I’ve always been someone who prefers watching a foreign movies with subtitles instead of dubbed. I didn’t figure out why, exactly, until after I’d lived in Japan for two years and then, back in the States, watched a bit of a dubbed anime with a friend and realized why the English voice actors were so weird sounding: they had no idea why they were saying what they were saying.

 

A couple years back, while visiting with family over Thanksgiving, my cousins and siblings and I started playing the card game we call King Peasant (though it’s also called a lot of other things around the world). 

 A handful of hours into Final Fantasy XII, your party emerges from the linear opening of the game and is able to explore and level up in the game’s first open world environment: the Dalmasca Estersand.

            I’m going to be honest: I don’t just like the best shooters out there; I play a fair amount of also-rans as well. I got my PS4 less than a year ago and have been working through the back catalog playing games like Undertale and Bloodborne.

I started playing Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones for GBA yesterday, and while on the Fire Emblem Wiki I glanced over the summary of the game’s reception, which went something like this:

In another post, I argued that videogames (like all expressive media) influence the world but that, cumulatively, their influence is more likely to be positive than negative because games can show us new. 

The console wars find Microsoft, with its ambitious yet expensive offer, the Xbox One, lagging behind the PlayStation 4. In fact, the PS4 has sold over six million units worldwide, while the Xbox One is yet to break four million.

            Between 2005 and 2007, the U.S. game industry passed up first the movie and then the music industries in terms of overall revenue, clearly staking its claim as a major media player for anyone who was still unsure.

I recently finished a playthrough of the amazing (if flawed) Grand Theft Auto V. It got me thinking about why my experience of it was so, so far away from my disappointment with GTA IV. This post is about why, despite my desire to like it, GTA IV finally drove me away. A follow-up post will explain why GTA V won me over as an amazing if still sometimes maddening game.