Recent reviews by Hunter

this game does have some of that 90s point n click bs, from obscure puzzles, to timed sequences that can result in game overs, to, well, being able to even get a game over, to the pixel hunt, to the excess mouse functions that could have really been streamlined (seriously when do you ever use push in this game?)
but
the story, the writing, the visuals, the voice acting, everything else comes together to make this one of the best point n click games of the 90s... just play with a guide and have a separate save for every day (you'll thank me when you forget to leave the snake scepter under the cushion and screw yourself over on the final day)

theres genuinely a lot good about this game, but its very jank
not necessarily the bad jank (beyond dealing with a shoddy pc port bc i dont wanna deal with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ n64 version)
but its not that good jank either
it almost hits that sweet spot of good jank
but it doesnt
leaving this with a managable jank that still adds a level of tension, and immersion that really makes you feel like dash rendar
like for all its awkward clumsiness and clunk
its making me play cautiously, the autoaim is gracious enough that while i still need to line up the shot, i dont need to land the pixel on it, its kind of like goldeneye or timesplitters shooting, at least on foot
and the very VERY jank controls do add a certain tension to things, making the set pieces FEEL cinematic, and not in the modern sense of the word, but in the genuinely immersive way like im in my characters shoes
so like theres one moment where ice starts breaking apart in the second level, and the clumsy awkward jank and weird controls had cost me 2 or 3 of my 4 lives earlier in the level due to platforming, so when the ice started to break, my immediate reaction was OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD" as i was running and jumping down the rapidly separating hall, only to be greeted by 2 troopers as i was on 5 health, which just made me mash my mouse button before they could land one shot on me
its such a feeling that i genuinely havent felt in games in a long time, the genuine rush of a tense setpiece. not just a hard moment in a game, but a moment that catches you off guard, keeps you on your toes and doesnt hold your hand to show the character do all the cool ♥♥♥♥, it lets ME have the cool action movie escape
its something i think games have kinda lost
but im making the game sound better than it is. it's genuinely a mixed bag, leaning on absolute mess
let's start from the beginning;
the opening level is a flying level, and its pretty fun, albeit slow. you remember those levels in star fox where you're not on rails but youre in an aerial dogfight arena? think that, but you shoot star wars shots. you do a section where you take out a couple droids and theyre piss weak, but hey its to get you used to the controls and feel so whatever. then you need to take down walkers, and theyre spongy, but not hard, though you might die crashing into them when you just want it to die already. then... you get to the camels and this becomes a problem. do beat the camels, you can either go back and forth around the arena shooting it for 5 minutes as each shot does a third of a percent of damage... or you can hook its legs. now, the game obviously wants you to hook its legs, but there are limited hooks. more than enough for the amount of camels, but, the camera, annoyingly, switches views when you hook the line to the leg, and you just need to deal with the clumsy controls and rapid camera change. ive lost so many lines from just being disoriented from the switch, you have no idea. after that, you get a stage with 2 camels, 4 walkers and several droids... its not hard but my god it takes forever, and god help you if you lose all your cables before you take down all the camels. so yeah the level loses some of its luster after you take down that first camel.
the next level is an on foot level, and these are the best parts of the game, this is the level i played when i described the feel of the game at the start of this. theres some simple fun in running around, blasting storm troppers, and having an on foot boss with one of those walkers from the first level but in an enclosed area... and then you can just cheese it by strafing around it from behind and shooting. it did not land a single shot on me. still kinda cool though
the next level is a short on-rails shooter where you can look in any direction and you need to shoot down like 60 ships or so and the controls are so terrible on pc, i dont even know how to describe it. its only 4 and a half minutes thankfully and i didnt die, so thankfully its not much of an issue
the next level is another on foot level but youre on a train and need to jump over obstacles and jump to other tracks... i dont want to talk to this level
the next level is another on-foot level but with an emphasis on platforming as well as shooting, and you get a jetpack. its fun, but i game over'd at the end, which kind of killed my enthusiasm, so i cheated my way to the next level
and im pretty sure this is further than i ever got as a kid, so i was curious to see what this biker level would be like
i played this level for 3 minutes, and decided to drop this game entirely
i really dont want to talk about it, its one of the worst levels ive ever touched in a game
i could just skip past it, sure, i used a code to unlock all levels, but the level was so bad it just killed any enthusiasm i had for the game

strife is so ahead of its time, its not even funny
i first heard of this game from ross's game dungeon close to a decade ago, and i've been meaning to play it ever since. sometimes i would pick it up, play for half an hour, forget i even started it, lose time in some other game, then a year or 2 later come back and do the same thing, rinse repeat like 3-4 times, always interested, but never committed. until now, that is, as i'm going through my backlog in release order.
and for some reason, once i started playing this time, i was entranced by this game from the start and couldnt put it down.
see now, this is no simple 90s fps on the doom engine, this game decides to take doom and turn it into a story-based role-playing game. prior to this game, almost every first person shooter was pretty much "go through the maze killing every monster you see and humping the wall, find 3 keycards, get to the elevator", and theres nothing wrong with that, duke3d and blood are some of my favorite games of all time, but the genre needed something added to it, lest it stagnate. so now, you go from that, to this game that has a story, it has cutscenes with cool comic type art, you can talk to characters and they're voice acted with passion, you can take on quests and even side quests, there's a primitive wanted system, currency, shops, items that arent just guns or health, a massive map that doesn't just feel like levels but rather a world, hell you can even go back to other areas at almost any time,, you can level up your aiming and health, there are multiple endings, you have a woman talking in your head, you can even fight alongside and summon soldiers, this game is such an advancement from doom, it's insane.
but i am overhyping the rpg elements to this game, it's rather light on them actually. this is no daggerfall. you don't create a character, or fit him with gear (armor works like it does in doom, so i won't count that). there are so few side quests in the game, and they don't even amount to much, its usually just "get this chalice, ok go here for your reward.", leveling up isn't based on experience, but rather a reward for beating a mission, and only affects aiming and health (maybe also punch strength? i noticed i could gib basic enemies almost instantly later in the game). point is, the rpg elements are minimal. if you want a more proper rpg fps hybrid, well there's system shock. i guess ultima underworld and elder scrolls arena as well if you remove the shooter part. but all those games are rather... clunky.
this game, is not an fps-rpg hybrid. at most, it's an fps with rpg inspiration
however, what we really have here is a co-creator of the immersive sim genre, a major leap from system shock or ultima, where menus and general clunkiness could take you out of the experience, strife just controls like doom, but where doom had a level-based structure and didn't have (almost) any story, strife keeps you going through its world organically as the story drives you. half-life and system shock may be lorded as the granddaddies of imsims, but i'd say strife is the biggest, most important leap for the genre, and i can't recommend it to old school fps fans enough
fight, for the front and freedom and move out

the best game you can play while listening to an audiobook
just hours upon hours of slow clumsy, yet deliberate platforming with not much else going on besides the occasional enemy to shoot. but its perfect for when you need something to do while listening to something that won't really distract you too much from the thing you're listening to
that said, i think i would have died from boredom if i wasn't listening to something more engaging while playing this, partially due to just how labyrinthian some levels can be, and idk about you but running around in circles looking where to go and what i missed just isn't fun. and im sure i would have given up if not for speed up and rewind via emulation, especially with how precise and lethal some jumps can be
that said, the last few levels do redeem the game in the end, and i am glad i played it

the best ys game to date, its genuinely impressive that after all these years these games seem to only get better with every entry (aside from 7)
it takes everything from ys 8 and expands on it, while also giving new movement options that make the game feel just so much better
my only gripe is that the story can be too intrusive to the gameplay. its a great story with fantastic characters, but it just feels like it interrupts the game flow too frequently and takes its time telling it. maybe im just impatient.
looking forward to ys x

TMoStH is much different from your "typical" sonic game (if there even is one besides 2d and boost), it's a visual novel, somewhat in the style of ace attorney or danganronpa, but if you've never been good at those types of games without just looking up answers, don't worry. when doing interrogations, there's basically no such thing as error, and so few choices that you'll easily know what evidence is correct. really, if you are a fan of those types of games, you might be a tad disappointed with just how easy it is, with no difficulty options either (kind of, but i'll get to that right now)
the only real challenge in this game comes in the form of these "dreamgear" stages you get when you choose the right answer in an interrogation. if you're a sonic fan, imagine segasonic mixed with the special stages of the genesis version of 3d blast with spritework closer to the advance games. if you're not a fan of the sonic games and that means nothing to you, its an isometric runner where you gotta get x amount of rings while avoiding obstacles. personally i don't believe these have much of a place in visual novels or point n click games. the challenge should not come from reaction based skill, but mental skill. but its a minor issue since you can trivialize the minigames in the options with accessibility settings. people have varying opinions on that kind of stuff, but personally, i think the option is right at home here. its a visual novel, you shouldnt need to do action segments every few minutes. i don't believe theres an option to remove them entirely, but you can trivialize them to the point where (and i didnt test this so i cant verify) you can likely get through all the stages without pressing a single button. soif you like sonic but don't really play many skill based games, no need to worry there. at most, these sections will prove to be a minor nuisance
beyond all that, the story and characters are fun fun. it's low stakes, but it's what it needs to be. the art is wonderful, it's only 3-ish hours long, but that's pretty good for a free game, and it's just overall a solid sonic visual novel.
if you like the sonic comics, you'll certainly like this game (vice-versa is also true)

jedi knight is certainly a game
dark forces was one of the best star wars games, and even one of the best first person shooters of all time, but does this one live up to its legendary predecessor? well not quite. its a game that really shows its age and could do with... maybe not a remake, but certainly a remaster, something nightdive could do. little things here and there would go a long way to improving this game, mostly in the controls department. you get so many weapons, along with items and force abilities and you need to either have specialized hotkeys for each one, or scroll through them one by one, along with keys to use each category. you cant even use the mouse wheel to scroll through weapons in the base game (theres a fan patch but for some reason it didnt work for me so i was stuck using q and e to swap like a SAVAGE), and good luck remembering which key does what. it's legitimately a crippling flaw of the game and honestly trying to go through everything you have in the heat of a gunfight just bogsthe game down so much. i ended up never really using my explosives (half the weapons you get are explosives) because of just how situational they are and by the time i manage to get the right thing out, the enemies have already scattered.i end up using the same 2 weapons the entire game
beyond the weapon problem, the game also leans more on the "where the ♥♥♥♥ do i go" and "how the ♥♥♥♥ was i supposed to notice that lever without this guide telling me about it" end of the late 90s fps spectrum. theres always going to be at least one moment in the level where youre just completely lost and wondering if youre even in the right area. theres some cool and interesting levels in here thankfully, but beyond a couple of levels with cool visuals, the actual level design seems rather uninspired
as for bosses... well they all force you to use lightsabers and... they all kinda suck. some are ridiculously easy, and others you'll spend like 8 minutes on dying over and over again because you just cant hit them with the lightsaber. its a jank mechanic that just never feels right, i feel like the cooldown between swings is far too long and it ends up making the combat feel delayed and sluggish, and this is at its worst in the final boss fight
there were also some annoying inconveniences like DIALOGUE BEING TIED TO SOUND EFFECTS DESPITE THE SFX BEING STUPIDLY LOUDER THAN THE DIALOGUE WHY DO OLD GAMES DO THIS?! i could barely even understand what was going on in the story because of how much of a mess the audio was.
oh yeah theres also force abilities... i only ever used jump because guns seemed more practical than the offensive ones. pull seemed useless. i couldnt use light side abilities because i went dark side for killing innocent people and droids. and i didnt even bother with getting speed or whatever the other one was.
honestly its not a bad game but... it doesnt live up to the first

story's still good, web slinging's still great, combat's still fun, stealth is still cathartic, and the mj/miles sections are still ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
the mods to remove all the tubing and padding and weird textures to costumes to make them more like the comics are also nice

lol

just go right to the second game, trust me dude