“An ancient pond. A frog jumps in. The splash of water. Hmm… Not a bad haiku.” -Old Man living in Sagami
Muramasa is like a haiku. It’s simple and concise. It comes from an ancient era where a direction pad and a button or two were all anyone needed to escape into virtual reality. Its three …
Cursed Mountain is the latest game in the survival horror mountain climbing genre. It really wants to let everyone know that it’s scary, it has angry contorted faces all over the place, deep dramatic music, and lots of dark shadowy stuff everywhere. It also really wants to recreate the feeling of climbing up a mountain. …
There once was a time where games were designed to ease the player into the gameplay, get him addicted, and then proceed to murder him. This was naturally because the games could only be sustained through a diet of quarters, and demanding a constant flow of money from addicted players was the most effective way …
What makes books so compelling? Lots of things, but one important facet is the ability of words, mere signifiers, to incite incredible images inside a reader’s brain. Few games encourage this, with their fancy polygons and all, but the same principle exists in them, whether it’s intentional or not….
I would like to diverge from videogame discussion for a moment to bring attention to a disturbing reality: the very cool website Eegra is facing some serious financial problems. On their front page you can see some posts explaining the situation and how it can possibly be resolved. It makes me sad to no longer …
Gears of War 2 takes place in a grim future where humanity is at war against an unstoppable force of monsters called the Locust. The endless fighting has torn down cities, painted the Earth’s surface a consistent shade of gray and brown, nearly killed off the human race, and made the survivors intolerable douchebags. If …
Video Games. What ideas or images flashed into your head when you read that phrase? Were they memories of yourself spending quarters at an arcade machine? Or maybe spending hours behind of a Guitar Hero drum set. Maybe you’re a typical parent who thinks of an evil device that erodes your children’s brains and turns …
It’s been 37 years now since Pong became the first commercially successful videogame. 37 years isn’t very long in the grand scheme of things, so with gaming still so young it’s not surprising that only recently there has been a popular interest in its history. Although the medium owes its existence to computer technology, games …
I love puzzle games. I don’t mean that I love most puzzle games, but that I love the puzzle genre. This actually leads me to hate most puzzle games because of the unreasonably high expectations I set for them. But when I do find one that I like, I really like it. Orbient is one …
It’s not very often that I actually read a game review. Over the years I’ve realized it saves a lot of time to just check Metacritic’s aggregated score, or maybe read the excerpts that it lists.
Why don’t I actually read what the reviewers have to say? Because their score is all they have to say. …
Defunct Games
