Allow me to open with a confession: I was never that big of a Mario fan. Not to say I hate the franchise but it wasn’t on my radar as much as other franchises while I was growing up. Over the years, as I got to play more of the games and experience other media related to the Italian Plumber, I did open up to a lot more of the magical Mushroom Kingdom. From finding appreciation for Bowser thanks to a YouTube Machinima or Luigi becoming a favorite thanks to the Luigi’s Mansion series, not to mention the games themselves being fun, I am a bigger Mario fan now than I was then. However, one aspect ..read more

The impact of the Nintendo DS contradicts its size. In fact, it’s the second-highest-selling console (154.02 million units as of September 2023) of all time, only second to the venerable PlayStation 2. It has been part of many gamers’ daily routines, and the visual novel genre found a foothold in a new market because of the influence of the inimitable console. It did it in a way that worked with the platform’s peculiar assets — the touch screen and stylus. An opening scene Visual novels have a long history in Japan. Most consider the first true entry of this genre to be Portopia Serial Murder ..read more

The last few years of PlayStation exclusives have seen a distinct shift from the legacy of previous systems, being far more focused on dense realism when compared to titles from the PlayStation and PlayStation 2. While technically impressive, the shift to cinematic realism has led to the neglect of other franchises in Sony's wheelhouse. And while these classic games are being acknowledged through places like the ill-fated PlayStation Classic and the renewed PlayStation Plus programme, very few of them have received new entries for cutting-edge hardware. The Gravity Rush series stands as one o ..read more

Showcasing the Game Boy on its 35th anniversary ..read more

For my entire gaming life, I've always been a bit of a Sony Pony. Aside from really niche items things like the PlayStation TV, I have extensive experience with practically all things PlayStation. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I've never owned a single Xbox product, not even a controller for when I want to play a racing game or a fighting game on my PC (I use a PS5 controller for Halo which makes a lot of people very angry.) I'm not even entirely sure why I have avoided Microsoft's flagship, other than maybe I had an N64 and a PS1 when I was a child and just kind of stuck with what I ..read more

Hyperbole and the gaming community go hand in hand. It is a big part of our culture, intentional or not. Over-the-top game ads from the '90s boasted that an upcoming game was the most brain-exploding, face-melting, hair-on-fire experience ever designed. Caricatures of gamers sit within basements, sipping Rolling Rock and ranting about how bad a game is (then assault Bugs Bunny). Even in-game characters wax poetic about how a gun first designed in 1872 is the superior choice to a legendary mercenary carrying an assault rifle and four types of grenades. If the tales developers tell us through v ..read more

2023 was a year of studio shuttering and closures, with Mimimi Games sadly on the list. The studio redefined tactical stealth design with Shadow Tactics, yet despite how well the series is regarded, they struggled to make this a long-term commercial success. As I think about the complexity of the games in the strategy genre, I wonder if it’s time for a structural change to how strategy and tactics games are made. Numbers, cones, and dice rolls The strategy/tactical genre are some of the meatiest games on the market; they often provide dozens of hours of choices, playstyles, examining map ..read more

I'm not sure about you, dear readers, but I stole. Not in the way that, say, professionals spend months training and preparing every bit of their elaborate heists to steal Monet paintings from some oil tycoon's summer villa. What I mean is that I have stolen once, way back in the bygone days when Max Payne still had hair and pimple-faced, Dr. Pepper-fueled gamers like myself still dreamed of something like Resident Evil 2 in VR. I remember the feeling with every fibre in my bones: the slowness of time, buckets of sweating before you decide to go for it and put Thomas Jefferson winking at you ..read more

Showcasing racing games ..read more

Contains spoilers for Final Fantasy VII, Remake, Crisis Core, Advent Children, and Rebirth until Chapter 9. When I first drafted this, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth was a week away from release. Sometime before that, screenshots of a previously unreleased scene leaked on a 4chan thread and were later pretty tellingly scraped from the net. These pics accompanied some sketchy timelines of the whole story (most of which were baffling) supplied by self-proclaimed early recipients of the game. There were a lot of magnifying glasses being held over the details, and theorizing took on a more wary edge ..read more