I can assure you that it is not a comparison in Yooka-Laylee’s favor. Both those movies are exquisite.

John Wick: Chapter 2 is fucking amazing.

Yooka-Laylee is not good, like John Wick: Chapter 2.

You’ve gotten my favorite moment and around it, my favorite level: New Donk City, the ultimate and best summation of Super Mario Odyssey’s design. I know being a minor sandbox it does stretch the idea of “level,” but it really is too wonderful to not discuss. Odyssey bills itself as both a return to Super Mario 64…

Yeah; as much as I love Eventide Island - and Hyrule Castle, and all the labyrinths, and so many small moments - it’s gotta be the Plateau. It’s one of the absolute best tutorial levels in modern games, partially because it’s a wonderful mixture of old and new. It’s more old school in how self-directed and obtuse it…

About a half hour ago, I mentally kicked myself because right, I totally forgot that Resident Evil had a well regarded, paradigm shifting sequel in January. This has been such a big year that while writing that I forgot about a lot of games: RE7, Yakuza, Rime, Snake Pass, Night in the Woods, Splatoon 2, Doki Doki…

I think it was supposed to be unrelated, more about the Wolfenstein tropes about the Nazis dabbling into the occult - and an explanation of why Deathshead decided to give up on exploiting magic before The New Order. It’s only “golem-y” insofar as it’s this monster thing; I don’t think it was meant to have any kind of…

Part of why it’s so good is actually because I’m going to slightly disagree with you, and say that it wasn’t the “pure” essence of Zelda. It was A pure essence of Zelda, and playing it and Adventure of Link this year helped me recognize that the series can be as bold and iconoclastic as it wants. There’s been a lot of…

Like, after over a month of consistent play and wonderful surprises, the latter started to run dry. And I was still enjoying it, but there was a tiny bit of resignation that yeah, that was inevitable.

This was an astonishingly good year for video games, if not always the culture around them. The best games were confident, experimental, thoughtful, surprising, and entirely sincere. Wolfenstein II had a deranged vision about the horrors of American Nazism and what was needed to fight it, but it was also one it fully…

Mentioned in my own thing, but Wolfenstein: the Old Blood (and possibly The New Order, though I’m not sure if I beat it by last WAYPTW). It was, ultimately, what most prequels should be: a way to spend a little more time with someone, something that expands on just enough on the backstory to be interesting without…

...And finally, my article on Mass Effect: Andromeda is complete. It’s something of which I’m really proud, and I think I managed to get at a number of the problems that were around of and part of it. I’m leading this off at the top mostly because really, what I played this week is less interesting: more DOOM, and…

I finally finished Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I’m in the process of finishing my article on it. In the end, while it was mostly a banal experience that indulged in some of the absolute worst tropes of open world design, and the writing was poor in general, I also ended up liking some of the characters (most of my…

So is the GIF a metaphor? Is the cat the collective development for video games released in 2017, and the bunny a confidence to explore and push unique ideas, perspectives, visions, and goals for what the medium can do?

We love ya too, Gerardi. Seriously; this is one of a scant few communities dedicated to gaming that I truly like, let alone love. I say this all the time, because I mean it.

I’m glad to hear both are good! It really surprised me initially that they turned out so well - certainly after watching part of that DOOM announcement, and that earlier, failed Wolfenstein reboot. Regarding my question, I actually had no idea it was a standalone thing, which definitely explains both why it does get…

What am I playing this weekend? DOOM, is what. I just grabbed the Switch version, along with Wolfenstein: the New Order (and “The Old Blood”* along with it). I’ll probably play a bit in handheld mode, but it’s kind of just exciting to see a hyper-violent id Software game on Nintendo hardware. I also “eagerly” await…

Honestly, in that sense, Assassin’s Creed more than any other game really is the flagship of Ubisoft. It’s a massive collaboration of disparate people from all over the world, highlighting different cultures and backgrounds and heritages. It’s interested in creating memorable worlds, ones into which you can immerse…

Due to a few reasons (mostly that the Wii U, the only “current gen” console I had for some time before getting a PS4 and Switch this year), I haven’t really been as inundated with the glut of open world games, but many of the ones I’ve played in the Seventh generation had this problem. I used to love the freedom Just…

I’ve mixed feelings on the Korok puzzles. On one hand, they can get repetitive, especially since Nintendo only had a few puzzle types. On the other, I was finding new types even around the 300 - 350 mark, and one thing about them that’s really cool is how the puzzles can be altered to suit new contexts. One of the…