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The Fall of the Online Lobby

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When I was a wee lad  Naruto was the hottest anime on the air, Linkin Park had just dropped their Minutes to Midnight album, Michael Bay was breaking the box office with Transformers , and Halo 3 was one of the hottest games released. This was actually the game that got my parents to set us up with Xbox Live, my brother, father, and I all got accounts to play Halo 3 .  A lot of things from Halo 3 are nostalgic for me, but what has recently come back to my mind is its lobby system, a system so good that even Call of Duty copied it. In this era of gaming, when you start playing matchmaking you get taken to a pre-game lobby where you can mingle with other players, vote on map and modes, and listen to slurs dropped by 12-year-olds. Outside of those slurs this system was great, it let you get a feel for who you were playing with or against, and let players choose which maps they actually want to play. After the match you got to choose whether to stick with those people or bail. It's
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Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Genesis, and The Orignal Sin

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Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is one of my all time favorite games, an easy Top 10 greatest for me. It's story is magnificent even if it stumbles by the end, it's design adopts my favorite class system from Final Fantasy V , and the game pushes the Switch to it's limit. It's like Metroid Dread in that it was my dark horse Game of the Year. Indeed, the only downside is that The Game Awards didn't give the game the love it deserved. Losing to God of War for best soundtrack? Not even getting a nomination for best story or voice acting? Seriously? It's snub at the Game Awards aside, Xenoblade 3 is a game chock full of deep themes and messages about war, love, loss, the nature of humanity in the face of hardship, and bitchin guitar/flute duets. But one thing I don't think a lot of people talk about is the games ties into The Book of (Sega) Genesis from the Bible. Not just how it has parallels, but how it criticizes specifically the creation of humanity portrayed in
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How Hades and Returnal Master Roguelike Storytelling

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  Recently I've been playing the 2020 indie hit Hades quite a bit. It takes me a while to get adjusted to a new game but I found the addictive groove of Hades ' rougelike and random design to my liking. It's also a great game on Steam Deck, when I've got 30 minutes to kill at work I power up the Deck and go for a quick playthrough.  But the more and more I played through Hades' story the more I began noticing similarities to another rougelike I've played, Returnal . With Hades II announced and the PC port of Returnal out I figured it would be a perfect time to talk about how the two master one thing very well, story integration. Namely how the two games integrate story into the design to tell two radically different tales in terms of tone. The first is Hades , casting the player as the titular lord of the dead's son, Zagreus, as he tries to escape his father's domain. Problem with that is he keeps dying; the good news is that as an immortal Zagreus just
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Skyward Sword and Metroid Other M: When Showing is Better Than Telling

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Recently, I re-played The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword  on Switch, a game I hadn't played since it came out on Wii a decade ago (god I feel old). Overall, I enjoyed the frame rate boost and quality of life changes that the port makes over the Wii original. I also think playing through Breath of the Wild has given me an appreciation for the dungeon crawling of Skyward Sword . Motion controls were still a pain , but I did love that camera control the motion controls have now. But as I was playing, I remembered a criticism about Skyward Sword that I had as a kid, a lot happens emotionally but Link doesn't speak, at all. It's normal for Zelda games but feels weird in Skyward Sword because it puts a lot more effort into making the player care about what's happening. So, it seems weird that Link doesn't say anything when it feels like he should or when someone directly addresses him and it's only implied that he speaks back. I came to the realization however that,
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Digging Through My Steam Backlog: Nights Into Dreams

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 Isn't this an odd one, Nights Into Dreams . I had heard people praise this as Sonic Team's best non-Sonic work and one day it was around $2 on Steam so I figured why not. Of course if it's on this backlog dig it means I never played it. Is Nights as good as people claim and worth begging for a sequel to as so many have?  Nights' story follows Elliot and Claris, two children going through tough patches in their lives, as they're pulled into the Dream World of Nighttopia. There they discover that an evil wizard is trying to destroy Nightopia with nightmares and team up with Nights, a jester of unspecified gender but I like to think is a woman, to stop said wizard and save Nighttopia. The story of Nights is told non-verbally and barebones which I personally am torn on was a mistake or not. There's clearly more going on here with Nights and the bosses she fights, namely this identical jester who serves as the second to last boss, and it looks like an interesting w
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Digging Through My Steam Backlog: Tomb Raider (2013)

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After Dukey Nukey in the Third Dimension , I figured it was time to revisit a game I hadn't played in years, Tomb Raider . No, not the 1996 original, the 2013 reboot. I remember playing this on Xbox One and not being impressed by it. It just felt kind of forgettable to me. But that was 8 years ago and shockingly time and hindsight gave me new appreciation for this game I didn't have when I was younger. The story of Tomb Raider is an origin story, following famed gaming heroine Lara Croft's first adventure. Lara, fresh out of college, winds up marooned on a mysterious island while on an archeological expedition. It quickly turns out however that the island is full of crazed lunatics who worship a long dead Japanese queen and it's up to Lara to survive, rescue her shipmates, and learn if the long dead queen is truly the reason no one can leave. Now I'm skipping a lot of nuance but one thing about this story I actually really liked is Lara's own growth. Lara star
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Digging Through My Steam Backlog: Duke Nukem 3D

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 After the kinda dark and dystopian Bioshock I had Resident Evil 4 next on the docket; but I was waiting for the HD pack mod, so I went with what was right next to it, Duke Nukem 3D . In terms of Boomer Shooters I had been wanting to do the Build Engine trinity of Duke Nukem 3D , Blood , and Shadow Warrior for a while. I have Blood , I have Duke , I still need Shadow Warrior though but that's beyond the point. The point is that we're here to ask the question, was Duke Nukem ever truly the king 90's gamers proclaimed him as? Well to start with we have the story, which is that aliens have invaded Los Angeles and are stealing Earth's women. The only person who can stop them is Duke Nukem; a perpetually horny steroid abuser with a penchant for murdering aliens. Shot down while returning to Earth after his alien killing side scrolling adventures; Duke must kill his way through LA, the Moon, and LA again in order to save the day. If that description wasn't obvious, Du
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