The appeal here is pretty different from what typically is involved in grand strategy. This isn’t a game of conquest or necessarily even of alt history (the national flavor here is lacking on launch, though I suspect this will be addressed over time), it’s very squarely a game about keeping a well-oiled economic machine running as efficiently as you can manage, with world events being interesting wrenches thrown in that plan you have to work around via managing different interest groups and the political coalitions they form. Like Vicky 2, the game is very concerned about pops and keeping them well cared for and happy. This is a game that wants you to do the best you can for many different people with many different interests, and I love it for that. When you're looking through the needs of each pop trying to figure out why they're struggling and what they need to live better lives, it sometimes puts you in this benevolent / parental god mindset, not unlike ActRaiser. The difference being that to actually help people and make them happier, you need to pursue economic prosperity and justice. You have to push through these rapidfire stages of history in order to please them, and I love that. In doing so, you get to really FEEL the way that early industrial economies built on top of themselves again and again, culminating in this fantastic lategame economic explosion finally giving your brain everything you spent hours training it to yearn for. I love it.

Much has been improved with regard to the portrayal of non-industrial and decentralized societies compared to Vicky 2, though I pretty much just echo the sentiments here: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/24/miscellanea-victoria-iii-confirmed-first-impressions/

In the future I’d like to play harder difficulties, because my main complaint so far is that it hasn’t really forced me to engage with the more involved systems as much as I’d like, though that does improve in the lategame. A lot of the negative reaction aside from the typical concerns about Paradox’s business model and “grr sjws grr no war micro” comes down to the fact that in many nations you can bypass a lot of the more complex stuff and just build things the game says will be profitable. With more aggressive AI settings and playing more difficult nations, I think I’ll get into that more.

I love this game. I understand the complaints about it being somewhat barebones, I really do. I don't like modern Paradox's business model either, but the truth is I already love what's here and have gotten a lot out of it. I suggest piracy with all games, but especially Paradox ones. I have a legal copy myself, but if the idea of keeping up with the wave of expansions that are sure to come sounds like it'll be too much for you, please just grab a torrent and enjoy what's here without the baggage of wondering if it was worth your money.

One of my absolute favorite things in art is when a piece tackles hopelessness from an extremely positive and loving standpoint, and this essentially does that in a variety of different gorgeous environments inspired by the developer's dreams. The tonal range here is extremely wide, going from carefree lands of joy to uneasy depressive ruts to the most hellish of nightmares. Yknow, the range of most people's dreams.

My favorite level is a world of ice where the last remaining people cling to trash fires while others who are disconnected and lonely sit freezing to death. As you move through it and spend time with people, treating them with kindness, additional fires magically light to keep them warm. This kind of sweet, simple beauty along with the always-gorgeous PSX (and sometimes N64) inspired visuals makes this a lovely time.

And as with everyone else, I miss my door wife.

I'm too old to be part of this game's demographic, but I can imagine it's a damn good time for kids in class and if it came out at the right time in my life, I probably would've obsessed over it. Krunker is fast and twitchy and has loads of custom content to constantly recontextualize and add variety to what is, at its base, a solid and skillful set of mechanics which feel fantastic from the moment you figure out how to bhop.

Unfortunately, I stopped playing soon after starting. The moment it started trying to sell me on NFT nonsense, I was out. As much fun as this is, it's not worth the moral hit of adding to the playerbase of a game pushing something that evil. I'm not sure how to give a score to something where my only negative thoughts come from the monetization scheme and not the bare experience of playing the game, so I'll leave this unrated.

Neon White is a tragic would-be masterpiece held back by its unrelenting irony-poisoned rejection of anything genuine or friendly, along with completely wrecking its initially excellent mechanical design the second it tries to ramp up the difficulty.

In a first person movement based game, the difficulty and reward comes from the depth of that movement itself, in mastering it and squeezing out everything those mechanics allow. The execution barrier on something like a surf map in Counter-Strike or simply competently playing a match of Quake is a large part of what gives those their richness. A high skill floor does not necessarily mean a high ceiling will come with it, but it's certainly much more likely and works out in these cases. Neon White tries to simplify the kind of satisfaction one gets from mastery of movement to something every player can enjoy, and at first that works. For the first few missions, the easy mode versions of surfing, sticky jumping, and other classic movement options make for compelling levels where it is genuinely fun to compete with your friends and improve. Soon, though, the mechanics lose their luster as you realize how little there is to them. Regardless of angle, all explosions will send you directly up where you want them to, and everything is generally placed in such an easy to clear manner that it becomes mindless. There is simply nowhere to go, and improvement consists mostly of cutting corners and performing actions more smoothly.

This doesn't last forever, though, and eventually Neon White wants to make clearing levels more difficult. At first you cheer, until you realize how they do that. Their basic movement options are so devoid of depth that they just gave up on getting anything else out of them, and instead just layer mechanic on mechanic, hide enemies all over the place, and ask you to route that out. So as you progress, you spend more and more time looking around for what you need and planning things out so that by the time you're doing actual runs and shaving off time, you just want to move on to something else. One might say that this issue mirrors actual speedrunning, where the fast path and how to complete all objectives while going down it is often not clear. That's certainly true, but routing and then grinding out a level in a speed game usually comes after playing casually and genuinely enjoying the space without trying to move through it fast. Getting familiar with the space is then a natural process during casual playthroughs, but you can't do that there. There is nothing else to these levels other than speedrunning. No storytelling or puzzle solving or anything else that makes us love games. There's no hook.

In that way, it ends up feeling a lot like 2D Sonic: utterly joyless restriction of movement makes it so that to actually have any fun, you first need to play through a level several times and get good. Getting through is not hard, but it sure is tedious. The fun comes after the grind and the game doesn't even make an attempt at hooking you in to get you to that point.

The less said about the narrative, the better. Awful anime dub-tier voice acting drags down characters already so utterly insufferable and internet-poisoned with the most mean-spirited "SIMP POGGERS GURO XD" bullshit you've ever seen. If you find anything cute or fun, it will soon be torn down and stomped on.

Can we undo the Danganronpafication and Personafication of anything weeby? Weebs deserve better.

Monster Hunter is a lot of things to many people, but for those of us infected with Souls brain, it's a comfy social lounge to do Soulsy things with friends. It strings together the immensely deep and satisfying combat we've learned to love with just enough MMOish connective tissue to create something so deeply addicting it's difficult to believe.

World dropped enough of the weird QoL and tutorialization barriers for me to finally be able to actually dive into that, and for that I adore it. I'm looking forward to going backwards in the series after I'm done with this one, but I don't expect that to be very soon. I've got a ton of postgame stuff to do as well as the huge expansion....as;ldkfja;lsdkghapsod I'm so excited I love this I love that I was finally able to get into this I love that the people I love are playing it with me aaaaaaaaaaaaa

I dropped this a long time ago, but it still makes me angry. Never have I been so enamored by a game and had it all come crashing down in one moment. Danganronpa is so inventive and strange in a way I couldn't possibly look away from until one key moment where it became clear this game hates me and it hates my people. You know the one.

Fuck this game and fuck its disdain for all the fun characters it somehow creates. There isn't a drop of love here, only "epic" twists and sick joy in ruining anything and everyone the player could actually like. As a player and as a human being, you deserve better.

A massive mechanical step forward for the series which is dramatically held back by the maps. I think Neversoft must have figured that with all the extra mobility and options for combo extensions the skating mechanics in THPS3 afford the player, they could make maps with much less clear lines and obnoxious hidden objects that make traversal and finding goals very difficult. This results in an experience that is generally much more competent than the previous two games on its surface, but which gets held back by maps that barely feel like they're meant to be skated on (much love for Airport, though).

I love this one less than I remembered, but it's still a good time and worth a play. To see this series at its best, though, you'll want to check out the masterpieces THPS4 and the much more recently released THPS 1+2.