We’ve timewarped into 1992 to play (what I think is) the best Sonic game: Sonic the Hedgehog 2Join me and Paulfor rings, things, vibes, and robot baddies.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse released in North America five years ago yesterday. It’s far from the best Dragon Ball fighting game, but it had a secret weapon: the ability to create original characters. This one key feature gave fans something they’d been craving since the early days of forum art and fan-fiction, and it resulted in…
Stories often have strength because we fill in the gaps. Whenever there’s ambiguity, there’s a chance to speculate and create meaning. Some of the most successful games understand this—Shadow of the Colossus isn’t just impressive for its giant monsters, but also for a story where nothing is entirely explained. Stories and Smoke operates on the…
Final Fantasy XIV’s current expansion Shadowbringers landed with a bang last July, and it’s been expanding since then with more battles and intrigue. Those additions have come in pieces: a string of raid monsters here, a cross-over collaboration with Nier Automata there. The early additions were enjoyable, but the story took time to move its…
There’s a saying among some Final Fantasy XIV players: “glamour is the true endgame.” While there are plenty of high tier raids and continuing story quests, fashion is a key component of the game, and today brings some good news for players who put fashion first. In the lead-up to the next round of fresh…
We live in an age where pretty much any game you want is right at your fingertips, so long as you have an internet connection. That wasn’t always the case. If you wanted to try out games in the 1990s and 2002s, you played a demo disc. The Haunted PS1 Demo Disc, which came out…
When I left the theater after a private screening of Sonic the Hedgehog, one of the organizers walked up to me with a question. Would the movie please hardcore fans? I took a moment to think. It didn’t matter, I said, shrugging. It wasn’t a movie for them; it was a movie made for kids.…
Your mission in Tales From Off-Peak City Vol.1 is simple: find and steal a precious saxophone from a pizza shop owner. It’s an undercover mission where you’ll masquerade as an assistant in the pizzeria. But something’s wrong. Everyone in the town is a little “off,” your boss is suddenly rushed off and gives you ownership…
BioShock: The Collection is out now, bringing Rapture and Columbia into glorious high(er) definition. But the most important thing is that the collection includes the best BioShock title ever made: Minerva’s Den. It is a humble piece of downloadable content for BioShock 2 and it is damn near perfect. This piece originally published in September…
I’m replaying VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender after chilling with the chill barista game Coffee Talk If you want to know how to make some strange cyberpunk drinks, here’s a video with some of the best.
Final Fantasy XIV’s recent expansion “Shadowbringers’ delivered some of the game’s best stories and challenges. But expansions don’t really end right away, and the next patch is stuffed with content and drama. A new trailer and developer livestream outlines giant robot battles, creepy villains, and maybe the most adorable and important mount ever placed in…
Zelda speedrunning is always changing. Long-sought skips have been found in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and Ocarina of Time has been completed in under ten minutes. Now, a new combination of discoveries might push The Wind Waker speedrunning to a new milestone, bringing its completion time to under an hour. One well-known Zelda…
If you were a Zelda fan in 1998, you probably took your sweet time playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Exploring the world could easily take days, and if you were like me or other unfortunate souls, you got lost in the now-infamous Water Temple. Speedrunners have whittled that wandering down over the…
Life sometimes feels like it runs a mile a minute. Shit never stops, there’s always a new crisis, and your jaw is clenched in perpetuity. In those moments, it can help to focus on the little things. Like coffee. A trip to the corner shop or a dirty cup from the office kitchen is like…
There are a few key ways to increase the difficulty of a puzzle game. You could add new rules that limit player options or strange hazards that shift their strategies. You can also just add a metric crap-ton of variables to track. Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät, a game by Stephen Lavelle, does exactly that by cranking Tetris up…
Gacha games rightly have a reputation as dangerous cash grabs, rife with tricks to lure players into spending gobs of money on new characters or items. If you’re a gacha player, you’re part of a dedicated group that literally warns other folks away from their chosen genre. That’s because the tricks never end, and one…
Kingdom Hearts III’s new DLC Re:Mind remixes the game’s finale into a series of altered events with additional boss fights and story beats. It also adds an additional chapter in which players can face off against highly difficult “data” versions of defeated villains. Diehard fans who push through these fights will find one final challenge…
Come watch us stream Kingdom Hearts III’s incredibly bonkers new Re:Mind DLC to give your Friday afternoon the anime-as-hell ending it deserves. You can follow us on Twitch for more streams just like this one.
Kingdom Hearts has two modes: cheerful Disney reveries and the most extreme of anime bullshit. Both have their merits, but the latter is where the series shines its brightest and is most captivating. Kingdom Hearts III’s new DLC, Re:Mind, embraces this. There’s time travel and scheming villains, dramatic clashes between light and dark, difficult new…
I died 40 minutes into Disco Elysium. Tired, I had left my hotel room and interviewed a cafeteria manager downstairs. I ran away when he said I owed money on a bill. I tripped, crashed into a woman in a wheelchair, and fell to the floor, where I had a fatal heart attack. I was…
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