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Breath of the Wild is, of course, a stunning game. And a surprising one, both in how it departs from Zelda tradition and in how I reacted to those departures. No more progressive unlocking of weapons/tools/areas, no more restricting those areas to your specific skill set / power level (at least after the first two […]

I wish I had something coherent to say about What Remains of Edith Finch: it’s a rather striking game, I just can’t put my finger on why? Which, maybe, is a reflection of the game itself: it’s more a collection of little games than a single game itself, so why should I expect myself to […]

Monument Valley 2 is basically just what you would expect from a Monument Valley sequel, with the added twist that the second character that they’ve added to it has the most amazingly charming movement animation that I’ve ever seen. I could try to go on about it for hundreds of words, but ultimately: if you […]

Mass Effect: Andromeda starts off by dropping you into the middle of the action. You’re part of a large-scale colonization mission in a new galaxy, things have gone wrong upon arrival, you’re part of a team sent out to investigate, and your ship has crashed. This sort of opening is one of the series’ strengths: […]

The question that free-to-play games always raise is: why am I playing this game? And I don’t mean that in a dismissive way, as an implication that playing them is a waste of time: if you can come up with a good answer to that question, then great! But free-to-play games do try to nudge […]

My normal policy for buying consoles is that I buy a new console when the game that I clearly want to play next is only on that console. Which means that I buy all of them eventually (well, all of them except for the portable Sony consoles) but that it sometimes takes a few years: […]

Earlier this year, I had a bit of time before the big Spring game releases came out, so I decided to replay Portal and to play Portal 2 for the first time. I’d liked Portal the first time I played it; I really liked it this time, to the extent that I think of it […]

Rocksmith put out a two quite substantial free patches at the end of last year. I’ve been playing Rocksmith significantly more since the patches, and in different (and better!) ways. As I said in that post, I’ve switched my practice from being primarily based on browsing (leafing through my favorites and playing whatever catches my […]

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: […]

Mini Metro is a good game. Interesting mechanic, simple but with (I suspect) a decent amount of depth, and (at least on the iPad) an interface that works extremely well with the gameplay. Super Mario Run is also a good game. Despite being a one-button game, it is unquestionably a Mario game; and the levels […]

(Spoilers ahead.) The introduction to Firewatch sets puts Henry in a situation that’s impossible to successfully navigate. I can’t really imagine what it would be like to have somebody you love not only fall into dementia but to do that when they’re in what should be the mental prime of their life; I would like […]

The latest Phoenix Wright game, Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, turned out to be one of my favorites in the series. Not for mechanical reasons, because the mechanics, while pleasant, are completely unsurprising to anybody familiar with the series: the same exploration, the same trials, the game keeps all the characters from the previous […]

Star Realms is an awful lot like Ascension. It includes the mechanic of multiple cards in the same faction reinforcing each other that Ascension didn’t add until a later expansion, some cards let you trash them for a benefit, its equivalent of constructs can be attacked, and of course many of the card effects are […]

I’d played one of the earlier Fire Emblem games, but only one. There are ways in which I like the gameplay, but I didn’t like the permadeath, the later levels got long, and the story didn’t grab me. Ultimately, I was more of a fan of Intelligent Systems’ Advance Wars games instead: I liked the […]

I liked the first Lara Croft Bow Warrior quite a bit: very legible action platforming, a surprisingly decent story about coming into your powers, tons of collection that managed to stay on the entertaining side instead of the annoying side. Rivers of blood and not enough tombs—it’s a AAA video game—and there were too many […]

In the September VGHVI Symposium, we talked about virtual reality, using the phrase “metaphoric presence” to describe it; we contrasted VR to immersion, which we defined as identification with a ruleset. Basically, with our definitions (or rather Roger’s definitions, though I support them) virtual reality gives the impression that you’re there, while, if you’re immersed, […]

The special thing about Pokemon Go: so many people are playing it. Parks are full of people playing it, my coworkers are talking about it, when I’m on a train I see gyms at stations change ownership before the train has even stopped. My favorite experience with the game was when Miranda asked me to […]

My first impression of Imbroglio: lovely symmetry, with a fondness for twos and fours. The playing field is a four by four square, with monsters coming out of the four corners. You fight monsters with the weapons on the playing field; those weapons come in two colors, red and blue, doing one point of damage […]

I am pretty confused as to what I think about Love Live! School Idol Festival: there are three fairly distinct aspects to the game, I’m not sure what I think about those aspects individually, and the three of them pull me in different directions. It kept me playing for quite a while, and I did […]

Some iPad games I played on vacation: The Room 3 The latest game in a well-done series: the puzzles are challenging without having me quite getting stuck on them, and the game is committed to those puzzles. (My favorite way that plays out: they barely pretend you you have a body, if you’re moving to […]