Ok, "completing" minesweeper aside.

I think this is interesting, maybe because there's like a powerful resurgence going on around me cuz of one person who decided minesweeper was fun again, but also because I was toying around with this vs. a bunch of other minesweeper knock-offs, and kept circling back to this one.

And why? Because of rng. Which is weird, because I can't think of anything more frustrating and annoying about minesweeper then you running into the dreaded 3-1 with two last clickable spaces left, or just the pretense that because you rolled the dice wrong you were fucked from the start, kiddo. But when I played versions that used algorithms to remove that element, where it just became a game of statistical probability using the same techniques ad nauseum, rather than some measures in my head to try to reduce the risk through intuition, it became... boring. A solved game isn't always bad, but it's not something I come back to, and I don't think most people do.

That's the wild part, this game is ancient and it swallows up my freetime hours lately with nothing but basic probability management and very simple to learn techniques. All baked into a very intentionally irritating gameplay component. There are people who have spent their lives optimizing that component, creating strategies to fuck with the board, bending the numbers under their knee until they unlocked it like a fucked up puzzle and going YES I GOT IT.

Fucking wild. Legendary game, probably not something I'll recommend lol. This is just a fun retrospective.

Hong Kong is one of the best levels I've ever encountered in any game, ever.

The rest of Deus Ex is all just as strong, too.

My non-lethal run started out as a teeth-pulling, save-scumming stealth game (still fun, even if a bit basic and slow as such) and gradually evolved into ballistic-armoring, speed-boosting, and occasionally straight up invis-walking past enemies. The progression that the augmentations afford is incredible and empowering, but never so strong that one approach feels obviously superior--a tough proposition even among the best immersive sims. Admittedly, if you're not feeling creative, some newer Arkane games occasionally run into this thanks to the omnipresent strength of blinking around. System Shock 2, while a master class in atmosphere, doesn't really have that many viable playstyles. Thief is an incredible stealth game, and I love it for that, but Deus Ex director Warren Spector had bigger ideas: he wished you didn't have to play Thief as a stealth game in the first place. Deus Ex is the first great, even masterful execution of that idea.

Another thing that is striking about Deus Ex, even to this day: almost all of the meaningful choices in the game, where possible, are presented through mechanics, systems, and open-ended situations rather than menus, text boxes, or button prompts. Want to kill or spare a character? Just do it. (It might not be easy, but that only makes it more immersive.) Want to avoid learning the passcode to this door? Stack some boxes to climb into the window. Or do whatever else you want. Only you can judge yourself. Try to stick to the approach you feel is right, or experiment wildly. It's all here. It's all tight, atmospheric, and--as clunky as the stealth, shooting, and AI can seem--it all works together as a brilliant clockwork contraption of mechanics, simulation, and downright satisfying game design.

0451/10

Danganronpa 2 is an interesting sequel that takes the core aesthetical mix of murderous insanity and exaggerated dark humor in an iterative if somewhat separate direction. It reflects a bit on the flaws of the previous games but ultimately doesn't do a whole lot to fix them, and more so swaps them out with something else.

The core plot is still a walking trash fire, with convoluted elements that walk straight off a cliff at the conclusion arc, leaving no satisfaction other than making true on just being insane as the game's first step let on. Characters are a bit more fleshed out now, with some interesting relationships and a few good motivations, but the game also does a good deal of throwing that out just to hit the core themes of the previous game, with one character in Case 3 especially turned straight into fucking mush for the sake of a gotcha. The game also ditches its grounded and dismal atmosphere for something way more surreal, and that doesn't come off as a welcome change because again, DR2 doesn't have much more of interest to say with it. This kinda leaves the setting to be a lot less memorable overall.

What is fun though, are the cases. They're an entire step up from DR1 by having more intricate puzzle solving structure to them, with situations so bizarre and outlandish but with case logic so strictly put together that each reveal in-game is interesting as it is satisfying to figure out. Each case still has a decent who dunnit, and a crazy interesting how dunnit. The why dunnit is still a crock of shit, but at this point it's something you have to accept when jumping into this game. In general the HEART of DR2 is still almost entirely absent for much of the runtime.

That's probably the most grueling flaw that DR is in no rush to fix. At the end of the day, DR is comfortable in drenching itself with an insane and somewhat satisfying junk food look, and leaves you with very little to mull over aftewards.

(spoiler drop at the end of the review)
Ambitious as it is messy, Apollo Justice is an interesting hodgepodge next entry in the series. It was a super pleasant ride for the good majority of it, but ultimately led to more frustration than I ever could've expected.

To start things positively, there's the general case mystery structure. Other than really 4-2, case mysteries are superwell structured in terms of the 'how' and 'why', with genuinely more grounded murders all wrapped in a different but welcome new tone. The pacing of it all tends to wobble between awful and bearable, but I still had an excellent experience putting the pieces together in something like 4-3.

The new characters range from completely new different types of cardboard to stare at like Apollo and Skye, to more interesting well developed characters, like the magicians, the Gavinners, and Trucy. They overall all feel very fresh and their own thematic struggles with the law and truth were interesting.

This does not extend to the massive elephant in the room. I can appreciate the outer workings and surface level wonders AJ pulls for a good amount of time, but there is something that needs to be addressed. Apollo Justice follows Trials and Tribulations with having a slowly moving and opened up puzzle box that reveals connections between cases that were always there that you can slowly pick up on and piece together.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Just kidding, Phoenix fucking Wright is here to tell you that he actually 5headed the entire game from day 1, and that you're literally on the coattails for him metanarratively pulling all the strings just so he can get revenge on this one dude in the most epic cucking ever staged. Words do not begin to describe the amount of frustration the final case for me was just to see all of the interesting thematic threads be tied to the dumbest character story I've seen thus far. Phoenix Wright actually brings down the entire game with his inclusion and having the whole story revolve around him. Fuck him, he was always cardboard in the previous games anyway and yet they somehow dropped the ball at even making his new struggle interesting.

Overall, despite my ridiculously jaded final impressions, I'd still recommend playing AA4 to an extent if you liked all the games previous. But you better be prepared for when it trips over the finish line and lands on its face.

Boy I really do love pushing up racist systematic oppression and fighting against tyranny as completely equivalent. It's especially more fun when I can shooty shooty bang bang the bad guys with my basic ass gunplay. Bruh it's so fucking deep you don't even know man let me grind this rail another time while agency actually doesn't matter to the major parties and everyone is right but wrong as we appeal to all of the broken promises we can for an 8 hour runtime.

I hear Burial at Sea is kinda neat but god forbid I spend another hour on this game.

It's kind of unfortunate that the only Halo game with a good story worth a damn happens to be attached to a shooter that's lackluster in almost every other area.

Not to say that the story is the only component worth considering here, Halo 4 definitely has incredible audio and visual design, with the best sfx in the series and wonderful vistas to discover. The soundtrack, while not as good as Bungie's general outings, is still solid and makes a lot of particular scenes ebb out of the screen in awe.

But everything else here is practically a miss! Level design is wide open but terribly balanced areas, with subpar enemy design with weaker AI than their prior counterparts. The forerunner enemies especially end up annoying in how reductive the strategy is to manage them, with some of the weakest emphasis on positioning here. It's unfortunate, because otherwise the campaign tells a great story about moving on, despite its shortcomings on pacing and the dank meme that is The Librarian. There's also some cross lore from the books that isn't exactly well put in here, although it does make true on forcing the Chief into an incredibly unfamiliar area with a shitton of time passing, so it's somewhat forgivable.

The multiplayer and spartan ops are just outright awful too. While it's not exactly the worst multiplayer in the world, firefights have incredibly boring map design and very low skill floor mechanics. You can pretty much sleep to get a decent kd because ttk is high even for Halo. Weapon strategies are simplistic, and snowballing is an ever growing problem even after patches. And the less said about Spartan Ops, the better.

That being said, I can't really say that this is an overall misstep in the series. The highs of Halo 4's campaign is enough to make an enjoyable entry and it does FAR FAR FAR FAR better than what Bungie did with fucking Halo Reach. Worth playing once.

Genshin Impact is certainly uhhh, something.

Or at least, it really wants to be something, it takes a lot of different things and smashes them together, somehow coherently, in the hopeful goal of being a something. But it really doesn't, it's not a something at all.

That's the long and short of it, but let me break stuff down to the specifics. Genshin takes a shitton of inspiration from other ps4 anime titles (weirdly Atelier Ryza kept coming to my head), BotW, and korean mmos in this weird mesh of trying to be a hack n slash anime open world. You have exploration, dungeons and character class and element mechanics, a pretty standard anime story, and a somewhat sweet vibe in the visuals. But like, each every one of these components are soulless, they don't really come together to make anything special, they're just there.

Exploration is route and boring, with a lot of fucking about getting numbers to go up and seeing very uninteresting sights. You might find some neat gear but gear generally just means number and stat ups rather than anything of much worth.

Mechanics boil down to being very simple, mostly picking whichever buttons you want to mash to make enemies keel over because enemy design asks nothing of you and all characters can functionally instawipe a group in their own way. Elemental play leads to very particular lock and key options but not anything dynamic, sheikah slates and element play of BotW it certainly isn't or really trying to be, it's just dressing.

The vibe itself is very disturbingly stolen from BotW, with the overworld music using the same kind of piano timbre that goes back to it, but it's just MISSING something. It's easy to say it's just missing a soul, but there's more to it, there's not even a sense of direction to what the music is playing. It feels ethereal but in the bad kind of sense, the one where you're playing around anime open world limbo rather than something serene.

I won't deny that the game at least looks pleasant, if anything that was the one thing I enjoyed in the amount of time I spent, getting a literal "ooo pretty" out of my mouth in the first five or so minutes. I guess another plus in this game's direction is that the gacha isn't overbearing as it is basic f2p design really, it's pushed in your face once and then it at best only subconsciously works for people going for completionism shit. From what I've been told, you can clear the story just fine without interacting with the shop at all, so that's nice.

That's kind of all the positive sentiment I can scoop up for this though, it really just kinda sucks otherwise. None of this ends up with Genshin Impact having its own identity, being something from even just one of its parts much less the sum. It really feels like a game made for eastern audiences that does 'just' enough to be relaxing and comfy to waste time in, but then offer nothing in return. Originally I was going to make this review just as I tweeted about it, saying that Genshin Impact is just Destiny 2 for eastern audiences.

I don't really even know about that anymore though, there is certainly a lot more I can give and recommend about Destiny, this is just going to be an afterthought eventually.