Lord Spencer's Gaming (and other stuff) Blog

Greetings dear readers. My name is Lord Spencer and I have been blogging about video games since 2010. At first, I started a thread in a football forum to discuss retro games before I had the brilliant (crazy) idea of reviewing all the 100 games in a Top 100 SNES games list by IGN. That started my game reviews in earnest, but I didn't end up reviewing all 100 games, since I wasn't much of a masochist for some of the more punishing genres. Later, I joined the wonderful gaming community of Destructoid and started blogging regularly in its community blogs section. I didn't plan to blog for long; initially planning to finish my SNES blogs ony, but here I am a decade later reviewing PS1 games. Unfortunately, the good times didn't last at Destructoid, and the community section disintegrated in 2022. Thankfully, much of the community stayed together and migrated to the wonderfully free realms of Cohost. That didn't go well for long. Still, the wonderfully resilient commu...

2023 began for me in the same way 2022 ended: Attending far too many funerals of both close and distant relatives, and in moments of grief, numbing myself by playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses . In times like those, and in global times like the end of 2023, it may seem that gaming is such a worthless side activity; time spent that adds no value. Yet, I reject that sentiment, and ironically find the language to reject it in one of the more controversial games I played and enjoyed this year. Death Stranding introduces many concepts, not all of them land, and it doesn't follow through with all of them, but the concept of humanity evolving into Homo Ludens is one that intrigues me. This concept, borrowed from 1938 philosophy book, states that the ultimate goal of humanity is to reach a point where they spend time to play, considering that a central driving factor of our species. If my gaming time this year is anything to go by, from over 1500 hours playing videogames, 200 hours playin...

  Isao Takahata's Pom Poko is the rare Studio Ghibli movie that I like a little less after every watch, and I attribute that to the same unique structure that was the film's biggest strength when I first watched it. Structured almost like a documentary, Pom Poko tells the story of a group of Tanuki (Raccoon Dogs) living on the outskirts of an ever-expanding Tokyo as they survive its expansion into their homes. The documentary angle explains both the mythical attributes of the Tanuki, who have the ability to shapeshift and the effect of human expansion on their environment. However, don't think that this is a dry documentary at all, since it is told from the entirely fictional and charming perspective of the anthropomorphic Tanuki's who struggle in quite humanistic ways against their fate. At least, their feelings are quite humanistic, but their methods depend on their shapeshifting abilities and massive balls. Yes, Pom Poko is the Studio Ghibli movie about Tanuki tes...

Producer: Tatsuya Minami Director: Koji Okohara Release: 2001 Console: PS1 Commonly thought off as one of the worst games in the series, there is a lot of truth to that sentiment. At its best, Mega Man X6 is an imbalanced mess of a game that delights for moments but infuriates as a rule. As the second game made by the same team without Keiji Inafune's influence, it's clear that they had an eye on the weaknesses of X5 and they aimed to correct them. Yet, while their intention was good in some cases, their aim was woefully off, and nearly every change the game made was for the worst. Take the expanded levels for instance, which in theory addresses the main issue of unimpressive stage design in X5 . These levels are indeed more expansive, yet they repeat their gimmicks in a mind-numbing fashion in certain instances, while having one of the most imbalanced and frustrating placements of enemies and obstacles in the series. Seemingly, the game itself knows it's unfair since it...

First planned as a training short for younger Studio Ghibli staff members, Ocean Waves eventually expanded into the first movie from the studio not directed by Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. Instead, an outside director, Tomomi Mochizuki (who would go on later to direct the excellent House of Five Leaves ), was brought along with support from outside studios such as Madhouse Studios. This results in a movie that doesn't quite nail the Studio Ghibli mark of excellence despite being quite good on its own merits. The story is told from the perspective of Taku Morisaki, a high school student in Kochi, who remembers the last day of high school when he started falling in love with Rikako Muto; a transfer student from Tokyo. Complicating that relationship is that Yutaka Matsuno, his best friend, also falls in love with Rikako. While this love triangle forms the basis of the drama, it does not fully dominate the movie. Instead, it spends more time focusing on creating three-dimensional ...

The PlayStation 1 had such a massive library of games that it is impossible to do it justice with a simple top 100 games list . As such, I decided to supplement my usual review of a top 100 games list (this time, I used the top 100 PS1 games list from Retro Sanctuary) with other games picked up from different lists. This parallel "Additional List" is not numbered in any ordered way, so the quality of the titles theoretically varies from top to bottom with no rhyme or reason. This report covers 10 series, with a couple of games that obviously deserve a place in Retro Sanctuary's Top 100 list. Of these games, I fully reviewed six games, since the rest of these consist of genres that I don't usually cover in these reviews or games that I played thoroughly a long time ago. From this report, I think that it is a travesty that Wild Arms or Wild Arms 2 were not included in Retro Sanctuary's list, while Jade Cocoon , Galerians , Arc the Lad Collection , and Metal Sl...

The massive success of Capcom's Resident Evil games heralded the appearance of many pretenders to its Survival-Horror throne, very few of them ever getting close to the level of proficiency needed to match the leaders. Despite being developed by a little-known developer, Galerians was one of the closest games to reach the level of Capcom's marquee Survival-Horror franchise. #A21: Galerians:- Year: 1999, 2000. Genre: Survival-Horror. Publisher: ASCII Entertainment, Crave Entertainment. Developer: Polygon Magic.

Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso feels like a call back to the adventure days of his earlier works such as Lupin III, The Castle of Cagliostro, and Future Boy Conan. It is one of the most straightforward films by him, and that's both a reason it retains a cult favorite status among Studi Ghibli fans and why it is less well-known compared to his more seminal movies ( My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle). Porco Rosso is the story of an ex-Italian WWI air pilot, cursed to look like a pig, who works as a bounty hunter in a fictional version of the Adriatic Sea; a place where pirates run amok and sporadic islands run themselves with little to no government. What is curious about Porco's, the story's hero, curse is how uninterested the movie is in dealing with it. There is no explanation about what cursed him and why, and as far as we know, we don't see if the curse was ever resolved by the end. What it does is provide a clear visual cue to the wa...

For all intents and purposes, the PS1 managed to carry the RPG haven mantle that first originated with the SNES. In the PS1 era, we have seen many RPG games spring beside the more famous names. Or rather, besides Final Fantasy . Naturally, the volume of JRPGs released meant few could stand out, especially when the rigid confines of the genre showed signs of stagnation. Enter the Wild Arms series, which managed to stand out from the rest of the pack with its unique setting. While other RPGs usually feature a high fantasy setting, or even a more modern one, the Wild Arms series chose to be influenced by the Wild West and Spaghetti Westerns while maintaining the Japanese roots of the genre. It's like finding a treasure in the middle of the desert With its combination of quality gameplay, interesting puzzles, unique Wild West setting, and excellent soundtracks, the Wild Arms games managed to hang on with the RPG giants for a while. Even reaching the milestone of securing an anime ser...