Recent reviews by -$ilver-

I feel sort of bad reviewing a game I could not play. But in saying that, it was a game I could not play. It would say it was running, but the game never started besides it's initial start up screen where Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-Tab, the Microsoft button, F4 and Alt-Enter did nothing. Restarting was the only way, but even then when you get back on Steam, the game still says it is running.

After that I could not even get the game to work in any capacity again, even after verifying it's contents and uninstalling and reinstalling again. All it would do was say it was running. But there was no normal way to stop it from running. Clicking Stop or right clicking it to Stop did nothing. Looking in Task Manager at first you could not see it. It is not running as a current or background app. You have to go to the Details tab to find it and delete it and then it would stop running.

I bought it on discount and it being old I did not expect much, but I did expect it to run in some kind of capacity. Up till that point, it is the only game I have found thus far that does this. I had to refund it, even if on discount I had only paid 64¢ for it. I should mention trying different compatibility modes did nothing. I am on Windows 10, so I am not saying it is the games fault for the Operating System I am using. But if you are going to sell it on a platform where the majority are using modern systems, update the game and provide solutions to ensure it works. Hopefully you can have a better time of it, if you decide to try it for yourself.

If you like anime/hentia girls, this may be for you. The three games presently at hand, are pretty lacking in the fun department. You have your standard memory game and jigsaw puzzle. But you also have a runner game of sorts, where you ride a motorcycle collecting coins and trying to avoid the obstacles. Nothing exciting and trying to gain gems to unlock more character portraits feels like you are pulling teeth. But it gets the job done.

The art work of the characters are pretty good. Apparently there is a way to unlock the more adult nature of the game, but I have not bothered. Also when ever you log in for the first time of that day, you receive an award of gems. Few for sure, but they begin to add up. And you get to gain more artwork (cards), by cashing in the gems for a randomized chance of winning new ones.

If you are looking for great game play, unless you are just a puzzle or memory aficionado, this is not it. If you are looking for sexy characters though, you will most probably enjoy it. It is definitely not for everyone, but some may find enjoyment of some kind... ^^!

A very nice and relaxing brick breaker game, with plenty of power-ups and power-downs in seventy-five levels. The music is a very good feature as well. It really reminds me of the Classic Sim Cities of yore. Really great stuff!

Vegans, vegetarians and all those who abstain from eating pork of any kind due to religious reasons, beware! The swine are plentiful in this game. Single player or co-op, you can water the flowers with the blood of your porcine enemies. They come in many shapes and sizes, from itty bitty to ginormous and even the undead kind. They generally roam in packs and while some can be docile, others can be down right egregious in their aggressiveness and hostility towards the player.

You start off with limited weapons, but can upgrade to more powerful ones along the way. The stages have a set number of pigs before the day ends and you go inside the barn between levels with a talking farmer who will belittle you if you do poorly and make wise cracks on other occasions. After so many days you also fight a behemoth of a boss, which of course is also a pig. During the levels you can "push" the dead carcasses into the meat grinder and gain explosives and other types of munition.

And there are seasonal events hosted by the developer, where you can gain special items. And I must say he is a very generous dev. For $1 at full price or fifty cents on sale, you cannot find a better FPS to wittle away your time with. And I have seen him offer to extend a seasonal event just to make someone happy, due to they had computer problems and could not participate.

And I was even offered a new game of my choosing that was worth the price of this one, due to I was no longer able to play the game myself under normal circumstances due to my stubbornness, way after any kind of refund from Steam could of happened. I declined of course, but the fact that he even offered was quite surprising.

I can not say enough good things about the game. And who doesn't like bacon? Minus of course those I mentioned in the initial introduction. ^^! Now grab yourself a BLT and get all saddled in for the ride of your life!

This is a good little zombie game. I say "little", because it behaves like a port from a cell phone app. It is bright and colorful, has decent graphics and an interesting story. Even the game play can be fun. But it can also be really tedious. Due to the nature of phone app games, it will constantly make you use resources like fuel to get from one place to another, sometimes back and forth to the same two places multiple times. Now the fuel does "recharge" on it's own, but it takes hours to gain enough to continue on. You simply do not earn enough through missions to continue like you would on a regular game. And that is sad, because when you get in that groove, you do not want nothing to stop you, but your traveling and fuel consumption will. You can of course fix that, by just purchasing the game. But that means it is no longer free.

Or I suppose you could buy some fuel with in game coins, but I'd rather save that for something more useful like a weapon or ammo for it. I am recommending it as a free game. It is doable, but you do have to trudge through the waiting around or coming back to it periodically like a clicker game. However that in itself can be a blessing if you have real life priorities or at least other games to play. So give it a break and come back to it later.

And then of course as I briefly touched on, there is the matter of tedious missions. For instance you will be tasked to find a base. Once found, you go back to the person who tasked you with the assignment. They then ask you to explore more of it to find the entrance, which you do and go back to them. They then task you with opening it to explore it, but when you go again you find it can not be opened on it's own. So you return to the NPC and they then give you a key card to get in so you do, but only explore a little. So you go back and are tasked to opening another door inside, so you go back to the base and do so. Then you return to the NPC and they need you to find documents. So you go back and do that and then return to them. They then want you to collect supplies from the base, so you do that and go back to them. They then want you to blow up the place and so you do. Now I may of added an extra quest in there or two or maybe even forgot one or two, but honestly that is what it felt like. Like half of that could of been done in two different missions and going back and forth, instead of the many times I had to.

Also it does not let you explore on your own. Unless the mission calls for a door to be opened, you wont be able too. Even if you did it last time you were there, it will not open. And if the game says you have to kill a wave of zombies, you better do it, because everything else becomes irrelevant. Even if you know you have to locate those secret documents and you can see them right in front of your face, you are not allowed to grab them until the zombies are killed. And even if you just cleared a whole hallway full of zombies, you trigger something and they "magically" appear from around a corner.

Also nine times out of ten if you try to explore a city or a stretch of road further, you will find nothing. Once in a great while you may find a locked safe to pick. But it was rare. Basically if it is not in eye sight on the main path, you might as well not even bother wasting your time. And lock picks can be broken so be careful on them.

But besides that the actual game play is decent, although limited. There is no crouching or jumping. There are multiple weapons and upgrades, but I do not believe you can get them all or even half unless you pay real money or farm on so many side missions (the same ones repeatedly) to earn enough in game currency to buy them and be lucky for them to be presented by traders found through out the game who have them randomly in their current stock and are refreshed on a timer basis and nothing is guaranteed to be available by the silver coins.

That is another major cell phone game port issue. I am not sure of the paid version, but if you want to do anything major like upgrades on basically anything from better damage or weapon handling or skins, better fuel consumption on vehicles, etc. you have to use mainly the gold coins. And those you do not get for free on a timer basis and you can not even convert gold into silver. You can only ever so slowly earn them in the game or find them a couple at a time or use real money to purchase them. I think that really sucks, as all the good things or most anyway are unlocked by gold coins and they seem to be asking too high an in game price for most things. So you stick to what is given to you or find along the way, which is not much so far anyway.

Also the majority of zombies are stupid. I mean I know they are zombies, but they all basically just shuffle to you with few exceptions and makes them easy to deal with, especially with all the explosive barrels around, which by the way wont hurt you if you are standing next to them and they explode. Head shots are easy to make up close, but from a distance it actually does take some skill and I can appreciate the iron sights. It is one of the reasons why I recommend it.

Another reason is the leveling up of skills and the perk system. It reminds me of Fallout, except basically ZERO exploration. It also has some rather good voice acting in my opinion, which I was pleasantly surprised.

All in all I do recommend the game for free. I might even recommend it to be bought on a decent sale, if you did not want to wait all that time for the fuel to recharge. But just be aware the game is not that complicated and the tediousness might turn you off. But give it shot at least for free and I think you will be presently surprised as well. Good hunting!

It should be noted I will be reviewing the Japanese language version, as that is the one I am most interested in. This is the game I have been wishing for. A few other games have come close, but always fell short for any number of reasons. This here though, this is the real deal and I can not recommend it enough! This is a game I can see playing everyday and I have already learned things from it.

Although the concept of playing an alien is a little odd to me, the game itself is an open world and cheerful. Relaxing even. You roam around pointing at objects and it will tell you the meaning in English and the word in Japanese. You can choose different ways to view it, but I prefer the kana and kanji one. It shows nouns, adjectives and verbs of people, homes, animals, buildings, cars, objects, etc.

For instance there is a door you can highlight on the house map. You have the choice of viewing all three. "Door" と　戸　is the noun. "Brown" ちゃいろい　is the color of the door. And "to open" あける　is the verb. The game touts over 1,000 words which is an impressive start and more than even simpler games offer. He is also working on even more words and content.

Once you have a few words, you can review and test yourself. Testing is currently done in two ways. "Find the thing" and "spelling". Finding the thing consists of it telling you want it wants you to find in Japanese and you go look for it. So if it tells you to find タクシー you do not find just any vehicle or even a car, but a "taxi". Pointing and clicking on said thing gives you a passing grade and passing the test gives you coins. The spelling is you just spell out the kana. So (tokushii) タクシー would be correct, but (tokushi) タクシ would not be. (We missed the long vowel at the end, the double i's.)

Right now the game is completely free. He may later add extra functionality like voice recognition as a fee, but the core game, from my understanding, will always remain free. When he gets time he will also add quests and possibly even ways to learn conversations, opposed as it just being a really fancy and fun dictionary.

For improvements I would like all words that have a kanji to be displayed as well, even multiple kanji in frequency order. If you noticed on the "door" example, only the noun had the kanji. There are in fact kanji for both the adjective and the verb as well. Also it would be great to have not only the speech recognition, but also a way to use your mouse and or drawing tablet to write the kanji and be graded on it and the proper stroke order. Which would mean that the game should also teach you the proper stroke order too, And obviously the more words the better. For Japanese we need N5 through N1 or at least N2 to be considered proficient and to read an official newspaper. So that is 6,000+ words and about 2,000 basic kanji. He is at least 1/6th of the way there. ^^!

Other than that, basically everything the developer has already mentioned he was already wanting to add, is the same that I would want. Really this is the time if you want to learn a language. It is not going to be much easier and more fun than this. It's free on both Steam and on cell phones. He has several languages to choose from, if Japanese is not your thing and more on the way. It's never been so easy to stay motivated.
Seriously, this review is done. Now go download and try it for yourself. Start learning that language you always wanted to learn! Do it NOW! ^^!

It's free. It's Stand alone. And it's Half Life!

Strange that I never made a review for this before. I guess since I had played it on the original Half Life game many years ago, that it just felt like a part of my general gaming library and not one from Steam itself. Some things have changed since then, but also stayed the same and I will explain in further detail.

It started out as a humble mod for the original Half Life. It took the game engine and added room for several more people to play. Maps began to come out for it, both from the team behind the mod and the general public, much of which were fun, innovative and unique. There were puzzle type obstacle courses before there was Portal. There were zombie maps before there was Left 4 Dead. Maps which totally revamped the game itself with new enemies, weapon skins and play styles. You have World War 2 maps complete with appropriate weapons, skins and atmosphere. You have ancient Egypt. Outer space. Even cell shaded cartoony Super Mario Bros levels and there was Resident Evil co-op on here before RE: Outbreak. You name it, they just about have it.

And to top it off it was all multiplayer co-op. Why tackle the map alone when you could do it with a friend or many. Puzzles that would demand cooperative solutions. And after all these years not only did they become stand alone where you no longer needed the original Half Life game to play it, but was able to stand on it's own two feet as a game it self. And not just that, but also allowing you to play the original Half Life levels co-op. How cool is that!? Not to mention there are other well known HL1 games/mods integrated into this as well.

It should be noted that the community itself is very helpful. They have tons of tips, tools and people willing to lend a hand. Have a question and they will do their best to answer it. The amount of knowledge at your finger tips is amazing.

If there were any down sides it would only be that due to the co-op nature of the game, there are quite a few maps where you NEED to have someone help you such as pressing a button or turning a lever as you are some where else doing the same to proceed. With out that there is nothing you can do, bar from cheating and that does not always work. So if you do not have a constant internet connection for what ever reason, it can be hard to enjoy the fullness of it. Also to play the maps of the original Half Life you have to play it in the co-op mode or disable it, but it is just not the same. But that is the nature of co-op. Although you can skip to any map level, you can not save thus it feels awkward in that regard.

Also as I was just blatantly reminded..., Sven Co-op is pretty free to do what ever you want. For that reason it may not be suitable for young children on online servers as people could potentially have things hentai/porn based. It's not every where and you can get a kick out of most things. Just be aware that odd map or player if you are sensitive to it. It is in no way, shape or form supported by the dev team of Sven Co-op, just with the open nature of the game it can be there. Better to herar it from me, than mistakenly find it yourself. It's few and far between and some may never even witness it, but just a heads up.

Finally due to it being co-op, undoubtedly there are others who have played these maps many many times. It being your first time you might miss a lot of stuff if they rush or even ruin the map story elements because of it. I'd suggest going solo or with a trust worthy friend or two and playing as it was meant to be played. Once beaten or progressed as far as you can due to some puzzles needing co-op (if going totally solo), you can go back and play it with many people and feel like a whole new experience.

Truly not much to complain here at all. I really have nothing, but praise for something this and gives so much great content for free. In fact I believe they even raised the map size as well which is a major bonus for those still interested in making maps and playing said maps.

It's a neat idea, but falls short... way short...

First off any game that touts to be like Shenmue in some way has pretty big shoes to fill. The idea of being able to roam around your place and interact some what with objects, including opening your fridge is a neat idea. But only having about 400 words is not that helpful. In one of the videos it says to test your mastery of the language... You need no less than 2,000 kanji and then some to be able to read a Japanese newspaper and you need a vocabulary of over 10,000 to be able to speak in normal (admittedly to advanced) everyday conversation and this game simply does not provide that. It may not even get you on par with a young child. You could point out objects, but have no way to know how to form a complete sentence.

A big issue is the home you dwell in is simply too small. Like really small. It can only hold so many objects. That and they will have the same object in different locations. It teases you with the front door, but no way to exit. If this at least taught you all 2,000+ kanji or at least all of N5 I would say without a doubt go for it, you do not even need to wait for a sale. If it had the rest of the levels of Japanese all the way to N1, even if in bite sized chunks for DLC I would be running around screaming at the top of my lungs to buy it right now to everyone!

But there are no such options. You are stuck with only 400 or so words that can be learned using a dictionary online or off. Get some sticky notes and start pasting them to objects in your home and you just saved about $10 and writing it down is half of the learning process to begin with. Free apps are a dime a dozen and there are a few really good ones I can name in the comment section, but I wont do it here in the review itself. If interested let me know.

At the end of the day it is a neat little game/teaching tool. What's impressive is that it went out of it's way to offer so many languages. But that was also it's downfall instead of just concentrating on one or two. But with the way the game was made, it was to be just for a handful of words and then just keep translating to other languages. If he had a bigger budget, more help, more inspiration and patience, this could of been a no brainer for language learning. Imagine going outside and interacting with your neighbors in Japanese, little by little at least.

Unfortunately as I stated in the beginning it fell short. I would still recommend it to anyone that needs that extra push and quite a few of us do from time to time, especially starting out. I'd suggest getting it on sale though and be aware of exactly what you are and are not getting, but it for sure can help people, even if only a little. Good luck to you in your language learning and never give up. And good luck to the developer as well.

Year Long Alarm is really only about thirty minutes... ^^!

However it does get and hold your attention all the way through. Neat explosive and push objectives, as “puzzles” would be more of a stretch to describe them. It starts slow and speeds up like any good mod/game should. Although the map(s) are short, they are made to give the impression of real places and you do feel like you are in the Half Life universe. You get a handful of the regular weapons with enough ammo to kill everything, even on hard mode.

In fact my one gripe is that the physics gun made an appearance. It was really only reserved for Alyx/Gordon as a prototype. With it in the hands of a nobody, in the middle of nowhere, it does sort of break the illusion. Also due to the way the physics gun works and the throw-able objects laying around, the real harm is that you can save primarily a good chunk of your ammo until the second half quite easily. Also Hunters would of made a great addition in the second half, but they were no where to be seen. Perhaps they were to be used later or this mod is strictly for the base game of HL2 and not any of the episodes. No antlions either which would of been on par for the outdoor setting.

It's only a minor complaint however. You can do as you wish by not using the gravity gun in the first place. But it is just all too tempting at times. ^^! In the end it is a worthy mod to play for Half Life 2 and I am glad it made it to Steam so others can readily enjoy it as well. 5 out of 5

I have to say, of all the Mario Kart type games I have ever played, original or cloned, this has got to be the best one. If you are a Sega fan it is a no brainer for a purchase. The nostalgia that will seep into your bones is unbelievable with the race tracks coming alive to old and new favorites from Sega. If you are a Mario Kart fan, this is a no brainer as this is essentially a Mario Kart game for ALL systems, not just Nintendo, but with enough new stuff to call it's own. If you are a speed fan, this again a no brainer as the speed you will be hurled to is astronomical. Even if you are neither of the three it is hard not to recommend it because there is just simply so much to love here for ALL ages.

The cast of characters with each one being able to be upgraded is very well matched with strengths and weaknesses, but no one ever too far behind not to be able to have a chance at winning. The vehicles, at certain times of the maps, will transform into a flying vehicle or a boat. The weapons and boosters are all refined and nothing too over powering or cheap.

Any time I have played online I did not receive much lag at all, if any, so that is also a great positive. And the race tracks that you play on can not be described, not in words. You have to witness them for yourselves. They just come alive with each theme giving off so much of a good vibe that you will never get bored, all the while finding short cuts and ways to cut down on your race times. Going for the challenges to get better stats and unlocking more race courses becomes addicting and as you complete those you find yourself getting better and better at the game as a whole and those opponents that seemed to be always winning, you seem to be able to start passing in online multiplayer. Seeing the race track actually evolve as the race continues and you are on your second and third lap is breath taking. And the sense of speed is just so satisfying.

I normally never say to buy the game at full price, but this one really impressed me. I say it is worth the price of full admission, but on sale for $5, it is a steal! You really have no reason not to like this game. Try it for your self!