Dementium isn't a good game. It's dumb as hell, the story is non-existent (the ending is almost as good as a big flashing "FUCK YOU".), and one of the recurring enemies are leeches that meow. Don't bother looking for the passcodes to that door lock, it's 666.

There's a boss fight against a guy in a wheelchair with a minigun.

This is naturally a day one buy for me and I'm hyped as fuck.

There is no NDA from what I have found and looked into, so here's some of my impressions.

I've played a ton of PS2 on PC, since the beta there, actually. The opportunity to check out the early stages of the title once more has been pretty exciting.

The big thing is, it works. A Dual Shock 4 is capable of playing PS2. That said, it's also not really great at it. Big surprise.

Part of the issue comes from questionable mapping. Class abilities are on L1, L2 aims down the sights, R2 fires, and R1 brings up a voice menu that you navigate with the right thumbstick. That's where you choose what voice chat channel you want to be speaking in, or select something like "need ammo/health".

If you want to toss out a grenade, you hit both L1 and R1 at the same time. Doing this while moving and aiming is cumbersome as fuck.

On PC, class abilities sometimes have logical "shortcuts". For example, the Light Assault uses a jetpack for his ability. As a result, you don't need to actually use the key for abilities to boost around, you can just double tap the space bar. On PS4, tapping X twice doesn't do anything. You have to hit L1. I'm not sure if it just isn't implemented yet or if the intentionally left out these shortcuts, but I know I'd like to be able to use them.

The flight controls by default are also an absolute mess, and I found myself dead within seconds. A quick look at the settings revealed a "easy flight mode", which I enabled, and the vertical flight was disabled by default. I'll see if that makes things better tonight when the servers go up again.

The spawning interface is a lot less cluttered, but feels like it's showing me less information. I understand why they would try to redesign menus for the console release, but being able to easily see where shit is going down is pretty vital to enjoying yourself in PS2, and right now, the game doesn't easily distinguish what areas have conflict aside from the basic pie chart.

Planetside 2 on PS4 seems like it's on the right track, but I don't expect anyone already invested in the PC release to jump ship over it.

Every article about Hybrid begins with something like "Wow, isn't it crazy that the Scribblenauts guys made a shooter?"

I don't really know that it is, though.

5th Cell are clearly a bunch of very creative people, and the ideas on display in Hybrid are just different and unique enough that it should have stood apart from the crowd. Unfortunately, it didn't, and the user base dwindled after a few months.

As a quick refresher, Hybrid was a cover based shooter that didn't allow for direct control of your character. You could move side to side when on cover, but to get from one place to another, you just looked at where you wanted to go, and hit a button. If you got shot at while you were moving, you could hit another button to cancel the choice and retreat to where you were.

While this sounds like it might makes things boring, it actually made things a lot more exciting. The small, compact maps had cover placed wisely, allowing firefights from all kinds of angles. It wasn't uncommon to flank a group of guys from behind, and also on the ceiling. Hanging out in little nooks and crannies on the walls could and did happen.

The other defining feature of Hybrid was the persistent war. Players picked a side at the start of each war, and each match they won or lost effected the potential outcome of the war. Depending on what gametype or map you chose to search for, you could possibly increase the power of one of the perks for your faction for the remainder of the war. Most wars began with intense combat over the most desirable perks, as you might imagine, while small groups would go grab the small stuff for easy points.

Finally, players on the winning side of the war got a nicer looking helmet as a prize than the losers. I really don't remember what else there was, if anything.

If it sounds like I really liked Hybrid, well, I did. It managed to distill the best moments of cover based shooters down to the basics, and then make you apply that thinking to every possible direction.

Killstreaks and loadouts are going to be around for a while yet, and thankfully, developers are starting to figure out how to balance them out. But back in 2012, when Hybrid launched, there was still a lot of cases where there were items or streaks that just didn't have a good "answer".

Hybrid gave players drones as they racked up their streak. These drones typically hung out around the player, in cover, popping out to shoot when they did. If a whole team of players was on a roll, you were screwed. However, if you had the foresight to equip a special grenade, you could force the drones to fight for you instead. Watching 3 soldiers panic as a swarm of drones turn and start firing on them never got old.

So as I sit here, remembering all the good times I had with Hybrid, I try to think of what made everyone stop. My guess is the reward for the war wasn't enough for people. That's understandable, but unfortunate. Even Counter-Strike has a carrot-on-a-stick these days, and maybe that says a lot about where we are at as consumers.

While it was certainly not ambitious in appearance, I would argue that Hybrid, in hindsight, doesn't really seem that crazy for 5th Cell to make.

Shooters making money probably didn't hurt, either.

Got a job on a help desk.

Content coming, slowly but surely.

Lunch break.

I'm only young once, and I'd like to continue pursuing this goal while I'm still, well, young. So I'm planning on beginning to write reviews for each game that I finish once again, among other things.