My favourite action slashy style game of the ps2 era would be DMC 1. In true contrarian fashion i actually don’t like dmc 3 anywhere near as much as 1 which to me is a perfect game with no flaws.

I’m currently replaying the originals and I fucking hate them. I think i stomached them at the time cos there was nothing like it and they were brilliant showcases for ps2 hardware but practically every aspect of the game is tortuous. QTE the video game, so many annoying qtes rammed into everything, open a door? Qte. Do a finishing move? Several qtes. All with annoyingly narrow windows for failure as well. Alongside that the game has so many climb wall or traverse rope sections that limit you to 2 buttons and are always really long for no particular reason. I vaguely remember the psp games being largely the same recycled nonsense which at the time everyone was fed up with by the time ascension dropped which is why they it disappeared for a while and they rebooted it. If they released another game in the same style it would have been a commercial failure

I swear it actually gets worse over time as devices try to cram more complexity into the protocol it craps out for me constantly regardless of device. I could write a thesis on how much shit Bluetooth has caused me over the years and anyone who says to me “it just works” instantly becomes my sworn enemy

I tried out wireless earbuds and they fucking suck. Shelled out for some decent sennheiser momentum 4 in ears thinking I’d get decent quality…

• bulky little box that doesn’t fit in my millenial skinny jeans pockets anywhere which was not a problem with wired cos i just thread through my fucking clothes duh
• heavy ear pieces rly hurt my ears after an hour of use
• the active noise cancelling amplified certain noises like talking to painfully loud levels. Transparency was turned off
• apt-x with lossless still sounded worse than my shure in ears
• the right earpiece came broken it always thinks its in my ear
• shitty firmware that takes ages to update and cooks my phone doing it??? Have to interface with a clunky app to change settings which require me to remove the headphones to change them
• always felt like someone could yoink them out of my ears at any point
• lossless codec breaks when i go outside for some reason and i have to drop it to high quality instead
• multi device pairing is broken and when my laptop outputs a sound while I’m listening to music via my phone it deafens me with glitches audio
• if its not deafening me with anc/glitchy audio the headphones are actually significantly quieter than my shure in ears
• randomly the right earpiece will click which apparently is a common fault with the headphones
• returned and refunded

Shure wired in ears with replaceable cables will always be the goat absolutely nothing beats them they last for years and never break and the audio quality is perfect along with foam eartips that actually isolate the noise (invaluable for my sensory problems). If thats too pricey lots of chinese earbuds now have replacable cables which wasn’t the case when i got my first pair of shures over 10 years ago. Killed them by accidentally running them under a tap after a solid 6 years of daily use. I’m sorry i ever doubted them

This series has been on my backlog for ages i need to get around to it

Can’t vouch for it not being malware but I found this http://avpunknown.com/avp2aio/

Didn’t recognise this at first but looked up a video and I played the shit out of this game.

Speaking of long forgotten DS games I really enjoyed Spectrobes. Mining for minerals was really calming

Ps1 has so many gems, alien trilogy, lifeforce tenka, tomba, fighting force, silent bomber, mdk or my personal favourite Apocalypse.

What do you mean we have quake champions all of my play time in quake wars was offline cos my parents wouldnt pay for xbox live. Still very enjoyable

kid me was terrified of the dark areas in the first level lol, love that game and the psp releases as well

Rogue trooper, it even got a remaster. For some reason my memory always mixes up rogue troop and army men sarges war idk why

Played starhawk and loved it never got to play lawbreakers it died too fast. These games would still be alive if they just released community server files but noooo just shut things down forever. Every now and again i think about Section 8

I played this one because the reboot avp didn’t run on my laptop. The reboot is still a gorgeous game for the time it came out in

As long as it doesn’t have an equivalent of the fade section in origins I’ll at least not hate it and drop it completely. I have a german friend who might be able to translate the references for me unless they’re dropped completely from the English version? From her I learned my new favourite word etepetete

Loved this game. I have the xbox 360 version cos my laptop couldn’t run the PC demo at all back then.

I’m sold on the box art alone I may have to give them a play the visuals are quite pretty from what I’ve seen. Reviews seem to lament its not like dragon age origins and as a dedicated hater of dragon age origins i might actually like this one

And cryostasis now that is a good game

Another one I can guarantee nobody other than me thinks about. Alpha prime

This deffo has a fair few dedicated fans me included. Most of the stalker fanbase swears by call of pripyat and alot actually only got into stalker via anomaly or gamma. But for me ShoC is and always will be my favourite game in the series.