through its many, many pain points and rough edges, it still ends up telling a great narrative with some really compelling characters. really fun environment too. when you finish the missions up in north algonquin they start introducing a deluge of faceless mafia or government goons to give you missions for the rest of the game and that's honestly my only real "issue" with the game as it were... why should i care about this revolving door of characters who will probably die at the end of their mission line to set up the next one anyway? then the game ends completely unceremoniously. you're winner.

i felt like i hated this game a lot of the time i was playing it but there was just something always bringing me back to get some more mission progress and just explore such a beautiful city (when they have the colour grading turned down) every day for the ~2 weeks it took me to beat it. i'm absolutely sure my feelings would sour towards it if i played it again but the first part of this game, sans the introductory few missions, is just the pure perfection of open-world gaming, especially when you're settling into the mechanics. maybe that's just because they don't make you do any close quarters non-cover combat until algonquin?

The driving is not hard and anyone who complained about it should be banned from reviewing games forever.

a wholly passable arcade racer like its progenitor. delivers on "burnout 1 but better" in the most average way it can honestly, just more tracks, cars, and events with some minor aesthetic and gameplay overhauls.

the main issues here are
A: why are these races so long. you get a few in that acceptable 3-4 minute window and then anything on a decently long track starts creeping up to a gruelling 6-8 minutes. that'd be on the longer side for an average simcade, but in this kind of modern arcade racer? really wears you down over those long ass grands prix especially seeing as there aren't that many environments (still a leg up on burnout 3 in track variety though)
B: difficulty. you either pick the new fastest car you just unlocked and breeze past everyone with a consistent 5-15s gap or you pick something suboptimal and have to fight tooth and nail the whole race, which i can only really find fun in games that don't make me do it for 5+ minutes straight. again, this is still a leg up on burnout 3 because at least that difficulty feels earned and not because the leading AI is tied to your car by a length of rope.

the driving really is fun and those crash physics have so, so much more impact than in 3, but it really feels like it's missing some important element that i can't quite place...
i trudged through the first series and called it quits for now, i'll come back to do the custom series one day and i'll probably be able to place what that je ne sais quoi is

It's difficult to explain just how fluid and natural this game feels. Street Fighter II, and even the Alpha series both feel like you're controlling someone with a very stiff metal rod stuck up their ass in comparison to 3rd Strike. The movement, the animations, the feedback, everything flows together to create an explosion of endorphins whenever you perform even the most simple combo.

This is, in essence, the culmination of all of the advances in 2D fighting games that were made throughout the 90's. It was even made during a time when, steadily, 2D was falling out of favor. Much like how the absolute peak of propeller plane technology stomped out the early jets of World War II, 3rd Strike shows that even though it was beginning to fall out of style, it was still the king. At least for a little while.

Killer art style and some genuinely disturbing moments.

I found the ARG stuff tiresome.

**Edit

Thinking more about this game. I really love what this is going for but one of my difficulties with taking the game on its own merits is having no idea how much game there really is.

The narrative bounties of this game are best when you are able to feast on them all and put them together. After getting like 4 endings I had no idea how long it would take to discover the rest on my own. Heading to a guide unimmersed and disinvested me from the story.

Having the Daemon be part of the game is a novel and interesting idea but ultimately I personally don't have much interest in some unknown quantity of the game being hidden from me. I know secrets and things to discover in games have been a thing forever but I guess I just would like some way to make this stuff more transparent as an option.

This is far and away the best game I have ever played. I seriously doubt anything will come close to making me feel the way that it does. Its praises are sung far and wide but somehow I feel like it's still underrated - this is true innovation in the medium of video games. And to pair that with seriously well thought out writing and truly meaningful explorations of philosophical ideas, I don't think I've ever seen a game that is as uncompromising as this. Outer Wilds is the antidote to modern nihilism.

It starts with a janitor.

You're tasked with trailing him to his house in your car for a uniform. All you have to do is wait and, when the time is right, have a polite conversation with him.

So, anyway, I put a bomb on his door and blew him up the second he walked over to it. I punched him, tased him, shot him, poured gasoline on his brand-new car, and rammed his brand-new car with my stolen one. When I was supposed to park my car around the corner, I made the side of his car my parking lot. All of this "spooked" him, but never once did he die.

Like Classic Rock, Open World is an umbrella term. You have your Checklist Open Worlds, Zelda Open Worlds, Open Worlds that play like STALKER, Open Worlds by Bethesda, and so on. And then you have Rockstar games. The selling point is detail: in Fallout 3, technical limitations mean that every time you see a train running, what you're experiencing is an unnamed citizen with a train hat on, literally running. With Rockstar, the nails in the train tracks around the world are dynamically hammered in by unnamed NPCs that you can talk to. Cars turn realistically in Grand Theft Auto IV, and your average fast-travel system is replaced with a network of trains that you can interact with unscripted. Viewed separately from the content in them, they're masters in their field.

Ultimately, it all comes back to that janitor in the end. I've ruminated on it before, but a lot of what I find to be funny about that scene, in particular, is an imbalance between content and context. It's funny to keep failing specifically because the game asks you not to but puts in no safeguards to keep you from using its more emergent systems against itself. The issue Grand Theft Auto V has is that its caricatures only accelerate this imbalance. If the entire experience is supposed to be stupid, head empty, dumb fun, why play the rules at all?

In Red Dead Redemption II, I occasionally did the same thing. The game was linear, and I was bored, so I gave myself something to laugh at. But more of my time was spent in a modded version of the photo mode, where landmarks as simple and small as hills became vital storytelling tools for my version of Arthur Morgan. Abandoned wagons spoke to a quiet feeling of loss as fog enveloped the greenery. As nature took its course, I felt my figure shrink until it folded into the shadowy figure of the mountains behind me. It could only last for so long—but at least I was there for the trip. Farewell.

There's an inherent sense of melancholy in Red Dead Redemption II's world that I've seldom felt in the games I've played—much less from the Houser brothers and their culture of debauchery. To their credit, much of that comes from the narrative and characters. But beyond anything they had more than a minor role in, it's due to sunsets, fog, red dirt, and dry sand more than anything else. Red Dead Redemption II made me understand the cliche of riding into the sunset beyond a bus I took in high school one time, and it made me want to keep riding through the dark.

Another returning issue from other Rockstar games is as follows: movement still feels janky. I don't find it surprising at all that legendary filmmaker John Carpenter, fan of Sonic Unleashed and Halo Infinite, couldn't bring himself to finish this game. First-person mode here is a continent and two miles above what they half-assed into Grand Theft Auto V for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports, and thus it's the way I recommend playing this. But eventually, you have to get on a horse, and there's no perspective you can control that in where it always feels as intuitive as you want it to be. Crucially, while running around, it was very easy to me to tackle someone accidentally in a public space. I am grateful that the police system in this is more lenient than what's currently in Cyberpunk 2077, because I would have quit otherwise. But it's not perfect, either. You can always pay off your bounties, meaning that while the ride to a nearby post office can be tense, it occasionally feels like there are no meaningful repercussions for aberrant behavior. Combat in Red Dead Redemption II feels better than anything else Rockstar has ever done; using the revolver actually gives you a reason to hip-fire instead of aiming at everything, and it feels glorious. But it's impossible to ignore that a lot of betrays the narrative cohesion found in the cinematics. Given how much of a vibe this game can be, it's a total shame that it falls victim to the Rockstar trope of every mission being either a Shootout Mission, Chase Mission, or Inconvenient Mission that Secretly Becomes a Shootout at the Last Second. As much fun as I had using the shotguns in this game, at some point, I was just kind of over it, and while that's not a feeling that stuck for very long, it never truly went away.

I loved Arthur Morgan, and I loved having him wear a brown coat and have long hair because those are the things that make me feel effeminate and manly at the same time. I loved naming my horse after a television reference because I had one of the final knife twists spoiled for me in advance, and also because it was a cute name for my horse. I liked both Epilogue parts, and I can understand the excuses someone might make for Guarma.

Easily Rockstar's best, I can't wait to see how they fuck up their next game.

(9-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

(adopts old-sounding voice) My son recently began— Dad, type it.

My son recently began his wonderful journey into his nice, wonderful, bean-covered world, and also there's purple stuff underground, don't go in there. And in the sky, baby islands. Nonononono I said "they be islands".

(Drops fancy voice) And also there's this weird goat, who's name is ROAR-oo. And also there's a boat in the sky. You have to hop on rocks. Bye.

[Dad's Note: When he said "Rauru", he didn't say the word "ROAR", he roared as loud as he could, and then said "oooo".]