Top 160+ Favorite Games of All Time! (Pt 7)

 39 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

The Castlevania that coined the term "Metroidvania" with how much it influenced both the series and the gaming culture itself. This is where they introduced stats, weapons and gaining new powers and characters throughout. The bosses are iconic, the gameplay is very fluid and visceral. Playing as Alucard is literally a game changer and they pulled out all of the stops. You have brand new creatures, as well as many returning monsters, like that jerk of a skeleton that throws femurs at you as you pass. The castle is a whirling maze that can get you lost until you find that one door that leads to a whole new environment with all new horrors to face. There are ways to play as a Belmont, but there are also plenty of other ways to change up the gameplay as you search for Dracula and end him!

38 Panzer Dragoon Saga

A change to the series that changed everything except how awesome your opponents are. The monsters are still unique, the blast from your Dragoon are still beautiful and the setting is vast and beautiful. Every single main boss has a quirk that forces you to change your strategy on how to kill them. Some of them need to be worn down with your smaller attacks before opening up for your ultimate attacks. Some of them force you to move around to avoid their attacks while taking advantage of their lowered defenses. It can get tense and you can find yourself frustrated with some of these flying horrors, but it makes you want to figure them out and destroy them! This is a beautiful RPG that came from a railshooter series, and they made it work in a big way! Panzer Dragoon reached a beautiful peak in awesomeness, and this isn't even my favorite in the series! That's just how awesome it is.

37 Sonic the Hedgehog CD

Arguably the greatest game on the Sega CD, which is not exactly glowing praise by comparison, but they made Sonic as beautiful in graphics as it is in gameplay. The levels can get long and whirling to the point where you get lost, but it's still an amazing Sonic game. With a sudden hike in play room, the devs took full advantage and brought you this master class in platforming. You're still fast, you're still awesome and it still has a Casino Night level, which is among the greatest praise. With the advent of Metal Sonic, this game brought about brand new Sonic lore that is still in the series to this very day. This is a milestone for the series and gave credence to Sega CD's existence, however small. 

36 Virtua Cop 

One of the most awesome railshooters and it came out in the greatest console! With sprawling criminal undergrounds needing some shooting to take down, this game brought you through warehouses, parking lots and skyscrapers in order to take down the big baddies that corrupt Virtua City. The shotgun, machine gun and even your starting pistol are all feel-good weapons that make you want to shoot and reload. Even when the criminals attack you from the bottom of the screen, it never feels overly cheap. You just need to pay attention and aim your crosshairs right between their eyes, or on their legs and limbs to get live arrests. They still disappear but at least they're still alive, right? Fight the big bosses with missile launchers and take down their empire of evil! Virtua Evil!

35 Quake III: Arena

An amazing way to impliment Deathmatching directly into your game. Could it have used a story or a deeper way to play? Maybe. However, going against your friends and fighting the computer to get to the top of the pyramid is still run and gun fun! Weapons introduced in this game have gone on to be staples in the Doom universe, including a Doomguy named Phobos! You'll recognize a lot of these characters from former ID Software titles, and you can even customize your own character to take them down. You need to learn where the good weapons are, including the BFG 10,000 that packs a nuclear punch, kicking like a mule. From the doublebarrel shotgun to the awesome plasmagun, this game has you covered on how to kill your opponents and get that ULTRAKILL!

34 Mortal Kombat 9

A return to form that put Mortal Kombat on the map after a very divisive plunge into 3D. Bringing the game back to its roots with 2D fighting in a 3D backdrop turned out to be the exact right move. The story mode kind of sucks but it still brings the fans the matchup they want. It acts out the first three Mortal Kombat titles with a new canon that was still destroyed in future titles, but the thought was there. Even with killing most of its main characters in an unspeakably terrible way, the gameplay and the combat on top of these awesome graphics brought this game to new heights! With character designs that will poke your eyes out and backdrops that give you a new look at the world they exist in, this game has the goods to keep you fighting and earning those Krypt goodies. Don't forget to get a look at Freddy Kruger and Kratos and make them crush each other!

33 Diablo II

The first Diablo was fun, but also pretty mediocre as games go. All of the problems I had with Diablo, the sequel fixed wholesale. Not only was Diablo more challengning as a main boss, but the game itself was just more fluid as a result. This game does have it downsides: Some of Episode 2 just looked like a desert or a sewer for the majority of it, and sometimes the travel gets rather monotonous. Other than that, grab a barbarian character or a necromancer character and introduce the demons to their entrails! The ability trees are vast and beautiful (after some of the abilities were a little broken before nerfing) and the hordes are nice and meaty with a good crunch with your axe cleaving into them. You fight Mephisto and thanks to the expansion, you also crush Baal between your fingers! This is a wild ride with a whole butt load of replayability. Fight Hell and have a ball!

32 Half-Life

Before this game came out, you really couldn't have known that an FPS game could have one of the best stories in all of gaming for years! This is all when your protagonist is silent and the scientists will not shut up! First, there are tons of creepy ass aliens that will jump out at you from the dark and scare the hell out of you! They even attach to the staff by the head and turn them into zombies with serious walking problems. They were never a threat, but they didn't need to be, because the military was right around the corner and adding all kinds of horrible challenge to the mix. Not only did the soldiers continuously shoot at you from every angle, but they also forced you into that HORRIBLE RAIL LEVEL. This game had one of the worst final levels, but that still did not tarnish its legacy because it was just that good. Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classics, Gary's Mod (original Sven Co-op) all have this game's DNA within it. That may sound uncomfortable, but it's true. This game's name is extremely ironic, unless you count the third game's nonexistence. Now I just made myself sad. 

31 Life Force

Sometimes, the original games from your childhood just stick out in your mind like a sore thumb. This game has the fluid gameplay of flying through space in a jet. That may be nonsensical, but all of the illogic flies out the window when you get a taste of that beautiful soundtrack. This game is HARD from beginning to end, but you keep wanting to play it because it's just that damn good. There is bullet hell all over the place, random aliens flying at you from off-screen and protrusions of tentacles coming out of every wall! If you are anywhere behind a building up brick wall, you have lost a life! Some call this Salamander and call it that if you wish, but this will always be a Force of Life.

30 Mario Kart 64

There are times when a game just gets it right early. This was the second game in the series and I will die on the hill that it is the greatest of the bunch. This game is lean, free of unneeded fatty features with Mario characters and karts with a battle mode and 3D graphics, the end. There are not too many maps, not too many characters and it really didn't need anything more than that. It runs like a dream and it controls even better! This was the original game that people remember, as great as the SNES title was, it was just a great precursor to the main show! There are plenty of other gimmicks from the later titles, but this is where they truly got it right. If you disagree, then we will lose our friendship next time we indulge in this masterpiece! It's happened more than once.

29  Super Mario Bros 3

The very first game that was advertised at the very end of an entire movie. The movie had nothing to do with this game until the climax and the movie was absolute garbage, but it is also when gaming started to break into the mainstream media. Super Mario 3 introduced so many new powerups that became staples of the entire series. The feather and the tanuki suit have become iconic since then. The game can be skipped with the flutes, and often is, but playing it through all of the levels is a much more fulfilling experience. Out of the Super Mario World and Super Mario 3 argument, this is the title I covet the most. Though, Yoshi was another great staple, so World definitely has its place.

28 Alice: Madness Returns

If a game needs to go out, this is a good way to do it. It's not the greatest game of all time, but it definitely one of the better 3D platformers. The dark themes and the shock value bogged it down to some degree, but if you're able to stomach the material, this is the game for you. The imagery is very macabre and the landscape of the haunted Wonderland was some of the best you could... imagine. Alice herself has become much more of a somber character, stripped of her childlike wonder from the death of her family and aiming to set her mental state right. With a freakish looking Cheshire cat and a horrific cast of monsters to fight through terrorizing levels, it's just a shining example of what can be done with some of our favorite fairytales. Now, where's the Peter Pan horror lore?!

27 Burning Rangers

Some of the best games come out of nowhere and are found in the most unlikely of spaces. Burning Rangers is a bit of a unicorn in terms of Sega Saturn games. It's extremely expensive to buy physically, so emulating it is pretty much your best bet if you want to get some gaming experience on this beauty. The freeroaming, the gameplay of fighting fires with water lasers, and the natural 32 bit graphics that pushed the system to its limits, all of it is just fun to play. It can get rather hard to complete, especially if you're trying to rescue everyone and get all of the gameplay down, but it's a labor of love. Along with Panzer Dragoon Saga, this is considered one of the greatest titles on the console. This is for very good reason.

26 The Legend of Zelda

The original has to truly great in order for its franchise to flourish. Nowhere is this more prominent than with Legend of Zelda. It may be cryptic in its progression, and there are some difficulty spikes with the amount of enemies you need to fight all at once, but it's just so much fun. The soundtrack itself is legendary, as are its dungeons that you need to traverse. You know, those dungeons with the puzzles and secret entrances. The triforce is now a staple in gaming, and Ganon continues to be one of the most recognizable villains in the culture. Just remember, his name is Link, not Zelda. Yes, this was a common miconception for a long, long time. 

25 Virtua Fighter 2

One of the greatest fighting games in my library and I will never give it up. Virtua Fighter was good, but the sequel was when the franchise peaked. They rose to heights of quality that is seldom seen in fighting games and it went hand to hand against Tekken on every single front. Even if it is not as popular, the game is still awesome. The characters are charming, even if the boss battle is less-so. You just can't help but love Jeffry's craziness and Shun's very unhealthy drinking habit. Either way, the fighting mechanics are solid and the 32 bit graphics are beautiful. 

24 Master of Magic

It is very hard to learn a game with extremely deep mechanics. Unlike some strategy games, Master of Magic is not quite as complex, but it is extremely fun to learn and play. The game can get a little frustrating, especially when it has monsters constantly attacking you early in the game when you're getting everything set up and building your armies. You need to learn as many spells as you can and produce as many armies as you can in order to get more and more cities to get more and more units, both magical and regular. The 5 type magical system and the weird A.I. of your allies and opponents just keeps things interesting and unique with every play through, especially with a map that is always unique to each new game. 

23 Nights into Dreams

Very few times have games truly met and exceeded expectations. When I first saw Nights on commercials, my dreams of it were very real. I wanted this game more than anything. When I got my Sega Saturn in Christmas of 1996, that was the game I bought immediately after, along with a second controller. This game blew my mind with its beauty and high flying gameplay. It pushed the system to its limits because Sonic Team knew how to use both platforms of 3D and 2D, using both to make the game's background and foreground without lag or drops in frames. It is HARD to meet expectations to get at least a C average in order to get to the last level, but it is well worth it. Nights became the Sega Saturn's most recognizable title for a very good reason.

22 TMNT

One of the greatest beat'em ups in gaming, bar none. This is just beautiful gaming that coencides with the hit TV show that was still going strong upon its release. Whichever turtle you play has slightly different play style, but everyone has their own favorite. These graphics were beautiful and even translated very well into TMNT 2 for the NES. The levels are vibrant and the different types of foot ninja are plentiful. The first fight with Rocksteady in the burning building is iconic, as was the sewer levels where you face the Killer Pizzas from one of the best episodes in the show. Fighting your way to Shredder and Krang cost you an entire week's allowance but it was money well spent for one of the Triforce of beat'em up awesomeness. Heroes in a Halfshell, indeed.

21 Castlevania

If you want dark, gothic horror in 8-bit beauty, this is your go-to. The graphics are simple, but the gameplay is HARD. When you get hit, you fall backward. This could make you fall into a death trap or just fall into another monster that does immense damage. The level designs play into this hardship amazingly, even if it can get rather frustrating. The music goes with all of it so well, and it's just so much fun to see what sort of castles and catacombs you're getting into next. With creatures flying into you and big hulking monsters coming out of the woodworks, you won't get bored, but you will most likely die. Die, you will, but with a cringing smile on your face.

20 Team Fortress Classics

Live service games were not always the pitfall many of them are now. Back when games were great and made with the Halflife engine, it was just as simple as logging in and choosing a character. Heavy Weapons Guys are the most fun, but they are also one of the cheaper and easiest to play. They are also the weakest against snipers with weak long range and slow running speeds. There's also pyros, spies, medics, demolition, all of them have their quirks and awesome mechanics that add to the experience. Engineers building turrets and ammo stations aid players in killing and protecting their flags. All of its culminates in an all out war with simple maps that keep you running into opponents to fight. It's just a lot of fun and you can still play it to this day as there are several dedicated servers, bots and people who will play it even when it has a perfectly good sequel. This is worth celebrating and checking out for yourself. Kill well and remember to drink water.

Resident Evil Extinction - Escape from Retcon City

This movie is a perfect poster child for why you need a future plan for a movie franchise. There are so many things that were changed for this movie to work, but then subsequent titles after this film act like its events never happen. Either that, or they quickly clean everything up and forget about all of it. Why? Because someone thought it would be a great idea to just destroy the entire world and turn it into Mad Max 2. That's not a joke, the filmmakers were very prominently inspired by the Mad Max series for this entire premise. These two elements could work, but only if they were willing to stick to their guns. Spoiler Alert: They didn't. 

That's not to say that this is a wholly bad movie. This is actually pretty entertaining, but it would have worked better as its own standalone film. The entire world is now destroyed. Entire bodies of water dried up and the T-Virus killed 90% of its entire population. Alice is now Mad Max on a motorcycle, going through the deserts and sticking to areas where Umbrella Corp cannot track her. We are also following an entire group of survivors led by Claire Redfield. They go through abandoned cities and ghost towns to gather resources with which to survive. LJ from the second movie is still here, as is Carlos. Both of them are on the convoy and helping them with a bit of muscle to help kill zombies and protect their group. 

We see a lot of stuff that doesn't exactly contribute to the main plot. Mostly, it's just them killing zombies and dying from random attacks, especially from that of the crows. Both Alice and the refugees are separate for the first part of the movie until this fight with the crows and she helps most of them escape their attack. There are plenty of deaths, though, and it's clear that they are losing hope until Alice tells them about a possible refuge in Alaska, which kindles a little bit of optimism. 

However, Umbrella Corp is still looking for Alice, even going so far as to frequently clone her in hopes of multiplying her blood, which can be synthesized for a cure. Dr. Alexander Isaacs is head of this project, but he answers to Albert Wesker, who is making his real character debut in this movie, for some reason. It's not that he's not part of the story, but he plays such a small part that his big first appearance could have been saved for a better contribution. In here, he's just sitting in a chair and telling Isaacs "no" when he wants to send a team to take Alice. Isaacs ignores this answer and manipulates Wesker's voice audio to command it be done anyway. 

Some things are done quite well in this movie. Isaacs is a great villain, manipulative and sinister with no conscience for human life. For him, the ends always justify the means, and he wants to create a cure so that they can use it to leverage what is left of the populace and gain control over them. There are all kinds of things wrong with this approach, because all of the cloning and all of the power they use for their facilities should be used for resources since the world is, you know, basically dead. 

They even go so far as to create super zombies that they have limited control over. These are far more vicious than normal zombies as well as physically stronger. In the end, it doesn't matter a whole lot, they are still just walking dead people, they can just run a little faster now. This attack kills all of the remaining prominent survivors in the convoy, aside from Claire. LJ was infected by the T-Virus in an earlier scene, so he was dying the whole time and turns into a zombie because he hid his injury from them. This is rather hypocrytical of him, because he gave Carlos a hard time for doing the same thing in the second film.

They almost get to Alice and nearly capture her, but they fail and Isaacs is bitten by one of the super zombies who also has a more aggressive form of the T-Virus. With their entire convoy aside from just a few survivors now dead, the plan to reach Alaska is now to take a helicopter from Umbrella Corp after getting through an entire legion of zombies. One very high point in this film is when Carlos decides to sacrifice his life to give them an entrance. The last zombie attack left him infected with the virus and so he drives a giant fuel truck through them, and causes it to explode. Before it does, though, he finds a nice little rolled smoke and uses it to light the fuel. He has a nice little puff before the end. Absolute boss way to go. Proper respects.

Once Dr. Isaacs gets back to the base, he takes the anti-virus in large doses and this turns him into a tentacle tyrant. The special effects in this movie is hit and miss. While the crows in the earlier scene look pretty decent, the Isaac tyrant looks awful, especially when he actually uses the tendrils. It also makes no sense at all that Isaacs has Alice's telekinesis powers. The fight they have isn't terrible, and it brings back a nice callback to the laser hallway that killed most of the special forces team in the first film. This would have been a lot better if they hadn't already done so in the earlier Alice clone scene at the beginning of the film, but it was pretty cool to see Isaacs get chopped to bits from the grid laser.

During all of this, one of the movie's greatest weaknesses pokes its head up. The clones. These clones could have been a pretty cool plot for the next movie, but as you will see from the next review, this cool little gimmick is whizzed down their legs. We are given the promise of a cool war between Umbrella and super powered (somehow) Alice clones led by the real Alice herself. It is teased at the end and they do next to nothing with it. The entire plot point of these clones is rendered completely useless as a result. They spent all of that effort into multiplying Milla Jovovich and all of it was wasted. 

Another very large brick wall that this movie faced was the plot device of Umbrella Corp's control over Alice via computer satellite. Not only does it help them track her, but it also gives them her off button. They use this in two parts of the movie, one was done so that they could find her and sic zombies on her. The other turned her off completely... for a few minutes. Then she literally destroys their control over her with her mind. Somehow, even though the satellite is in space, she gains back control from Earth. This was a very badly used plot point that really should have been retconned between movies 2 and 3. It's not as if they didn't retcon tons of other things.

As said before, this is a pretty decent addition to this series. It's far better than the second film because it takes itself more seriously. The problem, however, is that it is a Resident Evil movie and it does little to nothing for the entire movie franchise. This is a common problem from here on out and this is the last time that the movies ever reach the quality of "decent". Paul WS Anderson obviously had no idea what he was doing and was flying by the seat of his pants the entire time. He looked at the series, pulled a lot of the coolest elements but had no idea how to impliment them in a meaningful way. He thought he could put in cloning, the tyrant, Wesker, zombie crows and cool action scenes, and it would amount to Resident Evil. Well, it doesn't, and the series has suffered hard because of it. They made this movie pretty good on accident. They did not make that "mistake" again. If you have seen this series, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Virtua Bites. 

Xbox One - How Greed can Poison a Gaming Company

Anyone in the videogame zeitgeist can tell you why Xbox lost the console wars. It was not because Playstation was a trustworthy company and it was not because any exclusive game for another console. Microsoft did it to themselves and they are still feeling the stranglehold of that failure years after the eighth generation had come and gone. From the day that it was announced, the Xbox One uncovered just how bad a game console could get even before it was released in 2013. It also showed gamers just how much control they could have over their gaming experience and it was a very disconcerting revelation that made the general public stop trusting Microsoft. 

This all began in April of 2013 when a Microsoft Studios employee, Adam Orth, confirmed people's dreadful rumor of the next generation console requiring to be always online. He posted on his Twitter account that a console always being online was not a big deal and that people just needed to accept it. This was the first very large nail in Xbox One's console and opened up an entire flooding of negative press and public backlash. He lost his job soon after making the comment, but this was only the beginning of a very long and dreadful launch of a machine that was now in question. 

Adam Orth

The following months only brought more news and more disbelief. It seemed like every single thing that Microsoft revealed about the Xbox One only drew more backlash and public hatred. They announced that this console was not going to focus on gaming and that it was more about being a replacement to your computer and your television. Rather than giving people new games with which to gain hype, they told people that it was going to play BluRay, have cable service and live streaming capabilities that far exceeded all of the others. Rather than a gaming console, they wanted to replace literally every other high level media in a household. The idea was that the Xbox One would be the center of an entire family's entertainment rather than just playing to the niche of gaming culture.

Unpacking this, it still feels like this was a brainchild of both mismanagement and poor planning. Either a family would be required to purchase a multiple Xbox Ones in order to fill every bedroom and living room, or they would have one for the entire family to watch movies, TV shows while also bearing the burden of being little Timmy's way of playing new games. In retrospect, the idea had flaws down to the very foundation. When was the gamer actually supposed to find time to play the newest releases for the Xbox system when the rest of the family was counting on it to play their movies and other forms of media? 

Then they decided to bury themselves in even more controversy and show their true intentions with the console. Not only was it required to be purchased with the Kinect, an item that was already condemned as a meaningless add-on, but it also had a program that would marry one game to one console alone. That's right, you can only play new games in this console and you could not loan out your used games to friends, nor sell them to game stores. GameStop took issue with this, obviously, since the vast majority of their revenue came from used games. Gamers were not all swimming in money. It was quite the contrary in most cases and many collections were filled with used titles that were marked down. Xbox doubled down on this decision, stating that if they wanted to loan a game to a friend, they would need to pay a fee in order to do so. These restrictions were clearly meant to strangle every single customer for as much money as they could, even when it came to reselling the game to "certain retailers". 

One of the worst parts about this was the announcement that this system was always supposed to be online. That may seem arbitrary to some, but there are many out there who do not have a very stable internet connection. If the game console goes offline, you immediately lost the use of the Xbox One and the games you have loaded on it, whether you had the physical copies or not. After an enormous bit of backlash from this, the CEO of Xbox, Don Mattrick, in all of his lack of intelligence, announced in an interview that "for people who do not have an internet connection, there is another machine, it's called the Xbox 360". Once again, more and more people decided to side with the PS4, stating that they got the message loud and clear. This was such a callous and thoughtless comment, it brought about the theory that he was actively trying to make this console fail. Of course, they went from always online to only needing to be online once a day to check in with the Xbox servers. 

Giving credence to the idea that Mattrick stopped caring about the Xbox One altogether, he left the company soon after the controversy hit critical. He hit the road and instead went to Zynga so that he could leave that company as well two years later. This is one very large, glaring issue with the gaming industry as a whole. If things aren't going their way and they find themselves between a rock and a hard place, they can just zipline out of the company while it burns to the ground, taking their ridiculous amount of money with them. Why this man was ever given an opportunity after this blatant show of stupidity is a mystery all its own. 

The Kinect also became a point of concern for many, as it was always required to be on. They said that this was only so that it could have its voice activation on call for when someone wanted to turn on the Xbox One verbally. People saw this as very suspicious and began to wonder how much information they were gathering about each individual customer through both audio and video feeds. To try and reassure people, they told them that none of the data they collected was going to be used for any nefarious things like selling it to outside sources. However, the data was, in fact, being collected. The demand to remove the Kinect from the console was in an uproar, but Microsoft said that the Xbox One and the little camera gathering data were part of the same machine by design and it could not be removed. This was an outright lie, as they did remove it later on after the highest peaks in the controversy. It also had the added bonus of removing 100 space bucks from the price as a result.

Playstation did not help matters in the slightest, when push came to shove. They came out in front of the public and told people all of their features for PS4, which were not even real "features". They were, however, vast improvements over what was being promised for the Xbox One. They didn't require to always be online, they told people that all you needed to do to share your video game is to let them borrow it, they were focusing on making great games for the console, and the price tag for the Playstation 4 was 100 space bucks less. They even made a show of it. Two guys went on the screen and showed you the only step that you needed in order to share your games with each other, and it was just a guy handing another guy a game and him saying "Thank you". Ouch. 

There was another very large nail in the Xbox One's coffin, the price. It was 500 smackers! This was a ridiculous price, especially with how much they were planning to price the games and all of the other accessories that were not included with its purchase. Every single announcement that Microsoft came out with only convinced customers that this was not the console for them and the backlash only got worse as time went on and Microsoft continually failed to see the forest for the trees. By the time they started making the console more affordable and implimenting different improvements and services for it to flourish, the damage was already done. 

They had to race to meet PS4's quality and they even improved it to the point where it had backward compatibility with the Xbox 360 in some of its games. They put in a service called the Game Pass, where people could have an entire barrage of games for a monthly fee and started to focus more on new games rather than every other type of media, but it was all for nothing. The launch for the Xbox One was such a disaster that it became impossible to keep up. The good will that the 360 brought to the community was gone and they were playing catch up years after the Xbone came out. It helped to some degree but they had already lost the console wars.

If there was any generation of consoles to win, this was the one that needed it the most. Not only was the gaming industry becoming more and more competitive, the culture of digital games was blooming and that meant a big shift in the industry as a whole. Xbox One missed the mark, and that meant that all of the digital games that were sold for the console were not going to be bought for the next generations of consoles. If you bought games digitally for the PS4, there was very little chance that you would even consider moving over to the Xbox Series X for the next gaming experience. The digital library is fairly locked in by this point and all of it was made playable on the PS5. All of that revenue Microsoft could have gotten for people buying a new console under the Xbox banner was up in flames. 

As of the writing of this article, the Xbox is still feeling the effects of this gigantic misstep. The gaming industry's greed is still ever present, but never has it been so clearly unmasked in the public eye. They did everything to try and make up for their attempts to syphon money from their customers, but they lost all of the trust they had garnered in the years before. No one can blame the public for siding with Playstation on this one. Sony may also be greedy and constantly lie to gamers, but at least they do it while selling a product people actually want. It's a very sad notion that we need to catered to by thieves but that's the reality we live in. The gaming industry is hitting a gigantic low point because of it, but all we can do is hope for a brighter future and remember to drink water.

God of War (PS3 Collection) - Ares! Give me a Minute!

 There are few games that can truly be considered "legendary" in the ways of real staying power and cultural impact. God of War is one of those games. Having come out in the fabled era of the PS2's hayday, this title has become the true high bar of the Hack and Slash genre. Playing through this game, it is very obvious as to why. This game is unapologetic in its graphic imagery. It will show off cruelty, blood and sex as if it were a true page from the Greek history books. It involves all of the gods of old and depicts them in various imaginative ways and it shows off its hero as if he were a god of a man himself. 

Kratos is a character that exudes masculinity in its most brutal. He needs to be brutal because the problems that he continuously faces only grow more and more dire. He is equipped with two blades hooked up to chains and he slings them around, killing everything he can get his hands on. After some time and gameplay, he doesn't even need to physically reach them. He gains powerups the more enemies he kills and the more red points he acquires. He gains health and mana power through killing his foes and crates that you periodically find throughout levels. 

The power ups you gain come in many forms. You not only get to find items such as gorgan eyes and phoenix feathers to up your max health and mana, but you also gain quest items that make you able to form more abilities. Then, if you've finish quests or are on the way to completing a quest, the gods will come and tell you "good job" then give you the power of various gods. This comes in the form of a gorgon's head to temporary turn your enemies to stone and break them or even Zeus's very own lightning throws to take out enemies out of reach. The controls for these abilities are surprisingly intuitive and are thankfully easy to actually employ during a battle. You just need to remember which d-pad control activates which ability. 

One thing about this game is, it can get rather difficult. You can learn the dodge, block and attack functions just fine in order to kill your opponents, that doesn't get too difficult. The problems lie within some of the platform sections. This is ESPECIALLY true when you need to save the oracle. I haven't really stayed with this game's fanbase, nor am I aware of all the memes that were born out of this title, but I can only imagine the oracle section is up there with some of the more frustrating aspects. Not only do you need to traverse around platforming elements like wall-climbing on vines, but you also need to jump on ropes and walk over slim beams in order to beat a timer. Sometimes, the ropes just don't grab on like they should and the oracle falls to her death. It's definitely a bit more challenging.

The challenge doesn't stop there, either. No, actually there are sections where you're on a timer that you don't actually see. Sometimes, you need to kill shielded skeletons in a hurry before the floor breaks out from under you. Sometimes, you may just die in a maze thanks to a trap that puts you in lava and starts you right back at the very start of the maze. You need to know the controls and master them quickly, or something spiked will come out of nowhere and crush you while also stabbing you all over. It is very fast paced and sometimes the deaths can be very unforgiving. We can just count our lucky stars that this is not on a limited continue scheme. Something tells me it wouldn't be as popular.

The story gets wild. The deeper you get into Kratos's history, the more you see what kind of a badass he was, but also how it proves to be his biggest vulnerability. Concerning his history, though, there was a section where you watch the Spartans under his command get completely decimated by a barbarian horde. Like, there is not a single depiction of the Spartans killing a barbarian at all. Here I am, thinking that the Spartans were the strongest warriors in history and this seemed like a bit of a stretch. It's clear that they needed a reason for him to sell his soul to Ares, but it seems like they could have done something that didn't make him and his men look like complete pansies. Even history buffs that watched 300 have said that they didn't quite capture their awesomeness, and here's this game coming out and showing us that they can't even get a single barbarian on the end of a spear. It was a little off-putting.

There are also many puzzles to solve. To the devs' credit, they are definitely think pieces. Strangely enough, I was able to get through some of them through sheer intuition, but it was the more simple moments that had me a little stumped and needing to peek at a walkthrough. They can be as simple as moving a statue into place but they can also be a little more asking and require creative thinking. 

What draws many people to this game is the feeling of being powerful and acquiring the powers of the gods while defeating gigantic enemies. There are so many twists and turns, but I will not spoil the overall ending, as it is quite the unexpected turn if you're not entirely up on your God of War lore. For the time, this game was a marvel in graphical bliss and gameplay alike. It's really no wonder so many people love this game. It is very much not for children, not for people who have an aversion for sexual content or extreme bouts of gore. Kratos became a milestone for the Playstation and even though the games didn't really get much better after the original trilogy, this game has never lost its potency. It wears it bloody colors proud and very few games have matched it. I may have played Dante's Inferno first, but it's pretty obvious where the game tried to copy God of War's greatness, but fell rather short in some areas. I still retain that Dante's Inferno has its merits, but Kratos is the obvious winner, hands down. Virtua APRIL FOOLS!!!!! Ooooohhhh got you! Yeah that's the best I got, sorry.

The Age of Concord - How Bad Can it Get?

 I was not part of the populace that wasted money on this game, nor was I willing to waste my time in buying it while subsequently getting an obligatory refund for said game. I was one of the vast majority that watched this game come and go like a terrible fart in an elevator. It can hardly be considered a fart in an elevator, it was gone 11 days after its release! This should have been an amazing example of what not to do when creating a game, and yet it seems to be the example that so many developers and publishers have followed ever since. 

There are so many aspects of Concord that led to its extremely short lifespan: Catering to activists and their insecurities, releasing it with a $40 pricetag when its superiors were free to play, spending $400 million dollars and ten years to develop it and coming out on social media to shame their audiences for not wanting it, all of it should have been setting off alarms in Sony's head. This was a failure on such a colossal level, people barely even remember why we hated Atari's E.T. in the first place. This stomped every single competition on the road to the very bottom and it did so with such amazing ease that they never even bothered to rerelease it as free to play. 

No one has come to the conclusion that, perhaps, they should have been listening to the public. You would think that there was a PR department looking through the comments and gamer buzz to see what players were doing at the time. The problem was that this was all developed in the vain of Overwatch because of its amazing popularity and the fact that it made Blizzard all kinds of money. The fact that Blizzard still ruined Overwatch and fired all of its lead developers in the process doesn't even enter into the equation. The fact was that the moment they made the decision to try and remake Overwatch when it was popular meant that they were already behind the times. Gaming culture changes like the wind and waiting ten years to release a game to catch the "current" zeitgeist of entertainment is like trying to grab water on its way out of the faucet. By the time Concord was released, that ship had left the port years prior. 

The greatest games come about when a developer or a team of developers share a vision to bring something to gaming that wasn't there to begin with. Even if it's not an especially unique idea, if the vision is strong enough with the gameplay, there is a very good chance that it can be a huge success. These are games that come from a desire to exceed expectations in both design and aesthetic, making a vision come to fruition and polishing that game to a beautiful sheen. 

So, why is it that there are spiritual successors to Concord already? The game bit the dust and we're already seeing others come out of the woodwork that look eerily similar. Not only are they creating disgustingly unimaginative characters and boring as hell gameplay, but they are also doing the same cardinal sin of going after the gaming public that they need to sign their paychecks. If you do not have gamers playing your game, your game is going to fail. Period. 

Highguard made the same mistakes in spades. Every single aspect of Concord was brought back to the table, including the fact that they had no idea what gamers were asking for. They certainly weren't asking for a 3v3 hero shooter with gargantuan maps that they can't populate properly. Every single character basically plays the same aside from arbitrary abilities that unlock every so often. Beyond that, you get cookie-cutter weapons and ride horses that are astoundingly difficult to shoot from. The characters are unimaginative as ever. They either have modern day haircuts and/or look like they belong to other games, only made worse. 

Whoever is signing these developers' checks should make a clause in their contracts that obligate them to shut the hell up on social media! These people look so pathetic when they go on the internet and just whine and cry about how they wasted half a decade or more making this game. They will swear that the game they made was awesome, but then go into how they never got any outside influence of any kind, so they had no idea that no one was asking for it. After the ridiculous fallout of Concord, that should have set off some serious bells that this was all a very bad idea. Even if they were so deep into its development, they should have cut their losses or at least not put so much into it from then on. 

No one forced them to put the game at the end of the Game Award Show. They thought that including elements of every popular hero shooter was going to win them fans, but it just made it more generic. It made it fodder for memes and gamers coming out and calling it a sequel to Concord. This should have come as no surprise but it caused their development team to go radio silent soon after the Game Award announcement. All of a sudden, all of the echoes in their chamber started to truly doubt their creation. The release started with a promising 100,000 gamers playing it, but that number was brought down to a dismal 1,000 to 2,000 players within weeks. They accused gamers of not giving it a chance but that's all they gave it. The game was apparently so boring that people couldn't even make it past the tutorial which is REQUIRED at the beginning. It's evident that no one on the team had played a game in their lives or someone would have told them that this was a huge mistake. 

If one live service game wasn't bad enough, now they've announced the gameplay and character roster of Horizon Zero Dawn's new game, Hunters Gathering. In this post apocalyptic world, apparently it's fruitful enough for one woman to eat her way to a diabetic amputation. The characters still look amazingly generic and unappealing. Nothing was learned from Concord's cataclysmic failure. Of course gamers aren't going to give this game a chance, nor should they. It already released trailers and every single one of them is just getting disliked at an amazing rate. The publishers can stick their fingers in their ears and go LALALALALALA all they want, but no amount of blaming gamers for their failure is going to make up for the money they are about to lose. This is not making assumptions at this point, this is just common sense and gaming Darwinism at work. 

The boy can only cry wolf so many times before he loses his voice, and gaming companies are about to learn their lesson one game at a time. These games are not free to make and every single dollar may as well be burned for all it matters at this point. Give the money to charity if you want it to actually make a difference in the world. Stop wasting gamers' time. The only good thing coming out of this mess is the hours of content it is giving youtubers to make amazing videos. If that's the gift you want to give to the world, spend another 100 or 200 million dollars for our ironic entertainment. Stop torturing and crunching your developers and at least buy them some water. They're going to need it.

Retro Rewind - Be Kind and Lose your Mind!

 Back in the hayday of movie rentals, back when Friday nights were prime time for movie rentals, you were given the keys to the movie kingdom. The joys of going through those sections of your favorite film genres cannot be described in words. You just need to have some coin and a rental membership, and you could discover a new favorite. Of course, you could also find a movie that you turn off immediately because it plays to your worst fears, but those just happen. This game captures the feeling of working at Blockbuster, much like I did in the mid 2000's before its inevitable death. It has all of the charm and only some of the pitfalls. 

You are given your own movie rental store and you need to build it up from scratch. In true simulation fashion, you start with small facilities that can be expanded, and with limited options for decorations. The most important thing in the start is just gathering up as many movies as you can and getting shelves with which to stock them. You start out with horror and drama, but also have the option to purchase adult movies from the strange guy in the back alley. That's not as scummy as it sounds. At first, I thought that dealing with him could land me in some trouble, but I never saw any... well, not directly, but we'll get into that. 

The new release days are some of the best sections of the game. It's just fun to get a good 5 or 10 of them to begin with and see them disappear off the shelf as you gain more and more customers. The more time that elapses, the more genres and new releases that come your way. You need to get at least a few of the new movies on your shelves the day they come out, because customers will ask about them quite often. Once they become regular movies, falling out of their first week, you can keep a couple of them, but it's best to get rid of the excess by putting them in bargain bins. You need to make way for more movies, which will be coming very shortly. 

Designing your store and coming up with the section placement is not very important in any other way than space. With a smaller space, getting the shelves right will open you up to getting more movies and that means more money. You don't need to worry too much about decorations to begin with, because getting five new releases at a time means that you get a poster along with them. As you go along, you are able to play around with the style of each section, giving them a lot of character that goes to your taste. It's very easy to over-decorate, but once you get it right, it will draw more customers.

Customers don't shoplift, thankfully, and I hope that never becomes a mechanic of this title. They will, however, break the movies that you go through in your returns. Some of the movies are late as well, and both of these elements will cause an extra charge to your customers. It is best if you charge every customer for breaks and late returns, because even if they don't end up paying, you will get that money back in some form or fashion. As you go, they will multiply before you know it. You go to sections to recommend movies to them based on genre, age and whether they have a good rating from critics. It's a charming little tidbit to recommend titles, but you also don't need to get too involved with it. Sadly, you're not able to watch the movies other than a small trailer-like video on your decorative TV screens. Even then, it only shows the horror and sci-fi short movies. 

Employees are a mixed bag. Once you get to a certain level, you can employ one person to either work the front counter or movie returns. You want them to handle the cash register, that is definitely one of the more mundane aspects of this game, much like it is in real life. Go figure. These employees could fall asleep and you'll need to wake them up. Sometimes, they'll straight up call in sick and you need to pick up that extra slack. If it gets too blatantly obvious that they're misusing that privledge, it is up to you whether you want to fire them and hire another one. One of the employees actually blackmailed me into giving him a raise or he would tell the police I was dealing in the blackmarket videos in the back alley. He was given the raise, but immediately fired. Whether that was a real threat and they could actually call the cops, I didn't have any repercussions in the whole ordeal, so that's up in the air. 

Along with the movies, you also deal in snacks and drinks. This can be a simple snack shelf at first, but then you get drinks, slushies, popcorn and even cotton candy. All of these things enhance your profit margin. Each is a small hike, but once you put them all together, you see the difference. Selling your previously rented games in the bargain bins will also draw in a nice hefty profit, especially after all of the income from the initial rentals. 

The real meat of the game comes from both the cash register and the movie returns. At first, without employees, you need to shift between these two jobs. You have extra time in the beginning and end of the day to do the returns, but they keep coming throughout as people drop them off. Whether you like sectioning these movies or not will ultimately dictate your enjoyment of this title. If this is your bread and butter, this game can get rather addictive. 

Another great part is how quirky the world is around you. You could see a UFO abduct someone outside your window. On Friday the 13th, there will be weirdos outside and sometimes inside your store, staring in at you with hockey masks on. I think it's a movie reference or something, who knows? The little interesting tidbits like this are a ton of fun to observe while you work. With the weather change and the seasons passing, it can become a nice little ambience game at the same time. It's just all around pleasant. 

There are glitches here and there. Sometimes the word bubbles don't go away and sometimes your employees will walk through you while you're working and screw up your flow. None of this is a deal-breaker. This game is easy to figure out and it's all just fun busy play. It will either resonate with you or it could be a snorefest if this isn't your thing. It could even be fun to stock the sodas and make the slushies, but always remember to drink water.

Helldivers 2 - Eat Democracy Justice Explosions!

 Sometimes, it is interesting to see when a game gets references correct. In this day and age, you wouldn't expect to see a game that brought back the concepts of both Terminator and Starship Troopers. They did this in the same game. This is especially amazing because this is the mid 2020's and this is a Live Service Game! Such a thing should have been cast to the bottom of the pits forever, using the logic we've seen thus far in so many different games that tried the same idea. Well, Helldivers found a way to make co-op gameplay awesome again with a third person horde shooter. How did they do that? Well, let's get into it, shall we?

You are the new recruit in the amazing army of Super Earth! You are a Helldiver, an expendable asset of the government sent into warzones to take out the enemy. Now, we can go into the fact that, like Starship Troopers, the idea that these entities are not enemies but harmless races existing on their own planets could be viable. However, this time around, the "automatons" are at least able to perform space travel. So, this time, it is more possible for the robots to go through space. Kill the robots and make sure that they can't go to any other planet. While the bugs can't go through space, logically, kill them too because they're icky. 

The real thing that people love about this game is the comradary you feel when facing down an entire army with just two or four of you. In your arsenal, you possess a main weapon that you choose from the beginning. They give you a small bunch of options for your weapons and supplementary items to help you. Through continuous gameplay and victories, you'll earn more points to get better stuff as you level. 

Now, with an online play comes the inevitability of the troll. You will join games and assholes will do nothing but kill you. The problem with this game is that they do not penalize you for this. So, if you are not the host of the game, you have no choice but to quit the game or continue to be killed by the ones trying to help you. The best thing you can do is find the good players that are actually there to help you complete the mission and NOT just be there to farm for Super Cash, and friend them for future missions. 

Then there is the Super Cash system. The game uses in-game currency such as this, planet samples and your normal money you get paid for completing missions and side missions. This can be complimented with real money from your real pocket and that's really how microtransactions should be done. You can choose to take the short cut to get cool items, or you can just grind the game as much as possible to gain it what many would consider "the right way". So many games such as Shadow of War or Star Wars Battle Front 2 (2017) seemed to miss this concept and worked this into a requirement to get through the game. Battle Front 2 made it to where you either spend your real money, or put in 50 or more hours to get the items or characters you really want. Thankfully, Helldivers 2 doesn't make you grind QUITE that much. There are still commitments, but it's not nearly on that level. 

Helldivers 2 does one thing right in particular. It is fun to play and it is fun to share this experience with your friends. It may need to be online, but you also can solo missions. In the early levels, your best bet is to connect with random users, even with the aforementioned trolls ruining the experience, and gain levels. If you attempt to solo missions at the very beginning, you will probably have a very negative experience in doing so. You need new technology such as improved turrets or what they call "Watch Dogs" which are turrets that float over your shoulder and help you shoot things. 

There are three types of enemies that you can face, and each of these types have very unique qualities that you need to make sure you understand. You can fight the bugs, or Terminids. These are more susceptible to fire and gas attacks that nullify them and burn them up into exploding into bloody green splats. The bots, or Automatons require you use more destructive means like explosions or electricity to take them out. The Illuminates are aliens and those levels are, as far as I'm concerned, the less interesting matches. They are more humanoid and tend to use more alien technology like electric turrets. Each and every single enemy can be viewed as very different in both their means of attack and their means of barring you from your mission. 

We're not getting into the time that Helldivers 2 decided to sabotage their own work by nerfing everything and getting their game banned in multiple territories. They made some very poor decisions and nearly killed their own game that people were already enjoying. They came to their senses and fixed the game before it died, basically painting a perfect picture of when game publishers should back off and let the gamers cook. HD2 is a fun experience, but it can also get a little grating with the difficulty too high and solo gaming when you most certainly need a full team. Even when things get tense and chaotic, though, that can be some of the most fun you have in this title. Getting technology such as combat jeeps with turrets, tanks, or even mech suits to bring into the game is basically a requirement when you get to the higher difficulties. Take the game for what it is: Probably one of the better experiences you'll have in modern gaming. Take this with a grain of salt, but also remember to drink water.