In March of 2020, NBA 2k20 was added to Xbox’s Game Pass service. In hindsight, this is ironic timing as March of 2020 was also the month COVID-19 exploded in the United States. One of the early regional events was an outbreak of the disease at a nursing community near my home of Seattle, but I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say the country really took notice of the disease, its spread, and its...
Every (okay, most) years I write something about my games of the year. Sometimes it’s a numbered list. Sometimes it’s a categorical summary like this one. Sometimes it’s several blogs over several days in who knows what kind of format. When I sat down and looked back at what I played in 2020, the games seemed to align themselves into the categories you see below. With apologies to Giant Bomb's...
Honorable Mention: Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order I really thought this was going to make my Top 10 list. I like Star Wars. I like single-player games. I like the Uncharted style of traversal and exploration. This game has all of those things. It’s a competently told Star Wars story, and the traversal mechanics from development studio Respawn, at their best, evoke the freedom of movement they rev...
Did you think your chance to donate to Extra Life had passed? Were you only interested in donating during a poorly produced amateur stream? If those two things are true, I have some fantastic news for you! This Saturday, December 7th, I'll be doing my 3rd lifetime "Extra Life for Slackers" stream. From 9 am PST Saturday until 9 am PST Sunday, I'll be playing games on the PC, PS4, and Xbox 1 whi...
The past weeks have seen a lot of discussion around game difficulty, accessibility, and what should or shouldn't be available to players. This has spawned a whole Discourse involving designer/artist intent, gatekeeping, the definitions of "difficulty" and "accessibility" and probably a number of other related conversations I haven't seen and don't necessarily care to seek out. While this has la...
I wrote in my Game of the Year list about MLB The Show 18 getting its hooks into me through Diamond Dynasty, which is this franchise's answer to EA's Ultimate Team mode. It's exploitative and grind-y in all the ways designed to keep player engagement and spending up in gross ways, but I couldn't resist the appeal of building a team with Johnny Bench in his prime at catcher, Bryce Harper and Ted...
We all had fun during Extra Life, didn't we? Dave Lang played dress up. Alex put his body on the line and drummed like his life depended on it to raise a ridiculous(ly great) sum of money for sick kids. Rorie took his shirt off. Dan built a model. And then there's The Quiet Man... Who says the fun times have to stop? My 9-5 job is busiest every year from late October through early November, so...
Once upon a time, not too long ago, I was one of many people very excited for Destiny 1. There was an aura of mystery around Destiny, promising epic stories; a new shooter from the creators of Halo without all the baggage of that series was also reason enough to be excited. There were two preview periods, an alpha and a beta, and I played a fair amount of both. I remember those periods as the t...
Last spring, following the release of Street Fighter V, I thought I was done with fighting games. This had nothing to do with Street Fighter's troubled launch, but was more the acceptance of multiple realities. I had almost no history with fighting games outside of some Mortal Kombat II with friends in junior high and high school and occasional casual play of a few others. I've never been very...
The early part of 2017 has seen four games released that I've played to varying amounts. Horizon: Zero Dawn came out in late February, and I played it until The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released. Both games are fantastic, but are similar thematically and in what your characters do mechanically, but different in how you execute the controller inputs to do those things, so I decide...
“Hey, Matt, what did you think of E3 this year?” is a thing that I get asked quite a lot by the voices in my head, so I thought I’d take the time to briefly collect my impressions and figure out what, in fact, I thought of E3 this year. Sunday and Monday were the big days for people like me who weren’t at the show. EA and Bethesda streamed their events for the public on Sunday, with Microsoft,...
Hey duders - I'm doing an Extra Life stream on Saturday, December 12th. This is chance for anyone who wants to donate to help sick kids but needs to watch someone test the limits of their stamina and sanity at the same time. I've watched and donated to Team Giant Bomb the past few years, and decided this was the year to finally do a stream. Unfortunately, I work in US benefits administration, w...
Electronic Arts has a service called EA Access available on the Xbox One. For a monthly or annual fee, you’re granted early access to EA games for ten hours the weekend prior to release, a discount on digital EA purchases from full games to DLC to microtransactions, and “free” access to the EA Vault. This means you can download and play a number of EA games with no restriction as long as you ma...
Last week, I wrote about how games had fit into a 6 month period of my life that saw a lot of change . I don't want to make personal reflections on games and my life a thing... but the announcement of Fallout 4 got me thinking about the fact that I loved Fallout 3 but never completed it. And then I started thinking about why that was. Fallout 3 was released on October 28th of 2008. In late Augu...
On November 1st of 2014, I moved from the Washington, DC suburbs to Seattle, Washington to start a new job in a different part of my company. At some point just prior to or during the move, I became very ill. Over the past month, I very nearly lost my best friend, a 13 year old beagle/corgi mix who's on the mend after emergency surgery and a few setbacks in recovery. That's a LOT of change in a...
Day 4 of PAX was incredibly low key for me, as I headed up to the show floor around lunch time just to take a lap around the expo floors and see the Gearbox panel. The only thing that really grabbed my attention was Escape Goat 2, a title I'd heard about before but knew almost nothing about. I finally got close enough to the Klei merchandise booth to see that they were selling Alpha access to I...
Day 4 of PAX was incredibly low key for me, as I headed up to the show floor around lunch time just to take a lap around the expo floors and see the Gearbox panel. The only thing that really grabbed my attention was Escape Goat 2, a title I'd heard about before but knew almost nothing about. I finally got close enough to the Klei merchandise booth to see that they were selling Alpha access to I...
On Day 3 of PAX East 2011, I woke up feeling feverish, congested, and with a sore throat that made breathing, much less swallowing, difficult to impossible. I still (stupidly and very selfishly) toughed it out and went to the show and ended up having a great conversation with a small developer from Australia and saw the Gearbox panel, one of my reasons for going to the show. I wasn't in as bad...
Please note, as with yesterday's blog, I'm sharing this with non-GB friends and family, so some things that are probably familiar to this community are explained in a bit more detail. Day 2 of PAX PRime was the Giant Bomb-iest day of the show. Between the Harmonix podcast to start the day and an amazing Giant Bomb panel to end the night, I Saw fewer games in person but felt like the day was wel...
Note: I'm sharing this with some friends and family who aren't down with Giant Bomb, so please forgive the explanation of some familiar faces to this community. The first day of PAX Prime is essentially over, and it was awesome. From a practical standpoint, the best part of the day was getting to hold both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 controllers and being able to verify that they both feel g...
Warning: Potential spoilers for Gone Home follow. If there are eight million stories in the naked city, how many are there in a single home? Look through your own living space. How much does each thing , even down to scraps of paper, mean to you? To the ones close to you? What do you remember when looking at them? What would someone assume about you if these things were presented with no other...
I can count the number of interactions I had with Ryan Davis on one hand. They were fleeting, insignificant Twitter messages between a fan and a public personality, between a subscriber to a website and someone providing customer support. he steered me towards sociaimprints.com when I had an issue with a t-shirt order. He retweeted a photo of my beagle-corgi mix when I engaged Eric Pope in a jo...
I can't help it: I'm excited for E3. I know there's an expectation this will be a subdued year with no hardware reveals from Sony or Microsoft, and game reveals will lack impact because studios and publishers are waiting for the next generation of tech to unleash heavy hitters. I think being in this kind of transitional period is exciting, but that's not the reason I'm excited. Last June, for r...
I watched the live-stream of Thursday's Pancake Party, and the outrage and immediate emergence of the pessimists and doomsayers wasn't surprising. I'll even admint that I"m highly disappointed that we'll see less Whiskey cross-overs, as I've come to love Will, Rorie, Gary, Norm, Joey, and a lot of people I'd never heard of before they showed up on a TNT or a Quick Look. While that's a big bumme...
I've had my Vita for just under 7 hours and have had it with me or beside me the entire time. Following my post on why I was excited for the Vita, I thought I'd give a few quick hit, from the hip impressions. It's both a good size and a bit too small for my big hands. I don't feel like I have my hands cramped up playing it like I used to with a PSP, but the non-touch sensitive area on the back...
Normally, I'm an early technology adopter, especially when it comes to gaming. There are a few reasons for this: I'm excited to see the promise of What's Next, I'm easily swayed by marketing hype (but if I know I'm buying the pitch, is it okay?), and I have more money than sense. When Kaz Hirai made his infamous reveal of the Vita's partnership with AT&T, I decided I was going to pass on the 3G...
At 1:30 pm Eastern, I almost flipped my lid again. I got an e-mail at my Gmail account that a password reset had been requested for my Windows Live ID. "Those Sons of Bitches!" I thought (and probably said out loud) as I sprung into action. I wasn't going to let these nefarious, probably foreign (because I'm casually racist) hackers get my account again. And with Microsoft on the case, no less!...
I have a terrible habit for a working professional: I can't resist checking my e-mail on my iPhone. I spend 8 to 16 hours a day staring at my corporate Outlook client, but when I hear my personal iPhone buzz, I have to look. Yesterday, I heard a buzz while I was in the middle of a conference call. Usually this wouldn't stop me from sneaking a peek, but I had one of my employees in my office wit...
For the first time in a few years, I've actually been enjoying my time with Madden. I've probably played Madden 11 more in this first week of release than I did of Madden 09 and Madden 10 combined over their lifespan. While I liked hearing some new (or new to me) music in every year's release, I do think the use of more traditional stadium rock helps add to the atmosphere and create a more auth...