Recent reviews by Jack Bauer

You get to play detective as a New York City rabbi. Nuff said!

This is honestly my new favourite game! I thought I wasn't going to like it but something about the visuals and the concept forced me to buy it on sale. 100% worth the money. I just finished having Joe Biden run against Jill Stein (as a republican), so you aren't necessarily beholden to a realistic scenario. There is actually a surprising amount of depth in what I thought was going to just be a silly couple hours of fun and while I am still learning the ropes, it doesn't feel like a stupidly steep learning curve (cough cough any paradox game). You can choose past presidents as well all the way back to Eisenhower. I will say that I would have liked more contemporary options and some lesser known politicians, but maybe that can happen in a future DLC. Strongly recommend buying this game! You won't regret it.

I played earlier versions of baseball mogul as a kid. I still remember having occasional half-days at school and having to go with my father to work and they would let me use an unused computer in the office and I got to play Baseball Mogul on it. It must have been the 2008 version, but since then I was hooked. Baseball Mogul 2015 is basically the same game, just as good, but more recent. It is an incredible game for those who like the strategy side of baseball. Strongly recommend!

As an avid Jules Verne reader/fan and with Around the World in 80 Days being my absolute favourite book of all time, I had to try this game. I didn't expect much and was pleasantly surprised. Now that I have played the game for 7 hours and have actually made it around the world (lol), I feel somewhat prepared to write a review. First, the pros and cons:

Pros:
- The game is enjoyable and much fun can be had replaying it.
- The writers manage to capture the essence of Fogg & Passeparteau's characters, as well as their relationship.
- You are not forced to go the same route as in the book. In fact, alternative routes seem to be encouraged and is the primary reason this game is replayable.
- There are a lot of choices that can affect the outcome in sometimes unpredictable ways.
- The world is very detailed and there are many storylines that can play out depending on which route you take.
- There are a good variety of transportation options and each option is realistic (i.e. boats go faster, freight trains are slower than normal trains, etc).
- The game itself requires very little storage.

Cons:
- The biggest con and one of the few that is distinctly gameplay related is how long transitions take. I am thinking specifically of the intro screen which you are forced to watch whenever restarting and of the text that pops up every other second. The text is particularly annoying for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that it takes a long time to get through and if you've already read it you know what's going on (points against replayability). The second is that you can never seem to get through one train or boat ride without something happening. This feels unrealistic and like the game is just putting arbitary challenges in your way. More on this later.
- The way money works. It makes no sense. In the book, Fogg has already withdrawn £20,000 in bank notes which he then uses throughout the journey. There is no reason why you should start with only £4,000 and be forced to either trade or waste up to a week (%!%!) waiting around for more. I am trying to limit my criticism to the game and pretend the book is separate, but this is a core part of the story. Fogg is wealthy. Money is not an obstacle to him. This is my biggest pet peeve and is only second because the first criticism is more gameplay oriented.
- The way events happen in the game feels very static. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea that something unpredictable can throw your whole schedule off, but after playing four games where the same mutiny attempt happens on the way from Yokohama to San Francisco (something that never happens in the book I might add), it feels too scripted. The game would benefit from either having an element of randomness. This could either be a variety of scenarios which can prevent themselves on a given trip or perhaps a chance of something happening rather than it happening each playthrough. It would make each journey feel unique.
- The "discovery" of routes is annoying. Fogg would have known about the majority of them, especially the European ones. I understand that there needed to be an extra obstacle but it would have been much better if the standard routes were known from the start, but by exploring one could discover alternate routes that were faster but maybe more risk. There were many less annoying (and anachronistic) ways to do this.

Conclusion:
While I realise that my list of criticisms were a lot more dense than my list of pros (lol), I do ultimately give this game the stamp of approval. I'll continue to play it from time to time and I do think the game is worth getting, especially on sale, but I am left feeling a tad disappointed. Nonetheless, I can give the game 6 or maybe 7 out of 10.

Edit: So when I first wrote this, I didn't quite realise that this game was combining a lot of steampunk aspects. Given this, I've removed my criticism about the prevalence of airships (given that they didn't exist in 1872). I've also added an extra point to the pros column about how detailed the storyline is, although I'd still prefer an element of randomness to it, but I still strongly recommend this game for any fans of Jules Verne or the steampunk genre!

Civilization IV is absolutely the best civ game and nobody will be able to convince me otherwise. I say this as someone who has played every civilization game except for Civ VI. I got the original game as a birthday present from my parents and became obsessed with each one since, so I know the strengths and weaknesses of them. The early civilization games were good, but had flaws. For instance, if you screwed up even a little bit, your game was finished. Never ending wars were a constant issue in civ 1-3 to the point where it became like Orwell's 1984; "we were always at war with Ghandi..." It was only truly fixed in this game where peace treaties became binding and it was not possible to cross borders without an open borders agreement (in the old games, you could keep troops in your opponent's territory and they would have to tell you to get out or declare war, after which most AI would declare war). So Civ 4 (this game) fixed these issues whilst still retaining the core gameplay which was utterly decimated in Civ V and newer versions. Later versions changed the core gameplay a lot and added complexity which doesn't really complement the game at all. Most people were happy that unit stacks were removed (i.e. you could no longer have 20 riflemen, 10 artillery, and 5 catapults on one tile) and with other changes to how combat works, but I feel that it ruined the game. It made combat more strategic in a way, but also more complicated in a bad way for gameplay & enjoyability. It's hard to describe exactly why, but Civ IV had the best of both worlds: the beginning of improvements that made civ better whilst also retaining the game mechanics and spirit of the old civ.

Oh, and I actually have 300 hours on this game, plus a bit more from when I owned it before having a steam account. I don't know why, but it reset my hours when I reinstalled this game on my new PC.

TLDR: Civ IV is the perfect civ game and you should definitely get it.

Town of Salem is a great game for people that enjoy strategy & deception games. It is a cross between the party game "Mafia" and the Gmod gamemode "Trouble in Terrorist Town." The gameplay itself is entirely click based with night actions and voting being the primary mechanisms for progression. Each day the town can choose someone to lynch (assuming the majority agree) and each night evil roles can do their nefarious activities whilst town roles also have specific abilities that they can perform to aid the town and find the evildoers. The game does have a learning curve, but it doesn't take that long. After about 20 games you should get the hang of it. I suggest playing classic and ranked practice first, and then custom/all any after you know what the roles do.

That being said, I will caution new users by saying that the golden age of ToS was really 2016-2019. The game is still fun and I still play it quite often, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone, but you can see the game dying a very slow death. Nobody plays on the custom gamemode anymore which, in my opinion, was the best option, and ranked used to be good but it just sucks now that they removed a lot of neutral roles. All any has improved, however, and is a lot more fun now that there are reasonable caps on how many evil roles there can be (gone are the days of 6 mafia teams winning by day 3) but that doesn't make up for the numerous problems with the more populated gamemodes. Furthermore, cheating is rampant on this game, and if you don't play on ranked then you will have to learn to live with it occasionally. The mods will claim this isn't true, but I see it a lot, and you have to admit to cheating to be banned for it as there's no way to necessarily prove that people are on a discord call. So this is a constant issue, but not to the point where the game isn't fun anymore.

If you don't have this game yet for some reason, GET IT!!! It is, in my opinion, valve's greatest accomplishment and I have enjoyed it since 2013. Despite being an "old game," there are still thousands of players on it all the time, even on campaign. Despite what some people say, the community is not toxic as all that. The only downside for a new player is that versus is filled with expert players who have played since it came out (goes to show how replayable it is). It's a lot because versus mode has a steep learning curve and the only way to get better is to practice, so it is helpful to have a good group of friends (btw feel free to add me if you want someone to play this with). Nonetheless, its still a great game and gets better once you get the hang of it!

You will hear a lot of people here talk about how Ricochet is a dead game. Well, I'm here to tell you that this is absolutely true. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play it though. You just need to convince friends to get it or hop on and pray there are 2-6 people on some server (seriously, don't hope for more lmao). In all seriousness, it is a lot of fun and its a shame that Ricochet was never that popular.

Half-Life is one of those games that can't really be lumped into a single category (i.e. FPS, Horror, etc). It is a lot of things and to get a sense of what Half_life is all about, you really have to play the game for yourself. That being said, it is one of the greatest games I have ever played. There are some points where it is difficult to figure out what to do, but that is part of the fun. If you want a click and shoot game, go play Call of Duty. Half-Life is like one great adventure that you can relive over and over again. It is the first game in what can only be described as an epic. The graphics are a bit dated but don't let that stop you from purchasing the game (besides, it is only 99 cents on sale). It will probably take 20 hours or so to beat the game your first time around, but the experience will be worth it.

Deungeons & Dragons is one of those all time fan favorite games that will always have fans. I know so many people who played the board game and then loved the online game while others were a bit more dissapointed. I think it is as perfect of an adaptation as is possible. My entire family loves playing this game and I have played it years before it was available on steam (hence my low hours on steam). I strongly reccomend this game for anybody who enjoys RPG's