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Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows  Irreverent humor is my favorite type of humor. It got me nearly four solid months in Facebook jail, but damn if it's not funny. As the name suggests, BDSM: Big Drunk Satanic Massacre is exactly that type of humor. The basic premise is that Lucifer (who now goes by Lou) got overthrown as ruler of Hell when McDonald's (or the copyright-safe version of it) found a portal to hell in a toilet and expanded into Hell, quickly taking over entirely. Lucifer then becomes an alcoholic in a dive bar until he develops a murderous grudge against knock-off McDonald's and goes on a killing spree through Hell.  BDSM is neither a particularly long nor a particularly complex game. It's a twin stick shooter that has you navigate through various levels as you make your way through Hell and to the McDonald's headquarters. You start with just a revolver, but as you progress through the game, you'll unlock other weapons like a shotgun, an AK-47, a giant penis-shaped laser, etc. You also get a solid for a one-time-use magic ability pick-up like a shield or minion summoning. I wouldn't say that it's a particularly strategic game, but you definitely have options on how to tackle any given challenge, and the bosses - especially the final boss (and the secret boss) - do occasionally need to be addressed smartly.  Visually, I was actually fairly impressed with the game. It's definitely not a big budget game, but for an indie twin stick shooter, the environments were really interestingly designed. The humor, as well, was just fantastic. You'll come across various succubus women (plus a Nazi pony and "Not-Hitler") that you can trigger a lewd mini-game with, and that was just the icing on the cake for me as far as humor goes. I'll never understand why a fandom for a show totally built on "love and tolerance" like My Little Pony is SO infested with Nazis, but there's a TON of them, and this game pokes fun at that.  BDSM: Big Drunk Satanic Massacre is a relatively simple game, but it's a great way to spend a few hours if you're not easily offended by irreverent humor. I wouldn't pay more than $10 for it, and I'm not sure what the regular price is, but if you can find it for $10 or less on your platform of choice, I would absolutely recommend picking it up and giving it a play. My Rating - 3 Neps  Pokemon has had a bit of a troubled go lately as far as game quality has been concerned. Sun and Moon, which I felt were objectively the best of the series, failed to really “do it” for a lot of long-time fans, myself included. Let’s Go was an absolute treat as a laid back Pokemon adventure, but most fans hated how easy it was. Sword and Shield was absolutely perfect for online players, but it was a dumpster fire for single-player content. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were great remakes, but they were technical disasters at launch without a HUGE patch and made the controversial decision to go back to a 2.5D perspective. Legends Arceus was an absolute masterpiece, and there will be no mercy for its detractors when the revolution comes (although the lack of breeding and online battle was a point of contention for some). Then comes Scarlet and Violet. Will these games redeem Game Freak as a developer and finally satisfy Pokemon’s notoriously bitchy adult fanbase? Lmao of course not, but I think they’re great.  So let’s address the elephant in the room first - the game is, to put it nicely, a technical clusterfuck. While the character and Pokemon models look great, the environments look terrible, the textures are genuinely god-awful, and the frame rate makes Doom on SNES look smooth and stable. To be fair, a patch that came out a couple of weeks after launch dramatically improved the frame rate, but it’s still pretty bad. I’d say it’s overall on par with being in the middle of Sword’s and Shield’s Wild Area with wifi on. Except it’s the entire game, and that’s your best-case scenario. There is one particular part of the game - a windmill - that, when viewed from a distance, literally moves at two frames per second. Most of the game targets 30 FPS. It rarely hits that. Get about three feet away from an NPC, and that frame rate is halved. Get about three or four feet farther away, and it’s halved again. It’s so bad that you’ve got NPCs running at like 15 FPS in cutscenes. I’d understand it if this were a visual showcase game like Breath of the Wild, Bayonetta 3, or Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but it looks nowhere near as good as any of those games, and it runs significantly worse.  Now that I’ve addressed the unforgivable technical disaster that fanboys will never stop talking about, let me tell you why this might be the best game in the whole series. First off, your rival. Nemona is bae. She’s a perfect yandere goddess, and I love her. She manages to do what Hop, Wally, and Hau all tried and miserably failed to do - be a friendly rival that deserves to live. Every friendly rival before has been a terrible character flatter with less development than Port-au-Prince. Nemona is different. She seems flat at first, but as you progress through the game and get towards the end of her quest line (yes, there’s more than just “be the champion”), they actually flesh her out a decent bit and make her a relatable and sympathetic character. Then you’ve got the professor. Cryptic, interesting, and kind of a dick, the professor (there’s a different professor depending on your version) is hands down the most interesting to date. No matter whether you pick Professor Daddy or Professor MILF, this one has some genuine major plot significance. And let’s not forget the story in general - it’s the best Pokemon has ever had. Legends Arceus had a pretty interesting premise, but Scarlet and Violet manage to take a mundane and troped-to-death premise and turn it into a FANTASTIC adventure and story.  You’ve got three main quest lines to finish before you unlock the final end-game quest. There’s the obvious quest to beat all eight gyms and then take on the Elite Four and Top Champion to become a Champion-rank trainer. You’ve also got the Starfall quest line where you go around and attack five different Team Star bases, and despite how it sounds, this isn’t just a rehash of gyms. Lastly, you’ve got the Titan quest where you take on five massively powerful Titan Pokemon to steal their weed. I mean Herba Mystica. If you can count, you’ve probably figured that there are eighteen main objectives (plus the Pokmeon League). If you’ve played Pokemon, then you probably also know that there are eighteen Pokemon types. Each objective has a type represented, so no longer is it pick-and-choose which types get represented in the gyms; every type gets some love here (and four types give double love thanks to the Elite Four). When you do all of that, then and only then can you enter Area Zero, the mysterious forbidden zone in the very center of Paldea. Here you’ll find powerful and rare Pokemon as well as the game’s final quest. Beating the Elite Four doesn’t get you to the post-game here; it just gets you to the endgame, and it’s this endgame that really sets Scarlet and Violet apart.  While I’m sure everyone knows the big plot twist by now considering that the games have been out for a month, I’m not going to say anything about it because if you have - somehow - avoided spoilers and still haven’t played it, it’s worth discovering for yourself. While this may have been the worst-made Pokemon game to date, it’s definitely the best-designed Pokemon game to date. Game Freak proves here that, while they’re bad at making games, they’re absolutely fantastic at brainstorming them. The new Pokemon are almost universally awesome, some old favorites get fantastic new evolutions, and while there’s not a whole lot in the way of new forms, you do get some cool entirely new species that are based on convergent evolution; they look like they’re regional forms of old Pokemon but are actually completely unrelated. I, personally, would rather have just had regional forms, but I can’t deny that it’s a cool concept for new Pokemon. If you can look past the technical flaws and appreciate the game for what it DID do well, this is definitely a game with something every Pokemon fan can enjoy. My Rating - 4 Neps Also available on PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, and Windows  Trails from Zero is the fourth game in the “series,” although defining what is and isn’t part of the series is a bit easier said than done since it’s like a sub-series of a sub-series of a late 80s series. The series we’re concerned with here is the Trails series (or Kiseki if you want to be a pedantic weeb), and that’s what this is #4 in. Despite that, it’s the 8th game in that series to be released officially in English. Life is hard for Trails fans.  So the Trails series is currently broken into three arcs with a fourth on the way. The first three games are the Liberl arc, the three Trails in the Sky games. The sixth through ninth games - and the ones I’m willing to bet were, like mine, most English-speaking players’ first experience with the series - are the Erebonia arc, the four Trails of Cold Steel games. Games four and five are the Crossbell arc, Trails from Zero and the upcoming localization of Trails of Azure. So this is the fourth game in the series, the eighth game officially localized for the West, and the start of the second arc. Again, life is hard for Trails fans.  Despite releasing on Playstation 4 and Switch, this isn’t a 3D game with mind-blowing grayfex. This is a pretty humble-looking 2D game because it’s not new at all; it’s a remastered port of a PSP game from 2010. It is, however, new to the West. Coming on the heels of Trails of Cold Steel IV, a fully 3D JRPG, it’s understandable that some folks would be a bit taken aback by the 2D sprites in Trails from Zero, but don’t let that dissuade you; there’s an amazing game to be found here. It is not, however, the game I would suggest newcomers to the series play as their first introduction to Trails. Cold Steel 1 is a good starting point, but you really ought to start with the first Trails in the Sky (sadly only available on PSP and PC in English).  Picking up a few months after the events of the Trails in the Sky trilogy, Trails from Zero focuses on Lloyd Bannings, a rookie detective with the Crossbell Police Department, as he tries to make a difference in his hometown and slowly pull back the cover on the corruption festering in the city’s shadows. One thing to note about this game - and one of the reasons I say that this is a game for established Trails fans and not newcomers - is that it’s a very slow burn. You’ll be over halfway through the game before the drama really picks up. That’s not entirely unheard of in the Trails series, but while Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel both had slow build-ups, neither felt nearly as prolonged as Trails from Zero. That’s not to say that the build-up is pointless or bad, but be prepared to play 20 hours before it goes from an interesting police slice of life to claws-in-your-flesh drama that leaves you NEEDING to know what happens next.  That said, I do think this is the weakest of the three arcs. This is, admittedly, only the first half of it, and the game ends in typical Trails fashion - a HUGE cliffhanger that has you chomping at the bit to play the next installment. The characters, though, just aren’t as interesting to me as Skies or Cold Steel. That’s very much a personal taste issue, and I know folks who say that Zero has their favorite Trails characters, so take that particular statement with a grain of salt, but I didn’t find Lloyd to be nearly as interesting a protagonist as Estelle or Rean, and I didn’t find Crossbell to be nearly as interesting a setting as Liberl or Erebonia. Despite that, though, if you’ve played either of those arcs, you’ll definitely want to play this one no matter what. For most of us in the West, we probably got a brief and somewhat confusing introduction to these characters towards the end of the Cold Steel arcs with their Crossbell cameos (which is why I suggest people play the Liberl and Crossbell arcs before starting the Erebonia arc), and that taste of Lloyd, Rixia, and KeA definitely made me excited to play this game and get to know those characters in earnest.  Trails of Zero is a tough recommendation for me. For the record, I absolutely do recommend it, but that recommendation has a big asterisk next to it - play Trails in the Sky first. It’s totally playable without knowing anything about Trails in the Sky. Still, the context definitely makes the story more interesting and easier to understand, and I feel like it will be harder for players to stick with the admittedly very lengthy build-up the story has if they have some established interest in and knowledge of the world and universe. If you have that, though, while I found it the second weakest of the eight Trails games I’ve played (after Trails in the Sky 3rd), it was definitely a game well worth experiencing, and I’m super excited for Trails of Azure to come out in English next year. My Rating - 4 Neps |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
March 2023
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