Ghost of Tsushima

The TL;DR version of this review: Ghost of Tsushima is now my second-favorite video console game, after Horizon: Zero Dawn. The (fictional) island of Tsushima is part of the shogunate of Japan. The Mongols have invaded, led by Khotun Khan. At the start of the game, an army of samurai is defeated by Khotun. You are Jin…

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Control

I heard about the video game Control around the time it was released in 2019. I thought about getting it (I was still spending a lot of time at home recovering from medical stuff). But a little bit of research told me that the game was quite difficult (on the level of Dark Souls) and there was…

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Spider-Man: Miles Morales

For my review of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it may help to go back to my review from three years ago on its prequel/main game, Spider-Man. The ambiguity of "prequel/main game" depends on your perspective. SM:MM is either a short sequel or a very large expansion of the original game. At a current street price of about $50,…

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Mass Effect Legendary – some notes

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…

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Hades

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…

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Sunless Skies

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…

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Detroit: Become Human

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…

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