Words On Wednesday

Physical video game media has been a hot topic lately, and while I agree with the intent of the discussion, I don't think it matters as much as people want to suggest. While I mourn the bygone days of a SNES cartridge working 30 years into the future, the gaming industry has evolved in a way that does not operate in the same way as it did in years past. For the past few years, physical games have mostly given way to increasingly digital sales and gaming hardware has shifted to match. There has been fairly vocal outcry with each step in that direction, but with very little long term consequence. Sony released a "Digital Edition" of the PlayStation 5 without an optical drive in 2020 as an option to save money and play exclusively downloaded games. When Nintendo released the Switch 2, they also started creating some physical cartridges as "Game-Key Cards" that don't have any game data, they're just a physical license to download and play the digital game. ...

I'm a HUGE fan of trophies and achievements in video games and RetroAchievements has made it where I can get that same experience with games that were made well before achievements became commonplace in the industry. Don't ask my why I like achievements and trophies so much. I genuinely don't know, I just get a little dopamine hit every time I see one pop up. And I realize that a lot of people don't really like achievements, some even go so far as to hate them, so systems that allow you to turn them on or off really are the best of both worlds.  Furthermore, I do want to explicitly say that these games were not incomplete or inferior WITHOUT achievements. I'm not going to tell you that Super Mario World became a better game with achievements. It's just a neat thing for me to be able to see individual accomplishments listed together in a single place across all my games on that platform. So what IS RetroAchievements? It's a site that tracks tasks for older...

“Castlevania: Curse of Darkness” is a 3D action RPG released on the PS2 and Xbox in 2005. Early 3D games in the Castlevania series existed in a very weird space; they were trying to blaze a trail from a traditionally 2D genre into a third dimension, but 3D models were still fairly low resolution and the controls were often clunky. As such, Curse of Darkness is cursed (pun intended) with this sort of video game adolescence, where earlier games excelled with 2D sprites and traditional mechanics, and later games did something similar but better. However, does that mean that Curse of Darkness offers nothing worth playing today? My experience with Curse of Darkness began soon after it released on PS2. At a time when rentals were expensive and demos only existed for popular titles on quarterly demo discs, you basically had to make a decision off pictures from magazines and familiarity with the series. I played and enjoyed Castlevania games in the past, so it was a reasonably safe bet. Althou...

I posted a review for “Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age” last month, but I didn’t mention how I got the platinum trophy, one that was an absurdly long time coming. My first exposure to Final Fantasy XII was actually the original release back on PS2. My roommate at the time had a copy and he really enjoyed the game, so he let me borrow it. I played for a while and got maybe a quarter through the main story. I liked the game, but I moved out before I managed to finish so I returned it to said roommate. Rest in peace to that save file that maybe still exists on some PS2 memory card somewhere; I haven’t played it since circa 2010. A console gap and almost a decade later in March 2019, I picked up Zodiac Age from my local library to play on PS4. Unfortunately, I did have to start over since saves from the original release aren’t compatible with Zodiac age, but it was a small price to pay for the improvements and availability on a current platform. I played for a while and got further than...

I am fiending for a Steam Deck, and I’m not even ashamed about it. Although I have discussed before how there is a time and a place for consoles , I’m finding myself gravitating more toward the idea of PC gaming lately. I’m not saying that I’m done with console gaming; I still think the Nintendo Switch is probably the best gaming console ever made from the perspective of form factor. A single device that can be both a handheld and traditional console is amazing, and my family leverages that capability to great extent. And maybe that’s why I’m now becoming more interested in PC gaming specifically with the Steam Deck. Effectively, it’s the PC equivalent of a Nintendo Switch. It can be a handheld, you can dock it for a more stationary experience, and the OS seems to be very much geared toward browsing a game library and selecting something to play. My aversion to PC gaming traditionally has largely involved the difficult decision between building out a desktop rig and buying a high end l...

A new Ratchet & Clank game has been out for nearly a year, and I still haven’t played it. Anyone who knows of my gaming preferences can tell you that Ratchet & Clank is one of my favorite intellectual properties. I’m talking in the same echelon as Zelda, Metroid, and those kinds of classics. I LOVE Ratchet games. The graphics, the music, the shooting mechanics, it’s just all amazing. I’ll play them like a gosh dang addict until I’ve upgraded every weapon, found every secret, and satisfied every skill point. I even managed to get my wife on board with Ratchet: Deadlocked and we both had a really good time eking out everything that game had to offer. So, you’d expect that I would be on board with a new release on day one. And in some other scenario, maybe I would be. The problem is, I don’t have a Playstation 5 and I won’t, at least not for a long time. I can’t even blame it on console shortages and scalpers buying up the few that are made. I wouldn’t buy one if shelves were stoc...

I recently set out to get a secret weapon in Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age. The process convinced me to be much more critical of what information I consume, and to always listen carefully to all instructions. Zodiac Age, as I’ll call the game for brevity’s sake, has a number of powerful weapons not available in the original release of Final Fantasy XII. Fortunately, none of them are as ridiculous as the original way to get the  Zodiac Spear , which could be rendered unavailable if the player unknowingly opened any specific chests throughout the game, without any indication that they might play a part in obtaining what was the most powerful weapon available. The Zodiac Spear is still available in Zodiac Age, but they’ve generously removed that awful chest mechanic. Plus, there are actually several more powerful weapons available, so players might not even decide to procure the Zodiac Spear anyway. Many new weapons are upgrades to existing weapon classes, like the  Ku...