What Is Your Favorite Game?

Do you have a favorite game? Probably, right? If push comes to shove, most of us probably have that one game that we love more than the rest. A favorite game isn’t necessarily a static thing though. Favorites change, just as gaming changes, just as we continue to change. I know my favorites have changed…

Playing Games of the Past in the Present, or, Ready Player Two?

It’s easy to forget that the video game industry hasn’t been around forever. In terms of mass producing games, it hasn’t even reached the half-century mark. (I cite Pong [1972] as the first mass-produced game – the choice is debatable.) And in terms of its competitors in the “sports and leisure” Trivial Pursuit category, such…

Thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda as an Open World Game

It’s recently come to light that Mass Effect: Andromeda might be an open world game, one with a “seamless, open world galaxy,” as the headlines state. Seeing has how I’m currently knee-deep in the vivacious world of the original Mass Effect trilogy (on ME2 now, and loving it more than before), I couldn’t help but…

How Have You Changed? A Response.

Earlier this week, my colleague, Hatm0nster, wrote up an intriguing and inquisitive article titled How Have You Changed? If you’ve not read it, I highly suggest doing so before moving on, because what I have here is a response. A long response. One that started out as a comment to his article, only to develop…

How Have You Changed?

Do you feel like you’ve changed as a gamer? Not in terms of the amount of time playing games or other cursory elements like that. We’ve all had changes in our lives that have caused us to shift our gaming habits. I mean do you, at your core, feel like you’re a different type of player than you…

Mass Effect and that “Welcome Home” Feeling

Despite having a very full gaming plate right now (I’ll be back someday soon with more Twilight Princess), my recent experience replaying Red Dead Redemption seems to have infected my gaming motives, as I now very strongly want to revisit other “favorite” games from my past. To that end, I recently started playing Mass Effect….

Red Dead Redemption: Second Time’s a Charm?

At the beginning of 2013, I finally got around to playing Red Dead Redemption. We had rented to game some months earlier, and though it looked interesting at the time, I was too engrossed in other games to really take notice. But rather than just forget about RDR completely, I instead picked it up on…

Street Fighter V…Thanks, but No Thanks

Though I wasn’t great on following its news, at some point it became apparent to me that I was going to have to pass on Street Fighter V. Maybe it was with the announcement of the new characters, F.A.N.G., Necalli, Rashid, and Laura (eh, okay). Maybe it was when I learned that there’d be no…

Revisiting our “Favorite” Games

Inspired by a notion we recently saw floating around our Twitter feed, we’ve decided to pilot a small project involving our “favorite” games. And we don’t have “favorite” there in quotes for emphasis, but rather because  this project involves us challenging the idea of favorites when it comes to games. When we say “[insert game…

Dialing Down the Difficulty

  What is it that defines a given game? Some would say its story and characters. Others would say that a game is defined by its gameplay. Then there’s its difficulty. While there are many games out there known for being “hard”, I doubt that many of would venture the opinion that a game is…