Not putting stars because folk on this site are fuckin' weirdos about specific games, but I'm baffled as to how this became a beloved classic.

Playing it feels like treading treacle. I shouldn't have tortured myself by continuing on hours and hours after I lost all interest. I would usually drop something like that these days, but I had to know. I had to see what the fuss was about. Everybody who ever told me this was great should give me ten quid. How dare you?!

The game is spitting bible shit at me, and it just hits nothing. Lots of terms you know, but they feel empty. I want to blame the dodgy translation, but god (wahey) knows how accurate any of it is, because a quick google brings up either how it was painstakingly done to be as faithful (another one) as possible, or chucked together by one dude in a month. Whatever the case is, it regularly has conversations that just don't make any sense, and not because of weird references you might not know, but pure incorrect grammar, syntax, or replies that have no relation to what was just said. It's maddening.

The combat is such good fun with brilliant spritework, then they throw in mechs and you think "Oh baby here we go", but they fuck it. Combat inside your gear is tedious as shit. Your deathblows learned in normal fights allow you to do more moves when in the mech, but just using any of these moves requires you to do a series of weak shit attacks to build the power to perform a deathblow. It sounds kinda cool at first, but quickly becomes a chore on top of managing fuel as well as your health. Every fight inside your gears was an ordeal. They ruined giant robots.

I realise I have interchangeably used gears/mechs above. The game likes to do this too with all its various factions and races, or even characters with 2 or 3 names. This gets done seemingly at random and I had to go googling every time to check which person/faction/race they were referring to. At this point I still do not know exactly what Kislev, Zeboim, and Aveh are. It disnae matter. I'm done.

Disc 2 lmao

At one point during a lengthy visual novel part, I went "SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET ME KARATE CHOP A GUY" out loud.

I was ready to moan about the open world still being barren, and the massive step down in character customisation from 1&2, and every wee side thing being redundant because it gave nothing to the story and the rewards were always just a t-shirt, but I honestly had a great time in spite of all that, which might as well be a NMH staple at this point.

I'm not an intelligent man who can break down games, and say things like "When viewed through a lens of X, No More Heroes is very much still an allegory for Y". It is simply beyond my ability. Some things just get me hype as fuck, hootin' and hollerin'. Caveman Mode, if you will.

Combat is tight, and the combo of old stuff with the TSA Death Moves keep it fun, especially playing on Spicy where you need to be on yer toes constantly. It's the only part of the game that runs buttery smooth, and ye can just feel it being written at the top of a whiteboard labelled "PRIORITY".

I've said it many times, but I'm a Suda mark. It's fine, I admit it. The dude makes games for me. The whole last fight and end sequence was just laser-focused My Shit. Made me laugh out loud twice because they were just having fun with it. Firing jokes in because they know what this series is, whether it's truly the end or not.

No More Heroes Forever!

The Last Walking Sons of Dead Anarchy

You've played this a million times before. A middling Sony first-party third-person feelings shooter. So much of it feels very abrupt. Cutscenes with a real start/stop vibe to them. Radio calls that are obviously meant to have large gaps of time between them just triggering one after the other. It's jarring.

The story is aboot as deep as a puddle. You can see every beat coming a mile away, and the writing is dodgy to the point where plenty of interactions don't make a lot of sense. It's just very by the numbers and boring.

Even the enemies become tedious after a short while. More of an annoyance to progress than anything scary or exciting. I'm sick of hiding in fuckin' bushes.

I inflicted this game on myself for 60 hours. At least it was free.

Parkour across buildings
Feels like sex
Grappling hook
Feels like cumming
But I bust no nuts
Only heads

I waited a wee while after finishing to see how I felt days later. Can still see myself taking a half star off somewhere down the line.

The best conclusion I can come to is that yes it's very nice and shiny, but I hate that the rules seem to have gone. It feels like a toolset has been removed. RE4's combat had rules to it. You knew how to manipulate the crowd. Kiting enemies together then using a well placed shot to get a stun and roundhouse the lot of them. A leg shot on the running dude would put him on the ground and buy time to take out the stronger enemy coming at his back, or even let you go to town on him with the knife as he stands up to save ammo. You figured out the rules, and used them to your advantage. But now all those interactions feel like pure luck the game occasionally deigns to let you have. It feels like a consequence of chasing the realism that modern Resi goes for. They don't want recognisable patterns from photorealistic enemies. There need to be subtle movements and stuff that feel natural or the illusion breaks down. The arcadeyness is gone in favour of a fucking chicken being able to stun Leon long enough to let Ganados get a command grab on him. I'm just rambling here. But this all feels very clear coming off a replay of the original the day before release.

In their brilliant review, RexZakel said: "Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen."

Nail on the head.

Hahahahaha

I played this back at release as a massive fan of the series, and clearly just wiped 99% of it from my mind at the time. This streamed replay was such a miserable experience.

The pivot to full action shooter was a wild decision. There is no horror to be found here. I think I put my head in my hands when 7 chapters deep they introduce a dodge roll. Isaac Clarke was never supposed to dodge roll, what the fuck were you thinking? And co-op? Deary me.

Carver is yer player 2 who's technically with you throughout almost all of the game, but playing on single player means you enter some cutscenes and he just steps out from behind you like creepy Watson. Even him being an AI partner when playing solo would have worked, but as such, it feels like the guy only exists sometimes. This gets even more jarring when you're seeing cutscenes like these two dudes have come to depend on each other, and built up a rapport, despite having maybe spent eight minutes actual game time together. Resulting in it all seeming so forced.

Another way the co-op aspect harms single player is that I'm convinced they didn't turn down the amount of enemies or item pickups. I was never not holding 19 medkits. My inventory was filled with two people's worth of stuff. Which helps when almost every encounter is you getting stuck in a corner by what feels like just too many enemies. Good thing they gave you plenty of ammo, right?

Wrong. Universal ammo was a crap decision. It exists only to facilitate the FUCKING CRAFTING mechanics, but we'll get to those later. You have a gun that fires single rounds. Sweet. You are being told on the HUD that you have 300 ammo. Hella nice... You do not have 300 shots for that gun. 300 is how many rounds of universal ammo you have, but that single shot gun you're weilding might use "5 ammo" per shot. You know, because that makes sense. The numbers might as well not exist.

We're not going to get to the crafting because I can't be bothered moaning about the game anymore. I'm glad it killed Dead Space. The scariest part of all this was going on the Wiki and reading that the director had plans for fourth and fifth entries.

I saw a few folk disappointed in how gamey this is, rather than something more about just being a cat. I understand that, but if it was just a cat sim then fuckin' nothing would happen. A robot asks for help and you just lick yer baws? I'm afraid I want more for my £25.

Luckily what I got was a lovely adventure game about being a small dude in a city of robots. A city that is both grimy and beautiful in equal measure. The devs have somehow made a shithole that you'd like to visit. The robot inhabitants themselves are often charming, sometimes tragic. They're clinging to a dreg of humanity in order to keep that light from going out completely.

Enter, the wee man. A ginger cat. He's lost down here, and with the help of drone housing an AI, and a backpack he really disnae want to wear, he's gonna save this piece of shit city.

They've done a cool thing with the movement system where you're not free jumping all over the place, but instead get prompts on surfaces you can jump to. Think late Assassin's Creed traversal. Just holding a button and aiming the stick gives you a satisfying series of hops that feel like considered movements the way a cat does in real life. No shitty moments of falling into a pit because you misjusdged distance, or boucing off invisible walls until a surface lets you onto it.

In regards to story, despite it being about cats and robots, there's not much new here. Much of its beats are predictable, but for me that didn't detract from it. A recognizable tale told well with a new kinda setting and protag worked for me. Something doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be good. Sometimes there's comfort to be found in the familiar.

His name is Terry, and we all love him.