Recent reviews by www.whitecastle.com

bomb has been planted

This is a certified hood classic.

TL;dr: Get it on console.

Advanced Warfare is one of the best Call of Duty titles period and it's a shame the fraghead e-celebs hating it soured it's reputation. It's got a damn good single player that defies a lot of CoD tropes, has interesting socioeconomic themes, and an interesting antagonist instead of the typical "leader of a terror group" you find in every other Call of Duty title. It feels less like a CoD game and more like some cult hit 360 Sci-Fi shooter, except with the budget of an AAA game.

The multiplayer is the crown jewel of the game, featuring a fast paced departure from other CoD titles, both before and after AW. It's not about camping in a corner and racking up sick 360 noscopes, it's about movement and reflexes.

There are just two massive problems with the PC port: The port still costs $60 in 2020, and few people play this game online on the PC. People play this game on console still and you can find it for a few dollars used or $15-20 new. Furthermore, Advanced Warfare PC's single player crashed a few times for me when loading. This is why I cannot recommend a purchase of the PC port. Be sure and get the Xbox One and PS4 ports however, they also have stunning graphics and have people playing online.

The Halo MCC has been perhaps the biggest letdown in gaming ever since it launched in 2014 on the Xbox One and literally did not work.

It's 2020 now and the MCC is finally coming to the PC and it now works...well in the same way a car with blown seals and a flashing check engine light works. See the MCC is an interesting experience on the PC. The game has issues including sound issues and acts strangely on one PC...yet just works (tm) on another PC.

But the biggest issue with the MCC is beyond the 60fps exterior everything else is inferior. Despite 343 lying at E3 a few years back and saying that all the games would be exactly as they were when you played them on the Xbox back in the day, they're not.

Halo CE is a good example. Spawning is broken on CE so you'll oftentimes spawn right where you died or next to a cluster of enemies. In CTF expect to spawn in the same spot over and over again. If you compare it to the Xbox version it's an inferior port of the PC version. If you compare it to the PC version it's missing the legendary mod support including an SDK and the library of classic mods, hit markers IIRC, player run dedicated servers, ping counters, CE's MOTD screen, and more.

Compared to other Xbox Halo titles and even this game day 1, it no longer has map voting. Instead you pick Halo titles, player count, what game modes you want, and cross your fingers and hope you don't get something lousy, or that the teams aren't stacked. If you do, don't worry. You can quit. Quitting means that not only does nobody else get to join your game (343 hasn't noticed that kids started playing CoD in the 2000s remember?) but also that you get a matchmaking ban. During this matchmaking ban you can do things like play the original 360 Halo titles or install Halo PC.

But hey at least it has people online. At least you'll get a dedicated server in the West Coast and not a 150-200 ping lagfest. It's a shame it'll kill Halo PC servers even more, but at least it's one click to download it from steam without having to edit any config files or paste any files...that is if it works for you.

Tempest 4000 has been somewhat of an enigma in the gaming scene. In 2015, Jeff Minter, best known for developing Tempest 2000 released an obscure PS Vita game called TXK, which was a remake of Tempest 2000 but without the Tempest name. Tempest 2000 was not only known for being an amazing update of an arcade classic, but also the shining gem of a console most people today only know because of an angry gamer making a video about how much of a flop it was. Atari took legal action, and it only remained on a failed handheld gaming console due to the fact that Jeff Minter didn’t want to have his bank accounts drained fighting a dubious lawsuit.

Fast forward several years later to August 2017, and Jeff Minter not only made amends with Atari but was even working on a new Tempest title: Tempest 4000. There was just one problem, the game not only took a while to come out, but through 2018 its release date kept slipping further and further. Months would go by, as release date after release date was passed, to the point where when Tempest 4000 finally came out it’s almost like it was sent out to die. To rub salt in the wound, Tempest 4000 was released accidentally on the PS4 for around an hour or so, before being pulled off the store and released a few months later. The whole rumor behind this is that Microsoft was causing issues approving the game, something confirmed on the official forums, but now it’s finally out for 20 dollars on the PC, but on consoles its 30 dollars. Yes, 30 dollars.

So what is Tempest 4000? Well, Tempest 4000 is essentially a tweaked version of TxK, down to sharing a similar menu layout and the same gameplay mechanics of TxK. Essentially this game could be summed up as a tweaked version of TxK, except with a lot more visual effects spammed there, giving the game the smeared effect overload look of Tempest 3000 on the Nuon at times. The biggest difference between this game and TxK is the Atari license. The game has the Atari logo everywhere in the title screen, lots and lots of Atari references added in to the text messages, and both the Tempest 2000 CD soundtrack used for the port and the original Tempest 2000 mod file soundtrack, along with the TxK soundtrack. Essentially this is a formula that should be a grand slam, but sadly this isn’t the case with Tempest 4000.

First of all, the gameplay changes from TxK carry over into Tempest 4000, from earning points after a level by flying into objects to being a lot harder, from more enemies being on screen in earlier levels to the fact that when you die the level doesn’t reset itself, it respawns you in the level where you were.

The PC port has a bunch of issues. The graphics options are heavily limited, and furthermore the game logic is designed to run at 60hz, and nothing higher. If you’re rich and own a #gamer 144hz monitor, the game will run far too fast, and you need to limit the framerate with a tool or something.

There is a lack of polish in many areas, with the menus for example being carried over from TxK and not mentioning the new option to pick which soundtrack you want. Here’s a gamer tip, it’s the Y button. You’re welcome; I had to google for it on some forum to find that.

But there is one issue, one major issue that completely breaks the game itself. It’s the controls. You’d think that they’d tighten up the controls, considering how tight they felt in Tempest 2000 on either the Jaguar original or the ports, but they feel terrible. With a gamepad, the D-Pad only works in the menu. That’s right, only in the menu. The nanosecond you press the start button the D-Pad quits working. You can’t use the D-Pad in game, you can only use the analog stick and oh man the analog stick is horrible.

I think the best way to describe the controls is as “slippery”. There’s no precision to them, your zapper moves around the screen way too fast, and it’s very hard to control, especially as you get further and further into the game. Remember when I said the difficulty was higher? Yeah, that makes it even worse. With the keyboard, it’s completely unplayable. You would have thought a retro inspired game would have done what most of them have done and provide a standard layout copying the popular emulators with keyboard mapping being an option, but not only do you get no mapping, but the keys are mapped to awkward positions. You know A and B? Yeah, they’re literally A and B on the keyboard, enjoy playing Tempest like that. Even worse, the keyboard controls are somehow floatier than the controller controls are. You cannot map the keys or buttons whatsoever. You have to play the game the way Atari and Jeff Minter designed and balanced it.

This issue turns the game into an unsatisfying mess. The game is unplayable with controls that poor, and for $20 dollars it’s a complete ripoff. Do not spend your money on Tempest 4000 on the PC, until there is a patch for it because until then you might as well burn 20 dollars, that’s a better use of the money.

my friend destroys me online on it but i have fun anyway

Remember when Indie games on Steam mostly consisted of generic clones of older games that added nothing new to the table and were irrelevant in the long run, yet sold a bunch because they pushed all the right nostalgia buttons? Well Dusk is one of those kinds of games.

Dusk is a quake inspired retro FPS running on the Unity engine, down to the load screen that tries to simulate the game loading up from DOS. The game features 2 modes. The single player mode is...okay I guess? It feels like playing a generic Half-Life mod from back in the day or a shooter from the bargain bin. The level design is pretty mediocre, with empty open spaces (think like Painkiller) and it's easy to get lost in it, especially since the game lacks a map key or any cues to tell you where you're exactly supposed to be going. In the second level you're supposed to go into a cornfield but you're given no hint you need to go there and the cornfield opening is in the middle of a repeating texture. It's not exactly fun at times, and can range from boring to frusturating.

The multiplayer on the other hand is completely dead. You'll be lucky to see a few people playing this game at any given time, aside from maybe scheduled game nights which is the kind of thing you'd expect from a dead game with a tiny community, not a game that came out this year. When I looked for matches I found only one server with 4 people in it, that's right 4 people. That's on the level of say, Quake 4 (the unwanted step-child of the Quake series).

When you get into it, it feels like Half-Life Deathmatch or some other generic deathmatch game. There's only one mode (Free-for-all), the maps are terrible with boring layouts and spawning right next to another enemy multiple times, and the server ended up booting me out for no reason (I had to rejoin the server and there were fewer people). Let me let you in on a secret, more people play Quake 3 and UT99/2004 online than this game, and they're even on Steam too.

The graphics are well, the natural direction for Indie games to go after running the 8 bit pixel trend into the ground. The game tries to look like Quake for DOS (Not GLQuake or a source port, mind you), yet with the mismatched lighting effects it ends up looking like AssaultCube, Ace of Spaces, or even Minecraft, especially with the performance issues you might see on lower end integrated graphics. It somehow manages to look worse than Quake 1 however, especially with the extra-low-res weapon models and ugly blood and particle effects that look like squares, Minecraft style.

All in all is Dusk a good buy? Well Quake costs $5, and all the Quake games + expansions cost $25. This game costs $20, and offers less content. Sure, this game has mod support and whatnot planned, but you wanna know what also has mod support? Quake, Unreal, and other games this was inspired by. There's little reason to buy this game when those games exist and tend to be much better than this is.

Better than Call of Duty WWII.

AW was good, but unpopular (and dead on PC :V). What does Sledgehammer follow it up with? Something that feels like the worsts of Ghosts, MW3, and BO3/IW combined into one game. It runs iffy on my RX480 yet has bleh graphics, and the online is a laggy campfest. The maps are trainwrecks with camping spots in every nook and cranny, consisting of generic warzones (no more interesting settings for maps like previous CoD titles).

Just play BO2 instead, it's much better in every way.

The only video game that allows me to live my life as my true identity, a beat up 1991 Boeing MD-87 with "Monster Energy" painted on the sides and no hushkits to drive my neighbors crazy.