Perfection is boring. You can scrub and scrub away at imperfections until you scrub too much, and you lose something. You’re telling me this scene in Fellowship doesn’t move you in some way? There are also plenty of games with flaws, but none that are fatal for these hot messy wonders.
Fallout New Vegas
Someone will recommend Fallout: New Vegas to you as a game that’s better than most spiritual awakenings, and then slide a mod list with about 40 different quality of life mods your way before you even dare to play it. That’s just the way it goes.
The story behind Fallout: New Vegas’ insanely rushed development is pretty well told at this point, with Obsidian only having 18 months to turn it around for Bethesda. To put across just how insane this would be today, imagine Silksong releasing in, like, 2019 instead of…never.
You’ll be able to tell that New Vegas was rushed pretty much immediately, as the thing loves to treat itself to a little nap, i.e. a big crash, with the gayest of abandon, it performs absolutely awfully in terms of framerate, and it has an impressive, almost charming variety of bugs. And this is the PC version! The PS3 and 360 versions genuinely have framerates so bad that it’s like watching Skinamarink. Nothing happens!
And yet, the actual role-playing in this RPG simply is the best in class, with the best, most complex writing that in-house Bethesda could get nowhere near matching. You’ll start a quest, think it’s going one way, and then oops all branching paths.
New Vegas was pretty much peerless for the decade that followed its release. Also, it’s got a dog what looks like this. Yeah, um, checkmate.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
There’s something about sprawling RPGs that simply do not lend themselves well to what some would call a “stable video gaming experience”. Thanks to all the moving parts, RPGs tend to be the personification of that Simpsons meme. The elastic band is usually an engine from 20 years ago.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is also from 20 years ago, and yeah, in a lot of ways, you can tell. But just like New Vegas, feed this thing more mods than the fat kid from Matilda, and whether or not it’s 2004 or 202—5? Are we sure?— this insanely ambitious gem has plenty of vampire pun superlatives for you to use. Ooh it doesn’t suck, sink your teeth into it etc.
But bloody hell, does this really have a lot going on considering it was made by just 32 people at Troika on the Source engine. These days, you’d probably need closer to 300 people to replicate this.
In Bloodlines, you play as a new vampire belonging to one of 7 different vampire clans, and each play differently. I always found it crazy that if you played as Nosferatu, you had to stick to the shadows cos you were just so obviously a vampire, and all of your dialogue was also different because of it.
Bloodlines had branching paths, so many dialogue options, and a wealth of role-playing potential on top of multiple sandboxes to explore. So it’s little wonder that it was released in a pretty sloppy and basically unfinished state, leading the community to fix the many, many, many bugs over the years. Even in 2025, modders are still tinkering with this hot mess.
A sequel is apparently coming for this one, presumably before we’re all dead.
Red Dead Revolver
I’ve always wanted to do a video on “video game franchises that were very different to begin with than what they are now” but don’t really know how to succinctly package that. If you have any title ideas, drop them below. Please.
But Red Dead would certainly fit into such a video. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in 2004 who believed Red Dead Revolver would serve as the basis for everyone’s favourite testicle-shrinking, beer-drinking, sad-thinking simulator.
Compared to the two games that followed it, Red Dead Revolver is incredibly linear, with you making your way through levels and blasting until everything is very dead. Yeah, there is a hub of sorts where you can yap with NPCs and buy guns, but that’s about it. Shoot the dudes, watch the numbers go up, your dad’s your uncle — I still have a lot of time for those kinds of games, though.
Where Red Dead Revolver is a bit of a mess is in its story, especially compared to the later games. You are Red Harlow, you need revenge, suddenly you’ve got a big desire for custard creams for 20 minutes, you get revenge, and then the game is done. Red is a character who never really gets past the first bullet point on his character trait list, and it doesn’t help that you keep flipping between characters more than The Big Show from 2002-2018.
Add in that you basically have to babysit the camera the whole time, as well as some pretty poor performance if you’re playing it on older hardware, and you’ve got quite the fun, messy ride. It did introduce Dead Eye to the franchise, and you know what I say:
“Bullet time is always fun time.”
And it’s always a fun time to go bug hunting, too.
Earth Defense Force (the lot)
Look, this is the Earth Defence Force engine. Nobody knows how it began. Few understand its alchemy. All we know is that it exists, and we should all fear and cherish it equally.
It’s funny to go from talking about a franchise that’s become as insanely high budget as Red Dead, to talking about a series that probably about 4 people develop, in a cupboard, on computers that will start coughing when you press the space bar.
EDF is basically Helldivers 2, except with about 1% of the budget. It will chuck wave after wave of extraterrestrials at you, give you a couple of comically large guns and sometimes a cool mech, and then dares you to not have fun. Don’t worry about the whining noise your graphics card is making, that’s meant to happen, OK?
Stretching all the way back to the PS2 with Monster Attack, EDF has basically just gone “and then” ever since with each sequel, adding more nonsense layers on top of its silly, silly cake. The writers might have genuinely been replaced by these guys sometime around its Xbox 360 era, and honestly brain not want work all time, sometime brain just want smash.
And that’s what EDF gives you: just blowing and smashing a lot of stuff up alongside your mates. Talk about your week with those close to you as you absent-mindedly destroy half of the planet. It’s what these games were made for. If you can find it within yourself to look past the frankly arse graphics, you will be enjoying an evil laugh over all the mayhem before long at all.
The Evil Within
I genuinely think The Evil Within 2 is one of the best survival horror games of all time, and somebody, somewhere got the marketing of it very wrong, and that’s why it seemed to struggle so much at launch.
Or maybe too many people had already played The Evil Within 1 and thought that Tango GameWorks or Shinji Mikami himself hated them. They can’t be blamed if so, to be honest.
You see, the overriding sense a lot of people might get from The Evil Within is that it’s “cheap”. Not in the way it’s made, as the game looks great and has some ridiculous setpieces, but more in the fact that it just loves blowing you up or throwing enemies at you that you cannot feasibly deal with. It’s a classic survival horror experience that teaches you through failure, and that’s not really for everyone. I know I have to be in a particular mood for it.
Then there’s the story, which is just a lot to digest at once, with asylums, collapsing cities, science experiments, brains all over the place, and alternate realities to contend with. It’s also just a pretty clunky feeling game in 2025 in comparison to more current control schemes, and really just the way we’re used to things working.
However, I can’t help but be charmed by The Evil Within. It’s a full on kitchen sink game with some barmy mechanics, a completely unique look all its own, some brilliant enemy designs, and equally brilliant sequences where you’re getting the heck away from them. It’s a real weirdo of a game, and anyone who thinks it has nothing to offer just doesn’t know what they’re…stalking about.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (the lot)
PC games from the 2000s will often have absolutely obsessed players saying things such as “plays terribly, 10/10”. Coming out of an era where tiny teams were constantly pushing limits, often beyond their own, games like Bloodlines and Fallout: New Vegas proved that sometimes to break new ground, you need to quite literally break stuff.
There’s no game series that sums up this better than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Look, if S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 had come out and was completely bug-free and in a perfect state from day one, we all should have probably been very suspicious.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series follows interconnected stories that revolve around scavengers called Stalkers in The Zone, which basically got double-tapped. Not only was it near Chernobyl when that whole thing kicked off in the first place, it also fell afoul of another accident decades later. As a result, The Zone is crawling with not only more irradiated beasties than a night out in Rhyl, but also your fellow man looking for their big break in this promised wasteland.
Open world games made by small teams typically have their problems, but when you chuck in emergent narratives, weather that can affect gameplay, and so many more little marvels, STALKER tends to typify Eurojank. You’re going to want to save often, not only because death can come extremely quickly, but also because even in the fully patched and modded versions, Shadow of Chernobyl in particular can just crash out of nowhere.
But stick with them past the rough, bewildering first couple hours, and also maybe shift how exactly you play open world FPS games a bit, and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series might become your next obsession. As long as the technical issues don’t make you overcome with Rage. 2.
Rage 2
I played and completed Rage 2 back in 2019, which both feels like yesterday and also like it came out way earlier than that somehow. But let me tell you something: gun to my head, I absolutely could not tell you, without looking it up, what it’s about, or what your objective in it is, or who you are.
Andrew WK is there? I think?
The sequel to the extremely overhyped 2011 FPS from id Software, Rage 2 saw id returning alongside Avalanche Studios to basically make a Saints Row FPS meets Mad Max. Well, they absolutely nailed the feel of Rage 2’s combat, as this is as close to open world DOOM as we’re likely to get.
However, the story here really is just absolute plops, to use the scientific term. You’re a person called…[typing noises] Walker, and you have a cool suit. Basically the entirety of the storytelling happens in the first hour, then you kill a bunch of people, and then you surprisingly quickly kill the most important person, and then the game kinda ends. It’s hard to ground yourself in a world like this too when most of the storytelling is done with dudes yapping at you in your HUD.
But the general combat gameplay is what you should be coming to Rage 2 for. Your suit lets you do things like dash around, leap up super high, and even chuck black holes at enemies, which is stupid and great. You can see that id did carry over a lot of the combat to DOOM Eternal the following year.
Rage 2 is basically like a Pot Noodle video game: it’s got absolutely no substance and is probably bad for you, but boy does it hit the spot while it lasts, even if it sometimes feels like an alpha.
Alpha Protocol
Okay, now Alpha Protocol definitely feels like an alpha at times. This is another Obsidian whipper where you just kinda…have to look past the giant flaws that present themselves pretty much straight away.
Alpha Protocol is kinda like Mass Effect meets Everything or Nothing. You play as Michael Thornton, a secret agent who joins a secret group to do top secret bits and bobs. What this means for you is a lot of complex conversation trees, morality systems, tonnes of character and gear customisation, and mostly pretty rancid combat to go along with it all.
Yeah, Alpha Protocol is one of those RPGs where you really fall in love with the role-playing, and then wish the game side of it would catch up a bit. Performance issues and bugs are barely even worth mentioning for Obsidian games — they’re just a necessary evil apparently. The AI doesn’t help things, and neither does the fact that you’re basically shooting every bullet as a dice roll. If you got mad at XCOM, you might get even madder here.
Obsidian did have more time to work on Alpha Protocol than they did on New Vegas, but maybe them crunching to release two big action RPGs in the same year might go some way towards explaining the mess of both.
And yet, Alpha Protocol really does have a lot of weird charm to it. It’s all a bit lopsided, but I’m still pretty glad that it rose from its digital grave not that long ago.
Dead Rising 3
Listen, I need you to know something. I’m a weirdo. You probably knew that already based on uh, all the evidence, but you have to bear that in mind when I tell you Dead Rising 3 is honestly my favourite game in the whole series.
Yeah, look. I know. The first game has way more detail and personality. The second game has a far cooler setting. But there’s just something about this game that is like a soothing balm to me, and I think it’s the most immediately playable game in the series.
It’s true that Nick doesn’t have a lot to latch onto as a character, and basically everything Nick does is to make the goth girl notice him, but who among us can say that we’ve never battled across a zombified California in order to maybe make a goth girl smile?
Dead Rising 3 does have a few glaring design flaws, though. It does not run well, and the 60fps cap on PC is archaic. Also, back tracking is insane. Why is it so annoying to get around the map? You build the most open map in the series, and then make it a chore for me to explore?
But, also, you get to somehow magically sellotape cars together to create a real life Sir Kill A Lot and mow down a frankly impressive amount of zombies at once. Ultimately, I know Dead Rising 3 has a whole lot of flaws, but it’s one of those games where if I just want to turn my brain off and German suplex a zombie one minute while dressed as a shark, I know where to turn.
Deadly Premonition
Okay, Deadly Premonition, you are now in the “I talk about you too much and the other children need my attention more for the time being” penalty box and I cannot mention you for a while. See you in…two weeks.
You probably know full well by now just how much of a hot mess Deadly Premonition is. Its fans can still often be heard saying: “it’s awful, it’s so good!” with the same enthusiastic yet slightly tortured smile as a husband who knows their wife is slowly poisoning his meals but loves her too much to do anything about it.
Playing as Agent York, your job is to find what exactly is going on in Greenvale, who is doing a bunch of murders, and who left the door open and let all these otherworldly creatures in. You’ll explore an open world, chatting to the townsfolk to find out more about the mysteries while also keeping York well rested and fed. You even need to keep yourself showered, or you will have flies um flying around you.
Just in the way it sets its stall out and with the off-beat voice acting and cinematography, Deadly Premonition is absolutely worth a look. Yeah, a look. You see, actually playing Deadly Premonition at times feels like it’s actively fighting against you a bit, with worse combat potential than Steven Seagal when you ask him to stand up from his chair.
The game also just doesn’t perform well, with some sloppy framerates and a tendency to crash. It’s a shame that they seemed to use that as a unique selling point for the second game, which is honestly just not very good. That said, somehow, it all comes together in Deadly Premonition, like just about. It’s on the precipice. If the shooting was like 1% worse than it already is, it’d probably be trash. But it stays teetering, and is somehow just a fantastic hot mess.
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