Recent reviews by sMas_

YES! THERE ARE SONGS FEATURING HATSUNE MIKU IN THIS GAME! With that out of the way, let me tell you that Muse Dash is just a straight up good time. It's chock-full of the sort of uwu and uguu anime and vocaloid type beat vibes that I absolutely adore, but I don't think you gotta be a full-on weeb to vibe along and give your fingers a real workout here. Muse Dash is a HELLA cutesy rhythm game with lots of HECKIN' cute (and valid) music for you and your perhaps soon-to-be waifus to mash, bash, and Dash your way through together. The soundtrack has a pretty good mix of genres and moods, but leans mostly towards poppy and up-beat, with predominantly clean production and a generally electronic sound. There are only a few guitar-forward/rock tracks. No black metal tracks, sorry. Most of the vocals are sung in Japanese and Chinese, but there's some English and Korean as well.

The game's control scheme and overall premise is very simple. Notes travel down two rows, from right to left, and you're tasked with smashing them before they leave the screen, while also avoiding obstacles! You have an UP attack/jump for hitting notes in the top row and jumping over obstacles in the bottom row, a DOWN attack/dive for hitting notes in the bottom row and diving under obstacles in the top row, and an optionally manual "Fever Mode" activation function. By default, Fever Mode is activated automatically when the Fever Gauge becomes full. Fever Mode in Muse Dash works much like Star Power in Guitar Hero; hit notes, bar go up, use for bonus points + fancy effects. Wait, did I call them notes? I meant happy little clouds with bunny ears, visibly shy ghosts, samurai things, lollipops, cowboy(???) blob creatures riding seemingly rocket-propelled ice cream cones, grumpy cotton candy, HAMMERS (bonk), and... Smash and Dash 'em all! I will continue to call them notes from now on. If your chosen character gets hit by something, she cries a bit and takes damage, and if you fail a stage because she got hit a lot, she'll cry a lot. You don't want to make her cry.

Muse Dash is a game about playing a beat on your vidya manipulation device of choice in time with music, and not usually in correspondence to one particular instrument in a song, but several, including vocals! So you might go BAP BAP BAP BAPBAPBAP on your keyboard to a song's vocals, and then... BARABARABAPBAP -- you just BAP-ed along to a drum fill, on the same song! After finishing a song, you'll be given a letter ranking based on how accurately you played it, and a score based on STUFF. A note can be missed entirely, which counts as a MISS. It can be hit sort of on time, which counts as a GREAT hit. And it can be hit basically perfectly on time, which counts as a PERFECT hit. Going all brrrr on your keyboard and seeing "PERFECT" after "PERFECT" on the screen with every note hit is super satisfying. You need to hit all notes PERFECT-ly and not get hit by any obstacles to get 100% accuracy and the Gold S ranking on a song. If you use your mouse to click anywhere (except there) on the victory screen after finishing a song, you'll get a slightly more detailed rundown of how accurate you were. Hitting MOST notes in a song is often very easy, but hitting most of them perfectly is considerably more difficult, and hitting ALL OF THEM perfectly is just oof. There are also, like, just musical notes that u can run into and stuff... Ye. YEEHH, you get it. Notes come and notes go, and your mission in Muse Dash is to hit notes in time with the music.

Joining you and your waifus on your merry dashing and bashing are the Elfins. Elfins are these little creatures that fly beside the girls and give them various buffs. The different girls have different abilities too, but to be honest, which girl and Elfin you decide to use isn't all that important unless you're looking to absolutely maximize your score and climb the leaderboards. I personally care more about accuracy than score so I just play with pretty much whoever, although I've definitely developed a fondness for Marija Magical Girl... :L *bonk* They all function pretty similarly for the most part, but a few definitely stand out. Like Reimu from Touhou, for example, who can hover, and who is from Touhou! Touhou btw! And Sleepwalker Girl Rin, who will just straight up play through any track automatically, which is helpful if you wish to study a difficult track without dying constantly.

There are differently themed stages with different looking notes/enemies for you to Dash through. A jazzy song might have you Dash through a city on a rainy night, smashing top hats and missiles, because obviously. Whereas a more cutesy/sweet song will send you straight to diabetes heaven... <.< ... >.> ... It's also rumored that sometimes, on some songs, a stage might-- All of the different stages look great. It can take a teeny-tiny bit of time to get used to playing on an unfamiliar stage just because everything looks so different, but the core mechanics of mashing and dashing are the same between them all.

As of writing, there are 352 songs in the game, about 60 of which (I think) are included with the base game. The "Just as planned" DLC grants you access to all songs currently in the game + all songs added in the future, in addition to giving you a permanent 1.5x EXP boost and unlocking all girls (which I think the developers refer to as "Beauties", by the way :0) and Elfins immediately. A few DLC songs are made available to those with only the base game each week, for a limited time. The base game's "Default" songs (which doesn't include all the base game songs) are unlocked by leveling up -- they are NOT unlocked by the DLC. You earn EXP and level up by playing through songs. After you've unlocked all the Default songs I don't know what the heck your level even does. Mine's over 600 as of writing, which... Ok. If you like to watch number go the very big one, then wahoo mamma mia for you, I guess -- that number do be going up up up. I suppose there are the unlockable illustrations (and unlockable girls if you don't have the DLC unlock them for you), but they aren't gated behind specific levels like the Default songs are... It's a whole big thing. The illustrations all look very nice and can be viewed in the menu at any time, and they can be saved to your hard drive as .png's as well. Well, the animated ones can't be, but- WHATEVER! Unlocked illustrations can be seen on the loading screens as well. For like three full seconds. Stuff's cool and good, really.

Muse Dash is very straightforward. Hop in, play the tutorial, and BAM! You're off! It's got a wonderful, playful vibe to it. I don't have many complaints with it. I'm tempted to call it PERFECT. I suppose I wish there were more difficulty options for some songs. Because sometimes I find a song that I really like to listen to, but that I don't really like to play because I find it too easy. Ah well. Muse Dash is a very solid game, and a must-play for fans of rhythm games. Even those who have never played a rhythm game before should give it a shot. It's very easy to get a basic hang of, and the base game is cheap as heck anyway. If you end up liking it a lot, the DLC is definitely worth your money as well.

SO, first of all, buy this game. Secondly, if you're using a widescreen monitor (16:9, etc) do yourself a favour and increase the FOV by typing "default_fov [any value that doesn't suck]" into the console, unless you're into horse blinders. The console can be brought up/down by pressing the § key or ~ or this or that or tilde or Tilda or Matilda or whatever -- you'll figure it out! It may also be wise to eliminate mouse acceleration by enabling raw input in the mouse settings menu.


To more conveniently play installed mods:
Step 1. Go here: \Steam\SteamApps\common\Half-Life\valve\resource
Step 2. Open GameMenu.res with notepad or something similar (you may have to run the game once in order for this file to be generated)
Step 3. Press ctrl + f, then search for and delete the line that reads "nosteam 1"

Doing this will add the "Change Game" option to the main menu, which lets you select and play newly installed Half-Life mods without first having to restart Steam in order for them to be listed in your Steam library. Not only is this more convenient, but time spent playing mods that are selected via this menu will also count toward your total hours played for Half-Life and keep all of your Half-Life screenshots in one place. Cool, right?


Half-Life, released in November of 1998, is no doubt one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time, and I'm no doubt the billionth person to tell you that. Half-Life runs on the Gold Source engine, which is a fork of id Software's Quake 1 (idtech 2) engine. Half-Life's engine is a big part of what makes it so good, in my opinion. In large part because the movement just feels fantastic. Unlike in Half-Life 2 (which also has great movement though), the Shift key doesn't make you sprint, but walk. Sprint/run is always on by default, you never tire, and you move at a rather brisk pace. You move about as quickly as you do in other first-person shooters of the mid- to late 90's, but don't let that fool you into thinking that Half-Life plays like a "trve oldskool FPS". What I'm saying is not that Half-Life isn't oldschool, but that its release marked a shift in the way that first-person shooters would come to be developed, for better or for worse. Half-Life plays very differently in many ways to the first-person shooters that preceeded it. While there is no 2- 3- or even 4-weapon carry-limit as you often see in many modern first-person shooters, and you can carry all of the game's weapons on your person at the same time, and as already mentioned, movement is rather fast, etc etc, you are however dealing with combat that is very cover-focused, as the game's most threatening foes rely heavily on hitscanning attacks. There is nothing inherently un-oldschool about hitscanning enemies, it's just that they make up the majority of Half-Life's tougher combat encounters and you're never really going to be circle-strafing and dodging incoming projectiles like you would expect to do in first-person shooters preceeding Half-Life that are also touted as oldschool FPS classics. Uuhhh, you will be dodging smg nades though, or at least be trying to, trust me. Half-Life also doesn't have secrets in the oldschool FPS sense, and the game's maps aren't all disparate or somewhat disparate levels, but flow together more seamlessly into large chapters with a pacing that is more varied than what you'd see in many other first-person shooters from this era. Half-Life is not oldschool in the same sense that for example Doom or Quake are. Uhm, I guess Blood kind of did the whole--ANYWAY, while Half-Life was by no means the first FPS to include NPC's or scripted set pieces, it is arguably the FPS most responsible for leading the genre in a more scripted, linear, and story-focused direction, which in the Half-Life series' case culminated with Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in 2007. This is one of the main ways in which Half-Life would go on to influence the genre, which I'm not saying is all a bad thing -- who knows if we would have had Bioshock if it weren't for Half-Life? What I know for certain, is that Half-Life's got mods. Ah, the mods. There is no shortage of fantastic Half-Life mods. I've heard that there was a little mod that could, called Counter-Strike, which went on to become one of the most influential multiplayer games of all time.


More on the movement:
Letting go of the forward key and holding down either the right or left directional key, while smoothly moving your mouse in the same direction, will allow you to curve your forward midair trajectory either left or right -- this is called air strafing. You may freely alternate between left- and right-hand air strafes, but this can be a little tricky at first. Interestingly, air strafing also increases your forward momentum and you can garner immense speed by chaining together well-timed jumps and air strafes (bunny hopping).

Air strafing is a movement quirk carried over from Quake's adorable and quirky game engine, where it works differently in several ways, but the main gist of it is the same there as it is in Half-Life; hold directional key, move mouse in the same direction, gaming bliss ensues. This movement goodness was subsequently carried over into the Source Engine and tons of other games. While the ways in which different games with air strafing handle momentum acceleration varies, the aforementioned "main gist" of it all remains intact 'til this day, and can even be seen in more recent games like Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends. The bhop, KZ climb, and surf movement communities were born out of Half-Life and GoldSrc. idtech 2 laid the groundwork for these things, and with GoldSrc and Half-Life they came to fruition thanks to passionate communities. Shoutout to Momentum Mod.

There's A LOT more to Half-Life's movement than that, but I have to stop myself before I write an entire speedrunning tutorial or I go off about how amazing Team Fortress 2's rocket jumping mechanics are. Basically, movement in Half-Life's engine and its derivative, Source, is tight, deep, and satisfying. Like your mum.


I may be sooomewhat biased by the fact that Half-Life is literally one of the first games I ever played and nostalgia is crack cocaine, even if my only experience with Half-Life in my diaper-wearing years was with Half-Life Uplink, which is effectively the game's "demo", sort of, and also well worth playing by the way -- but to me, Half-Life oozes charm. It's a cozy game. The believable but blocky enviroments, the heavily exaggerated reverberation effects, the "ARGH! NO! STOP!" of the scientists, the ka-pow of the shotgun -- it all makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

In Half-Life you play as 27-year old theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, who works at the Black Mesa Research Facility, located somewhere in the New Mexico desert. The game opens with you arriving late for work in the now very iconic tram ride intro sequence, as Kelly Bailey's fantastically ominous ambient music plays in the background.

As you breathe the air and take in the game's atmosphere, laden with hi-tech industrial theming, it becomes abundantly clear that the goings-on at Black Mesa must be of unfathomable magnitude and utmost importance. The intro sets the tone for the game INCREDIBLY well. I cannot say enough positive things about this intro. It's a little long, yes, but it's communicative and just wow.

When you start the game, from the moment the game's title on a black background fades away and allows you to see, and until the game's end, you experience the game world entirely through the eyes of Gordon Freeman. From the moment the proverbial and literal ride begins, you're there every step of the way, with Gordon, through thick and thin, through the scorching desert, through once sterile offices where now lie the decaying corpses of your former colleagues, through test labs home to questionable ethics -- it's all unraveled to the player from Gordon's perspective, and it's so damn compelling.