In a nutshell, the game is technically impressive but deeply flawed and therefore hard to recommend. Despite this, I still enjoyed revisiting it, but I feel like this had more to do with my current state of mind and the satisfaction of conquering a game that had given me a lot of trouble when I was younger.

To start with the good, you simply cannot argue with Naughty Dog's technical prowess. This remains one of the most impressive games on PS2 and I'd argue it still looks attractive over two decades later. This is largely due to the strong art direction, high-quality models and effects and superb animation work. The cartoony style of the visuals also helps, of course. The quality of the animation is the single most impressive thing about this game, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just so fluid and satisfying to watch both during gameplay and in cutscenes. The cutscenes themselves have aged very well, with the models being much higher quality compared to what you get during gameplay. The voice acting is also great and the story is reasonably entertaining overall. It gets a bit bogged down with all the artefacts and prophesies by the end, but it’s solid. Jak II is probably Naughty Dog’s first proper story-driven game and a huge step up from their earlier efforts. Like in the first game, the music is not especially memorable, but it’s enjoyable to listen to while playing and it doesn’t grate on you.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good ends and the questionable and plain bad begins. If you’re looking for an exhaustive and well-structured analysis of the game’s gameplay issues, I recommend a video called “Jak II Analyzed” by “Novacanoo” on YouTube. I agree with most of his points. Anyway, my biggest gripe with Jak II is the open world portion of it. Naughty Dog clearly took inspiration from Rockstar’s GTA III and VC, which probably makes sense, because these games were huge at the time. Haven City is light years ahead of Liberty City visually and the number of NPCs and vehicles you can have on screen at the same time is nothing short of impressive. However, it’s dull, lifeless and tedious to navigate. Naughty Dog completely failed to grasp what made the early GTA games fun to mess around in. Apart from some side missions, there’s nothing to do or find and no real incentive to explore. The NPCs have no lines, they don’t interact among themselves or with the player. They just go about looking dejected, while all you hear around the city is the Baron’s tyrannical speeches and his militia’s harassments (lest you fail to notice that it’s a dystopian setting 😅). There’s no radio to listen to, no collectibles or stunt jump ramps or anything of the sort. What’s worse is that the handling of the “zoomers” you get to drive is quite awful (think GTA 4, rather than III) and the layout of the place is absolutely nonsensical, so getting places takes even longer than it should and you still find yourself getting lost even late into the game.

There’s also the infamous difficulty of the game which you’ve probably heard of have memories of. Yes, the difficulty level is higher than you might expect, if you go in blind after the first game. And yes, most of it has to do with poor design such as a finicky aiming system, unforgiving checkpoints and no replenishing of your ammo after a respawn, nasty difficulty spikes and more. But, honestly, as with many other games from my teenage years that I’ve returned to as an adult, I didn’t find it to be nearly as bad as I remember. That’s not to say that the issues aren’t there and that it doesn’t get frustrating at times, but it’s totally doable. I still managed to find enjoyment in the platforming and combat and it’s during these sections that the game is at its best. There are also many tricks and strategies that people have discovered over the years which can make your run a lot easier, so don’t hesitate to look up walkthroughs.

The really, really hard stuff is all side content (getting the high scores for the races, gun challenges, etc.). The difficulty can be genuinely unreasonable and inconsistent for some of those, but I’m willing to let it slide, because, you don’t really have to do them, unless you’re after trophies. For some reason, I decided to invest the time, even though I probably normally wouldn’t. I think I just enjoyed conquering a game that conquered me back in the day 😁.

In conclusion, even though this was the game I was least looking forward to revisiting out of the trilogy, I still found myself kind of enjoying it. It probably had more to do with my personal state of mind at the moment, because underneath the technical polish, the game definitely has a number of fundamental gameplay issues and I would think twice about recommend it to others. I wouldn’t call myself a fan and I don’t think I’ll ever play it again. Make of that what you will 😁.

And just a few words on the PS3 version. I found it to be a better port than the first game. The only thing that stood out to me was that the green star in the sky is again missing for some reason. The specular effect on metals seemed to work correctly in Jak II. Once, again, you can set your console to SD from the system settings to play in 4:3, rather than in 16:9, which is cropped. Unfortunately, even in 576p, there’s still some stuttering in the busiest sections of the city, but I understand that it’s quite a bit better than the PS2 version in this regard. I did not encounter the infamous punch glitch or didn’t notice if I did anyway. Maybe I was just lucky, but I think it mostly affects speedrunners and just players who spam the punch button to move around quickly. I’m neither so I wouldn’t know.

OO VENATOOOR
Beatus Sanctus
Bonum fati par dia.
Domus aeternus fiat morte
Erit sanguinem opulentuuum

This is Bloodborne, the best PlayStation exclusive in my opinion.
So, it was my first FromSoftware game and man, i loved it!
FromSoftware really nailed the atmosphere in this one, a combo of Gothic ,Victorian and Lovecraftian horror.
The soundtrack.. my God what a soundtrack.. its art, nothing else.
I gotta be honest though, The Old Hunters dlc is what makes this game a complete masterpiece. Its definitely one of the best DLCs ever.
Without this DLC this would still be a great game but it wouldn't be on this level.
The game itself was very easy, the easiest in the series (alongside Demon's Souls), no boss fight took me more than 5 tries, and it was my first FromSoftware game like i said.
Personally i dont want a remaster/remake, i'd rather have Bloodborne II but maybe we can have them both at some point.

I would buy a PS5 just for this game. This is a console seller much like Demons Souls was for me.
The absolute hardcore difficulty of it with an absolutely mine boggling story that is a heart wrenching all while having some of the best gameplay I’ve ever experience as well as showcasing just how amazing the DualSense is as a controller, makes Returnal easily one of the best games I’ve ever played.
It’s a shame that the games difficulty turns away so many players because it genuinely is an experience unlike any other.
If you’re a fan of Hades and Binding of Isaac, imagine a third person bullet hell version of that with intense horror elements. That’s what this game is and it hits every single note that it’s trying to achieve and expands on already existing ideas.
It takes the run based genre and goes with a heavy story that is gripping from the start. It may have some of the best atmospheric story telling in any game I’ve played. It matches the Souls series in every way. Subtle references lie in wait, alien dialect reveals the plot in strange ways.
The entire meaning of the game is so gorgeous and so impactful. I was left stunned by its ending.
It is hard to talk about this fantastic game without mentioning the controller and audio design.
I was always concerned the DuelSense would be a gimmick but Returnal proves it’s not. Every gun feels different. Every step I take, every bit of rain, every enemy attack feels and waves past the controller that immerses beyond just seeing what’s on the screen.
The audio as well, is just gorgeous. You honestly can tell where enemies are by the slight sound behind you with the 3D audio. It genuinely helped me in tight spots and every second matters in this game.
Returnal is honestly a fun, unique, extremely loveable game that sadly is turned away by it’s difficulty.
It deserves a round of a million applauses and has easily spiked itself up into my top PlayStation games of all time.
From the bottom of my run based heart.

Solid collectathon. Fairly easy to 100%. Not nearly as visually impressive as the sequels, but the art direction is strong and the animation in particular holds up really well. Music is pleasant enough, but not particularly memorable for me. The PS3 version is not 100% accurate. For instance, the specular effects on some precursor structures are missing. It's relatively minor stuff, though, and there are also improvements over the PS2 version, such as increased LoD and texture filtering. Also, the performance is basically flawless. If you're willing to switch to SD resolution from the system menu you can play in the original 4:3 aspect ratio, which has a higher field of view. Had a good time, would recommend.

When I first tried Hollow Knight five years ago, I bounced off it hard. I had not yet known the sweet embrace of Dark Souls. Although I did enjoy a platformer and the occasional metroidvania, the rhythm of this game's combat did not match the beat of my heart, nor did its by-the-book early traversal quicken my pulse. I didn't make it deep enough to even begin to meet the dramatis personae. I just set it down intending never to pick it back up.

That same heart, in the intervening years, grew to love From Software's oeuvre. This love has much to do with why I did eventually return, although not perhaps for the reasons you'd expect. Although Hollow Knight borrows some formal aspects from those games, most notably the bench/shade mechanic and a preoccupation with boss fights, it is on the whole more different than it is similar. And every time I've tried to dip my toe into a game because it's "like Dark Souls", I've walked away shaking my head and mourning designers' inability to learn the right lessons. That was never going to be my reason for playing this.

To understand the true reason, you must first understand what happened after FromSoft stole my heart. I played through all the games in reverse, from Sekiro to Demon's Souls, then wept for there were no more worlds to conquer. But to my friends, these paths were as yet untrodden. I would tune into their streams in vicarious delight as they first saw sights that I now knew so well. And on rare and precious occasion, a friend would ask me to take their hand and guide them through a game entire, the voice in their ear every step of the way.

I joined the journey of one friend in particular through Lordran, from believing these games were fundamentally Too Hard for them to beating the DLC bosses so fast it put the sickest Os in the group chat to shame. Playing together as learner and guide made us better friends and gave them a new perspective on their own skill broader than any video game. At the end, they told me, "I want to teach you to love Hollow Knight like you taught me to love Dark Souls". Now you understand: I had to return to this game.

So I picked Hollow Knight back up, started a new save, and began again. To be sure, after half a decade of honing my action game skills, I was far more proficient than I was before. Although the core mechanics are vastly different than a FromSoft 3D slash-and-roll, my skills transferred plenty well. I knocked out bosses quickly enough to leave Sable as dumbstruck as they had left me. But the real difference, the reason I'm wholeheartedly giving this game five stars now when I didn't even care to finish it before, was Sable. (And Sam! Another friend who was not as omnipresent, but who popped in frequently enough to substantially shape my impression of the game as well.)

Their infectious affection unlocked for me everything there is to love about Hollow Knight. With their encouragement I slipped quickly through the early game and found that the meat of it was indeed good. I could appreciate in fullness the personality of the various characters met through the game, their foibles and their tragedies. I could enjoy the environment design, have fun playing around with various builds, and really sink my teeth into bosses.

The boss design, once it gets challenging, is fascinating. Each boss has a relatively small set of moves, and the effective answers to them are highly technical combinations of movement and attacks. The emphasis is less on finding an opening and more on learning to sneak in hits while you evade. On the other hand, because you rebuild "soul" for healing while hitting the boss, in principle if you can find a hit/heal loop however inefficient you can just run it indefinitely even with imperfect play. The bosses then have to be designed around this, giving increasingly few chances to heal at all as they get more difficult but also taking quite few hits relative to, say, a Dark Souls boss.

Perhaps the place where Hollow Knight draws most from From's playbook is its plot: intricate and mournful but always a background presence, relegated to fragments of text with vague allusions and the occasional brief onscreen interaction. It must be easy to beat this game without understanding it at all, so once again I'm grateful to the guidance I had—just enough to draw my attention to key moments and answer the occasional question, never so much to shatter my nascent understanding with too explicit an explanation.

The story works so well precisely because it's understated. It's a collage of moods of which you see fragments, which the game asks you to connect yourself, to see the tendrils intertwine between what it has to say about parents and childhood, about duty and choice, about love and emptiness. It's a story in which can reflect much about what the player brings to it while still holding its own themes strong, not simply conforming to the reader's views. It's beautiful in that way.

I do have my complaints about Hollow Knight. I actually have kind of a lot of complaints. It's very clearly Team Cherry's freshman effort, full of little design flaws—why does it fire a spell if you press B to leave the menu and leave it down a little too long? why do you have to juggle charm notches just to see where you are on the map? why can't you see the world map in the fast travel screen?—that routinely drive me up a wall. But they're all small, and the ones that aren't fixable with mods are easy enough to simply ignore. And even for this, having a friend around helped. I am, after all, a huge believer in the healing power of bitching about stuff that annoys you.

Sable, since I know you'll read this: You did it. You taught me to love Hollow Knight. Thanks to you, I now have strong opinions about bug ghosts and spider/bee cross-species adoption. Dung beetles make me sad now and it's all your fault. I am changed irrevocably. Thank you.

As a fan of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, I had to play this.

Scorn is a visually stunning and atmospherically intense game that succeeds in creating a uniquely unsettling experience. It crafts a detailed world that is both grotesque and disturbing. This is why I like it so much, as it does not rely on cheap jumpscares to do its job. I am unsure how I feel about the combat.

The narrative is cryptic, relying on environmental storytelling and visual clues rather than explicit exposition. Players interpret the lore and piece together the narrative as they progress. The puzzles are challenging but not overly frustrating. I wish the lore was a bit deeper. I like it a lot and I find it really interesting but I wish I could get more information.

I also recommend this video, because it shows details you would not normally see during gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mexYNVlfD5Q

Flipwitch is an excellent metroidvania with a somewhat distracting, horny skin slapped on top. I feel like this is a chicken/egg situation. Did this start as a joke hentai game that became a legitimately fun, well-made metroidvania or did the devs fear that it wouldn't gain traction without catering to a certain audience? Either way, it's worth looking past the C-tier H-scenes to play this game. The background art & environments were visually stellar. I enjoyed the enemy design (although I felt that enemy health didn't scale super well to the late-game environments) and the bosses were always fun, even if they rarely posed a challenge. (With the caveat that the second boss' health needs a MAJOR nerf - the fight took way too long for that early on). I also surprisingly enjoyed the "sex change" mechanic insofar as it created good platforming and light puzzle challenges. This was a really strong effort and a joy to play. I would love to see another metroidvania from this dev without the pandering hentai stuff (or maybe just less of it).