I was on the fence for a long time about Tormented Souls. I kept seeing it come up in videos about modern, classic survival horror games. People kept insisting that it was good. But I had played the demo back near its release in 2021, and I wasn't really impressed. So it sat on my wishlist for years, waiting for a steep discount. That discount finally came, I bought the game, installed it, and it still sat on my PS5, un-played, for months.

But when College Football 26 turned out to be a borderline un-playable dumpster fire, and without having enough free space on my hard disk to install Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's 130-gig install, I found myself with extra free gaming time on my hands, and decided to look for some relatively quick games to play in my back catalog. It was either this or Crow Country, and I decided to give Tormented Souls the nod. Besides, Tormented Souls is supposed to be getting a sequel soon, so I wanted to play the first one, in case the sequel gets really good reviews, and I want to play that sooner rather than later.

Part of the reason that I was on the fence about the game was that I had concerns about the maturity level of the game and it's developers. The design of the player character is kind of ridiculous. Is she supposed to look like an anime character? Her default outfit looks like something you'd see an anime maid wearing, and they go out of their way to pull her tits out in the opening cutscenes. It all seems like it's designed to titillate a particular demographic that doesn't exactly have a reputation for having a mature or healthy view of women.

I could not take the main character's default outfit seriously.

It would be one thing if the game were going for some kind of dis-empowerment gimmick, and actually gave the player control of the character while she's naked and vulnerable. But they don't. She gets dressed during the fade-to-black between the end of the opening cutscene and the player taking control for the first time. So the outfit and nudity all seem rather pointless.

It seems like even the developers understood the ridiculousness of their design, since they include an optional alternate outfit for her in a locker in the starting room. This alternate outfit includes a more practical (and less revealing) pair of jeans with a leather jacket. I actually didn't notice this outfit until after I died and had to restart the game, but once I found it after the restart, I couldn't switch to it fast enough. At least now, I could take the character and game more seriously -- pending finding out if the game's story and scenario are equally silly and immature.

Nostalgic call-backs

Was the story as bad as I was afraid?

Well, no. Not really.

It's mostly fine.

If anything, Tormented Souls isn't so much "immature", as it is derivative. From the start, many audio cues and music sound like they are pulled straight out of a PS1 Resident Evil game. The improvised weapons give slight Dead Space vibes. And as the game goes on, it's story should feel more and more familiar to anyone who played through the original Silent Hill, except without all the clever symbolism and references to real-world alchemical and occult beliefs that help gave Silent Hill its uncanny tangibility.

If the bar is set at "less smart version of Silent Hill", then I guess things could be a lot worse.

Gameplay-wise, Tormented Souls feels more like the original Resident Evil with its static cameras, tight hallways with monsters hiding around blind corners, and a save system that requires a consumable resource to save your game. There's no magic item box though, as you carry all your supplies and puzzle items on your person at all times, including multiple weapons, a crowbar, a hammer, a car battery, and other large, bulky items that definitely don't fit into those pouches slung around Caroline's waist.

You will be blindly pointing weapons at enemies off-screen.

It definitely does have the classic survival horror feel, with some modern bells and whistles. For one thing, it borrows the REmake design of mapping the character-based tank movement to the direction pad, while keeping directional camera-based analog control on the left joystick. The tight halls and frequent camera cuts make it difficult to use the analog stick when navigating the mansion halls, and there were multiple places where trying to do so resulted in me turning around in circles multiple times. There were even a couple places later in the game where the camera glitched out and got stuck rapidly flickering between 2 angles. For situations like these, it's great to have the tank controls.

When you start a new Franchise in a Madden NFL game, you get 2 options:

• Use preseason rosters,
• Use current active roster.

For simulation users looking to start a new Franchise in the preseason, neither of these options is ideal. The preseason roster gives you all of the preseason players, but it does not include ratings changes, updates to player likenesses, or roster changes that occurred during or after preseason. The current roster, on the other hand, is up-to-date, but only includes each team's active 53-man roster. Practice squad players are all independent free agents.

If you choose the active roster, then every team will start the preseason with only 53 players, and CPU teams don't bother to fill their rosters during the preseason. This wreaks havoc with preseason play, since CPU teams will go into preseason with only 2 quarterbacks, or only 3 running backs, and so forth. So when it comes time to sub in all the backups in the 2nd half, things potentially break down, since the rosters aren't really deep enough to facilitate pulling out all the starters.

So I have taken it upon myself to try to partly resolve this problem. I have uploaded a shared roster file that restores most practice squad players onto every team's rosters. I went through every team, and added all of their practice squad players to their rosters. I used the rosters from ESPN, going into week 2, and looked for every practice squad player in Madden's free agent pool, and added them back to their team's roster. This included any currently inactive players who were listed on each team's injured reserve.

I have manually restored many practice squad players onto their team's roster.

This roster will allow sim Franchise players to use a roster that maintains major roster transactions that occurred during or after preseason (such as Micah Parsons being traded from the Cowboys to the Packers), as well as any ratings updates that EA applied after the preseason, while still giving all the teams some of their practice squad players back. These extra players can play in the preseason, and can be added to teams' practice squads after the preseason.

This roster is called "PLUSPRACTICESQ", and it is currently available on Madden 26's in-game roster share menu. I created this roster on PS5, so I'm not sure if it's available for XBox or PC players to download. Does EA have "cross-play" for file sharing? If you're playing on XBox or PC, and cannot find or download this file, then don't get mad at me; direct your anger towards EA.

2 years ago, after playing both Star Trek: Resurgence and Star Trek: Infinite, I started thinking about how the ludic genres of "point-and-click"-style adventure games and grand strategy games are both very good ludic genres for the Star Trek IP. I had originally planned on creating a short, 20-30 minute video talking about these 2 games, specifically, and how they manage to faithfully adapt the source material. And I wanted to contrast these 2 games against a few other Star Trek games in other ludic genres, such as Elite Force (a first-person shooter), and some of the old starship operation games like Starfleet Command.

However, as I worked on the script, I kept wanting to talk about more and more Star Trek video games, and I kept reading about other Star Trek games that I had never played. So I expanded the scope of that original project to start to include more examples of adventure and strategy games, as well as to talk about Star Trek games in other genres. I bought some games to try out, and fell into a rabbit hole of playing every Star Trek game that I could get my hands on, and watching let's plays of all the games that I couldn't play.

Before long, that 20-30 minute project had ballooned to over an hour of script. At that point, I decided that this was too much for a single video, and I decided to do 2 things:

1. I would split the video up into multiple parts (originally, I expected 3 or 4 parts),
2. I would make each video be about games in a particular ludic genre (such as adventure games, shooters, strategy games, etc.).

This necessitated more research, and more play-time with other games in other genres. Eventually, after 2 years of on-again-off-again work, I ended up with over 2 hours of videos talking about the different ludic genres into which Star Trek had been adapted. I talk about which ones work, which ones don't work as well, and also what I would like to see from Star Trek games in the future.

In the meantime, just as I was getting ready to finally release this epic project, 2 new Star Trek games were announced: Voyager: Across the Unknown (not to be confused with a Star Trek tabletop game called "Into the Unknown"), and Star Trek: Infection. So I may talk about those games in a future update video. Infection, in particular represents an entirely new ludic genre for Star Trek games, since it's a VR horror game -- the first true horror game that I've ever seen for the Star Trek IP.

The first part of my retrospective series is now available on YouTube, after a short period of Patreon-exclusivity:

The other 4 parts are already available to Patreons at the following link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/exploring-new-of-137678510. I will be releasing each new episode every few weeks, but Patreons are able to view all 5 episodes now.

I was very harsh of Dan Mullen's premiere performance as UNLV's head coach, in which UNLV barely eked by with a 1-touchdown win over an FCS opponent. I even went so far as to say that I suspect he would be fired sooner rather than later. Much to my surprise, UNLV has since beaten Sam Houston and UCLA to start the season 3-0. In fact, UNLV was absolutely dominating UCLA in the first half, going up 23-3 by halftime.

The defense, in particular, looked dramatically improved in the first half against UCLA. They were playing much more disciplined. They were gap-sound, weren't giving up the huge cutback lanes that had been their Achilles heel in the first 2 weeks, and pass coverage looked tight. They even got a couple sacks! It was a dramatic turn-around.

Is the team much better than that week 0 performance against Idaho State made them look? And do I owe Dan Mullen and his staff an apology for being so harsh?

The answer is: probably.

But there are some caveats. The biggest caveat, of course, is that UNLV did not look nearly as good in the second half. They almost blew the game, giving up 20 2nd-half points, while only scoring 7 of their own, in order to win the game by a single TD. UNLV's defense couldn't get UCLA off the field. In fact, UNLV ran a whopping total of 4 offensive plays and a punt in the entire 3rd quarter, because UCLA possessed the ball for the entire rest of that quarter.

PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Marcus, Las Vegas Sun via AP

Anthony Colandrea was forced to play "hero ball" too often for comfort.

Moreso, I still have big concerns with the offense -- the line in particular. Even though UNLV's offense appeared to be rolling while they put up 23 first-half points, the offensive performance was a bit rough. Most of that production came on improvisation on broken plays. Quarterback Anthony Colandrea was frequently forced to scramble, and was lucky that his receivers were consistently able to come back towards him and catch passes on the perimeter. And when there weren't receivers open at all, Colandrea was usually able to find a soft spot in the defense and scramble for first downs.