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.

Is it just me, or did EA release College Football 26 really early this year? Last year (and historically with the NCAA Football games of previous generations), the college football game would release in late July, about a month before the college football season starts. This year, however, the game released on 7th of July, over a month and a half from week 0 of the college football season.

Not that the extra 2 weeks or so would have made much of a difference.

I waited a couple weeks and bought the game used (and $20 cheaper!) off of eBay. This was partly because the early release date blind-sided me. I wasn't thinking about football season yet. Heck, I hadn't even activated my fantasy leagues or confirmed that people were going to play again this year, by the time College Football 26 released! I was also cautiously optimistic about this game, but still wanted EA to prove to me that they could actually improve a product before I would give them any more of my money with a retail purchase.

Despite not playing the game until it had already received multiple patches, it still managed to fall far below my cautious expectations, and fully vindicated my decision to not purchase a retail copy.

EA Sports College Football's sophomore year is not something to cheer for.

I am genuinely dumb-founded by EA's lack of effort and care with this year's College Football release. I really did expect that with the highly-anticipated return of its college football game, EA would put at least a year or 2 of solid effort into making a good, polished product, in order to build up some consumer confidence and good will -- you know, before they flush it all down the toilet and go back to being EA.

But they couldn't even be bothered to do that! It's just business as usual for EA. Except now they're selling us two shitty, low-effort football games, instead of just one.

The same, plus some options

First and foremost, so many of the problems from last year's game are still present, so I'll refer you back to that review. Yeah, I did eventually figure out how the option controls work, and get used to them, and even come around to liking them in last year's game. But kicking is still mercilessly difficult without any options to make it easier or less forgiving. This is despite the fact that 26 comes with a smorgasbord of new options for tweaking the ways that things like Wear & Tear and auto-subs work (which does resolve one of my biggest complaints with last year's game). But they couldn't be bothered to give the user any customization options for the kicking game, other than the choice of whether to hold or tap the buttons (the same option we were given last year).

There are extensive customization options for Wear & Tear.

There's still no tutorials or Skill Trainer to teach kicking or other game mechanics. So you're still stuck going to open practice and having to self-teach yourself (through trial-and-error) how to kick, run the option, use the Do-It-Yourself Reverse plays, use the switch stick, and so forth.

I think there's also more flashing indicators to tell me when players are triggering or disabling their abilities, and maybe also when they have Wear & Tear. I'm not quite sure, because there's no in-game keys that tell me what all the U.I. icons on the field mean, nor are there any tutorials or training modes that explain what all the icons and symbols mean.

(I had meant to write and publish this post last Monday, but I got distracted and didn't.)

Last week marked a subtle, but significant shift in my video game YouTube consumption. For the first time in over a decade, Stephanie (formerly James) Sterling did not post a new JimQuisition episode last Monday. (As of the time of this writing, I haven't seen an upload for this Monday either). She had warned us that she would be taking a long overdue break. Part of me thought that she wouldn't be able to go through with it, and that she just wouldn't be able to help herself and would publish a video anyway. She didn't.

Stephanie Sterling is part of an "old guard" of video game essayists on YouTube who shaped many of my perceptions of video game criticism, and criticism of the games industry at large. In addition to the JimQuisition, I was a big fan of creators like SuperBunnyHop, Errant Signal, Max Derrat, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, Joseph Anderson, and others. These creators (and others) largely influenced my own content creation philosophies. But many of these creators have slowed down or stopped uploading altogether.

SuperBunnyHop went from uploading an essay about every 2 months, to uploading 1 game essay over a span of about 2 years. Though he has since started uploading more regularly this year, with an excellent history of war-gaming (and how it evolved from table-top to video game).

Errant Signal was similarly publishing a new video every month or 2, but has slowed down to just a handful of uploads over the past 2 years. Almost all of those have been his on-going "Children of Doom" series. Will this series be his swan song? Or will he go back to more broad essays after this massive project is over?

Joseph Anderson is still doing occasional large critiques, but he seems to have moved more towards live streaming instead of pre-recorded, long-form essays. I haven't watched any of the live streams, but I have seen some clips from some of them.

Others, like Max Derrat and Noah Caldwell-Gervais seem to still be going strong, and both seem to be broadening the topics of their content. Max Derrat has begun covering other game series beyond Silent Hill and Metal Gear, while still keeping focused on how philosophy and the occult are adapted into whatever games he discusses. Noah has been creating a lot more "road trip" content, in which he talks about U.S. history from the perspective of driving a particular interstate route. I've actually liked those road trip videos a lot, since they make me nostalgic for the road trips that I took with my family as a child.

In any case, content from these foundational game essayists seems to have become fewer and further between over the past couple years, culminating with Sterling's decision to take her long-overdue break. I've been almost religiously following the JimQuisition for years now, watching almost every Monday. Last Monday, the internet seemed like an emptier, more hollow place without thanking God for her.

Last week marked the first Monday in a decade that Stephanie Sterling did not upload a JimQuisition episode.