Dying Light had a mediocre story and repetitive gameplay, but the parkour mechanic was what made it interesting in the long run. Jumping around and climbing stuff was so satisfying.

As for side scrollers, Ori might not be the most difficult platformer I’ve ever played, but it certainly was the most fun, thanks in no short part to the fluid and dynamic movement of the main character. The camera is also very wide, to allow you to see the road ahead clearly, which is not something that all platformers do right, surprisingly enough.

I don’t blame them. Nintendo fans buy anything at any price. I don’t see it being different this time.

Mario Kart 8 never goes on sale and sold 70m copies; Pokémon Scarlet/Violet sold 30m despite looking and playing like dogshit; they sold Skyward Sword HD, the remaster of a 10-yo game, at full price and still placed a few millions.

Nintendo is basically like Apple at this point, the brand is enough to convince people to spend more than they would for the competition, regardless of quality. I personally know a lot of people who loudly groaned/complained at the price announcement, but will still buy it day one, just like they always had in all these years.

And people terminally online should stop pretending the Steam Deck is competition to the Switch 2. It couldn’t even compete with the Switch 1, which was five years older, had worse performance, and had been easily emulated for years at that point.

Not much to say but this is the usual comment to thank you for your wonderful posts.

Enjoy Rome! Be sure to try our Carbonara at some point! :P

A subscription seems like the exact opposite of what GoG stands for. I buy a game, I own it forever. How does a subscription improve that?

I’m not well versed in finance. Is this good news for Ubisoft or bad news?

Yeah, community-made Pokemon games really hit some heights in recent years. Too bad Nintendo is so opposed to the homebrew scene.

I had lots of fun with Pokémon Odyssey last year, patiently waiting for the final update that should come this year as well. As I said, 2025 is packed!

Between this update, the new Digimon Story game and LumenTale, looks like this year will be packed for monster collector enthusiasts.

And Pokémon, I guess, but I lost interest in that franchise years ago.

So sad about GoG’s revenue drop. It’s my store of choice and I genuinely find it more unintrusive than Steam, but if it keeps going like this, I wonder how long it will exist. Hopefully they manage to turn things around.

I really liked GI and i was saddened by their closure. Quality journalism (gaming and elsewhere) is dying, substituted by AI slop, paid influencers and clickbait articles.

Hopefully a few of the good ones remain. This is a step in the right direction.

The answer to that question depends on your tastes, your current situation (amount of free time, mood, etc…) and many more. There’s no such thing as the “best” when it comes to a subjective piece of media.

I can’t even decide on my favourite game, because what I like and what I want to play depends on the aforementioned factors. I may be interested in a strong narrative today, on puzzles tomorrow, and on a crazy platformer game next. Different games resonate with me differently depending on when I play them.

Games that really stayed with me are (in no particular order) Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, CrossCode, Digimon World, Oddworld Abe’s Odyssey, Ace Combat 4-6, The Talos Principle, Ori and the Blind Forest, Threads of Fate, and I also spent a crazy amount of hours on Stronghold, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin and Medieval II Total War. There’s, like, at least half a dozen different genres in that list and all those games are very different from one another, but all had different qualities that resonated with me for one reason or the other.

I don’t think I agree. I feel like the game is so short and incomplete that you can see everything it has to offer by playing it for 10 minutes - or watching a YT gameplay.

The game has one map, no collisions, no AI. I think I remember it having different playable “rigs” but they are mechanically the same, so there’s no point.

At least with a game like Oblivion you could play it for 20 years and still find new ones. Big Rigs doesn’t have near the same “energy”.

Fun fact, Ace Combat 5 has a similar “going at ludicrous speed” bug (We have to go faster, We have to go even faster), but it also has an entire (actually good) playable game attached to it.

This feels like the Morbius re-release. Big Rigs is (in)famous for being one of the worst/most broken games ever made, who in their right mind would pay for it?

Quite the big step for gaming rights in the EU. In the last page, the document also mentions “whales” as “vulnerable people”, adding that a game targeting them specifically may run afoul of EU legislation when precaution are not taken to protect them from their impulses.

This may have a gigantic ripple effect in the industry – or it may not, if the industry decides that targeting whales in the US and China is more profitable than bowing to the EU.

It’s always a brighter day when I can wake up and read your gaming rants :)

The soundtrack is fine. It works very well in its context and I still hum some of its tones every now and then, but that’s mostly it imo. The end credits song is one of the best end themes I’ve ever heard in a videogame, though.

Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross and Xenogears are the holy trinity of JRPGs for me. Every fan of the genre should play them at least once in their lives.

2025 is the year of the X360. First the decomp tools, now this. Maybe we can even expect a serious attempt at emulating the system on PC? Xenia is still not good, unfortunately.

I’ll be honest, it doesn’t just “look like Advance Wars”. It looks like a rip-off. I love AW but I wish they went with a more original art style, like Wargroove did.

From the glimpses of the battle system, graphics and animations are truly insane. Incredible work from the devs.

About the GoG store’s second class treatment: it’s always worth it to email the publisher and ask them if they plan on updating their game on GoG!

I did exactly that a few months ago when I wanted to buy I was a teenage exocolonist - emailed Finji and let them know that their game was not up to date on the platform I wanted to buy the game on. They replied rather quickly and the game was updated a few days later. It was very nice because the game was on sale and, thanks to their quick reply, I was able to not miss the sale.

Still waiting for MS to do something right this whole generation.

AI techbros will have you believe that you can solve world hunger, cure cancer, and colonize Mars with a few prompts on ChatGPT.

Yet their AI is still incapable of answering two prompts consecutively without making shit up, or drawing a human without turning it into an eldritch abomination.

Game preservation could be fixed with open source emulators and fixing copyright laws so that I’m allowed to download a game nobody has profited from in two decades, but that’s not appealing to big corporations.

*Upcoming update for console insiders

Insiders may get bugs because that’s what the insider program is for.

Mildly surprised to see another installment in this series after all these years, but I’m pretty excited.

For those who don’t know, Styx is a AA stealth game where you play as a goblin assassin (the titular Styx). It spawned as a spin off of another fantasy game (Of orcs and men) where you played as both the goblin and an orc warrior, which was unfortunately a bit too janky for my tastes.

The focus on stealth of the following installments really benefitted the series, imo. While they still carry a bit of janky-ness (as many AA titles do), they are nevertheless a lot of fun! The story in the first one was very good as well. I still haven’t finished the second one, so I can’t comment much on it.

The first two games are also currently discounted on Steam and GoG ($2 for the first one and $3 for the second), and I think they are very much worth that much.

If you kind of liked the XIII games, I highly recommend Lighting Returns. Time limits make me deeply anxious but that game’s timer is VERY generous, especially because you can stop time pretty much forever. I 100% my first run in, like, four days out of thirteen.

The story is wacky as hell (I honestly didn’t care much after XIII-2), but gameplay’s solid and exploration is fun.

As for the last question, I think that they should go back to their roots. They pivoted away from the JRPG genre with each title, but recent successes from similar games (such as Persona 5 in the AAA department, and Sea of Stars in the indie category) proved that people still crave a more traditional turn-based system.

I really enjoyed Tunic for the same reason as you! It has nice and cozy vibes but manages to challenge the player without ever feeling too cheap or overwhelmingly difficult, in both combat and puzzles. I really was reminded of old-school gaming, in a good way.

The only thing I disliked is how cryptic the last few puzzles were, to the point that I doubt the vast percentage of the player base would be able to figure them out without resorting to a guide. I certainly wasn’t. I love puzzle games and I love games like Talos Principle and Crosscode. I guess I just didn’t like how meta-gamey some of the solutions (and the reward for the puzzles) were.

PS. Another great post and the formatting is excellent. Congrats!

As a fellow enthusiast with an obsessive-compulsive drive to write about my hobbies (not necessarily video-game related, but quite similar) i know that these things take a while to write, especially when you take the time to format everything correctly, link the sources, etc.

So I wanted to echo the others here and say that I really appreciate your work here. It was a fun way to start my day, and I’m looking forward to your next post :)

*three movies

Batgirl, Coyote vs ACME and a third one I can’t recall the name of.

Sony has stopped releasing games on GoG ever since they required login to the PSN. For example, you can buy God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn on GoG, but you can’t buy Ragnarok or Forbidden West.

They lifted the requirement a few weeks ago, but the games still have not been released on GoG, and at this point it’s doubtful they will.

Are they? Genuine question. Some of the FF titles I’ve played in the past were technical marvels on their respective consoles. FFXIII still gives modern games a run for their money on the graphical department, despite being 15 years old at this point. Not sure how they fare up nowadays though.

It did. It’s also on Switch and on Windows/Xbox as a Play Anywhere title on MS Store (buy once, get to play on both platforms). But from what I remember, FFIX was the one that needed the remaster treatment the least, as it plays fairly well on any emulator. FFVII and FFVIII, on the other hand, get more bearable with the built-in speed up button (which, yes, you can do on an emulator as well, but then the music gets sped up too and it gets annoying).

I was hoping for a new World game, but as a Digimon fan I’ve learnt not to be picky with new releases lol

Source: trust me bro

Fucking finally.

Oh damn, I don’t know why I thought it was a Capcom IP. Thanks for reminding me.

I was hoping for this after the Resident Evil bundle from a few months ago.

The way Dino Crisis 2 managed to turn the tankiness of the RE/Dino Crisis gameplay into an action-packed shooter is stunning to me and I love that game dearly. Replayed it last year and it holds up surprisingly well!

Now let’s hope for a Pararisite Eve GOG release! :D

I honestly just think that most people have bad text analysis skills/lack of proper reading comprehension. The book is told by the perspective of a specific character, and that character says “the sky is green”, so people believe it because they can’t detach the POV from what they are reading. It happens every time, such as people believing that the Space Marines are the good guys, or that the fascist dictatorship in Starship Trooper isn’t that bad after all.

The movies whitewashed a lot of bad stuff, and I still felt creeped out by them when I was a kid. I’m happy that some people is finally coming around to understanding it now that JKR is more vocal of her outlandish political views.

Racism and bigotry is so intrinsic to the world building of HP, that I find it kind of impossible to completely avoid it even by pirating the game to give no money to JKR and her allies.

Unfortunately, it looks like a remake of Sigma 2 with the gore added back in :(

Kind of pointless when we already had Sigma 2 in the remastered trilogy that’s already available everywhere, while the OG Ninja Gaiden 2 is stuck on Xbox consoles. Still nice to see Ninja Gaiden news though.

Can’t wait to play this one, it seems really interesting. I’m loving the revival of AAA games with turn-based combat as of late :)