Recent reviews by Hamchan

Played through on Steam Deck with no issues.

This game is the epitome of OK. The story, writing, and combat were all OK. You can feel they were held back by the budget.

Ringo is a great Shin Megami Tensei main character and makes a great case for why they shouldn’t have silent protagonists in these games anymore.

In the end I still enjoyed my time with Soul Hackers 2 but I recommend getting it on sale rather than full price.

Very enjoyable game. This is the 4th game in the Trails series and the start of a new two game arc. I recommend playing the original Trails in the Sky trilogy before this to receive maximum payoff for a lot of the events and character appearances.

The main draw of this series to me is the writing and story. Trails is unique as a JRPG series because it focuses on a lot of day to day life of the protagonists. In Trails from Zero, you are part of the police force in Crossbell city and will spend many hours of the game solving requests from the city folk. While a lot of people may find the story slow paced, once you tap into that vibe and start enjoying the world, it’s very rewarding. Especially since there are now 12 games in this Trails series now at the time of writing, that all connect to each other and build on the same story and world. You have to pace yourself when tackling this epic.

Durante did a great job with this PC port. Everything looks good and ran well.
Also every JRPG could do with a “high-speed mode” like this one.

Yakuza 4 played it on Steam Deck, ran well except for battery life which only lasted 1 and a half hours unplugged.

Yakuza 4 was a special game when it came out. It brought a lot of advancements to the series and is important for fans to not skip.

The context of the western release is important. Yakuza was near death in the West when it came out. We played each game in the series not knowing if we would be able to play another one in English ever again. We savored every single moment of Yakuza 4.

To now see the series in such healthy shape now, with so many releases and even more coming in all regions, to see it come out on multiple platforms and especially PC, it’s like a miracle.

Yakuza 4
Pros
+ Multiple playable characters for the first time in the series. Each with their own style and each one fun in their own way.
+ Expanded Kamuracho with rooftops and underground areas now added.
+ Smooth combat. You can tell it’s way smoother than Yakuza 3 which is very stiff in comparison. The feel that Yakuza 4 establishes lasts until the exceptional Yakuza 0 when they change to the Dragon Engine after that.
+ Graphically, you can tell they took a step up compared to Yakuza 3 as well. Kamuracho at night while raining still looks beautiful to me.
+ The localization is as a good as always.

Cons
-The story is a mess! It especially falls apart near the end when it feels like a self-parody at points.

Result: Play this game!

Really nice remake of Half-Life. Changes made are sensible and the game still holds up even 24 years after the original's release.

The Xen levels feel like they made a new game. They are high quality too, comparable to Valve's own creations.

Recommend this for anyone who wants to play Half-Life for the first time.

Have played the Project Diva games since the PSP and happy to see the series finally on PC.

It’s a great value package too. 250 songs (with the DLC), most of them full versions with 3D music videos, is a lot of content.

As a longtime fan of the Ace Attorney series this collection is great and worth it for anyone who enjoyed the high quality writing and characters of the original trilogy.

For anyone new to the series this is a great place to jump in too as it is entirely separate to the main Ace Attorney series and requires no prior knowledge.

Definitely get this game if you want read a well told tale with well written characters and good courtroom action.

198X is a pretty cool game!

The graphics and soundtrack are both great. Both work together to hearken back to the days of the 1980s arcade.

The game's structure consists of five throwbacks to 1980s arcade games. Each one will feel familiar to anyone who has played games from this era, a real tickle of the nostalgia bone. They are fun too and made we want to play the real Outrun or R-Type soon after finishing this game.

The worst part about this game is that it is around an hour long and doesn't actually end the coming of age story it bills itself as. You get a big "To be Continued" instead, so just know this going in. I got this with a humble bundle so I'm happy with what I got. For the $14.50 Aussie Dollars the game is priced at, at the time of this writing, it is a much harder sell for the length.

Umineko is a visual novel that is on one hand a mystery murder story and on the other hand a meta commentary on the entire mystery genre. The tricks and twists in this story are plentiful and very satisfying to uncover. It honestly took me until the second last episode before I figured out what was really happening in the story.

Though it wasn't only the mystery that hooked me. Umineko is full of family drama, emotion and romance. There is a pretty large cast of characters and for the most part they get fleshed out and have their moments where they shine in the story. I'll be thinking about the Ushiromiya family for a long time.

It took me around 80 hours to read both the question and answer arcs. It is definitely a commitment to go through it. I recommend spacing the episodes out to avoid burn out.

I also read the entire Higurashi When They Cry series before Umineko, which was also written by the same author. Although it is not necessary to read Higurashi for Umineko to be enjoyable I still recommend it. There are plenty of Higurashi references in Umineko that make the experience better. Also the first ep is free on Steam anyways, so just try it out: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/310360/Higurashi_When_They_Cry_Hou__Ch1_Onikakushi/