You know, I can almost envision a reality where this game received the notoriety it so clearly deserved, and it wouldn't take much strain to imagine. Given the time period in which the game launched, it had everything it needed to click with anyone who laid eyes on it: a bright and colorful cast of characters that felt ripped right out of the system they were made for, a story of super heroes fighting off an alien invasion during an era where The Avengers were exploding in popularity, quirky gameplay mechanics you'd come to expect from a company like Platinum Games, an all star team of action game designers who had the experience and passion needed to bring this crazy concept to life and flourish, the works. With Hideki Kamiya at the helm, there was no chance this game could possibly fail, regardless of the system it was launching on.

So what went wrong?

Clearly something didn’t click with people despite Platinum’s best efforts. There are many reasons this could be the case (unorthodox control scheme, confused marketing, niche appeal of the action genre, etc.) but it would be difficult to pin down one specific thing that turned people away.

In my eyes however, what matters most is not that the game lacked something to wrangle in the highest number of potential customers, but that the game did not restrain itself in what it sought out to do.

Let me set the scene for you: June 2020, one of the worst years in recent history and it refuses to let up. Due to the recent shutdown of my job given the status of the world at that time, I had devoted a lot of my free time to playing games, as many others in my position likely do as well. Everything in my life is starting to drag, and I can tell nothing will get better any time soon. However, there is a momentary glimmer of joy coming my way. The Wonderful 101 recently had an incredibly successful kickstarter, and having heard many positive things about the game, I decided to give it a blind shot. Many of my favorite games were action games, so while Platinum didn’t have a perfect track record in my experience, I was interested in trying something I knew so little about. Even if it was disappointing, it probably had some interesting elements to dig into.

I didn’t expect my expectations to be shattered like they were after finishing the game.

I’ve never played a game before that appealed to all my sensibilities like The Wonderful 101 does, and even after nearly 200 hours of play, I’m still picking up on new things to love that I never noticed before. I won’t bore you with the semantics, but every element of the game is emblematic of everything I love about the medium. The story felt cartoonish and stupid in all the best ways, the gameplay presented incredibly distinct systems to set it apart from other action games while tackling problems about the genre in interesting ways I had never considered before, and the whole experience was uncompromising in it’s vision in a truly inspiring way.

In many ways, The Wonderful 101 made me feel like a kid again and ignited a passion for life in my heart at a point where everything felt so aimless and dark. As this global pandemic slows down and eventually fades into nothingness, I’ll be sure to leave a lot of things from this era in the past, but this game is sure to stick with me for years to come.

Regardless of how you may feel about the final product, what can’t be denied is that The Wonderful 101 is everything it wanted to be and didn’t settle for less. And for the time period when it came into my life, that’s all I needed it to be.

I think if I had to really pinpoint which game best represents the shallow melodrama, clusterfuck of plot threads and ideas, bad character writing dumbed down gameplay and lack of care or attention given to its mechanics of cold steel i think IV fits the bill in every aspect.

Nothing about this game feels cohesive every one of its ideas and executions feel stale and messy the experience is marred constantly with the same issues every cold steel game seems to have and i'm not sure if they're even aware of what they're doing half the time as it seems like CSIV looses track of what it's trying to be halfway through although at times it seems like not even they knew what they wanted to be.

In general if you want an idea of what exactly is wrong with cold steel's direction look no further then the pantagruel scene big setpiece with all these characters from better games mingling with the CS cast which then results in the same 5 villains repeated ad nauseum since fucking SC getting in a zoom call with the cast while they're all angry at them which then culminates in a series of piss easy filler boss fights that ends on a deus ex machina with a character that was thought to have died in the previous entry coming to save them out of nowhere.

I really don't think i can say much as anything else would just be repeating the obvious fuck cold steel lmao

The last time I was in town for a night out I saw a young man, drunk, being removed from a strip club. he made threatening gestures towards the bouncer before falling backwards through a bush into a concrete pot. We all laughed.

There was another night, I saw a woman hunched down to wee against a shop shutter before she lost her balance and fell onto her own waste, piss all over her skirt.

I saw a man in London having a wank on a moped. I was eating hash browns I had gotten from a mcdonald's near King's Cross. I just left him to it.

In Glasgow i saw two girls one night having a kiss. It was quite sweet. Its sad knowing that, that simple gesture of love shared between two people in certain places of the world could be dangerous to express publically, so I just thought it was nice. As I passed them I noticed they werent kissing but were infact digging their nails into each other faces, clawing at each other as if they were zombies, drunk out of their mind.

I was in a CEX and saw a junkie buying Spawn on DVD. I didn't say anything then, either.

A prostutite offered me her services one night as I was going home. I wasn't sure at what point of talking to a prostitute you could get arrested so I just hurried on nervously.

She told me she was cold.

My factory sealed copy of Ghost Trick had a pube inside the box.

The young man who fell over the bush. He uh... he died. He fell back and landed on his head, a bad hit in the wrong place, simple as that. Dead. His last moments on this earth were spent being dragged out of a stripclub and giving abuse and being laughed at. We were still laughing as he lay there before we realized.

Yakuza was released in 2006 for the Playstation 2 and received generally positive reviews

im...im...im... a tekken fan and i need my diaper

#incel #blackpill #doomer #depression #suicide #firstworldproblems #bullying #cyberbullying #anxiety #socialanxiety #tfl #foreveralone #loner #redpill #bluepill #manosphere #omegle #onlinedating #tinder #bumble #onlyfans #pua #hikikomori #neet #looksmaxxing #gymmaxxing #gymcel #ricecel #currycel #chad #facerating #touchgrass #jbw #lgbtqi #gay #lesbian #transgender #christian #muslim #christianity #islam #niceguy #supremegentleman #inkwell #mgtow #feminism #monkmode #nofap #semenretention #fds #daygame #nightgame #hypergamy #cuck #alpha #beta #mogged #betabux #golddigger #realnigga #getalife #stopreading #satire

cool concept executed to mixed results

puzzles are all too easy and the narration tries way too goddamn hard to be portal, the stanley parable and a self help book all at the same time while succeeding at none of them

it's alright and has some interesting moments but it's so brief and simplistic overall that the whole game feels like a glorified tutorial. play antichamber instead

What an amazing story. I won’t go too deeply into it because of spoilers, but I love how personal and focused the story is. It balances drama, comedy, and action really well. It left me wanting more, which is good. All the side story stuff is good too—a lot of comedy, insight, and character moments.

The three main characters, Soujyuro, Aoko, and Alice, are all fantastic and form a strong trio. A lot of the humour and drama comes from their interactions. Soujyuro might be one of the funniest Type-Moon protagonists and maybe even one of the funniest VN protagonists of all time. A lot of the VN’s humour comes from him, and it’s usually just him being himself. Aoko is all around really cool and very, very, attractive. She probably has the best expressions in this. Alice is a very fun and entertaining version of the cold, emotionless type. All of the extended cast is good too, but I do wish some had more screen time.

This is 100% the most high-budget visual novel I’ve read. Koyama's character designs are all striking and detailed, with tons of expressions. It’s also nice how many different outfits everyone has; I feel like you're lucky if a VN gives you two. All the background art is fantastic with amazing detail, all of it does a great job at creating a mood, especially all the stuff at night. Of course, there are tons of high-quality CGs. They do a lot of cool dynamic stuff in the more high tension situations—lots of motion, effects, and just a lot of stuff I would sum up as dynamic. Even outside of these moments, there is a lot of thought put into how characters are positioned in a scene.

I do want to talk about the translation in this game for a bit. This game has way too many grammar mistakes in it; it really needs a patch. There is double spacing, no spacing, words are missing, words are repeated, and there are even spelling mistakes. It does suck but it didn’t ruin it for me. I assume that VN’s translation was rushed to be ready at the same time as the Japanese release, so there wasn’t enough time for proper proofreading.

Another odd thing is how they chose to translate the names. In practically every single Japanese thing I’ve engaged with in my life, "し" is translated to "shi," but here they translate it to "si," so you get names like "Sizuki" and "Yamasiro" instead of "Shizuki" and "Yamashiro." Imagine if one day Fate/Stay Night gets an official translation and Shirou becomes Sirou; that would feel wrong, right? I don’t even know how Fumizuka becomes Fumidsuka. To make all of this even odder, in the digital artbook that comes with the special edition, both the Nasu and Koyama comments wrote Yamasiro’s name as Yamashiro. There is even a short story in it where a character’s name is written as Yoshitsune.

The name thing is odd but not the end of the world, but the game really needs a patch to fix all the mistakes, and I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up between now and the English physical release, which would make this entire section completely useless to people reading this in the future.

Overall, Witch on the Holy Night is a really strong start as the first official Type-Moon visual novel in English, and I hope this leads to more like the Tsukihime remake coming over too.

Please play this.

Geist is a game that anyone who is a Gamecube enthusiast will have at least heard about about and know of. Often assumed to be Nintendo’s “Halo Killer”, this has a small kernel of truth to it. In the early 2000s, after seeing the success of Halo CE, Nintendo began shopping around NA for a first person shooter with “unique mechanics”, of all devs, N-space, a company known mostly for licensed games, impressed Nintendo with their pitch about an FPS where you could become a ghost(the working title was “FEAR”, imagine a game with that title coming out in 2005 haha). Despite numerous delays, the partnership was amicable and N-Space produced one of the most interesting IPs in Nintendo’s library.

During the course of development, Shigeru Miyamoto and Kensuke Tanabe were fascinated by the possession mechanic, and used their authority to heavily alter the direction of the game, Geist’s similarity to Halo soon became only barely there and it instead ended up being far more like Metroid Prime (with some beats Half Life 1), which greatly benefited the game, as the change in focus to puzzle centric game play made it far more memorable for any one who plays it in the long run. Unfortunately this also came at the cost of the FPS mechanics feeling half baked and unpolished.

Geist’s possession mechanic is its most memorable and polished feature. Raimi’s spectral form is mostly invisible and in order to progress through 85% of the game, you need to possess objects, people, and animals to solve environmental puzzles. In order for a person or animal to be possessed, you have to scare them first, this leads to some very entertaining novelties, like using a TV to project a demonic image of a cat to scare rats, taking over a steam pipe to make it explode to draw a guards attention, hijacking a vending machine to make soda fly at a scientist then having a sink fill with blood to make him fall backwards, making dog food fly out of a bowl, etc.

This need to scare living vessels contextualizes the feeling of playing as a ghost brilliantly, and allows each puzzle to have time to breathe.

The progression of each step in the puzzles rely entirely on the players logical observation skills, A chef is going to naturally investigate a malfunctioning oven, a dog barking will obviously scare small prey animals like rats, a technician will try and diagnose what kind of malware is on a laptop etc. Geist nails its name sake when engaging with the possessions, rewarding the player for problem solving and playing on the satisfaction of their correct assumptions.

Unfortunately the FPS part of Geist fares far worse, and while thankfully you won’t be engaging with it that often, it’s always boring to unpleasant when you have to do these segments.

The biggest issue is the lack of good audio and visual feedback when your bullets hit your targets. 99% of the time you have no visual or audio indicators that you’re doing damage, but this doesn’t mean the game is difficult, on the contrary, Geist is one of the easiest FPSes you’ll ever play. Each soldier goes down in 2-4 hits, and the later Demon enemies are incredibly weak up close.

The camera turning speed is also very sluggish, for the majority of the game when doing puzzles, this is tolerable, but it makes tracking enemies a pain during combat sections. To compensate for this, and the overall unfinished nature of the shooting, The hit boxes for your weapons are enormous, your reticule will often light up red while a solid foot off the target, so any potential frustration is replaced with boredom.

Sometimes you can possess enemy turrets or explosive crates, but due to how powerful you already are, this generally pointless sans a set piece and puzzle in chapter 5, the latter is the only interesting section of combat in the game, as you need to strategically possess the right turrets in a tight time frame.


Geist does feature a good handful of boss fights, but they aren’t very exciting or fun to engage with, at the very least each attack is very well telegraphed and the arenas are large enough that the sluggish camera turning is never an issue, since one can just move aside or vertically to avoid attacks.

Given how powerful Raimi is, the bosses are very easy to take care of, You will often do so much chip damage with the rifles the game provides you with for most encounters that you can generally bypass scripted weak points, And each boss area is very generous with health packs, so you will never be in genuine danger.

Geist suffers from very poor enemy variety, you will fight a total of five enemies for the entire game and all of them get mogged easily by the insanely high damage of your guns. 90% of the combat is killing soldiers made of paper, sometimes small imp demons who die in one hit, and every once in a while spider demons who die in 3 seconds when you simply get right next to them and hold down the fire button. There’s zero tension in the FPS segments due to your high damage output and the plentiful health packs in every 3rd room.

I saved the last enemy type for last as they only show up near the end game, and aren’t even really an enemy to begin with, they are basically a rope trap that pulls you into fire or enemy soldiers, you simply deal with these by firing your grenades. Making the final stretch of combat near the end game tension-less.

Due to the possession mechanic being the central focus, you will have infinite ammo when in combat to compensate for being unable to possess focused soldiers, This isn’t balanced very well given every weapon has massive magazine sizes, and grenades instantly restock, so for many mob fights, you can just wail on the Z button.

There is a Multiplayer mode, But it isn’t very good as it uses the same unfinished shooting mechanics in three basic TDM, CTF and DM modes. If you really like the gun play might get something out of it, as the bots can actually be quite vicious if you crank up their AI to the max. Though map design is nothing more than a few layered empty rooms.

Geist is one of the better looking Gamecube games with a realistic art style, god rays shimmer convincingly and there’s some great particle density, your guns show off impressive smoke trails after being fired. The textures have impressive depth, showcasing bumpy rusted edges, brushed steel shimmering, and pustule infested skin on the demons.

The art direction is quite nice, Raimi’s ghost form in particular is striking, looking like a spectral nerve chart, the darkened, heavily industrial volks facility feels like a truly oppressive prison with it’s tight corridors, dim blueish lighting, and winding geometry.

The UI is rather basic, but looks fine overall, with the map you can access pressing left on the D-pad being very reminiscent of Metroid prime, though given how distinct each room is, you will never need to use it.

The games Frame rate is mostly stable, but drops heavily in combat sections if heavy amounts of gunfire is active, going all the way down from 60-low 20s at many points, if it wasn’t for these sections being laughably easy, this could very well have made the game borderline unbearable during said sections.

Animation quality is passable. The mo cap for cut scenes is basic but not distracting because the actors aren’t constantly moving slightly like so many games of the 7th gen onward would be plagued with, enemy bodies often go flying after dying and it can look very comical at times, but bosses as mentioned before have clear, exaggerated tells with their moves, so fighting the latter is never frustrating.

Musically Geist is highly competent but tracks fail with their intended mood. Most of the game for when you’ll be in ghost form, the game sometimes plays dark atmospheric songs, these don’t really make you feel that powerful because Raimi always feels powerful, and the same can be applied to music that plays during combat. As the Increased tempo in the percussion and horns don’t make you feel like you are facing a threat, due to you always being the biggest threat from a game play standpoint.


Geist’s Voice acting is not very good, the delivery of every character is incredibly flat and bland. Nothing stands out as truly bad or good, but every line sounds like the actors are thumbing through each word that they have also memorized several times. While the tone of each voice fits each character, the delivery leaves much to be desired.

Geist’s plot is initially interesting though it’s not executed particularly well. The initial premise of a man weaponizing his interest in the occult to conquer the earth after the death of his sister left him with nothing is a solid concept. And there is some minor influences of Half Life 1 here as well, given the volk facility was researching another dimension and there’s a “accident” that sets the demons free.

Of course this has little impact, despite the Demon lord being incredibly powerful, for some reason he needs to weaponize human ghosts to carry out his plans, despite quite a few lesser demons coming in by the seemingly hundreds mid game. And the reveal that he has been in control of volks’s corpse for decades makes the initial premise not being relevant a huge letdown.


The Demons never feel like a threat of course due to how strong Raimi is, and the fact that each of the bosses are fought multiple times with zero changes in tactics. Despite the insistence from your allies that these creatures are a threat to the human race, the consistent jobbing sure does not make this feel truthful.

Geist’s human cast isn’t that memorable either. Aside from the secondary antagonist being afraid of dogs, no one stands out as likeable or dislike-able, Every one speaks and carries themselves in a professional demeanour and the flat voice acting reinforces how bland everyone is.

Raimi himself is a silent protagonist, but he’s rarely expressive in cut scenes. At most you may get the occasional smirk and/or gasp, but in general he’s just your vehicle for the world.

On a better note the story is excellently paced, Geist knows just when to kick you back into action after a gauntlet of puzzles, with waves of firefights leading to a boss encounter, that then winds you down again for some exploration with no puzzle solving for a good bit, giving your brain a good rest before you engage in the same excellent structure again.

Geist is a very bizarre IP in Nintendo's catalogue. Originally intended to be a Halo competitor, it instead became a Metroid prime lite with fantastic puzzles and excellent production values, with an unfinished FPS attached to it. It’s worth playing for sheer curiosities sake as the novelties of the ghost puzzles will elicit feelings of moderate joy in seeing how the possession subjects react or how Raimi can fuck with said objects, The music may not elicit the mood it intends due to how OP you are, but it is generally enjoyable, the story and cast are a bit humdrum, but the pacing is also excellent so you won’t be dreading any of the lows for long, and while the combat isn’t good, the puzzles that make up the majority of your playtime more than make this worth a look.

7/10.