25,361 community articles
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The Yakuza games are huge. For a while, each new iteration was even larger than the last, and packed to the gills with side-content, minigames, and "substories": the Yakuza franchise's name for those silly little sidequests where the main character might dress like a mascot, get targeted by ineffectual con artists, date Lady Gaga, meet national sports celebrities and somehow beat them at their...
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This happened: I booted my computer and it finished an update. I use this computer to use one app, Chrome, to use one site, Google Docs. Sometimes I open a second tab and Google synonyms. There are no icons on my desktop besides Chrome and the Recycle Bin. But when my computer was updated, I saw this: the Microsoft Edge icon invited itself to both my desktop and my taskbar. Then of its own acco...
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After playing the game for 130 hours over the course of 8 months, I finally managed to finish Cold Steel III . I was very excited to play this game not only because I love Cold Steel I & II but also because there was so much anticipation for this title. I finished Cold Steel II when III was getting ready to be released in Japan but it would take two years for the game to finally reach western s...
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They say sometimes less is more. In the time when personal computers were too expensive (and new) for most people, Mario Paint was probably the first introduction to a graphical art application for many of the Super Nintendo generation. I remember the first time we had Mario Paint we had difficulty getting the mouse working but once we did it was probably the most creative game I've seen until...
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Last time on video game industry, Microsoft put on a "gameplay reveal" for the Xbox Series X which contained neither any long-form gameplay nor that many Series X games. This lapse in marketing meant their arch-rivals Sony were now looking to be top dog. The purveyors of the PlayStation boasted floor-shaking announcements and a more extensive diversity of titles. But as hoped, Microsoft's earli...
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I'm sort of tying up a thread I began at the start of this month with the blog entry for Ara Fell ( IGotW #177 ) where I ruefully reconsidered my stance on RPG Maker engine games and how I may have missed out by turning my nose up at them as a matter of course. The fodder of many a discount Indie bundle, most RPG Maker games are rudimentary facsimiles of JRPG classics back during the genre's 16...
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Microsoft held its eagerly anticipated Xbox Games Showcase just a couple of days ago and people had been touting it as their most important presentation to date. The next generation of consoles is looming just beyond the horizon with both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 slated for a holiday 2020 launch yet we don’t even have a price point for either system. Both Sony and Microsoft have been...
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on monday i wanted to show my wife the 1993 donnie yen film IRON MONKEY. for many years i considered this one of my favorite movies. it was highly formative middle school viewing; i believe it was the first movie i ever saw that wasn't in english. i own the "quentin tarantino presents" miramax bluray, presented by quentin tarantino. it didn't occur to me until the moment i grabbed the bluray, w...
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Everyone's naturally abuzz about the upcoming localization of Yakuza: Like a Dragon , otherwise known as Yakuza 7, but after starting 2018's Yakuza 6: The Song of Life over the weekend I've noticed that even prior to Like a Dragon's paradigm-shifting absence of the Dragon of Dojima and the introduction of a whole new turn-based structure to combat, the series had already been undergoing some ma...
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I'm back after a month long hiatus, slowed down in Trails progress by Sekiro (Good lord it's so good. Top 10 games of all time personally... maybe a review for it will be my next writing project after SC ), Monster Hunter World (Alatreon rekindled some MH flames in my heart), and.... a surprisingly boring, and honestly quite bad chapter of TitS SC? A word of warning: this week is FULL of salty...
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These two options seem to encompassing the two marketing concepts that are driving Microsoft and Sony's approach to the coming next generation of consoles so I wanted to break them down a bit starting with Microsoft. This has been signaled for a long time coming that Xbox will be turning into a platform of sorts for people to jump on from a growing list of hardware and with the recent Xbox show...
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I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the greatest impediment to this feature - beyond my brain's fun little trick of making my own typos invisible to me - is that my system simply can't keep up with even the 2D pixel-art games coming out these days. That, along with my limited options for a system controller (currently the Steam controller, which might be one of the most poorly...
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The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Daggerfall Unity) MOVE OVER SKYRIM, IT'S TIME FOR THE UNDEAD KING TO RECLAIM HIS CROWN. VENGEANNNNCE! Developer : Bethesda Softworks Release Date : August 30, 1996 Time Played : About two hours on stream, messed with it a little more off camera Dubiosity : The original game is definitely a candidate for the coveted 5 out of 5 Dubiosity rating, but honestly Dagg...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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I've got some time between major backlog games right now, so how about another five hits of short and sweet delights from the mega-sized Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality ? I imagine I'll be chipping away at this enormous batch of games for many years to come, which is why I've been tossing several smaller games together so as to better highlight what the bundle has in store (and t...
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Note: The links and blocked-out text in this article contain descriptions of physical and sexual harassment. These acts are deliberately not described in the plaintext. If the climate were different, I'd use a surrogate E3 article like this to jot down my thoughts on the games Ubisoft will be pushing into stores over the next year. Given the recent news from within the company, I think a more h...
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I can't begin to imagine what reasons I might have for gravitating towards a lot of lighter stuff for this feature over the past few weeks, but I'm discovering there's less I'm able to tolerate from the more mentally-taxing fare available. There's a number of games I struck from my immediate Indie backlog after a few minutes of gameplay because I either wasn't feeling it or they took one look a...
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I’ve tried a few times to write something to follow my last blog post, but the only thing that will stick is more talk about cartoony platformers. It seems that there’s more to say on the subject, and what better things do I have to do? Since the last blog, I completed the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy , and the “fourth” game in the series was unveiled. Looking at the series with a critical e...
