25,357 community articles
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Hi folks! I've been playing a ton of UFO 50 lately. 73 hours as of this writing to be precise, and there are still about 15-20 games I haven't even touched. I suppose it helps that I've been on a big retro gaming kick this year. And though UFO 50 presents games from a fictional console from the 80s, it's quite forward-thinking in its design despite the purposeful technical constraints and retro...
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Just a mini-revisit of The Kobayashi Mario feature to yap more about the fun Shotgun Mario 64 hack (created by Dan_GPTV) I mentioned back in the previous Mento's Month (which you've all read of course but I'll relink it just in case you misplaced your bookmarks) and its equally intriguing achievement set over on RetroAchievements (devised by RA user MaddieKittyTV). There's no real metaphorical...
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Schlocktober '24: When spooky season comes around I start looking for (mostly) mediocre games to satisfy my urge for gore and chills. Some are horror, some are just horror influenced, most are deeply flawed and a little obscure, but as long as they've got spooks and shivers, games of all shapes and sizes can be part of Schlocktober. It’s impossible to talk about Evil West without discussing oth...
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Light Fairytale Episode 1 is the opening chapter of a multi-episode narrative project that seeks to revisit the creatively ambitious PlayStation 1 era of RPGs, notably taking after Final Fantasy VII in its presentation and setting but also bits and pieces from Wild Arms and others. Another Indie throwback, in so many words, though at least that period of 32-bit RPGs taking their first steps int...
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Goku is the first Dragon Ball representative to join my Video Game Hall of Fame. Next week's character will also be from Dragon Ball.
justiceleaguecanada (Premium member)
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Over the last couple weeks I beat Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. When the game came out it was at the vanguard of a massive backlash against a narrative consulting firm called Sweet Baby Inc. The gist of the claims were that Sweet Baby Inc. was ruining games by filling them with "woke" or "DEI" material, which was causing them to suck, and then fail commercially. It was seen as this bo...
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Last week , I talked through the basics of strict geographic determinism: the argument that the environment of a people defines them and lays the track to their historical endpoint. I said that the interactivity and social simulations of Civilization VI bit back at racist theories of predestination. However, the game also doesn't have to write like Thomas Jefferson to Tipp-Ex over the cultures...
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I bought Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in a moment of weakness. I was feeling a little under the weather, I was craving a dumb turn off your brain open world action game to just plow some mindless hours into, and it was $20 for the deluxe version on PSN. I was previously curious about the game, but had planned to wait for a super deep sale, like $10, or for it to hit PS+ or another ser...
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Alright, Let Me Defend Myself CURSED! CURSED I SAY! I want to talk about American politics and elections but avoid the looming existential dread of this upcoming November. For the past month, I have increasingly found myself using a browser-based application called The New Campaign Trail . This application seeks to emulate past presidential elections in the United States with an emphasis on pre...
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Earlier this year I checked out a graphic adventure game called The Procession to Calvary , named for the 1564 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The game, created by Joe Richardson , co-opted (which I learned recently is a nice way of saying you nicked something) both its namesake and various other Renaissance era paintings in order to create a historically-confused point-and-click adventur...
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Next up in the Video Game Hall of Fame is Siegfried Schtauffen, from the Soul Calibur series, joining Namco favorites Pac Man, Kazuya Mishima, Jin Kazama, Heihachi Mishima, Paul Phoenix, Nina Williams, King, and Kuma. Next week's character will come from the Dragon Ball series.
justiceleaguecanada (Premium member)
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Astro Bot! Astro Bot! Astro Bot! Now that game of the year has been settled… My Apes Gone Again So many good costumes for these monkey fellas. As many have pointed out, Astro Bot is essentially the modern Ape Escape game Sony was too cowardly to give us. So heck, why not play some Ape Escape right afterwards? I already replayed the original this summer (to get that sweet platinum trophy). So, i...
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Ten years ago, in 2014, a certain survival horror game released. Directed by Shinji Mikami, at the then new Tango Gameworks, The Evil Within looked cool. Almost like it was somewhere between the more “campy” zombie fighting Resident Evil, and the more “cerebral” and “can't tell what is and isn't real” Silent Hill. I say never having played a Silent Hill, other than PT. Anyway, it looked neat in...
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When you start a new game of Firaxis's strategy epic, it doesn't open on your first city or by asking you where you'd like to screw your capital into the bedrock. It parts its curtains on a mobile unit, the Settler, which you can consume to found your first human village. Why do the designers have us use a unit to raise our Munich or Babylon rather than simply clicking a tile on the map? We cou...
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I hit 10,000 forum posts here on Giant Bomb today, a fun number to stop and say, hey, thanks again to one of the best communities on the Internet. I hope forums regain their popularity. I dislike the impermanence of things like Discord and Slack, but I understand the functionality is better on those apps than it is a website whose forum tools have been broken so long now it's become the most de...
sparky_buzzsaw (Premium member)
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James Clavell's 1975 novel Shogun saw its second groundbreaking TV adaptation just recently with Hiroyuki Sanada playing the Tokugawa Ieyasu stand-in Lord Toranaga (the titular shogun) and Cosmo Jarvis starring as Blackthorne, a British sailor based on the real-life historical figure of William Adams (also the protagonist of the first Nioh game; William, not Cosmo). While both adaptations are r...
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I went into Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II with moderate expectations. The original Hellblade was a game I mostly enjoyed, and with a Metacritic of 82 it seemed like the sequel would also be a decent time. I wasn’t expecting it to blow me away but I thought it was a safe bet for a shorter game I could get something out of. What's good about Hellblade II? It's pretty. I'll give it that. A lot of wor...
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In 2023, the city of Santa Fe paid a local contractor nearly $50,000 to round up stolen shopping carts scattered around the city. The city had received so many complaints about wayward shopping carts that it became a significant issue requiring immediate attention. The Santa Fe issue and other cities facing the same missing-cart dilemma have laid bare the broader problem of missing and stolen s...
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Inspired by the Giant Bomb staff’s collective hatred of sad bastard covers in video game and movie trailers: here’s a list of sad bastard covers that I think are better than the original. Hurt — Johnny Cash (Originally Nine Inch Nails) ‘I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine any more.’ -Trent Reznor https://youtu.be/8AHCfZTRGiI?si=XrnLDQtgzaVbzBky Mad World — Gary Jules (Origin...
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The legendary Spider-Man becomes the first Marvel Super Hero to join my Video Game Hall of Fame. Next week's character will be a Namco brawler.
justiceleaguecanada (Premium member)
