i hate leaving things incomplete. whether it’s some evil or ill conceived bullshit or just a plate of no personality gruel dusted with quest markers, i’ll run headlong at the wall for hours. it’s not because i’m stubborn or stupid or that my time is worthless—though all of those things are true—but because my mother always stressed the virtue of not wasting food.

i’ve found enough good to keep me going, theoretically, during my shortish stint. i like how quests contort themselves, and i’m sure i’ve only scratched the surface. i like how the game luxuriates in its characters. i love the richness of its environments, neither overtly stylised nor starkly realistic. even the bad—the general ubishit, dull levelling and progression, infinite looping flavour dialogue, a script betraying the writers’ unfamiliarity with actual real life women—spurred more indifference than umbrage. the bigger issue was bubbling under all of that, a slow realisation that the witcher 3 and i are fundamentally misaligned.

an entire mountain of hay has already been made over how the gameplay “feels bad.” this is true to a point but oversimplifies the nature of the issue. it’s not that basic movement, basic combat, basic everything feels so awful as to resemble trawling through sludge or anything—at least that might grant an access of willpower to overcome it. this also isn’t to pine for perfect silky precision or excessive, sublime heft. i’m not that picky. at its core, a game just needs to feel like something, and therein lies the problem: the witcher 3 feels exactly like nothing. i press a button and geralt surely acts, yet there’s no feedback, no physicality. we aren’t in sync.

anyway, wake up babe, it’s time for your tangential hamfisted analogy.

driving an old car feels good as fuck. it doesn’t need to be finely tuned or exacting in its control to feel so, and the experience will of course differ vastly with make and model along with where your preference lies on the heft-pep spectrum. at any rate, your turning circle might be wide enough to orbit the globe. the road will more strictly demand your attention, absent modern sensors and cameras. momentum may build slowly as you accelerate from an intersection; newer cars might get off the bat faster, but you will catch them as sure as the engine’s purr becomes a roar. the enthused motorist revels in these things despite their antiquity, because they feel the friction of rubber on asphalt. at all times the motorist receives constant feedback, feeling as much a part of the road as they would with their bare feet planted on the tar.

the electric car, by contrast, may as well be hovering. what we receive in the (justifiable) transition from fossil fuels is an increasingly mediated, disconnected experience. whirrs and clicks take place of the engine’s rumble. the gearstick becomes a binary lever. knobs and switches now reside (spiritually) within a tablet, all centre-dashboard, taking our eyes off the road. turning requires not a full rotation but a slight nudge. and sometimes the car just does shit on its own. above all, the driver loses all sense of presence. we no longer feel each bump and change in texture, we just glide forwards sans resistance or force. the car doesn’t need us anymore; manufacturers decided that ux can stand in for live feedback, to which end our relation to the road is mediated moreso through sensors, alarms and cruise control features than through our own awareness. its operation is smoother—and simpler—than ever, yet at no point do we feel essential to its function.

very few action-[other descriptor] games are like an electric car. most are an early 2000s toyota camry, entirely unremarkable but reliable nonetheless. dark souls is a lumbering ‘88 volvo 940. super mario world is a zippy ‘92 honda city. resident evil (1) is a giant shitbox ‘71 range rover. you get the point. even where these fall short of perfect, they each have a distinct character and exhibit unique quirks in their operation. then we have the witcher 3: a shitty tesla stuck on cruise control, luxurious only until you start the ignition. sure, i can see a nice view ahead, but i only want to feel the road beneath me.

i wouldn’t mind seeing this through had cd projekt red not had the audacity to include silly things like ‘movement’ and ‘combat’ in their game despite knowing they’re straight up, fundamentally busted. why put me in the drivers seat if my input is so perfunctory? there’s plenty that’s compelling about the witcher 3, if only the core experience wasn't so eager to disregard my presence at every turn. oh well. hopefully someone turns it into a book someday.

I haven't played a footy game in years, but FC 24 still feels fairly similar to those early 10s Fifa games, I've always loved Career mode and there hasn't been much changes over the years it seems. The Volta game mode was a nice surprise and reminds me of the more arcadey game modes on the Wii Fifa games.
The gameplay is way too fast and hectic when you're playing 4.5-5 star teams, and counter attacking teams are too OP, but the sliders mitigate all these issues somewhat.

However, I had to make a new PSN account to even connect online, which is kind of fucking indefensable.
And as someone who doesn't care about women's football, I have no interest in Ultimate Team because for no reason at all, they grouped the women players in with the men. I guess thsi was some sort of ESG thing, for FC 25 hopefully they just make a separate mode for women players.

Got it for free on PS Plus

A decent game that resembles Gmod's murder game or TTT or some other games in this genre (Among Us).
The game doesn't feature a tutorial which is quite troubling because there are some mechanics that are confusing upon first experiencing. Bottom line this game really needs a tutorial.

A bug I noticed if a player leaves in the hub area before the game actually begins, the lobby will break. The game overall just seems unpolished.

The game also suffers if people don't use their mics, like it is WAY more fun and interesting if everyone is talking, if no one talks the synths usually win. Seriously people the PS5 controller literally has a built in mic you have no excuses now.

The game itself is alright, I think it has an odd aesthetic but it's ok. I think there is also some big balancing issues, the game is very much so synth-sided. As a human, you need all of your fellow humans to be competent to even have a chance at winning, which in random matchmaking, is unlikely. They need to buff the humans quite a bit.

I really enjoyed the physics and always love when games have VOIP, and the concepts at hand are pretty interesting. I think the gas may go down a bit too fast though, further making it too hard for the humans.
If possible, play this game with friends, use voice chat, and hope for the best. I had a lot of funny moments and had an overall enjoyable time, but this game simply will not last, so play it while you can I guess.

I predict this game will be completely dead within a year, if not sooner.

Me and my friends randomly decided to play this after looking for something different to play, I believe that this was on PS Plus a few years ago so we decided to give it a shot. While I am a very big believer that most games can be fun if you play them with friends, First Class Trouble is still quite dull regardless

Basically it is Among us but set on a 60's style space station I think, honestly I couldn't really tell you. Follows the same premise as Among us where you have to find and eliminate the killers. I did like a two things about this, Im a fan of the old timey aesthetic and I think all the levels looked cool. Also throwing bottles at everyone is unironically more fun than playing the game properly.

Where I think this games problems lie is mainly in the fact that it is too repetitive. Where as in among us your tasks were different each time, in this game the objective stays the same throughout which is finding three battery things to open a door. The level design is far to open for the killers to be discrete, luckily nobody plays the game how its meant to be so that doesn't end up being an issue. Also being capped at 6 players removes a lot of the chaos that you would expect from a game like this. Also through the games I played no random players used mics or the chat box so playing this without friends would be borderline impossible.

I doubt I will ever come back to this when I could just play Among Us. Despite the cool setting this game just doesn't hit for me at all.