I had only ever played Dead Space 3, and that was with a friend, so this was my first real introduction to the classic Dead Space. This 2023 remake is nothing short of a masterpiece for the survival horror genre. Systems which were annoying were improved significantly, the developers absolutely nailed the atmosphere and tone, the game is gorgeous, and any new features fit seamlessly into the Dead Space story. This is one of a very small list of remakes where I would whole-heartedly recommend playing it over the original.

As I said, I never played the original Dead Space, but I have really enjoyed watching others who have played it fall in love with the 2023 remake as well.

Hopefully rumors of the DS2 remake being canceled are false because I would love to see another with this level of love and care for the original.

Squadrons was an incredible flight sim game for those itching to fly in iconic Star Wars fighters. I can even fly my all-time favorite, the TIE Defender.

It is a shame the multiplayer community disappeared so quickly, which caused multiplayer matches to quickly be against very competitive players. I ended up really only playing against bots or with other players against bots, because it just was not fun anymore.

I really enjoyed learning the nuances of the power management system as well as some of the more advanced flight controls.

I would have loved to see a camera mode for Squadrons because the game is nothing short of gorgeous.

An unfortunate miss for the Halo franchise. Play with the original graphics only because CEA's remastered graphics do a significant disservice to the CE campaign and are in no way faithful to the original. Areas which were intentionally dark are bright and lit up, which ruins the atmosphere and tone and many models do not actually match up with their original hitboxes. There are sections of levels which appear to be walled off in the anniversary graphics which were completely open in the original, and you can just walk through the walls! It feels sloppy and like it was made with very little care to the original Halo.

Halo 5 was the first and only Halo game where I played the campaign once and did not ever play it again. The campaign felt like it was being pulled in so many different directions that it didn't feel cohesive, and later missions just turned into throwing a bunch of Wardens at the player. It took me a while to come to terms with the story, especially after the Hunt the Truth campaign teased a completely different one. I think an especially huge miss was not explaining any of the gap between 4 and 5 in game and instead relying on players to read comics and other outside fiction. I have read every Halo book, many multiple times, and was hugely disappointed to find out that Chief and Blue Team's reunion was essentially brushed over in a comic series. I think I would be ok with what the story started, but, in typical 343 fashion, they drop all of the story threads in Halo Infinite, so Guardians just becomes a weird canon island.

Halo 5's multiplayer was a blast. It was incredibly fast and really emphasized the new movement system. While some movement mechanics were definitely overpowered such as the charge and ground pound, 5's multiplayer was so fun to play at a high level because it was so fast.

The REQ system was a frustrating way to unlock customization options, I ended up using a spreadsheet which tracked my unlocks and told me the most optimized way to purchase the three tiers of REQ packs in order to maximize my unlocks. It made sense for weapons, vehicles, and other tools specific to Warzone, but locking customization items behind random chance was a big miss in my opinion.

Warzone was a blast, especially with a group of friends who could coordinate well. Unfortunately it was overshadowed and ruined by full teams of 12 dominating and farming teams of random players. Warzone games were very easy to get snowballing, and you could have one team pulling out highly overpowered tanks and other vehicles while the other is essentially stuck getting spawn killed in their base with nothing but ARs.

Warzone Firefight was an interesting new take on the firefight formula from previous Halo games, and it definitely made using some of the highest tier weapons and vehicles feel much more fun because you weren't afraid to lose them, generally.

Halo 5's forge was another huge step, and the PC forge tool, Halo 5: Forge was a game changer for making content.

I really loved working hard with a large group of people to unlock the Achilles armor and helmet, and it will forever be one of my proudest gaming accomplishments.

343 released an announcer pack for a few dollars which added a few new announcers to multiplayer, Buck and Exuberant Witness were my favorites by far. Something similar today would be significantly more expensive.

I would love to see H5 make a PC release one day, and I think the high speed of the gameplay would be very popular on PC. Halo 5: Forge was passable for forging, but custom games were rough because H5F suffered from severe amount of input lag, the engine was not fully PC-ready.

An excellent campaign and first start for 343 Industries. I really enjoyed diving into forerunners after Greg Bear beautifully fleshed them out in the Forerunner book trilogy. I do find myself skipping enemies after a while because encounters get boring and tedious, Halo 4's campaign suffers from the gameplay loop of run somewhere -> push button -> kill enemies -> run somewhere.. , but is otherwise very fun with a great variety of settings.

Spartan Ops was an interesting addition and the original weekly episodic release made every week a blast. I do not think SpOps was a good replacement for Firefight, but it scratches the PvE itch enough. It is a shame that the next set of SpOps were canceled as I would have liked to see where the story continued.

Halo 4 is the first case of 343 creating amazing story threads which they end up dropping in the next game, Halo 5, where they do the same thing, and then do it a third time in Halo Infinite.

The standard multiplayer was fun, but it does deserve some criticism for the loadout system. If you take out the loadout system, it feels like a newer take on the classic Halo formula, so I tended to stick to playlists which disabled it. I did use the loadout system for a while, but it does become very meta heavy and being able to spawn with weapons such as plasma grenades and plasma pistols gets very overpowered very quickly.