Gaming off the Beaten Path

I know my content is all digital, but I've always considered myself a print media first kind of person. It's getting harder and harder to be that way as more and more news outlets and magazines shift to online-only models or simply shut down outright. It certainly made the big gaming media news this month hit really close to home. After 33 years of publication, Game Informer is officially ceasing production. Originally started as a newsletter by everyone's favorite games retailer Funcoland, Game Informer eventually blossomed into a full-on magazine featuring game previews, reviews and walkthroughs. It would even survive the company's purchase by Barnes and Noble, which would merge Funcoland with its existing game retail store Babbages and rechristen their new Frankenstein monster with the name we know it by today, Gamestop. If anything, this was a boon for the magazine as it quickly became a package deal with the company's Pro membership. At its peak, Game Informer ...

  I want to take a little break from game reviews, I haven't had as much time to play the past few weeks and even less time to write. Besides, I kind of want to start changing things up a little bit. I hope it's been some level of noticable that I have been trying to incorporate some new gaming platforms into my coverage as of late, or at the very least have a little bit more variety. I have talked about this in the past, but it's almost impossible to completely eliminate bias from coverage. I was a Nintendo person that became a Sony person, who also had fairly consistent access to Sega and Microsoft consoles here and there. Looking back at the blog, you can really see that. It's further compounded by my genre preferences, I tend to gravitate to RPGs and fighting games. As such, my blog has a fairly understandable bias towards the SNES and PS1. I review a lot of 6th generation games, though that's less about bias and more about the fact that I just have more games f...

  I've been reviewing games for quite a while now and it's really changed the way I think and talk about games. I look back at some of my old blog posts, mostly from my college years, and it I can't help but feel a bit embarrassed. It's not so much that my writing is bad, though I have certainly grown as the writer. It's more the language I use that just doesn't sit right with me. I did a top 100 games of all-time list, but is that really what I should have called it? It's not really "THE" top 100, it's "MY" top 100. I'm sure some people would agree with my opinions, though most wouldn't. There are a lot of games I wouldn't rank even close to my top 100 that many people consider to be classic and vice versa. The thing is, it's not just me. It seems like a lot of online discourse around gaming is filled with hyperbolic declarations and personal attacks against people that disagree with them. I have certainly been guilty...

  It's time to talk about something I've been meaning to address for a little while now. It's to the point where I have been at this for almost five years now and I've never addressed it. I think it's important because I feel like understanding the background of a game reviewer is important for getting the most out of their reviews. For whatever reason, I've never fully gotten into PC gaming, to the point that I almost considered not including computer games in the scope of my reviews. I ultimately decided against it, because I do have a handful of PC games I consider to be among my all-time favorites. Even then, many of those games I ended up playing on console despite the fact those versions were inferior. Deus Ex and Doom are both 10s for me and I spent as much time with the console versions of those games as I did the PC versions. For reasons I will get into, it was either that or nothing. I also consider Heros of Might and Magic III and Might and Magic VI a...

I actually had a review prepared for this week, but I've decided to take a little bit of a detour. Thanks to the magic of personally curated content suggestions, I stumbled upon something I found to be quite interesting. When you play video games for as long as I have, you are bound to encounter some bad ones. Typically, these games are dismissed immediately and often become the target of online game reviewers like myself, pointing and laughing at their horrible controls or stupid plots or lousy graphics or whatever. I touched on the whole subset of online content dedicated almost entirely to anger-fueled, profanity-ridden rants against horrible games in the intro episode of my podcast. Unlike other media formats, it's seemingly rare for bad video games to have defenders. Which is why I was surprised when I came across an entire sub-culture of gamers that embraced these titles, games affectionately known as Kusoge. Kusoge is a portmanteau of the Japanese words Kuso, meaning cra...

  Sorry for another non-review, but it's been yet another busy week. Since this will be the first time I look back at a previously reviewed game on my podcast, I figured I would talk a little bit about revisiting games here. I've been doing this a long time and it's getting to the point where I want to give certain games a second look. Maybe it's because I felt I didn't do a game justice the first time. Maybe it's because there were a few games that were close to 10's that I think are in contention for a full score. Maybe it's because I just feel like it. Honestly, I've found it a little weird the last few years that I pretty much haven't been able to re-play anything because I just have to keep moving forward with new content. Oh well, enough complaining. My top five games that are candidates for revisiting include: 1. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne Honestly, the only thing holding me back from having replayed this already is time. I really, reall...

As with any media format, video games are often hated for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual quality. Don't get me wrong, not every game that gets hate gets it undeservedly. You would be hard pressed to find a gamer that will go to bat for Superman 64, it's easy to explain why that game is hated. It's hated because it is a miserable, barely functioning mess that is an absolutely abysmal experience from the time you press start to the time you inevitably shut it off in a rage when you can't fly through a million stupid rings because of the crappy controls. That's a problem with most media, how "good" or "bad" it can be both subjective or objective. Sometimes one will just completely outweigh the other, like the aforementioned Superman 64. You can like the art style all you want, I know indistinguishable blobs and random fog are some people's thing, but the bottom line is any subjective enjoyment you get out of the game is render...

  I'm going to take a break from game reviews this week to discuss a topic that popped into my head after a conversation, or rather, an argument I saw online a few weeks ago. I guess the whole "old vs. new" debate isn't unique to video games, or even new when discussing them. I talked a little bit before about why I prefer older games to newer games, and I feel like I reference this fact constantly. You know, I'm not really ashamed of that and no one is going to change the way I feel. But I also sometimes feel like an old man yelling at a cloud. Just because I prefer older games doesn't necessarily make them better, though I do maintain that they are very, very different. And even though I prefer the older games, there are a lot of things about newer games I prefer. Before I get into what exactly those things are, I want to establish (I guess re-establish) what I mean when I say "old" vs. "new." I did a write up about it last year, so check...

After last week's lousy game, I figured I would take some time to discuss something I've had on my mind for a while. The phrases "overrated" and "underrated" get thrown around a lot, like, A LOT, when it comes to video games. I hear those two words way more often when referring to video games far more often than with film, television, books or any other type of media (maybe music is a close second). Often, they are fighting words, leading to long winded online conversations and overly defensive social media posts about whatever game is being referenced. I actually decided to cover this topic after I got way too invested in a back-and-forth discussion on one of the many gaming groups I follow online. The original poster wanted to express his love for Chrono Trigger, something that isn't uncommon in retro gaming groups. But one user had to use the O word, expressing his opinion that while the game is excellent, it was a tad overrated. What followed was an ...