Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

Me and Fire Emblem are not buds.

Strike one: these games are tactical RPGs. I don’t hate TRPGs, exactly, but I’ve liked and completed far fewer than I’ve gotten bored with and quit. I love Final Fantasy Tactics, as any right-thinking person, but it doesn’t crack my list of top ten Final Fantasy games.

Strike […]

Outer Wilds: Thoughts, Spoilers, and Unfair Comparisons

I bought Outer Wilds because people recommended it to me. These were not normal “hey you might like this” recommendations. More than one person who knows my tastes pretty well mentioned they thought this could be one of my all-time favorites. It didn’t happen in conjunction with some other game they knew I’d played, either. […]

Aggressive Monetization Ruins Games

Look, I understand that game publishers need to make money. I get that. I’m not going to write a frothing rant about how DLC and microtransactions are destroying the landscape of gaming. I’m not going to stack up some hippy-dippy malarky about how creativity and capitalism are at odds and any company that “sells out” […]

Answers to 15 More “Unanswered” Metal Gear Questions

I wish I had seen this video back when it was first uploaded, which was around the time I was compiling questions for my own smart-aleck-y list of answers to “Unanswered” Questions in Metal Gear. Alas, the timelines just didn’t work out that way. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago the video butted into […]

Return to Return of the Obra Dinn

I’m happy to report that my second playthrough of Return of the Obra Dinn confirmed three things for me:

1) The entire game is solvable through observation, logic, and deduction. There is no point where identifying a crewman or their fate requires any sort of guesswork.

2) The game is even better when played like […]

The Critical Flaw of the Obra Dinn

This post contains no spoilers for The Return of the Obra Dinn, but I do detail some specifics about the nuts and bolts of the core gameplay loop.

I quite enjoyed my time with Obra Dinn. Steam reports the game took me about ten hours to solve, spread across two long-ish play sessions, immersed […]

Mega Man X is Really Hard to Fix

Mega Man fanboys and fangirls the world over have only just sloppily consumed Mega Man 11, we’re already screaming out for seconds. Except instead of Mega Man 12, the sequel we’re all crying out for is Mega Man X9. The formula seems easy enough: give us a Mega Man X sequel using MM11‘s engine, polish […]

Mega Man 11

Mega Man 11 is a pretty excellent game, and I enjoy it muchly. But that’s actually a pretty loaded statement that’s gonna take at least one entire blog post to unpack. I’ll try to get the summary out of the way first before I get in my Guts Dozer and deep-dive.

If you like classic […]

Infusion and Hopoo Feather

I realize nobody wants to read my nitpick-y pontifications on Risk of Rain. But I am burning with the need to pontificate in a nitpick-y way, so this is what you’re stuck with.

Risk of Rain is a game about finding items. The more items you find, the more powerful you are, until you eventually […]

Final Fantasy VIII on Steam is a stupid broken wonderful mess, and it’s all Chocobo’s fault

When Final Fantasy VIII launched in Japan back in 1977, it included a mechanism to interface with a peripheral called the PocketStation. As far as I can tell this was a Tomagotchi-style device where you could play bleepy little dot matrix games, but also plugged into your PlayStation so you could import bonuses into whatever […]