Revered by many at first glance
The original purpose of this blog was largely to give my most magmatic takes on animanga, TV, video games, and any other media, only to evolve into a comprehensive look at things I like, find interesting, or just plain don’t like. Case in point:
God of War III did better to make me feel guilty about f[growl]king up the world. I hate this game!
Read More »Very few imitators
You wanna know something interesting about games in the mid 1990s to around 2011 or so? The most popular properties were cloned and imitated ad nauseum. Google the most cloned video games and the search results will pull up some of the obvious examples because of how influential they were at release and still are. Doom, GTA III, Minecraft, Flappy Bird, and to add onto that, God of War, Mortal Kombat (especially in the 90s when it first debuted), Devil May Cry, and so many others as seen in this screenshot:
Even WatchMojo made a list of heavily cloned video games… multiple times. >_<
Read More »And what a bloody shame too…
One of the earliest posts on this blog concerned racing games, three of which I ranked in order from great to terrible: Midnight Club 3, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and L.A. Rush–with Gran Turismo 4 as the wild card that I would attempt to get back into at a later date due to vague memories of what it entailed.
I made that dedication on April 7, 2023 with this post: Racing Games. Attempts were made to fulfill that promise and short of typing “Results: Inconclusive. Project Cancelled” in bold letters, it’s worth noting what I experienced in the many times I booted the game up on PCSX2 and why it’s better to categorize it as “easy to play, hard to master.”
Read More »A serious mockery of an art form
Mind control doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t need to for me to make this next sequence sound all too familiar to a handful of readers. Open YouTube app on your mobile phone -> scroll through your feed -> click on a video that piques your interest -> if it’s monetized, ads will roll before, during, after, or at all three points depending on the length -> one of those ads is for a simple puzzle or side-scrolling shooter game -> the example player plays the puzzle extremely poorly. If you’re on desktop and have the Adblock for YouTube extension, then these may not be seen at all. If you’re on mobile, like I usually am, hammering away on the screen for the Skip Ad button is a regular routine.
Living After Midnight
Jet lag! Didn’t hit me as hard this week, but flying across two time zones is a sure-fire way to screw with the comprehension on this piece. Dying Light was promised and Dying Light is up for this week.
Yay alliteration
Jetlag is always fun >_>. A regular reader may know by now the entire shtick of this blog. Obscure, niche, underappreciated; this place is the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends of the entertainment world. And lucky that it is because I’m still discovering stuff that slipped past my radar or was unavailable to me at the time of release. Case in point:
Or more specifcally Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on Steam
Read More »Veni, vidi, vici
In the research for this topic, by way of the magic coincidence, former developers at Crytek have sprang from the woodwork and the coffin to announce that Ryse: Sone of Rome was something of an experiment. Those who recall the Xbox One launch title might be thinking, “Well, it was supposed to show off the Xbox One’s stellar capabilities,” and you’re right. It was, and it did… adequately.
I’ve been on PC since the COVID pandemic was classified as an outbreak at first in late-November 2019, but even then I was lamenting the absence of disk drives in PCs and laptops well before then… (T^T)
Read More »Blame it on the WB!! Well, not all of it
If you’re a regular viewer of The4thSnake and you follow his opinions on the HD continuation of the Mortal Kombat franchise or you simply keep tabs on WB Games and NetherRealm Studios, a conclusion you can draw is that the games started to get… complacent and stick to familiar angles come MK11.
Working forwards and working backwards
Long time readers know by heart my love for Max “Painkiller” Payne is outdone only by that of Detective Frank “One more thing” Columbo. But for those who are checking in from an uncharted part of the world (or galaxy), here’s my piece on Max Payne and here’s my most recent piece (as of this writing) on Columbo. Short version: play Max Payne, it’s great; and watch Columbo, it’s great.
A really long-time coming
Onto something now that I’d lightly touched on in this blog, but haven’t explored as thoroughly as my other talking points (“They were all dead. The final gunshot…” etc., etc.) due to regional exclusivity. Kantai Collection, Senran Kagura, and iDOLM@STER. Three pivotal and explosive multimedia franchises with libraries and treasure houses big enough for export to the colony of Mars… accessible to western fans by way of fanart, VPNs, piracy, and mastering Japanese enough to appease the organizers of the JLPT and the stalking green bird.
いいえ、やめろ！
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