I'm not rating this remaster cause it doesn't overhaul the game to such a degree that it warrants it, but I will list my summary on each game's remaster, as well as general stuff

Mass Effect 1)

Without a doubt, the best way to play this game now. I was weary when the lighting reveal hit (and granted, some of it still looks pretty bad, ESPECIALLY the lens flare use), but the QOL, a plethora of bugfixes, and a majority of the visual upgrade are more than satisfactory enough to carry it. I was already a defender of ME1's combat, but now I can safely say most people can play this game without too much issue.

Mass Effect 2)

More or less the same, though the game's yellow color tone is a little subdued cause of the lighting change, the lens flare is a little more obnoxious here, and I actually ran into two or three crashes (though they were far between each other and didn't impact too much). Still, this also has some QOL and new updated textures, plus I'm pretty sure the morality dialog mechanic here has been patched up so that some stuff doesn't require going all-in w/ Paragon or Renegade, or just holding them out til later. Plus every DLC for this (as well as 1 and 3) are baked in, so I don't have to deal with stupid ass installers like I had to for the Steam version of OG!ME2

Mass Effect 3)

I, and gonna assume every PC owner, went into this with the conclusion already in mind: Play the LE version cause of convenience and some new tweaks, play the original for mods. It's still gonna take time for popular ones like Expanded Galaxy to reach their full potential in LE, but what's available is at least enough for a vanilla+ playthrough. All that said, it's weirdly more janky than the original, even WITH the Community Patch mod installed, so heads up on that. Finally just.. OK I get removing the multiplayer, even if that's such a weird decision, but keeping the 50% TMS point instead of making it a full 100%, as well as altering the amount of War Assets needed to get the endings (you now need ≥7400 to get every ending unlocked, as well as the Perfect Destroy variation), meaning I'm now basically required to do fetch quest BS and other Citadel shenanigans is really egregious. Thank god for the DLC WAs, at least.

Finally, why is there no FOV option for the remaster on PC? I can see how they accidentally skipped some of the legacy bugs and such, but not including this in the launcher for a rerelease at launch just, confuses me, but at least there's a mod for that to hold over until they (hopefully) patch it in. Speaking of, there MIGHT be some achievement bugs for Paramour and Insanity II, and while I didn't have such issue, make some back up saves just in case

*Played as part of the Master Chief Collection

So the original Combat Evolved was one of the two Halo games I played, as it was the only one I knew of that was on PC at the time. I was just never an Xbox kid, so I completely skipped this series back during its heyday. Thankfully most of the series is on PC via the Collection (which I have definitely taken way too long to get around to as well), so are now more easily accessible (Halo 5 PC port though? When is that happening? I would like to eventually complete the series).

As a game, this is a pretty fun FPS experience, but it definitely feels dated now. The lack of accessibility options such as sprinting and weapon iron sights makes it feel like more of a slog to get through than it actually is, especially when redoing checkpoints. The level design is interesting though, with many large sections and maps that you circle around completely. This is something that I don't think I've really seen before in a linear game such as this. The vehicles are also fun to play with, although I hated driving the Warthog. For some reason, the Banshee handles like a dream, but the Warthog is this unwieldy thing that flips over every time you hit even a slight pothole or elevation change.

Overall, the story is enjoyable enough, but is still pretty bland and by-the-numbers. You also don't get much lore at all during the course of the game, with a lot of questions just left up in the air - I suppose for the later games to answer. Who are the Covenant? Why are we at war with them? Why is Master Chief such a unique badass? Why is Cortana so sassy? Who the fuck are the Forerunners and the Monitor? Anyway, I'm sure I'll get more answers as I go through the series, so I'm not too worried about these questions.
We continue onwards to Halo 2, which will be the first completely new game in the franchise I'll have played, so I'm looking forward to that.

One of my favorite games that I never want to play again. When I originally played Breath of the Wild, it was a truly special experience. The sense of exploration and discovery was unlike any game I had played prior. That first blind playthrough was something special, which is a double-edged sword. I usually don't replay games so that isn't something that would really affect me but this game sticks in my mind. Breath of the Wild does not hold up on subsequent playthroughs because you can only play a game for the first time once. However, I believe there is more to how I feel beyond that.

I jumped into each DLC as they came out but never finished them. With each DLC that came out, I was having an increasingly less enjoyable time. Maybe if I played them from the beginning of a fresh save file, things may have been different. But then that leads to the first problem of not being able to play the game blind again. The DLC doesn't feel like it should be played from an existing file, but to enhance a new playthrough. But enough about the DLC itself, whenever I jumped back in, the experience felt hollow and the things to do were tedious. These were feelings that I never felt in my initial 100+ hour playthrough of the base game.

These were all feelings that I felt in Tears of the Kingdom and made me look back on how I actually feel about Breath of the Wild. I have around 50 hours in Tears of the Kingdom and this feeling of hollowness crept in far sooner than its prequel. After the honeymoon phase wore off, I just felt bored with it; copy-pasted activities, Ubisoft towers, and resource gathering. All of these things that I criticize in other games, but I didn't criticize in Breath of the Wild. It made me reflect on Breath of the Wild and wonder how would I feel if I played it for the first time now.

Would I have gushed about it as much as I did when it was new, I don't know. Maybe the hype of getting a new console, that at the time was being scalped to high hell, carried my enjoyment, again I don't know. Another thing that is worth noting, is that this is the first Zelda game I finished. I played many prior but this was the first one to get me to finish, why? Again, I don't know, my feelings are so cloudy on this title. All I know is that Breath of the Wild is one of my favorite games that I never want to play again.

P.S. Weapon durability is fine, you're just too attached to some generic weapon that you'll replace in the next ten seconds.

Within the first 5 seconds of freedom this game gave me, I immediately picked up the kitchen knife and used it in probably the worst way possible. The game didn’t stop me and it also didn't seem to care, and neither did I. But that was probably the worst way possible to start this game, because as it dragged on for hours the main thought in my head was, “We were cooking on the first route” which should have ended the game. Instead I was trapped in a torture chamber of nonsensical solutions and horrible dialogue delivery, with an ending that wasn’t even interesting enough to be worth the painful drawl. The image of Daisy Ridley’s weird polygonal feet are scarred into my brain forever.

While I find the trial and error bit of gameplay to be rather neat, it’s done in such an excruciatingly painful way here. Every do-over lacks the ability to skip the cinematics so you’ll feel your body rapidly age with every scene you’re forced to watch on repeat. The lack of options your character gets to work with are frustrating and unrealistic. The characters shamble around like zombies and there’s zero way to speed up the process to get back to a later segment in the timeline aside from some line skips. I guess had they implemented such a silly concept then the game would quite literally be 12 minutes long. Instead, you sit through hours of trying out the smallest changes, only to awkwardly miss-click something and have to redo the whole process again. With every make-out session your wife assaults you with unprompted at the beginning of every loop, the more reptilian I felt while playing this game. How icky it made me feel while I slowly became an iguana.

You’d think a game that allows you to stab the shit out of your wife in the first five seconds would have literally anything to say about violence or impatience or domestic abuse or literally anything? Maybe it’d point a finger at me and go, “You’re part of the problem!!” and question my immediate conclusion to stretch the game's choices to it’s most inhumane limits. Nope. It meant nothing, like it was just something cool you could do for the sake of it. Violence is actually the only way to siphon any useful information from any of the characters, in fact the peaceful communicative solutions don’t even open up until after you’ve murdered so it’s not like it’s not encouraged. But, it literally doesn’t acknowledge this as something awful nor does it affect your character in any real way. The game does not care, so why should you? Allowing me to start the game with the ability to do this really set itself up for failure. It never challenged my thought process, so I just simply progressed with not giving a shit. It's almost like game interactivity has a way of affecting the player if it's implemented in a meaningful way instead of just existing for "artistic" shock value.

At the end of the day, does it even matter? I went through all this effort just to land on a conclusion that I said out loud as a joke. When the twist happened and that joke ended up being the reality, oh fuck off. This is it. It’s just a game that let me murder my wife in the first 5 seconds of it and nothing else. Riveting stuff, guys.

How they got James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe, and Daisy Ridley involved in this is insanely hilarious. They sound like they’re phoning it in the whole time, like they don’t even believe in this game’s bullshit themselves. It’s artistic, I’ll give it that. But, am I buying it? No. I ate chocolate mousse while a man screamed at my wife and hogtied her to the floor right in front of me. Neat.

I will be buying this cuz of Sony's ultra based move, lmao.
List of countries where people can't make PSN accounts:
Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bosnia Herzegovina, Botswana, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa), Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville),Djibouti Dominica, Dominican Republic East Timor (Timor-Leste), Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Eswatini(Swaziland), Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mauritius, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar (Burma), Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, North Macedonia (formerly Macedonia), Palau, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Saint Kitts, Nevis Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Grenadines Samoa, San Marino, Sao, Tome, Principe Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Suriname.

For starters, I’m no Buffy buff. I never watched the show growing up, nor did I as an adult. That’s okay though, as there are many great video games based on movies and TV shows that are fun without needing to watch the material it is based on. Buffy seems like this kind of game at first. While it’s clearly geared toward fans of the show, I have no idea what’s going on in the story. You are basically trying to stop some evil vampire spirit from ending the world. That’s literally it. You chase him around as he possesses various characters from the show. It’s dull and rather uninteresting and the game is also poorly written. Buffy’s one-liners get old as all five of them repeat constantly throughout the game and so do the one-liners from the enemies.


That’s just the beginning. Buffy has an array of acrobatic moves and they are actually quite good for such an early 64-bit era game. The animations are well done and the combat, when it does work, is pretty awesome. Buffy can punch and kick and execute enemies with a wooden stake. She also has Slayer Power which allows her to add-on some powerful moves at the end of combo chains. This, again, seems great on paper, but it’s poorly executed. While the animations are nice there’s constant knockback and you can’t interrupt the enemies’ attacks. This is the key flaw in the entire combat system. There’s no dodge button, no parry, and no way to counter attacks at all. You just have to take it and fall down and get back up, but some enemies will stomp you, and then multiple enemies join in and you end up dying and losing health over cheap gameplay mechanics. The game is just very cheap all around.

Another issue revolved around this is the terrible jumping and extreme distance you get knocked back at. This leads to cheap deaths off cliffs as some of the fighting areas are tiny and are not designed around how far Buffy can be thrown. I would make it to the end of a level and die just because I got picked up and thrown off of a cliff due to the poor level design. It’s everywhere in this game including platforming segments that shouldn’t exist here. I never finished the game due to the second to last level having so many cliffs of death, tiny arenas, and platforming woes that after the 7th time dying from a cheap death I put the disc back in the box and shelved it. I’m not missing out on much anyway.


If that isn’t painful enough the level design is boring and trite. You walk down boring brown or gray hallways, fight a few enemies, flip a switch, and move on. The level design is just bad and every location is so uninteresting. A foundry, a high school, a sunken church, all just blandly designed. At least the character models look decent and the voice acting is all right. This also leads to healing and other items which leads to the biggest flaw this entire game has, and what I think, completely breaks it. All these other things would be doing if you didn’t have to execute every enemy with a stake. You can knock them down to no health and they won’t die until you execute them. This leads to more cheap deaths as instead of them dying when their health is down you then have to break through their constant blocking, get knocked around more, lose more health, just to get in an execution. They will not die unless you have a stake or the glaive. Enemies block every single move you do, making combat take way longer than necessary, and they also shouldn’t take so long to die. For a beat ’em up enemies should have more balanced health bars.


There are also items like holy water, hellfire, and a super soaker that contains both. This is a completely useless tool as it depletes within seconds and requires fonts to replenish and only a few levels have them. It’s mostly used just to take down certain force fields. Seriously, what a waste of time and effort. And that’s pretty much all Buffy has to offer. Some decent combat and animations are all the game has going for it but is horrendously broken with terrible gameplay mechanics throughout the entire game.

I honestly can’t recommend this to anyone unless you are a Buffy fan, and even then you aren’t missing out on much at all. The story is boring, the level design is uninspired and bland, and the game is nearly broken thanks to poor design decisions.

It’s almost impossible to avoid the regurgitated tropes stuffed into horror games nowadays. This especially applies to the indie scene, where soulless projects can be thrown together in no time to make a quick buck. There’s a serious lack of originality or innovation in the genre; I suppose it’s just easier for devs to lean into cheap scare tactics and dime-a-dozen ghost stories.
September 1999, on the other hand, is a free horror game with a surprisingly interesting and well-told story - one that’s neatly wrapped up in the span of five minutes. While I won’t spoil much, I will say that I really enjoy the narrative that this game chose to tackle, and I think it was done well. There are clear comparisons to make to American Psycho; and obviously September 1999 isn’t nearly as complex or innovative, but it’s a refreshing idea to bring to horror games in particular. This isn’t any old dime-a-dozen haunted building simulator with a Samara ripoff.
You take the role of a man living alone in a small house. The first-person view is overlaid with VHS grain - even the time and date are stamped in the corner, a useful tool for tracking the chronology of September 1999’s events. The game doesn’t solely rely on this VHS gimmick, though; its entire visual style is actually quite amazing. Perfect realism is far from my favorite aesthetic, but it worked very well here I think. I almost felt like I was looking at real video footage sometimes! The only thing that struck me as a strange (and quite funny) choice was the protagonist’s apparent obsession with framed pictures of budgies.
There are a handful of little details to notice, too, such as the tape placed on one of the closed doors (if you’re not aware, this is done when someone wants to ensure that the person inside the taped room can’t leave without their knowing.) I’d even overlooked a few things my first time around that I only noticed on a second playthrough. An impressive amount of worldbuilding was done here, and in such a minuscule span of time!
There are some delightfully creepy audio cues scattered throughout the game, too. September 1999 plays with volume in very interesting ways; certain noises are so subtle that you might think it’s in your head at first, while others viscerally destroy the stillness of the house. Nearly all of the frightening moments are in large part thanks to this sound design.
In fact, September 1999 never once relies on anything like garbage jumpscares to make its point. Instead it utilizes visual storytelling and atmosphere! There’s not even any dialogue - something I think is really neat, as it means that anyone can experience the game fully without language hindrance.
Of course, there’s not really any ‘gameplay’ to be found in September 1999. You simply observe the story as it takes place around you. Actually, it can sometimes take a bit too long for the game to transition itself into the next scene; this can easily turn into a nuisance when you’ve already seen everything you need to, and you’re stuck waiting for things to automatically progress.
Still, that small annoyance didn’t hamper my overall enjoyment of September 1999. This isn’t a life-changing or genre-defining piece of work, but it’s something I really appreciate for what it is. It commits completely to story and quality over reusing tired old tropes. I definitely recommend checking this out, especially since it’s free and very short!


Visuals: 4/5
Sound: 4/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 0.5/5
Worldbuilding: 4/5
Overall Game Score: 3/5 [3.2/5]

A great game, an infinite King's Field experience, with approachability first and foremost in its vision. A treat to play for newcomers and old-timers alike. A wide array of dungeon tile-sets, weapon-types, true dual-wielding, spells, enchantments, and much more. Where it falls short is it could've used a few more tile-sets and a bit more to its few unique locations like the starting village. Otherwise, a joy to play, even if only for 40 minutes or for 4 hours straight. Check out my review if you wanna know more! https://youtu.be/yi2ZzW-FLJE?si=LD0BlAyaEhs4MmEK