Recent reviews by Historian

Before I bought this game it was pitched to me by a friend terrible at explaining things as "Hexen 3 with the serial numbers filed off."

That person is a dumbass.

If this game was Hexen 3, for the intro stage you would spawn in Spookytown with a dinky magic wand, proceed to the Woods of Doom to locate a very specific unmarked tree that needs to be shot thirteen (13) times before it will shatter into wood shards, two of which you must collect (not more) to bring back to Spookytown, and place in the Wood Lathe located in a large cavern hidden under a specific grave in the graveyard located in the corner of the map in order to form it into an axe handle which then must be brought over to the iron entrance grate and used to pry it open to give you access to the Dark Swamp of Souls where you have to find a glass eye which spawns randomly in the swamp underwater and can be found by walking over it in order to trade with a crow for an axe head which you then combine with the axe shaft to make An Axe which you then slam into the head of a statue of Corax which appears with no indication back in the Wood of Doom which will then bleed into the water turning it red which will cause blood leeches to spawn which you have to get infected by and then limp back to Spookytown and and now use your second wood shard in the lathe again (DO NOT DO THIS BEFOREHAND OR THE QUEST BUGS OUT FOREVER) to make a torch which can brought over to another single unmarked lit torch stuck on the wall on the other end of the level to be lit on fire which can then be applied to the leeches by hitting yourself with it, allowing you burn them off and then collect them again so they can be taken back to the statue you hit with the axe, and this will cause the portal to the ending of the tutorial to open up. Back in Spookytown. For 30 seconds or you have to do the leech thing again.

In this game, you pick up glowing weapons and fire assorted varieties of lasers at fantasy monsters and they explode.

It's Heretic 3, not Hexen 3.

And thank god.

I generally don't pop in to write reviews after only spending a couple of hours with a game, but Hedon's special enough that I want to make an exception, particularly as there's a handful of negative reviews on here that cite the slow start of Level 1 as the reason they stopped playing.

And hey, fair enough; everyone's got limited free time and only so much attention to spend on something before they start to wonder if the payoff is worth it. If you showed up expecting a Doom-like, the first level can be a rude awakening. This game has a significantly different gameplay loop than the nonstop carnage of a proper combat-oriented Doom mod; the goal here isn't so much to battle your way through the hordes as much as solve each level's layout to progress onward, while fighting enemies on the way.

As bizarre as it sounds for a Doom-based game, the emphasis here isn't on combat per se, but on atmosphere. On the harder difficulties there's an intentional reduction in the amount of handholding the game provides, *requiring* you to actually read logs, learn the layout of a map, explore, and puzzle out how the area is put together in order to move on.

When you're talking about a game running on an engine that's mostly bolted-together code from the early 90s with a bunch of extra amenities duct-taped to the sides to keep it in the air, this is a risky proposition. It gets even riskier when you're using that engine to make a game that it was never really intended to be used to make. In order for this to be compelling to play through, the environment has to be inherently interesting to navigate and explore. It's not enough to just toss some powerups behind a hidden door, assume players will find that to be a solid reward for exploring, and call it a day.

This is where Hedon sticks the landing in a way that I think many developers would struggle to achieve: This world is jaw-droppingly well-realized for what it is. Outside of the Dark Souls series, I don't know that I've seen a game in quite some time that's put so much effort into making things like access and egress routes feel like a natural part of the level instead of an abstract goal to reach. Stages flow into each other with a clear geographic progression, and the beginning of the new level usually starts at the conclusion of the previous one, adding cohesion.

You compare this to Doom levels, where you're getting most of the information about the level from its name and little else; the stage Nuclear Plant in Doom doesn't actually resemble any kind of power plant, it's just an abstract theme for a series of combat arenas.The orcs' town feels functional and lived in; there's closets, toilets, beds, assorted workshops, a tavern, even a mechanical water control system for the underground river flowing through it. It all makes sense and the level of abstraction is kept to a minimum.

It's the work of a singular person, and it shows in every bit of the game's design. Someone cares deeply about this world, has put a ton of time into it, and has gone back over these maps time and time again to add in little details, make small adjustments, fix minor bugs, and generally get everything up to a level of craft that's wildly higher than the phrase "Doom Mod" would suggest. It's a level of care that you seriously cannot pay people enough to get them to do on demand, you *have* to simply care enough about your craft to want to do it to the best of your possible ability.

I'll definitely be finishing this game; this review is already hideously long, so I'm going to skimp over the gameplay elements and just say if you've played Hexen, you'll feel right at home. Inventory items, weapon selection, general movement, all of it comes straight out of the classic style (which makes sense, given what's powering the game). I haven't gotten to futz with all the weapons yet but what's on offer so far reminds me a lot of Painkiller; each weapon has a pretty specific use and two separate fire modes, so clever use of your ammo and weapon is almost as important as movement during combat if you want to be efficient.

And that's all I got for now. I'm enjoying this game a lot, I'm enjoying seeing it slowly give up its secrets, and it's fun to play. If that sounds good to you? Ten bucks not even on sale, I've spent way more on stuff that gave me a lot less enjoyment for my money.

I tried this back when it first came out and left pretty underwhelmed. It wasn't bad, but it was fiddly to the point of irritating, the mechanics were unclear, and the combat seemed dull. I was also playing other games at the time and I wound up drifting away from it after hitting level 12 or so.

Now, I'm a huuuuuuge Morrowind dork. When the expansion came out, I decided to take the plunge on it if for no other reason than to revisit a game I spent easily a thousand hours on, just to see how it holds up.

First point to its credit: It does a truly a solid job of recreating the OG Morrowind experience. The map is nearly 1:1 as far as I can tell, though large portions of the middle mountain are inaccessible so the actual playable area is likely much smaller. It doesn't feel that way though; I'm easily 30+ hours in on my second attempt and I've yet to really do anything off the island of Vvardenfell except for some minor sight-seeing. I've not even touched the base game Main Quest, in true Elder Scrolls fashion, and the game totally allows for this.

More impressively however is that the game fully modernizes Morrowind. Every voice line has full (and well acted!) VO, complete with the actors making admirable attempts to pronounce all of Morrowind's insane dungeon names and Ashlander terms. Everything is much more lush and animated without losing any of the inherent weirdness of Morrowind. Telvanni mushroom towers are now inhabited by active NPCs who adhere to a day/night cycle and will work their jobs. Pages and assistants to the Telvanni mages fritter about talking among themselves. There's a ton of little details that have far more activity going on than the original game was ever able to allow, and it all just works. While it's set 700 years prior to Morrowind 1, there's still plenty of returning NPCs from Morrowind like Vivec and a much younger Divayth Fyr (that Telvanni Mage with the godlike Tower that players would always kill him and inhabit, and which had a dungeon below it (which is now a full-on raid, amusingly enough)).

Also impressively, the single player things you'd expect to be removed from an MMO, aren't. You can still pickpocket any NPC you like. Stealth works exactly the same as it does in Skyrim. Shoplifting items is a thing, as is selling stolen items to fences for cash. Bounties are enforced by guards, and just like Morrowind you can either pay them off on the spot or run (jail has been omitted but eh, whatever).

But the thing that's kept me playing is that this game is almost the Anti-WoW. Everything is vastly more complicated, seemingly as an intentional design choice, but unlike the launch version of the game it's now much more *crunchy* instead of needlessly fiddly. You can simply hammer out a few swords in the Blacksmithing profession and call it a day, OR you can dig deep into the system and craft some seriously powerful custom kit if you feel like it. Doing so, however, requires you to drop skill points into the system that could be spent on combat skills instead. Just like the Elder Scrolls games have always done, there's a significant choice to be made about character progression and they'll get better at the things they do more often than not. The complexity is initially pretty staggering but after a while you begin to be able to See The Matrix and the system winds up making perfect sense.

The approach to character level in general is a curious one as well in that there really isn't one. Everything in the game remains at the same base level, and gaining a level is reflected more in your skill points than any kind of base power creep. A wandering Alit becomes only marginally easier to kill at level 30 than it was at level 1, but the difference is that if you've acquired more skills, you simply have more kit at your disposal; you have to actually USE it, however. The numbers don't automatically get any higher.

This translates to gear being less effective as you outlevel it, making new gear necessary not so much to jack up your power level but to prevent it from falling off. It's...Counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense and serves the excellent purpose of never gating you off from content because you're not a sufficient level for it. You're ALWAYS a sufficient level for it, and it's always floating at a difficulty point that will provide a challenge. It takes some getting used to and was jarring at first, but now I find myself preferring it to the Dragonball-Style power creep in other RPGs. Smart stuff, if a bit unconventional.

Lastly, and impressively: This game is monstrously huge. There is an INSANE amount of stuff to do. It puts every other Elder Scrolls game, and honestly any other RPG I can even think of, to absolute shame in terms of sheer Crap To Do™. When you factor in that all of this is fully voiced and animated, the amount of content on display here is jaw-dropping. Wanna explore Elsweyr, the Khajit homeland? How about the Dragontail mountains, not seen since the original Daggerfall? The Gold Coast? Hammerfell? Daggerfall itself? It's all in here and it's super detailed and explorable.

~~And it's free.~~ EDIT: I'm an idiot, no it isn't, leaving this up because it's the only way I'll learn

Seriously. You can opt to pay $15 a month for the "Crown Plus" subscription. This is worth it if you plan on delving into the crafting aspect because you get a bottomless crafting item bag (which, believe me, you're GOING to want if you do any crafting), but if you simply want to ignore that aspect in favor of playing through the plot and going on exploration adventures, you can absolutely just play the free base game and be none the worse for wear. If anything, the $15 sub should be considered a Crafting subscription as opposed to anything gating off the proper game. It's incredibly useful for that feature, but really ONLY that feature, and you don't need to do it in order to play the content at all. Scaled item drops will always keep you sufficiently geared and you'll easily have a couple hundred hours worth of content to explore freely without limitation even if you never drop a single cent into the game itself.

So in short, yeah. This is absolutely worth checking out in 2018, and I strongly recommend anyone with a fondness for Morrowind to drop the cash on the Expansion that allows you to play through it and check it out. 100% worth it even if that's all you ever do in the game.

If you do opt to check it out, hit me up in-game. I'm on the EU Megaserver (I have no idea why, it's where it put me for some reason) and can be found @DJMalloc. Let's go explore the ash wastes and pick fights with Cliff Racers.

(There are still so, so many cliff racers. My god.)

I spent a hideously massive amount of time with this game when it was released for the original Xbox way back in the day. It's lovely. It's also ten years old, and it shows.

The quick and dirty tagline: If you purchase this on Steam, you are buying the 2004 PS2 console version of this game that automagically runs on your PC. Make no mistake though, this is the PS2 version. Nothing more, but also nothing less. That means no online play and even the button callouts are for a PS2 DualShock controller. Does that hurt the game? Honestly, not really. It was a great game then and it's great now, just don't go expecting much in the way of modern amenities. You're buying a classic.

Let's get the cons out of the way right now:

- No built-in online play. It's possible to use a third party program to do this, but it's not something that comes with the game. If your primary motivation for buying this is online matchmaking you very likely already know how to make this work, but if not, it's...a process, and it's not perfect.
- The resolution's a tad funky. You're given a reasonable amount of settings options, but the fact of the matter is that you're basically running a standard-definition 4:3 aspect ratio game on a modern system that very likely has far surpassed those specifications. The game will technically run in fullscreen at 1080p and 60FPS, but there's going to be some pillarboxing involved, and (as with most games from this era that were console exclusive), there's some empty space at the top and bottom of the game as well. It's essentially a 4:3 square floating in the center of any given modern display. It's not awful, and it's certainly playable, but the game simply isn't going to make use of all your screen real estate.
- Setting up the controls can be a bit of a pain. There's a handy program included with the game designed to do this, but it must be run outside of the game itself, after which you have to quit out and reboot the game proper. If you have PC-compatible arcade stick, it's possible to map it to work with the (admittedly kinda weird) default arcade GGXX layout, but this will take a bit of patience. This can get doubly weird if you're like me and have an Xbox One controller plugged into the PC along with your stick; the game will assume the XInput controller is Player 1, and you have to manually remap the stick to be player 1 if that's what you want to use it for. It's not impossible or even particularly difficult, but it's quite a bit more involved than the usual in-game, press-this-button-to-map-it-to-this-move shennanigans.

Let's go to the Pros:
- This game's brilliant aesthetic style is peerless even relative to other games by the same company, and getting to play it in razor-sharp resolution brings out a lot of the astoundingly beautiful pixel art detail you never noticed on an old CRT screen. This is what high-budget, mega-creative fighting game character design looked like in the early aughts, long after SNK had dropped the ball but before Capcom had/has picked it back up again.
- It runs great. Yes, it's a PS2 game port, yes tossing it in high res shows you that the much-vaunted "high resolution" sprites of the time...well, *weren't*, but you know what? You'll stop noticing the negatives about five seconds into actually playing the game. Outside of the odd screen size, the game runs absolutely perfectly. Everything is faithful, there's zero slowdown or other port-related weirdness, the controls are broken-glass sharp, and it's just an absolute blast to play.
- There's quite a lot of content for single players. Even compared to modern fighting games like Street Fighter IV and King of Fighters XIII, there's a weirdly comprehensive story mode in GGX2#R that makes most everything else look weirdly anemic in comparison. Fully voiced (in Japanese) radio-drama style stories for every character in the game, a boatload of secrets, an art gallery, and tons of other goodies are all built into the game. The Steam version also comes with the full soundtrack in .mp3 format, which is a lovely touch.
- The game itself holds up incredibly well. Guilty Gear was always something of an underdog series, but it has had (and continues to have) its die hard following for a very good reason: This game is fun as hell to play. Every character is entirely unique and they all have their own devoted mechanics to master, or work around if you're fighting them. Air dashing is a universal skill, one-hit-kill moves are possessed by every character without (somehow) making the game seem unbalanced, and everyone's got a giant mountain of personality to go along with their movesets. You've got a American playboy who fights with a cane sword, a pirate teenage girl who fights with an anchor bigger than she is, a witch rockstar who attacks you with her living hat, a corpse controlled by a liquid demon who can change shape at will, a 9' tall psychopath with a bag over his head who can teleport by opening doors in the background, and a bent-backwards down on his luck giggolo possessed by the ghost lady from The Ring (yes, really). That's just scraping the surface of this game's impressive roster. You will never be bored playing this, and the fact that the attention to detail runs so deep is just icing on the cake. None of the characters are throwaway gimmicks. Everyone has a personality, a story, a sometimes-incredibly-complicated moveset, and they all ooze style in a way few games can pull off.\
- The rest of the package is what you'd expect. You've got training modes, Vs. modes, an Arcade mode, and a bunch of extras to poke around in. Again, if the idea of "Play the PS2 version of the game on my PC" sounds like a good deal to you, you'll get exactly what you were hoping for.

At the price they're asking, this game is worth picking up. It wasn't terribly long ago that the idea of a semi-obscure japanese fighting game appearing on Steam seemed like something of a pipe dream, but here we are. With any luck, more will follow. In the meantime, if you're a fan you've probably already picked this up. If you're not a fan, though, this is a *great* place to start with these kinds of games. Highly recommended with some slight reservations regarding technical aspects.

It might sound like a backhanded compliment to call something "The Best South Park Game", but it's probably something South Park Studios would gladly slap on the box of this thing with all the underhandedness that that would entail, so we'll run with that. It's relevant that it's actually the best South Park game by a massive, orders-of-magnitude margin and actually manages to be a halfway decent game in its own right.

The plot revolves around your character, the New Kid, moving into a vacant house in South Park with your mom and dad. Within short order you stumble across the kids from the show who are fully wrapped up in a 4th grade LARPing session revolving around the Stick of Truth. You're quickly enlisted to help in the conflict between the Humans, led by Cartman, versus the Jewish Elves led by Kyle.

If you saw the "Console Wars" episodes of the show, they lead directly into this game in a way I don't think I've actually seen a licensed product do before. It's legitimately worth streaming them online prior to playing the game, as the game could really be considered just an extension of that plotline.

It's also a fun contrast to see what happens when the writers of the show aren't bound by Comedy Central's standards and practices. South Park as a show is known for pushing the envelope pretty seriously. South Park the movie had something like 250 uses of the word "♥♥♥♥", was obscenely violent, had Satan in a gay relationship with a (then still alive) Saddam Husein, and featured a giant talking clitoris onscreen as a plot macguffin.

The game puts the movie to absolute shame in terms of pure raunch.

This is easily the most gleefully offensive South Park has ever gotten, and they have things in this game the MPAA would've balked at. Were this a film it would've quite easily landed an NC-17 rating. I don't even want to spoil any of it because it's been a really long time since I've been genuinely shocked by a game, and this game managed to pull it off several times over the course of its 15 hours or so. Just by way of a comparatively mild example: You get "summmon" items in the game in a nod to Final Fantasy's summon mechanic, but here it's assorted bit characters from the show. One of them is Mr. Slave, who pulls his pants down and lands ass-first on your enemies before stuffing them inside of him while he moans with pleasure (in my case he performed this move against a 4th grade hall monitor, which means I've played a game where an adult stuffs a child up his ass as an attack. Try to imagine if they'd put that in a movie, even as a joke.)

Get ready for a lot of cartoon nudity, basically.

It's not all sex jokes, either. The plot starts as a bunch of 4th graders playing live action Dungeons and Dragons but things dramatically escalate from there and the stakes become much more real-world and cheerily violent and dark, even as the game (very amusingly) never loses sight of the fact that you're just some 12 year old kid playing pretend.

This is used to attach a lot of legitimate RPG mechanics onto the game as well.You're given the ability to customize your character's appearance, though not their gender -- you're always male. To be fair the game does give a perfectly sensible plot reason for this and it's played up for humor later. You can find and equip new gear as well as "Materia" of a sort (here called "Weapon Strap-Ons" because of course) and as the game progresses you get a series of spells that can be used outside of combat for environmental challenges, like using your "Dragonshout" power (which is a fart, naturally) to ignite open flames and light anything behind them on fire to clear a path.

Bosses include the denizens of a meth lab, red headed hall monitors, goth kids, 16 year old girls, drunk hobos, assorted wildlife, nazi zombie cattle, aborted fetuses, and in one memorable instance your father's swinging scrotum which you have to dodge using a quicktime event.

Somehow it all actually holds together in the gameplay department. Part of this is due to the game being made by Obsidian who know their way around an RPG and have a good sense of how to interweave gameplay and narrative. The game's pacing is almost weirdly solid, even as it sticks to the fundamentals. There's a definitive first, second, and third act; sub quests are handed out at an even clip; you're given a narrative break after major plot events in the form of the day ending. It has the usual South Park problem where they never seem quite sure how to end the thing and it winds up getting so ridiculous that when it finally wraps everything up it kind of just...Stops, anticlimactically (which the game promptly lampshades and mocks, so).

On the downside, the game is really easy, to the point where combat actually gets kind of boring because some of the crew's powers are so overbearingly good. You're allowed to use an item at every turn before attacking; there's an item (coffee) that allows you to attack twice. If you're willing to just stock up on coffee and pound it every round for the difficult-ish fights they become snore-inducingly easy even on Hardcore difficulty. If you want challenge out of this you sort of have to make it yourself, because you almost have to try if you want to lose.

It also means that while there's a good amount of variety to the jokes, just because of the nature of turn-based RPG games you're going to start eventually hearing a lot of the same lines over and over again. Attack animations also cannot be skipped or disabled, which gets old quick as the really good ones come with comensurately lengthy animations attached to them.

It's stuff that probably could've been ironed out if the game had a little more time in the oven, but if you've read about the very troubled history of the development of this game it's actually pretty wild that it turned out as good as it did, where I have to scrape a bit if I want to find things to complain about.

Basically, it's short but it's reasonably mechanically solid, well voice acted, looks exactly like the show, and is honestly pretty funny and worth playing for the jaw-dropping level of objectionable content they managed to cram into basically every section of the game on what seems to have been a dare. Needless to say if you're easily offended or like to consider yourself above relentlessly juvenile humor because you worry deeply about what others will think about your values system instead of, say, reviewing the game in a public place so everyone will know you played and enjoyed it despite said objectionable content, then you should probably not bother with this game at all. If the idea of jokes about abortion, nazis, pedophiles, Canada, things that can be found inside Mr. Slave's colon (condoms, puppets, live bats, a working flashlight, an iPhone, etc.) and so forth doesn't sound like your cup of tea, your enjoyment of this game will probably be somewhat limited.

Wasn't sure what to expect from this and walked away pleasantly surprised. It's a lot closer to the source material than I was expecting it to be; I was dreading a Metroid Other M style disaster, where a 3rd party's take on a beloved franchise falls horribly flat. Thankfully not the case here!

It's kind of a pleasant hybrid between MGS and Bayonetta. The storytelling is Metal Gear style, which is to say a LOT of cutscenes, an openly (and playfully) bonkers plot about the nature of war, memetics, what makes us human, etc, and tons of codec conversations. While there is technically stealth, it's not the focus of the game and things seem to push you towards just going balls out in the combat.

I won't ruin the story, as it's interesting enough to merit paying attention to the first time through, especially if you're a Metal Gear fan. It slots neatly in after MGS4, and while it's not anywhere near as far reaching, it works as a decent side story focused on Raiden. You don't really need to have played any of the previous games to follow along, although you'll miss some references.

The ending fight, for what it's worth, is one of the most gleefully ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane things you are ever likely to witness. It's a combination of a lengthy stoner discourse on the sustainability of the military industrial complex and a wrestling/shouting match between the Hulk and an amalgamation of every 80s Ninja Trope ever. With mechs. And slapstick comedy. I didn't think anyone would top Metal Gear Solid 2's fighting-the-president-with-ninja-swords-on-top-of-a-doomsday-weapon-in-New-York thing, but Rising sure gives it the old college try. The only major difference is that Rising is openly aware of how nuts the proceedings are; while it never breaks character, it's clearly not trying to take itself overly seriously all the same.

If you've seen the original RoboCop, kind of the same idea. The insanity is delivered with a straight face throughout, and that's what makes it work. In some ways, it even works better than the "main" Metal Gear series.

The PC port runs fine, I didn't have any issues at all. Not a whole ton of options for graphics but still better than usual for a console port. It comes with all the DLC baked in, so that's nice. You're going to want a gamepad, though.

The game itself isn't without some issues. Camera's finicky as all hell and can (and will, often) unhelpfully point your field of view directly into the nearest wall right as five tons of angry cyborg starts punching Raiden in the back of the head. There's also an abundance of quicktime events, some of which are instantly fatal if you fail then, which isn't horrible in and of itself but the game gets very confused if you're holding any buttons when the prompt appears. More than once I was in the middle of combat only to suddenly get tossed into a QTE, have it accept an incorrect button input because I was in the middle of hitting Jump or whatever, and result in an instant death. The best bet is to lay off the controller entirely when the QTEs surface, and just go into things aware that you're probably going to get an unfair death at least a couple times until you know what's coming next. The game has forgiving checkpoints however, so the occasional cheap death really doesn't detract from the proceedings all that terribly much, it's just mildly annoying.

This is also a game clearly designed for repeat playthroughs. I beat the campaign on normal in two sittings in one day; don't take this as a negative, though. There's a ton of unlockables, the harder difficulties ramp up CONSIDERABLY if you're looking for a challenge, and there's a ton of VR missions and other things to play around with once you've given the game a run through. If you're willing to spend some time on it, this game could actually last for quite a while and takes a good amount of dedication to really master.

I streamed my entire playthrough in two chunks. Feel free to browse around if you want to see bits of the game in action.

Part 1: http://www.twitch.tv/mattdjwarner/b/494718267
Part 2: http://www.twitch.tv/mattdjwarner/b/494857660

Really fun, and a far better homage to the original Shadow Warrior than I was expecting it to be.

If you're familiar with the Holy Trinity of Build Engine games (Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood) then there's going to be a lot in this game that hits your nostalgia strings in all the right places. It "gets it" in all the ways Duke Nukem Forever didn't; the guys at Flying Wild Hog know what made those games fun. Levels are big, twisty, and covered in secrets and interactive bits. There's a strong attempt to avoid the "boxes and corridors" design aesthetic that mostly succeeds, and the game flows at a fairly languid pace (when not in combat) that encourages exploration and messing about with your surroundings, only pressing on when *you* feel like doing it, not because the game is herding you forward.

When you do get into combat, everything gets fast paced and very spatially aware. You're expected to dance around and use the entire space you're given in order to play the game, not take cover and wait for enemies to pop up so you can shoot at them. There's zero attempt made at realism and the game is brilliantly playable for it, most evident in the fact that your primary -- and really, if you feel like it, ONLY -- weapon in the game is a katana. You do get guns, sure, but it's made evident early on that really you're mostly here to re-enact the House of Blue Leaves scene from Kill Bill vol. 1 and just hack stuff apart with gleeful abandon until it gets boring. Which it never does.

There's also a host of RPG-lite upgrades you can purchase using a somewhat alarmingly involved upgrade system. Every weapon can be upgraded in several different ways, there's magic spells to obtain and upgrade as well, and there's an entire subsystem of passive upgrades that can either shore up your weaknesses, specialize in a specific area, or just give you generic boosts like upping your ammo count or increasing the amount of money you can find from pickups. It's a nice carrot to dangle on the end of the exploration stick, and the rewards trickle down at a pleasant pace as you play.

Graphics are far better than they really have any right to be. Everything is done up in a kind of Magical-Realism Japan style. Style takes top billing over practicality, and you'll be a bit terrified at how ridiculously *expensive* all these nice house interiors you're splattering with blood look, but it fits great with the game's warped sense of reality and adds a vaguely surreal, Tarantino-film kind of lens filter to the whole thing. Voice acting is also surprisingly good, with Hoji the Wisecracking Spirit Guide winning as one of the more amusing smartass sidekick/plot mcguffin elements ever seen in a non-Nintendo game.

This game also updates the parody and plot along with the graphics and gameplay but doesn't forget what made everything in the original work. The humor in the original was a lowbrow (but hilarious) sendup of asian wushu/action movie stereotypes. Kinda like the films it was making fun of though, the humor in the original seems painfully dated if you go back and play it today. It was one of those things you could get away with back in the day when it was originally made, but trying it these days would fall flat. Flying Wild Hog knew this, and the update modernizes the humor without sanitizing it. Lo Wang is still named Lo Wang, and he's still cocky as all hell (if anything it's even worse now), but he's gotten an age shift to about 40 years younger and about 3 orders of magnitude less offensively stereotyped in every single thing he says. The jokes about his name come almost entirely from himself, and even then there's relatively few of them (and they tend to be better written). Mostly it's the banter between Wang and Hoji that paints the game's humor, and their love/hate relationship works out a lot better than original Wang spouting off one-liners in a horrible accent to himself for the entirety of the original game.

tl;dr Flying Wild Hog pulled it off, and made a Shadow Warrior game that looks and plays exactly like the original game had been released in 2013 instead of 1997. Worth the full-price money if you like first person action games, and especially if you played the original. Consider it a must-buy if it goes on sale.



Oh right, forgot to mention: Everything explodes when you shoot it. EVERYTHING. Cars? Explode. Motorcycles? Explode. Lampposts? Explode. Neon signs? Explode, somehow. Arcade machines? Boom. Air conditioners? Will kill everything in a 100 foot radius if you sneeze on them funny. Wood stoves? Shoot fire, then explode. Little pots full of coals with no discernable combustion method except they're vaguely fire-related as a stage prop? ♥♥♥♥ it, they also explode. Why not.

I'm hoping we can look back on this game as the tipping point, when the oversaturation of growly military FPS games finally hit its peak and started to roll back.

The single player campaign is passably entertaining at best, and at worst it's just boring. The only interesting thing about it is how much it oscillates between the two.

The beginning sucks to an almost impressive degree. There's zero actual characterization, you're on rails the entire time, and the plot is ridiculous to the point of it basically being impossible to care about even if you genuinely want to.

The plot never really improves. The game, however, does.

The middle of the game is far and away the best part, where you do a series of "Invade this base, blow ♥♥♥♥ up, escape" missions. At this point the maps widen out and there's less of a feeling of you being herded from place to place so you can rotely stare at the next explosion. These missions actually get legitimately fun, although it has less to do with good level design and more to do with the fact that those kinds of missions are just inherently fun in and of themselves, and well suited to arcadey shooter games. One of Half-Life 2's standout levels is the assault on Nova Prospekt; Moden-day Wolfenstien's best level by far was an assault on an underground Nazi base; hell, even Quake 1 was full of these kinds of levels. They're just fun to play, and thankfully those missions in Ghosts stand up as being quite fun, if not exactly super-memorable.

Things ramp up in bombast near the end of the game (which is saying something considering this game has an impressive explosions-per-minute rate even on its slowest levels) and it dumps a lot of variety as the narrative starts to urgently jerk around to different people in the same stage, so at the very least the final stages aren't as dull as Act 1, but they do bring back the funnel with a vengence. The final stage, while technically very impressive to look at, is almost literally a straight line from point A to point B; admittedly this is because you're on the back of a moving train, but it still means there's only one direction to go and only one way to do it.

The Multiplayer...Well, it's Call of Duty. What do you want me to say. Did you play pretty much any of the other ones? It's more of that. Whether this is a bad thing or not really depends on whether you like that kind of thing. Honestly, modern-day CoD is basically what Counter-Strike/Day of Defeat was back in '99-2002, and Quake/Goldeneye/Whatever before that -- I played the hell out of Counter-Strike back in the day, so it's hard for me to hate on the CoD MP. It's either a scene you're into (in which case you already own this game) or it isn't (and you may spend a lot of time mystified as to why it's popular). Either way, you don't need me telling you anything about it.

Final Verdict: If you don't have it already (read: You don't care about the MP), wait for a deep discount. Otherwise pass. It's not the worst thing ever, but if you really want to play a Call of Duty game for whatever reason, just go for Black Ops 2. It's a much better in virtually every way.

This is an interesting one.

Back when I saw this game at Comic-Con in 2012, I pegged it as a low-rent disaster waiting to happen. The advertising reeked of “trying too hard”, the trailer was obviously hiding the fact that not a lot was actually going on in the game, and the whole thing just stank of cheap cash in on an internet fad.

Eventually, the game came out, and I bought it despite myself. I'd heard the company who made it got laid-off en masse once the game shipped, which is always ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. I was almost curious based on that alone to see if it was warranted. Did ♥♥♥♥♥♥ devs turn out a crap game that the publisher was stuck with, or did the publisher put unreasonable demands on top of a low budget and a quick schedule? I was curious.

If you're going into this game expecting crap, the first stage doesn't dissapoint. It's a sewer level. An uninspired one at that. Having Deadpool point out how lame this isn't doesn't make it any less lame. On top of that, the controls are jerky, the combat is a poor man's Arkham Asylum, and the difficulty spikes wildly depending on how close you can get Deadpool to his enemies. Common thugs who use melee attacks will get sliced to ribbons no problem even on the hardest difficulty thanks to a really forgiving combo/interrupt system. Enemies with guns on the other hand can cut Deadpool down long before he gets anywhere near them. The ability to teleport short distances helps, but not when there's multiple enemies, and not when they can drop you in less that a second. Ranged combat quickly becomes all about plinking the enemies to death from a distance, or exploiting the poor AI into getting stuck behind cover long enough to give you a chance to close the gap. It's alternately infuriating and boring, and it's clear there just wasn't a lot of tuning time spent.

So I burned through the first stage, figuring I'd be eating the cost of this game as a failed gamble on a crap product. Not the first time it's happened, so oh well. I kept playing anyway because if nothing else, it was at least occasionally funny.

Then something weird happened.

About a third of the way into the game, the X-Men show up. Suddenly, the budget seems to kick in. Levels begin to look a lot more varied, and move from Boxes and Corridors™ into actual vertically-oriented explorable places. Enemy encounters become less about patience and more about thinking on your feet (and get much, much trickier).

Even the tone of the game changes. Initially, it seems like they're trying to MAX this game up. Deadpool drops liberal uses of the word “♥♥♥♥”, which is weirdly out of character for him, and he comes across as having basically two Nukem-esque mood settings: Horny, and Angry. It's tiring, even if you like Deadpool's comic version. Then, Angry gives way to indignant, then flippant, then actually seemingly enjoying himself. the Horny never really goes away, or gets particularly funny, but one out of two ain't bad, considering.

Cable showing up is the real marker that the game has turned a corner. His intro video is hilarious, his banter with Wade marks some of the funniest moments in the game, and the plot (as it were) actually begins to congeal into something with payoff at that point. From then on, the more you play the better the game gets.

It never really gets good, but it does get worth playing. If you hate the character, there's nothing here for you, but if you like him and want to see a good example of developers opting to give a damn when something was already a lost cause, it makes for a really interesting study along those lines. Just treat like an old-school arcade beat 'em up and try not to spoil it with YouTube video footage to ruin all the funny bits for yourself and the game actually winds up being worth the trip.

tl;dr Get it on sale for $10-15 and burn through it in a day (whole game takes about 12 hours); worth it unless you really dislike the character.

Often called the "lost" Sonic game, which was true for a while. Time was, this was actually a reasonably hard game to come by. Unless you were the rich kid in the neighborhood, you were stuck with the plan ol' Genesis, none of this Sega CD stuff. The rumor of a Sonic Game with animated cartoon sequences and CD-quality music and TIME TRAVEL and METAL SONIC and all kinds of other crazy ♥♥♥♥ in it became the stuff of legend among us poor cartiridge-bound schlubs.

Even well into my adulthood, this one one of the ones that got away, swallowed deep in the halcyon dreamtime that was the early 90s, before there were Rules™ governing the attainability to the masses of what should've been flagship titles, particularly for for ill-concieved system attachments that some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ executive thought up because they were told this Full Motion Video thing was gonna revolutionize gaming forever (kinda like how touchscreen is supposed to be the next big thing now).

So the game stayed weirdly hard to get throughout the early 'aughts. Emulation was possible but not simple until way later, and good luck tracking down an .iso, the Sega CD system BIOS, and an emulator that would actually smoosh all that crap together. eBay was also an option but that took a fair bit of money to chase down what amounted to an ephemeral youth-dream, for me anyway. Not to mention the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ headache of purchasing and setting up the godforsaken electrical-engineering night terror that was the Sega CD. Ever seen what it takes to get that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing up and running? It's not fun. You have to, like, bolt it onto the side or maybe underneath of your Genesis, give it its own power supply, configure the hell out of it so it would boot from the CD instead of the cartridge slot but still let you play the cartridge slot, wire up the sound output to supercede the crappy Genesis sound and it just kept getting worse the more you dug into its labrynthine, pre-Google-translate manual. More than one parent probably pitched the whole thing out the front door on Christmas day when it became clear upon trying to set it up for their screaming spawn what an unholy time vampire that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ was going to be.

So yeah. This poor game never got played much. The slow, choking death of its parent console didn't help, and given that Sega seemed weirdly reluctant to even admit its existence (let alone re-release it for modern ANYTHING), it remained somewhere in fantasy nostalgia orbit for a lot of people far longer than most classic games starring major, world-recognized characters really should.

It was the lost, legendary Sonic Game.

Now you can buy it on Steam for the price of an expensive coffee.

PROGRESS, PEOPLE