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Subsurface Circular is a visual novel about talking to strangers on a train. Basically, a British person's worst nightmare. It ends up being a relaxing and thought-provoking experience where you talk to androids and solve a mystery without ever moving from your seat. At ninety minutes long, Subsurface Circular doesn't overstay its welcome and if…
I've spent more time than I'd like to acknowledge thinking about the games that might be revealed at E3 2018. There's no point keeping these predictions in my head because then I can't be smug and annoying if I get any of them correct. Anyway, here are my predictions. Most of them are a bit…
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On May 2, 2017, The New York Times stated the following in an article about gamers: This quote was also included in a tweet which was rightly lambasted and laughed at by gamers and people with common sense. Stereotyping is rarely accurate or productive, especially when you're talking about 150 million people. For context, there are about 126…
Continue reading ➞ The Other Problem with that New York Times Article About Gamers
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*Review copy provided by publisher* Devil May Cry transitioned from being a Resident Evil sequel to one of the best new IPs on the Playstation 2. It inspired three sequels, a reboot, and the God of War and Bayonetta franchises. In other words, it's a series that has earned some respect. Unfortunately, this HD Collection is…
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Fair warning: this review is longer than usual and descends into analysis territory at times. An earlier draft was much shorter, but I didn’t feel comfortable putting my criticisms out there without concrete examples. Despite spending a lot of time focusing on the negatives, I don’t hate Iconoclasts by any stretch. It’s average. Iconoclasts is…
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Sometimes all you need is a push. I was tempted by the previous Yakuza games and even had Yakuza 5 downloaded on my PS3 at one point. I never played it. It can be hard to jump into a series so late and nothing I saw made them look like must-play games. Then along came…
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I died over 500 times completing Celeste's six-hour story mode. I died another 500 times on just one of the post-game challenge levels. If I’d have known this before playing Celeste, I would have deleted the game and never bothered. I like a challenge but there’s usually a limit to my patience with hard video…
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Video games can—and indeed should—deal with sensitive subjects like mental illness. Celeste and Night in the Woods tackled depression, however including sensitive such topics carries an inherent risk and isn't something to be taken lightly. If the developer doesn’t do its research or messes up the implementation then the illness can come off as a…
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Ubisoft's latest financial results provide further proof that major publishers are shifting from selling "traditional" $60 games to selling what Ubisoft refers to as "live service" games i.e. ones with recurring revenue streams. DLC, microtransactions, and loot boxes make money and a lot of it. When I was a wee lad, publishers made money by…
Continue reading ➞ Ubisoft to Create More “Live Service” Games
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Shadow of the Colossus is the perfect response to gamers who complain about the glut of remakes and ports of old games to new consoles. Shadow of the Colossus was on my list of shame for twelve years. I couldn’t afford the game when it first came out in 2005 but I made a mental…
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I always thought the term “collectathon” was a rather mean-spirited way to describe games like Jak & Daxter, Spyro the Dragon, and Super Mario 64. Sure, Jak & Daxter had 2000 precursor orbs to walk into, but it was the power cells that progressed the story and they took more work. You collected orbs but…
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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a disappointing follow up to The New Order. The story in The New Colossus features two of the craziest scenes ever included in a video game, and yet for most of its fifteen hour campaign, the story meanders from destroyed city to destroyed city—and then back to the first destroyed city—as…
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Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is the follow-up to the crazy but delightful Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. The original had me glued to my Vita the entire way through as I watched an evil animatronic teddy bear force a group of school children to murder each other. Goodbye Despair offers more of the same. There’s a bigger…
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Steins;Gate is my favorite visual novel and I recommend it to anyone. It’s a time travel story that makes as much sense as a time travel story ever can and includes a healthy dose of science to keep everything appropriately grounded. Steins;Gate’s “true ending” felt complete and it never occurred to me that we’d get…
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It’s about that time of the year when every online publication and YouTuber churns out a Game of the Year list. Actually, that time was a few weeks ago, but it’s still 2017, so I reckon I can get away with it. When have I ever been timely? I don't want to do a straight…
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I can usually tell if I'm going to enjoy a puzzle game from the first ten minutes I spend playing it. Puzzle games follow a standard formula: introduce a simple concept and then drip-feed new mechanics into the game to up the challenge. However, you're usually doing the same thing from beginning to end. If…
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A Hat in Time is an adorable throwback to 3D platformers from the N64 era. It’s a love letter to games like Mario 64, however it’s a love letter from an honest partner. One who isn’t afraid to point out your flaws and tell you where you need to improve. Yes, I love you, but we…
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SteamWorld Dig 2 is a beautiful and charming game with a satisfying mixture of exploration, puzzles, and mildly challenging platforming. The more treasure you collect, the more abilities you unlock, which in turn, lets you collect even more treasure. It’s a simple yet addictive loop that pushed me forward until I beat the final boss.…
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With Assassin’s Creed Origins, Ubisoft has made wholesale changes to its most popular franchise. There’s a new combat system that feels more like For Honor than Arkham Asylum, side quests with meaty stories like those in The Witcher 3, and a loot system ripped straight from Destiny. You can even hide in tall grass like,…
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“I can’t tell you anything about Doki Doki Literature Club. Just play it.” “It starts slow, but it’s totally worth it.” “You have to play this blind to get the full experience. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever played.” That is how people talk about Doki Doki Literature Club. Everyone wants you to play the…
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Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the best games released this year. It had a unique post-apocalyptic story told through strong characters and excellent writing, a visually stunning world populated by machines ranging from small animals to massive dinosaurs, and a relatively deep combat system that let you feel like an expert hunter. Horizon Zero…
Continue reading ➞ Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds DLC (PS4)
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SOMA is a horror game. Not because it has jump scares or because it fills you with a constant sense of dread. SOMA is a horror game because it makes you contemplate questions about yourself and humanity that are horrifying. These aren’t easy emotions to deal with, however SOMA isn't meant to be taken lightly. Right…
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The Evil Within 2 is a better game than its predecessor; however, it’s also a less interesting one. The first game was fascinating and yet hard to recommend due to problems with pacing, sloppy storytelling, and plenty of bugs and glitches. The sequel corrects most of those problems and, to use a term I hate,…
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There’s nothing about Cuphead’s gameplay that particularly appeals to me. Boss rush modes, trial and error based encounters, and bullet hell shooters are not high on my list of enjoyable game elements. And yet somehow a small indie studio run by two people has combined all these elements into one of the best games of…
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Imagine you’re a food critic who has to review a restaurant. You usually go to restaurants by yourself when you're reviewing them, but this restaurant insists you bring some friends along. The food was excellent, but the service was lousy and you were double charged for the beer. However, you had a good laugh with your…
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Uncharted: The Lost Legacy proves two things about the Uncharted series: One, Uncharted games do not need Nathan Drake. Two, Uncharted games do need an overhaul from the ground up. I love most of the characters in this series. I love the writing—which is largely unparalleled in the video game industry—and I love going on…
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The Evil Within is a frustrating game. Not because of its difficulty—although it can be tough at times—but because it comes so close to doing something great. So close, yet so, so far. Despite what the score attached to this review might indicate, The Evil Within is not boring in its mediocrity. It’s a game…
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You can feel the love. From the moment you see Sonic wagging his finger on that familiar title screen all the way until you activate Super Sonic six hours later, you’ll be in no doubt that Sonic Mania was made by people who love the original 16-bit Sonic games. Fortunately, Christian Whitehead, Headcannon, and PagodaWest…
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Early 3D platformers don’t stand the test of time. That’s the general consensus and it’s easy to build up a compelling list of examples to prove the thesis. Bubsy, Gex, and Croc all tried to jump into the third dimension and they all misjudged the landing thanks to poor controls and terrible cameras. Playing those…
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With Nioh, Team Ninja has created that rarest of all beasts: a video game that gets compared to the Soulsborne games and yet actually warrants the comparison. Team Ninja quotes Dark Souls as inspiration although the frantic pace of combat and focus on offense instead of defense means that Bloodborne will be most prevalent in…
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At the beginning of What Remains of Edith Finch, you walk down a path and approach a house that looks like discarded concept art from a Tim Burton movie. You’d be forgiven for expecting What Remains of Edith Finch to be a creepy horror game with a scattering of jump scares. Instead, it’s a sad…
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Prey starts off as a scary survival horror experience where you can’t so much as walk past a coffee cup or a trash can without tensing up and preparing to swing your wrench at an inanimate object. You scrounge for resources and treasure every ammo clip not knowing when you’ll get another. That’s how it…
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In my forty hours with NieR: Automata, I fought a giant construction site, watched machines conduct their own twisted version of Romeo and Juliet, and unraveled one of the most philosophically interesting stories in video games. I did this all while playing the game as a third-person hack and slash action RPG, a top down…
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The Sexy Brutale is a murder mystery game where the mystery is not figuring out who did the crime, but figuring out how to stop it. It's the first game from Cavalier Game Studios, an independent studio created by former Lionhead Studios developers, and made in conjunction with Tequila Works. https://youtu.be/4YZeHaYobKk In The Sexy Brutale,…
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Horizon Zero Dawn is the first game in recent memory where I’ve been thrown into a post-apocalyptic future and actually believed in the world around me. Horizon places you 1,000 years into the future, when humanity has been reduced to tribal societies, and machines roam the land. The concept sounds far-fetched and yet every minute I…
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My first five hours with Mass Effect: Andromeda weren’t just disappointing, they were flat-out bad. I rarely went ten minutes without encountering a glitch such as floating enemies or huge frame rate drops. The characters were dull and their dialogue cringe-inducing. My mission log filled up with pointless fetch quests, and the user interface seemed…
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DICE has done something new with its Battlefield franchise and it isn’t about to let you forget it. On booting up Battlefield 1 for the first time, you’re thrown straight into a horrifying single-player prologue that sees you struggling—and eventually failing—to survive against an onslaught of enemy soldiers. It’s a not-so-subtle attempt to demonstrate the…
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Crystal Dynamics gave the Tomb Raider series a much-needed shot in the arm with 2013’s Tomb Raider. Truth be told, it didn’t feel much like the Tomb Raider games I remember from the late nineties, but given the countless failed attempts to move the franchise into the 21st Century, that is perhaps for the best.…
Continue reading ➞ Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration (PS4)
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At its best, Fallout 4 is a captivating game in which the hours fly by as you wander the wasteland moving from adventure to adventure, collecting scrap to upgrade your weapons, and trying to survive in a brutal post-apocalyptic Boston. It’s a huge leap up from Fallout 3 in terms of graphics, shooting, and overall…
Rumors that Boss Key's employees found out about the company's closure via a tweet do not appear to be correct. Instead, a company meeting was held shortly before the announcement. On May 14th, 2018, Cliff Bleszinski announced via Twitter that Boss Key Productions, Inc., the studio he founded in 2014, would be closing with immediate effect.…
Continue reading ➞ Boss Key Employees Informed of Closure Via a Meeting, Not Via Bleszinski’s Tweet
EA's "live services" revenue represents 40% of its total revenue for the year ended 31 March 2018, with expected growth of 15% in 2019. Most of EA's live services revenue comes from the various "Ultimate Team" modes in its sports games with FIFA Ultimate Team being the most popular and profitable. Outside of Ultimate Team modes, The Sims…
Continue reading ➞ EA Now Makes 40% of its Revenue from “Live Services”
Nintendo's paid online service, Nintendo Switch Online, is coming in September, with free NES games and save data cloud backup. Nintendo announced its online service last year but was light on the details. We now know that Nintendo Switch Online is coming in September 2018 and will cost $3.99 a month, with options to buy in blocks…
Continue reading ➞ Nintendo Switch Online Will Have Free NES Games and Cloud Saves
Microtransactions are returning to Star Wars Battlefront II on April 18 alongside a new Ewok Hunt mode. Star Wars Battlefront 2’s new update, Night on Endor, brings with it the return of Crystals which are purchased with real-world money. Crystals can only be exchanged for cosmetic Appearances, although the Appearances can also be acquired for…
Continue reading ➞ Microtransactions Return to Star Wars Battlefront 2 in Next Update
