This is it. This is the game with the most character ever made. No video game has half of the soul that this horrible buggy ugly piece of shit has.


/Have no choice but be isolated/
Furious arm flailing

this one is so tough to rank because it's highs are so incredibly high, they're virtually unsurpassed by any game since then. this goes for the characters, the writing, the choices and consequences, the RPG options (playing as a Malkavian or a Nosferatu results in a completely different experience), and the setting as a whole (it is so heavy in atmosphere, and just has a sexiness about all of it). what drags it down is virtually all of the combat, especially in any encounter after the sewers, and the ending, which feels a bit abrupt. it also was supposedly pretty broken upon release, but i played with the unofficial patch which fixed basically all the bugs for me. i think the good largely outweighs the bad, but not enough to give this a perfect score.

the whole uproar about its premature release aside, i would say that (both collectively speaking and for myself) the primary grief with cyberpunk 2077 is its familiarity. there is—understandably, i think—a sort of unspoken and paradoxical desire for cyberpunk to simultaneously push boundaries and somehow return to what most would see as its conceptual roots: neuromancer, blade runner, and other works which set forth the feel and iconography of future worlds run by tech and overwhelming corporate power and corruption, as well as a profound posthuman interest. all of these ideas are well beyond familiar, now. this doesn't mean there aren't new frontiers for the genre... it just means that cd projekt red opted for nostalgia and pastiche. this isn't entirely a bad thing. (even those recent shadowrun games were very character-driven, nestled comfortably in their established and frankly derivative universe. and they're great!) it's a perfectly serviceable backdrop for character-driven stories, and for better or for worse, 2077 is abundant in this realm. for the most part, i think it's all really good! i mean, i really like some of these characters and enjoyed spending time with them unreservedly. to the point that... well, the culmination of my time with some of them almost left me feeling a bit empty, knowing there would be little left to look forward to outside my own imagination. (sux 2 b lonesome... heh heh.) maybe there is something "cyberpunk" about playing a game that makes one feel so forlorn in this era of everyone being so terminally online, connected by tech, yet no closer for it... seriously, i fuckin dream every night of finding someone who loves me and... uh, i kind of love those dreams despite the bittersweet aftermath of awakening.

i think deathloop might be one of the most disappointing games ive ever played

the standard arkane fare is fun, i enjoy these games. what i dont enjoy is random weapon perks, extremely boring levels (which dont change at all between the days, or at least, if they did, it wasnt at all noticeable or interesting to me), and extremely repetitive and annoying gameplay. throw on this some awful performance issues on PC and i just did not have very much fun at all. the game was cool in the beginning but i felt very railroaded very quickly and i dont really understand the fun of this game. the world is boring, i do not care about exploring or seeing any of it. what happened to the cities of dishonored 1 and 2 that actually had people living in them? this game, it just feels like everyone is standing around waiting to kill or be killed. this isnt interesting to me.

maybe ill revisit it and enjoy but im thoroughly disappointed for the moment. so annoyed even that i cant even write up what exactly i dislike about it.

AAA video game maximalism in its most joyous form, Forza Horizon 5 is simply about how cool and fun it is to drive cars. Fast cars, big cars, stupid cars... as long as you're driving them somewhere interesting. Mexico is a much better locale than the United Kingdom but I will admit that I'm mixed on the idea of ripping my baja truck through some ruins. I'll just baja somewhere else.

I look at the map in this thing and see an absurd, frankly sickening amount of open world icons. The kind that annoy me in most other games, but Forza Horizon 5 makes me a hypocrite. It's just too much fun to drive. Everything handles so well. Especially my darling 90s Toyota Baja Truck.

Probably the only game of its kind, very online and player-retention obsessed, that will actually retain me. I did spend 100 dollars to play it early after all. Might as well spend time with it in between other games for the next year or two. You made me a sucker, Playground Games.

I never played the original Saints Row until years later, but in the wake of Grand Theft Auto IV leaning away from arcade-like gameplay and more towards realism, this was an absolute blast back in the day. The story itself is fairly engrossing but as always with open-world crime games, the main gameplay comes from the fun you and your friends have with the limitations of the design. With an absurd array of customisation and crazy secrets you can discover, Saints Row 2 was a must have in the early days of the Xbox 360's life cycle.