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A game clearly made by a bunch of artists and writers who utterly lack the game design skill to actually pull off what they wanted to do. As a lover of adventure games I’m not a stranger to encountering adventure games like this, ones that add mechanics that just drag the experience down because the devs just did not have a good grasp of them at all or were too afraid that their work is not “gamey” enough so they felt the need to shoehorn them in. Little Goody Two Shoes is a life-sim/yuri VN frankensteined together poorly with an RPGmaker horror game and those elements are at complete odds with each other. The aesthetics and atmosphere are phenomenal, merging 90’s shoujo and Grimms’ fairy tales wonderfully. The writing is solid enough too as the main cast of ladies are likable and the mystery is engaging enough. The life sim elements are mostly fine, most of the job mini-games are alright though I’m not a fan of the rat one. The game does a bit of a bad job of pushing the player to overly fear raising suspicion though as it’s usually not hard to avoid or at least drop it down; I can easily see someone screwing themselves if they invested too much stamina and money in bringing Rozenmarine to work with them at all because it’s just not worth it, the villagers can be easily assuaged with the right responses. The night time horror segments is where the game completely goes to shit though.

This game really shows how it’s essentially a bad 2000’s RPGmaker horror game just with an actual budget as the nighttime segments are jank as hell with puzzles mostly relying on trial and error. One night has you run away from a boss who will instantly kill you and the game can’t really handle the chase sequence that well; spike blocks will fall too fast to dodge within a fair window unless you know they’re coming and the second segment seems like sometimes you’ll just get randomly killed even when you’re running full speed. The puzzles gets worse as the game goes on as Thursday has you play floor is lava with phantoms that are attracted to sound, but the camera tends to be too zoomed in to see them effectively at times so you’re probably going to walk your ass into a few of them because the game gives you very little visual or audio cues that they’re coming. Apparently some of the segments were even more obtuse and bullshit before they patched them and that’s just galling to me. The breaking point for me was on Friday where you had to go in complete darkness because turning on your lantern gets you instantly killed by statues. It’s absolutely abysmal puzzle design to the point where I’m baffled the devs thought it was a good idea. It’s not clever or challenging like good adventure game puzzles should, it genuinely feels like a troll. Thankfully somebody on Steam told me the solution so I went back and beat it but man did it still suck. The endings are also unsatisfying because they seem kind of at odds with each other and don’t really give a true conclusion if you take them into account. Just a wet fart of an ending to top off a game that was unraveling as it went along.

This game just utterly frustrates me because this game could have been great but its dogshit design decisions prevent it from being such. The game isn’t completely unsalvageable, a couple patches and overhauling the Friday puzzle to not be so awful and it’d be at a decent enough quality. Gonna be blunt and say they really need to hire a person who actually knows good adventure game design if they want to make keeping games like this. This is definitely the kind of game that you should probably watch an LP of. I’m usually the kind of guy who will readily defend games that have merely serviceable gameplay but great everything else, but Little Goody Two Shoe’s gameplay is too annoying for me to heartily endorse experiencing yourself.

The game that's come closest to bringing back all those childhood memories of playing Zoo Tycoon 1. A great mix of simplicity and complexity, as its easy to get the hang of it yet it demands you be able to meet the requirements of the fish as well as giving you side missions to complete so its always giving you enough to do. The devs have been supporting this game with quality expansions for years and I've spent nearly 200 hours with it over the years and have gotten every achievement. Just a fantastic tycoon game.

I’m an American so I didn’t grow up with The Moomins but I know enough about the series and I’ve been reading some of the comics so I decided to get this after playing the demo months ago.

Overall it’s a chill adventure game where you play as Snufkin as he wages battle against the cops and NIMBYs trying to gentrify Moominvalley. Puzzles are rather easy but it’s fun exploring and the stealth segments against the cops add nice variety. The art and music are wonderful, really capturing the whimsical fairy tale vibes the series has. The writing is fun with a good chunk of the game having Snufkin and Little My bouncing off each other. You can tell this is a love letter to the series so fans will definitely get a kick out of it but I think even you don’t know anything about Moomins you’ll still have a fun time, because it’s just a quality game all around.

I liked the demo enough when I played it months back to get this now that Episode 1 is done in EA. Overall Wizordum is a solid enough fantasy boomer shooter currently, though its going to need some more sauce to rival fellow Heretic/Hexen inspired indie shooters such as AMID EVIL and Hedon. The weapons are good and I used mostly all of them but they're not really exciting so far, mainly just variations of standard boomer shooter arsenals, i.e. the ice wand is essentially a machine gun that freezes, the blunderbuss is essentially your shotgun. The level design is solid; levels are rather big but your next objective is always indicated on your map so you won't get lost and the secrets are mostly pretty fair if you're paying attention to breakable walls and you only need to hit your face against more conspicuous objects on the walls. It mostly starts off as essentially fantasy Wolfenstein in level design though it seems like the later levels in Episode 1 start shaking that up. There's a good variation in the levels so far too, ranging from a fantasy town, sewers and dungeons, a graveyard, docks, and moving around the wreckage of the part of town on fire. The soundtrack is actually nice too, embracing the heroic fantasy atmosphere in contrast to its dark fantasy shooter predecessors and contemporaries. Hoping this game keeps improving, but even if it just maintains this current level of quality I'd be cool with it.

I can barely form a coherent thought about what I just finished but I feel weirdly seen by Final Fantasy VIII and its protagonist in particular as this understanding of specific feelings of capitalist alienation that I've been unable to articulate for the longest time. I don't have any official diagnosis and especially do not want people I barely know armchair diagnosing me online but Squall's struggles to process the most basic social interactions in terms of anything other than capitalist obligations like school or work, "shut up and get the job done" mentality, and specific jaded outlook are core parts of myself I never expected to see reflected in this fashion. While I narrowly prefer the basic bitch choices of VI and VII in terms of Final Fantasy games, this surreal response to the cultural zeitgeist of the latter game and weird as fuck (complimentary) use of Marxist theory (specifically the "annihilation of space by time" described in Grundrisse and expanded upon over a century later by David Harvey) in the same way that most RPGs use religious/mythological concepts solely because it sounds cool is a game that will no doubt have a special place in my heart from now on.

A virtual museum into the genesis of video games

I'd like to preface this review by apologizing for the recent review spam as I go through most of the games in the collection.

I can safely say I was never into video games of a pure retro nature mostly. I lacked the patience and my brain has rotted to the point that I found it hard to really go back sometimes. I knew about Pong and Asteroids and my only real experience with Atari's legacy was a parody of it via watching Code Monkeys as a kid and just know seeing how much it really influenced that show. Most of my arcade experiences themselves derived from Namco mostly due to the fact that The PlayStation 1 titles worked as virtual museums as well as its own space which I also recommend you check out if you enjoy this type of collection. That said, this is a pretty great collection that goes in depth of what exactly Atari did for the video game space and as a company itself.

I really don't want to delve too much into the story of Atari due to the fact that the collection does a better job of it than I ever will but I will say that it manages to go into depth a bit with the people that were actually there at the time. Video interviews, statements, reading the flyers from then and even secret memos and corporate documents from then really give you the context of what went into making the games. Going into Adventure's influence, explaining how hard it was to make games for the 2600 due to the fact that they had to constrict themselves to a specific limit compared to creating arcade titles and even crazy stories like how much weed the developers smoked. There's a lot more here to unpack but I really do believe the collection does it justice better than a few sentences I could muster really do.

The games themselves are cool as every library is covered barring a few important ones sadly. The Jaguar collection itself seems to be lacking as well (for better or worse) but I feel like you got a lot of the important classics for the most part. Tempest ended up being a personal favorite of mine for the visual style and fast paced gameplay and this also its Jaguar counterpart, Tempest 2000. Classics like Pong, Asteroids, Star Raiders and Adventure are here with some wacky concept games like Ninja Golf really surprising me. Also a cool addition is that each game comes with its manual and appropriate media to get the most out of the games too making this much more than just a regular collection of emulated games.

Digital Eclipse did a great job with this collection. Being given a bit more insight into the inner workings of how the concept of household video games as a whole is something I didn't expect to come out of knowing. Really wish a lot of arcade or early game collections were like this where you have first hand accounts and documents explaining the intricacies of making a specific game or how something specific came to be. If you have a huge appreciation for the medium, this is definitely worth taking a look at and only hoping more things like these comes around.

Digital Eclipse levels up their production bigtime here with a new format that presents the games alongside all of the supplementary material in a comprehensive timeline. This is essentially how I wished they'd done these things from the start, because while I didn't overly mind having to go into separate archive menus to peruse all the interesting stuff they pack these collections with, I did find myself jumping back and forth between those and playing the games in chronological order, effectively constructing the timeline for myself (this was especially necessary with the recent TMNT collection). This linear presentation of all of the material together (with the option to just go to another menu and play all the games whenever, of course) is an important evolution for their projects, I think.

The games and the story of Atari themselves as depicted here is engaging enough to carry this as its own thing, although the fun does peter off significantly when you get into the latter-day stuff because, um, the Jaguar is dogshit. However, for someone like me with absolutely no experience with the Atari of old and the desire for a curated entry point, this really fit the bill. I feel like I learned a lot!

There's no way to avoid lots of stuff being left out and the realities of securing some of the more notable titles, but I think this is probably the absolute best this collection could be while keeping in mind what must be a lot of limitations. As always, very excited to see where Digital Eclipse goes next - they continue to move in exciting directions.

Resident Evil 6 es la máxima expresión de todo lo que esta franquicia es. Mas allá de tener algunos pequeños errores (como apuntar demasiado a lo bombastico o las motivaciones de Simmons) es, probablemente, uno de los Third-Person Shooter mas completo de la historia, siendo una de las evoluciones mas naturales de lo presentado en RE 4. Esto se ve complementado con ocho personajes jugables (nueve si se cuenta a Carla en el Mercenarios) con diferentes armas y estilos que estan en cuatro campañas con diferentes enfoques (Leon con un estilo mas "Clasico", Chris con Accion a lo Gears Of War, Jake posee una mezcla de los dos y Ada con enfoque en el sigilo y Puzzles). Todo esto llega a su mayor punto con el excelente modo Cooperativo y el mejor Mercenarios de la saga.

Ico

2012

Basically a video game retelling of me and the bad bitch I pulled by being autistic.

un dos beefs que máis me interesaron na carreira é o enfrontamento entre Darwin e Marx. Darwin soltou un par de chorradas liberais xustificándose na súa interpretación de certas conductas animais. Marx contestáralle algo así como que viaxou polo mundo para acabar atopando na natureza a sociedade industrial inglesa da que procedía. é dicir, a forma de interpretar a natureza reproducía a ideoloxía burguesa da Inglaterra decimonónica, facendo pasar esas lecturas como obxectivas e xusticantes dese modelo de produción. Mutazione ten algo diso polo lado contrario: pretendendo fuxir das lóxicas violentas do capital, acaba atopando na harmonía e sensación de apoio dos ecosistemas un modelo político que lle agrada. o xogo vai un pouco así, ti chegas a unha illa onde se atopa o teu avó moribundo, durante máis ou menos unha semana, formarás xardíns máxicos cos que axudar á xente da vila nos seus pequenos problemas. eses xardíns teñen distintas prantas, con distintas necesidades, ás que ti axudas a crecer tocando cancións. as propias prantas producen sons que, en compañía, acaban xerando a canción ó completo. hai, polo tanto, un traballo de relacións simbólicas triple: os ecosistemas precisan de variedade e colaboración para sobrevivir, como unha canción ten distintos instrumentos con diferentes harmonías, baixos e percusións; como unha comunidade está chea de individuos que manteñen relacións sociais para vivir mellor. todo isto se estrutura con outras decisións moi brillantes: o uso da soap opera, co seu interese nos pequenos dramas locais, para levar a parte dramática de cada personaxe; a historia das mutacións e o pasado en ruinas da illa, para construir toda unha imaxe de outsider, dalgo maldito ou en decadencia, case monstroso, co que moitas veces defínese a xente que vive en vilas pequenas; así como un ciclo de días e franxas horarios para traballar esa sensación do ordinario, da repetición e o costume. entendo que moita xente o considere naif, pero para min aí tamén está parte da súa forza.

esse é o jogo mais Pós Wario possível e acho incrível como ele consegue traduzir todos os signos da franquia pra terceira dimensão e como isso reflete na caracterização de Wario – afinal, esse jogo se passa depois da série já ter definido sua própria identidade com duas iterações no plano 2D; Wario já tá rico o suficiente, seu status quo é uma mina de ouro, e ele não precisa mais ir atrás de tesouros e apesar dele estar Tão Feliz quanto no 4, a problemática de sua aventura agora é outra:

assim como no 2, o jogo começa com o Wario descansando em seu castelo até que alguma merda acontece mas diferente do 2 (em que ele é roubado), no World ele tá literalmente pagando pelos seus pecados: uma jóia causava corrupção e destruição, tendo que ser selada por spritelings…até que muitos anos depois, ela foi roubada por Wario – despertada, ela transforma o castelo de Wario em ruínas divididas em mundos estranhos, com o objetivo de tomar para si e criar seu próprio castelo (literal o objetivo do Wario em Super Mario Land 2)

e aí, toda a aventura do Wario consiste nele explorando os restos abstraídos de seu lar enquanto salva os spritelings e conserta a merda que ele mesmo causou, pra no final ser tratado como um herói (dependendo do final, que considera quantos spritelings você salvou)

não existe nada mais Wario que isso e esse jogo ser essa anomalia que abusa da profundidade do eixo Z enquanto progride por telas lateralmente me encanta muito – inimigos que respawnam infinitamente, moedas sendo redundantes porque TUDO te dá MUITO dinheiro explodindo a economia do Mundo De Wario, fases com padrões super óbvios mas que ainda sim cativam porque todas as mecânicas, gimmicks e desafios do jogo são iradas – e até mesmo os chefes são divertidos nesse jogo.

mesmo que em circunstâncias ruins, o Wario transforma sua própria jornada numa acid trip e ter que reaprender a controlá-lo por estar transicionando pra terceira dimensão do GameCube foi uma experiência muito mágica pra mim – mesmo que eu sinta falta da cabeçada e da corrida do WL4, esse é o único jogo em que o Wario consegue dar Izuna Drop nos inimigos.

are you using your time to properly think and talk with art? are you listening? or do you plug your ears anytime it tries to talk with you, to challenge you and make you rethink what you're engaging with?

i don't think i have any common ground with most people who like videogames, actually. but i don't think this is just videogames anymore, this is endemic in all of the arts. people stopped being listeners, started being consumers. no long a plot twist will make your heart skip a beat, now it's the author "betraying" your trust. no longer can complicated concept be presented before your public, now you're "fumbling", "overdesigning" or whatever new word people will invent to use as analytical shortcuts. like, really, you spent 90h with this game and all you could get back from it was that it has "Ubisoft-like" design because it has towers? i don't care if you gave the game 4 or 5 stars or if that was a compliment, is it that hard to think more about it? am i setting the bar too high? probably.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not a product, it's an art piece which you converse with (that's honestly 99.9% of games too btw). hefty admission price for sure, but it does not need to cater to you at any moment. it needs to be heard, seen, felt, I think running around the grasslands felt incredible and vibrant, i love how every map changes its whole design based on the chocobos, i love how sidequests have their own little songs to them with battle music included, i love how every character gets explored a whole ton more because now they have the time to do so, I love how Tifa can be herself instead of Cloud's past, I liked every change, I think this game is probably one of the most courageous games ever made and that will ever be made and people won't appreciate it enough, but that's fine because I will.

the more i think about it, the more i think about its last hours, the more i think how they handled -that moment- the more I like it. I like this and Remake for entirely different reasons, but Rebirth made me feel things I don't think i was even aware I could feel playing a game and I don't mean crying i cry for everything and i cried super hard at several moments in this game, it's something else, which i would only dare to explain if I had spoilered this text but i don't want to do so.

like i said i think i finally realized my lack of common ground is what makes it really hard to talk about videogames outside of my circle, people who only wear "videogames are art!!" as a mantle for feeling validated, but not really treating them much differently than the hamburger they'll buy for lunch. i don't mind if you didn't like the game but i only ask for something of substance, an interesting read, at the very least a personal perspective, not internet gaming buzzwords i can see in like 60 other reviews. i just want to think and challenge myself and i feel like i'm always going into a hivemind. but i guess that's fine i get to cherish good things when i see them at least.

i just need to remind myself of this

When I was younger, I thought Dead Space 2 was the usual case of a horror game starting incredibly strong and then weakly limping to the finish, but this most recent playthrough has totally inverted my opinion; while the first half gets all the nicest areas and flashiest setpieces, it’s the second half, where you’re funneled through the metal guts of the station, that the encounters start to pick up, with a wider range of enemies to deal with and a playful sense of meanness to the combat design- like a memorable room where the game spawns an explosive enemy right next to a breakable window that’ll send you out into the vacuum of space if you so much as touch it. The final section is amazing as well, chased by a regenerating necromorph that gets the best use out of your busted kit out of all the challenges in the game, forced to push through hordes of enemies while this unstoppable enemy is constantly shadowing you.

But all this should be couched in the fact that many of its best moments here hover around the opening 30 minutes of RE4- you’ll be really lucky if you’re fighting multiple waves of enemies or have to make meaningful decisions of who to prioritize first in combat, the designers seemingly all too comfortable to throw the standard melee and acid-spitting necromorphs at you and a haphazard assortment of the other enemy types as a little bit of flavor. Some of this flattening is due to how powerful your Stasis ability is: because so many of the encounters take place in this tiny corridors and cramped hallways, it’s really easy to negate the threat of an ambush or poor positioning by freezing an enemy and dismembering them with little thought on your part, aided by how generous the game is with dropping stasis packs and doling out recharge stations. It’s something especially felt with the Stalker enemies, a standout addition deemed so important that they get their own dedicated rooms, but they end up being some of the simplest in practice- boiling down to hunkering in a corner and waiting for them to run at you, a cool enemy type that feels unfinished when fought on their own. (The fact that you never fight these guys while dealing with your O2 meter is a massive shame, something that might’ve curbed how easy it is to passively engage them.)

Maybe the most damning thing here is that the weightlessness of the new additions to the bestiary highlight just how well-considered the original’s enemies were, testing you on the applications of the dismemberment system and on third-person shooting in a way none of the new creatures do- the frantic, vertical movement of the scorpion-like Leapers or the surgical precision demanded for the Pregnant necromorphs, diluted here with a lot of stuff that swarms you and that can be beaten out more simply with direct damage. A lot of the discussion about the two games centers on the weakening of the survival horror elements from the first entry to the second, but I think this less defined mechanical identity is probably the bigger loss for the series.

Still, a hard game for me to really dislike- nails the feedback for combat (even reloading looks cool!) and I’m not sure if another game has had a better justification and visualization for the combat tunnel/amazing skybox/combat tunnel structure than working your way through the various sectors of a dystopian mining station. Was ultimately reminded a lot of my time going through Titanfall 2 a few years ago, a strong string of setpieces and a great-feeling avatar not able to shake the feeling that the encounter design never really pushed the mechanics far enough.

Extra thoughts:

- Played through the game on Zealot, and got about halfway through on the limited-save Hardcore difficulty before losing a couple of hours of progress when I clipped through the floor of a tram and opted to call it there. Otherwise, I think these are pretty admirable difficulty modes, the increased lethality and reduced ammo of the former and the endurance needed for the latter do a nice job at recontextualizing the game. Granular bits of optimization, like being able to use random kinesis objects to slowly bludgeon enemies to death and getting a free refill on ammo and health when you upgrade their capacity, turn into run-saving maneuvers when you're under so much pressure. Good stuff.

- The Severed DLC is slightly more respectable than I remembered- the stasis enemies from Dead Space 1 aren’t a super-noticeable addition, but going backwards through old areas is far less egregious than it sounds, both due to some nice enemy arrangements (probably has the best Stalker encounter in the game) and for the fact that the player character comes with a predefined loadout that might get you to see a different side of the arsenal. Would never have used the Seeker rifle otherwise, for instance.