Recent reviews by PS3D

It's a fun concept, so I won't say no, but it needs work. The map sucks, it's just a grid of random roads and barriers, even in different levels. The melee weapons suck. In Hotline Miami (which this game is sort of like) melee weapons are satisfying, here they just suck.

Do you want a SimCity-like game with proper and proportional lot sizes?
Do you want actual gameplay and not just a "city painter"?
Do you dislike the type of humor that involves hashtags on the end of sentences makes them comedy gold?
Do you desire a traffic simulator that actually simulates proper behavior and 24-hour traffic?
Do you like freight railroads and want to see the loud train rumbling through with the familiar red flashing lights?
Do you like the idea of mixing and matching various zones (R/C/I) on one block, so you can have a house between skyscrapers?
Do you like paying $15 for a bunch of half-baked DLC each, but repeated 9 times?
Do you hate games that run under 30 fps, despite being made in the last 15 years and on decent rigs?
Do you want a city simulator that looks sort of like a real city and not childrens' toys?
Do you expect a game that's been out for about half a decade to fix glaring bugs?
Do you like having a good atmospheric soundtrack?
Do you want the developers of a game to actually come up with a solid base game that doesn't need mods to even come to a minimal function?

If you answered "yes" to any of those questions, prepare to be very disappointed. Cities: Skylines may have many fans, but it is a false prophet.

While I had heard of Home, the "unique horror adventure" released by Benjamin Rivers in 2012, I hadn't played it until September 2016 (part of a Humble Bundle). Let's not mince words here, calling Home a "unique horror adventure" would be like calling Super Mario Bros. "an epic tale of a humble man that battles the forces of evil in the name of love", which is laughable. Homesucks as a game and sucks as interactive storytelling medium.

From the start, it did not endear me to it by requesting I turn off the lights, use headphones, and play the game in one sitting. In fact, it seemed to imply that I had to play the game in one sitting, which would've annoyed me any further. But still, I felt annoyed it had the gall to tell me all that.

Listen. You do not tell me how I play my games. If you have to tell me the lights off and use headphones to create an "atmosphere", you're doing it wrong. You can leave the lights on and the jump scares in FNAF and it can still scare the bejeezus out of you and I'm not missing out on anything.

The pacing of the game plods along. Apparently you can't walk and hold the flashlight up at the same time, and the little guy you control moves extremely slowly with no run button in site. The latter is explained in-game as the main character ("Sweater Vest Guy") gets hurt and limps along, but unless Sweater Vest Guy has some sort of crippling neurological injury that disallows him to walk and hold the flashlight up at the same time, it's a horrible design and one of the things that harms the game.

From the beginning, you can already guess that HE was the killer all along (and references to the character's job loss and alcohol-induced sleepwalking seem to support that), but there's also some sort of contradicting "death list" found in underground tunnels just to mess with your mind and introduce some further fake ambiguity, all of which leads nowhere.

At the end of the game, Sweater Vest Guy will likely commit suicide (whether or not the player character really believes it was he who committed the murders) instead of offering a choice like running away or turning yourself into the police (there is a way to just "slip away", either by a complicated process of picking up and not picking up certain things...or by just quitting during the credits and continuing there). Not that such a choice had a lot of emotional impact. It's hard to feel sympathy for a goofy-looking ginger with two pixels for eyes and a sweater vest, but that only makes presentation even worse--I say the death of Sweater Vest Guy is meaningless based on the way he looks, but keep in mind I also was moved to tears during Final Fantasy VI, and that was sprite art as well.

I don't know Benjamin Rivers. I have no idea if he's a pretentious hack or a halfway decent guy who made a game that I just didn't really like. But if I ever meet him in person or online and voice my displeasure about the game's poor "storyline", I would be irritated if he said something like, "But ambiguity is the NATURE of the game!" then I would tell him this: "If you introduce disparate plot threads and then refuse to wrap them up or try to connect them in a logical sense, then you are not a genius, you're just lazy." But to be fair, Ben Rivers never actually said that to my knowledge, so until I have it on record that he said this, then it's still 0-0, he still may be a pretentious hack, but he at least hasn't directly insulted my intelligence.

If you have hopes for a good solid storyline, then forget it. Benjamin Rivers has a middle finger toward you if that's you're thing. I'm feeling charitable enough to say that it is okay enough for the 90 or so minutes it runs, but it was a time in my life when I was unemployed and played video games all day. I wouldn't waste time with it today, especially how slow the pacing is. Yeah, it's only $3 on Steam, but that's still far too much for what he's asking. Your money is better spent elsewhere.

The Steam Link, in theory, is a great idea. Unfortunately, for me, it didn't quite work out the way it should've. It's not compatible with my old Logitech F310 except in browsing, and then it's back to M&K, which is incredibly awkward to use on a couch. This was a huge disappointment considering that I had tried in vain several times to connect a long Ethernet cord (another waiting in the mail) directly to the SteamLink downstairs (where the TV was) only to figure out that you *had* to do it through the router instead of direct connection. Good thing the router was next to the TV!

But why include USB ports if very few devices actually work? With the Ethernet cable dangling down from my PC one floor up, that right there is indication that the Steam Link's "play anywhere" feature is flawed because Internet is flaky enough as is and it won't change the fact that my controller doesn't work. I didn't test "high impact" games because I don't have any, and the potentially impacted ones I did test were not great (they LOOKED great though, HDMI is a fantastic standard...I don't know why the TV scales Eversion perfectly but the PC can't with stretching or blurring). While I do love the concept of playing games on the TV and not in my somewhat cramped room, at this rate I should invest in just longer cords and USB extension cables where I can have a full experience and not be throttled by an intermediary device.

I'll try to return or sell my SteamLink soon unless they come out with a software patch that will allow me to run the controllers I want.