Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth
Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth has the prestigious honor of being the final retail release for Nintendo’s venerable 3DS hardware. As such, it is allowed indulgences abnormal of more active platforms. It incorporates characters and themes from Persona, a Shin Megami Tensei spinoff that has never appeared on a Nintendo system. It operates through the dungeon crawling paradigm of Etrian Odyss...[Read More]
Blood & Truth
There is a moment in Blood & Truth where the player gets to be a club DJ and a bloodthirsty crack shot at the exact same time. Hunkered behind a turntable in a shootout, one hand can fire a pistol into the brains of irate henchmen while the other, if you’d like, can scratch a nearby record and perfect the beat. This lasts about a minute but the absurd duality speaks for the entirety of B...[Read More]
Ritual of the Moon
From April 24th until May 21st I played Kara Stone’s Ritual of the Moon for a grand total of three hours. This works out to about six minutes a day for twenty-eight straight days. Played as designed, Ritual of the Moon’s eccentric structure is both a serious time commitment and an incidental diversion inside the hours I spend staring into a computer screen every day. This is not the on...[Read More]
Resident Evil 4 (Switch)
Resident Evil 4 has earned the catalog releases expected from a game of its stature. Its 2005 GameCube debut, despite Shinji Mikami’s infamous protests , gave way to an underperforming (but more popular) PlayStation 2 release later that year. Its 2007 trip to the Wii was adored for the attention it devoted to the Wii’s motion controller while the PC port that same year was adored for n...[Read More]
Everybody’s Golf VR
“It feels like you’re there” is a response to virtual reality that is both miraculous and mundane. The nature of the hardware taps into the primitive parts of your brain and overrides natural sensory input, effectively changing the premise of reality. That is amazing but it is also a trick that has now been performed on my brain dozens of times. The first time I played Everybody&...[Read More]
Team Sonic Racing
As the progenitor and king of Kart Racing, Super Mario Kart is allowed single-console iterations with minimal disparity. Sega’s attempts to do the same with Sonic—a being literally defined by speed—are as variable in quality as they are in style. Sonic Drift had more in common with Out Run than Mario Kart while Sonic R was a wackadoodle foray into bipedal sprinting and obtuse pop melodies.&n...[Read More]
Saints Row: The Third – The Full Package
Grand Theft Auto IV was a gift to Saints Row. Rockstar’s debut on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shifted Grand Theft Auto’s priorities away from the madcap open-world omnibus of San Andreas and toward a more Serious and Important direction with its narrative and content. Saints Row 2, while full of goofy jaunts, wasn’t technologically or inspirationally prepared to capitalize on ...[Read More]
Shakedown: Hawaii
Sponsored content. All-natural products. Charging a premium for exit-row seating. Software update subscription fees. Mail-in rebates. Targeted advertising. Raw water. Store credit cards. Superfoods. Day-one patches. Vacation clubs. Multi-level marketing. Oversold seating. Fuel surcharge. Convenience fees. If you have found yourself blankly paying for some kind of service (or absence of service) yo...[Read More]
R4: Ridge Racer Type-4 20th Anniversary Retrospective
It’s 6:30am on July 15th 1999. The Real Racing Roots ’99 Grand Prix, an eight race tournament, has made its fourth stop at a Yokohama course, Out Of Blue. The dawn sky is overcast with cloudy lavender and muted blue while gentle piano keys and daydream synthesizers compose the accompanying Lucid Rhythms audio track. Seaside shipping lanes sit idle, birds of prey circle the mountaintops...[Read More]
Giga Wrecker Alt
Giga Wrecker Alt is a game in which the player mercilessly bashes, slices, and torpedoes evil robots into obliterated piles of scrap. That wreckage is then gathered into a massive trash ball and used to influence environmental objects to solve physics-based challenges. Puzzles and combat are questions that can be answered with the same set of tools, albeit with wildly unstable—and sometimes madden...[Read More]
Jupiter & Mars
While the worst people on the internet still whine when games make even the most tenuous of political statements, active beliefs and social commentary remain inseparable from any artistic creation. It can be toned down and outright denied by its publishers, but personal beliefs have (and will always have) a place in games. In the early 90’s, when our destruction of the environment somehow sy...[Read More]
Final Fantasy X | X-2 HD Remaster (Xbox One)
Final Fantasy X served as the model for its generation of Japanese role-playing games. Final Fantasy X-2 replaced weight with whimsy and functioned as a celebration of its legacy. Both are integral parts of a disparate narrative and emblematic saviors of Square’s, and then Square-Enix’s, post-millennium operation. How these games played is as important as what they meant; the strength of the...[Read More]