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Streets of Rage 4 It felt a little stiffer than I would have liked, but ultimately the intuitive comboability of the game won me over, at least compared to my experience with TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge . Where bosses in that game felt like they were just rolling through their movesets and phases, with little regard for what I was doing, the ability to interrupt (some, not all) moves and pick them up with OTGs meant that the game never really ground to a halt on my first playthrough. Only one boss – the one with a shield which uses ranged attacks – really frustrated me at first encounter (frustrated in the emotional sense, not the difficulty sense). I did find it painfully tricky to avoid enemy attack patterns, but part of that was poor positioning and restraint on my part. Hopefully as I keep dipping into it, I’ll overcome my sillier instincts. Streets of Rage 4 ’s concessions to the casual audience are also more comfortable than Shredder’s , in terms of both my own preferences and the...

West of Dead I’m stretching it a bit to say I finished West of Dead . I did beat the final boss, but then he told me that he was bound by three souls and I hadn’t really beaten him blah blah blah. I’ll dabble here and there, but I’m not committing too much more time to it. Personally, I think it would have been a better move to polish out the mechanics and craft both a more engaging gameplay loop as well as more handcrafted combat encounters rather than rely on the willingness of players to commit to runs of procedurally generated content… but of course I’d say that. As it is, I’m really not sure why this was a roguelike. There’s pretty much no interesting power gains (ooh, big decisions like health or damage or alternate damage oh my), the guns are fairly samey, the abilities and charms do little to break it up. The slow pace of unlocks only adds to this sense of inertia, of being stuck. At least there’s ludonarrative harmony there, I suppose, but creating an array of unsatisfying t...

  This post contains spoilers. I once read that knowing spoilers going in makes experiencing a work of fiction more enjoyable. I think that’s bullshit.    The first time you experience something should be marked by unknowing, by eagerness and anticipation and uncertainty. Directors, writers and designers plan around this - not always in the best or most enjoyable ways, but then everyone's a critic. I don’t think we should be spoiling things for ourselves. In fact, I'd say that leans in to the predigested, preapproved way many of us consume media, both fictional and non-fictional. It’s unrewarding and even unhealthy at times. But I've spoiled things for myself a lot.   When I was younger, I read a lot of TVTropes. Most classics, hell, most media beyond children's books, came to me predigested. Almost every story that I encounter nowadays comes to me as a known quantity, not through deliberate exposure but rather osmosis. Rare is the time I choose to exper...