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.
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.
But mostly video games. I noticed "leisure arts" on a book cover just now and thought it funny. '84 is the year I became a PC gamer for the most part. Bye bye to consoles for the rest of the 80s. That stuff's for kids, or so I must've been thinking as a late teen. I'm still going to mention NES and SMS later though. Who can resist that.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
Got some time today (car repair again), so I'll finish up making notes on the list of best Wii games on Metacritic, now starting at those rated under 75.
I played a lot of digital titles this week and stuck with almost none of them (no respawns) but enjoyed myself quite a bit. Also some disc-based ones I did stick with a little longer.
In console gaming, there is a legend known as the Third Console Curse. Most consoles are not successful enough to receive a follow-up. If they are, then a third console is still not guaranteed. It is a hard industry not only to break into, but sustain a market share in. Yet something happens with the third console every time. It fails to meet the company's initial goals. Maybe it still sells fine, maybe the console has a wonderful library of games. Even if that is the case, the company loses market share and is in a worse spot at the end of the console's life than they were going into it. It could be arrogance from success. It could be a lack of perspective from being too used to success. Maybe it's just rotten luck. But it's consistent.
Welcome to another episode of PixlTalk! This week is another solocast featuring Nick and in a similar format to the last couple weeks. Nick chats about some of the site upgrades and demonstrates how to use a couple different features. He also enumerates exactly what features are coming next to keep an eye out for. He also talks a bit about his time with Penny's Big Breakaway and Agent 64. Finally, the podcast's main topic covers trends in gaming, both from the AAA and indie space.
Around this time of year, I like to make a list of my best games SO FAR, because usually the AAA titles are released later in the year during the holiday season, and the titles that came out earlier tend to be forgotten. So here’s when those games get their due. Keep in mind that this is my list only and no other outside opinions contributed. And if a game isn’t on this list, it either just didn’t appeal to me as much or I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. Ok with that out of the way, let’s begin!
Even from the outset, Pseudoregalia proves to be a fascinating game. Visually, it's striking - evoking the PlayStation 1 - you won't see many games that look quite like it these days, and few, if any, are able to pull off the style successfully. Similar to a title on the PlayStation, you're dropped into the game without much fanfare and with only the ability to jump. You have no map to help you navigate, no weapon to defend yourself, and compared to later in the game, extremely limited mobility. Exploring Castle Sansa and its surrounding areas will net you a sword and upgrades to it, as well as myriad upgrades to your movement abilities, enabling you to reach more parts of the castle.
It's fun to go down the Metacritic [MC] list, so I'm doing it again for the stuff I played in 2010.
What it is: Stuff I played close to the year of release or at least during console generation 7, listed in order of Metacritic ranking for 2008.
One of my brothers got married a couple of weeks ago, hence the title of this blog. So congrats to him! And I also got married as well. Sort of. You’ll just have to read on to find out! Yeah, sorry to use clickbait on you all, but it’s fun when it’s fun. Anyway after all this wedding stuff are more reviews I’ve recently written over at GamerDad.com. Please click on the links and read as many as you can and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two. OK let’s begin!
I ripped through a lot of stuff this week, being impatient to get through it all, the slightest annoyance sending me to the next game in my collection. But, I had a lot of good experiences anyway. I'll break these 360 games into two categories, physical and digital only (or, Xbox Live Arcade as it used to be called).
It’s always nice to get to review a game I really wanted to play. It happens less and less nowadays. So as a big Bluey fan and genuinely interested in good games for kids, I’m glad I got to review this first game on my review blog list. So please click on as many GamerDad game reviews as you can and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two. I’d appreciate it. OK let’s do this!
These are games that are still stuck in my memory today. Many highly rated games are good, and I've been revisiting them, but these are the ones that come to mind first when I think of 360.