brentsacks
2019
I was not prepared for this. Like, any of this
2019
Utterly adorable, charming, cozy game. Loved my time with it. Kind of curious how much it takes to unlock those other achievements…
…BRENT SNAP OUT OF IT!
Also, HELL of a game to finish on Mother’s Day 🥹🥹🥹
…BRENT SNAP OUT OF IT!
Also, HELL of a game to finish on Mother’s Day 🥹🥹🥹
2008
Realized I didn’t review this one, and I eventually might turn my footage into a video review, but I’m beating games faster than I can make videos. This one might get passed over. I’ll probably digest my notes and see what I have to say about it.
Dead Space scared the heck out of me, and playing it in surround sound is like a death wish.
This game cries out for the Enhanced treatment on Xbox, playing at a measly 720p on my 4K OLED TV. Like Mirror’s Edge or Forza Horizon, all you would need to do here is up-res it to 4K and you’d be golden. But of course, there was a remake on the horizon to ship, so I suspect this one was left off the glow up list on purpose.
Dead Space scared the heck out of me, and playing it in surround sound is like a death wish.
This game cries out for the Enhanced treatment on Xbox, playing at a measly 720p on my 4K OLED TV. Like Mirror’s Edge or Forza Horizon, all you would need to do here is up-res it to 4K and you’d be golden. But of course, there was a remake on the horizon to ship, so I suspect this one was left off the glow up list on purpose.
May or may not come back for a video review of this one.
As a Souls-like for someone who doesn’t Souls, I appreciate the gentle on-ramp for when I eventually return to Bloodborne.
The story and gameplay here are pretty solid. The music and sound design is excellent. Graphically, they really did a good job, but the game was plagued with glitches and crashed a ton. I played it in 2023 on Xbox Series X, so if it was ever going to be fully patched up and polished, it happened already. A shame that the technical hiccups weighed the game down for me.
Also, the first game I have ever unlocked every achievement for on Xbox, and I’ve been doing it since achievements existed! (Came close a couple times, it’s a sore subject, I don’t wanna talk about it.)
As a Souls-like for someone who doesn’t Souls, I appreciate the gentle on-ramp for when I eventually return to Bloodborne.
The story and gameplay here are pretty solid. The music and sound design is excellent. Graphically, they really did a good job, but the game was plagued with glitches and crashed a ton. I played it in 2023 on Xbox Series X, so if it was ever going to be fully patched up and polished, it happened already. A shame that the technical hiccups weighed the game down for me.
Also, the first game I have ever unlocked every achievement for on Xbox, and I’ve been doing it since achievements existed! (Came close a couple times, it’s a sore subject, I don’t wanna talk about it.)
A worthy if de-scoped successor to the original game, which is among my favorites of all time. Benefits a lot from some gameplay changes and refinements while not needing to reinvent itself completely. Fills the role of the expansion pack that has largely vanished from a gaming landscape full of DLC.
It doesn't have too many flaws per se, but it also didn't break my brain with its glory, probably because it was second in line. But man, Miles Morales is a rock solid game with insane visuals and, best of all, it is squarely focused on what it should be: FUN.
Video review forthcoming!
Edit: video here! More games should just be FUN!!
https://youtu.be/SPBmwWVInKQ
It doesn't have too many flaws per se, but it also didn't break my brain with its glory, probably because it was second in line. But man, Miles Morales is a rock solid game with insane visuals and, best of all, it is squarely focused on what it should be: FUN.
Video review forthcoming!
Edit: video here! More games should just be FUN!!
https://youtu.be/SPBmwWVInKQ
2020
Good, gorgeous, punishing game with a lot going for it. Video review forthcoming!
Edit: video here! https://youtu.be/s0l-oqb_wdw
Edit: video here! https://youtu.be/s0l-oqb_wdw
2019
This game grabbed me immediately upon playing the demo, and I hawked sales for six months before I gratefully bought the hard copy for half price on eBay.
My momentum with this game didn’t last long. The missions start repetitive, simple, slow, and boring. They don’t mix up the variety of enemy or mission types at first, and it’s easy to sail through the opening hours of the game with few armor or weapon upgrades/unlocks to show for it. The whole allure of the game to me was the radically deep customization options and mastery of the game’s systems, and it wasn’t giving me enough of that to keep coming back.
As I muscled through, I was rewarded. The mission variety improves, and they eventually get somewhat challenging, at least in parts. A big way to improve the difficulty and rewards is to have the player engage more enemy mechs (Arsenals) instead of lesser enemies. There are whole chapters of the game seemingly committed to just that, which was a nice relief. Additionally, I revisited the armor and weapon development menu ten hours in and found it well worth diving into, as opposed to the other times I had checked it too early in the game.
So many of my qualms got addressed with a little patience. Other things, not so much. The writing is among the worst in any game I’ve played. Both the general story and the individual dialogue lines are all written like a really bad anime. It’s hard to get invested because the story is gibberish, and the characters are almost entirely insufferable. They are horribly overwritten, with people routinely saying things only anime characters would ever say or think they could get away with.
The pacing of the game is dire. Every single mission is bookended by either cutscenes, dialogue sections, or both. Missions are frequently voiced over by more dialogue, and interrupted still more by cutscenes and dialogue reads mid-level. I’m pretty sure some if not all missions are wall to wall dialogue, hardly if ever giving you a chance to appreciate the sound effects and music without talking. It’s as talky as an MGS title, but not nearly as interesting, and the game probably takes as long per mission as it does for each accompanying cutscene and dialogue break. I’m not making this up. I had half a mind to skip it all, but I was invested enough that I did want to find out what the heck is happening in this game. It’s about as considered as what I was writing in middle school, so I was not expecting to be blown away at time of this writing.
Controls are good and fully customizable. Gameplay is good when it’s good. Graphics are a nice lightly cel shaded style but technically developed as well. I think the visual style is VERY cool. Customization is deep and confusing. Maybe impenetrable might be a better word.
The presentation as a whole is good, with tons of HUD elements and gauges to dress everything up, nice effects and particle stuff to catch the eye. It looks good and feels good to fly and zip around and shoot stuff up. The guns suffer from feeling a bit weak, shooting a bit slow, and not locking on from enough distance. I realize these are things that can be balanced and tweaked, but even when optimizing for these things, you still feel sort of impotent sometimes. I thought maybe that would get better as I keep bumping up my kit, but it never truly does.
The story is absolute hogwash, but it’s delivered with such conviction. The stakes get more and more dire as the game goes on, and by the end it’s utter catastrophe. But I never feel threatened or intimidated by any enemy or mission. (Until the final boss, woof.) All the emotion and drama is confined to text messages, dialogue exchanges, and cutscenes.
So far I’ve only spent one short paragraph praising the game. Of note, the presentation is really terrific. PMCs and characters send you chat messages between missions, with a smart and simple interface that even includes ellipses of the next message being “composed” before you click A to show the next one. The main hub area is a hangar bustling with screens, activities, your unlocked weapons, and dominated by your giant Arsenal.
The hangar music, which extends to the menus around the main hub like your armor and weapon customization, is extremely good and catchy. It fits the mood perfectly. The soundtrack is pretty terrific, although it occasionally veers into some screamo and metal territory that doesn’t always work for me. But a lot of it is just great stuff.
I’m really impressed by the graphics. I mentioned them earlier but they strike a nice balance between artistic and technical. Honestly I’ve compared them before to Breath of the Wild. I think there are some aesthetic similarities there, but BOTW stretches its visuals much further by constructing environments that are vastly larger and full of things to do and look at. DXM’s environments are bleak on purpose, but they’re largely barren, devoid of anything to look at. Sometimes you get some city blocks or a bombed out sports stadium; other times you get vast empty desert scapes, big military bases, or subterranean tunnel networks.
The cutscenes are surprisingly dynamic and well directed. They use a lot of flash camera moves and effects. They feel high quality.
I love how they portray the inside of the cockpits. The empty blackness with floating holographic screens is super cool.
It took me multiple years of playing on and off to beat this game. I finally had to look up how to beat the last boss, which was wiping the floor with me before that. I remain a bit flummoxed by this game.
Strip away the story and writing and when you’re just PLAYING it, it feels like one step forward and one step backward everywhere. Controls well and combat seems like it should be fun, but it’s dull a lot of the time with brilliance sprinkled in here and there. My Arsenal never felt incredibly lethal despite seldom meeting a challenging opponent; I would rather have had a more capable mech and tougher enemies than playing a game that always felt like one of the training wheels was still on.
I was looking forward to deep diving the customization, but a lot of it was too much fussing and not enough impact. Plus, aggregating parts and weapons took much longer than I would’ve wanted to hold my interest. I basically just subtly tweaked my mech to keep it well rounded every time I obtained new kit. Oftentimes I’d unlock a part or a weapon and never use it. I just wasn’t hooked like I wanted to be.
That’s what it really boils down to. I wanted to like this game, and I overall did…barely. It just could have and should have been so much better.
…which is EXACTLY why I’m stoked for Armored Core 6. BRING IT.
My momentum with this game didn’t last long. The missions start repetitive, simple, slow, and boring. They don’t mix up the variety of enemy or mission types at first, and it’s easy to sail through the opening hours of the game with few armor or weapon upgrades/unlocks to show for it. The whole allure of the game to me was the radically deep customization options and mastery of the game’s systems, and it wasn’t giving me enough of that to keep coming back.
As I muscled through, I was rewarded. The mission variety improves, and they eventually get somewhat challenging, at least in parts. A big way to improve the difficulty and rewards is to have the player engage more enemy mechs (Arsenals) instead of lesser enemies. There are whole chapters of the game seemingly committed to just that, which was a nice relief. Additionally, I revisited the armor and weapon development menu ten hours in and found it well worth diving into, as opposed to the other times I had checked it too early in the game.
So many of my qualms got addressed with a little patience. Other things, not so much. The writing is among the worst in any game I’ve played. Both the general story and the individual dialogue lines are all written like a really bad anime. It’s hard to get invested because the story is gibberish, and the characters are almost entirely insufferable. They are horribly overwritten, with people routinely saying things only anime characters would ever say or think they could get away with.
The pacing of the game is dire. Every single mission is bookended by either cutscenes, dialogue sections, or both. Missions are frequently voiced over by more dialogue, and interrupted still more by cutscenes and dialogue reads mid-level. I’m pretty sure some if not all missions are wall to wall dialogue, hardly if ever giving you a chance to appreciate the sound effects and music without talking. It’s as talky as an MGS title, but not nearly as interesting, and the game probably takes as long per mission as it does for each accompanying cutscene and dialogue break. I’m not making this up. I had half a mind to skip it all, but I was invested enough that I did want to find out what the heck is happening in this game. It’s about as considered as what I was writing in middle school, so I was not expecting to be blown away at time of this writing.
Controls are good and fully customizable. Gameplay is good when it’s good. Graphics are a nice lightly cel shaded style but technically developed as well. I think the visual style is VERY cool. Customization is deep and confusing. Maybe impenetrable might be a better word.
The presentation as a whole is good, with tons of HUD elements and gauges to dress everything up, nice effects and particle stuff to catch the eye. It looks good and feels good to fly and zip around and shoot stuff up. The guns suffer from feeling a bit weak, shooting a bit slow, and not locking on from enough distance. I realize these are things that can be balanced and tweaked, but even when optimizing for these things, you still feel sort of impotent sometimes. I thought maybe that would get better as I keep bumping up my kit, but it never truly does.
The story is absolute hogwash, but it’s delivered with such conviction. The stakes get more and more dire as the game goes on, and by the end it’s utter catastrophe. But I never feel threatened or intimidated by any enemy or mission. (Until the final boss, woof.) All the emotion and drama is confined to text messages, dialogue exchanges, and cutscenes.
So far I’ve only spent one short paragraph praising the game. Of note, the presentation is really terrific. PMCs and characters send you chat messages between missions, with a smart and simple interface that even includes ellipses of the next message being “composed” before you click A to show the next one. The main hub area is a hangar bustling with screens, activities, your unlocked weapons, and dominated by your giant Arsenal.
The hangar music, which extends to the menus around the main hub like your armor and weapon customization, is extremely good and catchy. It fits the mood perfectly. The soundtrack is pretty terrific, although it occasionally veers into some screamo and metal territory that doesn’t always work for me. But a lot of it is just great stuff.
I’m really impressed by the graphics. I mentioned them earlier but they strike a nice balance between artistic and technical. Honestly I’ve compared them before to Breath of the Wild. I think there are some aesthetic similarities there, but BOTW stretches its visuals much further by constructing environments that are vastly larger and full of things to do and look at. DXM’s environments are bleak on purpose, but they’re largely barren, devoid of anything to look at. Sometimes you get some city blocks or a bombed out sports stadium; other times you get vast empty desert scapes, big military bases, or subterranean tunnel networks.
The cutscenes are surprisingly dynamic and well directed. They use a lot of flash camera moves and effects. They feel high quality.
I love how they portray the inside of the cockpits. The empty blackness with floating holographic screens is super cool.
It took me multiple years of playing on and off to beat this game. I finally had to look up how to beat the last boss, which was wiping the floor with me before that. I remain a bit flummoxed by this game.
Strip away the story and writing and when you’re just PLAYING it, it feels like one step forward and one step backward everywhere. Controls well and combat seems like it should be fun, but it’s dull a lot of the time with brilliance sprinkled in here and there. My Arsenal never felt incredibly lethal despite seldom meeting a challenging opponent; I would rather have had a more capable mech and tougher enemies than playing a game that always felt like one of the training wheels was still on.
I was looking forward to deep diving the customization, but a lot of it was too much fussing and not enough impact. Plus, aggregating parts and weapons took much longer than I would’ve wanted to hold my interest. I basically just subtly tweaked my mech to keep it well rounded every time I obtained new kit. Oftentimes I’d unlock a part or a weapon and never use it. I just wasn’t hooked like I wanted to be.
That’s what it really boils down to. I wanted to like this game, and I overall did…barely. It just could have and should have been so much better.
…which is EXACTLY why I’m stoked for Armored Core 6. BRING IT.
2008
A lot of fun when it’s working, but it feels like the weak link here is me.
If I were a younger man (read: a less busy man), this game has all the hallmarks of something I would sink my teeth into. I can easily picture myself wringing the life out of this game with time trials and achievement hunting until I’ve mastered every level.
As it stands right now, it took me nearly two months just to beat the story, and my backlog cries out for other games to play, so for the time being, I’ll be retiring this one. But I had a great time when I wasn’t banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what to do. And when I say the Xbox One X Enhanced treatment—4K, HDR, and optimization, in this case—sings, I mean SINGS. Mirror’s Edge is something like 15 years old I believe, and just retooling the existing game and assets has a stunning effect all these years on. It also helps that the environment/level design and art style are superb and distinctive.
I guess it’s between a 7 and an 8 for me, and if I spent more time on perfecting it, I’d probably lean 8. The story is confusing and mostly just an excuse to do parkour, but the animated cutscenes are super cool and seem like relics of a bygone era when games could be 8 hours long and not overstuffed with content.
Video review here: Cracking Mirror's Edge - Review/Analysis
https://youtu.be/P3EnkUV20uo
If I were a younger man (read: a less busy man), this game has all the hallmarks of something I would sink my teeth into. I can easily picture myself wringing the life out of this game with time trials and achievement hunting until I’ve mastered every level.
As it stands right now, it took me nearly two months just to beat the story, and my backlog cries out for other games to play, so for the time being, I’ll be retiring this one. But I had a great time when I wasn’t banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what to do. And when I say the Xbox One X Enhanced treatment—4K, HDR, and optimization, in this case—sings, I mean SINGS. Mirror’s Edge is something like 15 years old I believe, and just retooling the existing game and assets has a stunning effect all these years on. It also helps that the environment/level design and art style are superb and distinctive.
I guess it’s between a 7 and an 8 for me, and if I spent more time on perfecting it, I’d probably lean 8. The story is confusing and mostly just an excuse to do parkour, but the animated cutscenes are super cool and seem like relics of a bygone era when games could be 8 hours long and not overstuffed with content.
Video review here: Cracking Mirror's Edge - Review/Analysis
https://youtu.be/P3EnkUV20uo
2010
Decent game—type of thing that takes two steps forward and one step back constantly. Will explain more in a video, but glad I replayed it, although the sluggish aiming and performance hiccups were disappointing.
2017
Pretty, fun little puzzler. Ended up being a little trial and error at first. I mostly let my non-gamer wife drive while I observed and occasionally offered suggestions. I wanted her to feel like I wasn’t backseat driving. We felt like we didn’t always know the solution to a puzzle before we found it, but as it went on, we got more synced with how the game works and progressively felt like we were solving puzzles because we figured them out and not because we tinkered enough.
The puzzles also get trickier as they go on, and we consulted walkthroughs twice, both very briefly. Only after exhausting every thing we could think of 😂
For reasons of simplifying the game experience and decoupling the act of gaming with making videos (for my sanity), I elected not to record this one and just play it.
I liked it and would highly recommend it, but a video would be short and mostly bereft of any deep commentary other than: art pretty! Puzzles clever! Which, they are 😄 If you like some brain benders and gorgeous, handcrafted art, this one’s an easy sell.
The puzzles also get trickier as they go on, and we consulted walkthroughs twice, both very briefly. Only after exhausting every thing we could think of 😂
For reasons of simplifying the game experience and decoupling the act of gaming with making videos (for my sanity), I elected not to record this one and just play it.
I liked it and would highly recommend it, but a video would be short and mostly bereft of any deep commentary other than: art pretty! Puzzles clever! Which, they are 😄 If you like some brain benders and gorgeous, handcrafted art, this one’s an easy sell.
Some loosely assembled notes I took throughout:
New graphics look great. HDR is obvious to me. Moonlight on gun. Flames on the cargo ship. Lens effects from sinking ship water spray, gas mask distortion, grime on lens walking through burning building with Russian loyalists.
Okay so the graphic update is surprisingly good. And the gameplay is still tight as ever. I think something I’m appreciating a lot is how they’re constantly putting you in cool situations. Take a cargo ship. Play as the deposed president when he gets executed. Sneak around a house with NVGs after the power is out. Shoot an enemy who’s hiding behind a door and being a nuisance. It’s constant little tweaks on the formula to keep it interesting.
The sound definitely got a makeover too. The AC-130 when it supports you at the end of Hunted. Damn.
One frustrating thing about the game design is the respawning enemies. You sometimes don’t quite know how to advance. Your allies wait for you to trigger certain events or trip wires before they’ll follow you or the next scripted thing will happen, meanwhile enemies swarm you and kill you from all directions. Wrote this note on the Hamburg insertion mission with the helo airstrike building scenario. Kind of a pain. Your dudes don’t always follow you around to help you.
It goes without saying but the gunplay is just so satisfying. I love how many different permutations there are of enemies taking hits and dying or falling or not dying and staggering and getting back up or crawling. This is one of my all-time favorite things about this game. It makes your guns feel powerful, but it also makes it feel like there’s more going on than “decrease enemy HP until arbitrary number when he dies.”
I think they re-recorded all the voiceover? Some of the lines seem wrong to me.
The convoy just walked past me on All Ghillied Up and my heart stopped. Still such an effective moment. Doesn’t seem to matter how many times I see it.
Griggs? Griggs bails you out from Azerbaijan?? How? Why? Why isn’t he in the Middle East? Dead? Why is a random team of Marines rescuing a British SAS unit half a continent away?
Damnnnn. The casualty projections of the nuke launch. I think about that scene a lot. It’s mortifying.
I completely forgot about the truck escape and the bridge showdown! Completely forgot!
One gameplay thing that just occurred to me: accuracy while moving. It’s not really there, which forces you to play stop-start-stop-start. You could pitch it as being realistic, but it’s not even totally realistic. You can shoot somewhat well while moving, especially if you’re trained. It compounds some of the issues I have laid out earlier in my notes. Endless respawning enemies until you cross a tripline, and dudes that swarm you and get you pinned. Make a move, you die. Try to press, your allies don’t always follow. So you stay put trying to clear out enemies from cover before you advance, but then more enemies (might) come out.
Worse, you’re not always sure when enemies are endless and when they’re finite. Different spots in the campaign seem to employ both tricks, so while dynamic and exciting, it’s also frustrating.
Mission briefs are, true to form, a blitz. It’s easy to zone out for five seconds during a brief and COMPLETELY miss where you’re going or what you’re doing. It gets worse once Griggs joins the party and just starts bullshitting every time he talks lol. I’ve played this game a dozen times over and still was like, “Wait, which country are we in now?”
Overall, my impressions of this game have, if anything, gotten better with age. The new facelift doesn’t hurt, either. The gunplay is largely taut and satisfying, excepting some of the aforementioned nitpicks. The campaign is a master stroke; short, sweet, to the point. Relentlessly paced; constantly juggling new ideas; putting you in positions you’ve never been before, at least when it was new; throwing you tons of bombastic events.
All Ghillied Up is still an absolute gem, and holy smokes the ending. I don’t know how I forgot about the ending scene. It must’ve rocked my ever-loving world as a kid. What’s funny is, MW2 does a pretty safe retread of a similar idea to MW1, and it was 2 whose ending I never forgot. Not that it’s any more memorable on the whole!
Oh and editor’s note? That HDR I kept praising wasn’t even shipped with the Remaster. It was my Xbox Series X doing its auto HDR thing. Hot damn, look at Microsoft go.
New graphics look great. HDR is obvious to me. Moonlight on gun. Flames on the cargo ship. Lens effects from sinking ship water spray, gas mask distortion, grime on lens walking through burning building with Russian loyalists.
Okay so the graphic update is surprisingly good. And the gameplay is still tight as ever. I think something I’m appreciating a lot is how they’re constantly putting you in cool situations. Take a cargo ship. Play as the deposed president when he gets executed. Sneak around a house with NVGs after the power is out. Shoot an enemy who’s hiding behind a door and being a nuisance. It’s constant little tweaks on the formula to keep it interesting.
The sound definitely got a makeover too. The AC-130 when it supports you at the end of Hunted. Damn.
One frustrating thing about the game design is the respawning enemies. You sometimes don’t quite know how to advance. Your allies wait for you to trigger certain events or trip wires before they’ll follow you or the next scripted thing will happen, meanwhile enemies swarm you and kill you from all directions. Wrote this note on the Hamburg insertion mission with the helo airstrike building scenario. Kind of a pain. Your dudes don’t always follow you around to help you.
It goes without saying but the gunplay is just so satisfying. I love how many different permutations there are of enemies taking hits and dying or falling or not dying and staggering and getting back up or crawling. This is one of my all-time favorite things about this game. It makes your guns feel powerful, but it also makes it feel like there’s more going on than “decrease enemy HP until arbitrary number when he dies.”
I think they re-recorded all the voiceover? Some of the lines seem wrong to me.
The convoy just walked past me on All Ghillied Up and my heart stopped. Still such an effective moment. Doesn’t seem to matter how many times I see it.
Griggs? Griggs bails you out from Azerbaijan?? How? Why? Why isn’t he in the Middle East? Dead? Why is a random team of Marines rescuing a British SAS unit half a continent away?
Damnnnn. The casualty projections of the nuke launch. I think about that scene a lot. It’s mortifying.
I completely forgot about the truck escape and the bridge showdown! Completely forgot!
One gameplay thing that just occurred to me: accuracy while moving. It’s not really there, which forces you to play stop-start-stop-start. You could pitch it as being realistic, but it’s not even totally realistic. You can shoot somewhat well while moving, especially if you’re trained. It compounds some of the issues I have laid out earlier in my notes. Endless respawning enemies until you cross a tripline, and dudes that swarm you and get you pinned. Make a move, you die. Try to press, your allies don’t always follow. So you stay put trying to clear out enemies from cover before you advance, but then more enemies (might) come out.
Worse, you’re not always sure when enemies are endless and when they’re finite. Different spots in the campaign seem to employ both tricks, so while dynamic and exciting, it’s also frustrating.
Mission briefs are, true to form, a blitz. It’s easy to zone out for five seconds during a brief and COMPLETELY miss where you’re going or what you’re doing. It gets worse once Griggs joins the party and just starts bullshitting every time he talks lol. I’ve played this game a dozen times over and still was like, “Wait, which country are we in now?”
Overall, my impressions of this game have, if anything, gotten better with age. The new facelift doesn’t hurt, either. The gunplay is largely taut and satisfying, excepting some of the aforementioned nitpicks. The campaign is a master stroke; short, sweet, to the point. Relentlessly paced; constantly juggling new ideas; putting you in positions you’ve never been before, at least when it was new; throwing you tons of bombastic events.
All Ghillied Up is still an absolute gem, and holy smokes the ending. I don’t know how I forgot about the ending scene. It must’ve rocked my ever-loving world as a kid. What’s funny is, MW2 does a pretty safe retread of a similar idea to MW1, and it was 2 whose ending I never forgot. Not that it’s any more memorable on the whole!
Oh and editor’s note? That HDR I kept praising wasn’t even shipped with the Remaster. It was my Xbox Series X doing its auto HDR thing. Hot damn, look at Microsoft go.
2007
Played on PS3 as part of God of War Saga. Loosely assembled notes, video to follow eventually.
I gotta chuckle at how fast the story set up is. “How do we knock Kratos down from his god status and create a conflict and challenge for the player?”
“I don’t know I guess have him piss off the other gods by being good at war.”
“Okay word that’ll do.” And that’s ALL they say hahaha.
Well the combat certainly feels visceral. The rumble feedback is tremendous. And the controls/combos came back to me pretty much instantly.
The gameplay graphics looks surprisingly good. The cutscene graphics still look clunky af.
Writing this note in Rhodes still, but running through corridors and hearing distant battles and muted noises is a great touch.
And there’s the way they reset all your abilities and progress! Lol!
The outside moving by as you watch from inside the Colossus is fantastic.
Dang, Gaia is the narrator and she’s rescuing me from death! This is so hardcore!!
I killed Prometheus to put him out of his misery. I get that this is the God of War shtick but it just makes me uncomfortable as the player. The solution to every problem Kratos has is killing something. Neither I the player nor Kratos the character had anything against Prometheus. Killing him to put him out of his misery is just a bummer. Could this be a meta commentary on how in video games, the answer to any problem is always violence? That seems a little too clever for Santa Monica, no offense. I don’t think high brow intellectualism is what they’re going for here. It’s a little passé to call the God of War games childish, but.
Siren fight hard. But cool floor reflections. And the scene running across the chain to get to the island of fate. Dope. Gotta include that shot in the video.
Wow cyclops battles were a great addition. Tough but fun. At time of writing, the enemies feel 1) more varied and 2) less of a repetitive slog to kill over and over again. So hats off for that.
The chain swing puzzle was cool. Felt like Spider-Man haha. The enemies you kill with the shields by slicing their heads off is a great finisher. Fighting the skeletons is oddly satisfying. The spiral staircase climb up with the top down camera was cool.
I continue to be impressed by the environment design. I’m fighting Perseus in this cool water filled chamber. Some of the areas before this were also quite cool. Nice mirrored floor on one.
Kratos’ various walk animations look dumb as shit. I got to the palace of the fates, the camera cuts to this dope angle, and I try to walk up all ceremonious like. And Kratos just glides like a moron.
I think I finally put my finger on something that bugs me about GoW games. The enemy always staggers you from any type of damage, but plenty of enemies have super armor.
I realized this late into the game, so this hypothesis may not totally check out. But it closes in on what bugs me sometimes. Kratos is supposed to be this fearsome, deadly bad ass. But more often than not, I don’t feel that strong playing as him. Enemies are still damage sponges in II, and it’s really frustrating when you are mercilessly wailing on a crowd of bad guys and one of them gets a hit in on you after swallowing a barrage of chain blade to the face. His hit staggers you, sets you up for follow up hits, and you can’t even finish the combo you were trying to stitch together.
Some might reply with a “get güd” but at times like this, it seems the game wants you to block or dodge. So you mix in attacks, blocks/counters, and dodges, and you just never find a rhythm. It’s hard, but I think the better word for it is annoying.
Puzzle design gets annoying too. There were two that had me beside myself. If the developers’ goal was to make me as angry as Kratos always is, they succeeded.
Have to ding the game for the ice puzzle room. I can climb on that wall? Give me a break. How was I supposed to know?
One of my hottest ever video game takes is probably that I don’t love GoW II. I was expecting this one to click with me after the first did not. But this didn’t either. Oddly, the standout aspect of both games that I thoroughly enjoyed with few gripes is the stories. I don’t always like how Kratos is portrayed and how violence is quite literally the answer to all of his problems, but in spite of that, I love the god/mortal/titan drama, and the team uses Greek mythology for a seemingly endless train of cool ideas, new characters, and surprising story beats.
The gameplay isn’t BAD—I don’t want anyone to think that I think the games are bad. They play well. They feel pretty good, combat gripes notwithstanding. This one is an unmitigated refinement of the first in a lot of ways—stripping out dumb stuff, adding in new abilities, enemies, dynamics, attacks, etc. I think this one is better to play, the environments are WAY better to look at and more varied, and the enemies are more varied and fighting them feels less repetitive. So they did make a lot of good progress from I to II.
But my overall impression of the game is still one of mixed enjoyment and irritation. Having figured out how to best the game now, I’d probably enjoy it more if I ever went back to it. But I’m not sure I’ll ever want to. God of War so far has been less enjoyable than everyone would have you believe.
Maybe III will be the ticket!!
I gotta chuckle at how fast the story set up is. “How do we knock Kratos down from his god status and create a conflict and challenge for the player?”
“I don’t know I guess have him piss off the other gods by being good at war.”
“Okay word that’ll do.” And that’s ALL they say hahaha.
Well the combat certainly feels visceral. The rumble feedback is tremendous. And the controls/combos came back to me pretty much instantly.
The gameplay graphics looks surprisingly good. The cutscene graphics still look clunky af.
Writing this note in Rhodes still, but running through corridors and hearing distant battles and muted noises is a great touch.
And there’s the way they reset all your abilities and progress! Lol!
The outside moving by as you watch from inside the Colossus is fantastic.
Dang, Gaia is the narrator and she’s rescuing me from death! This is so hardcore!!
I killed Prometheus to put him out of his misery. I get that this is the God of War shtick but it just makes me uncomfortable as the player. The solution to every problem Kratos has is killing something. Neither I the player nor Kratos the character had anything against Prometheus. Killing him to put him out of his misery is just a bummer. Could this be a meta commentary on how in video games, the answer to any problem is always violence? That seems a little too clever for Santa Monica, no offense. I don’t think high brow intellectualism is what they’re going for here. It’s a little passé to call the God of War games childish, but.
Siren fight hard. But cool floor reflections. And the scene running across the chain to get to the island of fate. Dope. Gotta include that shot in the video.
Wow cyclops battles were a great addition. Tough but fun. At time of writing, the enemies feel 1) more varied and 2) less of a repetitive slog to kill over and over again. So hats off for that.
The chain swing puzzle was cool. Felt like Spider-Man haha. The enemies you kill with the shields by slicing their heads off is a great finisher. Fighting the skeletons is oddly satisfying. The spiral staircase climb up with the top down camera was cool.
I continue to be impressed by the environment design. I’m fighting Perseus in this cool water filled chamber. Some of the areas before this were also quite cool. Nice mirrored floor on one.
Kratos’ various walk animations look dumb as shit. I got to the palace of the fates, the camera cuts to this dope angle, and I try to walk up all ceremonious like. And Kratos just glides like a moron.
I think I finally put my finger on something that bugs me about GoW games. The enemy always staggers you from any type of damage, but plenty of enemies have super armor.
I realized this late into the game, so this hypothesis may not totally check out. But it closes in on what bugs me sometimes. Kratos is supposed to be this fearsome, deadly bad ass. But more often than not, I don’t feel that strong playing as him. Enemies are still damage sponges in II, and it’s really frustrating when you are mercilessly wailing on a crowd of bad guys and one of them gets a hit in on you after swallowing a barrage of chain blade to the face. His hit staggers you, sets you up for follow up hits, and you can’t even finish the combo you were trying to stitch together.
Some might reply with a “get güd” but at times like this, it seems the game wants you to block or dodge. So you mix in attacks, blocks/counters, and dodges, and you just never find a rhythm. It’s hard, but I think the better word for it is annoying.
Puzzle design gets annoying too. There were two that had me beside myself. If the developers’ goal was to make me as angry as Kratos always is, they succeeded.
Have to ding the game for the ice puzzle room. I can climb on that wall? Give me a break. How was I supposed to know?
One of my hottest ever video game takes is probably that I don’t love GoW II. I was expecting this one to click with me after the first did not. But this didn’t either. Oddly, the standout aspect of both games that I thoroughly enjoyed with few gripes is the stories. I don’t always like how Kratos is portrayed and how violence is quite literally the answer to all of his problems, but in spite of that, I love the god/mortal/titan drama, and the team uses Greek mythology for a seemingly endless train of cool ideas, new characters, and surprising story beats.
The gameplay isn’t BAD—I don’t want anyone to think that I think the games are bad. They play well. They feel pretty good, combat gripes notwithstanding. This one is an unmitigated refinement of the first in a lot of ways—stripping out dumb stuff, adding in new abilities, enemies, dynamics, attacks, etc. I think this one is better to play, the environments are WAY better to look at and more varied, and the enemies are more varied and fighting them feels less repetitive. So they did make a lot of good progress from I to II.
But my overall impression of the game is still one of mixed enjoyment and irritation. Having figured out how to best the game now, I’d probably enjoy it more if I ever went back to it. But I’m not sure I’ll ever want to. God of War so far has been less enjoyable than everyone would have you believe.
Maybe III will be the ticket!!
2012
Review largely assembled from my notes. Video review coming, someday.
All right, it’s on. Been thinking to play this for years, and got it for free on XBL before it got delisted from the marketplace.
I’m enjoying it so far, and already excited to see how they improve in subsequent entries. This one is inspired. So many fun details scattered about like speed traps, discount signs to smash, and barns to find. The different bonuses and awards you can stack up by driving stylishly are nifty.
The game world is gorgeous, and from what I can tell, it’s not obnoxiously big. Trying to keep stuff a little intimate, for an open world driver (not a bad thing). I’m playing on Series X and 4K, so it looks fantastic. It loads so fast that I can’t bask in the pretty pictures or read any of the text.
So far, the driving is fun. I might have to crank up the difficulty. I ended up waffling between Medium and Hard difficulty depending on the race. I definitely skewed more Medium as I got towards the end. The physics are definitely not simulation, and I appreciate it. Handling is more forgiving, and it allows you to do some goofy stuff and recover instead of punish you.
I’m DIGGING the music. Great selection. Teleporting me straight back to my senior year in high school 😂
The whole conceit of the festival is realized really well, and setting it in Colorado fits perfectly. Can’t wait to see what other stuff they throw at me. They fleshed out so much detail. The festival setting itself, the banners and barricades, the posters with bands performing, the outposts and events marked with colored smoke, the colored wristband on your avatar in cockpit view, the rivals at each level that you have to face-off with, the radio stations constantly bantering about festival hijinks, the special events (Mustang vs. Mustang is a particularly memorable one), the crowds cheering you on, the popularity meter, everything reinforces the setting and central conceit. The game repeatedly points you back to what you are doing and why you’re here, which in turn makes everything you do feel purposeful.
The HUD/interface gets a little crowded and overwhelming at times, but I have a feeling I’m going to get used to it and get better at deciphering what flashes up and what I can disregard. I know I can tweak some of that too; so maybe I will.
I have a screenshot bone to pick. There are two resolution options for saving screens: sub 1 megapixel, and something like 8 or 9 megapixels. You can’t save them in the high res anymore, since the servers are shut down. The low res is pretty blurry on the 4K TV. I could screenshot the 4K photo mode preview in-game with the system screenshot, but you can’t take down all the HUD elements telling you what buttons do what in screenshot mode. So that ruins that. 😑
The auto HDR is exceptional. The One X Enhanced treatment too. Game is near flawless looking ten years later. Every once in a while, there’s a bit of a hiccup with shadows or reflections, but the few things I noticed came and went in the blink of an eye. And I don’t know what blemishes were endemic to the original 360 version as opposed to what gremlins may have arisen when updating it and playing it on new hardware and auto HDR.
Part of what I’m about to say could tip my hand that I’m incredibly behind on the cutting edge of gaming as a whole, and there have been four more Horizon titles made on progressively more powerful hardware, but I’d believe you if you told me Horizon came out two or three years ago. It looks that good.
Absolutely love this game. So much to do and see. So many hidden places just waiting to be discovered, nothing there to reward you except the view and the feeling of discovery. Driving around and just exploring is its own reward, and their rendition of Colorado is breathtaking.
Final impressions of the game as I’m reflecting on it. There’s more I could do, but I definitely gutted the majority of it. I left a few main events undone, along with more that I didn’t take 1st place, but I’m okay with that. I did enough to beat the game, finished with a boatload of credits that I could go back to someday to buy more cars, but not right now.
All right, it’s on. Been thinking to play this for years, and got it for free on XBL before it got delisted from the marketplace.
I’m enjoying it so far, and already excited to see how they improve in subsequent entries. This one is inspired. So many fun details scattered about like speed traps, discount signs to smash, and barns to find. The different bonuses and awards you can stack up by driving stylishly are nifty.
The game world is gorgeous, and from what I can tell, it’s not obnoxiously big. Trying to keep stuff a little intimate, for an open world driver (not a bad thing). I’m playing on Series X and 4K, so it looks fantastic. It loads so fast that I can’t bask in the pretty pictures or read any of the text.
So far, the driving is fun. I might have to crank up the difficulty. I ended up waffling between Medium and Hard difficulty depending on the race. I definitely skewed more Medium as I got towards the end. The physics are definitely not simulation, and I appreciate it. Handling is more forgiving, and it allows you to do some goofy stuff and recover instead of punish you.
I’m DIGGING the music. Great selection. Teleporting me straight back to my senior year in high school 😂
The whole conceit of the festival is realized really well, and setting it in Colorado fits perfectly. Can’t wait to see what other stuff they throw at me. They fleshed out so much detail. The festival setting itself, the banners and barricades, the posters with bands performing, the outposts and events marked with colored smoke, the colored wristband on your avatar in cockpit view, the rivals at each level that you have to face-off with, the radio stations constantly bantering about festival hijinks, the special events (Mustang vs. Mustang is a particularly memorable one), the crowds cheering you on, the popularity meter, everything reinforces the setting and central conceit. The game repeatedly points you back to what you are doing and why you’re here, which in turn makes everything you do feel purposeful.
The HUD/interface gets a little crowded and overwhelming at times, but I have a feeling I’m going to get used to it and get better at deciphering what flashes up and what I can disregard. I know I can tweak some of that too; so maybe I will.
I have a screenshot bone to pick. There are two resolution options for saving screens: sub 1 megapixel, and something like 8 or 9 megapixels. You can’t save them in the high res anymore, since the servers are shut down. The low res is pretty blurry on the 4K TV. I could screenshot the 4K photo mode preview in-game with the system screenshot, but you can’t take down all the HUD elements telling you what buttons do what in screenshot mode. So that ruins that. 😑
The auto HDR is exceptional. The One X Enhanced treatment too. Game is near flawless looking ten years later. Every once in a while, there’s a bit of a hiccup with shadows or reflections, but the few things I noticed came and went in the blink of an eye. And I don’t know what blemishes were endemic to the original 360 version as opposed to what gremlins may have arisen when updating it and playing it on new hardware and auto HDR.
Part of what I’m about to say could tip my hand that I’m incredibly behind on the cutting edge of gaming as a whole, and there have been four more Horizon titles made on progressively more powerful hardware, but I’d believe you if you told me Horizon came out two or three years ago. It looks that good.
Absolutely love this game. So much to do and see. So many hidden places just waiting to be discovered, nothing there to reward you except the view and the feeling of discovery. Driving around and just exploring is its own reward, and their rendition of Colorado is breathtaking.
Final impressions of the game as I’m reflecting on it. There’s more I could do, but I definitely gutted the majority of it. I left a few main events undone, along with more that I didn’t take 1st place, but I’m okay with that. I did enough to beat the game, finished with a boatload of credits that I could go back to someday to buy more cars, but not right now.
2001
Beat on 360 as part of HD Collection. More thoughts and video review forthcoming.
HIGH SPEED ROBOT ACTION
Omg that extended anime intro cinematic
O M G
The menu and font and layout and everything is identical to MGS haha
Shinkawa!! Kojima!! The art and graphics styles are unmistakable. This absolutely came from their studio.
I haven’t even started the game yet, and I can already tell this game is the perfect adaptation of a mecha anime which does not exist 😂
Opening cutscene: boy finds mech! You don’t say 😂
I don’t really know who this kid is or care about what’s happening to him, but at least it looks like he’s about to suit up and kick some ass.
The sparks. The metal panels and reflections. The subtitle text. Everything is ripped right out of MGS!!
First convo after first battle and the piano music is a little heavy handed lol. Also is it a mecha anime pre requisite to be a bratty teen boy pilot??
“Then a lot more people will die!” Music stops. Pretty effective, Kojima.
Lol Kojima. Just cutscene to gameplay to dialogue scene. This is just standing in for Codec. When am I supposed to pull up the start menu to turn off subtitles lol.
Well, so far so good. That fight with the lady mech was sweet. There was so much flair and pizzazz going on. Good capture of the best of the genre in game form.
This writing is hilarious. So over the top and melodramatic. Right in line with Gundam, oh my word.
The choice to let you fly around during what is essentially the area change loading screen is an interesting touch.
Hahaha “your question does not compute? Why not destroy it?” Sad piano music. After destroying first boss. So funny.
Area of the church in game is cool looking.
Why am I flying around this arena and shooting blocks? Why do I have to aim and shoot with the same thumb? Why do I have to listen to my AI person read her dumb line EVERY TIME
I’m at the EPS section of the game and just totally directionless. “I think I know where I saw [an unused and undamaged orbital frame]!” Okay…where? Why is the game not telling me?
A minute ago, I used a guide to find where to go. When I got to the right zone, with no direction other than the internet walkthrough, I was treated to a story cutscene. Lesson learned: if I’m stuck and I process-of-elimination go to every zone, eventually it will trigger a cutscene showing me I’m in the right spot. The next time I was directionless, I started spamming all the different zones waiting for the signal. No cutscenes. Wtf? Where do they want me to go?
I had to look it up and even then it was hard to figure out. Part of the issue I’m running into is the two week gap between sessions 1 and 2. I forgot stuff that was supposed to be fresh in mind. I am supposed to track down an abandoned enemy mech, and I forgot we were treated to shots of the two crashed mechs in the dirt early on. But also, those boys look pretty fried. I’m surprised I was supposed to figure that out.
On the other hand, the fact that I’m annoyed at the game for not holding my hand more might be more of an indictment of me than the game. I don’t get mad when Metroid games don’t hold my hand. I guess I was expecting this one to be a bit more straightforward. Although to be fair, my in-game girlfriend literally says “I think I know where one is!” And then doesn’t finish the thought 🙄
The fact the towns get destroyed and burn and stay that way and negatively affect your rescue scores is kind of eerie and lends a surprisingly strong weight to the action of the story.
I’m trying to examine the area switching mechanic more critically. It’s not always clear when you need to switch or where to go next. And sometimes it seems so perfunctory to just click a few buttons to change areas when the game could easily just warp you to the next place. I don’t know, it’s just weird. Hubs and areas have been in games for ages, but this one feels contrived. Maybe it was technical limitations. The areas aren’t very large but they’re blacked out with fog like an RTS, and there are little transition cutscenes between the sub areas.
I forget if I said this already but, the game does a pretty good job at making you feel/look cool. The way the camera and mecha tilt and and engage at angles feels dynamic and exciting. Without making the player do anything, it creates that epic mech combat sensation from the best anime. So hats off to them for that.
Man this cutscene after killing Tyrant is brutal 😂 so many people saying “What?!” Leo is such an absolute brat. I would never talk to anyone like this, let alone as a 15 year old. I’d be way too intimidated, and also it’s really hard to be a dick to strangers.
What people be saying about cramming all the boss battles in the end is true. And boy if this wasn’t a Kojima game at the beginning, it is at the end. Good grief. The soliloquizing! The cutscenes! The text! This cutscene of the girl burning up in Jupiter. Wtf. It’s awful. Awful 😂
Okay bottom line, it’s an all right game. Interesting proof of concept. Simultaneously too much Kojima and also not enough. It either needs to go whole hog into his wacky, cinematic style, or it needs to double down on being a blitzkrieg action game. It’s got its feet in both waters but neither one really gets going. The game is rather short, but the way the game world is structured kind of drags it out. Pause for cinematic, pause for dialogue, pause for entering a tunnel, pause for changing areas, pause progress while trying to find out where to go next.
Controls are decent but a little archaic. Combat is largely good, with some quibbles. It’s kind of simplistic, but it feels solid and looks terrific. The art design is stupendous, and the HD treatment is frankly shocking. It’s three generations old remastered on two generations old tech, but it’s quite impressive. Looking forward to 2, which I understand is a drastic improvement.
HIGH SPEED ROBOT ACTION
Omg that extended anime intro cinematic
O M G
The menu and font and layout and everything is identical to MGS haha
Shinkawa!! Kojima!! The art and graphics styles are unmistakable. This absolutely came from their studio.
I haven’t even started the game yet, and I can already tell this game is the perfect adaptation of a mecha anime which does not exist 😂
Opening cutscene: boy finds mech! You don’t say 😂
I don’t really know who this kid is or care about what’s happening to him, but at least it looks like he’s about to suit up and kick some ass.
The sparks. The metal panels and reflections. The subtitle text. Everything is ripped right out of MGS!!
First convo after first battle and the piano music is a little heavy handed lol. Also is it a mecha anime pre requisite to be a bratty teen boy pilot??
“Then a lot more people will die!” Music stops. Pretty effective, Kojima.
Lol Kojima. Just cutscene to gameplay to dialogue scene. This is just standing in for Codec. When am I supposed to pull up the start menu to turn off subtitles lol.
Well, so far so good. That fight with the lady mech was sweet. There was so much flair and pizzazz going on. Good capture of the best of the genre in game form.
This writing is hilarious. So over the top and melodramatic. Right in line with Gundam, oh my word.
The choice to let you fly around during what is essentially the area change loading screen is an interesting touch.
Hahaha “your question does not compute? Why not destroy it?” Sad piano music. After destroying first boss. So funny.
Area of the church in game is cool looking.
Why am I flying around this arena and shooting blocks? Why do I have to aim and shoot with the same thumb? Why do I have to listen to my AI person read her dumb line EVERY TIME
I’m at the EPS section of the game and just totally directionless. “I think I know where I saw [an unused and undamaged orbital frame]!” Okay…where? Why is the game not telling me?
A minute ago, I used a guide to find where to go. When I got to the right zone, with no direction other than the internet walkthrough, I was treated to a story cutscene. Lesson learned: if I’m stuck and I process-of-elimination go to every zone, eventually it will trigger a cutscene showing me I’m in the right spot. The next time I was directionless, I started spamming all the different zones waiting for the signal. No cutscenes. Wtf? Where do they want me to go?
I had to look it up and even then it was hard to figure out. Part of the issue I’m running into is the two week gap between sessions 1 and 2. I forgot stuff that was supposed to be fresh in mind. I am supposed to track down an abandoned enemy mech, and I forgot we were treated to shots of the two crashed mechs in the dirt early on. But also, those boys look pretty fried. I’m surprised I was supposed to figure that out.
On the other hand, the fact that I’m annoyed at the game for not holding my hand more might be more of an indictment of me than the game. I don’t get mad when Metroid games don’t hold my hand. I guess I was expecting this one to be a bit more straightforward. Although to be fair, my in-game girlfriend literally says “I think I know where one is!” And then doesn’t finish the thought 🙄
The fact the towns get destroyed and burn and stay that way and negatively affect your rescue scores is kind of eerie and lends a surprisingly strong weight to the action of the story.
I’m trying to examine the area switching mechanic more critically. It’s not always clear when you need to switch or where to go next. And sometimes it seems so perfunctory to just click a few buttons to change areas when the game could easily just warp you to the next place. I don’t know, it’s just weird. Hubs and areas have been in games for ages, but this one feels contrived. Maybe it was technical limitations. The areas aren’t very large but they’re blacked out with fog like an RTS, and there are little transition cutscenes between the sub areas.
I forget if I said this already but, the game does a pretty good job at making you feel/look cool. The way the camera and mecha tilt and and engage at angles feels dynamic and exciting. Without making the player do anything, it creates that epic mech combat sensation from the best anime. So hats off to them for that.
Man this cutscene after killing Tyrant is brutal 😂 so many people saying “What?!” Leo is such an absolute brat. I would never talk to anyone like this, let alone as a 15 year old. I’d be way too intimidated, and also it’s really hard to be a dick to strangers.
What people be saying about cramming all the boss battles in the end is true. And boy if this wasn’t a Kojima game at the beginning, it is at the end. Good grief. The soliloquizing! The cutscenes! The text! This cutscene of the girl burning up in Jupiter. Wtf. It’s awful. Awful 😂
Okay bottom line, it’s an all right game. Interesting proof of concept. Simultaneously too much Kojima and also not enough. It either needs to go whole hog into his wacky, cinematic style, or it needs to double down on being a blitzkrieg action game. It’s got its feet in both waters but neither one really gets going. The game is rather short, but the way the game world is structured kind of drags it out. Pause for cinematic, pause for dialogue, pause for entering a tunnel, pause for changing areas, pause progress while trying to find out where to go next.
Controls are decent but a little archaic. Combat is largely good, with some quibbles. It’s kind of simplistic, but it feels solid and looks terrific. The art design is stupendous, and the HD treatment is frankly shocking. It’s three generations old remastered on two generations old tech, but it’s quite impressive. Looking forward to 2, which I understand is a drastic improvement.
I had a blast with this game. I had played a tiny bit of it on Gamecube all those years ago, but I never owned it. It has loomed over me as one of the biggest omissions from my game history, so I was stoked to finally get to play it.
It really holds up remarkably well, and the PS3 remaster looks presentable today. I took a lot of notes and will, as is my new custom, make a YouTube review soon. Can't believe it's finally over! I've got Warrior Within, Two Thrones, Prince of Persia, and The Forgotten Sands as well. So I've got my work cut out for me!
It really holds up remarkably well, and the PS3 remaster looks presentable today. I took a lot of notes and will, as is my new custom, make a YouTube review soon. Can't believe it's finally over! I've got Warrior Within, Two Thrones, Prince of Persia, and The Forgotten Sands as well. So I've got my work cut out for me!