Galactic Embarrassment — Bethesda is responding to their hardcore PC gaming fans in the worst possible way. Rather than taking the customary high road of continuing to work on their popular game Starfield, their customer service team is instead waging battle by commenting on negative Steam user reviews. …

A remake of a classic to make it more like its own sequel — When you first look at Risk of Rain Returns, you might think “hey this doesn’t look that much different than the original.” That’s what I foolishly thought when I first laid eyes on the game last week. Turns out, this is a wonderful, lavish remake, and it truly does that…

The company stupidly fumbled an obvious opportunity — Ubisoft had the keys to a vast successful Pirate RPG Kingdom just sitting in their hands, but threw them away with a series of baffling decisions. Ten years ago, Ubisoft launched the wildly popular and critically celebrated game Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. It wasn’t actually the fourth game in…

Koei tried some fun new experiments this year — Normally, this is the time of year where I would write my “Top X Dynasty Warriors Games of 2023” list (See previous examples: 1, 2). This started out as both a celebration of my love for Koei’s long-running action franchise and its many spin-offs, and also a gentle lampooning of…

A mess on consoles, a little better on high end PCs — A few weeks ago, I wrote a cozy game round-up where I looked at some of the most popular current games in the space. The one I was most intrigued by was My Time at Sandrock, the followup to 2019’s My Time at Portia. It blends traditional cozy game tasks…

A brilliant music album wrapped in an awful nostalgia play — While I was busy being a wee baby, now-famous game developer Yu Suzuki was working on Space Harrier. This arcade classic codified the rail shooter genre, and pushed sprite scaling graphics technology to its limit in 1985. …

A true gift from the past in more ways than one — This year, Ubisoft actually tried something different with one of their big franchises instead of just another formulaic sequel. Assassin’s Creed helped usher in the modern open world era of tower-unlocking and dozens of map icons before then pivoting to a simplified take on something like The Witcher 3 instead. …

It remains a true benchmark nearly two years later — I’ve seen a lot of talk over the last few weeks about how Alan Wake 2 is the “greatest looking game ever made.” …

Broken Destiny, Now with Missing Features! — Until this morning, I had totally forgotten about 2009’s Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny. It came back into my personal realm thanks to the magic of the PlayStation Plus Premium classics catalog, a haphazardly updated collection of older games that you can either access through a subscription or a direct purchase. …