kaishek
2023
I fucking can't man. The game looks bad and plays astonishingly bad. Every moment I waste on this low energy Far Cry clone is a moment I could have spent doing literally anything else.
2005
A friend once described Killer7 as suda51 reinventing the FPS genre based only on hearsay. Grasshopper is not comfortable within any kind of restrictions, genre or otherwise. A straightforward story or a straight laced shooter ruins the creative mojo.
But, like, should you play it? Recommendations for surrealist stuff like this is hard so I'll just say, if you hate America you'll love this game.
But, like, should you play it? Recommendations for surrealist stuff like this is hard so I'll just say, if you hate America you'll love this game.
2023
I finished YiiK and not this.
2006
Nobody plays God Hand randomly in the year 2023. Picking it up in a 5 dollar bin and discovering one of the best action games of the generation was for when we were younger men. So if you're playing it now, it's hard to not squint and look around every corner for the greatness gamer know-it-alls talk about.
I definitely see it. God Hand is snappy, satisfying and responsive. Animation legibility is prioritized above all else, and maybe more than any other brawler or even fighting game I've played God Hand wants to nudge you into Gaming Good with its systems. Mashing buttons might manipulate Lvl 1 goon AI but after a while, you'll find yourself at Lvl 2 or high and getting blocked, countered and embarrassed.
This game is a marathon though. Health pick ups are random as are the spawning of demons from defeated enemies. These HP jacuzzies will waste your special moves and meter unless you're completely on the ball with your combos. It's a little annoying to have a run of a mission or even a boss ruined by this random element, but also silly that restarting is probably a viable strategy.
I'm gonna go back to it though. God Hand rules where it matters most, making me sweat through my cheap ass Target t-shirts at 11 pm.
I definitely see it. God Hand is snappy, satisfying and responsive. Animation legibility is prioritized above all else, and maybe more than any other brawler or even fighting game I've played God Hand wants to nudge you into Gaming Good with its systems. Mashing buttons might manipulate Lvl 1 goon AI but after a while, you'll find yourself at Lvl 2 or high and getting blocked, countered and embarrassed.
This game is a marathon though. Health pick ups are random as are the spawning of demons from defeated enemies. These HP jacuzzies will waste your special moves and meter unless you're completely on the ball with your combos. It's a little annoying to have a run of a mission or even a boss ruined by this random element, but also silly that restarting is probably a viable strategy.
I'm gonna go back to it though. God Hand rules where it matters most, making me sweat through my cheap ass Target t-shirts at 11 pm.
This review contains spoilers
Chadley may be an interesting avatar of SHINRA's desire to dissect and extract every nugget of value from the planet, and therefore reflect the modern player's desire to do every peabrained activity if it has a node on a world map but he still SUCKS.
Rebirth is boring open world busywork in between the actual interesting bits that made Remake such a fantastic game. I still like those bits, I still like the whole conceit of these sequels, but this is an unnecessarily bloated recitation of those elements.
The sidequests are not far removed from the pointless overworld nonsense and are as weak as they were in Remake. The world at this fidelity just isnt as symmetrical or foreboding as it was on PSX; the party dont fade into the background of the world, they tower over it with far more colored in personality. I believe, for a number of reasons, that this is fine considering the nature of the game's existence and what it's saying about FF7 as a cultural product, but it also means that the more this new series becomes a by-the-numbers AAA rpg the more a contradiction arises.
Rebirth is boring open world busywork in between the actual interesting bits that made Remake such a fantastic game. I still like those bits, I still like the whole conceit of these sequels, but this is an unnecessarily bloated recitation of those elements.
The sidequests are not far removed from the pointless overworld nonsense and are as weak as they were in Remake. The world at this fidelity just isnt as symmetrical or foreboding as it was on PSX; the party dont fade into the background of the world, they tower over it with far more colored in personality. I believe, for a number of reasons, that this is fine considering the nature of the game's existence and what it's saying about FF7 as a cultural product, but it also means that the more this new series becomes a by-the-numbers AAA rpg the more a contradiction arises.
2023
Wanted: Dead is not that weird, a lot of popular games have just become too buttoned down.
W:D works in that margin of utterly compelling amateur game efforts. They have a handful of genre and story ideas that they're ready to follow to the grave, but the rest is up in the air. Will the next cutscene be in-engine or will it be anime? What annoying rhythm minigame will be featured in between the next mission? Why is there a jukebox of obscure European covers of old pop songs?
It's a damn videogame. You can do whatever you want. Without blanching at the audacity of games to be absurd, there's not much left to criticize here. The story is a properly bloody wink wink quick shot of violent adrenaline, the action is snappy fun and rewarding. I just wanted: more of it.
W:D works in that margin of utterly compelling amateur game efforts. They have a handful of genre and story ideas that they're ready to follow to the grave, but the rest is up in the air. Will the next cutscene be in-engine or will it be anime? What annoying rhythm minigame will be featured in between the next mission? Why is there a jukebox of obscure European covers of old pop songs?
It's a damn videogame. You can do whatever you want. Without blanching at the audacity of games to be absurd, there's not much left to criticize here. The story is a properly bloody wink wink quick shot of violent adrenaline, the action is snappy fun and rewarding. I just wanted: more of it.
1997
When I was a kid I was for a short time addicted to this terrible Small Soldiers game (based on the hit movie). You created your own soldier (or whatever the animal/indigenous metaphor faction was called) and could accrue ingame money to buy custom parts.
The game ran at like 10 fps on my old 90s PC but it was an addicting loop. I would buy random parts and just watch my frankenstein's duke it out with the AI because it was easier than controlling it myself.
Armored Core would have absolutely OBSESSED my 8 y/o self. It would have leveled my conception of what games could be.
The robots are cool, they control stiffly at first but compared to most psx/n64 gen games Armored Core is very responsive. The missions are generally tight, and on a blind run you would have little idea what might happen since the mission briefings are very vague. Poor draw distance in the open air maps, and claustrophobic tunnels indoors keep you guessing even when the mission is unfolding. It also unfortunately incentivizes playing it safe with chunkier, slower AC's that can carry more ammo for missions that sometimes go longer than you might expect. Project Phantasm & Arena add those more focused PVAI pilot battles that make lightweight, nimble AC useful, but in AC1 they are a very risky bet.
8 y/o me would have just read everything on gamefaqs beforehand because that's just what I did back then, but that was also how I made game narratives explicable. AC never overestimates its storytelling capacity; it does not push the PSX to be a movie machine with wild, poorly rendered cutscenes. It's beautifully within its limits.
The game ran at like 10 fps on my old 90s PC but it was an addicting loop. I would buy random parts and just watch my frankenstein's duke it out with the AI because it was easier than controlling it myself.
Armored Core would have absolutely OBSESSED my 8 y/o self. It would have leveled my conception of what games could be.
The robots are cool, they control stiffly at first but compared to most psx/n64 gen games Armored Core is very responsive. The missions are generally tight, and on a blind run you would have little idea what might happen since the mission briefings are very vague. Poor draw distance in the open air maps, and claustrophobic tunnels indoors keep you guessing even when the mission is unfolding. It also unfortunately incentivizes playing it safe with chunkier, slower AC's that can carry more ammo for missions that sometimes go longer than you might expect. Project Phantasm & Arena add those more focused PVAI pilot battles that make lightweight, nimble AC useful, but in AC1 they are a very risky bet.
8 y/o me would have just read everything on gamefaqs beforehand because that's just what I did back then, but that was also how I made game narratives explicable. AC never overestimates its storytelling capacity; it does not push the PSX to be a movie machine with wild, poorly rendered cutscenes. It's beautifully within its limits.
2022
KIRA has a finger perfectly on the pulse of 90s PSX nostalgia. Basilisk & Basilisk 2000 were entertainingly meta, but I was curious what the longform of that kinda game looked like. Was the stamina there?
Lunacid is 10 hours of tight adventure. Within its labryinths, nearly every dead-end has a purpose: a new item or weapon, a journal entry, a secret door. Level ups are brisk and correspond to easily observed changes in ability, not just increased attack but higher jumping and quicker walking. Weapon upgrades happen only for a few weapons but when they do, the entire appearance and sometimes material makeup of the weapon changes.
Nothing is wasted, so in the end Lunacid does not feel like a watered down King's Field, or worse cropped out, but something just as filling in a smaller package.
My only issues with Lunacid is how it becomes a nexus of 90s standard definition nostalgia buried underneath a mountain of referential nods to important games, especially Demon's Souls. KIRA is talented enough that one day people will be referencing them in their own indie games, but for now the winking and nodding breaks a little of the magic.
Lunacid is 10 hours of tight adventure. Within its labryinths, nearly every dead-end has a purpose: a new item or weapon, a journal entry, a secret door. Level ups are brisk and correspond to easily observed changes in ability, not just increased attack but higher jumping and quicker walking. Weapon upgrades happen only for a few weapons but when they do, the entire appearance and sometimes material makeup of the weapon changes.
Nothing is wasted, so in the end Lunacid does not feel like a watered down King's Field, or worse cropped out, but something just as filling in a smaller package.
My only issues with Lunacid is how it becomes a nexus of 90s standard definition nostalgia buried underneath a mountain of referential nods to important games, especially Demon's Souls. KIRA is talented enough that one day people will be referencing them in their own indie games, but for now the winking and nodding breaks a little of the magic.
2000
A new personal benchmark for how bad a game can be.
2011
A gloomy adventure with fun-sized Zelda dungeons and admirable self restraint. If it hasn't had its reappraisal yet then it's overdue.
Computer, show me "Elena pandora's tower flesh eating compilation". Ah, now this is art.
Computer, show me "Elena pandora's tower flesh eating compilation". Ah, now this is art.
2023
A cynical liquefaction of Bloodborne. It has the vague trappings of a dying world and knows that addictive gameplay loop inherent to Souls-similar third person action rpgs. On the surface perfectly competent, but ultimately a collection of half understood tropes and overwrought boss battles to rage at (or watch others do so).
I could give it credit for enemy variety, the weapon dissembling system, or the legion arms and say it made Lies of P memorable but I'd be lying.
I could give it credit for enemy variety, the weapon dissembling system, or the legion arms and say it made Lies of P memorable but I'd be lying.
2023
This review contains spoilers
A beautiful and perfunctory RPG experience. Perhaps the most disappointing experience you will have this year.
Sea of Stars has no good reason to be an rpg other than back of the napkin ideas the devs must have had since childhood. Equipment are all small incremental flat stat increases, with only certain accessories even broaching the idea of customizability. One of them (the abacus, which lets you see enemy HP) is so vital though that there is little point in thinking about it. Characters are flat and largely unexciting, dialogue is uninventive and exists in the same space as settlements in this game. They need to exist, and in large quantities, to check the right rpg boxes, but they're superficial pitstops with little to admire besides the art. Eastward and Chained Echoes do so much more in a similar genre space with their settlements that I cannot give Sea of Stars a pass.
Combat itself is serviceable, but SoS gives neither the tension of difficulty or resource management, nor the thrill of customization and experimentation (your characters will still only have about 3 skills to use apiece by the end of the game). If this was a simple action rpg it might have received lower scores, but it would be a healthier game simply from the surgical removal of unnecessary fat.
Boss encounters are actually structured cleverly enough but even on Hard they never hit hard enough to seriously endanger your party, healing is plentiful, and even a stray KO is only a temporary inconvenience since your party member will self-revive with half health after only a couple of turns.
Dungeons and puzzles, such as they are, are busywork lovingly crafted to trigger the bespoke animations that are the actual heart of the game. More often it felt like I was plodding through Mario Maker autorunner levels, or a Sony game's climbing section.
The story is atrocious. Anything attached to the writing is nails on a chalkboard. It is in desperate search of conflict of any kind, but refuses to develop its MCs and their buoyant tagalong sidekick as anything other than the most bland genre versions of themselves. So you get a situation, with no conflict and no pushback, where the game has to pull conflict directly from its rear in deeply unsatisfying ways, falling into jrpg tropes disseminated, dissembled, and parodied decades ago and doing them in the most bland ways you can imagine. The character assassination required to do this is YiiKian in nature but even YiiK had the foresight to engender some kind of conflict to move the story forward, instead of just-so macguffin scenarios and jiu jitsu ass pulls.
The journey becomes predictable in its unpredictableness, a stale bowl of refried bean jrpg pastiche.
So, now the positives (with caveats).
Sea of Stars is the prettiest game released this year. I don't think it's particularly close. If you want to play a spectacle game, avoid FF16 and play this. It is arguably the best looking 2d rpg I have played.
But there are two exceptions to SoS immaculate graphics. First, the portraits are amateur, ill-fitting and immersion breaking. The problem is not necessarily the artistic skill at work, but the game's entire lack of identity. Chrono Cross has a divisive art style for its portraits, as an example, but it all coheres much better than SoS. Second, animated cutscenes play at random intervals of the story. They remind me of the CGI cutscenes inserted into SNES classics by Square when they ported the games to the PSX. Unnecessary and distracting. The pixels can more than speak for themselves and with how underwhelming the rest of the game is, they have to.
Sea of Stars has no good reason to be an rpg other than back of the napkin ideas the devs must have had since childhood. Equipment are all small incremental flat stat increases, with only certain accessories even broaching the idea of customizability. One of them (the abacus, which lets you see enemy HP) is so vital though that there is little point in thinking about it. Characters are flat and largely unexciting, dialogue is uninventive and exists in the same space as settlements in this game. They need to exist, and in large quantities, to check the right rpg boxes, but they're superficial pitstops with little to admire besides the art. Eastward and Chained Echoes do so much more in a similar genre space with their settlements that I cannot give Sea of Stars a pass.
Combat itself is serviceable, but SoS gives neither the tension of difficulty or resource management, nor the thrill of customization and experimentation (your characters will still only have about 3 skills to use apiece by the end of the game). If this was a simple action rpg it might have received lower scores, but it would be a healthier game simply from the surgical removal of unnecessary fat.
Boss encounters are actually structured cleverly enough but even on Hard they never hit hard enough to seriously endanger your party, healing is plentiful, and even a stray KO is only a temporary inconvenience since your party member will self-revive with half health after only a couple of turns.
Dungeons and puzzles, such as they are, are busywork lovingly crafted to trigger the bespoke animations that are the actual heart of the game. More often it felt like I was plodding through Mario Maker autorunner levels, or a Sony game's climbing section.
The story is atrocious. Anything attached to the writing is nails on a chalkboard. It is in desperate search of conflict of any kind, but refuses to develop its MCs and their buoyant tagalong sidekick as anything other than the most bland genre versions of themselves. So you get a situation, with no conflict and no pushback, where the game has to pull conflict directly from its rear in deeply unsatisfying ways, falling into jrpg tropes disseminated, dissembled, and parodied decades ago and doing them in the most bland ways you can imagine. The character assassination required to do this is YiiKian in nature but even YiiK had the foresight to engender some kind of conflict to move the story forward, instead of just-so macguffin scenarios and jiu jitsu ass pulls.
The journey becomes predictable in its unpredictableness, a stale bowl of refried bean jrpg pastiche.
So, now the positives (with caveats).
Sea of Stars is the prettiest game released this year. I don't think it's particularly close. If you want to play a spectacle game, avoid FF16 and play this. It is arguably the best looking 2d rpg I have played.
But there are two exceptions to SoS immaculate graphics. First, the portraits are amateur, ill-fitting and immersion breaking. The problem is not necessarily the artistic skill at work, but the game's entire lack of identity. Chrono Cross has a divisive art style for its portraits, as an example, but it all coheres much better than SoS. Second, animated cutscenes play at random intervals of the story. They remind me of the CGI cutscenes inserted into SNES classics by Square when they ported the games to the PSX. Unnecessary and distracting. The pixels can more than speak for themselves and with how underwhelming the rest of the game is, they have to.
2022
josh sawyer's love for history was so deep and convincing it was actually making me tear up
2000
Hellraiser cube gaming
2022
Liminal horror has been big the last few years and maybe someone smarter than me can write a thesis on why, but Basilisk does a wonderful job understanding what exactly "liminal" should be.
I'm gonna be thinking on this one for a bit...probably until I explore Basilisk 2000.
I'm gonna be thinking on this one for a bit...probably until I explore Basilisk 2000.