It's an okay stealth game that's worth playing once. But the issues go a lot deeper than just smaller levels and no rope arrows.

The worst design decision in this game was not committing to either first person or third person. The game tries to have both and it results in wonky sluggish movement because Garrett now has a physical body. The infamous floating Garrett bug was extremely irritating.

Most of the levels are fine but unfortunately nothing compares to the first two games. Even the famed Cradle wasn't quite as shocking as I expected it to be. It certainly had a potent vibe, but I expected to be more scared by what is apparently one of the scariest levels of all time. But maybe it really was back in 2004. I found some of the levels in Thief 1 scarier personally. In my opinion the seaside manor is the best level in this game.

Exploring the city between missions was a cool idea but this game had too many limitations to flesh it out properly. It became a tedious trek after the first time.

The story wasn't as good as the first two games and I already struggle to remember some of it, while I can recall the first two games' stories perfectly despite playing Deadly Shadows more recently than them. I was happy to get a definitive conclusion to Garrett's story though.

4 stars for actual game but im gonna have to give it half a star because my playthrough was ruined by fromsoftware elitist fans who have been ableist and stupid as shit to disabled people asking for an easy mode or using summons.

I genuinely will never interact with anyone who says "youre bad if you use summons" i do not give a shit, yes its easier and you can say the boss is boring now, but i dont give a shit. I cant play games like elden ring without help because im fucking disabled in my prominent hand so having to make my fingers work and do everything needed to beat a boss drains me mentally. Oh and thats not even it because there will always be that one mentally unwell basement dweller who says "git gud"

This game felt like it was 1000 hours long to 9 year old me. Thats a shit ton of podracing. Why did I do so much podracing?? I must have raced through the ceramic mosaic water world of Choot Chumba 100 times, somehow enthralled and also bored to tears as I piloted Kirtl Jonkta and his giant twin swamp cooler ass pods. I raced through the battle marshes of Terkwue, served my sentence in Anikins home desert of Bhutupo-3, and washed through the magma halls of Mount Dooq, all for a chance to unlock Darth Vader, the only Star Wars character anyone really cares about.

But in all honesty I do think I gravitate to Star Wars alot more when its focusing more on the “Star” and less on the “Wars”. Pod Racing isnt exactly the most mystical or sexy thing in a Jedi universe, but it actually presents an interesting cultural exposee with the fact that pod racing itself is an exotic popular sport. You race on planets that dont typically feature in Star Wars media and get a more involved look at how these societies might construct themselves - in some cases you can even see how they engage with the sport itself through contestant racers. Its alien Gran Turismo and thats still got more going for it than regular Star Wars.

I had a longer review written, but... Hmm...

There's this interview that plays in my head a lot. Someone brings up how popular Zero (a dashing genderweird character introduced in 6.1) is and Naoki Yoshida - the game's producer, director, and member of Square Enix's board - awkwardly mumbles out that he didn't quite expect people to love her so much.

This is innocent on the surface, but to me it was a huge head tilter at the time.

See, FFXIV has a problem with misogyny. Whether it's inconsequential shit like "Minfilia polled terribly with players, so we killed her and turned her into a mcguffin", Yotsuyu's weird allergory for comfort women turning sour in Stormblood postpatch, Ysayle/Moenbryda (self-explanatory), the double standard invoked with the fates of Fordola compared to Gaius Baelsar, the incredible overuse of sexual assault references in dialogue up until late Stormblood, or Lyse getting written out of the story because people hated her, there's a lot to chew on regarding misogyny.
It's sort of a "joke" (insofar as banal reality can be humorous) among woman-liking FFXIV fans that pretty much any new woman introduced will probably either die or be written out. Venat implicitly (in the Japanese text, explicitly) being denied reincarnation while the setting's equivalent to Super Hitler gets to constantly appear in flashbacks was just the nail in the coffin.

I bring this up because 6.5 is bad. It's not bad in the same ways 6.0 was bad - Natsuko Ishikawa's uncomfortably Imperial Japan sympathizing fingers are at a minimum barring 6.4 - but it's bad in more banal, eyebrow-raising ways.
To avoid burying the lede: 6.5 smacks of both swift, lazy rewrites and also creative sterility.

After 5 patches of overwritten, backtracking-padded, unsatisfying buildup, 6.5 just dispenses with most of the stakes and conflict to say "Beat Zeromus and Golbez will be a good guy!". You get an admittedly decent trial out of it before Zero abruptly becomes a Paladin with little fanfare (mirroring Cecil's iconic moment from FF4, but terrible) and surprise Golbez is a good guy.
Zero thanks you for your friendship and aid, before declaring that she's going off to the same not-relevant closet as Lyse and demanding you don't ever come knocking for her.

Honestly, as an aside: XIV's format is killing it. There is no real reason for 6.4 to not have the Scions immediately leap in to fight Zeromus other than the devs needing to do another patch. It sucks so much.

"Zero was intended to die but they changed their mind last minute" is, at the time of writing, a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, it's a believable one.

What's really telling to me, both about the void arc's development and also the reception Endwalker got, is that this patch opens with an incredibly lazy and overbearing Shadowbringers nostalgia trip. Needing Light for a storyline that should've ended last patch, you and Zero hop over to the First and meet all of your Shadowbringers friends! Hurray!
Except... Look, even putting aside my negative bias (I consider Shadowbringers the worst XIV expansion) it just reads incredibly poorly. It's an abrupt plot stopper, is mostly unvoiced filler dialogue/quests that serve no purpose than to tug at the player's nostalgia, and genuinely does not matter at all until the very end.
This is alarming, at least to me, because they did this after Stormblood (an expansion Japan infamously despises to this day) what with the sudden surge of Ishgard/Heavensward references and Aymeric being your BFFL all of a sudden in Ghimlyt, the nuking of Stormblood plot threads in Shadowbringers, plus the very abrupt resurrection of Zenos and the sudden announcement of a whole event centered on Ishgard - the first and so far last of its kind.
Lastly, the dungeon of this patch is a cheap rehash of Amaurot but because nobody gives a flying fuck about the storyline it has all the impact of picking up a plate with a towel and it sliding back into the basin.

All of this combines into a package that, honestly? Pisses me off personally. The Void and everything around it has long since been one of the most int- [remembers what games I'm talking about] least boring parts of the setting and it's essentially gelded, its sole promising voiced NPC neutered, all to... idk, shove the single remaining plot thread from pre-Ishikawa days in the trash and move onto Dawntrail?

Other reviews have said it already and I'm adding my voice to the chorus: I think FFXIV has went on too long.

I only have so much tolerance for drab cutscenes with the same canned animations, the same WoL responses, the same bad audio mixing that feels like mics are about to peak, the same annoying placid and uninventive BGM that I've been hearing since 2013. I have even less tolerance for quest design that hasn't changed since I left education - and it was the same when I went into it!

I want to lie and say that maybe Dawntrail will be better, but... Will it?

I forgave a lot of XIV's bullshit because the writers had a series of curtains drawn that I was eager to peek behind.

The curtains are open now, and despite my hopes they are indeed blue.

Will Dawntrail be any good? Will it deviant from dungeons/trials at odd levels, playing Machinations whenever it's safe to skip a cutscene, overly choreographed duties that're aimed at people who have panic attacks when asked to use tank stance, mediocre writing which betrays the writers' uncomfortable opinions on Imperial Japan's colonization efforts, and music which occasionally rises above "fine" but is mostly just forgettable BGM unless you're in a duty?

Beats me.

[The review has functionally ended here, I'm now just talking to myself.]

I've seen a lot of comparisons to TV shows and the MCU when talking about how exhausted FFXIV's formula is, and while I agree to an extent (I am an ex-Red vs Blue fan.) I think with games it's actually worse.

I alluded to it up above, but games being tired and going on too long is far more noticeable than in other mediums besides maybe music (shoutout to BFMV for making Fever for a decade straight).
It terrifies me that FFXIV is somehow one of SE's top earning games (barring this year, where their MMO division lost money for the first time in a while) but it feels so cheap. The same animations, the same music, the same format. For a decade, nothing but empty field areas and inconsequential yellow quests and 3 alliance raids and 12 normal raids and Hildebrand and five post-patches. A trial before you hit level cap, then a back-to-back dungeon and trial. Main leitmotif for the final boss. Final boss is a well intentioned extremist.
Over and over and over...

It's strange, too. I've recently gotten super into Granblue Fantasy, and it feels like a mirror into a better world. A better FFXIV. It, too, is a decade-spanning pseudo-MMO that's had to deal with the pains of being a GaaS title, yet it's managed to innovate within itself. Fights only get cooler and cooler as time goes on, characer kits manage to be relatively interesting without being a straight upgrade to existing characters (though these still exist), their writing has matured from its infancy, and the art/visuals/music only get better every month.

Sure, it has gacha money, but FFXIV is one of SE's top earners, yet it feels cheaper than some games I've played that were literally made by 10-15 Chinese folks in a shed.

I don't actually think CBU3 are entirely to blame. They are absolutely to blame for XIV's weirdly conservative stances on things, bad writing, and overexertion of creative control (STOP FORCING SOKEN TO MAKE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.), but I think most problems I've talked about here can be traced back to both the very strict "5 post-patches, then an expansion every two years" shit and chronic mismanagement/underfunding.
I know Naoki Yoshida is everyone's parasocial best friend who can do no wrong, but c'mon. Fumbling FF16 despite having infinite Mainline Final Fantasy money can't say anything good about his capabilities.

As I wrote this all out I found myself longing for Stormblood. I don't like Stormblood (or anything in XIV anymore, really, I just came back to get my IRLs prepped for Dawntrail) but...
Hm.
I don't know how much the devs really care about FFXIV, especially as Yoshida continually looks more withdrawn and disinterested with each fanfest, but as a simple end user it just feels like Stormblood was the last time they were firing on all cylinders. The duties were great - in side content especially - the field areas were gorgeous, the music had so much flavour compared to ShB and EW's morose slop, and for just a brief moment in this game's gargantuan lifespan I was actually interested in where the individual location plots went.

I don't feel the same way about everything after it. Shadowbringers was, in hindsight, the developers panicking after Stormblood's reception and throwing the player into a world divorced of the icky plot threads/women they so despise, and Endwalker was Endwalker.

Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.

But when you offer the player a dialogue choice to voice their discontent at being forced to meddle in Tural's affairs, only for G'raha Tia to smile and tell you "nawwww it'll be fun :)" I can't help but wonder.

P.S: This patch was so bad I actually forget Vrtra was there, despite Azdaja being the instigating incident. Imagine.

It's hard for me to complain too much about my issues (glacial combat speed, massive RNG influence, questionable class balance) because I still mostly had a good time with this game. Early on it's a multilayered resource management game; proper attack placement and spell management is necessary both to avoid falling victim to attrition, and to make sure you don't spend so much money on healing that you can't afford the next set of gear. Once your party becomes strong (and rich) enough to break this dynamic, it shifts into a globe-trotting dungeoneering adventure more focused on labyrinthine dungeons, trying to blow through encounters as quickly as possible and not falling prey to that one encounter that can stunlock your entire party if it feels like it. It’s satisfying to realise that you aren’t actually in as much danger as you used to be, that your fighter can hit multiple times for some reason and blast any enemy into low orbit when they feel like it, and that there’s nothing stopping you stuffing 99 potions in your back pocket to make your white mage really sad for the rest of the game. The stripped-back presentation and story lets these mechanics bring your own personal triumphs and failures to the forefront as the driving narrative. Even something as simple as watching one of your party members hit level-ups a bit slower than everyone else can call back to that one time where they got instakilled or stunned for eight turns in a row three dungeons ago.

While I didn’t find the game incredibly engaging once the earlier parts were over since the combat itself never gets any more interesting (or faster), it's still hard not to respect it. Almost everything weird, dissatisfying or ‘loose’ makes a whole lot of sense if you consider there’s a good chance it’d be one of the first RPGs you played if you had it back in the day, and was likely designed around that idea. The fact that I was measurably underleveled despite fighting everything I saw is uniquely interesting if considering that failure could have been intended in its design - losing characters and running back to revive them means gaining more experience on everyone else in the process. And while it’s not a particularly hard game - speaking as someone who *was* measurably underleveled - a lot of the friction it threatens is probably far more present for someone playing an RPG for the first time. While I can’t say if the whole ‘built for new players’ assumption is actually true or not, operating under it makes the game come off as extremely confident in how it can make itself approachable without compromising the experience it's trying to provide. It’s a beginner-friendly game built to be able to onboard people into a simple RPG system, but it’s still a heavily player-driven adventure with a lot of room for failure and discovery.

Ishtar, my beloved...

I went into Shin Megami Tensei II immediately after beating the first game, which speaks to both my desire for more and my concern that waiting any longer would cause me to disharmonize with SMT's first-person perspective. The last thing I needed was to run around directionless and disoriented until I puked all over Valhalla. Okamoto doesn't need me to embarrass him like this, he's already on my ass for screwing around in weird VR programs.

Shin Megami Tensei II goes a step beyond being the best of the SNES trilogy-- it might be my favorite JPRG on the console. SMT1 was enjoyable enough for what it was, and I have some pretty mixed feelings about If..., but SMT2 is one of those games I think about several times a week and which I badly want to do a second run through, if only I could justify the level of commitment required against my bloated backlog. If you've been following me on this site, then you may either take that as high praise or a concerning sign of my worsening psychopathy.

LAW: This bit again. It's going to be a long review.

Ok, maybe it won't be that long, because while I do adore Shin Megami Tensei II, it is very mechanically similar to the first game. The most significant change is in the total number of available demons, many of whom have gone on to become franchise staples, like King Frost and (my wife) Ishtar. Mara is also here, if you're into that sorta thing. Are you into that sorta thing? Send me a DM if you're into that sorta thing

Shin Megami Tensei II is a sequel more in terms of scope and production and is otherwise structurally identical to the last game. You still want to spec towards using guns and roll with a team of Zio wielding demons, it remains the most effective path through the game. However, battles are more bombastic, faster paced, and benefit from some exceptional sprite art and imaginative character designs. Few battles from the first game stand out, and they're mostly tied up with major story beats, like the fight against Thorman (he's Thor, man) before the ICBMs launch, and the climatic battles against the Law and Chaos heroes. Conversely, I remember even the minor bosses of SMT2, like Betelgeuse, who is terrorizing a mine located outside a demon pasture full of demon bulls, and the 12 Shinshō who test Aleph's strength in Geburrah's maze. To me, they're just as impactful as the larger story battles against Kuzuryu and Satan.

CHAOS: I convinced Satan to stop running a concentration camp and radicalized him.

Alternate title: Ah shit, I'm lost in the Diamond Realm AGAIN!

Even the simple act of navigating through Shin Megami Tensei II's world remains largely unchanged from the previous game. You're still trapped in a first-person perspective whenever you're not in the overworld, and both dungeons and towns (which might as well be dungeons in their own right) are still fabricated from a small number of similar looking pieces that can make the adventure a bit disorienting at times. Everything I said in my previous review is applicable here, right down to the fact that I can't blame anyone for bouncing off of a game like this. Not only is it easy to get lost, you might do so within the first ten minutes given how much more open everything is. If you stick with it, however, you will acclimate and maybe, just maybe, you'll find yourself having a little bit of fun.

What sets SMT2 apart, however, is how involved some if its dungeons can be. This is going to be a love it or hate it kind of deal, either you're way into exploring caves full of imperceptible pits that must be used to carefully navigate between floors, or you won't. You'll either be screaming at your TV set every time you see yet another patch of poison tiles, or you'll do like I did and start cheering, jumping on your couch, and absolutely destroying everything around you as you're consumed with animalistic glee. I see a teleporter maze and I go absolutely feral with excitement.

Part of why I find this all so engaging isn't in any particular enthusiasm for these sorts of gimmicks on a mechanical level, but rather because Shin Megami Tensei II just sets this mood that makes it so easy to let go of all external factors and just sink in with the game. It's a bit of a hard one to describe, but anyone who has ever driven down the i15 at dusk on the tail end of a long trip probably knows what the general sort of atmosphere of this game is. A barren landscape colored in purples and oranges, brief glimpses of industrialized civilization in the distance, and hanging over you a distinct sense of loneliness, of fatigue, and anticipation. Yeah, it's another "George listened to a lot of Coast to Coast AM" game. Something about SMT2's world just got me thinking of Art Bell's home/studio, nestled out there in the desert East of the Rockies, stories of cryptids, aliens, and government conspiracies being shared under a blanket of stars.

As romantic as I'm trying to make this all sound, it mostly meant I was slipping around on greased up floors while trying to navigate a maze of invisible walls while Art, exacerbated, reminds everyone that he only wants calls tonight from time travelers. Lot of semi-truck drivers are time travelers; in case you didn't know. What an interesting profession.

Look, my brain is like, a single unopened slice of Kraft singles American cheese, I may be assigning a very specific Rocky Mountain-Far West vibe to this that doesn't necessarily apply (and almost certainly wasn't in the mind of the Japanese staff at Atlus who worked on the game), but it makes sense to me! And it's something I find vastly appealing and extremely Weatherby-core. Shin Megami Tensei II may not share the same atmosphere as Nocturne, but in terms of how deeply it resonates with me, it's pretty damn close, and that's saying a lot.

The larger cast of demons you can recruit also offers a lot more in terms of how you can alter your party's composition, and it helps both the Jakyou Manor/fusion and negotiation systems feel like they have more depth despite not changing fundamentally. You can also recruit human characters that appear in random battles, and I love their designs. I could pour over the concept art for the first two Shin Megami Tensei games all day, and in fact they're a huge point of motivation for me to get into coloring my own drawings, for which I began using (digital) copic markers due to their use in SMT's artwork. I'm not trying to plug my crap-ass illustrations, so much as I am trying to make a point that being inspired to improve creatively because you like a peice of media so much speaks to the sort of strength and staying power it has with you on a personal level, and boy is that true of me and Shin Megami Tensei II.

NEUTRALITY: Whoops! Your artificial messiah killed the creator god.

Shin Megami Tensei II's story is a lot more complex and involved than the first game, which itself was pretty threadbare but enjoyable despite its lack of substance. Set in the same universe as that game and following its Neutral Route ending, Shin Megami Tensei II takes place in Tokyo Millenium, the last known human settlement after the nuclear apocalypse that kicked off half-way through the last game. The former protagonist, known as "Hero," has been assassinated and his kingdom co-opted by YHVH and his four archangels, which have pretty much turned the whole place into a fascist state. YHVH wishes to pass his judgment upon mankind but first requires The Messiah. Growing impatient, three of the four archangels disobey YHVH's orders and create an artificial Messiah, Aleph, SMT2's silent protagonist. Instrumental though you may be, like in any Shin Megami Tensei game your fate is up to you. Maybe you do want to team up with your best friend Satan and ascend to space, fire a death beam from above and reign over what's left. Or perhaps you just think that god fella deserves a good punch to the nose instead. Uh, the choice is up to you or something.

There's a lot of really great beats that play out along your journey, like your rival, Daleth, getting zonked on a love potion and agreeing never to fight you again because he's happily married now and doesn't have time for that shit. A particular favorite of mine is discovering that Arcadia - a paradise that at a glance is too good to be true - is really just a simulation, and its inhabitants brainwashed husks jacked into VR. Shutting that shit down probably isn't good for them, but I did it anyway.

Tokyo Millenium feels like such a believable and unique place that it's a large part of why I want to go back and experience this game all over again. I just wanna spend some more time there, hit up a few bars, talk to some mutant babes, and who knows, maybe Luis Cypher will show up for a couple of drinks. Truly this is a place where everybody knows your name... They also want to kill you and take all your magnetite, but they have character and that's really what's important.

Unfortunately, I live in the boring old pre-apocalypse. Ugh. The last time I tried to make friends with a Jack Frost IRL, I got stuck inside a Dairy Queen walk-in freezer. Apparently Jack Frost isn't real, which is bullshit, and I wasn't allowed back there. Garbage.

But maybe if I get through my whole backlog then I can fire up Shin Megami Tensei II again and just... fade into its world. That sounds nice. I only have uh, 260 more games to play first.

I'm going back to the Dairy Queen and this time I'm bringing the Megido Fire.

Well, mathematically speaking, it's just as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure.

I didn't give Prey a fair shot back when it released. 2017 feels much further away than it actually is, so I can't explain exactly what had me so distracted that I couldn't invest myself in "the best immersive sim of all time," but those opening few hours didn't hold me. I found myself meandering around and bounced off right around the point where you do your first spacewalk.

But here's the thing, if you're friends with Larry Davis, you can't just be like "oh I didn't enjoy Prey." That doesn't fly. You'll start getting texts while you're out that are just pictures taken from inside your apartment, some of which show you sleeping. He lives halfway across the country, how did he get in there? When was he there? The only way to stop the threats is to acquiesce to his demands. Play Prey or else. I always negotiate with terrorists, I'm a huge coward.

And I'm glad I did, because Larry's right, this is (probably) the best immersive sim ever made. I do, however, have to dock points for not having any Art Bell, something Human Head's Prey has over Arkane's. I'm aware that these games are not related at all outside of a very ill-advised, corporate decision to cash in on Prey's red hot brand name, but the least they could've done is throw in a few Midnight in the Deserts as audio logs. Not a problem, I just played a few in the background while making my way through the wreckage of Talos 1, bashing Typhons with a gnarly looking wrench while listening to Art's guest drone on about collecting and selling Big Foot scat.

Art: When I was in high school I ate erasers. No erasers on my pencils. I guess you could call that a strange addiction. When I went to erase something, I'd just scratch through the paper. Mmm... Erasers. That flavor has faded as an adult.

Ah, the true Prey experience.

That omission aside, Prey checks all the right boxes for me. Talos 1 is a great setting populated by interesting characters and engaging side quests that command your attention from the mission at hand not because they supply you with a list of things to do, but because Arkane has crafted a world so interesting and so fun to occupy that you want to delve into every nook and cranny. I see a locked door and I find myself compelled to know what's inside, even though the last three rooms I busted into had like, a corpse with a single discarded lemon peel in their pocket. Why did they have that? Every body tells a story...

Some of those side quests are going to stick with me for a while, which is both a sign of solid character writing and good mission structure. The fake chef booby-trapping fabrication machines and entry ways after you let him go adds a fun twist to revisiting old locations and makes your revenge that much sweeter when you finally catch up to him, and it's hard to imagine what shape the end game would take if you ejected Professor Igwe from his derelict storage container and skipped his multi-part quest. Which, you know, I initially did because I wasn't patient enough to hear him out. It's fine, I had an autosave, Igwe is totally okay!

That's just the way I play these games, with a dozen backup saves so I can test the boundaries of every moral crisis my character finds themselves in. I'm the kind of dude who will release a Typhon halfway into an inmate's cell just to see what kind of reaction I can get while turning over the long-term consequences of pushing the big red button. Not enough mirror neurons in my head, that's my problem.

Early in the game, you're presented with a personality test, an ink blot, and several variations of the Trolley Problem. An excellent way to establish what Prey hopes to accomplish with the player long-term, as so much of the game is affected by the choices you make both on a macro and micro level. The ending you get is clearly delineated between one of two set paths, but how those play out on a more precise level is affected by the small choices you made along the way. Take that chef, for example. You did get your revenge, but what of his other victims? Did you help them? Did you even try to find them? And what of your brother, Alex? So much of what happens aboard Talos 1 is his fault, but does your love for him win out in the end? Can you condemn him to his fate, or will you spend 30 minutes trying to wrangle his limp body in zero-gravity because the game won't trip one of the god damn objectives, which are clearly bugged-- oh wait, shit... I put him in a grav lift and it snapped his neck. Problem solved.

One area where I deviated from my typical immersive sim habits was combat. I often build my characters around stealth and avoid direct confrontation, but the Typhon abilities you're given work so well in concert with your weapons that turning Morgan into a violent powerhouse felt much more satisfying. There are also a few "survival" modifiers you can toggle at the start of the game, and I went with allowing injuries and suit damage, but not weapon degradation, because weapon degradation always sucks and is not as fun as getting concussed and needing to take "brained pills."

These modifiers add an extra layer of tension to resource management, something you'll be doing a lot of as you lug around literal garbage in the hopes that you might be able to squeeze a few extra shotgun shells out of whatever hard drives and bananas you have on your person. Fabricators are far between in the early parts of the game, often requiring you to loop back to your office for resupplies, which is a smart way of teaching the player the ins-and-outs of the game's resource economy while drilling in how Talos 1 is interconnected.

Is Prey the best immersive sim ever? Look, it takes a very boring man to admit when he's wrong, but it may very well be. Everything from the setting and story, to combat and the larger ways in which the game questions the player's morality is fantastic. My only complaint outside of some technical issues like the aforementioned problem with tripping objectives and a few crashes/freezes on the Xbox version is that there's no Art Bell. A whole .5 off the top of the score, I'm afraid. What's that? Art Bell was dead at the time? Nonsense. If Arkane only opened up a time-traveler's line, they could've booked him. Not an excuse.

arriving late to the party is always so weird. i'm sure the FFXI many people used to love isn't there anymore. we now have Trusts for everyone so they can solo content, crystal and book teleports so you don't have to rely on airship and boat schedules, many many rewards just for playing, including gearsets at every level. its difficulty and commitment was definitely watered down over the years and i can see how that would frustrate older players, the ones that got here first.

personally, regarding games that have existed for a long time like this one, i think a healthy dose of detachment is good. i'm not one to pine for FFXIV's HW days even though i did start the game there, but i also remember how wildly different that game was and how some things do get lost when you try to make your game accessible to everyone. like, i say this as someone who hates to socialize even in MMOs because i'm hella shy, but i can understand someone who feels like the game has lost its socialization aspect. it was its big thing (tbh it was THE thing for MMOs in general) and i'm sure it started many great and terrible friendships just because the game forced you to communicate with others.

but the thing is, for me, right here and right now, what I found was an incredibly charming game, a game that still asks a lot of commitment from its players. while teleports do facilitate moving around, you still have to make many first trips on foot, by boat, going into dangerous territory. like, i leveled WHM so i had invisible and sneak for me and my bf in dangerous dungeons, but what about those who don't? people still ask for help in cities from time to time, because trust characters won't be casting these spells on you.

i really really want to talk more about what this game does, like how some NPCs only sell items to players if other players have sold that item to said NPC, having to select weird invisible menu options to be able to proceed with a main story quest that involves an underground organization, how racism is actually ever present in the interaction between every wildly different race in this game and how this affects the whole world (something XIV would never dare), how the beastman dehumanization issue is there right out of bat instead of 2 expansions in, how every job isn't put into a nice little box of role and instead just do plenty of different and interesting things, how all the different maps are actually populated by people because that's how you level up in this game, or how the stakes are always high because you can actually level down when you die.

this game definitely went through many many changes, but i feel like it's still itself at the end of the day: a PS2 MMO that asks a lot of who's playing, and i'm glad i took my time to meet its demands.

also love that the story puts a lot of importance in events that happened 20 years ago, i feel like we played this at the exact right time

I think Sion should have never been reworked. Imagine all these shonen protatgonists running around getting one-shot by a guy who looks like Klungo from Banjo Tooie. It would have been the funniest shit in the world.

I am going to confess something that will forever change our relationship: I love League of Losers. I started playing in 2013 and it was the most exciting multiplayer game I had ever played. I played a shit ton of games as Shen and Skarner and with friends it was electric. Eventually I went to college and, living in the corn fields of Iowa, the internet conmection on these Iowa campuses was so rotten that playing League online was simply not a possibility.

So, I spent a few years Not playing League, working full-time jobs that meant that after a brutal 9 hour shift I was NOT even interested in getting screamed at by a 16 year old Udyr in my chat. I briefly tried going back to the game in 2021, but this was the time Akshan was released and I found his kit despicable. Which is nothing new: every new champion is released hideously broken and able to solo games because that is how you sell them. But that overloaded kit? Give me a break.

But, you know what, you can't stop me from playing Renekton, so I have been playing it the last month and I have a couple thoughts about the game that made me reflect on it. My first thing is: How do new people get into League? It seems impossible. If you show even the slightest competency in a win you will instantly get paired against Team Smurf who will make you go 0/15/4 as fucking Kennen or something. If I was brand new and I saw Yasuo owning my team while my team unearthed ancient slurs to tell me to kms, I would say, "Ah, this game is for fucking morons." The fact Riot is so incapable or disinterested in figuring out the smurf problem or actually banning people who abuse chat is insane. It has been a problem since the day I joined the game and has not even moved an inch.

Riot's general ineptitude is it's own essay entirely. They are a poorly run Boys Club that fails at even the simplest of tasks when it comes to operating one of the largest games of all time, and half their financial model has to be based around smurfs buying Yasuo skins on new accounts because it seems impossible to me that new people successfully are retained. It's like the Burger King that is ALWAYS hiring because the pay is shit and customers are fucking morons.

The amount of rage in this game is kind of astonishing. For the record, I think shit talking opponents is fine. They are your enemy! Shit talking teammates is insane to me. No one's play has ever improved because they got told to hang themself in the most grammatically alien way every written. I had someone rage at me in ARAM once! The fucking casual mode! What is wrong with this playerbase?

So, my recommendation for any new player is: mute EVERYONE. Do not assume that something someone types in chat will be worthwhile. It won't be. Pings can do enough. Watch good players online play, and they will regularly communicate their thought process during objectives and team fights, and a lot of those thought processes can be applied to your own game. Do NOT pay for a fucking course for the love of fucking God. The game is about map awareness it is not rocket science save your money. You should also avoid bot lane, as bot lane in this game is the most useless role I have ever seen in a Moba.

Historically, the ADC was great at pushing lanes and snagging kills, but now EVERY champion is hyper lethal and mobile, so the fucking Ezreal dinking around bot lane is just a relic of the past. He will never help nor hinder your game; he is just a sitting duck fr. Your Zed or Lee Sin or K'sante are the ones who will carry you to the finish line due to their ability to explode enemies and not die doing it. Supports are also the whiniest, most pendatic fucking crybabies in the history of gaming. If you, as a level 1 Vayne, don't engage in the most brainded fight in history, they WILL rage and probably AFK. Botlane needs a severe rework because it is such a useless and not fun lane.

So, after ALL this crying, how can I possibly like League? The thing is that sometimes it all works. Sometimes it comes together and you get the kind of excitement and thrilling plays that define great multiplayer games. Sometimes you'll lane against bloated characters like Yasuo and Yone as Renekton and just blow them the fuck up with your empowered W. 200 years of game design vs. a Pissed Off Crocodile. I wish there more beast characters being made, as every new champion is designed to appeal to Main Character Syndrome in ways we haven't yet seen. So just shutting those Main Characters down with really simple characters like Ren and Garen? M'wah, perfecto.

Other complaints: Voice actors are terrible anime dub actors. Mute them instantly. Nasus and Renekton sound awesome though. Unmute them. Whoever designed Akshan should be sent to a prison camp, and I'm not just saying that because my Akshan mid the other day AFKd after dying once since it prevented him from being the Main Character. Riot is so bad at making a game that they are still making it 10 years later.

Play it if you dare.

Man, I'm in a real rough spot. Family members are getting older and sicker, I'm overworked, not getting enough sleep... I need a real pick-me-up, something that's easy to play and has a lot of charm. Help me, Hello Kitty!

Gets cracked in the nose by a disc travelling at 95MPH, completely caving in my facial bones.

hello kitty ,why. ..........?

Like Tetris Battle Gaiden and Windjammers, Sanrio World Smash Ball! is a game I was first exposed to through Giant Bomb, where it ended up in their rotation of competitive multiplayer games on more than one occasion. And I can see why. Even sticking to the single-player mode, Smash Ball's head-to-head Breakout-inspired gameplay is addictive, and in its later stages, weirdly demanding.

You have precisely two moves: hit disc and hit disc harder, and while the early game is such a breeze it can be played on autopilot, the later stages will see you smacking that disc around an inch from your opponent's faces - which the stage itself is designed to resemble, as if Keroppi's smug visage was there to mock you - all in a frantic bid to keep it from your side of the court, which has progressively been designed to put you at a disadvantage. This is still a kid's game at its core, so the difficulty never excels to the point of brutality, but there's a curve here that keeps Smash Ball surprisingly engaging.

I hope one day I can find someone willing to sit down and actually play Sanrio World Smash Ball! with me, I think that'd be cool, I wish I had friends like Hello Kit-

Gets hit in the mouth by a charged shot that ricochets off of and back into my teeth several times

uuugh i thinki n eed to go to the hompsital

A strong argument against this lingering notion that many gamers seem to have that a fan-made “fixed” remake, remaster or otherwise invasive revision of a game that actively changes core aspects of its identity should ever be taken in as a first impression of, or worse replacement for, an original work of art. And to be perfectly clear, I don’t believe that on any step of the development and production of Black Mesa that Crowbar Collective sought for this to be the intent nor the response to their work. Above all else, Crowbar are very obviously fans of Half-Life, and that passion shines through even from an outside observation of the time, effort, and communication the team put into creating this reimagining. I am also a big fan of Half-Life. That is, a big fan of Half-Life, the 1998 game. The other titles in the franchise haven’t ever quite worked for me the way the first one did, but I can of course acknowledge their very real and important place in both the history of Valve Software and of course the greater gaming industry and its progress at large. With that in mind, the permeating thought I simply couldn’t get out of my head with every later-entry-adjacent puzzle, every bombastic music cue, every chopped-in tie to the later Half-Life series, was that the developers and I were fans of the original game for flat out contradictory reasons.

I would say that I overall had a fairly good time with Black Mesa, but if I were to go down the list of pros and cons of the experience and then proceed to skin that list of the stuff provided by the original Half-Life, I think the list of positives is rather short. I’d like to address those first, because I want to come off at least somewhat positive about an experience I overall… liked. Some of the supplementary radio dialogue did well to add context without feeling invasive to the tone of Half-Life, especially late into the HECU breach as the Xen aliens begin to take over the rest of Black Mesa. I was happy to see the entire Half-Life tool-kit accounted for - Black Mesa was not so revisionist as to excise a weapon or two for the sake of streamlining the experience. Most play rather well but I do feel a greater imbalance was created leading players to favor the shotgun and SMG, which while fun to use shouldn’t and didn’t feel as overwhelmingly obvious selections in most scenarios in the 1998 title. I think the initial Tentacle encounter is probably a little better than the original game as far as detection of sound makers. For all the many, many issues I would have with this game’s take on Xen, I will admit that the abandoned base early on was really cool and felt in line with something the original game could’ve done tonally. And… that’s about where my Black Mesa-specific positives end, unfortunately.

I wish I didn't even need to acknowledge technical problems, but the loading times were worse than the original, my saves got corrupted like four or five times through a single playthrough, and sometimes flags just didn't work several times in a row. Much as I'd love to say these were my biggest issues with this project, sadly they're more of a negligible piece sitting in front of my actual, core problems with Black Mesa.

The overwhelmingly tone-deaf approach to reimagining Half-Life that plagues Black Mesa makes almost every change hard to swallow. I feel as if Half-Life was treated as a game to be ashamed of its own unique tonal identity in the execution of Black Mesa, given how many changes were contingent to keeping pace with the rest of the lesser entries of the series which would follow. And even then, I certainly can’t say that Half-Life 2, Opposing Force, or any of the other entries got nearly as bombastic and maximalist as this. Epic gamer metal tunes blast through previously alienating and uncomfortable hallways and gauntlets. Previously quiet and pensive strolls are stopped in their tracks for far less meaningful interactions than those they emulate from Half-Life 2. Tense, brief, but memorable boss encounters are stretched to the point of nearly a fucking hour at their very worst - frankly, the Gonarch encounter is embarrassingly bad. The entire heart and soul of some of Half-Life’s most curious locations is sucked out and spat out - is this supposed to be Xen, or application art to work on the next Avatar film? It’s frustrating how passionate this piece of art is, because there’s clearly a lack of mutual ground I share with why the game it’s trying to reimagine is so special.

Over twenty-five years after the original release of Half-Life, it remains my favorite first-person shooter ever made. It’s just as fresh, just as alien, just as unique as it was in 1998. Thanks to a massive rewrite of the sequel from its original 2001 concept and the subsequent influence it would have on both the remainder of Half-Life as a series and the greater market of first-person shooters, Half-Life remains one of a kind. There really is nothing quite like it. Black Mesa takes that ball, runs with it, and proceeds to make it feel more and more similar to everything else out there. The game is reimagined, but the heart is lost in the process. And no amount of polish can piece that together once it’s scrubbed out. That’s just my take on it, though. I really do send all the hardworking and passionate individuals at Crowbar my earnest congratulations. I respect the dedication, the execution, the grind. It clearly impressed Valve well enough, too. Keep making games, no matter what. Don’t let my equally passionate love for Half-Life put your flame out.