Neverwinter Nights 2 is a complicated animal compared to the original Neverwinter Nights game. At its core, it's the same game restomodded, but it carries with it some issues that hold it back from being better than the original.

Gameplay
NWN2 borrows a lot of gameplay elements from KOTOR where you can assume control of your companions and some conversations are letterboxed cutscenes. Inventory management is also similar to KOTOR, where the items no longer take up inventory space with unique sizes on a grid, and now all occupy one space in your inventory screen. The huge side effect to this inventory management is that you will have more trouble than necessary finding certain items that you'll need as a lot of the icons look identical.

Gone from the game is the radial system where you right click on an element and you're given a UI wheel to assign an action to your PC. In its place is a drop down menu that does the same, but removes some of the inputs to keep the menu from being cluttered. The designers ideally want you to use the hotbar more than the drop down menu, as they believed that right clicking on the enemy you want you to perform the action on, and then click on the ability in the hotbar to do that action on the enemy would be more intuitive than the radial menu from NWN.

However the hotbar is incredibly tedious to set up now that the radial menu is gone, and any special feats you want to perform must be dragged through from your characters' character sheet. I also haven't found a way to assign companion commands to the hotbar - which you could do in NWN - and those commands are an absolute necessity if you don't want your companions to aggro any enemies you don't want in a fight. The AI wants to engage in all enemies, even ones that will break your party formation.

Overall, gameplay is a downgrade from the original game.

Graphics and Sound
NWN2's engine essentially splashes the original NWN with a brand new coat of paint that looks good as screenshots but awful when in motion. All of the characters' animations feel extremely floaty, especially when attacking and moving. Not to mention that the women in the game walk as if they're always on a catwalk strutting. The spell's visual effects have taken a downgrade as well, and I was kind of disappointed with how it handled the electricity visuals on weapons. Blood also no longer spills on the ground and just floats in air like a plume of smoke.

The game has some new sound effects and music, but it also has pretty much all of the sound assets from the original NWN, and the game relies heavily on the older sounds. Voice acting in the game is a mixed bag. Thankfully, all of the companions have good VA and they don't suffer from the crushed dynamics some of the voices from Hordes of the Underdark had. Unfortunately, a bit of the NPCs aren't as lucky. Most of the bad VA come from monstrous NPCs who would benefit from having some reverb or other post processing, but they often suffer from crushed dynamics making them fatiguing to hear. The ones that speak very slow are often the ones that have the worst voice direction, but I don't think it's the fault of the VO artist.

Some of the NPCs in the NWN2 campaign even have the Asmir Male voice set, which if you've ever used the NWN Toolset, you'll know that is the default voice set assigned to any newly created NPC. It just so happens that the designers forgot to reassign another voice that would have made more sense to the NPC. There are a couple of other design oversights in the game that could take forever to fill this box of text up, but I digress.

Story
This is without a doubt the only thing that makes NWN2 better than NWN1 in spite of its problems. Pretty much all of the original Bioware modules in NWN had subpar stories save for Hordes of the Underdark. However, NWN2's story kept me engaged all throughout its long campaign, so much so that I even sat through a no word of lie a half hour conversation during a trial in the second act. Companions all have engaging side quests, and they feel very fleshed out as characters in the story whereas in the original campaign they're mostly used tools as a means to make the game more smoother to play. It's a testament of good writing if I'm able to stomach the bad animations and questionable game design choices just to see what happens next in the game.

Replayability
There are several paths you can take in the campaign and they all fit pretty well with the game's plot, surprisingly even the evil ones. Replayability in the first campaign will not be an issue if you're used to the gameplay jank. Unfortunately, because the only thing that carries the game is the campaign, NWN2 doesn't have the longevity of its older brother. Despite having its own toolset like NWN, it was reported that the toolset is more complicated to use compared to the original one, so users ended up going back to the old game for content creation. I cannot speak about the toolset as I have no recollection of ever using it, but by no means does that mean the game is void of user made content. Far from it, it has a sizeable amount of content that will garner more hours of your time if you let it, but it is nowhere near the sheer size of NWN1's content.

Final Thoughts
To put this long-winded rambling of a review short, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a great game mostly for its main campaign. Once you get used to its jankiness, the story of the campaign is among the best in the Dungeons and Dragons lore with compelling characters and decisions that may or may not bite you back in the end. If you're looking for an older RPG that feels okay to play despite its jankiness, you might want to just play NWN1 instead, as it already has loads of fan content that sometimes outshine its main campaign.

Arceus almost hits the mark of what I've wanted in a main Pokemon title. Unfortunately, the game falls into the trap of holding your hand tightly during the first couple of hours of the game. Stomach that though, and the game actually becomes really fun to play once it lets you play.

The elements that it borrows from Breath of the Wild, along with some changes made to the formula made the game one of the most engaging Pokemon titles I've played to date. I loved how you can capture Pokémon without needing to battle them, and the way the game handled that feature feels great, especially when sneaking up on an unsuspecting 'mon and throwing a ball behind them. I also loved how the game seamlessly transitions to and from battle mode and exploration mode while you're still in control of your player character. It may not amount to much for some, but moving around while ordering your Pokemon to attack feels great to me.

However, even with all those changes carrying the game, it really needed more time to get refined into something even more compelling. There is still a lot of the jank that has plagued the previous 3D games including some graphical glitches, and seeing the same 3 or 4 animations the NPCs and even your avatar plays at every interaction. The graphics are still not up to par with the majority of the first party Switch titles. Battle animations have improved though, as any move that requires physical contact will cause the Pokémon to run at the opponent.

Overall a fun time.

Replayed after maybe 15 or so years after my rose colored nostalgia glasses fell off. Chapter one starts off strong. It's a fetch quest, but the villains involved are pretty awesome, and there are multiple ways to solve the issues and all feel like they work with the game's plot. However, once the chapter ends, it digresses into moments unrelated to the main plot. You have to take the main plot item somewhere across the desert, but you're interrupted twice, and those moments felt really padded out. They detract from the main story and almost felt like they were specifically designed only to add more to the game's length artificially. Also, the person that designed the Tomb of Kel-Garas in the interlude is a sadist.

Didn't really care for the final villain, or her motivations of why she did her plan. Deekin is still one of my favorite characters, though.

Fatal Frame is a game that relies heavily on atmosphere and ambiance over jumpscares. The story and setting kept me intrigued, along with the camera's multipurpose use of a puzzle solving tool and a weapon for the ghosts I encounter. I didnt really care that much about the back and forth backtracking a lot of the puzzles had, but I feel that's kind of most of the older horror games' schick.

The combat with the camera felt pretty clunky. I found myself fighting with the controls, even after changing it to the more comfortable alternative where it mirrors some of the FPS controls when using the camera. The thumbstick sensitivity only has two speeds when looking in first person, but there's a separate fast speed button that ignores any analog sensitivity, zipping along the screen even at a light tap of the stick.

Not at all a demerit, but the game is also not forgiving with its ammo. The weakest ammo - although infinite in theory as you can recharge it at the save points - will have you fighting ghosts for a longer than necessary period. You need to keep in mind of using the weaker film when solving puzzles and the stronger film for fighting, as well as try to prioritize attacking when either fully charged and/or the moment an enemy is ready to strike you. This makes the combat pretty intense, and it provides super satisfying moments dealing high damage the moment a ghost tries to strike you.

Older Japanese horror games have a habit of having bad English VA and this game is no exception. Though, I feel like it was the fault of the localiztion's voice direction that was the culprit and not the actors themselves as there were few instances where the VA didnt sound out of place. Mafuyu's VA unfortunately sounded completely disinterested in his role.

Despite its terrible English VA, the game sounds great. It has on-point horror ambiances and its reliance of the ghosts spatial sound design when fighting them makes it a great terrifying experience. Although there are cases where the ambiance stops abruptly when going into another room. I'm not sure if it was a stylistic choice or because of the game's limitations, but that sounded odd to me.

Near the end of the game, the difficulty spikes pretty harshly. Annoyingly, theres an enemy that screws with your controls, and there is an instance where the game isn't immediately clear of where a certain key item is, and you had to make a short time windowed decision to find it and put it in its right place or it's an instant game over far away from a save point.

Overall, I've enjoyed my time with the game, and I've heard the sequels are much better. I'm looking forward to playing Crimson Butterfly along with the rest of the series.

You wont get the same experience of the film when playing this game. The game goes a complete different direction that is more action focused compared to the film's focus on drama. That being said, it's a decent GTA clone with a mafia twist. For an early 3rd party Wii game, most of the motion controls worked, although the nunchuk is very sensitive to movement that you might mistakenly jab someone because of it.

Both the Wii and PS3 versions are recommended, as some of the bonus features present in both make it that much smoother to play.

Skyward Sword for the Wii is my least favorite mainline Zelda game not counting the DS games. It was very hand holdy, tedious, and the motion controls hampered the game more than they helped. So when they announced the remaster, I was taken aback by the 60 dollar price tag. Nintendo tried to justify the price by pointing out that they've fixed the general annoyances of the original. They were mostly wrong on that part, they've fixed most of the surface-level annoyances, but the rougher parts of the game haven't been tweaked.

The selling point of the remaster is that it's the same game, except now the mandatory and often forced motion controls are now made optional. The game is also smoother at a constant 60fps. They also fixed one of the glaring issues that plagued the original Wii title: made it less annoying to play. Their fix? You can skip dialogue and some cutscenes so that you can avoid Fi's constant interruptions during the game.

Alright, so at first glance, they went in the right direction, but I kind of wished they had a way to turn off Fi completely instead of allowing you to skip her logging. That also means you would have to skip entire cutscenes that feature her, meaning you'll likely miss key points of the game's plot if this is your first time playing.

As stated before, the fixes they made were pretty surface level. The constant and often pointless mcguffin fetch quests between dungeons, the imprisoned boss that you had to fight multiple times, the tear trials, and remnants of the game's handholdy nature are still present. Much of the main quests were designed to inflate the game's length for some reason, as this game could do without much from its 40+ hour average game length. Granted, they would have to basically redesign the game possibly from scratch to fix those issues so I'm kind of not surprised that they remain in the remaster.

The conventional controls work pretty well despite the original game's hefty reliance on the motion controls. You swing your sword directionally by flicking the right stick. Though some of the moves you have to pull like the ending blow might be confusing for the conventional controls, and there is a delay between the time you flick the stick and the time Link swings his sword. The absolute saving grace of the button-only controls is the actions that felt like the motion control felt forced I.e. the loftwing and swimming. I'm so glad I'm able to do those things without the odd controls.

As it stands, this game is better than the Wii original, the graphics and artstyle hold up incredibly well even after a decade, the story can be engaging during its intense parts, and the soundtrack is amazing. Unfortunately, it's all held back by a conservative game design that doesn't respect the player's time or intelligence.

Whether you're playing it for the first time or you're experiencing it again after some time, the game has its moments to really shine, but when it drags... unfortunately it really, really draaaaaaaags.

Disaster tries to cram every wii remote action into a minigame collection of saving people using gestures and shooting enemies in a rail shooter. It's a game that isn't even sure what it wants to be, so it tries to be everything, and its efforts are subpar. One good thing I can say is that it doesn't take itself too seriously.

The sound design of the game is questionable. First off, the sound of Ray's footsteps is laughably horrible. Secondly, the game wants you to have the tiny wii remote speaker on for most - if not all of the important sounds - as you need to listen in on the radio during the driving segments, as well as the gunshots in the shooting segments, because they're both actually inaudible in the game even with the speaker turned off.

I satiated my curiosity of the game by pirating it since it was never sold in the United States, and I think they made the right decision to not do so. It would have been sent straight into the bargain bin not even months later.

This game wasn't exactly a port of the 360 original, but rather a remake using Resident Evil 4's engine and gameplay mechanics as a foundation of its overall presentation. The only thing that the game benefits from doing this is better control over the firearms thanks to RE4 Wii Edition's controls. However, the engine and gameplay mechanics are so limited with what it can handle that everything else about this game is inferior to the original. There are way fewer zombies on screen, no photography, your mobility is limited, and killing zombies using anything other than your guns doesn't have the same impact as the original game.

Basically, this game is a demake of the original. I never understood why it had to be made.

Makes Red Steel 1 more of a prototype with how improved the controls are. Despite that, all of the fights are easily winnable with the matador skill and your fully upgraded pistol.

Don't bother getting the other guns, your pistol when fully upgraded is more than enough to help you in any fight. Though the TommyGun is a close second as it's a good cleaner for large fights, I cannot get over how bad the gun sounds. It's easily the worst I've heard of any gun in any video game. The other two weapons - the shotgun and the rifle - are both extremely useless as the pistol can do better long range and your katana can easily handle close range.

The graphics were nice for a Wii title and the game runs very smoothly at 60fps, but the mission structure was the same all throughout the game and none of the characters were even remotely interesting. Got bored of the game and moved on.

Croteam struck gold with this game for the series. At its best, it has the best-paced, balanced, and designed levels in the series. At its worst, there are instances where the game tries to pull some pretty bullshit encounters to overwhelm you. Those usually involve the bouncy rooms, which although they are hilarious, they get way too chaotic on anything harder than normal difficulty.

The new weapons in the game balanced out some of the general annoyances from the first encounter. For example, the sniper rifle is an amazing counter to the arachnoids that tend to spawn long distances away from you and pick you off with their hitscan chainguns, while the serious bomb is a great panic button that gives you a bit of breathing room in a pinch.

It's one of my favorite games growing up and I still enjoy playing it every now and then.

It's Doom 3's combat streamlined to be quicker and have more oomph in the gunplay, but with a bunch of same-looking corridors and bullet sponge enemies. I think I'm halfway into the game and I already lost interest. There are also vehicles in this game and they control like ass.

For what it's worth, it looks fine for a 2005 shooter when you turn up the settings all the way. The problem is there is a bug in the game that causes the textures to blur on the highest settings because the game doesn't recognize GPUs higher than 1GB. Thankfully, the fix is easy in the config file.

I can say one big positive thing about this game is that its shotgun feels way better than Doom 3's melee shotgun.

This is actually the first Doom game I've played in my life back on the N64. Contrary to the title and the nature of N64 ports, Doom 64 is an original game in the series and is a direct sequel to the PC games.

The game plays almost identical to the PC versions with completely different levels. Because of the game's engine upgrades, it places a larger emphasis on puzzles and traps. Personally, I find them fine except for some select levels which become a little annoying than fun or interesting. (I'm looking at you, Alpha Quadrant)

The game also ditches the hard rock and heavy metal soundtrack and in its place are some horror ambient tracks with slowed to a crawl instrumentation. These include pitched down baby cries that really bring the satanic imagery home.

I grew up playing this game a lot as a kid, so I kind of preferred this game's horror aesthetic over the badass vibe that the original games had. It's close to being my favorite Doom game, but I find some of the later levels pretty frustrating with their layouts and puzzles. The secret levels are not a necessity, but they will GREATLY benefit you in the last level. Might be worthwhile to have a guide for those.

All in all, I think that it is well worth your five dollars on modern consoles. The remasters do the game more than justice and plays extremely well on all platforms. It's a very good game that got the short end of the stick because people had enough of Doom in 1997.

Saturday Morning Metroid.

It is absolutely overhated because of the timing of its release when the last game in 6 years was the godawful Metroid Other M. The game itself is okay, it's a mission based coop first person shooter on the 3DS so for what it's worth, it controls pretty well for the platform it's on. It has a lot of sphere based puzzles that often require you to push a ball toward its goal by shooting at it. Do not go in expect it to play like Metroid Prime or even Prime Hunters.

You're not missing much forgoing this game, but I don't think it deserves the hate it got. For what it's worth, it could be a fun game for four players but good luck finding anyone else wanting to play it.