Video Game Round-Up! – November/December 2019

Welcome to another Video Game Round-Up! This is a bit late because I mostly wrote it on a Word doc on my laptop and then kept forgetting to copy-pasta it to FB. Whoops.

Before we get to the actual games I played this past month, I wanted to talk about various games that were announced during Sony’s latest State of Play, Nintendo’s latest Indie World, and the Video Game Awards.

Video Game Round-Up! - October/November 2019

Welcome to another Video Game Round-Up! This is five days late because work and writing both got pretty busy. As Facebook still hasn’t made the notes function available on mobile, I can only work on these things on a PC (aka at home and at work). Those extra five days let me play another three games, though, so this Round-Up is extra long at 11 games total!

Also, my video game talk at the Singapore Writers Festival went really well! Many people have complimented me, and I am super relieved because I was super nervous before going up and thought I was gonna mess it all up! But I totally didn’t! Yay for me!

Now, on to the games!

Video Game Round-Up! - September/October 2019

Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! I only played five games this month, but I finished four of them, so yay! I spent most of the month writing (we are so close to finishing the thing we’ve been working on basically the whole year, I can taste it), and I read the excellent Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier, an amazing book about video game development. I learned that it’s basically a miracle any time a new video game comes out.

There were also some exciting Sony news: the PS5 is confirmed for Holiday 2020 and should be backwards compatible with at least the PS4 (though apparently they haven’t quite figured it out yet). Also, my fingers are still very crossed for backwards compatibility for all previous PlayStation games so I can play X-Men Legends (PS2) again, and Fallout: New Vegas (PS3) for the first time. In less good news, the PS4 no longer supports Facebook integration, which means I won’t be able to post my in-game photos of large stone faces in games. Boo!

Finally, I will be giving a mini-lecture at this year’s SWF about video game narratives! Full details here, and if you’re around at 8pm on Saturday, 9 November, then come hang out! I’ve written the lecture, and it is going to be pretty great, if I do say so myself. I guarantee* it’ll be awesome!

And now, on to the HONK! I mean, on to the video games! :D

Video Game Round-Up! - August/September 2019

Hello everybody! I’m back with another Video Game Round-Up! I didn’t get a chance to play too much this month as I spent most of it writing and doing other writing-adjacent activities (like editing and going to a conference), but I have something to announce: I will be doing another video game talk at the Singapore Writers Festival! You can find out more here, so if you’re in Singapore on Saturday, 9 November, come by and hear me talk about video games! It says that the session was “conceptualised by SWF Youth Curators”, but you don’t actually have to be a “youth” to attend. I checked already. However, I definitely have to keep to the allotted 45 minutes this time (30 minutes for lecture, 15 minute for Q&A), so no going over for an extra long session like last time :P

Now, on to the games!

Video Game Round-Up! - July/August 2019

Hey hey! It’s time for another Video Game Round-Up, in which I talk about the games I played in the past month. Some old, some new; some good, some bad; all interesting.

This month I was actually able to finish five different games, which is amazing for me. I don’t get as much time to game as I’d like (all that pesky work and writing keeps getting in the way), but I realized as I was writing this that I actually finished five of the games I played! Three of the games I finished I’d been playing for some time, but the other two I started and finished in one month! And I got to watch a bunch of Star Trek: The Next Generation too! I didn’t read very much, though...

But on to the games!

Video Game Round-Up! - June/July 2019

Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! This month, we’ll see some mainstays, some new games, and some surprising returns! But before we get to the games, I want to talk about something else for a bit. On the last day of June, I got to hang out with writer Nuraliah Norasid at a National Library Board event and talk about video games for 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was only supposed to be an hour and half long, but we kept it going because we had so much fun. I want to thank Nuraliah for being an awesome co-presenter, Joey from NLB for setting it all up, and all the folks who showed up and asked some awesome questions (and helped me out with names and terms that my dumb brain couldn’t properly remember) for making it the best panel/discussion thing I’ve ever been on. I kept hyping it as the best talk this year before it actually happened, and now that it has, I’m happy to report I was 100% right.

Now, on to the games!

Video Game Round-Up! - May/June 2019

Hello everyone! I’m back with another regular installment of Video Game Round-Up! This is a bit late because of the E3 Special I put up last week and I didn’t want to upload both too close each other. I didn’t play a lot of games last month, however, as I was away for a week and a half, and then it was E3 week when I watched a bunch of games instead of playing them, and then the girl decided she wanted to finally play Gris, so I decided to read a bunch of comics on the bus, and then we had to do a lot of writing. So yeah, only five games this month :D

Onward!

Video Game Round-Up! Special! - E3 Conferences 2019!

It’s E3 season, and there are a bunch of press conferences/prerecorded videos from various publishers and platforms to talk about! E3 is basically a huge hype machine, and I am here for pretty much all of it :D Here are my quickfire impressions in somewhat chronological order (of when I saw the press conference/prerecorded video).

Video Game Round-Up! - April/May 2019

Hey hey! It’s another Video Game Round-Up! You will notice that I played a lot of Switch games again this month, and that is because I could only play video games on the bus. We had a lot of writing to do, so it was writing time every time I was at home. Until about the end of April, anyway, when we finished the first draft of one of the things, and then I didn’t have to write all of the things all of the times.

But I still had to write lots of things.

Here we go!

Video Game Round-Up! - March/April 2019

Helloooooooooooooooooooooo!

It’s time for a new Video Game Round-Up, and it’s only a few days late. Yay me! As you’ll see below, I mostly played games on the Switch. Part of that is because I was traveling for a bit, but the real reason is because Felicia and I are writing Lots of Things With Very Near Deadlines, so I don’t have any time to play games at home, where the PS4 is. But there was some news recently about the PS5 (Sony’s being all coy about their next hardware’s name, and they haven’t once used the term ‘PS5’, but really, what the heck else are you gonna call it, Sony?) and it will be at least backwards compatible with PS4 games, so I don’t have play them so fast if I don’t want to :D (I say ‘at least’ because I’m still holding out hope that it will go all the way back and I’ll be able to play PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS4 games on this new machine).

Let’s go!

Video Game Round-Up! - February/March 2019

Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! Guess what? I totally finished some games this month! Whee! But I also started some others. And there are plenty of games that I haven’t finished yet that I didn’t even touch this month, but you know what? That’s okay. Playing video games is supposed to be fun and not stressful, so I’m going to stop stressing about not finishing every game I start, and just have fun playing my games.

Okay, let’s do this!

Video Game Round-Up! - January/February 2019

Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! This month features the least amount of games I have played since I started writing this column. This is mostly because I am reading a lot more, and playing longer games instead of shorter ones.

But let’s get on with it!

Video Game Round-Up! Special! - 2019 Video Games I’m Most Excited About

Welcome to my second Video Game Round-Up! Special! The previous one looked to the past, to my top ten games of 2018, but this one looks forward, toward the games I’m most excited about in 2019. These will be in release date order, though not all of them have hard release dates. I will start with the games that everyone’s pretty sure will be released this year, and then end with a few that are unlikely to be released this year, but I really hope will be. Let’s get started!

Video Game Round-Up! Special! - Best Video Games of 2018

Welcome to the first Video Game Round-Up! Special! I got to play a lot of games this year that actually came out this year, which is not a thing that usually happens to me as I’m often playing games from years before (which I also did this year, as I played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4), the two best games of 2017). And a lot of those games I played were really good, so my list won’t be a laughable one :D

Video Game Round-Up! - December 2018/January 2019

Welcome back to Video Game Round-Up! I am not late this month! Yay! I thought I had mostly played games I had played before, but after a quick count, that turned out to not be true. I played a lot more Switch games this month because we went on holiday for almost two weeks, which meant more short games, or games that can be played in small snatches of time. I also read a lot of comics at the end of the year, which meant less video game playing in general. Still, I played a decent amount. Here we go!