bigsocrates's Articles

About 3 months ago I got sick and played through Miitopia. I said at the time that I was going to post a blog about the game but never got around to it, until a FAKE IMPOSTER @imunbeatable80 showed up and challenged me . I simply had to defend the honor of imunbeatable80, who no longer comes to these forums because he finally discovered the greatest game and now he can’t stop playing Billy Hatc...

RoboCop: Rogue City is a game with the odd reputation of being one of the best mediocre games of the 2020s. Its promoters, and there are many, all acknowledge that it’s a flawed game with a mid-sized budget and won’t blow your mind or land at the top of your all-time favorites list, unless you really love the license, but it satisfies that desire for a 15 hour straightforward campaign like we u...

I can't stop thinking about the Wii U. Other than the Saturn it is the only major home console since the PlayStation era that I never owned, and so it has an air of mystery around it that fascinates me. Unlike the Saturn the majority of the Wii U's library, and especially the library of games that I'd actually want to play, has been ported to the Switch (and now the Switch 2 via backwards compa...

A lot of people have written blog posts or articles about falling out of love with gaming, or how modern games just don't hit like they used to. This is not a post about that. Like anyone else my interest in gaming ebbs and flows, and I think this year has been kind of disappointing so far for the most part, but Donkey Kong Bananza, like Astro Bot last year, demonstrated that when the right gam...

I stood in line to get a Switch 2. Not at midnight, I'm way too old for that, but yesterday morning when I went to pick up my unnecessary preorder. I think the last time I did that for a console was the Dreamcast, since the only consoles I have gotten since then were bought for delivery. The line outside the Best Buy was wrapped halfway around the block, but it wasn't a party atmosphere. The vi...

I was really looking forward to South of Midnight when it was announced. Not only did it look great graphically, but a game steeped in the underexplored legends of the Deep South full of magic and mythos seemed like a tantalizing change of pace. It was also by Compulsion Games, which made Contrast, a game that holds a special place for me because it was the first PS4 game I played and the first...

There's been a lot of excitement around Giant Bomb recently, and the fact that it is finally an independent website no longer shackled to a corporate overlord who doesn't understand it, controlled by the staffers who love it and have direct communication with the community and audience. I understand why that's exciting. People want to see the old shows they love come back. They're hoping to see...

I don't know why I've been on a 7th gen game kick as of late. Maybe it has to do with the closing of the Xbox 360 online store and the feeling that the gen is finally actually ending, as opposed to the way its life seemed to stretch on so long thanks to digital stores still being open and the constant stream of remasters (which themselves haven't actually ended.) Maybe it's a retreat into nosta...

Giantbomb has long prided itself on being a friendly and welcoming community among all the hostile, toxic, places on the Internet and in gaming in general. And for the past this is true. People here tend to have a more mature and kind outlook on things than in many other online locations and try to disagree and debate things respectfully, focusing on arguing about ideas and not falling into ad...

The Switch has been Nintendo's primary system for 8 years. Just typing that is a little jarring. Assuming most of us will live about 80 years, that means the Switch will be the prime Nintendo platform for 10% of our lives. If you're 40 the Switch has been the Nintendo machine for one fifth of your life already. Nintendo is a company with a long and storied history, but the Switch is still a maj...

Gaming is one of the main ways I cope with the darkness in the world, and right now, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone paying attention but especially anyone in the US, there's a lot of darkness around and we're nowhere close to midnight, let alone dawn. I've been finding over the beginning of this already cursed year that what I crave from gaming is simplicity and linearity. When th...

Dragon Age: The Veilguard's director is leaving EA . Obviously the discourse around the game has been ugly, with a lot of it focused around the anti-woke movement screeching with anger because it's not a game about straight white guys, for straight white guys, by straight white guys, as they think all games should be. Obviously I don't buy into the anti-woke narrative, but there is an actual cr...

Agent Intercept is a game that I have a bit of a weird relationship with. I became aware of it through Youtubers the publisher gave free codes to upon its release, and it sat on my wishlist for a long time because I was interested in its sleek graphics and modern take on the Spy Hunter formula, but it was very short and I didn't want to pay full price. I bought it for $8 on Xbox at some point a...

Something I like to do every year is to write some "resolutions" for how I will approach gaming, which is my major hobby, in the year to come. I don't take it overly seriously but I do find it helpful as a reference towards what I want to do with my hobby time so I don't just end up giving into my darker impulses and doing something truly crazy like trying to platinum Balan Wonderworld. This ye...

I've used Reddit off and on for a long time, especially since it is often the best place to go for specific information on games, but I increased my usage after other sources of information about my beloved Intellivision Amico dried up. Subreddits are basically individual message boards with their own moderators and other than the massively popular ones that have huge and diverse populations th...

I play a lot of video games. Many more than most people, probably more than is strictly healthy. I (mostly) avoid it getting in the way of other things in my life and what I want to do, but it's my primary hobby and I make an effort to find time to do it. I've even been playing the Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster on my treadmill so I don't have to stop gaming to get exercise. Touch grass? Me? NE...

The Plucky Squire is a game about…a plucky squire. Hero of a series of children’s books he is a goodhearted warrior who, along with his friends and a kind wizard who acts sort of like their teacher, battles an evil wizard and his minions to maintain peace and harmony in the land. It's a fun little indie title that's a sort of linear top-down Zelda clone whose big gimmick is that it takes place...

This is the time of year when Americans make it a point to feel and show gratitude for the good things in our lives. Many people this year will be thankful for their health, for the fact that they have a roof and food to eat, and, of course for the people in their lives that give it meaning. Some people are thankful for gaming and the blessings it has brought us, whether that's time with friend...

The Switch launched in March 2017, which seems like a different world at this point, severely underpowered compared to its home console competition. Of course it wasn't just a home console, but while it definitely got some wiggle room because of its portability, as a unified platform it has been the most powerful device Nintendo and its third party support have had access to for close to a deca...

Four years after launch the PS5 stands alone atop the traditional console market. Ever since Sega’s exit in 2001 there have been three major players in the game console market. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. During these last 23 or so years Sony has had the most success, but it hasn’t always been consistent and there was a period during the mid to late 2000s where it was running in third place...

It gives me no pleasure to bury an Xbox console. I have a long history with the brand and even told my friend to get an Xbox One 10 years ago , after the botched launch and when PS4 was ascendant. I don't really regret that; we had lot of good times playing multiplayer games before he had a family and dropped gaming, and even after the Xbox served as a solid media center for his wife and him. I...

On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America for a second, non-consecutive, term. His first term was a bonafide disaster, in ways that people seem to hardly remember, ranging from his Covid response to his destruction of international institutions to family separation at the border and, of course, his appointment of judges who would dismantle...

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. Games were played, or at least started in October. What’s this...

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. Games were played, or at least started in October. Killing Tim...

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. Games were played, or at least started in October I was kind o...

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. Games were played, or at least started in October. I’m not sur...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I've been on a big Astro Bot kick with the release of the new game, and part of that included finally playing through the PSVR game Astro Bot Rescue Mission. I finished it before starting the PS5 game, but after platinuming the more recent one I decided to go back and so some more of the optional stuff I hadn't finished. What can I say, I like 3D platformers and in a year when I've been struggl...

It's hard to understand what it was like to play Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast on September 9, 1999. This was a turning point in modern video games. Namco had done a lot to enhance its fighting games for their home ports during the PlayStation era, with extra modes like volleyball or the Tekken Force quasi beat 'em up and lots of other bells and whistles, but the core games were still inferior...

These aren't going to be my full thoughts, I'm mostly posting this because I don't see a thread on Astro Bot, which is surprising given the amount of praise the game is garnering and how squarely it hits the Giant Bomb demographic. I'm a huge fan of 3D platformers and Astro Bot was one of my most anticipated games of the year. I think Astro's Playroom is a true masterpiece, a rare game that mak...

Yesterday afternoon I decided to play a little bit of Mirror's Edge. I was aware of the game when it came out and saw some videos and coverage, but I never got around to playing it because it looked like the kind of game I might enjoy but wouldn't really love. At some point I picked up a cheap digital copy on Xbox and last year I booted it up on a whim and played a couple levels, thinking it wa...

This year has been a weird one for me and gaming. I had a period where I wasn't enjoying games much , which is unusual for me, and in general I've played less than I have in recent years. That's not a bad thing per se, and probably has to do with life normalizing somewhat for me after the pandemic and its after-effects. But while I'm fine with spending less time gaming one unusual thing I've no...

I play a lot of video games by any objective standards. That being said, I, like literally everybody else, cannot play all the games, and I can't match the playtime of people who put in 5-8 hours a day, at least not on a regular basis. I'm more of a 15-20 hours a week type of player, sometimes significantly more, sometimes significantly less. But while I can't play every game, I would say that...

We're now at the halfway point for 2024. This has not been a great year of gaming for me so far. I'm looking at what I've played and what I'd like to get through and while I've had fun there hasn't been a lot that was special to me, and there's really nothing I'm looking forward to on the level of a Tears of the Kingdom or a Spider-Man 2. Of course there's stuff I want to play (like the new Zel...

Penny’s Big Breakaway was one of my most anticipated games of the year. I love 3D platformers, and they’ve been having a bit of a revival in recent years, with AAA and AA entries not just from old stalwart Nintendo but also companies like Sony and The Embracer Group. There have also been more than a few indies, and that’s where things get a bit dicier. I love a lot of indie games, but while the...

Bramble: The Mountain King is what would happen if you played a few indie hits like Limbo and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, then watched a horror movie while reading a book about Scandinavian folklore. You play a little boy, Ole, in an unnamed Nordic land. His sister has gone out at night to explore the countryside. Despite being nervous you follow her because she is your favorite person, and a...

E3 2021 was notable for a number of reasons. It was the final E3, taking place in an entirely virtual online format and featuring press conferences from all the usual suspects like Ubisoft, Gearbox, and Microsoft, each presenting games that would help define the entertainment landscape in the years to come. For most of us, however, it was all about the Amico. Of all the E3 moments that have bra...

I recently posted a blog about my experience with Skull and Bones , the oft-derided Ubisoft flop that they recently let people play for a week for free in the hopes that they'd like it enough to buy it, which seems unlikely given what it's actually like to play. I got to the endgame within that week, because I'm stupid, and once I arrived there I was surprised at what I found. At about the half...

Skull and Bones is one of the first games to make me think that AAA game design might actually be going backwards. Skull and Bones had a free week and I “took advantage” of it to play about 30 hours; finishing the main story, such as it is, and getting 40 out of the 50 Xbox achievements. This involved pretty much no lifing it over the weekend and pouring my time into it during early mornings an...

I've been thinking about the intellivision Amico a lot recently. This is true much of the time, but specifically in the last week or so after the news came out that Atari had bought the original Intellivision IP from the now nameless Amico company. I'm not the only one who this has affected. One Jeff Gerstmann devoted 20 minutes of his podcast to Intellivision, which is impressive considering h...

When the Voice of Cards games were announced I was excited. I like deckbuilders, I like RPGs, I like most of what Square Enix does, it was co-directed by the fantastic Yoko Taro; the idea seemed like a guaranteed hit. Then the games released to mixed critical reception and I read somewhere that they weren’t real RPGs with stories, just dungeon crawlers that used cards for everything in annoying...

This is mostly a reminder to myself. I have a lot of fun making fun of the Amico and its tribulations, but at the heart of the story there is a real and serious scandal. Whether or not it rises to the level of criminally or civilly actionable fraud depends on certain facts that aren't publicly known, but even if it doesn't meet the legal definition, the fact is that a lot of lies were told and...

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is a joke game. Meant as a riff on the infamous CD-I games Link: The Faces of Evil and more specifically Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon the game only is the way it is in order to reference a misstep so creatively disastrous that it prevented Nintendo from licensing its IP to partner companies for decades. If the games were just bad they would be vaguely remembered sid...

Fellow Amicoans. By now you have heard the news . If you’re anything like me your initial reaction was abject horror. I felt like a beloved family member had suddenly died. Like a massive terrorist attack had wiped out thousands of lives. Like my doctor had called to tell me I had stage 4 cancer. We have all built our lives and identities around the Intellivision Amico and to hear that the Inte...

Why is there a remaster of the barely remembered 3DO FPS game PO'ed? I'll admit that it had an attention grabbingly insane premise of a chef fighting aliens but it is not fondly remembered. It's the kind of game that would be interesting as part of a 3DO mini-console or retrospective pack (something like the Atari 50th collection for the 3DO would be great) but doesn't seem like it would be wor...

I should start off by saying that I never played Killzone back when it was relevant. My first experience with the series was in 2014 when I played the HD PS3 version of the first game. I kind of enjoyed that game. I then tried Killzone 2 in 2019 and...I really didn't like it. While Killzone 1 was sort of an interesting throwback shooter from the PS2 days, slow paced and not quite like anything...

Fellow Amico enthusiasts, it’s time to get excited! For those who used to follow the intellivision Amico project the last couple years have been fallow. Tommy Tallarico has left the company and the Internet, abandoning his previous commitment to posting through every failure and disaster, and activity has died way down. Intellivision still exists as a sort of zombie company but they’re not clai...

I want to be clear from the outset that I’m not talking about Microsoft’s involvement in games being under threat. Xbox owns Minecraft and Call of Duty. It spent almost $100 billion buying game makers over the past decade. The gaming division is now bigger than Windows. Microsoft isn’t leaving gaming, or if it does it will be by spinning off the gaming division into its own company or possibly...

@zombiepie has accused me of downplaying the gravity of Microsoft, and by association Phil Spencer’s recent actions so I want to start off by acknowledging that the recent job destruction at Microsoft is a choice, made by someone at Microsoft, totally unnecessary in a company as rich and profitable as it is, and inexcusable in both their existence and execution. But while Microsoft’s implementa...

It's 2024 and we're all used to constantly being cheated, manipulated, scammed, and nickeled and dimed in our real lives. It's just part of living in modern society, especially in the U.S. Whether it's grocery store shrinkage labeled as "new and improved," printers that have chips to avoid you using after market ink replacements AND that refuse to print in black and white after emptying their o...

I went into Tales of Kenzera: Zau with high expectations. The New York Times called it “a gem of human experience made all the more profound because of its self-assured heart.” Other publications hyped it up as a polished game with a lot to say and an excellent way of saying it. I was ready to be pulled into another world and maybe even shed a few tears at a story about love and loss. I came aw...

I wasn't going to play Helldivers 2, and I didn't until well after the hype cycle had died down. That might be part of the problem. Ultimately what pulled me in was a friend who rarely gets into games saying he loved it and wanted to play with me. I don't trust his taste in games at all, and he tends to be fickle, but I do like playing online with him just because I so rarely play with friends...

Extreme G and Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls are now live for #NintendoSwitchOnline + Expansion Pack members! Will you take your cyber-cycle to gravitational extremes in Extreme G or race through the towering tracks in Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls first? pic.twitter.com/WS9jvQgJNq — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) April 24, 2024 I regret to inform you that Nintendo has gotten into the Acclaim N64 catalog....

Wayforward is making another 2D platformer starring a young female protagonist. As news goes this is the equivalent to "today is Thursday." It doesn't happen every day, but it happens quite a lot. What's semi notable about this particular 2D platformer from the company that seems to churn them out as frequently as Nintendo churns out takedown notices for emulators is that it's based in the "Yar...

As someone who complains a fair amount about the state of "AAA" gaming, one of the solutions that I often hear is to play more indie games. Indie games are not plagued with a lot of the issues that infest the big company games these days. They're reasonably priced, often single player focused, and rarely riddled with microtransactions or other unsavory practices like always online DRM. If you l...

There's a story making the rounds (originally from a place called Newzoo) that market research shows that 60% of console and PC game time is being spent on live service games that have been around for more than half a decade, and in general gametime has consolidated around a small number of releases, making the gaming industry even more of a feast or famine proposition than it ever was before....

Contra: Operation Galuga has garnered mixed reviews upon release, and seems to have been disappointing for a Wayforward project, though not out of character for a modern Konami game. Personally I think the graphics are pretty ugly and the gameplay looks a little...off for lack of a better word. It's a wait for sale for me. But I'll be waiting a long time because the game launched at $40 (with a...

The Crew is kind of a bad game with one great gimmick. The map. The Crew is a (mostly) racing game that takes place on a compressed map of the contiguous United States, covering everything from Florida to Oregon, albeit shrunk down to a manageable size. You play Alex, a car guy who watches in horror as his benevolent gang leader brother is gunned down in front of him and he is framed for the mu...

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is one of those delightful experiments that seem to happen most often at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle. The pitch of “Mario with guns in an Xcom-lite game” was so insane that it seemed hard to believe when it was announced. Here was Ubisoft, which had already transitioned into its “open world factory” phase and was well on the way towards its “everything...

The Nintendo Switch is poised to become the highest selling console of all time. I honestly didn’t think that anything would dethrone the Nintendo DS or the PS2, both of which achieved their sales at a very different time, before the rise of cellphone gaming and, for the PS2, at a time when DVD adoption was in some ways more important than games. But on the Switch’s 7 th anniversary it has slow...

I didn’t think it would be Kirby. When I wrote last month about how I’ve been in a gaming doldrums for some time now I was confident that something would pull me out of it. I thought it might be Final Fantasy VII Rebirth or perhaps some random indie or shadow drop that would jolt me back into being excited about games again. What I did not expect was that it would be an enhanced remaster of a d...

There are a lot of terrible games out there. Most are forgotten quickly, some have a cult following, but a few become legend. Often you can identify the reasons behind those legends. E.T. for the Atari 2600 helped cause the game crash of the early 80s and changed the industry forever. The Zelda CD-I games took a franchise that was big then and has only gotten bigger and made these weird, terrib...

Sony recently announced that the PS5 was entering the latter half of its lifespan. Microsoft, meanwhile, promised that new hardware is being developed and it will be the biggest power leap we've ever seen. Meanwhile I'm over here questioning whether the Series X and PS5 will ever justify their existence let alone their price points. Whatever you want to say about the current generation of games...

I've been listening to the Trials Fusion theme a fair amount recently. I remember enjoying it at the time of its release, 10 years ago (I don't really want to think about what that means) and I also enjoyed the game, especially the way that my best friend at the time (we're still friends, just not as close) and I would compete for track times and send clips of our most outrageous crashes to one...

I wrote recently about how I couldn't log in to The Crew despite the fact that the servers are supposed to be up for two more months . On the plus side I did finally get in. On the downside it wasn't just a bad game, which I expected, but a game that gave me a shot of existential angst, which I did not expect. Before I start I'd like to note that while I wrote recently that I haven't been enjoy...

EDIT: This has now been fixed, at least for me. When the shut down of The Crew was announced for March of this year I decided I was going to play through it before that happened because I bought the game back in the day and never got around to it. I downloaded it to my Xbox and booted it up only to be greeted with a server error that made it unplayable. I have tried intermittently since that ha...

For most of last year I was having a really good time with video games. I'd overcome my tendency to play a lot of bad games and was focusing more on games I actually enjoyed. I started the year with God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon: Forbidden West and thoroughly enjoyed them both, albeit Ragnarok more than Forbidden West, which seems to be the general consensus. I had a really great time playin...

People are saying that 2023 is one of the greatest years for games in recent memory. I’m not sure I agree. I didn’t play some of the biggest games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield and maybe I would have loved those but I did fall off some of the other big releases not mentioned before like Armored Core VI (I liked it and will go back to it) and Like a Dragon: Ishin! (I like it but it’s no Yaku...

I have a bit of a tradition where I make New Years resolutions around gaming every year. It's very stupid and I rarely keep them but why stop now? This year I am going to keep them pretty simple. 1) Focus less on video games. Games are probably always going to be my major hobby and consume a fair amount of my time and energy, but I'd like to continue scaling that back in 2024. I just want to fo...

I liked Final Fantasy XVI and said I would buy the DLC when released. True to my word I did, and I played the first pack. I came away remembering why I don't really like most DLC. Echoes of the Fallen costs $10 or is $25 as part of a dual pack with more DLC coming later. For that money you get a 2-3 hour quest line only accessible if you've unlocked the final mission and done some other stuff (...

As I played through the battle-wizard FPS campaign of Immortals of Aveum I kept having a recurrent thought. “This is okay, but I can’t believe I paid $70 for it.” I didn’t. I paid $8, and that was for the deluxe edition with a bunch of game breaking equipment I never used. But I’d briefly considered buying it at $70 when it launched just a few months ago and that price was stuck in my brain as...

New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe has a stupid name and I don't like it. Either the name or the game itself. I got vaccinated Sunday and it knocked me flat on my back so I decided to finally finish Tears of the Kingdom, a game I played obsessively upon release but had to set down when life got too hectic. That took longer than I thought (and I think that the back end of that game's main quest is no...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When Insomniac started its new Spider-Man series in 2018 I remember having mixed feelings about it. I’m a big Insomniac fan and especially love their creativity in weapons and mechanics in games like the Ratchet & Clank Series or Sunset Overdrive. Having them restricted to the more tried and true powers of Spider-Man and constrained by Disney’s overbearing licensing division seemed like it woul...

Three years into its lifespan you can actually get a PS5 in a store, like a normal consumer good, and with a free game bundled to boot (at least while they clear out the old stock.) The thing that will always stand out to me about the PS5 is the process of obtaining one. I checked Wario64’s Twitter feed for months, making probably two dozen attempts to grab one by any means necessary that did n...

I've been picking away at Redfall since I started it in October and I really should stop. Today I was playing a couple of the "story" missions and got to one where you're searching this house multiple times and there are no lights so you have to use a flashlight. It was boring and frustrating and it was making my eyes tired. After awhile I wanted to just save and quit and come back to it later,...

We’re three years into the Xbox Series console cycle and a few things have become clear. The first is that the Xbox Series S has not worked out the way that Microsoft hoped. Not only has it not become a major driver in Xbox adoption, at least as far as we can see, but its technical limitations have started to cause issues, such as the Baldurs Gate 3 Xbox delay, and sent developers grumbling. Th...

The Pathless is a game with an interesting pedigree. Developed by Giant Squid, a company formed by former employees of thatgamecompany (makers of Journey) and previously responsible for 2016’s Abzu. The Pathless was also a touted PS5 launch semi-exclusive, also launching on PC and mobile (and PS4 like a lot of 9 th gen titles) but no other console at the time. It later made its way to Xbox and...

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats. Tell me this doesn't look like a horror game! Okage: Shadow King is a game I’ve known about since it released in the US in 2001. I remember seeing reviews for it online and in magazines and I believe I even picked up a real PS2 copy at...

Astrosmash is out on Steam, Xbox, and Switch. This is not the first game announced as an Amico exclusive and subsequently released on other platforms because those platforms are real and someone wanted to recoup some of the development costs. It was preceded by Dynablaster and Shark! Shark!, neither of which really appealed to me, but I enjoy vertical shooters and I’ve even played the original...

For awhile there was discussion about how bad licensed games sort of died off or at least moved to mobile during the 7th generation, and some people said they even missed them. Now of course licensed games never went away entirely, but they mostly seemed to be higher budget and more ambitious affairs, like the Batman Arkham games or Beatles Rockband. And of course there were still occasional TH...

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats. Oh boy, I’m going to get staked through the heart for this one. Growing up I was never a Castlevania kid. I didn’t like horror much to begin with, and while I had an NES as a child I was primarily a PC gamer. I did have a copy of Castl...

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats. Medievil is a weird remake of a second tier PS1 game from 1998. I remember when that original Medievil came out, it was lauded for its graphics, soundtrack, and humor but got middling marks on gameplay because of loose and sloppy contr...

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23: This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats. I decided to start my 2023 Schlocktober horror marathon by finishing Pumpkin Jack a game I started last year in an aborted attempt to have a horror game filled October 2022. This means that I only really played the last 30 minutes of t...

Shark!Shark! is out for modern platforms. It seems unremarkable. This game is what we all thought it was going to be. It looks like a low to moderate effort update to a somewhat obscure retro game without many attempts to modernize it or add content for longevity. It would have done okay on Xbox Live in 2006 but it's probably going to barely be a blip at a $15 price point in 2023. It definitely...

Rejoice Amico faithful! The prophecy of Tallarico has come to pass. Amico has spread across the globe like a pandemic of joy! The sun of Amico has risen to spread the light of happiness and the good word of the Prophet Tallarico to a population famished for family friendly co-op that only Amico can provide. If you have paid attention to gaming at all the last week then thou knowest that the gre...

When I was a kid gaming was a lot more compartmentalized than it is today. You had your Nintendo games, your Sega games, and your PC games and while there were a fair number of games that did come to multiple platforms there was generally one lead platform that the game "belonged" on. You could play Sim City on your Super Nintendo but everyone knew it was really a PC franchise. This mostly held...

I decided to play Wild Arms after finishing Final Fantasy XVI. I enjoyed that game but it had strayed so far from the series’ traditional RPG roots that it hadn’t satisfied my appetite for a JRPG . I’d bought Wild Arms on PS3 when Sony had a massive sale on digital PS1 games and that entitled me to a free PS4/5 upgrade so I figured that since Wild Arms had always been a series I was curious abo...

When Diablo IV first launched I was pretty excited. I bought it right away, tore through the campaign relatively quickly, did a little bit of postgame stuff, and then put it down. I got about 40 hours out of it (doing a lot of side stuff during my run) and put it down, satisfied. When they announced the Season of the Malignant season starting I was tempted to jump back in but Seasons in Diablo...

When Diablo IV first launched I was pretty excited. I bought it right away, tore through the campaign relatively quickly, did a little bit of postgame stuff, and then put it down. I got about 40 hours out of it (doing a lot of side stuff during my run) and put it down, satisfied. When they announced the Season of the Malignant season starting I was tempted to jump back in but Seasons in Diablo...

I am currently overwhelmed by the number of new games out that I am playing/want to play so of course I have been doing the most reasonable thing possible to handle that situation and playing through old Mega Man games on the Mega Man Legacy collection, which I bought almost a decade ago but never got around to playing. I've actually been having a good time with it, since Mega Man is one of tho...

It's safe to say that for old school gamers like myself the transition from PS4/XBONE to PS5/Xbox Series has been unique among console generations. To put it simply, we've never seen the lines between generations blurred to the extent they are now nor for as long as they have been. We are coming up on the 4th year the newer consoles have been out and we're still seeing big games being released...

I have a friend I’ve known for over a decade. Over that time we’ve remained close. I was a groomsman at his wedding and we text pretty regularly. Every couple months we go to a concert or something together. I’ve spent time with his wife and their son too, a fair amount before the pandemic, much less during, and now more again as things have eased up. That son just turned 7, and over the last f...

Immortals: Fenyx Rising has a horrible name, and I think that plus looking like a Breath of the Wild clone (which it was in some ways like the traversal and the shrines but definitely was not in others) doomed it. The game itself, however, was pretty solid and it was one of the first "9th gen" games I played on my Xbox Series X, though it didn't come out until about a month after launch. For th...

Klonoa is one of those series that has always been on my “to play” list but I never got around to. I remember liking a demo for the first game on PS1 but I don’t think I ever picked it up because the price was never right. I knew the remake and sequel both got good reviews on the PS2/Wii but like a lot of people I just wasn’t that into the idea of a short 2.5D platformer during those generation...

I don’t really like Twisted Metal 2. I want to establish that right off the bat. It’s not even a case of having enjoyed it at the time but it aged poorly for me or even not having played it at release so I approached it with inappropriate expectations…I played it in 1996 or 1997 when someone brought it to my house and even though I liked it conceptually I didn’t think the game was fun then. I t...

A month ago I blogged about the proposed Intellivision Amico game library and how it showed that Intellivision never had a serious business plan . Part of the purpose of that post was to lay the groundwork for this one, examining the same issue but from the opposite perspective. In other words, what’s missing from Intellivision’s announced lineup that should have been there if they had actually...

I have very mixed feelings about Final Fantasy XVI. It’s a game that I loved at the outset when I played the demo the night before release, then liked for most of the first 10 hours or so, only to sour on it as it dragged on with a slow plot and repetitive gameplay, only to warm back up during climactic moments or new areas opening up. I repeated this cycle several times, sometimes feeling like...

I blogged earlier about buying an Evercade and some of the experiences I've had with that system, mostly playing 80s/90s console games and some cool obscure arcade titles. Blaze Entertainment, which makes the Evercade, is a British company so it was perhaps inevitable that they'd start dipping their toes into releasing emulated Commodore 64 and Amiga games, because unlike in the US and Japan th...

I’ve reached a point in my life where I can’t pretend I’m young anymore. Once you cross into your 40s you’re firmly middle aged, and while I’ve had gray hair for awhile it’s now started thinning and there are wrinkles slowly etching their way into my face. I’m generally okay with this, but one place I’m starting to feel my age is in my gaming. It’s not just about carving out time or the fact th...

There’s been a lot of discussion about all the problems with the now dead Intellivision Amico project from its lack of a reasonable market to its price point to its horrible controller. There has been discussion about how bad some of the games look, and the lack of a killer app, but I think one thing that has gone a little under the radar (though not unmentioned) is how badly the proposed game...

For a lot of people this question is going to seem stupid and pointless and it kind of is, but it's something I've been thinking about. I owned a PlayStation during its relevant cycle. Ape Escape was a big release towards the end of that cycle and though I played demos and eventually picked up a Greatest Hits copy on the cheap, I never actually played the whole thing. Until it released for PS4/...

We're in 2023, which means that we're in the 10th year of the PS4 and Xbox One. Both systems just got 2 huge new releases in the form of Diablo IV and Street Fighter VI. They also continue to get the vast majority of indie or AA games, even if some of the AAA stuff has finally started to skip them, now that the new systems are nearing 3 years old and are entering their traditional primes. While...

This all started because I wanted to play some Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. I don't know if this was because of the impending release of Street Fighter 6 or just a random urge that drifted up from my subconscious but I couldn't shake it and I decided that the easiest way to satisfy it would be to play the 360 port, which I bought when it was released way back in 2009. Of course the 360 store page was l...

I want to be clear that the true victims of the Intellivision Amico saga are the investors who got swindled out of their cash and the pre-order customers who were promised refunds but didn't get them. Intellivision lied about a lot of things on its way to becoming the biggest phantomware flameout in modern gaming history, and it made off with millions of dollars via shady crowdfunding campaigns...

Let me start this by saying it is not a burial of Beat Saber. I bought it for PSVR1 but never played it because I am constantly overestimating my appetite for VR games,* but when the free upgrade was announced I downloaded it immediately as an excuse to get back into my PSRV2, which has been collecting dust since the first week I had it. Beat Saber is a great game. It reminds me a lot of Rock B...

As some of you may know I’m pretty obsessed with the Intellivision Amico, a vaporware nonsole that piled bad ideas on top of each other like a miser at a pay-per-plate buffet. It is impossible to dive into the Amico discourse without hearing about other contemporary projects that had more success through the radical business strategy of actually manufacturing and shipping products for people to...

The Intellivision Amico lives on as a project in a zombie state but it is, for all real intents and purposes, a dead idea. Many will argue that it was dead upon announcement; the idea of a follow up to a long moribund brand that sought to compete in the console space by positioning itself as a more expensive Ouya with a weird controller and a lot of hoops to go through to get games onto the pla...

Mass Effect 2. Holy shit was this game basically Mass Effect 2. From its focus on recruiting and preparing a team for a final rush against a big bad enemy, to the aesthetics of the Zeniths to its final reveal of an enemy that is more or less just the Reapers . Now don't get me wrong, I like Mass Effect 2, so this is not entirely a criticism. I would also say that one major aspect of Mass Effect...

When it comes to video games I'm a frequent saver. I grew up in a time where autosaving was far from the norm, and playing my share of dastardly early PC games that were more than happy to kill you out of nowhere or drop you into an unwinnable situation meant that I got into the habit of saving frequently and keeping at least a few backups around in case surrendering an hour of progress was a m...

At the end of 2022 I had a bunch of games that I wanted to either finish or play, from that year and before. I never got to Horizon Forbidden West or God of War Ragnarok (despite the 2019 GoW game being my second favorite game of all time) because I still had unfinished business in the first games of those series but couldn't find time to complete it. I had a bunch of big games from 2022 that I...

Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon was a game I always knew I would love but never got around to. I don’t know if other people have games like this, that they are confident they will enjoy but never find the time to play, but it’s pretty common for me. For Blood Dragon the reason was that both it and the base Far Cry 3 had a reputation of being awful on console. They launched during that awkward period rig...

I just finished Farcry Primal. That's notable because I actually started the game in February 2016, when it launched. Based on my achievements I seem to have dipped back in during 2017 and 2018 before putting it down for about 5 years (I may have picked it up very briefly in the intervening years but not played enough to get an achievement) and then finishing it in 2023. Why did I bother? Well...

Well it has happened. Google Stadia is officially a dead platform. For the vast majority of gamers this is pretty meaningless because most of us never even tried Stadia, or quickly abandoned it if we did. For a few people it means they have lost their main way of interacting with games, and I feel bad for them though at least they got their money back and in some cases were able to export their...

Under my TV right now I have a PS5 and a PS4 Pro, which I keep hooked up mostly for PSVR purposes and because the PS5's hard drive is so small I've been playing indie games and other less taxing titles on PS4 just to keep from having to constantly swap. I also have a launch PS4, which has been sitting in a closet for the last 6 years since I got the pro, but that I want to pull out of retiremen...

I like to make gaming resolutions every year. I don't have a great history of actually keeping them but they at least give me something to aspire to regarding gaming for the following year so I don't just aimlessly wander between games I don't really like. It's also fun to look back and see how I did and how my priorities held up. This year I want to keep things pretty simple. Here are my goals...

Towards the beginning of this year I made the bold prediction that 2022 would be the year of the Intellivision Amico. And I have held to that belief through the various ups and downs the console has gone through. I believe in the Amico and its potential to revolutionize gaming. Its biggest challenges as a product are that it doesn't exist and nobody would want it if it did, but I think it can o...

I was one of the lucky ones who got an Xbox Series X on launch day, from Microsoft at MSRP. It arrived on November 10 and I was enamored both of the box and the shape of the console itself. After the Xbox one had been a boxy, boring, thing that was nicknamed "the VCR," the Series X has a cool obelisk shape, reminiscent of a PC mini-tower from the 90s but with only a disc drive and that glowing...

Night Slashers is the first game I spent significant time with on my Switch in a while. I’m not sure why I hadn’t been feeling Nintendo’s little hybrid this year, but despite having some anticipation for Kirby and mild interest in Mario Strikers I just haven’t wasn’t playing it. But I have been on an inexplicable beat ‘em up kick lately and the idea of playing Night Slashers appealed to me just...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising Game Type: 2D Metroidvania action RPG Time Played: 20-25 hours Completion level: All achievements earned Approachability: High. It's light and breezy action with a very gentle difficulty curve. Should You Try It? : If you have a fondness for the 32-bit...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Game Type: Throwback beat 'em up in the style of the old Konami TMNT games. Time Played: About 3 hours Completion level: Finished story mode with a friend. Approachability: High. This was based on old arcade games appropriate for...

The concept of an "indie" game is pretty simple. It's a game that is self-published by a developer that is not part of another large corporation and so doesn't have big corporate funding behind it. It can also be expanded to include small scale "indie" publishers with limited staffs and budgets that don't really fund games but instead provide some basic help with distribution and marketing in e...

I am somewhat obsessed with the Intellivision Amico and I’m genuinely sad that it looks like it will never come out. It was this beautifully misbegotten project that harkened back to the days of the CD-I and the Jaguar; badly thought-out systems that didn’t catch on, and didn’t deserve to, but built their own weird urban legends. I used to read about them in magazines, things like how there are...

Fuse is a very late 7 th gen 3 rd person shooter (May 28 2013) with a reputation for being aggressively bland. This reputation is well earned. How I came to play it in 2022 involves my own neurosis. I bought a copy of the game in 2014 when Microsoft was blowing out Xbox 360 games and I somehow lost it between then and this year, 2022. I discovered this when I was doing a survey of my remaining...

Strider 2 is a weird little game. It’s a sequel to the arcade classic Strider, which really came into its own as an early Genesis title and also spawned a well regarded NES version that was a totally different game. That first Strider arcade game already had a sequel, called Strider II (roman numerals instead of numbers), which was made by US Gold and which Capcom disowned because, by most acco...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Citizen Sleeper Game Type: Visual novel game with mechanics drawn from tabletop RPGs Time Played: About 7 hours Completion level: Rolled credits. Approachability: Medium-low: It can be intimidating at first and many people won't 'get' it but it gets easier quickly and I think m...

I like to think of myself as a smart person but sometimes I am very very dumb. I own all three major modern consoles, Xbox Series X, Switch, and PS5 and while Xbox has been my primary platform since the release of the first Xbox in 2001, I have generally split my gaming time at about 50% XBox, 30% PlayStation, 15% Nintendo, and 5% PC/portable. Those numbers change over time depending on what I...

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Amico recently a it goes through its final death throes. It’s pretty clear that it’s never going to ship in a meaningful way and while it never seemed like a good idea I’m kind of sad that it will never make its long awaited goofy flop into the marketplace. I would have loved to see the reaction to “The Wii U but far, far, worse in every way released 10 years...

It’s hard to imagine a console having more momentum during the first half of 2022 than Amico has. Everyone else in the video game space seems to be slowing down while Amico only accelerates towards its glorious release. The Switch’s heyday is finally slowing, with Nintendo admitting it won’t sell as many a it did in 2021. Sony can’t keep Playstation 5 in stock, leading to frustration among its...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Trek to Yomi Game Type: Samurai action game with 2D combat Time Played: Xbox says 15 hours but I think that includes some suspend time and it's probably more like 6. Completion level: Rolled credits. Approachability: Medium. It can be tough and it won't be to everyone's taste,...

The First Templar is a bad game. This was not a shock to me, considering its 52% score on Metacritic* and my memory of coverage from its release in 2011. I remember the Giant Bomb quick look of this thing left me intrigued, though, and I bought a cheap copy a few months later with the intent of getting around to it at some point. I later misplaced that copy because, well, it was a cheap copy of...

Inversion is a game with some resonance for me. I listed it in a blog I wrote over 5 years ago about games that I had purchased but would never actually play. This, of course, meant that it stuck in my mind enough that I would eventually get around to it. I actually started playing in November of 2020, at a time when I was trying to clear some of my backlog of physical 360 games. I got through...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Pupperazzi Game Type: Dog photography game Time Played: Approximately 2 hours. Completion level: Rolled credits. Approachability: More or less universal, unless you hate dogs for some reason. Should You Try It? : Yes. It's short and shallow but almost everyone should get at lea...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Nobody Saves the World Game Type: Action RPG Time Played: Approximately 25 hours. Completion level: Rolled credits. Approachability: High. It's pretty easy and surprisingly intuitive. Should You Try It? : Yes. A lot of people loved it, and I thought the first couple hours were...

The gaming press, the Internet, and even the business media have been buzzing over Microsoft’s splashy announcement that they are spending nearly $70 billion to purchase Activision Blizzard. A lot of the discussion has focused on how this will play into Microsoft competing in the traditional AAA market and even the mobile market, where Activision subsidiary King has some very profitable titles....

Yesterday was an Amico kind of day for me. I wanted to play games but I didn’t want to play anything overly complicated or taxing. I was looking for some accessible quick fix fun, the kind we used to have back in the 8-bit era where gaming didn’t require 10 mapped buttons or 3D camera control. The exact kind of gaming experience that the Amico is selling itself on. I started out with Mighty Goo...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Mighty Goose came out in 2021 but I wanted to play it so I'm including it anyway. Game: Mighty Goose Game Type: Run 'n Gun Time Played: Approximately 4 hours. Completion level: Rolled credits. Messed around with New Game+ but did not complete. Approachability: High. It's very simple...

What does it mean to be the “year of” something? It doesn’t mean that thing is the highest selling. Within the video game sphere 2020 was the year of the PlayStation 5 even though the Nintendo Switch sold more units, because the PlayStation 5 captured the attention of the gaming world and became an object of desire among the frenzied masses who battled bots and scalpers more vicious than any fu...

A lot of words have been written about the death of the “AA” game. “AA” games are games that don’t have the enormous budgets of what have come to be known as “AAA” games, massive projects that soak up tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but still have the backing of large publishers and enough budget behind them for serious marketing budgets and frills like licensed music and well known vo...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: Olija Game Type: Puzzle/Action Platformer Time Played: Approximately 5 hours. Completion level: Rolled credits Approachability: Medium. It is fairly intuitive and very easy but its graphic violence and dire tone might be unpleasant for many. Should You Try It? : If you read a r...

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022. Game: The Pedestrian Game Type: Puzzle Platformer Time Played: Approximately 4 hours. Completion level: Rolled credits/all achievements. Approachability: Very high. Intuitive controls and no objectionable content. Should You Try It? : Sure, why not? It’s appropriate that the first en...

Last year I wrote down my ranking of the games I played in 2020 but I never got around to posting them. This year I’m putting them up. This ranking only includes games released in 2021, not the many, many, games from prior years that I played. I am also not including games that I bounced off or did not put substantial time into, though I didn’t finish every game on the list. Whether an unfinish...

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is an easy game to admire. It’s a small indie effort with a ton of originality and a sweet and positive message at its core. It’s a game that tackles themes of the self-doubt and imposter syndrome that plague a lot of young people and it isn’t afraid to make those themes front and center in its narrative rather than making them substories or side points. It’s got really...

2021 was a year of upheaval around the world but I think it's safe to say that it was also the year that Giant Bomb changed forever. With the departure of three of the longest tenured members, all of whom dated back to the Gamespot days, and the relocation of remaining staff away from the Bay area I think it's safe to say that the Giant Bomb we all fell in love with no longer exists. A lot of u...

Last year I made and posted some gaming resolutions. I wasn't successful with all of them but they acted as a useful guide to what I wanted to do with my game time during the year and I think it's an exercise I want to repeat. I'm repeating it. Here. In this post. This is me repeating it. Resolutions for 2022 1) Continue to control my spending. I spent less money on gaming last year and it work...

Lost in Random is not the game I was expecting it to be. I thought this was going to be a combat focused action game with some story stuff thrown in around the edges. Instead it’s very much a story driven adventure game with some combat arenas. A lot of combat arenas. Too many combat arenas, really, but we’ll get to that a bit later. Lost in Random is the kind of AA game we don’t see a lot thes...

F.I.S.T. Forged in Shadow Torch is a great looking game. I think it’s important to say that from the outset because I’m going to bury this game in a lot of ways, but the graphics definitely impressed me. I played it on PS5 and while it’s not the most technically impressive title on the system its stylistic fusion of neo noir and robot styles mixed with some impressive animation and textures mak...

Kena: Bridge of Spirits seemed like a surefire winner to me. A critically praised, beautiful and gentle-looking game with a linear action-adventure structure is exactly the sort of game that I tend to vibe with. With a protagonist whose staff looks like she borrowed it from Star Fox Adventures and whose plucky attitude is reminiscent of Link from the Zelda series it promised to be lighthearted,...

Christmas is over so I feel like playing Grinch and complaining about some of the recurrent issues in modern game design that piss me off. These aren’t the most serious issues in the game industry (such as workplace abuse, microtransactions, NFTs etc…) and they aren’t even issues that annoy every gamer but they are complaints that I need to get off my chest and so I’m gonna do it, and nobody ca...

Cruis’n Blast is uncut medical grade nostalgia and it need to be regulated by the FDA. It’s almost unbelievable that this thing actually exists. It’s an honest to goodness arcade port to home console of a venerable series and it plays like an N64 game while looking like a souped up Dreamcast title but it’s…good? It feels like falling down some kind of time hole into the bargain bin section of a...

Death’s Door manages to combine the formula of top down Zelda with a unique and darkly whimsical modern fairy tale setting to create a polished indie gem. In Death’s Door you take on the role of a nameless crow who works as reaper in a literal bureaucracy of death where other corvidae serve as clock punching office workers just doing the thankless and boring tasks of collecting the souls of the...

There’s a lot going on in The Ascent. It’s an isometric twin stick shooter action RPG that takes place on an arcology on a planet far from earth where corporations govern and most people are indentured servants who sell themselves into near slavery just to get to this grim metal city, presumably because wherever they came from was even worse. This is an intriguing premise, and the Ascent blends...

The Gunk is not an exciting video game. It is essentially a 3D puzzle platformer, except the platforming isn’t difficult and the puzzles mostly involve some very basic moving of object A to point B and hitting switch C to open up path D. It’s about 4 and a half hours long or so and most of the mechanics are revealed in the first hour and a half, leaving you with some very gentle iteration on th...

I turned the corner on Psychonauts 2 at the point where the hub area opens up and lets you explore the grounds around Psychonauts headquarters. Up until then I thought it was a decent follow up to the first game with better gameplay but less compelling story and characters. From that point, about a quarter into the game, to the end, I became convinced that it’s a masterpiece. Psychonauts 2 is t...

There are a lot of things to like about Octopath Traveler. It has fantastic music if you like the fantasy orchestral style, which I do. The combat is extremely tactical for a JRPG, focusing around enemy weaknesses and managing your character’s boost points to “break” enemies by damaging them with weakness sources until they get stunned and become vulnerable. This makes fights much more engaging...

When the Evercade was announced it seemed like something that I'd wanted for a long time but had never been done right before. It was a new cartridge based system that put old games back into print, legally, in physical form for reasonable prices at a high quality. The team at Blaze did an incredible job of designing decent hardware at a good price point and then licensing out games from publis...

One evening when I was bored I found myself paging through the Xbox store looking for something cheap and not very stressful to play. I love video games and I love great video games but sometimes I just want something where I can turn off my brain and not worry about my reflexes and just zone out without concentrating too hard. Not finding anything cheap that appealed to me after a few minutes...

I was legitimately excited when Balan Wonderworld was announced. I feel like that’s important to say, because at this point the game is kind of a joke and a meme and it’s popular to make fun of it, which I’m going to do some of, but it wasn’t always that way. A new 3D platformer from Yuji Naka, backed by the financial might of Square Enix was a very enticing prospect. Yes many of Naka’s more re...

It’s Thanksgiving in the US today and even though I’ve been a vegetarian for almost 5 years this is the holiday I most associate with meat. Turkey meat may be popular on sandwiches, but cooking a whole bird in a home oven can be difficult. People have burned their houses down trying various methods like cooking in brine or roasting over a fire, but even for those who just stick it in the oven i...

Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is a weird little project. It came out in 2017 on PC and PS4 VR as a short experience that bridges the stories of Psychonauts 1 and the sequel. It takes place immediately after the end of the original Psychonauts and resolves that game’s cliffhanger, though in a way that makes the timeline a little confusing. Nonetheless it’s a fun piece of Psychonauts storyte...

Psychonauts is one of those games that I bought over and over with the intention of playing it but never got around to. I think I bought my first copy for the original Xbox after it dropped in price at my local game store. At that point I was much more focused on PC games so I never actually played the thing, but I did want to. My second copy was bought on Xbox 360 digitally via that console’s...

My experience with the Far Cry series has been pretty limited. I played a tiny bit of Far Cry Instincts Predator on the 360, then a little more of Far Cry 2, and then most of Far Cry Primal. I have no real memory of Instincts, I sort of enjoyed 2 but ultimately found it too frustrating to get very far in, and I really enjoyed Primal’s unique setting and set of weapons but tired of its mission d...

This October I decided to play through a bunch of games with seasonally appropriate horror themes from my backlog. I wanted to get into the holiday spirit and finally get through some games I’d acquired over the years but didn’t otherwise have the impetus to play. I ended up playing a lot more than I thought I would and much more than I usually do over the course of the month and I really enjoy...

I did not manage to snag a PS5 at launch, like so many other people, but I did get a Gamestop bundle in late January, meaning I've had the console for nearly 10 months. My excitement over the PS5 was a bit blunted by just how hard it was to get one, and also by the fact that I'd had a Series X for over 2 months at that point, and already experienced 9th gen graphics. Nonetheless the PS5 had the...

Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was started in October and finished November 1st. SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether...

I have owned all but a handful of the major video game consoles released since the NES. Some have been great, some mediocre, but all of them have felt special in their own way. Getting a new console has always been like getting a fresh start in gaming, with a whole new library to explore and new ways of seeing and experiencing games. Until the Xbox Series X. While the Xbox Series X is a signifi...

Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October. SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth...

Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October. SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth...

Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October. SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth...

Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October. SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth...

Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was played in October. SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I have been playing a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full...

The Takeover is a brawler produced by Youtuber Matt McMuscles, formerly of Super Best Friends Play. I bought the game because of his regular shilling of it and because it was on sale on Switch. After playing it I have to say that it’s a pretty impressive project for a game done primarily by one person (who goes by the handle Pelikan13.) It is not, however, without its limitations. The Takeover...

A lot of game commentators seem to think that viewers like watching them play bad games because we want them to suffer. That there's some sadistic joy to be had in watching someone suffer through something they don't like and get frustrated and irritable over time. I can't speak for everyone, but for me this is definitely not the case. Watching people play bad games is fun because there's almos...

Little Inferno is a video game. When it was released there was some discussion as to whether it was a game or some kind of narrative interactive toy, like a visual novel where you burn stuff instead of chat with high schoolers, but there are enough established rules and gameplay challenges to mark this as clearly in the game category. It’s not a difficult game, and the gameplay isn’t its strong...

When I set out to play all the Assassin’s Creed console games I wasn’t sure that I’d actually play through the Chronicles side-series of stealth platformers. For one thing, most people say that these games are not closely connected to the broader Assassin’s Creed story and so can easily be skipped. More importantly, though, they have a terrible reputation as quick cash-grab tie in titles develo...

The Wild At Heart is a game that I went into knowing only that I liked the graphical look and that it was “free” on Game Pass. From the short bit of the trailer I watched I thought it might be an adventure game, though I wasn’t sure. I soon found that it is sort of an adventure game, in that you walk through some gorgeously rendered 2D levels talking to people and solving puzzles, but it is rea...

Everyone knows we are long past the days of the mascot platformer being the standard bearer for a platform. Sonic, Crash, and Mario had their day in the sun, but these days Crash is a minor character who is platform agnostic, Sonic games are few and far between, and while Mario is still one of the top characters in the world, platforming is a relatively small part of his game portfolio. That do...

Fox ‘N Forests is one of those games I picked up for $5 on an Xbox sale because I’d seen some coverage that said it was a classic 16-bit style platformer with a fun twist. The first time I played it I only played one level, which took me about 20 minutes, and then set it down because it seemed both bland and clunky, which is not a great combination. Plus the level was 20 minutes long, which is...

Superliminal wants to be Portal and doesn’t hide it at all. You play in the first person perspective of an unnamed character who has visited a psychological institute for unspecified reasons. You’re participating in some kind of dream therapy called SomnaSculpt, where you go through a lucid dream experience in order to learn about yourself or deal with some kind of psychological block. This gam...

Assassin’s Creed Rogue was always going to be a weird game. Released in 2014 as probably the last AAA exclusive for the 7 th generation of consoles, it is a sequel to Assassin’s Creed IV and a prequel to Assassin’s Creed III. It completes the Assassins Creed New World trilogy at the same time that the series was pivoting the back to Europe and its Ezio days with the simultaneously released Unit...

Today it is 6 months since the launch of the PS5, with the Series S/X having launched 2 days earlier. It is telling that most of the discussion remains focused on how hard these consoles are to get and how long it's going to be before you can just walk into a store and buy them. There's enormous demand for 9th gen consoles but what there isn't is a compelling reason to own them beyond wanting s...

Assassins Creed Chronicles Russia is a game I liked quite a bit, but that's not what I want to discuss right now. Instead I want to discuss one short sequence in the game that encapsulates everything I don't like about stealth games. For reference ACC: Russia is a 2.5D stealth platformer spin off of the Assassins Creed series. In the particular sequence being discussed you're playing as an Assa...

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China is a game that I wouldn’t have played if I weren’t trying to go through all the console Assassins Creed games. It’s a spinoff of a big high budget 3D series, which is already highly suspect given the quality of most spinoff games, and it’s a (mostly) 2D stealth game, which is not one of my favorite genres. Nonetheless I tried to approach the game with an open...

Assassin’s Creed Unity was a famously broken game at launch. There were the ubiquitous shots of characters with eyes and lips floating in midair while the skull was missing and the hair showed through the empty space, and all kinds of other issues like floating NPCs and bugged pathing. Playing it in 2021, most of that stuff has been fixed, especially on an Xbox Series X where the higher process...

When I was a kid in the early 90s a friend told me about the Neo Geo. This was well before the popularization of the Internet, and before I was regularly buying gaming magazines, so I didn’t know anything about the machine. According to my friend it was a ridiculously expensive nearly magical piece of technology that made games look just like cartoons you see on TV and put both the Super Ninten...

The most interesting thing about Shakedown Hawaii might be the platforms it has been released on. This is a spiritual sequel to the original 2D Grand Theft Auto spiritual sequel Retro City Rampage and it was released in 2019. Given that you’d expect it to hit the typical 8 th generation platforms of the Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox. It skipped the Xbox, which isn’t shocking, and was released inste...

The Gardens Between is a very simple game. You control two characters, a boy and a girl, who travel around a vast ocean plane in a treehouse, going from archipelago to archipelago. Each of these little clusters of two to three islands is based around some memory of their friendship and represents a playable level, each of which you go through in sequence. After competing all the islands in a me...

Spider-Man: Miles Morales almost lost me at the very beginning of the game. I can accept a lot of unrealistic things in video games, especially if they’re about super-powered teenagers, but there are certain events so utterly absurd that they require I do more than just suspend my disbelief, they demand I abandon it altogether. 10 minutes into the game Miles is supposed to do some shopping for...

I was watching some Youtube videos while I lifted weights yesterday and I saw one trying to make a defense for the most recent Fast and Furious game . It did not make me want to pay full price for that game but it did leave me craving an arcade racer, so that evening I flipped on my Xbox and loaded up Dirt 5. Dirt 5 was my first 9th generation game. I bought and played it on November 10th, when...

When I bought my PS5 it came in a bundle with the Ultimate Edition of Miles Morales. I was fine with that because it had the PS5 remaster of Spider Man 2018, and I hadn't played that game's DLC yet. I did so soon after I got the PS5 and now I'm making my way through the main Miles Morales game, which is just as good as everyone said it was. But the Ultimate Edition came with some other extras a...

Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry is something relatively rare. A piece of DLC that was released as DLC first but later released as a standalone game. Ubisoft’s decision to make this piece of content its own separate title shows their confidence in the add-on and their justifiable belief that, unlike a lot of DLC, Freedom Cry represents a substantial story and chunk of gameplay that expands the Assa...

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Ratchet & Clank series. I have played every console game in the series at this point and written about a lot of them on this very blog. I originally started playing through the series because I wanted to get the full background before playing the PS4 reboot. It was mostly an excuse to go through a series that I primarily enjoy (looking at you All 4 One and F...

Uncharted: Golden Abyss looks astounding for a handheld game from 2011. It’s not quite up to the standards of a PS3 game from that time, but it’s pretty close. There are some flat textures, some frame rate dips, and some limitations in the animation, but as someone who has played both PS2 and PS3 games in the last months I was very impressed by the level of detail. There was, in fact, too much...

I had a complex experience with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Last year I played through the first 5 console Assassin’s Creed games and the console port of Liberation. I liked AC1 despite its age and flaws, really enjoyed AC2, and then liked each subsequent game a little bit less until I hit the nadir of AC III, a game that has its moments and its defenders but was just a little bit too self...

Cyberpunk 2077 is at this point an infamously broken game that as of my writing this is still not digitally available on PlayStation Network (though that may have to do more with the refund stunt that CDPR pulled than the quality of the product.) On base Xbox One and PS4 it was apparently pretty bad, but I played it on Xbox Series X and on the 9th gen consoles, PC, and even the half-step consol...

Axiom Verge is the kind of game I wish I loved. It’s a tribute to Metroid, with a few other influences thrown in, and it’s incredibly well made. The graphical style is based on the 16-bit era but not slavishly devoted to recreating that aesthetic and the game is more than happy to throw in modern touches like scaling the screen back for greater visibility against massive bosses that the Super N...

If you pay attention to gaming news you're aware of Jason Shreier's article about Sony and that a Last of Us remake is in the works. Today, the remake of The Last of Us is being led by Naughty Dog and supported by Sony's VASG. Read the full story here: https://t.co/c5gw8WuMVy — Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) April 9, 2021 A lot of virtual ink has been spilled about how it's too soon for a Last...

The Covid epidemic has affected the lives of almost everybody in the world at this point. Obviously the most affected are those who have died or become very ill, and their loved ones. I've personally lost a family member and know others who have as well. There have also been people who have been deeply economically affected, including losing jobs and businesses, or suffered other hardships like...

Yoku’s Island Express is part of a relatively small group of games that try to take video game pinball mechanics and merge them with other genres like RPG or action-adventure. Yoku’s Island Express is a pinball Metroidvania, where you play a beetle named Yoku who arrives on an island to take over as postmaster. The old postmaster tells you that bad stuff is going on and he’s glad to get out and...

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is bad. And I don't just mean the title. I didn’t expect the game to be good, since it looked like a budget release and has a Metacritic in the 50s, but I thought it might be a decently fun little B-game, kind of like The Order: 1886 with much lower production values. I had fun with that game and thought I might enjoy this one too. It’s a stealth/action gam...

Outriders is what you'd write if you spent 3 weeks holed up in a hotel room with the movie Avatar on repeat on the flatscreen and smoking a metric ton of meth. I finished Outriders today. I kind of wish I hadn't. Setting aside the game part (which was very repetitive and had a lot of issues, including technical problems with both servers and crashes to the console "desktop") the story was maybe...

Outriders is a game whose demo did not impress me that much, but that I decided to play because it came out on Gamepass and there's not much releasing right now, especially not for free*. It's an okay diversion kind of game, not the kind that's worth full price but, hey, I've played much worse . Since I was switching platforms from PlayStation to Xbox I had to start the game over from the begin...

Ice Age: Scrat’s Nutty Adventure is a game that feels like it shouldn’t exist. A 2019 release on all relevant platforms it legitimately feels like a low budget remake of a terrible PS1 game. The kind of licensed garbage that came out late in the console’s life and would get a 4 out of 10 from IGN or Gamespot. It looks like a modern, albeit low budget, game, and it controls reasonably well, on p...

Balan Wonderworld is a bad game. I know that not just because of the Bombcast, and every review I've seen on the game, but because I played the whole demo and it was not impressive. This was one of my most anticipated releases of the year and it turned out to be a kusoge. Yet none of this, including my own negative experience with the game, has stopped me from wanting to play it. Part of this i...

After Memories of Celceta sent me spiraling down an Ys hole, I knew I’d hit the bottom eventually. For me that meant playing through Ys Book I and II, a pair of games that really function as a unit, with the first one being originally released in 1987, which is only a year after The Legend of Zelda and marks it as part of the very first wave of action RPGs, with all the clunkiness and obscurity...

What is console gaming in 2021? Last weekend I played through Ys Origin on my Xbox Series X. This is a 2018 Xbox One port of a Japanese 2006 PC game that received an English translation in 2012 and became backwards compatible with the Series X along with the rest of the Xbox One library. This history help explains the game’s unusual look, which resembles a high definition version of those PlayS...

I got an Xbox Series X at launch, and it arrived broken. The hardware turned on and could connect to the Internet to download and play games and perform the other basic functions, but something was wrong with the power settings. The console wouldn’t go to sleep, instead only shutting all the way down, couldn’t be turned on with a controller, only by pressing the button on the front of the machi...

Microsoft had an event today for ID@Xbox . They showed off a bunch of games, some good looking and some not so good looking, some new and some previously announced, and at the end of it they provided a long list of the games that would be launching day 1 on Game Pass. Earlier in the month Microsoft closed their acquisition of Bethesda and held a press briefing about it. No new games were announ...

At the beginning of the month I set myself a simple goal. Play PSVR for at least a little bit every day and blog about it. I got off to a good start and I not only found myself able to carve out the time to play the games but I was enjoying PSVR a lot more than I thought I would. I loved Moss , had a blast with a hotel smashing game , and even enjoyed a simple puzzle game partially because it w...

I was excited when I saw that Ys: Memories of Celceta was getting a port from Vita to the PS4. I played Ys VIII last year and absolutely loved it, so I’ve been jonesing for another game in the series ever since then. I’ve been aware of Ys as long as it has existed but I never played any of them before VIII, mostly because the early games’ bump combat concept did not seem appealing. That bump co...

I recently had a multi-day Internet outage due to...I'm not sure. During that time I had a couple windows where I did have Internet but it was out for the vast majority of the time and while the company eventually sent a technician nobody could really explain what the problem was. It seems to be working now. Obviously in 2021 during the pandemic that is extremely frustrating (though nowhere nea...

This series: Part 1 . Part 2 . Part 3 . Part 4 . Along Together is the game that made me stop and ask “wait, do I actually like PSVR as a platform?” I bought one at launch, messed around with it a bit, and mostly wrote it off, but other than Dexed and to some extent Tetris Effect, every game I’ve played on it this month has been…fun? I suspect that what may have happened was that PSVR launched...

This series: Part 1 . Part 2 . Part 3 . I came into Hotel R’n’R without a lot of expectations. I actually bought it specifically for this blog project, since it was $12 on sale and seemed like it would offer up some dumb fun. It also reviewed reasonably well. What I found was a much more polished and complete game than I expected. After the boredom of Dexed I put this on expecting to play a cou...

This series: Part 1 . Part 2 . On day 6 of Ma[PSV]Rch I encountered my scariest enemy yet. Screen smudging. Putting the PSVR on isn’t hard but it’s very easy to rub the lenses against your forehead or cheeks or whatever while adjusting it. Skin oil can create unpleasant smudges that make everything look cloudy. I cleaned it with a microfiber cloth and that helped but apparently a lens pen is th...

Ma[PSV]Rch Part 1 Ma[PSV]Rch is already a success. I chose Moss for my second game because it is one of the highest rated PSVR games and a game that I got excited about as soon as it was announced. I bought it soon after release and I don’t really know why I never got around to playing it. I could blame it on the inconveniences of the VR headset, but it’s far from the first game I’ve bought for...

Switch's 4th birthday! Woo! Party time. It's old enough to legally be licensed to drive a shoe car! The Nintendo Switch is 4 years old. I got mine on day 1 so that means I’ve had it for four years, or over 10% of my life. It definitely doesn’t feel new to me, but it doesn’t feel like it’s been with me that long. Time flies. For me the Switch has been both a good console and something of a disap...

If you clicked on this blog you may have some questions. What the heckin’ heck is Ma[PSVR]ch? After finding out that Sony was making a new PSVR headset I instantly wanted one, but I also remembered that I barely played with the headset I bought over 4 years ago (wait is that possible…oh no. 4 years?!?!?) I came up with the idea of playing PSVR every day in March and blogging about it to see how...

The Dualsense controller is arguably the most exciting aspect of the new 9th generation console, with its only real competition being the SSDs they both have. I really like the controller, with the exception of having a microphone in it which makes me uncomfortable. I think it looks great, the improved rumble and trigger tension both have potential to them (only realized so far in Astrobot) and...

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a game whose execution can’t quite match the scope of its ambition. It’s an indie title that seeks to take the game style of the Wonder Boy series and update it with modern graphics and gameplay conveniences to create a Metroidvania type adventure with HD visuals that reference those games, and a sound track crafted by some of the best composers from Japan’...

Most of the comments in my blog about Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus were from people who wanted to talk about Sly 2. I'm playing through that game and will have thoughts when I finish, but one thing that has really stood out to me is the sound. The game has fantastic music, but it also has really impressive use of surround sound. I bought a surround sound set up a little over a year ago...

\This is not a blog about buyer’s remorse or any issues with the PS5. The PS5 seems like a good machine and I’m sure I’ll spend many happy and some frustrating hours with it in the future. This is about how console generations no longer feel as distinct as they once did. I planned to get both the new consoles as soon as they were announced. I set aside money for them, followed all the news onli...

Sly Cooper was probably the least popular of Sony’s trio of furry 3D Platformer mascots from the PS2 era. He was also the only one whose games I never played at the time, though I knew about him and have seen video and maybe played a demo over the years. While Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon were Sony’s mascot platformers from the PS1 era, Sony did not own the rights to either character an...

I understand why fans didn’t love Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus when it came out in 2013. This was the first mainline Ratchet & Clank game in 4 long years after 2 disappointing spinoffs. It’s short, disconnected from most of the series, and lacking in some key Ratchet & Clank signatures; chiefly exploration and variety. The length is somewhat ameliorated by the $30 price tag (and it also came...

It isn’t fair for me to pass judgment on Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault because it was clearly intended as another attempt to make Ratchet & Clank multiplayer a thing. I only played the single player and the multiplayer community is long dead (I didn’t even check if the servers were up), though there is local multi if that’s your thing. Reviewing Full Frontal Assault based on its single...

I kind of get what they were going for with Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. One of the strengths of the Ratchet & Clank games is the characters and their relationships and another is the arsenal, so creating a multiplayer focused shooter with cool and interesting weapons just makes sense. They did something similar at the end of the PS2 era with Ratchet Deadlocked, which managed to tweak the classi...

Criticizing old games is hard. Many of the frustrations and issues they have were much less noticeable in the time they were made, and it’s easy to lose track of how much game design and technology have advanced in the last decade when you’re looking at a game like Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time, which still has nice graphics and plays more or less like a modern game most of the time....

Bowser’s Fury is the new add on for the Switch re-release of Super Mario 3D World. The question of what it is from a mechanical standpoint isn’t very complicated. It’s a remix of Super Mario 3D World assets (with some new stuff added, and controls and a camera that are much closer to Mario Odyssey’s) into a vast open world lake level, where Mario searches out “cat shines” in order to fight Bows...

Astro’s Playroom is a unique type of game I thought we’d never see again. No, not a 3D platformer, which are experiencing a mini-resurgence over the last few years, but rather a console pack in provided free at launch. It is also a heck of a good game and topped the personal game of the year lists of both Jeff Gerstmann and Brad Shoemaker, two duders who, rumor has it, have played a fair number...

I wouldn't call myself a 3D platformer fanatic, but as an older gamer it's a genre I've enjoyed for 25 years, and it's a type of game that I can actually relax with, since most of them are pretty chill. Balan Wonderworld is a project I've been excited about ever since it was revealed, since it's a 3D platformer from a major publisher with marquee talent behind it, and I was immediately drawn in...

I started playing Bugsnax half out of curiosity and half out of spite. There’d been a fair amount of buzz around the game, including some discussion on the Bombcast, but I wasn’t sure quite what it was and I wanted to see for myself. I also was, and remain, annoyed at Sony for only releasing the PS5 version on PlayStation Plus but I nabbed it there anyway and once I got my PS5 and finished Astr...

I really wanted a PS5 and was super disappointed when I missed the pre-order window because I am on the East Coast and was asleep. I'd set aside money for it from my tax refund earlier in the year and game consoles are one of the few things that I'm willing to spend a little irresponsibly on because I use them quite a bit at least weekly if not daily. I understand some people like to wait and t...

Maneater has a killer premise. Pitched as a ShaRkPG, you play a baby shark ( doo doo doo doo doo doo ) cut out of her mother’s stomach by a vicious reality tv shark hunter named Scaly Pete, and marked as the trophy for a future episode. During the course of the game you hunt prey, both finned and two-legged, and build up your shark into a giant powerhouse of the deep to exact revenge on Scaly P...

New Years Resolutions are lame and New Years Resolutions about video games are even lamer, but I can't sleep right now and I've been thinking a fair amount about gaming and what I want out of it in the new year. These resolutions are mostly for me to check in on at the end of next year to see whether I stuck to them or deviated and figure out why (did I get undisciplined or did I have good reas...

The first Watch Dogs game is one of my least favorite games I’ve ever finished. I hated the protagonist, the story, the setting, and thought the gameplay was barely adequate. I only saw it through to the credits out of some sort of twisted combination of spite and the hope that something cool would happen. There were a couple decent sequences, including a fun battle in a junkyard, and I thought...

Homefront is a famously mediocre Call of Duty Clone from 2011. I know this. I’ve known it since the game was released and the buzz was almost entirely negative. I knew this in late 2011 when I apparently ordered the game off Amazon for $20, which seems like an outrageous amount to have spent. I knew this when I popped the disc last night and started playing through the game. Now, having finishe...

It is clear from playing Binary Domain that it is a game of from early 2012. It’s a linear third person shooter heavily influenced by Gears of War and Uncharted, with a pinch of Vanquish for good measure. Playing it is a bit more awkward than any of those games, with cover-based shooting that never really feels great and clunky enemy movement and patterns. The environments are pretty small and...

Need For Speed The Run got mediocre reviews at the time of its release, which is why I never played it at the time. I picked it up for $10 in a digital sale in 2015, and just shoved it into my backlog, but remained curious about the game’s concept of playing through a car chase movie like Cannonball run. Loading it up in 2020 for the first time I wasn’t expecting to love it but thought it might...

This weekend I stripped all the data off the hard drive of my original Xbox 360 and put the machine in my closet for good. This wasn’t a launch 360, but it was the first one I owned; an elite I bought in early 2008 when there were finally enough good games to convince me to scrape together the money. It had an RROD not long after I purchased it, but Microsoft fixed (or maybe replaced) it for fr...

Watch_Dogs is one of my least favorite games I ever finished. I hated almost everything about that game, from Aiden Pierce and his terrible attitude to the lame story to the stiff combat and bland driving to the boring open world. There were a few minor highlights. I thought the Ubisoft tower climbs were moderately entertaining, liked the voyeuristic aspect of profiling people with your phone,...

I am on record as buying an Xbox Series X despite not being very hyped for it. I spent most of the day with one eye on my FedEx tracking information to see as soon as it would get dropped off, but the guy brought it up to my apartment door and rang the bell after he dropped it off, which was nice of him. The packaging was smaller than I expected, and the console is actually pretty compact. I am...

It's new console day today (and Thursday) for those lucky enough to snag one, and that means some discussion about launch libraries. Leaving aside comparisons between the two (for the record I think PS5 wins easily, even though I did not manage to get one) one thing that's interesting about them is how little filler/shovelware there seems to be. Launch exclusive games generally fall into one, o...

Xenoblade Chronicles was always a game that I meant to play but never got around to. It came out towards the end of the Wii’s period of dominance, and was only sold at Gamestop in the US. The price never dropped much below full retail, and I moved on to the new generation before I ever got around to picking it up. When Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition was announced I resolved to actually...

Genshin Impact is not my first gacha game. Like many people I've tried out previous gacha titles on my smartphone and while none of them sunk their hooks deep into me I enjoyed a couple enough to throw a few bucks at for a coin doubler or battlepass or whatever. Most of those games were pretty similar to one another, and in fact a few of them even used the same assets despite being from purport...

The Paper Mario games have been suffering from an identity crisis for a while. The first two games were stripped back traditional JRPGs, lacking the complexity of staples of the genre, but still possessed of a fair amount of tactical depth and deep, if whimsical, stories and characters. The third game kept in the more complex plot but changed to more of a platformer gameplay style. Then the las...

Mad Max is not a good game. It’s not an awful game and it’s far from the worst I’ve ever played, but it’s not good. It’s repetitious, grindy, technically flawed, and at times boring, with a bad and uninteresting story and only two real characters of note. It’s the kind of open world game where there are minefields out in the world to clear, but the only way to clear them is to go to one of the...

I consider video games to by my major hobby. It's definitely where I spend the majority of my entertainment money, especially when you consider AV equipment (like a nice TV and speakers) that I use for other stuff too but wouldn't own if I weren't into gaming. I set aside money from my tax refund for the new consoles and I intended to buy both but I only got an Xbox Series X pre-order in. That...

By most accounts Disintegration is not a horrible game. It's not a great one, sitting at around a 60 on Metacritic, but it's not some epic failure that nobody should play. I've enjoyed 60 Metacritic games, and plenty of them have developed a playerbase and had a reasonable amount of success. It's also a game with significant pedigree, including a large number of ex-Bungie employees, and one tha...

I've been playing a lot of PS3 lately, specifically making my way through the Ratchet & Clank series but not just that, and I think the games hold up extremely well. I don't mind playing games in 720p and while modern games have more refined controls and other conveniences (like better checkpointing) they really don't feel that different from 7th gen games. I compare something like Ratchet & Cl...

Arkham Origins is far from a flawless game. Putting technical issues aside for a moment (though we’ll get back to them shortly) it is a lesser game than Asylum and City in almost every way. Its open world lacks Asylum’s tight design and Metroidvania feel while also lacking City’s visually distinctive and memorable locations. Its story is simple and straightforward, relying on tricks we’ve alrea...

The original Final Fantasy VII was a milestone game for me. It was the biggest game in the world when it was released in 1997, setting my school ablaze with rumors of its production values and 4 disc length and it was hyped on the back of its breathtaking cinematics, which promised a whole new level of fidelity in gaming. It was the reason I got a PlayStation despite being a primarily PC gamer...

Tonight I finished the main game of Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, though I haven't played the new epilogue yet, and while I want to write up full thoughts at some point, for now I just want to complain about the end of the game, or really the back third. I think that XBC falls into the incredibly common JRPG trap of starting out telling a personal story about relatable characters and...

Assassin's Creed Revelations looks very different from the prior games. More colorful and lively. Assassin’s Creed Revelations isn’t a bad game. In some ways it is the best of the first four mainline console entries in the series, with impressive graphics, the best controls of the first two games, and a refinement of all the systems those games have introduced along with some new mechanics (chi...

I went into Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood thinking it was the last good one before IV, a final really solid game in a franchise that quickly nosedived after. I remember it getting a lot of attention during 2010 game of the year proceedings, a five star review from one Ryan Davis (R.I.P. big fella), and a generally positive reputation among gamers to this day. While in the end I, on balance, enjo...

The first Terminator movie is a lean little sci-fi action thriller about a killer robot. It has some cool special effects but it’s really a character driven film about two people on the run from an unstoppable enemy. The second Terminator film is a better movie in many ways, but is also more of just a big action extravaganza driven by explosions and catch phrases and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mov...

Assassin's Creed is best when you're climbing and exploring. Here we can see a direct route to the perch on the upper right, but there are some areas where you need to take a more circuitous path. I first played Assassin’s Creed in 2008, about six months after its release. I got about a third of the way through the game before abandoning it for Grand Theft Auto IV, a game I absolutely adored an...

The puzzle platformer seems like the ‘default’ genre for a lot of indie developers looking to make a project on a tight budget with a small staff. It makes sense, since they can be made with limited numbers of assets and rely more on clever design than complex mechanics that need to be tested over and over and very finely tuned. It means, however, that during the current bloom of indie teams we...

Rise & Shine is an incredibly short game, especially considering the $15 price. I got it for $9, mostly Microsoft Rewards money, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it at that price because it really is 90 minutes long. However, if you can find it for $5 or so what you get is a puzzle platformer with some pretty decent action elements and really nice presentation. It’s far from the best game I’ve ev...

I’ve been playing video games for a long time and I’m pretty comfortable playing games from almost any era. While modern games tend to be my favorites (I think Breath of the Wild and God of War 2018 are my two favorite games of all time, in that order) I have no problem going back to older stuff. In the last couple years I’ve played through the entire God of War series, took a detour to play th...

The side scrolling levels look...okay but nothing special, especially for a late 8th generation game. Artistically the game isn't even as good looking as Colors on the Wii. Sonic Forces doesn’t just feel like a bad game, it feels like a game that never had a chance to be good. It’s a disjointed mess in every way, from the nonsensical choppy plot to the short, simple, levels with no sense of pla...

Yooka-Laylee was pitched as a spiritual successor to the N64 Banjo-Kazooie games , the first of which is widely considered one of the greatest games of all time and almost indisputably one of the best games on the N64, a system that was pitched more at children than the rival Playstation and thus has a lot more nostalgia attached to it even though it sold many fewer units. Colorful graphics? Ch...

I started playing Ghost of Sparta last Sunday, the same day I finished God of War II. This proximity initially worked against Ghost of Sparta because it is so obviously scaled down in comparison to its main console cousin. Even though I played both games on the PS3, Ghost of Sparta’s character models and environments are chunkier and less ornate than those from its big black monolith-based pred...

I started playing Ghost of Sparta last Sunday, the same day I finished God of War II. This proximity initially worked against Ghost of Sparta because it is so obviously scaled down in comparison to its main console cousin. Even though I played both games on the PS3, Ghost of Sparta’s character models and environments are chunkier and less ornate than those from its big black monolith-based pred...

I’ve been slowly chipping away at the God of War series since the first game was released in 2005. Back then I played through most of God of War 1 before getting frustrated and stopping. I picked it back up for PS3 and in summer 2011 I completed that game and liked it reasonably well. I did not, however feel an urge to start God of War II immediately, because that was in the thick the heady las...

Hob made a terrible first impression on me. The game starts with a robot guy freeing your little character from a chamber. You walk out into a verdant 3-D world presented from a mostly isometric perspective and are supposed to follow the robot out into the starting area, which is not strictly linear. I tried running around a bit to see if there was anything else to do, and found a plant that I...

I want to start by saying that I like the New Super Mario Bros. series. I've only played New Super Mario Bros. 2 and now New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe , but I enjoyed 2 and I've played a couple worlds of U and had fun with that as well. So I have nothing against this series, and when they make the next game I'll probably buy that too. But I want that game to be called New Super Mario Bros. U D...

Toby: the Secret Mine is a game created with a very clear idea of what it wants to be. What it wants to be is Limbo. It isn’t. But in its failure to reach that height it shows what made Limbo so very special. I bought Limbo for 360 when it first came out but never played it. I got a free upgrade when it was ported to Xbox One in 2014, and then played it in July 2016 in preparation for Inside ,...

I don't mean it's the rarest or least highly regarded, but rather the most difficult to explain. Xevious 3D/G+ is a PlayStation 1 remake of an arcade classic. I picked it up off PSN about 3 years ago and I have played it every few months since then. What makes it weird is that while I had a PlayStation in the 90s I never had, or even knew about, this game. I also have no specific nostalgia for...

Nintendo Switch in 2017 was one of my favorite console years ever. Breath of the Wild is possibly my favorite game of all time, and Mario Odyssey was a tremendous achievement, the crowning jewel in gaming's most storied franchise. I had a great time with Fast RMX , played a host of great Neo Geo ports, and loved the hell out of both Kingdom Battle and Mario Kart 8 . There were some misses in th...

Last week Nintendo finally rolled out the Nintendo Switch Online feature. I immediately bought a year subscription and downloaded the NES games. I've been waiting since Nintendo Swtch was released to be able to play some classic games on this handheld/console hybrid, which is the perfect platform for them. After I paid for my subscription I opened up the app and took a few old favorites for a s...

Nintendo Switch has been a bit of an odd console for me in its first 6 months of release. Because of its hybrid nature it's less powerful than its larger, older, competition, meaning that it never had the new console graphics 'wow' factor that most new systems have during their honeymoon period. On the other hand it launched with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , which is one of my favorite...

The guy in Blue is the Magician Lord. Magician Lord and Magic Sword were, for a long time, linked in my mind as similar games I remember liking from my youth. They are both Japanese games from 1990, one on the Neo Geo the other on Capcom’s CPS-1. They are both medieval fantasy themed action platformers with a character who fired projectiles and a ton of creatively designed enemies who swarmed a...

Uncharted 4 felt like an event. Here was Nathan Drake, star of arguably the biggest franchise from the last generation of consoles, making his leap to the PS4. After a mostly lackluster exclusive lineup (Bloodborne obviously excepted) Sony was bringing out the big gun. And it was going to be Drake’s biggest adventure yet. His brother was brought in to push and challenge him the way none of the...

Enter the Gungeon is planning a new update next month . This is the second major update to the game, and it seems explicitly intended to make the game more accessible. I think this is a very good thing and hope other games in the genre take note. Quote: Our primary focus was to make the Gungeon a more generous place, while retaining options, for players who really engage with the difficulty of...

Agents of Mayhem is the kind of game that makes you question whether you’re wasting your life playing video games. That is a harsh indictment, and I stand by it, but ultimately Agents of Mayhem isn’t a terrible game. It’s a game with good ideas, good intentions, and insufficient resources to make those ideas work well. What you end up with is a game that was just fun enough to keep me playing b...

Quantum break is a mess. Its core concept, “what if we interspersed a television show in between acts of a video game?” is intriguing, but executed in a very strange way. When I first heard this idea I assumed that the video game would have limited narrative within it, and the story would be located in the TV show episodes. This seemed potentially smart. Video games are not always great at tell...

I want to start by saying that I don’t dislike Aloy as a character. I think she’s inconsistently written and can be a little annoying at times (as many video game characters can) and that the voice acting was…only adequate…but I mostly found her likable, smart and pleasant enough. She was fine. My issue is that the game sets her up to be something truly special. A fascinating weirdo the likes o...

Full disclosure: I have played a few hours of Yonder but not completed the main quest. I think I’ve seen what I’m going to, though, and most of what the game has to offer. You start in this little cave. The lighting system is nice. Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles starts well. Your dude (or dudette) is on a ship, gets a little bit of story about some ancient curse on the island he's headed...

I didn’t like Gone Home . At the time I thought that was because I played it too long after its release and after it had been spoiled for me. Some games just have their moment, and if you don’t catch them then you can’t go back. There were other things I didn’t like about it too. I didn’t like the fact that your character was following another character’s story, instead of learning her own. I d...

I don't like ragging on Nintendo, especially in a year when they launched one of my favorite games of all time, but it is mind boggling how their terrible chat app solution has been met with, if not a shrug, at least an understated eye roll and an "oh Nintendo" sigh. Having to use your smartphone to manage your chat is much worse than what Microsoft was doing in 2002 with Xbox Live (that's righ...

I haven't been feeling well this weekend so I've been marathoning Horizon: Zero Dawn. I already played the best that Playstation 4 has to offer , and the second best game on the platform , so I figured I'd check out this AARPG that the kids are crazy for these days. You guys, this game is pretty good. This is a good game. It took me awhile to fully get into it, but I'm there. Anyway, I decide I...

The Order 1886, a game whose best attribute is its beautiful graphics, starts with a first-person sequence where your character’s head is being held under murky water as he thrashes about and muffled voices murmur in the background. After what feels like an eternity, the character’s head is pulled from the water and some English guys yell at him. It becomes apparent that they are hostile. You’r...

Knack feels like a game made by some kind of emergent AI who has researched videogames on Wikipedia and Youtube but has never actually played one. All the components of a game are there, but they are put together in such an incomprehensible way that I played through the whole thing with my brow furrowed in confusion, occasionally screaming “WHAT?” at the screen. Knack rejects all foundations of...

Sengoku is not a great game. It's a 1991 beat 'em up with a transformation gimmick (you can transform into a dog, who I can't figure out a use for, a ninja who flippin' flips everywhere whenever he moves, and an ornate Samurai dude.) As a game it's...ok...kind of stiff and clunky but not unfun. What it does have going for it is that it is very very crazy. Deformed Ninja Turtle Sewer Dance Party...

The impetus for my finally playing Shadow of Mordor was a bunch of people naming it in a forum thread on games they just couldn’t get into . This was an inauspicious start, but I’d always intended to play SoM (I bought it at launch from Dell only to have the shipment delayed months) and I was very much in the mood for an open world game to just run around and cause havoc in. Having finished the...

Why play through God of War: Chains of Olympus in 2017, when I have a big backlog of highly praised current generation games and not nearly enough time to play them? I’m not 100% sure. But last night the urge to finally get to the PS3 port of this 2008 PSP title struck me, and here I sit about 24 hours later, having rolled credits on the second of Kratos’ adventures I have played through. It’s...

I've been playing LocoRoco Remastered off and on for the last few weeks, and it's great for what it is. It's charming, cheerful, gorgeous to look at and has the catchiest soundtrack this side of Katamari Damacy . It's a great game to turn on and bounce through a few levels as a default when I don't know what I want to play. I've even had a couple "Wake and Play" sessions where I wake up, immedi...

I am Setsuna markets itself as a throwback but also feels like a cheaply made game; a (literally) pale simulacrum of the older games it is trying to invoke. This sense of cheapness is dispersed through every aspect of the game, with the exception of the combat system, which is complex and polished enough to feel legitimately “old-school” instead of “old-school, but shoddier.” That doesn’t mean...

When the Switch was announced many of us had a dream of a united Nintendo platform where we could play every game the company put out on a single device, rather than having to have a handheld and a console if you want the full experience. In addition, those of us who are not much for portable gaming wouldn't have to deal with the cramped controls and ugly screens of the 3DS, instead being able...

This weekend was supposed to be all about Zelda . I blocked off a good chunk of time to finally finish that game, after starting it on March 4 th , and figured I would need at least 15-20 hours since I still had the whole Rito divine beast quest to complete and I wanted to gear up before the final battle. On Saturday I booted the game up early, went through the divine beast much faster than exp...

I remember when I first heard the legend of the Neo Geo console. I was on a school outing to a nearby park, walking and talking about video games with another kid from my class, the kind of kid who you tolerate because he’s someone to talk to but don’t actually like. I was telling him about my hopes to get a Sega Genesis but how my dad didn’t want to spring for one because we already had an NES...

I was sick this weekend, with a cough, scratchy throat, and fuzzy head. I don't really enjoy 'big' 3D games when I'm feeling like that, but I felt like playing something, so I wiped the dust off my little-used 3DS and downloaded BOXBOY! for $5. It's the first game in one of those series that, with each release, has gotten a small amount of buzz from critics I trust, and a simple puzzle platform...

I was a Switch skeptic prior to its launch, though not enough of one to drop my pre-order, and I remain somewhat unconvinced that Nintendo has enough support planned for this thing to make it a success. That being said, my first two weeks as a Switch owner have been delightful. I can't recall the last time I had this much fun with a new system right out of the box, and it's been pretty much all...

I spent this Sunday lost in the world of Hyrule in the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I loved it. Everything from the excellent climbing system (which creates a real feeling of tension when trying to reach something right at the edge of your stamina range) to the combat (fun and responsive) to the cooking (what a neat little tune!) to, most importantly, the world itself, which is probably...

My Switch arrived today, March 4th, a victim of the great Amazon Switch delay, which was made much more frustrating by the fact that some units were made available on Friday through Prime Now. Before embarking on the absolutely massive quest that I know Zelda will be I decided to spend a little time getting used to the system by messing around with one of the other launch titles, and given that...

I did not grow up in a small town but my parents had a house just outside of one that we’d go to on the weekends. In many ways Night in the Woods captures the rhythms of that kind of American community, where people actually do know their neighbors’ names and the things that seem truly important are the local happenings around your neighborhood, rather than whatever’s going on in some city hund...

It's been formally announced that the Nintendo Switch is going to launch without Virtual Console support. This is disappointing news, but hardly shocking, given everything else Nintendo has done these last 10 years. However it has also led to lots of people in forums and comments sections scoffing at the Virtual Console altogether and saying things like "it doesn't matter" and "who cares?" Well...

The original Titanfall is one of the few online only games I have ever fallen in love with. Despite never being particularly good at it I played enough to regen 3 times and checked in on the game regularly after, like when it released new maps or the (pretty good) PVE mode that came a few months after the main game. I more than got my money’s worth from that game and it was the first 8th genera...

Gravity Rush Remastered has a lot of obvious problems. The controls can be a little sluggish for the complicated aerial acrobatics the game demands, the camera often shows you walls or floors instead of the enemies that are bombarding you, and some of those enemies will often be stuck in the geometry, sometimes to the point where all their weak points are hidden by a wall and they are effective...

I can’t stop thinking about the Nintendo Switch. It’s now less than a month until it’s release and while I have a pre-order placed I am growing less and less excited for the thing as the date draws near. Zelda looks cool, but I have known about Zelda for years, and Mario also looks very exciting, but is a long way off. Other than that...there’s Snipperclips which seems like a neat little game,...

I have been anticipating the Nintendo Switch since the first rumors of NX were announced. I didn't buy a Wii U when it launched because I couldn't afford it at the time, and I never got around to getting one because there was never a good deal at a time when my budget would allow a purchase. But I miss Nintendo games on the big-screen (I have a 3DS), and I found the idea of a unified Nintendo p...

I picked up a PSVR today like a lot of people (well, Amazon dropped it off) and after messing around with Superhypercube for a little bit I decided to give Harmonix Music VR a chance, since I just wanted to enjoy looking at the pretty scenery for awhile. The beach mode was...just ok...with some nice visuals but nothing particularly mind blowing. Then I tried easel mode and...boom. Mind blown. U...

Forza Horizon 3 is out and as far as I'm concerned it's spectacular. It has great graphics, tightly honed gameplay, and probably the best open world driving map of all time, but while I really like that stuff it's not why I love the game. I love Horizon 3, and in fact that whole Horizon series, because it's the only non-kiddie game I can think of that is focused around the singular mission of s...

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONFESSION IS SO DANK IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE WITH A SERIOUS MEDICAL CONDITION OR A WEAK STOMACH. IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, MAY BECOME PREGNANT, OR IF YOUR MOTHER WAS AT ONE TIME PREGNANT WITH YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT READ THIS CONFESSION. THIS CONFESSION IS SO DANK IT HAS BEEN KNOWN TO CAUSE MEDICAL PROBLEMS, INCLUDING DRY MOUTH, TOE JAM, TENNIS ELBOW, WATER ON THE KNEE, S...

It's a Saturday in August 2016, which means, for me, it's the perfect time to mess around with PS1 racing games, a group of games I find more fascinating than good, but enjoy playing just to look at how games used to be and explore the weird oddities that don't really exist in today's more polished video games. Today I messed around with two titles: Hi-Octane: The Track Fights Back and Toy Stor...

I remember when Mr. Driller came out in the U.S. in 2000. I had already moved on to the Dreamcast by then but for some reason I picked it up for the Playstation (possibly it was cheaper, or I just preferred the Playstation D-pad) and I played the heck out of that game. I loved everything about it from the cheery graphics to the upbeat soundtrack to the fact that it had a weird story tie in to D...

Like a lot of video game players I started when I was young (back in the NES era.) Back then memory restrictions meant that most games were pretty short, but limits on lives and continues, and the sheer punishing nature of early game design, meant that they mostly took a very long time to finish. If you got a new game you knew it would be weeks or months until you saw the end, if you ever did....

Abzu, which I played on the PS4, is easily the most beautiful game I've ever played. The visuals are, frankly, perfect. They're stylized, with a sort of art deco look to the fish, so they don't suffer from the uncanny valley, and, from what I could tell there were no issues with frame rate or slowdown no matter how many fish are on screen at once (And at times there are thousands) creating a sm...

I played Firewatch in June and really liked it, so today I decided to go back and check out Gone Home, a game that some have compared it to, which was recently made free on Playstation Plus. I didn't really like it. I didn't have the vitriolic hate reaction that a lot of people seem to have, or think that it was "not a game" but I found it pretty boring and was not emotionally affected by anyth...

I've had my eye on Firewatch for awhile, mostly because of how often it came up on the Bombcast prior to release (What is Firewatch? It's a walking/conversation simulator. Not a ton of mystery to it.) but also because of its striking art style. When it finally released a couple months ago I bought it right away, but I didn't play it because I was so busy and stressed at the time I knew I couldn...

I always thought the Bit.Trip series seemed interesting, and always intended to give it a shot. I even bought Bit.Trip Runner for the Wii when it came out, but I never really got deep into it, probably both because it was difficult and because by 2010 I was rarely turning my Wii on for any reason. When the Bit.Trip came out for Ps4 and Vita at the end of last year I bought it immediately for $1...

While I like achievements and trophies I have never been much of a completionist. I don't have a ton of time to play the games I want to, and while I very much enjoy playing through most games the first time, the idea of going back to play through again for points just doesn't really appeal. Neither does spoiling parts of the game to avoid missing trophies or achievements. While I've completed...

First of all, this is not going to be some "console wars" type silliness about brand loyalty to faceless corporations that don't care about any of us. I want to say that up front. This is more of a 'rumination' about my over two years of owning this console. I have owned every Sony console (except the PSP) and bought the PS4 at launch, hooking it up immediately and spending the next day in anti...

Today, while checking out the sales on PSN, I saw that two old PS1 "classics," Boxing and Kickboxing were on sale for a buck 50 each. Since they were so incredibly cheap I decided to check them out and...what the heck? I expected two bland sports simulators from the dawn of the PS1, but I got something much weirder. The games are extremely similar to each other. They are basically 2Dish fighter...

A lot of people are upset by Konami's recent decision to abandon big game development and focus on mobile and pachinko. i am too, but beyond being upset, I'm also kind of confused. While the big video game market is difficult, it can also be extremely profitable for the big players, and it's an expanding market that will continue to grow for the forseeable future. Konami also has a lot of intel...

Sony is holding a big digital sale to commemorate the launch of the PS1, and I picked up Jet Moto 2 because it was $1.60 and there's almost no game I won't mess around with for under $2. I never owned a Jet Moto game during the lifespan of the PS1, but I played demos of the various games in the series when they came out. My memory of Jet Moto was as a series that encapsulated the worst parts of...

Growing up my home, like many, was a one console home. My parents had mixed feelings on video games, but they let my grandfather get me a NES and later a SNES because I desperately wanted them. There was never any thought that I might also get a Master System or Genesis, the systems some of my friends had, and if I wanted to play those I would have to go to someone else's house. This, in turn,...

I am not great at video games. I freely admit this. I generally play on normal and while I can finish most modern games I do my share of dying and being frustrated along the way. Recently I decided to play Jamestown+ (on PS4) because I haven’t played a Shmup in years and I really liked the hand-drawn look and insane story. It started well enough. I found the ‘normal’ difficulty reasonably chall...

Now I don't mean graphically or in presentation. I actually like the way the game looks (outside of characters faces) and the music. I also don't mean this in a negative way. I played the game to completion on normal and I liked it. I'd give it a 7 out of 10. What I mean is in terms of complexity of mechanics and amount of content. Massive Chalice is a pretty simple game at its heart (not to sa...

I didn't like the ending of The Last of Us. There are tons of threads rehashing this ad infinitum and I don't want to get into the specifics of the story choices, but what I felt most of all was that it showed one of the principal reasons that so many game stories are bad, which is the limitations of gameplay. Once Marlene tells Joel that they're going to kill Ellie to operate on her there are...

Mortal Kombat X came out a month or so ago and by most accounts, including mine, it's a top-notch game. It is also packed with content, with 24 characters (in the base game) a fun story mode, Lots of tower challenges, a krypt minigame, and heaps of fight modifiers for the very fun "test your luck" mode. Old-school gamers will remember the days when fighting games were sold with like 8-12 charac...

TL;DR: I think there's a very small gap between 7th and 8th gens on console and this will lead to a shortened generation followed by VR-focused consoles in a few years. Like a lot of gamers I've been pretty unimpressed with the offerings of the 8th gen consoles. We're over 18 months into the cycle and it feels like all I got for my money was an incremental improvement over the last gen in graph...

I've been looking into game collecting recently, specifically going back to fill in some holes from older generations (I never even had a Saturn) and it got me thinking about this generation and what collectors are going to look for from it in 15 years. With the Wii U, there's going to be plenty. Almost all the important games on the platform have physical releases, they are almost all exclusiv...

A little more than a year ago I told my friend to get an Xbox One, and he did. ( http://tinyurl.com/l9uf5sa ) A year later he is glad he did, but my real take away was that for the casual gamer there's just not a huge difference between the Xbox One and PS4 like there is for people who are more hardcore. The vast majority of the time he uses the Xbox as a media machine. My friend uses his Xbox...

If the pile o' shame is games you bought but never played what do you call games that you played half of and then walked away from for no good reason? The pile of super shame. With some actual time to game this week I resolved to mount an assault on mine. Here's how it has gone so far. Stick it to the Man PS4 This was a PS+ game I played and enjoyed earlier this year, but then I got busy and wh...

With the release of Infamous Second Son a lot of people were saying that Infamous 2 was a disappointing and skippable game, despite good reviews upon release. Having liked the first one and since I had a digital copy through PSN I decided to finally try it out myself. I'm glad I did; it was very good, but I also understand why it left a bad taste in people's mouths. Infamous 2 has great graphic...

A couple weeks back I posted a blog on Killzone 1 and its antiquated ways . Since then I have been picking away at the game and have some more thoughts. Overall I like it better than I did at first and see both how it influenced modern game design and some things modern games could learn from it. The biggest difference from the opening levels of Killzone 1 and the later game seems to be the abi...

One of my close friends was recently in the market for a next gen gaming console and asked my advice, since I have both a PS4 and an Xbox One he asked for my advice. I thought about it and decided to advise him to get the One and, since that system gets beat up a lot among hardcore gamers, decided to post my thoughts about why I gave that piece of advice, even while acknowledging that the PS4 i...

For some reason I found myself playing Killzone 1 today (I have many, many, better games to play but I felt an urge to play through the Killzone franchise and I picked up the HD trilogy cheap a few months back so...) Here are my thoughts on the first five or so levels: -The presentation stinks. I thought this was supposed to be an AAA PS2 game, but when I think PS2 AAA I think God of War or MGS...

I never much cared about gamerscore. Achievements are cool because they A) Give you a small incentive to pursue side stuff you might not otherwise care about, like finishing off collectibles or whatever, thus extending the fun of a game and B) Serve as a nice reminder of the games that you have played and finished. Services like True Achievements and the PS4 also tell you how many players compl...

First off this is not a review. I will wall off spoilers below, but this is a discussion of the complete game. Brothers got a lot of good press and is showing up on top ten lists . It's very cheap on XBLA right now so I finally picked it up and played through it today while off from work. Brothers has a lot going for it. The aesthetics are fantastic. I loved the music and while I wasn't impress...

When I first heard about Ryse it was on a bunch of podcasts where everyone was saying that it looked absolutely terrible and would be the worst launch game for either of the new systems. Because of this I didn't even consider pre-ordering it. Then the XBONE actually came out and reviews, even from those podcasters, were that the game was shallow but pretty, hyper violent, and reasonably fun. I...

I have owned every Nintendo console and handheld except the Virtual Boy and the Wii U, starting with the NES when I was in kindergarten. I grew up on Mario, Metroid, and the Legend of Zelda (original gold cartridge.) I love Nintendo. Recently I went into the Black Friday shopping season wanting only one thing, a Playstation Vita. One Amazon flash sale later and I walked away with a 3DS XL and a...

I recently completed two open world games at the opposite ends of the open end revolution, Jak II and L.A. Noire . Jak II came out soon after Grand Theft Auto III ignited the 3D open world trend and many reviewers at the time said that the open world was shoehorned into the design. That's a little unfair; Jak and Daxter the Precursor Legacy was technically an open world in that you could travel...

Recently there's been some excitement on the gaming podcasts and websites I look at about the summer drought of good new games coming to an end with the release of Darksiders II and Sleeping Dogs , followed by the release of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron . While these both look like good games and have reviewed well, I don't quite understand how it's possible for people, in this generation, t...

I've been playing through Fez , and it's fantastic. It's rare these days for there to be a game that actually draws me in to the point where I am sorely tempted to neglect important stuff to play it, but Fez definitely has me in that "Welll...I could file for an extension on my taxes..." mode. Part of it is the fun puzzle-based game play, but I think more than that I'm just really grooving on t...

I read a lot about Bastion before its release, and it seemed like a game I would appreciate but never love. The rebuilding land gimmick seemed a little silly and the combat looked simplistic. So I waited until it was on sale before buying it, while it racked up awards, and waited until now to actually play it. And for the first chunk of the game I'd say my expectations were about right. I liked...

One thing that I think has not been talked about in the discussion of possible disc-free consoles is the loss of an important distinction, that between the disc-based game and the downloadable title. XBLA and PSN downloadable titles have been a revelation this generation of consoles. They have rescued entire genres of gaming from seeming extinction and brought some of the best games of the gene...

I almost always end up taking a break from gaming after I finish a game. It's not because I want to really, though frequently the ends of games irritate me with their higher difficulty curves, but because I find it hard to decide what to play next. I have a large backlog of games, and I like to mix things up, following a shooter with a racing title, and a newer title with something old. I also...

This is probably mostly of personal interest of me, but with the new Youtube application for the Xbox360 you can now use your Xbox to stream Giant Bomb video easily and conveniently! Giant bomb posts most of the video on youtube where it's easily searchable by, for example, Giant Bomb NCIS if you want to see the fantastic and scintillating NCIS quicklook. I know youtube has been available on th...

In thinking about the differences between film and video games as artistic media, one of the things that always surprises me is how rare interactive credit sequences are. The familiar modern movie crawl of credits may make sense in a theater where people are gathering their things and leaving, but they're just kind of weird in a living room, especially when, as is frequently the case, they aren...

Game pricing in general is an irrational system that makes sense. Games almost all launch at $60, whether they're huge exciting titles like Skyrim, or unpolished messes nobody wants to play like Rogue Warrior (Released by the same publisher!) They then fall to whatever price the market will bear at varying speeds depending on their popularity. Thus a year after release you can expect a game lik...

I love great videogames. Who doesn't? There's nothing like being sucked into the polished experience provided by a triple A game where everything went right in production and the gameplay experience is even better than the image in your head produced by the back of the box. I recently beat Batman: Arkham Asylum (Yes I'm behind the times) and it lived up to every expectation. Sure there were a c...