I fell off Tony Hawk a bit after THPS 4, briefly tried both Underground games at friends' houses and they didn't do anything for me. But American Wasteland??? That hooked me from the start. The story mode set in L.A. is great, I loved having an overworld with missions in a Pro Skater title. It also has my absolute favorite soundtrack of any Tony Hawk game. The covers of punk classics recorded for this game are probably the best thing to ever happen to a Tony Hawk soundtrack. What a great time!

Serious Sam 4 has been out for a while on PC already, but if you're not familiar with it, imagine a Musou with guns.

My time spent mowing down aliens in the new PS5 port of Serious Sam 4 was absolutely bonkers in the best way. In the vein of Doom Eternal, this is a shooter based around constant movement. You hold still? You die. You've got to keep mobile, tearing through hordes at a surprisingly fast pace. The initial Musou vibes of the enemy waves worried me (I’m normally not a fan of the genre), but SS4 does a great job of regularly introducing new enemies and weapons to keep things interesting.

As for how the port runs, the game looks incredible on PS5, with the draw distance being astounding. The second level's Italian city scape is so vast and gorgeous, I whispered "wow" out loud like 4 or 5 times. There were some minor technical hiccups, but nothing that would detract from the overall experience. The opening battlefield scene stuttered pretty badly for the first 15 seconds but quickly caught up, and I didn’t experience any jitters like that again. More of an oversight than a technical issue, some enemies seemed to have a single voice/shout recording, so when I was surrounded by a dozen suicide bombers, their combined yelling sounded eerily similar to that Vine of someone pushing on a whole basket of rubber duck toys. The most common legitimate issue was texture pop in, sometimes having someone's face load halfway through a shot of them speaking during a cutscene. But as funny and charming as the dialogue and characters can be, you're not here for the cutscenes, are you?

There are a couple of missed opportunities with this port though. The Dualsense doesn't get any variation in rumble. It's either rumbling or it's not, so running into a wall feels the same as getting shot. The co-op is also limited to playing with other players over the internet, one player per console. This would have been a fantastic game for split-screen, so that's a bit of a shame.

But all in all, this is a great time! This feels tailor-made for people who've been playing shooters for 20+ years, but I think anyone who enjoys frantic gunplay will get a kick out of this one.

Oh and definitely set the Blood/Gore setting to Halloween. It's fantastic.

I have had some serious ups and downs with Hollow Knight. On one hand, it's built on a flawed design document, encouraging free movement and exploration with the story but all the while doing everything it can to stop you from doing the thing the game is supposed to be about. The end result is frustration, slow paced navigation, and a loss of anything that could be considered "exploring". The fact that the map is locked away and even when you get it is nearly unusable is just inexcusable. There's never a way to truly understand where you're going or why you're going that way. It doesn't teach you how to get stronger or leave even a tiny hint as to where to get upgrades. There is no natural pathing; just an eternal labyrinth.

The lack of direction and scarcity of checkpoints are totally unfair and stacked against the player in every way. Most boss fights don't' have a checkpoint anywhere near them, so by the time you get back to the boss you're back to 1 health. It's very easy to loose all your souls and very difficult to collect more. Fast travel is a total joke, and it's so useless and spread out it may as well not even be in the game. Hollow Knight is basically artificially lengthened by the extreme difficulty which is mostly the result of the checkpoint system.

The reward for finding anything in Hollow Knight is typically just death, and losing the items and money you've been so meticulously collecting. However, 20 hours in now and having picked it up again after 3 years I do want to keep playing it. After using a bunch of guides to find all the level ups and get my guy up to snuff, I'm much more confident traversing the underground. I still maintain this is a flawed design because the game didn't guide me to any upgrades or even indicate I should be looking for them.

On the other hand, the little cute bug people almost make it worth it. You're constantly finding weird things which is cool, but it's less cool because everything in this world is trying to kill you. There aren't any moments of silent contemplation and just looking around, but the ones that exist are wonderful. Typically though, If you're not in a resting room you're fucking running from point A to point B. It doesn't leave a lot of room to admire the scenery unless you clear every room as you go, which isn't how i like to play games.

Hollow Knight seems to do everything it can to stop you from enjoying it. Other people clearly like it though, so what do I know. None of the boss fights were fun, as they all resort to insanely fast attacks to get to you that are impossible to block or dodge without hours of practice. And then you're back at a checkpoint halfway across the map, and you're more than likely going to die just walking back to the boss. It suffers from all the same problems the Souls games do, front to back.