While GameCritics will soon post a full review of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, the good people at Bethesda were kind enough to supply a code specifically to test out this rework on Playstation 5 Pro. Surely Sony’s beefy machine will have no problems running a gussied-up eighteen-year-old game?

Bethesda titles have never been my particular cup of tea, as I usually spend three-ish hours walking around aimlessly post-tutorial and quit. The thing people seem to love about Elder Scrolls is “That Feeling Of Being Able To Go Anywhere And Do Everything”, and I prefer a tad more structure. I tend to want the main quest of a role-playing game to be the best part of the experience. I want the steak to sizzle, but Bethesda tends to ship out a frozen steak cooked in a microwave surrounded by the best brussels sprouts and mashed potatoes one has ever had. The sides are delicious, but that’s just not how I want to eat dinner.

Alas, I do have plenty of fond memories screwing around in Oblivion with my brother, so the idea of checking out a new version was intriguing. Thankfully, Oblivion Remastered is a pretty awesome product to the point where I’m somewhat surprised they called it a “remaster” over “remake”.

This is an extensive facelift featuring not only a shocking increase in graphical fidelity, but also dramatically improved combat (it goes from awful to mediocre!) and a bunch of very helpful Quality-Of-Life updates. Yet, somehow, some way, despite all the improvements, it is still very much that weird borked buggy mess that we all know and love. Character models are dramatically improved, yet still goofy in a very Bethesda way. One can make some real nightmare material in the character creator, and longtime players will enjoy revisiting old exploits and glitches while discovering all new ones!

This leads me into one of the weirder aspects of writing this enhanced look at this title — as with every game they make, I fully expect Bethesda to patch the hell out of this title. While Oblivion Remastered had, by any measure, a pretty fantastic launch, there are plenty of things to be worked on, and it seems like performance issues may be at the top of their list.

Just about the only legitimate complaint lobbed so far at Oblivion Remastered has been various framerate hitches. Even on some of beefiest PCs available, it frequently runs below 60fps, even at sub-4k resolutions. Reports have shown serious performance issues are also prevalent on the base console release, but I have not personally tested any of those versions. The folks at Digital Foundry have a video on the Series S/X release and found numerous instances of the game dropping to under 45FPS and out of VRR range, but that’s an improvement over the occasional sub 40FPS marked pre patch.

Like the XBox version, the Playstation 5 version has two options — Graphics and Performance. On PS5 Pro, both versions run at about 1440p, with the performance targeting 60 while the quality mode targets 30 with a few more graphical bells and whistles. There is a fairly substantial jump in graphical fidelity in quality mode with improved lighting and textures, and the 30FPS in testing was relatively stable.

Performance mode has less shadow density and a narrower depth of field, but most of us will be gunning for that smooth 60fps. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always get there.

My Samsung S90C is able to display framerates while in use, and on PS5 Pro, performance currently is marginally more stable than on the other home consoles. 60FPS is the standard with a few lost frames now and then in smaller environments like the various dungeons, but Oblivion Remastered does struggle in larger areas with heavy foliage density. The framerate can dip to under 50fps in certain sections, and due to the relatively poor VRR implementation on PS5 in general, these dips can be noticed even with a VRR enabled display. Similar framerate drops can also be found in both towns and during Oblivion gate raids.

These hiccups are annoying, but far less infrequent for Playstation 5 Pro owners. It is, at least as of this writing, probably the most stable way to currently play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. A VRR display will cover up most of these irregularities, but a few slip through. Is it enough of a performance boost to make one gloat over their rather unnecessary Playstation 5 Pro purchase? Probably not, but that won’t stop some on the internet from trying.

The good news is, again, I fully see Bethesda continuing to tinker with Oblivion Remastered and improving performance across the board across all platforms, and they’ve made a strong enough remaster to warrant that time and energy. Any of the millions of people who loved Oblivion before and find themselves ready to dive in again will find so much to like in this package.

The post The PlayStation 5 Pro Difference: The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

I’ve been writing these lists for a while now, and I always try to sum up how i’m feeling about the game industry at that particular moment in time.

In 2023 I wrote about the industry writ large essentially being a dumpster fire, and basically all of the bad stuff from 2023 got exponentially worse. 2024 was actually the year where I looked at my wife and said “if our children come to us and say they want to make a career in videogaming, it is our duty as their parents to steer them away from that”.

I don’t wanna do that, for the record. It’s a bleak business, but I wanna be positive. Let’s talk about something nice, something pleasant, something awesome — 2024 was the single greatest year the Japanese Role Playing Game ever had.

That’s a big statement considering this is a genre that peaked about 25 years ago, but on top of the four JRPG’s that made my list, we got three exceptional from-the-ground-up remakes in the form of Persona 3: Reload, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake. We also got a version of Shin Megami Tensei V actually worth playing with SMTV: Vengeance getting that exceptional title off the Switch. Indies bring it with this genre every year, and Bloomtown was a very difficult cut from my list. Hell, we got a new Mana game of all things, and it’s also actually good, which is pretty rare for that franchise.

Were there years with better JRPG’s? Sure, but I cannot recall a year so absolutely loaded with gems from this genre, and it’s truly shocking to see in 2024. Many fans of the genre are worried about keeping momentum going, but honestly I think we all just need to take a step back and appreciate how wonderful this year was for a type of game that was extremely formulative to me loving videogames in the first place.

So with the preamble out of the way, let’s hand out some awards!

2024’s “I ****** Up Last Year’s List” Award: Lies of P

I usually give this award to a game from last year that I didn’t get around to and which also wasn’t up for list consideration. I usually feel pretty good about my lists even after a couple of years, but I very clearly did Lies of P dirty.

I must atone.

When I wrote last year’s list, I had bought Lies of P the week before and was maybe like a third of the way through it. I really was digging what I had played and figured I’d go ahead and slide it into the tenth spot.

What I didn’t know at the time is that Lies of P would continue to get better and better and better as it went along, and it’s become possibly my favorite entry in the entire genre. I liked it so much that I beat it twice (very rare for me) and actually went back to finally play Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, and the entire Dark Souls trilogy. It made the Soulsborne genre go from something I liked on occasion to being a borderline obsession.

I deeply regret last year’s entry on this game focusing so much on Lies of P being “borderline plagiarism”. It isn’t. It stands on its own merits, and can hang with the best of Miyazaki and his team at FROM can produce. If I was re-seeding last year, I don’t see a world in which it’s lower than three, and I might even go higher. I truly cannot wait to play it again when the DLC releases now that it is also PS5 Pro Enhanced.

What a game.

2024’s “I Probably ****** Up This Year’s List” Award: Nine Sols

Speaking of exceptional Souls games, Nine Sols shot to the top of my “must check out” list after my previously mentioned Souls excursion. Everyone I’ve talked to said the same thing — it’s 2D Sekiro with amazing art and a fantastic score, which sounds like a winning combination to me. Unfortunately it was stuck on PC for most of the year, and when it finally arrived on GamePass in the busy holiday stretch, it fell through the cracks. I’m quite certain that I will love the heck out of it whenever it gets pulled from the backlog abyss.

Remaster of the Year: Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered

I was not expecting to, in the middle of the holiday rush, spend two weeks devouring an eight-year-old game. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a title that has sat near the top of my backlog shame pile for many moons, but I finally got around to it and with HZD Remastered being such a exceptional showpiece for the PS5 Pro. While I wouldn’t call it a full-on remake, it’s also significantly above an average remaster in terms of improved visual fidelity and numerous improvements in overall presentation. In-game dialogue cinematics between characters have improved significantly with far more expressive character models and animations. While the gameplay itself didn’t see much upgrading, it turns out hunting robot dinosaurs is still very fun nearly eight years later.

Also noteworthy about this release is that it has achieved a very weird and very telling feat — It’s the only game that’s a killer app launch title for both the PS5 Pro and the PS4 Pro. Poetic, I suppose.

2025’s Story of the Year: How many more studios will be sacrificed at the altar of Live Services?

2024 continued the horrific trend from 2023 of everyone getting fired, and from my vantage point it sure seemed like a lot of the people who got fired were making “live service” titles — constantly evolving games with weekly content updates require both extensive post launch support and a large, captive fanbase. Without both, the game dies, and without the fans it really dies.

This is now “the normal” for the AAA game industry. The ghouls running the show are essentially turning the business into Silicon Valley Unicorn Hunt-style investing. Make ten multiplayer shooters with season passes and purchasable cosmetics, nine of them will fail miserably, but the hope is that the tenth will save the whole company and make it worthwhile. Now that only works if you get to the tenth, and until that point, this system will make the lives of developers absolutely miserable. How many people toiling on abject failures like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Foamstars, XDefiant, and a litany of others saw this coming? I could not imagine the soul crushing atmosphere that must have existed at these studios that spend years making games they probably knew were going to flop.

Or maybe these studios were plagued with “toxic positivity”, which leads us to our final award…

Turd of the Year: Concord

I tried to not give this to Concord. I thought about giving it to the director of Black Myth: Wukong for being a world class dingus, but that would’ve gotten very mean very quickly, and I didn’t wanna end up on any list for the CCP. I didn’t play Concord (why would you?) and I had significantly more experience with other industry dumpster fires this year. I beat Suicide Squad Kills The Justice League, for the record.

But you know what the difference is? One can still play Suicide Squad. It didn’t get Thanos’d into the ether after a month.

In the history of this entire medium, there has never been a game released so emblematic of the problems facing an entire industry at the moment of its release than Concord. Apparantly the people at Sony were so impressed with the character art Firewalk Studios spent two years making that Sony spent four HUNDRED million dollars and three more years making a mediocre Overwatch competitor with characters and dialogue so blatantly inspired by the immensely tired Marvel Cinematic Universe that Kevin Feige should consider a lawsuit. It was bland, uninteresting, weirdly focused on characters nobody cared about, and its player base was so embarrassing that it got scrubbed from the Earth even before the accompanying Concord-themed Secret Level episode aired. What a fun time capsule that is!

There’s an argument to be made that this is the single most expensive failure in the history of art. That is a ludicrous statement, but here I am making it. In a year filled with catastrophic decisions, bad/traumatizing management, and some very disappointing games, The Turd Of The Year can only be Concord.

ALL THOSE OTHER 2024 WRAPUP LISTS? TOSS ‘EM. HERE IS THE LIST

Honorable Mention: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

I think this placement shows what I thought of the whole Erdtree nomination controversy at The Game Awards.

Let it be known that in a year of kick-ass videogames, the absolute best time I had playing videogames this year was Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which as far as I’m concerned is basically the best bit of DLC ever created. It’s as long as most FROM Souls games, and maintains that same extremely high bar of quality while making huge additions to The Lands Between. Promised Consort Radahn is the greatest challenge they’ve ever come up with in any of these titles, and no game this year even touched the high I got from defeating him after seven or so hours of trying. Shadow of the Erdtree takes one of the greatest games of all time and somehow makes it significantly better.

With that said, no, it shouldn’t qualify for Game of the Year. On top of not being a standalone game, it’s hardly standalone to Elden Ring itself. Like if Erdtree was an option from the main menu, MAYBE I’d consider it, but Shadow of the Erdtree requires players to play 50 hours of another videogame and beat one of the toughest optional bosses in said game to even access it. It directly carries over progress and information from a game that, frankly, already won enough GOTY awards, so I feel no need to include it in 2024’s results.

But I did really, really like it.

10. Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Another year, another appearance on this list from the great people at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios. I keep waiting for The World’s Best Game Developer to make a slip-up, and it just doesn’t wanna happen. Infinite Wealth had the danger of being juuuuuuuuuust one too many games taking place on the streets of Japan, so mixing it up with the very cool setting of Hawaii allowed the team to squeeze even more juice out of this Yakuza fruit.

In a series defined by an abnormally large amount of side-quests and things to do, Infinite Wealth turns this up to an absurd degree with multiple optional endeavors taking over a dozen hours each. Sujimon and Dondoku Island could be their own games, and I nearly enjoyed them as much as a main story that continues this series’s amazing ability to make me care about the weirdest, dumbest people in absolutely absurd scenarios. It doesn’t quite stick the landing in the ways I was hoping, but that’s a small hiccup in a overall excellent yarn. While this wacky series continues to march unabashed towards yet even more entries, I continue to be excited for them all.

Bring on the pirates.

9. UFO 50

It took me a little time to warm up to UFO 50. The first couple of times I fired it up, I thought it was very neat and a surprisingly fleshed out gag making fun of the now infamous Action-52. It takes a little while for the game to really open up to what it is, and the metastory of this very odd fictional game developer is drip-fed to the player very slowly while exploring the 50 games on hand. They’re presented in “chronological” order by release date from UFO Soft from 1982-1989, and the most amazing thing to me about UFO 50 is seeing the real-world development acumen necessary to portray a fictional developer growing through the years. The real developers at Mossmouth clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how games changed during the decade of the 80’s, and incorporating that into their compilation of titles is maybe the most impressive thing I saw any videogame do this year.

But it’s not one videogame, it’s fifty!

All this talk of homage and meta would be absolutely meaningless if UFO 50 had an Action-52 level of quality, but there are some legitimate 8-bit bangers on here. Starting with Barbuta was… a choice, but that choice makes a lot more sense as one sees the design ethos and complexity expand with each title. It wasn’t until I got to Mooncat where I realized there’s something really special going on here, and starting each new title is it’s own fun little experience. It’s not the best game of the year, but it’s certainly the best value of 2024, and one of the more memorable experiences I had all year. I have a feeling that, decades from now, I don’t know how much I’m going to want to fire up most of the other games on this list, but I’ll always be down to play some Bushido Ball.

8. Silent Hill 2

I’m still equal parts gobsmacked and pleased that the remake of Silent Hill 2 absolutely deserves to make this list. It is, without question, the most shocked I’ve been to greatly enjoy a videogame in a long time. Literally everything a game could have had going against it, this one did. I trust Konami about as far as I can throw it, they’re remaking one of the most important and beloved videogames of all time, and the people at developer Bloober Team frankly had never shown the emotional maturity necessary to handle the extremely dark subject matter of this legendary horror game.

And wouldn’t you know it? They knocked it out of the park. Silent Hill 2 is an exceptional remake that treats the original with the respect it deserves while also smartly expanding on it without desecrating a truly sacred text. It’s terrifying, it’s beautiful, the audio in general is exemplary, and it is an abject success no matter how one slices it. Sometimes it can do the body & mind good to go into a situation with deep (and deserved) cynicism only to have all wildest expectations blown away, and I couldn’t be more elated that it happened here.

7. Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

The AAA scene is in a rough patch right now. After fifteen years of saying “we have to do something about ballooning budgets, lengthy development times, and a shrinking audience!” all while basically letting all of those problems get even worse, we are very much at a tipping point where I’m starting to wonder if these games are even going to continue to exist. There is no project that exemplifies these issues while also showing the potential of what these games can be quite like the Final Fantasy VII Remake Project…Trilogy…Thing. It’s looking like it’s gonna take Square-Enix twenty years, three games, and $750 million to remake a JRPG where the characters had toasters for hands. We’re all very lucky Final Fantasy XIV has given this company seemingly unlimited money to create such insane vanity projects.

Luckily, Rebirth succeeds in a lot of ways where Remake (thanks Square for continuing to name their products in confusing ways) did not. While Remake recreated Midgar to an amazing scale, it was still only one part in what I knew was a much larger story. Rebirth is essentially the story of The Rest Of Disc One, and while that doesn’t sound impressive, a lot happens in the rest of disc one with a ton of variety and locales, each of which is rendered to a captivating degree in Rebirth. This is a lavish, opulent product that is honoring one of the more beloved titles in gaming history in ways I continue to become more on board with as the trilogy continues. With excellent dialogue among a very likable cast, some outstanding renditions of classic songs, and some rather unexpected diversions in the overarching scenario, one really gets the feeling the team involved with this game are starting to step out of the looming shadow of having to remake Final Fantasy VII while making this project into their own.

For those who still enjoy AAA bombast, this might be the most bombastic of them all, and that is an achievement worth noting. I just hope finishing this trilogy doesn’t sink the entire damn company.

6. Thank Goodness You’re Here!

This has been said by many gaming pundits before me, but humor is a pretty difficult nut to crack in this medium. Thank Goodness You’re Here! Reminded me of classic Lucasarts adventure games not just because all players really do in this game is smack stuff with their hand, but it also captures the exceptional pace at which those games delivered the yuks. Thank Goodness You’re Here! is not only funny, it is consistently funny throughout its entire three-ish hour run time. Gags are aplenty and constantly are thrust at the player in numerous hilarious ways.

It also successfully captures the urban decay of Northern England coal mining towns in a way that rises above the silliness that gushes out of this game. The two person team at Coal Supper saw this first hand growing up, and have done a great job thoughts about the human toll of Neoliberialism while also being side-splittingly hilarious. I don’t want to list any specific gags (like that poor bastard with the chimney) because this is an experience best when going in as cold as possible, so anyone here needing a few good chuckles would do well to check this one out.

5. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle

It is very rare for a licensed title to nail its source material this well, not only in presentation but also in gameplay. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle does a fantastic job of making the player constantly do Indiana Jones shit. Raiding tombs, punching Nazis, working around booby traps, and making the attractive woman tagging along swoon. It tells a great story in this universe, and the entire game is anchored by the best performance of Troy Baker’s career, who does a fantastic job of walking a very fine line between doing an excellent Harrison Ford impression while also sprinkling his own mannerisms in as well. He’s joined by an outstanding cast, including a truly exceptional performance from Marios Gavrilis who is clearly having a ball playing main villain Emmerich Voss.

Placing this game fifth is apt, because the first half of this game would’ve been first while the second half would’ve been tenth. Up through exploring a Nazi battleship (that’s not a spoiler for Indiana Jones), I was absolutely convinced this was my Game of the Year. Unfortunately, there’s a pretty precipitous drop in quality over the last couple of areas, I liked the hand-to-hand combat less and less after every boss fight, and it also seemed significantly buggier the further I got in. I also found the ending slightly underwhelming for reasons I won’t spoil here. Because of all this, it stumbled down the list a bit, but it’s definitely not going to spoil the fun for anyone down to step into the shoes of the worlds most famous archeologist.

4. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Ohh how the failure of this game eats at my soul.

They finally did it. Ubisoft made an interesting, refreshing title while also reviving a long dormant franchise. They did the thing the internet yelled at them to do for years, and then nobody bought it. While it had a decently long sales tail and ended up selling about 1.3 million units as of this writing, that wasn’t enough to save the development team at Ubisoft Montpellier getting split up to go make more side-quests in Far Cry that nobody wants to play. This is profoundly disappointing for a litany of reasons, least of all being how many people missed out on a truly incredible title.

As I said in my review, The Lost Crown is not the most original game, and the metroidvania genre has been absolutely done to death over the past decade or so, but it is just a good ol’ time hopping around as main protagonist Sargon in an expertly crafted, expansive map with a strong focus on platforming. It tells a good story, has top notch art design, and it is beautiful to see in motion, particularly for those with 120hz displays. It’s got some new features patched in since launch, and the Mask of Darkness DLC expansion is both very good while also providing an exceptional value at a whopping five bucks, so I hope these past couple of paragraphs can convince some to give 2024’s most overlooked title another chance.

3. Unicorn Overlord

Vanillaware is a developer I’m always happy to see pop up with a new game whenever they come out of their hole, and Unicorn Overlord is their finest work yet. They’ve consistently made games that were beautiful to look at but with gameplay that was serviceable enough to keep one engaged while they oogled at the art design and sprite work. This is the first time they’ve made a game where their core mechanics match their art, and that made for a truly engaging experience I was not expecting from design steeped in mobile game foundations.

Battles are not controlled directly, but rather battalions are formed and sent in to do combat on the players orders. Unicorn Overlord does a fantastic job of slowly drip feeding mechanics to the player and not overwhelming them at the start, so when the game does build up to a huge scale with tons of decisions to be made in each encounter, I never felt overwhelmed. It’s a shame this game is locked to consoles due to the head of the company having the same fears of PC piracy that developers had in 2005. I feel this game could’ve really found an audience there, but anyone with a box capable of playing Unicorn Overlord very much should.

2. Stellar Blade

I hate what the internet did to this game.

It is profoundly disappointing to me that nearly every time I said to my gamer peeps how much I adored Stellar Blade, their first question was either asking how horny I was or if liking it was somehow me protesting the Woke Mind Virus. If the truly revolting discourse around this title (none of which was fanned by the team at developer Shift Up) kept readers from partaking in the game itself, that is equal parts disappointing and understandable. I’m really not sure why the internet chose this particular hot videogame chick with absurd dimensions to be the cornerstone of arguments over “What We’ve Lost” while idiots decry attempts to make women in videogames look… y’know like a real lady. It’s sick, very weird, and it is a crying shame Stellar Blade got involved in this nonsense because it’s a hell of a videogame.

While i’m sticking with Lies of P for “The best Non-FROM Souls game”, Stellar Blade is a clear #2 in my eyes for its ability to take the principles of the Souls genre and add the complexity of combat found in character action games like Devil May Cry. While the whole ethos of this game borrows extensively from Nier: Automata to the point where they made some Nier DLC to go along with it, the combat, level design, and over world design all ensure it doesn’t sit in another game’s shadow. Last year I shouted out South Korea for making a mark in the AAA games industry with Lies of P, and I’m very excited to see this trend continuing here.

If those reading this are only going to play one 2024 PS5 console exclusive soulslike that the internet got very weird over, definitely make it Stellar Blade. I legitimately have zero clue how anyone could think Black Myth: Wukong is a better game.

1 Metaphor: ReFantazio

Well if one is wondering why it took until February to get this list published, this is the reason. I put about five hours into this game on Series X then dropped it when I got a little distracted by my new PS5 Pro and decided to spend the busy holiday rush playing old Sony exclusives I never got around to finishing. Once I finally got around to playing it around Christmas time, I could not play anything else until it was completed around 75 hours later.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is the best Role Playing Game the nation of Japan has produced this century. Studio Zero has been honing their craft for the past couple decades in the Persona titles, and Metaphor is what happens when a master craftsman is at the top of their game refining their work to an impeccable sheen. I can’t think of many games I’ve spent so much time in that were so polished, so expertly paced, and so respectful of the players time & attention. I can’t remember the last 80 hour game I played that basically had zero lull in the middle of it. I legitimately have no notes. I don’t know how Studio Zero could have possibly made a better JRPG. It somehow “Made Me Feel Like A Kid Again” playing PS1 JRPGs without pandering to nostalgia. It proudly wears the ethos of the past while blazing its own trail forward.

In every single regard, Metaphor: ReFantazio is extraordinary. Its story of uniting a divided people in times of racial and ethnic strife is not only extremely topical, but handled with such care and dignity that I am legitimately shocked that a monoculture such as Japan was able to produce it. The music is incredible, the art is incredible, the overworld design is incredible, hell even the menus are the best they’ve ever made, and that’s saying something considering these are the people that make Persona. It has all the stylish sensibilities of that franchise while remaining very much it’s own thing, which is a very difficult line to walk.

I circle back to my opening statement where I expressed the jubilation I had with the JRPG resurgence. It was a great year in the moment, but it was also a scene dominated by plenty of remakes or remasters. Metaphor: ReFantazio was the game that convinced me that the future of this genre is bright. It made me hopeful for a industry I am very worried about structurally. “Hope even in darkness” is a core theme of Metaphor: ReFantazio, and it represents that in the real world as well. It is not the most original, nor the most innovative, but it is the best game of 2024, it is the best built game of 2024, and it is the one I will forever remember.

The rest of the games on this list I merely recommend you play. I implore you to play Metaphor: ReFantazio.

***

The post Jarrod’s 2024 Top Ten Games of the Year and Other Meaningless Awards appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

The idea of a “Mid-Gen Refresh” for videogame consoles is still very much in its infancy, and with absolutely no idea what the next generation of hardware is going to look like (or when it will happen), I’m having difficulty labeling it a “trend” either. Microsoft does not seem to have much interest in a Series X…X(?) as a follow-up to the XBox One X, so Sony seem like the only ones crazy enough to consider such a thing as even necessary.

…And that leads me to the very best thing about the PlayStation 5 Pro — it is completely unnecessary. That may sound a bit weird coming from someone who just bought one and really likes it, but hear me out. 

When the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X came out, they were upgrades to severely underpowered consoles that barely could run modern games at 1080p and 30FPS. Furthermore, the games didn’t look particularly great for people that had 4K displays, which became the standard resolution for televisions between the launch of the original PS4/XBox One and Pro models . Our first round of “Pro” consoles last generation were substantial upgrades to consoles that desperately needed them.

The current PlayStation 5 does not have that problem. There’s really only a handful of games I’ve played this entire generation where the question of “would this benefit from a pro console?” even came up in my head. The vast majority of big titles have very few issues running modern AAA games at a high resolution and a locked/nearly locked 60FPS. While I don’t feel this current generation of hardware had the graphical “wow” factor of what one would hope for from new consoles, the true leap forward for the PS5/Series X has been optimal performance delivered faster than ever before with SSD backed loading. Because of that, any “Pro” console is going to run into the law of diminishing returns. Do games look better on the PS5 Pro? Yes, absolutely they do. “Should you buy one?” is another matter entirely.

Prologue: From purchase through initial setup

The actual act of acquiring my launch day PlayStation 5 Pro was significantly less difficult than anticipated. I guess I’m too traumatized from playing this stupid little game with retailers for the last twenty years to know how to handle myself when it’s easy to get a console. I figured I would be fighting with a literal army of resale bots, but I was able to secure a pre-order from PlayStation Direct the morning they became available. If I knew demand wouldn’t be through the roof and I could’ve got one on Amazon at basically any point over the last month, I wouldn’t have bothered.

While the console itself has been easy to get, the optional disc drive attachment has been experiencing shortages and second-hand markups, currently averaging around $140 on eBay as of this writing compared to the MSRP of $79.99. Fortunately my paranoia paid off here, as I ordered one off of Amazon the same day I got my pre-order in. In the same order, I also picked up the far more infuriating vertical stand (more on that later) and a 1TB SSD expansion.

These additions meant that I got to play “Construct My First Gaming PC” before I could plug in my shiny new PS5 Pro, as assembly is now a part of the home console experience. Installing the optical drive and the SSD expansion is, literally and figuratively, a snap, but it’s a bit too much of a snap as the pressure exerted and sound made when prying open the side panels were both equally worrisome. Luckily that’s the sort of thing one will only have to do one time, and once installed, both the disc drive and the SSD were recognized upon initial setup and worked out of the gate.

Once I installed the vertical stand, it was finally time to look at this monstrosity of consumerism on my game den floor, and I was immediately reminded of how much I hate the look of my launch PlayStation 5. It’s gaudy, it’s obtuse, and it looks like what people in the ’60s thought things in 2024 would look like. The bulbous disc drive looks awful and makes sitting it horizontal a huge pain, so its aesthetic affects practicality in a negative way. Moving it to a new location is a pain, and I’d be terrified of having it in luggage, fearing its little white elf ears would get caught on something. This sort of thing doesn’t bother me usually, but when my entire gaming area is a sea of black consoles, black furniture, a black mini fridge, black speakers, and a black TV, this bright white spaceship thing sticks out.

The good news is that the PS5 Pro does look a bit better. It’s still very much in line with the overall design ethos, but it’s significantly less bulky overall. The vents on the side of the Pro add to the sleekness, but also aren’t actually vents to anything and serve no functional purpose. Overall I’m tempted to call it a good looking console, and that is true until one chooses to install the optional disc drive, which somehow sticks out even more than it did at launch. When put on the vertical stand, it’s no longer centered and doesn’t quite look right. While it does look better than my launch PS5, “I hate looking at it slightly less” is hardly a ringing endorsement. 

Unfortunately, the first night involved very little playing of videogames, as my OCD self wanted everything transferred, updated, downloaded, and synced over from my previous PS5. This was easy to do but rather time consuming, particularly the 1TB of games transferred over from my external HDD which took about three hours. Downloading my entire library of save data from the cloud using PlayStation Plus was simple, and by the end of the evening I had a shiny new version of my old console.

At some point I did play the games, and I am, for the most part, thrilled with the results. I see the PlayStation 5 Pro as a fantastic bit of hardware well positioned to be my primary gaming device for the next 4-5 years. I also think the vast majority of people reading this shouldn’t even remotely consider purchasing one. For those curious if they are in the small minority of players who will objectively love this thing, I have created the following questionnaire. Simply answer the following three questions, and anyone who selects “No” to even one of them can easily assume the PlayStation 5 Pro isn’t for them. However, for those who say “Yes” to all three questions, not only should they buy one, but I’d say they should do so with confidence they are making a wise investment.

#1: Do you have the money for it?

In the capitalist hellscape we currently reside in, the concept of “value” differs widely depending on one’s own economic outlook. $699.99 (or an eye watering €799.99 in Europe) is certainly a jump, there’s no getting around it. That’s a rent payment for a lot of us, and if at any point one is pondering the potential financial implications of purchasing a videogame console, then that person should be happy to hear that the current iteration of the Playstation 5 will continue to serve them well. We do not need the PS5 Pro the same way that we frankly needed the PS4 Pro, and that helps the PS5 Pro exist as its own separate entity without being a perceived necessity. When one needs something compared to merely coveting it, value becomes a significantly different conversation.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is a vanity item. It’s priced like one, and it’s targeting a high-end market populated by those who value a premium gaming experience. With that said, a $700 console isn’t what I bought — I bought an $895 console.

I have around 100 PS4 and PS5 discs on-hand, so that $80 disc drive was a mandatory purchase. $80 is cheaper than the current $100 jump between PS5 Slim consoles with or without disc drives, and it’s pretty easy to install. Personally I don’t see a huge problem with this approach towards consumers who want to own discs, but it would have been nice if they made enough disc drives to meet demand.

On the other hand, I continue to be rather ticked off over the $30 I spent on the cheap vertical stand. My launch unit came with a stand, and when Sony is already pricing this thing questionably, nickel & diming their most loyal customers over a metal ring, a plastic plate, and a cheap plastic screw that stripped during installation feels highly unnecessary.

One place where Sony did add considerable value is in storage capacity. While PS5 Slim owners got a full 1TB of storage, launch users got a meager 825GB of SSD storage, and only about 667GB was actually accessible after initial setup. The Pro bumps that up to a full 2TB with 1.85 available to players, which marks a nearly 250% increase from my original capabilities. So did I need to throw in another 1TB expansion SSD drive for $85? Probably not, but I do live under a data cap, so I like having my games installed.

Also, that $895 figure becomes even more suspect if, like me, one is upgrading from an old PS5 to a new one. I tend to keep my consoles in good condition and store the boxes, so when it came time to upgrade to the Pro, I knew I could sell my launch unit pretty easily. I did this a few weeks ago to get ahead of the flood of used PS5’s from other people upgrading to the Pro, and I was able to snag $340 for my dusty old launch unit with a meager 500GB SSD expansion. With that done, the total cost of upgrading to a PlayStation 5 Pro came out to be $555, which feels far more reasonable to my wallet and personal financial situation. That said, mileage will definitely vary here.

#2: Are you really going to notice the difference?

It’s here where the actual personal value proposition of owning a PlayStation 5 Pro comes in, as the initial cost of the console itself is only the start of the financial questions that abound when looking to get the most out of this hardware.

To really notice the legitimate technological leaps the PS5 Pro makes, one needs a quality television, a good sound system, and an optimal viewing angle. One can have a top-of-the-line display, but if they’re sitting too close or too far away from it, picking up on the raytraced reflections and other bells & whistles the pro offers will be difficult. I have a 55” Samsung S90C OLED with just about every gaming centric feature one would want from a modern TV, and I’m sitting directly in front of it from about 70” away, which is the optimal viewing distance according to some chart a guy in a Discord chat showed me. This combination actually allows me to (theoretically) see and feel a noticeable difference in quality using the PlayStation 5 Pro.

Having a great TV at an optimal viewing distance is, in my eyes, critical to truly getting the most out of the experience Sony is pitching with the PS5 Pro, and achieving that is a hell of a lot more than $700. My OLED was a factory refurbished model and on deep discount at $1065, and that doesn’t even get into the financial issue of having a living space where one also has the space to have a designated “Game Den”. Optimizing viewing distance is not a luxury most people have. I also have a decent 7.2.2 sound system, and as someone who sees that as one of the bigger benefits to console gaming compared to PC, I’d throw that in as a necessity to maximizing enjoyment of the PS5 Pro.

For those with that kind of setup, the PlayStation 5 Pro does create a discernible difference in graphical fidelity. There’s 80 or so “PS5 Pro Enhanced” games out now, I have access to about a dozen of them, and I’ve put some time into maybe six of those games. There’s a lot of variance to what each game offers, but to put it as simply as possible, PS5 Pro offers you either quality modes with improved framerates or performance modes with increased fidelity, depending on however one wants to view the fluid in that glass. 

Practically, the vast majority of us seem to prioritize framerate and thus usually don’t see a lot of the graphical ballyhoo these new machines are capable of performing. Ray tracing on the base PS5 at a stable 60fps has proven to be difficult, so there’s a good chance someone only looking to prioritize performance hasn’t seen actual ray tracing in four years of PS5 ownership. With the Pro, we now have the ability to see the graphical performance boost we wanted from the start of the console generation with the 60FPS performance that has now become the desired standard across all platforms and genres.

I didn’t get much of a chance to play some of the more notable Pro Enhanced games. The showstopper is apparently Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and I’m sure it looks exceptional, but I already finished that game and don’t wanna be bothered downloading all 110 Gigs of it again only to play it for five minutes and agree that it’s real purdy. The exact same thing could be said for Demon’s Souls — another early standout apparently, but, again, I beat that game four months ago so I’m not in a rush.

The game that did get the most attention was Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered, which is a game I’ve now thrice bought some part of. The Pro Performance mode is truly dazzling to see, and the devs clearly did a lot of work getting the original title up to the graphical standards of the second. I was very happy to cross this one off the backlog, and the PS5 Pro is the best way to do so.

Of the other games I had access to, I prioritized those I legitimately wished to get back to, so the majority of my time on the PS5 Pro has been focused on Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade.

Rise of the Ronin is exactly what I described previously, as its performance mode has shown significant improvement in resolution, effects, and overall stability. That game had a lot of stutter during most of my time with it, and that has been eliminated here. Stellar Blade did a better job at launch of keeping the framerate steady, but it varied the resolution and scaled back draw distance wildly to get there. With the new “Pro Mode”, the resolution is overall much higher than in the base performance mode, and players with a high refresh rate display and VRR can run this mode at 80FPS without losing anything.

These are nice jumps for sure, and said jumps were also very easily noticeable to my eye as someone who put plenty of time into these games before the Pro released, but are these massive, foundation altering jumps? Absolutely not. Furthermore, I do often find myself pondering “is the PS5 Pro making this look so good, or is my OLED making this look so good?” I’m sure it’s a mixture of both, but that being true doesn’t speak well for the Pro. The jump here is nowhere what it was for 4KTV owners going from a PS4 to a PS4 Pro, but I think that speaks to the quality of the base PS5 hardware more than anything.

We also have had an assortment of titles that actually looked worse post PS5 Pro patch, and it seems we may be learning in real time the limitations of the Playstation Spectral Super Resolution (or the wonderfully abbreviated PSSR if you so choose) AI Upscaling available to PS5 Pro developers. Silent Hill 2’s Pro Patch amounted to just turning PSSR on, and not noticing the incredible amount of flickering it produced. A similar story can be seen in titles like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but it seems like the more glaring omissions have been patched since then.

Frankly, one should know already if the technical deficiencies outlined are the sorts of things that bother them to a point where upgrading hardware is a valid consideration. I absolutely adore the content of the team at Digital Foundry, and I have learned a lot about the technical aspect of games from them, but I also think they’ve given us all some level of graphical snobbery that console players in particular have never cared about. DF has trained us to be acutely aware of technical deficiencies that, in previous generations, would’ve been perfectly acceptable. 

Enjoyment of the Playstation 5 Pro is directly tied to how much these very pleasant, intelligent, pale men have infected one’s brain. I cannot sit here and say the Pro is a revolution in graphical fidelity, and the vast majority of players aren’t going to notice a discernible difference. I might be impressed with it, but none of my non-techdork friends will be.

#3: Do you primarily play videogames on home consoles out of personal preference?

Alright, those who have made it thus far both believe they can tell the difference and think they got the scratch for it. The only question left is if it will get proper usage?

We live in a time where it’s never been easier to play more games than ever on a litany of different devices, and very few of them have ever appealed to me. At the end of the day, I want to play videogames sitting on a sofa in front of a big TV with a surround sound system filling the room. That’s the main way I’ve consumed videogames for basically my entire life. I don’t want to do it at a desk, and I’d rather be reading or listening to a podcast while traveling, so I don’t want to play games on the go either.

For those of us who prefer to consume videogames this way, the PS5 Pro offers a rare opportunity to truly play games at the cutting edge of modern graphical fidelity in a way no console has. Could we get this experience with a PC? Sure, but it’ll cost significantly more money. Based on my research, building a PS5 Pro equivalent PC would cost around $1000-1200. Granted, one can do significantly more with a fully functional PC than they can with a game console, but consoles provide a convenience that still can’t be touched by a PC. Yes, using consoles has become significantly more PC-like with digital storefronts and software updates, but it’s still a far smoother experience.

Some people don’t mind hauling their gaming laptop or tower to their living room, plugging it into their TV, changing the display resolution to match their TV, using a bluetooth keyboard to use their computer from their couch, resyncing their XBox controller to their PC after playing earlier on Series X, then rebooting a game because the audio was outputting from the laptop and not from the TV’s sound system, along with a modicum of other minor headaches. I suppose I could have a designated gaming tower hooked up to my TV, but that’s a level of opulence that would make a Playstation 5 Pro owner like myself blush.

For players who still prefer games on a designated videogame console, this is the most technically proficient way to do so ever. It is the closest I have ever felt that a console is providing a truly cutting-edge graphical experience on par with high-end gaming PC’s. As someone who has seen that level of smoothness and fidelity on occasion but never really wanted to be bothered to fuss around with PC hardware, the PS5 Pro lets me experience that level of performance in a convenient, familiar way. That’s worth something.

Verdict

It’s weird to like something so much when I can barely recommend it to a sliver of the overall gaming populace. For parents looking to buy their kids a game console, the PlayStation 5 Pro is supremely unnecessary. Students looking to play something on a small screen with headphones at a desk in their dorms should also avoid the PS5 Pro. I wouldn’t recommend it to people with merely decent televisions, I wouldn’t recommend it to people who sit at less-than-optimal viewing positions to their televisions, and I wouldn’t recommend it to people only looking to play videogames once in a while. PC gamers who already have the ability to play the latest and greatest will find very little appealing here either. Anyone who currently is satisfied with the performance of their current PlayStation 5 need not apply, and anyone actually fretting over a $700 price point also need not apply.

The only person I’d recommend the Playstation 5 to is… well… me.

For readers who find themself in my very specific category, I actually think there’s a lot to like here. If the extra $200 (…or $395) is within one’s gaming budget, if one primarily plays games on consoles and prefers that experience of game delivery, and if one has the proper display necessary to actually see the difference, I’d almost call this thing a must-buy. There is a discernible difference in games that are Pro Enhanced (to a trained eye) and that will only increase in the future. In the coming years, the gap in what the Pro can do compared to what the base model can will only widen as more games push the technical boundaries of what both can accomplish.

The console gaming market is large enough to offer a premium product that is not meant for every user, and I feel Sony has been upfront with the capabilities and expectations for this new hardware. It does what it sets out to do, and while I’m still perturbed by what I paid for it, I’m only slightly perturbed. I’m excited to use this as my primary gaming platform for the next few years.

RATING: 8.0 Out Of 10

The post The Three Part Questionnaire: A PS5 Pro Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Shadows of the Damned is still one wild trip well worth experiencing.

LOW Realizing it’s not a remaster.

WTF The first noticeable slowdown on my PS5 Pro was from this thirteen-year old title.

For those who don’t remember, Shadows of the Damned was a bit of a supergroup project.

It was developed by Suda 51’s Grasshopper Manufacturing, and while Suda wrote the script, he didn’t produce. Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame (having just left Platinum Games) tagged along as a producer, and they looped in Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill to do the music. All of this was orchestrated and funded by Electronic Arts of all companies, who I’m sure were absolutely thrilled with the incredibly weird, dick-joke-filled spectacle the team turned in. Luckily, our man Suda was able to get the rights from his former EA overlords and repackaged his surreal classic in the form of the newly-released Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered.

Gamecritics has covered this game twice now, so anybody looking for a traditional recap of the games themselves would do well to check out our reviews.

In summary, Shadows of the Damned is an absolutely insane experience full of memorable moments, sexual innuendo, surreal imagery, shockingly endearing characters, and great music. It’s also a rather basic third-person shooter akin to one of the many Resident Evil 4 clones from that time period, but everything else about it is so wildly original that the moment-to-moment combat is more than enough to get players to the next preposterous set piece.

This is the point where my review veers negative, but make no mistake — I think people should absolutely pick up Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered. It’s a rollicking good time, and I’m sure that fans of Suda 51’s work in particular have already played it, and they should look forward to doing so again. The main character is named Garcia Hotspur, he has a gun called The Boner that Garcia talks to throughout the game like some weird buddy-cop movie, and occasionally The Boner transforms into The Big Boner. What more does one need to know? Go play Shadows of the Damned.

The core issue at hand is, despite being labeled as such, this is not a remaster. A “remaster” implies work was done to (at the very least) clean up the visuals and prepare the content for modern consumers. This? This is not a remaster — it’s a straight port. The folks in charge took an Unreal Engine 3 game, ported it up to UE5, left everything completely untouched, set it to run at 4K and 60FPS, and left it at that. Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered is most certainly not hella remastered.

According to Urban Dictionary, “hella” is commonly used in place of “very” or “really” to imply an emphasis on the discussion point. Remastering the game to the level of “Hella” could’ve implied many things including touching up the character models, putting some work into the shadow effects, maybe tweaking the combat to give it some extra punch, and then ensuring it’s PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced at launch with 120FPS support. That would’ve been hella sweet, bro.

Unfortunately, we got the absolute bare minimum effort from the team, but it could’ve been worse. Lollipop Chainsaw (another Suda 51 gem from that era) also got a recent remaster, and that one did attempt to modernize the look of that title — to truly horrific results. They also had to remove the licensed soundtrack from the original release, which we thankfully don’t have to worry about here.

While Hella Remastered is at least functional, somehow this thirteen-year-old title has some rather serious performance issues. It should be noted that I played and reviewed this title on my PlayStation 5 Pro, which theoretically improves performance on all games even if they’re not specifically patched to be Pro Enhanced. With that said, Remasteres features a mechanic where enemies will drape the world in shadow to become impervious to attacks. This causes the screen to turn blue and displays some extra effects, and whenever this happens (which is quite often) the framerate really starts to chug. It gets down to under 40 FPS and outside of the range of VRR, so it’s very noticeable when it happens.

This wouldn’t be as confounding if it wasn’t for the superior PS4 conversion, which somehow does not have this slowdown problem. That’s right — For PS5 owners of this title, it’s actually better to run the previous generation version to eliminate slowdown. The native PS4 version runs at a slightly lower resolution and has longer load times, but it is the more stable option. This strange scenario is certainly better than playing the original title in 720p at an erratic 30FPS on a 360 or a PS3, but given the power of the hardware being used to play it, these imperfections should’ve been ironed out. The PS5 version being actively worse than the PS4 version is something that I can’t believe exists in 2024, and something that was actually “hella remastered” would not let this happen.

The nicest thing I can say about this product is that Shadows of the Damned still kicks ass, and it’s an inherently good thing that people can play it on modern hardware thirteen years after its original release. This is a functional port that is certainly an improvement over the original iteration, but it’s also one of the more bare bones ports in recent memory, and calling it a “remaster” is a significant stretch in logic. Part of me is disappointed that more hasn’t been done to make this title shine, but the other part of me says Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered is still a win merely because it exists.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was originally developed by Grasshopper Manufacturing, remastered by Grasshopper Manufacturing,  and published by Netease. The game is currently available on Switch, PC, PS4/5, XBO/S/X, and was reviewed on a Playstation 5 Pro. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 4 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was not completed, but the reviewer has completed the game prior to this release. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood & Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Themes, and Strong Language. Shadows of the Damned is a thoroughly atrocious choice for concerned parents. Every single double entendre one could possibly imagine around human sexual organs is said, it is extremely violent, the script is extremely vulgar, the main character drinks booze for health, and there are strong themes of demons, the underworld, and the occult — parents particularly sensitive to that sort of thing for faith based reasons should also steer far clear. Do not buy this game for your children!

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes. The game has not been enhanced in any way for modern consumers and lacks any modern accessibility features.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be resized. The subtitles were legible on my setup but cannot be further enhanced. There are no necessary audio cues, and all important information is visually represented on screen. I’d say this is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls are not remappable, but the aiming can be inverted. Players control the main character with the left analog stick, control the camera with the right, aim with L2, shoot with R2, reload with the Square button, and access items with buttons on the D-pad.

The post Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A great improvement over the previous (!) remaster.

LOW Has a somewhat overinflated reputation that may disappoint first time players.

WTF This game is twenty and I feel exceptionally old.

Beyond Good & Evil is a very good videogame. It’s also only that.

Somehow that reads as harsh, but upon playing Beyond Good & Evil again, it’s weird to me that it’s morphed into a pseudo-legendary ‘classic’ when so few players played it upon release in 2004. How few? I bought the GameCube version for $10 back in 2004 a month after launch at a Circuit City of all places, so demand was not particularly high.

GameCritics is older than this game, so it’s already been covered here twice. I’ll skip the basics, so for those who haven’t played it and want a more comprehensive view of the core structure, you can read our other pieces here and here.

From my vantage point, Beyond Good & Evil is a well-done Zelda-like from a time where, surprisingly, there weren’t as many as the market probably could’ve supported. It’s got fantastic music, great character design, an intriguing story with a cool conspiratorial slant, really good voicework from the main cast, and a neat gameplay gimmick in the form of protagonist Jade’s camera supporting her role as an investigative reporter. While it isn’t my favorite Ubisoft game ever, it’s probably the game my brain most associates the company with. (Probably because it feels super-duper French, whatever that means.)

There’s very little wrong with it, but there were better and more important titles from that era that can’t be easily accessed today which I would’ve rather seen come back, and I believe one of the driving factors leading to this extreme reverence for it is the cataclysmic boondoggle that is the continued development saga of Beyond Good & Evil 2.

For those unfamiliar, BG&E2 was originally announced in 2008, and then we heard not a peep for a decade until a very weird and not-particularly-Beyond-Good-And-Evil looking CG trailer was released during E3 2017. It was then shown to select individuals at E3 2018, and went incognito again until the launch of this new 20th Anniversary Edition when Ubisoft essentially said “Yup! Still workin’ on it! Text later, bye!”

As something to consider, the apparent world record for development cycles has been Duke Nukem Forever, which clocked in at around fourteen years lasting from 1997 until 2011. BG&E2, on the other hand, is currently at sixteen. If this sequel is really coming, the people at Ubisoft were wise to make the original release widely available on modern platforms in order to refresh our collective memory.

Most of the legwork for this version was done a decade ago with Beyond Good & Evil HD, an XBox Live Arcade/PlayStation Network release that got the title up and running on then-modern consoles in 1080p with native 16:9 support. While one can still purchase and play that Live Arcade version through Series S/X backwards compatibility, those enhancements never made it to an already-primitive PC version, and the title has never appeared on a Nintendo console outside of the original Gamecube release.

It would have been easy to take that already existing HD version, slap in in 4K, then release it again, but thankfully Ubisoft has done a lot to make this a true anniversary edition.

On top of now running at a locked 4K/60fps on the tested Series X version, some of the character models and lighting have been enhanced, and there are more expressive faces on some characters in cutscenes. Sometimes the lighting can get a little weird, leading to Jade looking like she has different skin tones depending on the locale, but hopefully that can be patched. Granted, this is still very much a PS2 game for those judging it by a strict polygon count, but it was an impressive release at the time with outstanding art design from Michel Ansel and his former team at Ubisoft Montpellier. It’s still wonderful to look at, and this is the best it’s ever looked.

It’s also the best it’s ever sounded, as the original soundtrack was tastefully redone under the supervision of original composer Christophe Héral, and these new versions sound great with a touch more depth compared to the original. Furthermore, this version features new bonus content, including a well-done behind-the-scenes art gallery presented in a chronological order through development with matching written narration. This is an awesome addition with a surprisingly insightful and frank view of the obvious passion behind the game.

However, without question, the most intriguing aspect of this specific release are the new connections to Beyond Good & Evil 2.

Without spoiling anything, BG&E2 is supposedly a prequel. Keeping that in mind, the 20th Anniversary release has added content regarding characters from Jade’s past that will feature in the sequel. This is a ballsy move, and I certainly hope that whatever version of BG&E2 Ubisoft had in mind when they decided to do this is what actually comes out. If we get that sequel, this will end up being a neat thing to add to a re-release, and it has me more excited for BG&E2 than I’ve been since I was an undergrad.

While all of the tweaks and polish and the new connections are great, the only real issue is that BG&E 20th Anniversary Edition doesn’t fix the problems inherent to the original release. The lightweight combat is probably its biggest issue, as it feels like an afterthought. At the very least, it’s functional and not detrimental to enjoying the overall experience.

However, out of the various things that might be seen as negatives, a brief running time is not one of them. There is no original review of the first game (including ours) that didn’t cite length as a problem in their writings. During that era of punditry, length generally equated value, so a short game automatically equaled ‘rental’ or ‘wait for a steep discount’. BG&E was branded with a scarlet ‘S’ at retail it could not quite overcome, and was ground zero for “Yeah it’s good, but it’s only eight hours long“.

Interestingly, I think it’s possible to see a line between the commercial performance of this game and Ubisoft’s hard pivot into many of their subsequent titles being huge efforts overstuffed with content of scattershot quality. Yes, Beyond Good & Evil is probably a 10-12 hour game for first-time players, and someone like me who’s played it a few times can probably bust through it in half of that. But length does not actually equal quality, and the entirety of this experience is of a high standard that features very little fat. I appreciate that as someone who no longer has a fortnight’s worth of free time to finish a game.

When I look at a remaster, my baseline criteria for success is that it should make the original version obsolete, and Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary does that. It is an inherently good thing that this game is now available again in multiple formats, and the new additions are fantastic. It’s the very best way to play a very good game, and I’m happy this new version exists regardless of whether we get that sequel.

I don’t think Beyond Good & Evil is truly an all-time classic, but this is an exemplary remaster of a great game worthy of the classy treatment its received in this new 20th Anniversary Edition. New and old players alike will find it well worth their time.

RATING: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was originally developed by Ubisoft Montpellier, remastered by Virtuos, and published by Ubisoft. The game is currently available on Switch, PC, PS4/5, XBO/S/X, and was reviewed on an XBox Series X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 8 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10+ for Everyone 10 & Up and contains Animated Blood and Fantasy Violence. This is good for the young ones. The blood reference (I guess?) is from some ooze that comes out of aliens, and the language is very mild. It’s an easy game for a pre-teen to wrap their head around and has positive themes.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes. Considering that Ubisoft goes hard on accessibility options in their recent releases and have made a verbal commitment to that community, the accessibility features in this release are rather disappointing.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be resized. The subtitles are readable but cannot be further enhanced. There are no necessary audio cues, and all important information is visually represented on screen. I’d say this is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls are not remappable, but have two options: Original and Remastered. The only difference being switching the item use button between a face button and up on the D-Pad. Players control the main character with the left analog stick, control the camera with the right, confirm/attack with the A-button, and various items can be selected by using left & right buttons on the D-pad.

The post Beyond Good & Evil: 20th Anniv. Ed. Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Deals well with important, interesting themes…

LOW …but I’ve played many games that hit the same themes.

WTF There’s a lot of WTF. I can’t narrow it down.

For years now, as game development budgets spiral into the absurd and corporate greed infests the triple-A market, people have been clamoring for smaller, “double-A” titles that allow for more creativity and less financial risk. Big publishers don’t seem to get the message, but the good news is that we’re seeing indies step up to the plate to fill this necessary hole in the market. 1000xRESIST is a shining example.

1000xRESIST is a narrative adventure. While there’s some light puzzle solving and the surprising addition of a grappling hook, the vast majority of the experience is walking through hallways in third person perspective and talking to people. There’s no map, but a compass is provided during flashbacks to help players find NPCs they need to have a chat with. This structure definitely won’t win over people that are not into games of this ilk, but based purely on the quality of its narrative, 1000xRESIST delivers in spades.

Before getting into the meat of the experience, I can say that the presentation of 1000xRESIST is impressive for a small developer. Everything is fully voiced, and while this didn’t sound like the most seasoned VO cast, they gave great effort and added a lot of punch to the emotional core of the story. The art design is exceptional, and the dream-like world that the memories take place in is a real highlight — there’s a little Suda 51 in here, perhaps. I played the game on PC, and the system requirements are quite modest, so my four-year-old budget laptop with a 1050 and 16GB of RAM was juuuuuuuust good enough to play this properly. It’s a great audiovisual experience all around.

So, the story. Writing reviews for story-intensive games is difficult because I would hate to spoil key moments or dramatic reveals, and going into 1000xRESIST as cold as possible is the best way to experience it. As such, I’ll keep it brief and say that players assume the role of Watcher, who like everyone else in a far-flung future, is a clone of the ALLMOTHER. Earth is currently uninhabitable due to a disease that wiped out humanity, and these cloned remnants live in technologically-advanced underground areas. Gameplay then centers on the player delving into the memories of ALLMOTHER to uncover the truth about what led to where things are today.

1000xRESIST is a well-told sci-fi tale that’s going to be impactful on many who play it. It’s not afraid to get personal and delve into real-life sociopolitical situations that most developers would be absolutely terrified to touch. It has things to say, and I admire a developer willing to display its worldview like this. It also has a great deal of smart commentary on the nature of religious philosophy splintering and evolving over time that intertwines well with the core story being presented. Of course, like any good tale there are some shocking moments that come out of left field, and when they work, they work.

While the script here is strong, it’s difficult to see its themes and not think about a litany of other titles that touch on similar concepts. Players will find a lot of Nier: Automata here, and fans of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim have likely already bought 1000xResist. It sure does seem like the “Anime Visual Novel With The Last Remnants Of Humanity Hanging Out In A Highly Advanced Pristine Technological Society Where Something Bad Happened, Then Finding Out About The Past And Sharing Trauma” genre is a pretty damn popular one!

To be fair,1000xRESIST gets away with these similarities because it explores these ideas better than most of the titles it can be compared to, and there’s a grounded realness here which is difficult to pull off — but the devs manage it. My only real complaint is that the story does drag a bit, and there are perhaps a few too many hour-long sections that could have been cut, to its benefit — it’s a great fourteen-hour game that could’ve been a brilliant ten-hour game.

Another issue I had was with player agency. Without spoiling too much, the player makes major narrative choices at the end of the campaign. I personally made a choice based on what I thought made sense given the circumstances, only to get the cutscene equivalent of being called a complete idiot. I was then kicked back to the previous section and had to try again. I admire 1000xRESIST for taking strong stands on certain things but if it gives me a choice, I would expect my choice to play out. If the devs never intended branching outcomes, then it might have been a better idea to simply take player choice out of the equation completely.

If I were to sum up 1000xRESIST in one word, it would be brave. I walked away extremely impressed with how it handled its core subject matter, and I’ve been constantly thinking about the story since I rolled credits. It won’t change the mind of anyone who doesn’t care for narrative-focused gaming experiences, but I really do think this is going to be a special game for a lot of people. It speaks in a mature way that is extremely rare in a medium not known for its tact, and the team at Sunset Visitor should be proud of their work.

I can’t wait to see what they do next.

RATING: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Sunset Visitor and published by Fellow Traveler. It is currently available on Switch and PC, and was reviewed on a PC with a GTX1050 and 16GB of RAM to decent performance at 1080p. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 14 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Coarse Language and Extreme Violence. While the game does feature both of those things, they’re handled very well and I wouldn’t call anything in it grotesque or obscene. This definitely isn’t a title for kids, but for parents with an older teen who is into stories of this ilk, I think it’d be a fine choice.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be resized, but there is an option to make them transparent or opaque. The subtitles are quite thin and change colors depending on who is speaking, which could be difficult for colorblind players. It’s a story based adventure game, and there are no necessary audio cues. I’d say this is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls are not remappable. The game can be played with either a gamepad or mouse & keyboard. The developers recommend a gamepad, as do I. The character is controlled with the left analog stick, camera with the right analog stick, and interaction is done with the A button.

The post 1000xRESIST Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Holy Hell do I love the potential of the Gold Master Series

LOW …Sure feels like we should have a Jeff Minter Story Part II.

WTF The Konix Multi-System.

I don’t think there’s a franchise that I desperately wish to be successful more than Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series.

The videogame industry can be criticized for many, many, many things, but one of its most glaring faults is the complete indifference to its own history and preservation. I am legitimately over the moon that a port-based developer as dependable as Digital Eclipse has teamed up with a genuine videogame historian in Chris Kohler to not only preserve these important works, but tell the story behind them with such aptitude. I worry the industry is uninterested in helping this project succeed, but hopefully the sales will be strong enough to entice more stories to be shared.

The Jeff Minter Story is technically the second game in the GMS, but considering both this and The Making of Karateka share the layout and general design ethos of 2022’s Atari 50, it’s really the third. As with highlighting the accomplishments of Jordan Mechner last year, Digital Eclipse’s choice of Jeff Minter and the wonderous works of Llamasoft is both inspiring and obvious in equal measure.

For those who don’t know, Jeff Minter is the chillest dude in the history of videogames. He runs a videogame company he opened with the help of his parents, but usually he hangs out with animals on his lovely farm. When not feeding sheep, he makes weird-ass titles based on that time as a teenager he laid on the floor and blasted Dark Side of the Moon really loud. He has somehow existed as a major entity in this industry for over forty years making trippy shooters in his basement the whole time, and the fact that he’s basically still doing the same thing is the most amazing part of his story.

Having so many of his titles collected in one place is legitimately awesome, but the true value of The Jeff Minter Story is how it serves as a historical artifact not just for the work of his company, Llamasoft, but the oddity that was the British videogame scene of the ’80s and ’90s.

As a yank, I’ve never delved deeply into the backstory and libraries of home computers like the ZX-81 or the VIC-20. These machines were unbelievably primitive, and half of Minter’s genius is how he was able to deliver marginal approximations of arcade hits like Defender or Centipede on such devices. This was the time period when it was enough to make “a good Defender” as Jeff says in the documentary clips sprinkled throughout, and I enjoyed his friendly-but-blunt revisiting of old titles. One of his biggest early hits was Attack of the Mutant Camels, which he freely admits was just him having a laugh after it became a running gag that the AT-AT’s in Atari’s Empire Strikes Back videogame looked like the desert-going beasts, so he made a clone of that work with actual camels.

The layout of this documentary experience will be familiar to anyone who played either of the previous GMS titles, but essentially the games and supplemental material are delivered via a chronological timeline broken up over four chapters. Players can access the games at any time, but jumping directly there would deprive them from seeing the amazing bonus features placed around the games themselves. Box art, advertisements, game reviews from old British magazines, newsletters from the time period written by Jeff himself, along with several other kinds of fascinating historical material do a great job of enhancing the presentation.

As I said, this is all hugely illuminating and I love the format, but there’s a huge problem — It’s only half the story.

The Jeff Minter Story essentially climaxes with Tempest 2000 — debatably the work he’s best known for — but he did plenty of stuff after that! The Llamasoft game I actually have the most nostalgia for is probably Space Giraffe, and that only gets mentioned in the final documentary clip. The inclusion of Tempest 2000 doesn’t hit as hard considering it was also the pseudo main event of Atari 50.

Minter has been a gun-for-hire for decades, so the rights to many of his games are strewn about between various publishers. Many of his iPhone games no longer exist because he couldn’t justify keeping them on the iOS store with the yearly $100,000 necessary to be a iOS publisher. He’s also been a prolific VR developer in recent years, and that aspect of his career being unrepresented here is disappointing, yet understandable. Not seeing his fantastic rendition of Polybius here is a bummer.

Maybe it was a stylistic or editorial choice to posit Tempest 2000 as the crescendo for this project, but Jeff Minter has improved as a game designer in the thirty years since then. Further, modern technology has proven to be a better delivery vehicle for his particular aesthetic. To put it bluntly: I would much rather play the games from the second half of his career, which basically doesn’t exist on this compilation. I recognize the historical importance of something like Ancipital, but of the 43 games included in this release, many of them are repeated titles for multiple weird computers, and I’d probably say only about twelve or so have entertainment value beyond simply being historical artifacts.

While the collection of games on offer here can be a bit underwhelming, for people who care about the history of this artform, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is an absolute must-buy. It was truly wonderful seeing Jeff’s story fleshed out to this degree, and his reputation as a fascinating, cool-ass dude is well earned. With that said, I can’t help but feel that leaving out more than half of his career is a bit like telling the story of The Beatles and stopping at Rubber Soul. There’s a lot more to Jeff’s career after Tempest 2000, and it’s profoundly disappointing to see this exemplary piece of gaming history stop there.

That said, I guess one can’t be too mad when the biggest complaint is “I desperately wish there was more of this”.

RATING: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Digital Eclipse. It is currently available on PS4/5, Switch, XBO/X/S and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 6 hours were devoted to playing the games and following the documentary, and the game was “completed” as much as it can be. Various games in the collection have local multiplayer modes, but these were not tested.

Parents: This game has an ESRB rating of T for Language. There is no official summary from the ESRB, but essentially, the rare “shit” or “damn” might be spoken in the documentary clips. Other than that, there’s zero objectionable content in this release and should be fine for most kids.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game offers subtitles and closed captioning. The text size cannot be changed. Captions can be added in the video documentary section. As far as gameplay, I don’t think many of Minter’s games have necessary audio cues. I’d call it fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game’s controls are remappable for each game in the collection.

The post Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Dondoku Island

LOW Dondoku Island ends

WTF I don’t know how to tell my friends on Dondoku Island that they’re terrifying

I have written numerous reviews for the works of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio on this site, and I’ve occasionally opined about when this stupendous developer was finally going to reach market saturation. While I am about to write a whole bunch of words explaining in adequate detail how badass Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth is, I think we might have finally reached that point.

This, their most recent work, is the seventh game I have played of theirs on current-gen hardware.

It is the third Like a Dragon game (We’ve made the pivot from Yakuza at this point) that has been released in the last ten months.

I now need extra shelf space for the shelf designated specifically for this developer’s titles.

Don’t get me wrong, despite the quality of this title and the fact that I am overjoyed at the continued success of what has become one of my favorite franchises, I am ready for RGGS to make something not involving Japanese organized crime.

Set a couple years after the momentous events of the first Like A Dragon, we are once again in the shoes of everyone’s favorite lovably earnest idiot, Ichiban Kasuga. He’s trying to make it as a regular guy — as are the vast majority of Japan’s yakuza population — who also have found themselves out of work due to previous events. Eventually Kasuga gets cancelled in a rather hilarious turn of events, and loses his job at the local employment office. Shortly thereafter, he gets a good excuse to go to Hawaii and, without spoiling anything, goes on a brand new quest. He makes a whole bunch of new friends because how the hell could you not be Ichiban’s buddy, and also runs into franchise legend Kazuma Kiryu. Turns out he also happens to be on the exact same quest as Kasuga, so they team up to unravel a mystery worthy of the twist-heavy franchise LaD spawned from.

As mentioned earlier, franchise fatigue is perhaps starting to set in, but what keeps Infinite Wealth going is the old ’70s TV trope “when in doubt, go tropical”. Hawaii is a fantastic setting not only because of its distinct environment, but the rich shared history between it and Japan leads to great cultural crossover for the developers to work with. It allows the characters to visit a wildly different locale without relying on a lot of the typical “fish-out-of-water” stuff one might expect.

Once again, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has shown the ability to write believable humans in bonkers scenarios, and Infinite Weath has yet another cast full of wonderfully developed party members that I loved palling around with. They are flawed, they make mistakes, but there is good in all of them, and Ichiban’s relentless optimism ties the whole thing together by bringing out the best in everyone. Infinite Wealth, in line with the previous Like a Dragon, has also turned up the goofy to a level usually reserved for the sidequests in Yakuza, and it’s quite successful at it. This stuff is legitimately funny, and good comedy is hard to come by in this medium.

The only downside to this narrative (without spoilers) is that it ends a little on the messy side, with too many absurd circumstances tied up into too many perfect bows. Furthermore, everything involving Kazuma leads to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion considering this is supposed to be his big send-off. It still ends better than some others in the Yakuza series, but considering how astoundingly impactful the end of The Man Who Erased His Name was, this doesn’t hit the same heights.

Outside of a generally well-told story, Infinite Wealth also excels because it’s just a better JRPG than the first Like A Dragon. While the combat was good enough in the previous entry considering the developers completely changed genres, it wasn’t the smoothest transition. Thankfully, many of the kinks have been ironed out to leave a solid, traditional JRPG that expands on most of what was good last time.

For example, the environments that battles take place are more fully integrated, allowing for characters to pick stuff up and bash peoples’ brains in. Positioning is also important, items are more useful and interesting, and the job system has been dramatically expanded with a wonderfully Hawaiian-themed flourish. There are now jobs like Pyrodancer and Aquanaut which have some spot-on costumes reflecting the locale.

That same Hawaiian flourish seeps into most of the side content as well. First off is the Sujimon — a shockingly deep monster-collecting minigame with random hobos becoming cogs in an underground fighting league, complete with ranked trainers. It’s nuts and I love it, but my heart truly goes aflutter at the mention of Dondoku island, where Kasuga has to beat up pirates and piles of trash with a baseball bat while also managing a dying island resort. Both of these chunks of content are huge and will take hours to finish, so I guess instead of making new games, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are just gonna put more games into their games.

Infinite Wealth also maintains the exceptional production values the studio is known for. While this engine is nearly a decade old, the strengths still shine through. These are good-looking humans with expressive faces and good detail. The hair, clothes and skin all look right, and while it’s obviously not the most graphically-intensive title on modern hardware, it runs well at a solid 60FPS and stays sharp.

I cannot speak to the quality of the English dub outside of also wishing to pile on Sega for hiring some nasally, smut-peddling dweeb to play Kazuma Kiryu, the biggest B.A.M.F. on Earth, but this franchise is so wholly Japanese that it’s one of the few I wish to play in its native tongue. The Japanese voicework is outstanding, and I appreciate the goofiness of the English spoken dialogue in the Japanese dub — don’t forget, Infinite Wealth takes place in Hawaii, so Ichiban meets plenty of people who don’t speak Japanese. I don’t know if this is the case in the English dub, but there’s a real “it’s 1997 in Japan and we hired our foreign drinking buddies who work in the Eikaiwa across the street” zest to line delivery here, and I am 100% here for it.

As far as criticisms go, it’s still profoundly annoying that a Game Over is triggered whenever Ichiban is KO’d, especially considering I have direct control over characters who have revival spells and healing items, but that’s something one can easily adjust to from a gameplay standpoint.

More serious is the controversy involving the game paywalling New Game+ behind a deluxe edition. While NG+ isn’t generally something that’s a big issue for me personally, it’s a common feature that many players expect, and charging an extra $20 for such while also not making it easy to upgrade into later is highly questionable.

With that said, Infinite Wealth is another fabulous title from one of the best developers on Earth. The necessary improvements to combat have been made, it tells a great story centered around a fantastic protagonist, and Hawaii is a spectacular new location for the franchise. Even though the New Game+ situation outright sucks, there’s still an astounding amount of content in the base game, which helps alleviate the pain. With this release, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has successfully closed the book on Yakuza, and will let the Like a Dragon flag fly free for the foreseeable future.

2024 is off to a great start.

RATING: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and published by SEGA. The game is available on Steam, PS4/5 and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 63 hours of play were devoted to playing the game, and the campaign was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M  and features Blood, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Partial Nudity, and Sexual Themes. This one is an easy ‘no’ for parents. All of the ESRB warnings listed previously are very much in effect here. The script is extremely crass, there is extensive nudity, and sex toys are bountiful. Infinite Wealth also has some incredibly violent scenes even for this franchise, so it should probably be kept from the young ones.

Colorblind Modes: The game features Three colorblind modes: Green Color Blindness, Red Color Blindness, and Blue-Yellow Color Blindless. There is also a slider to turn up/down its intensity

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game features voiced cutscenes, and the dialogue is presented in white font. The size of the text is not remappable. All dialogue and instructions are provided in text, and there are no necessary audio cues. Especially given the nature of it’s turn-based combat, I’d say it’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are fully remappable

The post Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It just gets better and better and better…

LOW …Which is good because it doesn’t start well.

WTF The quality of Ubisoft’s voicework makes me question why I quit acting.

We have got to come up with a better name for Metroidvanias than “Metroidvania”.

Look, I get it. It’s a preposterous word, but when someone experienced in videogame circles hears that a game is a metroidvania, we know exactly what kind of game it is. It’s a good descriptor, and unfortunately alternative genre titles like “Search Action” haven’t caught on, so we’re probably stuck with it. The Metroid part means “non-linear and featuring a map” while Vania, I guess, means “gear and RPG elements”? The latest title to get this moniker is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

Even though Prince of Persia has been a metroidvania in the past, I was less than enthused about this latest entry being “one of those”. First off, there’s a lot of those, and the genre’s dominance in the indie sphere assures me that most of the people reading this review have probably played dozens like it over the past few years.

However, most people under the age of 40 don’t think of Jordan Mechner’s original Prince of Persia when they hear the name, but rather think about the 3D platforming Sands of Time trilogy from 2003-2005. That’s certainly where my nostalgia for this franchise comes from. Needless to say it’s been a while since then, so there was definitely some trepidation around this new offering considering that another game like Warrior Within (the best game in that trilogy and not a metroidvania at all) would’ve been greatly appreciated.

Those fears, as it turns out, were completely unfounded.

I was fearful after the first hour or so, because the only significant negative about this exceptional videogame is that it starts poorly. The introductory bit is an explosion-filled linear battle which doesn’t resemble the actual campaign in the slightest, and then the player is set loose to roam through the rather tame opening areas of the world map with a minuscule move set — it all left me feeling a bit cold. I also made a mistake and started the game on Hard. As I would find out, Lost Crown is pretty difficult, so making it more difficult on myself from the get-go was a bad call. Thankfully, this (among other things) can be changed mid-campaign thanks to Ubisoft’s exceptional accessibility settings.

Thankfully, this poor first impression wanes once a groove sets in, and from that point forward, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown absolutely sings. This is the latest project from Ubisoft Montpelier, who most recently worked on the exceptional Rayman: Origins and Rayman: Legends. Those titles were praised for fabulous art design and finely tuned platforming, and they have carried those two traits into this new release.

While it’s not the most technically impressive piece of software, the art design of the world and characters carries the load, and the anime-inspired effects in cutscenes look particularly exceptional as people scream and swing their swords in a highly exaggerated style. The character designs are a bit blocky, but they animate incredibly well both in-game and during cinematics.

The backgrounds aren’t quite as lush as they were in Montpelier’s previous work, but this is made up for by exceptional smoothness. Those playing on modern hardware with an up-to-the-task TV will thoroughly enjoy a full 4K resolution at a silky 120FPS. I played on PS5 which, according to Digital Foundry, has some slight dips compared to the more stable Series X version, but I didn’t notice much. Odds are those who can take advantage of 120FPS also have access to a VRR display, which cleans up the hiccups significantly. For a platforming experience where precision in movement is so important, a high framerate option legitimately makes it a better play, while also making the basic graphical fidelity more palatable. Screenshots and streaming video don’t capture it fully, but it looks outstanding in motion.

In terms of design, while The Lost Crown is essentially a metroidvania, it differentiates itself in a couple of key areas. The first (and most important) is a focus on platforming.

Combat is a big part of the adventure and some Souls-inspired boss design makes for exciting fights, but The Lost Crown is a platformer first and foremost. Lead protagonist Sargon is as nimble as a proper Prince of Persia protagonist should be, and it’s a real joy to flip and leap around levels while avoiding various spinning spikey things.

Another outstanding aspect is the pace at which the player earns new abilities. Unlike some contemporaries where one gets a move that is used occasionally and maybe opens a door for progression now and then, The Lost Crown is constantly giving the player huge, foundation-shattering moves that fundamentally change not only how it plays, but how I thought about traversal. This is the key thing that all of the truly elite entries in this genre share, and it’s done extremely well here.

For example, Sargon has everything from air-dashing to the ability to see into other dimensions, and only two-thirds of the way through does the player finally earn a rather benign sounding double jump. Once that comes along, the map really opens up and the possibilities for what the player can do become near-limitless. This is supported by pitch-perfect controls and an exceptionally well-thought-out default control scheme. It’s a purely joyful experience to just move in The Lost Crown. Further, there were a few puzzles near the end of the campaign that had me questioning if I had ‘broken’ the game and completed the puzzle in ways the devs didn’t intend, but this is a surefire sign that the vast array of abilities are working as designed.

I really can’t stress how positive an experience The Lost Crown is overall, but there are a couple of nagging issues. First off, while I adored the challenging and fast-paced boss fights, moment-to-moment combat with regular enemies gets fairly stale — I just want to jump around and traverse, not smash up some easy goons.

The music, sound design, menus, and tons of accessibility options are all great, but one of Ubisoft’s numerous Achilles heels shows up again via mediocre voice acting. Some performances are alright, but the actor voicing Sargon, the protagonist, isn’t strong when the script calls for things to get serious — the weak voicework in these sections undercuts the experience overall.

Very rarely have I done as complete a turnaround with something the way that I did with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. I went in concerned about playing another metroidvania and the bumpy start had me questioning the wisdom of requesting this assignment. However, I am happy to report that those feelings dissipated quickly — The Lost Crown is a fantastic project that both honors the lineage of the franchise while also taking it in a bold new direction. One could easily make the argument that this is the best game Ubisoft has produced in around a decade, and it’s an easy call to say that this is 2024’s first must-play title. Don’t miss it.

RATING: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ubisoft Montpellier and published by Ubisoft. It is currently available on Xbox One, XBX/S, PS4/5, Switch and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 29 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Mild Language, and Violence. Parents should rejoice, as The Lost Crown is great for all ages, and one of the few AAA releases not targeted towards adults. Blood is minimal, I can’t remember anyone swearing, and I found nothing objectionable during the whole runtime. It’d be an awesome game for pre-teens/teenagers.

Colorblind Modes: There game was reportedly designed with Colorblind gamers in mind, so there is no specific “colorblind mode”, but there is a setting for high contrast. Unfortunately I have heard through anecdotal experiences that these may not be sufficient for all colorblind players to fully experience.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles can be resized, a backdrop can be added, and there are different color options. Gameplay-based subtitles are fully customizable and there are no necessary audio cues. There are numerous visual aids for timing based actions. A full list of accessibility features has been provided by Ubisoft. I’d say this is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls are completely remappable on consoles.

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I’m stealing this from Nextlander Podcast host Alex Navarro because I simply can’t put it any better myself — this year in videogames was an astoundingly good one for products, and a miserable one for everyone who made those products.

It’s genuinely difficult to celebrate an industry that continuously chews up and spits out thousands of talented, amazing people who professionally sacrifice in ways that I’m just not down with. Studio closures came fierce, and mergers meant tons of behind-the-scenes jobs in advertising, PR, and community support became redundant overnight.

Rumors swirled around legendary studios when they slipped up even once with a sales disappointment. I also question just how quickly AI will sweep away potentially tens of thousands of jobs in programming, QA, and asset generation. The entire industry rests on a razor’s edge, and I sincerely worry we may have not yet seen the bottom completely fall out.

…And yet that terrible reality is juxtaposed with a year full of absolute bangers.

I am truly grateful for the people who make the games we get to play. It’s basically a miracle every time a good title gets released, and the stakes for every single one have never been higher. While I mourn the real-life pain of thousands of affected workers, this list is also a tribute to their incredible efforts that were behind both these games and the numerous others that were under strong consideration — and there were numerous.

2023’s “I F***** Up 2022’s List” Award: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins

There’s always one that gets away every year, and despite a propensity to play everything with the words “Final Fantasy” on the box, middling reviews and a constant fear of the “Soulslike” genre (which, as you will read later, is getting harder and harder to justify in writing every year) kept me away until it was on heavy discount earlier this year. It was then when I realized I made a huge mistake, as the adorably abbreviated SOPFFO blew away all expectations I had with outstanding character customization and infinitely variable combat because of it.

But that wasn’t the highlight. The true winner here is a story that, from afar, looked preposterously stupid in the Youtube clips I saw at launch. Little did I know that this prequel for Final Fantasy I was actually going to be the most brilliant unintentional parody of classic JRPGs I’ve ever experienced. I was in absolute stitches as all-timer dudebro edgelord Jack Garland grunted his way through every trope the genre has. He’s the JRPG protagonist the world needs, and I sincerely hope we have not seen the last of this lovable asshole.

2023’s “I’ll get to it eventually” award: Hi-Fi Rush
Hi-Fi Rush came out of nowhere in a lot of ways. Firstly it… well it did come out of nowhere as it was announced and released on the same day back in January. That’s a bold move, and one I’ve been pining for more developers to do, so kudos to Microsoft for having that confidence. Secondly, it came from Tango Gameworks, which I feel has exclusively made games that are interesting but only almost good for their entire existence. Considering how dark The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo both were, Hi-Fi Rush’s cheerful demeanor and funky stylings were even more refreshing.

Unfortunately, despite having it installed practically all year through Game Pass, I never quite got around to it. The 30 minutes I did play convinced me this was something I should spend time with, but I have this weird quirk about playing on Game Pass. Ownership (or whatever the hell that means nowadays) somehow adds to my drive to play something, so I’m sure I will get around to it when it inevitably hits $15 sometime in 2024. Maybe I should stop paying for Game Pass.

The “I really want to give this game an award but I just can’t” Award: Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0/Phantom Liberty
I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to acknowledge Cyberpunk 2077 on this list. While it took three years to get to an acceptable state, I cannot deny that playing through 2077 after Update 2.0 and alongside the release of the exceptional Phantom Liberty expansion was one of the very best gaming experiences I had this year. It really is the most dramatic turnaround of a catastrophic single-player launch that I can recall. It’s never gonna reach the hype of being the transcendent RPG experience CDProjekt Red promised before launch, but they have clearly put in the work to make Cyberpunk 2077 a quality game that I’m damn near tempted to call polished.

The plan was to make this my 10th best game of the year, but then it won “Best Ongoing Game” at The Game Awards, and I threw up in my mouth a little. Fixing a broken single-player game and releasing one piece of DLC over a three year span should not qualify as “ongoing”, and while I do legitimately love this game in the year 2023, CDPR should not receive praise for doing what was necessary to fix a cataclysmic boondoggle that people will talk about for generations to come. For those, like me, who were waiting to play Cyberpunk 2077 “when it’s done”, now is that time. Enjoy it, but never forget the nonsense it took to get us to this point.

The 2023 Turd of the Year: Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1

It was a tough choice this year, as there were a lot of excellent candidates. Again, Turd of the Year does not mean “worst game” or “most disappointing”. Turd of the Year is the most offensively bad game of the year. It is essentially the game that pissed me off the most. While Sonic Origins Plus certainly pissed me off and Atomic Heart was a game I genuinely hated, neither of them compare to the sheer, unadulterated anger in my heart towards Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1. The PS5 version I will give credit for essentially being on par with the HD collection released a decade ago, but the other versions are inexcusably poor for a litany of reasons I don’t have space to talk about here.

So there’s a game on this compilation called Metal Gear Solid. It’s kind of a big deal. You may have heard of it, as it easily earns the distinction of being a truly revolutionary videogame. This is the first time the original Metal Gear Solid has been available for purchase on modern consoles in over a decade, the first time it’s been easily playable on PC in over 20 years, and the first time it’s ever been on a Microsoft or Nintendo platform (Twin Snakes doesn’t count/exist). This should be a monumental celebration! Instead we got the most bare-bones emulation imaginable that’s about on par with playing it on a Playstation Classic.

This hurts even more because Konami has actually done a stellar job with remaster compilations in recent years. I reviewed both the Castlevania and Contra Anniversary Collections for this site, and they’re both fabulous! Great emulation, slick menus, nice configuration features, and exceptional bonus materials. While the bonus materials in Master Collection are good, they’re buried under multiple game launchers, and many of the bonus features aren’t even on the disc. Why do I have to download the digital graphic novels? Konami couldn’t fit those on a 50GB disc on this compilation of one of their most important franchises, and the first time they’ve done anything with said franchise in half a decade? This package contains three of the greatest games ever made, full stop. They deserve to be crafted around a proper, historical artifact that generations of players in the future can experience, and this ain’t it by a longshot.

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1 is a pathetic effort from a pathetic company. I hate that I paid for this, and I hate even more that I’ll be buying Master Collection Vol. 2 on day one as well just to see how borked that Metal Gear Solid 4 port is going to be.

THE ONE TRUE LIST THAT IS CLEARLY BETTER THAN MY FELLOW WRITERS’ LISTS

Honorable Mention: The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom
I’ve been writing GOTY lists for this site for a while, and the biggest no-brainer #1 pick I’ve ever made was choosing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as my personal Game of the Year in 2017. A dramatic reinvention of a longstanding videogame franchise with established mechanics is one of the hardest things to achieve in this business, and Breath of the Wild was certainly that. The Nintendo Switch does not become what it has become without launching alongside a legitimate GOAT contender, and Breath of the Wild didn’t just revitalize a legendary franchise, it revitalized an entire company.

And its sequel is… great. Really great, actually! Tears of the Kingdom is a tremendously well put-together sequel with an astonishing amount of content. It does not reinvent the wheel, but considering they blew up the car with Breath of the Wild and built a new one, that should be neither expected or necessary. With that out of the way, I can’t say it grabbed me in the same way outside of some truly mesmerizing memes seeing the insane things people created with its ingenious toolset. Garry’s Mod was not on my “inspirations for TOTK” Bingo card, but here we are, and I’m glad we’re here. Tears of the Kingdom is both of high quality and worthy of the franchise it represents, but let’s be real, its Breath of the Wild But Bigger-er, and in a truly exceptional year for releases, that wasn’t quite good enough to make the list proper.

10. Lies of P
We start the list with what was probably my biggest surprise of the year, as I was completely unaware of its existence until it released. Thankfully I had enough people send me the message of “Hey, the one you like is Sekiro, right? You should really play Lies of P“, and I’m really glad that they’re in my life. Lies of P is weird, haunting, occasionally disturbing, and has extremely well-tuned combat that is constantly adding new wrinkles all the way through its beautifully-realized world.

This is the best non-FROM-produced Souls game I have ever played, but I can’t really put it much higher on my list because Lies of P is basically plagiarism. Everything from the menus to the HUD to the world design to NPC interaction to the item descriptions (even down to the font) is ripped straight from various FROM works. But here’s the thing — a lot of games do that, and Lies of P is significantly more successful at it than something like Lords of the Fallen or Wo Long. It’s so damn good that I don’t really care that it’s an egregious copycat, and I don’t think Hidetaka Miyazaki does either.

Also, shoutout to The Republic of Korea for an awesome year of making big videogames. On top of this game, the country also produced Dave The Diver, the runner-up to my “I’ll get to it eventually” award. Korea has been producing games for a long time, but they usually stick to the FTP space dating all the way back to Maple Story. They haven’t made a lot of big-time, full-priced mainstream releases, but Lies of P definitely fits that bill. Here’s hoping Round 8 Studios and publisher Neowiz can keep that momentum going and Korea’s developer profile continues to ascend. We will forgive and forget about Gungrave G.O.R.E.

9. Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

I’ve been hesitant about legendary Yakuza protagonist and World’s Greatest Step-Dad Kazuma Kiriyu being such a large part of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. Like the previously mentioned Breath of the Wild, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios also succeeded in a complete reinvention of a longstanding franchise with 2020’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon, with its greatest strength being that it replaced a stellar ensemble cast with an equally stellar ensemble cast damn near seamlessly. With Ichiban Kasuga proudly taking the mantle from Kiryu with general ease, I felt like bringing back The Dragon of Dojima for One Last Hurrah wasn’t particularly necessary when they nailed such a difficult pivot already.

The Man Who Erased His Name convinced me that this is not only viable, but needed. Kazuma Kiryu deserves a better send-off than the weird place they left him after Yakuza 6, and this true ‘Gaiden’ of a release sets that up perfectly. For those who thought Kazuma being randomly shoehorned into the end of Like a Dragon was awkward, now it makes all the sense in the world. While The Man Who Erased His Name is really only for the most committed Like a Dragon fans, the more hardcore a fan you are, the harder it’s going to hit. The final chapter in this game is maybe the highlight of an entire 20 year franchise for those who have been there the entire time, and I do not say that lightly. It’s also a very tight experience, clocking in at a short-for-this-franchise ten hours (much longer for completionists), but it doesn’t have a drop of fat throughout the entire campaign.

It’s a tad overpriced, having to import a physical release was annoying (but cheaper!) and it doesn’t do anything new whatsoever. That keeps it low on the list, but this is an absolutely necessary entry into this franchise. It succeeded in its core mission of making me even more excited for Infinite Wealth than I already was, which I didn’t think was possible.

8. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
I love that FROM Software is in the middle of its “we get to do whatever the hell we want” phase after the past decade of abject success, and what they decided to do was go make another Armored Core. Not a reboot, not a remake, but Armored Core VI, as in “The Sixth Armored Core Game”. I hesitate to call it taking a chance because we’re at the point where anything with FROM on the box is probably going to do quite well, but as someone who grew up playing Armored Core, I really appreciated them straight-up just making a new Armored Core game and hoping everyone would go along with it like we all played Armored Core V in 2021.

Fires of Rubicon is a real meat & potatoes release. There’s a story and it’s actually rather interesting, but 95% of it is told through radio messages and powerpoint presentations. This isn’t some grandiose AAA extravaganza, but rather a gameplay first, mission-based, Capital-V Videogame full of boundless customization. Even slight recalculations of your AC’s weight and propulsion shows while playing, and I spent hours trying to build the perfect deathmobile for the playstyle I wanted to enjoy. It gets brutally difficult in spots, and the core Souls design the team has been sharpening for years definitely shows up in boss fights, but one also feels that same Souls-level sense of achievement when finally completing a particular hurdle. Armored Core VI was one of the purest game experiences I had this year, and I look forward to Armored Core being a thing again.

7. Star Ocean The Second Story R
2023 was a truly exceptional year for remakes. Dead Space, Super Mario RPG, and System Shock were all incredible from-the-ground-up revitalizations of beloved classics, and, hey, Resident Evil 4 got a remake too, I guess. However one stood above the rest in my eyes, and that was Star Ocean The Second Story R. As a production, Second Story R is outstanding, with great renditions of the original score, quality voice acting, and excellent menu design. There was no other game this year I loved looking at more than this one with its beautifully-realized rendition of the original title that still very much looks like Star Ocean The Second Story. It’s clear the people involved with developing this remake had reverence for the source material, and their love of it shines brightly here.

Early Playstation 1 JRPGs are not a group of games that have aged particularly well, and developer Gemdrops inc. did a tremendous job adding countless quality-of-life improvements while still maintaining the spirit of a game that can be rather punishing. Second Story R is essentially how the nostalgic part of my brain remembers Star Ocean The Second Story, and it makes the original release practically obsolete. It’s a title that was absolutely deserving of receiving such a classy, quality remake, and I’m glad it exists so a new generation can experience one of the true gems from the genre’s heyday.

6. Baldur’s Gate III

I didn’t even get close to finishing Baldurs Gate III and that’s the primary reason it’s so low on this list, as I’m pretty sure this was the best videogame released in 2023. If I was writing for another site and we were deciding an overall Game of the Year as a staff, I’d probably be advocating for Baldurs Gate III to win our site’s award, but the fact of the matter is that I’m maybe an eighth of the way through a 150 hour game, and I just got too distracted with too many others to fully commit to finishing this outstanding achievement. This game deserves ones full attention, and I have failed to commit to it properly.

I have never in my life played a game so down with however I want to play it, which is the thing people love about playing Dungeons & Dragons, right? Larian Studios has made the definitive D&D videogame, and the ability to have their virtual dungeon master make this absolutely massive game with so many variables work together is the greatest achievement of any title this year. It’s also amazing to see the incredible financial success this game is achieving. While the team did an unbelievable job porting this game to consoles, the astounding thing about Baldur’s Gate III’s popularity is they did it by making an old-school-as-old-school-gets PC RPG for their most hardcore fans first, and there’s never been an entry in this genre before as accessible to so many people while also maintaining such depth.

I am tremendously looking forward to the summer of 2024 where I may actually have time to play it.

5. Robocop: Rogue City
I was pretty sure I was going to dig Robocop: Rogue City considering how much I loved Terminator: Resistance, but I had absolutely no idea it would get this high on my list. Rogue City excels because I could not possibly imagine a videogame nailing its source material any harder. It’s the perfect Robocop game. Busting through walls, throwing guys through windows, and clearing Detroit of scum one bullet at a time while turning said scum into hamburger across a wide variety of dilapidated urban buildings — not since Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise has a property been so seamlessly transitioned to the world of videogames.

I wrote the review for the site, so any readers looking for a more detailed explanation as to what makes this game kick so much ass should go read that. Robocop: Rogue City is one of my favorite licensed games ever made, and it’s very deserving of this spot. Single-player First Person Shooters are a dying breed, and Teyon is doing their darndest to keep the genre alive one ’80s movie at a time.

4. Super Mario Wonder
New Super Mario Bros. as a franchise-within-a-franchise is perfectly adequate. They’re well designed, creative, and rather inoffensive entries into the Mario canon, but they’ve never quite had the spark seen in the upper echelon Mario games. Super Mario Wonder adds the one thing the development team needed to get it over the hump — drugs. Lots of drugs, which is what I would believe the development team had in abundance, but this game is made in Japan where drugs are a big no-no, so I’m just going to assume the people behind Wonder are high on life in all its grandeur.

The word of the day with Super Mario Wonder is variety. Nearly every level has some sort of quirk or mechanic to spice it up. There is no filler here. The level design starts at ‘exceptional’ and maintains an absurdly high bar of quality for the entirety of the experience. Any human walking the Earth today can have fun playing Super Mario Wonder, but achieving 100% completion and getting through the truly dastardly special stages is a real test for any player. 2D Mario is not nostalgic — it is eternal, and this is the best 2D Mario since Super Mario World.

3. Pizza Tower

There is something primal about Pizza Tower that really speaks to me. This game has a vibe, man. Taking heavy inspiration from the Wario Land games, Pizza Tower controls like an absolute dream while my main man Peppino Spaghetti frantically runs through well-designed levels that take full advantage of the movement capabilities the developers at Tour De Pizza have bestowed upon players. This is accompanied by the best beats I heard in any game this year, and the team channeled the spirit of the Sega Genesis in a way that this ’90s kid really appreciated. The escape theme drives fear into my heart while also making me bob my head in affirmation.

That same ’90s kid also adores the Nicktoons-inspired art beautifully represented on screen by some of the best sprite-work in recent memory. Even though it’s high quality, Pizza Tower’s ability to maintain said high quality while also successfully paying homage to dozens of sub-par, boilerplate 16-bit platformers in style and tone is commendable. It’s weird, it’s demanding, it’s occasionally unsettling, and it can be downright maddening for completionists, but I adored my time in Pizza Tower’s cheesy, gooey world. There’s nothing else like it in the astoundingly competitive world of 2D indie platformers, which helps Pizza Tower rise to the upper crust.

2. Final Fantasy XVI
I have a list of words and terms I desperately try to avoid when writing about videogames, and at the top of that list is the word ‘Epic’. The term that is far overused and it ruins the ability to use the term when actually justified. If everything is epic, than nothing is epic.

With that said, Final Fantasy XVI is maybe the most epic videogame I have ever played.

I’m a sucker for AAA ballyhoo, and this game had some of the most deliriously ludicrous production values I’ve ever seen. Beautifully rendered graphics, tremendous sound design, an exceptional orchestral score, a staggering level of detail in environments, and fantastic voice work, including a pun-fully-intended star-making performance from Ben Starr as lead Clive Rosfield. It’s a tad problematic in spots writing-wise and it drags a bit in the last third, but when it was firing on all cylinders, I didn’t have a better time playing videogames all year.

The scale of big moments here are absolutely spectacular, and spectacle has always been a hallmark of this franchise. Final Fantasy has never been the deepest JRPG or had the most complex gameplay mechanics, and so much of what I remember from playing this series for decades in particular has been crazy summon spells and hardware-pushing worlds. While I’m not sure of it’s merits as a Japanese Role Playing Game due to its “What if Devil May Cry was an MMO?” combat system, Final Fantasy XVI is absolutely a Final Fantasy game, and it was the most enjoyment I’ve got out of a mainline entry in over twenty years. That’s worth celebrating, and with Final Fantasy XIV producer Naoki Yoshida at the helm, I think the main franchise has a bright future.

1. Alan Wake II

This was an easy choice, but while I adored playing this game, it’s what Sam Lake and the team at Remedy have laid the foundation for that makes Alan Wake II stand above all else in 2023. What I’m referring to is the creation of the Remedy Interactive Universe. While they have referentially hinted at games they’ve created within their other games for decades now, they’ve now gone all-in on the concept of a shared universe. This can be occasionally problematic as Remedy only own the rights to about half their library, so some iconic names have to be changed. However, longtime fans of their work will be picking up on what they’re selling pretty easily, and the payoff is extraordinary for those players.

Alan Wake II is also the best videogame of the year partially due to the innovative usage of other forms of media. The Old Gods of Asgard are back, and they’re still pumping out hits. The goofy musical number in the middle of their horror game was already spoiled at The Game Awards, but I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of witnessing that thing having no prior knowledge. This work has the best-produced FMV in any videogame I’ve ever played, but the most impressive aspect of said FMV is how seamlessly it is integrated into the overall package.

In a year of very high highs, Remedy reached the highest, and nothing this year pushed the boundaries of what a videogame can be harder than Alan Wake II. Also, Ahti the Janitor is back, so that made this a pretty easy choice.

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