Recent reviews by Draven Crow

I liked this game, a decade old but still holds a candle up to other Star Wars titles save maybe KOTOR and is canon as far as I'm concerned even if Disney found a way to discard this into the legendary version along with any other Star Wars not owned by Disney. This series was a staple in Hollywood aside from maybe Neverending Story and other franchises milked for all they are worth. Back in the day when Devil May Cry was the cream de la creme of action games apart from its attempted competitor Kingdom Hearts, guess who TFU took after? If you said DMC then I'd agree since they didn't require timing prompts, just cool combos on the boss until they fell flat for you to get a cool new weapon. I remember playing this game on the PS2 back when PS was gold standard console gaming for nerdy gamers who watched anime on weekends, went to FYE at the mall, engaged in online chat role play when Cheetah Chat and Yahoo were king there and playing JRPGs was the only other thing they enjoyed as they weren't the rocker kids who were headbanging to nu-metal or industrial nor the public school preppy kids who were listening to pop/dance pop or hip-hop and rap... Nope, they were into whatever people found dorky. I however think this game was released prior to 2010 which is telling of graphical quality and general design. This PC version however, I noticed glitches, bugs and crashing galore meaning it clearly wasn't optimized for PC like any console port, causes you to wonder if the devs even know what a porting is and my PC is more than adequate to run the game that is over 15 years old. The sails got holes in them Lucasarts or Disney, patch them up or this game is in peril in turbulent seas. Still a classic, still needs loose ends neatly tied up.

To Starfield fans who won't be getting a coop or an MMO game just play Elite Dangerous + Odyssey expansion to fill that void, nuff said.

Though Fallout 4 feels like it takes Arthur Radebaugh's visions of the future from the comic strips to reality and asks 'what if the cold war never ended, what if the USSR and Communist China continue into the deep 21st century where culture never moved past the 50's and 60's? What if all that preparation for nuclear war in the 50's became a reality ironically years later?', you know the old speculation of the now old industrial world this game still has a decent grounds for 20th century nostalgia. The story appears like most of the movies and stories told in the mid to later years of the 20th century save for that whole 'they killed my lover and stole my family, I want revenge and to set things right' it also gives us an essential restore the world as you'd have done it survival thing. I'm not all that into the lore of Fallout universe but I got this game particularly for a bit of simulating an industrial age with a preferred narrative of fiction watered into it to make it less ho-hum, get ahead and get rich like we all remember the 20th century being. Nowadays, such a world seems like a museum piece of history whereas Cyberpunk 2077 feels like the present almost and we set Starfield as the future. It does have a bit of Disney's old 'be happy, let's party' attitude which is a bit of fondness of what once was though that wasn't the entirety of it, the culture and entertainment is the better part of it. I got Fallout 4 Script Extender for a better intro for the game which now comes across as more an Iron Man/Avengers music style (orchestra with hard rock) intro as seems more fitting to Fallout in general. The music in some cases does seem to head into a bit of a Silent Hill/Evil Within direction especially when you get into the dark mysterious parts of the game. I even went for a bit of x-men superpowers mod to bring in the superheroes to Fallout 4 or something of my own genre with a modern industrial setting. The themes keeps the game a sheer 20th century theme of 'family friendly on the surface, adultified deep below' with small hints of its steampunky predecessor but more its own dieselpunk style that makes Fallout what it is. Themes are a big thing to me as are vibes but this game has more right than wrong, I haven't done the settlement mechanics yet but will in time get into it. It's not nearly as blatantly cheery as Destroy All Humans or some of those more cartoony mid 20th century games but close enough.

If I were to explore this game like Tale Foundry then I'd say narratively this game from the protagonist perspective is essentially you are screwed and no prophecy says you'll have a better life or become great, you simply have to have the willpower to become great like Alexander who had no one waiting for him or greeting him like a figure of respect as he passed, you simply have to prove yourself worthy of admiration. Ultimately there is pain, anguish, death and the endless torment of doubt even if you aren't Dante going through the inferno, personally I call this narrative refreshing because you can truly become a badass without need for the crutches any other story would offer you giving you less agency on your path to becoming a legend, you can really become a legend by your own efforts and die-hard willpower whilst telling your own story. With the randomly soft or tough monsters this goes back to the arcade-ish days or the Super Nintendo days of genuine challenges that makes you battlecry like a real warrior when you've conquered a monster that really is difficult to kill having other players often die on that monster, that screaming adrenaline will feel most satisfying then. I know a guy who's played a lot of games and feels disappointed in today's stuff for not giving him the challenge he craves most, as in he's annoyed that so many games hold the player's hands or make the enemies sponges instead of formidable and worthy foes that he could slay as easily as they could crush him or turn out a puzzle of a being he'd have to find a weak-spot on to win so in a fashion he's much like Aoi from One Punch Man who's mostly pissed he can't find a monster that is actually very hard to defeat for him or a task that he can really sink his teeth into so he ended up creating his own tabletop game. I think he'd probably find this game able to wet his appetite for a challenge that works for him and that he can actually sweat it out trying to overcome the challenge. Me, I don't do a lot of challenge but hopefully this game can make a real challenge worthy of my willingness to tackle it head on. Yeah, yeah, I'm a wuss and could hardly call myself a 'real gamer' because I never took on challenges that could earn me boasting rights but I'm not interested in boasting rights, rather I'm interested in simply enjoying myself and I find grouping up with people isn't always enjoyable for me less I know those people well enough and I don't make a fool of myself by misusing or rather misunderstanding gamer terminology which is the only slang/terminology I even use besides 90's or Y2K slang/terminology and of course otaku slang/terminology where I find the rest as useless as pickup lines (though I might use Shakespearean/medieval/renaissance slang/terminology). I haven't met the universe beyond the start of the game so I'll need more time with it before commenting on the entire plot.

Back into the good old days of D&D RPGs when they aligned with and were not distant from tabletop style. This game is a treasure for every Nerd out there along with Baulder's Gate or anything from late 90's to early 00's RPGs. These were the days of even if the popular kids rolled their eyes at you and the joint smoking rocker kids wrote you off as a poser, you were basically authentic in the eyes of chess club, book clubs and most after school programs including those who's weekend fun was stargazing, watching cartoons of your favorite comics or buying collectibles of your favorite anime was a thing. Nowadays, Neverwinter Nights is amongst the few existing classics there are any longer as the RPG scene is dominated by Bethesda, BioWare (though Bioware partly helped make this game), CD Projekt Red and Blizzard and in the east Square-Enix, outside of that there are only startups and indie studios who make RPGs the way they used to be made. Neverwinter Nights is campaign based and each campaign was the length of a single long Elder Scrolls main zone quest in an open world of a lot of narratives waiting to be explored, you usually can only explore one with this one but the side quests are simply a quick trot into zones swimming in foes where they act by dice rules hence why the combat is calculated and slow. I'm pretty sure someone if they tried could complete the game in less than a day along with the other campaigns, short as it may be it is still a nostalgic trip before games started focusing on a depressing reality like The Last of Us. The music is the early days or maybe of Jeremy Soule when fantasy RPG music was still in peak performance and likely he had to train others to make epic fantasy music for RPGs or even epic Sci-Fi music for RPG shooters (though that requires training in electronic music). Jeremy Soule I imagine was making music before Howard Shore made the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's a bit too bad that his last work was on Skyrim before some socio-political quagmire railroaded his career as it did with a lot of brilliant creators. Even for as simple as this game is it holds a special place in my Geriatric Millennial heart, it was one of the first RPGs besides Dungeon Siege I played and no I never started with tabletop, in fact my first tabletop experience was a game my bro-in-law made. I will not declare I feel old until 50 but when I do this game will merit an honorary place in my library as I'm sure it will with a lot of old school role players. It is owned by Wizards of the Coast and Atari and now Beamdog who preserved it even if we'll likely remember it as one of BioWare's first games before fame came knocking and they got too big to like and EA bought out and ruined them. Take heart this isn't wholly considered a BioWare game, it is at its heart a classic and a WotC game at that.

Some on the 'club of intellectuals' level might call this game a rehash of other genius stories much like William Shakespeare's rehash of Tristan and Isolde famously called Romeo and Juliet only with the same iterations of later Stephanie Meyer's 'Twilight' mood and setup before it was even published, however in the current environment of gaming where the AAA games clog the air with over-the-top cartoony slog, superhero action bashes, dark universe slogs like Cyberpunk or Elden Ring or frankly the entire drought on any good high graphic games that aren't the product of copy-paste franchises or maybe remakes of beloved classics, this game manages to wet that appetite. It feels like there has been a lot of adultified 'let's throw in some sex, drugs, gore and maybe characters who talk like they live in some pirate port weening off of the big industry's garbage' games lately and it is a bit refreshing to see a game mostly shy away from that. It isn't a T rated game but close enough I guess, I rarely play action games that often, side-scrollers and isometric games are just as significant to me... Once you beat it, that's all you get. Like a candy bar, once you finish you are left with the wrapper. This sits on my rare, maybe every once in a blue moon shelf but still yanks me along for the ride. I've yet to finish it but some reviews say it isn't nearly as earth shattering as say The Evil Within or Half-Life 2, but you can never beat the classics anyways. Classics always become legendary, their creators reach paragonhood and that's how that story ends. The gameplay for me reminds me of Star Wars The Force Unleashed where you can grab anything in the environment and thrash it about. It's more fun if the world were persistent and yet the world isn't. Again and once you beat it that's the end of the rollercoaster.

Can't get any better than the classic titles themselves, back in the days when Playstation was king and action animes were normally restricted to consoles. In spite of the limits it was also 00's, largely early 00's when I was a teenager and listening to cold sweat, hot blooded, angst throttled bands who screamed hard and rasped on the mic was a thing for those of us who sneezed at pop and rap. We were into anti-hero films, vampires, action films with Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez (long before Captain Marvel) where they were the femme badasses and of course The Matrix trilogy. Devil May Cry found a new way to introduce action apart from Die Hard and action flicks with Vin Diesel in them by taking the Deadpool reborn as a whip smart demon slaying badass merc.

The music started here with what I'd call early grid rock where uses of late 90's Crystal Method techno, Nu-Metal styles of Adema, and some bits of Don Davis symphonies was a thing for games like this. This trend continued to Devil May Cry 3 in the mid 00's never once stopping our action packed ride of sheer adrenaline fun.

The gameplay harked back to the days of arcade action titles long before Lara Croft, Crash Bandicoot, and the newly 3D Mario on N64 making action games fun and sexy again.

The characters remain to this day central to the very name of Devil May Cry as do the plots though some failed to meet standards namely Devil May Cry 2 but when we look at the likes of DmC Devil May Cry it is actually quite a riot.

The unwholesome part of this collection perhaps is the requirements that make potato computers insufficient to play it even as its graphics are 20 years old. It tells me that Japanese studios aren't good with PC ports because they might come across as strange in function compared to consoles. With all the remakes in the last few years these old titles could use remakes of their own being updated to today's graphics but outside of that they should retain everything that made the originals so badass.

Less Dante than I'd like but for a devil may cry title it is still leagues better than the installment after itself. It is like someone took Nero's personality and Dante's body then meshed them together as some emo-punk as a compliment to the dev who simply couldn't get enough of himself. This maintains itself in the realm of classic, in the days when badass Dante was the norm and still a fun character while leaving the angsty one as more a side character. It was late 00's and apparently anime was huge, otakudom was top of the charts, cosplay was center stage, and Dante was a league of his own aside from Deadpool yet Devil May Cry never got its own live-action deal, many zealous fans would say it is for the better that Hollywood never touched Devil May Cry for even in today's world they'd ruin it and probably make an attempt to WOKE it.

The gameplay remains in the classic zone, the music also stays classic, the characters and the story all shout classic, if it got anymore classic it would have beaten out James Bond. It's a 10 in my book all the way.

Remember the days when I was some angsty emo-punk brat who apparently visited a strip club on a regular basis? Also the days when I apparently remembered myself as some half-angel, half-demon which they call 'Nephilim'... I think I was playing too much Diablo 3 at the time. That last half was mostly a dream of me when I was that young. As for the angsty emo-punk brat, grew out of that phase in a year once I got my merc licence :P but that was all so long ago, those were the days that Kat and Vergil got freaky and after Vergil vanished...well, Nero was born. Kat grew depressed and ended up in a psychiatric facility, that's on you bro! Speaking to Vergil of course. Well time to file this old memory away and talk about why this game is like visiting a badass rock concert!

1. Face The Music, It's A Cool Weapon! - I'm serious dude, it is, even in this game it makes my old memories look like some poser kid hit Hot Topic to become a mall-ninja. In this one we challenge some serious titan demons and rip them all a new one! :D Vergil still has trouble facing the music while he dresses like some Victorian noble who drank bad tea and had an accident where he firmly planted a stop sign post up his ass. The Dante theme, radical! Nero had some bits of grid rock in his. Vergil's I believe was more on the fusion side and his alter ego had an equally badass theme. The rest is right at home!

2. The Gameplay, Let's Rock! - If there was one good thing Ninja Theory did it was change up the gameplay style to be more fast paced but at the same time I took that whole 'Match Red with Red enemies, Match Blue with Blue enemies' curled it into a large ball and threw it into Antoine Acolaides face, he also got a punch from me for remaking my memory with some crew styled undercut like his ugly face has. I'd say to him 'what's next? I wear some swaztika because you have some hidden hate factor going on?' I understand the holy messages, just not him. Still, awesome gameplay that makes me feel the weapon and the action!

3. The Story Where Dante Exits The Stage - Apparently there are several ways you can tell my story, one of them being where I win anyways, another where Nero wins and I wake up in the emergency room scaring doctors when my tiefling effect demon mode engages, the last is having V along 'yes that is really his name as he's apparently some shadow of my brother' we kick the demon lord's ass and V does some ritual thing where Vergil returns and thanks to our past we have a score to settle. The rest is simply my story ending and Nero's beginning, where he is no longer Tom Welling Spider Man living in my Tobey MacGuire shadow. Just play it so I don't have to spill the best parts!

4. Sound, If It Isn't Shaking The Earth Go For Kickbacks! - Asking for realism is asking to kill the effects, face it, you couldn't test this in the real world because it is more comic bookish than practical but it still sounds like your trashing Nickelback's concert stage! The way the sword swings to how the jumping sounds and everything around is Devil May Cry gone apocalyptic!

Well hell on wheels I'm out of stuff to rate, still I'm back and kicking the same ass as I was years ago, send a dart in Antoine's direction for that trainwreck upon who I am which DmC was... Who came up with such a lame sounding title? Jim Carrey could come up with cooler sounding titles and some of his sound dumb in my book. Get this game, it will wash those bad parts out fast and take you back to the days when people weren't so high strung.

A sequel to Doom 3 the way Doom 2 was to 93 Doom, I'd definitely start with Doom 3, come to RoE and then go to Doom 93 and its sequel Doom 2 right after (particularly in Brutal Doom style with the Doom Metal and GZDoom all packaged together for the true John Carmack Doom experience which technology at the time didn't allow) followed by Doom 2016 and its sequel Doom Eternal if you want to do Doom in chronological order. I play RoE with some Alt and Industrial Metal as in 00's Metal which is how it would have been done back then if it was made the proper way though the Runner's Doom RoE helped with that and PRESTO, it was a proper doom game. Either way it's cool, Doom 3 RoE give a bit of that proper Doom experience, I think the feedback the was mostly by fans who were disappointed in the slow pace of Doom 3 and wanted a diaspora to real Doom style and this game definitely does that. Yes, yes, Millennial Doom fans were fond of Doom 3's slow-pace horror style which to them worked because they were more into survival games during the 00's. Doom 3 RoE's soundtrack is still unDoomlike though since it only has Tool's Intro song and little else which kills to overall Doom feeling, but yeah, the gameplay succeeded where the soundtrack failed.