Review by Matt S. As I was playing Legend of Mana, I found myself constantly wondering at just how innovative and beautiful this game must have seemed back on the PlayStation, where it originally released in 1999 (2000 in North America). On its art and aesthetics alone, this is one…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. With over 30 books in print starring Drizzt Do’Urden and his companions, you would think that there’s plenty of material to turn into a compelling RPG. After all, while R.A Salvatore’s novels are pulp fantasy in every sense of the term, so too are The Witcher…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Disgaea faces a big problem, which Disgaea 6 exposes; when you’ve got a series that has parodied JRPGs through raw exaggeration, how do you keep that series’ energy going? How do you take something that is already hyperbolic to an almost grotesque degree, and build further…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. It has been great to see Taiwan become a growing force in video games, in no small part because culturally and aesthetically there are synergies between it and Japan that has meant that many of the games that come out of Taiwan do great things with…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. The nature of reality is becoming an ever-bigger question mark that artists are grappling with, and that’s because we’re getting greater levels of control over the very foundations of the reality that we exist within. We’re taking the digital, constructed would and painting it over the…
Read MoreReview by Alex Kidman. It’s complicated having nearly the same name as a video gaming mascot. Not that I think there are too many people out there actually called “Sonic The Hodgehog” or “Maryo Maryo” to speak of. Still, with a name like mine, the years when Alex Kidd was…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I went into Guilty Gear Strive expecting to spend three-quarters of the review talking about Guilty Gear’s best character, Dizzy. I even had an awesome joke planned, since Dizzy wears skin-tight tiny shorts. I was planning on breaking out the old Austin Powers “how do you…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. I don’t know if any of you have seen the Chick Tract Dark Dungeons comic book. It’s pretty old now (published in 1984), but as I was growing up it did the rounds every so often at school because it is unhinged. Like genuinely, bona fide,…
Read MoreReview by Matt S. Ever play a game that you know isn’t all that great, but for reasons you’re not even certain of, you love it anyway? That’s my experience with the Farm Frenzy series. I’ve enjoyed these things from way back on the PlayStation Portable (where they were PSP…
Read MoreReview by Harvard L. My first few levels of SHING! were spent battling with my fingers to try and wrap around this game’s bizarre control scheme. It’s a brawler where the left stick moves and the right stick is used for attacks – flick in a horizontal direction to jab,…
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