cybermodules
132 reviews liked by cybermodules
MediEvil
1998
When I originally played this as a youngin', I only had the demo on one of those Pizza Hut demo discs they used to give out to people. It used to be scary to me and I had no idea that it was a comedy game. After playing it again in 2022, I realized that it was a comedy game and actually laughed a good amount of times. It's got a lot to do and an interesting story to go along with it.
Don't shoot them, they just want to be friends :(
Ultrakill
2020
Bought and refunded it like 3 times, 4th time was the charm and this game clicked for me, New Blood continues to work wonders. The world is not ready for when this game is actually finished.
I mean this in the nicest way possible: I would LOVE to see if the creators chilled out a bit. The game's fine and a challenging mystery but I constantly think about the description on the Turnabout Substitution website that's like "the standard ALL ace attorney games should be measured against."
Calm the FUCK down, dude.
Calm the FUCK down, dude.
My fifth and final run took me only 4 hours and 16 minutes. This game is in my top 10 for sure, possibly Top 5.
Sidenote/PSA:
DO NOT UNEQUIP THE P.R.L. 412 IF YOU ARE USING IT IN A NEW GAME+ RUN. IT WILL CRASH YOUR GAME IF YOU RE-EQUIP IT.
Sidenote/PSA:
DO NOT UNEQUIP THE P.R.L. 412 IF YOU ARE USING IT IN A NEW GAME+ RUN. IT WILL CRASH YOUR GAME IF YOU RE-EQUIP IT.
Hogwarts Legacy
2023
I'll start with the positive: The combat system is kinetic, satisfying, and has more depth than I expected from such a casual-facing AAA release. In a game so clearly built upon the open-world mold, this is the one part they truly innovated and improved upon Papa Skyrim.
Hogwarts is a boring and bloated Wizarding World pastiche of the open world game we already tired of five years ago. It's clear that the Western response to the insane innovation in this genre from Japan (Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring) is to serve us more of the same in a risk-averse, brand-dependent fashion.
To be honest, I'm enough of a Harry Potter fan that if this game was Skyrim clone with the pristinely spooky vibe of the source material, I would be satisfied. However, Hogwarts Legacy seldom feels like stepping into the world of Harry Potter as much as it feels like a Unreal Engine 5 wizard tech demo that just happens to really look like Hogwarts.
One of the most important parts of the Hogwarts fantasy is how charmingly inconvenient the wizarding world is. You can misspeak during a Floo Powder teleportation and end up in the completely wrong place, and "friendly" monsters will turn right around and feed you to their children if you are stupid enough to waltz into their den. A school filled with students learning magic is obviously rampant with bullying, cheating, and has secrets around every corner. The sheer unpredictability of Rowling's world creates the magic and wonder of the books and movies, which is the largest incongruence with the Western AAA Open-World, a genre determined to be as convenient to the user as possible. In a source fiction already rife with inconsistencies, Hogwarts Legacy impresses me with how often it manages to trip it's own immersion to keep the experience absolutely painless. House rivalries are irrelevant because everybody wants to be your friend within a single dialogue tree. On top of all this, you happen to be the master of an ancient powerful magic that nobody else can wield because of course.
Even the combat, which I had a good impression of, gets stale when this game is stretched out to Witcher 3 length without a Witcher 3 level of content variety. The enemies are fun and in-theme, but they all feel like what should be starter enemies in a better action game. Each of them also has a very clear best answer to deal with them, which can Revelio how similar individual encounters are to each other.
Design innovation be damned, combat variety be damned, interesting open world be damned... truly, the only thing I actually wanted this game to do was take me back to being a kid, turning pages under my blanket at night, completely transported to this wizarding world. Yet as an adult, I feel substantially more babied than the games my 8-year-old little brother plays. In the journey to make Hogwarts a painless AAA open world experience, they have created a game without any of the magic that made this IP special in the first place.
Hogwarts is a boring and bloated Wizarding World pastiche of the open world game we already tired of five years ago. It's clear that the Western response to the insane innovation in this genre from Japan (Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring) is to serve us more of the same in a risk-averse, brand-dependent fashion.
To be honest, I'm enough of a Harry Potter fan that if this game was Skyrim clone with the pristinely spooky vibe of the source material, I would be satisfied. However, Hogwarts Legacy seldom feels like stepping into the world of Harry Potter as much as it feels like a Unreal Engine 5 wizard tech demo that just happens to really look like Hogwarts.
One of the most important parts of the Hogwarts fantasy is how charmingly inconvenient the wizarding world is. You can misspeak during a Floo Powder teleportation and end up in the completely wrong place, and "friendly" monsters will turn right around and feed you to their children if you are stupid enough to waltz into their den. A school filled with students learning magic is obviously rampant with bullying, cheating, and has secrets around every corner. The sheer unpredictability of Rowling's world creates the magic and wonder of the books and movies, which is the largest incongruence with the Western AAA Open-World, a genre determined to be as convenient to the user as possible. In a source fiction already rife with inconsistencies, Hogwarts Legacy impresses me with how often it manages to trip it's own immersion to keep the experience absolutely painless. House rivalries are irrelevant because everybody wants to be your friend within a single dialogue tree. On top of all this, you happen to be the master of an ancient powerful magic that nobody else can wield because of course.
Even the combat, which I had a good impression of, gets stale when this game is stretched out to Witcher 3 length without a Witcher 3 level of content variety. The enemies are fun and in-theme, but they all feel like what should be starter enemies in a better action game. Each of them also has a very clear best answer to deal with them, which can Revelio how similar individual encounters are to each other.
Design innovation be damned, combat variety be damned, interesting open world be damned... truly, the only thing I actually wanted this game to do was take me back to being a kid, turning pages under my blanket at night, completely transported to this wizarding world. Yet as an adult, I feel substantially more babied than the games my 8-year-old little brother plays. In the journey to make Hogwarts a painless AAA open world experience, they have created a game without any of the magic that made this IP special in the first place.
Hogwarts Legacy
2023
This review contains spoilers
Spoiler review so I can dig into why exactly the plot is antisemitic and why you can't "just ignore" it.
The TLDR is that the game's about stopping a goblin rebellion, which we already knew from the trailers. The trailers also included a scene where the main villain goblin and dark wizard talk about kidnapping the player, calling on the antisemitic trope of blood libel.
Well we now have the full context, and it gets so much worse:
The dark wizard Rookwood (no subtleties here as that's the name of one of the Death Eaters in the original series, guess the whole families evil) cursed Anne, the companion characters sister, and framed the goblins for it. This out of context truth is most likely what people will use to say "see the games not antisemitic, the goblins were framed" but this is just backstory for one character and the rest of the game still exist.
While not completely new to the series (offhandedly mentioned like 2 times in the books) this game is the first time anyone learns what exactly "ancient magic" is. Ancient magic is apparently a substance that can be extracted from the body, and apparently extracting it is believed to be a form of "pain relief". Not dissimilar from medieval "therapies" of bloodletting and leeching. The antisemitic blood libel doesn't end with the goblins: In the game's backstory a former Hogwarts professor Isidora Morganach discovered how to tap into "ancient magic" by extracting it from her students. Isidora became addicted to "ancient magic" and made many magic repositories which you can find throughout the game. In the present the player character is someone who has "ancient magic", this is why the goblins and dark wizards want to kidnap you.
The goblins who teamed up with Rookwood are rebelling because the wizards don't give them equal rights, like wand use. As I said in my previous review this along with wizards trying to enslave goblins as "house elves" is already a part of the series' lore for their many rebellions. The game also adds little details like goblin artifacts that are eerily similar to Jewish cultural items, and past rebellions lining up perfectly with real world antisemitic genocides. And of course the final boss of the game is the "evil leader" of the goblin Ronrok who uses all the "ancient magic" to transform into a dragon, as if evil bankers wasn't enough. A better writer would maybe have Rookwood be the final boss after revealing he was just using Ronrok and the goblins plight to his own ends, to marginally make the story better (but not by much). But that wouldn't be in the spirit of the franchise now would it? And like I said in my other review, it's a prequel, they can't actually make any meaningful change to the status of the non-human sapient magical beings without breaking continuity with the original series.
Sure if only one of these were true (and the context of the books and creator didn't exist) it would most likely be an unfortunate (gross) coincidence. But that's not the case.
With Harry Potter you can argue the antisemitism is not a huge part of the books (but still a major issue) but with this game the antisemitism is at the core of its identity. The devs didn't have to quadruple down and add all this, but not surprising that the lead dev was a gamer gater before being booted.
You can't remove this game from its antisemitism and you can't remove this franchise from its creators' bigotry and political views.
Go read "Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus" by Chuck Tingle
The TLDR is that the game's about stopping a goblin rebellion, which we already knew from the trailers. The trailers also included a scene where the main villain goblin and dark wizard talk about kidnapping the player, calling on the antisemitic trope of blood libel.
Well we now have the full context, and it gets so much worse:
The dark wizard Rookwood (no subtleties here as that's the name of one of the Death Eaters in the original series, guess the whole families evil) cursed Anne, the companion characters sister, and framed the goblins for it. This out of context truth is most likely what people will use to say "see the games not antisemitic, the goblins were framed" but this is just backstory for one character and the rest of the game still exist.
While not completely new to the series (offhandedly mentioned like 2 times in the books) this game is the first time anyone learns what exactly "ancient magic" is. Ancient magic is apparently a substance that can be extracted from the body, and apparently extracting it is believed to be a form of "pain relief". Not dissimilar from medieval "therapies" of bloodletting and leeching. The antisemitic blood libel doesn't end with the goblins: In the game's backstory a former Hogwarts professor Isidora Morganach discovered how to tap into "ancient magic" by extracting it from her students. Isidora became addicted to "ancient magic" and made many magic repositories which you can find throughout the game. In the present the player character is someone who has "ancient magic", this is why the goblins and dark wizards want to kidnap you.
The goblins who teamed up with Rookwood are rebelling because the wizards don't give them equal rights, like wand use. As I said in my previous review this along with wizards trying to enslave goblins as "house elves" is already a part of the series' lore for their many rebellions. The game also adds little details like goblin artifacts that are eerily similar to Jewish cultural items, and past rebellions lining up perfectly with real world antisemitic genocides. And of course the final boss of the game is the "evil leader" of the goblin Ronrok who uses all the "ancient magic" to transform into a dragon, as if evil bankers wasn't enough. A better writer would maybe have Rookwood be the final boss after revealing he was just using Ronrok and the goblins plight to his own ends, to marginally make the story better (but not by much). But that wouldn't be in the spirit of the franchise now would it? And like I said in my other review, it's a prequel, they can't actually make any meaningful change to the status of the non-human sapient magical beings without breaking continuity with the original series.
Sure if only one of these were true (and the context of the books and creator didn't exist) it would most likely be an unfortunate (gross) coincidence. But that's not the case.
With Harry Potter you can argue the antisemitism is not a huge part of the books (but still a major issue) but with this game the antisemitism is at the core of its identity. The devs didn't have to quadruple down and add all this, but not surprising that the lead dev was a gamer gater before being booted.
You can't remove this game from its antisemitism and you can't remove this franchise from its creators' bigotry and political views.
Go read "Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus" by Chuck Tingle
Hi-Fi Rush
2023
From self-aware yet high-spirited attitude to the soundtrack curated by a person with the deepest 2004 taste palette, this is such a refreshing 2000s piece. It's so impressive how the commitment to the beat isn't just an enhancement to presentation — it's your guide in combat, the one that trains you to discern visual and audio cues, restricts button mashing, makes long strings of attacks a commitment; in other words, it teaches you how to play a spectacle action game! And for the price of admission there's a lot of game here, by no means it's less substantial than Bayonettas and Devil May Cries of the world. Simply a tremendous surprise.
And to all people saying Tango finally made a good game: maybe it's time to recognize that Tango was always good.
And to all people saying Tango finally made a good game: maybe it's time to recognize that Tango was always good.
Hogwarts Legacy
2023
As if the transphobic baggage, antisemitism and anti-worker rhetoric weren't bad enough, it's the worst aspects of AAA game design distilled into one unseasoned and flavorless package.
Hogwarts Legacy
2023
hot garbage
