If I was asked to name the greatest game of all time, I'd take approximately 0.03 milliseconds to answer, "Resident Evil 4." The 2005 classic holds a special sentimental value to me that almost no other media does. So when plans for a remake were leaked a couple of years ago, I wasn't happy about it, quite honestly. My thought process was this: Capcom, we get it, you had a lot of success remaking the PS1 entries, you want to keep riding the gravy train - but don't mess with perfection. Don't mess with Resident Evil 4.

I unashamedly admit to my cynicism throughout RE4 Remake's development. You see, when a game like Resident Evil 2 or Final Fantasy VII gets a remake, it makes sense because these games - excellent as they are - are retro titles made for outdated hardware. Resident Evil 4, despite being almost 20 years old, is still a modern third-person shooter because it fucking invented the modern third-person shooter. A remake was unnecessary. The first time I watched footage of the game, I felt a bit sad, as it wasn't particularly exciting - it was from the post-church segment of RE4, and the remake's take on it felt subdued. You also have to bear in mind that we were just coming off of Resident Evil 3 Remake, which was decent but disappointing, and Resident Evil Village, which I hated. Then the chainsaw demo came out, and I watched my friend stream it, and finally got excited. It looked faithful to the original, which was my biggest concern.

Now, having played RE4 Remake, my conclusion is this: it's still an unnecessary remake, but a worthy one regardless. This game does not replace or supersede the classic RE4 for me, but it's still an incredibly well-made third-person shooter. It's laden with nods to the original, even in places where it deviates from its parent game - be it for pacing reasons, or to better suit the grittier, grounded tone of this version. Almost all sections from the original that felt too Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider-esque have been excised, as have most quick-time events - a concession to players' changing tastes. Even as I missed the couple of areas that were entirely removed, I didn't mind too much - unlike RE3 Remake, where it felt like laziness, here it felt like a weighted decision to prevent chapters from becoming overlong or exhausting. Even when a section was abbreviated, there still existed some trace of the original that you could recognize.

On the flip side, certain sections have been expanded, modified, and reimagined entirely - with admirable results. Sometimes it felt like these curveballs felt like they were aimed specifically at players like me, who know the original game so well we could play it with our eyes closed. Having the rug pulled out from under me like this kept the game fresh and exciting.

However, there is one area where the changes are not welcome: characterization. While Ashley has been greatly improved in this version, to the point that I prefer her to the original 'HEEEEEELP! LEEEEOOOON!' screamer, the same is not true for the rest of the supporting characters. None of the rivals feel better off for their redesign: Mendez, Salazar, Krauser or Saddler all are less charismatic than their original counterparts. Mendez never shuts the fuck up, even during his boss fight, which robs him of his strong-and-silent menace. Salazar has a worse design and isn't as charmingly cheeky. Krauser has too much backstory and too much emotion, robbing him of his mystique. And Saddler is probably the worst-hit: he believes his own lies in this version, and I feel the Osmund of old, who was openly in it for the money and power, was a more effective villain. He also takes far too long to appear, compared to his early introduction in the 2005 original, which allowed him and Leon to develop a suitable antagonism towards each other.

And Ada, dear God, Ada. Her voice acting in this game is fucking atrocious, and I have no idea why her actress from RE2 Remake wasn't retained. Her new actress has no previous voiceover experience and had an extremely immature response to players criticizing her work, calling them racist. It isn't because you're Asian, Lily, it's because your voice work sucks. Ada's characterization in this game is also a lot colder and less likeable, and a mid-credits scene meant to redeem her would have been better if replaced by nothing.

I should mention that, in a vacuum, it's not like the characters' new motivations and dialogue are bad - indeed, Salazar's revamped boss fight is quite engaging, while the others faithfully recreate their original battles to great effect. It's just that I feel the original game's incarnations were superior.

Finally, there's the dynamic between Leon and Luis - one of the most beloved RE side characters. They take a lot longer to trust each other in this one, but it pays off well. I do feel Luis's character concluded better in the original than in the remake - but in case you've somehow managed to avoid the plot of one of the most popular games of the last 20 years, I won't spoil it for you. Also, Luis is finally playable in Mercenaries mode now! This was something I've wanted since 2005.

Resident Evil 4 Remake looks and controls like a dream. It should, because it runs on the RE Engine. I played through the game on Hardcore difficulty, which is recommended for people who've played the original. Here's a fun anecdote that shows my love, and countless playthroughs, of the original RE4: I kept dying at the first village fight because muscle memory kept kicking in, and I'd try to play this game with the 2005 RE4's controls! But once you're used to it, the gameplay really is super satisfying. Perhaps it's just my rote learning of the original, but I think this version is harder. It was shocking how intelligent and aggressive the enemies were.

RE4 Remake is a thrilling new take on a game I know by heart: when it deviated, I was suitably thrown off-balance, and when it remained faithful, I basked in its familiarity, the beautiful recreations of objects and environments from the original game. The soundtrack similarly defers to the great work of the original - it's a little more downbeat, but reuses musical motifs of the original to stir your memory.

This is the best horror game to come out in years. It already had most of the work done for it, all it had to do was eat at the table that the 2005 game had set. But Capcom made sure to put in the extra love and care that Resident Evil 4 deserves. This is a worthy remake. Not as good as the original - for me at least - but an amazing game in its own right. It would be too big of an ask for it to surpass the original, really. When Resident Evil 4 came out in 2005, there was nothing like it. When Resident Evil 4 came out in 2023, everything was like it. Every game that has an over-the-shoulder camera, every third-person shooter made after 2005, owes something to RE4. That's the level of influence this game has had, and as someone who has such an emotional connection to it, I give this remake my stamp of approval.

I gave Grand Theft Auto IV a relatively low score because while it was a decent game, the PC version being sold on Steam is player-unfriendly to the point of alienation. With The Lost and Damned, you don't have to worry about that. It gets a low score simply because it's pure and utter horseshit.

Mate, what a terrible expansion pack. They made the effort to fix the godawful motorcycle controls the original game had, and then stopped. Liberty City has never felt more like Detroit, Michigan a barren wasteland than in this lame ass motorcycle riding simulator. Christ, I get it, you fucking fixed the motorcycle controls, that's not reason to surgically graft the motorcycle onto my fucking character, making you fail most missions automatically if your bike gets damaged. I thought Grand Theft Auto was about stealing any vehicle you wanted?

And what a character he is. What characters they all are. Great crime stories often show us that while the thug life may look flashy and glamorous, it can only end with you six feet under or behind bars. The Lost and Damned takes a different approach to dissuade kids from a life of petty thievery: it makes being an outlaw biker just look so fucking embarrassing. It made me have second thoughts about Sons of Anarchy being one of my favourite TV shows, because it makes motorcycle gangsters look like manchildren. Every cutscene has the detestable cast getting in each others' faces - we get the point okay, they're all alpha males because they smoke unfiltered cigarettes and say 'fuck you,' in every sentence, ever heard of subtlety? When you fight against rival gangs, they toss playground insults like 'losers' (a very creative twist on the gang being called Lost) and 'deadbeats' (an equally profound mockery of Angels of Death). When two skinny cops get one over on these skinhead shitheads, they whine, "It's because of these guys that I joined the Lost!" Boo fucking hoo. Go tell your big brother, Johnny, I'm sure you still think he can beat police officers up for you.

Levelheaded players who have not been exposed to this rancid bucket of manure may argue that the story isn't quite so important when the gameplay is enjoyable. Ooooh, sit down sonny boy, and let me tell you about the gameplay. Every single fucking mission has you drive across the city - recycled and stripped bare of most of the side activities that were available in the original game - shoot a bunch of NPCs, refuse to elaborate, and leave. It's so mindlessly repetitive and because of the poorly paced, distilled cringefest of a storyline, there's little incentive to do so. I did half the missions in this expansion pack hoping it would be over quickly. I think I dozed off at one point, despite this being one of the few days where I got a full night's sleep. It didn't matter; you don't need your cerebral hemispheres to play this game - just the medulla will do. Finally, exhausted, I checked the mission list online, saw I still had half of them left, and gave it up as a bad job.

I used to think outlaw bikers were cool. After playing The Lost and Damned, all I can say is: lose the kutte and get a job, assholes.

This game was a cultural phenomenon of its time, so in true keeping with my tradition, I waited 16 years before actually finding out what all the hooplah was about. Don't get me wrong, I was interested - I can probably still recite some of the gushings about it I read in a magazine back then, waxing poetic about the game's living world, its vehicular combat, its in-game internet, how incredibly detailed it all was. But I didn't own a PS3 or Xbox 360; all I had was a Pentium III that was older than I was, so I figured there was no chance of me playing it. Little did I know back then that this game's PC port was so borked that even folks who owned high-end PCs in 2008 couldn't enjoy it.

I'm reviewing the Complete Edition incarnation of GTA IV, the one that's available on Steam. I purchased the game in one of my impulse purchases because Steam sales are more addictive than crack, and then I fucked around for 4 months before deciding it was finally time to play this game. And guess what? My laptop, which is no warhorse but still outstrips GTA IV's recommended requirements, still couldn't run it without stuttering like King George VI giving a speech. Clearly this game's requirements are only a suggestion. So I gave up, and tried the game on my dedicated gaming computer. That computer is a beast, and since I recently bought it and it's my precious baby, I almost didn't want to install the quasi-malware Rockstar launcher and Social Club bullshit on it that's required to play this game. But the refund period was long since gone, so I complied with their draconian demands.

And guess what? It still wouldn't let me play the fucking game. By this point I had 2 hours of Steam playtime on a game that hadn't even launched yet. First I had to solve 4 separate captchas to assure Rockstar that yes, I know what an upright cow looks like, and then I had to verify my email address again, and now finally I could play the game.

But what the fuck. Why does playing a game you bought have to be an experience on par with passing through an Israeli checkpoint? I gave up on video game piracy a while ago because of the perks Gaben's platform offers, but if the refund window had still been open, I would definitely have gone that route.

After all that, how's the game? Well, it's all right. GTA IV is amazingly detailed for its time - cars take realistic damage, the passengers inside them take realistic damage, you can shoot the driver to make them fall over onto the horn and go BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. The cars handle much more realistically than any game I've ever played; they have actual weight, and using the brakes is a necessity rather than a choice. While it takes some getting used to, the driving in this game - and believe me, there is a lot of it - is pretty fun.

The same cannot be said for riding motorcycles, however, and thankfully there are few missions that require you to. No matter how good you think you are at video games, you will always look like a monkey trying to fuck a football when you ride bikes in GTA IV. Out of the ~15 attempts I had to make on the final mission, one of the few that required repeat attempts (the difficulty in this game is usually very fair, which is surprising when you consider how bullshit most GTA games get later on), the list of failures go something like this:

- 11 were due to the required motorcycle section (the game suddenly loses all open-endedness to force a setpiece on you, and even if you shoot 15 rocket launchers at the final boss's boat, he won't die)
- 1 was due to me not stabilizing the helicopter fast enough, because the helicopter controls are almost as bad as the motorcycle ones
- 3 were due to a game-breaking, widely reported bug that Rockstar has had 16 years to fix, but they were too busy cutting content from the so called 'complete' edition to do so, leaving players to find workarounds.

Dear God, this final bug. It's not the only one in the game, but it's the most egregious, and really highlights how awful the PC port of this game is. Sure, it finally runs smoothly provided your computer is powerful enough to be able to run the game ten times over on its officially stated 'recommended' settings, but it's still not bug-free. NPCs getting stuck on geometry is extremely common, and the effect can range from you being forced to skip a cutscene and force the game to move on, to having to retry the whole mission because you can't bear to watch them bumping into walls like idiots any longer.

There are still stutters, and this was the first game to crash on my new PC - it can run brand new games at the highest settings with nary a glitch, but a 2008 game crashes. Sometimes Rockstar decides they're still not done bullying you, and their proprietary launcher closes without starting the game, so you have to click the Play button on Steam again and hope this time the two frontends this game mandates will both work. Not only that, the game doesn't seem to register manual saves, only autosaves after completing missions. Sometimes I lost progress because I had manually saved without completing a mission. I suspect this is because the Rockstar Launcher has its own cloud, which shuts down immediately when I quit the game after saving. Know an easy solution to this? DON'T HAVE TWO LAUNCHERS FOR ONE FUCKING GAME.

I realize I'm spending a lot of time talking about the abysmal performance of the PC version than the actual game, but when it's this egregious, it spoils the whole experience. I will try to talk about the game some more now.

Combat is much better than in previous GTA games, although it still is just on the level of a passable third-person shooter in 2008, one that lacks an open world. The cover system is finicky, and oftentimes it's better to make your own positional cover behind walls and boxes without snapping to surfaces. If you play with a controller, the triggers are used in all their analog glory - a half-press for manual aim, a full squeeze for auto-aim. There are a few missions that are extremely well-structured, such as the Heat-parody bank heist, even if a lot are simply the repetitive 'drive here, kill that' loop. The world is nice and detailed, though the NPCs are more cowardly than people in real-life - if you so much as sprint near someone, they will run away screaming. The in-game internet is rife with hilarious mockeries of the 2008 world wide web, some of which I sorely miss. There are also some fun side activites you can explore alone or on dates (romantic or otherwise), such as a strip club with at least 5 clones of Nicki Minaj walking around, a cabaret show that's honestly very entertaining to watch, darts, pool (played on a table made of ice, judging from the physics), and SEX. Pick up hookers and kill them after so you can get your money back. It's tradition.

Like all GTA games though, GTA IV suffers from most of the content being concentrated on the first island. There isn't even that much difference between the three islands - in the previous incarnations of Liberty City, you truly felt like you were moving to more affluent parts of the metropolis as you changed islands, whereas almost all of LC feels like a ghetto here. The third island hardly has anything to do at all. I've always felt that the reason memes about GTA are concentrated in the first third of the games is because most players don't progress past the first island. I guess Rockstar know that too, so they left the other two islands bare.

Despite all its flaws, GTA IV is extremely addictive. It's a decent game even in 2024, with an ahead-of-its-time attention to detail. With the issues it has though, I can't recommend buying the Steam version of the game. Rockstar don't care about fixing the bugs, and they don't care about your experience once they've got your money. They can't even be arsed to renew the licenses for the music, having removed 50+ songs so far, and it's only going to get worse. Every time I switched to the rock radio station, 'Wild Side' by Motley Crue would be playing, because there were about 4 fucking songs left on the thing. Do you want to have a cumbersome, watered-down, buggy time with this game? Nah. If you have the choice, I sincerely recommend finding an old PS3 disc and playing that instead. Don't give Rockstar your money for an incomplete 'complete' edition.