How could you forget about Crypt of the Necrodancer? This is some of Danny Baranowsky’s best work, and the game ships with two remixes of the original soundtrack (for Melody and Aria’s campaigns).

Fundamentally, it’s not about art it’s about business. Games (particularly games that get physical releases in multiple regions) are not “one person’s artistic vision” they’re collaborative products made by dozens or even hundreds of people all of whom probably see what they’re working on differently. So there’s no…

I voted for Undertale, not because I think it’s legitimately the greatest game of all time, but because I do think it’s better than Ocarina.

It’s really sort of funny that there’s so much fury about Undertale advancing so far when on the other side of the Bracket somehow Super Mario Bros. RPG made it to the final four.

Drew, you were on Chopped, so you should know this. A cookie press is really the only way to make authentic Alsatian spritzgebäck (literally “squirt cookies”); well I guess you could use a piping bag. You can’t get the same results with a cookie cutter because you’re literally making a different cookies. The butter to…

Really, “censorship” is so overused these days that it’s lost pretty much all meaning. If we’re just talking about “somebody selling it changed this piece of media because they thought it would sell better this way” that’s something that is going to happen almost 100% of the time. If you’re upset that something was…

Well, Roger Maxson was a U.S. Army Captain before the Great War, so the BoS Codex was in large part based on procedure for the U.S. Military. However, the point that New Vegas was making that in the intervening 200ish years since Roger Maxson became the first High Elder of the BoS, the operations manual has become…

Okay, this sold me on the Witcher 3. My number 1 complaint about most roleplaying games is that while I love roleplaying, I get bored with combat in video games quickly, particularly when combat it’s based on twitch reflexes more than strategy.

Strictly speaking, you should have been able to oust Maxson from the get go. New Vegas establishes that it’s a tenet of the Brotherhood of Steel Codex (their holy text) that the chain of command must flow linearly (i.e. “the Chain that Binds.”). So the Elder can give orders to Paladins, and the Paladins can give…

I lost a lot of faith in Fallout as an institution after Fallout 3 came out and broke my heart (as a long time fan of the series). I got a lot of that faith back after New Vegas came out and you could actually showed that you could meld the old-style roleplaying with the more action/exploration focus that Fallout 3…

Honestly “so cut content can eventually see the light of day” is why I like DLC as an idea to begin with. I mean, it’s better to offer the thing for sale and let people who think it’s worth the asking price than for it to simply never exist. DLC is also an opportunity for developers to apply lessons they learned…

Claiming that anybody was vehemently opposed to DoAEx3 is pretty much just a marketing move by Play Asia, in order to convince a certain “ethics in games journalism” crowd to buy their game. Nobody really cared about DoAEx3 to begin with, and that’s why it’s not releasing in the U.S.

To me, the best way to go about is to make everybody in the wasteland potentially killable (mostly to dissuade people from using rocket launchers and the like in populated areas) and create significant consequences for killing someone you shouldn’t have killed.

It really is kind of disappointing how over the years Fallout has gone from the video game RPG that was among if not the best at modelling the tabletop experience in terms of variety, negative space for roleplaying, and allowing the player to come up with alternative solutions to something that is an excellent action…

Sadly, you are still saddled with at most four responses at any given conversation juncture. I would gladly sacrifice “voiced protagonist” for the glorious 12+ responses a game like Planescape: Torment gave us. A lot of times polish is at the expense of enabling roleplaying, since roleplaying takes place in the…

For me, “when to buy a new console” has always been a function of price, not game selection. It’s not as though the Witcher 3 isn’t still going to be a good game if I don’t get to it this year, or next year.

I’m honestly surprised that this is news. Considering the quality of user reviews you find on various parts of the internet, having the people who made it review it is probably well-above average in terms of utility as the people who made it have at least played it extensively before writing their review (which is not…

This is absolutely not censorship in any shape, way, or form. That anybody could conceive of it as such betrays a fundamental misconception of the nature of “censorship” on the part of that person.

I have personally never enjoyed his podcasts or his videos, and I object to a great number of his opinions, but I feel terrible about this and I wish all the best to Mr. Bain and his loved ones here. Hope he beats the odds. F*** cancer.

I hate every part of this. Attributes being “what natural talents you have” and skills being “what you have learned to do” is a sensible and fairly realistic way to model these sorts of things. I mean, that someone is really “smart” by whatever standard doesn’t mean they are knowledgeable about science or that someone…