A strange curiosity that's mostly been forgotten about but has yet to be lost to time: Warp is an independent title published by EA long before EA decided to create a new brand for that alone. It is the only game its developer ever made before folding. Before Warp, they had their stamp on Fez. But for years at this point, Fez only has its developer's name attached to it.

Almost a decade on, I am still eerily fascinated by Warp. Is it a good game, is it too derivative for its own good? Do its flaws drag it down, or make it a more interesting game to ruminate on? I don't have the answers to any of those questions, unfortunately, as I've never played this thing from beginning to end. But one day and I will, and I... might have something to say. I don't know.

Either way, that alien is cute as hell.

While The Walking Dead was noticeably stylistic, The Wolf Among Us has style in fucking SPADES. Seriously, I can't overstate just how much I adore the art style of this game. Aside from a few blurry textures and some seriously questionable anti-aliasing on the PlayStation 4 copy I own, this has held up shockingly well for a game that's almost a decade old at this point.

I also really enjoyed the setting, characters, and plot. I haven't played through it in a long while and am only starting to revisit it now that more footage from the sequel has been released. But if my memories are anything to go off, this not only meets The Walking Dead at certain points but outright surpasses it at others. If playing The Walking Dead was like watching a different version of the television series, The Wolf Among Us is a campy noir thriller stretched out to five episodes in all of its glory.

Really hoping that sequel is good, I have a soft spot for this one.

I have put an unreasonable amount of time into this game because, although I fucking hate it, I have to admit that it's a fun little time-waster.

But seriously: this thing STINKS. It has got to be one of the laziest tycoon games I've ever played, hands-down. This plays more like an early-era, jank-fest DOS game than anything coming close to a competent or exciting studio management sim. It's so mindless that you could recreate the same experience with a piece of paper and a pair of dice. The only difference between the two is that you don't get the same nightmare-inducing character models if you decide to pass on the "proper" version of this """game.""" Occasionally, I'll say things like "that looks like it came out twenty years ago," and it'll be a hyperbolic statement. But in the case of Showtime!, the character models honestly look like they came out of a PS1 cutscene.

And none of this is to mention the fact that it's super easy to break any semblance of balance here. The game comes with a neat little editing tool for you to modify and create new actresses, actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, you name it. But the tool is so barebones that nothing is stopping you from creating a person in any one of those categories that is the literal embodiment of perfection and then making it so it costs next-to-nothing to use that person in-game.

Again, as a piece of mindless indulgence, this isn't actually that bad. As a video game, though? Play The Movies instead. It's a hundred times better and has a lot more substance.

No review for this (yet), but I have to say:

I still own my copy of this on the PS3. I started to revisit this thing on my PC the other day, and I had a thought that popped up in my head that was like, 'why have you never finished this game if you like it so much?'

Here's why: as much as I enjoy TimeShift, holy shit, this game is rough around the edges. I am playing on Medium, and the game is still kicking my ass. I don't mind regenerating health, but only when it regenerates at a reasonable pace. I get that the developers really wanted you to use your time powers, and I think that's great. But holy hell, those regenerate at a snail's pace, too. The only viable option is to use slow-motion because the other two powers deplete your energy at such a rate that they're best left alone for the myriad of time-based puzzles this game throws at you. At certain points, the combat in TimeShift ends up resembling something more akin to trial-and-error than the Hong Kong cinema-inspired FEAR. Bear in mind: I have to quicksave CONSTANTLY while playing with a Mouse and Keyboard. Now, imagine this experience on a tiny controller with no experience to quickly save your game in any convenient manner.

I love the cover for this game; it looks so dope. And being able to hold the game in my hand is neat, but I don't know if I'm ever going to touch the console version of this game ever again.

Mafia III sports a detailed world, fascinating setting, fleshed-out characters, and some of the most stylistic cutscenes to have come out of a AAA game in the last decade. Although its connection to the Mafia series is tangential at best and more of a stretch, it comes within arms reach of being a genuinely fantastic game that's up there with its inspirations in terms of quality. And then you play the game and wonder what the hell happened.

In truth, Mafia III had a long and troubled development cycle, and my god, it shows. The short version is that Hangar 13 was brought on board to replace 2K Czech (formerly Illusion Softworks) after their attempts to get a third Mafia game off the ground kept sputtering out. The Czech team was then relegated to a support role, and the decision to upgrade the engine for both Mafia 1 and 2 was made. There was only one issue: this was happening while Hangar 13's version of Mafia III was in active development. They struggled to update the engine, as most of its code was written in Czech and not translated. Horrible periods of crunch ensued, and the game's structure was an issue that they had very little time to fix due to an ever-approaching deadline by publisher Take-Two Interactive. If you're wondering why the final product is so gratingly repetitive, the developers have that same question, too.

For that reason alone, I can't hate Mafia III. Its developers poured their heart and soul into it, and while that might get lost in translation a little bit, the best parts of this game show that in colors. Somewhere, somehow, there is a version of this game that the developers wanted to make. You might have to mod all of the grindy sidequests out of the game in order to see that vision, but it's there. Mafia III is a special kind of disappointment in that it does everything well despite having no chance to do everything right.

If you want to hear the long story about how everything went belly-up, I highly suggest reading Jason Schreier's article from 2018 on the topic: https://kotaku.com/how-the-makers-of-mafia-iii-lost-their-way-1825242177

As a flash game, this was a cute and novel time waster that was fun to return to. If we're judging this as a flash game, I'd say it does a pretty good job. If we're judging this as a game that's ten more dollars than it needs to be on Steam, though... yeah, two-and-a-half stars. It has performance issues, the RPG part of this RPG feels underdeveloped, sidequests and characters aren't engaging, and a lot of the content feels superfluous. Again, all of that worked when this was tied to a web browser that you had open while you were on your lunch break at school. But on its own, it doesn't hold up.

I don't necessarily know that I agree with this anymore, so I've removed the rating I originally gave it. Thank you for the recognition, though; this review in particular is why I've stuck around on this website.

Alpha Protocol is one of the worst Stealth games I've played in recent memory. I'll say that it's not the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to stealth games; you can tell that they tried their hardest with what they had. There are a ton of fun options to work around with, including gadgets like a sound emitter and tranquilizer darts for your pistol. But four fundamental pillars always set it back: one, bodies disappear. I'm not of the school of thought that you need to be able to drag bodies in a stealth game, but I've always thought that it's necessary to make sure they don't despawn. Part of the reason I love stealth games so much is that they're tense in a way few games are; small missteps will absolutely set you back. Taking the consequence away from having to take someone out feels cheap and cuts that tension in half. Two, it's overly reliant on checkpoints. Another staple of the stealth genre for me is the ability to quicksave. I know not every game has this, and some games are generally better without it. But when checkpoints are your only option, things get frustrating quickly. What ends up happening is that you get spotted, and because you either aren't well-equipped for combat or just don't want to deal with that noise, you try to reload a save. Only, your last checkpoint was 30 minutes ago, and you have to backtrack aaaaaaaall the way back for a minor misstep. In a game where the main goal is to shoot all of the bad guys, going back 30 minutes isn't too much of an issue. But when you can consistently set yourself back, it gets tiring to deal with. You can technically save your progress from a checkpoint in case you want to pull any of the punches this game asks you to make. But if you're wondering if that actually comes in handy while you're playing the game, its purpose is null. Three, the AI is erratic. Sometimes it will spot you on a dime or even through a wall, while other times, you can take three to four guys out in front of another guy, and he won't flinch. It's both unpredictable and infuriating to deal with. Finally, and most egregious of all, this game is NOT graceful when you get caught. Other games might make the transition from stealth to combat easy on their players, so it's not too much of a hassle to deal with. But in Alpha Protocol, I associated this lack of a transition with that of a jump scare. I might have screamed on multiple occasions; I didn't count. But I screamed a lot.
So then why on earth did I give this four stars?

Here's the thing: in The Walking Dead, the choice of Doug or Carly only affects your experience in a minor way. The game isn't asking you if you want the story to change significantly, but rather which character you want to hang around and how you want to alter one tiny scene later in the game. The way The Walking Dead presents its choices isn't through a sense of fascination, though, but through urgency. Whether or not you go with Doug or Carly, Doug or Carly will die. There's something to be said about how choice in video games is an illusion; the game might tell you telling Lee Everett to be more aggressive will make others more cautious in his presence, but without the game explicitly saying that that's the case, you'd be hard-pressed to notice a change in behavior. The Walking Dead, and those in its stead, are an inconsistent mix of show and tell. They're willing to show you some things, but the only thing they have to offer is lots of telling. In some instances, Alpha Protocol is guilty of the same thing. But what sets Alpha Protocol apart from its contemporaries with one thing: its pacing. There are plenty of Doug or Carly instances in this game, but instead of waiting half the game for that choice to have any meaningful impact, Alpha Protocol is blunt about your choices' outcomes. In a way, it has to be. The most significant factor in how you handle reactivity to player choice in video games comes down to setting. If your game is set within a slowly dying world, where the loss of life might as well turn the sun brown, it almost makes sense for your choices not to have consequences right away. In the case of Alpha Protocol's espionage setting, there isn't a single character in here that's in the right or wrong. If you want to make a case for some of the most despicable members of its cast, you can. Everything is varying shades of grey. If I had to wait half the game to find out that sparing the boss who played loud 80s hair-metal made someone angry, I'm no longer making a case for having saved that character. The illusion of choice is pushed to its absolute limit in Alpha Protocol, and I don't think I've seen another game take its approach in the ten-plus years since its release.

But none of that would be entertaining if the writing sucked. Thankfully, they pulled this one off with flying colors. The first thing that I have to point is that they reuse the same rape joke twice, and it isn't funny either time. But in contrast with the rest of the game, that's the exception. I laughed my ass off multiple times, and it was never at this game's expense. If you have the option to play a conversation straight-faced, you also have the option to do it shit-faced. I'm almost considering doing a playthrough where I'm an asshole to everyone because some of this dialog is genuinely that funny. But I don't know how easy that would be for me, considering how much I adore these characters. Mina, Scarlett, Steven, and Albatross are some of the best this game offers. But even the smaller side characters are entertaining and odd in their own ways. I'm sure that I missed out on one or two of them, which just gives me more incentive to revisit this when I get the sound of that stupid alarm going off out of my head. And I look forward to that day.

If Alpha Protocol had a less troubled development and wasn't rushed to market off the back of a bleeding budget, I think that this could have the potential to be in my top five of all time. But as it stands, it's still really fucking good, even if that hacking mini-game can go knit eggs. With all of the sixth to seventh-generation console games getting remade lately, I'm praying that Alpha Protocol gets the reevaluation it deserves.

The bones of a fantastic game are in here. The shooting feels fun, and the mid-to-late '90s first-person shooter running on a VHS machine aesthetic is lovely. The inspiration is obvious, and I'm all for that.

Unfortunately, a lot of that is let down by some pretty poor stages. They're all too short for their own good, and while each fulfills a certain theme and idea, none of them really connect in any coherent way. I can only really recommend Maximum Action if you have an affinity for wave-based shooters. If you, like me, aren't mega-fans of that concept, move along or buy this while it's on sale.