"Finding it, though, that's not the hard part. It's letting go."

So, Fallout New Vegas is one of my favorite games. I have put more than 100 hours into the game over the course of multiple playthroughs. Just recently I realized that I've never played the DLC of New Vegas so it's time to rectify that. More New Vegas goodness! What could possibly go wrong?!

Dead Money is an ambitious chapter in the ethos of New Vegas, containing some of the best writing in the entire game with characters so unbelievably good you'd wish they were part of the base game. Alas it's packaged with gameplay that is so unbelievably frustrating.

"Has your life taken a turn? Do troubles beset you? Has fortune left you behind? If so, the Sierra Madre Casino, in all its glory, is inviting you to begin again."

Dead Money begins by following a radio signal leading you to an abandoned Brotherhood of Steel bunker. From there you fall into a trap and you wake up in the villa of the Sierra Madre, a forsaken city near the Grand Canyon, engulfed in a poisonous cloud. You're "greeted" by Father Elijah, a Brotherhood of Steel scribe with ties to one of your companions. It's not the most friendly greeting, he lets you know he's put a bomb collar around your neck. He also put bomb collars on three other persons, a Super Mutant, a Ghoul and a woman who can't speak. It's your job to find these loveable nuclear wasteland misfits and put together a team for probably the biggest heist since the bombs fell: robbing the vault beneath the casino.
It's a heist! Like Heist! The Italian Job!

I can't tell you enough how much the premise excites me. Recruit other people, learn of their backstory and how they are linked to the gloomy and ominous Sierra Madre. Robbing a casino with your life on the line thanks to some Brotherhood of Steel psychopath. And it's genuinely great, everything is so well written and the characters are great in that typical Fallout-fashion: relatable to a certain degree before their entire personality falls apart. You have the Super Mutant Dog, the docile servant of father Elijah and his alter-ego God, a more violent and ruthless side of the same coin. There's Dean Domino, a Ghoul who's been in the Sierra Madre for hundreds of years and who has intimate knowledge of the Sierra Madre. Lastly there's Christine, a woman who can't speak and uses sign language to communicate with the player.

The environment also has its own story to tell which you can uncover via text logs on the terminal. You can learn of the casino's founding and its eventual demise. Every character that had a hand in the casino's founding, their actions still haunt the place. They have never left.

So there you have it! Great story, terrific characters, it's time for the ride of a lifetime, the heist of the century, let us venture forth into the Sierra Madre!

Okay so it's no secret that the gameplay in Dead Money is tedious as hell and it pains me so much to say this but it kind of ruined the whole experience because of some things that were incredibly frustrating.

So first and foremost, you are stripped of all of your equipment and you're forced to scrounge for weapons, armor and items to use. You can buy them from vending machines using casino chips are forage equipment the old fashioned Fallout way: killing and looting. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, lots of other games employ a similar method of gameplay like that one island in Breath of the Wild no one can shut up about.

Exploration however is hampered by a few things, namely pockets of poisonous clouds that can kill you fast. The place is also littered with traps, especially bear traps and since they blend in really well in the environment these are incredibly hard too see. Then there are the Ghosts, enemies that can't be killed unless you decapitate them or sever some other body part. There are also deadly holograms, you can't hurt these at all and they decimate your ass in an instant. And last but not least we have easily the deadliest item in the Sierra Madre: Radios.

Yes radios kill. Their frequency can set off your bomb collar so don't stand to long in their vicinity. Some radios can be shot or deactivated either by turning it off manually or via a computer terminal. Other radios can't be shut off. You have to be quick and make your way through and try to spot radios whenever your collar emits a beeping sound. Problem is, there are a lot of radios, they are not always easy to find and combining this problem with every other hazard, like the enemies and the poison cloud, you can see why this gets frustrating very fast.

Combining all of these factors gives way too game that's just not fun too play. It becomes tedious and frustrating and I was save scumming my way to victory because everything kills you very fast. Ammo and supplies are also limited so the game becomes a sort of survival horror type game with progression that's slow as molasses.

There are not a lot of things you can use to alleviate these issues, only the small handful of resources that the villa provides. You will die a lot, unless you find the necessary recipes, the vending machines will not be of much use. I also put most of my skill points into energy weapons and only found one dinghy pistol and a whole lot of nothing for ammo.

I died a lot, if it wasn't for the radios I was dying because of the poison cloud or the many hard to see traps. But I pushed on, eager to see where the story would take me.

The story has not disappointed me but the gameplay will prevent me from ever playing it again. I'll just stick to the Fallout Wiki thank you very much.

Do you like hurting other people?

Hotline Miami is a top-down shooter developed by Swedish studio Dennaton Games and published by Digital Revolver. You play as an unnamed protagonist, dubbed "Jacket" by the fandom.

You go from level to level decimating the Russian mob, dabbling in a little bit of the ultra-violence. You can beat, shoot or generally maim your enemies until you are the last man standing. You can punch an enemy, leaving them unconscious for a while until you deliver a killing blow, usually by strangling them or snapping their neck. You can use the weapons enemies drop like bats and knives for an easy and swift kill. There are also guns available from pistols, SMG's to shotguns each with their advantages and disadvantages. Do it fast enough and you get more points which in turn unlocks new weapons to be used in the levels.

Play more of the game and you unlock "masks" which give you various advantages like starting out the level with a weapon, making it so dogs don't attack you on sight etc. The moment-to-moment gameplay is fast, chaotic and cathartic. The game gives you several difficult challenges that you need to overcome with patience, quick thinking and sometimes, a bit of recklessness. Memorization and being on your toes at all times are the keys to your success. Death is around every corner and you will die a lot. Thankfully, restarting is quick and hassle-free.

There are a few flaws with the gameplay and these are not easily avoided. Enemy AI is spotty and inconsistent. Normally, enemies react to gunfire but that's not always the case. Enemies that are in close proximity barely react to your shots and enemies from far away do react. These inconsistencies make it harder to employ your strategy if you want to achieve a high-score. Enemies sometimes get stuck in the environment or even go out of bounds. This makes it impossible for you to kill them thus making it impossible for you to finish the level. This happened during my playthrough on a few occasions. There's a problem that arises when you kill a lot of enemies in the same place. They all drop their weapons in the same place and it becomes difficult to acquire what you want to use

Interspersed between levels are cutscenes, detailing the plot and giving a tiny bit more context to your murder spree. Depending on who you ask, Hotline Miami does a lot with its narrative or nothing at all. On a surface level, it is a story about a psychopathic rage-induced maniac who gets strange phonecalls, talking about mundane things like picking something up or coming to work earlier right before getting in your Delorean-inspired car and racing of to the next mission. It's Drive mixed with Scarface. There are subtle little hints that invoke a much larger plot and those details even make a return in the game's sequel.

The game's central narrative is focused on thing you do the most in this game: enacting violence. The game asks you the question: "Do you like hurting other people". The narrative scatters several trails of breadcrumbs in different directions and asks the player where they want to go. You can try to make sense of the actual story in the game, Jacket's path of a violent psychopathic killer or you can explore it's different themes. There is a lot of room for you as the player to fill in the blanks, to derive some sort of meaningful message out of the entire experience. It's as introspective as it is violent.
To me, the game asks the question why we partake in this form of simulated violence, why we do gruesome things to these pixelated mobsters and warns us not to become too detached from it all.

Everything you do in Hotline Miami is to the beat of a stellar soundtrack from a variety of different artists. From the title screen to the end, every track is a banger and perfectly encapsulates the mood in every scene. Hotline Miami's soundtrack is an anomaly when comparing it to other video games. Instead of one or several composers, the soundtrack features tracks from a lot of different artists like Scattle, M|O|O|N, Sun Araw and Jasper Byrd. Sure, other video games have done this approach too but then we're talking about big AAA sports-titles. This is a game made primarily by two guys. The music is there when it needs to be there. It keeps your blood pumping during action-heavy intense shooting sprees, comes to a screeching halt when you have killed the last man standing and it mellows out before and after missions, giving you a brief respite in your appartment, the pizza parlor or the VHS-store. These are brief moments of calm and serenity before continuing your tour of depravity.

Released in 2012 to critical acclaim, the game was a phenomenon when it released on PC first and consoles later. While being influenced by movies like Drive or Scarface, Hotline Miami would in turn, influence a lot of other artists and game developers.
On paper, Hotline Miami can be a lot of things to a lot of different people. Shocking, exciting, unnecessarily violent. But Hotline Miami is greater than the sum of its parts. For videogames in 2012, this game was lightning in a bottle and twelve years later, the synth-wave fueled magic is still here. It's still one of my favorite games of all time.

Another game I vowed to finish this year... But at what cost?

Transistor is SuperGiant's second game after their smash hit Bastion. I was a big fan of Bastion. I even have the soundtrack on CD signed by composer Darren Korb.

Overall, this game is a mixed bag. Everything is here to make this game great. A fantastic soundtrack, a great art style and intriguing combat and while all these parts are great on their own, they never really mesh well together.
There are a few factors that bog down the whole experience:
1. Linearity
The game is basically one giant hallway from beginning until the end. Linearity in video games isn't a bad thing, some of my favorite games are very linear.
However, it becomes a problem because of the next problem which is: repetitiveness
2. Repetitiveness
The game has a great combat system but it isn't enough when all of the encounters are the same and there aren't enough incentives to experiment with your playstyle.
The game consists of battles which you fight in peculiar manner. You can equip up to four "functions" which can deal damage to an enemy, heal or buff you or give you some other type of advantage like dashing. You can combine these functions with other functions for added benefits. Battles play out very fast and frenetic. To give the player some breathing room, you can stop time and plan your next moves which your character, Red, will execute immediately. All of this plays very well and it's cathartic to employ an approach that can decimate your foes. After every battle you will gain experience points, you will level up and more aspects of your kit will open up. You can gain more functions, you can earn more space to equip said functions etcetera. All of this sounds very good on paper because it's a tried and true reward system. Many successful RPG's employ this system to great success. The problem is that you're going to use the same tactic over and over again because the game doesn't do enough to encourage the player to experiment with different abilities. If you want to get the most out of the story, you're forced to use the ones you don't even like. In the interest of not spoiling the game if you want to play it for yourself, let's say that this is an element of the game's story.
The encounters are almost always the same, you will fight the same enemies over and over again and it gets very boring after a while. Even though the combat is great as I've described, it is not enough to save it from the arduous repetition.

And for the story, I honestly believe they dropped the ball very hard with this.
While the premise is intriguing, you are a singer and you have lost your voice. You find a talking sword (frankly the thing never shuts up), the whole city of Cloudbank goes to hell and back and the whole thing is orchestrated by the "Camerata", a sinister cabal of slick looking high ranking officials. There are a lot of different story beats, each interesting on their own, like a system of democracy which you can use to choose which weather you can have or how the city has an ever changing landscape. But again, there's a lack of a cohesive feel and a lot of things are mentioned once and are then never mentioned again. So the story is dependent on a few characters. There's Red, the main character who can't talk but can nonetheless communicate non-verbally with all the different artwork the game provides. There's the talking sword you're carrying, the titular Transistor who can talk and would be much more appreciated if the thing could shut up once in a while. The Transistor has to have a say about everything.
Every. Tiny. Inconsequential. Thing. Sometimes there's no room for a scene just to breathe before the Transistor comes in but another unwanted remark.
A great story comes with a great villain. In this case, there are four and they are not very exciting. They get a great build up, they are being purposely kept in the dark and their character designs are stunning. But ultimately, not much is done with them. They don't get fleshed out properly and one of them doesn't even get any spoken dialogue.

In the end I didn't want to write an overly negative and critical review of Transistor but as discussed previously, the game has certain aspects that bog down the entire experience. I still love the artstyle and the soundtrack is amazing, very imaginative and eclectic, Darren Korb never dissapoints. Somewhere I'm glad I've finally finished it after so many years just to get it out of the backlog. However, I judge a game on a certain merit and that is: "Do I want to play this again in the future" and the answer is 'no'. I replay games frequently to get the most out of them. I do the same with movies, just in case I missed something crucial to the experience. But with Transistor, I think one playthrough is enough.