The 1.2 update is a fucking disgrace. Nightdive delayed the release of the update by several months to coincide with some console bullshit, and it turns out the PC version of 1.2 wasn't even fit to be shipped as evidenced by the fact that the game is now even buggier than before. They stated this update was done MONTHS ago. I guess all those months weren't long enough to do any QA.
All previous saves are now broken. Dropping the default melee pipe can allegedly crash the game. HUD opacity is broken. Key rebinding access is still only partially provided. All GOG achievements are broken. Access to the builds required to revert to a previous version in GOG Galaxy has been REMOVED for some unknowable reason. Cutscene subtitles disregard user configuration. And to top it all off I've heard that the revamped Shodan fight which was terrible at release is now somehow even worse. I wouldn't be surprised if the random crashes that drove me to give up my last 3,3,3,3 run are still in the game.
Great fucking work Nightdive. Both Steam and GOG forums are full of threads complaining about bugs.
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I want to love the remake but it's riddled with so many small irritations, both technical and tonal, and coupled with Nightdive's scummy behavior in the years leading up to the release that my view of the project is repeatedly soured. The remake is so frustratingly close to being excellent.
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Yeah the new Shodan fight is fucking terrible.
Bugs I ran into in this playthrough:
Vaporize All hotkey vaporizes scrap.
Z-fighting on elevators during transitions.
Enemy giblets frequently display graphical errors.
HUD Opacity cannot be configured.
Cutscene subtitles cannot be disabled.
Map markers cannot be placed.
Camera map icons sometimes persist on the minimap after camera destruction.
Damage sound effect from getting hit by a plant mutant's attack persisted until I reloaded from the title screen.
The Executive level railgun disappeared as I picked it up. The interstitial animation played out, but there was no visible model of the weapon. The railgun was nowhere to be found thereafter. Eventually I was able to acquire one of the later instances of a railgun, but this still isn't something that should have happened.

Improvements:
The level 7 trap finally kills the player after all this time.
That's it. That's the only improvement after a year.
You know what, since all achievements are currently bugged, I'm not even going to suffer through the 1.2 Shodan fight. They had a year to implement a healthbar and post boss monologue autosave. Yet somehow failed to realize how crucial such features are. For reference, the current 1.2 final boss is a long enemy gauntlet where you only have access to one shitty weapon at a time and cannot see your healthbar. There are no checkpoints. There are no health pickups. It is long. It is boring. There is an unskippable boss intro. I'm not willing to waste any more of my time on this shit that is somehow worse than the 1994 Shodan encounter. I'm marking this as done.

There was a Naughty Dog employee who had a funny concept of Daxter racing the loading bar between every zone, this person got properly sacked from his job after pitching such an idiotic idea (source: trust me bro); Jak and Daxter doesn't care about wasting the players' time with trivial things such as loading screens, when it throws in a cutscene it goes "it's ok you can skip" unlike its contemporary Ratchet & Clank, except you're not going to because they're charming as hell revealing snippets of this mystical world. The music is somewhere in the background quietly jamming, doing its thing so it doesn't overshadow the main dish; the game never explains this but Jak is an acrobat master with flips and rolls that would make the Souls protagonists blush (especially the adaptability fool), Daxter seems like a gimmick that would get annoying quick but gives some funny lines and helpful advice every time you're stuck. The whole time I kept waiting for the catch, that one moment that's kinda shit so I can dog on the game but it never came, it's just ~5 hours of pure platforming fun that refuses to overstay its welcome. Play the pc port (yes, look it up) and enjoy one of PS2's finest outings in its definitive form.

PC port of this game can be found here: https://archive.org/details/infinity-blade-pc

Yes, I copied the most-recent description from the most-recent review here, but it needs to be said enough that subsequent reviews for this game, if played on the PC, should indicate this.

Amazing just how much secrets this game actually had that I wasn't able to discover until this came by as a fan's stealth PC release. Didn't know about the negative bloodlines back then and how it could actually speed up your grinding by a few weeks ahead of time.

Still, despite being the premier game that defined the iPhone's appeal and power at the time, it is certainly aging a little bit poorly. Game's much easier to play when you're not fat-fingering it on the phone, but all the same beyond upgrading your stats, the gameplay loop doesn't change.

One part sniping away coin bags and health potions, one part swiping the screen looking for alternate paths on the longest road to the God King, and the last one being a punch-out game fighting against 3 enemy types beside the God King and his Dark Knight, that's all the gameplay you'll get. The numbers and difficulty may change but the core is always static. Well, the PC version's free, so why not play it anyway? It's a meditative experience that you can just plop anywhere and stop at any time.

this was the sickest shit i had ever seen on an ipod in 2010. shame that you can't play these anymore.

mobile games are a joke now. they're made for the sole purpose of harvesting as much cash as possible - whether that be from casual audiences, kids, or the 'people' who play gacha games and let themselves become more beast than man. but for a brief time, mobile gaming had promise. quick, cute, arcade-styled games ruled the market and weren't squarely focused on scamming you, but there wasn't really a substantive, impressive title for mobile. until THIS came out. this shit was nuts, at the time. it had atmosphere, actual gameplay, cool visuals - at the time i thought this was the future of mobile games. this was a bright, shining testament to the ingenuity possible in the mobile games market. now, it isn't even playable any more. lost to time in a sea of fuckin kim kardashian wait 14 hours to build a store games, banished into nothingness while anime girls get slightly naked if you pay several hundred dollars. shame, really.

not a shmuphead by any means but i found the 2014 entry surprisingly entertaining and was in a car for 6 hours so I tapped in on this. manipulating bullet patterns on a crusty 2017 ASUS laptop with a suspect shift key is just only a notch below an arcade cabinet in terms of intended shmup experience, and after a bit of mangling with the different modes and ship types i was hittin that rhythmic groove that made me fall in love with PCB & Imperishable Night when I played them way back when. shmups are really good at creating this kind of paradoxical enforcement and lessening of failure anxiety--good performance lessens the feeling that you're gonna lose and builds confidence in your competency, but also said good performance moves you up the linear curve of higher stakes, to where your prior good performance might not cut it anymore, which actually just reinforces the initial anxiety, and so on and so on. new breed trapper imposter syndrome not the fake bullshit for corporate eaters they talk about in litmags. anyway i really like this one because it kind of lets you set the variables for that anxiety game--do you want to be anxious about keeping up a high standard for an indefinite period of time, do you want to be anxious about keeping pace with an ever-evolving environment, do you want to be anxious about the precarious, 'zig when you shoulda zagged' nature of timing your next big move, etc. then the internal slip n slide of affect plays out from there depending on how you've set the board up. idk just really fun stuff at the end of the day.

Super solid shmup with a surprisingly affective story about the way christian-patriach culture brutalizes women for taking control of their sexual agency. It's a pretty good DDP-like in addition to that; the two components tie a clean knot thanks to strong theming and good sound direction.

It's not perfect tho. Visual clarity is far and away the most nagging part of the experience. Bullets easily blend into your sprite's similarly-colored hair. Enemies tend to have very little visual presence since they're mostly villager NPC's that blend in with the other NPC's you rescue, on top of also being able to hide behind background elements for cover. Then you got some enemies that stealth-dash between obstructions fucking ninja gaiden style, and your options which are also NPC-shaped and poorly-colored. So it leads to you going through most of the game not really knowing what you're shooting at, and not really feeling like the stuff that's hitting you is fair. It's that awkward difficulty balance of having hard moments but not really being too hard, which makes the scattered deaths feel like slaps on the wrist instead of challenges to overcome. All these problems really culminate near the end; I breezed through the first 6 stages on my first credit, then took 30+ retries to beat the last stage.

Good game otherwise, it's really cool to see the continuing trend of shmups diving deeper into storytelling, and I'm glad the genre hasn't been held back by heteronormative expectations that latch onto other sectors of gaming. Call it the perks of being in the same extremely niche subculture as Touhou.

If you're as disillusioned with the state of video game comedic writing as I am, then I can't recommend Moon enough. The Undertale inspiration is beyond apparent, but, thankfully, Toby Fox-esque dialogue isn't. Instead, it's written more like a golden age point-and-click, in which every character subscribes to the same sort of backwards logic that you have to make sense of in order to progress. This degree of committal, to me, is what separates retro quirk from modern indie quirk, which typically means presenting the player with a series of jokey, half-sarcastic statements that more often than not clash with the setting rather than characterizing it. And the setting's really everything in Moon, which tasks some kid (who I named "Sirloin," for some reason) with collecting love from the citizens of Love-de-Gard through various means. The more love you get, the further you can venture outside without having to sleep, which gives you more leeway into tracking the villagers' day/night and weekly schedules and allows you to reach new locations on your own accord. The same giddy feeling of planning out how to be in the right place at the right time that would later make Majora's Mask great is present here, but it's also amplified by the fact that you have to earn the ability to even be there. You're not guaranteed three full days, you have to work your way up to that point first. Moon's other stroke of genius comes with it being solely composed of sidequests that all reward you the same thing. Hit a wall in a typical point-and-click and you're done progressing until you eventually flail towards the correct answer, but getting stuck in Moon simply means you get to pursue a different avenue to obtain love. Your character's slow movement speed also gives you plenty of opportunity to consider possible solutions, more or less diffusing the feeling of wasting your time that usually comes packaged with any contextual puzzle game. The cherry here is the game's story, which you really have to stumble upon all by yourself. It's all about collecting love, until it isn't, of course, and it's easy to see how railroading could defeat the entire purpose.

Where Moon succeeds on a mechanical front, however, it often disappoints in the satiric sense... or, at least, that's what the first few hours led me to believe. It starts off as a surface-level subversion of JRPG tropes, positing a protagonist that's really a bully and monsters that are misunderstood animals, but, eventually, the hero fades away from the story, allowing Sirloin to create one of his own. Moon isn't simply a base parody or some milquetoast statement on love being the most important power of all, but a past tense coming-of-age story, a portrait of a very specific type of innocence loss using the framework of video games. We've all been there. Believing that L was real, that the truck in Vermillion City was blocking something important, that Sephiroth could be recruited into your party, or that Sonic was an unlockable character in Melee. The idea that games extended beyond the walls of your TV, housing unexplainable worlds where anything and everything could happen. Judging by Minecraft's Herobrine, this is a phenomenon that transcends both generations and philosophies of game design. But, at some point, we lost the ability, or perhaps the willingness, to reenter this state of mind. Play enough games and you realize there's a limit to what they're capable of, that there are certain rules that all developers more or less follow. This is what the fake/real dichotomy on the cover art refers to, and it's also something that's baked into how Moon works at its core. Learn enough about this world and you begin to find out that there's more to it than meets the eye, doing this also gives you the ability (or, the desire) to spend more time here. Spend too much time here and the seams start to show. Routines become too predictable, dialogue repeats itself, and the solipsistic nature of video games fully sets in. What adds to this is how consistently it subtly hints towards the boundary between fake and real. Take, for instance, this line. One on side of the spectrum, it serves to characterize Minister's anality (think "always watching, Wazowski") but on the other, it's a nod towards his ultrasimple AI. After all, any game trying to create the illusion of real characters would certainly avoid directly stating that doing X will always cause someone to do Y. Moon's puzzles also frequently point towards this separation. In gamespeak, someone telling you to look at a painting means that the player is supposed to physically study its graphical asset for clues, but in Moon, you actually have to literally position your character in front of it and wait for a few moments. This one briefly stumped me- I had to come back to it after awhile to figure it out, in other words, I was effectively punished for being on the "fake" end of the spectrum. I could harp on how Moon could've given you a few more reasons to hang out in town, or how the clock stops feeling like it matters too soon, or how it contains the most banal fishing minigame yet conceived by man, but it's hard to argue against how elegantly it ties its themes into how it plays. There's a reason why the tone's so somber, and why so many of the characters are trying to reignite some long lost spark. The Sirloin that your Gramby knew and loved is gone, replaced by a ghost wearing his clothes, while she lies in bed, Claire de Lune softly playing in the background. Once that dragon's slain, there's no going back.

Stop browsing Backloggd, and go to bed!