madbuk

#319 - Chaos;Child This was a good VN, and a nice change of pace considering most of the VNs I play end up being otomes. I have to admit that, despite being good, it was a little disappointing for me. This is part of the same series as Steins;Gate, which I loved, so I had high hopes for it (and the VN discord community I'm in said it was 'by far' the best of the VNs I own and hadn't done yet). The characters were great, although I'm disappointed there was no Mio route, but I guess it makes sense as the MC is still a minor and she isn't. The plot itself was likewise great, and completely different to what I went in expecting, but it was definitely way too long and began to drag on a bit - this is probably the longest VN I've ever done besides maybe Psycho-Pass. I also feel like it kept building up to something that just... never really went anywhere. It's something that gets brought up in Steins;Gate too, so maybe they're planning some big 'Avengers: Endgame' type deal where everything begins to tie together for one big finale? idk, we'll see. It's clearly set in the same world so there's definitely potential for a cross-over later. Overall, I enjoyed this, but I'm also not as sad to see it end as I was with Steins;Gate because of how much it began to outstay its welcome. I hope we see the previous game get translated someday, or Robotics;Notes.

Progress Update: #319 - Chaos;Child This was a good VN, and a nice change of pace considering most of the VNs I play end up being otomes. I have to admit that, despite being good, it was a little disappointing for me. This is part of the same series as Steins;Gate, which I loved, so I had high hopes for it (and the VN discord community I'm in said it was 'by far' the best of the VNs I own and hadn't done yet). The characters were great, although I'm disappointed there was no Mio route, but I guess it makes sense as the MC is still a minor and she isn't. The plot itself was likewise great, and completely different to what I went in expecting, but it was definitely way too long and began to drag on a bit - this is probably the longest VN I've ever done besides maybe Psycho-Pass. I also feel like it kept building up to something that just... never really went anywhere. It's something that gets brought up in Steins;Gate too, so maybe they're planning some big 'Avengers: Endgame' type deal where everything begins to tie together for one big finale? idk, we'll see. It's clearly set in the same world so there's definitely potential for a cross-over later. Overall, I enjoyed this, but I'm also not as sad to see it end as I was with Steins;Gate because of how much it began to outstay its welcome. I hope we see the previous game get translated someday, or Robotics;Notes.

Tour Mode will release after Episode 3, but other than that nothing else was announced.

The original Jumanji game was nothing too great either to be fair. A blatant Mario Party rip-off with much worse minigames lol so even if it was based off the classic I would still be very hesitant.

#318 - Need for Speed: Rivals Quite a bland, disappointing game unfortunately. I loved Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and found Most Wanted kind of average, so going into this I was a bit mixed on the franchise as a whole. I was hoping this'd recapture the magic Hot Pursuit had but nope. It's a bland, open world racer with literal checklist design. You get a checklist of objectives (gold x events, bust x racers, drift x yards, etc.), complete it, and get given another. Over and over and over. And none of it is particularly engaging. When you're not doing random things like driving past a speed camera 5 times at x mph, the actual events themselves... are okay. But something about the controls in this felt a bit off, especially the drifting, so the actual events themselves weren't even as fun as Hot Pursuit. I appreciate that, as long as you're at a safehouse/compound, you can fast travel to any event unlike in NFS MW where you had to manually drive to each one. I still prefer Hot Pursuit's method that felt like it was ripped straight out of Burnout, where you pick an event from a list and that's it - no faffing around in a large open world, straight to the events back to back, but at least Rivals was better on that front than MW was. Maybe it's just an issue with the last-gen port, but this game was also pretty buggy. I had quite a number of crashes, each of which reset my progress on my current checklist slightly, sometimes wiping it entirely, and it would also often slowdown mid-game. Pretty annoying but thankfully none of the checklists take overly long so it didn't ever take too long to get back to where I was. The graphics also seemed a bit subpar even for last-gen but that's not a big deal. One of my biggest issues with this game though is the lack of a pause button. Why? It's not always online, even when playing offline you don't have the ability to pause the game at all, which is especially troublesome on the racer side as cops can bust you when you're afk. As a cop, worst that can happen is a racer take you out but that's far less likely than a cop busting a racer. Very annoying and part of the reason I put this game off for years, left a very bad first impression on me. Overall, this did end up being better than my first impressions a couple of years ago, but it's certainly not great and I'm glad to finally be done with it.

Progress Update: #318 - Need for Speed: Rivals Quite a bland, disappointing game unfortunately. I loved Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and found Most Wanted kind of average, so going into this I was a bit mixed on the franchise as a whole. I was hoping this'd recapture the magic Hot Pursuit had but nope. It's a bland, open world racer with literal checklist design. You get a checklist of objectives (gold x events, bust x racers, drift x yards, etc.), complete it, and get given another. Over and over and over. And none of it is particularly engaging. When you're not doing random things like driving past a speed camera 5 times at x mph, the actual events themselves... are okay. But something about the controls in this felt a bit off, especially the drifting, so the actual events themselves weren't even as fun as Hot Pursuit. I appreciate that, as long as you're at a safehouse/compound, you can fast travel to any event unlike in NFS MW where you had to manually drive to each one. I still prefer Hot Pursuit's method that felt like it was ripped straight out of Burnout, where you pick an event from a list and that's it - no faffing around in a large open world, straight to the events back to back, but at least Rivals was better on that front than MW was. Maybe it's just an issue with the last-gen port, but this game was also pretty buggy. I had quite a number of crashes, each of which reset my progress on my current checklist slightly, sometimes wiping it entirely, and it would also often slowdown mid-game. Pretty annoying but thankfully none of the checklists take overly long so it didn't ever take too long to get back to where I was. The graphics also seemed a bit subpar even for last-gen but that's not a big deal. One of my biggest issues with this game though is the lack of a pause button. Why? It's not always online, even when playing offline you don't have the ability to pause the game at all, which is especially troublesome on the racer side as cops can bust you when you're afk. As a cop, worst that can happen is a racer take you out but that's far less likely than a cop busting a racer. Very annoying and part of the reason I put this game off for years, left a very bad first impression on me. Overall, this did end up being better than my first impressions a couple of years ago, but it's certainly not great and I'm glad to finally be done with it.

#317 - LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars Definitely one of the weaker LEGO games. The LEGO Star Wars aesthetic never really interested me in 1 or 2 so maybe I'm a bit biased, but even in those games the gameplay made up for the rather bland design. Here, there are some okay levels, but for every good level there are about 5 terrible tower defense or space levels so overall it's quite bad. Space levels may not have been so bad if the ships had controlled better. They're so floaty and trying to shoot down a target is annoying because your ship drifts off even if you aren't moving the stick. Tower defense though... those levels just dragged on way too long and the gameplay loop of them wasn't interesting at all. There were also way too many. idk which LEGO game I'll do next, I have a few options, but whatever it is I hope it's more interesting and not filled with bad gimmick levels. On the bright side I've never really been a fan of the open world in LEGO games, and this didn't have one, so that's a plus.

Progress Update: #317 - LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars Definitely one of the weaker LEGO games. The LEGO Star Wars aesthetic never really interested me in 1 or 2 so maybe I'm a bit biased, but even in those games the gameplay made up for the rather bland design. Here, there are some okay levels, but for every good level there are about 5 terrible tower defense or space levels so overall it's quite bad. Space levels may not have been so bad if the ships had controlled better. They're so floaty and trying to shoot down a target is annoying because your ship drifts off even if you aren't moving the stick. Tower defense though... those levels just dragged on way too long and the gameplay loop of them wasn't interesting at all. There were also way too many. idk which LEGO game I'll do next, I have a few options, but whatever it is I hope it's more interesting and not filled with bad gimmick levels. On the bright side I've never really been a fan of the open world in LEGO games, and this didn't have one, so that's a plus.

#316 - Steins;Gate 0 This was my first plat of 2018, and playing it really made me want to replay the original, so I did (twice, thanks to PS+), and then when that was done... I wanted to play 0 again lol. At the time I thought the only other stacks were foreign, but I was wrong, the Vita one was a different list to the PS4 one I had done. So I waited for a good sale, and it finally happened and caused me to replay this wonderful game. I do think the original game is better, overall, but this is still well worth playing. It fills a gap in the original game - which, by the way, was completely unnecessary to fill because the game worked perfectly anyway - and offers a very interesting juxtaposition compared to the original game. They're completely different in terms of tone but they both work extremely well at what they try to do. Without going into spoilers, you can really see just how much the previous game changed the main character by playing this. There was one specific part of this plot when I first played it that I didn't quite understand even by the time I had the plat. Now, having replayed it, I understand it but it's still dumb, unnecessary, and poorly explained. The rest of it is very good though so that doesn't really bring it down much. I enjoyed redoing this, maybe not as much as redoing the original, but still quite a lot. I'll be there for a Steins;Gate 0 Elite, however (un)likely that may be. (As a side note, between playing Steins;Gate Elite and Steins;Gate 0, I played the tie-in game that Elite comes with - Linear Bounded Phenogram. It has no trophies but it's absolutely worth playing, 40-50 hours of new, quality stories in the S;G universe. Don't let the lack of trophies put you off)

Progress Update: #316 - Steins;Gate 0 This was my first plat of 2018, and playing it really made me want to replay the original, so I did (twice, thanks to PS+), and then when that was done... I wanted to play 0 again lol. At the time I thought the only other stacks were foreign, but I was wrong, the Vita one was a different list to the PS4 one I had done. So I waited for a good sale, and it finally happened and caused me to replay this wonderful game. I do think the original game is better, overall, but this is still well worth playing. It fills a gap in the original game - which, by the way, was completely unnecessary to fill because the game worked perfectly anyway - and offers a very interesting juxtaposition compared to the original game. They're completely different in terms of tone but they both work extremely well at what they try to do. Without going into spoilers, you can really see just how much the previous game changed the main character by playing this. There was one specific part of this plot when I first played it that I didn't quite understand even by the time I had the plat. Now, having replayed it, I understand it but it's still dumb, unnecessary, and poorly explained. The rest of it is very good though so that doesn't really bring it down much. I enjoyed redoing this, maybe not as much as redoing the original, but still quite a lot. I'll be there for a Steins;Gate 0 Elite, however (un)likely that may be. (As a side note, between playing Steins;Gate Elite and Steins;Gate 0, I played the tie-in game that Elite comes with - Linear Bounded Phenogram. It has no trophies but it's absolutely worth playing, 40-50 hours of new, quality stories in the S;G universe. Don't let the lack of trophies put you off)