Top 50 Favorites: #2

Something special. Media Molecule's finest work as a developer in a career jam-packed with unforgettable gaming experiences. Every pixel of this game radiates the same comfort level as a warm log cabin in December, sitting in a soft chair with a mug of hot cocoa beside the fireplace. Makes your controller feel like a true magic utensil come to life, the gimmicks in this game genuinely made me feel like a kid again - "Ooh"-ing and "Ahh"-ing in giddy excitement with each new twist on the DualShock 4 (and your phone, which I highly recommend also using)'s utility. It really shows just how much Sony underutilized the PS Vita that all its features transferred over without compromise - nay, BETTER - from its original rendition. The sense of imagination here is so red-hot that it feels liable to beam out right off of your screen. Can't express enough how much I love this game, the dictionary definition of adventure. Comparing this to LittleBigPlanet, I feel, would be reductive - since this very much has its own unique identity - but it has more of that same 'energy' than that 2020 Sackboy game imo.

Top 50 Favorites: #6

"What if you don't feel at home anywhere?"
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"🎶Run and break the chain I hope to get away someday.🎶"

The Thin Blue Line. Question your own existence while roundhouse kicking triad members in the face and listening to The Drums. 110% amazing. Deeply depressed individuals hiding their insecurities behind violent power structures - a police badge being worn with the same intent as a gang tattoo. Such rich, complex characters on display - Wei Shen is an incredibly compelling lead in this and the supporting characters are all just as memorable. Strong themes of gender expectations, nationality/race, infatuation with tradition, oppressive hierarchies, thwarted masculinity, Chinese politics, etc. It's really impressive, plus the voice cast is stacked (Emma Stone, James Hong, Tom Wilkinson, Lucy Liu, and Tzi Ma among others). The gameplay is just as magnetizing - super content-heavy with tons of mission variety, fun minigames, rewarding collectibles, and one of the most exceptionally lively open worlds you'll ever play in. Driving through Hong Kong at night as Bonobo plays on the radio, drenched in the lights of roadside shops with a little bit of rain drizzle hitting... chef's kiss. Even the little number puzzles are a blast to run through. It's also (rightfully) totally inextricable from its kickass martial-arts-based melee combat system, which is a riot and a half to use. You can also jump from moving car to moving car!! Not just the best GTA clone, but one of the greatest video games ever made. Pork buns 4ever.

Alright, time to finally address this - I honestly think this is only 'fine'. It's still a game that I would consider to be good, but come on... I get that we all grew up with this but imo this isn't even one of the best Resident Evil games, let alone one of the best games of ALL TIME. Even in the HD port these cripplingly archaic controls never feel good to use, especially for a game that - at times - requires pinpoint accuracy. The environments here are alright but everything feels like it's only two or three colors (mostly the same shade of brown and grey). It does reel you in for fits and starts, though for the most part it's baseline competent but not a whole lot else. You've still got the solid dynamic of rotten flesh metamorphoses up against unkillable babes and hunks which this series has always been so sharp with - and Leon certainly carries this whole thing, with his emo-haired gymnastics and corny quotes perfectly understanding the assignment here. Ada's relationship with him is still great and Ashley's uselessness you just can't help but find some entertainment value in. But otherwise... eh. I'm sure this was a revelation in its day but now it feels somewhat flat. I also blame this for ushering in the grey quicktime hell macho-shooter era that would nearly consume the following gaming generation. No idea why (the, in my opinion - and I'm perfectly fine standing alone in this - resoundingly superior) Resident Evil 6 gets all the flak when this is nearly just as wacky - did everyone forget about the exploding cow, Bollywood aerobics, and giant robot statue stuff?

A fair bit better than The Struggle, but still feels like an overall shrug. That little song is nice even if it is just a short loop, there's some surprisingly dark dialogue in here, and I really like the dynamic of light and dark Natalia (even if it still does next to nothing to make this character... a character). Yet there's still no regular difficulty (??) leading to a stark imbalance between what you're left with - and most of everything else in it feels chintzy. Also I'm sorry but the stealth in this game was never a huge selling point for me to begin with. Wish this entire episode had the offbeat, gorgeous vigor of its excellent opening and closing cinematics.

A shitty bonus mode disguised as a story extension. The possibility for something good is here - not only just with the new ration system and inclusion of a mysterious character from the base game, but in how it sells itself tying up one of the biggest loose ends from its story. It doesn't really do that in a sufficient way, sadly - instead you get cheap black screen voiceovers, forced banter, MORE combat spam of enemies that weren't even fun to fight in the base, and a broken stealth section. And the little father-daughter plotline this re-introduces here was one of the more plaintive segments of the main game despite only being told through readables, this just sort of devalues it (and throws in a clichéd cop-out of an ending for good measure). Resident Evil in name only, the series has never felt farther from its roots than here - at least 5 had gonzo Wesker, this doesn't even have a normal difficulty lmao.

"Why does everyone hate me?"

Louisiana hothouse horror meets a black comedy snuff film - rightfully a revelation when it came out, if not the masterpiece I was led to believe. Enemy design still sucks as much as the last game, get used to fighting a bunch of generic unicolored blobs again! If I have to play one more zombie game that does the whole "there's the normal one, the fat one, and the fast one!" thing again I'm going to be pissed. Plus the F.E.A.R. knockoff stuff here is largely hit-or-miss for me, feeling contrived even at its best. But where this thing really sails imo are in its deeply haunting themes of lower-class suffering at the hands of governmental incompetence - being chewed up, spit out, and ultimately discarded entirely for serving your exact purpose to the best of your abilities. Its undertones of having your desires warped into physical mutations and violent outward expressions, having no choice but to see them as gifts in order to cope with simply existing are just brutal - even in spite of its poorly implemented "choose-your-own-ending" misfire placed insecurely onto the end of them (only one is canon anyway, and the other one sucks). Plot twist is amazing though, genuinely pulled the rug out from under me right in plain sight. It's got eye-popping graphics and memorable characters (Jack Baker > Mr. X). All its DLCs are necessary imo, and add a great deal to this. Even as a staunch Resident Evil 6 defender, this really was the course correction the series needed badly at this time - balances scares, laughs, texture, and action very well. Plus this new engine runs like a dream. I have my gripes but it's a damn fine game. "You're about to see something wonderful." Jesus Christ I hope not..

If the base Resident Evil 7 is Angel Heart, then this is Hobo with a Shotgun - guffaw as you eat worms, chuck spears at gators, have bare-knuckle boxing matches with swamp creatures, and 'splode through rows of enemy heads with an electronic Iron Man fist attachment. A totally unpretentious crowd-pleaser of an expansion, think Barry's sections in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 if they were good. Like Not A Hero the combat here has been completely overhauled from the base game, much more methodical this time around - very tight windows of opportunity that don't leave much room for error. Joe Baker as a protagonist is a gift that keeps on giving, I want more of him! While this is all very productively hokey, it still retains the base's bleak themes of civilian minds being betrayed by corporate recklessness - your life will be upended in a curdled attempt to stop other 'more important' lives from being upended, so pure that your body even rots differently. Simultaneously a meat tenderizer to the brain and a twinkle of hope in the fungal cesspool. Biggest flaw is how short it is, and level design leaves something to be desired.

21 > Bedroom > Daughters > Ethan Must Die > Jack's 55th Birthday > Nightmare

About on par with the first volume, though this is marginally better exclusively for the gleefully twisted "21" - which is not only a really fun spin on Blackjack (even when the A.I. blatantly cheats it seems like it only does so to stimulate your problem-solving skills, and how you're able to save your own ass out of a corner via the trump cards) but this continues the RE series' trend of genuinely shocking violence in a way that made even me feel sickened. Vile shit, I'm impressed! As far as memes go, Jack's 55th Birthday is initially amusing but as a score-grabber really uninteresting imo. Daughters is fine, with arguably the most enticing premise out of the two packs but it's out the door as soon as it seems to begin. It's always nice to see more Jack convulsions, but we finally get to see the Baker's horrific, undeserved transformation and it's over in the blink of an eye? It really needed to be the same length (longer, really) as Not A Hero to work at full effect. Plus its different endings seem kind of pointless to me. Anyways, not bad - but hardly anything that will really blow the roof off.

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

Graphically gorgeous, one of the greatest-looking launch games of all time - but rather vapid gameplaywise. I'd be lying if I said those impressive visuals didn't mostly push it over the "good" edge for me - but every other bizarre, perplexing, and/or stupid choice made here ends up making this feel more novel. There's a strange cozy atmosphere to be found here, and the sense of size-shifting is as rad as advertised. Its sequel improved upon it by nearly every metric, and I certainly won't argue that this is great per se - but it's a shame to see a pretty quirky and warmly familiar series' legacy relegated to unfunny YouTuber memes.

Nightmare/Night Terror are 100 times harder than Ethan Must Die and I will die on this hill. Anyway, this ain't bad! Nothing special but far better than that Ghost Survivor shit from Resident Evil 2 remake. Bedroom is the MVP - a taut, clever little puzzle-solver that had me genuinely stumped on multiple occasions (RE puzzles are finally back, baby!) though one which probably just should have been a video tape in the main game. Ethan Must Die is insanely fun for what it is, even though I'm almost never into these hyperspecific trial-and-error postgame asset flips - this one clicked with me for whatever reason. Nightmare is CoD Zombies but with only one map you've already seen in the campaign - it's competent and superficially diverting but as you'd imagine drains after a little bit, the weakest of the pack imo. More RE7 is never a bad thing but this is about what you'd expect.

"What happened to your face??" - Greg Giraldo, Roast of Flava Flav (2007).

Sadistic, breaking the entire carton of eggs just to even think about making the omelet. I'm with others on the opinion that this should have been an epilogue in the base game - but it being a free update mostly fixes that imo. Chris' redesign is scarier than the monsters in this one! That being said though, good ole' Redfield is my favorite RE character - so seeing his story be continued in a productive (albeit truncated) way here in the franchise's new direction was awesome. I just can't get enough of his quintessential do-gooder mixed with a vial of steroids persona, and his gameplay here feels like a fitting change from Ethan's - with more of a focus on almost RE6-style fleshy military combat, and noticeable changes to the mechanics in a way that makes this feel like its own thing while still retaining what made RE7 so good. "Think we did any good here?" Hell yeah, brother.

The idea here is really cute - this is clearly made for kids to play with multiple friends/siblings as each one is given avenues on whether to work together as a team unit, or to vie for success as the sole winner (conceptualized smartly during the good-versus-evil loading screen tips). It's rare that you see this sort of freedom to choose between competition or cooperation in a game like this. That being said... FUCK. This is easily one of the most punishingly boring 100%s I've ever gone for - levels padded out with an excess of combat spam and pointless replay requirements. Even if you were just playing this casually, it's still got some of the most broken and mind-numbing fighting since Borderlands - 99 times out of 100 you'll be one-shotted from a full health bar with no indication that you'd even been hit. Some of the worlds are pretty, some are murky in the way that PS3 games can be murky. I'd rather play Skylanders and that's saying something.

I think most of us all had the same reaction to this - yes this is a tight, bright, and perfectly acceptable platformer but I'd rather have just had LBP4 tbh. Normally I'm not so averse to franchises trying out new things, not even one that's as big of a diversion as this one was - but when the previous entry was an infamous example of greedy execs squandering a masterpiece that would have been by enforcing rushed deadlines, I'm pretty sure we all wanted to see Sumo Digital's clear skill with the IP applied to a timeline that allows them to actually make a substantial story mode in a mainline entry. For me what makes this series work is its singular, cozy, ethereal atmosphere that effortlessly makes you feel like a kid playing their new games on Christmas Day. This doesn't really have that - replaced here with something still competent, even fun, yet much more sterile. I respect the attempt at SD weaving their own personality into the series, and it's not that this fails - it's still really good - there's tons of poppy levels and Richard E. Grant lends more worthy British talent under this franchise's belt as the villain. But I just can't help but yearn for what could have been. Also, giving Sackboy a voice is one of the worst decisions ever made in a video game. But The Ripsnorter is a legendary feat of platforming skill.

Fun until it isn't. Tons of great alien mayhem gimmicks without any real connective tissue to bind them all together - leading to an experience that promises no-holds-barred fun right out of the starting gate yet winds up becoming tedious and repetitive shortly after. There's still good shit in here - the telekinesis stuff and general ragdoll/explosion destruction you can cause is pretty entertaining. But those talking segments are just pure trial-and-error B.S., and having to recharge your cloaking device by reading minds akin to Stick it to the Man! (which used this mechanic way better imo) starts out as a funny idea but ultimately leads to hearing the same handful of voice lines over and over AND OVER again to the point of full-on exhaustion. Gotta love its top-tier voice acting from J. Grant Albrecht and - the King - Richard Horvitz, but the game just can't maintain its sense of creativity the whole way through. And that final boss is all kinds of jank.