Recent reviews by Turbo Nozomix

Visually, Black Mesa is great. Musically, it's great. Design-wise, it doesn't match.

I think that some of the gameplay / enemy AI is inconsistently and poorly balanced. Enemy AI can be unrealistically and absurdly twitchy (even for something like the Apache), which is annoying and frustrating.

There are many places where there are clipping issues, interfering with movement and misdirecting navigation or puzzle-solving efforts.

The Xen part has numerous issues with its design that I don't recall encountering in the rest of the game. For example, in the Xen part, you can brick your progress in multiple places by not having one type of ammo or another on-hand. That's really bad design. And when I did the wrong thing for one puzzle, I was locked-out of solving the puzzle and progressing - so I had to reload a previous save. Again, really bad design.

In Xen, There are also sections which are conceptually nonsensical, which mirrors the lack of thought put into many the puzzle designs, which can lack appropriate indicators of what you should be looking for, or have the trigger to progress be ridiculously hidden just for the sake of it, which doesn't contribute anything positive. There are also sections that are visually confusing to navigate, and where you can jump to the wrong place that sets you back a long way from where you just were, and you can't get back without making a long trek through areas you've already been. Also, I repeatedly encountered a bug in Xen with power cables despawning when I moved them around too much. Then there'd just be disparate lights, not tethered to each other, that I could pick-up and move anywhere.

The Xen part in general stretches on far too long, becomes extremely repetitive and boring. It's not a good way to end the game. I think it should've been condensed down to, at most, 1/4 of its current length. If that was done, none of its design would have to be cut - only the repetitiveness of it.

A lot of the game is good, or fine. But, especially in the Xen section, there are parts that continue on and on, and have you do the same thing over and over, very-long past its welcome. The developers seem to have been excited that they could do something, and so they kept doing it - over, and over, and over, and over, etc. Or, they'll iterate on a challenge a few times too many, after it's already played-out.

I think there was a lot of eagerness to do things that just seemed like the kinds of things Half-Life did, but without having the reasoning for doing them that Half-Life did. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. It should be asked: is this fun, or is this interesting? And many times in Black Mesa the answer to both of those questions is 'no, it isn't'. And many times there isn't even a perceivable answer to the question of 'why is this being done at all?'. The original Half-Life is a lot better thought-out, and a better game in general.

So, Black Mesa features a good effort, but with bad execution in places, and it becomes very tedious and stays past its welcome towards the end. I'd rather play Half-Life again than Black Mesa.

I recommend the game... after a few patches. The gameplay changes are good, and have improved AoM from being a so-so game in its original release, to being a really good game in Retold. But the current state of AoMR is that it's plagued with bugs like a developer used the Egyptian locust god power on the code. There are tons and I've made a long list of bugs that I've encountered so far. So, I recommend getting it when it's patched up a lot, because they frustrate the experience a bit.

I wrote this review months ago, but then my CPU died and I didn't get back on my PC until now.

First, it's an open-world game, with typical open-worldisms: you'll do the same tasks over and over. But it's not as bad as an Ubisoft game, and sometimes the task is fun: like taking-out large hordes. You also get to ride a bike around, which is different and enjoyable. For the most part, the gameplay is pretty solid, which is where most of the fun lies. And the setting can be neat. As you can see from my time in the game, it was enough to keep me playing, and I probably 100%'d all side missions.

The rest of the game can be rough, with some parts very bad. I'll give a clear picture of what I mean.

1. Game glitches and bugs
2. Random encounter frustrations
3. Writing and dialogue


==== Game glitches and bugs

The game has some quirks in how it lists and tracks objectives and progress at times, which can make mission sequences de-sync and break (but the game will progress if you manage to figure-out what to do, even though characters and audio are not where they should be). I won't go into specifics, but you'll likely encounter some of it, as I did at least a few times.

The game has bugs: I found myself falling through the ground, teleporting way up into the sky and falling to death, autosaves saving the game in a bugged state, and a bunch of other issues. Sometimes remote bombs don't work (no explosion or sound effect, they just disappear without doing damage), and they didn't for me in the exact mission I was supposed to use them to deal with a huge horde. The next time I used them, dealing with another massive horde as part of a story mission, they behaved as proximity mines instead of remote bombs: they kept blowing upon the first zombie that would get close to them (wasteful), and that kept happening while I was still close to them, after placing them and trying to run away, causing me to blow up, too. I'd saved at my bike right before this. So, I reloaded my save many times, kept making completely sure I was selecting the remote bomb and not the proximity mine, and each time the same thing happened. I think the bug made the remote bomb act as whatever item was to the left of it in my inventory, as that would explain why when my proximity mine inventory was at 0, the remote bomb had no effect at all, while when I had proximity mines, the remote bomb acted as a proximity mine.


==== Random encounter frustrations

The wildlife AI can be absurd and broken, spawning a zoo's worth of hostile animals on you at the worst and most implausible times. The game's encounter logic doesn't take into account whatever is already happening, and so parallel encounters can happen, in an awful way.

Got a great strategy worked-out that you're feeling good about as you move to execute it? Enjoy these few wolves, a bear, and a mountain lion all suddenly attacking you at once. Fighting off a the last dozen or so of massive horde with your ammo running low, yourself dodging every which way, and you're just starting to think you've managed to survive? Here are those wolves, a bear, and a mountain lion, running through the horde at you all at once, because that's exactly how animals do things in the real world.

I was destroying a base of unfriendly survivors, and a pack of wolves spawned in one of their army tents (nestled against a rock cliff, no forest back there) and ran out at me.

You know that super zombie that was just introduced, which just one of can mess you up and significantly drain your ammo? Think it would suck to have one appear while you're fighting a horde? Well have THREE of them, along with a bunch of rogue regular zombies, at once while you're trying to deal with that huge horde. You might like it if you're hate-playing the game.

Destroyed that trip-wire across the road and killed those who placed it there? Why would you expect that to mean it hasn't magically respawned a few minutes later, so that it unexpectedly snares you as you're driving back through the area while fleeing a massive horde?

You know those mutated wolves that are fast and fly at you superman-style to knock you off your bike? Here are two of them running at you head-on as you flee from a large horde. Feeling relieved that you managed to survive that chance encounter at one of the worst possible times? Well here're another two of them right around the next blind corner, check them out in your face.

You know those screaming banshee zombies whose shrieks can knock you off your bike, disorient you, and cause packs of zombies to spawn, and which you've previously only encountered one of at a time? Well here are FOUR appearing right in front of your face as you go around a corner, while you've got one of the biggest hordes in the game right on your tail. That happened to me just now, as I was writing this review.

The random encounter algorithm seems to be broken so that the more the game throws at you, the more it decides to throw at you.


==== Writing and dialogue

Stupid / nonsensical writing really bothers me, so... DG's writing and dialogue are really bad, to the point the story is absurdly broken at times. But it keeps plowing ahead as if you're not supposed to notice or care about it. It might even be as bad as Emil Pagliarulo's writing.

Part (only part) of that is because, for no logical reason, the PC often lies to others about things nobody who's sane would even think to lie about, because there's no motivation or purpose for it other than to create problems where none exist. I guess that's the game's goal, to contrive an artificial sense of secretiveness and drama, and create future problems which are then part of the game's story and missions. At times, the game goes even further than just having the PC lie in the most stupid way, and has him own-up to his stupid lie by, instead of instantly clearing everything up by saying the non-threatening, simple truth, strangely saying another stupid lie that's inevitably going to fall apart and create another story-filibustering mess. Faking drama is a persistent, lame crutch in this game.

I would say that the writing in Days Gone is, for most of the game, slightly better than Emil Pagliarulo's writing, but that it has moments where it astoundingly exceeds even the dumbfounding stupidity of Emil Pagliarulo's writing.

Continuing on that topic, the PC is an insufferable manbaby, whose reactions in conversations routinely make no sense, but sound like an angsty teen being moody without rationale. He's also a raging, murderous, hypocrite psychopath, with no self-awareness. 90% of his lines are inexplicably delivered as though he's bored, frustrated, uninterested, tired and yawning, annoyed, or spazzing, all without any context to the dialogue and situation. And he stammers and says "uh" and "um" like ten times more than Obama, and three times more than Trudeau. It's like the voice actor thinks that just stammering while sounding annoyed without explanation in every situation is a convincing surrogate for meaningful voice delivery. But maybe the same person who wrote the game's story and dialogue also directed the PC's voice actor.

At least at times, the game seems to want to make the PC relatable, making token efforts to present him as moral, because he can't stand women being attacked or w/e. But then it also has quest objectives that include murdering innocent people without a second thought to achieve selfish goals (which would be completely unnecessary if he hadn't pointlessly lied). And the game doesn't reflect on or give an explanation for it, it just continues forward as if nothing out of the ordinary just happened. Maybe the writer is a psycho.

"Is that all? Too bad. Gotta kill every last one of those murdering rapists. Can't let one of them leave." - seething PC, slaughtering another camp with signs everywhere saying 'stay away' unprovoked, which hasn't raped anyone.

I've hit the review character limit, so must stop now.

Starfield getting an award for innovative gameplay screams that Microsoft and Bethesda did a backdoor deal with Valve and paid for that award, for promotion and to boost sales of another boring Bethesda title. Since its release, Starfield has been consistently characterised by players for its sore LACK of innovation. Personally, I wish I hadn't bought it.

It was Mario.

Chrono Cross is one of the best games made, in my opinion. The story (albeit messy), art, music, combat system, are all exquisite. They don't make game like this anymore, and they didn't really make them like this before, either. Chrono Trigger (not the butchered Steam version) and Chrono Cross are gaming miracles. Please, SE, make Chrono Break.

That said, don't go into Cross expecting a sequel to Chrono Trigger, because it isn't that. It is truly its own, stand-alone thing. It's the spin-off, alt take of a single disgruntled guy from the CT team who said he wrote CC as backlash to his ideas for CT constantly being overruled by the rest of the CT team. He also didn't even make CC's basic story with CT in mind, and only decided at the end of writing it (for Radical Dreamers) that he would tie it into CT - but it just doesn't work. Cross story is filled with plot holes even just within Cross' story, let alone when you try to think of it as connecting to CT (in which case, the plot holes become much bigger and more numerous).

Going a bit deeper into that point, the team at Chrono Compendium, the authority on all Chrono information, who spent nearly two decades trying to rationalize how Cross can make sense as a sequel to Trigger, not too long ago wrote a huge article basically giving a formal apology for that and conceding that the discrepancies between Trigger and Cross' story and lore are too many to reasonably claim that Cross is a sequel to Trigger, and going through a multitude of issues with that claim. They also write that the final straw for them was a 2022 Q&A with Masato Kato, the disgruntled CT staffer who was also Cross' spiteful, sole writer, in which he essentially confirms that there are no answers to the plot holes between Trigger and Cross, and that he'd just thrown whatever idea he had into Cross without thinking about how it'd work with Trigger.

Chrono Compendium is where people trying to defend the idea of Cross as a sequel to Trigger would go to, to pick out some tidbit of info as confirmation bias for their arguments. But check-out Chrono Compendium's more recent, disillusioned conclusion on whether Cross is a sequel to Trigger:

================
I used to joke about diehard Chrono Trigger fans who hated Cross, imagining that they would have preferred some rollicking direct sequel in the style of Dragon Ball Z, where Crono hops in the Epoch with some tasty snacks and jets off to fight a cosmic threat even bigger than Lavos. This was in imagined contract to Chrono Cross, which we argued possessed leagues' more of emotional depth and character quality. We also held that Cross successfully inverted the premise of Trigger by focusing on dimensions instead of time travel, and dealing with its unpleasant effects versus its simple application to save the world. Those notions are laughable at this point. Not only does Cross contradict the theme of Trigger by predetermining the entire plot of the game, its emotional moments have no impact in context of the nonsensical plot and inscrutable motives of the characters, nor does its mechanic of dimension-hopping ever receive justification or technical explanation outside of being a gimmick that inadvertently creates loads of plot holes and confusion. Thematically, it's simply a failed game. It looks beautiful, and the music lingers in the soul for years after one plays it through. But there is no remaining sense of adventure, nor satisfaction in reaching the end. There are only more questions—all of which, we now know, have no answers, or have "answers" that contradict one another and Chrono Trigger as well. Chrono Cross is best taken as a picture book with fantastic music for each page. Some of its ideas still remain tantalizing, like Lavos directly altering human evolution via a shard of itself, or the romantic idea of the Radical Dreamers staging heists in search of magical artifacts in 1020 A.D. But its theme and its story resoundingly fail, a bitter fact of which the creators have reminded us with the Q&A and HD remaster.
================

So, it's officially recognized at the highest echelons of Chrono analyzers: Chrono Cross isn't a sequel to Chrono Trigger, it's an independent game and idea that plays with some of the characters and themes from CT, albeit in a fashion that is very disconnected from CT's story. And as an independent game and idea, Chrono Cross is an amazing game that's well worth playing.

BTW, there was an actual sequel to CT planned by the original CT team, but Square shot their project down, despite Sakaguchi saying he fought hard with Square's execs to try to make it happen. Sakaguchi said he thinks Square didn't want Chrono to become a competitor to Final Fantasy, and so wouldn't let them make a sequel.

Short of fixing some story issues that are self-contained within Cross (which I don't count on being addressed), as well as more bug fixes, my biggest personal wishes for improvements to the game are widescreen support for the environments whose artwork can handle it, and that the mouse cursor would disappear when the game is launched instead of sitting on top of the screen like a white fly on my monitor.

Seriously, what is with Japanese developers making the mouse cursor remain on top of the screen while in-game? The mouse literally doesn't even do anything in Chrono Cross, there's absolutely nothing that can be clicked on with the mouse.

Cyberia is one of the best games released in 1994 and is one of the very best DOS games. It is very original in what it does, the different gameplay styles it combines, and has an excellent soundtrack.

I think that Arkham Origins is better than Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. It is kind-of more of the same as Arkham City, but if you haven't played either, then I think that Origins is the better game with a better environment and atmosphere, more interesting story and character portrayals. I'm guessing that if Origins had released before City, that people would give City a hard time and tout Origins as the better game.

The actual gameplay, environmental interaction, doesn't seem like it's Gothic. It's like a console action-adventure formula.

Gothic 1 and 2 are the best Western-made RPGs to-date. They both deserve to be remade, and if they're remade properly those remakes will be among my favourite games. But what I've seen of this demo so far isn't a remake of those games, and is more like just a skin of Gothic 1 while not actually being Gothic 1 in style, feel, intention, principle.

Just remake Gothic 1, and everybody will be happy and blown away. Because it's still at the top of the best RPGs made. But if you're just going to use the brand and location and characters to make an entirely different game... please don't. Gothic and its fans don't deserve that.

Dirt Rally 2 is an extremely underwhelming product. The single-player campaign is hardly there. The environments are the typical nondescript and uninspired fare that CodeMasters has unfortunately become known for. Almost everything in the game is tied to online servers, even the single-player parts of the game, and the servers are *very* slow to respond and are *very* unreliable.

Expect to spend 4 - 25 seconds just between changing menu screens because the game waits for server response between each menu change. And the game regularly, perhaps at least 3 out of every 10 attempts, fails to receive a response from CM's servers, and boots the game back to the main menu. That means all your team, setup, settings changes that you were trying to finalize were lost.

And often when loading a game or submitting race results at the end of a game, the game fails to connect to CM's servers. But when that happens, at least there's an option to retry the connection - so, you don't necessarily lose your race progress.

But, in all, DiRT Rally 2 is a barebones product that doesn't excel, and which isn't very impressive. And the fact that it's dominated by always-online DRM, and the worst always-online DRM imaginable, means it isn't worth your money and your time. It can easily be more frustrating than fun. And I think that CM don't deserve support when they disrespect their customers with this DRM that ruins the game.

WRC 8 is easily a more complete and robust package than DR2, with a fleshed-out single-player campaign, better team and car management, better road physics, much better environmental design, and no always-online DRM. It's just unfortunate that WRC 8 isn't on Steam until September, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered looking at DR2 again.

My advice: If you aren't desperate to play a new rally game, save your money. DR2 doesn't deserve it and doesn't deliver a satisfying package or experience.