Firefights in shooters are usually defined by positioning more than anything. Where your Zombiemen and Imps are pretty much defines how the whole thing is gonna go down, and just pulling out the right weapon for the job is pretty much the big decision the player makes when engaging. Halo is different. Positioning matters, but it's not always due to the designers hand that the player and enemies end up in their positions - it's the aliens themselves choosing where they go. Reloading a save for the same encounter will still often see it going drastically differently each time, and this is due to a multitude of factors: Master Chief has a limited arsenal at all times, and the enemies you fight directly tie into this. You will actually need to consider which weapon you want to keep as you can't predict which enemies will be ahead of you, or what they'll be equipped with, or where they'll be. Master Chief also has a shield system that will work alongside your healthbar, with which you get a brief window of protection from oncoming strikes but not full-blown protection; giving you just enough time to perform any risky maneuvers you may need. Everything you do is slightly delayed; from jumps to grenade throws and explosions to reloads delaying your fire to punches landing, giving you a constant need to think about every action you take. The real icing on the cake here though is the intelligence of the Covenant enemies, and how they interact with everything else.

The Covenant has, by no stretch of the imagination, probably the best artificial intelligence ever seen in the genre. The designers have claimed they merely attempted to make them seem smart rather than be smart since they weren't sure how to do that, but I'd argue they hit two birds with one stone. The real trick is that they're reactive, and equal. Reactive in the sense of emotionally expressing reactions to almost every situation, but reactive also in the sense of seemingly playing alongside the player for each gunfight. They'll flank you, toss grenades whenever you get into a comfy position too long or just overwhelm you with numbers. For almost every strategy you have, the Covenant have something up their sleeves to counter it usually. Each Elite has a shield system of their own, so every single fight you get into with an Elite will likely lead in you both taking cover to regenerate since Halo knows to also give the foes some self-preservation instinct. Want to charge in and just damage the Elite? They'll probably do the same; get pissed off and charge at you just hoping to kill you before you put them down. Hell, you might try sniping an Elite only for him to hop in a Banshee and start circling you in the air, and the thing is; this is only the Elites, and while yes: they are the most intelligent Covenant enemies, the true magic is emergence. This is only describing one Elite, what about two? What about his squad of Grunts? Well if you leave the Elite alive they'll have the confidence to charge in and try attacking you on their own terms, but if you take out the Elite first you'll be opening yourself up to them and the Jackals fire. Your assault rifle will make short work of the Grunts, but can it counter the Jackals and Elites shields? That's something new to consider, so you'll want to keep multiple types of weapons on you at once for this situation. What if there's too many to take out? Well there might be a Warthog nearby which you could straight up crash into them with, or just have a Marine fire for you as you strafe around them. Every single encounter requires you to rethink and preplan how you'll handle things, and you'll always need to keep on top of ammo/charge per weapon too; so you can't rely on, well, old reliable, forever.

Just when you've gotten comfy, the game throws the Flood at you. As divisive as they are, and as arguable the Library's quality is, I'd wager they're a necessity. They're a great shake-up to the more strategic combat centered around the Covenant, requiring you to pretty much treat every encounter with them as a gauntlet as they eat up bullets and plasma but just don't go down, and will revive other enemies as more of themselves. But just as is the case with the Covenant, emergence is their true strength. Late-game Halo: Combat Evolved has you overseeing armies of Flood and Covenant fighting to the death and it's your job to just get by while the games systems play their own little RTS as you go off shotgunning more zombies.

The truth to Halo's design is it's multifacted, and it makes the most out of very little. Compared to your average shooter there's not much variety in the enemies or weapons but the core behaviors are so nuanced and dynamic that they change moment-to-moment, encounter-to-encounter. It gives you a sandbox of weapons and vehicles against decently tough enemies (though this will vary depending on the difficulty you pick, but I recommend Heroic as it seems to be the intended experience) and asks how you will deal with it. Halo gives you tons of ways to play, but the enemies can play at that game too and utilize basically anything you can. It leads to an immense creativity in encounters that comes from the most fun form of problem-solving that makes it, in my eyes, one of the crowning jewels of the genre. None of the sequels rivaled the quality of the combat, because it's already the pinnacle of evolution.

We're all blessed/cursed to live in the age where the Internet is ubiquitous. In it we pour pieces of ourselves, in a gigantic web of communications, friendships, relationships, rivalries, petty grievances and every human interaction. Hypnospace Outlaw is like a mirror held up to us, in which we see a microcosm of our Internet selves, frozen in time in the moment we left our digital footprints. It's a story where you visit a fictional past, one unabashedly based on our actual history, whose concerns are still distressingly relevant twenty years later. Alexandria still burns, our past is still lost each passing hour. One day, this site will be no more, Steam will be no more, we will likely be no more, no matter how remote that day may be or seem. This doesn't mean being here is meaningless; even if it were, what's the point in having all the miracolous opportunities we're afforded and not using them?

Enjoy today, now. And if something breaks? There's a saying where I come from: "Pope's dead, make another".

Keep on rocking, reader. Godspeed.

Never ask:

A Cammy main, her age
A T. Hawk main, his salary
A Fei Long main, what they think about Daniel Lindholm

bland and paper-thin in almost every regard, stretched out to an absurd length making for an overall miserable experience in my opinion

from the very first moments of the game you're assaulted with walls and walls of just the most boring, repetitious dialogue, and it's always either banal exposition about the ancient evil corrupting the land, or a prophecy or other played out fluff like that, overbearing tutorialisng about stuff like don't like walk into fire or something, or incredibly tepid attempts at humour that almost never landed for me, your companion character issun's constant harassment towards like every woman you come across was particularly painful

i found none of the characters interesting or likeable, aside from amaterasu because she's really cute

it doesn't help that almost all of these long conversations are presented in the most boring 'A cam to B cam' kind of way, near the end of the game i realised i was reading the words, but i was retaining nothing, i found it tragically funny when near the end when all the characters you've met along the way were praying for me and giving me words of encouragement and all that, i didn't know who half of them were

the game has dungeons akin to ones you'd find in zelda games, but if you're hoping for some good puzzles like i was you'll be very disappointed, they're usually just a long series of rooms with puzzles i figured out in like a second without effort, turning them into a slog

this is partially due to the brush techniques, the main gimmick of the game. these allow you to manipulate the environment around you, but they're all pretty uninspired; draw a line from some fire and you can melt some ice, use some wind to make a thingy turn, use some ice to freeze something in place, slow down time so you can run past a fast guy, make specific parts of water go up, etc.

these are not only boring and kinda clunky to use but the way they're set up is part of what makes the puzzles so obvious, if a room has fire in it, you're probably going to use it, if you see a swirly bit of water, you're probably going to use it, and it rarely gets more complicated than that, you rarely have to like combine them together in an interesting way or anything like that, and you can't really give a 'wrong answer' to any of the puzzles if that makes sense, it's just drag this one thingy to this other thingy and a door opens more often than not

the slowing down time ability is also funny because once you get it, 99% of the combat encounters become just spamming it and mashing X, meaning most of the brush techniques are on par with bad zelda items; being glorified keys rather than tools for general use

if these were the only issues i would find okami to be merely mediocre, but it's so ridiculously long for how shallow it is that it crosses a line

the game is essentially JUST this, along with running back and forth across an oversized overworld, for over thirty hours, and i wanted it to be over after two

it never gets any better, i had to take breaks from it for days at a time and considered dropping it at multiple points, it was heartbreaking whenever i thought i'd killed the final boss and then like a dark cloud comes out of it and it goes somewhere else and the narrator lady is like 'wow their journey is FAR from over!!'

this happened multiple times, and it got even worse when the game started needlessly recycling content as well, making you re-fight a load of bosses you've already fought

i was kind of indifferent to the artstyle in all honesty, but that underwater area looked amazing. i felt similarly about the music, i mostly found it kinda dull but there were a handful of songs i really liked and enhanced some moments i otherwise wouldn't have cared about. i also liked feeding all the animals as well because they're cute and i like them :3

unfortunately that's the nicest i have to say, okami is just one of the most painfully boring games i've played in quite a while and the only thing i feel after finishing it is a sense of relief. i've literally just finished it, and have already forgotten most of it

I am not so ignorant as to sweep Blizzard's malpractices under the rug for the sake of my own enjoyment. Even ignoring the well-known laundry list of human-facing controversies in recent years, their products have dwindled in appeal to me for over a decade. As lamented in my retrospective on Wrath of the Lich King, much of the core identity of World of Warcraft has languished as it is torn apart at the seams by its players, and haphazardly sewn back together with every expansion. My favourite part of Overwatch was quickly dismantled in favour of supposed balance, a Sisyphean treadmill. Hearthstone crumbles under the weight of its power creep and enormity of knowledge required. Heroes of the Storm was left to wither on the vine. And Diablo III dropped from the heavens with a wet thud. So imagine my shock when Reaper of Souls rose from its ashes like a phoenix that hasn't gone out for over nine years now.

My love of World of Warcraft in particular was two-faced until the release of Shadowlands, the nail in the coffin for any fondness I still had for Azeroth. After completing the core expansion, I deleted Battle.net and never again felt the urge to revisit my account.

But Diablo III continued to call to me. And in a moment of weakness, finally bursting through my mental dam with the early access period for Diablo IV I caved, and felt and feel horrible for it. My scruples, irrelevant! Nothing has ever come close to the specific gameplay of Diablo III, and Diablo IV's beta suggests nothing ever will, not even Blizzard's own offerings.

What I adore about Diablo III is exactly what, arguably, makes it a bad ARPG. The combat is largely meaningless. Everything is item driven rather than character dependent. Builds are largely prescribed and difficult to tweak. There is next to no consequence outside of playing on Hardcore (which I have always exclusively done). Adventure Mode and its bounties are so linear it might as well occur in a hallway. Enemies might as well all be the same. Bosses have no interesting mechanics in end-game scenarios. Legendaries inundate the player to the point where you stop even picking them up. The grinding for Primal Ancients is absurd.

I love it all!

Diablo III is a constant that has been with me for over a decade, through good and bad. I have always known I could return to it for a few days or a week, click things, have them explode, and revel in its own chaos. My characters' deaths rarely bother me, if anything they instill in me a drive to do it all over again. Take bigger risks with my build to get back to speed. Try new gear sets with radically different modes of play (even if the end result is always one-shotting everything even on Torment XVI). In an era of games which try for balance above all else, Diablo III has leaned entirely into the fact that a game of its sort is unable to be balanced. Each Season amps up the absurdity of some small factor, showering the player in loot or damage numbers or some other quirk that widens my eyes. And this latest go around, Season 28, has taken this to what must be a maximal realisation. The new altar destroys any remaining shreds of balance and gets the player as close as possible to basically using a trainer.

I adore it, and I truly missed it. My time with the season is probably at an end, but I will likely return. If not for the next one, then some other season down the line. I'll shake my head the whole time then, just as I did now, so everyone knows I disagree.

That awful song was right, it should have been a genius, but it doesn't quite compute.

All in all, a collection that brings back old classics with a beautiful new look and even some brand new content... and also that seems to still retain the problems of the games and, worst of all, introduces new ones, with hitboxes and collisions that... could have been better.

Not gonna over extended myself since I reviewed all the games individually (You can see my reviews throught the links below) but yeah, while its fucntional, it could have been way, way better, but at least I got the chance to experience these classics with a neat visual style.

My review of Crash Bandicoot

My review of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back

My review of Crash Bandicoot: Warped

It’s personal

At the beginning of 2020 when everyone with a Switch was playing the new Animal Crossing I inherited my grandfather’s farm in a quaint town of Stardew Valley, have you heard of it?

I found a new life there that was everything I wanted & exactly what I needed at a time where I felt like it was my fucking duty to wait for the news broadcasts to tell me more bad news & scroll infinitely on Twitter to find more people in my same frame of mind as I was where we were all terrified & had to work in positions where business owners didn’t want to protect us & nobody cared that we were scared or that our families couldn’t stand to get sick

I came back in 2022 after losing both of my grandmas in less than a year & my grandpa needed to be placed in long term care because my family couldn’t properly care for him anymore

Recently my dad has been in poor health, avoiding hospitalization and struggling with a lot of anxiety and paranoia made increasingly worse by medicines that have been prescribed to maybe hopefully help eventually I think. We’re all scared and I’ve found myself thinking of a trip to Stardew to be with my cows and my chubby piggies and chickens and back to growing pumpkins and kicking blueberries around my greenhouse and saying hi to my little bats in the cave right behind it…

The more I want to visit my farm, the more I wish my dad could go too
A place where you can let go of your anxieties
A home away from home, but not too far