- Drakan: The Ancients’ Gates
- Dual Hearts
- Dino Stalker
- Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends
- Disney’s Treasure Planet
- Drome Racers
- Dark Cloud 2
Top 10 2002 PS2 Games Starting With D if Your Name is Steven Carlson
Random Crap
Stuff that doesn’t fit into one of the other categories goes here.
To Play or Not to Play Diablo 2
I have played a lot of Diablo 2 but for unknown reasons, I can’t stop thinking about the rerelease. In an effort to convince myself not to get it I have outlined a list of arguments and then, in completely self-defeating fashion, counter arguments, aka reasons why I should just get the damn game.
Why I shouldn’t play Diablo 2: It’s old
Diablo 3 is a better game and makes its predecessor feel dated and less awesome.
Why that argument doesn’t hold up: I didn’t like 3
Pretending for a minute I don’t routinely enjoy older games, I can entertain this position specifically aimed at Diablo style click-heavy ARPGs. OK, I am done entertaining. I played Diablo 3 close to launch and did not have a great time. Some of my negative feelings stemmed from the digital key reader my friend needed in order to even play the game, some were based on tired old arguments about aesthetics, and the rest comes from a legitimate feeling that the game simply wasn’t up to snuff. → Destroy All Articles! 2
The Future of (my) Video Games
Hoping for the best, planning for not the worst
I spend a lot of my time thinking about retiring in my 50s. I spend the rest of my time planning for the breakdown of society. The incompatible ideas constantly vying for my conscious attention will occasionally drown each other out and allow general concepts of family, work, and video games to briefly occupy my brain. These short moments of distraction are usually then reframed in my mind so as to view them through one of the primary thought patterns – where will I live in relation to my children after I stop working, or does a year’s worth of water for an infant equal a year’s worth of water for an adult?
Sometimes I think of my physical game collection through these lenses of retirement or environmental destruction. The enormous amount of plastic involved, which I recently learned can’t actually be recycled, and also began to appear in antarctic snow in measurable quantities, does not factor into my thoughts – I don’t believe individuals should feel responsible for systemic problems unless they’re actively profiting off of maintaining the systems or are my neighbor, that guy’s an asshole (too bad he isn’t hunting frequently enough to prevent him from buying bumper stickers about how badly he would rather be hunting). → Devil Summoner: Readou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Article
Top 5 Most Likely Video Games of All Time
After the recent scandal wherein President Carter revealed that the classic WonderSwan game Knuckle Justice: Fist of Freedom, Face on Fire (KJFoFFoF) was not an actual video game but rather an elaborate ruse perpetrated by stock insiders to bolster their Bandai holdings, the game industry has been looking inward and has not liked what it has found. With a key pillar supporting the entire enterprise of gaming now left crumbling into the ocean of deception below, it is unclear even to game historians if any actual video games have ever been produced or developed. It is against this tumultuous backdrop that we present you with our intensive research on the Top 5 Most Likely Video Games of All Time.
5. Rival Turf
With its overt graphics and controller support it is hard to deny this is a game. Experts are still studying the specific signals of the alleged controller outputs because it has been suggested by skeptics the movement of what is undeniably graphics on screen is actually following a semi-random program routine. → Readout 3: Takedown
10 Steps to Making Money with a Gaming Blog
People often ask me why I waste my vast cornucopia of knowledge of all things business on a minuscule website. I can afford to do this because I retired at the age of 14 after selling multiple blogs for millions of dollars a pop. This site provides a platform to share my expertise without the threat of anyone emailing for follow up information. Follow the 10 steps below (each as important as the last and therefore all assigned the number 1) and you, too, can retire at 14 by selling your weblog.
- Choose how much you want to make
The first step anyone reasonable takes before doing anything creative is to analyze the market and choose a segment that matches desired returns. How much would you like to make from blogging? Assuming you chose billions, we can then conclude you need to write about video games. There may be skeptics who are unaware games are a $280 billion a year industry and so I will spell it out in painful detail for these slower than average readers. → Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.
Rare Loot: The Games We Treasure – Pat Edition
Welcome back to Rare Loot where I quiz the ancient beings that rule over videolamer land about the treasured gaming stuff they’d sell their own children and or body parts for. The inaugural Rare Loot was with videolamer’s own Captain Picard, so it made sense to pick on a bearded womaniser next. Say hello to Pat who has beamed in from a planet made purely of pocket lint to tell us about one of his treasures.
Cunzy: Before we start proper, how would you identify your collecting habits? We know from Jay’s rare loot you co-own the Library(tm) but does this extend into trading cards, full body pillows, and giant Pokemon plushies?
Pat: The vast majority of my collecting energy and money are dedicated to games themselves. I am passionate about a few series and developers and might pick up a Special Launch Edition of a game with all the crap that comes along with it. I have a handful of artbooks I have bought over the years, but it would be more accurate to say I like owning certain Souls or Shenmue paraphernalia than to say I collect gaming art or artbooks. → Frankly my dear, I don’t read a damn.
Exclusive Details on Rumored, Still Unannounced PlayStation Plus Tiers
Sony’s recently announced changes to their Playstation Plus platform was met with mixed reaction by industry analysts and gamers. The service will be available in three tiers: Essential, Extra, and Premium.
Luckily for those of us unenthused by these announced tiers, the rumor mill is abuzz with likely extra tiers Sony will be making public some time this week. It is unclear if these additional tiers were always in the cards or quickly developed to save face after a mediocre showing last week.
Rumors for additional tiers are flying quick and loose but we stake our reputation as a news outlet that at least all of the following tiers of PlayStation Plus will, in fact, be rolled out this year.
PlayStation Plus PM – This tier replaces the Essential tier’s two monthly games with a single, rotating free title from storied developer Polygon Magic. Word is the service would start with a bang by offering Incredible Crisis in its first month. → Call me game-shmael.
Final Fantasy VIII is a Weird Game
There are countless examples of games that were trashed at release, only to have their reputations rehabilitated years later upon being (re)discovered by retro game enthusiasts. Usually this is because the game in question was misunderstood or otherwise ahead of its time, both revelations which are only revealed with the hindsight and context provided by the future.
On the flip side, there are games that were beloved at release, only to be trashed years later as retro gamers discover that it didn’t age well, or that launch-day opinions were misinformed, or whatever the case may be.
But there’s a third option as well, one in which the initial impression of Game X was accurate, and remains accurate once it hits retro status. In my (admittedly limited) experience, this is the rarest take of all. This is probably due to the simple fact that tastes and opinions change as we age, though it isn’t uncommon for people to change their minds for other reasons (for example, to better align with the opinions of their peers, or to adopt a contrarian opinion for the sake of attention). → Read more? No, I’ll read it all.
Games As Work
One thing that’s not so much changed in the last ten years but has certainly been amplified is the popularity of games that, for lack of a better phrase, “feel like work.” Games that focus on things like:
- Getting loot
- Playing through the same content to get said loot
- Being at the mercy of some random number generator
- Aren’t really about skill, strategy, creative thinking, teamwork, etc. and but rather repetition and memorization
- Require the player to spend lots of time (on the order of hours or days) doing these repetitive tasks in order to get a reward of questionable utility (due to the RNG)
There used to be a time where this kind of style was almost exclusively the realm of Blizzard games like World of Warcraft. But with the rise of Live Service games, this approach to design is everywhere. Even a strictly single player game like Control couldn’t get away from having item farming, crafting, and procedurally generated quests (which is part of the reason I dropped it like a bad habit). → I’d rather die than not read this article!
Review – SaGa Frontier Remastered
The SaGa series has been on a remaster/remake/rerelease kick lately – in part because the series seems to have strong advocacy within Square Enix because of a successful mobile game (Romancing SaGa Re;Universe, which pains me to type) which helps cross-promotion, and likely in part because it makes money. While the cynic in me would say these are probably low-effort cash grabs, so far these games have been more accessible and better than the originals. So this is at least a medium-effort cash grab. Not bad!
I’ve mostly been a “SaGa-adjacent” RPG player, primarily because many of these games didn’t make it over. The ones I did play either didn’t have the SaGa label (Final Fantasy Legend), or were among the few that made it over during the golden age of RPGs – which is, of course, when I was mature enough to enjoy them and had the time to play them. Watching remasters come out or get localized for the first time has been a treat, since it’s like getting a new classic RPG series, with most of the original sensibilities intact (in contrast to e.g. → The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Read