Huh..? I thought this was supposed to be that Obsidian Fallout in space...?

I think the structure of this game combined with the experience it provides might be one of the more profound moments in epic gaming history. I think the fact that the path to actually beat this can be done in 20 minutes and yet you simply won't and it doesn't matter at all says a lot about videogaming. You know, as a whole. Like, as a medium or whatever. You know what I'm saying man. I think I will compare every walking sim to this in the future *I am immediately pelted by rocks by the purist walking sim fandom because this game has 3 actions tied to right click instead of 1*

I think the one thing I would maybe fault it for is the lack of a clear message. I went into this kind of expecting something a bit more substantial in terms of some tenet to take away, but it's more a brainpickler in nature. Maybe that's on me. Maybe that's on hype. I don't know. I do know it kinda prevents it from hitting my favorite games list despite probably hitting my highest rated games list. Don't ask me to explain that. It drags the game down to a downright embarrassing 5 stars instead of 5 stars (backloggd has no rating scale options)

A feat of gaming.
They programmed an entire solar system emulated by a pure physics engine? The worlds are unironically spheres? This is awesome.
They told you to go anywhere and somehow perfectly designed the worlds to keep you progressing at a constant pace?
The replaced traditional traversal 'upgrades' and 'keys' with learning and knowledge? How.
Mario will never do this. Mario would hate for you to learn. Mario spits on you when synapses fire.
This makes the game effectively playable only once in your entire lifetime, and that's a good thing.

This game has some set pieces and moments that are pretty astonishing.
I was hoping to take a little bit more from the story, but that's ok. I think this is a result when nearly every review says "This game changed my perspective on life! I literally never smiled until I played this game" Expectations can only be so high. I almost took a half star away for this reason.
But then I realized - name another game on this level as of 2024. There just isn't one that I'm aware of.
Breaking against the traditional game design norms can sometimes yield the most satisfying results.

Why did I finish all the Batman Arkham games? Am I stupid?

Gamer picks up Arkham Knight hoping he's going to play another Batman game, actually plays a garbage Twisted Metal rip-off.

It's sad how much better this game could've been than Arkham City. It looks amazing, the movement is smooth, the voice acting is alright, there's not as many bugs as the previous game.... But why add a new mechanic to the game and forcefeed it to me? No one said the thing missing from this series of Batman games was the Batmobile. This series is not Batmobileman Arkham. Why fuck with a winning combination? Am I stupid?

Scarecrow farts over the city and I can't use the Batmobile? I smile. Batman saying he'll gladly huff farts if he can indulge in his mechanophilia fetish? My face contorts into a black hole and I suck my own dick to death. Arkham Knight destroys the Batmobile? I stop believing in black holes, therefore denying the existence of my face, paradoxically giving myself nothing but a smile. "Two phones, one for the plug and one for the load" ass Batman saying he's got two (2) of them? I register as a 9.5 on the Richter scale. Am I stupid?

>makes cool movement tech
>slaps it in licensed garbage
>changes all the designs to look like legally distinct versions of the famous actors
>makes it a "co-op game"
>makes it "uncooperative"
>crashes on startup and tells me my ram is single channel
i'm not playing any more of that garbage man

A game that has effectively taken every single system from the first and fleshed it out tremendously.

FO2 added sex.
That's fucking awesome :'D.
There's a formula to determine how good you are at sex, as follows:

(CH 50 + EN 25 + AG 13 + ST 12)
------------------------------------------------------------ + (SEX PERKS) > 9
100
I studied this formula meticulously, to craft the ultimate sex pest.

I started by fluffing the male porn stars in New Reno for most of August.

Depending on how much you fuck, you can receive various reputations regarding it. There's an option to use a condom if they're in your inventory. I ensured these devices of Moloch were never on my character. I ensured my obj_sex_rating was as high as possible at all times. Once I had sex ten times, I was delighted to find out that my sexual dialogue improved and I was given the "Gigolo" title. My addiction to Buffout and Jet was wearing me down, and the "poison" debuff in my mouth and groin did me little favors.

I eventually fucked a mob bosses daughter. I subsequently told her mom, who proceeded to tell me she was better in bed. My sex stats gave me more pillow talk options, in which I asked about her husband. I later decided it was in our best interest to kill the entire Mob Family (the daughter and my unborn child were caught in the crossfire - RIP)

I eventually bet my anal virginity to a super mutant over a game of arm wrestling. I woke up with a ball gag in my inventory. I got so mad that I decided to blow up an oil rig.

Also, I wrote like a real 6 paragraph review and then deleted it to post this one instead.

I awake in a cave. I walk up to a guy. "Fight me", he says, "but not to the death". He punches me until I die. It was from this moment I knew I was cursed.

I awake in a cave. I have re-allocated all my stats to punching harder. I walk up to a guy. "Actually we don't need to fight". Awesome.

Fallout 2 is way more finished than 1. That is to say, it is finished at all. Quests and cities are way better. There's much more sex. Every encounter has 60 enemies and 30 allies (making the combat take at least 8 years). The wasteland is a tough place - any child born with an Agility stat of less than 12 is immediately killed.

Being a punchy guy I am incredibly weak for 90% of my blind fumbling crawl through the videogame. I die repeatedly. This is the only game where I am extremely elated to hit 1/3 hits on a 73% hit chance. I like to imagine that every time my character dies I awaken in that same cave and retrace my steps until I inevitably blow myself up in a hurricane of shit trying to kill a rat in a toilet.

My tribal grug player character has immediately started doing Monty Python references and saying shit like "the narwhal bacons at midnight" the moment I hit the first town. At other points he says shit like "Door? What is door? Me live in tent what is door?". I find this a bit odd. But he's trying his best. My first companion who is here to investigate a slaver, doesn't seem to care that I've just bought my second companion from that same slaver. Luckily the slave is soon destroyed in milliseconds as I try to use a grenade with a thrown skill of 14.

At this point I can walk in any of 5 directions. I end up walking to the place where I get my semen guzzled out by a machine to store in a sperm bank. I knew I made the right choice.

At the remaining 10% of the game I suddenly cannot be defeated in combat by anyone ever, and I do 90 billion damage per punch, because I am awesome. As long as my fist doesn't run out of batteries.

Ultimately there's still a lot of leftover jank that it's hard to justify not fixing in a sequel - the fact that you have to open doors manually, the fact that I still can't see any of my items on the floor ever in any universe, the fact that companions can still choose to lock you inside a bar by piling on the entrance like my stupid dog in front of the kitchen door. The biggest problem is really the extremely long combat sequences - who the HELL wants to fight 20 wolves? All that being said it's still an immediate and obvious upgrade to Fallout 1. Hopefully they will make more!!! LOL!!!

It was probably revolutionary when it came out, but nowadays you can truly feel it was actually a step backward from what an actual beat-em up should look like. Ironically, allowing Batman to make the choice where he takes the fight next is less freeing than making the choice on your own as a player. Spamming square is so much better than choosing where to take the fight and what weapons to use! I would much rather play this game than Devil May Cry 3! (No one has ever said this in the history of the world) It's understandable that this game is as lukewarm as it is, because it attracts the type of people that say pizza is their favourite food.

Why is it that random hoodlums in a stealth mission are more unforgiving than my actual canon enemies? Why were both Bane and the Jonkler straight out of a Crash Bandicoot game? Were the creators of this game stupid?

Minor Nitpick:
This game is (current year minus 2009) years old. Why the fuck does Steam default to a Xbox controller layout for any one controller? Who the fuck looks at an X and thinks "oh yeah this is on the right side of my controller, I will now proceed with clicking that button". X is always down. You guys are PISSING me off.

Sexy, sexy Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy.

I'm complaining, this is the Complainer's Corner. I like this game. Now I'm complaining about it.

I genuinely don't know how this game is perceived for the kids who were born later and weren't around to see the tech demos and showcases of this game before it came out. Absolutely no clue. But you have to understand that the idea behind this game and how it was pitched was so engaging it had the world's eyes on it.

The greatest failing this game had was stats. It's really that simple. I don't know how this got greenlit, I don't know how it got shipped, but whoever decided "strongest piece takes precedence," like...WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

Like first off, from the perspective of this game where the whole. Entire. Point. Is to make creatures anyway you want. You decide to make this ABC-ass gameplay loop where first off, what your creation is mostly only matters for the first two stages. But second, having specific pieces just be best? Hello??? They straight up invalidate your other pieces and the problem with that is that pieces don't really have special characteristics of their own so the game is really just aesthetics and stat sticks. It's just like putting on armor in an RPG, completely invalidating the creature creation aspect which was the whole point of the entire game to begin with.

But third and most importantly, your creature doesn't matter anyways. The coolest thing about the showcases for this game was the fact that if you made a creature, there was no disconnect between what you made and how it functioned in the world. It made sense to have to make a creature with an arm that pops out of its head because that helps it reach high places. Making a creature a certain way would allow it to interact with the world differently, that was the most exciting thing about it in my mind.

But instead, nah, the body parts just clip. Nothing matters. The Creature Creator is just a for fun thing. And the worst part of it all is that the most of the stages feel like they should've just been their own games because they clearly took away from the whole project trying to fit these different ideas into both this engine and this game that they had to release in a timely manner.

And by "these different ideas" I mostly mean the Space Stage, because you can tell that was both the one they had to put the most time into and the one that's the most half-baked. It's not completely boring but it consistently feels like it should've been so much more and simultaneously you'll get this nagging feeling that the Creature stage (and the others as well, really) probably got neglected/rushed because they had to make the space stage so "vast."

But I think the thing that makes me saddest is the fact that there was never a follow-up. I don't necessarily mean a sequel, more like a spiritual successor. There is no Spore-like or Spore 2, and genuinely the only game I can think of that kinda has a similar vibe is Eternal Cylinder, but even if there are some out there that are kinda like it, I really wish and hope that one day we end up getting a game that lives up to what Spore was supposed to be.

Never ask a man about his salary.
Never ask a woman about her age.
Never ask Kingamajig about how his monarchy "took care of" political dissident Rotten Wrench after the events of Pantsylvania.

EDIT: Stephan Weyte did voicework for this game???