Ding ding ding dong!

The one that started an amazing series.

Asylum might be surpassed by City and Knight but damn, it still holds a soft spot for me. Exploring Arkham Island, awesome boss fights and a really fun story. Its everything you'd want out of a Batman game and I love it.

I always revisit this every year because of how fun it is. Hats off to Rocksteady. This is a masterpiece. Also very horrifying. Croc still gives me PTSD lol.

Yeah
7:30 in the night, yeah
Ooh

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
You come around, yeah
You ease my mind, you make everything feel fine
Worry about those comments
I'm way too numb, yeah
It's way too dumb, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time
I need the Heimlich, throw that to the side, yeah
I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
When you're not around
When you throw that to the side, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah

7-1-3
To the 2-8-1, yeah, I'm riding
Why they on me? Why they want me? I'm flyin'
Sippin' lowkey, I'm sipping lowkey in Onyx
Rider, rider
When I'm pullin' up right beside ya
Popstar, lil' Mariah
When I text a cute game, wildness
Throw a stack on the Bible
Never Snapchat or took Molly
She fall through plenty, her and all her ginnies
Yeah, we at the top floor, right there off Doheny
Yeah

Oh, no, I can't fuck with y'all
Yeah, when I'm with my squad I cannot do no wrong
Yeah, saucing in the city, don't get misinformed
Yeah, they gon' pull up on you

Yeah, we gon' do some things
Some things you can't relate
Yeah, 'cause we from a place
A place you cannot stay

Oh, you can't go
Oh, I don't know
Oh, back the fuck up off me

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
You come around, yeah
You ease my mind, you make everything feel fine
Worry about those comments
I'm way too numb, yeah
It's way too dumb, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time
I need the Heimlich, throw that to the side, yeah
I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
When you're not around
When you throw that to the side, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time

I want to press my like, yeah, I wanna press my
I want a green light, I wanna be like
I wanna press my line, yeah
I want to take that ride, yeah
I'm gonna press my lime
I wanna green light, I wanna be like, I wanna press my

Mama, dear, spare your feelings
I'm reliving moments, peeling more residual
I can buy the building, burn the building
Take your bitch, rebuild the building
Just to fuck some more
I can justify my love for you
And touch the sky for God to stop debating war

Put the pussy on a pedestal
Put the pussy on a high horse
That pussy to die for
That pussy to die for

Peter piper picked a pepper
So I could pick your brain and put your heart together
We depart the shady parts and party hard
The diamonds yours, the coupe forever
My best shots might shoot forever like

I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
You come around, yeah
You ease my mind, you make everything feel fine
Worry about those comments
I'm way too numb, yeah
It's way too dumb, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time
I need the Heimlich, throw that to the side, yeah
I get those goosebumps every time, yeah
When you're not around
When you throw that to the side, yeah

I get those goosebumps every time

This game is so damn clever. The key is the ability to rewire almost anything to its color coded components, and by doing so, you can absolutely run circles around the guards. In fact, you don't ever need to kill or sometimes even attack/take out guards; the vast majority of the game can be played strictly with pure stealth, and thanks to the game's constant autosaving, you can just keep experimenting til your plan sticks. With a wide variety of gadgets that you can purchase with in game bucks (which I never felt the need to do actually), there are so many different ways to approach the levels. There are optional objectives and ranks but they're more there to challenge yourself and if you want additional tidbits of lore from the world instead of mandatory completion marks. You can tell that it's fantastic level design because if you know what you're doing, you can finish the levels and the game super quickly (definitely under an hour). A great indie puzzler once you figure out how to not suck, and it's extremely satisfying.

so, you guys were trolling me right? when the collective masses declared this game to be a masterpiece, it was just one big joke, right? we were having a joe schmoe moment; there's no way this game got universal mass appeal down pat. you all had to have been fucking with me when you said this game was flawless.

bloodborne is an incredibly frustrating game. it's frustrating not just because of it having moments of great difficulty, but it's frustrating to play and just not get it. i do not get bloodborne, i will say it upfront. i do not get why people love this game so much, what about it speaks to them and gives them a good time. i wish i did! i truly wish i did. i went into this being prebiased in its favor; i did not start bloodborne wanting to dislike or even hate it.

but here we are.

this game inspires a lot of confusion out of me on a mechanics level because so much of it just does not work or mesh well, especially in the context of coming from people who made previous souls games. so many fundamental basic things are wrong, like having little to no player self-expression, refinements like equip load being nonexistent, and the absence of depth in mechanics (no magic whatsoever, there's half as many stats as previous souls games, etc.). hell, even the items feel culled and the lore feels less impactful. it's one thing to get only a handful of lore entries, but to make them all feel even more vague and esoteric? it doesn't help me with a setting that i just can't place in my head. maybe you're not supposed to get it, that's fine, but that doesn't work for me and feels like an artistic dead-end.

going back to player self-expression, that's probably the most incensing part to me! you get so little gear to work with, both in weapons and armor, and overall it feels as though you're going to be doing a lot less thought and exploration when it comes to builds. i would've much rather they just axed the stat system entirely, locked you to a handful of weapons, and focused more on making it an action game. instead, stats feel like they don't matter until you run into the enemy that has 309 billion HP and you're staring down the barrel of a damage race.

that's another thing that i dislike about this game: the bosses are monsters when it comes to HP. i'm willing to acknowledge that hey, maybe i'm just Bad at the Video Game! but also i found it remarkably frustrating that every boss took an obscene amount of damage to kill until basically the endgame. standouts include bosses like vicar amelia, who, combined with the blood vial system being so incredibly shallow and poorly thought out, made me want to stop playing the game entirely.

but, i did trudge through. i persevered. and i tried extremely hard to see what everyone sees in this game. there are good pieces of design smothered to death in a game that has environments that are incredibly generic and difficult to distinguish from each other and amateurish mechanics like frenzy. i like that bosses have forms to them, it makes them feel as though they're reacting to the player in an organic way. i like the trick weapons because they make dual-wielding feel much more dynamic and balance out taking away your gun by having more varied movesets. i like the graphical fidelity of the game, because even though i saw the same shade of black several thousands of times, i never once thought it was an ugly shade of black.

playing this game has really vexed me because i just cannot bring myself to say that my net experience with this game was a positive. i really, really disliked a lot of sections in it because there was frustration without any of the highs i would've gotten from a build becoming better or an enjoyable boss fight. this game felt like a chore, like something i was obligated to play rather than something i wanted to play. i don't begrudge anyone for liking this, but much like games like nier automata and ffviir this is something that just doesn't work as an action-JRPG mash-up and makes me wish the game had just leaned entirely on action. or been good.

i walk away from this one twisted up in disappointment. dark souls was a game that i had my reservations about, but came back to recently and fell in love with. maybe when this game inevitably gets a PS5 remaster, i'll revisit it and have fonder things to say. maybe i'll even enjoy it.

but, i never want to play this game ever again.

This has single-handedly made me oppose all video game remakes on principle.

The original PS2 version, to this day, is stunning. The strengths and limitations of that console were utilized to create something completely unique and impossible to truly replicate (even pc emulation fails at this). The blinding bloom lighting, washed out colors, and low resolution gave the game this otherworldly sheen that I was mesmerized by. It gives the impression of a beautiful but god-forsaken no man's land enveloped by Dormin's light, a light without warmth.

The PS4 version just... Looks like a typical AAA PS4 game. It's technologically impressive, but that's the only thing there is to say about such boring, soulless visuals. And in a few years, you won't even be able to say that. The remake further disrupts the style of the original with meaningless new features for a purposefully minimalist game, like frivolous collectibles, a photo mode, and a stats page. All just to pad the game out with more time-wasting distractions, as if we didn't already have enough games packed with that.

Worse though are the subtle changes that most probably missed. The gut-wrenching wails of collosi have been replaced with generic monstrous roars (seriously, go to youtube and watch the 4th colossus fight in the original and then in the remake, it's a disgrace), and the enigmatic color changes of their eyes during battle have been removed altogether in favor of always-orange eyes to signify aggression without nuance.

The fact that this is seen by the vast majority of gamers as a faithful remake baffles me. Maybe because it lives up to how most remember it: The pretty looking game where you fight big monsters and it turns out you were the bad guy the whole time! That's pretty much what it is when you boil it down, but I always thought it had a bit more of a mystique that made it stand above most games.

There is no real appreciation in the industry for old games beyond surface level nostalgia, and I think that's one reason why video games are such a wasteland artistically.

Everything besides the parkour and traversal was either boring or utterly unfun for me. Unless you grind up your survivor level, melee weapons are utterly worthless by endgame due to how scaling works. So I spent the majority of encounters either cheesing zombie AI or using overpowered guns that I got via dlc. Either way, the combat didn't feel engaging or interesting once I reached a certain point. That was probably partially my fault, since I elected to rush through the story mode, doing minimal side content, and in this game, side content and survivor level are actually important, which I was never made aware of until the final boss was dead. But I also didn't want to play this game for any longer than necessary, since by the time the zombies started out-scaling me, I was already growing tired of being outscaled and I just thought the game was "like this".

If you play Dying Light, run as much side content as you can to get your survivor level up, particularly airdrops and doing stuff at night for the double XP. If you don't, the whole thing will be a slog by the time you reach Old Town. Cause apparently in the first person shooter action parkour zombie game with no health bars, your numbers matter.

The first and only Max Payne without Sam Lake being the main writer and it is pretty immediately felt. The gritty, noir feeling of the first two is replaced a somewhat sunny but still grungy setting as Max hangs up his leather jacket in Hoboken for a flak jacket in Sao Paulo. Dan Houser's writing for Max is still great and the story really grabs you starting in the third act but before that it felt like I was just being dragged along. The gameplay is solid but feels more limited due to the nature of Rockstar's somewhat realism in most there games. No longer is the one man army Max Payne who can carry 2 shotguns, 3 rifles, 4 pistols, and a holy plethora of grenades. You are now limited to 2 pistols and a rifle, the attention to detail is nice but really makes the game feel less fun. Bullet time remains and like everything else in this game feels weighty and visceral. My main complaint with this game however is that it almost feels more like a cover shooter then the power fantasy of the first two games, maybe its due to the age of Payne or Rockstar's commitment to realism but you are a lot more vulnerable and I found it a pretty frustrating shift in gameplay. Overall, Remedy's titles are the superior Max Payne games with their tone and gameplay but this game is still worth the playthrough.