Gus Mastrapa picks out the things he thinks video game reviewers need to work on. I’m surprised he writes an entire paragraph about scores, but doesn’t say anything about removing scores entirely.

Space Invaders Extreme is, in many ways, to Space Invaders as Pac-Man Championship Edition is to Pac-Man. They’re similar visually, and both find ways to work modern game design into an old formula, but they do so in different ways. Pac-Man Championship Edition did it through pattern memorization and clever level design, and Space Invaders [...]

A brief article that could probably have better examples (how about Portal?), but one with a message I support. The word “gimmick,” especially since DS was first shown and detailed, is used in most gaming circles as something of a swear word.

Justin Marks is a video game writer, but here writes about how games’ narratives need to be more closely intertwined with their gameplay. That’s something I wholeheartedly agree with, but his attacking the contrast between Grand Theft Auto IV’s gameplay and story I don’t think is right.

Wii Fit is deceptively not a video game. I enjoyed both Brain Age games, but I had trouble convincing myself, even after Dr. Kawashima showed me all the studies he did, that it actually helped keep my brain young. As I got better at it, it didn’t feel like I was getting smarter, it felt [...]

With IV, Grand Theft Auto has, in many ways, grown up. The parody that too often ends up being potty humor is still present, but this is no longer a cartoon trying to be a gangster film, and Liberty City is no longer made up of rows of dollhouses with a couple dozen different types [...]

The music in this game deserves its own paragraph, as it’s one of the most ambitious video game soundtracks ever. The main theme, complete with a choir singing in Latin, might seem like a bit much the first time you hear it, but it fits. There are dozens of tracks in here - many from [...]

Kaim, the main character of Lost Odyssey, is a thousand-year-old immortal who has lost most of his memory, and scattered throughout the game are points where he experiences déjà vu - seeing children playing at a park will remind him of one of his hundreds of kids; a church’s bell ringing will remind him of [...]

If you buy Professor Layton and the Curious Village, get ready to be constantly confused. In The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, there are two boys playing catch in the starting town that give you hints on how to play the game, like “press start to access the item menu,” followed by “but I have [...]

The video game industry, she’s a-changing. Peggle sold better than Halo 3 last year and Nintendogs owners are eighteen million strong. So-called “casual games” are bigger than anything now, and nobody’s doing better with (or more for) the trend than Nintendo, who have led the way with everything from the aforementioned pet simulator to Wii [...]