Adding the audience for number 5 was a great idea. Their cheers and jeers enhanced the whole production, and the players leaned into it, drawing out moments of drama and getting pops and heat from the crowd just like a wrestling show would.

I played Skyrim on console when it first came out, but my friends who had it on PC argued that they were able to “fix” things like its magic system or its economics, and I was generally impressed by the alterations they curated. There was one “survival” mod that kept track of food, drink, and sleep, but also…

That reminds me of my method for accomplishing goals in JRPGs that would require hours of grinding: I break it into one-hour chunks, and each morning I brew some coffee and try a new album from the seemingly endless vaults of “metal promotion” youtube channels like Atmospheric Black Metal Albums or Odium Nostrum. I…

I don’t listen to any podcasts. They’re meant to be on passively in the background while you’re doing something else, and in those situations, I can’t split my focus between two sources of stimuli. Whatever I’m looking at or whatever action I’m performing is going to occupy my full attention and all their words will…

I like most of Ryan Hollinger’s video essays. This one in particular takes me back: to a time when internet culture still felt like an exclusive club where weird misfits hung out.

Don’t mind me, I’m just testing Kinja’s formatting for image files. The JPGs I used looked fine, but the PNGs were shrunk down, probably due to their higher file size.

Brütal Legend is the first game that comes to mind for achievement names, since it’s just as full of heavy metal references as the rest of the game: “Ran to the Hills,” “Practice Bloody Practice,” and “Flowerslave.” Hell, sometimes it doesn’t even bother trying to be cute about it and just calls them “If You Want…

Hidden Identity board games are pretty common, from the “one player is the traitor” format of Shadows Over Camelot and Battlestar Galactica to the Mafia-like (or Werewolf-like, if you prefer) games with multiple roles. This latter type is the kind I want to talk about. “Bang!” is the game in this genre I have the most…

Back when I was a teenager, a forum I frequented had a section dedicated to setting up online Starcraft matches, and also to posting battle reports afterward. The text of the posts these pictures belonged to is long-forgotten, but the silly captions still make me laugh. A small selection of what “Young Demons” was up…

I thought they were brilliant.

That is an excellent point about the loss of CRT monitors & televisions, and what that means for games that were designed to be displayed on them. Typically, when speedrunners describe a trick as “frame perfect,” they’re talking about the refresh rate of CRTs, which is something that is lost in translation moving to…

Seconded. Even if it’s every two weeks, or once a month, a curated list of the recent Gameological opinions & recommendations still has real value.

Now that has my attention. John Petrucci is a legend. The dude’s been making music for the past 30 years and once made a very inspirational guitar instruction video:

Indeed it is gone from the main post. No need to be sorry; otherwise we’d be wondering if we were supposed to google “Fortnite Battle Royal Kill Compilation” and just take a guess at which video was yours.

The last time I wrote about Magic: the Gathering, I gushed over my favorite biomechanical horrors and how their comeback ended up endearing me to the world they were invading. I wrote so much about the history and context involved that the actual matchup here, of the native Mirrans vs the Phyrexian invaders, was cut…

WAYPTW has many skilled writers who type up what they want to post in advance. I... do not. When this page goes live, at 2am my time, that’s when the best of us paste & proofread their contribution to Gameological. I either stay up super-late or wake up super-early and start writing.

Magic: The Gathering, as a collectible game, is tough to play on a budget. The siren song of “more cards and better cards and more cards and better cards” exists to entice students with more money than sense. Restrictions breed creativity, though, and I hope you’re able to solve your current card-pool, and find the…

The “heroic” Nathan Drake is a mass murdering sociopath actually, never mind. S’cool.

You can do it!

Duke Nukem 3d was a tribute to American action movies of the 80s. The main characters in FPSs before then had pretty much been blank slates for the player to inhabit, so Personality was what set his game apart from the others of the time. Spouting a one-liner after blowing an alien monster away felt great. But they…