Recent reviews by Stultus

My childhood home used to have this big wooden deck in front. Sometimes when I was bored I would create “tracks” on the deck with whatever crap was lying around: hockey sticks, umbrellas, gardening tools, whatever. Then, I’d try to ride through the convoluted circuit I’d made on a monkey bicycle without hitting anything, stopping, or falling off. That's the most accurate allegory I can come up with for this game.

The single-player experience of Parking Garage Rally Circuit is less like actual racing, and more like time trial challenges where you go through checkpoints on mostly tight courses as quickly as you can. Pseudo-90s is the aesthetic here, with old-school voxel graphics (actual voxels, wherein the screen resolution is kept so low that it can't render the complexity of the 3D shapes and makes up for it with chunky pixels, revealing that even the 3D image of a game is really just a collection of 2D squares) and a pseudo-90s pop rock soundtrack. The theme is American parking garages. They've even got the one from Fargo where Steve Buscemi gets his face blown open. At least, I think that's what it's supposed to be, so it probably isn't.

I like the way that the vehicles here drive for the most part, feeling very reminiscent of Crazy Taxi, though not as sharply affected by gravity, but still bouncy in their handling and collisions. There are only three to choose from, but you're allowed to customize the paint job quite a bit, and it'll show up on your time trial ghost that's automatically uploaded to the internet whenever you set a new PR. (Remember, real champions always set their number to 69.) Once you have a PR for a course and vehicle class, a few ghosts close to you on the leaderboard will join you in subsequent runs, which is a good way to learn techniques and improve your record. It's also just nice to feel like you're racing against other people, as the online multiplayer for this game is basically a ghost town, in spite of its functionality, though the levels can still feel very cramped for the quantity of simultaneous players allowed. I guess them's the breaks for more niche multiplayer these days.

Most of the technique in this game revolves around your dedicated drift button, which not only rewards a speed boost, but also a temporary raising of your max speed. This little bonus can stack on top of itself to reach even higher speeds, or be temporarily abated by easing off the gas if you need to carry it through a sharp corner. Or, you can get rid of it by too quickly ending a drift, or by driving too slowly, or just by crashing hard.

This all encourages you to chain these bonuses as much as feasible, but even though the game doesn't seem to put a practical upper limit on your speed, higher speed always comes at the cost of control, so precision is just as important. Sometimes you have to intentionally kill the speed bonus you've been building before a particularly tricky jump or turn, and sometimes having extra speed grants you an opportunity to take a little shortcut. It's depth I didn't wholly expect for such simple controls.

Still, like most games that relegate the initiation of drifts to a single button, I often find myself accidentally starting a drift while pointing in the wrong direction, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up my whole run. I find it especially common here, given how precise I have to be to stay on what are very thin paths, and how often the level geometry can subtly bump me just a few inches into the air where drifts can't be started, which is just disorienting. It's a bit of a contradiction, how the game wants to have this microscopic, twisted level design, but uses a type of drifting for which other games would compensate with wider and more directed tracks. I feel like this wouldn't even be an issue here if there were an option to relegate right and left drifts to different buttons. It's a little annoying, considering that even on my Xbox One controller, which for some reason the game confuses my left trigger with my right analog stick and vice versa, there are buttons that just don't get used.

As it is, the controls and vehicle handling can still handle the levels efficiently. There are only seven stages, but most have quite a bit going on: physics objects, independently moving obstacles, and a lot more vertical traversal than I would've expected from a driving game, to name just a few things. Some tracks have scripted events. In New Orleans, the power goes out on the second lap, and you have to depend on your headlights. In Mt Rushmore, specific debris falls in your path for two laps. Still, for all of this stuff, there really isn't any randomness to blame for failings, outside of the goofy-ass physics. I suppose even that is more due to technically player-induced minutia, but when that threshold is so small, as I'll get into, it might as well be random.

The bouncy physics are all well and good until you actually start trying for decent records, and then they become a pain in the ass. A jump that you did perfectly on the previous lap, approached with nearly the same speed and angle, but off by one pixel, will instead toss you a hundred feet to the left and ruin your run. Your car will unpredictably be able to climb up walls and flip over. Many of the paths you're expected to follow are laid out with loose objects that are far more likely to screw up your speed and trajectory than solid walls, and God help you when you need to lean on them in order to make a tight turn, because you can and will get tossed in random directions. It's a little frustrating when the game is about precision to have large parts of tracks entirely laid out with unavoidable obstacles that randomly influence precision. Even Mario Kart has more consistent time trials than this.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit has reminded me of the Kia Soul. I recall two things about that car: the ad campaign with the CGI hamsters acting all "street," and that dashcam video of one being launched like 10 feet into the air after it ran over a rogue wheel on the highway. That's the head space that this game shares. It's a brief burst of fun if you're the type of nerd who enjoys chasing perfection on one's own, and maybe having a laugh or two on the way, but its appetizer price reflects how much more it could be.

Cthon is a pretty simple roguelike, with the graphics and action of Wolfenstein 3D (albeit with all ranged attacks here being projectiles instead of hitscan), and the story of Doom.

The core gameplay consists of wandering procedurally-generated mazes, looking for the exit while fighting enemies with bare bones FPS mechanics, and managing and upgrading your ♥♥♥♥. You pick from one of three classes for your run through three chapters, each broken up into three levels, plus a final boss level. On normal difficulty, a full run takes about an hour.

Each class specializes in one of the three available weapons, though there's some utility for all weapons across all classes. You develop your character by equipping items that upgrade your weapons' capabilities or your own, but you're limited in how much you can carry or use based on your energy reserves and inventory space, which themselves can be upgraded with the proper pickups, or with resource expenditures at certain shops. (If you've played 3079 Block Action RPG or System Shock 2, you already have some idea of how this'll feel.) I like how most of the upgrades will actually show up on weapons' viewmodels and the HUD when equipped, which sticks out among...

Visually, as you can tell from the screenshots on the store page, Cthon is a bit basic. Pixels are chunky, assets are few, and the draw distance is short. Even beyond just sticking to a simplistic art style, I think this was really more about maintaining the aesthetics of early 3D games, which in all honesty, are still very much 2D in function. There is forward and backward, there is left and right, but there is no up and down. This could've just as easily been a top-down game, but the first-person perspective adds more tension and unknowns, alongside the unnecessary issue of being far wider than your field of view suggests, and I had to slowly adapt to that knowledge in dodging shots and navigating around all-too-conspicuous furniture.

The levels and their items/enemies/utilities are procedurally-generated, which does mean that every single playthrough is going to be different and keep you on your toes a bit, but stages often get built in a linear fashion that completely knocks the wind out of any sense of exploration. If the graphics were any more complex, enough for me to mentally note areas down as landmarks or whatever, the automap wouldn't even have a reason to exist. Probably a third of my time in this game has been spent walking back through levels that are really just straight hallways filled with corpses, to collect and/or sell items that I didn't get on my first pass before going on to the next stage. It's a hefty amount of boredom, but the way the difficulty works makes it necessary, especially on hard mode.

"Hardcore" difficulty creates problems, where 99% of the time, the player is set up to fail. It's not a question of whether it's hard, but why it's hard, and so often in hard mode this boils down to the randomness endemic to the roguelite genre, compounded by the simpler stuff that would otherwise be a welcome increase in difficulty. The randomly distributed enemies are tougher to be sure, but the randomly distributed resources are also far fewer, to the point that success will ultimately depend on extreme variables totally outside the player's control, rather than on ability.

You can have all the money in the world, but it means exactly bupkiss if you have nowhere to spend it.
You can be as thrifty as possible with your ammo and health, but it'll be for naught if the game keeps deciding not to spawn any source of either.
You can be as careful as you want with enemies, but that won't stop the game from starting a level with five or so tough ones immediately in your path, and you trapped in a short hallway with no feasible way to handle them all.

All of this is to say that no playstyle can account for the game's ability to arbitrarily cease a Hardcore run whenever it wants by creating impossible conditions. No matter how secure and safe you think your build, you're really just playing a Russian roulette marathon (Cthon thong thong). Now, is it still fun, despite that often inescapable futility? Maybe. I enjoyed it, even if it is a tad basic and its practical limits are constantly undercut like my DM is a spoiled brat who will do everything possible to make me lose, but we aren't all drowning in the masochistic psychological complexes we created to balance out our natural sadism. I digress.

The biggest issue from this is the discrepancy between the hard and normal difficulties. At its worst, Hardcore is downright impossible, but it does feel a lot more involved than normal difficulty, as a more focused playstyle is still demanded to endure until the game ♥♥♥♥♥ you with an unwinnable situation. After dumping hours into hard mode, though, most of normal difficulty holds zero challenge. There isn't really a middle ground that could be described as "tough, but fair."

The gap between the difficulties is a perfect reflection of my feelings on the game as a whole. After all is said and done, normal is likely going to be too easy and slow for those experienced in this genre, but Hardcore is so eager to deny its potential depth with insurmountable aberration that it feels more like blind gambling than technique. To that end, I suppose the people to whom I'd most recommend Cthon are those new to action roguelites, and those looking to punish themselves.

Star Wars Episode I Racer is one of those games from my childhood that I kinda sucked ass at, only to come back as an adult and find that it's not nearly as painful as I remember. I think the reason I had so much difficulty when I was young was due to the weird boosting mechanic. Before reaching double digits in age, any action requiring more than one step might as well have been advanced trigonometry.
Still, there's something to be said for how smooth this game is, and how much depth it has, considering its age and circumstances. The amount of control allowed is borderline unnecessary, though much appreciated, considering how fluid and speedy it all feels, and works great with a proper controller. As licensed games go, this is among the most memorable for mostly good reasons, and it holds up well.

The courses obviously borrow heavily from the lore, but the game doesn't get too distracted from its purpose. I like how the increasingly complex versions of tracks borrow from their simpler variations. "That path you used to take is blocked off now, here's a detour that'll take two minutes longer and is much more likely to kill you." It's a very old-school F-Zero way of keeping level themes from feeling like they've become obsolete, while still giving a few nods to the parts where I was less experienced.

The tracks can get pretty long, allowing ample room for shortcuts, and for the scale and decoration to make the places feel like believable locations. Sometimes your stage hazards are vehicles left on the path, and sometimes your shortcut doesn't even look like a shortcut. The key here though is that it all feels natural. Even when you have to slow down for a sharp turn, or speed up for a jump, or tilt to fit through a tight squeeze, it never feels like it's trying to be annoying just for the sake of being annoying.

Some problems which detract from the experience are due to these track designs, though. The models and textures are pretty badly dated, and most things only look smooth because you're zipping past them at high speeds. Many objects are somewhat jagged, to the point that my almost-undamaged machine might suddenly lose one of its engines because I snagged on a pixel of a rock, or some ever-so-slightly uneven terrain, or an invisible wall next to a jump. The draw distance is also kinda selective, mostly depending on the proximity to tunnels, and this can mean that while the fuzzy map on the top right will tell me there's a sudden turn ahead, I won't know the width of said turn or any obstacles until I go through it once. It's as close as one can get to a blind turn without it explicitly being a blind turn.

Even more annoying are the problems that plainly weren't intentional choices, like how I'd maybe respawn inside of a rock obstacle, or somehow get stuck inside the track itself... and sometimes I seem to hit things that aren't even there. At worst, the game would crash, often right after a lengthy match. To add insult to injury, my lap and race records would still be there, as well as the racer I just unlocked, but I'd still have to replay it to unlock the next one. However, I'm fairly certain that these issues are just due to the jank dgVoodoo emulation, which is at least built-in for this release. I've had similar problems with other games that I've had to run in this way.

The unlockable stuff is pretty constant. The races are all taken one-at-a-time, so you can progress at bite-sized paces if you'd like. They're divided into several linear series that are available simultaneously, so it's often not hindering your progress to temporarily distract yourself with another course if one is annoying you. Winning every race in a series unlocks a special course, and winning select races earns you new racers. You've got the recognizable faces like Sebulba and Maggie Gyllenhaal, as well as weird extended universe characters who are as much fun to compare to celebrities as they are to use.

I won't lie. The word "balance" does not come to mind. It's nice that the unlockable machines feel worthy of the effort needed to obtain them, but I need to mention a distinction often found in racing and fighting games, games that use large rosters like this. There's a difference between characters that are capable of doing exceptionally well by having access to advanced techniques, and characters that are just broken, and that's where this game kinda drops the ball.
As much depth as there is, the overall gameplay loop is still so simple that you can rely on overpowered stats instead of advanced techniques. If you've got space to use your boost, you boost. If your boost is on cooldown or you need to make a bunch of turns, you take the opportunity for repairs. Beyond that, it's just reflexes, and knowing which vehicles to use for which tracks, and some machines are so consistently outclassed that they have no reason to exist.

Of course, you can also buy parts to upgrade your podracer, but they're only temporary. They break after some use, and you're never really gonna have enough money to trick your ride out with everything you want, not before finishing the game, anyway. Yet, this mechanic actually ends up encouraging variety, in a small way. It's typically a better idea to just switch to a machine with the best base stats for the track you're trying to tackle. Then, if you find one that seems ideal, but the course is still giving you trouble, it's time to buy ♥♥♥♥. There isn't going to be one vehicle that checks all of your boxes each time.

There was an underwhelming sequel, with some features removed from the first, and less content overall. I know that this first game got a re-release with a few minor updates, but I think this is a decent case for an out-and-out remake. It's campy, but not so much that you can't sometimes take it seriously. There are clear balance issues between vehicles, but not so severe that they can't get equaled out a bit. Ultimately, though, the simplicity that hides under the depth of your options, and the lack of luck as a factor gives it only niche appeal. If you want an old single-player racing game that you can blast through in a day or two, Episode I Racer is a fun experience with room for improvement. It's one of the better scenarios one could hope for of a licensed title.

Titties be damned. This game is actually pretty fun.
The thumbnails and trailer should make pretty clear what sort of Zetria is. Straight away, the atmosphere feels highly reminiscent of that part in Metroid: Zero Mission where you're only wearing the body condom, but even playing as another big-titty blonde ponytail lady running through a futuristic 2D sci-fi labyrinth filled with dangerous aliens, Zetria is a different sort of game. It's by no means open-world; The maze-like levels are still very much isolated levels, tackled in a linear fashion. Combat is inevitable, but ammo isn't unlimited, so you need to manage your resources. Also, sex.

Every stage, you explore and fight your way through a small army of monsters, with the goal of locating a scientist and then carrying her to safety, but carrying her prevents you from performing certain actions. You can't reload, melee attack, or most importantly, jump while holding her. The levels are built with that in mind, and you have to overcome puzzles with moving platforms or doors or teleporters or physics objects to move them to safety. At first, their being at the mercy of gravity would seem to encourage just having the exit at the bottom of every map, but the level designs are creative enough to avoid falling into such a rut. The complexity ramps up quickly over such a short game.

Your enemies are, by far, not the smartest you'll encounter in a game of this type, but the stage designs frequently accommodate this. Even a dumb enemy that slowly walks at you can become a problem if it falls into a narrow pit that you need to go into as well, guaranteeing you'll take a hit unless you're quick enough on the draw to stop such a scenario from happening in the first place. Moving shield-users will be grouped with stationary shooters to protect them. Some enemies use homing attacks, forcing you to run for cover. Despite their simplicity, the quantity and positioning of monsters doesn't allow you to get too sloppy.

Obviously, there's porn in here, but it's mostly secondary to the gameplay. The most you're really required to deal with are characters and enemies with their boobs and/or ♥♥♥♥♥ just hanging out, sometimes idling in the way that animals know how, along with healing stations and certain doors that have pretty explicit sprite work.
You'll also occasionally run across computer terminals with lewd images, and if you're REALLY into bestiality, between the levels you can visit a menagerie of monsters you've encountered, carrying with them far more detailed "animations." However, that's optional.

Although the game does technically support controllers, it feels "just barely" so. Menus aren't always functional with the face buttons on my controller, but when I click in the menus with my mouse, I end up shooting and wasting ammo. Similarly, moving the stick to select menu options still moves my character. The feature to look around from a standstill, by clicking the right stick button and moving it around, is always overwritten by the position of the mouse.
There are also a few obnoxious things which... I can't tell whether they were intentional. Whenever I crouch, I automatically equip the pistol, even when I'm out of ammo for it, which is annoying in situations where I need to duck under projectiles while using the shotgun. The Bloom setting keeps turning itself back on every time I start the game up.
None of the problems are insurmountable, but they are constant.

Zetria is a weird game that seems a bit cheaper than it really is. It's pixel-art, it's lewd, and I would swear it was a Flash game if it wasn't actually made in Unity. Beyond the porn, though, you've still got a decent platforming-shooting game that can occasionally also exercise your brain, with a number of rough edges. It could use a little more polish, but it's mostly a fun experience.

Furious Racing is an update of the original Garfield Kart, thankfully with an online multiplayer scene that, somehow after all these years, still isn't entirely dead. Garfield Kart is the racing game that you play when you don't have a Nintendo console for the latest Mario Kart.

There's a lot of depth here, from the racing mechanics themselves, to the items, and a goodly amount of customizations for your kart. However, I'm not really a huge fan of the "perfect" combos, where specific sets of customizations yield bonuses greater than the sum of their parts. All it does is discourage experimentation, because you'll start to see just how unbalanced things can get. You can see it on the Time Trial rankings: Odie, Odie, Odie. Odie's boost is too damn good. It's so good that you can't use the full strength starting boost on certain courses without fumbling their first turns. You'll see more variety in multiplayer races, but I'll get to that later.

Past that, though, I find this to be strangely fairer than a lot of other kart racing games. Item distribution feels rewarding of your efforts to get to the front. Nearly everything can be countered or dodged so long as you've got good reflexes, know when to hold onto certain items, or can position yourself to avoid certain traps. Likewise, the shortcuts aren't always a matter of simply having the knowledge, and recklessly taking the wrong path can cause you to fall behind people who are playing it safe, forcing you to always carefully consider your current situation.

The last time I read a Garfield comic where he wasn't either edited to look like some eldritch monstrosity or removed entirely was probably five or so years ago, so I'm not up to speed on my Garfield lore. I'm assuming this is all 100% accurate to the canon, that the locations are of some importance to the Garfield extended cinematic universe.

Courses are serviceable, for the most part. Most have an abundance of sharp turns to capitalize on the drifting mechanics that are standard for this sort of game. There are occasional branching paths, some shortcuts here and there. It's basic stuff, generally done well enough, though I do have some complaints. For one, these tracks are pretty static. When you look at one of the more recent Mario Kart titles, for example, a lot of stages will have crap moving about on the course that injects a little more variety into each lap. In Garfield Kart, the decor in the background will often have a lot of moving parts, but the tracks themselves are as still as stone.

Another problem is that certain parts of the modeling and physics can feel... off. It's difficult to explain. For example, the circumstances which trigger "out-of-bounds" resets can feel arbitrary and untested. Some areas that look like obvious shortcuts will instead force resets, if there aren't already invisible walls in the way. Sometimes simply getting jostled around too much will trigger a reset, and other times, you'll end up literally driving on a wall. As well, resets will on rare occasion keep your momentum, so you might be dropped back onto the track facing in the same direction and moving at the same speed that killed you, and you'll have to sit through your death a second time. More frequently, worst of all, landing what looks like a simple jump can spontaneously stop you dead in your tracks, or even spin you so that you face backwards.

Of course, none of these issues makes the game outright unplayable, just occasionally annoying. An expert can cope with it, and it doesn't give anyone a major advantage. You're ALL subject to the imperfections.

Online races (when I'm able to find other players) seem to work nicely. I don't really have a lot of lag on my continent's server, and though I see other players occasionally rubberbanding, it mostly feels smooth on my end. It doesn't seem to influence the timing on attacking or defending too much. Still, it's better to fill a match with real players when you can, because the AI racers that fill the rest of the slots feel terribly inconsistent. Sometimes one will singularly destroy a server otherwise filled with human players, and other times one will get stuck driving into a wall to the point that I can effortlessly lap it.

Look, at the end of the day, Garfield Kart: Furious Racing is a goofy game with enough depth to be competitive, but also enough flaws to not be taken too seriously. It's an objective improvement over the original, and despite its flaws, like an abusive relationship, I keep coming back to it again and again. I'm just joking, though. I've never had a relationship. I'm too busy playing Garfield Kart.

I don't even know what to say about this one. To be honest, I was expecting a bunch of cutesy cartoon characters and wide open spaces packed with stuff to do that would drain away hours of my life, like an old-school Rare title. That's not really what I got.

Stages are free to be done in any order you wish: four themes, with two levels every theme. You've got your forest levels, your desert levels, your pirate-themed levels. The game describes itself as having a "low poly late 90s console look." Really, this is more like a, "late 90s console platformer from a forgotten studio that knew they couldn't hold a candle to Banjo-Kazooie so they didn't even try" look. The style is all over the place. The more clustered stages are pretty, while the bigger and more spread out levels look empty. Either way, these levels all feel empty, beyond the collectibles, mostly devoid of life and challenge. I don't know why this game even has a health bar. I didn't get hit once.

Then there are the fetus-themed levels. The visuals get flat and weird, and the music gets all haunting and ominous. I really thought that this was when the game was gonna flip the script and go full survival horror, but no. It's just weird for the sake of being weird. Some of that weirdness bleeds into the other themes, but just barely.

Is Super Kiwi 64 entertaining? I guess. It's the same sort of entertainment as that video of dancing vegetables you put on to distract your kids, instead of taking some of your precious time to play with them or read to them. You're a horrible parent. ♥♥♥♥ you.
This is an attempt at emulating the aesthetic of sometimes unsettling 90s platformers, with none of the depth or charm, the sort of game you'll complete in less than an hour and entirely forget by the next day. I don't wanna tell you how to spend your money, but three dollars will definitely go further elsewhere.

This is one of the hardest reviews I've ever had to write, not because I'm ashamed of what I have to say, or because my personal feelings of the game are conflicted, but just because there's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ much to talk about. I was on my fourth draft when I realized that the reason my rant wasn't getting short enough for Steam's dainty review criteria was due to me simply listing what changes the series had undergone from Morrowind. That alone pushed me into the 10k character count.

So, I suppose that the only way to even try to approach this is on the game's own terms, limiting both comparisons to what came before, as well as gauges against its sequels and spiritual successors in hindsight. I have to understand what the devs were going for, decide whether they accomplished it, and most importantly, decide whether the result is worthwhile.
How do I begin, though? Everyone already knows this series.

TES IV: Oblivion was released right on the cusp of the "HD era," before developers had truly figured out the realism that many titles strove for later in the life of the Xbox 360 and PS3; At this point, everything from that time looks dated, that wasn't at least drenched in some peculiar style to make up for its inevitable shortcomings, but the earliest to the party still manage to look the most... off.

Oblivion is no exception to this rule, especially considering its scale. It's beautiful from a distance, but jagged and rough up close. Cyrodiil's beautiful hills and mountains are covered in forests and other foliage that seem to grow with your approach. Pristine castles and elaborate houses of clean wood and sharp stone sit abruptly on patches of waxy wilderness, with no effort to blend their points of contact, or make it look like anything other than a Lego set placed on astroturf. Even the dirt looks clean. Medieval fantasy towns of somewhat believable size are populated by a wide array of Dr. Seuss characters: potato-faced elves, beardless Nords, and Khajiit resembling fursuits made on a two-digit budget.

Speaking of looks, the look of your character's equipment, a reflection of your level, will feel limited in the late game. High-tier heavy armor loses out to high-tier light armor when your light armor skill is maxed out, and there just aren't many of either.
Most variety in fashion is found not in the armors, but in the clothing that takes up the same slots, which is still lacking. Single-item outfits will supplant several equippable items to make you a visually boring amorphous blob, while some items display differently depending on the sex of your character. (I, for one, liked my man-skirt in Morrowind.) Fewer equippable items means fewer options for constant effect enchantments, and just overall less depth... but then, that is the overarching theme of this game.

Particularly with the actual RPG mechanics, that missed depth is on display. The 21 skills on offer are distributed equally among your attributes, and weighed equally when it comes time to determine what bonuses you get when you level up, which is frustrating seeing as how all skills are obviously not equally useful. You're *encouraged* to max out Endurance as soon as possible, as the exponential health gain benefit between levels is that much more exponentially punishing to delay; The other attributes, there isn't much long-term penalty for ignoring, and I ask, "Why deny myself the extra health if I'm going to max out whatever my favored attributes are and have to branch out into Endurance anyway?"

The world and its challenges are very much scaled to the player, right down to many of the enemies and quest rewards. On one hand, this often allows you to plow right into the content most suited for your character (or just whatever you want to do first) without regard for whether you'll be underpowered for the upcoming challenge. On the other hand, it means that items obtained earlier on, that would've been permanently useful if acquired later, are instead doomed to become obsolete. So, in essence, the game encourages a more counterintuitive behavior; Avoid doing the quests for the items you know you want until you're sure you'll get the best versions of those items.

Strangely, the quests mostly feel built to accommodate that sense of postponement. Their associated persons exist basically in their own isolated bubbles for their one quest, apart from maybe being regular merchants or guards, but nothing more. Again, calling back to Morrowind, many characters existed in what was more of a web of quests. They could become your best friends, keep you at arm's length, or die by your hand. It was still empowering to the player, but gave choice and result.
Here, though, you're only supposed to scratch the surface, and nothing more. The scale of the game was kept similar, but there's just less to it.

The factions share the same sense of isolation, and apart from the Thieves Guild, they don't really step on one another's toes or interact with each other. You can join every faction in one playthrough, and be the head of each simultaneously. They exist primarily as vehicles for their own questlines, atop one or two little perks each, rather than as extensions of your character's class and identity. These are very much "do or delay" scenarios, at your convenience, often in the manner of your choosing. Most of them play out in only one fashion, unless you do something stupid and get kicked out, which usually requires you to intentionally go out of your way. It's not that you can do anything; It's that you're supposed to do EVERYTHING, often without consequence, and there's a serious lack of immersion as a result, NPCs daily routines notwithstanding. There's rarely any sense of risk or urgency in the vast majority of this experience.

You have to realize, though, that most of these design decisions were clearly intentional. This was either never meant to be immersive, or, if it was, then the overly generous world that seems built to revolve around the player undermines it at every turn. It's a series of short bursts of fun, at the cost of a believable world and any long-term satisfaction that comes from building up the type of character you wanted to play, a class-based RPG that seems to resent its class system at every turn.

TES IV: Oblivion is an entertaining title, one that every ARPG fan should play once, and even that one playthrough is worth the price. Beyond that, though, it's also the most poignant shift in its series into a bland, utterly player-subservient direction. Its influence is more due to its quirkiness left over from its predecessors than the depth of its gameplay. Subsequent playthroughs feel less like I'm spending time in a fantasy world, and more like I'm dissecting a fantasy stage production where I'm the main character. Part of me knows that no matter what sort of character I create, it's usually going to end up in the exact same place, not because I want it, but because that's how the game was designed. Yet, even their journeys are only as different as a five-lane highway. Even in one lane, you can basically see what the others see.

Did you know that Max Payne had a GBA version? I say "version" instead of "port," because, well, you know. That was my first foray into the series. On a whim, I'd gone into a Gamestop, back when they actually sold games, and gotten a few GBA games that I knew had actual console or PC comparisons. Also on the list were Duke Nukem and GTA.
The catch, though, was that I had never before engaged with the "real" versions of any of those games. I was stuck in my hipster mindset of "I vaguely know what the games are about, and they're popular enough to be inescapably influential, so there's nothing more to glean from my partaking." Then, seeing what was undoubtedly going to be an inferior, portable version led to the morbid curiosity of, "How good could this possibly be?" Well, the answer was, "good enough to get me to check out the real version," though I'm glad that this one isn't a top-down sorta thing where you can't even tell where the danger's coming from.

It's weird, though. Max Payne doesn't actually bring much to the table that hasn't been done elsewhere, for better or for worse, but it holds up better than many of the third-person shooters that have borrowed from it in an attempt to copy its legacy.
The simplicity is what makes it so good. The action of the levels is chopped up into neat episodes with comic book style cutscenes populated by what were clearly the developers in community college theatre budget costumes, giving it their all. (I miss when that kind of thing was common in games.)
The voice acting is cheesy good.
The music is solid.
The visuals are... Visually, there are better looking games out there. Every character is given a .jpg photograph face. The world's surfaces are given no more depth than absolutely necessary, and many complex backdrops feel simply painted on as one texture. The game takes place at night, much of it in run-down urban locations, during the winter. So, the palette consists mainly of drab shades of gray, brown, and white.
What's impressive is how geographically memorable it manages to be in spite of its rough visuals. The levels are filled with interactive objects and things to destroy, constantly toying around with varied scenarios and different mechanics that usually lend well to the focused and fast-paced action, but never overstay their welcome.

The shooting is sharp, and the game is usually pretty good about keeping the player moving forward, giving you things to do. The cover system? There is no cover system, only what you can make for yourself from a crouch button, a few types of rolls, and "bullet time." Even with this, it's precise, with little fumbling around. It's sharp and quick. It's good that the player's mechanics are so refined, because I can't entirely say the same about the enemies'.

I don't want to say that the game is easier if you've beaten it before, because that's just every game ever, but on subsequent playthroughs and higher difficulties, one begins to understand *how* it's easy. Your opponents in this game are controlled by the most dated programming and design one can imagine, simple and predictable. 95% of their behavior is "run after you while shooting" or "crouch in place and shoot when you appear." However, the ones who chase you don't understand door technology, and the ones who make you chase them don't understand floor technology.
Toss a grenade near a guy you haven't aggro'd yet out of view, and he'll make no effort to save himself, and just sit there waiting for death. Or, a guy above you will endlessly fire down into the platform on which he's standing, because his line of sight doesn't line up with his gun. Or, you'll literally be able to run circles around a guy staying still in a wide open space, untouched by his bullets, because the enemies don't know that the guns in this game aren't hitscan and their bullets actually have to travel through the air as individual projectiles.
Max Payne's solution for this is perhaps even more dated, relying heavily on scripted sequences to try to catch you off guard, which will obviously only do their job on your first playthrough. You'll cross a certain invisible threshold, and all of a sudden two or three guys appear, flying straight at you with all piss and vinegar. Explosives will be chucked square onto your path around blind corners, giving you only a second to react. Occasionally, you'll be interrupted by a cutscene showing enemies advancing on your position, extra time that could be spent preparing for said enemies, but is instead spent on forcing you to run for cover and maybe switch your weapons when the cutscene ends and they're in the room with you.

To put it bluntly, this is a "gamey" game. It's not just the fact that, on the higher difficulties, the knowledge from the quantum immortality kicks in. It's the fact that on the higher difficulties you NEED to use this information to succeed, the fact that the solid controls and shooting mechanics won't be enough, and that this is where Max Payne stops short of continually forcing the player to think on one's feet.

Only other thing I have to complain about, is how certain parts of the game feel a bit roughly implemented. I don't mean, "having to install an unofficial patch to fix the audio and stop the crashing," although I did do that. I mean, in the more claustrophobic parts, how Max's arm will cover up the crosshair if you crouch or if your back is close to a wall, or how the crosshair becomes absolutely useless if an enemy is point blank. (Now, you might say, "Why not just switch to the bat?" To which, I say, "You gonna bring a bat to a gunfight?")

Regardless, the straightforwardness of Max Payne feels like a breath of fresh air in a market where it feels like everything but indie games are trying to be everything at once. Some of its more archaic flaws hold it back from perfection, but overall, it's a good reminder of how important it is to fine-tune the most immediate focus of a game, and just have fun with the rest. It elevates the less impressive aspects, and makes for an experience that's usually fun and memorable.

Divine Divinity is one of those classic isometric ARPGs that I didn't play when it was fresh. While I mostly enjoyed it, and it's a good way to unwind on one's own, it's an experience of extremes, good and bad. I don't mean it in the sense that this is one of the most crash-prone games I've ever played, though that is definitely the case. I mean that the amount of care put into much of its design is balanced out by how neglected (or intentionally ignored) other aspects are.

Presentation-wise, this game is close to perfect, everything it does well only slightly hampered by each its own little issue or two. The visuals are like a painting in motion, but the fixed camera angle means that objects can hide in the background, for which the game has a dedicated keybind for showing and labeling on-screen items. The soundtrack is gorgeous, and there's a great slew of charmingly campy voice acting, some of which was actually humorous enough to elicit a smirk from me, though it can come off as cheap when particularly talky and important characters for whatever reason aren't given voices for their lines.

The depth of the gameplay matches the detail of the presentation to a T. It starts out as a seemingly simple 3-class ARPG, but as you progress and level up, your options for your skills and equipment balloon outward, and you're really allowed to mix-and-match your build however you please. Want brute force? Wanna freeze baddies for cheap shots? Want indirect combat via traps and stealth? Wanna blend any or all of those? There are so many possibilities that you aren't liable to use them all in one playthrough, and for at least the first half of the game, you're going to see more variety and complexity than many AAA RPGs over two decades on.

Combat is obviously the main focus, but the NPCs also do a decent job (for the time) of making the world seem alive. Most can be talked to or traded with, giving them a believable amount of utility (instead of, say, existing for the sake of one quest and absolutely nothing else). Ignoring some obvious bugs (that I'll get to later), they're enough aware of the rules of their world to act as barriers to certain locations, or potentially stop you from stealing from their shops by throwing items.
The world feels somewhat realistic in size, yet it doesn't feel like there's a need for the type of overly simple fast travel that's common in such games nowadays, save for a handful of teleportation options, and even then it usually doesn't take forever just to get to where you need to go. It's choc-full of architecturally memorable locations, quests that start at the drop of a hat, and useful loot to collect. Even when you know exactly where the next objective is, if it's someplace you've never been, the journey will be ten times the event as the destination.

Even with this progression, though, Divine Divinity falls into that fatal trap of so many RPGs: a poorly-executed endgame. Maybe it was just because I was playing on Hard mode, but I eventually hit that point where it feels like there's too little butter for too much bread.
I'll have all this money, but little on which to spend it. The shopkeepers might occasionally sell a skill book I can use, but otherwise might as well only sell potions and services. Some skills that were useful early in the game become downright obsolete. All quests but the main quest are done, my equipment is some of (if not) the best, and there's basically nothing left to explore.
Even so, many of the enemies going forward are tanky, deadly, and give too little XP to not be a tedious grind. Yet, it seems like fighting them is what I'm expected to do, because there's no other concrete way to improve my character. That's where the game goes from "Use our RPG mechanics in the way we intended" to "Use Scorpion Traps to bypass the slog." Seriously, the Deadly Gift ability is so broken that I'm not sure whether to praise it for how useful it is, or take it as an affront for how necessary it can feel in the late-game, amid the similarly broken difficulty. Pure cheese, and it doesn't even need to be fully-leveled to annihilate the final stretch.

Actually, that cheese is omnipresent throughout the experience. It is VERY easy to intentionally break this game. You can throw the teleport item to skip cutscenes, go through walls, and go out of bounds. You can stack drink as many elixirs as you want to boost your resistances to the point that almost no magic can harm you. You can endlessly hard-reset shopkeepers until they sell exactly what you want.
I don't know whether I'd call this sort of fragility disappointing, as again, you often have to go out of your way to see it, but these oversights can seem too obvious when compared to how much attention was given to most everything else.

Divine Divinity was, and in many ways still is an ambitious game that gives most open-world ARPGs a run for their money. If you want something that hits you with both freedom and punishment, if you've got a lot of free time, and enough patience to deal with technical hiccups and more than a few contradictory design choices, then this is for you.

This is an isekai about a cynical old artist whose dreams haven't only not gone fulfilled, but have been corrupted into a corporate money stream of which the only escape is into a fantasy of his own creation... but don't take it too seriously.

I think that one of my biggest gripes of most point-and-click games isn't just that they bind the player down to some two-dimensional world with insanely specific ways to progress, but that the reasoning involved is often some sort of twisted MacGyver trick, something completely counter-intuitive that no rational person would consider, that would kill you if you attempted it in real life.

Toonstruck, I suppose, tries to turn that process upside-down. Instead of a kinda believable plot with a hundred ridiculous hoops to jump through, you've got a kinda ridiculous plot with a hundred *believable* hoops to jump through; Albeit, these are hoops of cartoon logic, which seem just about in line with how most point-and-click games feel in the first place. In that sense, many of the puzzles here feel fair when you revert your thinking to a child-like state. Plants behave like animals, animals behave like people, and people behave like caricatures in their own exaggerated worlds.

Puzzles get layered together here. Items will have several uses across several locations, which makes things feel nice and cohesive, though the sometimes clunky execution can create frustration when the game piles interactive objects on top of each other, with only one of which you're supposed to interact. As well, sometimes beyond just clustering things together to make you think "I already tried that," there's the confusion of indirect interactivity. For example, there was an item that I was trying to collect on top of a statue, but clicking on the item itself forced me to redo a short puzzle. I had to click on the statue. Why does it make a difference?

As for that imperfect execution, there are a few more bugs than I would've expected from such a small game. Some animations get stuck, or overlap. In the worst case, you'll lock up entirely, and no buttons will work; You'll have to tab out and close the game manually. I found this to be particularly annoying at one part of the game where it kept freezing up when I directly interacted with a piece of scenery. I was expected to use an inventory item, which would then cause me to automatically use said scenery object. I've again got to ask, "What's the difference?" and, "Couldn't the game have just given me a quippy denial, instead of outright breaking on me?"

The style is obviously a big selling point, and the presentation here is pretty good. The soundtrack is nice, and there are a lot of immediately recognizable actors who, despite the campiness of the game, somehow manage to make it feel inspired.

The visuals are obviously drenched in that 90's toon ambiance, with a healthy dose of 90's point-and-click crunchiness. However, I will say that, for a title which leans so heavily into its cartoon theme, some of the animation feels off. Sometimes you get these beautifully choreographed cutscenes, but other times it feels like there should be more detail, especially when some of the scenes move as slowly as they do, and especially considering how intricate many of the locations' backdrops are.

If you're one of those people who considers "thinking about how to do a puzzle" to be entertainment, then this is for you. For everyone else? It's not the "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" that it sometimes feels like it's trying to be, and its linear nature doesn't give much room for replay value beyond the jokes, but $10 still feels like a fair price for a somewhat memorable, pretty pleasurable experience.