A CCG is a ‘collectible card game,’ defined on Wikipedia as “a type of card game that mixes strategic deck building elements with features of trading cards.” They’re also called TCGs, or ‘trading card games,’ because there’s no set deck of cards like you’d get in a classic card game like poker or something. You collect your own cards, and then you use them to build your own decks, to play matches with other players. Hence, two players can battle with completely different cards — victory is declared via the mechanics that those cards represent (and tell the player about). Rules and mechanics, of course, vary based on the game, but you’ll probably recognise the names some of the famous ones: Yu-Gi-Oh, Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, and even Pokémon has its own TCG. But never mind all those good ones: I’ve gotten into Shadowverse instead.

For the few who don’t know, Among Us is a social deduction game that was released in 2018, gaining popularity first on the popular streaming platform Twitch in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, and then later on the phones and computers of approximately everyone in the world. Its ‘social deduction’ basically goes like this: all players play Crewmates aboard a spaceship with the objective of doing tasks and repairs, but there’s always at least one Impostor among them (hence the name) who just wants to kill all the regular Crewmates. The Impostor(s) must carry out their grim work without being discovered by the others, because everyone has the power to call a vote in order to expel someone out of the spaceship. Thus, the Impostor(s) must pretend to be Crewmates, and therein lies the ‘social deduction’: the Crewmates must figure out who the Impostor(s) is/are before it’s too late.

Holdfast: Nations at War is a multiplayer shooting game in which you play soldiers during either the Napoleonic Era or the First World War. You play soldiers of different roles, from frontline infantryman to combat medic to cavalryman to bagpiper (because that was indeed an important role during the Napoleonic Era, yes). Holdfast is most famous for its voice-chat features, with which players roleplay soldiers of the era. You may not find this in every round you play, but there are indeed player captains who strategise, order troops into lines, and tell them when and where to fire full volleys of gunshot — and the timing is important, because it takes what feels like 7 hours to reload every shot of your old-timey musket. And there are those who are bagpipers or fifers, standing by the firing line, tootling away to give their friends boosts, shouting about how great their side is in order to boost real-life morale.  

I’m comparing Rainbow Six: Siege and Fragpunk lore today, because I recently got into Siege X, since it’s free. This may seem to be an unfair comparison. Siege X has existed for a decade under the regular Siege name, and boasts a rich cast of characters as well as the original Tom Clancy books as source material. Meanwhile, Fragpunk is a brand-new game with brand-new lore. As such, I’m only going to be comparing the presentation of lore, so that both sides get an even shake — except both choose the least interesting way to present lore in a video game, that being large chunks of text.

Yes, that’s the title of the game. Already you can sense the vibe this game is trying to run with: it’s weird! It’s charming! It’s quirky! And it’s fun! It doesn’t want to take itself too seriously, ‘cos it’s chill like that! But what is it? I think it’s best described as “mostly-multiplayer Guitar Hero but with minigames, puzzles, and gimmicks.” I don’t like the word ‘gimmicks’ there, but I think it’s appropriate.

‘RPG’ stands for ‘rocket-propelled grenade.’ Wikipedia defines an RPG as a “shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon that launches rockets equipped with a shaped-charge explosive warhead.” A ‘shaped-charge’ is an explosive ‘charge’ shaped such that the destructive energy is focused in a particular desired way. In the RPG’s case, the goal is to penetrate thick metal armour, most likely on a tank (or a similar armoured vehicle). You’ll probably be familiar with the most famous RPG launcher: the RPG-7, which was originally designed by the USSR in the 1960s, but is still used today due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and hardiness. Oh, but as a side note, ‘RPG’ also stands for ‘role-playing game’ in video game terms.

As you might be able to tell from the title of this post, this is going to be about endings. Naturally, spoilers ahead, but then River City Girls was released in 2019, and its sequel was released in 2022, and neither are very long games. This is a sort of recommendation post, with some caveats that will become clear along the way. What you need to know is that these are 2D side-scrolling beat-‘em-up games — a mouthful of a genre term to begin with — in a retro mould that’s highly sought after these days. These games were all the rage in the late ‘80s and throughout the ‘90s, with franchises like Double Dragon and Final Fight leading the charge. River City Girls is a revival of one of those retro series: the Kunio-kun franchise, except this time you play as the previous main characters’ girlfriends who are trying to save them, and who have to beat up a lot of people on the way. Misako and Kyoko have been playable in the series before, but this game took the series in a new sparkly direction with updated visuals, but with all the classic mechanics that fans love.

I usually don’t mess with mods because I like video games as crafted experiences. If some developers release a game a certain way, I like to consider the reasons for why that may be; perhaps they cut or added content for good reason. For instance, a cut minigame in GTA: San Andreas that was discovered still hidden in the game’s code led to a massive scandal, and also led to the game being outright banned in Australia. Probably, the developers of that game had been pleased with the decision to remove it. Probably also, though, they would’ve been more pleased if they’d removed it from the code entirely.

It was only about three years ago when I first heard the term ‘game sense.’ It was when I had started playing first-person shooters for the first time on PC, and I had started with the game Valorant, because it had just come out a year earlier, and a bunch of my friends were playing it. Having just bought a new gaming laptop at the time, and not having played many PC games before then, I decided to give Valorant a go. So this was my first introduction to online gaming culture, and all that entailed.

It’s difficult and potentially unhelpful to continue comparing the Soulsborne/Soulslike genre to FromSoftware games. Yes, FromSoftware pioneered this genre of third-person action role-playing games, characterised by their difficulty, emphasis on indirect storytelling, and enemy-respawning/checkpoint mechanics, but surely things can’t stay like this forever, right? If you’re unfamiliar, it doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that these games have a really strange legacy: they’re very challenging, frequently unforgiving, and have really strange lore. This kind of strangeness is very, very particular to FromSoftware, and often Soulslike games —games that have attempted to follow the FromSoftware formula — don’t really hit the mark when they try to emulate it, or just don’t try. And that’s fair enough; it’s a very esoteric kind of strangeness, and it’s a very distinct flavour that wouldn’t work for many games. So it’s perhaps for the best that, say, Fortnite doesn’t go down that route.

I played Dark Souls III during the COVID lockdowns. I’d figured that, since I’d had a lot of time on my hands suddenly and had to stay home, it was a good time to investigate the appeal of Soulsborne games that I’d heard so much about. They were really tough, I’d heard. They demanded a lot of patience, I’d heard, and it was because of that they delivered great satisfaction upon one’s victory over them. And I did end up becoming a Soulsborne fan as a consequence, though I told myself as the credits rolled that I would never buy Bloodborne. I then proceeded to buy and play Bloodborne (as well as its DLC) the next year, when the lockdowns didn’t let up. Of course, after that came Elden Ring, and Lies of P. I even tried CODE VEIN at one point. Dark times.

I really like Batman as a character. I think he embodies a lot of things about human beings that I like to see in various forms of fiction: our fears, our responses to those fears, a fairly serious tone, a certain exhaustion with existence, but also some humour, because a fully-grown man wearing a bat suit is inherently at least a little bit funny. Naturally, plenty of Batman games have been made, and have tried to play with different aspects of the character and setting.