Beach Days and Run-Down Seaside Arcades

Sometimes you just need a beach day. And sometimes it doesn’t even matter which beach. That was the mood I found myself one morning recently. So I hopped on a train for two hours until I saw sand. Stepping off the platform, I was awash in nostalgia for a place I had never been…Across continents emerges a trans-Atlantic truth: there’s nothing like the charm of a trashy beach town arcade.

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Pikmin Bloom: Relics from the Real World

Bloom gives you a bunch of little Pikmin buddies with silly little costumes who follow you around while the app surveils all your fun little adventures. But your phone is going to do that anyway — with or without the Pikmin — so you might as well enjoy the Pikmin.

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Ridge Racer: A Tale of Two Ridge Cities

As a backdrop for the racing action, Ridge City leaves little to explore — spatially — beyond its rudimentary trackside features. Yet in its meager polygons, saccharine hues, and crude textures, it depicts a place I can imagine myself inhabiting. Each area of the city feels memorable and personal, driven to life by landmarks and daydreams.

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Disaster Report 4: Summer Empathy

Through its play, Disaster Report 4 imposes its chaos on the player with extreme ambivalence. Its ruined world can be neither saved nor conquered, and players are afforded just enough agency to cope. In the company of other survivors, the game finds a breadth of stories to tell — all at once personal, endearing, and a bit messed up.

The Bouncer: Square’s Cutscene ‘Em Up

The Bouncer was a simplistic beat ‘em up — but only when it wasn’t a cutscene ‘em up — and its tepid execution transcended neither. The game interspersed layers of brief, repetitive combat sequences amid a feature-length reel of ham-fisted cinematics, and then slathered skill upgrade menus and loading screen lore dumps in between.

The Bouncer aspired to be a hearty stew of gaming and film. Instead, it was a stale sandwich, cinematically bloated and lean on play.

Dare to Be SquareSoft: Getting a Grip on Driving Emotion Type-S

I am fascinated by this era of Square. Not only did its output spearhead the early PS2 hype, but it sparked intrigue for the kinds of gaming experiences that would await in the new millennium. What would happen when a renowned gamemaker (mostly) synonymous with JRPGs takes a swing at other genres way outside its wheelhouse? What unique innovations would its interpretations contribute? And in what inventive ways could it screw things up?

The answers, I’d find, were capricious and messy yet so bizarrely satisfying.

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GameWorks Redux: Vibing in Sega’s Lost Hub World

For me, the venue’s heart and soul have always lived in the wealth of experiences that take players out of its space and into new ones. More than a video arcade, or restaurant, or esports arena, GameWorks is at its best as a hub world.

Ranking Every Beach in Wave Race by How Much I’d Rather Be There Right Now

Despite their simplicity, WR64 and Blue Storm’s courses reward players ad nauseam for mastering the nuances of their layouts. They also feel like tangible settings, sewing rich identities from their vibrant aesthetics, distinct landmarks, and granular environmental details. So, the series’ locales are great fun to race around, but would I want to hang out there?Let’s rank them and find out!

The Joys of Pokénomics and Quandaries of the Pokécare Industrial Complex

So what’s up with the economics of this whole thing? How do Pokémon Centers — which ostensibly provide trainers with full medical services to heal their injured Pokémon for free — manage to stay solvent? Assuming they’re funded by some sort of public and/or non-profit subsidies, just how does that structure work? Who pays for it? How do its policies inform how medical services are rendered? And how are providers incentivized to administer that care? In other words: Is Joy really a sociopath or is she merely adhering to the rulebook propagated by a broken Pokécare system?

A Virtua Vacation: My Top Summer Gaming Destinations

I continue to relish the pastimes of summer gaming. Granted, I’ve grown more cynical over the years and the mass of toxic fandom cesspits, uncritically regurgitated nostalgia, and insatiable hype cycles ring hollower than ever. Still, I’ll take simple joys where I can find them. By wading through several summer-themed and summer-adjacent video games, I’m finding my beach, as they say. Whatever the weather outside — be it heatwaves, wildfire smoke, oppressive humidity, or January in July — I can count on these titles to bring the breezy summer vibes in spades.

Quest 64 and the Simple Life (of Brian)

Despite all the generic aspects of its world, I’m awfully surprised by the shitload of charm Quest 64 does muster. It’s a remarkably simple game but, as it turns out, that simplicity has its upsides.

Beach Spikers: Soaking Up the Sega Summer Vibes

Beach Spikers is one of the most overtly summery games in Sega’s catalogue, which says a lot given the blue skies and seasides imbuing much of its work. Aesthetically, this game drips with sunny, summer vibes, with all the sandy beaches, palm trees, and rampant outdoor advertising that entails.

Breaking of the Wild, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Runes

It’s a tad inconvenient (and understandably frustrating) when your spear shatters into dust right when it’s needed most. However, at some point, I realized those moments of dread and panic are exactly what Nintendo likely had in mind when designing the game’s fragile weapons the way it did. In effect, the adventure truly begins when Breath of the Wild asks: “So now what?”

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Reliving the Grand Pastime of Futuristic Racing Games

I thought it’d be fun to escape to that hopeful, hovercraft-filled future we once dreamed of. Naturally, I dusted off my Nintendo 64 and assembled my small collection of futuristic/sci-fi racers. I planned to indulge in pure anti-grav glee, blistering 900km/h thrills, and maybe a few yuks from their aggressively ’90s UIs. That all happened, of course, but it was only the beginning. In revisiting these games today, I wanted simple fun. What I got was a renewed perspective on — and appreciation for — the genre.

The Duke Abides: Revisiting Tony Hawk’s Xbox Debut

Through its infectious risk/reward hook, Tony Hawk tapped into a rare confluence of strategy, improvisation, and greed to paint the thinnest and most thrilling of lines between triumphant payoff and abject failure. In many ways, THPS appealed more to the score attack sensibilities of NiGHTS into Dreams, Crazy Taxi, or chain-based shmups than other popular conventions of the era.

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Emotional Engine: The Pod Race Odyssey of Gran Turismo Concept

Between the AI toaster car and its human driver, a bond develops. I feel I’m beginning to connect with my new Toyota Pod on a deeper, more emotional level. I grow instinctually more attuned to its feelings, its need for kinship, and its hopes of a gentler and more just world. What was once a cacophony of haphazard beeps, dings, and lights has evolved into a discernable language, imbued with meaning. For the first time, we truly understand each other — and we are not that different.

Football Fever: A Defense of the Mediocre NFL Video Game

Existing neither as a fully-fledged simulation nor all-out NFL Blitz-esque arcade fare, NFL Fever 2002 stands as a reasonably accessible football game that feels surprisingly solid to play, albeit with tempered depth and charisma. Overall, it’s quite mediocre. As famed cornerback Richard Sherman might put it: NFL Fever may well be the Michael Crabtree of sports games.

And for NFL Fever 2002, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

An Xbox Launch 20th B’day Bash

I’m in a pretty celebratory mood at the moment. I got the first dose of the vaccine, my bracket is still somewhat in tact (for now), and — with the looming 20th anniversaries of the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube — I have the perfect excuse to rekindle my bizarre, nostalgia-fueled fascination with sixth generation console launches with a birthday celebration of sorts.

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A Junkyard Musings Collection

While I figure out what kinds of things I want to write for this blog, I thought it would be fun to collect a few things I’ve written/recorded for the Saturn and Dreamcast Junkyards over the last couple of years. Without further adieu, here are a few…

Deus Ex: Taking Liberties in a Timeless Tutorial Level

Over the years, Deus Ex’s introductory Liberty Island level has been heralded for offering players myriad options to resolve its objectives, whether via stealth, hacking, diplomacy, guns, crowbars, and/or pilfering. Empowered by this freedom, I adore Deus Ex for letting me discover and express a nuanced, personal approach to play which reflects precisely who I am as a coward.

Something New

I thought it’d be fun to use this site to chronicle some of my impressions and experiences in virtual spaces, and to work out my other random thoughts about gaming as a medium. Honestly, I can’t say how frequently I’ll post or how long I’ll keep it up…probably not often and maybe not long. I have no idea where this will lead but maybe that’s kind of the point.