25,361 community articles
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All right, I've seen this phenomenon often enough that it's time to come up with a terrible name for it. "Truncapable." There you go. An adjective that describes any Indie game inspired by big-budget RPGs that must truncate many aspects out of necessity due to less resources and a smaller development team, while still capably delivering on the layers of complexity and enjoyment those originals...
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For a game that places so much emphasis on freedom of movement, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (I feel like that colon is in the wrong place but it's not and that's upsetting) has some pretty terrible platforming. Many times I found myself repeatedly plummeting to my death as a result of clipping through geometry, Cal stubbornly refusing to grab on to pipes and ledges that were clearly, often off...
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It has been a long time, nearly nine years, since I have made a blog post here. Part of that is simply due to life getting in the way, but another part is how I have become almost a semi-professional critic within that time, working for websites such as Blistered Thumbs before it closed and now writing articles for the website TechRaptor. This piece though, is fully based on my own thoughts and...
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It wasn't that far past the previous blog when I remembered why I stopped playing loot RPGs. The constant influx of treasure and character progression micromanagement is a fetching enough Skinner box but the wafer-thin story and combat encounters can make these games drag on for infinity, and it doesn't help that there are systems in place to ensure it can keep going for another loop or twenty....
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When we talk about media, we throw the term "aesthetic" around like confetti. We might praise the "aesthetics" of a film, say something matches our "aesthetic", or even use "aesthetic" as an adjective. In video game discussion, in particular, we're no strangers to the word, and we have a deeply ingrained idea of what aesthetics mean to games. In mainstream discussion of the medium, "aesthetics"...
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We're now almost halfway through 2020. In the past five months I've beaten ten video games (and put an undisclosed amount of time into an eleventh). That's precisely halfway to my personal goal of twenty games beaten this year. This fact has got me asking the question: which ten games would I most like to clear from my backlog in the seven remaining months of the year? Inspired by these thought...
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It's been a hot minute since I last checked in with Danish developers Die Gute Fabrik ("The Quality Factory", far as I can tell), having played their 2011 platformer Where Is My Heart? at some point in 2014 and forgetting to review or blog about it, a rare lapse on my part. I can tell you that Where Is My Heart? was largely about community and spirituality, and the more point-and-click focused...
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Oh dang today is already Monday! I was about to forget about writing this because of Memorial Day. I've finished Chapter 4, so I'm going to ramble on about that this week. (This is finally starting to look like what I was thinking of at first, a play-by-play journal of the Trails experience). Spoilers! The rest of Chapter 4: Quick recap of last week: Joshua is emo, and Estelle is back in Rolent...
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Yep, Titan Quest . I had a few other very in-depth RPGs earmarked for the final May Millennials slot of 2020 - and believe me when I say I'll have zero problems finding another four '00s CRPGs for next year if I go this route again - but I opted instead for a well-regarded if a little antiquated (in several senses of the term) loot RPG just so I could mindlessly run around killing things and gr...
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Nox A video game that didn't make me say "I could be playing the new Total Warhammer DLC right now" Developer : Westwood Studios (RIP) Release Date : January 31, 2000 Time Played : About 3 hours Dubiosity : 1 out of 5 (I’m like EDGE Magazine, I use the whole scale) Number of times I made comparisons to the classic 2001 Dreamworks Film Shrek during my streams: 2 Would I play more? Yeah. Of all t...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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I reviewed the first Anodyne some... six years ago ? Damn. Well, some six years ago I encountered a game that was outwardly riffing on The Legend of Zelda , as many Indie games have before and since, but soaked in a surreal and deeply personal veneer that was at various points relatable and utterly foreign, like reading through a stranger's poetry of falling in and out of love with people you'v...
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Preamble (a.k.a. Why Am I Doing This?) Some of you may recall a month ago; I played a smattering of visual novels for charity. If you have no idea what I am talking about, an archive of that stream is available in a follow-up comment. My experience during this stream encouraged me to start a new series about visual novels in between my Final Fantasy blogs. More importantly, I have a personal in...
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Well, it's taken two weeks, but I've finally brought Gothic II to a close. I make it sound like some immense Elder Scrolls style RPG with the amount of time I've sunk into it, but the game's design - and one's personal approach to a playthrough - can be very recursive. That is to say, there's two huge maps - one based on the previous game's setting, on which I'll go into more detail in just a m...
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PSA: Yes I'm playing these chronologically, and really only playing the campaign Halo Reach is still a great game! Bungie's last Halo game was just as good as the rest. It's amazing how these games have aged so well, I just got sucked right back in. It's been nostalgic but also I just have so much fun playing them. I stayed up super late playing it every night for a week (I'm playing on Heroic...
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Welcome to “Gaming Memories,” a blog series where I reminisce about my favorite video games . I will slowly but surely get to every game on the list, and speak to why each holds a special place in my heart. That not only means I’ll talk about why I think each is a great game that speaks to my tastes, but also where and how it affected me in a larger context. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for rea...
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Farming Simulator. Good chances are that anyone seeing that phrase on Giant Bomb is reminded of those old Quick Looks, the first of which is going to be a decade old this December. I feel old too. Perhaps because my introduction to the franchise was watching Ryan and Vinny horsing around, Farming Simulator is something that has long confounded me. Not so much that it exists, but that it exists...
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Like a lot of other people on planet Earth, I've spent the last two months attempting to escape the predicaments of the real world by living out an alternative existence in the world of Animal Crossing: New Horizons . It's nice to have somewhere I can go for an hour or so each day and forget about the stresses of 2020 thus far. I can hang out with other residents without having to worry about s...
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Ah, exactly how I remember my journey to school. The 80s were a strange time. As a person who grew up in that decade, I have a somewhat difficult relationship with the nostalgia and reverence for certain aspects of that period of time that creeps into modern media, particularly music and games. I got very into synthwave music a few years back, partly down to the rabbit hole that the Drive (film...
stantongrouse (Premium member)
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Here we go, rambling on. Since last week's was unnecessarily long and mostly just a recap of FC, this time is a short as possible catch-up to where I'm currently at in SC. Again, Spoilers abound. (Also I'll probably just post these only to my profile after this one, since it seems kind of rude to fill up the game page forums with blog posts meant for myself.) Prologue Wow, did not expect the ga...
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I didn’t read as many new books in 2019 as I did in 2018 (caught up on some older stuff, mostly), but I did like these: Peter Clines: Dead Moon Clines never really aspires to much more than delivering some fun page-turnery stories, but that’s fine: he does it well. “Zombies...on the moon!” is a great tagline for a book. Clines’ writing is usually pretty easy-going and fun; if you haven’t checke...
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Bwahahahaha! Nothing like skirting one's own rules on a warm summer's evening. Or something. So yeah, I'm just going to play Gothic II for another week, determining its official expansion Night of the Raven as a separate release for the sake of this feature's stringent regulation on starting a new game every seven days. I'm not going to spend this whole intro talking about the same material as...
