25,360 community articles
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Enclave 's been another unexpected treat this month, though it's not without its faults. A third-person action-adventure game - that sort of is and isn't an RPG - Enclave was a 2002 release for a fledgling Starbreeze Studios, their second game after the sci-fi RTS The Outforce . Starbreeze is better known these days for the Riddick games, the first The Darkness , the Syndicate reboot that Jeff...
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Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China is a game that I wouldn’t have played if I weren’t trying to go through all the console Assassins Creed games. It’s a spinoff of a big high budget 3D series, which is already highly suspect given the quality of most spinoff games, and it’s a (mostly) 2D stealth game, which is not one of my favorite genres. Nonetheless I tried to approach the game with an open...
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Assassin’s Creed Unity was a famously broken game at launch. There were the ubiquitous shots of characters with eyes and lips floating in midair while the skull was missing and the hair showed through the empty space, and all kinds of other issues like floating NPCs and bugged pathing. Playing it in 2021, most of that stuff has been fixed, especially on an Xbox Series X where the higher process...
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Man, it's going to be hard to put Tales of Graces F down for a spell while I move to other May Millennial games this month. Not only am I invested in the gameplay and story (which isn't too bad, if still a little generic) but the skill-based combat means I'm a little concerned that my ability to play the game will atrophy after too much time away. Fortunately, the other three games I've picked...
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I came to Giant Bomb around 2014. I remember I had a coworker who was a big fan in 2013 and he told me about them and I remember when Ryan died, but I finally dipped my toes in a bit later. I was immediately a fan. I used to be big into Achievement Hunter/the Rooster Teeth Let's Play stuff in the early 2010's but by the time I was getting into Giant Bomb a lot of that stuff just wasn't for me a...
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There has long been a fight between Nintendo and their fans over one particular character and whether he can be lent his own vehicle. No personality in video games has more disciples arguing that they deserve a game, and not getting their wish, than Waluigi. He's this total anomaly: he's appeared in 62 titles and yet hasn't become as much as a sidekick in a mainline Mario entry. He didn't even...
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Here are my reasons why these two are my most dedicated 1st party IPs of all time because: Having good realistic driving physics for the simcade standards but both definitely not as realistic as higher tier sim racers such as Assetto Corsa, rFactor, GTR (Sector3 Studios), Race (Sector3 Studios), and Project Cars. Having a good roster of playable cars and racing circuits. Having tons of car upgr...
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A bit of a somber time around these parts of late, and so what better fit for this week's Indie Game than a contemplative first-person puzzle game with its own ruminations on the meaning of life and the future? Before we start, I actually want to shout out a Giant Bomb buddy of mine, @omghisam , who actually gifted me the PC version of The Witness some five years back around the time when it fi...
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And I mean all of GB. From everyone who’s worked on the site, everyone on both sides of the cameras, and the beautiful community that I’m incredibly proud to be a part of. Like a lot of you, I am also sad about Vinny, Brad, and Alex leaving, but I’m also very happy. I want to say that I don’t begrudge any decisions made by these wonderful people, and I’m incredibly excited for them and look for...
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Along with everyone else going through the pain of 3 original members leaving it made me want to write a bit since I didn’t know what to do with these emotions. Seeing change and seeing all that has happened and is happening even when we are stuck or limited in action. This news made me examine myself and what I’ve accomplished as well as plans I’ve yet to, knowing whatever I would do the influ...
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I'm not really sure how to open this one. Like everyone else, when I read the news that Vinny, Brad, and Alex were leaving, I was shocked. I couldn't believe it, truly could not. And like so many others, I've just been overwhelmed with emotions the last few days. I've fought back tears, and choked up thinking about how much this website, and those three have been a part of my life for so long n...
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Having discovered, Gamespot in late 2000 and coming across, Jeff and Ryan along with, Brad, Vinny and Alex a short time later, I'm experiencing a feeling of great loss hearing that, Brad, Vinny and Alex are leaving, Jeff and Giant Bomb. It's akin to a band that you've grown up with and experienced life with through good times and bad, breaking up. You know you'll never have them together in qui...
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It's hard to express what Giant Bomb is with any series of words. It's a website about video games. It's just a group of guys (and sometimes girls) playing video games. It's a place where discussions can be had, in length, about the merits of wielding a bat against a knife, and vice versa. It's lockdown (the song, not the quarantine). It's that place where those guys played all of Persona 4, an...
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Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura In my restless dreams, I see that game. Arcanum. You promised me it would get good eventually. But it never did. Well, I'm alone here now. Waiting for you to come. Developer : Troika Games Release Date : August 22, 2001 Time Played : Around Three Hours Dubiosity: 4 out of 5 Number of times I’ve played through the opening hours of this game : at least ha...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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O utriders is a looter shooter that starts out slow. The Prologue is long, boring, and devoid of gameplay; lots of walking with exposition. The game even crashed on me and I had to sit through the entire section, training included, again. Maybe it was from having to replay the opening sequence of the game or the cheesy voice acting, but I quickly realized I do not care about this story, I just...
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Between the long blog I did last year after finishing it, and GOTY season with The Moosies, I've certainly written plenty about Persona 5 Royal. Enough that part of me didn't think I'd be writing about the Phantom Thieves again any time soon, yet here I am, having just finished the follow up and/or spinoff of Persona 5, Persona 5 Strikers. When a game surprised me as much as Royal did, and I gr...
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When I was a kid in the early 90s a friend told me about the Neo Geo. This was well before the popularization of the Internet, and before I was regularly buying gaming magazines, so I didn’t know anything about the machine. According to my friend it was a ridiculously expensive nearly magical piece of technology that made games look just like cartoons you see on TV and put both the Super Ninten...
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This week's blast from the pastels. Yes, I'm back on my regressive May bullshit once again for another year. I have another four RPGs lined up for this year's May Millennials feature, though for the first time I'm also incorporating console games available on the PlayStation 3 : after all, even if its online store was granted a stay of execution, there's no telling how long it has left or how l...
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Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Luigi's Mansion 3. Luigi's Mansion 3 is a parade of lively animation, gorgeous art deco interiors, and models you feel like you could reach out and touch. But today, I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about what it feels like to interact with Luigi's Mansion 3. The game is a unique beast. Mechanically, it doesn't hav...
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MLB The Show has had a feature called ‘Moments’ in it for years now. The idea is to put you in the moments that make baseball exciting. That full count, two outs, bases loaded home run that every little leaguer dreams of. There’s a laundry list of these moments in the latest entry and one, in particular, has Fernando Tatis Jr. (if you don’t know he’s an incredible talent playing with the San Di...
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Many years ago I played a little game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King for the Nintendo Wii. Like many WiiWare games, it was short and experimental and a little rudimentary, but the notion behind its structure proved unexpectedly compelling. As the sovereign of a small country beset by supernatural enemies, your tasks were split between developing your kingdom and prod...
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The most interesting thing about Shakedown Hawaii might be the platforms it has been released on. This is a spiritual sequel to the original 2D Grand Theft Auto spiritual sequel Retro City Rampage and it was released in 2019. Given that you’d expect it to hit the typical 8 th generation platforms of the Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox. It skipped the Xbox, which isn’t shocking, and was released inste...
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When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro bl...
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The Gardens Between is a very simple game. You control two characters, a boy and a girl, who travel around a vast ocean plane in a treehouse, going from archipelago to archipelago. Each of these little clusters of two to three islands is based around some memory of their friendship and represents a playable level, each of which you go through in sequence. After competing all the islands in a me...
