mkowzun
2015
Handily scratches that lizard part of my brain that jumps for joy seeing magic missiles cast on giant spiders, but I’m hard-pressed to remember an inkling of the lore or characters it so laboriously sketches out. Obsidian didn’t used to be this arch.
2019
New Vegas’ detail and humorous mean streak hollowed out and filled with grey paste dyed in all the colors of the rainbow.
Pretty depressing.
Pretty depressing.
2018
Yeah yeah pastiche, but a better Doom than the last three actual Dooms.
2020
Oregon Trail Xtreme
2019
There’s a negative review some ways down that characterizes this in one of those pithy, increasingly internet-specific ways as “Pynchon for (ill-defined hipster-adjacent group),” which is funny because I was reminded throughout of the distinct melancholy struck by the author’s own “Mason & Dixon” in its tale of a friendship between men who are, in an almost cosmic sort of coincidence, just the right kind of fucked-up for one another.
Anyone who knows how highly I regard that novel knows I don’t make the comparison lightly.
Anyone who knows how highly I regard that novel knows I don’t make the comparison lightly.
Still short some of the base game's emotional intelligence and finer shades, but the short-story quests dripping with lively, lived-in, and inventive mythos are back with a vengeance, and at the end of the day that's more than I expected from an expansion.
It’s more Witcher 3, which means it’s still packing a surfeit of low fantasy thrills and breezy pulp storytelling, but aside from isolated moments, the quieter grace of that game is lost in the shuffle. Replacing it: more mediocre combat and decidedly inferior side missions.
Good for a fun, polished quick fix of a game I’ve grown to fully embrace but conspicuously lacking the spark that brought together its immaculate technical presentation into something more.
Good for a fun, polished quick fix of a game I’ve grown to fully embrace but conspicuously lacking the spark that brought together its immaculate technical presentation into something more.
2002
Drivel, but the kind of drivel that imprints itself if you’re young enough (read: eight years old)
Call me a curmudgeon, but I was always deadened by its ostentatious vibrancy rather than charmed.
2007
Essentially the game version of TNG in that it’s stupid much of the time, charming many others (two aspects of it that are seldom mutually-exclusive), and the subject of obsessive vitriol from a very specific type of maladaptive online hypergeek.
Taps into what addicted me to DnD as a kid, and a thing I've long since thought impossible for a video game: a sense, however illusory, that the player is free to indulge in their own rules, however bullshit they may be. One of the few modern RPG's that invites you to tug on its edges rather than taking pains to conceal them.
Captures the spirit of old-school CRPG's while aiming their trappings at something entirely new rather than relegating them to window dressing.
Captures the spirit of old-school CRPG's while aiming their trappings at something entirely new rather than relegating them to window dressing.
2011
Combines the two objective worst types of humor (the swear portmanteau and self-announcing hyper-awareness) into something that's fun for two levels.
2002
The one game that could ever conceivably get me to utter the words "bodies in space."
An entire universe contained in a series of jumps, rolls, and shots.
An entire universe contained in a series of jumps, rolls, and shots.
2001
It's a millennial rite of passage to realize this game is ass, just as realizing "Spaceballs" sucks was one for the generation before us.
The quintessential game you played when you weren't allowed to play many of the good ones yet.
The quintessential game you played when you weren't allowed to play many of the good ones yet.
2006
Relatively simple as far as real-time strategy goes, but the spectacle of its systems bouncing off one another still proves an unadulterated delight.
A game that captures in amber that youthful joy of what we imagined setting off firecrackers in piles of plastic army men.
A game that captures in amber that youthful joy of what we imagined setting off firecrackers in piles of plastic army men.