25,361 community articles
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The distant future of 2020 is here! We don't have nanosuits, as Crytek predicted, but we do have Crysis Remastered , 13 years after the original release in 2007. Unfortunately, as a big fan of the original game on PC... this is at best, a flawed representation of Crysis , and at worst, straight-up unfaithful to the original. Story time! Crysis for the PC was the game that got me into custom bui...
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If you own an Xbox One, I think you should just get an Xbox Series S. Plain and simple. It just such a low financial barrier. I was skeptical going into this console generation – I have just built a PC, I'm trying to budget, and honestly there isn’t a compelling case for either the Xbox Series S/X or the PS5. But then the Xbox Series S price got announced at $300 USD/$380 CAD (actually ~$20 les...
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The Tenth Line is, I suspect, what happens when board game nerds are given the reins of a JRPG. If you haven't been playing board games for a while, or perhaps only the occasional Monopoly or Scrabble when family is over, they've embraced their largely grown-up proponents and have become vastly more complex and feature-rich over the years, demanding ever more mastery over Byzantine rulesets and...
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By most accounts Disintegration is not a horrible game. It's not a great one, sitting at around a 60 on Metacritic, but it's not some epic failure that nobody should play. I've enjoyed 60 Metacritic games, and plenty of them have developed a playerbase and had a reasonable amount of success. It's also a game with significant pedigree, including a large number of ex-Bungie employees, and one tha...
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Adventure games are bad. I’ve played a few of the classics now – Monkey Island, Grim Fandango and I feel like they really haven’t aged well. They should be interactive movies. Fun writing, quirky jokes, games totally defined by their tone, humour, and imagery. The interactivity is where they fall apart for me. The solutions to the puzzles are just so obscure! A modern game like Resident Evil 7...
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In the many decades I've been kicking around this increasingly imperiled blue orb of ours, I've played through more than my fair share of role-playing games from Japan, or those rare games made in the west inspired by same. The boundaries between what counts as eastern and western in RPG design have become all the more obscured over time, but back in the early '90s when I was getting my foot in...
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After I wrote the Might and Magic X blog post I was thinking in maybe writing something else, but I was unsure of what. I thought in maybe how about some thoughts on the Sword Art Online Alicization Lycoris? Which is quickly turning in my GOTY, but I need to play it more was I might need more time to reflect on some stuff, while I also wait to see how patchs and expansions will push the game. S...
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Now, you might be thinking that Avengers as a singular group, as a Brand® is enough of a thing now that Avengers doesn't really count as a crossover anymore. Seeing Cap and Thor together just feels like a common thing, and not so special like it did back when the first Avengers movie (not to be confused with Captain America: The First Avenger) released. But that's not what I mean. The crossover...
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The Bard’s Tale Games you could be playing instead: Literally any other video game of note from 2004 Developer : InXile Entertainment inc. Release Date : October 26, 2004 Time Played : A little over two hours Dubiosity : 2 out of 5 Mediocrity : 5.5 Would I play more? Only out of morbid curiosity It’s only fitting that following the release of Wasteland 3 , an honest to goodness non-dubious RPG...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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This blog is going to be all sorts of a mess, because I have two very similar yet differen ideas about what the hell it is I am about to blog about. I'll start where the idea came to me, as these blogs that I write once every other year seems to. Recently got back into PS Now and saw that they had added, among other things, Greedfall. A game I was curious about but not really willing to buy at...
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After shuffling things around last minute, I found myself dropping my usual random chooser process for this week's pick and just went with Timespinner , as one of the more acclaimed explormers from the past few years that was unfairly languishing in my backlog. Sometimes you don't even need an excuse. Timespinner is very much built from the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night blueprint (right do...
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Part 02 - I Bought The Strategy Guide Part 03 - Explainin' The Route --- I've always enjoyed watching speedruns casually ever since the days of Speed Demos Archive. For the most part I enjoy being on the viewing side but I have occasionally dipped my toe into speedrunning. I spent a good chunk of time putting together a speedrun of Hitman 2016 which I was very proud even though over half of it...
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Note: The following article contains major spoilers for ART SQOOL. I am a blue, genderless student with a bowl cut and circular glasses, and on my trusty notepad, I've made a shaky, out-of-proportion sketch of a sun. The sun is wearing a pair of jeans and peeing into an open toilet. The caption reads "Beliefing is the essense of life". I jump off of a pink continent into a void of sprinkle stat...
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Guessing there won't be a randomizer mode for the new Switch remaster. Missed opportunity if so. Hey there, I'm still on my randomizer business. The latest one I felt like playing is a Super Mario 64 Randomizer , created by Andre Meyer . I don't know if it's the official one used by speedrunners, but it has all the features anyone could want from a Super Mario 64 jumbled up free-for-all: all th...
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(note: I wrote this as a "review," but the way reviews on the site work means I can't format it as one? So this will have to do.) Once Braid and Limbo kicked off the indie puzzle scene, an arms race of increasingly wild gameplay concepts began. We’ve gone from manipulating time to literally rewriting the rules of reality . Heavy stuff! Creaks from Amanita Design doesn’t have a radical hook to m...
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Intro Oh no... what have I gotten myself into this time? It has been a while since I last discussed a Final Fantasy game on Giant Bomb, and that disappointing tradition continues this week. One of the most frequent requests I have seen on my last handful of blogs is for an exhaustive close reading of Final Fantasy VII Remake. While I'm not discounting this premise as being outside the realm of...
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I have a tendency to stay away from "decision games"; those where you have to constantly make tough choices with consequences that only become apparent later, once you've become powerless to prevent them. Telltale's focus on binary decision matrices, beginning with The Walking Dead: Season 1 , is perhaps the most famous example of this format, but there have been many others in the Indie scene...
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One of the many great 2017 games criminally lost in the shuffle. February 2021's English Ys IX release can't come soon enough. Hey friends. As you probably know, this year's been a bummer. A bummer for a great many reasons, but for the sake of our purposes here I'm specifically referring to the relative lack of new game releases and events, many of which were delayed or cancelled due to the Cov...
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A mere twenty weeks after covering Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap , I've found myself back in Monster World for the legally distinct adventures of Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom . While both games directly homage the Westone series , which underwent many litigiously-motivated name changes of its own back in its time that ranged from Adventure Island to The Dynastic Hero to Bikkuriman World,...
