In Pokemon if you want to heal in town you go to a hospital and your party heals for free; to heal outside of town you need to buy a very cheap item with money that you earn from every battle.

In Cassette Beasts to heal in town you need to give the doctor 10 pieces of wood, or 20 pieces of plastic for a healing item you can use wherever you want, or you can rest at a campfire if you spend 5 pieces of shit. Fuck off.

Tap the B button to spend half your stamina bar for a split second movement speed increase. Systems are not mechanics, economies are not fun. Complete waste of time.

Just like Pokemon, there is nothing to be gained from actually playing it that you can't get from listening to the OST and looking at concept art.

The most fun I had in Cyberpunk 2077 was sitting in the passenger's seat of a car, looking out the window, an activity that the game loudly informs you that you are able to skip at any time.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I'm part of the problem. I bought the game during this ongoing surge of popularity that seems to be going on due to the anime and the DLC announcement or whatever. I waited almost 2 years until the game was supposedly fixed up, I waited until the game's initial moment had passed enough that it did not so viscerally feel like an obvious laughing stock, until the game's defenders had quieted down enough that I no longer felt compelled towards contrarianism. There probably simply is not a better time for someone like me to get into Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a good time to get into this game at all.

To be clear, I was never hyped for this game, for a number of reasons. I played The Witcher 2 and I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the world, and I hated the combat, so I didn't play the sequel, and I had no reason to keep up with CDPR. However, I'm the kind of dweeb who watches all the big press conferences and sees all the new trailers and stuff, so naturally I had the game's title put in front of my face a handful of times over the course of about half a decade. Everyone falls prey to hype once or twice; maybe it's just a generational thing, whether it's each literal generation of humans born has their own ultimate zeitgeist letdown, or each generation of new hardware having its big new title that promises the world and never delivers. In any case, CDPR was putting up a lot of red flags from the start.

The thing about press releases, vertical slices, trailers, any pre-release coverage of a video game, is that you absolutely need to be skeptical of anything that isn't crystal clear. You should never assume that the game will contain anything you haven't seen. I like to think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to video games, and even in the last year or so leading up to the release of CP77 I had absolutely no idea what kind of game it even was, let alone the scope that they were aiming for. Everything was pure suggestion, nothing but talk, and the only explanations I can possibly think of for why so many people bought into it wholesale is because of the good will that CDPR had previously built up, or because many of the people on the hype train were either young or naive enough to not immediately be able to sniff out bullshots.

So what kind of game is Cyberpunk anyway? It's the same kind of game as Donkey Kong 64, or Haven: Call of the King. Haven: Call of the King really is one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had with a game in a while, like looking at the Rosetta stone of the modern AAA language. Calling Cyberpunk a game feels kind of silly; what are its core mechanics? There is shooting, yes, but you could go hours without doing it. Like those two other games I mentioned, Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly a game where stuff just happens.

You talk, you drive, you walk, you get into the passenger's side of your car for the first time and if you have half a brain in your head you think, "hmm, I wonder if the game is going to do something that will require my character to have their hands free to do something that isn't steering", and sure enough you do set-piece car chase rail shooting section. You do some cover shooting, and it's kind of like if every cover shooter you played 10 years ago was more clunky. You finally get let out into a part of the city that seems like something resembling an open world, and you find that it's still an empty façade, a more geometrically complex equivalent to the seemingly endless fields outside the main play areas of Overgrowth.

Something genuinely frustrating to me is that in both the opening desert area where the Nomad path begins and in the aforementioned initial city area, the game limits how far you can go with a Battlefield-esque warning that you've gone too far. Cyberpunk is far from the only game to do this, but even a game like Recore at least tries to contextualize this mechanic by putting little signposts up and saying anything beyond that point is radioactive. In Cyberpunk, you literally just get a message on your screen saying not to go that way until you get further in the game, and you get warped back if you keep going.

Think about a game like Ocarina of Time, the opening area is surrounding by walls of earth, in a lot of those old games even outdoor areas are sort of boxed in, always conveniently in some kind of canyon or ravine. There are two paths out of the town, both of them are blocked until some kind of progress is made. The blockage is in this case a character who stops you and provides some narrative justification for why you can't go that way, and moves once that reason is rendered null. Now, blocking a path with an NPC, ultimately a game object, feels sort of "game-ey". It's the kind of thing that we might avoid today unless the game is being made with some kind of limitation or there is some kind of unique narrative reason where having a person block a door makes immediate real-world sense. But isn't it still better than reminding the player not just that they are experiencing fiction, or making them recognize the mechanical layer of the game, but perhaps even worse making them directly confront the fact that this is a piece of software? There's probably some moron thinking "well, yeah, software is pretty cyberpunk right? It's part of the theme!"

Why even have such a big city if I'm just going to look at the mini map the whole time? Why animation facial expressions and motion capture gestures on everyone if I'm going to have to keep my eyes glued to the subtitles, or rather, to the area of the screen where my dialogue options will appear, so that I have time to read them before the other character snarkily asks if a cat's got my tongue.

There's so many weird things about choice. The character creator has quite a number of fields which contain options, but none of those fields actually has that many options. It's less of a character creator and more of a character tasting, it exists just to give you a sense of what a person in this world is. It doesn't have the haircuts that it has so that you can choose what best suits how you might imagine yourself in a hypothetical cyberpunk story, it presents a limited number of options to prepare you for the specific mold that you will have to fit for this cyberpunk story. It would be almost admirable if it didn't feel like the same obvious "Choices Matter" trick that every faux RPG for the past decade and a half has been pulling our legs with.

Something that still drives me nuts about Haven: Call of the King is that I really don't know how impressed I should be with it; it's a genuinely kind of terrible game that's mostly only made interesting within the framework of its world being a technical marvel for the time, but you spend so much of the game not really interacting with the world in any meaningful way that you have to wonder how much of it is a trick, because regardless of whether this impressive fractally generated world around you is "real" does not meaningfully impact the actual play experience in any way. Cyberpunk is, ironically much like the Deus Ex reboots, mostly just a linear cinematic AAA action game that is only made interesting by the idea that it's actually a role playing game. Though, like with Haven's massive multi-planet game world, this RPG element is mostly just a framing device, something to periodically gesture towards in order to try and remind the player how impressed they should be.

I'm playing the game on a machine lugging around more tera-FLOPS than even a person who actually knows what that means can really comprehend, and I'm still constantly shocked by how poor the texture quality is. I tried playing a bit of the game with ray-tracing enabled, and just as with literally every other game I have ever played with a ray-tracing option I am not only unimpressed by the visual changes, I genuinely cannot believe that anyone chooses to play games with this level of performance.

When I got to the braindance part I was reminded of Remember Me, and decided to look up a gameplay video on youtube. After a feature film's worth of Cyberpunk's sleep-deprived drivel I was completely blown away by how more emotive Remember Me's voice performances were by comparison. Everyone in Cyberpunk talks like the kid in high school who chews tobacco in class. Some of the most annoying dialogue I've ever heard delivered in a tone most reminiscent of a distant relative that you don't really know dismissively telling you "that's just how life is, man..."

It is just genuinely depressing to think of how much work went into something this cold and stale.

Fun fact I actually didn't experience many obvious bugs, mostly just general jank, like the game generally just feels terrible, characters' pathing is just constantly breaking, etc. However, the very first time that I booted the game up, instead of seeing the splash screen that's supposed to appear, I found myself staring at a completely solid white screen, so that was a good first impression.

Bloodborne is a trick, and I have enough insight to see through the illusion. 😎

The first area of Bloodborne has a variety of enemies that can all be sorted into 3 types. Large enemies hit hard and can't be staggered through normal attacks, but they have predictable moves that can be easily parried (and half of the large enemies in this area leave themselves open to backstabs). Animals attack with quick lunges that are hard to predict and avoid, but they have little health and are usually relatively docile until provoked, which teaches the player to actively chase down enemies and get the first hit in. The rest of the enemies, the normal humanoids, the townspeople and beastmen, are particularly interesting. All of these enemies can be easily staggered, and the windups on their attacks are so slow that even if the player runs out of stamina, the player will always get their own hit in before the enemy can retaliate. All the player really needs to beat the majority of the enemies in the opening stage is to run up to them and mash R1.

And for awhile, playing the game the way that it trains you to really is infectious. Hurtling through levels, ripping and tearing until it is done. There really were times where going through levels killing everything in sight gave me the same kind of feeling that Doom does. Unfortunately this feeling never lasts; Bloodborne has always failed to keep my interest to the same degree that other From Software titles have.

The enemy roster is quite limited. You'll fight the same townspeople, beastmen, dogs and crows throughout the entire game. In the forbidden woods they won't stagger as easily (despite having no visual indication that these particular enemies will behave differently), and in Yahargul they'll respawn indefinitely until you kill the enemy summoning them, but ultimately the models and movesets stay the same. Very few areas have truly unique enemies. Even the hallway leading to the (first) final boss is occupied by pigs, which have been around since the first level, and a mid-game boss repurposed as a regular enemy.

Bloodborne's focus on bestial foes means its most interesting combat encounters are more classic Souls fights, which is to say they are much less about reflexes and counterattacks, and much more about careful positioning. This is fine, though it makes the exceptions to the rule (such as the particularly famous DLC bosses) particularly grueling by comparison. The main issue with the beastly bosses is the fact that dealing enough damage to one of their limbs will induce a heavy stagger. In Souls, the main difference between fighting the same boss at a high or low level is going to be quantitative; if you have more health you can make more mistakes, if you deal more damage the fight will end sooner. In Bloodborne, the difference is qualitative. Dealing enough damage to be able to stagger the boss completely mechanically alters the fight, sometimes trivializing battles which once felt impossible.

The result is that despite Bloodborne's apparent downplaying of the RPG elements common to these games, the few numbers that you do still have to care about are much more important. Changing any gear besides your melee weapon isn't going to change much, ranged abilities aren't really viable enough to be your primary focus, and spells may as well not exist. Increasing your health, stamina, and attack power are the only real options you have, but doing so is more vital than ever.

While Bloodborne's weapon selection is slimmer than average, each weapon has an array of interesting and unique moves. Light, heavy, jump attack, attacking out of a roll or running, transformed versions of each of these, and an attack triggered by transforming your weapon mid-combo. Unfortunately none of these options are any better than just spamming R1, and the saw-cleaver, a starter weapon, has better DPS than anything I've ever wanted to experiment with.

Bloodborne's level design is on the better side of the spectrum, but the main path through the game is both shorter and more linear than any other. You only need to visit 5 areas, and you only need to kill 8 bosses, and aside from your second boss all of them need to be defeated in the same order in every playthrough. There is quite a bit of optional content, but the question "where should I go next, and why?" is never as interesting as in the other games. In Dark Souls you can kill both mandatory and optional bosses in a variety of orders, and there are reasons for why you might want to do one boss before the other. Most people fight Pinwheel or Dancer of the Boreal Valley late in their respective games, but there are reasons to kill them earlier. Why would I kill blood-starved beast, Amygdala, or the witch of Hemwick at all? Definitely not for access to the copy-and-paste chalice dungeons, and probably not for the ability to equip miniscule buffs. The optional content in Bloodborne mostly renders itself a checklist of stuff to do if I feel like I need to grind more money.

Some people have argued that the chalice dungeons are fine because Bloodborne's combat mechanics are deep enough to carry uninteresting level design. Though again, the most basic attacks with the most basic weapons are both the safest and most effective. And because the exact punishment for failure (losing your echoes, not only one of your main methods of getting stronger, but effectively your most important resource since you need to buy blood vials) is antithetical to the reason for doing these areas in the first place (grinding for echoes), using the chalice dungeons as a place to experiment isn't really worth it.

The game’s aesthetic is very consistent, and is very visually busy in a way that makes it look good in screenshots. Though there’s very little reason to peer into many corners, because most of that extreme architectural detail is just window dressing, even more so than usual. The “impossible geometry” on display might add to the Lovecraftian charm for some people, but for me it just means that Bloodborne is the only one of these games that I genuinely find myself losing my sense of direction in. The skyline of Yharnam is such a mess, further marred by extreme post-processing and LOD’s that I genuinely can’t tell what’s supposed to be a landmark. The game being so dark doesn’t help anything; even what variation does exist between areas is made less striking by the fact that your screen is mostly shades of black and grey regardless of where you are.

The performance is terrible, basically inexcusable. Even when it manages to hit 30fps it can’t deliver those frames consistently. It doesn’t even matter what system you play it on, it’s the same regardless. This supposedly “fast-paced” take on Souls-style gameplay ends up feeling like wading through the same old swamp. You practically have to be telepathic to react to the more challenging bosses. I would add half a star if they ever released a version of the game that properly worked.

The soundtrack is quite good. Ludwig’s theme might be my favorite boss fight music in any From Software game. The sound design in general is nice, even if a couple stock sound effects are a bit jarring and feel out of place.

Generally speaking, Bloodborne is just a fine game. It hints at having something greater under the hood, but in my opinion it never really delivers in the way that other games from this developer have.

"Why are we here? No reason, just nostalgia, I suppose."

I've said before, only half joking, that the Wii only has about 5 good games. I still believe it has a weak library overall but I will at least admit it must surely have some hidden gems, but they are WELL hidden. As it was released in North America, Innocent Aces is a game absolutely terrified of telling you what it is. I think it's the earliest released game that I own that has a reversible sleeve; the US retail package features different artwork from any other region, making it look exactly like every other flight game on this system. A side effect of the Wii's reputation for being a "casual" console is that not only are traditional "hardcore" games fewer in number, but for the sake of marketability they are made to resemble their competition as much as possible. The only real hints as to the true nature of the game are the fact that it was published by Xseed, and that savvy enthusiasts might recognize that the aircraft on the box is like no plane in the real world. It is otherwise indistinguishable (at least, on the surface) from games like Blazing Angels, Heatseekers, or WWII Aces.

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces is an Ace Combat spinoff made as a tie-in for an anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii. In the movie, in an alternate history setting, wars are now waged by the Rostock and Lautern corporations as spectacle. The combatants in their live-fire engagements are Kildren, genetically engineered ageless child soldiers. Nobody ever wins, nobody ever can win. There's a legend on the battlefield that somewhere in the sky is a plane with a black wildcat on its nose, piloted by the only adult man still in active duty. Sometimes some poor kid leaves the fight to try and be the one to take the man down, but nobody even comes close. It is implied that in Innocent Aces, you play as that very man in his younger years, just as Rostock starts making the switch to test-tube babies.

The presentation of the game is quite striking. In the post-mission rundown, the paths of all planes, friend and foe, are traced through the sky as red and blue ribbons. Many levels feature large environmental setpieces, a city, a volcano, a castle. Once in a while between missions you'll be treated to anime cutscenes done by Production I.G. The soundtrack is excellent, the mission briefing and debriefing tracks stand out as particularly memorable.

I was initially a bit disappointed with the weapon selection compared to Ace Combat, but that was before I understood how to use "Tactical Maneuver Commands". If you stay within close range of an enemy for a short time, you'll start filling a gauge at the bottom of the screen. Once it fills up enough, you'll be able to execute various scripted motions with a single button press that will automatically align your plane for a perfect shot. It's somewhere between the movement capabilities of Sonic's lightspeed dash and the Doomslayer's glory kills. It's very satisfying to be able to charge headfirst into a swarm of enemies, and once you've safely closed the gap, pick them off one-by-one with ease.

As you might expect with a Wii game, the controls can be an issue. While you can use a traditional controller (Classic Controller/Pro or Gamecube), it comes with some hiccups. The tutorial only teaches you how to play with the default control scheme, the remote and nunchuck. Not only are the button configurations so different between control types that you'll need to learn them yourself or consult the manual, many tutorials are actually impossible to complete with a standard gamepad because the fire button on gamepad is also the skip tutorial button. The controls are also simplified compared to typical Ace Combat fare, and while there is an "expert" mode meant to reimplement this, it puts yaw control on the D-pad meaning you'll need to use a left-hand claw grip if you want parity with the level of control you have in mainline games.

I played through the game with a Classic Controller Pro but I replayed the first few stages with motion controls out of curiosity; if nothing else, it was somewhat illuminating. For one thing, it all but confirmed my suspicion that the "Tactical Maneuvers" were a band-aid fix for how difficult it is to play with motion controls (though these moves are, perhaps accidentally, fun enough that I don't care). The motion controls are terrible. You move and aim with the nunchuck. Not the nunchuck's joystick, mind you, that would make too much sense. No, you move and aim, the most important gameplay functions of any flight combat game, using the nunchuck's motion sensor. When playing the game using the Classic Controller I sometimes found the controls to be over-sensitive, with small corrections requiring unusually subtle joystick movement. I now suspect that this is a side-effect of the nunchuck's limitations.

The game's pacing is excellent. Craft restrictions are introduced with a mission where you must use a poorly handling stealth plane to take pictures of enemy structures, and once fights break out at the end of the mission it's almost impossible to land a shot without using your TMC's. The very next mission limits the player instead to what it easily the most maneuverable plane yet. Some later missions require you to carefully regulate your speed, or navigate heavy wind currents. Even at their most challenging, straightforward air-to-air combat missions offer a breath of fresh air.

Aside from the controls, the most frustrating aspect of The Sky Crawlers is that even after playing the game and watching the movie I feel like I've still only seen too small a sliver of this world. We don't see much of what goes on outside of the battlefield, the newscasts, the bars, bowling alleys, and brothels near the bases. When we do get a glimpse into the lives of civilians in this world, they might sigh, they might slouch and stare out into the horizon, but they don't say anything. What do they think? What goes on in this world, who needs this war and why? Maybe the novels go deeper into this, but they're only available digitally and I've heard mixed things about their translation.

It's Super Metroid. It's The Good One. It's The Speed Run Game. It's The Sequence Break Game.

It has the most interesting controls of any of the 2D games. I hear the haters cry "it's floaty, it's clunky." You are a robot lady in space. It does commit a control scheme sin though: no game should ever put you in a position where you even consider the idea of pressing three face buttons at once, but to shoot while jumping out of a run you will have to do just that (unless you rebind things, which you really should).

Its level design and exploration have been talked to death. It's the kind of game where after playing through it a few times it starts to become unclear what the "intended path" really ever was.

The bosses are generally a weak point, each usually being either being a simple test of patience or a total pushover. Great music, some of the best sprite-work on SNES, though performance does take a hit in later levels which can make time-sensitive maneuvers like the space jump somewhat frustrating.

I beat the game with 69%, AND I got to see the lady in her under wear lololol

Playing 30XX is like watching how the sausage is made.

The sausage in question is not this game, and while I don't mean the above statement as a reference to the game being in early access, the fact that it is in early access certainly makes this feeling of sausage-making spectatorship more apparent. The specific element of the further development process that enables this is the fact that like many games playable by the public which are still being worked on, exact technical information about the level is being displayed in the corner of the screen at all times; this is likely so that if a player runs into a technical issue, the developers can see where it happened, making reproducing and fixing the problem easier. A side effect of this is that the seams between chunks of level become as apparent as they would be if the game still used classic Mega Man screen scrolls.

I want to be clear that I don't mean this as a negative criticism of the game, but as high praise. The game controls very well, it looks great, it sounds great. On a technical and artistic level its every bit as good as "the real thing".

I've been playing a lot of Mega Man lately, probably too much. While playing Mega Man 5, I had the thought that Napalm Man's stage felt a lot like Wood Man's stage from Mega Man 2. Sure enough, a few google searches show me that Napalm Man's stage is in fact laid out more or less the same way, though about 25% bigger.

Mega Man's level design is so formulaic that you could literally give a computer a formula that spits new Mega Man levels out. From aesthetic, to terrain layouts, to boss design, weapon types, every new iteration in classic Mega Man is putting only slight variation on the same handful of archetypes. With a handful of additions, which I don't doubt will materialize by the time this game sees a 1.0 release, and perhaps revisions, 30XX would be able to effectively replace any retro throwback Mega Man. Arguably the only reason 20XX didn't already do this was because some people didn't find the art-style appealing.

There's a reason that there hasn't been a new 2D Mario game since Mario Maker came out. Fans have made the reason clear: if Nintendo is going to make a new 2D Mario game, they better make one a helluva lot more exciting than what they've been doing for the past 4 games, because with Mario Maker we can have a near infinite amount of classic style 2D Mario levels.

Between this and fan projects like Mega Man Maker, I'm hoping that the sheer amount of Classic/X style Mega Man content reaches a sort of critical mass whereat a greater need for new explorations in 2D action platformer mechanics manifests. Maybe now that we have so many variations for this gameplay style, the next Mega Man, or spiritual successor, or fan project, or anything else, can be something other than a decades-old template with a fresh coat of paint.

An improvement over its predecessor in virtually every regard. Mesmerizing visuals, more polished controls, more intuitive level design, a phenomenal soundtrack. The most important change is that the game actually delivers on the original game's promise of speed (which should not be confused for the game being "easy", or "a rollercoaster", etc).

The whole idea for Sonic the Hedgehog was to take the Super Mario Bros. concept, lower the skill floor, and raise the skill ceiling; it sprung from impatience, why could a particularly skilled player not beat a Mario level even faster? If you know what you're doing most of these levels can be beaten in under a minute. For the majority of the game, the pacing is perfect.

And then Metropolis Zone is both the most visually uninteresting level in the game, and is also the only one that is three acts long. As much as I love the music and overall vibe of Sky Chase Zone, it doesn't feel like a brief moment of relaxation because it's placed right after Metropolis Zone. The last handful of levels are a pretty significant drop.

Metal Slug XX was just kind of a dull disappointment.

The gimmick where the enemies drop a bunch of coins when they die is kind of fun, but it's just about the only really interesting thing the game brings to the table.

In terms of environments many of these levels are either visually plain or bleed into one another. Almost every level is some kind of industrial quarry or mine. There's a water level and some nice snowy areas near the end, but the locales are generally bland.

I would generally hope that a non-arcade Metal Slug game would take some steps to be more forgiving, since there's no reason for this thing to try to eat quarters you can't give it, but that's not what happened here. Metal Slug XX has some of the most hectic and overwhelming enemy placements I've seen in one of these games.

It's just another Metal Slug game. That's it. No reason to play it instead of X or 3.

What does it mean to "play" a video game?

Do we play a role within the game, as an actor? Do we play it as we do a movie, and experience it as an audience? Do we play a sport on the screen, as a competitor? Depending on the game, depending on individual taste, any number of answers ring more true than the next, but I know what is most valuable to me.

The best video games are "played" in the same way that one "plays" a song.

Super Mario 64 is the first video game I played as a kid, and if it is not still my favorite game today, it is the scale by which my favorite game will be judged.

A video game controller, like a musical instrument, is on its own little more than a strange contraption with no visually apparent practical use (perhaps especially for the Nintendo 64 controller). It is only through use of the object, following a set of instructions, that the beauty of the thing becomes clear. A video game, like a song, must be learned.

Only three notes make up the swirling improvised harmonies of Super Mario 64's composition; three buttons, the function of which could be summarily described by the verbs "Ascend", "Descend", and "Lunge". Following a burst of upward momentum the player could effortlessly transfer this kinetic energy into a forward dive. One action leads into another seamlessly; Super Mario 64 is a platformer with the combo variety and tight precision of a character action game.

Super Mario 64 transforms the controller into rhythmic percussion. A flick of the stick, the thumb tapdancing atop the A and B buttons. Mario shouts with delight as coins jingle and his enemies grunt and squeal. Like a free jazz, it is hectic, it is also under control.

And like free jazz, it is endlessly improvisational. From every instant that the player decides their movement, to the traversal of the stage, to the gradual uncovering of the castle's many paths, the player is constantly making choices on every possible level. The game only requires any combination of little more than half of its objectives to be cleared in order to see the end; what any individual has difficulty with can be passed over, and onto the next.

The levels both possess within themselves an apparent Dark Souls-ian spiral of interweaving paths, and contain unseen swooping one man rollercoasters which the player is left to carve for themselves. Many objectives simply exist as an object in the world, they can be collected in order as the game doles out hints, or collected at anytime an experienced player wishes. They can be collected by an intended exploration of a winding obstacle course, or the intended route can often be circumvented by a flashy display of electronic acrobatic prowess.

Super Mario 64 is not escapism, its plot is irrelevant, its world is made up of incongruous chunks accessed through painted interdimensional gateways. It can be played competitively, but it doesn't have to be. Not every song is an endless operatic epic, not everyone who picks up an instrument is a star or virtuoso. Why does the everyman play an instrument? To busk for change? In hopes that they will someday be recognized as genius? Maybe, but in the face of a lack of either meaningful monetary gain or critical approval, why does a normal person play a song for only themselves?

Perhaps because the actions, in and of themselves, are satisfying.