Why are you in this system anyways?
The juxtaposition of playing this game right after Hi-Fi Rush is just sublime. Where Hi-Fi Rush is loud and fast this game invites you to play at your own pace. Take your time, observe, listen, take note. Let’s dive into why I am putting this game in my list of GOTYs this year.
Continue reading “Review – Season: A letter to the future”
Every once in a while you get where you play it and think to yourself – “They had one idea, one very good idea and then iterated and polished it until it was perfectly executed.” Hi-Fi Rush is one of those games. Developed by Tango Gameworks and published by Bethesda Softworks, this one truly did just come out of nowhere. As far as I know there wasn’t even a teaser trailer before the game just like…appeared on store fronts everywhere.
Continue reading “Review – Hi-Fi Rush”According to my Steam replay for 2022, two of the games I’ve played the most this year have been Apex Legends and Destiny. Steam is of course not counting the hours I spent in a non-Steam game like Overwatch. Yet, none of these games are on my list of games of the year.
It seems despite my enjoyment of multiplayer shooters, I grow increasingly tired of their progression systems. Every multiplayer game has a battle pass. Every game is a grind. For a time some of this grind is even mildly enjoyable. But only for a time, eventually I get tired of them. I slogged through an entire season of Apex Legends, bought the battle pass for the next one and then lost interest part way through.
So for my 2022 list of games of the year I have a list of single player games I consider good or interesting or weird or all of those things. More importantly all of these games don’t have an endless treadmill. They end.
Here they are, in no particular order.
Continue reading “My Games of the Year: 2022 Edition”Today I read an article on Rock Paper Shotgun which was a bitter rant about how bad Sonic Frontiers is and there is a paragraph in it that I want to expound upon:
Continue reading “The Open Worldification of Video Games”Oh, for God’s sake, of course I’m bitter. How could I not be bitter that Sonic has thrown all that delightful strangeness, that off-beat wrongness back in my weeping face? What the hell is Sonic Frontiers, anyway? A set of enormous maps that you gradually reveal portions of, complete with icons all over it to tidy up? It’s blinkin’, bleedin’ Assassin’s Creed, isn’t it? This is what people want from Sonic! This is what makes them cheer! To see him to fall in line. For him to be boring.
Stuart Gipp, “Sonic Frontiers is popular, but it’s a boring Sonic game – and I’m bitter about it”
What is that saying? “There is nothing new under the sun.” Well, Bethesda is out here proving that a hundred times over. A hundred star systems, a thousand planets, all of them with the dreadfully boring lockpicking system in them. But hey, this time we called it “Digipick”, isn’t that cool and futuristic?
For fuck’s sake. I don’t think Bethesda is capable of making something that is not Skyrim with a different coat of paint anymore. This time they don’t even have the lore and world of The Elder Scrolls universe to finger-paint with. Maybe the modding community will yet again bail them out of their creative bankruptcy.
There never was any Bethesda “magic”, just the one trick that they keep doing on the back of crunching developers.
I don’t want to climb that damn mountain Todd.