It's so weird to me how much this game looks and feels like it just comes default in the games tab of your fresh out of the box Vista from Dell and yet it is so good.

The big drawback to the game though is the difficulty scaling - boy howdy do monsters punch way above their weight towards the latter half and really prolong the experience more than is justified.

Still worth it for a rare instance of a mythology game that doesn't suck, also has a bunch of new expansions I have yet to play so there is still some love going into this one, somehow.

Generals is a fascinating RTS as while it is a break away from the rest of the C&C franchise in terms of setting, its retained devotion to the C&C big stupid action movie formula translates very well to the War On Terror melodrama of the new setting.

I consider Generals to be an excellent "baby's first RTS", having a respectable spread of units for each of its three unique factions and requiring very little in the way of the nuisance micromanagement that has permeated the modern genre. The difficulties scale fairly hard but the game is mechanically very quick to comprehend and manage.

The standout of this game is its engine, which makes full use of the modern 3D tech to make the game an explosive monster truck rally of a game, which suits the theme surprisingly well.

Renegade is a middling game in pretty much every respect, born of a time when every publisher was trying to force their franchises to branch into new genres, in this case to haphazardly put up a fight against the rising tide of FPS games.

As a game meant to compete against Quake 3 and Halo it of course comes up laughably short - why anyone would have high expectations of a first person Command & Conquer shooter is anyone's guess, though it does possess one strange quirk of mediocre shooters in that its longer levels are the better ones of the bunch, including one very early in the campaign that stretches on for so long it almost defies belief.

Dragon's Dogma truly captures the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, and by extension tabletop roleplaying and dungeon crawls, in a way very few have ever approached. You can feel in every nook and cranny of this game the passion of the developer for fantastical medieval realms and adventures fighting monsters in dank caves and crumbling dungeons, and talking in faux-englishe accents and drinking beers that are mostly foam.

So detailed and thoughtful is this masterpiece that it even includes the party of characters made by people not taking it as seriously as you, the partially barren world not intended by the GM for you to visit, and an ending where everyone just gave up and wanted to do something else.

Brigador is the ultimate end result of a game saying "what if we just let the player play the game" and making a series of enormous toyboxes for you to stomp, drive, float, and shoot through like some fucked up crossover between the Dukes of Hazzard and Godzilla. The game reeks of absolute style and a lot of work clearly went into the gamefeel of being an unstoppable menace.

You aren't just invincible, of course, and many levels present interesting challenges of combat or stealth or sheer speed that keep you from getting complacent. In the levels with large amounts of resistance, the collateral damage system of the game truly shines the brightest as shrapnel, wreckage, and debris scatter across exploding fields of bullets and lasers as you stomp and dash through buildings and hedgerows with reckless abandon. Delightfully, the game's missions award extra payouts based on how much collateral is caused, so there is not only no penalty for engaging in the most fun part of the game, but direct encouragement to set up chaotic nightmare battles.

There's only one singular mark I have against this game, and that is that it seems extremely reluctant to truly escalate the scenarios appropriately to your own performance as a player - either your mistakes are met with immense, overwhelming resistance as every enemy on the map zeroes in on you like sharks smelling blood, or there is barely anything that happens of consequence. This means the harder levels feel a bit more like a precision platformer where I need to execute very specific orders of operations to avoid instant death, and in other levels it creates a sense of unopposed aimlessness.