Reviews written by unGUILTY

I spent a couple weeks during summer years ago playing this with my best friend Alex.

My favorite parts:

* Transforming into different characters.

* Bizarre and freaky world, including the psychological childhood shadow-world of the protagonist.

* It starts out kinda fucked up and stays that way.

* The voice acting.

* Mush Head.

This game left my mind buzzing every night. I was annoyed when Alex played through a section without me! But oh well, I can forgive him. The emotional climax of each "episode" was often quite disturbing and vivid, like a bad dream, but real and humorous enough to stick with you.

Played this last year with my girlfriend, it wasn't quite as immersive as I remember it being, but it still stood up pretty well.

About 7 years ago I played this game for several days on end. I became an expert of the many techniques you must use to keep the waters under control.

Wetrix is the only puzzle game I've ever come close to mastering. For some reason my brain just doesn't work in two dimensional puzzle games, so Tetris and all of its clones are just annoying. I always hit a point where I couldn't keep up. But in Wetrix, the strategies for keeping things under control were more evident to me, and the game was a lot more fun while still being a continual challenge.

I can still hear the sounds and that funky robot voice, too. Love it!

I played this game about 5 or 6 years ago. By that time the graphics were significantly outdated. I remember seeing an ad for it in a magazine around the time it came out, and it captured my imagination. This kind of game is made for me.

The puzzles challenging without being frustrating, the voice acting is above-par, the characterization is engaging and develops throughout the game, and the ambiance is impeccable.

Making a game based on the movie must have been a huge challenge, but cinematic backgrounds are incredible. I remember one specific room, similar to the house towards the end of the movie where Decker fights the Nexus 6. Water drips down from pipes and strange sounds come through...

Even thinking about it now, I can feel that space. The way they constructed an area from screen to screen created a feeling that I was actually moving from place to place. I identified with the character intensely, and doing even simple errand-type puzzles was a thrilling experience. Combat, which could have easily been clunky, was equally exciting.

Not only does it do justice to the film, but the game develops its own version of the events and feelings of the Blade Runner universe. I have read the book, seen the movie and played the game. The game lives up to the other two works, which is saying a lot.

I was smiling the whole way through this game. I never made it to the end of House of the Dead. Straight-up twitch games just don't do it for me. This playful and hilarious remake is a lot better, and it has some interesting twists on the "type to kill your enemy" concept, especially during bosses.

My one criticism is that it's sometimes difficult to see what's going on (for example, in the cases of chest-bursting bugs) making it difficult to react to all that's going on. Increased transparency on the text-bubbles might have solved this.

The fact alone that the characters have keyboards strapped to their chests and Dreamcasts on their backs is justification for my high rating.

Things I love about this game:

* The emotions I felt while playing it and the valuable insight I gained from it about human experience and my own experiences. It was very intense. There are very few games that make me feel this much, especially over a relatively short playing period.

* Its unpredictability and flexibility.

* The integration of text and static images to create a fluid user interface.

* Whoever wrote this had a great sense of humor and knows when to say something directly (breaking the fourth-wall sometimes) and simply narrate. There is a distinct personality to the game.

* Frank, realistic depiction of sex and relationships.

* Variety in play experiences. My first time through I was abducted and murdered at age 3 or so, the third time I played I lived to age 80 and spent all my money on electronics equipment before death arrived.

I've played a lot of text adventures, focusing heavily on the ones without puzzles. This is one of the best, and I will play it several more times. A huge amount of work went into this game, as is made clear by the amount of small 1k files that make up the meat of the game.