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Thread 'Final Fight: Streetwise; Beat Down With Attitude'

Many Capcom franchises have, over the years, fallen to the wayside. It’s unavoidable I think when you have so many. For every Resident Evil, there’s a Dino Crisis. For every Devil May Cry, there’s a Maximo. And for every Street Fighter, there’s a Final Fight. Final Fight is far from the most suffering Capcom franchise of course, and there is one that has more greatly suffered and famously been more mismanaged across the years. It used to be one of their flagships, having started all the way...

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Thread 'Shotgun: A Lead-Laden Love Affair. (Greatest Hits of the Boomstick)'

Shotgun: A Lead-Laden Love Affair It’s no secret that video games and weaponry go hand in hand. From curvaceous katana, devious daggers, explosive ordinance, and good ol’ fisticuffs, players are never left wanting for a wide selection of destructive devices with which to lay waste to their foes. While my heart may wander, however, it always manages to find its way back into the embrace of one very special boomstick. Ah, the humble shotgun… Nothing more than a hollowed-out pipe or two...

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Thread 'The Bad Side Of Eden -- A Not-So-Brief Memory Of Cellphones'

It's sort of a miracle that I still have the box my first phone came in. When I was around sixteen-years-old my parents jointly decided that I could benefit from some change of scenery after they started suspecting that I was engaging in substance abuse and some other, shall we say, less-than-reputable pursuits. They were absolutely right, too. Their solution was to ship me some 200 miles south to my dad's new home, which was located on a place of such haunting natural beauty that it even...

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Thread 'Doom (2005) - The Rock, Schlock, and Two Smoking Barrels'

"Rip and tear your way out of the theater, before the lights go down!" Being a visual medium, video games are chock-a-block with movie references, inspirations, and sometimes downright theft. At some point, movies were due to return the favor. Super Mario Bros. (1993) was a rough start to that relationship - like having a first date at your colonoscopy - but Mortal Kombat (1995) saw Paul W.S. Anderson direct the first hit video game movie, making several times it's budget. The turn of the...

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Thread 'My Real & Virtual Nights -- Memories Of First Love Across Two Worlds'

I often write articles to honor and celebrate those who were hugely important to me, even though I know that the chance of them actually reading any of this is beyond slim. I also use video games as framing devises for these stories because I have come to realize that they work surprisingly well as a way to highlight the time they happened on without outright telling you when that was. It's kind of a neat trick, and one that I'm growing quite addicted to using (and it's also what allows me...

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Thread 'Double diSplay: A retrospective on the impact of the DS'

What can be said about this VERY unique system, some might say that there will be no other system like it (me, I’m saying it), the fact that it had two screens was really innovative for the time, and something that was never replicated since. So, in this article, I’ll tell you why the DS is my favorite console and explain to you why it’s concept transcends time. The development for the DS started around 2002, following a proof of concept by the at the time president of Nintendo, Hiroshi...

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Thread 'How good is each Dragon Quest game for a beginner? Spin-off Edition.'

Well met, again. I didn’t have enough with my last article about Dragon Quest, so I wanted to… complement, more or less, what I started last time. This time I’ll focus on the spin-offs. You know what a spin-off is, right? A product that deviates from what is considered mainline within a series. While they usually have different gameplay from the mainline entries, that’s not always the case (think of the Judgment games from RGG Studios). Another thing to take into account is canonicity: some...

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Thread 'Top Three: Games I Couldn't Play If The World Depended On It'

To Clarify, I'm Amazing At Everything Else There I was, navel-gazing and contemplating life on a weekend. Then I pulled out my phone, started a podcast, and turned on the television like a proper adult with a compromised attention span. Somewhere in the midst of all of this deep contemplation, I began to pay attention to the movie i had on. My imagination took over, and inserted me into the basic premise of the film...and then, my insecurities dreamed up the opposite. In 1984's The Last...

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Thread 'Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII'

Final Fantasy VII is a pretty good game. Uncommon opinion, I know, and I only make strong statements here. I’ve never personally been big into JRPGs. I appreciate learning about them to appease my obsessive need for details that I’ll never be able to use in any practical way, but I’ve never been a big fan of the gameplay or the ‘style’; that identifiable vibe that they all carry. You know when you’re looking at a Final Fantasy character as soon as you notice the buckles and the asymmetric...

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Thread 'Why Early PlayStation 1 Models Are Valued in the Audio World'

PlayStation 1: The Secret Weapon of Audiophiles For most people, the original PlayStation 1 (PS1) is a nostalgic symbol of the 90s, known for games like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid. However, in the audiophile community, this console gained recognition for a completely different reason. Early PS1 models (specifically SCPH-1000, SCPH-1001, and SCPH-1002) became a surprising treasure for those seeking high-quality sound. But how did a gaming console end up in audio systems alongside...

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Thread 'Players May Cry: A Devil May Cry (2001) review'

Devils don't cry, it's the players A Devil May Cry (2001) review. A little intro to the series. Hideki Kamiya, a man known for creating one of the most revolutionary game that would forever shape the Survival Horror genre. During the early 2000s, Kamiya and his team were working on Resident Evil 4 a game that's praised till today. However, Kamiya noticed that they pumped the action meter to a hundred since the gameplay strayed far away from what Resident Evil's action intended to be...

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Thread 'Rinry GameGame -- YouTube's original "Gamer Girl"'

You know me as the extremely nostalgic kind... the one who could take a look at a dust-gathering cartridge on his shelf and immediately get flashbacks to the times when it was actively being played with friends and family. In a way, I'm kinda like that dude in the Age of Mythology intro, seeing entire ancient battles through the statues he touches. I think that's kinda fitting, and more than a little silly... which just about describes my entire approach to gaming. However, I was actually...

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Thread 'Bonding over polygons and pixels -- how I made my first friendships through gaming'

What largely goes unsaid on my articles is that gaming was a bit of a lifeline for me. Painfully shy, extraordinarily awkward, and chocked-full of physical and mental health issues, my childhood looked sure to be a very lonely experience, a personal hell spent from the outside-looking-in, watching as my classmates developed life-long friendships whilst I was doomed to be a mere spectator. But then, there was a common ground, and the insurmountable gaps were suddenly bridged. It all...

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Thread 'Why AVGN is a Cornerstone of Gaming Culture'

“Hey, wanna listen to some tunes?” Today we’d like to talk about one of the most important figures in our community and that is James Rolfe, the man behind the Angry Video Game Nerd. What begun as a small film project all the way back in 2004 hosted on his webisite eventually grew into the anomaly that it is today. Today we not only look back on the character, as well as the man behind the gimmick, but also make an argument as to why he deserves to remain within public conscious. But who...

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Thread 'How good is each Dragon Quest game for a beginner? Mainline Edition.'

Hey, it’s about that time of the day again! That is, another Dragon Quest article. Frankly I should write more about this franchise. When you try to get into a franchise as a beginner, there’s always the same question: what’s a good game to start with? A lot of people will tell you that you go with the one that interests you the most, but sometimes it’s not that easy. If it’s a franchise like Yakuza, you can’t just start with another game that isn’t 0 or 1, because all of the games cover an...

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Thread 'Beat Down: Fists of (Cringe) Vengeance'

Do you remember the mid 2000’s? Such an amazing time, when everyone was walking around with full tribal arm tattoos and jnco jeans with spiked pocket chains. Limp Bizkit, blessed be the name of the holy ones, played from the heavens themselves above the constant street fights that went down in the cold Canadian streets. It was a magical and better time, filled with mesh tops and leather pants and one leg jeans, where friendships were forged by beating people down with a vengeance before...

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Thread 'Buying Guide: PlayStation Classic - Price, Games, Mods and Availability'

What is the PS1 Classic? The ps1 classic, which will be referred to as ps1 mini from here on out for brevity, was part of a long yet ironically short-lived boom of “mini” consoles back in the late 2010s, this awkward phase consisted consoles such as the NES mini, SNES mini, Genesis Mini and Atari mini. While this fad didn’t last long, it spawned a neat wave of novelty collector’s items that are luckily not too hard to obtain and mod these days. They serve as a fairly healthy gateway to...

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Thread 'Top 5 Robot Masters (Featuring User-feedback!)'

Concluding the trilogy of Capcom articles, we’ve got this last top list. This time we would like to feature user feedback! Giving this piece a bit more zest. ?But Firet, Some Housekeeping… Hilariously enough, this went through what I could only describe as development hell. That’s hyperbolic of course but it’s hilarious to call it that. It felt like the universe did everything in its power to make sure this article CANNOT come out, from things like really late dms, people I chatted with...

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Thread 'Floppy Disks don't reload and neither do I - Doom & Me'

What I liked the most about my gaming journey was the fact that it was imperfect, almost as if someone had kicked the puzzle box and then hastily tried to rearrange the pieces, but without any idea of what the final image was supposed to look like. I have always been drawn to the results, because there's a certain realism to them (painful as it was to figure out and navigate through). I was not supposed to first see Google by hooking up the Dreamcast to a landline first thing out of the...

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Thread 'Live-Action Video Game Movies: Where's The Fun?'

You know what I mean. ...no? Damn. Alright then, *context*. Okay, Talk About It There's a quality to a lot of Martin Scorsese movies that makes them challenging, at least to general audiences. When he shows crooks and hoodlums in classics like Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), he doesn't shy away from them having *fun*. They pal around, they get rich, these assholes enjoy their lives. They all have inevitable downturns as the criminal element catches up...

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Thread 'The Joy Of Doing Actual Work For No Pay - Harvest Moon & Me'

When I was a kid, I thought for sure that the entire point of gaming was to give me a quick fix. I didn't want to spend my time scrolling through endless dialog boxes or complicated lore that didn't appeal to me in the slightest. I just wanted to have some fast fun through the button-mashing, arcade-y nature of the many titles I had managed to get my hands on through trades and rentals. I didn't wanna play anything that required me to think. Of course, that mindset was challenged (and...

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Thread 'Scared Out Of My Mind and Loving It - Resident Evil & Me'

I remember when my friend invited me over to play the new game he had just gotten. He told me that Resident Evil 1 was one of the best games he had ever played, and I had no reason to doubt him... this was a famous game, and even if you were like me (and were living under a massive mountain), you knew what this game was, even if you had never laid eyes on it yourself. So, I was quite eager to finally play it. But as soon my friend handed me the controller, I thought that he was playing a...

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Thread 'The art of fishing in games'

Fishing. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it refers to “the sport or jobs of catching fish”. Fishing has been one of the main ways humanity has thrived since… well, the beginning of times! Whether it’s just to feed ourselves, as a source of income or even for fun (which I disapprove of, by the way) mankind and fishing have always been intertwined. Naturally, at some point, fishing seeped into videogames. Most gamers love a good fishing minigame. The thrill of what fish you can get is...

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Thread 'Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, the Forgotten Brawler'

I know, here we go again, another D&D game. I have a type, what can I say? I’ll be hard at work playing something else, then suddenly I come to, huddled in a dark room, playing Neverwinter Nights or Dark Alliance without even realizing it. Also, I do play more tabletop RPG’s than just D&D, just for the record, it’s just that the fantasy classic has way more (and better) video games than pretty much any other one. Unfortunately, both the two Shadowrun games are of very questionable quality...

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Thread 'Top Five Capcom Anime'

Good evening everyone. Initially this was meant as a general anime list, but given it was dominated by Capcom mainly, it felt more fair to lean more towards this direction. Naturally, we’re gonna follow the usual “one show per franchise”, as a lot of these got adapted more than once, especially a certain series about Karate fighters shooting fireballs from their hands. With obvious opinion disclaimers aside, onto the list proper! Honorable mentions go towards the Darkstalkers anime and...

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