This worked out pretty well last year, so with 2022 upon us, it’s time to start a new list! As with 2021’s list, new entries will be added to the top. There’s plenty to play, so let’s get busy:
Continue reading “FINISHED in 2022! (Updated 10/26/22)”
A lot of gamers keep lists of all the games they’ve finished throughout each year. That’s something I’ve always kinda-sorta intended to do, but I’ve tried to keep them all in my head, and at my advanced age (I’m all of forty-damn-seven), that’s nearly impossible for my withered old brain.
So since the beginning of the year, I figured I could keep track of them right here in a blog post, which I continually updated throughout the year. The latest games were added to the top. (I did not include re-playing old games I’ve already finished, like, say, Super Metroid or Mega Man.)
With the final update on New Year’s Eve, I ended up finishing 15 games in 2021. It’s not a lot by some standards, but considering how busy I’ve been with “real life,” I’m fairly pleased with that count, especially considering there are a couple long RPGs on the list. Hopefully 2022 will bring an even longer list, but for now, here’s a look at my year in gaming:
Continue reading “FINISHED in 2021! (Final update: 12/31/21)”
Just when I said I wasn’t going to be making as many regular blog posts, here comes the return of Video Vinyl! Bet you didn’t see that coming!
Okay, so to follow that shocker, here’s a hot take:
There’s too damn much video game vinyl.
Continue reading “Video Vinyl: Shadow of the Colossus and Actraiser”
This morning, after 18 years of waiting, I finally finished Shenmue III. As I’ve referenced before, I am a huge fan of the original two Shenmue games, and an eager Kickstarter backer of this third part.
So obviously, the big question is: How was it? Well, I’ve got a lot to say. Continue reading “Shenmue III: FINISHED!”
Wow! It’s been FOREVER since I did a WAWP post! So…what ARE we playing?
Continue reading “What Are We Playing? 01.12.19: Stranding Judgment Glory”
There have been so many milestone birthdays in video gaming to celebrate recently that all I can do is combine them into one big birthday bash post!
So who are the guests of honor? Continue reading “Belated Birthdays!”
Shenmue III came out today.
Say it again, with me:
Shenmue III CAME OUT. TODAY.
Did you ever think that phrase would actually come out of your piehole?
I can still remember walking into my usual haunt, the Pocket Change arcade in the Fox River Mall in Appleton, Wisconsin, expecting my usual rounds of Street Fighter II, when I saw a new fighting game from Capcom. It was like SF2, but faster, funnier, and…it was full of monsters. Darkstalkers had arrived, and unbeknownst to me, it was about to rocket up my personal favorite game chart with a silver bullet, and stay there to this day.
I may be late to the party (as usual), but I recently played and finished Heavy Rain for the first time. Being a 2010 release for the PlayStation 3 (although I played it on PS4), I guess it’s technically “retro,” although personally I’m not a big fan of attaching the “retro” or “classic” or “vintage” tags to anything quite that recent. However, during the hours I poured into just one play-through, certain aspects of its design felt very familiar, and I recognized immediately why: Heavy Rain features an interesting combination of game design concepts that hearken back to adventure games of the ’80s and ’90s, but reimagined and presented through a modern filter. Continue reading “Heavy Rain’s Classic Ancestry”
Today is the second anniversary of Retro Game SuperHyper! Happy birthday! Continue reading “2 Years!”
At the risk of featuring too many PS4 games in recent posts (what can I say, they all have a retro connection or I wouldn’t be talking about them), Sega’s Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (aka Hokuto no Gotoku) was released in the US this week, to the gleeful delight of combined Fist of the North Star and Yakuza fans everywhere. How wide or slim the overlap of that particular Venn diagram is, I don’t really know. But I’m wedged in there myself, and when this game was first announced, my head almost exploded like one of Kenshiro’s unfortunate opponents.
FotNSLP/HnG (it’s a long title either way, I don’t even know how to abbreviate it for this post) is just the latest in a really long line of video games based on the classic manga/anime property, Hokuto no Ken (lit. “Fist of the North Star”), dating all the way back to the ’80s when the manga was current and the show was actually airing on Japanese TV. Some of the games are good; many are not. And out of the dozens of HnK games released, only a handful were released outside of Japan. Let’s take a look at some of the good ones, shall we? (Perhaps I’ll do another post about all the not-so-good FotNS games someday, and call it “You’re Already Disappointed” or something.) (Don’t steal that, I just came up with it.) Continue reading “You’re Already Having Fun”
Having been introduced to videogames through arcades and the Atari 2600, I have largely lived my gamer life feeling that videogames should be played with joysticks. I mean, naturally I’ve gotten used to control pads, and I do think that the SNES controller and the DualShock are two of the best game controller designs of all time, and there are plenty of games with control schemes that cannot be executed efficiently on an arcade-style joystick setup. But I’ve always been a sucker for adding arcade sticks to my consoles; to me, there’s always been something better, more formal, more serious, more proper about using a joystick whenever possible. Continue reading “Joystickery”
Retro Game SuperHyper 