Recent reviews by Snufflegrunt

I acquired this on sale for practically nothing and I played for research purposes into the genre. I knew what I was getting into - a port of a mobile game with the microtransactions ripped out. All off the vestiges of that previous pay-to-play model are still there. It’s still a fun way to dispose of 20-30 minutes. The game has potential… and I believe the genre has untapped potential.

It turns out that only some saves can be migrated, not all. R* fail to provide any reason when asked. GTA:O, despite its predatory nature, is a lot of fun with friends in a private lobby where you can ignore all that bs, and now my character has been arbitrarily taken away. Apparently there's no text chat... what the hell is this?

Can I be arsed to play through the extremely linear early missions again? Not really. I played GTA V to absolute death, and Trevor is a fantastic character, but that was 2013/14 when there were almost zero other releases that interested me. It's a decent game with a decent story, probably among the best of its era, but I've overplayed it and... I prefer IV.

Pac-Man with fog of war is something you’d think up while high as balls. It’s not a good idea in practice, but for a free game the novelty is worth your time. You can beat the entire thing in 30-45 mins.

It's Left 4 Dead 3, because it's a fairly natural gameplay evolution of L4D2. I don't get the "controversy". Perhaps it's just people with nostalgia glasses for L4D who haven't played L4D in ages, because the Back 4 Blood is fairly old-school and I can see how that could be off-putting. The card system reeks of throwing ♥♥♥♥ at the wall to see what sticks, but eh if you want a modern co-op zombie-blaster then I can't think of anything better. Personally I'd still take L4D over B4B any day of the year simply because the graphics are more legible, however B4B does nothing objectively wrong for the genre it's in.

*insert 2010 indie platformer here* *yawn*

If you're into precision platformers then you'll get a lot out of it, although you've probably already played this if that's you. To me, even after only 45 minutes (I ran it overnight along with other stuff just to get the trading cards) and beating 2.5 "worlds", I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer - all it's going to do is make the jumping puzzles harder and harder until it ends. Meat Boy has "heart and soul" I suppose, and the soundtrack isn't bad, but that's about where it stops for me. There are no enemies outside of "bosses" (the bosses are effectively just time requirements for level completion because they chase you while you jump over stuff), no navigation puzzles, just jumping over/around sharp things as fast as possible until the game ends. High difficulty has its place but there comes a point where it just feels like padding to make what is actually a pretty simplistic game feel bigger than it is. I'd be interested to know how long Super Meat Boy took to make... I'm guessing 2-3 months at maximum assuming one person. (Edit: I found out it's made by the same person who made Binding Of Isaac. That explains it. S/he seems to have a habit of releasing concepts instead of real finished games.)

Newgrounds is the publisher, or was (I assume the contract expired). That should tell you a lot if you're of a certain age. It's *very* late 00s in its attempts at humour and is clearly programmed in Flash. It's basically just I Wanna Be The Guy except it costs $15 (wtf) and doesn't run in a browser. I think I got it in a Humble Bundle 10-15 years ago so it probably goes on sale for next to nothing. As for my continued quest for a modern 2D platformer among a sea of metroidvanias and "precision platformers" that is better than and builds upon Jazz Jackrabbit 2 from 1998, my princess is in another castle.

Joseph Campbell: The Game

A brilliant RPG that toes the line between accessibility and depth almost perfectly. Both newbies and D&D fans will be at home here. Since KOTOR takes place 4000 years before the films, you don't even need to be that much of a SW fan to get into it. You don't need to have seen a single SW film to enjoy KOTOR because everything you need to know about the lore is right there on the first planet. Sure, the game is held together with duct tape, quite badly aged, has a questionable UI even by the standards of the day, and has always been picky about configuration, but KOTOR is a classic. If you can get over those things, you are in for a rough gem of a game. It is *recommended* but not essential playing to get the most out of the superior sequel. The character writing and world-building is 10/10, which is the prime reason to play this wonderful RPG. Oh, and Pazaak is one of the best minigames ever.

A lot of the moral choices are very black and white. Do you want to chainsaw the cute puppy into gibs while cackling like Palpatine, or do you want to adopt it and build a giant doggo palace for the puppy to live in? Being an evil arse is fun, but the nuance (and QoL) is fundamentally why I prefer the sequel - it's got a more philosophical bent where many choices are morally grey, even when it looks like they're not. That said, SW is all about good vs evil 99% of the time, so in many ways KOTOR 1 is the more Star Warsy RPG of the two.

Deck/Linux: Use Proton 5.x for the game to work correctly. DO NOT use cloud saves across two devices running two completely different OSes unless you like losing progress. You should be using multiple save slots anyway. It's surprisingly playable on Deck, even without the slight remaster with official controller support that KOTOR 2 received.

Edit: It has a Limp Bizkit reference in dialogue with one of the companions. Lol.

Rogue Squadron 1 (obviously using the same engine) except it’s set just prior to The Phantom Menace with more limited gameplay despite coming out a few years later. I would’ve been all over this if I played it when it came out. Sadly, I get the vibe that nostalgia is required to truly enjoy it, although it isn’t an objectively bad game by any stretch. The game is from the era of manuals, and playing it without having read the manual does feel like I’m missing key information crucial to enjoying it.

It does feel a bit slapped-together, with obvious concessions made for the consoles that it’s optimised for. Things like enemies coming in very small waves and tiny play areas. The sound mixing is all over the place too, regardless of what you do with the settings. Speaking of settings, there is no way to remap your controls.

The story feels like it could go places as of around 5-6 levels in, especially if you’re a SW geek, but I have many other (better) games in my backlog. I’ll read the Wookieepedia page instead. (Edit: I read it and it's basically an excuse plot that doesn't add much lore at all.)

If anything, this game shows how ahead of its time the N64 was minus the cartridges. This came out on the PS2/XBox, while RS1 was on the PC and N64 and is *miles* ahead of Starfighter in pretty much all aspects, including technical.

Positive… if you have nostalgia for it. Even having never played it before, Starfighter does take me back to being 10 purely down to the aesthetic and theme. But without that Star Wars theme, nah, it would've been forgotten about within a year.

Also note that Starfighter’s Deck/Linux compatibility rating is total BS. It runs, but you won’t get any cutscenes regardless of what Proton version you use. It also DOES NOT support the Deck’s native resolution at all - it’s 4:3 or nothing. Yet more proof that Valve's compatibility ratings mean almost nothing.

If EaW didn't have Star Wars stuff in it, I'd hate it because this style of RTS with population caps and capture points really isn't my thing, but the space battles (which don't have CPs) really are something to behold. It's still supported and patched all these years later, even with Workshop support. The ground battles sucked even in 2007 so they suck even more now but, outside of a handful of occaissions in the campaigns, you're never forced into them. Galactic Conquest is where the heart of this game is anyway, which is essentially campaign mode but without the fluff and more open-ended.

Anyway... 18 years old?! Time, please stop it. Seriously, stop it lol.

If Santa didn't visit in the small hours of 25th December 1994 to drop off the full boxed registered version of this fantastic 10/10 game (I am going to keep telling myself that) then your parents failed you. The start screen has an evil monk doing the Y pose in the "YMCA" dance, what more could you want?!

However, I don't know why most DOS games on Steam use an ancient badly-configured version of DOSBox, but it needs to stop. You can do better. It runs at 286 speeds and is set to use Ad Lib for music/sound instead of the far superior SoundBlaster. I could tell it was off based on an incredibly old but incredibly ingrained memory.

I highly recommend using DOSBox-X to run the game, and delving into the setup.exe file. Steam won't track your hours but... eh whatever.

I can see why this is often cited as the best GRID game. From a car nerd perspective, AKA the target audience for this game, GRID Autosport is what GRID 2 should’ve been. I love GRID 2, which does hypercars insanely well, but this is better if you're a car enthusiast since it's a bit more grounded. The physics are incredible, especially for the time but it still holds up better than most games of this type released today. This is a pure celebration of (mostly European) motorsport. The original GRID is still the best in terms of content, but if you’re after something similar, a bit more modern and with perfect Deck support (even displaying the battery charge level on the top-right while in-game), then GRID Autosport is for you.

The AI knows how to defend and attack fairly, at least in the context of the motorsports depicted in which contact is mostly allowed and even encouraged in the case of stock/tourer racing. It’s not crazy like in so many other racing games. The cars handle slightly differently than other games I've played in this series, being a lot more stiff at the rear even with "soft" suspension, which doesn't suit my usual driving style but I've gained tremendous satisfaction in learning to adapt to that. In some ways, I'd go as far as to say that GRID: Autosport has increased my understanding of real life motorsports drivers (such as Sebastian Vettel) who prefer understeer to oversteer - you can be bloody quick if you keep the revs and gears up despite braking earlier. (No wonder Vettel dropped off after F1 went hybrid.)

Playing GRID Autosport on a Deck is frankly the best simcade experience I’ve had on that device. Usually I’d need to bump the difficulty down a notch due to not having proper force-feedback etc, but it works here. I’m just as quick as I would be playing on my desktop. When playing on a desktop, however, it makes use of a second screen to display race information, which can be very handy when attempting to manage your teammate. If you're in an important points battle over a season, it is of course invaluable later on.

Sadly, this cannot be bought officially anymore due to car brand licensing, but it is surprisingly cheap (less than lunch) if you know where to go, even with all DLCs.

Speaking of simcades, as a genre label it's far too broad because that would lump the likes of Need For Speed in with GRID and possibly even the F1 games. I propose a new dumb genre name: simulation racing sim. Tongue in cheek.