Category Gaming
Animal Crossing and the Wonder of an Aimless Gaming Experience
Earlier this year, near the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons and it got me thinking about how wonderful gaming can be when you’re not necessarily focused on a specific goal. After all, if we’re escaping into a fantasy world then maybe in addition to the monster slaying and the […]
Turning the Gears: Party Reputation and NPC Reactions
An important part of good DMing is creating reasonable and realistic consequences for player’s actions. Not just in the sense of heroes getting experience and loot for killing the bad guys, but also in the reactions of the NPCs around them. Instinctively, we want to keep track of it in our heads, and let things […]
Classics Corner: The Super Mario Brothers
Everyone knows about the Mario Brothers, and there’s not a lot to be said about them that hasn’t shown up in a dozen other “did you know” videos and listed articles already. Because of that, I’m not here to talk about Mario trivia or give you a history lesson (there’s plenty of that out there […]
Kickstarter Spotlight: Blueshift
I am a huge fan of 4x strategy games and it is exceptionally rare to see this genre represented well in board games. Sure, there are a lot of good strategy games out there, Catan comes to mind most readily, but for a game to capture all four of the X’s well is exceptionally rare. […]
Four Things That Made Final Fantasy Tactics the Perfect SRPG
Happy New Year everyone! I want to start the year off right, by talking about one of the few games that is, in my opinion, just about as close to perfect as a game can be. So let’s get started. Nearly 20 years ago Squaresoft released the actual perfect videogame in Final Fantasy Tactics. At […]
Indy Spotlight: The Witch is Dead
“The Witch is Dead” is a free one-page free RPG by Grant Howitt. Designed to be played in a single session, “The Witch is Dead” gives its players control over one of the late witches familiars and a single goal: revenge. You see, the witch was not the wicked kind. She was wise and benevolent […]
Why Performance Matters: A Consumer’s Take on the SAG-AFTRA Video Game Strike
If you follow the game industry then you’re probably at least passingly familiar with the SAG-AFTRA video game strike that’s going on. If you’re not, though, I’ll do my best to summarize it: SAG-AFTRA, a union of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, is the union that represents […]
Heroes in the Darkness: A Look at Roleplaying Horror Adventures
Horror is a genre that’s very easy to do poorly. Whether we’re talking literature, cinema, or games it’s really easy to screw up being scary because fear is a difficult emotion to effectively manipulate, particularly in an observer. It can be really difficult, for example, to take advantage of certain primal fears in the mind […]
The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon Go, and the Evolution of Adventure
So, even if you’ve been living under a rock these days you’ve probably heard some of the craze about Pokemon Go being out (because someone probably looked under your rock for a Geodude). The game itself is still in something like a beta, and even though trading still hasn’t become a thing this game has […]
Kickstarter Spotlight: Copper Dreams
Copper Dreams is an upcoming cyberpunk RPG by Whalenought Studios, creators of the strategy RPG Serpent in the Staglands. Stepping into the far future, Copper Dreams looks to offer all of the best and most iconic parts of dystopian sci-fi: corrupt agencies, digital espionage and hardened mercenaries trying to make ends meet in a dirty […]
The Game Detective 