THESE devs are (reportedly) doing a Silent Hill 2 remake. the world is doomed.

edit: oopsies haha! oops! haha

Fallout 4 is to the Fallout series what the first disney stars wars is to its franchise. something that, at its core, mistakes its own identity for iconography and marches on directionless with no unique ideas or interesting concepts. Instead, it relies on series' traditions and guns. Fallout 4 is a game that thinks people liked Fallout because focus groups of 13 yr old boys named Kyle think the apocalypse is cool and that power armor and shooting are awesome. Gone is any remote facsimile to something resembling well-thought world design, character writing, or role playing. Instead, characters talk at you and you select one of the boring options that never reflect the character you want to play. Because you can't play a character. You're a boring wife, with a shitty kid, on a lame adventure. An adventure thoroughly uninterested in creating anything, instead coasting off of things you recognize and modern game design tropes. yes, its combat feels better than New Vegas, but it's never as engaging.

whoever wrote Mikan shouldn't be allowed to live without constant threats to their health. they should NEVER be able to feel peace, kindess, or comfort of any kind in their lifetime ever again.

i couldn't tell if they were gay. i failed.

you could release the soundtrack with a couple features RIGHT NOW and it'd win all the oscars grammys. this OST goes WAYYYY too hard for a cute rapping dog game, it's a genuine crime we never got to witness them go further, to witness a beauty beyond Romantic Love's instrumental and its corny bars.

everything about this game just feels good. like, it plays a thousand times more responsive and smooth than the original. Rodney Greenblat's designs are so colourful and appealing, all these dudes are so CUTE i wanna buy marketable goods of em all. and the music. GOD. if you play through the song 'Big' and don't love this game, it's over for you.

look. look. we all know SMT IVA and SMT V's writing is awful but that doesn't make Isabeau good. you don't need to pretend she's a good character you're not immune to waifu-baiting anime-pandering and that's ok. we're all human, no one's flawless.

i was terrified learning Elden Ring would be open world. it's a type of game that is rarely ever exciting, the peak open world in games to many is Breath of the Wild's but that game had no sauce. i never walked around in Breath of the Wild and found something so cool id message people up about it, i never got excited from its world. and i was afraid Fromsoft wouldn't be able to pull it off.

they obviously did. Elden Ring's world design is the best I've seen in an open world game. EVERY part of the map is purposeful, every turn has something new and exciting to find. there's shit in here that's just magic to witness, full of the heart and personality people love from Fromsoft. you're not gonna see a cliff and climb it only to find a disposable sword that breaks in two hits or a collectable to write off a checklist, you'll find weapons so cool you'll want to play the game again to build for them, devious traps n foolish fuckers that'll kick your ass, or entire new areas and bosses tucked away into every one of its beautiful folds. and it is beautiful. Elden Ring's art direction and visuals are gorgeous, not the best optimised but breathtaking nonetheless.

only complaint is with bosses. dungeons reuse bosses often, and while sometimes they do so in very creative ways, sometimes you'll just fight that guy from before but with another one. in particular, fuck the foreskin boys and the Crucible Knights. a singular Crucible Knight was enough to be far and away the first area's most threatening boss (for me at least) and having to fight more than one makes me want to shrivel up and die. difficulty has become part of this series' (Elden Soulsborne? idk what to call it) identity but i think Elden Ring steps over the line in a few regards. enemies like the Crucible Knight have next to no safe windows for you to approach and never stop attacking in general, which is a design philosophy that carries over to some of the bosses as well. straight up could barely touch Mikaleth for instance, i think some aspects of the game's difficulty could be lowered and the game would be better for it. I've beaten every boss in this series so far but this game tested me and i mostly loved it.

it's hard not to feel bad for Babylon's Fall. like many people, i have a certain fondness for Platinum Games and want to see them succeed. but MAN is this not it. originally, i had the impression this was a Souls-like linear action game but it turned out to be this off-putting 'live service' slop (this game has a fuckin battlepass lmao) produced on a budget of peanuts with the visual appeal of one of those 60fps ai anime edits. it's a scummy feeling game, but i still can't help but feel bad since i loved Platinum. this game was also released at quite possibly the worst time there could ever be for any game, a week after Elden Ring - one of the most anticipated and highly critically acclaimed games ever released in the history of the medium. this is game would be lucky to even reach Balan Wonderworld levels of infamy, but i doubt anyone'll remember its name in the years to come.

Planet Laika is beautiful. I've spent years of my life wondering what secrets Laika held, I've considered learning Japanese to play it at times and I really can't overstate my gratitude towards the fan translation team - they did an INCREDIBLE job. It's hard to talk about Planet Laika without using words like "strange, scary, gross, creepy, weird" because it is very much all of those things. I mean, look at it. I don't think you could really show this to someone without them getting uncomfortable, it's just that sort of art. Off-putting, abrasive, and full of character. Beautiful, if you've got the eyes for it.

Planet Laika is an incredible game, one I'm gonna be thinking about for the rest of my life and one I want to dedicate a larger piece to. I really urge you to play it, its story is unique and its world is fascinating. It's like if a furry convention took place in the Black Lodge and everyone there was horrifically traumatized in their childhood. I've got a lot of thoughts n feelings about it and I want other people to play it so I can see theirs. I've never played anything like it and I'm really, really happy that I could finally play it.

one of the most viscerally unsatisfying and frustrating games i've ever played, Sonic the Secret Rings feels like it should have just been a tech demo that got shelved. disregarding its narrative, level design, enemies, bosses, art, music, etc. Secret Rings is just unfathomably broken. Sonic's core appeal is movement - going fast and eating ass - but Secret Ring's delayed, inaccurate motion controls are not a functional replacement for a regular-ass controller. there's no point getting into its other elements (they aren't good either) because you can't engage with them without the pitiful little Wii controller struggling to make any actual inputs happen or even make Sonic slothfully slide a couple centimetres to the right.

i got this game for christmas as a kid with a Wii and Mario Galaxy. i played this game before Galaxy and had a 'oh no did i ask for something stupid and waste my parent's money' moment of extreme guilt and i probably only played this for like 20 minutes before quitting and feeling like i committed some grand sin. was my first Sonic game, too.

also MAKE BELIEFS REBORN
QUESTION ALL THAT SNOW

Like if Blood came out after The Matrix. You're a badass coolguy who's the special cursed one in a long trench coat with a cool hat and steel boots, you've got guns that double as melee weapons, there's a morality system that can give you chain lightning, you have to fuck this one evil goth lady in an on-screen sex scene, and yes - you can double jump. Darkwatch is the kind of decent game with some neat ideas and fun design that people who made red and black MLP OCs who's special talent was bleeding would think is sick as fuck. and they'd be right.

Everhood has a lot of soul, a lot of creativity and talent and it is undeniably an interesting game with some incredible ideas. sadly, i'll probably remember it as a game with incredible ideas instead of an incredible game.

the core game is fresh and exciting, i loved the way it would add onto itself and evolve throughout. i love how the rhythm section twists to involve combat. one-off gimmicks like the racing, the cool visual tricks, the D&D bit. new encounters are exciting if only just to see what it'll add. i wanna stress how great the visuals are again, the way it plays with the camera itself and its psychedelic backgrounds rule. unfortunately every fucking location is just a black void with some scattered tiles and the world and environments of Everhood are thoroughly uninteresting.

i think Everhood's biggest failing is its writing. Everhood spends NO time establishing anything or anyone, none of the characters have introductions or lives or unique voices. not literal voices but why do the little gnome guy and the trucker slime boys talk so eloquently. to experience the story is experience an endless barrage of wacky one-note characters, some of which are fun, but none of them are developed in meaningful ways or feel important. i didn't care about anyone, which felt really weird when it came to the latter half of the narrative. it felt like the game expected me to get attached without doing any of the work to show me why i should like its characters. its larger thematic ideas are interesting but when the foundation of the story is so weak i didn't really care. it's like if Undertale's only character was Froggit a few dozen times over.

Nintendo published this game, which they own, and then proceeded to do NOTHING with it after and made sticker star and fire emblem fates instead and if that isn't enough of a reason to nurture a burning hatred for mario idk what is

it's mostly just ok but i can see why people love it. if you were 12 or 13 when you first played it this shit would fuck you UP. when you're in an adult, it just doesn't hit the same. still a pretty decent RPG despite a few frustrating mechanics, has some fun characters and a great soundtrack. easily the best of the Hashino Persona games

the most rancid, accursed odor a game has ever had. memories of a time when boys in your grade would laugh at Smosh videos and fight over yogurt tubes. of when eminem was the mainstream face of rap. a time where tobuscus was a guy who made epic parody songs and wasn't a guy who sexually assaulted people and melted his brain on drugs and conservative tweets. when pizza hut was fine dining. fruit gushers shared in humid computer classrooms. a time of pixar DVDs your mom's friend's husband burnt. a time of accursed rituals n goosebumps books n shit. just rancid.