played enough of this (~6hrs) to realise it's a game about getting on a horse and mashing the A button for hours at a time, exactly like RDR, and i hated that game for it, so im not gonna do it again

i like westerns a lot, i dont like this at all. i think i basically just fucking hate Rockstar writing, and the Beautiful Sprawling Vistas do nothing for me in light of that. i'm susceptible to that transcendent moment of adventure in a game, same as anyone, but i will not find it in a game studio as boring & unpleasant as this one.

man.... okay.

it's a basically competent stealth game. i really liked exploring all the hidden passageways in prague, to the point where i'd found loads of stuff before the game had even told me to go there. it's a lot of fun to get up on the rooftops. i still like the silenced pistol with a laser sight, and still didn't use anything else.

the writing is stupid, though. it's a world of conspiracy where everything is exactly as it seems. there are no surprises, no major heel turns; just the same stuff from start to finish, with some minor choices in between.

it's a big budget slice of Okay, and that's tragic. jensen is still an absolutely unlikeable meathead, and it's still completely humourless. it also has the Prequel Problem, where it keeps referring to characters from the original which you can't interact with in any way because that would break continuity.

i don't know. i wish these games were more ambitious, rather than just safe safe safe. i wish they were a bit more self-indulgent, a bit less cynical and ambivalent. it's frustrating.

i don't want to play as adam jensen any more.

the moment to moment of the game - pounding beats, hyper-violence, video nasty grime - still absolutely kicks ass, but this game suffers a little for its lack of focus in compared to the original. that even extends to the level design, where everything is huger than it was before and you spend a lot of time getting blown away by enemies you can't see.

the plot is much more ambitious than the original game and i really like some of the individual moments. it's got that claustrophobic feel of encroaching violence, ready to explode at any moment, while still being fundamentally an exploitation flick thriller.

i could rate this lower, because playing it is a frustrating experience, but the truth is that if you put enough stuff i like in a game i'll forgive you for some weird flaws or frustrations. and this game has a lot of stuff i like in it!

interesting to revisit this ten years later. the humour all feels incredibly of its time, although some of that For Science stuff was already played by the time it came out. it's still pretty funny, though, if you can power through that.

Portal 2 is a weird one to rate because it's technically much tighter than Portal, in a way that's both a positive and a negative; the surfaces onto which you can place a portal are often highly restricted or specific, so you can 'solve' puzzles just by repeatedly doing the next obvious thing without ever really understanding the overall test. that's a good thing in some ways, because it's a longer game, and getting stuck would be infuriating, but it also means that you never get the sense that you've 'broken' the game with a weird trick or an unexpected tactic like you did with the original.

the heart of Portal is rewarding player disobedience; when you broke out of the 'final' puzzle in Portal 1, it really felt like you were breaking something for a moment. P2 never manages to hit that high, since the cat's already out of the bag and players are expecting it, but it's still a great sequel and (excluding maybe one or two sections which drag a little) it's hard to think of any way it could be better.

this is definitely some type of mind control device. i keep playing it in a trancelike state, getting excited about the numbers and the pretty colours and the screenshake. i am being programmed to do something beyond my reckoning and i'm enjoying it very much.

edit okay i've played this a bunch more since i wrote this review and i hate to abandon the joke but this game really kicks ass. it reminds me of a vlambeer prototype: all the numbers just feel excellent, and you want to keep playing for just a little longer, yknow?

a lot of people have described the feeling that zelda games give them to me in their life, but i've never really played zelda so it doesn't mean anything to me. this game gave me the feeling that i think people are describing when they talk about playing Ocarina Of Time as kids.

it's just wonderful, folks, and a real landmark piece of game design in terms of exploration and non-linearity. i don't normally invest in fantasy worlds too much (except as analogues for or ways to explore our own) but as bits of the story fell together i found myself gasping and having realisations and really just enjoying the hell out of learning about a very different world, a very different universe.

what a beautiful, inventive, unique game.

wanted to like this more than i did, but it had enough fun moments and characterful Bits to get me through it. it feels a little bit like a prototype that needed tightening up and the addition of a more aggressive Vision; for a nightmare world of endless colonial capitalism, it's got shockingly few sharp edges, and it leans too cartoonish and slapstick to really land any gutpunch story beats.

that said, i actually quite liked the combat, which is sort of a miracle in an obsidian game. fair play to them! it's fun to use a sniper rifle!