edit (13/11/23): this review sucks. lol

I don’t understand Pokémon fans. When Sword and Shield released in 2019, it was understandable that Pokémon fans were quite upset. To start off with, the “graphics” at the time were considerably worse and when it was revealed that some Pokémon were not going to even be in the game, the game received heavy backlash from fans and was regarded as one of the most weakest mainline entries.

Then we got Pokémon Legends, which most fans agreed was a major improvement with it’s new formula of catching Pokémon out of the wild. However this also received some backlash as well, with a common theme running that the plot was shallow and the.. gameplay wasn’t fun? Wait, hold on, Game Freak has just changed the entire meta of the game for you and you’re still complaining. The fights were too easy? The graphics were too ugly? The characters are too one dimensional? It’s hard for the common Pokémon fan to find what they enjoy.

And as of now, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have released (although it leaked a week earlier if you know what I mean). And as of now, although a lot of positive comments, Pokemon fans are still complaining! The frame rate and performance is actually so bad now because you guys bullied poor Masuda into trying to produce good ones on a console that has the same specs as a car battery. The fights are too easy? The characters are too one dimensional? You want the mechanics back from a spin off game, even though some of you DIDNT EVEN LIKE IT????

You can hate this game. If you genuinely just don’t like this game or anything in it you are perfectly fine to criticise whatever you want, we are a website that criticises everything for god’s sake. What I just don’t understand is the Pokémon fans. Why do you guys stick with this series for so long if you do nothing but rag and complain about how bad they all are? Pokemon is a series dedicated to putting out low budget titles that appeal to 10 year olds and adults who can never seem to grow up, of course the fights are too easy and everything looks shit. And maybe if you’re favourite Pokémon didn’t make it into the new game, take it as a sign that maybe it’s time to move on and try new things. Go outside and take a nice walk.

I’m a few hours in, I’m enjoying the game. I like the fruity duck starter and the evil team leader’s a baddie so hey good job Game Freak 4 stars!!!!!

This game lives in contradiction. For as many good ideas as it has, it has so many frustrating and annoying elements to make up for it.

This is a game that has many good ideas, but fails to execute any of them well. I personally turned it into a social experience for the most part, playing online with friends. That was the way I figured I'd have the most fun with this game. I don't regret it, we got to laugh and complain together about this game.

I feel the performance issues cannot be ignored. Normally it wouldn't bother me in a turn-based RPG, however; this game also features an open world to explore. My motivation to actually explore is minimised when I feel like the frame rate is hindering my ability to explore at a reasonable pace.

Frame rate drops also cause battles to play slower, which was frustrating for me. It meant I ended up ignoring MOST wild Pokémon battles, and just focusing on main story.

Trainer battles were either a waste of time, or a waste of time. They often felt pointless due to the lack of indication of what level they'd be. They were either painfully low level that you'd get basically no merit for fighting them, or stupidly high level and would sweep your team. This is a problem because it basically is just waiting for the battle to be over either way. Thus, waste of time in most instance. It's one of those things I wouldn't even question if they weren't optional, but by making them optional and not labelling their general level range, it makes it difficult to find merit in challenging trainers at any point in the game outside of the beginning. You can get enough experience from battling or catching Wild Pokémon anyway.

Adding to the above, generally speaking none of the objectives had recommended level indications either. I initially thought the game might scale based on the order you tackle objectives in (since it does track your order), but that seems to not be the case.

Similarly, I don't understand why some lower level areas are found behind higher level areas, there's no reason you'd make it there without passing through a higher level area first, so there'd be no reason to fight anything in those areas.

There was one level ~40 or so Titan battle which was surrounded by level 20 wild Pokémon. It's really inconsistent and I'm not sure what they were trying to go for without proper labels for a recommended level or something.

None of the towns are interesting, and all but 3 of the gym leaders are forgettable. I've forgotten the names of most of them already, towns and gym leaders alike. However, I really like the Elite Four in this game, although I wish the champion had more presence.

Probably has one of the strongest finales in the series, unironically. Still, I love and hate this game equally. It cancels itself out.

EDIT: APPARENTLY YOU CAN RUN FROM TRAINER BATTLES??? This would've made my previous point about Trainer Battles being a waste of time much less of an issue lol, but the game never tells you this??? These games are so weird lmao

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the sixteenth best-selling video game of all time, the world's collective digital retreat from The Event. The Nintendo Switch is currently the fifth best-selling video game system of all time, and very well may overtake the Game Boy by the time it's discontinued. This game, and the Nintendo Switch, are each their own sort of Cultural Moment. A Social Phenomenon for millions of people.

I do not believe I have ever seen a Nintendo Switch, physically, in person, that was not my Nintendo Switch. That's all.

"I Chose More...I Chose The Impossible...I Chose Rapture."

It all began with a plane crash and a lighthouse... BioShock has one of the most marvellous openings of any recent video game. Taking the bathysphere down to the depths and witnessing Rapture in all its Art Deco glory is something that anyone who’s played it will remember. It’s a false promise of freedom and a threat of unimaginable violence.
Playing as Jack, this outsider, this mysterious figure, walks the streets of Rapture while Atlas whispers into your ears, asking you to kindly find the tyrannical Andrew Ryan.

The gameplay is slick, I’ve always enjoyed the way it plays, and I love that cutscenes are almost non-existent. It’s just you and Rapture, and although it’s a linear game, it feels so open. There are many standout moments, the mental and bizarre artistic savagery of Sander Cohen, the surgical violence and bedlam of J.S. Steinman, the lumbering hulks that are the big daddies, the quiet whispering of the little sisters, and many more wonderful locations, that will blow you away!

One of the best games ever made.

The best way to describe this game is that its more rewarding playing sections in vacuums rather than as a story. Like the demo for example is probably one of my favorite things ever, its tight, its well directed and theres real consequences to it. However i just simply don’t like the writing once david cAAAAAAAge starts trying to tackle racism, motherhood, and systemic oppression, it comes across as someone who just heard about the civil rights movement and was so touched they wanted to make a game about it. Which is a shame because i truly feel the game shines better as a noir game with connor and hank being the best part of the game, connor especially being the standout character here which is a shame because i want to like marcus and i enjoy when he dug himself out of the wreckage but the moment is ruined when you see they turn him into essentially video game MLK which feels so distasteful at times. Sarah (i believe) is just boring, nothing special to her but her actress was cute. Again connor is the best part of this game and i suggest playing the demo instead to get a better experience. At the very least as well i have to say connor and markus’ actors were 10/10, i need to see them in movies

Moreso than most games I've written about, it's hard to articulate my experiences with Grand Theft Auto V. As the best-selling action game of all time and subsequently one of the most recognized pieces of entertainment of our time, there's not much new ground to cover. No matter your issues with the game, it's consistently made billions of dollars.

As somebody who likes to write about the games in my free time, a part of me feels like it would be safe to stop there. But honestly, that's an attitude that feels almost antithetical to the points made ad nauseam through this game's narrative. Caught somewhere between an old punk band playing their greatest hits to an aging audience that sees them as part of the establishment they once rioted against and a new punk band taking the opening slot to a welcome applause from the same crowd, Grand Theft Auto V is both beholden to the dirge of the formula that its predecessors helped popularize and bolstered by the effort it makes to move away from what was becoming stale at the time. As a playground for destruction, it provides the requisite tools. It allows players to create goofy scenarios of their own accord without ever fearing that the player might veer off onto a course that isn't related to the narrative or a side quest of some sort. It's no Saints Row 2, but it actually runs at a stable framerate and is more readily available, so it's much easier to play nowadays. The two pillars of its sandbox, driving, and shooting, wouldn't exactly make compelling games on their own. Of the two, the driving is arguably better. But there's enough there that, if a team wanted to take what was there and morph it into something more small-scale, it would hardly be a fool's errand to get it up to snuff. Combined as they are in a massive open-world sandbox, there's enough there to provide hours of entertainment away from the main quest. The driving strikes a perfect balance between weightiness and floatiness, never absolutely embracing either camp but providing enough of the goods from both to create something simultaneously challenging and approachable to someone who's never picked up a controller before. The combat feels like a watered-down version of Max Payne 3 with the weapon wheel and abilities from Read Dead Redemption, which is to say that it mostly works but isn't anything spectacular. Watered-down or not, Max Payne 3 was a really fun game, though, and that shines through here. You won't be diving off of staircases or doing any of the crazy action moves that you did in that game, which I do believe makes this the lesser game. But in exchange for the replayability that hurdling yourself off a ledge in slow-motion while systematically slaughtering everyone around you offers, there's a wonderfully eclectic collection of weapons on offer. Not all of them have as much use as others; outside of the one mission where it's required, using a jerry can and then shooting the gas trail feels jankier than Postal 2, and I mean that with sincerity. Almost everything else, though, is lots of fun to play around with, in and out of story content. Where things do start to falter a little bit is that the open world content is too inconsistently interesting for a 100% completion playthrough to feel like anything but a massive chore. I know this is the kind of opinion that'll get me downvoted off of Reddit within a microsecond, but I honestly think Cyberpunk 2077 plays with its setting in more interesting ways. "Look around the world and collect a ton of things" sounds like a lot of fun until you realize that you have to collect 50 of the fuckers, and that's just one quest. It begs you not to be too goal-oriented while asking you to see if you can complete as many of its arbitrary goals as you can. And none of that would be a serious issue if the things you were collecting felt tangible in any way. A torn piece of a letter is a torn piece of a letter. You don't get to see the letter as you're putting it back together, and the game doesn't use the letter in any mysterious way that might interest you in collecting all fifty shreds. Going back to Cyberpunk, the one piece of its world that did feel like a massive checklist, mini-boss fights, is used to expand its setting. It's not enough that you've killed or incapacitated someone who was bugging out; you have to look around to understand why they went haywire in the first place so the person you're corresponding with can find better ways to help that person if you kept them alive. It's intriguing, builds on top of, and, in some cases, recontextualizes what you know while leaving a fair amount of the event to your imagination. If even one of the exhausting number of spaceship parts this game asks you to collect had something similar, I'd be going under bridges all the time. That's not to say that there isn't anything of the sort that's interesting here. There's a side-mission where the game asks you to find places that look eerily similar to screenshots sent to you so you can track down suspects. If the developers kept it at that level or tried to do something that wasn't just "find all of the stuff!" I wouldn't be complaining. But for fucks sake, you could at least make a murder mystery interesting without asking the player to fetch an endless number of collectibles for it.

And then there's the story.

I honestly don't know how to feel about Grand Theft Auto V's narrative. It's entertaining in a few areas, anti-climatic in others, and a bit too much of one good thing in-between all of the cracks left over by both. If you intend to spend 30 hours with a lighthearted action romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, you probably won't mind this. If you can't stand it when characters in a story are just stand-ins for whatever the writer's beliefs on society are and barely have anything recognizable past that, I don't have very good news to tell you. The three leads do manage to surpass this through the physical and vocal performances of the actors behind them, but I don't believe the rest of the cast fares any better. The best it gets is Trevor's drug buddies, but that's because Trevor is a fun character to play straight off of. Everyone else falls into this slippery slope where if everything is satirical, it starts to lose its bite. The main missions are at least pretty fun, even if it has the Rockstar problem of "every mission needs to have a shootout, and if not a shootout, then a car chase, and if not a car chase, then something monotonous to play off of your expectations of both." I don't blame anyone for never being bothered to see this game to its credits because, fun as that may be, it's a little too obvious in its structure. And that's not even talking about the other massive insecurity Rockstar's singleplayer games have struggled with since GTA III. The most fun moments I've had in Grand Theft Auto V's main stories have been when I've found incredibly arbitrary ways to fail. Planting a bomb on the door of a clueless janitor's home, not seeing him react to it when he gets to said door, and then blowing it up in his face is some Looney Tunes shit, and the game telling you that the obviously dead janitor was just "spooked" is never not hilarious. There are missions in Grand Theft Auto V where the game accounts for what the player is doing in a given situation; none of the fun ones are part of the main quest.

Once you've beaten Grand Theft Auto V and seen all you intend to see, there's not much to do outside of playing the aggressively monetized online mode. Except for using mods to swap all pedestrian models with Goku, replacing the textures of one specific building in the world with the shittiest looking McDonalds you've ever seen, replacing several of the ads in the open world with weeb shit, and then installing a mod menu to make every car start at a thousand miles per hour so you can steal a bus and make Speed 3 a real movie. Is that a run-on sentence? Probably. But I don't care. The modding scene for GTA games has always been out there, and it's no different here—which is why ennui runs through my system when I say you shouldn't buy this game if you intend to support the creators of such projects. In short: Fuck Take-Two Interactive. To elaborate, Take-Two Interactive likes to dick over its fans who dare to modify their game, seeing their contributions as blasphemous if they don't align with their corporate aspirations. It's ironic that I brought up Cyberpunk earlier because these motherfuckers would fit right in with that universe. But most ironic of all, the CEO of Take-Two said that his company would never release a game like that and that they're focused on quality, yadda yadda yadda. Less than a year later, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy—The Definitive Edition was pooped onto store shelves. Whoops! It turns out that when you talk out of your ass like that, people are less likely to trust anything you say going forward. Especially when you remove a lot of the wonderful work your fans are creating because you see it as "competition." What a sick joke!