I collected a lot of games for the N64, PS2, & PS3. And I finished most of them... eventually. My problem is that I’ll play something regularly for a little while and then put it back on the shelf for months at a time, until the day comes that I feel like getting re-acquainted to it. This process of rediscovery can be…

When it comes to the individual stories that make up FF6's ensemble, there’s an odd man out (besides the mime and the yeti). Shadow’s resolution is just to send his dog away with Relm. He ditches the group, like he’d been doing the whole time. I’m going to quote from one of my favorite sites that’s done Final Fantasy…

There exists a small insect monster which the game spawns underground in clusters during world creation, in the same way it places veins of coal or iron. It lives in innocuous-looking stone blocks, only emerging once you break that block. And then the rest of the hive crawls out of the goddamn walls. They’re not…

I am reminded of the film version of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” where the immortal Dorian Gray and the vampire Mina Harker end up in a swordfight, and realizing that they’re both healing instantaneously, Dorian smirks, “We’ll be at this all day...”

Removing the scarcity for TMs and Heart Scales was an improvement to this series. Even though I still check the online database and chart things out ahead of time for the most part, that freedom to experiment with a mon’s moveset is super valuable.

Was FF6's big twist partway through another break from convention? I’m not familiar with the JRPG games that came before the SNES, but it seems to me that most of them got by with an excuse plot made of easily-understandable archetypes, like most video games did back then. You’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys,…

I’ve been playing quite a lot of Minecraft lately. Sometimes I feel like grabbing my sword and heading into the bowels of the earth, braving the darkness and the danger on my quest for treasure and adventure. Sometimes I feel like agonizing over the floorplan of a building, the height of the ceilings, the placement of…

Been listening to a lot of Insomnium this week. True to their genre, everything is amplified; big and melodramatic. I can imagine a mindset that finds all this incredibly cheesy, but I’m really digging it. It’s hedging in on Opeth’s spot in my fall playlist: the soundtrack of feeling the temperature drop and watching…

A proper deconstruction of a power fantasy, like Spec Ops: The Line, tries to make the player feel bad about the collateral damage their unlimited power causes. Except that Spec Ops is a linear game, where what the player will encounter and what they can do about it is tightly scripted. By contrast, look at open-world…

Well, I’ve been EV training in Pokemon games since the DS era began, which means being willing to stop all other activity and fight only one ‘mon about one hundred times... and then doing all that again for the other five members of my team. So, yeah, the typical JRPG lends itself quite well to repetition, and I can…

Crusader Kings 2 was the first thing I thought of when the conversation turned to “random events and procedural storytelling in videogames” vs the comfort and safety that life simulators are built upon. I’ve admittedly never played a Paradox game, but among my friends, it rivals our D&D campaigns for the number of…

I have a ritual, not every morning, but most mornings. I pour a cup of coffee, put on headphones, and listen to a new music album while I zone out to some grinding in a JRPG (typically Pokemon or Final Fantasy). Whenever I play anything else, it’ll be at night, but this hour before my day begins is devoted to that…

Man, the introduction to Planet Zebes was so atmospheric and creepy. The ruins that the opening cave section leads to were conspicuously empty, and like an old-school Resident Evil game, I was anxiously waiting for the other shoe to drop.

This weekend I will be transcribing the events of the Civilization 4 game I played earlier in the week. It had been a while since I used the game as a D&D setting generator, so I fired it up, lowered the game speed all the way to Marathon, and started a game, writing the dates of important events on my phone as I…

You played the PS1 version, huh? I only ever played the SNES entry in that series, but I don’t think I ever actually got to Harvest the Moon.

I finished Pokemon Black 2 this week. And by finished, I mean I beat the elite four and the champion, watched some credits, and now all the dungeons and routes that have been blockaded up until now have finally unlocked. There are still new sights to see, new mons to catch, and new battles to have. Kind of a strange…

Yes, sadly DOOM 2016 does start to plateau near the end. The first 75% of it has fantastic pacing, as it seemed like every fifteen minutes you encounter a new environment, or a new weapon, or a new enemy type. By the final stretch, there’s nothing you haven’t seen before. It never stops being fun to play, but that…

I just learned that Origin had a new album in 2017: “Unparalleled Universe.” I fell in love with 2008's “Antithesis,” considered 2014's “Omnipresent” to be a decent follow-up, giving me more of the well-produced, hyper-technical death metal I crave, and the new album follows suit. My first impression is that I am not…

Nice. I’ve just started The Crippled God, myself. Even as this final story arc starts to come into focus, the series maintains its style of epic fantasy: leaving me perpetually bewildered and feeling like I’m in over my head. I find it difficult to explain why I like this deliberate obfuscation; the closest I can come…

Unreal Tournament.