I was actually set up and ready to play Super Mario Sunshine for the first time, but it came to my realization that my Mario 3D All-Stars collection was missing out of its case. It turns out that the likely reason why it’s gone is because my nephew swiped it while he was here last, meaning that my LIMITED RELEASE 3D All-Stars copy was stolen. Look, he’s just a kid and I’ll probably see him again later so I may have a chance to get it back. I’m really not mad or anything, it’s just that the next time I see him I’ll probably be whipping Kung Lao’s hat at him instead of Mario’s. Until then though, I needed to find something else to play…

With Mario still on the brain, I had Odyssey basically screaming for me to finally let it out. It’s supposedly nothing like Mario Sunshine but I wouldn’t know anyways. The only 3D Mario I’ve played is Mario Galaxy, so I wagered it would play similarly in that direction instead. What I do know is that when I said I would be playing Mario Sunshine, it was met with tomatoes and thunderous BOOOOOOs. After changing plans to this, the mood instantly shifted to cute rainbows, hugs, and smiles. hotpoppah will remember this. Not sure what caused the hate in their hearts, but I guess I’ll take this situation as fate dealt to me by God himself.

I could be wrong, but this has got to be the most unhinged game in the entire series. Bowser has hit an all-time rock bottom, destroying civilizations in order to force a wedding onto a non-consenting Princess Peach. Mario’s whole gimmick is possessing the bodies of enemies, demolishing their bones in order to platform through natural disasters and discarding them into the ocean. This game has huge TikTok energy. It starts at a 100 right at the gate, then tosses you into the first world where the mechanics are kinda just thrown in your face. The camera’s whipping around like a CCTV monitor. The game’s just giving Moons out like it’s Halloween candy. Holy shit, is that a realistic DINOSAUR? I have so many questions and not enough answers, but it doesn’t matter baby, we’re cruising like it’s NASCAR. I don’t know what the fuck all the rush is, but boy is it cool as shit flicking your way around Metropolis.

New Donk City? This game made me feel like I could Donk anything. It was very easy. Sorry kiddies, I’m the better Super Mario Odyssey player. It really says something when you’re 3,654,844th place in Jump-Rope and yet there are still thousands of children behind you on the leaderboard. Maybe try a little harder next time! But real talk though, why are some levels like 4 seconds long? We can discuss and argue battle mechanics or bosses all damn day, but just the slightest diverging path will net you so many extra Moons for nothing that you can just straight up leave the level as soon as the boss is defeated. Sure, you don’t have to leave as soon as possible, but once you’re 3 worlds deep trying to absorb the area for what it is, you kinda realize that a lot of Moons are just the same puzzle or mini-game in every World. It slightly makes up for it in the post-game where you can re-fight the bosses and run around in Mario 64’s version of Disney Land, depending on who you are. I bet this was awesome for long-time fans, but for me it was like I was invited to the retirement party of some guy I barely knew.

I finished the game with 180 Moons though, 220 with some Mushroom Kingdom exploration. If you think I’m collecting 500 total just to unlock what I assume will just be a cock and ball torture level, you’ve been Donked one too many times. I’m sure it’s easier than it sounds with how the game just gives you Moons for breathing, but it’s the easiness of the collection that made the whole process sound so mind-numbing to me. It’s fantastic and amazing when the set pieces and bosses are all coming together, but boring as shit when you’re just buying Stars in bundles or looking for spots to ground pound. I don’t want to do that shit!!!

On another note, the music in this game slaps but it’s weird that there’s so many long stretches of levels where there is no music at all. Mario is half naked, nipples out on the beach but all you can hear is the sound of seagulls and waves hitting the coast line. It was a very surreal experience that I don’t ever want to feel again. Other than that, fine. It was fun. I finally have another Mario game under my belt, and it was mostly just as good as everyone says it is.

I gotta go though, someone just popped my balloon. When I fucking get you, Splatoon profile picture.

Make no mistake, Dead Island can be a fun game, but it is by no means a good game. I originally played this when it came out and I remember having a good time with it, but having played it again after playing Dead Island 2, it’s pretty safe to say that this game is literal poo poo doo doo. However, it is still kinda fun if you allow it to take you for a ride. With that I mean, play this in co-op only. Dead Island is a series that is hard carried by its multiplayer aspects. Without them, this game is a huge slog for a multitude of reasons. It’s got pretty terrible balancing issues, horrible skill trees, horrendous audio, bad traversal, boring quests, and a confusingly shallow plotline that gets made easier to handle with the more friends you play it with.

Every year for my birthday I get a little co-op session going with my friends and this year, Dead Island was the chosen one. With 4 main characters that appear in each cutscene, we needed to play it the way it was meant to be played, with each of us playing as each one. After some convincing, we managed to pull it off. Two of them were ready to rumble, not really knowing what they were getting themselves into, while the third was begging for a sniper to take him out the whole time. I allowed them to pick their characters before choosing my own since I was the one player who had already beaten the game. Somehow I still ended up playing as Xian, who is bananas busted in comparison to the other three characters. For some reason, they decided that each character would be an expert in different combat styles and nothing really else. So while Xian and Sam B. are really good at using sharp and blunt weapons respectively, Purna is better at shooting the guns and Logan is good at…. um.. throwing objects.

While you may think that shooting guns is a good skill to have, this game just does not allow you to obtain a single gun until like 50% of the way into the game. Even then, it’s still extremely hard to find ammo and the guns are unusable most of the time. Blunt and sharp weapons are littered all over the place, and with Xian and Sam’s skill trees favoring damage and critical chance success, they’re easily the two characters that are skewed in favor of having the most fun out of everyone. It’s this initial kneecapping right at the start of the game that would probably taint the perception you’d have playing this game in single-player. Without this knowledge, you might pick either Purna or Logan and then realize you’re in too deep once the going gets going. Logan is actually able to deal some heavy damage with his throws, but my friend ran into this bug constantly where his weapons would just disappear upon impact. He’d be left empty handed more often than not, even with the boomerang skill maxed out. The plus side to multiplayer is that a lot of this ends up not mattering in the slightest. What would be a slog to get through by yourself, immediately becomes a speedrun with friends. The game will throw a big boss at you and the four of you will just beat him to death like a group of cavemen swinging sticks on an animal.

The one thing that multiplayer can’t really save though is the annoying as shit fetch quests that plague every story beat of this game. It’s fine in the beginning when you’re in the resort area, still getting your bearings, but the same fetch quests that John Sinamoi gives you are the same fetch quests that every other character will give you moving forward. “Hey, you four morons, can you please go to the warehouse outside and kill the zombies and grab some gasoline canisters for me pretty please?” No bitch, do it yourself!!! Each act has literally the same mission progression: show up confused, travel across the map multiple times to get supplies for a group of survivors you meet, go on a rescue escort mission, come back to the survivors having been mauled to death while you were gone, leave the area, and rinse and repeat. Two times is okay, but three and four…? It gets pretty monotonous. Dead Island is at its best in the first act, where you’re exploring the resort area. There’s something kind of metal about the whole blood in the sand, sunny beach vibes ruined by zombies that kinda hits different for me. I think at the time of its release, it was the first piece of zombie media to go there as it’s setting and it’s still really cool now, just hitting home how outrageously horrific a zombie outbreak could be while it’s descending on unsuspecting beachgoers on vacation who were having the time of their lives like day ago. Unfortunately, you only spend like a good hour and a half during this portion of the game because the characters eventually leave to these less interesting and gross looking maps afterwards.

Once you hit Act II, the game drops off hard. It’s just these really drab looking sewers, prisons, ugly jungles, and endless hallways that you’re constantly walking back and forth through. Even in the Definitive Edition it all still looks really ugly. It makes the fetch quests stand out even worse as the maps grow larger, you’re having to traverse further for the same quest but with different supplies, forcing you to walk through the sewers more times than legally allowed. The outside traversal will most likely be done by some of the most difficult to drive vehicles as well. You can walk, but it’ll take forever so there’s no point but to give up and just have someone ride that whip into the sunset, over and over again, constantly crashing it into trees and random blockades. There are some horrible oversights that come with this though. The cars only have 4 seats to adapt to the amount of potential players, but the escort missions don’t account for that. You’ll need the NPC to have a seat, which meant that 1 poor schmuck was hauling ass on foot behind us instead. This would be mitigated sometimes by the game allowing the stragglers to fast travel to the other players, but only when a main quest was about to take place, otherwise they’d be left behind. We also ran into this really annoying issue where everyone would body block each other in small hallways, which is definitely bound to happen in the later acts. Someone would just sit in a doorway and AFK as a joke while everyone else was left screaming in the room they were stuck in. You’d open a door to find an explodey zombie and perish because your friends are standing in the way.

Luckily, death is kind of just a suggestion in these games. The great thing about Dead Island is that when you die, you respawn back into the action rather quickly, instead of being sent back to a save from hours ago or having to rewatch the cutscenes. You get a little countdown and then blip back into existence just a short distance away. It’s nice because it allows you the freedom to just full send yourself right into a group of enemies and try again. The only real downside to death is that you lose a percentage of the money you’ve found laying around. There’s unfortunately a currency system in this game and its economy is kind of wild. Money is not hard to find at all, but it is a pain in the ass to lose like $3,000 because you slipped off a cliff. You can use the money to buy new weapons or crafting materials, but you also need it to repair and upgrade them for some reason. The weapon durability varies and some items are expensive as shit to maintain, so to lose a huge chunk of your money is pretty annoying. The game does give you a crap ton of weapons to work with though and you’ll likely be swapping your inventory out every once in a while anyways. This is a system that is just done better in Dead Island 2 though. Modifying the weapons is cool, if only for a moment. Electrifying or combusting the enemies is useful as it keeps them stunned, but the damage can also be self-inflicting. You’ll be swinging on an enemy nutty style, then die because your friend shot it with an explosive fire bullet. It’s just awful how much your co-op partners can get in the way sometimes, and I’m sure playing this with randoms back then was probably a nightmare of endless trolling.

When the four of us finished the game and the sound of Sam B.’s famous “Who do you voodoo, BITCH?” overtook our headphones, I asked them what they thought, only to be met with 10 seconds of raw deafening silence. They didn’t even know what they just witnessed. The gameplay was okay and getting through this with friends was an experience I’m sure we’ll cherish together like a couple of friends sharing survivor’s guilt after an accident, the overall consensus was mass confusion and I don’t really blame them. This game’s “story” is held together with band-aids and chewing gum. The core 4 characters only get shit done because everyone else you run into is extremely stupid, just doing the most moronic things for seemingly zero reason at all. For every dumb thing that happens in this game, there were like 5 smarter alternative solutions you could come up with almost instantaneously, but that’s just how it is on this bitch of an Earth!!! The cutscenes teleport the characters around in ways only magic could pull off, with random moments of tension just ending abruptly. The characters are just unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant and it tries to be serious the whole time, with nothing injected to give it a bit more life or breathing room. They don’t emote in any way at all, so something will happen and they’ll just kind of look like a deer in the headlights. You know you’re supposed to be upset because the emotional piano music is playing, but Purna’s eyes are looking in two different directions, so the whole thing ends up being funny instead. Now compare all of this to the most clickbait trailer ever and you can see why a lot of people think this game is diarrhea. Dead Island 2 really leaned hard on the comedic aspects that I think worked fairly well for it, but here there is no joy. It’s all “We gotta get out of here!!” impatience at the cost of not giving a shit about anything else going on, which makes meeting all the other characters pointless. Xian is the only character with glimpses of compassion written into her, but there’s a point in the story where a side character gets sexually assaulted off screen and all 4 characters, including Xian, are verbally just like, “Well, if you weren’t such a bozo idiot then this wouldn’t have happened!!” Huh???

It’s a story that does a lot more telling than showing. You’ll appear at an area where everyone was killed by zombies and a lone survivor will just explain to you what happened. You don’t actually see any sort of conflict that is inflicted on anyone aside from the ones in the core 4’s vicinity, so there’s no reason to really care for what happens. Those events are just vessels to shuffle them off to the next area and never see those characters again. Oh, what about the origins of the virus? How’d this even happen? Oh, someone just quickly explains it to you while you escort them and have your dick pounded by an onslaught of zombies. You can’t just show anything, it all has to be explained in the worst way possible so that you don’t even retain anything being said to you anyways. Jin is the only character that follows the party for the majority of the game and is given some weird emotional pseudo-arc, but it all falls flat when she’s just rendered as the game’s sentient storage unit who adds nothing else. She doesn’t help the character’s in any way, shape, or form, and the characters don’t have anything nice to say about her either. It doesn’t help that while escorting her, she bugs out and freezes in place randomly, so you can despise her in that way too!

Speaking of, there are a lot of weird buggy issues with this game. I’m pretty positive that the Definitive Edition fixed a lot of those issues, but there are some that are still prevalent. I remember in the original it was really easy to dupe and glitch the hell out of the damage modifiers on the weapons, and I’m not sure if that’s fixed or not but it was crazy being able to do millions of damage back then. I already mentioned Logan and Jin’s issues, but there were also some problems where zombies would just kinda disappear and then come back, or they’d phase through walls. The most grating issue for me though was that the audio mixing was shitting itself the whole time. For some reason whenever someone shot a gun or landed a critical attack, it would sound like someone played the metal pipe sound effect everytime. I don’t even know how else to describe it, it just sounded like they were hitting metal on metal when it should have been more of a flesh sounding injury. It’s just odd. The game overall looks so much nicer in the definitive edition, but the stand out is still the resort area. That part looks amazing and the rest of the game is just hampered down by some really boring set pieces after that. The original used to have this vaseline filter over the top of it and it was thankfully removed here. It did however come at the cost of removing the paper quests that the NPCs would give you, which I thought added a little charm to this rather charmless game.

I do have to mention though that something about the FOV or general visual is so off in this game too. Specifically when your character is sprinting, the screen becomes filtered and shaky. I had to turn off motion blur and adjust all my other settings because it was making me motion sick, which has never happened to me in a game before. I had to nibble on some snacks while I played to prevent it from ending my life early, so watch out for that if you have a weak stomach for first-person POV games, or just avoid it entirely.

I don’t despise this game at all, in fact I still found a lot of fun with this playthrough. It is just simply not a good game, but I would qualify it as circulating back to the “good kind of bad” in some way. There’s a reason why it’s considered a bit of a cult classic. I can’t in good faith give it a higher rating just because having friends makes it a little less awful though. However, If you’re gonna eat some dog shit, you might as well eat dog shit with some company. And hey! It could have been a lot worse. We could have been playing Dead Island: Riptide instead. Now there’s an idea for next year 🤔.

Pretty creative bit of storytelling through the lens of unpacking boxes over a multitude of years spanning the invisible protagonist's life. The organization of the items coming out of the box does a neat job at implying subtleties of what the protagonist is probably thinking or having to deal with in the moment. There's one level that pulls this off really well, while the rest are moreso the same.

It was fun, but really short and I think it would have benefitted a lot from being longer. I don't mind that the story ends on a wholesome note, but it does showcase the character's highs a lot more than their lows, and it would have been nice if there were like 2 extra levels that dealt with that part of the story a bit more. I don't need them to be outrageously depressed, but it kinda seemed like their life was exaggeratingly perfect almost the entire time. Give me some more layers to work with! Other than that, it's a pretty sweet game and a small morsel to enjoy.

It's finally done..

I find it so comically ironic that this game takes place near Christmas, a time of capitalistic soul sucking. Where sales and profit are at the utmost high and workers are treated like shit, devilishly masking itself under the innocence of child-like Christmas Santa Claus and snow flurry wonder. Dead Rising 4 could not be anymore soulless, just a pure husk of what once was. And it wasn’t even planned to be the last of the last, since this game’s horrible reception wasn’t even enough to stop Capcom Vancouver from continuing on like nothing had happened. Apparently not by their own volition, but Papa Capcom's instead. That is, until they were ended.

I really don’t have any anecdote to express in the same sentiment as my last review of Dead Rising. Like a lot of people who despise this game, I am just a big fan of the original game who watched as the series was slowly tortured to death by the studio it was shoved off into the arms of. I’m trying to put a word on how I feel, but can’t really conjure it up in my brain. I don’t think that bitterness is the right one. I think that if I had played it back when it came out in 2016, instead of avoiding it, I’d be angry I guess. But, now it’s 2024 so I suppose overall pathetic disappointment is leaning more towards the right answer. I’m just… so disappointed, my son.

There is a lot that I find wrong with this game, so bear with me. Dead Rising 4 fails at being a Dead Rising game and also fails at being a good game. I will try to get more into the former part later as it reaches into narrative territory, but if you remove what would be considered the staples of a Dead Rising game from Dead Rising, then all that you’re left with is another zombie game. And while some zombie games are pretty fun, this one is not. I want to try my absolute best to not compare this one with the previous iterations, but they’ve made it impossible to do so by turning Dead Rising 4 into “fan service”, which is weird calling it that since it might as well have served fans a plate of dogshit for dinner instead. I tried very hard to get through this without raising an eyebrow and I was almost successful through the prologue but that was it. “Frank West” is back as the protagonist of this game, although voiced by a completely different person for seemingly no reason at all. I was willing to swallow that pill and put it aside, but as soon as the game actually opened up and “Frank” was standing in what was considered the mall’s FOOD COURT?? They completely lost me. Immediately.

I can’t find a good picture of it, but this aspect of the game is what made me despise the direction Capcom Vancouver went in for this series. The Food Court of this damn mall is like… an Aztec?? Amazonian Forest replication with all these winding Planet Zoo ass elevated pathways and movie studio quality set pieces that only exist to look nice with zero function. Sir, this is a mall in Colorado. The Food Court alone, in this game, is the size of a fucking city. It’s a layout that is not only confusing to look at, but to traverse as well. Now put a bunch of zombies in it and you’re in for a really annoying time. This layout bleeds into the rest of the mall as well, as this game claims that Willamette mall was rebuilt into a megaplex after the events of the first game. Now the whole place is broken up into themed “towns”, like medieval and Tokyo. This is for completely no reason at all, other than having cool things to look at, but at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter because you’re only in the mall for 5 minutes before being thrown out into the open world that is the actual town of Willamette in Dead Rising 3 style map layout. The initial charm of the setting of the first game came from how tightly built the map layout of Willamette mall was. It was small, but there was always something to do, there were always things to find, and it was easy to memorize where things were and how to get there. There was a guiding arrow to point you in the right direction of the scoops, but you master the layout so quickly in that game that you end up not needing it. Here, you have to open the map just to turn a fucking corner down the street, with an ugly mini-map covering the corner of the game with waypoints that tell you distance. That distance being 1,000 yards, so get walking, idiot. It’s not good. It was already terrible in Dead Rising 3, and they somehow made it even worse in this game. News flash game executives, bigger is not always better!! Please stop!!!

There’s no point in destroying the map to look cooler, or larger, just for it to have nothing in it. There’s no reason to explore in this game aside from finding more dumbass combo weapon recipes, which are barely hidden in the first place. You can literally just purchase the ability for them to appear on your map and then grab them like a checklist, or like a chore (a recurring theme for this game). The fun of Dead Rising came from rewarding the player for their initiative to explore the area and find new ways to kill the enemies with. You weren’t finding useless garbage just made for achievement hunting back then, you were finding better weapons, hidden food items, and survivors that turned into leveling you up after escort. The magic of that is just completely lost here when the rewards are just Steam Trophies and already built combo weapons that break as quickly as you pick them up. There are no survivors in this game, technically, and there aren’t any missions aside from the linear main story content. Survivors are now relegated to Red Dead Redemption style world events where it’s just some randomly generated schmuck getting pounded by zombies until you rescue them, then dropping a random combo weapon and running away, never to be seen again. They no longer have personalities or quests. They are nothing but very ugly. Everyone, including “Frank”, looks like moldy cheese in this crusty ass game. Briefly too, there are no psychopaths in this game as well, those who were considered to be the bosses of these games. Again, they’re “here” but the lights are on and nobody is home. No cutscene to introduce them, no special battle mechanics or music, no real spotlight for them to shine. They’re just here with their minions, and get snuffed out as swiftly as candle light. Ironic, isn’t it?

Combo weapons are the actual bane of my existence. They weren’t initially this egregious, but were an ability given to Chuck Greene in a similar vein to Frank’s photographic abilities that were unique to him. He was a guy who had already seen some shit before the Fortune City outbreak and was intuitive enough to connect his knowledge of motocross with engineering makeshift weapons to fight with. They then expanded on it by making Nick Ramos a literal car mechanic to justify that skill now being used on vehicles, which is stupid but still made some semblance of sense. Frank West does not have the ability to do this and never has. You could argue that Off the Record Frank West can, but Off the Record is a non-canon alternate universe. He should not have the ability or want to hot glue grenades onto pitchforks, or combine a shopping cart into a go-kart with fucking laser beams. It’s all just stupid! They trivialize the shit out of these games without the work to obtain them. It gave them the excuse to just plaster combo weapons all over the place and overwrite what made the original game so fascinating. In this game, combo weapons are not an outlier, they are the norm. It’s no longer about using what you can to survive, it’s all about using annoying particle effects and flashy execution animations that drop the frame rate and pop the audio. It’s been overhauled into an action game where the enemies parry you like Dark Souls while you dodge roll your way around the arena. The action takes way more a precedent now than everything else that made Dead Rising cool.

The zombies in this game act like sand bags and it’s aggravating. Not only are there so many more, but “Frank” isn’t able to push through them easily. It’s like as soon as their hitboxes collide, he’s walled into a stun and stopped in his tracks first. Both them and the hostile humans are also so annoyingly tanky as well, either in their defense or just the sheer amount of health they have. It takes god damn forever to kill them in this game and therefore your inventory suffers because of it. The weapons break more often than they ever have, leaving you empty handed way too much. The normal items no longer seem to deal any damage, only the combo ones. So either make combo weapons on the fly or get fucking pummeled to death, I guess. That's if the game would even let me. Sometimes I would open the crafting menu and "Frank" would just stand there frozen, and I'd have to do gymnastics to get out of the menu for it. I hate it. I think that they knew this too, because the really shitty boss fights in this game have items and food littered around the floor all over the place, knowing that your shit would be busted upon walking into it. These fights are the most shallow, boring, pot shot back and forth bullshit you’ve seen in 100 games before this one and it doesn’t even try to re-invent it. Remember when you had to quickly maneuver yourself around the butchered cows that Larry left hanging up so that he wouldn’t immediately charge and overpower you? Or how Cliff would use his makeshift tunnels to avoid your attacks? Well, here you have to use a gun to lower the boss’s health enough to coax him into the arena where you can just slice him with the one of 45 battle axes they left near your feet. That boss's name by the way? He’s just called “Lieutenant”. Riveting stuff, guys.

Don’t even get me started on the exo suits. Yeah, because what Dead Rising needed were these over the top and flashy exo suit armor sets that “Frank” puts on to deal AoE damage. You find them all over the place with virtually zero explanation. Some of the enemies and bosses wear them as well, like they’re the latest fashion. I just want to find the literal one person who probably thought this was cool and gently ask them… why? In most instances you put them on for like 5 seconds and then after the objective, the cutscenes just tear it off of you. It’s all so pointless, so bland. It’s so stupid. They gutted everything that makes these games actually fun and put a shiny chrome coating over it to such an unrecognizable degree. They even went and overhauled the perfectly fine inventory mechanics and greased up their skill tree they crammed into the game from Dead Rising 3. A huge gripe of mine for this game was that they made going through your inventory a huge pain in the ass for seemingly no reason? Before you had a limited amount of slots, but the slots were always visible. You could always see what was in your inventory very clearly, and could sift through it quickly by using the controller bumpers. Now? You have to hold the D-Pad, then sort through 3 different inventories to select which weapon you want to use. Sure, they give you more slots to work with, but they’re divided into thirds and you can only throw items that are considered “throwable” meaning that dropping items is also a pain in the ass. You can only carry 2 food items at a time until you upgrade the ability to carry more. It’s just a terrible design for the sake of being different and makes inventory management a complete nightmare. I don’t know what they were thinking when they decided to change this.

Overall, this is just not Dead Rising. Just because the title of the game indicates otherwise and they dragged Frank back to Willamette, does not make a Dead Rising game. It’s just a terrible zombie game with a husk of the man that just says “I’ve covered wars, ya know?” like it’s one of those rage comic memes you made when you were 12 and tried to forget about. This character is not Frank West, and it’s not just the change in voice acting that showcases that. This is a completely different person and he’s annoying as shit. I talked a lot more about Frank West as a character in my Dead Rising 1 review, but he isn't this MCU, “Erm, well THAT just happened!!” annoying shithead that this game claims him to be. He never shuts the fuck up!! Capcom Vancouver just does not know Frank West and should have never had the rights to write whatever fanfiction they wanted to about him. He’s either rendered to be a running fat joke or this obnoxious, lippy asshole that has to commentate on everything around him. Not to mention, the other terrible characters in this game seem to keep suggesting that Frank West has always been this money hungry, fame seeking, terrible human and I just do not buy it. Frank’s initial motivation for entering Willamette in the first game was to put his neck on the line to find a big scoop that could have propelled him into making a name for himself, but becomes much more empathetic to the cause after hearing Isabela out, which drove him to reporting the outbreak. You know, so that the US government would be held responsible for the irresponsible war crimes they committed and covered up?? He didn’t just do that because it would make him money, it could have quite literally gotten him killed. He cared! The suggestion that he was always out for fame and money just trashes this arc he went on that showed the actual human side of his character. He is not a human in this game, he is an unfunny guy who’s reading a script that would rival Forspoken.

Now let’s put Frank out of his misery finally. There are other characters in this game, but I would use that term very lightly. The combo weapon designs in this game have more personality designed into them than the wooden cast of supporting characters you meet. You have Vick Chu, who is Frank’s student and that’s really all you get to know about her. You’re told that they have a mentor/student relationship, but the way that Vick screams and berates “Frank” in this game leads us to believe that they’re more like a surrogate father/daughter type of deal and it’s completely un-fucking-earned. She disappears for 95% of the game and there’s no establishing scenes that showcase their relationship aside from dialogue. So, when Vick comes out of left field reaming “Frank” about how she disagrees with his motivations in the plot, she just comes across as this huge gigantic asshole. Seriously, what the hell is Vick’s problem? LMAO. You can see that they were trying to somehow shoehorn her into being Frank’s successor, but it’s so painful to watch because she’s the most unlikable person in the whole game. Calder is a nobody character who we know nothing about, that gets randomly upgraded to supervillain half way through the plot. He barely has any lines and doesn’t integrate well with the story progression. He virtually has nothing to do with it at all. Hammond and her group of survivors have little to say and add nothing, but have a conflict shoved down your throat in Frank Rising that makes you feel more confused than anything else. And who is Brad? The only Brad I know of is Brad Garrison. They seriously couldn’t think of a different name for this pointless, useless character? They’re all just horrible, unlikable, and unfunny “characters” so why should the player give any shit about what happens to any of them?

I’ve been guilty of saying this myself, but there’s this sentiment that people “don’t play Dead Rising games for the plot” and I find that to be a reductive way of ignoring criticism after having played this game. Dead Rising as a series does have an interconnecting plot that they chose to continue on their own terms. Those plots range from goofy to pretty mediocre, with some satirical glimpses into US politics. While those glimpses exist to move the story along, they don’t really have anything that serious to say at the end of the day. It’s just that the gameplay mechanics tend to carry the weight of this series. When you remove all of the fun mechanics out of Dead Rising, you are left with the story. Dead Rising 4 not only has terrible gameplay mechanics, but it also has a terrible, terrible story. The events set up in the first two games at least made narrative sense and didn’t introduce plot inconsistencies anyone paying even the smallest bit of attention could point out.

I am genuinely wondering if anyone in the remaining shambles at Capcom Vancouver even played Dead Rising 1 before getting their hands on this series, because Dead Rising 3 already had some questionable revisionist decisions that meddled a bit with the aftermath of the events of the initial Willamette outbreak. I wouldn’t call it retconning, but they definitely did some unneeded meddling in the lore of this series that just raises more questions than answers and completely pisses on the mystery of the Santa Cabeza cover-ups that were already set in place. We did not need any further explanation of what happened in Santa Cabeza or why, at all, but they decided to bring back Dr. Barnaby’s corpse through the use of recorded testimonies he had made before his death 16 years ago. Ohhhhhh no guys, get it? Dr. Barnaby was actually playing 5-D Chess the whole time and was 15 steps ahead of everyone else!! Ohhh, noo he was actually spoilering his spoiler in a spoiler the whole time. Ohhh!!! Shut the FUCK up, no, he was not LOL. I really just despise when long-standing series feel the need to add into their mysteries. What’s the point of a mystery if you’re just gonna yap and explain away everything about it later? You’re giving away so much information that the whole thing just falls through your hands like sand. The more you add, the more inconsistencies there are to question. This just devalues Dr. Barnaby’s role in the first game for, again, no reason other than they wanted to. It just sucks.

And guess what, the ending isn’t even included into the game. It’s paid for DLC that adds an extra hour of content and a terrible ending. When I asked for a timer in my Dead Rising game, this is not what I meant. They give you a literal hour and a half to complete this content and for whatever reason, if you die, the timer doesn’t reset back to the point it was at upon Game Over. For some reason, there are challenges you have to do to get the good ending of this DLC, and you have to do all of them. There’s really no explanation for this. If you look at it in hindsight, the lack of challenge wins does not have any connection to what happens, it’s just if you don’t win them all, you get the bad ending. The distance this DLC makes you traverse on foot eats up most of that timer, meaning that any death is basically a loss for the player and results in the bad ending. However, the bad ending results in a different fate for characters you probably do not give two shits about, so who even cares anyways? Then it ends abruptly without any closure or follow-up. Cool use of $10, huh?

And after all of that, like a whimpering dog in the backyard, Capcom Vancouver was finally put out of their misery, shuddering their doors and never to work on these games again. (Very cool of you, Capcom Japan.) They wanted to bring Frank West back into their own game and play dress up with him under the guise of “bringing the games back to their roots” to a fanbase that was desperate for Dead Rising to be fun again. Instead they revised the shit out of the story, painted Christmas lights all over it, gutted all of the mechanics, made it wildly unfun and unimaginative, added mini-golf mode to try to extinguish the fires they made, and then DIED. It's not abundantly clear really who's fault laid where in the developmental mess of this game. It was set up to fail from the get go, with Capcom Japan not helping them in virtually anyway at all. There's several whisperings in the wind regarding how it wasn't meant to be a Dead Rising game in the first place and that obviously shows, but either way, we got this shit. There were people who told me that maybe I’d find something in it I liked, but that just did not happen. It was a sinking ship before it even left the dock. And it’s unfortunately still considered canon until Capcom HQ themselves decide to reboot this series, if that even happens. It’s definitely for the best that this series died when it did and it’s not a triumphant “finally” or even a sigh of relief. It’s just a disappointed shrug and life goes on. I didn't even get any catharsis out of writing this review like I do with some other 1 star games I've written about. How unfortunate.

Ah, film.

The Movies asks the player to make pure kino, and boy does it provide. Probably one of the better business tycoons ever made due to the sheer wealth of creativity it gives you to mess around with. It's amazing to me that we still haven't seen a similar game like this, aside from a demo that I've heard isn't nearly as stellar. The devs of this new game seem to be beating around the bush that their version will be lacking the Custom Script Editing that makes The Movies stand out in all of its mechanics, which sucks to hear. The Movies is a game that celebrates goofing off, experimenting, and being creative; a universe that exists in stark contrast to the money grubbing Hollywood we're dealing with today.

And in a tycoon stand point, everything is mostly streamlined to an interesting degree, without boring the player. While you watch your films being made, you can drag and drop those pesky freeloaders to the places they need to be to speed up more of the processes. And while you have several movies being made at a time, there's other offices constantly keeping busy with scriptwriters, with crew and extras running amok; genuinely highlighting the fact that a film is made from the hard work of hundreds of individuals even if only 1 - 5 people are listed in the intro credits. The campaign plops your studio in the 1920's and challenges the player with navigating the brutality of BUSINESS, as real world events determine genre popularity and technological advancements. It's just the details and overall research of the game that makes it oh so saucy. The last year of the campaign fittingly landing on 2005, the year that this game was released.

After getting my hands on it probably 15 years after the last time I played it, it felt like opening a Christmas gift. The insanity I unleashed upon this game, it didn't even know what had hit it. There is a sandbox mode that I recommend for the people coming into it wanting to mostly make goofy movies, but I settled for a campaign playthrough this time knowing it'd eventually have "an end" at some point. Here I realized what it must feel like to be a triple A game studio, spending a million dollars making a movie only to recoup $250,000 in returns. Suffering for my art.

The campaign is fun, but it also showcased a bit of the gripes I had for the management systems in this game. While you start out in the 1920's with little technology, etc. you are sort of left on rails for the most part. It's when you hit around the 1970's, everything just goes batshit insane. It takes some concentration to be able to manage several actors/directors, scriptwriters, and crew. While you're filming two movies, your actors have their own moods to keep in check. If they're upset at just about anything, it'll be harder to keep them working and your film's rating will suffer because of it. It's an aspect of the game that I genuinely like, but if mismanaged it could be detrimental. It seems there is a strategy behind setting up your campaign for success, as I didn't hire enough directors in my first initial hiring process. This was devastating as my one director became overstressed and quit, which led me to being BONED. Every once in a while you'll be thrust into an award ceremony where the results give the winners some OP bonuses, like making your stars basically unbothered for a short period of time, to giving them better experience gains. It's a rich gets richer scheme!! While my competitors swept the awards ceremonies, it became impossible for me to keep up. My studio was unfortunately and devastatingly mid at best. While I ended up finishing the whole campaign in 2005, we still ended it with -$500,000 in debt LOL. Welcome to Hollywood, baybee. Enjoy your newfound homelessness!

My main gripes with the game is that it can become a bit overwhelming to manage so many different units at once, but it is automatic for the most part. It only becomes an issue when you're understaffed, which is sort of typical. Since awards can launch your studio into the spotlight, you're less likely to acquire new employees if you're failing. It seems like after a certain point, the game just stops giving you potential hires for things like crew and maintenance, which meant that I had to pull from other departments to temporarily have an extra or crew member available. There's a deceptively evil fast forward mechanic, similar a la The Sims, that seems to only speed up the timeline of events and loss of money, rather than speeding up the actual employees who are working. The announcer lady would announce that a new person was in line to become an actor, but I'd go to the stage school and see no one there. Either she is a lying sack of shit or she announces it much too late every time. Either way, the shortage of staff is a quick way to bottleneck yourself into SUFFERING. The game gave me an Asian stuntwoman and then literally nothing else. So, I kept getting these funny reviews where the critics kept noticing how the stuntpeople never resembled the lead roles, who were mostly white men. It's a system with awesome rewards for your hard work and abysmal misery for failing, sometimes for things outside of your control. If there was a more frequent dispense of new employees in about every office, it would have easily mitigated all of those issues.

Which is why I recommend the sandbox mode for those wanting to dip a toe into this game for the first time, where your creativity can be displayed front and center. There isn’t a risk of getting a game over in this mode and offers a much more casual experience. The custom movie maker built into this game is fantastic for its time, with the ability to change weather, backdrops, costumes, and camera angles depending on the sets you’ve built on your lot. The list of poses and scenes you can work with is surprisingly expansive, especially with the Stunts and Effects pack installed, and it’s genuinely a fun time whether you’re taking the art of filmmaking seriously or not. That being said, it's a process that can be a bit time consuming and I wish there was a better way to make sure the actors and costumes stayed the same throughout the film. You’re given tools to make scripts automatically through the use of Screenwriters, who will write movies for you instead, but those screenwriters are smoking absolute crack cocaine. They’ll write movies that you wish you had the talent to make. Keep in mind though, that you could make the most incoherent movie ever and it will succeed solely based on the experience your lead characters in it have. It’s just fun to make dumb movies sometimes and I wish we could have a more modern version of this so badly. I want to start a new campaign fixing where I messed up in the previous one already. I need to know what it’s like to be #1, crushing the competition. PLEASE.

It’s more than a game. It’s CINEMA!

There is just nothing quite like Dead Rising 1. I have a review of this game from the last time I played it, but I don't think I really gave it the justice that it deserved back then. I was too busy trying to be a funny lil comedian, rather than being critical, and having finished it again recently, there is just so much that was left on the floor. I love this game a lot and I won't waver my 5 stars, but bear in mind that while you can be really passionate about something, that doesn't mean you should just ignore the criticisms it may have. It's not a perfect game by any means, and there are things in it that make me uncomfortable. But, I still enjoy the heck out of it all the same and it's a piece of media that I've been wanting to see brought back from the dead (hehe) for a long, long time.

Before the combo weapons, before the bloated map layouts, before all the horrible engine changes, before all the bullshit, this was peak as it is. I have played the other games in the series, minus 4. I've been putting off Dead Rising 4 for as much as I possibly could, but I have a hilarious friend who gifted it to me for Christmas and now it plagues my Steam Library like a nasty tumour. I would have honestly been more excited had he sent me a gift wrapped pipe bomb instead. I’ve agreed to finally sit down and play it, knowing that it was technically free, but I know that I will not like it. I despise Dead Rising 3 and Off the Record is a broken trash pile of flaming garbage. Dead Rising 2 is fun for what it is, and has come to be a game that I've mastered, but it's just not.. the same, ya know? It always lacked the simplicity of Dead Rising's original design while somehow being much easier in comparison at the same time. It’s the game where the cracks begin to form in what eventually lead to this series spiraling out of control and then mercifully euthanized at the vet when the time came.

I’ve always felt that the original baked-in concept of Dead Rising has been its shining star that speaks for itself. View it in the lens of it being an exploration game, before looking at it as a zombie game and you’ll see what I mean. The layout of Willamette’s mall is so tightly succinct, so perfectly sized with little gems sprinkled throughout in some of the weirdest places. The mall has just about everything you’d need, and then some. While smaller in size, it’s still comically filled to the brim with areas like a full-on supermarket, rollercoaster, totally not Home Depot, and a doomsday prepper’s wet dream of a gun store added into the mix just for funsies. There’s spots of infinite weapons or food to go back to when needed and secret items to find for the most devilishly explorative players. It’s so early 2000’s, arcade, before the Internet ruined everything fun. There was nothing quite like finding an SMG in a tree outside on accident, even today. I still find a random food item in a place I’ve never thoroughly looked over before. They’re so meticulously placed, without it being incredibly obvious. It’s everything that the modern open-world games of today are so desperately trying to capture, with many failing.

Uh oh, but- but- the whole damn place is packed to the brim with zombies like sardines in a tin can!! Those are only obstacles, my dear friend. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and grab that 2x4 piece of wood on the ground right next to you. You want to fill your entire inventory with the super OP shotguns that melt the psychopaths? Get to crowd surfing, bitch. You can use just about anything interactable to kill and slice your way from point A to point B. Not a weird combo weapon, or a hero’s sword specific to Frank, but the very definition of what you would call a Television. Anything, really, that’s allowed at the very least. Handbags, toys, sledgehammers, chainsaws, shelves, pipes, benches, bikes, etc., etc., etc. If the game allows you to pick it up, you can use it as a weapon. A real testament of your ability to explore, and make use of what’s around you. Your weapons break? Well, you’re standing next to a potted plant. Or use your fists even. BOTW Link would get suplexed so hard by Frank West, it’s not even funny. There are super powerful rewards in this game, but they come at a cost, which I love. The gun store is inaccessible until you kill the boss standing in it, so on and so forth. Adam’s Chainsaw’s trivialize the hell out of the game, but you can’t get them until he’s been killed, etc. The strongest weapons in the game are locked behind achievements and a daunting Infinity Mode unlocked after finishing the game once. Which is something that I feel the later game’s combo weapons are completely lacking. If you want to blast through the game with a gun that one shots everything, then you should have to work for it. It’s a greater reward to fuck around with once you’ve beaten the game and survived it’s challenges. There is still to this day, nothing quite like this item system in my opinion. You can compare it to BOTW or Dead Island, maybe, but it’s a silly system that flourishes in the mall setting and adds to the desperate feeling of using whatever you need to survive in the moment. It’s always been goofy as hell, and it’s always known what it is.

I’m sure that there’s people out there that would love to leave the walls of the mall, but in my opinion, it’s not needed. The later games try to explore this by making the maps much larger and expansive, at the cost of the player having fun. Not here. The opening prologue gives you a brief glimpse of the chaos outside through Frank’s unique photo mechanics, and you can clearly see that shit out there is bleak. In the first five minutes of the game, you’re fed everything you need to know through the lens of Frank’s camera, quickly loading up on PP bonuses before the game even begins. Pure interactive kino. It's a quick whirlwind of cramming what your goal is and that’s the point. Frank West is a no nonsense motherfucker. He’s a snippy man and has zero time for drama and hysterics. We got places to be and a story to report, people. It’s part of his charm, with brief moments of humanity sprinkled in. He’s not a complete unempathetic monster, but you’ll soon relate to his need for speed when you’re hauling 7 survivors back to the security room at once. I think he would benefit from a bit of fleshing out, of course. The later games seem to turn him into a completely uncaring asshole for pure comedic purposes and it kind of sucks to see. He’s annoying as shit now and it’s such a shame, honestly. The same Frank West that stayed with Brad and Carlito during their critical moments, is just reduced to a fat joke now. Haha!! So funny. Put this man in a dress, and he’ll be feeling himself ten fold. Put Chuck or Nick in a dress, and they whine to the player about it. Frank will always be superior.

Now let’s get to the contentious shit that people hate. The Survivors. Basically the other half of the game, cohabitating with the game’s plot. I see why people hate them, and you’re valid, but I gotta put my foot down and say that the survivors are a staple of Dead Rising. The survivors are what makes Dead Rising. You don’t have to like it, but without them, this game would be a jar of piss. The time mechanics are what separates this game from any other schlocky zombie kill simulator that its counterparts are already happily doing. Sure, you can go on a day binge of killing the zombies if that’s your underwear fit, but without hunting for survivors and killing the bosses, you’ll be seriously lacking in level ups, which means lacking in skill upgrades and health. I find the survivors in this game to be quite a cool collectible mechanic. They’re living experience rewards that require escorts from where they’re found to the Security room, and it adds an extra layer of charm to the game. While none of them are really.. characters.. per se, you can see that a large swathe of them were designed with some intent. Some are more aggressive than others, some are more cowardly, others are tied behind boss fights, etc. Some are easier to escort than others. They’re a challenge that is meant to be difficult and meant to be trial-and-error. A person expecting to find every single survivor in their first playthrough without a guide, is just asking too much for something that should be explored casually first. There are some survivors that are hidden, and others that may become the bane of your existence, but that does not eliminate their uniqueness nonetheless. The game allows you a NG+ with everything you’ve already achieved for a reason, it is not the end of the world to miss a few survivors on your first playthrough. The time mechanics have a stress factor that some may not like, but I’ve always appreciated how it made for something to do the whole game and challenges you to seek out areas of the mall you probably don’t walk through often. It’s a completely manageable mechanic for those willing to best it, and I feel only gets hampered down due to the game’s poor AI systems more than anything else. Where I think the mechanic falters is near the end game, as once you’ve rescued Simone there is just simply nothing to do for hours in-game. I think Day 2’s morning is the most stressful part of the game, while Day 3 is the weakest, with the least to do.

Now about those tricky AI systems, a criticism unable to be ignored. I love this game to death, but this is the part of the game that I think most people remember, no matter how they feel about the game overall. The survivors have what we would call… um.. Stupid Disease? At least, from a first glance that’s how it looks. Sure they walk into walls and can’t climb the simplest structures, or tend to let zombies eat their ass sideways until they die when you look away for a little too long, and that is of course frustrating. But, they were programmed with some thought that I just think wasn’t executed well. They all have a personality and act accordingly to it. Survivors like Aaron Swoop are pants pisser babies who will drop to their knees and crawl when surrounded. On the flipside, Tonya Waters is ride or die for her man and will act as a hero if you give her a weapon. Survivors will completely stop in their tracks if they witness you or their friend getting grabbed in front of them. They’re batshit terrified the whole time, so it makes sense, but that’s where the trouble begins because as soon as one of those dummies stops moving, it’s chaos from there. It is an experience that used to frustrate me to no end, but I am living in Nirvana now. I want to examine these survivors, to their finer details. I want to know why they’re so stupid. I want to peer into the binary code that makes them live. Had they been a bit smarter, or useful, this game would have fared so much better. It’s definitely the survivor AI and lack of auto-save that makes people tilt the most in this game. A speedrunner’s advice for those that may want it: the zombie spawn is affected by radius in correlation with Frank’s location. If you walk far enough away, the zombies on the outside of that radius will not appear, making escorting large areas a lot easier as survivors can stroll for a long time without getting grabbed. If you’re having a hard time, try this out, although I think having a hard time is part of the fun of it being a challenge.

I have yet to mention the story, but that’s kind of because the story is rather mediocre. It’s campy and satirizes a lot of zombie media in a really hammy way. It’s by far not a 5-star fine dining experience, but more like McDonalds brought home from your parents when you least expect it. It’s just a goofy time, not meant to really be taken super seriously nor does it have really that much to say about what it tries to politicize in its twists. There are things that could be made a lot clearer, such as the demise of an important character near the end game, as well as having a rather lackluster open-ended ending that can leave you with more questions than answers. It’s a fun time that swerves and curves while you play it, but the story isn’t why people play these games anyways. It’s the gameplay that makes this game so beloved by the people who cradle it like a baby. Like me.

Aside from all that there are item upgrades I never mentioned, that you of course have to find as they function through the use of holding magazines. There are blenders that exist to mix drinks with temporary stat boosting effects. The camera can be used for other collectibles and small morsels of PP here and there. As well as having an active role in one of the boss sub plots, but here’s where a personal criticism of mine comes from as well. I hate to do this but-but- I’m a.. a gulp- girl gamer, and I have to admit that the added interactivity of being able to take creepy ass photos of women and be rewarded for it with experience, as well as a nosebleed accompanying it, is not really my favorite thing to do in this game lmao. This game is very camp through and through and takes liberties of Isabela’s assets full front and center as they basically eat the cutscene camera, but those are honestly fine. I don’t dislike that aspect, but I can’t help but raise my eyebrow everytime I’m forced to get a good enough Erotica shot of Sophie’s undergarments just to fight Kent every playthrough, it’s just weird and nothing about Frank’s character gives the impression that he’d even agree to do that in the first place. Not to mention, if there’s a survivor like Kay Nelson in frame of the shot, you’ll get Erotica points on her crotch even when she’s not the focal point in the frame. Or getting Horror points for upskirting the older women, haha old lady gross!! farts.

The only one that works for me is Janet Star’s double Erotica shot for each of her gigantic boobs, because it’s so exaggerated and isn’t triggered by the player literally invading her privacy. That one admittedly gets a chuckle out of me, so it can be done in a way that works. But, I can’t help but think that this aspect of the game is kind of why Capcom doesn’t acknowledge that they made it in the first place, on top of the rest of the series being such ass poo poo water. If we ever get a remake of this game, don’t expect this part, or even Jo’s boss fight, to survive it. I’m not exactly sure how they’d go about making those changes, but I wouldn’t mind losing them personally. There is so much more that this game has to offer aside from the random lewdness anyways. L + ratio, girl gamer ruining my video games!!!

Speaking of, I think all of these criticisms and positives would benefit so hard from being remade. I mentioned it a bit in my last review, but just imagine how awesome it would be if everything in the game could truly be picked up. I feel as if there’s something on the shelf, I should be able to either grab it or put it on as an outfit. While the game gives so much to utilize, it also has a disappointing amount of objects that can’t be interacted with. I should be able to knock over objects, destroy book shelves, or even mess around with objects that are so neatly organized. The grocery store is so uncannily stocked to perfection, without any ability to move the objects around. Frank can infinitely take from areas that don’t visibly decrease in size, etc. It would just add so much to the feel, ya know? It would give so much more sauce than there already is. Just let me destroy everything in the area, then fix it when I come back. It would remove the weird barriers that exist in some boss fights like Jo or Steven’s where the display shelves actively get in the way of the two of you fighting. Cletus is by far the most dogshit boss in this game, with Sniper Carlito not far behind. They need to be bonked on the head with a magic fairy wand and changed so badly. Fix the AI on the survivors, give them a little more oomph, inject a little more life into their mini-stories and maybe even give them differing voice lines. Give Frank more modern shooting controls that allow him to walk and aim at the same time, etc. Either add or move around content into the later game that eliminates that boring part, and revamp the story to make the ending have more of an impact. It’s just an unfortunate case of what could be a great, fun time. The only thing that I don’t want them to change is the licensed music, probably the only time in my life I’ll defend the use of it. There is nothing more iconic than Gone Guru or Fly Routine as boss themes. And there is nothing funnier than seeing the sheer visceral panic a new player gets upon discovering the convicts for the first time while the initial “WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL-” blasts in their headphones.

There is just nothing quite like Dead Rising 1. The choices Capcom made to abandon this series is just so baffling and sad to see in hindsight because it could have been so, so much better. It deserved more than to be tossed aside to a studio known for making baseball games. It’s one of the few games that Capcom doesn’t even acknowledge on their 40th anniversary site: https://captown.capcom.com/en either. I could go on all day about why I think this game is awesome despite its flaws, clearly, as I tried really hard here. But, since I’ll be playing the 4th installment soon, I figured I should go back to familiarity for a minute and just live in its bliss before I inevitably tear my own face off. Since Capcom is in their remake era anyways, it could still happen and I’m not going to make any demands of them, but a small part of me can’t help but have a millimeter sized glimmer of hope in the back of my brain for every game conference that Capcom announces they’ll be apart of. Recently, there has been a sign that there could be one cooking over there, but we’ll just have to wait and see. I would even take their own version of a reboot if it means more Dead Rising. This game will always be a game that I come back to and a remake would not replace it, but it sure does deserve so much better.

And yet he complained that his belly was not full.

You know what? I don't hate it, but it is kinda stinky. If we really are of the belief that games are an art form, then games should be attempting to tackle tough subject matter when it's in an appropriate setting. Passive medium is just unable to create the same level of uncomfiness that the more active role a player takes in a video game ever could, in my personal opinion. However, the execution needs to be done well. I think this game falters a good portion of it's ideas, but there were bits that I found to be quite interesting buried underneath it all.

Had the game focused more on the 2nd half where the environmental storytelling in the apartment was front in center, I think it would have faired a lot better. They could have easily still made an entire Silent Hill mental unrest and anguish fun time run around scary monster game with the huge overflowing baggage of shit built into that part of the game without the bullying arc. I can't really talk about the latter half section without the use of a spoiler tag, but it was fairly unsettling way to convey neglect and the negative feelings surrounding it without hitting you in the face with a car. Had it been fleshed out a lot more and not rushed to oblivion, it would have been more effective. Part of it may have been uneasiness by seeing an environment like this in real life, maybe it hit a little close to home for me. But, it really seemed like they played around a lot more in this segment and it came across a lot better in my eyes. It is however, the shortest segment, which kind of sucks.

As others have pointed out, the bullying aspect of the game is quite too literal, too surface level, too on the nose. These are important themes to talk about, but it's done in such a ham-fisted way that it comes across as goofy at times, with some unstellar voice acting to add onto it. It has nothing really to do with how cringe the teenagers are in this game, because teenagers are indeed cringe. And if you say that you weren't cringe as a teenager, you're just lying, man. Just because kids today call each other Ohio as an insult, doesn't mean we weren't gallivanting around in our own emo tumblr phases worshiping Let's Play Youtubers who are still working and streaming this game as we speak. Social media and how it can affect someone with a need for validation is a very real issue that definitely still affects adults, but it's an issue that has been fumbled so many times in other media already, in the same traps that this game falls into. It's personally more than just receiving mean comments in a Xitter reply and could have been much more explored as to why It affects Anita specifically. Instead, they just used the most generic insults ever and skirt over the issue almost entirely to get to the better stuff, where you're meant to just jam Anita's isolated feelings into her trauma together like putting a hot dog into a sandwich bun. I have played cute indie games that were able to convey these messages about isolation and communication in a much better, more subtle way. It's obvious to see what they were going for and the ending is okay for what it is, but it's basically just a smiley face platitude. The game just can't get more than a box cake version of the "You Tried" cake from me.

It plays mostly fine, but chugs in some areas where the walls around you are morphing into scary game goop, which is unfortunate as I'm sure it would look neat had it worked properly. The monster is fairly cool, but the monster is also the bane of my existence. The last chase scene might as well have had Benny Hill music playing over it for the same effect, since it's so hard to navigate and the whole segment has to be redone if you die. It loses the scariness of it quite quickly and becomes a nuisance instead. While I was sighing in frustration, Anita was having a full on asthma attack the entire time until I muted the dialogue and lived in peace and tranquility for the rest of the section.

I feel like if this was a game I paid for, I would be a lot harsher for sure, but it is free and extremely short so it's not like it super wasted my time. Now please like this review, it would make me very sad if you did not do so.

Me Caveman.

I will Unga and if Sun God willing, maybe some Bunga too. It don’t take much for caveman to have oog oog time, maybe throw rock, hang dong. No brain required. Game give big field for caveman to swing stick but after seeing two or three moons and bludgeon creatures, caveman ended up honk-shoo honk-shoo on hard rock bed.

Game give too many menus about tree with skill and item craft with backpack limit. Too restrictive for caveman. Let caveman have unlimited inventory so caveman don’t lose eyes to the sacred roll when woman caveman ask for new hut. Now caveman has to walk to cold cave and dodge 74th jaguar kitty to pick “rare” weed and skin “rare” wolf with the same brain melt music playing in caveman cranium. Tree with skill only offer caveman simple bonus resource and no damage ups. Make hard for caveman to grubbagrong the other cavemen who come in drove with massive damage stick. Somehow bad caveman see me caveman from too far away and now the country of bad caveman on me caveman ass. Only funny when random mammoth spawn nearby and mammoth kill most of other tribe unprompted. Caveman find tribe infiltration boring, but game kept making caveman do tribe infiltration.

Me caveman found badger, named him Ciabatta. Ciabatta good badger who kill most other cavemen, only cool thing that make caveman unhinge mouth and point at during game. Ciabatta not fair well with bad bosses though, bosses and mini-bosses crush Ciabatta in one swing. Then caveman die. Caveman no like when perish because game say checkpoint, but not load checkpoint upon rainbow bridge traversal. Ciabatta and all other caveman friends stay dead but bad cavemen already killed get revived by Moon Goddess. It feel like Yak ass when happen. Two big bosses in game unimpress caveman. Would rather take nap in Sun than play cat and mouse pot shot with ice man and arrow lady and their mitosis spawning cavemen family. Final fight is butt cheese from oldest mammoth, only amount to playing peek-a-boo with baby while she hide behind door caveman not allowed to smash down for some reason.

Caveman also have to mention that universe would randomly stop moving around him, bringing him back to something called PS5 screen. PS5 screen appear whenever cutscene happen or caveman fast travel, making caveman have to redo thing again. PS5 screen appear many times, now worship him every Sunday sun rise. Cavemen and animals sometimes stuck in crevice then learn to fly due to Physics God drinking too much fermented stew. Caveman know that when boss at 0 HP then boss should be taken away by One Who Kills, yet some bosses still live with empty health bar and take 30 more rock to face before succumbing to weak knees. Caveman clenched butthole too hard wondering if game broken while trying to survive and not redo 30 minute fight with gabagoog.

Caveman think made mistake buying funny caveman game and expecting caveman time. Game not work well and make caveman fun time too much of chore like wife ask. If other Far Cry games like this, caveman would rather have brain matter splattered on rock instead.

I didn't have a co-op partner to play this with at the time I played it because Steam Remote Play is god awful, so I was kind of worried it would be omega unfun.

In actuality, it's still playable in single-player and pretty functional. You do have to use 1,010% of your brain capacity Scarlett Johansson style to control both birds dual-wielding both sides of your keyboard to pull it off, but it is manageable nonetheless. It's virtually impossible to get anything higher than a bronze medal per level, but boy did I feel ginormous brain after pulling off some of those typewriter levels all by myself. It is still pretty fun!

But jokes aside, you definitely should be playing this with a friend as it's meant to. I didn't finish the game, only some levels, so I plan on re-reviewing this later when I finally get to have the full experience. There are about 4 levels that get repeated, just with slight difficult variations and obstacles added in. Some level types are much harder than others. So, I see this game having Mario Party potential of lethal vitriol between partners.

I don't know man. I still need like 100 more tickers to get the ultimate fluffy, parrot colored Kiwi with the fanciest hat and backpack so I have to get that at some point. Me Kiwi, You Kiwi.

Surprisingly looks like it was ahead of it's time the day it came out while I was still in diapers, but of course, playing it for the first time for real as an adult, it's not really doing anything to wow me the way Yoshi's do when they pop 3 bubbles in a row.

But by god, sometimes when you're having a shitty week, you just want to cleanse your doom palette with some Yoshi's just trying to get by. The game is sweet, and it's short as Hell. There's no gloom here. There never was. Let the Yoshi's do that funny pose they make when you complete a level. Let them live their lives to the fullest, god damn it.

To have a game cater to my wishes of punching a hole straight through some guy's head just for looking at me funny is really all that I needed currently. But, for this game to offer up a metric ton of bananas side content with it was giving way more beyond any and all expectations, not to mention the genuinely thrilling plot to boot as well.

There's something so inherently batshit about how serious the main plotline is in comparison to how extremely unserious the other 85% of the game is. Everything is so masterfully exaggerated, from doing the most simple tasks, to the wildly different mini-games, to breaking someone's head open over Kiryu's kneecap. It's got a punch that will leave a lasting impression, mixed with such an emotionally delicate storyline that finally smashes together in the climax. This game is rad as fuck and holds absolutely nothing back.

Having known really nothing about this series going in, it's interesting to see the origin story of characters you've only ever seen in passing through various youtube clips and meme gifs. Oh, how joyous it is to finally understand the context of said moments and realizing that, nope, this game is just as batshit insane as it looks on the outside. Somehow they've made it work, while the bulk of your hourly playtime is coming from the business and substory segments of the game, it's sparsely broken up by the very serious crime soap opera that would often lead to some doom and gloom without the karaoke and disco mini-games to bleach your eyeballs afterwards. It never really felt like anything was overstaying its welcome, (save for the end, but I'll get there), and the pacing was completely self-driven. If you want to shotgun this plot rather quickly, by all means, but the benefits you get from some of the substories are more than worth it. Especially with the business ventures. Sure, there’s a person who is terrified and starving in a storage unit waiting for you to get back to them, but god damn it, someone has to take their hostesses on dates.

I feel like once you do a mini-game you don't.. really have to do it again, but they're interesting time wasters for sure. You can pretty much do anything from bowling, to poker, or pocket circuit racing or even watch a wide range of girls try their best to look cutesy sexy and totally not like they're trapped in a bathroom at gunpoint. I do however find it really funny that most of these activities lead to smaller plot threads that neither of the characters really have any business learning or caring about. Oh, you want to do some little mini-car racing for a bit? Well, the owner of the establishment is a lonely guy who doesn't understand his worth and could use a self-confidence boost. Oh, you want to eat some sushi because your health is a bit low? Well, the owner is a dickhead to his nice employee that should be treated way better for the amount of effort she puts towards running the restaurant when he's not around. It's so funny, every time. The phone mini-game would be less ass without the RNG substory elements added to it, however I do wish that there were more karaoke and disco songs though.

I did enjoy the combat for the most part, but to say it's perfect would be a bit of a lie. It's pretty simplistic by nature, but has huge room for growth. When you upgrade your characters, you really do feel more powerful with every heat action or special ability unlocked. I love the various styles you can pick from and how each one may affect different bosses in different ways, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't tend to lean towards some over others. The Brawler style for Kiryu has the fast paced wombo combo dream for me that the Beast style lacks, without losing the strength behind the punch that Rush often would. I knew that if a bicycle was in range, that shit would be done in 30 seconds flat. That being said, I think I much preferred playing as Majima, as his three styles were bonkers BUSTED. Making him a lot easier to play and also a ton of fun as well. The combos that the Slugger style offers are just satisfying to pull off, with devastating results. The Breaker style would go absolutely nutty if you pulled a string of attacks off correctly. I don't think I game over'd once as Majima, it was only ever as Kiryu. Kiryu is supposed to be the main character of the whole series and I played him like straight ass the whole time. Sorry, man. This doesn't even mention the final styles of each character as well, a very worthwhile reward for putting up with the long as shit business segments that ate up most of my playtime. It was such a treat to run away from Mr. Shakedown with full pants for 90% of the game, to finally get the pleasure of breaking his spine in half once the characters were fully upgraded. The combat can get repetitive at times, especially near the end, but it never truly stopped being fun. However, the bosses always felt like a special occasion. Except the one, or two technically, optional bosses. Not sure what the lore on that was about yet but you can add this game to the list of RPGs with some of the most dogass optional bosses you've ever seen.

I'm so glad they added the ability to avoid battles by using money, but it doesn't quite work all the time if you're a little late on the draw, which is when the combat would drive me bananas. Near the end of the game, the regular enemies beef up to annoying amounts of health and attack you in droves. It makes trying to waste time and partake in business activities a nightmare sometimes. Boy, do I love getting sandwiched between a triangle of 3 dudes that are just punching me endlessly with perfect succession. Or how the later game bosses really love to somehow skate behind you and kick you into a stun that takes what seems like an eternity to break out of. This was pretty constant in the end-game, but for the most part it’s not really an issue. It’s very fun to punch into enemies and then break their bones with heat actions nonetheless.

I think most of my gripes actually come from a money balancing issue I ran into while playing. Majima seems to obtain money at a much more exponentially insane rate in comparison to Kiryu. His business mini-game is also much more interactive and while it takes longer to get through a cabaret session, the profits for defeating a Star are always humongous. The only real issue I had with it was the atrocious fashion you had to put some of those poor women through for the best results, but it’s the 80’s I guess. Anyways, he gets money insanely quickly which in turn upgrades him at a much faster rate. Kiryu on the other hand has to invest into his business, which means saving a lot of his money to advance the real estate rather than himself. Not to mention, Majima doesn’t have to invest in Mr. Moneybags nearly as much as Kiryu does, which I found odd. I ended up getting through the Cabaret plot line rather quickly, while the real estate seemed like it took ages. There was a good chunk of gameplay near the end where I’d have to go find things to do while I waited for my profits to come in, which kind of sucked and it left Kiryu behind in terms of his upgrades. Which is realistically why I probably preferred one character’s playstyle a lot more than the other.

The substories in this game are goofy as hell and I like them for the most part, but I do think we could have done with a bit less of them to be honest. Some of the best involve bowling for a turkey and some of the worst includes Kiryu buying pornography for.. a child. But, for the most part, they all end in exactly the same way with the exact same lessons to be learned for the random Joe and Smough you came across. Someone needs help with something, it turns out there’s a big miscommunication, shenanigans ensue, some dudes try to kick your ass, then rinse and repeat. Either have less substories in my opinion or, at the very least, shake up the formula on a lot of them so that the next one doesn’t feel exactly the same as the last one. They’re pretty funny at first, but later on I had to speedrun the dialogue on them to not feel like I was going absolutely insane.

All in all though, the narrative is masterfully told and definitely the best part of the game. You knew when the Japanese voice acting started, you were in for some popcorn munching shit. It starts off the rails almost immediately for both characters and never really stops. You have Kiryu thrown into what seems like a battle royale where everyone and their mom is coming for his ass no matter what he does, fighting for his damn life every second of the day. Then every so often, you switch to Majima’s much more kind-hearted, but desperate segments that contrast so well with what I can only assume his character is like in the other games. (An insane madlad.) The buildup of tension is heart pounding and it never falters. The OST fuckin’ rips. It’s just absolutely jaw dropping from the beginning and ends on such a refreshingly tender note. I’m sure there was a lot of contextual air that I was missing having played the prequel before everything else, but I am pilled enough to finally try out all the other games that came before this one.

Baka Mitai (I’ve Been a Fool) for leaving this unplayed in my Steam library for so long.

Edit: Used to be a 4.5 star rating, but I stopped doing halfsies.

I do occasionally stream my mental breakdowns, so this seemed like a quick, silly grab off of the Steam sale. The humor is very obviously engrained in Twitch/Youtube references so sure, it got a chuckle or two out of me, but if you're not even partially inside that universe, either as a creator or watcher, I'm not particularly sure if this game would offer too much to you honestly. Maybe I'm just not a fan of deck-builders, but I didn't really get much out of this other than the surface level concept. It's funny in it's introduction to see that mental health is effected by mean comments, but it never really discusses it in anyway deeper than poking fun at an internet culture you may or may not actively be apart of.

It's a rouge-like deck building visual novel where you combat chat toxicity by providing content "points" at the cost of your health. That's probably the simplest way to describe the main battle mechanics. Basically, in order to make money, you want to keep the card games going as long as possible but at the cost of taking more and more damage as each round passes. If you run out of health, you lose a heart and after losing three hearts, the game just ends. I think this is a pretty clever concept, but it's never really explained properly and this is just what I gathered after playing it for a short time. The difficulty ramps up almost immediately because of this and as your character springs to outrageous levels of popularity in such an unrealistically short time, the cards you randomly get seem to do almost nothing. In turn, this makes you have to spend money to recover more health, constantly keeping you with extremely little resources. I get that's the point, but your character has other responsibilities and a life of his own going on in the plot that actively throws a wrench in the card mechanics as well. You get to choose what kind of categories to stream in, in hopes of attracting a larger audience, but there never really was a difference shown for what each category did. No matter what you chose, there were a crap ton of viewers and what audience you were streaming to just seemed to be completely random.

Since it is a visual novel, there is a plot and recurring characters. There may even be multiple endings, I don't know, I got destroyed by Gen Z commenters and died during my short bout with the game. While you make choices in regards to keeping yourself healthy and when to stream, you have almost zero control over what your character does in the plot. He operates on his own path that makes me roll my eyes, because he's a toddler in an adult's body and just chooses to fall down a path of his destruction on his own accord, which also makes the game artificially harder because he has to work harder to make more money. I kind of wish there was more you could do to change that. While the world of content creation has it's caveats of naysayers and pissheads, it's kind of important to recognize that it's a hobby way before it's a job and that not making money or fame from it isn't the literal end all, be all. It can be extremely rewarding in different ways. If that weren't the case, then no one would be doing it at all. But, the main character is very money driven without an inner monologue of his thoughts and he never comes across as if he's even having fun in the first place. He barely speaks and there's never a real self-reflection of his thoughts that take place, unless it's at the very end. They had an opportunity to delve into something a little deeper here and I think they just didn't take it in favor of keeping in this card mechanic.

I also think this may hurt the replayability as well too. I didn't beat it so maybe one day I'll come back to it. Even with the short time I had with it, the combat kind of grew stale. The "enemies" don't really do anything other than call you a poophead in several different variations. Your cards remain relatively the same for a long time. Different audiences you stream to seem to enjoy certain cards over others, but you don't really have a choice in that. I didn't get nearly enough cards to combat some of the audiences that I was randomly put up against. There's also a money making mini-game that requires you to mash the mouse button as fast as possible during what feels like an eternity, which hurts my wrist so I hate it.

I did have fun with it for a few hours, but that's really it. I already saw most of the zingers so I'm not sure if it would offer up anymore fun for me. It seems when you get a game over, you permanently obtain a new card to your deck but that's about the only leeway you get. I'd probably beat it one day and then never again, which is unfortunate because it seems like they want you to replay it a lot. Unfortunately, it's just a half-baked narrative with half-baked gameplay.

Oh well! On to the next content to consume, my little poggers. Be sure to like and- gunshots