For reasons I don't even entirely remember (just generally musing about old RTSs), I felt compelled to load up Warcraft 2 and just... click around. Then I thought "No, I should play Warcraft 1". In my mind, Warcraft 1 is exactly like Warcraft 2, just without all the ships and boats, but my mind likes to lie to me.

Instead it is some weird Game Gear ass looking game with even less options, road requirements for buildings, and... surprisingly a lot of neutral units(Oh Ogres?? I g...

I try not to argue exact language much. I try to keep my approach to language as a descriptivist. Language evolves in terrible and funny ways. Metroidvania is an awful term, but it's a term with history I will use long before I use the term Search Action(a genre name that has the same appeal as calling hotdogs Intestined Scraps). Sure, some phrases like Backtracking are too misguided for me to tolerate, but Quality-of-Life isn't like that. So called QoL changes can mean a lot of of...

There was a narrow window for me and jRPGs(I know there is some argument over this term being used to other Japanese RPGs, but as a wRPG hater I only mean this as a term of endearment). From barely being able to parse Final Fantasy 1 by the end of the NES's life, to burning out on jRPGs on Xenogears. I tried to play Final Fantasy IX after that, but by that point I was burnt out and broken.

By the time, Final Fantasy 5 was available as a part of the PSX Final Fantasy Anthology(Trul...

Blogging as I go has definitely left me without games for a year end wrap up. How fortunate for me that my friend Ash put a paid copy of UFO 50 in front of my steam library, destroying my next month and giving me more games to talk about than I've had in years.

Mossmouth's incredible collection of games, framed as a recovered and cracked archival anthology for a fictional computer system(the LX-III), overachieves in every way. UFO 50 could be half as good, with none of the best games I'm going...

I hate the term Backtracking.

I can't stop people for using it. I can't even blame them for using it. It's an insidious term, coined by my generation, in the early days of gaming. Because of its age, it's almost inescapable. With its age, it also carries a lot of baggage... Assumptions from an older time. These assumptions weren't ever correct, but they've grown increasingly more misguided as time has passed.

Backtracking is a term that's almost always said with contempt. Even when peop...