Recent reviews by Crow Dad

some absurd number of hours into my first playthrough i saw that my overall industrial throughput had been slowing down. looking into it, i found a mid-chain production bottleneck and realizing that my first solution (assign more miners) was not significantly helping, i came up with a comparatively radical solution (that i won't go into detail on here since it's boring). this solution was such a windfall that i seriously considered dismantling my entire industrial network and rebuilding from scratch, but instead i just started a new save. this game is ostensibly a sandbox space sim (like elite dangerous) but the entire time i worked this problem i was seated at a desk (in real life, and in-game).

you do not need to know any more about x4. despite the dodgy ai, lame storylines, okay voice acting, game economy that grinds to a halt if everyone is at peace, and oftentimes annoying ui, simply based on the paragraph above you already know if this is a game that tickles your brain in the particular ways that you enjoy. hell, if you're anything like me, you probably got to the part about analyzing production bottlenecks and had to get up and walk around for a minute

carbon-fiber, one-off hypercars are very cool, great at cornering and all that, but for my money the fastest and best car in the game is the '88 monte carlo super sport with the racing v8 and the black number 3 livery (of course). damn thing goes at keast 230mph

and it makes sense, "racing lines" sounds like some european ♥♥♥♥ to me, just get out there and intimidate 'em and win some ♥♥♥♥♥♥' races

wavetale has a lovely movement system, pleasant voice acting, and an enjoyably good story (with all the love in my heart: the story has the vibe of a book you'd give a kid who's not quite at the age of starting a young adult novel, but one who's ready to read about death and loss and the effects thereof; the kind of book that is fondly remembered twenty years later). the combat is nothing to write home about, but i certainly wouldn't call it bad, just not memorable.

but i don't get it, how come i hadn't heard of this until a year and a half after it came out? the video game channels in the handful of discords i'm in are all about indie games that are quick but satisfying, especially with unique movement systems, so i figured i would have seen SOMETHING about it somewhere, i wonder wh---

"former stadia exclusive." ah. well, so it goes.

if in 2024 you are reading a review of fallout 4 to decide whether to pick up the game or not, then by having not bought and played it in the past nine years you have already made your decision. but if you're still looking for an answer, take it from me, someone who has 25 days of time-played in this game: don't. it's fun enough to mess around in the sandbox shooting guys but the base-building, weapon and armor variety, and quests (especially radiant quests) are not good. bar harbor is alright (other dlc less so). skill progression is abysmal.

world-building is somehow even worse. i cannot impress upon you how long a time 200 years is. nasa put people on the moon less than 200 years after the united states was founded. why has boston not recovered, even a little? why don't people live in cambridge? you cannot say "200 years of the institute" as if that makes sense.

honestly if anything involving the institute were well-formed i would probably think better of this game, but nothing they do or say or are involved in makes sense. nothing they touch is well thought out or well written, from the initial "'kidnapping shaun and killing the non-player parent' instead of 'killing both parents' or 'kidnapping all three'" through to the final "despite one faction actively working to make the commonwealth a better place, another faction having the stated goal of acquiring, researching, and hording advanced technology, and a third faction really not having enough of a motive or manpower to do so successfully, all the groups opposing the institute decide that the best course of action is nuking them, killing a bunch of people, and destroying a clean source of unlimited energy."

mods do fix some of the issues but enough of them are baked into the game's systems (or the plot) that they basically become intractable, and frankly i've had enough of bethesda's schtick of releasing a game that's okay at best, then releasing modding tools 6-12 months later, and then waiting another 6-12 months for modders to solve all the issues for free.

bad game. play new vegas instead, or try one of the other first-person rpgs that have come out since 2015. i hear cyberpunk is pretty good now? maybe check that out instead.

what a lovely little game. perfect way to spend a lazy weekend, looking forward to going back and grabbing all the little things i missed.

for some reason, jusant reminds me so much of the mid-2000s game knytt (despite the differences between the two) that i had to check multiple times to ensure that the developer of that game hadn't worked on this one

put this game head-to-head against eve online circa 2005, and the only category in which elite dangerous comes out on top is the flight model. even the grind was better in eve

I waited until act 5 came out to start playing. What a fool I am. I should've been playing this years ago.