Bio
Just a guy who loves video games, and wants to share that love with you! Making gaming videos that go in depth as to why I love video games, so stay tuned for that!

I don't like using rating systems when talking about games, but for here, it's useful for organization. The scores don't matter, since everything is a gut feeling and liable to change!

Discord: spikethestupido
Personal Ratings
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Adored

Gained 300+ total review likes

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Mentioned by another user

GOTY '23

Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event

Well Written

Gained 10+ likes on a single review

Loved

Gained 100+ total review likes

On Schedule

Journaled games once a day for a week straight

Popular

Gained 15+ followers

Organized

Created a list folder with 5+ lists

Best Friends

Become mutual friends with at least 3 others

Gone Gold

Received 5+ likes on a review while featured on the front page

Noticed

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Liked

Gained 10+ total review likes

Elite Gamer

Played 500+ games

GOTY '22

Participated in the 2022 Game of the Year Event

3 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 3 years

Gamer

Played 250+ games

N00b

Played 100+ games

Favorite Games

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Banjo-Kazooie
Banjo-Kazooie
Persona 4 Golden
Persona 4 Golden

577

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

297

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 5

Mar 25

Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil 4

Mar 25

Kirby's Dream Land 2
Kirby's Dream Land 2

Mar 16

Kirby's Dream Land
Kirby's Dream Land

Mar 09

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Mar 09

Recently Reviewed See More

I feel like a fucking crazy person.

For context on this psychological self report, I was already a fan of the original Gungrave. On a recommendation, I had picked up Gungrave along with the sequel for mere pennies on the dollar in an ebay lot circa 2017. I was massive fan of Yasuhiro Nightow's work — Trigun being the inspiration for my username — so a game where his characters bearing their signature boldenly squared shoulders to carry freakishly huge, thematically blunt objects as weapons was a perfect fit for the medium of video games.

The original game was an arcade style third person shooter, where you play as the titular Grave himself, aka Brandon Heat. It's simplistic moveset involving diving while shooting, standing still to release a frenzy of bullets, and it's frequent special moves and heat mode squeezed an immense amount of enjoyment out of me. This was nothing massively complicated as a concept, but Gungrave provided the feeling of being this massive brick of a human being carrying a fucking coffin on my back with zero subtlety. The character had a massive sense of weight, the coffin would grind against the cramped walls of these desolate street rat hide outs, causing sparks to go flying. You'd shoot out in these fantastically stylized arenas where the music would kick into high gear and would elevate everything on screen as you blew away goons with your twin shooters. It was massive style, jam packed into a small, replayable shoot'em'up.

The sequel was more or less the same, though expanding on the insanity that is the story and the lore to Gungrave, but never quite provided anything new or substantial. As a sequel, it felt like it was by the numbers, but the gameplay was the core of my interest, and what it provided was more Gungrave style carnage.

These two games weren't necessarily jaw dropping, life changing experiences. They were fun, action packed, playable anime sci-fi gangster movies with a great sense of style. They managed to leave such strong impressions on me despite their brevity. I'd always come back around thinking about that first game and just how neat the experience was.

So imagine my shock when years later, a brand new game in the series had appeared abruptly in front of me.

What's this? The same studio behind the original games is working on the game? What?

Oh? A cool new cinematic trailer with a brand new character that's reminiscent of Nicholas Wolfwood, one of my favorite characters ever to exist? Oh me. Oh my.

Needless to say, my mouth was watering like Pavlov's dog. Each time a new trailer would be revealed at a gaming event, I would be that one guy yelling and foaming at the mouth in the voice call as this obscure game no one has ever heard of appeared on screen to the confusion of everyone. This was my shit, and I was absolutely here for it.

... Until the reviews came out.

The game was absolutely raked over the coals. One critic said that Gungrave Gore was "destined to become dead and buried". Ahh, clearly the media just didn't understand a cool game once again. I then decided to check the public opinion of a forum I would sometimes frequent. The reception wasn't great either. I distinctly recall one user on the forum posting a clip and stating a paraphrase of the following:

"This game is absolutely awful, holy shit. I used to love the original game, but this game is just awful. It feels like a fucking PS2 game, and not in a good way. I'm on the third level and this level is absolutely the most bafflingly bad experience I've ever had. Somehow it just keeps getting worse."

I was crushed. Here I was, hyped for a sequel to a niche series I liked, and everyone around me was aggressive in stating that the game was terrible. So, I did what was sensible. I passed up on buying the game. No one seemed to enjoy it, so I figured, why waste my money?

A week ago, I discovered the game was 7 bucks on Steam, and I just couldn't resist the temptation. I had to know how bad the game truly was. I had spent all this time getting hyped for the game, I might as well see it through to the end, yeah?

Upon first gaining control of my character, I could tell the game was different from the original. The sense of weight Grave carried was off, feeling rather floaty in comparison. Diving and shooting didn't have the same sense of weight to it either. Despite this, I was actually enjoying moving around and shooting at guys in the traditional Gungrave fashion. Killing dudes felt about on par to the original game, now with added mechanics like grappling enemies towards you, beating them down in a stunned state to regain shields, amongst other things. So far, this was alright.

Slowly but surely, I'd make my way through halls of baddies. These metallic halls held a very Unreal engine aura, like the game was primarily utilizing pre-built lighting systems or something. You could count the money allocated for the graphics through the textures. I'd clear waves of poorly voice acted Engrish mafia men, and eventually made my way to the third stage.

This was it, I thought. This is where the game was going to become one of the worst games I've ever played.

... And that time never fucking came.

I have never been more confused about the public's reception of a video game than I have with Gungrave Gore's. I'm typically fairly in tune with public opinions. Not that I fear of going against the grain, but I've often found that when I would demonstrate this act as a bitter sad sack pre-teen, I'd be unconsciously doing so with rejection of the status quo for it's own sake. I'd still try and be fair to the piece of media I'd butt heads with, but I'd often overlook/dismiss the game for surface level reasons without ever really giving an open mind to what was in front of me.

This feeling has nearly become extinct within me, and as a result, I've become more in line with the public's perception of good. I have my moments, Doom Eternal has been exemption for that, but rarely are they this drastic feeling.

First of all, what on earth was that guy in the forum saying? The third level is a sewer level with gross little mutant leeches popping up out of green mucky water from time to time, but they provided a break up to the rest of the combat loop. Sometimes, you'd have to run away from a spikey grinder that would attempt to crush you to pieces. But, like, so what? These diversions were fairly basic in their implementation? And I dunno, they were even kind of... Fun?

After playing Gungrave Gore to completion, the only thing I could really think of was that, it was fun. It wasn't anything unbearably bad, it wasn't anything masterful, it was just an incredibly enjoyable budget title.

It was another Gungrave game.

Granted, it's not the best Gungrave game to be made. GORE provides a leg up over Overdose with it's inclusion of multiple playable characters, a fairly decent progression system, and just being a more fascinating attempt in expanding Gungrave's core gameplay loop, but it's never quite as solid as that original title. But still, ultimately, GORE is another Gungrave game.

I have a feeling that many have forgotten what exactly Gungrave was all about as a game. Never was there a focus on exploration; you were here to shoot and kill bad guys. Never was this system meant to be complicated; Gungrave was never a complicated game. Their nostalgic perception of the game clashed with their modern sensibilities, and because of that, they forgot how unpolished and barebones the original game was in comparison to other combat driven action games at the time.

Of course, there are reasons to dislike this title. Perhaps in the heads of some fans, the lack of appealing style to the original was enough to dismiss the game outright. The game certainly doesn't look the best, washing out whatever shading was used originally for a more realistic art direction, albeit slightly more stylized to fit Nightow's concept art. Perhaps it's length overstayed it's welcome. The game has 31 stages, and while for the most part they do a decent job at mixing up combat situations with the mechanics at hand, by the remaining third of the game, they ramp up the difficulty and start chucking bigger and bigger boys towards you. Maybe these fans played on a higher difficulty than me, and struggled more due that experience. Normal was a relatively painless experience for me, but I could easily see how a higher difficulty on a first playthrough might be bone crushingly annoying.

However, many of the arguments I've seen from fans revolve around being fans of the original game, and the expectations from their fond memories of that game, so I believe there's at least a portion here that believes that original premise.

Of course, I come with my own set of biases. I didn't play the game at full price. I wasn't a mega fan of the original games, so I might not be aware of all the intracracies I'm missing out on. My expectations were set to the very bottom from public discourse of the game. But this game's goal was to be a sequel to Gungrave, from the same developers of that original title, and in that respect, they nailed the core of the game. From the stellar heart pumping music, to the insanely stupid and benign plot, to the absolute dumb coolness of every single character's design, they all are the epitome of what a Gungrave game is like. And for that, I honestly genuinely enjoyed Gungrave GORE.

Gungrave GORE has been a great teacher for me. Sometimes, your opinion on a game will be drastically different than what the majority believes. It's best to figure out for yourself if something is worthwhile to you. Experience is the best teacher.

But it makes me feel like a crazy person to be the one guy rooting against the rest of the crowd. Maybe YOU guys are the crazy people, not me.

Psychopomp is meaningless meaningfulness.

Almost nothing about the game is trustworthy. You inhabit the perspective of our main character, an unreliable narrator who believes the world has been lying to them, creating a device to perceive this world for what it really is. The problem is, this turns out to work, at least, from their perspective.

The game frames it's dialogue through our main character, with thought bubbles of her speaking to the player about gameplay tips and "tips" about the real world. Both of these tips are full of false information with the occasional true tip about the game. What's real here and what's not is hard to decipher, and that's exactly the point.

The gameplay is also designed from her perspective, the UI itself being the mechanical workings of the strange device she's devised. There's literal gears pulling up to showcase her inventory, colored tubes punctuating out of the mechanical brace of the helmet demonstrating her stamina, there's a monitor haphazardly placed to the side of her vision with an image of herself in order examine her vitals. Every part of the game is fed through her perspective.

The game harkens back to dungeon crawler mechanics, but with your primary actions being more within the realm of a point and click adventure game. You look at the horrid tentacle demons with anime masks hiding their true fleshy faces, you speak to large humonoid rat creatures with boobs the size of my head, you touch the warm felt of a metal processing worker's apron who's working under a giant creature's baby-like head who desires you to kill him. You attack in this game with your trusty hammer, which comes down with a satisfying animation and crushes everything into a fine meat paste.

You start off in each area you visit in relatively normal settings, only to descend down an elevator towards this new reality. In one, you're in a hospital wing with Alexander The Great, Cleopatra and Plato propped up by fat fleshy bodies, being kept alive with their sickly ideals until you cut their life support off. The giant creature child who only wants to die is being overworked and exploited by those around him, kids laughing can be heard inside burning furnaces, workers are ambivalent everything besides their work. The world is being exposed for it's true nature in it's most metaphorical sense.

Yet there's also hintings of something greater. There's implications on one sign that speaks of human beings like the writer isn't one of them, there's an entire epilogue sequence where we discover a note that showcases a galactic event occurring that has an entire portion of space blacked out entirely. There's a sign that reads interpretations of what stars mean, only for someone to write over it saying "there are no stars". We take perspective of someone waking up from a motel and speaking to someone on dealing with a future plan that will be unfolding, a new UI and everything to match with our maybe current reality. Maybe it's aliens, maybe it's Gods come to Earth in the form of aliens, maybe it's something else entirely.

Psychopomp feels like a stepping stone into a much larger project. Within the 90 minutes I've put into the game, it's managed to hook me in with it's visuals, dialogue, and gameplay, creating a dream-like nightmare that comes and goes in the blink of an eye. It's a fascinating title that I desperately want more of.

"That was absolutely fucking hell."

As I come back home to my reliable vessel, a triumphant victory music plays as me and my teammates perform a goofy little victory dance. The character I inhabit does not reflect the same feelings that I feel. This is because every time I play a round of Helldivers 2, I think the exact same sentence.

"That was absolutely fucking hell."

Which is a bit of a conflicting statement. On the one hand, that's the exact emotion I'm meant to be feeling. Helldivers 2 is an endless onslaught of bug blood, guts, and carnage. It's a loop of the same overwhelming feeling of never having enough fire power to survive, bugs swarming me from every direction, picking, gnawing, spitting, and piercing me - rinse and repeat, over and over again, for the good of Super Earth. The struggle to maintain my vitals as I fumble over a button combination to order an airstrike as I'm attempting and failing at dodging income acid spit is stressful and terrifying. Guns hit enemies and explode them in a visceral explosion of their beefy meat.

The world design informs the game design, and it's Starship Troops inspired tongue-in-cheek satire is brimming into every facet of this game's DNA. The sheer horror and overwhelming odds juxtaposed by the oddly portrayed fascist dystopian government works well together. The game has you tackling missions in real time to collectively liberate a planet from the vile cockroaches infesting humanity's homes, and that means winning and losing has actual effect on whether or not you'll liberate the planet. It's the sticky dough that keeps every aspect of the game from feeling like it's another run-of-the-mill shooter.

Helldivers 2 is effective at placing me into the same feeling as I'm meant to be feeling. On that level, the game is an absolute success.

On the other hand, I feel utterly drained by Helldivers 2.

While the gameplay loop is fun and addicting to an extent, part of me feels drained after every session. The game is designed where when the player is first starting off, they're nearly helpless against the bug's slaughter. The more you play, the better artillery you gain, and the stronger you become. I've been stuck on Medium difficulty for the most part of my total of 16 hours of game time, with only the last 5-6 hours I finally felt comfortable bumping the difficulty up slightly to Hard.

The last game I played was with friends who had invited me to a game with the highest difficulty, and it was like fighting bloody knuckled with every tooth and nail in my body puncturing the exoskeletal skulls of every bug I saw just to keep my head above water. Sometimes my controls would mess up, where I wouldn't be able to stand up or run away, leaving me vulnerable for attacks. Sometimes bugs would prevent me from getting away from a dodge, some how I killed myself with a guard dog, all while I failed consistently to dodge enemy attacks, shredding me to pieces like I was mozzarella cheese.

Of course, that's how I've been feeling on just about every difficulty mode I've played, but being thrown into the truest of deepest of ends really cemented to me just how much the feeling of playing this game was entirely and utterly overwhelming.

Perhaps this is on me and my preferences. I come to games to relax. Some of my all-time favorite games bring me comfort through their gameplay. It's taken me years just to break out of my comfort zone and play games that provide me genuine stress through mechanics such as timers. Helldivers 2 feels a bit like throwing myself into the deep end of the sauce and instead of pleasantly getting lost, I just drown in it. It's enjoyable and I'm having fun with it, but help, it's filling up my lungs, HELP ME, PLEASE, I DON'T KNOW HOW TO SWIM.

This review may be liable to change, as is the nature of live service style of games. My feelings might not be the same within the span of 6-12 months. As of now, Helldivers 2 is a great game that I enjoy, but the game is almost too much for my tastes. It's a fantastic slice of pizza, but the metaphorical onions are overwhelming to my taste buds.