Okay, so this isn’t important news, but I thought it was kind of funny, so here we are. Steam has been around for a very long time now, and it’s pretty much been the king of video game distribution on PC for most of that time. It’s not perfect, but it is, even to this…
Author: Hatm0nster
What Gives a Game ‘Heart’?
For a long time, I thought that good games, games with “heart” or “soul” were those that were made painstakingly from the ground up. They needed original gameplay, original music, original characters and artwork custom made to fit the developer’s vision. Whether it was an indie project or AAA giant didn’t matter, only that it…
Highguard is Out And It’s Doing About as Well as Expected
After its baffling reveal as the “one more thing” closer of the night at the 2025 Game Awards, Highguard and its developers entirely disappeared from the web as the discourse surrounding it grew ever more negative. The strategy was, as some theorized, to wait until launch day, go for a big reveal and take gaming…
Silent Hill f Wasn’t Quite What I Expected
One of the games I was really looking forward to last year was Silent Hill f, the long-awaited continuation of Konami’s landmark horror series. True, we’d gotten the Silent Hill 2 remake just a year earlier, but Silent Hill f is the first new full installment in the series since Silent Hill: Downpour in 2012….
PlayStation Store Has a Slop Problem
It seems gamers have found the first big stinker of the year in Teamkill Media’s Code Violet, with discourse around it focused almost entirely on just how bad it is. By all accounts, it’s a short, shallow, thrown-together buggy mess of a game that doesn’t even come close to the same galaxy as the game…
Triple A Gaming is Heading for a Crash
I’ve already touched on this topic several times over the past year or so, but my mind just keeps coming back to it. The ballooning prices, the insane budgets, the ever-more predatory monetization schemes, lazy design, bad writing and altogether way too lengthy development cycles…it all just has me thinking that there’s no way that…
Shift Up CEO Claims AI is Necessary to Compete with China
Last year we saw the rise of AI slop in everything from YouTube to TV and even games in some places. It was annoying, certainly, but at the very least the impact still felt minimal. Well, unfortunately for us, it’s looking like the slop is going to keep flowing and to ever greater extents. Triple…
Hat’s Most Anticipated Games for 2026
Now that 2025 is over and the reflections on its best games are done, the time has finally come to look ahead to what’s coming down the pike this year. I’m not yet sure how 2026 will stack up against the past couple of years, but it’s definitely got potential. There’s a ton that I…
Still No News, Let’s Talk Deadzone: Rogue Instead
As we all are painfully aware by now, there are just too many good games coming out these days. Seriously, even those of us who get the press releases can’t keep track of them all. No matter how many trailers you look at or how often you dig through the online stores, tons of great…
Hat’s GotY 2025: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Yup, Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 continues to collect Game of the Year picks, even from small time bloggers like myself. I guess this was always going to be the outcome too, now that I think about it. This wasn’t exactly a super stacked year in terms of game releases, you know? I think…
VIRTUAL BASTION 