TF2's situation in 2024 reminds me of a comic i read (not saying the title otherwise spoilers) where the main character dies and goes to heaven, and in heaven he meets god; who is this fat slob that doesn't do anything about all the terrors on our planet. the mc suggests he pays attention to the world and god says- "OOOOH, SORREEEE!! i only created THE UNIVERSE!!! your'e right i should be out running LAPS."

its obv im comparing gabe to god. the news, infestation and crimes i hear about on TF2 genuinely disturbs me. i understand online playerbases dwindling down and eventually dying but atm i dont see this ending well for us. hot take but i think we need to pull the plug, its not that i want TF2 dead but lets be real: do we REALLY expect valve to do anything that requires a moderate amount of effort? idk these are just my 2 cents.

edit: just to add so i dont come off as someone that doesnt care: my ideal wish for this game would be for valve to hand it off to fans that can manage the entire game system (ie: zesty jesus, uncle dane, or just good willed people)

I’m not typically a fan of board game games, but this one will always have a special place in my heart. Sort of a Monopoly derivative, this takes everything that makes that game such a slog to set up and keep track of, and makes it all automatic, adding more content and mechanics that straight digital ports of monopoly lack depth in. I’ve sunk many hours in this game over the years, and it’s one I keep coming back to; even playing by myself with CPUs is a joy. I will say, if you’ve played this game enough, the objective beats sort of start getting repetitive; owning a whole district is sort of broken, and becomes its own win condition, but sometimes fate doesn’t roll in your favor, so every game is a new day. I love how casually this is a Mario x Dragon Quest crossover, and I love all its idiosyncratic charm.

It's not that Ridge Racer V is a bad game, it's just that it's not Ridge Racer Type-4. Really, it's almost unfair to compare them. How do you follow up something that so perfectly nails the feel it's trying to evoke, both mechanically and aesthetically?

Ridge Racer V adopts that late 90s/early 2000s futurist vibe, rearranges the grand prix to include time trials and reverse courses as part of its standard progression, and leans in on drifting, and it's fine. Nothing about it plays poorly, though there is a lack of variety in some of the tracks and, personally, I never cared much for the "look" of the early 2000s, so the presentation here carries less weight for me.

The ability to customize the paint job of your cars and swap engines was something I wasn't able to fully explore due to issues with (I assume) my PS2's hard drive, or the software used to read games off of it. Every time I attempted to change my car, the game crashed, so I was forced to play through the entire thing with the same starting vehicle. Between this and my Wii, I'm realizing that hard drives aren't the best way to go about playing these games due to some of the stability issues they cause. Ridge Racer V is pretty cheap on the aftermarket, but... that's probably for a reason. Why would you go for RRV when any system that can play it would also support Ridge Racer 4?

I think that's more or less where I fall on this game. It's good, but I know what my Ridge Racer of choice is, and I don't see RRV doing anything more noteworthy outside the bump in fidelity.

BUT IS IT A SUMMAH GAME?

Get real low, stick your face to the ground, feel the hot pavement stick to your cheek as you watch as the air above it ripples against the asphalt fumes. You know what that is? Summah! Inhale, absorb its power.

The screech of tires, the cool blast of the AC contrasting the hot air licking at your cheek as it wafts through the open driver's side window, cars fading into the distance in your rearview... I wouldn't know what that's like, I used to drive a Sazuki Swift with a busted AC belt, but I'll tell you this: you can only get heat stroke in the Summah! Boiling to death in the slow-and-go is a rite of Summah passage, and road trips to the beach are as Summah as palm trees, boardwalks, and shark attacks. The smell of the Summah is a gas station, so pick up the nozzle and breeeathe it in... Cars are so tied to the season that I make it a point to play at least one racing game every month, but the question is, does Ridge Racer V meet the lofty expectations set by the Summah index scale?

Unfortunately, no. The vibes are all wrong. Sure, many of the tracks are set near the beach, there's palm trees, but we're talking the difference between Summer and Summah here. At 65.5, we have the first game of the 2024 season to not make a passing grade, and per Summah law, I must now go into a tremendous amount of debt buying every copy so that they may be destroyed.

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They warned me, they told me it was bad. They told me to skip it, I didn’t believe them. I thought maybe it would be like the Dark Souls 2 situation. Hell, someone once recommended I skip Trails in the sky 3rd and it ended up being my favourite game in the series.

No, this time they were right. The game is just as bad as everyone says.

Everything sucks about it except maybe the graphics. The melee moveset is pretty lame and a lot of the enemies require guns to be fought anyway. The upgrade system has been replaced by just numerical upgrades and honestly I’m not even sure I see the difference.

Mobs barely try to hit you. You can play most of the game by holding the button to fire your gun and you don’t even have to bother moving except for a few bosses. What’s more annoying is that it takes a lot of time to kill tanky enemies despite them not doing anything and the game loves throwing groups of enemies. You advance to a new area, you trigger a group spawn and you have to kill maybe twenty trash mobs. It never stops.

For my second playthrough as Lucia, I just skipped every optional encounter and the game was still dull. It feels like a bad copy of Mario 64 where I just follow the red coins. I don’t even know why I bothered playing this playthrough, it’s some of the same levels plus an underwater section and the cutscenes are barely different. Yes, even the cheesy cutscenes you get to watch twice.

Why is there even a story? Dante talks to a random girl who tell him to go somewhere and they both meet again there. Couldn’t they have do so right away? Then from a random village he’ll take a bike to go to a big city instead? Why? Why are you chasing this comical sorcerer dude and all? Why is there a full city “infested” (yes infested) by tanks?

Perhaps the only positive thing about this game is that it’s quite short, at least you only have to endure about six hours of suffering.

It’s a terrible experience, but real gamers don’t skip DMC 2.

A few screens into this you come across a hole in the floor. You drop through it by pressing down on the d-pad, and then the right shoulder button very slightly afterwards, not at the same time, slightly afterwards. It was only by overexposure to the AVGN's video on Batman games did I already know how to do this, otherwise I would fumble about with the controller until I would eventually get Brian Smyj to drop down, whom is playing the part of Val Kilmer, who plays the part of Batman who daylights as "Bruce Wayne". If you had played this back in 1995, you would probably have to consult the instruction manual that came with your copy of Batman Forever on Super Nintendo, assuming your parent didn't carelessly throw it out along with the box. The manual actually does detail your moves and how to pull them off adequately, it doesn't make it any less clunky or unintuitive, but it exists. However, this hidden move where you get Brian Smyj to drop through this conspicuous orifice is actually completely unmentioned in the manual, and I even made sure that it wasn't hidden in the warranty or in some character's profile. So in a pre-James Rolfe/GameFAQs era, you're pretty much guaranteed to be lumbering around trying to find out how you're supposed to get down in order to make progress.

That was the SNES game, I would like to talk about the Genesis/MD version now.

The AVGN did not do this version of the game, and there is only one guide on GameFAQs that specifically talks about this version, and it also fails to mention how to do this secret move that is needed very early to make progress. When I got to this part, I attempted to do a combination similar to the SNES version with pretty much every button on my six button controller, including the shoulders on my Retrobit pad despite them essentially just acting like extra C and Z buttons when plugged into an actual Genesis console. For the first time in what seemed like years, I felt obligated to bust out my phone and look up something that didn't have to do with cheat codes or passwords. Keep in mind once again that the manual fails to mention how to do this move, because it's easily the biggest riddle you'll need to solve in Batman Forever for the Sega Genesis/MD. It turns out that you have to HOLD C, and then press down on the d-pad. A very different input from the SNES version, and one that I find hard for anyone to figure out on their own back in 1995 without wasting an hour of boredom on it. Was this incompetence or nefarious design to get kids to waste money calling Acclaim's help hotline? Who knows, maybe Jim Carrey was running the company.

I went two paragraphs talking about the world's greatest detective getting utterly bamboozled by a hole in the floor, but that's honestly the biggest thing I can talk about other than this possibly being the most 1995 game that could ever exist, because you're not gonna find another time in human history where a Batman movie license tie-in is bone grafted with Mortal Kombat moves and inputs. It might be the biggest sellout game to ever exist, combining two of the most overpushed things at the time, all while not being able to have blood, because McDonalds would possibly withdraw on their agreement to sell Batman Forever licensed glassware mugs.

I briefly booted this up for a Geoff Follin tribute stream with some friends of mine for shits and giggles, before I closed it and went to Wolverine on NES. My weekend was full of morbid curiosity of a potential funny-bad game, only to be met with mindlessly boring gameplay where you smack wet noodles with enemies, carelessly shoot your bat dick out at the ceiling to try to find hidden rooms, and jump around trying to see if you can hit any background objects to make explode and drop health items. A hard game that is only hard, because it's an endurance round of buffoonery with no continues or passwords. The NyQuil-laced bank stage ending with a fight against waves of henchmen on top of a small platform where they could easily throw you off to your doom was the final nail in the bat coffin for me, despite me actually clearing that stage and stepping foot into a circus that had the gonads to force a time limit on me. The most fun you would get out of this is dragging a friend along in co-op, and gaslighting them on how easy the controls are and never explaining them, which is something you can already do in Cyborg Justice, an infinitely superior experience. Fuck Goof Troop man, it's all about ruining friendships with Batman Forever.

I would end this with the Nerd's closing line on his review of the game, but I've been beaten to that at least twice on this page, so I'm gonna use a little bit of one from another review he did of a game I actually kinda like.

It sucking fucks, it fucking sucks, it fucking blows, it's a piece of shit....and I don't like it.

Condenses the Crackdown formula to ~8 hours while also having way too many side objectives. I was getting a bit burnt out on it roughly 6 hours in but it turns out in that time I pretty much set up a domino effect to just run to every boss and knock them all down. You level up much faster in this one than the previous games, which would be nice but you also never really seem to be more powerful. The triple jump in this still feels less impactful than the full-agility level jump in the first game. Vibes in this one just aren't as distinct either and it's funny that it just plays the story straight instead of the twist of the first two. Overall pretty okay game, not as bad as its reputation, but could've been much better.

Another Souls knock-off, only this time it's by a developer whose familiarity never went beyond "Top 10 Dark Souls Fails" videos.

Every combat encounter feels like it was designed around the most ha ha tee hee funny troll moments from those games. The second area, found just past Not Firelink, is a vertically oriented nightmare of cobbled together planks and rickety platforms, a veritable Blight Town filled with dudes hiding behind crates and corners waiting for you to pass by so that they can rush you and kick you off into an abyss. This was funny in Dark Souls because it happened once deep into the game by a big dumb skeleton, but it becomes annoying when it's happening ten times before you're able to make it to the third boss.

Mop things up there and you're off to... Another Blight Town! Only this time it does the Blight Town thing of having enemies constantly throw shit at you while you're stuck dealing with mobs. Where do you think you go after two whole Blight Towns? If you guessed "a poison swamp" then congratulations, you just won my copy of Lords of the Fallen because I don't want it anymore!

I'm not sure what possessed developer Hexworks, a studio which unsurprisingly has no credits before this, to frontload all of the Souls series' worst level tropes. I was already on the cusp of dropping the game after slogging my way to the first corrupted beacon, but what really sealed it was going from the swamp to a gorge that was still riddled with choke points, gank mobs, dudes throwing crap, enemies hiding behind objects, and now mimics. Hey you know what would be funny? Placing a mimic just down the street from another mimic so the player dies twice in a row the exact same way. What do you mean only .2% of players have gotten all the trophies, how can that be??

The big gimmick here that sets Lords of the Fallen apart from Souls and its many imitators - of which I've yet to play a single good one - is its light world/dark world mechanic. You'll often need to assume "umbral" form to reveal hidden pathways and solves puzzles, so often in fact that I'd say 80% of the early game is spent not interacting with the "real world" at all. While in your umbral state, shitty little level 1 zombies constantly spawn in and rush you, which impedes your ability to explore and makes every encounter with a deliberately placed enemy or trap agonizing because you're simultaneously having to deal with that while mowing through trash mobs like weeds.

You're also on a timer, and if you spend too long in umbral form, a very high-level enemy with be summoned to kill you immediately. Basically, you need to surface for air before the timer runs out by rushing towards totems that return you to the real world, which as far as I can tell is the only tangible benefit the real world has, because 9 times out of 10 I'd turn right around and realize some fuckin bog or a pit was behind me and I'd need to go back into umbral form anyway.

Hell, even the little touches are all wrong. Vigor (see: souls) don't automatically flow into the player character. Instead, they drop like EXP or health pick-ups in Kingdom Hearts, but they also do so on a slight delay with a small draw radius, meaning it's not at all uncommon to move on only to find that you've left a bunch of vigor sitting there. The lock-on never seems to target the enemy I want it to, and I can't figure out how it's prioritizing its lock at all, because it seems to not be based on camera position or distance. Even something as minor as a prompt to hit X to speak with an NPC feels bad because it straight up lies to you, instead requiring you to double tap X. Worth noting that this is the only thing in the entire game that requires you to double tap anything. I'm not opening up a program, I just want to upgrade my ax with the blacksmith who also happens to be a slaver but look, I don't have time to unpack that right now because I got to talk to you about how bonfires work. Aaaaaaah!

There are doors all over the place and they're all locked, which in a better game might inspire some curiosity on the part of the player. But because levels are long as shit and typically only have one dedicated "bonfire," on top of all the aforementioned problems with annoying enemies and needing to be in umbral form, I never want to go back and figure out what's in there. You can spawn smaller "checkpoints" using a consumable on beds of umbral flowers, but doing so will remove all previous checkpoints in an area, which makes navigating backwards a pain in the ass.

I think before you set out to create anything you ought to concern yourself with what you want the work to accomplish, and I guess I just don't understand what the point is of making something that is intentionally designed to be tedious, inconvenient, and cheap other than to be mean-spirited at the audience's expense. Perhaps this is why even the subreddit, ostensibly a place where fans would congregate, is rife with posts going "yeah I don't think I'm gonna finish this!" The few positive opinions I've heard are only just, saying the game is "fine" or that it "looks pretty." I disagree on that last point, I think it looks like and plays like sludge.

It's as if every time Hexworks was presented with a design choice to make, they carefully weighed their options and intentionally went with the most obviously detrimental and wrong one, like the video game version of those AMA threads where someone posts "tried Meth, but I won't do it again," only to post a few days later "couldn't stop thinking about meth, so I did some more." Playing this started turning me into the fuckin' Video Game Nerd, but the loudest and most full-throated "what were they thinking?" should be saved for myself. I was warned. I was told repeatedly that Lords of the Fallen was very bad, but I didn't listen. When you're so deep into collecting games that you're buying multiple copies of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), what's $20 for Lords of the Fallen, really? A badge that says I'm bad with my money, apparently.

Congratulations to Lies of P for no longer being the worst Dark Souls rip-off of 2023.

Addendum:

"VERSION 1.5 - 'Master of Fate': This update represents the culmination of 30+ post-launch updates resulting in significantly improved performance, stability & optimization, alongside rigorous difficulty balancing, and also includes our 'Advanced Game Modifier System', allowing ALL players to fully customize and adjust difficulty of future play-throughs. The Master of Fate Update concludes now concludes the Free Content Roadmap for Lords of the Fallen, adding the following content and quality-of-life enhancements, vastly improving the experience for all players: - Significant performance, optimization and stability improvements - Rigorous difficulty balancing including mob density reduction & nerfed ranged attacks "

WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT WAS WORSE

Just like Fear Effect and Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball, Rumble Roses is a game I remember more for its marketing than any discussion around it. It's one of those games, where the jiggle physics is cranked all the way up, and any opportunity to sneak in a fanservice shot is seized upon with such ferocity you'd think some poor animator had on a collar rigged to blow if they don't fit in as much TNA as possible, like some pervert's version of Speed. Every print ad for games like this was carefully framed to tantalize the teenaged male demographic, with characters pressed together or caught in some compromising pose with "Mario Bros. doesn't have... BOOBS!" written in big blocky letters. Everyone who fell for one of those has a YouTube channel now.

Speaking of YouTubers, my friend and current Xenosaga hype machine, TransWitchSammy, is the only person I've met in my entire life that has actually played Rumble Roses as a proper video game. I still wasn't very interested until she put me in a mandible claw hold and forced my compliance. I had to look up names of wrestling holds for that joke, by the way. I don't know anything about the sport, I just remember seeing Dean Ambrose bring a Coney Island hot dog cart he stole to a match once, and besides that it's periodic updates from Appreciations about what Cum Punk is up to post-WWE.

I am likewise just as uninitiated with wrestling games, but as I understand it, most of them are total garbage. I can't say how Rumble Roses stacks up against its contemporaries or even modern wrestling games, but in isolation, it's got more going on than I initially thought while still not having enough to sustain me beyond clearing 40% of the roster in story mode.

Much like fighting games, which I often describe in how "responsive" they are and how good the impact of landing a hit feels, I'm so much of a philistine here that I can't articulate the more technical aspects of how this game works. I'm no expert on frame timing, I can't count let alone perceive input delay, I navigate these games the same way I would a real fight, all elbows and open-hand slaps (see: button mashing.) But the specials in this game are ridiculous and bombastic in the way real wrestling techniques are, and they look just as likely to cause real, severe, long-lasting damage when executed by a non-professional, so I'd say Rumble Roses ticks the right boxes.

The story is also appropriately bonkers, and I've made several attempts already to describe it as a mashup of wrestling storylines and fighting game narratives but scrapped all that after realizing they're basically the same thing. Dr. Cutter is doing a whole sexy nurse gimmick, but she's also like, brainwashing wrestlers and turning them into heels in an effort to harvest them for her cyborg, and that's something that feels as ripped from the WWE as it does Tekken.

It's just a shame then that Rumble Roses does so little with the heel/face alternate scenarios for each wrestler. Though this does double the size of the roster, each character's second scenario is truncated, with fewer fights and threadbare narratives that amount to an opening and closing cutscene to establish and bookend their gimmicks. Reiko - a certifiable babyface and the lead character - joins a biker gang, and she is completely unconvincing in the role, like a child wanting to be taken seriously. It's really endearing and silly, but you get so little of it. Likewise, there's a real drought of interesting costumes, with each character getting a normal outfit and swimsuit and a single pallet swap of each. Maybe I'm spoiled on Dead or Alive, but I feel like this misses some of the pageantry of wrestling. I just... I wanna dress up the pretty ladies......... .

There are also only three rings to fight in, one of which being a mud pit, and several wrestlers share moves with one another, which resulted in the game feeling a bit long in the tooth after only a few hours of play. The "glass half full" way of looking at this is that my biggest complaint about Rumble Roses is there isn't more of it. This is apparently something Rumble Roses XX addresses, but I've also heard more divisive things about that one... I'd love to say that since I'm buying Xbox 360 games up already that I'd just grab a copy and find out myself, but that thing is 70 damn dollars on average. I like Rumble Roses but not that much.

Anyway, 3/5. Would let Dr. Cutter perform unethical surgery on me.

Well, mathematically speaking, it's just as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure.

I didn't give Prey a fair shot back when it released. 2017 feels much further away than it actually is, so I can't explain exactly what had me so distracted that I couldn't invest myself in "the best immersive sim of all time," but those opening few hours didn't hold me. I found myself meandering around and bounced off right around the point where you do your first spacewalk.

But here's the thing, if you're friends with Larry Davis, you can't just be like "oh I didn't enjoy Prey." That doesn't fly. You'll start getting texts while you're out that are just pictures taken from inside your apartment, some of which show you sleeping. He lives halfway across the country, how did he get in there? When was he there? The only way to stop the threats is to acquiesce to his demands. Play Prey or else. I always negotiate with terrorists, I'm a huge coward.

And I'm glad I did, because Larry's right, this is (probably) the best immersive sim ever made. I do, however, have to dock points for not having any Art Bell, something Human Head's Prey has over Arkane's. I'm aware that these games are not related at all outside of a very ill-advised, corporate decision to cash in on Prey's red hot brand name, but the least they could've done is throw in a few Midnight in the Deserts as audio logs. Not a problem, I just played a few in the background while making my way through the wreckage of Talos 1, bashing Typhons with a gnarly looking wrench while listening to Art's guest drone on about collecting and selling Big Foot scat.

Art: When I was in high school I ate erasers. No erasers on my pencils. I guess you could call that a strange addiction. When I went to erase something, I'd just scratch through the paper. Mmm... Erasers. That flavor has faded as an adult.

Ah, the true Prey experience.

That omission aside, Prey checks all the right boxes for me. Talos 1 is a great setting populated by interesting characters and engaging side quests that command your attention from the mission at hand not because they supply you with a list of things to do, but because Arkane has crafted a world so interesting and so fun to occupy that you want to delve into every nook and cranny. I see a locked door and I find myself compelled to know what's inside, even though the last three rooms I busted into had like, a corpse with a single discarded lemon peel in their pocket. Why did they have that? Every body tells a story...

Some of those side quests are going to stick with me for a while, which is both a sign of solid character writing and good mission structure. The fake chef booby-trapping fabrication machines and entry ways after you let him go adds a fun twist to revisiting old locations and makes your revenge that much sweeter when you finally catch up to him, and it's hard to imagine what shape the end game would take if you ejected Professor Igwe from his derelict storage container and skipped his multi-part quest. Which, you know, I initially did because I wasn't patient enough to hear him out. It's fine, I had an autosave, Igwe is totally okay!

That's just the way I play these games, with a dozen backup saves so I can test the boundaries of every moral crisis my character finds themselves in. I'm the kind of dude who will release a Typhon halfway into an inmate's cell just to see what kind of reaction I can get while turning over the long-term consequences of pushing the big red button. Not enough mirror neurons in my head, that's my problem.

Early in the game, you're presented with a personality test, an ink blot, and several variations of the Trolley Problem. An excellent way to establish what Prey hopes to accomplish with the player long-term, as so much of the game is affected by the choices you make both on a macro and micro level. The ending you get is clearly delineated between one of two set paths, but how those play out on a more precise level is affected by the small choices you made along the way. Take that chef, for example. You did get your revenge, but what of his other victims? Did you help them? Did you even try to find them? And what of your brother, Alex? So much of what happens aboard Talos 1 is his fault, but does your love for him win out in the end? Can you condemn him to his fate, or will you spend 30 minutes trying to wrangle his limp body in zero-gravity because the game won't trip one of the god damn objectives, which are clearly bugged-- oh wait, shit... I put him in a grav lift and it snapped his neck. Problem solved.

One area where I deviated from my typical immersive sim habits was combat. I often build my characters around stealth and avoid direct confrontation, but the Typhon abilities you're given work so well in concert with your weapons that turning Morgan into a violent powerhouse felt much more satisfying. There are also a few "survival" modifiers you can toggle at the start of the game, and I went with allowing injuries and suit damage, but not weapon degradation, because weapon degradation always sucks and is not as fun as getting concussed and needing to take "brained pills."

These modifiers add an extra layer of tension to resource management, something you'll be doing a lot of as you lug around literal garbage in the hopes that you might be able to squeeze a few extra shotgun shells out of whatever hard drives and bananas you have on your person. Fabricators are far between in the early parts of the game, often requiring you to loop back to your office for resupplies, which is a smart way of teaching the player the ins-and-outs of the game's resource economy while drilling in how Talos 1 is interconnected.

Is Prey the best immersive sim ever? Look, it takes a very boring man to admit when he's wrong, but it may very well be. Everything from the setting and story, to combat and the larger ways in which the game questions the player's morality is fantastic. My only complaint outside of some technical issues like the aforementioned problem with tripping objectives and a few crashes/freezes on the Xbox version is that there's no Art Bell. A whole .5 off the top of the score, I'm afraid. What's that? Art Bell was dead at the time? Nonsense. If Arkane only opened up a time-traveler's line, they could've booked him. Not an excuse.