Lamp, broken circa 1988

ESCAPE ACADEMY [3] Thank goodness for Game Pass. This game's a hard sell since it's replay value is literal Zero. In a braver world, there's a way where you make this game without a hint system, and failing to complete the puzzles forces a narrative path. Instead, this game has one road that's lightly written and extremely blunt hints, while also making every puzzle timed. It creates a really uneven experience, like an arcade version of The Witness or something. If you would like to play ten escape rooms with about five lines of dialogue between each room, then you'll love Escape Academy. PC RERELEASE OF MONUMENT VALLEY [4] While the controls aren't well adapted from the touch screen, that's made up for by playing it on a big screen with quality speakers. Monument Valley is my 2014 game of the year, and it's still a complete delight that I wouldn't dare spoil why. I recommend it, but understand that it's more about atmosphere and tone than it is about challenge.

I've been playing some video games. STARDEW VALLEY W/ HILLTOP FARM [4] I've honestly never tried to play one of the alternate plots because every time I'd start it I'd just get "EHH BUT MY HABITS" and stop. This time I forced myself to get at least to summer on the Hilltop Farm start and I got to winter in the same week. Honestly, I love this plot more than the default now, even if it's impossible for multiplayer as a whole. Stardew Valley is still really good. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: SHREDDER'S REVENGE [3] So a reminder is needed here: A 3 in my scale means "I don't regret playing this." What I learned is that it is exactly as fun as the amount of people you're playing it with. I played it solo for an hour and hated it, but it's definitely well made and it's probably better with a crew that's invested. I don't have a crew that's invested. LAST CALL BBS [4] I have accepted in my 30s that my intellect is entirely interpersonal and creative. Another way to put that is that I am too much of a numbskull for logic puzzle games. While the majority of the stuff in here is logic puzzles, I love everything about the vibe of it. This is from Zachtronics, the developer behind a large number of puzzle games I am not smart enough for (Opus Magnum, Exapunks, Mobius Front '83) or programming games that I am REALLY not smart enough for. This... is still kind of one of those, but the difference is that it's a minigame collection framed around getting an obscure piece of PC hardware from a friendly fellow and making it work within it's limitations. There's a Picross/dungeon builder puzzle game. There's an emulator in it that runs a knockoff of Magical Drop. There's an extremely artsy puzzle game about growing organisms that lets you make animated gifs of your solutions that's explained as a project by a director who thought games were The Future and definitely feels like that. There's all sorts of other games in there, but I haven't tried them, because in order to unlock them you have to dial into a BBS (thus the name) and download them, and after you've downloaded them you have to wait for the BBS to let you download again because of how big whatever you just downloaded was. Putting it another way: this game has so far shown me two separate fake warez hacker intros, complete with custom mouse cursors, esoteric shout outs, invitations to joint the revolution, and all else. If this appeals to you, you should check it out. It is also on PC Game Pass. MAINLY FORTNITE [3] Fortnite's Zero Build mode has ripped through my friend group and has not let go, at all. It's the main thing we do to hang out now. And honestly, it's working great, because it's so garish and absurd that it's impossible to get mad at it, and that actually allows me to play that game with my friends since after how Good last year was, I have completely lost any interest in either trying to get them to stop raging or trying to give aftercare to keep them from beating themselves up. My bandwidth is lower than ever for that. DREAD DELUSION [4] As we are in the middle of indie games figuring out "hey we can make playstation games," there's been a host of people trying to workout how one might redo old first person RPGs. This is, at the moment, the best of the ones I've tried. Thick with atmosphere, a completely original setting, and a blunt instrument of an RPG system- this is the kind of game I am looking for. I have tired of comparing multiple numbers. I do not view Amazon Product Comparison as a fun mechanic. Give me a weird knife and an unclear quest, I want to go on an adventure picking up weirder knives and meeting hopeless souls and killing total freaks. Dread Delusion is great. Be warned tho, it is in early access. also when they had all those demos up I played the escape academy one and I'm gonna play that when it comes out this week

It's May 4th, and you know what that means: It's been a decade since MCA passed away, and I've watched this every year on the day. RIP MCA, and thanks for everything.

TUNIC [4] If I described what I had seen or what I was preparing to do tomorrow in the path of reaching the True Ending, I would be giving away too much of Tunic's magic. It is an exceedingly clever game, which covers the distance its mechanical action lacks. Strong recommend, don't read about it at all before you start it, good luck. KIRBY & THE FORGOTTEN LAND [4] Good god I've been playing a lot of really deeply good games this last month. Kirby is the most relaxing of the three I've beaten/come close to beating in the last month. It's also 3 for 3 on games that at some point dip into completely existentially galling territory. So that's cool! I think little kids might find the home stretch of this game super scary! So my list of games I intend to see the end of this calendar year now stands like this: Tunic (which could happen tomorrow or monday) Dark Souls II Scholar of the First Sin (which might not happen this year, depends on if they fix the online) Demons of Asteborg (which I might not finish because it kinda blows tbh) Hitman 3 (when I left off I was in Mumbai, intimidated as hell from how huge the map is) L.A. Noire (coinciding with when the action button review starts) ULTRAKILL Yakuza Like A Dragon (I'm at like chapter 3 or 4?)

ELDEN RING [4] Beat it. King of 3D video games. Good luck to the future. FOREST GOLF PLANNER [3] RAILROAD INC CHALLENGE [3] Some phone games! The first is the new game from the people what make the good sim games, Kairosoft. One of my favorite games of all time is Sid Meier's SimGolf. This is not as good, but, it's good! The second is a take on a boardgame I like, only now that it doesn't have physical limitations they do all sorts of weird shit like power ups and daily challenges. Only problem with it is that it swallows battery alive and my phone is pretty old at this point so I can only play one game before my phone warms up too much to be comfortable. STARTED NORCO Hell of a first impression! It's a little pulpy and a little silly, but they're definitely trying to write a dark gritty point and click thing and all the style they pack in on the edges can make it work. I got into a staring contest with a stuffed monkey and reacquainted myself with my home town by talking to the robot named Million in my mom's backyard. I will see more of this game.

That fight tormented me until I decided to change my strategy to the silliest thing I could think of, and that worked the first time I tried it.

I am presupposing you have purchased Game Pass, because the general answer of "what should I do with an xbox" is "game pass." With that in mind, here is A Condensed List of Games On Game Pass I Think Are Excellent in order of Excellentitude. Kentucky Route Zero Hollow Knight Gears of War Judgment Titanfall 2 The Hitman Trilogy Dragon Quest XI S Yakuza Like A Dragon Streets of Rage 4 Outer Wilds Children of Morta if you have someone to play local co-op with Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Bolts if you're looking for system exclusives, those are all in development at the moment lol check back in a year or so also yes i think gears of war judgment is better than titanfall 2, based on this completely non existent scale called excellentitude i just made up

I am at the last boss. I have reached phase 2 of the last boss one time out of 20 attempts. I have also never gotten to the last boss of a Souls game before, so that's neat. The First Phase seems like a learnable thing, it's just that I'm struggling with reading timing on some big attacks. I find that a common thing this game does is that the camera faints a movement that their body doesn't make. It's a vicious trick, and it's ingenious, because technically they're slower attacks, you're just getting mentally juked. For anyone looking for some kind of measurement of the time investment to reach the last boss, it took me about 92 hours, and I'm currently level 122. I skipped large chunks of the side content (namely one of the rivers, volcano manor, and all of the hidden areas). I can imagine myself doing two more playthroughs (one Max Poise/Shield run, one where my entire goal is a sword that is a callback to other From Soft games) but honestly after I finish the first one I'm going to take a break to mainline another game.

MARIO KART RELAPSE [3] "i'm looking for a switch thing to play, hey the SNES player has Mario Kart, hey I have Mario Kart 8, hey they just announced that DLC that's got that course I love from the DS game, maybe it'll have the other ones, oh look I bought it" one hour process, this. But hey, after falling off Forza Horizon 5, I'm having a good time with that there Mario Kart. BALAN WONDERWORLD [3] ok hear me out It was half off and I've seen so many videos about it that I resolved that goddamnit, I need to see this game for myself. Here's the thing, and this kind of links back into why I keep putting scores on things and why I use my specific scale: I think people's measurement metrics for what makes games good is predicated on this "Is This GOTY Calibur" and some games are not that no matter what. So when you're making your ordered list of the best platformers of the modern generation then yeah Balan Wonderworld aint Mario or Astro or Time Hat Time or whatever. Approaching it as it's own game, it's fascinating. It comes from the mindset of developers who had hardware limitations and engineered solutions in the hardware limitations, but modern hardware doesn't have the same limitations? So they feel like artificial hardware limitations? But at the same time, the levels have enough honest geometry that it's fun to crawl around and see where you can get that seems impossible or awkward, and that crawling around in the margins of what a game should be doing is really key for how I learned to enjoy games. The art design is surreal and the sound makes a lot of cooing squeaking noises and there are musical numbers at the end of every stage and if you 100% a zone you get the musical number in English and not french-sounding gibberish. It's a game full of strident, fascinating, old-fashioned Decisions. I don't know that I'd recommend anyone buy it, but I had to see it for myself and I'm glad I did.

I'm 50 hours in with my dex build (Twinblade) and I'm continually just floored with this game. For fifty hours, every time I've picked up the game I've had some experience that has drawn wonder or excitement or fear from me. Usually the times where I feel fear are the times that I stop, even though there's a few sections of the games that are primarily full of a childhood fear of mine. Maybe I'll conquer it. Maybe I'll pay a friend with tacos to play through those areas for me. I'm undecided. At this point my opinion is the extremely reasonable take of "I think this is the best 3D game." Sadly, Tetris exists, so I can't say it's the best game of all time, but "tied with Tetris" is pretty fuckin good in my book! At the end of the month I'm going to be alternating between this and Kirby and that will be funny. I don't expect I'll have it beat by then because I'm taking my time and also I don't like playing games for more than two hours at a time. I also know that I am probably not doing new game plus with this character, and I know what I'm doing for my next character: Max Poise. Sick of getting interrupted lol

maybe I'm just in a bad headspace but all that's coming to mind are the dudes I'm glad are gone lol shout out to satanpro and rickvirginianwa or whatever his name was, the traveling road show that destroyed the politics sub. every time someone complains about the politics ban I just imagine the next post is that penny arcade avatar and want to skip to the next page inherently, like a reflex or a stress response also shout out to that guy who quit posting here because he didn't like Nakamura's Boma Ye (that was the entirety of the reason), and to the dude who got cashed like ten minutes after trump won for taking his victory lap in the monthly photos thread also someone else mentioned the "I HAVE A WORKOUT BIRTHDAY MEETING BUT TATU IS THE BEST FUCK JERRY LAWLER" guy and the few days that SLL followed him around like the arrows from Throne of Blood is the thing I most regret not taking screenshots and logs of from the old board. tragically he was kind of right about jerry lawler, but that was still funny. dude started putting roleplay wrestling entrances with music in his replies. legendary L

To make up for the fact that the only gaming update I'm going to have for the rest of the month (maybe longer) is "Elden Ring Good," here's every good phone game I've run into. Retro Bowl is the best football game made in the last like 10 years. If you only get one thing I recommend, get this. Runner up: the Monument Valley games are excellent puzzle platformers that suggest you play with a headset, and I totally agree. The Room games are great spooky puzzle boxes. Very reminiscent of old flash escape room games. Slice & Dice, a very simple but straightforward and fun dicerolling RPG. If you want a game about rolling some dice and doing some RPG battles with absolutely no story, this'll work! Holedown is my personal favorite "watch balls bounce off things for points" because it's just a game with some of that and then no microtransactions. Desert Golfing and its sequel Golf On Mars are great "I am in a waiting room and tired and need something to focus on." Polytopia is the best Civ knockoff on phones, it's maybe a 20 turn game and that's enough time to get some really weird shit done. 10000000 (Ten Million) and its sequel You Must Build A Boat are fantastic slide puzzle RPG games, also light on story but engaging enough to see to the end. Baikoh and Petal Crash are good old-school puzzle games. Baikoh is a word puzzle game, where as Petal Crash is a more Junk Blocks Arcade Versus Puzzle Game kind of thing. If you end up liking Petal Crash a lot you can get it on Steam where it has good netcode. Typeshift is a really good word puzzle game, with daily challenges that escalate as the week goes on and a HUGE amount of regular puzzles. Million Onion Hotel is a puzzle game that will beat the living shit out of you and have a completely nonsensical story, so, uh, there's that. Card Thief is a really strong run-based card game about stealing shit, if you like doing weird card games. Reigns also works here but the trade off is that it's more simplistic but brilliantly written. Pocket City seems like a very good sim city, but I usually don't like sim cities, so I don't know if that means it's actually good or not. Lastly, Kairosoft makes a billion different sim games of all kinds, and the one I'll stick my head out for is Home Run High. They have hundreds of other subjects so odds are good that if you have some thing you like (lets say F1) they have some sim game about it. For all your "numbers going up" needs, turn to Kairosoft

26 hours in and here are some takeaways I've had I feel lucky to be here for this. Things have been Hard and this has been a huge light in my life rn. If I play too long I miss my dad, because when I was a kid dad played all sorts of weird RPGs (might and magic, shining force, fatal labyrinth (which is a genesis roguelike(which is probably the reason I hate roguelikes because I was done with them by the end of the genesis between that and Toejam & Earl)), and I can only imagine what his reaction to this would have been. I've been compiling a list of things to scream about after 90 days, when people would be more ready to hear anything about what's in this game. Every time I've sat down with this, without fail, I have seen something that's taken my breath away, or confused me about how it's even supposed to be possible to fight this, or made me feel like my imagination was never good enough because how do you come up with this. Grinding via assisting people with the first main boss is hilarious. I guess that's the biggest takeaway here: this game is So Much that it's caused me to rethink my ideas on whether art can be an endeavor undertaken by hundreds to create a single thing. I will not respond to additional questions on that take because it's one of those conversations no one likes having with me. Elden Ring is a scale of good that pushes my brain around every time I play it.

13 hours in as a bandit. So like, I've skipped most open world games since Breath of the Wild, so the sheer size of this is blowing me away. What's wilder is, every night I play (with one exception) I come away with some other thing I have found that makes me scream and laugh and curse. I will avoid mentioning direct things here but uh yeah this game nuts also I think I'm like wildly underlevelled lol Maybe I'll just go kick it somewhere else and level up by doing other dungeons, because the boss I'm at now is A Lot To Deal With, and the first area I went in otherwise was Also A Lot To Deal With. This game is A Lot To Deal With. I will say this: as someone who's never finished a souls game, this is the first time I've sat around thinking that this would be a cool game to try with other playstyles, as opposed to my default of "man I don't know how else you're supposed to do this and I'm not gonna learn." I do feel sad for one of my friends because they've beaten all the other souls games and they're trying to rush headlong into this and getting frustrated. They rolled deprived, and I cannot get them to internalize "honestly most of the time the right answer is to run the fuck away". I hope it takes at some point.

Hello. I'm finishing this. January and February were hellish months and that's why this took so long. First, I'm going to take a moment to post my own top 5 in case that would help people find new music. I am going to do it in spoilers as well. Now. "Ultrapop" by The Armed "The Powers That Be" by Pharoah "Jubilee" by Japanese Breakfast "Cavalcade" by black midi "Inside (The Songs)" by Bo Burnham I know black midi. I detested Schlagenheim because it made me think of all the great post-punk bands from the 2010s that informed so much of how I write my own music, yet didn't make it at all. And then the literal british art school kids came out and have a bit crusher and it's the new thing. Ok! Sure! Let's all make shit up! My opinion on this new form of British Post-punk both harshened (Black Country New Road is fucking terrible) and softened (Squid's "Bright Green Field" is fantastic) over the year 2021, and then everyone I knew yelled about this record. I didn't listen to it then, but I guess it's time to do it now. Thanks again for participating in this! I do, despite the tone of some of these reviews, really enjoy doing this because it puts me out of my comfort zone and gives me an opportunity to investigate why I feel and think and that makes a big difference in my own travels towards creative satisfaction. I can only hope y'all get an equivalent amount of entertainment from watching me writhe around sometimes. Hope to see you again!

Game update! HOLLOW KNIGHT [4] Cleared The Radiance a few days ago, which is exactly as much true ending as I am hoping to achieve. I said my piece on the last two times I wrote about it but yeah. Best Game 2017, top 10 all time, great great great great. Bring on Silksong, I crave it. GEARS 5 [3] If wrestling has taught us anything, it's that a slow start to a great finish can save a match, and a hot start to a rushed finish can ruin it. Gears 5 is the latter. There's these two big open world sections with all these weird nuanced and cool encounters (again, I didn't drive in the open world at all) and that was all great. Then you hit the home stretch of this game and gosh, I've never seen a game run up against its deadlines in front of me like that. The pacing of end of the game is "OH NO THE BRIDGE IS OUT AND I CAN'T BRAKE", and it ends on some Finish The Fight shit. Like... cool? I guess? I feel like a lot of steps got skipped? Oh well. We're taking a break for a bit before we do Hivebusters and the Gears 1 remake, so here's the current rankings. Gears of War Judgment Gears of War 2 Gears of War Gears of War 4 Gears 5 Gears of War 3 Entirely possible we finish every released Gears shooter before the next one comes out. PLAYED LIKE AN HOUR OF INFERNAX Yo you ever hear of Castlevania 2? Like, what if that but gory and edgy?! I know right?!?!?! Aint that so radical?!?!?! Pass me the [90S CHIP FLAVOR]s bro, we're gonna listen to Guns 'n' Roses all night and kill shit. \m/ STARTED ELDEN RING it's a from game. the servers werent online for the xbox yet. i rolled bandit cuz I've never done a dex class. idk.

i feel like everyone forgets that square is the people what put out Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and so they have to frame anything that's not one of those as a failure so shareholders don't go "why isn't this making final fantasy money, you're fired." tomb raider was a "failure" and they funded two more sequels and then got the marvel license. Square clearly believes in Crystal Dynamics. I bet Guardians will get similar treatment with that belief and the explicit justification of the critical response, and in the case of a game like this where the trailers are all brain poison but the critical response is extremely high, that tends to lead to higher sales of a sequel like some kind of knock-on award. or it wont and I'll be surprised.

So for people not in the loop, Street Fighter 6 got rebooted a few years ago after some kind of disastrous internal showing that cost the head of the entire fighting game department their job. So that teaser being a big nothingburger with a cheap logo is also representative of how direly on fire that game appears to be. I wish them the best, but honestly Capcom's been on such a winning streak that they're about due for something to fall on its face.

I was going to shitpost about metal album covers and mental illness or something, but I have an actual thing to say here: maybe the problem is that you're looking at Hollow Knight like it's a game about fighting when it's a game about platforming. Think about the average Sonic The Hedgehog boss fight. Present a singular gimmick, it has three moves, learn when you can hit them, do it three-to-seven times. Not a lot happening there. In contrast, Hollow Knight- which is a platformer first- makes Platforming boss fights where the boss is treated as a platform that aggresses upon the player in ways that allows strategic thought and playstyle nuances in the platforming. If you look at it in terms of games where you have to stay rooted on the ground, then maybe Hollow Knight falls short. On the other hand, Hollow Knight solves the problem of Platformer Boss Fights in just spectacular fashion. That's what's interesting about the combat. Not that it's a game with a deep Monster Hunter moveset, but rather a game with Highly Tuned Sports Car finesse in its movement options, and boss fights that rise to meet that movement style and challenge how well you've learned to move in this precision machine.

DRAGON QUEST XI S [4] I think one of my favorite parts of Dragon Quest is when you finally have your Setup and are just walking around demolishing everyone, because it both feels like you've broken the game and that it's the only actual way to get anything done. In old games, what I used to do was basically have two characters with Muster Strength (which takes a turn to charge a double damage hit) and then I have them alternate attacks and charges, and then my other two party members work to keep them alive. In this game, I have one person who swings for like 700 damage a turn at a high mana cost, two characters that keep feeding them mana, and then one character does cheap group heals the whole time. I would say that DQXI is probably the best one to start with because it's both accessible and high quality (I have it fourth on my all time list), and while it doesn't break into all time greats category of DQ games, that's not a fair metric. Strong recommend. Ready to move on to Yakuza Like a Dragon after an RPG break! HOLLOW KNIGHT - DID A WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF So idk if I stated this but I got pretty far in this game on Xbox, hit a boss that stomped the shit out of me, and decided "I need to play this without latency" and got it on PC. I am now further than where I was when I stopped, having done plenty of things I felt were impossible to do on console. This is still the best metroidvania, and maybe the best 2D game. In fact, impromptu, here's an off the top of my head list of the best games ever made that I've played from 1 to until I get to Hollow Knight. Tetris 99 Hyper Light Drifter Mother 3 Quadrilateral Cowboy Kentucky Route Zero Hollow Knight It's That Good. RETRO BOWL ON SWITCH [4] So I bought this wondering if it'd be harder to play this on pad than on phone, and actually it turns out that I'm just great at retro bowl lol. In my original save it took me like 9 seasons to make the Retro Bowl. On the switch it took 2. Then I went back to phone, started a new save, and got it in my first year. So, yeah. I think I'm just good at Retro Bowl. GEARS 5 - ACT 3 It's worth noting that, as I've played all these games co-op and we started playing them to get away from the idea of doing anything with an open world theme because I am officially sick of open world games (and yes, that does make me concerned about Elden Ring, but I'm hoping the mystery I'll have from not learning anything about it will make up the distance here), my friend has been driving in all the open world segments because I refuse to. So, with that in mind, I'm having a good time! It's also got this thing where all the side missions are HARD AS HELL and that makes them worth doing because the encounters are so fun, even if they're really really stressful a lot of the time.

Checking back in with some more Indian wrestling greatness! To my mind the two best wrestlers in Khali's fed are Sardar Singh (their HHH/Jarrett stand in only he uses a goddamn rifle as his prop weapon) and Badshah Khan (who just turned face but is occasionally a sickening crowbar). Well, they just had a singles match and guess what: it's great.

GAMING UPDATE!! DRAGON QUEST XI S - GOD THE BOSSFIGHTS IN THESE GAMES SOMETIMES I am currently at Octagonia in the second act of the game, and have failed to beat the bosses of this area three times, the third after spending multiple hours grinding. It wouldn't be so bad if they gave me a chance to heal at all between the boss fights. It's just an incredibly difficult pair of encounters and it's slowly draining my will to see this through before Elden Ring hits. STARTED UP DEMONS OF ASTEBORG AGAIN I'm at a point where, now that pixel art has stopped attempting subversion and is just nostalgia, anything going for "JUST LIKE THE OLD DAY" rings like absolute bullshit to me. The reason this gets a pass with me is because it was designed to actually run on Genesis hardware, and that kind of commitment to invocation is more respectable than "we look like earthbound cuz you'll pay us." The game itself is fine. REPLAYING DISCO ELYSIUM ANYWAYS Started watching a friend play it and was like "This counts for my playthrough!" then two days passed where they didn't and hey look I'm on day 2. This is still the best Actual RPG. I TRIED THREE INDIE GAMES AND DROPPED TWO AND THEN FINISHED ONE Game Pass is great. The first game I tried was Death's Door, which I refunded last year because I knew it was going to be a Game Pass game, deep in my bones. I fought two bosses and then decided I didn't like it much for free either. The second game I tried was Unsighted, which has been discussed as "Like Hyper Light Drifter. It's a bit like telling someone to watch Palm Springs because it's "Like The Lighthouse." Fell off this at the first lore dump text log. Well maybe the game I finished was good? Let's see! UNPACKING [1] I don't know how to explain why I hate this without either oversharing my mental illness or breaking the politics rule, so I will leave it at "I don't care about rich people." BEAT GEARS OF WAR 4 [3] Current Gears of War rankings Judgment. Best encounters, best shooting, tightest controls, best pace of storytelling, least amount of weird attempts at poignancy. Genuinely might be the best 360 game. Gears of War 2. Horde Mode would win if it was a separate entry. The campaign is fine, weighed down by the late 2000s obsession with "Can a game make you cry?!". Deeply improved gunplay puts it over... Gears of War 1. While 2 gets the edge for the massive wall of quality of life improvements (You can't run and reload in this! That is wild!), the encounter design is still absolutely razor sharp, and the attempt at poignancy is not some heart strings shit but a cold, icy threat. Your cool commander gets extremely fucking executed and then the killer looks at you before you run for your lives, and that's how you meet the final boss. Great, heavy, propulsive. Gears of War 4. What's good about this mainly exists to talk about what's bad about Gears of War 3. So let me do some positives and then I will dump. What this game does mechanically in the gap between 3 and 4 is put a lot of attention to moving in cover. This is a great starting point for a studio looking to get their hands on a franchise and make it Their Own. After pretty awful first & second acts, the pace of the game hits its sweet spot in the middle as you start dealing with The Actual Enemy instead of boring fascist robots asking you to please obey while they shoot you. Why are we still doing that. Anyways, once the game advances into dealing with freaks instead of robots, that emphasis on movement shines and turns this game into an excellent horror action game in the same vein as like the recent Resident Evil games. It's not going to actively disturb anyone, and it has nothing to say outside of Parent Power Fantasy stuff, but it's an extremely fun, gross Uncharted with bodysnatchers and hell weather. Pleasant surprise. This being second from the bottom is because it has to be here, as there's a WIDE quality gulf between this and... Gears of War 3, which is actively bad. Where Gears 4 is made by people who love Uncharted 2, Gears 3 is a game made by active competitors who were scared shitless by it. It leaks confidence everywhere, from UI design to "humanization," and this culminates in the encounters and the truly mentally tapped attempts to make those encounters more varied. Gears 4 is excellent as a game where you shoot fucked up monsters who don't have to take cover. Gears 3 croaks every time it moves away from Locust encounters and towards floating monsters and shit with weird tentacles that makes cover not count, or the attempts to make big monster fights happen. It is a drag, and I would have done exactly what Epic did with the franchise if we got put under pressure and stayed coal. Oh, hey, fun fact, coal actually has nothing to do with the creation of diamonds. Went to look up how that actually works, and it doesn't. On to Gears 5, the 6th Gears of War game!

Who's got a game update? I've got a game update. DARK SOULS 2 SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN - DRANGLEIC CASTLE, HOWEVER... ...I might be done with this game. Not because of anything they did, but because a Remote Code Execution glitch was found, and they shut off the servers, and I'm not confident I'm going to beat this before Elden Ring anymore because I bet they're fixing Elden Ring first and then maaaaaybe they'll patch the old games, and I like the messages and bloodstains too much to consider playing it offline. So, I might be done. It's up to them. DRAGON QUEST XI S - I HAVE ALL THE MAGIC DOODADS This last weekend has been The Shits, and to offset it I spent a lot of time with my switch reassuring myself I wasn't having an actual heart attack by staring at Dragon Quest and doing a bunch of shit in it. I think I put 12 hours into this game this weekend? It's good, but it's Dragon Quest, so you probably know if you want to play this, and if you're not sure, go get a 3DS and the remake of Dragon Quest VII, which I think might be the best game in the series. GEARS OF WAR 4 - WEIRDLY CONFLICTED? So I just got done with Judgment, which if you missed that, here's my review: Judgment rips. This game has, majority, not ripped. The robot enemies are hideously boring, like a focus test group learning about the Vex and seeing if they can make Extremely Boring FIghts work in their game too. They cannot. And yet I have reached the point of the game where there's a bunch of monsters everywhere? Which was my biggest gripe about Gears 3? Well turns out that was just the fault of the people who did Gears 3, because so far all the monster killing shit in 4 has been great fun. The zone is actually spooky, the setup is disturbing but urgent, and the combat encounters shift from close to far range and it introduces a bunch of mechanics that both make cover strategically destructable and punishes you for either relying too heavily on that cover, or not prioritizing that cover the right way. Basically, all the cover that can explode can also turn into an enemy if the wrong enemy gets hit but not killed. And it'll do that for the entire room. So if you can't find him, you have to pick between reducing the cover before he gets set off, or finding him and hopefully having an easier fight with more options. This is Good Stuff. This is the thing Gears 4 is doing best. I hear in Gears 5 they make JD a villain and this is also an extremely good idea. WINDJAMMERS 2 [4] Gorgeous! And not, like, visually. Visually I think it's kind of a mess and I think the usual dotemu style of comic drawing does this game dirty because the lines make the characters look bad at certain angles. Mechanically, though! This thing fuckin Goes. It took a two button game to a four button game, and made those other two buttons such seizmic changes to the pace of the game that I just love it. There's actual mixups! The mixups that previously existed have another layer to them! There's incentives to reading player behavior! They added a bar, and it does both Offensive and Defensive stuff, and both options are HUGE comeback mechanics, but only if you know how to use them! Just a delightful action game.

already got enough for another LIST UPDATE DARK SOULS 2: SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN- IRON KEEP In my last session I encountered two of the most powerful feelings souls games can offer you. On the upswing, I defeated The Duke's Dear Freja- a boss that has a long and arduous trek to withstand on the way there- on my first try. I felt fuckin' so sick and strong. Then I went to the last of area of the first half of the game, the Iron Keep, and have so far died to one mandatory phantom 25 times. This may take a while. GEARS OF WAR JUDGMENT- FINISHED I left the campaign my friend and I started last year to beat all the Gears games off my list cuz I haven't been counting multiplayer games. Judgment is the best game in the series and it isn't even close. It's the gameplay peak, it's got big stupid action movie pacing, and only really stumbles with the final boss, which has been the problem of every Gears game aside from Gears 1. Strongest possible recommendation. GEARS OF WAR 4- PLAYED ACT 1 A great first twenty minute flashback that's so far been followed with a pretty annoying game. So the main observation I took from Gears 3 is that is from a group of devs that shat their pants at Uncharted 2. The main observation so far in 4, a game from a studio that was founded to keep making Gears games, is that it is made by people who respect the Uncharted games so much, they made their main character half-an-uncharted. The title screen is literally just his face. The dev effort went into making moving feel better, and every part of it does. However, since Judgment is the black sheep, every single improvement Judgment made to the gameplay is now gone. I feel a great sense of dread about finishing this. THE ANACRUSIS- HOLY SHIT IT'S A CATASTROPHE Tried through the gamepass free trial thing. I know it's a game preview, but like... is this going to help? Is there any chance this helps this game? It is performance wise a mess, but it's worse to play and it's grating to boot. Like ok, Shatner Star Trek Left4Dead sounds great, but when it's just people talking in those outfits and then you are playing the grossest feeling action game? It's not going to do enough to cover the gap there. I hope there's so much ground covered between now and release, because the state it's in on consoles is completely unacceptable. DRAGON QUEST XI S - I'M PLAYING IT RIGHT NOW It's proven: the best way to play any Dragon Quest game is before bed. Just play until you reach the next save point!

LIST UPDATE CRUELTY SQUAD- FINISHED I opted for the first ending here as the process towards the true ending- which a friend already showed me anyways- requires me to go headlong against a major phobia and maybe some day but not right now! This is still the unquestionable 2021 Game of the Year and any conversation that doesn't include it isn't worth hearing out! Play Cruelty Squad! DARK SOULS 2: SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN- BRIGHTSTONE COVE TSELDORA Running a Cleric Miracle build, Primary is the Blacksmith Hammer +4 (it's fun), offhand is the Disc Chime, aspiring to get Sunlight Weapon. I've done two of the four great souls (or whatever they're called?) and it's honestly the furthest I've ever been in a souls game. I'm aspiring to beat this before Elden Ring comes out, especially now that I know Kirby is out a fuckin Month Later. I've made it to the Iron Keep, but there's an invader by the front door that is just kicking my fuckin ass so I'm doing everything else I have available. I'm skipping a lot of optional bosses, and just trying to get down the main line as fast as possible. DRAGON QUEST XI S- JUST GOT TO GONDOLIA This is a major landmark for me, as my first playthrough ended shortly after here on account of my primary PS4 had this cool thing where it would spit discs out all the time. So I'm almost done dragging my feet through stuff I've already done! I imagine the pace will pick up much faster after I'm done here. HOLLOW KNIGHT- DRAGGING MY FEET The Soul Master is my next obvious boss, and I don't want to do it, so I made progress in all these other games instead lol