50 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(01/25/24 4:19am)
Every so often, I’ll stumble into a game with almost no expectations. Usually, it’s because a single screenshot caught my eye on social media. That’s exactly what happened with Mike Klubnika’s breakout indie game, Buckshot Roulette. At first glance, it looks an awful lot like Inscryption — one of my favorite games of the last few years — but it’s not an entirely unfair comparison.
(01/17/24 2:30am)
The game-of-the-year conversation is tired at this point.
(10/25/23 4:01pm)
I find it extremely difficult to talk about Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. The horror-tinged occult mystery visual novel is one of my favorite games of the year, but explaining what makes it so special inherently takes away some of its strength. It is a title that lives and dies on its novelty, and mentioning any of its most compelling twists robs it of its potent ability to surprise.
(10/16/23 3:59am)
A decade after its original release on the Wii U, "Super Mario 3D World" remains something of an anomaly in the long lineage of “Mario” games. Unlike its home console predecessors, the "Super Mario Galaxy" duology, or its successor, "Super Mario Odyssey," "3D World" has no cohesive aesthetic or central gimmick. Unlike nearly every other 3D entry in the series, it is a level-based game with a pretty obvious straight line from the beginning to the end of every level.
(10/10/23 1:10am)
I’ve picked up a few Halloween traditions over the years. Some are relevant to this column’s usual subject matter; most Octobers, I will replay “Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion,” and I always like to start and complete a brand new horror game. However, my favorite tradition is the list.
(10/01/23 11:45pm)
This month, a movie will be released that seems to be at least half a decade late to its own party. That movie is “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” a long-in-development horror film based on the 2014 video game of the same name. The long-awaited (or maybe dreaded) arrival of the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie got me thinking about what exactly happened to FNaF.
(09/27/23 2:31am)
Last week, I wrote about Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis. I felt that its status as a lazily designed cash grab tarnished its legendary namesake by association. I still feel that way, for the record – since writing that column, I’ve barely touched Ever Crisis. However, it did remind me of just how much I love Final Fantasy VII itself. So, for the last week, I have fully immersed myself in the world of Final Fantasy VII. I’ve been reading the books, playing the spinoffs and above all else, tracking the production of next year’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. It’s the second part in the ambitious “Final Fantasy VII Remake” trilogy, which started with 2020's aptly titled Final Fantasy VII Remake.
(09/18/23 2:52am)
It would not be an exaggeration to call Final Fantasy VII one of the most important video games ever made. The adventures of Cloud Strife and co. have left an undeniable impact that can be felt in not just every modern RPG but, for better or for worse, nearly every modern game. Its cinematic storytelling, dense and complicated worldbuilding, expansive map and rich build-crafting set a standard that is still being chased nearly 30 years later.
(09/12/23 2:25am)
The opening minutes of “Marvel’s Spider-Man,” Insomniac Games’ flashy 2018 blockbuster, are pretty great. The camera pans over Peter Parker’s apartment, littered with dirty dishes, unpaid paper bills, and half-finished crime-fighting gadgets. The game seamlessly transitions from cinematic cutscene to gameplay as Peter pulls on the Spider-Man suit, and begins swinging through Insomniac’s breathtaking re-creation of Manhattan and cracking jokes.
(09/05/23 1:07am)
It’s rare for a game studio to become nearly synonymous with a single franchise, but that’s exactly what’s happened to FromSoftware, Inc. over the last 14 years. In the years since the 2009 acclaimed cult classic “Demon’s Souls,” FromSoftware has almost exclusively released “Soulsborne” games. In 2023, if you know FromSoftware by name, you know it for “Dark Souls,” “Bloodborne,” “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice” and “Elden Ring” games that are all part of an unofficial super-franchise helmed by director Hidetaka Miyazaki.
(07/08/23 1:04pm)
Every time I start to collect my thoughts on “Final Fantasy XVI,” the latest in Square Enix’s legendary series of blockbuster role-playing games, I’m faced with a problem: I like this game, but everything I need to say about it makes it sound terrible.
(05/24/23 4:00am)
I like “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.” I don’t love it, but I like it. Its hardware-defying physics engine and uncommonly large open world are cool. Scaling every single wall in the game admittedly feels like a bit of a magic trick of mechanical engineering. But, all of that seems as though it surrounds a game that just… doesn’t do very much. For a long time, I figured that was an inherent symptom of the open world formula– once a game reaches a certain level of “openness,” I reasoned, it’s impossible to get all that much out of it.
(04/28/23 1:28am)
This is a column about video games. They’re what I write about almost exclusively because I love them. As a medium, they play host to a fascinating tension between the player and modes of interaction, an idea not found anywhere else that’s rife with exciting artistic possibilities.
(04/21/23 1:58am)
In August of last year, I went on a bit of a “TRON” kick. I’ve always had some fondness for “TRON,” the wounded puppy of 1980s sci-fi. It’s a movie neither cynical enough to slot in among the “RoboCops” of the world nor coherent enough to spawn a “Star Wars”-like franchise. But as I lamented back in August, it feels as though “TRON,” a movie about video games, has rarely had much luck in its own games. At the time, I posited that games were spending too much energy on the film’s incoherent world-building and not enough on the flashy bloodsports that make up the movie’s most exciting moments.
(04/13/23 2:26am)
The remake of “Resident Evil 4,” released last month, is something of a minor miracle. A remake of one of the most beloved games ever made, retailing for a full $60 when the original usually goes for around $5, was an act of incredible hubris. Even with the excellent remakes of “Resident Evil 2” and “Resident Evil 3” in mind, part of me fully expected the game to be a mess.
(04/07/23 3:04am)
In 2014, “John Wick” was something of a revelation. The balletic action film, directed by future “Deadpool 2” director David Leitch and “The Matrix Reloaded” stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski, was a breath of fresh air. Its robust worldbuilding makes the film feel almost like a comic book movie with no comic book to adapt from.
(02/24/23 2:39am)
I’m somewhat fascinated by the concept of the “demake.” Video games very frequently chase technical advancement, higher graphical fidelity, more realistic physics - but sometimes those ideals are dashed by the simple limitations of the hardware. But as Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitation.”
(02/17/23 3:51am)
“Metroid Prime” has long been hailed as one of the greatest games ever. Developer Retro Studios brought Nintendo’s “Metroid” formula of open-ended exploration interspersed with terse, brief action interludes and brought it into the third dimension. Its reevaluation of physical space as it relates to traversal, violence and history has been endlessly picked at and analyzed in the 20 years since its initial release.
(01/31/23 4:20am)
Last year, Tango Gameworks released a game called “Ghostwire: Tokyo." It was a reasonably straightforward open-world title set in a haunted city. It felt like something of a half-step in a new direction — Tango Gameworks is known chiefly for its horror series, “The Evil Within,” directed by studio founder Shinji Mikami (who also directed the original “Resident Evil”).
(01/27/23 3:45am)
There’s been a lot of debate about video game boycotts over the last couple of years. In the wake of horrific allegations of workplace abuse at studios like Activision Blizzard, prospective players have rightly wondered whether or not it’s even ethical to buy certain games. It’s a difficult conversation. Many of the victims of abuse are people who directly work on these games, and there’s often a bit of push-and-pull when it comes to the fact that supporting these victims by enjoying their art is also supporting the companies that put them in fraught and dangerous positions.