Quite a few years ago, I published a series of articles on why streaming services, be that for music, for film or for games, were a fundamentally bad idea and ultimately audiences, or “consumers,” if you want to be crass and capitalist about it, were going to wish they hadn’t become the standard. A lot of people got surprisingly mad…
“Gallipoli Review: Beautiful, Brutal, and Fun.” This was IGN’s breathlessly enthusiastic title for its coverage of the recent Gallipoli game. It does my head in that, at a time where American military adventurism has it engage in illegal, utterly immoral warfare in Iran, destabilising the entire planet in the process,…
(Many thanks to Ray N. for letting me use his art of…
These first two paragraphs will be a mix of news and my…
You all know the “we should improve society” meme, right? The cartoon about a guy that is suffering from backbreaking work, starvation, and other ailments suggesting that we should do something to improve society, and the other guy leaping out of a well to say “yet you participate in society!”…
Read MoreThere has been a lot of gaming news today (a lot). One of the bigger pieces of news is that Resident Evil 4 is getting the remake treatment, and that it will release next year. I have a big problem with this. Resident Evil 4 didn’t need to be remade.…
Read MoreI don’t usually report on individual tweets, but one tweet from Xbox started off a storm of discourse today, and it got me thinking up some thought bubbles of my own. To get the lede out of the way: the assumption that many people have that subscription services are good…
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We recorded this podcast just before Square Enix announced it was selling Tomb Raider and other critical properties in order to finance (among other things) blockchain and NFT projects. This makes this podcast chat that we have about how NFTs are absolutely horrible for this industry, be that gamer or…
Read MoreI am becoming thoroughly sick and tired of developers taking a popular IP of some kind, and reaming it into a hole where it just doesn’t fit. Vampire: The Masquerade is a storytelling-orientated horror-fantasy RPG. It always has been. I haven’t kept up with more recent editions of the game,…
Read MoreThis is something that happens far too often: an excellent game with a lot to say and think about gets released, and, because it drops a few frames here and there, that’s all anyone ends up talking about. Related reading: Our review of Chrono Cross. Sometimes it does matter! Sometimes…
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Dragalia Lost had so much going for it. Not least of which was that it was Nintendo’s first foray into creating a new IP for mobile devices. Developed in partnership with one of the giants of the space, CyGames, it was a generally well-received and respected JRPG. Now, though, everything…
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Whenever FromSoftware releases a new game, one thing is guaranteed: the discourse of the week will be about its “difficulty”. Elden Ring, much like the Souls series and Sekiro before it, does not have an easy mode. In fact, the game is genuinely challenging. Note: It’s not difficult as some claim – it’s not like…
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