A bad horror game with some pretty pathetically easy-to-solve puzzles, save for some of the bomb puzzles, still easy but they had a decent setup, along with the poison mixture one, that one was okay. The game has probably the worst third-person combat mechanics of any video game. Not once could I use the heavy attack because the enemies run at you and immediately hit you, stun locking you from finishing your wind-up. The only way to land anything on your enemy is if you back up and use a light attack. That way you will land a hit as they're coming in to hit you. However, if you are cornered, you are done. The enemies will not give you a chance to fight back as all of your attacks require a wind up that is way slower than any enemy's jab.

I'm aware the game prefers you to avoid engaging in enemies and if given the chance, it wants you to utilize bolting the doors or barricading them to trap the enemies in. Unfortunately, because the controls are sluggish, you have to perfectly align yourself to the doors correctly in order to close them and then slightly move into them to bolt them. Sometimes the enemies come at you so quickly that you're not given the time to bolt the door before they open it up right after you close it.

Saw stays pretty true to its source material with the hamfisted symbolisms in the logs and traps you come across, along with its editing style of lots of in-your-face closeup jump cuts with a bunch of flashing and sped up footage. The game tries hard to jump scare you, and not once did I feel my heart wanting to break out of its ribcage. If you're a fan of the Saw franchise, maaaaybe it might work out for you, but have you ever considered better horror franchises?

Subnautica is a pretty amazing survival game built into some of the foundations of System Shock's immersive sim mechanics. It has a hauntingly beautiful world filled with plenty of biomes along with the creatures and flora that inhibit it. The story unfolds in the Metroid Prime/System Shock logbook system and the game lets you play at your own pace, never needing to rush. You can build your base, tend your garden, upgrade your equipment, and brace yourself to go deep in the very hostile ocean world.

There are some annoyances with how it handles the survival mechanics though. Finding resources to craft your equipment can get a little too grindy, and I also feel that the thirst meter drains far too quickly, giving me the notion that no one dies of thirst far quicker than the player character. Granted, the game does give you options on how to balance it out if you are able to find the blueprints for it.

It had a pretty drawn out end game as well. Without giving too much away, you are required to build something that requires a lot of resources and backtracking, some of which I think was pretty dumb with how it was handled. Throughout the game I chose to not build the Cyclops submarine because I felt I was getting through the game just fine without it, and I felt it was too big for many of the passageways and caves I came across.

However, It turns out the sub is a necessity for the endgame, because it has its own fabricator that crafts one of the ingredients needed to build the final part to get you home.

Despite this, the annoyances aren't enough to bring down such an amazing world to experience and explore. Sometimes I wish I could forget some of the areas in the game just to experience the dread and anxiety of coming across them again. The uncertainty of whether or not you should push further and then succeeding in doing so is super satisfying.

It took me awhile to finish this game, and it's kind of bittersweet that I did. There aren't many games of this genre that capture the feelings I've experienced playing this game. I'm sad that I won't be able to experience them again now that I know what to expect playing this in the future.

It's a middle of the road Telltale game, though it has a decent story as a Back to the Future entry. The puzzles can be quite obtuse and even the hint system doesn't always quite work as it sometimes believes you're solving another puzzle entirely when you're solving a different one. Episode 5 had a very great climax and I would say it made it all worth it in the end.

If you're playing the PC version, try to find the Tom Wilson mod from the steam forums if it's still around. It replaces Biff's dialogue with the re-recorded lines from the 2015 version of the game. It makes it a much more authentic experience with the original Biff Tannen voicing the guy.

I'd consider this the Deadly Premonition of 1997. The game is objectively not good and not well optimized, and you could beat it in one sitting. However, it has such a huge charm and personality that it pretty much defined my childhood.

Bear in mind I wouldn't recommend playing this game if your gaming palette is in such a state that you wouldn't be able to tolerate a framerate mess of a game that is very picky about the system it's running on. It's really one of those "you had to be there" games.

The game is completely dependent on the group that you're playing with. If you have great working chemistry with your group, it's insanely good. However, it is extremely punishing upon death and if you have a bad connection to the Internet, it goes out of its way to not let you play.

As a single player game, the AI of your crew will make things hellish. If you have the patience to reset when things go south, you will get through this game alone. As it stands, the game is best played with a group that does not treat this like a school group project.

I was one of the idiots that played this game on Steam. It's an awful Windows game, as it is heavily bugged and requires a lot of time and effort to make it playable. However, I gave it another go since I acquired the Steam Deck. Playing this game through Proton actually fixes a lot of the issues with playing the game on a modern windows system. You would still have to do a couple of things to get it working as if it was native to the system, but the amount of effort required is much less on the Steam Deck than a modern Windows machine.

As for the game itself now that it is relatively bug free? Age hasn't really diminished its gameplay for the most part. The platforming, wall running, and flag pole jumping portions never felt stale and there is always something new to pull off when scaling a room. This is where games such as Assassin's Creed and Uncharted got their inspiration of the platforming and wall climbing portions and it's on full display in this game.

However, the combat is the Achilles heel of the game. Despite that you have a diverse moveset and the game has some interesting ways of allowing you to pull those off, many of the encounters overstay their welcome and the fights draw out way longer than needed. You mostly fight three to four enemies at a time, but the encounters have you fight upwards of more than 20 enemies especially late in the game. It makes the combat feel almost endless. There are times when I wanted to run away to continue with the game as the fights grew tedious, and sometimes the game lets you do that, but there are times when you have to finish a fight before the game lets you move on.

The camera doesn't make things any better. Its collision detection with the walls along with its preprogrammed focus on combat makes it a constant fight between getting the camera to work right and making sure you and Farah don't die, and the latter is going to be especially problematic late in the game.

Graphically, the game looks fine. As a game from 2003, I can't really complain about how it looks and it pulls off its Arabian nights look pretty well. As for the sound, the SFX does its job and the soundtrack is a mixture of an Arabian-influenced sound melded together with hard rock. The mixture is surprisingly tasteful.

Unfortunately, there are issues with the attenuation of 3D sounds as some of the emitters are too small when the narrative happens between characters. The game also has no subtitle options, making it extremely difficult to make out what some characters are saying when they're far away from the camera, or when there is a lot of stuff going on in the scene. On the Gamecube, the sound effects have horrible file compression issues, giving them a very grainy effect, making them sound like they're from a PS1 or an N64 game.

For its puzzles alone, this is a great game that still holds its own to the test of time, but maybe play it in short bursts because the combat does drag on, and oftentimes frustrates near the end of the game.

The game itself is worth 4.5 leaning on five. Almost every single player DLC is in the this collection except Pinnacle Station, though that isn't a loss. If you're ever so inclined you can restore it using a mod.

Of the three that have benefited the most of a remaster, ME1 has had the most work redone, and for a good reason too. The gunplay feels a lot better than the original and your sprint button actually works outside of combat whereas in the original it just shakes the camera making you feel like you're running quicker, but you aren't. The Mako is still a physics nightmare but it's less so in this remaster as it has a bit of heft to it's weight. Apart from those, its still the same game I remember, an rpg that tries to be a third person cover shooter and it has the jankiness you'd expect from a decade old game, but the story and characters more than make up its shortcomings. It's still the same masterpiece as I remember.

It's been awhile since I've played Mass Effect 2, but I'm pretty sure most of its content remain unchanged from the original, apart from some of the bugs I had to fix using a fan patch.

Mass Effect 3's Galaxy at War has pretty much been removed from the game and only the single player components affect your war readiness. Unfortunately multiplayer was also removed, which is kind of a shame because even if it was a pretty standard wave shooter it was still fun as hell.

This would have been the perfect collection of the trilogy had the PC version not been paired with the godawful EA App, even on Steam. Midway in my ME2 playthrough the achievements have stopped working and the game believes that I've accomplished them all. For the steam deck users, you also can't play the game offline when you're away from wifi, even if you've started the game with it. The EA App needs a constant internet connection to allow you to play, otherwise it blocks your screen with an "unresolveable error" code that you somehow cannot click out of.

As a fan of the series since 2009, I've enjoyed my time immensely revisiting the trilogy with this collection, but fuck the EA App.

Metroid Prime Remastered is the same game from 2002 with a new coat of paint plus a new sound engine. Back then, it accomplished the seldom charted territory of taking a metroidvania game into 3D space, and it did it so perfectly that it set the example of how a 3D exploration game should be made, inspiring games like Dark Souls for years to come. It is an absolute masterpiece of environmental storytelling, connecting areas into a seamless load time masking manner to keep players immersed into its world, and it did so through - at the time - state of the art tech that ran at butter smooth 60fps.

At the time of its trailer release, I was seriously convinced that this game was a remake of the original game. It is not. Even though all of the meshes and textures that populate the world are new, the game underneath feels like it did originally. Lighting took a huge leap for the most part, going so far as to have the edges of Samus' visor reflect light from the text displayed in the heads up display as well as her map system. I say for the most part, because her beams no longer produce light. Unfortunately, explosions from enemies such as the Flying Pirates have gotten a graphical downgrade as well.

The game's sound design took a leap as well. Most of the sounds are the same, but they've all been upsampled and have crisp highs and boomy lows. I do believe the morph ball bomb was borrowed from Prime 3 as it sounds similar to it. Hallways now reverberate and reflect sound effects properly, adding more to the game's level of immersion.

As I said before, even with all of those changes, this is the same game 20 years ago under the hood. There are a couple of nuances that have been changed, but I'm glad that they kept the rapid missile glitch intact. It still feels like the game I played in my adolescent years and I'm all for it.

New to this game are a brand new set of twin stick controls partially inspired by Primehack. However you can choose to play the game with the original controls from the Gamecube, plus the joycon pointer controls from Prime 3/Prime Trilogy from the Wii. Apart from having to remap two buttons, the twin stick controls feel right at home with this game and generally give players more freedom to explore the area and take in the scenery, something that the original tank controls from the Gamecube took away partially.

In the original you have to use one of the shoulder buttons to look vertically and use another to hold the vertical position in place while you move around. I've played Prime so much with the Gamecube controls that they don't bother me that much anymore, but the twin stick controls is such a breath of fresh air to an already fantastic game.

One issue that Prime had on the Gamecube was how it masked its load times through its doors. When you're walking towards a door, the game starts to load the next area while you're meters away from the door. Sometimes it takes a bit that when you arrive by the door, you need to wait for the area to finish loading before the door opens. It can take upwards of 10 seconds for the door to open and can sometimes break the immersion with how long you have to wait. This remaster addresses that issue so well that I don't even recall at any point that I had to wait for the door to open. And it does all that plus keeping the game at a constant buttery smooth 60fps.

The original Metroid Prime had set an example of how 3D exploration games should be played. This game sets an example of how remasters should be made now. Even 20 years later, this game is still a must play.

I don't know why I had a fascination with this title for a while. Maybe because it's an Indiana Jones entry and I've always had a soft spot for the franchise. I'm aware that this game isn't great, the Wii version especially had issues with its constant motion control pandering, and many times the controls don't always register. Yet I've always wanted to find some kind of workaround to play the game since I've liked Emperor's Tomb in spite of all of its flaws.

I've been indecisive with whether or not I should play the ps2 version since it is visually inferior to the Wii version, but it seemed like the obvious choice since the game wouldn't be held back by its awful controls. After some procrastination I finally bit the bullet and played the game. Only to discover that even though the game is no longer held back from its broken motion controls, it still sucks. A lot.

The game is basically the port of the Wii game with scaled back graphics and motion controls now replaced with conventional button prompts. However, the evidence of its Wii roots are still present. It's extremely QTE heavy and the prompts pop up with some requiring only a split second for you to respond to them before you are killed.

As a relic from the 00s, the game doesn't hold back from prompting you with QTEs. They wear out their welcome to the point of happening regularly when you're solving similar puzzles. Expect to lose your footing from a loose rock every time you sidle across a narrow passageway, prompting you to mash on the shoulder buttons to climb back up every goddamned time you do.

The game tries to have a dynamic combat system, allowing you to use the environment which include whippable sets that topple over enemies as well as objects that you can throw or bludgeon. Unfortunately, all of the fights are made easy by using your whip on your enemies, followed by a knee to their face which is performed automatically often resulting in an instant kill. I do recall was a constant issue with the Wii version since the motion controls didn't work more than half the time. Any other instance including brutes or bosses have you waiting until they have a tell when they're ready to be whipped or have an object thrown at them. Otherwise the fights are pretty much all the same.

There are gunfight segments that act more like puzzles than real gunfights. Most of them are straightforward: hide behind cover and pick off any enemies shooting at you. However there are some that are programmed to be invulnerable, and at those instances, the game wants you to focus your attention on environment set pieces that you can shoot that will cause the invulnerable mook to either move or die from whatever you're shooting at. They mostly happen with enemies that dual weild, but the game doesn't let you know that you can't kill them through conventional means. Also, you're not completely invulnerable when you're hiding behind cover, figured I point that out.

Graphically the game is meh. Very much a ps2 game with its blurry textures hidden behind some bloom lighting. The animations do have their charm though. I can tell the majority of them are hand made and not motion captured.

All in all, just play Emperor's Tomb if you want a decent Indy Tomb Raider-like game, or even the Uncharted series. This game still isn't fun to play even if the controls aren't broken.

The mission itself was decent. Although, the fact that Javik is a very important character in the franchise and was (and still is if you don't have Legendary Edition) locked behind a paywall was an unethical move on Bioware's part, especially since Javik contributes way more to the story of ME3 than a typical bonus character.

In the mission you're fighting Cerberus troops revisting a location from the first Mass Effect game, and its set up to be a pretty standard wave shooter with flashbacks of the character. It's three and a half stars if I were to grade the mission alone, but I'm still sour by the paywall that EA and Bioware put up when I first played the game eleven years ago.

Ending Mass Effect 2 to tie into the third game is this less than stellar DLC. Fights are made needlessly more difficult this time around because Shepard is on their own with no one on their team to help them out, All enemies now target you since none of your squad members are around, and your shields are ripped apart the moment you pop out from cover, making combat more tedious than fun in this mission. Pyros are a plenty in this mission and some will hide in corners and stagger you, leaving you vulnerable to gunfire while you're panicking over being on fire.

This dlc unfortunately has to be played because otherwise they make up a nonsensical reason why Shepard is impounded in the beginning of ME3. It's the weakest mission in storytelling because you commit a war crime to stop the reapers from coming for only a few months, despite some implications in this mission that you're given a few more years when doing so. So great, you've bought some time from a galaxywide genocide by committing batarian genocide. Wow, great outcome.

What a wasteful mission to end the game with.

Mass Effect 2 Project Overlord. Brought to you by Autism Speaks.

Hoo man, this DLC was worse than I remembered. The line "His autistic mind is as alien to me as actual aliens" spoken by one of the doctors convinced me that the writers had extremely outdated viewpoints of neurodivergent people. David was dehumanized to speak in very simple sentences and was characterized by only his autistic traits.

Apart from that, you're fighting geth and robots and that's the crux of the DLC. So bring Tali, Legion, or Kasumi with you and it'll be a smooth ride. You also control the hovercraft called the Hammerhead in between the stations, and it controls way better than the Mako in a lot of regards. However, because of its lack of shields, I feel it was designed to run away from conflict than to address it head on. Apart from one instance, the speed of the hammerhead was enough to speed away from any turret that may pose as a threat, and the platforming portions were fun to pull off. Kind of lame that they put invisible walls over locations that the hammerhead can easily clear over though.

Overall, I remember liking the dlc for the story, but retrospectively it's very dated now. The outcome of this mission doesn't really affect the story of ME3 aside from getting bonus upgrades, so you could probably feel safe to skip out on this one. No new lines from your squadmates during the cutscenes either, so it feels a bit empty with your mates being silent aside from their standard combat banter.

A funny game that's a bit of a slog during the first two episodes. Episode 1 has some issues with getting 100% completion due to the requirement of talking to specific characters at very precise moments in the game. If you miss a chance, you have to start the game over. Episode 2 has an atrocious mini game at the end of the game. Episodes 3 thru 5 suffer from some pretty cryptic puzzles like all the episodes, but they're more straightforward than the first two.

The PC version has no shortcut keys, you manually have to access the map and inventory by clicking on the icons, unlike the Wii version which you can use the plus and minus buttons to access those menus saving you a couple of steps.

Aside from that, the game plays like a long Homestar Runner cartoon. I'm a bit biased because I love the series.