GO!! Mega Otaku Game-Reviewer Alpha

Edited by C. Marie   In the beginning, there were only video games and the people who played them. There  were no cliques or clubs. There were no “hard core”, “core”, or “casual” gamers,  no “hard-core” or “casual” games. In those days there was Defender and Stargate (Defender's  sequel)--these games were done with a stick and a bunch of buttons. They were also the closest thing to "hard core" games available at the time.  Most everything else had fewer and  simpler controls. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong,  Galaga... all hugely popular games. But there were no attitudes. There weren’t elite squads of  gamers trying to establish themselves as “real” gamers while everyone else was  somehow lower on the food chain. Back in those early days, arcades were King. Home consoles in the early  1980s were extremely popular; fun, yes, but also technically limited. Atari dragged the industry into a kind  of dormant state with their mediocre game catalog....

All the LSD in the WORLD… Today I finished two things. I finished reading Philip Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” As well, I finished the Bloober and Aspyr Media’s game, “Observer”. You see, I have been on this “Cyberpunk” kick. I’m sure you get that. I also have been reading reviews of “Blade Runner” and how it compares to Dick’s “Electric Sheep” book, and I know the two stories share some of the same names, but are, for the most part, completely different stories. Observer stars the voice acting of the late Rutger Hauer, who sadly passed on in 2019, the same year this game was made. In the game, Daniel Lazarski is the main character for whom Hauer provides the voice. Lazarski is an “Observer” (a kind of Cyberpunk cop, laden with implants giving him scanning and computing capabilities far beyond those of normal smart-phone savvy humans), working in Krakow, Poland in the year 2084. Now, despite in-game posters and signs being all Polish (with subtitles), everyone s...

I have loved the living hell out of Shenmue since day one. This is because I have PLAYED the living hell out of Shenmue since day one. This is the game franchise that made me like action RPGs. Before Shenmue, text speech was all there was, and the accompanying graphics, well, were 8-bit chibi. Shenmue introduced a style where many or most of the virtual folks you met along your way had at least SOMETHING to say. And they said it. With real voices. It brought a realism to the genre, a quantum leap. Money was spent as well as time. And gold was spun. Shenmue 3 has to be held in comparison with Shenmue 1 and 2, as well as a ghostly sense of what 3 SHOULD be with modern technology and techniques. Being the fan that I am, I think it falls short. Just a bit. Don’t hate me. There is NO reason why EVERY time I go back to a fortune teller, or sales person, or ANYONE like that, that they should begin anew explaining who they are and what they do, and what may result. NONE....