Category: Mechanics Review

FUSER and the the big problems with the modern rhythm games

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I’m Kinglink and this week I wanted to talk about music games and my love of Harmonix. 

If you don’t already know the name of Harmonix, this is the team who made Frequency and Amplitude, two of the best games on the PS2.  They made the fantastic Dance Central, as well as Fantasia: Music Evolved and…. 

Ok yeah, Guitar Hero and Rock Band.  Those are the games everyone will know them for, and sure they started both of those franchises and dominated the gaming with them, but they also have so much talent and made so many different games, it’s a shame they aren’t known outside of those titles. 

So as I said, I picked up FUSER, Harmonix’s newest game because I wanted to talk about my love of the music games and rhythm genre.  Unfortunately FUSER instead is better to highlight a lot of problems these games have.  

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Evoland: Legendary Edition – The perfect game for an RPG fan

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Evoland: Legendary Edition is a compilation of two games called Evoland and Evoland 2. They are both by Shiro Games and the Legendary edition just combines them into a single executable. As such, I’ll talk about each game individually and review both games and combine them for the full package’s final score.

Evoland is a parody of the RPG genre while remaining true to that formula at the same time. It’s a rather hard game to review because it does so many things but quickly evolves away from most of them before they grow stale.

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Horizon Zero Dawn Design Review – Hype meets reality

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I’m Kinglink and this week I want to look at Horizon Zero Dawn. Ok, it is not even that I wanted to dive deep on this one, but this game has been out a long time on PS4 and I kept hearing about it, it is now on PC, but… this is the great PS4 title everyone was raving about?

Let me start by saying I’m coming to this game in 2020, I’ve heard about it for over 3 years as Playstation fans bragged about what a killer title this is in their console war. Multiple critics have raved about Horizon Zero Dawn, and I was ready for a Sony masterpiece… I don’t know if I got that.

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Her Story Design Review – Revisiting one of the best video game stories of all time

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I’m Kinglink and this week we’re talking about Her Story as well as some other FMV games including Late Shift, The Infectious Madness of Dr. Dekker, and Telling Lies.

Long time fans of the channel may realize I have a fondness for stories in video games and have enjoyed many visual novels, including Eliza, the first two Danganronpa, and more due to their stories. Yet I often feel that stories and narratives are poorly done in the video game industry, usually relying on how movies and books tell stories without considering the interactive nature of the medium.

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Death Stranding Design Review – Showing what went wrong with MGS V by doing it again

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I’m Kinglink and this week we are going to look at Death Stranding. This was originally on the PlayStation 4, it has come to the PC and it’s time to talk about it.

Though, I do have to leave a little disclaimer here. I worked at Sony for about 6 years on MLB the Show and left Sony about two years ago. I want to be upfront about this because you should know if there’s any potential bias, but I can say I don’t believe there is. This is just for you to best judge my opinions.

There was a little overlap when I reviewed games and was working at Sony, but I chose to review Steam games to avoid any potential bias, and sure enough Sony has now come to the PC.

 

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SUPERHOT: Mind Control Delete Design Review – What SUPERHOT should have been, a great rogue lite.

Kinglink

I’m Kinglink and this week we’re doing a design review of SUPERHOT Mind Control Delete, with the bonus of being able to talk about the entire family of games here.

If you already own SUPERHOT before the release of SUPERHOT Mind Control Delete, on July 16, 2020, you already own a copy of Mind Control Delete, and you should check it out after this video.

SUPERHOT was a pretty good game from 2016. I enjoyed it quite a bit but if I had to give one complaint, it’s that it was a bit short. I liked it but I wanted more at the end of SUPERHOT. and yet at 25 dollars for the entire experience, I have to admit I felt it probably should have been longer. The good news was that a promise of free DLC, Mind Control Delete was made. This would be a rogue-lite mode with the same gameplay of the original. I was interested but it slipped off my radar.

 

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Persona 4 Golden: Design Review – A JRPG that hides a major dating simulator

Kinglink

Hello, I’m Kinglink and this week we’re doing a Design Review on Persona 4 Golden.

If you’re new to the channel, this is a design review. Rather than just saying the graphics, story, and gameplay are good and assigning an arbitrary score to the game, I look deeper at the gameplay systems and try to analyze what works and could be improved on in a game, usually using examples. Persona 4 Golden though is a massive game so there’s a lot to talk about with just it so I’m going to mostly focus on this one game this week.

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Streets of Rage 4 Design Review – Why does this work so much better than Double Dragon?

Kinglink

I’m Kinglink and today we’re doing a Design Review for Streets of Rage 4.

Though I want to do something a little bit different this week. Normally, I go over a game and tell you what I like and don’t like, and don’t worry, I will go into that, but Streets of Rage 4 was a challenging game to cover.

When I play most games, I try to think up interesting topics for videos, and there are times like The Crew 2 or Mortal Kombat 11 where I just don’t get enough content or want to rant about microtransactions and grind yet again. I did a video on that a long time and while I probably should cover the topic again, ehhh, it’s not exciting.

 

So when I started Streets of Rage 4 I thought of a very specific question. But let me roll back a bit.Read More »

Design Review: Katamari Damacy Reroll – How unique games stand the test of time

Kinglink

I’m Kinglink and today I’m doing a Design Review on Katamari Damacy: Reroll, but I’m doing this review on the entire Katamari Damacy franchise.

If you don’t know about Katamari Damacy, this is the brainchild of Keita Takahashi, sorry for mispronouncing your name. I just am going to assume I have. He’s also known for Noby Noby Boy and Wattam, which I’m looking forward to covering when it reaches Steam. But something is special about Katamari Damacy.

 

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Achievements and Trophies – Do they matter?

Kinglink

Hello, I’m Kinglink and today, I want to talk about Achievements. So I just did two videos on bigger concepts than just games, and sadly they may never be my top videos. I like putting out content I want to talk about. Today though, I’m going to put the game designer hat down for a bit and talk about something I care about passionately and why I do. It’s still a bit of a design review, but more focused on my personal experiences and opinions on achievement.

November 25th, 2005 was an important day especially in the world of gaming. On that day Xbox 360 was launched, and while many things are important about that one console, the one that I think mattered the most to me was this.

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