Mister Jack

Stellar Blade There is no way to not compare this game to Nier: Automata. They have similar storylines, similar main characters, similar post-apocalyptic worlds, and even the music has a similar feel to it. Nothing is to the point of plagiarism, but you'd have to be stupid not to notice if you ever played Nier. I would say that Nier definitely has the better story, but Stellar Blade has better combat. It's half Bayonetta and half Sekiro, where you have flashy skills and combos to play with but you also need to master timed parries and dodges in order to open up opportunities for powerful counterattacks. You can't get by simply mashing the attack button like you usually could in Nier. Not a bad game. Didn't blow my mind or anything but I'd give it a solid B.

Unicorn Overlord Another gem from Vanillaware. In fact, this might be one of their best games to date. This is a spiritual successor to Ogre Battle 64. If you never played it, imagine Fire Emblem except instead of turn based it's real time with pause and instead of moving one soldier at a time you have units made of up to five soldiers all moving as group. There is a rock paper scissors system of sorts in here like in Fire Emblem, but since each unit has multiple soldiers you can arrange them to compensate for each other's weaknesses and also edit their AI to determine when and how they use their various skills. Skirmishes play out automatically and the winner is predetermined based on how well you've set up your unit beforehand, but you can skip the battle scenes if you don't feel like watching them play out. I beat it on hard mode, which offered a reasonable challenge, but by the end of the game my main protagonist was such a beast that his unit could solo 90% of the enemy army, at least until he ran out of stamina and had to rest. I hardly need to tell you that Vanillaware games look good, but this might be the best looking one they've made yet. The story falls back on cliched fantasy tropes with an unambiguously good rebellion against a cartoonishly evil empire, but the characters are still pretty likable and fun to follow anyway. This game also has a pretty impressive localization. Not a difficult platinum trophy either, though this is a long game and it took me roughly 50 hours to finish the campaign.

Vanillaware is allergic to PC ports so I got this for PS5 after playing the demo for five hours. It's basically Ogre Battle, and it's been a loooong time since Ogre Battle 64, which I loved the hell out of back in the day.

Rise of the Ronin Nioh 2 is basically one of my favorite games of all time so this was a no-brainer for me to buy. Unfortunately, I can't help but be a little disappointed with this one. It's not a terrible game, mind you. People who haven't played Nioh or Ghost of Tsushima will probably like it just fine. I've played both, though. The open world doesn't really add that much and it isn't nearly as pretty as GoT's, which has possibly the prettiest open world I've ever seen. The combat isn't as deep as Nioh's, either. It's definitely more accessible than Nioh by design and it's a lot more challenging than GoT was if you thought that game was too easy but this game is very focused on parries and the timing on them is VERY strict. Enemies tend to do combos that are very difficult to read too and if you mess up the parry timing on one hit then you're probably taking the whole combo right to the face. Blocking is admittedly more viable than it is in Sekiro, but if you want to get through this game you'll have to learn to parry at some point. I did like that the story takes place during a period of Japanese history most games don't bother with, when Japan was just starting to open itself up to foreign trade (which means you can use pistols). I did also like that you can choose whether to support the shogunate faction who wants to establish ties with the west to learn their technology and medicine or the anti-shogunate faction who wants to expel all the foreigners because they're bringing over foreign diseases and corruption. Neither side is completely good or evil and they both make good arguments. I found myself flip-flopping between both factions multiple times before the story was over and yes, characters will call you out if you switch sides on them and then run into them later on. Even if you switch sides again to ally with them once more they'll hold a grudge over your previous betrayal and only welcome you back because they know how valuable you are, which I thought was neat. There are things that work here, but if you haven't played Ghost of Tsushima yet I would just tell you to go play that instead because it does a lot of things better than this game. If you have played Ghost of Tsushima and you want more samurai action then you could do a lot worse. There is online co-op for the story missions but I am no longer subscribed to PS+ so I did them all with NPC allies. It's also a fairly easy platinum trophy. I'd say wait for a price drop.

Yeah I hate ads but at least I only had to sit through two of them at the beginning of every third episode or so. Still bullcrap and not acceptable to me but I already have Prime for the delivery benefits so I might as well watch it.

Fallout was actually quite good. I was pleasantly surprised.

Good work defending liberty, gentlemen. Super Earth is proud.

So what makes this one so much better than the last one?

Pseudoregalia This is a 5 dollar 3D platformer Metroidvania on steam, a genre I did not realize we needed more of. I beat it in about 6 hours, although at least two of them were due to me getting lost and not knowing where to go. It's not very linear so it's easy to find yourself not knowing where to go next if you haven't been paying close attention to your progress. Still, these might be the smoothest controls I've ever experienced on a 3D platformer. Mario himself couldn't do better. This game is more of a proof of concept than a full-fledged title but if they ever make a sequel it could really be something fantastic.

Weird, I never really had an issue with those levels. Then again, I played the Genesis versions.

Into the Radius I really wanted to give this VR game a fair shake because a lot of people seem to like it but I've tried it twice now and it's always so cumbersome to play. Not only is the item belt situated practically inside your anus with no way to adjust its position but this game has the same problem I have with Red Dead Redemption 2 where absolutely everything is so slow and meticulous. If you want to restock your ammo, for example, you need to take your empty magazines up to the ammo box and wait for it to refill before you can actually use it to reload. To clean your gun you have to put it in a vise and then spray it with oil, scrub it with a toothbrush, tear off some paper, attach the paper to a ramrod, stick the ramrod inside the barrel to brush it out, and replace the paper whenever it gets used up to keep doing it until the gun is fully cleaned. If you want to eat canned food you have to peel the lid back and then stick your knife into the can over and over to eat each individual bite until the can is empty. If you accidentally drop a gun you'd better remember to pick it up because it will not teleport back into your gun holster (I lost a shotgun this way during a frantic battle). Maybe this kind of slavish devotion to realism appeals to some people. Clearly it does since this game has a lot of positive reviews, but I just don't think this kind of tedium is fun, especially when the item belt issue makes it hard to grab things in the first place.

Should've made an airless football and made Tom Brady use it.

This is what he said. "We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights." To me that reads as "We know, we know, stop emailing us about it."

Nintendo ain't gonna do shit. They took down a Pokemon mod for this game literally overnight (and rightfully so because the creator was charging money for it). I see no logical reason the Nintendo ninjas would leave this game standing for 3+ years if they had any legal ground to stand on. The only way they'd have a case would be if the Palworld devs literally stole assets and reused them, and I would be rather shocked if they were that stupid.

I remember reading that they got a Japanese firearms enthusiast to model the guns for them for no reason other than "Americans like to shoot things." They weren't wrong.

This game is huge now and it's only going to get bigger, so it was about time it got a thread.

I really do like Palworld and I hate that the discourse around it is mostly whether or not they plagiarized. I freely admit that some of the designs really skirt the line as close as they can without getting in trouble, but I'd rather have something derivative than ugly. I remember when TemTem was a thing. The monsters in that had their own unique style but that style was so hideous that I had no desire whatsoever to catch them, let alone raise them. Besides, once you strip away the surface level visual comparisons the fact is that Palworld and Pokemon are almost nothing alike aside from using balls to catch monsters. This is a dev team that literally had to learn how to make the game as they went along and it bums me out that they're being vilified rather than celebrated. At least their game is a huge success.

What kinda hardware are you playing it on?

I'm loving the hell out of Palworld, and for me that's saying a lot because I usually have no interest in survival games at all. I think what sets this one apart is that there's more focus on building your base and less on managing hunger and piss meters and stuff like that I usually hate in the genre. There is a hunger meter for you and your pals, but it's not that hard to manage and once you get a farm going you never really need to worry about starving anyway. You'll be spending much more time building up your base and catching pals to put to work. That's really what I love most, all the different ways you can use your pals. Not only will they help you with building things, but depending on their element they can also do things like cook food, water crops, plant seeds, power electric devices, and more. You can even make special equipment to use them in unique ways out on the field. I built a special harness for my fire fox that lets me carry him around and use him like a flamethrower. I made a harness for my deer pal so I could ride him around. I built my grass squirrel...well, an Uzi. I gave him an Uzi. Don't go to the Palpagos Islands tomorrow. Playing single player is fun, not to mention pretty challenging during boss battles, but I made a second character so I could join a friend's world and we had an absolute blast building up a base and hunting for new pals together. It's the most fun I've had in co-op in some time. While I didn't try it myself, you can also play on both official and fanmade dedicated servers that support up to 32 players. Maybe at some point I'll make a third character to give that a go. Some people out there are ripping on this game because they say they blatantly copied several Pokemon designs, and some of them do look really similar, but I kinda...don't care about that? Yeah, I don't care if they ripped off the biggest media franchise on the planet. Getting up in a tizzy about it stinks of some real "leave the multi billion dollar company alone" vibes to me. Besides, the gameplay is completely different in almost every way. Actual pal battles happen in real time and you're actively helping out with whatever weapons you have on hand. There's really no comparison. The other criticism I hear is that it's too edgy and I feel like this is really overblown. There's no blood or gore whatsoever and when you kill(?) wild pals they just ragdoll with spirals in their eyes. The supposed edginess comes from the fact that the game gives you total freedom to do horrible things if you choose to do so without forcing or even encouraging it, but the amount of freedom can lead to some fucked up implications. For example, I had a human poacher take a shot at me with a rifle so I caught him in a pal sphere. Yes, you can capture humans. I took him back to my camp, grabbed a meat cleaver, and chopped him up for parts (the butchering was censored with a mosaic). You can be as kind or cruel as you want to be and both approaches are valid. My personal style is to cherish my pals and keep them happy but also rain fire and death down on any humans who dare to cross me. It's a real hoot. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed an early access game this much and I can't wait to see where it goes in the future.

Custom difficulty settings. Palworld has easy, normal, and hard settings like any other game, but then it also has a custom setting where you can adjust sliders for practically everything. Look at this. There are a ton of settings you can change, and this screenshot is only around half of them. Think grinding takes too long? Just speed it up yourself. Want to make the game harder? You can adjust that too. I didn't touch most of these settings, at least not yet, because I want to experience the intended difficulty first. However, I did adjust the penalty upon death to just dropping your items instead of dropping items and equipment and now I'm having a lot more fun with it (you can also set it to no penalty, but I didn't want to make it too easy on myself).