wakka

Thinking about just albums that were released in 2023, it's definitely Fake Names' Expendables. If anyone is a fan of Cyberpunk 2077's Samurai (Swedish punk rock band Refused), Fake Names is the lead singer Dennis Lyxzen's pop punk project. I am especially fond of the song "Can't Take It", which effortlessly mashes up the kind of politically-driven catharsis Refused is known for with catchy and infectious pop elements. It's more of an earworm than its lyrical theme might let on. 😂

I can't say that I'm looking for a game to be "mindblowingly good" per se, and I think "unique" would be overstating it. There are definitely popular formulas to follow if a studio wants to succeed; but I have appreciated games like Telltale's The Walking Dead for reinvigorating a neglected formula (point-and-click adventure), breaking up releases that are surfeit of similar trappings. Both their Tales from the Borderlands and Sega's Yakuza are funny in a way that the majority of games aren't (i.e., on purpose), and Yakuza leverages a really small open world, contravening most titles, in order to deliver depth through depth rather than breadth.

I grew up as a big fan of Final Fantasy, but I think Like a Dragon definitively bests any RPG Square has put out since FF12. It's not like those games haven't been good, but they've been as stale as they are excellent. As games' budgets continue to explode (Last of Us Part II and Forbidden West, $200+ million each, Cyberpunk 2077, $300+ million), there has been some creative sclerosis in the name of risk mitigation. Why invest that kind of money into something that isn't almost surely going to make it back? People appreciated Sega's Dreamcast for its experimentation; however, its own yen for experimentation is a part of what killed it. I think gamers are often expressing a desire to experience something different rather than anything else, but it's not dumb of studios to play it safe, either. A bit of 'a rock and a hard place'!

FFX, for either question, which I have played through about a dozen times. It's strange that "coherent" could be a superlative when it comes to a franchise's stories, but that was my impression of what helped set X apart from its three immediate predecessors. Besides the sphere grid being an interesting twist on leveling, allowing for a lot of permutations, the game also nailed voice acting at a time when it was still in its relative infancy in the industry. The performances more than hold up now, too. The visuals were stupidly good looking for the time.

I like how the story manages to discuss race and religion in an artful way, e.g., the vagaries of the tension between the Al Bhed and Yevonites, the heretics and the faithful, conveyed through Rikku and Wakka, who must co-exist; the dichotomy of Seymour bridging relations between humans and the Guado, while also working simultaneously to destroy human and Guado life; or the party being banned from temples, but continuing their pilgrimage anyway, the battle with Yunalesca being their decisive act of iconoclasm. The game straddles a line between institutional religion vs. personal faith vs. secularity, and finds an intersection between them all. It's a well-told story.

Looking forward to Telltale's The Expanse. Played New Tales from the Borderlands last year, but it scratched an itch more because it ended a wide delta between releases of these kinds of point-and-click adventures games than because it was a genuinely good "Telltale" game.

Also looking forward to the DLC for Cyberpunk 2077. I've played through it twice now (actually started a third run). A lot of the story is in the periphery, kind of like Morrowind. There's probably reams of literature gamers skip through, but shards in Cyberpunk, like the endless dialog boxes of TES3, flesh out each's respective world in a satisfying way. Reeves' Wick only says 380 words in John Wick 4; I'm curious to see what the studio will squeeze out of the similarly tight-lipped Silverhand ...

I can't say that I have any games that I love that are rated abysmally low by Metacritic, but I thought that Telltale's third season of The Walking Dead, A New Frontier, was actually the best of the franchise, although it has an aggregate score of 69. Pivoting Clementine back to the third person, but as a grown-up "Dirty Harry Clem", as her voice actor Melissa Hutchison calls her, was the right metamorphosis for the character. I also thought that the game correctly copied an important part of the original formula: interspersing moments of despair with ones of hope, propelling the player through loss. That's really hard to do when a cardinal, driving mechanism of the story is character deaths. It's even harder when attempting to do it for a third time in a row; but they managed it.

There are a lot of things that A New Frontier got right, but I think the way that Telltale oversaturated the second installment with despair just turned off a lot of gamers from the series. The Final Season is scored higher, but, I have to say, I get some jarring "art imitating life" vibes from the story. It mostly felt like an effort from the studio to almost kill its darling, which, I guess, is a microcosm of the studio's own fate.

I was a big fan of X-Play with Sessler and Webb back in the day, as well as the Pereira/Munn Attack of the Show. My most vivid memory of AotS, for whatever reason, is Kevin covering Occupy Wall Street, which wasn't getting a lot of traction elsewhere in media at the time. That being said, I've only seen one of the new AotS episodes, and some of the Sessler videos. G4 probably has to do a better job of adapting to the current industry. I mean, I miss reading Greg Kasavin reviews, but even if a sizable portion of gamers felt that way, their appetite would probably be somewhat satiated reading his GotY list, once a year, on this site. How would you update the written word for the times? Bringing something back without integration just results in an anachronism, right? 🤷‍♂️

Dan is back, and he was the bloke most excited about playing Shenmue; so, I would like to see this madman pick (abduct?) two staff members and finish the saga. 😂

Almost never. I think the last time I did was the FFVII remake for PS4, which is about as ridiculously anticipated as a release gets. Regardless of what the new "starting point" for titles is, my magic number is usually $19.99, lol.

Started my playthrough a few weeks ago on PS5, finished it. I clocked about 100 hours, going through all the gigs, side quests, etc.; I encountered one or two crashes that were totally inconsequential considering where I was checkpointed. I don't think, though, that that's out of the ordinary for most games, anyway. It feels really polished at this point. Highly enjoyed the game and am looking forward to the DLC.

Kingdom Hearts 3 ... a bit of a sunk cost effect and wanted to "see it through"; of course, these games might as well have been written by Vince Russo, and I cannot recall how many 'false finishes' I thought I saw in the third game alone ...

I actually thought that the KH3 trailer was satire when I first saw it. The voice acting was especially horrendous, and maybe this is the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, but it has seemed to get worse over the course of the series. A lot of the dialogue in the game feels really disjointed and lacking the right inflection, timing, etc., as if the characters had had entirely different conversations, and then bits of each conversation were plucked and patchworked into a coherent meta.

The game is bad in a lot of ways. That's just what stuck out, off the top of my head. I can thank corona-chan and lockdowns for finishing the playthrough.

Apologies to Jan who loved the game (and cried over Donald?). 😂

(Maybe I can put Shenmue III up here in the future ... It's still in the shrink wrap at this point, and I'm not sure if I have the heart to touch it. I'm kind of content with having collected it LOL).