- 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
Articles
Switch 2 Technical Review – Shocking frame rates exposed!
I haven’t been following the news for some time because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, like the origin of this blood I’ve been coughing up for three months. If ICE comes to send me back to Africa, where I have on good authority all humanity is from, I can let them know I haven’t been following their activity and they will let me go because clandestine police forces with vague accountability are anything but unreasonable. At least that was my experience during my brief internship for Pinochet.
But news of the Switch Deux did somehow make it past the spoons and forks guarding my cave, and like any caveman, I am wowed by shiny things. Yes, I immediately bought the console after deciding I wasn’t going to buy it and ignoring the preorder period while judging the marks who wanted to buy an expensive piece of hardware sight unseen. Then, as if to mock those who want but cannot have the thing (which is likely evidence of a moral failing), I got one. → May God smite me if I stop reading here!
Old Disappointments Revisited: JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Volume 1 (SNES)
Over the past decade or so, I’ve tried to play every SNES RPG I can find, even if I don’t beat them all. I played most of them at some point via rentals, and I have fond memories of many of them (even Lagoon). Over the years, I have built my collection to include as many as I can reasonably justify (ex: I might pick up Brain Lord, but I’m probably not getting Dragon View). Even the most mediocre of these games has had some redeeming quality, but I’m here today to tell you about one that really doesn’t. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Volume 1, which should probably have been named “Volume 1 of 1” in retrospect, really doesn’t have that much going for it.
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. → Readbot Chronicles
Please Finish Your Games Before Dying
Due to one part being bad with money and one part psychosis, I have over 100 Switch games. Many are smaller (and were thankfully cheaper) indie games that are probably shorter than a dozen hours, but the catalog still adds up to a huge time investment. At the rate I play, maybe a decade’s worth of games. Perhaps I should stop playing, “browse the eShop deals section and buy random shit,” and focus on something with better game mechanics, like this Live-A-Live demo with huge sections of nothing but listening to people speak at me.
If games stopped coming out, would you have enough to last the rest of your life? There are a few factors at play – how old you currently are, how long you’ll live, your ability to get your hands on old games, and your willingness to play old stuff. Assuming you’re a good person who can stomach games from most generations (I understand not wanting to play Asteroids clones for years, but then why did you buy them in the first place?) → Show me the reading!
Retro Games, Presentation, and Gatekeeping
For those of you who are white collar workers, imagine the following scenario. It’s happened to me more than once in real life, and perhaps it’s happened to you too …
A new bit of jargon recently crept into your industry. For now, let’s just make up a word, like … “scropely.”
Everyone starts to use it, slowly at first, but it quickly builds momentum. At first you think you understand what scropely means, but then a few people use it in a new and seemingly contradictory way. Now you’re back to square one.
At some point you’re in a large meeting. The new jargon is being tossed around freely – everyone is talking about how something is or isn’t scropely. At some point it’s your turn to talk, and you bravely (or foolishly) state:
“I’m not sure about you folks, but I honestly don’t know what it means for something to be scropely.”
You fear that you will be mocked, but the opposite is true. → Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the article?
“Revived” Franchises and Kickstarters
It’s no secret that I like Suikoden a lot. Even the bad ones. The series’ spiritual successor the Eiyuden Chronicles: Hundred Heroes got yet another trailer recently. The creators are mostly saying the right things, indicating they’re focusing on things that Suikoden did differently from most games – having a large cast, involving that cast in the story (appropriately), and a relatively realistic and political scenario.
I’m a little worried, though, because past crowdfunded games that focused too much on recapturing an existing series’ magic lost sight of being their own thing, and end up being known as inferior copies. Mighty No. 9 is probably the most notorious, but it’s definitely not alone in this. Been there, got the t-shirt, still wear it ironically (probably), but honestly haven’t played the game. Or Shenmue 3. Or Pathologic 2. But I spent money on them. That’s on me, not necessarily on the developers of those games – and I’ve learned my lesson from those experiences. → Rule of Read
The Future of Games I Care About: A Brief Overview of Crowdfunding
In early 2012, Double Fine launched a Kickstarter campaign for a then unnamed point and click adventure game meant to be reminiscent of studio founder Tim Schafer’s work on LucasArts classics Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. Kickstarter had been used to fund video game projects before the Double Fine Adventure campaign, but they were mostly smaller projects offered by developers with less of a reputation.
In the intervening decade the template of high profile Kickstarter campaigns from well known developers has become familiar to onlookers. Often a team or individual who built a reputation making games in a specific genre that has trouble getting funded by publishers in the current market (point and click adventure, shmup, isometric RPG) revisits that genre by turning to Kickstarter for initial funding and potentially to prove to deeper pocketed publishers that there is sufficient enthusiasm among fans to make the concept viable. The trappings of these campaigns have also become familiar to those of us who participate: stretch goals for exceeding the initial funding target that could include additional characters or areas, hiring a well-known composer for the soundtrack, or additional game modes; the temptation of physical copies, art books, soundtracks, in-person meetings or even dinners with the developers, and other perqs for higher tier pledges; and updates that arrive frequently throughout the campaign to stoke enthusiasm and inevitably slow down as the game enters the long period of development. → All happy games are alike; each unhappy game is unhappy in its own way.
Waiting for Arc the Lad – PlayStation RPG Memories
In the early months of 1995 my friends and I poured over every drop of PlayStation information we came across, whether it be a magazine ad with Polygon Man telling us the system was more powerful than god, Sony suggesting we were UR NOT E, or the giant cardboard cutout of whip wielding Sofia at the local Palmer Video that still managed to be half an hour away. The older consoles were looking less appealing by the day (thanks, Vectorman), especially when compared to generation-defining beauty such as the widely advertised Battle Arena Toshinden (Sofia wore leather, you see, which really pops when rendered in cardboard).
By the midpoint of the 90s my friends and I were all 13 and desired a higher caliber of digital entertainment regardless of platform – the RPG. The first one previewed for the upcoming PlayStation console was called Arc the Lad and we all eagerly anticipated the game and expected it would be available soon after the system, at this point having no concept of localization, publishers, and all the messy stuff at the rotten core of the game industry. → Read, I am your father!
Awful Boss Fights
What do Wolfenstein: Young Blood and Halo: Infinite have in common? If you guessed that they’re both mediocre games, you’d be right, but that’s not what I was thinking of.
No, what I was thinking of is that they both have similarly terrible final boss fights.
The basic rules of each fight are as follows:
- They both take place in a vaguely circular arena. You’re exposed if you go into the center, but you can find some protective walls if you move toward the outer edges
- The boss flies and/or teleports around hurling projectiles at you, some of which can be difficult to dodge when you’re also trying to shoot back
- Multiple waves of enemy mooks spawn in to try and distract you
- The boss has multiple phases
It is uncanny how similar (and similarly terrible) these fights are. The main problem they share is that because the arena is circular, there is no true cover. The protective walls along the exterior may block attacks from head on, but they can’t stop enemy mooks from flanking you from the left or the right. → There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is games.