RotW: Dec. 19-25, 2016: Two-person battle = A quick-n-easy job!

Part of the whole holiday experience is MASS LAZINESS. Therefore, I have three reviews to judge for two places this week.

1. Nightfire's holdover from his week judging.
2. Nightfire's new review.
3. Pickhut's new review.

There'd also be my review from last week, since I am not a slacker (STOP LAUGHING), but that one gets held over to next week for EmP to work with. Anyway, let's get this over with, as MASS LAZINESS is calling me.

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SECOND PLACE

Pickhut's Batman Returns (SNES)

I remember playing this game once and it really made me thing "Final Fight, but not as fun", and so I only played it once and didn't advance all that far into it. Kudos to you for apparently doing much, much more. Seems like it probably wasn't worth the time. Or maybe it was. You do a good job of illustrating how this is a better-than-average movie license game, while at the same time having annoying flaws that prevent it from being much more than a diversion. Those brutal boss fights remind me of another SNES licensed beat-em-up in Pirates of Dark Water, as that game was good, but had a ton of sponges who took a ton of damage, while boasting vicious attacks. Makes my skin itch a bit just thinking of that. I'll stick with masochistic platform games when I want to make my pride hurt (replaying Ms. 'Splosion Man at the time!). Anyway, ignoring my tangents, this was just a really good, solid effort that provides a very even-handed look at this game's pros and cons. Sort of what one hopes to get from a 3/5 review, where there are both good and bad elements on display.

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REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

Nightfire's SteamWorld Heist (PC)

On one hand, your Sims pic of the luchadore assaulting the child almost caused me to give the win to that review. On the other hand, the fact I had to read a review for a Sims game almost caused me to give the overall win to Pickhut just to teach everyone in general a lesson about my personal opinion of The Sims. Take all that out of the equation and this was my favorite review of the week. Which means it wins Review of the Week. As memory recalls, I read Rhody's review of this game for another RotW and liked it, too. On one hand, that's a bit annoying because you'll be talking about stuff and I'll have this brief "I kind of remember reading about this before" vibe that can be a bit jarring. On the other, it gave me a good point of reference for what you're talking about. And, as I'm sure I've said before, this seems to be a very interesting and quirky game that probably deserves a bit more publicity, considering what you said about its low profile. You do a good job of explaining how this game works, which is good considering the "add in light RPG elements and some XCOM-style combat" is the sort of intro that definitely needs explained upon. This seems like a fun game with a lot of personality and you did a good job of bringing both of those to the forefront.

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Tune in later for more RotW goodness!

Yeah, I tried to keep the redundancies between me and Rhody's review to a minimum, but I also wanted my review to stand on its own, so that meant having to re-explain some of its core mechanics.

Also, not a fan of the Sims, eh? Guess I'm not surprised. It's one of those love-it-or-hate-it kinda deals. Even within the franchise itself, I also have strong feelings about it. I absolutely hated The Sims 1 & 2, then strangely enough The Sims 3 became one of my favourite games of all time, then the Sims 4 came along and lapsed the series back into mediocrity and disappointment.

Anyway, thanks for the win! Glad you got a bit of a break over the holidays.

Trust you to pick up the easy week. Grumble.

Good work to Pick, though, and congrats to Nightfire.

Been meaning to reply since yesterday, but like you said in the beginning: MASS LAZINESS. Well, that, and I had a toothache...

I'm surprised to hear you kinda had the same reaction to the game I had after I played it recently. I'm just used to hearing praise for the game simply for the fact that it's a movie game that doesn't outright suck. Yeah, sponge enemies are the worst in games like this; I expect it from an arcade port, but it's disappointing to see in a game made specifically for consoles. Thanks for the read and comments. And congrats to Nightfire for RotW!

Well, I'd say I'm more apathetic towards the Sims than anything else. I've never played any of those games because I've never really seen a point to them (and since I see a definite point to Kemco's games, we're probably entering "take with grain of salt" territory now) other than being goofy "real life simulators".

So, it's sort of like how most gamers have genres that automatically get their attention and genres that don't mean anything to them personally and for me, games like The Sims fit into the latter category. To the degree that I'm not even sure why they're popular. Like, doing various things to emotionally torture your Sim-people would be a fun diversion, but as to why a game like that becomes a legit time-sink for a person, I don't know that I could even comprehend.

It's true that The Sims has no point, and I stated this quite openly in my review. However, I liked The Sims (or more specifically, The Sims 3) because I like creating characters. As a fiction writer, I have found that it is a way to have some fun with character designs while gathering inspiration for story ideas (laugh all you want).

I also found The Sims 3 to be quite relaxing. If I write a full review about it at some point I might expound about this, but summarized, the "point", if any, of The Sims 3 is to make your Sims happy, and there's something very refreshing about a game that is focused upon positivity rather than blowing stuff up all the time (granted, blowing stuff up is also fun, but sometimes it's nice to do something different for a while).

The Sims 3 was also a welcome divergence from the previous two games that mostly seemed to be focused on materialism, which I found distasteful. I simply couldn't stand how the characters in The Sims 1 & 2 would constantly be whining about how their house wasn't big enough, how their TV wasn't big enough, how they didn't have enough stuff, etc., whereas in The Sims 3, if you designed a Sim who had unambitious goals, he/she could be perfectly happy living as a starving artist or a homemaker, etc., which was a bit more on the realistic side.

Also, simulators are just fun in general. All of the various iterations of SimCity also had no point to them, yet they are quite fun to play until you've exhausted everything they can do. In this respect I also liked the building aspect present in the Sims. Designing houses, businesses, etc was also a very enjoyable aspect of it.

I can understand that. I guess, that for me, the simming is more of a means to an end, to where I can do sim-like activities, but prefer them to have the goal of raising an army to crush everyone else...while the concept of simming to sim doesn't have the same appeal. Part of the "different people like different things" thing.

Clint of LGR has this interesting fascinated-bored relationship with the Sims games, and that in itself is amusing. When you like to monkey with something, it doesn't matter if it's personality traits or stats ... entertainment is as it does.

I've tried to figure out what's interesting about it, but don't want to spend any money to find out. Yeah, I know what I'm telling myself, and that's fine. In some sort if sympathetic performance, the free edition of Sims 2 I got on Origin doesn't do well on modern platforms to the point of not running at all on anything newer than an old ATI Rage card.

I'll leave the curiosity to those more opportuned to discover.

My wife loves The Sims, and found the series before I did. We have very nearly every expansion to each of the four games, including a bunch of stupid stuff like the Ikea Stuff pack and so forth. Just stacks and stacks of the games... and I haven't been tempted to touch most of 'em.

I liked The Sims on PC, the original one. I spent a few dozen hours with it, probably. What I had the most fun doing was designing a house and furnishing it so that it looked like a place where I would want to live, but without using cheat codes. It was a fun, simple experience that I'm not sure the more complicated later installments have actually improved on. I think my wife picks up the new ones out of habit, and she doesn't go hunting for expansion packs like she used to. The franchise has run its course. A fifth installment wouldn't stun me, necessarily, but I also wouldn't be surprised if one doesn't materialize for a long time.

@ Rob: Yeah. Not everyone likes the series and that's perfectly okay. But for me personally, if there is a Sims 5 and it is done right, it'll probably become my new obsession.

@ Jason: Same here. The house building was pretty much the only thing I liked about the first game. The rest of it was just so dumb and/or infuriating.