Another quality installment in Digital Eclipse's series and a neat historical look at the UK computer scene of the 80's through Jeff Minter's experiences, especially for me as an American who had little knowledge of it; but man just like with Karateka I just don't like the vast majority of Jeff Minter's games in this collection. A good chunk of them are obnoxious sensory overload that go way too fast and/or are overly complex to a trollish degree. Also didn't change my opinion that Commodore games just sucked. Tempest 2000 is cool though and I definitely can see why it was the only reason to get a Jaguar. Funny thing is I felt Jeff's visualizer programs were more of an interesting topic when it came to his games because even if I wasn't totally into them Jeff had a clear passion for them as well as an ambition that was ahead of his time with them. Just as with Karateka, Llamasoft is a great historical piece but I just wish they could cover games that are mostly fun to play. Regardless I'm completely locked into with this series and definitely will be Day 1 once again for the next installment.

I liked the demo enough during Next Fest but unfortunately Children of the Sun proved to be entirely style over substance. What starts off as a neat little sniper puzzler with a Killer 7-esque aesthetic devolves into trial and error, tedium, and wonky hitboxes. In some levels you aren't even able to see every enemy initially so you straight up gotta trial and error it. The later mechanics the games adds feel more like annoying gimmicks and the last level is just an absolute slog and I just gave up because I couldn't find the last damn enemy in all the visual noise and didn't feel like repeating all that shit over and over again just to find them. Easy skip and I regret I'm probably past the refund window.

This game took a lot of strength to get through as I nearly gave up on it twice throughout my playthrough. To put it in one sentence, this game has aged like milk.

The story is so bland and boring but that's not the main focus as each games story is really similar where Rico is tossed into a politically unstable country and has to kill a dictator. The characters are also really dull, with Rico never speaking outside of a cheesy one liner and the two other side characters are there only to tell Rico his mission. Pair this with eerie almost uncanny valley cutscenes with character models I can only describe as something you would see in a low budget 2000's animated movie.

The map is enormous, which I will commend the game on for its time being of that big a scale. There is also lots of side content which I never touched as it all looked exactly the same. This was clearly a game created to spend more time on than just completing the main story, which I did just over 5 hours, across like 2 days as I couldn't take much more of it after two hours.

Now onto the rest. Gameplay wise, there is nothing special to note. Instead of enemies being bullet sponges, Rico is a bullet sponge. Due to there being no form of a cover mechanic, Rico can take stupid amounts of damage, so much so that I spent around 3/4 of the game with around half health and never had any problems outside of 1 mission. Enemies will never hit you, the only way you can die is by blowing yourself up or getting hit with a rocket. The driving acts like the entire game is on ice and is really hard to control. Enemy vehicles rubberband onto your car so ridiculously quick that they are impossible to escape, meaning that every piece of downtime between missions I was being chased by helicopters and armed cars. Also at one point my entire loadout disappeared, dunno what happened there.

Two missions in particular nearly made me quit. The 1st time was the far cry 3 esq burn a field of drugs mission as it was so painstakingly long and had no efficient way to burn anything (also featured no dubstep). Plus my game crashed after I burned everything and I had to do it again which nearly made me quit. The worst of them all, the 19th mission, where there are infinitly spawning helicopters and jets, a ridiculously bad checkpoint and an almost impossible objective if you dont manage to get a helicopter. This mission took me like 15 attempts and I nearly just called it quits but pushed through just to say that I did.

A game that was no doubt groundbreaking at its time but has aged as well as warm milk. I'm gonna play the rest of the Just Cause series as I have only played the third game and wanted to try them all out. A bad start unfortunately

A short, sweet, solid adventure game about solving puzzles to make plants grow. The vibes are nice and the puzzles are logical and while clues aren't actually recorded in your in-game journal they usually aren't far away from each other. The game's not super plot-driven, its mainly the protag dealing with stuffy British eggheads not taking her seriously because she is a woman doing science ala Mary Anning, and this carries the game enough and it even has a nice ending. Overall just a chill game worth checking out.

After months and months of dropping this game out of fear and scaring myself, because I'm a pussy, I've finally finished it, thanks to Kuro for giving me the strength, I love you, holy shit. The best horror experience I have had in my life by far, I suffer too much playing scary games, but then I enjoy them too much.
The game has an interesting plot, but the best thing is the lore and the tension it produces.
This game can have bad things, such as being repetitive and the abuse of using the same technique to collect keys, etc., but in a different way that at least makes it enjoyable, although it is normal in horror games, so that the player is afraid and he despairs, which he achieves.
An amazing horror game, what I like least is the final part, we start in a madhouse, where experiments are done, but oh, there is a large laboratory hundreds of meters below, a laboratory center like the one in Half Life 1 identical lmao , where the final "enemy" is more than just a fucking crazy man, we tried to stop him, we succeeded, but he possessed us, we tried to leave and suddenly new soldiers appeared and machine-gunned us, the ghost came out and killed everyone, WOOOOOOW, WHAT A GOOD ENDING (sarcasm), Outlast is simply what is worth is the journey, because the story is very XD.
The setting, the soundtrack, the dialogues and the setting are 10/10, yes.
I still don't know how I'm going to be able to play Outlast 2 and Amnesia collection...

A decent enough horror experience. A sort of "spiritual successor" to Dead Space, you can really see some of the DNA from that franchise here, but unfortunately just not executed as well.

The story is pretty boilerplate, with bland characters and cliche plot threads. In the year of our Lord 2023, I didn't think we'd ever get another boring, shaved-head, gruff-voiced main character, plucked straight from 2008.
The combat is heavily melee-focused and meaty, but it does get old and repetitive quickly as there are about 5 or 6 enemy types in the entire game - most of which you don't even encounter that often.
The scares are also lacklustre and unimpactful, which is something you DON'T want in a horror game. There was never a single moment that gave me actual dread or made my heart race.

Overall though, I didn't hate the game by any means. It's just very lacklustre and I was kinda hoping for something more the entire time I was going through it. Thankfully, it's not too long, although it can feel padded out at times. It also looks very good, even on PS4, with some nice, claustrophobic area design.

Sekiro is a very good game, but I'm not a fan of it. I have really enjoyed this game every time I have played it, it is addictive and makes you keep playing more and more. It is incredible how beautiful the message is to the player, of perseverance, not giving up and continuing despite difficulties, getting up all the time and fighting until you achieve it. Sekiro is not a difficult game, Sekiro is a game where you don't know how to play and you learn in the process, once you master everything, even the most difficult Boss can seem easy to you. Sekiro (the character) is very interesting, and very good despite having little substance. The story isn't the big point of this game obviously, but that's okay.
The problem that I have had with Sekiro is the problem that it is so repetitive, it is something that has made me drop it many times because I was bored, I didn't feel like starting the game, but once I did, I enjoyed it, but It's very repetitive, I guess it's like that in all souls. But I think I'm going to enjoy Dark Souls much more, the aesthetics and ideas are more interesting to me.
Sekiro is a game that I really care little about, it may be in my top #20 video games, but nothing more, a rewarding experience, and different from the rest. The gameplay is repetitive, but satisfying every time you kill a boss. The parry technique is beautiful.
And I have nothing more to say, yes, the best game related to Japanese aesthetics. GOT is shit next to Sekiro.

i was gonna hop on here and DOG ON this shit hard but then that started subsiding and i found myself retyping this because i was realizing.. i DID have some fun with this
Totally Spies is one of those shows where I remember really enjoying it despite not being able to tell you a damn thing about the show itself aside from the basic pitch, liking the whole cast and that people are Very Weird about these girls

I was stoked 2 see that there was actually a game that wasnt just a flash game or something on cartoon network...

...

and then it was more like.. a bunch! of cartoon network flashgames LMFAO

Minigame collection type shit usually has more of a tendency to suck especially when youre not a kid in a car ride riding the high off of your favorite show, but this is honestly so inoffensive at times i cant think of a moment where i was Truly Like "this game is complete shit"
cause some bits are Shit-TY but other times its chill
Like i enjoy the pseudo battletoads rope shit you do with Alex
the platforming bits with Clover are FINE
And uhhhh... I mean the puzzles are all so incredibly simple..
this is O K
for licensed games you can do a hell of a lot worse

it could be ONE shitty platformer
or ONE shitty abysmal spy game where everything is broken

instead its in the vibes of like
i enjoy the spy girls teaching videogame motor skills practically type shit

like i enjoyed this even if im way out of the age skill ceiling atp

Also i always thought it was fucking stupid how the girl in red is named Clover while the girl in green is named Sam
it made me think about if there was actually red four leaf clovers in the world and then i looked up if there was one on my dads shitty dinosaur dell computer when i was like 8 and there was no results n tht just made me saltier

First, you created your world.

What should a game be? I've never been inside the room when a studio decides to make something new. It's not hard to imagine what it's like to have all the potential in the world in front of you, just waiting to be molded, but rarely is that the most accurate picture of what the creation of anything new on a significant scale looks like. Why would most developers bother asking what a game should be? What it is is set in stone from before they even began: It is a product, first and foremost. This doesn't preclude it being art, even great art—the two categories are not mutually exclusive, even if they are in tension with one another.

But when I sit down and play The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, it feels like everything about it was designed downstream of that one vital question of what a game should even be. I feel this way with Pentiment, with Heaven's Vault, with Strange Horticulture, Book of Hours, and Suzerain: It feels like I am standing on the edge of a new world, even while they are inescapably familiar and old in many ways. But so it is for anything new. Nothing springs out of the aether. These games and their designers recognize that what they are is written in their very essence—not merely their code, any more than our DNA is our essence exactly—and that we are the ones who write what that essence can be.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood stuns with its structure. It loosely aligns itself into chapters and acts, following a linear path, but one that is hard to distinguish from the little splits in every direction flattened under the feet of those who were once lost here. That is to say: I had no idea where the game was taking me, but I was eager to follow and see what I could along the way. You build a deck that is not quite tarot. You read the cards for those you meet. You change the rhythm of fate. This is the main connective tissue of the game, but the game doesn't so much revolve around mechanics as it does around the ideas of fate and meaning. Halfway through the mechanical focus of the game completely pivots and you find yourself mired in a political race.

This prospect thrilled me. So often a world is constructed to draw limitations on a narrative when working with something this intimate in scope. It is the jailer: You cannot leave this single location, and the Lore justifies why that is. Here, the world is constructed to shatter the limitations that we are stuck with. If we are jailed, why is that, who enforces it, and how can we interact with the world nevertheless? The existence of the jailer and the jailing society are contained within the jail itself. The smallness of this game creates something that feels so expansive that when you look back at the end, it's hard to believe it's just been a couple hours.

Much of that, to me, is created precisely by the opacity of the game and its mechanics, similarly to many of the games I listed previously. I'll say it: I'm fucking tired of the fetishization of player agency, letting you do anything and go everywhere or whatever nonsense that idea has morphed into. I don't need games to be a world that I live in for exorbitant amounts of time. I love when games have totally inscrutable mechanics and some degree of randomness and lock you out of events and force you to just reckon with whatever decisions you made. Give me severe limitations in scope and options, just make it interesting. Have a vision, for god's sake!

And yet: The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood's vision is of a world in which you truly construct your own meaning (which is a funny thing to say, given that meaning is perhaps the only pure act of creation that any of us engage in). It is all about agency. There's an idea here about playing the cards you're dealt by recognizing that you get to decide what the cards mean, despite the limitations of each card. But once you lay down the cards, the truth is decided. Fortuna writes reality.

Which is a funny tension, isn't it, the idea that agency is real and you decide what is, but then how could anyone else have agency when you simply write what is? How could even you have agency once you've read the cards? It's that delicious tension that lies at the heart of this game, time laid out flat so that the future and the past and the present are all just here at once when you shuffle your deck. I feel this tension most during the peak of the political campaign when a Cosmic Poet stops by to help you. Such a small thing and still we reach for the cards to generate the poem that we would have written even without the cards, skipping straight to the end that could not have been without all that we skipped over. They call it a paradoxical poem. It's beautiful:

First, you created your world. Waiting on the first beat of a new universe, you float, weightless, timeless, inside the potential of magic. This is what happens when you hold two mirrors together.

A piece of art is almost like a person. You see the fragmented experiential pieces of all that created them: the other. You see the thoughts lifted from your own head and reflected back at you: the self. You recognize the self inside the other and the other inside the self. I think I love this tension of agency undermining itself because ultimately, who gives a fuck? I don't care about whether I really have agency in a game. I just want it to be an almost-person, to be a mirror. I want us to bounce light back and forth between us until it fades away into reflected incoherence, fully subsumed into something new that we've created by staring into each others' abyss. I want it to create something new inside me that will fester and grow until it springs forth into something beautiful.

This is what happens when you hold two mirrors together: You create. The beginning was written in the end, and the end in the beginning. What difference is there, really, when time folds against itself upon the draw of a card?

At the end of the game, it turns out nothing you did really changes anything. It all collapses back into itself, into the fate which you wrote at the very beginning of the game. You were picking a card without realizing that is what you were doing. The strokes of reality had already been drawn from that very moment.

But in-between the strokes you found everything that matters.

This is exactly how you do a Remake!
You keep everything that made the original good and you modernise it in such a way that you don't ruin the atmosphere and general feeling of the first.
I'm glad they did this remake because i never finished the original from 2002.
Given the advancements in gaming technology and storytelling, this remake was certainly overdue and is a welcome return to a story that captivates with its historical context.

As for the gameplay, it maintains its classic narrative, which is as compelling now as it was in the original. The driving mechanics stand out as an interesting feature; they certainly add a unique flavor to the game, although im not sure how great it actually is. It might be because i played on Classic difficulty.
The shooting mechanics didn’t impress me as much, feeling somewhat mediocre. Again, this might be heavily influenced by the Classic difficulty setting, which is intended to provide a more difficult experience.
One of the most impressive achievements of this remake is how it recaptures the ambiance of the 1930s. The setting, the music, the costumes, and the dialogues all combine to create a rich environment that transports players back in time.

Overall, this remake is a prime example of how to rejuvenate a beloved classic without compromising its core elements and it also stands as a testament to how classic games should be revitalized, by making them accessible and enjoyable for a new generation of gamers.

I fucking love this game so much. It's the game that saved resident evil and each time I replay it I just appreciate that even more. Re7 is an absolutely perfect game.

For a start the music is phenomenal, it does an amazing job at getting a response from the player whether that's Fear, sadness, or curiosity. Also the gameplay in biohazard is top notch, it is fun throughout. This is largely due to its fun and innovative puzzles, great gunplay, and horror elements.

For me at least the worst part about re7 is the Mia portion on the ship. Now this is by no means a bad portion it's just slightly tedious at times with you having to go up and down all the time. Another fantastic portion of this game is the story, in my opinion it is one of the best in the series, while it loses me a bit at the end due to its more actiony supernatural elements it still makes for a fun time.

I think one of the main reasons for this is the games antagonists for a good chunk of the runtime, the Baker family. They get introduced first at the dinner table scene, showing their dynamics with one another and being a family were the player can already tell something is wrong with them. It's by the end of the game that you realise that the bakers were kind people until they were infected by eveline. Which makes them much more compelling 'villians' then Mr X or Nemisis because they aren't evil tyrants created in some lab, they are just a normal family who's minds have been corrupted inadvertently by their kindness.

I could ramble on for ages about this game but in short, it's a terrific game that is a good entry point for new fans whilst reviving the series for the old fans. I can not recommend this game enough, if you haven't played it already what the hell have you been doing for the past 7 years! (Side note: how the hell was 2017 seven years ago)