Shamus Young devoted an entire chapter of his series on FFX to the Blitzball championship in Luca - specifically how the underdog story of the Besaid Aurochs, the resolution of Wakka’s inner conflict of whether to be an athlete or a guardian, and the example in microcosm of Tidus as an agent of change, upending the…

I get what you’re saying about a lighthearted adventure through a world that has already been saved, where the characters are freed of some of their burdens and can live a little. But it didn’t feel like character development. It felt like character assassination. I found the extreme levels of camp to be grating, I…

I’m so torn on Final Fantasy X-2. From what I’ve heard from those that have played it, the game mechanics are solid, deep, and enjoyable. It’s a shame that I’ll never be able to experience it on that level, because it’s not just some obligatory throwaway plot. It’s shitting all over something I formed an emotional…

I can think of video games that I have a personal attachment to: games which meant a lot to my specific gaming groups at specific points in time. Their relative obscurity meant that we could treat these games as specifically “ours.”

Wizards of the Coast owns both the first trading card game and the first roleplaying game. Both Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons embody the archetypal Fantasy genre, but there’s really no connection between the two; they’re separate departments, with separate teams of game designers, telling separate…

Those three Megadeth songs may indeed be the cream of the crop from that album, but I really consider Rust In Peace to be their magnum opus, and would be happy with any three-track combination from it.

My only experience with Sea of Thieves is watching my favorite streamers try it out on launch day. I don’t know what kind of lasting appeal it may hold, but it definitely was a good fit for their show since there was much joy to be found in discovering the mechanics and possibilities, particularly because they - as…

Baroness - The Red Album

I prefer Ride The Lightning, myself. If I had to pick a suite of three from that album, I’d go:

That’s interesting; my pick from Pretty Hate Machine would be the next three tracks:

I love “Us V Them,” but I wouldn’t want to mess with the original post’s journey of “status quo - sorrow - catharsis.”

Excellent choice, especially considering that Time concludes with a reprise of Breathe. The whole album flows as one cohesive whole, but that opening “birth to life to death” suite is particularly epic.

Your description of “empty online spaces seeming surreal and tragic” reminds me of the positive reviews of No Man’s Sky I saw on youtube after the game’s release: They took the iconoclastic stance of giving the developers the benefit of the doubt and assuming they meant to present players with an incomprehensibly…

A good designer can put together a series of challenges that teaches the player the game mechanics and continually raises the stakes, testing their mastery of those mechanics with more specificity than any procedural system could. But this can be poorly done: There are Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty missions where…

Pokemon has become quite the institution, and all the iterating on its formula that Game Freak has done over the years has refined and deepened its strategy, from the additional types I mentioned to the splitting of the “Special” stat into “Special Attack” & “Special Defense,” to the addition of Abilities, to the…

I write about Magic: The Gathering a lot. it’s something customizable that I can make distinctly my own, and it’s something I was lucky enough to grow up alongside, giving me some perspective on how it has evolved and changed over time. The same can be said of Pokemon.

I had a lot of fun during the section of FFX where I was backtracking to see the whole game again before moving on to the finale; I liked seeing what was different in each town, and I liked seeing what there was to steal from all the enemies. Doing the monster safari takes a lot of time, and if you weren’t already…

I dusted off my old copy of Civilization IV this week. I have been stubbornly attempting to make a go of it as a druidic culture: refusing to subject my citizens to the health problems that come from overpopulation, and refusing to clearcut forests to get at the land beneath them for farms & mines. Forests add to a…

It may not be the most exploitative thing out there, but I still really hate the practice of rendering single player games online-only. A multiplayer game is a moment in time, inherently ephemeral, and its fleeting nature doesn’t bother me so much. But when a linear narrative is tethered to a company’s servers, it is…

My brother and I frequently quote videogamedunkey’s reaction to Thomas The Tank Dragon: “Yeah, pick ‘em up! Pick ‘em up wit’ your wheels!”