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

In this story, we will discuss everything you need to know about Dreaming Crests, including how to get them, how to use them, and how to maximize your gear's potential. We will also compare the Shadowflame and Dreaming Crest system in Seasons 2 and 3 to the gear upgrade systems from previous seasons. Dragonflight Season 2 introduced an all-new gear upgrade system that utilizes Flightstones and Shadowflame Crests. This system replaces most of the upgrade systems that were in place in previous seasons, including Valor and Storm Gear, for example. Now, players can upgrade alm ..read more

Twenty-one years ago, the anime and trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh! sparked my interest in card games. Since then, I have tried digital card games that range from Hearthstone to Magic The Gathering to Night of The Full Moon. None of them held my interest like Yu-Gi-Oh! did, but they gave me a greater appreciation of the game genre. Imagine my surprise when I decided to try the 2022 Nintendo Switch card battle RPG video game Shadowverse Champion's Battle Legendary Edition and became totally hooked. Created by Cygames and published by X-Seed Games, Shadowverse Champion's Battle Legendary Edition is ..read more

2002 was an exciting year for the Resident Evil franchise. Barely a decade old, by the early 2000s, the series had sold about 16 million units. What began as a reinterpretation of a movie tie-in game, Sweet Home for the Nintendo Famicom, became a bona fide franchise and genre innovator. It branched out into comics, action figures, and novelizations by S.D. Perry (an author who you love or hate if you’re a fan of the series). To put it mildly, Resident Evil was on top of the world. The only thing left to conquer was Hollywood and the big screen. Aiming for Hollywood In The Making of Resident E ..read more

If you’ve been a fan of Pokémon for even the shortest amount of time, chances are you’ve heard somebody mention a “Nuzlocke” at least once. This self-imposed set of rules has been influential for an enormous chunk of the community, focusing on turning a children’s RPG into something thought-provoking, challenging, and consequential. Since the origin of the Nuzlocke in 2010, Pokémon fans have iterated on the rules even further and spread their ideas all over the internet. So come along as we observe the journey that is the Nuzlocke Challenge. Bringing permadeath to Pokémon Initially dubbed "Ha ..read more

Have you ever read a book you looted in Skyrim? It's one of many inessential items you can pick up – in the corner of a guard's barracks, or a cave full of cobwebs. Most players, myself included, wouldn't think twice before selling the books, like throwing junk out of an over-stuffed inventory. Even in games where these collectible texts don't take up any space and can't be discarded, where you acquire them while exploring or after completing side-missions, the most people usually do is skim them. And no wonder: there are so many games coming out every year, and the time you have to play them ..read more