Sloppy.

Sifu is one of few games on Backloggd that has fewer total plays that it does people who are planning on playing it. At the time of writing, I'm following 36 people; of those, two have played Sifu, and nine have it either wishlisted or on their backlog. Most of the games I've seen on here do not have numbers like that. Sifu is a very obvious outlier, though pinning down exactly why leaves me kind of stumped; it's been a game that I was looking forward to playing for a long time, but I can't remember where I first saw it or why I was excited to play it. I have to imagine that most Sifu stories are similar. It might just be the fact that it was locked to the Epic Games Store for about a year on PC, and the people who wanted it then put it aside until it could get released elsewhere and then never got around to playing it. Regardless, I come to you all now as someone who was like you, just days prior. I wishlisted Sifu, it sat on that wishlist for however long it's been on there, and I've finally broken free of the vortex to play it for myself. With these new eyes and this new perspective, I can tell you this: don't bother.

I got the feeling I was going to be in for some shit when, about five minutes into the first level, you walk into a hallway and are immediately treated to the Oldboy shot. Great. I love it when a bunch of French people cobble together all five of the movies they've ever seen where a fistfight happens in the hopes of making something that can come together in the edit. You ever seen The Raid? How about Kill Bill (not Lady Snowblood, since nobody actually watches movies made before the new millennium)? Have you ever wanted to play a facsimile of some of the fight scenes from those movies but with enemies who can shrug off every hit you throw at them? Haven't you wanted to see some mook slowly get chipped down over the course of a full minute before he powers up and then takes another full minute of chipping away at before finally going down? No? "Part of the appeal of those movies that are being referenced is that those fight scenes against swarms of people are brutal and fast", you say? Huh? No, what you liked about The Bride squaring off against O-Ren wasn't the fact that they only landed two strikes total between both of them; you just liked that it took place in the snow. The action itself doesn't have the fun bounce of something like Police Story or Fong Sai Yuk, nor does it have the grit of the new wave of Indonesian action films like The Night Comes for Us or Headshot. It's just this gray paste of not enough influences and not enough understanding, swirled together into something that feels somehow uninspired in spite of the obvious inspirations which act as the glue between scenes.

Much like Sekiro, the enjoyment of the moment-to-moment action is regularly brought down by blatant technical issues like the camera constantly clipping into the fucking walls and making it so you can't see what's happening. Unlike Sekiro, though — and unarguably worse for it — is the fact that Sifu doesn't have a lock-on. It's got that DmC: Devil May Cry soft lock-on stuff where you mostly gravitate towards the closest enemy, though this is never consistent. Sometimes an enemy will fly in from off-screen like they're hitting Bob Beamon's 29-foot Olympic long jump, and the game often isn't ready to change your target direction for you. Given that you as the player have zero control over who you're trying to look at in any given moment, this compounds an already-frustrating set of mechanical problems. I feel like I'm riding a bike with a rusted-out chain.

Hell, I didn't like Sekiro, but even I can admit that the dual health-and-stagger bars for enemies was an interesting concept. The less health an enemy had, the slower they recovered stagger, which made it almost inevitable that you'd break their guard so long as you could get enough good hits in. Whittling down their health bars made it easier to win a battle of attrition; they have their resources, and you're expected to grind down all of them to deliver the kill. Sifu does not do this. It has enemy health bars, it has enemy stagger bars, but neither one informs the other. The most optimal strategy for the last three (of five!) bosses seems to just be based around running away until they hit you with a singular, simple sequence that you parry over and over again. You'll only ever hit them to try and speed things up, but hitting the bosses contributes such a marginal amount of stagger while also requiring that you press more than one button. You'd be better off not swinging. Either you focus almost solely on parries, or you find the one attack that completely breaks their AI and lets you loop it on itself for an easy kill. It's remarkably simple to get one of several infinites on Yang's phase one where you punch him in his dick or heavy-punch-swap-positions with him over and over for sixty straight seconds. The new problem we run into is that this kills the boss, which is what will guarantee that you get the bad ending.

Enough has been written about Sifu's stupid "revenge is bad" plot contrasted with how the player has no issue slaughtering goons in the run-up to the boss that I won't dig into it further than to say that it doesn't work. It's clunky, and it doesn't work. What I do feel gets ignored, however, is the rest of the story leading up to the point where you find out that revenge is bad. This is one of those "the lore is the story!" games that people who don't care for the Dark Souls narratives accuse the Dark Souls narratives of being. There are all sorts of little incidental trinkets and slips of paper that you can collect and read at your hideout conspiracy board, and it all broadly boils down to "the antagonists killed your father to steal some elemental talismans that they were otherwise forbidden from using". How this is meant to excuse them slitting a child's throat and then the game itself painting you as a bad person for killing them is left as an exercise to the player; more accurately, it's left to the 100% completionists who are planning to make "ENDING EXPLAINED" videos in the first week of release. A lot of people have mentioned feeling like the "revenge is bad" twist comes out of nowhere, and that's because there's very little given to the player across all of the cutscenes. It's there, it's set up, but it's not executed well.

But what's unforgivable is the fact that I invested into a focus build only to find out that the final boss is inexplicably immune to all focus attacks. My entire strategy was invalidated by the fact that the developers made him fucking invincible against a core strategy that has, up to this point, never once been hinted at to be something that wouldn't work. I was either going to have to try beating Yang using a completely hobbled skill set with nothing that would actually help in fighting him, or I was going to have to restart the entire game to set up a better build that I could actually bring into the final boss. Your skills get locked in after every level, which would mean starting over from scratch and ignoring one of the core mechanics of the game because I now had the meta-knowledge that it just doesn't work at the end for some reason. Fuck off. Imagine if Devil May Cry 3 took away your devil trigger for the final Vergil fight, or if the Elden Beast was immune to magic. Some YouTuber or streamer must have dropped the line "focus is a crutch" at some point because it's the only thing that the fucking parrots discussing this on Reddit (type "focus" "crutch" site:www.reddit.com/r/sifugame into Google and count the number of pages that show up) can come up with when someone makes a thread asking why they took the mechanic away just in time for the game to end. I know they didn't all come up with the exact same quote independently of each other, so I'm making an open call to my minions to go track down whoever said it. I'm putting up bounties and shit. We will find them.

The game is gorgeous, and I won't pretend like that isn't worth celebrating. There are a lot of really lovely touches with this watercolor-esque shader and bold lighting shifts. It doesn't always work — one fight takes place in the rain with only a spotlight illuminating a center area, and so you'll spend most of it in the dark trying to figure out where you are — but it hits far more often than it misses in the visual department. It's clear that, if nothing else, the team behind this has a genuine passion for the art side of things. If Sifu was an animated short film, it'd only really need a better script to be something special. It's regrettable that Sloclap made a video game, instead.

A friend of mine said he was upset that they never made an Absolver 2. I'll share his pain. I'd also like an Absolver 2. It'd probably stop them from making another Sifu.

>whistles for magic horse
>chase rolling skull and loot Golden Rune[1]
>notice corpse with huge purple glow
>"Mhmm.... four red leaves... purple glow... Arteria leaf, gotta be"
>"come on, Torrent"
>follows rays
>loot 3 golden Rune[1], 7 rowa fruit, 10 gold-tinged excrement, 1 turtle neck meat, 15 ruin fragments, 2 thin bones, 4 arteria leaves and 6 nascent butterflies on the way
>Hollow™ guy appears
>MYAAARRRGHHUUHRGH WAH WAH WUH
>sip
>SHING PFYUUSUHHH fyuuuuuuoooohhnnn
>"Hmmm... Hollows™ pretending to be zanzibarts.... better tell C the forgotten about this"
>opens map and teleports to NPC hub
>"whasts hast broughsts thee to me'st.... thou'st who are guided by grace, in search of the elden zanziring..."
>accidentally choose "talk"
>"the elden zanziri-"
>"when the myr-"
>"the lords-"
>"Zanziba-"
>"an-"
>"gui-"
>click "hand over faded shards of the Myrmidon"
>"Oh.. yes indeed... the pleading Myrmidon, so easily forgiven... you have done'st thee well'st, Tarnished..."
>reload at site of grace
>C is dead
>loot Golden Rune[3], Arteria leaf, smithing stone[1] and Forgotten Darksword of C
>look up wiki to make sure quest is completed
>reload area at bonfire one more time just in case

We love a game where the genre of background music changes depending on the ethnicity of your enemies.

The Punisher is an honest character. In a world of goody-goody, boy-scout superheroes who seem keen on saving the world through no-kill rules and putting their enemies in jails with revolving doors instead of cells, The Punisher gets shit done. He picks up a gun and goes out in the street and shoots the bad guys to death. It isn’t complicated by anything else. They’ve done bad, he kills them, they can’t do bad anymore. There’s no risk of recidivism, of reoffending, of getting away; they’re dead, and it’s done. He's cleaning out the bowels of New York City, one pull of the trigger at a time.

The Punisher is a dishonest character. He, and his fans, and his writers all hold the belief that treating a symptom is treating a cause. Drug addicts and purse snatchers and rapists and jaywalkers and protesters all meet the same end of the same barrel of the same gun, mowed down for “being criminals” and nothing more. Non-violent offenders, first-timers, gang members fresh out of getting jumped in — every criminal gets shot to death. There are no second chances, no degrees of justice, no punishment too severe. If you’re one of the lucky ones, maybe you won’t get tortured before your head gets blown off as retribution for being addicted to heroin.

The matter to ultimately keep in mind is the fact that The Punisher is a comic book character for children. Teenagers with behavioral problems, at the oldest. These mass-market superhero comics have exceptionally rarely been intended for actual adults; there’s a reason that Frank Castle debuted in a twenty-cent Spider-Man comic, and not in the middle pages of Arcade between shit by Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Much as the most diehard Punisher fans would like to pretend as though The Punisher has ever been telling a mature story for mature adults, this can only hold true when in direct comparison to other superhero comics from the same parent company. Certainly, The Punisher is as dark as Marvel is willing to get, but what you ought to take away from that sentiment is that these stories are the darkest that Marvel is willing to get. Take The Punisher seriously, and you’ve already lost long before you began.

The 2004 movie tie-in game mostly seems to understand this. Despite coming out shortly after the movie and bringing back Thomas Jane to play Frank, there’s little that the game actually has in common with the film; aside from a set piece or two where The Punisher has to take on a legally-distinct version of Kevin Nash’s character in his apartment, the game is far more faithful to the comics than Jonathan Hensleigh’s version was. Fuck, the movie took place in Tampa instead of New York. There's an unwavering adherence to the comics present here that reveals The Punisher as the absurd little aberration in this world that he is; throughout the runtime of the game, the grizzled angel of death that is Frank Castle has to share screen time with goofy characters like Nick Fury and Iron Man, all kitted out in their magic power armor that they use to fight human waves of color-coded Russians and Italians. The Punisher will grab some Yakuza guy in a bright-pink Steve Harvey suit and shove a gun in his mouth until the Yakuza screams “it’s my birthday!”, giving Frank a burst of health. You then blow his head off, and Frank quips “last one”. The game is well-aware of how stupid this all is, and assumes that you’re as in on the joke as it is. Don’t think too hard about it; everyone knows this is silly.

A core mechanic of the game lets you take human shields, which can absorb an inordinate amount of bullets and then be interrogated to recover any lost health. You can also press the L1 button to throw them about fifteen feet ahead of you, at which point I immediately clocked that this was a Volition game. The Punisher seems like it wants to be Max Payne at first glance, but it’s actually Saint’s Row. The controls are remarkably similar, as is the tone; The Punisher himself is taking all of this very seriously, but it’s all so ridiculous that you as the player clearly aren’t expected to. The gameplay loop is simple to start, but gradually demands more of you; starting enemies will die in a shot or two to the chest, but foes later on will be kitted out in Arsenal Gear Tengu armor that essentially requires you to land perfect headshots if you want to deal any meaningful damage.

This all comes together to create an inverse enjoyment curve. You start the game mowing down whoever crosses your path in a very wish-fulfillment-styled rampage, but spend the latter half slowly walking around the battlefield with a human shield and taking potshots at enemy heads with the most accurate weapon that you have. Shotguns are basically invalidated as a weapon type the second that enemies put on bulletproof vests, and you’re limited from that point on to little more than your choice of the AK-47 or the M16, and whatever handgun you can get ammo for. Regular enemies die to headshots just as easily as the guys who showed up dressed as the Combine, so there’s a massive compression in what you’re able to do as a player the further into the game you get. The optimal strategy is to take a shield and fish for headshots, and that’s about all you’ll be doing for the final three hours of playtime. Two of the bosses can only be damaged with explosives that get dropped by the adds they summon, which is about as fun as it sounds.

It ends up as little more than a game that’s mostly okay, which used to be something that was celebrated when a licensed title pulled it off — even more so if it was a movie tie-in game. Aside from a few good laughs and some initially interesting gunplay, there’s not much to this. It can’t manage to be more than a version of Blood on the Sand with about the same gameplay quality and a less interesting final product. Even as ridiculous as Frank grumbling “I’m gonna kill every inmate on Riker’s Island” is, he still can’t reach the heights of Fiddy going after his fucking skull. I’d suggest that anyone who’s thinking about this ought to go try Blood on the Sand instead, but the average Punisher fan probably draws the line at being asked to play as a black guy.

I was originally going to format this review as a comic storyboard, but I wrote too many words for that to be viable. For your consideration, here is an album of Punisher doodles that I left on the cutting room floor.

Dead on arrival.

Dear god, this game had a budget of $125 million. Immortals of Aveum is one of countless misfires in the gaming industry that makes me wonder if anyone with access to as much money as this has any idea what they're doing with all of it. You can see the underlying mentality of use-it-or-lose-it with regards to the budget — celebrity cast lists, particle effects so dense that you can't see through them, Unreal Engine 5 tech demo scenery — and how little it actually goes towards making a game that's fun to play or a world that's interesting to engage with. I was certain that this was a small-scale AA game that EA was publishing simply to make a little cash on the side; finding out that this is one of the most expensive games ever made just confuses me. It's a complete and utter squandering of basically everything that it had going for it. We're witnessing a gaming failson being created in real time. It's like Victor Frankenstein made a monster that emptied the family bank account on a timeshare scheme.

This might be the most poorly written piece of media I’ve ever sat through. I’m extending this beyond only video games. Immortals of Aveum is written the way that people who don’t like Marvel movies think Marvel movies are written. There is no moment that cannot go un-quipped, no revelation nor death so important as to prevent every nearby character from rolling their eyes and cracking a joke about it. This refusal to hold anything as sacred can work — most comedies pull this off just fine — but this game exists in that 2000s-era Adam Sandler dramedy hellsphere where, despite the fact that none of the characters are taking this seriously, it’s clear that the viewer is expected to. Immortals of Aveum wants to be a story about wildly differing people coming together in the face of adversity, a story about betrayal, a story about racism, about ancient world-ending prophecies and secret orders desperate to keep the balance. It also has a character say, verbatim, “he’s right behind me, isn’t he?”. He is, in fact, right behind them. Holy fuck. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

Speaking of, every character is such a potty mouth. I know that’s the most Melvin thing imaginable to complain about, but it really does clash with everything that’s set up here. This feels like a PG-13 movie. The best comparison is that it’s an adaptation of a young adult novel that doesn’t actually exist, but it’s not a good adaptation, and the YA novel in question was written like Divergent instead of Hunger Games. This is some bootleg bootleg garbage. This is stepped-on Noughts and Crosses. Characters in this universe ought to be saying “crap” or some made-up fantasy curse like “stars and bolts!” instead of shouting “fuck” every other sentence. Everything and everyone is so flat that you can only reasonably conclude that it was written to appeal to children, but the constant swearing reminds you that they actually intended this for adults. The ESRB gave this an M rating, and I think it’s almost exclusively because of the strong language. There’s barely any blood — hell, barely any actual violence beyond shooting little flashes of magic at people. Harry Potter is more hardcore even in its earliest parts, when the cast is made up of fourth graders fighting ogres in the school bathroom. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

I want to take a moment to complain about Devyn, who might be the most annoying character I’ve ever seen. I cannot fucking stand Devyn. He even spells his name like an asshole. They very clearly want you to be annoyed by Devyn — he’s a Claptrap figure of sorts, placed here by a cruel and uncaring god solely to torment you with his quips — and this is probably the greatest triumph that the writing can manage. In a world where nobody is the straight man and everybody seems desperate to be the one who gets to say something “funny” next, Devyn stands out for his ability to fuck up every single conversation by inserting himself directly into the middle of all of them. Some character will start complaining about the Immortals being isolationists who only care about themselves, and Devyn will cut them off to go on a John Oliver-esque rant for a straight minute to mock them. The player character sets up an uneasy alliance with a member of a discriminated race, and Devyn hops on the holo-orb to joke about how much he hates the entire filthy lot of them. The player character starts telling a story and Devyn fucking burps like a cartoon character to cut him off. God, fuck him. I’d say that I hope he dies, but the game actually pulls through and obliges me. The lead villain blows a hole through his chest like Piccolo and we’re expected not to instantly start rooting for him. People mourn Devyn. He’s the first name that our heroes drop when they give the villain the “and this is revenge for...” speech once he’s defeated. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

Devyn is really only as annoying as he is because his actor is as annoying as he is. This is a common thread throughout the entire cast; all of the actors here are performing like this is their first time in front of a camera. Hell, I thought it was. Turns out that the entire cast is comprised of actual fucking screen actors who do this shit for a living, and none of them seem to have a clue what they’re doing. This is doubtless a directing problem — Gina Torres is delivering a career-low performance, far beneath even the worst projects she’s done elsewhere — and it seems like Ascendant believed they could just hire professional actors and tell them to "start acting" as their only point of reference for what they ought to be doing. Charles Halford as Rook crushes it, though, and I have to wonder if it’s solely because his character doesn’t look like a human being. They were apparently doing some weird hybrid face-scan/mocap setup where the actors would have their faces scanned while they were doing voiceover in a booth, and then their heads would get pasted onto the bodies of whoever was doing the mocap. There are scenes clearly intended for big emotions, or that expect the actors to at least raise their voices a little — when they see their friends die, when they give speeches on the battlefield — and they just can't seem to muster them for this. Everyone just talks. Nobody in Aveum has ever heard of an outside voice.

I've gone this long without mentioning the gameplay because it's about as much of an afterthought as this paragraph. You get three types of magic, creatively named Red, Blue, and Green, and Blue magic is so ridiculously good that you only use the other colors when the game forces you to. Blue magic is a semi-automatic rifle that gets a stacking percent damage bonus on critical hits, which are guaranteed on headshots and weak spots. It has virtually zero recoil, infinite range, hitscan, and does obscene damage obscenely quickly. Red magic is a slow shotgun that deals a solid chunk of damage but has low DPS, and Green magic is a projectile-based submachine gun with some homing capabilities that serves mostly as a shitty shotgun that misses more often than it hits. Since all of your basic magic has infinite ammo, there's little reason to do anything other than keep your Blue magic in your hand and spam bolts at enemies so far away that they're using their low LOD models. Consider binding your fire button to the scroll wheel to spare your index finger from a repetitive stress injury.

What I do like, however, is that there's actually some emphasis on platforming and exploration. While this isn't an especially interesting world to poke through, there are all sorts of goodies scattered throughout, and they're all more or less worth collecting. Grabbing lore notes will always reward you with XP even if you don't read them, and actually getting to them can be fun. You've got a double jump to start out with, which is already a plus, and you'll eventually graduate to a hookshot and a glide that you can use to get basically anywhere you want to be. Chaining air dashes and hookshots with your glides to get across a massive pit with a treasure chest at the end of it might be one of those gameplay systems that's inherently rewarding. Even though most of what you'll get for doing these mini challenges amounts to little more than a lump sum of XP or a buff to some of your damage numbers, it's the act of platforming around where the tiny kernel of fun is hidden.

There's really not much to say about Immortals of Aveum besides the fact that, were it not for being the worst-written thing I've ever seen in my fucking life, I would have completely forgotten about it in the two weeks it's taken me to type this out. I'd almost say that it's worth playing if only to see how ridiculously bad the characters are, but you're better off watching someone else play it on YouTube at that point, and you'd be watching it for way too long to get a laugh out of it. At least bad movies usually have the courtesy of ending in two hours, not eight. Part of the problem with "so bad it's good" games are the amount of time that they demand you invest in them, and then you've gotta reckon with the fact that you're putting in work for something that isn't going to be worth it. I don't regret playing Immortals of Aveum. That's faint praise, but it's all the praise I can give it. The studio isn't going to exist by this time next year. It's hardly worth thinking about beyond the thoughts I've already had. People probably won't even remember that this existed, and what a sad thought that is. Try not to think about what they could have done with that money instead.

What are we, some kind of Immortals of Aveum?

An unintentional period piece.

Fair warning, I'm gonna be talking about the grim shit that happened during the war on terror. I'm also gonna be talking about 50 Cent's career. These two are intertwined.

I doubt there are too many people using this website who are young enough to have completely missed the meteoric rise of 50 Cent, but I'd be remiss to not make sure that everyone gets a primer. At the turn of the millennium, the golden age of gangsta rap was giving way to the bling era; what had become conventional in the late-80s to mid-90s was rapidly becoming less popular and less profitable than the revival of alternative hip hop. Of course, this didn't stop some artists from keeping their old sound in the face of new trends. Whether it was because they were stubborn, incapable of changing, or confident enough that they could keep selling exactly the way that they were, a genre shift will never be enough to completely unseat people from making what they want. 50 Cent had been making mixtapes for years, getting some notoriety from flipping the beats that other rappers had laid their voices on. He wasn't about to shift gears. 50 Cent kept his sound the same, and was rewarded handsomely: his debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, went 9x Platinum. The Massacre came out two years later and went 6x Platinum.

That was 2005, and it was the last time 50 Cent was relevant.

Blood on the Sand released in February of 2009.

A significant part of 50 Cent's fall is that, frankly speaking, he’s kind of a shit rapper. His style was already out by the early 2000s, and it’s only thanks to a fortuitous pick-up by Shady Records that you’ve heard of him. He’s not talentless, nor was he ever; his mixtape work prior to his studio debut is still good at its worst, and GRoDT is a solid-enough record (as much as I’ll get called an RYM backpacker for not saying it's outstanding). But 50 doesn’t really have any pen game to speak of. It’s more like crayon game. The guy writes like a fifth grader. The first bar off the first track in his debut album rhymes “off my chest” with “off my chest”. There’s another not even three minutes later where he drops the line “I'm the boss on this boat, you can call me skipper. The way I turn the money over, you should call me Flipper”. Christ. 50 Cent has a lot of friends in some really high places, but there’s a reason that Curtis couldn’t get certified in the year that Graduation went 5x Platinum; people were tired of him after less than a decade after his mainstream breakthrough. All of the Slim Shady and Obie Trice and Snoop Dogg features in the world couldn’t stem the tide that people like Kanye and Lil’ Wayne were creating, and 50’s monotone flows, GarageBand default beats, and garbage lyricism were reliquary.

But 50 Cent’s relationships are what propelled him, and they helped him build a legacy that he’s still controlling to this day. He made it big by starting feuds with virtually every other rapper he could on How to Rob, only delving deeper into his many, many beefs as he got involved deeper with Shady Records, taking up their fights as an associate. He turned getting shot for running his mouth into his armor — you become feared and respected in equal measure if the guy that puts nine bullets in you winds up dead before you do. He created a multimedia empire of television shows, of vodka, of luxury underwear, of investments in South African palladium mines.

And of video games.

Blood on the Sand originally had nothing to do with 50 Cent, and you can tell. It was meant to be a tie-in with a Jason Bourne sequel series written after the death of author Robert Ludlum, but the television show that was also set to release at the same time got cancelled before it could leave production. This left developer Swordfish Studios holding the bag; this is basically what happened with Croteam when they made Serious Sam 3. Swordfish had sunk two years of dev time into making their Covert-One game, and now they had nothing they could do with the prototypes.

Enter Vivendi Games, who order a sequel to 50 Cent: Bulletproof.

It's obvious while playing Blood on the Sand that 50 Cent was just kind of dropped into a product that already existed before he got involved. You have all of these wide, open vistas, with sparkling bloom effects casting rays of light down onto the sand-bleached stones. Dilapidated malls and bombed-out highways serve as the backdrops for stop-and-pop cover shooter segments, tearing up the surroundings with heavy machine gun fire. So much of this game visually tries to tell a story of beautiful landscapes, contrasting against the war-torn buildings and roads of this unnamed Middle Eastern country. It’s ripe for some gruff-voiced American special ops player character to glibly comment on war being hell and how the American invasion of this land is the only way to save these wayward people, mowing them down all the while.

50 Cent doesn’t give a fuck about any of that. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull.

Blood on the Sand is honest. It's a puff piece for 50 Cent. It's a product that exists solely for the purpose of boosting his image and providing him with another brand tie-in he can point to as a marker of success. 50 Cent doesn't have any poetic musings about the nature of man or if he's the real monster for slaughtering all of these inexplicably Serbian and Slovenian goons. 50 Cent thinks this place is a shithole and he wants to go home as soon as he can get his $10 million jewel-encrusted skull back. The non-fictionalized 50 is on record saying that he loves the game because it shows him jumping out of helicopters and because his model has huge muscles.

The game attempts to answer the question of why 50 Cent is somewhere in the Middle East (the Covert-One books out at the time don't take place in the region, so there's basically zero clue which country this is meant to be) by saying that he's there to play a concert. We have to keep in mind that fiction, unlike reality, is designed from top to bottom to be experienced by an outside viewer. The in-universe justification is that he's there to make money. The real-world reasoning is because, in the year 2009, you're just kind of expected to set your game in the Middle East. They were easy "bad guys". Just because Obama was president doesn't mean shit. Just because the torture of political dissidents in Abu Ghraib was known for half a decade before this doesn't mean shit. Just because it cost untold trillions of dollars and a million lives doesn't mean shit. They — capital-T, bold-italics — did 9/11, so it's all fair game.

But this is all in service of making 50 look cool. Not of anything else. You're meant to watch him gun down five guys with a machine gun while the word MASSACRE takes up a third of the screen and and think "wow, this guy's a badass". You get Gangsta Fire slow-mo and 50 Cent bonus points to unlock music videos for killing quickly, because it makes him look cool. You have three separate helicopter boss fights because 50 Cent's son thought it would make him look cool. You listen to a rotation of background tracks that all sound the same and can only be differentiated in a firefight by whether 50 shouts "I run New York!" or "My gun go off!" at the end of the chorus. You have a dedicated taunt button that you can upgrade to make 50 shout progressively more profane things at his foes for bonus points. Because, you know, it makes him look cool. I think the target demographic for this game was 50 Cent.

Unsurprisingly, 50 Cent and the rest of the G-Unit do a fairly poor job of acting as themselves. Perhaps more surprisingly, everyone save for Lance Reddick kind of sucks in this. The final boss cycles through a Texan accent, a South African accent, a British RP accent, and at one point what sounds like a Chinese accent all in the span of a single helicopter battle. Tony Yayo just...whines all the time? Like, he doesn't do much besides complain about how much he hates being in a Middle Eastern warzone, which, y'know, valid gripe. The other members of the G-Unit are no longer on speaking terms with 50 Cent. That's not relevant to the rest of this paragraph, but I did all of this research into 50 Cent, so I had to mention it somewhere.

The story is nonsense, but it couldn't ever be anything else. 50 Cent just wants his fucking skull. Everything else is tertiary. The "love interest" crosses you, then double-crosses the villains with a story about how they're holding her family captive, and then triple-crosses 50 one final time by revealing that she has no family right at the finish line. 50 Cent quips that she's a "crazy bitch" and that's how he likes his women, and then blows her up with a rocket launcher. Your concert promoter/handler/blackmail victim inevitably turns on you — "trust no one," says the arms dealer, advice which 50 ignores three separate times before the credits roll — and just dies unceremoniously in a generic gunfight. You can blast him the moment you're out of the cutscene and get a 25,000 point bonus for doing it in under thirty seconds. This game is bordering on a work of deconstructive genius.

Blood on the Sand is funny, because Blood on the Sand is quaint. It revels in its own selfishness; the war on terror as an aesthetic to push a real guy as being tough, completely bereft of having anything to say other than "damn, 50 Cent is cool". It's almost refreshing to see something so concerned with itself that it's completely unbothered by its own implications. This is a better condemnation of the war on terror and the American culture that spawned around it than Spec Ops: The Line. Hit that big-ass ramp, Fiddy.

This is the good karma version of Rogue Warrior.

"It can't be that bad."

(1 Dante and Lucia playthrough later)

"It's that bad."

God of War: Ascension is a fine enough game but it struggles to earn its existence. On one hand, I think the combat is a lot of fun, more fun than the usual for these games. The chains being used more and the increased emphasis on grabbing with them makes the gameplay a lot more fast paced, very rarely did I get frustrated with it. Elementals effecting the blades also was a good feature. Im not sure how much of this is new and what was added in GoW3 but I liked it nonetheless. That being said, thats about the only praise I can give this game.

The story is well, it sure is a story. While God of War isnt known for peak story telling outside of the newest entry, I found most of the games to have pretty compelling and enjoyable stories to them. Besides this one. As a prequel it doesnt really bring anything new to the table. The characters are uninteresting, the cool set pieces are few and far between and the story is just unapologetically mid. Its not bad, but compared to past entries I was incredibly less interested in it and all the villains are completely forgettable.

I think the biggest problem with this game is how much it feels like just an attempt to modernize the series and make itself relevant. Sure, graphically its impressive for the PS3 but the art style itself looks ugly and bland like so many other games in the era, it loses most of the charm even the PSP games were able to retain. The menus look like a generic action game and lets not forget everyones favorite 2010-ish single player game feature: tacked on mutliplayer. Its dead now of course but I wager it was never very lively to begin with. All of this just makes the game feel like a bit of a cash grab. Not an effortless one, mind you but a cash grab is a cash grab.

All this being said, I still find it to be a pretty good game overall. The combat is very fluid and although there arent many, the dope moments are certifiably dope. If you've finished the rest of the series and want more God of War you are sure to get something out of this, but it might just make you long to be playing the previous entries instead.

Trophy Completion - 91% (34/36)
Time Played - 13 hours 16 minutes
Nancymeter - 69/100
Game Completion #66 of 2022
June Completion #1

*no I did not forget to change the playtime from my FFA review, they legit both have the same playtime

I now have two big regrets when it comes to gaming. The first is that I have gone through life having never owned a PlayStation 2, and the second is that I didn’t support and play Tango Gameworks’ Hi-Fi Rush before the studio was unfairly axed by Microsoft in 2024. The year prior was a crazy year in terms of the amount of quality game releases, and it was quite frankly, a tad overwhelming keeping up with them all. Despite all of the praise being given to Hi-Fi Rush, there were just so many other games that were coming out, or games that I wanted to get to, that I just threw it on the backlog thinking that I’d get to it eventually. Unfortunately, 2023 was also a year with a heartbreakingly large amount of game studio closures, and this is something that is continuing in 2024, with Tango Gameworks themselves being a recent victim at the time of writing this review, despite all of the success that Hi-Fi Rush had achieved the year prior. Coincidentally, the game also had gone on sale as part of a Humble Bundle around the same time the studio was shut down, and fellow Backloggd user duhnuhnuh had an extra key for the game that they were offering (huge shoutouts to him by the way, I’m extremely grateful). Given the timing of everything and an opportunity to play the game in a way that doesn’t directly support Microsoft, I leapt at the chance to give this game its due diligence, and I was absolutely floored at how much the game truly lived up to all of the praise people had given it.

Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm-based action game that takes place in a city in the far future. It stars Chai, a sarcastic and oblivious slacker dude with a disabled arm who really wants to become a rockstar. He volunteers for a cybernetic limb replacement program being run by Vandelay Technologies on their very own campus. Shortly before the process begins, CEO of Vandelay Technologies: Kale Vandelay, a callous CEO stereotype, observes Chai’s records. Unimpressed, he harshly dubs him a loser before he carelessly tosses Chai’s music player away, causing it to fall into the testing site onto Chai’s chest. During the limb replacement process, the music player becomes embedded within Chai, giving him electromagnetic powers while also causing his environment to sync up with the music itself. However, this causes him to be labeled as a defect by Vandelay Technologies, whose security forces attempt to bring him in. As he flees, he meets up and makes a deal with Peppermint, a robotics prodigy with a grudge against the corporation, who helps him escape in exchange for helping her investigate them. Together, the two team up to uncover the shady secrets behind the scenes of Vandely Technologies so that they can expose them to the world and stop their plans from unfolding.

The gameplay is that of a character action game like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, but with rhythm game elements that supplement the combat and platforming. Before I played the game, I heard a lot of people comparing it to Devil May Cry, but I wrote those comparisons off as an over-exaggeration, since I feel like a lot of people will compare any action game with combat they really like to Devil May Cry. I was delightfully surprised to learn that no, the game really is essentially Devil May Cry, but with rhythm game elements. You can perform a variety of combos that are dependent on the timing of your button presses, you’ve got a stiff yet highly vertical jump, you’ve got short platforming segments to serve as variety in-between the combat, you’ve got a ton of different upgrades and additional combos you can purchase with the game’s currency, and you’re graded on your performance after every battle and level with a letter ranking system.

Everything in the game is tied to the beat of the song that’s currently playing, and I do mean everything. The attacks and movements of your enemies, platforming hazards, sound effects, and even animations in the background are all tied to the music, and the game tests you on your ability to not only perform well while in battle, but doing so while also staying on beat with the music. I did find it a bit difficult to get used to timing my attacks to the beat at first, but I got better and better at it as time went on. I can’t tell you how satisfying it feels when you’re able to successfully perform attacks in sync with the rhythm. Just like in Devil May Cry 5, the music will add additional layers of instrumentation the higher your letter score, and the game will also play the sound of an audience chanting Chai’s name as well. The better you do, the more ecstatic the game feels, and performing really well during a fight can feel genuinely euphoric.

The rhythm game elements don’t stop at syncing your attacks to the beat, however. There are a number of quicktime events where you need to press the correct buttons at the correct timing, such as during certain special attacks Chai can perform. Additionally, when close to death, more powerful enemies and certain bosses can force you into a one-on-one segment where you’ll need to successfully parry or dodge their attacks, which are telegraphed to a series of specific beats that you need to replicate with your button presses, and successfully doing so allows you to finish them off with one final strike. As someone who is a big fan of character action games, it’s extremely surprising how fresh and satisfying adding rhythm elements to this genre’s gameplay makes the game as a whole feel. This melding of the genres works fantastically. There is a great sense of cohesion between the two, and for the most part, elements of one genre don’t overshadow the other.

There’s only one element of combat that I have some small issues with. As the game progresses, you will meet additional characters who become allies that you can call upon during combat to aid you in battle. They’ll perform a special attack that has a cooldown once it’s executed. Your allies become a pretty key part of combat, as these special attacks are needed in order to make certain enemies or bosses vulnerable. The issue is how inconsistently your allies’ attacks function. You can’t manually target enemies, so when you call on your allies to use their attack, they can sometimes use it on the wrong enemy, or they’ll miss entirely. If this happens, then you’ve just wasted that summon and you now have to wait for the cooldown to finish before you can summon your ally to attack again. This was especially annoying with Macaron, who needs to use his ability twice in order to break the shields of certain enemies, and whose cooldown takes twice as long compared to your other allies. If he misses or targets the wrong enemy, then you’re basically a sitting duck until his ability recharges, which can be very frustrating. You can purchase some upgrades to make the cooldown slightly better, but they do cost a lot of currency, currency I’d rather spend on other things that can enhance the gameplay experience for myself, like additional combos I can perform, or items that increase my health or special attack gauge.

The game’s tone is very playful, upbeat, and fun, complimented by a gorgeously colorful artstyle that’s inspired by a combination of western and eastern comic books/manga. It tells a story that is a not at all discreet criticism regarding how the leaders of corporations frequently interfere with, mismanage, and ruin the lives of those who work under them. It also goes into demonstrating how much this hurts when the job is something that people have aspired to do for much of their lives, and are very passionate about. The story is extremely straightforward, but you can tell it’s one that comes from very real experiences that I’m sure the folks that have worked on the game have gone through, and considering what ended up happening with Tango Gameworks, it’s a story that resonates now more than ever.

The characters are decent, they serve the story well enough. I will say I’m not the biggest fan of Chai, but he did eventually grow on me. He’s a huge dork who’s very self-serving, unmotivated, and oblivious to those around him. He does get better as he starts to take the situation at hand more and more seriously and comes to care more about the people he meets and works with to take down Vandaley, though his ego remains pretty big still by the end of the game. He’s not at all a bad character or protagonist, he’s just a little too white bread for my tastes. The other characters don’t get much of a focus during the game’s main story, but talking to them in-between missions at the hideout allows you to learn more about them and how they feel about the unfolding events of the narrative. I think I might’ve developed a stronger attachment to them if they had a larger presence in the main plot, but this is still a fine and fun cast of characters.

While I personally would’ve preferred the tone be a bit less playful and to have had a little more edge to it, like the old school Guitar Hero games or Brutal Legend, I feel that would’ve made the game somewhat of a harder sell, not just to general audiences but to get approval to make the game in the first place. The exaggerated, Saturday morning cartoon-esque personalities of the game’s characters (the villains in particular), really manage to offset how personal, and in a way, sad the message that’s being communicated under the surface is. The villain Zanzo in particular is an excellent demonstration of this. His manically over-the-top demeanor and constant Jojo posing, to a certain degree, masks the very real, outrageous, and constant demands the person in charge of a team may have, and how their ego can get in the way of seeing the project to completion, making the efforts of the overworked people underneath them all for naught. The game’s current tone isn’t at all a bad one either. I can see some folks not jiving with the comedy, and I can also see certain people writing it off as “reddit humor”, but even if the game didn’t necessarily make me laugh out loud, I still found it to be endearing.

I’ve really enjoyed the rhythm games I’ve played, but I don’t play too many of them because the vast majority of them don’t appeal to my taste in music, so I’m really glad this game exists. I played the game with its original soundtrack instead of the licensed music (in case I decide to one day stop being a coward and start making YouTube videos), and I gotta say, it was pretty fantastic. I’m more of a metalhead than a rock guy, but this game’s music is still really good. The soundtrack has a lotta groovy riffs and decent solos that are never tiresome or boring to listen to.

Hi-Fi Rush was truly a surprise for me. I went into this without much in terms of expectations, but its fluid and immensely satisfying combat and complete banger of a soundtrack kept me hooked the entire time. I’m heavily debating doing a quick second playthrough of the game even though I’ve finished it because I was just that hooked and enamored by its gameplay. If the game had a different tone and a heavier soundtrack, I genuinely think it would’ve ended up being my dream video game, but even as it currently stands, it’s a brand new favorite of mine. The irony of a game condemning the actions of corporate dickheads becoming a massive success while the studio that made it gets shut down a year after it launches is honestly extremely tragic. It’s not like my $30 was the $30 that would’ve kept Tango Gameworks from shutting down, but I still feel really bad after finally playing this game that I didn’t purchase it and support Tango while they still existed. If you haven’t played Hi-Fi Rush, I implore you to, and I also implore you to learn from my mistake and actually support those games that don’t get AAA marketing, yet gain an outstanding reputation via word of mouth. Don’t just put them on your wishlist forever and wait. I can’t stress enough how much we need more games like Hi-Fi Rush, and if we don’t make our voices heard with our wallets, we hurt the chances of these games being made in the future.

Forever and always: Fuck You, Microsoft.

While in the middle of my Cult of the Lamb playthrough, my power went out for 4 hours. In that time, I had nothing to do except go on my phone but eventually it died. I remembered my 3DS was fully charged and so I decided to look through my DS/3DS games to see if I can be productive and replay something I hadn't in a while. Decided on the original New Super Mario Bros, since I hadn't played the series in years. After playing through the first world, my power came back on not long after. Decided to continue replaying this even with the power back on so here we are.

The New Super Mario Bros games were not games I ever truly loved. Yes, by the time 2 and U came out, the series became super stale. But even with DS and Wii, I never found them amazing at all. Replaying DS, this seems to still be true for me. In fact, this may be my least favorite of the bunch, at least next to 2 for several different reasons. Even despite that however, it's still a fun time overall and worth coming back to for a certain addition I'll talk about later.

First thing you'll notice when playing the game, would be its graphics. Personally, I always thought the NSMB games had a fine enough artstyle tho I much prefer how the sprite-based games looked in the past. DS though is sadly the ugliest in the series now. It was certainly a marvel back then but nowadays, just looks kinda ugly a lot of the time compared to the other titles.

Level design-wise, the game has plenty of levels that actually are pretty memorable. The sewers level, the giant wiggler level, the pipe maze level, the fucking brutal 8-1 level with the birds. I wish more of the levels were memorable like these, since a large chunk can be forgettable but I was surprised just how many I ended up remembering. This game also added the star coin collectable and honestly, they can be a tremendous pain in this game. They don't hide them behind invisible walls like future game but some of them require a powerup from other levels or toad houses and it can be frustrating. Same with the secret exits (which came back from Mario World). Like a third of those require the aforementioned outside powerup and they're a pain. I do recommend going for 100% tho cuz once you beat the game, you can actually buy bottom screen skins with any star coins you have and I never knew this and it's awesome. Such a great reward for going out of your way to get them.

One more aspect of the gameplay I wanted to get into were the powerups. 80% of the game you'll be seeing the fire flower which is a good powerup of course. The other 20%, you'll see the three new ones (and the classic star I guess) and I gotta say they're not that great. The mega mushroom is a great concept and is fun to use but is barely in any levels naturally. The mini mushroom is also not used that much and I honestly never liked much just because it's so floaty. And the shell is just obnoxious since you start moving on your own the moment you hit top speed and you have to manually stop to get out of your shell. I'm sure it's super fun when speed running but alas, it just annoyed me more than anything. This is another thing I think future games did better, especially WIi, that one has a great selection of powerups.

I really don't have much to say about the soundtrack. It's alright at best I think and it doesn't help the 1-1 theme gets reused in Wii. I did actually like the map theme for world 7 though, something about that feels so nostalgic. This game is somewhat nostalgic to me since I remember seeing a classmate play this on field trip bus ride when I was 8 and thinking it looked so cool. Never ended up playing the main campaign until after I played the other 3 NSMB games but my memory of that bus ride is engrained in my memory, and part of me thinks that classmate was on world 7 that day which might explain why the song feels so nostalgic. Either way, besides that one song I really like, never cared for the game's ost sadly.

This is all fine and dandy, but the real reason I think someone should come back to this one is its multiplayer modes. Minigames are a blast to play, even if most of them are ported straight from 64 DS, but there are a couple new ones which is nice. I probably played these more than the actual game back in the day. The Mario vs Luigi mode was also a lot of fun back in the day too. The goal was to get the most stars and you could steal them from the opposite Mario brother. Was just really fun constantly screwing the other person over. Though I guess since (most of) the minigames are in 64 DS and future games had multiplayer in it's campaigns, these aren't amazing reasons to come back to NSMB DS specifically, but it's still a nice little package of multiplayer goodness overall.

Like I said, was never a huge fan of the New Super Mario Bros games, and while this still rings true...I'd say this was still a fun time overall. Would be fun to replay them all but I'd have to spread them out considering how samey they are lol.