I absolutely love Lovecraftian horror. There’s something about it that’s so incredibly mysterious and still leaves it that way after the story is told. There isn’t much in terms of monsters or jump scares, but mostly just really weird imagery, atmosphere, and psychological effects on characters. The Alien Cube nails the atmosphere and strange landscapes and imagery, but sadly, not much else.
You start out in a forest where you find a weird cube that crash-landed from the sky. It’s obviously extraterrestrial, but after getting this cube, it’s just one weird, trippy event after another. There is a weird occurrence after the cube, and you’re trying to keep it from them while also following clues left by your uncle. That’s it as far as the story goes. Most of it is told through journal entries, but don’t expect deep lore, character development, or world-building here. This is straight-up your typical “walking simulator,” with just decent graphics and strange imagery.
There are different environments you’ll end up in, from indoors to outdoors. There aren’t any puzzles here, but there are roadblocks that require you to find an item to advance, such as bolt cutters to break a lock, a shovel to clear a path, an axe to chop down a path, etc. These items usually aren’t hidden at all, so there isn’t a challenge to this game either. It’s really just a rollercoaster of weird images. There is some minor backtracking, such as visiting areas from before just to pass through them, and it’s hard to die. There are a few areas that require you to make it to a certain other area before you freeze to death, and there is one long swimming session towards the end, but nothing crazy. You will run into monsters here, but these are scripted chase scenes, and unless you stop to take in the sights, you can’t really die.
The sad part about this game is that it doesn’t break the Lovecraftian video game stereotypes. Usually, they’re clunky, void of any type of cohesive or interesting story, no character development, and just really weird imagery. The Alien Cube doesn’t help this at all. I still feel Dark Corners of the Earth is the best Cthulhu-based game so far, and it hasn’t been beaten. While it’s clunky by today’s standards, it’s a much longer adventure and actually has somewhat of a story. Outside of just walking forward forever, the graphics are rather decent using the CryEngine, but not on a level we’ve seen in the past. Most of the game is very dark and foggy. It can also be finished in less than three hours.
Overall, The Alien Cube is a decent Cthulhu game but doesn’t do anything we haven’t already seen. Thanks to its short length, it’s an enjoyable rollercoaster of weird imagery, but nothing
I’m not the best at reviewing monitors, CPUs, GPUs, or anything that needs lots of graphs, comparisons, statistics, and whatnot. I can give you my honest opinion as someone who’s picky about their displays, however. I purchased a second monitor to go on top of my 34″ ultrawide as I was tired of games not being natively supported for 21:9 ratios. This way, I could play games in ultrawide or 16:9 and it wouldn’t matter anymore. I also wanted something that had G-Sync, looked bright, crisp, and had great color.
First off, I have to say that the HDR400 is pretty useless right off the bat. Sadly, Windows 10 doesn’t have a feature for HDR400 (8-bit HDR) to auto-detect it when games are running. You either have to turn HDR on all the time or leave it off, and the pay-off for that inconvenience isn’t worth it. HDR is barely noticeable on this monitor, but I won’t knock it too hard for that as I didn’t get this monitor for HDR anyway.
The fact that this monitor is 280 Hz at 1080p is pretty amazing. While higher-end games won’t ever get that framerate, graphically simple games like CS:GO, Overwatch, Warcraft, and any game made before 2015 might run that high if you have a GPU capable of it. The monitor has Asus’ own anti-blur tech built-in, and unless your games are over 60FPS, it won’t’ do you any good, but I honestly didn’t see a huge difference with it enabled. There are various other OSD settings, like better dark levels, which is a must. Dark areas resonate and pop more with this setting enabled. There are other various presets as well, but the Racing default out of the box was just fine. This is a well-calibrated monitor out of the box, which is always nice. Once you get a calibrated profile off of tftcentral and calibrate it via the recommended settings, the monitor seemed less bright, and the colors looked really good.
Physically, the monitor is nothing special. The base has a weird red ring that I mistook for lighting up, but it does have a vertical arm that the monitor can slide up and down on. I personally mounted the monitor to my desk, and the 100×100 VESA mount was just fine. The buttons are easy to get to, but the monitor has a long wake-up time, and when I first plugged it in, I thought my monitor was dead. My ultrawide wakes up instantly, but this one takes almost 10 seconds, at least on DisplayPort. I also liked the power brick that was supplied. It has a barrel plug, and the brick is round and flat, almost like a laptop brick, and can be easily tucked away.
When playing games, the monitor was bright, sharp, and crisp. Even at the low 60FPS end, things looked good, and at 280FPS, things just flew, and I didn’t notice any smearing or ghosting. G-Sync, of course, is the way to go for best responsiveness and removing all tearing. There are minor issues with IPS panels, like edge bleeding, and it’s not the brightest monitor—only 400 nits—but it looks fine in bright and dark rooms. Overall, this is a great monitor for the price range, and I don’t have many complaints.
Lone Sails was an interesting puzzle adventure game that took place on a 2D plane. You micro-managed various things on your vessel while acquiring upgrades to overcome new obstacles. Changing tides is exactly the same thing, but on a boat instead.
There is no store or character building at all, and that really stinks. I can tell the world in Far is sad and clearly post-apocalyptic, but the game gives me no reason to care about it other than the puzzles. You start out swimming this time and learning the basics. jumping, climbing ladders, moving objects, and picking them up. You then acquire your ship and learn how to manage your fuel, sails, filling with air or water for submarine controls, cooling your engine, and using your boost power. You acquire these over the course of the game, but fuel management is key. Don’t use fuel unless you don’t have wind, which was the mistake I made. I wound up with tons of fuel at one point without realizing that’s the most I would ever get, and that was 2/3 through the game.
Gathering fuel is done by collecting junk lying around. This isn’t often, and sometimes you will hit a buoy, and below these are caches of fuel. Don’t get lazy and skip them, but sadly, the game never tells you to look out for them either. Each upgrade requires a giant puzzle of a level, and they were never hard or complicated. Mostly, it’s pushing a lever to drop an object into a machine. They’re fun, but not hard. While you’re sailing, there will be long stretches of nothing. Sometimes not even music. This can get quite boring as the micromanagement of the ship gets tiresome after a while. It was fun at first, but I felt like this was the main gameplay loop and not the puzzles. Overall, there are only four upgrades to get, so about 4–5 puzzles in total. You spend at least 2–3 hours just sailing and micromanaging your fuel and sails.
Once in a while, there are cinematic platforming moments in which you just follow a linear path, which was neat because it’s the only action in the game. I just can’t care a lot about this series without some kind of back story or context. Games like Limbo, Inside, and Little Nightmares do this well with storytelling from your environment. There’s not much to tell in open oceans with just wasted buildings. Even the puzzle areas had murals that supposedly told a story, but they really didn’t mean anything. There’s only one neat moment at the very end of the game before the credits roll, and that’s it.
The platforming itself is fine, if not slippery. I constantly found myself wanting to twitch jump around the ship, and I would constantly fall down holes, get stuck on ladders, or not get to where I wanted because of the slippery jumping and physics. It’s also a bit too floaty. The puzzles are the most enjoyable part of the game, and it’s a shame the boating is so tedious and boring most of the time with nothing going on. If it were cinematic or a more interesting management system, I would really like this idea. I didn’t care for it in Lone Sails, and it was doubled down on here.
Overall, Changing Tides looks good for what it is and has a nice art style, but you will quickly forget this game. It’s about 3–4 hours long, and I can’t stress enough that there
Video games that are considered moving art are rare and don’t happen as often as they used to. Games like Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, Journey, Monument Valley, Echochrome, and various games from large to small budgets would be among that crowd. Lost in Random takes visual and character design inspiration from the likes of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Alice: Madness Returns, and Psychonauts. Now, I don’t know if those are exact inspirations, but it sure does feel like it. I feel like I’m playing a Tim Burton cartoon.
You play as a girl named Even. The world-building in Lost in Random is very well done. By the end of the game, I completely understood this world and the horrible things people have to go through. There is an evil queen who rules a black die. When she rolls a die, it determines where a child gets sent. There are six realms in the world of random. You are, of course, starting out at the bottom and have to work your way up to Sixtopia, where the evil queen resides. Children are used for something, and the queen also takes your sister Odd back to Sixtopia with her. The people of Random used to have their own dice, and the evil queen didn’t like this, so she took them all away, and only she can decide anyone’s fate.
Each realm is very well done. They all look different, and each realm plays an important role in serving the queen. One realm makes the cards, one realm offers the garbage to create the evil robots, and so on. As you climb through the realms, you meet people and can do side quests, which, surprisingly, aren’t that annoying. You mostly finish them all just by completing the main quests in each area, and I rarely felt any made me go out of my way. Exploring is one of two major parts of the game, and it’s quite enjoyable; in fact, I enjoyed it more than the combat, which there is more of. I loved seeing the beautifully crafted areas, talking to the crazy NPCs, and learning how each realm is dealing with everyday life. This kind of detail isn’t put into games as much these days unless they’re strict RPGs.
As you explore the realms, you can shoot down pots to earn coins to buy cards. Cards are used in combat, but it’s not like Hearthstone or anything like that. This is real-time combat with cards that give you what you need in the battle. You can carry a deck of 15 cards, and there are around 30 or so in the game in total. You can usually carry 2–3 of each one in your inventory. The deck is varied and broken down into categories. Weapons, traps, hazards, assists, and so on. The problem is that because the combat is in real-time, it can drag on and take a while to get any battles over with. You start out with just you and your death. You only get to roll a one at the beginning, and as you climb realms, you get more sides. This is an issue because until you get at least four sides, you can’t roll very high. You must run around the arena, shooting crystals off of enemies, to build up your hand. I find this whole process tedious, which really dampens the combat a lot and nearly kills the fun. Once you have gathered enough crystals, you can roll your die, and that determines the spending points you get. Each card has a number from 0 to 3. The strategy is picking the right cards for the situation and making sure you have a varied deck. You don’t want to be caught without a melee weapon or health, for example.
Once you play your hand, you have to shoot crystals all over again or “blink” through enemy attacks. An important card is Blink Attack, which damages enemies as you dodge because, without a melee card, you’re weaponless. This also drags out combat, as I wish the slingshot would automatically do some damage. You’re stuck just running around shooting crystals and hoping a hazard or weapon card comes up so you can attack and do some damage. This also makes for cheap deaths, especially in the board game areas where there are no checkpoints. Board games have various rules in which a game piece is moved around, and your roll determines the moves. There are hazards, enemies, traps, and obstacles to overcome, and I absolutely hated these. They dragged out the already dragged-out combat, and if you died towards the end, it was another 20 minutes to fight your way back to the end.
As you can see, the combat has some great ideas, like real-time combat mixed with card battling, but getting to that sweet spot is a chore. There is also so much combat in this game. Once you left a town, you just went into one arena after another, and it felt like it would never end. The only reprieve in combat was the boss’s fights as they changed things up. The same five enemies repeat throughout the entire game, and then, after a while, it just becomes a game of survival rather than strategy. You already know how to kill these enemies after the 50th time, so the strategy is gone early in the game. I wound up just equipping the cards that did the most damage, dropped my spending requirements down, gave me more spending points, and required fewer crystals to get to the cards. I stuck with melee weapons, bombs, healing, blink attacks, and poison, and that was about it. Most other cards end up becoming useless as the game gets harder.
Overall, the game also overstays its welcome. The combat isn’t interesting enough to last 10 hours. As you battle your way through six worlds, each with multiple bosses, quests, side quests, and cards to buy, the game grows tiresome towards the end. I just wanted to explore the beautiful worlds and enjoy the scripted events towards the halfway point. Every time another board game came up or another arena, I groaned. That’s not a good thing. I liked the mix of combat types, but getting to that point with the crystal shooting is just such a chore and slows the whole game down. What’s here, though, is a wonderful story, great characters, fantastic voice acting, and a beautiful world to explore.
Undertale took the gaming industry by storm. Its Earthbound-inspired humor, innovative combat system, and fun characters drew huge crowds and garnered great sales. The 16-bit RPG was short in length but large in spirit. It’s hard to make you really like a game and remember it in less than five hours, but Toby Fox managed to do it.
You play as a human who wakes up in an underground world run by demons. These demons need one more human soul to break the barrier between our world and theirs. It’s a simple story, but it’s the characters you meet along the way that make up for the overall lack of scope of the game. Sadly, there’s no deep lore or real backstories for any characters, but the here and now is well done, and the dialog is sharp, witty, and fun. The game mocks standard JRPGs and Zelda games all the way through. The beginning tutorial dungeon doesn’t wait to get around to it. Pushing boulders onto blocks just to have one that’s sentient makes the task harder for you. A lot of different puzzle-solving elements are not found anywhere else in the game, but puzzles do exist and can be quite challenging.
The combat system is the most unique aspect of Undertale. You can attack, but the entire system is mini-game-focused. There is a meter on-screen, and you need to press the attack button when it’s in the center. Different weapons move this bar faster or have multiple hits. The enemy attacks are all skill-based. It’s essentially your own fault if you die. The center of the screen shows a white box, and your heart is the object that you need to move around to essentially dodge various bullet-hell-style mini-games. Spirling projectiles, daggers, flames—you name it. There are several dozen different attacks, and each enemy and boss is unique in their own way. The game’s other system is its moral system, and you can be a pacifist and not kill a single enemy thanks to the Act command. You can try to figure out how to weaken the enemy through charm or talking and spare it via the Mercy command. If the enemy’s name is yellow, you can automatically spare it. This is an interesting concept and leads to two different endings based on whether you’re a pacifist or not. If you choose that route, you don’t get any XP to level and just get gold, which can be used to buy better armor and weapons.
There are a few towns you can visit to shop, but a funny tidbit is that you can’t sell anything in the game, and the shop owners comment that they don’t want your junk. There is one town you can sell at, however, so make sure you save all your old items to score big towards the end of the game. There are also a few side quests you can complete, but these are cryptic and require holding on to certain items throughout the game. The tip here is to save everything in your box near the save points. Don’t drop anything. When you’re not fighting, you can solve puzzles, as stated earlier, and these range from mini-games to various switch-based puzzles. Backtracking is thankfully minimal, unless you want a certain item at a shop that you couldn’t afford previously.
The sheer variety of the gameplay is astounding. Not a single battle is the same, and not any boss battle plays out the same. Sometimes you have to fight, and sometimes having a specific item makes the fight easier or ends it instantly. Levels aren’t labyrinthine and difficult to navigate, and random battles are minimal as leveling up isn’t quite necessary. At the end of the game, I was level 12 and had the most powerful armor and weapon. Due to the variety and constant changes in the way the game is played, it never gets dull or boring. I played through the entire game in one sitting because I wanted to see the ending, and the game was just so fun and interesting. I can’t remember the last time I sat through an RPG like this and was this hooked.
The visuals are incredibly charming. They are clearly inspired by Earthbound, and each character has a whacky 90s/16-bit style to them that I adore. The soundtrack is also amazing, and I listen to it often outside of the game. Toby Fox did an amazing job with this game, and it’s something you only get once in a lifetime. There hasn’t been this unique Western JRPG 16-bit clone that I can remember. Undertale is the perfect RPG. No grinding, fun characters, great writing, charming visuals, fantastic music, and constantly changing gameplay with a unique battle system that has never been done before If I were to pick something to gripe about, it would be the cryptic nature of the items you need to find or hold on to, as there are no hints as to whether you need said item at all. You just end up with a character asking for something or maybe accidentally using an item during a boss fight and having it do something.
Adventure games that both have shock value and a good story are rare and hard to come by; sadly, Martha is Dead is not one of those. You would mistakenly think this is some sort of horror game with monsters and demons, but it’s barely even that. This is a ghost story, a story about battling mental illness, and a story about surviving WWII in Axis Italy. You play Guilia, who is Martha’s twin sister. This is a detective game more than anything, with plot twists and an interesting vintage camera system.
The game starts out simple enough. Introducing controls, the plot, character building, and the whole nine yards that adventure games typically put you through. Martha’s best feature is the camera system. While you can take photos anywhere (I don’t know why you would), you need them for specific plot points. Guilia is trying to talk to the White Lady of the Lake and find out why her sister died. This is kind of the first half of the story, as it jumps around so much. The game is very plodding, slow, and constantly leads you on for little payoff. Taking photos for objectives is simple enough. Just get the focus and distance right, and snap the photo. You then get to develop the photo, but instead of taking you through the entire complicated process, the game explains to you what that is and says it cuts 90% out for better gameplay. Why? You just focus and position the negative for exposure and then develop it in liquid, but the point at which you stop it is the same for every photo. A pretty lame “mini-game,” if you ask me, with tons of lost potential.
With the camera feature out of the way, there are other small gameplay things you do, such as a morse code mini-game, which I actually enjoyed. I had to look up a morse code chart online and decipher it myself. That was actually well done and made me think, but that’s the only part that did. 75% of the game is spent in Guilia’s house or the wood’s winding paths. There are a few scenes where you control a motorboat, but it’s just to get to the other side of the lake. You are mostly wandering around at a slow pace, going from point A to point B, and interacting with objects. Go check out the graveyard, go back to the house and develop the photo, go back to the lake and find an underground bunker, go back to the house, and put up a flag. The constant backtracking is tiring and clearly used for filler.
Then the last hour of the game is zero gameplay. It consists of long puppet shows recapping the entire story, like you already didn’t know what happened. The story thinks it’s more complicated than it is. Honestly, the puppet shows are cool-looking, but they didn’t advance the story. The story here gets recapped numerous times in various forms, which is really annoying and makes the player feel dumb. After the puppet show stuff, you just walk around interesting scenes with narration, and that’s it. The best parts of the game are the gory death scenes, which are pretty nutty. They would make Mortal Kombat fans blush. But in total, this is maybe five minutes of the entire game. There’s a bike you can ride, but the control is terrible, and it’s only used to ride around the house and surrounding path, so what’s the point with that?
Then there are the visuals. Yes, the game looks damn good. Crazy detailed textures, amazing lighting effects, and models—and it just looks like a AAA title—but at what cost? The game runs horribly on even my RTX 2080 that’s overclocked. There is ray tracing in the game, but I couldn’t tell the difference between that and ultra-graphics settings. I feel this was put in more for next-gen consoles for a subtle effect. The game has constant stutters, frame drops, weird frame rates with ray tracing on, and even DLSS set to ultra-performance. At 3440×1440, I had scenes that ran at above 60FPS with ray tracing on, and then I would turn around and the frames would drop by over half. Without DLSS? Forget it. The game would drop into single digits one second later, and then inside the house it would be 90FPS. Super terrible optimization all around here, and even with DLSS set to ultra-performance without ray tracing, I still saw dips under 60FPS. Totally unacceptable. DLSS shouldn’t be used as a crutch.
Overall, Martha is Dead mostly relies on shock value for the few scenes that have it. It’s neither a horror game nor a puzzle game. It’s just an adventure game with various story elements tossed together, boring backtracking, and little gameplay to keep you interested. The photo mode is ambitious but purposefully handicapped when it could have been as robust as real-life photography back in WWII. It’s a missed opportunity. The game spoils itself constantly with frequent story recaps, and in the end, there’s a final plot twist. The story runs its course about two-thirds of the way through, and you’re left with a giant recap scene with no crazy finale that most adventure games have.
I had actually never heard of this game before seeing the remastered release make some noise. It’s an arcade game from the mid-90s that’s basically frisbee with tennis rules. You pick your character based on their speed and power and toss a disc around a court. It sounds way too simple at first and looks simple at first glance, but the controls have a steep learning curve due to the speed of the game.
Don’t expect a story or even a back story for the characters here. This is pure arcade action, and it’s all about the sport. The game has an 80s aesthetic of purples, blues, pinks, and oranges. It looks really good, and the characters look nice too. There’s a surprising amount of detailed animation here as well, especially for a top-down sports game. The first thing you should do is read the tutorial. It shows animations to help you understand the text, and at first, it seems simple. You can dive for the disc, toss it back, do a curve toss, and do a lob. Simple enough. It gets more complicated as you add power for each move. You need to stand still and press up or down on the control stick plus the respective move button. There’s strategy involved in this, but mostly for other players.
That’s the downside here. The AI is downright cheap, and I almost felt as if I scored out of pure luck. There’s a difficulty setting, of course, but it just feels like you’re playing against an AI, and there’s no way around that. There’s online play, which is awesome, but lots of practice against the computer is recommended to get better. You should pick a character and stick with them at first. Faster characters don’t need to dive as much as they can dart around the court, but the slow players rely on diving quite a bit, but they have more power and can toss the disc faster and harder.
There are mini-games thrown in that can help you master the controls and your play style, but the best practice overall is with someone else. This is truly a two-player competitive sports title through and through. There’s also nothing more to this game, so it’s great for pick-up and plays and not much else. About 30 minutes per session is all I could stomach before I felt like I was either beating my head into a wall or just couldn’t tolerate the same thing. There’s only one court, and the visuals, while looking fine here, are dated and look blurry, but the control is responsive and there are no audio issues.
Overall, if you hate or don’t want anything to do with 90s arcade games, then stay away. There won’t be anything here to interest you. Being an arcade port or remaster, there’s not much the developers could have added without breaking the core game. It’s fast-paced, fun, and a blast with another person, but the single-player AI feels cheap and calculating, making the game not as fun. At least there are mini-games to help hone your skills.
Well, I finally pulled the trigger and bought a system I thought there was no point to. I was on vacation in Oregon when the local Target finally had some in stock, and I said, “What the hell? It can’t be that bad.”The box itself is more vertical and more compact than the original models, which I found strange. Smarter packaging techniques, I guess. Once I pulled the tablet itself out of the system, it looked bigger, but I wasn’t sure. The bezels were nearly nonexistent, and the bottom and top edges were smooth and round. Overall, the tablet itself felt the same, maybe just a bit heavier.
The white Joycons were beautiful. It’s a brand new color we haven’t seen yet, and it makes the Switch look very smart and less like a child’s tablet. Those weren’t any different, but the straps looked different. They have the same white and black straps that the Skyward Sword Joycons had. I guess this is the new standard now. The dock was probably the biggest physical difference. While it’s white, looks beautiful, and adds to the smart, higher-end electronic look of the OLED, the back is different. There’s a quarter circle cut out for cables, and the back flap isn’t hinged. It just comes off, which is kind of annoying. However, there’s no USB A port back there, but a LAN port now!
Other than these noticeable differences at first glance, the HDMI cable, charger, and grip are all the exact same.
The Differences
When I first powered on the Switch, the difference in screen quality was noticeable, even with just the Nintendo logo flashing. The colors are brighter, sharper, and more vibrant, and somehow the screen just has a smoother feeling to it. It almost seems like it has a higher refresh rate, but I know it doesn’t have one. It just felt that way. The usual setup process was the same as any switch, but I did notice the internal memory has been doubled to 64GB, which is great for anyone just starting out and doesn’t have a massive library. You won’t need an SD card for a while, at least.
The OLED feels heavier in the hand, and it is slightly bigger. The screen ate up the large LCD bezels of the original models and then expanded out about 0.1mm, so the screen size expanded a whopping 0.8″ and it shows. The bezel-less design is so clean and sleek that I can’t go back to the original model or even to the Lite. Games look amazing in motion on this thing, and then there’s the controversy about the Vibrant mode exclusive to the OLED model. The Vibrant mode pushes the saturation a bit and doesn’t look good on some games, and you can really see it on the home screen, but it works well in games that are full of color or are very dark. Flashes of color pop in dark areas, and it just looks so good. I didn’t realize the upgrade would be this noticeable, but it’s stark if you hold any other Switch model up in comparison. The colors, even in the standard contrast mode, make the other models look dull and less colorful in comparison.
With a huge 7″ screen, a sizeable upgrade is nothing to scoff at. The next best thing to hold up that giant screen and the heavier Switch is the kickstand. This is probably the second biggest change, as the stand goes along the entire back of the switch and is basically a metal plate that folds out almost flat. You get steeper and shallower tilting angles this way, and it no longer basically stands straight up. This is great if you’re sitting higher or standing and can lay the switch flatter. With the metal design, it no longer constantly pops off and is leaning on one side of the switch. The MicroSD slot is also just underneath here and is easy to access. This should have been on the original model, but we won’t go there.
The OLED’s 4310mAh battery is exactly the same as the older model, but it lasts a bit longer thanks to the OLED’s better power management, but it also depends on the game. Brighter and more colorful games will drain the battery faster than darker ones. Nintendo claims a wide range of 4 hours to 9 hours and 5.5 hours playing Breathe of the Wild. On average, you will get around 5 hours of life for most 3D Switch games, and more for 2D games. One thing I see anyone failing to mention is the improved top buttons. The power button is now oval instead of round and less inlaid, and the volume rocker is thinner and sticks out a bit more. All these buttons have more of a subtle, sharper click and aren’t as mushy. However, the game card door no longer has a notch for your finger and instead has a small gap for a fingernail and is harder to open. It’s also rectangular instead of a rounded door.
Lastly, I want to mention the speakers. They have improved quite a bit, are the third-best upgrade for the Switch, and add another plus to the edge towards a purchase. I didn’t know this going in, but the speakers are larger (or at least more exposed) and are located on the bottom of the system instead of the back. The speaker’s grilles are right where the kickstand opens and go right along to just under the screen. The sound is louder, clearer, and overall more of what I expect from the fantastic sound quality of Nintendo’s 3DS lineup. The 3DS has fantastic handheld speakers and has always been hard to beat. When it comes to your old Switch cases, this will fit, as it’s only 0.1mm longer than the standard Switch, and it fits for me even in a tight case. I also want to mention that the white OLED just seems like an added bonus for the cost, and it looks smarter and sleeker than the black model does. It’s not as eye-catching.
Overall, the Switch OLED is a phenomenal upgrade over the standard and can justify the extra $50 price increase. With almost a single-inch larger screen, better and louder speakers, a bigger and better-designed kickstand, better top buttons, a LAN port in the dock, and seemingly better battery life thanks to the OLED screen’s better power management, there’s so much going on here that is hard to see on the surface. No, there are no upgrades under the hood; the overall design is the same, but the gorgeous display with the Vibrant setting (on some games) just makes this the best handheld screen on the market and surpasses the 2012 original Vita OLED screen, which had the crown for the best handheld screen until now. If you can’t justify the extra cost for another switch, just know that, of course, no single thing is worth the cost increase, but everything added together makes this an amazing package.
*Note* The OLED model DOES have 5GHz wifi. During testing, it wasn’t seeing any 5GHz connections for a few days, but it’s working now.
Fall of Man was a hot mess, and it showed. It was a frustrating, clunky, one-foot-stuck-in-the-last-generation game that just didn’t show off what the PS3 could really do. It almost seemed like it was being developed on PS2 and got ported over later on. Resistance 2 fixes nearly all the issues with Fall of Man, but because there were so many problems, Resistance 2 didn’t get a chance to really shine. It also holds on to some of its predecessor’s problems.
First and foremost, Resistance 2 looks miles better than Fall of Man. Even years later, the game looks great. With highly detailed textures, the scale of the game has increased tenfold. No longer are there boring .JPG mountains in the background. We get full-on battles and giant building-sized ships in the sky, giant aliens roaming the city, and more enemies on screen. The weapons look better and have moving parts; the characters look better; the Chimera has more detail; and overall, the game looks like a next-gen game should. It’s part of the upper echelon of PS3 games, graphics-wise. However, that’s about the peak here. The story still doesn’t explore the Chimera enough, their planet, or their origins. Nathan Hale has been updated with a voice and infected by the Chimera, but it doesn’t make him more interesting. He’s still a typical white-bald dude from the 2010s. The secondary characters are dumb, and their origins aren’t explored. Again, there’s no reason to care for anyone here.
With the story being a toss-away, the gameplay has improved to some extent. There are more weapons, and this time around, you only get to hold two at a time instead of all of them. This makes you strategize your needs based on the current situation. Some of the original weapons return, such as the Carbine, Bullseye I and II, Fareye, Auger, and the Rossmere. However, the Auger has been improved by letting you actually see the enemies through walls this time. There are some new interesting weapons, like the Marksman with a secondary fire that shoots a plasma ball, and the Magnum, which has explosive rounds. The weapon arsenal is better than ever, and the aiming has improved as well. The weapons have weight, and the Chimera aren’t bullet sponges. They actually have animations to show they’ve been hit, and you can interrupt their shots.
There are boss fights this time around, which are pretty cool and cinematic. Your environment is the United States this time around, and you jump from various cities such as Chicago, Louisiana, and San Francisco, just to name a few. The varied locales are a nice change of pace from the previous game, but the game changed its boring color palette from gray to brown. Everything in this game is brown, with very little color. At least we get new enemies to change things up, like big Titans; these guys rush you and have shields; there are Chameleons, which will one-hit kill you unless you shoot them down (one-shot kills them); and Mauraders, which are giant, four-legged creatures that show up a couple of times in the game. The largest problem from the last game returns, and that’s the insane difficulty. This game is so poorly balanced. It starts out easy and nice, and then about halfway through, you’re restarting areas over a dozen times because there isn’t enough ammo in the area, you don’t have the right weapons, the cover is poorly paced, or there are just too many in the area for you to take on. You die in just a couple of hits, but the health meter was axed for regenerating health, and the “red screen”
The last few levels of the game were insanely hard and unfair. The game is only about 6 hours long, but it took me over a week to finish it because of the constant deaths. The campaign isn’t worth playing again, and the multiplayer servers are shut down, but I do remember playing a demo of the multiplayer back in the day, and it wasn’t anything special. Resistance has never been a fun multiplayer game, but the co-op campaign might make it more enjoyable and less difficult. While I praise the game for fixing many of the problems, it introduces new ones and retains a few major ones.
Simulator games these days are becoming a serious addiction for me. With Power Wash Simulator becoming one of the best zen-like time sinks I’ve ever played in my life (when it’s out of Early Access, I will do a full review) and my past addiction to time management games like Diner Dash, I can easily play this game for hours on end with tunes in the background cranking out cars. There’s not really a story here, obviously, but you start out from scratch with the most basic tools and a small garage, but over time you can expand, make repairs faster, and fix up cars from the ground up even.
You start out with just the basics. One lift, slow examination, mounting, and screwing skills You start with the first of 30-story repairs by doing tire changes, fluid flushes, and basic repairs. The great thing about CMS is that it slowly gets you familiar with how cars work and break down. I felt like the game was rocket science at first and quickly got frustrated. What’s a rubber bushing? Where are they all? Then I realized that all the bushings are tied to the suspension. You eventually learn each section of every car and will start building engines from the ground up, and then entire cars. After about three or four hours I was expanding my garage by adding car washes, another lift, spending XP to make my skills faster, and adding things like a welder to get rid of rust on bodies.
Things get easier and faster once you unlock diagnostic tools like an OBD scanner, a multimeter, and fuel and engine pressure tests. In the beginning, you basically have to take everything apart and look for the completely rusted parts, as those are the ones needing replacement. The beginning cars will tell you what’s wrong so you get the hang of how the gameplay loop works. Later on, every part will be undiscovered, and it’s up to you to diagnose, visually examine (it’s an actual diagnostic mode), and know how to spot fully worn parts. Sometimes you can take a car on a test track to get a wider diagnosis of what’s wrong, then there’s the test path for brakes and suspension. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of what diagnostics work for each condition of a car. If the car won’t start, then you should use your examination mode first, then your OBD scanner and multimeter, and fix those parts. If the engine fires up but won’t drive, then you need to do the other tests. Sometimes none of the tests will tell you what’s wrong, and you have to do exploration diagnostics.
There are other elements like a spring puller for shocks, a tire separator and balancer, and a brake disc lathe, and you can do a small minigame to repair parts that aren’t completely destroyed, of course, once you unlock all these tools. You can even do headlamp adjustments and alignments. It’s fun changing fluids, screwing in parts, and discovering new engine types with more pieces than before, but after you finish the story, all that’s left are random repairs (which are quicker than story missions) and visiting the junkyard and auction to rebuild cars and sell them for more money to turn around and buy more cars, but what’s the appeal in that? Driving the cars on the track is really generic and boring, and the fun part of the game is the mechanic part. I don’t want to collect cars, really. Once I upgraded and bought all the expansions there wasn’t anything left to do.
After about 20 hours, I could build any car with my eyes closed, and this is my main concern with CMS. The individual car systems are limited in scope. Yes, there are many engine types, but they all go together basically the same, just with different parts and varying sizes. It was fun to build an engine on the stand and lower it into the car. I had fun restoring several cars, repainting them, or giving the car performance parts to stick on the dyno. However, if it’s not for a repair, I didn’t feel any satisfaction. Once you rebuild a few cars, you experience the most challenging part of the game. There were a few issues early on in which you could get stuck with no money if you start buying up too much. You need to grind repairs until you get around 30,000 credits and can rebuild and sell a simple car from the junkyard to give you your first serious payment.
The other issue is that everything is canned. all animations, movements, and actions. This isn’t a Surgeon Simulator or a Cooking Simulator. There are no hands you can control in real-time. When you click it apart, there’s an outline of where it needs to go. You hold the mouse button down, and the part appears, as do the screws. You hold the mouse down on all the screws, and you move on to the next part. It’s essentially like building Legos. The overall longevity of the missions outside of the story will determine how much you get out of these limited systems within the cars and various small mini-games. It becomes redundant and almost boring after so long when the entire reaches its peak early on.
What’s here is a satisfying and fun simulator for at least 20–30 hours. You will want to grind the story missions, unlock everything, and experience everything at least once. Restoring cars from just the frame is fun, but I also would have liked more exterior customization. It’s very limited to just doors, windows, hoods, trunks, lights, mirrors, and that’s it. There’s also almost no satisfaction from just buying cars, restoring them, and keeping them to race on a dull track, or selling them for money that isn’t really needed anymore once you unlock everything.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !