This Week’s Topics:
Back in 2013, a little known Chicago based game developer by the name of Phosphor Games announced Project Awakened, an incredibly ambitious superhero game that promised to offer an, in retrospect, downright absurd level of customization and variability compared to other games on the market, all powered by the then new Unreal Engine 4. It stuck with me for quite a while, even after the independently developed game failed to accrue the needed funds via Kickstarter, and the project was supposedly cancelled. But the developers apparently were able to salvage enough of their work and concepts to create a brief game that also served as a tie-in to some TV show I have never heard of… Which I guess is still something. (more…)
After going through select entries in the Sonic series over the past few months, I think I’ve reached my end with this. A game that released eleven years ago, and served as a present for my eleventh birthday, because I was still a dumb little child young enough to find the edginess of this game to be cool. So I got the game whenever I did, including the limited edition Shadow The Hedgehog beanie. A collectible that I eventually threw away, but remembered well enough to reference it in a story of mine… because I think that the fact Sega sold this game with a beanie is funny. (more…)
With Andromeda still looming over the horizon for a few more months, and my reviews of Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 out of the way, it’s time to dig into Mass Effect 3, the game whose heinously negative fan reaction effectively murdered the series for me for approximately four years. It’s easily the game I remembered the least of the series, but seeing as how I genuinely enjoyed my time with it at launch, I assumed that it would still prove to be a good conclusion to the Shepard saga. Well… I was wrong. It’s a great conclusion. (more…)
This game has been sitting in my “games to review” queue for quite a while now, and I’m not really sure why. True, I was not the biggest fan of Metro: Last Light, but I do have fond memories of playing the original Metro 2033 years ago and a remastering like this would ideally improve whatever shortcomings that game had. Ideally, but in trying to fix a few things, it turned what I recalled as being a delightful little experience into a far more annoying one. (more…)
About a month ago, I started going through the beloved Mass Effect series once again, starting with the less than stellar predecessor to the series that I just couldn’t seem to love. That was Mass Effect 1, but Mass Effect 2… When thinking about what games really resonated with me, what games brought me an overwhelming amount of good feelings, and offered an experience that I kept coming back to, Mass Effect 2 is one of the first that comes to mind. It was among my favorite games of all time before my, what, sixth playthrough, and I think I may love it even more after going through the game yet again. Also, I played the game using a controller mod, which you can find here. (more…)
Red Faction: Guerilla has been off my radar for quite some time, which actually surprises me, as it is a game developed by Volition, the people behind Saints Row, and I absolutely loved the second and fourth games in that series. It is also a game about destroying buildings, which has a primal and cathartic appeal to me. However, the brown aesthetic of this game always put me off, and it wasn’t until I caught a few glimpses of people gushing about this game before I chose to check it out and see what made their knickers so tight and cozy. Yeah, I still have no idea what they found so appealing about this game. (more…)
So, I’ve been wanting to revisit the Mass Effect trilogy for a while, but I kept putting it off for various reasons. The vicious opinions surrounding the ending, the overpriced DLC that isn’t included in any bundle, and the lack of controller support. Although, I managed to remedy the latter using a handy mod. Anyways, with Andromina still a looming enigma on the horizon, I figured now is as good a time as any to start the spacefaring adventure of Shepard the space shepherd. So I’ll just jump on in. (more…)
Cat Girl Without Salad originated as an “April Fools joke” back in 2013, with developer WayForward claiming the game will be every genre under the sun, and come out for every system possible in fall of that year. That didn’t happen, and the game’s announcement, despite being supposedly real according to WayForward staff, was largely dismissed as a simple joke. Over three years later though, the project was announced on the tumblr of the lead artist and was released exclusively through the Humble Monthly Bundle for June 2016. Was this oddball little curiosity something worth waiting so many years for? Eh… Kind of. (more…)
Wolfenstein: The New Order has been on my to-play list for quite some time, even though I don’t have much affinity for first person shooters. Ever since it clicked to me that they visually look like games about disembodied guns shooting people, it became difficult for me to not look at them as somewhat gauche. Yet, I heard good things about the story, which is weird for a game where you shoot nazi robots in the face with dual wielded shotguns. (more…)
About a year ago I went through the two mainline Danganronpas, Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair, both of which I thought were fantastic games about deception, murder, hope, despair, and being very dark while also being profusely silly and overall fun. As such, I was quick to order a copy of Ultra Despair Girls, which acted as my one full-priced retail purchase for the year of 2015, and I had high hopes that it would be among my favorite titles of the year, but that’s unfortunately not the case… (more…)
I viewed the first Borderlands to be of so little value, to be so worthless, that it is the only game I threw in the trash. More specifically, I threw it into a ditch just outside of my childhood Kindergarten, which I walk past whenever coming home from school. That ditch only really existed to prevent flooding, by gathering excess sewage water and was likely an incredibly filthy place that I rolled around in regularly as a child. It also had these metal sewage gates that I always wanted to wander into, but I was too afraid of crocodiles to do so… Anyhow, I gave money to a Video Game Museum and was given Borderlands 2 was a reward. And despite having given it twenty hours about a year and a half ago, I decided that I would give the series a… fourth chance. However, I was only able to get about twenty-eight hours through the game before I hit my threshold and dropped the game like a backpack full of rocks, glad to be rid of it. (more…)
As the years have gone on, I feel as if I have gotten increasingly more cynical, and less permissive of things that I openly would have praised in year’s past. I do truly and always want to sing the praises of just about anything I believe to deserve it, but there are and were moments where I was a bit too excited and felt too justified in saying nice things that I ignored some of the negligence thoughts that now fill my mind whenever I play any game, which kinda sucks now that I think about it. (more…)
I have professed pretty regularly that I have nothing shy of a strong affection towards the Saints Row series, well, namely to parts two and four. I have mentioned my issues with Saints Row: The Third but most of those stem from how much I enjoy the two aforementioned titles and very much want to love everything related to the series. That said, even when viewing Gat Out of Hell as a standalone expansion that I managed to get at launch for $5 because of a pricing error, I have some pretty major qualms about it. (more…)
If you put me on the stop at this very moment and asked me what my favorite franchises are in the realm of video games, I would probably ponder and stutter for a few seconds before spitting out Pokemon, Metal Gear, and Saints Row. The last one is naturally what I’m here to talk about, as while I do adore parts two and four, the first and third parts of this to be pentalogy are far lower on the totem pole of quality in my mind. While part one is the franchise before it really got its own identity, part three was where the franchise was established, became AAA to a certain extent, and had a staff that was 80% people who did not assist in building this franchise up. But that was three years ago, and I feel it is worth revisiting… That, and I was in the mood for a game with character creation, and this was the only one on my list of games I own which I ought to play. (more…)
In retrospect, I really am not sure why I shoved this game onto my bucket list. I guess the argument is that it was a quality game that I could see myself enjoying, but nothing about it stuck out to me and I don’t recall hearing about its existence prior to its release, where ti was well received. Heck, the Call of Juarez series to me is encompassed by The Cartel, which is a game that involves choking strippers and misinforming people about sex slave trades. But regardless, I decided to pick it up and play it after falling into a rut of titles that were as stimulating as being in a muck-like substance that smelled like soup.
I am a bit torn on how I should introduce this review. On one hand I could bring up Audiosurf and the idea of playing a level or stage based on a user selected song makes me practically giddy. On the other I could talk about how dumb it is to entitle a game something like Symphony. At least Amnesia had a subtitle. Or I could get personal and call my father out for never teaching me jack about music when he is a massive music nerd who has a 15 foot long wall of CDs. Or I could gush about “Symphony” before realizing I’m not reviewing Symphony of the Night. Instead I did all four. I am the cleverest girl in all of the interwebs! (more…)
Funny story about how I got Metro: Last Light. I was just getting into the PC gaming in July when I was directed a link to snag the game for a penny… legally. The reasoning was that there was some error on Best Buy’s part and I managed to get the game before it was fixed. Why did it take me so long to get around to seeing as how I really liked the 2033rd? Well, I wanted to play the game in ranger mode, waited until it was on sale, played it, and realized that ranger mode was pretty terrible due to how it is impossible to know how much ammo you have. Backstory handled, so let’s talk the twenty-thirty-four! (more…)
You know what I learned by looking into my blog’s metrics? It is the most beneficial for page views if I talk about games that are a year to three years old, as they tend to get the most traffic from me due to the internet algorithms. That is not what I am reviewing Binary Domain, curiosity and a $3.75 price tag did that. Not that I would justify it for much more than that, with my reasoning being listed below.
If you couldn’t tell from my list of glob knows how many reviews, I am not bound by anything in terms of what I pick up and when. So a positively received title that was a sequel to a game you could get for $5 at any given Gamestop, which somehow was a disappointing product in regards to sales? Sure, why not. The Darkness II because I picked it up for $6. (more…)
