Blue Fire is a game I like, but I don’t love. It’s a game I want to love - it draws influences from some of my favorite games, broadly 3D Platformers but with a bit of Zelda, Metroid, and Dark Souls thrown in for good measure. But despite this, it just doesn’t all come together as well as I hoped.
Not so many games really. Actually, my favorite thing this year wasn't games but audio recording. My best friend and I would get together in breaks from our different colleges and go on road trips. Our favorite thing was to record ourselves doing skits or other nonsense on cassette tapes while listening to our favorite music. I still have them, some 30 or so. I converted them to CDs in the early 2000s and stored them as files on a now defunct hard drive. However, MK and I would go to arcades still here and there. I watched a lot of movies as well.
1986 was the year I went to college which likely distracted me from the NES and SMS releases. I was most concerned with my Apple computer that year, but I'll go through all I've subsequently gotten into and some notable facts (notable to me anyway).
1985 was a little light in gaming for me but it was notable to most of us in the west as the year the NES was test marketed in the U.S. that October (and nationwide in Sept. '86). I was unaware but it can't go unmentioned. Here's everything I remember clearly.
I've been without a car this week which has made it hard to get to MK's for gaming, but I managed it one day by bus. Here are the results.
Beat, Heart, Beat is an action-rhythm platformer that puts a unique spin on the auto-runner, incorporating a midwest emo soundtrack and a truly bizarre cast of characters and premise. Through fifteen unique levels/songs, you’ll avoid obstacles, attack in three directions, chain combos, and try to do it all to the beat to earn the highest scores. The short quest relies heavily on replayability and high score chasing and your enjoyment will likely hinge on your affinity for the distinctive midwest emo soundtrack.
Oh gaming. Perhaps I was spending more time on sports, records and photography, but there was plenty of arcade visits still going on, not to mention playing my friends' consoles at their homes. Here's what I played and remember.
Let's dig into 1982! I got games, games, games, and a little bit about music at the end 'cause I was into it then.
Up until Lies of P released, I thought it was impossible for anybody not named FromSoftware to make a great Souls-like. We’ve certainly seen plenty of teams adapt the formula to 2D successfully, but despite the similarities, those titles feel more like variants on the classic Metroidvania formula than a proper Souls-styled game. False Hero, though, leaves no question where it draws influence - this 3D Souls-like, the product of a single developer, is imbued with everything that made the Souls series great. It even manages to add its own twist to the formula, creating its own identity in the process.
Continuing the share, my games of the 80s, maybe a few others if I'm into it. This is 1981.
I'm not really playing any 80s games this month (I'm still trying to weed my collection) but I am doing the 80s in other media this month, so I thought I'd at least write something about the games I played from this decade.
When Star Fox Adventures originally released back in 2002, I skipped out. If you read my review on Star Fox, this might surprise you, given how much I love the series. But Adventures wasn’t really a Star Fox game, it was the Rare N64 game, Dinosaur Planet. It got an awkward Star Fox coat of paint, some poorly executed Arwing sections, and was dumped into the Star Fox universe, thanks to Nintendo leadership.
I started with just arcades but then got carried away with other interesting releases and facts of the later half of the 70s. This is the time I became more interested in games.
I’ve got another batch of GamerDad reviews I’ve recently written, including a trio of amiibo figures! Please click on the links and read as many as you can, and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two. I’d appreciate it. OK let’s begin!
That's right, folks, PixlBit has officially turned 17 years old. It's hard to believe that this little gaming site has been going for that long, but here we are. This year has been particularly special for the site, as it represents a full reboot of the site with new technology and a new direction.
I'd like my media project for the year include video games, or games in general, but they just doesn't work because video games are so new and what came before them isn't so interesting that they could take up months of free time. But let me back up. What is my media project for the year? It's to go through human history in twelve parts. This is September and I'm in the 1970s, finally a decade that includes video games. If I had made gaming match the project, I would've been stuck with board/card games for eight months of the year. That isn't going to happen, not even for one month. Truth be told, I couldn't even spend a whole month on 70s video games. Only by the 80s are there enough video games to keep me going for a month.
My trials and tribulations as I go through my PS3 collection. I'm still in the top 100 critically on Metacritic.
I was going to dig into this week's plays when I forgot about RetroCon. There are some videos up of it now but none of the cosplayers yet. There were some good ones I saw and I'm sure someone did a video that'll be posted eventually. Also, I thought I'd mention the first game I played this week, Demon's Souls and post a few vids that I like made by From Software that give me goosebumps every time I watch them.
Whether you asked for it or not, chances are, Generative AI is now a part of your day-to-day life. Increasingly, it’s been worked into every facet of, well, everything. If you’re like me, it’s become a huge part of your work life too, regardless of whether you asked for it. GenAI is changing our world; it’s deskilling workers, weakening labor power, increasing the surveillance power of institutions, and reducing our collective agency and intelligence.
Well, I refined my randomizer table and came up with something better and that works like a DnD Encounter Table. I also customized it for myself. This is a project for next year, I think. I'm so exhausted by my current plan (go through everything I own and weed out the undesired), I want to think ahead. So here goes.
Tomorrow, we're due to finally find out what Nintendo has been cooking up next for the Zelda franchise. There's no question that there are few games as beloved as the Ocarina of the Time, which puts Nintendo in an interesting position for this remake. As we all know, the Zelda formula has been totally shaken up with the latest entries, prioritizing emergent gameplay and sandboxes that allow players to explore and create, a total departure from the Ocarina-style that previously defined 3D Zelda.
I got to thinking about how to create a Random Encounter Table for PS3 games, because I always loved those things from my DnD days way, way back. Here are my results from the top 200 PS3 games on Metacritic.