In Japan, I would say that the torch of Sailor Moon is being carried by Pretty Cure. It’s been the big “magical girl warrior” anime for 12 or 13 years, at least. It’s ... kind of dreadful, and targeted pretty strongly at the younger child demographic. It adds and extra layer of bows and ribbons, makes the sentai…

Yay P4G. I understand the hate for the Kanji and Naoto storylines, but I also understand where they’re coming from, and I really do thing they’re much more a problem of the context in which they exist (something looks a lot more like cowardly erasure in a general media context where LGBT erasure and silencing is the…

This week was a bit of a romp through smaller indie titles. I finished up my time with Signs of the Sojourner, playing through it twice and finding I just didn’t have the stamina for a third try, even though there were lots of storylines I wanted to explore to their end. There’s next to no progression or variance…

I’ve been playing a few different games. Hardcore Mecha was just too intense and challenging for me to stick with it, I’m sad to say. It’s a level based platform shooter, with some true two-handed dexterity on the controller necessary to pull off moves. Keeping it all together in my head to jump, aim, fire, boost, and…

Yeah, the oversized weight that the 1964 Olympics played in the Japanese psyche, and thus the metaphorical power of the Olympics in any piece of Japanese speculative fiction, is not obvious to non-Japanese viewers.

I can’t say I have nostalgia for it, because mine were a time of unrelenting misery and abject failure in every way. I have almost no good memories of my youth, and a lot of it I’ve just blocked entirely from my memory. That’s why the fantasy of going back and living an entirely different life is so appealing. Being a…

I muddled my way to an astoundingly anti-climactic bad ending in Persona 4, and haven’t had the heart to go back and go for a real ending. I have to say, I felt kind of crushed to see the my empty shell protagonist just get on the train and leave at the end of it all. My fantasy time living a youth that was anything…

Hey, all, long time no see! Like, months and months, I think.

I found that I was really in the mood for a mostly unchallenging strategy game, and the game that scratched that itch was Stellaris. I sit and slowly watch my meters tick down, watch my star blob expand, beat up on rivals stupid enough to attack me ... it’s such a nothing-burger of a game in so many ways that it’s…

I have never played a FF game, but I must admit that I am curious. Curious enough to spend money on a game, somthing I did only once last year - for Total War Three Kingdoms? Maybe.

This week I’ve mainly been getting ready to move. With any luck, my area will not go into total lockdown before the move is completed, but there’s nothing I can do about that, so it’s work work work until I can’t.

I’ve been back and forth across all sorts of games. I got tired of Two Point Hospital when I got to Industrial Zone and was given access to surgery - not because of anything to do with that mission or zone, but simply because I’d made enough hospitals and wasn’t feeling it any more.

Yeah, sounds like my sorta thing, presuming I could tolerate the 80's-ness of it.

Speaking of Canadian-themed adventure games, one of the tiny handful of adventure games which I have truly enjoyed was released just a few years ago. Kona is a first-person 3D adventure game of sorts, more gameplay than a walking sim but almost no actual action and thus not really a shooter. I thought it was really…

I’ve got Prison Architect in my queue, but I’m also sufficiently queasy about the subject matter to have never actually gone ahead and played it.

It might. I didn’t play Theme Hospital. This is my first hospital game. I’m just into the grim and realistic, and would rather be dealing with long-term debilitating injuries and chainsaw trauma and malaria outbreaks.

Mario Fans — Offhandedly reference game trivia as if it was a Bible quote in the 1600's, correctly assuming that everyone gets it and understands its importance.

I liked my compainions in Pillars, but I always felt that I was somehow out of sync with the game, because I had the damndest time figuring out what I was supposed to do with them. It never let me get the Paladin, because I decided to do the obviously correct thing and just kill all the stupid gangsters. Which never…

I feel like I enjoyed Fallout 3 as much as it let me, and I put a bunch of time into it. However, I’d heard the main quest ended in a stupid mandatory suicide for no clear reason, so I lost steam after a while. Also, the clear disconnect between the implied timeline of the locations and the actual timeline explained…

When I hear someone express their rapturous appreciation for grappling hooks and double jumps, I can only shake my head in sadness. I appreciate them as anxiety relieving tools, and little more, because my in-game fear of heights means that platforming in general is pure misery, and is only slightly mitigated by the…