I really was not ready for the start of football season this year. Part of that is the fault of NFL Fantasy Football, which migrated its leagues to ESPN's fantasy app, but waited till the 11th hour to actually enable the ability to transfer. I got the email about it in the spring, and was just kind of waiting to get further instructions from the NFL on how to do the migration. Those instructions didn't come until like the end of July, only a couple weeks before the start of the NFL preseason.

This delay in setting up my fantasy football leagues this year meant I wasn't really thinking about football, and didn't even bother looking for cheap copies of College Football 27 on eBay when the game released. I ended up buying my used copy off eBay a whole month after the game's release. In fact, it was so late, that I received the game in the mail the day before Madden 27's official release. So I'll probably be late about getting my pre-owned copy of that too.

Another year of Big Money and conference re-alignment ruining college football is upon us.

Being a month late, I apparently missed a whole lot of a drama with the game's launch. From what I've read, the Dynasty mode nerfed experience gain for players and coaches in order to sell XP boost micro-transactions. Without those micro-transaction XP boosts, users report that it would take 150 seasons of undefeated national championship runs to get a custom coach up to max level. (The game only supports 50 years of Dynasty Mode)

Things were so bad that apparently content creators and influencers (even the Ultimate Team ones!) were in active rebellion and recommending boycotts. EA back-tracked ... partially. The XP boost micro-transactions were removed, and the names of the Coach XP sliders were renamed in order to obfuscate whether a "fast" option is included or not. So maybe XP gain is back to normal, or maybe it's still slower than in past years. I don't know. Worse yet, EA still kept a paywall for certain coach skill trees.

Even influencers (such as Bordeaux) were quick to call out EA for its brazen attempts at pay-to-win monetization.

It actually teaches the game this time?

Upon finally receiving a copy of the game, I jumped into a quick exhibition match with last year's national champs expecting to feel right at home and breeze to an easy victory, and to start my reviewing process with the impression that the game hadn't changed much. I did breeze to an easy victory, but that had more to do with playing as the reigning national champs instead of anything I was doing. Instead, I actually felt surprisingly out-of-place. A lot of simple things from years past were different. For example, the commands for shifting defensive linemen and linebackers weren't mapped to the controls I expected, and I generally had no idea what any of the defensive pre-play controls did, because so many of them were moved, combined, or had unfamiliar commands in their menus. The buttons to view wear & tear weren't where they used to be, even though a quick trip to the setting menu confirmed that wear & tear is still in the game. And so forth.

So the next time I played, I went to the Training menu, expecting to be disappointed by a measly list of un-helpful mini-games that would force me to go to the internet to figure out where all the familiar commands had been moved to, and what new commands might be present. What I found instead was an exhaustive suite of tutorials, including an entire menu dedicated specifically to mechanics and features that were new this year, or significantly changed from previous years. On top of that, the tutorials showed subtle, but significant design improvements over the Madden counterparts that I had been familiar with for years.

There is [finally] an entire tutorial menu dedicated to new and modified features.

In general, these Skill Trainer tutorials lacked good feedback for what you might be doing wrong, if you are failing to execute the commands being tutorialized. In fact, when I got to the tutorial for the new timing-based catching mechanic, I was kind of stone-walled. There was no on-screen indicator, dial, or gauge of any kind telling me what to press or how long to press it. My receiver kept catching passes, but I wasn't given credit for executing the timing catches, and the game wasn't giving me any feedback on what (if anything) I was doing wrong. So I hopped on the internet and searched for "College Football 27 perfect catch tutorial not working", and immediately found a reddit post explaining that, by importing last year's settings, the timing-catch mechanic is disabled by default. That's right, the game's most significant and heavily-advertised new feature was disabled by default! I had to quit the Skill Trainer and turn on the timing-catch setting. Then, suddenly, the tutorial started working, and the rest of the Skill Trainer drills were mostly smooth-sailing and were highly informative.

I love Pacific Drive, and have actually been coming back to it periodically over the past year, whenever I need to kill some time. I'm not usually a trophy (a.k.a. "achievement") hunter, but I will go for them if it's not too far out of my way. My first playthrough of the campaign earned me all but a handful of the trophies in the game, and the remainder seemed fairly achievable. After all, there is no trophy for doing things like "collect all Frequency Files" or the other documents, or for completing the in-game encyclopedia. Stuff like that is a grind that I would never bother to do. So as I've been playing the game's epilogue, I've been trying to earn the few remaining trophies.

There was one trophy, however, that was driving me up the wall. If you've played Pacific Drive, and made any effort to try to get all the trophies/achievements (or you've spent a lot of time on Pacific Drive forums and subreddit), then you probably know what trophy I'm talking about. That's right, the one trophy that looked like it might stand between me and a Platinum was the "Watch out for hop-ons!" trophy.

Like many other players, I was one of the unfortunate ones for whom this trophy seemed to refuse to pop.

"Watch Out For Hop-Ons!" is the one trophy that
stands between Pacific Drive players and a Platinum.

I spent hours driving around various junctions with various bunnies and hares attached to my Remnant (usually with a YouTube video playing on my phone, so that I wouldn't feel like I was completely wasting my time), but the trophy just wouldn't pop.

I even tried the "pause the game while driving with an attached bunny" recommendation that showed up in so many forum and Reddit responses, even though Ironwood Studios has insisted that pausing doesn't trigger the achievement.

I planned entire runs around going through as many junctions as possible that had bunnies and/or hares listed in the anomalies.

But this trophy just would not unlock...

... That is, until last week.

A few months ago, the Jimquisition had an episode about gamers criticizing game reviews and reviewers for "not finishing the game". James/Stephanie Sterling correctly points out that this complaint with a game review is most often employed to deflect from valid criticism of a game -- usually because the person complaining likes the game and gets overly defensive in response to any criticism. While I agree with James/Stephanie Sterling's response in the original video, I also have strong feelings about other practical concerns regarding whether a video game reviewer should need to finish a game in order to review it. As an amateur game critic and YouTube essayist, this particular brand of attack against reviews and reviewers is relevant to me, my gaming habits, and my content creation, so I hope that I have a worthwhile perspective about this topic.

As for the underlying issue of whether a game reviewer should have to finish a game before reviewing it: the answer to that question is a resounding, absolute, unequivocal "no".

As an amateur, who plays games and creates written reviews and video essays, all on my free time, outside of a full-time job, I cannot play every game to end credits -- let alone to 100% completion or a Platinum Trophy.

And you know what? Neither do most players.

Go ahead, take a look at the achievement or trophy metrics for any game you play. You'll probably find that the achievement for beating almost any game will be owned by well below half of all players, and might actually be less than a quarter of players for many longer games like RPGs. And while there are certainly some players who play offline and don't report their stats to Steam, Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo, the achievement stats for the vast, overwhelming majority of games is very closely representative of the population, since most players don't go to the trouble of playing "off the grid".

Finishing a game is a relatively rare thing for the average gamer to do, which means the average gamer isn't going to care if a particular review finished the game or not. That average gamer is probably not going to see the end of the game anyway, so a review that only covers the first half or so of the game will still be perfectly adequate and informative for such a player.

Most games are completed by well under than half of all players.

So as an "average gamer" who plays as a hobby and writes reviews and other content on the side, as an un-paid amateur, not finishing a game is good enough for me too. Yes, I will try to finish the main campaign of a game that I review, if it's possible and practical. For most shorter games (with campaigns less than 20 hours), I do, indeed, almost always hit the end credits before I publish a review. It will usually take me a few weeks to do it, which is why, even if I bought the game on release day, my reviews will still be several weeks late, or longer. Most of my reviews are practically retro reviews by the time I get them out.

I debated whether to turn this into a retro review of Shadow of the Colossus, or to focus this review on whether or not this particular remake manages to re-capture the magic of the original. Honestly though, what could I possibly say about Shadow of the Colossus that hasn't already said? I might as well try to write a retro review of Citizen Kane or Hamlet!

The original game (released in 2005 by Fumito Ueda's Team Ico at Sony) is a classic and a masterpiece of interactive art. It ranks right up there with games like Portal, Half-Life, Super Mario Bros., and Tetris as a contender for the title of "best video game ever made". Virtually every creative decision that the original team made was the absolute perfectly right decision to make. From the desolate and bleak, yet hauntingly-beautiful landscape. To the immense sens of scale and grandeur that embodies almost every crevice of the game and the sheer smallness of the protagonist himself. To the intimidating, yet majestic aesthetic design of the colossi themselves. To the bittersweet death animations of the Colossi, accompanied by Kow Otani's outstanding score, that makes you question the rightness of your actions. To the way that Agro's independent actions, slightly imprecise controls, and occasional insubordination sell the idea that she's an autonomous living character, rather than a simple vehicle that you pilot as an extension of the player avatar. To the decision to not drag down the game's pace or pollute the overworld with a single encounter with grunt enemies. And on and on...

Shadow of the Colossus was like a digital vacation when it was released in 2005.

It's as perfect a video game as has ever been made. It's the centerpiece of any "games as art" argument (if we still even have to have that argument anymore). Critics and analysts before me have already consecrated Shadow of the Colossus far beyond my petty powers to add or detract.

Bluepoint is the masters of remasters and remakes

Why couldn't Bluepoint have done
the Silent Hill HD Collection?!

Because of how absolutely brilliant the original game is, I had reservations about any attempt to remaster or remake it, especially after the debacle that was Hijinx Studios' Silent Hill HD Collection. Fortunately, however, the remake privilege (or burden, depending on how you want to look at it) was given to Bluepoint Games, the veritable masters of remasters and HD collections. Bluepoint had already released an HD remaster of Shadow of the Colossus on the PS3 back in 2011. I never played it because I thought the PS2 version of the game still looked fantastic and didn't need to be remastered to be enjoyed. That HD remaster was very well-received by the general public, as have been all of Bluepoint's remasters, as far as I am aware. Why couldn't Konami have given Silent Hill to these folks?!