25,360 community articles
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Super Mario Maker is the democratisation of Mario level design: a complete reimagining of the relationship between the developer and the audience. Rather than a studio authoring the platformer's levels, the studio is the author of a set of tools, and the audience alternately plays the role of designer and player. Because a whole community is creating the play experiences rather than just one co...
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Spider-Man: Miles Morales almost lost me at the very beginning of the game. I can accept a lot of unrealistic things in video games, especially if they’re about super-powered teenagers, but there are certain events so utterly absurd that they require I do more than just suspend my disbelief, they demand I abandon it altogether. 10 minutes into the game Miles is supposed to do some shopping for...
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It's a day of the week that has a Y in it, which means it's time for another explormer for the Indie Game of the Week. This week's big map to navigate is Aggelos , a retro-styled throwback that - like a few others - doesn't so much follow the blueprint of any one game but combines a few together to create something paradoxically familiar but distinct. In this case, Aggelos looks to combine the...
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Before we start, I want to thank everyone who watched and/or donated during my Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run stream. Thanks to your generosity we managed to reach our $15K team goal, and I personally managed to raise more than $680 on my own personal page (which hey, if you feel like making me revisit a previously played dubious RPG you could always donate to reach my goal $800.) I also pl...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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I was watching some Youtube videos while I lifted weights yesterday and I saw one trying to make a defense for the most recent Fast and Furious game . It did not make me want to pay full price for that game but it did leave me craving an arcade racer, so that evening I flipped on my Xbox and loaded up Dirt 5. Dirt 5 was my first 9th generation game. I bought and played it on November 10th, when...
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Hey there, all you Kamurochochachos, to another redundant edition of "Why the Yakuza games are good, actually." I've poked around this thorny and divisive issue a number of times previously, as I've been slowly catching up to Sega and Ryu ga Gotoku Studio 's expansive open-world brawlers for the best part of a decade now: you can see previous efforts to delineate what makes these games so compe...
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When I bought my PS5 it came in a bundle with the Ultimate Edition of Miles Morales. I was fine with that because it had the PS5 remaster of Spider Man 2018, and I hadn't played that game's DLC yet. I did so soon after I got the PS5 and now I'm making my way through the main Miles Morales game, which is just as good as everyone said it was. But the Ultimate Edition came with some other extras a...
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Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry is something relatively rare. A piece of DLC that was released as DLC first but later released as a standalone game. Ubisoft’s decision to make this piece of content its own separate title shows their confidence in the add-on and their justifiable belief that, unlike a lot of DLC, Freedom Cry represents a substantial story and chunk of gameplay that expands the Assa...
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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Ratchet & Clank series. I have played every console game in the series at this point and written about a lot of them on this very blog. I originally started playing through the series because I wanted to get the full background before playing the PS4 reboot. It was mostly an excuse to go through a series that I primarily enjoy (looking at you All 4 One and F...
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Uncharted: Golden Abyss looks astounding for a handheld game from 2011. It’s not quite up to the standards of a PS3 game from that time, but it’s pretty close. There are some flat textures, some frame rate dips, and some limitations in the animation, but as someone who has played both PS2 and PS3 games in the last months I was very impressed by the level of detail. There was, in fact, too much...
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I've been making a conscious effort not only to play more visual novel s but to understand precisely what their definitional parameters are and whether a game can still qualify as a "true" visual novel even with a few interactive indulgences. Dating sims and traditional Japanese adventure games, for instance, have certain aesthetic similarities but are generally treated as their own separate en...
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In the great console war, I have always remained neutral. I have no loyalty and I'm fine with that because it's all about the games. Eventually, I grab the "other" console so I can play exclusives. Last generation, I went full Playstation following a love affair with the Xbox 360. Everyone had an Xbox 360 and when the next consoles were announced, my main group of friends went Playstation 4. I...
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I had a complex experience with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Last year I played through the first 5 console Assassin’s Creed games and the console port of Liberation. I liked AC1 despite its age and flaws, really enjoyed AC2, and then liked each subsequent game a little bit less until I hit the nadir of AC III, a game that has its moments and its defenders but was just a little bit too self...
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“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” –Soren Johnson A while ago, I posted a lengthy diatribe against Cyberpunk 2077 . I had plenty of issues with it: the story didn’t resonate with me, the gameplay wore out its welcome before I had finished all of its quests, and I left feeling that the experience was empty—not just in the lack of thematic follow-through, but in...
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I created the last "A Minor Primer" because I wanted to elaborate on something I'd bumped into a few times while playing Japanese games and researching them for various Wiki Projects - specifically in that case the origins and evolutionary path of Japanese adventure games , and the way they've since branched out into mostly-passive visual novels and routine-micromanaging dating sims - and it wa...
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An Unexpected Trip Down Memory Lane When I was a child, I had the tendency to see every browser-based game as the most exciting thing in the world. I did so partially just because I was an excitable child who hadn't grown particularly picky about games yet, and in part because browser games tended to promise tons of playtime for free, an enticing proposition for a child who had already exhauste...
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Cyberpunk 2077 is at this point an infamously broken game that as of my writing this is still not digitally available on PlayStation Network (though that may have to do more with the refund stunt that CDPR pulled than the quality of the product.) On base Xbox One and PS4 it was apparently pretty bad, but I played it on Xbox Series X and on the 9th gen consoles, PC, and even the half-step consol...
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If you're the sort to notice regular names on the forums you hang out at, you've probably noticed I spend a decent amount of time talking about MLB The Show . In the past four years, it has supplanted the NBA 2K franchise as my go-to timekiller, a game in which the audio quickly becomes repetitive, the gameplay likewise becomes practically 100% muscle memory and 0% creativity and there is an en...
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Axiom Verge is the kind of game I wish I loved. It’s a tribute to Metroid, with a few other influences thrown in, and it’s incredibly well made. The graphical style is based on the 16-bit era but not slavishly devoted to recreating that aesthetic and the game is more than happy to throw in modern touches like scaling the screen back for greater visibility against massive bosses that the Super N...
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If you pay attention to gaming news you're aware of Jason Shreier's article about Sony and that a Last of Us remake is in the works. Today, the remake of The Last of Us is being led by Naughty Dog and supported by Sony's VASG. Read the full story here: https://t.co/c5gw8WuMVy — Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) April 9, 2021 A lot of virtual ink has been spilled about how it's too soon for a Last...
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Now that video games have been entrenched into mainstream media, Netflix has been trying to latch on tight. After a League of Legends documentary, several seasons of a Castlevania series and even a terrible take on Dragon's Dogma, the streaming service has teamed up with an industry titan. Together with Valve, an animated series about none other than Defense of the Ancients was spawned, named D...
