25,361 community articles
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The Mega Archive has gone into indefinite hiatus, but we still have one more update for its CD side-hustle before we can put the year of 1992 behind us. The Sega CD had only just debuted in North America so we're still in launch window territory for the time being, with a handful more games that hit the shelves around the same time as the console itself. That includes one more FMV game from Dig...
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Sly Cooper was probably the least popular of Sony’s trio of furry 3D Platformer mascots from the PS2 era. He was also the only one whose games I never played at the time, though I knew about him and have seen video and maybe played a demo over the years. While Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were Sony’s mascot platformers from the PS1 era, Sony did not own the rights to either character an...
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The Push and Pull of Nintendo I got a lot of problems with the Nintendo Switch! And now you’re gonna hear about it! Ok, ok, I don’t hate the Nintendo Switch, I think I just have an issue with the perception of it and why Nintendo tends to always get a free pass. At what point do we look at the output for the Switch and conclude that it’s spotty at best. There are large swaths of time where the...
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I understand why fans didn’t love Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus when it came out in 2013. This was the first mainline Ratchet & Clank game in 4 long years after 2 disappointing spinoffs. It’s short, disconnected from most of the series, and lacking in some key Ratchet & Clank signatures; chiefly exploration and variety. The length is somewhat ameliorated by the $30 price tag (and it also came...
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It isn’t fair for me to pass judgment on Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault because it was clearly intended as another attempt to make Ratchet & Clank multiplayer a thing. I only played the single player and the multiplayer community is long dead (I didn’t even check if the servers were up), though there is local multi if that’s your thing. Reviewing Full Frontal Assault based on its single...
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Preamble This is certainly something "different." Last year, many of you may recall a blog I wrote lamenting Mobius Final Fantasy's shutdown. For those who may have missed it, I spent over 100 hours playing Mobius . While I would struggle to call the game "good," it got me, and at no point did I feel exploited by its gacha mechanics. However, its closure leads to a conversation I continue to ha...
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On the one hand, I'm torn about spoiling anything about what was eventually revealed to be the next chapter in the Frog Fractions saga for fear of denying its eventual players what they'll come there to enjoy, whether they yet realise it or not: the ubiquitous element of surprise. Per contra, this game has been out for five years and I think there's probably been enough "beating around the bush...
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I kind of get what they were going for with Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. One of the strengths of the Ratchet & Clank games is the characters and their relationships and another is the arsenal, so creating a multiplayer focused shooter with cool and interesting weapons just makes sense. They did something similar at the end of the PS2 era with Ratchet Deadlocked, which managed to tweak the classi...
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As some of you may know, I'm trying to start a fresh save on my lifestyle by investing in some real workout classes and nutrition . You can read about the start of that adventure here, but I wanted to check in (with myself I guess) just so I have a log of how things are going a couple of months later. Well, I guess right off the bat the good news is that I've lost a bunch of weight. I've never...
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Another warm welcome to the Mega Archive, a chronological journey through the release library of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive . Well, we finally got here. This is all that's left of 1992, and the end of the Mega Archive in its current form. That said, we will have one more Mega Archive CD coming sometime later this month before I put a cap on this whole endeavor for a long hiatus while I conside...
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Popping the Question The image that started it all. As far as questions go, this one is sort of impossible to definitively answer, I know. But it's one that came to me about a month ago, when I was reminded of Team Fortress 2 's " Something Special for Someone Special. " Added nine years ago to the day, the Something Special is a 100$ engagement ring which the user sends to whomever they wish t...
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Criticizing old games is hard. Many of the frustrations and issues they have were much less noticeable in the time they were made, and it’s easy to lose track of how much game design and technology have advanced in the last decade when you’re looking at a game like Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time, which still has nice graphics and plays more or less like a modern game most of the time....
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Bowser’s Fury is the new add on for the Switch re-release of Super Mario 3D World. The question of what it is from a mechanical standpoint isn’t very complicated. It’s a remix of Super Mario 3D World assets (with some new stuff added, and controls and a camera that are much closer to Mario Odyssey’s) into a vast open world lake level, where Mario searches out “cat shines” in order to fight Bows...
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PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE The time has finally arrived. Twenty two updates and almost two weeks later, my retelling of the events of Twitch Plays FF7 will soon be over. As expected I'm struggling...
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PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE We have arrived at the final dungeon of Midgar. The Shinra corporate headquarters is massive, containing multiple floors of puzzles and a gauntlet of four powerful bosses...
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It's a day with a Y in it, so that means we're covering another explormer on Indie Game of the Week! To be specific, it's a rare case of an underwater explormer - Aquaria and Song of the Deep being the only other examples that come to mind - and one that balances the grimness of a watery post-apocalyptic Earth with the natural beauty of a vast sub-aquatic ecosystem. The Aquatic Adventure of the...
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PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE Chat crashes dramatically through the ceiling of the church in sector 5 and headlong into a fateful encounter. It's here we finally recruit Aeris, a key player in the sto...
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PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE Hello and welcome to the new and improved beginning of this blog series! As mentioned in the original Part 1, this was supposed to be a simple one off post describing my...
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PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE It's been an exceptionally long road, but after 148 hours, chat has finally arrived at the ultimate secret location, riding our golden mount of victory across the oceans...
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TL;DR Pick a game everyone wants to play and discuss Play the game for a set amount of time (we do 1 month) Discuss the game a little every week or all in one go at the end of the month Why do a Video Game Book Club? Video Game Book Club (VGBC) is just a book club, but for games! What follows is not an end-all-be-all guide for how to make VGBC happen for you and a group of friends, but it's wha...
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Welcome back to the Mega Archive, a chronological exploration of the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis , as it inches ever closer to the end of 1992 and the conclusion of a banner year for Sega's 16-bit champ. Have to admit, now that the western developers have all but taken over, it's become a lot less... I suppose "mysterious" is the word I'm looking for here. When I researched the SNES/SFC in a simila...
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PART 1 - **NEW** PART 1.1 - PART 1.2 - PART 1.3 - PART 2 - PART 3 - PART 4 - PART 5 - PART 6 - PART 7 - PART 8 - PART 9 - PART 10 - PART 11 - PART 12 - PART 13 - PART 14 - PART 15 - PART 16 - PART 17 - PART 18 - PART 19 FINALE Chat is now six hours into our ranching adventure. MOM and DAD have been successfully captured, but in order to grant the desired flavors of chocobo children, both need t...
