I have a few games to review in my personal queue of "essays I plan to write long after a game has been released so that any review is meaningless": Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Control, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. I decided to bump Mass Effect Legendary Edition to the top of the queue because this isn't a review. The…
If you go by the number of times her work has been reproduced, Pamela Colman Smith is probably the most popular artist in the world. She is the one who created the artwork for the so-called Rider-Waite Tarot Deck; the claim that she's the most popular artist comes from multiplying the number of Tarot decks with her…
On the surface, Hades sounds exactly like the kind of game I wouldn't enjoy: you fight a lot; you die a lot; it looks like another pointless arcade game. It wasn't until I saw Felicia Day play the game on a YouTube video from her Twitch stream that I became interested: So what makes Hades different from…
This game and the next game I plan to review (Hades) have been labeled "rogue-like" or "rogue-lite" games. For the folks who read this post who don't know that means, I'll describe what's generally meant by the term. Rogue was a video game from the early 1980s. The game was originally developed to use ASCII characters for…
Staged is a clever TV series now available on Hulu. In it, Michael Sheen and David Tennant play fictionalized versions of themselves. In the first season, they're restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic but still try to rehearse for a play to open immediately after the pandemic ends. In the second season, things get meta as they deal…
This is a review of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion by someone who didn't care for the original Gloomhaven. Let's step back a bit. Gloomhaven was published in 2017. It created a bit of a stir. At $140, it was among the most expensive board games published (though that price point has been exceeded since then). It…
In reviewing The Last of Us Part II, I'm going to do my best to avoid spoiling both that game and The Last of Us. That's not easy, because the first issue I'll discuss is whether you can play The Last of Us Part II (tLoU2) without playing The Last of Us (tLoU) first. Strictly speaking, you…
As I played Detroit: Become Human, I was strongly reminded of two other games I've previously reviewed: Batman: The Telltale Series and Batman: The Enemy Within. They are all "choose your own adventure games": The emphasis is on the story. While there's some combat, it's all in the form of QTE's (see below). The story evolves as…
Right now, the PS4 game that everyone is talking about is The Last of Us, Part II. So I'm going to talk about GreedFall. GreedFall, published by the French game company Spiders, is a story-based role-playing game in the same vein as Bioware's Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises. The flow of GreedFall is the same: -…
thatgamecompany is known for making computer games for people who wouldn't otherwise be interested in computer games. Sky: Children of the Light is their attempt at making a MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game for people who would otherwise not be interested in MMOs. In my opinion, they did not succeed; if you're not already a gamer with…