Short Video Game Reviews

Red Dead Redemption: Grand Theft Horse in the new old west. Hunting rattlesnakes was a bonus.

Demon’s Souls: The Souls series begins and this ground-breaking game made PS3 users pity X-Boxers for not being able to play it. It also made some X-Boxers glad they were spared the brutal contest of will and reflexes that is this exercise in sheer dogged determination. One of the ten best games ever released out of Japan in the 2000s.

Dark Souls: Fun in a way putting your tongue to a cut lip is fun. Oh, yeah, it also happens to be the most challenging game of its time. Finish it and you feel ten feet tall and arrow-proof.

Dark Souls 2: Honestly this game is Demon’s Souls 2 but it wasn’t able to be marketed that way. The weakest title in the Souls family still manages at times to be as brilliant as its ancestors, and even more frustrating.

Dark Souls 3: The Souls series’ apotheosis comes more polished and playable than any of its predecessors, and for that reason is just as time-stealing and engrossing. You may never hate/love/love/hate any game more.

Bloodborne: I don’t consider this a Souls game, but many do. Wandering a nightmare realm of undead and creatures straight from a Lovecraftian nightmare demands absolute attention or you’ll die, and die, and die, and die…..

Elder Scrolls III Morrowind: One of the first times games showed they are capable of stealing the thunder from sci-fi and fantasy movies and novels. Hasn’t aged well but in its era minds were blown wide open.

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion: here we first learn of the agony of an arrow in the knee. Wandering Cyrodiil occupied hundreds of hours of my life in the late-00s and still draws me today.

Elder Scrolls V Skyrim: To be honest, Skyrim never grabbed my heart the way its predecessors did. Nope, not through any of the three-hundred hours I played it.

Fallout 3: Greatness thy name is Capital Wasteland.

Fallout New Vegas: Tougher, more refined, less rewarding, more faction-driven first cousin of Fallout 3 was my entry point into the Fallout series.

Fallout 4: Brilliant but buggy. Fallout 4’s weakness was it was really the same Fallout you’d played before. Of course that was also its strength.

Double Dragon: Never exactly got the boy I knew named Tarzan who played it constantly to let me have a go, but I watched him play it when I had nothing better to do back in my late single-digit years. Seemed both fast-moving and boring.

Barbie Explorer: Barbie travels through the rain forest, Himalayas, Egypt and elsewhere seeing out treasure and artifacts, Indiana Jones style. Barbie is badass!

No Man’s Sky: A letdown that still managed to captivate me much longer than it should. There is literally no way the human race playing twenty-four hours a day could see everything in this procedurally-generated recreation of the universe.

Dante’s Inferno: Like the source material, it sounds better than it is. Still, if fighting your way across Hell exactly as Dante described it is your cup of mud, this PS3 classic is only a dollar these days.

Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Everything about this game is great except the needless, tiring, maddening “pull down the star destroyer” sequence, which was deservedly reviled. The closest I ever came to feeling like a Force-wielder.

Missile Command: Okay, I am not making this up. This was a game about stopping these jagged lines from moving top to bottom on the screen and no matter what you did eventually you’d always lose, yet my cousin was obsessed with it.

Diablo III: Felt a lot like an ‘80s style arcade game.

Koronis Rift: There are advantages to having young parents, like the fact this Lucasfilm game release in the mid-80s gave me a chance to sit by my dad after school (we were both in school at the same time for a minute, him getting his Masters, me in kindergarten) and watch him travel around a Lucas-esque universe. For its time this was standard-setting.

Bioshock: I loved this imaginative game so much I have no idea why I never finished it.

LA Noir: The greatest detective game of all time. Gritty, brutal, violent, detailed, it deserved more sales than it got.

Pac-man: I loved the bright colors and the quirky Japanese-sounding electronic music so I used to beg my mom for a quarter to play this and when she held me up and let me I always ended up puzzled at how lame this mega-popular game was. I would also last like thirty seconds each time. Maybe someone who was older then can explain why this game was such a hit back in the day.

Lego Lord of the Rings: Surprisingly butch for a Lego game, and surprisingly tough.

Lego Harry Potter: Felt like seven years at Hogwarts, and took almost as long to complete.

Space Invaders: The music takes me back to my earliest days when my dad played it on Atari 2600.

Dishonored: best stealth game ever made. Dunwall lives around you like some dreary Londontowne done in oil tones.

Dishonored 2: Less fun but still worth playing through. The semi-tropical setting here did not work as well as Dunwall, and even moreso than Dishonored (1) you were truly penalized for using all the awesome lethal powers you were given.

Dishonored Death of the Outsider: Finally Dishonored gave us a license to murder all we wanted!

Lord of the Rings War in the North: Hamstrung by a bug that made you unable to progress past the middle part, and it was never patched. I loved this game til then.

Kingdoms of Amalur: What happens when a software publisher goes under right after releasing a game? Not a lot. I had fun playing this day-glo-hued WOW clone. Shame there were no expansions. Reaching the “hanging tree” alone made this game worth playing.

Minecraft: Boooooooooring. So boring.

The Last Guardian: Beautiful graphics, unplayable product.

Witcher 3: I think I am the only person in the world who hated this game.

All other video games were a mixed lot.