Many, many years ago I was an avid reader of Nintendo Power.  I had already developed a taste for RPGs, although they were a bit less numerous back then.  A bunch of them were bad — and often, even Nintendo Power was willing to admit that. Regardless, I would read each article about an RPG with fascination.  When it was a game I knew, I would enjoy flipping through the various artwork and reading about the tricky parts.  Otherwise, I’d quietly file it away in a hidden corner of my mind, to play later. I’m finally working my way through the last few of those games I filed away — recently Paladin’s Quest and 7th Saga, and ...

We need to talk about the PSP Vita. It isn’t exactly lighting up the sales charts.  True, it isn’t technically out yet in the West, but if it is true that its Japanese numbers are still hovering around half a million units, then the 3DS almost matched Vita sales in its first week alone.  Unless fortunes reverse, and the Vita ends up doing gangbusters over here, I think we can agree that Sony has a problem on its hands. What frustrates me is why this is happening.  For all appearances, the handheld is a marvel of hardware design, is relatively cheap, and has strong launch titles.  So why is it that no one is going nuts over ...

God I hate these Top 100 Lists. Not because they number the games wrong, or omit key games, but of the inevitable backlash they endure from our happy and always intelligent flock, the Internet. Some were so mad that they got pissed off at the site they read the list on, even when it wasn't originally written by that specific site. If you're man enough to go through every single game and not have some derogative comment after, then I will let you view the winners, courtesy of Next-Gen.biz. As I went through the list, I started to see what they were trying to do. You'll see that EDGE ...

Continued from the previous article, this is a set of mini-reviews from stuff I didn't get the chance to actually write about in 2012. Diablo III (PC) Because impressions from the beta were somewhat divided, I held off on picking up Diablo III until early summer, when the hype for the game had died down to “acceptable dungeon-crawler”. Unfortunately, I commit the ultimate sin now by (mini-)reviewing it without having actually beaten it. After the wealth of customization, strategy, and randomness that was in Diablo II, its sequel came as a huge disappointment. Despite more than two hours of gameplay, I had yet to make an actual decision for either character I ...

Since I didn’t get the chance to write about many of these games on videolamer, this is sort of a 2012-as-reviewed. Apologies if it’s a bit much; I’ll try to keep my impressions brief. These are all games that stand out to me, in either a good or a bad way. Some of them were released in 2011, but as a fellow gaming peon (no review copies for videolamer) I didn’t acquire them until this year. Games appear in rough chronological order. Overall, 2012 has been a really great year for video games. Personally, I’ve been trying to limit the growth of my backlog while completing as many new and interesting games as I have the ...

The JRPG genre is filled to the brim with games that are so ridiculously easy they are bad “games” - in the sense that a game is something you should have to play optimally to achieve success. The Suikoden series, my favorite of the past two generations, has gone from being “somewhat tricky in one or two battles" to "a breeze at its hardest, with pretty much no thought involved." Part of this is a plague of the genre - the phenomenon of grinding. For those who don’t want to think about what they’re doing, grinding is an easy way out. There’s no need to play perfectly when you can spend a few ...