Platted on PS3 back in 2010.

While I like Dark Souls 1 more, this game has so many odd systems - World Tendency is truly wild - and the willingness to make every world's final boss a "puzzle boss" is bold. The world isn't very well-connected so it feels more like Mega Man as compared to Dark Souls' Metroid. And, of course, obtuse RPG mechanics including carry weights and absurd upgrade costs. I'm in love.

To get a plat I had to farm one specific enemy that only shows in one specific area at maximum black world tendency (requiring me to go offline and suicide like 50 times to tank my tendency) for hours. No wonder you never see people with maxed out Sharp modifiers lol. I love this shit.

Great game. Deranged.

Extremely cozy game. Obviously Half-Life 1 inspired. What if you played the scientist team and had to survive with your wits instead of your inexplicably amazing way with guns?

I'm generally anti-survival-crafter because they mostly seem to be about stripping the environment of trees and rocks and shit and building an extremely ugly-looking box house. This game recontextualizes that behavior into strip-mining an office complex to build little hovel-apartments to support your work exploring each zone. As a result it feels like the intermediary period between the start of the cascade and when you as Gordon Freeman run into some scientist guy huddled in a corner behind a makeshift barricade going "please help me!!!"

The other thing I super love about it is that so much of your time is about exploring a specific path until that path eventually loops back into the main "unlocked" part of your run. There's five billion shortcuts per area, all bespoke, all uncovered by digging through every nook and cranny. It's extremely rewarding to just wander around and get lost and follow some arbitrary path because it'll give you resources AND open up new parts of the level.

Brilliant stuff. Palworld could never.

Western search action with an X-Files plot tied intimately with Alan Wake and the rest of the Remedyverse. It's obviously a banger, gorgeous, with many genuinely heartfelt moments as well as fun speculative worldbuilding. Anyone who grew up loving "monster of the week" shows like me would undoubtedly adore this game.

The core combat loop doesn't really gel until you get Throw, but once you do it's so fun. Played correctly, you're practically invincible, thanks to how good all of your weapons and utility powers are. Floating around the battlefield like some vengeful god, smiting corrupted soldiers with a flick of your finger. It's intoxicating and I think a much better expression of the combat loop of Quantum Break, which I liked but didn't love.

My biggest complaint? Ends sort of abruptly - almost like a TV cliffhanger - even with the DLC, some odd difficulty spikes, and a mod / challenge system that seems completely out of place. Seriously, why are there repeatable challenges to grind for weapon mods? I would've greatly preferred scattering concrete secrets around, like missile tanks in Metroid. Feels so out of place here.

Platted on PC and near-platted on PS4 so it's unlikely I will ever return to Control. I enjoyed my time here though and I hope the next game in this series leans into the exploratory strengths and discards some of the cruft.

Still formulating my thoughts on this, but for a game that directly cites FEAR as an inspiration and has seemingly put sooooo much effort into "versimilitude" and emergent mechanics, playing it is pretty fucking boring.

Here's the problem, and why I love FEAR while games like this do nothing for me: FEAR is actually pretty straightforward, the enemies are dumb and easy to kill, and the environments often eerily absent of detail. It lives large in people's memory because of what it ~evokes~, not what it explicitly shows. It's constantly trying to surprise you with new room layouts and situations. As a result it's both sparse and memorable, two great qualities for a game to have.

Meanwhile, in this game you can press "Use" twice to open a can of soda and then drink it. Many objects can be picked up and thrown around but this does nothing interesting. The encounter spaces are full of all this detail, like turning off lights and closing windows and such, that plays pretend at a cool and theatrical sort of combat style, but which ultimately amounts to nothing because rooms are basically just boxes attached to other boxes without interesting vertical elements, unique layouts, etc. Enemies are bullet sponges even with headshots. And one of my biggest aggrieved nitpicks in games: it binds an important core function to Caps Lock.

Really disappointed, the promo stuff for this game actually caught my interest so to see how badly designed the levels are deeply frustrates me.

Really wanted to like this one, and there are some parts of it I do like - the broad brush strokes of the narrative, the soundtrack (sans the rapping; lyrics were too cringe for me lol) - but ultimately it felt easy, repetitive, hollow, and boring. Making most of the enemies in a Max Payne homage melee was not a good move, and there's way too many levels. You don't have to slo-mo or dive-dodge basically at all in this game, and in fact will actively hurt you in the boss fights as the roll-dodge is how you get away from the boss tracking. A strong effort for sure, but a weak outcome.

I grew up with Command and Conquer, and have extremely formative memories around Red Alert, so this game is obviously my jam.

However, I forgot just how fucking hard Tiberian Dawn is. Seriously! Especially Nod. We're talking a good half of the campaign being no-base missions, and the other half getting your dick ripped apart by waves of units that effortlessly squish your poor rifleman beneath their treads.

Red Alert in comparison feels like a much more mature RTS. Westwood learning the lessons of Tiberian Dawn and applying them to craft a directed, textured campaign experience.

The remaster is mostly wonderful, with many small quality-of-life changes, from right-click commands (BOO!!! HERESY!!!) to a jukebox letting you mix and match the original and remastered albums together (hooray!). The graphics are well-done and faithful, and you can always toggle back to the original sprites if desired. The lack of attack-move will definitely trip some people up, as well as the complexity of the basic micro and pretty bad pathfinding, but in my case I find it charming and a fun skill expression.

All this said, and the reason this remaster isn't five stars, is the AI upscale on the old footage is BAD. Like, seriously bad. The water writhes like worms! They could've just blown it up, kept the aspect ratio, and put a CRT filter to smooth it out, but instead we get some of the ugliest cutscene work ever. Barf.

Definitely worth it. I think these games hold up really well - particularly Red Alert - in a genre now overladen with micro-heavy design where every unit has Special Abilities. But even if they didn't, it's clearly a labor of love by a team of people who adore these games and wanted to make them more accessible to the general public.

I hope someday we get a Tiberian Sun / Red Alert 2 remaster, though they definitely do not need it as much as these games did.

It goes without saying that this game is gorgeous - a passion project by one of the artists at Vanillaware - so I won't belabor that point. It also has great sounds and music and I loved the empty emotion of text-to-speech saying "I'll see you in hell."

Scoring and survival are pretty standard stuff here. Kill enemies while you're close to them for more points and multiplier, use bombs to survive, and eat bombs to juice your score. What really surprised me, though, was how clever all the patterns were. Most games of this ilk just blindly imitate Cave games - and don't get me wrong, I love Daifukkatsu and ESPrade and Mushihimesama - but Devil Blade is more interested in evoking Treasure shooters with its patterns, in particular Ikaruga. I'm also a huge fan of the scoring system specifically because it means you're constantly nose-to-nose with bosses just ~daring~ them to attack you.

The end result is something gorgeous, fun, and a breath of fresh air for shmups. A great return to form. Really love this. Beat it no-death on Easy already, gonna go for higher difficulties and scores for sure.