Towards the end of TR1/TR 2 was when the movement really clicked with me. But during 3 & 4, I felt all that unclicking. It started feeling more frustrating than enjoyable. Maybe that's more my personal experience than the objective quality though. I will say that I enjoyed The Last Revelation more than the third game though.

Atomic Heart (XSX Game Pass)

You have to hand it to Russian developers- they seem to make the games that they want, for better or worse. This one initially had me thinking of quitting it, but I ended up being so glad that I kept at it. The things that initially bugged me were the overdone number of locked doors that require some annoying puzzle solving, then the open world and its form of constant respawning enemies. However, with some practice I got the hang of the door lock puzzles and I soon realized that all you had to do in the open world was run for it- only stopping off at safe rooms. Never bother destroying the cameras, it just attracts more enemies, the opposite to what you normally expect.

The world and its alternate history lore is awesome. Soviet era Communism taken to its ultimate destination. Story was also quite decent, though sometimes the game does talk to you a bit too much for a shooter. The graphics are excellent, looking very much like Soviet Bioshock Infinite. I think the English voice of the protagonist is a bit of a miss, but I got used to him, he's just a bit annoying. Special mention has to go to some of the game's enemy animations, especially the ballerina twins.

Combat is okay, though I settled on a loadout and play style very early and just stuck to upgrading those weapons and abilities. It's worth noting that you can respec at any time using the horny tentacle fridge, if you find that your play style isn't working for you, or you just want to experiment.

On Xbox the game ran fine, I cannot remember any instances of frame rate problems- though of course using a freesync TV can cover up minor drops without knowing they're there. Apparently, it was very buggy on launch day- all I can say to that is the day one patch must have been amazing, since I had no problems except for one play session where the achievements stopped tracking- causing me to not get three in succession. When I came back to the game again all achievements then worked fine from that point on. Overall, despite a slow start for me, it became a really fun Euro-Jank shooter- I'm definitely going to replay this on harder difficulty at some later point.

Yes, single player only. I have no idea why. I can only guess it's about people streaming the game using offensive names. But Dick is an actual name for some people.

Halo 2 Anniversary, Feb 28 (Xbox Game Pass)-I thought it was better than the first game in nearly every way but still a little lacking. The vehicle sections were better, splitting the gameplay between two characters was fun, and the plot was more interesting if rather cliched. But with the exception of the last two levels they were all far too long, enemies still felt like bullet sponges especially the Flood, and the game just kind of ended unresolved. Actually any section with the Flood was extremely tedious and the worst portions of this game whereas I thought they were some of the best in the first game. Also, the Oracle level was a little glitchy and even when it wasn't freezing that extremely long elevator ride enemies stopped moving and made it seem like the game was still glitched.

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The Quarry (PS5 PS Plus)

Probably the best Supermassive game/movie since Until Dawn. At least story and atmosphere wise anyway. This one has even less game play, being genuinely just a CYOA movie- but it really is a fine one. It follows the usual scenario- you try to guide and keep alive a group (9 this time) of really dumb adolescents that are stuck at a summer camp in the wilderness. They do all the usual stuff that idiots do in these B-Grade horror movies, they go off on their own, trip over at the worst moments and there's that guy that just never seems to find any clothes for the entire movie- so just goes around in his underwear the whole time.

It was a lot of fun and has very high production values. You can play it seriously and try to really save everyone, but it is just so much fun to see what happens when some of these idiots do stupid things and meet horrific ends. I just played it as it as it fell at any given moment. I'm debating if I'll play it through again and save everyone- I've worked out how to do it, but I really like how my game turned out anyway.

As good as this one is, I still think Until Dawn was a bit better because it has more a mystery to solve on top of the action- same goes for the Dark Pictures Anthology. The Quarry on the other hand has little mystery, the game pretty much gives you all you need to understand the story- it's really more of a supernatural thriller this time.

Citizen Sleeper, Mar 4 (Xbox Game Pass)- Its a pretty good game, well written, kinda sad. It plays a bit like a resource management/worker placement board game. It starts off tough with few resources and looming threats but that quickly fades to the background and after an hour or so you get into a rhythm, the threats disappear or maybe they were never really there, and you just enjoy the story. Its very linear or at least I don't think what few choices you have can really lock you out of content. I doubt its replayability as I think everyone will have a very similar experience limited only in how much of the story you want to read. But it was still fun for a few hours and as I said every ending I saw was pretty sad and melancholy.

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It Takes Two, Mar 4 (Xbox Game Pass)-This was a really fun game, a little on the easy side for experienced gamers but a little on the difficult side for more casual gamers. Story was fun but right up until the very end I thought it might take a dark turn. All the gameplay mechanics were good and often required real teamwork making success feel even better. It strangely seemed most difficult in the beginning levels especially the boss fights while later bosses were quite a bit easier and the game finished without a final boss at all. Not sure if that was intentional trying to mimic working together better as a team or if we really were getting better at the game or what. But a pretty good game walks a fine line difficulty wise with a wide audience.

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Paradise Killer (XSX Game Pass)

Open world investigation VN. Awesome game for a person that really enjoys exploration. Probably not as great for someone that actually wants to make deductions. I do like exploring open worlds though, and the characters and plot here were bizarre in a good way. I don't believe there is any fail state for this game- you explore and talk to people and gain as much info as you can and then go to trial and accuse whoever you feel like. I actually completed every task for every case after fully exploring the world- so I had a blank task book by the time I went to the trial, meaning I had every shred of evidence the game provides, so everyone I accused actually did confess. You can also take the piss and go to trial with no evidence at all and accuse whoever you want and complete the game in 10 minutes- there's even an achievement for doing exactly that.

The world is very stylized, I really liked it. On console it even has ray tracing whilst still running at 60 fps. The open world is very vertical and suits the fast movement speed really well, especially if you seek out the movement upgrades during exploration. At the start the fast travel system is annoying due to the need for a type of currency that you find in the world, a currency that is also needed for many other things. Early on I was always critically short of the blood gems that are used as currency- but the situation soon eased the further I got into the game and accrued more currency than I needed.

Definitely recommended for someone that wants a relaxing open world game based around exploration, rather than action. A sequel is strongly hinted at. This is another of those odd games that I'd never have considered buying or playing if it wasn't for Game Pass, so another winner. It leaves Game Pas in a few weeks though, but It's also on GOG.

Final Fantasy VII Remake:

From now on this game should not be referred to as Remake but instead obnoxiously stylized as Re:Make since I think that Tetsuya Nomura probably intended for us to get something like that out of the game in the first place. Probably would have been kinder if he named the game Final (Fan)tasy 49/7: re:Make in line with Kingdom Hearts naming conventions.

So, I did play this game. I did mostly as a way of playing a game I would not care too much if I quit it part way through. I hurt myself and the way I have my PS4 set up it was easier to play this while lying down than my Xbox where I have been on and offing Diofield Chronicles. Anyway, I do not need to make excuses for playing games but this is more or less book keeping for myself later when I ask myself why I beat this game.

Anyway, onto my thoughts:

This game, even just the basic PS4 2020 release, sometimes is a good looking game. The particle effects, the character models (how Square can manage to make realistic looking people who look good with an ounce of flare whereas Crapcom in every RE game since VII feels like they add a superfluous layer of skin to the mocap actor/actress's face) look very good and are nearly perfect reflections of how the characters should look, and pretty good performance. However, this is Unreal Engine 4 and how anyone without a truly top of the line GPU can ever believe this engine looks "great" is beyond me. My go to example will be the completely stupid looking mirrors in the bathroom. I mean, even Duke Nukem had a convincing enough mirror for goodness sakes but this... it looks pretty terrible. The meshes show all the time, there are constant little dots leading up to the meshes all the time, sometimes all the stuff going on in battles is less spectacle and more digital diarrhea. I should clarify, the characters that look good are the ones that have obvious attention to detail due to importance: Cloud, Tifa, Aerith/Aeris, Barret, Jessie, Kyrie, the Shinras, etc. The others look very generic and meh from a technical point of view, clearly you can see where the visual budget went. Some of the new characters also look silly (Johnny, Marle, that woman in the slums who steals stuff).

Gameplay... If this battle system returns I will not play that game. In all likelihood. I hate this battle system. If you try and play it like a normal action oriented role playing game by primarily playing as Cloud then some people will tell you you are playing the game wrong. I am not sure how that makes the game not poorly thought out then as then you are constantly switching between your often two characters building action points. So you end up playing characters for like ten or thirty seconds at a time. When you play mostly through the one character (often times bosses were easier if I just played Barret throughout the fight since his triangle attack was actually useful - Cloud's is not) then the other characters are too conservative and you have to baby sit them through the command screen (not a big deal but not terribly fun). I have little issue with items being given a cool down and I am cool with skills and stuff having action points but having the action points and the items share the same point system was just annoying and occasionally aggravating. The main attacks are also only kind of enjoyable to perform, nowhere near as satisfying as KoA Reckoning or Dragon's Dogma or... (flips RPG rolodex) Dragon Quest Builders. This is also the meat and potatoes of the game, nearly as bad as a random encounter game.

I have no problem with a role playing game utilizing an actions battle system (Witcher 2 has a somewhat weak one but that's another great game) but this game just feels like it is never going to end, like how some people describe Michael Bay movies. You think you get a break because there was one in FFVII? TS, here's another Spectacle (TM) for you to play through. Thought that was fun, good, because here is another one right after that. The final three or five hours are just constant pile-ons of stuff on stuff on stuff, it is laborious and has no respect for the player's time.

The side quests all pretty much are universally dull. I did probably between 80 and 90 percent or so of the side quests and did not really get much out of any of them. They were okay, few of them were painful or baffling but they often times were longer than I would have preferred. I should say, a couple weeks ago I beat FFXV and complained about the side quests and how they should have telegraphed better to do them now wink wink but this game has no subtlety at all on that. It's fine but feels a little stupid in the story for there to be such demarcated breaks for side quest time. Sure, Tifa as far as you know thinks you are dead or sure Aerith/Aeris is held by the evil overlords and who knows what is happening but those stupid kids need you to gather their snotty noses and send them back to class. It threw the pacing especially the third time.

One little thing: the gameplay pacing is odd at times. Like, Wall Market felt to me like Final Fantasy x Yakuza (or Ryu ga Gotoku depending) and anything to do with the basement at Shinra felt like Final Fantasy x Resident Evil (or Biohazard).

I guess I will talk about the story a little. It was... okay. My brother was playing the actual FFVII and I watched it. That game is far from perfect, I will just say. Cloud is more like Wayout MacCool Dude in the original whereas here he is more of an emotionally constipated teenager. I exaggerate a little but not too much I'd say. His characterization was better from the perspective that he is suffering some kind of brainwashing or trauma and he comes off more as emotionally distant than just trying to be a little edgy. I liked Tifa, Aerith/Aeris, Barret (even if he makes too many genuinely bad decisions), and Rufus pretty well. One note on Tifa and Aerith/Aeris: this game feels like a waifu game on more than a handful of occasions (best example when you are recovering consciousness in the sewer). It does not bother me but it was not great either.

The main issue with the story is that not only was it a little weak in the original game but the changes they made here (which are extensive and easily findable) do not always make things better. In fact, aside from getting to know Avalanche a little better it was almost always detrimental. Not so much to make the game bad, I kind of liked the colosseum (except for the stupid joke boss) but things like the stupid "whispers" just start to ruin the game and brings with it a lot of contrivance.

I suppose I shall wrap up as I doubt this is very well put together but in the end the game is not bad but neither would I really call it good.

Edit: Forgot to mention a couple things.

Asset streaming was kind of atrocious some moments and lots of areas in this game have pretty rudimentary geometries considering how new the game is (the junk yard had some really oddly flat and triangular junk piles).

The vocal track I used the entire game long was the French option because it was there. It was really fun to see the little differences in what little French I can understand and the English subtitles. The cast was actually very good and the acting was excellent, maybe I am saying that simply because I do not speak French but I was pretty impressed by the performances. I really wish more games gave more vocal track options like that (I like playing Metro in Russian and would like to play Greedfall in French).

Another edit: Looks like Johnny is actually an original character repurposed. Oh well.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2

Finished both tours with Tony Hawk himself.

As far as remakes go, this one is amazing and represents everything remakes should be.

The only thing I didn't really like is that there are "Group tour" and "Solo tour" selections and the game always defaults to the group one when you're starting the game, so I ended up doing group progression accidentally sometimes and having to repeat stages to advance my character's career.

Other than that, I have had very little experience with the series back in the day. Played a bit of 1, a bit more of 2, but never progressed further than the few initial stages, and I didn't play any of the others until THPS HD back in 2012, which I liked a lot, despite the poor reviews by everyone.

So when I picked this one up, I just went through the levels I was familiar with and then took a very long break. I recently picked it up again and, since I began to make good progress rather quickly, I got excited enough to go ahead and finish it.

I may try to unlock the Alien (Jack Black is too hard to unlock) and meddle a bit in the park creation tools, but neither is a priority right now.

Finished Clive Barker's Jericho

It was a nice surprise. It is a very linear, story-focused FPS with squad-based gameplay mechanics. Each team member has different weapons and different abilities and you can switch from one to another when you want. Some levels and bosses require to use specific abilities to progress. Graphics have nothing special and keep mostly the same grey/nrown tone, with added red for the blood. Note that this is not a stressful horror game but rather gore horror game.

I enjoyed it but it got a bit repetitive in the end although it lasted "only" 8 hours.

Full list here.

Undertale, Mar 7 (Xbox Game Pass)-I'm a bit conflicted on this game. The first 30 minutes I hated it and uninstalled. Then I gave it another shot but still didn't like it until late in Snowdin. By the end of the game I was actually enjoying myself quite a bit. I'm not feeling bad about killing enemies that attack me first and say they're trying to kill me no matter what the game says. I tried to avoid combat and spare who I could but the random combats were too frequent and the bullet time too difficult for me to be fully committed to sparing everyone. Highlights of the game were the ridiculous humor and the amazing soundtrack. Story was ok when it wasn't trying to guilt trip you with a knife to your throat. Actual combat was pretty hard and got rather tedious. I'm glad I played it but I have no desire to ever pick it up again to get a true ending.

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I added it to my whistlist. Yeah. I cant see myself paying full price for 15 hour game tho. When I saw it first time I thought it was some indie crap tbh. At least they ahve put some money on it.

The Hunt (NWN EE)

Review here