What game did you finish today?

Wytchwood. Pretty good. Perhaps longer than it needed to be. I got it without knowing much of anything about it. I kind of expected a witch sim in the same sense that there's things like farming sims, but instead it was much more like an adventure game. Instead of engaging through puzzles, though, it just has fetch quests. The whole game is composed of fetch quests, compounding fetch quests, where it tells you exactly what to fetch and even what area on the map its in. That's it.

Now, that sounds like it could be awful, but it ends up playing very nicely because you have four quests to work on at any given moment, the quests route you through many different areas but they're all connected to a hub, and you often have choices of where to source things, so you're basically always able to whittle away harvesting things for something and are always making small decisions that keep you engaged. The art style is fine, it's like Don't Starve but with a colorful kid's fairy tale book vibe instead of a Tim Burton vibe. Actually, everything about this feels like Don't Starve, the perspective, the attitude of the world (magical, but very silly/cartoonish). The music is just there, it does its job but is completely unremarkable.

Storywise, it is bland but functional. It's a fairy tale. You basically have twelve souls to reap to get your dead body back. The big twist is obvious from the moment the plot is set up. Each of these people is a shitbag some way or another, and you don't always kill them karmically but usually it builds up through an investigation of why they're a shitbag, how to lure them into some kind of trap, and then ruining them. Animal-themed enemies that run a wide range of sins and draw from different kinds of fairy tales. It's very charming. I do think it could have been better if any effort had been put into making characters talk like they're from a fairy tale (it's very modern in tone, like a lot of low effort works). I also felt like it wore itself out at the end (but may have just been tired by then, this isn't a gameplay concept that holds up for the long haul), and I was expecting a double cross and final boss that never came.

I absolutely love the Graveyard area with the ghosts everywhere.

Good game, surprised at how well it managed to execute an idea that on paper sounds absolutely awful.
 
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Not for Broadcast. In the end it disappointed me, but it was definitely an experience, and it was surprisingly based.

So the game, mentioned it around here before, you run the live news broadcast of a nation (Britain, everything is vague but it's Britain). Your job is to run a good broadcast: cut the footage well (keep it on whose talking, mix it up instead of letting it sit), bleep the swears, play appropriate canned audience noise, keep the radio tuned in properly, stuff like that. What makes it interesting is that you are playing through the descent of a nation into socialist authoritarianism and then revolution and you effect it.

Basically, it's like Papers, Please, but instead of themed around the Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's themed around... something much more odd. But honestly, it feels like it's mixing up ideas from Venezuela, Argentina and the French Revolution with modern day Globohomo. And it's delivered through FMV video, which is interesting because it is said to be far and away the best FMV game ever made.

The core gameplay is brilliant, but I'll admit, it fails to develop it fully. At first (as in, before you get near the end and it wears thin) controlling the news feels really, really good in a tactile and brainfeel way. It's very simple tasks with a minor amount of creativity (you can rewatch your broadcasts after the fact to see what exactly the viewer at home saw) that keeps you moving around, clicking buttons, fiddling with things, while listening to story. It works extremely well. However, it never really builds up complexity. It throws in a gimmick here and there, and very rarely will throw two tasks at you at once, but I was expecting it to just all fall apart, all go to Hell, at some point, and that never happened.

Story-wise, it is odd. These populists (one of them an earthy swearing hard-drinking Northern Englishman old man) take over, people who are kind of vague but have a sort of generic Globohomo-like vibe behind them. Their agenda is drastic wealth redistribution and expanding the welfare state, and right off the bat they start using massive civil rights violations to compel compliance. Over time they expand this sort of fascism-with-a-smiley-face - not a hammer and sickles socialism but a clean sort like something you could see in a corporate presentation - while the former wealthy and other disaffected begin a campaign of mass resistance. You control the outcome through your control of the news, such as to show unflattering footage where there should have been flattering, to comply or not comply with censorship requests, and so on.

Now, it's not as smart and freeform as it might sound. There's a Hardcore Mode that takes away the visual aids, but without that it does basically just tell you what is offensive to whom, the endings in its branching paths largely come down to a few major decisions (but it's not pressing-a-button-choice, I had no clue what would happen in some major decisions). There's too many endings and I suspect, based on the one I got, that they suck (more choice = worse average quality). The biggest complaint I have is that with the headlines mechanic, it seems to be that you choose how reality is instead of how it shaped up.

Comedy-wise, it's all over the place. In most broadcasts it had at least one segment that was tedious and awful and one segment that was the funny shit I've ever seen. Tone can be all over the place, too, and some of it felt overly dramatic, but I was still very invested. I was surprised at how much it zigged and zagged, how it would have me feeling kind of discontent and skeptical of it going with what felt like a very Lefty take and then blindside me with something bold. There's content in there that feels like it anticipated Canadian euthanasia (if that wasn't alreayd a thing before they made it). There's content at the end where the Globohomo socialists are basically denouncing their opposition as a bunch of bigot Nazis that are going to kill the gays and make all the women be pregnant. There's stuff in there with the govt pushing antinatalist propaganda. In my run I never got to the bottom of that, apparently it had to do with the govt trying to distract from a sterility crisis they accidentally caused (as opposed to a Replacement or Neo-Malthusianism thing), but it still felt... really, really timely?

My biggest complaint with the politics was that the game never seemed to suggest that Advance may not actually be able to make all these miracles happen. So it was "muh security vs freedom," "muh atrocities and ends justifies the means," and it made the opposition seem much less reasonable. The opposition, BTW, is lead by Black British Alex Jones with British Kanye rapping for him.

Basically, it is the only game I know that was a media darling, yet seems to be depicting a dystopia drawn mainly from the modern Western Left.

In among all that, you have these visual novel like segments going into your own family life. I thought the family was supposed to be gay because I forgot that Alex can be a girl's name. At first I thought it was extremely wanky, but that too really grew on me. It was honestly kind of terrifying, just because I felt like I was seeing a version of reality, arguably not even exaggerated over this shitshow we're living through, and things that some may find goofy I found chilling, like the "Community Cohesion Officers" (Commie faggots bringing in secret police and naming them something harmless sounding), the passport restrictions, govt war propaganda (there's a kind of French Coalition Wars thing going on) and so on.

In the end, I just found that the humor got worse near the end, like they forgot to be funny or were taking themselves too seriously. But the beginning section was hilarious, and by the end I was invested. So I was disappointed with how abruptly it all ended, how little it gave in the way of epilogue. It was like it just ended on a cliffhanger, and I can't help but think that's a consequence of it wanting to stretch a ten hour game into a 160 hour game.

But it was still well worth it and it should be very much of interest to Kiwi Farmers.
 
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Arkham City. Gaming gets right what capeshit gets wrong. They actually know when and how to kill a villain off, instead of having him escape and kill X amount of people over and over again.

Also, the boss fights and challenge maps are great. My only complaint is that the Riddler is the only announcer for the bad guys in the latter, when the Joker was more fun in the previous game, and Origins even has each enemy group's leader be the announcer. But fighting Ra's Al Ghul and Mr. Freeze back to back was really fun.
 
Kind of finished two, Turmoil and my replay of Mafia III.

Turmoil was addictive but in a braindead way, the kind that saps your energy and doesn't really give anything back to you. I suppose you could in some sense call it a roguelike, just in that it's one where you play campaigns of it. You're drilling oil. You're dragging pipes. You're uncovering reserves. You're on a short time table to do it with the decision to manage debt (to start up faster), auctions for land, and stuff. In the end it's all shallow as a puddle. Fun to pull up a single game (and good that they included that option, kind of makes me wish that games like Spelunky and FTL had some sort of quickplay, do just one level/battle option) and just try to efficiently drill, but it's pretty unimpressive all told. Definitely isn't worth full price. The whole thing just feels like a cheap ass Flash game, and petty as this may sound, the description of the upgrades makes that case for me. You don't invent a specific drilling technology, for example, it's just "Speed 2" "makes you drill through rock faster" type stuff.


Now, Mafia III was a massive disappointment and I actually gave up on it and uninstalled. Broke my heart. I've praised it to high heaven around here on two grounds. One was that the story was really, really good, and the other was that it had a much better treatment of racial conflict than Red Dead 2. However, it seems that I just overlooked a lot of obnoxious stuff in it the first time. It came out way back in 2016, during clown world but before the Great George Floyd Apocalypse.

Gameplay wise we all know the story, it was GTA mixed with Far Cry with no meaningful side content, you just knock over outposts (not labeled like that, but it's functionally what they are) until you get to do a good mission. I liked the gunplay a lot, still do. No complaints. The stealth is the bare minimum you can have and call it a stealth game, I liked it my first time because I had no taste but realize it's total piss now. The cars, they're a mixed bag. You have this system where it auto aims and your own tires can be shot out. Unfortunately, they're shot out almost immediately in every chase. Overall the cars are pretty disappointing for a 1960s-1970s (it's set in 68, but the late 60s feel like the 70s) game. That was an era that (if I remember correctly) had a lot of classic Hollywood car chases, muscle cars jumping bridges type nonsense, and this would have been the perfect setting to play into that. Black Dukes of Hazzard vibe, basically. You don't get that, the cars barely matter.

In terms of progression, it's genuinely tedious if you do everything, but if you only do the minimum you need to its not. The problem is that this requires the player to GAMBLE on what is worth seeing and what isn't. I also hate that it tends to make you do each big setpiece racket location twice (once to get intel and a second time to take over). I think they probably intended for this to be a way to let you both stealth and shoot it up, but that didn't occur to me until way too late as I knew I didn't want to bother with stealth because there were no interesting tools or mechanics.

Story, your Black gang got fucked over by the New Orleans Mob and your character, a Vietnam SOG commando that has returned home enlists the help of his MACV CIA spook (no, not that kind of spook, the other kind) to tear it all down bit by bit. There's this really cool mixture of documentary bits (some with real photos and footage to give it a sense of reality, like how For All Mankind would repurpose historical stuff) that give lore, movie-like scenes with the antagonists for dramatic irony, just super stylish. It's absolutely fantastic. Now, the story missions I praised to high heaven? Some of them are awesome and others are just there. The good ones are a shootout in an abandoned theme park where you lynch a cracker, a shootout at a Klan rally where you burn a Klansman on his own cross, the final shootout, the bank heist in Mardi Gras, crashing/sinking and having a shootout on a paddleboat in the bayou, and... that's all I can really remember that's truly unique. It's got super memorable moments interspersed with lots of filler, and the problem is, some of the big boss villains feel, themselves, like filler.

In comparison to Mafia DE and Mafia II (which I recently played, and found I liked Mafia II a lot more this time), you lose the sense of reality. Those games were, thanks to being much more linear (Mafia II had no real open world, it was equivalent to LA Noire in that regard), also much more meaningfully paced, they had a sense of the passage of time, they had a sense that your character exists in a real world, and that world was interactable. Mafia III doesn't just cut the shops and stuff (and they're still there, marked out on the map, suggesting they DID intend to have them at one point), its NPCs are totally wooden. They will casually walk by a corpse and not react. A giant fucking shootout will attract no police and cause no panic as long as it's on arbitrary gang ground. And the story, cool as its presentation is, as its whole high concept is, is a lot more formulaic and repetitive.

What ultimately killed it for me was just the depiction of the South. My position on it in the past is that it just portrays its race war matter-of-factly, it doesn't really have many or any good White Southern characters but it doesn't really demonize the area either, outside of two particularly stupid parts of the story. But I was missing a ton of environmental details, background stuff, stuff I did notice the first time but forgot. Obnoxious subtext about BLM and jabs at "privileged" Southerners.

The biggest elephant in the room is the Klan being allied with the Mafia. The game uses real Mafia lore (Santo Trafficante JFK assassination conspiracy theory) but it ahistorically depicts the CATHOLIC ITALIAN Mafia being on the Klan's side instead of, as they historically were, a proxy of the US government to UNDERMINE the Klan. The irony is that they could have had a Mafia game about dismantling the Klan and still had the character be Mafia, and had it be more accurate. Instead it's off in fantasyland. But whatever, let's say. These are the donut steal OC Southern Union, a Catholic Klan, and they're pro-Mafia. Well, they also run fucking slave trafficking rings in the 1960s, because that was how eeeeevil White Southerners were at that time, it's totally a thing that was a big deal in 19-goddamn-68. The Klan just makes my head hurt here, in real life they were obnoxious moralists who terrorized people that didn't fall in line with WASP morality. Their depiction as being in bed with these libertine guido degenerates strikes at the heart of everything the Klan was.

Dumb as that is, though, it's topped by the Dixie Mafia, who the big boss in town gives the Black neighborhood to for no fucking reason, then open up brothels specifically selling Black women to peckerwoods. Because that makes a lot of sense. Gangbangers always gangbang in OTHER ETHNIC GROUP'S neighborhoods. Having the equivalent of an occupying army that has to commute from the bayou to do this around a hostile population makes a ton of sense. And who winds up in charge after you lynch chief peckerwood? A sassy Haitian revolutionary woman that constantly bitches about everything. Burke and Vito feel like real people. Cassandra feels like something a retarded Millennial would come up with. She feels like something that should have been in Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. And of course after getting rid of the racist jungle-themed bar they turn it into a classy jazz club, and instead of selling heroin to the Negro they sell heckin' wholesome weed.

Because Haitians, of all the people in this world, are the most known for their deep sense of civic responsibility and taste.

There are other aspects of it that just feel inauthentic. I could be wrong on this, but the Irish seem totally out of place. Was being Irish something people actually gave a shit about in New Orleans, especially when it was a Catholic city? It feels like the Czechs making this game - Czechs adopting stereotypes, visions of the area, from Yankees who are already ignorant of it - were just copying shit from the Northeast, from the generic Godfather type crap they had already adapted, without thinking if it made sense. This also goes for the tone of revolution. I could be totally wrong on this, but my impression is that the Black Power shit, the radicalism, was a Northern and West Coast phenomenon. You did not see crap like that in the Civil Rights South, SDS and what not came in to stir shit up but the Blacks were largely a religious church crowd and didn't try to start shit with the Whites like Panthers, BLA and what not did elsewhere.

You've got a lot of stuff with these racist restaurants and stores and stuff, things that Blacks themselves would have probably liked back then (a diner called the Briar Patch; Br'er Rabbit tales are something Blacks told their children), things that are so absurdly touristy that you could only really imagine them being marketed to Yankees or being located in the North in real life.

One thing that disappointed me was that it always seems to characterize the country/bayou people as worse than the city people. I don't know enough about Cajuns to say what their view of Blacks was, but they owned few slaves, were largely neutral in the Civil War, were discriminated against in their own state. Like Appalachians but in an even worse position. This was also about the start of the era when Cajuns began to develop a racial consciousness. And they weren't fucking Klansmen. It would have gone a long ways if Burke's Irishmen had been replaced with a Cajun ally gang, either in the bayou or the city or both, but instead the "coonasses" seem to always be played off negatively. And it saddens me because I've made it a big part of my life (outside of my actual job) to study this history and culture, and it feels like a slap in the face to the rural French folk of Louisiana.

That's the same kind of vibe I'd get from RDR2's Lemoyne (and to a lesser extent Roanoke Ridge, but Roanoke Ridge isn't near as lopsided; the people of Butcher's Creek and the Murfrees are horror movie stereotypes, but Annesburg is a normal company town). You have a wonderful, colorful little world to explore, and then the characters spit so much venom about it, like having someone else along on a vacation that hates it and bitches about it the whole time.

Very disappointed. I think Hangar 13 will make a great Mafia 4 one day, and if a person doesn't give a shit about all I just said Mafia 3 can still be really fun, but for me personally it felt insulting and ignorant.
 
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Aviary Attorney. Le French bird detective game.

It was okay. Really short. I was totally up to play an Ace Attorney ripoff (never played that series), but you don't actually have many cases, there's basically two real ones, then one big mission that sets up most of your plot, and then a stubby little epilogue. For what it's worth, it's pretty economical with its time, most everything that happens is meaningful and furthers the plot in some way. The dialogue is unremarkable, humor's unremarkable. Cringy dated jokes about Facebook and stuff. There's cool real history in it, like murder cases involving the Carlists and real life inventors. The art style (JJ Grandville animals-dressed-like-people) is cool but I wish it had actual voice acting.

Thing is short. Leaves little impression. Still have to admire it for its creative concept.
 
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Norco, and it sucked.

Norco is a neo-adventure game. Gameplay wise that means nothing - its "puzzles"/progression are as straightforward as "environmental puzzles" in an action-adventure game - so this is pretty much going to entirely be about its story, which is also linear (of that style of presenting dialogue choices, but the story plays out one way).

So what is it? It's a weird-ass mystery set in the industrial exurbs of New Orleans. Cajun country, oil country. A small town, an oil refinery company town set in a vaguely near future where robotics, brain computer interfaces and such are fairly common, but people's lifestyles and culture are quite familiar. I got the game on this impression that it was a surrealist work where the rural-industrial landscape slowly consumes the town and everything turns fever-dream-hellish. I don't know where I got that impression, because it doesn't happen. What you've got is a mystery where the main character's mother has died, her brother is missing, and as she looks into it she finds that her mother was in deep into some research into a spook light (assumed by most to be a UFO) that the oil thugs are also investigating.

At first it's pretty good. I won't say amazing. People compared it to Disco Elysium, to Kentucky Route Zero and I personally think it's got very similar vibes to Transistor. But it isn't really like any of those in any good way. The problem with it is that it pulls that shit where the plot and tone completely change halfway through, become completely absurd and goofy, in the same way that something like Condemned 2 did, or for me, ruined its mystery like Firewatch did. And this is a completely story-based game with a runtime of 5.5 hours. If it stumbles at any point it has ruined itself.

The short of it is that the game sets up what FEELS LIKE (initially) a sideplot, a gag, a chapter, with this Christian UFO cult, but nope, it turns out that cancer is what the entire plot comes to revolve around, along with some Da Vinci Code bullshit, and in the end it degenerates into a giant fantasy sequence/surreal sequence where nothing makes sense. At the same time the writing quality - the actual prose - starts to fall from "not amazing but pretty good (for a game)," with some bits that even stood out (glimmers of Disco Elysium quality) into silly schlock.

it feels like something where the dev had some kind of artistic vision and just ran out of juice halfway in and started making shit up.

I hate it. I hate it because it strung me along until near the very end thinking it was going to shape up to be something really cool.

Edit: It was cool when it was focused on the town, the nature and the people in it. Human stories about these people, even when it was already over-the-top. The cult bullshit and main-character-is-descended-from-Jesus crap was what completely killed it.

None of its story threads were developed in the end.
 
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Hatred. It was awesome!

We all know about Hatred. It was that sleezy outrage bait game that everyone freaked out over. Had the theming of a mass shooter. A lot of people spilled a lot of ink overanalyzing why that's bad. A lot of people slagged it off. Everyone knew it was a cynical ploy to sell copies but they still fell for it anyways.

Well, people may have slagged it off in its day just to virtue signal, but the game is funny and fun. It's not a comedy like Postal, but instead the comedy comes both from appreciating it for what it is - the stunt it was - and for walking this fine line of being absolutely retarded while also presenting itself as though it's taking itself seriously. I mean what I said there. It's a weird vibe, but it has the main character - a heavy metal looking/acting dude with long black hair and a long trench coat - spout off the silliest edgelord shit while setting it in a world that is otherwise completely normal. It doesn't feel offensive because it is too far removed

The gameplay works really well. It seems the devs used it as a test run to raise cash and establish a name before releasing their actual project, a Commando-like called War Mongrels. I was left wanting more. People call it "twin stick" but I played with mouse and keyboard. You're in an isometric perspective, black and white, but the graphics and physics are surprisingly detailed. Shoot. Unlike something like Hotline Miami (the closest thing I can think to compare it to) you are built like a tank, but you also have to get health back by closing in to melee kill enemies, and you get lives by doing side missions. It can be rather hard, like Cuphead but with mass murder. A pretty typical pattern is that it will have one really cool level in an open map where you have to knock off a certain number of civilians to trigger an armed response (while dealing with police swarming in all the while) and then clear out the armed response. Then it will alternate those with much worse linear sections. Where it all comes together is the Downtown and Army Base missions. The former also has the only real social satire/commentary in the game. I also compare it to Maneater, in that you're playing a "monster" that's whittling away at the human population while dealing with unending reinforcements. As a game it just feels really good to play.

Can't think of a lot to say about it. I actually wanted more civilian-focused open levels. There were also topics they didn't have the balls to take on, like universities or churches in the settings, stuff like that. But it was pretty cool. Was totally overblown in its day, underrated gameplay wise, and I admire them for suckering a bunch of dumbass journalists and gaymers with the constitutions of church grandmas into freaking out like they did.
 
Finished The Callisto Protocol. I didn't touch any of the alternative modes or the horde stuff, but did the main story and the ending DLC.

It's not a bad game, but it definitely feels rote if compared to Dead Space. I think the biggest problems are the lack of enemy variety and how repetitive melee combat becomes. Having about 2 full chapters devoted to the "sneak around blind enemies"-style of gameplay really dragged things on. Even the weapon choices are a bit repetitive: why do I get a one-handed shotgun and a two-handed one? Why give me a second pistol that does less damage but has more ammo capacity 2/3 of the way through the game? It's a sci-fi game, but it felt like they were constrained by trying to make it "realistic," so you don't get stuff like flamethrowers or saw blade guns or explosives (outside of the alt-fire on a couple weapons, which you probably won't unlock until the final quarter.)

The story and characters are generic enough that if you ever played a horror game before you can probably predict exactly what's going to happen. There's the very cliche "twist" with the DLC ending, but it doesn't really change anything other than make the cliffhanging of the original ending feel even more like a bait-and-switch. I don't know if they devs just assumed there would be no sequels, but it almost feels spiteful the way they wrap things up. I sure as hell wouldn't pay $15 for it, when the only good part was the new melee weapon you get to enjoy for 20 minutes before it ends.

I guess I'd give it, I don't know, 6/10? Not bad, but not really good, fun enough for a day? I'm glad I wasn't hyped for its release back in 2022, I'd be pretty disappointed in it as a Dead Space successor.

(Somebody please kill off the trend of having audio logs in these games. Or do something unique with them! I'm tired of nameless nobodies spouting cliche exposition about things I can already see right in front of me.)
 
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Wo Long Fallen Dynasty. I enjoyed it but what surprised me is how easy the endgame bosses were. I killed them all in under a minute no deaths. Maybe I just had a very fortunately skill/gear combo but a couple different people mentioned the game was very difficult.
 
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Beat Steamworld Dig. Not impressed. have heard it's like Portal (the first one is only talked about because of the second).

I don't really like Western: The Genre type stuff anyways, and especially not when it's turned into other genres, but I got it because I had played a TINY bit of it for free on PS+ way back when I was a kid with awful taste and I really liked Motherload. So how does it go? Well, it's really engaging in that it's easy (especially for as short as it is) to just squirrel away digging and digging and digging. I appreciate that it marks off depths on the minimap so that you are more or less encouraged to keep reaching deeper.

Motherload was interesting because of fuel management, mainly. Doing everything burned up fuel, you could easily have very tense races to get out of the maze of your own creation, and fuel efficiency determined profits. But the downside was that, because you are a helicopter, you could just dig straight down, and at some point you realize that and then you never have a reason to do anything but just dig a giant cavity, like strip mining, straight down to Hell. It kind of ruins the game the moment you learn that.

In this it almost hits a compromise in how you have the light mechanic (that cannot hurt you, really, it's really just a nuisance), the special abilities that require water (but are easy to satisfy and basically just waste your time VERY RARELY), and more stuff in general going on with cavern structure. So it does hold up better than Motherload, but not by a lot.

Yeah, not impressed.
 
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Beat each track of Lonely Mountains: Downhill on some difficulty, which is kind of like "beating" it.

It's a mountain bike game (arcadey) based around gravity, you can peddle and you can brake but you can't go backwards. I mountain bike in real life (not super intense stuff, I'm out of shape and new to it, but I go on a trail pretty much every day) and it does feel "right" to me, you're swooping around curves, sliding around, that kind of thing. The graphics are god-tier, I would like for someone to make that style (polygonal, bright colors, basically minimalist and very clean, evocative) for a more general purpose casual sports-and-outdoors game (like hunting). However, there is no music, and it's MUCH better if you play fast, wild music (for Hotline Miami-like frenzy).

Good game
 
Played Spark the electric jester 1&2. i liked the first game. some good 2D classic but i felt the game dragged on a bit longer then it needed to. the Frak mode was superior since Fark was alot more fun to play and i liked his story and character more. the OST was really good though.

didint like two much. felt like a tech demo and testing the water. the retcons from the first game was weird but atleast Fark got some character development out of it.

heard the third game is much better so i will play that at some point.
 
Go! Go! PogoGirl on the switch.

You're a girl, riding a pogo stick, trying to reclaim another pogo stick that got stolen, Cute indie game that tries to capture that SNES/Genesis era. You collect 100 green gems and 3 red gems in each level, which there are 5 of (5th one being the boss level) and there are 4 stages, with a "Master" stage unlocked after you beat the game the 1st time.

There's achievements, but they aren't impossible like in some other games, but there is one specific one that is cryptic that involved you finding the codes to unlock the various cheats, including one that is activated via a sound test like Sonic 2.

if you're really dedicated and play nonstop, it can take you like a day (or two) to fully complete it.
 
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Played and beat Star Ocean: The Second Story R.

It was a great nostalgia trip. My only complaint was that it wasn't balanced very well and some of the accessories that granted multi-hit make your melee character skills obsolete. The game overall was a breeze. The battle system is so good that I still didn't mind all that much. If you're a genre vet you're better off bumping up the difficulty to Universe.

It's also way shorter than I remember (around 20-25 hours). If you're in the mood for a short JRPG this is a good one. It's a good intro to the genre.
 
Seeing the current state of AAA gaming, I've committed myself to seriously looking into playing and finishing the games in my backlog and somehow find a way to tackle them without getting overwhelmed by the large scale of my pile of shame.

As dumb as it may sound I found going down the list in alphabetical order, regardless of the system it is in, and picking one that starts with that letter makes it less daunting. So far I've completed:

A: A Tale About My Uncle.
B: Bayonetta.
C: Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.
D: Darksiders.

I'm narrowing down letter E and I'm actually finding this system working perfectly for me. It has been a while since I've had this much of a drive to finish the games that I already own.
 
Seeing the current state of AAA gaming, I've committed myself to seriously looking into playing and finishing the games in my backlog and somehow find a way to tackle them without getting overwhelmed by the large scale of my pile of shame.

As dumb as it may sound I found going down the list in alphabetical order, regardless of the system it is in, and picking one that starts with that letter makes it less daunting. So far I've completed:

A: A Tale About My Uncle.
B: Bayonetta.
C: Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.
D: Darksiders.

I'm narrowing down letter E and I'm actually finding this system working perfectly for me. It has been a while since I've had this much of a drive to finish the games that I already own.
sounds very autistic but, whatever works for you i guess.
 
Finally beat Elden Ring in preparation for the DLC, Radagon was a bit of a pain with his aoe spam and Elden Beast was more annoying than actually difficult, but it wasn't too terrible.

It felt like Godfrey was a better final boss than those two, to be honest, especially since the murder-amoeba practically comes out of nowhere right after Radagon and spends at least 80% of its own fight running away like a coward, which doesn't exactly make the final boss and last obstacle before I'm able to commit worldwide arson very fun.

I'll probably like it more on my faith and sorcery builds, since I'll have a bit more range and (at least for my faith guy) Lord's Divine Fortification to invalidate most of its moves.
 
I finished Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty a couple days ago for the first time. It is a genuinely great game after the 2.0 update and if it had launched in it's current state, would be considered an all-time great.

I greatly enjoyed nearly every minute of the 200+ hours I put in on my first playthrough. As a fan of the two most recent Deus Ex games, this one feels like it does everything those games did even bigger and better. The story is genuinely great and emotionally engaging, the guns are fun to use, Iconics are always worth the trouble to track down, the cyberware is fun to mix and match to suit your favorite playstyle, and the near infinite combinations of outfits are a lot of fun to mess around with. Even the hornier elements of the Cyberpunk setting are presented in about as tasteful and mature a manner as possible given the inevitable comparison to BG3. At least here it doesn't come across like CDPR designed all this stuff one-handed. I don't know where this game fits on my favorites list, but it's easily up there with stuff like DMC 1&3, MGS, Baldur's Gate, Syphon Filter, Darkwatch, Halo, Diablo 2, and Champions of Norrath.

I don't know how many more playthroughs I'll get before the sequel comes out, but Night City is a place I'll be roaming around in for years to come. For my personal tastes, this game is near perfect.
 
Finally got to finish Super Mario 64 (open source port for PC), I feel relieved for some reason as the first time I ever played it was 2017 and never got around playing it until recently. One thing that surprised me is that you have to turn off the console when you finish the game as there is no continuation or reloading a save, so I sat there staring at the end scene and had to search what's wrong with it.
 
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