Game-Boy

I saw Anamanaguchi live for the first time in March and it was everything I could have hoped for on a night that was damn near a disaster. Min and I assembled in Baltimore in front of a tiny club we’d never seen before. Sonar isn’t that far from the harbor. It’s a tiny club about the size you’d expect a band like Anamanaguchi and its 8-Bit Alliance traveling partners would be able to draw. Small and intimate. Scarily intimate, actually. I calmed myself by remembering that it’s rare for people other than myself to show up on time for a rock show. ...

It was late fall or early winter. The precise season doesn’t matter; it was definitely cold. Equally cold was my companion riding shotgun. Her visit to icy Ithaca was, as usual, marred by the arguments we always found ourselves embroiled in, only this time I was living in a double with Min that should really have only been a single. The claustrophobia of such a tight space was so overwhelming that we traded it for the equally tight confines of my Corolla, but there’s something different about driving down a country road. Something that gives you the illusion of openness and freedom while you are crammed between lane lines and car chassis. The tension and anger seemed to flow away. We made peace and turned around about halfway to Lisle and didn’t look back that weekend. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Wallpaper courtesy Pet-Shop on DeviantArt”] [/caption] Ruminations on video games as an art form - this could very well become a Mother 3 review. There will be spoilers here. Seriously, don’t read it if you want to play Mother 3 and not have the plot spoiled. There’s a trite comparison that floats around the internet almost every month that always gets my eyes rolling. Inevitably, someone will call such-and-such the Citizen Kane of video games or ask what the Citizen Kane is or claim that the medium is immature because we’ve yet to hit our Citizen Kane. It’s exhausting and, quite frankly, futile and stupid. To begin with, Citizen Kane opened with good reviews and was generally well-received, but it didn’t start to gain notoriety for ten years. It didn’t even make #1 on a top movies list until twenty years had passed. When the Citizen Kane of gaming hits (god I hate that phrase), we probably won’t know it for quite some time. The more important point is that movies and games are apples and oranges. ...

Eric came up with an idea to write parallel reviews of the same video game to see how similar our reviews came out. You can see his at Eric’s Binary World 2.0 Tetris is…" video gaming distilled to its core" [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“350” caption=“The most fun a person can have playing Tetris is completing this drop”] [/caption] A Tetris Review (In Four Lines) ...

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. Due to some poor life decisions, I find myself stranded for five weeks without any video games. What’s a guy to do, right? Well, rather than just giving you some of the headlines from the week’s video game news in lieu of what I was planning to be gameplay impressions, reviews, and the like, I’ve instead started a five week “All-Stars” feature. Each week we’re going to look at a video game era and spotlight my top three games from that era. Each of these games will also receive a place setting at the prestigious “Table of Honor” feature that I’m working on. Here’s the weekly plan: ...

You’re playing through an RPG. You’ve gained five levels, found some sweet equipment drops, minimized the use of your precious items, and then it happens. You come up against a behemoth of a monster. Your party is decimated, your progress lost, your controller tossed through the screen. Does this even begin to sound familiar to anyone? It’s like modern gaming, in an effort to bring in an even broader audience, has started to dumb down our video game experience. Think back to the last four, at the very least, Final Fantasy games (not counting XI). Aside from side quest bosses who are geared to be a challenge, how often did you even find yourself remotely challenged in these games? I honestly don’t think I worried much about save points in any of these games (aside from when I was hunting the harder mobs in XII) at all. There was none of that between-save-point stress and worry that a game with any difficulty might throw at me. I just go on through the game, breezing through the fights and find myself at the final boss, sometimes taking more than one try to kill him, but, more often than not, just breezing through him too. ...