11 reviews liked by kakofonous


Fortnite is ruining my life one more time

thing thing arena but made by an angry chick who listens to black dresses instead of some dude who definitely frequented vampirefreaks in its heyday

wears everything about itself on its sleeve - one look and you should already know whether or not you fuck with it

Never wanted to stay away from reviewing something so much in my life. Discourse around this game has been so draining on both sides.

Yes the live service aspects hurt the game’s overall plot (due to needing to wait for new seasons to progress it) and the endgame loop is barebones. I, personally, find the gameplay itself so engaging that I don’t find the loop as boring as others but it’s totally valid to criticise the game for that.

I’m not going to try to talk too much about the story that is there. I’ve been reading comics consistently for a decade and I really enjoyed it. I don’t think my experience makes my opinion more valid or anything. But I’ve read/watched/played enough content of these characters that this felt a bit more fresh.

Again, I totally understand if people don’t like the direction the story went. I can understand their feelings especially as it’s a follow-up to the Arkham series. But some people are acting like the story killed their dog or something and they need to chill out.

Alisa

2021

Very interesting and satisfying survival horror. The vibe and mood is perfect. The weapons are satisfying to use, and most of the enemies are fun to kill. My few complaints involve the camera angles in some parts; they can be rather confusing and make navigation/combat harder than they would be otherwise. Also near the end of the game is a really dumb stealth section that, while short, is still annoying and weird. But aside from the that, the boss fights are great and the game is good overall. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes classic survival horror.

Alisa

2021

Rough around the edges, but undeniably compelling. I also get do dress up with all kinds of pretty dresses.

the last human space online. 99% amateurish user-generated content. gobs of first experiments with 3d worlds, fanshrines, abandoned hangout zones, idealized suburban lives, outsider art, hyperfixation outlets. incredible photography "game," and a reminder of what the internet could have been.

I went into Saints Row expecting it be the worst of the series - an unpolished, unfocused mess with poor writing and annoying characters. Through the first act, that is what Saints Row is. This game does not put its best foot forward. The game has a slow start, the writing is at its worst, which leads to the unlikable characters. However, once the Saints start becoming Saints, things get better and better. By the end, I was loving my time with Saints Row's last hurrah.

Not to say it was a great game by the end. The business venture side missions (which honestly felt like the bulk of the game) became tired and repetitive fairly quickly. Each business has its own unique side mission, which are mostly fun. The problem is I do the side mission, had fun, and the game says do it ten more times. Its those last ten times that are no fun.

Most criticism I heard about the writing and characters were one hundred percent accurate based on the first cut scene with the companions. It was a bad scene. Fortunately, the characters got better. They don't compare to the original Saints; the new Saints have plenty to like about them. The story focused more on the companions and less on the rival gangs. I would have liked more story to flesh out the other gangs; maybe focus less on the business ventures.

Additionally, the game's story was oddly paced. It felt like it took forever for the Saints to form. Then before I knew it, all the rivals gangs were defeated (in a span of three consecutive missions) and I was on the last mission. It could be because during act two, I was mostly focused on the business venture side missions, but thinking about the story, it definitely felt the first act was the longest, which each successive act being shorter. Which is a shame since the first act is definitely the weakest.

Stand alone, Saints Row is a decent game with writing and pacing issues. As an entry in the Saints Row franchise, it definitely falls beneath the heights of 2 and 3. Volition and Saints Row deserved another go around to get things right (I say the same thing about Agents of Mayhem). Unfortunately, the volatility of the video game industry means neither Volition or Saints Row will get to return to glory. While it wasn't the studio's or franchise's best, Saints Row was worth a playthrough, and I had plenty of good times with it.

the only thing stopping this game from being perfect is the combat, it would work so much better as a walking simulator! other than that, rule of rose masters everything else. i love seeing female adolescence and trauma through the lens of fairytales and flowery language to remind the audience that jennifer was too young. a silly yet efficient reminder that these are just kids, capable of doing awful, awful things, but still, kids playing a game.
diana in special stands out to me the most: she's just awful. maybe there's a reason for that, after all the adults around her aren't exactly teaching her to be a good person. but to jennifer, she's just a mean girl. the things diana did might not impact her, she might not even think about it often, but to poor jennifer, it's a scar she carried for a long time, something that takes a long time to make peace with.
rule of rose tells this bittersweet tale in a way that haunts me, if i think too much about it: it never hide its horrors, only try to cover it a little with rose motifs, because it's a children fairytale. but in its core, it's a letter full of empathy to all those kids that were mistreated, and it says "you can survive this, and you can move on"
hits too close to home and i know i'll keep this game in my heart for a long time.

This game ultimately feels like it's not for the hardcore Harry Potter fan but for the casual one. It's for the fan who enjoyed the movies when they saw them years ago and thinks it would be cool to play as that kind of wizard in a video game. It's got the narrative logic of those franchise theme park roller coasters that recreate the characters and the sets and the props and then slap together a little storyline to immerse you in that universe for 10 minutes. It's for the people who remember the spell names and the creatures and the castle but aren't SO invested in the story that they'll think too hard about why any of these elements manifest in the way that they do here. Why is the Caretaker (who is essentially the security guard at the school) teaching your student character how to pick locks after dark?? Why does a regular student just know one of the wizarding world's so-called "Unforgivable Curses" and why does he teach you to use it on him?? Why is the solution to saving wild animals from poachers to more or less poach the animals yourself?? Why is everyone in the game trusting your 5th-year transfer student with no past or internal motivation with all of this stuff??

The answer is because these are the tools you use to play the game. Your wand is your avatar's weapon and the spells are your abilities. The animals provide crafting materials. Your character is at the center of this story because they're your character. The game wants you to create your avatar in whatever image you'd like but doesn't make any room to deepen the context. There's no personal connection to the larger conspiracy you take part in. The villains are one-note caricatures seeking power who never emotionally register. The trailers for this game teased a "dark path" your character could take but really all that amounted to was the existence of Unforgivable Curses in your arsenal. There are zero consequences for using these once you've added them. You know they're SUPPOSED to be bad because they are in the original books and movies but the game wants you to have them so they play dark ominous music when you first learn one and then you're more or less off the hook.

After almost a year of passing over this game I wound up getting it for Christmas. My fiancé and I are always looking for a big story-driven game to get sucked into and we've both loved Harry Potter since we were kids so on some level we felt compelled to eventually check this out. I don't feel great about it. I wish I could say the story or the mechanics were so unbelievably compelling that it was all worth the trouble. I've sunk quite a few hours into it at this point and I'll admit I've had some decent surface-level fun with it but I can say that it's probably not worth whatever moral handwringing you might have to do to get yourself to play it.

(Just an fyi, I read the Divine Comedy last week and it’s living in my brain atm)

God, what is there left to say about The Beginner’s Guide? The game’s critical buzz has never really abated; gristly bits of comparative critics funnel through concentric grinders operating like a fountain in orbit around Wreden and “Coda” , the last cavernous mouth open at the center of things for the player to hop in and be bitten through - and strangely enough, like another undead game as manifesto, Getting Over It, critics keep themselves in the crucible and hop like fishes into that dulce maw. Of course, it’s not a difficult ask when the writing is as sharp herein as it was in The Stanley Parable, proving Wreden is not merely an apt and capable comedic dev but also that he genuinely knows how systems, when contextualized, produce pathos - systems that, when circling ever downwards through architectures and environments inescapable and, if we are less brazen at the end of things come breakdown, irreducible, cannot help but ensnare new writers every year. Unfortunately, I don’t have much more to say on the game than any astute critic has brought to The Beginner’s Guide in the last seven years (so I won’t try to ape Errant Signal, Innuendo Studios, What’s So Great About That, or Watch out for Fireballs) - what I can say is this: I think that the quality of gratuitous self displacement in game circles is proportionately massive in comparison to the toxic empathy seen in other many other mediums’ audiences (I mean, I love Mary Wigman’s dancing as much as anybody, but you never see people get so utterly invested in her or her compatriot’s subliminal ‘meanings’ as we do with fixations in games and other, to a lesser proportional extent, pop media), and this is something that requires more frequent investigation even in the wake of Davey Wreden’s time bomb. We are beset by locutions memeified because of the way games communities are able to articulate themselves in reference to the experiential empathy we incur when playing games: feeling a great deal in the experience but being unable to express those feelings due to a loss laden transliterative method of re-exacting momentums which are plainly articulated with game’s worlds/systems/context and filthily made invective when spoken, written, or recorded. This can often lead to different sins of insular connectivity: feelings of you as a player being the only one who, according to developer universal laws, ‘gets it’; feeling as though you and your immediate circle are elevated by engaging with something that cannot be other but played; feeling like a perfection of play is equally substantial as a perfection of statement. These all can lead to leaps in the infectious inebriation gamers can be drunk on (or be fused with in a pillar of flame) when forming attachment to developers, game characters, game worlds, IPs, or the intermingling of those constituents into a myst of implacable facade sighted through only by those with eyes hardened heroically against blue light. Those sightlines are less rose tinted beer goggles and more cheap 3D red and blue chintzes; Gog and Magog seeing the proper and cordial, cozy by the fire, correct understanding/interpretation of a work while simultaneously turning an icy wrath, freezing from the head down when downturned up, any dissenters of opinion. This is why, in my opinion, affirmative phrasing is often the only accepted internalizations of outside criticisms articulated outside of the game’s referenced mechanics - it’s a system which draws its meaning from solitudinal bits of emotional information. Of course, this is all just restating the premise that Davey Wreden underscores within the opening minutes of The Beginner’s Guide, but I’m trying to do what I’ve just said is difficult: put into words that which is stated by play. It’s a daunting task; one of the popular critical reads is to turn the actions similar to the in game Davey’s back on the wielding critic, self reflecting/flagellating for assuming positions held by the dev byway of inferring from a game’s impossible to translate grammar structure. But I don’t think that’s the real issue - of course assumptions made on behalf of the dev’s personality are fruitless (and frankly useless for unlocking game criticism: I mean, we’ve all read New Criticism texts, right?), but there is something to be said for agglomerating components made within games to form an extrinsic meta text that is based in the language we use to talk about games and not from within the inarticulable games’ languages themselves. Leave the individual games criticisms to other games - media will always be better at critiquing its own kind than we can - and focus on producing a different type of understanding that does not industrialize the meanings component within any art object navigated by button pressing.

At least, I think that’s what I got from The Beginner’s Guide.

1 list liked by kakofonous