The Last of Us Part 2 continues the incredible, heartbreaking story of Joel and Ellie trying to survive a zombie-like post-apocalypse, making their way across America using stealth, their wits, and deadly bricks. Just like its predecessor, Part 2 arrived right at the end of the console’s lifespan and spotlighted the incredible things the soon-to-be-replaced console could still achieve. In the way The Last of Us defined the previous generation of PlayStation, for me, The Last of Us Part 2 takes the crown for PlayStation 4. Combining trippy visuals, a breathtaking soundtrack, and expert usage of VR (though it can be played without it) Tetris becomes the vessel in which developer Enhance delivers a message of - and I’m not kidding - world peace. Obviously he didn’t change any of the gameplay, why would you when Tetris is literally the perfect game? But instead, he set his sights on the psychological phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect, a kind of fugue state that gamers can enter when entranced by the tetrominoes slotting into place. Matt Kim - Tetris EffectĪt the tail end of the PS4’s life cycle, Tetsuya Mizuguchi of Rez fame decided to reimagine one of the greatest games of all time: Tetris. As much as I wish it delivered narratively, its emergent gameplay allowed me to create so many stories of my own, and the mayhem I was able to unleash with Snake’s bag of tricks was reminiscent of the joy of playing with action figures in a sandbox as a kid. Sadly, Hideo Kojima’s magnum opus is appropriately titled, and its missing pieces are especially noticeable in the final acts. Simply making Snake move through the world feels good, whether he’s sprinting full-tilt across the battlefield to clock a guard in the face with a Six Million Dollar bionic punch, or seamlessly slithering from an army crawl to a crouch. The Phantom Pain is full of wonderfully bizarre little features like this, but it also nails the most basic fundamentals in a way that many games fail to. You can tell the game your birth date, and if you visit your base on that day, an army of hardened mercenaries surprise their ruthless leader and make him blow out candles on a cake. You can paint your helicopter pink and make it play Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” at full blast while showering an enemy camp with rockets. You can have your cardboard box delivered via airdrop, knocking out enemies if it lands directly on their heads. You can collect sexy pinups to put on your cardboard box that will distract horny guards. You can sled down sand dunes on a cardboard box. You can make Snake take a shower after missions, but if you don’t, he’ll get so dirty Ocelot dumps a bucket of water on him when he returns to base. Oh, and you can find a cassette tape of bathroom sounds, which’ll make guards leave you alone if you play it while hiding in a latrine. Did you know that in MGS5, you can train your horse to defecate on command, and if cars drive over the manure, they’ll spin out and crash? Or that you can abduct a bear with a weather balloon? You can also disable electronics by spraying them with a water pistol. My favorite games are the ones that make you run and ask a friend, “Did you know you can _?!” Hideo Kojima’s propensity for packing his games with exactly this sort of detail is what got me hooked on the Metal Gear Solid series to begin with, and it’s what made me fall head over heels for The Phantom Pain. Max Scoville - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes & The Phantom Pain Plus, It also did what I thought was initially impossible – it made me care more about Arthur Morgan than I ever did about John Marston. Its stunning world is packed full of memorable characters, from funny drunken escapades with Lenny to Dutch Van der Linde cementing himself as one of the greatest, and most menacing, ever video game villains. But there’s so much substance to that style, too. For a game released on the PlayStation 4, only a small handful of games can compare to it graphically today. This was the famed GTA studio’s only new release on the hardware, but one that proved worth the wait as it delivered on both grand scale and nuanced detail (yes, horse testicles included).
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