A nice little look at what could have been a good game. It's not bad. There are great low-poly visuals, despite for the most part lazy monster design that is admittedly papered over well by some text logs. The text logs and narrative might be cool for people who are into science fiction. I found the Coleridge references unsatisfying to put it generously. There's a split ending thing that is much cooler in concept than in execution.

I think I want to like this game more than I actually do. Again, it's not bad. That's probably as good as it is though. But it's like, you really feel some personality went into this; some nerd who played too much DOOM and Super Metroid and Half Life in high school got into the lab and really took a crack at something. How no one has done rocket jumping in a metroidvania before or since this game is unclear to me. It's fun, if unpolished and fleeting.

I really liked this.
Felt a little trapped by the format and "quiz" idea but was pretty emotional and hit close to home with some parts. As someone who has been in toxic/abusive relationships, it felt pretty emotionally honest but, like most emotionally honest pieces of media, it was a bit undeveloped and lacked some finality a more fleshed-out piece might have.
Should've had a content warning though as, clearly from other reviews of this game, it has had a negative mental impact on others and that should always be avoided if possible.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/mod-corner-paranoia-half-life-2007-review/

When you have a dedicated fan base that are willing to spend a lot of time making and playing mods for your game, eventually a lot of these mods will eventually push the limits of your game and it’s engine. One of the mods that pushed what the Half-Life modding tools were capable of was Paranoia.

You play the role of a Russian officer of the Secret Service. You are called out on a mission, and your first impressions are that it will just be like any other. But you find yourself facing the dark secret side of military experiments that want to bring the dead back to life. It’s pretty much a horror B-movie, and it does a pretty decent job at being one.

Like a lot of Half-Life mods, Paranoia takes a note from it, and the first ~20-30 minutes of Paranoia is going around a Russian military base, teaching you how the game works and showing people going about their lives before shit hits the fan.

It’s here where you can see how Paranoia really pushes the GoldSRC engine for the time it was released, with all of it’s locations looking incredibly accurate to it’s real world counterpart. The team behind this mod took a ton of references from real world Russian architecture and environments, and it really shows how much work the mod team put into the small details. Every location feels run down, grimy, and gloomy.

The game even adds in a few new shiny visual effects that the GoldSRC engine didn’t have, such as bump mapping and gloss on top if it’s detailed textures as well as better lighting effects, which makes the flashlight more useful than Half-Life’s, really highlighting the incredibly run down and sometimes claustrophibic levels. The team behind this mod, appropriately named Paranoia Team, spent 3 years developing this mod, and it clearly shows.

It does show it’s age a little bit in that a few things have a lower polygon count than more recent games. Especially with other characters faces, which use real peoples faces as the in game faces.

Going into combat does have some strategic elements to it. Your character has a Ballistics Helmet that you can use to protect yourself from getting more easily killed. The down side is that it’s harder to see and you can’t view down the scope on certain weapons. There is also the Gas Mask, but is used twice in the entire mod, and one of those times is to teach you how to use it.

Maybe the developers intended to have it be used more, but didn’t have the time or man power to have more areas use it, so they left it in just to have another bullet point to show off. All of the weapons all look great and sound really satisfying to use. There is also the ability to use iron sights, which was getting popular in games at the time. Hand-to-hand combat isn’t exactly a viable option since enemies could easily kill you if you get too close to them. Although, when you kill your enemies, you can loot ammo and other stuff off of their bodies. This is how you’d get most of your ammo.

Aside from picking up medkits throughout the game that immediately give you health, you pick up Painkillers too, which are an item in your inventory you can activated at any time. On the easiest difficulty there are so many of them that I maxed out the amount i could carry and never ran out of them, but I’m pretty sure on higher difficulties they’re a lot rarer.

The AI enemies and companions are actually a lot better than the ones in Half-Life. Friendly companion AI can actually hold it’s own fairly well. You do get a game over when one of them dies, so you’ll have to take care of them to some extent, but it never feels like you’re babysitting them. The only problem I have with them is waiting for them to get in position, and I was never quite sure if I was the one who was supposed to open a door or they were until one of them moved their way in front of a door. On harder difficulties, the enemy AI is a bit hard for my liking, but I never had any problems with it.

Surprisingly, this mod’s soundtrack was done by a Russian metal band called “Slot” along with their own original music. I’ve never heard of them before, probably because they’re a Russian band, but from what I’ve heard looking them up, they seem to be pretty good. The games mix of dark ambient music for slower atmospheric moments and higher energy tracks when the action gets started really add to the tone that the mod was going for.

Paranoia eventually got a version called “Paranoia: The Game Version”, which runs on something called Xash3D, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine. This was done so that the people behind this mod didn’t have to continually have to update the mod every time Valve updated Half-Life. Plus it gives the added bonus of not needing Half-Life installed.

Probably the most interesting thing about this mod is that it got a port to the Dreamcast using the leaked unreleased port of Half-Life. I didn’t have the chance to test this myself since I don’t have a Dreamcast, but from the videos I’ve seen, it seems to work pretty well.

Should you play Paranoia? Hell yes. It’s one of the best mods for Half-Life out there, and it even has some of that loveable jank that Russia games tend to have.

God of War is a big serious game about guilt, redemption, peace, and teamwork but you spend most of the run time killing faceless monsters. It is an intimate, linear journey which is endlessly distracted by meandering fetch quests and side content. It neuters the near perfect camera of the original and replaces it with one which basically drags down the whole game with it. There are some benefit here for story telling reasons and a few of the set pieces, but I fail to see why the camera just couldn't change positions depending on the encounter, cutscene, or set pieces. Any good idea GOW4 has in its gameplay-the recall axe and combat environmental interactions- is just drowned out in just endless and tiring it is, and when you add in entirely pointless rpg mechanics it makes the main gameplay of the game something to dread more then anything. It even skirts any tough decisions in terms of gear by making Kratos's level a sum of his total gear's level so a player is incentived to just choose the gear which makes the level number go up or risk ending up too underlevered to fight enemies.

The story is an okay as a modern HBO/marvel blockbuster spin on Norse myth (its certainly better then Marvel's Thor) , but suffers from a constant slew of quips that deflate key moments and an obnoxiously respective approach to world building: how many times do we need to hear how much of an asshole Odin and Thor are? There is also just some some strange story decisions like how does Atreus fight off a hoard of dark elfs with an axe he was just handed? Its a minor thing but one which sticks out as contrary to the entire story, and is entirely in the cutscene so it doesn't have the excuse of Ludo narrative dissonance.

The original God of War games didn't have the most in-depth combat or nuanced story but it did deliver on constant, ever expanding action where Kratos's single minded rage, and darkly comedic ultitarianism could shine. While GOW4 sometimes delivers in the set piece front, these are few and far between the game's repetitive main combat. While GOW4's combat can feel fresh when a new weapon or move is unlocked, these new strategies quickly get lost in a see of visually similar enemies and rpg number crunching. While GOW4's story sometimes hits the emotional beats it built itself around, even these become diluted when bookended by hours of repetitive gore animations.

I only played two hours of this game but it is somehow the worst fucking game I've played in recent years. To the absolute piss poor performance to the absolute barrage of jokes in the game that somehow all manage to fucking bomb. It is insane how bad of a video you cannot make not just in the writing department but also in the actual just video game department. The mediocre gameplay wouldn't even be that bad if it wasn't for the rest of it. Why does this have the most frame dips I've played on a series X when it looks like a unity student game. No FOV slider with the awful camera made me almost want to just immediately quit the game out of motion sickness. The absolute just barrage of Justin Roiland doing his dumb shitty morty voice for the 50th time and me continuing just to play the game straight face. "Oh but you can turn off the dialogue on the gun!" yea but why is it so bad in the first place. If it's default then I assume it's an intended way to play. There was one joke that made me laugh in game and it was the character customization joke. Please for the love of god this game isn't even worth the "well it's on gamepass" because that was my reasoning. Please just go pickup a good game, if you want something with very meh writing pickup Neon White. Atleast that game gives you an amazing video game to play. I cannot reiterate how bad this game runs with the constant frame dips and general bad look. Do not play this game

who cares if it's not out yet? the 25-minute preview we've been shown was fucking misery-inducing. I could barely slog through 5 minutes of the preview, let alone the other 4/5ths of it. it's Justin Roiland at his most unfunny and the prospect of playing a game where both your gun and your knife never shut the fuck up is a depressing one. there wasn't a single joke that made me crack a smile - the game seems to be going for the old "keep talking and talking and talking and eventually you'll seem funny" adage except they forgot the latter part of that proverb and just kept talking into the void, ad infinitum ad nauseum. the only hook this game has going for it is "lol, wouldn't it be FUCKIN HILARIOUS if, like, you were playing a shooter, and your GUN kept talking to you???", something that would barely even be all that funny in a five-second Rick and Morty gag let alone a five-to-eight-hour game (or longer, a scary thought).

So what if the game's not out yet? It already shot itself in the foot right from the get-go, and the talking gun character probably said: "ohhhh wow, look at you buddy, yeah you, uh, you shot yourself in the foot. You literally shot yourself in the foot, look at that! Most people, you know, most people, they just-- they just metaphorically do it, right? But no, you? You literally did that. You did that, wow. You're the-- this-- this is my master now, huh? You're the guy that's gonna be using me for the next few levels! What a life. What a life I live, man. Woe is me. Ugh, whatever, c'mon, let's take the next train to Glorbaflorbia and ride the Shick-Schnell line all the way to Dergaflop. Glerpscherp's waiting for us."

If that made you laugh unironically, then... I guess this game's made for you??? Hope you enjoy the edibles that'll probably definitely come packaged with this pandering piece of shit.

in its early iterations, this was one of the most soulful MMOs ever made.
the combat system had a lot of depth and build variety (before people metagamed the absolute optimal skills), its crafting minigames and life systems were really well thought out (before being cheesed by plugins and bots) and aesthetically it was pretty inspired (before it turned into flanderized run of the mill anime shit).

the skill and gear system allowed for different kinds of customizations and was very asymmetrical. the weapons weren't predictably tiered (wooden, iron, gold etc) like they are in RPGs now, but rather every weapon handled differently and lent itself better to certain builds. upgrades were often tradeoffs or specializations. some weapons were straight better than others, but you could make most of them work, so you picked what you liked.

item management mattered and was very fun in its grid arragement, kinda like RE4. nearly every item felt like it had a use, be it gear, fashion, crafting or quests. you could get all kinds of loot from different dungeons, exploration ventures, gathering skills or smacking random objects in the world. there were titles for bragging rights, too. also a food system, depending on your diet you got fat, buff or skinny. and a music system that let you play music from MIDI scores. lots of little things that greatly added to the social aspect.

one of my fondest memories was venturing out into a far flung forest area in the iria continent to get to a dungeon with a few friends. we stopped to make a campfire at night and gathered mushrooms to cook and share around the fire. going to a dungeon was a big deal and required preparation and travel, which made one feel like there was something at stake.

this game had so many things i miss in modern MMOs; asymmetrical, open ended design, genuine exploration, a story that guides you through the game without railroading you, and TONS of opportunities to be social.

a shame how it turned out over the years, mainly caused by Nexon's awful business practices and gameplay meddling. devCAT is (was?) one of most talented korean studios i've seen, and they honestly deserved better. there were so, so many good gameplay decisions in this game that are completely unappreciated and lost to time, bogged down by additions, changes and a changing market. i wish the real sequel to this game didn't get canned, vindictus doesn't count it's basically a different game.
i saw about mabinogi mobile, not excited for that if that if it ever comes out.

edit: last i checked, there was a private server that replicated the classic experience. probably the definite way to play it these days over the live version.

Dubbed the original Resident Evil 3, this game you take control of Claire Redfield one of the protagonists from Resident Evil 2.

this was the first game of the series to take place outside of raccoon city, what this game does well is add an atmosphere not seen before with eerie sound effect and slow opening doors at certain points with a heartbeat sound effect to really add the tension.

What really lets this game Down is the over the top backtracking which gives you a real sense of ohh i was only here 5 minutes ago and makes you feel like you are doing the same thing over and over the game overall is a good resident evil when you get over that but this really dents the gameplay and enjoyment overall.

What this game does do well is the OST probably up there as one of the best resident Evil ost's the musical score in this game is amazing.

to add further damage to this score, Steve one of the side characters/support becomes so unbearable it makes you wish you could kill him off yourself add to the fact he has a tendancy to make a move on Claire while she's asleep.....

overall i would say give the game a go if you havent played it before because its worth giving a try, beyond that its not a resident evil i'd return to play too often. 3/5