Oh my god. I'm still in disbelief at what I just played. Finishing this game made me increase both this game and Innocent Sin to a 4.5 star rating, it really is that great. Another persona game that makes me ugly cry at the ending of the game. Ooooh how much I love the P2 Cast and the world and the story. My opinions on the combat and dungeon design haven't changed as I still think they're terrible.

The story. My god I had some major whiplash going from mute Tatsuya to mute Maya. it felt super jarring at first that Maya went from a character who probably had one of the most important roles in Innocent Sin to a mute protagonist. That was kind of a turn off, but it didn't deter me from playing this amazing game. This game was all about deja vu, and the repeat dungeons and scenes truly symbolised 'Eternal Punishment'. I do enjoy this games story more than Innocent Sin because they don't dump the Xibalba and the Last Battalion stuff on you all in one go. I enjoyed how you had to sometimes fight some of your main party members as part of their development and plot, I think that just enhanced my experience with the game. The game feels extremely eerie with some shops being switched to different areas of Sumaru, and it works wonderfully, contributing to the setting of the game. Overall, a great story that literally had me bawling at the end of the game.

Gameplay, there really isn't much to say that's different from my Innocent Sin review. There aren't really any dungeons I enjoyed myself, and I hated all of the dungeons that made you fall through the floor and restart the entire thing all over again, terribly designed. I also disliked the final dungeon where you couldn't deal damage to a specific enemy unless you had a specific persona with you, that's also terrible. Honestly, the only reason this game and Innocent Sin aren't 5/5 is because of the terrible gameplay. I did use the velvet room this time around to try and get into the gameplay, and it was just plain annoying honestly. Play this game for the story and characters, not for the battling.

Characters. This game shows that they can write a great persona game with an adult-centric cast. Katsuya, Ulala, and the return of the persona 1 characters are all great additions to the roster, and I love the bickering between Baofu, Katsuya, and Ulala, almost reminiscient of Lisa and Eikichi. Baofu is great, not on the level of Katsuya, Ulala or Tatsuya for me, but I like his little monologues about being an adult to Tatsuya. But I have to talk about Tatsuya Suou, probably turning out to be one of my favourite characters ever. The turmoil and suffering he has to go through, and then the ending to top it all off really made me all emotional. He truly got eternally punished for committing an innocent sin. Persona as a series is just great at writing characters that make me fall in love with them. This cast might be one of my favourites casts ever, alongside Innocent Sins cast.

I said I was let down by Innocent Sin in that review, but I take it back. I am overly satisfied with the Persona 2 duology, it's great and I'll probably replay it eventually one day. It's gonna feel weird having completed all of the mainline Persona games, but I don't dislike any of them, and that speaks to the volume of how great they all are individually. Persona 2: Eternal Punishment was a fantastic game that had me hooked from the start.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin was a difficult game to get into I'll admit. I tried one playthrough before but I got extremely annoyed with the dated gameplay and awful dungeon design, on top of how rapid random encounters were. I decided to give it another go this year as part of my Persona/SMT binge, and I will say that it did not disappoint. This game has some lows, but there are some unbelievable highs that make it a solid game for me.

I'll start by saying that I still prefer the P3/P4/P5 formula, those games just feel much more fun in a gameplay sense and a story sense, whereas this game only feels fun in a story sense. I'm sure people enjoyed the gameplay of this game but it isn't my cup of tea.

The story is great. I will say the mid-game where they drop a bunch of random words on you did confuse me, it didn't really take away any enjoyment I had for the game. I love the game conceptually about how rumours come true, and some dungeons and their gimmicks reflecting that. The characters are probably the strongest aspect of this game because I don't dislike any of them, though it feels like they did throw one specific character aside during the endgame. The characters just all have such distinct personalities and each have great development over the course of the story. The dynamics between the party is also fantastic and I love the bickering between Eikichi and Lisa, it's great. Solid story and great characters make this a game worth playing.

The gameplay.. There's just something that doesn't do it for me. Yeah, there's persona negotiations, but most of the time you make them angry and you get nothing for it. The amount of arcana cards you need to create personas was a huge turn off from me, so I avoided that aspect entirely. Now my major flaws with the game, the encounter rate and dungeon design. The dungeon design is held back by the encounter rate being so damn high. I'm just trying to make my way through arguably the most annoying dungeon in game aka the forest, and I get stopped every five steps due to an encounter. To top it all of, that dungeon is also way too confusing with the layout and me having to whip out a guide because that dungeon itself is the one that started to burn me out of the game. Not all dungeons were terrible, the one in the museum where you're timed to get to the rooftop is great, and I enjoyed exploring the schools and the big plot-twist dungeon too. I do think the dungeon design was severely lacking in this game, and resulted in me only caring about the story and the characters.

The music is great. I think I might have the battle music stuck in my head because of how boppy it is. Lisa and Maya's themes slap so hard and live rent free in my head.

Overall, this game is great overall, but I feel kind of let down. People have been hyping up this game, and yeah I get it, but it just doesn't have that much of an impact on me than the other three persona games after this (excluding Eternal Punishment). However, I am fully invested in Persona 2 and can't wait to begin Eternal Punishment to see where the story goes from here!

This is fine. Better than either of the original Quake 1 expansions, I think. Not too surprising that Xatrix is the only one of these Quake 1/2 expansion devs to go on to anything particularly notable afterwards (not counting MachineGames, obviously).

I liked the new weapons in this one a lot, particularly the Phalanx. The maps are a bit of a mixed bag, some really good, some really bad (particularly the lazy final map that recycles the Makron boss fight from the base game but set in a much worse arena). The new enemies aren't anything special, and there are way too many enemy encounters that involve you getting ambushed from behind by an enemy that was hiding behind a secret door. But overall I had an OK time playing through this.

Whilst I can say that I'm glad another team is taking a crack at making a cod zombies like game (even if their main inspiration is cold war zombies and not the original zombies) I have to sadly be pretty harsh on this.

First off, this game runs like shit. It has awful optimisation and even on performance mode with uncapped frames it barely runs at 30 fps. The "zombies" (more like occultists) function more like killing floor enemies than their cod contemporaries which causes a clash in gameplay between mechanics being similar to cold war but the zombies not being able to be properly utilised. IE Trains. The easter eggs also reduce to some pretty bland steps that reduce to the worst of what cod zombies had while also having quite confusing and visually weird map designs. The perks are also extremely boring compared to their more visually interesting and easy to read counterparts the perks in this game reduce to a small syringe in the wall that gives you a bad RPG-like buff that's something like 5% movement speed. I hope this game irons out some of its more displeasing aspects but I just sadly cannot say you should play this. Shoutout to having a demo that allows people to freely play one of the maps as much as they want.

So far this is my favorite of the PS2 Gundam games. It captures 79 perfectly - if you're Amuro, you're on easy street. If you're anyone else, every battle will be the most vicious dogfight of your life. The character campaigns are cool and show different sides of the OYW, and the combat is excellent. The lock-on problem of Gundam vs. isn't solved, but everything feels so smooth it's easy to ignore. Going hard on the thrusters and spinning through space feels incredible, and maneuverability varies between suits in subtle but appreciable ways. While the controls are easy to understand, mastering them is a different story. In a typical battle, you'll need to dodge projectiles, manage ammo, eliminate enemies quickly, and more if you want to survive. Learning the ropes was a challenging but rewarding experience, and by the end of my playthrough, I felt like I had advanced a lot in terms of skill. Certainly one of the best mecha action games on the PS2, and worth playing if you're a fan of Gundam.

I've been meaning to get into the Max Payne trilogy for a while. Whenever I thought about buying it, I always ended up going with some other option, and I don't know why it took me so long to get around to buying it. I bought Max Payne two days ago, along with Yakuza 0, and even though I just beat it a few minutes ago, I can't wait to get back to the game and beat it on Hard-Boiled mode.

Max Payne is a fairly short game whose levels are mostly pretty similar in terms of gameplay, but there's a reason why this game is regarded as the classic that it is. For starters, I loved this game's atmosphere. The grimy, snowed-in New York setting and terrific voice acting from James McCaffrey made me feel like I was playing through a gritty, no-nonsense crime novel, and it also worked really well with the comic panel cutscenes, introspective storytelling, and especially the nightmarish and unnerving dream sequences. This brass knuckle atmosphere meshes brilliantly with the gameplay, which clearly (and proudly) takes inspiration from filmmakers like John Woo and the Wachowskis with its bullet time and shootdodge mechanics.

I generally loved Max Payne, but there's one level in the game that made me consider lowering my score entirely. While I didn't mind the game's lack of checkpoints, as I thought that it made the gunfights much more engaging, I was especially annoyed and frustrated by the level "Stone-Cold Dead", which went on for almost ten minutes and had the unbearable elevator sequence. That level wasn't enough to fully worsen my thoughts on Max Payne, though, as I thought that it was a fantastic game that makes me really excited to check out the other two games in the trilogy.

Since I wasn't that crazy about the first game to begin with and thought that the second game was astoundingly terrible in ways where I could barely believe the franchise even kept going after its release, I was unsure if I even wanted to go ahead and play Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, and so I took a bit of a break from the series after playing the first two entries within two weeks of each other. As time went on, though, I heard quite a few people say that it was well worth it, and that made me decided to finally bite the bullet and play through the fan favorite of the franchise. Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening was one of those games that I really looked forward to jumping back into whenever I wasn't already playing it, because while it definitely isn't perfect in some outright frustrating ways, it was a massive improvement on Devil May Cry and especially Devil May Cry 2.

Before I even got the chance to control Dante, I had a feeling that I was going to like this game thanks to its cutscenes, because if there's one thing that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening has in spades, it's a strong personality. Instead of being vessels for dull exposition, the cutscenes in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening are loaded with hyperactive camerawork and editing, blood-pumping music, campy dialogue, and some immensely over-the-top action that made my jaw drop multiple times, and I looked forward to every single cutscene to the point where they were my favorite element of the entire game. The stylized cutscenes were complimented by Dante's much more lovable personality, fleshed out characters, and a genuinely compelling story (a first for the series!), and seeing how Dante's relationship with Vergil evolved alongside Lady's relationship with her father Arkham was compelling from start to finish. The gameplay here got a much-needed revamp from the first game's barebones combat and the second game being entirely dedicated to having you spam the square button forever, as the twitchy, fast-paced combat is bolstered by a combo system that rewards speed and a whole slew of weapons and styles to choose from, the former of which you can switch on the fly. Not only did the variety of options to choose from alone make for a lot of experimentation, but the weapons and styles themselves being genuinely really cool made me excited to unlock new items and moves, and I got to try pretty much everything at least once while still clinging onto my favorite playstyle. The bosses are also loads of fun to fight with how hectic and varied they are, and while I do wish that they were spaced out a bit more and I especially wasn't a fan of the unnecessary repeated fights (looking at you, Mission 18), their Gothic designs made every encounter memorable.

Pretty much everyone who has played Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening talks about how difficult it is, and while it is pretty challenging, I don't think it would be half as hard to play as it is if it wasn't for the atrocious in-game camera. I don't know what it is about this series, but I haven't been able to play a single Devil May Cry game with a genuinely good camera system, as it constantly jerks around to the point where you can't even see what you're trying to kill, let alone avoid their attacks. This also ended up impacting the still-clunky platforming, barely functional enemy targeting system, the gimmick enemies that break the flow of combat with how they can only be killed in one or two ways, and practically every boss fight in the game, as attacks constantly come at you from off-screen in ways where you don't even get the chance to react to them to the point where it makes certain fights flat-out annoying to play. Although I wouldn't really call Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening the masterpiece that so many people have crowned it as over the years, it's still a great game that proved to be hugely influential to the character action genre, and while I'm not that interested in playing Devil May Cry 4 or DmC: Devil May Cry, I definitely do want to eventually check out Devil May Cry 5 when I come across a copy of it.

Maybe the most missunderstood and wrongfully shamed game of 7th Gen. From the critics who claimed it was a repetitive techdemo with a shallow parcoure system, to the sequel dickriders who retroactivly shunned it: Get fucked. The First Assassins Creed is a game of focus, a clear vision of making a historical spy thriller with a sci fi twist.

It weaves historical fact with fiction excellently and creates a believable world for Gameplay to take place in. Altair is an excelent protagonist, beeing a reflection of the World he lives in. A Land that is beeing grinded down between the waring parties, where your fundamentalist believes and oaths justifie the end to any means. And unlike many of the Sequels: Altair actually changes and earns his arc as he learns the truth about the Holy War. Hes not Ezio who becomes the Holy Prophet of the Creed even after fucking up again, again and then a little bit more for good measure. Assassins Creed 1 considers consequenz and choice important to the narrativ, like it fucking should.

The gameplay consists of parcouring through the distinct cities of the Middle East. Jerusalem, Damascus and Acre all have unique districts, color pallets and Architecture. The devs had so much trust in the level design that they allow the minimap to be turned off and let the player explore based on landmarks and directions given in missions briefings alone. And it works. Having the buro always in the north of a city gives a clear starting point for exploration, making it entirely the players fault if they get lost.

The traversel through the citys is handle by a complex parcoure system allowing complete freedom of movement with side ejects, back jumps, slides and eventually ledge grabs. The later getting acquired to late in the game even though it unlocks a cruchial new layer to the traversal that should have been unlocked after the intro in my opinion. That and a piss poor tutorial, wich the series still suffers from, may have contributed to the lack of engagement players might have fellt toward this first Entrie. Although I would argue the game is open enough to allow experimentation without the need for endlessly forced tutorials. And perhaps that was the point.

The missions that are supposedly so repetitive all tie into the movement and use it well. And to be clear: there are no side missions in AC 1. Its all in service of the story and how much context the player wants to have before killing their assignt target. AC 1 simply prefers to not pull away any focus with random bullshit, just sometimes stoping the plot for present day segments that give further Context and even have their own secrets to discover. Random Flags and Templars to kill are placed in the world, wich I do admit feel very tacked on and unecessary. Their isnt even any reward for doing it.

Combat is not nearly as complex as parcour, but still provides solid fun. Its all about the numbers, giving even more the feeling that your a lonely Assassin send into the lions den. Parry can become a Get Out of Jail Free Card if its mastered sure, but in the late game enemies turn up in such high numbers that the most viable strategie really is the make a quick escape across the rooftopes. To give some credit to the critics: Combat does become repetitive simply due to the fact that by one of the last sections it becomes a litteral Kill Corridor of Enemies with no Stealth or any way to avoid it. It sucks and it reeks of a rushed deadline they had to met.

Still those are minor problems in my eyes for a game that is so unique among it own Series even. It is a shame that Ubisoft kickd the series creator Patrice Desilets to the curb when it came time to make follow ups, just so they could have complete control over milking their new cash cow dry until the heat death of the universe, or more fittingly: Soon the company itself, according to all the reports. I wonder what could have been, but Im also glad AC 1 still exists. Its a game I keep coming back to since I was Tennager and I appreciate it more every time I replay it.