Since the HD remaster of Phantom Dust is currently free on PC, it's an easy proposition to give it a try at least. The game is a 3D action battle game, with the key draw to it being that it uses card game mechanics for its combat. The implementation of these mechanics is very well done and fun, with tons of possibility for depth and variation as the player becomes more skilled.

I played the campaign for several hours, past the stage where you can start building your own "decks", and I feel I can comfortably shelve the game where I stopped. The reason is that, although it's an enjoyable game, there are a few key weak points to its design from a modern perspective. The enemy AI often is not very aggressive, leading to battles mainly playing out in familiar cycles of hovering around the area where your "cards" spawn and repeating some simple strategies. The multiplayer aspect of the game would obviously change that a lot, but for the campaign there could at least have been the possibility of somewhat randomizing the spawn points of cards in order to keep you on the move and engaged with navigating the arena.

It's a fun game and a great idea, but one that was ahead of its time. It would really soar with a modern sequel of some sort.

It Takes Two is a really odd experience. Production-wise, except for a shaky start, it's mostly great. There are many types of games and game mechanics represented, which allows the game to serve as an intro to gaming as a whole to the uninitiated.

What makes it hard to speak too positively of is the story that is central to the game. I think young people who haven't been in a serious adult relationship yet may find the story good or even just ok, but to a married adult man such as myself it's nonsense. The way the characters, who are already in the process of a divorce, speak to each other doesn't make any sense. They alternate wildly between encouragement, compliments, insults, frustration , and flirtation. The reasons they have for divorcing are all based on things which would have come up long, long before the process of divorce started. The climax therefore felt entirely unearned, and just uncomfortable.

It's a great game to play with a friend or partner, it's just not a well written one.

While The Witcher 2 thankfully massively improves on the combat system from the first game, as well as just having enormously improved production quality in all areas, it also is in my opinion an unfortunate relic of its time just the same. The introduction before you're finally let off the leash echoes the trends of the era it was released in, where to be a big, serious, modern title games needed to try to shoehorn in cinematic, "interactive" experiences to go for a larger-than-life presentation. The execution on that was often not great, and that's the case here, too.

The good news is that this game was enormously improved upon in the following title while keeping much of the soul that CDPR already had down.

Witcher 2's impressive graphics will absolutely ensure that it stands the test of time far longer than the first one, it still looks great to this day. Really impressive what they were able to do with this.

Enough has been said about the cool atmosphere and the commitment to lore, as well as has been said about how unfun and dog shit the combat system is. What hasn't been discussed enough is how the way this game handles sexual encounters, which is better than every other video game I've seen them in. In this game the sex is just implied, with maybe a short setup, then the scene transitions to a heavily blurred and bloomed background with indistinguishable 3d models rubbing polygons, and imposed over that fades into focus a lewd or nude painting of whoever you are having sex with. I romanced a peasant woman with flowers, and for her portrait she was cupping her breats exposed from her open blouse with one arm while the other was ladling milk from a wooden bucket across them.

Also it's hard to think of another game with such wild discrepencies in the quality of voice acting across its cast, good grief.

I played around 6 hours and felt I had gotten a good enough impression of it, especially seeing as I had played 3 first and could recognize a ton of its DNA in this. Also made me feel more confident in my decision to leave it where I was, simply because you can tell that with 3 they achieved pretty much everything they fumbled with in this game.

Played through two campaigns on single player and I feel as though I've seen enough of it. Maybe it shines a bit more as a multiplayer game, but as a single player experience it's lacking. That said it's a very interesting and seamlessly executed concept regarding the content generation for the campaigns.

The combat is not very well executed. Which is not to say that it's bad, it's just too easy even on harder modes and though there are occasions to expand what your character can do, it never feels very robust or all that rewarding.

The storytelling is fine enough, but so many interactions with the characters end up with them all have the same Joss Whedon dialogue quip-per-minute personalities.

I hope to revisit this one day and get more out of it, as of now I don't regret buying it but I also am glad I got it at a steep discount.

The strongest aspects to it are just how much it leans into charm and being unique, as well as using that charm as part of the gameplay design. As in, in order to find your way forward you're going to have to talk to everyone you can, which you're encouraged to do because the dialogues are so fun to read. There's a very sweet and emotional side to the game as well, and the ending sequence is an all-timer. Just lovely. Also the suspend/rewind/save state function on the Switch version is a great way to experience it, and allows you to bypass a lot of repetition and headaches.

The less good stuff is in how some enemies are pretty bs, and how certain mechanics required to advance involve a certain amount of lateral thinking in ways that only occur once in the game. So at times it feels like the game is really trying to sell you the official strategy guide. For instance, in the last fight it's only minorly hinted at that in order to beat the final boss you need to use a mechanic that until that point has been more or less useless to you. The game also has way too many items and it's not always clear which ones you're going to want to keep around and which you'll need to use the very clunky storage mechanic for. Undertale for instance, which was HEAVILY inspired by this game, solved that by giving you universal storage often throughout the game.

It's very good and feels like a completely realized vision, which is certainly rare in games.

Vampire is a video game adaptation of a tabletop rpg, so it has a lot of great implementations of that style of game mechanics and giving you many ways to react to and shape situations according to how you want to play. The main story/mechanics of the game are as follows: the "masquerade" is what vampires call keeping knowledge of vampires away from humankind. Because vampires are vastly outnumbered, it would be a death sentence if ever it became known to humans at large that they exist, so violating the masquerade is dealt with harshly. You can get 5 strikes before it's game over (there are a couple times in the game where it is possible to redeem a violation). Also being a vampire, you need to drink blood to live, which is also sort of like your Mana for your special abilities. You also have a mechanic called Humanity, which all vampires must keep high or their beastly nature takes over. Practically what this means is as it falls you will lose control of your character at times and they will attack others, risking retaliation or even Masquerade violation.

When you start out you can either answer a stylized "questionnaire" that will pick a Clan and assign your skill points for you, or you can do it yourself. Clans are different types of vampire with different special abilities, strength/weaknesses, and traits that make their playstyle unique and even affect how others interact with you. For example the one I picked was one of the most "human-like" ones and sort of seductive in nature, so I could drink blood out in the open from people I had seduced without consequences (just looks like we're necking I suppose) and all my humanity losses and gains were doubled. Which makes sense, if I'm the most human-like type then it would make sense that being more human was easier, and doing inhumane things had a harder impact on me. So it really incentivizes me to play to my Clan strengths.

The cool stuff:
About blood-- it's a really well implemented rpg mechanic because it's an extremely useful resource and also not very easy to get, so without realizing it I was starting to think like a vampire while playing, taking note of when npcs would turn down dark alleyways alone so I could sneak up in the shadows and get a little refill. So simple yet really well executed.

The world is not really "open" but more of these individual little hubs that you get access to as the game progresses. What the game does really well, and which is one of my favorite things in games that pull it off, is in making every place in the world matter and having you familiarize yourself with it. When you get a quest there's not an icon or a marker or even a map menu, your quest description just tells you what the name of the place is you have to go to and in which "hub". If you need to go to the Lucky Star Motell, you're going to scan your surroundings and see the star sign down the street and start heading that way, and you'll be checking out and making a note of the places you pass on the way. Since all of these areas are small, like maybe a small city block, it never feels overwhelming at all.

There are a lot of places where your skills and playstyle allow you to progress in a mission or solve a problem in a way that you find satisfying, you can hack computers and sneak your way around an area or you can go in guns blazing, you can bypass places by having a high lockpick skill, you can notice a hidden key or environment detail if you have the perception skill for it, etc. You can have the persuasion or intimidation chops to peacefully talk your way out of a conflict or you can sometimes even turn down entire missions if you just don't think your character would go along with them.

The vibe of the world rules too, it's kind of bare at first but the music and sound design rule and make this very unique environment where you're walking around a world that has traffic and city nightlife sounds happening while you're fully aware that cars never drive down the road in the game. You just don't care because it somehow just all meshes. The voice acting also rules, sometimes it's really well done and even when it's not it has this exaggerated and almost cartoonish style that very much feels like the voice actors were having a blast just going ham on these characters.

The not cool stuff:

Like a lot of games, the devs didn't have a lot of time to finish this game, so certain rpg aspects especially towards the end were neglected and a higher emphasis on combat put in their place, which was not the intention to begin with. Since my character wasn't cut out for that I ended up kind of having to do a simple cheat towards the final hours which made me invisible to enemies. It kind of sucks to have to do that to keep enjoying it, but it honestly doesn't feel too bad to skip the unfun stuff so you can do the fun stuff instead.

Combat itself is also not great, think that this game came out 4 years before Fallout 3 and was made on a much smaller scale. It's not always awful but clearing combat areas never feels fun, more like something you're relieved you got past.

The unofficial patch is mandatory pretty much, and even adds a way to skip the worst level in the game and possibly any game, the Warrens, which is extremely long and convoluted and just sucks the life out of you. There's another bs level you can't really skip with a very unbalanced enemy that you have to somehow defeat in a very inscrutible way, that it's worth looking up how to deal with as well. It's a very small part of the game but unforgivingly brutal. I almost failed it even with invisibility!

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The game is really good overall, and with the little tips I mentioned it's very enjoyable and replayable. Games like this might be showing their age but really they don't make em like this much anymore, and it says something that this game still has a very active and dedicated cult fanbase to it. I also like the variety in playstyles, there are two REALLY different Clans from the others for example which you shouldn't pick at first, one called the Nosferatu where you basically have to live in the sewers and eat rats because you look to horrifying to pass into human society like the others, and one that is like some kind of insane clairvoyant type vampire that gets a ton of unique interactions and dialogue options because you can kind of see things from the future you don't really understand.

If you like games like New Vegas for their roleplaying and being able to make decisions and steer the outcome you want in the game between different factions, definitely give this a try. Think of it as NV on a small scale. It's not very long, even while taking my sweet time and taking care of a baby while letting the game run steam has me at 26 hours on it.

One of the things that makes Dark Souls unique is that it succeeds in its purpose to such an astounding degree that all of its many flaws can more or less be left as footnotes, the most glaring of which being how jealously it withholds information from the player. But its almost fully and geniusly interconnected map, the physicality it gives the character, the swiss watch precision by which its combat mechanics are dialed in, everything about the game is a undeniable achievement.

Though many attribute ideas and mechanics to this game a little too generously (you would think from some reviews you read on the internet that this game invented difficulty and boss fights) it can't be denied just how influential this game has been and will continue to be for years to come.

Policenauts takes a lot of the familiar contours of 80s/early 90s buddy cop action dramas and marries it with a somewhat cyberpunk space future setting that gives it an entirely unique character of its own. There's a lot of charm and humor to its story, and the details of its setting are expanded on and luxuriated in by Kojima who obviously put a lot of thought into what this sort of future could look like.

The point-and-click interface is the tool by which you investigate and converse, with other gameplay applications coming into use as the story progresses. Though it's mainly a visual novel of sorts, it alternates to shootout sequences (other console versions used Light Gun peripherals for these, which would have been awesome to experience) which have you try to kill the bad guy before your own health runs out.

A drawback of this game, which to some degree is an artifact of its time and place in the japanese computer game market of the early 90s, is the groping and molestation of the female characters which the game allows, but does not encourage, the player to do. There boob jiggle animations have their own credits, even.

It's an extremely unique and engaging game, with awesome animated sequences and inventive gameplay. I highly recommend emulating it with a translation if you can, and use a CRT shader as well to get the best visual experience. I'll be thinking about and referencing this game for a long time to come.