As the second-best Zone of the Enders game - behind the fascinatingly committed strategy RPG/visual novel Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, which I could talk about for so long that it would legally become a crime - The Second Runner feels to me like both a real step forward from the first game ...

Alright folks, congratulations, we've finally got an episode for the greatest game ever made, the podcast can stop now. Our work is finished. It's hard for me to consider Final Fantasy VII outside of its massive formative impact on my personal tastes and cultural touchpoints. It was the first game I...

Hey all, I'm going to be at the next VIDEOBRAINS conference at the end of the month giving a talk on the history of video games trying and failing to tackle issues of politics and political history, alongside a whole load of other interesting and informative speakers. If you're in the central London...

My post-Christmas list (aside from keeping up with podcast games) has mostly been me getting to know my new Playstation 4. I've finally cleared Uncharted 1, I'm making headway into Bloodborne (Just beat the Blood-Starved Beast and loving this game so much even though I was never sold on Dark Souls) ...

Easily my favourite of the handheld Zelda games. Approachable, beautifully designed, lovely to look at and a really great evocation of Link To The Past. The thing that always stands out to me the most is that its audio design really is wonderful, and really gives the world a lot of sense of place. D...

PSN - AMMask

I don't really play any PC games online

Undertale is one of the most cohesive games I've ever played, even in its wildest moments. When Toby Fox wants to be funny, everything from the writing to the graphics to the mechanics contribute directly to that. When he wants to explore an aesthetic affectation, he does so in ways that constantly ...

This game is a weird collection of interesting affectations around a very conventional centre, so I think we can clear the first part of this by saying that the shooting in the game is perfectly competent, if uninspired, and the length, I thought, was perfect, with great pacing throughout. That said...

Street Fighter 3, for me, is a weird game: obscure, having mystifyingly never arrived on the Playstation 2 in the PAL region; unfashionable, having arrived in that brief period where Namco's fighters were far more in vogue; alienating, having eschewed most of the previous popular characters from the...

First off, let's get this out of the way; trains suck, boats are way better. Everyone who likes trains is a dork and I will personally wedgie them. Going places on tracks is less fun than sailing there, and creating a train-centric world for this game is very slightly less lame than the waterworld t...

So first off, a disclaimer: The Chinese Room are based locally and I’ve hung out with at least one of the people who worked on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture a couple of times at local game dev meetups. I don’t think that’s enough to affect my judgement of it significantly, but just take note. Eve...

So while I'm writing up my "What I Thought" post, gotta ask: what are everyone's "Small Rural English Village" bona fides? Spent a lot of time in Gloucestershire (Gloss-tersheer, yanks) myself.

I was actually too young to play this at the time, though I was a HUGE Street Fighter EX+a fan. I remember reading a solid 9/10 review in Official Playstation magazine at a time, back when that was an incredibly impressive thing, but I only got a copy myself several years later when the GBA version ...

I have way more affection for Phoenix Wright than I feel like the game deserves; in fact I can't think of a game with which I have a more skewed quality:affection ratio. I have a history of being visual novel-adjacent - played a lot of games with visual novel bits, read a lot of visual novels over L...

Slightly tenuous but I was listening to the Silent Hill podcasts (yes, I'm still catching up on old episodes!) and I was reminded of the very heavily Silent Hill-inspired work of black ambient band The Axis Of Perdition. If anyone knows their metal, it's in a similar vein to bands like Blut Aus Nord...

This game is a great example of how one mechanic can change everything. For the most part, the game is okay, if a touch boilerplate - the mechanics are derivative, the art direction is fine, the story is pretty much exactly what you think it's going to be, and not nearly what you hoped. But that Nem...

So my mum found this thread while searching for the feature of mine on the main site, and she just wants to thank you all very much for the well-wishes and for your suggestions!

dezm0nd wrote:

Alex79uk wrote:Dark Souls?

That's usually a reply for most videogame questions, it seems but probably not this one!

"Y'see Mum, the idea is that you play this over and over until Stockholm Syndrome convinces you that you're having fun."

Lovely! Also, there's a "free-to-start" Pokemon themed picross game for 3DS if she wants something with, I dunno, Pikachu on it? :) Best wishes for your mother! :) Oh god, can I really not just pay outright to get a regular premium-price experience? Pokemon Picross sounds awesome but I'm ...

Picross on the DS is about all my mum wanted to play. That's not to say that all mums are the same but hey, who doesn't love Picross! :D This is actually a solid plan just because I already own every available Picross game as far as I know. More than enough to get her through the recuperation proce...