[blog] churros are fried until they become crunchy, and may be sprinkled with sugar

As far as I could find, the Sands of Time Remake hasn't been canceled. It may have restarted development at some point but it's still going.

As far as I could find, the Sands of Time Remake hasn't been canceled. It may have restarted development at some point but it's still going.

🤞

I got sick for a couple of days and I wasn't in the mood to play anything serious or that required my full attention. I got this game with a discount and it seemed like the perfect mindless game for a sick day.

And it was great! Just what I needed, a stupid little game with easy controls that I don't have to think so much plus some old episodes of the TV show (my comfort food/guilty pleasure I guess). I played 4 out of the 5 campaign chapters and had a great time.

Then I got healthy again and went back to play the last chapter of the campaign. I couldn't stand how dull this game is. Retired.

Everything about the game feels underdeveloped, especially when you compare it with the other (great) RPGs available in the franchise. The combat lacks weight and they didn't figure out a way to do good visual feedback on the attacks. No matter how much nostalgia I have for that horrible N64 game, I couldn't play it to completion.

As a last note, to be fair, the game is designed mostly for multiplayer and to be played with friends, and I played it with bots. But on the other hand, anything is 'better with friends' anyway, right?

Result: retired

Rating: 7/10

Screenshots:


There is an abundance of pooping and farting references, as expected.


And vomiting.


Why didn't the toilet paper make it across the road? It got stuck in the crack.

¡Un forastero!

What can I say. It's RE4, it's RE Engine, it's Capcom doing great as they have been doing it nowadays. I love the progression of this game, both how different some sections feel (villa, castle, lab, etc) and how it becomes more actiony as it goes (saving bullets at the beginning, blasting everything at the end).

I still thinks the original RE4 is very playable (it's tanky but not as bad as the PS1 games), but it's hard to go back I confess. Moving around and aiming feels just right in here (as with the other remakes).

The DLC is pretty good as well and I tried my best to play it 'side by side', progressing on both campaigns at the same pace. I wish they could somehow do this out the box, like an official order of the chapters to go back and forth the two campaigns.

It's a very good game, really easy to recommend, but it's not my favorite Resident Evil. I'm one of the few that loved RE3 remake and I have it in high regard (I love how replayable it is). Village still takes the top spot for me (I want to replay it in third person so badly!).

Result: completed

Rating: 9/10

Pros:
+ controls well
+ great progression
+ weapon variety
+ good voice acting
+ cheesy cutscenes and dialog in a good way

Cons:
- (none)

I really wanted to love this game. I played Diablo 1 back in the day and absolutely loved it, both the gameplay and the unforgettable atmosphere. The tristan theme is my favorite video game music ever.

I skipped Diablo 2 because I didn't own a PC at those times (I played D1 on a PS1) and then I played Diablo 3 many years later (somewhat recently) with low expectations, it felt so different. And for sure it was, I found it too cartoony for my taste (that WoW look and feel) and I missed the simplicity of the setting of the first, ended up retiring it after few hours of play.

With Diablo 4 Blizzard went with a darker tone which got me a bit excited. In a way it delivered, I think the scenarios are gorgeous and sets up the mood perfectly (even though it doesn't match the simplicity of the first). The music is top notch. The classes and skills are interesting enough. Big open-world with lots of stuff to do. What could go wrong?

Difficulty. Or lack thereof. The game is just too easy. Shortly after picking up some few levels and unlocking what became my main skills, the game became a chore to play. I know ARPGs are not supposed to have complex gameplay (it's mostly a 'zone out' kind of game) but playing in World Tier 2 (the hardest available before beating the main campaign) felt like story mode.

I've picked the rogue class for my character and made a build about poison damage and setting up traps, didn't read anything on internet I simply picked up because it sounded fun. In my mind this was supposed to be a swift character, set up traps, attack with poison, dodge, and keep moving, right? Well, in practice, I felt like a tank. My armor bonuses that recovered life automatically alone were enough to take care of almost all the damage I ever took, no need to heal or to move away from the line of fire. I made a build expecting to keep jumping around on the screen and suddenly I realized that I just didn't have to move at all. The game was on story mode despite being on the hardest difficulty available.

So I decide to 'speed run' the main campaign to unlock the World Tier 3. This choice of locking tier 3 difficulty behind beating the campaign kinda ruined the game for me. The story of this game seems pretty cool, but playing in a hurry (not taking the optional dialog options, skipping some side stuff on the cities in the way, etc) killed all the immersion.

World Tier 3 seems a bit better after I tested it out on a dungeon, felt like what Tier 2 should be. But for now I'm good with the game. I'll probably forget about it for awhile and maybe come back to it later, after a expansion or two gets release.

Oh, and last balancing thing that is kinda of atrocious: it seems that everything balances to your level. Leveling up and grinding fells a bit pointless if the entire game will level up together with you, right?

Result: completed

Rating: 7/10

Pros:
+ great graphics
+ great ost
+ great voice acting
+ interesting plot
+ vast world
+ quick to move around
+ fun character builds
+ easy to respec

Cons:
- too easy
- world tier 3 locked behind campaign
- always online
- greedy microtransactions
- repetitive

I think this game is overrated. As the studio’s first game (it is the first, right?) it’s quite ambitious. The stages are big, there is a good amount of enemy variety, and the game models are highly detailed. However it fails in some key parts of its execution.

There are a lot of invisible walls, that would be completely fine if the game didn’t push you to go off the beaten path and explore. It never felt great trying to get into a corner that visually seems unblocked and realizing that you are blocked by an invisible wall.

The combat audio and visual cues are fine, but I could notice a bit of an annoying input lag. I was playing just fine, but it never feels great to adapt your brain to react with a slight delay, even if you are able to do so (like I was).

The bosses were a hit or miss. The small-ish ones, that stuck to the ground, were amazing. The bigger one’s felt pretty bad. It’s bosses like those that makes me value the Monster Hunter series even more: it turns out that movement and hitboxes of huge creatures aren’t easy to develop. I ended up retiring the game while on one of those.

Oh, and there’s a particular stage that is so long with enemies and locations spread out so sparse around it. I think they did it on purpose, to convey a sense of grandeur, but it just made it painfully boring to traverse it.

Result: retired

Pros:
+ beautiful graphics
+ easy to understand mechanics
+ amazing enemy variety
+ great boss design

Cons:
- minor input lag
- no map
- hard to follow story

Rating: 7/10

Screenshots:


Give me those eyes.


You’re too pale, are you alright?


Agree, buddha. The game is just “OK”.

I’m never lucky with those games, boomer shooters that is. At first I thought this was the one, I was loving just mindless running around and killing everybody. Then I was down in one hit by a not so visible trap and had to replay the entire level.

That was annoying but I kept going. Two or three stages later I got stuck in a level just not knowing what to do. Yeah, I’m never lucky with those games.

I like the Roman aesthetic and vengeance theme though.

Result: retired

Pros:
+ interesting scenarios
+ simple controls

Cons:
- no checkpoints
- unfair traps
- unbalanced


Cozy.


Not so cozy.


Let’s slash all those pixels.

After being tempted many times to buy this on a sale, I finally did it. The game is not great, but it’s good.

It turns out that life on Mars it’s kinda repetitive, everything has a brown or orange color, missions are not super creative, the environments are bland. But blowing stuff up is fun and that carried me throughout almost the entire game.

Almost the entire game. I retired it because the game required some stupid item that I didn’t purchase to enable the last mission (and have better things to do than farm currency on Red Faction Guerrilla).

I wonder how fun Teardown is. If I find myself itching for a game of this kind again I’ll probably try it out.

Result: retired

Rating: 7/10

Pros:
+ destructible environments
+ easy to pick up and play

Cons:
- repetitive
- bland artstyle
- last mission locked behind an item purchase

I don’t know why but I had this on my library (some Humble Bundle of the past). After playing Guerrilla I thought, why not try this one out too?

It’s a completely different game. While the destructible stuff is here, the game is incredibly linear, corridor-style sometimes. The game is well made but I honestly missed the mix of openness and destruction.

The game was fine but it was missing the fun, I ended up retiring shortly after I started. Maybe my expectations are to blame here.

Result: retired

What a lovely weird little game.

The story is nothing to write home about, but the imagery of getting your heart stolen by the dragon at the very beginning of the game is really iconic.

It starts incredibly slow and doesn’t hold your hand, but if you endure the first couple of hours or so, you get rewarded with amazing combat and a decent map to explore. I played as a ranger and I liked how it makes you press the button in a rhythm to shoot the arrows (instead of holding or bashing the button mindlessly).

The game attempts to bring a bit of realism as game mechanics. Things like the food spoiling if you keep them in your bag for too long, and you have to manually turn on/off your lantern while keeping an eye on the oil burning. Cool ideas, but it didn’t matter much in the end. Oil was easy to find and durable, and I barely needed to eat food (my pawn was a mage and healed me most of the time).

I love how the game attempted to make you plan for your travels, but playing the Dark Arisen version kind of ruined it (infinite fast travel). But putting the fast travel spots yourself was awesome, forced me to think of the best location for them.

One big downside is that the game has a lot of stupid job post quests like “kill 30 goblins.”

50 hours after enjoying a lot of it, I retired due to a stupid reason: I came back to the game months after pausing my playthrough and I forgot what was going on with the main story or what to do. Didn’t bother figuring it out or seeing the end, but I’m pretty sure I was one or two quests away from completing it.

Oh, and mounting the beast was pretty fun. It’s like a Monster Hunter RPG (same engine even I guess).

Result: retired

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ engaging combat
+ innovative gameplay
+ you can mount giant monsters

Cons:
- boring quests
- pawns can fall off cliffs on their own
- forgettable music

Screenshots:


Just walking around.


Princess… Zelda?


Yes, I use Linux, how did you know?

What a sequel. This game is amazing. It improves the first game in every single way.

Beautiful graphics. Pawns are easier to manage. Exploration is rewarding. You have to actually plan out your journey. Main plot it’s pretty interesting. Less stupid subquests. Stellar enemy design and behavior. It respects your intelligence.

Funny how a Japanese developer is setting a really high bar for the western RPG genre.

Result: completed

Rating: 9/10

This godsend answer fixed my audio glitching on Linux, which happened with most games: https://askubuntu.com/a/1525337

Leaving this here mostly for myself, but might help others.

I didn't like both Ori games so in theory this one would be a pass, but thankfully I decided to try it out anyway.

Oh, this is Early Access by the way.

I'm not in love with the artstyle, but I quite like the isometric camera in a more slow paced game. What's not great is the game optimization, or the lack of it. It didn't run too great on my system, but it wasn't bad enough for me to drop it. And forgivable, I'm playing the game earlier after all.

Stamina based combat plus bonfires, so that obvious game influence is there. The game is all about exploring and combat, and combat is good!

Exploring is better than good. I love the level design here. In a slew of procedural generated roguelites on steam, it is refreshing to explore such a handcrafted world. This is by far the best aspect of the game.

I couldn't care less about the story, but that's more on me than on the game. There's a light crafting system and you can own a house decorate it, thankfully you don't have to engage too much with those.

The campaign is unfinished, but there's a good chunk of a good game here.

Result: completed

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ Stellar level design
+ good combat
+ weapon variety

Cons:
- runs poorly (early access)

Screenshots:


Playing it on potato mode.


Some religious stuff going on in the story.

What a great little game. I'm a bit tired of games blending genres nowadays, but this one does just right. It's Metroidvania, bullet hell, and classic top-down Zelda. And somehow everything gels perfectly.

The game has a bit of an old school flash game look and feel, which works much better than the bland, lazy, and poorly made pixel art of some recent indie games.

Game has a good length, good amount of secrets, amazing boss battles. I'm a sucker for bullet hell bosses in non bullet hell games.

Everything about it is polished and feels nice. I would love to glide a little ship again on a sequel, fingers crossed.

Result: completed

Rating: 9/10

Pros:
+ great controls
+ charming visuals
+ stellar soundtrack
+ great boss battles
+ memorable map

Cons:
- (none)

Screenshots:


Pew pew pew.

Another tech support probably for my future self kind of post. I'm playing Path of Exile 2 in short bursts (great game!), and without a good apparent reason the game started lagging a lot when I moved around.

I change and tried every graphical option imaginable, and restarted the game many times. No luck. Until my Google search blessed me with this answer:

IT WAS THE MOUSE. ANYTHING ABOVE 1K HZ LAGS IT OUT. Thats so funny

Yup, the reason of my lag was my newly purchased mouse, this guy:



A mouse making a game lag, now I've seen everything.

Microsoft keyboard and mouse center, or something like this, recognized my new rodent friend but I can only adjust DPI and set some macros on the mouse.

Also, I never expected you could get the polling rate through a website, pretty neat: https://cps-check.com/polling-rate-check. Might not be the most precise thing in the world, but it works. I tried a bunch on configuration on my machine (Linux) to force it to be polled less frequent and help me test it (no luck btw).

I don't know why, but RetroArch from steam is not been able to download thumbnails (at least for me). The solution was to download everything, extract it, and put on "RetroArch/thumbnail/" folder. Takes a bunch of space (~10gb for me), but solves the problem for good.

https://github.com/libretro-thumbnails/libretro-thumbnails

What did I just play?

I usually avoid walking simulators or old school adventure games because I know I don’t have the patience for them, but recently I’ve been trying some of them and liking it. Maybe I’m just getting older.

There are some little puzzles, I had to look up on the web for a couple and it felt more like bad UI and not really my fault. But overall they didn’t halt my gameplay too much.

What’s unique and the very best about this game is that this is actually what “psychological horror” is supposed to be. A lot of games emphasize horror as something outside of your mind. Not here, in this game you play in first person characters going insane. I love it.

I don’t care about the spoilers on this one: there is a cannibalism scene. Thankfully, not too graphic due the low res artstyle. They could have warned it though.

Result: completed (2h 30m)

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ more psychological than horror
+ charismatic characters
+ memorable moments
+ immersive

Cons:
- a couple of easy to get stuck moments
- the game should warn that contains sensitive themes

This is a double-A gem.

This game feels old school in the best sense of the term: great level design. It saddens me when I think the crazy amount of procedurally generated roguelikes in the indie world and how everything became open world in the AAA space. Thankfully, this is neither.

For the love of god, Zelda and Dark Souls became Ubisoft-style open world games. Oh, that’s a rant for another day, back on the subject.

The weapons are all thematically themed (fire, ice, etc) and the game makes you use their variety both in combat and exploration, mostly in combat. Most of the enemies are color coded, it’s not really a task of figuring it out what to use it and more of doing weapon swapping while being agile and avoiding damage.

The combat is demanding, but the game felt perfectly balanced on the normal difficulty, I wouldn’t change a thing. When reading some of the Steam reviews, to my surprise, people do complain as being too difficult though.

I have a theory why: moving around is slightly clunky and the game is very demanding in that regard, you are constantly moving, dodging, and turning in midst of fights. Didn’t feel like a problem to me though, quite the opposite, the ‘clunkiness’ is pretty consistent and predictable. It actually allows you to be more precise than an otherwise ‘floaty’ movement.

Just like with the combat, the puzzles felt spot on. I wouldn’t change a thing.

I have just a couple of minor complaints. A particular boss could have a bit of a hint that there is a gimmick and how it works. Another one is that some enemies requires you to turn 180 degrees and the camera takes too long to do that (I played with a controller). A dedicated button to turn around would be perfect in this game.

Result: completed

Rating: 9/10

Pros:
+ stellar level design
+ great combat
+ great weapon and powerup variety
+ atmospheric
+ easy to follow story

Cons:
- turning the camera around could be tweaked
- some bosses could have better hints

In this kind of game (ARPGs, that is), I always go for the ranged option, and I wasn’t disappointed. The class was fun to play, and I managed to create a workable build without looking anything up online. The skill tree is more daunting than it looks. I focused on speed, poison, and ice. Apply status effect on crowds, run, status effect again, run, rinse and repeat, then finish off the last enemies with regular attacks.

One of the best things about this game is the bosses. They are surprisingly varied and require learning their patterns and strategizing a bit, but never too much.
The enemy variety is great. The three acts are vastly different in terms of characters you meet and places you visit. The music and sound design are also excellent.

An innovation of this game that I like, but not everyone loved, is that you move with WASD (instead of clicking), and there’s a dodge roll (a must for bosses). It’s a tad slower paced than most games of the genre too. Some folks even started calling it a souls-like, but I wouldn’t classify it as one of those at all.

Other than stash space, all the microtransactions are cosmetic. One amazing quality-of-life feature: despite being an online game, you can pause. That’s right, if you’re playing alone, you can pause the game.

It pains me to retire this game, especially because I was right at the end of the main campaign and was enjoying it a lot. But I reached a particular boss (Viper Napuatzi) in which my FPS dips to 20, which makes it impossible to beat it. There’s a specific quick attack that kills me in one hit, and it’s impossible to dodge with such sluggish performance.

Changing graphical options didn’t help (even playing on potato mode at 1024x768). I think the fault lies with my CPU (which isn’t the greatest). But on the other hand, the game is also at fault: it doesn’t feel like there’s enough going on in the fight to make the CPU struggle this much.

I’ll probably check if things on this fight particularly improves on my end after it leaves early access. Fingers crossed.

Result: retired

Rating: 9/10

Pros:
+ stellar boss designs
+ beautiful graphics
+ great music and sound design
+ fun builds
+ WASD movement option

Cons:
- server issues
- performance dips
- some in-game descriptions are too vague

Screenshots:


Are those..?


Yup. And what a comforting justification.


What’s going on down there in that cage?

Another "tech support for myself" kind of post:

Blizzard doesn't list the old Diablo 2 installer on their main website anymore since there is a remake now, but it's downloadable here (game) and here (LOD expansion).

This was one of my favorite boomer shooter experiences. There are so many small quality of life features that fix almost all the gripes I usually have with this kind of game.

The main problem with games similar to the original doom is the level design. Finding the colored keys to unlock doors is fine until you find yourself in an unintentional labyrinth. I love getting lost in a good zelda dungeon, for instance, but it doesn’t gel well with this kind of game. Thankfully, there is a magic trail that guides you to the right path with just the press of a button. No shame in using that.

The weapon variety is great, and during the more chaotic encounters, I found myself strategizing a bit (but not too much) about which weapon to use for which enemy.

The game does feel slightly unbalanced at times, but it is not a deal breaker. Checkpoints can also be a bit odd. Sometimes you get one right after another, while other times it feels like ages before the next one.

The one negative part of the game that drove me nuts is that if I load an auto-save from the campaign, I have all my weapons. But when I decide to restart the level (within the same campaign), I lose all my weapons. That wouldn’t be such a big problem, except some of the better weapons are pretty rare to find again.

The music felt kind of generic, but the sound design is excellent.

Result: completed

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ good controls
+ great weapon variety
+ quality of life features

Cons:
- easy to pick up and play
- unbalanced moments
- bad checkpointing

Screenshots:


My loyal companion.



What a no-filler experience.

I couldn’t care less about the story. I’m not a warhammer person. The shooting feels amazing, and chainsawing through enemies is even better.
There aren’t a lot of branching paths, collectibles, or "protect this civilian while danger happens" moments. You just go forward and kill everything in your path, and I loved it.

I do wish the level design were a bit more creative, maybe with more environmental elements to use or avoid during combat. A few more enemy types wouldn’t hurt either.

I beat the game in two sittings, but you could easily finish it in one if you have the time. The campaign is too short, but I got the game on a good sale, so I can’t complain. Honestly, I prefer a great game that’s too short over a bad one, no matter the length.

Result: completed (7h 30m)

Rating: 8/10

Pros:
+ chainsaw
+ no filler
+ good controls
+ good audio design

Cons:
- level design is too simple

Screenshots:


You talkin' to me?


YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?


Now that’s a big f’ing gun.



Sadly this game run like *** on my machine. Another case of my CPU not being able to handle a game (looking at you Path of Exile 2). The amount of stuff happening in the background made it unplayable.

Retired until I get a better rig…

Result: retired

Played for 10 minutes. A cat walking simulator?

Not a fair opinion after playing it for 15 minutes but, for a cat roleplay, all my expectation was to freely... JUMP! What a disappointment.

Result: retired

Screenshots:


Cat game.


Yup, cat game.

Stray actually has a really cool story! I hope you'll give it another chance one of these days. It's honestly probably one of my favorites.