Deeper and deeper I ventured, a brave warrior in search of… jeez, I don’t even remember at this point. At first I thought no place could be worse than the Depths, that it was the darkest point in the universe. I had defeated Gaping Dragon, its nightmare boss, and was rewarded with a key to Blighttown. That name does not sound promising, but as a brave warrior in search of <REDACTED>, it was on my list of places to visit. After all, if you’ve been keeping up with these Diaries then you know… it couldn’t be worse than the Depths, right?
The chances are that if you’ve found your way onto Tap Repeatedly, you have a videogame backlog. You can deny it all you like, but you know. You know, I know and The Log knows. The Log sees your ever amounting pile of games. He sees them and he laughs. Sat there, freshly chopped in the woodland, all sly looking, costing you money and time..
My name is Mat C and I have a backlog problem. I know I’m not alone. If you own a Steam account or have more than two PlayStation 3, Wii or Xbox 360 games to play, you have a backlog. If you’ve pre-ordered a PS Vita, intend on buying a PlayStation 4, NextBox or Wii U, you have a backlog before you’ve even purchased any hardware to tackle it on.
At Tap Repeatedly, we can help you. Or just laugh and mock. We’ll see how this goes.
I never feel comfortable writing a full review until I’ve played an entire game. On the other hand, I’m actually pretty comfortable writing an almost-review about Saints Row: The Third now. I can’t really call this “first impressions,” because I have seen a lot of Saints Row: The Third. Since buying it, I’ve watched both my husband, and a mutual friend, play pretty big chunks of the game. It’s actually one of last year’s games, contemporary to Skyrim, but since I had to wait my turn, I just started playing it this week myself. Here are my thoughts.
It’s great! I love it.
Wait, you were expecting an article of some kind? I guess I should qualify that opinion, then.
I am enjoying doing these Diaries, as someone should know my suffering, but since I waited until I had a solid backlog before publishing them, I’m beginning to forget some of the stuff that’s happened to me in late December and early January (you’ll note these Diary entries date well before that). In any case, I’m going to try and catch up a bit so I don’t forget stuff if I have a Dark Souls adventure and no chance to write it down.
Now, some of you may be getting sick of the Dark Souls Diaries. I can understand that. If you are, let me know, and I’ll polish the (currently) 6,554-word scholarly paper I’ve been working on in parallel – the one that talks about Kierkegaard and Kant, about the concept of the Knight of Faith, about Campbellian Monomyth Variances, and so on – and I’ll just run with that. It will be epic.
Remember the time Armand K got really wasted and wrote that weird paranoid manifesto about how I’d tried to lock him out of the Bordello because he owed me $7.42? Well, I don’t know if Armand’s fully kicked the habit, but I’m pleased to have him back (and apparently lucid) with another guest entry. He’s …
For gaming, 2011 was a year like many that preceded it: from January to October not a lot happened, and in November a bunch of publishers thought it was a good idea to have their games compete with Modern Blopfare and Field of Battles. At least Epic and Microsoft had the sense to get Gears of Beefcake 3 shipped in September so people would care about it for two months.
Ah, but that’s not the whole story, is it…
Slow and steady wins the race, my friends, and I have slowly and steadily been failing to make much progress in From Software’s bleakly brilliant Dark Souls, as my report here will attest. But it’s about the journey, not the destination, and thus do I share with you more of the journey. I promise, you’ll get sick of reading these long before I’m through writing them. To adventure!
About five years ago, on the message board 4chan, a Japanese artist posted a charming but strange concept illustration. The picture depicted five girls, envisioned as the potential love interests in a Japanese-style visual romance novel. So far, so ordinary, but there’s a twist: all of the young women had a unique disability. One was …
I’m the last person on the list so far to write one of these, so that means I’m going to tread some ground our other authors have already walked. That’s all right with me, though it does mean there may not be too many surprises on my list.
These are in no particular order, really. As with the other lists, I’m not saying “objectively, these are the best games made in 2011.” These are the games I primarily played in 2011, which define the year for me personally, and which I found most obsessworthy or worthy of conversation. I also decided, so as not to go on forever, to narrow this list down to games actually released in 2011, but I’ll mention other titles below.
When I think back over the last twelve months of my gaming year, the word that instantly springs to my mind is “change”. I began 2011 the same way I’ve started and ended the last fifteen years; as an exclusively console gamer. But mid way through this particular year something changed. I built my own …