There are a few things I noticed in the Final Fantasy XV Duscae demo that have made me a bit concerned for the highly anticipated upcoming addition to the Final Fantasy series. The automatic camera angles are jarring and have a nasty habit of changing right when you’re trying to […]
Sarah Nixon
99 posts
The very first time I tried my hand at streaming I was hit on. I had just returned from GameStop with my just-purchased gaming headset – I had never really seen the need for one before as I rarely game online – and was a bit giddy to get started […]
Romance can sometimes be a tricky and troubling thing, and it appears that this is no different in the the virtual world. In my review of Story of Seasons, a new addition to the Harvest Moon franchise that had to undergo a name change due to licensing issues, I described […]
The Final Fantasy franchise is certainly known for some “offbeat” character outfits. Between the excessive ornamental decoration and strange mishmashes of different styles and themes, fans have come to expect unique interpretations of style in every new edition. After years of some visually stunning and detailed but occasionally odd clothing […]
Patience is an essential component of farming and, as it turns out, is a value I wish I had used when I decided to purchase the most recent “official” Harvest Moon release, Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley. As you might remember from my previous review on the title, I had […]
I spend a good deal of time watching, thinking about, and analyzing anime. Prior to the start of each anime season (which is broken up into fall, winter, spring, and summer), I meticulously comb over the list of upcoming premiers and choose those series I believe have potential to be […]
About two weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend the 2015 Game Developers Conference (GDC) through an opportunity at work. For those who may not be familiar with the annual gaming conference, GDC is the largest gathering of professional game developers. But rather than the industry trade show feel […]
Fresh from multiple narrative and writing based GDC panels, my head has been full of theories on best incorporating narrative into game design and all the ways narrative reveals itself in games. At one writing roundtable today, an attendee proposed a question on how to explore and build a game’s […]
Last week a witch hunt pervaded the Hearthstone community. Like most witch hunts, it spawned from a baseless accusation: a top Hearthstone player is not who they say they are. This statement, which was little more than a rumor, quickly became accepted as fact as it spread across Hearthstone communities, […]
In an interview published last week on Game Informer, Rhianna Pratchett, writer for the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider and the upcoming game Rise of the Tomb Raider, was questioned about how Lara Croft’s long history of overt over-sexualization and persistent objectification was handled with these latest reboots. For most […]
I hadn’t heard of the episode until the night that it aired. Even then I only noticed it whilst browsing Wednesday’s TV Guide: an episode of Law & Order SVU involving gaming, and, more specifically, violence against women in the gaming industry. My eyebrow was metaphorically raised in interest, but […]
I admit it, sometimes I feel like I’m being a little bit hard on Nintendo and of the various studios they direct and/or publish for when I critique the way they present gender in their games. After all, in comparison to some of the other big name game studios, they […]
Fantasy Life, Level-5’s semi-recent contribution to the Nintendo 3DS’s impressive array of games, is all about (as the title suggests) living your role playing fantasies. Although light on plot and structure, the game’s numerous character classes and the ease in which you can transition between them makes it a memorable […]
The end of the year is drawing upon us and in the first of two posts reviewing this year of gaming, I thought I’d analyze the cover or box art of some of this year’s new console releases. For the sake of simplicity I will be focusing only on some […]
I know that it’s a bit early for sweeping comments 2014 seems to be the year of a lack of female character creation options. Or, more specifically, the removal of female character creation options for the sake of the game’s “quality.” This not so pleasant instance in this year’s list […]
The Alaska carefully crafted in Upper One Games’ first creation Never Alone is as beautiful as it is haunting; as enchanting as it is perilous. In some of the most treacherous lands in the continent a young girl named Nuna, accompanied only by an arctic fox known simply as Fox, […]