I have a lot of CoH nostalgia. I played a ton of 1 + 2, it's probably my second favorite RTS ever behind Starcraft.

3 Delivered on making me feel young and having more of a gameplay that I have loved. However the single player offering this go around feels rather weak. The Italian campaign is a brand new game mode that felt a little long and not too challenging. The Afrika game mode was uninspired with some quick and slumpy maps. All in all, it is only 8 missions in Afrika which can be completed in an afternoon.

CoH is here to play online as an RTS and that part does still thrive. Happy to have a modern version. Well, mostly modern. The UI of the menu is pretty... not awesome :D

𝙼𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑 𝟷𝟾, 𝟸𝟶𝟶𝟻...

𝙸𝚝'𝚜 𝚊 𝚍𝚊𝚢 𝙸'𝚕𝚕 𝚗𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚝.

𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚙 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚖𝚎 𝚍𝚒𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚍𝚊𝚢.

𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚜 "𝚊𝚜𝚔𝚎𝚍" 𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚘 𝚓𝚘𝚒𝚗 𝚊 𝚝𝚘𝚙-𝚜𝚎𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚝 𝚐𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚖.

𝙽𝚘𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸 𝚑𝚊𝚍 𝚊 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚒𝚌𝚎.

An old woman stumbles towards you with a raised pitchfork in her hands. You stab in her in the face. She does nothing. You stab her a few more times. Maybe she'll do something. She does nothing. You stab her in the face a few more times. Maybe she'll do something? She relents. Now there's enough distance to shoot her kneecap with a 9mm bullet. She does nothing. Her head would now be at the perfect height for you to spin-kick it into the piranha-infested waters like a toxic football, but she's still walking towards you; it's time to parry. When the game gives you permission to do so, you press the button and bat away her pitchwork. She stumbles back in impressive pain, and the sheer force of your kick causes her husband to stumble, tripping a landmine in the process. The mine incinerates the dock you're standing on in a shower of beautiful sparks - one for every pound you spent on this Nvidia GeForce GTR 4090XL graphics card - and you remark on how far video games have come since Pac-Man. In a past life this display would have immolated the rest of the woman's family too; they would have melted away into chicken eggs and pesetas. But they're still here now, waiting for their turn in the same sanitized digital ballet you saw in John Wick 4 the other night. Time to do the same old thing again.

You return to Resident Evil 4 for a lot of things, but I think the paragraph above succinctly describes the core loop that we all keep coming back for on the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, the Xbox Series S, the Xbox Series X and the PC. The scenario might change (slightly), the enemies might change (significantly), the weapons might change (substantially (fuck you for what you did to the TMP)), the graphics might change (definitely). But you are, despite it all, controlling a baying mob in the cleanest, nastiest, most efficient way you possibly can. Bonus points if you can make it look cool as Hell in the process.

Playing this right after resident evil 4 (2005), it's plain to see how this game was a forking point for the series - both games are essentially the same implementation of a core idea, but choose to tackle combat from different angles of genre. At their best, they emphasise close management of an advancing enemy pool using a fairly limited toolset that flows naturally into the other aspects of itself: Knife to pistol. Pistol to kick. Kick to grenade. Grenade to egg. The movements feel primitive, awkward and unintuitive at first, but soon reveal themselves to be expertly crafted for natural achievement of a precision-flow state, racking up minor-yet-satisfying hits to keep a crowd under control while setting up scenarios where bigger and badder moves can be unleashed at the appropriate time. Put Leon in resident evil 4 (2005) and I bet he could manage at least a few rounds of The Mercenaries.

This replay of the game was inspired by a re-release of the game that recently came out. As someone who spends a lot of time talking shop to people about people like Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya, it's easy to fall into the trap of evaluating these games as beautiful little puzzle boxes to be mechanically solved and understood - but spend ten minutes with someone who likes Resident Evil 4 because they simplified the water room, and you'll discover that there are actually people out there who think Resident Evil 4 (in its current remade form) is as much stupid greatness as your average A24 film. I hate these people, but I do understand where they'e coming from - when this game came out, I bought it for myself despite knowing I was deathly afraid of time's perpetual march forwards; even worse, I was the type of person who said things like "you can't improve on this in any way" when Leon told Saddler to stick around at the end of the castle section. Resident Evil 4 (in its current remade form) is essentially my worsetest nightmare. It’s Resident Evil.

𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚞𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚗𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚢 𝚔𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚍 𝚖𝚎.

𝙱𝚞𝚝 𝚊𝚝 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚔𝚎𝚙𝚝 𝚖𝚢 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚏𝚏 𝚘𝚏 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚢𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐.

On the one hand, this is a remake of one of my favorite games of all time that tightens up the mechanics and makes things not ugly to look at, and the five star rating reflects that. On the other, this really feels like a bare minimum for a remake and, especially knowing how well HeartGold and SoulSilver would turn out with all of its rebalancing and expanded content, feels sort of light in comparison, I blazed through this game really quickly because I was making a beeline for the new content after having played the originals so recently, and I can't say any of it was particularly gripping or anything.
All of that being said, I think the more interesting case for this game isn't for me, or for someone who is deep enough into video games to be reading this, but for someone new to JRPGs as a whole. The Kanto Pokemon games, with all due respect to Final Fantasy VII, absolutely blow every other JRPG out of the water in terms of mainstream cultural understanding and accessibility, it didn't launch a multimedia empire that goes toe-to-toe with anything Disney owns by accident. Let's Go Eevee and Let's Go Pikachu are fun diversions that I enjoyed my time with, but this remains the best true remake of those games, and if someone asked me "hello, I would like to get into Pokemon" or "hello, I would like to get into Japanese RPGs", I would hand them this. Accessible enough so that the average ten year old child can beat it, customizable enough that there's an entire cottage industry of people doing insane teambuilding challenge runs of the game. If you bounce off this game, the genre almost certainly isn't for you, and if you like it, there's suddenly a whole world to unlock for yourself.
So here's to Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, the best entrypoint to the genre that taught me that video games are more than just "run to the right and jump on the bad guys".

As a little dipshit child who didn't know or care a damn about Star Wars, I always saw Star Wars Battlefront 2 as "That one really fun library map". No joke, my go-to instinct whenever I'd boot up Battlefront 2 was as follows:

"Instant Action > Coruscant: Jedi Temple > Conquest".

In spite of only ever bothering to play one single map in the game and nothing else, I was absolutely floored at how much fun it was, wasting hours upon hours either at my place or my dad's, just steamrolling as the Empire on this one map for hours on end, and that says a lot about how damn fun the core gameplay of the title is. Little 7 year old Cameron had no idea there was an entire rest of the game waiting for him, with a campaign and other maps, other play styles, all he needed was that one map.

This was still my go-to action upon booting up Battlefront 2 over a decade and a half later on my Steam Deck, before and after fighting the control configuration, and it's still just as much fun as I remember. Might actually try to play the rest of the game at some point, but IDK yet cause Conquest on Jedi Temple still hasn't worn out its welcome.

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

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

Rouge-likes don't have to be doomed to a pit of mid-tier or just fun afternoons.

When you've got arenas this good to compliment combat this great, everything else is just a bonus.

And boy howdy what a bonus. Atmosphere is off the charts and art design is so stellar. The alien ruins never stopped being a sight to behold and the sound design never lets up it's brilliance. Evokes all the best parts of the Metroid series.

Really this could have been a case study for Metroid Other M on how to translate 2D metroid to 3D properly.

Even when I was getting my ass handed to me, I still loved every second here.