Fallout: New Vegas is, to me, the pinnacle of Fallout games. I know, I know! Fallout 2 is also within that same realm and for many, that is the ultimate Fallout game. New Vegas, however, I feel is the perfect marriage of the isometric Fallout games and the modern first-person immersive Fallouts. It's not a game about tight plotting, but a game about rewarding player agency. 13 years later, I'm still finding things in the game that I did not know you could do and handle in specific ways. By giving the players so many off-the-beaten-path choices, it rewards you so many different outcomes and experiences. 13 whole years of it for me. Obsidian doesn't always see their ideas and games come to fruition (As many are abandoned or cancelled) but when they strike gold, they strike it very rich. Both Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas are the pinnacle of Role-Playing Games in my eyes. I've often had an oddball love for janky games that are flawed that have an incredible amount of heart. My love of Cyberpunk 2077 proves just that. Obsidian's work is usually characterized by glitchy and janky products that have so much depth and heart to them that you keep finding your way back year after year.

What to expect with Fallout: New Vegas:
-A deep, complex world full of various factions with varied ideologies of the world and politics.
-A world full of interesting, twisted and often hilariously memorable characters. (Fantastic anyone?).
-Writing that straddles a very thin line of not taking sides, but allowing the player to formulate their own.
-A blank-slate player character which allows each player to fully craft/decide who they want to be and what they want to do.
-Various ways to approach any given situation. You have tons and tons of tools at your disposal and how you craft your character will give you opportunities to utilize your chosen abilities to reach your outcome.
-Tons of different builds that perfectly showcase why the difficult job of the blank-slate approach can work so well. Make up your own story!

Would I recommend this game? You're damn right I would. It ties for my favorite RPG of all-time and easily fits in my top10 games ever made. I feel like Yes Man (the only single thing in this game you cannot kill) perfectly sums up Fallout: New Vegas when he says "It's whatever you want to do!". Time for my next run!

Red Dead Redemption II is one of the single most moving and well fleshed out pieces of video games as art that I've ever been so fortunate enough to experience. An epic of loyalty, honor, love, morality and of course redemption. It's a tale of men and women who exist in a time where they don't really belong anymore. The wild west is dying and industrialization and a new civilization is birthing from the ashes of the old west and there exists a gang of outlaws fighting for survival when survival of their kind is all but hopeless. It's an inevitable collapse.

The characters are given so much room to breathe and reveal themselves that by the end, the beginning seems SO far behind. This game takes its time to reveal it's haunting dark core. The madness of their trials and errors slowly compounding and the avalanche of chaos, heartbreak and destruction that brings it all crashing down.

Arthur Morgan is as tragic as any character released in any medium. John Marston a character who gets a new shot at life ... but the sad part is knowing where that eventually leads. You cannot outrun your past. The ghosts come back to haunt you eventually.

While the first Knights of the Old Republic is a tremendous game and among the all-timers, the sequel is a rockier and murkier existence. With the restored content mod, KotOR 2 shapes up a lot better but it's still no doubt the messier game; the sequel happens to be better off for it.

KotOR tells the typical good/evil Star Wars narrative. It's the tailored Star Wars fantasy experience we had ever wanted in video game form. KotOR II wants to tell you a more subversive tale. It gets to the heart and deconstructs why the Jedi Order is so fundamentally flawed and isn't really all that much better than the Sith? That perhaps they are two sides of the same coin.

Kreia among the highest tier of any Star Wars character to date; Kreia's lesson to the Exile being that she has no qualms about how the Exile's goals are achieved, only if the choice they make has a servable purpose. That following the binary ideologies of Jedi/Sith cheapens both the Exiles and others agency. That anything done not serving your own ultimate purpose is a waste and misguided. When the choices the Exile makes; binary choices of good/bad, the reprimand from them is a tool to recontextualize the simple moral extremes.

KotOR II wants you to examine how fragile and broken both Jedi/Republic and the Sith are. It does something only The Last Jedi would attempt to do years later. I have absolutely no hesitation when I say it's the best thing to ever exist in Star Wars across any of the mediums.

"A culture's teachings, and most importantly, the nature of its people, achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves… or find themselves lacking."

Initially written Nov. 2021. Imagine this will morph a bit once the new update/DLC release.


"I love this freaking game. Why? Let me tell you about one of my oldest friends. We grew up playing Video Games in the days where games were VIDEO GAMES for the sake of being just that. AAA gaming today is so incredibly focused on these cinematic qualities of trying to mimic great cinema. In immersing the players in these vast, detailed worlds that feel truly alive. Many games made today, he struggles to really /care/ about and instead owns Nintendo as his primary way to game and a decent PC for gaming here and there. Gaming in todays age is heavily geared towards trying to create cinema in interactive form. For him, this is NOT the type of gaming he grew up loving. This is something I entirely understand. My all-time favorite game is Red Dead Redemption 2. I AM a massive cinephile. I love these kind of gaming experiences developers are putting out today, BUT ... I did grow up in that time where gaming was /VIDEO GAMES/ for the sake of PLAYING.

With that, we reach my point: Cyberpunk feels both incredibly detailed, incredibly cinematic and all-around technically impressive ... yet highly regressive. It feels like a jarring mix of these AAA cinematic immersive games, but yet feels very dated in many systems that you'd mistake some of it for being very late 90's / early 2000's. I love this. Your mileage will vary, but different strokes for different folks. The moments this game hits me with thematically rich narrative beats in a very stylish cinematic form, it grabs me. It takes hold. I eat up every kitschy minute of it. The narrative is compelling, the characters some of the best I have ever experienced in any game. The detailed world, loaded with incredible world-building has a hold on me. There is so much to love! The regressive, dated-ness is a joy factor for me too. For me, it's just super FUN to run around and PLAY! I grew up in a time where glitchy games made you often laugh at how stupid some of those glitches can be. Hell, I still play Oblivion to this day! It's a charm factor that is hard to explain to anybody who hasn't experienced the classic Bethesda model of game where events happen that can be so broken, you just end up shaking your head and laughing. Cyberpunk 2077 almost feels like great euro-jank, even though it cost 300+ million to develop.

Sure, there are things that I find could have definitely been better! The loot system I don't think is so bad that it prevents me from enjoying the game, but the randomized looting in Borderlands style isn't great. My biggest is the progression. The perks are NOT my favorite thing. Again, not terrible in a way that makes me quit playing the game, but just not great. In Fallout: New Vegas, when you take a perk, you almost always notice its stark effect on your build. It feels truly rewarding. In Cyberpunk 2077, you hardly notice. The only time you start to take note is long-term when your build starts to "fill out". Taking a perk in this game doesn't really feel exciting. The writing is mostly fantastic, but there are inconsistencies. Possibly a downfall of the open-world design. The moment you first meet Johnny in your apartment and he threatens to kill you, 5 minutes later you're getting your car crashed into by a rogue sentient AI cab driver and you just chat with Johnny like you've been friends for 30 years. It's jarring sometimes.

After having re-played both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 back to back, I am actually shocked at how incredibly similar they are. The faults of The Witcher 3 are vastly more magnified in Cyberpunk 2077 because CD Projekt Red developed a game inside the Rockstar wheelhouse. Take off those rosy glasses and get objective about it, and you'll see The Witcher 3 has many of the same issues as this game, but you didn't /care/ as much. They were easily more disguised. Both of these games are among my all-time favorites, but I won't pretend they are perfect.

Do I recommend this game? It depends on who you are as a gamer. For my money, I loved it tremendously and still love playing it despite the issues. It's imperfect. It's flawed. It's janky, but it's also so much fun and incredibly compelling. The characters are wonderful, the gameplay loop is super enjoyable (in my eyes) and it's just a joy to explore. It feels like a split between the cinematic AAA gaming experiences being marketed today, and an archaic regressive VIDEO GAME for the sake of being a VIDEO GAME to PLAY! Much like Fallout: New Vegas, it has HEART where it counts. Now if you'll excuse me, I must once again go diving with Judy."

Growing up with Harry Potter, I went years and years wondering if a genuine game would ever come out to put me into this Wizarding World someday. Being a massive RPG nut, I hoped that when it would, it would be in that genre.

It took 25 whole years for it to happen but when it was announced, I was suddenly young again and full of excitement for it. Blood Meridian, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Infinite Jest; these are some of my favorite novels ever, but nothing means more to me than the Harry Potter series. I've always loved the calm of them. The mundane, everyday ordinary lives the characters often lead much like any of us ... JUST WITH MAGIC!

When Hogwarts Legacy released, I was thrilled and was in awe of many things from the get-go of the game. In particular, the castle is a stunner. For 15 whole hours, MOST of my time was spent around Hogwarts and Hogsmeade (which I consider kinda attached to the magic of the castle). I loved solving little puzzles and secrets and reading field pages around the school.

It's a pretty enjoyable 3.5/5 because it does some genuinely wonderful things: mood/tone of the world is great, it's visually gorgeous, the combat is decently satisfying, and just overall it really does nail the feel of the wizarding world quite well.

It's also one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. I can't consider it a bad game, but it misses the mark on some core things that, on my end, are pretty essential here. There is very little player agency. Not much of anything you do matters. A lot of the design contradicts itself often as you're railroaded into one particular path without consequence. Another is the horrid loot system. My favorite games in this genre genuinely REWARD exploration of the map. The worst games in this genre are just busy-work checklists. By the time you find your 20th legendary scarf, it's hard to really care since it's the same as the one you found 10 minutes ago. This doubles as an issue with the ubisoft style game design that I can't stand. Meaningless checklists / busy work filler instead of more unique and meaningful encounters and rewards that feel earned. You have very little effect on the story and world at large and everything outside of the castle feels just utterly tedious. NO, I WON'T DO 95 FUCKING MERLIN TRIALS!

Had the game had more hand-crafted experiences outside the school and rewarding the player with unique experiences and items that fueled that feeling of wanting to explore, this could have been amazing. As it is, it's the most disappointing game I've played in 2023.

Christ, I thought the takes around Baldur's Gate 3 were exhausting but this is something else. It's almost impossible to find reasonable people to discuss the game with right now.

I'm about 50 hours in so I can't give this a definitive rating just yet but at current standing, I'd say it's about a 4/5 but also possibly my favorite game I've played this year. It's the throwback janky Bethesda game I've needed for 15 years. More akin to Oblivion and Fallout 3 in design philosophy than Skyrim or Fallout 4.

The UI is pretty downright awful and thankfully a mod exists to already improve on it. Space travel is of course lackluster and I can't ignore that it could have possibly felt more kinetic but overall, it doesn't actually personally bother me at all.

The quests so far are the best they have done since '08 and I love that. It's also an aesthetically pleasing experience and the various art designs are great and overall I'd say it's just a mostly 'beautiful' looking game outside of some pretty downright hilariously silly NPCs. Seriously, the bug-eyed citizens gawking at you is giving me some serious Oblivion NPC vibes and I kinda love it. There's some poor textures that can crop up and a few models that feel flat but MOST I'd say are pretty fantastic. The weapon designs rock too.

I don't think ANY of their RPGs are flawless experiences ... but I love 'em anyway. This is no exception.

The new 2.0 update to the game plus the full DLC, Cyberpunk 2077 is in a fantastic place. It's like a brand new game. Me? I understood the issues/flaws on release, but I still adored the game despite them. It's in my top10 all-time games.

For me, so much going on around your character V is reflective of such a "Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll" experience and in equal measure, a game about why friendship is the most important thing in the world when the world around you is such a dumpster fire of a place. For me, it rocked in 2020 and it rocks even harder in 2023.

The trailer for the show (I'm apprehensive as can be considering this is my favorite game franchise of all-time) has given me a drive to re-play through the entire series again (not you 76, fuck off).

I re-played Fallout 1 last week and just beat my re-play of Fallout 2 last night and for years, I found the first game generally the superior game. It was tighter, more focused and it has this mix of Post-Apocalyptic / Post-Post-Apocalyptic nature. It's a desert shithole and you really get the feeling everything is a total struggle for the people of the wasteland. There's a sort of sparsity to the world. It's genuinely bleak. Fallout 1 also has this real sense of urgency to the entire thing. It's a game where you feel just any moment, everything could collapse. I love that.

Fallout 2 is a far bigger game and at times, you could mistake it for being bloated even. There's A LOT of stuff to do. What strikes me so much on this re-play is just HOW incredibly interconnected its world is and how much it feels sensible and almost tangible. When people describe it as a Post-Post-Apocalyptic game, I think that's an ace view. So much of Fallout 2 is about being REBUILT. The bombs fell a long time ago; people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and did their best then to rebuild. It's different, but equally gives the same strong time and place feeling as the first game in my eyes. It's not just reaping purely from its former, but it has a mind to do its own thing.

Some bemoan the "jarring" humor of the game and how it breaks you from the immersion of the world and I can definitely understand that criticism. On my end, it 'mostly' is just amusing asides to break me from the bleak nature of the setting. Different strokes.

I 'love' Frank Horrigan for the fact that he's just geninely terrifying and his design is incredible and the voice-work is fantastic, but he's less complex than The Master and I also dislike that the only option is to actually fight him. Even then, I've always felt both The Master and Frank Horrigan would have benefited from a few personal interactions with the Vault Dweller / Chosen One throughout the course of both games before the final confrontations just to really build up each and showcase just how awesome both are.

There's many aspects of the sequel that tempt me to place it ahead of the first. It's a tough choice but one thing is for sure on my end, they are two sides to the same coin and some of the best role-playing games you can lose yourself in.

Gearing up for a re-play of this probably after I finish my Fallout marathon of the franchise.

I remember in 2019 reading people describing this as either the spiritual successor to Fallout: New Vegas or a failed / mediocre one and I thought to myself ... no, more like Fallout 1.

It says Obsidian, but this wasn't the team who made New Vegas. This in so much of its game design philosophy and construction is essentially riffing on the first Fallout and really, that should be no real surprise why that is: Cain / Boyarsky.

I've read criticisms towards the thematic nature of the game being shallow and not much being done with themes around unchecked power / capitalism, corporate greed and exploitation of its workers and people. That it has no real solution to any of it and sure, I get it. I remember just generally finding it a light-hearted romp with some zany funny characters, some genuinely well-written zingers in there wrapped around half-way decent gameplay. Could be better, but far from terrible.

Looking forward to my re-play here soon which will be coming off me finishing Fallout: New Vegas (for the 36th time).