858 reviews liked by Detchibe


Edit: Maybe I'm full of shit. I want to play more of this now..
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I liked dressing up my dog and the tonal clash of the happy Wii dog graphics and the heavy illness-focused slice of life story. Actually even sniffing around for new items was kinda fun. But the way the two fit together makes them both mutually feel heavier, and there's not really any substance to the sniffing out of items. I was kind of impressed they would put this story in a kids' game: by all means kids' games Should be about these things! But the gameplay otherwise was kind of infantilely simple.

I don't feel it's controversial to say this - we are living in the worst era of video games in the medium’s history. In this post-creative type age, AAA games are designed by corporate committees, the bleeding hearts and artists chained to their whim. Here's $10 billion dollars, make a game. Your livelihoods are threatened if it falls beneath our expectations, except not really because we're going to lay off 60% of your team anyway after launch. We want a remake of an old classic of yours now that we've bought the rights from your old publisher - we'll give you no more than five years to finish regurgitating the same game you made in a fifth of the time two decades ago but your game will still come out unpolished, unappreciated, your bloody hands and dried tear ducts for naught. We're your new publishers, we're looking for a change of pace from your streak of critically acclaimed titles - we feel a live service game will be more beneficial to us. We’ll be looking into layoffs and a potential merger if the Metacritic score doesn’t meet our expectations. It cannot be understated or made any clearer - the bubble is not about to burst; the bubble is bursting.

It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.

What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.

User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.

2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.

You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.

Had next to no expectations about this one so forgive me but I'm very pleased lol. I was Not expecting Rockstar to have it in them, this has so much arcade racer DNA despite its open-world core. Blisteringly fast & cartoonishly responsive controls, making great use of the open world's hazards and emergent chaos to make every race feel rich w/ needle-threading improv. Most impressed by how hard this is clearly pushing the PS2 graphically, in service of a dreary industrial conkcreet hellscape. With enough tricks of the light 20FPS feels like 9999FPS. Would earnestly recommend playing this in software rendering mode on pcsx2 for it to hit just right. Techstep of all things on the OST and fugly neon car underglow it's good to be back in 2006 again babye. Career mode is kind of threadbare, all of the cutscenes are Xavier Renegade Angel-grade FMVs where the dialogue is just "yo is that a car🤔❓ hit the boost ese 🗣️🔥" and you essentially experience all the game has to offer in the first hour of playing.

Decimate Drive is alright. Going entirely off of the premise, this had the prospective for being one of the most effective horror games I'd be able to play. Growing up amidst a handful of cases where friends and family fell victim to (thankfully minor) vehicular accidents instilled in me a profound fear of cars. They're fucked up things, densely destructive machines, screaming hunks of steel and aluminium that instantly alter the brain chemistry of anyone behind the wheel into callous freaks fully convinced in their own invulnerability. Isn't it fucking crazy that you could be minding your own business, walking on the pavement, doing everything right, and something could just happen? All because of someone having a bad day/off their nut/losing control/insisting on breaking the speed limit to shave a minute off their commute? How am I supposed to be normal about that? I've certainly never been. It's tricky business on the Cu Chulainn Causeway, brothers 😔.

The setting of Decimate Drive, being a simple enough premise of going from A to B while under the relentless assault of vehicles in the dead of night is quite literally what I have regular nightmares of, I was interested from the jump. It handles the core pretty well, you're basically just running from checkpoint to checkpoint in the midst of a handful of underlit destruction derbies. Not exactly rich with mechanics or anything, but the game's short runtime and abundance of increasingly fucked vehicle types kept fanning the flames of tension.
There are moments where Decimate Drive hits some incredibly high notes; adept use of lighting and sound design to evoke tension. It doesn't take long for the artifice to set in, however, sharply shifting gear into a game akin to like Clustertruck. Despite the presentation of the game gunning for a sense of realism, the perpetual crashing of vehicles without any visible damage undermines the intensity and unintentionally creates a sense that they aren't putting in enough effort to pose a genuine threat to the player lol.

Ultimately this game pushed me to check in on BEWARE, which I am happy to see is still in active development :)

Demonstrates in perfect stride how this series has never had any clear idea for what they want Haruka to be, in such a way that it almost entirely uproots this whole story for me. My experience was more positive on this entry overall than it was with Yakuza 5, largely because its runtime is less than half of that game's torturously bloated length. This is a series that is at its most effective (to me) when it narrows its scope and focuses on the micro stories of its world’s inhabitants, rather than the endless vortex of clan warfare and revolving door system for cloak & dagger. It was honestly so refreshing that this was as stripped-back as it was. I see a lot of people almost rightfully decry the large swathes of Kamurocho being blocked off for what I’m assuming to be development timeframe reasons. It’s a shame not to see the Champion District in the shiny new Dragon Engine, but I’ll take a few bites out of a world map if it saves me tens of hours of playtime at this point.

Since much of the appeal of these games remains to me in its stunningly realised period piece virtual tourism, I’m always happy when they jumpscare me with an entirely new locale. Hiroshima’s gotta be my favourite in the series I’ve seen yet! It’s such a stunning portside town, coiling up a mountainside. It adds a level of verticality unseen in these games before, offering an incredibly scenic look into sleepy rural life in the Japanese afterglow. I’ll never personally have the funds to justify a trip to the country - so this series is about the best I’ll ever get, and it just doesn’t disappoint.

Alongside the Dragon Engine came some shifts to the gameplay I found very welcome (autosave 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯). I’m surprisingly keen on the revamped eatery system, better encouraging exploration and dining wherever possible for stat gains and tourism points. They fixed the rhythm game so the tracks aren’t bizarrely varying speeds. Also kind of hilarious to me how busted the dropkick is. Yaku 6 will throw so many mobs at you that it’ll almost feel like a musou game at points, and that attack felt like a Lu Bu finisher or something. The ragdolls are insanely fun too.

But yeah, the story was a miss for me. Broadly speaking, I’ve come to learn that you’re best off taking everything the Yakuza series says at absolute face value without an inch of scrutiny, because its platitudes about honour and family and determination tend to fall apart under even a non-prescription lens. It is so insane to me how Haruka spends 95% of this game in a vegetative state when she’s played such a pivotal role in setting the stage. As I mentioned, this series is terrified of scratching the surface of Haruka’s autonomy and growth into adulthood, god forbid she leaves the “Pure & Perfect Daughter” box she’s been bolted into. God forbid we see the romantic relationship between her and her partner blossom, her demonstrate her independence and stop being a mom for five minutes. It felt as though she learned next to nothing from her experiences in Yakuza 5 outside of the events in its final hour, once again sabotaging any attempt the game makes into having her stand up for herself and stop doing exactly as told. She’s stern but in the same way a Weeble is. And while Kiryu’s final letter demonstrated a touching degree of self-awareness w/rt his effect on the people around him, where he stands on family, etc, it was addressed to Daigo while Haruka was in the room lol.

They called this shit Penta Tentacles in Europe lol. Out of all of these Art Style games, I honestly think this one is my fav!
Rotozoa shares some similarities with Thatgamecompany's flOw, surprisingly (to me) enough, but with far more of a puzzle game-y spin on the formula of wading across the primordial ooze eating plankton and amoebas. What is essentially just a colour matching challenge can become pretty engrossing with some smart engagement design that stacks wonderfully as you're tasked with an increasing amount of plates to spin. All 35 stages have their own unique bgm, upon which layers are added and excited depending on how much you've grown and how much you're wrecking shop, it's pretty charming!
It's a shame Skip didn't stay active for very long after the release of Rotozoa - you could tell this studio was bustling with ideas. Skip's Art Style / Bit Generation titles very rarely feel as though they've had enough backing to push them past the concept phase, which can certainly be a bit of a charm point, as I genuinely believe that their projects still present themselves incredibly uniquely. Their titles have this confusing, stripped-back air of something that'd appear on your DSi one morning to confuse and scare the piss out of you as if you've just been airdropped some alien spyware. From what I've played or achieved, Rotozoa is the only one of their titles that lives so long it has its own credits sequence.

Now this is Puregaming.
Only learned of ThruSpace while haplessly browsing the now-threadbare wii dot com website out of sheer curiosity. A little official relic of late 00's web design, true to Nintendo's branding and visual language during the Wii era - Latestage Frutiger Aero, Hospital-core, perfectly scaled to suit for your 1024x768 XGA monitor. It's nice, I still love it! Anyway, I looked through the WiiWare page on the still-functioning Japanese wing of the website and the featured titles look great. I was aware of the Bit Generations' gorgeous minimalist games being on the GBA, but they also have WiiWare ports??? I gotta get into somethn!!!!

ThruSpace is dictionary definition neat. A snug 10 mb game w/ no fat. You get your cubes and you get a corridor and you will learn to love them. Not a whole lot to really wax poetic about, it's a simple shape rotation game where you position your tetromino as best you can to maximise your score, with extra feats to strive for in speed, accuracy, and painting the whole gap in if u dare. Looks absolute minty phresh, easy 2 learn hard 2 master. Ultimately I think this is great but find myself losing my grip on the shape's orientation very easily because of how few focal points you're given, I spent a lot of my time panic spinning.
Here's some gameplay from someone only a fraction as good as I am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1yao_PBRnQ

Just some quick thoughts for this one, apologies if it's a little scatterbrained.

As a game this is probably the most ""content"" for your dollar that you could possibly get out of a scripted game and I'm truly blown away by how much effort it must have been to put this whole thing together. Dondoko Island is a minigame with more mechanics than 98% of the games I play each month. If that were all there is to say then I'd be giving it a 10/10 - and I understand that everything after this point is going to make me sound like an insane person to 85% of people playing this - but the truth is that this game (like Y7) is so hell-bent on being silly at all times that it often undercuts itself when it comes to dramatic tension or consistency of plot/characters - again! Genuinely, if the Ichiban games just knew how to solve their tonal issues then I'd be giving this game an extra star, if not more. Classic Yakuza goofiness works best as a break from the drama - it's less effective when the cutscene establishes a legitimate, serious threat to your loved ones and then immediately warps to your female party member decked out in a coconut bra and maracas strumming a ukulele at a guy with a beach ball for a torso.

Some things (the combat and chain attacks, Hawaii, every non-Sujimon minigame) are miles better than they were in Y7, but the game also loves to tell the same jokes over and over so things that are initially endearing (seonhee fangirling over kiryu) become extremely grating by the end. I also think Yakuza Gaiden works better as a farewell tour for Kiryu because it's not just crammed into a game about someone else in a city he's barely been to - having Kiryu reminisce can be fun at points but so many of the locations are completely arbitrary and having Kiryu go "Remember all the times Date rescued me in a helicopter?" because he walked into a cafe feels dry and artificial, not fun. I'm almost resentful that so much of the focus is placed on him in this story when his main purpose for most (not all) of it is to be a cool friend who people on the street constantly recognize. The big Kiryu checklist wavers between being interesting (reflecting on basic things Kiryu never got to enjoy because of his insane life of constant fighting) and mind-numbing (do you remember the dancing minigame in Y0? how about the fishing minigame?). Ultimately though, it's part of a larger push to make these characters feel like they have lives outside of Ichiban's adventures (Ichiban included) and it works wonders... when it works at all. Tomizawa shines particularly brightly as someone whose drink links highlight a life that's been uprooted in a way that ties into the main plot while remaining personal to him and exposing more of his character. Saeko and the other women, however, mostly get these nothingburger chats that are about Ichiban or how cool Kiryu is or how stressful it is to run a business.

Also: It needs to be better about signposting when you're about to switch protagonists. At one point it splits your group between two locations and warns you that you're going to need good gear because there's some combat coming up, but it doesn't tell you that it's going to switch you to the other group first, leading me to 75 straight minutes of fighting with a party that is severely underpowered because I read the warning and assumed I'd be fighting with the group I was currently controlling.

Also also: I'm still not a fan of the enemies they cook up in the Ichiban games. A lot of them are creative and fun and a lot of them really, truly are not - it's cool to see what attacks they assign to random day jobs, it's not funny or interesting when the fat guy in ill-fitting clothes hits you with a big hot dog or the Chinese mafioso performs acupuncture in the middle of a fight. That shit is so fucking boring, dog. Ichiban could really use a better imagination.

I realize that this might seem overly negative for the rating I've given. I enjoyed myself for the vast majority of its runtime, but so much of this just collapses in on itself for me when I give it any thought at all. I'm still in awe at the production value here - this game blows my mind in much the same way that 2D mode in Dragon Quest XI did - they simply did not need to go so hard in crafting a big video game buffet. Combat has only seen a few changes but the changes that have been made take it from something I tolerated in Y7 to something I truly enjoy (as long as I'm not underleveled). Y8 addresses so many of the concerns I had with Y7 but about once an hour I'm reminded that the Daidoji faction is transparently complete nonsense (in the same way the Florist used to be), that the Drink Links still insist on having One Big Problem that each character must solve that ends in a fight (which means each character only gets to talk about a single thing during their moments in the spotlight), that both the English and the Japanese dubs feel inappropriate for the setting at least 50% of the time. There's a lot to like about this game and for significant chunks of it - mostly while I was ignoring the story - I was considering just giving it 5 stars and calling it a day, but the more I think about it, the less appropriate that feels.

Help! The American Hero has been injected with Nazi! The only cure is Drums Krueger Hoover

Do you have what it takes to take on AI-Blurred Breasts, Carrot Juice, and Clint Howard? Do you have what it takes to be an... American Hero?

(Logged as a shoe-in for both the base Monster Hunter: World game, and the Iceborne expansion.)
Lavish & deathly exciting at practically all times - varied and expressive social MMO tissue connecting its numerous multi-layered terrariums of gorgeous arenas and silly monsties.

I do have some background with the series, with much history on Freedom Unite, and far less with the fantranslation of Portable 3rd + 3Ultimate at various points through highschool, and hit the credits of Rise. Freedom Unite came packed with FMV cutscenes that demonstrate how the monsters lived in their downtime - characterising the monsters to assure the player that they weren't merely thoughtless models with movesets to memorise, but individual links in the food chain with roles that keep the world biodiverse & strong.
It was always my favourite part of the game, and what felt like the series' missing hook to really sell me on the core conceit was in how this aspect is somewhat downplayed or unexplored.

By God's grace this was the kind of ecological focus MH:W absolutely relishes in. An interlinking tapestry of ecosystems ticking away, living & interacting in countless ways to make the New World feel so gd raw. And it's not just pageantry either, it plays into behaviours and environment interactions from traps to turf wars. So so so good to head out for a simple hunt to watch it blossom into a scrappy mess of tooth & claw, so so so good to go on aimless expedition to a zone and notice a new handful of behaviours from their endemic life. I’d not be able to sleep at night if I didn’t compliment the chefs on all of this, every monster in every zone is given so much purpose it’s inspiring.

One thing this series has always been great at is its environment design - the world of Monster Hunter is a land of plenty, and everything is blown out of proportion to match. You're eating sirloin steaks the size of your head, oyster side dishes that can feed an army. The tooth you built your hammer out of can sink a ship. Zones and skyboxes that coil across different unique biomes rich in visual stimuli, adding heaps of context for the world and how things are as they are. Pan the camera up at any point and you can assuredly see a spire of choral, ice or crystal towering over you from what appears to be a mile away. Hoarfrost Reach is gorgeous I need to live there NOW.

Moment to moment combat is of course good as hell. I love that it’s slow and weighty enough to separate it from a more typical Capcom character action affair. Even with the amassing layers of QoL the series has glazed itself with, World still focuses on hefty player move commitment and punishment. Every weapon here feels great and each individually recontextualises your approach to any fight, but I found a home with the Dual Blades I’m afraid. I love these stupid ale blades man!!! Basically adored the progression right up until the Furious Rajang, where the game takes a very steep swerve into grind and Raid-like Design territory I find catatonic & diagnostic. The Fatalis fight is so much fun I wish I could solo it 😢