The lights are on
I'll miss you! And here's why!
A few weeks ago I was able to go hands-on with one of the most anticipated Nintendo 3DS games, Kid Icarus: Uprising. You can check out my impressions of the game in my preview, but one thing that struck me in my hour of playtime was how many optional peripherals gamers will have to choose between while playing. I double-checked with Nintendo to make sure I had all of the facts straight. Here’s what I figured out: More
I double-check with Nintendo to figure out what's going on with all of the add-ons for the 3DS and Kid Icarus; Uprising.
Well, that’s another year! And…I somehow just realized that it’s actually been a year since I blogged on here. Whoops! Between tons of work trips, features, Replay and Reiner & Phil videos, and my first cover story, 2011 was an insanely busy year. But in-between all of that work, I still managed to finish a solid 34 games, up three from last year’s 31. More
I run down the full list of games I completed in 2011 with my personal score and thoughts on each.
Throughout 2010, I kept a list of every game that I finished. Here's a look back with some brief thoughts on each.
I have a long history with Final Fantasy games, and an even longer history with putting them off. Like any good RPG, entries in this seminal series from Square Enix tend to be very long. My problem is that I don’t like playing them in short chunks, so until I reach a few weeks-long period where I know I can devote multiple-hour-sessions every night, I often won’t pick up the controller at all.
This would explain why I have only now – four months after its release – finally completed Final Fantasy XIII. Aside from the boring MMO that was Final Fantasy XI, FF XIII is easily the most fascinating anomaly in the main series to me. It is at once the most unique and singular but also the biggest exercise in frustration that has ever carried the Final Fantasy name. More
From Guitar Hero to Space Channel 5, music games are often about the music first. They’re fun because they allow you to interact with established music tied to static, preset gameplay. Beat Hazard takes the opposite approach; though it’s undeniably a music game, it’s about music interacting with dynamic gameplay rather than vice versa. And it’s freaking awesome. More
I went into a screening of Life 2.0, a new documentary about the people who obsessively log in to the virtual world Second Life, expecting to laugh. These will be nerds, I reasoned, who are quantifiably nerdier than I am. Instead of laughter, I ended up sitting through the majority of the movie with a sort of quiet anxiety, a thoughtful nervousness at what was transpiring on-screen mixed with a growing desire to get out of the theater as quickly as possible. I found the source of these emotions about halfway through the film when I realized that I had a lot more in common with the people being chronicled on-screen than I wanted to admit. More
Have you ever wanted to see just how terrible a full-time video game writer can be at online multiplay? Oh boy, am I ever ready to show you. More
As one of the handful of Game Informer editors who reads comics seriously -- I'm talking weekly trips to the comic shop seriously -- I've taken it upon myself to start doing some blog posts about comics. No promises about doing this weekly or anything, but whenever I want to geek out about comic stuff, I'll try to get one of these posts up. More
So I realize I’m incredibly late to be doing a “Best of 2009” post, but I blame a month of crazy deadlines. With the March issue of the magazine wrapping up production, I’ve finally got a free moment to breathe. Instead of doing that, though, I’m going to take a look at my personal Top 10 of 2009, which was featured in our February issue on “The Editors’ Top 10 Picks” page. As a bonus, I’ve included a couple of honorable mentions that came VERY CLOSE to making my list. More
You’ve seen GI’s Top 50 games of 2009 in the magazine. Now check out my personal picks.
As planned in my New Year's resolution blog post, I spent most of last weekend playing through Final Fantasy XII non-stop along with a friend of mine who was visiting and a ton of cool people on Twitter. Although we didn't come close to finishing the game, I definitely mark the experience as a huge success. More