AlexaLily
I really liked what I was able to play of Epistory - it's practically my platonic ideal for what a typing game should be. But I have one problem with it that ends up being a pretty big, game-breaking, issue. This game has an egregious amount of screenshake. Everytime you type a letter, everytime you finish a word, just about everything you do causes screenshake and there's no way to disable it. I don't usually get motion sickness from games but this is one of the few examples that made me dizzy to the point of not being able to play it.
2021
A pleasant little game. Cute writing and art. Not too difficult. Free. Short. But the controls feel kinda clumsy and it isn't always super clear what to do or where to go next. But it's worth a look anyways.
2013
I think the nicest thing I can say about this game is that the shooting feels okay. It's nothing special but at least it doesn't feel actively bad. Unfortunately, that doesn't get it very far because I never felt that the plasmid abilities felt particularly good or fun or interesting so the combat ends up feeling like an overall let-down.
And then there's the writing. It's a steaming hot pile of racist centrist garbage. There's a single named black character and you kill her because apparently black people are just as bad as racist white people?? Absolute horseshoe theory nonsense. Total garbage. Centrism is bad for the brain, y'all.
And then there's the writing. It's a steaming hot pile of racist centrist garbage. There's a single named black character and you kill her because apparently black people are just as bad as racist white people?? Absolute horseshoe theory nonsense. Total garbage. Centrism is bad for the brain, y'all.
2010
Is Deadly Premonition good? No.
Is Deadly Premonition ironically good? Also no.
This game is bad in just about every way it's possible for a game to be bad. It looks bad, it runs bad, the running around feels bad, the driving feels bad, the combat feels bad, the writing is bad, the voice acting is bad, the side quests are tedious and bad, the main character oscillates between 'asshole' and 'idiot' (but never in an endearing or entertaining way). Then, to top it all off, the end of the game gets deeply, deeply transphobic and this is somehow seen as an amazing plot twist. It's astounding to me that this game has somehow tricked so many people into thinking that it's secretly good when it's actually probably one of the worst games ever made.
Is Deadly Premonition ironically good? Also no.
This game is bad in just about every way it's possible for a game to be bad. It looks bad, it runs bad, the running around feels bad, the driving feels bad, the combat feels bad, the writing is bad, the voice acting is bad, the side quests are tedious and bad, the main character oscillates between 'asshole' and 'idiot' (but never in an endearing or entertaining way). Then, to top it all off, the end of the game gets deeply, deeply transphobic and this is somehow seen as an amazing plot twist. It's astounding to me that this game has somehow tricked so many people into thinking that it's secretly good when it's actually probably one of the worst games ever made.
2019
One time I watched an actual scientist play this for a few hours and talk through all the how's and why's of things worked the way they did and it was one of the most fascinating experiences I've ever seen.
And then I tried to play it myself and I felt like a toddler trying to drive a car.
And then I tried to play it myself and I felt like a toddler trying to drive a car.
I played an unhealthy amount of this game when I was in college and absolutely loved it. I had never played a Battlefield before it and haven't played another since. Absolute banger of a shooter, both the campaign and multiplayer. I still have some of those MP maps committed to memory.
2016
Watch_Dogs 2 is a pretty clear step up over the first game in every possible way. It feels better to play, the world is more interesting, much of the excessive fluff got trimmed out, and (most importantly) the characters are actually likable now! Marcus, Sitara, Wrench, Josh, and Horatio are all great characters that were a ton of fun every time they got to have some dialogue together.
The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.
My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.
But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.
The main story did have some issues in that it felt like disjointed series of short stories with little to no impact on one another. In addition to that, the antagonist feels like he only matters in a conceptual way rather than any him be any actual threat. This all made the story a little tough to feel motivated to complete and resulted in the ending feeling a bit flat.
My final issue is that the politics of this game are in a weird place. The game paints itself as very rebellious and anti-establishment and while it mostly is that, it doesn't seem to want to go all the way with it. For example, there's a mission where you find out that some cops are using data they get from ctOS to do illegal stuff with a gang. It'd be a great time for the game to go on about police abolition or about the ways in which police don't actually serve the people but instead it goes into a bland "we need to get rid of the Bad Cops so that the Good Cops can be in power instead" and it makes it fall flat. The whole game ends up feeling like it wants to be perceived as progressive and very far left when it really isn't.
But overall, it is an enjoyable thirty-ish hours. Not my favorite of Ubisoft's open world games but a very solid one.
1998
Fallout 2 improves upon the foundation of Fallout 1 in many ways and when people are reminiscing about "the good old Fallouts", the things they're thinking about are almost entirely from Fallout 2.
The combat is a smoother experience and while it has some issues (that I'll get into later), it is a generally better game to play. The writing is, on average, better than FO1 (with the caveat that the humor tends to be much more abrasive - either opening mocking the game or its characters, or winking and nodding at how silly videogames are. I'm not a fan of either of those things but your mileage may vary). The crowning bit of this game, though is the ending. It's a pretty great ending that actually sets up one of the biggest facts of the setting that the Bethesda games later leaned into quite heavily.
But before I get too much further or get into too much detail, I need to get into some of the bad stuff. First off, the game is deeply racist. There's the very obvious stuff like Hakunin and Sulik both being bizarre mish-mashes of actual cultural traditions which result in deeply offensive caricatures. But there's also an idea that is pervasive in post-apocalyptic fiction that humanity would somehow "regress" back to more "basic" types of cultural, specifically that tribal or indigenous cultures are somehow "lesser" than more "advanced" cultures. This idea is straight-up racist and deeply offensive to indigenous peoples because it assumes that they are somehow inherently less intelligent and less capable because they live in tents and not in bombed-out buildings. Fallout 2 then takes it a step further and leans into this idea by having people (especially in the early game) refer to your character as "a tribal" and will talk down to you because of it. The game never seems to do this knowingly, either, because it never really remarks on how that's bad or anything - it just considers it a truth of the setting. On top of that, there's the classic Fallout racism that is in each and every game with ghouls. If you have the ghoul companion then you're going to have to tell him to wait outside whenever you enter a building because people 'don't like his kind around here.' The game at least seems aware of what it's doing with this but still isn't doing much to make note that people are being racist and that's a bad thing. It's once again just considered a factual part of the fiction. At least when Fallout 1 was racist it had the good graces to be ashamed and try to hide it a bit.
My other main issue with the game is that the combat, while an improvement FO1, is a slog. At the start it's okay because it's just the beginning and, hey, whatever, it's fine. But by the end of the game, nothing about the combat has changed in any meaningful way except now instead of fighting geckos and rad scorpions, you're fighting groups of Enclave soldiers in power armor. So you either have to do even more of this not-great combat to level up to even up the playing field so you can maybe survive all these random encounters or dump a bunch of your points into the Outdoorsman skill so you can avoid the random encounters completely. It's a poorly thought out system that seems to punish you for avoiding combat (because you get less experience) but also punish you for engaging in combat (by draining resources like health and ammo). It's not fun at all and is only worse because the game never adds any sort of interesting combat mechanics for you to implement. There are no skills, no special weapons, nothing that would make you approach combat in a different or more interesting way. The entire game you're either shooting things with a gun or hitting them in melee.
The issues with the combat connect into the later parts of the game where for the final third or so, the game sends you on a series of very long fetch quests. "Oh you just got here, we need you to go somewhere else to get one item or talk to a person." Over and over and over again. So you end up having tons of these high-level encounters while you're running all across the map to try and find every macguffin to move the plot along. It's an awful grind that exists only to drag out the length of the game. The actual end area of the Enclave Base is good but I'm not sure if it's even fully worth how much of an awful slog all these fetch quests are.
And that brings us to the ending which, outside of one specific part, I think it's pretty good! The most interesting parts of the story are here with some big reveals about the Enclave and the truth about the world as a whole. It should be said though, that none of those interesting reveals are ever hinted at when they really should have been just to let you know that something bigger was going on and not just evil people being cartoon villains (okay, it still is somewhat that but not entirely).
That one issue I mentioned about the ending is, once again, combat. After everything is said and done, you have to fight through a final boss. Despite Fallout 2 being touted as the game you can talk your way through, you still have to fight the biggest damage sponge in the game (and on a time limit, no less!) For a game that encourages so many different types of play and wants you to play around with how you interact with the world, it's absolutely bizarre that the ending is a fight with a big slab of beef with a minigun.
So overall the game is an improvement over Fallout 1 and I'd say a pretty alright game. Just don't be afraid to open up a character editor and give yourself some stats so you don't have to deal with atrocious end-game combat. It's a game you play for the story, there's no good reason to suffer through unrelated parts just to get to the good bits.
Oh and one final thought: I just want to give a shoutout to the talking scorpion. It's the funniest gag in the entire game and maybe the whole franchise. It plays within the game's setting (instead of most of the humor which can get pretty meta both about Fallout and about videogames as a whole) but it also has interactions with the game's mechanics and the player's stats. It's very clever and silly and fun and good.
The combat is a smoother experience and while it has some issues (that I'll get into later), it is a generally better game to play. The writing is, on average, better than FO1 (with the caveat that the humor tends to be much more abrasive - either opening mocking the game or its characters, or winking and nodding at how silly videogames are. I'm not a fan of either of those things but your mileage may vary). The crowning bit of this game, though is the ending. It's a pretty great ending that actually sets up one of the biggest facts of the setting that the Bethesda games later leaned into quite heavily.
But before I get too much further or get into too much detail, I need to get into some of the bad stuff. First off, the game is deeply racist. There's the very obvious stuff like Hakunin and Sulik both being bizarre mish-mashes of actual cultural traditions which result in deeply offensive caricatures. But there's also an idea that is pervasive in post-apocalyptic fiction that humanity would somehow "regress" back to more "basic" types of cultural, specifically that tribal or indigenous cultures are somehow "lesser" than more "advanced" cultures. This idea is straight-up racist and deeply offensive to indigenous peoples because it assumes that they are somehow inherently less intelligent and less capable because they live in tents and not in bombed-out buildings. Fallout 2 then takes it a step further and leans into this idea by having people (especially in the early game) refer to your character as "a tribal" and will talk down to you because of it. The game never seems to do this knowingly, either, because it never really remarks on how that's bad or anything - it just considers it a truth of the setting. On top of that, there's the classic Fallout racism that is in each and every game with ghouls. If you have the ghoul companion then you're going to have to tell him to wait outside whenever you enter a building because people 'don't like his kind around here.' The game at least seems aware of what it's doing with this but still isn't doing much to make note that people are being racist and that's a bad thing. It's once again just considered a factual part of the fiction. At least when Fallout 1 was racist it had the good graces to be ashamed and try to hide it a bit.
My other main issue with the game is that the combat, while an improvement FO1, is a slog. At the start it's okay because it's just the beginning and, hey, whatever, it's fine. But by the end of the game, nothing about the combat has changed in any meaningful way except now instead of fighting geckos and rad scorpions, you're fighting groups of Enclave soldiers in power armor. So you either have to do even more of this not-great combat to level up to even up the playing field so you can maybe survive all these random encounters or dump a bunch of your points into the Outdoorsman skill so you can avoid the random encounters completely. It's a poorly thought out system that seems to punish you for avoiding combat (because you get less experience) but also punish you for engaging in combat (by draining resources like health and ammo). It's not fun at all and is only worse because the game never adds any sort of interesting combat mechanics for you to implement. There are no skills, no special weapons, nothing that would make you approach combat in a different or more interesting way. The entire game you're either shooting things with a gun or hitting them in melee.
The issues with the combat connect into the later parts of the game where for the final third or so, the game sends you on a series of very long fetch quests. "Oh you just got here, we need you to go somewhere else to get one item or talk to a person." Over and over and over again. So you end up having tons of these high-level encounters while you're running all across the map to try and find every macguffin to move the plot along. It's an awful grind that exists only to drag out the length of the game. The actual end area of the Enclave Base is good but I'm not sure if it's even fully worth how much of an awful slog all these fetch quests are.
And that brings us to the ending which, outside of one specific part, I think it's pretty good! The most interesting parts of the story are here with some big reveals about the Enclave and the truth about the world as a whole. It should be said though, that none of those interesting reveals are ever hinted at when they really should have been just to let you know that something bigger was going on and not just evil people being cartoon villains (okay, it still is somewhat that but not entirely).
That one issue I mentioned about the ending is, once again, combat. After everything is said and done, you have to fight through a final boss. Despite Fallout 2 being touted as the game you can talk your way through, you still have to fight the biggest damage sponge in the game (and on a time limit, no less!) For a game that encourages so many different types of play and wants you to play around with how you interact with the world, it's absolutely bizarre that the ending is a fight with a big slab of beef with a minigun.
So overall the game is an improvement over Fallout 1 and I'd say a pretty alright game. Just don't be afraid to open up a character editor and give yourself some stats so you don't have to deal with atrocious end-game combat. It's a game you play for the story, there's no good reason to suffer through unrelated parts just to get to the good bits.
Oh and one final thought: I just want to give a shoutout to the talking scorpion. It's the funniest gag in the entire game and maybe the whole franchise. It plays within the game's setting (instead of most of the humor which can get pretty meta both about Fallout and about videogames as a whole) but it also has interactions with the game's mechanics and the player's stats. It's very clever and silly and fun and good.
2017
There are a lot of things I like about HZD. The enemy designs, the flow of combat, the way it tells multiple stories at once (and the way it paces them out smoothly). But also this game features some of the most egregious cultural appropriation I've ever seen. So while I love a whole lot of it, did everything, got the Platinum trophy, and still occasionally consider going back for more, I can't really fully recommend it without some pretty big caveats.
1997
Fallout is a very interesting game but, in the modern day, it is mostly interesting in the way it is remembered (or, rather, mis-remembered).
People talk about how satirical it is but it really isn't. It has occasional comedy to it, mostly in the form of irreverence, but it never quite has anything to say about what it's joking about. It just is what it is.
The other major thing people like to tout is that it's anti-nukes but it really isn't. It doesn't really have anything to say at all. At the very end, there's even an option for you to set off a nuke and it's not even treated as a bad thing, just as a different way to achieve your goal.
With old games like this, I think there's always a question of 'is this worth going back to' and I think that for Fallout 1 it's a firm 'No'. Mechanically it's very rough. Exploring the world feels tedious and the combat is a bit like trudging through mud. While the writing has its moments, it is extremely uneven with most of it landing in the 'mediocre-to-bad' range. And I've never found the general Fallout setting or lore to be particularly intriguing so this game didn't have much to go back to for me, but that's a much more personal thing than the rest of this.
It's a game of the past and I think that it should be left there. While I think there's some valid arguments to be made that it's a historically important game, I'm not sure I'd fully agree with any of that. Other games were more important and influential in just about every way and this game only feels notable because of the Bethesda RPGs that came later in the franchise. If it weren't for those, I think it'd mostly be remembered as this odd little thing that came and went.
People talk about how satirical it is but it really isn't. It has occasional comedy to it, mostly in the form of irreverence, but it never quite has anything to say about what it's joking about. It just is what it is.
The other major thing people like to tout is that it's anti-nukes but it really isn't. It doesn't really have anything to say at all. At the very end, there's even an option for you to set off a nuke and it's not even treated as a bad thing, just as a different way to achieve your goal.
With old games like this, I think there's always a question of 'is this worth going back to' and I think that for Fallout 1 it's a firm 'No'. Mechanically it's very rough. Exploring the world feels tedious and the combat is a bit like trudging through mud. While the writing has its moments, it is extremely uneven with most of it landing in the 'mediocre-to-bad' range. And I've never found the general Fallout setting or lore to be particularly intriguing so this game didn't have much to go back to for me, but that's a much more personal thing than the rest of this.
It's a game of the past and I think that it should be left there. While I think there's some valid arguments to be made that it's a historically important game, I'm not sure I'd fully agree with any of that. Other games were more important and influential in just about every way and this game only feels notable because of the Bethesda RPGs that came later in the franchise. If it weren't for those, I think it'd mostly be remembered as this odd little thing that came and went.
2008
Some very cool characters that game treated pretty poorly. A great battle system that is a little bit clunky. The politics of the main plotline are pretty bad. It's a game I'm very mixed on despite enjoying quite of bit of my time with it.
I wish I liked this game as much as everyone else does, I really really do. It's got some of the best feeling turn-based combat in the franchise (and probably in the whole genre) but so much of the rest of the game just didn't click for me. I liked a few of the characters, but my favs were all left with rather short and unsatisfying storylines whereas the characters I didn't care about very much all the focus. On top of that, the voice acting is.... well it's historically significant and it's important that it's there but it's really rough. It was genuinely hard for me to sit through all those cutscenes.
This game is massively important to Final Fantasy and to JRPGs and maybe to gaming as a whole but to revisit it in the modern day is tough, especially for someone like me with no nostalgia for it.
This game is massively important to Final Fantasy and to JRPGs and maybe to gaming as a whole but to revisit it in the modern day is tough, especially for someone like me with no nostalgia for it.
1995
While it's a flawed game it's an incredible genre-blending experiment that pushed the boundaries of what games were at the time. The controls are a bit awkward but they are absolutely worth putting up with to explore this hidden gem of gaming history.
Brave Story: New Traveler is secretly a very underrated gem of the JRPG genre that is stashed away on a handheld no one uses anymore. It's not revolutionary in any way but it's not trying to be. What it does instead is look at the tropes of the genre and execute on them with extreme quality to the point that every aspect of this game is so solid that it wins over your heart no matter how many games you've played where you save the world via the power of friendship.
Also there's a lizard dad and who wouldn't love to pal around with a big lizard dad.
Also there's a lizard dad and who wouldn't love to pal around with a big lizard dad.
Similar to Volume 2, this game is also nowhere near as good as Volume 1 was. The puzzles are pretty much entirely gone and replaced with even more combat. The final boss fight is particularly terrible. If you, for some reason, decide to play this: please just use cheat codes when you get to the final boss. It's awful otherwise.