Dead Rising 4 is pretty much my Devil May Cry 2. I hate this game. As someone who classifies himself as a fan of Dead Rising, this game pretty much took away almost everything that made the series enjoyable. I get they wanted to make the game beginner friendly and try to draw in new people, but this was not the way to do it. It's glitchy, unfunny, and they ruined Frank West and everything that made the series fun to begin with. This game will be the reason why we won't be seeing Dead Rising again in years, if not at all. The only reason why this isn't half a star is because I kinda like the Christmas theme, and the exo suit is kind of cool.

Calling this Mastered because I beat Champion's Road. Only a true Super Mario Psychopath would aim for the 100% file in this game (beating each of the 82 levels with every character!!).

My girlfriend discovered Super Mario via last year's 3D All-Stars, and has since voraciously consumed pretty much any plumber-based video game I've put in front of her. To see her go from "so if I hold the button in longer, he jumps higher?" in the castle grounds of SM64 to the end of Champion's Road in the space of 6 months is what I think it would probably feel like to see your child winning the 100m sprint at the Olympics.

3D World essentially has two distinct difficulty modes: solo and co-op, each with its own unique challenges. Having to return to the start of the level every time you die in solo play makes it arguably harder than co-op, where fallen players return in bubbles after five seconds, but solo players don't have to contend with the multiplayer-exclusive enemy types - bloodthirsty versions of Mario, Luigi, Toad and Peach who relentlessly chase you across the entire course and attempt to throw you into pits at any convenient opportunity. Terrifying!

In all seriousness - who the hell at Nintendo decided that [Run], [Use Powerup], [Throw] and [Pick Up Player] should all be mapped to the same button?! By trying to simplify the control scheme as far as possible, 3D World's designers have inadvertently made the game harder to play with friends... B-but I also kinda like the chaos that ensues when someone's accidentally picked up? Hmmm...

The pick-up button dilemma is emblematic of the bold design dichotomy at the heart of this game - it wants to be a friendly-family romp that everyone can enjoy, but it also has a fairly obvious desire to return to the days when Mario games were breathless challenges that required talent and nerve - perhaps partly as a response to all those people who complained that 3D Land gate-kept its good shit behind eight worlds of relatively mindless, toothless platforming.

I read in Iwata Asks many years ago that this game's Captain Toad sections were an attempt to wean casual New Super Mario Bros. fans onto the concept of a 3D camera that's controlled by an analog stick - a new take on the castle grounds for people who weren't around for the Nintendo 64. I think 3D World's secret agenda was to sell Mario Luddites on the Triple Jump Era...

For the most part, 3D World succeeds in its aim to bridge casual and hardcore mindsets - the placement of green stars in the early worlds feel almost tailor-made to cater to multiplayer setups where one person is still trying to grasp the idea of running and jumping while their partner is side-flipping, wall-kicking and dive-rolling all over the space. Unfortunately, around the time of World 6, auto-scrollers and slidey platforms and boost pads begin to run riot and gaps in skill become much more pronounced and frustrating. The bubble-up mechanic is a best-of-a-bad solution to the co-op camera problem, but it can sometimes feel like certain levels were never meant to be played multiplayer. The final showdown with Cat Bowser in particular is a complete fucking nightmare - I remember hating it as a single man and player back in 2013, but trying to get me and my girlfriend up that stupid auto-scrolling tower together in 2021 was nigh-on impossible, with us both randomly disappearing off-screen and becoming bubbles at seemingly random intervals! Ugh!! It's really annoying, because the idea of Bowser getting into Mario's big bag of tricks for a final boss battle is really fun and cool - it deserved better execution!

Funnily enough, we had far less problems with the post-game levels, which in many cases felt specifically designed for ridiculous Mario Party-style fun. The rolling block level in particular is almost a game unto itself, a true test of co-operative spirit and patience that could probably stand alone as its own fun little indie game! Oh how we laughed!! And the shmup-homage level? Wonderful! I like when Nintendo's designers are allowed to crib from boxes of toys outside their own corporate playpen.

I'm gonna go ahead and give the 3D World + Bowser's Fury package a whole-assed 5 stars because even though Bowser's Fury and 3D World are probably worth four stars each when packed apart, together they form this really joyous, heartfelt whole that encompasses almost the entire Super Mario experience - there's homage to just about every mainline game here and then a whole lot more! The ideal jumping-on point for anyone who has somehow managed to miss out on the Mario phenomenon in the last 35 years.

I love this game so much. Despite its sequel being my favorite of the series, the gameplay in this is easily the best of... really, anything Valve has put out. Some of the most nuanced and thoughtful combat ever put into an FPS ever, if not the most. Every weapon has a purpose, despite some trumping others. (shotgun for life!) Battlefields are not a test of your abilities, but rather, the closest thing to a chessboard in a shooter. Just as much as you plan out your moves, your enemies have reactions that challenge those moves. You're not shooting at idiots who blindly walk at you like in other games (hell even Half-Life 2 does this), you're shooting at trained military officers who know what they're doing and will fight back against you just as hard as you fight against them.

The most common complaint I see about this game is some of the levels are frustrating, the two that get called out most being On A Rail and certain parts of Xen. All I can say is... I don't see it. I had no problems with On A Rail, and the only part of Xen I was frustrated with was the platforming in Interloper, and that was a short segment.

Despite being their first game, Valve already showed how they told their stories, with a fair bit of storytelling and worldbuilding being from what you see rather than what you're told, a concept which would be amplified tenfold in the sequel, of course. Regardless, for a debut, it showed immense skill and care taken to make sure the game would hold up in the decades to come, and I say it has. Sure, the graphics are dated, but they have a charm to them, y'know? For newer fans of the series, I do recommend playing Black Mesa and then coming back to the original if you enjoyed it to get the full experience, but this game still holds up completely on its own.

I have conflicting feelings about this game. The shooting and movement feel surprisingly fluid and yet is wasted on some extremely subpar level design. Some levels are much too large for their own good, resulting in plenty of downtime before anything remotely interesting. Enemy encounters don't feel well thought out and in rooms with significant verticality enemies spend the majority of their time running up and down staircases trying to reach you.

On the other hand I love how stylized the game is. The enemy designs are fantastic and varied. The setting of each level is always entirely different from one another and never got stale. While the humor didn't always land with me, it certainly got a few laughs out of me from time to time.

Overall an average shooter that is exemplified by it's visual style and Postal charm. Worth picking up if you want to turn your brain off for a while.

Definitely one of the better modern boomer shooters I've played, although it's no Doom Eternal or Dusk imo. The movement is very fluid for the most part but some parts like the grappling hook feel a bit clunky (swinging around the enemy like you can in Doom Eternal). Some levels also felt too large so I did find myself getting lost because I needed to push 1 tiny button on the huge wall or walk through a door that looked like a wall. The enemy and level design have so much variety, and the game also just has a great look and I can't compliment the art direction enough. I did also enjoy all the nods to other Postal media. And in classic Postal fashion, it's crude, offensive, and sometimes in bad taste with its humor, which is what makes Postal, Postal. I'd recommend this game if you like boomer shooters or Postal.

“Western adaptation of Snatcher” is the glib one-line review here, but it is remarkable how closely this game mimics Kojima’s Blade Runner fan-game in structure and content, to the point where I’m suspicious about whether someone from Westwood played the 1994 MegaCD release and saw the opportunity for an Officially Licensed Blade Runner™ Product. Click on a corpse, fly-by-night to a multi-storey police station, see a Coca-Cola advertising board with Japanese writing on it, that sort of cyberthing. The key difference between the two games is that Blade Runner is suffocated by the tedium of a traditional point-and-click-and-walk template - while the back of the box brags about not having any puzzles and a story that unfolds regardless of what you choose/fail to do, you’re still going to find your progression blocked by the pixellated whims of a 240p environment and the typical this-noun-then-that-noun chains that govern whether an adventure game can progress; best exemplified by me brick-walling 15 minutes before the finale because I hadn’t found out about the type of cheese sauce a sandwich had, which in turn had locked me out of a whole series of conspiracies that lead all the way back to Eldon Tyrell and the nature of human existence itself. Remember the part of the original movie where Deckard couldn’t confront Roy Batty because he’d forgotten to check which toy was in the Burger King Kidz Menu this month? (“This game really feels makes you feel like Blade Runner!” - PCGamer, November 1997)

To some extent, the game does succeed at making you really feel like Mr. Blade Runner - the music is here (amusingly, Westwood created a room the exists solely for you to stand around listening to Blade Runner Blues from the movie soundtrack), the sleaze is there, the neon is everywhere, and it does, on occasion, achieve the paranoid-android feeling of wondering and worrying whether the next person you interact with is going to be a hostile replicant (the game’s primary claim to fame is that they’re randomised on every playthrough). But it’s mostly superficial simulacra, Blade Runner for the fans who would display Rick Deckard’s Iconic Blaster Pistol on their toy shelf or drink out of a plastic whisky glass that looks like it came from the props cupboard of 2049. Gaff shows up to drop his little origami animals, but more as a referential signifier than a concerted attempt to implant any thoughts or memories beyond those of the movie; compare this with Blade Runner 2049, a sequel that used its predecessor’s philosophy as a foundation to build upon rather than outright replicate as this game does with its Dick Reckard protagonist and little Universal Studios field trips to the original sets. There’s a real lack of the ambiguity that defines Blade Runner - the (well-realised) Voight-Kampf Test’s role here as an absolute judge of character seems to fly in the face of that iconic scene with Rachael, and every crisis can be averted by presenting evidence like you’re a cyberpunk Phoenix Wright - quite the contrast with boozy Harrison Ford showing up half a day late to every crime scene reeking of cigs and regrets. Frankly, I expected more from the writing team who gave us this.

With regards to the “Enhanced Edition” claims - all signs seem to point to this being a big downgrade from the ScummVM port that launched on GOG a few years ago, and my playthrough on the Switch crashed to desktop twice with debug info being written to console (no!!! bad nightdive!!!) Avoid, unless you really wanna play this on console for whatever reason - the “classic” edition is bundled with every purchase of the new PC version now. There was a whole bunch of drama between the scene hackers who originally brought it back from the dead and the otherwise-spotless Nightdive, but seems like they’ve decided to bury the hatchet (due to literal death threats from “fans” over a 90s point and click game) so I won’t get into the morality of that particular can of highly-artefacted electric worms.

The fact that the majority of the game's enemies are hit-scanners that will evaporate you before you notice them will definitely turn a lot of people away from this game. Finally starts making sense when you treat every corner as an enemy camp and the dynamite as your primary weapon. you are fast and able jump and duck around in succession like a hong kong action movie protagonist, dodging upcoming bullets while shooting and blowing up saloons full cultists.
Incredibly brutal and also extremely satisfying to play.