I have a four-and-a-half-year-old son who is quite the budding gamer. I suspect that one day he will surpass me in skill; some might tell you that he is pretty close to doing this already. I figured I’d briefly talk about some of the games we have tried recently that have been a big hit with both of us.
Jayson Young is effectively Toronto Thumbs’ foreign correspondent; living and working in some remote, mountainous area of Japan, he must wait for the Toad Gods to give him permission to use the internet to communicate with the rest of the world. He spends this limited time sending us his experiences in the land of the rising sun. Enjoy! – ed.
For many gamers of a certain age —specifically, those of us who remember a time when that apocryphal term “Nintendo tapes” was synonymous with “videogames”— Japan holds some kind of magical allure. Beginning in the late ‘80s and abating only recently, Japanese ubiquity was the order of the day in the home console market. Now, as the once-mighty trendsetting nation quietly becomes increasingly relegated to the handheld and “casual” (that is, purchased and then forgotten about, *ahem*) markets, one man sets out on a personal quest. That man is me; a Toronto gamer for most of my life, now sufficiently leveled-up and with enough muscle memory to tackle that shiny, far-off final dungeon. But I’m beginning to fear that my princess may be in another castle.
Here at Toronto Thumbs we like to engage our minds. One fun exercise that really stretches the ol’ noodle is the “a vs b” fight scenario. What’s that, you ask? It is when you use your imagination to figure out the outcome of a battle between two named parties. Those who tend to calculate odds in sports tend to ponder things like this; however, the scenarios we like to think about are usually ones that would probably never happen.
Today’s fight? Zombie Michael Jackson vs. Thumbs Mike Jackson.
I’ve been running OSX for quite a while now. Probably since 10.2 came out. The reasons are largely work related, and I’m certainly not here to persuade anyone that OSX is any better or worse for your own personal needs which I know nothing about; but as a gamer, I have always had to keep a machine running some version of the Windows OS close at hand.
Thumbs newcomer Jayson Young writes about how a game like Heavy Rain might be more than just a simple ripple in a puddle. – ed.
For evangelists of the games-as-art movement, it’s no doubt been heartening to see the blockbuster sales figures and overwhelmingly positive critical response surrounding Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain. Its development was a huge risk for Sony: they invested millions of dollars in a completely unproven, counterintuitive style of game. A marketplace that demands endless Gears of War clones and Modern Warfare knockoffs might foreseeably have ignored a piece of “interactive fiction” with a relentlessly depressing narrative. But Heavy Rain is a bona fide hit; arguably the most unlikely “Triple-A” title in recent memory.
I used to take character names so seriously when I was a kid. Generally, I cribbed them from my favourite movies and books—Raistlin, Gimli, Madmartigan, Khan, Roland—but there were a few made-up names that found their way into heavy rotation. Like Thon Malus; that was my go-to name for close to a decade. I’m not sure how it came to me exactly, I only know that I used it so often and so consistently that twenty or so years later, when one of my childhood friends met my son for the first time, he said, “So, I guess this must be little Thon…”
It’s shaping up to be a perfect weekend for gaming. All your friends are out of town or working, there are no major concerts or sporting events you want to attend, and the weather is going to suck, so you don’t feel obligated to “get out and enjoy it.” You can start playing games from the moment you get home from work/school Friday until someone has to surgically remove the controller from your hands on Sunday night.
Except… you’ve played all the games you own at least three times. Since all your friends are out of town, you can’t go borrow, beg or steal any from them. And since you’re between paycheques and rent is due, you can’t go buy or rent any new games. What is a gamer to do in this situation?
Well, you can take yourself down to the library and borrow a couple.
As a freelance writer with a love of video games, I found it hard to decide where my “best of the year” list should make its home in 2009. Then I stole Shaun’s laptop. A few auto-saved passwords later and the rest, as they say, is history. Without further ado, please enjoy my very own Top 9 of 09!
These are in no particular order, and some of these actually came out before 2009. However, these are my nine favourite games from 2009, so deal with it!
Year-end lists are nothing new. It’s a well-known fact that lists are what blog readers love reading more than anything; yes, even more than Professor Layton Deleted Scenes, apparently. While cliché, expected, and somewhat lazy, lists are still a good way of organizing thoughts. With this in mind, our 2009 lists are not necessarily about games that came out in that year, but rather games we played like crazy and loved.
