25,360 community articles
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Ah, throwback platformers, where would this feature be without you? We're jetting to Central America for this week's game, Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan , an 8-bit styled stage-based platformer with some mild explormer elements by way of upgrades and the occasional backtracking for collectibles. It seems CollectorVision started the Sydney Hunter franchise - each focusing on an Indian...
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The Covid epidemic has affected the lives of almost everybody in the world at this point. Obviously the most affected are those who have died or become very ill, and their loved ones. I've personally lost a family member and know others who have as well. There have also been people who have been deeply economically affected, including losing jobs and businesses, or suffered other hardships like...
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Yoku’s Island Express is part of a relatively small group of games that try to take video game pinball mechanics and merge them with other genres like RPG or action-adventure. Yoku’s Island Express is a pinball Metroidvania, where you play a beetle named Yoku who arrives on an island to take over as postmaster. The old postmaster tells you that bad stuff is going on and he’s glad to get out and...
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Intro It's time to do some good in this world! Why, hello there! As the title of this blog might suggest, I will be a participant in the Giant Bomb Community Endurance, the yearly springtime user-run charity effort on the site! This year, the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run (i.e., GBCER) will be returning to its regular charity, Pencils of Promise. Pencils of Promise is an education-based ch...
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Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is bad. And I don't just mean the title. I didn’t expect the game to be good, since it looked like a budget release and has a Metacritic in the 50s, but I thought it might be a decently fun little B-game, kind of like The Order: 1886 with much lower production values. I had fun with that game and thought I might enjoy this one too. It’s a stealth/action gam...
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So long, PS3 PSN. You were like a candle in the wind: unreliable. Like many of you, I was disheartened to hear that Sony was closing the digital storefronts for the PlayStation 3 , PlayStation Portable , and PlayStation Vita . My chief source of distress is that it's yet another example of Sony disregarding its own history and defying long-standing game preservation efforts by making it harder...
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Hello Everyone It's time once again for the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run and once again I shall be doing my best to entertain you all with my sleep deprived insanity and poor push up form but before I get to what all I have planned I want to talk about something real quick. This year we have shifted back to Pencils of Promise as our charity which is cause I truly believe in. A good educat...
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Outriders is what you'd write if you spent 3 weeks holed up in a hotel room with the movie Avatar on repeat on the flatscreen and smoking a metric ton of meth. I finished Outriders today. I kind of wish I hadn't. Setting aside the game part (which was very repetitive and had a lot of issues, including technical problems with both servers and crashes to the console "desktop") the story was maybe...
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Hi Hello and welcome to another exciting installment of “ArbitraryWater plays video games in order to incentivize people to donate money towards charitable causes. ” Following my Mass Effect Andromeda hijinks from Extra Life and my RPG Ironman Ironman runs from last year, the time has come for me to ramp it up a notch. Not only is this my second Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run, this also mar...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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If you've played your fair share of multiplayer RPGs, you'll know what it's like to carry more types of currency than a bank. World of Warcraft has over thirty of them, Destiny 2 had upwards of twenty, and this multitude of money gets on a lot of adventurers' nerves. As they try to sort their Justice Points from their Emblems of Valor and their Phaseglass Needles from their Seraphites, some pla...
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I'm not sure what this says about my psychology, but whenever I complete a gigantic game that's taken my focus for several weeks if not months I always come away from it feeling this acute sense of withdrawal that momentarily prevents me from starting something new. Like a certain inertia to embarking on a similarly long journey after a small period of enervation from concluding the previous. T...
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Suikoden IV ArbitraryWater playing a less-beloved installment in a long-dead PS2 franchise? Is it a day ending in -y? Developer : Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (KCET) Release Date : August 19, 2004 Time Played: A little over two hours Dubiosity: 2 out of 5 Random Encounter Rate: 108% Would I play more? It might eventually happen for the podcast, but I’d be lying if I said I was relishing...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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Preamble WHELP! So, it's happening. Sony is sunsetting the PlayStation Store for the PS3, PSP, and Vita at varying dates depending on the platform. As this blog's title suggests, the full details are not nearly as bad as I was initially fearing. Sony appears to be using its cross-buy and cross-play programs to bring old titles to their suite of modern platforms. Likewise, the initial fear was t...
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2020 felt like it was never going to end. On top of the pandemic, I also had my first child. I was prepared for the journey but it was so much tougher than I thought. My day-to-day life dramatically changed. I used to play multiplayer games with a big group of friends for hours upon hours on a nightly basis. As soon as I had to rush to the hospital for the baby, it seemed like my gaming came to...
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Outriders is a game whose demo did not impress me that much, but that I decided to play because it came out on Gamepass and there's not much releasing right now, especially not for free*. It's an okay diversion kind of game, not the kind that's worth full price but, hey, I've played much worse . Since I was switching platforms from PlayStation to Xbox I had to start the game over from the begin...
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The following game franchises/IPs I really missed are: MotorStorm Project Gotham Racing Enthusia Professional Racing (Konami) Battle Gear (Taito) RalliSport Challenge Ridge Racer Sega Rally Racing Jam (Konami) Blur (Activision) Split/Second Excite Truck F-Zero Chase HQ (Taito) Midtown Madness Midnight Club Burnout Gradius (Konami) SpyHunter (Midway) Wii Sports Wii Music Wii Play Interstate (Act...
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Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is a game that feels like it shouldn’t exist. A 2019 release on all relevant platforms it legitimately feels like a low budget remake of a terrible PS1 game. The kind of licensed garbage that came out late in the console’s life and would get a 4 out of 10 from IGN or Gamespot. It looks like a modern, albeit low budget, game, and it controls reasonably well, on p...
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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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Balan Wonderworld is a bad game. I know that not just because of the Bombcast, and every review I've seen on the game, but because I played the whole demo and it was not impressive. This was one of my most anticipated releases of the year and it turned out to be a kusoge. Yet none of this, including my own negative experience with the game, has stopped me from wanting to play it. Part of this i...
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This is a video I made about the Korean RPG Arcturus: The Curse and Loss of Divinity and how it influenced Falcom’s Trails franchise. I had known about this game for a while but started thinking about it again after making my Falcom history video last year. I decided to play through Arcturus myself and make a short video about it back in November but it ended up taking a long time to get throug...
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After Memories of Celceta sent me spiraling down an Ys hole, I knew I’d hit the bottom eventually. For me that meant playing through Ys Book I and II, a pair of games that really function as a unit, with the first one being originally released in 1987, which is only a year after The Legend of Zelda and marks it as part of the very first wave of action RPGs, with all the clunkiness and obscurity...
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What is console gaming in 2021? Last weekend I played through Ys Origin on my Xbox Series X. This is a 2018 Xbox One port of a Japanese 2006 PC game that received an English translation in 2012 and became backwards compatible with the Series X along with the rest of the Xbox One library. This history help explains the game’s unusual look, which resembles a high definition version of those PlayS...
