25,363 community articles
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Mario is one of my favorite franchises. My favorite game of all-time is a Mario game. Some of my best friends are Mario games. Super Mario Sunshine is a bad game. In the midst of some Twitter shenanigans , someone asked me in earnest about Super Mario Sunshine's status as a shitheap (I might be paraphrasing), so I decided to humor him with a rougher draft of what you're about to read. It's nowh...
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The Sims is nothing, if not proof of video games' unique potential to make any story interesting. One of the purposes of media is to mirror our lives back at us, giving us something we can see ourselves in, but most media has only been able to mirror the peaks and valleys of lives: the new partners, the family deaths, the births of children, and so on. We live most of life in the in-between: it...
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As has become a Summaries tradition, we celebrate the end of each year's quarter by looking at what the subsequent one has to offer. 2018's been a fairly low-key year so far, especially compared to 2017, but I already have a handful of smaller games on my wishlist that I'm meaning to delve into when the opportunity arises, including Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom , Iconoclasts , Celeste , Into...
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Click here to flog Jeff with Sanic help us raise money for Pencils of Promise! Sonic Heroes is a game I have never played! I've actually not played any 3D Sonic, and have only finished Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to boot. Here are the things I know about Sonic Forces. Sonic (center) flanked by two of his friends, *checks notes* Pinky and Bubsy. Sonic the Hedgehog makes a cameo appearance as Sonic the...
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It's the most wonderful time of the year! Donate now: https://fundraise.pencilsofpromise.org/fundraiser/1361587 Hello everyone, it's me again! It's a new dawn, it's a new year, and that can only mean one thing. It's time for me to play some Final Fantasy nonsense for charity! For those of you who followed my activities last year, you may recall I marathoned over thirty hours of Final Fantasy VI...
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I knew it wouldn't be too long before I found myself back in the bloom-drenched world of Frozenbyte 's Trine , having completed the first two episodes of its little trilogy relatively recently ( Trine: Enchanted Edition was part of 2016's May Mastery feature , while Trine 2 was the 33rd Indie Game of the Week ) and eager to see how it concluded. Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power 's big advancemen...
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The Quina Card is actually really good in the FF TCG 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 this...
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So, I've been playing a lot of Into the Breach lately. It's a fantastic game, and highly recommended to anyone who enjoys turn-based tactical games, or puzzle games (which I might argue it's more of the latter). There's a lot of little details about it that I think make it an extremely well-designed game, but that's not what I'm here to discuss today. No, I'm here to talk about the game's diffe...
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Like any good experiment, Rainy Days and Mundis went as far as it could go before it suddenly mutated and killed a bunch of people [citation needed], so it's probably time to draw it to an end. My original intent was to go ten episodes, if only because I picked up ten Aritfex Mundi games in the same bundle, but I've been repeating myself a lot more than I anticipated. It's not just that these h...
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Hiya folks, Last thread was deleted for self-promotion, so this is strictly a blog-post notice for anyone that stumbles on my user-page - given my utter obscurity being able to publicize this to the community most familiar with me would've been cool, but rules is rules! In any case, I made the god-awful decision to dedicate myself to an original series project from my own brain, and after a yea...
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I was cautiously optimistic about Sea Of Thieves. Having watched some reputable streamers play the beta (admittedly with the cynicism that Microsoft had paid for them to do so) it looked like a fun, albeit repetitive sandbox. The full game boasted a larger range of quests and incentives to play, and after a friend suggested I sign up for the two week Microsoft Game Pass Trial I was able to take...
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Just having fun over here. Or maybe it's the opposite of fun. Grr. Darkness. MP3 Download: Lockdown
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After watching the new Tomb Raider movie (I get into more detail on that below), I've been considering movie adaptations of video games and how they always seem to miss the mark. I think there's a couple of obvious arguments to make: the first, and perhaps more cynical, is that video game stories are rarely decent enough to work in a medium like movies or TV or novels which have far higher stan...
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Survival horror is one of those genres I dip into occasionally, partly because it offers a distinctive atmosphere that's a welcome change of pace from all the platformers and RPGs, and partly because I'm curious to see if anyone's innovated on the core mechanics that seem to be the bedrock of almost all survival horror games, which is to be ferried through a circuitous path to look for key item...
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Or any other way of copying myself into a digital version in order to live on. Something I am sure most of my fellow duders have been wanting, or at least thinking sounds cool. I mean, of course it sounds cool! Not having to be limited by our biological needs and wants, having the ability to experience the far-flung future of humanity. When (or if) this becomes reality, there really are no limi...
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It's that time again! the cgi in this looks like it cost a lot of money If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in i...
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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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NamCompendium is an attempt to survey the output of NAMCO from October 1978 to present. The primary goal of this work is to provide as authoritative of information as possible for Giant Bomb’s Wiki, with the secondary goal of considering the relative merits of individual games. In this issue, we cover a game so good it was included in a fobbed off gag in one of those superhero movies you kids l...
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1 . HITMAN HITMAN is my favourite game in the franchise and the best one since Hitman Blood Money. It's easily one of the best stealth games ever created with large levels that we can explore and plenty of ways to assassinate your target(s). Playing this game was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had and my favourite this generation. 2 . DiRT Rally The past 3 DiRT games (4 if you cou...
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1 . Need for Speed: Most Wanted The earliest 7th generation title on this list but my favourite nonetheless. It's my favourite Need for Speed game of the franchise and just can't stop playing it to this very day. The story is cheesy perfection, a douchebag villain, an asshole police officer and an attractive woman that helps you along the road of becoming the #1 most wanted street racer in Rock...
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There's this opinion about Nintendo which I've seen swimming around forums ever since the release of the DS in 2004. It's usually expressed in an exasperated voice and asked as a question: "When is Nintendo going to drop their handheld consoles and switch to mobile?". The implication being that that is something the company could and should do. The DS, 3DS, and mobile devices all trade in techn...
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As with Hollywood, video games have been a little remake-happy of late. I've been looking ahead at the releases for a Q2 round-up (that should drop on the Saturday Summaries for the 31st) and there's a lot of familiar games coming to Switch and enhanced remasters for PS4 and Steam. There's even a few upcoming Japanese games that are actually remakes of games we never got the first time around:...
