The TL;DR version: After playing one of the best console video games I've ever played, unfortunately I followed it up with one of the worst. In writing about Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, I feel I must make comparisons to an earlier game based on the characters: Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Game. To spare you…
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…
I reviewed the original Life is Strange three years ago. Since then, there are been a few more games released in the series, but I gave them a pass. While I like the original game, I didn't feel a need to explore any sequels or offshoots. I became interested in Life is Strange: True Colors when (a)…
To put my review of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla in context, I'm going back to the distant days of 2007, when we were all so young and innocent (or at least unindicted). I played the first two games in the Assassin's Creed series. The overall framework of the game hasn't changed in the past 14 years: You play…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…