The original Lego Star Wars games on the PS2 were integral to my childhood. Replaying it for nostalgia's sake is a fun romp through familiar levels and simple gameplay that holds up to this day. The LEGO retelling of classic pop culture stories remains the peak way to experience them, particularly Star Wars. Lightsaber slamming into a standout lego prop and mopping up the studs that flow out will never get old. What DOES get old is replaying every level a MINIMUM of four times in an attempt at 100%. Once for story mode, again for Free Play, while hunting down minikits and red bricks, again for the blue minikit challenge modes for every mission, and AGAIN for the "Super Story" plus the tedious bounty hunter and bonus missions. All in all, probably not worth the effort to 100%, but I thoroughly enjoyed the first 20 or so of those 40 hours, and now at least I can call it DONE.

Now on to Slopwalker Saga...

A fantastic shining sequel. Nearly everything about Dead Space II is a straight improvement from its predecessor. Gunner Wright kills it as gaming's favorite fully voiced schizophrenic whos boots are heavier than ever. The enemies are more varied, and encounters are more challenging. The environments and lighting are still more than good enough to visually stand up to this day, and the scale of those environments is still awe inspiring.

Dead Space 2 was a much harder game on my first playthrough, which makes it all the more satisfying to master it and breeze through sections which before would've taken all my resources just to scrape by. Sheer fun kept me going through four consecutive playthroughs. Clocking in at around 8 hours per run in a relatively careful playthrough, this game is prime for replaying, speedrunning, challenge runs, NG+, 100%ing the upgrades, One Gun Run, etc. etc.

Like its predecessor, DS2 is really only scary on your first playthrough, when you don't know where everything is, you might not be sure what weapons you're most comfortable with, and you don't know what to do in particular situations. So I recommend that first playthrough being on Survivalist difficulty, so you get one solid playthrough of resource stress survival horror before you start bending the game backwards on repeat playthroughs, which you will.

I'm still knocking it a full star grade cause the game refused to give me my Foam Finger after I beat Hardcore.

Classic horror action with ample replayablility. I'm in the middle of a NG+ powerthrough and I intend on starting runs on hard and/or Impossible soon. And the structure of Dead Space lends itself very well to self imposed challenge runs.

Isaac Clark is one of the most iconic protagonists in gaming and with good reason. Beyond the cool suit, he's not pre-established to be any kind of badass. He's just an engineer for Space Geek Squad stuck in a really bad shift. This idea is reinforced by the majority of his problem solving being related to fixing or making something, and the majority of his arsenals being mundane tools being used in all the wrong ways. It's not every game where your main bread and butter weapon option is a cutting tool.

Performance-wise, it's a 15 year old game, you'd be hard pressed to find a system that couldn't run it but that can sort of be the issue. Some things like menu mouse speed and physics can be tied to framerate and get funny if you left vsync enabled. I turned v-sync off and the most common issue was body physics liking to go a little goofy. The more problematic issue was sometimes my gun would refuse to fire for a couple seconds. It's not so ever-present that it makes the game unplayable but it's jarring when it does happen. I suspect this is tied to me not capping my framerate with outside performance software. But I've decided to leave it in, because CEC tools and weaponry jamming for inexplicable reasons is very lore friendly and adds tension when there's a twitcher right behind you about to turn your prostate into your antistate.

I'd pick difficulty carefully depending on what you want from the game. I played on Normal and I did feel like it got a bit casual occasionally. I only died a handful of times, most of them were my fault, and I was rarely at any risk of low health or ammo, which lowered the tension quite a bit. There was ONE(1) section where I had wasted some ammo and didn't have a shop available for a while, so I was stressing for ammo a little bit, and that was when I was most invested and careful for the whole playthrough. For a first playthrough, I'd recommend Hard mode so the resource management is more of a factor into building tension and making you play carefully.

120/28/23 EDIT:
I never continued that NG+ game, electing instead to go a run through on Impossible using the Plasma Cutter only. Which inadvertently makes the game even easier than it was on the initial playthrough. I can count the times I lost health on my hands, and the times I died on one. Still a fantastic game, but I'm docking half a star for the aforementioned performance issues.

Rise is fun, but it's not what I want out of Monster Hunter. It changed the moment-to-moment gameplay a LOT for the sake of a faster pace, but in doing so it makes the pacing of the fights seem unnecessarily frantic. In addition, the wirebug mechanic exacerbates the already pretty bad weapon balancing. Longsword, which was already strong, flashy, and popular, is even more strong, even more flashy, and even more popular, all while other weapons have wirebug moves that are either bad, or just situational. I'm bitter about this cause my main, lance, got hit by this pretty bad. But other weapons arguably got gutted even worse, Hunting Horn is not the same weapon in the slightest, and SA's axe mode is made obsolete by wirebug actions.

I played MHW and Iceborne for over 800 hours and find myself coming back for a couple hunts at least once a month. I have barely 200 hours in Monster Hunter Rise, have no particular interest in the expansion, and I got bored of grinding before I hit HR100.

Maybe Sunbreak fixes everything I personally disliked about the game, but it doesn't look like it, and I'm probably not going to find out any time soon.

Very competent zombie horde game, fun with friends and every class has decent mechanical depth to keep you engaged beyond spam clicking. Especially the melee powerhouse Berserker, my primary class of choice.

But progression is painfully slow, the gameplay is formulaic and repetitive by design, and if you like that, brilliant. There are definitely people who have an itch in their brain that this game scratches perfectly over the course of thousands of hours. It just never managed to capture me for long.

It's a miracle that this game exists in the first place and I don't really mind that it does.

DMC2 was what a new director could cobble together from broken pieces over the course of six months. The end product is a dull game, where the best and fastest option for every encounter is always "sit in a safe spot and spam guns". Despite having some interesting ideas, the movement and melee combat are too inconsistent and clunky to cook with, and Dante's twin 1911s were made powerful to compensate. Broken AI, bizarrely open levels, janky animations, and bizarre characterization of Dante all combine to make this game funny at best and dull at worst. DMC2 is a stain on the franchise, but interestingly, it's not the most hated by a long shot, it's just kinda mourned laughed about.

DMC2 is objectively horrendous dogshit that only exists by the grace of god (Hideaki Itsuno) but it's an interesting and important part of the franchise's history, and it's really funny to meme about so I'm glad it exists.

A foundational game for an entire genre. Some of the best action games in the industry wouldn't exist without the influence of the DMC franchise. I cannot overstate how important Devil May Cry was for the history of gaming as a whole.

That being said, Devil May Cry 1 was a janky experimental game born from a Resident Evil 4 prototype and it shows. Camera angles change as you walk through the mansion, the mood is dark and gothic until the combat brings in the BANGER soundtrack, and much of the fluidity and fast style of character action games simply wasn't present yet. Targeting is inconsistent, especially on certain minibosses, and avoiding damage often boils down to either popping DT and getting your heal/free damage in, or hopping like a very red kangaroo all over the place to reposition. This game LOVES throwing dogshit fixed camera platforming sections at you too.

Despite the showings of its age, I still thoroughly enjoyed the grandaddy of one of my favorite genres. (Most of) the bosses are fun and challenging, exploration is rewarding, the swordplay is solid, and there is certainly some cooking to be done. Devil May Cry just wants some feedback on the seasoning and a little more time in the kitchen.

Fantastic game I probably won't ever finish. I used to have a PSP with a copy but that's long gone, so now all I have is emulator, the multiplayer is a bitch to set up on PPSSPP and everyone playing it is in super endgame by now. Playing solo is clunky but satisfying. If I had a mobile device to play it on, I'd do gathering and tedium to prepare better for hunts, but that feels a bit too drawn out on an emulator. Easily a game you could sink 500+ hours into if you have the right autism for it though.

O, we are the valiant infantry!
We are the alpha team with passion and comraderie!
Hear as we shout at the top of our lungs,
"Be calm, be bold, and raise your guns!"

High up in the air our comrades fight,
Dashing through the sky now like a million bolts of light.
We shall spread our wings wide and fly high,
Soaring, gliding through the endless sky!

It is only with our sacrifice
That mankind can still exist down here in paradise!
To defend our dearest Mother Earth
We're ready to give up our lives!

Now, pick up our weapons, off we go!
Firing at the flying saucers, shooting down our foes.
We shall not allow these aliens
To rule we Homo Sapiens!