System Shock: Enhanced Edition


1 death to slow radiation poisioning,
3 deaths to "middle click the landmines".

It's a good game. It does control like pushing a computer on wheels at times and Citadel has a real "How the hell do I get there" problem at times. The audio logs and data system was so close to being perfectly excited, but it doesn't record things that are on paper or on screens, so you can sometimes be left wondering, "What the heck is this access code?"

All that I'd ask for is a better minimap, because that too is just so close to being what I'd want. Or I could have taken the time to leave better notes, but the only reason I dropped them was basically as "Investigate this" since the game doesn't do the Descent 2 thing of leaving a trail of dots when you ask for guidance.

Mars Horizon.

Spent 46 hours on my first playthrough playing as the ESA, ended up 4th overall in the race to Mars, although I wasn't actively competing with the others, just doing my own stuff, what I thought would be cool to do. If you want to win you definitely need to plan ahead and focus your research and missions.

It's a great game, I'd rate it 5/5. It's unique and plays really well. It felt immersive too, with great music, visual style and narrative elements. Quite easy to learn, but can definitely be challenging towards the end. It has multiple difficulty options that decide how tough the AI will be.

The gameplay has a nice mix of macro management, strategy and puzzles.

Negatives? I thought the game was a bit limited in scope. Granted it's called Mars Horizon, but considering it allows for basic exploration of the entire solar system I hoped it would also allow for a focus beyond just Mars, like sending people to Titan or something. Perhaps the next game, if there is one, will have a grander scope and allow for more possiblities and paths.

Another negative is that the area where you place your buildings it far too small, and it's weird that you have this limitation since it does not feel realistic at all; why should you not be able to buy more land? Towards the end there's simply not enough room for all the facilities you have unlocked, however the ones you unlock initially are more or less "core" ones I would argue, and thus you are hesitant to remove what you have previously built.

In the end though, it's a really fun and unique game, and I seriously hope the devs will expand on this game or franchise because we are severely lacking in games like this.

I finished Ultima 2.

At a systems level, this game tries to take the formula from the first game and make it more of a full fledged RPG like Wizardry but gets most things incredibly wrong. It's a never ending grind for money.

Thematically, it's awesome. Going back and forth between time periods through the time gates, travelling to other planets, it's everything I'd wish modern RPGs would let me do.

I'm firmly in the camp that good games don't need remakes, they only need players. Bad games with cool ideas need remakes. Ultima 2 would be a perfect game to get a remake.

I love them both to death but prefer Origins over Legend. Not even sure why. I guess I find it to have more charm perhaps. But it is likely just because it was first of them I played and it is hard to unseat first love. What I certainly give to Legends are those awesome musical stages. No demo got me more hyped for any game than the Black Betty level in this one.

Those music levels in Legends are my favorite levels ever in 2D platformers, especially the bonus versions you unlock where they play tricks on you like blanking the screen or flipping everything upside down, forcing you to rely on the rhythm.
Funny how few people ever talk about the 2D Rayman games when it comes to great platformers. I've never played any of the 3D entries though, so maybe they aren't as good.

I think Rayman 2 and 3 are good. Nowhere near the level of Origins and Legend but I enjoyed them well enough. It has some problematic camera but other than that they were quite entertaining 3rd platformers.

I just got it the other day and threw it in to my Wii U last night. It's been a more relaxing, but not easy, game so far and looks and plays great. I was actually hard pressed to think of another 2D game I've played that looks better. I am enjoying it about as well as Origins. I don't know about 100% everything but I probably will grab all the Teensies, feels bad to leave them behind.

Dungeons & Dragons Dark Alliance (XSX Game Pass)

A very maligned game since it released about two months ago. But I have a mild fetish for maligned games, as long as they fit into genres I like. It's no where near as bad as it's made out to be. People make it sound like it's totally unplayable. Well I finished it without any bugs or crashes and it ran flawlessly. It has two aspects that annoyed me, however. One is how enemies ignore your ranged attacks if you are beyond their reach. It's only a problem if you choose it exploit it. The other issue was how long it takes your character to get to their feet after being knocked down, I played as Drizzt and the way he just took his sweet ass time getting back up was a bit infuriating. You would think someone in mortal danger would be jumping back to their feet!

I think the real reason people hate the game is because it's not what they were expecting. They thought it was going to be a sequel to Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. What the game is, however, is a looter shooter- or looter slasher if you prefer. It has more in common with Borderlands or Outriders. You choose your character, set your difficulty and play solo or co-op to collect better loot and build your character. There's only a bare bones story and levels are self contained missions. It's about 15 to 16 hours long for one play through. It's no masterpiece, but I had fun with it anyway.

Sable (XSX Game Pass)

A rarity here, a game with no combat or killing, and I really enjoyed it- just like when played the excellent Eastshade last year. I hope I'm not becoming a pacifist. It's story telling the way I like it done in games, meaning it is me that uncovers most of the story and not the developer using cutscenes or linear scripting. You play as a tribal girl leaving on a sort of coming of age pilgrimage to find your place in the world. You are set loose into an open world and the story is then what you make it.

Game play is heavily focused on exploration on your hover bike and exploring ruins using climbing. It is slow paced and relaxing, thought provoking and not for action junkies. Finishing the game entails discovering masks that are worn by different trades or jobs in the world and then, eventually choosing one. You can finish the game after finding just a single mask if you like. But i spent around 16 hours fully exploring the world, learning a lot of its history and why it's the way it is. I seem to have collected all the masks.

The games art style and music get top marks for such a small team. Unfortunately the game has performance issues. Not just on Xbox, but if you read PC reviews they are saying the same. The game has a built in constant stutter that seems to be related to mismanaged asset streaming. It runs perfectly smooth until it needs to auto save after picking something up, or the game needs to stream in some new assets. Objects also suffer from clipping issues, so you can often see through walls and other objects when standing next to them. The game was perfectly playable still, since it's not a twitch action game in any way. But it would be great to see the game further polished just the same. Despite the roughness, I enjoyed every minute of the experience. This will be right up there with this years best indie games finished, along with The Falconeer and The Artful escape.

Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon is a 1995 arcade game based on the manga/anime. It's a pretty standard Final Fight-style beat-em-up - you walk from left to right, beat up whatever gets in your way with a combination of strikes, jumps, spin attacks that cost some of your health to use, and special magic attacks that are very limited. You can pick any of the heroines from the series to use and I guess there's some variation in their abilities; e.g., Sailor Jupiter seems to be a strong but slow type since she's the biggest.

I never watched the show, but I like beat-em-ups so I figured I'd have a run through this. It's a tad long, although part of the reason might be because the enemies feel kind of spongey. Your attacks just don't seem to do significant amounts of damage to them, so it takes a certain amount of time longer to polish off even low-level enemies compared to stuff like Final Fight or Streets of Rage. There are no weapons to pick up and use. The game looks nice but the way it plays feels very generic, like they went with a standard template for the gameplay and didn't go any farther. Since I'm not familiar with the intricacies of the source material, I'm not sure what they could have done to give the game more of an identity. It's a licensed tie-in game, not bad but not exceptional either.

Swords & Souls: Neverseen [Humble RPG bundle]

Quirky but overall enjoyable game.

Took 15 hours to beat it, though I'm sure someone could beat it faster. Of those 15 hours I'd say the first hour was a bit slow, hours 2-10 were really enjoyable, and the last 5 hours was just playing out the string and completing a few extra achivements.

It's really 3 games in one:
1) training mini-games
2) pet and fish collection
3) light tactical sorta-turn-based combat

#2 is mostly skippable. I think one advantage and one flaw is that for the most part the training mini-games are quite fun, but if you do them too much the combat/story-line is really unbalanced and you can rollface through a lot of the combat/storyline.

In the same vein, some of the mini-game achievements feel pretty unbalanced. It wasn't hard to hit all the max achievements for one of them, but others I could probably play for a million years and never string together 50 "star" dodges or 400 total dodges in a row. Possible it would be more achievable starting over from scratch because as you progress the difficulty ramps up.

And tbh, that scaling difficulty is also what at times makes it gleefully fun stringing together blocks, or dodges, or attacks. Is it worth the full $15? Eh. Is it a steal at $2-5? imo it absolutely was and gave me moments of real joy, despite the places where it's a little jankier or drags.

Lost Words: Beyond the Page (XSX Game Pass)

A short narrative driven game with some interesting game play used to drive that narrative. Written by Rhianna Pratchett, it's a story about the circle of life. You play as a young girl writing in her journal whilst also writing a fantasy tale. The journal segments entail platforming using the words themselves. Then the fantasy story segments work by plucking words and using their meaning as a powerful tool to modify the world- it's a bit like Max Curse of the Brotherhood, except instead of using a marker to modify the world, you use the power of words. It's all pretty easy, as the focus is on the narrative and not the platforming. It was actually a really good, short, experience. Just perfect for playing between bigger and longer games.

Just beat Horizon: Zero Dawn on PS5 (PS4 version enhanced to run at 4k and 60 FPS).

I actually got this one soon after release because it was bundled with my PS4 Pro but somehow I couldn't quite get into it back then. I found the game boring and tiresome back then. For some reason I was in the mood for it now, though, and decided to start from scratch. It was a good call.

Briefly put: gameplay-wise it's merely okay. It's a sandbox game with stealth, crafting, basic parkour and whatnot and frankly it's not the best in either regard. The combat, which mostly revolves around fighting robots with bow and arrow, feels kinda disorganised and random and the stealth gameplay is very basic and shallow. The formula is pretty promising at first since the robots have different components that you must shoot off in order to deal serious damage and cripple the robots - using the right weapon with the right component can even make robots catch on fire, explode, get frozen etc. and you can also place traps or lure the robots. In the early game I still bothered a bit with these strategies but most of the time I felt that it's just not worth the effort and it does get old if you fight the same machine several times. And fighting humans is as bland as it gets. And what I found frustrating is how hard the movement of the enemies is to read - combine that with IMO too small hitboxes and it's really not great. Damaging the machines feels satisfying but it's just not interesting in the long run. Also the quests are very unimaginable and rarely involve anything other than - you guessed it - killing stuff.

That said, in terms of world, story and presentation Horizon is amazing IMO. The setting, where people living in primitive tribes which face robotic animals and dinosaurs, is quite fascinating to me (though awkwardly similar to Enslaved, which I admittedly also loved) and luckily the story involves solving the mysteries of this world, as well as the heroine's very own mystery. And honestly, I found Aloy (said protagonist) to be an extremely lovable and interesting character and I see some parallels to the Witcher's Geralt - what they certainly have in common is that they are far more sophisticated than most other people in the world and shunned by them despite feelin a sense of duty toward them. Also, Horizon is an absolute feast for the senses. The game remains one of the best-looking games in terms of sheer graphical fidelity but more importantly this post-apocalyptic world is utterly gorgeous and made me use the photo mode more than any other game - well ,except Ghost of Tsushima perhaps. It's almost shocking how much of this massive world feels carefully crafted. Also the character designs, which implement sci-fi into tribal attire, are pretty amazing. All of this was enough to keep me going and genuinely enjoy the game despite its substantial shortcomings.

Also, one pro tip from me: use fast travel. One of the reasons I couldn't get myself to beat the game the first time I played it was that I grew frustrated from travelling over long distances through the same areas over and over without encountering new stuff on the way. Personally I tend not to use fast travel as much as I should and in Horizon you may be further discouraged from using it because each travel uses up a travel pack - however, the costs are tiny (and later on you can buy a permanent travel pack that makes fast travel free) and you will get a much more enjoyable experience this way.

Anyway, I genuinely enjoyed the game a ton and I'm kinda glad that I have yet to play the DLC area and am really looking forward to the sequel now.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3)

A 19 hour movie with a few game play segments thrown in as an added bonus. Out of 19 hours I estimate there couldn't have been more than 8 hours of game play. The final cutscenes alone, after the final boss fight, went for 2 hours! It did tie up most of the story arcs though, as it needed to, since it's the final part of the story.

Glad I finally played it, but it's not my favorite of the series. I prefer the early parts of the story- MGS3, Peace Walker and MGS5- the Big Boss games in other words. MGS 4 concerns itself so much tidying up the series overall, that it barely tells a story of its own. Plus it lacks the better controls and freedom of play of MGS5. Despite that, this is the game in the series that most needs a remaster- due to the only way to play it being to buy a second hand disc, I don't think it's even available on the PS3 digital store (definitely not on the Australian store anyway). At least the discs are cheap and easy to find.