my halfway point impressions on FF8! I hate to say it but I think Channel Awesome superstar TheSpoonyOne was wrong about this game!

they did it again!!! another slam dunk!! Squall is one of my favorite protagonists and the contrast between him and Rinoa makes for such an interesting character interplay. I also love the supporting cast, such an alive world!!

my roommate had described FF7 as the feeling of playing with your action figures as a kid, as anything could go and anything could happen. I've been thinking about this comparison while looking at FF8's themes of growing up and maturation. The shift to detailed models really enhances that feeling of growing up and having to face responsibilities. It's amazing how personal and thoughtful such massive games can be. This is a special franchise.

Also the card game goes crazy. I love building a killer deck, turning cards into bones and turning the bones into powerful magic. This is the kind of game I LIVE for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play it if you dare.

I am pleased to find that one of my favorite games as a kid is as fun as I last remember it being. Mechanically, there is a lot rough around the edges here, as is expected from Insomniac trying something brand new, but the amount they get right in this first go is remarkable.

That they were able to nail the tone, art direction, sound design, worldbuilding, and general game feel in this first entry just confirms what Spyro fans already knew about this studio's brilliance. It's the things that they miss on that make their successes all the more puzzling. It's not too detrimental in the year 2024 because, you know, a bunch of sequels came out and addressed issues R&C1 had, but if I were reviewing this in 2002 I would have gone in on Insomniac for not having strafing in a shooter. I was busy being a Child in 2002 though, so no one asked me my opinion.

The lack of strafing is both a glaring omission, but clearly noticed by the developers, as every one of the best guns in the game is designed around positioning and crowd control more than it is precision aiming or dodging. The tesla claw, pyrocitor, suck cannon, and the almighty RYNO combined with large mobs are where the combat has some grease on its wheels, allowing you to have a little more control over the fight and get into it and, you know, have some action in your action game. Ranged enemies that require the devastator or blaster primarily put the fucking brakes on the experience, as the game trains you that the ideal way to deal with these situations is to sit in a corner with the devastator or visibomb and pick them off from afar. It's effective, but completely at odds with the comic-book action the game is clearly going for. Ratchet coldly picking people off from afar just isn't what comes to mind when I boot up one of these games!

The final boss is very bad about this, and also features everything that drags the game down, especially in regards to the terrible check pointing in Ratchet and Clank, where dying sends you back 3 years into the past to replay half the game every time you die. I get you don't want the game to be too easy, but I don't want it to waste my fucking time either!

The combat here is so rudimentary and unpolished that it never ever elevates beyond average. Which is kind of a problem in a game with so much of it! But it's just passable enough and surrounded by so much delightful set-dressing that I personally don't think it does enough to drag the experience down. I don't think nostalgia is guiding my hand here, as I haven't played through this game since at least 2007, so there are many years between me and this series at the moment, and I have given myself enormous amounts of brain damage watching Super Sentai and Family Guy between now and then that I might as well be playing this shit fresh.

One thing I am amazed they nailed is how actually honest-to-god funny this game can be. the 2016 remake being a completely sanded down baby game for toddlers makes me even more angry when I remember that R&C 2002 had some wit and irreverence to it. The dialogue is snappy, well-written, with fantastic voice acting. The plot is very competently structured, and minus some hiccups in the second act where Ratchet has his heel turn for a few levels, has some pretty solid foundation to it. The consistent theme of capitalism ruling everything in the world works both narrative and mechanically, as the game isn't afraid to put toll bridges up to really drive home how Cash Rules Everything Around You.

Plus, it is a beautiful game. I am sickened when I remember this is a 20 year old game, as it still looks so wonderful! The way the game frames the vistas of every planet upon first arriving at them is that artist's touch that really gives this game something special. Its framed so deliberately, it reminds you how everything has such a careful design here.

The pure focus on exploration and platforming is what separates it greatly from its more action-oriented sequels. In many ways, I think R&C1 might be my favorite for that alone, as I love the way Ratchet feels to control, how the variety of worlds encourages exploring every nook and cranny, and how there is no real fat here, they included about as many good bits as they could.

Of course, there are bad bits. The dumpy racing minigame every 3d platformer is legally obligated to have, but thankfully, isn't actually THAT bad. Rail grinding sections where the camera is placed in such a way to make it difficult to gauge where obstacles sit on the rail, very stinky. The hydrodisplacer being a big waste of time that's most likely just here to showcase that water looks good on the PS2. The stuff that doesn't work isn't bad enough to drag the experience down, and none of it is as wretched as some of the putrid minigames in Spyro 3 or Crash 3, but I still don't get why if you have a really solid foundation for a game, you would have the player do something completely irrelevant to it.

Could I recommend Ratchet & Clank? Yeah, absolutely. It's very fun and bursting with charm, and what's here to appreciate is so brilliant. Thinking about how sanitized, charmless, and, to be frank, unfunny the newer Ratchet games are, it is all the more stunning how brilliant so much of the 2002 game is.

Yeah I gave it a 4 1/2, fight me. "ooh it aged bad," i will Kill You.

Played on PC, I loved it on Saturn but the save crystals ramp the challenge up to ferocious heights in a game that's already hard with save scumming. I Love This Shit, games that require practice and mastery of their controls and systems are my jam. Tomb Raider works on such a consistent set of rules that by the end game you can eyeball a room and figure out where you can and can't move.

Also the variety of locales is incredible, I'd recommend playing just to see the crazy ass final levels.

The story is great, Lara is just a callous villain who is purely out for herself, she is incapable of introspection or finding a deeper meaning in her actions and I love her for it. She spots a fucking T-Rex roaming the earth? She draws. She doesn't give a fuck.

Recommended for cool good looking people, ugly people who smell will not enjoy it.

One of the most paradoxical sequels I have ever played. Mechanically a huge improvement on the first game, which adds in features that make total sense for a sequel and refines what was there. It is also much worse than the original and made me raise my star rating for the original.

There is so much here that I love: the opening, first few levels, refined combat and the great sense of humor remain in tact, the fact that Clank isn't with Ratchet at first because he just wants to stay at home and kick back is incredibly funny, and I have to say that the first half of the game lives up to the hype and is where the game is at its absolute best. The combat can offer more unique challenges due to strafing, the platforming is as tight as ever, and the dialogue maintains that snappy wit that made the first game so enjoyable to get through.

The second half of the game, after the Thief's identity gets revealed, is a very dramatic nose dive to the finish line, leading to an interminable final level and shit boss fight before the game just runs out of steam.

A lot of it has to do with the game being over-designed. During development they found that players were favoring weapons, so weapons could only level up once, the hope being that it would make the player have to use more of the weaponry on hand. The problem here is that by the end of the game, EVERY WEAPON that isn't the Minirocket Tube or Plasma Coil is not worth using. Lancer, Blitz Gun, Mini Nuke, all become completely irrelevant in the end. So they essentially took different steps to get to the same problem.

The final level will just become the player picking enemies away with the plasma coil and minrocket, running back to the ammo vendor to refill, and going back to do it again. It becomes as unengaging as the final level of R&C1 being sitting in a corner using the visibomb to deal with every enemy. But at least every tool in R&C1 CAN be used! They don't just completely fall off at a certain point, the game allows you to try whatever method works, whereas Going Commando strong arms you into one playstyle.

I should note that this game was made in about 10 months, which is fucking crazy and irresponsible for a publisher to insist on something like that, and the fact that the game is this good and this packed with content is nothing short of miraculous. But its story being strung together haphazardly and levels becoming very uninspired makes it very apparent that at a certain point a game just had to get done. The story still has the great satire on capitalism and consumerism that defines this series, and is very biting and funny in regards to that, but the actual narrative thrust goes nowhere and the ending is a total flatline. It's like they just ran out of time to actually round things out, compared to the original having an actual for real ending that is the culmination of character arcs.

The biggest issue with the story is not only that Ratchet has been sanded down a little. Nowhere near as dramatically as he will be in 2016, and he still has definition here, but I can't help but find the more dynamic and changing character in the first game more compelling, as we see him become heroic and learn a lesson. Here the game strains to find something for him and Angela to do when they talk but is incapable to extract any character from it whatsoever. WASTED CHARACTER!!! AH!!!

I want to compliment the battle arena though. That is a great idea and is a ton of fun, implemented perfectly and is easily the highlight of the game and a great way to play with the weapon sandbox.

Back to my ANGER!! The hang-glider stinks, throw it in the trash. The tractor beam is so worthless they might as well have not even bothered. The snowbeast yetis are worse than anything in the first game, it's alien to me how no one realized what a stinker they had on their hands there.

That's the biggest issue, is that the shit here is stinkier than anything in R&C1! The bad bits of Going Commando are fucking horrible. Giant Clank might be the worst thing ever put into a game, whenever an enemy knocks you back the camera swings towards Clank, messing with the perspective to such a degree you have to readjust. Bad! The regular Clank sections are still as unnecessary as ever, slowing down the pace to a grinding halt. Stupid! Why do ammo boxes only ever give me visibomb ammo? I am in the middle of the final boss that takes a fucking hour to beat, I need ammo for the guns that actually work on him!!

Oh, and the charge boots. The fucking CHARGE BOOTS. In a game with some really punitive checkpoints, having a device that is basically designed to blast you right off the sides of cliffs is a Dick Move. There's no way to stop it once its started, and you will always do it by accident while throwing your wrench, it's like a troll gadget. You have to turn it off so you don't accidentally kill yourself while playing casually, but you have to turn it back on to zoom through the empty, flat levels when you need to refill on your Minirocket Tube ammo.

I have been nothing but incredibly negative here, and I think the game earns it with some truly nasty design choices, but it's just too well made to truly deserve less than 3 stars. I played through all of it, had fun generally, loved the world design and art direction just as much as the original. I still think it's leaps and bounds better than any of the Jak games, and most PS2 platformers for that matter. I think back to some of the minigames in the first Sly Cooper and am tempted to give this 5 stars just for not being that game, but given how good Ratchet & Clank was, it's hard to not find the ways this one takes a step back to be a massive leap backwards.

so many people on here have this and Klonoa 2 in their top 5 that I was too curious. I had played this when I was younger and liked it a whole lot, but perfect top 5 game?

Yeah actually. Turns out the consensus on things can be totally correct!

Klonoa is a smart, fun, creative and clever platformer that has genuine poignancy and themes that resonate in ways most other platformers don't bother to do, or modern ones that overdo it to the point of seeming disingenious.

Klonoa is the real fucking deal. It's borderline perfect, a must play for platformer fans but it will spoil you on the genre, because when one doesn't have the same passion Klonoa does you'll just come back to replay it again.

the enjoyable parts of this game are offset by how breathtakingly stupid it is. just such incredible dumb guy energy emanates off this thing like the orb of confusion. you are constantly under attack from dogs and highwaymen, the reload speed is almost comical in how lackadaisical it is and the writing feels like a post-apocalypse story written by a facebook boomer dad. if you ever wanted to shoot up young people with dyed hair who listen to hip hop music and also drive a Ford F-150 and cut me off without signaling, the game for you is finally reality!

i am ADDICTED to this game. Not this game, specifically, but the actual trading card game. My experience with Yu-Gi-Oh, which was incredibly negative and had me staring in the mirror like the Damaged cover art, didn't completely turn me off of card games entirely. So I figured, "I'll give Pokemon and Magic a shot." Magic I am still entirely confused by, but not turned off of, but Pokemon I am in LOVE with. This card game is so much fucking fun to play with my friends.

More specifically, my partner! We have been bonding over this game and playing it every night, going to the game shops in Omaha to buy cards and test out new decks. It has been awesome! This is the crazy thing though: I have no real interest in Pokemon otherwise. As a kid I only liked the show and Pokemon Stadium, and a few years ago I REALLY loved Pokemon Unite as a much leaner and more fun League of Losers, but other than that? I couldn't have cared less about these Pocket Monsters.

What changed? The format did! I like the structure of the card game, as it is truly turn-based and there are no instants and spell cards (Instants I don't really have a problem with since you HAVE To spend a resource to use them, whereas in Yugioh you can just get fucked for free.) each turn feels more focused on getting your best cards into your hand as fast as you can, so you can build up a supply of firepower to blast your opponent to kingdom come while hoping they don't find a way to throw a wrench in your plan. Honestly, having your plan derailed might be even more fun, because it then becomes a game of improvised strategy. "OH fuck, they took away my Switch card so I'm going to have to retreat, but I can use Dialga's ability to get that energy back, so I just need to get Corviknight on the field and I can turn the tide again."

Also this version of the game is pretty cool. The battle pass sucks ass, and it gives you coins that for the life of me I think are genuinely useless as I can't find a way to purchase card sleeves or custom coins or whatever the fuck. I bought sleeves for my real deck for 4 bucks! It was super easy!

I would recommend this game to learn to play, but after that? Go get a deck and play some friends, as it is so much more exciting that way.

Such a catastrophic drop in quality that it almost defies logic. Reviewing this game is like being Kurt Russell in the Thing walking through the Norwegian base, trying to figure out exactly what went wrong. It seems almost inconceivable that a game as electric as F.E.A.R could produce a sequel that is so middling, preposterous, and a complete fucking bore but the same geniuses at Monolith who produced Blood II cracked their knuckles and got hard at work. I would love to just write "game stinks" and move on, but there is just too much wrong under the hood that we have to make repairs or this car is going to lock up on the highway and get someone killed.

The tragedy is how much effort clearly went into this game. It looked amazing to me back in 2009 and the graphics still produce a post-apocalypse city in some pretty fantastic detail. Weapon animations and enemy animations are still top-notch and there is more variety in levels here than before, but that in itself is a bit of a downgrade. It feels like they missed the forest for the trees in terms of what made F.E.A.R so good. In a way it's almost what made F.E.A.R really not NEED a sequel. It ended in such a perfect J-horror style: Nobody escapes the curse. It's all-consuming. As is the problem with the sequels to Ju-On and Ring, we have to walk back SOME of the curse to ensure this thing keeps printing money.

As much has been said about how incredible the combat in F.E.A.R is, I think an equal amount has been said for how calamitously they fucked up everything in F.E.A.R 2: the jam-like blood, environments get less blown the hell out in firefights, the actual slow-mo has so many bells and whistles on it it makes you kind of sick to use it. In their effort to shoot for the moon they ended up tunneling into the fucking Earth.

Also the ending. oh my GOD the fucking ending. It's SO stupid it defies belief. You almost kind of need to play it just to witness galaxy brained writing like this, even in 2009 as a sweaty teenager I had to replay the final level a couple times to truly grasp what had just happened, it's fucking baffling. It's SUCH a bad idea executed terribly, a legit AVGN "What were they thinking?!" moment. 2 stars.

There are so many fucking releases of this game I couldn't even figure out which version i SHOULD rate 4 1/2 stars. The Dreamcast version is the one I grew up with and love, but it's functionally the same as the N64 version so I'm sticking with this release.

It's incredible that Rayman 2 is Rayman's finest moment because it's VERY VERY Good, which is interesting because the other Rayman games are just fine, mostly. This is an outlier series where one entry is the very best the genre has to offer and everything else is whatever.

Anyway, this game is wonderful, plain and simple. For my money, the best 3D platformer, it controls so good, Rayman is so buttery smooth, so responsive, it has momentum and weight while still feeling light and slick. When I play something like A Hat In Time, I feel like Hat Kid has no weight whatsoever, she is just flawlessly acrobatic in a way where I feel like my inputs make no difference and the game might as well play itself, in something like Mario 64 or Rayman 2, there is that element of player involvement that makes pulling off the meatier challenges really satisfying.

Honestly, this really should be in the echelons with Mario 64 as "really fucking good 3d platformers," but I feel like the hundreds of re-releases making the game worse and worse over time has done a number on the respectability of what really is a crown jewel for the genre. It really is the Sonic Adventure DX problem all over again!

The game does deserve to be remembered as it was originally released, as an extremely tightly designed game with fantastic level design, whimsical and catchy music, plus honest-to-god artistic cohesion. Rayman never goes to the Shopping Mall level or the Snowman level, he is always in a consistent, realized fantasy world and the platforming challenges feel fantasy enough to fit, while also feeling contextualized enough to make sense.

I think the combat leaves something to be desired, but it seems like they were aware of the problem a lot of 3d platformers had of combat being so ancillary and pointless it felt like an inclusion for its own sake, like, even as a child I don't think a goomba ever grazed me in Mario 64. For what it's worth, this world feels alive, enemies feel like actual threats, it doesn't have the Glover thing where it feels weirdly cold and empty, they've taken great measure to give Rayman an identity all its own.

So how should you play Rayman 2? Probably ReDream to be honest. The PC version requires so much dicking around to get working I don't think it's worth the hassle. The PS1 version is MISSING stuff!! Revolution adds in a bunch of crap to a game that didn't need anything, and every version afterwards finds some way to make the game less playable. A shame!!