Oh yeah, the wall jumping is so terrible that I'm not sure I ever used it (unless it was necessary at some point). To be honest, I forgot that it existed.

Will do. I've heard that the sim elements and your ability to dramatically personalize your town is limited, but that it sticks the landing on really making you care about the residents.

This was a nice write-up on Layers of Fear, and surprisingly might be the best way to get me to play it. I'll look into it; the Steam sale is going on, so who knows?

That's a good point. There are some games that I've lost pretty regularly in, but had a good time due to the apparent potential for winning, and the good show demonstrated by a skilled opponent. I often found this to be the case in Hearthstone, and have had more than a few matches of ARMS already where I was beaten -…

Good subject for an article! I can say that I'd be entirely up the creek in ARMS without the practice mode, available from the main screen, and the Grand Prix. The practice mode, in particular, does what this article suggests and has the player practice specific techniques against an AI opponent to learn why and how…

Thanks for writing this! I wasn't actually aware that there was an "anti-shark" lobby, which may speak to my naivete; anyway, I guess it's one more backwards cause to fight against. Stay safe out there :)

I know what I'm going to be looking up! I'd never heard of this and, after @wolfmanjew:disqus's comment above, I got to wondering how there hasn't been a 1st person Megaman-style game.

That's a much more coherent point than the one I tried to make, haha. Thanks for boiling this down to the fundamentals. Your thoughts on an "open-world" cave system are absolutely fascinating, too.

No I haven't! At this point, given the sprawl inherent to MMORPGs, I'm inclined to play the game primarily to explore new places and continue the narrative. Glad to hear that leveling is reasonably easy - I've always been leery of MMORPGs due to the tension between offering compelling gameplay and presenting gameplay…

I find this contributes to a pretty interesting topic - what differentiates Metroid and Zelda? There are some very fundamental similarities: gated areas, having the game "open" from the start but being unable to progress in a given direction without the right tool, archetypical villains/monsters that recur despite not…

I just this week finally re-upped my Final Fantasy XIV subscription! I think that Stormblood marketing got to me, even though my character is Level 23 so I won't actually be buying the expansions for a long time (if ever).

This is an intriguing issue, actually. My experience on games has varied radically - Super Bomberman R remains a hassle to play online due to lag, Puyo Puyo Tetris is a significant improvement with no noticeable lag, but I get booted from matches at least once a session, and ARMS runs flawlessly with no lag at all. So…

I'm with you on Oxenfree. I appreciated that it was trying something new, and would be willing to check out the next thing its creative team publishes, but it ended up ringing a bit hollow for me personally. I was happy to be done with it.

I hear you on the Ever Oasis demo. That's one of my most anticipated games of the year, so I'm excited for next week, but I also don't want a repeat of my Disgaea 5 demo experience, haha.

I don't think there's currently any way around the long delay, other than publishing increasingly buggy, low-quality content. It just takes too much time to build new or innovative gameplay mechanics, lifelike visuals that stand up to 4K scrutiny, reactive AI, and large worlds. Many companies at the moment seem to let…

I'm with this answer 100%.

I wanted to download this demo,, but realized I have very few Mii buddies on the 3DS. Though now that I think of it, I do have four neighbors on there, along with some Gameological folk. Might download it this evening.

Excellent write-up about Transistor! It's actually among my favorite 20 games or so. Perfect length, perfect gameplay, perfect aesthetic. Might need to replay it some time in the near future :)

Argh, all of these WAYPTW games sound awesome! I won't be playing any of them, though, because I'm waiting for Hollow Knight on Switch and a sweet sale on Nier: Automata on PC. Bummer.

Yeah, it was a poor choice of words. What I meant was that the interpretation of the people talking about it yesterday was that we were, after discussion, collectively not bothered by it. I was intending to say that that was a limited discussion, and that other people might reasonably take issue with it. My comment…