25,362 community articles
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I didn’t know if I was going to find effective anxiety relief advice as I decided to read Dan Ryckert’s novel on his trials living with this condition. While I was a bit disappointed that Dan didn’t go in depth into particular aspects on his anxiety recovery efforts, I still got a lot out of reading his novel. For one, I felt at ease that I wasn’t the only one who experienced anxiety and panic...
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Hello and welcome to a new mini-series blog of sorts in regards to my recent spell with anxiety. It may be weird for me to write about my experiences with this condition but there’s multiple reasons why I wanted to write up on it and to share some particular content here on my Giant Bomb profile. My number one reason I wanted to write and share my experiences is that I can always refer back to...
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Debates about the quality of the Sonic series always follow a script: Someone makes the observation that the 2D Sonic games were fun, but the 3D ones are some combination of boring and obnoxious. Responses then typically come in the form of a large crowd agreeing, some people saying that the early 3D Sonics were decent, and some others saying that Sonic was never fun. There is also a community...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Welcome to the second of these monthly monstrosities, as I aggregate everything I've been writing, playing, and watching over the previous thirty days. At this point, I'm starting to realize I probably blog way too much, so think of this as like the Cliff's Notes version of what I've been up to. Lots of brief summaries and reviews with links to the original articles for those looking for more i...
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Although we have another May feature in full bloom, that doesn't mean I can neglect my weekly Indie check-in. Daedalic 's point-and-click adventure games are a fine fit with the other retro happenings this month, though, as faithful as they are to the genre that reigned supreme in their home country of Germany for most of the 1990s. In particular, the Deponia series is beholden to the Simon the...
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This one's really been a long time coming. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is the sequel, sorta, to BioWare's original Knights of the Old Republic , which told the usual tale of Jedi and Sith and lightsabres some several thousand years before the canon that the movies cover. The Sith Lords has Obsidian pick up where BioWare left off, retaining most of the core gameplay...
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Take out some avocado toast and LaCroix from the fridge and get ready to kill some industries because this year May's goin' Millennial! To be specific and to add a little context, every May I embark on some massive month-long spring cleaning ritual in one area of my backlog. For years I've been giving May over to older games - as it's traditionally a quiet month for new releases - that's meant...
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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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Welcome to the Bucketlog! It's going to be 2019's year-long blog series, focusing on games I've been meaning to play since forever. I've put together a list derived from a mix of systems, genres, and vintages because it's starting to look like 2019 might be the first "lean" year for games in a spell (though time will tell whether that pans out to be true) and I figured this would be a fine oppo...
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It's the end of April, and here's my list of current and upcoming games for the PlayStation Vita. Embracing my tardiness and the fact that most Vita releases these days tend to be unannounced surprise drops, I think it's safe to say to now expect these posts as a summary at the end of the month instead of a upcoming release schedule as was originally intended. April was Ratalaika month, as the...
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I started playing Ghost of Sparta last Sunday, the same day I finished God of War II. This proximity initially worked against Ghost of Sparta because it is so obviously scaled down in comparison to its main console cousin. Even though I played both games on the PS3, Ghost of Sparta’s character models and environments are chunkier and less ornate than those from its big black monolith-based pred...
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I started playing Ghost of Sparta last Sunday, the same day I finished God of War II. This proximity initially worked against Ghost of Sparta because it is so obviously scaled down in comparison to its main console cousin. Even though I played both games on the PS3, Ghost of Sparta’s character models and environments are chunkier and less ornate than those from its big black monolith-based pred...
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While I don't mean to drag Dex in particular, there's a certain familiarity to cyberpunk's conventions that makes it hard for any true-blue genre homage to really subvert or surprise any more. It almost always culminates in some manner of ghost in the machine twist, or a shadowy scientist villain that purports to move humanity to the next evolutionary level, or a massive corporation that seeks...
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Preamble I remember it like it was yesterday.... Three weeks have passed since the ninth edition of the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run. Since the event's conclusion, the GBCER team has raised $12,576 for Pencils of Promise. For me in particular, I managed to collect $2,568 of my original goal of $2,500. As such, I feel safe in saying the event as a whole was a resounding success. The Giant...
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Hey there, welcome to Part 2 of this rundown of all the cameo appearances in Square Enix's crossover JRPG, World of Final Fantasy . ( Part 1 can be found here .) My goal with this feature is to look at how a crossover game, which often has to create new context and backgrounds for its many guest characters, takes the rich character development of those with an entire 60+ hour adventure to grow...
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I’ve been slowly chipping away at the God of War series since the first game was released in 2005. Back then I played through most of God of War 1 before getting frustrated and stopping. I picked it back up for PS3 and in summer 2011 I completed that game and liked it reasonably well. I did not, however feel an urge to start God of War II immediately, because that was in the thick the heady las...
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It's a quiet enough April, so what better time to get back into the old-school RPG spirit? Eschalon: Book II is a 2010 game from Basilisk Games and the sequel to Eschalon: Book I , which I covered... huh, this very day last year . Weird. Both games are vaguely Ultima -like CRPGs, in that time only passes when the hero moves or performs actions and they have a top-down, isometric perspective. Th...
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After nearly three years of staying in my Steam Library, I have dove into the acclaimed Her Story , an FMV game about a woman being interrogated by the Police for reasons unknown to the player. It's up to you, gumshoe, to figure out what exactly is going on. Get it? I am currently at 3 hours clocked in and I still am piecing together what is happening. The one thing that I am coming away from i...
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For years, my Giant Bomb account was inaccessible to me. I could either not log in or it spat me out to a duplicate account that the switch from Whiskey Media forced me to create. The most important reason for me to finally kick my anxiety aside long enough to bother Rorie to see about fixing it, after years and years of waiting, was that I enjoyed filling out Wiki entries for games other peopl...
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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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Whenever a game studio decides to throw together a crossover RPG comprised of characters from multiple games or franchises, there's often this fascinating process where the writers have to figure out new backstories and story roles that allow them to co-exist in this new setting without compromising the original characterization at their core. Sometimes that means trying to figure out how a cha...
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A common perception about gameplay systems is that their complexity is a product of how many moving parts they have. Even if you feel that a simple game can be engaging and that there are plenty of boring complex games, you may also describe mechanically minimalist games as simple and games packed with mechanical levers and pulleys as complex. But there is another way to look at it. In Katie Sa...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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I figured it was time for something a little more contemporary for this feature, so here we are in 1807 trying to figure out what happened to the doomed crew of the Obra Dinn of the East India Trading Company. If you aren't familiar with how Return of the Obra Dinn works, the goal is to use a compass-like device called a Momento Mortum - "remember death" - to witness the moment of a person's de...
