In spite of all the changes and stress that this second half of the year has brought, I'm happy to have found (out the blue) a great source of joy in finally being able to play The Beatles: Rock Band whenever I want – madly hammering the keys of an old Magic Keyboard like in the old days of Frets on Fire.
I love this game so much. The studio chatter on loading screens alone can probably cheer up the hardest days and nights.
Thank you, Dolphin people!
If Wishfield was irresistible before, my foolish brain had no chance of ignoring Persona 5: The Phantom X now.
I want to believe my childhood box of floppy disks is somewhere out there, waiting for someone who will discover inside the adventure games I pirated in my early days with a computer: the point-and-clicks I managed to understand and love back then, like Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island, and the enigmatic text parser ones, like Police Quest or The Colonel’s Bequest, that went completely over my young non-English-speaking head.
This week, luckily, I got to spend the evenings after work playing The Crimson Diamond by Julia Minamata, and now that whole mystery is what I would consider my first real experience with a text parser game. Nancy Maple rules from the start, and the ending I got left me feeling very inspired, with a desire to go back and finally play through those Laura Bow adventures I missed as a kid. Especially The Colonel’s Bequest, which I also remember finding a bit scary… but surely it’s going to be fine now!
I was young and in love with SCUMM games when I discovered Tómate un Descanso, a graphic adventure by Ciro Durán. To my surprise (and probably because we've been reminiscing a lot about our old blogging days lately), Vic stumbled upon a fairly recent retrospective of the game, including a very kind nod to the blog where I reviewed it back in 2008.
Tómate un Descanso was the first game made in my home country that I ever played. For that, and for Ciro's cool art and point-and-click humor, I tried launching it again on my PC… and it worked!
A win for game preservation and avoiding work.
I couldn’t jump straight into the Iki Island expansion. The whole of Ghost of Tsushima is worth revisiting again and again.
The broom-wielding kid in me, who could spend hours pretending to be Himura Kenshin, El Zorro, or a vagrant Jedi Knight on some stormy planet, couldn’t be more pleased with Jin Sakai's gameplay.
For now I’m just missing that flute song to summon rain at will.
Not the best season… but still, it was a year with Modrić. For as long as he played for us, that was more than enough for me.
I've been dreading this day for a while, but now the goodbye is real, and I'm just… incredibly sad. A bit existential, even. I'm sure Saturday is going to be special for him, Lucas Vázquez, and Ancelotti, but if somehow the match enters a time vortex and loops forever and ever… well, I wouldn't complain.
I missed crossing rivers in Death Stranding.
Clair Obscur is going to be something special. You can feel it right away, and Val's already humming the themes.
I was looking for a fan translation of Morrowind on a Spanish forum back in 2005 when I first encountered the early screenshots of The Elder Scrolls IV… and I couldn't believe my eyes. Even more than Morrowind itself, and in a way that Skyrim never matched for me later, Oblivion has an importance in my life that’s hard to overstate.
Today's reveal had my eyes widening again.
Looking back on three generations of elfroot gathered over the past few months, I wonder if someday I’ll make it back to Orzammar.