This is a pretty controversial take in the gaming world, but honestly, I just didn't get Fallout New Vegas. For the most part, I liked the stories of the game. The engaging questlines were what kept me playing for as long as I did. However, the gameplay is what brings this down so much for me. I spent most of my time in combat using guns and it always just felt clunky and unsatisfying to me. There are options to avoid combat, but even those options usually end up being some form of a persuasion check. While I'm glad that these alternative options are there, it does still feel like I'm just skipping over a lot of the content, which left me less engaged, and thus less invested in the story which had been dragging me along. Exploring the map also gets boring after a while. When you are first exploring the map, it is fun. Finding a place mentioned in a log entry and filing out the lore in my head was fun, but after all the iconic locations are discovered, exploring all parts of the map felt like a chore. The games' faults may be chalked up to it being older, and me deciding to play it on older hardware (Xbox 360), but it really just does not hold up to my modern standards of how a game should play and feel.

Sorry, baby. I just don't love you the way I used to.

It's not you. It's me. You haven't changed, even though you really should have. You're still as much of a buggy mess as you were on release, with all of your crashes and non-functional mechanics, but those never bothered me. A couple community patches — you always did have a tendency to rely on others to make you work properly — and you're about as stable as you could have been. So why is it that I'm coming back to you over a decade later, with all of my fond memories, and I find that whatever spark we once had is now gone?

It's because you're boring, baby. That's the awful truth.

I really did think I was above such a petty complaint. I mean, your writing is excellent. You've got some incredibly strong characters and storylines, and you allow for a way more freeform approach to your narrative than most of your contemporaries could ever dream of. You've got a tone about you. Nobody could ever look at you and mistake you for anyone other than yourself.

But your moment-to-moment experience is just so boring. So repetitive. All I'm doing is walking. Walking and walking and walking from flat plain of dirt to flat plain of dirt, and then fast traveling between flat plains of dirt, while one of about five licensed songs play on loop. You've got the shortest playlist in the world. You've got spurs that jingle-jangle, you were always a fool for your Johnny, yippee-yay, I know it all. I could always turn off your radio and listen to the ambience of the areas around me, but your environmental sound design just isn't up to par. I don't blame you. You didn't even have a year to get ready. It's not your fault.

You take way too long to get going, and by the time we get there, I've seen everything you've had to offer me a hundred times over. I'm sure some people would say that I'm not treating you the way that I ought to, and I'm just being unfair because I've played too much of you. Maybe. But I've visited old favorites that I've been with a lot longer than you, baby, and none of them bored me the way that you do now. I can't keep feeling like the burden is on me to make you more fun; like I need to be the one going out of my way to get all of these mods and patches for you when keeping me entertained is your job.

I know nobody ever came to you for the gameplay, but you keep insisting on putting it front and center. I can't get away from it. If there was about 50% less "game" in this game, it would still be too much for what it currently is. It's borderline vestigial. I know that you care a lot more about your story, and so do I. I wish that you could have just focused on what you were good at. Your environments aren't pretty enough to get lost in, and they're not enough of a traversal challenge to be engaging; all I'm doing is walking forward and popping the occasional enemy, and it's just not enough.

What more can I say? I've fallen out of love. A classic needs to hold up to be a classic, and the twelve years since your release have left me unsure if you ever even qualified. You were novel once, and now you're not. You could have been more, but neither your publishers nor your developers were keen on that idea. You were rushed, and it'll always show.

I got carded trying to buy this at a Gamestop in 2011 and was refused because I didn't have my ID on me.

The “Dead Rising” I knew was dragged behind a shed and shot in the sweltering summer of 2010, its rotting shell sharing the same name but carrying the soul of an entirely different beast. Stumbling upon the shambling creature, I fell for its ruse, a 24-hour entanglement with a monster wearing a beloved veil. But for all of the carcass’ failings, I couldn’t bring myself to hate it. Glancing upon the decayed remnants of a lost friend, I still could see the remains of the dearly departed; in spite of the malicious current pulsating through its veins, I still saw the “Dead Rising” that I fell head-over-heels for, crumbling away but still recognizable all the same. Laid to rest and buried away, I said goodbye to not only “Dead Rising” itself, but the love I held for it, not out of new-found hatred, but out of acceptance for what it was becoming. In 2013, something bearing the name “Dead Rising” crawled out of that grave, festering and desecrated.

It’s… extreme, to put it in such intense terms, perhaps hyperbolic. However, as time passes and as I expose myself to more and more of the series, my individual story becomes one of watching something I adore be ripped limb from limb, it’s remains cobbled together in a discombobulated amalgam and presented as a new iteration on “Dead Rising”. The spirit of the original has long been excised, and the withered corpse walks, lacking the stylistic flourishes, the mechanical depth, the heart and soul that the name “Dead Rising” usually encompasses.

Yet despite my obvious grievances with the game, I have reached acceptance in my personal stages of grief. Beyond my preconceived notions of what is or isn't “Dead Rising”, of a minimalist structure maintained by the backbone of breakneck pacing and nerve-shredding time limits, something is under the shallow surface. Buried under the murky sands of mid-2010s design philosophies, emotionless browns and soul-sucking grays plastered under a user interface reminiscent of a thousand mobile games, the embrace of freedom over structure flawlessly encapsulated the mindset behind Dead Rising 3. Disregarding story, tonal consistency, and filing away mechanical grain, the city of Los Perdidos becomes a puerile playground, an endless wave of gory, grotesque, goofy ways to dispatch impressive waves of undead practice dummies.

I wish there was more to say, but Dead Rising 3 casts aside most of what I like about the prior entries, with the tone leading in the grimy direction pushed by its direct predecessor, the oversimplification of combo weapons and streamlining of the leveling system. I can’t fairly say it’s a game I disliked; playing online was still extremely fun, but that comes down to the fact that every game in the world can be fun with someone else, even irredeemable trash. As a game building off of one of my favorite series, it’s a massive let down.

So obviously expect a Dead Rising 4 review in a month or so, We Doin’ This

Played via Rare Replay

I am in no way an Xbox hater, but if there is one thing that hurt the British juggernaut Rare after they looked unstoppable in the mid & late '90s it was getting acquired by Microsoft. Following a string of high profile disappointments the original founders jumped ship and those who remained got put on Kinect duty, where the studio's reputation faded to the point where they don't even have a presence in present day gaming outside of their online pirate adventure simulator Sea of Thieves.

One such stumbling block responsible for that was this 2003 horror-themed brawler that sees you battling your way through a maniacal weirdo's monster-filled mansion in an effort to save your girlfriend like some family-friendly version of Splatterhouse. It was a bit of a misfire with professional critics and didn't quite have the developer's typical sense of personality or style. Yet, despite its mediocre reception I actually think there's a lot to love here.

There are definitely a few odd design choices, such as how the camera is controlled with the left and right triggers while the second analog stick is used to attack. For the most part though it's a fairly straightforward experience. As you head towards your goals you'll learn that each section of the estate you pass through comes with a challenge that must be completed before you can progress and turns what would otherwise be normal combat scenarios into miniature puzzles as you try to contend with whatever rules have been put in place. The variety of modifiers, enemy types, and consumables have been mixed and matched in a number of ways to ensure that no two segments feel identical. A huge plus as the grounds you'll be traipsing over end up not being as big as they at first seem, so you'll be revisiting the same rooms over and over again. The fact that you'll encounter different obstacles and item placements every time prevents a repetitive vibe from ever truly setting in even when your surroundings start to look familiar.

If there's one aspect I wish I could have enjoyed more about the title it would have to be its persona. Don't get me wrong I LOVED the setting and motif despite areas of the environment getting a touch overly traversed as they both proved a perfect fit for my October season. The story and accompanying comic book panel cutscenes annoyed me however, as the writing lacks the comedic wit I expect from the creators of Banjo-Kazooie and Conker. So my enjoyment comes exclusively from the gameplay.

Between Viva Piñata, Kameo, and now this I can confidently state for certain that Rare did in fact lose a level of quality back in 2002 when they were bought out by their current parent company. Each of the games I just mentioned (all of which I am a fan of) have their rough edges where you see the hints of underdeveloped ideas and cut concepts. If this is as far as they were destined to fall before getting stuck in their motion-sensing sports compilation phase though, then I wish they would go back to putting out products of this caliber as opposed to the whole bunch of nothing they're working on these days. "Ghoulies" may not match anything from the N64 height of the team's career, but it is still more creative, imaginative, and fun than the majority of what we've gotten since their relative absence.

8.6/10