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death stranding

So: Death Stranding. It’s actually the first Kojima game that I’ve played, or at least that I’ve finished: I dipped into the first Metal Gear Solid a while back, but it wasn’t really my thing, and I haven’t played any of his subsequent games. It turns out, though, that I kind of like Kojima’s approach […]

jet set radio

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 […]

bohemian rhapsody as video game

Rock Band 3‘s signature song is Bohemian Rhapsody; and, as a video game, that song is a very odd experience indeed. Unless you’re singing, you spend large portions of the song waiting for your next chance to play; whether or not you’re singing, the style and difficulty vary wildly from section to section. This is […]

killer 7, five years later

For better or for worse, I only rarely replay video games. When I start a game, I almost always make it all the way through the game; but once I’ve done so, my brain decides that it’s happy and that I should move on to something else. And constraints on my time are such that […]

operas, musicals, and video games

Earlier this summer, we went to see Puccini’s opera The Girl of the Golden West. Which was quite the spectacle, but my first thought after it was over was “after this, I’d better not hear anybody ever complain about video game plots again!” Its plot was threadbare and ridiculous; I’ve certainly played video games with […]

psychonauts

For its most recent game, the Vintage Game Club returned to its Tim Schafer roots with Psychonauts. Which I was curiously ambivalent about: many people speak highly about it, but I hit 3D platformer fatigue fairly suddenly several years ago, and only one game has really managed to break through that. Still, it’s a genre […]

games that have stuck

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: […]

no more heroes

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started playing No More Heroes. I was astonished by Suda 51’s previous game, Killer 7, but I didn’t really expect more of the same: for one thing, my brain isn’t imaginative enough to contemplate what more of Killer 7 would be like, and also the reviews had […]

okami

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 […]

killer 7

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 […]

populated database

I’m now fully populating the database with information from my collection. It took longer than I expected; I’ll keep that in mind the next time I plan to work in a unfamiliar area. (It wouldn’t have been so bad, of course, if I were working in chunks larger than an hour or two at a […]