Recent reviews by Carlos the Dwarf

It's a pretty good game.

This game is perfect if you are an English major with a taste for modernist fiction who has somehow found gainful enough employment to afford decent computer parts (lol). Also if you like the Sopranos but wish everyone was oblivious to their depression. Oh and if you enjoyed Deadwood but wish the body count was several thousand times higher.

This game is perfect.

All I want is a game that does a reasonable job simulating an NFL strategy & play performance with evenly scaled challenge on both sides of the ball. 14 years after I ragequit this half-assed joke of a franchise I bought last year's iteration on sale and, to the surprise of no one who's played this game in the intervening years, I'm still looking for one.

No matter how I adjust the difficulty level and gameplay sliders, no matter how I build my team, no matter my weekly strategy, no matter how conservatively I attempt to play - the second my quarterback has a positive TD:INT ratio I turn into an interception machine. I've tried every kind of different game mode, I've watched passing tutorials, I've called audibles, I've cheesed QB special abilities...nothing. When I lower the difficulty to Pro I am so good at defense that I regularly score three touchdowns via turnover in consecutive playoff games. Even then, career 22:5 TD:INT passer Russel Wilson finished the season with 44 TDs and 22 INTs.

For the "git gud" folks - I don't care about winning every game, I want to feel like it's fair when I win or lose. I also want to feel like when I buy a new game it's somehow different than the previous version, but other than the rosters I can't really tell how this is any different from the Madden 2004 that used to make me throw my PS2 controller at the wall.

I guess I'll pick up Madden 2042 when I get the football itch again, but hopefully in the meantime either congress has broken EA's monopolistic hold on NFL licensing or the planet has died a horrible climate change-related death and put me out of my misery.

A great Contra clone almost thirty (!) years later. Have not tried to use a cheat code, but this game is forgiving enough, or maybe I just enjoy alternating between Brobocop and Broker Texas Branger. Every 'Murican 80's action hero is here and plays a little bit differently (hint: McGuyver sucks) and the one shot death (with three lives) each level makes it perfectly challenging without ever being frustrating. The only thing missing for me are the 19-inch CRT and frosted flakes on a Saturday morning.

My beautiful wife was diagnosed with cancer. Then slow fever. My court physician succussfully treated the cancer, then the slow fever, then the cancer again, but after a year she still died. From the cancer. I kept staring at that damned little crab-in-the-heart just above the green saw and needle icons, but there was no stopping it. I got depressed. I married again to a Greek princess to father more heirs in case my beloved Stephen died, but it turned out she preferred the ladies, so I bedded my genius courtier and fathered a daughter who I legitimized. Then my new wife got pregnant, I sent my mistress to tutor my son, paid him off with gold and watched as all of my prosperous realms were decimated by smallpox. In the end, the cure for my depression seemed to be burning three witches at the stake.

Oh the thoughts this game makes you think.

"If you have another child I'm just going to murder him as soon as he turns sixteen so his older brother Pandolf inherits the whole kingdom."

"I could do a quick raid to steal some of their gold OR I could beseige their castle, capture all their womenfolk and either sell them for ransom or take them as my concubine."

"If I press my subject's claim on a city halfway across the continent resulting in the deaths of thousands of soldiers and locals in the process, I might be able to get another half a percentage point more prestige closer to crowning myself emperor."

You start thinking about these things in the shower, then just before you go to bed, then you stay up starting at the ceiling mapping out your strategy for the next time you hop on, growing anxious if you saved and quit right at the end of a massacre at the hands of a Mongol deathstack or your infertile wife turned forty, discovered your plot to murder her and went into hiding. It will consume your life, and even work will be an endless scroll through /r/crusaderkings just waiting to get home and play this productivity vacuum.