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The first 100 are part of my top 100 game project: click here for that list
- The Greatest Games: BioShock (2007)
Would you kindly give me a moment to reflect before diving into BioShock itself? And so, I finally reach the end of this project. I don’t think I realized what I was setting myself up to do when I established a goal of writing a minimum of 500 words for … Continue reading The Greatest Games: BioShock (2007) - The Greatest Games: Persona 4 (2008)
Playing Persona 4 back in 2008 was a major revelation. Being my first Shin Megami Tensei game, it surprised me that a traditional turn-based RPG could be truly challenging from the very beginning. But the truly mind-blowing element was the unique formula with which the Persona series tells its stories … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Persona 4 (2008) - The Greatest Games: Life is Strange (2015)
Greatness does not mean without flaws. While most of my favorite games achieve this status by juggling several strong ideas without notable hiccups, Life is Strange has some obvious issues. Namely, this is a Telltale-style adventure game with some stilted dialogue. A narrative-focused video game with questionable writing should be … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Life is Strange (2015) - The Greatest Games: Mass Effect 2 (2010)
Being the middle episode of a planned trilogy can come with some issues. The first episode gets to capture our imaginations with whatever new world the story is introducing to us, while the third will hopefully be able to tie together all those concepts established in the earlier entries. The … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Mass Effect 2 (2010) - The Greatest Games: Super Metroid (1994)
While Metroid Prime was a nearly perfect transition into the third dimension, I have to give a slight edge to the previous entry. The Metroidvania genre has largely stuck within the 2D realm because it’s a perfect twist on the traditional platformer. Despite its quality, Metroid Prime can be a … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Super Metroid (1994) - The Greatest Games: Dark Souls (2011)
According to legend, Dark Souls is a relentlessly brutal video game experience that will punish the player for the slightest error. People shudder in fear at the thought of losing all their currency by dying once and failing to get back to the same spot…almost as if they’ve forgotten that … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Dark Souls (2011) - The Greatest Games: Metroid Prime (2002)
Nintendo sometimes insists on certain terminology for their games. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an ‘open-air’ game, whatever that means. Metroid Prime, meanwhile, is not a first-person shooter, despite being in the first person and involving shooting. No, no, Metroid Prime is a first-person adventure. Genres … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Metroid Prime (2002) - The Greatest Games: Silent Hill 2 (2001)
The original Silent Hill was one of the first big hits to match the cinematic possibilities of third-dimensional gaming with a truly mature narrative. Silent Hill 2 amplifies this experience. The story is better, the monsters scarier, the atmosphere denser. This is everything a survival horror game should aspire to … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Silent Hill 2 (2001) - The Greatest Games: Return of the Obra Dinn (2018)
As video game development gets more complex, more and more people get involved in the creative process. This complexity mixed with bloated budgets has resulted in an industry where truly daring ideas never get off the ground. So called ‘medium-defining’ works like The Last of Us Part II are only … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) - The Greatest Games: Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
Shadow of the Colossus is a maximalist minimalist work, a game built around pushing a single concept to its greatest form. This is an action-adventure game with no common enemies to slay, no towns to visit for upgrading your gear, no dungeons to trudge through. This is purely a gauntlet … Continue reading The Greatest Games: Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
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- Review: Ne Zha (2019)Ne Zha is a film that captured my curiosity after seeing its performance at the worldwide box office. Like The Wandering Earth earlier this year, Ne Zha is a work of mainstream Chinese cinema that broke big enough in its own country to land within the top ten for the … Continue reading Review: Ne Zha (2019)
- Review: Hustlers (2019)Hustlers is one of those delightful surprises that pops up now and then, a film directed by a relative unknown with a plot that renders simple advertising inadequate for daring to explore a controversial subject matter with an uncommon amount of depth. This is the story of a group of … Continue reading Review: Hustlers (2019)
- Review: The Goldfinch (2019)The Goldfinch is an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt. After exposure to this film, one might walk away convinced that literature as an art form must have died a decade ago if this was even on the shortlist for best of 2014; having never read the … Continue reading Review: The Goldfinch (2019)
- Review: It Chapter Two (2019)The first of these It films, which really ought to have been titled Chapter One from the get-go, was one of the most surprisingly fun horror movies in recent years due to its mixture of standard horror thrills with an engaging coming-of-age adventure. Pennywise and his cavalcade of monstrosities are … Continue reading Review: It Chapter Two (2019)
- Review: 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)I feel like little should need to be said about this movie after mentioning that the first real ‘scare’ of the films involve an atrocious CGI fish lashing out and literally screaming at a teenage girl. Unfortunately, it would be misleading to stop there, for such an absurd moment suggests … Continue reading Review: 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)
- Review: The Angry Bird Movie 2 (2019)A movie like The Angry Birds Movie 2 is all but doomed from the start, being based on a property that really offers nothing in terms of narrative or aesthetic potential while having enough familiar imagery that the film can’t step too far away to dive into unexpected places. This … Continue reading Review: The Angry Bird Movie 2 (2019)
- Review: Good Boys (2019)Good Boys follows a certain familiar formula to the letter, a crude coming of age comedy about a group of youths caught up in quirky hijinks as they attempt to attend a party. The formula is tweaked just enough, tracing the same ground but with tweens in place of the … Continue reading Review: Good Boys (2019)
- Review: Ready or Not (2019)Ready or Not is one of the not too uncommon works that is open about being designed with a future cult audience in mind. A wedding turns into a bloody game of hide and seek as a rich family must hunt down the bride or risk possible annihilation from an … Continue reading Review: Ready or Not (2019)
- Review: The Farewell (2019)Lulu Wang’s The Farewell offers up an immediately gripping premise and executes it flawlessly, tackling a heavy topic with both grace and levity. Young Chinese-American Billi, already struggling with accepting the fact that she has been rejected for a Fellowship, is devastated to learn that her grandmother back in China … Continue reading Review: The Farewell (2019)
- Review: Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)Richard Linklater’s latest work follows Bernadette Fox, a neurotic architect pushed to the breaking point when her daughter Bee suggests they go on a family trip to Antarctica over winter break. She spars with a nosy neighbor and hoards pills while ranting about her anxieties to an unseen personal assistant … Continue reading Review: Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)
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