Arguably the greatest Halo game, and perhaps even the greatest game Bungie will ever produce. Bought at midnight launch, played day 1 and almost every weekend for the next couple of years.

Meh. The theme is nice, but it's a fairly simplistic and barebones city simulator. Couldn't be bothered to go past the tutorial. Paradox has a good approach to menus and default controls.

A fun rhythm-y, twitchy platformer-shooter with a unique art style and fitting, overacted dialogue. Probably great, but not my cup of tea.

13/40

One of the greatest VNs ever ;)

Writing decreases in quality as you get towards the end, as there is only so much verbiage you can use to describe "nothingness" (or conversely, political philosophy in a neutral, fully developed way).

Downloading the Disco Explorer mod and setting running speed with a 2x multiplier is almost essential - otherwise movement around the map is a real slog.

Actually quite fun fooling around in this sandbox game with friends.

It's like David Cage simulated himself 10 times and cobbled together the script from each of his clones' fever dreams. Every cliche, every trope, every unintentionally hilarious French video game aesthetic instance is thrown together in a Unreal Engine 5 decision tree demo.

That being said, definitely his best game. But one playthrough is more than enough. I'm boycotting Quantic Dream after this; the unskippable cutscenes made me want to kill myself a few times.

Also, great soundtrack.

2010

Fun little indie/art-adventure game. Don't remember much about it.

Played around release and a couple times after that. Very fun little game, reminiscent of the halcyon days of flash.

Played for a couple weeks after release. Such a far cry from the trailers that intrigued us all, but even the bastardized product we received had enough style that I kept going for a while. Utter waste of a preorder (gold edition, too).

Played with younger cousins sometime in summer 2021.

Played a couple hours.

Eh, not for me. It's too big of a world, with too many tasks to do and combat not enticing enough (but I admire the true variety and detail put into the different classes and styles). Often marketed as a single player game perhaps with instancing, but I think Capcom should commit to calling it an MMO. It's one of the best MMOs out there when stop and think about it, and it'd set better expectations for players, too: it's soo grindy on your own.

Played from release sporadically until COVID.

What I most admire about Death Stranding is that it delivered a genuinely new game mechanic. Obviously, the delivery man gameplay loop was the point of much ridicule, but I grok'd Kojima's vision pretty quickly and enjoyed the systems designed to exploit the player's altruism and honor into maintaining a tight delivery schedule and infrastructure. It works as a competitive leaderboard type lure as well as an atmospheric, casual game to unwind to. That being said, once you progress enough into the game to regularly encounter enemies that require lethal means, the gameplay loop devolves into a more standard open world shooter and becomes much less interesting and more tedious.

The story has Kojima's usual weirdness, but aside from the horror aspect I found it sparse in detail enough to mostly ignore. (If you like it, you like it, but it's not particularly deep sci-fi.) I thought it was interesting that concepts like transhumanism and the Singularity had seeped into the lore, suggesting that these buzzwords are now rather prevalent (had also been encountering more usage in the wild for the previous year or two).

I think I got within a few hours of the climax. COVID amongst other things took me off track, but I don't feel a particular draw back to it. Shelved, for now.

This review was written before the game released