"Flashback 2" is a game I used to dream about. I don't know if I can eloquently express just how cool the original game seemed to me as a child. It was unusual to find a game where you played as a character with realistic human proportions, for a start, but it was the wild diversity of its locations, and the satisfying consistency of its controls that really captivated me. The weird, lush alien jungle you wake up in leads you to a weird, concrete underground that reminded me of the alleyways and backrooms I wasn't allowed to go in. Flashback was dangerous and sort of illicit. It was satirical about adult subjects like part-time jobs, public transport and bureaucracy. It was a million miles from any other Mega Drive game. At that time, no game seemed better lined-up to deliver all the rich potential of the future than "Flashback 2".

I don't really want to bully this game too much. I love Flashback, and I didn't buy this to fuel an online rant. I'm an earnest fan, and while I saw many red flags on my approach, I was curious about the game that Paul Cuisset decided was worthy of branding as its first numbered sequel. I recently viewed a behind the scenes video on YouTube that had been uploaded around a week prior. I was the twentieth viewer. I'm well aware that the braver members of the development team may be trawling the internet for player reactions, and by posting a review, there's a fair chance they'll read it. I don't want to ruin their week, and given this, I'll pepper this review with a couple of pieces of faint praise.

1- Flashback 2 isn't as bad as I'd anticipated
2 (even fainter)- Flashback 2 is the best continuation of Flashback I've played (including that truly abysmal Flashback Legend GBA prototype)

For all the talk of unacceptable performance issues and idiotic design, I don't think the game is that bad. On calm waters, I felt the game was acceptable. It's a first-time project from Microids' new in-house development studio, and given the state of independent multiplatform development in continental Europe these days, I think the game they delivered makes sense. Ubisoft's acquisitions ravaged France, Belgium and much of Northern Europe's games industry with relentless studio buyouts, and I'm thankful Cuisset retained the rights to his greatest achievement after working with the publisher on that atrocious "remake" ten years ago. All the attention surrounding the game's release has been put on IGN's 2/10 review, but if this had been released as a 3DS eShop game without a familiar title behind it, I fully expect some outlets would have risen to a 5 or even 6.

Right. Hopefully that's cushioned the blow.

With the couple of software updates the game has received since launch, Flashback 2's biggest problem isn't its performance. It's just that it's really fucking boring. Conrad Hart wakes up after sending himself to cryosleep, drifting off to the boundless unknown at the end of the first game, and wakes up a few moments later having to revisit all the same locations and do a bunch of the same shit. New Washington, the jungle, Planet Morph, IAN. They're all back, expecting you to have remembered them from 30 years ago. Only a few things actually resemble the original game. Mainly the elevators. The original game's art hasn't been referenced for much beyond the colour of Conrad's jacket. Typically, if anything in Flashback 2 reminds you of the first game, it's coincidental.

The game uses a Kirby and the Forgotten Land-style diorama view, with Conrad appearing small and distant in these elaborate sci-fi environments. Conrad isn't a big pink ball, though, and it's often quite a challenge to see where this drab little man is on the screen. The camera often obscures ledges and jumping points, and you need to line yourself up with each one perfectly to be able to use them. So much of the game is spent wobbling into the intended position to progress. I'm still trucking on with my 2009 Sony Bravia, but the combination of Flashback 2's obtuse camera and Black Friday sales was the closest I've come to buying a bigger TV in 14 years.

Despite the precedent for falls killing you in Flashback, this sequel loves a sheer drop. You take zero damage from them now. It just makes designing environments easier when you don't have to line up different floors properly. To Flashback 2's great benefit, if an obligation is ever at risk of making the game truly insufferable, they just don't bother putting it in. The unbalanced gunfights, the disjointed level design, the wonky puzzles. Don't worry, the game's not asking you to commit to any of it. They essentially give you a "skip content" button whenever things are getting too rough. If you continue after dying, there's no punishment. All your progress carries over to your new spawn. Trivialising every action sequence is a good way to prevent players from feeling frustrated, though it jeopardises any sense of tension or excitement the designers may have once hoped for.

Different levels take distinct approaches to gameplay. Sometimes subtly so. One may play more like an RPG, or a standard twin-stick shooter, or even a Metroidvania. Typically, the less demanding a style is on the surrounding game design, the less of a pain in the arse it is to play. There's a wee hacking mini-game in here. It's something you could run on a solar-powered calculator, and it's far and away the most solid part of the whole package. There is a sense that this team could make games, but expecting them to make a PS5 release is like asking your cat to paint your house.

A fundamental problem with the game's structure is they've jumped to the conclusion that "action" equals "fun", without making combat in any way exciting or challenging. These parts are supposed to be the fun bits, to reward you for pushing through the tedious bits, but there's no distinction between the two. The game constantly throws medikits at you, and no matter how many hits I took from complete lack of care, I never ended up with less than 10 in my inventory at any time. Gun play operates like a twin-stick shooter, and it just makes no sense with Flashback 2's floating - sometimes side-on, sometimes isometric - camera. The automatic lock-on function does all the work, lining up shots and playing the game for you. Geometry does nothing to spice up these sequences either, with bullets flying through cover and Conrad having little meaningful relationship with his environment. Thanks for making this game, guys.

I wouldn't call Paul Cuisset a household name. He hasn't had the best career. Shockingly, he does not seem ashamed of it. I'm used to cute wee nods for the fans in games from Kojima, Suda or Suzuki. I almost leapt out of my seat when I saw this prick reference the PS3 survival horror shitshow, Amy, in Flashback 2. What's he doing? The old man has left the house with his trousers down. Please arrest him for his own safety.

If you're a true Flashback nut (i.e. me and the other nineteen guys who watched that YouTube video), you may have some knowledge of a "Flashback 2" that was briefly worked on for the Mega CD. Not much is known about the project, and most of its story would be reworked for Fade to Black, but one thing they were most keen to implement was a mech suit for Conrad. In this radically different version of Flashback 2, they have been keen to implement the feature. Weirdly, and amusingly so. Multiple characters will surprise you with their familiarity with Japanimation robots. From a Marlon Brando pastiche mobster to a mutated village oracle figure, there's a wide range of personality types who will act against type to discuss just how intimately familiar they are with mechs. The mech stuff amounts to an atrocious minigame you play once, and another section later on, where you walk in a straight line. I think the 1993 Flashback 2 "mechs" more resemble this game's power armour - a feature that the game barely introduces, and rather, just dumps in without much explanation. You press triangle, and Conrad goes into morphin' time, adopting a full body metallic suit. It prevents him from taking damage from radiation. Like most of the game, it's completely lacking in substance, but it's cute to think that maybe Cuisset was thinking of the first time he attempted to make this game at some point during production.

I'm a fan of early 3D games from small, inexperienced developers. I can enjoy a 10fps Game Boy Color conversion of a PC FPS. I have completed Deadly Premonition. It's fair to say I have a high tolerance for poor performance in games. That said, Flashback 2 pushes at the furthest reaches of my empathy. Environments are often very large, and you may spend over an hour in some of them. Interact with them too much, by destroying breakables, attacking enemies, or opening pathways, and the software will dedicate more processing power to remembering that interaction, dropping the framerate. Even menus seem affected by the increased burden, taking multiple seconds to scroll through options. In one Metroidvania-like section, I was completely stumped for well over an hour, retreading the same ground over and over. By the end, the game looked like I was attempting to run Half-Life 2 on Windows 95. Leaving the area and coming back doesn't reset the environment to default. The game does not forget. It does not forgive. It encumbers itself with remembering each little interaction you ever deigned to commit to it in your flailing cluelessness, warping and sweating for your sin. Somehow, I eventually fiddled with the Analyser's frequencies enough in enough rooms to find my way out of this rapidly-degrading purgatory, but it's not an experience I will forget anytime soon.

There's also a lot of weird presentational setbacks. The bold utilitarian typeface, clashing hard against the overdesigned neon, semi-transluscent HUD elements. The menus that feature synonymous terms for different options. The dialogue trees that display the wrong characters' portraits, and once, a blank white square. Character artwork and in-game models bear little resemblance to each other, too. One fairly significant character appears with blonde hair in portraits and cutscene artwork, but with pink hair on their in-game character model, and I highly doubt it's intended as an homage to A Link to the Past. I've seen people accuse the game of using AI-generated artwork. I will not libel myself by commenting on that. Environments frequently look surprisingly complex, attractive, and intricately detailed, though some of the most interesting-looking locations are blocked off by invisible walls, and only serve as elaborate backgrounds. There's also the script and the apparent lack of any voice direction. I suspect it wasn't written by native English speakers, but French programmers who were confident enough in their fluency to avoid hiring any English localisation staff. There's a lot of awkward terminology, weird, bad jokes, and conversations with no sense of natural flow. Conrad doesn't feel anything like any previous version of the character (which thankfully means he's not like the Ubisoft remake Conrad, either), mainly coming across like a college student who wants to be cool and funny, but has no idea how to tell a joke. Locations, technology and character names get pronounced differently by each member of the cast, and one of them even struggles with the name "Ian". Maybe the most nostalgic part of the package is that it feels like years since I've played a game that had a script this bad.

I almost respected the story. It looked like it was headed towards some amusingly pulpy territory that surprised me with a sort-of clever twist. I thought they were using some very silly logic to make both Flashback 2 and Fade to Black simultaneously canon sequels to the original game. They don't, though. They use modern "multiverse" shite to tell a story that's both completely incoherent and inconsequential. There's two Conrads, and a supporting character that's named suspiciously closely to one from Fade to Black, but I don't think the team ever thought about the story half as hard as I did. There's some interesting stuff regarding a subclass of mutants on Titan, and what that suggests about the enemies at the start of the first game, but I'm not sure they even had those guys in mind. It's mainly just a hodgepodge of worn-out tropes, and very little of it gels together in any meaningful way. There's a Deku Tree, and AVALANCHE, and a bit where you have to tell which of the two presidents is the real one before killing the imposter. It's nonsense. Don't make the mistake I did by thinking it might be worth paying attention to.

Despite the myriad of problems I have with the game, I do have a little respect for it. On some level, as a boring game for the world's biggest nerds, Flashback 2 almost works. Through all the ideas that don't quite come together, you can see the things that were once attempted with it. The ambition it once had, that was later sacrificed as they had to be realistic about what the team's capabilities. I'm not going to pretend that it represents the fulfilment of a creator's long-discarded personal dream in the way a Shenmue III does, but it's a much more curious prospect than something as homogenous as a typical PS5 action game. The twin-stick, Metroidvania, lite RPG, wannabe cinematic epic. I don't know. I haven't played many games like that, and if I really squint, I can almost see the game they once wanted to make. If the team had a Satoru Iwata-level talent on board, they might have been able to refocus the project to deliver something worthwhile. There is not a single person on the planet who I'd recommend play the game, but if I was to hear a Real Flashback Guy ranting against it, I might ask them to calm down a bit.

When I completed the game, the ending cutscene failed to play. Goodbye, Flashback 2.

There's been this notion around the Sonic games that if Sega just stopped making stupid decisions, it'd be perfect and we'd all have a great time. You know, I don't buy that. Maybe I'm just a little sick of Sonic.

Despite everything else, the old Mega Drive games are still fairly precious to me, and I have some affection for a half dozen other Sonic titles, but I wasn't as bowled over with Mania as most seemed to be. There wasn't a lot of truly new stuff in it. I just don't know how fertile this formula is. If running around rollercoaster tracks and jumping when necessary is all that captivating, or if it can really be taken to interesting new places without a radical shake-up.

Don't get me wrong, Superstars is pretty crap. They've been understandably keen to promote the physics they've pulled from Sonic Mania, but that doesn't save the poor collision models, the rotten level design or the dogshit mechanics. Even if Sonic runs up hills properly now, it doesn't prevent the game from being tedious as all get out. It just doesn't seem to have been designed with much insight. Sonic Team have included a Fantasy Zone level in here, solely because they didn't get the joke when they saw Mania's Mean Bean Machine boss. I struggle to recall any moments where I had fun. Mostly, I remember the shock when I saw they thought to bring back the bouncy floor from Sonic CD's Wacky Workbench.

Oh, and everybody's already talked about it, but those bosses are truly appalling. I couldn't bring myself to replay a single level, knowing one of those were at the end of it.

There's pockets of positivity in the project. Basically all aesthetic. The character models are generally pretty nice, but their limited animation makes them look like they were extracted from a better game and dumped onto a Steam community page. Sonic Mania/Shredder's Revenge boy, Tee Lopes, has composed a few typically great tracks, and they stand out alarmingly in among the synthesised dredge from Sonic Team. The 2D animation sequences are nice too, as is typical of all the post-Mania stuff, and like those, they're let down by lacklustre music.

At its best, it's a halfhearted retread. It's attempting to mine nostalgia from a source that's been tapped out relentlessly for decades. Bold, youthful confidence used to be Sega's whole thing. They'd speed into new potential anywhere they saw it, and all their most beloved projects carried a sense of boundless energy. Now, they're sitting in the paddling pool, trying to make Samba de Amigo a thing again, and too scared to do a Yakuza game without Kazuma Kiryu.

I wasn't even excited for this, and I'm still bitterly disappointed. They've really fucked this one up, and if you bought it on launch day, you might have paid £55 for it. I can't recall the last time I've been this upset with a new game, and I'm in the middle of playing Flashback 2 right now.

The original game came out when I was a compsci undergrad minoring in applied physics, so you can imagine how badly the patter stunk in the intervening time-space; the sequel only exacerbated the situation, and by the end of my degree I'd developed a debilitating cake-based neurosis. Not really the game's fault, but I still hold it accountable.

Replaying it again after all these years, I was prepared to hold my nose and dive through all that unpleasantness - but to my surprise, the Redditisms just felt quaint and harmless, a playful reminder of a time when that corner of the internet wasn't a testing platform for Mossad COINTELPRO programs. The simple joy of the game almost made me ashamed of all the ways I've blithely scorned the earnest energy of /r/ifuckinglovescience shit, but alas, there's still a solid hour where you're trapped in an industrial colouring book, dutifully shading wee squares of orange and blue in order to receive reward-pellets that take the form of a Stephen Merchant podcast recording; excruciating stuff from a developer that usually wedged narrative all the way down the back of their gameplay's comfy couch. It's no surprise that this was Valve's last single-player effort for a decade - as espousers of the "always step forward" philosophy, I doubt they could stomach any more competition with the succeeding decade's first-person rollercoasters.

The original game was far more merciful, and the co-op mode's main purpose here is to remind you of that fact. This was my first time through it, and I relished almost every moment - especially the parts where you can invite complex chain-reactions of misfortune upon your companion. Aside from a few sections where you're returned to the colouring book with four squares instead of two, there's a much tighter focus on the square pegs, round holes and triangular hammers, with concepts often being combined in far greater depth than they were in the single-player. Perhaps it's a limitation of this game's (unshowing) technical age, but I'm still disappointed that neither campaign offers a testing chamber that combines light bridges, gravity wells, colour goos and laser grids... I feel like you could - as Wheatley tries to do at the end - mash up some really cool shit with all the toys in this ̶o̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶ white box. It's still fun!

In the 1983 film A Christmas Story, the main character's father receives a large package in the mail as a prize for solving crossword puzzles. The giant crate contains a lamp in the shape of a larger-than-life-size leg wearing a fishnet stocking. His wife hates it, eventually destroying it. He tries to put it back together. It might seem obvious but it's important to emphasize that while the film's narrator sees it as a primal signifier of sex, the father surely must know how tacky and shameful it is to display it in the window for all to see. He doesn't like it because it's good, he likes it because it's his, because he won it, because it's a symbol of his accomplishment. It's a matter of pride.

"It is the first American-produced visual novel"

For the first several years of my adulthood, I worked in a retail store. Christmas came and went, and every year we stocked a variety of holiday novelties and trinkets, including cheap reproductions of recognizable objects from a number of Christmas movies. Every year we got the leg lamp. We got it in different sizes. They sold, they sold out, and once it was sold out people would still come in asking if we had it.

"They sold this. To people. For money."

Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has no redeeming qualities. It isn't a good game, it isn't a good piece of software, it isn't a good video or PowerPoint presentation or whatever. James Rolfe could have told you that, and he did, and that's the only reason anyone knows what this is, and the people publishing the remaster know this. The original is a piece of shit from top to bottom, beginning to end, from concept to production to release, and it is a piece of shit in earnest. There is no reason to go back to it, it deserves no legacy.

Yet it's being re-released for purchase and play on modern systems, under the pretense of historical significance or preservation. It will be bought out of irony, to share in some arms-length observation, a gross curiosity. From tip to tail the cultural object that is Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has been transformed from something honestly and irredeemably bad, to a completely disingenuous empty spectacle.

I haven't played it. You haven't played it. Nobody should play it. Nobody can play it, because it isn't a game. It shouldn't be here, it shouldn't be on the Switch or the PlayStation or the Xbox, it shouldn't be in your library, it shouldn't be in your thoughts. Let it fade away.

At this point, Konami can't make a move without causing a controversy, especially with Metal Gear fans. But my PS1 shelves are already full, so I have to thank them for allowing me to experience all the European dubs without having to buy a 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th copy of PS1 Metal Gear Solid.

When you're as deep in the hole as I am, the idea of playing the entire thing through in French actually sounds like a compelling proposition. I'm quite impressed by how seriously late-90s KCEJ approached an international release. It wasn't common to see much beyond French and German options in PAL releases, and very few games had as much writing in them as MGS1 did. Especially not spoken dialogue. Sequels stripped back on localisation efforts, with only Japanese and English audio tracks, but every single line in MGS1 had been recorded in Japanese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. It's interesting to hear the game with different voice direction. Some of the cutscenes play a little differently with the unique interpretations of each relationship. Without exception, I think all the female characters in French MGS1 sound really great, though many of the boys lose a lot of their nuance. Like the Japanese version, Liquid mainly just sounds like a big tough guy, lacking some of the pompousness and elegance of Cam Clarke's performance. I was really looking forward to French Revolver Ocelot, but he mainly just sounds like some old geezer. Jim Houseman didn't even sound particularly well recorded. French Snake has moments of brilliance, but his delivery is a little one-note, lacking some of Akio Ohtsuka and David Hayter's range. For my money, Mei Ling is the real stand-out among the French cast, sounding much bouncier and more excitable. I never would have expected a world-class designer of military technology to sound so... cute.

I think the biggest issue with this release is in its visual presentation. I'm completely on the side of whoever decided to stick with the PS1's 240p rendering, with reverence to the original team's approach to presentation, but I don't think it's scaling to HD resolutions correctly. The visuals are far below the standard of a PS1 with a clean RGB output, with the Master Collection release blurring over the dithered texturework that I love so dearly. It's perhaps closer to the composite signal that the majority of players will be used to, but I've grown to associate the game with a much cleaner image. Apparently this port is from M2, most widely known for their brilliant SEGA AGES releases, but I think this is their first time working with a PS1 game, and the lack of tweakable emulation settings may be the result of that. Scanlines are reportedly on their way via a patch, but I really hope display settings go much further than that. Throw in a Duckstation-style hi-res mode for the kiddiwinks if you must, but please give me a mode that presents those original 76,800 pixels as sharply as possible.

The extras in the pack aren't all that exciting. I've heard alternating reports of what the "Master Book" actually is, with some claiming it's a new English version of an old Konami MGS1 book. No. It's new. The fact that it's new might actually be the most interesting thing about it, as it presents the series' timeline with knowledge of all the retcons and inconsistencies that have been injected into the series up to the end of The Phantom Pain. There's even a page that bluntly explains everything that's said about Ocelot's backstory in MGS1 is a bare-faced lie. This is "the official version" of the series' story, although I'd never suggest that those who play Metal Gear 1 for the first time today ought to be thinking about Major Zero and Venom Snake. The book's fine, though its presentation is a little closer to a modern Konami website than a Japan-only 1998 MGS1 book, which would typically be filled with bespoke artwork, debug-mode screenshots of each environment, and often, interviews with the game's key staff. There's a lot of notes on secrets and checklists to follow through the game, but it can't be accessed while you're playing, so it could be a little more useful.

The script book is a little cooler. There have been officially-released script books for MGS1, 2, 3, 4 and Peace Walker in Japan, though I think western fans are being presumptuous about the vintage of these. They're based on the games' English localisations, and I'd assume the direction notes are newly-written, as opposed to insight into how the games were originally written. I'm pretty sure the Metal Gear 1 & 2 script books are entirely the result of someone playing the games and transcribing all the text, instead of someone digging into Kojima's decades-old production notes. Nonetheless, they're still pretty neat. It's nice to have easy access to all the CODEC conversations without having to experiment with every single variable in the games to potentially trigger alternate dialogue. It would have been cooler if you could access each of the scenes - with their audio - from within the book, but that would have been much more of a logistical nightmare.

The Master Collection release of MGS1 is a pretty cool package for hardcore fans of the game, and it does the job of bringing MGS1 to new hardware for less demanding players, too. It's not the end-all, be-all definitive release that some seem convinced they're entitled to, but I'm satisfied enough with all the things it does to stop myself from buying those alternate PAL discs. That's an achievement. If you're not rabid enough to have bought it already, either wishlist it on the platform you find most appealing, until it's inevitably on sale for a good discount, or stick with an emulator you already like. There's not much real value in investing in the wider online discourse.

Wow kind of loved this. One of those plinky ploinky IcoXJourney type games that actually manages to completely seal the deal with some genuinely astounding world design that compliments the character movement. This laser focus on the goal of verticality and the notches inbetween - tactile, weighty, arduous toil as you use your climbing gear to best the challenges the geometry imposes. Gushing with a sense of true scale, milestoned by countless opportunities to pan the camera back at the places you’ve come from and the mountaineering feats you’ve cleared. Dense and well-considered little pockets of civilisation in between crumbling pathways and inclines, full of the kind of coastal town fishery imagery I am a cow for. Beautiful and breathless game imo. Shame it undoes itself with all of these collectables and wordy diary entries that explain away the superlunary mystery of da world, although I’m fickle enough to kind of think I’d have given them a pass if the font choice was more diegetic lol.

Jusant is 1 for da perverts who blush at the Google Image Search: “Abandoned Crab Traps stacked rly high”.

A sapphic love letter - a daisy chain of vignettes that offer glimpses into other creative and influential media powerhouses, metered out by the task of juggling keys and receptacles in limited inventory slots across a vast steel complex. Too much mule work for its weight in silver in my humble. This search for lost love where ur body is weighed down by deprivations of liberty and soul rings so hollow to me when it's so clockable under a very narrow scope of media that strikes the same chimes so much better. More to the point I think I'm just too depressed to find any spark in this. Since I've been resorting to it recently, the flashes of self-harm imagery just piss me the fuck off.
Signalis a visual juggernaut that can dole out amazing one-two punches of sight and sound when it wants to, but the genre darling glazing is too sickly for my blood, I'd roll my eyes at practically every cutscene calling to something in the creators' Anilist Previously Watched stack. Not a classic survival horror head either, sorry not for me, not a problem in and of itself.

With great shame, I've always been apathetic to Mario's plight. His journey is a noble one, but I do not see myself in his bings, nor his bings. His wahoos do not reach me. I feel like a cunt rat bastard for giving this Three Succulent Backloggd Stars ⭐⭐⭐ and absconding with the ultimate sayaway that this is "still one of the better Marios" but that's-a my burden, not yours - my paesano in cristo. I pirated and completed the game days ago and earnestly found myself worrying I'd forget I even played it before it released and I could officially log the game on BL.

It's good!!! Honest and true!!! Nice to see what felt like notes of 3D World in here with the little rosary bead structure and rhythm of each level having their own little wonder flower acting as an F5 button, refreshing the level's objective into a unique blink-and-you'll-miss-it sleight of hand trick. It keeps u guessing but only so much. It's still Mario, it's still the charisma of a cereal box free toy, but credit where it's due - the soundtrack is nice and they did a great job in shuffling the artstyle up into representing illustrative 3D. Not losing my nut over this but it's nice to see some sparks of personality rattling around behind mario's shark eyes.

Despite not being particularly arsed about the demo that dropped a few months back, I’ve ended up really enjoying playing Lies Of P, the fairly shameless Bloodborne rip-off from Neowin. It’s good, undeniably so. It manages to capture some of the essential elements of From Software’s masterpiece in regards to how it plays, how the combat and movement feels and wraps it up in an aesthetic that manages to combine some of the best parts of Bloodborne with a pinch of Resident Evil 4 and just a touch of its own vibe and some really, really impressive visuals - it’s a great little package that is well worth your time.

I’ve found it to be a fascinating little thing. I love it. It borrows so much from Bloodborne and, to be fair, mostly the right stuff too and also pulls them off to a high standard. The setting is cool, the performance and visuals are great - the only area I feel you can make a real argument that is superior to Bloodborne, art design aside - and the enemy variety and boss design is cracking too. So, why ISN’T it as good as Bloodborne?

Little things. Tiny details that don’t make a game bad when they aren’t present but are the difference between a game being a damn fine 8/10 and an absolutely essential all-timer 10/10. The kind of touches that get applied to a game by an elite-level game director like Hidetaka Miyazaki instead of some dev studio that previously worked on some forgotten MMORPG.

Now, this may sound like I’m shitting on Lies Of P here so I must stress, I think the game is really good and I do recommend that anyone with a even a passing interest in the Soulslike genre give this a go, but there’s just a few things that add up to make it end up sitting comfortably on the second tier of the genre, rather than rubbing shoulders with the elite. Despite all of the stuff that it does really well, it lacks that special extra sauce.


As great as the visuals are, the level design is a bit simplistic. From Software’s games often allow you much freedom to explore and even tackle areas in any order. They allow you to get lost, get stuck and find secret areas that seem so off the beaten track you’re not entirely unconvinced that you’re the only person to ever have found them. Shortcuts are a key part of the Soulsborne DNA and when you unlock a means of getting from the last checkpoint to a section deeper into an area in second it is a fantastic feeling of relief and satisfaction that you have now made some permanent progression and in Bloodborne they’re expertly weaved into the level design, with some of them not even being clear to you until you’ve actually activated them and suddenly realised where you are. They’re present in Lies Of P and, to be fair, are just as satisfying to unlock but they’re just so obvious - doors locked from one side and faulty elevators that need to be repaired, for instance - that they feel so mechanical. Sure, they’re offering the same end result but they’re just a lot less interesting. Again, small things.

The lack of exploration feeds into a general lack of wonder in Lies Of P. While Bloodborne is intentionally vague with information and details about how to proceed with quests, Lies Of P has a handy indicator on the fast travel screen which tells you if someone has any new dialogue for you or is waiting for a quest item to be handed to them. A brilliant ‘quality of life’ (whatever that means) feature it may be but instantly removes the mystery that creates real life discussion around From Software games, trying to figure out what does what and how to progress quests and find different endings. You’re simply not going to have those brilliant conversations that come from playing From Software games, where you’re asking your mates if they’ve found X or done Y. In Lies Of P, everyone will do everything in order, eventually. It's a linear progression - Level > Boss > Level > Boss > Level… repeat until the end. Very good levels and even better bosses, mind.

There’s also the really old fashioned skill tree full of unlockables that houses some really good and important moves that feel like they should just be part of the starting skill set. With games in this genre I like the idea that you have everything you need to finish the game from the word go and, although I’m sure some maniac will no doubt have completed a no upgrade run in Lies Of P before you’ve finished reading this newsletter, it sometimes feels that you’re missing out on some fairly basic moves.

I’ll admit, I’m being hyper-critical here but when you borrow so egregiously from one of the very best videogames I have ever played, you invite comparisons to that game that are only ever going to come off unfavourably for the most part. As you get further into the game, however, Lies Of P begins to get a bit more comfortable and confident with its own elements and it really starts to shine. The levels get a little more complex. The bosses get more and more challenging with some spectacular designs. You start to really reap the benefits from the unique weapon customisation, which allows you to mix and match head and hilt from any weapon you find, imbuing them with different abilities. You’re forced to experiment with the tools Lies Of P gives you to succeed and you start to see that, as it turns out, ripping off Bloodborne still puts you head and shoulders above a lot of the competition.


There’s three clear areas where I think you can say with confidence that Lies Of P is either superior to Bloodborne or simply brings something to the table that is really smart, unique and undeniably cool. Firstly, it’s the performance. If you think Bloodborne is inferior because it runs at 30fps I think you’re an idiot but let's not beat around the bush, if you’ve got the option of 60fps then take it, man. A special shoutout to the Series S version here, which can run at 1440P/40fps if you have a monitor that can do those weird framerates. Secondly, unlike Bloodborne, there’s a whole load more variety in your build choice thanks to the three starting ‘classes’ and the sheer variety of weapons and customisation possibilities. You can really shape your build around your playstyle in a way that, although present in Bloodborne, is far less nuanced than what you can do in Lies Of P.

Finally, and for my money this is Lies Of P’s one genius idea - the ability to regain one of the Estus Flask equivalents when you have used them all up. Once you’ve healed with your final Estus (or whatever it is called here) you begin charging up a meter by landing hits on enemies. Once filled, you gain your last Estus back. This means that you’re never out of a fight and you’re encouraged to play the game on the front foot. In Bloodborne, when you’re down to the last of your health and you have no means of recovering it against a boss it can feel a little helpless and like you may as well just die and try again. Here, you should never give up. With some skilled play, you can get that bonus Estus and get yourself a health boost when you really need it and then, of course, begin charging another. It’s such a smart mechanic and one that harmonises perfectly with the best elements of this type of game. A near perfect bit of risk/reward.

The thing about Lies Of P is even though you can look at it as a fairly cynical Bloodborne rip that you can play on things other than a PS4 but it turns out a Bloodborne rip is actually still remarkably good. Despite borrowing a whole lot from From Software’s masterpiece it does deliver all of those elements brilliantly and, as you get further and further into Lies Of P, it starts to stamp its own identity onto things. Despite falling short of the truly elite titles it takes influence from, I think Lies Of P sits comfortably above the other ‘best of the rest’ Soulsborne titles like the Nioh games and is easily the finest non-From Software game in the genre. Now, does Neowin fancy having a crack at a Sekiro-a-like next? Whatever they have planned, they’ve certainly gained my attention.

Completed this over the course of a rainy weekend with my partner and I don't think I could have asked for a better environment to experience the game in. Being the Watson to someone else's Holmes as they spend an oppressive autumn experiencing this genre is so bloody fun.

The Thinking Panel is the chief innovation here, and now all I want is for this game to somehow fall into the laps of Ace Attorney's design team. The Thinking Panel places the onus of investigation thoroughly on the player, but doesn't cast them adrift in a world of deductive overload - an incredibly brain-pleasing achievement that even the best mystery-focused detective fiction often fails to do well. Agatha Christie has been put on notice post-mortem; gone should be the days of Phoenix railroading us down conversational flowcharts that hurtle towards a linear, factual truth.

At one point during our playthrough, it was suggested that this gameplay could be imposed upon existing mysteries (e.g. a Hounds of the Baskervilles DLC pack), but I think the world that Andrejs Kļaviņš and Ernests Kļaviņš have created here is rich enough that we don't need to go raid our old pile of Ian Rankin novels for inspiration. The way each murder builds from a comedy to the singular tragedy of absolutist "virtue"-driven Modern England is just too deliciously timely to ignore. We are all coming down with a Case of the Golden Idol.

God help me, I did it again.

What am I supposed to tell you? If you're curious about how the game is on the Switch, it's a fine version. It's a quick, cheap remaster, and unless you have a specific interest in playing this game on a Switch, you're no better off than you would be running it on Dolphin. It lacks the Wii version's pointer controls, though, again, there is some crude motion control support. Weirdly, the widescreen presentation is far better than the new version of 2, with all assets displaying correctly. I can respect where their priorities lay.

What was interesting about doing another playthrough so soon after the first was how the game remains interesting for repeat visitors. The developers were aware they were making a short game for a console with a very limited library, and there are rare occurrences that you'll only see under certain conditions. Ignoring a landing site for several days means that grubs will eat your bridges, and predators will return, and some of the weirder enemies are reserved for that. My approach changed, too. At times, I was more ruthlessly committed to acquiring as many ship parts as I could in a day. On other days, there weren't 24 hours worth of parts to chase after, and I could spend my time farming Pikmin and taking on the weird, optional enemies. The experience drew me towards riskier decisions, but I didn't like myself for it. My willingness to see dozens of Pikmin, sacrificed by a High Score hungry commander. This wasn't the canon playthrough. I'd earned this opulence.

Pikmin is a great fit for the Switch. Finding a spare 20 minutes in your day, and coming back from sleep mode to chip away at the campaign, is really appealing. I've been umming and erring about the idea of going back to Wii U Pikmin 3, while I'm still on this Pikmin kick, but I can't pretend it's going to be nearly as casual or convenient to go back to. Along with Super Metroid and Ocarina of Time, Pikmin 1 is one of those monolithic Nintendo titles that I'd suggest any big fan of the company ought to have played, and I'm really glad that from GameCube, to Wii, to Wii U, to Switch, they've ensured that first-time players have always had the chance to play it. If it's still on your list of games you've been meaning to get around to, it's a great opportunity to sort that out.

My only real exposure to Armored Core was this MAD I had somehow stumbled into back in 2011, so I honestly couldn’t say that I fully knew what this series was about (aside from laser lightshows and missile contrail carnivals) until I finally gave AC6 a shot.
Game good! With courteous thanks to how easy it is to fall into builds that turn enemies into drywall it kind of eliminated all concerns I had about spending more time diagnosing my mech in the equipment menu than actually playing the game. Moreover, the straight-from-the-tap gameplay delivery system of a farcking mission select screen, it’s so lean and mean in a way I had long since given up on the idea of FromSoft ever going for.

In all honesty more than anything I just think this game is beautiful. Such a fully-fledged and well-rounded exploration of what “mech” means. You have your piloted robots run the gamut from sleek and amphibian Metal Gear RAYs, to cubic mili-utilitarian Mechwarriors, to plastic-looking Small Soldiers. There’s an impressive devotion to building a sense of historicity and design ethos for each of the factions and corporations.
I love the sheer depth, detail and scale put into the environs. There is a relatively understated mission where you go down into a mine and it had me gawking at the set dressing for nearly half an hour, just this absolutely painstakingly realised devotion to depicting ‘Industry x1000’. One thing that always gets me is these overhanging industry locales, like an impossibly large train junction hanging precariously miles above the ground, city-wide of tracks landing on the factories below and standing bolt upright. The smell of lead paint absolutely fucking HUMS off this game man. With little human-sized walkways and doors and staircases peppering the landscape for good measure the illusion of scale is thoroughly sold to me. Incredibly illustrative quality to this game. Just gushing with calamitous industrial might, a world suffocating itself in an iron eggshell. Architecture that commands tone and mood. It's cooler than the mechs themselves.
also holy shit allmind‼️‼️‼️

I believe in Pikmin. I am certain that human life will end through nuclear war or ecological negligence, and someday a funny little man will land here on a spaceship and pluck doting vegetable guys out the ground to fight mutant spiders and frogs. I think the setting raises interesting and prescient ideas about the nature of survival and social hierarchies. It's the central reason I have such a problem with Pikmin 1 receiving a staight-to-VHS comedy sequel.

Having survived the first game by the skin of his teeth, Olimar arrives home and is immediately sent back to Pikminland because his boss is skint. I hate this miserable coda. I hate that his longing to see his family again is put on hold to chase money. I hate that earth is immediately seen as a place to mine for resources. I think there's a kind of dark satire about capitalistic greed in it, but I do not enjoy this part of the fantasy. I feel sick.

Pikmin 2 isn't a game about survival anymore. There's no time limit, except the daily clock, which seems more of an irritation here than the structural grounding it served as in the original game. The game's more willing to kill off your Pikmin now, because you can just go farm more. Olimar and Louie can stay here as long as they want, and seemingly, the only reason to rush is to complete the game with a score you can boast about. There's still the familiar Pikmin gameplay, but that's largely relegated to the overworld sections. The bulk of Pikmin 2's content is found in the caves; RANDOMLY GENERATED dungeons with a series of floors to excavate treasures from. Pikmin 2's quite antithetical to 1's carefulness. The Pikmin are fodder now. If they die, tough luck. Fuck your wasted time. Go find some more and try again. They probably don't have souls, right?

I've got as much distaste for randomly generated content and roguelikes as anyone, and it's a big sticking point with the game for me. It's tempting to lay it on too thick. In reality, Pikmin 2 is generating content from a fairly well-crafted library of pieces. There's still humanity in the product. Some cave floors are clever and creative. One uses a toy train track to create a central barrier that Pikmin can walk on top of without falling off, but they can walk under the drawbridge. It's cute and smart, even if it does undercut the game's setting pretty dramatically. Random elements generally come in the form of enemy and item placement, and it never creates anything unplayable, even if there are a few too many dead ends and groups of explosive nightmares.

This review follows the new Switch release of the game. It's an awkward thing. I became a Pikmin fan through the original Wii U release of 3, and the New Play Control versions of 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. To me, pointer controls are just how Pikmin is supposed to play. I'm aware there's GameCube folk who think being able to aim all over the screen messes with the intended balance, but it's just a much more deliberate aiming system than wobbling a cursor based on where your character's facing. I think 4's implementation of a lock-on system was a decent compromise, but Nintendo's already come up with the solution to this problem. Going back to the classic controls feels like playing an FPS on the Dreamcast. There is motion control support in here, but it's the airyfairy implementation from 4, where you can manipulate your cursor within the character's throwing range, and it doesn't feel any easier or more intuitive than just accepting the rudimentary 2001 standard.

In an act of curious apathy, Nintendo have chosen to base the widescreen implementation on the Wii version's clumsy presentation. While gameplay and cutscenes are presented in a native 16:9 aspect ratio, menus and text are consistently stretched to fit the dimensions of modern TVs. As the traumatised Captain Olimar is sent back to PNF-404, I'm being dragged back into the horror of friends' 2004 living rooms to suffer wrong-looking Simpsons.

I'll admit I've had a better time with Pikmin 2 on Switch than I did on my initial Wii playthrough. Knowing this is the one I didn't have much emotional attachment to helped warm me to the idea of the Pikmin gameplay grab-bag. It's a shallow pleasure, and I'd be callous enough to suggest its biggest fans have shallow appreciation for the games' setting. That said, previous releases of the game featured licensed products as its "treasures", and I've always felt a bit of a thrill from their subversive implication. The human race is dead, and the only remaining evidence of their civilisation is capitalistic waste. The Duracell batteries and Haribo bags are, understandably, not in this new version, I'll always have a bit of respect for Pikmin 2 for how it egged corporations into painting themselves as the problem.

Some people think Pikmin 2 is the best in the series. Who am I to say otherwise? Maybe you'll love it. I just hope I helped you understand why I really don't.

If the Resi 4 remake was the sequel to the Resi 2 remake, here's your spiritual successor to 3.

I don't know anybody who wanted a remake of the deeply forgettable Separate Ways campaign. After the pleasant surprise of the 4 remake, I think most were just quietly awaiting more of that reasonably enjoyable content. It's maybe a little more faithful than we'd hoped. This is largely a story about Ada's journey from canon cutscene to canon cutscene. The appeal of this confident, elusive spy, run into the ground as we see her do all the same shit as Leon and respond to an on-screen hookshot prompt as she sees him choked by Mendez. She must think this guy is a right fuckup. Every time she bumps into him, he's shit outta luck.

Look - I like Ada. She's a fun idea, and a good wildcard to toss into the mix after the wholesomeness of the Resi 1 cast. She makes a rotten protagonist, though. Her whole appeal is tied to popping up out of the shadows to turn the tables at the most exciting moment. Watching her do all the standard civvie Resi shit is rubbish. She's supposed to be above mixing herbs. Giving her a canon campaign (Assignment: Ada does not count) was a tacky idea to make the PS2 port look cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Mikami put God Hand into production entirely out of spite for it.

- ̗̀ New ̖́- Separate Ways also attempts to address a problem with the main campaign; the annoying fans who pointed out a couple of memorable omissions from the original. They're back, sweaty, and waiting for your applause.

Ada's secret agent role encourages the team to lean harder into everyone's favourite new aspect of the remake; THE STEALTH! Yup. Get excited to enter more rooms with ganados facing the wrong way for ages. There's a whole bunch of them here. Ada also gets some Spy Vision shit, where she can make footprints glow blue to solve a couple puzzles. It's nothing. Don't pretend you've got an idea, Resi 4 remake DLC.

The campaign does pick up after a brutally dull opening. It isn't a complete slog throughout, and as pandering as they often felt, the old Resi 4 bits did make me smile a couple of times when they were brought in as a surprise. There's a wee coda at the end that leads into 5 a little more cohesively too. I'm not telling you not to play it, just that you totally don't need to. The best addition here is easily Ada and Wesker in Mercenaries, but you get that as a free patch anyway.

The Resi remakes have been Capcom's safest bet for chasing the Triple A crowd for the last decade. Monster Hunter and Street Fighter have a lot of fans, but they're not appearing in the "Similar customers also bought" tab when you put The Last of Us: Part I in your cart. I'm sure they want to keep going, but I don't know if they can confidently put as much money into a 4K Steve Burnside model. They might be stuck pandering to the hardcore fans, and I really can't get excited about a faithful remake of 0. I don't know. Is it worth speculating? This is me writing a lukewarm review because I was let down after the high standards set by the Resident Evil 4 remake. We're in unprecedented territory, here.