Recent reviews by DustyBlue

This is the indisputable proof that Microsoft lied when they said they would protect/support the studios they acquired. You are not safe under the Microsoft umbrella, but in danger.

It's not much of an Xbox "family" when they are the ones who are first to plant the knife in your back themselves. This is a truly unforgivable sin, and has lost Microsoft the trust of the customer and their own business partners alike, dreadful uncertainty from within and without. A hopeless company/brand with the stench of death and betrayal and arrogant incompetence all over it now.

They infamously never give any guidance to their devs because they truly have none to offer. Nor do they have any guidance to offer to this industry other than to be a living example of what NOT to do. It's like Hillary Clinton giving advice on how to win elections. Do not listen to a word Microsoft says when they speak with such authority about the struggles of "the industry" (themselves), there are lots of companies in the industry who have plenty of success, it's just not them, because they have been walking into rakes with just about every business venture they've attempted for like the past 15 years. Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows 11, Games for Windows Live, the Microsoft Store, Skype, Bing, Bing's schizo AI chatbot, Mixer, Cortana, Groove Music, the Zune, Nokia and the Windows Phone, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Rare, Lionhead, 343 Industries, Bungie and Epic Games walking away from them the first chance they got... I could go on and on. This company is propped up on legacy Bill Gates money, not on merit.

Despite all the experience, they have learned nothing and speak with such infuriatingly clueless ignorance, as if they are blameless and helpless to the situation they put themselves in. Microsoft as a business can only follow trends and parse through spreadsheets and what is directly quantifiable in dollar sign metrics, so they are completely blind to the human soul, detached from basic humanity or human relationships or art or anything that truly matters in this life. Truly a company that most embodies the ultimate quintessential essence of a psychopathic CEO. That's what makes them a $3,000,000,000,000 company that somehow doesn't have the money to keep their own recently bought studios afloat, but has enough to pay off despicable Bobby Kotick's golden parachute an amount that would've funded the entire Tango Gameworks AND Arkane Austin staff for 17 years.

This is an exceptional, original, great and joyous game that one cannot help but play with a distracting tinge of sadness in the way now. So, to even the score a bit (at least emotionally if nothing else), I would recommend playing it in a way that does not further enrich Microsoft with your money, because buying it here now, none of it is going to the people with actual talent who actually made the game, just the thoroughly untalented mealy-mouthed excuse-making mediocre hacks at the top who had nothing to do with it and who have presided over countless disasters at this point, the exact sort of people like the villain of this game's story. There are other ways. You should play this game, but by buying it here on Steam, you are arguably letting the bad guy win, letting them profit off the corpse of the bright young soul who had such a promising future ahead of them and whose life they so thoughtlessly and callously cut short. Microsoft needs to feel regret and no success from these sorts of grave robbing business tactics, so if you are particularly outraged like me and want to stick it to them in at least some small way, this is just one idea on how to make that happen quicker.

This is one of my top 5 FPSs of all time. It has a certain atmosphere that I've still never seen another game replicate the feel of, it is immersive and eerie and reflective. It has a really fascinatingly told story via your interaction with computer terminals, reminiscent of System Shock which came out in the same year. A story that challenges the player directly just as much as its puzzles and combat. This, too, has the elements of an AI talking directly to you, and a war between AIs and aliens, and you can really get a grasp of their next-level intelligence. The aliens and sound effects are all iconic. The feeling of survival with so many dead around you, and the helpless living survivors being slaughtered right before your eyes if you don't intervene. The level design is pretty impressively intricate and expansive too.

This is also the first FPS to have vertical aim. While Halo was impressive for console standards and set a new standard there, I think Marathon has even more depth in terms of sci fi and set a new standard for PC even after Doom (which had only come out a year prior to this). It was originally a Mac exclusive, so this served that same purpose Halo did as a killer app on the other side, tempting you, taunting you. Thank goodness for this Aleph One version and for Bungie allowing Marathon to be free to the community, so that this early work of Bungie can always be remembered and experienced firsthand. And I am so glad for this new Steam version to revitalize interest and accessibility for this fantastic game. There's multiplayer too.

Even with mods, the game is still a glitchy experience plagued with janky movement/collision and really constraining PC options (even with this one being about cyber space). If there's any series that should embrace high framerate/refresh rate as part of the intended experience, it's Sonic. But no, 60 fps cap and no ultrawide support either, and it would keep resetting resolution. Very basic settings in general. No voice audio unless you enable Windows Sonic for Headphones. I figure there isn't any patching effort going on at this late date post-release either if it's still in this state.

I wanted to go with this version over consoles because the Switch seemingly made every console version have constant super bad LOD pop-in everywhere, but even with max LOD modding on PC here you still see it sometimes. It's weird playing a Sonic game that is so much about puzzles, and it's very blatantly derivative of Breath of the Wild, but there are some ideas with potential here and Sonic hasn't really tried expanding its scope in a long, long time, so I respect that this one was trying something different, but it just feels like a less tedious Sonic '06 with some good music that puts you in a reflective mood. Unfortunately, my reflections have led me to the conclusion that I'm just not gonna click with this game and I should get my $28 back. Hoping that the inevitable Frontiers 2 is a more proper PC release and sorts out the jank.

Within not even 12 hours, my negative review converts into a positive review now that they have honored the will of the people regarding the PSN account requirement. You give respect, you get respect. It's really that simple. And in terms of customer leverage against stubborn all-powerful $100 billion corporations, if you don't use it, you lose it. The swifter and harsher and more united the backlash is, the better the odds of actually getting them to budge on their BS. Your rights only exist to the extent of how willing you are to defend them.

Despite the imperfect online experience, this was the funnest fighting game of 2022 to me, a breath of fresh air, and I still play it to this day even after getting all the achievements and buying/unlocking just about everything. The roster is gynormous, and I greatly enjoyed their picks for DLC characters. I enjoy the music. I enjoy the stage gimmicks and use of 3D space for movement. The stages and manga panels look great. Lots of costumes. You can skip through all the intro logos real fast, which I always appreciate. And there's a ton of great mods, making this, I believe, the definitive version to play.

The "story mode", All-Star Battle, has a lot of secret missions/side objectives for the matches that make it fun to replay each fight. Just doing endless mode over and over and something about how combos are formed in this game give me a really satisfied feeling. Fights are always frantic, with an X factor of surprise. So much fanservice. The original version of this game was kind of a mess (I got all the trophies on that one too, back in 2013 or so), it actually blows me away how they made something this crisp and snappy out of all their old assets from that and Eyes of Heaven. It's like night and day. It's an actually fun technical fighter now. Just don't expect eSports.

The original game was made before any of the anime, almost purely off the enduring strength and popularity of just the manga. You hardly ever see that happen! Games based on a manga directly, not on a successful anime adaptation. But now that there HAS been a successful anime, and this game coinciding with Stone Ocean's anime release, made this game even better for it and have even more of an opportunity that it capitalized on, like adding an encore page of story mode panels and Weather Report and new moon Pucci as free DLC characters (in the original version, both Puccis were one super deep Pucci, but they split them sort of like Samus/Zero Suit Samus or Zelda/Sheik in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate).

I know a lot of people are dead set on not buying this game unless it has rollback, but I still love this game and operate on the mindset that fighting games having rollback is a great privilege but not a default or a given, since I'm sure it's hard and very complicated to work that out, especially on such a niche game whose guts were made like a decade ago. PS3 games by CyberConnect2 just aren't built like that. Apparently the engine was called JoJo Shading Requiem? Lol. You can tell here which assets are newly made and which are recycled from the PS3 game 10 years ago, particularly with the drawn art. But I forgive them in the same way I forgive FromSoftware for frame drops in Valley of Defilement in Demon's Souls or Blighttown in Dark Souls, cause they were still a scrappy little Japanese company operating at a budget level at that point. FromSoftware's games, likewise, were able to exist by continuing to daisy-chain off of the foundation they had managed to build and achieve in all their previous games, and continuing to build around that get progressively bigger in scope.

This new release is able to exist because of how it piggybacks off all the work done in the original game and Eyes of Heaven. If they had to build an all-new game from scratch, they probably wouldn't have been able to justify it financially. And I really am just glad we have what we have here and am truly happy with it, even if it's not perfect for what modern fighting game players demand nowadays. Maybe one day we can get a full-fledged sequel with all-new assets (or not, so it can be an even bigger roster continuing off of this one; it still looks really good graphically and I really hate how many characters were lost in Guilty Gear Xrd and Strive), those last 2 or 3 characters still only in Eyes of Heaven N'Doul, Joshu, and Heavenly Dio), more part 7 and part 8 characters, and more fully modernized online technology under the hood.

This game has been a shallow insulting cancerous scam since day 1, but thankfully even the diehard fans Bungie undeservedly got are starting to see it. Somehow even with the infinite MTX money-printing combined with Sony's money, they still don't have enough to keep their workers paid. And these are the live service experts Sony now defers to over their own home-grown developers? They've had a total of like 3 expansions where the general playerbase agreed it was good. Everything else has been Bungie's deliberate strategy of mediocrity-by-design and psychological manipulation. They literally hired a neurology scientist devise their plan to trick people into staying on the line forever. If that doesn't tell you that this is an evil company, I don't know what would.

When they split from Activision and were free of any publisher meddling, what did they do? The same old nickel-and-dime MTX scam ♥♥♥♥, and without even having the moral consistency to fully commit to a free-to-play model. This is not the work of predictably always-sinister Activision, this is Bungie itself. This is not by accident, this is by intent, and even the most cucked fans are getting sick of it. This game has not the integrity to call itself art or entertainment, it is a get-rich-quick scheme, a flashy colorful carnival trick for suckers to rob them blind like the arcade games of old. A fool and his money are soon departed. Don't be that fool. Even if you play for free, it robs you of your most valuable priceless resource: time and energy. They don't even respect their own developers' time and energy, since they are willing to delete their own work at the drop of a hat.

Find better games and better companies that deserve your money. It's not like Bungie has a monopoly on good FPSs or sci fi settings. Bungie fails their players and workers alike, to them you are nothing but a cow to squeeze milk out of to make numbers go up with no intent of creating anything special. This game is a series of false promises to get willing participants through the door and rob them of every minute of their lives and isolate them away from other games, like a cult. To all currently in the cult, I encourage you to leave and see the big wider world you've been missing, because not everybody makes cynical hollow ♥♥♥♥ like this. Please, have some self-respect and hang up the phone on these people. If Bungie continues to lose money, maybe they will finally have the motivation and incentive to change strategy and create a good game that respects the players' time again. The Final Shape is gonna be in the shape of a dog turd, and you don't need to be around to smell it.

The game was unbootable past the Blizzard logo in its launch state. Pretty damning for a AAA PC-focused game. Thankfully I happened upon someone in the community who found a fix (rename dstorage.dll file to dstorageold.dll).

I have played 34 hours of the PS5 version prior. I have had fun with it, but the always-online requirement consistently makes for a sluggish and lag spike-filled experience, and weird physics glitches. Blizzard, I promise you that if you simply do this one thing and get rid of that unnecessary requirement, I will change this to a positive review. Despite everything else wrong with the game, that's all you gotta do for me to be willing to give a charity benefit-of-the-doubt thumbs up. One simple task to get my good will and be one less dog on the dogpile, but... I don't think you'll do it.

Never bothered with the Season of the Malignant; malignant being the perfect debut season theme word to summarize modern day Blizzard. Those infamous nerfs were a hell of a way to kick this game in the nuts right away. Maybe it's on Season of Blood now because Diablo is bleeding out, and so that's why it has desperately crawled its way to Steam so quickly. As a casual player, there is not much I can add that hasn't been said by everyone else already, you should defer to their wisdom. I can say this minor thing though: the intro cinematic is still one of the best ever in gaming and it's a shame we can only view it once, and with subtitles having to be on.

As much as I am glad that Blizzard games are finally coming to Steam, the Blizzard debut on Steam should've been a happier occasion. Sadly, Blizzard has ruined their once-prestigious reputation, and what should have been a time of celebration as a momentous turning point in Blizzard's history with the PC gaming community going "♥♥♥♥ yeah", instead feels so deflated and sad. I hope they continue to put their classic untainted back catalog onto Steam, and not just use the platform merely to opportunistically bolster their live service dumpster fires.

This is one of those releases where it doesn't show which keys navigate the menus, only Xbox controller buttons. But they just added trading cards, which got me back into playing these games again. 7 different titles to pick from, but it should be treated as just 3 games.

Darius 1 is the game that set itself apart with the insanely 3-screens-combined wide screen and tons of branching paths. Pretty good backgrounds too. Seems like a feat of engineering to even get a 2D scrolling game played in these proportions. For some reason, everything is sea creatures, and that persists across all the future games too. Comes in 3 versions.

Darius 2/Sagaia is mostly the same (it came out only 2 years later), but lets you change your ship direction backwards, but only for bosses when they specifically get on the left side of the screen.. I wish every shooter would let you manually switch, don't know why the majority of them don't want you to. But this way is still better than not being able to fire backwards at all. Really cool how it has vocals in the music for a game that came out in 1989. The stage hazards seem more extravagant. The screen is not as wide, since it is on a 2-screen setup instead. Also comes in 3 versions.

Darius Gaiden is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sick and needs to be seen/heard/played to be believed. This came out 5 years later, now in the 90s proper, so there is a huge technology leap and gameplay is way faster, although no super wide screen anymore, just a regular 1-screen shooter experience here. Sad that the screen only kept shrinking, instead of getting wider and wider... But the size of the screen reverting to something standard and ordinary does not change the fact that Darius Gaiden is still an incredible transcendental experience and a dramatic step up for the series and genre. Vocals in the music too. You've got bombs, super flashy ones. You've got 3D effects. The bosses explode Mega Man X4-style, but with even more layers of effects, which is always awesome in my book. And this has nothing to do with anything, but the sound when you collect a powerup, I swear I have heard in another game before. Comes in 1 version.

It's not a series I grew up familiar with, but I can see how these games really pushed the boundaries of tech for arcade shooters. Esteemed shoot-em-ups on Steam can be pricey, so you should get this on sale, and particularly for Darius Gaiden. I wish this collection included G-Darius too, but they put special attention into that game specifically later, and so they now sell it, but separately (for two-thirds the price of this entire collection for that game alone).

The people who make Overwatch porn work harder than the people who make Overwatch

Now that I am probably the 10th guy in a row to steal this joke/review and still get tons of awards for it, I expect the same for me. Go on now, hand them over

Just a fun ass game. It's like Crimsonland meets Castlevania. Crimsonvania? It's hard not to get hypnotized by it and do run after run. Good sense of progression, good soundtrack, good sprites, funny bestiary entries (written by Jim Sterling, it turns out), lots of choice in upgrade paths and that critical element of luck. And all at a humble price. A cut above other indie games at this point, and even $10-20 ones. Fantastic game to play while listening to/watching stuff. Absolutely deserves the good word of mouth it's been getting. I hope with its success it gets ported to other platforms too.