Recent reviews by ash

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

'How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!'

'I'm sure those are not the right words,' said poor Alice, and her eyes filled with tears again as she went on.

terrible remake that is currently 90% off, the better version of the trilogy is free

- terrible remade music with no option to use the originals
- ugly crash design that makes him look like a psychopath by giving him weird small eyes
- ruined crash 1 by giving it uniformed gameplay to 2 and 3, removing a huge part of crash 1's personality (bonus round crates count towards the gem now, you don't need to beat levels deathless to get gems anymore, no passwords, heavier gravity)
- none of the games have their distinct main menus or game over screens anymore since it's all put together in a game selector which further dilutes their personality (which also causes continuity problems by having uka uka showing up on the game over screen for crash 1 despite him not being part of the series until 3 since they reused the same game over screen for all games)
- ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pill shaped hitbox for crash because vicarious visions couldn't figure out giving crash a box hitbox and make him go up slopes smoothly while naughty dog had that figured out in '96, that pill shaped hitbox ruins any sort of fine movement needed for moving through narrow pathways (mostly for crash 1 on the bridge levels)

i implore anyone to just go play the originals instead, even if they're locked to 30fps because no one will ever bother to reverse engineer them like they did for CTR, they're still lightyears ahead of whatever activision slop this remake is

an elegant co-op game from a more civilized age

world's most overrated game

oh noooo bulgaria at a bright, sunny daytime with no pollution, what an oppressive and eerie environment!

if HL2 wasn't such a landmark for graphics and physics i'm convinced no one would've liked this game, because it's so lame in absolutely every single other regard

- none of the cool and funny aliens from HL1
- none of the fun experimental weapons from HL1 like the snarks, tripmines, tau cannon and gluon gun, and nothing interesting replacing them either
- complete tonal shift by inexplicably being set in bulgaria instead of HL1's new mexico (actual zero in-universe explanation for the whole cast being moved 10,000km to another continent, topped off by writings, signs and graffiti all in cyrillic despite the game not having a single eastern european person and everyone in the game being american and clearly only knowing english)
- every gun feels lame and sounds lame with unexpressive and unreacting enemies who don't flinch or run away when injured, nothing
- braindead enemy AI that just runs towards you to die on queue like it's a theater play
- long ass cutscenes with people talking where you're most often than not not even part of the conversation and all you can do is walk around and press E on things to pass the time
- loss of player agency by making every single friendly NPC completely immortal where you could shoot anyone in HL1, even if it just gave you a game over
- the most horrendous lack of full body awareness in gaming, you lift objects with your mind, you drive vehicles without using or seeing your hands, and you can't see your legs

ravenholm is the only mildly interesting part of it and even then it's just a trap playhouse styled level where every single run through it is the exact same with no variety anyway

still to this day the most casual and fun co-op shooter ever made, no matter what always guaranteed to have a blast hopping in with your bros and shooting the ♥♥♥♥ together

and it's moddable to ♥♥♥♥ too, any minor inconvenience can just be removed and you can easily make mod packs to share as a collection

SPECIAL shoutouts to the team psykskallar aesthetics mod for making the game look so insanely good https://eo.steamhost.cc/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3260067578

10/10 game

mahoyo is peak KINOko nasu, it's not just my favorite type-moon visual novel but also favorite visual novel period

a few points as to why i like it so much:
- 80s japan mixed with urban witchcraft is peak setting
- full-on novel with no minigames or selectable options, and in turn no dead ends, makes it a lot more approachable to read and you can better focus on the story as there's no interruptions
- no set protagonist, multiple characters get story beats in their point of view, letting each character get much more fleshed out than the usual VN where you only see characters from the eyes of the protagonist
- and in turn a ton of typically pointless side characters get genuinely tangled with the story and matter a lot more than you'd expect (kumari my beloved)
- genuinely comfy and campy slice of life mixed with tense stakes makes for a really fun story to read through and it has a lot of slow paced, comfy moments to break up the action
- isn't absurdly long like certain other VNs so it leaves you wanting more instead of burnt out
- really fun characters that subvert usual japanese tropes, none of the main girls are trope girls for soujuurou to navigate and "get" them, they're actual characters with motives, goals, personalities of their own
- soujuurou is straight up the most fun male protagonist i've ever read, clueless characters tend to be quite annoying for me (as they tend to be blank-slate characters and a stand-in for the reason), but soujuurou was really fun from the sheer absurdity and earnest of it all, he has actually ZERO human sense having grown up in the mountains and constantly does the most absurd illogical actions imaginable. aoko is headstrong and easily riled up, alice is cold and pragmatic, and soujuurou is a complete tool that serves as to "break" them during the slice of life sections and still have genuinely cool moments when ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan due to said cluelessness and taking genuinely mindboggling actions that end up working out (not in an asspull kind of way, in a genuinely cool way)
- beyond beautiful artstyle, CGs, character sprites and designs. amazing music and presentation all around

it took me a bit under 30 hours to read everything it had to offer (there's a few unlockable chapters after you beat the game, including a really fun murder mystery side chapter) and it quickly joined my list of favorite games of all time so i'd say it's well worth the money. read kinohoyo now!

tl;dr
aoko sex

god tier pve co-op shooter from the long forgotten era where developers knew how to make fun games with a dark aesthetic, unique sense of style, and deep co-op mechanics instead of harping on turning everything into a sterile hero shooter with smarmy self-referential humor where everyone can just run and slide around hopped on speed without having to actually, you know, co-operate

this unique mix of dark and foreboding survival horror aesthetic and feel combined with genuinely funny campy humor is something we'll never see again, it's a true product of its time in the best way imaginable

This is really personal to me so I'll yap a bit. I've played the original AoM on CD-ROM since I was a kid, bought The Titans back in '04 or so and loved it, bought Expanded Edition when it came out on Steam in 2014, and like everyone else, I was extremely disappointed with how mediocre and buggy that release was, alongside the extremely half-baked and uninspiring Chinese expansion, so imagine my shock when Retold is actually really fu​c​king good?
Some things I find extremely exciting about this release are how Favor has been reworked, that you can now choose your player colors in-game without having to edit a xml file in the game's files and official in-game lobby support. I'll go through each one in detail.

1. Basically god powers now aren't just a one and done deal, you can cast it for free like usual, but any subsequent use costs favor, with increased costs and a cooldown between each use, which is honestly just such a fantastic change, it makes god powers a lot more predominant in matches, as it should be. Something I used to do was to mod the game as a kid and to give every god power infinite uses but with cooldowns, so it's really interesting to see that Forgotten Empires came to the same conclusion.
2. It's what it says on the tin, you can just change every single team's colors with a RGB wheel picker in-game as opposed to having to edit the playercolors xml in the files, and something really cool about it is that the colors you choose even impact the new character portraits during the campaign, really exciting stuff.
3. Basically what third-party clients like Voobly had, but now in-game, which is really handy, playing with a friend online or with randoms is seamless, just join a lobby and play.

A few problems with this release are the fact that while the new music is fantastic, and the new voice over is mostly very good, there's no option to use the original ones, although the game releases with official modding support, so that can be taken care of. Another thing is the removal of LAN support, which I already expected to have, but it's still extremely sad to see removed, one day the servers will be taken down, and that's fine, but let me still play via LAN, ugh.

My biggest problem with Retold is the new and honestly dubious artstyle for the artwork of the Gods, originally during the closed beta of the game was shoddily made with AI generation, but since the game released it has been redrawn by actual artists, so that's good at least, but it's still mostly at best bland, definitely nowhere near on the level of the charm and charisma the original game's art had. Premium Edition comes with a DLC, the Legacy Portraits DLC, with every single compressed low-resolution artwork being faithfully recreated, it's not a 1-to-1 recreation, as I'm pretty sure the original full resolution artwork it's around anymore, but it's still an insanely good recreation, this DLC really should've been part of the base game, that would've made Retold much better, but it's to be expected out of modern releases, I suppose.

In conclusion, this release surpassed my expectations, I would never expect a modern re-release of a childhood game I love would be good, but here we are. It's not a perfect re-release, but it's definitely not just serviceable, but very good. The artstyle (bar the new Gods artwork) is fantastic, the new hotkeys are great and consistent between buildings (training units with QWERT, using god powers with F1 F2 F3 F4, and so on), there's an auto-train feature for unit-producing buildings which works really well to get the edge off from having to micro-manage your base so you can focus more on the fighting, expanding, etc, there's even a feature to automate your civilians, although I haven't had much luck with it. If I had to give this a score, it'd be a 8/10, and I can't even remember the last time I'd give a re-release a score this high. It clearly has a lot of passion put into it, it's great, it's fun, it's Age of fu​c​king Mythology. Definitely pick this up if you're a fans of RTS games and mythology in general, it is what gave me a hyperfocus on mythology as a kid after all.

bloodborne kart is finally here! legitimately a pretty good kart game with a surprising amount of vehicular combat mixed in with actual racing which is pretty pogga.

gameplay wise this would be better if you had a default weapon you could use at all times even with no powerups, like in twisted metal with it's the gatling gun, basically just make the trick weapons you get from the item box (like saw cleaver or holy blade) a default weapon you can always swing by pressing a button, maybe have the shoulder buttons be the swing buttons while the triggers are jump and use item? would be a huge improvement for the vehicular combat sections

also this has no native dualshock support, why? at least the option to pick your preferred controller's UI in the options would be nice, since steam can take care of the lack of dualshock support anyway

apart from that uhhhhhh i'm eternally crying this uses mario kart drifting and not CTR drifting :( rip, it's fun tho