25,357 community articles
Published
While researching various video game firsts, I sometimes became frustrated with incorrect, lacking or scattered info online. First power-up? No, not Pac-Man. First easter egg? No, not Adventure. And so on. What's more, sometimes the correct info isn't even that hard to find if you just look past the first google search or AI chat result. Hence this blog series, which will highlight innovations...
Published
I feel like I’ve put this off for far too long, but hey, the series is hitting the big 3-0 pretty soon, which is a good excuse to jump into this thing and talk about why DOOM might be the only franchise out there that’s somehow still able to hold my interest across all of its iterations (yes, even Doom³). Now part of this is pure nostalgia. I grew up playing Wolfenstein 3D on my buddy’s PC, bec...
Published
Up next in my Video Game Hall of Fame is Undertale's own skeleton Sans. Next week's character will be from the Elder Scrolls game.
justiceleaguecanada (Premium member)
Published
This year I picked two games (Nier Replicant and Yakuza 0) that I’d taken multi-year pauses from back up and finished them. I remember why I put Nier down, and the reason was incredibly stupid. There’s a set of side quests, entirely unnecessary to complete the game or even get achievements, that require you to go between locations in the game without jumping, diving, or getting hit by an enemy....
Published
Over the last couple of articles on the rot of Magic: The Gathering, we've chomped on big topics that we can sink our teeth into. Imbalances and randomisation are complicated enough that they each needed an essay by themselves. But there are many more issues with the game we've not gotten to, issues that can summarised faster but that don't have a uniting theme apart from invoking a feeling of...
Published
It was the best year for video games; it was the worst year for video games. The year 2023 will be remembered with joyful glee or utter misery, depending on which side of the video game you are on. Game developers probably had the worst year I’ve ever seen. Studio closures, layoffs, excessive crunch, and that’s on top of the other bullshit they usually have to deal with. Conversely, video game...
Published
I posted a month ago about all the bad licensed games that were coming out this year and how in some ways it seemed like we had returned to the "glory" of the 90s, when it seemed like a third of all games were licensed and 80% of those were terrible. Since then things have only continued, with a late contender taking the scene in the form of The Walking Dead Destinies, a game that combines a lu...
Published
Mercantile-minded folks are out celebrating Black Friday, but here I am celebrating Black Eye Friday instead. That's right, this week we'll be covering a brawler, a genre I don't dip into much (and for good reason, outlined further below): WayForward 's River City Girls , published/licensed by Arc System Works . Anime fighter peddlers ASW acquired the Kunio-kun license from Technos Japan (or, w...
Published
Don Mattrick fully earned his place in the bad video game executive hall of fame. People remember the various ways in which the Xbox One launch was botched, ranging from the confusing and ahead of its time in a bad way DRM, compounded by Mattrick’s condescending “if you don’t have reliable Internet just play your 360” comments, and, of course, the Kinect. Microsoft built the system and its mark...
Published
Goro Daimon joins his teammates Kyo, Benimaru, and Shingo, as well as fellow SNK fighters Terry, Andy, and Joe, in my Video Game Hall of Fame as the last SNK representative for 2023. Next week's addition will be from the Undertale series.
justiceleaguecanada (Premium member)
Published
Yohane the Parhelion: Blaze in the Deep Blue review (9 hours 10 minutes and 2 seconds to “100%” according to my save file. Played on Switch with Japanese text.) To describe Yohane the Parhelion: Blaze in the Deep Blue by Inti Creates is to keep the impulse of using “sequel” and “spin-off” in check. First there was Love Live! phone game. Then it got an animated adaption which became a new horizo...
Published
The Intellivision Amico, a proposed console whose pitch never made any sense but that managed to raise over $15,000,000 and never got to market, has been an obsession of mine for years now. I'm an old school gamer and I miss the old days of strange and misguided hardware, like the Virtual Boy or the 32X. Amico promised to bring that back by providing an incredibly underpowered system with compl...
Published
There's a common misunderstanding in the gaming community that adding more randomisation to a game makes it less luck-based, and pulling back from random elements increases its basis in skill. However, if you use RNG right, you can get a game that tests players' skills more scrupulously. In many action games like Ghosts 'n' Goblins or Destiny, some enemies will use random number generation to d...
Published
Sometimes you want to stick a game on that offers layers upon layers of deep mechanics to dig into or some equally deep storytelling that'll keep you immersed for an unhealthy length of time. On other occasions, you probably just want some basic-ass Where's Waldo? game with a sci-fi/UFO theme because you're busy enough already. Looking for Aliens belongs to that most underappreciated of genres:...
Published
By 2011, I was done with the Wii. At the time, I was more focused on building my Steam library with games that wouldn’t be played until this very backlog battle. I skipped out on The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword despite my fandom for the series. In the following decade, I saw the standard “Zelda Cycle” take place in popular opinion. There was the initial hype, followed by legions of haters, a...
Published
The PlayStation 4 launched 10 years ago. I got mine on launch day and proceeded to play a little bit of Resogun before turning to the true star of the launch lineup, Contrast, which I ended up getting all the trophies for. I kid a little bit (I actually did get all the Contrast trophies) but the PS4 launch lineup wasn’t great. Some of the multi generation games like Assassin’s Creed IV were goo...
Published
Thrall is the next Warcraft character to join my Video Game Hall of Fame, joining Illidan Stormrage, Menethil, and Sylvanas Windrunner. The next character will be a King of Fighters favorite.
justiceleaguecanada (Premium member)
Published
...And if you think that title is bad, wait until you see what game I'm playing. Much like General Custer at the Battle of the Tiny-Huge Island, I have allowed myself to grow overconfident after demolishing Super Mario 64 by mastering its Retro Achievement set and have now set my sights on something even less attainable (and, dare I say, less palatable as well). That's right, I'm playing Donkey...
Published
Insomniac's Spider-Man series does not know what to do with Mary Jane Watson. The first game updated her from the actress in peril to a plucky reporter who was able to help Peter Parker by investigating the various villains he was facing. This worked well when she served as a radio presence driving the plot and less well when you controlled her in slow, boring, stealth actually doing the invest...
