3D collectathon platformers occupy the same lane for me as comfort food or an AC/DC album. They’re reliable, and no matter how much time passes, I can always return to them and feel familiarity. Of course, the best 3D platformers that leave their mark on history end up feeling more…
Hamster Corporation has announced that the classic Namco arcade game Air Combat 22 will be heading to its Arcade Archives series for modern platforms. As the sequel to the industry defining Air Combat, Air Combat 22 expanded the gameplay by allowing players to select different aircraft to carry out their…
Limited Run Games is back with a brand-new lineup of merchandise based on a classic Sega title. To honor the 25th anniversary of Jet Set Radio, you can now get a whole slew of shirts, plushes, trading cards, and keychains to show your love for Beat and the crew. While…
Welcome back to Season 2 of the Character Column, where we run down all manner of royal, ruffian, and rough-around-the-edges rube in a weekly analysis of various characters. Last time we covered the questions of self-inserting avatars as they pertained to Corrin of Fire Emblem Fates. Nintendo has had no…
It’s the 20th anniversary of a video game that has truly stood the test of time, as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time celebrates a whopping two decades of being hailed as one of the best, if not THE best, video games of all time. The action-adventure title garnered…
One genre that has sadly gone the way of the dinosaurs, it seems, is the wacky, arcadey sports game. I love titles like NBA Street, Daytona USA, and even extreme sports like Tony Hawk and Snowboard Kids. In this day of overly-involved sports simulators full of loot boxes and microtransactions,…
Welcome back to Season 2 of the Character Column, where we run down all manner of royal, ruffian, and rough-around-the-edges rube in a weekly analysis of various characters. Last time we kicked the season off with a look at one of my favorite villains, the horrifyingly complex Porky Minch. The…
While I’m not the resident reverent roguelike rapscallion (that title goes to the superior spelunky savant Matthew Weidner), I do enjoy a jaunt through an ever-changing dungeon or two every now and then. The cyclical design of the genre allows for a perceptible change of skill growth in your own…
It was whispered of only in legend; a long-forgotten series of analysis pieces on various video game characters that once resided on this website — so ancient, it saw the time of the Inquirer. Tidings of its returns have been muttered, yet never come to pass… until this day. For…
Modern video games love stealth. It seems like a large chunk of single-player games that come out have some sort of stealth mechanics, from first-person shooters, like Wolfenstein, to hefty adventures like Spider-Man. Good stealth, however, is not as common. The aforementioned Spider-Man has relatively entertaining stealth sections, but they’re…
When the meat of Dragalia Lost was revealed about a month or so ago in a special Nintendo Direct, I felt fairly underwhelmed by what was on display. The story seemed cookie cutter, the overall aesthetic didn’t grab me, and the gameplay looked pretty banal. Nothing about the concept seemed…
Before I ever owned a home console, arcades were where my interest in games truly started, with more quarters spent than I’d ever want to sit and count. Within those hallowed grounds of lights and sounds two types of games managed to wring the most out of me: fighting games…
When Shovel Knight released in 2014, it was an immediate critical and commercial success, setting off a wave of praise (and cameos) for years to come. The horned-helmeted hero has grown into such a modern indie icon that he’s become the first indie character to become an Assist Trophy in…
I grew up with a healthy number of classic game franchises, but there are some that I didn’t really get into or understand until relatively recently. Mega Man is one of them — I’ve played the first two on NES, but that’s the extent to which I’m familiar with the…
I like my sports games like I like my Smash Brothers: as wild and crazy as possible. Historically, my roommate and I use these realistic sports simulation games to make the game as ridiculous as we can. Making an entire team of the same player, customizing rulesets to create really…
