crispy4000

Ooof At least Toys for Bob made it out alive.

Time Spent: 15 minutes Rating: ** Psychedelic 2d platformer with nothing else going for it. You can dash in the air to course correct your jumps and get a little forward boost. It's strange and odd as expected, but once the difficulty started ramping up in an unpolished way, I just said enough is enough. The gameplay isn't worth seeing the visuals through.

Time Spent: 1 hour Rating: ***½ Metroidvania where the focus is unlocking new guns and powerups for said guns. I'm so glad there's no ammo system, at least not that I've encountered so far. It's one of the weakest parts of Metroid proper. Instead the upgrades you find power up the range and damage of your guns. Sick. Visuals might seem a bit drab on the surface, but they do some neat particle effects that make it not feel like a strict throwback. There's a few flaws: the music is very repeditive, the mixing is kind of bad. Some of the environments seems purposely crafted to make visibility a problem, most notably during one of the early boss fights. But mostly those are minor quibbles.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: *** Strikey Sisters a good Breakout-like where you can swing to hit the ball and enemies that come close to you. You'll need to proritize your ball over the powerups and bonuses that fall from enemies. Animations are great, special attacks are suitably powerful, it feels like a long lost NeoGeo arcade game. There's even voice acting. But I'm biased here. It's not as fleshed out as Firestriker on the SNES. That game let you walk in any direction, not just horizontally, and even had scrolling maps. Strikey Sisters feel too claustrophobic for my tastes. It doesn't feel like there's enough real estate between you and the enemies/bricks.

Time Spent: 1 hour Rating: ***½ This one's a bit dangerous as a timesink. Your character runs makes laps around a path, auto-battling monsters. Your role is to change out equipment and place landmark tiles that upgrade your character, add additional enemies to spawn, or affect battle conditions. You recover a bit of health again at the campfire tile you start at (reminds me of passing Go in Monopoly). After you place enough tiles, a boss appears. Between rounds, there's a persistent upgrade system where you unload aquired supplies from the past run. Unfortunately that does break the illusion that this still just is an auto-battler at heart, but overall, it's still a ton of fun. Props to the CRT filter here. I typically find them overdone, even the ‘good’ ones. But this is so subtle and enhances the vibe, I'd definitely recommend turning it on for this game.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** Very similar to Blazing Beaks, and I might slightly prefer the general flow of this game, in theory. I say that because it's at a 30fps lock, and built for 4:3, which is just too limiting for a modern enough game. There's not even a vsync option, so I had to use the Nvidia control panel. Maybe if it ran better, I'd be willing to rate it a bit higher. It's definitely less daunting feeling than Gungeon, and the bonus characters all play very differently. But Voidigo still remains my favorite of these types of games I've tried.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** Another run based area shooter. This one feels better than Archvale, and is much more approachable than Gungeon. The clean visuals and accessibility factor are its strengths. I could see this being a really fun local multiplayer game. As for twists on the formula, you can pick up various curses and turn them into the shop for bonuses... but that's pretty much it. There aren't alternative bosses, just the same old you've killed before.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: **½ A Fanatical bundle trash pickup I got for shits and giggles. There's puns, but not even the oof kind, which is disappointing. Otherwise its your basic open structure 2d platformer with towns and bosses. The melee attack feels quite bad because of the range of your swung kid. That and having to hold a button to wait to recover them when thrown (think Titan Souls). Still not as bad as I expected, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: **½ Endless runner where you have to collect coins to add to your very limited timer. Between runs, you can spend those coins for upgrades, many of which the game is impossible to complete without. That's pretty much it. I don't think the black and white aesthetic helps with readability, it has that same issue as beat'em ups where you don't always know what objects you're vertically aligned with.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: ***½ As the black king, you are a one many army wielding a shotgun in a game of chess. You do more damage the closer you are to pieces (which have HP), and can swivel your aim with the right stick. Reloading takes a turn, and multiple enemy pieces can move at once, as indicated by shaking pieces the turn before. Every new floor gives you and your opponent a bonus, out of two selected loadouts. It's super smart, but by round 12, I can only imagine how fucked up the rules would get on both sides. So there's the question of balance, but wow, what a neat game concept.

So much blame for this falls on Epic. I bet UE4 games that actually do a good job, like Days Gone and Gears 5, had to do a lot of tweaking under the hood. That's definitely game dependent. Does a very powerful CPU fix Stray, for example?

Maybe if I get through it all! Wishful thinking...

Interested in it, but I'd rather not add to the list with gifts. Especially of new games. Most of these are on the older side now.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: ***½ If you like Pokemon and want it for your Steam Deck, this is probably a no brainer. It's Pokemon GBA spruced up with better graphics and animations. I've read there's fewer elemental types, but some clever additions such as difficulty customizations and level up bonuses you can select. Like Blossom Tales, its extremely shameless, but also of a quality you can't deny. If I hadn't had my fill of Pokemon yet I'd be all over it.

No, but Jedi Survivor and Elden Ring alone are enough to be frustrated about. Ideally, a good PC should be able to power through frametime issues present in console releases, not to have even more added on top, no matter your rig. That's what makes the shader stutter issue so egregious. From a value standpoint, console games shouldn't be running smoother than on a PC you spent twice as much on. Yes, there is truth to this. But generally speaking, stutter on consoles tends to be less pronounced and frequent, due to optimizations possible for fixed hardware. It's more the general framerate and fidelity dips that consoles get to deal more with. Though traversal stutters and occasional hitches aren't beyond them.

There’s still more. Ghostwrite Tokyo is supposedly awful about it. Castillo Protocol. Wo Long. Chernobylite. Probably a bunch of UE4 indie games where it isn’t getting the same attention. (Supposedly Bramble is another) Its too big of a problem to hand-wave, at least for the end of last gen/early this gen. Sucks that it’s pretty much a permanent problem for those games that aren’t fixed.

Jedi Survivor Wild Hearts Elden Ring Stray Dead Space Remake FF7 Remake Etc. More I’m forgetting. I don’t think any game with egregious shader comp stutter on PC is preferable there.

It wasn’t always this way. It used to be that being a PC gamer implied you liked particular kinds of games, not all the games or any games because they’re all here. And there was a period of stagnation where PC game felt d00med. (Here’s a thread from 2005 on the subject) There’s still some remnants of that in some of what becomes popular on Steam today. But I remember when JPRGs and character action games were something novel on PC, going back to the old Eidos FF7 port. By the PS4/XBO gen the question shifted to if the PC port would make it to Xbox. Oh, and just to mention it, PC does have the stutter struggle problem today. Maybe things will get better with newer titles, but there are quite a number of games where consoles are still the optimal place to play them. Unless you’d trade resolution for dealing with judder.

That's inevitable with modern console transitions now. Ever since we've had games go open world without too much compromise, the whole bigger better thing has become a moot point. And almost no one is designing their games around physics and such that only a next-gen console could do. (... meanwhile you have Nintendo pushing the bar forward confidently on super outdated hardware) All said, playing FF7 Rebirth has me thinking they couldn't get close Remake's fidelity if they were still on PS4. They clearly needed a new console to make that game. Otherwise, the visual continuity would have dropped of a cliff. I wouldn't want to see what a PS4 version would need to look like.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: **½ Basing this off impressions from a demo of it I played a while back, though I have the full game now. I can't imagine much would have changed, since the demo is the opening act. There's a lot more style than substance here seemingly. Really beautiful use of UE's lighting, but a pretty bog standard adventure game with multiple text options. Get the right information, use it to deduce and act. Something about the use of animals throws me off. I can't take the tone of it seriously when it’s got a King Charles Spaniel in a turtleneck.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: **½ Bullet bloom, the video game. The effect actually gets more intense the more there is on screen. As for the game itself, its a roguelike where your currency is the game timer, where you have 18 minutes otherwise to finish. Most curses work like Returnal, but affect the clock. The controls are meh, the music is annoying, enemies are bullet sponges. It's not obviously a bad game or anything, but it's clear that I won't enjoy it.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: ***½ If Contra and Metal Slug had a love child. I'm definitely more in the Metal Slug camp, so it's welcome to see some of its influences make it in, notably the vehicles and muffled voice effects. The devs get it. Each of the five levels is technically checkpointed, so it avoids the pitfalls of the classic Contra games too. It's highly recommended if you enjoy these sorts of games, but if you don't, you could probably just play Metal Slug and not miss out on much. Side note, I feel like there's some Turrican influence in here too at parts.

Time Spent: ~30 min Rating: *** I'm normally not a big fan of rhythm games, and this hasn't converted me. Still, it does some smart things. There's a synchronization procedure that accounts for the input delay on both your controller and your TV/Stereo. The gameplay uses the same rhythm based system most of the time, but there are moments that let you play bits of the games it parodies. Each level also transitions between games it riffs on. I'd imagine this one would be fun enough to see through.

Take-Two reportedly shuts down Roll7 and Intercept Games, Private Division suffers layoffs WWW.GAMESINDUSTRY.BIZ More details have emerged about the ongoing layoffs at Take-Two Interactive, with reports suggesting the publisher has …

Prime is giving away The Forgotten City this month. Also, Fallout 3 Definitive, Tomb Raider GOTY and Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars.