Recent reviews by hellfire

Pac-Man World 2 was a game I played for probably hundreds of hours as a kid. I loved it. It was my introduction to Pac-Man as an IP. I remember trying to collect tokens so I could unlock more arcade games. I remember the sense of mystery and not knowing how to reach certain items. I remember very iconic sound effects and very iconic worlds. I look back on this game fondly.

So when I heard they were remaking it, my interest piqued. I preordered the game, waited for weeks and weeks to finally play it. Had a lazy saturday where I could play it. I booted it up, and the first thing I see is a dialogue box asking me to accept their privacy policy. I hit decline. I am the type of person to not read it, hit decline, and deal with the consequences (online features being disabled, etc.) I don't care for online features in what is a singleplayer game. I couldn't proceed. I can't play my $40 singleplayer game without accepting their privacy policy.

So I read their privacy policy. Here's a few interesting bits:

"We collect information about the computer or device you use to access our Services, including the [...] MAC address, IP address International Mobile Equipment Identity (“IMEI”) number and other unique device identifiers"
"We may collect information regarding the geographic location of your device"
"[...] providing the data to our ad agencies and ad platforms to target advertisements of our (and our group company) games and services to you outside of this game"
"Legitimate Interest [to] provide contextual in-service advertisement"

You know what DIDN'T collect my IP, geographic location, and train data algorithms on my behavior for advertisers, all while expressing that they reserve the right to do so? Pac-Man World 2 on the PlayStation 2.

So okay. I guess I have to accept their stupid ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ policy to play my singleplayer game. Whatever. I hit accept, as I had no choice.

Voice acting for Pac Man, hate it. Muted him immediately, sorry. I'm sure the VA did a great job, but I'm not a fan of games having the player emitting constant worthless grunting OOFs and Hahas and whatever.

Controls, awful. Never bothered using the throw mechanic, felt horribly tacked on with nothing accommodating it that didn't feel forced in. Camera never felt quite right. Pac-Man would often clip and jitter while walking into things.

Hate the guiding yellow paint circle underneath the player and closing ring every single time you jump so you can time the super bounce or whatever they call it. Good games use a shadow. The super bounce is unnecessary and should have been reworked into a different move or something. I didn't even understand the super bounce power, it seemed kind of random to me until I learned that the ring closing in was my visual cue. For some context, I read none of the signs because I felt I should be able to play a remake of a game I played for hundreds of hours as a kid, so I guess it's my fault for not listening.

Rev Roll does not zoom in the camera and it is too easy to change the angle. OG game zooms the camera into the player to assist your aim direction, rotation is slow and methodical. If you so much as push the stick in a direction and then let go of that direction, Pac-Man snaps 180 degrees and you end up shooting your rev roll in the wrong direction.

The controls feel sanitized and modern-game tight and not in a good way. It doesn't feel like I'm playing Pac Man World 2. A genuine improvement, I will say, is removing when he did that thing in the OG game where you'd roll off of steep curves (like in pac-village on the roofs of the buildings). Except now instead it's impossible to get on top of the buildings because the hitboxes on those vines growing around them or whatever make no sense and my player keeps jittering trying to clip inside stuff. Feels weird and bad. Swimming still sucks and I think is more confusing than the OG game.

The gameplay feels pretty sanitized too. Levels end like a sonic game.

Don't even get me started on the whole gacha thing I don't even want to talk about it.

Here's the thing. You're remaking a game. I'm incredibly in favor of a company remaking a game and restoring cut content, adding new features, accessibility features, improving the art direction, so on. But not rewriting history. This is now what future generations will know to be Pac-Man World 2. But this isn't Pac-Man World 2. This is not the same experience. It is not the same game. If you're making this amount of changes, if you're going to ignore the source material to this degree, why not just make a new damn Pac Man World game?

It's a good effort. I see that. But I can't recommend this as a remake of Pac-Man World 2.

she bench on my mark til i 3D

game does not work on windows 7

game does not play in 4:3

game has little replayability (i played and beat it on ps4)

hoping mods save this game

i love JBMOD

the fact this is a free mod is just absurd

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome

half-life 2 if it was made by people that really wanted half-life 2 before half-life 2 released

this review is written from the perspective of: wanting to play half-life 2 in two-player co-op, one of which never played a half-life game

i strongly dislike how much this mod changes the hl2 story maps. it adds a ridiculous amount of NPCs and your weapons definitely do not do enough damage. the amount of enemies the game adds to the game is definitely optimized for 4+ players and if you are simply playing in co-op with two players the game will be impossible to beat without cheats. and i'm not talking about difficult, i'm talking literally impossible, sections that had maybe 10-15 enemies has upwards of like 50.

"vintage mode" which apparently disables this is broken entirely and the only way to progress through the game without headache is to adjust the skill config file to make weapons more powerful, but the amount of enemies will still make sections such as needing to keep an npc safe really hard, like the parts with barney or alyx.

mod adds a lot of stupid immersion-breaking logos and texture changes i.e. the photo of alyx's parents and her as an infant was replaced with a photo of a cat??? and Eli talked about it and it made no sense

i saw a lot of others complain about needing to noclip a lot, i don't think this is the case, needed to maybe noclip once or twice here or there.

there are sections where the scripted sequences refuse to play and you have to do "ent_fire lcs_whatever start" in console to progress, an example of this is when you meet up with Eli in the prisoner pod in nova prospekt and alyx will just sit there and not press anything on the computer to unlock him

the respawning system is really obnoxious and inconsistent. sometimes you will respawn within like five seconds and other times the game refuses to respawn you with no timer and no explanation if you can get back into the game and help your partner.

all things considered, obsidian conflict is not on steam and the newest version doesn't work, gmod co-op mods are broken worse, and on the whole there is really just no better way to play hl2, which really sucks

i thought this would be cool as ♥♥♥♥ but i didn't enjoy what i played. i refuse to elaborate

i keep saying that i want to play this game and then i play it and give up after like 28 minutes