Análises recentes de Ben McLean

Donut County is fun to play. It's not hard: the puzzle elements are only minor, but the central mechanic is fun to use. The playtime is about 2 hours, then you're probably done with this forever because there doesn't seem to be any kind of sandbox or free play mode, just an option to repeat some of the pre-made levels.

The story isn't horribly written, but it is a cookie-cutter anti-capitalist "Evil company Shinra is doing the exact opposite of what any real company would do, so you have to stop them!" plot. It didn't strike me as especially whiny, but it does have a "capitalism is like, bad mkay" message. Except capitalism must be OK in real life when you spend your money on the game, so there's a certain essential falsity to attempts to use commercial games as a critique of capitalism. Also, as usual, the evil capitalists in the game are responsible for making all the stuff in the game's world which actually makes the game interesting at all to play, which seems to always be the case with anti-capitalist video games. They're never very well thought out in terms of story.

However, there isn't a ton of story. It's mostly gameplay and the 2 hours of gameplay Donut County has is fun.

No Man's Sky has improved dramatically. Even though the things from the early interviews weren't promises, Hello Games has built most of it anyway, plus a few extra things which no one ever asked for. The few features that are still missing are rather nit-picky. Give this game another chance.

Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is almost certainly the greatest CD-ROM adventure game of all time and it presents the most complete, hisotrically accurate computer model of the Titanic ever made. If you are a fan of Titanic history then you must play this because this is the definitive interactive Titanic experience. If you are a fan of the Myst series or the Journeyman Project series then you must play this because this is the same genre as those games done with the same super high level of quality they represented. If you like spy and time travel games then you must play this because it has a wonderful time travelling spy narrative full of intruige and suspense.

If you are a fan of the romance from the 1997 James Cameron film, then you'll be disappointed, because this is not a romance game. This is a much cooler spy game which came out a year before the film. It has a much better soundtrack and a much more interesting narrative. I played this game before I saw the film, and I knew exactly how to get to every location shown in the film after having been all over the ship from playing this, but the film still disappointed me because the game is better. Skip the movies and just play this!

By the way, to anyone who is complaining about the low graphics quality: This is a game from 1996. I'd love to see a remake for modern resolutions but we're super lucky that NightDive Studios has managed to even get it to run on modern systems at all, so the original graphics are all we've got. If you can't stand playing games from 1996 then you are just a terrible person.

THIS SOFTWARE ACCURATELY SIMULATES THE PROCESS OF EMPLOYMENT FOR HUMANS.

HOWEVER, THE ECONOMICS OF THIS PRODUCT SEEM TO BE REVERSED. HUMANS MUST PAY MONEY IN ORDER TO EXPERIENCE EMPLOYMENT. HISTORICAL DATABASE INDICATES THAT HUMAN MONEY AMOUNT INCREASED AS A RESULT OF EMPLOYMENT RATHER THAN DECREASING. IT DOES NOT COMPUTE.

It's the Talos Principle, but now in VR! Wait, wasn't this game already a virtual world? My head a splode.

Rick & Morty has the worst fanbase I have ever ....

Batman Arkham VR is one of the best VR experiences available. This is one of the coolest most fun VR games you can try out ... for about 40 minutes. Then it's over. Please keep that in mind when making your decision about whether to purchase it or not. There are Riddler secrets and achievements to track down for those who want to play it again, but those are for nerds. (like me)

The Steam Store page says it's only for Rift and Vive, but Windows Mixed Reality works too. Although it did feel a little odd to suddenly be holding Vive controllers in the menu when my real controllers are Windows Mixed Reality controllers.

Spoilers ahead.

Do you get to play as Batman? Yes.
Do you get to play as Joker? Uhh ... almost?
Do you get to throw Batarangs at stuff? Yes.
Can you drive the Batmobile or other vehicles? No.
Can you fight people? No. That's why they had to end the game so soon, because they did not build a fighting mechanic into this game. The Dark Knight Detective really places emphasis on the "detective" part here.
Can you honk Alfred's nose? Yes.

One complaint which has come from many reviewers is that Batman Arkham VR has continuity problems. This is false. Batman Arkham VR fits right into the Arkham timeilne, taking place after Arkham City but before Arkham Knight. The basic idea is that the entire game is a dream Batman is having, and the dream is disturbing because of the toxin he's dosed with in Arkham City.

However, "it's all a dream" isn't just a cop-out to keep it from affecting anything this time. The fact that everything is a dream is subtly hinted at throughout Arkham VR but it never comes right out and says it because the Arkham series is always classy. Batman: Arkham VR has good writing which was very carefully planned out to connect very closely with Arkham Knight. Arkham Knight spends alot of time dealing with stuff going on in Batman's mind and the Arkham VR experience really ties into that in a very clever way. It reveals Batman's motivations for pushing away all his allies, which was a very important Arkham Knight plot point that was left mostly unexplained until Arkham VR explained it.

It is canon that the dream Batman has which is the events of the Batman Arkham VR experience disturbs him so much that he writes down things he remembers from the dream on a whiteboard, trying to understand the meaning of it. You can see the whiteboard by interacting the grand piano in the Wayne Manor Challenge Map in Arkham Knight, which is the first thing you do in Batman: Arkham VR. It's all connected!

In "Important update (1.0.22.1)" they have censored the game. They didn't just add an option for sensitive people to skip disturbing scenes: they took away content from the game so that we do not get a choice. On top of that, they lied to us by previously saying that they were not going to do exactly this.

At the time of my writing this, there were 2,315 comments on the update post. Not one like. Not. One. Zero likes. Literally nobody likes this.

I notice that it isn't April 1st.

I really don't think that Social Justice zombies listen to reason. They eat brains: they don't use them.

My guess is that this isn't the same team as made the original game controlling things any more. They probably got infiltrated by Social Justice zombies and now the original devs are probably going to be looking for other work pretty soon.

But if there are any of the original team left with any degree of influence over SUPERHOT, that comment to like ratio of 2,315 to zero should tell you something.

A toggle to skip cutscenes for people who just want to get to the gameplay would have been fine. Censoring the game so that some passive aggressive pink haired land whale from the depths of Tumblr is going to tell us what content we can and cannot have is not OK.

We have to root out this subhuman cancer from our society. We need gatekeeping, social pressure and mockery: whatever it takes to keep Social Justice zombies out of any position of power or influence.

Here is what this review used to say until December 2021:
I recommend SUPERHOT VR because there aren't very many really great VR games out there, and SUPREHOT VR is definitely in the top five at least. There are a number of really cool moments in SUPERHOT VR.

However, players should be warned that there is also some really bad game design on display in SUPREHOT VR: things that other games solved back in 2D game design ages ago. One of the things that made Super Meat Boy work was that its design was very strict about keeping a super low iteration time for players so they wouldn't be afraid to try whatever they think of doing. If you mess up in Super Meat Boy, it's never a big deal: you can always start again right away with no waiting.

SUPERHOT VR does not have that feature. Some of the levels are very difficult and the game often requires you to repeat several levels before you can get another chance at the part that's giving you trouble.

That wouldn't be so bad if the enemies had randomized spawn points, weapons and behaviors so that beating them required actual thought each time. But they don't. They come at you from the same directions and act the same way every time. After a while, you'll be memorizing arm movements to repeat in order to get through the levels as quickly as possible in order to get another chance. Over and over. That part is not fun.

However, as I said at the beginning of this review, SUPERHOT VR is a big fish in a small pond. There aren't very many really top tier VR experiences out there and despite it's flaws, SUPERHOT VR is still better than most of its competition in the relatively small VR games market.

For anyone who got really frustrated with the original Surgeon Simulator, the VR version lets you take your REVENGE! You can totally breeze through alot of stuff that was much, much harder in 2D.

Try reading the book "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" (1884) by Edwin Abbott Abbott before deciding whether or not to play this.

That's one of my all-time favorite books so I like 4D Toys. But if that book only gave you a headache then this might not be the product for you.

I should mention that I've only tried it in VR with full touch controls. It doesn't say it supports Windows Mixed Reality but it totally does and I noticed no technical problems. I haven't tried playing it in 2D and I'm not sure it would be worth it without VR. Being able to actually pick up and toss around the objects makes all the difference.