TAIKETSU FOUND DEAD IN A DITCH

After dozens of DBZ games that just tell the story of the show over and over again (which, admittedly, this also does), it's incredibly refreshing to have "What If?" storylines like what the first Budokai had. I got to play as Frieza, massacring the entire Saiyan and Human races before blowing up the entire Earth while killing Cell! That probably doesn't sound like happy fun times, but it was just nice to have a different narrative! Very solid for a GBA fighter, looking forward to trying the sequel soon.

Man, what happened to you?

TF2 was once the GOAT of multiplayer class based FPS(s), I have terrific memories of the game centred around playing frequently with small communities on dedicated community servers.

Since its launch it has had a series of changes of focus which have almost entirely altered how the game plays, how people engage with it, and even what the purpose of playing is.

Been dropping into it over the last couple of days and damn, alot of those changes were not for the better. The move away from community hosted servers means you're almost constantly playing against randos and the population of bots - putting it generously - is not insignificant. What servers do exist, are sparcely populated playing heavily modified game mods or are just for farming items.

The changes to the gameplay through item updates actually added alot of dynamic changes to each class (sometimes making the higher skill focused classes like Scout more approachable), but has ultimately resulted in an item/economy based grinding loop that detracts from the actual gameplay. The changes also gradually began to erode the consistent aesthetic the game strived for.

It's a shame, because even now there is clearly a lot of love for the game in what remains of the community, in its peak for me; this was a 4+ star game. These days, it feels like a cheap abandonware FPS.

Some kind of TF2C would be very welcome.

Jeez everything wants to kill Silver Surfer. And I thought the whole town trying to kill Dr. Jekyll was like bullet hell.
Everything OHKOs you and enemies are fast with wacky patterns, still... the game is great and it has a great reward system: survive and you get to listen to the amazing soundtrack, which is one of the best on the NES.

I couldn't finish a single stage lmao
You definitely need a turbo button to have a chance.

The worst sin a musou can commit is making the mere act of bludgeoning peons to death uninteresting, and in this regard DW Gundam Reborn is the antichrist.

DWGR's tutorial introduces you to charged shot attacks (executed by holding down the charge button and releasing) that instantly kill peons and start chain reactions, on top of doing respectable damage to officers. They are, unfortunately, the best tool in every single Mobile Suit's kit, which leaves the entire game feeling super samey and the suits themselves feeling like extraneous little skins.
Not helping this is that, perhaps due to most suits using beam weaponry, the actual combos available all feel decidedly weak even by the standards of early-mid 2010s musous. Especially on a sound design front, where everything is diet Star Wars wooshes. Not sure what happened; I used to rate this higher than DWG3 but combat in THAT game feels like Monster Hunter in comparison.

There's also that trademark Bandai Namco cheapness on display that leaves this feeling like a port of an arcade title.

There's a lot of archive dialogue in use, meaning characters whose sole narrative contribution is 'dying' will often scream their heartfelt tragic final words in the midst of you clearing through like 300 dudes a second on your way to murder a teenager and end the level.
Dialogue from the main cast was done by the VAs and it shows because not a single sole providing voices to this game gives a shit. Shuichi Ikeda either wasn't being paid enough or simply stopped caring, because all of his voicework here sounds like he's been AI-synthed.
Lastly... God the music is so bad. I know licensing music from animanga properties is hellish unless you're called Cygames, but what they gave us is impactless generic music that tries to vaguely recreate the mood of Gundam music and fails miserably.
Genuinely, when I say 'it's bad' I don't just mean that I dislike it, I mean that on a technical level it's a mess that's barely fit for TV commercials let alone Gundam. It's cheap, repetitive music without any sort of motif or cohesivenes that sounds like each track was made by separate composers.

DWGR features a whole bunch of story modes recreating official Gundam stories and they're all terrible. Only the melodrama of Gundam is preserved, nothing else, and the stories are so truncated that their inclusion is somewhat baffling. The SD Gundam arena fighter has a better story than this.
DWGR's format does not support Gundam very well, with each stage just being a series of capture objectives interspersed with bored/archive dialogue and the odd officer fight. In attempting to retell Gundam stories - especially MSG - they've inadvertently made it funny. It's telling then that the format only really works for Unicorn.
Looping back to the music, each story reuses the same 5-6 tracks so you'll get TIRED of that one exact 'sad song' by the time Zeta Gundam's arc has concluded, and it's only the second story arc.

I'll admit that this game's quality or lack thereof is fascinating to me, because the last game was quite frankly the kind of opulent vanity project that I wish more anime franchises got. Not quite Koei's Attack on Titan 2 levels of insane (or enjoyable), but up there.

This, though? This is ChatGPT's Universal Century.

Astro’s Playroom is a wonderful experience that leaves me with far more complicated emotions than something so straightforwardly joyful really would ever want me to. It celebrates everything about Sony’s past, showering you with artifacts that lovingly render hardware ephemera in 4K glory, grounds itself in the present walking you through the innards of your new device and showing off the capabilities of the DualSense, and has no vision of the future. Jumping and moving through the levels is serviceable, and the adaptive triggers and HD rumble feel great and are used great.

The references and cosplays in this get to pretty deep cuts (I gasped at the Jumping Flash fella, then was knocked flat by the Vib Ribbon bunny, and I’m still confident I hallucinated a fucking Siren reference), and it’s delightful to see all of Sony’s back catalog get their due like this. It’s been four years and there are exactly thirteen PS5 console exclusives that could be added to a sequel - five of which have not released yet*. Nine are in established franchises, and over half are sequels or remakes. Seven are rated M for Mature, four are rated T for Teen, and two are so early in development they haven’t been rated by the ESRB. Astro’s Playroom is one of, generously, three games on this list that somebody under the age of twelve would be expected to have any fun at all with, and frankly I think 90% of the appeal would go over their heads given what a nostalgia trip this is.

The PlayStation 1, 2, and 3 are all of a certain type of utopian thinking that died with Web 1.0. Technology and art were synthesized into something for everybody, from children to adults, inventing new design grammar as they went along to create experiences that no medium could ever replicate. Sony developed, funded, and promoted scores of games that aimed at every conceivable demographic and, frequently, aimed at no demographic, believing that pushing the medium forward and creating wholly unique kinds of games creates the kind of brand identity that builds real loyalty.

Games have grown up since then, and they make games for grown-ups now, with such large budgets that true experimentation is quite difficult to justify (unless you have Hideo Kojima-sized star power and trailer editing). This one, especially, is still trying to be in the lineage of what came before, offering a utopian look into the World of PlayStation, but there is that key difference; before, each console offered a glimpse of the future, a foundation for a better tomorrow. Astro’s Playroom tries to show a utopia, but can only really believe that we already experienced it, have seen what it could offer, and have moved on towards greyer horizons.


*I am counting Rebirth here even though there are 48 hours left. Sue me.

Ok

Elden Ring, is the nice boy in class, he has all the good grades, he's not particularly ugly, he's cultivated, he'll likely gonna get into a good university once he's gonna graduate, he seems to have no flaws, except one, he's painfully boring in its flawlessness

Demon's Souls on the other hand, he's the bad boy , he's dark, sinister, a bit cringe , he has black hair, he makes barely passable poetry , he smokes marijuana and is involved with several case of high school crime, he always brings a guitar and listen to 21 pilot on his airpods, not the kinda guy you should get interrested in, he looks silly , he looks like a fucking looser, he thinks he's goat, but he's not goat, he's just a piece of shit edgy kids and oh my god I hate this guy, but one day you go to a party

Who did you end up in bed with ? That's right , not fucking ER, he's too good for this, It's DeS, you woke up next morning, and he fucked you and you look past the bed border and your mom is lying on the floor , fucked like she never has been before. Then he wokes up with pancackes, kiss you goodbye and leaves you with a teen pregnancy he's never gonna act upon. But the memory of such an experience will last with you for the rest of your goddamn life

Will always love how japanese devs made the most creative stuff with the bakumatsu setting. It's like is the best historical moment to make anything you want. A hack and slash? Sure, here you have one. A RPG with turn based combat? Sure, why not? A RPG where instead of battle you just talk? Why the fuck not? A Rance game? A Yakuza game? Just go dude. And it's aways incredible. Way of the Samurai 4 takes everything good in the franchise and do a good mix that is irresistible to not play over and over. Will get a couple more of runs and I am sure that once I get enough with this one it gonna be a 5 stars.