Hexen: Beyond Heretic (PC, Steam)

Added.

I think I mainly noticed because of how I put one up today and then saw it wasn't around on the front page and neither were any others. If not for that, I might not have noticed it until I thought about doing one at some eventual point.

They were accidentally removed because the query that determines whether they display relied on a reference to a table column that has since been removed from the database. But the query has been adjusted and the blog entries are back. Thanks for catching that! I would have eventually, probably, but it might have taken me a few months given that I missed it initially.

Did blogs simply get moved off the main page or is that a fix that hasn't been done yet? Or was something said about this before and I just missed it?

HonestGamers is and will (I hope) always remain one of the most welcoming places on the web for people who appreciate puns.

If I thought ending on a lame pun would disqualify a person, what would that say for Joe's chances, being that he began with a lame pun? Or to be more specific, had said lame pun in his tagline, so it was the thing I saw before I even clicked on his review.

And if I then dumped both of you because of bad puns, well, Joe would still have two more chances to get in, but you'd be out and then I'd be in a position where I might have to give EmP positive recognition for his review which was most definitely NOT AT ALL a series of pokes at me. Makes me feel I need to re-visit an oldie of mine where, with one of my DOOM reviews, I referred to the Imp as an EmP. I mean, this site has BARELY ANY reviews of DOOM games or their .wads!

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In other news, I did forget to give a line or two to Joe's non-placers, so here they are.

1. Phantasy Star IV: Very solid review that kind of reads like a template review for a really good RPG, where if you changed names and stuff, it could describe a decent number of good games. A fun read, but lacking in what I guess I'd call the distinctive voice your other two had.

2. The Frankenstein one. While I said in my recap of Jason's review that walking simulator-types don't interest me at all, you did do a good job with this one, with your focus on how this game works, with new revelations leading to negative consequences for your character. Doubt I'd want to ever play this game, but you did a really good job of illustrating its appeal.

In short, I admire your reviewing work ethic. Three reviews in one week, with all being good and two of them being definitely placement-worthy on this pretty strong week. Meanwhile, my burnt-out self finished God of War about 3 weeks ago and hasn't even started writing a review of it yet because I'm either too busy or not feeling it or just wanna play shit because 3 of the 4 games I'm playing are long and RPGish to various degrees (Dark Souls II - action game with RPG elements; Witcher III - action-RPG; Divinity Original Sin - X-TREME RPGing!) and when I sit down with one, it's hard to cap things at just an hour or two unless I hit a wall in DS II. And I haven't hit many walls lately with the exception of that Ruin Sentinel room in Drangleic. Hell, I shocked myself by getting through FloodWaterDeath Zone Shrine of Amana without THAT MUCH fuss. Even if I feel a bit humiliated because the big frog demon actually killed me once in a showing where I showed no composure or ability to react to what it was doing. A death made even more humiliating due to how decisive the rematch was in my favor, where I think I got hit once the entire fight. If the rematch with Velstadt goes the same way, I'll be happy!

And here I thought ending on that incredibly lame pun would automatically disqualify me for ROTW... Thanks for the vote of confidence! Glad you liked the specific comparisons to Zelda; it probably wouldn't be a good idea to just say OoT is better because it's the name brand and has 20 years of nostalgia going for it.

Congrats to Marc and Joe, and I can certainly relate to Jason's challenge of trying to make Picross reviews interesting. For what it's worth, as a veteran of these games, it told me what I needed to know, so it seemed to do its job.

Weeks do seem to start slow, unless a few people just missed the deadline for the previous week, and then finish in a rush (relative to whatever was produced at the start of the week). It seems like most people get most of their writing done on the weekend.

Thanks for the topic and comments, overdrive. I would have commented sooner, but I was dealing with some pretty critical backend work and that got in the way a bit. I know reading about picross isn't your cup of tea, but I think there's a pretty decent chance you would actually enjoy playing it. So maybe look into that if you get a good deal on a good one. ;-)

Okay, all features that you are likely to see as a site contributor should now be working as normal once again (and staff resources are also mended). There are a few more features that I will be adjusting in the back end, but you're good to use the site as usual and shouldn't encounter any new error messages. If you do get an error page or an ugly error message you haven't seen before, please bring it to my attention so I can address it, but I don't anticipate that happening. Thanks!

What the hell indeed. Thanks for getting the RotW up so quickly. After a very slow week, I'm glad we had a good turnout in the end.

The site's host alerted me around noon today that the server I'm on is vulnerable to a particular type of attack unless I update the WHM/mySQL and cPanel settings to the latest version. They warned that hosted sites which do not make those modifications, because they are at risk, will be deleted immediately and backups will not be provided.

This would be a bad thing, but then, so would falling victim to the noted vulnerability. So I had to take a crash course today in updating the sort of stuff that on a managed server has always been done on my behalf. A few hours later, I've successfully updated the software (it seems) and the site is loading fine and will continue to load fine, aside from the usual minor issues on the host's end. However, the required updates also forced a significant upgrade to mySQL, which means that old INSERT queries no longer work around the site. This is a short-term problem that means various interactive features around the site are broken until I can resolve them individually, one at a time.

Resolving everything will take some time, as you can imagine. But I am making that effort my priority. I've finished fixing new bugs impacting the forums, as far as I can tell--mostly so I could post this message ASAP--and I will be targeting other features tonight and tomorrow, including account features, staff tools and review submission options. In the meantime, you will receive error pages when attempting to use some features with problems I haven't yet been able to address.

In the short term, please don't worry about reporting those errors to me. I'll stamp them out as quickly as I can, and I already have a pretty good idea about where to look and what to test. If you are still encountering new issues a few days from now, that's the time to alert me. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but there shouldn't be major issues in the long term and the site will be that slightest bit more secure and may even perform better as a result of this process. Thanks for your patience!

I regret nothing.

It was a quick and easy, RotW, I thought to myself. We had entered Sunday and there were only four reviews to go through, so I felt like it'd be a breeze.

And then HELL SUNDAY came upon me, where Marc possibly doubled his 2019 output with two reviews, Joe had an OctJOEber flashback and also submitted two and EmP delivered the coup de grace with one review that showed him gleefully taking all manner of shots at my age or my penchant for chatting informally (or, as he refers to it, rambling) in my reviews.

And brought us to a total of 9 reviews by 6 different people. My easy week turned into quite the battle. Fortunately, even if I'm showing my age, I am still limping along respectfully, so I am still doing this RotW even if you jerks made it tougher on me than I'd have preferred.

In an order for honorable mention:

CRB shows up with a review of the arcade version of Captain Commando -- a game I reviewed twice: once as my first, very primitive GameFAQs review and then re-did for this site for, uh, some reason. It was a fairly short review that had a good bit of enthusiasm and did a good job of giving the basics. I did think the first paragraph read a bit rough to where I understood you were talking about the history of the CC character, but the sentences ran together in a kind of awkward manner where it seemed a couple thoughts went unfinished as you went on to the next one. Still, it always is nice to see someone put together a more positive take on a game that I found (at least on the SNES port that I played for my reviews) to be a blah Final Fight clone.

Jason reviewed a Picross game, giving us two Picross-game reviews over the past handful of weeks. Well, since I'm in mostly-retirement from those Kemco reviews, it's good to know we have another niche to step into! I did have to chuckle a bit at that sentence following your description of the rules where you said that previous paragraph might not make the game seem exciting. Mainly because my eyes kept glazing over while I was reading that paragraph and it took me 3-4 tries to get through it and begin to understand just how to play this game. Which isn't really anything to fault you over, as I'd imagine that explaining any of these brain-teaser games to someone uninitiated in them might prove more difficult than actually solving the puzzles. Twas a good review, but on a Rob's Interest Level category, it was right there with point-n-click adventures and walking simulators and virtually anything a a certain subsection of reviewers uses terms like "very important" and "it might not be fun, but…" as reasons to play. Which is not a compliment to the subject matter. But you did good at explaining the game to people who'd be interested! I especially thought discussing how this isn't a NOOB game due to how there aren't any novice-size puzzles, BUT, that makes it a good value to experienced Picrossers who wouldn't want to do 25 really basic ones to get to the meaty ones.

EmP's game was all full of fun references for a game that basically shares my screen name. And he took full advantage of that to poke at my dislike of brevity or how I'm in my mid-40s and feeling it (yesterday evening, I legit pulled something in my chest in the act of standing up from my sofa…WTF?!?!?). While I'd love to be spiteful and petty and use that as the one and only reason this review didn't make the top three, there are other reasons! I'd say the main thing is that you were SO DAMN GLEEFUL to immediately throw in the age and rambling comments that you wound up with this weird thing where you all-but-open by describing how the game outstays its welcome and mentioning several ways in which it does that and then just kind of throw in as an afterthought that this is a scrolling shooter. I looked through the Indie library back in the day and still have no memories of this game, so to me, that says its obscure enough to maybe talk a little bit more about what it is before jumping into what doesn't work about it. After I got my bearings, you did do a good job of describing a flawed game that works hard to try to engage players. but it took a couple paragraphs to figure out what I was reading about and a re-read to truly put all the pieces together.

THIRD PLACE

Marc's Spyro Reignited Trilogy (PC)

Armortale was a good review of one of those new-age retro title that should have had it all, but is brought down by a couple big issues. This one hit me more, though. Probably because I do own and have played and reviewed all three of the Spyro titles here AND when I bought my PS4, I saw they were coming out with this on that system and my first reaction was along the lines of "BUT I ALREADY HAVE A BIG BACKLOG AND A BUNCH OF GAMES I WANT FOR THIS SYSTEM -- DON'T DO THIS TO ME!!!!!!" Overall, I thought this was a very fair assessment of the series as a whole, where you eschewed talking about individual games or moments in favor of describing the total package. I do agree with how all three games kind of meld together despite whatever differences they possess. Only so many times you can do a level based on collecting gems where you might have a story, but odds are that story will solve itself simply by you progressing from the beginning to end of a stage (like the Yeti one in the second game, where you reach the end and the yeti gets auto-beaten). But I'll still probably get it at some point. What you said about the presentation is probably what I'm most concerned with. I've seen the games as they were on the PS1 and now I want to see them as the fairytale book lands I kind of imagined them as deserving to look like. Although, good mention on the camera. That could always be annoying on the PS1 games, so it is kinda a bummer to see that hasn't changed.

SECOND PLACE

Joe's Life of Black Tiger (PlayStation 4)

This is a rather fun bash review that made me thing certain things like: "Please tell me that Jason comp'd you this for a review and that you didn't spend money on it!" and "If not, of all the games on the PS4, you spent money on THIS?!?!?!", with the second of those thoughts being followed by cruel laughter as I try to ignore the presence of Venetica (360) in my library. Back to this review, you did a great job of letting the game speak for itself, by which I mean, you mainly just described stuff you saw and experienced while playing and let how bad things were speak for themselves. The thought of a tiger carrying a huge animal in its jaws like it was a small stuffed animal cracks me up, as does the image of a game with at least somewhat real-life graphics featuring over-the-top animal kills. Bad in the funny ways. And, yeah, your tiger having the sort of utterly lame social media presence of a marketing group… Bad in the pathetic ways, too, I see. And your tiger-centric title suddenly making you control a human at the end? Bad in the WTF?!!? ways, as well. This game seemed to hit most, if not all, the gamuts of being bad and you did a good job of conveying that.

REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

Mariner's Darksiders: Warmastered Edition (Switch)

I liked this review a lot, I say in stating the obvious considering I gave it the win. On a personal level, as a guy who has the original 360 version in my backlog, it's always good to see another person's opinion on something I'll likely be playing in the fairly near future, so I was interested in reading your take on it. As a guy judging a bunch of reviews to arbitrarily determine which three win praise, I really dug the overall theme. This game is inspired to a good degree by Ocarina of Time, which is a very big name game that people are likely going to know about and have good memories of. Therefore, show how this game stacks up to it via examples and comparisons. That led to a review where I could understand what you were saying and how you were coming by your opinions. Everything worked together well and it was easy to understand what you meant when you mentioned flaws such as how the game is more linear and pushing you forward, so the need to occasionally go back to get new stuff wasn't necessarily felt. Or your issues with the large number of moves and the often-low amount of damage caused. In short, this was an XTREME-ly good review!


And now, I'm off to do two reviews of my next game to review. The one that will be the eventual final submission for it and the 5000-word alternate version that I'll submit on EmP's week and then take down after he's been forced to read it in order to put up the real one. That'll show him!

THE KING OF FIGHTERS ’97 GLOBAL MATCH
Vita, PS4
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0576-PCSE01224_00-KOF97GLOBALMATCH
https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0576-CUSA11055_00-KOF97GLOBALMATCH

Added.

On the one hand, and then on the other hand?

I see what you did there.

I used the "keep reading" phrasing quite deliberately, for a variety of reasons. Your protest over its use actually tells me it served at least part of its intended purpose.

And yes, although I recognize that a review for a clock doesn't on the one hand make for exciting reading (hence my use of that phrase), on the other hand I do feel (like you) that it serves a valuable function. I hope to review lots more oddities in the years to follow, around other work I'm performing around the site. And if I ever finish or even just catch up on that work, you should look forward to a flood of Nintendo-focused content from yours truly. I've unofficially declared it my personal beat.

Thanks for the timely topic, even though I knew I had no chance of placing at the top of the heap. Sometimes, a man just has to review what a man has to review. Sometimes, a man has to review a clock.

Thanks for the nod on this very small week. And you got it up the next day in record time! That's probably more impressive than our reviews.

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THIRD Mario Clock [NDS] Honestgamer

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Wherein Jason Venter reviews a clock.

I mean, you review it as well as anyone probably could. It’s good that you took the time early on to explain why you’ve decided to review a glorified clock because, otherwise, people might start questioning your need to talk about anything with even the lightest Nintendo tint (nintinto?) attached.

On the other hand, your lazy use of “Is X going to be Y? Read on to find out!” to close out the second paragraph is awful, and you deserve to be called out on it!

Otherwise, yeah, it’s a review of a clock. Other than question who’d leave their DS/3DS on all night so as to make use of the alarm, there’s not really a lot more I can add. Well done on recording to history some little semi-obsolete bit of software that will probably cease to exist soon. I find that a worthwhile endeavour.

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SECOND Dark Devotion (PC) Joe

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I’m not sorry for bringing the pun plague to HG’s taglines. I feel a sense of pride in how it’s infected so many of you. Like a fungus.

I think this is a good hook to take, that the game kicks your arse while you slowly chip away at it. Maybe that’s because I recently beat Sundered, which also has a massive kill everything fetish. I didn’t really like the opening paragraph which felt a bit like a placeholder, but the documenting of the difficulty and how you eventually got around it made a lot of sense to me. You also did remarkable well by getting through most of your review before you compared the game to Dark Souls. So close! Though, to be fair, this game certainly deserves that comparison a lot more than the comparison usually merits elsewhere.

One complaint: you finish a paragraph with “I could rattle of Dark Devotions horrors for days”, but the majority of examples you used were pretty generic. More of the green children, please; less lava belching golems. How gauche. (Also, off, not of.)

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WIN 198X (PC) Masters

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I review all kinds of weird shit (Jason personally ensures that I can’t go more than five reviews without lobbing a visual novel at me, for example. None of the rest of you have to review VNs!), but my least favourite category is easily compilations. Marc has a very abridged compilation title, but still takes all the different games modes to task, in a direct fashion that wastes no words, but still manages to tie them back to their obvious inspirations and then note how lacking they are.

Perhaps he doesn’t manage to do that as well with the dungeon crawler, because he’s yet to let the rage-inducing majesty of Eye of the Beholder into his life. The best of them is the arcade action takedown that wants to be Strider or Shinobi, but is instead a sodding ever-runner. Those are rarely any good! Really, though, what impresses about this review is that it takes a game that has a short run length but pulls itself in six very different directions (five completely different genres, and the plot that ties them all together) and wraps up the discussion in about the time it would take for Rob to just finish his rambling intro. Gots to sneak in hidden Rob shots somewhere.

Thanks for the win! I liked how that review turned out, so to see that others have shared that opinion is pretty awesome. Now I just have to find time at some point to get back to writing, as I have another game ready to review, but haven't been able to find time to even get started.

Thanks for the topic and placement, Joe! Congrats to overdrive and Nightfire for finishing ahead of me with terrific reviews, and to Jerec for a capable review of a game probably not a lot of people will ever bother writing about. I continue to love seeing that sort of coverage on the site, because it helps us fill a niche and give people a broader idea where they maybe should--and shouldn't--spend their precious time and money. This was one of those weeks where there weren't any weak reviews that I could see. First-rate stuff all around!