Man, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

For all this time, I mainly avoided the whole club aspect of this expansion pack thinking that that’s all it really added. Eh, whatever!! Maybe I don’t want my Sim to enjoy group outings with friends. But then you pull yourself back a little bit and you realize that this pack is like the main reason why there’s any LIFE in the LIFE SIMULATION game at all. I was a fool, but now.. Now I am with my tribe. In terms of completionist content for my own sick pleasure, there’s just 1 new skill and 1 new aspiration so that part is whatever. It's the actual gameplay elements that shine the brightest here though.

No, really. Arcade machines, dance floors, foosball tables, bar nights, dance clubs, cafes, civilization itself? All of that was added in this pack and it kinda makes me wonder what on God’s green Earth were Sims doing before it. Watching paint dry? Slowly aging until the sweet release of death between the walls of their solitary home? While it’s still a bit of a pain in the ass, the group mechanic allows you to control multiple Sims at once to get them to actually interact together while out. Activities can be done with several Sims, like they actually like being around each other. Before you would just kinda hope they’d sit together at the dinner table so you could have some semblance of normality in your escapist life, but sometimes that wouldn’t be where the cards fell. My wife would eat dinner on the toilet while I sat alone in the dining room. Well, not anymore!!!

They worked their pussy off creating Windenburg. It’s gotta be one of the best towns in the whole game in terms of aesthetics and things to do. It has a shit ton of empty lots to build off of for the most nasty Sims architects out there. You can visit an old antique house and learn the backstory of a random ghost couple for no reason other than.. they felt like putting it into the game? Like, it sounds stupid but I’m being serious when I say they don’t do stuff like this anymore. I’m sure as I keep reviewing these packs, there will be less and less to talk about because they get more streamlined by release order. The Sims is pretty well known for having genuinely bananas lore and questionably canonical timelines. Stuff like this just reminds me of how charming this series is at its center, even if it doesn’t really feel like it anymore.

For the club feature itself, bro I can’t tell you enough how alive I actually felt putting one together. They give you so many goofy ass options to work with in terms of club requirements and activities. It’s the kind of core dumbassery that I love experimenting with in The Sims, just a breeding ground for chaos to lay waste across your town. As your club grows more powerful, the more perks you can buy like a completely diabolical Fallout: New Vegas build. You short on change, buddy? Get your 8 friends to paint for you without a break, then collect their money. No need for romance when we’re all doing the do. I’m beating up the elderly AND cleaning up the beach at the same time. It's not like they're gonna help with that. The rewards for skill boosting are unbelievably broken in exploitative ways that I will be taking full advantage of. If I want to max a skill in under an hour, I can just buy all the skill boosting perks and then have my friends come over to watch me show off until it's 100% done.

And look, you can bark at me all day long about how this all sounds like it should have been base-game content and yadda yadda, I agree. I get it man, whabby doo, but we don’t live in this utopia that you speak of. Your dreams are just dreams and I am not the CEO of EA. You can't really talk about The Sims without someone booing and throwing tomatoes about DLC and I don't disagree with those criticisms. But, I am the ruler of my own wallet and I say that video games were actually a mistake for mankind. I am the schmuck who bought the expansions so that you don't have to, my brave soldier.

My definitive answer is that this pack is one of the better packs in the entire line-up. Is it the best ever? Naw, there's some fancier dinner plates coming down the line, but people might really enjoy the social aspect of this one and those people can use this information however they will.

Gang, gang.

!!! 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

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.

Got around to playing this game the right way and I’m glad that I did. Disregard my first review as either a solo-player's point of view or just simply the insane ramblings of a madman. We’re KeyWeing as God intended now.

This game is playable in solo mode for sure, but it’s like asking your brain to work at a level it cannot simply comprehend. With co-op you get free range of your keyboard and a buddy that will share 50% of the backbreaking work with you. How else do you people think you get your mail? Not by people, but through the blood, sweat, and tears from the most overworked, underpaid, armless birds. At least they get the benefit of informal dress codes. Please excuse my dripless friend, he’s just not quite at my level yet.

There are 4 main level designs that vary in obstacles as the game progresses which is just enough variety that keeps the game extremely fun throughout its entire playtime, which is decently lengthened. It’s enough to get through in one session and can be stretched by rechallenging the levels for better rewards, hidden items, etc. There are bonus levels with different gameplay mechanics as well and they net you more tickets for your gold mine of Kiwi cosmetics.

I think what works the best for KeyWe is how there isn’t any Overcooked! or PlateUp levels of vitriol. All three are great games with similar co-op mechanics, but there’s equal opportunity for both players to actively help in each scenario here. You can’t really impede on the other or kill your friend, which makes it a real breath of fresh air. In fact, the only thing that impeded anything were the slight moments of online desync, but it wasn’t a big issue. I found establishing a level of communication and having to shout “1, 2, 3!” before simultaneously finishing a puzzle to be rather charming. We are considering speedrunning the game now, that's how Earth shattering it was for us.

The difficulties fluctuate without ramping up to impossible degrees. While it’s a relatively easy game overall, the later levels have a fitting stress factor for the hidden masochist inside of you. The final stretch is one big, satisfying gauntlet of all of the skills you've acquired throughout. It’s not that the levels are super difficult, they’re just stressful with really well-executed shit inducing anxious music to go with them. You're a professional at this point, but the music is making you second guess yourself. The OST is actually fantastic and I’d post examples but I can’t find it ANYWHERE!!! All I have is this old trailer to work with, but it uses one of the best songs in my opinion. Classic example of the composer giving it their all, even if it’s for a short goober game about bird mailmen. Never stop.

Anyways, play KeyWe. It’s ridiculously fun.

This game has a lot of potential, but I feel like the initial concept works against it. It’s a bit more mean-spirited, where you kind of hope something horrible happens to everyone and it actually needs to in order to progress. It’s a concept that unfortunately rips away all of the scariness and hilarity that most people would probably be looking for. Aside from a well-timed spawn, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Unlike the other game that this one will be compared to until the end of time, there’s no chance of organic comedy coming from your friends who are avoiding danger rather than looking for it. The point here is to hope that something kills everyone and that the camera man isn’t dicking around somewhere else while it’s happening.

I played the game for about 2 hours and feel like I’ve already experienced everything it has to offer. The upgrades it sells you are mostly cosmetic and the amount of views you get per video seem completely arbitrary. You’ll have some rounds of gameplay where everyone dies in the first 5 seconds, leaving you with 60% of film left and others where barely anything happens at all. The environments don’t really give you that much to play with and there’s no reason to wander off because there’s only one camera. Every day ends with an awkward movie experience where everyone sits around looking at the unedited footage and maybe sometimes you’ll hear a light chuckle under someone’s breath. It’s nice that they offered it for free, but I probably won’t go back to this one until it gets some major updates.

My third eye is open and it’s crying.

This pack seemed so obviously fine tuned to a mediocre experience that I’m sure someone out there might enjoy, but it’s a personal nightmare to me. There aren’t any new collections, but there sure are a handful of weird aspirations that delete my inner peace instead of inspiring it. You’d probably guess from the title, but it’s a pack that introduces the spa, and therefore tosses in everything from detoxifying tea to massages to meditation and yoga. But boy, am I far from relaxed.

Finally my dream job of re-organizing the bones of my neighbors through unlicensed massages is actually achievable, except they made it work in the dumbest way possible. You can’t outright buy a spa in the same way that you can a restaurant, so your Sim is meant to just show up and start massaging people.. just.. because they want to? Please do not tell the IRS of my grift, but there’s no shot I’m getting a W-2 for this. It’s weird in practice and also in function, since the spa has actual NPC employees working hard for their $7.50/hr. It feels like the equivalent of you squeezing behind a cash register at your local Walmart and accepting tips from the customers for letting them skip the line faster. It’s aggravating because the NPCs are actively competing for your space, when really you’re just an asshole, leaving you to constantly beg the customers to let you tickle them a bit with your fingers.

That’s honestly really it? You get the Wellness skill which gives your Sim super calming aura, I guess. They can teleport while meditating and that’s pretty goofy, but other than that there’s not much here besides the furniture. The neat thing is that apparently EA actually refreshed this pack sometime in 2021. (This is the only time they’ve done this. Probably the only time they ever will.) This refresh added Aspirations that weren’t there before and these were what I was forced to do. They are not fun because they play poorly.

It meant I had to pull off some MLM scams at the local spa by bringing people with me. Getting multiple Sims to do an outing together in this game is like pulling teeth and the spa locations have got to be the worst places out of them all. There’s yoga classes happening every 5 minutes, which distracts every Sim in the vicinity like they’ve been hit with a sonar thought wave. One brain cell, only yoga. Everyone drops everything they're doing in an instant and starts performing yoga outside even in torrential downpour. It made getting the massages I needed really aggravating. I ended up deleting the yoga mats and pondered locking all the yoga instructors into a 2x2 containment cell. I would have honestly been doing this town a service since we lost some neighbors who were forced to perform yoga in a snowstorm. God bless those poor souls.

The rewards are not really worth it because they just net you more money for performing spa work. Sir, I am a 2.2 Simoleon millionaire and you will never see me on this lot ever again. I’ll take the soothing super power though if it makes my Sim’s kids complain less while they’re around me. I’d skip this one personally, unless you’re super into granola.

I hope we see free pack refreshes more often though, but this was 3 years ago and that ship has probably SUNK. I've mastered true clairvoyance now and that is sensing when EA is trying to siphon more money out of my wallet and surprising them with a Home Alone death trap instead.

I am a charlatan, an utter buffoon. A fool in clown’s clothing, already messing up the order of my reviews. Outdoor Retreat is actually the first expansion to The Sims 4 and the laugh track that plays over my life is pointing at me in a never ending cacophony of agony. Is it that I went a little too hard on the fizzy juice or just that this is a pack that isn’t used very often?

That’s not to say that this pack is bad by any means. It’s just that the majority of its content is separated from what would be normal gameplay. It introduced vacations to The Sims 4 and a lot of what it has to offer is located in Granite Falls. This place is by far the best vacation spot in the game so far. The other two are dumpsters in comparison. I haven’t dabbled that much in the woods yet, but it’s a camping site where you can partake in bothering the wildlife and accidentally setting your Sims on fire with a fire pit. In fact, the first time I went here my Sim immediately died upon leaving so I actually believe the place is cursed by this version of Boo Boo Bear.

You could be chillin’ and minding your own business under the stars and suddenly a guy in a grizzly bear costume starts doing push-ups off to the side of your campfire, right in front of your children. The game and your Sim recognizes this person as a real bear, but he’s clearly a dude in a costume and his name is Clyde Johnson or some other randomly generated name. He’s talking to you, but he’s totally a real bear. He’s stealing from the plate of hot dogs you just made as we speak. No one knows his secrets, but he has an agenda. Either Granite Falls is the location of the Sims furry convention or this is just a mystery left in the shadows never to be fully uncovered.

There is also a hermit that you can befriend if you follow the correct paths. I haven’t met them yet and I don’t know if they’re as weird as Clyde, but what I do know is that they’re going to be the next target in my 100 Baby Challenge. They let you fish for rare fish and collect rare bugs like Snow White without the 7 dwarves. I’m going to their house literally right now and bringing the bear with me.

I’m also a bug guy, if I were a Pokémon Gym Leader, I’d let a bunch of kids kill me in the first 1 hour of the game if it meant I could be a Bug Type Leader. This expansion adds the Insect collection that works pretty similar to the collectibles in The Sims 3. Like, they kinda just spawn wherever and then your Sim comes and yoinks them. Ooo yes, enjoy your little glass hut you will now live in forever my pretty little beetle guy. They even got one for the weebs too, look everyone can be happy! I can’t attest for how hard this collection is because I still haven’t finished it, but I doubt it’s anything significant. I’ll just live in the woods for 8 Sim Weeks until I find them all. My children haven’t seen me in years but I will have this awesome collection to add to my basement.

Holy shit, it’s also 4/20 I just realized. Light up that herb baby, we got the Herbalism skill. This works attached to the Gardening skill and helps you identify plants in the wilderness. There are herbs now that are either healthy or toxic, and the only way to find out is to either eat them caveman style or train for your Herbalism PhD. Although, the toxic ones only make your Sim sick and can’t actually murder them. I don’t think it’s that super useful, aside from being able to make herbal remedies on the stove that instantly fill your piss meter or something. No longer do I have to shower when I can just drink a potion that retracts the sweat back into my glands, so I guess I would say it’s not completely useless. There is this weird glitch right now though where if you own a grill outside, your neighbors will just autonomously cook herbal remedies on it and then leave them on the ground. Every now and then I look in my backyard and there’s just piles of jars of this crap just sitting out there. I think in honor of this review I am now going to start drinking whatever horrible concoction they leave instead of just selling them. Godspeed to my Sim.

Aside from that it also adds some really nice features that you can take with you, like a tent. I can just buy a tent and sleep anywhere I want now and not a single other person can say anything to me about it. I got shit to do and my Sim is tired but I’m not leaving and coming back; whip out that bad boy and have a snooze right in the middle of the restaurant. Combining this with the reward trait you get for clearing this pack’s one Aspiration is also pretty wise, as it allows your Sim to enjoy camping no matter what and never complain about it ever again!! You could be homeless and they’d still have a ball.

So while this pack is weird and mostly segregated, it’s still pretty good for the little things it adds. The items you can make and take with you can benefit other aspects of gameplay, at least if you’re me torturing your poor Sim to go through the Olympics of Simming. All in all, it’s just a funny little camping pack you can use whenever you get bored of looking at the four walls you force your Sim to live in. I think I am going to befriend the Bear now, I have some experimenting I want to do with him.

I am on a bender right now, so I’ll slowly start to review (almost) every Sims 4 expansion. The ones that I own, at the very least. I have been partaking in a self-imposed 100 Baby Challenge, but added completionist elements to it in order to spice it up. (All Aspirations, Collectibles, and maxed Skills on one Sim.) Because of this, I am having to use pretty much all that every expansion has to offer in one single save file. This save file is years old now and is on the verge of black hole collapse, but it’s still standing even if it’s got wobbly knees. I will not be starring these reviews though. As much as I would love to have a 3-star middle finger looking graph on my profile, I really just don’t want to muck it up with a ton of DLC expansions.

Anyways, Get to Work? What are you, my mother-in-law?

Ah, the very first expansion in a long line of never-ending add-ons. The Sims 4 was known for having quite the rocky start with a pretty bare bones base-game that was lacking heaps of things that were eventually added in updates later. Get to Work seemed to be a call-back to The Sims 2 Open for Business and The Sims 3 Ambitions, which offered gameplay features for the sickos that get their thrills from working behind a cash register. Get to Work adds on to this by also introducing active career paths like playing as a Scientist, Doctor, or full-time Bastard.

I actually do really like this initially since most Sims careers are rabbit-holes. I can go to work with my Sim and watch them do home-wreck affairs in the office with the randomly generated neighbors that look like they fell out of a blender before coming to work. It’s got a shelf-life though. There’s only so many samples I can analyze, or patients to scan before I get bored. However, you get promoted a lot faster by gripping the bull by the horns and just doing it yourself. It’s just that after a long time you kind of realize it’s eating up the whole day… like real work. The Detective career expands on this a little bit by allowing you to go to crime scenes, but soon you kind of realize that the culprit is just always spawned into the crime scene before everyone else and you know it’s them every time. It’s funny though because you can release the prisoners for no real reason. I don’t know why you’re in the slammer bro but I want to get home early tonight so go on, GIT!!

I think the lack of an aspiration is what disappoints me in particular though. You would think there’d be a few that were attached to the careers they added, but nah for some reason. Without that there wasn’t really any need for me to pursue these career paths that deeply. I’m not gonna spit at added gameplay elements though. I play The Sims for the life simulation after all, so even if I don’t particularly have an interest in curing Sim cancer, I can at least appreciate that I have the ability to do so. I can see why people would enjoy the routineness of the tasks you’re given on the job. Plus, you can also just send them to work without going yourself and it’ll play as normally as it usually does.

This pack also introduced several unique collectibles though and also Aliens, which are what I would consider to be a staple to The Sims. The aliens have some diabolical social interactions, like erasing the entire memory and relationship panel of a targeted Sim. They disguise themselves as humans and the only real way to discover the truth is by seducing them and finding it out after the fact. They sometimes randomly abduct you in the middle of the night while you frantically try to cancel out the interaction. They will impregnate your husbands!! Absolute menaces to society, but I love them anyway.

Other things: Magnolia Promenade is one of the worst towns in the game, but not the worst. Only 4 empty lots meant for retail properties, so it just doesn’t breathe any sort of life from it. I find it so odd that there’s buildings drawn onto the map where other empty lots could have gone. I guess it’s nice that there’s a designated area to put your retail store instead of using a lot in one of the other neighborhoods though. I haven’t actually dabbled into the Photography skill yet, but it’s funny to fill your walls with horrid photographs and be reminded of them every time you enter Build Mode.

Also, baking! So long Hamburger Cake, we’re having Rainbow Gelatin tonight baybeeee.

It’s honestly not half bad for a first expansion, but in hindsight it’s also not that impressive either. They use a lot of these gameplay elements in future expansions with careers that are more varied with better rewards. There are a lot of expansions like this though, which I’ll get into when I get to them. You’ll experience parts of them once and then not really ever again. If you’re looking to expand your game through DLC, there are better packs that will give you better bang for your buck in my opinion.

I know people cream their jeans about the first Psychonauts game but that wasn’t really my experience with it. Big uppies to the visual style and really unique level-design, but the controls and platforming were uhhhh… POOP?? It was still a really fun game, but I just didn’t find it to be the game that everyone held up so high at the time. There were things I found odd with it like how some powers were only useful for short sections of the game and then never again, and generally just how annoying it was to platform and move around. The story though? That shit rules, dog. Psychonauts uses everything in its crayola box bussy to personify ideas and mental concepts into living designs, be it through the enemies or the overall builds of the levels as they shapeshift around you. The levels were just as much characters as the characters were, and the exploration was rewarded with interesting character writing that was shown instead of told without force feeding you a novel of it at the same time. It’s a game that I wish I liked more and I think I’m only babbling about it because I reviewed it when I was new to this site and didn’t really understand how to barf up how I felt in words yet.

Anyways, this is a review for Psychonauts 2 and the short of it is that it was by and large a tremendous upgrade from its predecessor. My main gripes revolving around the game’s controls and camera angles flew right out the window pretty much immediately. Movement and platforming was so buttery smooth and that dodge roll they gave Raz might as well have renamed him Rizz instead. I was so happy that they gave most of the essential powers in the first few minutes, allowing you to play around with them from the get go. With the added addition of the new enemies, now just about every power has a place on the table, allowing you to dish out pain in any way that you see fit in the moment. While there are particular enemies that require certain powers to be exterminated, the Pyrokinesis and PSI Blast abilities still carried most of the weight. The Time Bubble power is pretty much a must have moving forward, and the upgrades to all of the abilities makes them so much more useful than some of the abilities from the first game. My only minor gripe with the combat was having to assign powers mid-battle through the power wheel. For whatever reason I just would not budge from removing Levitation from LT and anytime I had to remove it during a wave of Panic Attacks and Enablers, I did audibly groan but that only happened a few times in the late-game. I definitely appreciate the challenge even if it meant swapping hotkeys like I was playing a speedrunner’s version of ball in a cup. However, hitting the objects that dropped health would send them into the fucking stratosphere sometimes, which made them pointless in my time of dire need. I would say that my least favorite boss fight was the plant one just because it was probably the most restrictive, but that’s one boss out of several who generally made for some really fun segments.

Aside from this game basically Kingdom Heartsing me by being a direct sequel of a 2nd game that I don’t own the console to, it was still a groovy time from start to finish. While none of the levels hold their own version of “Milla’s Secret” nearly at the same intensity, it was still a rather warming story about a group of friends working through their regrets with the help of Raz. It’s a story that still “went there”, just in different aspects. I don’t personally need the most fucked up thing to happen that lands this game into another 4,000 Top 10 Darkest Moments in video games lists until the end of time for it to be compelling. People are still DYING, Kim. I found the deep dive into the other Psychonauts to be rather interesting as it helped build the world that exists outside of the levels to a higher detail, closer to the ones that represent the actual brains where all the showmanship is. Of course the actual brain levels are still the best part of the game too and a whole heaping of them really delivered. I found both the cooking and concert levels to be the stand outs, as they represented the chaotic unraveling, or re-raveling, of their mindscapes so well. Like honestly, is the character losing his damn mind through sensory overload or am I, because that was quite the adventure into horrible ASMR that I didn’t expect to fall into.

And that’s where this series really shines because who else is crafting level design in a way that really puts you in the shoes of it’s characters in the same way that Psychonauts does? Where it really asks you to maybe reflect on your own trauma by dousing you in colors and sometimes difficult climbing; where mental healing and overcoming your obstacles is truly the ultimate goal at the end of the day. As someone who has mental illness in my family, it’s such a tender way of showcasing forgiveness for not just someone else but also yourself. It’s exquisite art design that is packed in just about every crevice and corner with some sort of metaphorical punch to each character’s inner turmoil, whether they have an addiction, horrible regrets, or unimaginable shame. There was care in connecting the platforming mechanics to the overall visual storytelling that combines into this whirlwind of gameplay that tells its story, with narrative twists that really make ya go “ZOINKS”. Interactivity is so fucking cool, bro!!!!

With that too, the game still has its comedic beats of course. The comedy is still written in a way that isn’t competing with the more downer sides of the plot because it’s written in a way that understands when each tone has its place to shine and both lift the cutscenes up without overshadowing each other. That is an aspect of both games that still rings very true. Unrelated to this though, Raz is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz who also voices Billy from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which made his blood curdling screams that he makes upon falling off a ledge really funny to me for some reason. Dying really wasn’t an issue because I genuinely laughed every time he screamed, as horrible as that sounds.

Related to Raz’s voice though, my real complaint of this game, that is still rather minor, is that Raz honestly talks way too much. I know that I’m 3 years late to this game, but I’ve been noticing a trend lately with any game involving a puzzle that if you don’t solve it in 2 seconds, the characters feel the need to just blurt out the answer for you as if you can’t figure it out for yourself. I am all for accessibility features for kids and everyone else but I really wish you could turn off tips without having to mute the voice audio in the menu. Sometimes I just want to examine what I’m working with before jumping into it and I don’t need Raz backseating the shit out of me- “I need to focus more with my Clairvoyance to-” at every chance- “I hear some emotional baggage around”- he could get- “I think I need to connect blank with blank in order to progress the level” Raz, please, I beg of you.

But all in all, this was a really good time and I felt like it would be. I really wanted to like Psychonauts 1 a lot more than I actually did and when I heard this sequel turned out great, I was more than excited to play it. Overall, I found the levels to be a lot more memorable here as well. I’m sorry Milkman fans, but I have made a solemn oath to never lie in a Backloggd review unless it was about how good I am at the games I’m criticizing. While this game does have things that irk me, they’re really not something that dings it in any grimy way. I guess they’re just more of a personal preference. But, having played this and Portal immediately after beating Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it was a huge breath of fresh air. Give me more games like this pretty please, please, please please.

Also, stop posting this fucking meme every November, you goddamn selective assholes. Whoever made this image and then dropped it into the piss ocean that is Xitter needs to answer for their crimes.

Finally got around to playing this. For some reason I played Portal 2 when it came out and just never got around to Portal Sr. Having prior knowledge of how to do the puzzles because of this made Portal 1 quite the breeze to get through and that’s really the only issue that I think it has.

It relies a lot more on environmental storytelling rather than any actual plot progression. It exists more just to set up the small world and act as a bit of a demo slice for its fun portally puzzle physics. The turrets are very silly and GLaDOS carries a lot of the runtime with sarcastic humor that kind of distracts you from how ominous the circumstances surrounding your character actually are.

It’s the kind of puzzle mechanics that itch your brain like giving scritches to your pet cat. Made me feel like I was both overthinking and also not thinking hard enough at the same time in some areas. There was one where I couldn’t figure it out immediately so I tried to loop myself between portals infinitely for fun, just to find out that that was the solution all along. So even while the rooms feel like you’re locked between padded walls, it really gives you just enough to play around with until you’re able to solve the problems. If anything I wished it was a bit longer or that the advanced puzzles were different levels. They’re really just the same maps just with harder obstacles like poop floors and more turrets.

Portal is Portal and Portal is very fun. I would say that Portal 2 is the better game, but that’s mainly because it’s just larger in scale, has co-op, and extends the universe created here. You have to start somewhere though and Portal 1 is the perfect sprout to a beautiful gigantic beanstalk.

I guess I’ll start off this review by saying that I am not Final Fantasy VII’s biggest shooter. I’ve played the original and the remake and it’s a pretty good story, but it’s not my favorite Final Fantasy. I don’t really have any outward complaints about the narrative because of this, except for what’s directly presented to us. If they were to remake X or IX and do whatever they wanted with them in the same vein as this trilogy, I’m sure I could understand a lot of fan’s frustration, but for the most part I’ll be talking about the core gameplay. I’m gonna be trying this new thing where I talk about spoilers in hyperlinks instead of cramming them in the bottom of the review and describing them in vague terms, so don’t worry about getting your eyes tainted to something you don’t want to see. For the most part, it sits in a weird place in my head because I liked a lot of what they did but also despised a lot as well. As soon as I opened the menu and saw crafting I was extremely hesitant. It’s really funny to me that this game had so much discourse about yellow paint breaking people’s immersion, but no one seems to care about the pouches of crafting materials just laid all over the place for no reason. I would describe this game as a complete descent into madness personally.

I’ll start with the combat because it was my main gripe with Remake, and I want to get the positives out before I get into salt territory with the negatives. I’m much more of a turn-based connoisseur and getting used to the action gameplay was like getting shoved into arctic waters. I always felt like the dodges on the characters weren’t effective and the ATB gauge build up would drop a sledgehammer on my balls every time I’d get caught with it empty and unable to heal during a 45 minute boss fight. It sucked ass in that game, and it wouldn’t benefit from the fact that most chapters are just endless roadblocks of bosses that fly and cancel out your actions with cinematic cutscenes. Some of this is still present in Rebirth, but they managed to both fix the momentum of the characters in combat and delete half the health on most of the enemies. It was like leagues different and done way better here. Most of the character’s dodges were changed and were actually able to dodge attacks. Cloud was given this ranged laser attack that allowed him to build ATB from a distance which made him so much better to play as, especially because he’s the only party member that can’t be switched out. I found both Red and Tifa to be extremely overpowered due to their critical chances. If you give them ATB boosting items, they turn into automatic weapons that barely need to reload. It was just a much better experience overall. Instead of rolling my eyes at the giant mech boss, I was actually enjoying myself for once. I do still think Aerith is atrocious to play as though. She has better Ward abilities, but she’s still cannon fodder. Everytime she was forced to do a battle by herself, it was like Guantanomo torture.

The addition of the other party members hanging out on the side was neat, but I honestly can’t tell if they were actually helping or if they were just there for moral support. I definitely saw Barret pressure some enemies from afar when the stars aligned, but it seemed like Red and Cait Sith would just stare menacingly off to the side. It was still like, the perfect small change that you didn’t really know you needed though. There’s never any questioning what they were up to while your core 3 get to kill everything, because well… they’re right there! What I would love to see in the next game is the ability to potentially swap characters out on the fly, similar to Final Fantasy X. If the characters are there anyways, it shouldn’t be hard to implement. It would just be so nice if you ran into a flying enemy and could swap your melee attackers out for Yuffie/Barret mid-battle, instead of having to do it before battle after a reload. Since you’ll have the full party for that game, I feel like it’s going to be a must-have feature and I hope they don’t continue these full chapters of split parties just for the sake of forcing you to play as someone else for 3 monotonous hours. It helps that enemies are much easier to stagger in this game, meaning that they’re also much easier to kill overall. The combat is just a huge step up and it was actually fun in this game.

Just like in Remake though, there are a lot of highs and lows in this game. The highs are monumentally fantastic, while the lows are like slamming your face into concrete. If you thought that Remake had a serious issue with padding out its ass, then I’m so sorry to say this, but it’s made so much worse in this game. The issue is still extremely prevalent, it’s just that it’s relegated more into the side content than it is in the main story this time. Rebirth does benefit from taking place across multiple locations, and they are beautiful, but the chapters are still bloated beyond all Hell by chores masked as mini-games and mini-challenges. And here’s the thing, I don’t want to hear anyone in the comments raising a finger and going, “well, it’s all optional and you’re very dumb!! Why did you do it if you didn’t enjoy it? ☝️🤓” Is it though…? Is it truly optional content if your party’s EXP, SP, and relationship with them are tied to the side quests and intel? You can say all day that the shit doesn’t have to be done, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that your main level progression comes from playing the same QTE puzzle 6 times per area and turning on shitty ass Tears of the Kingdom towers so that Chadley can constantly bitch in your ear about shit you do not care about. I’m genuinely wondering if people actually liked doing these? Not just, “I didn’t mind it.” Nope, did you genuinely enjoy doing this repetitive crap? Don’t hesitate to raise your hands. Even if you did, just because the shit is “optional” it does not mean it’s not in the game, and I’m here to talk about what I don’t like in the game, bucko. Like 75% of the playtime of this game is just as much bloated trash as the Trash Island that’s swimming in the ocean right now.

The mini-games ranged from very fun to complete horseshit. People are like, “man I wish Final Fantasy had mini-games again, what happened to them??!!” What, you mean these torture devices? I’ve never been a fan of most Final Fantasy mini-games. They’re at their best when they’re short and confined to one area. If they’re forced to be played, they should at least wrap into the story in the same way that Blitzball does. And I KNOW!! Final Fantasy VII was like mini-game central, there’s some sort of mini-game from giving CPR, snowboarding, to changing your damn clothes. I got it, but in Rebirth there are more than just the recreations of the original mini-games. There is a mini-game for doing the most mundane shit in this game and it’s overbearingly god awful. The beginning of the game was so overwhelming; you’re tossed into this gigantic landscape and get 37 tutorials thrown at you at once. How to run around, how to do combat, how to get a chocobo, how to ride a chocobo, how to tie your shoes, how to sit through Chadley’s dialogue without killing yourself, how to use SP, etcetera ad nauseam, until finally it just leaves you alone. There’s got to be a better way of introducing players to open-world games because the first 6 hours of each one always feels like sitting through job orientation everytime. Now toss in 24 mini-games per square inch of each area and you have my Joker origin story. I think it was in Chapter 9 when I was doing a side-quest for Aerith and it turned out to be another mini-game where you have to use the controller bumpers to rip mushrooms out of the ground, the inner coil of my being keeping me sane just burst like the engine belt inside of a car. From then on, I was hanging on a ledge by my last remaining fingers. I did eventually fall off the ledge, but it’ll be brought up in spoiler talk due to it being extremely late-game.

To be honest, not all of them were terrible. The Costa del Sol events, while extended way beyond its original counterpart, were easier to swallow because they were meant to be a fun respite to the major plot. The Gold Saucer events obviously were fine, it’s like the one part of the game where you’re supposed to fuck around. Queen’s Blood was genuinely interesting and the Junon marching was really fun when the game finally let you fucking get on with it. However, Fort Condor can drink my piss, especially because they changed the rules of the game for the sole reason of probably annoying me. Chocobo Racing can die in a ditch off the highway. That punching mini-game was needlessly complicated for no reason at all. The Cactuar mini-game might as well have ripped my face off instead. These are just the ones that annoyed me the most, the 50 other ones were either less annoying or just forgettable. It’s nice that the soundtrack is amped up to its extreme, with this being what seems like a 500 song discography, but that only slightly mitigates how annoying the games are to play. (I would drop that one dog song here, but everyone else beat me to the punch a month ago.) The PS5 has some dogshit bumpers too, like I can’t be the only one who thinks this? They hurt to use for someone like me with wrist pain, and there’s a lot of mini-games that require you to mash them. They’re too busy trying to ooh and aaahh you with motion controls and sensory features that they forgot how shit it is to mash bumpers that are literally fighting back. It’s nice that you can turn that off, but they put it in by default as the intended way of playing it. It’s just so egregious and doesn’t help with the pacing issues that most people had in Remake, in fact it’s made somewhat worse.

ring ring “Hey, it’s Chadley here!! I’m going to remind you that this game was $70 and therefore your complaint is rendered discarded. Just don’t do the content, forehead. It’s that easy."

Chadley, I will not hesitate to split you in half. I keep seeing this flimsy argument thrown around every time someone complains about this game. They get swarmed by people dropping the $70 comment like it’s the ultimate backhand. That it’s okay for the game to be overflowing with boring slop because it justifies it being $10 more than it would have been 5 years ago. It’s so cool that you like watching paint dry, but I don’t. There are games worth $30 and 5 hours long that were much more pleasant and much more memorable experiences than this. Baldur’s Gate 3 discourse has rotted all of your brains thinking that every game has to be 200 hours long to be worth it, when in reality if that game had been cut 50 hours it still would have been great because it was fun and had meaningful content. All the boring chore work in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth bothers me because it does nothing but waste your time and take you away from the character writing, which is the good shit. I will never forget how this game forces you to do a shitty on-rails gun mini-game 5 seconds after Barret has one of the most heart-wrenching cutscenes in the entire game. You might as well have played a laugh track over it. It’s not enough that you talk to the characters and maybe sometimes go on an outing with them, nope, you have to do a 6 chain side quest of killing monsters and playing mini-games, or looking for locations from a photograph, or crafting an object for the local idiot. There’s literally one Yuffie quest where a character you don’t remember from the Intermission DLC basically says “Hi” to you, then you run around the entire map looking for a monster for 30 minutes just for him to leave and have nothing else to add. It was worth it to get brownie points for Yuffie and unlock better dialogue for her that actually rules, but did they really have to make you work that hard for it? I guarantee no one will remember these quests in like 6 months.

It just blows honestly, because they put so much care into fleshing these characters out to the extreme. Their friendships are more prevalent and actually matter in this game. The comedy is funny when it hits and there’s sprinkles of silly moments that work well in making Cloud less of a hardass and more of a softie as the game progresses. I have never given a shit about shipping in this game, and it doesn’t matter here because they finally give those fans what they want if they work for it, so just about everyone is happy. Aerith and Tifa are actually friends and not weird competition, it’s so refreshing. And no matter how you feel about the narrative changes, the plot of FF7 is still just as fascinating as it ever was so the game is fantastic when you’re actually going through the main events. This has got to be one of the most rag-tag cast of characters in the whole series, maybe right next to IX’s gaggle of weirdos, and I genuinely care about what happens to them so of course I want to unlock all of their special dialogues. It’s just so unfortunate that it’s all bogged down by the most monotonous content ever. The writing prevents the game from being less ass than it could be, but it also could be so much better at the same time.

This link is everything I have to say about spoiler territory. Click at your own discretion.

Some other random things I felt: I’m glad that they introduced a fast travel mechanic because it's the one thing that doesn't waste your time. It’s not just a fast-travel at chocobo stops, but just about any location you discover has the ability to teleport to it. Without that, it would suck. The landscapes are amazing and so beautiful, but it came at the cost of mobility. Everytime my chocobo clipped onto a rock or refused to leap off of a small cliff, part of my soul cracked. It just made travel a pain in the ass sometimes, especially in the rocky, ruin like areas. Every action from getting out of the dune buggy and sitting on benches would feel excruciating because Cloud would always pause for a second before and after doing it, just breaking up the flow of the mobility for no real reason. I really hope they fix this in the next game because it was just another thing in it that started off kind of annoying, but then grew to extreme displeasure as the game went on. Selena is by far the best chocobo though.

The game over screen is worded atrociously. The multiple options to reload are confusing and I learned the hard way that reloading a checkpoint instead of a battle was a deathly mistake. These needed to either not exist or be rephrased differently. Why on God’s green Earth would I ever want to go back 3 hours on reload? It’s also really awful that you can’t adjust game settings mid-combat. More like ASScessible if you ask me. There’s no real reason for this, especially when some fights are right after cutscenes because the reload brings you right back to the fight, not before it. It made a certain Chapter 12 fight so fucking annoying to do because the NPCs wouldn’t shut the hell up the whole time. Jesus Christ. Imagine someone needed to adjust color blind filters or some other visible- oh wait, there aren’t any accessibility features at all, except for the scary yellow paint everyone pooped their pants about.

I really did want to like more of this game but it seemed as the longer it went on, the more psychotic I felt. I have found out how much of a pushover I truly am because of this game at the detriment of my own sanity. Critiquing this game seems to be an act of war in some parts, like having criticism for it is somehow removing the mask that I'm actually a gluttonous consumer that doesn't appreciate the art of games, which is nonsense. This toilet is art and I'd piss on that too. I'm glad that people found things to love in this game, and while it is beautiful, it is much more boring than anything else. There’s so much that I liked and yet so much that I hated, so I can only hope that the final game fixes a lot of the issues I have. I’m not going to hold my breath though because that’s exactly what I said in my review for Remake. This story never needed three 60+ hour games to tell itself and it’s getting more clear as time goes on. If the combat stays the same or changes for the better again, then I’m willing to see it through to the end. I'm already 2 games deep and I want to see where the story is going, but I imagine this game without the combat fixes and shudder at the possibility of its existence. We'll see in another 4 or so years.

Skyrim is the very definition of pure unfiltered SOUL. What else needs to be said about Skyrim that no other person has dared to say before me? It is quite simply one of THE games of all time.

Skyrim takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion, Bethesda’s other classic gem, where the player is put into the shoes of their hand-crafted Dragonborn Chad or Chadette. A civil war has taken place between the Imperials and Stormcloaks, and your character begins their journey at the helm of their disarray. (I still remember, to this day, when Ralof said “Hey, you. You’re finally awake” to me on my first playthrough.)

After a dragon accidentally helps the player narrowly escape their own execution, you soon find out that not all Nirnroots sing a pretty tune. Turns out that dragons have been extinct for centuries and now they’re back. Once you meet Balgruuf, it’s over. He orders you to fight an incoming dragon before it wipes out the city of his people. Reluctantly, your character participates, only to find out that they are in fact what we would call a Dragonborn, also known as Dovahkiin. (For those who didn’t know.) These rare somebodies are people born with the blood of Dragons and therefore can wield the same powerful magic. Fucking banger. It is now up to you, the player, to play the game and stop the dragons in order to say that you have beaten the game.

With a healthy level of jank, you could say that the gameplay loop of this game has aged quite poorly. And I would agree. There is no shortage of unfun first person combat to be found here, in fact, there is literally so much of it. However, the jankiness of it all is what gives Skyrim that rough edge charm we all know and love, and therefore I would say that even though it’s a 2011 game, it’s actually held up quite nicely. It’s not often you see me praising an old game that is THAT old, so you just know that it has to be the peak of the RPG medium.

I really think this game gets a lot of heat nowadays for really no reason. Have you ever considered that maybe this game is supposed to be a fucking mess? Just download a truck load of mods and exploit the enchantment table in order to deal 1247083927028238 contact damage on the Bandit Outlaw preventing you from progressing through the cave. It honestly takes a lot of skill to beat this game without it crashing at least 764 times with all the mods you’ve downloaded, so maybe just get better at the game before giving up on it. You seriously have no idea what you’re missing and I actually threaten you to give it another chance. Jankiness is an element that can be bested with both time and practice and was in fact intentionally put into Skyrim in order to challenge the player’s ability to keep their cool. I admire Todd Howard for shaping me into a better man.

Did you know that the term, “I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee” actually came from Skyrim? You can trigger this event when walking around town and speaking to any generic guard. Not even M’aiq the Liar knows that one.

Now let’s talk about some of the mid level designs. Ugh, if I have to complain about something it would be in this area here. Everytime I walked into a Dwemer ruin, I wanted to take all my anger out on Lydia again. The Falmer? The Automatas? The one big dungeon that’s almost as big as my Mom’s house? They make me want to drop this kino from a 10 to a 9 so bad, but I am a much stronger person than that. The nice thing is that you don’t have to go through them very often, but hoo-wee if I had ever seen bad design, it’s that. Not sure what the game devs were thinking with that one.

Disregarding that, some parts of this game really make you feel like you’re truly on crack cocaine. I mean, there’s really no way to fling yourself into the air without dying in real life so baiting a Giant to do it is like the next best thing. I took off all of my clothes, got 10,000 bounty in each town for killing the merchants and not even a single NPC gave a shit. It really made me feel like I was crafting the RPG adventure of my dreams. I once ignored all of the main quests and drank so much Skooma that I instantaneously died right in front of Delphine, and I’d do it again too. Anything to stick it to that bitch. There is no way she can convince me to do Spoiler, ever. Also, did you know that the dragon Paarthurnax is voiced by Charles Martinet, the original voice actor for Mario?

I really wish that I could play this game for the first time again so that I could become the ultimate Skyrim racist on my first playthrough. I was too nervous to go that route the first time, but I really think I missed out on something special there. Oh well, there’s 17 re-releases of this game that I can do that on!

Trophies: 76
Playtime: 20 minutes
Graphics: Potato
Music: Based

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdvClO0qYlcfWVA6WXd3oczS3hZSko-Zi&si=SFytVGI9TK3jm_Uk

Here are my scores for those who don’t know:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐- A complete and utter masterpiece. The best thing I have ever played. I will be thinking of this one for generations to come. I got a tattoo about it on my back and will be naming my children after the main characters.

⭐⭐⭐⭐- It’s dogshit. I’ve never been more insulted in my entire life. If I could refund it I would but Steam’s horrible refund policy prevents me from refunding games after 65 hours.

⭐⭐⭐ - Anyone who likes this game should be imprisoned on death row. You are genuinely the worst person who ever worsted.

⭐⭐ - I wouldn’t even accept this as a gift. What are you? Anti-Santa?

⭐- It’s woke.

Happy April 1st, everyone!

I was actually set up and ready to play Super Mario Sunshine for the first time, but it came to my realization that my Mario 3D All-Stars collection was missing out of its case. It turns out that the likely reason why it’s gone is because my nephew swiped it while he was here last, meaning that my LIMITED RELEASE 3D All-Stars copy was stolen. Look, he’s just a kid and I’ll probably see him again later so I may have a chance to get it back. I’m really not mad or anything, it’s just that the next time I see him I’ll probably be whipping Kung Lao’s hat at him instead of Mario’s. Until then though, I needed to find something else to play…

With Mario still on the brain, I had Odyssey basically screaming for me to finally let it out. It’s supposedly nothing like Mario Sunshine but I wouldn’t know anyways. The only 3D Mario I’ve played is Mario Galaxy, so I wagered it would play similarly in that direction instead. What I do know is that when I said I would be playing Mario Sunshine, it was met with tomatoes and thunderous BOOOOOOs. After changing plans to this, the mood instantly shifted to cute rainbows, hugs, and smiles. hotpoppah will remember this. Not sure what caused the hate in their hearts, but I guess I’ll take this situation as fate dealt to me by God himself.

I could be wrong, but this has got to be the most unhinged game in the entire series. Bowser has hit an all-time rock bottom, destroying civilizations in order to force a wedding onto a non-consenting Princess Peach. Mario’s whole gimmick is possessing the bodies of enemies, demolishing their bones in order to platform through natural disasters and discarding them into the ocean. This game has huge TikTok energy. It starts at a 100 right at the gate, then tosses you into the first world where the mechanics are kinda just thrown in your face. The camera’s whipping around like a CCTV monitor. The game’s just giving Moons out like it’s Halloween candy. Holy shit, is that a realistic DINOSAUR? I have so many questions and not enough answers, but it doesn’t matter baby, we’re cruising like it’s NASCAR. I don’t know what the fuck all the rush is, but boy is it cool as shit flicking your way around Metropolis.

New Donk City? This game made me feel like I could Donk anything. It was very easy. Sorry kiddies, I’m the better Super Mario Odyssey player. It really says something when you’re 3,654,844th place in Jump-Rope and yet there are still thousands of children behind you on the leaderboard. Maybe try a little harder next time! But real talk though, why are some levels like 4 seconds long? We can discuss and argue battle mechanics or bosses all damn day, but just the slightest diverging path will net you so many extra Moons for nothing that you can just straight up leave the level as soon as the boss is defeated. Sure, you don’t have to leave as soon as possible, but once you’re 3 worlds deep trying to absorb the area for what it is, you kinda realize that a lot of Moons are just the same puzzle or mini-game in every World. It slightly makes up for it in the post-game where you can re-fight the bosses and run around in Mario 64’s version of Disney Land, depending on who you are. I bet this was awesome for long-time fans, but for me it was like I was invited to the retirement party of some guy I barely knew.

I finished the game with 180 Moons though, 220 with some Mushroom Kingdom exploration. If you think I’m collecting 500 total just to unlock what I assume will just be a cock and ball torture level, you’ve been Donked one too many times. I’m sure it’s easier than it sounds with how the game just gives you Moons for breathing, but it’s the easiness of the collection that made the whole process sound so mind-numbing to me. It’s fantastic and amazing when the set pieces and bosses are all coming together, but boring as shit when you’re just buying Stars in bundles or looking for spots to ground pound. I don’t want to do that shit!!!

On another note, the music in this game slaps but it’s weird that there’s so many long stretches of levels where there is no music at all. Mario is half naked, nipples out on the beach but all you can hear is the sound of seagulls and waves hitting the coast line. It was a very surreal experience that I don’t ever want to feel again. Other than that, fine. It was fun. I finally have another Mario game under my belt, and it was mostly just as good as everyone says it is.

I gotta go though, someone just popped my balloon. When I fucking get you, Splatoon profile picture.

Make no mistake, Dead Island can be a fun game, but it is by no means a good game. I originally played this when it came out and I remember having a good time with it, but having played it again after playing Dead Island 2, it’s pretty safe to say that this game is literal poo poo doo doo. However, it is still kinda fun if you allow it to take you for a ride. With that I mean, play this in co-op only. Dead Island is a series that is hard carried by its multiplayer aspects. Without them, this game is a huge slog for a multitude of reasons. It’s got pretty terrible balancing issues, horrible skill trees, horrendous audio, bad traversal, boring quests, and a confusingly shallow plotline that gets made easier to handle with the more friends you play it with.

Every year for my birthday I get a little co-op session going with my friends and this year, Dead Island was the chosen one. With 4 main characters that appear in each cutscene, we needed to play it the way it was meant to be played, with each of us playing as each one. After some convincing, we managed to pull it off. Two of them were ready to rumble, not really knowing what they were getting themselves into, while the third was begging for a sniper to take him out the whole time. I allowed them to pick their characters before choosing my own since I was the one player who had already beaten the game. Somehow I still ended up playing as Xian, who is bananas busted in comparison to the other three characters. For some reason, they decided that each character would be an expert in different combat styles and nothing really else. So while Xian and Sam B. are really good at using sharp and blunt weapons respectively, Purna is better at shooting the guns and Logan is good at…. um.. throwing objects.

While you may think that shooting guns is a good skill to have, this game just does not allow you to obtain a single gun until like 50% of the way into the game. Even then, it’s still extremely hard to find ammo and the guns are unusable most of the time. Blunt and sharp weapons are littered all over the place, and with Xian and Sam’s skill trees favoring damage and critical chance success, they’re easily the two characters that are skewed in favor of having the most fun out of everyone. It’s this initial kneecapping right at the start of the game that would probably taint the perception you’d have playing this game in single-player. Without this knowledge, you might pick either Purna or Logan and then realize you’re in too deep once the going gets going. Logan is actually able to deal some heavy damage with his throws, but my friend ran into this bug constantly where his weapons would just disappear upon impact. He’d be left empty handed more often than not, even with the boomerang skill maxed out. The plus side to multiplayer is that a lot of this ends up not mattering in the slightest. What would be a slog to get through by yourself, immediately becomes a speedrun with friends. The game will throw a big boss at you and the four of you will just beat him to death like a group of cavemen swinging sticks on an animal.

The one thing that multiplayer can’t really save though is the annoying as shit fetch quests that plague every story beat of this game. It’s fine in the beginning when you’re in the resort area, still getting your bearings, but the same fetch quests that John Sinamoi gives you are the same fetch quests that every other character will give you moving forward. “Hey, you four morons, can you please go to the warehouse outside and kill the zombies and grab some gasoline canisters for me pretty please?” No bitch, do it yourself!!! Each act has literally the same mission progression: show up confused, travel across the map multiple times to get supplies for a group of survivors you meet, go on a rescue escort mission, come back to the survivors having been mauled to death while you were gone, leave the area, and rinse and repeat. Two times is okay, but three and four…? It gets pretty monotonous. Dead Island is at its best in the first act, where you’re exploring the resort area. There’s something kind of metal about the whole blood in the sand, sunny beach vibes ruined by zombies that kinda hits different for me. I think at the time of its release, it was the first piece of zombie media to go there as it’s setting and it’s still really cool now, just hitting home how outrageously horrific a zombie outbreak could be while it’s descending on unsuspecting beachgoers on vacation who were having the time of their lives like day ago. Unfortunately, you only spend like a good hour and a half during this portion of the game because the characters eventually leave to these less interesting and gross looking maps afterwards.

Once you hit Act II, the game drops off hard. It’s just these really drab looking sewers, prisons, ugly jungles, and endless hallways that you’re constantly walking back and forth through. Even in the Definitive Edition it all still looks really ugly. It makes the fetch quests stand out even worse as the maps grow larger, you’re having to traverse further for the same quest but with different supplies, forcing you to walk through the sewers more times than legally allowed. The outside traversal will most likely be done by some of the most difficult to drive vehicles as well. You can walk, but it’ll take forever so there’s no point but to give up and just have someone ride that whip into the sunset, over and over again, constantly crashing it into trees and random blockades. There are some horrible oversights that come with this though. The cars only have 4 seats to adapt to the amount of potential players, but the escort missions don’t account for that. You’ll need the NPC to have a seat, which meant that 1 poor schmuck was hauling ass on foot behind us instead. This would be mitigated sometimes by the game allowing the stragglers to fast travel to the other players, but only when a main quest was about to take place, otherwise they’d be left behind. We also ran into this really annoying issue where everyone would body block each other in small hallways, which is definitely bound to happen in the later acts. Someone would just sit in a doorway and AFK as a joke while everyone else was left screaming in the room they were stuck in. You’d open a door to find an explodey zombie and perish because your friends are standing in the way.

Luckily, death is kind of just a suggestion in these games. The great thing about Dead Island is that when you die, you respawn back into the action rather quickly, instead of being sent back to a save from hours ago or having to rewatch the cutscenes. You get a little countdown and then blip back into existence just a short distance away. It’s nice because it allows you the freedom to just full send yourself right into a group of enemies and try again. The only real downside to death is that you lose a percentage of the money you’ve found laying around. There’s unfortunately a currency system in this game and its economy is kind of wild. Money is not hard to find at all, but it is a pain in the ass to lose like $3,000 because you slipped off a cliff. You can use the money to buy new weapons or crafting materials, but you also need it to repair and upgrade them for some reason. The weapon durability varies and some items are expensive as shit to maintain, so to lose a huge chunk of your money is pretty annoying. The game does give you a crap ton of weapons to work with though and you’ll likely be swapping your inventory out every once in a while anyways. This is a system that is just done better in Dead Island 2 though. Modifying the weapons is cool, if only for a moment. Electrifying or combusting the enemies is useful as it keeps them stunned, but the damage can also be self-inflicting. You’ll be swinging on an enemy nutty style, then die because your friend shot it with an explosive fire bullet. It’s just awful how much your co-op partners can get in the way sometimes, and I’m sure playing this with randoms back then was probably a nightmare of endless trolling.

When the four of us finished the game and the sound of Sam B.’s famous “Who do you voodoo, BITCH?” overtook our headphones, I asked them what they thought, only to be met with 10 seconds of raw deafening silence. They didn’t even know what they just witnessed. The gameplay was okay and getting through this with friends was an experience I’m sure we’ll cherish together like a couple of friends sharing survivor’s guilt after an accident, the overall consensus was mass confusion and I don’t really blame them. This game’s “story” is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. The core 4 characters only get shit done because everyone else you run into is extremely stupid, just doing the most moronic things for seemingly zero reason at all. For every dumb thing that happens in this game, there were like 5 smarter alternative solutions you could come up with almost instantaneously, but that’s just how it is on this bitch of an Earth!!! The cutscenes teleport the characters around in ways only magic could pull off, with random moments of tension just ending abruptly. The characters are just unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant and it tries to be serious the whole time, with nothing injected to give it a bit more life or breathing room. They don’t emote in any way at all, so something will happen and they’ll just kind of look like a deer in the headlights. You know you’re supposed to be upset because the emotional piano music is playing, but Purna’s eyes are looking in two different directions, so the whole thing ends up being funny instead. Now compare all of this to the most clickbait trailer ever and you can see why a lot of people think this game is diarrhea. Dead Island 2 really leaned hard on the comedic aspects that I think worked fairly well for it, but here there is no joy. It’s all “We gotta get out of here!!” impatience at the cost of not giving a shit about anything else going on, which makes meeting all the other characters pointless. Xian is the only character with glimpses of compassion written into her, but there’s a point in the story where a side character gets sexually assaulted off screen and all 4 characters, including Xian, are verbally just like, “Well, if you weren’t such a bozo idiot then this wouldn’t have happened!!” Huh???

It’s a story that does a lot more telling than showing. You’ll appear at an area where everyone was killed by zombies and a lone survivor will just explain to you what happened. You don’t actually see any sort of conflict that is inflicted on anyone aside from the ones in the core 4’s vicinity, so there’s no reason to really care for what happens. Those events are just vessels to shuffle them off to the next area and never see those characters again. Oh, what about the origins of the virus? How’d this even happen? Oh, someone just quickly explains it to you while you escort them and have your dick pounded by an onslaught of zombies. You can’t just show anything, it all has to be explained in the worst way possible so that you don’t even retain anything being said to you anyways. Jin is the only character that follows the party for the majority of the game and is given some weird emotional pseudo-arc, but it all falls flat when she’s just rendered as the game’s sentient storage unit who adds nothing else. She doesn’t help the character’s in any way, shape, or form, and the characters don’t have anything nice to say about her either. It doesn’t help that while escorting her, she bugs out and freezes in place randomly, so you can despise her in that way too!

Speaking of, there are a lot of weird buggy issues with this game. I’m pretty positive that the Definitive Edition fixed a lot of those issues, but there are some that are still prevalent. I remember in the original it was really easy to dupe and glitch the hell out of the damage modifiers on the weapons, and I’m not sure if that’s fixed or not but it was crazy being able to do millions of damage back then. I already mentioned Logan and Jin’s issues, but there were also some problems where zombies would just kinda disappear and then come back, or they’d phase through walls. The most grating issue for me though was that the audio mixing was shitting itself the whole time. For some reason whenever someone shot a gun or landed a critical attack, it would sound like someone played the metal pipe sound effect everytime. I don’t even know how else to describe it, it just sounded like they were hitting metal on metal when it should have been more of a flesh sounding injury. It’s just odd. The game overall looks so much nicer in the definitive edition, but the stand out is still the resort area. That part looks amazing and the rest of the game is just hampered down by some really boring set pieces after that. The original used to have this vaseline filter over the top of it and it was thankfully removed here. It did however come at the cost of removing the paper quests that the NPCs would give you, which I thought added a little charm to this rather charmless game.

I do have to mention though that something about the FOV or general visual is so off in this game too. Specifically when your character is sprinting, the screen becomes filtered and shaky. I had to turn off motion blur and adjust all my other settings because it was making me motion sick, which has never happened to me in a game before. I had to nibble on some snacks while I played to prevent it from ending my life early, so watch out for that if you have a weak stomach for first-person POV games, or just avoid it entirely.

I don’t despise this game at all, in fact I still found a lot of fun with this playthrough. It is just simply not a good game, but I would qualify it as circulating back to the “good kind of bad” in some way. There’s a reason why it’s considered a bit of a cult classic. I can’t in good faith give it a higher rating just because having friends makes it a little less awful though. However, If you’re gonna eat some dog shit, you might as well eat dog shit with some company. And hey! It could have been a lot worse. We could have been playing Dead Island: Riptide instead. Now there’s an idea for next year 🤔.

Pretty creative bit of storytelling through the lens of unpacking boxes over a multitude of years spanning the invisible protagonist's life. The organization of the items coming out of the box does a neat job at implying subtleties of what the protagonist is probably thinking or having to deal with in the moment. There's one level that pulls this off really well, while the rest are moreso the same.

It was fun, but really short and I think it would have benefitted a lot from being longer. I don't mind that the story ends on a wholesome note, but it does showcase the character's highs a lot more than their lows, and it would have been nice if there were like 2 extra levels that dealt with that part of the story a bit more. I don't need them to be outrageously depressed, but it kinda seemed like their life was exaggeratingly perfect almost the entire time. Give me some more layers to work with! Other than that, it's a pretty sweet game and a small morsel to enjoy.