Ever play Metal slug and think to yourself "That was great and all but it really needs 100% more dolphin". Well boy do I have the game for you!

Evidently some former Metal Slug developers had the same thought when making this run and gun for Sammy Corporation in the early 2000s. Initially only released in arcades on Sammy's Atmoiswave arcade boards but later ported to Dreamcast by fans a few years ago to allow more people to experience it. Though adding in it's own unique ideas Dolphin Blue is such a close representation of Metal Slug you would think it was actually a spin off by SNK themselves. The military uniforms, guns and even the sound effects in places sound like they are just samples taken from it's influential forebear.

You get two characters to potentially play as, Erio an Arms Dealer and Anne a soldier. Regardless of who you play as in this adventure you will shoot through hordes of soldiers as they kidnap the Kingdom's Princess as the main premise. The most striking thing about Dolphin Blue are the visuals. It uses a mixture of chunky 3D backgrounds with 2D sprite characters and it's a gorgeous mix. Whilst the sprite work isn't the best I have seen of that era the colours and contrast with it's backgrounds make the game a real looker to play through. There is a lot going on at any one time with a lot of action and enemies on screen. A lot of the humour of the Metal Slug games is present such as scuba diver enemies suits inflating up when damaged and soldiers dangling precariously off of runaway trains in a very comic fashion. The levels themselves are pretty memorable with flooded mines, battleships, airships in a 1940's style diesel punk aesthetic.

There are only 5 levels but there only needs to be because this game is bloody hard. There are 3 types of gameplay in it's hour or so runtime though all three are run and gun type of foot, swimming or dolphin riding. Each have the same principle of shooting enemies, stabbing them if they get close whilst picking up some weapon power ups like Vulcans, missiles or firecracker grenades. These weapons have limited ammo and though frequent aren't always frequent enough and your base rifle can barely kill basic enemies but little else. Aside from that you also get a special attack that has a charge bar I was calling the RPG in my head (Rocket Porpoise Grenade) where your Dolphin flies forward doing a strong homing attack or on land you do a more powerful shot.

Now where the game gets hard is in both it's design and execution. On land your character feels stiff to control and shuffles rather than walks with no way to speed up. You can only shoot in 4 way directions despite some encounters clearly needing 8-way which I found extremely vexing often leaving me in no win unavoidable situations. The enemies will come in force from all angles leaving deaths often unavoidable and without the abilities to really deal with them except learning the game and the later levels are utterly brutal. The other modes are a lot more fluid for both underwater sections feeling more like a shoot 'em up and the dolphin Riding sequences which are a genuine blast to speed though. Even then though you can't fire backwards sometimes leaving you open to attack from the enemy encounters which was also a small annoyance. If it wasn't for the Dreamcast port I would never have beaten this as it has infinite continues and in places I just died endlessly.

I guess overall no matter how I look at it this is a good looking fun game that's a bit weird but there isn't a lot here that I don't think to myself Metal Slug already did and better. Certainly worth a playthrough for run and gun fans or people that like playing obscure retro games like me but it's not quite the hidden gem I was hoping.

+ Dolphins!
+ Great visual style and colours, striking looking game.
+ Dolphin riding!

- Too hard for me in the latter half.
- Stiff characters on land and no 8-way directional shooting. Really?

Unpacking is an interesting idea. It's essentially fairly freeform puzzle game of 8 levels unpacking boxes of someone moving into different houses. It follows an unnamed woman's life through her first room as a girl, through college house sharing and relationships to a middle aged adult.

The game makes use of environmental story telling to push what is happening along, moving in with their first partner, the lack of space or compatibility etc. Without meeting or hearing about this woman you can piece together the events of her life and interests. It's a really neat idea and I liked seeing the small changes to belongings from location to location or items she has taken with her through most of her life. It does wear out it's welcome after a little bit though as I don't feel it gets quite clever enough with it's items to progress that story as it could. There are only so many piles of the same books and socks I can unbox and put on shelves or in draws without feeling like the idea ran stale. There are also some sections where the simple music just stopped leaving an odd silence as I decided where to put the yoga mat under the bed again in the next bedroom.

Still I really appreciate what a neat idea and unique game this is. I would have preferred more interactive items, close up's of photos to show things our nameless protagonist had done, new hobbies or even problems in her life to flesh it out more. What I really took from this though is if someone unpacked my things for me if I moved house what sort of person would they think I am? So much of what we own, decide to keep and how we keep them at home speaks so much about us as people. For that alone I am grateful to this short and cute little game.

+ Interesting use of environmental story telling.
+ Unique game idea.
+ Nice pixel art style.

- Runs out of steam a bit in the last couple of levels.

This is one of those games that I really want to like. I’ve tried nearly a dozen times to get it to “click” and it never does.

I always bounce off of it and I’ve never entirely understand why.

Sure, the platforming is precision machined but maybe the fact that the game is too forgiving with its checkpoints leads to a lack of stakes or tension for someone like me that isn’t going to go for every strawberry.

I also think the levels might be too long and that the game forces you to spend too much time in individual biomes.

The story’s presentation, at least early on, may also be a bit too sappy and not engaging.

Idk. I know people really love this game and what I’ve played of it is fine. But it’s lacking something crucial.

Good OST, though.

unfortunately, it's very much a Lucius 2 situation where the first game becomes somewhat of a cult game and the sequel instead of trying to understand what made the first game work and improve it, instead trying to be different and throws a bunch of mechanics at the wall whilst doubling down on the story it's crazy there is a 6-year difference between this and the original and the combat still feels as clunky still just as easy to be stun locked into a corner, honestly, I think it's every worse hears way too many of the ghost enemies rely on randomly attacking you from off-screen it is dread---full they also added a bunch of stuff mechanically like I mentioned stealth and melee combat is now a thing none of these ever working together it's usually either a camera or melee or stealth not of them great another thing lost in this game is a bit of the charm of the graphics in a goal of improving to look more modern you lose that cool "retro" look that now seems a lot less intentional but honestly despite this being a pretty mediocre horror indie game I am not gonna lie I still kinda enjoyed I think there is still a charm there with the world design being so unique and some of the monsters who ever did the drawn art for the monsters you can look at in the beastiary they look so good but still very hard to recommend this to anyone unless they are just survival horror fiends finding for something different even if it doesn't work out

for being such a black sheep, you'd think it'd feel a hell of a lot less like doom!

sure, it's a more 64 oriented take than what most fans are comfortable with, but absolutely deserving of the moniker nonetheless; way more so than that qte-laden quake knockoff 2016 reboot, anyway

it's one thing not to like doom 3's pacing, corridor-driven structure and how it distributes enemies; it's another thing entirely to dismiss anything and everything designed outside shooter norms as "dated" - as if the lighting in this game isn't still impressive or completely and totally deliberate. that "duct tape" mod wasn't an ingenious feat of fan programming that fixed a broken aspect of a woefully mismanaged fps; it just went against the game's intended design

and call it a symptom of half life's popularity if you want; i feel the mars base introductory sequence is more atmospherically dense and to-the-point than black mesa could've dreamed to be. unlike quake 4, which has a lot narrative stop-and-go, the action in doom 3 is almost completely uninterrupted throughout. it's story-driven compared to its maze-y predecessors, but most of that happens via in-game radio chatter. never once did i ask myself "where's the next thing to shoot at?"

hell - if anything i'd say this may be the core doom experience to a fault. the way enemies are dispatched doesn't differ much from their DOS-based counterparts. there's a lot of strafing around projectiles and shotgun kissing. like - a lot. and that's great, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't get seriously tired of needing to back away from every door i opened to prevent getting jumped by an imp's otherwise unavoidable lunge attack. granted, this wasn't because it was cheap and unpredictable or whatever - much the opposite - all it took was running up to the guy when he stood up and blowing his ass away with a single shotgun blast

oh and since i've opened a can of controversy by even mentioning the shotgun, i'll just come out and say that it - along with pretty much every other weapon - is really good. yeah yeah, spread is bad, whatever. the maps are set up in small to medium sized corridors and arenas. so it's not hard to get up close and kill most enemies in a single shot. too far away? that's what your other weapons are for. i'm not sure where the strangely common ammo complaints come from either. i played on veteran and used most guns in equal measure (though i favored the shotgun and used the chainsaw religiously) and i often had max ammo for everything minus the bfg

my biggest problems with the game structurally, besides its oft stale monster closeting, are more retrospective than anything. the whole experience is lots of fun, but it ramps up so much more in the second half that i can't help but wonder why it doesn't get there sooner. why is so little time spent in hell and the nether regions of mars? why does the enemy variety take several hours to spontaneously expand beyond primarily shooting imps and marines?

i don't wanna mince words here: this is the best depiction of hell in the whole damn franchise. it's so grandiose, grim and genuinely fucking evil. the level design also feels much more in line with what i'd expect from a classic doom title and has brilliant lighting which forgoes any need to even use the flashlight. it's perfect but most of y'all probably didn't even see it because you dropped the game about six hours too soon

apparently resurrection of evil is a lot more akin to the second half so i'm expecting that to be great as well. whether i'll play that or prey 06 next, i'm not sure; what i am sure of is that id tech 4 goes hard and doom 3 is pretty fuckin' awesome. i'm not surprised to see that the common consensus of a post-quake id software game is wrong once again. at this point i probably wouldn't be surprised if rage was the best game ever

Unfortunately I have given this game one more half star than I did before. The only thing that makes this game more tolerable is playing with friends which I have been doing lately. If you are a woman or someone with a femme voice you immediately get clocked as and get harassed. I'm giving it 3 and a half stars but at some point you really have to change your mindset in this game to "it is just a game, who cares" or it immediately gives you brain rot and makes you the most toxic human being known to man. I hate the way this game handles currency in every way, these skin bundles are not worth 80 real buckaroonies at all and you get no in game currency from the battlepass like every other godforsaken fps game in the world. This game sucks I love it. Also going back into the review and instead of giving it an extra half star it lost one. I still love playing with friends but the rest of it sucks. <3

Judgement is so close to being a top-tier Yakuza game. It fixes a lot of problems that have hung over the series but also introduces new ones.

Well, they're not so much "problems" as "Odious Additions." Judgment is a detective story, so they've added some detective gameplay. The game starts off with a 4 hour prologue introducing you to all the new detective stuff you can do. Tailing missions, looking for clues, spotting people in a crowd, presenting evidence, disguises, lockpicking!

The issue is, most of these mini-games fall by the wayside outside the first chapter, left to be used in the side cases. Those that do stick around, clue searching and tailing, lack engagement and come across half-baked (the fact that every search sequence in accompanied by a hidden mewling cat kinda robs them of any inquisitive or dramatic tone.)

When the detective elements work, they work great. Spotting a camera on a rooftop or calling out a flaw in witness testimony feel good in the moment and help set the noir tone. Other times it's things like "Find the lightswitch." The lightswitch isn't in any unique spot, It's where you expect the lightswitch to be, they just wanted to make that spot interactive for....??

The key ring is the most head-scratching inclusion. I don't know what the value gained here is other than a tiny XP bonus.

No, for most of Judgment's runtime it leans back on the Yakuza tradition of violence to solve problems. Here you get two styles to swap between: crane for crowd-control, and tiger for one-on-one. Most of the abilities you get are for tiger and the game actually doesn't throw hordes of foes at you like prior titles, so Crane by and large falls by the wayside.

Not that I mind this. The RPG elements have been greatly reduced. No longer are you doing twelve 5% increases to health at ramping XP costs. Instead there are 3 increases to health, each one doubling your bar. It may be simplified, but it feels more satisfying and each trip to the level up screen meant walking away with a tangible benefit (though it's still loaded with borderline useless perks like heat moves exclusive to fighting in a convenience store).

What raises Judgment up is it's narrative. Completely seperate from the mainline games, this is a great noir story about lingering regret and corruption. The story is maybe two chapters longer than it needs to be, but I enjoyed the more grounded story. Yagami doesn't have the immediate likability of prior franchise leads, but he does have strong "just a dude" energy that gives him a John Mclain feeling.

Some may find the main story forcing you into side missions to progress the plot annoying. It's certainly something I've complained about in prior titles, but here I didn't mind it. For starters there's no point where they interrupt any forward action, instead acting as time killers while waiting for a phone call or the events to progress. It gives a kind of a TV show feeling, where the main mystery builds gradually amidst "case of the week" type missions. It helps to build the very likeable cast of characters. I'd actually hazard to say that this is one of the best casts of any Yakuza game.

The big gold star Judgment gets is that in the last chapter a last hour antagonist isn't introduced to explain how he was the mastermind all along and also the head of the illuminati somehow. Here the main antagonist becomes clear half-way through, but like any good detective story the thrust becomes about uncovering how they did it. It unfurls very naturally with a thrilling final set piece. If there's any final BS revelation in line with prior titles it's to do with a particular method of execution and the reasons for doing so are so goofy it loops around to being palatable.

Best part of the narrative is how it actually ties to Yagami's arc of regret and lost faith in his judgment (Hey, that's the name of the show!) It has shades of Saejima's arc in Yakuza 4, which is still the best Yakuza game and probably why I liked this one so much.

For those that view the Yakuza franchise as a vehicle for playing SEGA roms, then this game has you covered with all of Virtua Fighter 2 & 5, and Fighting Vipers. Weirdly a lot of normal side activities have been removed, probably to make room for the detective missions. Drone racing is a banger though, and best addition since cabaret management.

Honestly my feelings on Judgment could go either way. I can see how the shake-up to the formula could be found lacking enough to drag down the experience. For me, the narrative saves it from a lower score and I'd probably consider this a personal favorite. If they had trimmed a bit of the fat then this would easily be an S-tier entry in the series.

First played this 5 years ago and "loved the style :D" but hated moving/shooting/taking painkillers/any other thing you do while actually controlling Max Payne. I'm genuinely kinda embarrassed this was my take because it turns out I was just playing it entirely wrong? There were moments in this newest play-through where I winced a little bit after remembering how I dealt with combat encounters coming back to them. Felt like I was doing parallel play with my 19 year old self and screaming at her for getting frustrated with scenarios I was enjoying. "Yeah no wonder you hated the gunplay you were barely using its central mechanic!! Stop trying to duck behind cover!" "Remember when you forgot you had a sniper rifle for that section in the Aesir building where you're being shot with grenade launchers from unreachable playforms? And you thought it was "broken" because you couldn't clear it easily with a Desert Eagle?" Just a constant parade of "Jesus Christ what were you doing".

Maybe I shouldn't be quite as harsh to 2019 me but I do think this game clicks a lot more once you accept that it's very difficult and requires you to use all the tools at your disposal. Individual rooms are little gunplay puzzles that you need to maybe die to once or twice before using bullet time to clear effectively. Thinking bullet time was "style over substance" or w/e just meant I wasn't really playing Max Payne at all. To be fair I was originally playing this out of obligation a guy who thought I would be hotter if I also liked Remedy games so it's not surprising I just wanted the whole game to be over.

I think I also just wasn't into it enough to appreciate how genuinely fun a lot of the storytelling is- started playing Max Payne 2 at the time of writing this and I like the pacing and cut-scene direction in it even more but here you can see a lot of that same style even as it seems they have to stretch their budget way thinner. The graphic novel sections are wonderful and I love seeing all the photo-sourced panels- you get the impression the devs were having a blast, they're leaning into the camp of it all. Still, other sections manage to be much darker in a way that feels effective. Any section set in Max's house or a nightmare variation of it is genuinely uncomfortable; the bit in the one nightmare section where almost all the walls in the house are replaced with the disgustingly cheerful wallpaper from the baby's room and rock-a-bye baby is echoing through the house got me pretty bad. Like Max's brain is actively taunting him with how disgusting and backwards the irony of finding the murdered corpse of his infant son in this room designed to feel safe and Lovely is. The "Huggies!" poster in the baby's room in particular feels extremely cruel.

Love the goons. Love how the killer suits are revealed through their dialogue to be LARPing idiots who want to live out the same power fantasy the player is. Just having played the opening chapters of 2 last night "My gun's name is Dick Justice" contrasted against the appearance of Dick Justice as a TV show that's very clearly a parody of Max himself in 2 also feels like it's retrospectively calling attention to Max's own state as a roleplaying weirdo, which from what people have told me/what I've played thus far is a thing that gets explored a lot in 2. Feel as if another review on here by Woodaba illustrates this point much better than I could.

Gunplay is obviously very tight and stylish. Chugging painkillers while mid-shoot dive then switching your weapon is tons of fun and can help you choreograph genuinely excellent little shooutouts, and when you get the grenade launcher it becomes indispensable to beat the reaction time of late-game enemies while also ensuring you don't blow yourself up. VATs got absolutely lauded when FO3 came out but I think this game is very impressive for bothering to make sniper shots bullet-cams and slow-motion enemy deaths into a source of flair in the same way that game does but in 2001. Feels as if every weapon is designed around how cool it'll feel to be used in bullet time. I will say, however, that I wish the shotgun felt a bit more viable in the late game without having to use the Jackhammer. I felt like I was still able to use most of my other weapons towards the end aside from the one-handed variants of the Beretta and Ingram, but pulling out the sawed-off or pump-action just felt like an easy way to get killed. Feels like it limited the scope of what an encounter could look like at the end of the game just a tiny bit.

Overall this was a blast. Managed to pull me away from the Hitman: Freelancer Hardcore doom spiral (which I want to write about at some point because it's so fun but also so insane both in how it twists Hitman into a roguelike and the thematic shit weirdness that comes with that) which I can only thank it for because I need a break from beating my head against a wall due to being Bad At Gaming. Love you Maxwell! Just keep being yourself and you can do anything! :)

post-review note: Jesus Christ does Rockstar need to do some serious patching work on this. I know the remake is coming out but c'mon man. Got softlocked in the Vinny chase because white men can't jump unless they're running at or below 60 FPS. Dude just fell into a pit because his movement in that cutscene is framerate dependent and I spent the rest of the mission watching goons react to a guy who wasn't there tell them to whack da crazy bastard. I was able to move cut-scenes for some reason and the section ended when the camera eternally hung on a scene that seemed to have its completion dependent on Vinny reaching a certain place which he couldn't because he was invincible and stuck in a hole somewhere. Needed to download a hex editor at one point, an expanded, open-source version of the NVIDIA control panel, add some framerate limiters on, etc. Pumping the game full of community patches and screaming "WE'RE LOSING HIM!" as something else with my rig causes visual fuckery every other chapter. Glad the game was good enough to make constant troubleshooting worth it.

As I traversed the upside down castle with whip in hand fighting knights with my cool back dash I thought to myself Castlevania Symphony of the Night is a great game! I was however playing Afterimage, a Metroidvania made by Aurogon Shanghai. It's one of those games that I simply can't remember where I heard about it but It's been on my radar a while for it's gorgeous visual style...and I'll frankly play any Metroidvania you throw at me.

From a Metoidvania point of view it's kind of weak in a lot of ways though. The game is absolutely massive with about 20 locations to explore over the course of the adventure. Some of these locations are almost the size of other games of the genres entire maps and it took me over 30 hours to initially finish it off. The level design is expansive with various secrets to find with more skills and abilities unlocked as you would expect but backtracking is a nightmare and fast travelling uses a consumable item which just seemingly discourages it early on. The mid game I found it difficult to know exactly where to go and there is a weird difficulty spike due to the multiple directions which took a while to smooth out. The story equally feels it lacks cohesion. It's very dialogue, character and plot heavy but at the same time wants to be mysterious and lore intense like Dark Souls / Hollow Knight yet instead just leaves a lot of questions like it was never really finished. Playing the extra mode unlocked after several endings as a side story does answer some of it, as does the true ending but there are still many aspects of the plot that feel very incomplete or unsatisfying.

So why a 7/10 if you are luke warm on the level design and story Fallen? I hear you ask in confusion. It's simply because despite that, I had a lot of fun with it. The locations are varied and the artwork is really stunning throughout, the soundtrack is beautiful and sometimes haunting. The protagonist Renee's animations are smooth and combat for the most part is fun with a variety of weapons, accessories and magic to choose from.

Yes the game could have done with tightening up a little bit where I think they got a little overzealous but overall it's a fun little game.

+ Beautiful art design.
+ I liked the soft haunting melodies of the OST.
+ Combat is fast and fluid with some good options.
+ I just like exploring in Metroidvanias...

- Level's are a little too large.
- Story could be tightened up more, it wants both a lot of dialogue yet mysterious lore and doesn't quite work for either.

Believe it or not a co-worker of mine talked about the SCD version of this game with me once, out of complete curiosity I booted it up for like a hot minute.

It's an incredibly by the books adventure game where you walk around finding items that go to whatever situation you're trying to solve. Well until a mutant appears and you suddenly start fighting the fucker exactly like a 2D fighting game. Unfortunately, the game actually spoils this by giving an option for "practise fights" at the main menu, but hey hopefully I made you chuckle a little bit with the sudden genre change.

Anyways, my co-worker/friend/acquaintance said he couldn't beat Victor Frankenstein in this game. It turns out he sucked and doesn't know how to fight CPU opponents, you just need to find the one move, which in this case it was the running shoulder charge that does multiple hits (qcf+a I think). I continued the game for a while until I got bored of being lost in the SCD's horribly compressed overhead segment of the town and turned the game off.

That's the only reason I played, to gloat about being good at beating CPUs. So yeah, I'll be rubbing it in his face tomorrow assuming I remember.

Bigger, better, and mechanically deeper in every way, Jedi Survivor is exactly what a sequel should be.

It's a great game and—even better—a wonderful Star Wars story. Between Jedi Survivor and its predecessor, this series has secured itself as one of the best ways to immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe.

I experienced frequent (but minor) visual bugs throughout the game, but 98% of my playthrough was otherwise perfectly smooth.

Trying this out again with the PS5 update. I never played this game on anything else other than my OG PS4, got the plat back in like 2017 and I never touched it since. So it's kinda crazy seeing it in smooth 60 FPS.

Anyways, this game singlehandedly carried me out of Destiny jail back in the day, the gameplay loop was more than addictive enough for me. Pick a spot in the map, shoot all the bad guys there, loot everything, haul it all back so you can upgrade your equipment, and repeat. The gunplay is quite solid, especially for an action RPG. And the weapons customization is just so fun to do, mfs be trembling at the sight of my glow-sighted drum-barrel powerful long-barrel automatic pipe rifle.

Then you have the Commonwealth open world itself, which nails the 50s retrofuturistic aesthetic that Bethesda really likes to focus on. And Fallout 4's colorful-yet-rustic art direction creates a lot of varied atmospheric locales to explore. Bethesda also handles their typical environmental storytelling stuff quite well, so there's usually some interesting tales to stumble upon.

Speaking of stories, there's no escaping NPCs in this game, and the actual dialogue driven stories that you'll be experiencing are just so flat, aside from a couple exceptions. The RPG aspects unfortunately doesn't extend to its story, and even in the dialogue choices, it doesn't feel like you're carving out a path for yourself. It always feels linear and limited, which is not good for a series that has made a name for itself with big narrative playgrounds. And the general quality of writing is just meh. A lot of the dialogues don't convey enough personality, and it can come across as toothless and boring. I do quite like the company of some characters like Nick Valentine and Piper, and there's some good story moments scattered all over the main and side missions, but overall it is not the driving force of the game's fun factor. They did made Far Harbor, which basically transplants an actually good RPG storyline with memorable writing into the game, so it's not like they can't do it. I guess they don't care enough or something.

But yeah, that's it really. Fallout 4 is a fun time when you don't have classic Fallout fans screaming at you. It's a very wide inflatable pool that has a lot of floaties to play with, but it's still an inflatable pool, and you'll probably yearn for the sight and sounds of the real sea at some point.

Really fun idea that for some reason burns through all its content asap, so you can see everything it has to offer in under an hour. If you had to unlock the next stage through a high score or challenge or SOMETHING there'd be something here. It might have been an update they did at some point to just auto unlock everything from the start but that just makes this game feel like one of those achievement farming shovelware games.

It's an inherently fun concept, and it plays well, but the game around it undermines itself. You truly gotta have no interest beyond arcade style leaderboards to get anything out of playing for more than an hour. And even then I seem to remember the leaderboards being busted.

First game on steam I ever refunded, which succs cuz it's not a bad game but they just go out of their way to spoil the whole thing.

My third eye is open and it’s crying.

This pack seemed so obviously fine tuned to a mediocre experience that I’m sure someone out there might enjoy, but it’s a personal nightmare to me. There aren’t any new collections, but there sure are a handful of weird aspirations that delete my inner peace instead of inspiring it. You’d probably guess from the title, but it’s a pack that introduces the spa, and therefore tosses in everything from detoxifying tea to massages to meditation and yoga. But boy, am I far from relaxed.

Finally my dream job of re-organizing the bones of my neighbors through unlicensed massages is actually achievable, except they made it work in the dumbest way possible. You can’t outright buy a spa in the same way that you can a restaurant, so your Sim is meant to just show up and start massaging people.. just.. because they want to? Please do not tell the IRS of my grift, but there’s no shot I’m getting a W-2 for this. It’s weird in practice and also in function, since the spa has actual NPC employees working hard for their $7.50/hr. It feels like the equivalent of you squeezing behind a cash register at your local Walmart and accepting tips from the customers for letting them skip the line faster. It’s aggravating because the NPCs are actively competing for your space, when really you’re just an asshole, leaving you to constantly beg the customers to let you tickle them a bit with your fingers.

That’s honestly really it? You get the Wellness skill which gives your Sim super calming aura, I guess. They can teleport while meditating and that’s pretty goofy, but other than that there’s not much here besides the furniture. The neat thing is that apparently EA actually refreshed this pack sometime in 2021. (This is the only time they’ve done this. Probably the only time they ever will.) This refresh added Aspirations that weren’t there before and these were what I was forced to do. They are not fun because they play poorly.

It meant I had to pull off some MLM scams at the local spa by bringing people with me. Getting multiple Sims to do an outing together in this game is like pulling teeth and the spa locations have got to be the worst places out of them all. There’s yoga classes happening every 5 minutes, which distracts every Sim in the vicinity like they’ve been hit with a sonar thought wave. One brain cell, only yoga. Everyone drops everything they're doing in an instant and starts performing yoga outside even in torrential downpour. It made getting the massages I needed really aggravating. I ended up deleting the yoga mats and pondered locking all the yoga instructors into a 2x2 containment cell. I would have honestly been doing this town a service since we lost some neighbors who were forced to perform yoga in a snowstorm. God bless those poor souls.

The rewards are not really worth it because they just net you more money for performing spa work. Sir, I am a 2.2 Simoleon millionaire and you will never see me on this lot ever again. I’ll take the soothing super power though if it makes my Sim’s kids complain less while they’re around me. I’d skip this one personally, unless you’re super into granola.

I hope we see free pack refreshes more often though, but this was 3 years ago and that ship has probably SUNK. I've mastered true clairvoyance now and that is sensing when EA is trying to siphon more money out of my wallet and surprising them with a Home Alone death trap instead.