Recent reviews by TheCakeIsaPie

RetroArch is very robust, versatile, and light on performance. It supports many features and has a modular design for running different machines. It also works on Linux. I recommend it.

Don't let the brevity of this game fool you. It is a masterpiece. Although you can complete the main story in an hour or two, there are plenty of other missions to go on--and they all have high replay value. Just like every MGS game, "Ground Zeroes" is packed full of secrets and hidden content. This is not just a prologue to "The Phantom Pain" that you can ignore. You owe it to yourself to play this.

If you like "the classic shooter from the 90's" then you'll love this.

The story is disappointing, largely because Kojima wasn't given the time he needed to finish development, and the world isn't crafted with nearly the same level of detail and care that previous entries were. But the gameplay is arguably the best in the series. If you play MGSV with the right expectations, and think of it more like an all-you-can-eat buffet of stealth action, or a really big expansion pack full of original levels, then you'll have a mostly enjoyable experience.

But do yourself a favor and install a mod such as "Anyone's MGSV TPP Improvements" (https://www.nexusmods.com/metalgearsolidvtpp/mods/277) to make the game less grindy. Konami really wants to keep you playing, and so they made progress a real chore, even with the bonuses that being online offers.

TF2 has great teamwork and great gameplay. It has a zany sense of humor too. In what other game can you dance over an enemy's dead body after slapping them to death with a fish, only to then be exploded by a claymore-wielding black Scotsman who dropped out of the sky?

To put it briefly, Civ V's combat is much, much better than Civ IV's but most other things are the same or worse. Try both!

A faithful update to one of the PS2's greatest games!

I love almost everything about FF XII, from its story to its rich world to its combat system. FF XII is a masterpiece of the RPG genre, which is surprising considering its troubled development cycle. FF XII has the perfect difficulty curve. It starts off ridiculously easy and simple so as to ease in even a first-time RPG player, but its difficulty eventually ramps up at a satisfying pace, and its combat is wonderfully deep, with the gambit system and license boards providing a plethora of short-term and long-term options that should sate even the most ardest tactician, while also being manageable by casual players. This was, in fact, the first RPG that I ever played back in 2006, and I had no clue what I was doing, but FF XII guided me along. 12 years later, as a seasoned RPG player, the gameplay is not too easy for me.

The updates in this version make a great game even better. The new job system lets you have even more options for play, and the technical improvements are quite welcome. Aside from now being able to play the game in HD with revamped music, you can also speed up the gameplay which is great for when you want to run through the wilderness at super speed. A newly-added Easy mode and Hard mode cater to either extreme of gamers. There is also the ability to have Japanese voices with English subtitles if that's your thing, although the English voice acting is perfectly fine (Vaan, just like Tidus from FF X, can be a little annoying, but he's meant to be and it's not too bad. There's no dreaded "laugh scene" in this game).

I cannot reccommend this game highly enough. Of course, it does show its age a little, and it has its flaws just like any other game, but you owe it to yourself to play through this at least once.

So slow-paced that it should be considered unplayable. There is no way to speed up the game in the options.

I couldn't get past the first boss, which is a screen that tells me to activate the game. This boss is impossible to get past because there's no way to counter the "There was a problem communicating with the servers" attack. I figured that this boss fight would be really easy because Steam itself gave me the weapon to defeat the boss: a 16-digit code. 'What a strange weapon,' I thought. But no matter how many times I pressed "Activate," the boss simply refused to die.

In all seriousness, this is unacceptable. I could log in to Rockstar Social Club so I know that my connection was valid. I tried everything I could think of, including adjusting the firewall and restarting my PC. I saw that there are many other players in the forum who have the same problem. There is no reason at all to require an activation code, and thanks to unresponsive servers I can't play the game that I paid for. Thanks for punishing me for spending money on your game, Rockstar.

A colossal waste of time. The game is filled with hundreds of pointless quests that just amount to busywork. The world map is filled to the brim with hundreds of question marks; once you uncover the location it usually just amounts to "go here and kill the beasts/humans" or "open the treasure chest" or "follow a trail of breadcrumbs" or even a combination of all three. The characters, for the most part, are wooden. The dialogue is way too voluminous and the cutscenes way too long overall to be entertaining. There are innumerable scenes and interactions that are pointless, don't further the story or help the plot or character development in any way, and just get in the way of the mission. If I were to play the game all the way through I think that I would end up saying, "There's about 20 hours of good stuff buried within 400 hours of garbage." As I finally quit around 50 hours, however, I can only say that there were about 2 or 3 good hours. Don't play this game.

Gameplay:
The combat, which makes up about 10-30% of the gameplay depending on difficulty level, is clunky and not at all fun. I have been told that the combat is meant to be that way because it makes potions, etc. more valuable and forces the player to think more strategically. But here's the thing: in a game like "Demon's Souls" or "Dark Souls" the difficult combat is implemented correctly, so it's fine. In "Witcher 3" and other open-world RPGs such as the "Elder Scrolls" series, it sucks. I turned down the difficulty all the way down in both cases, not because I'm a coward, but because I don't enjoy combat against bullet sponges (or in this case, sword sponges) that turns what ought to be a one-minute fight into an all-day affair. Tough enemies wouldn't be a problem, actually, if there weren't thousands of them. There is entirely too much combat in "Witcher 3" and even on easy mode it still becomes a waste of time. Even then it still wouldn't be that big a problem if the combat were used in the right way. In one scene, the boat Geralt is riding in is attacked by pirates and you have to fight them off, only to end up shipwrecked on shore. If the fight against pirates weren't the same as literally every other fight in the game, it could have been interesting. But they just had to shoehorn a fight in for no reason. The ship could have crashed upon the shore because of a storm. It didn't have to be combat, and the game didn't have to force the player to come up on deck and fight them.
The horseback riding, which makes up another 30% of the gameplay, is finicky. For all the time that you spend riding Roach throughout the game, you'd think that they would have spent a little more time tweaking it. Riding Roach isn't bad at first, of course, but the little inconsistencies and inconveniences add up and after a few dozen hours I wanted to ride Roach as little as possible. I just sprinted when I could and used fast-travel the rest of the time.
The remaining gameplay consists of odds and ends such as Witcher Mode (think of Detective Mode for the Batman "Arkham" games), dialogue, inventory and menu navigation, and a few other things. Wicher Mode also starts out ok but just becomes a chore in the end. Follow the breadcrumb trail, look for a key or treasure chest, find a door, and so on. Almost none of these Witcher Mode sequences make me feel like a detective as the Batman games did; they just make me feel like my finger is going to fall off from holding the trigger button down for so long. Looting is tedious and there are mods that auto-loot so you don't have to deal with the inconvenience. Dialogue is OK and there are some dialogue branches that can affect the outcome of the game. But the fact that you can skip every line of dialogue with a button press says plenty about the verbosity of the game. Just get to the point, already! While you are walking to various destinations there are sometimes NPCs who will come up to you with their problems. For example, there are two drunks who come up to you in an unavoidable encounter and ask you for drinking money. You can either give them coin or use a magic spell to make them go away. They then depart and you get on with the mission. So... what was the point of that, exactly? "Witcher 3" is filled to overflowing with such pointless encounters. They have no bearing on the story or the world in the game, they certainly don't impact me in real life, and they don't impact me as a gamer aside from making me grow increasingly aggravated at what a waste of time this game is! Of the hundreds and hundreds of quests in this game--that is, of the ones I've come across so far--almost none of them had any meaningful impact on me or changed me as a person in any way.
In my opinion the best part about the entire game is Gwent, which is an optional card game you can play against various characters. I really enjoy Gwent, and I wish that I could play it anytime, against anyone. In the last 20 or so hours of gameplay, Gwent was honestly the only thing keeping me going, aside from the faint hope that maybe the game would improve eventually.

Story:
The story is big--very big--and if you could only play one video game in your entire life, I'd say that this one could keep you busy for many years to come, especially if you don't skip any dialogue. The main problem with the story in "Witcher 3" is that it goes for quantity over quality. There are many little routines, skits, vignettes, short stories, big plots, grand overarching stories, and so on that often intertwine and more often diverge from each other. These could make the world fleshed out if they were written properly, but the stories more often than not fizzle out and just add dead weight. In one such story a woman is irate that a wolf is stealing her chickens. Upon investigating, Geralt finds that the 'wolf' in question is a group of war orphans who have made camp nearby. The player has the choice to talk to the woman and convince her to adopt them. Once that's done, Geralt and the woman part ways. Unless there's a part 2 to the quest that I don't know about, Geralt never sees them again. So... how did this quest help the story in any way? It's already established that there are war orphans all over the place. The characters in this quest have zero character development and have zero appreciable impact on the world around them. This is the case for 99% of quests, which--again--usually boil down to "go to this location and kill everything that moves, then loot the treasure chest." I will admit that some of the plotlines stick with you. I'll forever remember the image of the Bloody Baron holding his unborn daughter in his arms and speaking with a shaky voice, on the verge of tears. That touched me. But finding a note on a corpse that says "Go here for buried treasure" doesn't have any emotional impact on me the 100th time. Actually, scratch that. It makes me feel the emotion of anger at what a waste of time this game is!

Visuals:
"W3" is a very visually impressive game. The first two "Witchers" were not very well-optimized and even at low settings made my computer sweat. The third time's the charm, I guess. The expansive vistas in this game are truly beautiful. The wildernesses, the forests and mountain ranges, the creaky old castles jutting above a mountainside, even the towns and cities are all very nice to look at. The mountains in Skellige in particular make me want to go hiking. Especially in the early hours of the game, the world is just a vast, open world that you want to explore. I was willing to put up with coming across monster nest #4,309,212 that needed to be destroyed just so that I could keep exploring. Many of the NPCs look like close relatives, and that is a problem common to most open-world games. If you can just accept that every merchant is a clone, then it's not a problem.

I don't have enough room to keep going, but I think I've made my point. Don't waste your time or your money on this.