Morte (reading the Nameless One's back): "says here you died of ligma"

Nameless One: "what's death"

Morte: "ligma balls"

It's weird to consider that Hotline Miami might be one of THE most seminal games from the 2010s'. It helped inspire a swath of artists, from game developers to musicians, for the decade to follow.

Do you want to know why I said that it's only "one of" the most seminal games of the last decade? Because Dark Souls has three games in its main series, one game that came before it and a remake of that one game, and at least three games by the same developer that play just like it.

We are no longer in the era of sequels being a neat addition—cinematic universes, television, and live services are all more popular than they've ever been before. Whether or not you're ready to brace a media landscape where the idea of discussion being finite begins and ends with "but I can't wait for the sequel" is irrelevant; this is where we're at, and we're too far in to course correct now.

For the moxie of the developers to not want to squeeze their golden goose too hard, I admire their work. It's not just that they've made two all-time indie classics, the likes of which helped define the scene in the late 2000s'. It's that they made a really good game, let people talk about it until they inevitably moved on, and didn't try to keep its relevance on life support for ten years. Hotline Miami is relevant ten years later because the artists it helped inspire wound up creating games like it, with more to come in the future.

In terms of the game itself, it's about as fast, brutal, and fun as you've been told it is. Its commentary on violence in video games might not be the revelation it once was. But compared to a lot of the meta-commentary that was being made in games at the time, it's surprisingly subtle and doesn't overstep its boundaries. The soundtrack is, of course, magnificent, and I still listen to it daily. Hotline Miami is the kind of game that I stop, start, stop, and then eventually finish just that one more time. Part of what makes that meta-commentary hold up slightly more than it should is that Hotline Miami is a genuinely fun game to play and revisit. Hell yeah, I'll bruise some bad dudes with my free time! Why the hell not?

I've played around three versions of this game, and that's mostly to test the waters. For my money, the best port for this game is on the Nintendo Switch. But the Vita version gets very close! Hotline Miami on the Vita uses the back touchscreen in a way that makes me proud to say that I'm a Vita owner, if only because nothing else feels like it. But it's those joysticks, man. They're too small, and their deadzones are pretty tiny, and my god, you feel it while playing Hotline Miami. It's a little better than the second game on the Vita, though. Good lord, hand me a Switch, and I'll blaze through the first few levels of that game, but I can barely dodge roll to save my life on the Vita port.

Anyway, five stars, and I regret nothing.

It almost feels silly to call anything else an RPG now that this exists. It's a perfect culmination of the idea of injecting stats and rolls and modifiers into a game that actually lets you play a role, to define who this amnesiac man is and how he relates to the world he inhabits.

And what a world: broken and tragicomic, Revachol comes off at first glance as a bitter satire written by a disillusioned leftist. But the deeper you dive, the more it opens up into something haunting and beautiful in its own right, with even a faint glimmer of hope hidden among the ruins. No people is truly broken, argues Disco Elysium, while they still have hearts to care for one another and arms to link against their oppressors.

The £0.79 I paid feels like the right price for this. Not in the cost = value sense - I have paid far more for games I've appreciated far less - but as a symbolic act that forms part of the Dog Days experience's larger whole. From the moment I clicked on the Steam launcher, the game started its audio-visual assault - taking over both my monitors, refusing to run in borderless or windowed mode, crashing to desktop when I tinkered with the AA settings, running my modern raytracer rig hot before I'd even seen the main menu. It was every Fuck You that Backloggd had promised me it would be, and I hadn't even clicked on "Start campaign" yet! Wow!

This may all sound like facile shithousery, but there is something kinda special about a game with Square Enix and IO Interactive title cards trying its absolute hardest to assault you through the screen. Title screens are an important part of the Gaming Experience, and the Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days title screen is no exception - hitting you with a barrage of low-kbps door-knocking sound effects, poorly-mixed raindrops and presumable Chinese swearing. Two paragraphs in and I haven't even pressed the Any key yet - that's how you know this is a game worth talking about! Yowza!

At the time this game was released, I was all over the cover-shooting scene - Gears, Ghost Recon, Uncharted, Vanquish - the whole hole-hiding lot. Gears of War 2, was, and still is, a 5/5+10/10 Certified: Awesome banger in my eyes. Landing an active reload and separating a locust's chest from its dick and balls will always feel (Marcus Fenix voice) Nice! to me, But could I have handled this game back in 2010? You've all heard of the Cool Ranch Dorito Effect, but this game is the Moldly Stale Nacho Cheese Dorito Effect - an alluring flavour so overpoweringly awful that you can barely handle the taste. But something about it just keeps bringing you back... This is Woke Up This Morning (Nightcore Remix) in video game form. Awesome!

It blows my mind that this game has splitscreen co-op. It does not blow my mind to learn that the splitscreen co-op is apparently broken in all sorts of offensive and ridiculous ways - it's so perfectly fitting in so many many ways that elude elucidation. It's now a Life Goal for me to play through this thing in splitscreen with a buddy while we're both spun out of our minds on something or other. It would whip so much fucking sack. I feel like splitscreen Dog Days would function as a drug in and of itself. Even if I wasn't blitzed, I feel like it would still give me a hangover the next day. Can you imagine two guys doing that sprinting animation at the same time while overlapping "SHT YOU CNT!!" "FCK PSS!!" audio files play at different levels over the top of each other and six other stock uzi sound effects of variable volume? It would be sick! Fuck yeah!

It always kinda bothered me when people told me No More Heroes was "belligerent by design" as part of some larger Art Game whole - it was just boring as hell! (Travis Touchdown voice) Fck off! Even if it was intentional, No More Heroes always had its sneakers halfway into its player-hostile concept. Kane & Lynch 2, by contrast, is completely unafraid of confrontation with the player on the other side of the keyboard/gamepad. Like killing people, do you, nerd? No More Heroes 2 (released the same year as Kane & Lynch 2) tried to take the antagonistic nature of the series further towards real meaningful stuff, but it looks like Little Baby Shit in comparison to Dog Days. Suda51 apologises for wounding you. IO Interactive interactively pisses in your wound - and maybe fucks it too, before crashing to desktop! This* is how you challenge your player about all their endless killing and collecting. God damn! Are you enjoying yourself?

I was gonna do a paragraph where I lamented the fact that the game lacks that final furlough of audio/visual/gameplay polish to complement the art vibe that almost takes this to 5 Star Status, but in the process of writing this I realised that the game just wouldn't land the same if you could actually hear the music or think clearly over the sound of a shotgun getting stuck in an audio loop. If I'd been able to clear the rooftop chase the first time without being wiped out by a fucked up ragdoll distracting me and causing me to run into a glitched-out cop who couldn't find cover, I wouldn't have been half as aware of the artifice of video game running-and-gunning-and-murdering. Holy shit! Am I enjoying myself? No! Five stars!!!!

Um smash bros da capcom com muito poder e super esquecível

Dessa vez vou dividir em duas partes o texto porque como é uma coleção lançada pro PSP de jogos do Dreamcast, vai fazer mais sentindo eu citar o que achei de cada um deles, então da-lhe.

Power Stone 1

Po sinceramente eu achei ele um jogo bom, porém os controles hoje em dia ja estão meio datados e os cenários dele é super confuso, não sei se isso é culpa da câmera do jogo que em alguns momentos se mostra muito próxima dos personagens, ou se é realmente um erro de construção nos locais de luta mesmo.

É um jogo que tem um certo potencial, tem personagens com habilidades diferentes, pouco combo infelizmente, porém se encaixa com o estilo que o jogo propõe entregar. Eu não gostei tanto assim do 1, principalmente por conta de sua dificuldade exagerada e olha que eu joguei no fácil, achei muito casca grossa desnecessariamente, mas foi divertido jogar ele por um tempinho, só depois que ficou muito massante.

Power Stone 2

Nesse aqui eles conseguiram melhorar tudo o que tinha de errado no jogo anterior, a dificuldade bem mais equilibrada, uma partida demorada com apenas 1 K.O, seleção de cenários e claro.. gráficos bem melhores. Só que mesmo assim não consegui me simpatizar tanto com o segundo, na verdade, acabei gostando mais do primeiro depois de jogar o 2

Ele tem mais personagens, tem uns estilo mais casual, mudança nos cenários, combate enquanto o personagem cai no chão o que eu achei maravilhoso, mas ainda assim sei la.. não gostei muito desse jogo, acho que não foi pra mim infelizmente.

Tenho certeza que daqui a 1 semana se tu me perguntar sobre, irei esquecer que joguei ele.

Star Control 2 is pretty much the perfect video game in the sense that it exceeds in all the goals it aims at accomplishing. The atmosphere, world-building, narrative, alien designs and dialogue are all done well beyond the level of most science fiction. Its a very soulful game that is still pretty much one of a kind. (Which is surprising, considering it developed a pretty decent blueprint for what could have been a fun subgenre of space exploration games)

There's some nitpicks to be made about the games writing and core gameplay but most of these come down to personal preference. There's some obtuse missions in the game that I cannot imagine figuring out without either a guide or some hint beforehand and I can't imagine "beating" the game blind on your first playthrough but these don't really get in the way of the main appeals of the game.

The less you know about this game the better. Go in blind and drink up the scenery.