Homeworld isn't the best RTS I've ever played, but it's probably the coolest. Full 3D space movement that's intuitive? Dope ass ship designs? Came out in the late 90s? Has a really tragic yet hopeful revenge story? I mean really what else could you even want!

Well, for one I'd want the game to be just a bit faster. But also slower. Faster between "encounters", as moving from your mothership to enemies takes the majority of the playtime, and faster when building (i swear half the game is just waiting for things to happen). But slower in combat, where if you look away for a second (likely when you take out your phone to kill the time as your fleet moves to engage the enemies halfway across the.. space?) you're likely to lose half your ships, or when wanting to change orders, if you misclick, you might again lose half your ships.

I guess this is all par for the course for many old games, but really none of this felt like an issue until the last few missions, which spike the difficulty in such a way that really shows the game's flaws upfront. The pre-penultimate mission is set up in a way that almost expects you to grind, with tens of enemy ships and almost no resources (which can be automatically harvested). I didn't finish the last mission, because if I wanted to push through I'd need to spend hours and hours on that mission.

Still, I respect the game. It's well written and technically an insane achievement. I just wish it wasn't annoying in a time sensitive way.

I was gonna write up a whole blog post about this, but upon reflection I don't have a whole lot to say. It's a good remake, one that updates the source material so it feels like it hasn't aged a day, but keeps the core of the original intact. For ex, cutting out transphobic jokes, and adding more opportunities to bond with your team, are both much appreciated changes.

That being said there's some things that I feel got lost in translation. For one, a couple of the original's animated cutscenes are now in engine, and every time that happened they were just much blander, which was disappointing. That's my one concrete criticism.

Beyond that, I don't like new tartarus as much as old tartarus. It feels like there's too much going on, like the game is pulling away from its dungeon crawler roots, and it just makes it a little tough to completely chill out while exploring like I did in the original. Plus your teammates talk a LOT more, which went from endearing to annoying after about 30 hours of it.

The other criticism I have is just about the general feeling of the game. Persona 3 is now a modern game, one that bends over backwards to make things nice and convenient for you. Social Links seem more stable, it's harder to get locked into things, etc. And that's not a bad thing, but I think there's a little lost when you move a game that used to be somewhat hostile to players into a more welcoming direction, especially a game with themes and tone like Persona 3. It feels like the balance between social sim and wish fulfillment sim has been tipped even further towards the latter. I appreciate that they seem to have made it impossible to 100% the game in one run though, you have to actually choose which relationships to foster.

Again, it's a good remake, one with the original atmosphere fully intact (once you bring the default brightness down 3 or 4 pips), and it's one that to 90% of people I would recommend over the original. But even if this had all of the content that'd ever been released for persona 3, I don't think I'd call this the definitive best version.

I just replayed Mass Effect 1 for the first time since I was a kid, using that new Legendary collection, and it was a much more interesting experience than I was expecting? Mostly because I've recently played through all of the Bioware RPGs that came before it that I'd missed, like Jade Empire and NWN. So I've got a more complete picture of where they came from and where they were going, I guess. While I was in a lot of ways dissappointed revisiting ME, there were also bits that really shone, and bits that surprised me how much I liked them.

The rest of the review (just for mass effect 1) is here

Not gonna write up a whole big thing on demons souls ps5 because I've already reviewed the original, but demon's souls is my second fav souls game mostly because of how puzzly the levels are, and the clarity they have.

The remake is honestly not as bad as I was worried it would be. Only a few boss designs are markedly different, and some of that seems to be a change in the style of a lighting effect (old version of old hero vs new is a good example). Mostly it seems faithful, if less atmospheric and needlessly detailed.

While I don't think remaking the game to have advanced lighting and stuff was really worthwhile, I'm still glad that the game isn't locked on ps3 anymore.

but i do have to say, while the extra performance is nice, the visuals do not make the game any more fun!!!!!

Ghost of Tsushima is a game that exists in a similar space to Jedi Fallen Order for me. That is, it's based in that first party Sony game style of the last 10 years (see TLOU or GOW 2018), but diverges enough that it feels like its own thing, most of the time. What it keeps from those games is the camera angle (close behind the right shoulder), the slightly stylized realism art-style (though this feels more stylized than most, in how the game is filled with bright colors and gorgeous article effects), and the kinda plodding prestige tv show pacing. What's different here is the combat, of course, which is a pretty tight souls-ish feeling system, the structure (TLOU isn't an Ubisoft-em-up last I checked), and the storytelling style? All of this is kind of a mixed bag as to how it turned out, I think, with the only real successes for me being the combat and the storytelling. It's a good game altogether, it's just.. very flabby.

Read the rest of the review here

I don't have a whoooole lot to say, but while the gameplay is the same as DOOM, the level design is completely different. Where DOOM was labrynthine, DOOM II is all puzzles. Pretty much every level has an easily identifiable design idea, though loads of them are kinda just jokes? It definitely feels like it takes itself even less seriously than the first. Personally, I found the levels much less frustrating than DOOM at it's worst, though it never quite reaches the highs of DOOM EP1. In general? Good fun.

While I think Dragon Age II has some interesting ideas, I also think it kind of reeks of low budget. Sometimes a low budget can help a creative work, make it so the mechanics need to be distilled down, the ideas focused, and just can help make the game more charming. DA2 feels like a different beast though, like a game that wasn't just designed within a small budget but designed to wear that budget as a business success. So, it all takes place in a handful of maps in one location, the city of Kirkwall. There's a new art style too, one with a bit of a comic book feel to it, which just happens to come along with (at least what appear to be) simpler looking models. Maybe that's all that necessarily feels cheap here, but the implementation of Kirkwall, the Only Setting of the Game, leaves some to be desired I think.

Now the whole one city thing was something I was actually pretty excited for. I LOVE a good, large RPG hub, and Kirkwall oft gets compared to Sigil in Planescape Torment (most of the setting of that game) which is one of the greatest RPG hubs. Kirkwall even has a lot of the hallmarks of a good hub, like quests that have you crossing knottily through the city, different districts, characters that change with the city as the game goes along.

My thing is it feels like the city was built off a checklist. It's got different class divided districts, just like Taris, but there's no progression through them. There's recurring characters that grow with the city, but they never make much of an impression, as if they're all from the same mold just tinkered with a tiny bit so they fit their quest. But those quests are my main issue. I think they were going for a kind of "the city is the main character" thing, because there doesn't really seem to be a main plot, or at least there wasn't one when I stopped playing at the end of Act 2. Instead, there's a main plotline for each act, which runs simultaneously with a bunch of sidequests. Each of these quests feels about equally complex, and by and large these are the only type of quests in the game. There's one fetch quest, and it's pretty involved for a fetch quest, but the rest of the game is just going back and forth between characters, talking and progressing quests with that mass effect dialogue system, and writing that's middling, if well delivered. It's a fine way to do quests, it just feels so... static. There's no variety. I don't think the fact that this is a quest-marker driven game helps thing either.

Moving on to the one part of the game that doesn't feel low budget, the combat is... well it's not great. It's kind of a combination of a Jade Empire-like action system with a RTWP system. Or at least that's what it seems like it wanted to be? In reality it's just RTWP but the default settings make it so you need to press a button to attack every time and hold a button to pause. Thank god you can change that! The bigger issues are 1. Because the game thinks it's an action game, every move has a cooldown and a resource drain. It seems to be influenced by MMO design I think? But without interesting ways to replenish your resource, it's not so much a resource management thing as two very long cooldown timers on every ability. It takes what's supposed to feel fast, fluid, and interesting and just needlessly slows it down. You can easily just end up without anything to do after a couple seconds besides autoattack until your abilities ready up. Even health potions have cooldowns on them. I get it's supposed to get you to focus on the tactics, but I was playing on easy because I know I'm not tactically minded, yet the game still felt always either slightly too easy or way too hard.

It doesn't feel properly balanced, and the game just feels willingly constricted under it's budget. I didn't really love DAO, and I was hoping the black sheep of the series would win me over (as often happens), but even I've gotta say this just feels rushed out the door.

Lmao Romero came around and delivered the best DOOM episode since the first one. The levels are less mazelike and frustrating, and more interested in guiding the player through some interesting levels with the occasional oblique wall for that classic flavor. Also the music (even just the MIDI ost) is incredible, maybe my fav DOOM ost, or at least up there with the N64 version's. Romero's crafted almost Mario-like levels in terms of mechanical progression, with the added bonus of the most cohesive feel and tone in the series. Who coulda guessed?

Jade Empire is kind of exactly what I thought it would be. The first Bioware RPG to not use their RTWP system, the game between KOTOR and Mass Effect. It's the last game that I think you could credit to "early" Bioware, a pre-EA buyout expereince, though Mass Effect 1 kinda fills that role as well. But Jade Empire feels more related to those older games, in the way Dragon Age Origins has obvious links to them.

First, one thing that did surprise me is that, especially for a game made by mostly white western developers in 2005, the game doesn't feel at all racist. Sure it's a bit cultural appropriation-ey, but it feels more in the realm of like, ATLA. It's an americanized slurry of cultural references, but seemingly a pretty respectful one? At least as far as I, a white guy the midwest, could tell.

The other big thing I was worried about was the combat, and I feel like I was right to be worried. See, when Bioware created RTWP, it was with the intent of making TTRPG combat more dynamic and engaging than a direct translation. After KOTOR though, it seems like they wanted to take the opportunity to work on a fully action-based system for the first time. And I mean, it just feels bad. In a way it reminds me of Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, where it's this weird cross between turn based ideas with real time positioning and execution. But mostly it just feels weightless and not timed out correctly. Combos are finicky to get started, blocking is fairly overpowered, some ranged attacks will track you even if you dodge behind the caster before they go off, and any attack that doesn't use a weapon is impossible to predict success on. I ended up cruising through the second half of the game on easy, just so I didn't have to deal with the system much anymore.

Moving on to parts I liked, the different locations are all pretty great. There's only 4 or 5 total, and only 2 are true hubs like you would see in KOTOR, but those two are pretty gigantic! You can really tell they're making better use of the Xbox's hardware by now, with how much larger and more detailed each individual map is. Really, the whole game is gorgeous, especially if you're into the way OG Xbox games looked. Anyways, the dungeons are nicely varied, though a bit small, and the sidequests are numerous (in those two hubs). Really my only disappointment here is that a lot of the sidequests are only one or two steps, mostly feeling like fetch quests in a way that kinda thins the world out, I think. The good sidequests are really good though. Once you get to the bigger hub city there's a couple really fun doozies, I gotta say.

Probably my favorite part of the game, and the bit where it really can lodge itself with the classics, is the story. It's a classic hero's tale, a hero with a thousand faces-type story, but the plot machinations are really pretty perfectly executed. The twists land hard, the emotions ring high, and the themes are maybe the least straightforwardly heroic out of any Bioware game of this era. Really, and this is just a hunch, it almost seems like they were influenced by KOTOR II, and managed to fit a little bit of the self-questioning darkness of that game into classic hero morality.

I think I'd recommend playing it. Especially if you've run out of true Bioware classics to play and want more of that flavor. I think you'll get more out of this than you would NWN's main story, that's for sure, and maybe even NWN 2's main story, even though it's Obsidian! (but you should play that one just to get to MOTB which is proper greatness in DLC form). If you find the combat annoying like I did, just turn it to easy and cruise through, but really spend as much time in the hubs as you can. The game's linear, so the two hubs kinda build on each other a bit, and I think they both feel more real if you spend time getting to know them. I'm glad I did.

anyways I think playing this with the hyperkin duke was a bad idea my wrist hort now

I think this game could've been the best AC game. The controls feel better than ever, the AC building is just as wonderful as in AC4, but just a smidge clearer, the story is the most defined, best written, and most interesting (both dramatically and plot-wise) out of the games I've played, which has the notable hole of AC3. But it feels just as good as For Answer, and while it's story is a bit less politically complex, it feels clearer, more crystalline, and more focused. If that's all it was, a great sequel to For Answer, this would be a perfect game I think. At least a perfect AC game.

It's not though, at least not by my estimation, and that really comes down to two things about the game. First and most obvious is the addition of traditional video game bosses to the series, in the tradition of Dark Souls. Big Honkin Robots that telegraph their huge attacks, but if they hit you you're toast. It makes sense that FromSoft would put these in here, between For Answer and Rubicon they made 6 soulsy games which completely defined their output for those 15 years, outside of 1 vr game and 2 more AC games. People would expect it, especially people new to this series. I just think they don't fit with the rest of the game at all, thematically or design-wise. They bring out all the clunk in the controls, they make you treat your Big Fuckoff Walking Tank like an agile little fly, and in the case of the worst offending boss, they just don't really feel like they fit in the world of AC, which usually sticks closer to hard-sci fi instead of sci fantasy.

Outside of one or two that feel right out of elden ring or sekiro with their speed and design though, the bosses are pretty doable (though they kinda crowd the missions in chapter 3). What makes them feel extra bad, though, is the ACS system, also known as the posture meter in sekiro. Basically, when you or an enemy has taken enough continuous or semi-continuous damage, you get stunned and take more damage for a sec. This is another thing that I don't really get why it's in here.

On a literal level, these are big tanks, why do they get stunned? On a gameplay level though, I just didn't find it very fun, or that they made the fights more dynamic (which I think was the purpose?). With enemies, the idea is that you keep the fire on with continuous damage until the meter is full, then you blast them when they're stunned and take more damage. But in practice, weapons like machine guns don't really do much to the meter, so you're better off using big guns all the time, in which case the meter just changes how much damage some shots do, but there's no strategy to it. And on weaker enemies the meter either feels like it doesn't do anything or protects them way too much. On yourself though, the meter has this great thing where you either forget about it or it just causes a death spiral. Get hit by the first attack or two in a combo from a boss? Great, you're now stunned and taking increased damage and can't heal up. Getting hit by almost anything else? You will never have to pay attention to this meter.

It's just weird that all of this is in here. It's not like the other AC games felt unfinished or stale? It feels more like they wanted this game to fit better with FromSoft's other output, so they added the 2010s FromSoft special in. It sucks, because literally every other part of the game is some of the best AC has ever been. It feels so much more grounded, like the world is more persistent than ever before. Locations feel more unique, the visual design is more vivid, hell chapter 1 has some really wonderful classic AC style missions to it. But the overall design feels unconsidered, like they couldn't decide if this should be a soulsy version of Armored Core or just a new Armored Core game, so it ended up like a bolted together version of both.

Maybe this won't bother you as much as it bothered me. After all, I think the souls games are good in spite of their difficulty, not because of it. But I think there's a lack of cohesion in the design, while every other part of the game is basically perfect. And that really drags it down. I guess I should be glad it's still mission based.

I also think hiding all the really cool new content behind NG++ is dumb as hell

I finally got back around to this, after getting bored with it last time I played. It's weird to play this as someone who's been playing KOTOR since I was a little kid, since it's kind of the missing link between Baldur's Gate and KOTOR. But it really feels more related to BG1 than BG2. In the same way that BG1 is a representation of how people often played AD&D 2e, and BG3 is how people play D&D 5e, NWN is how people played/still play 3e. You explore smallish maps until you find dungeons, then you go delving. There's a main quest and sidequests, but they're more often than not just excuses to get you into the areas surrounding the hub at that time. In that way it feels like an MMORPG of the time, and in a way it kind of was? Though it's not "massively multiplayer", just "multiplayer".

First of all, the game is fun. It's a 3rd person/isometric early 3d (and it's that good kinda early 3d) real time with pause VERY FAITHFUL implementation of D&D 3e, and that's just a good framework. It's a little rough around the edges, like how rests work, or how the wasd controls lock the camera to your back unless you actively swing the camera around, which is goofy when you switch targets and the camera WHIPS around. But broadly, it's fun. It's pretty well balanced as well as you go along, especially once you get out of the swingy early levels, where 1 bad roll is death. The puzzles are good, the dungeons range from good to fine, it all feels considered and, honestly, like it was pushing the genre of western RPGs forward.

One interesting way it pushed things forward was by providing a toolkit to make your own campaigns. You can just set up a server and play a custom D&D campaign with your friends, or build your own more traditional RPG campaign and put it online. Games don't usually offer toolkits like this anymore, but I imagine it created a hunger that's still satiated with modern modding scenes for popular RPGs.

Now, as far as the game's main campaign, it's kinda bunk. There's 4 chapters, and each of the first 3 has a hub and 3 or 4 areas leading off. Each area has a few dungeons and quests in it, and usually there's one big dungeon per area that's related to the main quest. And it's all just so boring and long winded. The story goes from "oh that's an interesting premise" to "it's been 15 hours since the story last moved along and even though I've focused entirely on main story dungeons" like 3 times, there's a lot of goofy sidequests but not many that feel substantial, and almost every quest, main or side, has 1 step. Go get an item, come back. It's a game of boringly contextualized fetch quests that, compared to other games with loads of fetch quests, take FOREVER. So you've got to focus entirely on the gameplay. While it's broadly good fun, the relative slowness of the mechanics really sinks in when fighting and exploring is all you're doing for 60 hours.

The last hub (and the final few dungeons after it) go a ways towards making the game more fun, but they don't fix the problems so much as they're just more interesting. The dungeons are more elaborate, more tied into the overarching story, and there's just more going on! Plus there's the best sidequest in the game, an investigation thing where you're a wrongly accused guy's lawyer. But that all brings something else into focus: Most of this game was done better in KOTOR.

KOTOR is a faster version of essentially the same gameplay, with the big twist from NWN worked into the main quest, and just much more interesting writing. Even that lawyer quest is repeated, but there's so much more dimension to it in KOTOR it's not even funny. The only reason I could see someone liking NWN's main campaign over KOTOR's is if they just don't care for Star Wars. KOTOR also doesn't have a toolkit and multiplayer like NWN does though, and that's not a small thing.

I still want to play some of the official expansions (many of which were made by other companies than Bioware), as that seems to be where people fall in love with the game. But later. For now, all I'll say is you can get the same experience as playing NWN by playing KOTOR and imagining it's all medieval and the writing is blander. But if you want more KOTOR dungeon crawling it kinda scratches that itch? Idk, make of that what you will

Uh, a few months ago I was really excited for Baldur's Gate 3, and figured I'd try Starfield out because I have gamepass, but honestly I didn't think I'd like it very much. Now, here I am, finding BG3 middling, but being able to connect with Starfield in a way Bethesda games rarely hit for me. It's certainly no perfect game, in fact it's kind of deeply flawed all over the place. But somehow it manages to have a weird charm to it, like working on an original setting gave a huge boost of life to the team over at Bethesda.

I'm actually not even sure how to talk about the game. I could put it in the context of Bethesda's other games, but there's some snags. Really, all you need to know is that it's a Bethesda game, most similar to Fallout 4, but without pretty much all of the annoyances I had with that game.

I think I'm just gonna start listing things I liked about the game.

First up, when you create a character, you get to choose a background! And a TRAIT THEY BROUGHT TRAITS BACK HELL YEAH! If you don't know, traits are something Fallout 1 and 2 and NV have that you choose at character creation, where you get a bonus depending on which trait you choose, but you also get a corresponding weakness, like if you choose Introvert you get a bonus when you don't have a companion, but a penalty when you do have one. In a similar vein, some features that are usually compulsory in Bethesda games (for example, stealth meters) aren't unlocked by default.
That's something a lot of people are gonna hate, but I'm insane so I like the specialization it implies lol. The game doesn't bring RPG stats back into Bethesda games, but it feels like with these design decisions they're trying to work real character specialization into their perk-based system.

I also just love the new setting. It's a bit firefly in parts, sure, but while it's not a crazy original setting (not to mention just how American of a setting it is), it's just lovingly thought out. Honestly, I wish less effort had gone into the game's scale, and more had gone into crafting these cities and towns and the cultures that inhabit them. Then maybe they would've broken the mold a bit more, or maybe there would have been a less cliched faction. Still, what's here feels like it was done with love.

I also just loved some of the companions here, which isn't something I usually like about Bethesda games? I liked the detective guy in Fallout 4 I guess? Here though, there were solidly 3 or 4 I really liked, and my favorite two made some events in the game hit so much harder than they could've. I think having the companions also be your crew makes it easier to form relationships with them, to get to know them, and it really helps the game.

The plot's not that much of a plot, but I do love that it's one of the few times where, rather than just being a save the world/chosen one-style plot, this really puts exploration first. And I mean, every game from this company should do that. It's the whole draw of their games! There's also some light philosophical questions and interesting lore-history diving threaded throughout, which is great cuz that's my SHIT! Even if the philosophy was pretty shallow. I appreciated the effort lol.

Honestly if this wasn't set on being a game where you can explore an entire galaxy, and was instead like a bit bigger than The Outer Worlds, with all the extra effort going into varied stories and maps instead of just more. But that's AAA game dev for ya I guess.

Anyways, I really wasn't expecting to get so into this game. It's bloated in exactly the way you think it is, and there's tons of systems that aren't there for anything besides customizability. You can go through the game without interacting with the ship builder, or the outpost builder. The core experience though, that's what's really strong I think. The themeing, the design, hell the writing is the best they've had in years. If you want to play an explorer of the cosmos, you could not do much better. Just know that's not the same thing as actually exploring the cosmos.

Bleh. This is the most bleh crpg I've bothered to finish. Crazy production values it might have, but to what end?

The implementation of 5th edition here is slow and clunky, and incredibly unforgiving, even on the lowest difficulty. Sure, it's tactically interesting, but combat takes forever and is filled with tons of tiny little annoyances, and honestly far too swingy for a modern AAA game. Even Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil, which sports a very similar combat system (though it's 3.5 instead of 5) feels faster, though it suffers from many of the same issues regarding clunk. Even rolling skills in dialogue is slow as hell, even when you skip the main part of the animation it's just leagues slower than any other game I've played. The dice rolling animation is cute the first time but my god does it drag on the 500th time.

One thing ToEE didn't suffer from that this does, though, is camera issues! The camera's kinda goofy. When you zoom in, it tries to pull behind your character a bit (or just provide a cinematic viewpoint), but when you zoom out it angles flatter, to be a tactical camera. It only zooms out so far though, and just loves to get stuck on the multileveled terrain battlefields, which are a good idea in concept but really just feel annoying, partially because of this camera.

The world is beautifully realized, but feels a bit off, at least from my idea of the forgotten realms. It's been Larianized, I guess? No matter how serious things got, there was just this undercurrent of lightheartedness. Not as bad as their other games, but still not great. The maps don't really draw you in any direction, which made my pass through the underdark feel pretty aimless. It's got a bit of that quest-marker driven map design in it, I guess.

Finally, the story is interesting. Not as a narrative, it's pretty weak, but as an exercise in making a story that adapts to your players. That's the real strength here, right? The game lets you take many different paths through the story, and even story-critical moments are wildly variable. That's a lot of work to build, and it worked out, but not really to the benefit of the story. Player agency is crazy high, but as such the story feels meaningless, just a set of events you go through. The companion stories are a bit better, their issue is kind of a Marvelly quippy writing style (though again, less so than previous games of Larian's).

I've probably been a bit over-mean in this review, so lemme list some things I liked: Being able to go into turn based mode at any time, following multiple sidequest threads in Baldur's Gate (the city), the Gauntlet of Shar dungeon (minus the trials), most of the story beats around ketheric thorm. It's a well made game, it's just horribly uneven and imo hampered by some large issues

It just felt like an exercise in recreating the experience of playing 5e at the table, with a little bit less math and a story that, while free, still can't match the adaptability of a GM or something. It's a frustrating, often unbalanced game, and although it occasionally falls into stride (the city of baldur's gate was fun, though not really well split up) I finished the game glad it was over, with the feeling that nothing here really meant anything, no matter how pretty it looked or free it felt.

Just play fucking 5e