25,361 community articles
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2019 was a pretty different year in video games for me. I had the least amount of time to play, and therefore I’ve only finished 1 of the games on my list. There weren’t as many absolute all-time bangers this year as there have been the last few years, and the majority of the games on my list also have a fair amount of issues. Despite all of that, games are still good, and I want to celebrate m...
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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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Here's Part 1 and Part 2 , for your pleasure. We've managed to reach the end of my Total War: Warhammer ranking list, an endeavor that accidentally became way more of an endeavor than I thought it would be. It's been a nice writing exercise, and a good reminder that I can try and follow a prompt of my own making, but now my RSI is acting up and it's time to wrap things up. Before we get to the...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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So, new year, new hopes and dreams for the future instantly dashed by the successful US Senate criminal cover-up and the inevitable passing of Brexit and the great purging of our socialized healthcare and civil rights to follow. It'll be weird to think that, although the 2010s didn't really see much change besides smaller phones and better sunbeams in games, the end of the 2020s could very well...
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Assassin's Creed Revelations looks very different from the prior games. More colorful and lively. Assassin’s Creed Revelations isn’t a bad game. In some ways it is the best of the first four mainline console entries in the series, with impressive graphics, the best controls of the first two games, and a refinement of all the systems those games have introduced along with some new mechanics (chi...
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Hello you who have stumbled upon this here blog of mine, and welcome to 2020! You may be familiar with the concept of backlog - an ever-growing gaggle of games that you've started and then put aside with the intention of returning to complete them at some undisclosed moment in time. Like teeny tiny ghosts they haunt the empty spaces between games finished and games yet to be played. I have deve...
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Last weekend, I and many other people traveled to the faraway land of Chicago to attend the...wait, what was this thing called... ..."NieR: Orchestra Concert re:12018".... Sure, yeah, the NieR concert they're touring around right now. Here is my detailed report. Before The Show: Since the release of 2017's NieR:Automata , there's been no shortage albums, concerts, and NieR chill music mixes to...
clagnaught (Premium 64 member)
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The Legend of Grimrock franchise may be on indefinite hiatus, but it's opened a few doors (by putting rocks down on the right pressure plates, naturally) for other cautious developers wondering if their idea for an old-school first-person tile-based dungeon crawler might find an audience. Then there's the way the Indie sphere has grown to the point now where any pre-existing genre (and many tha...
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We’re onto my favorite games of 2011. Which games make it to the next round for games of the decade? If you haven’t seen my 2010 list, catch up here, first! My 2011 ranking is as follows ( List Link ): 2011: Mortal Kombat Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection Dark Souls Bulletstorm The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim L.A. Noire Catherine Madden NFL 12 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Dissidia 012 Fin...
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Part 1 is here if you want to see all that sweet sweet faction ranking from the top. Or, the bottom, as the case may be. In unrelated news, I made the mistake of looking up prices for a bunch of semi-obscure PS2 JRPGs thanks to Giant Bomb's recent episode of Demo Derby. I... will probably not be purchasing any of the Shadow Hearts games anytime soon. Oh hey I'm back again with my favorite "Writ...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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(Text originally from a video review I put together.) I never really gave Call of Duty it’s proper due. What was once a World War II shooter made by folks who worked on Steven Speilberg’s Medal of Honor series transformed into something gaudy, a rip-roaring, ‘Murica fueled romp into the Middle Eastern theater of armed conflict. Replacing the time honored righteous fight against the Nazis were s...
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That jump in technology over the years. Ace Combat sure has come a long way.
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Really should have noticed the version number on this screen before hitting play. 2019 was a particularly rubbish year in our little house. We went through losing family members and job redundancies which pushed us into challenging times mentally and financially, which alongside all the other life stuff changed the way I was able to approach and play games – up until recently a major part of my...
stantongrouse (Premium member)
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Plz Help. I played about an hour of Ancestors Legacy and it seemed pretty cool, but in that hour I just ended up going back to Total War Oh hey there. Because I’ve put myself down a dark path, the games I’m currently playing the most in this current year are Monster Hunter World’s Iceborne expansion, and my continual Total Warhammer II habit. Backlog? What even is that? Oh, I guess I did play B...
arbitrarywater (Premium member)
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The Winter 2020 anime season has had a lot of interesting shows that I've tried. I think it's the most shows I've tried to watch concurrently in the short time that I've been following the seasonal cycle. But with so many shows on my radar at once, and plenty of other things to take up my time, I'm more likely to drop a show that I'm no longer interested in. My first show of the season to hit t...
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Nintendo rumors are like pimples. They tend to pop up all the time, but it’s rare that they become anything to worry about. Online Nintendo fanatics freak me out because they take each new leak as gospel, only to be shocked when they get a Byleth instead of a Dante . Unless concrete proof exists, I don’t trust anything that doesn’t come from official sources. The paper motif allows for some fun...
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Space inspires an equal amount of wonder and terror alike, as an endless inky void that permeates and surrounds us all in every direction, and so there's no shortage of sci-fi space-faring horror fiction out there. However, I'd argue that The Brotherhood 's Stasis is less about the abyss of space but the abyss of the human soul, given several generations to let the march of technology bring us...
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A cornerstone of any good RPG, oriental or occidental, is a strong sense of encounter design. Sometimes an RPG will relegate its clever encounters to boss fights, and leave you to cleave through mobs to get there. Others will take the time to carefully consider every combat scenario in the game, ensuring that there's always some new wrinkle or enemy type you've yet to meet before, or at least a...
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Awhile ago I came across a video on giantbomb.com that couldn't play because of a bad YouTube video ID. I decided to dig deeper and ended up finding hundreds of broken YouTube IDs and some misplaced videos. The Videos Giant Bomb has over 14,000 videos on the site. When a user visits a video page the video will either be served by Giant Bomb and played in a custom video player or will be served...
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A film is doing something right if it can start off with a character's funeral and another character saying what his final message to her was and then still make you cry when she dies anyway. I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is a story about the relationship that forms between a boy that shuts himself off from other people and a girl with a terminal illness. I find it kind of similar to something li...
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Weathering with You is a very good movie. I was a little late to the party on Your Name, but when I first rented that on a weekend a year or so ago, I ended up watching it three times before the rental period was up. So I was excited to see whatever Makoto Shinkai did next. This follow up film was better in a number of ways, some that I probably didn't fully appreciate on my first viewing in th...
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Sometimes, when faced with a scary new decade, we look to the familiar comforts of the old. Avadon 2: The Corruption was originally released in 2013, but it looks and plays like a game released thirty years ago, not seven. That's by design, of course, and I'm not using the observation as a pejorative: for genre veteran Jeff Vogel (who has been making these specific types of turn-based CRPGs sin...
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There's almost no worse feeling than having to play catch up. I was kind of a slow kid when it came to getting work done, or "obeying rules." But sometimes, catching up can be a profound joy. It's like unlocking a door into a world with seemingly boundless content waiting for you. This joy of discovery could turn into something that could define a section of your life. That is me with professio...
