Year: 2026

Let’s keep working together

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It has recently come to my attention that a number of videolamer staff are trying to unionize. I am posting this open letter response here because I do not have all you greedy, backstabbing assholes’ email addresses. And because I care.

lame Team,

We write during this extraordinary time for our company, our site, our writers and our country to tell you we want you to love coming to work every day. We’re making progress and we will not stop trying to do our best for you. We love you.

Also, we want to share our thoughts related to the current barrage of union activity that has been directed at videolamer and other “non-union” websites during this difficult time we call the 21st century. →  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this post!

Waving the White Flag – Wartales

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On the surface, Wartales looks a lot like other games I like. I enjoy large-scale simulations, I like fiddly minigames with bonus rewards, I love RPGs, and I even sometimes play tactical games.  But in the end I stopped playing Wartales before getting to the second town, waving the white flag of freedom after 15 hours.

There are a few different reasons for this. One is that it’s not possible to focus on just a single aspect of the game. While you have the freedom to, for example, forge weaponry for your squad using the blacksmith “profession”, the materials required to do it must either be purchased in limited quantity or mined from nodes that respawn at unpredictable intervals and are spread throughout the map.  →  Postlanser: Heritage of Read

Dear lamer: Child rearing advice from a professional video game player

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In this exciting new series, our mascot answers letters readers have sent in with sage advice.

Dear lamer,

I am a real person who hacked their Genesis mini to add a bunch of regular and popular games, such as King Colossus, that Sega omitted from the product. My neighbor, who is not actually the neighbor of someone who writes for this website, saw this excellently decked out Genesis mini and asked to borrow my “Sega Genesis” sometime in 2023. Have you noticed an immediate tell that someone doesn’t have much or any experience with Sega consoles is the use of the word “Sega” before naming a system? It’s a Genesis, a Saturn, a Dreamcast. No one cool says Sega Genesis or Sega Dreamcast, just like anyone familiar with Nintendo doesn’t call the Super Nintendo the Nintendo Super Nintendo.  →  U R Not lamE.

2025 in Virtual Postcards

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The only general addition to video game console controllers in several decades now is the share button. Now a relic itself as I think we’re kinda collectively done with the social-media- through-your-gaming-device experiment: the PlayStation’s janky native streaming seemingly never took off, Xbox arguably peaked with the 360 dashboard and avatars and you need to daisy chain a whole series of antiquated devices to get stuff off your Switch SD card.  

However, I’m interested in why it is we choose to capture those digital postcards. I use the snapshot button way, way more than I would have guessed and for the most part those images go nowhere. Part of my motivation, and I know this is going to age me one thousand human years by typing it out, is because I still remember a time where if you wanted to rewatch a cool cutscene that plays 34 hours into an RPG, the only way of doing so was creating save slots on physical memory cards (normally at a fixed save point) just before it played. →  Read Dead Redemption

Wednesdays with Andrew – Virtua Racing and Panzer Dragoon

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams

Another arbitrary amount of time, another entry in the ‘guy makes another guy play Saturn games’ series. This time we played a little of a promising shmupper (this term is useful as it pleases neither the ‘shump’ nor ‘shooter’ crowds), and a little more of two absolute classics by Sega.

Layering Attack Rays in Sections of Galactic Force

Should Galactic Attack have music? Does Attack Galac have a second stage? Why is there so much audible rattling under the hood of my minivan while I drive? Until these questions are answered satisfactorily, we decided to put aside Galactic Attacktic for a future date. In the meantime I will find a new bin/cue file and not speak to a mechanic. →  Secread of Evermore