Captain Buttbeard's Gaming Corner

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins (PlayStation) Developer: Acquire Publisher: Activision Released: 1998 Genre: Stealth
I heard of this series of course, it's a cool ninja assassination game and apparently the first 3D stealth game ever. Xbox has an improved version of the third game that's why I wanted to play through this series, but I heard it's hard so I didn't want to waste a CD in case I hate it so I just played it on my PlayStation Portable. You can select between two characters, a stronger guy and a faster girl, I went with the guy. There is a training and it was so hard for me lmao I could barely pass it. There is barely any story in this game, basically you are a ninja doing random shit for your lord, like assassinating corrupt politicans and merchants, finding herbs for the sick princess etc but there is a dude who shows up a few times who is working for this evil demon or some shit lol honestly I couldn't really tell. You can pick equipment before missions, like poisoned rice to distract and stunt enemies (if you kill them before they eat it you can collect it back lol), grenades, shurikens, mines, health potions etc, and if you get the best rank you unlock a special item too, I managed to get it once and it unlocked the armor which helped me a lot lol. The game has a really nice aesthetic and graphics (I loved the blood effect) and some lovely locations, like a bamboo forest, a snowy palace, a fortress, harbor etc and it takes place at night which explains why the draw distance is so limited. What I did was I used the grappling hook to get on roofs (which wasn't easy thanks to the fucking inverted camera), drop down silently to kill an enemy then go back before someone notices, it made the game easier when it was possible of course, other times I waited till an enemy turned around then executed him silently from behind (you can also lure them into water where they drown lol). That wasn't always possible so sometimes I had to fight enemies but you can block attacks, still I died a couple times and you get a haiku on the game over screen lmao. You get all kinds of enemies from samurais to pirates, some fucking cultist demons that make crying baby noises lmao, dogs, cats who can alert enemies, or a fucking bear lmao. There are some cool moments like that ninja honor shit where the corrupt guy kills himself because of the shame, it was pretty cool. The levels aren't too long and you can replay them for better statistics and ranks but lol fuck that. The last level was ridiculously long and difficult though, I could barely get to the final boss then he destroyed me. It took me so many tries to get to him again, and all I had to do was attack him once instead of doing combos and that killed him easily lmao. I tried the first level with the girl and yeah she played so much faster, I still prefer the dude though. I watched her cutscenes too on YouTube and she just talks shit to everyone lmao meanwhile the guy was all honorable and shit, but the missions are the same except you fight that dude who kills himself because she insulted him lol. I thought the last mission will be different, like she saves the princess but no they just changed the cutscene and the guy saves her instead eh. It was a really impressive game even though it was short and the last mission was frustrating as hell, I'm looking forward to play the second game.	2023/06/09
Sudeki (Xbox) Developer: Climax Studios Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios Released: 2004 Genre: Action role-playing
There aren't many RPGs on Xbox so of course I heard of this one before and that it's similar to Fable so I knew I was gonna play it at some point. It takes place in a world that split into two, a light and a dark realm and the light realm is under attack by the dark one. I always found the character design so off-putting lol, the artstyle reminds of the shit you would see on DeviantArt back in those days lmao. There are 4 characters and you can change between them during battles, two melee and two ranged and these were really interesting because they play like an FPS. Meanwhile the melee system is rythm based, you need to press the button the right time for succesful combos so it never turns into mindless button mashing. Battles are arena like, they only happen at certain areas and you can't progress until they are all dead. You can open a quick menu which slows down time to use items, change weapons (which can be important because you can put different enhancements on them like health or skill point regeneration, immunity, poison etc), use your buffs or one of your skill strikes. Then there are these spirit strikes, which you get from the god in this world lmao (just like your armor, you can't buy new ones) are like gigantic fucking attacks that usually destroy everyone. But you have to watch this shitty animation every time you do any of those like it's a fucking anime lmao it got tiresome after a while. I usually just buffed everyone then switched to one of the ranged characters and just shot at everyone lmao. You are not always together though, sometimes you only have one other character with you and sometimes you are alone (usually boss fights), I pretty much only used the skill and spirit strikes these times. You get points when you level up and you can increase your health, skill points, power and essence (which makes your skills and buffs last longer and make them more powerful) and you can unlock new skills too. They also have special powers, like moving objects, seeing invisible chests or walls, climbing walls and flying with a jetpack lol, you can use these abilities to find hidden stuff or open up paths for other characters later. The world is really colorful and looks beautiful (especially the giant moon you see up in the sky, reminded me of Outcast), you have your usual castle, countryside, a port city, a Grand Canyon like place where the animal people who are like Native Americans live (they have shit like cheetah and rabbit couples lmao) or a cool steampunk city with robots. It really is like Fable, there are no huge open areas just roads to follow which slowly open up and you can go to new areas. There are of course NPCs who give you secondary quests, blackshmits and traders, some of the voices are fucking ridiculous though lol like that gay German trader who is obsessed with furs lmao. At some point you will got to the shadow realm and later it will be your hub world when you use portals for fast travel. I got a dirty disc error once, it was very strange so I ACL patched it just in case but it happened again later, I think it's because I was running leaving the other character behind and I got to a loading screen without them and the game just couldn't continue. Anyway near the end you go to the dark world which is like a copy of yours but it's in ruins and you meet your dark variants too lmao, some of them even join your party for a while (and later some dude joins your character you can't control, only time it happened lol). At the end your characters unite with their dark world variants to form a new person wtf, it was like they need to team up to take the evil god down but nope only the warrior dude fights him eh, which wasn't hard with all the buffs and shit. So because the development was rushed there is just a short drawing cutscene at the end showing the two worlds united back and that's it lmao, years later the developers uploaded an unfinished ending cutscene to YouTube with all your chatacters, it's so fucking bizarre you need to watch a video online to get the true ending lmao. Even if the game was rushed and unfinished I still liked it, it's a simple Fable like RPG where you can finish everything in 3 weeks and that's perfect for me.	2023/06/05
Army of Two (Xbox 360) Developer: EA Montreal Publisher: Electronic Arts Released: 2008 Genre: Third-person shooter
I always wanted to play these games but I got scared recently because I kept reading everywhere that the AI is bad and it's a co-op designed game and you are supposed to play it with another person. But now that I have the discs (and I remembered reading the same about Resident Evil 5) I decided to try it. You can choose from two characters, the big muscled dude and the cool looking dude, I went with the cool dude lol but there is no difference between them. They are soldiers but they hate being in the army and after the first mission in Somalia they decide to join a private mercenary group and go on missions to Afghanistan (where there are suicide bombers too lmao), Iraq, to an aircraft carrier, China and to a flooded Miami. It really isn't that story focused but there is a plot about a conspiracy to replace the military with mercenary groups that is slowly unveiled. The training mode teaches you everything and you can quickly tell what makes this game unique, the big focus is on aggro, if you shoot more enemies they will focus on you and your teammate can flank them and they won't notice it until it's too late. You can give orders to your squadmate, I usually made him aggressive and told him to hold position while I flanked everyone lol. It really is co-op focused, there are so much actions you can do together, like back-to-back firing and slowly turning around killing everyone around you, dual sniping a target at the same time, taking a car's door down and using at as a shield while the other one is shooting behind you, pull up each other to higher areas, parachuting together with one of you controlling and the other shooting, you can trade weapons too and my favorite you can do silly things like fistbumps and air guitars lmao or slap the guy if he did something stupid. When one of you is down the other one needs to drag you somewhere safe to heal you but you can still shoot while you are down so that was cool, and you can even faint dead and they will leave you alone but next time they will know you are faking it lol. There is also Overkill mode after you kill a lot of people and build up tons of aggro, basically you turn red and become invincible and cause more damage lol and the other guy becomes invisible. Before missions and at checkpoints you can go to a store and buy and upgrade weapons, you have a primary, a secondary (P90 ftw) and a special weapon (and grenades of course but you can't buy or upgrade them), and you can buy better armor and different masks too lol. You can do stupid shit too like pimp your gun out with gold and diamonds and shit lmao which increases your aggro. You can earn the money to do all that by killing enemies I guess and by completing objectives, optional secondary ones too and by finding these hidden briefcases. There are boss fights at the end of locations but they are like the normal tougher armored enemies, you can only kill these from behind so you gotta use the aggro tactics a lot. There are some vehicle sections in a hovercraft but they were really underutilized. People who complained about the AI are just spoiled by competitive online gaming, it was perfectly fine most of the time, my squadmate only did something dumb like twice when he tried to heal me and I noticed an enemy just standing there once but that's it, I think the AI was actually impressive. And it was a fun game, clearly Gears of War inspired and the gameplay was really good, only the story and the setting was too forgettable to make it a classic, but I will play the next game for sure.	2023/06/02
Seek and Destroy (PlayStation 2) Developer: Barnhouse Effect Publisher: Conspiracy Entertainment Released: 2002 Genre: Action
I only heard of this game recently, it's one of those crazy Japanese games with sentient tanks who are like people and live in towns and shit lmao and you can modify your tank with insane shit like a chainsaw or fucking angel wings so fuck yeah I'm playing this lmao. Apparently it's part of the Choro Q series but I don't know anything about it, it seems to have these litle deformed cars. The graphics reminded me of SkyGunner, it has really nice aesthetics. The story is very simple, big evil empire conquers everything, your kingdom retreats to its last town then fights back and defeats the evil empire. There is some dialogue but they don't really say anything important, plus the translation seems ridiculously basic and barebones, it was a budget game after all but it's like they just used a dictionary lmao. You can select your starting tank but it doesn't really matter which one you pick because you get tons of new ones as you progress through the game. You start right off with a battle in your last town, and the controls are very simple, you can't really aim with most weapons so just shoot it and hope it hits something lmao. The default controls were weird thought but you can change it so it wasn't a problem. After missions you are on the world map and you can go to your next mission or go back to a town where you can buy and equip new stuff. You can see shit like fucking tank statues, tourists, a priest or the tank king lmao, and you can talk to them but you don't get anything useful. You can buy all kinds of stuff like radars, searchlights, shit that makes you faster, more armor, insane weapons like double chainsaws on your side, bombs you can drop, flamethrowers, wings, you can even turn yourself into a boat for the water missions lmao. And the best thing is you can sell them back for the same price you bought them and that's really helpful for someone like me how hate customization because I can't decide what to do. You can put camouflage on your tank for free and it makes the enemy harder to hit you if you are in a desert, forest, town etc. Different towns have different equipments but there is a helicopter you can use for fast travel so it's not too tedious when you are trying to find an equipment. I actually spent a lot more time with customization than with actual gameplay lmao, mostly because missions are short. There are also these battle arenas in towns where you can fight tanks 1 vs 1 and you get that tank if you beat it. The other types of arenas are like minigames and sometimes you need a specific equipment to start it, like a chainsaw to pop balloons lol, drop bombs on an obstacle course, racing on land and water vs the AI in splitscreen, other silly things like that (I could never finish the last two though). Battles are usually just destroy the enemy tanks or some buildings or defend your allies lol, they are simple but so much crazy shit happening like tanks parachuting to the battlefield like they are people, flying in the sky to destroy an enemy bomber, or destroying battleships in the sea lmao, and crazy bosses like a giant fucking tractor. The final boss was some crazy mechanical monster lol and it was the only hard part of the game, and you get a cute victory parade after you defeat him lol. Beating the game restarts it from the beginning with the angel wings and a special tank unlocked lol and you can go on different missions as you can usually select between them, originally I wanted to replay it but I got tired of it lol. Besides the campaign you can play against he AI in the arenas or do the minigames, and there is a Destruction mode which I guess was the challenge mode with waves of tanks coming at you. There is also Museum where you can read about the tank types but eh I didn't care about it. So yeah it was a simple crazy Japanese game and those are usually fun, these are the kind of games it's worth owning a PlayStation 2 too.	2023/05/30
Portal Runner (PlayStation 2) Developer: The 3DO Company Publisher: The 3DO Company Released: 2001 Genre: Platform
As I said this is like a weird platformer and adventure spinoff but it continues the story right where Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 ended. The blue chick discovers there are portals to other worlds and she wants to get Sarge lol so she tricks Vikki to go to another world to get rid of her. As you can guess you are playing as Vikki in this game but it has the same shitty controls as the previous one lmao. You collect gems which increase your score and your maximum health (I couldn't even find all of them with a guide wtf) and you have a bow with different arrows to attack and destroy obstacles and shit. The platforming is so fucking bad though and her movement is so weird, sometimes in cutscenes they moved like they barely had any animation lmao. You have a lion with you who helps you out in combat, and there is supposed to be a gameplay mechanic where he gets angry when you are injured or attacks too much and you would need to calm him down, but I never noticed his anger doing anything bad lmao just makes him stronger and faster. On some levels you ride the lion (and she rides it like she is fucking it lmao), there are even levels where you play just the lion. You are in the toy world first, then in a cave, a prehistoric world, a medieval world and then a scifi ship lol. They are usually simple enough but some levels were really confusing, I hated that alien chase level, I fell off so much and had no idea where to go when the countdown started. The most complex thing you need to do is tell the lion to move to a platform and move it through the air with pedals, but you can only press them in the correct order anyway so you can't fuck up lmao, it's a braindead simple game but not the good kind. There are also these secret lion platforms you can ride for more gems and for a vista point (what the fuck was that?), I did most levels 100% but I couldn't do a couple, they unlock some shitty pictures and apparently if you 100% the game you get some pics of Vikki, no new cutscenes or anything. There were no boss fights until the second half of the game which was weird, then you get like 2 in a row lmao, and the final boss was an alien brain lol. Honestly this game is like Malice, just shows you how bad that game was because this shit wasn't even enough for 2001 lmao. So finally this shit is over and I can move on to the last game on Xbox. Oh I watched the cutscenes of Army Men: RTS on YouTube but it isn't connected to the story at all just have the same characters in like an Apocalypse Now parody setting lol.	2023/05/22
Stranglehold (Xbox 360) Developers: Midway Studios - Chicago, Tiger Hill Entertainment Publisher: Midway Games Released: 2007 Genre: Third-person shooter
I think I watched parts of some Hong Kong action movies on TV in the 2000s, they usually featured insane destruction lol. Oh why I'm talking about Hong Kong action movies? Well this game is a sequel to John Woo's Hard Boil, which I watched before starting this game, it was so fucking dumb lol but the action was funny, just pure dumb fun. Another movie he made was Face/Off lmao which I love so much, I haven't seen it since the 2000s, I need to watch it again. I never really thought about playing this game though, but it looked like an Asian Max Payne lol so I thought it could be fun. I wouldn't call it a sequel though, the only connection they have is the main character Inspector Tequila, who in this game is going after the Triad and the Russian mafia in Chicago who kidnapped his daughter and his ex girlfriend, who happens to be the daughter of the Triad boss. No subtitles of course and it was a bit hard to follow the story because they talk in this broken English and because I couldn't fucking hear anything (what the fuck was up with Midway Games, I noticed in previous games too that they barely ever use any subtitles, fucking assholes they deserve the bankruptcy lmao). It really is like Max Payne but the bullet time is called Tequila Time here lmao and there is so much destruction, you can shoot at billboards or air conditioners to drop them on enemies, and you can destroy covers too lol, for stylish kills you get stars which fill up your extra power meters which you can use with the D-pad, one recharges some health, next one is precision aim which helps to take out targets far away from you, barrage makes you immortal with inifnite ammo for a little bit so you can do insane destruction lmao and the last one is a spin attack where you kill everyone around you with fucking doves flying everywhere lmao. You can also find little origamis to get more stars, they are collectibles too I guess but you unlock stuff with the points you earn, there is a shop in the main menu where you can buy them from John Woo himself lmao, concept arts, videos, a prototype video based on Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (that was interesting to see), no making of video though eh but there is a video on how to make origamis lmao and you can unlock character for multiplayer too (which is online only so it doesn't matter). You can do all kinds of crazy shit too, like running up and down on a handrail, hanging on the chandelier, going down on zip lines, drop on a foodcart and roll forward while you are shooting lmao, it was ridiculous. Sometimes there are these standoffs with a bunch of people around you, and you need to avoid bullets while shooting at guys lmao. There was a turret section too but only once and it was ridiculously long for some reason. There are not many locations but they are long levels, you have like a Hong Kong street, some fishing villages (this was kind of confusing, you need to navigate through drug labs and do a lot of platforming), a giant restaurant and casino where there is a band that stops playing and the enemies tell them to keep playing and you need to protect them during a shootout lmao (only the drummer survived lol), a museum in Chicago where you can destroy dinosaurs lmao, the ruins of Kowloon (man that place would make such an awesome setting for a game), or the Triad boss's mansion. It was actually a hard game and I died a lot, but still I completed it in less than a week so it's a very short game and I'm not sure if it's worth it. It was alright though, I liked the destruction and just how much insane shit you could do lol.	2023/05/19
Spider-Man 2 (Xbox) Developer: Treyarch Publisher: Activision Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure
This game has an epic open world where you can swing around freely and that's how I heard of this game, naturally I really wanted to try it (and I liked the first two Spider-Man movies) so I had it on my hard drive for a long time and tried it out but that was before I read the manual and knew what to do and I sucked ass lol. But now I'm better at it and man it's really cool swinging around in New York and launching up with charged jumps and shit, but to be honest I couldn't really master how it controls so a lot of times I bumped into shit and some of the chases took a while but whatever. Apparently it's a sequel to the first game and not just a simple movie adaptation so I watched it on YouTube cause I knew I would have hated it (and I was right lol) but it wasn't even connected besides the narrator lmao who talks during the tutorial and gives you gameplay tips, he is really funny (the game was funny in general, the shit Spider-Man said were so goofy lmao). The missions follow the movie's plot somewhat and most actors voiced their characters which is cool but there are lots of other villains and it's more similar to the comics I guess. The graphics look nice, the city is really impressive looking with the sunlight reflecting from windows on skyscrapers but the character models look really shitty lmao. You go through chapters, which require you to do the main missions, shit like chasing Black Cat (a lot of times actually eh), going somewhere in time, dealing with some villains, missions like competing with a guy in an arena, going to the Statue of Liberty to stop aliens lmao (which was a fucking nightmare because I suck at swinging), and of course there are parts from the movie like the bank robbery, the train stopping scene which was really fucking underwhelming here lmao, and the final fight with Doctor Octopus but man that one was the absolute worst, it took me ages to finish (slowing down time helped). The other thing you need to do is get enough hero points by doing side missions. These can be challenges, usually racing through checkpoints in time, gameplay tips you can find around the city, but usually you need to stop random crimes, or help injured people by taking them to the hospital, save people from falling down, rescue people from sinking boats, or get a kid's balloon back lmao. There are also tokens you can collect hidden in buildings, on skyscrapers, on buoys in the water (these were the worst) etc. With the hero points you can buy upgrades, like faster swinging, lots of combos and shit. Some of them were really useful so I just spammed those because combat can be really frustrating, especially when there are tons of enemies around you with guns or those fucking mechs. You can also find minigames in an arcade lmao but finding the arcade was harder than the minigames because the map is huge and you can't set any markers so you have no idea what the icons are. You can get awards for killing bosses, certain number of enemies or completing certain number of side missions, but they are just titles, much like achievements they are completely useless. After the credits there are two more chapters, but the goal is to get insane amount of hero points lol that's when I started doing the challenges and the secondary missions, which are taking photos for Jameson, meeting Mary Jane in time and delivering pizzas (that fucking pizza delivery music lmao I can't believe it's from this game) and these are really hard I couldn't even finish all of them. It was a bit buggy though, like cutscenes sometimes glitched out when I was at the Daily Bugle, and saving took so long for some reason lol. It's a fun game and I really liked swinging around the city but the story was ridiculously short and the side activities got really repetitive after a while. I found out recently they made another similar game between the two movies which is based on the comics, I will play that one for sure.	2023/05/15
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 (PlayStation 2) Developer: The 3DO Company Publisher: The 3DO Company Released: 2001 Genre: Third-person shooter
So this game has a bunch of different versions, I'm not sure what's the difference between them but I just went with the PlayStation 2 port hoping it has better controls lol. The menu is really nice like a kid's toy room, and the bios you can read are like action figure packages lol, they did a great job with the Toy Story aesthetics, like the HQ is a dollhouse lol, the kid's room has tons of toys and books and shit lying around and that level on a toy store looked really cool. You start with another bootcamp which is in an underground base, and holy fucking shit the controls, well it's better than the previous game but still lmao. The right stick just looks around your character so it's pointless, the left stick is ridiculously sensitive, they are not PlayStation 2 controls that's for sure lmao but at least I wasn't struggling with the game because of it so that made everything a lot easier. The combat and auto aim is still bullshit though so I just played on easy again, seemed like a logical choice in a shitty game like this lmao. Anyway the Green Army is about to win the war, but back in the real world a sexy spy chick finds General Plastro and revives him with her perfume lol because apparently if you stay in the real world for long you turn into a plastic toy. The cutscenes are still funny (no subtitles again of course) but the sound quality is so bad for some reason wtf. The game looks fine though, the first one was really fucking ugly but everything is so shiny here lol. The levels are so much shorter and smaller here, some of them were like just a few minutes long lol. They seem to have secret places where you find pickups, like invisibility, armor, increased weapon damage etc and there are new weapons like firecrackers which do giant damage lol and you can call an airstrike too. Sometimes you can play as Vikki too (foreshadowing the next game lol), some levels are weird like a graveyard with zombies, and sometimes you need to do shit like destroy ten toy trains before they escape or rockets before they launch, this is the only mission with time limit I think. The last mission is inside a pinball machine lmao and you need to find your squad there, and then you are together for a few seconds before the game ends, which is like the only time you are actually with your squad lmao, I still don't know why the fuck are they in the game when they don't do anything at all. See I don't hate this game unlike the first one, it was a lot easier when you aren't fighting the controls, but purely on a technical level this game sucks ass lmao and it's barely any better gameplay wise than the first game, like they barely improved anything. The story continues in Portal Runner which is like a weird spinoff, there is also Army Men: Omega Soldier which is part of this storyline too but the only story it has is the opening and ending cutscenes so I just watched those on YouTube. And apparently Army Men: RTS too but eh I don't want to play RTS games anymore.	2023/05/13
Viking: Battle for Asgard (Xbox 360) Developer: Creative Assembly Publisher: Sega Released: 2008 Genre: Action-adventure, hack and slash
Back in the 2000s I was really into Scandinavian mythology and I remember this game coming out and seeing in stores all the time, I really wanted to play it but somehow I never did. When I was looking for Xbox 360 games to play a bunch of reviewers said it's boring and repetitive so I thought maybe it's shit and I didn't bother with it until I had more discs. It starts with a cutscene that's just drawings eh but then it transitions into gameplay cutscenes. You are playing as some dude who is dying in a battle but the goddess Freya saves him and grants him magical powers so he can liberate Midgard from Hel and her undead soldiers. You start in a nice town and talk to people and get new quests then you venture outside and your job basically is to recruit more soldiers by freeing them from captivity or doing quests for other settlements so they will join your army. When you liberate an area it turns from a dark, rainy place to a bright and sunny one which was pretty cool. The world is huge though, there are three islands but you can't go back to previous ones eh, still they are pretty much open worlds, sometimes you need to liberate an area or help some people to get access to new parts of it, and you can find gold and treasure everywhere (and you can buy maps that show them on your minimap), which you can use to buy new combos in Battle Arenas, more health and equipment. There are laystones you can use for fast travel because it takes a long fucking time to walk everywhere. Combat is pretty cool, when the enemy is damaged enough you can do brutal executions lol like cutting them into pieces (kinda like in Darksiders), it can hard though sometimes there are tons of enemies you need to deal with, you can use stealth and execute them instantly if they don't notice you but it's not really a stealthy game lol so it's hard to pull it off, sometimes you have no other choice though when you need to infiltrate an enemy city (these parts have these skull collectibles too). Anyway the reason why you recruit soldiers is to build an army to initiate assaults on patrols, fotresses, cities, and I mean giant fucking battles which were so awesome, like hundreds of soldiers on both sides. You can summon a dragon too and open a map and select a boss type of enemy you want to destroy, you need runes to summon them though and you get them by defeating those big enemies, like shamans and these fucking giants and champions, you need to weaken them and then a QTE starts (again, just like Darksiders). There are 3 elemental powers you can use which makes you stronger and you can buff your soldiers around you too, they are actually helpful and kill enemies so they aren't just there in the background. After you liberate a city your people move back there lol which was cool. By the way this whole recruiting soldiers for a giant battle thing reminded me of The Lord of the Rings, even the world looked similar with ancient ruins and shit everywhere, I wish there was a game like that too. The last battle was so fucking hard and took so long, I couldn't even finish it on my first try lol, just a giant battle then going up in a huge tower to face Hel, then you get the final cutscene which like came out of nowhere, like the hero just had enough and destroyed the gods and we only know this huge thing happened because the narrator mentions it like yeah that also happened lmao wtf. There are so many achievements you can get by just playing the game, seriously I got all of them except the last three where you need to play it on hard, I've never seen a game being so generous with achievements before. It's kind of a buggy game though, one time it didn't want to load and it crashed too, and the framerate drops like crazy during giant battles. On paper it should be a boring repetitive game where you do the same things and same kind of quests over and over again (one of them was hilarious though, you need to investigate strange noises and turns out it's just a coupe fucking lmao) with barely any story but man I had so much fun with this, it was really enjoyable and I wish there were more games like this.	2023/05/10
Driv3r (Xbox) Developer: Reflections Interactive Publisher: Atari Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure
As I said I remember the review controversy, some magazines were paid to publish good reviews of a game that was clearly unfinished, buggy and had an archaic game design that had a separate open world, which just wasn't enough after Grand Theft Auto had changed the game. I found a strategy guide for this, but it was kinda pointless, I just mostly used it to find the secret stuff. There is a patch for this game which I installed, but I'm not sure if it fixed anything. On the first day I just drove around in Miami, the graphics look good and I like the artstyle but man the draw distance is shit here too, like cars just materialize in front of you eh. Free Ride is so much better here, there are so many areas to discover and bunch of secret stuff, there are ten of these Timmy Vermicelli guys lmao you need to kill in every city, obviously based on Tommy Vercetti with fucking water wings on his arms lmao. When you kill all of them an armory unlocks and you need to drive there, it's a cool bunker in Miami, and when you get out a minigame unlocks, which turns cop cars into giant trucks that launch like crazy and the cops turn into Timmys lmao. There are of course secret cars too, one of them is a go-kart and you can race against some dude with it lol. You can swim too and drive boats and bikes, but you get stuck in everything with them, like the bike just launches up the sky sometimes when you hit a fucking curb lmao. The driving actually feels better but it's kinda floaty, like there is no weight to the cars, still it was cool to just drift on corners lol but the worst part is that there is no sense of speed, no matter how fast you go it just feels slow as fuck. The Undercover Mode has some really fucking nice cutscenes and awesome music, and they got a bunch of famous people but they barely have any lines lmao, like Iggy Pop said like three lines and that's it lol. It's inspired by Michael Mann movies, especially the Miami part, it's very cinematic. The story is about Tanner and Jones going undercover again to stop some car smuggling group (which is so retarded, who gives a shit about some fucking cars). Meanwhile Jericho killed his boss and took over his empire and turns out he is involved in the car stealing. So the third person parts finally have weapons and the first mission is basically gun training, where you can experience why everyone hated these parts lol. The movement sucks ass but you know I don't think it was that bad, or maybe I just got used to it because it felt like something out of a PlayStation game, and you can turn on auto aim in the options which people might forgot to do (the jumping is whats fucking terrible though but more about that later). But enemies sometimes just materialize in front of you lmao and when they die it's like they come alive for another second before they fall down again lmao. Tanner is really fucking hardcore here, he just kills people in cold blood lmao. Like in the previous game when you load your save you see a Previously in Driv3r scene like it's a fucking TV show lol. Missions are longer here but thank god they have checkpoints, some of the later ones would be impossible without them. There is more mission variety here, like you need to destroy a construction site (barely finished with one second left) which had a car tutorial mode feel to it, or you need to shoot up a bar (again finished in the last second lmao), hell they even recreated the warehouse escape mission from the previous game where cars block your way. That's when I realized it's the same fucking game design just in 6th gen lmao, like they were finally able to make the game they originally wanted but couldn't do on the PlayStation. There are very few cop chases but it's a lot harder to get rid of them, it's so much easier to just get out of the car and kill them lmao. Well as I was going through the Miami missions, destroying a big ship and shit like that, the game crashed with a loud screeching sound, and it happened later too so there is another evidence of the unfinished state of the game. Sometimes there are missions where you are in the back of the car and shooting at cars chasing you, the aiming was so weird here, and you can shoot while you drive too but it's so hard to do at the same time as there is no lock on. Well eventually you will reach Nice, and it's drastically different with narrow streets, hills and European cars. Here killing all the Timmys turns civilians into gun blazing lunatics who will try to hunt you down lmao. There are more interesting missions here, like stealing 3 cars and driving them up to a moving truck and it has a km limit instead of a time limit, and like Pursuit Force this game has a mission too based on the movie Speed where you can't go below a speed limit lmao, and you need to drive next to a truck so you passenger can jump out, this part was so fucking hard. There is a mission where you need to break into the docks and use a fucking crane to load some cargo to a truck which took fucking ages lmao, it's like the shitty mundane tasks from Mafia II. And then there is a chase mission where you need to destroy a car but it took me fucking days that shit was insane. But the last mission in Nice was the worst, you need to use a forlift to raise up a box, climb up a ladder (he moves like a fucking girl when he does that lmao), jump on the box and from there to the next platform, which was a fucking nightmare to do because movement and jumping as absolute fucking ass and the box sometimes just fell off. And of course you don't have a weapon here meanwhile enemies try to break through a door and then start shooting at you, and if you manage to get through you still need to drive somewhere and kill a bunch of enemies, it was fucking insane I don't know what the fuck were they thinking. Well then you go to Istanbul, which looks like shithole lol and has really old cars, killing the Timmys here gives you indestructible vehicles, you can push away everything in front of you even with a bike lmao. There you have missions like using a grenade launcher from a back of a car to destroy cops, chasing a truck that drops bombs at you, a long mission where you play as the black dude and you need to go through a building killing insane amount of enemies, and then there is the fucking Calita chase mission, it has separate parts of car and bike chases, it's so insanely long and hard, one mistake and you need to start again, somehow I accidentally managed to knock her off the bike and win, no fucking way I could have kept up with her. In the last mission you need to outrun a train which I thought was impossible until I found a way to get out to the roads and follow the train to get ahead of it lol, then you need to go through waves of fucking enemies (of course it crashed there again eh) to face Jericho who has like a million fucking health, but it's ok because you can cheese it by standing behind a trash container where he can't hit you lmao and you get a cliffhanger ending where you don't know whether Tanner survived or not. It has the same driving games as the previous games, they aren't as bad here because the traffic isn't bullshit in this game, I did a few of them they were ok. There is a nice making of video too but it's more like gameplay with narration lol, but Michael Madsen has more lines here than in the game which is fucking hilarious lmao. It's a much better game but jesus it's still not a good one, but you know I don't even think it's possible to make a good game out of this concept, and I think they managed to get the maximum out of it. There were a lot of complaints about how unfinished the game is but I don't think it's actually missing anything, at best they would have just polished it even more and get rid of shit like curbs launching you up and the random game freezes, but fucking True Crime: Streets of LA had this many bugs and it was fine, so it wouldn't have changed anything in my opinion. But again, it's a clear improvement, it's not a bad game anymore just a mediocre one lmao, so there is a good chance Driver: Parallel Lines will finally be a good game lmao, and it is certainly possible because I heard they finally realized they should be just copying the Grand Theft Auto games.	2023/04/29
Army Men: Sarge's Heroes (PlayStation) Developer: The 3DO Company Publisher: The 3DO Company Released: 2000 Genre: Third-person shooter
I played the demo of Army Men: RTS on PC when I was a kid and I loved everything about it (no wonder, it was made by Pandemic Studios), it's such a cool concept based on the Toy Story green soldiers, just toys having a war in your garden and kitchen and shit like that (there was a map called gob_rats for Call of Duty 2 which I played all the fucking time lmao I loved it so much). So I always wanted to play these games but most of them have no story except the Army Men: Sarge's Heroes games, and the last one of them actually came out on Xbox which I downloaded years ago and it's coming up soon so that was the main reason why I decided to try to play through this game again. Yes again, because I actually played the first three levels of the Nintendo 64 version of this game, and it was such a piece of fucking shit game with hard as fuck controls that I just couldn't do it anymore. Now the PlayStation port is actually a dumbed down version where you can't go into buildings and shit and the level design is more simple so I thought it will be easier, plus it has cutscenes which were actually really fun. You are playing as Sarge, who serves in the Green Army which is at war with the Tan Army, led by General Plastro. The Tans are winning the war thanks to the toys they brought from the real world through portals lmao, and of course your job is to stop them. You have some squadmates but they are barely in the game, mostly you just rescuing them lol and they are all wacky characters, and there is your Colonel's hot daughter Vikki who you are in love with (and who looks like a human lmao, did he fuck a Barbie doll or something?). You start in a boot camp which is like a training level where you can learn how to use your weapon and control your character through an obstacle course but good fucking lord the controls suck fucking ass, it doesn't help that the PlayStation Portable doesn't have enough buttons so I had to reassign them, but even if I played it with a controller it would still be absolutely terrible, like he barely ever turns and I pretty much have to stop to do that, and of course it has inverted aiming which wouldn't really matter if the auto aim would fucking work, like even if there is some dude in front of me it targets some other enemy on the other side of the map lmao. It's buggy as hell too, like you can't properly aim because it's like there is an invisible barrier next to covers so I can't even hide there and score some headshots. Jumping up somewhere is also a nightmare, you have to align perfectly or he won't grab the platform, and of course one wrong step and you fall down like I did on that fucking bathtube level which was instant mission failure. There are some good ideas like you need a mine detector to go minefields safely but it doesn't matter because the difficulty is a nightmare even on easy thanks to the absolutely terrible controls. Sometimes you need to escort someone and I couldn't get past that mission with the spiders and shit in the garden, I just had to cheat because it was literally impossible. And then there was another mission with the giant toy robots where I had to cheat again otherwise I would have never completed the game. There is a blooper reel after you beat the game lol and if you beat it on harder difficulties you can see more of them but yeah no thanks lmao. It's a dogshit fucking game but at least the cutscenes were funny. The next one is on the PlayStation 2, I hope they made some serious improvements over this shit.	2023/04/23
Aliens vs. Predator (Xbox 360) Developer: Rebellion Developments Publisher: Sega Released: 2010 Genre: First-person shooter
I played a demo of Aliens Versus Predator 2 on PC when I was a kid, this was before I watched any on the movies lol. It was too dark and scary for me and again I had absolutely no idea what to do. Someone I knew actually had the full game and played it online a lot, I tried that mode where there is one Alien and the marines need to survive or they would turn into an Alien when they die, but I couldn't get used the controls, my shitty brain couldn't handle running on walls and shit. I actually tried playing this game a long time ago (it came with my Xbox 360) on easy, but I got absolutely destroyed and just ran out of bullets, I couldn't even get through the second level lmao, I have no idea what the fuck I was doing wrong because it wasn't even that hard now on normal. I thought about playing it again in the past few years but I always found excuses not to do it because of those bad experiences lol, but finally I was in the mood for it. It's not connected to the previous games, it's more like a reboot but the concept is similar: you have 3 separate campaigns, Marine, Alien and Predator, and they are all connected (and in fact they are connected to the movie too, which I don't think was that bad, never seen the second one though). You can play them in any order but I played them in the order they were listed, and obviously they are not that long, the Marine is like half the game, the Alien is really short and the Predator campaign is a little bit longer. The overall story is that a Predator pyramid was found on a human colony, with Alien eggs apparently, and Weyland wants to use them as weapons. You have the same locations in all three campaigns, colony, research facility, jungle, pyramid etc, sometimes even the same levels from a different perspective, and they all have different collectibles and cliffhanger endings lol. In the Marine campaign you arrive to investigate what happened to the colony when a Predator ship destroys one of your ships, you get injured and when you wake up you are alone in the abandoned colony. The locations are obviously inspired by Aliens (which is like a shitty action movie compared to the fucking incredible looking Alien), it has the chains from the first movie lol but obviously Alien: Isolation was so much better replicating the look of that movie. It's a dark as fuck game though, thank god the flashlight never runs out and you have infinite flares, you just gotta wait a bit between using them. There are tons of fucking Aliens you need to fight through, they aren't some indestructible killing machines like in Alien: Isolation lol, you can even melee those fuckers, it's kinda unrealistic but it works, but it takes so much ammo to kill them. Sometimes there are hordes of them, and those parts are kinda hard. There are different kinds of them, like there is an acid throwing one that walks on walls and shit, they are hard find because of that but they are easy to kill. And then the little Facehugger fuckers, they are so small I could barely hit them, better to just use flamethrower on them and their eggs lol. Sometimes you have a couple other marines with you but they don't live that long. Later you need to fight androids too, they are hard to kill, you gotta aim at limbs and shit and when they die they blow up lol. There are boss fights too, like the Alien queen or a fucking Predator lmao, and the final boss is Weyland himself who is an android. You finally escape but turns out you are fucked and they will use you to breed more Aliens. The collectibles here are audio diaries, you can learn a lot about what happened on the planet and a lot of references to the movie. The Alien campaign is about an Alien with a number 6 marked on its head who was used for research, he breaks out and all hell breaks lose. You can walk on walls and shit with it, it's a bit disorienting but I got used to it. It's more about stealth here, you can see in the dark and destroy light sources (it's kinda like The Darkness lol), go through vents and shit. You can hiss to lure marines near to you but their AI was so fucking dumb for some reason, sometimes they walked next to me and didn't do anything when I attacked. You can do brutal executions on them lol, use that little jaw thing on the fuckers (that's how you press buttons too lmao it was hilarious), and you can harvest civilians by holding them down and a little Facehugger walks on their face lol, but sometimes they just commit suicide when they see you coming damn. The collectibles here are some royal queen juice canisters you need to destroy, and the final boss is a Predator you need to harvest to create a new Alien spieces, it was so fucking hard to defeat him though. The Predator campaign starts with a tutorial where you learn everything, it has very different controls, like you can only jump up to places where you point an icon. This is more stealth focused too, but you have a bunch of gadgets you can use, you can become invisible, distract enemies by imitating human voice, and do brutal executions like rip the dude's head off along with his spine lmao. Your objective here is to reclaim or destroy the tech humans have found in the pyramid or got from other Predators. So you slowly unlock new shit you can use, you have like an energy weapon you can fire, mines (I only ever used them versus the final boss which made it so easy lol), a disc you can throw, new mask filters for Aliens and shit, a spear etc. The problem is you only unlock the cool things by the end and you can barely use them. His collectibles are these skeleton trophies, and you can see them where they are on your mask lol so they were the easiest to find. And at the end the ancient mask he finds reveals the location of the Alien homeworld, which would have been interesting to see but there were never any sequels. There is a Survival mode too where you play as a marine, it's just two maps with waves of enemies coming at you, the first was easy until the 7th wave and the second have paths that open but it was way harder. It was actually a fun game to play, it's like 3 separate games inside one, but that's probably why it wasn't that impactful.	2023/04/19
Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (PlayStation 2) Developers: Raven Software, Pipe Dream Interactive Publisher: Majesco Entertainment Released: 2001 Genre: First-person shooter
When I was going through lists again I found this game and I realized I actually played a demo of it on PC when I was a kid and I thought it's cool as fuck, so yeah why not just play through the entire game. I never liked Star Trek though, I think it's dumb as fuck, the only things I watched were some episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on TV, like two Star Trek: The Next Generation movies and those three J. J. Abrams movies. The first mission is a simulation against the Borg, I remember that was the demo and I was so amazed by it, but I barely remember completing it more than a few times cause I was lost all the time lol. I remember walking on the Voyager ship too, and that part where there is an explosion and you need to press a button to activate a shield, but I don't think I ever progressed there, I didn't really speak English and I thought it's a timed thing and you need to run through there fast before it explodes lmao. Anyway after the holo mission you get an opening credits like it's the TV show lol, they even got all the actors from the show. The ship got teleported to somewhere full of destroyed and damaged ships and they need to find a way to escape. There is a giant space station that prevents them from using their hyperdrive, so they need to find a way to repair the ship then disable the space station. So you go over to an alien ship to collect some crystals, and turns out the aliens there are actually friendly after you shoot through half of their crew lol, then to some Klingon pirate ship which is more like a stealth level, then the Borg takes your crystals so you go after them too. It's a very linear game, it's easy to navigate which I appreciate, some of these shooters from this era had such confusing level designs. Thankfully you can change everything about the controls in the options, the aiming made me a little dizzy like Half-Life, it's just feels so much like on PC with these ports. The framerate sucks ass when there are a lot of enemies on screen, but there is a nice auto aim which made everything easier to deal with. Sometimes your stupid squadmates block your shots lol and I had to go back for them a couple times before using elevators, the AI is not the brightest. You can use a bunch of different weapons, and pick up alien ones too, you can recharge the ammo from terminals (and your health and shield too) or from crystals on alien ships. Between missions you can walk around the Voyager and talk to people, and do some holodeck missions, they are like simple challenges like killing all enemies in a castle lol. Near the end your ship gets attacked by the bugs from the space station, then you go there to disable it, there is a lot of platforming here and shit like invisible laser floor you need to shoot to walk through lol. And when you find out they are mass producing an army there to take over the galaxy you go after the final boss, which was brutal thanks to the terrible framerate lol. The end credits was like a TV show again lol, there are no unlockables though, only thing you can do is read about the crew members and your squadmates. It was actually a really fun game, even with the dumbed down graphics and the awful framerate. I'm not gonna play the sequel though because it's PC only and fuck playing anything on that shit again.	2023/04/17
Shadow Ops: Red Mercury (Xbox) Developer: Zombie Studios Publisher: Atari Released: 2004 Genre: First-person shooter
One of those games I've never heard of until I read about it in a magazine recently. It's a modern military FPS that's not a tactical shooter, it's kinda like a proto Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare so I guess in some ways it was ahead of its time. I played it on easy because I heard it's a really frustrating game, asshole enemies just pop out of everywhere making it hard to react and there are no checkpoints, it was a bit too easy until the last few levels so I guess it was the correct choice. They drop you right in the middle of the story, first two missions are about going after a guy with a nuke, but you can't stop him and he blows it up wow. Then the game does a 72 hours earlier shit and you play through what led to it, you are just some Delta Force dude on a mission in Congo when the CIA sends you after the nuke and you go through the usual locations, jungles, desert, snowy military base, research labs etc. Sometimes you have squadmates which was nice, the missions where you were alone kinda sucked. The movement felt slow as fuck lol (no sprint button) and the fucker got stuck in everything, aiming was slow too and the framerate wasn't always the best which just made it worse. But I liked how you can lean up and to your sides when you zoom in on your weapon, it helps you a lot when you are behind cover but you can't move while you are doing that eh. The way enemies appeared was really weird, it actually reminded me of light gun games, like when you turned a corner they just popped out of covers and ran through doors and always at those specific points so you always knew where exactly the enemies would appear. Sometimes you had to destroy tanks and shit but I just ran to the tank while it was looking at me the entire time lmao and destroyed it with explosives lol. I thought the story was gonna be like you need to stop the nuke from blowing up but no it happens anyway lmao and it's like it barely did any damage and everyone is fine lmao. Then you get like 3 fucking twists under a minute near the end, and you go through Paris, fight your way up to the Eiffel Tower and the final boss is a helicopter lol, it was so hard to destroy it with the RPG. There are a bunch of making of videos which was cool, they talked about how they wanted to create a cinematic shooter but literally the only cinematic thing about this game is the cutscenes, and they were full of ridiculous over the top dramatic cuts and camera work lmao, and the characters looked so fucking bad, their faces and the way they moved lmao, the game didn't look bad at all they just outsourced the cinematics to some shitty French company lol. There is a co-op campaign which is different from the main one but I couldn't try it out, I don't think it has cutscenes though. It's a very meh game but I actually had fun playing it, this weird light gun tier gameplay in a first-person shooter was I guess really unique.	2023/04/16
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (Xbox) Developer: Midway Games Publisher: Midway Games Released: 2004 Genre: Third-person shooter, action adventure
This is a game I always wanted to play because it has a bunch of cool powers and shit, the story is about some Psi-Ops agent who gets his memory wiped and is sent to be captured by an organization called The Movement who use psychic powers to take over the world. It's a third-person shooter but the controls were a but weird, like they barely had enough buttons for all the shit they wanted to do. Some girl who works undercover helps you and you slowly get your powers back, and when you get a power back you get a flashback training to teach you how to use them (and you get trained by one of the bosses in the game lol, they used to work together). There is not much focus on the story or any depth to it, it's like a really dumb action movie lol but it was fun (no fucking subtitles of course). So you get powers like telekinesis, you can pick up soldiers and throw them away lol or throw boxes and explosive barrels at them, you can also pick up shit like boxes or any object you can stand on and surf through the air lmao, it sounds really cool in concept but I could never figure out how to do it, I kept falling off shit unless it was a box, and the telekinesis in general was really underwhelming, it felt so weak, I wanted to throw these fuckers at walls to break their bones and shit but they are just slowly moving eh. There is remote viewing too, which is like some out of body experience where you can walk through closed doors to scout ahead, I barely ever used it. Mind drain is how you recharge your kinetic energy (there are pickups for that too), you can drain a little power from dead enemies (if they still have their heads) or from alive ones but only if they haven't noticed you, and then it makes their heads explode lmao. You can take over a soldier's body with mind control and press switches to access new areas or just kill other enemies with them lol, and you can make them commit suicide too lmao, this power was pretty cool. There is the usual pyrokinesis, you can just throw fireballs nothing extra lol, and at last aura view which allows you to see invisible things, like cracks on the wall you can break, see if an enemy noticed you based on their aura color, invisible mines or these fucking monsters from another dimension, and the game gets really hard by the last two missions when these fuckers appear. There are some cool moments like those illusion hallways, and when you need to hide behind barriers during that boss fight with the reactor overload. Bosses have powers too and you need to use yours against them of course, like the mind control boss reverts your controls lol, the final boss was really hard though. It has a wtf ending where the guy suddenly remembers everything then helicopters come and you get a to be continued lol fuck off, it also came out of nowhere like there was no indication of anything bigger than that happening (at least we get a cute picture of the developers in the end credits). It's actually a short game but there are other modes like Co-op (one player controls the movement while the other uses the weapons and powers, interesting concept), Arcade, Boss Rush, and tons of extra skins and missions you can unlock by finding these hidden evil gnomes lmao wtf (some of them were bullshit though, like you had to find two when you are trying to escape with a timer). Basically you need to use your powers to complete challenges, like surf over a course, launch yourself over a wall with giant balls lol, a fucking bowling game with huge balls lmao, position a bunch of gears to start a mechanism, a fucking pool table with giant balls you can only move with explosive barrels and pyrokinesis lol, waves of fucking gnomes attacking you lmao, insane shit like that. And you get a bunch of concept art movies, early gameplay videos, a making of video which I always love to see, trailers, some shitty music video lol. Honestly the game felt like a proto Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, but the use of powers were way more primitive and clunky, I mean I had fun with it but I expected something better.	2023/04/10
Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 13: OutRun (PlayStation 2) Developer: SIMS Publisher: 3D Ages Released: 2004 Genre: Driving
OutRun 2 is coming up on Xbox eventually and I've always been intrigued by that game, just the aesthetics and the insane drifting, there is something really satisfying about that game. Now the first game was an arcade game back in the 80s, and I'm pretty sure I've heard about it relatively early, maybe saw it in a movie or something I don't know. So I wanted to play the original too but I really didn't want to bother with some shitty 2D game, but I found out Sega released a bunch of its famous old games in 3D with really simple PlayStation like graphics on the PlayStation 2 in Japan, and one of them was this game. It did come out in the West too as part of the Sega Classics Collection and that's where I played it, but because I didn't even touch any of the other games there I'm just listing it with the original Japanese name. Now unlike most car games you aren't racing anyone except the timer here, as you are just driving from one location to another, trying to stay on the road and avoiding traffic, it's a very simple game. You go through different European inspired locations, take a right or left when the road splits to get to the next area before the time expires, so there are a couple different combinations you can do but eventually you're gonna get to one of the 5 goals where you get a cute little victory screen, my favorite was the Arab world where they hand you a lamp and a bunch of girls come out of it and start touching you lmao. It's not an easy game at all though, it's hard to avoid traffic but the worst part is that you can't see shit most of the time, either because of how big your car is in this version or because you can't see too far ahead anyway lol (I tried out the Mega Drive version on an emulator on my PlayStation Portable and it's actually so much worse there lol so I won't complain about the big car as much as I wanted lol). But to be fair it's an arcade game, so you are supposed to play through it many times to memorize the track layout. Before you start you need to select a music from 3 tracks (or from their arranged modernized versions), I liked Splash Wave the most lol. Btw I hated how I had to change the transmission to automatic every time I started the game, you can't save the options for some reason. Well besides the original Arcade mode there is also Arrange mode, which has a different diamond shaped course layout, with 4 different roads in the middle and only one goal at the end. The locations here are American inspired, like Las Vegas, US countryside, a big highway lol, and every one of them has a rival you can pass for more points, I guess that's the racing aspect of this game lol. There is also a Time Attack mode where you just drive around without traffic to set up new records, yeah no thanks fuck that shit. So yeah that's the game, not really relaxing lol but it was alright actually, but I'm sure OutRun 2 will be an even better experience with the insane drifting I've seen in videos.	2023/04/08
SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs (PlayStation 2) Developer: Zipper Interactive Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Released: 2002 Genre: Tactical shooter
After playing through the Conflict: Desert Storm games I decided to play these games too, as I said they were released around the same time so it would be nice to compare them, plus there are PlayStation Portable games too which I heard are really good. Before I started the game I noticed they included a documentary about SEALs, their training, history, equipment etc it was pretty cool, I love these kind of extras. You have two squads, Alpha and Bravo, but you only control the squadleader, you can't change between members. You can give them really detailed orders though, you need to navigate through menus which is easier than remembering tons of button combinations (and thank god it pauses when you open it), you can tell them to hold position, shoot everyone on sight, plant explosives, do all kinds of shit, and you can use a headset too to give orders if you have one. Before missions you get detailed briefings, they look like top secret files with maps and you can change weapons and equipment but I just went with the default ones (and I barely ever used grenades and shit, just went gun blazing lmao). You don't get much bullets though, and I ran out of them a couple of times but you can pick up enemy weapons too. The controls are kinda janky, not as bad as Conflict: Desert Storm though, but I hated how the fire button was R1 and you couldn't change it in the options eh. The X button is context sensitive, you can use it to knife or rifle butt the enemy, pick up weapons or enemy body, plant explosives etc, but when you press it he just slides there lmao and if he gets stuck the enemy won't even react until the animation finishes lol. There are primary and secondary mission goals too, secondary is more like the way you are supposed to accomplish them, like gather intel or use stealth, or capture this guy instead of killing him, but you can still complete the mission if you fail them. You get a detailed map that lists everything and shows recommended routes to make it easier, and have pre-determined points where you can send your squadmates. There is no storyline, just 3 missions per location, like snowy Alaska on a ship or an oil driller, on little islands and temple in Thailand, the jungles of Congo, and in the desert of Turkmenistan, and the maps are a lot smaller than in Conflict: Desert Storm. There are no difficulty settings and you can't save during missions eh, you have to complete them to save. I failed a couple missions on first try but it wasn't that difficult as I thought it would be, except for that fucking prison level with the helicopter, I had to cheese it by completing the mission goals in a different order and just rush at the end lmao. The last mission was fucking brutal too, just hordes of enemies in a destroyed city, I can't believe I completed it, my health and my last surviving squadmate's health were both in red and running out of bullets when I finally found the target lol. There is also one mission with an absolutely insane premise, you literally have to blow up some nukes in a cave wtf lmao. You get stats and ranks after the end of missions but they don't really matter as they don't unlock anything. The end credits have some dumb Russian song lmao which was on the radio in one of the earliest missions, it felt so out of place. I liked the game though, I mean the AI was dumb as hell sometimes as the squadmates or the people you need to escort got stuck and I had to go back for them or couldn't get through doors because of them but it was a fun game, but still I enjoyed Conflict: Desert Storm more, but I think the sequels improved this one more, we will see.	2023/04/05
The Darkness (Xbox 360) Developer: Starbreeze Studios Publisher: 2K Games Released: 2007 Genre: First-person shooter
This is another game I had no idea it exists until recently, and all I really knew is that you have these tentacles that talk to you lmao, but because you control both those and your weapons I had this impression that the controls must be really complicated so I didn't really think about playing it before I had all these extra discs. It's based on a comic I've never heard of, which isn't suprising but this is from a smaller company so it's weird that it got an adaptation. And it's made by the developers of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and they are very similar, both the controls and the gameplay, and both use darkness as a core mechanic, so I felt it maybe wasn't the best idea to play it right after it, I don't like playing similar games right after another (in this case it was a stupid thought). So you are playing as this guy Jackie who works for this mafioso called Paulie (who is his uncle?), but on his 21st birthday he tries to kill him but he survives as this thing called the Darkness manifests itself. As I said you can use both your weapons and the tentacles, the gunplay is fine but the crosshair is like a tiny dot lol (interestingly there are auto aim levels, I just put it on max lol) and you can do gruesome executions up close which were really cool but I barely used them. You can use your tentacles to kill enemies too and then devour their hearts to get more energy and level up, they will also suck up the dark for energy lol, and obviously light damages them and they will disappear so you gotta stay in dark areas and destroy light sources. And you have these abilities you can use, with Demon Arms you can destroy and move shit away, Creeping Darkness sends out one of your tentacles like a snake lmao and you can go to places you can't reach and go on walls and shit but it was so hard to control and it got stuck in everything eh, Darkness Guns are pretty self-explanatory, you have these weird looking guns you can use and the ammo is the dark you suck up lol, and finally Black Hole which sucks enemies up lmao. There are these Darklings too you can summon from some portals, they are little demon guys like in Overlord lmao, they have 4 types too, a machine gunner, a kamikaze one lol, one that destroy lights and a berserk, and you can find silly outfits for them too lmao, but I barely ever used these unless they were required or at the very end. Much like in The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay you can talk to people and do quests for them, in fact you can go around in New York with the subway system, it's always night though (and it has the shithole city aesthetic I like so much). The people who like you are these old mafia guys from like the 60s lol (it's funny when they help you kill bad guys, like one was on oxygen in bed but still shooting lmao), they usually ask to find something or kill someone, shit like that, and you get phone numbers as rewards, they are the collectibles you can find too. If you call them on payphones you hear some ridiculous conversations, like there is some dude you need to call like 20 something times until he finally tries to tell you something about alien Elvis but you hear him get shot at the end lmao, a suicide hotline that makes you wait, or some automated 911 call which says shit like press 3 if you are being stabbed right now lmao, or just listening to music forever when they make you wait, or something about an animal magic museum lol (the conversations you hear on the street are crazy too, like some dude wants to fuck a moose and someone tells him he needs to go to Sweden to do that lmao). They unlock a lot of shit, a graffiti making of video, concept arts, scripts, bug screens lol, a bunch of comics (a prequel to the game, the original comics the game is based on, and a bunch of other ones from the publisher, it took me ages to read them lol). You can also watch TV in the game lol, music channels, Flash Gordon episodes, or the entire To Kill a Mockingbird movie you can watch sitting on a couch with your girlfriend wow. Man the bad guys in this game are truly sick evil bastards, like the kind of believable psychopaths, that scene with your girlfriend was really brutal. The entire vibe of the game is really brutal and depressive, I loved the little stories Jackie tells during the loading screens. At some point you kill yourself and end up in WW1 hell which I fucking loved (it has my favorite weapon ever the Mauser C96), that's my favorite war and I wish there were more WW1 games. The Germans and the Allied soldiers there look really fucked up and disfigured, I loved it. There is an on-rail tank section too lmao and you can find letters there which you can mail when you return to the real world. The final level actually starts during the daytime, but then a solar eclipse happens and the Darkness becomes more powerful, and you just fuck shit up till you get to your uncle and have your revenge... which seals your fate and you get a really, really sad ending. I really liked this game but I don't think I'm gonna play the sequel, because it's made by a different developer and apparently it's more true to the comic, and this game felt really different from it. I really liked one of the unlockable comics though called Hunter-Killer and I read all of it, but it's only a few issues and it just randomly ends eh, seems like that's the fate of everything from this small publisher, it's a shame really.	2023/04/01
Malice (Xbox) Developer: Argonaut Games Publisher: Mud Duck Productions Released: 2004 Genre: Platform
Normally I wouldn't play a shitty platformer like this but I remember the screenshots of this game, it looked so good and I love that graphical style, it was supposed to be a launch title but it came out in 2004 lol. The story is some total nonsense, Malice gets killed by some dog god lmao, but Death sends her back because apparently she is a goddess, and some clockwork being helps her but she needs to find keys so he can locate the dog god for her lol. And you have this world with no backstory, or no real story whatsoever, like these evil crows and a bird resistance lmao. Jumping is so fucking slow lmao like your are floating, the platforming is terrible in general because it's hard to tell where you will land and the shitty inverted camera makes everything worse, and the combat sucks too because you can't move while you swing your weapon. You start with a club but you get a hammer and some other shit later, but they all work the same. There are some magic spells you will learn, like floating, healing, more power, stuff like that. It looks good though, I love this metallic look so much, there aren't many different locations though, there is space, some forest with a talking tree and mushrooms and worms and shit, inside a big factory machine that was pretty cool, sewers, prison and a lava world. It's such a simple game, the only real extra things you do besides the jumping and combat are these robots on the factory level you need to guide to open doors and opening cells with different keycards to free prisoners on the prison level, there is even stealth on that level but it's also braindead simple. It's also braindead easy, the only collectibles are these hearts to increase your max health but some of them are in the ghost world and it's almost impossible to die so I just had to stand there and wait till I got killed to collect them. Of course you don't get anything extra for it, no unlockables at all, even the menu is empty as fuck lmao. The humor is weird too, like Malice just talks shit to everyone lol, the only thing that made me laugh was that Juju Man who turned her into some giant headed freak on a level lmao. There are boss fights too but they are just as easy as everything else, but the final boss took fucking forever to kill. It's just a braindead easy game with no personality, it's just fucking nothing at all with barely any content, honestly this wouldn't have been enough for a PlayStation game, it's baffling to me that this game was released at all, I have no idea what the fuck the developers were doing for like 5 fucking years.	2023/03/28
Driver 2: Back on the Streets (PlayStation) Developer: Reflections Interactive Publisher: Infogrames Released: 2000 Genre: Driving, action
I realized Driv3r is coming up soon on Xbox so it was time to suffer through the second game lmao. I played this one on my PlayStation Portable too, it's a two discs game but for some reason you can't switch between them (normally that's not an issue, it's just this game) and the solution I found was to use separate eBoots for both discs. Finally there is a proper story with nice cutscenes (with subtitles thank god) and not just random shit happening, basically you gotta find the money man of some American mob lord who aligned himself with some Brazilian mobster. There are four cities again, Chicago, Havana, Las Vegas and Rio de Janeiro, and they are so much larger wow and the roads aren't just squares like in the first game, they actually bend and curve, and they all feel more distinct, like Havana is drastically different than the other cities, and not just in looks but with different cars too. And they aren't empty, you can find secret cars (the one in Chicago is inside Wrigley Field lmao) and secret minigames if you can find hidden buttons to activate them, like a horse racing track lmao and an empty racing circuit, so there is actually a reason to use Take-A-Ride mode. Cars seem to control better too, and you have more variety in this game, besides all sorts of cars you can drive buses, trucks, money vans etc. And finally you can get out of your car and steal another one, which completely gets rid of your felony meter! The controls are so bad though lmao and the only other thing you can do is press buttons, no shooting or fighting at all. I know the framerate is supposed to be really bad on the PlayStation but on the PlayStation Portable it was fine, the draw distance is ridiculous though lol things just pop up right in front of you. Cops were a huge issue in the first game and it seems like there are fewer of them patrolling, and thank god they don't spawn near your mission goal, in fact if you are being chased they just disappear right before you get there, this makes everything so much better. Missions have more variety too, like there is one where you have to escape from a labyrinth like storage area, or outrun a train to rescue a guy whose car is on the tracks, driving a car bomb to a location, jumping on a ferry lol, planting bombs on foot an running out before they explode etc. So yeah it's better in every possible way and it fixes a lot of problems with the first game but ultimately it doesn't matter when the core of the gameplay is a terribly designed frustrating mess, it's just not working. It's so much harder to damage enemy cars, and when you get to that fucking Havana mission where you need to destroy 4 of them with a time limit it's genuinely impossible, like seriously fuck off with this bullshit, I had to download a save online so I could continue the game. Getting out of the car to get rid of your felony sounds great in concept but realistically you don't have time for it during most missions, and when you start on foot and need to run to a car, or get out of the car to plant bombs you lose valuable seconds because the controls are absolute dogshit and turning is a nightmare. The last mission is another bullshit (not as brutal as the first game's at least) where you need to follow a helicopter and can't make any mistakes or you will lose it, and with the fucking traffic and cars chasing you and coming right at you it took me fucking days and some insane luck to finish it. It has the same minigames like chases, checkpoints etc but it's the same fucking frustrating shit too. Oh and the replay editor, but who gives a shit about that. So all the improvements turned a terrible game into just a bad one, I suppose that's better than nothing lmao. Next up is the controversial Driv3r which is supposed to be unfinished lol but it has more focus on the third person action, but I can't imagine it being worse than these two.	2023/03/20
Full Spectrum Warrior (Xbox) Developer: Pandemic Studios Publisher: THQ Released: 2004 Genre: Real-time tactics
I always wanted to play this game because it was made by Pandemic Studios. For the longest time I thought it's a tactical third-person shooter like SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs or Conflict: Desert Storm, only in the last few years I realized you can't even control your soldiers or fire their weapons, you just give them orders lol it kinda made me lose interest in it. It's basically a third-person strategy game lol, and I heard it was made for the US army as a training game, that's so cool though (and you can unlock that mode with a code). The manual and the strategy guide made everything sound so complex and complicated, but there is a really long training mode (that took me two days to finish lol) that teaches you everything, and it's much easier once you see how it works in action. Basically you have two squads, Alpha and Bravo (there is a Charlie too sometimes) each with 4 soldiers with different classes, the team leader, a grenadier, a rifleman and a dude with a big ass machine gun lmao and you can order them to move but you can only move an icon, and they move up to formation depends on where do you order them, to a corner, behind cover etc. It sucks though because sometimes you can't see where the icon is and you can only move the camera around the selected squad. You can also give orders to individual members but I never really used that. You gotta use military tactics to defeat enemies, hop from cover to cover, supress a group of enemies with one squad and try to flank them with the other one (because you can't kill them when they are behind cover, except in the last few missions with the Rangers lol), it was suprisingly fun to do, although you can't really react quickly because it takes a while till they react to your order, so fucking RPGs and grenades killed me a lot and it was really frustrating. It's game over if more than two squad members die, you need to pick up the injured soldier and carry him to the CASEVACs to heal him, and you need to go there anyway at least once or twice to restock your ammo. You can request a recon flight to mark enemies on your map but they can move away so it's not always accurate. You save by reporting in on radio at certain points, and you can go back and replay levels from that point anytime, altough there isn't any reason to do it because there are no statistics after missions and you can't select gears or anything before missions for different tactics. The game takes place in this made up Middle Eastern country (basically a mix of Afghanistan and Iraq) ruled by a genocidal dictator, and the US shows up to fuck shit up lol. There isn't much story, there are some nice character introduction at the beginning where we learn shit like this guy has 9 anime tattoos lmao and they shit talk a little bit but there are no character developments or anything like that, they are just soldiers going through cities and trying to hunt down the dictator. So locations are kinda samey but there are some cool shit like fighting during a huge sandstorm. At the end you kill the guy with an airstrike lol and then they show a cutscene where they find civilian mass graves damn this game ain't fucking around. There are two DLC epilogue missions which was really cool, the second one was really long and by far the hardest in the entire game though, with some funny CIA shenanigans at the end lmao. The only thing you unlock is a concept arts movie though eh I expected a nice making of video at least. So yeah it was suprisingly fun, I had no idea I could enjoy a game like this (I guess you can't go wrong with Pandemic Studios) so I'm looking forward to play the sequel.	2023/03/19
TimeShift (Xbox 360) Developer: Saber Interactive Publisher: Vivendi Games Released: 2007 Genre: First-person shooter
I was really excited for this game after I read previews of it in the magazines I bought, it sounded like the coolest fucking shit with time travel. But I was excited for the original version of the game with the steampunk aesthetics and the Timecop like story with Dennis Quaid and Michael Ironside, the game got delayed for a year after they switched publishers and the developers completely abandoned the plot and redesigned the world and everything, it's such a shame. That's why I never really bothered with it until now when I have plenty of discs. Now all the story we get are some short cutscenes where we learn some scientist who designed time travel suits takes the prototype one and goes back to the past, you go after him with the improved version and it turns out he changed the past and he is an evil dictator now. But we barely learn anything because these cutscenes are ridiculously short, your wife or lover gets killed by the bad guy and that's like just a few seconds and the guy never talks and we don't know anything about it unlike in the original concept where it's an important part of the plot, how about some fucking world building you dumbass developer fucks? Instead of the cool steampunk world we get like a BioShock looking design but a very bland and boring one (well the graphics are really nice at least, it's that mid 2000s style I really like), and again we learn nothing about the world, it's just an empty set piece for the action. Which is really nice, I mean the shooting is just average (for some reason it made me fucking dizzy though, I had to lower aim sensitivity to minimum, at least they gave you that option), there are some cool weapons though like that submachine gun that has a flamethrower too lmao or a thunderbolt crossbow lol and later some plasma weapons, and you can destroy covers so there is some destructibility. But none of this really matters, because the coolest thing is the time power mechanics, the entire game is build around them. You can stop, slow down or reverse time to help you in combat and to solve puzzles to progress. Like a bridge gets destroyed in front of you, you press reverse and run through it lol, or you press stop to walk through electrified water, or if a grenade gets stuck on you just press reverse and move away lol, or slow down time to walk through a propeller to reach an area, or use reverse on a turbine to launch you up lmao, you can even steal the weapons out of enemy hands if you stop time lmao, they are so cool. The game always tells you which one to use though so it's not like you have to figure out what to do. My favorite part was probably the big assembly line where you need to go through Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones style lmao using all your powers. The first part of the game takes place in a city but later you ride a zeppelin lol (the usual turret section) to go to a crash site and rescue prisoners, these parts are usually outside so huge open areas, and there are parts where you ride a quad bike lol. Later enemies have suits too, like the Storm Guards have a shield so you gotta stop time to kill them, Flash Guards go really fast so either slow down or stop time to deal with them, and then the Warp Guards can teleport and they are hard to kill and have a really powerful electric gun. The last level came out of nowhere, like suddenly the resistance took over the city when you go back and you need to kill the bad guy's giant walking spider like base lol, and after he is dead you go back to the present and get a wtf ending, it just ends with the dumbest cliffhanger, and again it's like a 10 seconds long cutscene lol. There are no collectibles or hidden things, you just unlock concept arts, music and cutscenes. It's not a bad game and I had fun but Jesus I really wish we got the original game instead of this bland, boring world and plot, it had so much potential.	2023/03/08
Infected (PlayStation Portable) Developer: Planet Moon Studios Publisher: Majesco Entertainment Released: 2005 Genre: Third-person shooter
I was a bit hesitant to play this game because it's made by the developers of Armed and Dangerous and I could definitely tell that from the shitty cutscenes and gameplay lmao, but imo the games they make are better suited for handhelds. It's a simple zombie shooting game with just a couple minutes long missions. There is a story though but it's barely there, basically there is a zombie outbreak in New York during Christmas, and they somehow explode from your blood lol so you are alone out there killing hordes of them and rescuing civilians. The gameplay is braindead easy though, basically you shoot them until they turn red, then fire your blood gun to kill them, and you can chain them together for pickups and bonuses. The more you kill the better weapons you get, shotgun, assault rifle, rocket launcher etc, and you can pickup a chainsaw too which kills them without your blood gun. Way too many levels are about saving civilians and carrying them to helicopters, at least you don't drag them behind you this time lol and you can carry all of them. Zombies can go berserk when they overrun a zone and they become stronger and faster, and later it gets really hard when you can't pick up soldiers and you need to run between zones to protect them, and the last mission is saving the commissioner's son from hordes of zombies lol. If you can pass missions within the time limit or save enough civilians you earn points and medals and you can upgrade and buy weapons or upgrade your health, speed etc. You can also unlock new character skins, some of them are from the band Slipknot lmao (the music is this trash metal shit too, and you can watch bonus music videos lol) and Rayne from BloodRayne but she plays the same as every other character, no new moves or weapons eh. The basic characters have a lot of customization though, I could even select that my character was from this shithole country. It's not offensively bad, I guess it's ok for a handheld game if you just want to play for a few minutes, but it's like fucking nothing lmao. At least it's still funny, like when mentally retarded kids visit the headquarters and the guy shoots a kid when he makes some retarded sound because he thought he is a zombie lmao, or when the guy talks about eating rotten fruits and rat shit for months when he was kept in a basement as a kid lmao wtf or that typical singer who does a zombie aid because they are misjudged peaceful people lmao. Of course they don't show any of that, they are just random voiceovers before missions...	2023/03/06
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (PlayStation) Developer: Crystal Dynamics Publisher: Eidos Interactive Released: 1999 Genre: Action-adventure
So I'm not sure when I heard of this series first but probably around the mid 2000s, I just knew about Raziel and my impression was he is an iconic character (and for some reason I always confused this series with Vampire: The Masquerade, I don't know why). I actually read the plot summaries when I was reading a review of Legacy of Kain: Defiance but I don't remember anything lmao so everything I experienced was new to me. This is another game with LibCrypt shit so I was like ok I will do the tutorial in that shitty emulator because that's where it triggers and then I can just continue the game but how wrong I was, it froze because you need to get through that area every time you load the game. So great another CD wasted and some voices are missing in that shitty emulator so I can't continue it there, but now I can just play NTSC games so it shouldn't have been a problem, however I found out that the NTSC copy freezes at some points when it's played on PAL consoles lmao, but at this point I already burned the CD so I was like I'm gonna play this as long as I can and if it happens I will just switch over to PlayStation Portable. Well it didn't happen and I could play through the entire game (well it froze once but it could be just my fault too), I'm not sure if it's because it doesn't happen on PlayStation 2 or my method of playing games just bypasses the boot screen (either way I saved like every time I went through a door just in case lmao). The story continues the bad ending of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain where Kain now rules the world and he built his throne room around the ruins of the Pillars of Nosgoth. In a really nice intro (no subtitles of course) one of the leaders of his vampire clans Raziel evolves into having wings, and Kain can't have anyone challenge him so he throws him down to an abyss and he dies as water hurts vampires. But some Elder God dude resurrects him and sends him back like hundreds years later to kill Kain, but the world is in ruins, vampires are like mutant zombies and mindless monsters now. Because Raziel is more like an undead corpse lmao he can't suck blood anymore, now he sucks the souls of dead enemies to replenish health and it slowly depletes when he is in the material plane. And it's one of the biggest features of this game how you can shift between the material and the spectral planes to solve puzzles, pass through areas where you couldn't in the material plane as they are usually different. Because enemies are vampires they can't be just killed normally, you need to finish them by throwing them in the water or to the sunlight or impaling them, it makes sense but sometimes it made the combat frustrating. You can kill them with the Soul Reaver too after you get that weapon, you can only use it when your health is full but it also stops your health from depleting, but it sucks when they damage you and you end up without a weapon (you can avoid enemies sometimes though). Puzzles usually involve blocks for some reason and it took fucking ages to flip and move them around, like you spend around 20 minutes in a room doing that shit then go to the next room and it's the same fucking shit again, it was seriously the worst part of the game. The platforming sucked too, like I could never tell if I'm gonna make that jump or not, and the inverted L2 R2 camera doesn't help it either. Boss fights usually involve puzzles to defeat them (that spider vampire boss was a real nightmare fuel lmao) and when they are dead you get their abilities which you need to progress to new areas: wall climbing, projectile shooting, swimming, running circles around objects to turn them lol. And man the world is big for a PlayStation game (luckily there are gateways for fast travel but you still need to walk a lot eh), and there are lots of big areas you normally wouldn't discover unless you kept looking, you can find health and magic upgrades and new spells there. Like there are human vampire hunters and if you ignore them they start worshipping you, and you can find their gigantic hidden citadel full of people and soldiers with flamethrowers lmao and bunch of hidden upgrades and spells. The lighthouse was another place like that, and you get the most powerful spell there which is like a light bomb that kills every vampire around you lmao. And you can enchance your Soul Reaver with fire to make it more powerful lol but I only used it for a puzzle. The story is really interesting in this game too, there is a twist around halfway into the game where you find out who Raziel was before Kain turned him into a vampire, I was like holy shit. The last area is The Oracle's Cave which was in the previous game too but it's so much better here, it has a bunch of interesting puzzles and at the end you can see the past and future through a bunch of portals, like more enhancements for your Soul Reaver and the death of the ghost chick from the previous game who helps you here too, and after you fight with Kain and learn he planned everything from the beginning (yeah right...) you follow him through a portal and I guess end up in the past where Moebius apparently was waiting for your arrival... and then the game just ends with this cliffhanger lmao. So I guess outsmarting your opponent and escaping your fate through time travel will be the central point of this series. Honestly the game felt like a proto Darksiders to me lol, but the blocks and platforming, the bad framerate and the bugs (had to reload game so a bugged out block would appear, and that lever where I thought I can't progress, kept pressing the button for like 30 minutes until it worked eh) stop it from reaching true greatness. It was still good though so I'm looking forward to see where the story goes next.	2023/03/03
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Xbox) Developers: Starbreeze Studios, Tigon Studios Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games Released: 2004 Genre: Action-adventure, stealth
I watched Pitch Black on DVD in the early 2000s, I didn't think much of it but it was a nice grounded 90s scifi with mining colonies and shit like that kinda like the Alien movies, then fucking The Chronicles of Riddick came out which was like an entirely different universe and more like a fantasy world lmao it was so weird. I remember seeing ads for the DVD cartoon too and I watched that and Pitch Black again before playing this game. I remember this game too from magazines, I didn't really care about it at that time but I know it's one of the best licensed games so I was looking forward to play it. Which I couldn't at first because it said the game needed to be played from an original disc lol never seen that before, but now I'm familiar with ACL patching so it was easy to make it work hehe. It has a really nice menu, like a metallic cube with blocks shuffling to display texts, it's so cool. And damn really nice looking graphics too, I don't know what this mid 2000s graphical style is called (bump mapping or normal mapping?) but I really like it and it's insane how powerful the Xbox is because it looks almost like early Xbox 360 graphics. The game starts with Riddick being transported to a prison planet by the bounty hunter guy from Pitch Black, but when they arrive he escapes and almost manages to get off the planet but of course this was just a dream sequence to teach you the basics. Inside the prison you can interact with people and do favors for them as quests and they give you money and cigarette packs in return (the fucking moth quest was awful though, they randomly fly around and it's so hard to catch them, it took me days to finish that shit). You have hand to hand and weapon combat, it reminds me a bit of Breakdown as it's in first person but you have less moves and there is more focus on the gunplay here as the shooting is way better. There is a lot of focus on stealth because you don't always have access to guns, so you are gonna sneak past guards in the dark a lot, or kill them from behind and drag and hide their bodies or wear the guard's clothes lol. Basically the entire game is you trying to escape from an area, and when you almost make it the bounty hunter dude or the prison warden catches you, throws you into a worse part of the prison, and this goes on and on until the end lmao. Like from the cells they drop you down into a hole where these mutant things live in the darkness (that's where you get the ability to see in the dark), then to a max security area with more inmates and quests and a fight tournament lol (nothing beats my tactic of stab-retreat-stab again lmao), then to the mines where you need to cause a distraction (aka explosion) and release these big monsters lol, and then finally they put you into these futuristic looking part of the prison in cryosleep and they only wake you up for a few minutes to exercise damn but you still manage to escape lol, this part has little mechs and you will pilot a big one, the controls were really wonky but it was funny how the mech AI kept talking to you lmao. And then finally you escape with the bounty hunter who didn't get paid for delivering you lol, and they tease the (at that time) upcoming new movie after the end credits. The cigarette packs you can find and get for quests unlock so many things, like seriously this game has the most impressive list of unlockables I've ever seen, concept arts, movie set pics, trailers, a prototype video from 2002, early gameplay video from 2003, motion capture video (this one includes parts from Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade too, I guess all the effort went into this game lmao), tech video, and a chapter from the book (no making of video though eh). It was a really fun game and to be honest back in the day I wanted to play The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena on PC and recently on Xbox 360 too but I wasn't sure if I would like it (it includes this game too apparently so I wouldn't have missed anything) but now I'm really looking forward to it and I already burned the disc lol.	2023/03/02

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