Ahoy is a wonderful channel. The writing, narration, and graphic design are all top-notch, and I’m always happy whenever another of these documentaries is released.

Dragon Quest 1 and Elder Scrolls: Arena, eh? Games that laid the foundations for massive, well-known genres (narrative eastern RPGs and open-world western RPGs, respectively), but also games that have absolutely none of the quality-of-life features that were added over time as those genres were refined and iterated…

Thanks for everything, Matt. The kindness and civility fostered in these Gameological threads makes them an internet oasis, and your writing has kicked off a thousand good conversations. Best of luck in the future!

I’m on a Minecraft hiatus right now. The newest version (1.13 - The Water Update) is out, so the multiplayer server I play on was shut down in order to make way for a new server running this latest version of the game. It was bittersweet to tour the realm one last time, taking screenshots and reflecting how much time…

Most stores have a supply of basic lands for players to use, but bringing your own certainly can’t hurt. The other thing you might think about bringing is some plastic card sleeves. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found that freshly opened cards have a different “texture” than cards that have been handled a…

I’ve never seen the show, but I can say that the Song of Ice & Fire books hooked me so hard because they have a compassionate, empathetic heart beneath all the apparent cynicism. From what I can tell, Martin hates autocrats, and believes that power will always make those under that power suffer. The glamour and…

This is actually the perfect time to try drafting! Core Set 2019 is the return of the “Core Set” concept after a long hiatus: A more simple, entry-level game, focusing on the core rules of Magic without needing its own mechanical twist or gimmick.

You have it backwards: “Being an asshole” was turned into “Playing the game as intended.”

In truth, I didn’t play it that way. After I discovered the simplest path forward to be “drive a vehicle right into the building, do all the damage you can, bring the structure down on top of yourself, respawn and call it a win”, I found it unsatisfying AND tonally unpleasant.

Funny you mention the ludonarrative, because that is something I always found kind of fascinating about Guerrilla. The game presents the player as THE MIGHTY THOR, armed with adamantine hammer, jetpack-assisted flight, and rockets as thunderbolts. No matter how many times he is knocked down, he rises again, coming for…

I consider Red Faction Guerrilla a hidden gem of the seventh console generation, and am happy to see the game prettied up and re-released for those who missed it the first time around. It’s not perfect, but there is certainly fun to be had.

I can think of two examples from childhood where I was terrified of losing.

The first place my mind went was the X-Ray attacks in Mortal Kombat (2011).

When a Minecraft streamer I watched on an occasional basis announced that he was starting a second server that subscribers could apply to play on, that motivated me to speak up and buy in. I’ve been part of that community for a month now, and it’s been great, except for a bit of culture shock I had to acclimatize to.

My favorite part of that episode was when it returned from commercial break to Tom Bergeron announcing, “Welcome back to the Gilbert Gottfried Show!”

I too found them endearing when playing Resident Evil 4, and it wasn’t just the novelty at the time. Both God of War and RE4 use rapid tapping as “Struggle!” and the exertion connected the player to the character. The surprise “Dodge!” prompts that RE4 used fit the danger that the monsters & environment represented,…

Isn’t he behind the plan to open up all the cages in the hunters’ camp and let the newly-freed dinos rampage through it? That may be the embodiment of why I find The Lost World so dissonant: it seems to be saying, “Those people are hurting the animals! Boo!” and following it with “The animals are hurting those people!…

Great writeup on a classic game. One thing that sticks in my memory is how quickly the gaming culture seemed to fall out of love with Quick-Time-Events. The turnaround from “How novel! You thought you were safe because you were in a cutscene, but you were still playing,” to “Ugh. Pressing a button to advance the…

Raising the difficulty seems like the obvious solution. My brother and I had a similar situation recently, playing some old-school Diablo 2 and inviting a friend who wasn’t really into it the first time around to join us. This friend’s a good person, but has some impulse control problems. His need to be constantly…

While I still found the ease with which you could seek out your “weapon of choice” and then go about the rest of your game a positive when playing Fallout 3, I get the comparison to New Vegas’ booming arms industry, and the way players could aspire to owning the most expensive gun in their specialization, with the…