October 15, 2026 by Greg Noe
The Final Fantasy VII Remake project will go down as the most ambitious and likely most expensive remake in gaming history. Treating the original Final Fantasy VII simultaneously as both a sacred text and clay waiting to be reformed, Square Enix is walking a wire attempting to appease both old fans and new with the new trilogy. The Remake introduces brand new characters and scenes, remixes existing fan favorites, and throws in some destiny-aware ghosts to confuse everyone. Chapter four of Final Fantasy VII Remake exemplifies Square’s mission statement of what the entire Remake project is set out to do.
Mad Dash, the fourth chapter from the 2020 remake, is brand new material from start to finish. The first few chapters of the remake follow the original closely with the bombing run, escape, and exploring the slums, if elongated and stretched quite a bit, but Mad Dash declares with certainty that this is not a one-to-one remake. There’s motorcycle combat, flirtation, ghost shenanigans, a flashback, a brand new tragic backstory, a walking simulator section, and a parachute jump. Let’s take the leap.
Read moreOctober 2, 2026 by Greg Noe
Sweet Home is the best RPG on the NES. Better than its three Final Fantasy titles; it beats all four Dragon Quest games; Ultima, Mother, Swords and Serpents, you name it and I’ve played, and Sweet Home bodies it. Released in 1989 by Capcom, the game has never gotten an official English translation, but thanks to a dedicated cult fanbase, Sweet Home lives on.
Based on the horror movie of the same name, Sweet Home combines RPG and survival horror aspects into a groundbreaking adventure with character permadeath, party splitting, and limited inventories. Unbelievably confident in its design, it’s a shame the progenitor of the entire Resident Evil series is so hard to play.
Let’s take a look at the two Sweet Homes, the game and the movie, both unfortunately exclusive to Japan for almost 40 years.
Read moreSeptember 28, 2026 by Greg Noe
About two months ago my son asked if we could start another Satisfactory game. Since our last completed run back in late 2024, Satisfactory has hit version 1.2 and I had also built a homelab capable of running a dedicated server. I apparently didn’t need much encouragement because within a day we were back in the game. My son bailed after 16 hours of playtime, I don’t blame him, he’s a senior in high school and tremendously busy. But eight weeks and 150 hours later, I beat the game along with finally getting all the achievements.
I started playing Satisfactory in January 2021 during the game’s early access period (pipes had just been introduced!) and instantly became hooked. I returned to the game every few months to see what had changed and by early 2023 my family owned three copies of the game so we could all play together. While it felt like we played a lot, it wasn’t until the full 1.0 release in September 2024 that the game truly consumed us.
After 400 hours of total playtime, I am confident in saying that Satisfactory was the best game of 2024 and one of my favorite games ever. Let’s go to work.
Read moreSeptember 9, 2026 by Greg Noe
A great thing about going to college is you get to befriend people from wildly different backgrounds than you came from. Religious beliefs, economic classes, and political ideologies are the boring examples, but for me it was my friend Steve, who was a Sega kid growing up. He had a Sega Saturn along with ten controllers so we could all play Saturn Bomberman at the same time! He also had a Dreamcast, we played tons of Power Stone and Giga Wing, and he introduced me to Shenmue, a series I genuinely love.
He also shared with me Skies of Arcadia, which I played a few hours on the Dreamcast and then instantly bought the Gamecube remaster. A few years later I got around to playing its first hour which I wasn’t super fond of. Almost twenty years later and I’ve finally finished the game thanks to my Ayn Thor, 2x speed, and cheats to skip random battles! Let’s explore the Skies on the Dreamcast’s anniversary.
Read moreAugust 20, 2026 by Greg Noe
The Disco Elysium-likes have arrived: heavy narrative with meaningful choices, dice rolling, and a strange title. The zombified publisher of Disco just released Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and back in March we got Esoteric Ebb. Created by dungeon master Christoffer Bodegård and based on Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition’s Standard Reference Document, Esoteric Ebb feels like the purest form of this new genre: six attributes, saving throws, and natural 20s.
When I played Disco Elysium on PlayStation 4 during covid, I was enraptured by its world and mechanics. I could play an eternally hungover detective interested in communism in a world that was aged and unknown. Esoteric Ebb brings those memories back, playing a devout detective interested in socialism in a world that is aged and unknowable. Let’s roll the dice and see where they take us with Esoteric Ebb.
Read moreAugust 7, 2026 by Greg Noe
During my fifteenth birthday party, my parents offered me a choice between two video games: Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color. We weren’t well off so they were going to return the game I didn’t pick, putting some extra pressure on me. In the end, the choice was simple: my friends were over and I had already played Link’s Awakening on the original Game Boy; Super Smash Bros. please, mom and dad. This bit of nostalgia isn’t about that game though, we’re here to revisit the colorized Zelda classic.
Read moreAugust 3, 2026 by Greg Noe
I recently went trawling through my GOG library for games to play on my Ayn Thor and pulled up Dredge, Black Salt Games’ cosmic-horror fishing adventure from 2023. I played a taste of this near release (not even a full first hour), and have been intrigued by its premise and the fishing gameplay. Somehow fishing has almost become a core mechanic in video games so I’m always interested to see how it’s implemented. Let’s set sail.
Read moreJuly 27, 2026 by Greg Noe
Has a game ever kept you up at night? Not that you stayed up late playing it (though that happened here, too), but that thinking about the repercussions of its plot spirals you out in despair, keeping you from falling asleep. The Incident at Galley House did that for me. On its Steam tags, “Horror” barely cracks the top ten most popular, but this is one of the scariest games I’ve ever played. There are zero jump scares, no monsters, no bad guy; just incredibly effective storytelling.
Read moreJuly 19, 2026 by Greg Noe
Fifteen years ago, I published my original review of Radiant Historia for the Nintendo DS. I leveraged the game as a way for me to return to the JRPG genre after feeling burned out by Persona 3: FES and Odin Sphere. As a trio of Atlus games from around the same period of time, in retrospect there was really nothing significant about me enjoying one of these titles more than the other two. Radiant Historia had turn-based battles and was shaped mildly similar to Chrono Trigger, whereas Odin Sphere had more action and Persona 3 just sorta sucked all around. (I’m not a strong hater in general but I do still proudly hate FES as a badge of pride almost two decades later)
When the 3DS expanded remaster of Radiant Historia released in 2018, I immediately jumped on it, ready for a replay. It was never meant to be though, for whatever reason I didn’t stick with the game long. I believe I know that reason now, however, so let’s explore Perfect Chronology.
Read moreJuly 11, 2026 by Greg Noe
Almost 19 years ago, I reviewed just the first hour of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I had fun with it but had already played the flurry of Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS Castlevania games that had come out in recent years, so the formula felt a bit stale, even though this was the game that changed the series.
I don’t think I actually beat Symphony of the Night at the time, so I decided to break in my brand new Ayn Thor with the PSX classic. Here’s my thoughts on the Castlevania great and a brand new piece of unique gaming hardware.
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