Recent content by EzraPound

The Secret of Monkey Island

#1 Portal 2 #2 Rayman Origins #3 X-COM: Enemy Unknown #4 Deus Ex: Human Revolution #5 L.A. Noire

Positive launches are launches with killer apps--almost no consoles, historically, have been able to field a wide array of great titles. By this standard, we can compare the good with the bad. Good launches: NES (U.S.): Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Ice Climber, Excitebike--probably the...

So I'm drinking a bit of wine, after playing through a bit of Red Steel 2--which I never got around too--as a postlude to my daily X-COM session. It's pretty cool--not a 'major' FPS in the vein of Far Cry 3 or [/i]Human Revolution[/i], but a fun hybrid of No More Heroes and an FPS...

I played Deus Ex and Human Revolution within the past couple of years. While Human Revolution was great--and yeah, you're right about a lot of aspects being improved--I thought it had a number of weaknesses that made it worse than the original, i.e. repetitive level design, a narrower range of...

Yeah, but WRPGs are one the few genres that have actually improved since the millennium (most have declined), and even at the time of its releases Sonic Adventure 2 was a bit iffy gameplay-wise. I've actually given specific examples repeatedly. And no, I don't think this is just...

I actually did--I commented that things were better in the nineties because of a rare combination of financial accessibility and corporate finesse, and because the robust state of the economy and the constant graphical upheavals engendered far more risk-taking than at present. And yeah, I'm...

Sopranos GTA ftw

Just don't play anything after 2001 that's not by Valve, Nintendo, or Capcom

Huh? I never criticized any genre in particular, since they've almost all declined--RTSes, FPSes, sim games, fighters, point-and-click adventure games, 3D platformers, and JRPGs have all declined since the new millennium. Though on the bright side, WRPGs have been strong, MMORPGs are better than...

If gamers with any grasp of history are whiny in 2013, it's because games are shitty--it's not as if their sense of collective discontent arose in a vacuum. I'm not really concerned about the ratio of good games:bad games--I just want good stuff to play, and while the 'average' mainline game...

It's pretty sad that you have to use the best year in recent memory to defend the seventh generation, and it still doesn't stack up. How about we compare 2006 to 1997, or 2008 to 1999? It's obvious which era had better games. Take BioShock, for instance. History won't remember the game--it will...

1) Is re-democratization really good, though? It seems to be that what made the fifth generation so special was the combination of financial accessibility and corporate finesse. Now we have creative mobile games that can't be so ambitious on account of the limited resources possessed by their...

I didn't mean literally--just whether it's going to recover from its current creative nadir, or whether a new crash will instate terrible games as the norm.

Since I was about twelve years old--in 2001--gaming has visibly been in a state of decline. In the years before then, things were stellar: the 3D revolution, in the mid-nineties, forced developers to rapidly adjust to a new design environment. This change, combined with the strength of the...