The shoot ‘em up is one of my favorite genres. In this age of 70 dollar games and season passes, these staples of a bygone arcade age offer uncompromising and unrelenting action like nothing else on the market. The premise is as...

Releasing a new video game is a difficult and expensive task that even giants of the industry don’t always get right. From the Atari Jaguar to the PlayStation Vita, history has plenty of examples of consoles that failed for one r...

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time on this website, first, how dare you stalk me like that, and second, you know I’m a fan of shoot 'em ups. I understand better than anyone just how niche the genre is, as it...

This is Part 4 out of 5 in the Legacy of Kain Retrospective. Read the entries on Blood Omen, Soul Reaver 1, and 2, before continuing. Creative differences are a common occurrence in any group project, and the Legacy of Kain series is n...

Scoring systems are essential to any sort of competition. Be it Monopoly, martial arts, soccer, or even tabletop RPGs to a lesser extent, there needs to be a way to declare a winner and a loser. Video games are no exception. In the ear...

In an undisclosed back-alley in the city of Melbourne, there’s a café. From the outside, it looks like any other business. It's a two-story building with plenty of space for tables, where an impressively tall tree stands s...

The invasion of Brazilian games on the global market is still a recent phenomenon. Being a developing country, access to technology and resources is naturally behind the rest of the world, with our historically stupidly protectionist p...

This is Part 3 out of 5 in the Legacy of Kain Retrospective. Start with Part 1 or read Part 2 if you haven’t already! Life is a mystery. One can never truly know what tomorrow brings, and even the most laid out plans can crumble ...

This entry is Part 2 out of 5 in the Legacy of Kain Retrospective. If you haven’t read Part 1, I strongly recommend you do so. Sequels are a tricky affair, and I think most people will agree with me when I say that the concept ki...

Why are you here, reading this text? Maybe you saw the title and recognized the subject. Maybe you follow me on this website and trust my writing to some extent (thanks, by the way). Or perhaps you are ordained to be here now, guided b...

I once said that the Shoot Em Up genre isn’t usually the place where one would find life-changing experiences. “Usually” being the imperative word. Like with every media, circumstances dictate how much of an impact an...

Videogames are weird. By that I don’t mean just the stuff that comes from the Land of the Rising Sun, I mean gaming as a whole. It’s a medium so young that some people have quite literally been there since the beginning, bu...

Over the years, I’ve dropped very subtle hints that I might love the shmup genre. Although they’re way past their prime, the genre has been enjoying a certain renaissance for the last decade or so, something undoubtedly he...

It’s been a while since ya boi wrote one of these. After dedicating the last few months to the C&C Retrospective, I want to take things nice, easy, and slow before getting back into the grind. To do that, I scanned the Made i...

Ready for more? After 2010, the C&C series was declared deceased. The release of the abysmal C&C4 left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouths and didn’t take long for EA to pull the plug. What followed was a decade of ...

Throughout this retrospective of mine, it was my goal to make each entry more than just a really long opinion. I know every blog is subjective to some degree, and at the end of the day that opinion will inevitably make its way into th...

The Apocalypse has begun... In life, there are some things that are simply inevitable. The sun will rise, water will evaporate, the human race will eventually wipe itself out the face of the Earth, and after every mainline installment ...

If I asked you what the golden age of the RPG genre was, there's a good chance you'll answer “the '90s”. With the increased popularity of console gaming came a demand for more mature and narrative-driven experiences that a...

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do was watch my father play games on our old PC. Some of my most treasured memories involve the two of us exploring games till midnight or those times when I got sick but since my bed was ...

If you’re familiar with the world of videogames at all, you should know of the shmup (short for Shoot ‘Em Up) genre. Out of all gameplay loops out there, it’s one of the simplest and most satisfying: shoot a lot of b...

Doom Eternal, the sequel to the unexpected hit that was Doom 2016, is upon us, here to save us from the dread and fear of real life. It is also much, much harder than its predecessor, requiring a slightly different approach from that g...

You can't kill the Messiah... In 2003, after the release of Generals, the C&C series went dark. With the closure of EA Pacific and its subsequent merger with EA Los Angeles — the event that prompted many members of the origin...

When you think about the most influential consoles of all time, the PlayStation 2 is among the first to come to mind. Released two decades ago, this powerhouse of a console hardly needs an introduction. Being the proud owner of one of ...

I don’t think anyone on the internet can deny that the Sonic franchise is perpetually stuck on a roller coaster. Sometimes it reaches amazing highs, with fantastic titles like Colors, Generations, and Mania. Other times, it is c...

Compared to other media, videogames are a relatively new form of entertainment. But even with less than a century of existence, sometimes their history can feel dense and impenetrable as if it was written by the most insane of the Eld...

After Renegade failed to meet EA’s expectations, and with the closure of Westwood Studios, the future of the Command & Conquer series seemed uncertain. Times were changing and if the series were to survive, it would have to ...

Time sure flies by fast. It feels like it was just yesterday that a little sandbox game with voxel graphics came by and took the whole world by surprise. Notch’s little baby grew to become a sensation all over the world, and wit...

A few years ago when I was still trying to get a degree in music, I had a teacher of musical composition that would always, without fail, take 20 minutes of his classes for musical appreciation. We already had a class on that subject b...

After creating what was essentially one of the greatest RTS games of all time, Westwood’s days were coming to an end. The shadow of EA was finally creeping in the studio, and it wouldn’t be long before they delivered the f...

Black Mesa, the unofficial-turned-official fan remake of the original Half-Life has been trough a lot. Upon release, it was missing the last portion of the game, Xen, a portion that many fans of the original (myself i...