Rundown (9/24-9/30) A 13-Year-Old Dream Lives On!
I believe that I have talked about how back when I was around the ages of 12 – 14, I was a big fan of a lot of Newgrounds flash animations, amateur made cartoons that often took the form of video game parodies, and provided one of my friends and I with countless hours of enjoyment. One of my favorite series from back then was TTA or TVTome Adventures, a story driven and incredibly ambitious series centered around a convoluted anime-esque story about people playing a virtual reality MMO based loosely on the online interactions of a bunch of teenagers. It was a 73.5 episode saga created primarily by one person, Chris Niosi, throughout his high school years, along with other various flash cartoons. (more…)
Red Faction: Guerilla Review
Red Faction: Guerilla has been off my radar for quite some time, which actually surprises me, as it is a game developed by Volition, the people behind Saints Row, and I absolutely loved the second and fourth games in that series. It is also a game about destroying buildings, which has a primal and cathartic appeal to me. However, the brown aesthetic of this game always put me off, and it wasn’t until I caught a few glimpses of people gushing about this game before I chose to check it out and see what made their knickers so tight and cozy. Yeah, I still have no idea what they found so appealing about this game. (more…)
Rundown (6/05-6/11) PRE3 2016: Now With Less Eroge
E3 2016 is days away, and PRE3 2016 is in full effect. Reveals were made, trailers dropped, and leaks are still dripping from the sweaty underbelly of the video game industry in anticipation for the hype driven commercialized video game event of the year. I could be jaded and cynical about the whole blasted affair, but I’d gain nothing but smug satisfaction in doing so. It’s a fun and exciting time in the world of video games, so I may try to enjoy it and everything related to it. (more…)
Rundown (1/17-1/23) Sadness of a Large Amount
Okay, The Malice of Abigale Quinlan has been released, and now I’m pretty lost as to what I should do. I’ve been pretty depressed as of late, with school starting up, my job being incredibly stagnant, and my inability to come out as transgender to my parents is really getting to me. I have insecurities and anxieties, which are two common things that I should learn to live with because they are never going away no matter what I do. Oh, and constantly feeling like a failure when it comes to literally everything I do certainly doesn’t help. (more…)
Saints Row IV Review
As the years have gone on, I feel as if I have gotten increasingly more cynical, and less permissive of things that I openly would have praised in year’s past. I do truly and always want to sing the praises of just about anything I believe to deserve it, but there are and were moments where I was a bit too excited and felt too justified in saying nice things that I ignored some of the negligence thoughts that now fill my mind whenever I play any game, which kinda sucks now that I think about it. (more…)
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell Review
I have professed pretty regularly that I have nothing shy of a strong affection towards the Saints Row series, well, namely to parts two and four. I have mentioned my issues with Saints Row: The Third but most of those stem from how much I enjoy the two aforementioned titles and very much want to love everything related to the series. That said, even when viewing Gat Out of Hell as a standalone expansion that I managed to get at launch for $5 because of a pricing error, I have some pretty major qualms about it. (more…)
Saints Row: The Third Review
If you put me on the stop at this very moment and asked me what my favorite franchises are in the realm of video games, I would probably ponder and stutter for a few seconds before spitting out Pokemon, Metal Gear, and Saints Row. The last one is naturally what I’m here to talk about, as while I do adore parts two and four, the first and third parts of this to be pentalogy are far lower on the totem pole of quality in my mind. While part one is the franchise before it really got its own identity, part three was where the franchise was established, became AAA to a certain extent, and had a staff that was 80% people who did not assist in building this franchise up. But that was three years ago, and I feel it is worth revisiting… That, and I was in the mood for a game with character creation, and this was the only one on my list of games I own which I ought to play. (more…)
Rundown (7/13-7/19) I Am Truly The Nicest One There Is!
For the past… I don’t even know how long, there’s been a lot of talk about bringing in a wave of diverse characters and trying to lessen the use of characters fitting a mold of being straight white males with short black hair, athletic builds, and possibly some beard scruff, as that is quite frankly an incredibly dull mold when you consider how those sliders can be manipulated. Hell, when I started writing, well, writing something that I actually completed, I specifically went out of my way to avoid that mold, when I was dealing with the medium of writing, which is where the character’s visual appearance does not matter all that much as it is not a visual medium. Yet I still went out of my way to make sure I had balanced ethnicity well, even if I boiled it down to four variants, White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian, made them either pansexual or asexual, and make sure the character at the very least obtains a female form if they do not begin with it… The Transformation, Ascension, and Degeneration of Terra is coming to this blog 11/18/2014 or sooner! I’ve got about three more chapters and two months of editing left to do, so I’d say early October. Probably. (more…)
Saints Row 2 Review
I really do not have an explanation for what I decided to replay Saints Row 2, let along the vanilla version of a not very good PC port. I am aware that there is a supposedly awesome mod by the name of Gentlemen of the Row, but I forgot about it until I was nearly done with my 45 hour playthrough where I did just about everything I could do that wouldn’t be easily viewed as mindless busy work. However, this is not a review where I look back and question why I did not see faults with a title, but one where I actually come to terms with how I probably should have loved this title even more than I thought I did. Also, I want to review something happy on Christmas, unlike last year… (more…)
Saints Row IV Review
Note: I re-reviewed this game in 2015. Please disregard this original review.
The Saints Row series has always been a bit of an oddity to me, but at the same time, few games managed to change themselves up so drastically over a single generation of consoles. From GTA clone, to a silly parallel to the series, to a game that tried to ape its wacky demeanor but somehow felt lacking. To part IV, which is probably going to be my GOTY unless I finally play Bioshock Infinite.