Titus Andromedon continues to be the greatest sitcom character of all time.

And now I can make him shirk responsibility and take a nap.

Played enough times to see every single option, including those you can select twice with different results. (Definitely call Donna Maria twice, and DEFINITELY listen to the whole song option the second time)

Everyone is so good in this. I'm now conviced that Richard Wayne Gary Wayne is the greatest role that John Hamm has ever played. I do wish there was more Mikey, though there's not really a natural place for him in the story.

KARATE RUN!!

[Demo review, 3 hours played]
Lovely minimalistic artstyle, satisfying animations and engaging gameplay. The tetris minigame is a fun way of distributing stats. 3 runs deep I already noticed that the RNG aspect for unlocking skills weighs too heavily on the success of the runs. Certain skills feel pretty damn vital, while others rather insignificant or downright useless, making it easy for a run to feel frustrating due to factors outside of your control. However, according to its Steam page, the game's planned to be in Early Access for less than a year, so the balancing will likely get improved upon.

The Mega Man World games have reached their conclusion with Mega Man World 5, released in 1994.
Even though the original Game Boy would still be getting more games in the years after, with this being the last classic Mega Man game for the console, released at the time that it did, it feels like we're reaching the end of an era.
Classic Mega Man was about to leave the NES with Mega Man 7, and Mega Man X had already kick-started a new take on the Blue Bomber.

It really feels like they went all-out with this one, with the new Robot Masters being the Stardroids, androids from outer space! Each of them are named after one of the planets, and I really liked their designs!
I will admit though, because of their names being the way they are, but most of the designs not conveying their names, like how previous Robot Masters did (ex. Toad Man looks like a Toad), it made the Boss Rush later down the game a bit hard to figure out which robot was who, in order to know what their weakness was. The lack of color doesn't help either.
But that is only a small issue that I have with the game.

The level design is pretty solid all around, having multiple new enemies and gimmicks. I found many of the weapons Mega Man got to be pretty cool and unique, like Pluto's Break Dash or Uranus' Deep Digger.
And Mega Man also has a new weapon himself, the Mega Arm! It replaces the Charge Shot with something that, while it doesn't have the same range, it can come back to you, and potentially deal some damage to enemies along the way.

But what really helps are the upgrades you can buy for the Mega-Arm! One to grab stuff from a distance, and the other to deal damage to enemies multiple times before needing to charge it again. While the second upgrade didn't always work, I highly recommend you getting these upgrades, as they make the Mega-Arm an awesome addition to the Blue Bomber's arsenal!

This game also introduces Tango, a robotic cat that just... kinda spins around and hits enemies. To be honest, I didn't use him much, and I also ended up not using Rush a lot.
It's so odd as, as I progress through these games, I use Rush less and less.

In terms of presentation, it keeps a lot of the same production values as Mega Man World 4, and adds in more dialogue for good measure. It's not a deep plot by any means, but I do appreciate what was added.
The soundtrack is also unique to this game, and while I didn't find many of the songs super memorable, I did like many themes and the fit well with the stages.

Overall, Mega Man World 5 ends the Blue Bomber's Game Boy line of games on a high note, making it one of most solid titles for the original Game Boy and ending the original 8-Bit Mega Man games with a bang.

Probably truly technically impressive (I can't imagine you'd need anything short of a titanic amount of passion to make a homebrew game that for the Intellivision) (Also there was a comment asking how the guy made the one pixel tall laser beam) but falls flat on gameplay. I can imagine that technical limitations prevent much variety, especially when you're making something that can run on the actual console (afaik,) but it's hard to enjoy the same enemies being thrown at you, especially in the last two stages where two of them don't do anything. All that playing on Easy does is slow the game down, which would be fine, but it takes twice as long to get to the boss. Could there not be a check for that that reduces the amount of waves? Especially with zero indication on how close you are to it. Once you're done the first loop there's not really an incentive to play, you only see your score when you die and it's real repetitive.

That all said, playing on Hard is enjoyable. Each enemy (bar the dark blue guys) does something different and unique, and I was on my feet anticipating what the new one would be each time I got to a stage. It only takes 3 or so minutes to reach the stage boss which felt like a good pace. Every death was identifiably my fault, the game is perfectly fair throughout. (The readme says that boss' weakpoints need to be discovered, so no, the hitboxes are perfectly fine on them actually.) There's only three songs, only one of those being played for an extended period of time, but none of them get tiring and all fit the mood as much as is possible on this console. It's honestly pretty solid on the first loop, and I wish there was more that could be done with it.

Base game review

The first of the two DLC campaigns for DOOM Eternal that serve as the conclusion not just for Eternal, but to this modern era of DOOM’s story that began with DOOM 2016. Eternal was a game that pushed its mechanics and overall scale to astronomical levels. With Part One of The Ancient Gods (TAG for short), iD Software aims to push things even further. Despite their efforts, I’m a little bit mixed on their attempt to do so. While I ultimately believe the good things about TAG1 outweighs the bad, the things that are bad can lead to some degree of frustration that dampers the enjoyment.

While the DOOM Slayer might have put a stop to the Khan Makyr and halted the demonic invasion of Earth, his work isn’t done. With the Khan Makyr gone, Hell’s forces have taken over her homeworld of Urdak, and with the planet’s resources in their control, they now have the means to invade and conquer all of reality. With the help of Samuel Hayden and the UAC, the DOOM Slayer sets out to find the Seraphim, an ally from his past that can provide him the means to return to Urdak, so that he can finally end the demons once and for all.

The Ancient Gods continues the base game’s storytelling approach, meaning it still lacks a lot of context in regards to what’s going on. You do get the gist of what’s happening, but there are a lot of terms that can be difficult to keep up with and aren’t explained very well. That being said, it’s a DOOM game, so you really only need to know the bare minimum when it comes to story anyway.

The DLC comes with three additional levels: UAC Atlantica Facility, The Blood Swamps, and The Holt. These levels have some of the most intense combat encounters in the game (outside of the Master Levels, which are re-worked levels from the base game made to be even more challenging). After its original release, TAG1 was actually updated in order to reduce its overall difficulty, and even with the changes made, these levels will still give you a run for your money.

Atlantica is without a doubt my favorite level in the DLC and possibly the entire game, depending on how my replay of Ancient Gods Part 2 goes. The design of its combat arenas is excellent, memorable and feels like a very natural progression from the level of difficulty you experience at the end of the base game. They’re wide, with a lot of room to run around in. The Marauder controversy after the base game’s release had been going on for a while at this point, so when you get towards the end of the level and you have to fight two of them at the same time, it very much feels like the devs are paying attention to what fans were saying at this time, and that they trusted them to be able to overcome these enemies.

Atlantica also introduces a new environmental hazard: Turrets. These are mystical eyeballs sitting on top of a podium that shoot energy blasts at Doomguy from their position. You can’t get too close to them, otherwise the eyeball will retreat into the podium. They need to be destroyed using fast and powerful long distance projectiles like the Quick-Scope mod for the Heavy Assault Rifle, or a shot from the Arbalest. While these can initially be annoying, they’re pretty easy to take out once you’ve memorized their locations and gotten your aim up to snuff in order to take them out quickly.

The Blood Swamps are next, and for the most part, it’s a very strong level, with some of the most intense combat arenas in the game. It’s actually kind of flooring seeing the amount of super heavy demons the game throws at you during combat encounters, but it’s also really thrilling stepping up and taking them all on. This level also introduces a new enemy: The Spirit. The Spirit is a ghost demon that possesses another demon on the field, increasing that demon’s damage, speed, and resilience, making them a lot harder to kill and evade. After killing the possessed demon, the Spirit will exit that demon’s body, where it’ll be stunned for a moment, before it begins to possess another demon. The only way to kill a Spirit is to use the Microwave Beam mod for the Plasma Rifle, which shoots out a beam that holds demons in place before causing them to explode after a period of time. I don’t really like this new demon very much, and encounters with it really got on my nerves.

The Spirit feels like it was made solely for giving the Microwave Beam an actual purpose. Prior to the DLC’s release, the Microwave Beam was widely regarded as one of the least useful weapon mods in the game. It’s a slow method of killing demons, and using it hinder’s Doomguy’s movement, making him a sitting duck. Since combat in Eternal is designed around you constantly moving, this mod is inherently antithetical to that idea, so being forced to use it here kind of sucks, especially given how intense the combat arenas are. When the Spirit possesses a Hell Knight or a Baron of Hell, then it will hound you, and seeing either of those demons charging at you with their increased speed is genuinely terrifying. Furthermore, killing a possessed demon doesn’t mean it’s over, as you now have to use the Microwave Beam to finish off the Spirit, or risk it possessing another demon.

The Spirit might be a bit less frustrating on lower difficulties, I decided to play through this on Nightmare, the game’s hardest difficulty, since I’ve played Eternal so many times and wanted a challenge in order to keep my adrenaline up. On Nightmare though, the Spirit is a major threat even if it possesses fodder demons simply because of how much stronger the buff makes them. This is what makes the Spirit impossible to ignore, and why trying to kill it is so frustrating. If you end up killing the possessed demon in the wrong place at the wrong time, there’s nothing you can do about the Spirit without risking all of the other demons jumping your ass. Even if it seems like you’re okay to take it out with the Microwave Beam, another demon or a projectile might swoop in outta nowhere and take you out. There might be some strategy I’m not familiar with that makes the Spirit easier to kill, but I don’t know for sure. All I know is that I never really found a consistent and clear cut way of killing it, and a lot of my deaths came from trying to safely get rid of this god damned poltergeist.

Finally, there’s The Holt. The Holt is without a doubt my least favorite level in the DLC, and most likely the entire game as well. I really hate how The Holt’s combat arenas are designed. The arenas are usually multilayered and claustrophobic structures with tunnels that obfuscate demons and make it hard to keep track of who is on the screen and where they’re at. It also has what I feel to be the most extremely forgettable and boring music in the game. The Holt also introduces one more new series of enemies: the Blood Makyrs, and I’m not a fan of these guys either. They are flying, angel-like beings that protect themselves with an impenetrable shield of energy while shooting their own projectiles at you with their spears. They also have a melee attack they can perform that halts your momentum if you get too close to them. They’re completely invincible until they use a specific attack that causes them to drop their shield, after which, they can only be killed with a precise headshot from the Arbalest or the Quick-Scope for the Heavy Assault Rifle.

My dislike for the Blood Makyrs is partially a skill issue, while also tying in to why I dislike The Holt’s combat arena designs so much. Because of the design of these combat arenas, trying to get an accurate shot at a Blood Makyr when it drops its shield is a lot harder than it otherwise would be. This might have been the intention, but either way, it makes trying to kill it very aggravating. Once again, a lot of my deaths came from me missing their head and getting blown up by their attacks, or getting killed by other demons because I was focusing too hard trying to aim at them.

Despite being DLC levels, the team at iD spared no expense making them visually on par with the levels from the base game. Each level has a distinct look, feel, and atmosphere, thanks to their unique color palettes and themes. Atlantica is basically a giant oil rig out in the ocean with a lot of blues and stunning looking water and waves, The Blood Swamps are tinted in a sickening green shade with a lot of gas and fog, and The Holt has a reddish-purple color palette symbolizing the former paradise of Urdak’s fall to the demons. Much like the rest of the game, each level’s environments are absolutely stunning and have breathtaking scale to them.

I mentioned in my review of the base game that there was some behind the scenes issues regarding Mick Gordon, the composer for Eternal and DOOM 2016’s highly acclaimed soundtracks, that I didn’t have time to get into because of the review’s length. During Eternal’s development, Mick had to put the game’s score together under completely obscene degrees of crunch, and in the end, wasn’t even paid for a good chunk of his work. When Bethesda promised an official release of the soundtrack, Mick wasn’t consulted, and that soundtrack release was put together by an audio engineer who, with all due respect, didn’t do a very good job. The sound quality of Eternal’s formally released OST isn’t the best, and the music doesn’t sound quite as full as it did in 2016 OST release. After DOOM Eternal came out, Mick Gordon parted ways with iD Software. After Mick’s departure was made public, Marty Stratton, iD Software’s executive producer and the man responsible for Mick’s poor treatment, took to social media to slander Mick, calling him overly demanding and difficult to work with, and he used the power of NDAs to besmirch Mick’s name while he was unable to say a word in his defense. Years later, after those NDAs had expired, Mick Gordon was finally able to publicly defend himself with an extremely long blog post containing irrefutable evidence regarding how he had been treated during his time at iD Software. The fallout between Mick and iD Software is ultimately, very sad, as it was clear that Mick loved working on DOOM. I said it in my base review, and I’ll say it again here: Marty Stratton is a piece of shit, and the fact that he continues to work at iD Software today is disgusting.

With the departure of Mick Gordon, Andrew Hulshult was brought on board to compose the music for both parts of The Ancient Gods. Hulshult is an extremely respectable and skilled metal musician, and is well-known amongst the boomer shooter scene for his love of DOOM and other older shooter franchises. He did the music for modern day boomer shooter indie titles, such as Dusk and Amid Evil. He was the perfect person to replace Mick Gordon, and while I wouldn’t say that his work surpasses the base game’s soundtrack, his skills do shine here. Atlantica and the Blood Swamps’ music is very, very good, with a lot of heavy, yet catchy riffs that capture the game’s aggression and other-worldly feel. The Holt, like I previously said, is unfortunately rather lacking. There isn’t much guitar at all, and it's mostly just forgettable atmospheric bass and electronic noise, which adds further to the disdain I have for that level.

Part One of The Ancient Gods is a decent start to the conclusion of modern DOOM’s story. While it begins with a huge bang and some of the best content Eternal has to offer, as it goes on and the game experiments a bit more with enemy and level design, it unfortunately produces some mixed results that involve a lot of frustrating moments that detract from it a bit. I do think that the highs outweigh the lows though, and that it’s still worth a playthrough. I just don’t recommend playing through it on Nightmare difficulty like I did, unless you’re a completionist that really wants to master the game.

When Fallout 3 was originally released in 2008, it did not let you continue playing after you finished the game. This notably ruffled a few feathers, so Bethesda, known best for their substantive DLC, released a DLC pack less than a year after its release which rectified the issue. Seven years and some change later, Fallout 4 did not repeat this "mistake." Upon finishing Fallout 4, you're met with a cutscene that's three minutes shorter than what was in Fallout 3, after which the game hastily throws you back into its world. No credits, no real acknowledgment of any of the choices you might have made outside of the main quest. What this ultimately betrays, though, is not what the player spent the last thirty-to-forty to god knows how long doing in the Commonwealth. This single, one-minute cutscene—one of two in the entire game—comes to represent Fallout 4's main points of failure.

A change from F3 and New Vegas that's immediately apparent is that F4 drops the Mad Max style of narration, where the player character has been made into this legend of sorts whose adventures likely get misappropriated and lost in translation by the locals as time wears on. F4's opening and ending cutscenes are in the first person, feature stark, high-contrast imagery, and have heavy, emotional music playing over them. The concept, on paper, is likely that Fallout 4 was meant to be a more investing, personal tale than that of the Courier, who let Fisto have their way with them because it was funny. The voice talent for the player character in F4, god bless both of their hearts, put their souls into reading lines about how their fictional son was missing, and in a vacuum, their efforts pay off. But after the game gives you a tank to walk around in and a minigun to kill a Deathclaw with in its first hour, and then lets you keep both of them, it's hard to tell whether or not the game is taking itself seriously. I would say that the culprit of this is that any power armor set you wear makes the cinematic, Mass Effect-style conversation camera angles feel laughable. It's hard to put yourself in the shoes of a desperate parent when that parent is behind a hundred layers of steel and isn't emoting; The Mandalorian this is not. But ultimately, the conclusion I have to come to is that it's context that neuters the experience of its grain.

Fallout has never had a strong emotional core. I've come to the realization that the reason I see both Fallout and STALKER paired with each other, despite being continents apart in tone, intent, inspiration, lore, and nationality, is that both favor the minutiae of being in their worlds as opposed to the grander scheme of what they're meant to represent on a narrative level. These games are sandboxes, and sandboxes shouldn't be limited by such finicky, human matters. Do you see that bandit camp over there? Clear it for no other reason than it feels good to shoot at mannequins and then loot their remains, and then go back again to do the exact same thing halfway across the map. Therein lies the overarching problem with Fallout 4's narrative structure: it wants to be convinced that it can have those bandit camps, gameplay loops so refined and repetitive you'd think Bethesda was run by Kairosoft with a budget, and something to tug at your heartstrings with. As it so happens, it also desperately wants the Faction system of New Vegas, so that has to fit somewhere into the narrative, too. The end result is too crowded for any one angle to feel sharp. Every possible corner feels rounded and flat so any of the hundred ideas it's running with don't conflict with the rest.

Series purists will decry this as a black sheep of sorts and claim to resent it, even though they've never played it. Lest we forget, New Vegas is an untouchable masterpiece, even if it's as emotionally dry and ineffectual, save for Obsidian's sterling ability to make you laugh. "Have you played New Vegas?"

Having spent an ungodly amount of time in New Vegas, what I will say about F4 isn't that it's the former's RPG mechanics that the latter loses. New Vegas had restraint. Thirteen years ago, when it was praised for its scale, it might not have seemed so. But in hindsight, Obsidian never let its ambitions outweigh its talent. Almost every piece of New Vegas feels deliberate in its inclusion because Obsidian gave themselves the space they needed to maintain that sense of intention. In Fallout 4, the overworld is so large that it almost makes sense that the solution to a locked door is almost always lockpicking/hacking or finding the key in a nearby desk with no in-between.

However, in spite of it all... I kinda loved my time with Fallout 4? Until the end, at least. I'm going to go off of a branch and say that this is the most fun I've ever had with a Bethesda game. Skyrim and Starfield are too sterile to resonate with me, and as much as I love New Vegas, even with a chunky modlist, it still feels like one of those mods the Bethesda community has been fixated on for nearly ten years that builds a new game on top of another existing one through mod tools. Despite it sharing the same janky, archaic properties that even the aforementioned modlists can't scrub from New Vegas, almost all of Fallout 4's systems feel refined in some way. Weapon modding is no longer a menu interaction that adds invisible buffs and debuffs; it's an involved process that lets you see the changes for yourself. Although I never got into it, settlement building could easily be ripped out of this to become its own game. Progression is a bit barebones, but what's there still allows for modular playstyles that alter the game. Like I always try to do with these games, I mained a stealth build that eventually got so overpowered that I was one-shotting super mutants with a silenced automatic pistol by the time endgame rolled around. Tying this all together is that, for the first time in this series' three-dimensional existence, Fallout 4 has really fun combat. It still borders on janky in a few areas but in general, shooting and whacking stuff felt appropriately flashy in appearance and sound, and I was delighted!

I cannot deny that I had a ton of fun with this game, but by the time I reached one of its four-ish endings, it had worn out its welcome. I would argue that that is the single flaw that holds all of Bethesda's modern output down. Until they can find ways to better pace their experiences, and allow them to be more meaningful than dumb fun, their contemporaries will keep outshining them.

...

(THE ANECDOTE BELOW CONTAINS SPOILERS):

I did have two really funny stories from my time playing this that I'd like to share.

So, when you reach the institute and talk to Father, the game doesn't stop you from capping him in the head. And if you do it sneakily, the game doesn't stop you from capping almost everyone you see! So, for shits and giggles, I went around and did that until it caught up to me. I noticed there was an absolute shit-ton of enemies, but I didn't see them, so I figured I would be able to walk out of the institute with my pride intact. Wrong. As it turns out, the enemies I was seeing on my compass and listening to were below me, and because Fallout 4 is terrible with directional audio, I didn't know this until I took the elevator down. What I eventually discovered was an optimal strategy for dealing with the 60+ synths (not exaggeration!) trapped beneath me was to take the elevator down, fire off a mini-nuke, go upstairs, and wait for my status to reset from "Caution" to "Hidden", go downstairs, do that again until I was out of mini-nukes, start using my rockets, and then finish them off with a machine gun and some psycho. The pile of dead bodies not even halfway through this process was so absurd in its size that it momentarily tanked my game's framerate. Quite clearly, these developers either never considered this a possibility, or they didn't put up enough guardrails to prevent you from doing so, as I was not considered an enemy of the institute after my massacre. I guess if no one's alive to see you reach the exit, they can't put you on a hitlist.

But this pales in comparison to the stupidest moment in my entire playthrough. So, picture this: I'm on my way to confront the mayor of diamond city. He's a synth, he has a hostage, and it's up to me to settle his fate once and for all. My instinct, as a gun-for-hire that everybody is too pretentious and morally righteous to call a mercenary, is to lockpick the door and shoot him in the head. I notice my silenced pistol doesn't do stealth damage, so it takes two shots to the head to take him out. Not optimal. I reload my save and pull out my .50 caliber sniper rifle to do the job in one fell swoop. Before I can pat myself on the back, his hostage then gets up and starts shooting at everyone in the room, even though the bullet never hit her. If I shot her at all, everyone in the room would start shooting at me, but if I left her alone, they would finish her off. Reloading my save at least ten times because I couldn't believe my eyes, this was consistent. I may not give Fallout 4 as many marks as my playtime would suggest, but for giving me one of the funniest bugs/oversights I've ever seen in a game like this, it at least deserves some credit.

I should be clear: no harm no foul to the developer. Assuming this source isn't bull, Frank Johnson (sole dev afaik) worked like a motherfucker to crank out ten whole games for this system in just under two years. Back then, especially with licensing pressures, that's legitimately commendable. Rest in peace.

That said, the end product is still the end product. Absolutely nothing feels right and there's like 4 minutes of content tops. Donkey Kong is green, the ghosts have no AI, the second stage just isn't clear, and honestly it pales in comparison to another game in Frank's catalogue, Donkey Kong Jr. Not that that's a good game either, but it's remarkably more sound and more playable than this is. Good god, man. I never thought I'd give half a star to a game that wasn't shovelware or entirely unplayable anytime soon, but wow. Just wholly not worthwhile.

P.S: Don't play this one on BizHawk, as of right now you can't collect the hammers. Their core seems to have a few issues generally but this is the only concrete thing I've found.

-ep 1 more than anything this seems to work as a weird writing exercise for lake and dealing w both extremely positive and negative reaction and reception for the past 25 years. prob the most metatextual thing remedy has ever done at least in regards to themselves as a game dev company. idk def not the first game to tackle parasocial relationships but maybe the highest budget one to do so and idk that’s v interesting to me!!
-loved rose so fucking much in the base game,, cute ditzy but ultimately sincere and sweet bpd girlie. endeared by this cute and glossy world she’s kind of conjured up to deal w the monotony of both working a dead end job + obsession w someone who you’ve put on a pedestal and who doesn’t see u in that same way. relatable shit fr!! love the color palette here and how rose is living in a literal fantasy within the framework of the fake show just as she does in the base game. cool usage of flowers especially how it’s photos of flowers like it’s this v melodramatic almost douglas sirk type beat aesthetic choice but it’s just framed photos in an otherwise kind of unrewarding job. the rockabilly ass soundtrack LMFAO. cinnamon and gunpowder 😝😝
-love when remedy leans fully into the Alan is a very bad a narcissistic guy type of thing,, it’s great and always funny !! not subtle in the slightest but idk remedy works best when their writing is blatant and obvious,, stories about broken men breaking down other ppl in weird miscalculated shots at revival and retribution. so the idea of him spending thirteen years in the dark place only writing hackneyed scripts where he’s always the center of the attention and secretly a good guy,, a misunderstood nice guy type of archetype is good and funny and works for what remedy is trying to say about these men.
-i wish i could say i like the original alan wake’s dlc a lot more than i actually do,, turning a survival horror game into an arcade shooter is fun and cute fluff i just wish the writer and the signal did more in retrospect. everything in those levels for the most part just looks like cut levels from the base game where ur redoing waves and waves of killing enemies and it’s just not rlly fun?? this however,,, great fun,, more fun than alan wake 2 tbh!! guns feel better and enviros look great when they’re being destructed

-episode 2 is like one of the most inconsequential and pointless things i think ive ever played? don’t rlly gaf about control like at all so was fully expecting this to not hit for me but wow it rlly does not hit for me!! mostly it’s just running back and forth between two places three or so times in a row bc this entire dlc is v obviously padded. best thing i can say about this specific chapter is i rlly do appreciate that each ep gets its own color scheme i think that does kind of make them look a tiny bit diff from base game even though everything here is just reused assets + locales,, fun visuals in the very last two places u visit in this ep but that also consists of maybe five mins of a fifty min thing so it all just feels pointless loll

-ep 3 i mostly like bc its trying to do a lot of new stuff both w visuals + gameplay that hopefully will bleed over into future remedy games. on some travis strikes back or like smiling friends type of multimedia work and i think that’s great to see!! the comic section straight up some of the fucking ugliest art ive ever seen jfc on that rolling tray blacklight type shit, v embarrassing! also i just dont rlly care about the remedy connected universe type stuff its rlly boring and like basic to me,, i don’t gaf about marvel bc im not a sixteen yo boy lol! i think quantum break is a v good game i like it a lot but i am not clamoring for a sequel that obviously can never be + a part of me wishes remedy would kind of move on and away from all of that but whatever lol.

The final game in the Guitar Hero lineage, and it's an unexpected 5-year-later reboot that entirely changes everything, from the visuals and aesthetics all the way down to the actual guitar controller and gameplay. A reboot this radically drastic from the series it's from is a one-way ticket to being divisive among players, and as a big guitar hero fan I can't say I hated playing this but I sure didn't really love it either.

The visuals have 100% forsaken the funny wacky game-generated chuck e cheese bands with their goofy mocapped animations in place of having full FMV footage of some shmoes playing the songs at a concert with a huge crowd of people. There are tons of different fake bands that you play alongside instead of sticking to one central band or character like the previous GH/RB series did, and everyone is acting at 400% cheese levels. I haven't seen people move and emote in such corny ways since playing FMV games on the sega CD and 3DO, it really has that kind of energy. There's a level of complete disassociation when you finish a song and watch your first-person video feed walk to some random dude holding your next guitar for you as he swaps your instruments while giving you the fuck me look, or when you are playing a song and the video feed points to your band mates who are getting way too fucking into their performances. All with zero prior context on who these people are and why you are even playing with them. There are also two different video feeds that switch depending on how good you are playing, and the "U rappin awful" feed is way funnier than the "U rappin great" feed. Seeing the entire crowd and band of FMV actors look overly dumbfounded and disappointed in you as you biff your guitar solo never gets old under any circumstances. There's no subtle change between the video feeds either, it just kinda blurs everything as it transitions from one to the other so it's really like your character is completely drugged out hallucinating the most bipolar crowd in existence sometimes. The rest of the games menus and aesthetic carry over to the UI as well, as everything has that peak mid-2010s minimalism to it that you will either love or hate. The setlist is also certainly something, since like the original guitar hero games kinda came at a good time period where edgy rock music was pretty trendy as well as classic rock really never falling out of style, but by the time this dropped I feel like most mainstream music is more in the poppy, electronicy, hip-hoppy type mood so a lot of this games setlist can be pretty radio-core if you catch my drift. You play fucking Bangarang by skrillex with a guitar in this game for fucks sake. And the FMV band is still playing!!! You mean to tell me this NPC-ass crowd is getting super excited to hear some singer go "shouts to all my lost boys shoshoshoshoshoshoshouts to all my lost boys we rowdy" in person????? It's certainly a vibe.

The guitar is the main sticking point of this game, as we now have a 6-fret guitar with two rows of 3 buttons instead of a 5 fret guitar with one row of 5 buttons. Now you have to worry about your fingers vertical placement instead of just the horizontal position of your hand, and it certainly takes some getting used to especially if you are already intimately familiar with 5-fret like ya boi. Apparently they made it this way to both make it feel more like a real guitar (i have not ever learned how to play guitar so I cannot say how much more accurate this is) as well as to address some players complaints about their hands not being able to reach the orange fret (which honestly is pretty valid, when I was a kid I was stuck on medium because I couldn't comprehend shifting my hand a little bit to reach orange). It's certainly super humbling to plow through all the previous guitar hero games on expert without breaking much of a sweat at all to get absolutely curbstomped by this new control scheme enough where I had to crank it down to hard instead of expert. The 6-fret guitar certainly has a bit more depth in terms of the patterns that can show up as there are 3 different types of notes that can come down each row instead of the 1 in previous games, and I got discombobulated super easy with songs that frequently require shifting from the top and bottom row at a fast pace. The notes that require you to press both the top and bottom button on a fret weren't my favorite as I felt like I couldn't find a consistent way to press down between both that would activate the note fast enough while still being comfortable and practical with my hands. Sometimes only one would end up pressing down enough and it would kill my combo which ain't very cash money, and this might be a me thing or a wii U version thing but despite buying this game practically new old stock my guitar sometimes didn't feel as responsive as the other guitar hero guitars I've used. Maybe it has to do with the in-game timing windows or calibration, maybe it has to do with the port, maybe it has to do with the guitar but especially with strumming there were patterns I could do EZPZ on any other guitar hero on the same TV and settings that would like frequently drop while playing this one, it felt like sometimes inputs would be either late or drop which is def not something that's good for rhythm games where consistency is a must.

It's certainly a huge departure from main guitar hero and while I def can understand why it didn't catch on or set the world on fire the same way the original games did, I kinda respect the decision to change things up so drastically instead of just sticking to the same old formulas. There's also an online mode that was apparently pretty fucking cool where there were hundreds of songs that rotate around a drop-in drop-out online radio that you can play with the music video in the background which sounds rad as fuck, but the servers are down. Knowing me and my obsession with fan servers, I did discover, patch, and try and connect to the GHTV reloaded fan server that restores that mode alongside adding new custom songs to play, BUT I was a fool and bought this on Wii U, where in order to connect to the fan server you needed to still authenticate through nintendo network which just shut down so oops guess I got around to this too late. Luckily the dongle for the guitar is cross compatible with every console except xbox so if I want to try out the fan servers I just have to hunt down a PS3 copy of the game which isn't too big an ask. The six-fret guitar is also surprisingly supported in clone hero with its own small subculture of fans and custom songs, but to get it to work you need the dongle for the xbox guitar so I haven't been able to give it a go. Certainly a guitar hero game of all time for sure.

Mega Man World 4 continues the Blue Bomber's Game Boy saga, and while this game continues on the same formula established by the previous Game Boy games, there is some new stuff added.

The biggest addition, I'd say, is the addition of P Chips. P Chips can drop from enemies and can also be found in stages. These are basically currency for the "shop" Dr. Light has in the game! This is actually pretty cool, and predates Mega Man 7's usage of bolts as currency by about 2 years.
You can't buy much in the store, but what is there is very useful, like E-Tanks and the Energy Balancer item, which I did get.

In addition, production values seem higher for this one. There are more cutscenes and cool animations to see in this one, and even some dialogue close to the end of the game, something that didn't really happen in the previous World games. The soundtrack is also pretty solid, with great renditions of the songs found in the NES titles, plus some new ones.

Besides that, you go through 4 stages from Mega Man 4 Robot Masters, and after a boss, you go through 4 stages from Mega Man 5 Robot Masters. I'd say that the level design in this one is my favourite in the World games. There are familiar set-pieces, for those who played the NES games, but there are also new gimmicks added, that make the stages pretty fun.

The new major Robot Master, Ballade, is also pretty solid, and on-par with Mega Man World 3's Punk, in my opinion. Although I did find the last Wily stage to be kind of long, this time around. And this game actually brings back the traditional Boss Rush from the NES games, which doesn't help with the length.

Regardless, so far, I think Mega Man World 4 is my favourite of the Game Boy Mega Man titles, with solid level design and great production values!