i think my ideal racing game would completely do away with any sort of voice acting and wouldn't bother with a overarching story as a way to motivate the player into the various races and challenges. of all genres i think racing titles have to potential to make really compelling gameplay loops that are enhanced by a lack of explanation or justification. wanting to go fast and make a cool looking car is its own motivation. cutscenes, phone calls between races, an end point to a story, distractions that pull focus from everything that actually matters. so many games in this series alone are made worse for just trying to explain themselves instead of letting the driving systems speak for themselves.
unbound at least makes the narrative into a gameplay concern. kinda dead rising in how it asks you to work within a set timetable which i really love. the first racing game in a good long while that's really broken out of the traditional open world racing structure and attempts to force new playstyles and ways of thinking about very traditional racer activities. i want to revisit this title someday and see if i can't crack it open.

continues to copy respawn's homework and is better for it. after stealing most every movement mechanic from apex (aside from the broken stuff like wallbounces) they've moved onto swiping evo shields (evocrhome is technically last season) and supply bots. i do appreciate that every big update to fortnite keeps adding to the movement systems to the point where you can basically just consider it an arena shooter with one really big map. every change is well considered but the whole experience (at least in terms of gameplay) is just slightly too polished off to give us some really good exploits that really bust the whole thing wide open. there are enough systems at play on their own and getting around is smooth enough that i'm never truly bored in the transit times but the best Gaming Locomotion is always unintended by the developers.
they tightened up the graphics on level three. i didn't think it would be that noticeable but i moved from pc to console just to get all the fancy new bells and whistles. it is really really nice to look at. i truly loathe temporal artifacting, every time i see ghosting outlines of my character or the level geometry i feel like someone is dragging my brain across pavement. but there's something incredibly charming about the artifacts coming out of these early ray tracing engines. it feels so raw and grainy and weirdly analog. like you're seeing every little photon of light dotting your character whenever you're under the shadow of a tree. i imagine how i feel about this is similar to how most people get nostalgic for affine texture warping in old ps1 games. it's more genuine then temporal ghosting in my eyes. i think this is gamer brain damage really kicking in at age 26.

hard to rate this one. ⚠️BORING⚠️ bad campaign that does a lot of lifting from other games seemingly at random (uncharted 3 and watch dogs 1 are the biggest sources here) but is otherwise just dumb in the normal us military propaganda way. it is funny how hard this tries to be sicario but only by lifting flavors from that movie and sidestepping the cia/military criticisms. it makes the whole thing weirdly disjointed and sometimes totally schizophrenic.
the ui feels like a psychic assault at all moments but i actually really enjoy the overall unlock and progression systems. this is the first time a cod has managed to make me push myself outside my comfort zone in terms of weapon and loadout choices. the gunplay is really sharp but the maps are generally pretty bad. you are constantly reminded that this whole game is built around warzone to an alarming degree. even without the mode out yet you can see its gestalt defining the boundaries of entire systems. in the case of maps it really holds them back. discrete chunks pulled from warzone just don't feel as purpose built as all of the mw 2019 maps did. a lot of similar layouts and identical skyboxes that all conform to a very obvious grid.
i was never big into warzone but i'll try it when it's out. i am excited for the tarkov ripoff they're including and overall i'm having a lot of fun with this game but you can really really see the seams in every single aspect with this one. raw in a way cod generally isn't

god of war 2018 (and to a much lesser extent the last of us) got basically all its cultural clout off the back of this game. i think having the development experience from dead space 1 really helped visceral nail minute details that most other ""prestige"" developers totally ignore in favor of extreme scale. the lighting especially is so considered and thoughtful in almost every room across this entire game. it's really got that arkham knight magic where the graphics are better then most big $70 releases we see nowadays. i don't care that it's way louder and more brash then dead space and has really weird pacing sometimes this is an absolutely perfect video game.

the mega man x collection for some reason took out save states and rewinds so this one actually filtered me lol. as it stands i think this game is just kinda ugly. every sprite looks like it came out of a lego duplo set. the audio is so lame too. behold the world's most embarrassing riffs that all sound identical. compared to doom it's certainly the weaker effort in its attempt to digitize a guitar. a generally slower paced title compared to the previous 5 nes games which isn't a bad thing, just stacked on top of the bulky ass sprites it makes this game feels like it's covered in bubble wrap.

everyone sucking overwatch 1 off back on that games launch genuinely made me feel like some weird space alien. it seems like public opinion has finally course corrected to some form of "it was fun the first year or so" but this doesn't properly acknowledge that the game has always been just terrible to play. titanfall 2 came out the same year as overwatch and i was just supposed to act like this slow ugly fps with the worst movement you will ever experience was somehow bringing back arena shooters. thankfully it faded from the public consciousness fast so now they've rereleased it without really changing anything to drum up engagement. they also purposefully bottlenecked the servers on launch to boost demand in the cheapest possible way and get people tweeting the word "overwatch." literally just go play fortnite instead of this for a better looking and feeling shooter in every conceivable way