Man, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

For all this time, I mainly avoided the whole club aspect of this expansion pack thinking that that’s all it really added. Eh, whatever!! Maybe I don’t want my Sim to enjoy group outings with friends. But then you pull yourself back a little bit and you realize that this pack is like the main reason why there’s any LIFE in the LIFE SIMULATION game at all. I was a fool, but now.. Now I am with my tribe. In terms of completionist content for my own sick pleasure, there’s just 1 new skill and 1 new aspiration so that part is whatever. It's the actual gameplay elements that shine the brightest here though.

No, really. Arcade machines, dance floors, foosball tables, bar nights, dance clubs, cafes, civilization itself? All of that was added in this pack and it kinda makes me wonder what on God’s green Earth were Sims doing before it. Watching paint dry? Slowly aging until the sweet release of death between the walls of their solitary home? While it’s still a bit of a pain in the ass, the group mechanic allows you to control multiple Sims at once to get them to actually interact together while out. Activities can be done with several Sims, like they actually like being around each other. Before you would just kinda hope they’d sit together at the dinner table so you could have some semblance of normality in your escapist life, but sometimes that wouldn’t be where the cards fell. My wife would eat dinner on the toilet while I sat alone in the dining room. Well, not anymore!!!

They worked their pussy off creating Windenburg. It’s gotta be one of the best towns in the whole game in terms of aesthetics and things to do. It has a shit ton of empty lots to build off of for the most nasty Sims architects out there. You can visit an old antique house and learn the backstory of a random ghost couple for no reason other than.. they felt like putting it into the game? Like, it sounds stupid but I’m being serious when I say they don’t do stuff like this anymore. I’m sure as I keep reviewing these packs, there will be less and less to talk about because they get more streamlined by release order. The Sims is pretty well known for having genuinely bananas lore and questionably canonical timelines. Stuff like this just reminds me of how charming this series is at its center, even if it doesn’t really feel like it anymore.

For the club feature itself, bro I can’t tell you enough how alive I actually felt putting one together. They give you so many goofy ass options to work with in terms of club requirements and activities. It’s the kind of core dumbassery that I love experimenting with in The Sims, just a breeding ground for chaos to lay waste across your town. As your club grows more powerful, the more perks you can buy like a completely diabolical Fallout: New Vegas build. You short on change, buddy? Get your 8 friends to paint for you without a break, then collect their money. No need for romance when we’re all doing the do. I’m beating up the elderly AND cleaning up the beach at the same time. It's not like they're gonna help with that. The rewards for skill boosting are unbelievably broken in exploitative ways that I will be taking full advantage of. If I want to max a skill in under an hour, I can just buy all the skill boosting perks and then have my friends come over to watch me show off until it's 100% done.

And look, you can bark at me all day long about how this all sounds like it should have been base-game content and yadda yadda, I agree. I get it man, whabby doo, but we don’t live in this utopia that you speak of. Your dreams are just dreams and I am not the CEO of EA. You can't really talk about The Sims without someone booing and throwing tomatoes about DLC and I don't disagree with those criticisms. But, I am the ruler of my own wallet and I say that video games were actually a mistake for mankind. I am the schmuck who bought the expansions so that you don't have to, my brave soldier.

My definitive answer is that this pack is one of the better packs in the entire line-up. Is it the best ever? Naw, there's some fancier dinner plates coming down the line, but people might really enjoy the social aspect of this one and those people can use this information however they will.

Gang, gang.

"You exercise your right to 'freedom' and this is the result."
Metal Gear Solid 2 is the biggest lie ever told in gaming.
I have never seen a game with so much narrative ambition like MGS2. Theres alot to go on about regarding how it recognises its nature and fanbase expectations on it as a "sequel" to one of the most influential and acclaimed videogames of all time, but instead opts to subvert it completely. It tackles so many things at once: the nature of love, identity, digital information, truth and facts, post-modernism, reality and fiction, escapism, free will, legacy and if its nature is even worth leaving behind. Yet, it all loops back to MGS1's core messages at the end about carving your own path in life, free from outside influences.
To put it simply, Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most "anti MGS" sequel and the most "MGS1" sequel at the same time. It intentionally parodies the events of MGS1 so closely on a surface level but intentionally misses what makes those moments so special.
The game is all about carving out your own legacy, regardless of how real or fake your past is. Thats the only way we can leave any trace of life on this earth, not by imposing our ideals or genes on others but rather through stories of what we've seen, heard felt.
Anger, joy and sorrow. Building the future and keeping the past alive are one in the same thing.
MGS2 is a must play for anyone looking for proof of the artistic integrity that the gaming medium can offer. Its story is prophetic and meaningful, its gameplay is a complete overhaul of the first game's clunky combat and it has one of my favourite final acts in all of gaming that I really CANNOT spoil for you (if youve managed to avoid spoilers until now, that is). Bravo Kojima!
I wish the colonel was less mean 2 me💔💔💔💔💔

Got around to playing this game the right way and I’m glad that I did. Disregard my first review as either a solo-player's point of view or just simply the insane ramblings of a madman. We’re KeyWeing as God intended now.

This game is playable in solo mode for sure, but it’s like asking your brain to work at a level it cannot simply comprehend. With co-op you get free range of your keyboard and a buddy that will share 50% of the backbreaking work with you. How else do you people think you get your mail? Not by people, but through the blood, sweat, and tears from the most overworked, underpaid, armless birds. At least they get the benefit of informal dress codes. Please excuse my dripless friend, he’s just not quite at my level yet.

There are 4 main level designs that vary in obstacles as the game progresses which is just enough variety that keeps the game extremely fun throughout its entire playtime, which is decently lengthened. It’s enough to get through in one session and can be stretched by rechallenging the levels for better rewards, hidden items, etc. There are bonus levels with different gameplay mechanics as well and they net you more tickets for your gold mine of Kiwi cosmetics.

I think what works the best for KeyWe is how there isn’t any Overcooked! or PlateUp levels of vitriol. All three are great games with similar co-op mechanics, but there’s equal opportunity for both players to actively help in each scenario here. You can’t really impede on the other or kill your friend, which makes it a real breath of fresh air. In fact, the only thing that impeded anything were the slight moments of online desync, but it wasn’t a big issue. I found establishing a level of communication and having to shout “1, 2, 3!” before simultaneously finishing a puzzle to be rather charming. We are considering speedrunning the game now, that's how Earth shattering it was for us.

The difficulties fluctuate without ramping up to impossible degrees. While it’s a relatively easy game overall, the later levels have a fitting stress factor for the hidden masochist inside of you. The final stretch is one big, satisfying gauntlet of all of the skills you've acquired throughout. It’s not that the levels are super difficult, they’re just stressful with really well-executed shit inducing anxious music to go with them. You're a professional at this point, but the music is making you second guess yourself. The OST is actually fantastic and I’d post examples but I can’t find it ANYWHERE!!! All I have is this old trailer to work with, but it uses one of the best songs in my opinion. Classic example of the composer giving it their all, even if it’s for a short goober game about bird mailmen. Never stop.

Anyways, play KeyWe. It’s ridiculously fun.

If there’s anything in this world worth keeping alive, it’s love.

In the void that is Revachol, we see the light of love and hope slowly fade away. It is up to us to cultivate and nurture that light so it does not die. Love is not dead! As you read this, you are alive and breathing, and it's up to you to seize what remains and fight for it. We can no longer wait for some great revolution that will fix all of our problems. If you truly desire a revolution, you must create the conditions necessary to birth it!

Disco Elysium isn’t just a game about what political faction you align with or finding out who lynched the man behind Whirling-in-Rags; it’s a story about love and why we must hold onto it, even in the darkest of times. I understand that nowadays, with the current state of affairs, it's hard to believe in love and hope. It's difficult to place our hope in a future that seems to have been stolen away from us, yet that's precisely when we need it the most.

I choose to believe in love. I choose to hold on to the hope that a better future is possible, no matter what, because I believe it is. The people we know, the community we live in, and the world we inhabit are worth fighting for. Disco Elysium taught me that fixing the world and making it a better place isn’t just about picking up a gun and waging some violent revolution; it’s about cultivating community and caring for those in it. That’s where the true beauty of Disco Elysium lies.

I believe the way this game conveys that message is quite powerful. Disco doesn't make some grand showy gesture beating you over the head with its message; instead, it laboriously takes the time to show you that the world you live in is beautiful and worth fighting for. It spends the time showing you the inner lives of those around you and has you helping them, one person at a time.

There is one specific character that I feel best embodies this: Cuno. Cuno, at first, is seen to be an irrational, difficult, vulgar, and poorly-behaved child, which leads you to inevitably hate him. As you learn more about Cuno and his home life, however, you realise there’s something greater at play. He doesn’t act out for the hell of it; he is the way he is because his father is a drunk who’s fallen down on his luck due to becoming a victim of the system giving up on him and his son. He’s left with no choice. The system has abandoned Uuno and his son, leaving them both to fend for themselves and pick up the pieces. Which sadly isn’t uncommon in Revachol and the real world as well. It’s perhaps one of the most striking and poignant stories in the game. I eventually went from despising Cuno to feeling empathy for him, as I did for many others in Revachol when I learned their stories.

I believe this approach to storytelling and character writing is incredibly effective, and the best part about Disco Elysium is that these kinds of stories are all over the game. This goes to show how much love and care was put into humanising the inhabitants of Revachol, which helps make the world feel alive. Because of how well the game fleshed out its world and characters Disco Elysium was successful at conveying the message that this world is worth fighting for. Not only was I captivated by this world, but as the game drew to a close, I found myself deeply invested in the wellbeing of these characters and the city.

As I learned about these stories, Revachol’s history, and the many political factions vying for power, I realised that this game was never about solving a murder or finding which faction is "correct." It was about learning to love those around us and working together to create a better world, one step at a time. Creating a better world was never an unattainable goal conjured up in the minds of idealistic and "ignorant" kids. It is a possible reality, but it demands the working toiling masses of the world unite and work hand in hand in creating this future. It is on us to seize the future and lift eachother up when we need it most.

Never give up on fighting for this future. It is only dead when you allow yourself to be convinced that it is.

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

All games are products of their time, even ones which "bucked trends" or "were ahead of their time" are only so in comparison with their contemporaries. RE5 is interesting historically because it definitely screams 7th gen : the color grading pejoratively described as the "piss filter" of brown environments assaulted with bloom, the co-op multiplayer focus of the days where such things were starting to become mainstream in the console market, the mowing down of hundreds of racist caricatures by a buff white guy, the fact that Albert Wesker's tailor discovered normal maps and is really excited to absolutely plaster them on his jacket etc.

Its hard to avoid noticing the main two things which jump at you when playing re5, namely that its RE4 but not as good and more racist. Asset reuse is fine, honestly, even mechanics recycled from re4 arent unwelcome but its the rehashing of re4 set pieces whilst doing them worse that lets re5 down. Similarly, the ingenious inventory management mechanic of the RE4 attache case : equal parts survival horror resource management and tetris space allocation is replaced by a dull 3×3 grid whose ultimate depth involves exchanging shit to your ai partner to reload a weapon before exchanging it right back.

The multiplayer aspect makes re5 have kind of an absurd difficulty curve based on your luck in finding partners. Some sections with the Ai partner were a bit patience testing, given their passive nature and limited commands, but then Id get randomly paired up with a god on their fifth playthrough who'd hand me 300 bullets for the machine gun and absolutely tear mfers up with endgame weapons. Very funny to me as well, how certain doors and weights and stuff require the cooperation of chris and sheva because of course its too heavy for a guy whos built like a brick shithouse, he needs help from a small framed spinning instructor to move it.

That being said, its got its bright moments and thankfully the multiplayer aspect made the use of QTEs for custcenes impossible so it does have that over RE4. In all honesty, its not an AWFUL game gameplay wise. There are a few levels which are quite striking visually, namely the temple areas and the faster arcadey nature of it all makes it not better but different to the pace of RE4. The implementation of a cover system and gun wielding zombies is as stupid and unwelcome as you'd expect, and the smoking gun for me that the island in RE4 is not only the worst part of that game but an incredibly ill omen of things to come for the franchise.

I suppose I should mention the elephant in the room : the game is set in "Africa". Not very specific where in Africa except the locals speak French so theres about 20 countries that could apply to. The spectre of the war on terror looms large as the intro depicts an american leading a counter terrorism operation and soon we see Akihiko from Persona 3 doing an arab accent get executed by frenzied locals riled up by a preacher. And sure, like in re4 the reason for it all is a parasitic infestation but the visual language of the game borrows a lot from contemporary wars that its hard to miss. There are heroic black characters like Sheva and her captain buddy but they seem there more as a pre emptive defense at criticism.
Admittedly, considering the state of AAA games at the time, RE5 is not THAT much more racist that the other shooters about doing imperialism in thr global south; that is until you get to the chapter where the enemies are all black people wearing grass skirts and chucking spears at you. And im sorry but zombie or no zombie, that sequence made me surprised to find out that Rudyard Kipling's ghost didnt have a writing credit in the game.

Smarter and more personally invested people than me have already talked about this aspect so I won't go much deeper into it except to say that its an odd obsession with studios who thrive on schlock and silliness to try to delve into more serious or thorny subjects that they are not equipped to handle.