É difícil para mim NÃO gostar de um jogo mas com o Alan Wake estive muito perto disso, a história realmente é tudo o que dizem e mais, eu aprecio a exploração do síndrome de impostor do Alan, das metáforas pouco subtis e o que eu assumo que seja uma recontextualização de como foi ter que escrever o Max Payne.

É uma história muito pessoal e isso é raro em videojogos, adiciona algo muito único à narrativa, mesmo não sendo o primeiro nem o último a fazê-lo continua a ser uma lufada de ar fresco.

O meu problema é com tudo exceto a história, a gameplay passa de aceitável a irritante, o jogo é geralmente janky e em momentos incontáveis atira-te tudo à cara, existe pouco horror no jogo, é só um shooter genérico a esconder-se por trás de uma obra narrativa muito gira. As DLC's oferecem uma exploração um pouco mais aprofundada de mecânicas introduzidas mesmo no final do jogo, contudo a primeira é genuinamente atroz e a segunda é o que o jogo devia ter sido: uma exploração mais calma e dependente da história em vez de 40 minutos a mandar tiros a vultos, 5 minutos de cutscene e mais 40 minutos a disparar para o ar. É quase uma pena que tenhas de passar por cerca de 12 horas para chegar ao ponto alto do jogo, que nem está inserido na experiência base. O terceiro episódio é puro aborrecimento e o último episódio devia ser mais curto, parece que eles puxaram os episódios ao máximo para poderem caber em time-slots de uma hora.

Let’s create the scene: you’ve come in after a shit day, you really need something to cheer you up. You just sit around looking at your phone to see the latest game news. You then choose to see whether or not there’s any new switch games that have released (simply out of boredom) and then you see chapter 2 of deltarune has been ported over to switch at last. You quickly boot up the game and hop into the chapter and wow. Everything about this chapter was improved from the first chapter and I love it.

The story is improved heavily with new characters and expansions from characters who didn’t do much in the previous chapter (Noelle, berdly, etc). The story takes them to the cyber world where they have to close another fountain created by the ‘queen’. The writing for the chapter is just as good as the previous chapter and the characters feel like a major improvement.

As for gameplay, it’s also improved. Now, not killing enemies actually does something! You can now ‘recruit’ them and they’ll come over to your town near ralsei’s castle. There is also the secret possible ending which I won’t spoil but is very eerie and interesting.

Overall, this chapter was an excellent improvement on the foundations the first chapter lay and I can’t wait for the next few chapters to come out.

Don’t rush it Toby. You deserve to take a break when you want to and not to over work yourself. You’ll probably never read this but we’ll enjoy the game you finish at the end of the day.

Major improvement, wonderful soundtrack, berdly has zero rizz, the ferris wheel :>

You know how sometimes that there are things that just make you happy? Like, make you forget the wrong in the world and just put a smile in your face? This. This is it right here.

Toby Fox's work has always struck a cord with me but my god, Deltarune Chapter 2 is just... everything. It has a certain energy, a certain love, a charisma that few other games have, and it can be both a fun travel as much as a scary one, but it's always entertaining and lovely. The only reason this is not a 5 star is because it's not the full package yet, and I want to wait for the full game before giving it the perfect score, but the fact that this is totally free still bugs my mind, just...... just play it man, it's a fun one.

Yeah, I played and beat this because it was featured in Ready Player One. Far be it for me to validate Ernest Cline's tendency to reference whatever he feels like without guiding people along. But (1) Adventure's important enough to play through anyway, and (2) Cline at least did his due establishing Adventure for non-nerd readers, so I got no qualms here.

Adventure is regarded as one of the first Adventure games (it's where the term comes from, after all). These days it definitely feels quaint for how limited it is, but it's a decent enough time. It's easy enough to get what you're supposed to do that it's still worth the quick revisit.

Though, I have read takes that even at the time, there was way less to do in it than its contemporaries. I suppose since there is no score system or anything, the game comes across as quite limited for an Atari 2600 title. Kind of funny to think about, since I'm used to thinking of things from the opposite end of the equation, but I can see it. Yars' Revenge gets its depth from its emergent high-score difficulty, after all.

Let the record show: "Rhindle", "Grundle", and "Yorgle" belong in the conversation for "best video game enemy name", alongside "Cacodemon", "Mancubus", and "Clyde".

We were young, and we were still learning. Coming into our own, yet still not quite there.

The second generation was much like some of us who had experienced the series from the beginning as bright eyed and optimistic children. Maturing, finding our footing in life, and trying to figure things out for what we really wanted out of our future. Do we continue onward with our current path and continue developing our skill? Are we seeking to make a career of said skill? Those drawings bearing a similar crudeness to generation one sprites that we etched on the back of our tests, those little characters that you made from your own two hands and the ocean of your imagination. They would need to be refined, perhaps to the point you would be sick of seeing them again through the months and months of practice. We struck gold on something we were good at, but were we ready to make this our life? How do we get ready for life? Would we even make it to that path we dreamed of?

For us, this was the sequel. A sequel to childhood, and the path to maturity.

If we were to get ready for life, we would need to learn how to maintain a schedule and utilize a form of communication to keep in touch with our contacts. Through our little battery-powered clock in our cartridges, we kept track of the time of day in order to search for different friends on different paths. We would remember what day it was, so we could participate in a bug catching contest and try to find that Scyther. If we couldn't get up in the morning early enough to catch a Ledyba, what good were we in participating in life? It was at this point we were starting to get into the thick of things, we weren't children anymore, but teenagers who aspired to be more like adults. We were excited of all that upcoming opportunity that would only be granted to us with age, and with that age in due time came responsibility and expectations to provide. Life would soon not be all about fun anymore.

It was soon time to grow up, and perhaps move away from home to master our craft elsewhere...

It's hard however to leave behind everything that you grew up with. We traveled to Johto to learn how to better ourselves, perhaps like the bike shop owner who got unlucky on their new shop placement in Goldenrod, but for us it wasn't truly home. We would long for our old pals, our old hangout spots, and our favorite order from our childhood fast food place. We desired a return trip home to Kanto, so we can say hello to everybody one last time before we begin our life's career. Home however, wasn't quite the same as we had remembered. Forests were chopped down, caves were cleared out, and Lavender Town's place of remembrance had been converted into a radio tower. Kanto has changed, or has it matured like us? Resources have been plundered for practical use over the thoughts of those who had lived there, and spirituality has been pushed to the side in the name of technological advancement. Have we lost our way, or is this what is to be expected of us in the future?

When I finally climb this mountain and end this visit home, what will await me at it's peak?

The last lingering strand of childhood I had left made manifest, the past me armed with the very first friends I had made on this adventure. If I must let go of the past, I must defeat the longing memories of what once was. Even if I were victorious, will the memories finally rest or will they continue pursuing me? With the destruction of the past, we make way for the future. This is the way. This is the way we grow up. We no longer have room for trifling matters such as our childhood friends, memories, or the places we once held dear. It's time to make way for adulthood and to only go forward without ever looking back. Home is no longer home, it's no longer even a memory for us, it was thrown back into the toybox where it belonged. With this we continue our adventure elsewhere, and we leave everything behind. It was a fad, and it's time to bury those McDonalds toys and trading cards in a box or sell them off in a yard sale.

It was never to be the same again, for we have both grown up. Us now simple mature adults, and them a fully-realized juggernaut of a franchise with no end in sight. We've defeated our childhood, there was no reason to keep going with this series obviously geared towards what we had grown out of. We could take a peek once in a while to check on them when they make the television, but we would do so with a look over our shoulder to try and maintain our mask of adulthood and maturity. It was time to only watch mature programming, and play mature games while doing other such mature things, like swearing while our parents weren't around. This is what is expected of us now, it's time to leave it behind to the next generation who will grow with the next set of games, whom may also leave once they have grown past it....with another generation to follow.....and the cycle repeats....

My time was over, much like Kanto and the Game Boy, but despite what life and middle school demanded of me, I would never be too far away.

I am home, I always have been.

To quote another Capcom game, "a solid beginning may lead to a perfect ending". A solid beginning was something that Street Fighter V unfortunately didn't really have, and it pretty much haunted it for the rest of it's life, even if it deserved the contempt or not.

So what can Capcom do to deliver this solid beginning to 6? Well, how about a fun as shit mode where you make your own self-insert, and run around Metro City delivering shoryukens to the back of some old lady's head and initiate fights with everyone you see? A Yakuza-like perhaps, but for me it's Mortal Kombat Deception's Konquest Mode expanded and perfected. It turns out all you need to attract more casual fans is a cool single player mode that just so happens to have a neat fighting game attached to it. Vets like myself love it too, because the Capcom references and lore drops never stop falling on top of you, and the cellphone interactions with the fighters is so fucking adorable. God, it's probably the best mode I've ever played in a fighting game.

Capcom is always Capcom, they do silly things constantly, but here they've proved that they've learned from the last game. I haven't felt this good about a Street Fighter entry since Third Strike, and obviously it remains to be seen whether this can have that kind of longevity. Regardless, everyone I know who's playing is absolutely fuckin' happy, and you know what? I'm fuckin' happy. It feels so nice seeing the game launch this well after V's clumsy-ass stumble out of the starting gate. I do think there's a special kind of quality to having Street Fighter do good, and attract all this attention even from friends in my circles who don't normally play fighting games, perhaps more good things will come in the end....more fighting game friends.....yes....let's fuckin' go. Yes, I WANT YOU TO PLAY FUCKIN' FIGHTING GAMES!!

For now, I have high hopes.... perhaps a perfect beginning may lead to an even better ending. Rooting for ya champ.

Justice for All is widely agreed on to be the weakest of the Ace Attorney trilogy, for reasons I can understand. It only contains four cases out of the typical five, for one. The first case being a tutorial and the third, infamously, being brought down by the pedophile love triangle plotline. For all of that though, it still introduces incredibly important developments for the series; premiering Fransizka and finishing with the much revered Farewell, my Turnabout

As a child this was easily the least influential game for me, I absolutely could not STAND Fransizka and none of the cases stood out to me much. Now though, I definitely feel more positive about it. I still dont have much attraction for the 1st and 3rd cases but I'm pretty impressed by the overall implications the events in this game have over the rest of the series. In a way, some of it feels partly like a set up for T&T, especially the happenings with Morgan and Pearl. But heres where we start getting smarter and more thoroughly crafted cases, psyche locks also being an intresting way to interact with and progress characters outside of court. As a kid I think I preferred Maya, but honestly Pearl is very endearing and a delight to have as an assistant. Her being more "mature" than her cousin despite her age introduces a lot of funny situations and also reinforces my belief that 9 year old girls are the greatest force on the planet. Mimi Miney and Acro are two of my favorite killers in the trilogy, and I thought Mimi's situation in the 2nd case specifically was very cleverly thought out.

Unfortunately this game (all of the trilogy, really) has some bad habits which annoyed me in JFA particularly. One is just straight up showing you who the killer is- if not in the opening cutscene then just at a random point throughout the case. The other is withholding all developement until you present a random item/profile to a character- despite the fact that you may have already discussed said item with said character 2 or 3 times but you havent ACTUALLY unlocked the conversation topic for it until you show them. And it is very easy go forget what you should be showing whom as theres no way to keep track of dialouge, so that can be a tad frustrating.

Farewell, my Turnabout is a huge bombshell in terms of the logic of the series and opens up a lot of questions that it is still answering. Mainly, what it means to be a defense lawyer and what the search for truth actually looks like, if the law can even uphold that standard, and how to make the right decision within that confinement. Watching Phoenix grow throughout the game from being an anxious rookie to a genuine attorney is important, but it's really only evident through the developments in this case as his and Miles' relationship is reestablished. Miles himself has grown into the character we more or less remember him as, and in a world where prosecutors hate your guts, it is very refreshing to watch a dynamic where the two work together and mesh with each other so easily. Because of the game's length, Fransizka tended to be sidelined a great deal of the time (being the only prosecutor to not even have her own theme), but she did get her moments throughout case 4 that made my heart hurt a little. Especially the post credits scene which had me tearing up a bit at the end, it is a huge shame we dont really see more of her throughout JFA and T&T because I adore her and she should be treated better.

Overall I'm kind of just happy to finally be playing T&T now, and while I wouldnt risk it all dying on the hill of defending JFA- it IS still a very good and important game to the Ace Attorney series regardless of how much you may want to hang Trilo upsidedown by his feet and force feed him milk till he pukes.

umm, like... how do I close out a review? I kind of, like, forgot. Sorry.

On the surface, Alan Wake is the more conventional of the two RE4 inspired Peaks-type horror games released in 2010 (Deadly Premonition being the first true Peaks-type game), but once it gets into the weeds of its meta narrative it morphs into a decidedly unique action game story. The plot is also able to carry the relatively simple gameplay loop after it eventually becomes rote.

Said loop being: holding your flashlight until the Elite Beat Agents circles close and then hitting fire a couple of times.

Those repetitive encounters and environments are my only major knock against Alan Wake. Still, it’s got that diegetic flashlight reticle and y’all know that design element is a Conman-core situation.

One thing this game has in spades is the ever illusive thing I call soul. I always like to have the term soul in my back pocket just in case I’m too lazy to describe aesthetics. Alan Wake has a thought-out, serious story, but Remedy does a great job of not letting pretentious self-seriousness consume everything. The in-game tv shows, the radio, the manuscripts… come to think of it, this is one of the only times I’ve sought out audio logs to experience the audio logs themselves. That is some of the highest praise I can give a game’s collectibles.

Also, thinking about how Swery claims he’s never seen Twin Peaks never ceases to make me smile. As another side note, my almost 8-month-old son did NOT like this game or Condemned: Criminal Origins. “Boo hoo it’s scary” so what stop being a baby.

Shout out to small rural towns overtaken by an evil or dark presence that corrupts them or brings hellish creatures. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.




Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.

Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.




Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.

But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—,  the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.

The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…

…luckily, it has a dragon.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.

It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.

Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.




Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.

‘’But there’s something else’’, he said




But there’s something else.

A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.

I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.

The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.

But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.

It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through.  In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.

Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.