Webhead123

The fact that System Shock 3 apparently got sucked down into development hell really upsets me. At least we finally got an incredibly high-quality remake of the original but I've kinda lost hope for the arrival of future games. If you ask me, I feel like Mortal Kombat is passing the point of saturation. I love the early games in the franchise and a couple of the later games are pretty decent but, man, there are just so many of them now and they all start to blend together.

I also generally like fairly flamboyant colors and costumes on my characters, given the choice. Color and flair is fun.

The original game is also available through Steam or GOG and usually on sale for less than $5.

This is a personal favorite on mine, not because I think most of the game play is exceedingly strong. None of it is bad, for sure, but neither does any of it truly excel. No, where BG&E hits its high notes is in world-building, relatable and fun characters and an overall story that has just the right blend of excitement, intrigue and emotional melodrama. By the end, I truly cared about the stakes of what was happening and was truly curious about some of the loose ends that are teased but never fully explained. That, combined with appealing graphics and character designs and some really wonderful music makes it a very memorable experience in my eyes and I think everyone should give it a try at least once knowing this. 8/10 easily.

I actually rather enjoyed Temple Run and Temple Run 2 a half-dozen years ago or so. They were entertaining for what they were and weren't overtaken by predatory gimmicks. Honestly, I still haven't been able to find a decent (free or one-time payment) mobile game and have been thinking about just going back to Temple Run because...well...everything else has just felt hollow and scummy. Will gladly take any suggestions.

I downloaded Jetpack Joyride a couple weeks ago after doing a YouTube search for "mobile games that aren't complete garbage" and seeing it recommended. No joke, one of the videos was of a 20-something talking about it with nostalgia from his "distant childhood" and how they "don't make mobile games like this anymore". I mean, nothing wrong with that. Nobody gets to choose when they were born and you gotta appreciate every day you're given but it just made me chuckle a little inside when I realized that the game came out in 2011 and...fuck...now I feel old! By the way, the game itself? Yeah...I uninstalled it after about 20 minutes. I guess you just had to be a kid in the 2010's.

Played the original for about an hour. Interesting concept but the game itself was only average. Played AC2 for about 8 hours and enjoyed it quite a bit at the time...but have not revisited it since, what...2010? Have not played any other game in the franchise, so no comments there. 6/10, I guess?

I love it when games can work their HUD into the game diegetically, the way Dead Space does.

I love Jackal. One of my favorites on the NES, honestly.

I agree. Astyanax was a game I never knew existed until the late-2000's. The cartridge caught my eye at a local shop one day. The label art was appealing and it was only like $6, so I gave it a shot. Very underappreciated, I think. The game play is immediately reminiscent of the quite excellent Legendary Axe on Turbografx and that's when I discovered that they share the same developer. If I had access to it as a kid, I certainly would have given it at least a few rentals.

It's beginning to happen, gents. I'm finding myself thinking I'm gonna need to start carrying reading glasses. My standard prescription just ain't cutting it anymore. Those instruction manuals are getting blurrier and blurrier.

Great game, especially for its time, but way too fucking hard in spots. The difficulty is really the only thing that keeps it from being higher for me. Even so, I still remember what a huge deal the Batman movie was in '89 and playing this game in 1990 was honestly very exciting. The graphics and music absolutely slay and the play control is very solid, with my only complaint being that I wish they allowed the player to switch special weapons on the pause screen. Having to rapidly switch weapons mid-action can be frustrating at times. I've never beaten it and am not terribly worried about doing so. I just like to pop it in and play a few stages to listen to those beautiful chiptunes. 8/10

I concede that my word choice was not ideal. What I was implying was that "modern devs have done great things with [it] the inspiration that they've taken from that series".

Yeah, I don't know what it is about the game but I have a difficult time adjusting to the controls and pacing of the action. A fantastic game but if I want to see anywhere beyond the first stage, I'm going to have to buckle down and get serious.

Well...when they take inspiration, they really take inspiration, don't they? But hey, I'm sold. Classic Castlevania is one of my "anytime, anywhere" game series and many modern devs have done great things with it, like the Bloodstained games. Here's hoping this one turns out as good as it looks.

The word "parody" would imply that there were some level of comic/humorous value to it. There is no humor or joy to be found in the entirety of the game. If parody was what they were going for, I think they missed the mark. Instead, I'd call it a "soulless imitation" of the beat-em-up genre. All the elements are present but they don't combine to create a greater whole. It's kinda like those famously-bad Turkish and Italian films of the 70's and 80's that tried to imitate popular Hollywood action movies without understanding how to make those kinds of films or even how to write dialog in English. That's The Tick on SNES in a nutshell. It's trying to copy the beat-em-up formula without understanding how to make it interesting.

I played The Tick on SNES to completion because of some challenge back in the NintendoAge days (Reed...was it you that put me up to it?) and I still haven't recovered. That "game" represents 3 hours of my life I'll never get back. If you looked up the definitions of both "repetitive" and "vapid" in the dictionary, you'd probably see a picture of it. The title of the very first stage is "Night of a Million Zillion Ninjas" and they weren't lying. What really sucks is that The Tick is a personal favorite comic book property of mine and is defined by it's goofiness and irreverence. The fact that the video game was devoid of any humor, personality or entertainment value at all is the real knife through the heart. That and the fact that no beat-em-up game should ever, EVER take 3 f***ing hours to beat. Oi vey!

Uncut Gems really took me by surprise and 90% of that movie owes itself to Sandler. Not his usual fare...and that's a good thing.

You know, I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The initial vibe the game gives off is very much that Souls aesthetic, even down to some systems like parrying, rechargeable health potions, etc. Granted, I'm only in the opening area but so far I was surprised that I've not been beaten over the head with Souls-like difficulty yet. There was that opening boss fight, which seemed to be made to look impressive and intimidating but was kind of laughable. The first few enemy types have been similarly simple to dispatch. So yeah, I was (and I guess still am) expecting to be annoyed by difficulty at any moment...but that moment hasn't yet come. We shall see. We shall see. As for the Souls-like "mopey gothic" thing...that's honestly one of the elements that has limited the appeal of the proper souls series for me. Again, I love horror, gothic architecture, blood 'n guts, mythical monsters and all that stuff...but I don't think it's too much to ask that such games mix it up with a little "fun" from time to time. The game doesn't have to be that emo, Marilyn Manson fanatic with a pentagram pendant and black nail polish you knew from high school 100% of the time.

I was scrolling through my unplayed category on Steam last night and decided it was finally time to boot up Blasphemous and give it a go. It's a slow start and I'm only about 30 minutes in but I can see the potential for when I've got a few upgrades unlocked and this game finally starts opening up. I'm wondering if the "super-duper, mopey, gothic gorefest" aesthetic will get old after a while but at the moment, I'm still fine with it. Not that I'm some kind of prude or anything but I usually find those kinds of themes are more interesting when they're injected with a sense of bombast or levity (take Doom, Blood or Mortal Kombat for example). Thus far, Blasphemous seems to be playing that theme straight as a razor, which I can respect artistically but it does run the risk of becoming emotionally numbing to the player. Other than that, seems promising so far in terms of game play.

This was actually my gut rating but I decided to round it down to a 7. It has a lot of admirable qualities. The pixel art and overall graphic presentation, the music, even the characters are all good. It's in the genre of what I call "death cycle platformers", like Super Meat Boy, where the object is to die repeatedly learning the pattern of each area until you finally make it through by finding a perfect rhythm. Also like Super Meat Boy, I've just learned that I enjoy these kinds of experiences for the first half of the game or so and by the second half, the memorization demand combined with the increasingly absurd twitch-response requirement just makes me ready to be done with it. With Celeste, I actually made it about 80% of the way through...more than I expected...but I will admit that I cheesed my way through the final stretch of the game, as I was just not interested in investing the hundreds of deaths it was going to require to finish the thing. When areas started to take a dozen deaths or more to figure out, I couldn't be bothered. So, Celeste was a game that I can understand why someone might rate it as one of the greatest platformers of all time...but personally, although I enjoyed and appreciated it, it's not a game (or even a genre of game) that I'm very interested in revisiting.

Reminds me that I should try to work my way through this series this year. That and the Jazz Jackrabbit games. I've been sitting on them forever with no real excuse not to knock them out.

While it didn't stop me from finishing it (much to my regret), Far Cry 3's story kept getting shittier and shittier the further along it went until, finally, it reached the apex of diarrhea with the b.s. ending. The game play, although pretty repetitive by the end, was good enough that I powered through the "story" but that final middle finger to the player at the end basically turned me completely against the game and honestly kinda ruined me on the series as a whole. Except for Blood Dragon...but that game was intentionally bucking series trend, so it doesn't count.