Self Similar – self similar's personal gaming nonsense blog

Writer’s Blocks

Like a lot of people my age, Tetris was first introduced to me via the venerable Game Boy version that so many of us got as a pack-in at the time, although certainly plenty of people fell in love with ports on other systems as well. Indeed, Tetris is one of those games that has been ported absolutely everywhere. Attempts to make sequels and spin-offs never managed to enter the zeitgeist in the way these late 80s – early 90s versions did, even if a great many of them were positively received. That hasn’t stopped attempts to keep remaking and iterating on the game, and some of the more recent releases were actually pretty successful. The original VR-oriented Tetris Effect and Tetris 99 both come to mind.

“Just one of the many themes in Tetris Effect: Connected.”

Tetris Effect: Connected is a version of that PlayStation VR version ported to other consoles and given some additional online features. It’s one of two games I picked up on Game Pass at around the same time, played a bunch, and then put down for a while before noticing they dropped off of Game Pass before I could finish them. Doh! Still, Tetris Effect was the one that was easy enough to keep picking up, playing a bit, and putting back down again no matter how long had passed since the last time, and that’s exactly how I played it. I did eventually beat the “Journey Mode” campaign on Normal difficulty after abandoning my initial goal to get at least a B rating on every level. The verdict? I loved it.

Tetris Effect combines classic Tetris gameplay with some trippy visualization and a dynamic, rhythmic soundtrack to create an amazing audio visual experience and, moreover, a really cool vibe. I’m sure it is an absolute blast in VR but even without a VR headset, it’s still fantastic. Gameplay-wise, it’s a fine version of the Tetris experience we all know and love. While there are some tweaks, notably the “Hold” queue, which lets you swap out the falling piece for the one in your holding area on-demand, and the “In The Zone” feature that, after building up, lets you hit something of a panic button to pause gravity temporarily, alleviating the death rain of tetrominoes and hopefully allowing you to maneuver yourself out of trouble, its mostly just good ol’ Tetris. I somehow missed the existence of both of these features and never purposely used them a single time during my entire playthrough, by the way, so it really was just classic Tetris for me. Maybe now that I know about those features I can go back an improve my scores, eh? 😅

“Dolphin attack!”

Between the classic gameplay and the awesome presentation, it’s just a great game to lose yourself in, and in that way, it’s quite relaxing, at least up into the point where it suddenly becomes a desperate panic, which is no doubt part of the core Tetris experience. Overall, the main thing Tetris Effect proves to me is that Tetris itself is literally a timeless classic; it’s just a great game at its core. To that end, I’m really curious about the recent Tetris Forever, which is something of a combination of a historical archive, including a documentary and a tour through many of those classic versions of the game. Once I can get it at a generous discount, you’ll probably see it here.

As an aside, while this is much less well known than its Tetris counterpart, another beloved puzzle classic, Lumines, actually got the similar Tetric Effect treatment from the same team in 2025 with Lumines Arise. Nice!

“Mio and Zoe, combining their powers… or something.”

Shifting gears completely, after enjoying A Way Out and loving It Takes Two, Hazelight’s similarly co-op focused Split Fiction ended up on my wishlist the second I got a good look at it. While we didn’t dive into it right away, my girlfriend and I eventually played through the game via couch co-op on our Xbox Series X. Unfortunately, it took us a few months of random sessions instead of being hooked enough to push through the game in a week or two as you might expect. Let me take a step back a bit first…

Split Fiction has each player playing one of the two protagonists of the story, Mio and Zoe. Mio and Zoe are both writers looking for their big break who, along with others, get invited to a big publishing company to pen deals to sell some stories, but are instead invited to participate in a new experimental virtual reality program which will apparently let them experience a sort of immersive virtual reality simulation of their own stories. Things don’t quite go as planned, and Mio ends up in Zoe’s simulation with her. Stuck in this corrupted virtual world built from the minds of both authors, the two must journey together through their stories and try to find a way to escape.

“One of the more WTF?! inducing side-stories.”

Honestly, the game’s first impressions weren’t that great, as I found the character models and scenery in the introduction where Mio and Zoe first visit Rader Publishing in the “real world” to look just a little too generic, almost bordering on the uncanny valley. Thankfully, once the game starts in earnest, it’s actually quite nice looking, and at times absolutely beautiful. Given the setup of the game, if they somehow dropped the ball on realizing these sci-fi and fantasy inspired worlds, it would have been hard to get passed. Sound design is also great, and I have no complaints with Mio and Zoe’s voice actors, which is good, because they talk a lot.

It’s hard not to compare Split Fiction with It Takes Two, and the biggest difference between the two besides the obvious plot differences, is in their gameplay. While It Takes Two felt inspired by the type of early 3D platformers that were all over the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation with their semi-open, more exploration based gameplay, Split Fiction feels more inspired by 2D platformers in that it has much tighter controls, much more action, much more linear level design, and is much more challenging overall. I wouldn’t say Split Fiction is necessary a “hard” game, but it definitely felt like there was a lot more friction than we felt in It Takes Two. I think we collectively died far more times than in It Takes Two, though I could be wrong and I just don’t remember dying often in It Takes Two because it was just so much more forgiving. In either case, at the end of the day Split Fiction felt a bit more intense and at times aggravating, and as a consequence, a little less fun than It Takes Two.

“2D platforming, mirrored!”

It’s hard to quantify and that is no doubt entirely subjective, because despite this, the game is still absolutely brilliant. As with It Takes Two, there’s a huge variety in gameplay, level design, and themes and almost all of it is competently executed. Split Fiction tends to mix up the gameplay mechanics per level rather than in sub-sections, and even the mini-games found throughout It Takes Two were replaced with “Side Stories” which are themselves differently themed smaller levels. While there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, I’d argue that most of these side stories were more interesting than the mini-games found in It Takes Two, it does contribute to that more linear feeling. I also think the style of cooperative gameplay is a little different, with Split Fiction focusing more on scenarios where each character has different abilities which they use in parallel, and sometimes in together, rather than being forced to work together through mechanics that require being used in combination as was often the case with It Takes Two.

Like the game, I want to end on a more positive note, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, Split Fiction really ups the ante with its last level, which twists the concept of split screen co-op in some really creative, often mindbending ways. Saving these antics for the last level kept them from overstaying their welcome and felt like a great send off.

“Q: Are you in my world, or am I in yours? A: Yes!”

Overall, while I’d highly recommend Split Fiction for those looking for a solid two player co-op experience, I’d recommend It Takes Two first. While I’m sure some people will prefer Split Fiction, it seems that the popular consensus is with me on this one.

You know, I really should play Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons one of these days to complete my tour of Josef Fares’s work… 🤔

Pig Papillomas Patrimony

I’m slightly too old to have been one of those Harry Potter kids, but I begrudgingly checked out the first movie when it was relatively new and already massively popular, and despite my skepticism, I actually enjoyed it. That led to me eventually watching them all, many times, including several in the theater, reading and/or listening to all the books, and having way more fun than any middle aged man should admit to with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter stuff at Universal Orlando. My partner, a bit younger than me and more in-line with the age to have been enraptured by it as a kid, is similarly afflicted. When Hogwarts Legacy came out and started getting a lot of acclaim, she ended up picking up a copy. I figured she’d love it because on top of loving Harry Potter, she’s played plenty of open world games, but while she didn’t bounce off it, the gameplay didn’t quite hook her either. After a few sessions she lost interest. I, on the other hand, liked what I saw and added it to my backlog. It had been a while since I’ve played a game of this sort, and feeling in the mood for one, one day I dusted it off and jumped in.

“There it is, Hogwarts Castle.”

First, I should say that the game looks (and sounds) quite beautiful. The developers did a bang-up job realizing the world. While I’ve not played even a single other Harry Potter related game so I can’t really compare it to previous efforts, I can say that a lot of love and care was put into crafting the world, particularly Hogwarts itself. It’s huge and absolutely brimming with secrets and insane details, so much so that not being able to find my way around eventually started to get a little old. Thank Ignatia Wildsmith for Floo Flames, eh? Seeing Hogsmeade at Christmas time was another highlight. Unless you’re simply not a Harry Potter fan, this all goes a long, long way all by itself. Overall, the game feels very competently made, and while I wasn’t really familiar with Avalanche Software before this, they’re now very much on my radar. I’m impressed!

As for the gameplay, after you get through the introduction which sets up the main story of the campaign, you’re finally plopped down in Hogwarts. From there on, the game consists of an open world where you can more or less do anything you want, with most quest triggered by approaching the relevant NPC and chatting with them. Of those quests, the main story related quests tend to be much more linear and focused, and of course, include quite a few cutscenes. The rest are a bit more of the variety you’d usually find in an open world game, with some being a bit more involved than others. There are also quests related to going to your classes, though these are usually more like cutscenes which usually lead to special assignments from your professors that result in the opportunity to learn new spells. All of the main story quests, classes, and some of the more notable side and relationship quests are grouped together so that you need to complete everything in the group to unlock the next main quest, and completing that will unlock the next group of quests. This actually works quite well in ensuring that you don’t skip anything too important to the overall story.

“Correct answer. Get fucked, Gryffindor!”

Combat is action RPG focused, mostly consisting of your spammable basic cast and more interesting spells which are on cooldown timers. There’s not really a mana system or anything like that; as long as a spell isn’t on its cooldown, you can use it, and the more spells you have, the less you need to use your basic cast while waiting around for other spells to become available again. It’s all pretty straightforward. One of the funnest and amusingly weird things about the game is how incredibly violent combat actually is. You have a huge selection of spells by the end, but even the most mundane ones you have at the beginning are pretty brutal. Levitate someone so they’re helplessly flapping around in the air, then shoot the shit out of them, then pull them closer to you, still keeping them floating, then push them away, violently slamming them into a wall. You can “juggle” them like that for quite a while too, although I prefer using some of the interesting spells you get later instead. I mean, why not burn them alive in the process as well? While I think the spells are represented accurately enough, seeing them actually used like this doesn’t quite fit the tone of Harry Potter. This might turn some off, but as I said, I find it darkly humorous.

You know, early on, I came to the realization that between the over the top, whimsical British vibes and this particular style of the open world action RPG gameplay, Hogwarts Legacy actually reminded me quite a lot of the Fable games, particularly Fable II. Of course, combat aside, a bit less over the top. I mean, there’s no farting to impress prostitutes in Hogwarts Legacy, but I guess we can’t have it all. (/s) Searching around a bit, I definitely don’t seem to be the only person who saw the similarities, and I’m quite curious about how much the upcoming Fable game is going to end up resembling Hogwarts Legacy when it’s released.

“Torturing a Mountain Troll and not feeling too bad about it.”

One big difference between Hogwarts Legacy and the Fables games is that there’s no morality system in this game at all. You’re supposed to be a student at Hogwarts but by the time the campaign is over you’ll probably have brutally murdered hundreds of dark wizards, poachers, and beasts, trespassed everywhere, and stolen everything not nailed down and no one, absolutely no one, cares. Nowhere is this more clear when it comes to “unforgivable curses”. Yes, you can learn some of the infamous, highly illegal spells that only dark wizards use. You can agonizingly torture someone with Crucio right in front of other students and even teachers and no one bats an eye. You can even learn Avada Kedavra (the killing curse, which instantly kills a target) later too. Yep, met with a shrug by everyone around. It’s hilarious!

The main quests take you all over the map, from very familiar locations like Hogwarts itself, Hogsmeade, and the Forbidden Forest, to innumerable tiny hamlets, ruins, caves, dungeons, and other points of interest. In fact, this relates to my another complaint about the game. I wouldn’t say its absolutely massive, but I do think the world is too big for this game. It would have been better to tighten the map up to just the notable areas from the books and maybe a small number of hamlets and specific side quest locations. Instead, this game takes the opposite approach and fills a pretty large area with a number of random puzzles and collectibles. Like I said, it’s been a bit since I’ve played an open world game like this, so I went kind of OCD trying to do and collect everything. This was mostly pretty fun, but the game did start to feel a bit like a massive checklist outside of the quests.

“Flying a Hippogriff at night, Hogwarts Express below.”

At least you can fly around the map, and I have to say, I love the way flying a broom feels in this game. Some may complain about the lack of maneuverability, but to me it looks and feels exactly like it’s portrayed in the movies. My only real complaint is that they somehow neglected to include Quidditch. I suppose adding an entire sports game inside of the already content rich main game was just too heavy of a lift for Avalanche Software, but it does feel like a bit of an oversight, even if there is a flimsy in-game excuse for why the season was cancelled.

There are a lot of other diversions, from growing and gathering herbs and other spell ingredients to brew potions with, to decorating your own magical “room of requirement” space, and even capturing and breeding beasts. I put around 70 hours into the game and while I got pretty close, even with my compulsion to check all of those boxes, I still didn’t 100% the game. I wanted to, but there was just too damn much to do, even though I was still having fun with the game.

“Trying to make a Kneazle like me in my Care of Magical Creatures class.”

Overall, quite an enjoyable game, and yes, I will definitely be paying attention to the details on its sequel as more are revealed. Part of me is kind of surprised that it’s getting one, as after the initial hype died down, it seemed like everyone stopped talking about the game. Then again, it was the global best-selling video game of 2023. Who knew?!

Metal Gear Mania 2025 – Metal Gear Solid (Bonus)

I’d actually been tossing around the idea of a Metal Gear Solid series playthrough for quite a few years now. I came to love other series in the genre, like Splinter Cell and Hitman, and suspected I’d really enjoy these games as well. It also felt a little odd to have zero experience with such a highly influential series, and one that a few friends of mine absolutely loved as well. Having picked up the HD collection for the Xbox 360 at release, something like 15 years ago now, my only problem was that it omitted the first Metal Gear Solid. As followers of this blog are no doubt well aware, I’ve been a long time Xbox devotee and until relatively recently, didn’t own a single PlayStation console. It might sound silly, but not having a good way to start such a narrative heavy series from the beginning felt like a real barrier to entry.

So, what options did I have? Well, I could obviously buy an original PlayStation or maybe even luck out and find a fat PlayStation 2 with its highly sought after backwards compatibility, but I’d been downsizing my vintage console collection and didn’t really want to buy another old console, especially for a single game. Another possibility was emulation, but way back when I first started seriously considering a series playthrough my PC was pretty old and I worried about being able to emulate the game smoothly, the accuracy of the PlayStation emulators available at the time, and my lack of an actual PlayStation controller to play with. Another option was the PC port of the game, but it always sounded just a little compromised to me, though opinions on it did eventually change and I decided that would be my path forward.

A little later, I learned of the existence of the PlayStation Classic which I’d somehow totally missed. A cheap dedicated emulation machine that I could plug into a modern TV, complete with a couple of apparently good quality recreations of the original controllers? It even included Metal Gear Solid in its selection of out-of-the-box games! For a fleeting moment this seemed like an even better solution, but sadly, the more I read about the PSC and its heap of emulation issues, the more I talked myself out of the idea. On the plus side, this did lead me to learn that the PlayStation 3’s backwards compatibility was actually one of the better ways to play the original MGS. A PS3 also meant I could play an even more exclusive Metal Gear game, Metal Gear Solid 4. Sold!

“MGS on the PS3: Ready for action.”

I acquired an almost brand new PlayStation 3 Super Slim along with the original PlayStation versions of Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions, and the PS3 versions of Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection and Metal Gear Solid 4. This also led me to embark on a fun little journey to build a library of many of the other most interesting PS3 exclusives I missed out on during the era, though that’s another story. Of course, as luck would have it, the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, which includes Metal Gear Solid, was announced shortly after this, and now Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, which includes Metal Gear Solid 4, is due to be released this year. Talk about winning…

Still, I thought it might be fun to give those two runner-up methods a shot to compare them to my time playing through the emulated game on my Xbox Series X via Master Collection Vol. 1.

Starting with the PlayStation 3, there are actually two distinct options. The digital PlayStation Store release (which is the version that came with the The Legacy Collection) was probably the most widely played of the two. Believe it or not, my used copy of the Legacy Collection actually came with an unused code which I was able to redeem for it. Yes, in 2026! The big advantage of this version is that, of course, it doesn’t need to load from disc which means much faster load times and none of the nostalgic noise of the disc spinning and the optical pickup unit moving around. Some claim it runs a bit better than the disc version, though whether this is simply due to the faster load times is unclear to me. I’ve also seen claims that it has some minor visual issues, but again, nothing I noticed. The disc version, on the other hand, is often claimed to be the more “authentic” experience of the two.

In the brief time I ran through the cargo dock and heliport areas, I didn’t notice any notable visual differences between these two versions. In fact, the only thing I noticed is that the disc version, by default, has no smoothing whatsoever, which makes the stereotypical PS1 jaggies and particularly the dithering look absolutely atrocious. While true to the image output back in the day, a CRT TV would have smoothed the entire picture over considerably. To remedy this, the PS3’s emulator does include a “Smoothing” filter you can turn on which really helps. The digital version, on the other hand, already seems to have some light smoothing effect enabled from the get go and enabling “Smoothing” ends up smoothing it even more than the disc version. This is especially noticeable when looking at the font whenever text is displayed – you almost can’t tell the font wasn’t originally so nice on the digital version.

In any case, I concluded that I would have been quite happy to have played through this way, only losing some of the relatively minor conveniences provided by the Master Collection Vol. 1 version. Plus, the added authenticity of playing with a DualShock pad isn’t insignificant.

“The PC version running in widescreen with no filtering. Mind the mess!”

I also wanted to try out the PC port. Watching this excellent video by Retro Renew, I more or less followed their recommendations for setting up the GOG version and the excellent MGS Launcher. This allowed me to run the game in higher resolution, in real widescreen, with fixed sound and lots of other useful options exposed, and with great controller support. I’m not sure if running this version or running DuckStation or some other emulator with all of the bells and whistles cranked up will get you closer to a modern experience, but in any case, this was surprisingly nice. The game looks great running on my system at 1440p, and while it could be my imagination or just my fondness for the hall effect sticks on my lovely 8bitdo controller, I’d swear the modded analog controller support feels even better than playing the game on my Series X. This PC version also brings some interesting out-of-the-box features included in this unique take on the “Integral” version of the game such as the ability to play entirely in third person and the ability to save anywhere, and without going through Mei Ling to boot. Of course, there are some downsides; namely Psycho Mantis’s fourth wall breaking antics being nerfed.

As with playing the original version on the PlayStation 3 as above, I really only played around in the beginning few areas, but if that was anything to go on, I think I would have been quite satisfied with playing through the game this way. I actually liked it so much I decided to leave it installed for next time I fancy a jaunt around Shadow Moses Island.

“The master collection version running in High Resolution mode.”

As mentioned in my main Metal Gear Solid post, the emulated version that is included in the Master Collection Vol. 1 does include some tweaks and neat features of its own. You don’t get save-states, but you do get the ability to manage your virtual memory cards, including adding dummy saves for other games for Psycho Mantis to taunt you with. You can add in image smoothing, a CRT scanline filter, and going the opposite direction, the ability to run the game at HD or 4k resolutions, which looks quite nice, though it does appear to apply some sort of automatic smoothing/filtering, which I know some people will hate. There’s also no option for true widescreen or even a non-linearly stretched widescreen, which is a big bummer. Of course, there are mods and fixes to address some of these limitations on the PC version of the collection. Overall, given its availability, the other included contents, and Konami’s shockingly decent post-release support, I think the Master Collection is probably the best option for most players, though I’m personally teetering on the edge of preferring the PC version.

I could go much deeper into this topic by installing DuckStation and/or acquiring a PlayStation Classic, but alas, I’m really itching to move on to Metal Gear Solid 2.