1999
The closest any singular video game has ever come to being designated as an SCP
It's like Street Fighter/King of Fighters/Super Smash Bros, if its character roster was built out of the Akashic records and took the form of an impossible shape optical illusion
I don't know how the community is now, but back in the 2000s/early 2010s it was a bureaucratic nightmare hellscape ruled by Napoleons, the worst possible community for a game reliant on user-generated content, with so many rules, moral prohibitions, and warring factions (warehousers vs. creators) that it'd make Kafka shit his pants and die
This game is basically the video game equivalent of the King in Yellow, an impossible forbidden game that drives its players to madness, when I was a 12-year-old autistic child with strong convictions about preservation, my actions in the community made people threaten to kill me and dox me and send fake reports to the FBI over me (which is a felony btw! epic win) which definitely has NOT fucked me up for life with anxiety issues
There used to be a list of "unrequestable characters" that were prohibited from distribution due to stolen code, or stolen art, or because they just didn't like who made them, and that instantly turned every character on that list into a hot commodity all of us WAREHOUSERS just had to find
We were all assholes and deserved each other, like we had all sinned during a previous life and this community was our punishment
P.S.: a "warehouser" is defined as somebody who engages in unauthorized distribution of MUGEN content, you would become a social pariah if you shared characters without permission, even if those characters had been offline for years and would be lost permanently without reuploading, you are still catching a ban
It's like Street Fighter/King of Fighters/Super Smash Bros, if its character roster was built out of the Akashic records and took the form of an impossible shape optical illusion
I don't know how the community is now, but back in the 2000s/early 2010s it was a bureaucratic nightmare hellscape ruled by Napoleons, the worst possible community for a game reliant on user-generated content, with so many rules, moral prohibitions, and warring factions (warehousers vs. creators) that it'd make Kafka shit his pants and die
This game is basically the video game equivalent of the King in Yellow, an impossible forbidden game that drives its players to madness, when I was a 12-year-old autistic child with strong convictions about preservation, my actions in the community made people threaten to kill me and dox me and send fake reports to the FBI over me (which is a felony btw! epic win) which definitely has NOT fucked me up for life with anxiety issues
There used to be a list of "unrequestable characters" that were prohibited from distribution due to stolen code, or stolen art, or because they just didn't like who made them, and that instantly turned every character on that list into a hot commodity all of us WAREHOUSERS just had to find
We were all assholes and deserved each other, like we had all sinned during a previous life and this community was our punishment
P.S.: a "warehouser" is defined as somebody who engages in unauthorized distribution of MUGEN content, you would become a social pariah if you shared characters without permission, even if those characters had been offline for years and would be lost permanently without reuploading, you are still catching a ban
2002
Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao
TBD
I had to mark "played" to leave this review but that was a lie, just wanted to leave this review to say I had the chance to play this once at GEEX 2011 and I didn't, not knowing it would get canceled, which will haunt me for the rest of my life
2005
I think you need to leave
2003
PLAY THE JAPANESE VERSION
The voice-acting is full English, they got new blander voice actors and completely butchered SWERY's script for the US/EU versions
The original Japanese version with its English script as originally written is a pretty great satire of MGS, Mission Impossible and John Le Carre novels
Don't forget to snap a picture of Nicklaus every time you see him to get the true ending
The voice-acting is full English, they got new blander voice actors and completely butchered SWERY's script for the US/EU versions
The original Japanese version with its English script as originally written is a pretty great satire of MGS, Mission Impossible and John Le Carre novels
Don't forget to snap a picture of Nicklaus every time you see him to get the true ending
Servicable and inoffensive remake, but missing almost all of the mechanical and aesthetic peculiarities that make gen 1 interesting, like the chiptune music, the low-fi bichromatic GBC colorized visuals, the primordial off-model monster designs, and most importantly, the terrifying pantheon of the imagination that is glitch Pokemon and glitch interactions
I'd take Glitch City over the Sevii Islands any day, the most important part of gen 1 is the unauthorized feats of alchemy, Missingno multiplying your items, obtaining Mew to finish your dex by leaving a specific trainer alive and going on a fetch-quest, getting your game frozen by an infinitely screaming interdimensional creature with a gender marker for a name, stuff like that
FR/LG is missing all the cool stuff
I'd take Glitch City over the Sevii Islands any day, the most important part of gen 1 is the unauthorized feats of alchemy, Missingno multiplying your items, obtaining Mew to finish your dex by leaving a specific trainer alive and going on a fetch-quest, getting your game frozen by an infinitely screaming interdimensional creature with a gender marker for a name, stuff like that
FR/LG is missing all the cool stuff
Shut the fuck up. You say "I'm baby" but you're not. You are not baby. You are not capable of being baby. You possess neither the limitless potential of baby nor the driving curiosity of baby. You have some similarities. You cannot function on your own, you depend on others for your most basic needs. But where baby eventually outgrows these flaws, you are already hardened by your failures. You will not grow. You are not baby.
Quick go play this game while you can before it gets shut down to evade taxes
2021
Not an accurate portrayal of England, haven't seen a single TERF
1993
Open the door, get on the floor, everybody Color a Dinosaur™
2023
This review contains spoilers
Simultaneously the most unoriginal and the most original game(s) ever made, Lies of P isn't a "Soulslike" game, the term that implies awful student projects made by Full Sail University graduates, armchair game devs with zero understanding of what works and what doesn't, putting slapdash ""cel-shading"" on top of asset flips, no, Lies of P just IS a Souls game, merely by a different hand. IP ownership should never exclude participation in an ongoing design dialogue, mechanics, game feel, all of that belongs to the people, hell, intellectual property belongs to the people but most aren't ready for that conversation yet.
Some may (and do) balk at the way this game carries itself with such unearned pomp, with such cringe swagger, but as a connoisseur of unhinged media I couldn't get enough of what this game was laying down and was marathoning it for days, barely tearing myself away to eat, which is not a reaction I've had in a while
70% of this game is made up of FromSoftware, much like how 70% of Hideo Kojima's body is made up of movies they both commit the necessary social transgression of creating transformative art, but let me tell you, the 30% of this game that doesn't come from From is so wonderfully and delightfully made stranger by incorporating it into the Souls framework
Characters overexplain and exposit in ways atypical of their work, they make their motivations clear, clearly tell you where to go to help them, largely make their quests unfuckupable, and to top it all off the menu design feels like a direct reply to internet brainwormed accessibility discourse that pops up every single time From releases a new game, doing things like pointedly marking when a destination has a character that needs helping
But lest this make you think they decided to go easy on you with this one, I love the way this game innovates on From's pantheon of spectacle bosses, with Leechmonger as a modern two-phase spectacle boss and Nier Automata carnival colliding with Raiden Metal Gear being some personal favorites, when parrying a massive string of freakishly moving attacks from the second phase known as Puppet-Devouring Green Monster, it dawned on me that with the way this creature is moving and lunging at you, this game would terrify children and you absolutely should not play it around them, and when it comes to design in this context it feels like an accomplishment
Level designs aesthetically cool as hell too aside from a couple that feel like padding, the Opera House scared the shit out of me, it almost feels like they developed the game in the order you progress through the areas because it feels like there's a consistent increase in quality as you go, alpha footage from 2021 being exclusively of early areas presented largely unaltered would seem to support this
They take a bold step of making the actual process of playing the game as frictionless as possible, the edges that Dark Souls III sanded off are further sanded down, shortcuts are way up, the elevator goes back on death without pulling the lever, less side paths, key items are within a stone's throw of their locks, everything is in service of relieving the mental strain of navigation and decision-making in favor of reusing the now-freed tension headroom for ramming the boss patterns straight up your ass, parry like your life depends on it because it does
There's something immensely satisfying about the way From's games cast you in the role of archaeologist piecing together 10% of a forgotten history, but there's also something satisfying about the way this game gives you 100% of recent history, you get told everything you want to know
And perfect optimization too! 4K120 and not a hint of a frame drop throughout the entire game
Despite those accessibility changes (which I must stress I don't think are better so to speak, moreso that they make the game feel tonally different in a way that befits it), my instinct is to say this game is for sickos who played all the """Soulsborkiring""" games prior though, and if that's you and you weren't feeling this game I question if we were playing the same game, and maybe we were! You might've been burnt out, but also patch 1.3 apparently improved the game design pretty substantially with clearer windup animations among other changes
I can't overstate how incredibly funny it is to graft a cynical "I'm putting together a team" "The legendary Pinocchio will return" "Everything is going according to plan Mr. President" stinger ending onto a fucking Souls game, I rolled my eyes so far into my head they looped back around, if that doesn't make you crack a smile I don't know what to tell you
And the game ending on a Crash Bandicoot 1, Sen's Fortress channeling megacastle that conveys its scale to you visually by showing you every place you had been before, while showing you in real-time the entire journey up from the beach to the very peak, you can tell they really paid attention to complaints about From's game design by making sure to end the game on a strong note, and they wait until then throw Malenichiro at you, and then two more 2-phase bosses after that
This can feel like a soulless game at times, sure, but like Pinocchio himself, the game is ensouled by the uniqueness of its soullessness, the way it animates itself in imitation of life captivating if nothing else
The writing is actually very similar to the overly-verbose nonsense time travel version of Dark Souls II that we never got, before Shadow Tower Abyss director and later Elden Ring co-director Yui Tanimura was dragged in to clean up his original co-director Tomohiro Shibuya's mess, and you could argue "they cut that approach because it didn't work", but it's nice to see for myself why it wouldn't have worked, you know?
It wouldn't work for Souls, too off-model, but it works for this game because despite all the Bloodborne memes this game is very much its own thing and synthesizes From's work into a cohesive whole where Sekiro's parrying mechanic and Bloodborne's rallying mechanic achieve a magnificent symbiosis alongside its weird, French-inspired, forgotten mid-80s OVA energy
This game is like an overproduced April Fool's joke made real and I wouldn't have it any other way, feels like a 4.25 basically
Some may (and do) balk at the way this game carries itself with such unearned pomp, with such cringe swagger, but as a connoisseur of unhinged media I couldn't get enough of what this game was laying down and was marathoning it for days, barely tearing myself away to eat, which is not a reaction I've had in a while
70% of this game is made up of FromSoftware, much like how 70% of Hideo Kojima's body is made up of movies they both commit the necessary social transgression of creating transformative art, but let me tell you, the 30% of this game that doesn't come from From is so wonderfully and delightfully made stranger by incorporating it into the Souls framework
Characters overexplain and exposit in ways atypical of their work, they make their motivations clear, clearly tell you where to go to help them, largely make their quests unfuckupable, and to top it all off the menu design feels like a direct reply to internet brainwormed accessibility discourse that pops up every single time From releases a new game, doing things like pointedly marking when a destination has a character that needs helping
But lest this make you think they decided to go easy on you with this one, I love the way this game innovates on From's pantheon of spectacle bosses, with Leechmonger as a modern two-phase spectacle boss and Nier Automata carnival colliding with Raiden Metal Gear being some personal favorites, when parrying a massive string of freakishly moving attacks from the second phase known as Puppet-Devouring Green Monster, it dawned on me that with the way this creature is moving and lunging at you, this game would terrify children and you absolutely should not play it around them, and when it comes to design in this context it feels like an accomplishment
Level designs aesthetically cool as hell too aside from a couple that feel like padding, the Opera House scared the shit out of me, it almost feels like they developed the game in the order you progress through the areas because it feels like there's a consistent increase in quality as you go, alpha footage from 2021 being exclusively of early areas presented largely unaltered would seem to support this
They take a bold step of making the actual process of playing the game as frictionless as possible, the edges that Dark Souls III sanded off are further sanded down, shortcuts are way up, the elevator goes back on death without pulling the lever, less side paths, key items are within a stone's throw of their locks, everything is in service of relieving the mental strain of navigation and decision-making in favor of reusing the now-freed tension headroom for ramming the boss patterns straight up your ass, parry like your life depends on it because it does
There's something immensely satisfying about the way From's games cast you in the role of archaeologist piecing together 10% of a forgotten history, but there's also something satisfying about the way this game gives you 100% of recent history, you get told everything you want to know
And perfect optimization too! 4K120 and not a hint of a frame drop throughout the entire game
Despite those accessibility changes (which I must stress I don't think are better so to speak, moreso that they make the game feel tonally different in a way that befits it), my instinct is to say this game is for sickos who played all the """Soulsborkiring""" games prior though, and if that's you and you weren't feeling this game I question if we were playing the same game, and maybe we were! You might've been burnt out, but also patch 1.3 apparently improved the game design pretty substantially with clearer windup animations among other changes
I can't overstate how incredibly funny it is to graft a cynical "I'm putting together a team" "The legendary Pinocchio will return" "Everything is going according to plan Mr. President" stinger ending onto a fucking Souls game, I rolled my eyes so far into my head they looped back around, if that doesn't make you crack a smile I don't know what to tell you
And the game ending on a Crash Bandicoot 1, Sen's Fortress channeling megacastle that conveys its scale to you visually by showing you every place you had been before, while showing you in real-time the entire journey up from the beach to the very peak, you can tell they really paid attention to complaints about From's game design by making sure to end the game on a strong note, and they wait until then throw Malenichiro at you, and then two more 2-phase bosses after that
This can feel like a soulless game at times, sure, but like Pinocchio himself, the game is ensouled by the uniqueness of its soullessness, the way it animates itself in imitation of life captivating if nothing else
The writing is actually very similar to the overly-verbose nonsense time travel version of Dark Souls II that we never got, before Shadow Tower Abyss director and later Elden Ring co-director Yui Tanimura was dragged in to clean up his original co-director Tomohiro Shibuya's mess, and you could argue "they cut that approach because it didn't work", but it's nice to see for myself why it wouldn't have worked, you know?
It wouldn't work for Souls, too off-model, but it works for this game because despite all the Bloodborne memes this game is very much its own thing and synthesizes From's work into a cohesive whole where Sekiro's parrying mechanic and Bloodborne's rallying mechanic achieve a magnificent symbiosis alongside its weird, French-inspired, forgotten mid-80s OVA energy
This game is like an overproduced April Fool's joke made real and I wouldn't have it any other way, feels like a 4.25 basically
do you remember that episode of Spongebob where the Krusty Krab gets bought out, becomes Krabby O'Mondays, and starts serving new synthetic burgers that look just like the old burgers, but once you bite into it, it's revealed that it's actually raw gray sludge that came off a conveyor belt, just painted to look like a burger from the outside
2001
"Any prize for Backloggd reviewers?"
Note: no prize for Backloggd reviewers.
Note: no prize for Backloggd reviewers.
Up yours Tosa Loyalists....we'll see who cancels who!
2011
Add this game on your Steam account as a non-Steam game through RPCS3 as Yakuza Dead Souls spelled exactly like that, and boot up the game and set your in-game controls to control type B
Steam stores community configs for non-Steam games that you can easily download through Steam provided your non-Steam shortcut has the right name
Then go browse the community control configs and download my lovingly crafted input config that automatically induces a mode shift causing your right analog stick to be read as a left analog stick only when you press R2, therefore enabling Right Stick Aiming without messing with your camera controls or movement, like a modern game
I might revisit this idea for another Steam community control scheme that puts aiming on L2 and shooting on R2 respectively, relocating some of the other top inputs to make room (if I do I will also upload it to Steam, so check that space if you're interested), but for now I'm using a controller with two remappable back buttons to also put R2's aim onto the left back button, and Square's shoot onto the right back button, therefore approximating modern aim/shoot controls
And for emulating it I've found the most success and least crashes with a combination of undervolting my CPU to make it run stronger and cooler, using frequent save-states to mitigate the consequence of crashes, and setting my preferred SPU threads in the emulator to 2. I'm getting a wonderfully frame-paced 30fps in combat which is where a consistent framerate matters most, and at a beautiful 4K, using my i7-9750H CPU
Enjoy! This is a better game than people give it credit for with the control mapping issues and framerate fixed
Best played immediately following Yakuza 4 imo
Steam stores community configs for non-Steam games that you can easily download through Steam provided your non-Steam shortcut has the right name
Then go browse the community control configs and download my lovingly crafted input config that automatically induces a mode shift causing your right analog stick to be read as a left analog stick only when you press R2, therefore enabling Right Stick Aiming without messing with your camera controls or movement, like a modern game
I might revisit this idea for another Steam community control scheme that puts aiming on L2 and shooting on R2 respectively, relocating some of the other top inputs to make room (if I do I will also upload it to Steam, so check that space if you're interested), but for now I'm using a controller with two remappable back buttons to also put R2's aim onto the left back button, and Square's shoot onto the right back button, therefore approximating modern aim/shoot controls
And for emulating it I've found the most success and least crashes with a combination of undervolting my CPU to make it run stronger and cooler, using frequent save-states to mitigate the consequence of crashes, and setting my preferred SPU threads in the emulator to 2. I'm getting a wonderfully frame-paced 30fps in combat which is where a consistent framerate matters most, and at a beautiful 4K, using my i7-9750H CPU
Enjoy! This is a better game than people give it credit for with the control mapping issues and framerate fixed
Best played immediately following Yakuza 4 imo