I wrote this article for an arts publication – unfortunately, at the last moment they weren’t about to publish it for reasons, but the upshot of this is that I can publish it here! While it’s not specifically about video games, AI and Gen-AI in particular is going to have an ever-bigger impact on the games industry, so it’s still…
If you’re on a certain social media platform owned by a ketamine-addicted fascist (and you know all know which one I’m talking about – ask yourself why we all know that), then you’ve probably seen a new phenomenon sweeping across the techbro accounts. One of that mob released a new…
I was tempted to resist writing anything about the announcement of Ghost…
“What games have you regretted buying the most?” It’s one of those…
The things that the old computer saw… It’s easy to assume that lewd games are a relatively recent addition to the gaming landscape. A lot of people attribute the rise in their popularity to Japan’s adoption of fanservice-heavy anime-style games in the PlayStation 3 and subsequent Vita eras — but…
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Bad endings are an interesting example of convergent evolution in the history of the game narrative. It appears across various genres as an early example of player choice. In games such as Double Dragon or Dragon Quest for the NES, the player is provided with the end-game choice to join…
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“New US$69.99 price may negatively impact PS5 game unit sales, data suggests. Reports indicate that PlayStation users are buying less (sic) games, and Sony’s data suggests that higher costs are a reason why unit sales have dropped.” This lede, published by TweakTown, seems ludicrous. It’s one of those real stating-the-obvious…
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Around this time next year, there will be a special event near Fuefuki in the heart of Yamanashi Prefecture (the one you travel through to get to Nagano from Tokyo). For decades there has been an annual recreation of the Battle of Kawanakajima, one of the most compelling and dramatic…
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Once on the DDNet podcast, we got to talking about “canon” games – ones that many people would consider to have historical or aesthetic significance. These are games that are worth going back to, even after technological increments have iterated and refined their design. For the JRPG genre, we immediately…
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“Oh! Rikku’s wearing a bikini! It’s bright yellow and it’s a THONG!” Looking at Final Fantasy X-2 now, with its PlayStation 2-era fuzzies and jaggies, it’s hard to believe that it was once right up there with the most controversially fanservicey things out there. I remember the discussions that raged…
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The Rurouni Kenshin film series consists of five films in total (with the fifth, and final, released worldwide and exclusive to Netflix, in 2021). In the time since the first film, 2012’s simply-titled Rurouni Kenshin, the series has become one of the largest film properties of all time, with three…
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There’s no way I can start this article without acknowledging that professional wrestling, the one “sport” that I properly follow, is a staged performance. “Fake” is often thrown around, but that’s not entirely accurate when you’re talking about a performance that can involve being thrown off a ladder through a…
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In 2016, a study by Paul J. C. Adachi and Teena Willoughby was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence that found that of people aged 17-25, playing sports video games increased involvement in real-life sports. “Sports video game play may be an effective tool to promote real-life sports…
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Loneliness is a theme that has threaded its way through a great body of Japanese literature over the past 120+ years. It’s something that has been explored by the country’s greatest writers in several ways, showing it as a result of subjects as varied as fractured psyches, troubled marriages, and…
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