If you have nostalgia for this game, as I did, lock it away in your heart and cherish it forever. Don't taint it by revisiting with 2023 eyes.

Playing through this today, it felt like all the negatives of the classic AKI games, with all the positives sanded away. The speed of the game is cranked up, which is fine, but all the balance seems to have flown out the window as a result.

The punishing ease with which AI can reverse you, a facet of many AKI games, is even worse here. It's magnified by the lack of a real 'momentum' system; which sort of defines the classic N64 games. Building your meter just brings you closer to your finisher but doesn't actually change the momentum of the match.

Coupled with limited movesets, and a super underwhelming player character for the story - and this is one I won't be keen to revisit again. Fight For New York forever!!!!

It is with a heavy heart that I also slap an 'ABANDONED' on the PC version of Splinter Cell 2. While functionally much, much better than the PS2 version, my first two hours with it were pretty dull -- feeling like a samey retread of the first game, but with much less interesting level design.

A cardinal sin came for me at the end of the Paris level. You crawl through an air vent, into a locked room some enemies are trying to get into. After some brief story dialogue, you see enemies priming a bomb to open the locked room. I died on my escape (they heard me trying to crawl through the vent), so I quick loaded and had an idea! Before entering the room, I dropped a smoke grenade from the vent to the floor below! So the enemies trying to break into the room passed out, and were no longer a threat! I played through the same dialogue as before, but this time there was no bomb-prep cutscene because I had dispatched the enemies.

HOWEVER! The level is unfinishable without the bomb. You need the bomb to blow open the door to allow you to extract. And I had already used up my one quick save slot after taking out those enemies, so my only other option was to REPLAY THE ENTIRE LEVEL AGAIN, AND NOT BE AS CLEVER! Why the enemies are killable when they are needed for story progress I do not know, AND the game doesn't even give you a proper 'hey you messed up, here's a checkpoint' fail state. It's insane that innovative play like that in a stealth game just lets you fuck yourself in that manner.

Anyway, I have no desire to replay the entire level, so we're calling it quits here.

Just a note on the PS2 version of Pandora Tomorrow: this is a deeply cursed way to play this video game. The PC version was infamously on fire at launch, and I didn't feel like installing any mods to fix it (you also can't actually buy it digitally on any real storefront) - so I decided to try the PS2 version.

This game has maybe the worst loading I've ever experienced in a game. Almost every area is bookmarked by a load or a save; and saving isn't some quick thing with a little spinning icon on the bottom of the screen. You walk through a door, they throw a menu at you, you pick a memory card, you say 'yes I wish to save' and you sit there and watch it work. Then you walk into the next area and there's a load - and the loads are long.

Obviously some compromises were needed to get the beefy PC/XB version on PS2 but this is a bridge too far, to me. Especially having played the original game on PC and finding it to be a sleek, relatively modern experience despite its age.

Retiring this version forever, and I've decided I will jump through the hoops needed for PC because I don't want to skip this game outright.

Spent a few hours with the Remastered Project on PC, and it's a really great piece of work. A vibrant update with beautiful new textures, full HD support, widescreen fixes, modern controls, and great performance on even a modest desktop. A top notch way to revisit (or maybe play for the first time) a gem of a B-game. I don't see myself finishing the game again as it's quite grindy, but I'll definitely keep this installed for an occasional Miami rampage when the mood hits.

Side note: don't bother trying to get this going on Steam Deck. I spent a lot of time tinkering with it and it never came close. The modded version is a no-go, but the vanilla PC version is unplayable without mods. A tonne of reddit threads are out there saying the same thing, and it's not something the mod team are actively working on. So save yourself some time and go straight to a Windows device.

A wonderfully ambitious first effort. The start of something cool but definitely the start. So much of Splinter Cell's light and shadow tech still looks awesome, and even without the HUD element, it's advanced enough that you can know how concealed you are simply by looking at the screen. Backing all that up is some excellent sound design. Broken glass, falling shell casings, the night vision bewwwmmm -- it's all great.

And some of the archaic control elements are actually kind of cool! Are speed up and speed down buttons a bit silly compared to simple analogue stick control? Maybe, but I appreciate it all the same!

Where it falls down is with level design and AI - both of which are mostly great but have some sizeable issues. Enemies react to noises, visuals, distractions, and even environmental things like you switching a light off. But sometimes they'll walk 50 feet across a court yard or hallway just to inspect a light you switched off. And the cardinal sin for me is that, when you're rumbled, every enemy in the scene knows where you are and can shoot you precisely regardless of your stealth meter. It's always a shame when mechanics like that matter until they suddenly don't.

Likewise there are tonnes of interesting level layouts and objectives, but sometimes you'll get bizarre fail states like accidentally killing an NPC before realizing you were supposed to use him to open a locked door. Then there's the inexplicable shoot outs -- I never understand why stealth games choose to do this, but it's especially bad here because Sam can't take much punishment, and his incredibly wonky aim is not meant for all out warfare.

But nonetheless; a cool, satisfying espionage tale that lays the foundation for more.

A wonderful version of a classic; modern but true to source. Some of the changes are good (Ashley re-write, new approach to knives, cutting some of the bloat-y sections), whereas some are a negative (the new, worse method of choosing how closely Ashley follows you).

Then there are some things that are a bit of a wash, and your mileage will vary. Like RE2 Remake, the new visuals are beautiful but some of the ambience and unique style is lost. Similarly, the writing has some of the original's camp qualities but not all of it -- the tradeoff being that characters like Ashley are... Actually well written.

Additional note: I played this on Steam Deck and with a mix of high and medium settings, I got a solid 30 fps. Hooray!

We took Midway for granted, we really did.

While this didn't remind me why games are great quite as much as Chicago studio's previous game Psi-Ops; it is nonetheless a rip-roaring good time that put spectacle and action movie power fantasy before all else. The rag doll physics, the destructible uhhhh everything, the bullet time - it's everything you'd want from a 'be in the movie' type of shooter.

For the most part, the game's simplicity is tremendously charming. There isn't much to the gameplay but the levels are well designed enough, with enough contraptions to send your enemies flying through, that you won't really care.

Even with a relatively short run-time, the boredom does start to set in in the final third as bullet spongey enemies and a lack of fresh objectives take their toll.

Psi-Ops is not a perfect game, but it might be my perfect game.

A wonderful, fun-first action game where the entire selling point is giving the player a thrilling set of powers that are actually fun to use. The giddy thrill of rag-dolling enemies with your superpowers eventually gives way to a much deeper experience. Levels are excellently designed, allowing you to really experiment in either chaos or fine strategy. I managed to skip an entire puzzle by using the game's unique mix of powers and physics, in a manner not unlike something you'd see in a twitter video of Breath of the Wild. Despite its short runtime, there is a lot of room for experimentation.

The story is nothing - or at least it seems that way at first. By the end, the cheese factor had won me over and I was genuinely a bit gutted to see it end on a cliffhanger. Not because of the characters, but because it just feels like this is a bygone era of games - and just like this story, we will probably never get back to it.

Despite some wonky set-pieces in the fourth quarter, this is a wonderful game that you could breeze through in one session -- and I hope some of you do.

Brother, that final boss fight had me about ready to call the whole thing QUITS!!!! Goddamn, that nearly broke me.

Anyway, this absolutely lived up the hype. A genuinely inventive and atmospheric shooter that seriously holds up (in most ways) to modern sensibilities. The level design is genuinely just as good if not better than a lot of stuff getting released today. So many interesting ideas, and none really outstay their welcome.

The only thing that has aged is the visuals (this was vanilla, OG HL, no mods or remakes) but in a way they add to the vibes. I love late 90s/early 00s PC horror. Those weird, liminal spaces, and basic textures are so jarring and genuinely add to the tension.

A fabulous, cheesy, gory gem of a mid-2000s license game. The headlines for Punisher 2005 will obviously be about the grotesque interrogation scenes, but the minute-to-minute gameplay is also a joy in its simplicity.

While mechanically it's a fairly standard third person shooter, there's enough polish here to make you smile. Enemy AI is surprisingly good, as NPCs run around looking for cover or items to throw at you. They can fling crowbars at you, nail one of their buddies by accident, and will usually even have a little quip to acknowledge that.

Punisher is full of little moments like that, plus an assortment of ragdoll physics chuckles, that make for a game that's tone can be summed up as "giddy."