Bringing back this old-ass feature that really only had a couple of entries, so don't worry about it. I've been playing a lot of fighting games recently! Let's talk about them!
Bringing back this old-ass feature that really only had a couple of entries, so don't worry about it. I've been playing a lot of fighting games recently! Let's talk about them!
My SuperStation arrived last week and life will never be the same - here's what I've learned and/or messed around with so far.
Oh god Quake is as old as I was when I moved to Germany I need to lie down
DOOM (2016) is ten years old and I am crumbling into dust.
A tale of waiting around for a dragon that never actually showed up, and why that doesn't actually matter.
We come to the end of our journey with this, a DOOM you can play on the go! Wow! Hey, remember how annoying Nintendo was about the SNES port of Wolfenstein 3D? What if that was id this time?
A console port that doesn't use the Jaguar as its base? Made in secret? In a cave? With a box of scraps?
The DOOM Port Corner returns, and this time we almost had FMV!
The DOOM port that was the blueprint for all the other DOOM ports is here and it only took me four entries to get around to it.
Finally, a port that boldly asks the question: What if the PS1 version was worse?
Our trip through the various ports of DOOM continues with a port full of compromises that was a launch title for the 32X! Just don't listen to the soundtrack.
The first in an ongoing jaunt through as many ports of the original DOOM as I can get my hands on. This time: IS THAT A PAIN ELEMENTAL?
Look I know just trust me bro I have new stuff to say about it I swear
Ford_Dent actually took the time to set up RetroArch and organize it all nice and it turns out retro gaming is pretty enjoyable? I know, "shocking," right?
There were a lot of games in 2025 and I played some of them and liked some of them more than others! This is an overview of those!
I promise this is the last of the TMNT talk for a while, but this came out in 2025 so it's totally relevant okay?
A side effect of ranking some TMNT games was going back to games I haven't touched for years - decades, even - in any serious way. Some things I probably should've stayed away from.
They're heroes in a half shell and they are also green? Preposterous! Let's get the important stuff out of the way first: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is still a Bad Video Game for a couple reasons which I'll get into, but I cannot in good conscience have it at the bottom of the rankings anymore. In fact, it clears not just the Game Boy entries, but I will go a step further...
Like most dudes in their 40s, a big part of my childhood involved watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in its various forms. It also meant that as soon as I got my hands on a slightly modern(ish) video game console (the NES, roughly a year after the SNES came out) I started trying to convince my parents and really anyone else I could find to give me a way to play as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tu...
Is this our chance (to talk about JRPGs?) Author’s Note: This started out as a FF7R blog – which is to say I had every intention of just chewing over FF7R as I dove back into it after a typically (for me) years-long pause, but then I kept getting distracted by wanting to talk about other stuff and gave up about three paragraphs in. So instead you get a rundown of how I’ve been spending my time...
We’re continuing our quest to only play games that nobody has thought about in years here, and this time I don’t even have a decent reason for why this particular game suddenly grabbed my attention. If I had to point at something, I actually think it was seeing some fanart of the Grave Robber and Plague Doctor making out on Bluesky? I can’t think of any further reason for me to be drawn to a ga...
I mean I guess technically any time is a terrible time to get into the Evil Dead game again after its delisting from every store on earth earlier this year, but I have a whole point to make here. It all started when I got rid of my Game Pass subscription in response to the whole BDS thing, and with €20 no longer going to Microsoft every month, I thought to myself „hey, what if I messed around w...
God, isn’t it the worst when video games get political? I just want to have a good time and escape everything! Politics have no place in my video games, I only care about cool guy stuff like “the specter of nuclear Armageddon” and “the epistemological crisis brought on by an overwhelming flow of uncontrolled information.” Okay, now that I’ve made a guy up to get mad at, let’s get to the real me...
Every once in a while a game comes along that makes you think “damn, what an interesting twist on a familiar classic! I should play the absolute hell out of this thing,” and damn if that’s not what we’re talking about today. It’s to be celebrated, I think, that the simple formula of DOOM (demons + shotgun + fast = Perfection) still has legs, provided you have the right people working on it. It...
Note: Shockingly, it appears that the earlier version of this was deleted without explanation. I would never suspect the mods of doing something like that, but I would suspect whatever thin-skinned dickhead is running things over at Fandom of demanding it, so this has been revised to be More Brand Safe! Hello Giant Bomb Community, It's me, [redacted for brand safety]! You may have noticed some...
This guy right here I’m not sure how many cacodemons I killed this past weekend as I completed my SIGIL and SIGIL II duties, but it did lead me to ask John Romero just what the hell was up with all the cacodemons in SIGIL II. He didn’t answer, presumably because he has better things to do, like work on a new FPS that I am desperate to see any sign of, and I don’t begrudge him that. It is, howev...
Well, another Community Endurance Run is in the books, and I participated in it for the first time. I was extremely nervous for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with worrying that I would fuck something up in OBS and the stream would have no audio or video or something and I wouldn’t notice. Or worse still, that I would get hung up on some level and get angry and miserable and nev...
He wants to help the children This was kind of an inevitability, I think. I can’t just be making all these damn posts about DOOM and how I think I might be pretty good at DOOM without eventually having to go prove it. I’m not gonna do it for free though – your boy isn’t easy . So we’re going to do it for the kids. Specifically, we’re going to do it for Pencils of Promise , as a part of the Gian...
DOOM turned 30 Imagine my surprise when I looked at the calendar and was like “oh right DOOM turned 30 two years ago,” which means that I wrote my first rambling post about DOOM two years ago, which is a lot to take in, let me tell you something! Time: it continues to move forward, in spite of everything! You’ll remember that way back when I wrote about SIGIL, I mentioned that Romero’s initial...
(Also some other stuff I forgot) Mine is European so all the logos are blue but you get the idea See? I fucking said there were too many goddamn video games in 2024, but did you believe me? Noooooo. Now look at what we’re dealing with! A follow-up! Mostly it’s just a couple games that came out in 2024, but I would be remiss if I did not also spill a little ink on some older stuff that I got Ext...
Did you know Yukes made this? I mean come on, what are we doing anymore? How is a motherfucker supposed to keep up , huh? I had this whole thing planned where I was going to do the usual spiel at the top, you know “boy howdy 2024 was a fucking year , huh? Enormous parts of it sucked shit! Some parts were great! I finally read all of Berserk and now have an entire bookshelf that is nothing but t...
Yeah, yeah, I'm talking about DOOM again. Look, I had grand designs of writing up my GOTY list next, but it turns out I didn't finish this before going on vacation and then I came back from vacation and now we're here. Please look forward to my GOTY list, which will probably include an extended digression on Sword of Berserk: Rage of Guts for the Sega Dreamcast, among other things. There is som...
AKA Ranking of DOOMs Part Six All Caps When You Spell the Game's Name I think the title kind of gives the game away, here – sorry about that, but if we’re going to talk about DOOM – and unlike with DOOM 2016 I refuse to put (1993) next to its name all the time because fuck you, it was first and you know what the hell I am talking about – we are going to state the truth up front in the headline...
AKA Ranking of DOOMs Part Five I’ve Made a Huge Mistake In one of perhaps the funnier bits of good timing, I sat down to start messing with DOOM II for this entry into the Ranking of DOOMs shortly before going on a week’s vacation. This is not really what you’d call an obstacle in getting plenty of quality time in with DOOM II – just ask my brother and also my dear sweet mother, both of whom no...
AKA Ranking of DOOMs Part 4 (it is 4, right? Eh, it doesn’t matter that much) I am, in spite of everything, a little reluctant to talk about this one. There’s a couple of reasons for this, which are as follows: Mick Gordon got fucked over by id, and that’s fucked up. Gordon seems like he takes his work super-seriously, and maybe that bit him in the ass a little here, but also it sure does seem...
AKA Ranking of DOOM Part 3 2016 is one of those years that felt like it was a decade long. It was some real Living Through History shit, and it is not hyperbolic (it is a little hyperbolic) to say that in terms of video games on offer we were spoiled. Release dates lined up the way they sometimes do for whatever reason, and we got a fucking smorgasbord of games that almost universally whipped a...
AKA Ranking of DOOMs, Part Two, I Guess? Look, we’ve all been there before, haven’t we? We’ve all had a beloved franchise that was known for its fast action and its deeply satisfying gunplay as we faced down hordes of enemies and chewed through them like a skull fed into a grinder that allows you to shoot little bits of skull at other enemies and thought “yeah but what if it was spookier” or “w...
The Little Game That Could(n't) The Doom Slayer (ha ha we love our jokes here on giant bomb dot com) DOOM 64 was not exactly set up for success. I mean, just look at its release date: nearly a year after the release of Quake, a game which was (like DOOM before it) more or less a revolution in the way that people played first person shooters, a genre which (by 1997) was evolving enough to make t...
There is an Irish Game from John Romero…. Okay I don’t know if that actually counts as Irish, I mean the dude just moved there but moving to a place doesn’t mean you become the thing. Whatever, I was just making a Paul Mason joke, settle down everyone. Here’s some games I played in 2023, including the one I think is the best game I played this year that also came out this year. I am once again...
You can see I'm at 73% health because when I went to take the screenshot I was immediately shot. This is like five seconds in! Last night at around 1:15 am my time I downloaded and booted up Romero's birthday present to DOOM on its 30th birthday, SIGIL II. I whacked the difficulty on Ultraviolence, because I'm an idiot, and the picture above is what greeted me. Compare that to the picture below...
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...
Games I Definitely Played in 2021 Oh hey I forgot I could just post this shit here, huh? Well, here are the games of 2021 that I thought were good, along with some other shit in there. My brain is rapidly decaying so I probably forgot something, but ehhhhhh good enough. 1. Hitman 3 This game whips ass and I will hear no word against it. I think I have put well over a hundred hours into it and I...
Hey so remember when I said I was going to run this series? Remember when I was like "hey see you in a month or two?" Well. Life, as it happens, had other plans. Namely, a bunch of other games came out and somewhere in there I upgraded my video card and look. Look . I love writing, and even writing about Video James , but sometimes finding time is hard, especially when I think November is when...
I should start with the normal disclaimers that come with discussing older PC games, which is to say that in spite of all the efforts and polish CD Projekt put into the Enhanced Edition of the Witcher it still crashed on me kind of more than you want a game to crash (particularly because it did not choose to start crashing until chapter 4, when the plot is cooking and maybe if you're me you don...
A few weeks ago (I think. Time has gotten increasingly difficult to keep track of as we enter the tenth year of 2018) I decided that my launch Xbox One had inexplicably desynced with my controller for the last fucking time and so would pay the price of being resigned to the dustbin of history (at least until I replace my tv and move the old one to the bedroom, and hook it back up to serve as a...
Recently, for a bunch of reasons which probably all have to do with barreling headlong into the uncertainty of moving across the globe for work and adventure and a couple other dumb reasons that I promise I’m okay with having as reasons even if they are dumb, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own inevitable demise and what precisely it is I will leave behind when I go--if indeed I leave behind...
Not exactly the big city, but bear with me here I’ve often expressed the opinion that the third installment in the Metal Gear Solid franchise is the worst installment--an opinion based, admittedly, upon hazy memories of playing the original PS2 version on a small television in my (equally) small dorm room in college. The visuals were muddy, the sound was tinny, and detecting the presence of ene...
I’m approaching the point where it is entirely possible I have completely lost my goddamn mind, as my fighting game library has expanded further since the last time I checked in a mere two weeks ago—not only did I wind up grabbing Under Night In-Birth , I broke down and grabbed King of Fighters XIII and Yatagaseru , because I figured I was on a roll and might as well keep this train going (it h...
Apologies for the sudden disappearance—work got busy, and then I found myself distracted by video games for a while, and then work got busy again , and then, you know, video games. I’m attempting to spin things back up here as far as regular content goes, but we’ll have to see. Somewhat unsurprisingly, a lot of my time has been dumped into various fighting games (also Trackmania ). I’ve brought...
My goodness, but it’s been a while. All these video games out there, you know, and so few of them are fighting games (and anyway, I’m not sure how many more fighting games I can realistically take up before I go mad). I had a lot of other things demanding my attention, so I spent just under a week doing very little in the way of fighting at all. In spite of that, it’s been an eventful time sinc...
It had been my hope to raise this house into glory, but I fear I have only brought about its ruin. I am born, or more accurately created, on the first day of my reign—and there is a giant chalice talking to me. I am an immortal god-king, the product of the blood of the nation’s heroes, and it is my duty to keep the kingdom going long enough for the aforementioned chalice to do its work and save...
Before we go any further, I’ve got an important confession to make: I’d intended to keep to my semi-regular schedule of getting these up on Sundays, but I spent the lion’s share of Sunday the same way I spent the lion’s share of Saturday, and indeed the lion’s share of my Friday evening—watching the Combo Breaker tournament on this very website (thanks for allowing me to not have to sit in Twit...
It has been a general rule for me for a long time that I don’t typically buy games the week they release. I made exceptions for more tent pole releases that I was particularly fond of (your Halos and Mass Effects), but generally I pick games up weeks (or months) after they’ve released when they go on sale, or when I know for sure they’re games worth getting. Since I started frequenting this sit...
This is part two of what will be a continuous series on my foolhardy attempts to actually become semi-decent at fighting games. You can read last week’s entry here , where I lay out the whole plan. This edition: The stick arrives, and Chie continues to be Best. So Wednesday evening, I’d planned to see Age of Ultron , but my buddy had to cancel on me. I was disappointed, but not that disappointe...
I spent a lot of time in elementary school being tormented by my peers, as I basically assume anyone you ask about their time in elementary school will tell you (this is part of my working theory that children are assholes and everyone has a miserable first six or seven years of schooling), but in spite of the constant bullying and social ostracism, I still found myself attending school events...
I’ve been putting this off, because I knew deep in my heart what was going to happen the moment I booted up Pathologic again. In my last update , I’d been infected, failed to save a house full of people (and gotten one poor bastard assassinated), I was low on food, low on health, and exhausted. The only thing I’d managed to successfully take care of as the morning dawned was convince the leader...
When deciding the best way to return to the site after nearly a month away (I was in England for a week and a half, and there was some other travel in there too. England was lovely as ever, in case you were curious, and Wales remains near and dear to me in a way that few other places could ever hope to be. I even had nice weather!), I figured something new should mark my glorious return, so her...
Not much to say this week--I was away on business last week, which meant I didn't have much time for gaming although I can say Pillars of Eternity is a masterpiece and Forza Horizons 2 Presents Fast and Furious is pretty fucking fun, but that's really it--and I'll be away on business next week, and then I'm going to be drunk on the shores of the Irish Sea after that...which is to say the next f...
Also I didn't really play any games that got me in the mood to write about them, although I did go back to Sunset Overdrive for a while there and it was nice. I wrote this and posted it somewhere else last night, and now I'm blatantly using it as my weekly blog here so I can get back to the important business of watching more GB videos while my laundry dries. Last night, I agreed to lease a new...
Occasionally, I’ll forget about games I’ve bought, because after so many years of being poor, having actual steady income has caused me to become the worst kind of impulse-buyer when it comes to Steam—seeing anything even remotely resembling a game that might intrigue me means there’s a real chance that I might pick it up, especially if it is $20 or less. Abyss Odyssey , with its $15 price poin...
AKA "Fuck You: The Game" It has been six or seven weeks since I arrived at the Dank Dungs, aka my ancestral home that was apparently built upon a temple of 100% pure fucking horrors because that's just how things happen in video games. Progress has been slow--my initial group of adventurers proved unable to make it through the first quest alive--RIP, plague doctor whose name escapes me! You tur...
It is my hope, my desperate hope, that we keep seeing games like Lost Constellation as the year moves forward. I know I gushed about Kentucky Route Zero last week, and I’d actually intended to write something about Far Cry 4’s hilarious co-op this week, but instead I was reminded by the appearance of the Lost Constellation QL yesterday that I’d not checked this out, in spite of being a backer o...
WARNING: There are going to be spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero ’s first three acts. I don’t know if that will make a difference—you should play this game anyway, your experience will probably not be my own—but hey, it takes about four or five hours to get through it all, so go buy it, play it, and come back if you think not being spoiled is important. A Beginning There are some things we shoul...
I’ve had a whole week to sit and let the hate for this next round of arcade games fester, or at least the hate for two of these games to fester—or really just the one. The others range from totally inoffensive to surprisingly fun, even though… well, I’ll explain why when I get there. No pictures this week, because I'm feeling lazy and don't feel like looking all that shit up. Plus I mean four o...
The company I work for recently (by which I mean like yesterday) held its annual holiday party, and this year said holiday party was held at the local arcade/bowling alley/laser tag arena/bar, which had me pretty goddamn excited—arcades are mostly dead, it’s true, but I’ve yet to enter an arcade that didn’t at least have a forgotten Tekken or Street Fighter cabinet tucked away in the back corne...
Woof, it's tough getting back on the horse, let me tell you. A little vacation and all of a sudden I forget how to write about video games and the like almost entirely. Still, it was a good break--I had a nice vacation, and debated with my brother about the best game of the year a little, and now that we're nearly halfway through the first month of the new year (time flies , man) I figure it's...
This week, full of the holiday spirit, I made the move and decided I would buy myself a PS Vita (it’s cool, technically I bought my brother a Vita, and he bought me a Vita, we just…bought them for ourselves. This is the sort of shit you do to rationalize purchases when you have a twin brother). So this week, I obtained a Vita, and with the Vita I picked up three games immediately, which are goi...
Back when I wrote my initial post about Pathologic , which was come to think of it quite some time ago, I’d considered continuing a sort of ongoing diary of my experiences in the game. I almost immediately forgot to do anything about it, of course—a lot of great games dropped shortly thereafter, so this desire almost immediately fell by the wayside. Still, I can only go so long without checking...
Given that NASA successfully launched (and returned) the Orion capsule into deep space and back this past Friday, I’ve been thinking about the fantasy of being on other planets. There’s a lot that Destiny doesn’t get right, but making each planet that isn’t Venus (which honestly just looks like a jungle most of the time, apart from the sulfuric pools) feel like a real other world. Sure, it coul...
I never thought that I would find myself, facing you good people of Giant Bomb dot com, admitting to the fact that I’ve played more Destiny in the last week than I’ve played any other game, including Dragon Age: Inquisition (which I actually spent all of yesterday playing, so this isn’t quite accurate anymore, but still). The thing is, when I get home from work at night and work out, I generall...
WORDPLAY, y’all. That’s what I’m bringing to the table today. Also, some minor spoilers for the very beginning of Dragon Age: Inquisition —so if you’re looking to stay pure , leave now (and then come back later once you’ve gotten past the introduction). Yeah there's the stuff right there yesssss So last Thursday I found out all about the existence of a six hour early access deal on Dragon Age:...
FUCK YOU ROGUE I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY YOU I’ll be the first to admit that I am particularly unfond of the original Rogue. I’m fucking terrible at it, I never know what I’m doing, and I die within like five minutes of getting into the dungeon. At one point I drank a potion and wound up poisoning myself. Other games that have taken Rogue’s mechanics, by contrast, have almost always managed to c...
Blame for this week's entry is solely placed upon Cara Ellison's head, as her S.EXE articles on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (which is a stupidly long title that I'm only going to type out the once) had me thinking about the fact that once upon a time I both paid money for the game, but had enjoyed it a fair amount and wound up booting it up to see what my character was up to. What I'd no...
As a younger man—one with significantly more free time on my hands than I knew what to do with, courtesy of a disinclination toward social activities that were not sports-related (i.e. mandatory) and a group of friends with similar opinions, my brother and I spent a large amount of time playing video games through most of our schooling careers. Yep, we're on this now What this meant more than a...
I’ve never been too great with endings—the fiction I write, when I write it, tends to be open-ended when it comes to concluding events—and you might have noticed by now that even my posts tend to more terminate abruptly more often than they come to an actual conclusion. I don’t like things to end, especially when they are things I’m in the process of enjoying. It is part of human nature, perhap...
A combination of work stuff and catching a cold means that when it came time to write this week's post, I got about two paragraphs in and then realized I hadn't done enough work to bring the ruckus in my usual manner, so I'm giving this week a miss. If you're disappointed about not being able to read my opinions about video games this week, why not listen to them instead? Episode four of my bro...
I’ll give the orcs this: they are more than willing to lay aside their numerous and varied beefs with one another if it means killing a human. They’ll be vocal about it too; interrupting one captain’s duel resulted in Gashnak (or something like that) the Eagle-Eyed informing me that first he was going to kill me, then he would kill the fellow he was dueling—or perhaps, on second thought, they w...
The Nintendo Gamecube was the first gaming console my brother and I ever bought with our own money. Until that time, we’d made do with the few consoles we’d been fortunate enough to receive as gifts (a NES and a N64) and a gaming PC that was, in fact, the product of cannibalizing three broken PCs into one, mostly functional PC. We all saw the Ganondorf tech demo, and the Eternal Darkness fog de...
A few weeks ago, spurred by news of an online sale and against good common sense, I picked up Killer is Dead , the latest foray from Suda 51 into the world of modern console gaming. I have been a huge fan of Suda 51 for a long time, although I've had the creeping feeling that since the release of the second No More Heroes , he's been a bit lost. I enjoyed a lot of the bombast of Shadows of the...
Click it. Go on. Ever since that fateful day earlier this week when the Pathologic Kickstarter went live, I have been staring at the launch icon for the original game on my desktop, debating the merits of firing it up and running around in it. I confess, sheepishly, that I was only able to find a pirated version of the game back when I first heard of it, and never felt comfortable playing it (a...
I am fully aware that I'm putting myself in the minority here, but I tend to allow myself to get wrapped up in the silliest game narratives (like Gears of War 2 , which includes the best line ever uttered by anyone ever ("THEY'RE DESTROYING OUR CITIES WITH A GIANT WORM!")) while remaining fully aware they are completely fucking stupid most of the time. One of the franchises that I always really...
I remember reading a statistic somewhere that said some insane percentage (like 90% or something) of games owners only finish like 25% of the games they own or something like that (feel free to fact check me on this), and at the time that made me feel a lot better about myself, because my track record when it comes to finishing games is something just this side of abysmal, so much so that I am...
Always go for the easy jokes, that's what I say. It's been... nearly a week since I got back, which is long enough to have decompressed a bit and gotten back into the swing of things, although when I say "the swing of things" I mostly mean "dear god is it the weekend I can't go to work anymore, I am so tired." These con deals wear a body out, and with the added stress of actually being on a pan...
This isn't actually a super-substantial blog, but I posted about the hiring controversy and it turns out I really liked that post, so here it is replicated below (I changed Sam to Samantha because who the fuck am I pretending that I am on a casual basis with some lady I've never met): So here's the thing about Samantha and Leigh and their angry, angry responses to what were (I'm sure) totally l...