Recent reviews by Patchy

Love this game. Hate that the new anti-cheat (which apparently doesn't even do an especially good job at stopping cheaters!) has broken Steam Deck support and EA seemingly has no interest in making their games compatible with Proton again.

It's the best Halo co-op game to come out since Reach, Also just a really good game, even if the optimisation consistently seems to get WORSE with every update rather than better and the game can be rather glitchy sometimes.

The preservation of gaming history, whether in the form of documentation and assets from during development or code, such as prototypes like this one, is important, and Sega's decision to release this freely to the world is a positive contribution in that regard. It's a very brief, feature-sparse and unpolished "proof of concept". so don't go in expecting anything more than that, but it's definitely good to have it available.

That said, the apparent lack of any consultation with the people who actually coded and built this demo at the time, along with there being no attribution of the work done on this game to those original developers, is definitely poor form and understandably the people who worked on this project weren't happy with how Sega handled this release. That was not helped by a comment initially made in the description:

"Golden Axed may be janky, may be buggy, may be an artifact of its time"

This might not have been meant as an offensive statement, but given that development conditions for the demo (and the game it was supposed to become) were a nightmare of 14-hour days, and there were tensions with management who, among other things, assumed they could just use the same codebase to concurrently develop their Streets of Rage project, it's not hard to see why those who worked on this project would be incensed at Sega's attitude towards this release.

Regardless, I personally think the release itself is still a net positive, so this gets a positive rating, though the developers have my full sympathies.

Metal Slug 3 is a fantastic game that I would heartily recommend to anyone interested in a good run-and-gun sidescroller who somehow hasn't played it yet. This port of the game, however, is honestly just unplayable.

It's slow and prone to stutter, even when running from an SSD, and it's pretty processor hungry for something that would supposedly run on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4. Worse, the controls keep dropping inputs; in particular, my experience with this game has been that you can't hold down the left or right movement button for more than a second or so before it stops you dead. In a game where moving rightwards is required throughout, this kills the experience outright.

I'd love for this to be an easy and enjoyable way to play Metal Slug 3, and to its credit there are plenty of resolution options in a range of aspect ratios. But this just isn't good enough. Definitely play this some other way. Just emulate it, even a potato PC will run that better than it will this half-baked port.

Buggy, rushed and unstable.

But the story and roleplaying options, and the mod support, are good enough that this game is still highly recommended to anyone who wants a good post-apocalyptic RPG.

0/10
There is no sense of pride and accomplishment in playing as Darth Vader.
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They ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pulled Linux/Steam Deck support from GTA Online after having it for years, with no prior notice and seem to have no intentions of making their BattlEye anti-cheat implementation work on Linux even though BATTLEYE ITSELF SUPPORTS LINUX JUST FINE.