Your vn be so fine then bam! Rape.

Majikoi is a dopamine rush in software form. When it sets off to entertain – it's always fun. When stopping to explore its characters – it's expressive and meaningful. It's not a particularly deep story, but it doesn't miss a beat in a tale it wants to tell. When it's good – it's really fucking good and I genuinely want to love it.

It's also an eroge, and with some particularly disgusting moments to come. I don't mind horny especially when it's funny, I can stand silly anime shit like peeking after girls in hot springs. But the way it treats sexual assault is insane and you cannot read that one scene in Chris route and not think whoever wrote this must be a fucking psychopath. With all its strong points I just cannot think good of something so morally daft.

Would be easy 5 stars if it was just Yukie route though.

Improvements to combat make it a way more enjoyable affair than Gears 1-2. Nearly all changes and new enemy types are here to force you out of cover and throw you out of position, which coupled with better level layouts make for more dynamic and interesting shootouts. Lambent aren't that different from locust as an enemy to fight, but even their presence alone often creates interesting encounters where you get ambushed by both enemy powers from opposing sides. It still is not like astonishingly great, with yucky dialogue bringing down some actual striking moments of loss and dread. Nonetheless: easily the most likeable game out of the first trilogy.

I see why Skate killed Tony Hawk. At the time when Birdman's games completely fumbled their way into seventh generation of consoles, the laser focus on the physicality of real skateboarding with unconventional yet awesome controls made Skate such a cooler breeze next to the series that couldn't rediscover itself. For that alone, plus pretty sublime map design Skate 3 gets a "nice" mark – it's just an enjoyable game to go back fiddle with for a 15 minutes at a time.

I miss that Tony Hawk personality though: inventive gameplay objectives, crude MTV humor, petty skaters that brag about DVD players in their cars, globe throtting jumps between skating toy versions of real cities. Somehow an open-world skating game is less scenic than a private lobby in THUG PRO where I can load up a Moscow map and show my US homies around Red Square, talk about sights and history while doing sick flips over mausoleum. Of course I don't ask to replicate that exact mood: the Tony Hawk series itself is a time capsule of an era long gone. But really, aside from a really cool live-action intro Skate 3 just didn't make me interested in anything other than its half-pipes, ramps and rails. I can only hope that enough time passed for eventual Skate 4 to gain its face – because these ramps are absolutely the best feeling one can find.

Added this game to backloggd database just to slam it with low rating. Misconstrues Touhou characters and puts them in top 10 epic Mother moments to hit the quota of references, asking you to clap when you see a familiar thing. No consideration for what makes both of these series great and how they can play off each other's strengths to create something meaningful. Pros? Some of the music mashups slap pretty hard and some of the humor does land, but these moments are far and between. I might be asking too much from a 12-year-old fangame, but it's well regarded in the community and fairly – it's a waste of time.

Playing this in 2022 was a mistake, and I can't believe the fan base considers original Gears games better than Coalition output. Gears 5 has many ways to force you out of cover and create interesting positioning decisions – be it explosives, rushdown melee enemies, flankers, or enemies that require flanking to kill. Here the peak encounter design is to give an enemy a high cover where your only consideration is which flank they have exposed to shoot from. Set pieces were impressive in 2008 now aren't much more than shooting galleries and some contextual actions in the environment. And oh god these games used to be brown, so, so brown. Wish I left Gears 2 as a distant memory of summer split screen past, time hasn't been kind to it

Gouyoku Ibun, the 17.5th Touhou and the first sidescroller in the series. Community had assigned it so many red flags during the troubled development phase, the game finally crawls past the release date.... And it turns out to be such a unique startling thing I'm astonished how special it's shaping up to me.

Here, behind the usual touhou mysticism hides another modern fable that denounces greed as the biggest threat to environmentalism, but its tale is optimistic and uplifting in resolution. Brash dialogue and PoV heavy plot structure make up story layers that are such a delight to peel, building up the timeline of events with many moving parts and personalities that bounce off each other in a way that's full of energy and style. I seriously envy people that happen to go in this game unspoiled, there are such surprises along the way that ensure no touhou fan would be left feeling indifferent.

And on the other side of increasingly shiny coin is the culmination of over 15 years of Tasofro's experience of creating games where girls shoot A LOT of bullets and let you have elegant tools to JUNK them. Balancing between cautious evasion with chip potshots and rabid flurries of attacks isn't much unlike other sidescrollers, but all the haphazard mobility you have put against swarms of projectiles on screen leads to such a unique moment-to-moment dynamic, there's simply nothing else that plays like it. Coupled with how different playable characters feel – it's nearly euphoric. These playables share no identical moves or tools, their styles are different, their mobility is different, their resource management is different, their meters work differently... They shouldn't work all in the same game, but they do, and they fight the same enemies on the same stages. Where Kanako has to gallantly float around the field and invoke crushing forces of nature, Murasa haphazardly grapples herself all over the screen and setups air juggle combos. The mad playstyle distinction becomes the very means of character expression, it truly makes you feel like a wind goddess or a ship ghost with murderous tendencies, one could say.

And I ain't even gonna fully touch on the artstyle or music, how much it's doing with this few pixels and what a cool vibe the remixes of classic themes are. Gouyouku Ibun is such a sensation for me and I wish others get even a fraction of emotions I experienced. Maybe wait until the english patch is cooked to completion, but otherwise even if you're even tangetially interested in Touhou, you should pay attention to this game, you're in for a threat.