I feel like I'm watching something die while playing this, there's something uncannily disturbing and also pathetic to it. 2077 is an aesthetically visionless game, a collage of 2012 cyberpunk wallpapers, complete w the thoroughly unexamined orientalism. Mechanically your options are the standard collection of Ubisoft open worldisms, pick up guns that are magically bigger number than the same gun you had an hour ago, pick up a collectable, talk to a guy to go to a base where you can either do shallow stealth or shitty shooting, and sometimes you might get to pick a dialogue option! Plus like every modern AAA game loads and loads of trivial terrible unskippable dialogue. Gave up after the third crash in 12 hours, lmao fuck this game. Remember when they put flashing lights in it that could kill people?

After fiddling with this game on and off to little success in my teens, I found an approach that worked for me: pick it up once every three years or so, beat one scenario, and put it down. This keeps me from burning out on the relatively slim amount of content (i.e. torturing myself with back-to-back Rune quest runs) and preserves the mystique of the intricate mechanics, the postmodernist style mashup, the cryptic staccato dialogue, all the stuff that makes Frontier special. The only character I have left is... Riki. (I doubt I'll play Fuse, since I've cleared four of the other characters on different platforms and I don't much feel like doing it again.)

Anyway, Lute blows, but everyone knew that already. See you in 2026!

Strong bones, weak flesh.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the kind of game where it’s a miracle that it’s as good as it is, and yet it still manages to fall a little short. Anyone attempting to make a follow-up to 1999’s Deus Ex couldn’t possibly realize what they were setting themselves up for — that’s how we got Invisible War, after all — and dominant design trends of the early-2010’s didn’t exactly set a suitable stage for immersive simulators. Contemporary stealth games had sucked ass for years, too; a stealth-y immersive simulator that could come out as anything other than hot garbage was going to be an accomplishment.

Under those expectations, then, Human Revolution is probably the best game it could have been. All media will inevitably become a product of its time, and I think Human Revolution managed to hang on a few years past what should have been a very early expiry date. There’s a weird unskippable walk-and-talk section in the opening moments of the game, most of the social commentary is delivered with the grace of a brick soaring through a windshield, clear budget issues present themselves through the mass (re)use and abuse of hubs; all of these are era-specific foibles. You can’t play Human Revolution today without immediately catching the stink of 2011’s triple-A conventions wafting off of it. That stink might also be left over from the piss filter that they wiped off the screen in the Director’s Cut version of the game. I’m not sure.

But Human Revolution mostly manages to hold up. The characters are strong — Adam Jensen has remained a breakout favorite for many, with his constant, gravelly rasping and catty attitude — the gameplay is largely fine, and the atmosphere is thick. The streets of Detroit and Hengsha can suck you into themselves like quicksand if you aren’t paying attention, filled with little crooks and crevices to explore and loot. Even paths that lead to dead ends still reward you with XP, so the act of exploring never feels like a complete waste. You’ve only got a few flavors of builds; you can go one of stealth or non-stealth, and one of lethal or non-lethal. There’s not much point to mixing and matching, and the game itself is woefully easy to get through regardless of which build path you take. At the very least, no option feels wrong.

While the earliest parts of Human Revolution are strong, the game starts to lose its footing a bit as it goes on. The second visits to Detroit and Hengsha swiftly devolve into little more than running from one end of the map to the other in a continued series of acts that feels like the game is trying to stall for time. The DLC boat chapter from The Missing Link has been forcibly rolled into the main campaign, and it’s shit. There isn’t much more to say about it than that. It’s a hyper-linear slog with twists you can see coming from a mile away, and manages to be the worst combination of "too easy to be challenging" and "too long to wrap up before it gets boring". The Missing Link now acts as a ridiculously tall speed bump in the late-middle of a game that’s already beginning to drag its feet, and whatever momentum Human Revolution had before it put you on the boat evaporates just in time for the final stretch to begin.

It’s certainly not a bad game, by any means, and the opening segments are far stronger than I remember them being. The game ends weakly, though, and that’s always going to feel worse than the inverse. This is the exact kind of project that I wish could have been made with a bit more time, a bit more money, a bit more freedom. As it stands, it’s still a competent follow-up to Deus Ex. It never could have been better than what came before it, given the climate that Human Revolution released in, but it’s an admirable attempt all the same. A few issues spoil it, but there’s nothing here that isn’t salvageable.

You can make Adam Jensen say he “never asked for this” to like four different people before the credits roll. It’s really cute seeing him make up his own catchphrase.

I just finished Naruto manga so I thought I would check this out since I got it on humble bundle at some point. I had no idea what this game was, i saw the first reveal trailer and thought it was cool, but didnt know what it was; I did assume it was a hero shooter thing (i was right).

There is like an hour of tutorials before you get to the real gameplay and that sucks. I played one round and it was a fucking clusterfuck of people doing shit and not really fun when not a clusterfuck.

Outside the gameplay this game is structured live service so you have to grind out Naruto characters to learn their ninjutsu and that fucking sucks. Then everything in the menus are just like not in any reasonable order. They will have Naruto/Sasuke/Sakura at the top of the list, then a bunch of blank spaces, then other characters. Then they aren't in any sort of order based on alphabetical, or chronological, or even relevance really. This fucking random order. The top section of the clothes store had Sakura, Sarada, and Sakura 2 outfit; then the bottoms section had Sarada, Sakura 2, and then Sakura. Then the fucking accessories had Goggle (Colour 5) then way later in the list had the rest of them. WHY. The loading screens have random characters together with no sorting either. It just honestly pissed me off.

Anyways, idk why you would play this over Ninja Storm or something.

Demon's Souls is, in a word, uncaring. A better word than 'difficult' as it loves to fluctuate between easy and hard, fair and unfair, long levels with shortcuts and long levels with no shortcuts. It is a hard game - and delights in putting you into particularly nasty situations - but it's one that, particularly with the help of healing items, can feel fairly easy to power through. Yet it all manages to fall into place; it's reasonable to muscle through but death will often set you back far more than any later, causing even the easier sections to become tense when they last too long.

Demon's Souls is, in a word, atmospheric. A game built to make you feel small, to make you feel threatened. As early in its world as the Nexus, towering and decadent yet disconcertingly empty. As early in its encounters as the Phalanx, as you bounce off its shell, step back and realise just how outnumbered you are. Boss monsters are more than just large enemies expected to be attacked and dodged like anything else, instead expecting you to find their weakness and exploit them; a method befitting foes of their size and strength. Its mood brought out fully by its soundtrack being subdued yet intimate, ominous, intimidating, and only breaking its mould for its greatest moment.

Demon's Souls is, in a word, bizarre. A world consisting of a strange selection of landscapes populated by even stranger monsters. Full of strange bosses, utilising strange mechanics that punish you in strange ways and demand to be approached as such. Backed by strange mechanics that affect your game in strange ways, which you won't even know or understand without looking them up. It's consistent and cohesive in its strangeness, and culminates in a curious and compelling world to explore.

Demon's Souls is, in a word, fantastic.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

Void Stranger is a 2D sokoban-style puzzle game. But maybe it isn't? But it is, right? Maybe the real puzzle all along is the puzzle of the game itself? Only the Void can answer that...

This game does a lot of things that I've only seen a few other games attempt, and it pulls them off dangerously well. It's an almost euphoric feeling to solve the seemingly unsolvable after hours of theory-crafting and coming to a greater mechanical understanding. Which isn't for everyone, but it IS for me - wow.

Absolutely play blind, and reach for the limits of your faith.

Theoretically speaking, it's not difficult to analyze and write out your thoughts on games whether it's a one sentence zinger that either hits or misses, or a 10,000+ page novel about how the early polygons obstruct your view of Venus or that the camera isn't competent enough to bring about the age of thermonuclear fusion.

It is however quite hard to articulate everything when the said game is your answer to the casual question of "what's your favorite game?", especially when an insane frog runs up and asks that same question with a gun to your head, eliminating any act of fence sitting thanks to platformers starring monkeys or hedgehogs. Needless to say, if I can do all of this without breaking out into emotional ramblings I'll be a better person for it. So I'll do the best I can.

If I had to take a haphazard guess as to why the original Spyro is my answer, it's that it represents basically everything I look for in a game. It's gameplay focus is a gliding mechanic that I feel takes full advantage of three-dimensional space. What Jumping Flash did for vertical movement, is what Spyro does for horizontal. Utilizing distance and scope is something I hadn't quite experienced in the capacity it was brought to me with playing as this purple dragon. I think the stage that best demonstrates this is Cliff Town, it's built to start you on the ground and have you ascend yourself to the tallest climbable building, only to glide yourself across the river and find yourself at the highest peak in which you use to fly yourself to the rest of the treasure on the other buildings. So, the mechanics are all good, and the stage design is also good.

That's not what I generally look for though, what I look for are the little things that make the game an experience and something that sticks with you for the rest of your years on this planet. Those things like clobbering green men with big dumb feet, rescuing dragons who bring you memorable quotes that you'll spout with zero context and baffle your friends with, and listening to a soundtrack brought to you by the drummer of The Police that perfectly captures the spirit of a cute little dragon who happens to also be as big of a badass as "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.

All of this while traveling through worlds with their own personality. Your home that acts as the beginning area with Gnorcs who at first are completely unarmed, a desert of old timey soldiers with big dumb hats playing catch between themselves with their cannons, and a mountainous region with an odd turf war going on between ice wizards, tornado witches, and.....green boys that shift the level geometry around. Challenge then ramps up with daunting platforming in the guise of poisonous swamps with cool cyberpunk Gnorcs, challenges to your courage in the form of nightmarish beasts brought to life with darkness, and baffling tests of exploration in a dreamscape of animated giant armors in a twist of evil knights attempting to slay the good dragon. All accumulating in fun with explosive barrels at a shipping dock, and a final challenge of the Gnorcs bypassing all fun and games for modern weaponry.

In Misty Bog, at the beginning there is a relaxing Gnorc with a box trap set up stationed behind your starting point. Herding the chicken to the left and towards that same Gnorc will have the chicken go under the trap, and the Gnorc will set it off and catch it, jumping for joy at his apparent dinner for the night. You can then promptly charge and cruelly headbutt him straight into the smelly waters of the bog, or you could leave him be and be nice to the very people who had been mean and attempting to stop you from rescuing your fellow dragons. The choice is yours.

You think it's nothing, but to me that is the little things that tend to be common in all of my favorites.

A lot of things can happen in 24 hours, let alone 25 years. It's more than enough to change someone in many ways for better or worse. If there is any constant for myself, it's that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze is still my favorite movie, and Spyro the Dragon is still my favorite game. Some things never change...

I never stopped believing in you Spyro.

About as perfect as a game has any right to be. It takes what made the original amazing and improves every aspect of it. The introduction of Crimson Head zombies makes every room in the mansion scary throughout the entire game. Having expert modes like Invisible Enemy mode is something other survival horror games should have borrowed in the future, it rewards the player for perfecting their strategy to a point of knowing where enemies will be in rooms before they enter. One of the best games ever made, and the best survival horror game ever.

Played with FallenGrace.

Dimension Shellshock sends you - and god willing, several other players - through various arenas based on other Turtles properties, like a Comix Zone inspired take on the Mirage comics or 8-bit zones that are clearly nods to Manhattan Project and the Game Boy games. For someone suffering from TMNT brain rot (like me!), there's probably enough here to justify buying it for eight or ten bucks. Addicts like to make excuses for what they're doing, it just a fun quirk of theirs.

For everyone else, I'm not sure it's really worth even the inconvenience of reinstalling Shredder's Revenge. Survival mode is serviceable, but feels a bit sloppy and underbaked. During our first few runs, Grace and I were not given power-up prompts and so were left scratching our heads as to what stuff like an evil laughing face meant versus a canister of ooze with Bebop's mug on it, but even when not glitching out, some features and mechanics are not particularly intuitive and resulted in us asking what something did a bit too often.

Newcomers Usagi Yojimbo and my wife Karai are excellent, and similar to Sonic Mania Encore, feel more valuable than the mode they're packed with. The sprite art for both of these characters is fantastic, even if someone on the development team clearly had a preoccupation with Karai's ass. I do appreciate that her defeat sprite leaves her in the Peter Griffin death pose until everyone moves on to the next round, at least. The additional color palettes are also good, I especially like the Game Boy and NES ones, and it doesn't take that much effort to unlock a character's full swatch, though the leveling system does mean you'll likely want to stick with one or two characters if you want to make real progress in the actual game mode.

I still had a good time with it, but I can't help but feel this pseudo-roguelike survival mode could've been dialed in a bit more, and I think I would've much preferred new campaign content, especially if it went with the same dimension-hopping motif.

During the whole Dracula bit I could feel my brain rotting away as I laughed my ass off at the absurdity of it all. I don't think a game ever made me feel like that and I very much doubt that any other will manage it going forward.

The mid-two thousands and the early 2010’s could be considered the what I like to call ‘’RPG-Maker Horror-Narrative Golden Age’’; that’s not say that there haven’t been any games done with the variations of the engine since, games like Omori and even the Fear & Hunger duology quickly come to mind as two great examples of how recent RPG Maker made-in games can still bring something new to the table of the broader indie scene, but even those games are of an entirely different breed. Experimentation was the name of the game, even if there were your usual and classic RPG suspects, the most prolific games from that era are ones that broke de bounds of conventional RPG’s and explored different ways of telling a story beyond the limitations of the turned based combat structure. Sure, a ton (and I mean A TON) of low quality games spawned in this time with the hopes of jumping into the horror bandwagon, and some games are just plain tasteless and don’t really deserve being in the discussion, but even with this overabundance of low effort, the stars that explored the frontiers of narrative-focused gameplay, isometrical horror or just doing whatever they thought it was interesting: Yume Nikki (A game which also inspired an entire sub-genre of fan-games alone), Ib, OneShot, Mad Father and even more polarizing works like To the Moon are all examples of varying results of this; some noteworthy, some are a couple of the most important games of the whole millennial, and in cases like OneShot, some of my personal favorites. It’s also worth mentioning that around this time there was also the presence of ‘’comical/parody’’ games, most of these are generally products of their time and basically time capsules for memes and internet culture for all those years back. My point with this terrible info-dump is to say that it was up to each developer/s what to make, and how most of the best RPG Maker games focus on one thing at a time and thoroughly explore it, and the results mostly being phenomenal… anyway Space Funeral is a game were you kill ghosts by using old movies, the final boss questions the conditions of perfection and how that can tear minds apart, and a Djinn turns you into a fish…so yeah, it is a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit weird…

To be honest, and considering I just spat out the most boring Ted Talk possible about the RPG Maker indie scene, it’s only fair that I mentioned that Off (A game which I have yet to play) explored the base ideas of Space Funeral two years prior, that being focusing on bizarre world with and unconventional world and more involved combat compared to its contemporaries, but you see, the difference lies in that, whereas Off used its comedy and bizarreness as a more direct exploration of the fourth-wall and the relationship between protagonist and player, Space Funeral is just FUCKING BATSHIT CRAZY, to a level that I cannot make any funny remarks about it! Like, what I’m gonna say about the fact that you companion is a horse made with horse legs? It’s just a bunch of horse legs, I cannot make the absurd even more absurd! I CANNOT EVEN MAKE FUNNY PUNS WHEN THE MAKE ALREADY DOES THEM FOR ME, THIS GAME IS MY KRYPTONITE, I CANNOT STUPIDIY THE ALREADY DUMB OH GOD HELP M-

This game is, and looking at reviews from different places I’m glad that this notion is accepted, stupid, it’s an incredibly stupid game, so it might perplex you when I also say that this may be one of the most clever games I’ve played in all the year. It’s an unabashedly stupid piece of art, from the moment you open it is gross as it is beautifully dumb; a nonsensical world with no rhyme or reason, mind-boggling lay-outs and maps that have the colors of skunk vomit, characters that are as repulsive as they are comically sincere (seriously, everyone in this fucking game is so direct that reaches absurd levels, and I’m all in for it), the music ranges from pretty good sounding midis to absolute crazy tunes and possibly quite the scariest track I’ve heard in a while and sprite work that is either actually pretty cool and detailed or the most made-in-paint thing you’ll see in your life. It’s stupid… but the game perfectly knows it is. And by that I don’t mean that there’s a huge twist and it becomes super ‘’meta’’ and turns out the brain rot had a point, no, Space Funeral does tackle interesting themes and we’ll get to that, but from beginning to the very end, this game is non stop absurdity, even if it moments were it seems like there should be a more serious moment or the tone should shift, the game manages to still become a joke about itself: the fucking final boss has an incredibly interesting speech, and it decides it to end with the monument of a phrase that is ‘’Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven….. motherfuckerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!’’. You know that friend that sends you stupid unfunny memes but you both now they are stupid and that’s where the ironic hilarity comes from? Now imagine if that friend did LSD and also was Socrates. That is Space Funeral. A game so content with its own foolishness that you cannot do nothing but be marveled by it, so… itself, unlike anything there could be at the time, both script wise and visually, it is one of those RPG Maker games that decided to do whatever it wanted, but it went far beyond I could had possibly imagined. There’s a reason I opened this review talking about the Dracula bit, it’s the perfect mixture of funny and uncomfortable that Space Funeral pulls off so well time and time again, and it’s what makes it so distinct and what made me so incredibly sad that I didn’t play it sooner.

It's even unconventional on how it tackles its themes; I originally thought that this game would be about maybe grief, considering the title, the main character’s sprite and the abundance of skulls and coffins, but that couldn’t have been further away from the truth, and in fact you could argue that it mocks tackling that subject at a certain point! Instead, Space Funeral seems more interested on focusing on battling a criminal lord drawn in paint using Bibles, going to the CRAP store and catching elves, you know, your usual Space Funeral stuff, but it does show snippets of a larger theme in some spare moments, and it all culminates with the ending. Remember when I said that didn’t go ‘’meta’’ at any point? Well, that was both a truth and a lie. Space Funeral seems to seek to tackle not only what ‘’perfection’’ truly means and implies, but the relationship between a creator and its work. I don’t want to get too much into spoilers, but this game does leave on a very interesting note without fully breaking the fourth wall, and even if the result seems to be made better in other games and it feels like too little to late, it was something that I really wasn’t expecting, and hey, maybe the fact it feels rushed or a bit unfocused it’s the point, you never know with this game.

The only thing I have real issues is the combat, not because it’s bad, mind you, and in fact for a game that lasts an hour, it manages to make its encounters feel nuanced and impactful: there’s a huge number of options and skills, a lot of equipment you can find for both characters and it’s very rewarding to learn fast and defeat enemies with the tools the game gives you. However, it’s still a fairly easy game, which I normally wouldn’t have much of a problem with, but that and its short duration made it so there was never a real point where I felt like I needed to use all of my tools or think that strategically, aside from the usual defense drop or heal, and it’s a shame ‘cause the combat seems like a part of the game that was made with genuine intent to be more complex and interesting, but sadly it’s probably the most mind-numbing part about the whole thing.

But, if anything, I’m still ‘’mind-melted’’, Space Funeral reminds me of why I adore exploring weird yet fascinating worlds, and how absurdity and surrealism can make a work so incredibly enjoyable, funny, and even… lovely. That is a weird adjective to use with the game, but hey, the game itself is weird…

… so it kinda fits, huh?