25,363 community articles
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And so it comes down to this: the final episode of this The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past randomizer run, featuring the only version of Link that leaves dead mice at Zelda's doorstep. Like a piece of uncooked spaghetti (or an erection, I guess) Garflink's journey has been long and hard, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about then I would suggest that you start here to experience t...
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For the past 8 or so years, my life has been consumed by trying to find out the name of one movie. Okay, a bit dramatic. It's more like once every three to six months, this movie will pop into my head and I will spend hours searching the internet with no success. Probably doesn't help that I'm not even 100% sure it was a movie and not some TV or mini-series or something. Anyway, point is I'm re...
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The Intro blog didn't really do Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds justice. Not because it didn't adequately cover the way the game looks or plays, but how there's a certain point around four or five hours in (which was after the Intro ended) that the true hook of the game comes into play and it finally starts surpassing its predecessor rather than walking down similar roads to diminishi...
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While anime is a medium which can be at its absolute best when telling ultra-compelling, complicated, dark, twisted tales; sometimes you just need to sit down and watch something wholesome. In previous reviews, I've pointed out that one of my least favourite genres tends to be Slice of Life. I didn't really like Nichijou , One Week Friends didn't do anything for me, K-On was actually pretty fun...
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SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years. The goal of action games (that is "action" used in the cinematic sense, not "action" meaning "hand-eye coordination") is to make us feel like the heroes of action films and novels. However, the protagonists of Hollywood blockbusters display superhuman reflexes and ingenuity that most us playing games could only dream of. For game des...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Hey peeps, and welcome to another weekend update. It seems like I passed the 1,000 blogs milestone earlier this week - I'm not quite sure how I should be feeling about that. Proud? I guess? But it's also the culmination of eight years' worth of constant blogging, throughout which I seem to have improved my craft very little. Since I made watching more TV and movies this year a priority, maybe I...
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My oh my, look at the time, it's I haven't made a blog about my music in a few years o'clock . Now that I'm finally all settled into my new home and my shoulder has recovered from its injury, I'm starting to truly get back into the swing of things. Battle Disco I made a big new track titled Battle Disco. The name itself should start putting an image in your head. Yup. That's it. That one. You w...
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Finals are done, classes are out, and that means gaming time is way up. In just over a week, I was able to bust through four - count 'em, four - games. Of course, that's a little misleading, as two of those were really quick. Still, considering the scope of the other two, I feel pretty good about my gaming productivity over the past week and change. The first item on the hit list was finishing...
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In case you missed the first episode, here's a link: Back To Basics With Final Fantasy I - Episode I: Time For Some OG Final Fantasy Nonsense Part 9: Why Would You Make An RPG With No Story? I forgot to mention the dwarves have Scottish accents because OF COURSE, THEY HAVE SCOTTISH ACCENTS! Of all the games covered in my Final Fantasy blog series, this has been the hardest. Final Fantasy I's me...
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Deep Listens is a gaming podcast series I'm recording with a few of my friends. Every two weeks we pick and play a new game and then discuss it from a literary, philosophical, and game design perspective. Its kind of like a book club for video games. We try to dig as deep as we can on an individual game every episode so check it out! In part one Gino and Chris " @zombiepie " -REDACTED- discuss...
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Eschalon: Book I , which I wrote about around a month ago , was the oldest game I had covered in this weekly feature. Offspring Fling , conversely, is the "Indie Game of the Week" entry that's been in my collection the longest: I bought this in a Humble Indie Bundle way back in the halcyon era of 2012, a few years past the point when the Indie market had truly landed but early enough that you c...
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The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as...
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Over the past few months, I've stepped away from games and just threw myself into my film hobby. I tend to go through phases where I'll dedicate more time to one over the other. So I decided to do the Film365 challenge, purely to make it through my movie backlog, and after six months of watching a new movie every day, I'm really starting to miss playing games. Don't get me wrong I haven't compl...
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I know I usually try to be coy, or come up with clever names for these, but I figured I would just get to the point with this one. Especially after seeing so much praise for 6 (if anyone has a link to some actual criticism of the game (not just 4/5 reviews or fluff on "how good a dad" Kiryu is), let me know because I haven't seen any), I found myself profoundly disappointed. Especially because...
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It's time to bid our Garfield-head/Link-body abomination good fortune as he stands outside Ganon's Tower poised to put the kosher kibosh on the mad pig wizard's schemes. However, if you happened to join us this close to the end of the adventure, you'll probably want to retrace your steps to this first episode and the explanations therein for what a The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past random...
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Hey there folks. How are you all doing? It's been a little while, hasn't it? Some of you may be wondering where I've been recently, to which the answer is definitely "around", albeit in a much more passive sense these days. Fellow inhabitants of the blogosphere might even have noticed that my previous entry (promoting my contribution to last month's Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run) put me at...
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May Maturity is back with our third game this month (sorry for the delay; Eurovision sorta happened, and I'd rather not talk about it). Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds is continuing a trend set by The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3 earlier this week in delving into the sequels of games we covered last year. Part of the once-immensely popular Ultima series, which up and vanished some twenty...
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Online, fans of Prey have lent the game a nickname; it's " Bioshock in space ", and if you squint, you can see it. Prey and Bioshock are both atmospheric first-person action games which include a mostly abandoned environment full of art deco visual design but also reminders of the rigorous engineering done to keep them safe from the hostile nothing beyond their bulkheads. Their settings are bot...
chuck@giantbomb.com (Premium member)
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Sort of a miscellaneous intro section this week, since I've covered most of the topics I usually talk about - RPGs, backlogs, Indies - far too recently. First, I want to talk about what some of my blogger peers are up to on this site. ArbitraryWater's getting into Tales , and I couldn't be happier for him and the long yellow brick anime road that stretches out before him. Talking of Namco joint...
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Oh boy, that sure was an adventure game created in the mid-90s. The big innovation for The Legend of Kyrandia Book 3: Malcolm's Revenge - as I learned from @arbitrarywater directly in the comments for the intro and indirectly from the game itself - is that it has multiple solutions for its puzzles. These alternative solutions often, but not always, involved different levels of dickery: part of...
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Having played Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment last year, and having no idea when Shovel Knight: King of Cards will arrive this year, I figured there was a sufficiently large enough gap in the schedule to squeeze in Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows , the first of Shovel Knight 's three "Treasure Trove" spin-offs. Shovel Knight's developers, Yacht Club Games , has been supporting their debut ga...
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Lately I've been wondering about this. I've been disappointed with the NFS franchise since 2011 and there's no other driving games that satisfies my need for (speed) street racing, car culture and police chases. The Forza Horizon series is great but it doesn't have the vibe that I want and Slightly Mad Studios have presumably announced a Fast and a Furious video game but not much information ha...
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I managed to make my way through two of Westwood Studios 's comedic fantasy games last year, but didn't quite have enough time to complete the set. Taking elements of Sierra 's King Quest and LucasArts 's Secret of Monkey Island franchises but mechanically distinct from either, The Legend of Kyrandia games were difficult graphic adventure games to break into due to some odd decisions they - and...
