When I started up Outcast: A New Beginning, I thought it was another remake of Outcast, the 1999 game beloved by those of us who still think of weird stucco-like peaks when we hear the word "voxels". I thought it was strange that they were doing another remake after Outcast: Second Contact (not to be confused with the remaster Outcast 1.1), but hey, we might be getting a second remake of Resident Evil 1 in the next few years. It turns out that A New Beginning is, in fact, a sequel, and it was originally titled Outcast 2 before being changed, presumably because they figured most people would not want to do homework by playing a 15-year old game.

I was under this impression until a few hours into the game, because early on, it sure seems like a remake. In short, Outcast is the closest thing to a Benjamin Sisko Simulator, wherein you play as a human guy on an alien planet, blessed by its extradimensional gods and designated as their divine savior. The general beats appeared the same, and I saw areas that looked like places in the first game. Eventually, it shows its hand and makes it very clear that this is some time after the first game, but your character, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE, FROM THE MEAN STREETS OF CINCINNATI, has had his memories erased.

This is an interesting way of onboarding new players, as NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE is just as clueless about what's going on as you are. And you will be, because the Talan, native inhabitants of Adelpha, LOVE to talk to you about anything on their mind. They constantly use words of their language and, though there is a glossary you can pop up by pulling a trigger during conversations, for quite a while you'll just be going with the flow. Sure, the dolo-tai guardians got reverted before they could activate the daoka and now their haagen-dasz is in sankra. Whatever, dude.

This barrage of nonsense, along with the game's very strange tone (veering wildly between sardonic humor, outright silliness, and sincere sci-fi), doesn't make a good first impression. I was pretty iffy on it for a while, but eventually you unlock the two things that make the game really fun: Traversal options and weapon modules. You have a jetpack that can be upgraded, both to let you zoom around at high speeds and great height, and a Just Cause-style wingsuit to cover greater distances over the air. Your guns, a pistol and rifle, can both be customized with various modules that either alter stats or completely change their method of operation. Think Gunstar Heroes for the best comparison. Turn your pistol into a shotgun that heals when it kills enemies, or turn your rifle into a sniper rifle that attaches mines to enemies it shoots. You also unlock various melee moves that I didn't use much, but make it clear that somebody involved in this game's development really liked Vanquish.

So playing the game is fun, but what do you actually DO in Outcast? Talk to aliens, mostly. Your main goal for the majority of the game is freeing the 7 villages on this big-ass map from human control, so you do missions for them that often intersect. This place needs booze from this other place, and the booze village needs bombs from the desert village, and so on. It becomes a pretty interesting interconnected ecosystem, and many parts of it can be done out of order or without being directed to do so. I was just putzing around temples collecting tablets for no real reason, and then when I got to the mission that required them, NAVY SEAL CUTTER SLADE was just like "oh yeah I already have that." This sort of Emergent Questing can break sometimes, as I occasionally had a character talking about something that wasn't currently happening, but it's novel.

Outcast 2's biggest downfall is the shift in focus into an Open World Map Vomit game. I'm sure it's to make it more accessible to Gamers in general, but I don't think they're going to be getting a lot of new people in the door with this game's $70 price tag. The first game was a pretty unique action-adventure game, where you mostly focused on crippling the enemy's supply lines and weakening them, rather than powering yourself up, so 2 being dumbed-down is kind of a bummer. The quality of the activities in the game are variable: clearing bases and outposts are fine, because the combat is fun. Opening Essence Shrines to upgrade your max health is okay, as they have you follow a little ball around and the traversal is fun. Orym Trails, which are mostly the same thing, suck ass because there are 50 of them and they only give you a paltry amount of upgrade resource. Gork Eruptions are also fine, you just kill a few enemies near the Gork and then you collect the Gork to feed to The Gork. He's a weird guy in a cage, don't worry about it.

Outcast 2's SECOND biggest downfall is the performance. I would have rated this higher if not for the huge amount of glitches I saw during my playtime, as well as massive framerate problems. Within a few minutes, I switched to the 30fps mode because it was running anywhere between 30 and 60, with zero consistency, and it actually started to make me feel sick. The game also seems to have a memory leak or something, because during extended sessions it would start hitching more and more frequently, eventually hitching every time I jumped. Restarting the game fixed this, but yikes. Other glitches were all over the place, usually audio-related, but sometimes bouncy plants would be un-bounceable, making certain platforming challenges impossible. These were all fixed by just reloading a save, and you can save anywhere, so it wasn't a big deal. But this was on XSX, so I would say unless you have a really good PC that can brute force it into running well (because I doubt it's properly optimized on PC either) it's probably best to wait until the PS5 Pro comes out and play it there.

Your enjoyment of Outcast 2 will depend on how much you can tolerate this specific brand of jank. Personally, I don't mind it. It's not like Bethesda jank, where they're just too lazy to fix their shit that's been broken for decades. These are small, scrappy teams doing their best to realize their vision. Does this mean there are like 3 total models for the aliens, and some of them are voiced by the same people with comical "Witness Protection" pitch-shifting effects? Hell yes.

Get used to it, baby, this is all we're gonna have soon.

7/10

easily the best narrative i've experienced in a shooter to date; i acknowledge that's not exactly the highest bar, but if this were the benchmark we'd perceive the genre very differently

i'd say durandal marks two steps forward and one fairly meaty step back from its predecessor. story's the most obvious improvement thanks in no small part to the titular AI narcissist (who naturally happens to be about 100x more interesting than the marathon's leela ever could've hoped to be) as well as a plentiful amount of intriguing infodumps, which are now usually accompanied with some pretty cool 90s era pixel art to boot

gunplay sees significant improvements too, as every weapon (barring the alien blaster) looks nicer and feels way punchier. not to mention that the shotgun(s) here may be the best of any retro fps i've played; doom 2, eat your fuckin' heart out. it's nice having more aliens to shoot at too - almost every new enemy type is a welcome edition (fuck those giant missile-eating drones tho)

where things fall flatter for me, however, is level design. your mileage may vary, but as much as i love being showered with ammo (especially on total carnage, where it's a necessity to have 5835230952 grenades stockpiled) at all times, i can't say i'm half as enthused by running back and forth through such open and large mazes

it's not as if the original didn't have its share of backtracking, but there's just too much of it here. "begging for mercy makes me angry" is the most frustrating and obvious example; a long gauntlet stage that revolves around constantly returning to a central hub and covering obnoxious distances to revisit save points and health stations. where marathon exuded confidence in its placements of those things, often forcing players to abandon them and actively take risks, durandal just doesn't have the same sense of activeness or urgency in most cases. there's also far less in the way of puzzles - maybe a blessing to some, but a curse to me. oh well - at least there's plenty more terminals to make up for it

ultimately, the improvements and downgrades kinda cancel each other out. either way, you should absolutely play both games. expect strong storytelling and shooting here, but don't anticipate the same consistent quality in terms of level design

This game is very poorly designed. The progression and the mini games make this a very tedious collectathon experience. It almost feels like the developers were playing a practical joke with its game design. One of the mini games is broken to the point of being nearly impossible and it is repeated at least four times. To top it off there is a very easy to activate softlock that can gate 101% completion from you at the very end of the game. This all makes it hard to recommend to people. It's like a full time job of a video game.

To me this game design actually holds value. It makes for a game that's so over the top that it turns around and becomes compelling. You enter these giant collectathon sandboxes and it's so overwhelming, but slowly working out the ins and outs of the levels and achieving that 100% felt really satisfying in a way banjo never really got for me. A lot of people rightfully criticize the way it handles playable characters, but I think that limitation of having to find them was another step in this big puzzle of navigating the labrynthine collectathon loop the levels present. DK64 was always pushing me and testing me in all these ways that kept me engaged the entire time. I don't think there will ever be another game like it. Like what game has five variations of most of the collectibles in a level? It's just so insane to me and I find it endearing.

This is all held together by phenomenal presentation. I think this game values and understands the vibes of Donkey Kong Country more than people have you believe. Banjo is full of whimsy and a cozy feel to it. DK64 has a heavier emphasis on atmosphere, with the later levels going for moody foreboding stuff that you would see in the country games, it's great, and I think it compliments the daunting collectathon challenge it presents. I feel the same way about the music and I think it's easily Grant Kirkhopes best score. It's a surprisingly varied soundtrack and I often felt that it was going for the same kind of natural ambience David Wise goes for in the country games. I really don't understand the complaint that it just sounds like Banjo, they are definitely going for different things.

I wasn't sure I wanted to give this game as high of a rating as I did, but what cemented it for me was Hideout Helm and the final fight with K. Rool. It's an incredible finale and it's almost worth all the crap the game puts you through. Hideout Helm is a tight timed gauntlet that puts your knowledge of all the Kongs to the test with this incredible track that really puts the pressure on. And the K. Rool fight is this incredibly ambitious 5 round minimum boxing match where you have to use each kong's unique abilities to take him down. Legit one of my favorite bosses of all time, it's a masterwork in puzzle focused boss design.

I think one of the reasons I loved this game as much as I did was because it felt like a culmination of rareware at Nintendo. For better and worse it's this swan song collectathon where they just put all their eggs in a basket and went crazy with it. The fact you play Donkey Kong arcade and Rarewares Jetpac for mandatory progression only cements this idea. It's a celebratory experience that you have to really work at to get it's bombastic payoff. I don't think it's a game I'd casually play, but it was a challenge I set for myself that I found really fruitful at the end of the day.

I think the modern gamer has a tendency to outright dismiss a game's larger worth as a piece of art if it doesn't match a specific ideal of gameplay and presentation. Pikmin is not exactly what I'd consider a pretty game in all respects (there are certainly a few aspects that were technically impressive at the time though), and its gameplay experience seems purposefully tumultuous as much it attempts to simplify the RTS formula down in the typical Miyamoto fashion. But Pikmin is still a beautiful piece of art all the same, is it not?

I first played Pikmin in my teens, and I think it might've been the first game to teach me two things about games as a medium: that friction (and consequences) within a gameplay experience can be meaningful and compelling in its own right, and that a game can be more than the sum of its parts. It's actually kind of cool that the Pikmin AI will sometimes not listen or do something absolutely stupid; the things that modern gamers find annoying are part of what made Pikmin special.

Sure, Pikmin 2 is filled to the brim with content, and Pikmin 3 is a more realized and polished mechanical experience (I am not disparaging either of those games, I love them as well), but Pikmin has the most heart both in how its mechanics force you to think about your time and resources, and in how its narrative is more personal and dire. The bad, neutral, and good endings of Pikmin all stick with you.

Pikmin taught me that failure is okay, at least in the abstract gameplay sense. Olimar may have perished or even just returns home with no fanfare, but the player has another chance to do it better the next time. It's not a particularly hard game, but I do think it's an oft misunderstood game, so I just wanted to give this incredible little game the love it deserves.

you thought halo ce aged poorly?

...then how the hell was bungie utterly outshining that game's level design a whopping 7+ years before it was even conceived?! for a game of so many firsts in first person shooters, it's unnerving how little recognition marathon gets. not to mention how many of its pioneered ideas are often wrongfully attributed to the likes of half life; health stations, friendly npcs and narrative drive, to name a few

more than anything being falsely credited however, i'm upset that this melee combat hasn't been actively replicated by literally every succeeding fps. typically when playing a shooter - especially on harder difficulties - most people start pissing their pants as soon as they fire their last clip. doom with fists only? duke with his shoe? sure, it's been done for challenge's sake, but is it ever optimal?

it is in marathon because your fists don't deal static damage - rather their power increases with speed. on total carnage, the most standard enemy can eat 6 whole pistol rounds before he croaks; that's trivialized to 3 quick meetings between fist and face if you know what you're doing. simply put, punching dudes till they explode is insanely addictive. tell me this isn't the sickest shit and i'll rightfully call you a liar

a few of the levels here would make halo's library check the fuck out (colony ship for sale and pfhoraphobia most notably) but despite the sadism, i'd call most everything here pretty well designed and memorable thanks to some solid puzzles and smartly-placed save points. weapons are fairly basic, but the alternate firing modes (another bungie-birthed fps mechanic - go figure) help vary things up a good bit. shoutouts to the fusion pistol, flamethrower and whatever the fuck that alien gun is in particular - especially the alien gun because i adore it

narratively, there's definitely stuff of interest being brewed and i'm more invested here than i ever was in the original halo's plot, but i can tell things are just getting started. so onward i go - to durandal...

“Hey let’s just reuse the same locations and same puzzles and add some new half baked game mechanic”-every triple A dev team when making a DLC ‘story’ expansion since 2013

Maybe DLCs like this are fun only if you play them in the month window after they come out but they age awfully because you finish the main game load up the DLC to find out its story and you just have to play the same stuff again but more undercooked and just worse quality with one new annoying gameplay mechanic that doesn’t gel with the rest of the game.
And a character walking speed that makes the whole game feel so sluggish

Also if the base game was silent hill 1 inspired this is clearly silent hill 3 but without any of the pop punk y2k grit and style and nuance.

A couple months ago, I decided to breathe some new life into my old, beat up Sega Dreamcast, and transferred its internals into a new shell. While I was up in them guts, I figured I'd go the extra mile and put in a PicoPSU, Noctua fan, and (most importantly) a GDEMU clone. I own three Dreamcast games on disc, they're all Sonic and they're all scratched to hell, and considering the longevity of Dreamcast disc drives, it did not pain me to rip that sucker out of there. Besides, an SD card opens me up to games I'd never dream of affording...

Anyway, I 100%'d Sonic Adventure 2 again. God damnit, why do I keep ending up here?

I explicitly told myself I would not, but looking at my childhood save file, I was maybe eight to ten hours of actual work shy of running through Green Hill, which I've previously unlocked twice on two different versions of the game (the Dreamcast original via emulation, and Battle for the GameCube.) It's not like I had something to prove so much as I hated the idea of leaving something undone, even if it meant feeding a Chao the same skeleton dog over and over again for three hours while alone in a dark room. Oh well, my time could not be less valuable.

I bring all this up because I'm going to say some fairly disparaging things about Sonic Adventure 2 - which for a lot of people sits in this exalted "sacred cow" position - and I just need everyone to accept that I've done my time with this game and feel pretty strongly about it.

Sonic Adventure 2 condenses Sonic Adventure's six distinct gameplay styles into three, and makes each of them more robust, which on paper sounds great. Sounds like something you'd do with a sequel, cut all the filler and build out from what worked... Only, I think adding more to the mech and emerald hunting stages makes them a total drag to play. What was once arcadey and enjoyable is now bloated and boring, sometimes outright frustrating. Sonic and Shadow get the best levels of the bunch, but given how often these brief bursts of fun are interrupted, does it even really matter?

Even setting aside my grievances with the way these modes are designed, I feel like Sonic Adventure 2 is just... sloppy. It has the collision detection of a cheap D-tier licensed platformer, with characters constantly juttering and clipping when making slight contact with uneven surfaces. Even flat surfaces are temperamental given how often Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles will catch on some 1 pixel tall seam. The camera is uncooperative, characters move inconsistently, and every part of the geometry feels like it's held together by Elmer's glue and tongue depressors. So much as brush a corner wrong and the game will shut off whatever complex calculation it needs to run to determine momentum. Having done this three times now, I can confidently say the worst part of the 180 emblem experience is fighting with the parts of the game that are unpredictable, like, you know, landing on a solid stationary platform and just falling through it.

This is all coming from the guy who frequently writes Labyrinth Zone apologia on Backloggd Dot Com, so I can't stress enough that my opinion on this shouldn't be taken as some condemnation of those who enjoy Sonic Adventure 2, or a statement that I'm more right for having a dissenting opinion. There's thousands of you and uh... I don't think there's even a dozen people that like Labyrinth. And hey, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't without its charm. I've previously praised the excellent soundtrack, which I remember owning once on CD (which also got scratched to hell), and though I hated the tonal shift SA2 made at the time, I think it's probably the best part of the game now. The voice clips cutting off, Grandpa Robotnik being put in front of a firing squad... it's not good, but it's good.

Unfortunately, it's not enough to bring me around on the game as a whole package, and I feel like the amount of hours I've logged both qualifies my dislike while calling into question my sanity. Sometimes you go for 180 emblems in Sonic Adventure 2 while playing Mario Party 6 while playing In Sound Mind while playing Shining in the Darkness. Sometimes you're just that kind of depressed, where you're glad you don't live with someone who could walk by your room and see you running through Mad Space and think "oh god he's spiraling." But it doesn't matter now. I'm finished. I never have to do this ever again.

Oh hey, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is on sale on Xbox...!

!!! MOVE OVER GAMERS, WE GOTTA GET THIS REVIEW OUT BEFORE CHRISTMAS !!!

You want to know the funniest thing about being a kid? It’s being ignorant to the fact that some things are just horseshit, and boy was kid me quite the ignoramus. Revisiting this game, it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but there was some sick part of me that wanted to relive a good moment of my life in the one Spyro game I have the most unblurry memories of.

Well it turns out, those memories end at the 2nd level and nothing beyond it. Even the borderline racist NPCs somehow scrubbed from my mind. There’s no shot I finished this as a kid, and my memories kept the better portion of the game in stasis forever. They’re not good levels per se, just functionally better. After that the game quickly hurtles closer towards dystopia the further you get into it. To put it quite bluntly, this game is just not finished and couldn’t be more of a beacon of developmental hell. Except this was from the PS2/Gamecube era back in 2002 and.. yeah folks, crunch and corporate shenanigans have been happening our entire lives. This shit was made in the same time it takes to grow a human fetus and still somehow ended up being more of a disappointment.

With vast levels that are emptier than corn fields and enemies with zero life put into them. There’s no variety to be seen, just small ranged dinosaur and big dinosaur who make this sound when you murder them. If this game has achieved anything, it’s that it is at the very least sometimes funny. But you won’t be laughing when the camera 360 no scopes itself into the wall of the level design, launching you off the platform that you’re currently standing on. On normal hardware this game runs like it’s being squeezed through a tube, but even while playing it through unscrupulous means there still feels like there’s some sort of wind resistance pushing against Spyro as he charges. He feels like he weighs a metric ton, which makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. If that’s not enough for you, throw in some magic floors that clip through your body, and mini-games made by Satan himself. The draw distance is abysmal. You want to go on your cozy little gem collectathon, but they removed Sparx’s little hint clues which means you’ll be scouring all of these gigantic levels for much longer than you want just for that one last gem to appear out of thin air because it glitched out the first time. It's actually a marvel of achievement that speedrunners were able to figure out how to beat this game in 1 minute, the amount of time it takes for the veil of nostalgia to be sucked from your eyes.

What’s it all for, you may ask? Well, some of the most weirdly named Dragonflies I could have ever imagined. They really just pulled from anywhere with these guys. “Hey, it’s Karen!!” Spyro says, but the subtitle says “Rhett.” I can’t believe my childhood hero Spyro just deadnamed that dragonfly. And like I said, these issues get more prevalent as the game keeps going. With each level, the more unfinished it feels. The worlds get emptier with more nonsensical tasks that barely function. Assets aren’t re-used, but still uninspiringly pulled from previous titles in an effort to save time. Unlockable powers that get used less and less, voice lines completely missing in some instances, etc., etc. It all culminates into a final boss fight that not even I could foresee. A baffling affront to God himself, just a gauntlet of atrocities deep fried through the Christmas deadline conveyor belt. Spyro died and we killed him.

Keep this game dead, do not “reignite” it. There is no redemption to be had. Lock this one in the vault and treat it like a lesson. One day you too could make your own Enter The Dragonfly, and you don’t want to be that guy. Sometimes things should be left as memories in our heads, never to be revisited. This is a ghost for a reason, so fear it.

Now for the end of this review, I feel like it’d be only fitting to just stop talking in the middle of my

Between its dark and gritty aesthetic, its Trent Reznor soundtrack and its intimate relationship with the pop-culturization of the Internet, there may not be a more distinctively 90's game than Quake. There may also not be a more influential one, and while that can be readily debated, the one thing you can't debate is that Quake is everywhere.

It's really hard to find other games that have had such a profound effect on gaming as not only a hobby but an art form. This was where having that fancy extra dimension really started to make sense. The shareware version of Quake dropped one day before the original Japanese release of Super Mario 64. More than a quarter of a century later, both of these games not only continue to be The Guy To Wanna Be for their respective genres, but also serve as platforms upon which speedrunners and other sick, twisted individuals can demonstrate their digital wizardry. That's before mentioning Quake's hand in popularizing speedrunning and the online deathmatch. And of course, there's all of the other classic titles directly inspired by it or based off of it, such as the OG Team Fortress and Half-Life itself (with GoldSRC being a modified version of the Quake engine). While I didn't grow up with Quake, I've been feeling its influence my whole life.

It's especially remarkable because Quake is a far cry from the original vision its creators had for it, designed first as a more fantastical and RPG-ish third person action game. The title stemmed from the player's key weapon, a mighty and magical hammer that could blow away foes with the sheer force of its swings. The name Quake ended up being terrifically apt regardless of this departure, not only for the way it shook up the industry, but also the way its troubled development fragmented id Software. How many success stories like Quake do you know of that effectively killed the company they spawned from? It's also another great example of how taking the "safest" path arguably led to the greatest returns. While it might be interesting to see what would have happened if Quake had stayed true to its earliest concepts, I'd be deeply concerned as to what the rest of the gaming landscape would look like in the absence of Quake as you and I know it.

And, y'know, it's still pretty fun to play. So there's that.

If quad damage were real I'd use it to cook a chicken with one slap.

To the people who have been coping for years over this game and convinced themselves its "better" than New Vegas. Please do yourself a favor and play through it again. It's been a decade plus and I promise you its not how you remember.

Everything about it is skin deep, Bethesda should thank Obsidian over fixing every bad design decision. They effectively overwrote how skin deep everything about this game is in memory. Every quest is some variation of go in a room, shoot 3 guys, hack a terminal or reload until you win a speech check (and that's where they all end there's fucking nothing more to them), DC is a collection of poorly dressed rooms that are a slog to navigate, every dungeon feels like mush.

The bible quote thrown at you 3 times has no bearing on the plot and was most likely them googling "bible verse about water". Genuine embarrassment for video games as a medium, fucking actual dogshit.

I don't know why I waited so long to finally 100% Banjo-Tooie. I grew up playing this game here and there, but never made it very far. Banjo-Kazooie has always been one of my all-time favorites, but as an adult, I never took the plunge into tooie until recently. And wow, am I glad I did. <3

This game is just as charming as the first, and it will make you realize just how small the worlds of BK are. The interconnectedness of Banjo-Tooie is mind boggling. Some folks find this to be a tedious venture, but in my opinion, it's where the game truly shines. The jiggies and objectives get harder as the game progresses, and some of the challenges really make you work for a single jiggy. But that being said, the satisfaction I felt after finishing a tough section (lookin at you, Grunty Industries) made it well worth the effort. The cheato-pages definitely helped alleviate some of the pressure of the final boss as well, which improved the pacing at the end of the game significantly from BK.

I love how this game reignites that spark of wonder that you feel while playing a game for the first time as a child. Where is the secret Glowbo? What will it do? Will I ever find the alleged Ice Key from BK? What will the Stop n Swop eggs hatch into? There are just so many little mysteries in this game that keep the player returning to discover. Not many games can do that, and for that, this game deserves a perfect score.

I hope someday we see a true Banjo-Threeie, and I hope it feels a lot like this game. 5/5, I love this series so, so much. <3