25th Ward little story expansion, won't take you more than 15 minutes to read if you are decent at reading. This is just a fangame recreation of the manga, which is also translated by fans.

I'd rather recommend you reading the manga first since it has more illustrations and is more visually appealing overall. Text is considerably slower than either 25th or TSC too.

It's a nice fan tribute to the games themselves, artstyle and uniqueness but again just read the manga. There is a character that will end up appearing in No More Heroes 3, which is part of the greenout chapter and this is her first appearance with a little origin story. It reminded me a little of 25th Placebo very last chapter, just way shorter.

Only recommended in case...you want to hear the music while reading? Filling the gaps will be way harder without the illustrations. If you are curious, give it a try.

I don't feel it's controversial to say this - we are living in the worst era of video games in the medium’s history. In this post-creative type age, AAA games are designed by corporate committees, the bleeding hearts and artists chained to their whim. Here's $10 billion dollars, make a game. Your livelihoods are threatened if it falls beneath our expectations, except not really because we're going to lay off 60% of your team anyway after launch. We want a remake of an old classic of yours now that we've bought the rights from your old publisher - we'll give you no more than five years to finish regurgitating the same game you made in a fifth of the time two decades ago but your game will still come out unpolished, unappreciated, your bloody hands and dried tear ducts for naught. We're your new publishers, we're looking for a change of pace from your streak of critically acclaimed titles - we feel a live service game will be more beneficial to us. We’ll be looking into layoffs and a potential merger if the Metacritic score doesn’t meet our expectations. It cannot be understated or made any clearer - the bubble is not about to burst; the bubble is bursting.

It goes without saying, and there is no exception in this day and age, that if a AAA game is good, it is good in spite of any grievous sins it commits. LEGO 2K Drive is a fun arcade racer. LEGO 2K Drive also costs $60 USD, has five consecutive battle passes each locked behind their own purchase, and in-game currency is drip-fed at a consistency I’ve seen more generous in Korean F2P mobile games.

What is the point of sending obviously hardworking, dedicated game developers to this critical death? Why must creative teams have to be chained to the ankles of executives uninterested in art form - merging, dissolving, firing developers at will off the weights of failures not their own? 2K Drive is fun. Undoubtedly. The divide between the joy of its loving arcadey gameplay and creative spirit to the horror of its fleshy, bleeding abscess of finance-leeching rotting flesh is too palpable. Though leeching it does, because after some time the imbalance grows too great.

User-made custom car creations are downloadable in-game in its current state, but I distinctly remember why publisher 2K had to announce this wasn’t planned to be before release, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone. What’s the point in creating if you can’t share with the world? The answer became obvious almost immediately when looking within. Why do I get 10 Brickbux for getting a gold medal in a challenge, and 50 when winning a race, when a fucking cosmetic car costs 10,000? Oh, that’s an easy answer, because you’d have no reason to be pressed to pay real money to boost your in-game currency if you could just download the cool user-created stuff online. This isn’t counting the five consecutive battle passes. This game also costs $60.

2K Drive’s progression is, by design, torturous, but its gameplay is at a clear odds from it. Cars handle well, its challenge missions engaging and varied, its races variably frantic and exciting, its story a cute and charming melting parody pot of racing story tropes. Despite finding myself growing more and more averse to the tired trend of open world games, this is where the divide is drawn with mile-wide crayon - it’s fun. The plainness of its formula is upended by the sheer joy of absurdity it relishes in - barreling through structures, rocketing through explosions of thousands of LEGO pieces both structural and minifigure (yes, you can just mow down pedestrians in this, it’s hilarious), pun-riddled dialogue both confident as it is surprisingly more endearing than annoying (something I think the LEGO games have always been good at). Unfortunately, its wholehearted spirit is progressively crushed the more time you invest, because you're expected to invest as much money as you do your own time into 2K Drive. Progression stagnates, incentives are diminished, and the only joy you can wring out after you feel closed off completely is just enjoying the online races yourself, outside of the story mode. Oh wait, no you can't, because the online also barely works.

You don’t need to stretch your neck out very far to see the state of the way multimedia is being curated today, and you don’t need a third eye and an all-encompassing andromedatic galaxy brain to see how much art today is dictated by committee - this is just the most obvious its ever looked. Underneath its Financial Terror Shield is a game that’s struggling to exist - an honest core, crying by itself, to just be a game. We’re undoubtedly worse off now, but this game wouldn’t even be much different 10 years ago. Its future also feels all too certain, being under the reins of many alike a publisher more eager to kill off a game’s entire service before they’ll let it live indefinitely without profit. It’s not just developers who’ve been demoralized and dehumanized throughout this process - you are also no longer a fan. You are a demographic, a consumer, a target market, complicit either way you look at it. If you need any further proof of the post-post times we live in, 7 companies have laid off their employees in the week I spent writing this on and off, and it’s only a matter of time before every brick in this failing structure is put back in its box. The most radical action a consumer can perform today is to download a user-made LEGO rendition of the Flintstone's Flintmobile off the content shop and not spend their actual Brickbux on the corporate-mandated seasonal coupes, and hope that when the last brick falls, we can all put a hand towards rebuilding.

This game is Quadruple Ass.

I am so glad I don't have to play this at launch. I played the open beta and an even earlier version about 6 months ago. The two versions were identical, and all accounts are saying that nothing has changed from the beta and the final game meaning I can talk about what I played.

That is, to say, a baffling regression from the 11-year-old AC: Black Flag. A game where 95% of all actions are done in your ship, only stepping out at specific ports to buy items and accept menial side quests. A game where you do all of the combat, exploration, and SURVIVAL MECHANICS in your ship. A truly baffling game that is so clearly limping out of development hell, and you can see it in every aspect of the game.

You can tell this game was going to have some sort of story at some point, but it just.. doesn't. I sometimes complain about RPGs that have a main quest that feels like a bunch of side quests duct-taped together but that's LITERALLY what this is. There is no overarching storyline, no interesting characters, NOTHING. Just awkwardly presented window dressing for you to do boring open-world quests that either ask you to find some materials kill a couple of ships or some flavor of those two.

It doesn't help that the game doesn't look that great either. There are moments where the visuals look pleasing like during a sunset, but the closer you are to the visuals the crustier and less defined they look, made all the worse when you see just how BUGGY this game is. There were so many opportunities to fix the bugs from the previous times I've played this game and we got NOTHING. Audio bugs, visual bugs, frame drops, server crashes, game crashes, the whole shebang. I have reported at least 8 of the bugs that still show up in the final product of this $70 Quadruple-A game.

The open-world and survival bullshit is not frustrating, but it is incredibly monotonous. Ship controls are generally janky and the process of mining for loot, using it to upgrade your ship, and increasing your infamy level CAN be super rewarding if it weren't for several baffling design decisions like the fact that you have to do ALL of that in your ship. But the other big one is that.. that's the extent of the game.

It's not deep enough to invest all your time into, but it takes the place of an interesting story, actual quests that mean anything, out-of-ship exploration, all of it. While it may have some nice music and there are brief moments where the stars align and the gameplay loop is decently engaging and interesting, it just doesn't make up for everything that was lost. It's just an objectively lesser version of a PART of Black Flag, stuffed with microtransactions and shoved onto stores for $70. What an embarrassing turnout from Ubisoft.