I didn't feel like editing all my notes so this one's coming in hot

the menus, ui/ux, and maps are nothing short of awful and the emphasis on fast travel, witcher vision, and waypoint markers make starfield one of the least convincing game worlds in recent memory. an endless sequence of vacuum sealed content boxes strung together by constant menus, loading screens, and teleporting, and bolstered on all sides by hundreds of procgen wastelands full of crafting junk

it's frustrating that there's something here I think I could like, but it's completely obstructed by design decisions that only make sense if your first and last priority is scale. aside from some dungeons and sidequests it feels like your only options are to be led by the nose like a dog or left to wander nothing areas for the rest of your life. a critical bug had me chasing my tail for over an hour on one of the essential planets and I was bored out of my brain so I can't imagine how sterile the non-essential ones must be

can't weigh in much on the RPG side of things cos I barely saw it in 10+ hours. it's like a cryptid where people keep swearing it exists but I'm still not convinced. can say that the dialogue options I've seen aren't too far off from the YES / YES (SARCASTIC) / NO (YES) we know and love from FO4 tho. writing doesn't go full head trauma this time around as quickly but everyone's a Quip Bastard or a block of wood so it's kinda six of one half a dozen of the other. the most memorable moment was when heller went chris dorner on the new atlantis police department unprovoked, but somehow I don't think that was what bethesda intended

perks/skills are as lifeless as expected. 10% more damage with shotguns or 10% damage with pistols or 10% damage with energy weapons or 10% damage with rifles or carry 10 more pounds or have 10% more health or..... zzzz

less I say about space and ship combat the better. everyone knows it wouldn't be better handled through a menu, but what this review presupposes is... maybe it would?

all in all it's a mess. bethesda's signature open world fractured and dashed across the stars; a marriage of some of the worst aspects of both pre and post morrowind eras with a slew of new unforced errors added to the mix. modders will fix what's fixable, I'll keep drinking that garbage, and the world will keep on turning

can't wait for skyrim 2

nothing embodies this experience better than the 1-2 punch of the loopy arthouse perfume commercial intro followed almost directly by the mcdonalds ass "595839122 deaths served worldwide" advert in majula

on one hand we got a game with the foresight of a haruspex that envisions the ever-escalating arms race the series would find itself in and tries to preempt it with radical mechanical changes, and on the other we got a game that thinks Rat With a Mohawk is a really sick idea for a boss

this thing is the living end; the result of a wild disregard for anything fans consider sacred and a critical eye that found dark souls' core pillars wanting. given the chance to do a remix/remaster they chose to ignore all feedback, double down on all the bullshit, and name it SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN like it's a terrence malick movie. the haters never had a prayer against this kind of power

oscillates between achingly beautiful and sandy petersen's work on doom II. presents characters as haunting as vendrick and lucatiel then goes and reskins dark souls' most emotionally resonant encounter as ripper roo. both modern fromsoft's most melancholic, human game, and the only one where you're forced to play as an absolute mutant

I'm at the point where I'm glad the lighting got downgraded before it came out. it should be fucked, it needs to feel sickly and eroded and wrong. iron keep has to be something you can't understand, and the transition from shaded woods to drangleic castle has to be as disorienting as possible. every time you question the earthen peak elevator I only grow stronger and more insufferable

this is the response to a call no one made. it's gotchas behind gotchas behind gotchas, noble failures, bandai namco PTDE marketing quotes, and fromsoft's most indulgently experimental design since demon's souls. it's the bondage gimp door, the gender swap coffin, npc invaders modeled after the most dickhead player behaviour possible, and the cumulative psychic damage of the frigid outskirts

it's fighting the rotten four times to skip half the game, becoming drangleic's next top model, and having NAMELESS CHAD kill you while you idle in iron keep. it's backstep iframes, powerstancing demon hammers, unbelievably good pvp, and yui tanimura's masterful turn as director of the dlc trilogy

talk all the shit you want:

a lie will remain a lie

proud repulsion; the wriggling extremities of capital and hyperneurotic shoot-to-kill police horror viewed thru a queasy dutch angle. the malignant hypnotic wave of the gig economy, conditioned response, consumer slop, microplasticked newborns, get-rich-quick schemes, and salacious newsreel highlights as accelerated further thru nihilistic excess

indebted to bataillean self-laceration and mystic economism; transformative violence, sacrificial hedonism, and refusal of poise undercut by knowingly grotesque laughter. trauma and transgression as freefalling elevators toward the most terrestrial outcomes; absurd monuments erected to the unwell; flickering lighthouses and garbled siren songs drawing shipwreckers into the same crashes again and again until they find an exit

organs spilling out and lining your pockets, stock markets juddering senselessly and pointlessly, bank accounts engorging and deflating. every exchange, every action inherently transactional in nature; shared psychosis hitting fever pitch

work/life balance as infinite on-call uniformity

body as pure reflection of environment

self as perfect corporate weapon

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

it's a sad day for fighting game fans as katsuhiro harada announced the long-running tekken series would be laid to rest earlier this morning. this comes mere hours after news that competitor under night in-birth II sys:celes sold over one birthillion copies, leaving many to question why bandai namco chose to go head-to-head with the anime juggernaut

chaos later erupted at the funeral when kamone serizawa unexpectedly leapt from the casket mid-eulogy. armed with steel chair he wasted no time incapacitating michael murray before removing his shirt, shotgunning several cans of beer, and climbing back into the mahogany box. witnesses say he refuses to leave, stating it "belongs to [him] now"

virtua fighter creator yu suzuki was seen fleeing the scene and while he declined to comment on recent events, he revealed he's been hard at work trimming down shenmue's story and now expects it to conclude within the next six or seven games

when we return we'll have more breaking news on the dark side of accessorizing, the closure of ed hardy, and why some are calling this an unprecedented golden age for planet earth

stay tuned

the tribal stuff is awful and the sense of humour stinks like greasy 90s posturing and rank self-congratulation. bombards you with unbearably unfunny pop culture references, plays sexual assault for laughs, and couches all its insipid beerbong edgelord shit in THATS THE WASTELAND BRO because it has no conviction or insight whatsoever that wasn't set up in advance by cain and boyarsky

avellone + friends' worst work by miles and miles. the only thing I like here is My Chrysalis Highwayman which mark morgan probably plagiarized like (allegedly) half the music. everything bad bethesda did to the series' integrity (and worse) started here. this is ground zero and the common (delusional) notion that FO3 was a bolt from the blue tells me the classic fanbase doesn't know shit. Bro??? it's all right here. it's been here since 1998, inside this gross, smelly software that you (allegedly) played. imagine clutching your pearls about a fridge ghoul when FO2 canonized talking deathclaws and tom cruise — even pete hines unwittingly had you boneheads pegged. who the fuck cares about the world building in the knowyourmeme ass family guy rpg?

"this is worse than the time I got beaten at chess by a freaking radscorpion"

lower gen x into the ground already

gaslighting's everest. megafreaks convincing me this was the series peak had me telling everyone I knew how bad mega man sucked for two decades. I've already done more damage to the mega man brand than inafune ever could, and I was primed to do even more before I tried some of the other ones

sure, the robot master stages are mostly solid, but you'd need the most hexed, jinxed, and cursed grey matter on the planet to convince yourself normal people want to experience wily's castle in any capacity. the creases in your brain need to have been carved by unnaturally odious forces to sit there recommending this with a grin on your face while knowing sniper armours exist

boobeam comes up in conversation and MM2 guys go silent at the dinner table, start pushing their peas around the plate, and ask to be excused

if you love it so much then why don't you marry it

I love the way exploration works here; the refusal to budge on fast travel save for diegetic ox carts, snatching back dark arisen's infinite ferrystone, and stretching the landmass both horizontally and (especially) vertically is wonderful. in many, many ways it's a bigger, slower, denser game, and they did it all while focusing on the most mundane environments devoid of giant theme park attractions bulging from every flat surface

likewise I love the idea of elaborating on the sense of traversal and moving toward a holistic spirit of adventure. deteriorating health ceilings aid attrition and help answer the inherent slime of menu heals, and having campfire rests operate as something of a risk/reward mechanism goes a long way toward giving each journey a greater heft and substance

even something as transparently gamey as designing the map as a network of funnels and chokepoints stippled with smaller threats and crosshatched with bigger ones was very clever; it's all just nouns crashing against nouns as they fire down chutes, but when coupled with the meaty physicality of the game's interactivity it goes a long way toward building up those Big Moments

but the consequence of trash mobs operating as speedbumps means moment-to-moment encounters operate more as filler than anything you could consider independently engaging scenarios. it also means that despite the map being several times larger than gransys it ends up feeling a lot more suffocating due to all the overlapping nouns slamming and interrupting each other without end

I just about luxuriated in the rare opportunities to enjoy brief spells of negative space; I savoured it like one of those FMV steaks. I'd kill for more moments like the arbor or the battleground where I was able to inhabit the world as a pilgrim or wanderer rather than serial wolf slaughterer or battahl sanitation expert, but they're very few and far between

there's no escaping the impenetrable walls of goblins, wolves, harpies, and saurians polluting every inch of the world. the already slender DD bestiary's been ported over nearly 1:1 with about as many additions as subtractions, and between the absurd density and massive landmass the variety ends up looking and feeling significantly worse than it did when it was first pilloried twelve years ago in a notoriously incomplete game

when the Big Moments do happen they're often spectacular, and it's easy to see why the chaotic intersection of AI, systems, and mechanics was prioritized so heavily and centered as the focal point of the entire experience. early on every bridge that breaks behind you, every ogre leaping from city walls, and every gryphon that crushes your ox cart feels huge and spellbinding; the game's at its best when all the moving parts align just right to achieve dynamic simulacrum, leveraging unpredictability to carry encounters well above their station

where that stuff loses me most is in the complete lack of friction. for a game with so many well considered means of drawing tension out of discovery it manages to render most of them meaningless when you're never being properly threatened enough to let them kick in. camping, eating, crafting, consumables, ambushes, and setpieces all take a significant blow from the chronic lack of bite, and it's frustrating to see so much potential go to waste when everything's already set up unbelievably well for success

even if you choose to go it alone, or do as I did and run with a party of two (ida + ozma: wily beastren + weakest creature), it only does so much when every corner of the map has CAPCOM Co., Ltd superpawns and npcs popping out of the ground to aid you unbidden and monsters are all mâché sculptures begging to be stunlocked. where's hard mode? why does it feel like everything DDDA did right got ignored? we just don't know

I'd have been happy if the game yanked a bit of control back with some kinda endgame/post-game dungeon, but there isn't one; there aren't really dungeons in general. in opting for quantity (50+!!) over quality we end up with none of them feeling particularly curated, and none of them having the scope or menace of the everfall, let alone bitterblack. no ur-dragon either, which is just baffling. the entire run from endgame to post-game is a gaping hole where something oughta be but certainly isn't

when I hit credits I felt almost confused, like I'd just been tricked into playing a remake or reboot of the original dragon's dogma that somehow had less material stretched even thinner. I enjoyed what I played for the most part, but the more thought I put into it the more it feels compromised and unfinished in all the exact ways itsuno promised over and over it wouldn't be this time around

there's a lot to love here: stuff like fucked up modular teeth, the sphinx, seeker coin platforming, pawn bullshitting, the dragonsplague, cyclops ragdolls, opaque sidequests, intentional tedium, and routinely bizarre interactions. much of what was good in the past remains good, and even bits that stumble backward generally land someplace close to decent regardless. some of the vocation/gear downgrades aren't to my liking, and there's an odd shallowness that hangs over the experience, but I think I liked it?

I just don't really get it

fans love to make erroneous arguments about how detractors dislike the game cos it's different, but the problem has always been that those differences amount to nothing of substance. if they're not completely insignificant they're fakeouts or walked back, if they're not fakeouts or walked back they're jj abrams mystery box bullshit to keep the online dustcloud with arms and legs kicking and howling about The Implications for another four years. this is a game more concerned with how to capture will they/won't they Engagement than its own thematic core; an impressively meticulous effort moored in goopy fanservice and speculation bait

control freak energy from top to bottom, sanitized to an extent that you'd think square report directly to the health department, and guided by one of the medium's most overbearing directorial hands. all slick and shiny bombast and spectacle, perfect skin, compilation pilled navel gazing, and endlessly wrested control. thirty long hours of red light green light meandering thru kidzbop cover acts of familiar events and environments before shunting all responsibility for unpacking anything it might have to say onto the next game

big win for folks who wanted tifa to be a noodle armed simp and sephiroth to have the presence of yakuza kiwami majima

FFXV's a ghost game, a haunting. the immaterial remnants of Versus XIII's blighted development history in conflict with the internal nightmare dialectics that inform modern final fantasy. from the weightless combat and absent storytelling to the lifeless world and characters, this is a game defined by nothing. a game that says nothing. a game that does nothing. a thousand ideas, all equally formless and unsatisfying outside of those brief moments before first contact

it's in the dead landscapes dotted with little more than gas stations and rest stops where nameless, faceless motorists drive endlessly from nowhere to nowhere. it's in the way we're told of rich, meaningful bonds without ever seeing them firsthand. it's in the way virtually every interaction prioritizes presentation over active involvement. enormous vacancy disguised by ostentatious pageantry; simulacrum within simulacrum, every moving part uncanny and ersatz. the plot, the road trip, the party, the relationships, the core mechanics — nothing coheres, nothing is substantiated, and nothing feels real. this software isn't real. it doesn't exist

by the midpoint even the pretense of wholeness or congruency erodes entirely. hours and hours of empty spectacle and collapsing narrative slip away and in the unearned pathos of its closing moments you're left with one final display of pure artifice: an ending to a game that never really occurred

"I am a sleeper, one among thousands. I bring you a message. dagoth ur calls you, nerevarine, and you cannot deny your lord. the sixth house is risen, and dagoth is its glory"

despite the doom and gloom about oblivion, it's morrowind that serves as the elder scrolls' greatest anomaly: an inflection point that swerved the series away from faceless maximalism, monolithic breadth, and randomized content. developed during a period of fear and uncertainty about the future of the company, todd howard summed up the philosophy behind the risk taking succinctly: "what's the worst that's going to happen?"

a meticulously handcrafted world you could feasibly traverse in real time, a multitude of elaborate static questlines, lessened emphasis on level scaling, fast travel relegated solely to in-world means, rich itemization, an enhanced dialogue system, smaller dungeons that approximate real spaces... to say the changes were significant is an understatement. while established pillars like the character creation format and learn-by-doing skill system remained largely in tact, nearly everything else was reimagined or reworked to fit a game that was, among many things, more local. where bethesda once crafted abstract worlds, here they'd take on the challenge of designing, establishing, and allowing you to inhabit an actual place

nine regions spiral inward, each housing numerous geographies, cultures and settlements; each with drastically distinct architectures informed by them. the mushroom towers of the telvani, carapace huts of gnisis or ald-ruhn, stone and thatched roof settlements of the imperials, yurts of the ashlanders, and crooked daedric ruins being but a few. where previous — and to a lesser extent subsequent — entries in the series drew from a standard palette of european history and high fantasy, morrowind takes great efforts to distinguish itself as something uniquely alien, largely thanks to artist, writer, and designer michael kirkbride

fittingly, you're a stranger — a foreigner, outlander, n'wah — tasked with observing and navigating the region, its factions and religions, and the splinter groups and fractured politics within them. if you follow the narrative throughline you'll be expected to gather some body of knowledge, but most of it is offered in the way of extracurricular research and after hours inquisition

it's a congruent approach that allows for as much or as little engagement with the absurd amount of subsurface lore and worldbuilding as possible. if you choose to delve you'll get stories full of contradictions, unreliable narrators, historical records, mythological yarns, rituals, poems, lusty argonian maids, and a guy who learned to wear heavy armour so well he could walk on his hands and fuck his wife without removing it. if you choose not to you can stick to the more utile texts like the red book of 3E 426 or dismiss everything altogether. you can go the whole game without knowing what a dwemer is, but you're covered: some folks don't know shit

really, you don't have to know or do anything. once off the boat you'll amble forward all sluggish and dim and likely spend most of your time wandering aimlessly, learning elaborate public transit routes, memorizing directions, and getting lost in vivec. while there's urgency to the main quest, more often than not it'll be sending you far and wide to hobnob, get the lay of the land, and delve into tombs and caverns

and therein lies the brick wall that fells many an adventurer: the combat. in a contentious swerve morrowind is the only game in the series that binds the success of basic attacks to dice rolls. your blade may look like it's passing through one of the dozen cliff racers that've chased you from sheogorad to the ascadian isles, but the outcome is up to chance — and chance is working against you in the early hours. on its face it's a bad decision; it inarguably feels worse than any other game in the series, but that's ultimately why it proves to be the correct one

morrowind has something of a hyperbolic power curve. odds are if you're new to the game you might make a build where rats are lethal, walking up a slight incline requires you to take a break, and your understanding of your weapon is fundamentally unsound in a way that shouldn't be possible. you're basically the biggest loser to ever grace tamriel, and after you meet jiub, sign your paperwork, and get lost finding caius cosades you'll probably find yourself poisoned, paralyzed, or worse. the beauty in this is how it enables a heightened level of contrast

by the end of the game you'll be soaring over the ghostgate adorned in Exquisite Shirts and Pants that eliminate fall damage and fatigue, wielding custom swords that siphon enemy agility ("malder's gait"), and hosting a gilgameshian hoard of artifacts so valuable you'll have to sell them to a crab just to get half the money they're worth. you'll become a living cartoon on some who framed roger rabbit or space jam shit, and the juxtaposition couldn't possibly be more satisfying — all because of those shitty fuckin dice rolls

morrowind is a journey, one that's as much about murking bureaucrats, finding a smoking hot telvani wife, getting called slurs, contracting a thousand diseases, and severing the threads of prophecy as it is being ""Nerevarine"" or anything else. for all its little flaws and idiosyncrasies it continues to creep up the list of my favourite games, and hell, I guess I love it

in the end after a hard fought victory I ended up back where I started: in caius cosades house, now stacked knee high with books, glass armours, boots of flying, sixth house trinkets, and a fire hazard's worth of odds and ends. in honour of my good friend the spymaster I decided to relax, hit the Good Skooma Pipe (Quality: 0.15), and get some rest...

I sure hope nothing weird happens with The Tribunal haha!!!

blows insane plume

real fun as usual, but these levels are killing me. I understand people who want actual levels in these kinda action games lost that fight a long time ago, but can you at least make them look pretty or something? I got a nightcap on and I'm yawning cartoonishly cos I've been staring at this fuck ugly tree for so long. I'm out here snoozing in a game where you can dual wield a motorcycle and give sin scissors a funny little hat

can't help but miss the vestigial resident evil bits and the weird kamiya + mikami -isms that itsuno sands down further and further with each subsequent entry. no doubt this is the best the combat's ever been, but DMC was never only about the combat no matter what weirdos whose favourite fighting game maps are the training stages tell you. I wanna do the Smokin Sexy Stuff and explore a gothic castle or tower or something with a reasonable amount of atmospheric oomph, I don't wanna hang out in butthole corridors for half the game

hard to talk about why the combat rules in a compelling fashion, or even some gross approximation of one. always struggle to put that kinetic verve into words and find a way to emphasize the heft of a blade or the timing of rating increase's sound effect. much like music criticism I think a lot of the text deployed in service of something so fundamentally felt seems ill at odds with the feeling itself. many have sought to obliterate language's stranglehold and biases on human experience and I can't help but think that's the proper lawful good instinct

just rest assured it's best in class

nero's a full character now, dante has never been more dante, and as many growing pains as I had with V I ended up really vibing with him by the end of my Dante Must Die run. don't mistake me for a zato sympathizer but despite his gameplay being comparatively shallow there's a satisfaction to the resource management and spacing elements that I find gratifying. learning the golem rhythm is a lot of fun once you're given good reason to bother and while I never graduated from the school of "make the bird do the held attacks while manually controlling the cat" I like the energy it gives off. plus I looked just like V when I was sixteen so

good game, but I'm gonna have some words for itsuno if he doesn't treat lady better next time

the discomfort zone got too comfortable so we made the comfort zone discomfortable. samus: meet samus

where super dove uncritically into the power fantasy that metroid II (the game with a literal Genocide Counter in the UI) unmasked and deflated, this feels like it's turning it inward against you personally. Your body, Your likeness, and Your autonomy hijacked; Your celebratory past tense role as (repeated) casual annihilationist to reckon with and cower from

it operates as something of a Super Negative Image Metroid: an inversion right down to the uncomfortable, choking grip of the direction. all that clammy ADAMsplaining, those sequestered zones, the redline urgency; everything's dialed perfectly into the exact same channel with uniform intent. even the woozy alien psychedelia's been spirited away in favour of clinical, detached interiors and astroturfed xerox biomes with some of the most appropriately sterile Oops No Backlight lighting on the GBA

and no, it obviously doesn't accomplish the same things as its predecessors, but it's not attempting to. this is a game about lack of control, and altering the format would be akin to breaking the spinal column that holds it upright. fusion's big successes (the pacing, brevity, tonal and thematic consonance, and delicate curation of tension and challenge) are the result of its structural changes. being shunted around a tiny sarcophagus isn't a flaw, it's the entire premise. duh

even without all that though it's impossible for me not to love a game with nightmare, the Profaned Baja Blast Suit, AQA's sunken banger, shots like this, and those absolutely psychotic ridley screams

quite possibly the best SA-X heavy fusion since the sultry sounds of steely dan

outside of the (understandably) on-the-nose coloured doorways nearly every instance of environmental interaction is rich and tactile. thirty years later it's still a wonder to grope and paw at every (Possibly Maybe) malleable surface and leverage every new upgrade toward greater structural manipulation and command

in ensuring how and when are given as much significance as what and where it forms a relationship between actor and environment that bears uncommonly personal patterns and markings as you learn to use Your body as an implement to interface with the world. sidepaths and back alleys that carve Under - Over - Through reshape the familiar thru layered mechanical discovery and shift the internal v external dynamic in turn; mastery of the self begetting exponential mastery of the other

a fitting problem then that the biocircuitry, plunging intestinal mazes, and gloomy dark ambient synthesis quickly become less something to endure so much as to dominate; the dissonance for show, and the brutality nakedly glamorous and one sided. so much of it exists in service to the pursuit of (Your) power, kneeling with its neck outstretched waiting to feel bones shatter for Your gratification. sure, I feel obscenely powerful, but I'd rather feel anything else