Tag Archives: genre

One-Shots

The term “adventure game” no longer has any meaning

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Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed adventure games — mostly those of the point-and-click variety, but I’m certainly not averse to those with text parsers, or which are entirely text.

Trouble is, these days it’s actually surprisingly (and annoyingly) difficult to track down genuine examples of these without also being confronted with a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. I made the mistake of clicking on a GamesRadar piece about “the 25 best adventure games to get swept up in right now” earlier — obvious SEO-optimised clickbait, in retrospect — and literally three out of the 25 games were actual adventure games.

The rest? Far Cry. Hogwarts Legacy. Batman: Arkham Asylum. Fucking Skyrim. Not only did the list completely lack any established classics of the adventure game genre that are easily accessible today — such as any of the old Sierra and LucasArts titles that are on Steam and/or GOG.com — but it also seemingly completely misunderstood what the term “adventure game” actually means.

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Community, One-Shots

Seven Arbitrarily Chosen Things You’re Missing Out On If You’ve Been Operating Under the Mistaken Belief that JRPGs are “Dead”

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It seems that every time we get a new Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy or Persona release, we have the same old “we’re having a JRPG renaissance!” discussion.

Well, dear reader, with my coverage of Death End Re;Quest on the horizon at the time of writing and plenty more RPGs in our shared futures, I’m here to remind you that RPGs have been alive and well ever since what people think of as their “golden age” — the SNES and PS1 eras. This will not be a shock to some of you reading this, of course, but I’m sure there are quite a few people out there who have passed up some wonderful experiences for one reason or another.

So with that in mind, I thought I’d do a list of seven arbitrarily chosen things that you might have missed out on if you’ve been operating under the grossly mistaken assumption that the role-playing game genre has somehow been “dead” despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Here we go!

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Podcast

The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 17 – Death to Metroidvania!

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Hello! Welcome back to The MoeGamer Podcast, featuring my deliciously fruity vocal tones along with those of my good friend Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels.

The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos; you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!

Or you can hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer.

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Community

Brotherhood of the World Bloggers Award

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There’s gaming stuff coming a little later today, but for now it’s time for another Community post!

The charming and attractive Arthifis was good enough to nominate me for the “Brotherhood of the World Bloggers Award”, and these things are always a good bit of fun, so I thought I’d indulge.

For the uninitiated, these “Award” posts are primarily an excuse for those of us with itchy typing fingers to cross-promote each other, get to know one other a bit better and also to let you, dear reader, find out a bit more about us. So without further ado, let’s begin this round.

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From the Archives, READ.ME

From the Archives: A Question of Genre

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How do you describe a piece of interactive entertainment? Chances are the first thing you mention is the way it plays, or the supposed “genre” it is part of.

Final Fantasy is a JRPG; Gears of War is a third-person shooter; Mario games are platformers. And this isn’t only true for mainstream games, either — even the most esoteric indie games tend to be described in terms of their mechanics. Fez is a puzzle-platformer; The Binding of Isaac is a roguelike shooter; Minecraft is an open-world building and survival sim.

While you may then elaborate on that by describing the setting — sci-fi, fantasy, cartoonish crazytown — it’s highly likely that this is not the first thing you mention. Interactive entertainment is pretty much the only artistic medium in which we do this.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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