bloody FPS remix of games like Quake, Blood and Thief. Its the game that really launched the Boomer Shooter explosion that we are still experiencing today and for good reason.

You play as Dusk Dude, a mute badass with an arsenal of weapons, ready to fight an eldrich cult and its hoard of horrific creatures. The hows and why arent exactly clear or important but the game trickels down enough hints through out its level design for the game to feel like a greater whole and not a collage of unrelated maps. Fun is the main focus of Dusk. You bunny hop, summer sault and slide your way through horror themed levels while picking up power ups and dual wielding shotguns, firing rocketlaunchers or sniping with wallpiercing crossbows.
It all results in a beautiful ballet of bullets and mayhem, that still is my platonic ideal of what a Boomer Shooter is suppose to be. Although as much as I love the game in its entirety, its not a perfect masterpiece.

The best part of Dusk are its open ended levels, with jump pads and all kinds of cover you can slide behind when combat gets too heated. Sadly some it seems to forget that philosophie for about a 1/3 of the game, specifically in Chapter 2. Its basicly swaps the open maps for tight corridors that need to be navigated with a tiny flash light, sometimes even in pitch darkness and that doesnt work at all. Dusks Combat simply isnt build for those kind of sections. Enemies frequently soak up to many bullets, allowing them to push you into a corner until you run out of health. Higher difficultys become especially egrious and for someone like me who doesnt want to play with midlevels saves, its the point where I become so annoyd at its bullshit that I just turn the game off. Shout out to the Cowgirls, who like to come out of nowhere, blasting explosives at you that can kill you in only a couple hits.

Fortunatly Chapter 3 mostly remedys that design flaw, dropping you in shorter but more bizzare campaing that leads you to the endfight with the Ultimate evil. Chapter 3 might be my favorite, having the best level in my opinion when you get to the mindbending map that is Homecoming. And that is ultimatly the reason why I love Dusk so much beyond its flaws. The willingness to be bizzare and experimental in the limited framwork of an 90s FPS. Its what made me fall in love with this new genre in general, even making me go back to older games I didnt know I would love as much as I do now. And with its new HD coat of paint and full mod support finally here, there no better time than to fall in love with Dusk all over again.

Aniversários são como rituais, e a glorificação deles é o que forma seu significado, por bem ou por mal. São construções sociais assim como dar bom dia e boa noite; mas acima de tudo, rituais com seus próprios valores. Há quem trate seu aniversário como um dia normal, quem simplesmente evita comentar sobre, quem o trata como o pior dia do ano, e existe também a Juliet – que teve “o melhor aniversário dentro do inesperado”

À disposição desse fenômeno, Lollipop Chainsaw fantasia sua experiência como um sonho lúcido dentro desse aniversário, e por consequência, fantasia Juliet como a protagonista dessa história. Sem se questionar de seus absurdos, o jogo retrata um apocalipse zumbi da maneira mais pós-moderna possível, considerando o boom da internet e as diversas referências à cultura pop, como sua própria trilha sonora licenciada (a música tema do menu ser Cherry Bomb é genial…) e voltando algumas linhas desse parágrafo, será que os absurdos precisam mesmo ser questionados?

Sendo honesto, eu acho que não. Como alguém que enxerga God Hand como um dos melhores jogos do gênero, Lollipop Chainsaw entrega seus trejeitos humorísticos de uma maneira muito semelhante mas com uma abordagem diferente – e Juliet Starling, a estrela desse sonho lúcido, emana constantemente uma energia mais vigorosa do que Gene. Quaisquer zumbis que objetificarem seu corpo terão o próprio corpo cortado ao meio.

Partindo do princípio que Juliet “pode tudo”, o jogo amplifica seu cerne e seus desejos de aniversário para sua própria ludologia – desde sua estrutura óssea onde são necessários diversos minigames e gimmicks para progredir, à sua estética de graphic novel com interfaces, cutscenes e até VFX estilizados para se assemelhar à HQs, à sua estrutura mecânica com seu excelente combate.

Um beat em up baseado em posicionamento e crowd control com temática de zumbi é uma ideia simples mas que eu nunca parei pra pensar sobre ser uma combinação perfeita – pompom para atordoar os inimigos, motosserra para matá-los e todo o resto anda de acordo com suas habilidades de posicionamento e manipulação dos inimigos, e o quanto os encontros com inimigos do jogo variam de acordo com suas condições.

E por fim, Juliet Starling completa seu ritual, se provando constantemente digna de emanar a energia que ela possui – e coroando Lollipop Chainsaw como um dos melhores jogos de seu gênero. Feliz aniversário, Juliet!

i could talk about the uninteresting story and characters, the number of ways the game tries to slow the pacing down thru long ass pipe nd ladder climbs nd elevators very subtly disguised as loading screens, the fuckass combat that u can pretty much cheese by spamming wallrun/slide kicks, how short it is (who gives a shit), the all things considered pretty bland anti capitalist themes, etc, etc, but i think what many seem to forget abt mirrors edge is that not only did it revolutionise first person movement nd made people realise u cld make first person platforming fun, but it also paid a lot of attention to level design nd made it genuinely feel like u were platforming thru real environments nd not stuff made in a level editor w platforms floating abt. not that that stuff cant be made fun ofc not, but every platform, every zipline, every handlebar has a purpose nd really feels like u are breaking and entering thru government buildings nd sewers nd musky interiors w stuff lying around. i appreciate that stuff a lot in any game trying to be parkour cuz thats what i believe to be the true spirit of parkour. finding cool places that were never meant to be designed for moving around in nd just going wild. kind of a lot like skateboarding. sorry this review is so long i just want to see this happen in more 3d platformers cuz i think its cool nd i think that gives this game so much personality, even if it sadly keeps doing it less nd less as the game goes on bcuz first person games werent allowed to not have guns in them back then. the sequel does a great job at it too even w its ubisoftisms nd other stupid shit in it. it still feels fun to play nd move around in. its awesome

I genuinely don't see the hate for this game. Outside of the voice acting and music, this remake is an improvement over the original in every way. Controls, framerate, weapons, utility, visibility, and everything great about MGS2 has been put into the original. It feels like one of those remakes where people hate it because all the MGS boomers told them to hate it. Yet everyone I know who's completely finished the game in its entirety liked it a lot or loved it. Give it an honest shot. You'd be surprised by how fun the gameplay is.

this is exactly what would happen if you went back in time to 2007 with a copy of ultrakill, bulletstorm and fear and gave it to a bunch of source modders

the narrative kinda falls on its ass when it gets gigarushed 3 missions in, and the gunplay when youre not in bullet time feels like trying to pee with a boner when youre not using the spassy

i'd recommend this to anyone who has ever held a computer mouse, including my own mother

Mega Man X6 representa a imagética do apocalipse de forma plena. É um jogo repleto dos obstáculos mais velhos de Mega Man: buracos e espinhos. A construção das fases dialoga meticulosamente com os temas do jogo, o nosso salvador está morto e os reploids que sobraram estão se matando de pouco em pouco; a sociedade foi danificada de forma irreparável, o arrebatamento aconteceu, os poucos sortudos subiram e só sobra repetir o ciclo da luta entre o bem e o mal.

Me parece extremamente apropriado que as fases do Mega Man X que "não precisava existir" -considerando que X5 era pra ser o final definitivo-, sejam todas abstrações de conceitos bem definidos. Florestas, museus, lixões, laboratórios; conforme os robôs ficaram mais humanos, mais a verossimilhança com o nosso mundo foi se reduzindo ao ponto de retornar à ludicidade dos Mega Man de Nintendinho.

MMX é uma série que gosta muito de brincar com a dualidade do personagem do Zero; ele frequentemente tem sua moralidade questionada, é uma existência que vive na contradição de ser o grande herói mesmo sendo um assassino. São jogos que falam muito sobre a visão distorcida que se pode ter de um herói quando esse é inserido no contexto da guerra. MMX4 dá consciência pro Zero e transforma ele num herói trágico com algum tipo de remorso, mas incapacidade de impedir o ciclo por causa do senso de dever, e MMX5 joga os pecados do mundo nas costas dele pra fabricar a existência de um sacrifício messiânico.

MMX6 inverte os papeis de suas figuras centrais. Como o Niel disse na review dele (vou deixar linkado nos comentários) "nesse jogo você precisa reviver o diabo pra te ajudar num apocalipse ludológico". É cômico que o Zero seja realmente o diabo desse mundo, no sentido mais literal possível de ser quem vem pra roubar, matar, e destruir. No X3 foi apontado que enquanto o Zero estivesse vivo, não haveria paz. Em X6, ele morto, continua -mesmo que indiretamente- causando caos. Gate, por outro lado, é um cientista; um cientista que criou diversos robôs e nenhum deles conseguiu sobreviver no status quo que o Zero lutou a vida toda pra proteger.

Em resumo: sua missão é assumir o papel do diabo pra ceifar a vida dos servos revividos do "criador", deus de uma nova era. Andar no laboratório cibernético do Gates enquanto passa por incontáveis estátuas de anjos e demônios te faz pensar que realmente é um jogo sobre forças contraditórias numa batalha eterna lutando pra decifrar o sentido "correto" da vida como robô. O Sigma (e por consequência o Gates) acredita que os reploids precisam aceitar os sentimentos perversos da humanidade, é o caminho da evolução. X luta uma guerra infindável pra descobrir como batalhar contra as piores partes da consciência, e vê a paz como motivador principal.

Não sou eu quem vai querer julgar as morais de X6 (apesar de ter feito isso com o X5 por particularmente odiar o jeito com o qual eles lidam com a política do mundo naquele jogo), mas talvez o Sigma ser "poeticamente fácil" -citando de novo o Niel- nos diga alguma coisa sobre quem o mundo dos deuses escolhe vomitar ao invés de engolir.

This was a very difficult game for me to review. Overall I have to say I'm disappointed with the game. It has some great moments but is also really bogged down but a few things. First of all the gameplay as a huge tactics fan was overall very boring and easy. I will say at the end of chapter 3 the gameplay becomes way better and the tactical gameplay becomes fun, but that is way too late into the game especially when the first 2/3rds of the game are boringly easy.

The story took a long time to get going for me. The Phantom Thieves get basically no development because it takes place during P5. At least in Strikers it was after and was far more interesting. The focus is on the new characters for this game and while it's good I just didn't enjoy it as much as past Persona stories.

Overall if you are a Persona fan it's worth playing, but if you are just playing for the tactics I would recommend other games

If FEAR 2 was Call of Duty's influence being felt, FEAR 3 is that influence being on full display. The gunplay still pales in comparison to the original FEAR, but it feels better than FEAR 2's limp combat, though removing health kits in favor of regen removes what little resource management there was. Damage also makes you flinch now which is just immensely annoying, alongside new enemies that are also just kind of annoying - though one type seems interesting when you first encounter them, the novelty wears off quickly. Zombies (but not by name) are another new addition which was just kind of stupid frankly, very pointless. There's a story but it's not even worth mentioning. Graphically the game looks pretty okay, it's not as cartoony as 2 (good), but it's also not as imposing as the original (bad). There's a few decent spooky scenes but nothing to write home about, and some of the level design is neat. Giving Point Man a face was a pretty terrible choice, at least there was some mystique as a faceless badass but now he just looks like a generic brooding action character.

Overall pretty unremarkable, there's an option to play as Paxton apparently but I didn't care enough to bother replaying any of the levels, maybe in the future. Also the ending song was an incredibly corny choice.

Too often I think we are chained by the systematization of concepts and sensibilities to truly grasp the way in which the vibrations and rendering of place and action can exist through digital spaces. Within a ten-minute text-adventure game on itch.io (constituted almost entirely of raw-text sentences on a blank wallpaper) I've intuited more textures and tastes of imagery and landscapes than any video-essay or structured analysis I've ever seen. Maybe it's a sort of cathartic and utopian awakening to touch a work that manages to portray this sort of ambiguity regarding the lens through we which we "feel" aesthetics in games (which is almost uncharted territory in terms of definition since we can't even manage to determine what 'game design' is) and not succumb to this cynic preposition of everything needing function and purpose through some sort of utilitarian perspective regarding "intention", that is, the sort of evaluation that seems to look at art from the outside instead of the inside, and I think that's the key point overall I'm trying to make. In order for something to "succeed" or to be "convincing" to one's understanding of art there's a certain undertone that implies a sort of staticity in our "digestion" of those experiences, a voyeuristic excitement at 'consuming' works that are, to our eyes, something that exists in our plane first and in their plane last.

"feelsgood" and "gamefeel" are wide-ranging adjectives I've seen be used in game criticism for a while in both bad and good connotation but we sometimes forget how those concepts of "crunchiness" or "pleasure" traverse for one person and the other. The popping little explosions of Kingdom Hearts' keyblade plummeting the enemy away like a ragdoll and Doom's shotgun ravaging its way through the fleshy insides of a demon is a very superficial comparison I'm making on the fly to demonstrate the differences in "feel" interactive fiction can create, but in that sense why do we tend to use this word as if it somehow systematized and encompassed all sorts of feel into a concept that can be 'good' or 'bad' depending on context? Sometimes it feels good to hit things. Sometimes it feels awful but it is also compelling. Sometimes a world can exasperate its breath through traversal and physical connection like Breath of the Wild does with its ephemeral assimilation of challenges and progression, and sometimes it can inspire action and improvisation on virtual architecture like Sonic Adventure, begging us to ramp and spindash through hubs and places that mechanically only exist to grant a sense of friction to movement, but inspire the imagination and playfulness of running through their skies, water and colors --- Sonic Adventure's "jank" gives these spaces life in the unpredictability of direction and speed. If there's one thing I learned with Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is that most things I love about games I love will probably remain unspeakable, verbalized mysteries until the day I forget what words mean and only feel the sunshine of Outrun 2's skybox peeling the anxiety of my mind through the sound of Magical Sound Shower. Until the day I can only remember the drifting piano of Breath of the Wild's biotic world orchestrating its digital stillness, like a God breathing on my shoulder while I move and slide aimlessly like a lost wanderer. Until I can only recall the melody of Demon's Souls' Nexus and the sound my footsteps raise when walking through the water mirror on its center. Until I can only reminisce about Proteus's singing flowers and its island that dances through optics and observation. Maybe that's why we write reviews and want our loves validated or to be seen as something 'higher', 'mightier', something complicated and mystical as the maths that reveal humanity the mysteries of the universe since centuries ago. We want answers we'll never be able to grasp as long as we try to analyze, and to analyze we need to lie in the exterior. We need to watch, study and patronize; we need to put these architectures and spaces into boxes and views of 'critique' and 'deliberacy'. We need to leave its heart and embrace the surfaces of technicality.

Maybe we should try to feel more, see more, hear more, sense more. To be inside those worlds and not inspect them, but love them. Or hate them. Or feel nothing. It'll always depend. But I don't want to pretend that I know anything anymore, I don't want to play jigsaw and piece it all together.

I've always questioned my taste for existing in spaces. In my dreams I'm often attached to the unearthly and chaotic logic that conducts the sights and people that I see in my own mind. I want more than anything to exist in places that can make me feel something about who I am or the people that surround me, I want to belong and to discover. I know that I want to not know, I want mystique; the dialectics of discovery, wonder and impermanence. Maybe that's why my favorite Super Marios are 64 and Galaxy, because I'll never forget how mysterious and dreamy the castle felt on my first way through in 64, expanding unto itself as if it had a life of its own; and I'll never forget how silent and empty the starred void could be in Galaxy, even if I couldn't traverse it --- picturing it through a looking-glass was enough to capture its scale in relation to Mario, its gravity pulling me with ease and swinging me around spheres as I grasped the cosmos' force beyond what I could jump on despite the universe looking so calm. Maybe that's why Danganronpa's claustrophobic and unworldly, exaggerated style of pink blood and flipping cardboard cut-outs resonated with my urge to pull the paper off the stage, exploring and gathering evidence towards nonsensical, absurd truths. It's not that I want to exist in worlds that make me forget I am here, but worlds that remind me how much there truly is in the unseen, between the lines of the material. Those hypnotizing physicalities we conjure of body, mind and soul. If we broke away from all the systems, equations and measuring, who knows what frontiers we could uncover.

Google tells me I'm past halfway through Final Fantasy XVI and I keep finding weak excuses to not finish it. I just don't find this game fun.

Frustrating combat, weak story and lifeless semi-open worlds... all working against the beautiful score, truly next gen presentation, and the epic but infrequent Eikon battles.

I could probably push my way through if the combat was fun, however it is so dull to smash through. There is no challenge to it, just spongey enemies and repetition. The game often throws waves of enemies at you, yet rarely offers anything new. There is a mission about 10 hours in where you are working your way to a boss through these puzzle rooms, and you fight the same enemy dozens of times for about an hour. I was bored out of my mind.

I consider myself a mediocre gamer (Souls-likes terrify me) and haven't died once, not even in the optional side boss battles. That isn't what you want from a game like this.

Sounds like I hate it, so why the rating? The Eikon battles are incredible. The spectacle of them is unparalleled. Trim the game down by 10 hours so these battles become more frequent, and you've got a game I'd finish.

I also loved the performances, even if I didn't care for a lot of the characters or what was happening. There was a lot of heavy lifting done by the talented cast, and they deserve all the praise I think they'll receive this awards season.

Within the game's gorgeous open zones, windows of interaction with different manners of moving through the maps (using a stream of wind to get up a platform, using a fire skill to burn down vines, etc.) are often gatekept by a varied set of abilities acquired by leveling up certain attributes in favour of specific openings in the game's Affinity trees (which are unique for each Blade) --- the so called field skills are only but one of the many variables that rule how Blades you bond with will interact with traversal, combat and overall progression through the game. There is a notable contrast between the sprawling, natural and detailed zones of the setting and the slippery, awkward character movimentation through these same panoramas filled with markers and cluttering UI identifiers; an incongruity between the maximalist, megalomaniac numerical obsession of the matters in which players connect and interact with that virtual world, and the often terrain-based combat/navigation that constantly demands that you look around and look for gaps between the pixelated topography, to check if there's an unrelated enemy around who could aggro you and interrupt your chain of orbs, to topple a flying enemy and make it fall down after you make it to higher ground, to use rails, rocks or other common environment assets to cheese your way through battles by gaining distance from the enemy's aggroing and auto-attacking with a bitball or a cannon while their path is blocked by said asset, to make use of the game's many position-based Arts: these strategies are not exceptions, but constant thoughts and visualizations I had through the game's many, many encounters.

This friction between the 'artificial' and the 'pulsing', the 'constant' and the 'drifting', is what builds this game's main dialectics: in this made-up world of flamboyant designs destined to be made fun of or utilized for their visual and questionable appeal, of series of integers and technical rigidness bounding the player to a progression based on variables and array-based requirements, how do we achieve genuine connection between constructs that seem to attract inherent unseriousness and confusion? How do we break down the walls of 'artifices' between the player and the game? The answer could only be one: Rex, and his Salvager Code.

The panache and naivete of juvenile optimism, the shonen-esque confidence in all that exists and the resolve to make people smile. Within the bounds of its own artificiality and the signifiers used to construct its experience, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 somehow manages to weave a convincing force of sincerity through a world that is conducted by the forces of constants, arrays, dipping frames and uncertain dynamic resolution --- all of that which cannot be organically touched or interacted with, ends up crossing the walls of mechanicality unexplainably by the end of it all, finding expression and meaning in the most unexpected places. A boy and a girl make a promise to reach Paradise; the boy complies without knowing why, not even because of the fact she saved his life right beforehand --- for giving his life for a stranger is simply his spirit. A girl who fears her own power, shutting herself off for unspecified milennia; a boy who finds treasures in junk for a living, salvaging meaning and memories out of seamless clouds. In the friendship between Rex and Pneuma lies the game's final and most important dichotomy, the impossibility between eternity and remembrance, the way in which our selves are tied to our egos which are formed by the promises we make to each other, how one would rather die than be forgotten by the one they love and keep on going for infinity. Theirs is a relationship of light: uncertainness about oneself's purpose breed spontaneity and trust in that which shines the way forward. Shin had Metsu, Hana had Hikari; within the endless streams of lights we project when we break down the walls of artifices between us, we find identity and purpose.

In each of the game's varied landscapes, one sight tends to repeat itself: the view of Alrest's enormous World Tree, the promised spot that gives access to Paradise and God, peering at his creations above the sea of white. To find that these organic leaves sprouting from its head and that the wooden exterior of its large shell house a high-tech facility full of elevators and robot guards only intensifies the images that Alrest creates through gameplay: an ocean hiding before humanity's ruins in Morytha, the vistas of the clouds forming different shapes and patterns within the perspectives of each character, numerical catharsis and exploitation of the artifices as a means of visualizing the act of bonding and the struggle of moving forward by your own means. Connecting Arts and auto-attacks indefinitely, building up elemental spheres and breaking them with the collective power of strategized synchrony; the endless QTEs building up in the screen demanding timing and linking in this fascinating real-time turn-based system.

"I love this world because you're in it."