2018 is now upon us! That means a whole new year of games to look forward to! Here's a few that I can't wait to dig into this coming year in no particular order
Spider-Man
I said no particular order, but Spider-Man is the exception. I am more excited for Spider-Man than any other game on this list by a significant amount. I have high hopes for this game as well as licensed franchise games in general. My hope is that Insomniac is able to tell a new unique Spider-Man story as they see fit and build the game they want to build around that story. Batman Arkham Asylum was so special and I believe this game can have a similar impact. I don't necessarily want it to become a franchise or even have a sequel. I just want Insomniac to put out a great game and get rewarded with great sales to match. Hopefully it's significant enough that other companies take notice of what Batman and Spider-Man have done and see that if they put their licensed properties in the hands of caring studios and don't require them to tie it to an upcoming movie (or other property), they can be rewarded with critical and commercial success that helps their brand overall. I want to see better Star Wars games, Ninja Turtle Games, Transformer Games, and of course, better superhero games in general. I believe this game is the next stepping stone on that path.
The staff and administrators of RF Generation, would like to wish you all a safe and Happy New Year! Thank you so much for making 2017 such a great year for site contributions and we hope that you will continue to enjoy this service to the world-wide gaming community for years to come. Happy 2018 to all!
What a super weird year for my gaming habits! So let's see... after several years of pretty much playing everything on PC, I bought a Switch and barely played it for more than a month, dusted off my Xbox One and remembered how much fun it is to play games on a couch and using a controller. Since then I sold off a bunch of stuff, bought a new 4K TV, shoved my PC in a closet somewhere and still haven't really taken the Switch off its charging dock. (The Switch is a great console by the way - and great piece of tech. But I prefer it as a handheld rather than as a docked console, and to be honest I just don't play handhelds all that often lately). Anyway, yeah it's been a weird year for my gaming habits, but it's also been a pretty stellar year for games. Once again I struggled to actually keep up with everything I really wanted to play. So of course this is just a list of my favorite games that I did manage to play this year. Oh, the places I've been!
I only played 3 video games this year...well, not really, but I only played three games for a substantial amount of time. People who know me or who have heard me speak in the last two years can guess what one of them is. The other two are both on the Nintendo Switch (with a third on deck). Let's talk about why I keep going back to the same series and why I am finally at a point where I can spread my gaming wings a little bit.
Late last year, once all of the annual 'Best of' lists started coming out for the games released in 2016, I lamented the fact that I had only played a paltry four new release titles from the year and thus had no opinion on many of the games that were being discussed. So in 2017, I was determined to play more new release titles during the year in an effort to stay more up-to-date with all of the discussions going on for the latest and greatest games. And just like with everything I do, I went insanely overboard and ended up playing nearly 30 new release titles this year.
Instead of doing a traditional Top 10 list of the games I played this year, I wanted to focus on a select few that I thought were particularly great but may unfortunately go unnoticed and slip under the radar of most people. Most of these games really aren't what you would call obscure, but with the massive amount of great games released this year, it can be easy to forget about the ones that didn't get quite as much coverage. These also aren't necessarily my favorite games of the year, as I am intentionally leaving out some of the more popular titles that were released.
There are rare moments in gaming history where a game releases and shows that it is truly possible to learn lessons from a well designed video game and apply them to the real world. For most of us the first lessons that come to mind might be critical thinking skills from having to think abstractly to solve a puzzle, twitch reflexes from high octane action games, or the obvious social benefits of a good online community. [i[Persona 5[/i] is something different, and represents a far more difficult pill and series of lessons for many around the world to swallow. Persona 5 is an important game, not because its the best selling in Atlus' history and could represent a small first step in a larger paradigm shift for turn-based role playing game design, but because it is one of the most down to earth reflections of the corruption that can penetrate and permeate a society from the highest levels down to the lowest. It's the same type of importance one might give to say, the first Deus Ex for calling out many of the problems of society, governance, and the very real world of false flag operations and conspiracy that existed in the late 1990's while that game was being developed and is still continuing to this day.
Since it is Christmas time, I figured I would review one of the games that I have the fondest holiday memories of. December 25th, 1997 was the Christmas that I received my first PlayStation, and with it a few games. In my possession at the time was a demo disk, WCW/NWO Thunder, and Jet Moto. While I was a huge wrestling fan, Thunder SUCKED (I'll do a review some other time), so I was left to spend my Christmas playing a game I had not even heard of up until that moment.
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.
Driv3r appeared on the game market at a bad time. The game industry was already swimming in the wake created by GTA3, its sequel, GTA Vice City, and the hype generated by the next entry in the series due out but he end of 2004, GTA: San Andreas., Honestly, you couldn't open a magazine without seeing coverage from one or two "sandbox" games. But Driv3r did have one thing going for it, that being lineage. While many of the GTA copycats out there had nothing more to go on than genre similarity, Driv3r already had street cred, with two games out that were pretty popular during their respective times. Despite this, it turned into a failure, and after a few ports (PC, GBA, and mobile), it disappeared forever. But, could Driv3r be all that bad?
Another year closing, another chance to get in on some cooperative fun with friends and family! In between grandma kisses and overloading on sugar cookies, hopefully you can convince some folks to sit down and have some game-time. For some of us, this is one of the only times of year we can actually get some decent couch co-op going, so hopefully my own crews' countless hours of "testing" these titles can prove useful. As is generally the case, I tossed together a selection of lesser-knowns along with some popular games that have overlooked multiplayer options. *Mario Voice:* Here we go!
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is a first person shooter that was developed by Machine Games and released on October 27 2017. It was also my most anticipated game of the year.
In this review I go over the story and character focus, the gameplay, the environments, and whether it lives up to The New Order, which quickly became one of my all time favourite games.
This November we played through our first ever title on the original Game Boy. Hosts, Rich (singlebanana) and Shawn (GrayGhost81), are joined by special guest, RF Generation site member, and gray brick aficionado, MetalFRO (aka. The Game Boy Guru) to discuss the classic, action/adventure RPG, Final Fantasy Adventure. In this episode, the guys discuss the gameplay, the weapons and items, the somewhat convoluted story, and the game's surprisingly complex music. Did this game pass the classic gaming "sniff test" for all of the guys, or is it just another lackluster relic from days of yore? And which game series does it have more in common with, Final Fantasy or the Mana Chronicles? The answer to these questions and many more in this month's episode of the RF Generation Playcast. You won't want to miss it!
As always, we are happy to hear your thoughts on this game on our discussion page (linked below). We will respond to your comments and are always happy to discuss the game more. We hope you enjoy our show. Please be sure to rate and write a review of the show on iTunes to help us increase our listenership. Thanks for the listen!
This is an interesting curio - Nail 'n Scale from Japanese developer I'Max, and published by Data East. Originally released in 1990 in Japan as Dragon Tail, this unique puzzle platformer didn't make its way to Western shores for nearly a year and a half. By the time the game was released in 1992, most developers had begun to really take advantage of the Game Boy's hardware capabilities. Nail 'n Scale, however, still looks and plays like an early Game Boy title. Does this ruin the game's chances of standing up against some of its then peers? Watch the review, and decide for yourself!
We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you this month's edition of RF Generation's Site News! In this issue, we celebrate a recent award bestowed upon our site, announce our January 2018 community playthrough title, check in on our 2017 Pain Yourself With Submissions Contest winner, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals during the month of November. We are changing our submission "focus" again, so stay tuned to the end of our broadcast for more details. Thanks for keeping it on Channel 3!
REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line. Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
Ask any retro gamer what consumer CRT they would prefer and you're probably going to hear Sony Trinitron. Few Sony products carry the same gravitational pull as the Trinitron with over 280 million tubes sold and name recognition on par with the Walkman. The apreture grill technology used in the Trinitron line gave Sony's products a unique look and made the name Trinitron a synonym for the best quality TV sets and computer monitors around. So with all of this going for the Tiritron CRT why would you choose anything else?
