“Lara Croft is a major babe…“
-Roger Ebert

I love tank controls. Every movement and every jump in this game has to be deliberate or else Lara Croft will fall 200 ft and crumple on the ground. Moved slightly to the left? Dead. Mistimed the jump? Dead. Nothing against the Tomb Raider reboot, but I think you lose the inherent thrill of danger when everything is so choreographed.

So I played through this with tank controls, obviously (after trying the modern controls for approx. three seconds), but I also played through mostly in the classic graphics style. I think the aesthetic changes in the remaster are more faithful than say, Halo:CE Remastered, but I’ll always be a classic graphics soldier (even if I also own the trilogy on original hardware).

Reminds me of the time when I was a baby and my dad and uncle were playing through the PS1 version, when my uncle accidentally saved over their last level save file when starting a new game. Horrifying! I have a baby now too, and I think he’s at about the age I was when my Dad played through it. Weird, but cool.

Speaking of the last level, I’ve always loved that you spend most of the game raiding tombs, but then it’s suddenly Turok 2 at the end. I personally think the Egypt section is the best in the game, but I’ve always loved an Egypt level. One of my favorite generic gaming aesthetics.

I recommend trying this game, but if you do, I suggest not using the modern controls, because they suck. Also quit being a baby and just use the tank controls, unless it’s for accessibility reasons, in which case good luck bc the modern controls feel busted. Just kidding do whatever you want. The modern controls do suck though.

I love this game. Not as much as Tekken 8 but it’s pretty dang good!

A surprising lack of tomb raiding for the bulk of the game.

Obviously there’s still a bunch of climbin’ around and trippin’ off ledges, but also way more auto aim combat. If for some reason you play Tomb Raider for the combat, this game is for you, but almost every area had at least one very boring level. I appreciate most of the additions, including vehicles and ziplines, but as a whole I’m more of a Tomb Raider I guy.

My playthrough had occasionally buggy lighting in the classic mode, but worked flawlessly in the modern graphics style. I think this game lends itself better to the new art better than the previous one. I’d still recommend this, as it maintains the careful platforming gameplay and beautifully solitary atmosphere of the first game, even if it is significantly more tedious in the middle.

Did you know? It's well documented that first lady Hillary Clinton was an avid player of the Game Boy during her husband's presidency. However, what isn't as well documented is how she loved the handheld system so much that she bought two of them to give to George Bush and Dick Cheney before their inauguration as a symbol of goodwill among the two parties. Bush and Cheney reportedly loved Metroid II in particular so much that the game's plot about the Galactic Federation making up some bullshit about dangerous weapons and sending Samus to SR388 was what inspired the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Deeply embarrassing.

Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.

Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.

This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.

The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.

The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.

Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.

Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.

What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.

If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.

been playing hella yugioh and moved back 2 my parents place which might indicate illness & questionable judgment 2 some (🧍‍♂️) but confident in saying this is juiced. played this with a 2016 mod or smthn similar that added in cards up until then & just went absolutely 2 town with some green/white creature spam. just gets that i like being teased a lil with some perfunctory side quests and random encounters until i can go in the shop & get that one absolutely busted card that'll take my deck from celtics shaq at the free throw line brick machine to the most consistent bomb after bomb pile u've seen since the obama administration. late 90s British pc gaming influence all over this tooooooo every piece of armor is grainy as fuck all the sorceresses & enchantress sprites are just recolored elviras every creature from beyond the grave has glowing red eyes. shit just closes itself automatically when u beat the game too no credits no nayfin this is just gaming at its finest man.

peripeteia is about to be on some LEGENDARY SHIT. i spent 15 HOURS exploring this demo - and i only played the first 3 levels, not even touching the final one (which is bigger than all of the previous combined). the elevator pitch is gloomy anime girl deus ex with fun platforming and like 50 different weapons. derivative? sure. doesn't mean it's not awesome. i can scale the biggest building in the game and then run across the rooftops of the city for zero (0) reason. there are so many areas and details in this game that serve no gameplay or narrative purpose other than to be cool. so climb buildings! look at stuff! any game that allows me that kind of kinetic freedom is an all-timer in my book. the soundtrack and audio design are on point too. idk, i don't wanna say to much already, but now that we're able to leave reviews here i really wanted to say how excited i am about this project.

oh also marie is very cute and murderous

Yakuza 5 is an anthology series.

Episode 1 - Kazuma Kiryu
“Suicidal Pedestrian Kart”
————————————————
The citizens of Nagasugai are desperate to die! It is your job to thwart the morbid plans of the populace while lawfully delivering your passengers!


Episode 2 - Taiga Saejima
“Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts: Sapporo Edition feat. Weapon Distribution Santa”
————————————————
Eat tripe, learn what a Marten is, and giggle every time Saejima says “Baba-chan”!


Episode 3 - Haruka Sawamura
“Harukatsune Miku”
————————————————
Sing and dance as you learn to stand up for yourself, but also repeat things back to authority figures verbatim and follow countless instructions without any error or deviation of any kind!


Episode 4 - Shun Akiyama
“Inept Businessman Simulator: Osaka Expansion”
————————————————
Spend very little time establishing a new office because there’s so much DANCING and KICKING to do!


Episode 5 - Tatsuo Shinada
“Brothel Baseball Chocobo Racer”
————————————————
Whack balls, race chickens, and write smut to get out of CRIPPLING DEBT!


Episode 6 - All
"Yakuzavengers: Homecoming"
————————————————
Probably the most baffling, nonsensical climax of any Yakuza game so far, but that doesn't stop it from being hype!

Trivia Time!

Luigi's Mansion was originally pitched as "Peach's Womansion", in which the Princess would fight through a house filled with ghosts that represented misogynistic tropes. However, the game was retooled as a Luigi title after it was deemed too radical for western audiences. A decade and a half later, many of the original "Womansion" ghost ideas were reused in the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and were subsequently lost to time, as no one actually watched that movie.

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!

The most amazing thing about this game is that it came out only two years after Arkham Asylum. Back before gaming devolved into a competition to see who could offer bigger open worlds and more live service content (not to mention more-realistic horse testicles), developers could make awesome, fun, full-featured games in a quarter of the time – games like this one.

Arkham City isn't a perfect game by any means. My opinion of it is a bit lower than the general consensus. Some indoor areas, like the ice lake, are a hassle to navigate, the bosses are just OK, and the balance between Batman and the secondary protagonist feels uneven. The story also plays more like a series loosely connected events than a cohesive tale.

But the great combat from Arkham Asylum has returned intact, and grappling and gliding around the city is fun and fluid. Plus there's plenty of side missions and bonus content for people who want more after the credits roll.

Look, I understand that it's not realistic for developers to churn out games like this every two years. Burnout is a real risk, and after one or two sequels, sequelitis undoubtedly rears its ugly head. But there has to be a happy medium between the nimble development of eras bygone and the ridiculously long modern dev cycles that often result in games that are simultaneously over- and under-cooked. I hope more developers find the sweet spot soon.