Pepsiman
In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, many brands were shifting marketing strategies, and tragically, due to either that shift or his Japanese origin, we in the West weren’t able to experience Pepsiman.
Rockstar Studios and their impact on American culture
When I think of Rockstar Games, I think of movies.
Rockstar’s greatest trait as a studio has always been their ability to create worlds that felt organic and lived in, and in the case of their GTA series, that means hyper-real American cities chock full of the same kinds of people that inhabit those spaces in real life.
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Get busy “gud”ing or get busy dying over and over
For as long as the series has been a thing, Dark Souls and its spiritual successors have led the conversation around difficulty. Whether the conversation is held in bad faith or not, any Soulsborne fanatic will tell you the highest barrier of entry for the series is difficulty, after which you’ll likely hear any number of stock community in jokes. More often than not that joke will be “git gud,” a meme that originated in the early era of Souls’ popularity.
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Fallout 4’s settlement builder is so bad it’s fantastic
Sometimes I enjoy things that are bad.
Zelda CD-i cutscenes. The Johnny Depp remake of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Fallout 4 base building.
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Halfway between Pokémon and Shin Megami Tensei
As loyal readers might expect, Jesse’s GOTY pick is a little unorthodox.
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From Silent Hill to Soma & back again: how horror got here
Horror games are having a renaissance right now. For a while, they were stale, same-y, and uncreative, and Jesse Boruff thinks he knows why they became that way.
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Get in the robot, Reader
Recently in my internet travels, an angry forum user labeled me braindead because I like Gundam and giant robots, which irked me. Not because someone was mean to me online, that shit happens all the time. No, I was irked because Gundam doesn’t deserve to be called braindead.
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Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Homo War
The Fire Emblem series is partially responsible for my pansexuality. There’s no shortage of queer coded characters, especially in the most recent entry, and there’s quite a history to it. Sometimes the series really drops the ball, but I think that there’s a fair amount of positive and important representation in the series.
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The world’s supply of Nintendium has been exhausted
Working at a game store in the mid-2010s, a coworker of mine, in reference to the Wii U , remarked Nintendo was “all out of Nintendium.” That specific moment played back in my head as I opened up my phone at nine in the morning, navigated to Nintendo’s YouTube page, and prepared to watch the Nintendo Switch 2 reveal.
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From Terra to Leo
Amnesiac protagonists may be an overdone trope, but Fantasian: Neo Dimension pulls it off.