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.
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.
Got another batch of game 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. I’d appreciate it. OK let’s begin!
2013 is really the start Console Generation 8, but to me it's still Gen 7 because the Xbox One and PS4 came out late in that year, and I didn't get either one until maybe a year later. Yes the Wii-U was out in 2012, the 3DS and PS Vita in 2011, but it really felt like Gen 8 fully to me in 2014. So this is the last year I'll review until I get past all the Gen 7 systems in my retro journey this year.
Knocked off a bunch more in the 360 collection. I was writing down all the digital only games I wanted to play on 360 and came across a lot of them. I own a lot more than I remember and there are ones I missed as well. This is just adding to my "collection" and making getting through 360 a real chore. I passed my usual burnout on year-long gaming projects a month ago, so I think I'm good for the distance now. Here's this week's plays plus a few buys.
When a game console is considered “dead,” I like to write a tribute blog about that console and its games. While most people would probably consider the PS4 ‘dead’ for a while now, I’m still reviewing games for it. I guess a game console is really only considered ‘dead’ once you stop playing it. But since recently I wasn’t able to get simple games like LEGO Batman and Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection on the PS4, I figured it was about time. I’ll probably do a similar blog with the original Switch later towards the end of this year. Most of the games on this list you can play on other consoles as well, I mostly used the PS4 as a third party machine if I couldn’t play or review it on the Switch, or if I’d rather play it on the PS4. Anyway, there are so many games I’m going to split this up into two parts. And the first part is going to be all about classic game collections, and remakes of classics and styled games.
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.
In conjunction with Metacritic. These are my first 10 picks for DS, going from best to worst on Metacritic.
I went over the Metacritic list of best DS games and made my own list with comments. There's certainly many more great games I didn't mention for various reasons.
I'm deeply obsessed with Hogwarts Legacy right now, but I found some time to knock off a few more gen six games for either keeps or trades. Then I got some black friday sale games already - also finished a book and watched more Power Rangers.
My girlfriend and I am going on a short vacation to our old college in central New York this weekend. Among other things, I'll be looking to see if that arcade machine, Sky Shark, is still there in the pizza shop I used to go to. The odds aren't good after so much time. But anyway, I played a lot of games this mid-week-end that I have (I'm off wed/thurs regularly) trying to decide what to keep of my 90s game collection.
Mario Kart World was recently released as a Nintendo Switch 2 launch title. I was lucky enough to get a Switch 2, thanks to help from my family. So let’s take a road trip tour at all the tracks you can race on in the game. So grab your road trip snacks and let’s roll!
So I'm trying to stick to the years 1995 to 1999 as the core of Console Generation 5, but it is often that i get tired of the retro and just do a genre search for the latest RPGS and see what I can play for free or cheaply.
I got to 35 hack 'n' slash games in March. The early ones go quick and some later ones just stopped me dead at some point with confusing mission objectives, difficult mechanics or some other dumb thing I couldn't stand. I have been trying to stick to each game as long as I can, pushing beyond my limits. I'll try even harder next month. There's nothing like actually finishing a game. I think I finished exactly 6 of these - all mentioned below.
There are a lot, so I may save some to mention later. The earliest of the games either didn't grab me, which means I only played them for 15 minutes or so, or they did, in which case I beat them in about an hour. I found some more of them than I mentioned before by cruising through collections too. I'm being pretty arbitrary strict in my choices: it has to say "hack 'n' slash" in the game's description or as part of the genre on wikipedia. So here's what I played (most of it) this week.
In this batch of GamerDad.com reviews, I’ve noticed nearly half of them are about cats or mice, so hence the title. Please click on and read as many as you can, and maybe post a ‘like’ or comment or two. I’d really appreciate it. OK, let’s begin!
I didn't play many of the most celebrated games at the time, '90-'94. I played my own thing which was brawlers, action games and a few sports and board games. My friend Mad Krammer (MK), who I still play with today, and I would get together and play whatever we had, which was, at first, a Genesis. We started going to flea markets and eventually picked up a SNES and then he ended up with some old computers from his job and we started in on PC gaming. Here's a year by year list of what I remember playing back then.