(Episodes 1 - 3, will revisit E4 after Doom II)

I don't think there's anything I could say about Doom that hasn't been said better by someone else, so I won't. Instead, I'll talk about the VR port by Team Beef because that's how I played it. It was also my first time playing Doom I all the way through.

The game looks surprisingly great in VR, I would have expected sprites to look jarring but it is all incredibly immersive. The environments look really cool and seeing them in this way really helps you appreciate the detail.

The controls are also incredible, very smooth and very natural for the most part. My only gripe is jump being on B, it's easy to forget but there is also isn't really a better option so it isn't major.

Really enjoyed playing it in VR and I think I'm just gonna play all of the "essential" classic FPS games this way.

This was my first time with Skate 1, though I did play a bit of Skate 2 and hundreds of hours of Skate 3.

Right off the bat, I loath the low camera angle, just makes it hard to read things for me. It's easy enough to adjust to but I still don't enjoy it. Some of the challenges suck, specifically SKATE matches and the film challenges that give you 30 seconds to accomplish multiple things. The deathraces are also kind of rough due to the camera angle (for me) and the AI. Speaking of, the AI are basically skate terorrists. I cannot be convinced that they weren't programmed specifically to get in the player's way and run into them.

That said, I think this might actually be the best map in the Skate series. It's not as big as 2 or 3's, but the whole map feels so good to skate in. Lots of hills for speed, the environments were crafted super well to be skateable all over the world for the most part. There are a few areas with a lot of stairs that can be annoying to navigate due to not being able to walk, but it isn't a common issue. The game looks great, too, it's not as dark aesthetically as 2 nor is it as bright and ugly as 3. Small stuff like X-Games having a custom UI is neat too, and the X-Games park is potentially my favorite event park from the series.

Overall, the skating feels good and the map is great. The camera gimps enjoyment for me and some of the challenges can get pretty obnoxious, but it's still plenty enjoyable outside of that.

The addition of walking is nice for stairs at least, but it's so floaty and unwieldy that it just kind of sucks otherwise. Other than that, it's basically more of Skate 1 except grittier, and a little heavier as far as physics go. I still like the first map more, but 2's is still good and both are superior to 3's. The challenges are about the same mix as in the first game; some easy, some challenging, some obnoxious. Doesn't take long to technically "beat" the career, but there's a bunch of challenges to play afterwards in addition to just skating around. Some of the control wonkiness (grind magnetism behaving weird, walking in general) and some of the more grating challenges can mar it down a bit, but it's still plenty of fun.

Disco Elysium is the kind of game where any explanation or review doesn't really do it justice. All the reading may make it an acquired taste, but it's certainly an experience to behold. It was the first game in a while where I finished it, and then was immediately ready to jump into a second playthrough just to go about the whole thing in an entirely different way. It goes without saying that the writing is on another level, all of the characters are unique and stick out in their own ways, the music is great, the atmosphere is great, and there's entertaining options at every nook and cranny for any kind of character build you choose. Phenomenal game, highly recommend.

I played a lot of Skate 3 when I was kid. Revisiting it so many years later and after finishing Skate 1 for the first time and Skate 2 for the first time in years, it makes 3's flaws stick out a bit more glaringly.

The skating feels more refined than ever and the off board control feels a lot better than 2, so that's good. Hardcore difficulty was a cool addition and makes from nice, closer to realistic skating. The art style sucks, the game is dizzyingly vibrant and almost cartoony in aesthetic. The city pales in comparison to both of the prior ones. The parks are fine I guess, but I actually enjoyed the DLC ones a bit more than any in the base game. The challenges are absurdly easy; death races might be challenging if you lack reflexes and killing some of the films and photos can require some precision, but generally speaking most of the challenges are one-and-done without much effort.

It's not a bad game, I have many fond memories of it and still enjoy skating around in it, but it just lacks that gritty street spark that 1 & 2 had and it suffers for it.

Some of the enemies are annoying (specifically turrets and mechs) and veer more towards being a nuisance than being difficult, and the lab aesthetic gets a bit old after a while. That aside, FEAR is fantastic. The gunplay feels great, bullet time adds a fun dynamic to combat, the ambiance and atmosphere are incredible, the horror is mostly subtle though there are some minor jump scares. The story isn't anything spectacularly but I found interesting enough to be engaged with it, and the environmental storytelling through phone calls was pretty neat. Overall great game that aged like wine, highly recommend it.

Extraction Point has both more combat and more scares than FEAR did which is pretty impressive considering it's about half the length. Fights are quite a bit bigger with more enemies and that's great because the gunplay is one of FEAR's strongest suits. The mechs that were pretty annoying in the base game seem more bearable now, either because they're squishier or just because strong weapons seem a bit more readily available. This is a great follow-up to FEAR but can also stand on its own even if you haven't followed the story.

If I could use one word to describe Perseus Mandate, it would be "chore". The story is just kind of pointless, the pacing is stilted, the characters are mostly unlikable (Chen was the only one that got beyond indifference from me), the relatively subtle and eerie horror from previous entries is replaced with cheap jump scares, creatures/enemies that were scary and/or difficult now appear so frequently that they lose all novelty. Then, there's the combat. One of the series' strengths thus far is also just overplayed in this expansion. There's more fights than Extraction Point, with each fight having many more enemies, and the fights themselves seeming almost constant to the point where I was wishing for a dull moment just to break the tedium. The new weapons are mostly lackluster, the new enemies are just old ones but stronger (meaning bullet sponges and unreasonably fast), combat was already exhausting by Interval 3 (less than halfway through the expansion), not because of difficulty, but simply because of the frequency. By Interval 5 I had fully stopped caring what was going on and just kind of waltzed through what was left with no real regard just to simply wrap it up. While it has a few good moments, Perseus Mandate is mostly an underwhelming follow-up to FEAR and Extraction Point and kind of hard to recommend unless beating your head against a wall for 5 hours sounds appealing. The final stretch of the game is an absolute joke, it's a meatgrinder just for the sake of being one and individually breaking each of your own fingers with a hammer may unironically be a more fun experience.

I'm not quite sure what happened during development, but the magic that made FEAR enjoyable was lost somewhere along the way.

I was going to give it a slightly higher rating but the ending was so bad that it singlehandedly took that last point away, FEAR 2 is a demonstration of how to do everything wrong in a sequel. The story sucks, the characters mostly suck (Stokes is okay, the most likable character doesn't get a personality until the literal end of the game), the gunplay is a massive downgrade, leaning is gone which is one of the stupidest decisions I've ever seen, there's very little tension at any point in the game (there was exactly one horror-esque scene that really drew me in, everything else was just cheap jump scares, blink and you miss it appearances, or entirely unengaging due to said lack of tension). They added a sprint for some reason and it's useless, you barely go faster and stamina drains so quickly that it's basically pointless to use, audio seems to be massively buggy (glass shattering makes no noise, explosions make no noise, gunfire's often silent which makes finding where you're being shot from a pain), at one point I encountered the "sound acceleration error" that quite literally removed all sound until it randomly fixed itself on a new launch. It suffers from the same poor choice that Perseus Mandate made with combat just being so constant it becomes a drag, enemies seem to die slower than ever, and enemies that made for tense encounters in the past are spammed so much that they might as well be generic fodder.

The only good things I can say about FEAR 2 are that the writing was actually kinda funny at times, and while the gunplay is significantly worse than it was in FEAR + expansions, it's still a bit above average even while feeling completely gimped. This is a very hard game to recommend, even as someone that likes FEAR enough to be forcing myself through parts that I'm thoroughly not enjoying.

This expansion is, for some reason, better than the base game of FEAR 2 was. The story is at least an interesting idea, even if it is only a vehicle to reintroduce someone, and some of the set pieces were pretty neat. I won't bother going into detail as a lot of my gripes are just an extension of FEAR 2, though I will say that if the expansion was a bit longer I'd be willing to knock the rating up a tad bit more. I finished it in exactly 46 minutes which makes it pretty hard to put stock in, definitely would've been more suitable as an epilogue than a separate expansion.

One of the more polarizing entries to the series, this is where THPS shifted to the mission focus with bigger levels and away from the timed runs from the earlier games. I was pretty fond of it but this was also my first THPS game so there's certainly a level of nostalgia. The gameplay itself is a bit more forgiving, with it seeming a little harder to bail and the addition of flat ground and switching grind tricks making huge combos more doable than previous games. There's more content than ever with more levels and more goals per levels, more customization content with cash, etc. Takes a bit longer to work through on account of that, but still good fun all the way through (except for Shipyard) and it features my personal favorite soundtrack (still can't get over the fact that Chad Muska produced an album with a bunch of old school hip-hop heavyweights).