I have a lot of nostalgia for Minecraft because I grew up playing a pirated version of its Alpha version that somebody handed my older brother in middle school. Many of my best memories from that time come from messing around with tools, like the time my brother used a cheat tool to spawn in ice blocks and TNT to create a tsunami and then used that TNT on my savefile to dig me so far inside of a mountain that I had to create a new savefile.

I have respect for the game as it is.

But I just gotta level with you, man; Minecraft has never clicked with me. I can't put my finger on it, but games like this always begin and end with me returning to them every few months and then abandoning them out of boredom. When I try to play with people who don't get bored immediately, I'm outclassed by people who have been playing this for years, so it becomes a pretty boorish showcase of feeling like I'm behind the times.

Again, again, again: I get that it's a good game. But it's just not for me.

I don't think it's possible to make a "true" sequel to Postal 2 nowadays.

I'm not talking about the offensive humor or the minutiae of its small-scale sandbox and the chaos it lets you indulge in. What makes Postal 2 an exceedingly tricky game to follow up on is the era in which it was produced. Postal was created in the era of outrage. The finest example of this would be Grand Theft Auto and the numerous outrages it spawned at the time. But GTA never let you put a cat's ass on the barrel of your shotgun or go around peeing on people until they vomited. For all of its attempts at humor, Postal 2 was made in poor taste purely to get attention, and it worked wonders. Its content has slightly more historical merit in this medium than, 'hey, wasn't that the game that got banned in several countries?'—at least, if you're in America. It's thanks to Postal 2 that the M rating comes with two separate labels for violence outside of the Cartoon and Fantasy parameters, 'Violence' and 'Intense Violence.'

The problem now is that things don't "work" that way anymore. If there's any game in the past fifteen years that changed how Americans look at the way their games are rated, it's arguably Manhunt 2, and that's only because of how many politicians petitioned for it to get an Adults Only rating. Outside of that, which is small-beans compared to the irreversible change to the American rating system caused by Postal 2, there hasn't been much on offer. In the past ten years, you'd be hard-pressed to find another game like that. The closest analog is Hatred, which caught fire for treating Mass Shootings with more leeway than Uwe Boll. In a sense, Hatred almost surpasses Postal 4 in terms of relevance, if only because it mirrors the hellscape many Americans have constantly lived in fear of for over two decades at this point. Making a game about a mass shooting on that scale and not marketing it to outright weirdos who get off to the sight of Japanese school uniforms is like a cheat code for making your game controversial. Twenty years ago, it was easy to assume that any game that let you kill droves of nameless, faceless NPCs was a straight ticket to hell, much, in the same way, D&D was for the greater part of the 80s' Satanic Panic kicked off by the detestable con-woman Beatrice Sparks. All you have to do now is go through a Post Malone phase and put on this façade of having to say something "important", even if the only words you're saying constitute little more than shock value printed on the half-price pulp that the National Economic Registry hastily rejects in secret, and people will try their damnedest to take you seriously. Jack Thompson is dead.

This is the precise predicament that Postal 4 finds itself in: after its developer sold its soul to the Russian equivalent of Electronic Arts, an act only decried by ardent fans and the developers' post-mortem, the goalpost had moved. When your live-action adaptation only makes headlines because very few people find it funny, and the quotes you're cherry-picking from for marketing revert back to calling it a weaker version of South Park... what's the point? By the time Postal 4 was released in early access, it had been several years since a room full of critics applauded the Kevin Smith movie where Dante Hicks and Randal Graves argue about whether or not going ass-to-mouth is justified for minutes on end. Good Boys, a 2019 movie about children, had a trailer so perverse and explicit that I could see my dad physically recoiling in his seat whenever a trailer for it showed up in the theater we were at. To say that the shtick that worked in 2003 is something that would only spark protest from The Vegan Teacher in 2022 is being exceptionally polite.

On top of all of this... Postal 4's just not very fun. Okay, I'll admit that Postal 2 isn't exactly a high watermark for the medium as a whole. But to say that that's all it is is a reduction. It's dumb fun dry-aged in gold leaf. Once you crack through its shell, the center you're left is with is something that doesn't have much appeal outside of being a digital stress ball with piss-and-shit jokes and a cameo from Gary Coleman, but cutting right to the center is missing the point. It's fun to look around and find new weapons, find your way across the labyrinthine map to buy a Christmas tree in the middle of July, and play around with the surprisingly reactive world in front of you. Sure, it doesn't have the taste of something like Grand Theft Auto, and shivering behind all of the things that I like about it is just about the trashiest game I've ever played, but it's got replay value. What value does riding a mobility scooter across a map that's too large to entertain for more than a second have? "Grand Theft Auto had cars, and now so do we" is the exact mindset that Running With Scissors mocked in Postal 2, and it's something that's shamelessly regurgitated here without any of the wit or subversiveness seen previously; it's in here because Postal 2 had it, and if it's something they can reuse, self-awareness is off the fucking table. The combat's fun, but the AI somehow lags behind a game twenty years its senior. If you really, really want more Postal 2 to the point where you barely have any standards, look no further, but this is the exact kind of reduction that I warned against with nothing to dress it up.

It's not much of an Emperor's New Clothing for Running With Scissors to be met with derision, it's what they based their brand on. Hell, they're marketing this game right now with the 1/10 that GameSpot gave it. Here's where I suggest something completely different: Postal 4 is not only a weaker game than its predecessor; it's also a lazier one. Right down to flaunting the critical reception like a badge of honor! The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in this case, boy howdy have things not changed at all.

Want to make a proper sequel to Postal 2? Forget the apocalypse, forget a contemporary setting, forget mobility scooters and jokes about Karens and that one Tiger King guy and also COVID. None of that is relevant, and you might as well be making a game in another series if you believe it is. Postal built its brand of regression, and the funny thing is, it worked. Not one-hundred-percent, but I guarantee you that the first two games in this series are far more timeless than this will ever be. As I said, it was the era of outrage. 3D had only been a thing for one-and-a-half generations prior, and with video games only being readily available to the consumer for two to three decades, it's easy to argue that aspects of the medium were still in their infancy. Postal wasn't infamous for how good its gameplay was or how particularly shocking it was, it was part of a wave of digital entertainment that set a precedent. Decades apart, speaking about how regressive the series was is speaking about history.

If they wanted to make a true Postal 4, they had to embrace that. Set it back in the early 2000s, or, hell, late 90s. Make it a commentary on the crazed American politics that fueled both games with the stunning insight that such a large gap in time has caused, while also paying mind to the new wave of gaming it was a part of. You don't need a massive map or aspects that feel appropriated from other, much better contemporary titles. Fuck struggling to catch up, this should have been behind.

I know it comes off as pompous and arrogant to readily assume that you could do better than someone else when creativity is involved. Especially in game development, dick-swinging is what typically leads to developers slaving away for years and, in some cases, over a decade on something that might not work out in the end. But consider how fascinating it would have been if Postal 4 actually embraced its roots instead of chasing the bitter aftertaste that III left in everyone's mouth. I'm sure the developers would know; their CEO was unironically tweeting before the 2020 election about how Joe Biden should be thrown in Guantanamo Bay for crimes that haven't been proven.

At least I bought these games before discovering the developer's Twitter...

I've flip-flopped back and forth between saying "I genuinely like this game" and "Postal 2 is only good as a guilty pleasure" for a few years. In truth, this is a game that's hard to classify. Is it trying so hard to be offensive that it ends up being a bland exercise in poor taste, or does that bad taste coalesce into something more compelling? Having played through Postal 2 multiple times, I can sense a whiff of some social commentary, but anything profound you take out of it is an unintended side-effect of the climate in which it was produced. Strangely, that makes it so this winds up being one of the most fascinating PC games from the last twenty years. Postal 2 has aged so poorly that it's wrapped around to being a genuinely interesting piece of history--which is weird to say about a game where there's a dedicated button to unzip your trousers so you can pee on pedestrians. But really, no other period in time could produce something like this. If Postal 2 was made nowadays, people would say it feels like a cute throwback to 2003.

The question is: now that the shock factor has worn off, is it worth playing nowadays? I think so. Postal 2 harkens back to the origins of the Open World format. The whole "build a massive world and copy-paste everything" formula wasn't there yet, mainly because the technology to back it up wasn't, either. Instead, older games took the idea of having a large playspace and handed the keys to the player. If you want to go here, you can, and it might even save you some time if you use it as a shortcut. I'm tempted to classify this kind of a game as a "classic" open world, but more accurately, it's a sandbox. Think about it this way: sandboxes are not massive. As a small child, they're easy to get lost in. But the moment your legs start to sprout a few extra inches, you see the wooden planks holding up the small borders for what they are. As an older person, a beach might be where you want to go. But at the beach, there's always the fear of nature taking its course. If the water doesn't wash away your sandcastle, the crabs underneath the sand will scare you away. The sandbox is small, but you have more control as a compromise. Build a massive castle at the beach, and its scale might dwarf you, but built at your own level, you start to tell yourself stories. Video game sandboxes work in a similar manner; the bigger the map is, the more wasted its real estate is if the developers don't put it to good use. If the roads are smaller, though, there's less room to waste. You can link them, have them go to areas that the game never tells you to go to, and a curious player will think they've stumbled across something massive. Postal 2 is full of these areas; part of what makes this so much fun to go back to is discovering all of the possible shortcuts you can take. In reality, that answer is probably two or three, but in practice, it immerses you. The attitude of Postal might no longer be relevant, but the relatively small scale approach to non-linearity is timeless and makes revisiting this a blast every time.

What bums me out the most is that an excellent example to the contrary of that is actually this game's successor, Postal 4. A subtle running joke that's woven into this game is the use of cars as explosive barrels. The map of Paradise, Arizona, is small enough to be fully explorable by foot traffic without ever needing to resort to any other means. The idea that something that can take you to where you want to go within seconds is the best way of exploring the detailed map Running With Scissors has created is laughable. When you go to approach one of the many cars out of curiosity and resort to violence because you can't enter them, it's almost like the game is laughing at you for expecting less of the developers. While not hilarious in the traditional sense, it's perfect for Postal 2's "in your face" punk rock meets heavy metal aesthetic and cements what the developers set out to do with the technical limitations they had to put up with. In Postal 4, a game with a map that's probably more than twice as big as what's offered in Postal 2, the same gag appears a second time. The only difference is that it's there just be to be a callback to Postal 2. In Postal 4, any attempt at meta-humor is ruined because you spend a good chunk of your time exploring on a mobility scooter. This small, minor annoyance of mine is just the tip of the iceberg. In an attempt to look back at their glory days, Running With Scissors fundamentally misunderstood what parts of their game held up the best and cobbled together something else instead. It can technically be called Postal because it has the same whacko energy to it--but I wouldn't consider it a successor when the act of moving forward with an idea means you stumble in place every time.

In conclusion, I wish more of the Open World games that are coming out nowadays would harken back to the roots they were founded on. This isn't to say that I don't like Horizon, or Assassin's Creed, or Far Cry, or Ghost of Tsushima, or Day's Gone. But none of them feel original or exciting anymore. From what I've seen of Death Stranding, it seems to have tried something new, and I respect that--and hey, it even lets you throw your pee on people! Can't wait for the RWS collab coming... soon.

EDIT 4/16/24: Knocked off half a star because these developers are now delusional enough to think that their game, which is the most early-2000s shit imaginable, has aged well. No, it has not, shut the fuck up lmao

Riff Racer is a cute take on the "play your own music" formula. Like many of these games, it's very basic in design, and that can get repetitive. But unlike Audiosurf, this isn't an on-rails experience. You drive the car in Riff Racer, and it's pretty fun. It goes beyond being a dumb gimmick and becomes genuinely exciting--granted, you're playing songs that bump up the difficulty. Other than that, the visuals look nice and clean, and the little progression system isn't necessary, but it's a neat addition.

Many of the reviews I've seen for this bring up Eurobeat because it makes sense, but as my own recommendation, some of that earlier, rougher-sounding techno from the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s is perfect for this. Think Overseer or Jasper Byrne's earlier output as Sonic. The cheese factor fits this game to a tee in a pleasantly surprising way.

Beat Hazard 2 is more of the same, but where I really have to get it credit is with its Open Mic feature. Since streaming has been prominent for long enough, not a lot of people are buying their music or downloading MP3s nowadays. While I like to own a good chunk of my music, it's much easier and more versatile to have a playlist of more than a thousand songs instead. The issue is that YouTube has ads and will fuck you up the ass with an 18-inch lawsuit if you try to say otherwise. Spotify has to go through so many mediators to get music on their service that working with them basically means working with a hundred other companies. So why not cut out the middleman and just use whatever's playing on your desktop? I have serious respect for the developers for modernizing this kind of game with blunt simplicity. Even if I'm not a massive fan of shoot-em-ups, these kinds of games need to start embracing this kind of technique.

Meh?

Beat Hazard tries to have more complexity than something like Audiosurf. But unless you're a serious nut for shoot-em-up games, Beat Hazard's offerings are pretty barebones and feature uninteresting enemies that take away from the core gimmick. I'll give it points for presentation: it's flashy enough to distract from how shallow it is, and you can pump up the frequency and intensity of the flashing lights featured for the true Gaspar Noe experience. Even with the flashing lights at their lowest value, this is still not a game I'd recommend to you if you have epilepsy, and the game is not shy about letting you know that.

Overall it's okay, and if you want to try out more of these games, it's an interesting diversion from the standard Audiosurf clone.

Audiosurf 2 is barebones in terms of its presentation and features. Whether or not you'll enjoy it will depend on how much you like music. If you absolutely love your music and just want a fancy excuse to listen to it, Audiosurf 2 is (still) one of the best options on the market. If you're looking for something with more complexity, a game like Crypt of the Necrodancer or the recently released Soundfall are fun alternatives.

There was also the whole controversy about the developer stripping support for YouTube's API over undisclosed matters. Given what happened with many Discord music bots that used YouTube's API, it seems almost prescient, and I wouldn't be surprised if something eerily similar happened. You can still technically mod it back into the game, but here's where I have to be upfront with you:

it's a nice feature, but it was kind of janky even when it was officially supported. You have to keep the video in the corner of your screen, which can get very distracting if what you're watching is a music video and feels pointless if it's not. The kinds of videos you're allowed to use are never specified, so the best thing about playing a rhythm game set to a YouTube video (I.E., giggling as you slowly move to the beat of an ASMR video or an old meme) never delivers itself with consistency. In terms of playing to music, it mostly works at finding what you're looking for, but it's only ever guaranteed if you're looking for something with many views. Other than that, it works, I guess. If you ask me, I think it would be neat to have a sequel to this that does the exact same thing that Beat Hazard 2 did (instead of capturing audio from a specific source, it just records whatever is on your desktop and charts it). It might be a little janky, but it's a fantastic compromise that deserves to be in a much more interesting game.

Eh?

I haven't touched this one in years because my memories of it aren't that great. I remember there were a few weapons that were fun to play around with, the sword was a blast to use, I liked a lot of its humor, and the ending felt surprisingly poignant for a game that spends half its runtime making jokes about rabbits humping each other. But at some point, it became a bland mish-mash of frustrating enemies, uninteresting levels, and me looking up a walkthrough because I didn't know where to go next.

Maybe it's better than I remember it being? I do remember not totally grasping everything that was in the game and did cheat to unlock all of the upgrades because I was too bored to find them myself. But honestly, I don't care enough to find out myself by this point.

Three stars.

If mods are what saved Skyrim from mediocrity, they're an elegant addition to Fallout 4. While you could argue that this is a weak Fallout game (I wouldn't know; I own all of the games, but that doesn't mean I've played them), the base game is still pretty solid in terms of its gameplay and presentation. Yes, the main quest is (oh god, this will age so poorly) mid, but it's competent enough to occupy your time neatly.

I will say this; if you're going to play Fallout 4 modded, I would recommend playing on Survival with these mods:
- Gas Masks of the Wasteland,
- Agony (with the animation patch),
- Fallsouls (just make sure to configure it to your liking; I personally don't like the game not pausing, but not having the world pause when I pull up my Pip-Boy adds tension that isn't present in the base game),
- Survival Needs 76 and Hunter of the Commonwealth,
- Darker Nights and Pip-Boy Flashlight,
- Uneducated Shooter,
- Arbitration,
- Weapons of Fate,
- No Combat Boundaries,
- Realistic Ammo Magazine (not compatible with many weapon mods, but works with all base-game weapons),
- Immersive Fallout
- Enhanced Lights and FX,
- True Storms,
- WET (Water Enhancement Textures),
- True Grass,
- Badlands 2,
- Full Dialogue Interface,
- Start Me Up

And additionally:
- Pilgrim (it's not on Nexus anymore, but the mod author still has links for it up on their Discord server. Not compatible with Darker Nights, but a good substitute if you're looking for a more horror-themed atmosphere),
- Whispering Hills (I don't believe this is compatible with Pilgrim. Aside from that, it provides a very special experience that may not be to everyone's liking. I, personally, uninstalled it after a while, but if you like the idea of a Fallout and Silent Hill crossover, it's a fun time)
- Survival Options (the only reason I didn't include this is because its only function in my modlist is to include the ability to quicksave in Survival mode. You can already modify survival needs in Survival Needs 76, and Arbitration changes damage variables. But no other mod makes it so you can quicksave in Survival mode, and because I'm a cheap bastard, I like that.)
- Loot Logic and Reduction/NPC Loot Drop Rebalance (Unsure of how this works with Realistic Ammo Magazine because I haven't tried playing with both installed at once),
- Combined Arms and its expansion (Not compatible with Realistic Ammo Magazine. Combined Arms also lets you craft ammo freely, which may make any attempt at difficulty trivial. But on the flip side, these are probably some of the best weapon mods out there)
- War of the Commonwealth with the additional MCM patch (I originally had this recommended, but unconfigured, War of the Commonwealth is fucking BRUTAL. I intended to make a difficult, but fair, modlist, and having tested it myself, I can say with a certainty that I'm having a hard time recommending this one unless you have a save file that's past the starting area)

These mods will add additional layers of challenge to the game, but it should be balanced enough not to be completely unfair.

Meh?

I don't have much to say about the base game, but Coven, on the other hand? It's okay? It feels like there's a weighty emphasis on the evil roles, which can lead to some genuinely fun moments. Chaos All/Any in Coven is Town of Salem operating at its fullest, with some of the most chaotic matches I have witnessed in over 400 hours. But while that can be fun or maybe one or two matches, it quickly wears out its welcome and gets a bit tiring to play. I don't think I'm alone in that assessment; while All/Any is still played on a day-to-day basis, the other modes aren't touched. Good luck finding a Coven Classic match, and you're fucked if you're expecting to find a Coven Ranked lobby with more than two or three people in it. The two other modes of note, VIP and Lovers, are the best part about this expansion and probably the reason to buy it. But for some asinine reason, they switch between the two on a weekly basis instead of always having them both as options. I think this is a woefully artificial way of getting people to play either one and is done in the most bafflingly transparent way imaginable.

Other than that--I mean, Juggernaut's fun, I guess? If you ever to get play as him, however.

I want to love TS2.

I found it at exactly the right time: I wasn't fatigued with FPS games at the time, still played quite a bit of Goldeneye 007 with my brothers, still used our Gamecube and Wii almost religiously, and had access to people who were free enough to play four-player split-screen with me.

I was compelled to start a blog about this game when I was ten years old, despite the last game in the series having been released six years beforehand. I wanted to rediscover my love for this game, so I figured I'd try to play what I heard was the best version of it: running on a GameCube emulator, hacked to support mouse injection.

Let me tell you right now: there's a reason I had such a hard time unlocking the brick as a kid. It's hard to quantify when your view of the TV is from the top of a triple bunk bed in your disaster of a room. But playing the game on a screen that's barely a few feet away from my face, it's not a secret: the FOV is pretty narrow, and even on a keyboard and mouse, the controls feel wonky. Again, playing this with a GameCube controller from halfway across the room, I never noticed that.

The sad reality that my nostalgia for this game will never live up to how I play games now is something that's only made me more excited for TimeSplitters Rewind, though.

Let me tell you about a game called Deadzone Remade:

Deadzone Remade was not unlike many of the DayZ clones that were popping up at the time. It was a mixture of PVP and PVE, with status bars and the other survival mechanics you'd expect from a game at the time. The zombies weren't brilliant, the survival stuff felt like an afterthought, and while the world had a few memorable locations, too much of it felt unmemorable for how small the size of its map was.

But there was something special about that game. What made Deadzone Deadzone wasn't its zombies or survival mechanics but the inherent sense of risk versus reward. If you saw something that enticed you, you could pick it up and store it in a safe house away from the flesh-hungry zombies and untrustworthy players. Or, you could use it on the spot and try to find another one. The safer option might net you loads of supplies for when the time is right, but since they are lost when you die, they're only safe so long as you never use them. Transporting yourself to the safe house wasn't instantaneous, either. You had to make sure you were out of harm's way, safe in a hostile area. Then there was this interesting social mechanic going on. Players were assigned a rank that determined how much of a good or bad person they were. If you went around killing people for no reason, it might drop. But if you killed someone with a low rank, you're seen as a much better person. While this system invariably led to a string of random killings and situations where you couldn't avoid being seen as a worse person, it created interesting social conflicts that made the best out of its multiplayer framework.

Deadzone Remade came out on Roblox in 2014. It's been offline for years, and even if it were to come back online tomorrow, it wouldn't receive much buzz. Roblox, at the time still had this independent, punk-like spirit to it. A big AAA studio wasn't going to make a game like Deadzone Remade because DayZ suited them just fine. Of course, there were the seeds of something more insidious being planted at the time, but that was easy to ignore when so much of what was being played felt new and invigorating.

I say all of this because the game I am talking about was a remake of a game made by the sole creator of Unturned. The story behind why said creator left Roblox isn't too much of a mystery: his games kept being stolen, and I'd like to assume that the obvious limitations Roblox has always had weren't too empowering, either. So he switched to Unity and made Unturned. You might assume from all of my rambling that some of what Deadzone special can be found in Unturned.

And here's where I hate to break it to you: Unturned is the kind of spiritual successor that does everything right and is polished to a tee, but ultimately lacks the individuality of its predecessor. If you stripped away the cute, blocky aesthetic, Unturned wouldn't have anything else going for it. Its survival mechanics work, the social scenarios you can get into are fun, and it rewards exploration--but never in a way that sets it apart from its inspirations. It's not as bland of a game as that description might lead you to believe; again, the blocky-art style absolutely saves this. It's reminiscent of how goofy Roblox's characters were in a zombie apocalypse and mines the unintentional humor that the clash of those two styles generates to general success. It's refreshing to have a take on the zombie survival genre that doesn't treat its subject matter with grit or reverence but revels in just how stupid the whole premise is. By making the art direction the same kinds of colorful whimsy that that same grit tries to run away from, it makes for an experience that brings more smiles to the party than overplayed cowls. Other than that, though, there's nothing worth playing this for, really. It's baby's first survival game. The boorishly simplistic survival mechanics and zombies are carried over almost verbatim here, and without any of Deadzone's stand-out social features, fail to carry what is otherwise a pretty lifeless experience.

I can't help but admire Unturned, but you've played this game before—and better.

(EDIT: Accidentally said "hard to ignore" when I meant "easy." Whoops!)