The Nerd Next Door

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

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

  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