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!