Apologies for the lateness in this one. I’ve been so busy lately that I outright forgot to update this post.

ReCore

This was one of those games that was meant to be a selling point for the Xbox One, but much like that console as a whole, it’s kind of shit.

It’s an incredibly boring game. Moving around is slow and tedious, with few fast travel options and no way of covering large amounts of ground quickly. The combat is horrid. It’s a third-person shooter where you just dump ammo into fast-moving robots and then pull out their cores once they get low enough. It’s extremely repetitive. Also, the enemies have levels, and many high-level enemies are in the same areas as low-level starting enemies. So if you take a wrong turn somewhere, you’ll either get minced or spend forever dumping ammo into someone.

The platforming sections are decent, but the crappy movement mechanics don’t do it any favours.

And the cherry on top of this shit pile? Shit tons of crafting bullshit that feels like a serious afterthought.

I did not bother finishing the game. It’s a complete waste of time.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

One of the two Uncharted games I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet, the other being the Vita game, Golden Abyss. I went with the PC version of the game, as I quite frankly cannot be arsed to turn on my PS4 these days. The PC version seems to be mostly fine. I know it’s received multiple updates since its launch, which have greatly improved performance, among other issues.

The easiest description of this game would be that it’s the “buddy cop” film of the Uncharted series. Chloe from Uncharted 2 & 3 returns along with Nadine, the big afro lady from Uncharted 4, who is in the running for the worst-written villain ever. Nadine is still the worst character in this series by a long shot. She is a perpetually pissed woman who refuses to relax or even reconsider her mistakes.

The two characters are constantly talking to each other in the modern video game way. Which is to say, it is extremely annoying.

One chapter is a very large area where you get to drive a Jeep around, going to various points on the map. This was probably the most interesting section of the game. Going to different places in any order to fulfil a main objective. Each area being its own puzzle or challenge. There’s also a hidden monkey temple you can access by finding a collectable specific to this area.

The gun combat is still not great. It’s always been a bit weak in this series. Swimmy controls and aiming, general lack of precision, and bullet-spongy enemies are something Naughty Dog refuses to improve on.

Finally, the villain. He’s just a collector looking for more stuff and becoming greedy about it. And of course, he has a private military at his fingertips. The easiest way to describe him is “half-arsed.”

That’s not to say I dislike the game, but I wasn’t that impressed with it either. There are some good ideas, but I’ve gotten so sick of modern video game tropes that Naughty Dog practically pioneered that it lowered my opinion of the game as a whole.

Full playthrough here.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii

Yet another spin-off in the Like A Dragon / Yakuza series. This time, everyone’s favourite one-eyed crazy man, Majima, becomes a pirate. Which is possibly the most hilarious and fitting premise for him. Unfortunately, the execution is a bit disappointing.

Majima starts the game with amnesia and meets a young boy named Noah, who has a dad who’s a bit of a drunk. After Majima beats the shit out of him and the people harassing his bar, one thing leads to another, and we end up running a pirate crew on a ship. This is then followed by going to the island from the end of Infinite Wealth and meeting the religious group there. After that, you get wind of treasure and go off on your merry adventure.

Noah is a bit of a drag. He can’t do much, as he is both a child and an asthma sufferer. I generally hate kids in games, so I won’t waste much time on the point. I just don’t like him much as a character.

Majima in general seems like he doesn’t care about what’s going on in the plot. He acts uninterested a lot of the time, or worse, uninvolved. Giving off a “Why am I here” kind of vibe.

Getting into the gameplay, it’s an action game again this time around. They’ve added a jump button, meaning that Majima can do aerial attacks and juggling. I hate to say it’s some “anime shit,” but there’s not much else I can compare it to. Combat styles return. You have his standard Mad Dog style and then the Pirate style. The latter gives you a gun and a grappling hook. It’s certainly interesting, but it doesn’t really provide the variety this series desperately needs.

The ship combat is certainly new and inspired heavily by Assassin’s Creed IV. But unlike Black Flag, I struggled to enjoy it that much. It’s really slow, there’s a lot of annoying micro management, and the colosseum battles relating to it are bloody awful after a while. I’ll give them credit for trying to do something different, but it really sucks after a while, especially if you’re the type that tries to do all the side stuff.

At 5 chapters long, you’d expect the game to be short. And for a Yakuza game, it is. However, it’s about 50-60 hours if you want to do EVERYTHING. And once again, side quest hell is a thing. But it seems to be fully encapsulated inside of chapter 2. Or rather, everything gets dumped on you then. No other side stories appear in the later chapters; it’s all dumped then. My playtime at the start of chapter 2 was 10 hours-ish; by the end of the chapter, it was closer to 40 hours.

This was also a bit of a problem in Infinite Wealth as well; I would spend so long on side content, I’d completely forget the main plot.

With all that said, the lead up to the ending seems very quick. The progress made in Chapters 4 & 5 ends up being fast-tracked, and then it’s all over.

Before I get to my concluding points, the Minato Ward Girls side quest ending was a fucking fever dream. Basically, you gather a handful of girls to meet your first mate, but what follows is a fully live-action dating show-esque nightmare, complete with watching the real actor for your first mate bathing himself. What the fuck.

Anyway, I’m hoping that they’ll finally move on from these characters. I’m praying Stranger Than Heaven changes things enough and is successful to the point where they can finally put these characters to rest. Majima has stopped being the sinister, crazy, and loveable man that he originally was but is also not the cool-headed man he was in Zero. He’s basically a clown at this point. And clowns are not fun to hang around with long-term.

LocoRoco 2

I remember liking the original LocoRoco when I played it on PSP many eons ago. Unfortunately, this one got on my nerves after a while.

Don’t get me wrong, the visuals, music, and overall vibes are still very solid. All the LocoRoco, NPCs, and enemy designs are nice and vibrant. Seeing all the various things animate is neat too.

That said, it comes at a cost. Emulating the game is surprisingly demanding. It runs like a tortoise through sludge at 1080p, and I was only able to get it to run stably at 540p, which is around the resolution of a PS Vita.

But I digress, my issues with the game. Predominantly, the physics-based platforming becomes extremely frustrating, especially near the end of the game. And having that borderline OCD thought process where I have to collect every single dude to make myself bigger, taking damage, which would cause me to lose them, due to some wonky physics enraged me more than it should have.

Furthermore, most of the levels have areas that you can’t access because you lack the skill to do it. But these skills are just randomly tutorialised to you at points in the game and are not an item or anything. They just show you the controls, but for some reason, you’re not allowed to use them until that point. This is more annoying in context, as I saw the tutorials and thought, “Why couldn’t I do this before?”

However, by the time I finished the game, I lost all motivation to go back to get the rest of the collectables. I was so fed up with the game.

Full playthrough here.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2

SPACE MARINES?! The Sequel. After many years, they made a sequel and actually added proper co-op this time. Not that I played that way; I stuck to single-player.

That said, it’s about as repetitive as the first game. There’s a real lack of enemy and gameplay variety. All the guns feel the same, all the melee weapons feel the same, and most of the enemies die in the same way.

The swarm is impressive technology-wise, but actually fighting them is quite brain dead. The forgiving parry system for every single attack that they try renders the enemies little to no challenge at all. However, once you get later into the game, the swarm is replaced by Chaos Marines. But this does not alleviate my criticisms. They’re no fun to fight either.

If I were playing in co-op, perhaps I would have had a more enjoyable time, but as-is, I found the game to be very average. Also, I only played the main story campaign and did not try the co-op-specific missions.

Story campaign playthrough here.

LEGO BrickTales

One of my biggest pet peeves about Lego games is that more often than not, it is Lego objects inside of a normal world, and rarely do we ever see a fully Lego world. Where everything is made from Lego. And I mean EVERYTHING.

However, Lego BrickTales falls into the latter category. Every object, every world, and every character is Lego, no matter how big or small.

Anyway, the game is about travelling to different Lego worlds in order to find crystals that power up a machine that helps you rebuild your grandad’s theme park. And the key selling point is that you are the one building the structures inside the game.

At various points in the game, you’ll get asked to build bridges, helicopters, and various other things. Once complete, they’ll exist in the world exactly the way you built it. And it can actually be somewhat challenging at times. During your first time doing the puzzles, you’re given a limited pool of pieces to use. And once you make your structure, the game then runs a simulation on it to see how sturdy it is and if it can withstand a player walking on it or if they get stuck at all.

I really like it conceptually. But it’s a bit of a boring collectathon outside of that mechanic. You can get a free-build function after finishing each puzzle, but I rarely bothered to do it unless I really wanted to improve the look of something.

Full playthrough here.

Rise Of The Ronin

This game takes place at the tail end of the Shogunate’s reign in Japan. And follows the story of Sakamoto Ryouma. But unlike Yakuza Ishin, you don’t play as Ryouma himself. Instead, you play as one of two twins from a secret ninja clan that are trying to stop the evil gaijin menace from ruining Japan.

Basically, you get to make your own evil twin because during the first mission you have to choose which one you get to play as, and then for the rest of the game they betray you and play the villain for the rest of the game.

Getting back to Sakamoto Ryouma for a bit, he’s a fun character. Very likable, extremely supportive, and caring for the main character. Unfortunately, if you know your history, you know what happens to him. Or so you would think. As it turns out, the story changes based on your decisions and what missions you do. So you can change his fate, along with other characters.

There are three chapters with three areas to explore. Yokohama, Edo (Tokyo), and Kyoto. Each one taking place during different points in the timeline.

To get around, you obtain a glider. Which is a bit far-fetched, but hell, it’s a video game. You also get a horse. And this game does a small thing that I really appreciate: when you call your horse, you immediately mount it. It doesn’t just stand there or run past you. Eat your heart out, Red Dead.

But let’s get into the combat. It’s not quite Nioh, but it does have different combat stances. There’s a jump button and a parry button, but not quite like Wo Long. It’s a very robust combat system. Certainly way better than Ghost Of Tsushima, as it is way less floaty and weird. Loot is also part of it, but again, it doesn’t go crazy like Nioh does, but there’s a good amount of stuff. But once you get orange gear, you basically stick with it.

Tsushima does have one thing over Ronin: far more interesting exploration. Ghost Of Tsushima’s puzzle shrines are far more interesting than most of the explorable places here. That’s partly because Ronin isn’t great at rewarding the player. Tsushima gives you a specific key item; Ronin just gives you another piece of equipment that you more often than not have a better version of anyway. Like getting another sword. More often than not, I was hunting down cats for a particular NPC. A quest line that only gives a couple of cosmetic rewards that are worth having.

That said, exploration is certainly beneficial. I became so overpowered that most encounters were outright trivial. So I decided to challenge myself for a few of them and fight them non-lethally, either using wooden weapons or fighting people barehanded. Which was a lot of fun. You can play the entire game like this, and in certain conditions, it can affect the outcome of a mission.

Finally, there’s a romance system. It’s nothing crazy, really. But you can get into a relationship with someone, break up with them, and then get into a relationship with someone else. I do somewhat regret playing as a female character, but the game does let you romance both male and female characters regardless.

Rise Of The Ronin is an underrated game. The performance problems certainly bring it down a bit, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game and played it damn near constantly for several months.

Death Stranding 2

Norman Reedus going for a really long walk, the sequel. This is certainly an improvement to the original game. Some of the jank has been polished away, and the game now showers you with tools and weapons early on to make your life easier and faster. As opposed to the drip feeding of them in the previous game. You get vehicles and suppressed guns in the first area if you’re willing to 5-star the people there.

Also, there are non-lethal guns now. I can’t remember if they were a thing in the original, as I think I stuck to using the bola gun. But it makes encounters a lot easier to deal with at any rate. Plus, there are suppressed weapons as well, so stealth is back on the menu. The game does give you quite a lot of weapons and tools, but I didn’t use that many of them. Popping people in the head seemed the most effective method. One last note on guns: you can input a code, and it will make any gun lethal. But I never used that.

Except when it comes to BTs. The most effective way of dealing with them? Summoning your own BT like a goddamn Pokemon! That’s right, the nightmare tar creatures, which, upon touching a human being, will cause a nuclear-tier explosion, can now be pulled into a BT fight to assist you. Except they’re horribly overpowered. What’s worse, there’s no limit on which ones you can capture, including bosses. So every time I had to deal with a BT, I would summon “The Tar Lord”, a BT you can obtain from a submission about 2/3 of the way through the game, and it would just smoke whatever I was up against.

There are roads to be built, of course. And I spent so damn long building them. Along with monorails. It does make getting around easier, but the sheer amount of resources and time spent building them, only to not really see the fruit of your labour until the very end of the game, takes its toll.

For every main order or new facility added to the map, I probably spent about 2 to 10 hours just doing infrastructure building and levelling up the facilities. I’d find myself going from one end of the map to the other and then back again, and then back again, and then back again, and so on. Each time with cargo from either new orders or just picked up from the ground. I likely extended out the game’s playtime by several dozen hours.

Unfortunately, this had the side effect of completely pulling me out of the story and slowing the pacing to an absolute crawl. Now perhaps it’s partly my fault, but keep in mind, I would have to do these upgrades after the end of the game anyway, and I would always prefer to do most of the content before the end rather than after, because once I get to the end, I basically lose interest in playing any more.

On the subject of the end of the game, it’s a cool set piece, but it’s completely unplayable. It’s entirely a cutscene. But as a kick in the shin, it’s the kind of thing that was playable in MGS4. If you know what section I’m talking about, you would understand why I’m not happy about it.

Overall, I enjoyed Death Stranding 2. But it is a podcast game, a very long podcast game. It refines much of the first game’s mechanics and ideas, but the novelty of it has long since passed. I don’t know what they could do from here, but I think they should explore other aspects of the world and perhaps other gameplay ideas. I think a co-op big BT hunting game could be neat.

Crimson Desert

I originally jotted down this game with the expectation that I would play more of it. Alas, I’ve only put in maybe a dozen hours at most. Considering the game is about 300 hours or so long, what I’m about to talk about is from very early in the game.

The game starts with a character who is a Greymane, which I think is the game’s equivalent of being Scottish. As such, everyone hates you for some reason. After a tutorial fight, you’re killed and then brought back to life again. And then I get dragged to some town where I have to do a bunch of boring side quests, including cleaning a fucking chimney. Which I end up keeping the broom from because inventory management is a nightmare.

The controls are a complicated mess. Combat requires literal fighting game inputs. Talking to people requires you to aim at them and then press a button. But sometimes it’s a hold instead of a press because this game is very inconsistent. And then God forbid you need to pick something off the ground. Because you can pick up EVERYTHING, so if there are multiple things on the ground, you’re going to be grabbing all of it in the struggle.

The map is massive. With a huge fog of war covering all of it. There are bells in the world you can ring to clear the fog, but the game does a bad job of highlighting them on your map. Likewise for fast travel points. Which not only do not get highlighted when nearby but also require you to step on them for multiple seconds to activate them. So if you’re looking to fast travel to a town and wondering why you can’t, that’s why.

You do get the ability to fly and glide early on, but it’s incredibly slow. There are flying mounts and even jet packs, but I’ve not run into those yet.

As for performance, well, after several patches it has improved a bit. But initially, my PC was struggling even at low settings. Now I can get a good mix of medium and high with some help from DLSS. Although the early days were rough. Flickering lights, LODs being broken, and more. It’s certainly in a better state now.

Input is a problem; there’s a delay to everything, and the character feels sluggish to move around.

Generally, the game is a mess to figure out. It’s like they piled on a hundred and one ideas without thinking about the consequences to the controls, the gameplay, or the player’s understanding of both. Sometimes more content is not the solution. And it certainly isn’t a replacement for Dragon’s Dogma that I was hoping for. But I’ll keep chipping at it when I can.

Ryse: Son Of Rome

Do you yearn for Rome? For me, not so much. More of a British Empire guy myself. But anyway, this game was an Xbox. One title back in the day that eventually got a PC release. Developed by Crytek.

Starting off with performance. Initially, it was terrible. Constant stuttering and a lower than ideal framerate. After a few config file changes, I got it running smooth as butter.

Being a Crytek game, there’s an expectation about graphics, and I’m happy to say that the game still looks pretty good. There are some dated models and textures here and there, but overall, it’s still quite impressive what they managed to achieve.

Now is the game good? Not really. But it’s not exactly bad either. It’s very mediocre.

The game is extremely one-note. There is combat and nothing else. I hope you like X, X, X, Y button mashing with colour-coded finishers, because that is the entire game. And I do mean the entire game. Every encounter is just combat. The only changes are times when you have to gang up with your Roman comrades to build a shield turtle to assault a position and when you have a reason to throw a spear at someone.

No puzzles. No deeper combat mechanics. It’s mind-numbingly mundane.

As for the story, there’s a subplot involving gods pulling strings to manipulate things, but primarily, the plot is about the main character getting revenge for the death of his family. And if that sounds like the plot of Gladiator, congratulations, you’ve figured out the game’s main point of inspiration.

It can’t recommend the game, but it is at least pretty. Also, there are elephants at one point.

Playthrough here.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

I really enjoyed the original RE4. It was very whacky in places, but that is part of the charm. The significantly more serious remake has disappointed me in several places.

The core gameplay, the combat, especially the shooting, is considerably worse than the original’s. Less accurate, more randomness, and a lot more weight. The animation priority system also gets in the way, throwing me off my target or letting an enemy grab me from several metres away. It’s considerably more infuriating than the original in my opinion.

There are many similarities in the maps. Some feel mirrored from the original, while others have been condensed down. But there are many sections just missing outright. Remember the lava level in the castle part? That’s gone. Plus, several boss fights have either been removed or changed over to Ada’s story.

Ada’s story is actually longer than the original but is lacking some key fights. The horrid Krauser fight is completely omitted, but the fight against Saddler has changed in location and is a bit more interesting. Although it’s also harder due to being able to get stun-locked easier.

I wish I had more to say about the game, but it’s so lacking in the charm and humour of the original that it ends up being forgettable. I had more fun playing Resident Evil Village and RE2 than this. And I certainly enjoyed the original way more. But that’s not to say it’s a bad game. I could easily recommend it, but I can’t say that it’s better.

Full playthrough here.

Other Games

Planet Of Lana 2

The first game was a fun little experience in the same vein as Limbo and Another World. The sequel maintains the quality of the music and art while expanding the world a bit. There are new biomes like a snowy mountain, a jungle, and even a city. However, you’re never really in these locations for too long. Which is fine because it keeps things varied and helps the pacing. The game ends on a cliffhanger, so I suppose a third game is planned.

Playthrough here.

Forza Horizon 6

This is just the same game as the last four, but now it’s in Japan. The cars still drive like a boat, the events are incredibly stale, and I outright muted the game because everyone still talks like an utter prat. But hey, now it’s in an incredibly corporate, sterile, lifeless husk version of Japan! Where basically no one is Japanese.

I haven’t been arsed to even finish it, as I ran out of races to do, but the game wants me to do dumb events like speed traps just to be able to get to the last part of the game. But I’m too damn bored of it.

Replaced

Some years back there was a pixel art cyberpunk game that caught everyone’s attention called “The Last Night”. This isn’t that, but it does tick some of the same boxes. The combat is very Batman-esque, but the animation priority often causes you to take damage in the few frames between finishing an animation and gaining control again. You also can’t break out of these animations, but you can be damaged during them. Which breaks the flow and causes it to become frustrating.

The story is lame. Basically, you’re an AI inside of a human brain, and that causes all manner of issues, so now you have to go back to the lab to try and fix it. Meanwhile, you’re being chased by everyone. The writing feels like a teenager wrote it. The characterisation is lacking as well.

And lastly, there’s a side quest involving a girl repairing old arcade machines that you can play. And they’re all terrible.

Playthrough here.

Anime Corner:

Needy Girl Overdose

What the fuck did I just watch?

I would like to leave the summary there, but I’ll continue to explain. This is an anime adaptation of an indie game, but instead of retelling the story, they added a bunch of new characters and significantly more backstory. Although it starts off a bit pretentious, it gets weirder and weirder. With wild art style changes and getting into some pretty nasty subjects. There’s a lot of bodily fluids on display as well. Not for the faint of heart, but an interesting watch if you can stomach it.

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Once again, I am late with this. Try as I might, I don’t think I’ll improve the situation. Other blog posts will return soon, and the next one of these will be at the beginning of next year.

ADMAN

I played quite a bit in the second half of this year.

Call Of Duty: Ghosts

When Call Of Duty: Ghosts came out initially in 2013, it was absolutely dogpiled on by everyone for being mediocre at best. Some even went as far as to say that it was trash. I do not share this opinion. The biases from around that time are likely due to how frequently games in the series release, and people just being sick of the same general formula.

Well, more than a decade later, and after a relatively long detachment from the series, I can say that Ghosts is a reasonably OK game. The set pieces are relatively well done, and the story is actually somewhat interesting. But I would say that the lore behind it is lacking explanation and details. It also ends on a cliffhanger that quite obviously has yet to be resolved.

Gameplay-wise, it is more COD. You shoot dudes, move forward, and shoot more dudes. There are a few more stealth sections thrown in there this time. Overall, however, I did enjoy my time with the game. The gunplay is a bit floaty and recoilless compared to the current handling model, but you get used to it.

But to cover the biggest memes from this game, the dog sections are better than I was expecting but front-loaded and don’t appear later in the game. And the fish do in fact swim away if you get close to them.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Vampyr

Where do I even start with this game?

It takes place in London during the latter part of WWI, in 1918. The city is stricken with influenza, and parts of the city are quarantined. This game was made before COVID, but the restrictions that were around during the time the game is set are unsettlingly similar. But you can do your own research into that.

Anyway, the main character wakes up in a pile of bodies after being turned into a vampire. And now has to deal with vampire hunters on top of the now increasing numbers of “Skals”, a mutated vampiric strain. For the record, we are considered an “Ekon”. I don’t know if these are real terms or not in actual vampire lore, but that’s what the game says.

As a vampire, the player has several restrictions placed on them. They can’t go out in the sunlight and cannot enter people’s homes without their permission. But they do get the powers of mesmerisation, along with other combat-specific powers. That said, I found little use for those powers. I’ll get back to the combat in a bit.

Being a doctor in-game, you spend a lot of time running around the city talking to people and giving them medicine. In speaking with the inhabitants of Southwark, Docklands, Whitechapel, Pembroke Hospital, and the West End, you obtain information about all the other characters, often in the form of gossip. However, this information opens up new talking points, which can provide a few alternative ways through encounters. Furthermore, as you unlock more information about a character, the more XP they’ll be worth should you decide to drink their blood.

The gossip is humorous at times, and I will be using the expression “He is of lesser lineage” in the future, but the characters are extremely downtrodden and gloomy most of the time. I know there’s a war and a pandemic on, but the complete lack of traditional British dark humour and wit is noticeable. But seeing as this game was developed by French developer DONTNOD, I can’t say it’s terribly surprising.

Getting back to the gameplay, this is where pretty much all the complaints start piling up. It’s a pseudo-Soulslike. Perhaps more akin to a bargain-bin Bloodborne. You’ve got stamina, health, and blood meters on screen, the last one of which acts as your mana bar for vampiric powers. Enemies are damage sponges to start with, although they become more of a pushover as you get better weapons, at least the general mobs do.

Enemies have levels, and they tend to go up considerably as you progress through story beats. To level yourself up, you need to rest at a hideout and dump XP points into abilities and stats. However, this respawns every enemy on the map. So if you need to go from district to district healing the residents, because they have a tendency to get sick every time you rest as well, you have to clear out the enemies again. This gets extremely tedious, doubly so when they start spawning tougher monsters at higher levels later in the game.

And don’t even think about fast travel. It doesn’t have any whatsoever. You have to leg it around the map.

The crafting system provides minor improvements to weapons. You’re better off finding the best weapons in the game first before dumping resources into them. Said resources are a bunch of chemicals with really long names. I don’t think there’s any actual scientific process involved in the upgrade materials; I think they just picked whatever was “close enough” to what might actually be useful.

The game’s difficulty is one of the biggest issues. The level gaps near the end of the game get quite large. The last boss fight in the game had a 10-level difference between us. It makes those larger fights more of a chore than they need to be and requires more of a reliance on cheesing them rather than engaging with the combat properly.

Unfortunately, unless you want to literally kill everyone in the game for their blood, you’re not going to get enough experience to be able to match them.

Although I enjoyed the social mechanics in the game and the story was good enough to keep me tagging along, the gameplay and other mechanics just make it too tedious to recommend to most people. But you can watch my playthrough here, if you’re interested.

Sushi Ben

I was really excited for this game and had high hopes for it. It’s originally billed as a VR game set in a remote Japanese sea town. You are here to help out a local sushi place get back on its feet. Unfortunately, there’s a real estate agent that’s buying up all the property in the area, driving people away and sabotaging the procurement of ingredients for the sushi.

This real estate agent treats her subordinates as a method of transportation. Walking all over them, using them as a motorcycle, even as a helicopter. A fun character, but barely in the game.

As you can tell from the screenshot, it has a very Mega Man Legends-esque look. It’s what drew me in initially. As you can imagine, performance in the game is fine. It didn’t stress my PC out at all.

I previously mentioned that it was billed as a VR game. The fact of the matter is that you can in fact play it on desktop. And I would highly recommend doing so, as the VR implementation seems to be abandonware. Strewn with bugs and issues not found in the desktop version. Plus, all the activities are infinitely easier on desktop. Fishing, archery, the lot. Table tennis is probably the only one where it’s mostly the same.

On the subject of archery, they originally drew a curve to show where your arrow would land, which worked well in VR. But then they changed it and made it a dot. Which made archery in VR significantly more of a hassle to use.

I’ve also had my fair share of bugs and softlocks with the game. Halting progress and often requiring a restart. It got better after a few patches, but it does add to the many annoyances I had with the game.

But the biggest problem with the game? It’s boring. The mini-games aren’t fun; most of the story missions involve walking slowly across the map to talk to someone, having your annoying frog statue thing turn into some item, and walking somewhere else. Then you go back to your apartment for the night. It becomes tedious, and as fun as some of the characters are, they’re a bit flat, and you can’t interact with them outside of their usual story beats.

And then to top it off, it ends on a really crappy cliffhanger. An utter disappointment. You can watch my playthrough here.

Resident Evil 4 (OG)

I had never played the original Resident Evil 4. My primary experiences with the series involve the remakes of 2 & 3, RE7, and Village. All of which I enjoyed. Seeing as it was Halloween, I decided that it was the perfect time to finally play it.

I did not play it as is, however. I decided to install the HD Texture mod pack and an additional mod that added some tweaks and options to the game, particularly removing the QTEs. I must say, the improved textures are most welcome. They were painstakingly recreated from original sources and replace the old ones near perfectly.

Considering the age of the game, you’re probably wondering how it holds up to modern scrutiny. Well, the tank controls certainly don’t feel great. Turning your entire character around when you move in a direction. But the game was designed around that, and I never found it to be too intrusive. The gunplay, on the other hand, holds up quite well. I’m not sure if the RE4 tweaks mod makes any changes to it, but I had no issues landing headshots. Not being able to move while shooting wasn’t as much of a burden as I was expecting either; I tend to stand my ground when I shoot in games anyway. Probably a holdover from when I played Counter-Strike: Source.

Inventory Tetris is about as fun as it is troublesome. Not a huge deal, but I wish there was an automation feature. Finding the space for items can take a while at times.

As for the game itself, the story is fun enough to keep me hanging on. There’s an appropriate amount of cheese and weirdness to keep me interested. The enemy variety is not too bad either. There are certainly some enemies that are awful, those flying bugs you have to deal with once you get to the castle, for instance, but generally it does a good job at keeping you on your toes.

Babysitting Ashley wasn’t too bad. Some of the heavier combat sequences let her hide in a box or something while you take care of the enemies. Some of the sequences in the castle can get stressful, as you have to look after both her and yourself simultaneously. The actual annoying part of it is if she gets grabbed, you have to make sure you’re not aiming at her directly, or you’ll kill her. As friendly fire is very much present. Once you complete the game, one of the unlockable outfits you get is a full suit of armour that makes her completely invulnerable, likely trivialising the whole game.

Ada is awesome. Absolutely bewitching from the moment I first saw her in a cheongsam doing a cartwheel kick during the first cutscene with her and Leon. She has a whole campaign that becomes available after finishing the main game called Separate Ways. It’s a shorter story, only 5 missions. It takes place concurrently with the main story but covers Ada’s side of it. This includes cutscenes from her perspective, also containing secret cutscenes that you could only view in the main story if you did certain things.

Her story also has unique boss fights, including against the main bad guy. As well as turret sections and more. Her fight against Krauser is a bit of a stain on her campaign. It’s a very small arena, and you have to constantly dodge his attacks. If I didn’t have auto-QTE turned on, I likely would have died multiple times.

You get good guns from the get-go in her campaign, so the merchant doesn’t get used much.

Speaking of good guns, the RPG is completely overpowered. It one-shots almost every boss. So it’s good to have one on you at all times so you can instantly win against any tough enemy it throws at you. But it does make the story bosses an absolute joke.

I enjoyed the game from start to finish. The pacing is excellent, with exploration and puzzles breaking up the high-octane action. There are a few sections, particularly in the caves and sewers, that I didn’t like as much, but thankfully, they don’t last that long. The castle section was easily the best part and looked amazing with the HD Textures mod. I see why this game is held in such high regard.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Ninja Gaiden 4

Ninja Gaiden is a notoriously difficult series. I have been beaten by the first level of Ninja Gaiden Black and Sigma multiple times. It’s put a serious hamper on my progress through the series. But I decided to play through Ninja Gaiden 4, as it was on Game Pass and was developed by Platinum Games. External developers for the series haven’t been positively received in the past (Ninja Gaiden Yaiba springs to mind), but Platinum have done good before.

You play as Yakumo, a generic fuckboy ninja dude. He starts the game by rescuing some lady, although he was sent there to kill her, and then spends the rest of the game fighting bosses to bring back the Black Dragon, some super powerful monster whose sealing has led to constant rain and miserable weather in the area.

Let’s start with the good points.

Firstly, the game runs well. I was getting well above 60 FPS on high settings. I was using DLSS, but it wasn’t required if I wanted to keep the smooth framerate.

Combat is mostly good. The animations are smooth, and attacks can be quite visceral. There are two main stances: normal attacks and then a more powerful stance that can be used to parry enemies’ unblockable attacks. Guarding is extremely powerful too, but the game really wants you to learn how to parry, despite it.

As for the negatives, well, there’s a reason why I said the combat is “mostly good”. Starting with the hitboxes, they’re absolutely massive. The first boss has an attack that completely goes above the character’s head but hits for full damage. And there’s hit stun too. So this attack that visually misses you, stuns you, and then further attacks follow quickly, and you die in three hits. Enemies also have absolutely abhorrent tracking, Dark Souls 2-tier even.

The lock-on system is absolute dogshit, and you should turn it off immediately. In multi-enemy fights, it will always choose the enemies furthest away from you instead of the ones right next to you. It also prevents you from parrying or blocking incoming attacks from other directions. It’s simply broken.

Parry windows are not explained at all. The timing on them is a mystery to me, and the tutorials the game gives you on them do not even remotely help. If there was some kind of visual indicator that could assist me in figuring out when to attack, like a circle or on-screen prompt, it would make it considerably easier to understand.

But even that wouldn’t help, as the animation priority system is the largest dictator as to whether or not you eat shit during a combat encounter. Even if you try to attack or block during an enemy attack, the game will ignore it, as the animation for your character being hit begins several frames before actually being hit. This basically means that parrying becomes virtually impossible. It never works properly for me.

I still managed to power through and finish the game. And I don’t hate it, but I spent most of the game swearing at it for very annoying things. These issues on their own would not warrant that much ire, but combined, they led to a very stressful and irritating experience.

Anyway, if you want to watch my playthrough, you can do so here.

Wanted: Dead

Christ, what a pile of shit this was. I finished it out of sheer spite. The worst part is that I don’t know if it was made to be bad deliberately.

The combat is awful, gun and melee. Bullet-spongy enemies make firefights a chore, and melee combat has the same problem Ninja Gaiden 4 does with animation priority, but made even worse. I barely get ammo for the guns that I use, and the gun customisation stuff is nonsensical, with longer barrels on guns giving you less velocity and changing sights somehow letting you do more damage.

That said, I could probably deal with the melee combat on its own, but when most fights centre around guns, it just makes me wonder why it’s even there. They tried to do both and made both mechanics weaker because of it.

This also extends to the boss fights. The first boss is a giant spider tank that’s easy enough to defeat, but the second boss is a dude with a gun for the first phase and then fights you unarmed for the second. But he has attacks that track your position and stun-lock you to death. It was about as fun as using fibreglass as mouthwash. There’s a fight with a sniper with an invisibility cloak that was somewhat better, and the final fight isn’t too difficult as long as you know when to dodge their instant death attack.

So what’s the draw of this game? Why did I finish it?

Well, I finished it out of spite as a driving force, but I also needed to know how much worse it could get. The combat wasn’t the only awful thing. The story is completely nonsensical, and the dialogue sounded like they just grabbed a bunch of random actors and had them read out all their lines on the first take.

That doesn’t bother me that much, however, because at least that is entertaining. The silliness of the game is certainly something to behold. For example, this is the loading screen:

This is a parody of a well-known GIF that’s derived from a lesser-known parody rap battle from the mid-to-late 2000s. It’s a bizarre addition, but the only one. There’s a bunch of anime cutscenes that are related to the main character’s backstory, but like the rest of the plot, they lack any kind of coherence.

To top off the lunacy of it, there are mini-games. There’s a claw machine, a ramen-eating rhythm mini-game, a karaoke mini-game, and an arcade game. The first and last of which are probably the only ones that aren’t an abomination. The latter two have issues with timings, dropped inputs, and just being overly difficult and complicated with their inputs. But they are at least fun distractions. The arcade game was reasonably competent. Debatably the most polished thing in the game.

One final annoyance worth mentioning is that the collectables do not stay collected if you die and get reset back to the checkpoint. It’s a massive pet peeve of mine, and it’s present in this game too. Just one of many problems with it. Also, the woman who played Quiet in MGSV is in this game; she doesn’t do too much, but she’s there.

You can watch my shambles a playthrough here.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7

Black Ops 7 is a bad video game but interesting in its concept. First of all, it requires people to enable TPM and SecureBoot, which I couldn’t be arsed to do. Instead, I streamed the game over both XCloud and GeForce Now. XCloud ran quite well, with only a bit of latency. Although it didn’t feel like the frame rate was actually 60FPS. GeForce Now ran below 60FPS, and I had frequent lag spikes. However, after finishing that session, I realised I had left something downloading in the background, which likely was the root cause of those problems.

Once you get into the game, you find out that it’s online-only. With a forced co-op campaign, although you can play it solo if you want. That said, I played the majority of the game solo, and the one time I decided to play it in co-op made the game significantly less shit. But we’ll get into that.

But because of the forced co-op, there are no mid-level checkpoints to load back into. If you leave a match, you have to start that level from the beginning. You also cannot pause the game.

And now we get into the meat of the problem, the gameplay. The guns are not terribly interesting; the abilities you unlock are useful but only if you remember to actually use them. However, the most annoying thing in this game, head and shoulders above everything else, is the enemies being massive bullet sponges. These aren’t your typical bullet sponges; these dudes have got health to spare. We’re talking about guys who tank multiple magazines’ worth of bullets.

If you thought that the robot enemies in Black Ops 3 were bad, this game doubles it. But for every enemy. Robot enemies also feature in this game, and guess what, they also have stupid amounts of health. It makes every encounter a chore now. Slow, constant shooting, having to manage a tonne of enemies everywhere because they only did the bare minimum of balancing for solo play.

Playing it is a awful slog. So why I did I say that it was interesting?

Well, you spend the entire game tripping balls. You’re hallucinating all kinds of crazy shit. Zombies, giant machetes falling from the sky, and giant plants as a boss fight. The levels are filled with insane visuals. It’s a complete departure from the military focus that the series is known for. It’s almost as if the Zombies team were told to make something, and they just threw shit at the wall. Every level is followed up by an open-world area, which I believe is the Warzone map that has been repurposed. These levels aren’t all that fun, as you rarely get any respite from the enemies that continuously respawn.

But once you finish the game, that open world turns into an extraction shooter with various objectives thrown about the maps and other players. I don’t know if it’s fully Player vs. Player vs. Environment; I think it’s just Player vs. Environment, as I wasn’t able to harm other players. I didn’t play much of it, unfortunately, but it sounds like an interesting idea.

Don’t bother playing this. Complete waste of time.

Skate Story

I remember seeing the trailer for this years ago and wondered if it would ever come out. After what seemed like an eternity, I can finally play it. It’s fucking awesome.

The vibes are immaculate. Visually wild-looking, with the glass skater and abstract rock and building formations everywhere. As for music, it adds a lot to the surrealist aspect. There are also visual and gameplay sequences synced to the music.

The game’s story is fun. It revolves around the player having to eat moons because the devil demanded it. As part of this deal, you get a skateboard, and your body turns into glass.

It works its way into the gameplay, as every small stumble and bail shatters you into tiny pieces. Thankfully the checkpoints are quite forgiving, so it’s never really that frustrating.

As for the skateboarding itself, it doesn’t play like Skate, but I would hesitate to compare it to Tony Hawk as well. It uses a single button to ollie, with additional button presses to mutate it for other tricks. For example, pressing R1 or L1 will let you do kickflips or heelflips. Double tapping those buttons, plus using R2 and L2 as well, you get a reasonably sized but simple list of tricks you can do. There are no grabs as far as I can tell.

It’s a simple system, but the feel of landing tricks and the general weight of the gameplay certainly do a lot of the heavy lifting. If I were going to complain, I would say that the handling of vert ramps, like quarter pipes and halfpipes, is not as smooth as it could be.

Did I mention the game has boss fights?

They’re quite the highlight. Not necessarily from the gameplay perspective; fighting them is quite straightforward, but rather from the audio/visual aspect.

As I mentioned earlier, the music is often in sync with the visuals. So as the music absolutely envelops you, the tension of the fight heightens, and you get absorbed by what you’re doing.

If someone asked me to describe this game, I would say, “Imagine if Suda51 made a skateboarding game”. It’s super cool, I highly recommend checking it out. You can watch my playthrough here.

Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare

Black Ops 7 wasn’t the only Call Of Duty game I played recently. I also delved into the other COD game I hadn’t touched yet. This one seems to be a bit forgotten. It’s quite a departure from the regular COD games, as it takes place in the far future, and you have dogfights in space and Zero-G shootouts.

It’s a bit of a mix between the movement tech from Titanfall and the dogfighting from Freespace. Actually, the similarities to Freespace are staggering. Missions are picked from a map screen on a hub ship, your personal ship has a launch and subspace jump sequence that is very similar to Freespace 2, and the dogfighting in general feels very similar.

Before I get into more of the gameplay, I should comment on the story.

As I mentioned, it takes place in the far future, the UN has now gained complete control and has become the world’s government (God help us), and Mars is now a space colony. However, the colonists aren’t too happy with the Earthlings and have decided to start a war following a failed recon mission by Earth’s forces.

The main villains’ motivations aren’t really explained. He just seems comically evil, committing war crimes en masse with little to no justification beyond “Earth is bad”. The main villain shares an actor with Jon Snow from Game Of Thrones, so that’s something.

The entire game apparently takes place within 24 hours, which just doesn’t seem feasible considering the distances they need to cover and the fact that the main character ends up getting thrown out into space without oxygen for a while but somehow manages to recover without issue.

I can’t say I cared that much about the characters in the game. Only one is even remotely memorable, and that’s the robot guy. And that’s only because he has some dark-humoured jokes about robots destroying humanity.

As I mentioned, missions are picked up from a map screen on the main hub ship. The side missions consist of dogfights, stealth missions, and sabotage missions. Fairly standard COD stuff, but now in space. You also get to choose your loadout.

The weapons vary from Space AKs to pistols that vaporise people in one shot. The latter of which is called the Eraser pistol. An apt name. That said, besides some of the bigger guns that had obscene damage outputs, I didn’t use that many of the guns.

The levels aren’t much to write home about. Although the skyboxes are gorgeous, the levels themselves aren’t that crazy. But occasionally, there are some mechanics associated with them, like shooting windows on the moonbase to cause enemies to get launched out into the vacuum of space. A level that takes place on Mercury has you avoiding direct sunlight so you don’t get instantly cooked.

Although I liked parts of the game, I do understand why it’s not that popular. It is a massive departure from the normality of the series and goes a bit too far into sci-fi. I still think it’s interesting at least.

You can watch my playthrough here.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business

Earlier this year, I played RoboCop: Rogue City and was surprised at just how much I enjoyed it. All the side quests and characters helped flesh out a world I’d only seen in movies. So when Unfinished Business was announced, I was quite excited to jump back in.

Unfortunately, it’s just not anywhere near as good as the base game. Although a lot of my gripes have to do with the performance.

I ran the original RoboCop mostly fine on my rig, with some settings turned down. But here, I need to turn it down further and rely heavily on DLSS. The image quality suffers a lot. But to make matters more confusing, you spend most of the game in an interior. Grey corridors, labs, and offices make up the majority of environments. I suspect the polygon count is way higher than it needs to be.

Not helping matters is the crashing. I streamed my playthrough of this and experienced an average of two crashes per stream. Usually about 40 minutes to an hour apart. It usually occurred during or just before a cutscene. I suspect it’s something to do with the loads. And it’s not just me encountering these problems either; the Steam forums are full of posts about it.

Putting aside the performance problems, how is the game?

Well, if you’re coming into this expecting more exploration and side quests, you’re going to be disappointed. There’s a very heavy combat focus the moment you get out of the opening sections, and breaks from it are somewhat rare. Not to say the combat is bad; it’s about the same as the first game. But it doesn’t do anything new, and enemy variety is lacking. At some point it just gets very repetitive and numbingly easy once you equip the Auto-9 with the PCBs that turn it into a full-auto monster. You practically turn into a walking A-10 Warthog.

There is at least one memorable combat segment. You get to control an ED-209. Although short, there are a few Easter eggs, and getting to be overpowered as hell is always enjoyable. I must say, it did remind me of the mech segment in Escape From Butcher Bay. Actually, this whole expansion gives me a similar vibe to the Riddick game.

There’s not much new in the way of weapons. The highlighted weapon they’ve added is a freeze gun. It turns pretty much any enemy into a popsicle. Unfortunately, the polygon count on the ice shards is absurdly high. So using it absolutely ruins the frame rate. It’s also not that fun to use, but it is effective.

There are some breaks from the combat. There are a couple of hub sections where you can pick up some side quests. These usually involve going from one place to another, getting items or searching for clues. There’s nothing that really stands out, unfortunately. Most of these side quests are usually finished in the same sentence that I start them in, or quickly thereafter. I can remember one where some dude wanted me to lift a gate, so I did, and then the side quest immediately completed about as quickly as it appeared on screen.

There are a couple of other sections, such as the part where you play as pre-RoboCop Alex Murphy and another section where you play as the scientist lady that communicates with you throughout the game. Murphy’s segment is too different from the main game, but the latter’s section starts off running away from thugs, and the best of it is a walking simulator with a choice at the end.

The story is a bit of a mess. The main villain’s goal is not particularly clear. He’s stolen the chair RoboCop uses, and I assume he’s trying to use it to hack OCP. But to what end I’m not sure. He also has history with Murphy, which is part of the flashback previously mentioned. There are a few recurring side characters, but beyond that, I struggled to care too much.

Overall, it’s still fine. It’s more RoboCop. But this expansion certainly has a lot of problems. I can only recommend it if you really want to turn more bad guys into paste. You can watch my playthrough of both the main game and the expansion here.

Metaphor: ReFantazio

As of the time of writing this, I have not finished Metaphor. I’m at the 2nd town; I’ve fought the boss there. I’m struggling to make my way through the game.

The fantasy racism aspect isn’t as appealing as it could be. Partly because they only depict the bare minimum of actual atrocities so far. But the thing that actually bugs me is the lack of reasoning, insults, and slurs that actual racism would actually bring. It’s really half-arsed, but they spend an ungodly amount of time on the subject.

Every single conversation in this game feels like an exposition dump. Constantly having to explain the intricacies of the world, as it isn’t ours and doesn’t operate like ours. But it bores the fuck out of me. I’d rather listen to the shipping forecast.

I don’t care about any of the characters whatsoever. They are miserable to talk to, they barely do anything outside of battle, and their personalities are uninteresting. I seriously could not care less.

The actual turn-based combat is OK. You get an amount of turns; you get more uses out of them if you exploit weaknesses. But there are no all-out attacks, and you can’t knock enemies down. You can’t swap to specific party members in battle like you can in Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload via Baton Pass.

The class system is a bit complicated. There’s a bunch of them; they all have their own skill sets, and you can change the class of every character at any time out of battle. As you level up the classes, those skills can be used with other classes. What bugs me about the system is that the characters clearly have preferred classes, but the game is awful at explaining which ones those are.

As for what I actually like about the game, well, it’s pretty. There are some nice backgrounds and art. And you get to ride a giant mechanical lizard thing as your main method of transportation.

I’ll try my best to finish this, but I will have to force myself to do so.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

As if I could start this section in any other way.

This game blew up this year, and various people I know have raved about it, so I decided to give it a go.

And holy shit does it run like crap. It looks like crap too. The image quality is fuzzy and blurry. You have to use temporal reconstruction along with DLSS because you simply cannot run this game at native resolution at a reasonable framerate.

As for the gameplay, well, it’s a turn-based game similar to Persona or SMT, but with some real-time aspects. You can aim a gun at specific weak points to do additional damage, dodge and parry attacks, and your skills have a quick-time event associated with them that boosts the effectiveness of them.

No need to worry about mana levels either. Skills are gated by a battle-specific meter that recovers as you do damage and parry attacks. Which is nice. Worrying about mana use gets tiring after a while, so I appreciate not having to bother with it.

Levels are mostly corridors with hidden bits and other things to find. There’s no minimap for these levels, so it becomes easy to lose your sense of direction. There’s also an overworld map which you explore more or less the same way but with the camera further out.

Much like Metaphor, I’ve barely touched the surface of it. It’s more interesting than Metaphor, but I’m struggling to find the time or motivation to play it. I’m just not seeing what everyone else sees.

Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii

Majima is a pirate now.

This is an amazing premise let down by an incredibly slow introduction. They spend the first hour or so of the game introducing mechanics like growing plants and feeding animals.

Once the game does get going at least, it’s not too bad. The combat is fast-paced. Majima gets a dual-sword moveset that turns him into a human blender. But the combat isn’t anything beyond what the series has done before.

I’ve fought a dude named Keith about four times now, after about 6-8 hours of playing. Each time I wonder why he continues to bother trying to fight me. Once I can understand, twice also, but three fights and beyond – what has he got to prove at this point? Is he a masochist or something? Does he enjoy getting his arse kicked?

He’s not even a main character or anything. I genuinely do not understand why we keep fighting this dude.

I’m barely into chapter 2 as I’m writing this, so I still have plenty left to play. So I’ll give another update next year.

Other Stuff I Played:

Lumines Remastered

I hadn’t played Lumines before. My first experience with it was with the demo for Lumines Arise. If I were to describe it in layman’s terms, it’s a mix of Tetris, Puyo Puyo, and Puzzle Fighter. The goal is to connect 4 coloured blocks into a box shape. Then a line goes across the screen, clearing the blocks.

Off the bat, the music is incredible. The first song is “SHININ'” by Mondo Grosso, which is an awesome song. Other songs by them and songs by Nobuchika Eri are featured heavily in it. And they’re absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, unlocking songs requires me to be significantly better at the game than I am.

My one actual complaint is that the game is FPS dependent. Playing above 60Hz causes it to run at much higher speeds than intended. Although 60Hz can also be quite difficult during the latter stages. I haven’t tested at 30Hz, perhaps that would solve the issue.

PowerWash Simulator 1 & 2

Another busybody game in a mountain of simulators of real-world work. I did not play much of the first game. It made me motion sick after a while, and hunting down the smallest of smudges became extremely tedious as the maps got larger.

The second game greatly improves the pixel hunting, highlighting the specific parts that require cleaning. Plus it’s more lenient as to when something is clean. Soap is free in the second game and is an extremely powerful tool. Using it means I no longer require the highest pressure nozzle for the toughest stains. Making my life much easier.

If I must complain, I’m not sure what the point of the hub area is. You can customise it, but it doesn’t serve much purpose. Also, the order of the levels does not really respect how much time you’re willing to put into it. You’ll start with a small job and then immediately receive multiple longer jobs after it. Some of which take over an hour to finish, if not more. There’s no time estimate on these jobs either. Thankfully you can save in the middle of one and pick up where you left off.

It would be nice if it gave you a time estimate for a job as well as organising it into small, medium, and large jobs. And then letting you pick which one you want to go to at the present time.

Either way, it’s a good time-wasting/podcast listening game.

Keeper

Double Fine released a game this year. Not that you would know, considering the complete lack of marketing for it. Anyway, it’s a pretty walking simulator where you play as a lighthouse making his way towards a mountain. Although you don’t stay in the lighthouse form. You get turned into a boat for a bit and a couple other things.

There’s no combat to speak of, but there are some puzzles. They’re not terribly difficult to figure out, but they use the mechanics they introduce to you fairly well.

It doesn’t run very well. I was struggling to maintain 60 FPS on near-low settings with DLSS Performance. I don’t know how the hell they managed to make a heavily scripted walking simulator run so badly, but they did. It’s an annoying blemish to an otherwise neat little game.

You can watch my playthrough here.

All In Abyss

I believe I mentioned this when I talked about Balatro. It’s another poker-focused game, but with a story told via a visual novel. I actually prefer it to Balatro because I play against another character instead of just the void. I prefer having the social aspects of poker, and seeing the other character react to your moves is fun.

That said, although the game does a good job at explaining the hierarchy of hands, cheating is part of the story and gameplay mechanics. So it doesn’t matter how good your hands are at times; the game can and will ruin it.

I haven’t finished the game; I’ve only made it up to the story part leading up to the next boss. But the first boss’ death scene was very disturbing. All I’ll say is that it involved food, and I’ll leave it at that. I hope I get some more time to play this soon.

DOOM 64

I feel like this game gets overlooked a lot. Probably because the N64 is probably the worst pile of crap to play shooters on, and partly because it was stuck on the N64 for the longest time. Either way, we can play it on PC now.

It feels like they took at the later levels in DOOM and made more of them. The maps are complicated with a lot of key hunting. A good amount of secrets too. Most of the weapons and enemies are the same, but with a different visual style.

I think the new art looks pretty good, albeit different. Certainly better looking than the PS1 port of the original.

The final boss is stupidly difficult, however. It requires you to obtain items from secret areas throughout the game to power up the Unmaker weapon. Otherwise, the final boss will obliterate you. Unless, of course, you save your BFG ammo and cheese it. In the additional levels they added for the remaster, these secret items are in the map with the final boss. Cutting out the need to hunt them down in prior levels.

You can watch my playthrough here.

Anime Corner:

Turkey!

I came into this expecting a bowling anime. I did not get a bowling anime.

Instead I got a stupidly contrived plot about time-travelling teenagers introducing bowling to some ancient Japanese family of girls while they deal with trying to figure out how to get back. Then they go back, realise that the girls they were friends with get slaughtered by the local warlord, and decide to go back again. With little to no consideration for how their actions could potentially change the course of history.

Frankly, it takes itself far too seriously, while also being probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever watched.

New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt

After God knows how long, there’s a new Panty and Stocking anime. And it’s the same as ever. Tonnes of pop culture references, sexual humour, and a crap load of uncensored nudity. The last of which is exclusive for Western audiences, as Japan censors that.

The parodies are generally more recent and very Western. Everything from Star Wars and Indiana Jones to Tomb Raider of all things. Inferno Cop even shows up at some point in some weird joke about American police brutality. I enjoyed it.

City The Animation

Remember Nichijou? City is from the same author. There are a lot more characters and more story threads than in Nichijou. There’s a group of three girls that often act as the main trio, but focus is certainly spread out beyond them.

The animation is incredible in places. Lots of characters on screen moving around, long shots with multiple gags as the camera moves past time, and so on. KyoAni still have some fantastic animators working for them.

That said, I don’t think the show is as funny as Nichijou was. The many characters do a lot for the world-building, but there are so many of them that it’s difficult to focus on some. Which means there’s a lack of driving force behind the overall plot. Nichijou mostly focused on Yuuko, her friends, the robot Nano, and her child professor. Other characters would only get a handful of gags. Here, characters get most of a whole episode. Sometimes multiple plotlines run in parallel. It gets hard to follow.

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My Top 10 Games Of The Year

Released Games That I Wanted To Play Or Play More Of

• Death Stranding 2
• Rune Factory: Guardians Of Azuma
• Gal Guardians: Servants of the Dark
• Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
• Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
• Baby Steps
• Tokyo Xtreme Racer
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Lumines Arise

God I wish I had money.

Worst Game I Played

Sushi Ben

I really wish this game wasn’t as boring or buggy as it is, but here we are. I already talked about it above, so I’ll save you the reread.

Honourable Mentions:

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby

Not technically a 2025 game considering it’s been out in Japan for about 4 years. But I enjoy the lore of all the horses portrayed. Especially Gold Ship and Nice Nature. Unfortunately, the grinding and gacha elements were having a net negative effect on my life, so I had to drop the game.

Now here’s the Top 10:

1. Keeper
2. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
3. RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business
4. Ninja Gaiden 4
5. All In Abyss
6. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
7. Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O.
8. PowerWash Simulator 2
9. DOOM: The Dark Ages
10. Skate Story

I loved the style, the music, and the skateboarding was awesome despite being somewhat simple. It’s just a damn good game and stood out the most compared to everything else.

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My Top 10 Anime Of The Year

Special Mentions:

• Rock wa Lady no Tashinami deshite
• Ballpark de Tsukamaete!

Both fun shows, but lacking something that keeps it out of the top 10 of the year.

Worst Anime I Watched:

• Lazarus
• Turkey!

Lazarus doesn’t respect your intelligence and feels the need to spew self-righteous moral bullshit at you every chance it gets. The animation is good, but I couldn’t stand the plot or its characters. Topping it off is probably one of the stupidest endings ever written.

Turkey, on the other hand, could have been a normal “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” anime about bowling. But instead, the animators decided on time-travelling nonsense. I’ve already talked about it above, so I won’t repeat myself.

Right, here’s the Top 10:

1. City The Animation
2. Kowloon Generic Romance
3. Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Otona e no Kaidan
4. Okinawa de Suki ni Natta Ko ga Hougen Sugite Tsurasugiru
5. New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt
6. Kusuriya no Hitorigoto 2nd Season
7. Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray & Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Part 2
8. Mattaku Saikin no Tantei to Kitara
9. Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc
10. Ninja to Koroshiya no Futarigurashi

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Well, that’s another year in the can. It was pretty awful for a variety of reasons. Storms with power outages, a close family member died, several people in the games industry whose games I grew up with passed away, and prices of everything skyrocketed to fuel some idiotic fake demand for AI.

God, this year sucked. And next year is probably going to suck too. Let’s try and make the best of it.

ADMAN