I'll start with praise: Wo Long's spirit system is genuinely brilliant, elegantly intertwining Bloodborne's reward for aggression with Sekiro's posture- and deflect-oriented combat, giving an extra dimension to combat and organically rewarding the player for mixing and matching between normal attacks, heavy attacks, and martial arts. I think you could build an excellent game on top of that system, but I don't think Wo Long quite hits that mark.

The first chunk of this game, through about the Ayoe boss fight, is paced so that this combat system shines. But as time goes on, the difficulty ramps up in ways that specifically undermine its greatest strengths. Enemies start having long, frenetic normal-attack combos that are very difficult for mere mortals to consistently deflect and which simultaneously leave no room for normal attacks. Fights start to boil down to dodging out of range, memorizing the timing of exploitable critical attacks, and nothing more.

This is compounded as the game starts dumping multi-foe fights on you, demanding that you react to layered overlapping combos that are barely feasible on their own. It's not even the difficulty that's frustrating—you can smash your way through these fights with enough patience—but all the nuance that's compelling about the combat is gone. After beating Lu Bu and feeling nothing more than vague annoyance, I think I'm done with this game for good.

When all else failed, when the ability to craft narrative worth sleeping through, when the will to design enemy encounters didn't expand beyond funnelling idiotic soldiers through ugly bits of over modeled chain link fence and shrubbery, when the beauty of possibility in Cryengine found nothing worth representing than what had been more lushly shown in 8-bit and chunky polygons, why not simply lean on the fact that most computers can't run the game as your stand out achievement of gaming.

Crysis is the epitome of the grossly unpleasant and profoundly unthinking horde of shooters that represented the mass of late 00s gaming. I think it stands worse than any of its type that I have played, and would think it more poor still if it had anything within it capable of grasping onto that didn't fizzle and disappear the moment it is touched.

so much of re4 comes down to the tension of its moment-to-moment play, and i bear this in mind as i consider the possibilities of the remake and the crucial matter of how the action feels if the pacing and your maneuverability is significantly increased or 'improved' — as we expect it to be.

looking back at the original game (and its various ports), especially having now played the re2 remake and a number of similar modern tps games, there's a vaguely king's field-like sluggishness to re4 and its tank controls and slower forward movement. combined with its wild action setpieces and a synesthetic style resembling an arcade game (especially apparent in the character models, their faces and the particular expressiveness of their voices, the scope and flair of the boss fights, the button-mashing qte stuff, etc), this very deliberate and yet very flexible approach to action in balance with tension is something which continues to set re4 apart from the rest. in praise of games which offer interesting friction to your mobility, rather than endlessly seek ways of reducing it. amen.

These games are pure catnip to me. The intricate clockwork dioramas of the level designs are made tactile and enthralling by allowing the player to wreak havoc within them and see what happens. In a lesser game even this premise could wear thin after a time, but IOI knows exactly how to wring every ounce of value out of the worlds they create, from the stories woven throughout to the escalations that reframe the levels to even just the quality of writing that makes it worth listening to all the little conversations between NPCs.

The level design in 2 is generally excellent: levels exist with different organizing principles, from multiple strongholds connected by a common area like Mumbai and Miami, to layered increases in security like New York and Sgàil, to the spectacularly iconoclastic Whittleton Creek. My biggest complaint is that the DLC special assignments are lackluster, generally smaller in scope than their Hitman 1 equivalents and substantially less transformative of the levels that contain them.

I'll also mention Freelancer mode here since I played it along with Hitman 2. The underlying concept there is genius, forcing players like me who take a save-heavy approach to the game to take a wildly different approach, think on our toes, and learn to use tools that may have just sat in the loadout screen. But at the same time, failure is often more frustrating than it is fun or educational. It's just too easy to take an action that looks safe only to trigger an alarm, get gunned down, and lose your entire campaign out of nowhere.

What Freelancer needs (and the rest of the game could certainly make profitable use of) is a little bit more indication of what is or is not allowed. Show me trespassing boundaries in focus mode. Let me know whether I'm being watched before I chuck an iron at a guard's head. Guessing and checking works well enough when saves are involved, but it's not quite up to the task for a mode with such heavy consequences.

(Played Hitman 2 levels and escalations in World of Assassination)

PERSONAL BEST: 26,430pts

(Based on the port by Github developer Ytiurin, which amazingly recreates the Electronika 60 release)
https://ytiurin.github.io/tetris/

One of the only perfect games in existence since it's just a simple puzzle environment with a closed system. Tetris is beautiful philosophically and ideologically. The only foe you have here is your own lack of imagination and its almost zen-like quality makes it a standard for hardcore and wide audiences alike. Who would've thought Soviet's best export of the feared 1984 would be a video game to resonate with so many generations? I remember my parents not liking video games, but even they liked Tetris, and they were born in the mid-50s. A big reason for its popularity here in Serbia are the small LCD Chinese handheld platforms whose only purpose was to play Tetris and similar block-based arcade games.

My favourite versions to play are this Electronika emulation, the DOS one, and the NES one which has a magical chiptune rendition of The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. It would keep me up for nights where I couldn't sleep. I didn't spend my time with the Game Boy version, sadly.

(Glitchwave project #011)

Surprised by the number of people who think of this game as predatory or morally bankrupt in some way. It's simple - a game where you just WASD around, where every weapon is a passive effect, and the game never really attempts to disguise the fact that unlocking more things just changes the components of the light show.

You don't have to enjoy the game (or even respect it, really), but there's definitely room for stuff like this to exist in the landscape without it degrading the medium or whatever the concern might be. There's still a game here, there's still concern for how systems interact with each other and you can still come up with unique strategies using the handful of tools you're given. It's not artistically ambitious, but I don't think it has to be. The existence of fine dining does not render fast food obsolete.