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.

The sixth horror game from Supermassive, and the fourth entry in the Dark Pictures series, really shows the flaws with the series. This is probably the buggiest game I played all year, from audio bugs, constant pop in of textures, and once where we had to restart the game since the flashlight wouldn't function. I could excuse all that, but the plot in this one is just really tired. The setting sounds good on paper but doesn't live up to its potential, the villain is an invincible Halloween/Friday the 13th style monster who lumbers around, and they have again used the same tired characters at each others throats. I was fairly interested in this title when they first showed the preview, but within a few minutes I found myself not caring for the setting. They've announced that there will be a break between this one and future "season 2" entries into the series, and I hope they take the time to fix the bugs and the gameplay loop. Once again, the preview for their next title has me intrigued, but we'll see. This game could've been a lot better with some Resident Evil style puzzles and exploration.

Essentially a battle between the two sides of nostalgia’s collectable coin: on one there’s the ugly and hollow self-perpetuation of “oddjob slappers-only natalya AI bad” that the Nintendo-Microsoft marketing machine is currently indulging in - cravenly memeing about the pause menu music while the game’s original developers call foul of an emulator’s exhumation in the replies column; but on the other side, despite it all, there remains a more sincere evocation of random-access memory here, one that arrives in unexpected moments - on this playthrough I was struck by the sound of Natalya shooting a guard off-screen in the eerie silence of Jungle, the way the cartoon violence suddenly veers towards reality in a rainforest soundscape that thrives upon an absentia of Kirkhope’s otherwise-welcome elevator-electrofunk. It felt good to be reminded of a time when this game felt so real to us and there was genuine fear in Xenia barrelling across a rope bridge with a grenade launcher… I don’t want to go back, but I do like to visit.

Like Pokémon Red & Blue, this is a game that’s ultimately doomed to be misunderstood and maligned by those that came after us. Despite playing this game for days and years on end, I’ve never been able to perceive the all-consuming glitches, bugs and jank these games apparently stink of. A recent Twitter thread recommended switching the control scheme to 2.3 Mode and then using the Switch’s built-in accessibility settings to swap stick and button inputs around in order to get the conventional twin-stick shooter experience; many replies praised the OP for “fixing” the game on behalf of Nintendo - but in what way was the game broken? Why afford yourself precision aiming in a game that is best left in the hands of a frankly glorious Auto-Aim? Why deny yourself the James Bond Musou experience of running down Control’s corridors with dual RPKs on full auto? Why not indulge in a couple of thoughts about how game designers in the 1990s overcame technical limitations that they didn’t even know existed yet? Other gamers in proximity to the thread lamented the fact that the re-release does not include upscaled or redone textures and character models, but I’m not going to get into the Midjourneyification of preexisting art because I don’t like to write mean things about consumers who just want to hitch a ride on a Ship of Theseus that bears the false flag of Goldeneye: 007. It aged poorly? So will you, soon enough.

Working titles for my review included:

1) "God of Snore" - Reason not used: Taken
2) "God of More" - Reason not used: Could imply the more was positive/good
3) "Teen Angst Simulator" - Reason not used: Everyone was angsty, not just Atreus.

Used Title: "A Series of Unfortunate MacGuffin's"

I bought this game almost entierly out of curiousity, one of my more controversial gaming opinions and reviews is that of the renewed God of War (2018,) which I played because I wanted to get a gauge on the game that defeated Red Dead Redemption 2 come year's end at the Game Awards. In my experience I found GoW to be a mostly bland, monotonous, and unadventerous experience. I didn't get the same buzz or energy others did from the axe-wielding combat, I didn't enjoy the consistent babbling from Mimir and crew, and I certainly did not have a positive takeaway on the MacGuffin nature of the plot. I'd hoped, in playing Ragnarok, that the extremely high acclaim given to the game by critics when review embargo ceased meant that Sony had remdied the issues I had with the previous title. Now, I know that The Game Award should and have zero bearing on my enjoyment of a game, but it's clear that the two frontrunners for the big daddy of them all "Game of the Year Award" will be Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarok. Curiosity killled the cat, and maybe it killed me too. What I found almost immediately in Ragnarok was that I'd be getting the exact same takeaways and experiences that I had in the 2018 game.

Starting it off with combat, which is admittably a little less... boring as it was in 2018 but comes with its own grievances. Gone is going 75% of the game with the same weapon, as you start the game with Kratos' famous Blades of Chaos and pick up a third weapon down the line (redacted for spoilers.) This is nice because it gives you a little variation in terms of visual flavor for the majority of the game but this fell completely flat for me as the enemies, from start to finish are pretty much all just "bullet" sponges for lack of a better term. There's a certian flare to the combo weaving of different weapons and taking advantages of status effects, but at the end of the day you'll have to pump so much time and effort into enemies to kill them, that I abandoned trying to make it look snazzy. Basic enemies aren't too bad but once you get into the special/mini-boss fights it gets real samey, real quick. Monotonous combat was a compaint I had in the 2018 release that really took up a lot of my opinion on the game, and unfortunately it's back in Ragnarok. Not only does Kratos' arsenal not feel very different overall, not enough for me rather, but again the enemy variation and recycled encounters greatly holds this game back just as it did in the predecessor. I recently played Bayonetta 3 which had the enemy arsenal/variety to make this work, but in God of War every gameplay sequence in a realm can be boiled down into such: Shimmy through a tight loading screen corridor -> solved light puzzle that requires throwing axe and using some kind of time magic -> fight same three to five enemies that are dropped into area -> shimmy loading screen -> repeat. These enemies change per location but the cyclical nature of fighting them, their spongey health bars, and responding to their same mechanics got reallllly old real quick.

You switch between Atreus and Kratos in Ragnarok for level sequences and unfortunately the combat doesn't feel very fresh in either when you change between. Atreus' gameplay loop is even more restricted than Kratos in the first game and his equivalent of Spartan Rage, while stronger, is just a swap-in move which doesn't even do the Nero-Dante dynamic that every character action game should do in making playable protagonists FEEL fundamentally different so controlling them comes off as fresh. My ultimate qualm with the combat, which is also backlines my qualm with the game itself, is that it doesn't feel fresh enough. The combat feels the same, the Hollywood-board-room-type dialogue feels the exact same, the light unecessary puzzle solving feels the same, the missions/levels feel the exact same. What's new with God of War that's supposed to push this series from Great to Fantastic? I don't know, I can't answer that question because I surely didn't find it. The narrative that is meant to wrap up Kratos' Nordic saga felt bland and broken at times, leaving me to constantly wonder the where's and why's of my actions. I get there is an over-arching narrative at play leading to Ragnarok itself, given the actions of the previous title, but I think the game could have done a much better job sequencing its filler-story content. Missions just felt like they were happening to give characters exposition, rather than move the narrative forward and do so. Final Fantasy X does a great job at this, giving each character their own arc while actually advancing the stakes and story at hand. Wakka, Kimahri, Auron, Tidus, and Yuna all have their character examined and challenged while keeping the focus on stopping Sin. Ragnarok had me wondering why I was taking Freya, Atreus, Sindi, Brok all on their own respective adventures that didn't really add to the sequencing of the game in a manner that made sense. With each of these characters you'll find either Kratos or Atreus running the same combat-puzzle-loading screen gambit in an attempt to achieve something or retrieve an item that is to help them in their final huzzah. Doing this over and over and over just felt... bland. God of War Ragnarok for much of its runtime didn't feel like an epic adventure across one of the cooler pantheons to exist within dated mythos, but like a buddy cop comedy where the entire exposition was to retrieve MacGufffin's.

This game honestly just reminded me of the MCU, specifically speaking the Avengers film franchise. Avengers is a media phenomenon that took the world by storm, utilizing a carefully crafted pattern to set up a plethora of Marvel heroes/villains to have them culminate in an epic cinematic experience sure to take the world by storm, and it did. Marvel/Disney spent the time and monetary effort setting up this big "Huzzah" that had never been seen before in the world of film. Almost everyone I knew that was a casual movie watcher, thus excluding those who I would call "Movie hipsters" like myself, were jumping at the seams to speak on the magnitude of the avengers and its fiscal achievements. People were completely enamored in what was a fairly basic story. How do you react when so many around you are speaking in praise of something that you view so mediocre? Surely the right thing to do is not speak ill on something in the world of media that others hold high, because a film series like the Avengers is entierly subjective when it comes to taste, but it's reasonable to have the discourse with those that investigate your dissent with the series further. Thus is my issue with God of War 2018 and Ragnarok. Almost everyone I know that has played the game(s) has loved them, critics have been raving over Ragnarok as soon as reviews were allowed to come out. I've had to step back from most discourse because I don't want to be "that guy" but this is a review space and this is my review, so I feel alright stating how I feel. God of War is that Avengers to me, it's something that can only be made possible by having a lot of money to make and afford the resources needed to make it "work." They both are spectatcles, never shying away from thrusting intense CG and big moments at the consumer. They both utilize top tier composition, sound design, and voice acting to create a complete experience, free of any hitch. God of War was a completely polished game, I had only one minor bug, and it ran phenomenally on my computer... but can that alone with a mediocre story and samey combat make the game "good" for me? The answer I found, to be no it cannot.

There are some things God of War Ragnarok does well, but in the theme of things being the "same" to me as 2018, they were the same things that the game before it did. Christopher Judge is a great Kratos, matter of fact the entire cast does an amazing job acting out and making their characters mostly believable (shoutout SungWon Cho,) but it's almost... too AAA. The game itself is beautiful, I played performance mode on my PS5 and it truly was a crisp experience, taking full advantage of the graphical prowess of the console and my 4k monitor. The game was eye candy, but to that point I felt myself let down with these amazing vistas because of the soulless gameplay loop I knew I was about to embark upon. Animation was great, again I had that "wow I remember gaming twenty years ago moment" whenever they panned to Kratos' face and you could see his emotion vividly. I also love how they took full advantage of the Norse pantheon, including smaller characters like the Norns, Sigurn, Angrboða, and many more to the bigwigs like Freya, Fenrir, Tyr, and Surtr. I loved seeing/hearing a character speak and opening up their wikipedia page to remind myself about their lore. I used to love doing that in my youth, and God of War Ragnarok was a great reminder of doing that.

Lesser issues I had with the game include one, the assumption that you as the player did all the sidequesting and optional content from the previous game. It was a little confusing when Kratos/Atreus were referencing things they did like "Hey remember when we did this" or explaining to another character of their actions and I'm sitting there completely confused because no... I never did that and I had no clue what they were talking about. Secondly, the camera was just downright poor in most combat and even in cutscenes. There was quite a lot of forced panning that takes away player agency from experiencing what they want in a game. Maybe this is part of appealing to the most common consumer, but it was more offputting to me because I am overall not a fan of being told how to interpret or take away scenes from a narrative experience. I would be trying to walk through a scene or turn to see the entire environment at large to only be met by a slow moving camera and a locked screen.

Ragnarok largely missed the mark for me, really feeling like a DLC/Expansion of the 2018 game without enough variety/change to rectify the previous mistakes for me. There were new vistas and characters, but it felt like the fundamental same experience for me, and I'm glad I didn't wait four years between these two releases. Odds are, fans of the 2018 game will absolutely love Ragnarok, and dissenters will not. I cannot recommend God of War Ragnarok, especially for $70, unless you're set on the experience and getting the most out of its sidequesting and characters.