slipped under my radar last year somehow but glad i played it now. such a visually striking thing with a compelling world to explore, puzzles with some actual difficulty/complexity to them, nice music, and on.

absolutely loved working my way back through the scattered locations to establish links between the languages and seeing the changes that followed. wish more game worlds felt like they actually change/shift because of things you've done tbh.

one of the best puzzle games i've played from the past few years, for sure.

Yu-Gi-Oh! was one of my hyperfixations when I was little. I had Duelist of the Roses and Capsule Monster Coliseum for PS2, The Sacred Cards for GBA, and a tonne of trading cards. Needless to say, I played countless hours of this game in the past. In my mid-twenties I've finally developed a fascination with nostalgia, and so I've been returning to certain texts that were key to the development of my tastes. Following this trend, I revisited The Duelists of the Roses some time last year.

I think the most interesting aspect of this game is its uniqueness. I remember being captivated by the baffling aesthetic of early modern European historical strategy meets JRPG and the way the resulting anime characters were familiar yet alien. It struck a balance between the other two games I owned, diverging from the rules of the TCG but not so far as to have to stand on its own like Capsule Monster Coliseum does. I remember having some difficulty with this game, which kept my small mind engaged and grinding to improve.

Upon revisiting, I didn't find the game's difficulty as engaging. I chose the Injection Fairy Lily deck, because the fairies are cute and in retrospect Yu-Gi-Oh!'s fairy monsters and Téa's deck in particular were one of my earliest markedly feminine fascinations. As a child I remember mostly choosing Patrician of Darkness both because Dark monsters are cool and edgy and because I'm sure I intuited it was busted. In any case, this time I had minimal difficulty with the game from a mechanical standpoint. I built my deck around reliable powerful female fusions for attack, Guardian Elf for defense, and buffs. Any opposition I could effectively durdle out with a mix of powerful defenders and choke point exploitation. The gameplay felt relatively trivial in my adult hands, though I'm sure a weaker deck would offer more engagement with the game's decidedly janky mechanics if one wished. There is an element of tedium to the duels due to turn speed, but that's easily glossed over in the emulation era.

The nitty gritty aside, I had fun with my replay! I liked playing the cute fairy deck and beat the Lancastrian route. The aesthetic is still captivatingly idiosyncratic and the gameplay is fun in its own novel way. It's not a classic, but it's worth playing for fans of the series and unique if raw games. I can see myself revisiting this in the future as a comfort game that I can reminisce while I play for a short cozy experience every now and then.

Me: I really miss mid tier licensed games from the 90s and 00s.

Me playing this: Hmmmm, perhaps Not...


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This is the jankiest feeling new game I've played in a pretty long time. There's definite potential to be had but the game spends so much time taking inspiration from elsewhere while not sticking the landing with anything. I was able to deal with it a bit more early in but as time went by mixture of the less than stellar combat, level/map design from hell, the backtracking, and rancid platforming/slide sections took a toll. I just wanted it to be done.

There's a solid base here and I'll be keeping tabs on a sequel. It could be something special.

i posted a joke review but i wanted to come back to this because this game is incredible. originally, i thought balatro would be too complex for my gorilla brain, yet the tutorial and roguelite progression introduce new jokers slowly (like tboi ig?) in a way that isn't overwhelming and lets you learn as you play.
thinking of ways to win with new jokers and getting insanely busted runs as a result make the gameplay loop so incredibly fun and addictive.
easily the best card game ive ever played, please give this a shot

a million different things can be said about death stranding, it's probably one of the most thematically complex pieces of work done in this medium so far and reminds me of so many different films while also managing to be completely idiosyncratically kojima. it took me about a year and a half to fully complete this, one restart and over 80 total hours of gameplay. in the time it took me through various starts and stops, i managed to complete kojima's metal gear solid series and get more acquainted with him as a "auteur" before jumping back in to finish this. much like sons of liberty it's a game constantly playing with your notion of who kojima is as a creative, what games even really are as a medium, and what we should expect as players. it's also a game about the gig economy, covid (even though it came out in 2019), growing american (and world) division, fascism, terrorism, the military industrial complex, and the question of whether governments or communities keep us truly safe. it's also a game about love, fear, memory, faith, connection, separation, loss, grief, and hope. all this to say it's a game that's really impossible to actually pin down but constantly has me thinking about it and comparing things to it. through all it's messy gravitas and earnest guts spilling it becomes a unique and beautiful experience that while feeling indebted to cinema can only truly be captured in the interactive medium.

not to say that it's all a narrative or thematic project, the actual gameplay is simply invigorating in it's overall simplicity. as a courier, you are given starting points and destinations, but the route you take is entirely up to you. by utilizing equipment you slowly start to build your world outward, constantly changing the environments you inhabit to make paths and routes for sam to take. as more of the game opens up, you also get access to building roads and collaborating with online structures to access even more locations in less and less time. it's devilishly simple, climbing mechanics controlled by shoulders buttons, combat at it's best when you're simply avoiding it, but it iterates on the core design philosophhy of metal gear solid v (objectives given with no course of action specified) while de-emphasizing combat to create a game that just has an addictive gameplay loop that makes all the side objectives fun to complete. if this had been released simply as a courier simulator with none of the narrative interest, i'd probably still give it a very high rating based on that alone.

feels like possibly the current pinnacle of kojima's career, given so much freedom to create whatever he wants kojima decides to put out this messy sprawling epic that raises more questions and has even less answers than the best in the metal gear franchise. possibly a case for more "auteur" driven video games but more than that it's a case for giving actual budgets to teams that want to create things as audacious as this is, the only AAA game worth a damn.

as an ending aside, some of the films it reminded me of were: southland tales, the end of evangelion, the rebuild of evangelion series, david fincher's the killer, shyamalan's old, tenet, first cow, universal soldier: day of reckoning, cronenberg's crash, the resident evil films, the matrix films, cloud atlas, inland empire, twin peaks: the return, spielberg's AI, and so many others that i can't remember to just list here.

As someone who enjoyed BotW, I couldn't bring myself to buy and play TotK. Part of it is me missing the classic Zelda formula from the other 3D titles, but mostly because TotK just appears to be more of the same as BotW. I'm not sure if I'm ready to purchase this 60-70€ game and dive into another massive world that feels way too familiar. Instead, I decided to revisit one of my favorite franchises of all time and go back to its roots. I'm excited to finally explore the 2D classics I never had a chance to play as a kid!

It's fascinating to see how far the franchise has come. It has shaped countless childhoods and left a lasting mark on the history of video games. And to think, it all started here.

Having grown up with the beloved 3D titles and knowing how Zelda games have evolved over the decades, I think it's understandable not to be particularly impressed with this one. However, I can still appreciate it for what it is. Personally, I have severe fatigue from the BotW formula and wish Nintendo would reinvent it once more, as they have so many times before. Because Zelda deserves more than being just another bloated open world experience that seems to plague most modern adventure games.

I really wanted to like this game more, and with a bit of TLC, it really could be brilliant. It just has so many glaring issues that make it painful to play in its current state. They're hardly even technical issues – just development oversights and poor decisions.

The first chapter (or "story scene", as the achievements call them) was great. I love the combat, I love the card system, I love the items and equipment and I love the meditation system! What I don't love, though, is the... strange rogue-lite save-resetting clunkily shoved on top of the whole thing, souring both a story and a combat system that really doesn't need it. I cannot overstate the feeling of confusion and disappointment I felt when I died for the first time, an hour into Chapter 1, and was thrown right back to the beginning of the game. No "continue" on the title screen, nothing. A clean slate. Just a few more levels for my character, which really don't feel like they mean anything – at least this early on in the game. I was fuming! I closed the game and didn't come back to it until the next day. I got this game in a bundle, so I didn't know this was a thing at all.

The way the story is presented makes the rogue-lite system entirely nonsensical. Starting from scratch at the beginning of each chapter, when the enemies only continue to get stronger while you get weaker is possibly the worst difficulty balancing I've ever seen in a video game, and it's so frustrating, because I love the story and the worldbuilding and I want to know more! I want to continue, but I'm on the easiest difficulty, and it's an absolute slog to get through. It's a real shame.

I have other issues with Zoeti, one being the fact that most important characters aren't given proper names above their dialogue boxes, even after we learn them. For example, Mistasa, the character who speaks the most and guides the player throughout the game, is simply labelled "Cute Guide". Weird. This is probably just a translation issue/lack of localisation, but it's offputting regardless. It makes it difficult to attach to the characters properly, when they're treated like an unimportant NPC by the UI. There are also various technical issues, mostly to do with the menu freaking out about too many inputs at once. The main one I encountered was when I tried to open my inventory immediately after meditating, to equip my newly upgraded skill. Once I closed the menu, however, the heavy gaussian blur behind it did not go away no matter what I tried – even once I'd started a mission and entered a battle. I couldn't see anything; I ended up having to reopen the game. This happened multiple times, and would be fine if the game actually saved more then once every half hour. You cannot save manually, and it seems to only autosave at the beginning and the end of a mission, and nowhere inbetween. It also doesn't tell you when it's saved, so I have no real way of knowing this at all. I'm just guessing based on experience.

I'm marking this abandoned, as I doubt I'll pick it up again unless it gets some much-needed overhauls; I would love to see this game flourish, though, as it truly has so much potential.

3.5/10

in the midst of some downsizing and have decided that i'm either going to sell or otherwise get rid of my ps4. only have one or two games that are still tied to the system and not available elsewhere so i'm going to prioritize trying (if not fully playing through) those and replaying a few others.

there was a time where i believed this was my favorite Uncharted game, for whatever that's worth seeing as i'm not really a fan in general. either i was on crack or i'm in for mess with 2 and 3 after this.

i'm just going to say it, i hate sticky ledge/gliding through the air platforming but i can understand its usage and even tolerate it though i think it replaces engaging mechanics with nothing. having said that, my toleration accounts for the platforming being mechanically sound and working on a moment to moment basis. for a game that does the movement for you mostly, it's in shambles. finicky behavior when jumping and shimmying on ledges (especially if there's multiple edges around), swinging and jumping from ropes or chains is a death wish, and so on.

which isn't to say anything about the combat either. i've never found the combat in this series particularly engaging (4 was onto something a bitsy because of the increased mobility but that's discourse for another day) but in its earliest forms it was such a slog? the absolute onslaught of one combat encounter after another, usually bad ones at that wears thin by the seventh or eighth chapter of the game but then you have more than half to go yet. i've never made a game so i don't talk about this from the standpoint of thinking i could've done better or anything but it genuinely feels like the combat scenarios were literally the last thing done in some of these cases in terms of how poorly thought out they felt.

it wasn't completely dire but the bright spots in things like Elena and Sully or the aesthetics holding up more than expected didn't do much to offset the lows. at the time of release i think i was missing Tomb Raider a lot and this scratched that itch but playing it now i think i've had my fill and don't need to come back. i kinda hated it. 😭