malvasia bianca

Final Fantasy VII Remake really hadn’t been on my radar before it launched. I had played the original, it’s actually the only Final Fantasy game I’ve finished and I do recall basically enjoying it; but I’ve only played it once, and it’s probably approaching two decades since I played it? (I never owned a PS1, […]

I’d given up hope that I’d ever see another Shenmue game; but then the Shenmue III Kickstarter happened, and here we are. And, unsurprisingly but gratifyingly: Shenmue III is very much a Shenmue game. There are tweaks to the formula: martial arts practice is a little different, fighting is a little different, there’s an mild […]

I was very glad that Shenmue and Shenmue II got a re-release in preparation for the forthcoming third game: I thought back on those two games incredibly fondly, but I didn’t actually remember so many details about them, and in particular I could use a plot refresher. Maybe I was a little curious how well […]

I used to play driving games a fair amount: they were never my genre of choice or anything, but I found them soothing. I’d gotten out of the habit over the last few years, but I’d been hearing good things about various Forza games for a few years; so when I finished playing through Shenmue, […]

The only Yakuza game I’d played before Yakuza 0 was Yakuza 2. And it had been eight years since I’d played Yakuza 2, so I didn’t remember it particularly well; just a vague memory was that it had some similarity with Shenmue but that I didn’t like it nearly as much. Anyways, I started Yakuza […]

John Walker’s editorial in Rock Paper Shotgun on “Why Games Should Enter The Public Domain” was going around my Twitter feed the other day, frequently coupled with Steve Gaynor’s response. And what I appreciate about both of them is the pragmatic tack that they take: I think that the U.S. Constitution has it right by […]

I first played System Shock right when it was released: a friend of mine who worked at Looking Glass gave me a copy. And it’s apparently lodged itself in my brain—over the summer, I wandered across some footage of the game, and it all came back, almost two decades later. So I figured I should […]

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 […]

There was a time towards the end of 2008 when it seemed like everybody in my twitter feed was talking about Yakuza 2. It was apparently a Shenmue-style action RPG (also published by Sega), but (as Steve Gaynor so eloquently outlined in the 2008 holiday confab) filled with delightfully quirky side missions, missions that added […]

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: […]

I finished Spore quite some time ago, but I’ve been putting off blogging about it: it’s a hard game for me to wrap my brain around. Still, a month is long enough to procrastinate, so I suppose I should say something now. I’ll begin from the point of view of a traditional video game player […]

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 […]

I didn’t play any of the Resident Evil games during the last generation. That was probably mostly because I didn’t have a Playstation back then; eventually, RE2 came out for the Nintendo 64, but it didn’t make enough of an impact for me to want to buy it. Also, the genre didn’t excite me too […]

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 […]