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I read Ernest Cline's dystopian, reference-laden young adult novel Ready Player One in 2015 after it was recommended to me by my wife. Though I enjoyed the book, I felt that the reliance on references of 80's pop-culture was a little overwhelming. When I heard that the book was going to be adapted into a film, I was intrigued. What would it be like to have the many intellectual properties referred to in the novel seen on the big screen together? Even with Steven Spielberg at the helm, and the original author contributing to the screenplay, could a coherent story be told with all the pop-culture overlaying the action? I recently checked out the film with my wife, and here are some quick, spoiler-free thoughts.
Continue reading RF Cinema: Ready Player One
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I hate seeing a major title misfire right out of the gates. Sure, there is some serious opportunity for schadenfreude, especially when the game in question is released by a cynical, consumer-hostile publisher like EA. When Mass Effect: Andromeda was announced, I was very excited for it. Although I believe the series declined from its initial entry, I was excited to see how Bioware and EA would create a new story within the Mass Effect framework.
Continue reading Don't Believe the Negative Hype - Mass Effect: Andromeda
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World War I has recently piqued my interest in a major way. I've been studying the events of the "war to end all wars" for past few months as I honestly knew nothing about it previously. Recently reading All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms made me want to dig deeper into this historical catastrophe. After much reading, and watching countless Youtube videos, I sought out a copy of EA and DICE's WWI shooter Battlefield 1. I played through the campaign recently and I thought the game was very interesting and enjoyable. However, I was left scratching my head at some incredible omissions by the developers, namely the countries involved in the playable campaign.
Continue reading The Incomplete Single-Player Campaign of Battlefield 1
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For gamers and collectors, the advent of a new year commonly brings goals and resolutions as with any other aspect of life. In the past I have tried to tweak my habits to get the most out of the medium, and I have usually been able to maximize my enjoyment of the hobby, or at least evaluate my own behaviors in an honest way. My goals for both playing and collecting video games in 2018 are reactionary to the way I approached them in 2017. I'm going to reign back the deluge of spending and quantity of titles played.
Continue reading Hello, 2018!
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I'm ready to wrap up 2017 from a gaming perspective, and otherwise. This year will go down as another banner year for video games which ends in a seven, and while I have acquired many of the top-tier titles released this year, the only one I played was Persona 5. It was a fantastic experience, but it was the only cutting edge experience I had all year. As the year draws to a close, I find myself looking forward to 2018 as the year when I will play the best games of 2017, like Nier: Automata and Yakuza Zero among many others.
Continue reading Good-bye 2017!
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As a longtime fan of the Yakuza series, I was as excited as I was perplexed by the announcement and release in 2011 and 2012 of Yakuza: Dead Souls. Much like Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, the game is a zombie laden, non-canonical side adventure using characters and locations from the main series of games. Dead Souls takes place after the events of Yakuza 4. It is interesting to note that the release of the game was delayed after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 in Japan, as the game depicts real-life Japanese cities in a state of ruin.
Continue reading Yakuza: Dead Souls
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Before I dove back into the numbered series of Ace Combat games, I decided to take a look at another handheld entry in the series with Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception for the Sony PSP. The game certainly starts out promising and converts elements from the console games to handheld very nicely, but it does have a few shortcomings. Ace Combat X is seemingly going for the same dramatic presentation of Ace Combat 4, but it can't quite reach the high bar set by that title. For one thing, the voice acting is pretty poor. For a series with anime-influenced futuristic war stories, the presentation has to be really authentic to be effective. In this game it was difficult to take the story seriously at times.
Continue reading Ace Combat Retrospective, Part 2
[img width=700 height=393]https://nsx.np.dl.playstation.net/nsx/material/9/9d9d03f922f1679d1c21fac11f6db7824868cd18-802072.jpg[/img] Image of Ace Combat: Infinity courtesy of Playstation
Since I played Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy on the 3DS last month, I had been craving more dogfighting, dive-bombing airplane action. I didn't realize how addictive the gameplay was until I was done with the game, when it dawned on me how much it left me wanting more. There's something about controlling a fighter plane, and methodically locking onto enemies and taking them out, one by one that is very satisfying.
Continue reading Ace Combat Retrospective, Part One
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Hello fellow gamers! I couldn't decide on one dedicated topic this month, so I decided to write something that is more like a blog post in the traditional sense. This is just what I've been up to lately. I hope everyone is doing well. Settle in for a nice, breezy read and say, "Hi" in the comments below.
Continue reading What I've Been Up To...
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I've been a casual fan of the modern variations of the LEGO games since the first LEGO Star Wars game. I love playing them with my wife and the easy, low-stakes gameplay makes for a balanced experience for players of differing skill levels. Last year I played LEGO Batman 2 on the Nintendo DS and I thought it was a fine hand-held counterpart to the console version of the game. I knew then that LEGO games on hand-helds had the potential to be great, and was looking forward to trying another one in the future. I recently played through another LEGO title on a more advanced piece of hardware. How did it stack up?
Continue reading Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins
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Although I have been an anime fan for a number of years, much like with gaming, I tend to not be on the cutting edge of what is new and popular. As such, I was extremely late to the party for the phenomenon known as Attack on Titan. The first season of the show began airing all the way back in 2013 and I did not dive in until this year. With that said, I am hooked, and perhaps fortunate as the second season began airing shortly after I finished catching up with the first season. The premise is simple. Humanoid giants known as Titans have killed off most humans and pushed them into isolation behind huge walls enclosing their city. Military squads do their best to fend the Titans off but the situation is always somewhere between bleak and dire. I will make it clear without reservations, I am enthralled with the Attack on Titan universe and characters. With that in mind, I was excited with high expectations for the video game adaptation, which I played through recently on the PlayStation 4.
Continue reading Attack On Titan
[img width=700 height=403]http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h32/grayghost81/interactive-sampler-disc-cd-volume-8_zpsardimgx2.jpg[/img] Image courtesy of gameigloo.com
Video game technology is taking us to a somewhat lamentable place, where physical demos of games are fewer and farther between than they were in the 1990's when I was growing up. Even though digital demos and game samples will probably always exist, many gamers miss the days of physical demo discs which were filled with playable demos, videos, or some other goodies related to upcoming releases. Even as I grow further away from an obsession with physical media, I can definitely look back fondly on the days of the physical demo discs of the fifth and sixth console generations. I still have many of these demo discs in my collection, and one in particular whips up so much nostalgia in me that it is one of the prized possessions I have.
Continue reading The Best Demo Disc
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During the discussion of Diablo on our podcast, I remarked that the game, while mostly enjoyable, made we want to play more modern games inspired by the classic dungeon dive. One example of such a game, which I mentioned by name, is Dungeon Siege III, a title I purchased quite a long time ago, but had never even cracked the shrink wrap on. Having put the game back on my radar, I decided to finally give it try. Did the game satisfy the modern dungeon crawler urge that Diablo had lit within me? Let's take a look.
Continue reading Dungeon Siege III
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I recently stumbled upon a game that surprised me with its presentation, cultural flavor, and overall fun. Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble for the Sony PSP was the perfect game to play after finishing Yakuza 5, as there are similarities between the two games, although Kenka Bancho is distinct in many ways. Though there are many entries in this series, this is the only one we've gotten in North America. Let's check it out!
Continue reading Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble
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This is going to be a follow-up of sorts to my previous entry. Writing that post was quite cathartic, and putting into words feelings which I had trouble identifying over the past year or so. A month later I realize how down I really was about my fleeting passion for gaming and I knew I would need to bounce back, or my interest would fade further. I was hoping that hosting The Secret of Mana for the community playthrough and playing it on original hardware would light that spark, but to put it simply, it didn't happen that way. Instead, a combination of a few things happened concurrently. I soft-modded a secondhand Nintendo Wii and loaded it with emulators. I did the same thing to my phone. I started playing games wherever I could in an effort to add games to my post in the "Games Beaten" thread to get my count up in January for a big start to the year. So far I've played a lot of handheld games (because they are shorter), and I'll tell you a little about them in a bit. First I want to mention the other project I'm working on that has fired me up a bit when it comes to gaming.
Continue reading On Sharing - A Follow-up
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