Category Archives: video game

Where to begin with this mythological beast of legendary stature? I guess we can lead with the two main points of hype in the year following its release. Elden Ring was endlessly called a masterpiece, and it was claimed to be the most accessible FromSoftware title to date.

I have played over 300 hours spread across two classes, and that’s a lot to digest and then distill into a brief review. The easier of the two claims to cover is its status as a masterpiece. In this, it absolutely deserves the title. I’ve always liked the worlds of Dark Souls, and while I wasn’t as much of a fan of Bloodborne, I could still recognize the haunting beauty of its settings.

Elden Ring manages to surpass all previous entries, and I can’t tell you how many times I would freeze in the middle of a trip across the map just to take in…everything. The night sky, a gorgeous lakeside view, a cavern illuminated by glowing rocks that made me forget I wasn’t outside staring at the stars, or an underground waterfall populated by a slumbering giant that I’m loathe to wake and break this moment of grand spectacle. Every shift in the biomes is a new reason to stop and soak it all in. It’s a positively gorgeous work of art. Continue reading →

Yep, it took me forever to do it, but I finally committed myself to push through Sapienza’s stunning beauty to play the rest of Hitman, and let me tell you—

“Hold up!” you shout with understandable annoyance. “Where the hell have you been since July?”

Well, see imaginary reader, every month that we were supposed to get my new gaming PC, something came up and the money had to go elsewhere. The vet, paying for a new heater, the TV died, whatever. My work computer was already unable to play most newer games besides indie pixel games, so I just kind of locked in on playing the stuff I’ve already reviewed. I played every Dark Souls, all three Borderlands and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Skyrim with multiple builds. But, in December, I finally got my new gaming box (it really is a tiny box that fits neatly under the new TV, and by the by, gaming on a 50 inch TV is so, so nice) which meant I could finally play Elden Ring. And yes, I will have a review on that, too. But in between rounds of Elden Ring, I also decided to download and restart Hitman to see everything it had to offer.

Let me tell you, that is one hell of a game. I can’t quite call it perfect, but it certainly kept me enthralled for the better part of two weeks. Even after I finished it, I felt like I needed time to distill all my thoughts on it. But before I even get to that, I should answer the main question: was it so good that I want more? And the answer is, yes, I will be getting Hitman: World of Assassination in March because I really want to see what other sets they put together for Hitman 2 and 3. Continue reading →

I should probably start this post off with some pleading apology after saying I would do a game review soon and then vanishing for weeks. But what happened was, I started playing older games, and I kept bouncing from one to the next as soon as I finished a run in each. Nothing worth a review, but I had a good time, and it helped me to avoid doom scrolling. I’m calling that a win.

Anywho, when it comes to technology, we live in strange times. My phone, despite being two years old now, has more RAM and storage space than my first PC, as well as more video RAM, better sound quality, and a higher screen resolution. And yet, when it comes to mobile games and apps, we live in a time of virtual garbage.

This is why I initially had hope for subscription models that would make games better by ditching ads, “microtransactions,” (100 dollars for a bag of digital currency is not a micro anything) and loot boxes. But many games on these services are the same mobile shite with the exploitation removed, and that doesn’t change the fact that most simply aren’t fun to play. They still desperately peddle daily login gifts to try and keep people on the treadmill, but when it comes to the actual gameplay between all the lousy menus and worthless presents, there’s not enough incentive to keep going.

Which brings me to Word Trails, courtesy of Netflix’s subscription. It’s pretty much like a lot of other word puzzle games. The top half of the screen is similar to a crossword grid, and the lower half has a circle with letters to link and form words. Any words spelled that aren’t on the grid go into a bonus pot, which eventually fills up to award a pittance amount of gold. Continue reading →

Folks, I apologize for all these delays with new updates. I finished playing the Brotato: Abyssal Terrors DLC for this review before I went to the hospital, but I am still on the mend and find myself returning to bed for long naps with just a few chores around the house. Did I need to ride my bike into town for supplies? Well then, it’s time for a two hour nap. Pulled some weeds in the yard? Three hour nap. This isn’t likely to improve soon, but I’ll do my best to get back on track with reviews.

So, before I talk about the Brotato DLC, I should mention that I had little interest in getting it until I noticed that the achievements progress bar in Epic Game Store’s library page wasn’t full even though I’d unlocked everything. This by itself annoys me. I can’t say if it’s a problem with Epic’s platform only, or if it was a choice of the game maker’s and is the same on Steam, but either way, I should not be penalized for not buying the DLC.

Adding into this is the percent of players who completed the achievements, but I’ll get into that later. (And this will be a recurring theme in my next review as well.) But setting that aside, I decided to get the DLC because some of the challenges sounded interesting enough that I wanted to try them. Continue reading →

Gaming in 2024 became a bit more vexing for me this year. As I’m mentioned several times before, my PS4 died, and my PC is now so old that it can’t keep up with newer games. So stuff like Elden Ring, Enotria, Lies of P, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns all gave me a big nope when I tried booting them up.

Now don’t worry, I’m planning to get a new gaming PC in 2025. Whether I get a PS5 is still up in the air, and depends a lot on me getting some new books out. But that’s a me problem, not a y’all problem.

Despite the hardware setbacks, I was still able to find these gems, which I am quite happy to share with y’all. Continue reading →

I am absolutely delighted to be contrasting this review to my last one for a number of reasons, because in most of the ways River City Girls failed, Neon Abyss manages to make playing it not only tolerable, but enjoyable. Granted, they are not similar games, with one being a fighting game and the other being a side scrolling rogue-lite. But what I mean is that Neon Abyss sets out to build a game that I’d want to keep revisiting over and over, and they passed that test with ease.

Neon Abyss opens with Hades asking the player to defeat the new titans, who have stolen some of Hades’ powers and taken over the human world through corporations. So the player picks a mercenary to enter the titular neon abyss to slog though a set of dungeon and boss fights, leading to a showdown with one of the titans.

Each defeated titan unlocks another target to hunt down, and defeating the regular bosses also unlocks alternate forms of the fight. For example, defeating Tok, the god of social media, unlocks Tik, and beating Sung, the god of Screens grants access to later fights with Sam. Continue reading →

Time is a funny thing. The way you experience it can feel vastly different depending on whether you are enjoying what you do, or whether you were being tortured. For example, I played just a hair under fifty hours of Shakedown Hawaii and loved almost every minute of it. Then I played twenty-two hours of River City Girls, and it felt like it would never end.

Unlike Shakedown Hawaii, an homage to GTA games, River City Girls is an actual entry in a very long-running franchise, Japan’s Kunio series. The intellectual properties were bought by ARC systems, who then went on to make this and many more games. I can’t talk about the quality of the others, but I can say this was quite a painful experience, both physically and mentally. Beating the game somehow made all of my efforts even worse, like deciding to pick my nose after scratching my sweaty butthole.

Oh, and I need to warn you, there will be massive story spoilers this time, because I cannot explain my pain without exposing that god awful ending. So if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review, okay? Continue reading →

Bro. Bruh! This game…if I were inclined to review games based only on the first day of play-time, Brotato would have not only been a 5 star winner, it would have been on my games of the year list. A lot of this comes down to its similarities to Vampire Survivors, but also to sharing some features of The Binding of Isaac.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. You play a potato who is killing waves of purple aliens. Yep, that’s it. If I make that sound bad, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s good to play a game where the whole premise can be summed up in a sentence, and all the real intricacies comes from learning to master its core mechanics.

In this case, the core mechanic is simplicity defined. You don’t have to push any buttons to attack, because that’s done automatically. All you have to do is learn to move, either to dodge attacks or move in just close enough to deal some damage of your own. Continue reading →

You know, I’m starting to wonder a lot about myself. Last year, I loved playing a serial killer in Party Hard, and now here I am mostly loving Shakedown: Hawaii, a game about an evil CEO learning to embrace his inner mobster. If not for the end game, this might have even been a 5 star review because I loved being evil, which makes me wonder: dudes, what the hell is wrong with me?

But let’s start with the plot. The CEO of Feeble Industries is watching TV when he sees a report that his empire is failing. His CFO Ron explains that streaming is killing his video stores, online shopping is killing his retail empire, and most of his other enterprises are falling behind as new technologies supplant the things he’d invested in. So this CEO decides to get “aggressive” to return to prominence.

I think the best part of this story is how many times the CEO discovers how modern business models are forcing him to pay more for bullshit like convenience fees or HD streaming, and he’s mad, but not because they’re fleecing him. No, he’s mad because, as he says, “Why aren’t we doing this kind of con already?” Continue reading →

I think that as a lot of us gamers get older, we tend to forget that games are meant for the young. We romanticize the challenges of our first games while downplaying all the games we played that were more accessible. Yes, Ninja Gaiden, Contra, and Ghouls N’ Ghosts gave me many sleepless nights trying to finally beat them. But there were many other sleepless nights because I’d gained so many free lives in Pac-Man that I couldn’t lose, or spent late nights with Super Mario Brothers, Bionic Commando, and Castlevania, games that I had beaten many times, but I just wanted to do it one more time.

In that particular mindset is where I want to talk about The Spirit and the Mouse. Its story is simple and straightforward, the controls easy to understand, and the challenges within are easily surmountable with only a few harder challenges here and there. It’s a game meant to welcome the new kids, yes, but it’s also ready to offer some nostalgia to the older gamer not married to their hardcore pride. Perhaps best of all, it’s short, done and dusted in a few sessions. It stays around just long enough to be fun, and never overstays its welcome.

The story is introduced in a few minutes. A mouse living in a small village in France decides it wants to help people be happier. It sees a woman lose her favorite scarf and gives chase to retrieve it. Instead, it climbs the highest metal pole in the village right as a freak lightning storm delivers a guardian spirit. The mouse receives the spirit’s power and is tasked with making people happy, so it would seem that fate has smiled on the little furry dude. Continue reading →