I'm happy to see that the rumored Mass Effect remaster is confirmed. One of the best series that I've played -- especially the first one. I hope that ME1 gets the gameplay updates from the later games, but keeps the cool sci-fi story.
Just a texture pack though, no real graphical improvements (e.g. new models)
Still a great saga, I hope EA will sell the IP to someone worthy.
I can live with just a graphics upgrade, if they will also fix the inventory system. ME1 had the worst inventory management system that I can remember ever encountering in a game.
Bought ghost runner, had to unfortunately refund. The game it self is good. But had an issue with button presses constantly not registering (grapple and attack) . In a game that based around quick pace and accuracy movements, it's not on and makes it unplayable for more than 20 minutes.
Add to that I think the level design isn't the best, wall running sometimes does not activate and you have to face the wall to do it, and I can't hold crouch when falling to go into slide - wtf I just land and sit still.
So yeah. Really sad it has these issues because I love the game.
Add to that I think the level design isn't the best, wall running sometimes does not activate and you have to face the wall to do it, and I can't hold crouch when falling to go into slide - wtf I just land and sit still.
So yeah. Really sad it has these issues because I love the game.
I've just read that analah Pearce has joined Sony Santa Monica as writer. I'm not informed at all regarding her skills, so I wonder why she gets that much credit in the industry. She was a cosplayer, then worked for IGN, youtuber and host of some E3 event. Voice over in a couple of videogames. I've watched a couple of videos and she really seems like the standard journalist. It's not a critic (of someone I do not know), I'm just wondering why she has that much credit. Anyone has the answer?
watching streams of AC: valhalla have me thinking.
What if they decided to make Valhalla its own thing instead of "just another" assasins creed game and actually tried something new? Just imagine the possibilities.
Idk, I havnt played the game so I dont know much about it aside from limited viewing, and I havnt played any ac game for that matter. But what I can feel from what I have seen is that it looks and feels like every other Ac game I have watched videos of.
Just a thought. Just a wish, that big industries would stop sticking to "safe" franchises and remakes for maximum profit and take creative risks on new and different.
What if they decided to make Valhalla its own thing instead of "just another" assasins creed game and actually tried something new? Just imagine the possibilities.
Idk, I havnt played the game so I dont know much about it aside from limited viewing, and I havnt played any ac game for that matter. But what I can feel from what I have seen is that it looks and feels like every other Ac game I have watched videos of.
Just a thought. Just a wish, that big industries would stop sticking to "safe" franchises and remakes for maximum profit and take creative risks on new and different.
It's not that uncommon for a journalist to join the industry really. One of the project leads for Dying Light 1 and 2 in Techland is Tymon Smektała, in the past known as Hut Sędzimir, who previously worked for many years as a journalist for the biggest video game magazines in Poland, Click and CD-Action (and beforehand he was starting out as a rapper). I guess in theory having someone who criticize games for a living and act as a sort of intermediary between developers and playerbase on your development team might potentially lead to valuable feedback, in practice the results vary (as Roger Ebert find out when he decided to try his hand at being a writer for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls)
Why is it surprising? Writing is literally her profession
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I wholeheartedly agree. I'll even hit this from a different angle:
I think this is Ubisoft trying to capitalize as much as possible on the "Assassin's Creed" brand. Personally, I feel that Assassin's Creed Brotherhood was the last game in the series that really felt like Assassin's Creed (meaning: the gameplay, style, and focus that the original game created.) I really didn't care for the others. I loved Black Flag, but it truly didn't feel much like a true AC game. More AC-ish-like. Smashing game, but not really "Assassin's Creed". The latest entries, Origins, Oddessy, and what I am now seeing of Valhalla feel like totally different games wearing "I <3 AC!" pins on their lapels.
This harms the games, I think. Rather than players picking up the game and playing it as "an awesome new Viking game"...they're going to inherently compare the game to the overall Assassin's Creed motif. It's going to automatically create a negative reaction in those players hoping for a return to AC roots. It's the same thing as Fallout 4. Despite its flaws, I think Fallout 4 would have done so much better if Beth had decided to just create their own, unique spin on a post-apocalyptic game. Call it, "200 Years After" or "Waking Wastes" or "Another Settlement" or something. Let it stand on its own. The minute the title Fallout appears...anyone expecting a "Fallout" game is probably going to be disappointed simply because it's really not.
It's an entirely psychological effect, but I think it's an extremely powerful one. It's the difference between reviews that say:
"...a flawed but fun Action RPG that offers some great bang for the buck!"
and
"...a disappointing addition to the franchise that fails, in most ways, to live up to experience provided by earlier titles."
(I think you may have quoted the wrong post.)
oof ouch youre right, edited. Great post though.
Yakuza Kiwami
After Yakuza 0, series prequel from 2015, it was a perfect time to dive into Yakuza Kiwami, the remake of the first game in the series from 2005, which was (re)created with the assets and gameplay mechanics taken straight from Yakuza 0. Because of that it kinda feels more like an expansion to 0 then a standalone game, but at least developers themselves were aware of that, so they priced the game fairly instead of selling it for the full price, like some other publishers would do.
Kiwami begins seven years after the story of Yakuza 0. The bubble burst open and Japanese economy took some serious hits, thus ending country's golden era, however on the other hand our main protagonist Kazuma Kiryu doesn't do bad at all for himself. His career as a Yakuza member goes fairly smoothly to the point that he's on his way to become a patriarch of his own Yakuza family. That is until a certain incident which leads to his friend murdering a prominent figure within organisation. To protect him, Kazuma takes the blame for the crime and spends next 10 years behind bars. After finally leaving prison, he finds familiar world of the criminal underworld turned upside down, and the whole Tojo Clan, who he is a part of, is now on the brink of civil war over stolen 10 billion yen. Obviously Kiryu finds himself in the centre of this whole mess, in which a crucial role plays a certain little girl, Haruka, whose fate ends up being tied to his.
The original story was recreated very faithfully in the remake, with all the prons and cons of such an approach, even many cutscenes were taken from the original game 1:1, just with a higher quality visuals. Of course, the quality of the story is not even nearly as high as that in Yakuza 0, but that's understandable, seeing how 0 was a sixth Yakuza title developed by this team, while Kiwami is still just their first game of this series in a new clothes, so of course plot of itwon't be as good as later games. One of the biggest issues I found with the main story was it's pacing, which in certain moments feels way to fast, while at other moments it suddenly jumps to a subplots with barely any relevancy to the main plot, which would work a lot of better as a sidequests.
Despite that, for the game originally released in 2005, the story overall still pretty decent and characters fairly likable, especially with the additional story scenes added in Kiwami. Remake greatly expanded the role of Kazuma's best friend, Nishikiyama, and fan favorite Goro Majima, who in Yakuza 0 acted as a second playable protagonist, in order to reconcile different ways those characters where depicted in the first game in comparison to the later games in the series, for example in the original game Majima was basically a two dimensional psychopath who was obsessed with Kiryu for unknown reason and appeared in merely three scenes (and two of them were boss battles with him), but in the later games he gained a lot of depth and became a sort of friendly rival to Kiryu, so Kiwami decided to make his personality consistent with the future/past games. However sometimes I had a feeling that developers trying to make a faithful remake on one hand and to expand the original story on the other sometimes result in a certain dissonance between the scenes from the original and those added in the remake, especially in case of Majima's story.
As I said, gameplay mechanics were lifted directly from Yakuza 0, so I won't be focusing too much on them again and instead I talk about some of the changes. This time Kiryu from the start has an access to every combat style from the previous game (Brawler, Rush, Beast, Dragon), but after 10 years in prison, he simply fell out of shape, which explains why we need to relearn most of the skills related to them. Fortunately developers didn't simply copied progression system and skill tree from Yakuza 0, but instead completely redesigned it. This time instead of money, we buy new skills with a classic experience points, earned for fighting, quest completion and certain activities, which I liked a lot more then the system from Y0. The only exception here is Dragon Style, which we can relearn only with the help of... Majima. Majima Everywhere is a new in-game system, which comes down to Majima being able to attack us at any point during exploration and fighting him allow us to learn skills related to that particular style. We can encounter him searching us across the streets, attempting sneak attacks on us, joining our battle with random thugs and sometimes organising a special events for Kiryu, which always end up being a riot. Does it somewhat contradicts scenes related to him in the main story? Sure, but that system is fun enough to render it as a rather minor issue.
A new addition to the combat system are so called Kiwami actions. When boss or special enemy suffers enough damage, he can enter a state in which his health begins to regenerate, which we can interrupt with Kiwami Action. Each style has a different one and we need to adjust it to our opponent, but in the end it doesn't differ much from regular Heat Actions and stretches out the boss fights a little too much, without adding anything meaningful gameplaywise. Speaking of bosses and special enemies, there are some really annoying fights in the game, which were equally obnoxious in the original game as well (who was the genius who thought it would be cool to have a boss fight with discount Dante from Devil May Cry series in a game focused on hand to hand combat, I will never know), which were pretty tedious to get through, but I guess it's possible that my troubles were the result of me being impatient and choosing an incorrect approach.
Just like 0, Kiwami offers quite a lot of side content and side activities, mostly directly lifted from the previous game. So we have a various gambling related minigames, bowling, underground combat arena, karaoke, UFO catchers, mahjong, shogi, various bar and shops (it's kinda cool how due to the economical downfall you can see there is less of it available then in 0, similar to the number of phonebooths, which are used for saving the game), darts, billard (with addition of puzzles), Pocket Circuit racing (with added track editor), and from the "new ones" we have hostess dating and mix of the card game with fighting game called Mesuking, with an... interesting character design. I wrote new ones in quotation marks, because the first one was already a part of the cabaret club minigame from 0, while Mesuking is a reworked version of another minigame from it. Overall we have less side activities in Kiwami then in the previous game (for example, arcade games and disco dancing is missing), but lack of some of them is somewhat justified by 17 years long gap. Sidequests are another thing that is much weaker aspect of the game in comparison to 0, which again is the result of the original game age, but developers tried to improve them by removing more generic sidequests, combining some of them with each other, turning some of the main quests into a side quests and even adding some new ones, which reference events from Yakuza 0 and expand the main story. So it's not like side quests in this game suck, but they are much less consistent in terms of quality and creative then the ones in it's prequel, but there are still some pretty good ones.
Yakuza Kiwami is not as good as Yakuza 0 and I don't think it could be, after all it's still just a remake of the first, more janky game from 2005, which becomes obvious in a inconsistent story pacing, outdated parts of the gameplay design and fairly repetetive sidequests, but despite that, thanks to the new content and various improvements, it's still a best way to painlessly. Due to the issues I listed above, I wouldn't recommend it for your first contact with the series, but if you already played Yakuza 0 and liked it's world, as well as characters, Kiwami will provide you with several dozens of hours of good entertainment. If you take it as an expansion for Yakuza 0 and given it's reasonable price, it is worth buying.
My rating: 7+/10
After Yakuza 0, series prequel from 2015, it was a perfect time to dive into Yakuza Kiwami, the remake of the first game in the series from 2005, which was (re)created with the assets and gameplay mechanics taken straight from Yakuza 0. Because of that it kinda feels more like an expansion to 0 then a standalone game, but at least developers themselves were aware of that, so they priced the game fairly instead of selling it for the full price, like some other publishers would do.
Kiwami begins seven years after the story of Yakuza 0. The bubble burst open and Japanese economy took some serious hits, thus ending country's golden era, however on the other hand our main protagonist Kazuma Kiryu doesn't do bad at all for himself. His career as a Yakuza member goes fairly smoothly to the point that he's on his way to become a patriarch of his own Yakuza family. That is until a certain incident which leads to his friend murdering a prominent figure within organisation. To protect him, Kazuma takes the blame for the crime and spends next 10 years behind bars. After finally leaving prison, he finds familiar world of the criminal underworld turned upside down, and the whole Tojo Clan, who he is a part of, is now on the brink of civil war over stolen 10 billion yen. Obviously Kiryu finds himself in the centre of this whole mess, in which a crucial role plays a certain little girl, Haruka, whose fate ends up being tied to his.
The original story was recreated very faithfully in the remake, with all the prons and cons of such an approach, even many cutscenes were taken from the original game 1:1, just with a higher quality visuals. Of course, the quality of the story is not even nearly as high as that in Yakuza 0, but that's understandable, seeing how 0 was a sixth Yakuza title developed by this team, while Kiwami is still just their first game of this series in a new clothes, so of course plot of itwon't be as good as later games. One of the biggest issues I found with the main story was it's pacing, which in certain moments feels way to fast, while at other moments it suddenly jumps to a subplots with barely any relevancy to the main plot, which would work a lot of better as a sidequests.
Despite that, for the game originally released in 2005, the story overall still pretty decent and characters fairly likable, especially with the additional story scenes added in Kiwami. Remake greatly expanded the role of Kazuma's best friend, Nishikiyama, and fan favorite Goro Majima, who in Yakuza 0 acted as a second playable protagonist, in order to reconcile different ways those characters where depicted in the first game in comparison to the later games in the series, for example in the original game Majima was basically a two dimensional psychopath who was obsessed with Kiryu for unknown reason and appeared in merely three scenes (and two of them were boss battles with him), but in the later games he gained a lot of depth and became a sort of friendly rival to Kiryu, so Kiwami decided to make his personality consistent with the future/past games. However sometimes I had a feeling that developers trying to make a faithful remake on one hand and to expand the original story on the other sometimes result in a certain dissonance between the scenes from the original and those added in the remake, especially in case of Majima's story.
As I said, gameplay mechanics were lifted directly from Yakuza 0, so I won't be focusing too much on them again and instead I talk about some of the changes. This time Kiryu from the start has an access to every combat style from the previous game (Brawler, Rush, Beast, Dragon), but after 10 years in prison, he simply fell out of shape, which explains why we need to relearn most of the skills related to them. Fortunately developers didn't simply copied progression system and skill tree from Yakuza 0, but instead completely redesigned it. This time instead of money, we buy new skills with a classic experience points, earned for fighting, quest completion and certain activities, which I liked a lot more then the system from Y0. The only exception here is Dragon Style, which we can relearn only with the help of... Majima. Majima Everywhere is a new in-game system, which comes down to Majima being able to attack us at any point during exploration and fighting him allow us to learn skills related to that particular style. We can encounter him searching us across the streets, attempting sneak attacks on us, joining our battle with random thugs and sometimes organising a special events for Kiryu, which always end up being a riot. Does it somewhat contradicts scenes related to him in the main story? Sure, but that system is fun enough to render it as a rather minor issue.
A new addition to the combat system are so called Kiwami actions. When boss or special enemy suffers enough damage, he can enter a state in which his health begins to regenerate, which we can interrupt with Kiwami Action. Each style has a different one and we need to adjust it to our opponent, but in the end it doesn't differ much from regular Heat Actions and stretches out the boss fights a little too much, without adding anything meaningful gameplaywise. Speaking of bosses and special enemies, there are some really annoying fights in the game, which were equally obnoxious in the original game as well (who was the genius who thought it would be cool to have a boss fight with discount Dante from Devil May Cry series in a game focused on hand to hand combat, I will never know), which were pretty tedious to get through, but I guess it's possible that my troubles were the result of me being impatient and choosing an incorrect approach.
Just like 0, Kiwami offers quite a lot of side content and side activities, mostly directly lifted from the previous game. So we have a various gambling related minigames, bowling, underground combat arena, karaoke, UFO catchers, mahjong, shogi, various bar and shops (it's kinda cool how due to the economical downfall you can see there is less of it available then in 0, similar to the number of phonebooths, which are used for saving the game), darts, billard (with addition of puzzles), Pocket Circuit racing (with added track editor), and from the "new ones" we have hostess dating and mix of the card game with fighting game called Mesuking, with an... interesting character design. I wrote new ones in quotation marks, because the first one was already a part of the cabaret club minigame from 0, while Mesuking is a reworked version of another minigame from it. Overall we have less side activities in Kiwami then in the previous game (for example, arcade games and disco dancing is missing), but lack of some of them is somewhat justified by 17 years long gap. Sidequests are another thing that is much weaker aspect of the game in comparison to 0, which again is the result of the original game age, but developers tried to improve them by removing more generic sidequests, combining some of them with each other, turning some of the main quests into a side quests and even adding some new ones, which reference events from Yakuza 0 and expand the main story. So it's not like side quests in this game suck, but they are much less consistent in terms of quality and creative then the ones in it's prequel, but there are still some pretty good ones.
Yakuza Kiwami is not as good as Yakuza 0 and I don't think it could be, after all it's still just a remake of the first, more janky game from 2005, which becomes obvious in a inconsistent story pacing, outdated parts of the gameplay design and fairly repetetive sidequests, but despite that, thanks to the new content and various improvements, it's still a best way to painlessly. Due to the issues I listed above, I wouldn't recommend it for your first contact with the series, but if you already played Yakuza 0 and liked it's world, as well as characters, Kiwami will provide you with several dozens of hours of good entertainment. If you take it as an expansion for Yakuza 0 and given it's reasonable price, it is worth buying.
My rating: 7+/10
