DAMN 💢💢 THOSE ALIEN BASTARDS ARE GONNA PAY FOR DOWNLOADING MY RIDE ‼️ ‼️ ‼️
There are certainly better games where you hold RT until you reach the end of the track, but few that accomplish this much in so little runtime. Excellent-feeling controls that are a perfect match for the blisteringly fast, topsy-turvy obstacle-courses this'll digitize your way. It could be a bit of a sticking point that the main story isn't particularly difficult, but it's adherence to atmosphere and unbroken speed is more thrilling than the game devolving into Happy Wheels imho. Adore the sound design and the slicing mechanic!!!

https://i.imgur.com/AbGZYCb.png
Game's heavier than a honey baked ham!!!
For every moment in Yakuza 5 that lead me into thinking I was playing an untamed vortex of passion and uncompromised vision, there were two-to-five other uncomplimentary moments that felt like spinning plates and taking the meandering narrative for walkies. Spreads its roots far & wide across so many ideas and gameplay concepts that, on paper, scans as a maximalist daydream I'd love to lose myself in, but all of it feels so perfunctory and checklisty. Fifty different minigames to micromanage and level up in individually to access Harder Levels of said minigames - - - Vidcon Gospel since time immemoria but my patience has limits :(

Haruka's chapter was probably my personal standout, if only with thanks to how vastly different her story played to any character to come before. The rhythm battles were so fun albeit with the game's slim tracklist, and her substories took on a refreshing dynamic too. The combat in these games has never impressed me but I'd much rather play an unimpressive rhythm game than a brawler I've lost heart in. From a narrative perspective, it is infuriatingly complacent with the practices Japanese idol industry in a way I find legitimately toothless in a series that tends to dedicate fisticuffs to rooting out corruption and it makes Haruka's characterisation weaker as a result.
When came the Shinada chapter I was desperately hoping the end credits would finally begin to roll, which is a shame because he and Koichi's dynamic is probably my favourite spark of character chemistry in the entire series.

I in complete honesty couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the final hours. This was a game I had started months ago and it rather hilariously demanded for me to recall with perfect clarity a cloak and dagger conspiracy that happened in the initial chapters. The overarching story was a wash for me but I much preferred when the leading cast were locked in their own little bubbles, & exploring their own vignettes about dreams lost & worth aspiring 4. Truly believe that in another world, this would have been a younger me's One Playstation 3 Game For The Month and I'd have completely melted into it - but sadly, I had to play this in incredibly granular sessions that largely felt like clocking in for community service.

“I'm a thin girl do I fucking look like I play video games? I'd rather play dead at a necrophilia convention.“ meee anytime a man tries to talk to me about video games

the space that’s between insane (mall goth/scene girl) and insecure (tumblr grunge)

written like weird and cynical pomo books of the 90s, underneath that hate there’s a lot to be said about how sad and listless the experience of being a teenager in general is and esp when ur shaped at a rlly young age from traumatic events that had nothing to do w u. most of the characters r just rlly sad and depressing ppl but cover that up w irony, zillenial ass vn. think nicole is like so insanely well written esp w how she deals w her trauma.

one of the only pieces of media ive consumed where it rlly gets across how sociopathic and entitled being a teenage girl is. ik this was written by a man but more often than not I felt that this was fairly empathetic towards the women in the game. think “hell is a teenage girl” type media only works for me as parody or melodrama, when aiming for realism it kind of falls entirely flat for me bc being a teenage girl feels too big to be constrained as realistic fiction. it’s why margaret (2011) hits hard for me but lady bird (2017) doesn’t

lowk huge into every single ending just being on a sliding scale of bad, there’s no true or good ending, it just all sucks lol. much like how being a teenage girl in hs sucked and much like how there’s no true experience to that or to womanhood in general. rlly rlly cynical worldview so I do get if someone doesn’t fuck w it but for me it worked so wonderfully bc wasn’t scared to show realistic scenarios and conversations just done through a v heightened way

After finishing this, I'm completely at a loss for what I should rate it. On the one hand, by committing so hard to making a game about Fucked Up Shit, you're going all-in on your jokes landing with the audience and they definitely do not always land. It's pretty easy to see why people are comparing this to Always Sunny (especially early IASIP) but one of IASIP's big strengths is weaving together A- and B-plots while peppering in other jokes, and the truth is that Class of '09 never has as much going on as IASIP does in any given episode, so you kinda gotta be on board with whatever sociopathic shit Nicole is getting up to. There are entire endings whose comedic premise just did not work, leaving us grimacing for 15-30 minutes straight as Nicole accidentally gets roped into an actual hate crime. It's got some clever jokes but you're just as likely to run into a 5-minute bit where the entire joke is "this person is being horrendously mean for literally no reason". (Note: I haven't played the first game, so I've almost certainly got some misplaced sympathy)

I gotta admit, though, it was a blast to stream this thing in a Discord call. It's got some really solid voice acting and the auto-text does a lot for comedic timing that could've easily been ruined if you let players click through this at their own pace. The game loves presenting you with some wild-ass choices too, so a lot of the fun is clicking shit like "commit charity fraud" or "skip school with the violent alt girl" and watching things immediately spiral out of control into "multiple felonies" territory. Emily is the greatest character of all time.

(this whole thing has me wondering what we're in for when that 20-year nostalgia cycle really hits)

Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.

Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.

The unenviable task of developing a "revamped and remade version of Princess Maker 2" by truncating PM2 PC's filesize from 50mb to a Super Famicom cartridge's 4mb laid waste to all manner of content and the sloppy debugging is riddled with bulletholes as a result. Even though the presentation here is kind of lovely and I adore the animations for events and the new cast and artwork - this is a game about planting your feet into the matrix, reaching into the fold, and pulling out 50,000 gold coins from the ether alongside a marriage event flag you never asked for.

a buffet of gorgeous animations and sound effects, just a feast for the eyes and ears. whoever is doing the marketing for this game needs to stop drowning everything in music because the one video the game has on its YouTube channel that showcases the sounds is the best sales pitch they've got. listen to how chunky those energy weapons are!

it's been fine-tuned mechanically, too - the key to avoiding damage is rapidly and constantly repositioning around your enemies' predictable attacks. they're varied in a way that continually adds to the challenge without ever making you feel like you died to bullshit: lots of attacks that limit the playable space in different ways keep you dancing around while you dodge more direct, heavy-hitting attacks, so if you're surprised that you died then you probably missed the tell. healing is doled out frequently but in small amounts that expire quickly, so you can only benefit from it if you're willing to risk your skin to grab it. a more skilled player than i might turn this into a really impressive montage seamlessly blending jumping, strafing, goomba stomping some guys, and using the rails to skate out of there, but that ain't me. in fact, the rails are a cool idea that i find mostly useless, since they're finicky enough and enemies are straightforward enough for most of a run that the rails are more trouble than they're worth. in any case, if you feel like getting creative with your movement then you'll likely be rewarded for doing so, since the game challenges you very early to start thinking about each combat arena as a 3d space.

i don't think the game strikes out on any particular element, either - even my harshest criticisms boil down to "this works, but I want something more interesting from you guys". the classes are your action roguelite staples: a pet class, a stealth/assassin class, the works. there are a variety of good builds, but they tend to fall into a few categories (auto-crit, elemental application, marking enemies, a few gimmicks based around your class abilities) and once you settle into one comfortable build, the game will do very little to make you change it. the quest items push you to revisit old areas but i just do not like receiving an item deep into a run that does nothing until i die and reach chapter 3 again. i wish these things gave some kind of buff for the run in which you pick them up, even if its a trivial one.

it's good though, it's a well-crafted game and i'm finishing this review now because i started writing last night and stayed up way too late actually playing the thing instead. starts out pathetic baby easy mode and ramps up pretty significantly until you're convinced that you could have a pro Overwatch career, playing first-person ikaruga as you melt your screen with ricocheting crits and a grenade launcher that carpet bombs them with ever-changing elemental damage. i can't really give a stronger endorsement than that. you get to feel like the best soldier 76 player in the world and you don't even have to play overwatch. that's a pretty good deal if you ask me

Pretty great season honestly. The Italo map is up there with the strongest the game has ever had, I don't even mind that I'm playing it on max settings and hitting 40fps because it's worth the lumens. Not keen on mods as someone who thinks games keen out too much on firearms as is, and all its implementation here really accomplishes is making half of the sniper rifle drops useless. The medallions are cool because they’re something of a bluffing game. Is this dude carrying the medallions around because he’s a huge badass who can handle multiple players knowing where he is on the map, or is he just an incompetent iPad 9 year old being kept alive by the stock market value of Peter Griffin Coin. I know the additions of Rocket Racing, Lego Fortnite & Festival are technically counted as entirely new standalone games but it's funnier to consider them as just little distractions/cooldowns for after you and your friends have wrapped up a Battle Royale sesh. Like when it comes down to it the Harmonix skeleton crew created a gamemode that is no better than an Only Up obstacle course map. Rly fun, I've been strapped into the Tim Sweeney metaverse electric chair since 2017 and I don't see myself breaking free any time soon, why should I when the Butter Barn's got butter plate specials that'll treat ya right?

(I'd like to go on the record as saying that I bought the Fear & Hunger games before the video essayists got to it.)

It's oft said as a maxim, "To steal from one is plagiarism, to steal from many is research". A common thread amongst many retro throwback indie games you see come out is a slavish devotion to a single game, or some dubious rose-tinted era that never really existed. Indie devs who's only real creative aspirations are "What if I made Chrono Trigger again?". Fear & Hunger 2: Termina at a glance could easily be thrown under this umbrella as well: it's plot is a whole-sale reference to Majora's Mask (if you couldn't already tell from the title alone). There's an enemy in-game that's just Art the Clown from Terrifier. Silent Hill, old internet urban legends, H. P. Lovecraft, Hellraiser, the list goes on and on. Termina could easily be filed under this umbrella of unfocused & derivative pop-culture worshipping games, but despite being outwardly familiar, Termina's greatest strength is it's sense of mystique and magic; it's ability to feel like a truly unknowable black box of psychosexual Eurojank horror.

Termina uses its myriad base of familiar inspirations and influences as a jumping-off point, a way to set your expectations before it pulls the wool over your eyes and shows you what it truly wants to accomplish. With a cast of 14 unique characters (8 of which are playable, each with unique ways they affect the core gameplay loop) and a 3 day time limit, there's a sense of wonder as you try (and die) again over and over, with each playable character & NPC having some kind of obscure interaction with other characters or the world that you can stumble upon multiple hours into your 5th or 6th playthrough still. It's structure of a large and relatively static world map, coupled with a downright sadistic and unfair difficulty almost lends Termina the air of a masocore game a la I Want to Be the Guy or Kaizo Mario. It's about venturing head-first into a challenge and getting your ass handed to you in a way so insane and out of left-field you almost laugh at the sheer absurdity of it if you weren't so pissed about your last save being an hour and a half ago.

Saving your game at a bed advances time and causes characters to move around, potentially die, and limit your ability to explore, yet is also the only reliable way to access the game's leveling mechanic to improve your character. Powerful enemies can randomly show up around town and deliver total party wipeouts. While enemy positions and item boxes are static in each playthrough, their appearances and contents are otherwise completely random and up to chance. This risk and reward throughline forces a different approach each playthrough with enough variety that it always feels like you're never truly in control of the situation, no matter how many shotgun shells your carrying around or how many people you have in your party, and it manages to keep up the incredibly tense horror even after you've been desensitized to the horrific monster designs & nightmare scenarios with the constant looming threat of losing progress.

Termina is a dubiously tactful psychosexual nightmare of a game that I can't get enough of. While it will no doubt be picked apart down to its very cogs in the future, I'm enamored by it's mystical black box nature and I hope the future updates this game is planned to recieve flesh it out even more. I can say with confidence that Termina is a cult classic in the making, and a bold new entry into the RPG Maker Horror canon.

A tremendously handsome visual novel, illustrated by the talented Aogachou. The character designs are pretty good across the board, but the key art in particular is nothin short of breathtaking and captures that brothers grimm vibe the story is trying to shoot for..

Believe me, I find nothing more boring than technical complaints in a video game review, but if this thing was held together with spit and a dream it'd only be more structurally sound. We're talking 'every launch is a dice roll as to whether or not u'll make it past the intro fmv'-grade craftsmanship here.
There is no save system - the text scroll animation is so agonisingly slow - no skip function - crashes constantly - there is a folder in the game's root titled & i'm not shittin u: "BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame" lol. At a certain point you just need to cut your losses and just remake the game in Ren'Py my guy.

Apparently the story and screenplay was by Suzuki Kazunari, one of the writers behind Shin Megami Tensei - and more convincingly "Additional Crew" for a bunch of other shit. He's on the Steam store description looking really funny in a little credit portrait they gave him. I dunno man it's kinda rough, yet another unmarinated dark fairy tale from a twisted mind type beat. A horse has sex with a sleeping 14 year old almost immediately as a tone setter. I can't be fucked with it honestly.

Of the three new games put in fortnite in the last week or so, Festival is by far the most fitting. Lego Fort feels a bit tacked on and barely keeps touch with the main platform, and Rocket Racing feels like a minigame for Rocket League that for some reason, is found in fortnite, but Festival actually kinda makes sense. It's actually shares the styling of fortnite for one thing, but is also a pretty reasonable extension of the relationship the main game has had with celebrity and music for the past near-decade now. Add on top fortnite's very obvious avenues for the monetisation and licensing of everything involved with a rhythm game and it really feels like this should really work. It's so easy to visualise the way it should be - get the Weeknd skin and it comes with a Weeknd emote and a few tracks to use in what is basically rock band 5, the new live service music game that could ride on for god knows how long.

Well, first problem with that is Harmonix have presumably lost all the staff that knew how to make rock band, because festival is just fundementally terrible, keeping the worst aspects of rock band (multiplier scoring, uninteresting charting, difficulty coming from endurance and repetitive notes, note accuracy not mattering), but worse.

Main issue is really the charting. It is, for one, shockingly easy, with even the very hardest currently available chart (Kendrick Lamar's I on expert, vocals), being barely a mid-level Rock Band chart in terms of diffculty, and games like even the relatively casual DJMAX wouldn't rate it about the bottom half of its difficulty scale. Realistically, that alone is enough for the game to really fall apart for even new rhythm gamers quickly as there is next to no challenge, but the woes go further than that. In an adapatation to making this work on controller face buttons, the chart is now secretly split into two, a bit like djmax, and opposite holds arent allowed (i.e you cant hold the middle and fifth button on expert because they would be the Square and Circle PS5 Buttons simultaneously). Whilst this isnt a distaster on it's own, combined with the already weak charting of Harmonix and you end up with some extremely unengaging rhythm gameplay. It's repetitive and boring.

The song choices are just shit too. The licensors might have truly pulled all the big guns, but protip, Seven Nation Army, a song that repeats the same 3 second riff for 4 minutes, is not a good track for a rhythm game. A whole bunch of tracks will have 30 second plus sections where you just wait and emote, i guess? Don't put that in your rhythm game!

This last thing probably is a result of, for some reason, still sticking to the old guitar-drums-voacls-bass set up for song charts despite that no longer being neeccessary, and them all fundementaly playing identically due to the loss of peripherals and lack of imagination.

The nail in the coffin is really the monetisation, which is really poor. I know music licensing is silly and that rhythm games often come with a tax, but a super limited rotation of free songs, an awful battlepass that's twice the price as the BRs, and $4 a pop if you want to keep a song with no other frills attached is twice as bad as rock band's traditional pricing, which itself was pushing it. And when that's put side by side with content for the real game at a more reasonable price, it sticks out even worse.

I don't want to even bother talking about the Jam Stage feature, one of the most worthless game features ive ever seen, which lets you mix some samples with friends. It's remarkably limited, doesnt sound good, and you get a whole two tracks to sample from. It's embarassing.

The other two additions to Fortnite this month, rocket racing and lego fortnite, are also bad - Rocket Racing is kinda boring and Lego is cursed by being a survival crafting multiplayer game, basically delivering it straight to the pit of medicority, but Festival is the biggest stinker, and a huge waste of potential. Given time and a lot of work and deep discounts, epic can probably force it to be a long term thing - but the start here is the worst game i've played from Harmonix and you have to wonder whether they will just dump this and go all in on the lego.

Most of the conversation I’ve seen around Venba has revolved around the story of the entire family the game is about, but centered on the point of view of Kavin, the child. A second generation immigrant, Kavin experiences the social pressures of otherness growing up and we see this expressed through his own insecurities with his situation and his attempts to fit in throughout his life as well as via the way his mother Venba vents her frustrations with how she feels he’s rejecting his culture and his family, with his dad Paavalankind of caught in an empathetic middle ground. I get why this happens – I think a lot of the people who like, actually play the game are more likely to identify with Kavin, and the game shifts more focally to his perspective in the back half, and he’s admittedly something of a reflection of the lived experiences of the game’s lead designer, whose life the game is heavily drawn upon. And I don’t want to downplay Kavin’s experience; obviously modern second gen kids’ relationships with their parents are stories that a lot of people connect strongly to – it’s a really common thing in my generation. But when I was playing the game I couldn’t help but find myself so much more drawn to Venba herself.

My wife is from India, and while it seems kind of funny in hindsight there was in fact a lot of hubbub when we first got together. We were dating in secret for a long time because there was sure to be controversy over my whiteness and my religion. When we got found out it was a little longer before I was allowed to meet her parents and then a lot longer before I felt like, actually accepted, which is fair. Things were very different from how they were expecting things to go, even if my wife herself never really planned to adhere to these expectations. I always thought her mom HATED me though, even after the CONTROVERSY of our relationship cooled off. She was so quiet around me, so distant, and I never knew how to talk to her. But it turned out she also felt that way about me. Insecure and weird about this stranger that she felt like she had zero common ground with.

Eventually we bonded over two things: our mutual love of roasting the shit out of my wife and my sincere appreciation for her cooking. She’s got this deep well of recipes and they’re all so fuckin good dude but neither of her kids have any real interest in cooking like at all, even before my wife became too disabled for that to be something she could realistically do, so I think she took some genuine pleasure from it when I started asking persistently for her to teach me how to make some of her stuff when we would visit each other, and now I have a pretty good stock of family recipes that’s still steadily growing, with my wife and mother-in-law’s seal of approval. (In fact I would say that if you have a working knowledge of how to cook most basic Indian foods then most of the puzzle elements of Venba will be essentially negated because it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal, a masala is a masala and a biryani is a biryani and a dosa is a dosa). But I’ve also spent a lot of time with her now over the years, doing this stuff, and a pretty good amount of time with her alone, and you start to know people, and I see so much of her in Venba.

A woman who moves about as far away from her life, her home, her family as it is possible to move, unwillingly, as a matter of practicality, Venba never quite assimilates. A qualified, highly educated worker in her home country arbitrarily unable to find work in her new one for racist reasons, relying on a stressed partner to make ends meet while she handles domestic duties and isolates herself, partially because her new society rejects her and partially because she rejects it. “I have Paavalan,” she says at one point. “I have Kavin.” There are all kinds of reasons why and they might even create a twisted ouroboros sometimes but ultimately Venba just doesn’t like it in Canada, and she did like it in India, and if she had her way she would probably just like, go home. It hurts her to be apart from her parents when they get old and get sick. It hurts her to see her son so easily slip into this culture she feels embittered towards and treat her like part of the embarrassing thing to leave behind.

I think my mother in law feels that way a lot of the time, especially since both of her children have left the nest, although this is where her experience diverges from Venba’s. My wife and her brother are very close to their mom, and I think that’s part of what anchors her here, despite everything. They don’t have the contentious relationship that Venba and Kavin have that gives Venba kind of a freedom to return to where she’s happy, or to necessitate the reunion and reconciliation that they loosely share in the final chapter. ac

While my secondhand experience with a life that Venba so strongly evokes in my mind’s eye does make me feel a little frustrated at how cleanly this game resolves its lingering conflicts by the end of it all, I don’t think it falls into the trap of, as a friend of mine wisely phrased it yesterday, “barren sentimentality” that I think even well-meaning games often fall into when they try to tackle real subject matter. Venba may be a short game whose focus on food and small scope limits the windows into these lives that we’re allowed to peer into, but its dialogue is often cutting, it knows when not to pull punches, and it says a lot without words.

The writing is uniformly excellent but I think the best stuff is consistently the way the game communicates without words. The way Kavin’s letters unfold more slowly across his word balloons when he speaks Tamil vs when his parents do or when he’s speaking English for most of the game because he’s less comfortable with the language; the way that the last time you play as Venba there’s minimal interactivity because at this point in her life she’s memorized her recipes and developed her own techniques and using newer equipment for the most part, so there are no puzzles to solve and all the game asks from the player is a couple of button presses or stick rotations; the way that when you’re playing as Kavin he just kind of drops or tosses ingredient containers gracelessly back onto the counter vs the way Venba would put them back down like a normal person. There’s a moment where you’re texting and the game is auto-advancing the conversation but once you’re given the freedom to exit the conversation you can actually scroll up and see the entire thing again, including the beginning chunk of it that you weren’t originally shown and it is as horrible as you would imagine. Venba is such a short game and its vignettes are necessarily so focused that this intimate attention to detail makes a huge difference in the texture of the world.

Applicability is very real, I suppose. On its face Venba is an incredibly generic immigrant story, with only the food angle making it stand out narratively, but even then it isn’t even the only “wholesome indie game about a second generation immigrant trying to reconnect somehow to a parent via family recipes” that I know of off the top of my head. We all know people who have lived the broad details of this family’s story. But the particular voices that come out of their mouths are bold and articulate and human. Enough for it to evoke specific traumas in my wife, who loved this game, enough to make me wistful about my relationship with her mother, which is occasionally complicated. And I know other people who have felt similarly. It’s easy for me to imagine a lesser version of this game and I’m glad I don’t have to talk about that one haha.

As I write this we’re four days into a six day visit from my wife’s dad, whom I often struggle to get along with, and who doesn’t know that I’m transgender, and her brother, who is cool but who left early this afternoon. Today has been the first time we’ve had a break from work or being around them constantly since they arrived. It’s been a long and stressful week, but getting a couple hours to play through this game was in turns relaxing and sad and fun and cathartic. And we’re about to go out to eat at a South Indian restaurant with her dad, which was a happy coincidence that we’ve had planned for a couple of weeks. I think we’re gonna go ham on some dosas. Maybe try not to cry about Venba while we do.

I think I'm more positive on this one than most because I actually quite enjoy the core mechanics and track design here. Collision handling is terrible though and makes the middle of the pack racing feel like casino, and I wonder if it's Fortnite's fault cause Rocket League doesn't have this problem whatsoever. If epic has balls they'll turn the collisions off entirely and turn Rocket Racing into their version of Trackmania, crank out wilder and trickier courses, but they won't. Still fun, and kids don't know how to drift for shit so you'll be always second or first until at least the gold rank.