Recent reviews by KingKrouch

This rerelease of The Sims fares a lot better than The Sims 2 in some aspects, but has some minor gripes and major issues in others.

For the positives:

• The game runs at the resolution that you have set, and there's no godawful bilinear filtering going on, you're getting raw pixels.
  
• They seemingly rewrote all of the rendering code in Vulkan (Although who's to say that this isn't simply just a D3D7 > Vulkan wrapper of sorts running underneath), meaning in theory it should handle modern hardware much better
  
• They got the game running higher than 30FPS, which for a while required a D3D7/DirectDraw wrapper to fix on the original release of the game.

For the gripes:

• The loading times when you're just starting the game (or even saving) is egregiously long.
  
• While the starting screen seems to run at whatever your screen refresh rate is, as soon as you go in game, it dips by quite a bit, and it gets worse the further you zoom out.

For the major issues:

• The game reaches unplayable framerates (like 4 to 6FPS) when a few sims are on-screen, and it gets even worse the more sims you have.

Honestly, I was thinking that this version could've been better than the treatment that The Sims 2 got, but honestly, in some aspects, it's significantly worse. EA had one job, and they fumbled it. This needs to be patched as well.

About time that EA rereleases The Sims and The Sims 2 after years of being unavailable to buy on Steam. But so far, something that should've given EA some much needed praise in these dire times fell completely flat given the state of this rerelease of the game.

So for some positives of this rerelease:

• The game supports a wider range of resolutions now, including ultrawide and HD resolutions
  
• They patched the game to allow using more RAM
  
• They patched the game to have better UI scaling at high resolutions
  
• This version comes with all of the expansion packs for a relatively sane price, considering the fact that expansions were $30-40 back in the day, and Stuff expansions were $20.

There's already several things that I can say are wrong with this rerelease of the game, and that EA needs to patch:

• Rather than EA fixing the problems with shadow rendering, they completely disabled shadows in this game, with no way to turn them back on. Modders already found a fix for this in the game's original release, and that can be found on the PC Gaming Wiki.
  
• By default, the game only has Fullscreen Exclusive Mode with a set list of hardcoded refresh rates, and it defaults at 640x480 for some obtuse reason (Which nowadays does cause problems). If your screen refresh rate is over 100Hz (Even then, your display actually has to support that specific refresh rate), only a 60Hz option will appear. Your display needs to explicitly support 75Hz, 90Hz, or 100Hz to even get those options. Fullscreen mode should've been switched over to a borderless mode. For now, you can force a borderless mode by using "-w -r2560x1440" in the game's launch parameters on Steam, and then using the Borderless Gaming app to force it. If you're using Linux, and specifically KDE Plasma, all you have to do is right click the icon for the game, go to "More", and then tick off the box for fullscreen.
  
• WASD camera movement only seems to work in the lot-view section of the game when you load into a town.
  
• Camera corner movement (basically, when you move your mouse to the corner of the screen, it moves the camera in that direction) is completely busted at framerates higher than 60FPS.
  
• Arrow movement feels slower and significantly more floaty when the game runs higher than 60FPS.
  
• The body shop application is completely missing here.

It's also worth noting that some people have reported crashing issues with the game, but I don't know if this is because of AMD/Intel drivers, or something else entirely. Things have been relatively stable for me on Linux, but it might be worth trying DXVK on Windows to see if the game still has crashing.

I think it's only fair that we judge a modern remaster/rerelease of a game by modern expectations for ports of older games. This really is rivaling the Star Wars Battlefront 2 remaster from Aspyr, SADX from Sega, and Rockstar's treatment of the entire GTA PS2 trilogy's ports and remasters in terms of how badly a company can screw up a remaster of a beloved game.

It's great that you can run this game without needing obscure GPU-specific config tweaks and special third-party software for configuring the game anymore, but there's some really massive missteps in this rerelease and EA's refusal to fix certain things that makes this a questionable effort. They didn't do enough to fix the game to run optimally on modern hardware, and actively downgraded certain things to make it worse than the original release of the game.

Kind of wish there were more Blue Archive songs, and the difficulty on two of them are overbearing even on easy, but it's neat that there's Blue Archive stuff and two new Menthako BA images since they stopped uploading in December of 2023.

The way that things are worded regarding collab stuff is strange, as they make it seem like it fades away if you don't buy it before the deadline. Why not just sell those as DLC and have them as a bundle (And then remove the time limited DLC from sale once the time expires), so it's not confusing to buy new content and there's less of a risk of a save issue wiping the content you paid for. This single DLC basically acts as an unlock key of sorts. What if the deadline expires and your save somehow gets wiped on accident? Would that mean the content you paid money for disappears?

That said, I need to play more of the new tracks that have been added. Get this on sale rather than paying the $40 for it.

So far, this is a vast improvement over the original PC releases of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 on Steam. You also don't need a gazillion third-party mods (like the 60FPS patch) and workarounds (like dgvoodoo2, since the game only runs at 640x480 FSE natively) to somewhat have the games working fine on modern setups. I've been needing to get around to playing this series, but was reluctant as for a while, the only good way to play the first game was to emulate the Sega Dreamcast version. I'll update my review when I play more of the game, but based on the praise I hear about this series, I better not be let down. So far, I dig the atmosphere, and the voice acting is really good too.

But from my time trying to get the original PC releases running on my system, here's some of the notable changes to this remaster, plenty of which are welcome additions, and make this the definitive way to play the game.

• The new models and textures seem like a noticeable improvement (at least to me, I'm aware that art remastering is subjective in this regards).
  
• The game runs without issues on the Steam Deck. No compatibility layer workarounds or third-party fixes required, it works and boots up fairly quickly at that.
  
• The opening FMV for SR1 is both higher resolution and rendered at a smoother framerate (Can't say if they re-rendered things, or used AI upscaling/interpolation for this, but the results are pretty good considering how others attempt this).
  
• Works fine with ultrawide resolutions.
  
• Tuns with an unlocked framerate (Unlike the original which had physics issues with anything higher than 30FPS).
  
• Native DualShock/DualSense support (Although currently with the caveat that you sadly have to disable SteamInput to have the correct prompts, which may present issues on the Steam Deck or Bazzite when using a PS controller as you can't easily disable it in game mode).

Now for some things I would've liked to see:

• This one may be incredibly contentious, but in a similar vein to how the Tomb Raider remaster had a new control scheme, it would've been nice to have the ability to aim things to throw (like enemies) in a specific direction using the analog stick. I think the closest example that I can think of on the top of my head is similar to throwing characters in Metal Gear Solid V. I've heard other people complain that these games feel dated, but I don't really have an issue with it outside of that one issue, so that's the only stickler I have with the controls at the moment. The lock-on system likewise is serviceable.
  
• Would've been neat to see more significant lighting and mesh changes like with what the Tomb Raider remasters had, but from what I recall, from the NoClip documentary about Soul Reaver, Aspyr cited an engine issue as the reason for being unable to do that.
  
• Extra graphics and scalability options (like anti-aliasing and supersampling options). But considering the game already runs pretty well even on a Steam Deck, lower spec systems being unable to play the game shouldn't be a huge concern, considering the ridiculously low system requirements (for current day standards).
  
• A built-in OpenGL to DXGI interop, the reason being that the game has stuttering issues unless you have a modern GPU that has updated drivers with the ability to make OpenGL and Vulkan games run with a Flip Model swapchain (essentially, how frames are presented to the screen, depending on how this is done, it can introduce latency or stuttering). Judging by the system requirements, plenty of older GPUs might not even have up to date graphics card drivers with a driver-side workaround to fix this issue.
  
• Menu navigation and the photo mode controls feel more erratic and hard to control the higher the game's framerate is.

Despite the current small nitpicks that I have, this remaster so far has enough quality of life improvements where I'd suggest picking this up over the original Steam releases, even if the base price is slightly higher. The extra money that you pay not only is voting with your wallet for a potential new game, but also for the convenience of not having to spend hours modding the original games into a playable state. What you aren't paying for with money, you're usually paying for in time.

For a $10 upgrade, this isn't a huge downgrade, and there's some tangible improvements here regarding ultrawide support and frame generation (Which is an improvement for high refresh rate displays and handhelds). My issue with this upgrade is that for some reason, the game is more CPU bound than it was with the previous version of the game (Changing FSR quality settings and lowering graphics settings does diddly squat for performance), mouse controls still feel pretty weird (even with frame generation disabled), the forced PlayStation launcher stuff (You have to use a launch parameter to even get the game working on Proton and the Steam Deck), I could keep going. I have a 8 core 16 thread Ryzen CPU, and for some reason this version runs significantly worse than the original game regardless of graphics settings.

The install size is basically doubled despite there not being that much of a visual difference with the maxed out original PC release outside of character models.

I could've sworn a bunch of the cutscenes in the beginning were done in real-time, because for some reason, those run at 30FPS, while I remember the original game having these cutscenes done in-engine. Either that, or it ignores your graphics settings during cutscenes.

For $10 sure, but I can't imagine spending $50 on this, wait for a sale.

A load of crappy decisions after another on behalf of EA, and now they completely blocked Steam Deck and Linux support.

How about take a hike, we are already tired of the live service nonsense and the questionable battle pass, and this just the cherry on top.

Despite the Call of Duty games having anti-cheat that blocks Linux and Steam Deck users, it still had cheaters on day one. We are not installing a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ operating system (Windows 11) that was a glorified beta just to play one game.

Imagine making frame generation an NVIDIA GPU exclusive feature when FSR 3 support (only upscaling unfortunately) is technically already in the game. RTX 40 series GPU owners aren't even the majority and the game in theory should already run well on those cards.

There's a weird issue during cutscenes where the framerate tanks below 60FPS, but actual gameplay seems to run fine. This game seems to have really strange framerate issues at the moment.

You have to switch the display manually in the graphics settings because using the shortcut to move a window to a different display results in stretching if they aren't the same resolution.

HDR support in the game is half-baked, for some reason it looks washed out and reds look like browns.

DualShock and DualSense support is not in this port, there's only Xbox prompts.

The most positive thing I can say at the moment is that most of the features they advertised are there (setting aside cutscene pillarboxing on ultrawide, which is understandable since they likely don't want to go and touch these up to fix issues), and the game doesn't seem to play terribly on a mouse and keyboard. It also runs mostly at a locked 60FPS on the Steam Deck with everything maxed out but shadow quality set to medium, and shadow blending set to smooth.

EDIT: Before anyone says "Just use the Nukem9 DLSS to FSR mod, Uniscaler, or DLSS Enabler", trust me, I've tried both of these and yet while frame generation works fine before you enable it on startup, it causes the game to not even boot up if you have it enabled from the get-go. The fact that I've spent nearly 2 hours trying to troubleshoot this game (much in the same way with Red Dead Redemption 2 and how it crashed with my USB headset at launch) should already be a massive UX failure. People can spam the jester award at me all they want, I'm dead serious, cope about people not being mindless consoomers for a change. Modern western/eastern game studios can't even get a port of a 14 year old game correct nowadays.

This is a fun little PSX/N64 styled 3D platformer that feels like a mix between Crash Bandicoot, Ristar, and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. For the price of $7 on a Steam sale, this is pretty good. I really like the gameplay, it's pretty, picking up enemies and throwing them is pretty amusing. The game has a cute art direction.

I do have a few things to note regarding technical issues with the game (Most severe first, with the more inconsequential stuff last), and then some minor qualms about the sound design.

• The first technical issue is that the native Linux client (What you'll be playing on Linux or the Steam Deck by default), has extremely egregious stuttering and framerate issues that happen regularly during gameplay, and the fullscreen mode stretches on an ultrawide display. To fix this, you can just go to the compatibility settings for the game, and then set it to use Proton Experimental. For some reason, both the Windows and Linux versions are installed in the same directory, which means you have an extra copy of the game installed, don't get why this can't just be a separate depot.
  
  
• The second technical issue is that you will need SteamInput force enabled in this game, despite the developers flagging it to support DualShock/DualSense controllers natively, because on the DualSense, the left analog stick's vertical axis is reversed, camera control is busted (You can't use the right stick, and for some reason the triggers handle the vertical camera control), and so is the D-Pad movement. This is a simple fix though, just enable SteamInput in the game's controller settings. I can't say if this will just work with DualShock controllers or on Windows, but my DualSense controller on Linux gives me issues.
  
  
• The third technical issue is that while the game has a list of resolutions that can be chosen, stuff like 4:3/16:10/Ultrawide resolution support is nowhere to be seen. From what I've played of the game, there's no design choices built around a specific aspect ratio (like fullscreen UI elements that are supposed to be clipped) that would prevent supporting this.
  
  
• The fourth technical issue is probably going to be a minor nitpick at best, but the moving platforms are seemingly using FixedUpdate for movement, which at least on my 175Hz monitor, results in extremely visible jittering when you have Renata on the moving platforms.

I could attempt to fix some of the technical issues by creating a BepInEx mod, but I can't say for certain if I can find exactly what needs to be fixed (without simply bruteforcing a hook that grabs onto a function that changes the game's resolution) thanks to the game using IL2CPP (essentially it compiles Mono/C# IL code to C++ machine code, and it obfuscates a ton of things), which makes it more difficult to mod.

Onto the sound design, things sound relatively decent, but I personally don't feel like the level finish (or when you finish bosses) has enough of an emotional impact compared to the standard level music. In other words, it doesn't give enough of a rewarding feel to it.

It's a pretty fun game so far, just make sure to follow my advice by enabling SteamInput and using Proton Experimental on Linux and the Steam Deck to avoid most of the issues.

EDIT: I've put together a mod to add ultrawide support to the game, trying to minimize stuttering issues (right now it's a simple FixedUpdate value workaround), and a way to offset the camera distance and height, that can be found here:

https://github.com/KingKrouch/FrogunFix/releases

Schneider, Regulus, and Spathodea 😭😭😭

That first part aside, the game is alright (I think it does the turn-based thing better than other gacha games by having it card based), and the story is pretty good from what I've played. Imagine Fate/GO if it was actually good.

The majority of my playtime was on mobile and Waydroid. You can get it running on Proton and the Steam Deck very easily.

Despite the game's 30/60FPS option, the game runs with an unlocked framerate, at least on my system configurations, which is great, as the mobile version has a locked framerate and looks noticeably choppier. There's no keyboard shortcuts for in-game actions, so you're gonna be using a mouse or a touch-screen to play. It also works out of the box with my ultrawide monitor (3440x1440).

Noticeable FPS drops, shader compilation stutter (pair that with egregious texture pop-in even on an NVME), a 60FPS lock (paired with slowdown below that), and no ultrawide support on a game that the publisher (Bandai Namco) is charging $100+ for. If you buy it on a key-site (like Humble or GreenManGaming) then it's around $90 but you forfeit your right to a refund.

The only positive thing I can say about the PC version is that it has some graphics options (DBZK was barebones in comparison), PlayStation button prompts, and actually lets you play the single-player mode on Proton/Steam Deck.

The game is seemingly using Unreal Engine's Fixed Framerate settings which is bad news because if you raise the framerate with INI tweaks, it will slow the actual game speed down if you can't hit that target, and even with the default settings if you can't hit 60FPS it will slow down. Just use delta time normally like every other Unreal Engine game does.

Alt-tabbing is completely busted as it won't hide the window when you focus another one.

The HDR display mode looks incredibly washed out and dull (Probably poorly configured defaults in Unreal Engine striking yet again). At least on Linux (through Gamescope) it is, on Windows, it looks fine. Some people report it looks washed out for them on Windows, so your mileage may vary.

This also isn't using the Unreal Engine 5 version that has built in PSO caching (This uses 5.1.1 if the exif metadata is anything to go by). Turning down the graphics options does squat to help improve performance or to fix the physical slowdowns.

The online multiplayer doesn't work on Proton and the Steam Deck due to the anti-cheat shenanigans.

Played a few matches, the game itself is fun, but they learned nothing from the DBZ Kakarot PC port. And despite their constant patches on that game to add more live service crap, they didn't fix anything that was wrong with that port, so I'm not holding out any breath that this game isn't going to be similar. I'll revise this review once Bandai Namco patches the game.

There's a bunch of characters in Tenkaichi 3 that aren't in Sparking Zero.

EDIT: Just got the game installed on my Steam Deck. Strangely enough the game doesn't have black bars with anything narrower than 16:9. I noticed this when I saw that there was a strange issue with Master Roshi's ultimate kamehameha and how the top and bottom were expanded.

But from my time playing on the Steam Deck, no, it's not a stable 60FPS, even with low settings, and the game's speed does slow down using default settings (no INI tweaks).

If the game didn't have the slowdown issue, you probably could cap it at 40 or 50 and have it stable.

EDIT 2 (Mods to fix the issues):

So it looks like this mod works for unlocking the framerate in Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero for me.

You will need this which you then put into SparkingZero/Content/Paks/~mods:

https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonballsparkingzero/mods/10

You will also need this mod to basically force the game to load signatureless .PAK files:

https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonballsparkingzero/mods/18

As for ultrawide support, you can use this mod:

https://github.com/Lyall/UltrawidePatches/blob/main/Fort%20Solis/FortSolis_SUWSF.zip