I started undergrad in August 2007, a little bit before Jeff Gerstmann and GameSpot parted ways. I discovered Giant Bomb in 2011, about a month before I received my Bachelor's Degree. I was updating a computer lab and actively dropping out of grad school when I learned of Ryan Davis' death. I shepherded the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run for its first few years before @thatpinguino stepped...
Oh no, he's doing it again. ****** Max Payne (Finished) Max Payne remains technically impressive, if nothing else. Hardcore Gaming 101 recently did a podcast episode on Max Payne, which reminded me that I had a half finished save file on my Xbox. So I’ve gone back and finished a game that I wasn’t particularly enjoying already. Final take? It’s just okay. It’s interesting to go back to pre-San...
Editor's Note: This was originally posted to the NamCompendium blog in May 2020, aka the Before Times. It has been modified to fit your screen. The Tower of Druaga June 1984 (ARC, Japan) The Tower of Druaga is one of those “important games”, a pesky class of entertainment products which, while not really “fun”, were groundbreaking and/or influential in their day. Druaga was groundbreaking, and...
Round Two. Fight! ****** Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Finished) Notably, this is the first AC game where I've not synchronized every view point. Maybe I'll go back and do this? The worst feeling in the world is playing one of these contemporary AssCreed games, stealthing up on a target, pressing Y to Instakill, and seeing a health bar go down by *only* 80 percent or so. It’s the kiss of death. Not...
Note: This is adapted from a blog posted from June 2019, back when the hills were young. Some edits have been made. Another NamCompendium entry, and two more games up for consideration. And by god, hopefully the turnaround time on these won’t be as long as the last piece. (Editor's Note: This is just hysterical to me in hindsight). The two games on the docket today represent two different schoo...
I’ve been tutoring people for about a year now. These folks have come from different walks of life, have been in different parts of their academic journey, and I’ve done my best to improve my craft along the way. Something I wind up telling clients a lot is, “The best assignment is the one that’s turned in.” We can work with ugly, we can grade a compromised assignment, we can incorporate negati...
Note: This was originally posted to namcompendium.com in April 2019. It has been lightly revised. I had a professor during my undergraduate years who was a great inspiration to me. One of the things this professor hammered home for me was to avoid using the passive voice when possible in writing. Be direct. Write in weighty, punchy prose. I’m not great at this mode of writing, as you may have n...
Hello! There are two different "sign of life" style posts in two different .txt files on two different computers, which were incidentally written in two different years. This is not either of those. I used to have a job. I used to have a job that gave me what is, presently, an unbelievable amount of money for not a ton of work. That's one sentence. Here's another one: I used to write on this an...
Pro Yakyuu World Stadium Developer/Publisher: Namco | Release: 20 May 1988 (JP) Foreknowledge Psst. Hey man, check this out. You like that Famista? I got more of that Famista, but without that “Fami” part. GAZE UPON THE FACE OF YOUR DESTROYER World Stadium is Namco cheekily releasing Famista-style baseball games on any non-Nintendo platform. This started out in the arcades before a couple itera...
Yū Yū Jinsei Developer/Publisher: Hudson Release: 22 April 1988 (JP) Foreknowledge Piss temperature: Boiling The Game of Life is abysmal. It’s the dirt worst board game. I rank it worse than Candy Land in a walk. Both games are abominable, make no mistake. However, I can think of at least one way to make Candy Land at least slightly more interesting and game-like: draw two cards and pick the be...
R-Type Developer/Publisher: Hudson R-Type I 25 March 1988 | R-Type II 3 June 1988 (JP) | R-Type November 1989 (NA) Foreknowledge We’re eight games in and we’ve finally arrived. Here it is, the first shooter released on the PC Engine. R-Type would define the fate of the platform in a way that Hudson likely did not foresee. In some sense this is the canonical game for the system, though for my mo...
Here we are at the big inhale, before the console really steps into the spotlight. And by an astonishing coincidence, the occasion aligns with another specific perversion of mine. The next few entries in this thing will be a little more substantial. My work situation is very much Not Normal yet, and I don't have a great idea of if/when that will happen for me again. This might formally become a...
Jaseiken Necromancer Developer/Publisher: Hudson | 22 January 1988 (JP) Foreknowledge Early in this project I alluded to just how complicated the PC Engine platform looks to an outsider. It has an 8 bit central processor with 16-bit graphics processing. It has multiple variants, some of which include minor chip variations while others include CD-ROM units and different BIOS revisions. Those CD-...
In the mid-1980s, software developer Hudson approached platform holder Nintendo with what amounted to a hardware pitch. This hardware would have amounted to a sort of Famicom++, allowing for richer aural and visual experiences than what had been hitherto accomplished on said platform. This proposal was ultimately rejected. However, a certain Japanese electronics company which had already carved...
The PC Engine's launch year comes to a close! We're gonna cover the last two games today. This is done in large part because one of them is horrible, and I'd rather this coverage year (and this calendar year) end on a less dismal note. ***** Kato-chan & Ken-chan/J.J. & Jeff Developer/Publisher: Hudson | 27 November 1987 (JP) / 13 March 1990 (NA) Foreknowledge When I try to conjure the early PC...
I'd like to set an expectation up front here. Some weeks I might cover two games. Others, when it counts, I might cover one. There may even be weeks where three games get a look in one of these posts. I'm also reserving the right to occasionally post about things outside the realm of PC Engine games, as well as not posting anything at all if other things are going on in my life. In that spirit,...
Promises made, promises kept. For now. This week I'll be covering the first two PC Engine games to tumble into this world, both of which arrived at launch. Bikkuriman World Developer/Publisher: Hudson | 30 October 1987 (JP) Foreknowledge Okay. Here we go. *produces Charlie Day conspiracy board* Bikkuriman World is a reskin of Wonder Boy in Monster Land , which is the second game in the Wonder B...
I'm a simple man. I see milk on the menu, I might order it. Hi! Again! Several years ago, when the hills were young, I started NamCompendium . My goal was, and remains, an exploration of the entire output of Namco . That is not done! It will surprise likely zero folks reading this that the last few years have not gone entirely to chalk for me, as they likely have not for the readers either. Pla...
Minogueamy For a defined period of time (might I suggest one month), the challenged member of the Giant Bomb staff must forsake all music except that performed by Australia's Kylie Minogue. This reasoning extends to the realms of film and television as well, by which I mean the only TV programming you'll be watching for the predefined period will be reruns of Neighbours . More to follow, maybe....
Friends and enemies of video games, Amidst the present unpleasantness, myself and the good people at Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run are thrilled to come together for another festival of livestreaming goodness! Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run X will run from 17-19 April , and I'm going to be a part of the proceedings! Yes, again! No, you can't stop me! I'll be live on my Twitch channel du...
Pictured: Myself playing Mr. Driller on Hard Mode tl;dr Visit my page and Donate to help us raise $10,000 for Pencils of Promise go go go Hi! When you've rolled with this hobby for long enough, there's a very real chance that your pallet will start to shift. Games which once held a great appeal to you will start to feel passe . Entire genres that were written off as far outside of your interest...
Editor's Note: I know now what I must do for this year's Community Endurance Run. May you all one day forgive me for what I must do. --------------------------------------------- *digs self out of a pile of Namco game cartridges* Hi there! I was in a helicopter once. It's true! This year's Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run is less than three months hence! It was a treat getting back into the s...
Xevious December 1982 (Arcade, Japan) 1982 was a banner year for Namco, and I've endeavored to make the case that it represented the close of a golden age for the company. What better way to put a capstone on that year, than release one more barn burner? Xevious is quite the colossus, and has a rich history of ports (and port-adjacent things). Let's get right down into it. Original arcade flyer...
We’ve been on a roll recently here in the NamCompendium, covering some positively mythical games released by Namco in wild hot streak that lasted from 1980 to the end of 1982. Pac-Man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Bosconian , Pole Position, Ms. Pac-Man (if you’re counting games Namco didn’t actually make), and the Rally-X series (if you like crap) all emerged in this period. We’re not even necessarily done...
Pole Position July 1982 (ARC, Japan) Confession time: Up to this point, I've been content to consider the later reissued versions of the games considered in the NamCompendium to be sufficient for review purposes. I have in fact played games like Galaga , Pac-Man , and Dig Dug in their original arcade format, worn out joysticks and all, but up to this point we have been strictly dealing with gam...
The brilliant Ms. Pac-Man was the offspring of what amounted to stretching the terms of a licensing agreement between Namco and Midway . The latter wanted to leverage the former’s intellectual property for more arcade profits, and brought in General Computer Corporation’s bootleg expertise to create a game that sublimely iterates on an already incredible blueprint. While the details remain murk...
Let us continue our long, NamCompendium nightmare that is the documentation of Ms. Pac-Man's ports . This "not really a Namco game but they sorta repatriated it kinda into canon" game started its life as (probably) a joint Namco- General Computer Corporation - Midway joint before being licensed to Atari, Incorporated , who then dragged GCC into developing versions of Ms. Pac-Man for Atari platf...
(Editor's note: There's not a lot of excuses that can cover for as long a gap as the one there has been in this project, but death in the family is probably one of them. I have been helping my partner process the emotional and legal fallout of her father's passing, and this entry took a backseat for a while. It is now live on NamCompendium.com, and I decided that I might as well put out somethi...
Dig Dug 19 April 1982 (Arcade, JP) Taizo Hori , aka Dig Douglas, is the canonical father of Mr. Driller . Give the choice between Mr. Driller’s adventures and his father’s first outing, I’m team Driller every day of the week. I’ve never quite gotten the flow of Dig Dug down to a point where I can get much past the first four or so levels. The game nevertheless represents the boldest stylistic s...
*Editor's Note: Norwegian classes have really kicked into gear, and most of my writing as of late has been done på norsk . This project will likely ramp up over the summer. I've also got namcompendium.com on lock and it redirects to a WordPress blog where these posts will be reblogged as an official repository. At the outset of this project I stated quite clearly that I had no intention of cons...
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...
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...
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 entry, we shall consider Namco's immediate followups to their single best known work. Spoilers: they aren't as...
Update 1 March: Panzer Dragoon Zwei advances over Mighty Final Fight to the semifinals! My special boys all get byes into the quarter finals of this thing, but I want YOUR opinion as to what I should be playing as part of my return to the GBCER. So, head on over to Twitter Land for up to date progress on this thing or follow this blog post where I'll be doing my best to link the current poll! N...
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 entry, we shall consider Namco's immediate followups to their single best known work. Spoilers: they aren't as...
In the Galaxian entry to this ongoing odyssey of chronicling Namco , I mentioned that there would be some additional airtime given over to covering some more unsanctioned ports of the presently considered arcade hit Pac-Man . As it happens, there are three such ports of low birth that I would like to touch upon before we enter the maelstrom of the Famicom and NES versions of Pac-Man. As best as...
Editor's Note: Between the start of this project and now, I have resumed taking classes at a Large University in North America. These classes have eaten into a surprising amount of my free time, and I let this article sit unfinished for months. It is still not finished, but this is probably the most important game I will write about throughout the project. Therefore, I have decided to split the...
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 entry, we drill down into one of the most influential yet unsung video games ever made. As an aside, I hencefo...
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 entry, we examine the early Namco arcade games that weren’t called Galaxian . In the last few weeks, my Giant...
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. To kick things off, however, it is worth considering NAMCO’s origins. When you see the name Namco on a product today,...
NamCompendium Articles Prologue: Two Wooden Horses NamCompendium 1: Toru Dreams of Pinball, and The Limits of this Project are Tested Severely NamCompendium 2: Galaxian NamCompendium 3: Pac-Man, Pt. 1 NamCompendium 4: Pac-Man, Pt. 2 NamCompendium 5: The Guns of October NamCompendium 6: Cars, Cars, and Stars NamCompendium 7: Galaga NamCompendium 8: Bosconian NamCompendium 9: Dig Dug NamCompendiu...
Yeah, so I fell off the horse. What better time to hop back on than the present though! And if you wind up missing me, you can catch my editorial presence and occasional appearances on Hardcore Gaming 101 's Top 47,858 of All Time Podcast , available at your local podcast vendor! Tomorrow the lads rank Sonic '06 and Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman , meaning some good people were forced to play S...
Note: Did you know that I make a podcast? It's true! I work with the good people of Hardcore Gaming 101 to produce the Top 47,858 Games of All Time Podcast , a fool's endeavor where we use a very strict science (think Giant Bomb's own Ranking of Fighters) to rank the games that YOU nominate! Wanna see the results? Check out bit.ly/47kgames and subscribe to the show by searching for Hardcore Gam...
Note: I tend to fuck up the follow through on almost every blog writing thing I've started. This is but the most recent attempt to work against that tendency. I accumulate video games. In the heyday of the Humble Indie Bundle , I foolishly bought nearly eighty goddamn games and have managed to get through perhaps twenty five percent of them. I've tried to establish a system wherein I must basic...
Note: This is different from a Top Games of 2016 post, which he'll get around to later. It's also different from the Hardcore Gaming 101's Top 47,858 Games of All Time Podcast that he helps to produce, and hopes you'll check out. So, this year, right? I started this year in a very real crisis mode, during which my favorite musician and a personal role model died. Then people kept on dying, and...
So, 2015? Pretty good year. It was a pretty damn formative one for me personally. By the end of it, I was at a point where I felt confident in the general direction of my life for the next decent chunk. I got comfortable. That came to an incredibly abrupt halt with the end of a very serious live-in relationship with my girlfriend in December. It's been a rough transition for me. The good news i...
What is even left to be said about this thing? While this probably the third time I've picked up Paradise since it launched, I've put a solid twenty hours into the game so far and I'm only a third of the way to my Burnout Elite license thus far. I'm exactly one trophy away from pulling off my first Platinum, and may or may not have purchased a PlayStation Eye to accomplish this. I've also had s...
Not much new to report on the video gaming front lines of Twin Peaks. I've mostly cycled through my "Now Playing" list and am now working on the following: There are still some billboards advertising "live" content, including Vizio televisions and goddamn Burger King. Burnout Paradise (PS3) - I am experiencing some weird issues connecting to EA's servers for stuff on launch (apparently putting...
I continue to play video games, and occasionally they get finished. Who knew? Metal Gear Solid was a game I had always appreciated a distance. I knew it had a crazy plot involving eccentric military personnel, giant death robots, and something about plugging the controller into the second port. My first experience with the series was actually borrowing a copy of Snake Eater from a classmate in...
Do you remember your first few hours with Elder Scrolls games? Of course you do! Even you, liar! So much well thought out stuff happens at the outset of those games. Tarhiel the wizard falls from the sky just north of Seyda Neen , leaving behind those ridiculous jumping scrolls. Patrick Stewart shows up in a video game and gets shivved. A dragon appears! Excitement! There's also the part where...
Hello! Last week I wrote the longest post-academic career piece I've done to date, marking up Episode 18 of the r/civ Battle Royale Mk.II. It clocked in at just south of 8000 words, and I had quite a bit of fun doing it. It might have woken up my dormant desire to write about stuff on the Internet. That was a very focused piece, however, and I would like to stray into more open ended writing. I...
I've been playing Zelda video games on and off for a decade now. Between Minish Cap , Wind Waker , Ocarina of Time , the NES original , A Link to the Past , Majora's Mask , and Skyward Sword , I have had countless hours of fun and enjoyment out the franchise. I enjoy the fantasy trappings of the series, being prone to bouts of Dungeons & Dragons, and damned if you can't count on each entry to p...
I started a project to watch fifty films this year. All of them were nominated for Best Picture but failed to win. I'm going to work my way back in time to 1962 over the next year, and blog about each film. The gig is called Almost Oscars, and you can catch it all right here. The first entry is on Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, a movie that good Screened seemed to enjoy a bit. Maybe somebo...
I love computers. They have actively enriched my life by keeping me in contact with friends after repeated moves across the country, and their need for continuous preventative maintenance has kept me gainfully employed since 2008. Some of my strongest memories of elementary school are playing Math Blaster on what was probably an Apple II. My family’s first computer was a Packard Bell PC pre-bun...
My friend and associate Kevin Knodell just published a piece on the closure of Comic Book Inc. in Tacoma . I will confess to never having gone to the shop in question, mostly from my lack of interest in comic books. However, I look at the closing of any independent business with a pain in my gut. At one point during my time in Parkland, I went out shopping with a new group of Dungeons & Dragons...
The last post I did in this series concluded with something of a rant, the point of which was that you can learn from video games if you give it a shot. Yes, these things are crafted first and foremost to be enjoyable, but you can take away quite a bit from some of the more ingenious ones. Ask most of the people in the know and they’ll agree that if you aren’t gaming on a PC, you’re getting som...
A lot of my close and not-so-close liberal friends seem pretty flabbergasted today. Turns out the state of North Carolina has voted on an amendment to its state constitution that would define the only valid marriages in the state as those between one man and one woman. This vote has passed by a fairly large majority, 61% to 39% as of this post. The outrage! The shock! It’s pretty incredible how...
(This was written about two years ago while I was studying abroad in China) Throughout my academic career, I've had to introduce myself over and over again to new groups of people. I realize people feign interest in me (as I do them) but sometimes they’ll go out of their way, like a journalist who remembers halfway through an interview that she’s paid to ask questions, try to uncover something...
NOTE : This is copy pasta from our actual blog. On this crisp, clear edition of the Onboard NIC Crew, we get directly to the bottom of Mobile World Congress (not Conference), attempt to comprehend the mindflaying insanity that is a Start Button-less Windows OS, and debut the exciting new feature, "What's That App?" Lauren also returns after a long and lonely exile to lure away Sean and Auston,...