Gain Sense

The space 4X genre is one of my favorites (4X stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate"). As a kid I played games like Galactic Civilizations II, and later on I was always eager to jump into games like Endless Space, Distant Worlds, and StarDrive. But of them all, Stellaris is probably my favorite.  In Stellaris your goal is relatively simple: Develop your spacefaring civilization in any way you deem fit. You can stick to one star system and pour all of your resources into a hyper-advanced ecumenopolis, or you can choose to be more expansionary, sending scouts to nearby stars and colonizing outwards. You can be a warring civilization or a peaceful one, you can choose the direction of your society's research, you can prioritize certain resources over others, you can engage in diplomacy and market manipulation, and you can build spy networks to snoop on AI opponents. And there is much more beyond that.  Here I want to spin for you a tale about a playthrough I had a...

  Good morning everyone and welcome to another article! This is one I've been thinking about for a while now, and yet could never find the time to write. I'll admit, it's been some time since I've played the first two Trails of Cold Steel games (I have yet to play three and four for reasons explained below), but my impression of them is still rather clear. Conversely, I just finished playing Persona 4 Golden and finished Persona 5 a few years back, so both are fresh in my mind.  As a disclaimer, this isn't so much a critique of either series (as I very much enjoy both) so much as it is a comparison of certain aspects that stood out to me. I will also attempt to avoid spoilers as best I can. Finally, I'll organize the article into categories so that you can skip to the part you want to read. Without further ado, let's begin!  Story The Cold Steel games take place within a much larger universe dubbed "The Legend of Heroes," and are technically the si...

Lengthy videogame retrospectives are the norm rather than the exception these days. Games like Skyrim now have 20 hour retrospectives that, while generally being of exceedingly high quality and enjoyable to watch, got me thinking about a controversial topic: Race in videogames.  Just how are videogame retrospectives and race are related? To me it has to do with  who  is creating these retrospectives and  how  this impacts their analysis of games. It's not controversial to say that most of the YouTubers creating these retrospectives are white men without degrees in history or related analytical disciplines. Even so, they present their conclusions with the confidence of a scholars speaking from the pulpit of an Ivy League lecture hall.  When it comes to discussing topics like race and racism, I believe they are lacking some nuance in their analysis.  A select few of these retrospective creators are so confident that they've begun weaving critic...

  Shionne (left) and Alphen (right), the game's main characters. Warning: Spoilers Ahead These days I don't have much time, so it's rare that I finish long sprawling RPGs like  Tales of Arise . But finish it I did, and so I figured I'd take the time to jot down some of the thoughts on the game. To sum up, my initial impressions were very positive. I liked the protagonist, I liked the graphics, and I found the combat to be a nice improvement over the last  Tales  game I played,  Tales of Vesperia  (admittedly I have not finished this one).  As the game wore on, I ran into several roadblocks that tend to arise (sorry) in most Japanese RPGs (or JRPG for short): the enemies got tougher, requiring some grinding. The bosses had overinflated health pools, and money and other important battle items like  Arise 's equivalent of health potions became scarce. Maybe I am less dedicated than the average gamer these days, but I felt obligated to buy the double ...

  I recently bought a Google Nexus 7, and love it so far. For you to understand how I got to this point though, I'll need to start from the beginning... I was always a skeptic when it came to owning a tablet. In fact, I held fast to the idea that they were pointless. Until now. It all started in 2010 when Apple came out with the iPad. It seemed to me like a nice toy to play around with. A luxury item that the wealthy could flaunt in the faces of the rest of us while they gleefully loaded up Angry Birds on the morning train to work. In other words, nothing that had any practical use. I just didn't get it. A 10 inch fragile screen that does everything a budget laptop can do, for twice the cost. On top of all that, it lacked a keyboard, so it would be useless for word documents and taking notes. As someone who often finds themselves in a classroom, I did not find that at all attractive. Flash forward two years, and my perspective has reversed. This is mainly due to two reasons: th...

                  I will be honest in saying that I let the sentiment of the general public get to me when it came to choosing whether or not to play The Witcher. Indeed, I had assumed that this game wasn't worth playing mainly because of what I had read about it on the internet. After paying the huge sum of $2.50 for The Witcher: Director's Cut, I fired the game up and expected something that, as I had read from reviews online, was unpolished, had a horrible combat system, and lacked in so many other areas that I would be convinced to skip it entirely and play The Witcher II instead. Thirty hours into the game, I can tell you that most of these accusations are overblown or downright incorrect, and that it would be a severe mistake to pass up on the first Witcher just because the second one is an improvement. First off, one of the primary complaints I heard of this game was that it had amateurish voice over dialogue. While it is important to ...