Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

Despite my love for Need For Speed Underground 1 & 2, particularly 2, I never played the follow-up, Most Wanted. I know it’s beloved by much of the Need For Speed audience, but I never got around to it for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, to get it to run on modern machines, you have to mod it. Thankfully, the process of doing so isn’t too difficult, and if you know where to look, you can find versions of the game with all that stuff included. With those installed, the game runs pretty much perfectly. It looks extremely crisp and runs at my monitor’s full frame rate. I don’t know if there are any frame-rate-dependent aspects to it, but I haven’t found any problems.

The racing is solid. Plenty of events to do with different goals and challenges. The car selection isn’t huge, especially near the start of the game. But even halfway through the game, it’s still pretty minimal and mostly parrots the cars you receive for free by beating the racers on the “Blacklist”.

Dragging down the experience is the whole other half of the game: the police chase segments. These chases have their own challenges and goals, and the best part is that they’re mandatory. You cannot progress the game without dancing about with the rozzers. It bogs down the pacing of the game horrendously.

The serious issue with it is having to babysit the cops so you can get your heat level up just so you can even attempt to take on the challenges that you are required to complete just to continue racing. The whole thing is tedious.

It’s really killed my motivation to continue playing it. Which is a shame, because racing around the world is great. But the other half of the game is an annoyance.

Max Payne 1 & 2

These games have been in my backlog for a long, long time. I originally tried to play them back in 2010-ish but ended up putting them on the backlog. Thankfully, I finally came back to them.

Max Payne 1 is a bit of a rough game. The gunplay still mostly holds up, but the difficulty spikes can be frustrating. The checkpoints are basically non-existent, so you have to rely on quick saves. Levels are mixed in length and mostly take place in corridors or warehouses. Combat in general does get a bit repetitive by the end.

The first game’s surrealism and dream sequences are still as nutty as I remember them, and seeing the new stuff fills in more of the blanks about what Max is thinking about.

The first game overall holds up OK but is a bit rough. It also crashed on me several times.

The second game certainly expands upon the original in terms of design. The new physics system and improved gunplay add a lot to the firefights.

Levels are more varied too, with fewer apartment corridors. The first level is a hospital, with other levels taking place in environments including an amusement park, a construction site, and an elaborate mansion.

The surrealist elements do appear again, but they’re different from the original. There’s less 4th wall breaking stuff. It didn’t stand out as much this time around.

The difficulty is ramped up in 2; stronger enemies with bigger guns are the most prominent cause for the difficulty spike. But they’ve also added multiple escort sections. One of these is a sniping section where you play as Mona and have to cover Max. This section was miserable for me, as I could barely see the enemies with my bad eyesight. Thankfully, I didn’t take too many tries to get through it, but I imagine the harder difficulties would make that section infuriating.

The second noteworthy escort mission involves a Mafia boss wearing a “Captain Baseball Bat Boy” mascot outfit, which has been fitted with a bomb. This section isn’t difficult because of the escort part but rather due to the unrelenting amount of enemies with massive guns that it throws at you, often spawning them behind you, and getting turned into Swiss cheese thereafter.

Despite their faults, I’m glad to finally get these out of my backlog. You can watch my playthrough here & here.

RoboCop: Rogue City

Licensed games are usually terrible. But every once in a while you get an exception. Teyon created that exception with Terminator: Resistance. A game that came out of nowhere and was apparently pretty good. I never played it myself, but I will get to it eventually. But hot on the heels of that, they decided to make a RoboCop game. And I can attest that it is really good. Two licensed games in a row being good is a hell of a coincidence.

Let’s start with the vibes. It nails the aesthetic. The police station, the old steel mill, and OCP HQ all look spot on. The characters look pretty close to their original actors too, although several have been replaced or changed. Lewis spends most of the game in a hospital bed, so we get a rookie as a partner. His name is Ulysses Washington. He’s a bit of a prat and spends most of the game just “being there” and talking in your ear about stuff.

RoboCop is still voiced by Peter Weller and does a solid job. The voice acting is a bit stiff in places but does have a charm in the same way the movies did.

The game is best described as a Deus Ex-like. Specifically the newer ones. Open-ish hub worlds with side quests to do and characters to chat with. There are several points in the game where you can make choices about how you interact with a character, choose a side in an election, and so on. Although it doesn’t change the progression of the game much, it does make some minor changes here and there.

Gunplay is visceral. The main hand cannon (pistol would be an understatement) is pretty much the only weapon you’ll need. Although weapons like an M60 and the high-powered sniper rifle do serve a purpose. The sheer sound of the gun, combined with the bloody squelching when some poor sod gets righteously mowed down, provides a meaty ensemble of justice.

Adding to that, there’s an upgrade system where you place chips on a PCB. You have to use these to connect up wires for different abilities. But there are only so many chip designs, and each has its own percentage of how much it boosts the abilities. So you have to pick and choose carefully. And not everything on the PCB is a benefit. There are actually some debuffs that you might not be able to avoid unless you have the right chips to bypass them. The system is interesting but not really all that difficult to avoid getting the debuffs.

Although, my favourite updates were always the ones that made enemies explode and dismember more.

The main villain of the game is dumb. On paper, his motives seem solid, but the execution turns into a bit of a mess near the end. And that’s probably because the other story beats of the election, Delta City, and the OCP goon that runs the police force eat into the player’s attention.

But overall, I had a surprisingly enjoyable time with it, and I’m looking forward to playing the expansion as well as the Terminator game. And you can watch my full playthrough here.

Outrun 2006

This game is held in high regard by the small cult of arcade racing enthusiasts. I always wanted to give it a try but never got around to it. Eventually, I played the PS2 version of it, but issues with the emulator made me eventually switch to the PC version.

Man, this game is great. The drifting is fun as hell (Most of the time), and the music is probably the best stuff Sega has ever produced. Seriously, give this a listen:

I’m not including Splash Wave of course, because I have standards.

The selection of Ferraris is pretty good. I’m quite nostalgic for the Enzo, as I used to have a large poster of it on my wall back when I lived in London.

Girlfriend mode brings out the weirdness of the game. Challenges in that mode include running into ghosts, avoiding UFOs, and driving through a meteor shower with said space rocks pounding the road in front.

My one gripe with the game is the difficulty curve. It gets hard as you get into the later races in the game, unfair at times. The rubberbanding can get especially bullshit on the longer races, where you get ahead and stay ahead up until the final stretch, and then 3 or 4 cars suddenly pass you.

But I’m still enjoying it regardless.

Echo Point Nova

Holy shit, play this game. It’s incredible.

Imagine Titanfall, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Quake, Tribes, and Minecraft had an unholy baby; that is this game. A fast-paced FPS with environmental destruction, hoverboards, grappling hooks, and a ton of exploration.

The game takes place on a bunch of floating platforms. On these floating platforms are activators for spawning waves of enemies. Defeating these waves rewards you with either a gun, a perk, or a hat. Perks can change the game wildly. They include activating PvP, slowing down time when aiming, and even propelling you while you’re firing, leading to situations like this:

Hats, which make you look cool, also serve the purpose of increasing your allocation points for perks. So, more hats, more perks you can equip. An interesting concept, to say the least.

You also get others, like a springboarding wind power, a grenade, and a combustion power that melts through every material and even propels you when in mid-air.

The general gameplay loop is a ton of fun, and grappling around, multi-jumping, and riding around on the hoverboard just feel amazing. The gunplay is solid, although leading your shots gets quite difficult unless you toggle on some assists.

This blog post has taken so long to make that I actually played the free expansion to it. Unfortunately, it’s more of the same. The main difference being that it takes place on land instead of on floating platforms. It gives more use to the hoverboard.

Collectables are much easier to find in the expansion; they’re almost always within spitting distance of the checkpoints strewn across the map. Which kills the exploration a bit.

Regardless, if I had played this last year, this easily would have been in the top three, if not number one. And I’ve made a mental note to play Shattered Steel, the developer’s previous game.

Sonic Adventure DX

I played the crap out of this game as a child. But I only finished Knuckles’ campaign previously. I probably spent most of my time in the Chao garden back then.

But good God, does this game not hold up. The controls are terrible; everyone feels floaty and imprecise, except for the few times when they handle like mud. There’s also an oversensitivity to the controls. The camera has a fit in a bunch of situations. Bad game feel all around.

The levels sucked. Some of them were broken, so I would fall to my death unintentionally while trying to latch onto some mechanic that would transport me to another part of the level. Other sections might require you to do a spin dash; instead of maintaining speed, I graze a wall and come to a complete stop.

Amy’s levels are particularly awful, as you have to deal with the dogshit controls while also being pursued. Plus, Amy just sucks in general.

The only saving grace of the game is the exploration. You can find upgrades and additional Chao eggs. There’s something comforting about hub worlds in this era of video games. I felt the same way playing Shenmue and Mega Man Legends.

I eventually finished Adventure 1, but I can’t say I enjoyed it that much. But if you want to watch my playthrough, you can do so here.

Sonic Adventure 2

The one thing I liked about Adventure 1 was the open, explorable world. The 2nd Adventure game removes that and replaces it with linear levels and doubles down on everything I disliked about the first game. As you can imagine, I don’t like this game.

There are two story paths, Heroes and Villains. Heroes being made up of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. You switch between them over the course of the game.

In terms of level structure, they’re all similar to how they were in Adventure 1, but with bigger levels. Sonic and Tails aren’t too bad, but the increased level size in Knuckles’ case means I have to spend even more time playing hide and seek with emerald fragments. To make it worse, their positions are more randomised this time, so I spend ages searching and have to rely on in-game hints to figure it out instead of the previously existing radar. Said radar’s radius has been drastically reduced.

The controls are still awful, and the level design hasn’t improved at all. There’s still plenty to get hung up on. And then to top it off, the boss fights are horrendous. They track your movement mid-attack, they have tight timing windows, and the mechanics around them are about as fun as stepping on broken glass.

I dropped the game; I have no interest in torturing myself further with it. Jeff Gerstmann is right; there are no good Sonic games.

Hogwarts Legacy

Oddly, I’m one of the few people that enjoyed the Harry Potter games more than the books and movies. The world-building in the series has always been well regarded, and the movies and games really added a lot to it. Hogwarts Legacy expands on it further by sending the player to the 1890s.

You get to explore Hogwarts in all its glory, plus the surrounding areas of Hogsmeade and beyond. It’s a big old area to explore, and there are craploads to do in it. There are puzzles and collectables spewing out of every nook and cranny. It’s an absolute collectathon nightmare. I found myself spending most of my time doing side quests and random puzzles in the world instead of the main quest.

Most of the rewards are cosmetic: hats, cloaks, etc. At some point I had so many items of clothing that I decided to stop bothering with all the side stuff. But also because it had gotten extremely tedious.

Exploring gets a lot easier with both fast travelling and unlocking brooms. You also get animal mounts, like a hippogriff. That said, your speed is limited for data streaming reasons, so you don’t really zip around all that much. It’s still decent enough.

As for the story, it mostly revolves around some “Ancient Magic” that never gets its full potential explained beyond a single instance of mind control. And in a typical “Main Protagonist Syndrome” way, we’re one of the only few characters that can even see the magic.

The character’s overly chatty and doesn’t really have anything interesting to say. Early on, I decided to start listening to podcasts while playing the game and didn’t stop. At no point did I feel the need to listen to what characters were saying to me, and I didn’t care. It really is that boring.

But how about the gameplay? Spellcasting and combat? In short, it’s underwhelming. Most of the spells are boring, and combat is a chore. You end up using the most effective spells over and over or avoid combat entirely by using stealth. You learn how to turn invisible fairly early on, so stealth becomes trivial, and you can even avoid combat entirely in some parts.

The most interesting thing about the spellcasting is that you get to learn the Unforgivable Curses. But you can only use them on enemies, and there are absolutely no consequences whatsoever to using them. Remember, you’re supposed to be thrown into Azkaban after even one use of them for any reason. And one character can be if you choose. It makes learning them uneventful, as the killing curse amounts to nothing more than a one-hit-kill spell with a cooldown timer.

I enjoyed aspects of the game, but the negatives and shortcomings started adding up, and by the end, I just found the whole experience to be mediocre.

Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault

Ever wondered what the Call Of Duty developers worked on before Call Of Duty? Well, that’s what this is. Taking you through various fronts in the Second World War, getting stuck into some of the most important campaigns from 1942 onwards. The American campaigns, that is.

The gunplay is dated; this is a 2002 game after all. No aim down sights, stiff movement, etc. Thankfully, shooting bad guys has been a solved problem in video games for years, so the jankiness doesn’t get in the way too much.

There are a couple of stealth sections in the game, where you wear an enemy uniform and try and infiltrate a base. But in my experience, I get past the first couple of groups of enemies, and then the whole place ends up on high alert. I can’t tell if I’m doing something wrong, but the game really doesn’t give me any feedback at all. It’s either I’m getting away with it, or I’m getting shot at, with no warning or explanation. Again, this was just how old games were.

The difficulty curve is all over the place. Most of the time it’s a non-issue. But then you get to D-Day, and you have to navigate a minefield to get into a trench. But it’s literally impossible to know where the mines are, plus you’re getting minced by an MG42 nest.

It gets worse as you progress. That infamous level with the snipers is no joke. I played the game on Easy, and they were still pushing my shit in. I suppose it’s somewhat realistic, going down a street at a snail’s pace, peeking around every corner, desperately trying to find and pick off snipers that you can barely see.

I didn’t bother with the expansions, the main campaign really took it out of me. You can watch my playthrough here.

Assault Spy

Imagine Devil May Cry, except you’re a Japanese salaryman (sort of). That’s pretty much the premise of Assault Spy. You play as one of two characters, one male, one female. I forget their names; it’s not really that important.

The story is silly. It starts with the male character who’s a corporate spy and has been laden with a rookie. They try to break into their target and find the place overrun with robots that are now attacking humans. Various office workers then become a collectable you can find throughout the game.

The story gets stranger from there, but I think I’ll withhold the details. By the way, the other character is a wacky blonde bimbo that works for the CIA.

Getting into the meat of the gameplay, the male character fights with a briefcase and an umbrella; the female character fights with her fists and a gun (she’s American, of course she does). You unlock combos using a currency you gain from playing the game; think of the red orbs from DMC.

The combat is mostly OK, but I felt that most of my inputs kept getting dropped, and the input timings seemed pretty tight. The explanations for the combos don’t seem to map to the actual inputs correctly; some are also under-explained entirely.

The game gets very repetitive after a while. Enemies are not that varied, nor are they particularly fun to fight. And that’s when you have to fight them. The game features a major stealth section 2/3rds of the way through the campaigns for both characters. And believe me, it’s terrible. Almost made me drop the game entirely.

The bosses are somewhat of a highlight in that they’re at least different, but also a low as some of these fights are more infuriating than anything. But that’s partly due to the shortcomings in the combat in general. I had to cheese the last few bosses, as it was so difficult to actually attack them without taking excessive damage. It made the ending of the game more of a downer than it should be.

There’s certainly an idea with this, and I did enjoy some of the absurdity of it, but the problems with the gameplay just dragged down the experience for me. You can watch my playthrough here.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game – Remastered

This game is the Ghostbusters Reunion Tour. The main four actors are back, and you go to all the environments you remember from the two movies, plus a few new places. And you fight the same ghosts too. Slimer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man make appearances very early into the game.

You play as a silent protagonist that’s a newly joined rookie of the Ghostbusters crew. And that’s for the best, as the dialogue between the lads is more interesting to listen to than whatever some hack writer would likely come up with. Their interactions are entertaining and very fanservicey, often referencing events from the movies.

The Proton Pack is a very fun weapon. You get a variety of different blaster versions with their own uses, including one that acts as a shotgun, one that shoots goo, and another that freezes ghosts. The environments get absolutely ripped apart by the proton beams, burning holes in walls, destroying furniture, and sending debris flying. It’s extremely impressive considering it’s a PS3/360 game at its core.

My only problem with the game is the difficulty curve. A couple of boss fights and even a couple of arena fights are alarmingly more difficult than they need to be. The boss fight in the library stood out as being particularly troublesome. Adding to this, I have to babysit my teammates because they have a habit of running headfirst into danger. Keeping them alive is quite important too, because if they go down, you can’t rely on them to draw enemy aggro or have them revive you if you go down.

That said, it did not detract from my experience that much. Overall, I was surprised by how enjoyable the game was. It’s genuinely great. You can watch my playthrough here.

Quantum Break

This is also a Remedy game, although it doesn’t feel like it. The gameplay is so generic, it’s painful. It’s just a typical 3rd-person shooter with some extra powers slapped on top. The gunplay is lacklustre and gets mundane very quickly. The time powers are somewhat effective but are not exciting to use at all.

The story is very generic. For a game about time travel, it plays it remarkably safe, and major choices do not actually change the gameplay. They do change the live-action cutscenes, however.

Every chapter in the game is followed with a 40-minute live-action TV show episode. They’re not particularly high budget and mostly focus on characters that are not featured in the game at all. Aidan Gillen’s character is a bit of a mess. His explanation for falling from grace is never explained that well beyond trying to correct the timeline that he broke. The late Lance Reddick’s character is somewhat enjoyable, being a bit of a double-crosser.

There’s some enjoyment to be found in the visuals around the time travel stuff, but the game just does not utilise the idea well enough. Quantic Dream do a more interesting job with all of their games than what Remedy does here. It also lacks the Sam Lake weirdness that Max Payne and Alan Wake had. Anyway, if you want to watch my playthrough, you can find it here.

DOOM: The Dark Ages

Doomguy has put on a few pounds since Eternal (although this might be a prequel; honestly, I have no idea) and is now extra thick and heavy. The ground quakes beneath his feet. Lesser enemies shatter as he lands on the ground. And I wish I was making this up. Mobs literally explode into gibs when you land after a large fall.

The shotguns are still fantastic, although I do miss the grappling hook. However, I ended up using them 90% of the time. The other weapons, although conceptually interesting, weren’t really all that much fun to use. A couple has some weird mechanics attached to them that I rarely ever found a use case for.

They’ve added a destruction system for the props in the game, and it’s very impressive. In a time where a lot of games are very static in terms of interactivity, it’s nice to be able to blow some shit up.

Enemy AI is a bit dumber this time around; they tend to just stand there or have limited movement. Eternal and 2016’s AI seems more advanced. The trade-off is that there are a lot more enemies this time around. Dozens on screen, in fact. Not quite the hundreds that the original DOOM games could have, but still impressive.

Some folks have been concerned that the game would turn into “Parryslop”, and I can somewhat understand their apprehension. A lot of enemies and attacks now require you to parry them. Thankfully, the timing is so lenient I don’t even need to be anywhere near the attack to parry it. Seriously, it’s a joke. And you can make it even easier in the accessibility settings.

It’s still a lot of a collectathon. Figures, gold, and other stuff are all hidden around the levels. I swear I spent an alarming amount of time looking at the map screen. Annoyingly, there are points of no return in levels. So if you miss any collectables, you’ll have to replay the levels to get them. That said, they do mark out these points, so you are aware of when they happen. But in Eternal, you could fast travel around the maps, so you could collect almost everything your first time through. In this game, I still got 100% on most levels.

As for the story, it’s very Warhammer, but it never needed to be. They put a lot of effort into the cutscenes, but I genuinely couldn’t care less about anything that happens in them. It just feels like somebody’s fanfiction that they co-opted for this. It’s inoffensive, but it does make it hard to care about the main villain’s motives.

Overall, the game is pretty good, but I wouldn’t pay the £70-odd price for it. I’m glad I played it on Game Pass. You can watch the playthrough here.

Other Stuff I Played:

Balatro

Poker, but it’s about getting the highest number possible from your hands. It’s certainly helped me remember poker hands better, but the RNG screws me over a lot. I usually get bad hands or get a status effect that makes it impossible to win. Plus, I don’t really enjoy playing poker by myself; I would prefer to play against others. I’m interested in playing All In Abyss, as it has similar shenanigans but against characters.

Children Of The Sun

The best way to describe this game is to imagine SUPERHOT, but you’re a sniper. You have a single bullet, and hitting an enemy lets you aim at the next enemy with the same bullet. The goal is to kill everything with a single round. Throw in some clear inspirations from SUDA51’s games, particularly Killer7, and it creates a really neat puzzle game. My only complaint is that it’s a bit short. It’s only about three hours long. You can watch my playthrough here.

Anime Corner:

Okinawa de Suki ni Natta Ko ga Hougen Sugite Tsurasugiru

I ended up checking this out purely because anime set in Okinawa is a bit of a rarity. Plus, I don’t know much about the place. This anime is absolutely jam-packed with trivia, from dance moves to what people get up to during a typhoon. The characters are fun, if a little safe. There’s a bit of a love triangle going on, but it doesn’t really go anywhere in the anime. It’s good fun and makes me want to visit the place even more.

Kusuriya No Hitorigoto – Series 2

After greatly enjoying the first series, I was excited to see where the story was going to go. The second series adds several new characters, including a new servant girl that befriends Maomao. These characters are quite mysterious at first. The first half of the series is a bit boring, unfortunately; most of the episodes are one-off stories or build lore. They don’t raise the tension at all.

Once the second half kicks in, the story starts getting more interesting. Jinshi and Maomao get separated, making Jinshi extremely agitated. You get to see his more serious side and start to understand his secrets. At the end of the series, it’s all laid bare and opens up for a continuation of the story, where hopefully things get even more interesting. I do hope they adapt more of the story; there are quite a few novels to work with and plenty left of it to tell.

Kowloon Generic Romance

I’m not going to lie here; I only know of the manga because I absolutely love the design of the main character, Kujirai. But I never read the manga, and I had no idea what it was about. I went into the anime version completely blind.

The basic premise is that Kowloon exists again and is in a permanent state of summer. The main character, Kujirai, has no memories of her past but feels compelled to work at a real estate agency. There she meets Kudo, and they become a couple over the course of the show. But there’s more.

There’s a mysterious object hovering in the sky above Kowloon, and no-one knows what it is or what it’s doing.

Alongside the main couple, there’s also a gay couple that gets quite a lot of screentime. Unfortunately, their plotline is significantly less interesting than the main couple’s, but they get a lot more screen time than they probably should. A lot of Kudo and Kujirai’s slice-of-life chapters have seemingly been cut, which is undesirable.

As a result, the most enjoyable aspect of the show gets trampled on by additional, unnecessary plotlines. That being said, I still enjoyed the show. The art style is strong, and the overall atmosphere is engrossing. Kowloon was a crazy place, and it’s always fun to see it pop up in fiction.

Ninja to Koroshiya no Futarigurashi

I’m a fan of Shaft’s older work, but recently, the studio has been in a bit of a slump. Sangatsu no Lion was the last anime of theirs that I truly loved. Although the additional Monogatari adaptations are welcome. But it has been a while since they adapted a comedy manga.

“Ninkoro” is a hilarious anime. You expect fun ninja shenanigans and get hit in the face with pitch-black humour and suffering. They go out of their way to make you feel bad for the ninjas that the main character’s partner unremorsefully murders. The main character herself is a damn psychopath, showing no negative emotions whatsoever about turning the corpses of her former comrades into leaves. It’s not just bodies; she turns various objects into foliage, including a building.

It’s good form for Shaft and a good start for their new staff that worked on the show.

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Sorry this took so long to get all this written up. I know I keep saying this, but I’ll try harder to not rush these posts at the last minute.

ADMAN