written by Dayna Abel
You wouldn’t ordinarily associate the phrase “feel-good hit of the summer” to a video game, but if anything deserves the attribution, it’s Power Wash Simulator.
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[Review] Power Wash Simulator
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Tag Archives: video games
[Review] Final Fantasy VII: Remake
written by Kate Danvers
To the people I once told to stop holding on to false hope that a Final Fantasy VII remake would ever come out, I would like to humbly say I was wrong…though not really, because TECHNICALLY–
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[News] Secret Project Reveal
Dayna here! If you’ve been following my Twitter, you know that I’ve been working on a project this summer that’s been under NDA, so I couldn’t talk about it.
Guess what I can talk about now.
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[Review] Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
written by Kate Danvers
My Summer Vacation to the Isle of Lesbos:
Around my one hundredth hour of playtime, when I romanced the pirate who helped my mother when she was on the run from a cult, I realized I’d had about six romantic partners throughout the course of the game. My whirlwind lesbian sex tour of the Greek isles had turned the social structure of Ancient Greece into Six Degrees of Sappho.
Welcome to Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
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[Review] Secret Little Haven
written by Tylyn Anson
Secret Little Haven is a 2018 video game from designer Victoria Dominowski – or more officially, publisher/developer Hummingwarp Interactive – about a youngster named Alex in 1995 spending time on their Sanctuary OS Computer (a Mac ersatz, given context clues) instead of dealing with the issues in their own life. Alex writes fan fiction, surfs the net, chats with friends in an IM client while learning rudimentary coding – basically, everything that someone growing up in the ’90s and early 2000s like myself did as we were discovering ourselves in our youth.
That’s all there is to it, gameplay-wise, and yet it’s one of my favorite games of the year so far, possibly one of my all-time favorites.
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
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[Review] Horizon: Zero Dawn
written by Kate Danvers
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: humans make machines, machines have pretty big flaw that no one notices until it’s too late, machines cause apocalypse, humans now live in a post-apocalyptic world fighting against machines.
I know, I’ve just described The Matrix, Terminator, and countless other stories. The hubris of humankind when creating machines is a theme that’s so well-tread that we all fear Siri will one day rule the Earth…after she tells us “drool the mirth” isn’t in our contacts. While the robot apocalypse theme isn’t a new one, it’s still possible to take that theme in a new direction to make a unique story.
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[Review] Watch_Dogs 2
written by Matthew Finneman
Hype is a tricky beast. On one hand, it is a powerful tool for motivating gamers into anticipating your new IP. But that same wave of excitement can quickly turn to backlash when the hype-fueled, unrealistic expectations give way to reality. Hype can quite literally make or break a game. There are quite a few notable games this generation which have fallen prey to “the hype,” and one of the most well-known of them is the game which encapsulated all of the excitement and anticipation of the new generation of consoles – Watch_Dogs.
Years went by. Hype grew and turned to skepticism and snark. The game sold well, but its grimdark setting, repetitive mission structure, unlikable grimdark protagonist, and its GTA me-too gameplay kept it from becoming a true classic, despite the novelty and fun of a fully hackable world.
Enter Watch_Dogs 2.
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[Review] World Of Final Fantasy
written by Matthew Finneman
We live in an age of remakes and reboots. A world where ’80s throwbacks are slowly giving way to ’90s throwbacks. A time where cashing in on nostalgia has never been more prevalent or lucrative. A lot of these endeavors are met with eyerolls, and are often called out for being cash grabs. Fans claim imagination and inventiveness are dying. And maybe they are right. But sometimes, just sometimes…an attempt to hearken back to an earlier era, an attempt to throw caution to the wind and lol fanservice in our faces just works.
That is exactly what happened with World Of Final Fantasy.
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[Review] Stardew Valley
written by Kate Danvers
It’s easy to put games these days into a certain genre: simulator, FPS, action, adventure, sports, RPG, walking simulator, racing, and over-priced collector’s edition bookend. When we’re not sure of the genre, sometimes we fall back on descriptions reliant on popular or well-known games: “like Minecraft but…” In reviewing Stardew Valley, I struggle with putting it into a genre. Maybe “farming RPG”, but many describe it as “like Harvest Moon but…”
In my case: like Harvest Moon, but I actually played this game.
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[Review] Fallout 4
Fallout 4: Synth and Synthability
written by Kate Danvers
“War…war never changes.” -Fallout narrator
“Wheeeeeee! Explosions!” -Kate Danvers
War may not change, but the Fallout series definitely does. Once a third-person top-down RPG, the series has changed with the times to become a first-person shooty action adventure RPG. The basic mechanics are still there in an evolved form, and the themes remain, but there have been vast changes even from 2008’s Fallout 3 and 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas. Some changes are good, some are bad, most just take time to get used to, but overall the game is a solid experience.
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