25,362 community articles
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It's not generally in my nature to gush over extended commercials from major video game corporations - hence my usual indignation whenever E3 rolls around - but this week's (2019-02-13) Nintendo Direct was firing on all cylinders for someone who's always appreciated the more JRPG-heavy corners of Nintendo's first- and second-party output. There were a lot of surprise announcements too, so I mig...
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The Western genre is oddly under-represented in the video game sphere, despite being such a major cultural touchstone in other media - movies and TV especially. However, there was one very important cowboy game that came out fairly recently that was packed to the gills with historical realism and an evident fond appreciation of that once-ubiquitous thematic genre, ensuring that cowboy games wou...
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We all want what we can't have. Before every Nintendo Direct, the live chat is always tittering about something or other. Animal Crossing, Pokémon, whatever. These games will come. But there’s one request that only seems to get louder each time. Mother 3 . “Come on Reggie , give us Mother 3!” yelled a puppet nerd at E3 a couple years ago. The community was ecstatic to get any recognition, even...
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Nintendo’s latest Direct presentation was packed full of information, announcements, and details. Plenty will be written about and focused on the big announcement of a new Mario Maker so this will focus in on three standouts for different reasons from the latest Nintendo Direct. As per usual a sleeper is something that showed promise but is getting very limited if any traction amongst the commu...
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It's easy to buy into a game's hype. After all, publishers pay employees quite a bit of money to make you so anxious to play a game you'll line up for hours outside a Game Crazy at your local mall, your bag of Naugles tacos in hand while you talk about whether or not Seal could beat up all the Boyz II Men. Which he totally could, b-dubs. Fuck, I'm old. The point is, someone's always trying to s...
sparky_buzzsaw (Premium member)
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It's been a few months since I finished Red Dead 2 , a game I thoroughly enjoyed, and while hindsight has granted me the ability to acknowledge the game's flaws there's still several core aspects which I think are excellently designed and which I've been wanting to explore here in my blog. Top of the list is the difficulty curve. Spoilers ahead! By having the protagonist contract a deadly disea...
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Hi. I'm TFP. I like to write stuff. A lot of it ends up on this website in the form of a review or game of the year list you may or may not have read. Today I thought I'd try something a little different. Twitch Prime, the service in which Amazon decides that if you link an Amazon Prime account to a Twitch account , they'll give you free games, decided it was going to throw Final Fantasy XIV: A...
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It's easy to point at all the games that Apex Legends is comparable to. There's the militaristic, attachment-focused gunplay seen in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the more fast-paced style of battle royale that Fortnite has, and Overwatch's choice to feature specific characters with certain abilities. Then there's of course the fact that it plays like Respawn's own Titanfall (it is from the sa...
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I still remember when I got Knights of the Old Republic. This was well before I was deep into games coverage/releases, was a big Star Wars fan and I’d read a review, maybe on IGN that got me excited. I picked up a copy on a Friday night and played it till well into Saturday morning despite my girlfriend’s complaints. I loved Knights of the Old Republic and was completely blown away by the twist...
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Hob made a terrible first impression on me. The game starts with a robot guy freeing your little character from a chamber. You walk out into a verdant 3-D world presented from a mostly isometric perspective and are supposed to follow the robot out into the starting area, which is not strictly linear. I tried running around a bit to see if there was anything else to do, and found a plant that I...
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Giant Bomb doesn't have too many mainstays these days besides the Friday night/afternoon cornerstone that is Unprofessional Fridays , but one of my favorite long-time series continues to be Ranking of Fighters . Though couched in ostensibly scientific and deeply nerdy positioning and repositioning of various fighter game classics (and "classics"), it's really just an excuse for Jason, Jeff and...
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My whole life, I've loved zoos; they're places that let you bask in the seemingly limitless colour and variety of the animal kingdom. There are almost no environments on Earth which are inhospitable, and evolution has ingenious means for adapting organisms to both extreme and forgiving biomes. Zoos not only let us peek in on those organisms but also break down the barriers between those environ...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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I'm really not sure where I stand with Shantae . On the one hand, I love the level of presentation each game has between the cute (but oddly thirsty) visual style and music, and after enough of these IGotW entries you're probably very familiar with just how enamoured I am by Indie spacewhippers in spite of their ubiquity. On the other hand, Shantae games make very little effort to innovate beyo...
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With the main rankings out of the way, there's still a few loose ends and things that didn't quite fit on the list proper that I want to touch on before closing the book on Ridge Racer. R: Racing Evolution - Sony PlayStation 2/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo GameCube, 2003 A Missing Link I wasn't planning on talking about R: Racing Evolution , but after spending some hands-on time with it, I realized t...
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[This is the final entry in a countdown of the best Ridge Racer games. I recommend you read the introduction before reading this; it includes a brief history of the series and links for each entry.] Ridge Racer 7 - Sony PlayStation 3, 2006 Drift King Ridge Racer 7 is where everything in the series comes together. Featuring the arcade gameplay that's been around from the start, the depth that wa...
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It's that time of year again, when ghosts and ghouls, horrors and horribles, calamities and climate change wreak havoc and scare us all to our bones! (But seriously stay safe whether you're in sub-arctic temps in the US, surface of the sun temps in Australia, or whatever else wherever else). But, in honor of this scariest of months, or more likely due to complete chance, I played a couple of ca...
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I'm gonna let you all in on a little secret. That newest Assassin's Creed game? It's great! That take is hotter than 50 Shades of Sparky, I know, but I'm wildly happy with this game. I should be - I've been playing it off and on for a damn month pretty much exclusively, and with over seventy hours in, I'm barely past the 60% storyline mark. That's partly on me, because I like monkeying around i...
sparky_buzzsaw (Premium member)
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So yeah, you've probably all heard about the shuttering of Nintendo's Wii Shop , and with it any and all purchases you may have made on the digital storefront. Of course, it doesn't seem like it would be beyond the bounds of possibility to offer all those same games through the Switch eShop instead - it's not like that place has much of a sluice gate right now for new releases regardless - but...
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On this date seven years ago, I signed up as a member on this great website about video games. I was looking for a new video game website to lurk around after leaving Gamespot due to a number of reasons. I was made known about Giant Bomb peeking at my brother watching a video at the site. As soon as I found out that Ryan Davis and Jeff Gerstmann were running the site (I wasn’t keeping up with g...
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You might recognize Strikey Sisters from a UPF segment a few months back. It was one of Jason's choices, which meant he was left to play it on his own while everyone else discussed sodas or wrestling or whatever. It was evident enough from the footage that it was another "one of those" like Wizorb ; an old-school "bat-and-ball" Breakout / Arkanoid type of game with a cute pixel art aesthetic an...
