Recent reviews by Metric Guard

Vol.1 Bonus Content primarily features games that aren't viewed fondly by most Metal Gear fans, and for good reasons.

NES Metal Gear is an infamously butchered port that Kojima himself loathes. If you didn't play it when it was new, you probably discovered it thanks to the AVGN Metal Gear episode. Some of the Nerd's critiques aren't exactly accurate, but there's indeed a fair amount of frustration that wasn't in the original MSX version. Something the AVGN episode doesn't include is the Lost Woods clone outside the entrance to the prison area. Unlike in Zelda, the game doesn't provide a solution to the puzzle anywhere, so it's better to leave that Pettrovich guy and his daughter to get blown to smithereens. While there's fun to be had, I only recommend playing NES Metal Gear if you've finished the MSX version and want to experience the differences (and giggle at some of the hilarious Engrish text).

The other game, Snake's Revenge, is an entirely original game starring Solid Snake except now he's a cartoonishly buff action hero more worthy of the moniker "Big McLargehuge", making it the most interesting part of Vol. 1 Bonus Content. Although it's not a terrible game—it's certainly a lot more polished than NES Metal Gear—it isn't very good either. Flaws from the first Metal Gear, like the backtracking and keycard swapping, are dialed up to 11, and at least one of the designers clearly looooves bottomless pit traps, because those pits are overused and eager to cheaply kill you. There's also side-scrolling sequences that are pretty dull and frustrating, AND the game often makes you backtrack through them. I don't regret my playthrough, but I can't see myself revisiting this.

Also included are the two MGS digital novels which, as the names suggest, aren't games. Even without the questionable to downright offensive alterations, the absence of interactivity automatically makes them inferior adaptations of great stories. Memorable parts like the entire Psycho Mantis section and Liquid Snake criticizing Solid Snake (and by extension the player) can only work as well as they do in a video game.

On a positive note, the NES games have save states. If you're not lame enough to abuse them, you can instead use them as a means of avoiding the need to enter a password to resume a playthrough after exiting. Speaking of, here's a fun fact: there's passwords in NES Metal Gear that start with a Tier-3 swear word and put the player right at the finale.

Unlike the other games in the collection, Vol. 1 Bonus Content can't be purchased separately; you have to buy the whole Master Collection Vol. 1 package. If you already bought the games separately, you're not missing much unless you're reeeeeally curious about the NES games. Still, despite being...not good, I applaud the decision to preserve these works so we can all point and laugh at their flaws. Since they're all functional and free for MC Vol.1 owners, it's ever so slightly too difficult to give Vol.1 Bonus Content a thumbs down. The only real disappointment is the digital soundtrack, which has an extremely limited selection of tracks, though the new arrangements of the main themes are quite pleasant.

This review is about the PC port rather than the games themselves. I do recommend playing them if you haven't already, but if the first Metal Gear feels too old-school, at least give the sequel a try, because it's very comparable to MGS1 and in some ways better.

Anyway, these are the versions that you're almost certainly familiar with if you've played them before. They're technically not the original MSX versions; they're mobile phone versions that were later included in MGS3 Subsistence. There's some changes, namely the character portraits in MG2, and both games have additions like a results screen at the end and a boss rush mode.

As for the new Master Collection stuff, the scripts for both games and a "Master Book" are included, along with optional wallpapers to fill the empty space not used by either game. That's about it, and honestly, there really doesn't need to be anything more. The keyboard controls are rather strange and can't be changed, but at least they're not nearly as dumb as the keyboard controls for the other games in the collection.

When buying MG1 & MG2 separately from the rest of the collection, they're bundled with MGS1. While these probably aren't the main reason you're buying the bundle or the whole collection, PLEASE don't skip them. Although you might need to bring up a guide for MG1 at a few points, all you should need for MG2 is a screenshot of the tap code that can be found right before starting the game.

This review is about the PC port rather than the game itself. I highly recommend playing MGS1 if you haven't already.

Thankfully, as of Ver.1.5.0, this is the best way to play MGS1. It's for the most part a basic emulation of the PS1 version, which automatically makes it vastly superior to the atrocious PC port from 2000, but there's some nice additions as well.

• Regional versions (NA/EU/JP) of both MGS1 and VR Missions are available. The once Japan-exclusive Integral version is included as well, though some menu text is unfortunately still in Japanese.
  
  
• A new pause menu where you can access various settings, but more importantly can be used to pause cutscenes.
  
  
• A (PC-exclusive?) Controller Response Speed setting that, when switched from Stable to Fast, trades what I assume is authentic input latency for more responsive gameplay.
  
  
• Optional wallpapers to fill the blank space that the game screen doesn't use, as well as a few (also optional) screen filters.
  
  
• The script for MGS1 and a "Master Book" are included. They'd both be proudly displayed on a shelf if they weren't digital.
  
  
• You can add save data from other PS1 Konami games for Psycho Mantis to read.
  
  
• Disc swapping is automatic.

The biggest flaw of this port is the comically bad and unchangeable keyboard controls (E+M opens the new pause menu lmao), but a controller is the best way to play the game regardless since it uses analog input and vibration. While neither feature is essential, the former makes precision actions easier, and there's a few moments where the latter is used quite creatively.

Again, while there's some pretty good additions, this is otherwise a straight PS1 emulation, so don't expect 8K 144FPS support. However, if that doesn't bother you, or you're actually cool enough to prefer the original resolution and framerate, this Master Collection version is a solid way to play a Solid game.

Once again, there's missing tracks, but not nearly as much as it might seem. Although the majority of Downpour's music is completely new, it also utilizes many tracks from the original game that were unused. Most of these previously unused tracks can be found within the three prior Rain World albums.

Prior to the release of Downpour, I was pretty worried about the music not sounding right since it was made by new composers who, regardless of their immense talent, likely couldn't flawlessly imitate the distinct sound of Rain World's music, but that thankfully isn't the case. James Primate, one of the original composers, did the mastering to make sure the new music is as close to the original music as possible. James and Lydia also worked on a few new tracks as well, particularly a track that only they could do justice.

Additionally, unlike the other Rain World soundtrack on Steam, Downpour's pairs its standard MP3s with high-quality WAVs for those that desire uncompressed audio. Purchasing the Downpour soundtrack here is a fine option if you don't mind Valve getting a cut of the profits.

Anyway, I like Downpour's music a lot. If I didn't know, I probably wouldn't have even suspected the music was composed by different people, so everyone involved did an excellent job.

Favorite tracks: Overcast, Vast Unlife, Eyes of Iron, Lost City, Orange Lizard

Unfortunately, this is not the complete Rain World soundtrack. Instead, this is the "Songs and Rhythms" album, which only contains a little less than half the total tracks in Rain World, while the rest (along with many unused tracks) can be found in the "Ambients and Instrumentals" and "Alphas, Gems and Junk" albums from James Primate's Bandcamp. While the Bandcamp albums are more expensive, they have FLACs that aren't in the Steam version, so if you're willing to spare the extra cash, I recommend getting the music from there instead.

https://jamesprimate.bandcamp.com/album/rain-world-songs-and-rhythms
https://jamesprimate.bandcamp.com/album/rain-world-ambients-and-instrumentals
https://jamesprimate.bandcamp.com/album/rain-world-alphas-gems-and-junk

With that said, this "Songs and Rhythms" album does contain many of the best tracks, including great arrangements of all the procedural threat themes. The music of Rain World as a whole is excellent and quickly became among my favorite video game soundtracks.

Favorite tracks: Urban Jungle, Floes, White Lizard, Random Gods (Theme III), Stone Heads

In 2012, a programmer/artist named Joar Jakobsson showed off a prototype called Maze Runner, a Pac-Man-like game about eating things while avoiding being eaten. Years later, this arcade-style ecosystem evolved into an entire odyssey and released as Rain World on March 28, 2017. So many excellent games were made available the same year—heck, the same month is when Breath of the Wild released—but Rain World is more than excellent. Although its unforgiving essence certainly lacks broad appeal, there isn't any other game like Rain World.

You are a slugcat. Slugcats eat fruit and bats. Sadly, the world gets frequently thrashed by horrific, bone-crushing rain, as if the abundance of creatures that think slugcats are delicious aren't bad enough. You also just got separated from your loving slugcat family and are left to search for food and shelter all on your own during the brief dry periods between each volley of lethal precipitation. There's a lot more to the narrative which I won't dare spoil, but that's all you get at the start. While the game provides light guidance in the form of a little yellow worm that will occasionally point toward a key destination, there's otherwise no handholding. It's up to the player to navigate the open world in search of the slugcat's family, and perhaps even find some answers along the way.

Each "cycle" has the player character hunt enough food to avoid starvation, evade or fight ferocious predators, and reach the next shelter before the rain crushes or drowns everything it can reach. When you rest in a shelter, alive and nourished, your level of "karma" goes up. When you die (or exit the game 30 seconds after a cycle begins), your karma level goes down. Regions are segmented by gates that will only open if you meet or exceed the required karma level, so while a single death will cost around 10 minutes at most, dying too frequently can sharply halt progress. As a result, caution is not just ideal, it's crucial. Curiosity is also important, but as long as you're careful, you never need to die to learn something. The slugcat is frail, and though it's possible for skilled players to kill virtually any creature, stealth and wits are almost always better than brawn. Even without the karma mechanic, the difficulty of Rain World is mercilessly high, matching its harsh setting. An easy mode (The Monk) and optional gameplay adjustments were added in later versions, but I strongly recommend resorting to them only as a final act of desperation; the original experience (The Survivor) is far more satisfying.

The Steam store page for Rain World claims it was "inspired by the simplicity and aesthetics of 16-bit classics". However, unlike a lot of other indie games that were influenced by the classics of yore, Rain World's pixel art looks more like a pixel filter. Hard-edged shading and distinct, focused color palettes are utilized brilliantly, sans the blockiness seen in almost every other deliberately pixelated game. The application of modern technologies also doesn't produce dissonance since the way everything moves meshes well with those technologies. Instead of sprites, Rain World uses physics-driven procedural animations, which are remarkably fluid and grant creatures a vast range of behaviors and expressions that would require an impractical amount of work to implement with traditional animations.

Speaking of, the creature AI of Rain World is perhaps its most impressive feature, especially considering it was programmed by a single person. In nearly every other video game, enemies exist solely as obstacles to overcome, with the objective of stopping the player. In Rain World, "enemy" and "obstacle" are hardly apt monikers for any of the various critters that inhabit each region, as they each share the same goal of survival provided to the player, and will continue to pursue said goal regardless of whether the player is present. This can lead to scenarios where you stumble upon a pair of lizards fighting over a meal, or a corpse produced by an offscreen battle, lending the world a great sense of realism. A whole ecosystem of predators and prey is simulated, and seeing it all in motion is fascinating even when the player isn't an active participant. If only there was a mode where you can safely observe a region like you're watching a nature documentary...

As for the creatures themselves, detailing their complex behaviors and outstandingly creative designs would be a great disservice to those who haven't played the game. That said, it's important to note that the locations of creatures (and some items) are randomized at the start of a cycle. While this unpredictability means every playthrough presents unique experiences, it also opens up the possibility that the player could be placed in a nearly insurmountable situation. It's a risky design choice that reinforces Rain World's unromanticized depiction of nature, though calling it "unfair"—as many critics have—would be mostly erroneous. To put it accurately, whereas other games treat computer-controlled opponents unfairly, Rain World favors both the computer and the player equally. If that doesn't immediately sound unappealing, you just might find Rain World to be an unthinkably exceptional experience.

One facet that may be a bit harder to accept is the static screens. Rather than having a camera that scrolls along with the player, the view remains fixed and only transitions to the next when you move far enough to the edge of the screen. Horizontally, the view shifts when you're close to the edge, but vertical transitions demand going all the way off the screen. This may lead to a predator that happens to be resting at the bottom or top edge of a screen grabbing you before you can react, though this is thankfully rare and mitigated by audio cues that indicate danger is nearby. Regardless, I find the stationary camera to be pretty fitting. The advantages, like the tension it builds and how the fixed perspectives allow the phenomenal visuals to breathe, make up for any potential frustration.

The unusual music of Rain World utilizes "junk audio"—sounds that are sampled from mundane, discarded objects, then tweaked and placed into a piece—that perfectly suits the game's derelict, alien environments. Much of the music is sparse and scripted only to play upon entering specific rooms, so most of what you hear will be diegetic...unless a threat is nearby. The threat themes are segmented into layers that fade in and out depending on the level of danger, which is an ingenious way of reducing repetition and communicating the presence of predators to the player. The main composer, James Therrien, is also the sole level designer and writer, resulting in his compositions being very closely linked to the gameplay and narrative. Apart from being incredibly well-integrated, the music on its own is simply fantastic and quickly became among my favorite video game soundtracks.

In conclusion, Rain World is a truly special game, nigh untainted by the expectations of a narrow-minded playerbase or an avaricious publisher. It's challenging, immensely immersive, visually stunning, boasts individualistic AI that somehow feels decades ahead of even multi-million dollar efforts, and provides strikingly high tension that puts most horror games to shame. As I'm writing this review, no game I've played before or after Rain World has reached such monumental heights.

hattle royale

At this point, you've probably already heard that this is a bad remaster. I obviously agree since this is a negative review, though not for the same reasons given by many others. In fact, I can't believe that one of the most common criticisms is "the graphics look the same" when there's a significant difference in regards to the lighting and effects, unfortunately for the worse.

To begin with, a new lighting system has been implemented to make the game visually closer to Dark Souls III. The deep colors, bloom, and armor shine that are integral to Dark Souls' excellent art direction are now absent, and the overall visuals are excruciatingly flat and bland. While other miscellaneous effects are technically more detailed, they're often a bit excessive and aesthetically inferior. The slow, otherworldly flame of bonfires is now a generic fire, the screen effect when resting at a bonfire lacks transparency, bloodstains are strawberry jam, fog walls are too detailed and look flat from certain angles, the majestic glow of lava is severely downgraded, etc.

Sadly, there's examples of blatant ignorance of the artistic intent of the original throughout the entire "remaster", but the first of hundreds can be seen as soon as you finish creating a character. In the opening cutscene, the dim lighting of your prison cell was supposed to hide your character's hollow appearance before they move their head up to a small amount of light. The remaster ruins this reveal by increasing the brightness of the environment, making the protagonist's lifeless face immediately noticeable.

The visuals are indeed a big letdown regardless of whether you appreciate art or just want to see a lot of pixels and polygons, so the gameplay must be a letdown too, right? Well, if you want it to be like Roll Souls III, you'll be disappointed, but for those who simply want the pure Dark Souls experience, you'll be... much less disappointed. The gameplay is practically the same, though there's small changes here and there of varying quality.

Starting with the good changes, you can use and offer multiple souls and Humanity at once, you can use the triggers to scroll through menus faster, and the password system is present and makes jolly cooperation with friends easier. That's about it; the rest are either bizarre or outright dumb.

I personally liked how world hosts had to use their own Estus to heal phantoms, but I understand why the devs made it so phantoms can now use Estus. That said, I dislike how you get more Estus usage whenever an enemy phantom is defeated; it just makes gank squads way worse. Speaking of gank squads, the Dried Finger item works exactly like DS3's, allowing for a third phantom and a second phantom invader. On the bright side, at least invasions don't prioritize gankers.

Another pair of gameplay tweaks are related to bonfires. First of all, you can now swap your covenant alignment at any bonfire. While there's still consequences for covenant abandonment, the encouragement of swapping between them willy-nilly ruins the feeling of permanence they once had. A new bonfire has also been added next to Vamos, which is a ridiculous addition that undermines how the world of Lordran is designed and serves as a beginners trap for brave adventurers that choose to venture into the Catacombs before obtaining the Lordvessel.

Honestly, I could go on and on and talk about what is and isn't different, but I've already gone over most of the noteworthy alterations. However, one of the strangest modifications that nobody talks about is the sound. Though I can't really tell if the audio quality is improved, I have noticed that there are sounds that have been slightly changed, the sound of bonfire warping being one of the few to come to mind. Also, the Blighttown bell now rings in the worlds of other players when rung, which is a neat addition, but hilariously enough the devs dun goofed and used the Undead Parish bell sound.

That alone summarizes the competency of Dark Souls: Remastered. QLOC, the developer of the remaster, wanted to make a bunch of minor enhancements, yet almost every single one of those minor enhancements ended up being a mistake, and they all piled up to make DS:R an inferior experience. I would recommend buying the original Dark Souls PtDE instead for those that don't own it, but for some asinine reason Bamco removed it from the Steam Store despite it being a perfectly functional product even without the fan-made DSFix mod. Because of that, I have no choice but to recommend Dark Souls: Remastered to those that haven't played it, because it's still one of the best video games ever made. But for those that already played the original release, which I assume is the majority of people that would even buy the remaster given how much the original PtDE sold, stay away. Not only is it ludicrous to pay for a game you already have on the same gaming platform, it's the worst way to replay this masterpiece.

Bad Rats Show is more than a game; it's a way of life.

I was just looking at the store page, and suddenly I got this irresistable urge to buy and play it. No, not just an urge - more than that. It was my destiny to play Bad Rats Show.

When I played it, I suddenly got a feeling of inner peace. I can't put it into words. I felt... safe. Like it was what I was meant to do. Like I'd found the key to true happiness. Does that make any sense?

You should buy Bad Rats Show... Then you'll know what I mean.

The physics don't make sense, the blood and gore effects are cheesy as heck, the achievement sound is the treasure jingle from Zelda, offensive stereotype rat is OP, and I can get nearly if not all my money back by selling the Steam trading cards that can be earned in mere hours.

It's okay.