Matthew Supert

Found this over on Reddit. It was a fun little exervicse, so let me share why I chose each of these games. 

Favorite Game - Overwatch: I had quite difficult time selecting this actually as there have been so many games that have really captured me. I picked Overwatch simply because it is the game I have the most hours into and I am still playing it to this day. 

Best Story - Bioshock: The game played out like a novel for me in the best way possible. It was dark, mysterious and so self contained in an interesting way. The world that the game was set it was one of a kind and the twist at the end of the game broke the fourth wall for me and literally made me drop my controller. 

Favorite Art Style - Wind Waker: This wasn't my first Zelda game, but it was the first one that truly captured my attention and the unique cel shading was a huge part of what made this game look amazing when it came out and why it still looks amazing today. 

Biggest Personal Impact - Spiritfarer: Very few  video games have brought me to tears like Spiritfarer. This is just the sweetest of games telling the story of unimaginable personal loss while celebrating all of the people and moments in one's life. It was a magical experience to have played this game. 

Best Combat - Bayonetta: I could've gone a lot of different ways on this one, and almost settled on a fighting game like Street Fighter 2, but Bayonetta jumped out to me for its combo system and flashy animations. Easy to button mash but hard to perfect. 

Overhated - Sonic the Hedgehog: The Sonic games get a lot of hate for for just their roller coaster side scrolling and not really being games. I can't say I've played much 3D sonic, but the 2D games always make for a good time.

Underrated - Fantasy Life: Fantasy Life on the 3DS. took me by complete surprise. It's an open world adventure RPG where you have maybe a dozen different jobs you can switch between. Never expected to love it as much as I did, but it is so charming.

Overrated - Fornite: I'll be honest I have maybe less than a dozen hours here, but I honestly think other Battle Royales almost always do it better and I just never could get the hang of the building mechanic.

Needs a Remake - Prince of Persia Sands of Time: I played this on the GameCube and it totally captured me. Amazing story. Funny writing and fantastic gameplay. 

Criminally Overlooked - Sunset Overrdrive: Nearly a launch title on the One X this game should've become a series. It was bright and flashy, had fun music and great controls. It was goofy in that mall punk sort of way. I wish we got a sequel.

Favorite Protagonist - Assassin's Creed 2: Ezio Auditore. 

Favorite Antagonist - Portal 2: Wheatley and GLADOS.

Best Sound Track - Skyrim: Simply amazing and I play it on a regular basis. 

Best Multiplayer - Overwatch: I had to give it to Overwatch simply because of how much I play it. It still hold up. 

Not Usually My Thing But... - Pikmin 3: This game took me by surprise. It was charming, cute, and funny and actually fairly slow paced, and I held on to the end to finish it, 

Turn My Brain Off - Meteos: I'll admit that I haven't played this game in years, but I felt I needed to put a good puzzle game in here somewhere and I spent hours and hours playing Meteos in college to turn off my brain. 

Best with Friends - Rock Band 2: This one is pretty self explanatory. Having the full setup and then jamming out in your living room is and experience like nothing else and unfortunately, not one I think we are ever going to see again. 

Best Retro Game - Super Mario World: It's rated as one of the best games of all time for a reason and the game is just perfection.

Nostalgic Childhood Game - Uniracers: This game just enraptured me on the SNES. It looked amazing and it was so fast. No other racer was like it and I remember just spending hours playing it. 

Game Everyone Should Play: I have to give this one again to Spiritfarer. There is just a deep emotional hit with this one that I think everyone should experience. 

I've been playing Citizen Sleeper for a little over a year now, popping on to play it in 20 minute bursts. This game was so delightful and hit the same sort of melancholy vibe for me that Spiritfarer did. This is a narrative game with a delightfully dreamy ambient soundtrack, that is perfect to play in the dark late at night. The stories told here through your experience as sleeper are very heartfelt and personal and are designed to showcase each of your direct impacts upon the people and places that are around the Eye, which is the space station you inhabit. 

Play this game and go ahead and IV drip it in slow increments as it is just pure bliss with some fantastic storytelling. 

I have not had an opportunity to play a lot of games over the past couple of months. I recently wrapped up Indiana Jones and the Great Circle a few weeks ago, and that game took me almost 3 months of on and off play to finish. There is a lot of good stuff coming out this summer, so I didn't want to get into another super long game. South of Midnight came out on Gamepass a few weeks ago and had a bit of hype going around it online. I decided to give it a go, not knowing exactly what I was getting into. 

I was pleasantly surprised by South of Midnight as it turned out to be a really nice adventure game. It really harkens back to an older style of gameplay that I felt was very refreshing. It's a simple, run/jump/fight/explore game that is fairly linear in process. It took me about 12 hours to complete, and I really enjoyed my time with it. 

The game has a beautiful graphical style, an almost quasi-stop motion design that gives me Fable aesthetics. If Fable ever comes out and looks like this game, I would be more than pleased with the aesthetic. The music in this game was also delightful as well, giving me "Tim Burton" vibes where the songs and lyrics played into the scene and narrative. It really incorporated into the gameplay really well.

The game does have some issues. Notably, the combat. While it is good, it is largely stagnant, and you are doing the same thing from the start of the game all the way to the very end. I never felt like the combat was that big of a deal and most instances were quick, so it never really got in the way of the gameplay. 

There was one story element that also really didn't feel cohesive and was sort a sloppily wrapped up at the end of the game. Again, not a big deal, but it just felt a bit weird. 

Overall, totally worth playing. Great vibes with some very touching moments and some fun character design. Worth checking out for a quick game. 

I've been slowly making my way through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle over the past couple of months. I started it back around January while over holiday break and I just wrapped it up this past weekend, taking a small break for the past month or so. This has been a really fantastic game that captured the feel and of the original Indiana Jones movies really well. Everything from the music, to the writing, to the score all nailed the feel and I honestly would love to see this story made into an Indiana Jones movie. 

I need up taking a break in the game because I was striving to get all of the secret collectables, which I haven;t done yet, but aim to go back and do at some point. My only real critique of the game is that I felt the third act (in Sukothai) felt a bit long for me and was mostly the same gameplay mecahnics being brought forth for a third time. Even while exploring that area, I never really felt like I had a good handle on where things were in relation to each other, even with the use of the boat. I think this in part might be due to the forest generally looking the same, but also the traversal areas are much more limited due to the flooded pass area. 

Such a great game though and just makes me want to see and consume more content in this world. 

The January Game of the Month over at r/SBCGaming was Metroid Prime Fusion. I have never played this game before and I was rather excited to give it a go. I have not really played any Metroid 2D games with the exception of Samus Returns for the 3DS. I've found that these games share a lot of DNA and I suppose that is just how 2D Metroid games are? If it is I unfortunately have to admit that perhaps 2D Metroid games aren't for me. 

I rather enjoyed the exploration aspects of the game quite a bit, but I found two of the core gameplay mechanics incredibly frustrating. First, while the exploration was rather fun, the investigation for the various hidden areas is a complete chore. Some areas had visual cues to indicate that there was something there, but most of them had no indication they were there. It ended up in me just shooting and bombing the walls for every room that I entered. Even after I found some the the hidden routes, I sometimes still had trouble figuring out what I was supposed to be doing.  It bogged the game down and I had to lookup a walkthrough on more than one occasion.

Second, the boss battles were infuriating most of the time and I often had to go back to the same walkthrough to read about how to game the combat. I finally had to give up on the game just near the section that is in the screenshot of this post when I came face to face with my nemesis in the game and had to figure out how to out run them with little queue on how to actually solve the encounter. 

Perhaps this game is just a product of its time, but I have to admit that it just isn't for me. 

I've really been feeling some nostalgia the past few months for some retro video games. I picked up Master Blaster Zero for my 3DS a few months ago and the aesthetic and gameplay felt really refreshing to me. That led me down the path of looking into getting a retro handheld gaming device. After a long research process I settled on the TrimUI Brick. It is a fairly new device, released this past fall, but has some good reviews. Megan picked it up for me for Christmas and I have been getting some of my retro game time on to some delight. 

Some of the games I have played so far are Super Mario World (of course) and Super Baseball 2020. Over on the r/SBCGaming subreddit they are doing a "Game of the Month", which is a really fund idea to get people to explore games. January's game is Metroid Fusion, which I'll talk about bit more about in another post. 

I'm having a really fun time with this little device so far though. It's rough around the edges though and the software is not very polished. This is definitely a "tinkerer's" hobby with messing with settings. On more than one occasion I've had to hard reboot the device and clear out settings that I've messed up. 

If you have been following the gaming news as of late, everyone has been talking about Space Marine 2. I picked it up about two weeks ago, since I am a big fan of the world building. I beat the game last week so, let's talk a little bit about my thoughts. 

Overall, I had a decent time with this game, but I am not quite sure it lived up to the hype that I am seeing online about it "harkening back to an older time in gaming". The campaign was probably 15 hours or so for me to beat. It was fine and a decent linear romp, but if I am being honest, it felt very much like a less rushed Warhammer Vermintide, with just a little bit more ammo. 

The waves of enemies that are thrown on screen at you are cool the first couple of times they happen, and the opening chapter sets a nice tone for the game. By the 30th time it happens though, I just sort of got bored with it. I guess that sorta goes for the combat in general for me as well. Executing a well timed counter results in a cool cinematic, but when you see it for the 60th time, it doesn't continue to impress. I also found the combat a bit frustrating at times because the armor/health management and recovery is not satisfying as it should be. Too often I found myself overwhelmed with crowd control, while simultaneously getting rocked by a ranged attack somewhere offscreen that I couldn't see. 

Bigger enemies just took way too much to whittle down before you could get the "execute" option and the returned armor/health almost never made up for the damage you took to get in close enough to melee them. 

I also found the game surpassingly devoid of combat puzzles through the campaign. There were a couple of instances of holding some zones to open a gate, and one fun instance in the PvE multiplayer where you had to enter some glyphs to attack a drake, but that was kinda it. And also, if this was such a throw back feeling game, where was the obligatory vehicular run and gun sequence?

Overall I felt everything just kinda felt boring and samey at the end and even when the Chaos Marines finally showed up, their tactics and enemy types were almost exactly the same as the Tyranid. I'll leave my final single player thoughts with the fact that I also kinda hated the main character you played as. He is a terrible commander, and that would be fine if not for the fact that they try to redeem him with this camaraderie ideal right at the end of the game. I hated Titus and there were multiple times in the game where he chewed his squad out for making poor choices, but then he deliberately would not divulge mission critical information to them. 

Multiplayer also leaves me really wanting. The PvE chapters are fun, and the concept of having you play as the "B Team" in parallel to the main story mission is a brilliant idea. However, they still have that Vermintide feel to them for me, and out of the maybe dozen sessions I've played I have yet to matchmake with a full party. PvP also is just middling. While it does bring back a Gears of War sort of feel, I don't think I'm fully grasping the combat translation from single player to the multi-player. For example, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to be effective with melee combat in PvP and similarly, does the counter/parry system work at all? I haven't seen it trigger at any point. I believe there are only three or four maps too. On top of all of that the load out customization appears to be different between multiplayer environments? Why? 

Overall, fun game, but I don't think I got a fully $70 worth out of it.  

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the past month or so, since it came out on the Xbox. People have been praising this game since August so I was pretty excited to get into the game. I am a huge D&D and TTRPG fan afterall, so the prospect of bringing that to a videogame seemed pretty exciting.

I’ve just hit Act 3 this past week and I think I am about 60-70 hours in. If I am being honest, I dont think I like this game very much and it almost entirely boils down to the combat.

But before we really get into that, let’s talk about some other things in the game that just don’t seem to connect with me. The game is very heavility influenced by the actual D&D roleplay mechanic system. Unforuntely, that brings all of the similar trappings that come with playing D&D, but without the benefit of having the ability to get contextual information or clarification form your dungeon master. Roleplay is probably my favorite part of D&D and Baldur’s Gate on the whoile does a pretty decent job of this. However, it obfuscates the skill checks and rolls in most roleplay or social situations. I very often will find myself in a conversation which results in a roll, but I have no way to know which character may be most appropriate for the situation or context. Furthermore, when a roll like Persuasion is required I have no idea what the stat for the chracter that I have select is. If the game didn’t explicitly have a dice roll in these situations, I probably wouldn’t care, but if it is going to show me that actual roll, every…single…time at least let me see what my modifier is before I select that as a dialog option.

Contextual clues are the biggest frustration I have with this game. There have been way too many situations where I am walking around the world where combat will just suddenly start, or worse yet, I think it will, and it doesn’t resulting in a conversation that has to preempt combat. Just today I wrestled with a combat scenario against some Githyanki in a hidden library. I must’ve run this combat 6-7 times. After getting obliterated the first time I tried to sneak and get surprise on the enemy for an attack. every single time I would get a spell off and then the conversation would trigger and then waste the concentrate or spell I just cast. I had a nearly identical level of frustration with the combat that occured at the entrance of the Moonrise Towers in Act 2.

I basically had to “cheese” the combat to get an upper hand due to the action economy. Almost every combat has significantly more combatants than your party.

Let’s continue our conversation though on that Githyanki fight and the way it was structured. There were two portals on the sides of the room, summoning in more Githyanki each round. Those portals were placed just sor perfectly to be out of reach of any of my spells like Fireball, etc. This is frustrating game design, because it is almost impossible to know that those exist until you fail at a first attempt of combat. There was no way going into that room to know how to position my characters and accommodate for that specific setup. So many of the combat encounters have this same sort of thing and it is just driving me away from wanting to continue to play.

Let's take a look at my year in gaming on Xbox. I am a bit surprised at this to be honest. I had no idea that I played 43 games. Deep Rock was definitely my most played game this year. I am surprised at my hours for Starfield. I cranked through that game in a couple of weeks and enjoyed it, but fell off pretty hard after the first ending. I didn't make to any subsequent NG+ games. 

This past week I have been knocked out of commission due to a nasty head cold. I unfortunately have never been able to "nap" so I have be stuck on the couch, cleaning up work emails and trying to find something else to pass the time. Too tired to read or engage my brain in any real creative activity I decided to give the recent Gamepass release Pentiment a go, and boy did it hit the right spot at the right time. 

Pentiment is a text based murder mystery game focused around 16th century Bavaria, the Catholic Church, and the Holy Roman Empire. The adventure takes place in the town of Tassing where you have to first investigate a murder at the local abbey. The murder mystery has you as the main character going around the town, looking for clues and interviewing people in the town. All standard "your choice affects the world and people" stuff we have seen in many games. 

What really sets Pentiment apart though is the atmosphere. First the game's art style is a wonderful hand drawn and there is almost no music in the game, with the exception of two notable instances in my play through. It came to be incredibly relaxing while laying on the couch sick. 

The other thing that really caught me about this game is how it built this sense of family and community. The game is really about the people and the families of Tassing. There are three acts in the game that take place over twenty years and through each act you see families grow, some members pass away, and others get married to each other. It was touching and it really grounded me to the characters to see where they have come and where they were going. Finding out that someone from the first act had passed away really struck me emotionally as I needed to delicately navigate how to inquire about the circumstances of what happened the seven years I was gone. 

This was the late 1500's after all and times were tough. Political and religious struggle was bounded by the plague and class warfare and that is reflected in this game. It all came together though in the third act as the game culminates on Christmas Eve. All of your choices an all of the lives of the characters in the game come together on the Christmas Eve celebration at the local inn. All of the townspeople are there and there is this brilliant moment of cultural community that is brought together that just really touched me from a storytelling perspective. That pure sense of community and despite all of the hardships and tragedy that have occurred to the characters in this game, they all soldiered through it together, as a community.

The game can be a bit hard though to get invested in, especially if you aren't prepared for the amount of text you need to parse through. Additionally, there is a beautiful element many of the character's text in the game is different based upon their profession. For example, the monks at the monastery have text bubbles in a gothic font. The local printer has his family's text in a print font. This is a great touch, but can be a bit hard to read at times. Thankfully, there is a "simple font" option for those who want to turn it on, but the game does lose a bit of charm there. 

Also, the other minor fault in the narrative flow is that the game doesn't always give you a good indication of how much interaction and time you have between the scenes. There were multiple instances where I could have interviewed more people, but didn't realize my current interaction was going to progress forward the clock. That was not telegraphed very well early on. 

Overall though, such a wonderful and touching game and I think I might play it again to see how the story changes with different dialog choices and different interactions. Check it out if you are looking for a nice, slow paced game.