malvasia bianca

Some notes on games I’ve played recently where I don’t have enough to say to fill up a full blog post: Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE A few months back, I was in the mood to play something joyful. And I knew that I’d be going on a trip soon, which argued for that game being […]

I don’t quite know what to make of Umurangi Generation. It’s stylish in a way that reminds me of Jet Set Radio; a rare occurrence, and one I quite appreciate. But, while it reminds me of Jet Set Radio both visually and philosophically, Umurangi Generation doesn’t control nearly as fluidly as Jet Set Radio. Which, […]

Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE is by the Persona team; it’s effectively a lighter-weight Persona game (plus a very light dusting of Fire Emblem), with an idol plot. And it is amazing. I’m trying to remember what in the game first made me sit up and take notice. I have to think that it involved Kiria: […]

If you’d asked me not too many years ago what my prototypical idea of a video game was, I probably would have come up with some sort of RPG-ish thing. Single player, with the story standing out more than anything (and with that story being excessively grandiose); but also with a lot of time spent […]

I’ve always been an unconventional video games blogger, because of the low volume of games that I find time to play, but that’s become much more the case over the last year. I was surprised to look at my recently played games list and realize that I didn’t finish any games for five months solid […]

As is doubtless clear from this blog, for the last several years most of my time interacting with art has been spent with video games. And that’s been wonderful, no question. What is less clear from this blog, however, is the extent to which that wasn’t always the case: while I’ve played video games regularly […]

Every year brings with it its collection of lists of top N games; I mostly enjoy reading them, though I have misgivings about their existence, but I’m not very well positioned to create one myself. This year is special in that it has also brought ‘games of the decade’. About which I have fewer misgivings: […]

The World Ends with You is an, uh, RPG? from Square-Enix. Honestly, I’m not sure which pigeonhole to stick it in: in particular, I’m pretty sure that the main reason why my brain leapt toward the RPG category is its publisher, because it varies significantly from traditional RPG design. You return to the same areas […]

Okami is an amazing game. In some sense, it’s quite derivative: it’s working well within the Zelda genre (complete with sonic homages to its predecessor), so it’s not as novel as some recent games, but there’s more than enough new presentation in the game to keep me happy, combined with a thorough rethinking and improvement […]

If memory serves me well, about a year and a half ago I was feeling kind of down on video games. The start of this generation had been quite nice (largely because of the Dreamcast), but for the last year or two, it had seemed like the best I could hope out of a game […]

Fortunately, the pneumonia drugs are working nicely. Compared to my dim memories of what I normally feel like, I’m still probably not doing too hot, but compared to the recent past, I feel great. So: back to our normal subject matter. Today: Shenmue II. The second part of a three-part series telling the story of […]