As more and more action movies come out each summer, they all tend to blend together. In order for Hollywood to make sure the newest film is a sure thing, it must tread some proven ground to make sure the masses will accept it. Once in a while, a big-time action movie will stand above the rest with snappy dialogue, more impressive action scenes or a budget that allows the use of cutting-edge technology, but they’ll still include a number of cliches. The good guys will win, everything will be wrapped up and fixed within the next two hours and, perhaps most importantly, the hero will almost always get the girl. I like to call this “Speed syndrome”. READ MORE
I never need a reason to re-read a good chunk of the Penny Arcade archive. At least once every six months or so, I’ll whittle away an afternoon by clicking on a random date and reading onward. When they finally started putting the comics out in print form with the collected trade paperback volumes available at retail, it was all over. I own each of them and they’re practically hanging off the spine because PA’s gag-a-day format makes it so easy to pick up and hard to put back down. Gabe and Tycho just celebrated their 13th anniversary as the creative team behind one of the most wonderful and enduring pieces of internet humor ever. READ MORE
Bethesda is a company whom you really can’t begrudge for their faults. Sure they ship unfinished games with horrible, obvious and sometimes game-breaking glitches, but the game itself is usually really good. This actually may not be the case with the incredibly-hyped Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. READ MORE
When the Wii was about to be released, I could not have been a more jazzed little Nintendo fanboy. My bros and I were in high school and had loved Nintendo for all our lives, as many of us of course have. With well-produced videos and coy press releases, Nintendo slowly revealed info about the console and made wild and lofty promises about the mystery codenamed “Revolution”. It totally worked on me. For two nights and one day, I stayed in front of the Best Buy in my town in a tent. I was second in line and the employees leaving work Friday night told us we were crazy and to go home. They opened the store the next day to a line around the building. READ MORE
As I’ve mentioned many times in the several venues on this site through which you can hear me pontificate and whine about video games, I manage a video game store. From behind that counter, I see every type of gamer go by. There is the dude who wears a long black coat, fake fangs and a ponytail, and only buys Square Enix games. There’s the young asian girl who would be pretty attractive if she didn’t wear a foxtail out in public. And there’s a disturbingly large subset of people who come into my store, buy Madden or Call of Duty and leave, only to return when the next entry in one of these series is released. They terrify me. READ MORE
If you listened to this week’s podcast, you’ll know that I wasn’t the biggest fan of Batman: Arkham City. Don’t get me wrong, the game is entirely competent and I had a good time with it. It’s a great action game, but to me it wasn’t a great Batman game.Then I realized it’s actually a great adaptation of a Batman. Just not my Batman. Whose Batman is it? Keep reading. READ MORE
Batman: Arkham City came out this week, and gamers everywhere have retreated into their own caves to finish the game before Kotaku can spoil anything else about its plot. I was running the midnight launch at GamePorium, so I couldn’t help but give in to the hype and bring it home that night to put in a couple hours before passing out. So far it’s about what I expected, but I haven’t been blown away by it. If you’ve played the first game, you know exactly what you’re in for. What I want to see is some game companies shaking things up with comic games. READ MORE
This is a subject I think about a lot. As you can see by my past posts, I have decidedly eccentric tastes. Over the years, my gaming palette has gotten broader and broader, as my mind opened to newer and weirder games. Unfortunately, the amount of weird games being released has had the opposite trajectory. READ MORE
I’ve pontificated in the past about my love for the licensed game, as well as my willingness to come to its defense in the perspective of game history. Plenty of great games have been based on existing properties, but get lost to the winds of time due to rights issues. They can also get bogged down by the sheer amount of games based on that property. Such is the case for Scooby-Doo Mystery on Sega Genesis. There have been tons of games based on the Scooby-Doo franchise, but I’d venture to say this may be the only good one. Things are even further confusing for this game as it’s not even the only one with that title. READ MORE
Last week I wrote about Square Enix’s decision to re-release Final Fantasy X over remaking Final Fantasy VII. My reasoning for this: an HD update of a PS2 game would be way easier than remaking a PS1 game, as it wasn’t a full rebuild. A day after the post went up, Square announced that Final Fantasy X on Vita was in fact a full remake using the Final Fantasy XIII engine. My post was rendered completely moot, and it seems that yes, maybe Square does in fact want to just mess with its fans.There’s a whole other post about why I think the company made that decision and I’m still vaguely on their side, but that’s for another time. The whole thing did get me thinking about games we should probably just stop asking for. READ MORE
