I've been quite busy the past few weeks, still writing essays but in general as well. I didn't like how little was going up so I wanted to put up something even if it isn't amazing. This is just an off the cuff sort of rambling... podcast? About 10 minutes long, I wanted to keep generally themed ...
2022-02-15 20:29:20 +0000 UTC View PostNormally I try to bring a faux-expertise to what I write here. While I can at least meaningfully speculate on something that confuses me, I generally try to have as informed an outsider perspective as I can manage. This isn't the case here, but I wanted to talk a bit about the curious dynamic bet...
2022-02-04 03:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostSilent Hill fandom in this day and age is known far and wide within gaming as being extremely angry, even by video game fandom standards. This is distinct from merely Silent Hill fans as individuals. As a community, the kind who would describe themselves as remaining torchbearers for this franchi...
2022-02-02 03:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostSomething I rarely think to mention are the things I'm glad have changed in games over the years. It's easy to identify cases where increasing size of the corporations creating them has led to worse monetary practices and broader abuses of the people making them. There's an infinite well of topic...
2022-01-28 03:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostIn almost every sense, essays here are just "for me" but there are always degrees. Sometimes I'm trying to bring across a point I care about, or to try to better understand historical context. This time this is just for me to sort out my feelings on something that has been in my head for the majo...
2022-01-26 03:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostThere's something very presumptuous about putting a year at the end of your game's name. It is like a tacit promise to the consumer of two things. The product you are selling is going to be followed up consistently, if not yearly then close enough to it that it makes sense to designate by year. T...
2021-12-25 03:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostArcade racing games used to be a pretty big business. Sega built a name for itself off games like Hang-on and Outrun. Namco's Ridge Racer was a bright burning flame during the PS1's reign as the dominant console. Even now Mario Kart is consistently one of the highest selling games of any given ge...
2021-12-22 03:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostThere's not really a snappy way to say what I'm getting at with this post, but there is something that permeates video game discourse and especially becomes a problem as a game gets analyzed and overanalyzed. The more you examine a game's construction and the more you replay it, the harder it is ...
2021-12-17 03:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostThe early rush to get out software used to produce a lot of strange objects. The fundamental hardware design of a new system was almost totally incompatible with how a previous piece of hardware worked. That's not even mentioning that the leap between generations meant that a hastily converted ga...
2021-12-15 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostThere's a somewhat famous quote from Jaime Griesemer, a designer on Halo, talking about game design and construction. In it he describes a game like Halo as "30 seconds of fun" repeated in different scenarios, different configurations for variety/to keep it interesting. It's about as succinct an ...
2021-12-10 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostOften at console launch you'll get one or two licensed games—if you know anything about either launch games or licensed games you know full well that this is a terrifying crunch to put literally any human being through. I wish I could tell you that Orphen beats the odds, or even that it feels l...
2021-12-08 03:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis is an essay I was basically destined to write the second I chose to actually do any sort of project like this, but the announcement of Star Ocean: The Divine Force and some gentle prodding from a friend has pushed it to the front of my priorities list. Star Ocean: The Second Story is one of ...
2021-12-02 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostIt used to be that the weirdest games came from Japan, and the even weirdester games never left the country. We've largely moved past that period, both because the weirdest moderate budget excesses of the PS1 and PS2 eras are long in the rear view and because the market for localizations of niche...
2021-12-01 03:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostI didn't want to write this follow-up. If you haven't read it, this will be me expanding on "Machismo and the Marketing Masculinizing of the Video Game Hobby" which may be found here (https://www.patreon....
2021-11-26 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostQuintet's a developer with a lot of clout for a very specific crowd. It’s a company that burned exceptionally brightly on the Super Nintendo, carving a legacy that sparks reverence from fans of the console to this day. The only game of theirs that's still actually officially playable at this po...
2021-11-24 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe choices for RPGs on the PS2 in the first year were pretty slim. This was especially the case if you wanted traditional turn-based RPGs. While From Software and Level-5 would produce a number of action RPGs in that first year, there really just wasn't much in the way of vanilla JRPGs on the sy...
2021-11-19 03:00:59 +0000 UTC View PostJust want to mention that there will be some experimentation with making the audio versions of posts the top of future posts to see if I like that a bit better presentationally. The full text of any given post will still be underneath it, it'll just have the audio at the top in a player rather th...
2021-11-17 21:38:55 +0000 UTC View PostI talk about the PS2 a lot here, it's probably where the broadest spectrum of my knowledge comes from. It's the system I tracked as many games for as I could, subscribed to multiple magazines, read websites. When I had trouble at home, I immersed myself in caring about video games to not think ab...
2021-11-17 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe games as art debate is stale and pointless. The question of whether a medium can produce good art is stale and pointless, hashed out eternally over the 00s and 10s. I'd much rather declare victory and discuss the fallout. Games can be art, games can be good art, but their need to serve multip...
2021-11-12 03:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostHey let's shoot for some synergy, the PS2 Grand Theft Auto games are being remastered/have recently been remastered as of when this goes up. It's hard to describe how singular these games were in defining the way that the PS2 and by extension the entire industry would be going forward. Open world...
2021-11-10 03:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostFighting games are easier (though still extremely hard) to update than do sequels to. When you're making Street Fighter II: Champion Edition your roadmap for what needs fixing is tons of open player reaction to what's wrong with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior. When you're making Street Figh...
2021-11-05 02:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostAs everything on this patreon is probably already making clear, I love throwing on games from 10, 20, 30 years ago and just observing them for a couple of hours. To take dim memories and cast them into the light or to experience something I remembered reading about and never playing and just seei...
2021-11-03 02:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostSega of the mid 00s was a tragic company to watch, desperately latching on to whatever new identity it could in the wake of its utter destruction as a hardware company, but still retaining a glut of talented developers capable of producing unexpected gems. I want to highlight a weird little game ...
2021-10-29 02:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostThe creator of the Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) franchise, Toshihiro Nagoshi, has left Sega. It's the end of a long tenure at the company dating back thirty years and with dozens of classic games that he acted in some major position on. Nevertheless his lasting legacy will be gifting Sega one of the fr...
2021-10-27 02:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostI'm sick of all the complaining I do here so I want to talk about a game I threw in one night and ended up adoring even though I think it is technically kind of a failure to be an approachable game. Dearly departed Human Entertainment's Mizzurna Falls. To be clear, I would consider this gam...
2021-10-22 02:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostBy the time this likely goes up it'll have been a few weeks since Koichi Sugiyama passed. If that name's not familiar to you then... well mostly I'm sorry for the information this is going to transmit to you. Sugiyama was the composer of the Dragon Quest titles and, by the title of this you can p...
2021-10-20 02:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostLet's talk about Tetsuya Nomura, a man with heavy involvement with many of Square's most mainstream games and ever a lightning rod for debate about his merits as an artist, game designer, director, fashion designer, etc. He's been in the industry for over 30 years, starting as a debugger on FFIV....
2021-10-15 02:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostLet's talk about Adventure games. I love a good slow paced adventure when I'm in the right mood. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (buy it buy it buy it) was so good it got me to actually write again. The plot structure can have more build up, more set up, more dramatic rise and fall. The slower ...
2021-10-13 02:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostSo I sometimes intend to use this for subjects I sort of hope age poorly. In this case it's the reaction that's been brewing in my mind for like a year now to the FFXVI reveal and why the game fundamentally does not excite me based on what they showed. The game had by all accounts been in dev for...
2021-10-08 02:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostEvery so often I have to pursue a topic that is of consequence to no one but me basically. If every essay here was me doing sad prognostifications about the state of the industry this place would be miserable rather than merely tedious. So I'll pull up a common punching bag for people ragging on ...
2021-10-06 02:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post