Top 5 reasons why DOOM still rocks in 2024 (by a tenderfoot born in 2000):

1. The amount of testosterone per pixel. If you want to play in lower difficulty levels you’ll have to acknowledge your lack of masculinity and pick the “I’m too young to die” option. I find it endearing.
2. The shotgun.
3. The main character’s walk cycle. It’s so exaggerated, I love how much it moves up and down, right and left, and how the weapon also swings around with each step you take. It makes you feel like a fucking berserker.
4. The action is great, but there are also some amazing horror set pieces. Lights will suddenly switch off and you’ll have to survive a shooting in the dark by trusting your instincts and the fleeting light of each shot you fire.
5. Finally, a horde of demons coming from Mars is too cool and iconic to be true and we should point out more often just how well this thing knows its own aesthetic.

DMC 2 is so strange that it deserves more than its reputation simply being "game sucks." It doesn't deserve better, but it does deserve more. Let me start by just aggregating all my major issues with the game:

1. The enemy AI is almost unilaterally broken. A lot of bosses are ostensibly pacifists. They don't to hurt Dante. In many instances they simply can't.
2. Pretty much 95% of bosses can be killed by spamming Ebony & Ivory. If you have a turbo button on your controller you can bring your playtime down from 3.5 hours to probably two-hours-forty-five.
3. The plot here is more an elaborate collection of mostly unrelated cutscenes than a coherent storyline.
4. The game employs an auto lock-on and a manual lock-off (what), neither of which really work properly.
5. The upgrade system has pretty much been stripped out for... something that I never really understood. You can reach S-rank sometimes by just mashing Rebellion.
6. Infested Chopper.

As you'll notice, that means basically every pillar of the game is ostensibly busted. And that is true. But DMC2 also has some cool elements. I'll list those next:

1. The art direction is mostly really good. Lots of super cool locations and enemy designs.
2. Dante animates quite well. He also feels a lot more nimble than DMC1.
3. Gaining new traversal powers to use in Devil Trigger is a great idea.
5. There's a great amount of environmental variety here, something I think DMC suffers with as a series overall.
4. It's still Devil May Cry, so it's intrinsically cool.

Often, playing this game is like playing an NES game that's sort of objectively disastrously programmed but is still fun both in spite of, and because of, all these issues. It's almost comedic how all the tentpole elements of the game are just in shambles, it's sort of fun chuckling while standing in the corner of a boss arena burning their health bar with Ebony & Ivory while the boss just vibes alone in the opposite corner.

Because DMC 2 is so short and so extremely easy, you can kinda just sit back and enjoy the mess unfold. This game is almost entirely painless to play through: if all the big problems coalesced in a game that was angeringly hard then it'd be a half star. But it's not. Above all, DMC 2 is just sort of a source of bemusement. I think it's worth playing if only just to appreciate how a game of this status turns out this bizarrely. It's rare to play something which fails so completely, and I'd be lying if I said that's not worth the afternoon it'll take to see through.

Perhaps one of the most controversial games in the franchise! It was AC: Origins that twisted expectations and introduced action RPG mechanics into the gameplay, probably influenced by the iconic The Witcher 3 HUGE release.

This game serves as a breath of fresh air in murky times, a welcome change. The plot revolves around Bayek, a very charismatic and intriguing character, along with a heavy and historically famous supporting cast. The setting in Egypt is splendid, a factor that the franchise has never failed at. I played Origins with a GTX 670, with graphics on low, locked at 40 fps, and SOMEHOW this game managed to hold my attention from start to finish, even in these terrible PC conditions.

However, it hasn't a top notch game design like past entryes in the series. A solid mid game, with good things in between. My favorite of this new generation of Assassin's Creed!

Was this necessary?





























Bonus half a point because Sackboy is awesome.

Risk II is a very nostalgic game for me because it was among the first video games i've ever played.
It successfully captures the strategic depth and core rules/mechanics of the original board game. Basically, in this game you need to conquer the world.
The map is well-detailed, and the troop animations during battles add some flavour to the experience. The user interface is intuitive, allowing players to easily manage their armies and territories. The inclusion of detailed statistics and battle outcomes helps players refine their strategies and improve their gameplay.
The AI adapts to different strategies, however sometimes it gets easy to read as it has its own limits.
Overall, Risk II is a well-crafted strategy game that successfully translates the classic board game experience to the digital realm.

Game Dev Tycoon is the only game i'ever bought on my phone because you know, if you pirate it you'll have no chance of getting too far into the game. At some point your games will start to get pirated and you'll go bankrupt eventually.
You start from a small garage and you end up growing into a major industry leader. I love the fact that the game begins in the early days of the gaming industry (around the 80s) and progresses through several decades, the furthest I got was to 300 years in the future 😅
The game is very engaging and it gives you freedom, you can create games by selecting various genres, themes, and platforms, and then manage the development process by allocating resources to different aspects such as graphics, sound, gameplay etc.

The game's biggest strength is it's replayability. As you progress, you unlock new technologies, game genres, and research options, allowing for increasingly sophisticated game development. There's also the challenge of staying ahead of industry trends and competitors. It adds a layer of strategic depth that keeps the gameplay interesting over multiple playthroughs.
The biggest flaw of the game is that at some point, you reach endgame and you stop unlocking new gameplay elements. I wish they supported this game for longer and added more depth to it.

All in all, this is a neat and unique idea of a game that gets addictive really quick.
Im sad that i never developed a game that got a pure 11/10 rating:((

Now that I’ve had a day to sit on my thoughts of the game I will make an actual non-shitpost review.

This game is a mess. I wasn’t kidding when I said this is the MGS4 of the series. An extremely ambitious, earnest, heartfelt celebration of the series that has extremely high highs but also constantly falls on its face with extremely stupid writing.

The pacing is some of the worst we’ve seen from RGG. For a game that can easily be 100+ hours long it is both too long but also too short in areas. It constantly pulls you away from the main story to do very involved mini game/sub system tutorials but then has no time in the final hours to wrap up most of the story. At least 4 of the main characters this game is about don’t show up in the final cutscene. You just have to be told about what they are doing from a mouth piece so we can wrap shit up. Kiryu is just kinda left in this weird limbo as they don’t explain what the fuck got them to this point with an achievement titles “man who reclaimed his name”. It genuinely feels like there is either an entire chapter or at least a huge segment of one missing from the end. One of the main villains just stops showing up for 10+ hours only to be seen again in a cut away and is completely unrecognizable for at least another few hours. They then try to do the coin locker scene again with them and it feels completely unearned because they haven’t done anything. The two main villains you do fight are extremely forgettable and underwhelming. One is given what you’d imagine to be a super important connection to Ichiban but it never comes up. The two share a single cutscene at the start of the game and that’s it. Why was it even a plot point to begin with then???? So many plot threads just go no where or are left extremely unsatisfying as they hand wave them away so it can’t be viewed as “a plot hole”. I seriously think how they structure their stories needs to change because I don’t think the Yakuza writing formula they’ve had for 2 decades translates to a 100 hour JRPG. Imo the best way to enjoy the main story of these games is when you can just progress the plot freely and not be bogged down by side content or busy work. I usually save that stuff for premium adventure so the story isn’t so “start and stop”. But you can’t do that in these games because of the rpg leveling and just how the story constantly blocks you to do other shit I am currently not interested in. No RGG I don’t give a fuck about your Pokémon clone and it’s 30 minute+ forced tutorial I just want to get on with chapter 4 please.

Most of the cast has nothing to do in this game which would be fine if they didn’t force them to have boring ass drink links you need to do to make them objectively better in gameplay.

The gameplay needs massive changes going forward because Jesus Christ was I sick of the multiple grinds it imposes. The long battles they do in this game are terrible. In previous entries you’d have a long gauntlet where you’d have to fight to a location and they do this here but they constantly make you take the most out of the way route and block off better ones with excuses like “there are dudes over there!” Only to send you down an alley with 7 fights. If 9 does the same formula 8 repeated from 7 I might just drop the series. I do not want to go back to scrounging for money and being locked out of jobs till chapter 5 again. I do not want to have to do massive material grinds for good gear. I do not want to have 80% of the moves you get to be fucking useless because they aren’t an AOE and don’t deal elemental damage.

Highlights of this game is everything they do with Kiryu outside of the final chapter. Life links are overall goated outside of some implications of how no one reacting to Kiryu being alive despite you are only able to see them after Kiryu is broadcasted on national news to be alive.

There is honestly too much to talk about with this game So I’m just gonna end it by saying this: I’ll look back on the good in this game as some of the best but I never want to replay this game ever again. Also this game only makes Gaiden look even dumber and further cements it at as a $50 scam. Yokoyama fucking lied Hanawa is not important and he fucking knew that.

Mark my words that this game while currently being hailed as the best game in the series, that its perfect and other things like that will be looked back on a lot more negatively once the honeymoon phase is over, once hypebeasts move onto the next thing, once people won't freakout if you have anything negative to say about it. It won't be a hot take or "being contrarian" to think that the game is mid, super front loaded and falls apart in the end. It's fine if you do think its perfect and its your favorite game or whatever but the amount of people who lose their shit when you have anything negative to say about this game or gaiden is seriously annoying.

This game also made me get into a car accident so fuck it lol

this is like the anti-sonic forces to me.

the problem with sonic forces is that it's bland, boring and it has extremely little to do. shadow has plenty of levels, hundreds of paths and is ANYTHING but boring.

but it's laggy, unpolished as all hell, extremely edgy in the corniest ways possible, and the level designs are... awful, to say the least. sonic forces, for how much i enjoy shitting on it, is an extremely polished game with so little edge it may as well be a circle.

shadow is better simply because i felt something while playing it. even if that was just laughing at the stupid cutscenes and stupider dialogue, it got something out of me. it also took some risks that, while i don't think they paid off, were at the very least interesting.

bad, but in a fun way.

Ghost Trick was one of the first games I put in my Amazon wish list back when I made an account in 2017. I remember a Youtuber I liked, Nintendocaprisun, streamed the game and the little I watched from the stream looked really cool. It sat in that wishlist for ages, eventually skyrocketing in price. It wasn't until last year, that I decided to bite the bullet and buy the game physically off eBay. It was expensive but it was a game I wanted to own for a while now, and I figured playing it on the DS would have been awesome. By this time, I was already a big Ace Attorney Fan, and knowing that this was another Shu Takumi game..I was pretty excited to play it. While I personally still prefer AA1 and AA3 over this, this was still a great time overall.

This game makes great use of the touch-screen. So, the basic premise of the game without going into story details, you the main character have died. You are a ghost and find out you have the ability to go back to the past, four minutes before someone has died, and have the potential to save them. You also have the ability to move to different objects and control them. You do this by going into ghost mode and moving your little wisp icon from object to object. The catch is, you can only move it a specific distance away. If something is too far away, you have to figure out how to get there by possibly interacting with the object you're on. This is called "tricking" and it can vary depending on the section of the story you're on. Some can be very simple while others you need to time specific actions in the real world. It might seem a bit confusing with how I explained however, it's very easy to understand in game. Either way, this gameplay loop is really fun and is perfect for a DS game. Near the end of the game, it also throws another character at you with some different mechanics. And it even combines the two at once and it can lead to some really fun puzzles. The game was never that hard, I never even had to look up a guide, however I never found them super easy.

Story-wise, like I said the premise is you die at the start. You play as Sissel, someone we know nothing about, and not even he knows who he is. His main goal from the start is to figure out who he is and how he dies, but along the way he meets a colorful cast of characters, and the game gets more complicated from there. Overall, I enjoyed the story and cast of characters for sure. Like Ace Attorney, they're all very distinct and can be very goofy. The main cast is very good tho I have to say I didn't connect to them as much as I do with the main cast of Ace Attorney. Probably because this game is shorter than your average AA game, and I was able to connect to that game's cast through the span of three games! Either way, while I didn't love any character here, Sissel..Lynne..Jowd..Cabanela..Missile..the entire cast is memorable and entertaining. The story is also full of twists and turns throughout. The ending may be a little convoluted imo but I think it was executed well and I did not see it coming at all. While not mind-blowing overall, I can at least commend the story and overall concept of the game for being unique. Always love seeing really out there stories like this.

This may be weird to here, but I don't think the absolute best aspect of this game is the story or the gameplay. It's the visuals. Honestly, some of the best sprite-work I've ever seen in a game. Every animation is so buttery smooth and really gives the game a lot of character. The look of each character sprite too, idk how they did it, but it has this very distinct look to it. Since the game is very goofy at times, the characters animations are goofy as well. The art style on the portraits is very distinct too tho those aren't animated. They're nice but it would have been cool if they had little animations as well, like Ace Attorney. Along with the sprites being full of personality, so is the dialogue. If you played Ace Attorney before this, you'd be right at home here. It feels just like Ace Attorney. Goofy and witty when it wants to be, serious when it wants to be, and full of heart throughout. In this regard, it may be better than Ace Attorney because I didn't notice any spelling errors lol.

The OST is probably my biggest disappointment compared to Ace Attorney tbh, especially since the AA1 composer did this game. The first Ace Attorney's ost is now in my top 10 OSTS of all time. I just love it so much, so I might've hyped myself up too much with this game. That's not to say this game has a bad soundtrack, I just don't find it comparable to the Ace Attorney games personally. Maybe I just haven't listened to the OST enough, as I know this is probably a hot take and others will disagree. Still, there were songs I did like. Four Minutes Before Death probably being my favorite since it reminded me of Ace Attorney the most haha.

I do wish I ended up liking this a bit more, especially since this game is praised so much and has a 4.5 average, however in this case I can totally see why it is as this game is really great. I guess maybe it just comes down to my personal preferences. Or maybe I'll like this even more on replay, who knows. Either way, while it seems I do prefer the Ace Attorney series more (sorry I keep comparing them, it's just hard not to with the type of game this is), this is still must-play DS game imo and worth all the praise it gets.