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Five Games Forever

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If we had to choose only 5 games to play until we are all inevitably stung to death by killer bees, what would we choose? These are not our favorite games, but ones we would enjoy playing over and over again – though there is likely to be some overlap. More importantly, this is not a desert island list. It’s completely different so stop thinking it isn’t.

Jay

With the news Capcom will be using GenAI for game development, I’ve realized the idea that games I don’t want to play may eventually be all that come out. This fact combined with hearing an episode of The Legacy Music Hour that featured a brief discussion of how one of the hosts could basically exist just replaying about 20 games got me thinking about what I would choose for such an exercise. Only with five games because no one wants to read or write a list of 20 games from multiple people.

X-Com – Not the new one for losers who like well made, easy to play games – the original PC game. →  Postlanser: Heritage of Read

Chaos;Head – The story of a Whiny;Loser

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There’s a scene in Wayne’s World, which you’ve seen 9 times if you’re in this site’s target demographic (American, mid-40s, name starting with J) where Wayne laments his misfortune directly to the audience in an unappealing way. “I’m being shit on. Shit on,” he says. The camera begins to pan away from him, the joke being that the audience doesn’t want to waste time with a whining loser. This is my short review for this game – I am the audience and Chaos;Head is Wayne Campbell in the brief moment he is uncool. But I will add some more words for people who demand actual information in their game reviews. You know, nerds.

I started Steins;Gate because it has a reputation as a great visual novel and after Looping Rage, that’s what I needed. But about 3 minutes in I realized that S;G was not the first in its series, so I checked Wikipedia and then my list of ‘eShop games bought on sale I don’t remember I have’ and discovered Chaos; Head on both (the version I played has the word ‘Noah’ appended to the title to designate it as the rerelease with improved graphics, rounder letters, twice the punctuation, etc.). →  May God smite me if I stop reading here!

NetEase to Divest from videolamer Holdings, Inc

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NetEase Inc. will cut off funding to the website led by videolamer creator jay, the latest to be affected by the Chinese company’s broader strategy to shrink money wasting activities.

Employees of videolamer Holdings, Inc. were told of the decision on Friday, according to people familiar with the situation. A NetEase spokesperson confirmed  it will stop financing the site on Memorial Day as a commemoration to those who lost their lives fighting for short form, video content.

videolamer’s impending closure underscores the struggles of a broader website industry that surpasses tanning bed services and manufacturing in revenue, yet in recent years has faced growing competition from alternative entertainment such as depression.

videolamer was created in 2005 after jay, one of Japan’s most frequent guest’s, having visited three times, decided to graduate college and do something that would generate no income. NetEase and Tencent Holdings Ltd., which were both actively recruiting Japanese gaming talents and never before heard of websites for their expansion overseas, competed for videolamer at that time. →  Article Hominid

NetEase Games Establishes videolamer Holdings, Inc

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GUANGZHOU, CHINA, MAY 12th, 2026 – NetEase Games, the online games division of NetEase, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTES, HKEX: 9999), is delighted to announce the establishment of videolamer Holdings Inc. in Tallahassee, Florida ( https://videolamer.com/ ). Jay, former producer of GuessHowManyNipples.com, has taken up the post of Most Literate of Directors and CEO of the website, along with experienced writers, many of whom worked on iconic webpages. The site will focus on developing high-quality console-focused editorials that will be released globally, as sites tend to be.

Creating Entertainment filled with DREAMS and LAMENESS

videolamer Holdings, Inc. enjoys full authority to manage and create the kinds of posts that they alone are passionate about, with NetEase Games’ support.

There have been sweeping changes made to how content is produced in the entertainment industry, in terms of how it’s made and the business model that supports it. These changes are happening at a greater speed, thanks to the advances in technology and infrastructure. However, NetEase Games and videolamer both believe that what people want from entertainment hasn’t changed one bit. →  Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Post

Phantasy Star Never Had a Theme Song

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All serious JRPG series have their own designated musical theme. Or so you’d think, but one of the big three (as of 1995, I will have to check to see if anything has changed in the short time since), Phantasy Star, never had a theme for the overall series. Let’s take a quick look at the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy themes so we are all on the same page as to what “music” is.

Composed by a living (now deceased) Nazi skeleton, the Dragon Quest theme set the stage for the genre’s theme tunes. Grandiose and classically flavored, it’s still in use today and immediately calls back memories of yore and other forced “old English.” Following suit, excellent composer, and as far as I am aware, acceptable human Nobuo Uematsu created a theme for the Final Fantasy series. Both of these themes have been with their series from the first entry, which is an impressive feat. Final Fantasy is so confident in its new music, it often hides its own theme deep within series entries. →  Read more? No, I’ll read it all.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined – Fragments of a Rearranged Past

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I’ve enjoyed nearly every Dragon Quest I’ve played, but it took me decades and a streamlined version to finally complete Dragon Quest VII. I might be the exact target audience for VII Reimagined – busy, a fan of the series, and dangerously prone to nostalgia. But I feel VII Reimagined ultimately drops the ball by overly simplifying dungeons while not addressing some core issues with a disconnected structure and lack of character development.

The main problem I have with the changes to dungeons in DQ7R is that things have been made too effortless. The classic “Dragon Quest loop” (or if you prefer just a “classic JRPG loop”) is one of attrition – in battles you have to determine the most efficient way to make use of limited resources (primarily MP, but also things like rare revive items or, early on, HP recovery items). In Reimagined, HP and MP are restored on level-up, and additional save statues which restore MP have been added at the start and end of most dungeons (in all difficulty levels). →  Do a barrel read!

Shin Maou Golvellius – A Valley of Quality

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videolamer’s Chris sent me a link to a sale on EGG Console games the other day. For well-adjusted people who don’t know what I’m talking about, the EGG Console is a line of old Japanese computer games rereleased for modern consoles. So like Hamster’s Arcade Archives line but for Japan only games that generally require actual reading (in Japanese) as the collection is of computer stuff. I had looked at the EGG titles years ago when it first surfaced in North America and was composed mostly of Hydlide and Xanadu but then lost track of the releases. Luckily for me, Chris knows what sort of garbage I’m into and he noticed Golvellius on the list of games on sale. I immediately bought it and then spent an hour looking into the other EGG Console games, even the ones not on sale because I am fiscally irresponsible.

The Japanese version of Miracle Warriors, my beloved mediocre Master System RPG, was apparently released on the ol’ EGG in late 2025. →  You may say I’m a gamer, but I’m not the only one

Wednesdays with Andrew – Gunbird and Saturn Bomberman

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Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA | Sega CD Gaiden

Last time we covered a slew of Sega CD games that I originally presented to victim Andrew maybe a year ago. It was a pleasant detour we all thoroughly enjoyed. But now it is time to get back on track with the original intent of the project – familiarize Andrew with Saturn games before it is too late. For him, not me. I don’t plan on dying.

Gunbird may or may not be hellish

We briefly revisited Galactic Attack before playing Gunbird. Everyone had more fun with the latter as I sat there smiling politely but slowly shitting my pants in veiled anger. See, I’ve never really liked the bullet hell subgenre of shmups. My experience consists of possibly only Castle Shikigami 2, but that seemed sufficient to make a blanket judgement. (That game does have a solid plot, though.) →  Read, you fools!

videolamer ignoble

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Writers and people who write despite never being able to generate income with their meager abilities all know that for every published great American novel or 200 word blog post, about ten times as much never sees the light of day.  The world may never see a finished version of Kafka’s The Castle or whatever Camus was writing when Gunpei Yokoi ran him down with his car, but now the unpublished works of the videolamer staff are archived in a place accessible to all.

We present to you a trove of our lesser writings, things we were not proud enough to post here on this main website. We present to you videolamer-ignoble. When you have read everything on videolamer.com and even endured the material from the 00s but still have hours of time to fill at work, try this exciting new repository of mediocre content. It may be less entertaining, not as well written, and overall fairly rote but it will still help pass the time. →  The only thing we have to read is read itself.

Thinking about the Genesis library: Part I

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The Genesis of the Idea

I’ve been sitting with an unfinished version of this post for half a year. Making up incorrect theories about the Master System is fun because few people actually care enough to be mad at me, but the Genesis is the big leagues. I’ve settled on splitting the ideas I have about the Genesis library into two main parts, one about their first party output and one about third party support. This gets a little muddled because I cover internally developed, developed by a company Sega owns, and at times third party games published by Sega in this first post that’s supposed to be on first party efforts, but I try to clarify what is being discussed.

Similarly to the thesis of my Master System writeup, Sega did the majority of work supporting the Genesis with games – Sega developed 80 titles internally for the Genesis, while Nintendo internally developed 24 SNES games. This was done both by direct development but also a large number of publishing deals. →  Tony Hawk’s Pro Reader 3