I'll probably play… nothing, again. Seems like I'm still in the post-travel blues*, and since I hardly played games during the travels, it's hard to get into them again. I tried a bit of Night In The Woods, but the very first door bell-puzzle seemed so arbitrary that it took me right out of the mood. Which is a shame,…

I second that. It's one of the games that is vastly improved by customizing the map to your own playing preferences. I actually would have loved to turn off everything, even quest markers and so on. Both because it's such a lovely world to explore that I would gladly have paid more attention to it, being forced to…

Oh, this sounds… bird's intestines. Never anything good come out of bird intestines.

Asterix was not by Konami (it was Infogrames, Google tells me). But yeah, that was a perfectly fine, albeit a bit by-the-numbers platformer, aswas The Smurfs by the same dev. Which of course only underlines your point: there are stinkers among licensed games that were bad enough to give all of them a bad name, but…

Talking about influences: Chris Thursten wrote a really convincing essay on Eurogamer in which he argues that BoTW takes a lot of inspiration from PC games, namely the immersive sim. This is the genre that follows the ideal of creating a world with defined rules that do interact in a lot of different ways (not all of…

I know that Kickstarter has a bad reputation, but you know what?

He would have had a stronger argument if he based his claim on the 'game'-parts like the Skinner box elements. What was easier to attack was his insistence on how games could never be art because they could not reflect authorial intent due to their interactivity and the role of the player. A claim that is based on a…

With Platinum in a special advisor role for the combat design.

A house in the village I grew up in had to be abandoned due to a pretty serious fire. The inhabitants didn't go back to save all of their stuff, mostly because a lot of it was black and smelled a bit toxic. Of course, we didn't mind and took it is an opportunity to go spelunking. There was a NES console in the living…

This is actually why I still hold out hope for the day Nintendo realizes that one of their brightest futures waits on the path paved with indie devs. While AA(A) devs never will invest more than a fleeting thought in how to use those things, there is a whole scene of innovative indie developers who are doing silly and…

You take that back, sir! (If I ask in a civil and polite manner? Please?)
In our village, Zelda II was the definite and defining Zelda experience. Don't know why, but a local seller (we had to get our games from a camera store, of all things) sold the cartridge in all its golden glory, and not fewer than three kids got…

Of course people would worry about the specs. It's that sweet techno fetishism, so deeply ingrained into gamer culture.

That is a really solid list. One thing that is missing IMHO is a reflection of the rise of Korean cinema.

I'll be abroad traveling for a good part of the year, without much time or need for games. That said, I'm still looking forward to coming back and catching up on what I missed. The best thing about it? Since I kickstarted a lot of games that are bound to come out in 2017, the games will arrive in my inbox in my…

Night in the Woods is definitely also the game I'm most looking forward to. A few weeks ago, I did what I could well imagine becoming a yearly tradition for me: I replayed the free standalone episode Lost Constellation on solstice — the 'longest night' the game is set in — and I absolutely like to second…

Yeah, and the stop motion creatures are about on par with the animation in this series, it seems. Great children's movie.

For me, it will be more Steep. It's surprising to myself how much I enjoy returning to that game. I often do a challenge here and there, but mostly I just try to find an interesting landscape feature or line, enjoy how the light transforms the mood and turns the mountains into different shapes, and listen to music.…

Hyper Light Drifter was also done in Game Maker? Between this, Vlambeer and Cactus all working with it, it really can lead to complicated feeling whenever I remember that I have bought a version of the software in a Humble Bundle and even worked my way through the whole The Game Maker's Apprentice tutorial book —…

Here's a quick update, since the holidays left plenty of time for gaming:

When Diablo came out, I was into RPGs with a lot of numbers (think Might&Magic or The Dark Eye), so in my youthful desire to be edgy, I refused to accept is as an RPG. What is funny is that all these year later, I know that was a shitty kind of 'rockism', but I do still not have the slightest interest in Diablo or any…