@topcyclist: "For people who never liked dark souls originally and didnt "get it" and mostly thought it was hard, clunky, boring, and had limited progression or incentive to play along with not telling you enought about what to do....im surprised giantbomb now years later likes dark souls like games so much. Heck even other sites originally hated dark souls now its the bees nees." Giant Bomb has always been pretty positive on the DS games, especially Brad and Vinny, so I'm not sure where you got the idea they hated it, then didn't. Years ago Vinny did Load Our Lost Souls and Brad did Demon's Souls, and both (along with a few others on the site) have been championing those games almost since launch. So much so that Vinny and Brad are usually the people who do the quick looks for "Souls-like" games before Ben came along.
I'm kind of mystified by Romero's reputation as a "Great level designer." I've played way better WADs in Doom than whatever this shit is. These aren't really particularly well designed levels, even on the standard of the original Doom when it was new, they're just bullshit "kaizo" levels, basically. Anyone can be a dick and be like "Oh hurr hurr...walk along a tiny walkway while 50 guys shoot at you and then at the end there's 8 Cyberdemons, etc.. etc.." it doesn't take some great brain to come with that kind of infantile crap. I feel like the fan community put way more effort into more interesting experiments back in the day.
Not that I blame the GB folks for not remembering much about Enter The Matrix, it was pretty ambitious in that it was specifically made to bridge the story between The Matrix and Reloaded, as well as expand a few other things. It had a lot of live action cut scenes filmed on the actual sets (with the actors) that were intended to flesh out aspects of the story. You could play as either Ghost or Niobe and it changed the cut-scenes to reflect that, changing the story in slight ways. I thought the game was pretty awful (if nothing else, the level design was super-bad) and it was unfortunate that so much story was wrapped up in it. I think there's almost an hour of footage in there? Personally, I think the Matrix sequels suffered from this video game a lot because so much stuff was kept from the average viewer and this was in the age before you could simply hop on YT and watch all the cinemas. Nowadays, all the ETM footage is on the Matrix Blu rays at least.
The tone of this game seems really bad. Mostly in the weird attempts at hybridizing the 1980s that we all lived through (or remember) into an alternate history where the Nazis dominated huge swaths of the world. You cannot have stereotypical 80s culture (much of which was largely born from the post Cold War and the culture struggles of first-world democracy vs. first world authoritarianism) in a world where the social environment that produced "the 80s" never really happened. If anything, the cultural explosion would take place sometime well after Nazism had been fully defeated around the world. I know this sounds like over-thinking the game, but I guess I'm just getting tired of "THE 80s" as this lazy trope developers are using as an aesthetic in so many things these days (Generation Zero, New Dawn, endless indie shooters, etc.) Blood Dragon pretty well nailed it, everyone else needs to stop trying so hard.
It's really sad how many outlets are just glossing over the total bullshit that they are gating iconic Marvel characters (some of whom were in UA 1 and 2) behind a fucking paywall. Like it's already a premium price game with day one DLC to unlock old characters. Sorry, this shit is unacceptable. Why do stupid people keep paying for this?
For those curious why GTAO is so popular, it's basically because it's just "Griefing: The Game" I played GTAO for awhile just on a casual level and I can definitely say it's arguably the worst online community perhaps in all of gaming. You can enable an option where other players can't kill you, but they can still physically interfere with you though (i.e. running you over, blowing up your car, blocking access to your house, etc.) and that's basically the entire game. Rockstar put a ton of work into all sorts of activities, but for the most part, no one plays them except to grief other people trying to play. It's just pure chaos. It's fun for a bit, but eventually it wears super-thin, yet the game is still the most profitable online game in history or something like that. It would be kinda cool if you could play in an instanced world by yourself (just do jobs and play as your own character), but I don't think you can, at least not on console.
Auto Chess seems to have embryonic ideas for a good game, but it's ruined by fairly poor game mechanics (in my opinion), way too much RNG, and ludicrous session time for what it is. (average Auto Chess game on mobile takes about 20-25 minutes).
Surprised Jeff didn't go into it, but the reason why the Genesis version of Pit Fighter is considered the "definitive" one (although they are all terrible) is that they wisely pulled the camera way back, made the arena bigger and the controls a bit peppier. It's better than the arcade version, but not by much.
An actual successor to Wipeout is coming later this year as Pacer (aka Formula Fusion) which is being developed by some people who used to work at Psygnosis Liverpool who developed most of the core Wipeout games. It looks to be pretty good, and the early access reviews on PC have been pretty positive so far. Redout is not bad, but it's not Wipeout, unfortunately.
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